To think about language is to think about what it means to think. That cumbersome sentence makes defensible sense, in fact, because language is the means by which we think. We take up language to say something about our experience in the world. We form subjects and predicates, sentences and paragraphs, and in doing so we come to human consciousness, a special kind of attention which objectifies the world and ourselves.
It is important to remind ourselves about this bit of philosophy because it stands as the principle of clear and effective writing. To write well depends upon thinking clearly: making distinctions between this and that, saying this, not that, directing our thoughts to a particular audience with a certain purpose in mind, intent on truth and not merely persuasion. In doing that we are thinking objectively, and we give both others and ourselves some measure of distance from the emotional charge which writing (and speaking) otherwise carelessly amplifies. We can, then, come reasonably to an understanding of things.
In the technics of language, this objectivity is accomplished through the linguistic (and logical) device of subject and predicate. The subject names that which the clause intends to say something about, and the predicate, which includes the verb, is the announcement of what the writer wishes to say. This two-headed creation of subject and predicate is the snake in the garden, though, because the distinction it demands we make between agent and action is responsible for both the glory and gore of our human experience. To think in this objectifying way is inescapably to think about things. Even more than that, it is to think things, to make the world into a collection of things, one acting on another. The subject-predicate trick is how we conceptualize. With it we produce a world of mental objects, giving ourselves the distance we need (good or bad) to assume a certain position and take a certain action. Everything’s a thing.
We can see how language works like this most readily in what are called transitive verbs, verbs which require a direct object, which by definition cannot be the same thing as the subject of the verb. For example, in the sentence her friend translated her novel into German, the writer wants to say something about her friend—not about her, not about her novel, not about the German language. We know this because only her friend is the subject of the sentence. The assertion which the writer then makes about her friend is what constitutes the predicate, which centers on the transitive verb translated and its direct object novel. This predicate is then completed by the remaining phrase into German.
And with that we have an otherwise simple and undivided experience sliced and diced and minced and mulched into subject and verb, direct object and complement—all accomplished by and undertaken for the rise of our human consciousness. This is why precision is said to be the heart of style: the more exact we are, the sharper are the images with which we think and write. And the sharper our images, the clearer-cut are our mental objects, which can then act burr-like to catch and bind a reader’s attention. It is no coincidence that the words think and thing are conceptually related. A thing meant originally a pubic or deliberative assembly, where thinking, or deliberation, took place. To think, then, is to see our human experiences as made up of things, one objective reality in some relation to another with a certain effect and consequence.
What’s odd about this propensity of language to make the world into a container of things, however, is that this doesn’t happen with a verb we use countless times every day: the verb to be. In the sentence my friend is a novelist, it may appear that there are two things in the universe of that statement, friend and novelist, but that, it ends up, is a illusion of our conceptualizing, because the verb is (as used here) does not intend to express action on a direct object (as was the case with translated her novel), but rather to predicate an identity between the two things named. Converted into a arithmetical equation, it would be expressed friend = novelist. Verbs that work like this are called copulas, and instead of denoting an action, they assert a state of being: my friend is a novelist ultimately means my friend is in a state of being a novelist. To distinguish things, in other words, is not necessarily to objectify and divide them.
And, finally, midway between the transitive and copula is the intransitive verb, which expresses action without aiming it directly at anything: my friend writes every morning. There we have action, but the subject is not seen to be writing something, just writing every morning. Here the world portrayed is filled with fewer things, and so the reader’s attention is corralled into staying with the action alone, not with the product or result of it. Understanding this allows us now to appreciate a peculiarity of the verb to be, which we earlier noted was a copula, linking or identifying subject with some noun in the predicate. But when there is no noun in the predicate of that verb, as, for example, in the sentence my friend is here, we must understand the verb is to be asserting existence, not identity, which defines it no longer as a copula, but as an intransitive.
All of which points to an interesting observation. These distinctions of kind into which we classify verbs have an importance beyond the academic niceties of wordsmithery. All three—transitive, copula, and intransitive—produce in their respective subjects and predicates the clarifying consciousness we so prize as human beings, but we should distinguish, as do the poets, between consciousness and awareness. To be aware is a matter of insight—not just seeing, but seeing into or seeing through the things which comprise our objective experience. In awareness, something is understood to be behind the factual reality out there. Just what that is, however, it is not possible for language to say.
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