The sounds of Being

For someone who supposedly does not speak, Helena Iara is tremendously verbal.  She responds when we talk to her, sings along with her favorite songs, and tells us very clearly when she is happy or unhappy.  And amazingly enough, at the age of three months, she speaks one word very clearly, "é", the Portuguese word for "it is", or (in response to some questions: Portuguese is complicated that way") "yes".

You're allowed to doubt me, of course: everyone knows that children don't speak until they are around a year old, and when they do speak, nouns come first.  It's mere chance that one of her first sounds happens to mean something in one of the languages that her parents speak.  She can't possibly understand the meaning of "To be" or "Yes", immensely complex ideas.

This whole counter-argument is quite true, but I still want to contend that Helena is, in fact, speaking as sensibly as any adult does.  Half of the argument depends on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the other on a rather difficult critique of the whole western philosophical tradition.

Wittgenstein, as a pointed out in a conversation with Helena many weeks ago, insisted that the essence of language does not lie in a single way that words mean or signify things or ideas.  In fact, there are many different ways that language works, and we have to pay attention to what kind of a "language game" we are playing.  If, however, we were to begin a general theory of language based on Wittgenstein's later works, though, it would probably begin with remark 42 of the Philosophical Investigations (and I'm citing from memory here, though it has been a long time since I studied the book): "For a large class of cases -- though not all -- it can be said that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

When Helena speaks with us, and we ask her "are you a cute baby?  Are you the smartest baby around?" and she responds "é", she is, in fact, playing the language game correctly, answering with one of the acceptable ways to say "yes" in Portuguese.  She may not know what the word means, but she is using it correctly: and the truth of the matter is, if you ask me about a lot of words I use, I might have to defend myself the same way: a perfect definition may slip away from me, but I know how to use the word!

Which brings me to the second question, the one about the western philosophical tradition.  Martin Heidegger famously insisted that the real question of philosophy is "what is Being?" and that most of post-socratic philosophy is a bad-faith detour to escape that very simple issue.  He then wrote five hundred pages of indecipherable prose to try to investigate Being, and didn't even get halfway through his project before giving up.  Freshman philosophy students have run the same gamut since philosophy became an academic discipline.  "What does 'to be' mean?"

"É"is the third person singular of the word "to be" (ser) in Portuguese, even if it is also used to mean "yes."  But many non-indo-european languages don't have a word for "to be" or "it is": in years of studying Hebrew, it was always a challenge to try to translate English phrases with "is" or "was" into classical Hebrew, because the word just doesn't exist.  The word that most often gets translated as "being" in the Old Testament (including in the famous self definition of Yahweh as "I am that I am") really means "to become" or "to make oneself".  [That phrase from the Moses story is even more complicated by the fact that in Hebrew, there is also no present tense: it might be best translated as "I will become what I will become," which makes God into a very different divinity than most Christians think!]  In my brief attempts to learn Aymara and Kuna (two native American languages) I have also failed to find a word that really captures the sense of "being" in English (or any other indo-european language I know).

So here's the point: we could say that Helena's use of "é" is empty, without content because she doesn't know the meaning behind the signifier.  One could argue, however, for as many pages as Heidegger tried to say something else, that "being" is an equally empty word, and we don't know what "is" means any more than Helena knows what "é" means.  In Hebrew, if you want to say something like "roses are red" you just say "roses red" -- the connecting role played by "are" (to be) is simply understood or silent.  Which to me means that "being" is a blank, a signifier without a signified.  So if Helena is using "é" in the right context, she has as much right to the word as Martin Heidegger.