This article is reproduced from: General Knowledge Simulcast
On February 3, 2020, the famous literary critic George Steiner passed away. In memory of the Slovaks, Boya Gothic compiled an article from George Steiner's masterpiece "Language and Silence", "Escape from Words". In this essay, the author sketches a panoramic picture of the expansion and retreat of mathematical language since the 17th century: mathematical language has not only dominated the field of science in its entirety, but also directly or indirectly dominated history, economics, and philosophy through terminology and logic. Fine arts, music and literature also show a general trend of verbal retreat. Modern art and music reject the possibility of communication between fine art, musical language and lexical language. The retreat of words from the literary realm has a more complex context: on the one hand, the rise of mathematical language has led to a sharp reduction in the number of realities that can be portrayed by words; on the other hand, in the era of mass democracy and marketization, it is necessary to rely on popular and rudimentary language to attract people. The author not only expresses regret at the retreat of rhetoric from outside the scientific field, but also expresses his deep concern. He called for the need to reaffirm the authority of literature in dominating the jargon of other fields of knowledge other than science, so as to avoid the annihilation of classical literacy and the collapse of moral and political values.
Escape words
George Steiner
One
_
Jesus told us that there was a word in the beginning. But he didn't tell us with certainty what the end would be.
He would have applied Greek to express the concept of "logos" in Greek culture, because it was precisely because of the inheritance of the Greco-Jewish cultural heritage that Western civilization is inherently verbal. We take this property for granted today. It is the rhizome of our experience; outside of it it it is difficult for us to express our imagination at will. We live in the act of discourse. But we should not think that the words and deeds of the spirit are conceivable only in the matrix of discourse. Some modes of knowledge and sensory reality are based not on language, but on other forces that can communicate, such as images, musical notes, etc. Some spiritual acts are rooted in silence. They are difficult to speak of, because how can words justly convey the form and vitality of silence? I can give a few examples to illustrate what I mean.
In some Eastern philosophies, for example, in Buddhism and Taoism, the soul is seen as freed from the shackles of the body, through the realm of enlightenment (which can be presented in highly precise language), soaring upwards, to the deeper silence. The supreme and pure state of "thought" is "Gur forgetting words." Something wonderful is always outside the boundaries of language. Only by breaking the spiritual vision of the language barrier can we enter the room and realize the enlightenment. With enlightenment, the Tao no longer tolerates the impurities and fragments that language necessarily mixes, and does not need to conform to the naïve logic and linear view of time in syntax. In the "Avenue", the past, the present and the future are integrated. It is the temporal structure of language that artificially separates it. That's the key.
A enlightened monk or Taoist monk must flee not only from the temptations of worldly behavior, but also from words. He disappeared into a cave, Taoist temple or temple, and was a silent image. Even believers who have just embarked on this journey are taught to remain suspicious of the veil of language, and only by shedding it can we enter into clarity. Zen Koan (We know the sound of a hand clapping, so what is the sound of a hand?) ) is to help beginners escape the training of words.
The Western tradition also knows to transcend language into silence. The Trippists in the Catholic Church emphasize asceticism, abandoning words like the Stylites desert fathers. St. John on the Cross expressed a solemn respect for the contemplative soul, for he was freed from the shackles of the saying:
“
I came into the world knowing nothing,
I left the world knowing nothing,
So I transcend everything that is known.
”
But, in the eyes of Westerners, this hierarchy of experience inevitably smacks of mysticism. No matter how much we compliment the sanctity of mysticism (the compliment itself indicates the attitude), Archbishop Newman's quip represents the prevailing Attitude in the West: "mysticism" begins with "mist" and ends with "schism." Few Western poets (with the possible exception of Dante) exhorted the authority of surreal experience to imagine. In the soft light at the end of Heaven, before a bright light, we accept blindness and insight. But when Pascal says that the silence of cosmic space is frightening, he is closer to the mainstream sense of Western classicism. For Taoism, the exact same silence conveys tranquility and imitation of the gods.
The primacy of words—the primacy of words that can speak and communicate in discourse—is characteristic of Greek-Jewish wisdom and is inherited by Christianity. The Greco-Roman and Christian world managed to govern reality under the domination of language. Literature, philosophy, theology, law, history and art are all attempts to encompass all human experience, its recorded past, its present and its expectations for the future within the boundaries of rational discourse. The Code of the Roman Emperor Justinian, Aquinas's Theologian Compendium, the Outline of the World History of Medieval Literature, and the Divine Comedy all wanted to be all-encompassing. They divinely bear witness to the belief that all truth and truth, except for the strange little dot at the top, can be placed within the four walls of language.
Now, this belief is no longer universal. Since the time of Milton, confidence in it has begun to decline. The reasons and trajectories of this decline provide a strong inspiration for understanding the context of modern literature and language.
Justinian I is pictured
It was in the 17th century that the many great realms of truth, reality, and behavior began to withdraw from the boundaries of linguistic description. Before the 17th century, the dominant tendencies and contents of the natural sciences were descriptive, and this is generally true. Symbolic notation in mathematics has a long history, but mathematics is also a brief expression of linguistic propositions that can be used to describe the framework of language and have meaning in them. Mathematical thought is a major exception, but it is still subject to the material conditions of experience, which in turn obey the orders of language. In the 17th century, this was no longer the norm; a revolution began that radically changed the relationship between man and reality, the face of thought.
With the advent of formulaic representations of analytic geometry and algebraic function theory, and with the development of Calculus by Newton and Leibniz, mathematics ceased to be a dependent notation and an empirical tool. It became a rather rich, complex, powerful language. The history of this language is gradually moving towards an untranslatable history. It is still possible to translate the processes of classical geometry and classical function analysis back into equivalents or approximations. But once mathematics entered the modern era and began to show a powerful idea of self-assertion, such translations became increasingly impossible. Great architecture of form and meaning conceived by Karl Friedrich Gauss, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Niels Henrik Abel, Moritz Benedikt Cantor, Karl Theodor Weierstrass and others retreated from language at an increasingly rapid pace. It may even be said that they need and develop their own language, which is as expressive and exquisite as the language in discourse communication. Between these and ordinary languages, between mathematical symbols and words, bridges became increasingly fragile and weak until they finally collapsed.
