When I'm hiking, I don't ever really reach any kind of a 'zen' state where my mind just goes blank. Instead, I wind up thinking about the most random things. Yesterday, for example, as I was huffing and puffing up a slope, I found myself thinking of a philosophical problem presented by post-structuralists like Lacan (of all people). The question is this: if there is really no such thing as "meaning," but rather an unending chain of signifiers, and if those chains of signifiers are subjective, instead of objective realities, what possibility is there for real communication?
I was spurred on by an article on the New York Times on how language affects the way we think. The gist of the article was that languages don't necessarily restrain us from thinking in certain ways (which is what people thought, once) but rather different languages require us to think about certain things. For example, Romance languages require the speaker to think about objects in gendered terms, in order to give them their proper article. The article also mentioned that studying different languages reveals that some things we consider as objective fact, like colors, are really just matters of opinion; English-speakers think of green and blue as two colors and name them accordingly, but in plenty of other languages they're simply considered two shades of one color. So while we have to specify which color we're seeing, they don't have to think about it. In contrast, if you think about ROYGBIV from chemistry class, even though indigo and violet are named as separate spectra of light, I just think of them as two shades of purple.
The link between this article and my half-remembered thoughts of Lacan was related to color. How do we know, really, that what I think of as purple is what you think of as purple? We can test this in a general way by pointing to various purple or not-purple objects and seeing if our estimations agree, but how can we ever know if we are both experiencing the phenomenon of "purple-ness" in an identical fashion? Maybe our perceptions are merely similar, enough to pass the eggplant vs. tomato test, but not the same.
That led me into thinking about the issue of meaning in general, and the ability of verbal communication to, well, communicate with others. The whole point of communication is that we put words out there to describe what we're thinking or feeling, and trust that when the person we're speaking to hears those words, they will call up exactly the same meanings and associations as we had in our own minds. I'm not trying to say this doesn't happen in an effective manner pretty much every minute of the day--human society would have disintegrated by now, if it wasn't workable. The question is really just a philosophical one: does language reveal, or obscure? Can we ever really see the world through someone else's eyes?
That brings me to the Pirandello play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author." The play itself is a bit of absurdist meta-theatre (it reminded me of Noises Off, which, living with theater people, I had to watch/hear about a few too many times) in which a group of characters invade the rehearsal for one of Pirandello's own plays and demands that the manager let them enact their drama, since their Author has abandoned them. This bit jumped out at me:
The Father. But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
Maybe we are only capable of understanding our fellow beings in broad strokes, most of the time. Maybe there are some instances, with the person you love, or a close friend, where you feel closer to being perfectly understood. Still, I can't help but wonder if my purple is really Sean's purple. And how would we ever know?
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