Episode #119 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope you love the show today.

So, in keeping with the theme from last episode, there’s an attitude about the meaning of words and statements that was extremely common in the 1700s that still persists in some people’s thinking to this day that would seem to a post-structuralist or postmodernist pretty naïve and outdated. The attitude is something like, “Look, I am extremely careful and cautious with my words. And I do this because I want to deliver clear, distinct statements that carry very specific, pointed meanings to people. Well, it’s not always easy for me to do. Admittedly, sometimes I, I have to pause and think for a bit about how exactly I want to word something. But, because of how careful I am, basically any rational person that’s listening to the words I’m saying will come away with the meaning I’m intending. Look, for you to misunderstand me you’d have to be either inept or insane or in the business of deliberately trying to misunderstand me.”

To put this point another way, there are stable, authentic meanings to words and statements out there somewhere, the same way an Enlightenment thinker might think there is a stable, authentic reality out there that we’re all accessing or a stable, authentic self-identity that can be accessed, and that if only we reason about the meanings of things in the Athenian Agora long enough and are careful and precise enough with our word usage, we can arrive at the stable, authentic meaning of these words that we can then use to communicate in a more objective way. To a thinker like Jacques Derrida, this way of thinking would be naïve, outdated, and it’s based on some pretty fundamental misconceptions about how language works and what words are when you look at them under a microscope. And probably the best place to start explaining this is to talk about two things that every word carries beneath a surface level examination: diachronic and synchronic meaning.

Now, real quick. Some of you out there might be saying, “Oh, great. Here comes some philosophically loaded jargon that takes something straightforward like words and turns it into an overanalyzed, complex mess.” But I think how a semiotician might respond to that, Jacques Derrida among them, is by asking, is it possible that semiotics is not overanalyzing words? Is it possible most people under-analyze words, take them for granted, throw them around indiscriminately, and are missing out on something pretty amazing if they’d take a closer look? Remember, we talked about the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and how the meaning of a word lies in the differences between the word and all the other words within a linguistic system.

The example we gave at one point on this show -- I mean my favorite example to illustrate this concept -- is a free throw in basketball. The basic idea is, it is impossible for you to know what a free throw is without also having an understanding of tons of other related concepts, for example, what a hoop is or what a backboard is or, more fundamentally, what the game of basketball is or, even deeper than that, the idea of what a game is at all. You’d need to understand the idea of a foul. And, in order to do that, you’d have to understand the concept of rules within a game. You’d have to understand the concept of there being a right and wrong way of behaving in a particular circumstance. You’d have to understand what the lines on the floor denote. This goes even deeper than that, though. You’d have to understand what a line is. You’d have to understand what denotation is. And the point I’m trying to get across here with all these examples is that this required understanding of related terms branches out in countless different directions just to be able to understand something as simple as a free throw.

Now, couple this with the fact that the word “cat” to some structuralists only has meaning insofar as it is not the word “dog” or “horse” or “lawnmower” or any of the other words within a language, and what you’re left with is what some structural linguists refer to as the synchronic meaning of the word or, more simply put, the position of a word at a particular point in time within the current linguistic system that it’s occupying. The squiggly lines C-A--T on a piece of paper don’t give a word its meaning. It’s the position of the word in relation to all those other words and related terms. But, if you were looking to define the full extent of the meaning of any one word in its entirety, the synchronic meaning alone wouldn’t tell you the full story. Because think about it, words have a meaning right now in this moment within a particular language. But language itself and the meanings of words are constantly evolving and shifting. Language is a living, breathing organism in that way, and it’s constantly adapting. For this reason, if we ever wanted to have a conversation about the full extent of the meaning of any word, that conversation is going to have to include what some structural linguists refer to as the diachronic meaning of the word or, simply put, the historical catalog of all the different meanings that particular word has represented in the past.

For example, take the word “justice.” The word “justice” has a particular meaning to us in this present moment. But, whether we realize it when we’re using the word or not, the word carries with it an entire etymology. The word “justice” means something entirely different today than it did 50 years ago or 200 years ago when it’s being used in its Old English form or 1,000 years ago when it’s being used in its original Latin form. To some linguists, these historical meanings matter a lot, not only because the words we use today have structurally emerged out of them, but also because if you’re just looking at the word “justice,” not the particular meaning it has to you right now but almost like we were doing a documentary on the word “justice” and any meaning it could potentially carry, there is no logical basis for us to privilege any one of these historical meanings over another. Now, of course, it should be said, and we’ll expand on this later, there are tons of reasons to privilege one of these definitions of justice if it’s part of a statement you’re trying to relay to someone else as a speaker or writer. But we’re not talking about the intention of a single speaker or writer right now. We’re talking about what words are and how meaning works. And to ignore or deny the existence of all the other meanings a word can potentially carry and has carried is to be missing something about what words are and what sort of game we’re really playing when we use language to create statements about things.

