The Bergson woman was busy laughing at a stranger’s head. When she saw me, however, she continued our previous conversation at exactly the point we’d left it. Uncanny.
‘Is it not language which allows us to call forth particular things from the uninterrupted continuum of the visible?’
‘How so?’ I asked.
‘The word mountain allows us to separate the mountain itself from undifferentiated background - you know the argument in any case. The template of language divides the mundane continuum into the shapes of reality. When we see these shapes we forget that, in some sense, we are also seeing the template.
‘Animals, I said, who do not have language, are nonetheless able to pick out categories of object from the seamless visible. When you throw your dog a ball it does not matter that it is not the same ball as yesterday. The dog does not see the particular ball, only the basic repeatable pattern. There is a sense in which the dog intuitively grasps the concept ‘ball’.
It was as if a gnat had landed on her shoulder. She continued -
‘There is, to be sure, an implicit language of things, and human language is the most perfect expression and realisation of this. The world is ‘poor in language’ and awaits human nomination. The dog, lacking the word ‘ball’ does not fully know the ball, anymore than, not having the words ‘week’ ‘hour’ ‘day’, he fully knows time’
I was taken aback. ‘I’ve been calling you ‘the Bergson woman’ – are you in fact the Heidegger woman??’
‘For the time being.’
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