In the aftermath of surviving the construction of a mono-syllabic blog post—as an exploration of language’s inherent limitations—it is perhaps time to attempt a post in which the dualist underpinnings of modern language are examined and minimized. As an aside, perhaps “Aftermath” would be a better name for this blog, given its shift of focus from quantitative energy analysis to a broader condemnation of the consequences of modernity.

How is the English language a Trojan Horse for dualism? Several major constructs preserve and promote dualistic thinking. Foremost is personhood: first-, second-, and third-person framings emphasize the primacy of individual agency and ownership. Ownership receives its own possessive pedestal in language construction—present even in this sentence. Pronoun choice then serves to establish possession of personhood—or, significantly in the context of a dualist mindset, lack of personhood denoted by “it” (see this fun solution by Robin Wall Kimmerer). Also looming large, subjects and objects serve to promote a clear duality of agency: something or someone does something to something or someone else. The framing promotes humans as subjects having subjective experiences involving instrumentalized objects. Even the use of “something or someone” two sentences back nurtures a dual classification scheme.

This post will explore some of these pernicious dualistic influences in modern language. Throughout, every attempt is made to use non-personed language—mainly via avoidance of “I”, “we,” etc. Some experimentation will also appear toward the end attempting to break subject/object dualism. Don’t expect too much. It is English, after all, and thus a flawed starting point.

Of course, most people in our culture—imprisoned by dualist convictions and thoroughly steeped in dualist language—would struggle to make any sense of the objections and work-arounds contained herein. Presumably, readers of this blog are more amenable to questioning pervading metaphysical foundations.

Caveat

This post is not written by a linguist, or by one who has been exposed to any scholarly treatment of dualism in language. As prevalent as the phenomenon is, it’s actually not easy to find much on this essentially-invisible topic. Everything here is fresh out of one meat-brain as general impressions and associations—based mostly on discovered frictions between a non-dualist metaphysics and the annoying incompatibilities constantly enforced by language. It would be fantastic to know more about language structure as practiced by ecologically-rooted people. A few instances will show up below, but exposure and expertise is painfully scant in this arena.

Passive Humility

Central to dualism (also idealism) is treatment of “mind” as fundamental; irreducible; phenomenal. Matter is either thrust into a separate category (dualism) or obliterated as a figment of the imagination (idealism). Having done so, a person becomes the mind: a singular entity in control of decisions and implicitly having override power over material interaction—i.e., the actual boss…maybe immortal… Language buttresses this metaphysical assumption in all sorts of ways, but perhaps most obviously via first-person representations. Sentences that contain such elements as “I,” “for me,” or “to my mind,” (which even non-dualists grudgingly use as a matter of convention and habituation) serve to reify this purported soul-apart-from-matter. Likewise, second- and third-person constructions implicitly assert this “bossness” to be present in others: an entity beyond the physical. A materialist-monist perspective, by contrast, is satisfied with humans being atoms in a particular (staggering) arrangement shaped by evolutionary feedback, without requiring any transcendent owner/operator that might be called “me.”

In the gripping book North to the Night, numerous interactions with traditional Inuit people provided unexpected insights into a subsistence culture. One such instance:

Their belief that one should never draw attention directly to one’s self is carried to such an extent that, when a hunter stands to leave the igloo, he says, “Someone is about to go hunting.”

This is awesome: strongly resonant. It becomes harder to have a culture of jerks under such conventions, right? Also in this vein is the faceless man (Jaqen H’ghar) in the Game of Thrones series, who might represent to Arya their relationship as “A man teaches a girl.” It’s such a great convention, as a foil to dualism.

Passive voice is the easy remedy for personhood. Note that our culture frowns on passive voice: writing advice tends to discourage its use. Maybe it fails to stroke the ego inherent in dualism? Maybe dualists demand assertion of agency and ownership? It gets old, once attuned.

Besides striking a passive tone, it is perfectly common in formal English to refer to a person as “one.” Queen Elizabeth II (especially as played by Tracey Ullman) exemplifies this convention. Phrases like “One should take care not to spill one’s hot tea all over one’s crotch” might be true-to-form.

Use of “one” is definitely a good half-step toward humility, hiding just behind the skirts of full-on personhood. If extended to rocks and rivers and plants (in animist form), then the practice takes another significant step in the right direction.

What convention would fit a materialist monist perspective? It’s hard to say. An important aspect would be acknowledging the material actors involved, which extend beyond brains and bodies to include the vital environment. Also, “objects” considered to be inanimate in modern cultures would need to share the same language privileges. For example, a long-hand version to replace something like “To my mind…” might be: “What fits well into all that this body is—including all associated relations and heritage…” Yes, it’s a mouthful when using English. Presumably an actual non-dualist language would have shorthand words to sweep up much of this sentiment. An important goal is that the construction works equally for any material arrangement.

