Love:Question for Monists

Or it can lead to no communication at all. Like it or not, until we evolve to telepathy we're stuck with words - and it's words which cause most of the trouble.

Confucius was on the right track with his idea for 'the rectification of names'.

 

Even telepathy, as I understand it, is something that would rely on words.

The love in my mothers eyes when she looks at me is something no language could ever communicate.

 

That was my Guru

 

Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, in our current state, words are really the building blocks of 'reality' as we percieve it.

 

Mmm... its said that if you are with a real true friend you can sit together in perfect silence and enjoy the love that is eachother's company. I've done this once or twice...its really beautiful.

Its the same with those old married couples...like my grandparents...they don't have to speak (my grandmother kind of can't really)... they just love eachother...and that's it...

...its like a silent peaceful love...but I don't think people slow down (or shut up) long enough... you know?

 

Well yes - of course we can communicate in many subtle ways. However, we aren't able to communicate complex data by such means.


I can tell by reading body language if a person is suffereing stress - no words are needed. But for me to come to know why they are suffering requires a verbal explanation.

Also, unless as a child, I'd learned the linguistic map of reality, I would not be able to think at all in th way I do now, which is in language. Even our perceptions are conditioned by it. It is virtually impossible for me to look at a tree and not quite spontaneously and even unconsciously attach that label to it. Arguably, it is only because of language that we are able to distinguish separate objects at all.

Thats why the 'holy grail' of so many paths is mental silence. As long as we are immersed in the rational, thinkng mind we are immersed in language and everything is conditioned by it.

Languages such as Chinese and the ancient Egyptian which derive from pictograms rather than words may be more flexible than indo-european languages. Wish I had time to study Chinese.

 

Yes which brings into the question about the authenticity of reality itself. What is reality? something made up by words? Or Is our reality based on some real signified object? In other words, if words make up our reality, are they refering back to the reality of the world that exists outside of human experience?
In saussaurian terms, words are merely signifiers to an already signified real object.
Then,
What if the signified is a signifier to another real object? For instance, the word in writing such as the "tree", it refers to an audible sound of tree pertaining to "T , R, E, E " put together, which refers back to the object in reality.

Then what about concepts? when they are signified with a signifier "C O N C E P T S " and an audible word, do they refer back to an object that exists in reality independent of human existence?

Anyway, I ask these questions because these same questions made me wonder something like this an year ago, my personal reflection about these matters made me conclude that reality and the world as we know it is only made up with words, they are made up by the mind.
Even the object that we recognize, we only recognize it because of the word. If you want to experiment, take a piece of paper and draw a circle. You recognize the circle and not the paper because of the word itself. If you did not belong to this earth, to this planet, the circle and the paper maybe completely meaningless to you. You would probably be cognizant of that which your language permits you to be cognizant of .

 

Jedi - 'reality' itself is just another word.

I'm familiar with saussaure up to a point. I'm also interested in the linguistic theories of Levi Strauss (the French structuralist philosopher, not the american jeans manufacturer), and post modernist/post structuralists like Barthes and esp Foucault.
My own working hypothesis on this question of the relationship between words and their referents is that in many cases, it is purely arbitrary, and as Saussaure noted, the meaning of words changes continually. Language is not something static or fixed.
When I was a kid back in the 60's 'gay' meant happy, bright, cheerful, and was used in that context. Today, the meaning has totally changed, and some less well educated members of the younger generation just think it has 'always' been a word for a homosexual.
A small example, but one which certainly has a political significance.
To what extent then can words pronounced hundreds of years ago be relied upon today? Perhaps the speaker at the time meant something entirely different from what we would understand his words to mean today.

In a sense, language is arbitrary. We are free to create our own language if we have the capacity (few do, even great writers. Only recent examples I can think of off hand would be Gurdjieff, James Joyce and William Burroughs).


In general, the problem seems to be that some systems of thought, or better 'discources' - eg. marxism. christianty and many others, are like closed bubbles - Foucault called them 'grand narratives', which seek to explain to us everything about 'reality'.
The problem is that such systems tend to be self authenticating or self validating. Each part of the system seems to 'prove' the correcteness of other parts and therefore of the system as a whole.
Language seems to operate along similar lines.

As to 'reality' itself - I'd say it can be experienced but not conveyed in words, because it must be something beyond words, concepts, systems etc.
Philip K.Dick, the american sci fi writer said 'reality is that which continues to exist when we stop believing in it' - I quite like that.

 

I was suggesting the samething i guess, that language shapes our reality.

but about arbitrariness of meaning- why do we even have to go back to so many years. Just pick any text, any poem, any hipforums post, our interpretation is based on the set of biases we already hold. A feminist is going to read "uncle tom's cabin" differently than a new historicist. I will read your post differently than you will read after you write it.

There seems to be some flexibility to language because of its arbitrariness.