Inflating the Political Significance of Language

I often wonder if language is more real for novelists and literary scholars who police, it seems, how and what texts say. For them, it may be more vivid and alive than I understand as a philosopher. Literary scholars make critiques in light of this over-inflated power of language in much the same way that the linguistic turn in my eyes was wrong to undercut the ontological scaffolding of lived-experience in James and Dewey. Since I am in an English department, I am now aware that the tendency to think of everything as a text is very real. The driving difference between my friends and me is

1. Language does not disclose being for my friends;
2. Language and belief are not rules for action that terminate in the truth of an action or practice for my English colleagues; and
3. In thinking everything’s a text, they overextend the metaphor resulting in two flaws. Let me describe them below.

First, they consider A. experience primarily perspectival from the second flaw. The second flaw is: B. experience is always aesthetic. For them, all value judgments are reduced to how they handle literary critique with texts and are exercising aesthetic judgment as if that’s the only form of judgment one could make. They admit to A all the time, but B is my interpretation of what it is they are doing when I use language to describe rightness, wrongness, warrant, process, relations, or any other claim that falls outside aesthetic judgments. Language discloses the activity of Being as Becoming. In this way, I make any number of claims in epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics. For me, language must be disclosing something about events and relations.

When I claim that language discloses Being, the mistake that philosophers have made for 25 centuries was not about language as much as it was that philosophers have misunderstood Being. Being as the most fundamental and general category of metaphysical inquiry should have been regarded as Being as Becoming. Philosophy seeks unity only because it has a sense of what Being was at one time (perhaps a unity as an hypothesis), and that some aspects of these fragments of Becoming may be united in episodic interpretations of discourse. The fragments may be unified to fulfill some purpose. We unify to understand and solve problems. Understanding is the most general of problems, and if it is never clear what philosophy is doing, it is pragmatically aiming at trying to understand the world in order that we may act in it more skillfully.

In claiming that language and belief are rules of action, language can become secondary in relation to the role of belief formation. Aside from simply being a commitment of pragmatism, the role of belief is to generate beliefs that help us cope with a dynamic and embodied existence. Language coordinates as the medium of forming rules of action, and language works in so far as it achieves that end. In doing so, it has a lot of pitfalls and structures that may err. Users of it also err. Language can also change and adjust to new parameters of what we ask from it. Poetry breaks convention all the time to convey and symbolize aspects of meaning-making that one cannot get with conventional usage. Language is fluid and experimental. In this way, the fact that our practices help us adjust language and we adjust to language only reinforces the the mutual interaction between language and action, syntax and speaker, users and knowledge. So when someone over-inflates the significance of speech, there is a belief in what one can do with language that does not bear out in concrete practice.

In the end, language can change minds and enlighten users, but the belief in its fluid and experimental structure must also be accompanied by paradigm shifts from our institutions and our collective habits. Without those changes, one is simply asserting the power of language and symbolism to change the world without attention to the practices such speech is meant to challenge. It is an optimism of the symbolic much like the optimism of the critical theorist who thinks discussing the violence of capitalism will open pathways for change. The optimism of the symbolic can be changed and challenged so freely in literary texts that does not reflect the recalcitrance of a world resistant to change. This freedom of imagination with language in our head belies what art and novelty can actually do, so if it’s naive, then at least it’s an assertion of the transformative power of art through language. There might be a world in which their assumptions are true, but it makes no sense to talk of transformation of mindset or values without also addressing how these things are concretely experienced.

Got a Book Contract for William James’s Radically Empirical Philosophy of Religion

I have four chapters written. I almost done with the fifth chapter and it’s designed with six chapters. I find myself rethinking some sections now that I have a contract and they’re giving me a year. I can probably have it done sooner, but the thing is a form of perfectionism is now emerging in my thoughts.

I find myself reading some secondary scholarship on James and then incorporating yet more insights into the James book. Take for instance a quote in which Charlene Haddock Seigfried is critical of James’s metaphysics and then I read his letter to Bergson last month in which he calls attention to a metaphysical system he is building. The fact that he thinks such system building is possible flies in the face of some who think James to be a bad metaphysician incapable of building that system. I find myself thinking that I should incorporate a reference of the Bergson letter in the first chapter; there’s no doubt in my mind James intended to build a system, even if he left it in ruins upon dying. I could easily see myself second guessing whether or not there’s enough secondary literature or textual references to drive this or that point home.

As far as the book, I argue that radical empiricism is the built in assumption that unifies disparate parts of the various problems in philosophy of religion James took up. There’s a deep relational ontology; it becomes almost a non-dualism. John Stuhr calls it a “process philosophy of relations.” I love that phrase and Stuhr is correct in that assessment.

I have two/three other ideas for books down the line. I want to do a book on the philosophy of community and democracy in the United States. I also want to do a book on the problem of One and the Many in Emerson and James and maybe Dewey. I’m unsure whether the second book is really the first because I have been thinking of Dewey’s political thought as if it’s an extension of the problem of the One and the Many. A second/third would be on naturalism in American thought from Emerson to the present. It would end in process thought, I think.