Not even language is a ‘language’

Not even language is a ‘language’

Fredric Nord

Fredric Nord argues that knowing reality through language is fundamentally and inescapably a misunderstanding of reality. We misunderstand what language actually does and, thereby, misunderstand what life is. The key to understanding life is, he argues, a reframing of language and representation. This should end the paradigm of materialism and facilitate transcendence as a priori.

If the term language is to have any meaning to us at all, it must be in the sense of using signifiers to signify. Language, at face value, implies something to the effect of a particular instance of perception that serves as a representation of another instance of perception. Or, an instance of perception that appears to present as ‘not itself.’ A word is a perception we call ‘graphics’ (for text) or ‘sound’ (for speech). This perception has an experiential component. Yet since the experiential component isn’t a sound/a graphic, we’re faced with ‘a perception that isn’t experienced’ and ‘an experience that isn’t perceived.’

By that simple distinction we’ve uncovered a split in perception. The instance of perception (IOP) that we perceive as a word implies two representations that alter the experience of what is presented. The first is that we see a word where there is only graphics—meaning that the graphics represent a word. The second is that the word implies an experience that differs from itself as IOP. The word represents an experience. Thus a word is an IOP that’s both misperceived and misunderstood. I do realize that this misunderstanding is traditionally understood as the very function of language. Nevertheless, it’s technically a misunderstanding of what is perceived.

The experience of language is achieved by sabotaging the sameness of perception and experience. What does that mean? The sameness of the style of perception called seeing, for instance, simply means that seeing implies the experience of vision but not of olfaction. This confusion of perception is at the heart of language. The experience of language is like perceiving a twig but experiencing it as if it were a rock because it appears to us as a cloud. Not first perceiving a twig, mind you, that we perceive as a cloud because of our linguistic conditioning, only to then ‘translate’ it into the experience of a rock—supposedly by processes in the brain. That is precisely the kind of misconception that will be discussed here...