Some things can only be destroyed by naming them

In the beginning was the Word

Some things can only be destroyed by naming them.

“In the beginning was the Word,” says John. In Genesis, the animals are brought to Adam to see what he will call them, and whatever he calls them becomes their name. Naming is granted a peculiar power: it makes the living world available to a human order.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” writes Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus. The distance between those statements is immense, but the word stands at the border in both. What enters language? What must remain outside?

Jung’s distinction between Logos and Eros gives this problem another form: Logos separates into parts; Eros unites into wholes. Pirsig makes it possible to imagine a great deal of Western intellectual history as a continuous act of naming. Hofstadter places categorization at the core of thinking and analogy at the core of categorization, reaching back before symbolic language itself.

Seen this way, cutting reality into pieces and naming those pieces has been a driving force in our intellectual encounter with the unknown. Something that was darkness acquires a boundary. Something that had no boundary acquires a name. With the name comes the ability to compare, remember, and communicate.

But every time something of great value is achieved, it is wise to ask what it cost.

Are words equally important everywhere?

What is the cost? Are words equally important in all cultures? Could the domination of naming over, say, music create a blind spot for things that cannot be named?

We know music is real and part of our world. Yet a collection of propositions about a piece of music is not the music. A description may be accurate while leaving out the very thing for which someone listened. If our account of reality admits only what can be articulated as propositions, what have we done with that remainder?

Pirsig’s Quality is one of the things I have in mind. Meaning is another. They are so large and all-encompassing that defining something about them can make us focus on tiny parts at the cost of the whole. A definition works by making a distinction. What happens when the thing we wish to indicate is the value of the relationship across the distinctions?

Then what is the solution? One needs to feel it. Only then might an abstract index be sufficient for a person to understand what an author is referring to.

Pirsig describes the prairies—the endless grass and wind, the thing that can be noticed because other things are absent. He has given up talking to others about it. He hopes another person will see and feel it. “It’s here, but I have no names for it.” That sentence matters because it distinguishes the absence of a name from the absence of something to encounter.

A word can therefore be an index without being an inventory. It can point toward an experience whose particulars the reader must supply. The pointing works only if there is something shared on which it can land.

Before articulation

There is another sequence worth considering: acted, dreamed, spoken; procedural, imagistic, articulated.

We can imagine what we cannot articulate. We can also act out something before we can give a satisfactory account of what we are doing. An organism can enact a pattern, and the world can answer that pattern with success or failure, long before the organism names a principle.

Imagine two individuals enacting a similar pattern. An analogy could abstract what their actions share. With further abstractions, the pattern becomes less dependent on any particular individual and more available as a principle. The principle can then be named, discussed, compared with other principles, and abstracted again.

The direction matters. A name may be the late arrival in a much older relationship between an organism and its world. If we mistake the name for the beginning, we may lose access to what the name was trying to preserve.

The act of synthesis has a related difficulty. When a new category is carved out of reality, the borders of older categories may have to dissolve—at least temporarily—before the new border can be outlined. Analogy is a precursor to that synthesis. It notices a relation before the familiar names have agreed to recognize it.

Categorization gone wild

Acronyms offer a small contemporary example. Producing an acronym is often an act of categorization: parts of reality that previously had separate names are gathered into another named combination. This can be useful. It can also become a hypertrophy of the belief that cutting reality into pieces and naming the pieces necessarily increases our understanding.

The tendency is visible wherever progress is pursued—where we believe that going from point A to point B will make things more desirable. Science and politics both generate names quickly. A new category can become available before we have asked whether its boundary is doing useful work.

I am not worried only about inaccurate names. An accurate name can still divert attention. It tells us which resemblance to notice, and a resemblance can become so familiar that differences stop appearing. Perhaps the discipline is to keep returning to the thing that was there before we had a convenient way of referring to it.

Some things can only be destroyed by naming them. Or, more carefully: some things can disappear from our attention precisely when we become certain that we know what to call them.