Bloody meditations: meaning and language.
(The title, btw, is an in-joke within the Philosophy department at my uni - the head of Philosophy hates Descartes and his "bloody meditations", and so do the majority of the students, as we have to go over them so much. There are other reasons for this but that's not the point of the post.)
So hi! I know I need to update al you guys on my life, if, of course, you are interested. And there are some Avatar headcanons and analyses which I will post on here once I refine them. For the moment, however, I am attempting my Moral Philosophy coursework. What tends to happen when I am doing Philosophy work is that my mind drifts off into tangents, and I end up having very Philosophical thougths which are in no way relevant to the topic at hand.
This is such an occasion. While I am supposed to be answering the question "what makes a question a moral question" (I KNOW, isn't it awful?), I instead started musing and meditating on thought, language, and meaning. This is a topic I often come back to in my personal philosophical meditations. Up until this point I was considering language as defining our subjective experience of reality, and therefore reality itself. Today, however, I rebelled against this view I had been cultivating, and counter-argued with another, which I prefer.
If anyone's interested, this whole thing was inspired by this wonderful piece of music, Flare, from the Homestuck soundtrack.
Without further ado, here is the meditation itself! Comments, critiques, and counter arguments welcome and encouraged :D
---
I really don’t think language defines meaning. Wittgenstein and other philosophers of his ilk use language to set the parameters for reality itself, which implies that without language we could not understand the world. (I need to research this further.)
But that can’t be. Before language, we had ways of interpreting the world. Animals do. And I don’t think it’s language that makes us more intelligent than them. Don’t get me wrong - the effects of language are far to diverse and subconscious for me to understand, and I’m not downplaying them in any way. We would be, for the most part, lost without language.
But I don’t think meaning is defined by language, nor that our thoughts are based in language.
When thinking, I feel like there’s an echo effect in the stages of my interpretation of meaning. My initial stage of thought I think is one of wordless meaning, which links to other interpretations of this meaning. The second stage, which follows so fast that it is almost inseparable from the first stage, is the thought as we interpret the meaning: my mind adds on language to quantify the meaning acknowledged by the first stage. This second stage effectively translates this essential meaning into language, and that is what is commonly accepted as thought.
There are further stages, depending on what exactly the thought is and what the stimulus was. For instance, if the stimulus is external, such as a picture of my sister as a child, the stages following the first two stages would be linking memories, working out what year this was, linking emotive responses etc. However, if the thought is internalised - a new idea - the following stages would be different. I won’t go into them now.
There are times when we can experience the first stage of thought (pure meaning) without it being immediately followed by the second stage (translation into language). We all have those moments when we can’t find the words to exactly describe what we are thinking. To my mind, the second stage of thought is failing here: when I have experienced this phenomenon, words and potential explanations clash together in my head but I am unable to settle on them or express them, yet the meaning of what I desire to express remains. It is possible that in this instance without the second stage of thought the initial meaning is lost. I have experienced this too. Without being able to quantify this wordless meaning, I lose the depth of the meaning, and it is gone.
There are times, however, when the second stage is not needed for us to understand the first stage of pure meaning. I have experienced this when, for example, watching a play or reading a book. The meaning of interaction between the characters, or the narrative, is conveyed into my mind without me having to translate it into language. This might be because the translation is already there on the page, or being spoken by actors. But there are other levels of meaning - say, body language used by the actors to convey attitudes towards the other characters - that aren’t translated by the external stimulus yet I am able to accept the meaning without having to translate it into language. Another example is poetry: when annotating poetry and analysing it, we discover layers of meaning that, while they were conveyed to us while reading, were not initially apparent in the language.
Dance is another example, and perhaps a better one, as there is no initial translation of meaning into language. Through movements, dancers can convey a myriad of meaning which we accept yet do not have to translate into language. The dancers can convey sadness, elation, and any number of meanings without translation, and we can accept them as such.
All this does imply, however, that if language is not needed to interpret meaning, some other form of communication is, eg: body movements. Yet there are times when I encounter an external stimulus, say a beautiful sunset, and meaning is conveyed which I accept yet do not need the second stage of thought to translate it to understand. When watching a sunset, various meanings are conveyed to me - what all the different colours mean about the stage of the sunset (objective meaning?) and also meanings the stimulus invokes within myself (subjective/emotive meaning?).
I’ll have to come back to this later, some time when I am not attempting a meditation on an entirely different subject. I need to expand on the ideas of different types of meaning (see previous paragraph), other translations of meaning besides language, and the implications of these thoughts (changes to Wittgenstein’s assertions, for instance).
