Naming is always a symbolic act of power. A name does not merely designate; it fixes a person’s position, role, and mode of presence in the world. When parents give a child a name, they are not only naming them, but also, to a certain extent, attempting to direct their fate. In adolescent environments, where relationships are often built through domination, a nickname becomes a sign of status and subordination. The same mechanism can be observed in closed communities, criminal milieus, initiation rituals, and even intimate relationships.
A new name appears where a person enters a new scene and finds themselves in a new capacity under someone else’s gaze. Here, the name does not fix an essence, but a position within a structure of force. For this reason, naming carries not only an abstract meaning, but also a quite bodily sense of violence. An insult is experienced not as a harmless sound, but as an intrusion, often comparable in intensity to a physical confrontation.
In the abstract sciences, this mechanism becomes purer. There, naming no longer serves the direct subordination of a person, but the construction of a model of reality. To name is to distinguish, to give form, to include something within an order of differences, and thereby to gain power over the prediction of events in time. In this sense, naming is metaphysical power.
Language, in the process of its practical implementation, is inseparable 34 The Bakhtin Reader from its ideological or behavioral impletion. Here, too, an orientation of an entirely special kind - one unaffected by the aims of the speaker’s consciousness - is required if language is to be abstractly segregated from its ideological or behavioral impletion. … The divorce of language from its ideological impletion is one of abstract objectivism’s most serious errors.
Great example. Low status members of a group may be given nicknames that, because they ambiguously humiliating, reinforce this low status. Accepting the nickname may be the cost of remaining in the group. Challenging the nickname may be framed as lacking a sense of humor, etc.
Yes. Naming is part of the verbal or sublimated violence of the civilized. To be civilized is even largely to prefer virtual violence to visceral violence. I agree with those to insist on the distinction between mere speech and violence proper, but this is a matter of pragmatism. Yesterday’s euphemism is today’s slur, and today’s euphemism is tomorrow’s slur. In other words, verbal aggression adapts itself quickly to live safely within the norms. Ambiguity allows for plausible deniability. Last but not least, it is a matter of situated judgement whether so-and-so’s naming or other speech act is ( 1) intended to humiliate or (2) humiliating anyway, whether or not intended.
Yes. Is there some sense of this hinted at in the story of Rumpelstiltskin ?
The king keeps his promise to marry the miller’s daughter. But when their first child is born, the imp returns to claim his payment. She offers him all the wealth she has to keep the child, but the imp has no interest in her riches. He finally agrees to give up his claim to the child if she can guess his name within three days
I also had in mind the fact that Adam, as the steward of Paradise, gave names to the animals. In Europe, there is a tradition of giving several names at once. In the Jewish tradition, and especially in Kabbalah, knowledge of the true name gives complete power. That is why the true name of God is unknown, while the known names are taboo. This is stated directly in the commandments of Moses.
In general, the name as something sacred and mystical is widely used in mystical and occult traditions. The most obvious example is the popular idea of voodoo dolls. I, on the contrary, want to move out of the field of esotericism and transfer this into ontology. But I have not worked much on this yet. My message is rather a whole, original insight.
I respect that. My take is that phenomenology, in thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre, realizes that it is already ontology. So Sartre for instance gives an ontological analysis of owning things. Destroying something, for instance, is an intense form of possession. Consider the violence of jealous lovers, destroying what they were so eager to keep to themselves. Sartre also analyzes putting wear on a bicycle to truly possess it.
A “dualist” might say that this is “just psychology.” For the dualist, the world is the alienated/dessicated scientific image, the quantifiable skeleton. I instead take the lifeworld in its blazing ambiguous plenitude to be the real world, so describing its structure is ontology.
I can understand some limitation on what structures should count as ontology rather than a specialized science. In my own work, I might save the label of “ontology” for an analysis of objects as such, including their “being” or “presence” while also prioritizing signs as especially important objects.
It seems that, in some respects, we think in similar ways, because my drafts also contain reflections on sacrifice and initiation, which I likewise translate into the sphere of ontology, being, and time: sacrifice as irreversibility, and initiation as memory as the condition of a new reality.
If different people can arrive at the same thoughts independently and without relying on sources, then for me this is a reason for optimism, since it hints at some fundamental or archetypal knowledge.
Yes, I think so. For being is profoundly related to time. I’m influenced by Heidegger, but I am working on a my own synthesis of many influences. Sacrifice as irreversibly and initiation as the imposition of a reality-changing memory make sense to me. Do like Freud, Jung, Campbell, Joyce ? Your work seems connected to deep psychological-sociological structures that could indeed be approached ontologically.
In my case, I have read quite a few thinkers. So I understand my own work to be original primarily in terms of curation, emphasis, and style. This doesn’t bother me, because I think the “great” philosophers did the same. At least I find more and more continuity and less pure originality the more I read.
I do believe there is archetypal knowledge in some sense. If all the books were lost, all knowledge forgotten, I expect we’d see the emergence of some analogue of the lost tradition.
