Reflections on Chomskyan Nihilism
I
love Chomsky. And it doesn’t mean I
agree with everything he says. But I
found him clear and honest, and most of his descriptions about capitalism and
United States’ foreign policy make a lot of sense to me. It is so clear, that I assume it should make
sense to anyone.
I
agree with Chomsky’s moral sense, rejection of moral relativism, calling for a
common sense altruism in defending common goods, his optimism about human
nature, and his call for activism.
But
I see a big hole in his seemingly systematic philosophy. And it is about “the meaning of life”—or what
one might call his “spirituality”. It is
striking to me that I am coming closer and closer to the conclusion that
“atheism” inevitably ends up to “nihilism”.
And this doesn’t mean that religious bigotry and hatred is better than
nihilism. Surely, there are nuances and
we need to carefully separate “good religion” (balanced) from “bad religion”
(fundamentalists), “good atheism” (Chomsky) from “bad atheism” (Dawkins), “good
pleasure” (attending God, friendship, and joy) from “bad pleasure” (greed,
drugs, and alcohol), “good egoism” (when one can see one’s self-interest is
overlapped with species-being, all species-being) from “bad egoism” (only my
self-satisfaction matters), “good altruism” (when one can see one’s
self-interest is overlapped with species-being, all species-being) from “bad
altruism” (my good pleasure and well-being don’t matter, it is all about doing
good to others).
You
see, we can almost always turn something good into bad, it is less likely to
turn something bad into good, but can be used as a counterbalance when good has
turned into bad. For example, religious
belief that turns into a gaze that sees evil all around itself can sometimes be
counterbalanced by a healthy dose of skepticism, provided if one takes
“religion” as such as good, as I take it.
And
I know what I am talking about as I was on the both sides of the line. I have been a Marxist in my teens and spend
my twenties in Iran’s prisons for my peaceful though subversive activities, in
which I don’t take pride anymore. I now
see how blind I was to the politics of the time, and how spiritually I was
lost.
But
I understand what Chomsky means when he-- along with a host of atheists from
Marxists to Russellian Anglo-American tradition of philosophy to atheist
existentialists such as Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Foucault--says that:
“The meaning of life is what you make
of it. Life does not have any meaning apart from that, for a human, a dog, a
bacterium, or anything else. It is up to you what the meaning of your life is.
So, it is partially under your control.
If someone were to
say “Life is just a bowl of cherries?”
If that is the way you want to look at
life, fine. If you decide your life is maximization of goods, then that is the
meaning of life. We can have sympathy for you, but that is what it is. If you
decide that your life is friendship, love, mutual aid, mutual support, a
community of people who try to increase their own and other people’s happiness
and welfare, then that is the meaning of life. But there is no external force
that decides.”
https://zcomm.org/zmagazine/the-most-dangerous-belief-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/
Now
I have this hypothesis: If all diverse philosophical traditions from Marxian or
Chomskyan to Nietzschean hold to the same nihilism that life doesn’t have a
universal meaning, but it is about “aesthetic of existence” to give it a
meaning, or it depends on the subject’s mentality (enlarged or limited) to give
one’s life meaning, if all of these seemingly contradictory philosophies share
one nihilistic conclusion, which basically nullifies their systematic
rationalizations (Russell, Chomsky, Marx) or seemingly-non-systematic
discourses (Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault), there should be something in their
common ground (Western Enlightenment and atheism) which brings them to this
absurd conclusion.
Why
is it all absurd? To highlight my point,
I repeat: think about Marx or Chomsky.
Think about Marx’s grounding consciousness in relations of production, think about Chomsky’s
anarchism and his modernist commitment to defend Western Enlightenment and
universal values of autonomous subject embedded in our biology, think about
Nietzsche and Foucault’s postmodernist critique of universal values of an
autonomous subject—all of them share one conclusion: there is no universal meaning
to life. It is strange. And it is absurd, because they have this totalizing all-knowing gesture (atheistic preconception)
as if they know that life has no meaning—“life does not have any meaning
apart from that, for a human, a dog, a bacterium, or anything else,” as Chomsky
puts it. How do you know? And it is by definition absurd because the
claim of life as an accident of universe without universal meaning—having only subjective
meaning-- means anything goes; there is no obligation to anything even to one’s
own survival. It is not strange that
Camus believes suicide is the most important philosophical question.
It
is absurd, because after all these, the question will become: Is there really a breach between moral/political values and the meaning or point of our existence? Chomsky advocates universal moral values ("friendship, love, mutual aid, mutual support, a community of people who try to increase their own and other people’s happiness and welfare"), but essentially holds they are not part of the universal meaning of life?! Chomsky is not willing to ponder that subjectification of the meaning of life will include all the values: why should I not
follow egoism—Ayn Rand’s rational egoism, for example? If there is no universal point of connection to our existence on this planet, between us and to each other, to all species, the universe, and God, and we are an accident of the universe, determined by blind
genes, and the blind genes themselves are a subclass of dead atoms and
particles, then what are these “ideologies” about? To say, as evolutionary biologists used to say, the meaning of existence is "survival of genes" begs the question that "what is the meaning or point of survival of genes?" Why should intellectuals like us care to be
altruistic or not, fight for the common good or not, fight for a better world
or not, fight for the survival of genes or not? In the context that everyone
equally is justified to take the meaning of life as anything, even the notion
of “better,” morally or politically, won’t have a meaning, because the meaning
of life can be rendered even contradictory things, depending on what
the sovereign individual chooses: self-centeredness, to promote slavery,
following hedonism, devotion to the well beings of others, relationship, humanism,
hermit-isolation, domination of others, following a religious path, or being
materialist and cynic. There won’t be
any universal direction and moral codes to follow, and in the last analysis there is no breach between values and the meaning of one's life.
