Aug 26, 2026 08:55 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 26, 2026 11:32 PM by Magical Realist.)
Several thinkers, notably Derrida and Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Benjamin Whorf, viewed reality as largely a language construct. That the nature of this reality is entirely "textual" and semantic, words and propositions forming the very interface between mental concepts and physical things. I pretty much agree with this, suspecting that it is only from languages' own relentless self-referentiality and endless recursion that we find ourselves in a physical world saturated with qualia, properties, and intelligible meanings. If there is any sense in which we could step outside of this vast sprawling network of semiotic relations, it would not be by simply being silent. The physical world, as well as our cultural one, is hopelessly infected with all the categoricals and generalizables and indexicals and morphemes that come from a mind already pre-structured to see and think only in these entirely linguistic terms.
No, the only real way of getting outside of this continuously self-involving and labyrinthine solipsism of our evolved language-programmed brains is to ask who is the one who speaks or thinks? What is the nature of our being such that we have become so thoroughly emeshed inside of a realm of mere abstractions and representations. Humans as the speakers and users of language and the readers of its textual meanings. This is how we can get outside of language, not by being muted in a world that is everywhere speaking to us but by finding in our own words themselves a necessary incompleteness and open-endedness--that poetic and imaginative muse herself--who eternally lures us beyond our rigid narratives with promises of fresh new experiences and consciousness. Extra-linguistic being iow not enabled thru brute sensate physicality so much as by ideational creativity. We are only outside of what we are saying by being the one saying it, not by being just another thing said about. Our essence is agency not objectified thingness. Being is a verb not a noun.
No, the only real way of getting outside of this continuously self-involving and labyrinthine solipsism of our evolved language-programmed brains is to ask who is the one who speaks or thinks? What is the nature of our being such that we have become so thoroughly emeshed inside of a realm of mere abstractions and representations. Humans as the speakers and users of language and the readers of its textual meanings. This is how we can get outside of language, not by being muted in a world that is everywhere speaking to us but by finding in our own words themselves a necessary incompleteness and open-endedness--that poetic and imaginative muse herself--who eternally lures us beyond our rigid narratives with promises of fresh new experiences and consciousness. Extra-linguistic being iow not enabled thru brute sensate physicality so much as by ideational creativity. We are only outside of what we are saying by being the one saying it, not by being just another thing said about. Our essence is agency not objectified thingness. Being is a verb not a noun.