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Communication - Action - Meaning : A Festschrift to Jens Allwood Elisabeth Ahlsn Department of Linguistics, Gteborg University 2007 978-91-975752-45

Escaping the prison of language

Paavo Pylkknen University of Skvde and University of Helsinki Abstract What role might the structure of language play in our perception and conception or reality? This central question of traditional metaphysics was given a new twist by David Bohms experimentation with a new mode of language, the rheomode, which gives the verb the basic role in the structure of language. This paper briefly describes Bohms experiment and discusses some of its ramifications. Keywords: Language structure, rheomode, fragmentation, atomism, holism, quantum theory, Bohm 1. Introduction There is a long tradition in Western metaphysics which assumes that the structure of reality is reflected in the structure of language. This tradition holds that if we wish to understand the structure of reality this is best (and perhaps only) achieved by studying the structure of language. However, it has from time to time been recognized that at least the surface structure of language might lead us astray. For example, in the late 19th century Gottlob Frege criticized the

traditional subject-predicate distinction for being too dependent upon the grammatical surface structure of Indo-European languages (Juti 2001: 55). A much more striking example of someone who mistrusted the structure of language is the physicist-philosopher David Bohm (1917-1992). He felt that there is a strong connection between the subject-verb-object structure of modern languages and what he called fragmentation: our tendency to treat things as inherently divided when they in fact are aspects of an undivided whole. Modern science, he claimed, was demanding a new non-fragmentary world view. However, in order to be able to give up fragmentation he felt it was necessary to become aware of the way common language contributes to fragmentation. This he felt could be done by experimenting with a new mode of using language, the flowing mode or rheomode (Bohm 1976 and 1980). In this paper I will briefly describe and discuss Bohms project. I think it is particularly fitting to draw attention to such a project in the context of celebrating Jens Allwoods 60th birthday. Jens has a deep concern for restoring the wholeness of life, as witnessed by his engagement with communication, dialogue and some of the holistic dimensions of Chinese culture.

2. Fragmentation Fragmentation is a technical term for Bohm. A fragment is not a part. If you break a clock with a hammer you are likely to end up with lots of fragments, not with parts. This provides a metaphor for the way Bohm saw the state of the individual, the society and nature in the

contemporary Western industrialized culture. Our way of life is fragmentary and brings about ...pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder, and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who have to live in it (Bohm 1980: 2). Of course, one could think many possible reasons for such fragmentation, but Bohm was adamant in emphasizing the role of language and thought here. Here is, in a nutshell, his basic idea about the root of fragmentation: ...fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for a description of the world as it is ... Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look at these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments. (Bohm 1980: 3) The idea is that fragmentation arises not from the content of our thoughts as such but rather as a result of our attitude toward these contents. We have a tendency or a habit to take these contents literally, and since these contents typically involve all sorts of distinctions, we literally start believing that the world consists of independent parts in some fundamental sense, and act accordingly. Such beliefs, and the action based on them then give rise to fragmentation.

3. Fragmentation and the structure of language

We saw above that according to Bohm one cause of fragmentation is our attitude toward our thoughts, our habitual tendency to interpret them as literal truths rather than as convenient abstractions. But he felt there was also another important factor contributing to our tendency to fragment our world: the structure of language. Perhaps somewhat similar to the way Frege criticized the subject-predicate distinction, Bohm criticised the subject-verb-object structure of sentences prevalent in many modern languages. His starting point was the idea that the structure of language plays a significant role in giving shape to our world view. We think about the world with the help of our language, and the structure of language thus partly influences what we see the world to be like through our worldview. If you like, we habitually project the structure of our language to what we perceive and conceive to be the (logical) structure of the world. The proposal is that our perception and conception of reality is not merely theory-laden (as philosophers of science often say) but much more fundamentally, structure-of-language laden. This also has implications for those who try to formulate alternative world views: ...every language form carries a kind of dominant or prevailing world view, which tends to function in our thinking and in our perception whenever it is used, so that to give a clear expression to a world view contrary to the world view implied in the primary structure of a language is usually very difficult (Bohm 1980: 46). Bohms basic suggestion is that in our modern Western technological culture the primary, dominating structure of language is mechanistic. Thus, even though developments in especially modern quantum and relativity physics call for a new, non-mechanistic world view, this is

hard to articulate as long as our thinking is controlled by the mechanistic habits reinforced by the prevalent structure of language. Let us examine in a little more detail why Bohm thought that the prevailing structure of language is mechanistic and connected to fragmentation. His starting point is to note that a central feature of many modern languages is the subject-verb-object structure of sentences. He then notes that [t]his structure implies that all action arises in a separate entity, the subject, and that, in cases described by a transitive verb, this action crosses over the space between them to another separate entity, the object. [...] This is a pervasive structure, leading in the whole of life to a function of thought tending to divide things into separate entities, such entities being conceived of as essentially fixed and static in their nature. When this view is carried to its limit, one arrives at the prevailing scientific world view, in which everything is regarded as ultimately constituted out of a set of basic particles of fixed nature. (Bohm 1980: 29) Bohm thus claims that the subject-verb-object structure of language strongly encourages us to see the world as consisting of separate entities which are fixed and static in their nature. According to him such a world view is, however, limited and is not at all adequate to describe the more fundamental, process-like nature of reality which modern quantum and relativity physics has revealed: ...the analysis in terms of ... relatively fixed sorts of separate entities, such as ... atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. is only a descriptive convenience, and does not correspond to the actual nature of what is. Indeed, each entity is only relatively stable. For example, if [a] fluid is placed under a fire, it dissolves into a moving flow of gas. Similarly, at higher temperatures (e.g. in the sun, or