My Hypothesis
This
is my hypothesis: sociobiology, evolutionary biology, biolinguistic,
materialism (mechanistic or dialectic), physicalism, etc. all these theories,
which believe our being here on this planet is accidental, are the products of
Western Enlightenment autonomous subject.
The metaphysical assumption of autonomous subject is destructive and nihilistic
through and through not only in terms of brute libertarianism and neo-liberal
politics, but also in terms of the nihilism of Marxian socialism and Chomskyan
anarchism, because all of these theories, with different variations, from sheer
individualism to libertarian socialism, share one major conclusion: there is no
universal meaning to our lives; the meaning of life is subjective to the
sovereign individual. At the surface it
looks like the subjectivist nature of the meaning of life gives a great choice and power to the
individual, as if one has so much control over one’s life that even one can
construct or “discover” one’s exclusive meaning of life, but indeed this
subjectification of existence means breaking down the reverence of human life
as a divine gift, as a mode of connection to the universe and God, the divine
source. Strangely enough we have lost the dignity of being human (in being reducible to animals and things) by the fallacious metaphysical assumption of
autonomous subject.
The
interviewer asks Chomsky:
“Of the perhaps 30 or
40 young people to whom we posed the question, “If you could ask a question of
someone who is considered one of the smartest people in the world, what would
you ask?” Most of them asked that question—so, what do you think is driving the
need to answer that question about the meaning of life?”
And this is Chomsky’s answer:
“It is probably the sense of either
unwillingness or inability to take your life in your own hands. If you see
yourself as a creature of external forces, buffeted by a market, government,
parental authority, whatever it may be, then you search for something elsewhere
that will tell you what the meaning of your life is. If you have developed (it
is a value judgment) what I think of as a healthy respect for yourself and
others, you will design the meaning of your life.
Of course, you can’t do it completely.
You may want to be a world champion high jumper, let us say, and you may not be
able to achieve that, but you can shape your life to a substantial extent and that
way give it meaning, in fact, discover the meaning as you proceed—you don’t
know in advance. It is after you develop relationships that you discover their
value.”
I ask myself whether too much theories
can’t darken one’s perception to the extent that in responding to the question,
“Why do we ponder the meaning of our existence here?” He answers, “It is probably [because of] the
sense of either unwillingness or inability to take your life in your own hands.
If you see yourself as a creature of external forces, buffeted by a market,
government, parental authority, whatever it may be, then you search for
something elsewhere that will tell you what the meaning of your life is.”
Obviously, Chomsky commits red herring here. Red herring, because he simply changes the
question of “why we are, ontologically, on this planet in awareness about our
very existence and death” to irrelevant point that “if you ask this question it
is because you are unwilling or unable to take your life in your hands”! Well, what on earth does this mean? Only the delusion of metaphysical autonomous
subject can come to this bizarre libertarian conclusion that our lives ontologically is in our own hands. What is the use of all the books in the world,
if they can’t help us seeing that we are all wired into air and water and
food? That we can’t ground our own
existence here on this planet? That we
are dependent through and through to biosphere and to the universe? That we don’t know why we are here—without
the divine help?
Of course, Chomsky admits that we
cannot have complete mastery over life, “but you can shape your life to a
substantial extent and that way give it meaning, in fact, discover the meaning
as you proceed—you don’t know in advance. It is after you develop relationships
that you discover their value.” This “discovery”
for Chomsky is essentially arbitrary, which means it has no universal meaning
and telos. One arrives at a sense of
significance as one proceeds but in no way this “discovery” can be a revelation
of real-universal meaning of life, because the hidden presumption of
subjectification of the meaning of life and the sovereignty of
autonomous individual is that life has no universal meaning, and essentially it
is arbitrary. Even evolutionary biology
and the story of genes can’t give a universal meaning to our life (despite Dawkins,
Wilson, and Pinker’s will), because it grounds the meaning of human existence
on “selfish genes”, which themselves are a sub-class of dead and accidental/chaotic
movements of particles. “Discovery” is
used here in a rhetorical way as retrospection upon a past way, a developed
relationship, for example, as a furrow of memory and character/habit made in
the course of time: it is a construction not a discovery. The interlocutor asks Chomsky:
“Do you think the key
would be in the relationship itself? For example, in some kind of collective
meaning?”
