Tacite: When The Poverty of Language Is A Good Thing
We are nothing without a shared experience. Sometimes words are truly not enough
You are reading The Busyminds Project: a performance site for irreverent learning. I write essays from contemplation, interest, and curiosity. I test things and hold fast to that which is good. It is my way of staying awake (and receptive to wonder) in a lulling world.
Warning: This essay you are about to read is quite lengthy. It will take about 12 minutes to read through. Therefore, I recommend that you read it at a convenient time. That way, I will not rob you of more important things and will get your full attention whenever you are ready. Until then, thank you for being here. I appreciate your readership.
The phenomenon “tacit knowledge” is — by the implication of being tacit — rarely spoken about. Yet its intractability does not make it to be less pervasive or abundant in our lives. In fact, it is more abundant and pervasive than the tractable, definitional modes of knowledge. For all I know, tacit knowledge will be said by Fat Tony to be “I don’t know it in words but I know what it is.”
I start with something simple: beauty. Until Scruton, I had not realised that I knew what beauty was without being able to define what beauty was. (When communication happens irrespective of the looming vagueness around, it means that both parties are aware of more than they can speak.) And this is not about its meaning in the lexicon; I can guarantee that not many of us ever sought the dictionary to define beauty. The definition that “a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight” does nothing for me if I do not already know what “pleases the aesthetic senses” means. I only know what those words mean because I have experience; the experience precedes the meaning. You will find it tough to explain beauty and “aesthetic senses” to a fellow who has no aesthetic senses. Beauty only means something to people who know beauty.
Imagine you saw a beautiful woman. And while avoiding the words “beautiful” or “pretty” because of their vagueness, you will realise that you cannot demonstrate what you saw. Yet, you saw it. It is from this poverty of words that the cliche arose “seeing is believing”; because no amount of words can do justice to our description unless you see. The words we employ only mean so much to a fellow with a shared experience.
On a more silent level, the qualities we call "grace" in a woman and "charm" in a man are qualities that we pick up subtly yet swiftly without having definitions for them. For if we were to meet a blind person who cannot perceive this quality of grace and charm in another person, it is useless to use the words grace and charm. Grace and charm strike a tune only because both the hearer and the speaker presuppose what quality is spoken of. You don’t know “rizz” unless you see it. By this, we know that "grace" and "charm" are shriveled words that fall short of describing the phenomenon at hand and in view. The true qualities denoted “grace” and “charm” are useful in so far as they are self-evident. The same goes for “aura.”
You may, if you are so versed and well-equipped with words, employ hyperboles and enthusiasm to describe a woman’s beauty to your friend. You may get geometrical: describe the symmetry of her face, the cuteness of her lips, and the birthmark between her eyebrows. He may still fall short of grasping it unless he is a gifted artist with a sharp imaginative eye. He may catch on, and know that you have truly seen an object so mesmerizing. But it is an error to conflate your friend’s enthusiasm with the notion that he grasped what manner of beauty you speak of. In other words, your friend may contact your excitement but his vision remains blurred as to what you saw, what quality you perceived or were enchanted by, and what originally infected you. Your excitement may infect him, and your exhilaration may overwhelm him. He may look forward to seeing what you saw, but he will never grasp fully how beautiful she was. This is the case with tacit knowledge.
To raise the confusion further, assume two descriptors for the same phenomenon. One says the river was majestic. The other says the river was nice. Those are two descriptions of the same thing. How can you know which word or description fits the bill unless you see the river for yourself? By the virtue of language being symbolic, all our descriptions cannot help but be stripped and reductive. This is the poverty of language. And it is a good thing.
See again; relating tacit knowledge is like relating colors. How may I relate "red" to a person born blind? Red only means something to those who already know what red looks like. I have thought of describing red by alluding to other senses such as heat. Can I tell the man that “red” is associated with heat? What difference will that make? Will he be able to imagine it? Aren’t I just sending him on a fictitious goose chase? It becomes clear to me that there are things we cannot speak of if we do not already share its common knowledge. Safely in this category of things we share as common knowledge are the ideas of the “self-evident” truths.
