That is the conclusion that the noted biologist Stephen J. Gould arrived at after years of studying fish. The conclusion that the very thing he had been studying, does not exist. One wonders just how upset he was when he realized this, and if he applied to some higher power for his life back, so he could focus on more important things, like stamp collecting and pulling a Sisyphus. Indeed, it’s like one off those Zen riddles that are supposed to have no answer: What is the sound of one hand clapping and how can the biologist have researched something, if that thing does not exist?
It almost puts one in an existential frame of mind. Admittedly, it isn’t the sort of thing that Camus, the first writer to consider the existential nature of Sisyphus, would have written about, but there is still that odd sense of epistemological freedom. Like being lost at sea, without the possibility of rescue. It’s when floating here, seemingly lost, that sees that there is no lost, because there is only the sea and only yourself for guidance, so better start swimming. If you yourself got lost there, don’t worry. There’s some evidence that I was as well.
Of course, Stephen J. Gould did not mean that fish are not nonexistent. He simply meant that the word fish I far too vague of a concept. After all, we don’t call everything that flies a bird. He was just pointing out all those things we label fish are actually quite diverse. For instance, salmon are genetically closer to camels than hagfish. Although, the salmon surely isn’t that relieved that it’s more closely related to camels, as it won’t make for a more attractive family tree.
But, that still leaves one with an existential quandary, this time about the state of our language. It is such an unstable construction, a patchwork collection of the romantic and Germanic languages with an uneasy knit of Greek for good measure. It is inherently unstable, the most diverse of languages and hence the most difficult to control. Although other languages rely on inflection and modifiers, we are not bound by such conventions. There are those that believe (erroneously, but that’s another story) that Inuit have over 30 words for snow. Well, we have at least that many for variations on emotions.
And, yet, despite our unstable variety, we are still at the mercy of our language. In order to have any understanding of the world, we require our language to share it, to discuss it. But our language is not really concrete enough. It assumes a shared experience that we have no empirical way of verifying.
Consider the eye. We perceive our vision as absolutely clear thing, like the film from a camera. But actually, it is, before being processed by our brain, a jumble of images, more like a camera held upside down while riding on horseback, confusion incarnate. And so, given the level of processing it must take in our mind for any conceivable image to become comprehensible, we can never be sure that what each one of us sees is the same as what others do. And here our language is, again, an accomplice, as it is only on this flimsy basis that we can actually communicate what we see. If we are unable to trust our language, than we are unable to understand our own and others world. It all breaks down on the basis of language. And if fish has gone out the window, something that we all think we have a pretty firm grasp of, whose to say what else we think we know is wrong. At what point is something concrete enough in our collective thoughts to be a reality? Is such a thing even possible? Are we truly lost then, without language, navigating internal, landless seas, until we unable to swim further?
Or has the writer gone way to far with a simple comment about fish?
No comments:
Post a Comment