Chapotraphouse

sorry for saying it so harshly, but this is hard to not just call a load of pseudo-linguistic, pseudo-marxist rubbish! trofim lysenko-level "analysis".

firstly, "european languages" is not a useful category here in any way, shape or form. If you're speaking about any and all languages present in europe, then you're ignoring that they are composed of several unrelated families (albanian is indo-european, gagauz is turkic, basque is an isolate, etc.); if, however, you're talking about the indo-european family, to which most languages on the continent belong, then you are ignoring the multitude of languages of that family spoken outside the borders of what is commonly considered europe. all this also ignores the fact that you need to define what you even consider to be "european" in the first place.

furthermore, nouns and verbs are not uniquely "european" features. languages spoken outside europe also commonly distinguish between nominal and verbal expressions. moreover, tense does not simply "modify things over time"; together with aspect, it encodes how events are located in time and whether they are bounded, repeated, completed, or ongoing. many european languages also possess grammatical resources for expressing impersonal processes, reflexivity, passive transformation, modality, relationships, and other such concepts.

secondly, grammar is not the same thing as thought! imho, your argument relies a bit too heavily on the sapir-whorf hypothesis to have much merit.

such linguistic determinism (the idea that language determines what people can think) simply does not correspond to what we see in reality: people routinely develop ideas that are not transparently encoded in their grammar, use metaphors, invent technical vocabularies, create new grammatical constructions, and explain concepts that their everyday language does not make immediately obvious, etc.

writings in any science or field of study - mathematics, systems theory, ecology, historical writing, or Marxist theory - as well as any kind of (sub-)cultural jargon that may exist, all demonstrate that languages can always be extended to represent new relations and processes.

english, for example, communicates processes and relations quite effectively:

the book emerged from a network of labour, technology, and institutions. its meaning changes as different communities read and reuse it. the publishing industry transforms trees, labour, and language into commodities. the book is what it is through its relations to other social processes.

and those were just some rather simple sentences, weren't they? despite using ordinary nouns and verbs, they express a thoroughly relational and historical analysis. even the word "thing" itself need not imply an isolated, changeless object. a "thing" can very much be understood as a temporary stabilisation of processes and relations, if the context so dictates.

furthermore, dialectical thought itself requires abstraction. we cannot describe every causal relation surrounding a book every time we mention one. the problem is not that abstraction exists, but that an abstraction is mistaken for the whole concrete reality. "book" is a useful starting point; reification occurs when we treat that category as self-sufficient and ahistorical. the remedy is not to eliminate nouns, but to be able to move between levels of abstraction as needed and, if necessary, restore the relations that the abstraction leaves out.

the issue is not that "european languages" were "not meant" for dialectics. it is that everyday language is optimised for practical coordination, while dialectical theory asks us to make visible processes that ordinary communication can safely leave implicit. a socialist vocabulary can feel difficult not because it requires an entirely new language, but because it requires using familiar language against its most habitual, reifying tendencies.

You're just talking about linguistic determinism, the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Both versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have been consistently disproven in every study that's tried to quantify it.

Sapir-Whorf should be rejected as a primary driver of social control as it is and remains an unproven and non-scientific linguistic theory. If alienation from the understanding from revolutionary language was the major roadblock to revolution, then we wouldn't see that every single successful revolution has so far had a primarily illiterate population.

The issue is that we are primarily alienated from any of the material conditions that can generate revolution, which has been a project by the neoliberals, who understood what Marx was talking about and have built multiple aspects of this system we live in to mitigate these tendencies.

The former stewards and builders of this empire understood you needed to shear the sheep, not kill it. The current stewards? Not so much.

This is what Bohm wrote about in Wholeness and the Implicate Order. I agree with the premise that language inherently instills biases towards undialectical thinking, but at the same time, I'm not really convinced of the attempts to replace language with a "dialectical language." My concern is that it seems pretty inherent to the nature of language to begin with the categorization of things, in order to be able to identify anything at all, which inherently breaks things apart into logical, "ideal" categories, and no change in language can possibly overcome that. I don't think the goal of dialectical philosophy should be to change language to make it dialectical, but rather, it is recognize the limitations of language.

