UPTC School of Education
Course: Epistemology
Passage 1, August 12, 2001
The Human Paradox
Fernando Silva, UPTC
Guildernstern: “My Lord, we were sent for.”
Hamlet: I will tell you why, so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and
Queeen moult no feather. I have of late,-but wherefore I know not- lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of
exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a
sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look, you, this o’erhanging firmament, this majestical
roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of
vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! in form and moving,
how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals, and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me ...
Shakespeare in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Man is a weird abortion of nature, an uglyish creature without the fiery color of the
butterfly, or the glossy coat of a bear, or the graceful shape of a bird. He canters along with
an ungainly, two-legged gait that makes him slow and vulnerable as compared with the big
cats, and features a size that makes him no rival to the bigger mammals. He has released
himself of the responsibilities of every other creature in the food chain: while alive he is
the preferred food of no predator. In fact, he has become his own sole predator, killing his
kin not for food, but for spite. Over and above that, he remains the most voracious predator
of nature, destroying everything in his reach for no other purpose than his own pleasure. He
has an unduly long prenatal stage, longer only in the very big mammals, and unlike any
other animal an abnormally long dependent period between birth and adulthood: both the
insect and the whale calf, at either end of the scale size, are born with full control of their
members and ready to survive in a hostile world. Man, on the contrary, struggles through a
lengthy childhood and a traumatic adolescence, and at times in his old age and deathbed, is
still a child, unable to cope with reality.
And yet, he calls himself Creation’s King, the Masterpiece of Paradise. What makes him
think so? Two minor things: one a bodily feature, the other, a spiritual glint.
Like the primates, he has an opposing thumb. All other creatures are limited to their jaws,
like a tiger, or their extremities, like the spider, or even its whole body, like a snake, to
catch another creature, and they do so only to feed or mate. Man uses this little accident of
his upper extremities to turn every object of his surroundings into an extension of himself:
he learned to hurl stones and arrows, and later bullets, to dishearten enemies or to fell prey
much bigger than himself, and he can deftly climb up a tree to flee from a threatening
predator. He can cover himself with the warm skins of furry animals by stitching their hides
into garments, and build a lodging to protect himself from weather and foe. Finally, unlike
any other animal, he can put together subtle elements like kindling and heat to build himself
a fire for protection, warmth and company.
And unlike any other creature, or at least we think so, he thinks. In truth we do not really
know whether any other creature in the universe can claim this strange ability of thought,
presumably residing in the brain, but we know that none other shares the even stranger
ability to share his thoughts with his kin through articulate language.
Language itself is an abortion. While every sense has its own organ, speech , like sex, must
usurp the organs of other functions as if both were of little or no importance: the lungs,
pharinx and nose are meant for breathing and making noise, but man has made of them a
resonating box to refine the noises into linguistic sounds. The mouth and tongue are meant
for feeding, and man has imposed on them the task of further modelling the sound to
produce words, and thereby thoughts. Even the brain, that mysterious organ that seems to
set the limit between spirit and matter, used to be a mere coordinator of bodily organs in
lower animals, but man has turned into a powerful engine of thought and language.
However, the urge to mean is by no means an exclusively human endowment. Every
creature from the most simple living organism, such as the sponge or protozoid, must
impose itself on other members of its kin and on its environment to carry out two basic
functions: to feed and grow as an individual, and to reproduce and survive as a species.
This impulsive behaviour of all living organism to move outwards is the deepest origin of
human language. But once again, man uses it for new and surprising purposes: to coo and
to deceive, to entice and to reject, to manipulate and to rebel. In brief, to think.
To think? Is not then speech the result of thought? Isn't it, perhaps, the other way around, so
that thought is the child of speech? A child is born with the ability to think, but he really
only thinks after he has developed the ability to speak, or more broadly, to use language.