See, it can be a little confusing to think of words in this way because using language is so normalized to us in everyday life. We do this stuff all the time. Words have meanings. Those meanings are present and observable. And what I’m doing here is I’m using words as building blocks to construct meaningful statements to talk to the people around me. But what if words are not as stable and simple as that? Put it this way, how do you think the way you view words would change if it was your job to sit around all day studying them: part of the job of a linguist, part of the job of a semiotician? What happens when you look at words under a microscope? What are they exactly? Well, just to continue the visual of the microscope, at a macrolevel we may just see the word “justice” as squiggly lines on a piece of paper that mean something to us. But, when you look at that word under a microscope, when you see it through the lens of semiotics, what you might see are, you know, tons of related terms sort of orbiting around the word and branching off into countless different directions. And these terms are as crucial as the word itself when it comes to what the word means within the structure of the language, the synchronic meaning of the word. But, then, you’d also see a long, almost like an asteroid tail spanning off into the horizon of all the different meanings that word has carried throughout history that are potentially brought to bear whenever the word is used, the diachronic meaning of the word.

Now, maybe I’m taking too much creative license putting a visual on it like this, but the important part here is to consider just how strange and complex of a thing words really are when you take a closer look at them. Consider a few other strange and complex things about language that structural linguists and post-structuralists are noticing throughout the 20th century. First of all, that words, and signs for that matter, are generative. Words naturally produce and rely on more words to be able to exist. Signs always produce more signs. For example, if you wanted to know the definition of a word and you went to Google or the dictionary to look it up, what are you given at that point? Well, more words to explain what that word means. If you don’t understand the words in the definition, you look up those words and are given more words to describe what they mean. The definition of a word is always other words. Think about what we’re doing there. To describe the meaning of a word, we use words that themselves only have meaning because the meaning of other words justify them, and then the meaning of other words justify those, and so on.

Second of all, let’s consider the synchronic meaning of a word a little deeper for a second. I mean, at the risk of being completely redundant, remember the synchronic meaning of a word refers to the meaning of a word at a particular point in time, its position within a particular system. Only way we can know what a free throw is is also to understand tons of other things: backboard, hoop, basketball, game, etc. Okay. Well, don’t all of those related terms themselves require other related terms for them to have meaning so that they’re then capable of giving the original word its meaning? So, wouldn’t that imply that, if you looked at these related terms with an even more powerful microscope, you’d see tons of related terms to each of the related terms, each of them with countless branches spanning off in every direction. Further, wouldn’t this also have to be the case when it came to the related terms to those related terms and even deeper than that? And, look, I’m sorry this has become super abstract like this is a, you know, like word inception or something. But the point here is to illustrate, words, when you step outside of how normalized they are to us and how easily we just throw them around, words are truly bizarre and complex things. They clearly are not as simple as there just being a word and then an obvious, stable meaning that we can access. And, again, this is clear to a post-structuralist in the same way it’s clear to them that what we have access to is not an obvious, stable reality, and what we are is not an obvious, stable self-identity.

Pinning down the meaning of words like we’ve tried to do so often in the past starts to seem like an extremely chaotic enterprise if not impossible. I mean, to some semioticians out there, the meaning of a word must actually at some level include the meanings of every other word in the language, all of which are constantly changing. Now, completely aside from how crazy it is that the human brain is capable of participating in a game like this, even in the tremendously flawed way we do, consider the fact that this game of language that we’re playing is not a necessary aspect of being a human being. In fact, if you think about it, it was a pretty arduous process you went through for years with tons of specialized books and TV shows and professional teachers and parents guiding you along the way, supporting you, just to get to a place where you’re capable of the most basic articulation of what you’re thinking, all throughout your life as an adult improving at this skill as well. To Jacques Derrida, if you were trying to locate where the meaning of a word lies, the meaning of a word is always what he calls “non-present” or “deferred.” And what he’s referring to there is something he thinks is a giant mistake philosophers have been making since they first started trying to find the meanings of words, a mistake in thinking Derrida’s going to refer to as the philosophy of presence.