Possession Obsession

English and other modern languages abound with possessives. As a matter of clear communication, the practice has its place (see?). To speak of “my arm” at least narrows the target of speech down to two out of 16 billion human arms. But because our dualist culture is heavily invested in possession (money; phone; car; house; spouse?), it seems likely that the unacknowledged association is most often that the transcendent soul/mind/driver is the owner—rather than, say, the temporary arrangement of atoms comprising the body, or the stance that ownership is ultimately devoid of meaning in the universe.

The test is whether replacing “my arm” with a construction like: “the arm that is attached to Tom Murphy” is objectionable for reasons other than its cumbersome length. Maybe to get past the length issue, what if someone tended to use “this” in place of “my”: the syllabic length is at least the same, now. “Welcome to this home.” “That thought hurts this head.” It sounds a little off, and one could easily attribute the awkwardness to being one of convention alone. But pause to probe for any more foundational offense in the lack of ownership claim.

Newton’s Third Law

Often stated in terms of actions and reactions, Newton’s Third Law is really about forces. Any force has an equal and opposite partner. A book sitting on a table feels gravity from Earth while Earth feels an equal tug toward the book (really distributed among all the quarks/gluons/kinetic-energy/electrons in each). Another force pair—of separate, electromagnetic origin—is the contact force of the book pressing on the table, and the direct response from the table supporting the book (against gravity, thus canceling net force on the book and leaving him at rest).

In light of perfect pairing of every interaction, subject/object dualism is a distortion of the underlying truth of perfect reciprocity. Consider the symmetric situation in the sentence “Mike gives Tina a high-five.” Despite assigning one person as a subject and the other as an object—according to the convention of language—swapping names does not alter the essential event description. The less symmetric arrangement: “Tina punches Mike in the face” does not preserve fidelity to the physical event if the two names are exchanged. But it is still possible to interchange subject and object by saying something like “Mike’s face received Tina’s clenched fist” (pardon the possessives in service of conventional brevity). Re-framing a statement to reverse subject/object should always be possible, as a matter of perspective.

To explore further: maybe, in fact, Mike taunted Tina into the punch through an expression of disrespect, so that Mike was the true author of the event. Or was the cause of the encounter that of the father who “raised” Mike, because of values passed along (via both genetics and experience)? Or does it go back further to the rise of patriarchy in the wake of agriculture? Or further, still—to apes, mammals, fish, microbes, and supernovae? Yes, it does. It comes back to ownership and authorship, which dualists situate narrowly in the most proximate person’s (theorized) “mind.” Maybe the world is more tangled than this tidy mental construct would suggest, and all causally-connected matter/interactions—even those in the distant past—are the collective authors.

One job language inevitably performs is a vast simplification of an exceedingly complex reality into a tiny code. In order to fully describe the process by which the face of the one called Mike made contact with fist of the one called Tina, it would be necessary to detail the interactions of every particle in the entire past light cone of that event. Such a task is beyond impossible—especially when restricted to the tiny footprints that words occupy in a much more expansive space. It’s no surprise, then, that in its necessary drive to capture key aspects of an event, language takes shortcuts that inevitably fail to preserve the entire story. All that is really known about the foregoing face-punch is that face and fist made contact at modest relative velocity pursuant to—and wholly dependent on—an enormous chain of events and physical interactions.

Now, social animals evolve mechanisms to deal with behaviors that can represent a net harm to group survival. This might often involve imposing consequences on an individual deemed to be operating outside of the customary zone of tolerance. Such corrective actions are also in a sense passively mandated by the totality of circumstances all the way to evolutionary pressures and beyond (extending to the environment, the nature of the universe, etc.). It is, apparently, the way of things.

Equality

In this context, if assigning ownership of blame is a socially-evolved operative construct, perhaps subject/object divides are inevitable in language. All the same, what might language look like if avoiding this imposed duality? This is an extreme challenge, because it’s not a matter of vocabulary or slight grammatical tweaks—as in the case of avoiding “I”, “we,” “you,” etc. The very structure of grammar is impacted. This post can only give a dim sense for how things might otherwise go, being constrained to the use of English words and grammar.

The first trick in breaking the hierarchical asymmetry imposed by subject/object constructions is to select or favor verbs whose function is (or can be) intrinsically symmetrical—using Newton’s Third Law as inspiration. For instance, the sentiment that might conventionally be expressed as “Mike ran into Tina on the street yesterday” acquires better symmetry as “Mike met Tina…” but even more so as “Mike and Tina met…” Now the two are essentially equal players. Order is not important to the message, but language—as an audio or textual time-series—is necessarily serial, so some order (hierarchy?) is inevitable. The street plays a key role in the story as well: “Tina and Mike and the street met…” Even greater equality is achieved if time, like the street, is acknowledged as an active participant and not a passive backdrop: “Tina, Mike, the street, and yesterday all met.” Sure, it sounds strange to ears habituated to other styles, but it is a perfectly valid (indeed, compact) grammar by which to convey a unique event in spacetime.

