THE PROBLEM WITH WORDS

1. THE PROBLEM WITH WORDS Neil Greenberg Departments of Ecology, Medicine, and Psychology University of Tennessee, Knoxville Tiffany, “Education” (1890) January 2008

2. Threads of Evidence: Needs met Meeting NEEDS is the basic business of life. When real (or perceived) needs are not met, stress is created. Organisms have ancient and powerful mechanisms for relieving stress Needs exist in a hierarchy of urgencies. When the most urgent need is met, all the organism’s energy is focused on the next need.

3. NEED HIERARCHY Self actualization Esteem Sociality Safety Health

4. AS SOCIAL ANIMALS, among our most urgent needs is COMMUNICATION • WE FIRST COMMUNICATE with OURSELVES ... Numerous feedback loops confirm the veracity of our experiences Then as development continues and consciousness enlarges... 2. We will come to communicate with CAREGIVERS and eventually anyone with whom we have transactions that can affect us Communicating is essential to progressive development, to sociality and to culture BUT there are limits: consciousness often contains concepts we cannot readily communicate – even with ourselves!

5. THE INABILITY TO COMMUNICATE can become acutely painful, desperately urgent "If you bring forth that which is within you, that which you have brought forth will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, that which you do not bring forth will destroy you."(Gospel of Thomas #70) But organisms are nothing if not always striving for efficiency: “Artists, DeStaebler once said, “don’t get down to work until thepain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.” As Anaïs Nin put it, “... the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

6. NEED HIERARCHY Self actualization Esteem Sociality Safety Health

7. MEETING NEEDS SOCIALITY is a need that must be met for humans to survive, thrive, and self-actualize “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” – Aristotle (Politics, Book 1)

8. The constrained organism • MODALITIES of communication are limited by our unique Umwelt – our sensory and perceptual world -- for example: • Vision: 390-780nm • Hearing 20-20K Hz “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo – reflects his conviction that all things can be measured

10. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . . Communications are BIASED by past experience .. Development as well as proximate context

11. We see the world not as it is, But as we are . . .

12. Ineffable:defies expression, cannot be described in words. Noetic:gives insight and knowledge into deep truths. Transient: brief and cannot be accurately remembered, though easily recognized if it recurs. Passivity:facilitated by preparation, but once begun it seems out of one’s control … as if controlled by a superior power William James 1918 mystical experienceepiphany, insight

13. Ineffable:defies expression, cannot be described in words. Noetic, Transient, Passive experiences are hard if not impossible to communicate in linear language … this motivates every kind of artist … poet … They must “eff” the ineffable Ineffable experiences

14. Expression: The artists problem … effing the ineffable … Authority: Gospel of Thomas … urgency to express … to share …

15. WORDS The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation . . . --Joseph Campbell (1968)

16. So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerresTrying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquerBy strength and submission, has already been discoveredOnce or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hopeTo emulate—but there is no competition—There is only the fight to recover what has been lostAnd found and lost again and again: and now, under conditionsThat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. From “East Coker,” 2nd of TS Elliot’s “Four Quartets”

17. The problem with words words “. . . are the instruments of thought; they form the channel along which thought flows; they are the moulds in which thought is shaped.” --Aldous Huxley

18. Important Digression NEW evidence for Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: • German newspapers describing a new bridge “it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" … In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? • In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, • Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely • In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory … the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.” • From Begley 2009

19. Are we any more able to express qi than to experience our own metabolism? Our own dynamic balance of bodily energies?How do we express the experience of harmony? Qi seems to be ineffable

20. “Transcendent of human language, there is literally nothing we can say about Ain Sof,” the incomprensible one (The Path of the Kaballah)

21. “the dào that can be spokenIs not the eternal dào.The name that can be namedis not the eternal name.” Dào Dé Jīng

22. Śūnyatāvoid शून्यता

23. Nirgunathe formless, universe-pervading attribute of Brahman निर्गुण ब्रह्म

24. Apophaticthe unknowable, ineffable essence

25. We become accustomed to hierarchical stages, progressively ensheathed, layered with the stages that came before, pregnant with the stages within to come: we are confident that a stage will come ... But it will be ... Unlike all before ... Ineffible... We are forced to go beyond words ... To become artists Koshas of Vedanta, vijnanas in Buddhism, sefirot in Kabbalah

26. For example, we communicate with bits of information such as words or numbers . . . As far they refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

27. "The senses cannot think. The understanding cannot see." Immanual Kant Critique of Pure Reason

28. "Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

30. “How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of "yes" and "no" revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void?” (Jos Campbell, THTF1949)

31. Apophaticthe unknowable, ineffable essence