---
So yeah, it's pretty rough and needs refining. But I thought I'd share it anyway! Hope you found it interesting :D
~Lili
So hi! I know I need to update al you guys on my life, if, of course, you are interested. And there are some Avatar headcanons and analyses which I will post on here once I refine them. For the moment, however, I am attempting my Moral Philosophy coursework. What tends to happen when I am doing Philosophy work is that my mind drifts off into tangents, and I end up having very Philosophical thougths which are in no way relevant to the topic at hand.
This is such an occasion. While I am supposed to be answering the question "what makes a question a moral question" (I KNOW, isn't it awful?), I instead started musing and meditating on thought, language, and meaning. This is a topic I often come back to in my personal philosophical meditations. Up until this point I was considering language as defining our subjective experience of reality, and therefore reality itself. Today, however, I rebelled against this view I had been cultivating, and counter-argued with another, which I prefer.
If anyone's interested, this whole thing was inspired by this wonderful piece of music, Flare, from the Homestuck soundtrack.
Without further ado, here is the meditation itself! Comments, critiques, and counter arguments welcome and encouraged :D
---
I really don’t think language defines meaning. Wittgenstein and other philosophers of his ilk use language to set the parameters for reality itself, which implies that without language we could not understand the world. (I need to research this further.)
But that can’t be. Before language, we had ways of interpreting the world. Animals do. And I don’t think it’s language that makes us more intelligent than them. Don’t get me wrong - the effects of language are far to diverse and subconscious for me to understand, and I’m not downplaying them in any way. We would be, for the most part, lost without language.
But I don’t think meaning is defined by language, nor that our thoughts are based in language.
When thinking, I feel like there’s an echo effect in the stages of my interpretation of meaning. My initial stage of thought I think is one of wordless meaning, which links to other interpretations of this meaning. The second stage, which follows so fast that it is almost inseparable from the first stage, is the thought as we interpret the meaning: my mind adds on language to quantify the meaning acknowledged by the first stage. This second stage effectively translates this essential meaning into language, and that is what is commonly accepted as thought.
There are further stages, depending on what exactly the thought is and what the stimulus was. For instance, if the stimulus is external, such as a picture of my sister as a child, the stages following the first two stages would be linking memories, working out what year this was, linking emotive responses etc. However, if the thought is internalised - a new idea - the following stages would be different. I won’t go into them now.
There are times when we can experience the first stage of thought (pure meaning) without it being immediately followed by the second stage (translation into language). We all have those moments when we can’t find the words to exactly describe what we are thinking. To my mind, the second stage of thought is failing here: when I have experienced this phenomenon, words and potential explanations clash together in my head but I am unable to settle on them or express them, yet the meaning of what I desire to express remains. It is possible that in this instance without the second stage of thought the initial meaning is lost. I have experienced this too. Without being able to quantify this wordless meaning, I lose the depth of the meaning, and it is gone.
There are times, however, when the second stage is not needed for us to understand the first stage of pure meaning. I have experienced this when, for example, watching a play or reading a book. The meaning of interaction between the characters, or the narrative, is conveyed into my mind without me having to translate it into language. This might be because the translation is already there on the page, or being spoken by actors. But there are other levels of meaning - say, body language used by the actors to convey attitudes towards the other characters - that aren’t translated by the external stimulus yet I am able to accept the meaning without having to translate it into language. Another example is poetry: when annotating poetry and analysing it, we discover layers of meaning that, while they were conveyed to us while reading, were not initially apparent in the language.
Dance is another example, and perhaps a better one, as there is no initial translation of meaning into language. Through movements, dancers can convey a myriad of meaning which we accept yet do not have to translate into language. The dancers can convey sadness, elation, and any number of meanings without translation, and we can accept them as such.
All this does imply, however, that if language is not needed to interpret meaning, some other form of communication is, eg: body movements. Yet there are times when I encounter an external stimulus, say a beautiful sunset, and meaning is conveyed which I accept yet do not need the second stage of thought to translate it to understand. When watching a sunset, various meanings are conveyed to me - what all the different colours mean about the stage of the sunset (objective meaning?) and also meanings the stimulus invokes within myself (subjective/emotive meaning?).
I’ll have to come back to this later, some time when I am not attempting a meditation on an entirely different subject. I need to expand on the ideas of different types of meaning (see previous paragraph), other translations of meaning besides language, and the implications of these thoughts (changes to Wittgenstein’s assertions, for instance).
---
So yeah, it's pretty rough and needs refining. But I thought I'd share it anyway! Hope you found it interesting :D
~Lili