Chomsky responds:
“Unless you are a
hermit. If a person decides I’m going to be a hermit, I’ll get myself a piece
of land in Montana, I’ll farm it, I’ll live by myself, I won’t pay any
attention to other human beings, I’ll have no form of communication with
others, okay, that is the meaning of your life. I know people who have become
hermits. I met one climbing a mountain once. The guy was living in a mountain
hut and he just wanted to be alone. That is a choice you can have. For most
people, life means warm, supportive social relationships. But you don’t know it
in advance.
Take, say, marriage. Suppose you get
married when you are 20. You don’t really know what the meaning of that
relationship is. You may be discovering it 60 years later. As relationships
mature, circumstances change, you have children—which adds a new dimension of
meaning to your life that you can’t imagine. Or maybe it becomes sour. But
these are things that develop through life and at each stage. If you do have
the sense of self-respect and autonomy and concern for others you can, within
the limits that external factors provide, determine and discover the meaning of
your life. Discovery is not a small part of it.”
This is a confusion that Chomsky can’t
and don’t want to shed any light on it: the universal and existential meaning
of life is not an individual choice and having family and children per se can’t
render life a meaning. To say only the
individual gives meaning to his or her life means “just deal with it”. If there is no universal truth about the
meaning of human being on this planet, “discovery” has no meaning.
Chomsky
is atheist but not hostile to religion.
He really doesn’t want to think that religious belief is a real
phenomenon. For him religion has only a
social function.
“This is a question
from a 12-year-old. “What do you think happens when people die?”
Chomsky: “I believe the body
deteriorates and that is the end of the person.”
“And from the same
questioner: “If one is not a believer in religion, is it worth challenging
others beliefs in things like reincarnation and an afterlife?”
Chomsky:
“I don’t think there is any
simple answer to that. You have to ask yourself whether the religious beliefs
that you don’t accept have a significance in other people’s lives that would
reduce the value of their lives if those beliefs were taken away from them. If
that is the case, then it would be supreme arrogance to challenge their
beliefs.
If, on the other hand, you think the
beliefs are basically a burden, that they would be freer, more creative, more
independent individuals without those irrational beliefs (“irrational” in that
they are not based on evidence and argument), well, then, it makes sense to
discuss the beliefs with them. It is not just religious beliefs, but any other
beliefs as well.”
Chomsky has the presumption, as I used
to have, that religious belief either is a burden or give some practical value
to the life of those who practice it. He
can’t see that the third option is that a genuine religious belief is possible
as a mode of connection to God, to the Source, a sense of oneness and unity
with the universe and embracing and grasping a universal meaning of life. An atheist is basically deprived of this
sense of connection—except with dead particles. So Chomsky continues to say:
“For many people, their religious
beliefs are kind of like a foundation for their survival and existence. I know
people like that. So, a poor immigrant woman who has lived here (I’m thinking
of somebody) for 50 years and worked her way up to the point where she had
children, managed to get them to school—she lived a very hard life in the
ghettoes, her husband had all kinds of problems and ended up in the army—but
she created a kind of life for herself and she is an Evangelical Christian. A
large part of her life is the community of believers that she is part of. So,
for example, they have prayer sessions in the evenings where they visit people
who are ill or have prayers for others they know who are ill or maybe
disturbed, etc. And that enriches their lives and may even enrich the lives of
the people they are praying with. Why should anyone try to take that away from
them by telling them there isn’t going to be any Second Coming? Or, suppose a
mother would love to believe that her dying child is not gone forever, but that
she will see him again in heaven. Do you have to give her lectures in
epistemology?
There are plenty of people we call
“religious,” who belong to religious communities, but don’t have these beliefs.
If you go to a New England church in some middle class, professional, academic
community, the people might not have any more beliefs than I do, but being
part of that community is important for them, meeting on Sunday morning, going
through the rituals. There are families who are held together by ceremonies—you
come for this ceremony, for that ceremony, your life is built around it. You
don’t have to have any particular beliefs for that to function.
That is even true of ultra-orthodox
people. I can think of my grandfather, for example, who was an ultra-orthodox
Jew. If I had asked him whether he believed in God, I don’t think he would
have known what I was talking about. Religion was your life, the practices
you carried out, your associations, where you spent your time, etc. You did say
prayers which had words like “I believe,” but it did not matter much whether
you questioned them or didn’t question them; they were just among the other
practices.
The rituals served as
a…
…as a structure of life. It is
not for me. I don’t want it, but if other people want it, is it my job to try
to take it away from them? If it has harmful consequences for the person or for
others, like if under the banner of religious belief you launch a crusade, let
us say, well that is a different matter. But that is true of any belief,
secular beliefs too. Actually, one of the most dangerous religious beliefs,
maybe the most dangerous belief, is the secular faith in the sanctity and power
of the state. We see that all the time.
