Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 209

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PÉTUR KNÚTSSON
appears to many to verge on the abhorrent, although it does not
seem that such a stance would necessitate any particular change in
the present modes of linguistic analysis in themselves. This distaste
is reminiscent of earlier attitudes towards heresy, which is why I
mentioned faith a little earlier. The stock response is to ask, “Where
do you suppose language came from, then? Extraterrestrial beings?
God?” I cannot see the relevance of these questions to the accepted
practice of linguistics. My colleagues do not find it difficult, in
their linguistic analyses, to disregard the question of where the
human mind came from, although it seems to me that that is as
difficult a puzzle as the question of language. The human mind –
by which they usually simply mean the brain – has simply evolved,
they say, like any other system. And language hasn’t?
The human brain, according to the present state of our scientific
beliefs, is a substrate which supports (among other things) a com-
plex system known as language. This implies that, without the
substrate, the system cannot become manifest; but it does not fol-
low that its organization as a system is an essential quality of the
substrate alone, or is controlled by the substrate alone, although it
manifestly thrives there. Natural phenomena occur continually in
the form of activity in substrates without being generated or even
maintained by them. A wave in the sea is a perturbation of water;
it is a movement, not an object; a verb, not a noun. If it were not
for the wind that moves upon the waters the sea would not act in
this way, as it sometimes doesn’t. Of course it is sensible of us to
treat the wave as an object, to run away when it approaches lest we
get our shoes wet. We can study waves, calculate their dynamics,
protect our shores from erosion, design mechanisms to turn their
energy into electricity. But waves roll through the sea, and pass on;
the sea enables them, but does not generate them.24
The human body, we are told, renews all its molecules over a
certain span of years. This formulation is in itself a reification of the
human body. We might better say that the material substrate sus-
24 “Waves are not generated by the sea, but by the wind.” But the wind, too, is perturbation of the
atmosphere. Let us ignore the question as to what generates whatever it is that generates the wind
(moving upon the waters). The point to focus on is that the wave, like the wind, acts as if it had
been generated. Or rather, that is how we can usefully think about it; as long as we remember that
it is not generated by its medium.
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