language and experience

If language can only imperfectly communicate experience or reality, then what's the significance of the experience of communication?


Apple. Picture it. Imagine tasting it. Pick one. Do it, in your mind. Is it really an apple? Of course not.

Now think about another person doing each of the same things. Do you think they are thinking about the same apple, or even the same kind of apple? Enjoying the imaginary apple in the same kind of way?

Here I am talking about a very simple thing. An apple. Yet, rest assured, we already find great divergence in what we are talking about. If we can't even agree on a precise meaning of simple things, then how are earth are we to communicate clearly when it comes to deeper communication?

In my mind, I consider every act of communication to be an act of miscommunication, although sometimes we are not far off the mark. This can be a source of great consternation, as we try to share our experience of life with the people around us, but it can also be a great source of pleasure, as we explore our social surrounding.

At the end of the day though, I cannot get inside your head and you cannot get inside mine. Words may be out in the open, but the listener may presume to understand something, according to their experience, whereas the speaker may presume that the listener understood the communication according to the way the the speaker themself had intended it.


So, in a sense, we can escape all this quite easily by forgetting about words and getting to actions. I may eat an apple. I may share an apple. I might eat an apple that looks and tastes the same as another one, eaten by another person. But, did I eat it alone? With someone? Was our experience of eating the apple similar?


OK, so a largely identical experience may carry differing significance for two people. No problem then. Experience must be the loci of meaning then. No original statement there, after all, that's where the phenomenologists ended up. But, I am not thinking of the pathway through exploration of the meaning of experience that follows from cognition through to psychoanalysis. This was a path that seemed to carry a significant portion of philosophy and psychology over the last century much farther from reality and truth than closer to it.

What is the significance of experience? of AN experience that is. The apple. Looking at it. Eating it. Picking it, etc. When does it become more than than just the act in itself?

When is eating an apple more than eating an apple? I suggest, perhaps, when it takes on a social nature. Eating an apple is a thing that any apple-eating animal can do. Doing so as a human, well that's a different story.

It is something that can be done together. The very fact that it is done alone may also have a particular signifiance, or none. Whatever the case is, we can go beyond the action itself. It goes beyond the shared or solitary experience of doing so. More than simple objective reality, transformed into a symbol, a word, it becomes the paranormal, something more than reality. An experience we share, or may talk about. And in the act of communication, it may be something that may take on all sorts of additional meanings, and bring us to much deeper levels of self- and social-consciousness.

Still, I am really referring to that very simple apple, all the while aware that much more can be pulled from the word, all of which goes well beyond the object as it is in material reality, and belongs in the scope of social REALITY that we construct, within and between and among ourselves.

The word is not the thing, but the word is a thing unto itself.

An experience is not a word, but can be transformed into a word in its own right.

The experience of a word, or many of them, in communication, is not just a word, not just an experience of something that is in nature, when abstracted from humans, but is something more.

What then of a note, the stroke of a brush, a step of a dance, a flicker of a smile. All, much more than they seem to be. More than nature, because their nature is social.