Fire and Knowledge

For those just jumping in, here are the previous links:

• John’s Article: A Word Wrapped in Light
• My First Thoughts on His Article
• John’s Comment and My First Response
• John’s First Response
• My Second Response
• John’s Second Response [you are here]
• My Final Response

Josh,

Thanks again for your response. You’ve done an excellent job at demonstrating why verbal language (here and elsewhere I use “verbal language” to include both the spoken and written word) is important for all people to master and should not be expected to disappear any time soon. Like Postman, you are concerned to stave off any trend which would lead to the neglect of literacy.

I don’t believe I am proposing a deprecation of reading and writing. It was never my goal to argue that visual language could replace verbal language. Rather than offering an either-or, I am submitting for your consideration a both-and: that both verbal language and visual language may have their uses. And while certain forms may preclude certain kinds of content, in my experience ideography is extremely flexible. Even very abstract concepts are rather easily encapsulated in it. I’ll provide an example later which I hope will help to demonstrate this further.

All the same, my contention really isn’t that we start doing philosphy in visual language. Rather, it’s that we begin to think about where ideography might have some use. Verbal language, after all, carries with it both advantages and disadvantages—the intersection of which render it very well fit for some uses, and perhaps less well fit for others. Certain kinds of discourse, therefore, may lend themselves as much to visual, or ideographic, language—which also has its good and bad points.

What kinds of ideas might recommend themselves to the ideographic form? As a general rule, I feel images are better than verbal words at depicting connections and relationships. Thus it is very hard to describe the relative locations of the cities of France in words, but quite easy to understand them from a map. Family trees quickly show us how members of a family relate to each other, data charts show us differences in quantity or change over time, and so on.

Thus, the ideographic form might prove superior to verbal language in cases where the idea that needs to be conveyed includes concepts such as levels of importance, nearness and remoteness, differing quantities, changes over time, causes and their effects, and so on.

These are speculations only; however, what I hope to show by this is that I do not see the differences between verbal and visual language as being ones of caliber, but of kind. It’s not that one language is superior to the other, or affords superior discourse. It’s rather that each lends itself to certain uses that the other does not; while for some uses, both may be equally well-suited. There is a lot of thinking and practice that would have to be done if we were to take seriously the challenge of working out which form was best suited to any particular use.

In the meantime, though, I am content to argue for a rather more limited point: that visual language has a syntax, and is therefore capable of conveying propositional truth. I’m glad to see you coming around on the issue of visual syntax. If you can also agree that images are capable of representing wide classes of objects—that is to say, they are capable of abstraction—then the possibility of propositional truth seems almost a foregone conclusion. A reliable syntax combined with abstract signifiers seems to me to be, if not an incontrovertible guarantee of propositional capability, at least a very persuasive case for it.

Let’s bring this closer to home with an actual example, which will hopefully add weight to my assertions as well as show up the strengths and weaknesses of ideographic language.

I asked my wife for an example of a verbal sentence, in order to translate it into visual ideography. The construction she came up with was, “The purpose of education is the cultivation of virtue.” That’s a pretty lofty sentence, no? It’s full of abstractions and intangible meanings. But watch how easily it’s translated into a series of verbal metaphors:

As I’ve said before, ideography often works through metaphor. The pasteboard is a familiar representation of all things educational; the gear is an accepted symbol for “action” or “work”; the equals sign needs no introduction; the hoe is my own suggestion for “cultivation”; and the man with a halo is obviously not too bad a guy.

The first thought you probably had was, “There’s no way that image would get translated into the original sentence!” That’s true—this is a translation from one language to another, and translations are never exact. However, this is also representative of the beauty of ideography. What we’ve encapsulated is not the English words, but the ideas they stood in for. So “reading” the image back, we might say any of the following:

“The work of education is the growth of a good person.”

“The application of schooling equals the production of goodness.”

“The activity of learning is nothing other than the development of a complete individual.”

Every one of which, we can see, is implicitly contained in the original English; especially if we realize that “virtue” originally meant something like “mannishness” or “that quality of being fully and completely human in the best way.”

This is why I am not much worried about your concern over misinterpretations of an icon. If you think of interpretation in this context as drawing out the represented ideas and their relationships, then one only needs to be familiar with a few (already mostly well-known) symbols and a bit of the language’s syntax to understand what the author is trying to convey. If, on the other hand, you mean “interpretation” in the sense of translating the ideography into English, then there are a number of excellent options available to us; and one almost cannot go wrong.