We cannot really think without language (Wittgenstein). We can bring to our mind the
shapes of nameless objects, much like we can perceive objects that we cannot fully discern,
and therefore cannot fully name. Even so, when this happens, we quickly impose language
on these unlikely shapes, the language of form and color and likeness. We say, or think,
“this or that is something like a shapeless sack” or “it is big and heavy”. However, beyond
perceiving or remembering un-nameable objects, we cannot grasp them in any way without
the use of language, as if language were the opposing thumb of the mind. Thinking is
strictly propositional, and advanced thinking is only possible with an advanced command
of language. Hence, while most people thing that language is the child of thought, some are
tempted to believe the opposite, that thought is the child of language. Halliday proposes
that every failure of a child at school is really a language failure. Thought, then, or rather
language, is the second item that makes man a creature with a higher destiny.
And this brings around a paradox. A creature with such high calling should stand well
above all others in nobility and rank, but oft enough he betrays this calling.
How should we then perceive this strange creature? Like the spiritual being that can bring
himself to the threshold of the gods? Or like the “quintessence of dust”, the lowly scoundrel
that kan kill his own kin for no apparent reason, an orphanly abortion of nature, deceivingly
clad in spirituality? Which of the two we choose depends on mood. To Hamlet, in his
despair of having uncovered the murder of his father at the hands of his uncle and mother,
man is the latter: a hopeless creature capable of the most hideous baseness. To the poet in a
lighter mood, paraphrased by Hamlet in the first lines of his paradox, man is nature’s most
enlightened product, a mighty piece of work. But in the line of paradox, man is both. To
Hamlet, Guilderstern and Rosencrantz, standing before him, are an incarnation of the
paradox: first his long-time friends, and now come to him, by order of his mother and
uncle, to become his murderers.
However, notwithstanding his biological limitations, man is best perceived in his higher
bidding. The human side of man (as opposed to his merely biological side), is a result of his
ability to think, a result, in turn, of his ability to speak. Thought is merely a re-elaboration
of experience. We can think beyond what we know, but only in terms of the things we
know: every creature of our imagination has the limbs of the creatures of our experience,
and we code this knowledge in terms of “internal speech” (Wittgenstein). From a different
angle, everything in the human side of man has a single purpose, to enable human action,
defining said “human action” as that kind of move that transcends biological intention. We
cannot act in the absence of knowledge, and we know and learn in order to act. Truth, or
knowledge, is anything that we can act upon. The opposite of truth is not falsehood, or
ignorance, but irrelevance. Conversely, in a way, all “truths” are lies because they are
necessarily incomplete renditions of reality, and as such, untrue. Thus the object of intellect
is not certainty, which can never occur, but the adoption of a healthy measure of skepticism
to the extent that we can act upon it safely without pretending it to be absolute truth.
Language reflects this paradox. Whereas a classic view of language, as analysed y
Wittgenstein in a passage of St. Augustin, is usually taken to be univocally meaningful and
dependable, pragmatical analysis shows it to be equivocal and undependable: we rarely say
what we mean, we rarely mean what we say. Language is merely a well-intended attempt to
tell others of what we think we know, but turning this intention into a fully unequivocal
statement implies such complexities, that in the end we end up saying only a fraction of
what we would have to say to make it unequivocal. Grice sets this paradox in the context of
a “cooperative principle”: when we say something we give it our best shot, and we can only
hope that what we say will be adequately interpreted by a cooperative interlocutor. Even so,
the hearer may decide to twist my proposition and make it say a totally different thing.
Thus a given proposition said by a speaker is only as true as the hearer wants to make it,
first because the speaker is limited by the context (he may say more or less than needed, he
may be intentionally telling lies, he may be saying it the wrong way, and he may be
speaking of something that is not relevant), and then, because language is inherently
inaccurate. Hence it will always be up to the hearer to decide how much credit he gives to
the utterances of the speaker. This being true it goes without saying that, if language is the
vehicle of knowledge, knowledge is at best an approximation.