Between different lexical languages, no matter how distant the syntactic backgrounds and habits are, there is always a possible equivalence, even if the actual translation can only reach a rough approximation. Chinese are ideographic scripts that can be translated into English with the help of explanations or meanings. But there is no dictionary that maps the vocabulary and grammar of the higher mathematical language to the vocabulary and grammar of the lexical language. We cannot "translate" the programs and notations behind Lie group operations or n-dimensional manifold performance into any vocabulary or grammar outside of mathematical languages. We can't even explain. Interpreting a good poem may result in a lame passage of saliva; but there is a discernible continuity between the shadow and the entity. The interpretation of a complex proposition in topology may be completely confusing, or it may only be a fork or "dialect" that transitions into another particular mathematical language. Many of the spaces, relationships, and events involved in higher mathematics are not necessarily related to sensory materials; they are "realities" that occur within closed axiomatic systems. You can only make sense and normative if you speak them in mathematical language. This mathematical language, detached from the most basic level, is not a lexical language, nor can it be a lexical language. I noticed that topologists who didn't understand each other's living language at all were able to use the silent language common to their academic circles to effectively co-calculate on the blackboard.
This fact is significant. It has split the experience and cognition of reality into different spaces. In the West, the most decisive change in the course of spiritual life since the 17th century was the increasing acceptance of mathematical models and practices in increasing fields of knowledge. As often pointed out, a study, as long as it can be structured mathematically, marks the entry of the former scientific state into the scientific state. The rise of formulaic and statistical methods within a science has given it dynamic possibilities. The tools of mathematical analysis transformed chemistry and physics from alchemy into the predictable science they are today. Because of mathematics, the stars came out of the myth and entered the astronomer's workbench. As mathematics penetrates into the essence of a science, the concepts of this science, its habits of creativity and comprehension, become increasingly difficult to reduce to our ordinary language.
To say that they cannot be expressed in a language that fits them (i.e., the language of mathematics) is to beg for the basic ideas of our current cosmic model, such as quanta, the uncertainty principle, relative balance, asymmetry in the weak exchange of atoms, and to do so, if not irresponsibly, arrogantly. Without mathematical language, these words are ghostly, adorned with boasts of philosophers or journalists. For physics had to borrow these words from colloquialisms, some of which seemed to retain their general meaning; they wore the cloak of metaphor. But it's an illusion. When a critic manages to apply the uncertainty principle to discussion of performance painting, or to discuss improvisation as used in contemporary music, he is not linking the two fields of experience, he is just talking nonsense.
We must beware of such illusions. Many of the terms used in chemistry come from the early descriptive stages; but the formulas of modern molecular chemistry are actually sketches, expressed not in words but in mathematical discourse. A chemical formula is not an abbreviation for a linguistic proposition, but replaces a mathematical operation with a symbol. Creatures are in an interesting middle position. In ancient Greco-Roman culture, it was a descriptive science that relied on the precise and suggestive use of language. Darwin's views on biology and zoology are powerful in part because of his seductive style. In post-Darwinian biology, mathematics played an increasingly dominant role. Wentworth Thompson's magnum opus, Of Growth and Form, clearly marks a shift in this shift in focus, with poets and mathematicians receiving equal attention. Today, a large number of areas of biology, such as genetics, rely primarily on mathematics. As biology moves toward chemistry, and biochemistry becomes the dominant science it is today, it tends to abandon the descriptive formula and replace it with the computational formula. It gave up words and replaced them with numbers.
It was the expansion of mathematics in a multitude of thought and action that split Western consciousness into C. Snow. P． Snow) refers to what he calls "two cultures." Before the time of Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt, talented people with super memories could have been successful in both humanities and mathematics. Leibniz has made an outstanding contribution to both cultures. Now, it really isn't possible anymore. The divide between verbal language and mathematical language is widening. There were people standing on both sides, and in the eyes of the other, they were illiterate. There are as many illiterates who do not know the basic concepts of calculus or celestial geometry as there are illiterates who do not know grammar. Or, to borrow Snow's famous phrase: People who have not read Shakespeare are uncultured; likewise, people who do not know the second law of thermodynamics are uncultured. Both sides are blind to each other's world.
Except in very calm and sober moments, we pretended that this was not the case. We continue to believe that the dominant thing is the human authority, the realm of speech. The roots of humanistic literacy are still in classical values, in discourse, rhetoric and poetics. But it's ignorance, or the laziness of imagination. Calculus, Carnot's principle, and Maxwell's concept of electromagnetic fields not only cover the realms of reality and action contained in classical literature, but may also provide an image of our perceptible world, more real than any verbal assertion constructed. All the evidence shows that the form of matter is the form of mathematics, and that both integrals and differentiation are correctly recognized alphabets. In the past, some people, after the success of circumnavigation of the globe, still thought that the earth was a flat table; after Newton had already proved the theory of mechanics and inertia, he continued to believe in the mysterious impulse. Today's humanists, like these elm braincases, pound their chests.
