words, meanings, and the sublimation of speech
the fact that a word in one language can (at least approximately) be translated into another shows that the spirit of language “hovers” above its lexical face, “forever unable to alight”
Most disagreements are spurious because they are fought over words and not meanings. The constant temptation presents itself to mistake the feeling of familiarity with a word that hearing it or reading it may bring with having understood the meaning and significance of it. The words then function like mercenaries in proxy-disputes, or conflicts that are vicarious. I think words like “God” or “socialism” or “consciousness” are very telling examples, but virtually all discussions of “scientific” subjects fall into the same category. In all of these cases, essence of what is at stake is rarely approached because we remember having heard or used the word before and so assume we already know what it means to us, in itself, and to our interlocutors. The words themselves begin to carry as an implication their own judgement. For example, “God” for a religious person does not imply that he is a figment of ignorant people’s imagination or a cognitive structure that increased genetic fitness of our forebears in the way that the same term would do for an atheist. And yet they both use the same word. “God” then, is secretly a homophone. “‘God is said in many ways,” to paraphrase Aristotle.
In the same way, when someone asserts that “character is genetic,” they cannot really mean what the words imply. To wit, it is incoherent to suppose that someone could discover even the rudiments of character through any assay of the genome, which in principle, will never contain anything but base pairs of deoxyribonucleic acid. Instead, when someone makes such a statement, he is really making a moral claim which he is attempting to conceal, and to render unassailable, by dressing it up in a Trojan Horse of scientific terminology. In essence, he is really opining that individuals should not be held accountable for their character traits: a statement which presents the image of truth painted on a canvas of falsehood, as anyone who has set a resolution and followed through with it can immediately attest.
It might be objected that the above represents mere “semantics” and that a word is identical with its meaning. But the fact that a word in one language can (at least approximately) be translated into another shows that the spirit of language “hovers” above its lexical face, “forever unable to alight.”1 The essence of a word is more than its instance; the spirit of language is more than its letter.2 It makes me wonder if music presents something like the sublimation of speech. In casting off any definite form, speech would free itself from the fixtures of habit and foregone association that usually constrain our discourse. I picture the way dry ice sublimates to become vapour, and merge like breath into the wind.3 The first thing has a predeterminate form while the second is formless and therefore retains the potential to assume any form while still retaining its meaning, essence, or substantia. This provides for pluralism that is not facile pluralism because it does not merely capitulate to “anything goes” or “that’s just your opinion, man.”4
Cf. Owen Barfield, in the closing paragraph of Poetic Diction (1928):
Over the perpetual evolution of human consciousness, which is stamping itself upon the transformation of language, the spirit of poetry hovers, for ever unable to alight. It is only when we are lifted above that transformation, so that we behold it as present movement, that our startled souls feel the little pat and the throbbing, feathery warmth, which tell us that she has perched. It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.
Cf. 2 Corinthians 3.6:
Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
i.e. pneuma, spiritus. Cf. the following excerpt from What Barfield Thought, forthcoming:
On the received view, the Evangelist was employing the term pneuma equivocally when he wrote that
The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit [pneuma].
In the first instance, the word is often supposed to be a literal reference to wind. Hence, “the [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof.” In the second instance, pneuma is supposed to refer, by way of metaphor, to that which is meant by the English word “spirit” (including, in this instance, the personal and theological overtones that come with the translator’s use of a definite article and capital “S”). The term pneuma as rendered in the phrase “everyone born of the Spirit,” is therefore understood to indicate something different than the pneuma which “bloweth where it listeth.” Hence the Evangelist’s use of the term pneuma is interpreted as decidedly equivocal, and presumably metaphorical.
On Barfield’s account, however, the Evangelist’s use of the term pneuma (in this instance and many others) is univocal. The pneuma that bloweth where it listeth and the pneuma whence a man may be born again is the same pneuma. Hence, Barfield maintains that the Evangelist did not compose a sentence that is patently ambiguous or fancifully figurative. He instead employed this term deliberately and univocally to convey a meaning that the modern mind finds difficult to grasp and virtually impossible to express. At the time when the Gospel of John was written (ca. 1st century), Barfield argues, the word retained a largely undivided meaning that was neither purely material nor purely immaterial.[1] The compulsion for modern translators to employ two English words “wind” and “spirit” for a single Greek one arises not from the original author’s equivocal use of the term, but as a result of fundamental changes in the meanings of words that are, in turn, a reflection of the evolution of consciousness. The conceptual distinctions that are naturalized in modern English express meanings that characterize a different state of consciousness than that of the author of the Gospel of John. In general, it may be observed that the thoughts and the expressions characteristic of modern English forfeit in fullness what they gain in precision; English words are at once less rich and more exact than their Ancient Greek counterparts—a thesis which accords with the trajectory of development from ancient languages to modern ones more generally. Let us observe, however, that while phenomena of a certain kind will be more amenable to conceptualization by way of precision, others may be rendered decidedly unintelligible for the same reason that analyzing a text with an electron microscope makes it virtually impossible to read. Any movement of precision or analysis represents a departure from the prior whole to which all of those analytical elements pertain. If the departure is too extreme or too sustained, a resulting obliviousness to the wholeness is likely to incur. Indeed, Barfield suggests that this is precisely what has occured in respect to modern consciousness when he observes that the original meaning of pneuma “and therefore, in this case, practically the whole sense of the passage
[1] Barfield notes that some words, like “heart,” still faintly embody an old semantic unity. Though we can easily distinguish between the physical and psychical meanings of “heart,” we are still strongly inclined to associate the emotions with the chest, despite having no physiological justification for doing so.