Halliday, Explorations in the Functions of Language. London. Arnold, 1972
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. London, Basil Blackwell, 1958
Shakespeare, Hamlet, King of Denmark.
of nature
an uglyish creature
without the fiery color
of the butterfly
the glossy coat
of a bear
the graceful shape
of a bird
with an ungainly, two-legged gait
as compared
with the big cats
The noun phrase
a size
to the bigger mammals.
of the responsibilities
of every other creature
in the food chain
the preferred food
of no predator
In fact
his own sole predator
(not) for food
(but) for spite
the most voracious predator
of nature
in his reach
for no other purpose
his own pleasure
an unduly long prenatal stage
in the very big mammals
unlike any other animal
an abnormally long dependent period
between birth and adulthood
the insect and the whale calf
at either end
of the scale size
with full control
of their members
in a hostile world
on the contrary
through a lengthy childhood
(and) a traumatic adolescence
at times
in his old age and deathbed
a child
to cope
with reality
The sentence
He
calls
himself
Creation’s King,
the Masterpiece of Paradise.
Two minor things
make
him so:
one a bodily feature,
the other, a spiritual glint.
he
has
an opposing thumb
like the primates.
All other creatures are limited
and
and
to their jaws, like a tiger,
or their full extremities, like the spider,
or even its whole body, like a snake,
to catch another creature,
so
only to fight, feed or mate.
they
do
Man
uses
this little accident
of his upper extremities
to turn every object of his surroundings
into an extension of himself:
he
can hurl
he
can deftly climb
He
can cover
stones and arrows, and later bullets,
to dishearten enemies
or to fell prey much bigger than himself,
up a tree
to flee from a threatening predator.
himself
with the warm skins of furry animals
by stitching their hides into garments,
and build a lodging to protect himself from weather and foe.
Finally, unlike any other animal,
he can put together subtle elements like kindling and heat to build himself a fire for protection, warmth and company.
And unlike any other creature, or at least we think so, he thinks.
In truth we do not really know
whether any other creature in the universe can claim this strange ability of thought,
presumably residing in the brain, but we know that none other shares the even stranger
ability to share his thoughts with his kin through articulate language.
Language itself is an abortion. While every sense has its own organ, speech , like sex, must
usurp the organs of other functions as if both were of little or no importance: the lungs,
pharinx and nose are meant for breathing, but man (like other animals) has made of them a
bellows to push air through the system to make noise, and the system into a resonating box
to refine the noises into sound. The mouth and tongue are meant for feeding, and man has
imposed on them the task of further modelling the sound to produce words, and thereby
thoughts. Even the brain, that mysterious organ that seems to set the limit between spirit
and matter, used to be a mere coordinator of bodily organs in lower animals, but man has
turned into a powerful engine of thought and language.
However, the urge to mean is by no means an exclusively human endowment. Every
creature from the most simple living organism, such as the sponge or protozoid, must
impose itself on other members of its kin and on its environment to carry out two basic
functions: to feed and grow as an individual, and to reproduce and survive as a species.
This impulsive behaviour of all living organism to move outwards is the deepest origin of
human language. But once again, man uses it for new and surprising purposes: to coo and
to deceive, to entice and to reject, to manipulate and to rebel. In brief, to think.
To think? Is not then speech the result of thought? Perhaps it is the other way around, and
thought is the child of speech. A child is born with the ability to think, but he really only
thinks after he has developed the ability to speak, or more broadly, to use language. We
cannot really think without language (Wittgenstein). We can bring to our mind the shapes
of nameless objects, much like we can perceive objects that we cannot fully discern, and
therefore cannot fully name. Even so, when this happens, we quickly impose language on
these unlikely shapes, the language of form and color and likeness. We say, or think, “this
or that is something like a shapeless sack” or “it is big and heavy”. However, beyond
perceiving or remembering un-nameable objects, we cannot grasp them in any way without
the use of language, as if language were the opposing thumb of the mind. Thinking is
strictly propositional, and advanced thinking is only possible with an advanced command
of language. Hence we are tempted to believe that thought is the child of language, and not
the other way around. Halliday proposes that every failure of a child at school is really a
language failure. Thought, then, or rather language, is the second item that makes man a
creature with a higher destiny.