Use and mention

To make anything explicit requires an entire code or symbol system to be functioning implicitly.

While a sign is functioning symbolically within your act of meaning – i.e. while it is in actual use – you can’t pay attention to, or even mention, its function. As Douglas Hofstadter put it (modeling his epigram after a familiar saying), you can’t have your use and mention it too. Likewise Michael Polanyi: ‘we cannot look at our standards in the process of using them, for we cannot attend focally to elements that are used subsidiarily for the purpose of shaping the present focus of attention’ (Polanyi 1962, 183). In scientific practice, you can’t make your measurement (observation) and describe your measuring device at the same time:

even though any constraint like a measuring device, M, can in principle be described by more detailed universal laws, the fact is that if you choose to do so you will lose the function of M as a measuring device. This demonstrates that laws cannot describe the pragmatic function of measurement even if they can correctly and completely describe the detailed dynamics of the measuring constraints.

— Pattee (2001)

Likewise in the realm of cognition or experiencing, of which science is the public expression: if the creative or forming power could emerge visibly from behind the forms which are its expression, then it could not be seen as a form; the seer would instead be ‘blinded by the light.’ As we have already heard from Thomas 83: ‘The light of the Father will reveal itself, but his image is hidden by his light.’ Or as Moses Cordovero put it, ‘revealing is the cause of concealment and concealment is the cause of revealing’ (Scholem 1974, 402).

Talking with the animals

Is the body language or vocal expression of, say, a wolf or a chimpanzee symbolic? It’s part of an instinctive habit-system, but its ‘terms’ have very little capacity for growth in either breadth or depth. Nor can they be combined, in the way that symbols can, to make reference more specific or more general. Wolves can talk (and listen) to us, but are not in the habit of talking about us in our absence, in the way that we are now talking about wolves.

From the human side, Farley Mowat communicated with wolves by pissing around his territory. But could he say anything to them about, say, astronomy? As a member of a symbolic species, he could even talk about things and situations that don’t exist, and about whether they could or should exist (modality). Whether this actually raises the level of conversation is debatable – but only in symbols.

Gebrauch in der Sprache

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

— Wittgenstein (PI I.43)

What a word means also depends on where and when you use it. ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ is one of several popular names for the common weed Daucus Carota – in North America. In England, ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ is the name of an entirely different plant, Anthriscus sylvestris (Heiser 2003, 44).

Meaning

Nothing is meaningful in itself. Meaningfulness derives from the experience of functioning as a being of a certain sort in an environment of a certain sort.

— Lakoff (1987, 292)

Meaning is something signs do—not something found at the end of the rainbow. And being signs ourselves, we do it all the time, whether we mean to or not.

Universe

The universe is the only text without a context. Every particular mode of being is universe-referent, and its meaning is established only within this comprehensive setting. This is why this story of the universe, and especially of the planet Earth, is so important. Through our understanding of this story, our own role in the story is revealed. In this revelation lies our way into the future.

— Thomas Berry (2006, 23)

Sauntering to the Pole

Ancient Hindus ‘thought that the purpose of religious practice was to release the atman from the prison of the physical body’ (Okumura 2010, 189). Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, regards the life of the bodymind is an expression of the buddha-nature. Okumura (2010, 152) says that ‘our bodhisattva practice takes place within the world of desire, walking with all beings.’

Thoreau’s Journal, 10 January 1851:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily,—not [to] exercise the legs or body merely, nor barely to recruit the spirits, but positively to exercise both body and spirit, and to succeed to the highest and worthiest ends by the abandonment of all specific ends,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering. And this word “saunter,” by the way, is happily derived “from idle people who roved about the country [in the Middle Ages] and asked charity under pretence of going à la Sainte-Terrer,” to the Holy Land, till, perchance, the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds.

According to OED, the origin of the word saunter remains obscure. But the point of Thoreau’s reference to “the Holy Land” is further developed in his essay ‘Walking,’ (first published a month after he died), which picks up the trail of thought where the Journal entry left off:

… but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

Thoreau’s “Holy Land” bears a striking resemblance to the metaphysical “Pole” in Annie Dillard’s striking essay on ‘An Expedition to the Pole’:

The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility is “that imaginary point on the Arctic Ocean farthest from land in any direction.” It is a navigator’s paper point, contrived to console Arctic explorers who, after Peary and Henson reached the North Pole in 1909, had nowhere special to go. There is a Pole of Relative Inaccessibility on the Antarctic continent, also; it is that point of land farthest from salt water in any direction. The Absolute is the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility located in metaphysics. After all, one of the few things we know about the Absolute is that it is relatively inaccessible. It is that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions. Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also—I take this as given—the Pole of great price.

— Dillard (2009, 22)