Richard Weaver - Ideas Have Consequences
Part 2 - Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”
—John 1:1, 14
Read Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien: Words Create Worlds
Ideas Have Consequences
Further, words are much more than symbols scribbled on blank paper, spoken into the ether, or typed out in pixels on a digital screen. As Richard Weaver so poignantly articulates in Ideas Have Consequences, words possess inherent metaphysical substance and are bound indissolubly to truth. Reminding his readers of the “ancient belief that a divine element is present in language,” Weaver insists that “if the world is to remain cosmos, we shall have to make some practical application of the law that in the beginning was the word.”1
By cosmos, he suggests a well-ordered whole, societies functioning in harmony toward a good. Its opposite is chaos—disorder, confusion, and disintegration. In this pronouncement, he makes a profound, even prophetic, contention regarding language’s power. In the fashion of Tolkien, he claims that words can create or destroy worlds; they form the cosmos or plunge societies into chaos.
Weaver’s assertion that language, or word, is rooted in the divine reaches back to antiquity, not only to Genesis, but also to Heraclitus and Plato and the rest of the virtuous Pagans who identified the divine, i.e., God, with mind. It further finds its quintessence articulated in Aquinas's realist view of language: that words signify things that actually exist. That is, words correspond to real beings in the world (or in the mind of God), and possess their own ontological status: Modi essendi et subsistendi ("modes of being and subsisting").2
Weaver is deeply concerned, however, with the modern infatuation of semantics (e.g., logical positivism). He argues that it is nothing more than the progressive product of Occam’s Nominalism. Simply stated, Nominalism refers to the belief that words do not refer directly to real things in themselves, but to mental concepts or significations, how we think about or categorize things minds: Modi significandi et intellegendi ("modes of signifying and understanding”).3
This distinction matters tremendously because the Nominalist shift has profound consequences on our ability to flourish both individually and as a society. Nominalism severs language from its metaphysical correspondent and leads to cultural relativism, legal positivism, and moral subjectivism. It further makes traditional education (which is rooted in the idea that words and ideas reflect realities) increasingly unintelligible and irrelevant. When words are separated from realities to which they correspond, truth becomes flexible and law and morality become procedural. Truth is something we construct, not something we discover; and, justice is no longer about aligning law with nature but about codifying the cultural consensus.
A contemporary example of this is the recent redefinition of marriage. The realist view would hold that marriage is a real institution grounded in human nature and teleology (its natural ends, such as expressed in Summa Theologica and Westminster Confession of Faith).4 It has an essence—a fixed nature—that exists whether or not we name it or recognize it. To speak of "marriage" is to refer to a real thing that has an ontological status and moral structure. Thus the word “marriage” signifies a real human good rooted in natural law, human biology, and divine ordinance. In this view, language mirrors reality.
The Nominalist (and later, the logical positivist), holds that marriage is whatever society or individuals define it to be. There is no essence of marriage outside our collective agreements or psychological associations. Thus, the term “marriage” is simply a label that we attach to any number of relational arrangements, according to preference, feeling, or utility. In this view, if a society decides that marriage can include same-sex couples, polyamorous groups, or any other configurations, then the definition changes because the word “marriage” refers not to a real universal, but to whatever society agrees it means. Any given word or expression is merely a social construction, a convenient tool for organizing our experience, not an ontological good or intrinsic reality rooted in nature or creation.
Lamenting the sophistry of modern of semantics, Weaver writes of its endeavor:
This is only an attempt to substitute things for words, and, if words stand, in fact, for ideas, here is but the broadest aspect of our entire social disintegration. Here would be a vivid example of the things in the saddle riding mankind. For the sake of memory, for the sake of logic—above all, for the sake of the unsentimental sentiment without which communities do not endure—this is a trend to be reversed.5
The phrase “things in the saddle riding mankind” is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote in “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing” (1846), “Things are in the saddle//And ride mankind.”6 For Emerson, the expression means to criticize the growing materialism and industrialism of his age which had reversed the proper order of life. In the modern age, Emerson recognized tools and concepts (i.e., “things”) had become masters over the very people who created and are supposed to be using them. Instead of man being the rational steward and governor of things, those things now governed him. Instead of controlling their tools and economic systems, people were being controlled by their creations.
For Weaver, the metaphor extends effectively into the realm of language and semantics, especially in the context of Nominalism and modern linguistic skepticism. Language that had originally been a tool for expressing reality and truth is now the master of thought itself. Even more pernicious, words and symbols that were once used to describe things, now shape and determine how we think about reality, regardless of whether that thinking aligns with what is real. Semantics, then, is a clever kind of sophistry, a closed system where the play of signifiers detaches from actual referents.
Consequently, societies become subservient to their linguistic categories, allowing labels to define reality rather than describe it. This is especially ominous in a culture dominated by technical jargon, ideological euphemisms, and bureaucratic talking points. In these cases, words frequently obscure rather than reveal truth. For example, “fetus” replaces “baby” to manage the moral discomfort of killing a child in the womb. “Equity” replaces “equality,” subtly altering the meaning of “justice for all.” “Gender identity” replaces “sex” and redefines the anthropological categories of human nature. To this end, language does not serve truth; it manages human perception. And once perception is governed by such sophistic terms, humanity becomes saddled and ridden by its own linguistic inventions.
Weaver campaigns for the restoration of language because our ability to reason accurately, in accordance with reality, is congruent with our ability to comprehend or correspond to Divine Reason, i.e., the Logos. Words cannot be arbitrary mental labels we use to describe experience. Words have substance, so we must acknowledge they correspond to metaphysical realities; if human beings are going to flourish, to live successfully in community, we must be able to understand one another. Words, when used in common, everyday life, express something that transcends the ephemeral moment they are used. “Unsentimental sentiment,” Weaver argues, is necessary for sensus communis and rational public discourse.
Read Part 3 - C. S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man
C. S. Lewis argues the greatest shift in Western history takes place, not at the fall of Rome or the Renaissance, but at the time shortly following Jane Austen. Read the essay to find out why. You can download the essay for free.
Want to join me for a live discussion of C. S. Lewis’s grand essay? Great! You’re invited to the inaugural meeting of the Tsundoku Reading Society.
We will be reading “De Descriptione Temporum” this month, and discussing it in a live Zoom meeting for Socratic-like discussion on Monday, June 30th at 4:00 pm PT (7:00 pm ET). Upgrade to a Paid Subscription (just $5.60 if you upgrade before June 30th) or a Poiema Fellow to join the discussion.
Paid subscribers should download the essay and read it; mark it up; ask questions of the text. Then, watch your inbox for login instructions to join the Zoom meeting on Monday, June 30th at 4:00 pm PT (7:00 pm ET).
Questions? email me@scottpostma.net.
Series Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.
Sayers, Dorothy. “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Escondido: Escondido Tutorial Service, n.d.
Tolkien, J. R. R., Humphrey Carpenter, and Christopher Tolkien. 2000. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
——— and Christopher Tolkien. 2006. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: Harper Collins.
Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
The Westminster Confession of Faith. Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996.
Weaver, Ideas, 134.
Weaver, Ideas, 136.
Weaver, Ideas, 136.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 9 (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.), P3.S.Q44-49 and The Westminster Confession of Faith, 24.2.
Weaver, Ideas, 144.