in an atomic explosion) the atoms out of which the gas is constituted break down and dissolve into more subtle forms of movement (such as neutrinos and radiant energy). There is nothing known that does not ultimately dissolve into movement in this way. (Bohm 1976: 40) Ordinary language would thus seem to be biased with respect to world view, because it favours an atomistic world view. One of the themes of 20th century philosophy of language has been that we are in a sense prisoners of our language the idea being that as mental beings immersed in and (at least partly) constituted by language we cannot step outside our language. Some might think that the structure of language is part of the transcendental preconditions of our understanding, thus pointing to the fundamental difficulties anyone wishing to alter this structure might inevitably face. Now, if the structure of our language really favours atomism, and if language is a prison, does it follow that it is difficult or even impossible for us to understand the more fundamental, process-like nature of reality (if it now should be the case that reality is more fundamentally movement)? Bohms answer is to ask whether it is possible to change the syntax and grammatical structure of language so that we give a basic role to the verb rather than the noun. When this is done, the language forms will ...have as their content a series of actions that flow and merge into each other, without sharp separations or breaks. Thus, both in form and in content, the language will be in harmony with the unbroken flowing movement of existence as a whole (Bohm 1980: xii). One purpose of the experiment is thus to bring us closer to the more fundamental nature of reality. Bohm believes, in the spirit of process

philosophy, that reality is more fundamentally movement. By experimenting with forms of language which take movement as fundamental he hopes to bring language and reality into better harmony with each other. His main point is not that we ought to start using such a new type of language in our practical communications but rather that (as is typical in science) we make an experiment, with the help of which we try to learn more in this case more about the way the structure of our usual language affects our world view. He emphasizes that ...one of the best ways of learning how one is conditioned by a habit (such as the common usage is, to a large extent is) is to give careful and sustained attention to ones overall reaction when one makes the test of seeing what takes place when one is doing something significantly different from the automatic and accustomed function (Bohm 1980: 28). The idea is that if we can be better aware of the bias of the structure of our usual language with respect to world view, it will be easier for us to get free from its restricting influence. This, in turn, opens up the possibility to understand in a better and less biased way the more fundamental, process-like nature of reality. It seems that Bohm, too, thought of language as a kind of a prison, but he thought further that by experimentation it is possible to escape, at least to some extent, the limitations imposed by a particular type of language structure upon our world view. 4. Discussion

I will not consider the details of Bohms rheomode experiment in this short article. The experiment focuses upon such philosophically central issues as relevance, perception, separation, order, truth and fact. Maxim Stamenov, in particular has emphasized the novelty of the experiment: From linguistic, psychological and philosophical points of view, the proposal of Bohm for an alternative language is an unprecedented one... Nobody before him claimed that in order to comprehend how language contributes to the way thought is constituted it is not enough to follow it: it is necessary to actively interfere with its function... (Stamenov 2004: 148) Stamenovs article is the first systematic study of the rheomode, and provides a good starting point for further discussion (see also Lappi 2005). There is a strongly naturalistic flavour in Bohms experiment. Language and thought are not seen as phenomena separated from nature. This makes it in principle meaningful to experiment with language, just as we experiment with other natural phenomena. Of course, experimenting with such fundamental features as the structure of language might profoundly affect the epistemic situation in which we typically find ourselves. Our very criteria for what is intelligible may be relative to the dominant structure of language. Changing that structure might thus change the criteria of intelligibility. While experimenting with the structure of language we might actually understand new kinds of phenomena. Is this really possible? To find out one has to engage in experimentation, not just talk about it. This is what Bohm has done.

What is thus particularly interesting is the way Bohm brings experimentation to a philosophical context. Philosophers often adopt the Wittgensteinian attitude that philosophy leaves everything as it is. In contrast, Bohm experiments with the very structure of language. No doubt his work physics gave him a deep appreciation of the power of experiments in advancing our knowledge and understanding. If we want to understand language better, why not experiment with it in a suitable way? In the end, however, I think there is a sense in which Bohms experiment, too, leaves things as they were before the experiment. To realize the main potential of his experiment it may not be necessary to actually start using the rheomode in the explicit form sketched by him. More likely, we keep on using the usual language, and let it develop in a free flow. But what we can learn from experiments such as Bohms is a new attitude to language, an enhanced awareness of how language affects the way we perceive and conceive the world. Such awareness might help us to kick the habit of mechanistic thinking whenever it does not fit the context in question, and that way help us meet the challenge of fragmentation. No doubt it will also be helpful as we try to move forward on the difficult task of developing a world-view that does justice to the result of modern science, not the least those of physics and consciousness studies (see Pylkknen 2007).

References Bohm, D. (1976) Fragmentation and Wholeness. Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation. Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge. Juti, R. (2001) Johdatus metafysiikkaan. [An introduction to metaphysics]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. In Finnish. Lappi, Ari-Pekka (2005) Language as a part of flowing reality - The relevance of Bohms rheomode-experiment and holistic quantum metaphysics to philosophy of language. Masters thesis, Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki. In Finnish. Pylkknen, P. (2007) Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order. Heidelberg and New York: Springer. Stamenov, M. (2004) The rheomode of language of David Bohm as a way to re-construct the access to physical reality, in Globus, G., Pribram, K. and Vitiello, G. (eds.) Brain and Being. At the Boundary between Science, Philosophy, Language and Arts, pp. 167-197. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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