The Primacy of Experience, the Danger with Words
The problem with words is that they can become objectified, taken and reified as if they existed apart from the subjective consciousness of the speakers and hearers.
These latter, are not simply blank or pristine rational intelligences but as human beings, complexes of body, mind, emotions, memories, inclinations, biases, and their contexts from which they are not separate, they receive or emit words with an immense amount of other ingredients present which are not discernible purely from the words.
The problem with words is that they are often too much and never enough. There are indications from the history of philosophy and religion (in the past, as often enough today, the distinction between the two is de facto arbitrary or at the least, permeable) that there was an awareness of the perils of over-reliance on words, particularly the written word. Plato acknowledges it, the Vedic seers and the Buddha acknowledged it, the Egyptian priest-philosophers acknowledged it, and we are told by classical authors that the druids of northern Europe acknowledged it.
When teachings are written down, when the technology of writing develops, there is both a great boon and flourishing in intellectual cultural life and a new set of contradictions and pitfalls. It of course takes the knowledge out of the exclusive remit of the elite and popularizes it in the best, progressive way. This is primarily a gain, and it should be regarded as the overbearing benefit of information technology (like writing). But overbearing benefit does not mean pure benefit.
Sometimes – as we may see, often times – the ease with which the objectified word can be falsely taken as a pure entity-in-itself and not a product and consumable of human consciousness, with all it’s inscrutable meta-rational, irrational, components has been a source of fanaticism and anti-humaneness.
This point is not about appealing to ‘eternal justice’ or some transcendental realm, but rather calling attention to the very concrete reality that words, terms, teachings, narratives, logical constructs, analyses, opinions, all – are never separate from the great cloud of other influences and multifaceted activities that make up the mind-body-environmental complexes we call human beings- speakers, hearers, writers, readers, teachers etc.