philosophical grammaticality

i just finished Surprised by Joy, the autobiographical conversion story of Clive Staples Lewis. his writing is beautiful and insightful and i enjoy contemplating his phrasing just as much as the ideas presented through it.

he talks centrally (as centrally as an autobiographical work can) about what he calls Joy. a feeling of wanting something so intensely that the very desire itself is more desireable than anything.

now, Lewis's description of Joy does not fully match my religious experiences; i was raised in a very different environment. but i appreciate the idea and am immensely interested by it because of the perplexity it arouses in language. in my own notebooks i have questioned the meanings of words like 'want' and 'lack' and 'have' and 'possess.' lewis makes a muddling paradox out of it all.

i love paradoxes.

my first semester back from england, i took a philosophy in literature class, by a charmingly ironic old man who brought coffee to class every day and betrayed no harsh opinions about anything. it was a classic academic autumn, lit up with exploratory excitement. in the class we talked about another lewis who was fond of writing in paradoxes: lewis carroll. lewis carroll has very little to do with what i'm trying to say here, actually. but among the lectures on alice and logic games, i remember our professor saying that he taught another class, philosophy somethingorother, which had as its most basic premise the idea that all philosophical problems are at bottom problems of grammar.

which struck me, a newly declared english major. how strongly language influences our thinking if its grammar forms all the deepest philosophical arguments, shaping and qualifying all the answers we may ever hope to find.

yet we have power over it. we grant all words the meanings they have, we spawn new words all the time, and we can twist innocent words into completely different connotations merely by using the tone of our voice or the look on our face.

i am also on the verge of finishing orwell's 1984. this book terrifies me. while the thing is more often considered a political commentary, i find it (especially the ending) horrifically religious. the way poor winston is forced to change everything he ever thought and believed, to give up himself and his every emotion, to surrender everything to the Party, all that is eerily reminiscent of the way we as christians are asked to surrender everything up into our love of God. the only difference is that it seems less tortuous. but does it really? is it not life's pain that teaches us, inexorably, that one way is wrong and one way is right. that is guilt. that is consequence. in 1984 it says often that 'the end is contained in the beginning,' meaning every choice contains its results within it, inescapable. that's life.

there is also a lot of talk, in the book, of Newspeak. a language so narrow and so confining that it impedes all heretical thought, making original expression and independent thought impossible. it's all part of how grammar influences philosophy. crazy.

of course i don't believe that God is really equivalent to big brother or that the way life and the world shape us is anything as brutal as the controlled and miserable society depicted by george orwell.

i'm not complaining. i'm just making connections.