Reality as Relational: Language and Meaning
If there is any one idea which has made itself evident in the last couple years of my study, it is relationality. At every level of analysis, intelligibility requires an antecedent relationship of difference, and it is the relationship of two things which bring forth individuality, identity, and meaning, substantial enough to convey truth. This applies to every domain of knowledge: language, ethics, anthropology, metaphysics, and more. At the moment, it may seem extremely conceptual, but I want to take the next few reflections to exemplify this idea, both philosophically and theologically. That is, relationality is not only philosophically tenable, but it is reflected in the Biblical Corpus. Let’s begin with language:
As Saussurean semiotics suggests, every letter represents a sound, and every combination of letters creates a unified whole, constituting a word. Words are formed by a sound-image (signifier), and a concept (signified). A sound-image refers to the psychological sound in our minds, whereas the concept refers to a mental understanding of a word (e.g., “car” is associated with a metal, moving box thingy, inhabited by a driver). The unified construction of signified and signifier equate to a sign; that is, a word. Individual words, possessing a multitude of meanings and situating themselves into parts of speech, are combined into intelligible patterns, creating sentences. This is the basic architecture of language: letters form words, words form sentences, and sentences form arguments, stories, questions, etc. So how exactly is relationality at work?
Recall the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9): Following the flood, civilization reemerges in the land of Shinar; everyone speaks a common language, and they set out to build a tower into the heavens so as to “make a name for themselves” and unify the people. But God, being a jealous God, “confuses” their language, “scatter[ing] them over the face of the earth.” So what on earth does this story mean? Despite a multiplicity of interpretations of God’s intervention, there is a semiotic way in which to understand this story, largely brought to light by Jacques Derrida’s De Tours De Babel: Contrary to the assumption that God altered man’s language in such a way that some spoke Hebrew, others spoke Mandarin, and others spoke Greek, this reading posits that all words became the same. Consequently, there is no avenue for communication or understanding. This is an insightful reading of the text, since it signifies the relational structure of human language.
Imagine all words are the same, and that word is “earth.” In order to understand the concept of earth, beyond mere visual perception, you need other words such as planet, ocean, space, land, etc. The absence of other words render the word “earth” meaningless. Further, imagine you are attempting to construct a sentence: “ Earth earth earth earth earth.” Again, this is simply empty jargon, a meaningless sum of letters and spaces. There is no distinction, no true relation, and thus no meaning.
Conversely, it is the distinctive and patterned relationship amongst words that brings forth coherent communication. Subjects, verbs, predicates, objects, adjectives, and more serve to create meaning. That is why an complete sentences necessitates a subject and verb. The phrase, “God is real,” is only intelligible because the difference between the words “God,” “is,” and “real.” Realness is predicated of God, linked by the word ‘is.’ Linguistic meaning, then, is the byproduct of difference and relation. Without it, communication ceases.
At the lowest level of analysis, symbolic language, relationality gives way to meaning. Any form of linguistic communication presupposes relation, or meaningful difference. This is why individual words or signs are arbitrary, since it is only in their relationship to other signs that communication arises, and the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis demonstrates, among other things, this truth. However, relationality giving way to meaning is not circumscribed by language, but it permeates a host of other domains— human sexuality, christian ethics, and Trinitarian theology— which I intend to address in the following reflections.