A Problem Addressed by Zen Buddhism
Language and Religion, E306, spring 2002
R. Port
Our Western point of view, that is, in the intellectual tradition inherited from the Greeks, especially from Aristotle (but an idea that is probably not universal in our species) is that:
The world consists of independently existing Things.That is, things, eg, objects, in the world exist independently of each other and independent of us, the observers. So when we open our eyes on some scene, we see it immediately populated with all these Things, objects that we can name. They are all just sitting there waiting for us to look at, think about, comment on, apply names to, etc. In our culture this just seems like a fact about the world (not a fact about human ways of interpreting the world). I certainly believed this when I was young. You probably do as well. But from my research into human cognition as an adult I now see many difficulties with `obvious' idea.
But I ask you: ``How many things are actually here in this room?''
Think for a few moments how you
would answer this question. Is an answer possible?
There are several problems you will find as you try to answer.
1. If you start to look close, you will realize that it is difficult to specify what that list of objects actually contains. For example, every `student' thing I see in the class room has parts; such as, various clothing items, jillions of individual hairs, millions of other body parts: leg, knee, knee-cap bone, a little scar on the left side where you were scratched last week (which itself, on close inspection, might be just a row of tiny little circular scabs). Also the knee contains various blood vessels, nerves, individual molecules and even individual atoms. What about a student's thoughts about God, about a sister, about their car, etc. Isn't each of those is a potential Thing? Are they in the room or not? If your thought is in your head, the it seems like it must be in the room too. Does each student have all these things as parts? And are they all among the things in the room?So what seemed obvious and trivial at first turns out to be a nightmare without some criteria to decide what kind of objects we are interested in. So, if I say, `I don't care about your knee scab or your toenails, but only in the aspects of you that are relevant to my life as a teacher', then it turns out that the OBSERVER (me) is determining what the Things are that are actually out there! And it turns out that it is not possible to say what Things lie before us apriori ( that is, in advance of our looking at them with a particular goal and point of view). So our specific prejudices and goals and assumptions (which might be wrong) about what is important and relevant to our lives at the moment we look actually determine what objects lie before us. A doctor or nurse might look at you and see a patella (kneecap) that is out of position and needs surgery. A waitress might see you as `the every-seed-bagel-and-creamcheese in the last booth'. I would never see that. So Things apparently do not preexist - that is, they are not just objectively sitting there waiting for us to apply a label to them. The things that are there for us are what we believe is relevant to our individual purposes.
Therefore, any time we DO say something like `I see a student sitting there', we cannot help but misrepresent the actual situation. We streamline it, schematize it (like drawing a primitive cartoon of the world) in a way that is determined by our personal purposes, biasses and assumptions. So any particular linguistic description of the world cannot help but render many things invisible to us. That's what Buddhism and Zen are worried about. And I think they have a valid point.
2. A second problem, related to the first, is that linguistic names always ignore detail in favor of a practical generalization. To take a simple example, think of the color spectrum when white light is split up into component frequencies by a prism. There is a continuum of colors: from violet to blue to green to yellow to orange to red. This continuum has no breaks or discontinuities, yet it is split by the vocabulary of any language into some number of `segments'. But how many colors are really there in this spectrum? Actually an infinite number, of course, since they do not break naturally into discrete values. Many languages (like Swahili, for example), have a basic color term that covers the range from violet to blue and green and another for red, orange, yellow. We might translate them `bluish' and `reddish'. English speakers, of course, divide this range into the six terms I mentioned above. (Of course, in both languages it is possible to elaborate the description with more words and specify colors in greater detail.) It has been experimentally shown that, if shown some patches of differing colors along this spectrum, English speakers find it easier to remember, for example, that one was labelled `orange' and the other labelled `red' than Swahili speakers do. Why? Because English uses different words for those two colors and Swahili uses the same word for those two colors.The point is that when we label things, we tend to remember (and use in our cogitation, thinking and reasoning) the labelled category, instead of the visual image itself. Thus, even English speakers have trouble remembering a distinction between two colors that we label `red'. We tend to remember the linguistic category (that is the word) only.
