The Perils and Paradoxes of Language

The nature of language is strongly instrumental; its categories organize perception, perspective and evaluation. Its characters and agendas are at once subtle and aggressively momentous in their tendency to quietly become our own.

Language is not merely a reference game, filter or lens – it organizes not only our perceptions but the expectations and frameworks with which we inaugurate them. Like all instruments, but more, perhaps than any other, language reforges our minds in reply to its necessities and peculiarities. This is because it is a cognitive instrument, and our relationship with it instructs our mind and restructures our brain.

The character of our mind takes a subset of its most profound inspirations from the results of our constant immersion in culture, language, and the relatively abstract overlays they can be seen as.

Underneath the costume of our relationships with language, something vastly unsuspected is in constant development, agitation, and opposition — and this is as true in our cultures as it is our own lives and minds. One might imagine this as our own nature and its attendant opportunities... those which, for example, we expressed the precursors of prior to our experiences of enlanguaging and enculturation. An array of prodigies that I believe our encounter with these forces largely muzzles, and usually permanently.

For those who understand and continually explore the trap it represents, language can become a powerful asset in development, relation and intelligence. Unfortunately, for those who do not fortuitously acquire this uncommon awareness and its associated disciplines, language is more like a parasite. In this role, its demands are boundless and it will actively inhibit, co-opt or shut down whole arrays of other developmental opportunities while placing cruel limitations on the acquisition of the intelligence necessary to see through this strange, internally-conducted coup and the bizarre charades that follow.

All of our instruments are dangerous. And of them, it turns out that we understand the risks and specific dangers in language least of all. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that it is an underlying asset that is used to organize our own minds and reality. Thus, like our own eye, it is difficult ‘to see into what we are seeing with’. As we know the world partly through the influences of language and its categories, it takes a peculiar situation to endow us with the necessary liberty and insight with which we may experience and work with these matters firsthand.

Beyond its perils, language is a nonordinary domain. As such, it also presents profound opportunities to those who may withstand or transform its threats. There is a story unimaginable hidden in our evolutionary relationships with language, knowledge, and seeing. It is at once historical and personal; we have each relived it uniquely, in a time-compressed analog... as our own infancy and developmental adventure.