WORDS HAVE MEANING! Was thinking the other day about how much of philosophy relies on vocabulary. If certain key concepts are unintelligible to you, you will not be able to work with them; and most of philosophy is not defining terms (that turns out to be wildly hard to do through reason alone) but extrapolating from terms, linking concepts, and working out the consequences of terms we already accept.

I’m becoming too abstract here, so let me give some examples. Here are some terms. I think I know what they refer to, more or less; I think I know what these terms mean:

will

deserve

love

honor

self or identity

“justice vs. mercy”

“should have been”

home/exile

meaning

joy

“happiness vs. pleasure”

sublime

I’ve seen rationalist philosophies attempt to leach all the meaning from these terms. This is why art (inc/esp literature) and experience are the foundations underlying philosophy: When rationalism threatens to apply its acid to the terms that philosophy needs in order to get anywhere, you can return to art and lit. A description of joy or an example of the sublime tells you more about what joy or sublimity are than any definition could.

Maybe in a later post I’ll key each of these terms to books or other artworks that I think might be worthwhile for people seeking to figure out what these terms could possibly mean. I’ll start with “will”: Try “Hamlet.”