⩩ 45
When we look around, we see subordinate things made ultimate goods, means treated as ends in themselves, empty forms fossilized and repeated for their own sake. Look at our school and university systems. Completing predetermined assignments, a student ascends ready-made grades to receive a degree, a title. Look at what passes as religion: a place, a service, a robe, the recitation of a memorized prayer. Look at who we call wealthy.
After wondering for a while why this is, I finally thought I had part of an answer. We are blinded by habit, especially by the most prevalent and ingrained habit: language. We are bewitched by language. We confuse our usual name for a thing, a nametag, with the thing itself. We don’t even know there is something else there to know, something yet-unknown. We call it its conventional name and think we are done. Having put our trust in society’s nametags, we neglect our own eyes and inquiring minds. There are all sorts of problems with society, sure, but the names of things we’ve got figured out. Naming is the easiest thing in the world! School! Church! Technology!
Indeed, it is hard to resist naming something when we see it. As soon as it shows up, practically everyone around us leaps up, shouting out loud just what comes to mind and what it is usually called, as if it were a contest to be the first to say it. We are eager to name it straightaway because we feel more powerful doing so, too. To name it is to know what it is, and we named it (we reason to ourselves), so we know what it is.
It is hard to resist naming something when we see it, and yet it is necessary to do so. We are dead wrong in thinking it is easy and cheap to name something. Truly naming is hard, costs a lot, and you have to put in work to figure out what it is. A thing’s name is entwined with its being: its name says what it is, so you can’t name it truly until you have learned what it is, which includes what it is good for.
In complex and mysterious ways, language is normative. One of these ways is that our terms themselves are normative. The good lives in our words and concepts. Take explaining. When we say someone explained something, we mean that she succeeded in explaining it, that she explained it well, that her explanation is a good one.
Things that can be good, though, can also be bad. And when we go to the other side, things get more complicated. When we call something a bad explanation, what are we saying? If it is a bad explanation, then it doesn’t explain, and if it doesn’t explain, then it isn’t an explanation: this is an etymological tautology. So how can there be such a thing as a bad explanation?
On reflection it is clear that what we mean is that it is meant to explain, but does not. It tries to explain, is intended to explain, aspires to explain, but fails to. A bad explanation is a failed, unsuccessful explanation. In this way we see that aspiration, with its dual possibilities of success and failure, is built into our semantics. Only the good instance is what it aspires to be.
And yet “good,” as an adjective, sometimes becomes evidence of our own confusion. Seeing that there are in some sense bad explanations, we think that there are two kinds of explanations, good ones and bad ones, and that an explanation in itself is neither good nor bad. Then, when someone has finished, we think, “There’s the explanation. Now let’s see whether it’s a good or bad one.” Then in the end we perhaps call it a “good explanation,” thinking that “good” adds something to its being an “explanation.”
At this point we have confused and crippled ourselves. By removing the idea of the good or success from our concept of explanation, we hollow it out. We make the word a mere tag, a label. Using the word this way, it becomes meaningless. We fall into an external, encumbered way of speaking. This is the suicide of thought.
It makes all the difference in the world whether, forgetting about the good, we treat words as mere labels, or whether we ourselves look at the world and, looking toward the good and successful and ideal, apply them where they are earned. When the person gets done speaking, we should think, not whether it’s a good or bad explanation, but whether it’s an explanation. Period.
So also with school, teachers, worship, prayer, wealth. We should see whether the candidates earn the name, whether they are entitled to it. So that we speak meaningfully, let our speech be full of baptisms and fulfillments. Every action and every word lives: it tries, aims, dares, longs, and aspires. In and of itself, it promises, and is what it is only as it fulfills.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 45, the sixth installment in a chapter on language.