Some of us, ignorant of the science of precision science, can only imagine the world through the veil of non-mathematical language, and still live in a living fiction. The truths of the universe (the space-time continuity of relativity, the atomic structure of all things, the wave-particle state of energy) can no longer be entered from words. This is by no means a contradiction, but in essence, reality now begins to be external to the language of words. Mathematicians know this. "First through geometry, then with the help of purely symbolic structures," says Andreas Speiser, "mathematics is freed from the shackles of language ... Today, in the kingdom of the world of knowledge, mathematics is more effective than modern languages and even music in a state of deplorableness at their respective frontiers. ”
Pictured is George Steiner
The scope and nature of this upheaval is hardly realized by humanists (Sartre is clearly the exception, and he has repeatedly called attention to the crisis of language). Many traditional humanities have become more languishing, a nervous reaction to a deep recognition of the successful blackmail of mathematics and the natural sciences. In areas such as history, economics, and other important "social sciences" (one might call the fallacy of the form of imitation), great changes have taken place. Although discursive patterns in these fields still rely almost entirely on lexical language, historians, economists, and social scientists have managed to graft some mathematical methods or very strict procedures into the matrix of language. They take a defensive stance on the essentially tentative and aesthetic nature of what they seek.
Let's see how the cult of positivity, precision, and predictability has invaded the realm of history. The decisive shift appeared in the writings of Lepold von Ranke, Auguste Comte, and Hippolyte Adolphe Taine in the 19th century. Historians began to see their materials as elements in the furnace of controlled experience. Derived from an objective examination of the past (such an objective is in fact a naïve illusion), the statistical model is derived, the cyclical law of national and economic power, for historians to refine the "laws of history." This historical "law" of great importance to Danner, Marx, and Spengler, as well as the inevitability and predictability inherent in it, is a concept borrowed from the kingdom of precision science and mathematics.
The dream has a scientific rigor and predictability, and this ambition has seduced many historical writers from their true nature, artistry. Many of the things that are now considered historical writings have little literary color. L. Namir B． Namier's disciples (not Namier himself) sent Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Jules Michelet into the hell of pure literature. Scientific illusions and academic fads often transform young historians into shrewd ferrets, chewing on trivial facts or numbers. He indulged in footnotes and wrote dry treatises that proved as far as possible the scientific tendencies of historiography. Only a handful of modern historians are prepared to openly defend the poetic nature of the historical imagination, one of which is C. Wedgwood. V． Wedgwood）。 She fully acknowledges that all styles have the potential to distort: "Never at any time detract from the framework of reality, the task of scholarship is to discover and reconstruct this reality; unfortunately, no such literary style exists." "If style is completely abandoned, or if the illusion of objective precision is embraced, such excavations will only illuminate the dust."
Let's look at economics again. Classical economic masters such as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Alfred Marshall were all masters of literary style. They rely on words to explain and persuade. But in the late 19th century, mathematical economics began to emerge. Keynes may be the last economist to span both the humanities and mathematics. In discussing Ramsey's contributions to economic thought, Keynes pointed out that many iconic economists were too deeply involved in mathematics, which not only confused economic laymen, but also too esoteric for classical economists. Today, this gap is even more astonishing, and econometrics has become the dominant discipline in the field of economics. Traditional core terms, such as axiology, cycle, productivity, liquidity, inflation, revenue and expenditure, are changing. They are moving from linguistics to mathematics, from rhetorical discourse to equations. The symbology of modern economics is no longer primarily a word, but a chart and a number. Today's most powerful economic ideas are using the functional analysis and forecasting tools of 19th-century mathematicians.
The allure of precision science is most pronounced in the field of sociology. Many of today's treatises on sociology are not literary, or more accurately, anti-literary. It was conceived in a set of extremely ambiguous jargon. Whenever possible, words and grammars of literary meaning give way to statistical tables, curves, and graphs. Where words must be used, sociology is also borrowed from the terminology of the precision science. We might as well make an interesting list of these borrowings. The most prominent are modulus, groups, scattering, integration, functions, coordinates. Each word has a specific mathematical connotation or a specific connotation. Stripped of these connotations and forced into unfamiliar contexts, these expressions become ambiguous and pretentious. They do the new owners a favor. However, sociologists inexplicably often use terms such as "cultural coordinates" and "peer group integrals". This reflects the illusion that their fanatical worship has shrouded all rational research since the 17th century: as precise and predictable as mathematics.
However, the most high-profile and astonishing of the areas of retreat from words is philosophy. Classical and medieval philosophy is fully committed to preserving the dignity and resources of language, to believing that language can bring the spirit into line with reality, provided only with the necessary precision and subtle manipulation. Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, and Aquinas were all masters of word builders, building a magnificent edifice of statements, definitions, and distinctions around the architecture of reality. They adopted a different mode of discourse than the poet; but they, like the poet, held that lexical inference produced a responsible understanding of truth. Again, this turning point occurred in the 17th century and was marked by Descartes' implicit identification of truth with mathematical proof; the most obvious twist, of course, was Spinoza.
Spinoza's Ethics (full title Is Ethics in Geometric Order) represents the terrible effect of new mathematics on philosophical mentality. Spinoza sees in mathematics the rigor of the statements, the unity and conclusiveness of the results. This is the dream of all philosophies. Even the most rigorous assertions of scholastic philosophy, armed with syllogism and lemma, cannot resist the process from axioms to proofs and new ideas, which can only emerge in Euclid and analytic geometry. Thus Spinoza was extremely naïve in her desire to turn the language of philosophy into the language of mathematics. The structure of Ethics is naturally divided into axioms, definitions, proofs, and inferences. Each set of propositions ends proudly labeled "proof done." This is a unique and interesting book, as clear as the lenses that the author has honed to make a living. But it didn't bring anything new, except for repetitive self-mirroring. It is a delicate repetition. Words differ from numbers in that they do not include function operations. Doubling or dividing equally, they will only give their meaning to other words or synonyms. Spinoza's proofs are only confirmations, they are not evidence. But such efforts are prophetic. It confronts the philosophy that follows with a mystery; after Spinoza, the philosophers know that they are using clear language, like a cutter polishing a diamond with a diamond. Language is no longer seen as a pathway to verifiable truth, but rather as a spiral or a mirror gallery, bringing thought back to its original point. After Spinoza, philosophy lost its innocence.
