Language as Prior to Thought
Yesterday, I enjoyed a chat on Clubhouse (sadly in the gloaming of its life) which touched on Percy Shelley and Plato, among others. I tried to explain why I am no Platonist despite admiring his doctrine of anamnesis and all its aspirational implications. I think it is because at the moment I’m beholden to empiricism, so my epistemological method is opposite to Plato’s in a directional sense, kinda. But where I find him to be least beautiful and most credible is his treatment of language, which occurs most explicitly in Cratylus (which happens to be one of his more anaemic dialogues). Plato’s conclusions about language are as follows:
Words are but imitations of reality.
Both the poetic and prosaic use of language exist on an inferior plane to reality itself.
The artifices of human conventions modify language’s correspondence to nature and prevent it from faithfully presenting reality.
Language can be neither trustworthy nor beautiful since it expresses only a partial truth.
‘We know an essence (ouoaiav), the definition of the essence, and the name’ (Laws X 895). Names can parse and distinguish objects, but words are at odds with any higher knowledge; knowledge lies outside of the realm of language.
Fallible humans legislate names, since synonymy (different names applied to the same object) preclude language’s objectivity.
And, as we know, Plato would exclude poets from the Republic. Shelley, on the other hand, famously dubs poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ at the end of A Defence of Poetry.
Shelley’s treatment of language in Prometheus Unbound and A Defence of Poetry is at odds with Socrates’ conclusion in Cratylus that there is little worth in inquiring into language. In the Defence, Shelley defends poetic language as that which brings us as close as possible to reality, which lifts the veil from it, and which fastens together the sublime and the real. This idea becomes fantastically dramatised in Prometheus Unbound, in which language is prior to thought.
Shelley’s Prometheus (‘fore-thinker’) liberates mankind from Jupiter’s tyranny by imparting the gift of speech: ‘He gave man speech, and speech created thought,/ Which is the measure of the Universe’. Speech (here functionally the same as language) comes from the Promethean fire which, being tamed, gives men tools of ‘iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power’; from this illuminating power, men develop speech which in turn allows them to think. Only then can men become creative agents and poets. So, language is a divine agent of human intellect, allowing men to perceive as well as describe the universe around them. In an appropriately exquisite passage spoken by Asia, Shelley praises language for its ‘Godlike’ power:
…the harmonious mind
Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song,
And music lifted up the listening spirit
Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,
Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound.
Not only does the gift of language awaken the imagination, it lifts ‘the listening spirit’ into an ecstatic union with the logos. In the image of the enlivened spirit walking ‘o’er the clear billows’, Shelley evokes Christ, the Word made flesh. In the final act, Shelley repeats this praise of the Promethean gift in the voice of the Earth Spirit:
Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The Orphic song animates that which the mind perceives, giving shape to otherwise ‘senseless’ thoughts. This passage recalls Shelley’s definition of poetry in A Defence of Poetry as the perfect agent of measurement: poets
measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit […] Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonime of the cause.
Shelley’s treatise asserts that poetry’s purpose is to be an instrument of moral good because of the way it acts upon the imagination: ‘The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause’. Throughout Prometheus Unbound, Shelley plays on this causal link between language and goodness (and between evil and the perversion of causality itself). Jupiter’s Furies pervert the law of causality since they are both the cause and effect of evil: ‘So from our victim's destined agony/ The shape which is our form invests us round/ Else are we shapeless as our Mother Night’. Evil is totally circular, giving form to its own propagators. The Furies mock the sacrificial ‘destined agony’ in which they delight: ‘Behold, an emblem-those who do endure/ Deep wrongs for man, and scorn and chains, but heap/ Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him’. Then, in a pivotal moment of Christ-like self-sacrifice, Prometheus proves the Furies wrong: he recalls the curse he put on Jupiter and refuses Mercury’s offer of freedom in exchange for disclosing Jupiter’s fate. Demogorgon is pleased in result, and universal good springs from his suffering.
Shelley plays around with causality and language, doubtless aware of language’s faults - of its grasping, approximating nature - but determined to excessively laud it regardless. Part of this excessive laudation is framing it, however dubiously, as being prior to things. Further, both in the heroic action of Prometheus Unbound and the oratorial prose of The Defence of Poetry, he insists on language’s ability to not only capture reality by means of accurate measurement, but to effect something even greater than a recording of reality: moral good. Plato, on the other hand, draws attention to language’s limitations and deems the study of language inferior to that of objects themselves.
I sentimentally agree with Shelley in my view of the ‘unutterable’. There are some snippets of poetry (utterances, by nature), which elicit a sensation which is greater than and outside of the reality they describe: in uttering, they produce something unutterable. That is to say, the most remarkable constructions of language I’ve ever read have induced in me a shuddering effect which feels more transcendent, at once as far above and as perspicaciously close to reality as possible, than any wordless sensation has. Woolf’s ‘moment of being’, Wordsworth’s ‘spot of time’, Joyce’s ‘epiphany’. They don’t quite utter the unutterable; rather, the writer conjures anew something unutterable out of the utterance. Language is prior*.
Joyce’s eighth Epiphany.
*Scientifically it’s not but YKWIM.