It [whatever that is] Snowed Today
Dec 5th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 6 Comments |
It did indeed, and it made me strangely happy. I think it was because it made it feel like the world hadn’t ended yet. Nature was still winning against “global warming.” Less to feel guilty about.
Got me thinking about what the “it” was that was snowing. Or what the “it” was that felt like the world hadn’t ended. They both refer to “the situation,” I guess? (Not that they have to both refer to the same thing. It just seems to me they do.)
Or like the “it” in, “It’s great to see you”? No, I think there it’s the “seeing you” that’s great.
In German, a common colloquialism (though I think it’s even too ingrained in the language to be called a “colloquialism”) that means the same as “there is” is “es gibt.” Literally, that would mean “it gives” (es = it; gibt = gives).
So Heidegger said that “es gibt” a difference between Being and beings. Which is true. He then went on to ask what it was that gave the difference. Or so I hear. I haven’t ever read his later philosophy.
I love reading this blog. I don’t understand a third of it but I love reading it all the same.
Josh,
Micah’s blog has officially been dubbed, ‘Tillman’s Semantic Sophistry Symposium.’ Heh!
Micah,
Here in Wisconsin, we have already thoroughly defeated Global Warming. It is now snowing again and I have already broken the snowblower. We have no expectations of seeing the Earth again until late March or early April.
When we do philosophy, we have this tendency to want to think that a common word corresponds to a common entity. For example, we see the word “it” in the sentences “It is snowing” and “It was great to meet you.”
We want to reason, then, that both “It’s” might have a common, outside reference.
What if “It” is just the word we use when our meaning is made clear by the rest of the sentence. The word “It” just helps us to create clumsy, redundant, foolish sentences such as “The clouds are snowing” (Well, no duh, where else would the snow be coming from.) or “The experience of meeting you was great”
As I look at that second sentence, though, I realize there is a subtle difference. My clumsy sentence is narcisstic, in a way. This sentence makes the focus the experience, the focus is how it made the speaker feel. In Micah’s sentence, the subject disapears. There’s almost an appearance of objective fact, instead of subjective judgement, in the sentence “It was great to meet you.” Because the “I” which does the judging does not make an explicit appearance.
I’m not sure what any of this means, exactly… And I’m not even sure if I took Micah’s post a bit more seriously than intended… but at any rate, that’s how I see it.
So ‘it’ is sort of used as an understood sort of a pronoun to put the sentence in a life-context (I just made that up). ‘It’ is snowing. You immediately know, unless you’re from another planet, that ‘it’ is the concept of a meteorological event. ‘It was great to meet you.’ It’s the same thing, Our meeting was great… ‘It’s a great day for Football’ or ‘It’s a day that will live in infamy.’
Is this a peculiarity to English? Do other languages have an ‘it’ too?
Not normally. Most languages can use verbs with understood subjects instead (not necessarily well-defined subjects). English can’t. We must have a subject in the sentence. Thus, the use of “helping” pronouns to make up for our deficiency.
I remeber discussing Descartes in philosophy class. The professor pointed out that the words we translate as “I think therefore I am” were written “Cogito ergo sum.” (Hopefully I got the spelling close to correct.)
In English, it’s clear that if we treat this claim like a logical argument he’s begged the question. “I” appears as a premise and then we act surprised that there is an “I” in the conclusion.
As formulated, though, the word “I” (or it’s equivalent in another language) didn’t appear. The verb form “cogito” implies an “I” to do the thinking but the word doesn’t actually appear.
It becomes harder to make the claim that he’s begged the question in the original, and probably seemed more shocking.