A heads up approach to language

The necessity of the breakdown

I’m published on paper! I wrote about my journey from grad school to grade school and what a life of philosophy looks like to me. It’s in Symposeum Magazine. You can find the online version of my essay here. Shout out to Daniel Bennett, who pointed me toward the Symposeum people earlier this year and whose awesome piece on “home” is in the same issue.

⩩ 41

How much we take for granted! How much we do not, far from understanding, — how much we do not even think about! As William James knew, our normal waking consciousness is only one special type of consciousness, while all around it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different. 

James got confirmation of this by inhaling nitrous oxide, but you don’t need to venture onto the seas of drugs to arrive at this conclusion. In its cascade of objects waking consciousness itself teaches this lesson. Sustained disinterested attention to a particular thing invites you beyond your ordinary egotistically utilitarian consciousness, opening a door to you. Could be a rock, a river, a person, a spoon. As in the Collins poem, the whales swim perpetually in the seas. We pass one hand through the screen, and apprehend the mysterious divine.  

How much we are not seeing noticing watching that wants to be seen noticed watched! To be understood! At least we all have moods in which we are led to look at them in awe and wonder. And I have the particular disposition to feel that this mood should last forever. Rightfully, it doesn’t end. I would never look away from these divine beings. It is intolerable for attention to move on, to forget. 

But the fact remains that these moods are brief, that the world is panoramic while we are concentrated, that the wonderful sights slip from view, that, for the most part, we are entirely blind to them. The mood is but a moment.  

It’s not only that we naturally pay attention to things only insofar as they affect us, come near to us and touch us; it’s that, however near to us they are, we don’t even pay attention to things as long as they’re working for us, like our digestion, breathing, and language. Nature closes our eyes, hiding from us what we don’t need to know, or don’t know we need to know. What works is taken for granted, which is why, as Plato and Wittgenstein and Heidegger knew, thinking begins in aporia, in breakdown, in disruption. Hence I started this series with an image of interruption.  

Using a thing and looking at it are activities that exclude each other. To use a thing is not to see it, and to see it is not to use it. What we use are tools, but when they are being used as tools we do not, we cannot, attend to them in their own right. Think of a hammer. When you are using it, you are looking at the nail. You are effectively forbidden from seeing it by using it. Only in stopping using it can you feel its weight in your hand, turn it over, look at it from all angles and wonder about its make. Only by not using it can you look at it and see it in and for itself.

So it is with all things we use, everything we do, all our habits. Our movement is on the ground: only in stopping, only in standing still do we get tall enough to look around. This is true for all our tools, and all the more so with words, because they are all the more useful to us.

We learn language so early and effortlessly and speak it so unintermittently that we never see it. Nothing is so usual, so useful to us as language, and therefore so invisible. And so a word breaking down, a word falling solidly into our hands, occasions the temporary suspension of one of our deepest and oldest habits. Suddenly we see again that these things, our words, are beings in their own right, with a shape and a sound and a story of their own.

So suppose now we are to interrupt language. In terms of our image of words as coins, this means momentarily taking coins out of circulation. Holding them up to the light rather than sliding them across the counter.

In theoretical terms, this means setting aside that language works and that we know how to use it, and attempting to consider it in itself. What is language? Suppose that, as a kind of meditative searching attention to speech, we were to become mindful of our words. What would we see? 

Now this experience may be a one-off, a whimsical anomaly, or it may open a doorway to a whole new approach to words, a whole new way of speaking, as my friend Josh DeFrieze put it to me, a “heads up approach to language.” I love this, though I wonder if we sell ourselves short, and it is not a heads up approach to language but a heads up approach to reality. And who can say where this will end? I like it best when I know perfectly well where and why my friend is pointing, and don’t know what he’s pointing at. Let’s go through that door. 

Of course, we look back here to our first principle, the flag staked in the ground under the name firsthand. As with everything else, the task is to bring it within arm’s length. In the coming essays we will try to figure out not what people know about language, but what we ourselves know and understand of language, what language really is. How are words used? What can we do with them? How do they show themselves in experience?  

Experience! Experience! My experience! I have no experience yet. I am on my way to experience. This whole series of reflections is evidently tentative, progressive, an experiment. And the one thing I will forever be willing to stake myself on is that looking at something, attending to it, taking interest in it, changes it and changes you. The object is not indifferent to our attentions, nor are we indifferent to it, nor is this mood a mood of leisure only, or mere curiosity. It is the path to reality, the path of the creator to their work.

We language not, not yet. We are on our way to speaking for the first time. 

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You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 41, the second installment in a chapter on language.