Now, understanding this mistake throughout the entire history of philosophy is going to be crucial when it comes to understanding the post-structuralist, postmodernist critique of modernity. We’re going to return to it and talk about it in more detail in a couple episodes, but the single sentence, not-doing-it-justice version of it is that for a long time we have assumed that there is a level of immediacy between words and their meanings that just doesn’t exist. And the only way this has been made possible over the years, to Derrida, is because philosophers throughout history have almost solely focused on speech as language rather than writing. He calls this tendency in the history of human thought “phonocentrism.” There are things about the nature of language and words that become much easier to see when you analyze writing rather than speech. And, once again, philosophers throughout history have privileged speech over writing because when a person speaks -- more so than writing, which can sometimes feel like just ideas on a page with no real human being present and can feel a little disconnected -- when a person speaks, it feels more like it’s a human being articulating ideas with a very clear intention behind them. And, to Derrida, this phonocentric approach has allowed thinkers throughout history to persist in a delusion that the intention of an author somehow grounds the ultimate meanings of the words. Once again, we’re going to talk about it in a couple episodes, but there are things we need to talk about before that so that this makes sense.

So, given the complex and strange nature of words, that there’s obviously a lot more to talk about, the reality of what language is leads Derrida to certain conclusions. The best way I’ve ever seen it put is in the analysis of Derrida by Lawrence Cahoone where he says, “To Derrida, every statement is a lie.” And the reason this is the case is because, when you consider just how chaotic the process of pinning down the meaning of words is, when you realize how many historical meanings -- the baggage that any one word carries with it from the past -- when you realize the ever evolving, shifting, synchronic meaning of words, you start to see that, because we want to communicate as human beings and these crazy things called words are the primary tools we have to do it with, by necessity we have to participate in this crazy, chaotic game called language. And an essential part of playing that game is to always be someone who has to repress all of the other potential meanings of the words they’re using. Simply to be able to speak we have to do this.

This process is a big part of a concept he refers to as “logocentrism.” To Derrida, as speakers we can never escape this logocentrism. With every sentence we utter we have to speak pretending as though the words we’re using have stable, concrete meanings, as though the words you’re saying are actually easily and clearly understood. We have to pretend as though the words we’re saying are connected to what he calls a “transcendental signified.” We talked about signifiers and signifieds. He’s referring to us speaking as though our words are connected to some ultimate concept of what that word means. We have to pretend like this if we want to communicate anything at all to anyone because the reality is that what philosophers have been trying to do for millennia is impossible, to Derrida. It is impossible to provide an immediacy between speaker or writer and the object that they’re referring to. That’s just not how words work when you look at them under a microscope. They’re far more complex than that. It is impossible to use words to reference the full meaning of something. And, so, what happens is words always go beyond what we intend for them to do. These building blocks called words don’t have clear, stable meanings. But we have to use them as though they do.

Now, also consider the fact that we do tons of other things that sabotage communication. We say things when we really mean something else. We say things just to get a certain reaction. We outright lie and misrepresent the truth. And it’s a wonder how anyone could be surprised by the fact that misunderstandings and misinterpretations happen all the time. And here’s the thing, many of these misunderstandings happen without either party even being aware of it. I mean, a lot of misunderstandings happen with both people thinking the other one got exactly what they were meaning to say.

Now, it’s in consideration of this point that Derrida drops a pretty big bombshell. It’s by far the most famous line he ever wrote, and it goes like this: “There is nothing outside the text.” And what he means when he says that is that there is nothing about your experience at all -- of reality, of the world, the universe, whatever you want to call it -- there’s nothing about your experience that isn’t mediated, governed, affected by, or, as in some cases, entirely controlled by language. Think about the philosophical implications of that if that is true. And we just got done laying the foundation for making a case that language is this crazy, chaotic game where we’re all desperately trying to repress the true extent of the meaning of words so that we can wield them for our own selfish and narrow purposes. What if everything about your entire existence is filtered through that game?

Let’s talk about a hypothetical for a second. Not that this is even possible at this point for us to do fully, but try to imagine yourself as the only being in existence. Now, in this example you have no language or concepts to chop up the universe and make sense of things. And let’s say in this existence you came across something that in our world with our language we would refer to it as a tree. You’re staring at a tree. Okay. Without the mediation of language, there would be absolutely no necessary reason for you to delineate between this green and brown thing in front of you and the ground beneath it or the sky behind it or the trees next to it or even you, really. If you were the only being in existence, the tree quite simply wouldn’t mean. You’d still be looking at something, but it wouldn’t mean anything. Meaning itself doesn’t exist until it’s introduced by language.