Take what is called “American
exceptionalism,” the notion that we are unique in history; there is the
fundamental benevolence of our leaders; they may make mistakes, but always with
good intentions. That is one of the most dangerous beliefs. It is a religious
belief and has no foundation in fact, and it is one of the most dangerous that
exists. In fact, secular religions have been extremely dangerous. Nazism, for
example, was a secular religion.” (Underlines Added)
I understand Chomsky’s account about
religion, because I used to think the same almost eleven years ago (2005). Similarly, I believed that religion is either
a burden or has a social function for people who practice it. As I was not a believer, I held that prayers
and communal interconnections were a kind of irrational make-believe for the
sake of having a community. Similar to
Chomsky and other atheists, I was appalled by religious bigotry, sectarianism,
and violence. So I learned to discard it
altogether. This is the way we make
decision about most issues in our lives.
If we see a host of problems in a certain belief system, it is unlikely
we really do a thorough research to make sure we are not throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. We don’t care, we
just make a general decision, especially if we are hurt. This lack of imagination, this lack of doubt
that thousands year religious experience (not only “belief”) might have a real
phenomenological content that I can’t imagine or experience, is pervasive
between all atheists. They see religious
belief as a kind of delusional self-hypnotizing and self-fulfilling prophecy to
soothe them about one’s death or the death of loved ones, as Chomsky mentions
above. Or as something that have some
functional and communal significance only.
Surely, religion affects one’s life in so many dimensions, including
creating a way of life and giving the individual a sense of community. I can’t blame the atheists who never
experienced the objective content of religious experience or the mystical
for themselves, something completely distinguished and singular that will
shatter their assumptions about common sense and the possibility of human
experience. But I blame them,
including Chomsky, for the lack of curiosity to research about thousands year
religious experience and practice some forms of it to have an experiential taste
about it, as much as they are ready to test a scientific theory in a lab. I blame them for the lack of imagination to
reflect on the absolute possibility that
the domain of human experience cannot be confined to a scientific discourse or
any finalizing and totalizing discourse.
After going through a transformation of
consciousness in which my usual commonsensical perception of the world and the
self was shattered, I awakened to the fact that I had no imagination of the
possible horizon of human experience.
And after my body and brain went through a bizarre consistent and
permanent modification in experiencing a kind of bliss, it came to my mind that
how short-sighted and narrow-minded I had been to assume that I knew for sure
what the domain of human experience was.
I couldn’t imagine that my feelings, subjective experience, and the experience
of body as they were confined in everyday practices of my life were not the
only way to experience reality. One thing became clear to me: I lacked
openness. A religious experience has
to open up the practitioner to the world, rather than closing him or her off.
In Chomsky’s above assertions about
religion, one can see this blindness. I
underlined some words in his comments about religion. He says if you go to the people of
certain class they might not have any more belief in the divine than Chomsky
but they still need the community and the rituals for a sense of belonging. This is true, but Chomsky completely excludes
the possibility that some of these people might really have a genuine
phenomenological religious experience that he cannot fathom or imagine. He implies a sweeping assumption that as some
don’t need to have any particular belief (he doesn’t talk about “experience”)
to hold onto religious community and rituals, therefore religious experience
has no objective content.
Obliteration of the Meaning of Life in the Subject-Object Dichotomy of Modernism
Chomsky’s congealment in 16th,
17th, and 18th century philosophy of Descartes, Locke,
Hume, and Humboldt, doesn’t allow him to think about basic existential
questions raised by Heidegger. Chomsky
flatly rejects Heidegger as a charlatan and Nazi, I will discuss Heidegger’s falling
into Nazism in another reflection[1]. Chomsky shows no anguish about the question
of existence. He, similar to logical
positivists, renders the question of meaning of life absurd, because he thinks
those who raise this question show lack of autonomy. I hold
that the metaphysical (not legal and political) thesis of autonomous subject is
nihilistic and absurd. No living
being on this planet is metaphysically autonomous. Only getting lost in too many abstract
philosophical, ideological, and supposedly scientific theories can darken one’s
existential horizon not to see the simple fact that “reason” per se can’t
answer all questions, and the fact is that pondering our existence here makes us “human” or as
Heidegger put it: we have a pre-ontological (pre-theoretical) understanding of
Being. Chomsky’s Cartesian subject can’t
overcome the false dichotomy of subject and object, to see the interrelation of
the linguistic concept of Being and the ontological condition of possibility of
having this concept, which is pre-theoretical-linguistic, or more accurate it
is coextensive with language: it is equiprimordial. It means any child and adult understands that
we are and it is a puzzle to him or
her. And it has nothing to do with “computational
recursion” and “taking one’s life in one’s hand” because first of all this
sense of awe is not “computational” and second, we are not self-sufficient and
don’t know and can’t fathom why we exist[2]
unless religions help us.
Considering the
pre-ontological understanding of Being, not only as a concept in language but
also as that which makes human conception possible, is absent in Chomsky’s
linguistic theory. It is not strange
that he thinks the question of the meaning of life shows that one doesn’t have
autonomy over one’s life, because he is Being-blind (similar to “color-blind”). For him concepts such as being and existence are
grounded in a biolinguistic capacity of brain.
His theory about the way we understand universal concepts is based on
Turing’s general theory of computability.
