Is Precise Language (Always) Good?
On Gödel, Heidegger, and Poetic Speech
If you’re trying to tell someone, “Hey, look out, a train is coming,” you want your language to be as precise as possible. Clarity means life; ambiguity death. You want your language to have no hiccups, no idiosyncrasies. The content is what matters; not the style. If a computer could say the message just as well, there is no reason to avoid outsourcing the task. Call this paradigm 1.
But most of our time on earth—we hope—we do not follow this survivalist paradigm. Out dignity is found not in the kind of messaging that is easily repeatable and programmable, but in the kind of language that is what the pre-moderns called “soulful.” Call this paradigm 2.
Legalese tends to follow paradigm 1. Ambiguity is a bug. Poetic, spiritual, and contemplative texts tend to follow paradigm 2. Take the genre of the parable. Is there really only one way to parse it, or is the awesomeness of the text not to be found in the fact that it engenders something new, something beyond it? In my view, great texts and great utterances facilitate insight in what is called a “between”—a space that is neither purely in the text nor purely in the reader.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem states that for every system there is at least one truth that is not provable within that system. Great texts are virtuously incomplete in precisely this way. Heidegger says that the greatest thought a thinker can offer is what is unthought in their work. Same idea.
Does this mean that we should throw interpretative rules to the winds? That interpretation is purely subjective, relative? Not quite. It’s just to say that seeking a single best or correct meaning is not the primary or best way to access texts that are wise. To make soulful contact with a text, to translate it in a way that does honor to your singular relationship, you must go beyond asking what does this word “mean” in the dictionary-sense of the word “mean.” You have to ask, “what does it say to me, now”?
If we only stick to paradigm 2, we do run the risk of leaving behind norms of accountability around comprehension. Paradigm 2 introduces the risk of arbitrariness. Who is to say what makes a reading soulful, authentic, deep? But if we remain in paradigm 1, we are really just boring, input-output machines.
The question is when is precise language good and when is it a hindrance? When is accuracy the interpretive goal and when is it an obstacle to something more existential?
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