"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."Ludwig Wittgenstein
Like most, I've always thought of language as a tool for communication. It's pretty obvious that without language it would be nearly impossible to express ourselves or to know what's going on in the world. We couldn't just send up smoke signals to keep our complex civilization going or keep ourselves informed
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However, the more I learn about language and how it works the more I realize that communication is just the tip of the iceberg. Language, it turns out, deeply conditions how we engage with ourselves and the world and what we understand about both. And it works in unexpected ways.
To begin with, language plays a starring role in shaping our perception of what things are and how they appear. Words allow us to describe what we notice, what we attend to, about anything and everything, both to ourselves and to others. It's language that enable us to name, label, and categorize things. And it's through language that we extract meaning from what is named and labeled.
When we say, for example, 'I know what that is' we're invoking a pre-established system of language that provides both name and meaning. Words tell us what a thing is and implicit within that is what there is to be known about it. Words are pregnant with meaning.
But how does language manage to do this, provide both name and meaning?
Words work by differentiating one thing from another. They are difference making mechanisms- this is not that and up is not down. By establishing these differences words effectively box in whatever is being perceived as either a this or a that. In doing so, what gets described becomes object-like. Not only that, buteverything that appears to us seems to have a boundary around it and is surrounded by space. And with that a world of subjects and objects is created.
On a personal level, it's somewhat bewildering that language plays such a dominant role in constructing the very perceptions that make up my knowing of things- and with that my sense of reality. But much about those things is left out by the words used to describe them.
It's as if language has driven me into a corner where I rely on words to understand the everyday experience of what I notice and how I think about it. I had always assumed it was far simpler, that I was just looking out from behind my eyes at a world populated by things; and between me and those things was empty space.
Of course, I conceptually understand that's not how it really is. Even reading a bit of science informs me that what I'm able to perceive, what actually appears, are not objects as such but rather processes that are continuously in motion and forever changing. It's common knowledge that at the atomic or subatomic level there are only atoms and quarks spinning about. And there are no boundaries like those appearing before my eyes.
So it’s somewhat mysterious that whatever is out there, whatever presents itself to my cognitive apparatus, looks real and permanent. I certainly wouldn't slam my body into any of it. But, apparently, there's nothing very reliable to be found in my perception of appearances as real things.
Nor does it often occur to me that the words with which I construct my world are only approximations of what is actually out there.
Words are labels, so to speak. They're a proxy for something they're supposed to represent, but not the thing itself. And if not the thing itself, do words really do their job to fully inform me what those things are. Do they include everything that could be noticed and known about those things?
Of course not, words don't work that way. They describe only so much about what I perceive. The rest goes unnoticed and unknown- that was yet another realization.
When I think deeply about it, I realize that words derive their content from what I already know and what’s familiar- you might say from my past experience. And that imposes a limitation on my perception of things by excluding new knowledge about them. If there are characteristics of things not previously known words cannot describe them. Simply put, words cannot reach beyond what is already known.
Words present bounded objects in space and that’s what appears through my viewing lens and consequently determines my sense of reality. Within that setup I become the subject, the one who is looking, and everything else are objects to be looked at.
And that's what Wittgenstein's was cautioning us about, the power of language to present a world constructed by language. Our intelligence, he said, has been bewitched by language. Or, to put it another way, our intelligence is trapped in linguistic habits, patterns and meanings that limit what new knowledge might otherwise be available to us.
When I think about intelligence and look at my own cognitive warehouse of known things, I'm surprised to find that most of what's there are words. Everything I think I know is built upon words. Sometimes I even equate my own intelligence to the abundance of words in my warehouse, along with how capable I am of connecting them to each other. Words certainly allow me to talk a good game. Yet how much do I really understand about what's behind those words and what I think I know. Maybe it's just one layer of words on top another.
Though Wittgenstein and other philosophers understood the power of language to hijack our intelligence, that insight deeply registered with me when I came upon this single sentence: "The knowable must fit in the openings and spaces language provides." It's from the book Lotus Language by the Tibetan lama Tarthang Rinpoche.
In actuality, it's words that provide both the framing and the content through which we perceive and interpret our experience. In turn, that conditions our sense of reality as a world of objects in space.
Tarthang Rinpoche offered this further insight, "When you commit to a world of identified things, you also commit to the rhythm of linear time. To say something is a chair, means it remains a chair thorough time, even if that time is brief. That's what 'is' means, i.e. lasting through time."