In an interview, Chomsky explains the
Basic Property of human language in this way:
“The language faculty provides the
means to construct a digitally infinite array of structured expressions, each
of which has a semantic interpretation expressing a thought, and each of which
can be externalized by means of some sensory modality. The infinite set of
semantically interpreted objects constitutes what has sometimes been called a
“language of thought”: the system of thoughts that receive linguistic
expression and that enter into reflection, inference, planning and other mental
processes, and when externalized, can be used for communication and other
social interactions. By far, the major use of language is internal — thinking
in language.”
https://chomsky.info/on-the-evolution-of-language-a-biolinguistic-perspective/
This way of explaining the working of
language—digital production of structures from inside to outside—is based on
the Cartesian model that prioritizes the thinking subject to the world and at
the same time the mechanism of producing infinite sentences such as “What is
the meaning of life?” “What is Being?” or “We have pre-theoretical understanding
of Being” all are quantifiable number of innate structures which are the result
of adding up simple sentences to make complex ones. Chomsky states:
“The Basic Property takes
language to be a computational system, which we therefore expect to observe
general conditions on computational efficiency. A computational system consists
of a set of atomic elements and rules to construct more complex ones.
Universal
properties of the language faculty began to come to light as soon as serious
efforts were undertaken to construct generative grammars, including quite
simple ones that had never been noticed, and that are quite puzzling — a
phenomenon familiar in the history of the natural sciences. One such property
is structure-dependence: the rules that yield the language of thought attend
solely to structural properties, ignoring properties of the externalized
signal, even such simple properties as linear order.
To illustrate, consider the
sentence birds that fly instinctively swim. It is ambiguous: the
adverb “instinctively” can be associated with the preceding verb (fly
instinctively) or the following one (instinctively swim). Suppose
now that we extract the adverb from the sentence, forming instinctively,
birds that fly swim. Now the ambiguity is resolved: The adverb is construed
only with the linearly more remote but structurally closer verb swim,
not the linearly closer but structurally more remote verb fly. The
only possible interpretation — birds swim — is the unnatural
one, but that doesn’t matter: the rules apply rigidly, independent of meaning
and fact. What is puzzling is that the rules ignore the simple computation of
linear distance and keep to the far more complex computation of structural
distance.
The property of structure dependence
holds for all constructions in all languages, and it is indeed puzzling.
Furthermore, it is known without relevant evidence, as is evident in cases like
the one I just gave and innumerable others. Experiment shows that children
understand that rules are structure-dependent as early as they can be tested,
by about age 3, and do not make errors — and are, of course, not instructed.
The only plausible conclusion, then, is that structure-dependence
is an innate property of the language faculty, an element of the Basic
Property. Why should this be so? There is only one known answer, and
fortunately, it is the answer we seek for general reasons: The computational
operations of language are the simplest possible ones. Again, that is the
outcome that we hope to reach on methodological grounds, and that is to be
expected in the light of the evidence about evolution of language already
mentioned.” [Bolds are added]
https://chomsky.info/on-the-evolution-of-language-a-biolinguistic-perspective/
Chomsky is
puzzled
that the way children-human-beings understand language “ignore the simple
computation of linear distance and keep to the far more complex computation of
structural distance.” And he concludes
that “structure-dependence” is an innate (a
prori—before experience) property of faculty of language, based on
computational operation.
There are two elements here: one is
“structure-dependence” characteristic of learning a language--complex computation of
structural distance versus the simple computation of linear distance. The second one is that this is an innate property
of faculty of language.
In a recent article published in
American Scientific (Sept. 2016), Paul Ibbotosn & Michael Tomasello
question the
second account. The core of this article
states:
“A key flaw in Chomsky’s theories is
that when applied to language learning, they stipulate that young children come
equipped with the capacity to form sentences using abstract grammatical rules.
(The precise ones depend on which version of the theory is invoked.) Yet much
research now shows that language acquisition does not take place this way.
Rather young children begin by learning simple grammatical patterns; then,
gradually, they intuit the rules behind them bit by bit.
…..
The main response of universal
grammarians to such findings is that children have the competence with grammar
but that other factors can impede their performance and thus both hide the true
nature of their grammar and get in the way of studying the “pure” grammar
posited by Chomsky’s linguistics. Among the factors that mask the underlying
grammar, they say, include immature memory, attention and social capacities.
Yet the Chomskyan interpretation of the
children’s behavior is not the only possibility. Memory, attention and social
abilities may not mask the true status of grammar; rather they may well be
integral to building a language in the first place. For example, a recent study
co-authored by one of us (Ibbotson) showed that children’s ability to produce a
correct irregular past tense verb—such as “Every day I fly, yesterday I flew”
(not “flyed”)—was associated with their ability to inhibit a tempting response
that was unrelated to grammar. (For example, to say the word “moon” while
looking at a picture of the sun.) Rather than memory, mental analogies,
attention and reasoning about social situations getting in the way of children
expressing the pure grammar of Chomskyan linguistics, those mental faculties
may explain why language develops as it does.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/
The problem with both of these accounts (Chomsky and Ibbotosn & Tomasello) is that none
of them try to see that this might be a false dichotomy and language learning
is neither based on innate computational recursion, nor on merely usage-based
learning. Both of these assumptions
follow the mechanical subject-object interactions. One might argue that the ground of
children-human-beings understanding language—“in keeping to the far more
complex computation of structural distance, rather than simple computation of
linear distance,” as Chomsky holds, is pre-ontological-equiprimordial
understanding of Being, where and when the subject and object merge in a
holistic understanding of Being and referential totality, and the “concept” or
“word” is that relation between “I” and “the world” or “Being” (not that it represents the world).
