Yourself

A grammatical intensifier and its connection to the firsthand

⩩ 14

Were you yourself there, or did you get this from someone else? What is your source?

Socrates made this distinction again and again. He drew a circle in the ground and said that within this circle only what you say in your own voice can be said, only what you yourself have seen and can vouch for.

There is a tribe in the Amazon whose language marks this category grammatically. In fact, they favor perception and firsthand experience rigorously and across the board. They make few artifacts and don’t keep any. They don’t use numbers or count. They don’t tell stories for which there is not a living eyewitness; they have no use or interest in them. Their extravagant predilection for the concrete is legendary. They trust the soundness of their senses; they leave no crack or crevice for abstraction.

This preference for the firsthand is expressed not only in what they talk about but in how they talk: in the structure of the language, the grammar of the verb. Our English verbs mark number and tense: I bring, he brings, he brought. In the Pirahãs’ language, the form of the verb tells you whether the speaker witnessed the thing herself or heard it from someone else. It specifies the speaker’s grounds. It says firsthand or second.

What we achieve through complex nesting — “I heard the drawer is empty” or “I saw the drawer is empty” — is marked for them by the verb itself, in a special suffix: “the drawer is₁ empty” versus “the drawer is₂ empty.” The verb’s form indicates the presence or absence of the evidential source for the assertion, and so the force with which it is asserted. How great a care it must have been to these people, over a long period of time, for it to become a grammatical category!

We, on the other hand, are utterly careless here. We mark in passing when we are entering into another’s voice and story, but spend so long there and are so neglectful of the distinction that we forget to come back, to slough it off and take up again our own. We are so used to giving the views and opinions of others, as it were, living and breathing them, that we lose track of the distinction entirely. The call becomes an impertinence, a whim we tamp down and ignore.

And yet it is not just this odd tribe. The further back you go in history, it seems, the more you bump into this distinction: the more awareness and concern there was for this node, and the more urgently its question was asked. It litters the pages of Herodotus, for example, who meticulously notes what he has seen himself and what he has only heard in report, as he sets the two side by side and weaves them together. 

It is of the first order of importance about any story or statement. It precedes the story logically. Whether you are telling what you yourself saw or what you heard is not itself part of the story, not another event or piece of information, but cuts across the entire thing.

Think of it like this. There are two levels any statement or opinion can be said at: it can be said hypothetically, as a possibility to be entertained, or as the plain asserted truth. In other words, there is the plane of rumor and the plane of assertion, and the listener can’t react to the statement until he knows which plane the speaker is populating.

And really consider this: it doesn’t matter what your parents or teachers say, or what anyone else said who might have made pronouncements or written a book on the topic. It doesn’t matter what everyone says. It matters what you say.

Socrates made this principle the cornerstone of his whole way of speaking and being. He lopped clean off the sphere of rumor; he turned off the lights on the second floor, made it defunct, so that everyone he talked with had to come down to the ground floor and converse from there. He laid it down as a rule internal to conversation, the price of entrance.

Within this circle, everyone stands on her own two feet. And truly this approach is the height of good sense, because the maintenance of the conversation depends on nothing less. To tell someone else’s story, to speak at secondhand, is to appeal to someone who is not here, to outsource the thinking and end the conversation.

On the other hand, if we insist on that – writing the story ourselves, keeping the conversation going; if we put our foot down on all authority being within this very circle, then to say something hypothetically is not yet to say anything; to report a rumor is not yet to say anything. Yes, sounds have been made, but nothing has been moved, put forward, asserted. Nothing has been said.

To adopt this attitude is to let go of the prejudices and honors of the majority. It is to “say goodbye” to the crowd. It is to enter into conversation, to speak with the singularity in front of you, to talk with one as one.

Such an attitude has consequences to the extent it is adopted. When it is made a habit, when it becomes character, it makes the person unusual, strange, generally and thoroughly out of place. Received cultural abstractions — education, wealth, worship — they take up and examine these, one by one, testing them against the body of experience by their own judgment. By definition, they become idiosyncratic.

For example, the habit puts them outside religion, at least conventional religion, religion based on belief in something in the past, two hundred or two thousand years ago. And it sets them apart from the academic scholar as such, whose work is channeled through disciplinary and institutional assumptions they did not make and cannot investigate.

In all cases they want to say: “If the one who actually experienced it and said it for the first time were here, I would ask him about his experience and what he meant by it; but since he is not here and since the one standing in this circle with me is you, I want to know what you say. The floor is yours.”

So I hate quotation. At times, I even hate names. Tell me what you know.

---

---

Did a part of this essay resonate with you? Make you think of something you have seen, heard or read? Have another angle on the topic? Please leave a comment.

---

You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 14. Here are some highlights from what came before.

Firsthand

⩩ 12 Learning

⩩ 11 Secondhand

⩩10 Habit

⩩ 9 Firsthand

Stagestranger

⩩ 7 Mistake

⩩ 6 Whim

⩩ 3 Speechless

⩩ 1 Headsup

If you enjoyed one of them or the series as a whole, please consider passing it along to a friend. And if a friend passed it along to you, welcome. By subscribing you can have these notes delivered to your inbox, too. If you would like, stay abreast.

---

A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.

---

I learned about the Pirahãs in Daniel Everett’s book Don’t Sleep: There are Snakes.

---

If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.