That is to say, not to change the language, but to use the language with full awareness of its inherently ideal nature. You can thus still use language, despite its ideal nature, because the material reality is held implicitly in its meaning, as long as all participants in the conversation understand dialectics and thus the limitations of that language.

This, of course, does create a problem, like in questions involving "is X socialist?" when you encounter a leftist who does not understand dialectics, and thus misunderstands the language. For them, they take all the words at face-value and don't understand the implicit limitations of them, and thus they are taken for what they are, and that leads directly to idealist interpretations.

This is hard to correct because they are deriving entirely different meaning from the same sentences, and the difference in meaning depends upon a complicated underlying philosophical background they don't have, and may never have if they do not bother to study. I don't really know of some sort of easy solution to this, but I don't believe at all that a solution can be found just in changing the language, because language is inherently ideal, and changing it up with just replace one set of ideal categorizations with another.

This is, again, a limitation of language itself. Language doesn't carry reality, it is just symbols on a page. The issue is people taking the symbols too seriously. Reality is not symbols, but what those symbols represent. The word "dog" isn't your real dog, but a stand-in for it. Your real dog is the one in the real world you can go look at, pet, hug, etc. People who take the language too seriously get lost in abstractions, take the symbols for the reality, and forget to actually consider what the symbol is referring to in the real, empirical world.

You see this a lot with leftcoms and other kinds of puritans. They quote-mine Critique of the Gotha Programme for some "definition of socialism" and treat some of the characteristics outlines as sort of "true" definition of what socialism looks like in objective reality, then they look for states that perfectly reflect those definitions in pure terms without any blemishes or contradictions. They don't find any societies that fit this puritanical definition, so they declare "true socialism has never been tried."

This, however, again, is a problem I see with language generally, not of a particular language specifically. If I had to talk about everything all at once, I could never have time to talk about anything specific at all. To talk about anything specific, I have to break reality up into categories. Reality does not actually physically exist as broken up categories, so the moment I do that, I have abandoned talking about material reality for what it really is, and am talking about abstract, idealized categories I (or, more specifically, the society I exist within, as language is socially constructed) created for the purpose of communicating something interesting to me.

The moment we break apart reality in this way, we risk, as Bohm warned, to descend into abstract metaphysics and idealism if we start confusing the abstract, human-made categories as literal material reality for what it really is. However, we really cannot escape this process of abstraction and categorization, because otherwise we would not have enough time to talk about anything at all. The only solution is not a new language, but rather, to use language with an understanding of its limitations, and so the material reality we are speaking of is implicitly understood rather than explicitly spelled out.

Indeed, this is what Bohm even meant when he talked about the "implicate order." "Implicate" because it is implicit. You cannot actually capture material reality in language. It's just a logical impossibility. The material reality we are trying to talk about can only ever be implicitly understood by the reader, but since it is not explicit in the language (which is not possible), there always runs a risk of a person not implicitly understanding the reality it refers to.

I also think Jocelyn Benoist's notion of "contextual realism" is somewhat useful here. He also has written extensively on this issue of the disconnect between idealized language and reality. The implicit reality the language refers to, he refers to as the "context." The context refers to the real-world, observable, empirical situation in which the language is actually employed to refer to. Benoist warns that we risk falling into idealism and abstract metaphysics if we use language but forget its context, i.e. we start talking about objects and categories in the abstract as if those abstract categories are actually part of reality.

His solution is, again, not to invent a new language, or to abandon the usage of language, but to recognize that this problem is resolved automatically when all participants in the discussion are implicitly aware of the context being referred to, even though it is impossible to explicitly state the context (as attempting to do so will lead to an infinite regress akin to Wittgenstein's rule-following problem), as context is wholly empirical and not linguistic.