With tacit knowledge, there is a daunting task: the exercise of finding the words to objectively describe the qualities one wishes to demonstrate. How can I describe the soul of the world in terms that allow my reader to capture the soul of the world? A mistake that I believe we make when we reach this point is we substitute the utterly subjective for the objective because we think any word fits. For instance, when speaking of the beauty of the sunset, we may adulterate the objective beauty of the sunset with words that do not acutely communicate what we see. We give in too soon and too hard to the poverty of words. We accept defeat, unconsciously though as if anything goes. The challenge here presented is to see how I may describe a sight such that you get a more precise transmission of its quality. Is it possible to do so while avoiding vague platitudes like “magnificent,” “touching,” and “transformative”? Not that awe and magnificence cannot be prompted by the sight of the sunset. But how long can a listener hold on to this conviction of awe and sunset without seeing it for himself?
None of those things accurately describe what my eyes see. What you are actually getting from me if I deploy those words above is how I feel about the phenomenon itself. But what if I am selling you short — as we so often do? And this is a hard line to delineate. It also raises the question: to what level is a prompting about a thing equal to the thing itself? And the bigger challenge: how can I do better?
I hope you will see by reading this that in speaking, we are ultimately poor, irrespective of the many words that exist in all languages. We will consequently realise that more times than we will admit, we will have to settle for less when transmitting some of our experiences. But it is a good thing that we have this poverty; it saves us from merchants who wish to sell us on their emotions and perceptions rather than on the experience itself. It will also, because narrating is effectively reductive, allow many more of us to go in for a first-hand experience.
In my own small corner of the world where I learn and have experiences, I have had my share of this sting of linguistic poverty. Not because I am short of words. But because I know that words are not enough. I look at things and know that they are there. I say that they are there but I am not believed. Not because I lied but because most likely, I am either explaining to the blind, or I am explaining to the naive. The naive constantly request for everything to be tractable; the blind think the intractable is absent. Maybe if Socrates were here with me, or if he reads this, he would, for instance, kindly ask me: “define human nature” I tell you, I will be dumbfounded. Not that I cannot see this thing called human nature; I sure can. But asking me to define it because “if you cannot define it, you don’t know it,” I am sure to walk out of there with my head bowed in sadness; I can see it, but I just cannot say it.
This problem remains with everything tacit: I can perceive it; it is right here; I perceive it stronger than I perceive many demonstrable facts. But to tell it, to define it, to describe it, I fall short. This dumbfoundedness leaves me looking like a fool who makes up a phenomenon that he cannot defend to bypass a conversation. Again, if I were to describe a Lion as majestic, I am simply borrowing the metaphor of regality — I am appealing to the aura of a king to help describe the aura of the Lion to my listener. If my listener knows not what the aura of a king feels like, communication will not have happened. We are nothing without a shared experience. Sometimes words are truly not enough.
But I want us to look again. I want us to see this not as a curse but as a blessing. Because tacitness is designated so, as in the Latin tacitus, it means wordless or noiseless. Tacitness is a curse to the loud and loquacious but a blessing to the silent and attentive. Tacit knowledge in its original place in the world is doom for those who are hasty to transmit it. It is a blessing to those, however, who wish to experience it. Tacit knowledge is essentially silent, secret, and implicit. It is locked in, seemingly transmitting itself without offering easy access to demonstration and description. It seems to open itself up to a few people to describe and demonstrate — only to a few individuals who have no common, traceable quality that foretells what they can do unless they do it. We do not know such people or simply identify them by talent. We know them post-event; only after they have articulated such quality.
May I interest you in articuliosa? This is the associative joy of articulation that we experience as readers and listeners when we find people who say precisely what we feel, think, or know in words and vocabularies that we do not possess. Articuliosa — the joys of articulation — is best compared to John the Baptist’s leap in Elizabeth’s womb when she met Mary her cousin who was pregnant with Jesus Christ the savior of the world. It is a leap, a lift, a relief that an implicitly known quality has met its liberation in the words of another man. Shockingly, even the all-encompassing German language has not a single word to describe this associative joy. Again this is the doom of tacit knowledge. Does this mean then that we should, as Wittgenstein recommended, not speak because we know it never does justice?
