The Nature of Language
In his response to my last post, Harris Stern addressed an intrinsic paradox in the relationship between freedom and constraint with regard to willing. We seem to have the freedom to direct our behavior through an act of willing, but we are also constrained in our ability to do this. We sometimes have this freedom, and we sometimes lack it. In earlier essays, I have referred to this paradoxical freedom using the analogy of rolling dice. Half the time, I can successfully will a rolled die to come up odd, and half the time I can’t. Harris Stern frames the same phenomenon as a paradox. I am free but I am also constrained. I can control my own behavior, and I can’t. His way of framing this reality, as a paradox, is no less valid than my own.
I am inclined to frame it using the die rolling analogy because I assume the universe to follow consistent natural laws 100% of the time. Of course, if a dropped ball were to sometimes fall up, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that there’s no law of gravitation. It would, however, suggest that there’s more to gravitation than a simple, linear, cause-and-effect rule. A simple, linear, cause and effect rule should work 100% of the time. If it doesn’t, there’s something hiding there that begs for elucidation. It’s more complex and subtle than we are assuming it to be. Harris Stern and I agree on this. I define this as an “illusion,” meaning that there’s something here that isn’t what it appears to be. Harris Stern defines it as a “paradox,” meaning that there’s something here that isn’t what it appears to be or, at least, there’s more going on than the term “free will” might seem to imply to most people. I’m fine with calling this a “paradox” instead of an “illusion.”
Harris Stern has stated that he believes that paradox is an inescapable characteristic of all discussion of “reality,” and all that pertains to it. I agree completely. In this essay, I hope to explain (only partially and imperfectly, but usefully) WHY this is the case. The key point that I wish to make is that we cannot know reality directly. We can only know it through our perceptions and thoughts. We can only know it through our language and culture, and language and culture are intrinsically paradoxical. Language is paradoxical in the sense that it often defines reality in mutually contradictory terms. It is also paradoxical in that it obscures and distorts as much as it clarifies and defines.
I built my master’s thesis on the philosophical principles of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the idea that the language we use to think and communicate shapes and defines our perceptions and thoughts. That language also, I believe, necessarily distorts and warps our perceptions and thoughts, and there is no way to avoid this. All my life, my native language has been the bane of my existence. It has frustrated me no end for as long as I can remember — to such an extent that I have, on multiple occasions, considered redesigning it. I am by no means the first person to consider reconfiguring the English language to bring it more closely into alignment with objective reality. The E-Prime movement, for example, seeks to remove the verb “to be” from the English language to avoid the distortion of reality that its use causes. The phrase, “that goat is sexy” rendered in E-Prime becomes “I find that goat sexually attractive.” Objectively, goats aren’t intrinsically sexy, nor are people intrinsically “evil,” or works of art intrinsically “beautiful.” The English verb “to be” grammatically warps and distorts reality as it defines and clarifies it. Noun forms do the same thing.
As he has explained, Harris Stern intentionally uses gerunds to describe psychological functions (feeling, thinking, willing) instead of nominal forms (emotions, thoughts, intents). He refers to “choosing” or “willing” rather than “free will” because he doesn’t wish to suggest that “willing” or “feeling” are objects or things which have materiality. This is wise. (Or, as one would say in E-Prime, this feels wise to me.)
Even though he wisely avoids nominalizing feeling, thinking, or willing, Harris Stern does nominalize himself grammatically. He uses the pronouns “I” and “we” when he says “I have free will,” or “we have free will.” Does this grammatical nominalization, almost required by the English language, distort reality? Of course it does, in all sorts of ways. Not only is Harris Stern a living, dynamic and ever-changing process rather than a fixed and unchanging thing, he is an entire collection of processes — millions of them — and these dynamic processes have conflicting characteristics. Furthermore, when he linguistically defines himself in nominal terms (I), how is “he” categorizing or conceptualizing that “I”? Am “I” a single organism, fixed in nature and functionally independent from everything around “me”? Am I a collection of synergistically interacting organs? Is “my brain” a single object, or a collection of qualitatively distinct and different modules — the brain stem, the limbic brain, the pre-frontal cortex? Am “I” a dynamic and ever-changing collection of quadrillions of cells? Or a seemingly infinite number of interacting molecules? Moving to the other end of the potential “object” spectrum, am “I” a component of my family line, a citizen of a nation state, a member of the human race, or perhaps a component of the Earth’s biosphere?