Another example: we can use a category like `light fixture' to refer to a student desk lamp, a living-room table lamp with a tube-shaped cloth shade, or a boxy thing on the ceiling that holds 2 or 4 flourescent bulbs. But when we refer to one of these things with the generic term `light fixture' or `lamp' we are ignoring all the huge differences between these objects. Why? Because what is important at the moment is that these are sources of electric light. But for many purposes much more information would be necessary (eg, if you were asked to replace the bulb).
These are not special, unusual cases. ALL words in ALL languages have this property. So do all grammatical categories - like Gender (some things have ambiguous gender), Tense (since many events are not clearly either Present, Past or Future but maybe more than one or not quite any of those), or Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, etc. They force us to focus on or make claims about certain aspects of an object or situation and THEREBY close off or ignore other aspects. There is simply no way to avoid this property of human language. After all you can't possibly describe EVERYTHING. You have to pick and choose what you will `observe' and report to your listener (including when you yourself are the `listener'). But doing so means you distort, schematize, cartoonize, and grossly simplify. I think this is a completely fair and accurate assessment of how human language works.
3. A third problem is inherent in Peirce's notion of a `symbol' as a kind of sign (a sensory signal that has a meaning) that depends on its relationship to other symbols to acquire part (and, in many cases, all) of its meaning. These symbol-symbol relationships (see my earlier note on `Icons, Indexes and Symbols') can have meaning even if the `thing' they refer to is not visible or sensorily detectible. We can believe and understand things about reincarnation, about gods and mythical tales, about folk medical treatment in various cultures, about people we have not met, etc. -- even without ever having any direct sensory evidence about them. Symbols work just as well for things for which no direct evidence is available as for cases where evidence IS available! So it is all too easy to entertain or believe in a whole complex of ideas that have little to no direct empirical support -- including belief in things that we might call objectively `false'.So here is another problem with, another risk posed by, language: It is very effective for communicating about the real world (as interpreted by the speaker) but it is equally as effective for communicating things about the world that might be just plain mistaken or fantasized or even deliberate lies.
Returning to the ``common-sense'' Aristotelian view mentioned above that the world is just sitting there, divided by nature itself into real `things' that need only a name attached, it should be clear by now that this is a naive idea -- no matter how obvious such a view seems to us. The objects we distinguish always depend on our division of the environment into aspects that are critical for our lives at the moment. Although it may be troubling to you, observers `create' the objects that they `see' -- not the natural world itself! This is surely somewhat unsettling.
Conclusion.
The simplest way to put the big problem is this: When we face a scene in the world we live in, we face a staggering amount of `information'. It would take a vast number of bits to encode the visual image, the changes in the image over time plus the audio and other sensory inputs. But we can usually describe any scene in a fairly small number of words or `think about it' in certain terms. In doing this, we simply must pick and choose the most important and ``relevant'' aspects to comment on (or think about) with nouns, verbs and adjectives. In doing so, we cannot help but leave a huge amount of information uncommented on and thus ignored. Buddha and Zen saw (correctly I think) that this is a real problem. They also believe that what is left out is often extremely important. To the extent that they are correct, the linguistic description IS a problem.
Buddha and especially Zen have intuitively, in my view, understood these properties of language and conscious awareness (since it is essentially a linguistic awareness). This is why they mistrust languages. They mistrust focussed awareness of our situation and our actions since this too depends largely on internal linguistic description (again, I think they are right here). Thus they prefer to use language in paradoxical ways (like poetry and koan) rather than in straightforward discursive ways (as I am doing here). Now, they also consider it very detrimental to understanding ourselves and our true situation in life. How true THAT is is a decision you will have to make for yourself.
Some Buddhist Quotes
Here are some Buddhist quotes. I hope that now they may sound less paradoxical and more insightful than they may have seemed otherwise. To me, these sound less strange given the arguments above, but I admit that many of the other quotes STILL seem strange and paradoxical. But then, this idea about language is not their only target.