Rambling on...

As a follow-up to my previous entry, I'm going to leave Plato aside for the moment (preferring to leave the ins and outs of 'proper' philosophy to those better equipped than me to deal with it (step up, overlyconscious)), in favour of a more recent philosopher of meaning and the meaning of meaning. Soon after I wrote that nugatory musing on trees I came across the following passage, from Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, in an anthology I happened to pick up:

If language is born, indeed, from the profoundly symbolific character of the human mind, we may not be surprised to find that this mind operates with symbols far below the level of speech. Previous studies have shown that even the subjective record of sense experience, the ‘sense-image’, is not a direct copy of actual experience, but has been ‘projected’, in the process of copying, into a new dimension, the more or less stabile form we call a ‘picture’. It has not the protean, mercurial elusiveness of real visual experience, but a unity and lasting identity that makes it a an object of the mind’s possession rather than a sensation.
[…]
In short, images have all the characteristics of symbols. If they were weak sense-experiences, they would confuse the order of nature for us. Our salvation lies in that we do not normally take them for bona fide sensations, but attend to them only in the capacity of meaning things, being images of things – symbols whereby those things are conceived, remembered, considered, but not encountered.

The best guarantee of their essentially symbolic function is their tendency to become metaphorical. They are not only capable of connoting the things from which our sense-experience originally derived them […] but they also have an inalienable tendency to ‘mean’ things that have only a logical analogy to their primary meanings. […] Images are, therefore, our readiest instruments for abstracting concepts from the tumbling stream of actual impressions. They make our primitive abstractions for us, they are our spontaneous embodiments of general ideas…

Now this is shading into the vast and nebulous gloom of that area of human thought known as 'the imagination', and I have no desire to try to get to grips with that kettle of particularly slippery fish. I would just note that theories of the imagination and the literary imagination in particular (since Romanticism, anyway; the following is no longer strictly the case, but nobody talks about 'imagination' or 'creativity' in literary theory nowadays anyway) have focused almost exclusively on the act of literary creation on the part of the creator – as if there were not a creative consciousness involved in the reception of a work of art, as if the reading of a book were somehow a secondary process, a blurred mirror-image of those operations involved in the writing of a book. This is clearly not the case: a whole different set of mechanisms is involved in reading: reading and writing are not isomorphic processes; reading is not the inverse operation of writing in the same way that the solving of a crossword puzzle is something like the setting of the puzzle in reverse order. Solving a crossword is a matter of reconstructing the fragments of meaning scattered to the four winds by the setter, by inverting the transformative operations involved in the initial deliberate concealment of meaning: it is a mental process whose parameters are more or less strictly demarcated by the conventions of the peculiar ideolect of crosswords. Books work entirely differently, because there are no parameters that transcend the sum of all books: the parameters that form symbolic understanding are continually reshaped with the reading of every new book.

Having said that, I find myself wondering whether those parameters were not in fact fixed more rigidly in the past: I’m thinking of the Renaissance episteme, and the limits to the symbolic imagination that were set in the humanist education. To write (or to read) literature in the Renaissance, one had to be fully versed in the Classical canon (which, for much of that period, meant in practice studying the works of perhaps a dozen Latin authors, plus a small number of 'modern classics'). The symbolific potential of any one semanteme was, therefore – must have been – conventionally defined much more sharply than the equivalent unit of meaning is for a reader today. If everybody's read the same stuff, then meaning making is surely more to do with a sort of collective consciousness than to do with an individual act of creativity – whether on the part of author or reader. And I presume that your averagely well-educated sixteenth-century humanist did generally know most of the names of trees and what they look like.

But what's this I see before me? Those vast vistas of contemporary critical theory where signifiers float free like colourful balloons and signifieds weigh anchor and sail over the horizon as meaning soars as gracefully and stupid as an albatross. A place where quality means nothing and art is as beautiful as a rusting, broken down locomotive, and poetry might as well be as badly written as this sentence for all it matters. No, this will not do at all.

I think that Langer's argument for the interanimation of sense experience and symbolic imagination cuts through this. If the passage from visual perception to mental image is not a straight line, not a simple case of copying (and it is now widely acknowledged, of course, that the notion of pure perception, a pre-conscious seeing uncoloured by individual experience and expectation, is a fiction), but a much more delicately calibrated process in which metaphorical associations play a primary role that is spontaneous and concept-forming, then aesthetic experience is something absolutely fundamental to language and to how the human mind works. It is something irreducibly complex and inaccessible to definition in language, but at the same time it is something real and true. And I suppose it is possible that not knowing what trees look like might actually enrich that experience rather than diminish it, because it opens up new vistas of thought ungrounded in concrete sense experience, by establishing new and unique neural sub-networks for thinking with. And I suppose that shaping of thought in turn might colour our perception of trees when we do finally encounter them in reality, so that our experience of walking through a wood becomes not a seeing of shapes and forms and colours but an act of intertextual reading of the great Book of Nature.

