"In the beginning was Logos"

A word or five on the meaning of "meaning"

From Chapter 10 of my book, War of the Words, the following explanation of how words can come to “mean” the opposite of what they originally meant, as in the distortion of the word “racism.” (Originally posted in 2022.) The abstract: Words in their primary function do not “signify,” they identify. When the initial act of identification is forgotten, words are treated as signifiers, making them open to distortion.

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When we talk of entities and the words that signify them, something is missing. There is, on the one hand, a thing, a material or mental entity like an adult female human or the idea of racial prejudice. On the other is a word we hang like a tag on those entities: “woman,” and “racism.” But if the word is only a tag, where does its meaning come from, what gives it meaning? Some might retort that the entity itself gives the word its meaning, and that tracks with experience. A woman means “adult female human” because those are the attributes of a woman. But a gap has opened up. While a woman does indeed exhibit those attributes, how is it that we know these attributes? And how do subsume them under a single word? I am not questioning our ability to know what a woman is. Rather, I wish to explore the gap between entity and word for clues as to a missing element that links one to the other. To do that, let’s start with a startling example of what it means to “know.”

At the age of 19 months, Helen Keller (b. 1880) suffered an attack of scarlet fever or meningitis (it’s unclear which) that left her blind and deaf at an age that found her on the doorstep of language. At 19 months, most infants know only 10 or so words, and have barely begun to make the transition from sounds imitating the language of adults to the actual deployment of sounds as signs, i.e., language. It was at this crucial moment that Keller was cut off from language and left lone and isolated. Years went by. In 1887, the family arranged for a young teacher, Anne Sullivan, to work with Keller. Patiently, Sullivan would impress one of Keller’s hands with touch-language words for whatever the girl happened to be holding in her other hand at that moment – a mug, a fork, a stone, etc. All that transpired at first was that young Helen smashed a mug in frustration. And then, Sullivan placed one of Helen’s hands under some water while spelling “w-a-t-e-r” with the motions of her fingers in the palm of Helen’s other hand. Keller later recalled:

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”

What had happened? One might be tempted to say that Keller had suddenly understood “w-a-t-e-r” to be a label for the wet thing she was experiencing. But philosopher Henri Bortoft, following the ground-breaking work of Martin Heidegger, has explained why this relationship – that of the word “representing” the entity – is secondary to what he calls “the primary event of language as disclosure.” Long before a word serves as a tag, it reveals or discloses an entity. Bortoft quotes Heidegger: “The essential being of language is Saying as Showing,” which emphasizes language as disclosure. “A sign is to be understood fundamentally as ‘showing in the sense of bringing something to light,’” Bortoft continues. Things go awry when “we do not understand the sign this way, but think of it instead as something that designates.... In Helen Keller’s experience, the word ‘water’ says water in the sense that it shows water…whereby water appears.”

It may seem strange to think of water appearing only upon the arrival of the word which says it, but that is precisely what is going on. This is the ontic (the physical fact of water’s spatiotemporal existence) “brought to light,’ or what philosophers call taking on the ontological dimension of the object. The word in this role is expressing the condition of the element in the gap as a concept. A concept is the identity given (the meaning given) to an entity. This is not the same as the entity itself. The entity is the thing grasped. The act of grasping is the concept. Helen Keller had felt water countless times prior to her awakening. It was water every time she felt it. But she did not know it as water until the word for it made possible the grasping of it in its identity – the concept or meaning. Without the word, the concept -- the act of grasping the identity of the cool liquid running over her fingers -- could not exist. This is language in its true primary function of illuminating the identities of material objects and, as we will see, of mental objects as well. From this point on, we will follow Heidegger’s distinction between language used in this revelatory, identifying way on the one hand, and language in its role as designation. By “language” I will mean the employment of words as tags for entities. Tags, by definition, can be switched, as in labeling nectarines “oranges.” But for the use of words in their primary role of illuminating entities by allowing the grasp of their identities I will use the word Logos.

