Tags
abstraction, futile, language, mind, reality, sufjan stevens, thoughts, useless, waking life, words
1) My ability to communicate through words seems to be deteriorating every day. I’ve been experiencing a dry spell with poetry-writing for the past while, and all I can seem to say is thoughts, not emotions. I cannot emote through spoken language, and I don’t believe that’s my fault: emotions transcend words in most (if not all) cases. Every day, my ability to speak my feelings shrinks, even though my ability to know how I am feeling is not impaired in the list (and neither is my ability to speak my mind). So what is this? I don’t understand it. I just realized that it’s happening right now: I am speaking my mind, but can’t “speak my heart”, so to speak.
2) Words are just a very specific way of describing things. Example: if I am looking for a word that refers to things that move from one location to the other with that being their primary function, then the answer is “vehicle.” If I’m looking for vehicles that I can use to transport, say, a family of human beings, I’m looking at “cars.” If we keep narrowing it down, we will eventually reach a very narrow band of objects, e.g. a sports car that has 1000+ BHP, ten radiators, etc. and the answer is the “Bugatti Veyron.” The name of the thing itself, generally, is meaningless. It’s just a label we use to simplify our lives. Names are also used as pointers to memories in our head. Imagine trying to remember someone without knowing their name: “They’re a living creature who are of the Homo sapiens species, and they live in […] .” Instead, we do it the other way around: we give the person a name, and by extension we can know the other things about that person.
3) This is an old though, but: language cannot exist without an outside world to which it corresponds. (Try describing something new to someone who’s never seen it, and then show them a picture. Chances are they’ll be imagining something completely different.) Thus, as far as I’m concerned, language is only useful/practical in use for the physical world. As for other applications, it’s only useful if you’re painting with words. Language breaks down at a certain “philosophical” level, so to speak. How would you define a word? You could say that it is a collection of letters arranged in a specific order to represent the name of a specific thing, but what is a word? This collection of letters is, in and of itself, meaningless. It’s a portion of metaphysical reality referring to a portion of physical reality. But what happens when this portion of metaphysical reality refers to another portion of metaphysical reality? How do we know that we’re describing the same thing?