certain oblique tendencies

April 15th, 2010 § 3 Comments

There is something so peculiar about our tendency to name things, to articulate things, to make non-linguistic things into linguistic concepts.  One of its peculiarities stems from the supposition that we might be allowing ourselves an overly liberal amount of error in articulating our state of being. We say that we feel or think such and such with an un-(or sub-)conscious premise that we may be absolutely wrong about what we ‘actually’ feel or think. (This is not to suggest that we tend to say we feel giddy when in fact we are solemn, but this has more to do with finding an exact point in varying degrees of something like ‘wellness.’) There is pretty much no way we can find out whether our articulation and the actual thing coincide, but we go ahead and fulfill our purposes as speaking beings, and we thoroughly enjoy doing it despite that huge possibility of error.

Then maybe it’s because the issue at hand is that there is no actual thing before it is said (either verbally or otherwise) as existent. If that is the case, even the idea of there being errors in the process of expressing one’s thoughts may not be relevant anymore. This is to say that speaking brings things into existence, and that there had been no such thing as a pre-existing, non-conceptualized analogue in the first place.  In other words, one feels what one says, one is what one says.

I don’t know about you, but that scares me.

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§ 3 Responses to certain oblique tendencies

  • jenchiu says:

    So how you feelin?

  • Brian says:

    Matt 12:34 is so true.

  • becky says:

    jen,
    for the sake of internal consistency: perplexed insofar as i say i’m perplexed. (are you rolling your eyes? heehe)

    brian,
    matt 12:34 is good, but it seems as if it runs through the entirety of the narrative of the bible. bouncing off from your reference, if we were to really find a biblical equivalent, wouldn’t it go all the way back to genesis, where God speaks things into existence and likewise allows Adam the capacity to name things?

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