Logos is ancient Greek for “Word.” It was Logos that Helen Keller experienced on that incredible day with Anne Sullivan. Later, it is safe to assume, she would use the word “water” as a signifier, a simple tag for the entity she had come to call by that word. But at the moment when she grasped the identity of the cool liquid, “Water” was Logos, a verbal formation making possible the concept – the act of grasping the identity, the meaning – of the cool liquid.

Logos fills the gap between entity and word. It is the lighting-up of entities that allows up to grasp entities as particular identities (id-entities) as it allowed Keller to grasp the liquid so familiar to her as a certain object, uncovered by the Logos “water.” Logos conveys meaning. These three words – identity, meaning, concept – are cognate terms subsumed under the word Logos. They differ in the varying functions they bring to the same event. Keller’s event identified “water” (set it apart from other entities) as meaningthe liquid she felt running over her fingers; from then on, she would carry the conceptof water with her to apply to all encounters with that entity. Maintaining the alignment of concepts with the entities they identify is possible only by locking on to the Logos and not allowing it to stray. This is conceptual integrity, the insistence that a word reveals a certain meaning and no other.

Note that Keller used the phrase “living word” when telling her story of cognitive awakening. “Living word” is an accurate phrase to attach to words as Logos, just as “dead word” would be accurate when referring to words that have lost their original, identifying function and are now bandied about as empty signifiers. Why is this important? While it is one thing to forget the revelatory origins of water or trees or mountains or sky, it is quite another to forget the origins of what is revealed in words such as “freedom” “equality,” “justice,” “love” and “beauty.” If we forget the revelation of water, and “water” becomes a flat designation for H2O, a certain sense of wonder is lost. If we forget the revelation of freedom, and “freedom” becomes whatever someone decides to call it (for whatever ideological reasons that may attach to their concept of freedom), then freedom itself is lost, for the thing designated by “freedom” began, as every word begins, as an unveiling, and what was unveiled was a certain state of Being and no other. Downstream from this, however, when the word’s origins were forgotten, “freedom” was easily corrupted by the unthinking, the unreflective, and the outright enemies of the very thing the word originally unveiled. It was corrupted by the simple act of replacing the concept behind the tag, by abandoning Logos for language. I will have at length something to say about freedom (and equality and justice and all the rest), but without a ground in the understanding of word as Logos, the instrument of revelation, the use of such words as “freedom” and the rest in everyday language would depend on mere dictionary definitions. The dictionary is a graveyard for language is its secondary mode, dead to its origins in Logos. It is the very forgetfulness of Being that Heidegger warned against.

Philosophical novelist John Crowley has written eloquently of Logos as meaning. From his novel, Love and Sleep:

“…the language not of denotation but of meaning.

“Is that what (Giordano) Bruno had been talking about? He and all those who ransacked their vocabularies (in Latin, Italian, French, English) for words that meant what logos means in Greek – ‘word’ ‘idea,’ ‘reason,’ none of them right or large enough. Maybe because they had no word such as Meaning has since become in English.

“Meaning. The hidden interior light that makes things things, the light which casts a matching shadow in the mind, a picture, a glyph: not a picture of its shape or size or color, not a sign of its difference from me but of its likeness to me: of its Meaning.”

Meaning (Logos in its central function) is what “makes things things.” Physical things are not arrangements of atoms and molecules in a certain pattern but are identical with the meaning of those material arrangements, the “interior light” shone upon them. Mental entities are not mere imaginings but are derived from the meaning of physical actions – of just or unjust, free or unfree, loving or hateful actions. But the moment it is believed that language has “meanings” of its own, apart from Logos, all argument is ceded to the side most successful in convincing the population of the meanings it proffers. At such a moment, “truth” is abandoned, and what was an arena of ideas becomes a battlefield of political power, with the winner determined in advance. When the meanings of words are put up for cultural grabs, there is no more room for Logos, the flash of identity that sees a thing for what it truly is.

