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Interpretation Precedes Experience
“The nature of an organism’s becomingness is to be found in the accumulated alterations of the organism’s perceptual processes, purposes, and values. That is, the ‘now’ of a specific organism’s perceptual world is the high-water mark of the synthesis of the becomingness of purpose (value) of that organism as related to the becomingness of all other functional activities constituting reality” (1960, p. 14), From The Morning Notes of Adelbert Ames, jr. Edited by Hadley Cantril and including a correspondence with John Dewey.
There Are No Things Without Language.
Language is the mother of all things. Just as Korzybski noted, 'Whatever you something is, it is not,' so too we should equally admit that it is only by language that we can say what something is or is not.
As Lee Thayer suggests, there may well be a world beyond what we say about it, but no one can ever say what that world is.
Where lives the thought that you didn't know you knew?
You cannot say what is independent of language. There may well be much that is other than language, what Wittgenstein called, the forever unspeakable only showable. But without language you'd be so tethered to the immediate present in an immediate now. As one example, note that Nietzsche writes,
Observe the herd as it grazes past you: it cannot distinguish yesterday from today, leaps about, eats, sleeps, digests, leaps some more, and carries on like this from morning to night and from day to day, tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to the stake of the moment, and thus it is neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard on the human being to observe this, because he boasts about the superiority of his humanity over animals and yet looks enviously upon their happiness—for the one and only thing that he desires is to live like an animal, neither bored nor in pain, and yet he desires this in vain, because he does not desire it in the same way as does the animal. The human being might ask the animal: ‘Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?’ The animal wanted to answer, ‘Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say’—but it had already forgotten this answer and hence said nothing, so that the human being was left to wonder.' (
Unfashionable Observations, 1995, p. 87)
Korzybski and Bateson
Alfred Korzybski maintained that training in "consciousness of abstracting" would lead people beyond the paradoxes of abstraction. Gregory Bateson, on the other hand, argued for the inability to achieve this thoroughly.
Bateson concluded: "It seems to be a universal feature of human perception…that the perceiver shall perceive only the product of his perceiving act. He shall not perceive the means by which that product was created." (Bateson, 1977, p.238)
Antiques, and ancient relics even more so, are things that represent worlds that have long since passed away, and it is this representing whereby things transcend their merely physical properties and become, at another level, surrogates or stand-ins for times now gone…even at the level of the not-words, we always already have introjections of inferential data. This means that items of the human world are not simply themselves. They inevitably get transformed into nonverbal metonymies in accordance with the situations in which they are embedded and in which they have participated.
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