Talk, talk, talk! Words, words, words...

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We were talking (talking, nota bene) the other day about the limits of language, and William James's sense of the "glimmer and twinkle" of something in "the living act of perception," something that language cannot catch but that honest philosophers must acknowledge. I'll be curious to see if the Existentialists share a similar skepticism towards those who uncritically accept our human ability to know reality verbally. The post-existentialist structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, theoretical psychoanalysts, Derrideans et al definitely do not. (Or maybe it would be better to say they don't really buy into the idea that "reality" names something nonverbal.) Derrida famously said “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” ("there is no outside-the-text"), a view James would find laughable. Me too.

I was reminded of this while reading Emily Eakin's new memoir/history of those post-existentialists, The Frenchmen. At the end of chapter 27 she writes of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981):

...he'd scrubbed his work of any residue of biology or Darwin... there were fewer and fewer allusions to the world of things. Lacan had abandoned Earth for the theoretical firmament. [A critic wrote:] '...when I read his work I can't help thinking, 'Words, words, words.'

And at the beginning of chapter 28:

Words, words, words indeed. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a better slogan for the decade [of the fifties in French philosophy]. 

Ha! In 1892 William James had written:

What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words. --Letters I, Dec 28

And in Pragmatism III (1907) be wrote:

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation.

James loved words too. He just didn't think they crowd out nature and the rest of the unverbalized fields of our experience. As Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So WJ would say to Lacan and his logorrheic peers.