I get the part about 'a world of identified things' but 'to commit to the rhythm of linear time' is somewhat enigmatic. What could time have to do with it? Is Tarthang Rinpoche saying that our sense of linear time- running from past to present to future- is also unreliable and just an appearance.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here writing this post while thinking about the next thing I want to say. I take for granted the words that pop into my mind and what they mean. Yet it's beginning to occur to me that though words are indispensable in describing what I'd otherwise have no way of talking about they also limit the characteristics of whatever appears- if they're not already known and familiar I simply won't notice them. Any description in words leaves much out about what's being described so it's only a partial knowing. Consequently, I miss everything else about whatever is appearing that could have been noticed and known.
That brings to mind a film entitled The Gods Must Be Crazy. The film is about how Bushmen in Africa perceive reality based on their experiences and cultural background. The idea is that someone might not see something unfamiliar like a plane in the sky because it doesn't fit within their frame of reference. They have no mental category for it.
Isn’t it also like that with words and the characteristics they describe. If you have no words to describe certain characteristics why would you even notice them. And if you don't notice them how can they be known.
In thinking about the conversation I'm having with myself right now it's all in words- you might say one part of my mind- my inner voice- is talking to another part. That voice is an internal narrator of my moment to moment experience and speaks to me using the same words with the same meanings that I use when speaking or writing to others- and with the same limitations. Yet what choice do I have but to rely on those words to tell me what's what, to make sense of my experience.
Maybe it's because of words and their limitations that I sometimes feel I'm being visited by the same recurring thoughts over and over again. It's not easy breaking away from the meanings they deliver and to reach out into new territory, to open to new ideas rather than churning what I already know. Yet if my inner voice couldn't speak to me in words- what then?
Language is tricky business and I'll continue exploring it in future posts. I want to consider how words, for example set up dichotomies like the so-called mind-body problem, which might just be a language problem, that is, no actual problem at all. Or, our understanding of cause and effect. And most intriguing is how language sets up the idea that we’re a self. The Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer says this about the self. “‘I am” limits everything after that.” What could that possibly mean?
Note: I'd like thank Robin Caton, my very special teacher/guide/friend at Dharma College in Berkeley Ca, for helping me understand Tarthang Rinpoche's insightful and demanding book Lotus Language.
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Thank you for this expansive and beautifully layered reflection. You’ve illuminated so clearly how language does more than convey meaning. It creates it, shapes it, limits it, and often blinds us by the very boundaries it so cleverly constructs. There’s something humbling in realizing how much of what we “know” is inherited through the openings and closures of language.
I was especially struck by the example from The Gods Must Be Crazy, a film I remember vividly. That image of a Coke bottle falling from the sky, unnameable and therefore unknowable within the framework of its receivers, says so much about how language not only reveals but conceals. We can’t see what we haven’t been trained to name.
And yet, even knowing that, I still find myself wrapped in the strange comfort of words. As you write so insightfully, they become a kind of cognitive scaffolding. We build and rebuild our reality from them, stacking approximations and echoes, sometimes mistaking the symbol for the substance.
Your mention of Dr. Ellen Langer’s line, “‘I am’ limits everything after that,” reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Aldous Huxley:
“Dualism: Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. ‘I’ affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; ‘am’ denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. ‘I am.’ Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth!”
And still, I love words. I keep writing, not to arrive at certainty, but to listen for the moment when something unsayable gets close. Even if just for a breath.
Thank you again for this generous invitation to reflect more deeply on the language we so often take for granted. This conversation is a gift.
I'm also interested in how language frames our world.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as the philosopher of change. One of his theses is that we—as a culture, since the Greeks—have been obsessed with how things stay the same. How Howard is the same Howard tomorrow as today. How the universe is constituted as of invariant particles such as protons and neutrons and electrons, which maintain their essential structures over time.
This seems to be what Tarthang is saying: "To say something is a chair, means it remains a chair thorough time, even if that time is brief. That's what 'is' means, i.e. lasting through time."
So being is persistence, unchanging. Or is it. Deleuze paints an alternative world picture.
For Deleuze, the world is not composed of stable, unchanging forms that the material world merely imitates or participates in. Rather, he sees the world as fundamentally dynamic, where difference and change are primary, not secondary.
Deleuze argues that the traditional Platonic view relies on a metaphysics of identity, where being is understood as a fixed, self-identical substance. In contrast, Deleuze proposes a metaphysics of difference, where being is conceptualized as a process of constant differentiation and becoming. Rather than static essences, Deleuze sees reality as composed of difference, multiplicity, and ceaseless variation.