Perhaps any such language would be less confusing if verbs were positioned first in the sentence, so that the list of involved entities will have an established context on which to hang. Otherwise, suspense builds, while also inviting impatient misinterpretations. Something about prime-positioning of verbs feels right to me, as many animistic languages are verb-dominated, not noun-dominated like objectifying dualistic languages are.

Other verbs that can be implicitly symmetric are ones like collide, merge, touch, agree, fight, play, kiss, hug. A way to get there: if the two (or more) actors can appear as order-irrelevant “equal subjects” to the verb—as in “The fingers on Mike and the face on Tina gently touch” (after making up from the punch, presumably)—then the verb can work in egalitarian symmetry.

Moderating

Grammatically speaking, verbs used in a transitive sense force an object—such as punch, grab, manipulate. Intransitive verbs like laugh, smile, and appear take no object. Some are “ambitransitive,” able to play on both teams (like touch or meet).

Now, transitive verbs are very practical in codifying everyday experience. Yet the Salish people seemed to manage without them. It is certainly plausible that a culture whose animistic tradition is strong enough can tolerate the use of transitive verbs without generating a sense of asymmetric privilege. Aiding this aim would be balancing the subject and object so that one speaks as often of the stone or river acting on “a person” as the reverse. The important point is not to differentiate standing (personhood status, interactive engagement, agency of a sort) among any of the entities in the universe—lacking justification outside dualism/idealism—but to acknowledge standing as broadly distributed, without favor.

Disappointing Example

An example attempt at non-dualist language may help. A good candidate would be a passage that required many quotes to caution against literal interpretation of first-person metaphysics (idealist or dualist). The following text showed up at the end of a comment that tried to resolve the apparent conflict between determinism and agency—a conflict that presents only in a dualist metaphysics. In its original form:

The past can’t be changed: it went the way it did without violating physics (determined by physical interactions). That past was once a future, so the same can someday be said about “our” future, in hindsight. In advance, it is impossible to know what the script will say, yet we find “ourselves” actively engaged in the creation of words that “we” utter as “we” go: formed by “our” atoms in full interaction with all the other atoms in “our” surroundings, including those in other human actors (together with those in rocks, microbes, weather, the sun, etc.).

It’s clumsy with all those quotes meant to disavow literal (transcendent) personhood, right? How might it go if trying to apply some of the suggestions from this post? Get ready for an even clumsier passage, when forced to use English in a less problematic fashion.

Never again shall any being (interpreted quite broadly as anything that can “be”) and the past meet, and thus neither can any longer directly interact. The past and physics agreed on the only course of action available at the shared time, via mutual interaction. Past and future meet in the present, at which time the past and immediate future agree to merge, becoming a single past. When a being and the next new moon meet, some of what now exists as open, unpredictable future will gel as one closed past. At that time, the being and the past will agree that it was the only viable path—clear in shared hindsight. When a being and time are engaged in joint flow, that being and developing events are hopelessly entangled and co-dependent. The atoms involved tirelessly speak and listen to each other, mutually deciding their equal and opposite reactions to the confluence of themselves and conditions. No two atoms—whether or not contributing to a living being—have any choice but to listen to the other and both act in tandem as they must. The long-range nature of physics means that particles in both the sun and humans are tightly joined in a mutual dance.

To English-acculturated ears, this passage does not seem like any improvement in clarity. But the part about past and future meeting conjures the image of a zipper. The past is already a single path, while the future has numerous plausible (speculative) branches, still. The zipper pull never stops, welding a single track from all the strands in the only way it actually does (and must) fit together. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but has some value.

Gibberish?

This exercise is not meant to suggest dropping English in favor of something like the example paragraph above—which if mimicked would be taken as solid evidence of insanity. Obviously, the languages spoken today are not going anywhere overnight. Spoken languages were not designed, but evolved on millennium timescales in close contact with metaphysical convictions. The point is not to advocate a sudden new language, but to become more aware of the dualistic impositions deeply woven and perpetuated into modern life, through language. The point is to recognize the prison bars and the constant brainwashing rhetoric issuing from the speakers in the asylum of modernity… and to dislike the situation. Only then will language transform itself, via changed sensibilities together with changing material conditions. Perhaps one day the only paragraph of this post that would make any sense at all is the one that today seems like gibberish.

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