I tend to use curse words. This is true whether I am with family, discussing philosophy with friends, and when I work as a therapist. Another therapist told me that they thought expletive was an important part of being real with clients, and that they "didn't even think about it anymore." I found this reassuring, as it is a part of who I am that I have been reticent to bring into the role.
I fear that the role needs to be proper, demure, restrained.
I also wonder about what I wear.
It seems to me that expletive is actually a philosophically interesting question because it demonstrates the highly contextual nature of language.
The idea I'm sussing out is that expletives can be thought of as 'direct referents', or words that are used in highly situated and embodied ways. Words like 'this' and 'that' only gain meaning in relation to an embodied context of intelligible action. Expletives are notoriously flexible, having dozens of meanings depending on the context. Because expletives are so context-dependent, they are an interesting starting point for reflecting on language more broadly. I am seeing what is the overlap between expletives and direct reference.
My friend is currently teaching Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (sup bro) and I have been reminded of how deeply that work explores these issues. Wittgenstein was able to notice the way that the word 'slab,' for example, could mean 20 different things depending on the situation and tone in which it was spoken. The word, as a form, is only a vessel or path for something more. The situation, in other words, has a meaning that exceeds the what can be captured by words.
Eugene Gendlin says that this situational 'excess' is an embodied meaning that is always present. Words only acquire meaning in relation to the embodied processes of our lives that are inherently meaningful prior to their being spoken of or symbolized. These embodied processes, moreover, are a form of speech (or logos) and 'speech' in the sense of spoken word is derivative of them (embodied process) and not the other way around. Gendlin's book Thinking Beyond Patterns is subtitled Body, Language, and Situations. One major upshot of the book is that the claim that body, language, and situation are mutually implying terms, and, moreover, form a central weave of experience. To be a body is to be in a situation, and to be in a situation is already to be possessed of language, or, better yet, possessed by language. To speak of any of these terms also implies the existence of others who are also embodied, situated beings, possessed of language.
The three words body, language, and situation could be reformulated in myriad ways to show their dependence on one another: to have language means to have a body; to be in a situation means to be working with language.
The three words, in a technical sense, are tautological. To say one is already to imply the others.
We all use language in these highly embodied and situated ways. We approach a friend in the park and we say 'what is that?' perhaps indicating a direction or object with a hand or a nod. The word 'that' only gains sense in light of the embodied situation where one can understand what it is referring to.
The situated-embodied character of language implies the existence of 'direct referents', that is, words that try to refer to something directly: 'this', 'that', 'it'. This is most obvious in the case of objects in space. I say, what is 'this/that/it' as I indicate spatially or bodily.
Direct reference can also be made to things happening internally: we may refer to an invisible psychic process (feeling, thinking, everything in-between) as 'this' or 'that' or 'it'. When we are trying to remember someone's name, for example, we may say "ah, I've almost got it..." or "I can feel it right there..." This is known, of course, as the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon.
This happens quite often, I think: we encounter some feeling of perplexity or stuckness, but we don't know exactly what it is. But something in our bodies or minds tells us something is up. We can feel it. I'm having to do this as I write. I keep writing about 'this' happening, or trying to understand how 'that' happens. I imagine we often are 'wrestling with fog', vaguely perturbed by our problems. Collingwood spoke, for example, of the early stages of work on a philosophical problem as vague perturbations, vague agitation with something. It is not until the problem is already quite far to being solved, he says, that he becomes aware of what he is thinking about.
This is a fundamental fact about our experience: Our total organism is intelligent, and not just our conscious mind. At an embodied level we are constantly grappling with the nuances of what is happening to us. Tolerating the 'vague perturbations' and 'wrestling with fog' means being in touch with this embodied process of understanding, simultaneously vague and precise, elusive and close, present and absent.
Direct referents are the words that we use to try and speak to and/or from that murky embodied business (that Gendlin always describes so well). We say, 'what is it that I'm working out?' or 'why did they have to go there with it...'
All this can be well summarized by a lyric from the band Why?: 'My body knows more than I can form with my brain.' The totality of meaning is in our embodied engagement with our situations. Embodied engagement in a situation is already enough to be called 'language'. I walk up to a barista, I point at donuts, and I raise 2 fingers. I have communicated, I have done something, I have made my presence, intelligence, and goals understood by a being that finds my comportion intelligible. A minimal definition of language: 'embodied relational comportion'. 'Language', in a more proper sense of symbol, image, rhetoric, or other more complex manifestations of language, are all derivative from language in this fundamental and primordial sense of 'embodied relational comportion'.
Expletives or swear words are direct referents. They are words that we use in highly diverse and situated ways to convey a variety of meanings. Their flexibility is evidence of their situation-nearness, and by implication life-nearness.
It is strange to me that 'curse words' are also called 'swear words'. I looked up the definition of expletive and it said 'an oath or swear word'. The word 'swear', of course, first means a promise, and second a bad or offensive word.
Perhaps in using expletive I am vowing to be close to life. That would be the conclusion I would like to draw from all this.
Yet my desire to draw that conclusion is something I can feel in my chest, not something I have thought through at this point. If I dwelt on that feeling in my chest, I have no doubt, I would find the right questions to raise and the right order to raise them.
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