Heraclitus and Epictetus are my two, favorite, dusty, dead Greek dudes (I like many more, but these two are personal canon favorites). Both were known for their ‘odd’ language use and I choose to believe were of similar perspective, if not neurotype, as me.
My man, Heraclitus, had a grip on my concept of paradox as the ultimate herald of any existent, Manifest Truth. Standford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy as of Dec. 2023 sums it thus:
“The exact interpretation of these doctrines is controversial, as is the inference often drawn from this theory that in the world as Heraclitus conceives it contradictory propositions must be true.”
I believe, feel, and think that very few humans have a deep grasp on the global influences and roots that underline and support the English language these days. I used to read the dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia for enjoyment/discovery/fun. I have never been admired for this, nor the many facts held and relationships mapped. Most times, I just annoy the fuck out of everyone for trying to enjoy them too hard.
The concept, a moment, in which I am attempting to gently enter your left temporal lobe and complete a brain scan using tooling that looks figuratively harmful but is, in fact, completely made of squiggles on a page, and cannot harm you. (The human, vocalizing in front of you rarely finds as enjoyable a realization. Le sigh.)
I am well aware of the twin axioms. I used to be a technical writer. Axioms for literacy and language competency in audience reading…. and go!!
1. If delivering to a non-technical audience, reading level is best kept to between 6th and 8th grades.
2. If delivering to a technical audience, reading level is best kept to between 8th and 10th grades.
Heraclitus wrote on the PhD level. Many philosophers make fun of him for pedantic language, complex syntax, and being ‘too literal’. I’m convinced this fellow was neurodivergent. Indeed, I believe, feel, and think we may well claim most of the thinkers, eventually. Muhahah! MUAHAHAH! (ahem. humor.)
Anyway, I know I red-line the readability. I use it to my advantage. There is trust building in longer forms that the short simply cannot manage. Why else do you think they pay marketing people to make logo statements and slugs? Sound bites are the most expensive shit going, believe it. (Spent some time in paid placement/PR, and the basic outlines are now freely reviewable, it’ll blow your mind.) I don’t hook, more like hookah, really.
ANYWAY… According to Flesch-Kincaid, I’m usually between Master’s and PhD when writing privately, and try to keep it just as long, but lower on the mental drill for comfort. This item, as currently written and now being edited (!!) is at:
Flesch Easy Reading Formula: 51.38
Flesch Kincaid Formula: 10.28
FOG Index: 12.81
SMOG Index: 12.26
Automated Readability Index: 9.59
So it’s not like I’ve fallen out of the habit of keeping it down, but there’s often no way to clearly indicate a connection you see if someone else cannot. Just like that sudden presence of analysis wasn’t jolting to the moment.
Having a perspective you actively polarize against is a very uncomfortable thing. Humans who experience it are rarely feeling safe and protected. They’re usually either reactive to a known bias or to fear of a hidden one. So it’s pretty easy to feel defensive about not seeing something clearly being communicated OR something being communicated, but you do not find it to be clearly.
(This is like, probably 98% of all human interaction problem’s root, she bluntly editorialized. It is commonly referred to as ‘The Double Empathy Problem’. All humans are responsible for it, but presently, only the #neurodivergent humans, disabled, and marginalized humans are punished for daring to insist that neuronormative bias actively harms and kills humans — and this is their legacy and their 50% being profoundly shirked, as fucking usual.)
What Heraclitus and Epictetus had a knack for that I decidedly lack? Pith Profundity – PP >:); the art of a single sentence that contains figurative universes upon unpacking.
The only other group noted proficient in this to be the monks, nuns, and teachers of the various Buddhist philosophical tradition. (Which, in my opinion, is founded on this as both an art form and science, effectively several thousands of years ahead of mainstream, from roughly 3500 years behind, neatly demonstrating an example of paradox doing it’s heralding.)
But with Epictetus and me, it all began upon my discovery that a saying “I came up” with as an analyst in the early 1990’s is, in fact, just Epictetus of old being reinvented out of ignorance.
I wrote, “You cannot learn if you think you know.” The ancient philosopher, Epictetus wrote: “For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn that which he thinks that he knows.” – Book 2, Chapter 17, ‘The Discourses’
It is not narcissistic to be proud of myself reinventing a key tenet of stoicism; especially when I know I’m far from the first to do so over these thousands of years. Hurray, I have similarities, too!
Not to be disrespectful, nor glossing over these two human’s work, but I no longer do philosophical deep dives. Too much energy to engage in the active depths and too few improvements on form over time. Most of my inevitable disagreements now better defined and understood by me, to me. I hold with philosophy in general as a good thing, but I still prefer the ancient to the contemporary; the savor in these foods do not decay with age and their context is unique spice to my own, here and now.
Their age alone makes them replete with meaning worthy of digging up and contemplating as our cycles continue to repeat. I also find that most modern attempts have largely sagged into obsolescence in the face of the vociferous, vehement, venal vehicle that is this conflagration of late-stage capitalism on a world stage, again, as usual.
Glorious Rome has fallen, is falling, will ever fall. Long live Rome! (tongue firmly in cheek, folks)
I am called pessimistic. I find myself remarkably pragmatic, perversely prosodic, peevishly pleonastic, and practically stoic. Pessimism? No room at the inn, so say I, the assonance-hole©.
Now that we know that language is not thought, and thought is not language (finger points at moon, anyone?), another good paper from 2017 here… language is a puzzle whose meaning must be deciphered between humans to be understood. Meaning shared and reflected make us the species that we are… we are losing our sense of shared meaning.
