The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:
“What has a name is real.”
“What lacks a name is unreal.”
What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.
What has a name is (taken by us as) real; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.
In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.
In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.
The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.
To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”
Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.
Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.
Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.
This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:
Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?
Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?
In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.
Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.
A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.
The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.
Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.
Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.
When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.
Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.
But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.
Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.
An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.
Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.
When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.
The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”
Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.
Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.
But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.
When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.
Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!
Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.
These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.
If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.