At the heart of Deleuze's new worldview is the notion of "difference in itself" - the idea that difference is not simply the negation of identity, but a positive, productive force that generates new forms and realities. For Deleuze, it is difference, not identity, that is primary and generative. The world is not a reflection of fixed, ideal forms, but an open-ended process of differentiation and change.
The metaphor of reality as "objects in space" is exactly how the world was framed in by Descartes. Famously, this picture of space contains no place for one of our primary experiences: that of being conscious—of having a mind. So Descartes segregated things of mind (res cogitans) into completely different dimension. Descartes thought that our mind-stuff communicated with spatial object stuff (res extensa) through the pineal gland at the centre of the brain. Today, neuroscientists are still struggling on how to reconnect these two domains.
But from my perspective (and those of the many 20th century philosophers, the division of the world into two distinct categories is just a linguistic construct. That which as made by people, can be unmade. The problem lies just in that we are so entrenched in this linguistic habit that it's hard to imagine it otherwise.
Thank you for this expansive and beautifully layered reflection. You’ve illuminated so clearly how language does more than convey meaning. It creates it, shapes it, limits it, and often blinds us by the very boundaries it so cleverly constructs. There’s something humbling in realizing how much of what we “know” is inherited through the openings and closures of language.
I was especially struck by the example from The Gods Must Be Crazy, a film I remember vividly. That image of a Coke bottle falling from the sky, unnameable and therefore unknowable within the framework of its receivers, says so much about how language not only reveals but conceals. We can’t see what we haven’t been trained to name.
And yet, even knowing that, I still find myself wrapped in the strange comfort of words. As you write so insightfully, they become a kind of cognitive scaffolding. We build and rebuild our reality from them, stacking approximations and echoes, sometimes mistaking the symbol for the substance.
Your mention of Dr. Ellen Langer’s line, “‘I am’ limits everything after that,” reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Aldous Huxley:
“Dualism: Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. ‘I’ affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; ‘am’ denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. ‘I am.’ Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth!”
And still, I love words. I keep writing, not to arrive at certainty, but to listen for the moment when something unsayable gets close. Even if just for a breath.
Thank you again for this generous invitation to reflect more deeply on the language we so often take for granted. This conversation is a gift.
I'm also interested in how language frames our world.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as the philosopher of change. One of his theses is that we—as a culture, since the Greeks—have been obsessed with how things stay the same. How Howard is the same Howard tomorrow as today. How the universe is constituted as of invariant particles such as protons and neutrons and electrons, which maintain their essential structures over time.
This seems to be what Tarthang is saying: "To say something is a chair, means it remains a chair thorough time, even if that time is brief. That's what 'is' means, i.e. lasting through time."
So being is persistence, unchanging. Or is it. Deleuze paints an alternative world picture.
For Deleuze, the world is not composed of stable, unchanging forms that the material world merely imitates or participates in. Rather, he sees the world as fundamentally dynamic, where difference and change are primary, not secondary.
Deleuze argues that the traditional Platonic view relies on a metaphysics of identity, where being is understood as a fixed, self-identical substance. In contrast, Deleuze proposes a metaphysics of difference, where being is conceptualized as a process of constant differentiation and becoming. Rather than static essences, Deleuze sees reality as composed of difference, multiplicity, and ceaseless variation.
At the heart of Deleuze's new worldview is the notion of "difference in itself" - the idea that difference is not simply the negation of identity, but a positive, productive force that generates new forms and realities. For Deleuze, it is difference, not identity, that is primary and generative. The world is not a reflection of fixed, ideal forms, but an open-ended process of differentiation and change.
The metaphor of reality as "objects in space" is exactly how the world was framed in by Descartes. Famously, this picture of space contains no place for one of our primary experiences: that of being conscious—of having a mind. So Descartes segregated things of mind (res cogitans) into completely different dimension. Descartes thought that our mind-stuff communicated with spatial object stuff (res extensa) through the pineal gland at the centre of the brain. Today, neuroscientists are still struggling on how to reconnect these two domains.
But from my perspective (and those of the many 20th century philosophers, the division of the world into two distinct categories is just a linguistic construct. That which as made by people, can be unmade. The problem lies just in that we are so entrenched in this linguistic habit that it's hard to imagine it otherwise.