The picture shows spinoza's "Ethics" book
Symbolic logic, perhaps glimpsed in Leibniz, is an attempt to get out of this cycle. In the works of George Boole, Gottlob Frege, and David Hilbert, symbolic logic was originally conceived as a special tool designed to test the internal consistency of mathematical inferences. But it soon had a greater relevance. Leibniz, as a pioneer in symbolic logic, established an extremely simplified but completely rigorous and self-unifying model. He invented or assumed a syntax that avoided the ambiguity and ambiguity that tradition and usage brought into ordinary language. He borrowed inductive and deductive methods from mathematics and used them for other modes of thought to verify whether these patterns were valid. In short, he wants to go beyond language and objectify the key areas of philosophical study. Nonverbal tools of mathematical notation are now used in ethics and even aesthetics. The calculus of moral impulses, the algebra of bitterness and pleasure, such ancient concepts are revived. Many contemporary logicians want to devise a computable theoretical basis for aesthetic selective behavior. In almost all branches of modern philosophy, we find numbers, italic letters, roots, arrows, and these symbols are all used by Leibniz to replace the rebellious old master of the word.
Wittgenstein was the greatest modern philosopher and the one who most wanted to escape the spiral of language. All of his writings begin with the questioning of the unverified relationship between words and facts. What we call fact is perhaps a veil of language that covers our minds, far from reality. Wittgenstein prompts us to think about whether reality can still be spoken when discourse is merely a process of infinite retreat, words spoken by other words. Wittgenstein probed the mystery passionately but seriously. The famous ending of The Treatise on the Philosophy of Logic does not claim, as Descartes claims, that philosophical statements have enormous potential. Instead, it withdraws from the authoritative self-confidence of traditional metaphysics. This leads to the equally famous conclusion: "Obviously, ethics is ineffable. Wittgenstein probably included most of the traditional fields of philosophical study into his ineffable category (which he called mystery). In reality, only a special and narrow part of the language can speak meaningfully. The rest, as one might think, most of the reality, belonged to silence.
Wittgenstein later deviated from the narrow position of The Theory of Logical Philosophy. In Philosophical Studies, he is more optimistic that language has an intrinsic ability to describe the world and express patterns of behavior. However, it is an open question whether the discourse of the Treatise on the Philosophy of Logic is more powerful and unified. Of course, everyone will feel this deeply. Because of silence, the moment revolves around naked words. With Wittgenstein's insight, it seems that silence is more of a window than a wall. Following Wittgenstein, as we follow certain poets, we look out of the language and see not darkness, but light. Anyone who has read The Philosophy of Logic will feel the strange glow of silence in this book.
Although I can only talk about this in a flashy light, it seems to me particularly clear, escaping the authority and category of the language of words, and playing a huge role in the history and nature of modern art. In painting and sculpture, realism in the broad sense (reproducing those we understand as imitations of the existence of reality) corresponds to the period when language was the center of spiritual and emotional life. A landscape, a still life, a portrait, an allegory, an event taken from history or legend are all interpreted in terms of the colors, scrolls and textures of reality that can be spoken in words. We can describe objects in a work of art in words. The canvas and sculpture have a title that associates them with the concept of words. We say that it is a portrait of a man in a golden helmet; or, alternatively, it is a canal at sunrise; or, alternatively, it is a portrait of Daphne incarnated as a laurel tree. Before we see this work, words produce special counterparts in our minds. Of course, these counterparts are less vivid and enlightening than the paintings of Rembrandt or Canaletto, or the sculptures of Canova. But there is a substantive relationship here. Artists and critics talk about the same world, although what artists say is deeper and more inclusive.
It is this kind of rhetorical reciprocity or consistency that modern art betrays. Because so many 18th and 19th-century paintings appeared to be mere illustrations of the idea of words (illustrations in the Book of Language), the Post-Impressionists fled from words. Van Gogh declared that the painter should not paint what he saw, but what he felt. What you see can be transformed into words, and what you feel may in some sense precede or be external to language. It can only be expressed with specific color discourse and spatial structure discourse. Non-objective and abstract art rejects the possibility of linguistic reciprocity. Paintings and engravings refuse to be named or titled; they only need to be labeled with labels such as "Black and White No. 5," "White Form," or "Work No. 85." Even with a title, like many of De Kooning's paintings, the title often has a mysterious ironic meaning, which is not to point out the meaning, but to embellish or deceive. The work itself has no object that can be described in words. Ibram Lassaw refers to the curves on the welded bronzes as "clouds on the Strait of Magellan," but the title does not provide an external reference; Franz Kline's "Heraldic" (1950) is just a painting of spirals, and has nothing to do with the sensory habits of language. A collage of colors, a mess of wires, or a pile of pig iron, refers only to itself, just introversion.
Pictured here is Rasso's work "Moons of Saturn"
Because of their success, their emphasis on the instantaneous energy of the senses has provoked a fanatical response among critics. The looks of Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp drew us in to the replication and complementation of their movements. De Kunin's "Weehawken's Grass" bypasses language and seems to have a direct effect on our nerve endings. But more often, abstract design conveys only the original joy of ornamentation. Many of Jackson Pollock's works are vivid wallpapers. For the most part, abstract expressionism and non-objective art express nothing. The work itself falls silent, or yells at us with inhuman nonsense. I wonder if future artists and critics will look back with bewildered disdain when they look back at the many pretentious gadgets that now fill our galleries.
Obviously, the problems of atonal music, figurative music, and electronic music are very different problems. Music is clearly related to language only as a background to the text, as music for a specific formal occasion, or as a musical program, expressing deliberate scenes with sound. Music always has its own syntax, its own vocabulary and its own way of symbols. In fact, while the spirit is in a non-verbal state of feeling, music, the primary language of the spirit, is with mathematics. However, even in the field of music, there is a clear trend towards escaping words.