In this context it is “innate” for children
to understand the whole sentence structure and as Wittgenstein puts it, the
whole language, before understanding linear parts in it. The reason of this holistic understanding is
not that this “innate” capacity is computationally before experience or the capacity just comes
from usage-based learning, but the innate capacity, the practice of
categorization, and usage of expressions and sentences in language happen
simultaneously based on the divine holistic capacity to have an understanding
of “existence”, of “Being”, of “world”, of “life” and of “death”. Chomsky and scientific discourse can’t
imagine this way of looking at language, and so it is not also strange that
Chomsky believes that if people ask about the question of meaning of life, it
is because they cannot own up to their life, because he sees the foundation of
language and understanding as “computational recursion” similar to
computers. One may argue that human beings
have existential angst which is permeated through through with questions about
the meaning of their existence, because they are aware of life, of Being, and
this awareness is simultaneously the source of linguistic capacities, concept
formation, usage of categorizations in practice, and communication. It is simultaneously the source of
linguistic, moral, existential, and spiritual capacities. So the source of language is not subjective
or objective, is not innate or empirical, but it is in Heideggerian relation of
being-in-the-world, against the background of pre-ontological (pre-reflective)
understanding of Being or God, as that which cannot be reduced to any entity and as such withdraws in
concealment in bringing beings into clearing of understanding for human beings.
Chomsky’s way of
understanding the working of language is based on scientific method grounded in
17th century empiricism and is similar to Russell and early
Wittgenstein atomistic theory of language.
This view that our mind starts from simple or atomistic propositions or
sentences and proceed to a more complex one is clearly rejected by late Wittgenstein
and Heidegger.
According to Heidegger
we proceed from a holistic understanding of referential totality in which subject-object
relation is dissolved in the absorption of the subject in the world. As Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts
it:
“According to Heidegger, Descartes presents the world to us
“with its skin off” (Being and Time 20: 132), i.e., as a collection of
present-at-hand entities [objects] to be encountered by subjects. The
consequence of this prioritizing of the present-at-hand is that the subject
needs to claw itself into a world of equipmental meaning by adding what
Heidegger calls ‘value-predicates’ (context-dependent meanings) to the
present-at-hand [object]. In stark contrast, Heidegger's own view is that
Dasein [human being] is in primary epistemic contact not with
context-independent present-at-hand primitives (e.g., raw sense data, such as a
‘pure’ experience of a patch of red), to which context-dependent meaning would
need to be added via value-predicates, but rather with equipment, the kind of
entity whose mode of Being is readiness-to-hand and which therefore comes
already laden with context-dependent significance. What is perhaps Heidegger's
best statement of this opposition comes later in Being and Time:
What we ‘first’ hear
is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the
motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker
tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated
frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and wagons
are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case
Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand
within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside
‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations
to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives
at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside
what is understood. (Being and Time 34: 207) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#ModEnc
This means that
in ordinary situation a child doesn’t generate atomistic digital sentence-structures
separate from a holistic understanding of his or her situation. On the contrary, the holistic understanding
of the situation (and of Being) precedes a child’s learning process in which
inner faculties of language are being activated to learn and make separate
sentences. Chomsky fundamentally rejects
this phenomenological description because he believes in Cartesian picture in
which we move from inside to outside, not being able to see that inside and
outside collides in us for being endowed a unique capacity to understand Being
and upon this ontological understanding we are gifted to ask: “What is the
meaning of Being?”
In “The Nature
of Language”, Heidegger asks for undergoing an experience with language, which
means language “befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and
transforms us.” Unlike Chomsky’s bizarre
claim that if you ask “What is the meaning of life?”, it shows you are
unwilling or incapable to take your own life in your own hands”, Heidegger
holds that “when we talk of ‘undergoing’ an experience, we mean specifically
that the experience is not of our own making: to undergo here means that we
endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it.” (On the
Way to Language, p.57).
Heidegger calls
the method of analytical philosophy and science in relation to language “meta-linguistics”
and defines it as: “the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of
all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary
information.” (p.57) He doesn’t deny
scientific approach to language, the way Chomsky seeks to deal with linguistic
questions, but along with his critique of technology, Heidegger believes this
approach is limited and if we confine our experience with language to
scientific and analytic “computation”, it distorts our relation with language. Following a poem by Stefan George, he
interprets the stanza “where words break off no thing may be” in this way:
“No thing is
where the word is lacking, that word which names the given thing. What does “to name” signify? We might answer: to name means to furnish
something with a name. And what is a
name? A designation that provides
something with a vocal and written sign, a cipher. And what is a sign? Is it a signal? Or a token?
