Words&Dirt

“‘The more we “communicate” the way we do, the more we create a hellish world,’ wrote Parisian philosopher––also a historian of cybernetics––Jean-Pierre Dupuy.

I take ‘hell’ in its theological sense, i.e., a place which is void of grace––the undeserved, unnecessary, surprising, unforeseen.  A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.

That hellish world, devoid of grace––has it arrived?  A world of information glut and gluttony; of bent mirrors and counterfeit texts; scurrilous blogs, anonymous bigotry, banal messaging.  Incessant chatter.  The false driving out the true.

That is not the world I see.

It was once thought that a perfect language should have an exact one-to-one correspondence between words and their meanings.  There should be no ambiguity, no vagueness, no confusion.  Our earthly Babel is a falling off from the lost speech of Eden: a catastrophe and a punishment.  ‘I imagine,’ writes the novelist Dexter Palmer, ‘that the entries of the dictionary that lies on the desk in God’s study must have one-to-one correspondences between the words and their definitions, so that when God sends directives to his angels, they are completely free from ambiguity.  Each sentence that He speaks or writes must be perfect, and therefore a miracle.’  We know better now.  With or without God, there is no perfect language.

Leibniz thought that if natural language could not be perfect, at least the calculus could: a language of symbols rigorously assigned.  ‘All human thoughts might be entirely resolvable into a small number of thoughts considered as primitive.’  These could then be combined and dissected mechanically, as it were.  ‘Once this had been done, whoever uses such characters would either never make an error, or, at least, would have the possibility of immediately recognizing his mistakes, by using the simplest of texts.’  Gödel ended that dream.

On the contrary, the idea of perfection is contrary to the nature of language.  Information theory has helped us understand that––or, if you are a pessimist, forced us to understand it.  ‘We are forced to see,’ Palmer continues,

that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves.  In modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.

Infinite possibility is good, not bad.  Meaningless disorder is to be challenged, not feared.  Language maps a boundless world of objects and sensations and combinations onto a finite space.  The world changes, always mixing the static with the ephemeral, and we know that language changes, not just from edition to edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but from one moment to the next, and from one person to the next.  Everyone’s language is different.  We can be overwhelmed or we can be emboldened.”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 417-9

“Now where do we begin to understand ourselves?  Here am I, and how am I to study myself, observe myself, see what is actually taking place inside myself?  I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship.  It is no use sitting in a corner meditating about myself.  I cannot exist by myself.  I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself.  Every other form of understanding is merely an abstraction and I cannot study myself in abstraction; I am not an abstract entity; therefore I have to study myself in actuality––as I am, not as I wish to be.”

––Freedom from the Known, by Jiddu Krishnamurti, pg. 22