Classical sonatas or symphonies are not, in any case, a form of verbal expression. Even in very simplified examples ("thunder tones"), there is no one-sided equivalence between tonality and specific lexical meanings or moods. However, in the musical structure of classical forms, there is a certain temporal grammar or expression that is indeed similar to the process of language. Language cannot translate the double structure of a sonata, but the continuation of the theme, the transposition of the theme, and the restatement of the main points at the end do effectively convey an empirical order similar to that of language. Modern music does not show such a relationship. In order to achieve a certain complete autonomy, modern music has categorically deviated from the understandable "external" meaning. It rejects the listener's discernment of meaning, or, more precisely, the possibility of associating the listener with pure auditory impressions with any linguistic form of experience. Like non-objective oil paintings, "new" music tracks often omit titles in case the titles provide the wrong bridge back to the world of illustrations and word imaginary. It is generally only labeled as "Variation 42" or "Composition".
In the process of escaping from the neighbor of language, music is inevitably attracted to the monster of mathematics. Just browse the latest issue of The Musical Quarterly and you'll find an article discussing the "twelve-tone invariant":
The starting level is labeled (0,0) and is the beginning of the coordination system, which includes both scale and tone values. Scale and pitch values are represented by twelve integers, 0 to 11, each of which can appear only once. In the case of scale values, this represents only twelve tones; in the case of pitch values, this is equivalent to octaves.
In describing his own method of creation, a contemporary composer who is by no means the most radical says,
The point is that, as the name suggests, the concept of invariants inherently invariant, if applied to all parameters, results in undifferentiated integration, eliminating the last shred of unpredictability or surprise.
The music created in this way may be very charming and technically interesting. However, the ideas behind this music are clearly related to the great crisis of humanistic literacy. Only those committed to the ultramodern (whether out of professional mission or pure passion) would deny that many of what is now considered music are nothing more than barbaric noises.
Two
Until now, I have been arguing that before the 17th century, the kingdom of language encompassed almost all experience and reality; today it contains only a very small territory. It no longer expresses, or is associated with, all important patterns of action, thought, and feeling. Now, a large amount of space for meaning and practice belongs to aphramantic languages, such as mathematical, symbolic logic, chemistry, or equations of electronic relations. Other fields are sub-languages or anti-languages of non-objective art and figurative music. The world of words has shrunk. Unless mathematical language is used, there can be no talk of out-of-limits; Wittgenstein implied that ethics or aesthetics should not be discussed in the existingly usable discourse. I think it is very difficult to talk meaningfully about Pollack's paintings or karlheinz Stockhausen's music. The realm of the kingdom of words has tightened. Whether it is science, philosophy, art or music, is there such a thing under the heavens, that people like Shakespeare, Dorne, and Milton cannot speak naturally, and whose words cannot enter naturally?
Does this mean that fewer words are actually used today? This is a very complex unsolved mystery. It is estimated that excluding categorical words (e.g., the names of all classes of beetles), English today contains about 600,000 words. Elizabethan English vocabulary is believed to be only a mere 150,000. But these rough numbers are deceptive. Shakespeare used more words than any writer behind him. The King James Bible, though it used only six thousand words, hinted at a more comprehensive view of cultural literacy prevailed in that era than it does today. The key is not how many potentially usable vocabulary there are, but the extent to which language resources are actually utilized. If George McKnight's estimates in English Words and Their Background (1923) are reliable, then half of the modern spoken English and American vocabulary contains three-quarters of the basic words. In order to make it understandable to more readers, the modern mass media has degraded the English language to a state of semi-illiteracy. In the historical period to which the languages of Shakespeare and Milton belonged, words were able to naturally control empirical life. Writers today tend to use fewer and simpler words, both because popular culture has diluted literary ideas and because the number of realities that can be adequately articulated by words is decreasing.
This sharp reduction (the imagery of the world is retreating from the control of word communication) has had an impact on the quality of language. As Western consciousness becomes less and less dependent on linguistic resources to direct experience and manage spiritual affairs, the words themselves seem to have lost some of their precision and vitality. I know that this idea is controversial: that is, that language has its own "life"; in a sense, the life of language is not just a metaphor, it implies that the concepts of exhaustion and depravity are related to language itself, not just to the use of language by people. De Maistre and Orwell held this idea; it also gave strength to Pound's definition of the poet's duties: "We are under the rule of the word, the law is carved into the word, and literature is the only way to keep the word alive and precise." "Most linguists suspect that language has its own inner life. And let me briefly explain what I mean.
During the Tudor, Elizabethan, or Jacobin periods, the manipulation of the English language gave a sense of discovery, a pleasant sense of gain, a feeling that had never been experienced again. The words used by Marlowe, Bacon, and Shakespeare seemed to be new, as if no predecessors had obscured their glimmer or muted their echoes. Erasmus mentions that once when he was walking on a dirt path, he suddenly saw a page of a book on the ground, and he bent over in ecstasy to pick it up, because at that time the miracle of book printing was still very fresh. This is what people thought about language itself in the 16th and 17th centuries. The great wealth of language was before them, suddenly open; they felt that the resources were unlimited and could be plundered at will. On the contrary, the language tools at our disposal, due to their long-term use, have been dilapidated. In order to cater to the demands of mass culture and mass communication, today's language takes on the increasingly tacky task.
Apart from being ignorant, sparsely simplified, and trivial, what else can infect the semi-illiterate masses who have been summoned to the market by mass democracy? Most such communications are effective only in increasingly rudimentary and dilapidated language. We might as well compare the linguistic dynamism hidden in shakespeare, the book of prayer, and the squire Cavendish style to our current colloquialisms. The "motivational researcher" (the gravedigger of literary language) tells us that the vocabulary used in a perfect advertisement should not exceed two syllables, and the sentence should not be paraphrased. In the United States, millions of volumes of Shakespeare and the Bible are published in comic strips with commentaries on basic English vocabulary. There is no doubt that a man educated in only half a bottle of vinegar holds economic and political power, with the result that the wealth and dignity of words are drastically reduced.