I think we should. We should still try to relay what we know but cannot perfectly say. However, this comes with a caveat — a specific limitation. We ought to be careful and deliberate about it. This class of knowledge does not respond well to the careless use of words. It requires a certain discipline; a discipline not found in everyone who simply speaks. Because if we carelessly transmit tacit knowledge, we run the risk of transmitting not the imperfect things, but the wrong things. It takes care and attention. Without care and attention, like with superfluous critics, shallow commentators, and loose-tongued linguists, we face the danger of pollution; of putting things out there that occupy space but have no meaning. We face an expanding emptiness; we risk trading one’s attention for smut; asking our eyeballs to digest vacuity. It robs us of our innocence; kills our ability to contemplate; suffocates our focus; all the while supplying us with memes and talking points.
With carefulness comes attention; with attention comes a contemplative posture. And here is what I mean: don’t speak of the Mona Lisa until the Mona Lisa speaks to you. Don’t go off in all profanity, speaking of the Mona Lisa unless you have found just the words to transmit her transcendent quality. It takes time. As Simon Sarris has said, while we should all strive for clarity, “a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention.” The price one must pay to deal in things of a tacit quality is the price of time and attention.
In a fast-paced realm where attention is scarce and content is king, careless descriptors abound; so do our destruction. Any superfluous words that do not transmit the genuine quality of the Mona Lisa occupy the same space that true words should have. It renders us grammatically obese and disables us to move toward the real object. It puts an unhealthy distance between the listener and the object which is the exact inverse of what it ought to do — to bring us nearer to it. Take the example of critics and reviewers. Their job is to describe an experience. But mixing words with cynicism does not a good reviewer make. It is the experience that forms the reviewer — it is by immersing himself in the experience or quality that he gets the words to describe the experience. Without any intent to hastily speak, but by observing intently enough, the quality offers him the words to describe the experience. The only price is “staring intently enough”; the currency is attention.
Anyone may paper over an experience with words; seemingly because he has them abundantly. But he will never transmit the quality. He will like every one of us have accomplished nothing even though he expends all the words in his grammatical arsenal. A book reviewer may write “such an amazing book!” and leave us with that. We will only have to gaze at those words a little longer to know that although we have the sense of those words — because we understand syntax, it has no “soul”; neither does it “hit us” nor “connect with us”; it gives us information but starves us of an experience. We need both the information and the experience.
If transmitting tacit knowledge is hard work, it is not because you have to sweat to interpret it. No. It is actually light work. But the labour you have to undertake is the decision to keep on looking until the interpretation comes. The labour involves an indefinite gaze; there is no time stipulation. And anyone who waits knows waiting is a tough job. So knows anyone who has strove hard to communicate his thoughts — thinking is hard. You think you know it until you are asked to say it. Then you meet that your clouds are empty — clouds without rain. Patience is the price; attention is key. Then you wait, and you keep waiting. You meditate, and you keep meditating. Finally, you speak; but you still find yourself dissatisfied. Such is the curse of tacite. But I insist that it is a blessing.
The poverty of words is a blessing because by being aware of it, we are allowed to choose the mediators of our experience. Consider it to be a filter. You get to choose what and who may stand between you and the real thing. Even better, it allows you to be a first-hand witness. When you realise that even the best wordsmiths may not do justice to an experience, you will ride out on your own to see the sea for yourself. You will satisfy your longing by yourself and not hang by second-hand reports. You will stare at the woman’s beauty and receive firsthand the spur of joy. All unmediated.
Remember, you cannot describe Mona Lisa with any words you choose; carelessly. You have to look and observe intently. Only then will the words with which to describe her choose you, jump at you, bubble up in you to do justice. You may have the Paul Dirac experience, whose eponymous equation, he claims, came to him out of a fire. All that you need to do is observe; look again; to pay attention. Keep paying attention.
Lastly, it is not enough to seek the truth, you must also preserve the wonder. Where “truth” expels wonder, where revelation dispels awe, where knowing obliterates veneration, danger looms in the shadows; degeneration begins. This is my call: pay attention. That is the only price.
Taste and see that the LORD is good
Psalms 34:8
Of course, here is your meme:
Have a great week.
Here is a big thanks to “Ghost” for helping me read through this essay and refine it for public reading. It is always good to have a second pair of eyes before I let fly.