You, I, We, It - The True Grammar Language Experience
Sociology by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Part 2: The Grammar of Experience
Most of modern spirituality is bullshit. Just people running away from doing the actual work and following Gods assignments. Most people can´t even hear them.
We live in the idea of ‘being independent’ in a state ‘detachment’ as if that´s the way to go. The pain in the ‘we & it spaces’, the Humanity in interconnected reality we all share, is just too much for many. Yet it´s exactly where we get Gods assignments from.
In my last post I showed how philosophy is keeping us stuck. In this post I´ll dive deeper in the implications of language and it´s grammar.
The Grammar of Experience
‘I am’ is probably one of the biggest fallacies of modern spirituality. Buying into it we lose touch with the true grammar of becoming it. There´s so much more to our being than this ‘I am’.
The ‘self’ as ‘I am’ is an idea of defiance. An idea that arrogant people love to know about first. They forget the fact that it´s a ‘secondary stance’. First you know about the ones that look at and talk to you. Only then you know yourself as ‘self’.
In his book ‘Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit’ Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy puts it this way:
“Man experiences himself according to grammatical law: first as 'you', then he listens, as 'I', later two speak to each other. Afterwards as 'we', then we realize what we have seen happen. As 'it' at the end, because then it is clear what it meant.”
Let´s use a little story to illustrate this.
One day a father with two children decides that they need firewood. He goes to his two children and tells them: “Go into the forest and get me some firewood”. Through this he has struck ‘you’ with his imperative. He ‘named’ you to go, to become a ‘woodfinder’.
Through the pressure of the assignment the kids go. They talk to each other: “I go the right way” says one of them. “Let me go to the left”, the other one answers. The ‘you’, the hearer of the commandment cast out into the future, is transformed into the subject during the execution.
After a while the children come home proudly. They report back together: “We have bought back firewood.” The assignment was fulfilled. They have overcome the tension and abyss in time, and because time has been bridged, the narrators call themselves ‘we’ together.
In the end ‘it’ simply is. Something has become history because a command has become fact.
“We is the perfect of you, I is its present and you is its future.”
Huessy named these different states an ‘act of faith’. It´s morphing from ‘präject’, to ‘subject’, to ‘traject’, to ‘object’. The same word ‘go’, moves through alterations in time: first you say ‘go’ then ‘I go to…’, later ‘we went…’ and ‘it went…’.
Today we rarely do justice to all four stages. Often we stick to one or two, but all four parts are lifeless if not moved through in the right order.
“The word enters the world by präjecting a soul, compelling it to subjective communication, forcing trajective report from all participants in their assessments, and finally can be objectively reckoned to anyone.”
Language is altering every occurrence. For this purpose we are speaking. If it was just the imperative we could grunt it.
Language is creating a raft on time. The spirit is speaking ‘before’ and ‘after’. Language survives every situation and puts everything that happens into context.
We can see now that language goes around experience in time and creates the double time of before and after.
And it´s not just in time it goes around the experience. Language also creates spaces. hrough the pressure of the fathers request the kids internalize the assignment. The subject remembers the commandment and thus gives it space inside.
Later when the father counts the firewood, the wood lies in the exterior space of the world, as a piece of nature. This calculation is abstract as all knowledge of nature.
“It abstracts from the three steps of the action that had to precede it: while occurring it was agenda, in progress it was agitation, as history it was act, in abstractio it is considered fact.”
So what language is doing is not describing, but creating times and spaces. An ‘after-as-before’ as well as a ‘here-and-there’. Double-time and double-space.
“The abstract madness of school grammar declares the last grammatical creation: the declarative sentence “These are...” as the beginning of language. But it is the end, after which it has to start all over again.”
Spirit: The Language of the Human Race
The language of the human race is ‘spirit’, though often misunderstood as a tool to express thoughts.
“Anyone who regards language as a tool for expressing thoughts must misunderstand all these forms. Rather, since language is the Creator's means of throwing us beyond ourselves into an 'after-as-before', the connection of all grammatical forms with one another is the first thing that language must achieve.”
Language can express anything, because it came into the world to make the unspeakable, the newly experienced, sayable. This is why:
“Language only loves those who desire the impossible.”
Everything we can say today seemed unspeakable when it was first proclaimed. All alterations of language are the cooling down of the ‘at first ineffable’, which can be expressed more clearly with each alteration.
We can see this easy if we take for example the ‘we’, which is misunderstood as the plural of ‘I’. But ‘we’ is not a plural. A million ‘I’ don´t make a ‘we’. ‘We’ is something completely different. ‘We’ is the power of a common body, created and strengthened by shared experience. It´s singular. This is why we don´t have one humanity, even if we have billions of' I´s. Only if you have answered as ‘I’ to hearing ‘you’, you can say ‘we’.
Let´s meet in So(u)litude
Today many begin their life with hearing the third (historical account) or the fourth (logical system) alteration of language first. They build a whole system of logic in their head. Instead of living they think reality.
They never develop (creator) agency. Instead they live as separated individuals, in a ‘detached reality’. But humans were not designed for individuality.
“The individual person is not the building block of a group or society, because the individual becomes shizophrenic, insane, nihilistic or commits suicide. […]. We awaken to each other, strengthen together, master alone.”
Huessy names the processes of life that transform a powerless baby to a master of life. There´s three parts ‘reciprocity’, ‘community’, ‘solitude’.
Reciprocity - the first step
Even when reading this we create the reciprocity of reader and author. Polarity is the most generic reciprocity. Common ones are speaker and listener, father and daughter, teacher and pupil.Community - the middle step
The reciprocity that is repeated emerges as community. Father and daughter, mother and son experience the emerged reciprocity as the community of family. Teachers and pupils will find themselves in school, which they themselves have created.So(u)lutide - the last step.
This will bring mastery to the ‘lonely’. He becomes the heir of reciprocity and community. Through his so(u)litude the process can begin again. Don´t mistake the ‘lonely’ for the ‘individual’. As the ‘lonely’ has been created only after embodying community.
In ‘so(u)litude’, the ‘u’ in the brackets stands for ‘you’. If you´ve mastered community you become community in yourself.
I believe this is also the way in which we re-discover our soul. You don´t have a soul, you embody soul by building your ‘character’ in service to the ‘whole’, after realizing it´s all you.
You can do this all the time. With anyone you meet. Just begin to talk, have some reciprocal opening of your being and love. Create your soul in emergent community. Strong enough to stay with you in so(u)litude.
Thanks for reading :)
In love Marco.