“with its implications of its own internal powers of Will”
-I’m not saying you have to be a believer in divinity. But you should recognize that language has all the qualities conventially ascribed to divinity. It is the quality of our collective Being on shared communal scenes of exchange that transforms our horizontal existence of appetitive life into something vertical or transcendent. Where does language reside? You can’t point to anywhere in the brain or in any material domain where words reside. We grasp the word and its significance when many neurons fire to associate letters or sounds or body language, and in doing so we access an imaginative domain that is truly beyond the material.
Because the way that happens is something we can never fully explain, though it does happen, it may have the appearance to some of “internal powers of Will”. But I think we do better to say that it is precisely because the historical process, which is a process of exchanging signs on shared scenes, is not controlled by any one person’s will – because history is not some kind of conspiracy of power or knowlege – that for those who still need to believe there is someone controlling the “invisible hand” in history there is a tendency to invoke some extra-human will. But I think we should be suspicious of all theories that invoke any human or divine will to power. The mystery is that transcendence occurs without any evident will controlling it, other than the unconscious will, or the mysterious divinity, that is shared, in part, by all participants and rivals on the human scene. This is why the Jews, in recognizing that their God was also the universal Being of all humanity, recognizing that the Jews were but a light unto the other nations, transcended tribalism, the implications of which we are still working through.
