Dead languages are always spoken. In fact, dead languages are only spoken. When a language dies or vocabulary passes into obscurity, it is precisely then that the word’s vital possibilities reawaken in the light of another language. When we explore etymologies, we define old words in terms of our current language, opening up new possibilities and ways of thinking foreign to the “dead languages.” Only our spoken languages are truly dead because they lose their vitality precisely by being spoken habitually. Once the novelty of a word disappears for the speaker, the very word which first expanded consciousness becomes the means of its limitation.
When we first encounter a language, its words are vital, new, and potent. Whether it is Latin or philosophy, the words hold a vibrant and inexhaustible addition to our vocabulary and therefore to our mode of thinking. The irony is that “dead languages” like Latin and Greek are perhaps the most alive because they have their own horizon, which a tired language does not. Precisely the exotic sense of old languages opens the possibility for a redefinition of our own words. It is our language, not Latin, which is dead.
The appropriation of even a single new word radically changes not only what we do think about, but also what we can think about. Our vocabulary is the extent to which we are able to think. When are in the habit of using only one language—politics, philosophy, psychology—our thoughts begin to form mental ruts, following the same paths, the same circles, and the same habits. A language is never dead in itself; a language dies because of its members.
When a language grows tired, it is really the members of that language who have grown tired, lazy, and negligent. When a political position can be reduced to “talking points” it uses a very tired language. When the creationist position can be summarized in a handful of superficial arguments, the language needs to be revisited and reformed.
A language is alive as long as it is exploring within its own horizon. If a language’s horizon is exhausted, there are two options: dying gracefully by allowing its words to be redefined by other languages, or refusing to die by consuming other languages. A tired language tends to bleed beyond its natural horizon, consuming all other languages. A student of psychology can quickly come to think only in terms of psychology; of politics, politics; of theology, theology. The problem is not that each language does not have its own limited sphere. Quite the contrary! Every language has its own horizon, limitations, and authentic possibilities. The problem is when one language becomes such a totalizing force that it absorbs all others and defines all words in terms of a single, unitary paradigm.
As a language tires, it tends to turn into a hermetically closed system which allows no new words even as it attempts to redefine other languages exclusively by its own terms. Translation becomes more and more difficult because terms begin to be defined only by other terms within the same language. As each language grows more habitual and less meaningful, it expands to feel meaningful. The truth is that each language is entirely meaningful within its own horizon. The expansion of the horizon of a particular language is in fact an act of bad faith which betrays the vital possibilities of the language in the first place.
A tired language moves back upon itself faster and faster in tighter circles. This reflexive movement of a tired language creates friction between it and other languages, which creates outward momentum. This outward momentum projects a particular language out upon other languages in a totalizing extension of horizon.
How do we suspend this reflexive movement of language and keep our mental habits from being exclusively self-referential? By redefining our words in terms of other languages and introducing new terms, we open up the possibility for other valid ways of understanding the same topics, the same concepts, but in entirely different languages. For example, a non-metaphysical understanding of sacraments is not mutually exclusive to a metaphysical understanding, but rather the two open up a multiplicity of paths to understanding the same truth.
A dead language is one which has reached its fullest extent, has defined all it can define, and is complacent. Its reflexive movement is both so small it cannot be seen and so large that the very horizon has vanished. It has stopped changing and has thus died. Life is a process of degeneration and regeneration; the same is true of language. Without change, though itself a small death, life ends. As time progresses and the human condition changes, language too changes to our particular circumstances. Revision of past concepts is perpetually necessary not because we are at a better place, but because we are at a particular place in time, space, and language. This is why missionaries learn native languages in order to translate their gospel into other languages. We must always be open to the gospel of other languages. Only by allowing our language to be appropriated by others do we stand the chance of keeping our own language. As soon as we become closed to the possibility of our own inadequacy, the reflexive movement of language accelerates and we will invariably find ourselves in mental ruts which are extremely difficult to escape. The outward momentum of a tired language is a premature death seeking to take other languages with it.
While the outward momentum of a tired language is a form of change, it is an illusion of life. Only by consuming and being consumed does life exist. The totalizing force of a closed language only consumes. What is there to do with a dead language? It must be consumed and deconstructed in order to find a new possibility for truth. Our languages of party politics, evangelicalism, and even capitalism have grown weary precisely because each asserts a claim on all others rather than allowing each to exist within its own limited horizon, living as it does within its natural environment. Only a perpetual revision of our vocabular will keep us from intellectual dishonesty and totalitarian language.
Recently, Tim Raveling wrote an article on why he is no longer a Christian and is now agnostic. While I have respect for him and many of his ideas, there is a fundamental flaw in his approach to faith. I do not propose what Jacob Holt has written earlier about Christian existentalism. I do not propose any positive system of faith or knowledge, but rather affirm the plurality of modes of knowledge.
There is a danger in all forms of knowledge that the language will consume all aspects of life. A good example of this is economics. A firm follower of the Austrian school of economics can very quickly come to think entirely in terms of incentives and economic “benefit.” Without going into detail about how the term “benefit” is left undefined except in terms of subjective want, the language of economics does not apply to all of life. Nor does the language of theology apply to every imaginable aspect of life.
Every science has its own language, and there are a number of hermetically sealed languages. Freud’s methodology gives results that are invariably Freudian. This might be considered the strength of a system, but that is also its greatest weakness: by only being able to speak in terms of itself, it is as much a “faith” as a science. This is the same as an evangelical who says “Because the Bible says so.” The refusal of evangelicals to allow any external evaluation of their method is the danger of every method.