Incidentally, the Latin word for 'book', liber, is also the word for 'bark' [of a tree].

On not knowing the names of trees

The other day I fell to thinking about the consequences of being almost entirely ignorant of the names of trees.

Not knowing the names of trees, I believe, raises some of the most important questions the human mind can grapple with. These questions touch upon diverse categories of knowledge, among them sociolinguistics, theodicy, philosophy of language, cultural history, the relationship of rhetoric to dialectic, and the emergent discipline of dendro-ontology.

But I want to set all those questions aside for the moment in order to bring my immediate concern into sharper focus, namely the implications not knowing the names of trees has for the reader of literature.

It is at this point that I must declare an interest: I myself do not know the names of trees. Or rather, I know the names, but I don't know what they look like. I can just about identify an oak. A fir, maybe. A weeping willow, no problem. But ask me to tell a birch from a beech, or a yew from a sequoia, and I start to struggle. In short, I don't know my ash from my elm-bough. (geddit?)

So, my question is this: does not knowing the names of trees induce in the sufferer a state of mind that is incompatible with certain types of aesthetic experience? Does it inhibit the faculty for visualization? Does it prevent the subject representing to himself a scene from a rustic idyll? Is the subject unable to read long passages of descriptive prose in works by nineteenth-century Romantics? Does not knowing the names of trees limit the subject's ability to read poetry, to visualize a scene in the mind's eye, to appreciate ecphrasis, enargeia, the word-picture? In the style of Freud, I intend to use myself as the test subject for this investigation.

Case study #1: I think Flaubert and Proust are always naming trees; I might be misremembering, but those two seem like the type to casually drop tree names into a description without so much as a by-your-leave. Now, I read both of them in French, and my knowledge of the names of trees in French is even worse than my knowledge of the names of trees in English. When I come across a French word that is of the order of tree-designating-nouns, my background cognitive processes just kind of freeze up and my conscious mind fills in the gap by going 'Oh, it's just a type of tree'. I can usually then dredge up from the darkest recesses of my mind the equivalent word in English for the tree, but I am no closer to being able to visualize the tree itself.

Case study #2: There are lots of trees in Roman poetry. The first line of the first work of the greatest Roman poet has a tree in it, a fagus if memory serves. I cannot now for the life of me remember what kind of tree that is, but I do remember that it is a feminine noun, second declension, that you recline under the shade of it if you are a shepherd and you can use it to make spears (I think; I could be wrong about the last one). The reason I know it is feminine is because I remember that pretty much all trees in Latin are feminine, even though the generic word for tree, arbor, is masculine. Where has all this got us? Nowhere within sight of the mental image we're desperately trying to summon. I can't see the trees for the word.

Case study #3: The Laurel. This tree is perhaps the most familiar of all the trees to readers of poetry. So what do I know about it? That it is sacred to Apollo. I know the Daphne story from the first book of the Metamorphoses. I know that its branches were used by the Romans to signify excellence both in poetry and in war. I know you make wreaths out of it, and award them to writers of sycophantic doggerel. I think it may also be the same thing as a bay tree, but don't hold me to that. Note that the closer we get to anything resembling solid, practical knowledge, the less sure of myself I become. What does a laurel tree actually look like? It's a mystery.

Conclusions: not knowing the names of trees is not detrimental to the cognitive capabilities of the subject. The 'tree' sign fails to stimulate the visual cortex (cortex: it's as if the word is deliberately tormenting the tree-blind subject by its very etymology); it functions for the afflicted subject as an abstract noun, calling up an indeterminate number of associations both visual and abstract in nature, but is itself not of the order of concrete experience. The subject's experience of trees in literature is therefore limited on the eidetic axis but is not limited on the poetic plane. The subject can comprehend the existence of individual trees as linguistic entities, and is capable of differentiating trees by their texture and chewiness, and by the number of branches (still speaking language-wise, here). The subject can't see the bark, but can feel the bite, so to speak.

Next week: Did Plato not know the names of trees, and if not, is not knowing the names of trees the basis of the entire Western philosophical tradition?