Language

54th installment to my philosophical system.

Photo illustration by Sofya Levina. Image by George Cruikshank.

Language is the physiognomy of the soul. All men have it, but few know how to use it. Language is acquired by all naturally, but it is seldom developed by anyone who isn’t a natural orator or who isn’t artistic in some respect. It takes a certain kind of creative soul to be capable of seeing language as something more than a mere tool for communication. The common folk view it vulgarly, and so, as a result, they have a very limited vocabulary, and most are utterly incapable of having an original thought—not because their lives don’t contain any originality, but because they don’t know how to add personality, or character, to anything they say; they lean on overused phrases and the most common expressions which even children know. If they were able to command their tongue in such a way so as to always have something interesting to say, their common prattle would be very worthwhile to listen to indeed—for the average person does, in fact, have enough experience in life to speak wisely on a variety of matters. Alas, this, while fervently to be wished, can only ever remain a dream, for common folk concern themselves only with the common, the simple, the practical, and the personal.

Individuality reigns supreme today, and while I think that a good thing overall, freedom seems lost on the majority; nobody seems capable of using their freedom to will anything beautiful, important, life-changing, or culture-altering. Everyone’s concerns are pragmatic, egoistic, herd-like—it is the triumph of herd instincts. Where have the powerful ones gone today? Where has there ever been an era in history quite like ours, where the means to culture and change lie before us but remain untouched, without a mark—as if we all preferred to stare reverently at our idols rather than toppling them over and setting up our own. Modernity is filled with magnificent instances of utter stupidity like this; and why should it be this way? All one needs to do is look around at the general culture to see all the proof they need. The masses have no instinct for the beautiful. Andy Warhol knew this perfectly, which is why his pop art so beautifully captured and represented an entire generation: it was the first time art was made that wasn’t deliberately abstract or obscurantist, wasn’t specifically geared towards a niche audience; it was art made for the masses, art commodified, made simple, recognizable, and intriguing precisely because it was comprehensible—in short, not geared towards the elites of society, or for other artists who produce similar things.

I love those who know what they’re doing, who know they can do more but, against their better judgment, do less deliberately in order to appear more popular among the herd. I love even more, however, those who know their worth and who make their art for generations not yet born—for the philosophers of the future, future geniuses if you will. I have in mind Nietzsche, my predecessor: the ultimate artist, the most lyrical philosopher to have ever lived—or, as he would have preferred to be called, the most musical philologist of all time. In fact, Nietzsche is the quintessential example, because he represents someone capable of making art out of language itself.

For, truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen—that one must learn how to write? —Twilight of the Idols.

Language has grace enough to speak to itself in our minds, and thank God for that. We are the products of our language; we, in fact, cannot comprehend the world without first filtering it through our linguistic framework. It is for this reason that those who know multiple languages are more easily able to comprehend the significance of nature and human expression—their multilingualism informs them as to the inflections and conjugations of the human heart, and so, they’re able to ascend and descend from darkness and light as they wish. That is, they are able to understand the obscure and the simple equally powerfully, and in doing so, are afforded the luxury of having a broader perspective on life, from which they form their liberal, safe, culturally appropriate opinions: their ultimate ascension being a mastery of themselves and everyone around them (hopefully to enlighten and draw inspiration from them). But, having not enough lifetimes to comprehend their own person, let alone everyone else, the least they can do is find ways of raising the life of another, or themselves for that matter, with an influx of culture and humanity that is enough to satisfy them in this lifetime.

I wish to repeat this point, however, because it’s extremely important and more often than not ignored even by the subtlest of thinkers: having a broad perspective, being able to remove your egoism to perform an “objective” analysis, speaking multiple languages, and having a strong educational foundation are all things which the herd either doesn’t care about or lacks the means by which to pursue. The majority of people develop their character—and thus, sense of culture—through a form of internalization which acts, usually, as a protective barrier against their own self-perceived shortcomings with respect to broader societal values; in a sense, personality is a mask, a performance, a projection of who we wish the world to see us as—who we would like to identify with within ourselves. But this, of course, is the highest form of dishonesty, for people are starting from an already tainted sense of their own identity—tainted, again, by what the broader culture was when they grew up.

