A Philosophical Predicament
Philosophers, down the ages,
Have strenuously tried
To figure out language:
Their numerous narratives polarize
Into two Grand narratives, a binary:
Language is referential / differential.
This binary has yielded numerous derivatives.
On the referential side, for instance,
There’s the view that language is an instrument,
As advanced notably by Aristotle, Bhamaha and Dandin.
On the differential side, we have
Saussure’s notion:
Language is a system of differences
(without any positive terms).
Derrida, for his part, widened it:
Language is infinitely differential,
As suggested by his coinage differance,
which implies: language is
slippery, radically unstable,
which, in turn, gave rise to
mind-boggling derivatives
in this postmodern world!
Some of them are: Derrida’s (own) freeplay
of the (autonomous) sign,
Bloom’s (willful) misreading,
And Lyotard’s (incommensurable) language games
(which we all play in this postmodern space willy-nilly)
All these differences have led
Often to acrimonious disputes,
Couched, of late, in a language
that abounds in ambiguity
and neatly underpinned by illogic!
The predicament of these philosophers (old or new) is:
What they and we all observe
is not language-in-itself,
but language as seen by us—
which is similar to what Heisenberg said about nature!
These disputes remind us
of the dispute among the six characters,
in the age-old parable,
which reportedly originated in the Indian Rigveda.
(but now found in several belief systems).
It’s the parable of the six men
(as narrated by John Godfrey Saxe)
Wherein the characters tried
To figure out an elephant,
which, unfortunately, none of them
Had the faculty to see:
So, one called it soft and mushy;
for another it was like a snake;
for the third, it was fan-like,
And so on.
Thus, they “disputed loud and long,
Though each was partly in the right
…and all were [rightly] in the wrong!"
***
Copyright © Ram R. V. | Year Posted 2017
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