Your Philosophy is (Mis)leading You Back

Sociology by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; Part 1: The Language of Sociology

I´m currently reading “Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit” (eng. ‘in the cross of reality’), a book about ‘the sociology of times and spaces’ by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

The book is different. While most of what I read (online and in books) is revamped old ‘philosophical knowledge’, the book feels like the ‘next step’ for feeling through into humanity. The problem though it´s super hard to understand. I´ve just written an article in german about it and the feedback I got was pretty bad. So let´s try again.

Sociology and the Authority of Language

The first assignment of Huessy´s sociology is the ‘installation of language into it´s full authority’. We have lost touch with this ‘authority of language’. Lies, propaganda, opinions and gossip are commonplace. The speaking we do isn´t actually real speaking. We just talk, without understanding any of the forces that move us.

For it to be real talking ‘speaker’ and ‘listener’ have to become one system. Before that there´s no use in actually trying to communicate anything. Can you do that? Just listen to my words and let them sink in?

This is the reason the first fundamental sentence of sociology is this:

“We must remain faithful to each other in mutual contradiction.”

For sociology to work you must stay in connection, in the “we-space” with others. Sociology sees society as the ‘syntax of grammatical soul transformations’. Society changes through us and the language (and grammar) we speak.

Philosophy on the other hand is built on ‘argumentation’. Before the advent of philosophy there was a circumvolution of language. This circumvolution literally turned the philosophers head. For the greeks language was part of ‘nature’ not of the ‘spirit’. Therefore the ‘loveless individual mind’ was seen as it´s bearer.

“They (philosophers) based their systems on language in reverse, where language does not produce our names lovingly, but consumes them rationally.”

The necessary place for this circumvolution is the ‘argumentation’. In a contention between self-opinionated parties every word has to be used in a way that the enemy (other party) can not dispute it.

“In a trial, you can only say what even hatred has to accept.”

This type of ‘speech’ is a necessary evil in a litigation. But what is a litigation?
In a litigation a whole lot of people ‘step in between’ the fighting parties so they don´t knock in their heads directly. So the trial is the bare minimum of responsiveness so that the parties don´t fall into feud and vendetta.

Neither philosophy nor philology should have based their study of language on this type of language. To become proficient in the spirit of language we have to speak out of love. Love is the source of all language. Even if we abuse language today.

Huessy divides ‘speaking’ and ‘talking’ in order to illustrate the difference.

“Talking is not speaking in the full sense. Because all speaking is advertising; but talking only wants to convince.”

A ‘sentence’ in todays ‘abused speaking’, talking, limits the parties ‘spoken’ about to what was said. True speaking on the other hand throws the law of the ‘sentence’ into the future. Into what the parties will say, in the future, because they love. It´s judging without judging.

Fun fact: Even the ‘categories’ of our grammar were derived of prosecution speech: ‘kategorein’ means accusing.

The Fallacy of Modern Science

Everything has a cause. At least that´s the premise of modern science. But did you know that even the ‘cause-term’ was derived from greek law speech. Pre-greek humans saw the birth of the moon in the moonrise, it was an occurrence not a causal happening.

Processes in life weren´t ‘externally observed consequences’, but ‘fully experienced’ procreations, weddings, births or deaths.

‘Occurrences’ can´t be derived from what was before, because only lovers can experience it. That´s the reason war ‘breaks out’, as the pre-greek language acknowledges. Something in me breaks in two.

Every occurrence means there is something new being recognized. Acknowledging this changes the one who recognizes. Just like naming a child engraves the newborn into the heart of the father.

So science is tracing everything back.

“All natural science traces the later back to the earlier, sexless, i.e. passionless. For it thinks in Greek, that is, in causes instead of occurrences.”

Modern scholars believe that ‘cause’ is a scientific term. But ‘cause’ isn´t a real term, it´s a dogma of science. ‘Science’ is the attempt how far you can go with the naive assumption of a cause.

So ‘cause’ is never a fact, it´s always a ‘method’. The method of asking whether it´s necessary to see something as an occurrence or creature, perhaps we can ‘simply’ trace it back?

Falling into this trap you reduce and reduce. Water becomes H₂O. So the name ‘water’ Thales called out can be denied. Instead of a ‘creation story’ we have a ‘religion of causes’. Even we become a product of our environment and past.

But all this is is the procedure of ‘finding evidence’, like in a court proceeding. A “Liebesersatzverfahren” (love-replacement-procedure) as Huessy calls it. The root of modern scientific thinking.

Plato's dialogues have canonized this upside-down relationship between naming occurrences and tracing them back to causes. His philosophy is conceptualization. And conceptualization is a subsequent emptying of names for the purpose of being right in a legal dispute.

“The Greek mind transfers the logic of the impassive lawyer to the logic of things, to the nature of facts.”

Society and science at large are living in this mindset. Taking away the magic of creation with our way of thinking.

“All this research attempts to undo the creation of proper names and the course of occurrences. […]. The method of science is not itself based on science, but is founded on the dogma that there is no harm in tracing every thing back to its cause.””

All ideologies, including the Nazi-ideology are based on this greek-thinking, strictly ‘scientific’. The Nazis said: “There once was a completely northerns type. Now we have to spawn him again. What caused him?”

Instead of children of god, made of love, we then have the ‘spawn’ that was and can be caused in the proper way. Like in China where they try to create the perfect baby through gene-editing.

Be mindful of when a ‘true name’ gets beheaded and amputated. This is always denying an occurrence or creature, as if acknowledging it would happen by denying it´s true name.

What are the consequences of this procedure and thinking?

• Whole nations were repatriated as if all they are is the consolidation of history.

• People become ‘solid’. We take away their autopoetic nature, by ‘sentencing’ them.

• Ideologies that try to ‘force’ specific change onto life by trying to ‘control’ the causes.

• …

“Cause-thinking is merciless against all later events! No thing, no person, no people, remain themselves. They all cease to be who they are destined to become. Science, as the heir to the Greeks, has reduced the entire world to its causes, thereby turning the last thousand years into rubble. They never happened. For science is sexless thinking and the world born and reborn can only happen to the lover.”

The Language of Love

If you read this far you hopefully understand the ‘fall(acy) of language’. And the need to put language back into it´s place. But what is this language I talk about?

The greeks denied the collaboration of ‘love’ and ‘believe’ in speaking. Original language doesn´t emerge from antagonism, but in advertisement. Todays we consume language. Most of us lost the capacity to ‘love’ language into existence, our capacity to ‘name’ from the ‘we’, by loving all of creation.

“The term comes after the name has already been given. This is why the church insists that the spouses confer the marriage and the official only writes it down.”

Funnily enough the majority of todays brides believes the registrar is marrying and giving her husbands name to her, because he is writing it down.

Actually we create language by being lovers to the universe. Speaking into existence from the we. Naming things and therefore making it real. Sadly most of todays speech is ‘philosophical speech’. We are fighting about the truth, instead of manifesting together out of it.

“The confusion of consumption and production, of cause and occurence, of insight and recognition is the fundamental Platonic error that paralyzes almost all scholars and educated people. Philosophy is the thinking that is derived from the argument in court, the thinking that leads back.”

Sociology on the other hand is the science with the help of which we ‘Vergegenwärtigen’ human society together. There doesn´t seem to be a fitting english word for this.

‘Gegenwart’ (eng. present) is the stem for ‘Vergegenwärtigen’. ‘Ver-’ is one of the most used german prefixes. What Huessy is talking about is the procedure of ‘making present’ in sociology. We don´t fight about the truth, but ‘make reality present’ together.

To the next chapter of this series.

Thanks for reading.

Marco

---