Steve Talbott is a senior researcher at the Nature Institute and the editor of NetFuture, an online newsletter about technology and human responsibility. To view the full article, see netfuture.org or thenewatlantis.com.
To judge from some of the ancient creation narratives, the world arose as a visible manifestation of speech. "In the beginning was the Word," as it says in John 1:1. First there was formlessness and chaos, and then the divine voice flashed forth like lightning in the darkness. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." The world began to assume visible, comprehensible form.
Whatever we may now think of the old visions of creation, we can remain sure of one thing: without the speaking of the Word -- without language -- we would have no science today with its striking power to illuminate the world. This observation may seem trite; no one will deny that we must use words in order to achieve and record our scientific understanding, or to pass it on to future generations. But once we stop to reflect upon the fact that science is always a science of speech, a remarkable thing begins to happen. We find ourselves transported to a richly expressive realm of scientific meaning, as far removed from cramped, conventional notions of science as the first day of creation was from the primeval chaos.
The truths capable of revolutionizing our understanding can sometimes be so close to us that we fail to notice them. So it is with science and language. It is not only that we humans happen to need words in order to talk scientifically about a world that in its own right has nothing to do with language. Rather, it is that our need for words testifies to the word-like nature of the world we are talking about.
We speak a word -- say "atom," or "energy," or "mass" -- and by this word we mean something. Of course, we readily acknowledge that the word itself has a meaning of some sort, but we should not forget that this meaning (to the degree we use the word truthfully) also exists in the world. After all, the whole point of our language, our speaking, is to characterize something other than the speech itself. We speak about something. We seek to elucidate an aspect of the world. To the extent the meaning of our scientific descriptions is not at the same time the meaning of the world, the descriptions fail as science. As scientists we are always trying to speak faithfully the language of nature.
In slightly different terms: the world is in some sense a text waiting to be deciphered -- which is why we can in fact decipher it into a scientific description. As with any text, we expect the world-text to make sense, to hold together conceptually, to speak consistently, to justify itself to our reason. These are demands we can bring only to whatever is word-like.
The intimate relation between the meaning of our words and the meaning we find in the world may be so obvious as to seem almost trivial, yet its implications are so profound as to have mostly escaped the notice of working scientists. If we took the fact of the world's speech seriously -- the world speaks! -- there would be none of the usual talk about a mechanistic and deterministic science, about a cold, soulless universe, or about an unavoidable conflict between science and the spirit. Confronting the many voices of nature, we would inquire about their individual qualities and character, we would look for the direction of their expressive striving, and we would struggle to grasp the aesthetic unity of their various utterances -- all of which is to say: we would listen for their meanings. The necessity for such inquiry is implicit in a world that speaks and also in the scientist's employment of speech to translate the world-text. This turning a deaf ear to a resonant world and even to our own speech accounts, as we will see, for many of the limitations and contradictions of the science we have today.
As for what I mean by speech and word-like, I hope this will emerge with greater clarity over the course of this essay. Suffice it to say for now that everything word-like presents itself as a perceptible exterior bearing an inner and partly conceptual meaning. The meaning of words is never found in the mechanisms or physical causes of their production. No chemical analysis of the ink on the page, no physical analysis of the act of writing or of the speech apparatus and the air-forms it produces, can by itself give us the inner content of the words. That's because meanings and concepts are immaterial; they are not tangible or otherwise sense-perceptible things, which is what I mean by saying they are inner. One could also say: meanings are always contents or expressions of consciousness.
Most of us have had the experience of successfully reading the meaning of texts and hearing the meaning of speech, and therefore in this practical sense we already understand words as bearers of meaning. And just as we find our own speech vitally supplemented by physical gestures of every sort -- gestures that are themselves outward bearers of inner meaning -- so, too, all of nature presents us with word-like gestures. The trouble, however, is that we often fail to pay attention; we never learn the language of the world we inhabit. We try to master nature while becoming increasingly deaf to her complex symphony.
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The emptiness of scientific language, just so far as it fulfills the reigning quantitative and logical ideal, is scarcely open to dispute. It has been recognized, as we have seen, by prominent scientists and philosophers. If you still want to declare the world cold and impersonal, indifferent to human hopes and feelings, relentless and implacable in its mindless obedience to physical necessity -- well, that is certainly your privilege. But the mathematical precision, certainty, determinacy, and universality of scientific laws is simply not an adequate or convincing ground for this contention. At least, it remains unavailable until one elucidates a path from empty formalism to a revelatory description of the world, and then demonstrates what the precision, certainty, determinacy, and universality of modern science mean for the enfleshed world. This in turn will require coming to terms with Einstein's now-familiar paradox: "As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
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We are creatures of the word, inhabiting a world that can be understood only as speech or text -- even if we prefer to notice only its blank, unspeaking grammar. Our own communication depends upon the word-like character of the world; if we did not find word-stuff all around us, we would have no material for our own words. Nature presents us, not with blank, mute, disconnected objects, but with expressive images, and such images are the native elements of story, song, and poetry. Even at the level of "mere" sound we can say: only because every sound has its own gestural and significant form -- only because it speaks with its own qualities -- can we recognize it as a distinctive element and employ it for our own speech.
Further, even where we have reduced speech to the high abstraction of alphabetic text and have rendered the connection between word-signs and their meanings perfectly arbitrary, a speaking quality of the signs themselves is prerequisite to our apprehension of them as words. If we did not perceive and feel the different qualities of a horizontal and vertical stroke, and again of a vertical and circular stroke, we would be unable to distinguish one alphabetic character from another. This last point, humble as it may be, sums up everything I've been saying in this essay. It is also extremely difficult for people of our day to grasp, and is worth a great deal of reflection.
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We gain a very different kind of clarity, not by minimizing the qualitative, phenomenal content of our scientific descriptions, but by maximizing it. We illuminate a phenomenon from every possible side, in every different light, exploring its contextual relations and potential for transformation as fully as we can. This clarity is not attained by stripping reality down to a formal grammar. It's the clarity produced by fullness of understanding rather than ease or simplicity of understanding. Instead of obscuring phenomena with the blinding white light of abstraction, and so reducing them to a kind of black-and-white skeletal syntax, we open ourselves to receive the phenomena in all their full-throated color.
Then, perhaps, it will not be too much to hope that we as scientists may learn to "sing the light" of creation -- not as voyeurs staring at a cold and alien world disconnected from our own life, but as participants in a new morning of creation when, if we make ourselves worthy instruments, the Word will rise up in us as a song of understanding.