Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism

6. Naming and Renaming the World

108 In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the character Adam describes an astonishing psychic event. Having completed the task of giving names to all the newly created animals, Adam recalls: “I named them as they passed, and understood / Their nature; with such knowledge God endued / My sudden apprehension” (VIII, 349–54). Earlier, in our investigation of Saint Augustine, this passage was introduced to illustrate a persistent view of symmetry: that names of things have a deep and permanent connection to their essential natures. As we have seen repeatedly, this view does not stand up to empirical observation or rational reflection. Nevertheless, while specific attributions of symmetry are usually mistaken, the broad intuition of symmetry is never simply wrong. I want to begin this chapter by examining a special way in which Milton was right. designating versus naming Milton speculates that Adam came to know the essential natures of the animals as he named them. Insofar as it encourages the belief that the names of things (perhaps in their original, pure form) can instruct us as to what the things are really about, this speculation is mainly erroneous. We 6 Naming and Renaming the World naminG and renaminG tHe World 109 will not learn a great deal about dogs, cats, or any other animals by contemplating their names or through researching their etymologies. About the porpoise, we may be temporarily fascinated to discover that its name is a blending of the Latin words “porcus” (pig) and “piscis” (fish), but this only tells us something about an impression the animal once made, nothing about its nature. At this point it may be useful to clear the air once again about the function and usefulness of names and etymologies. The alert and opportunistic symmetrist might well object: What you are saying might be very true about simple names like “dog” and “cat” and even “duckbill platypus,” but how about complex terms like “justice” and “courage”? In trying to understand what justice is, does it not help us to know that the term “justice” derives from the Latin root “jus,” meaning law; and that in earlier usage the word also has the meanings of precision, correctness, and straightness, as in the “justification” of lines on a printed page? The answer is, yes, it helps a great deal, as a record of how people have used this term in the past. Any serious study of an idea such as justice ought to begin with an examination of this record, and such an examination will often uncover bits of forgotten wisdom and knowledge—encapsulations of what other people have known and thought. However, the meaning of justice is not contained in its name, or in its accumulated usages. It is in fact the asymmetry of names to things that makes possible the long and varied histories of usage and semantic change that we find so interesting—not to mention the fact that the twenty-first century American idea and practice of justice may be different from (and superior or inferior to) ancient belief and practice. For individual cases of justice and for the attempt to define justice in such a way as to guide us in these individual cases, the linguistic investigation may be initially useful, but it has to be supplanted fairly quickly by investigations that are historical, empirical, and philosophical. And so, back to Adam’s animals. Having pushed back once again the hard claims of symmetry between words and things, even very complex things, I will contend that Milton knew what he was talking about— that his narrative about the first human being giving created things their first names carries an important insight. It is important to realize that Milton is not actually claiming that the names of the animals contain their essential natures. His claim is that Adam came to know their natures in the act of naming them. Here is where Milton’s speculation is highly insightful: the process of naming, especially naming for the first time, is 110 naminG and renaminG tHe World an imaginative process, a process of coming to know something. In some cases, Milton would add—most especially in God’s creation of the cosmos with words—it is commensurate with the process of creation itself. This is an insight entirely compatible with our conclusion about social construction —that important realities are made by language. Adam, of course, was highly privileged. Most of us do...