Pictured here is a version of the comic book Bible
Given the state of the German language under Nazi rule, I have shown elsewhere how political atrocities and lies can change a language when it is cut off from the roots of moral and emotional life, when it becomes rigid with clichés, introspective definitions, and residual words. Today, what has happened in the German language is happening everywhere, just not so dramatically. The language of British and American mass media and advertising, which is considered to be of the cultural standards of the average American high school, or has the style of current political discussion; this is a clear indication that the dynamism and precision of language have diminished. The English spoken by President Eisenhower at the news conference, like that of a new detergent salesman, was neither intended to communicate his true knowledge of national life nor to elevate the listener's mind. It is deliberately intended to evade or disguise the need for meaning. When the study of radioactive solute was called "Operation Sunshine," the language of the community was already in crisis.
It is the decline in the vitality of language that leads to the cheap collapse of moral and political values, or the weakening of language because of the decline in political vitality, and in either case, it is clear that the tools of language available to modern writers are threatened, on the one hand from the squeeze outside the language, and on the other hand from the degeneration within the language. In Blackmer (R. P． Blackmur) the so-called "new illiterate" world, the most humane writers, find themselves in danger.
What I want to examine next is the influence of escape words on literary practice, and the effects of the cultural divide and cultural reduction that follows. Of course, I do not examine all of Western literature, nor an important branch of Western literature; I examine only certain literary movements and individual writers, who are more representative of escapist words.
Three
We now know that the poetic crisis began in the late 19th century. It stems from the gulf that arises between the new sense of spiritual reality and the old pattern of rhetorical poetic expression of consciousness. In order to express the wealth of consciousness open to modern sensibility, many poets sought to break free from the shackles of traditional syntax and definitions. Rimbaud, Comte de Lautréamont, and Maramé worked to restore the fluidity and provisionality of language; they wanted to return magic (the power to weave something unprecedented) to words; it had that magic when language was still a magic form. They realized that traditional syntax arranged our cognition into linear and monistic patterns. As Black, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud demonstrated, these patterns distorted the role of subconscious forces and suppressed the rich and varied spiritual life. In his prose poems, Rimbaud manages to liberate language from the inner constraints of causality, with results simultaneously appearing in non-sequential forms before causes and events unfold. This became the quintessential means of surrealism. The language of Malami is not primarily an act of communication, but an act of imitation that enters into a private myth. Maramé uses buzzwords in eccentric and mysterious ways; we recognize them, but they deviate from us.
Although they created great poetry, their ideas were fraught with danger. To be effective, there must be pressure of genius behind the new private language; talent alone, something too easy to come by, cannot be done. Only a genius can make such a strong and special point of view that it can cross the barrier of broken syntax or private meaning. Modern poets use words as private markers, and it becomes increasingly difficult for ordinary readers to enter them. Where the master wields it, where private language becomes a tool for reinforcing cognition and not just a skill, it is inevitable that the reader will have to make an effort. To grasp Rimbaud's point of view, or to understand the peculiar argumentative structure of The Lamentations of Duino, we must first realize that in order to move from truth to more reality, Rimbaud and Rilke are using language in new ways. But in the hands of ordinary people or mediocre people, the effort to renovate the language eventually backfired, making the language more barren and obscure. Dylan Thomas was a lesson. He had a talent for entertainers and realized that by giving a wide range of unqualified readers into poetry that seemed to have depth, he would be able to cater to them. He combines Swinburne's rhetorical bubble with the syntactic and imagery of Kabbalah's Jewish mysticism. He proved that everyone should have a cake and should eat it. But apart from a few eloquent lines of poetry, there are few good things in his poems, but they are only confusing.
When poetry tries to detach itself from clear precise meanings and the conventions of syntax, it tends to an ideal form of music. This tendency has played an interesting role in modern literature. The idea of equating words and poetry with musical value has a long history. But with the advent of Symbolist poetry in France, the idea gained particular strength. Implicit in Verlaine's view that "the most important thing is music"—is this fascinating and confusing notion: the most direct way a poem communicates is its loud tone. The pursuit of tonal mode rather than conceptual mode, the series of poetic works produced, only when it is truly accompanied by music, can play its full connotation. Debussy could use Metrynk's Pelléas et Mélisande almost verbatim; likewise, Strauss could use Wilde's Salome almost verbatim. In both cases, the poetic works are plays, looking for a composer. The value and manner of music is already evident in language.
Recently, literary forms that have succumbed to musical examples and ideals have gone farther and farther. In the works of Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann, we find the belief that the musician is the artist in the fundamental sense (he is more worthy of being called an artist than a painter or writer). This is because only music can achieve the goal pursued by all art: the perfect combination of form and content, the perfect combination of method and meaning. Eliot's Four Quartets and Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil are the most avant-garde poetic designs of our time, containing ideas dating back to Mallarmé and L'Aprés-midi d'un faune, both of which seek to suggest counterpoint structures of musical forms in language.
The novel The Death of Virgil consists of four parts, each representing a movement of the quartet. In fact, there are indications that Hermann Broch wrote with reference to the structure of a quartet in Beethoven's later years. In each "movement", the rhythm of the novel is intended to refract the corresponding musical beat. For example, in the dexterous "Harmonic Song", the plot, dialogue, and narrative advance at a fast pace; in the "Row Board", Hermann Broch's style slows down, and the process is long and tortuous. The last part is the passage that really tells the story of Virgil's death, and it's an amazing performance. It transcends Joyce in liberating the shackles of traditional narratives. Words flow entirely in a continuous polyphony. The threads of argument are interwoven like a string quartet; the imagery in the development of the fugue is repeated at regular intervals; and finally, when historical memory, reality consciousness, and future prophecy are added to a single grand chord, the vagueness of language suddenly bursts forth. In fact, the entire novel strives to transcend language and find a more accurate and refined way to convey meaning. In the last sentence, the poet steps into death, realizing that something that is entirely external to language is also external to life.