In psychological terms, is “I” the subjective experience of Being (what we generally call “consciousness”), the collection of dynamic cognitive processes that exist above the threshold of consciousness, conscious and unconscious cognitive processes combined, mechanical neural activity and chemical activity at the cellular and sub-cellular level? All of this? In all of its intrinsically non-homogeneous, contradicting inconsistency, and dynamic fluidity? What is this fixed, independent, autonomous, and homogeneous OBJECT which the pronoun “I” appears to refer to?
In his last essay on this topic, Harris Stern expressed the opinion that he has neglected to explain how Wholistic Existential Psychology might include and conceive of the unconscious aspects of the “self” and, in so doing, has misled me into thinking that he conceives the self as being limited to what is conscious or self-conscious — and that it is this conscious aspect of self which is “willing” or “free.” “I” disagree. “He” is wrong. (In E-Prime, it seems to me that what “he” is thinking and saying “is incorrect” — which is to say, what “he” is thinking and saying doesn’t appear to “me” to accurately reflect reality.)
No, Harris Stern hasn’t misled me at all. I understand perfectly well that he doesn’t naively believe that he is nothing more than the conscious parts of his mind, and that he doesn’t naively believe that he is a single, homogeneous fixed and independent entity. However, I also understand that his dynamic and shifting thought processes are shaped by his anatomy, physiology, language, and culture, and that all of these things warp and distort his understanding of reality in ways that are both profound and dynamic. Sometimes, he consciously understands that he is a dynamic collection of urges, impulses, drives, aversions, complexes, thoughts, feelings, impressions, conflicts, and biases. Sometimes, at least partly, and at least for brief moments, the language he uses forces him to mentally frame “I” as a singular, homogeneous, macro-scale object. Sometimes, at least partly, and at least for brief moments, the language he uses lures him into defining “I” in terms of the conscious experience of Being — not an organism or person who “has” consciousness or “is” conscious — but the dynamic subjective experience of consciousness itself.
These distortions, created by language, culture, and habit, are intrinsically fluid and dynamic, and blend into each other continuously — from moment to moment. They’re also layered on top of each other, and our experience of them is subjectively distorted by which part of this complex pile of ever-changing, dynamically re-organizing, shifting, fluid logically-inconsistent concepts of self we’re holding in our minds at any given instant.
How can one utter the statement, “I have free will” or “I will things to happen” without — at least to some degree, conceptualizing oneself as a single, fixed, homogenous object? The very act of thinking or speaking these phrases (at least momentarily) frames a reality in which you are an object, and that object is composed of molecules, cells, and organelles. (As opposed to you being a collection of disparate molecules, cells, organelles, psychological processes, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, complexes, drives, etc. etc.)
The very act of thinking or speaking these phrases (at least momentarily) obliterates the reality of internal inconsistency and the reality of the dynamically self-contradicting and eternally battling multitude that exists within us. On some level, in some sense, when one says, “I willed myself to exercise today, and succeeded” one has misrepresented the reality of oneself, and turned oneself into a conscious, homogeneous mind — or experience of conscious awareness which successfully forced non-conscious aspects of itself to do its bidding. Language does this. It warps everything in unavoidable and profound ways.
The question that I would put to you is this: What is this “I” that successfully willed itself to exercise or stretch today? What is this “I” that chose to eat a salad instead of a cheeseburger? What is this “I” that failed to exercise today? Or ate peanut butter instead of cottage cheese? What is this “I,” and is that even a meaningful question?
If this “I” is actually a dynamic, non-homogeneous, collection of thousands of self-conflicting and profoundly qualitatively different components, how can it meaningfully be an “I”? Would a herd of buffalo say, “I decided to go over to the watering hole to have a drink?” Would a flock of birds say, “I chose to land on that barn roof”? Would, or could, Congress say, “I like Donald Trump” or “I oppose Obama Care”? We say — using the English language — that the American people “chose” Donald Trump as their president four years ago, but countless millions of people did no such thing. WHO then, elected Donald Trump? WHO is this WE who put Donald Trump into office? WHO is this WE who will likely impeach him for a second time?
