Whats in a Name?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...(1)

In a recent tai chi class that I was leading, the topic of 'naming' came up. I have long been a great fan of practices that allow for an escape from the stories we tell ourselves—stories that can seem to have a life of their own; and if not attentively curtailed may descend into destructive ruminating loops. Over the years these practices have included basketball, juggling, tai chi and meditation, and more recently endurance running. It is also a reason I became enamored of eastern philosophies which prize embodied engagement in the world and warn of the ways in which an over reliance on mental abstraction can separate us from that embodied footing.

And yet, a vital aspect of human nature resides in our capacity to manipulate symbols that refer to our world of experience. I think it is difficult to overstate the all together overbearing magnitude of the role this capacity can play in the way we experience our wold and our place in it. It is also a capacity that commonly operates below the surface of our conscious attention. To reacquaint ourselves with the power which symbol manipulation contains—a capacity to open up our world—I offer the words of Helen Keller describing her discovery for the first time of this capacity:

 Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.
I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! ..... As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.
On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.........It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come. (2)

Yet, if we do not bring our attention to this capacity in process, we ourselves can become vulnerable as subjects of unexamined self-manipulation. The quote at the top of this post is the lead sentence from Joan Didion's classic essay 'The White Album'.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience..... Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.(3)

In that essay, and in many others Didion plays out this paradox— a conflict between the importance and necessity of telling ourselves stories contrasted against the recognition of the likely self deception the stories engender. Didion felt she could only really understand her own thinking by writing about it. Perhaps this is why even more strongly, she felt that self understanding required a mastery of language; a capacity to whittle those stories down to their core essence.

I am not without some sympathy for Didion's view, a view for which her own writing presents the best case. While Didion's writing is often described as detached, cold and sparse, I experience the opposite as I read her. I find myself gaining a clarity of detail and nuance as I reconnect and engage with common experiences and perceptions such as my current surrounding environmental climate ( Didion wrote often about California and specifically about Malibu.) Didion was expert at using the tool of language to gain a deep, subtle and layered appreciation of her physical, social, and cultural surroundings. This type of appreciation can certainly assist our self conception as it embeds within the world.

Nevertheless, I ultimately find a linguistic based conception of self-understanding to be overly narrow. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle was famous in part for valuing not only linguistic  knowledge ( 'knowing that' ), but also the knowledge of practice and performance ( 'knowing how' ). He went so far as to suggest that 'knowing how' is prior to 'knowing that' — that 'knowing that' is dependent on 'knowing how'. This is not actually inconsistent with Didon's method. She had a writing practice, and through that practice her mastery of language helped enhance her process of connecting to her world —gaining self-understanding. In my view, however, not all self-understanding enhancing processes need be language based (although language often imperceptively intertwines with all others.) For example, I feel immersion in the non-linguistic based practices I mentioned at the beginning of this post enhanced my self-understanding. Another practice I enjoy is music appreciation. I have come to love and appreciate many musical genres from various times, places, and cultures. I think this appreciation allows me to better understand people from those cultures and thus better understand myself.

To conclude, I feel it is a mistake to think of 'naming' as a negative, nature deforming activity as if it were something we somehow could do without. There is a danger in harboring either a thoughtless neglect or a compulsive obsession with the stories we tell ourselves. Believing the stories real in isolation from our engagement with our world can become a form of fantasy while practicing the art of pruning and refining the stories may enhance our imaginative world connecting capacity.

This book can tell you nothing; the Tao leaves you where you began.
A maiden can leave things nameless; a mother must name her children.
Perfectly empty or carrying ten thousand words, you still return, and return, and return.Naming things loses what unites them.
Failing to name things loses them into what unites them.
Words are limits that make experience possible.
But form and formlessness are the same.
Tao and the world are the same, though we call them by different names.
This unity is dark and deep, but on the other hand it is deep and dark.It opens into the center of everything.  (4)

1. Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (Kindle Location 28). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

2. https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Helen-Keller-Recreated-Scene-at-the-Water-Pump

 3. Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (Kindle Locations 33-36). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

4. Tzu, Lao. Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching (Kindle Locations 65-73). crispy press. Kindle Edition.