Category Archives: Rhetoric

Interruptions and Philosophy

by Tim Gorichanaz Mahabharata, Rhetoric

Yo, Taylor. I’m really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!

Kanye West, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards
Socrates, Study, Boardman Robinson, 1935
Boardman Robinson, Socrates (study for “The Law Givers”), ca. 1935, Smithsonian American Art Museum

A foundational work in European philosophy is Plato’s Republic. Even today, 2,400 years after it was written, it is still one of the top college texts assigned worldwide. The tome takes the form of a dialogue in which Socrates discusses a number of topics with various interlocutors, from the meaning of justice to the structure of the soul.

An interesting feature of the Republic is the role of interruption in the dialogue. Plato scholar David Roochnik goes so far as to say the Republic is structured around five key interruptions. Perhaps a chief observation here is that the entire book itself is framed as an interruption. The Republic starts this way:

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess […] When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.

Republic, Book I

At this point, the characters go to Polemarchus’ home, where the philosophical dialogue takes place. For Roochnik, the interruptive character of the Republic emphasizes that the book is (a) a conversation, which is how philosophy happens; and (b) deeply human, rather than abstract or systematic in nature.

If the Republic is a monument of Western philosophy, the Mahabharata is a monument of Eastern philosophy. It’s a Sanskrit epic—the national epic of India—and one of the major texts of Hinduism. But besides being purely spiritual or historical, the Mahabharata is also deeply philosophical.

I’ve only recently begun studying the Mahabharata, but I’ve already been piqued by the role of interruption in this text as well. Just as with the Republic, the entirety of the Mahabharata is sparked from an interruption: In this case, the seer Vyasa and his disciples have come to interrupt King Janamejaya, who was carrying out a snake sacrifice that threatened to wipe out the entire race of serpents. Nothing like a 1.8-million-word poem about your ancestors to make you forget what you were doing, I suppose.

And just like with the Republic, the dialogue of the Mahabharata is dotted with interruptions along the way. Perhaps the most famous is when Prince Arjuna is riding into war alongside his charioteer Krishna, when he calls Krishna to pause in no man’s land—”time freezes,” says my translation—to have a discussion about metaphysics and ethics. In the West, this part of the Mahabharata is best known of all: It’s the Bhagavad Gita.

I’m not sure what to make of all this yet. Perhaps it is only that we humans interrupt each other, and that interruption is present in any dialogue. But it seems that there’s something deeper at play.

In the Republic, Plato makes the point that learning is a matter of turning around—exemplified in the Allegory of the Cave—of questioning, of thinking, of dialogue. Perhaps these are all forms of interruption. This is quite interesting, given that the word interruption has a negative connotation: we don’t want to be interrupted, and we feel we shouldn’t interrupt other people. Then again, we don’t quite like learning, either, and we avoid it when we can. But when is interruption good, and when is it Kanye West at the 2009 VMA’s? (Or is it, perhaps, that Kanye West was being the consummate philosopher here?)

To word a world

by Tim Gorichanaz Experience, Rhetoric

The poet Muriel Rukeyser told us, “The world is made of stories, not of atoms.” Of course there is some kind of world made of atoms out there, but it’s not my world. I don’t see through atomic microscope eyes. I don’t see with utterly detached scientific objectivity. No, I’m a person, just like you, awash in the world—a world made of stories.

blue-marbles

Too often, we seem to forget this. We seem to wish we were more mechanical. We talk about our minds as if they were computers—some even dream of a technological singularity that will obsolesce our very bodies. But this theoscientific point of view misses a whole swath of the universe: the lifeworld. Philosopher Roger Scruton presents beautifully the duality of the scientific perspective of the universe and that of the lifeworld: Whereas the scientific perspective hears sounds, the lifeworld hears music.

I’ve been thinking about worlds a lot recently. I wrote a piece on Medium about how we create lifeworlds to inhabit simply by being human—I describe in particular the ultrarunning world. And recently I saw the film adaptation of the eponymous literary masterwork The Little Prince, in which we travel from world to world. We don’t literally travel from world to world, but rather we come to inhabit others’ lifeworlds—represented in the book and the film as tiny planets.

One of the pleasures of the lifeworld is that we share it, with innumerable beings—common things like scissors and tomatoes (as oded by Pablo Neruda), and of course other people. Besides this automatic, passive sharing, we can welcome others to participate in our lifeworld by opening them up to it. We do this through communication.

One way to communicate is through the written word, a very powerful way to share lifeworlds. We tend to assume that writing merely represents—for instance, the word “tree” represents the thing in real life that we call a tree. Certainly writing does this, and some writing—above all technical writing—relies on it.

If writing could only represent, it would go nowhere in trying to create a bridge between lifeworlds. But we know writing can do more—we’ve all gotten lost in a novel, for instance, taken over by the characters’ lifeworlds. Writing evokes the lifeworld in this way not by representing, but by presenting. It’s not the words themselves, which only represent; rather, it’s somewhere between and among them where the presentation unfolds. This is what your English teacher meant when they told you, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s why a summary of a novel does no justice to the experience of reading the novel. It’s why thoughtlessly adapting a novel to a different medium can be disruptive. That’s what it means to word a world.

Exploring the role of intention in the interpretation of messages

by Tim Gorichanaz Experience, Rhetoric, Technology

In a recent podcast, executive coaches Dave Asprey and Anese Cavanaugh discuss the importance of intention when it comes to interpersonal impact, and their conversation brings up some interesting questions for the realm of the pragmatics of written language.

Anese teaches that our intention forms the base of how our reality unfolds. For example, if you are stressed or angry, the people you interact with will perceive this—perhaps only subconsciously—even if your words and gestures are ostensibly pleasant. In other words, your intention (in this case your bad mood) permeates your outward performance. Conversely, if you cultivate gratefulness, positivity and calmness, you will find that people “inexplicably” are drawn to you. I’m not sure if these things have been studied empirically (I haven’t dug into it), but they certainly pop up so often anecdotally that they’re difficult to ignore.

These findings are curious, and if we consider them linguistically, they fall within the purview of pragmatics. There is something deep within our communication that conveys meaning. What is that “something”: The subtlest facial expression? A nuance in our voice? A shade of gesture? Something electromagnetic?

I am interested in the extent to which these findings hold true in cyber communication. In video and audio chat, for example, and also in writing. We know that the general principles of pragmatics come to play in these areas—but what about all this? They are questions that could be explored empirically:

  • Might an email message written by a flustered sender be interpreted with corresponding aloofness? That is, could a receiver predict the emotional state of the sender?
  • If so, what criteria would affect this: Sentence structure? Word choice? Punctuation? Could we, say, endeavor to calculate the net sentiment that a double space or an ellipsis accords, given a certain context?
  • Could there possibly be an effect with regard to the interpretation of identical messages written by happy compared to unhappy senders? Such a finding would be truly remarkable.