Every grammar teacher eventually figures out that no matter how you explain any concept in language, from part of speech to spelling to comma usage, you will be confronted by some accepted usage that your explanation cannot explain. Language being what it is—an organically human construct whose evolution no amount of effort can control—that things would be this way, though certainly a challenge, is not surprising. But this only mildly disturbing insight into language turns out to be true of everything try to put a handle on. It’s not that we haven’t understood evolution of physics or math or climate change pretty well. And we have marvelously useful ways of understanding psychology, economics, sociology, political science. Still, we always eventually come to the place where we cannot fit our handle or make a new handle that would not require destroying the entire system or structure of understanding that this knowledge is founded on. The problem cannot be overcome, but it can be acknowledged. It’s the problem of using language to understand the world. It’s the problem of the way language understands the world. And that is certainly an effect of the structure of the human brain, which is an effect of the way it evolved and what it evolved to do, which was not primarily to understand the universe. (I say “not primarily” because I am not convinced that understanding the universe is not, to say it tendentiously, why evolution itself was invented.)
If the goal is understanding, and if understanding is understood in the philosophical sense, the discursive sense, without emotional, intuitive or spiritual sense, in the way that we understand a math problem, in the logic of the pieces, in the way computer can be trained to write code without any possible interference by love or beauty or desire but concerned merely with efficiency and accuracy, then the procedure is always the same: to identify the pieces, to construct (changing metaphors) concepts that pen in each discrete piece and, monitoring, describe the interactions among the pieces. Great progress was made in evolution, and then came the platypus.
Thinking of spirituality or fiction or poetry or music or any of the arts (including those not yet created or defined) or emotion (in the Romantic sense) or any of the experiences of the body as forms of knowledge, paths to understanding, helps but by no means solves the problem. Each of these is also a thing toward which understanding is directed. And each leaves us finally unsatisfied.