The tendency for us to look for meaning in things is a biproduct of the fact that practically every second of our existence we’ve just been immersed in language. No matter what it is, everything you think you know about anything, everything about your entire experience of reality you understand only through the context of language and how one word or concept relates to other words and concepts you know. You can never say anything about the way reality is without ultimately expressing it through a language. And simply by doing that, to Derrida, you have limited yourself to describing reality through metaphors between symbols. For all intents and purposes, there is nothing outside the text because there’s nothing about your existence that’s outside the context of language.

Now, some of you may be saying, “Well, that sounds like a big assumption. I mean, clearly there’s something outside an existence mediated by language. I was born. I was existing. And I didn’t have a language.” Jacques Derrida would say, yeah, that’s absolutely true, but there’s no going back at this point. And a totally reasonable reply to that might be, “Really? Is there really no going back? Is it really impossible to peel back the layers of this language game that we’re playing? Couldn’t someone hypothetically throw out the idea of meaning all together, and maybe through some sort of contemplative practice or some methodology we could arrive at just the raw sense-data that we’re perceiving?”

So, answering this question in a satisfying way I think is crucial before we try to understand Derrida any deeper. It’s only going to lead to misunderstandings if we don’t. And this question is actually not entirely dissimilar from some of the goals of Husserl and the phenomenologists on the continental side of things. Remember, part of their work was to try to bracket our experience in such a way where we could get access to the raw phenomena of experience. Well, long before Derrida, gaining access to the raw sense-data that we perceive, devoid of all the human stuff we pile onto it, was part of the goals of a group of thinkers in the analytic tradition that would come to be known as the logical positivists.

You know, we talked about this period in the early to mid 20th century where thinkers were growing increasingly skeptical of reason and its ability to deliver us the utopia that was promised and expected by some during the Enlightenment. We talked about groups like the Frankfurt School, who at the very least called for there being a lot more safeguards against the horrible places reason can take humanity. But this wasn’t how everyone was thinking about reason back then. I mean, there were a lot of people saying that the problems produced by Enlightenment reason came about because we didn’t actually reason. I mean, we reasoned more than before. Descartes certainly used reason a lot more than many thinkers that came before him, but then he “reasons” to a proof of God’s existence. Kant “reasons” to his synthetic a priori propositions that turn epistemology into a convoluted mess. Hegel “reasons” to the concept of Geist, etc. The problem isn’t reason, some people said, the problem is people going in with the intention of reasoning, going way out of bounds with unverifiable speculation, and then dressing it up in the clothing of reason. Some people thought around this time, we need to double down on reason, recommit to the process in a way that we never have before. And not that any of them would say it in those explicit terms, but this is the sentiment that surrounds the work of the logical positivists.

The idea is, let’s forget about all the unverifiable speculation. Why isn’t there a group of people that only focuses on what we know? Truths of reason, truths of fact -- that’s it: a priori propositions, a posteriori propositions. And, yes, maybe this means we’re not going to be able to talk about things like morality or, you know, what the good life is like we’re, you know, Aristotle in the 4th century B.C., but at least we’ll know that the work we’re doing is arriving at actual truth about something. So, if that was your goal, what would that sort of work look like? Well, when you consider classic a priori propositions like, “All triangles have three sides,” “All bachelors are unmarried,” I mean, you can imagine at least part of their work is going to be concerned with formal logic, linguistic analysis, and mathematics. A few of the thinkers were even interested in doing something philosophers have been wanting to do since Hobbes, really. They thought part of the problem philosophers have run into over the years is that they’re limited to only speak about philosophical concepts while using ordinary, everyday language. Might it be a good idea, they thought, for someone to create a different kind of language, a philosophical language or at least one that’s a lot more precise than this clunky one we use to talk about reality TV and, you know, getting tacos and stuff?

So that’s one piece of their work. Now, when it comes to the a posteriori side of things, or things that are immediately verifiable by our senses, propositions we can check like, “The faucet is on in the downstairs bathroom,” I mean, as you can imagine, there’s a heavy emphasis on science. And this a posteriori focus is the source of their deep interest in trying to find some way to get to the raw sense-data that we perceive. Just a bit of foreshadowing, they run into some pretty serious problems when they actually try to play this approach out. The responses to their work from Wittgenstein and his philosophical investigations is a pretty big part of why Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Next episode.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.