A word game

An eastern and a western perspective on the limits of language

My friend Pen encouraged me to write an associative substack, starting more-or-less at random, and following the ideas wherever they took me.

A game

When do words fail us? When we try to describe things with extremely subtle differences. For example, faces.

To illustrate this point, I’ll use a phrase you’ll rarely have heard me speak:

Let’s play a game.

Here are the rules:

• First, imagine your mother’s face.

• Second, imagine your father’s face.

• Third — speaking aloud and counting on your fingers — describe their facial differences.

• If you list ten or more differences, you win.

• If you list fewer than ten differences, you lose.

Aren’t games fun? Or at least — entertaining?

Now that you’ve listed all the differences, let’s look at a few perspectives on the limits of language, from the East and West.

Modern Anhui, where Zhuangzi is thought to have been from.

Autumn Waters

We start in Ancient China, in a town called Meng in modern Anhui Province, where once lived a person named Zhuang Zhou (~369–286 BC).

I started this morning with his book, the Zhuangzi, Outer Chapters, chapter 17, “Autumn Waters” (p135, trans. Zipyorn, emphasis mine):

Ruo of the Northern Sea said, “Looking at the vast from the viewpoint of the tiny, it appears inexhaustible. Looking at the tiny from the viewpoint of the vast, it becomes unclear. ‘The subtle’ just means what is small to the point of indistinctness, and wherever our limits are overflowed is the fullest reach of ‘the vast.’ So these terms are suited to different uses, as determined by the situation. But both the subtle and the coarse are limited to the realm of things with definite form. What has no form can be distinguished by no quantities; what cannot be encompassed can be exhausted by no quantities. What can be discussed in words is just the coarser aspect of things; what can be reached by thought is just the subtler aspect of things. But what words cannot describe and thought cannot reach cannot be determined as either coarse or subtle.”

Two things stand out to me here.

• First, the contextualism: “different uses, as determined by the situation.”

• Second, the idea that thoughts can reach what words cannot reach — but that there is more, which thoughts cannot reach.

“I choose door #2: That which words cannot reach.”

Are there such places, which words cannot reach?

Faces

Schopenhauer, writing about two thousand years later, says that there are such places, which words cannot reach. More specifically, he says this about physiognomy, the study of faces. Wikipedia now calls it a pseudoscience, and Schopenhauer describes why it can probably never become a science.

This is because concepts are not fine enough to reach its finer points — with the implication that without concepts, reason cannot operate. (Note that he notes that some people are nonetheless better judges of faces than others.)

Here’s Schopenhauer, WWR I, §12 (1818, trans. Payne, emphasis mine):

In like manner, the application of reason is also disturbing to the person who tries to understand physiognomy; this too must occur directly through the understanding. We say that the expression, the meaning of the features, can only be felt, that is to say, it cannot enter into abstract concepts. Every person has his own immediate intuitive method of physiognomy and pathognomy, yet one recognizes that signatura rerum more clearly than does another. But a science of physiognomy in the abstract cannot be brought into existence to be taught and learned, because in this field the shades of difference are so fine that the concept cannot reach them. Hence abstract rational knowledge is related to them as a mosaic is to a picture by a van der Werft or a Denner. However fine the mosaic may be, the edges of the stones always remain, so that no continuous transition from one tint to another is possible. In the same way, concepts, with their rigidity and sharp delineation, however finely they may be split by closer definition, are always incapable of reaching the fine modifications of perception, and this is the very point of the example I have taken here from physiognomy.

Schopenhauer notes that it is directly through the senses and direct understanding that faces are apprehended. Perhaps this presented difficulties when you played the game above?

This passage doesn’t just note the limits of language, but it does so on the basis of faces.

Family resemblances

His interest in faces bears a resemblance to points made regarding “family resemblances.” If you know this phrase, you most likely know it from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953).

But the phrase has a longer lineage. In fact, Schopenhauer himself uses it three or four times in The World as Will and Representation (1818).¹

Wikipedia notes that Schopenhauer borrows it from Schelling,² and that it’s next used by Spengler (Decline of the West, 1918) — but actually Nietzsche uses it as well, in Beyond Good and Evil, part I, §20 (1886, emphasis mine):

The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar — I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions — that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.

Nietzsche goes on to argue that philosophers from the Ural-Altaic languages, in which the idea of the “self” is least developed, probably had an entirely different way of thinking. (Probably Christopher Beckwith would agree.)

I agree with Nietzsche, and came separately to a similar conclusion: that most problems of Western philosophy are grammatical at heart, especially with the verb “to be” and the way nouns are formed. This is why all Indo-European languages run into the same problems regarding “things” like “Being” and “Truth.” Ancient Chinese did not have these problems.

Games

Was the exercise a start at the game? Was it entertaining?

This brings us to one of the most famous passages of The Philosophical Investigations, worth quoting in full, since it’s forever referenced but comparatively rarely read.

66. Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” a but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! a Look, for example, at board-games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all ‘entertaining’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience [solitaire]. In ball-games, there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck, and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of singing and dancing games; here we have the element of entertainment, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way, can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: similarities in the large and in the small.

67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family a build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth a overlap and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.

And likewise the kinds of number, for example, form a family. Why do we call something a “number”? Well, perhaps because it has a a direct a affinity with several things that have hitherto been called “number”; and this can be said to give it an indirect affinity with other things that we also call “numbers”. And we extend our concept of number, as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread resides not in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

The famous aspects are the fact that “game” has no unambiguous definition, that philosophy should be done by looking and not by thinking, and that words refer to groups of things that are more like “family resemblances” than things that meet a list of attributes (called “intension”).

I could go on a tangent about how the idea of the meaning of words being divisible into extension (set of things referred to by a word) and the intension (set of attributes common to a word’s referents) came about in Saussure (1857–1913) and Frege (1848–1925), and how Quine (1908–2000) preserved extension by dispensing with intension, and Kuhn (1922–1996) preserved intension by dispensing with extension, but I can feel you getting tired of all these words. You’d rather talk about feelings.

Feelings

Later in the same work, here’s Wittgenstein on feelings. He’s no longer talking about the judgement of faces, but the judgement of whether feelings are genuine — but I think its family resemblance to Schopenhauer’s writing above is clear:

355. Is there such a thing as ‘expert judgement’ about the genuineness of expressions of feeling? Here too, there are those with ‘better’ and those with ‘worse’ judgement.

Oh hey, Schopenhauer said that some people are better at judging faces, and now Wittgenstein is saying some people are better at judging feelings!

Back to Wittgenstein:

In general, predictions arising from judgements of those with better knowledge of people will be more correct.

Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can learn it. Not, however, by taking a course of study in it, but through ‘experience’. Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. — This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here. — What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them rightly. Unlike calculating rules.

So this brings us back to the Zhuangzi. There are places even thoughts can’t reach. Only experience can.

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All the best,

Bryan

1. If you’re searching Payne’s translation of Schopenhauer, he renders it “family likenesses.”

2. I’ve looked at the passages of Schopenhauer, and it’s not clear that it’s a direct quotation from Schelling, but I’m still hunting. Possibly it’s in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) or System of Transcendental Idealism (1800).