There is a sociological footnote related to the turn of literature to music. In the United States, and increasingly in Europe, new cultural literacy is embedded in music rather than words. Records that play forever have revolutionized the art of casual. The emerging middle class in affluent societies read very little, but many genuinely like to listen to music. Where the library used to house books, it is now proudly filled with rows of records and high-fidelity components. Compared to records that can be played permanently, paperback books are short-lived things that can be easily discarded. The end of the book is no longer the collection room of a real library. Music is the mainstream of popular culture today. Adults rarely read aloud to each other; even fewer are willing to regularly spend their spare time in public libraries or literary clubs, as their 19th-century ancestors did. Now, many people gather in front of hi-fi equipment to join the music performance.
There are complex social and psychological reasons behind all this. The rhythms of urban and industrial life can be exhausting when night falls. When one is idle, music, even if it is difficult music, is easier to enter and bring enjoyment than serious literature. It's heart-pounding and brain-free. It even allows those with little to no training to enter the classics. It does not divide people into silent islands like reading a book, but rather brings people together and gathers in the illusory community that our society has worked so hard to create. Victorian courtors gave poetry to their sweethearts as garlands, and lovers now choose a record, which obviously means daydreaming or seduction with music. When we saw the new album cover, people immediately realized that music had replaced candlelight and black velvet that our way of life no longer offered.
In short, in cultured societies, music, and art and its reproductions in the narrower sense, are beginning to occupy a place where words once occupied.
Perhaps, the mainstream of modern literature has been pushed along the water. Hemingway's style, with its myriad imitators, was a clever response to the diminishing possibilities of language. Highly artificially crafted in simplicity, this style degrades Flaubert's ideal of "every word is right" to the level of the basic language. You can worship or despise. However, there is no doubt that behind this style is the narrowest view of cultural resources. Moreover, the clever techniques of Hemingway and others often obscure a key distinction: just as in works such as Tacitus, the Book of Common Prayer, and Swift's Tale of a Tub, simple words can be used to express complex thoughts and feelings, and simple words may be used to express themselves low-level states of consciousness. Reducing language to a powerful lyrical sketch, Hemingway narrowed down the living space for observation and writing. He was often accused of writing about hunters, fishermen, bullfighters, and alcoholic soldiers. This consistency of writing objects is actually the inevitable result of the language intermediary he can use. How can Hemingway's language convey the rich inner life of a more eloquent person? Think of writing Raskolnikov's consciousness in Crime and Punishment in words from The Killers. This is not to deny that Hemingway's Killer is perfectly concise. But Crime and Punishment encompasses the whole of life, and that whole life is beyond Hemingway's thin medium of language.
The shallowness of language has made much of recent literature mediocre. There are many reasons why "Death of a Saleman" didn't reach the foreseeable heights of Arthur Miller's brilliance. But the obvious point is the poverty of its language. It is an obvious fact that people speak like Macbeth before they die than they say clichés like Willy Loman. Miller learned a lot from Ibsen, but he didn't hear the beating beat of poetry behind Ibsen's traditional approach to realism.
Those who mutilate language, language will retaliate against them. O'Neill is a prime example. This dramatist always writes some rotten works in a calm and even rather touching tone. A Long Day's Journey into Night is wet as a swamp, dotted with passages from Swinborne. These lines are fancy, romantic, and cumbersome. O'Neill cites them to humiliate the character's youthful madness. In fact, however, after theatrical performances, the effects are diametrically opposed. Swinburne's linguistic energy and brilliance burned a hole in the surrounding linguistic fabric. They transcend trivial behavior, and instead of humiliating the character, they humiliate O'Neill. Modern writers rarely go unpunished when they cite writers who are better than them.
However, literature still has many desperate struggles in the process of universal withdrawal or evasion of words. I'll just give a few examples of English literature.
There is no doubt that the most beautiful counterattack of modern writers for the reduction of language comes from Joyce. After Shakespeare and Robert Burton, Joyce was the greatest word foodie in literature. Seemingly aware that science had pulled away the language's former wealth and outer territory, Joyce chose to annex a new kingdom that had died and had been buried. Ulysses captures the entanglements of subconscious life with clever webs, and Finnegan's Vigil mines the fortress of sleep. Joyce's work, more than any writer since Milton, recalled a rich legacy for the Ears of the British. Under the pressure of the need for imagination, his works gathered an army of words, recruited words that had been sleeping for a long time or rusted to re-enlist, and also absorbed new words.
Pictured is Joyce
But when we look back at this battle that won a decisive victory, we rarely get positive consequences from it, and the kingdom of words is hardly ever expansive and rich as a result. There is a lack of people in English literature to truly inherit Joyce's mantle; perhaps there are no more geniuses willing to exhaust the potential of the language. What's more, joyce's linguistic wealth, plundered from everywhere, still gleaming around his work, has not yet been treated as currency. Unlike Spencer and Marlowe, they did not generally speed up the spirit of discourse. I don't know why. Perhaps the battle came too late, or maybe the secrets and incoherence of Finnegan's Night of the Spirits seemed too abrupt. As it stands, Joyce's counterattack is not so much a monument to life.
Another deadly counterattack, or raid behind enemy lines, came from Faulkner. Faulkner's style was dominated by Gothic and Victorian rhetorical means. His sentences swirled back and forth, showing the enchanting landscape of his hometown; his ornate dialects, constantly tapping on our senses. His words often seemed to be cancerous, multiplying wildly. Sometimes, it feels like a miasma in the swamp is diluted. But this unique Victorian nocturnal talk is always a style. Even if the words annihilated him, Faulkner was not afraid. Where he was able to control the words, Faulkner had a powerful sensory impulse that brought everything to the words. Many of Faulkner's works have been "indiscriminately" written, or even said to be "rotten". But novels are always written over and over again. Eloquent behavior, which is the duty of a writer, should not be left unavoidable.
