The Spiritual Interior of the Word

Chapter 5: Hearth Science

Kotodama (Japanese): The Spiritual Interior of the word

I discovered Professor Leopold Auerbach when a colleague sent me a research paper about the Myenenteric Plexus earlier this autumn. Since the plexus also bears the name of a person, I wanted to know the story of how it came to be discovered, and who it was discovered by. I wanted to attempt, if I could, to locate myself with him at the point of discovery, to look over his shoulder, to see if I could feel what he felt. I wanted to understand the method of innovation and its epistemological foundation: how did he come to know what he knew? Are the stories we are inheriting about these breakthroughs true to how they are actually made?

Over the past thirty years, as I have deepened into studying the art and science of connection through a number of trans-disciplinary lenses, including the linguistic, I have been intrigued by lexical gaps in the English language, places where it is missing words. If a language is a map, a net, and if as Wittgenstein suggests, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” then the places where a language has holes in it–the gaps in the net–tell us the limits of the world people speaking that language are trapped in.

A lexical gap, by definition, means that someone else (some other language) has noticed that something exists or could be differentiated, and yet there is no word for it in the language that you speak. Perception is often fused with language in very profound neurological ways. There are cultures that don’t differentiate between the colors blue and green: people who grow up in those languages are unable to distinguish between the two colors. Is that language or optics? This is what Wittgenstein was pointing at. Linguistic limitations become neurological and metaphysical. Physics tells us that the world is made out of quarks and atoms. Wittgenstein, and John before him¹, would have us believe it is woven from the cloth of words.