Sadly, it requires some philosophical background, and thus some education, for people to improve their thinking and to think in more concrete and less abstract ways. I don't think there is a way we can achieve this just by changing our language, and I don't think any particular language is at fault (i.e. "bourgeois language"), but it is just inherent to the nature of language, and can only really be helped with education.

Are we reinventing the first chapter of the 2,300-year-old foundational text of Daoism from first principles? Either way, I have had an occasional thought as well of "What would a language built around the dialectical method look like?" but I've had those thoughts knowing that linguistic determinism is bunk and that this thought experiment would not make for an actually useful language. Actual normal natural human language is itself shaped by its contradictions, it's a very beautiful thing. So on the whole, I agree with others' criticisms here.

Hexbear delves into anprim language theory.

So what would a language that does not revolve around noun-verb clauses look like?

Don’t have time to find a source but I’m pretty sure Marx thought that abstractions are the substance of thought. Thought is idealist almost by tautology. The task is not to transcend concepts in thought (nor in language, as extension of thought) but to reason about the concepts themselves.

It’s a question of epistemology. From where does knowledge ultimately derive? For Hegel, knowledge is found in the contemplation leading to an absolute concept or Spirit, and all other concepts are only partial knowledge. Marx’s epistemology, on the other hand, says knowledge can derive only empirically from the senses. Marx wasn’t the first to say this; you can find it in Kant, who Hegel tried to transcend with his dialectic, and in the materialists, notably Feuerbach.

It was not Marx but Feuerbach who should get credit for the refutation of Hegel[^1]:

Feuerbach’s great achievement is: […] His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.

[…]

Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself – as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself.

The positive position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position demonstrating itself by its existence – not an acknowledged position; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the position of sense-certainty based on itself. [Feuerbach also defines the negation of the negation, the definite concept, as thinking surpassing itself in thinking and as thinking wanting to be directly awareness, nature, reality. – Note by Marx]

Marx agrees with Feuerbach that Hegel’s negation of the negation, a central mechanism for Hegel’s dialectic, is incomplete because it inevitably affirms the position that it wants to negate. The negation of Hegel’s negation, the “self-supporting positive, positively based on itself”, the “position of sense-certainty based on itself” is nothing other than empirical measurement, which provides knowledge that is true in and of itself.

In summary, the task is not to make our thoughts non-idealist because that is impossible. The task is to develop our ability to do science and to reason “outside of” our own thinking.

[^1]: Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General

The actionable thing we can get from this observation, outside of unlikely conlang projects, is the question of how we should steer the social process of Naming new things. How do we make names that are the smallest possible obstacle to understanding?

Are the best names the ones that do not contain important information about the object, like Tories, Weeaboos, and Hexbear? Though this is hard to apply to objects that appear to us as physical items, like a book.

Should we name things after their main relations, their main contradictions? Should a book be called a Writerwork-reading? Writerwork-published-reading? Writerwork-intertextual-published-reading? It's getting a little unwieldy, maybe logographic languages were right all along.

I think this is why we end up with a lot of "Is China socialist?" type questions and answers that just look at whether the thing right now fits some abstract definition.

This occurs because the people on the "no" side of the question have a dogmatic definition of socialism as a fully socialist economy rather than socialism as a process from A(capitalism) to B(communism). Those of us with the latter definition have a very easy time understanding China is still socialist whereas those with an economic dogma claim it is not.

How would one express that differently to eliminate the alternative explanations? I haven't a clue tbh.

Let me know when you make some progress on the conlang...

There's def some truth here, and some value to analysing language to understand hegemony and power. Gramsci in particular is good with this analysis. As a linguist, his deep understanding of the functions and origins of language, overlaid with the history of the spread of the Florentine dialect during the Risorgimento, forms one of the pillars of his formulation of hegemony.