So, to a far greater degree than I think any other than perhaps writers have realized, the language a human uses is effectively unique. The thoughts being expressed may share historical, cultural, and societal interpretations and agreements on a generalized meaning, but the true emergent expression relies upon engagement, mirroring, and reconciliation – most of which are unavailable outside the meat-space, face to face, encounter. Not even technology fully understands, let alone could replicate the data stream a human body sends and receives in its home, the biome.
I believe, feel, and think that the human inattention and disinterest in being a species is a sign of our overall failure at being a species.
I believe, feel, and think that no amount of aspiration or gritty optimism neutralizes the reality that we are ruining our biome in the name of transient benefits targeting a would-be superiority that is, on closer examination, an arrogant and ultimately misplaced sense of supremacy and self-centering so far afield of an inclusive ‘humanity’ as to effective be an example of anti-species behavior.
Active, literal self-destruction in the genome. We are become lemmings, y’all. The cliffs call. We fall. That is all.
That is not pessimism, that is actually happening, right now, all around the globe.
“Oh, well that seems remarkably lacking in nuance.” (The random, anonymous, usually passive reader, assumed to say…)
I love learning from others how to better construct a good strawman. Am I improving? I believe, feel, and think I am. Neener.
But ok, big hypothetical and likely rhetorical question:
Do you have the time to receive the data and lecture to understand just how nuanced this is? How much work I have done to get to that seemingly simple sentence? It’s like “42”. I have all the questions and readings that got me from ignorance to this period, right here.
You down with the infodump, my human homie? You got time to do this grind? Cringe, motherfucker; if you want nuance, share yours and I’ll see what I can do. Just know full well I’m already locked and loaded on reference or I wouldn’t be opening my mouth. Kinda just how it is here. I believe in science and replicated facts. Beyond this, I believe in lived experience. Mine. Because it’s the only one I’ve got and I don’t need another reason.
So when I hear you say things like, “That seems lacking in nuance”, you’re basically admitting you do not find a path of thought that allows you to rapidly chart the connections between science, ecology, and genomics that could and would immediately recognize the relevancy and validate it.
Which is fine. Most humans don’t seem to have this and I’m ok with being different. It paid my bills for a long time, I’d like to do so again, and I always wanted to do more with it, but it makes people too angry to listen, so it’s probably not as great as I have always thought it. How great can a thing be if everyone is too angry to hear it? Right?
Anyway, I’m always trying. And if I’m talking to you, believe me, it’s because I like talking to you.
I like talking to almost anyone. See, I know you have a different world in your head. I like knowing we see this world and one another differently. I like finding ways to arrive to a general agreement over both the similarities and the differences in how we perceive and consider the emergent process of living as humans. I like those moments when each of us gets to go, “Wow, I never thought of it that way.” Better still, when we’re all just sitting there in our feels because we’re together, living and being.
But when you say things like this? It informs me of so much more; all yet probability, still some emphasized merely by the language and our penchant for plausible deniability.
The higher the possible interpretations, the higher the probability that plausible deniability is intentional, if not premeditated. (One of the axioms in my ongoing opus on normative discourse in a neuronormative culture of weaponizing language.)
If one has a pruned awareness of how the systems of the world operate, it is difficult to recognize or see patterns across or that cross them, let alone conceive of a robust context of historic and multi-perspective nuance that have unfolded, nor how those tendencies add to probability in something called ‘distributed causality’ rather than remaining unaffected by changes.
But mostly, it just informs me via negative feedback that somehow, we are now approaching an argument, and that mutual disclosure is no longer considered beneficial to self, thus you become defensive. I am speckled with the many arrows of aspersions of life and time; if you cannot be pilloried alongside me, let us not speak, for we are neighbors, we humans, and we rise only upon one another’s shoulder or not long at all.
And now, with this language that you likely did not meditate upon as I clearly did (for all I use it more like paint than chisel), it seems you clearly signaled dismissal under cloak of constructive critique, plausible deniability cloaking both the jibe as intention and as signal of lack of interest in a different perspective; either/both telegraphing negative sentiment and some degree of personal (extra-topical) judgment, bias against disagreement, all elements constituting a ‘bad faith’ engagement.
Then again, I wrote that and totally projected it as its own thing. A mythos of perfected innocence wronged. Humans are really good at that, too. I’m not actually doing that here, but I’m spending the time to address how much I’m not doing it, so you know I’m not oblivious or lacking in self awareness. But have you ever noticed that it is impossible to say that without invoking it, nonetheless? Infuriating.
Then again, I did all this deliberately to make a point that I spent decades enjoying being challenged in good faith toward mutual understanding. Also, my constructs, gleefully identified as such, are formed of bits and pieces of actual, real life, face to face conversations I’ve actually had; I’m channeling people I’ve met and enjoyed talking about this with, some of whom were much more educated formally than I will ever be. Once upon a time, this was a regular and enjoyed activity. Kind of like mental exercise.
These days, some call me ‘an overthinker’ as if I am supposed to place their rating above my own, but I’m the arrogant one. Yeah, right.
I enjoy thoughts and language. I enjoy hearing both that do not originate with or in me. I enjoy that I have to extend myself to enjoy these things. I like to think, and to speak about what I think, so I can enter mutual disclosure and mutually enjoyable exploration of another human mind. Preferably different from my own, but not so much so that I am an ontological evil to be exterminated.
I mean, it would be nice.
Afterthoughts and related thoughts, no particular order….
– Language that assumes or presumes upon civility is, itself, uncivil.
– All humans possess three things, unilaterally and uniquely emergent: agency, autonomy, and lived experience authority.
– Access is not availability.
– Proximity is not permission.
– Expression is unique, sharing in generalities and intersections, yet unique to the concept of feeling and thought known in a human mind yet not known to exist in ‘the other’.
This is why communication is hard.
I am circling a far deeper rabbit hole that I have no intention of delving further today, so that’s all you get for now.
Happy humpity-hump-the-hump day, y’all.