Is language a means of communication? A friend recently used the word “flimsy” in a somewhat unusual context, and I asked, “What do you mean by flimsy?”
He replied, “Well, the word means what it sounds like — flimsy. Don’t you hear how it sounds?”
“I can’t always tell what an English word means by the way it sounds,” I said. “English isn’t my native language.”
“Oh,” he answered, “I didn’t realize that. But it’s true — we learn to associate meaning with sound from an early age.”
That remark made me think of the Russian word for flimsy, and immediately a whole series of images and associations stirred in my mind.
When we look at a thing, we think we are seeing the thing itself. In reality, we are seeing a constellation of images and symbols handed down to us by language and culture.
Language builds a house in which we live. We cannot step outside its walls, even if we try. Whatever we see or think exists within that house — and it is there that we dwell.
Martin Heidegger said,
“Language is not merely and not primarily a means of communication. Language is the house of Being in which man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”
This “home” is preserved for us by language and culture. We think we live in the world, but in fact we live inside a text — a system of meanings and interpretations into which we were born. We dwell within our cultural semantics.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” And Jacques Derrida sharpened the point further: “There is nothing outside the text.”
I am rarely conscious of the fact that when I look at a table, I am seeing a different table from the one my American friend sees. We do not encounter the table directly. First, we see the “text” about the table that we have absorbed from our respective cultures and languages.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.”
— Edward Sapir, Language
I believe I am looking at a thing, but I am looking at semantics — a system of symbols shaped by my language. That’s why people from different cultures interpret things differently. They live in different houses — different coding systems. That’s why cultures clash. We sincerely don’t understand how someone can see the same thing in a different way.
In the final analysis, most wars are waged for semantic reasons. One culture becomes so convinced that it sees the world the “right” way that it seeks to compel the other culture to acknowledge it.
Fascism is a purely semantic phenomenon — one culture identifies itself so completely with its semantics that it equates them to ultimate reality. It deifies its own coding system.
Fascism arises when we refuse to look at one thing in two different ways. Reversal of fascism begins when I attempt to transcend my cultural semantics. I discover that there’s Meaning behind my smaller meanings — the Logos behind all cultural semantics.
There is a Symbol behind all symbols. As I move toward that Symbol, I come to realize that my culture is only a shadow. It foreshadows Reality but cannot replace it. When we embrace the Symbol, the Symbol embraces us in return — for the Greek symbolon means “to throw together, to unite.”