Of course, there is always a danger of unsympathetic interpreters—those who have some axe to grind with you or your ideas and will perform every hermeneutical contortion in order to present your ideas in the worst possible light. However, there is as much a danger of this in speaking and writing. Words can always be twisted. In fact, the printed word may be the most susceptible to this kind of antagonistic pedantry. Whereas the spoken word sounds out and is gone, the written word is a permanent and precise record of one’s argument. The skeptic can pore over it with a fine-toothed comb and draw out every apparent contradiction, every questionable generalization and every neglected counterexample.

This is because the written word is often more precise than we ourselves wish to be. It can be useful, of course, to impose on oneself the rigors of the orthographic form; but often the writer finds himself taking special pains to protect himself from hostile pedantry when he would rather just say what he means and be done with it. He must read his work with the critic’s eye because he knows the medium renders him vulnerable.

Ideography may prove itself better suited to the ambiguities of human thought and intuition which the written word resists, precisely because ideographic interpretation is less determinate. This, I admit, remains to be seen; and it will be both a good and bad thing if true.

At the same time, it may be that in the near term ideographic constructs will need a little verbiage to help them along. This may lead us to think that the verbal is somehow more primary or essential than the visual. However, words themselves were never exempt from such an evolution of usage. There was most likely a time when anyone using or hearing the word “sincere” had to actively bring to mind an image of a marble statue made “without wax” in order to understand the metaphorical reference. At some point that word-picture was abstracted away through usage, and now most of us use the word without any thought as to the metaphor originally behind it. If ideography must get along on similar “training wheels” for a while, it is only following in the footsteps of other languages before it.

That, in a nutshell, is my real claim: that we are witnessing a new form of language (really a variation on an old form) starting out “on training wheels.” I mostly feel it will catch its stride whether some of us choose to help it along or not. I am simply trying to provide an account of the phenomena to those, like yourself, for whom this might be a worrying trend.

***

Finally, I want to address your points about Jesus and the second Commandment.

I feel that you understate the corporeal significance of the Incarnation somewhat. You say that Jesus has given us a book; I would argue that what He gave us was his body. The book is a record of the Incarnation; it is much less a thing than the Incarnation itself—though, naturally, important for preserving and transmitting the account of it.

The Incarnation is no small thing for Christianity—it is its primary defining characteristic, compared to all other religions. It demonstrates to us that the body is not evil; that matter can have spiritual significance (we operate under this assumption every time we take of the Lord’s Supper or administer baptism); that God relates to his people as whole beings; and that the redemption plan extends to the whole created order. In fact, this sacramental significance is brought out in every part of the Word—with Genesis, Leviticus, the gospels and Revelation merely containing some of the most strikingly earthy examples.

Sadly, Protestantism never quite grew past its original iconoclasm and we still find it impoverished in the area of sacramentalism today. This is part of why many Christians are finding themselves drawn back into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

When we read of Christ “being the brightness of [God’s] glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3, KJV), we cannot miss the author’s exorbitant declaration. Jesus came to us, in a profound and fundamental way, as God’s own image. He was more than that, it’s true—but he was certainly not less. And if God is willing that the ultimate Word should be captured in the form of an Image, then I am emboldened to do it for many much lesser words.

The fact of the Incarnation must also inform how we interpret the second Commandment. God prohibits the Israelites from ever making “carved images, or any likeness” of things in the created order, and they are not to “bow down to them.” I think there are only two ways to take this command. Either we are not to make images of anything at all; or we are merely not to make carved images, such as likenesses of natural things, in order to worship them as idols.

The first interpretation is problematic—if for no other reason than that God orders the temple artisans to craft many creaturely likenesses (pomegranates, cherubim, almond flowers) in the construction of his own temple.

Neither interpretation, however, says anything about God preferring to be referred to by verbal language instead of visual language. After all, he himself gave us an “express image of his person.” So I think Postman and Hunt are wrong to take this commandment so far. Certainly God does not want to be confused with any idol, and certainly he is not like any created thing. However, there are a number of symbols which do a fine, abstract job of communicating “triune God” and do it without breaking the second Commandment. They’ve also been in use among Christians for hundreds of years.

(Borrowed from here)

I don’t consider such symbols to be any more blasphemous than uniting the letters G O D in a line.

God, in his pleasure, has decided that his primary way of being known in our time is through Christ’s body on earth—the church. We experience this body in many ways: through hearing the words it preaches, certainly; but also in encountering the good works and concern of its people, and in experiencing its sacramental observances with our senses. None of these parts can say to another part, “I don’t need you.” In the same way, I don’t believe proponents of a purely verbal society can say to those experimenting with visual language, “We don’t need you.” If the visual word is indeed in the ascendency, they may soon need us more than ever.