This is a somewhat critical article. We will try to examine if language had impaired our experience of the world, and how does symbolic abstraction reshapes (and narrows) perception ?
Fänden auch wir ein reines, verhaltenes, schmales
Menschliches, einen unseren Streifen Fruchtlands
zwischen Strom und Gestein. Denn das eigene Herz übersteigt uns
noch immer wie jene. Und wir können ihm nicht mehr
nachschaun in Bilder, die es besänftigen, noch in
göttliche Körper, in denen es größer sich mäßigt.
Monotheistic religion
When we think about monotheistic religions, we think about spirituality, connecting with a world of spirit : the opposite of material. While its true that monotheistic religion avoids Materialism, it does not mean that it reaches spirituality, as much as the opposite of bad, is not necessarily good (also “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”). Monotheistic religion based itself on the written text. Religion reinforced a linguistic mediation of reality — scripture, doctrine, theological concepts — over immediate perception. God was no longer immanent in the wind, the river, or the mountain (as in animism/polytheism), but transcendent — beyond the world, accessed primarily through sacred text. The world itself becomes secondary, even fallen, compared to the “true” divine realm. Language is schematic, it gives a word to a phenomenon, a thing, it makes connections between the objects behind language look necessary. Language is not the world, it is a meta system referring to the world, creating semantic connections with written and spoken language.
“Devaluation of the world” in Western thought: reality is no longer what’s here; the real is somewhere else, accessed through interpretation and belief.
Language is schematic, it gives a word to a phenomenon, a thing, it makes connections between the objects behind language look necessary. Language is not the world, it is a meta system referring to the world, creating semantic connections with written and spoken language.
Modernity
Swallow everything
Ask now man
Digest and consume
A liar in costume
Shocking and gross
Real annihilation
—Zyklon
Modernity is a direct descendant of monotheistic religion, it shares the same ambitions.
Monotheism sought to unify the multiplicity of the world under a single transcendent principle, to impose order, coherence, and ultimate meaning upon the flux of existence. Modernity, while ostensibly breaking with religion, repeats this gesture in a secular register. It strives for universality—through reason, science, technology, and progress—promising salvation not in another world, but in this one, which stays mostly idealistic. The modern state, with its drive to regulate and rationalize life, mirrors the unifying authority of the One God. The Enlightenment’s faith in reason echoes the religious faith it replaced: both are animated by the desire to eliminate fragmentation and multiplicity, to bring all under a single horizon of truth. In this sense, modernity does not abolish the religious impulse but transposes it, carrying forward its ambition of total explanation and total transformation.
The triumph of conceptual grids, loss of contact with nature
With science and industrial modernity, this linguistic-symbolic turn becomes hyper-rationalized:
- Nature is turned into a set of measurable variables, formulas, and categories.
- We interact with the idea of “forest” (as timber resource, carbon sink, biodiversity data) rather than the felt, sensuous presence of trees, smells, bird calls, shifting light.
Technocratic logic. Our world becomes a system of signs, data, and models.
Nietzsche saw language as “a mobile army of metaphors” that have forgotten they are metaphors. Words pretend to be transparent windows onto reality, but in fact they freeze dynamic, ever-becoming reality into fixed categories.
- Life is flux; language wants stability.
- Over time, concepts turn into idols — morality, truth, God — cutting us off from the raw, terrifying, ecstatic immediacy of existence.
For Nietzsche, even science carries this tendency: it turns the living chaos of reality into lifeless systems, enabling control but erasing intensity.
Language, a small container for things in the world. When computer engineers are trying to make machines as much as similar to human beings, they come across one major problem :
“A machine doesn’t have psychology, nor does it learn on the fly; thus, it can’t individuate. Neither can it have any sense of a “self” acting in the world. All it models is that world itself and the possible paths through it, annotated (courtesy of the value network) with each path’s goodness or badness.“
It’s very hard for us to think about history as a force, that can push us into certain places, making certain choices, that sometimes don’t make any sense, but still we do it : we against other people, we against living things, we anti life. In real life, strategies include experience doubt, uncertainty, fear, and triumph.
Language became increasingly detached from the body and the land. Words were now signs referring to other signs, not necessarily to lived, sensory reality.
Instead of relating to this specific oak tree, we relate to “oak” as an abstract category.
The map replaces the territory, and we begin to live more in the symbolic realm than in the world itself.
Language “ruins” the experience of the world in the sense that:
- It replaces sensory reciprocity with symbolic mediation.
- It shifts us from participation in the world to representation of the world.
- It feeds the illusion that the conceptual model is more real than the phenomenon.
There are still missing gaps when objective language tries to build one theory to unify the relationships between computing, machine learning, neuroscience, evolution, and thermodynamics. We try, non-stop, to see goals in processes, teleology, but instead we only reflect our human self, at least part of it.
Language can also be used poetically, bodily, mythically to re-enter the sensuous.
- Poetry, song, and oral storytelling can bend language back toward the world.
- aphoristic, metaphor-rich style was one attempt at this.
- “integral” structure of consciousness emerging that would integrate, not erase, earlier modes.