Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English by Jonathan Rée
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Linguistic Promiscuity: The Politics of Words

Never trust language, no matter who is using it. The problem doesn’t lie with the speaker or writer; it’s in the language. Language may be useful, beautiful, inspiring, even true. But it is never real. Language has nothing to do with reality. Quite the opposite: it always separates us from reality. Witcraft is an entertaining and erudite demonstration of just how language obfuscates; and how that obfuscation is also immensely revelatory about the reality of its users. Perhaps the book is a bit too erudite for the casual reader in its level of detail. But it’s main points seem clear enough.

Because words are connected only to other words, not to non-words, their meaning is never fixed. Words bob randomly on the tumultuous sea of language. Sometimes they float on the surface appearing to have ‘obvious’ references to non-words; but these tend not to last as long as the words themselves which are constantly rearranging their relations to other words. Sometimes they sink a bit into the depths and are known only to professionals whose domain is that of arcana and esoterica like doctors and lawyers - archaic fossils which are kept in use as tribal symbols, like religious creeds. And very often they drop to the ocean-bottom and lose their connections to other words entirely except for linguistic historians like Reé.

Nothing makes the semantic fluidity of words more obvious than translation. The connections among words in one language never correspond to the connections in another. So for example Heimat in German might be translated into English as ‘homeland;’ but the connotations in German of its use under National Socialism aren’t captured at all. And there simply is no English word which can do any better. Quite literally, to translate any word accurately would require a reestablishment of the entire lexicon of both languages, a clear cultural impossibility.

Less obvious, but more dangerous as a consequence, is the implicit translation we make of historical texts. For example, the 16th century English adjective ‘naughtie’ doesn’t refer to the trivial misbehaviour of a child, but to mature predatory evil. And it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with its homophone ‘noughtie,’ designating a person of the early 21st century, which I have recently found to be mis-spelled as the former term. Sometimes, of course, the change takes place far more rapidly. For example, Even as recently as twenty years ago, ‘gay’ implied happiness not homosexuality.

Changes in the significance of any single word affect the entire language. This is especially obvious in technical languages such as those used in philosophical discourse. For all its precision, it is simply not possible to represent the terms of discourse in Ancient Greek, upon which much of philosophy is based, into modern languages. Even the word for ‘word’ in Greek, logos (λόγος), can be translated within a semantic range that includes ‘order,’ ‘reason,’ ‘opinion,’ ‘expectation,’ and ‘principle’ just to name a few possibilities. This puts a definite cramp in the exhortation to ‘be reasonable’ by the participant in any philosophical argument. No one has any firm idea what the exhortation could mean; or, more likely but equivalently, each participant will have their own idea.

In fact even in our native language we are translating all the time when we listen or read. Every individual has his or her unique constellation of connotations. Our words always mean something different to others. We call this sort of simultaneous translation interpretation. The result is an unavoidable linguistic indeterminacy (or promiscuity, as Reé calls it, thus demonstrating his point) that obviously has practical consequences; although language does its best to hide the obvious.

For example in my own field of theology the great Arian controversy between the Eastern and Western churches about the divine status of Christ in the second and third centuries - was he equal to his Father or not? - was resolved with a monumental linguistic fudge. It was decreed by the participants of the Council of Nicaea that Greek ousia (ουσία) and the Latin substantia were equivalent and that Christ’s and the Father’s were the same. In fact the two terms were contraries, perhaps even opposites. The pretence about agreement kept everyone together though, if only for a time. And the Nicene creed is recited in many Christian churches today with the terms in question translated as ‘being,’ which according to Plato was merely another designation of logos! Some words do get around.

The law is as equally fond as religion in trying to maintain the fixity of language. For example legal historians like to connect the modern corporation, and therefore its status, with the Roman corporatio. Linguistically this seems plausible but it is entirely wrong. The Romans knew nothing like the modern corporation and would probably be appalled at its status as an artificial person. The corporation does in fact have its roots in Roman law, but in an obscure convention that was ultimately picked up by the new orders of Catholic friars in the 13th century which wanted to use property without owning it. It took almost exactly a century of legal battles in the Roman Curia, the international court of the day, to arrive at an articulation of the institution that would come to dominate our world.

For Reé imprecision and inaccuracy are unavoidably built into any philosophical discourse. Indeed any use of language confronts the same problems. But for Reé it is in philosophy that these problems are meant to be addressed: “Most branches of culture – from poetry and prose to music, politics, law and unreflective forms of thought – are deeply imprinted with the distinctions, concepts, rhythms, strategies and styles of the language they inhabit. But philosophy is different. It stands in a refractory relationship to all the languages in which it is practised, and it has always been linguistically promiscuous.”

In this sense the role of philosophy is counter-cultural, namely to call out those folk like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, many politicians, some scientists, and of course Donald Trump, who pretend that they are the ultimate arbiters of language and what it really means. In general those who insist most on their ability to describe and analyse the world in their own terms are probably the least reliable. Their real agenda may not be visible, but that they have one is made clear by their insistence on the correctness of their own language.

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