The Metaphysics of The Sentence

If you read people like Derrida eventually you're going to run across the idea that the English language - or languages in general - are always/already involved in metaphysics. Now as a philosophy undergrad, I didn't really understand that. It sounded correct, but I couldn't quite grasp it.

Well years later, I finally gave the lecture on the metaphysics of the sentence, assuring myself that I might, maybe, know what the hell that means.

So one of my students in ENG 111 (Expository Writing) asks me about my PhD. And I go - well my focus is Rhetoric and Literary theory. I'm interested in the theoretical. And I go - here's an example.

And I write this: "Bob hit the ball."

Well we could diagram it - or point out that it's Subject-Verb-Direct Object. But, I say, that would be boring. (Now for teachers out there - I do teach them this stuff, but it's not what I care about.)

So I go English language is active/violent by it's construction. (Violence being used loosely) English is always an active subject knocking about in a passive world. It's the metaphysics of our grammar. And, well, it's both good and bad - easier to understand if you put the subject early in the sentence, but always implying a world that's not active which is philosophically, well, wrong.

And I get blank stares from lots - which I would have also given this stare in their position. So I give them the counter example - and I'm proud of this one: Yoda. (This one's for you Phillip)

Yoda is basically a Buddhist and hence he speaks in basically passive voice. Yoda would say something like "Hit the ball I did." Now, we usually just laugh and go "That's how Yoda talks." But it's not an accident. Yoda is talking in a way that conforms to his metaphysical understanding of the world. Yoda thinks the whole problem is a bunch of active subjects thinking they beat up on and manipulate the world of objects. And perhaps we should learn something from him - perhaps not adopt his rhetoric, but embrace the lesson that is metaphysically behind it. (Next time we'll discuss how nothing is being anything. Or something like that.)

Wrote an essay I did.