I’m thinking about this quote by Arthur Koestler
“Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.”
I alluded to concept assemblages and the breakdown of communication in this post. To recapitulate, what I mean by concept assemblage is a concept that is constituted by many concepts that are already abstractions by themselves. Since many abstractions can not be understood intuitively but need to be learned appropriately, one person’s grasp of an assemblage might miss some of the key component abstractions that make up the definition of the same assemblage as understood by the other person. This structural complexity makes misunderstandings between people more likely, as one person might say for instance fascism and mean something quite different from the other person they are conversing with.
So how does this connect to Koestler’s quote? I think that of the many interesting interpretations of the notion of language as a screen between thinker and reality can be that some instances of language use such as concept assemblages can cause a great difference between two or more minds’ understanding of a thing in reality. The insidiousness of this phenomenon is that these two minds can be fairly convinced that they are talking about something similar, but in fact they are alluding only to a fraction of the other’s understanding of the term as they continue their debate.
In this double dissonance, the first one between language and reality, the second one between both differing incarnations of the same concept, the real thing that is being discussed can get lost in translation.
I think this gets even worse when we are dealing with concept assemblages that have been with us for decades or centuries and their definitions have been subject to constant evolution. A clear example is the notion of profession. A part of the assemblage of abstractions that constitutes this notion can be easy to distinguish. It consists of all the predetermined names that we have for types of professions: psychotherapist, lawyer, travel agent, data-scientist. And an expression of its constant evolution over time is that nowadays multidisciplinary professions, or the famous ‘generalist’, are becoming increasingly recognised in the mainstream. The communication issues happen when one person holds this ‘updated’ notion of profession while the other is still employing the ‘outdated’ notion.
It is a situation that adds much friction to an attempt at speaking about professions, because few people have the time and willingness to first express what they think a profession is and even less people feel that they have the right to redefine words for others.
So we end up speaking past each other on very important issues such as politics or our positions as productive members of society.
And now to address the creativity part of the quote, if we content ourselves with throwing words around without thinking of how we are contributing to further misunderstandings between people, we are diminishing our chances of having a more beneficial impact in reality. We cannot create better conditions in reality if we cannot talk about them properly. The most interesting problems are rooted in complex slices of reality, especially those slices to which our old concepts cannot allude appropriately anymore.
That’s why in my opinion it would be beneficial to learn to talk about assemblages by deconstructing them, because something of the reality that they were supposed to refer to is still mixed into them. For example, we can say that a profession is something that defines your identity, or that you are supposed to choose one or two and use it as your only channel through which you can make productive contributions to society. As you would expect me to say, these are debatable components of the assemblage ‘profession’. Instead, a component that I would say is more attuned to reality is that profession is about using skills to solve problems in a consistent manner that others can rely upon.
So in this case, similar to what is called first principles thinking, I would be deconstructing the idea of profession and only grabbing one component from it. Then I would propose to discuss this simpler component instead of the whole assemblage of profession. The reason I would do this is that this component is easier to grasp intuitively and thus to be sure that we are speaking about the same thing1. Then, by holding on to a simple basic notion, both participants in this conversation could talk about professions more creatively. They could aim directly at the essential idea of reliability and solving problems with skill. Thus, they could come up with ideas on what problems to solve and how to do this reliably, instead of talking about what profession is more likely to find employment, or what profession has the bigger institutional prestige. It is evident that both of these preoccupations completely skirt the point of the basic notion that I selected above.
And the conversation could take even more creative directions as the old conception of profession is abolished and new fragments of its assemblage rise again alone without the burden of all of its outdated, obsolete former companions and merge again into new ideas that are more useful for a society that has severely changed in the last decades. I’m talking of course of all of the new possibilities that are opening with the introduction of digital technologies, the internet, AI, biotechnologies, and all the rest of the usual suspects. I’m also talking about the cultural and societal evolutions that can be made possible thanks to the insights that these new technologies can allow us.
Will it still be called profession? Perhaps, but if we don’t rethink such complex concepts so they are more positive for us in the bigger picture and just as importantly find better ways to integrate them in our minds and talk about them, then a much necessary change in how we choose to ‘plan’ our lives, to be a ‘productive member’ of society, to ‘enter’ adulthood, will not come as fast as needed, if ever.
Of course, the same need for deconstruction and agreeing on basics can apply all across the board. One example cited above is with the term ‘fascism’ and many other political or ideological terms that have become too muddy and could use better alternatives to address the actual reality of today.
And many times, these new terms need not be explained technically in rather long treatises such as this one, but appropriated playfully. Ideally, they would be appropriated like a new term organically developing in the secret dialects that are held between best friends, siblings or long-time partners. Where a growing shared experience of the world reveals all the shared nuances that conventional language is unable to grasp, but that they need words for. Now, such an attunement of minds happens extremely rarely between strangers. Not only do they have to recognise an intelligible slice of world phenomena that remains unnamed but desperately needs to be made expressible, but they need to somehow identify the presence of this same worry in someone else’s mind.
And as a last nod to Koestler’s quote. I do think that many words and phrases are losing meaning in a fragmented mediation of the world. Sometimes an appropriate antidote to this might very well be to regain these meanings but not only in words. Our power to make the products of our imagination a reality can take many different shapes. The important thing is that these meanings become contained and intelligible in as many fronts as possible. This way, we can share these meanings together, talk about them, be inspired by them and employ them to improve our reality.
- It’s important to clarify that complex terms made up of abstractions are not something that needs to be abolished. They were made for a reason. If we want to speak at a reasonable pace about something, we need to package complex ideas into single words so that we can get on with what we want to express more efficiently. Obviously, the caveat here is that we need to be on the same page about exactly what we are talking about. This is why many terms or ‘jargon’ are reserved only for specialised or academic discourse, where an understanding of the theories or at least an awareness of the need to explain ideas with precision are considered as givens. ↩︎
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