Warning: Contains references to Wittgenstein
Transcript of this video:
I was sitting at my computer this morning feeling a bit bored and slightly despondent and I noticed that I was sort of clicking on browsers and social media…
…rather like someone who’s been playing a fruit machine too long, pulling the handle and being dissatisfied with everything that was put in front of me.
It seemed like every article on LinkedIn was shouting some hard certainty at me in a way that I wasn’t really interested in.
And yet I kept on clicking as if something good was going to come my way.
And I realised that it wasn’t going to.
Fortunately, a friend rang me up and we had a conversation about what was going on in our lives.
And I found myself saying to her, oh, I think I need to get out.
When I finish this call, I’m going to go for a walk, even though I don’t really feel like one.
Probably what I need to do is tear myself away from the internet.
So I did.
I went for quite a long walk and 45 minutes in, sadly, I’m still feeling quite despondent.
And I know myself well enough to know that if a walk isn’t working, I probably need to go for a longer walk.
And so I did.
I walked quite a lot further and still not feeling great.
I started to ask myself, well, what is it I need right now?
Because when I’m having this sort of negative rumination, often about things that have gone wrong in the recent or distant past, it’s really about something I need in the present.
And what is that?
So I thought to myself, well, maybe what I need is some self-compassion.
And I cringed, because my experience of receiving compassion from people is, well, they may intend it as compassion, but I often experience it as pity.
They’ll say something like, oh dear, that’s terrible.
I kind of die on the inside.
And I thought, well, it’s not compassion.
It must be something else, something more robust than that.
And then I had this idea that, well, maybe I need to invent a name for the mysterious quality that I need for myself right now.
And rather than just making a (whole) word up, I thought, well, I’m going to make this one up a letter at a time.
So what letter shall I start with?
F?
No, that’s too obvious.
D?
No, done that before.
L?
Oh, well, L’s good.
And then what, a vowel after that, I suppose?
An A?
No.
E?
No.
I?
Oh, A’s good.
And then G?
Oh, G’s good.
Is it a soft G or a hard G or a “lidge”?
Yes, that’s good.
Anyway.
Somewhere into this process, I decided the quality I needed right now was “legado”.
And you know what?
Even though I couldn’t really define exactly what legado is, it was exactly what I needed.
And my mood shifted and I was starting to have a bit more of a spring in my step.
I was walking along having more expansive thoughts and I was less self-preoccupied and…
I found myself thinking about a book that I’ve been rereading recently called The Overweight Brain by Lois Holzman.
It’s a really thought-provoking book that sometimes goes to the edge of being almost annoying in how challenging it is to the status quo.
And the chapter that I’ve been rereading is about Wittgenstein…
..possibly the most brilliant and exasperating philosopher of the last century and Wittgenstein’s view of language, which I’m going to attempt to sort of explain here.
I may well get it wrong.
But Lois was saying that we tend to think of language as naming real things in the world.
So that’s a bicycle, that’s a dog, that’s a bin.
And we use this terminology for ideas as well.
So we talk about the unconscious.
or narcissistic personality disorder.
And we think it’s like, ah, yes, well, that’s naming a real thing in the world.
And we confuse ourselves into thinking that we’re naming actual objective things.
Lois is making an argument here about how psychology is a bit of a bogus science because it acts as if these things are real when they’re actually made up.
That’s a video for another day, I guess.
Anyway, she talks about Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein dismisses this notion of language as naming actual things and says, essentially, what we’re doing is we’re playing language games.
that all language is a form of gameplay where we’re creating meaning with others moment by moment because the meaning of words depends very much on the context that we say them in.
I mean, if you’re English, the word “sorry”, well, sometimes it means an apology, but in many contexts, it just means get out of my way if you’re saying it to people as you push your way through a crowd.
So I was thinking about this notion of language as a game
And a few minutes later on, I realized, oh, so when I decided to create a word, Ligado, to describe the thing that I needed right then, I was actually playing a language game with myself.
I walked a bit further and then I walked past a little cottage in the village of Fen Ditton and on a tree in this cottage was pasted a notice that said something like “there’s no such thing as the poo fairy” which really caught my eye and basically this house owner was saying don’t let your dog poo on my lawn because there isn’t a magic poo fairy that’s going to pick it up
And I walked past it and I thought, oh, well, that’s a beautiful example of a language game that the house owner is playing with anyone passing by.
What the consequences of her sign are, heaven only knows.
Because, of course, if you take this view, we’re using language improvisationally all the time.
You know, people often talk about improv as a thing that happens in the theatre.
I think Wittgenstein is saying, no, no, we are improvising with language all the time.
when we describe our experience we’re not actually naming a thing; when we do it we’re changing our experience of it by putting it into language so the act of using language changes the experience – you can’t separate the language from the experience at least i think that’s what he’s saying.
And of course, it occurs to me that when I make these videos, I’m playing language games with myself.
I’m actually looking at a little picture of me here on the phone as I hold it in front of me.
And with a bit of a temporal adjustment, I’m playing language games with you.
And in the spirit of language games, if I say at the end of this one, “I’ll see you for the next one,”
I hope you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
Photo by Ryan Wallace on Unsplash