The scientific method is the most obvious culprit here, but hardly the worst. Any method can become a totalizing force consuming other sciences. One method of knowledge can very quickly spread to other fields beyond its original horizon. Each science has a different method and a different mode of knowledge. This is the danger of fideism, which admits no rational evaluation of religion. This is also the danger of rationalism, which admits no religious evaluation of reason. Certain terms fall into certain sciences. The concept of “good” or “God” is not a matter of economics nor of the scientific method. But every science is related because the common element is the human agent.
This is the danger of Wittgeinstein’s concept of language-games which he does not only apply to hermetically sealed minigames, but to the entirety of language, science, and life. Practically speaking, virtually any method can be misapplied to other fields with the illusion of success. But as soon as economics steals the word “benefit” (bene, “good”) needs the aid of philosophy! But economics doesn’t allow philosophy to enter its equations (at least not capitalism). A unitary method for approaching even an agreed upon goal is oppressive because there are always multiple paths to the same goal. To assert that the scientific method (or any other method) is the absolute source of “undeniable” truth is presumptuous at best. We must always be open to a revision of our vocabulary. This is the most honest way I can think of growing. If you start thinking only in terms of x, it is time to shelf x… at least for a while. You can dust it off again, but after it is no longer a mental addiction. Inasmuch as we are able to have inhibiting physical habits, we can develop crippling mental habits which prevent us from being able to connect with others in their language and on their level.
Any all-encompasing, totalizing attempt at rationalizing every science will invariably be irrational. Why? Because it will take a method of determining ratios in one field and apply it to other. It does not make sense of an artist to use the scientific method for painting (if one can even imagine that) nor does it make sense for the technician to speak exclusively in terms of philosophy. The danger of “methods” is that are very good and people assume that they are also very good when misapplied. We must always be open to the perpetual exchange of vocabulary, not just to being consumed by another science nor to destroying others. A language only dies when it is overused.
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How does this approach to language affect our ability to truly converse with cultures of the past? One could infer from your points that we are always approaching a new, living, and certainly alien language when interacting with, for instance, classical thought. I don’t have a problem learning from and being revitalized by the past, but I’d be interested to know whether you think, with postcolonialists and new historicists, that we are trapped by our dead symbols, and that therefore we must essentially leave the tired present and “live” linguistically in the past alone. Yet this is just the sort of unidirectional thinking that leads to totalization!
I do not think we must exclusively live in the past vocabulary. In fact, I think we must always cultivate a new vocabulary. As soon as words are forgotten, they have become so “old” that they offer a vital possibility for newness again. Just as languages like Latin and Greek now offer possibilities of a more vibrant present language, so too does the invention of new words like Tyndale’s coinage of “atonement” (at-one-ment) offer us new ways of speaking. New ways of speaking create new ways of thinking and therefore of acting.
Casually spoken language is language we forget that we speak. Latin and Greek are languages we remember forgetting. Language must forever allow the light of Logos to shine upon the world. Logos is the light of the world and (as you said to me elsewhere) brings things to light. Everyday language does not do this; only new language brings things to light. Forgotten languages or yet undiscovered languages remain vital possibilities for bringing things to into the light of Logos.
I like what you’re saying about mixing it up. At the same time, there are only so many sounds in our collective dialects. Yes, we should mix them up, but at the same time, we should remember that linguistics is a finite system that repeats itself with infinite variation, kind of like a fabric that repeats its pattern and contains patterns within the pattern. Linguistic pluralism, at its logical conclusion, is tired; because as I said, there are only so many sounds. But in the sense that we need to take a break from certain words in order to appreciate them, you are absolutely right.
In the words of Plath, “Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak.” An overly reflexive dialect is crippling, but so is one that obsessively focuses on the other at the expense of the Self, and will lose its orientation in the end.
Finally, how would you handle the positivism of a cube? It has height, depth, and width, but how would you affirm each of those dimensions without alienating them from each other on the one hand or totalizing them on the other?
Idle (or casual) talk contains our way of thinking. To escape casual thought, we need a formal language: we need new words. Without the right words, we will not have the right thoughts.
“Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts are not expressed and not even conceived.” — Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy.
“Idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back.” — Martin Heidegger, Being and Time.
As for your example of the cube, I don’t know. I presume that a revised conception of dimensions so that height, depth, and width were contained within a more robust language. In a positive science like you’re talking about, there is always the possibility of a paradigm shift. It’s not that one way of thinking is better than another, but when it becomes so commonplace that we forget to question the way we talk, we run the risk of being satisfied with easy and superficial knowledge. Once a paradigm shifts, it does not invalidate the previous one. For example, Newtonian physics, for the most part, still work. The biggest revisions simply pointed out its limitations and we have moved onto a new way of thinking.
Questions concerning time and space have been answered, defined, and answered again for millenia… as far back as Buddha, Parmenides, Zeno, Heraclitus, Aristotle, or Solomon and as recently as Einstein or Heidegger. What each of these thinkers did (intentionally or otherwise) was to reinvent our conception of space-time. Zeno’s paradoxes or Eastern paradoxes such as “Being is Becoming” or Heidegger’s more recent Being and Time (which many say could just as easily be Being is Time) each show the possibility of reinterpreting space-time. Even Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time comes to bear on this.
I can’t define height, depth, and width in another language because I don’t know the right language to revisit these terms. The point would not be affirming the three dimensions, but to redefine all of space-time. Often old words continue but with new definitions (isn’t this what heretics are always doing?). Virtually all of our measurements are anthropocentic and not absolute: foot (obviously) and the meter (though recently this has been redefined as the distance light travels in 1⁄299,792,458th of a second… but since time is relative, the whole thing gets very messy and dimensions becoming highly suspect. The closest we’ve come to is the lightyear, but recently they’ve managed to speed light up, so that could begin to change.
[...] and may not survive without excommunicating the Episcopal Church. The language of evangelicalism is tired, so much so that I don’t even think it’s worth discussing anymore. I exhort Patrol to [...]