A marker? We have become very
slovenly and mechanical in our understanding and use of signs.” (p.61)
And Heidegger
clarifies that “everything depends on how we think of what the words ‘sign’ and
‘name’ say.” Are “name” and “word” the
same? Is “name” mere “designation”? What about “in the name of the King” or “in
the name of God”, “in the name of him who bestows the hours”? Here “name” means “at the call, by the
command”. In Stefen George’s poem the
terms “word” and “name” are different from mere “sign”. So Heidegger goes back to the last stanza:
“No thing is where the word is lacking” and interpret the word “thing” as
meaning anything that in any way is. The word alone gives being
to the thing. But how it could be,
because we don't think a word brings a thing into being but the reverse. I will explain it through comparing Heidegger’s
questioning of “representational” view of language with Chomsky’s.
Chomsky contends:
“As I mentioned, the conventional view
is that atomic elements of language are cultural products, and that the basic
ones — those used for referring to the world — are associated with extra-mental
entities. This representationalist doctrine has been almost universally adopted
in the modern period. The doctrine appears to hold for animal communication: a
monkey’s calls, for example, are associated with specific physical events. But
the doctrine is radically false for human language, as was recognized as far
back as classical Greece.
To illustrate, let’s take the first
case that was discussed in pre-Socratic philosophy, the problem posed by
Heraclitus: how can we cross the same river twice? To put it differently, why
are two appearances understood to be two stages of the same river? Contemporary
philosophers have suggested that the problem is solved by taking a river to be
a four-dimensional object, but that simply restates the problem: why this
object and not some different one, or none at all?
When we look into the question, puzzles
abound. Suppose that the flow of the river has been reversed. It is still the
same river. Suppose that what is flowing becomes 95 percent arsenic because of
discharges from an upstream plant. It is still the same river. The same is true
of other quite radical changes in the physical object. On the other hand, with
very slight changes it will no longer be a river at all. If its sides are lined
with fixed barriers and it is used for oil tankers, it is a canal, not a river.
If its surface undergoes a slight phase change and is hardened, a line is
painted down the middle, and it is used to commute to town, then it is a
highway, no longer a river. Exploring the matter further, we discover that what
counts as a river depends on mental acts and constructions. The same is true,
quite generally, of even the most elementary concepts: tree, water, house,
person, London, or in fact, any of the basic words of human language.
Radically, unlike animals, the items of human language and thought uniformly
violate the representationalist doctrine.”
It is interesting to notice the way
Chomsky sees concept-formations as innate computational recursion. So we construct the concept of “river”, “canal”,
“person”, “tree”, “house” etc. before experience based on computational recursion, and in this way he rejects representational view. This mechanical-computational view about
concept-formation clearly shows Heidegger’s concern and warning about “technology” and its metaphysics in which only the measurable/quantifiable is real.
We can see it in the way Chomsky understands
the question of “meaning of life”.
Because the concept “meaning” or “being” itself are complex mechanical-computational
recursive phenomena and a construction of the mind, therefore, the question of
the meaning of life is not a genuine question but shows the lack of autonomy of
the questioner. This is a subtle
nihilism shrouded in linguistic jargons.
In going beyond “representational”
thinking and “innate-computational” assumptions about the relation of the
individual and the world, Heidegger tries to open a holistic third path to see
how ontologically concepts are formed and objects are designated. He
contends that a word is bespoken not by an object alone but a mode of being of
the subject, and the mode of being discovers the word in relation to objects
perceived in that mode. There is a
relation between “subject” and “object” in this encounter. We need to understand how the world and
objects are disclosed to us, under what direction of attention. The mode of being of observer can discover
different objects in different projections and all these objects, such as atom,
quarks, spaceship, a river, a canal, a road, a house, a tree, etc. are real and
grasped as real when they are named. Do
names thus represent the objects? We
are walking on a razor edge bridge between “subject” and “object”—a bridge that
Heidegger seeks to pass and not to fall into any of them, into Chomskyan
subjectivism or representational objectivism.
So in reflecting on the experience of Stefan Georges’ last verse: “So I
renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be,” Heidegger
seeks to undergo the experience of Georges with language. “[T]he poet has experienced that only the
word makes a thing appear as the thing it is, and thus lets it be present. The word avows itself to the poet as that
which holds and sustains a thing in its being.” (p.65-66) But the word is also
a gift with which the poet is constituted as a poet. But the poet is sad with
his renunciation because it means a loss.
Heidegger continues:
“Yet, as we have
seen, the renunciation is not a loss.
Nor does “sadly” refer to the substance of the renunciation, but rather
to the fact that he has learned it. That
sadness, however, is neither mere dejection nor despondency. True sadness is in harmony with what is most
joyful—but in this way, that the greatest joy withdraws, halts in its
withdrawal, and holds itself in reserve.[….] The poet could never go through
the experience he undergoes with the word if the experience were not attuned to
sadness, to the mood of releasement into the nearness of what is withdrawn but
at the same time held in reserve for an originary advent.
