One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with his head

He went galumphing back.

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

By drawing a distinguishing line between truth and meaning, between knowing and thinking, and by insisting on its importance, I do not wish to deny that thinking's quest for meaning and knowledge's quest for truth are connected. By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking

Nature is bound by the rationality of the law embodied in it. 

Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscripts

A now, briefly, about the enormous, perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of all: the belief that mutual understanding is possible. This deceptive conviction derives from another illusion — that the supreme aim of existence, its highest value, and the necessary condition of its meaning is understanding. And the source of these illusions is a centuries-old, complex — to the point of being, to some extent, chaotic — system of feedback loops and interdependencies among physical, biological, psychological mechanisms, and perhaps others whose nature remains poorly understood. These mechanisms condition the persistence of life, and realize themselves, broadly speaking, in the tension between pleasure — that which favors persistence and is therefore desired — and pain — that which threatens persistence and is therefore avoided — as well as through the dynamics of recognizing and distinguishing one from the other, which creates an irresistible impression that there exists in the world a coherence that can be grasped and followed. In other words, life is conditioned by the operation of opposing categories-signposts, and the process of recognizing them manifests itself as the impression of understanding. This impression, in turn, as a functional, directly felt “overlay” upon base reality, is projected back onto the world, which consequently — and mistakenly — appears to be something understandable, or at least something that can be understood. This applies especially to other subjects, with whom coexistence is particularly important for the persistence of life.

So: no. Neither understanding, nor all the more mutual understanding, is possible, although both appear to be so fundamentally important. One may try to blur the boundaries, to claim that they are not fully possible, or not always possible, but little is gained from this; it is better to puncture this bubble. At the same time, this deceptive conviction, apart from being useful in the context of survival, has resulted in the emergence of a number of valuable technologies aimed at supporting understanding and mutual understanding. However much they miss their mark, they make existence somewhat more bearable, serving as pleasant entertainment — although at times they also degenerate into lethal instruments. These technologies are crucial to everything I intend to say further, and in fact they are the reason why I have decided to try to say anything here at all.

The first and supreme of these technologies is language. It is on its ground that all apparent understanding and mutual understanding take place, as well as all actual misunderstanding. Not necessarily through something that can be uttered: language is not limited to speech, but rather constitutes a structure, or even the possibility of structure, for everything that can be thought — including everything that can be felt. It is a model of the world and a matrix for existence. Nothing exists outside language. Nothing exists that cannot be grasped and expressed in language. The world is language, in short.

The tool within language that interests me most, however, is precisely that which can be uttered and also heard: the word. The universal foundation for the existence of words is language, while their particular foundation is articulation made possible in a given environment, by means of apparatuses developed within that environment. For example, in the Earth’s atmosphere, by the organisms proper to it. We have become accustomed to thinking that words mean. But the matter is more complicated. Words do not so much mean as embody. They are a concrete form: a dynamic, spatio-temporal shape that the body must assume in order to emit them. And, by way of resonance, the mechanism of fellow-feeling, and the tendency of organisms to imitate one another, also in order to assimilate them — through the partially imagined assumption of a given form by the body of the listener.

What words embody — the presumed meanings they carry — is far more fluid and unstable than one would like to admit. These are rather remnants of meanings. Echoes of individual feelings that can never be fully transferred. Just as there are no two identical bodies, nor identical forms that bodies could assume, so there is nothing even close to univocality. To realize this fully, it is worth undertaking the well-known experiment of repeating a familiar word many times, until it loses every meaning habitually assigned to it and reveals the emptiness stretching out behind it. Or another experiment, less well known but equally instructive: inventing one’s own nonexistent word and likewise repeating it endlessly, until it becomes intimately familiar, yet just as empty.

Some of the maps I have looked into:

Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action

Ernst Casirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Guy Dove, Abstract Concepts & the Embodied Mind

Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity

George Steiner, After Babel

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality