I Am NOT a Word: On the Ontological Stupidity of Nomenclature
To those—including myself in yesterday’s post—who insist on calling me words, here is why I am not.
I tend to be playful about what I call myself. I enjoy the sheer pleasure of trying to be—pretending, in other words—something heterodox to the status quo. We all do. And, invariably, it gets stale and we go some place else and repeat the same process again and again.
Yesterday (linked above) I had one of those moments. I seem to have made a case for something I only talked about casually: post-structural conservatism. Those who have known me for some time might recall my brash assimilation of the entirety of politics into something fundamentally liberal. If I parse-out ‘liberal’ (libertas) and argue for something like “true freedom,” I can still make that argument. But neither name is the real point.
You see, we (myself first and foremost!) are not mere words. The names—and the meaning those names carry—we take to be who and what we are can never capture our being fully, or, in some cases, partially.
Many people like to reject specific words like ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ or ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ and opt for better, more general words like ‘human,’ ‘American,’ or ‘Christian.’
This just seems ontologically stupid. I an NOT a word. I am not the mere skeletal grammar I call ‘Sam,’ ‘Catholic,’ ‘Mexican,’ ‘human,’ or even a ‘person.’ Even without the quotation marks.
I am something more than that; something ineffable, indescribable, unspeakable.
I am the thing you and I cannot write without doing it violence.
So, as I continue to throw around this or that word with this or that pet argument to describe what I am and, perhaps, what you might be, don’t take me too seriously.
After all, you (and I) are NOT a word. We are so much more than that.
Comments are closed.
Since ontology is the subject, I feel compelled to point out a fallacy you are committing:
If I call you a conservative, I have called you a word, but I have not called you “a word.” Which is to say that I have used a word to refer to you, but I have not said that you are, ontologically speaking, a word. You are a person.
As for the deeper philosophical point, your remarks concerning the inadequacy of language suggest a radical conclusion: all philosophical discussion from now on should take place using emoticons.
:-|
Sam,
I agree we are more than words, but that is what we have to work with here, in religious or political discourse in general, as a practical matter, and I do believe words can point us to the Truth (that’s right, a capital “T”) and that certain agglomerations of words can be utterly destructive and deceptive (a la much of what comes out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth) or constructive and true (for example, a lot of what came out of Martin Luther King’s mouth–not to mention Holy Scripture).
And in plain words, it seems to me that both Liberalism and Conservatism as we know them today in America are both mish-mashes of elements brought together in a historical process. Each have good and bad elements from the Catholic Christian point of view.
And so to make a long story short, we Catholics end up as moderstaes, or middle-of-the-roaders, in terms of the present political discourse. As far as redefining those terms–maybe that is what you are trying to forward? Do you have that much confidence in words?
phosphorius and David: The point of this post is not to abolish language, but simply to remind myself and, perhaps, others, that the investment we put into this or that pet term is not the heart of the matter.
In many ways I find that nomenclature can literally open or close the mind of a perfectly reasonable person. This problem, as I see it, is that however illogical or fallacious it may seem, we often believe this to the case. So, words, like life in general, is tragic.
As far as liberalism and conservatism go, I think there is a different political ontology at stake that makes them mutually exclusive, as I argued earlier.