Alexander Stern writes:

In the film The Big Sleep (1946), the private eye Philip Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart) calls at the house of General Sternwood to discuss his two daughters. They sit in the greenhouse as the wealthy widower recounts an episode of blackmail involving his younger daughter. At one point, Marlowe interjects with an interested and knowing ‘hmm’.

‘What does that mean?’ Sternwood asks suspiciously.

Marlowe lets out a clipped chuckle and says: ‘It means, “Hmm”.’

Marlowe’s reply is impertinent and evasive, but it’s also accurate. ‘Hmm’ does mean ‘hmm’. Our language is full of interjections and verbal gestures that don’t necessarily mean anything beyond themselves. Most of our words – ‘baseball’, ‘thunder’, ‘ideology’ – seem to have a meaning outside themselves – to designate or stand for some concept. The way the word looks and sounds is only arbitrarily connected to the concept that it represents.

But the meanings of other expressions – including our hmms, hars and huhs – seem much more closely tied to the individual utterance. The meaning is inseparable from or immanent in the expression. These kinds of expressions seem to have meaning more how a particular action might have meaning.

Are these two ways of meaning – designative and immanent – simply different things? Or are they related to one another? And if so, how? These questions might seem arcane, but they lead us back to some of the most basic puzzles about the world and our place in it.

Human beings are brazen animals. We have lifted ourselves out of the world – or we think we have – and now gaze back upon it detached, like researchers examining a focus group through one-way glass. Language is what allows us to entertain this strange, but extraordinarily productive, thought. It is the ladder we use to climb out of the world.

In this way, human detachment seems to depend on the detachment of words. If words are to keep the world at arm’s length, they must also be uninvolved in what they mean – they must designate it arbitrarily. But if words fail to completely detach, that failure should tell us something about the peculiar – and humble – position we occupy ‘between gods and beasts’, as Plotinus put it. [Continue reading…]