What we identify with most throughout life are really shadows, illusions, falsehoods that were implanted in our psyche in order to pose as true values, when in truth they were always false from the start. The only way to dispel these mirages—the only way to look past the ruling values, in a phrase—is to overcome them by becoming your own self in opposition to them; a person must be willing to disregard everything they were taught about themselves, and the society they live in, in order to grasp the deep sense of decadence which lies at the heart of the world presently. The present is an abomination, but what intellectual has ever been satisfied with life? Particularly life as it existed in their era. Go back to the oldest records in history and you shall find juvenoia rampant, sadness ever-present, and anger foremost among the passions. Every good fortune is really a blessing in disguise, but the world will do all it can to make that blessing seem eternal. Blessings do, after all, only last as long as one is willing to believe in them.

But to return to the herd: there’s a question of whether the present material relations are suitable to engender within them an appreciation for culture or, more generally, a form of class consciousness. I’m not so sanguine myself. The more one lives, the more one sees how stupid crowds can act when given a narrative that wasn’t thought through by them; like lambs to a slaughter, a nation will walk into collapse if it’s sold to them as rebuilding, as an opportunity for growth, as a chance to rest, etc. Nothing today is held in high enough esteem to warrant a deep investigation of it, and as a result, you have a populace that doesn’t deeply consider anything outside of their immediate circumstances. Again, people’s personalities today revolve around affirming what is impossible for them to achieve, and without a serious desire to reflect on their own life, they conjure up dreams and Hinterwelten (other-worlds) that bear no resemblance to this world in the slightest—some even go as far as to make their faith in this other world the whole basis of present happiness. I need not go into the obvious life-denying qualities of this sickening, infantile cope—I dare not touch it without gloves, lest I infect another with its crippling perversity.

To answer the question in short, the herd are not capable of overcoming their early programming—of seeing themselves outside of their objectified subjectivity; a personality developed as a response to their material conditions—and so, the wise will say what they always have, and the foolish will continue to ignore as they have before. Such is why every intellectual today (whether they be philosophers, psychologists, historians, mathematicians, statisticians, politicians, painters, writers, sculptors, journalists, artists—in essence, wanderers, contemplators, idle ramblers, and free-spirit connoisseurs) who speaks of a better future rings a bit hollow and sounds shallow, long-winded, and doubtful in the highest regard—they’re hopeful but uncertain about their own hope. Hope is really a cope for them. What they want is certainty, but because the world doesn’t offer them real confirmation of it, they continue on, stupidly clinging to the same faith that passed by their ancestors. The best they can muster is a small audience of like-minded and hopeful people, but in terms of actually changing the world, they’re far, far off.

Again, people think what they do matters—as if any of their actions were capable of building communities large and powerful enough to overcome the age they’re all reacting against, rather than overcoming deliberately. These first steps into the dark are really leaps of faith into the unknown; what is perceived as progress is really the ascent upwards right before a great drop—they think they walk on solid ground when, in truth, they’ve stepped right onto a cornice, overhanging nothing but air. Notice, too, how all groups tend towards the like-minded, the servile, the oligarchic, the consensus-driven pandemonic. This is what I hate most about culture: it is always top-down, and those who strive to make a change in it bottom-up are always crushed from above. The system is so designed so as to make it impossible to get anything going within it. Very little agreement can be had, yet, once again, the consensus sapientium is still honored—why, I will never know. The need for agreement and cohesion is precisely where all group order goes to die, and thus gives rise to factions and splinter sects which divide and divide, all to die off as small little movements of nonsense and circle-jerking—nothing ever gets done in them except the same old talk, and what becomes of them is representative of culture at large: abandoned by true innovation and left to live off of whatever compensation it can receive from those foolish enough to support it (even though it be dead), culture becomes nothing more than a temporary trend and resembles more a business cycle than an actual force of positive change and upliftment.

Those who proclaim to be cultural connoisseurs are really cultural deprecators—they make themselves a part of culture, and in doing so bring it down to a mortal level, thus condemning it to an eternal putrefaction. These folks, with their high ideals and know-it-all attitudes, are the ones responsible for culture’s death, for the more they try to spread it, the more they defame it and lessen its value. This is why the herd can have no true culture that is bottom-up—it always ends in a war of attrition whose victor is decided by time, not the people themselves, individually. Humans are merely the interpreters of culture—but none since Nietzsche have been willing to question culture itself, have actually wanted to see culture revived through a resurrection rather than a deliberate resuscitation made on behalf of the masses. Everyone wants culture, but nobody wants to work for it, in the same way everyone would like to learn a new language but few put in the time necessary to actually acquire it. When it comes to culture, few ask the most important of all questions regarding it: who is to be judge, who is to be critic, who is to be interpreter?