The case of Wallace Stevens is particularly enlightening. The poet himself was a rhetorician. He saw language as a gesture of courtesy and drama. He loves the taste and light of words. He tasted them with his tongue like a rare wine. But the most distinctive stylistic inventions or habits in his work come from a small and fragile resource. Look at his most famous discoveries: "bright nouveantés," "foyer," "funeste," "peristyle," "little arrondissements," "peignoir," "fictive," and "port." Most are Latinized or simply borrowed from French. They are clever terms imposed on language, unlike in Shakespeare and Joyce, where language grows out of the soil of nature. As exotic embellishments, like "Tambourine" and "Giggling Byzantine" in Peter Quince at the Clavier, the effect is profound. But elsewhere, it's all ostentation or over-embellishment. Behind Stevens' language acquisition, there are strange localist overtones. He borrowed the French word, a little abrupt, a little excited, like a traveler who bought a French women's hat or perfume. He once declared that English and French are closely related. This superficial view betrays his view of language, and the poet should beware of such superficiality.
Seeing the present situation, I suppose that the best hope for the rebirth of words in the realm of pure literature is perhaps pinned on English novelists of Irish descent and of Anglo-Indian background: frankly, Scoby looks like anyone's age; he is born before tragedy, younger than the death of Athens. He was conceived after the union of a bear and an ostrich in Noah's Ark; before full term, at Mount Ale, the disgusting purring of the keel delivered him. When Scooby came out of the womb, he was in a wheelchair with rubber tires, wearing a deer net and a red flannel rope belt. The curled feet are worn with the softest elasticated boots. Holding a rotten family Bible in his hand, the title page reads "Scoby, 1970." Dedicated to my parents". His wealth also included dead moon-like eyes, visibly curved pirate spines. He loves five sailboats. What flows in Scooby's veins is not blood, but green salt water, something from the deep sea. His steps were slow, like saints walking endlessly in the church of Galilee. He spoke in a dialect of green water that swept across the five oceans – like an antique shop with a flash of elegant fables, with sextants, astrolabes, isobaric lines... Now, the tide receded, leaving him in the high dry land next to the rapidly rushing stream of time, and became Joshua, the bankrupt weatherman, this islander, this hermit.
I know many people don't like Lawrence Durreu. His style is anti-trend. Anyone trained to write in a Hemingway style would be disgusted and unappetizing to him. But maybe we were wrong, eating porridge for a long time. Darrell's cult masters were Burton, Brown, de Quincy, and Conrad. He is immersed in the ancient tradition of plump novels. He strives to make the language match again with the multiple truths of the empirical world. In order to achieve his goal, he needs to go overboard. Darrell was often pretentious, and his vision was weaker and more superficial than the techniques he mastered. But what he strives to do is what matters: it is not just a literary effort for literature's sake.
But as we have seen, literature represents only a small part of the universal crisis. The writer is the guardian and shaper of the word, but he cannot do it alone. This is especially true today. The status of the poet is greatly reduced, both in our society and in the life of words. Most science is completely beyond his comprehension, and his clearly creative discursive ideals can only be imposed on a small field of humanities. Does this mean that we must abandon the key areas of history, ethics, and sociology that words still dominate to uncultured jargon or quasi-science? Does this mean that we have no reason to complain about the unpleasant silence against the various arts?
There are those who insist on offering small hopes. Oppenheimer (J. Robert Oppenheimer points out that the interruption of communication is equally severe between the various sciences, just as it is the interruption of communication between science and the humanities. Physicists and mathematicians do not understand each other, and they are also pulled apart by acceleration. Biologists and astronomers look at each other's work across the silent chasm. Everywhere, knowledge splits into fragments, increasingly specialized, guarded by technical language. There are fewer and fewer technical languages that a person can master. We realize that reality is so complex that the unified or integrated understandings that make common discourse possible no longer exist. Perhaps, they only work at a low level of daily need. Oppenheimer further suggests that finding bridges between languages is a misguided effort. Trying to explain to laymen the realistic conception of modern mathematics and physics is of no use. This cannot be done in any sincere way. To use crude metaphors is to spread false fallacies and illusions that encourage understanding. What Oppenheimer implied was extreme humility, an admission that ordinary people actually could not understand most things, and that even highly trained intellectuals knew too little about reality.
Regarding science, this sober view seems invulnerable. Perhaps, most knowledge is destined to be broken. But we should not admit that the fate of knowledge such as history, ethics and economics is also the fate of knowledge, as well as the fate of the analysis and conception of social and political behavior. Here, it is necessary to reaffirm the authority of literature in dominating the jargon. I don't know if that's going to work, but it's a big bet. In our time, the language of politics has been infected with obscurity and madness. Even the greatest lie can be expressed in a roundabout way, and even the most despicable cruelty can find excuses in the verbosity of historicism. Unless we can restore clarity and rigor to the meaning of words in newspapers, law, and politics, our lives will be dragged further toward chaos. At that time, a new dark age will come. This prospect is not far away. "Who knows," said Blackmer, "perhaps the next epoch will not express itself in words at all ... because the next epoch may not be as cultured as we understand it now or as it has been understood for the past three thousand years." ”
The poet who wrote Pervigilium Veneris was in an increasingly dark era, an era of gradual collapse of classical literacy. He knew the muse might fall silent:
Because of the silence, I lost my muse, and Apollo no longer answered me,
Similarly, Amyclas died of silence because of silence.
"Death in Silence": The civilization that Apollo no longer looks at will no longer last.