The historical turn at which language absorbed the function of Logos and became “meaningful” in and of itself happened around 400 years ago. As noted earlier, when Descartes declared in the 17th century that all knowledge must begin with the observation, “I think, therefore I am,” the stage was set for internal, subjective processes to dominate the realm of ideas. The subjective was locked inside, and with the external world merely a secondary projection of the subjective, language was now empowered to mean whatever the subject wanted it to mean. Humpty Dumpty ascended the throne of Ideas. From Descartes on, the Humpty Dumpty approach has constituted the prominent strain of Western philosophy: All that matters is language. “There is nothing outside the text.” This is a complete reversal of the truth, which might be stated, “There is nothing inside the text; everything is inside Logos.” When we use language, we are always in danger of empowering the “text” (the language) with the ability to apply to any given entity any concept that fits its ideological stance. This is easily accomplished by de-coupling a concept from its Logos and supplying a different concept to fit the word as it is used in everyday language. As Logos, “freedom” means the independence of individual adult humans from coercion. But as used in language, “freedom” can be made to mean all sorts of things unrelated to freedom. It can “mean” the right of everyone to a living wage, or the condition achieved when everyone’s income is equal, or an obligation to the community. When Logos is abandoned, Orwell’s “Freedom is Slavery” is not a difficult thing to achieve.

Consider for a moment what would happen if someone attempted to de-couple the concept of water from the Logos (identity/meaning) “water.” Suppose down the road that Helen Keller encountered milk splashed over her hands and someone called it “water.” Or that someone gave Keller gin and called it “water.” She would of course know immediately that neither the milk nor the gin was water. The consistency of the milk, the taste and effect of the gin, would make it clear that “water” was not the proper word for either. Without going into the ragged history of the word “concept” and the technical and philosophical controversies surrounding it, it suffices to say that the Logos “water” needs the concept of water in order to endure, to persist in the identity of the entity to which the word “water” is attached. “A thought and its object are the same,” wrote Parmenides. A thing cannot be other than it is, and that means owning a certain identity.

Now consider the insistent insanity surrounding the meaning of “woman.” There exist adult female humans and for this concept, this identity, the Logos is “Woman.” But recently the word “Woman” has been decoupled from its originating concept and a new concept supplied. This concept is admittedly vague, as it can only be, given its audacity, but it amounts to something like: “Any human being who identifies as a woman.” The claim is cognitively empty because it refers back to itself. If a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, the question remains, “What is this ‘woman’ that a ‘woman’ identifies as being?” We have hopped aboard a verbal merry-go-round, for we can never understand a word defined in terms of itself. In the current anti-intellectual atmosphere this is never pointed out, and if it were, it would simply be dismissed as not conducive to the case the woke Left wishes to make. Intellectual consistency is not worrisome to sophists.

But the rub, for those interested in more than linguistic acrobatics, is this: Even if the woke definition of “woman” were to be accepted, there would still exist adult female humans. What should we call them? It wouldn’t matter if some number of them did not “identify” as women, there would remain a group of beings that displayed the qualities of being adult female humans. If not “women,” then, what are they? It is not possible to deny their existence, and as they exist, what is their name if not “woman”? The de-coupling of entities from concepts is a game, but it is a game without rules, and the most audacious will win it so long as no rules are introduced.

The de-coupling game gets still more intense when the entity is an idea, like that of “freedom.” How do we know what “freedom” really means? How can we be sure that freedom is not “the condition following the institutional establishment of equality,” a typical Left definition? Because, like the adult female human who remains after the word “woman” has been hijacked to mean something other than she, the concept of the independence of individuals from coercion remains long after other concepts have been introduced under freedom’s hijacked banner. Like the existence of adult female humans, the existence of individual independence from coercion will persist and will demand a name. And not just any name, but the one given it at its origin: Freedom.