These few
pointers may suffice to make it clearer what experience the poet has undergone
with language. Experience means eundo assequi, to obtain something along
the way, to attain something by going on a way.
What is it that the poet reaches?
Not mere knowledge. He obtains entrance into the relation of
word to thing. This relation is not,
however, a connection between the thing that is on one side and the word that
is on the other. The word itself is the
relation which in each instance retains the thing within itself in such a
manner that it “is” a thing.” (p.66, emphasis added).
Conclusion
I just came back from my walking meditation beside water. I emptied my mind of all the conflicts, fears, anger, theories, and ideologies. I opened up my soul and body to the reception of the divine. In absolute faith and trust in God, my body-mind went through a transformation, being released from the thoughts and concerns of this world. I experienced a sense of unspeakable bliss with manifest ecstatic psychosomatic change. I experienced the mode of absorption in God in being-in-the-world. In this divine mode of encounter with the world, the blissful standing beside and outside myself and the world (ecstatic, ex-sistance: standing-outside or -alongside), the world: trees, birds, people, and water opened up in a different mode. I was aware of a range of concentration from no-language-thought-worry-conflict to awareness of language in interpreting the world in the mode of absorption.
When I was actively receptive to God, focused and concentrated on God, my origin and my ending, there was no computation or engagement in the world. I was experiencing the exit-death in letting go of this world of pleasures and conflicts, in which the divine is present in each single moment, to the bliss of returning to my source. This is not a denial of the world, or extreme ascetic practice, it is cherishing the world as the abode of growth and experiencing God to arrive at letting-be-letting-go unity with the source—the most pleasurable experience, which we separate its experience from pleasure with the word “joy” or “bliss”. This is the mode of detachment, I assume, that all religions and sub specie aeternitatis mean in experiencing the emptiness which leads to fullness of life and God. This experience incorporates and exceeds language.
Now, Chomsky believes through innate computational recursion we generate concepts such as tree and river and in a more complex way God, joy, pleasure, and bliss. Some are evidence based and rational and some are not. From the fact that concepts are generated before experience in computational manner (not representationally), Chomsky probably would argue, the meaning of words such as “meaning of life” are subject-dependent and can’t have any universal reference in a world separate from autonomous subject. Chomsky would possibly tell me: “in believing that your individual existence, in any human relational configuration that you can imagine yourself—married or hermit—was experiencing ecstatic connection with God this morning in absolute absorption in letting-be-letting-go mode and holding onto it as the meaning of our life, yes OUR life, not only your little subjective experience,” Chomsky would say, “in this seeking the meaning of your life, you surrendered to an authority outside you [ineffable God] to render meaning to your life, while if you respect your autonomy, you yourself will give meaning to your life.”
To repeat, Chomsky believes if you ask the question “what is the meaning of life?” it is because of “either unwillingness or inability to take your life in your own hands. If you see yourself as a creature of external forces, buffeted by a market, government, parental authority, whatever it may be, then you search for something elsewhere that will tell you what the meaning of your life is. If you have developed (it is a value judgment) what I think of as a healthy respect for yourself and others, you will design the meaning of your life.”
In this reflection, I tried to show that why this absurd account is based on a metaphysical belief in autonomous subject, on the one hand, and Chomsky’s “innate-computational-recursion” theory embedded in his biolinguistic view. I argued that Chomsky’s computational theory of language and the metaphysical assumption of autonomous subject are modernist ramifications of his Cartesian subject-object dichotomy in which the world and language are grounded in the thinking subject. So, “meaning” is a property of the mind and only the mind itself can render meaning to its life, not any external world-force-authority-God. These elements together darken his perspective to understand the common sense notion that as a child or adult, our being and death are an issue for us. We are connected to the biosphere-earth-universe-God and in losing this connection, in anguish, we lose the meaning of our life, and hence longingly we seek the meaning of our life. This meaning is not a subjective regeneration. It is a calling for our connection to the source of our existence. We don’t need a theory to know this. Any human in his or her dignity can understand this, unless one is burdened by loyalty to one’s theories about innate computational recursion of universal grammar.
I tried to show that Heidegger’s ontological-holistic account that we have a pre-ontological and pre-reflective understanding of Being gives us a better sense of both language and why we ask the question of meaning of life. Our linguistic-ontological understanding of Being, which transcends subject-object relationship, grounds-and-is-grounded in the unity of subject and object, the self and the world, the “I” and Being, as belonging together equiprimordially.
Briefly, I discussed Heidegger’s discussion on the Nature of Language and compared Heidegger’s anti-representational view (overcoming subject-object dichotomy) to Chomsky’s anti-representational view (embedding concept-formations in innate computational recursion) and how these different views deal with the question of the meaning of life.
[1]
Heidegger’s
falling into Nazism has to be investigated in order to find out the components
of his thought that could potentially give rise to this falling. I will discuss this point in another reflection
on the recent publication of his “Black Notebooks”. https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks
But to reject his philosophy altogether is false, because he
didn’t stay in that pitfall and questioned Nazism in its total technological
mobilization and anti-Semitic ideology.
