Being that can be understood is language.1
Helen Keller provides an account of learning the word “water” in chapter 4 of her autobiography.
What does it mean to say that language has a labelling function, which is obvious to us, but that this labelling function of language is downstream of a more energetic revelatory power that it also possesses; that language can name phenomena, but that it must first disclose the phenomena that it then names?
Consider: if we found a piece of inert matter that suddenly animated itself, would we suddenly conclude that inert matter is in fact animate matter, or that inert matter can animate itself in some conditions? No, that makes no sense. The only way it could make sense is if the materialists succeed in impoverishing our definition of terms so that we no longer distinguish the qualitative difference of life from non-living substance—here, and not in a laboratory, is where the real scientific battles are fought.
Returning to the scenario above, if we encountered a piece of inert matter that suddenly displayed characteristics of alert matter, we would say that the phenomenon we had mistakenly assumed to be composed of inert matter was in fact not what we had assumed it to be. If a stone leaps out from under your foot as you take a step, it was not a stone after all but a toad. Naïve people imagine scientists just stumble upon empirical evidence that furnishes them with their theories but this attitude is like the one who imagines milk comes from milk bottles and not cows, or that wine comes from wineskins and not grapes and vintners and the sun and earth and rain and seasons and, finally, the power that created and sustains the material universe.
“Miraculous,” as a descriptive term for the process of perception is not out of place, especially when we reflect on the etymology of the word and its semantic relation to the Greek idea/eidos. How is it that our minds are suited to grasp the essence of phenomena that are apparently entirely heterogenous to them? Perhaps they are not entirely heterogenous after all. Schopenhauer, upon his encounter with the philosophy of transcendental idealism, observed that “there is no sun, but only an eye that sees it.” Goethe, reflecting on the intimate connection between the eye and light, perceived the other side of the Schopenhauerian maxim and remarked that: “were not the eye sunlike, never the sun could it behold...the eye was made for the light; out of indifferent animal organs, the light called forth an organ that belong to itself.” In other words, they belong together, the eye and light. Can this connection shed light, by analogy, on the relation between the mind and being?
Were we to travel to a distant planet and encounter an alien world full of unfamiliar phenomena, we would, to begin with, just like the blind men, be constrained by our language to interpret the phenomena we encountered according to the ideas that were familiar to us from our own world. What does this tell us about how we first came into this world, without any language altogether, and what does this tell you about the function of language in giving shape to everything we call “real”?
Imagine learning a word like “the world.” Before you learned the word, you may have seen faces, trees, fences, bicycles, and countless other phenomena, but you would not have seen “the world” because you did not know to look for it, or how to look at it. In this case, the word is creating in you an organ to perceive the correlative phenomenon, which before would have remained imperceptible. This process of revelation would have recapitulated the same pattern that also would have transpired in respect to each of the things I listed above. That means that language is not merely naming things that are already present, but rather presencing things that we then name. In that way, learning a second language is very different than learning a first one because the second one doesn’t have to do the second thing, but only the first, since the first language already presenced the things. To learn that “el mundo” bears roughly the same meaning as “the world” is not the same as learning the meaning they both bear to begin with.
Language fosters our ability to understand and manipulate the world. But these things are secondary and downstream of its real potency. After all, while language assists us in understanding the world, it was also the condition for there to be anything there for us to seek to understand altogether because “the world,” or “reality,” or “being” are not things anyone has seen with his eyes or touched with his hands. These are concepts without which these phenomena could not appear to us any more that the elephant could appear to the blind men.
Language has been poetically conceived as the paint that we daub the empty canvas of the world withal. I appreciated the artistic conceit to convey the function of language vis-à-vis the world. But it is needful to amend it slightly so to concern a painting painted upon a painted canvas; the canvas is also made of paint. After all, no one has seen “the world” with his eyes any more than one of the blindmen could perceive the elephant through his touch. Language only labels phenomena that it first disclosed, or “painted.” Imagine literally painting labels onto a scene with the same paintbrush that you used to compose it.
And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field…2
Adam’s giving names to the creatures is not a separate activity from God’s having created them. After all, God spoke all things into existence from the beginning, including the voice that Adam now raises to call forth the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field and “all the creeping things that creepeth.” José Ortega y Gasset observes:
The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Christ is the Word, the Λόγος, “and the Word was God.”3
Original German: “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.” Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 470. German text accessed through a Google Books preview of Wahrheit und Methode, 334.
Genesis 2:19-20
John 1:1
Max, you do not believe in direct experience? "In this case, the word is creating in you an organ to perceive the correlative phenomenon, which before would have remained imperceptible." There are no such "correlative phenomena," except for the labels themselves. Saying "the world" really does not add very much at all. There is no organic necessity to tie together the fence, the mailbox, etc. I have long been curious to you, Max. I subscribe to you, too. But, beyond the quotation above, I could not follow it. It started quite well b.t.w.
''We are not beings who produce what we know and understand just for ourselves. No, we provide through our own souls the stage on which the world first comes to experience some of its existence and becoming. If there were no (human) knowledge and understanding, the world would remain incomplete.....In my concept of knowing, we ourselves are co-creators of the world and not mere copiers of something that could be taken away from the world without lessening its completeness.''
Henry Barnes Quoting Rudolf Steiner In His Book Life for the Spirit; Rudolf Steiner in the Crosscurrents of Our Time