Philosophy and ordinary language
‘But let me next ask you this. What power do names have for us? What’s the good of them?’
(Plato, Cratylus, 435d)
A strange difficulty with philosophical writing is that unlike thought, which moves all the time, writing stays still. Kafka’s one-paragraph story The Top describes a philosopher who tried in vain to catch a spinning-top while it was still spinning. Whenever he caught it, and it stopped spinning, ‘he felt nauseated’. Writing philosophy is equally nauseating: I have to artificially put my thinking on hold in order to catch it and depict it in a still form, in pixels or in ink.
This essay is an attempt to catch the spinning-top of my thoughts on philosophy and language.1 I make this point about Kafka’s story not only because my thoughts on this topic are still in progress but because philosophical writing, as I understand it, necessarily involves a tension between dynamic movement and static representation.
If we accept the idea that the form of writing affects its content, then issues of philosophical style becomes philosophical issues in their own right. One of these issues is: what relation should philosophical writing have to ordinary language—that is, to the formally loose, widely understood language that we use in everyday life?
Within philosophy, some people have argued that the exclusive use of ordinary language is a necessity. The idea is that philosophy deals with concepts, and concepts exist in language; so if the concepts of philosophy have no origin in ordinary language, they can be of no use to ordinary people. (Of course, for Wittgenstein, a philosophical concept is extraordinary by its very nature, which is why philosophy’s only task should be self-dissolution throuhg a return to ordinary language.) But according to others, the informality of ordinary language is the problem that philosophy deals with: the task of the philosopher, therefore, is to formalise concepts, to be a ‘conceptual engineer’. This is the kind of goal expressed by someone like Rudolf Carnap.
These two views do not exhaust the territory: there are also, for example, philosophers who are driven to silence on the supposed basis that all langauge is inadequate (Eckhart, middle Heidegger, later Kierkegaard). What is significant, however, is that all such views share a common assumption—namely, that philosophy ought to inhabit one single, static position with regard to language. Either it should remain grounded in the ordinary, or escape the ordinary in the hopes of finding certainty, or abandon language altogether.
What I want to defend is a relation that does not share this assumption; in other words, a philosophical style that has a dynamic and changing relationship to ordinary language. Both of the positions above have arguments that make sense. It is true that an idiolect or a totally formal language has very little to offer to real experience—that is, to the everyday. But at the same time, this everyday experience itself is so opaque, so ridiculous and inconsistent, that it practically begs to be given some kind of formal-conceptual structuring. The only way to provide this structure without doing injustice to the dynamism of the real, I think, is for the structure itself to be dynamic.
If this sounds abstract, consider a metaphor: imagine the earth as the grounded, reliable domain of the ordinary and the everyday. The sky, on the other hand, is the open expanse of concepts and abstraction. In the terms of this metaphor, I think we should imagine the position of philosophy as that of a plane. If the plane stays on the ground forever, it is totally useless, and it has no chance whatsoever of staying in the air forever: if it does, it will run out of fuel. The task of the plane is to begin on the ground and ascend to the sky; after having moved through the sky, it returns to a new position on the ground. So too does philosophy have its task. Philosophical writing must always begin with the confusions and inconsistencies of ordinary immediate experience and develop its concepts in accordance with them. In our use of these concepts (that is, in the process of writing), we will find that they evolve. The concepts themselves—the things we write, the words we read—become objects of experience themselves. To write is to externalise a thought, to abandon it from the first-personal mind to the publicity of the page; in this abandonment, the thought and its concepts undergo transformation. Only after this transformation can the concepts offer something new to experience; their development is the sign that the world appears in a different light once we have thought it through.
I think there is a serious truth, therefore, in the anecdotal saying that E.M. Forster quotes: ‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’2 We cannot set out, at the beginning of our writing, all the precise meaning that our words and concepts are supposed to have. If we do, these words and concepts will become stamps that we forcefully impose on reality, making it conform to the structure of the definitions we’ve already established, and thus we will have learned nothing: the result of our philosophising will have been prepared for us at its outset. To tell ‘what I think’—to see what my words and concepts mean—I first have to ‘see what I say’ by using these words and concepts for a particular goal.
I therefore combine something from Wittgenstein and from Heraclitus: philosophical writing should always take us back to ordinary language, but should also acknowledge that the destination of this journey is not exactly equal to the origin. We do not step in the same river of language twice. I like Stanley Cavell’s choice of words: the goal is not to ‘replace’ but to ‘reinhabit’ the ordinary.3 To reinhabit is to find a new way of dwelling in a place we already occupied. As I described in my previous post, the opportunity for philosophy arises when a person feels a sense of disconnect, detachment, or inconsistency with the world they inhabit. Is philosophy not then a condition of being a ‘foreigner’ (or ‘outsider’, or ‘stranger’) in language and the ordinary? To philosophise, therefore, is to remedy the condition of being a foreigner in the ordinary world by finding a new way of inhabiting it. It would be a mistake to think that there is another world one can opt for instead.
Adorno also uses the metaphor of foreignness. If someone is a foreigner in a country, and does not speak the language, their only hope to learn the language is not to read a dictionary, not to see precise definitions of every word they need, but to hear these words appear in different contexts. Philosophical writing, according to Adorno, should replicate this learning experience: ‘the essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, not in a treasure-hunting obsession with foundations.’ So, to repeat a point, this time through Adorno rather than Forster: the thoughts and concepts which philosophy concerns itself with only make sense—only exist at all—in the rough and changing terrain of their actually being used, and it would therefore be a mistake to try to establish them cleanly before getting our hands dirty with the actual, confusing, spinning-top process of thought.
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915)
In one way, this essay can be seen as an attempt to make sense of what Hegel means in paragraphs 15 and 16 of The Phenomenology of Spirit, and what Wittgenstein means throughout Philosophical Investigations, but especially in paragraph 120.
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 99.
Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 82.