Writers’ shelf (essential books for writers) – On Language as Such and on the Language of Man by Walter Benjamin

Some days ago, @damianjayclay started a nice initiative which I would like to support by adding my own two cents. Which books to read to learn about writing? Of course any book you read, be it a novel or a book of poems, teaches you something about writing. About what works and what doesn’t. But there are also texts that are especially meant to guide you as a writer of texts. Several came to mind, and maybe I’ll write about all of them at one point.

On Language as Such

I picked a short essay for now, one that has transformed the way I think about writing, but also about language more generally. And especially about the relation between the two. It’s a a very short text, only 18 pages long. But 18 pages is enough for a great thinker like Walter Benjamin. I’ve been reading and rereading this essay for some years, most often in the English translation, but also with the German original next to it. Philosophical texts often make it necessary to go to the original, to find out what is meant. But even if you only have access to the English text, you will find it extremely interesting.

“Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions.”
~ Walter Benjamin, opening sentence essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’

This sounds innocently enough. Language as an expression of human mental life, fair enough. But this quickly escalates in Benjamin’s mind. Because language is also something more than that, and that’s where things get really interesting. Language as such, is something in which reality is communicated. So something is communicated in language, not through language.

“The existence of language, however, is not only coextensive with all the areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely everything.”
~ Walter Benjamin, still on page 1, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’

With this move, to connect language to the fundamental existence of reality, Benjamin opens up a very interesting but overwhelming can of worms. Many writers write about how language is connected to them, to thoughts, how it connects a human being to the world around you. But Benjamin seems to step out of that tradition, by posting different questions altogether. When is something communicable? Is it communicable because of language, or is there something linguistic in every thing?

And what does this mean for a human being? How is it that we use words? Or, in short, what does it mean to name something? Why does man name things, what do we communicate by this? And when we find out the name of something, is this because we lay it on that thing, or does the thing communicate its name to us? But by naming them, does man communicate anything other than himself?

Okay, I’ll stop raising more questions. But these are the main things Benjamin addresses in the first four pages. It goes on. And I’m not in a position to summarize his thoughts or the points he makes.

Walter Benjamin and being a writer

But I can perhaps explain why this text is essential to me, as a writer. When I write, I create a universe. A world in which a truth exists, in which something happens. What does it mean to write this? To give a name to things that were simply ideas before? Where do those ideas come from, and what is this type of creation? Benjamin was firmly rooted in the Jewish traditions, and in the second part of the essay this is clearly visible. He relates how this original image of God creating the world by naming, by speaking a word, is still what we consider our own basic linguistic relationship to the world around us. And to the worlds we create ourselves. Benjamin questions this.

“God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. He did not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which had served Him as medium of creation, free. God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is creator.”
~ Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’

You don’t have to be religious at all, to relate to this text. It resonates somehow. It rethinks some of the basic notions we grow up with, at least in the Judeo-Christian world I live in. It questions notions of creativity, the origin of thought, and the role of language. All extremely important to me. As a writer. As someone who is very much aware of using words to name things, to create order, and to open up the world around me through using the creative power that language harbours.