However, I am of the opinion, as an emphasis if not a rule, that if we are doing epistemology, we are not doing praxis. I'm not convinced that the dynamics you describe are inherent to language itself. I think they are cultural, political, moral framings rather than a limitation of this or that specific language. We don't have to learn German to understand Marx. The limitations imposed on language and thought are a much larger project that exist in education, mass media, cultural production.

The problem with consciousness isnt a problem of language, but that the culture, morals, and politics, the superstructure, conceives of things too abstractly: "The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society." We can imagine the individual, and we can imagine society, but we can't see how individuals create society or how individualism is a social relation/construction.

The problem with abstraction, is a lack of concreteness. Lenin wrote in 1903, "Truth is always concrete." You are absolutely correct to say that the problem with consciousness is a problem of abstraction. People conceive of "things" as idealized Platonic forms that are static and immutable. The conception of things literally resists formulating a theory of change, "that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively."

In practice, this looks like making generalizations and then treating those generalizations as truth. Practical Marxism means going into the social conditions of workers and the oppressed, organizing people to discuss, articulate, and critique their own experiences, organizing more deeply on the basis of those newly understood conditions, and proving the power of shared experiences and active solidarity. The contradictions are right there, people know them because it is our lives. But because we lack a way of thinking about our experiences without using abstract categories, comparing ourselves to an ideal, or within the context of social hierarchies, all social contradictions are projected on the individual -- itself a historical social relation.

I'd recommend reviewing Theses on Feuerbach and the German Ideology, deep diving into Gramsci (I can get you a reading list on exactly this topic so you can speed run), revisiting Lenin not for his particular conclusions but the way he develops his case for political action, he was a master at political concreteness. I'm also a particular fan of Paulo Friere's pedagogy, which IMO is the most direct method to developing this kind of concreteness in criticism, and the best explanation of how and why to be concrete.

Good post, my only criticism is the emphasis on language, which becomes an idealized abstraction. By uncritically placing the burden on the linguistics, as a category removed from the people who speak it and use it to convey meaning, you are reproducing the same errors you are trying identify.

I think this is why we end up with a lot of "Is China socialist?" type questions and answers that just look at whether the thing right now fits some abstract definition. It's trying to put the thing into a nice little box that we can understand.

Is socialism comprehensible or is it mystical? If it is comprehensible, then we should be able to give it a definition. The question is what the definition is, not if definitions are tyranny.

The struggle is due to pervasive propaganda. It's not that our language is insufficient, it's that we've had generations of people be deliberately misinformed. They already have "context", it's just wrong/fake context. That takes effort to overcome.

That is a very interesting theory, maybe we should try to build a new socialist culture from scratch.

Jokes aside, language is a tool for communication and sometimes miscommunication happens. Like when the Aliens fly to Washington with their flying saucer and peaceful Americans come to greet them, turns out in the Alien language Peace = War and then naturally the Aliens start blasting everyone, because the aliens can build inter-galactic travel devices, but aren't rational enough to assume that other people have different languages, that maybe it was a misunderstanding.

On the flipside you have a different movie where the Alien doesn't talk at all, but is intelligent enough to asses lack of threat. Something that very often seems to be very challenging for us to do. These concepts exist even within Dog doodoo Capitalist Imperialist societies and philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.

:wittgenstein-chad:

Lolwut

Alright then, sounds like its time for a new dialectical conlang (constructed language)! Its a lot of work, but soon you could be expressing your self dialectically without the restrictions of indo european grammar.

Consider Ithkuil or something simple like toki pona as examples of what a conlang definition looks like.

I'm not personally a proponent of strong linguistic determinism, but I do accept that language can influence how we think about things. Though I think that has more to do with meaning than form, its still fun to play with language and see where new constructions take you. At the very least this is an interesting premise for a constructed language, even if it doesn't automatically make you a Marxist.

Interesting ideas, one thing that occurs to me is that language evolves and this problem might resolve itself as socialism becomes more broadly understood and discussed with new terminology and concepts emerging organically from those discussions.