Whether the whole of mankind can be brought to a level of enlightenment deep enough to appreciate culture as it currently exists is an impossible speculation and, in my honest view, total fiction; for, as one should know by now, culture is really a young person’s game and has no appeal to those who are not naturally inclined to ponder the beautiful, or to look upon a statue and wish to emulate it. The masses are too busy consuming rather than ruminating, and so, naturally, one must adopt a quasi-Nietzschean position with respect to society as a whole: the masses are to be dominated rather than allowed their freedom. The genius of America, in fact, is that unlike in democratic monarchies (take the UK or Denmark, for example) where class stratification is implicit within the social hierarchy as such, we’re a republic—which means that our freedom appears more tangible, more our own, more in our own hands. This is all a show, however—freedom in America has always meant freedom for the wealthy, freedom for those who have the power to employ their freedom, those with the means by which to exercise their will willingly; it has always been a fraud from the start. Our hierarchies appear less artificial, more liable to change—and so, every issue is made individual rather than societal, inequality is treated as a personal failing rather than a systemic one, and success is touted as self-made, possible with enough elbow grease and the right attitude. But everyone not already well-off knows the emptiness of all these trite platitudes; the façade has crumbled away, and nothing but the dust remains—it only takes one brave enough to blow the dust away to see the dead figure beneath.

Culture is dead, and the herd has killed it. So long as men strive to maintain the status quo, to work around the edges without changing anything, to keep the nonsensical “rules-based order” alive—in order to preserve its legitimacy, of course—Nietzsche will, sadly, always be correct to affirm the aristocratic, the rule of the supposed best: where the herd follow mindlessly what they’re told, and the masters do what they will as they wish—Athens under Pericles, in a sense. Let it not be forgotten, either, that America already has this system in place; the only thing is, it’s maintained through a sly reversal where the lower classes believe in social mobility so surely they deliberately maintain it themselves. A more perfect form of civilizational capture (domination, really) could not be conjured up by even the brightest minds: it’s a system run on a dream, but I fear its time is nearing its end within the next two decades, for my current generation will be the one to overthrow it—of this I am certain.

Language is, in all respects, the most essential part of a culture, but culture, it should never be forgotten, is like a thermometer which measures how decadent a nation’s inhabitants truly are; if such is the case, then the very words we use in everyday speech are a reflection of the values we hold with regard to them—if a word has no value, it has no meaning, and thus refers to nothing. With the state things are currently in, it’s no wonder our literacy rates have declined drastically and why the humanities have been receiving cut after cut. It’s all a reflection of where the current values lie: we all, in America, live in the clutches of capital, and so all that is not subordinate to it perishes in the attempt to overcome it; those rare few who do, however, lead a path only they can follow, no one else—and that is why it all seems so hopeless: there is no savior figure or workable strategy produced by a super-genius coming to rescue us from our own inept system of social organization. This goes back to my earlier point about character: people’s character, or personality, is primarily a byproduct of the nature that nurtures them—it’s symbiotic, not independent. And this is where the societal pressures which make up modern culture—for it directs people’s actions—influence people in a negative way: again, placing the blame always on them and, correspondingly, making them desire things not natural to them, but natural to their environment.

To summarize it all: the greed and avariciousness which seem to be the most universal staple of the American character are a behavioral adaptation to the social conditions which make it like that, and this is enforced out of necessity, societal pressure, and a clear lack of individual purpose. All this leads to an inevitable collapse of the culture, whose signs are first made clearest in the language itself—in the way we structure and organize our thoughts regarding the issue as it appears. This also reveals something very telling, for the American system at least: it is only held up on the continued belief of it working; the moment faith is lost and the workers refuse to cooperate—a nationwide strike, essentially—the American empire will fall as fast as Germany’s did after the Second World War. It is in this example of the individual proletariat that the revolutionary subject emerges, in all its glory, and demands to be recognized as an equal for the labor performed by them. When this is done, capitalism has two options: sublate itself and become progressive, or be overthrown for a better system! This is the internal contradiction of capitalist social relations of which Marx first spoke, and which everyone must understand if they wish to understand culture more broadly. First learn the language of culture—how it arises and fades away—and then you can talk about it.