I like the word “optimism,” because there’s a feeling of high sociality in philosophical insight. This is counterintuitive, because one can feel very alone with an insight. Forums like this are great, or at least they can be.
I am more of an amateur, and I have been studying philosophy for only a few years. Of course, I have read some things — authors such as Jung and Freud — but I consider that insufficient. For now, many of my thoughts are personal insights, and, for example, I discovered Heidegger much later, with surprise, but also with a certain optimism, seeing that he had many similar ideas.
For instance, the idea that the essence of time is not linearity, but uncertainty; or that a thinker endures a thought — thinks from alienation or death — rather than arriving at it through purely intellectual reasoning.
FWIW, I’m impressed by your work here. I also appreciate your prose.
I’ve had about 30 years to study philosophy ( went to school finally for math tho, because philosophy got me interested in math). Really got into it when I was 20 maybe. Before that, I was focused on poets like T. S. Eliot. I also recall getting a little pocket paperback of Freud’s last book, The Outline, and really being affected by it. The psyche is a civil war !
I feel you. I likewise anticipated Heidegger in my personal experience and thinking on a classic issue. Probably many people have had the experience and expressed it in their own lingo. But basically I mean the “shock” that comes with seeing that the world is. Not how it is but that is is. To me this the strongest reading of “the ontological difference.”
I completely relate. I love early Heidegger for wiping away dominant prejudices. Like the prejudice that thinking is bloodless calculation with universal essences in a universal logic. I recently discovered Bakhtin, and I’d rank him with Heidegger on some important issues. Different style, but also revolutionary and liberating.
The changing of names goes beyond that in the Hebrew Bible, consider Abram becoming Abraham and Sarai becoming Sarah (the insertion of the ה, showing a sharing of God’s presence into them. Also Jacob (Yaacov, from akav, ankle, as Jacob grabbed Esau’s ankle in the womb to try to be the first born) to Israel (meaning one who wrestles with God). Others, like Miriam (Moses’ sister, whose stories revolve around water (ma’im in Hebrew), although this is more interprative than as direct as the others.
And then there is shinui ha-shem, the Jewish practice of changing one’s name if very ill to promote healing, as it changes one’s identity.
A male child isn’t officially named in that tradition until the 8th day, the same time as the circumcision, the same date the child is brought into the tradition. Consider also that the circumcision commandment and the remaming of Abram and Sarai both occured at the same time (Genesis 17), linking the two.
The point here isn’t to suggest that names truly look to metaphysical or mystic status (as Judaism claims), but instead to acknowledge our words are imbedded in our mythology and hold significance regarding how we interpret our world, likely in ways we don’t appreciate.
None of this contradicts entirely non-metaphysical linguistic philosophical systems that assert meaning is found by use alone. That is, it’s entirely consistent to say Abram didn’t change in any way when he got a new name, but just that our public practices toward him did.
Black Americans often exercise creativity in naming their children. This is related to a spontaneous effort to create a distinct black American culture as a refuge from the white world where being black was pervasively wrong.
I mean something slightly different. Not that names are mystically connected with essence, as is often claimed in various esoteric or occult traditions. I am speaking about the act of naming itself. Whoever has the authority to give a new name — or to establish the original one — undoubtedly possesses power.
This may take the form of intimate names exchanged by lovers, a number in a state archive, or a title that affirms a social hierarchy — pastor, colonel, professor, doctor, judge. Here, of course, the power does not belong simply to the person who directly uses the form of address — “Judge Smith,” for instance. Rather, it belongs to the system that made such naming possible in the first place.
As in the Gulf of America, Ho Chi Minh City, Mt. Mckinley, etc.
And not to overlook the heriditary surname system wasn’t always so widespread, meaning it was imposed upon many cultures (no longer a first name followed by “son of” or of a town).
When Bob Jones and Jane Smith marry, it’s Jane Jones, and to some Mrs. Bob Jones.
Trump provides so many examples, naming buildings after himself. Professional firms fight over whose name goes where on the door and we actually renamed a street in Atlanta just because it became synonymous with crime.
So naming clearly creates and maintains power, so the point is clear.
Thank you. I have heard of Bakhtin, and I suspect that he may turn out to be an important author for me. But for now, there is still a great deal in Heidegger that remains unfinished for me.
I tend to think of books as a compass — a way to check, clarify, or confirm a direction. In my case, I came to philosophy already at a mature age, and I doubt that I would have been able to truly receive Heidegger when I was twenty.
Much of my experience was formed through life itself: experience in sport, relationships, business, an interest in classical art, and mathematical problem-solving. All of this gradually weaves a certain phenomenological pattern, which Heidegger did not create for me, but rather helped me recognize.
After all, perhaps this is what philosophers and artists do at their best: they transform deeply personal experience into a universal form.
This is from Gia-Fu Feng’s translation of verse one of the Tao Te Ching.
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
The Tao is the undifferentiated unity of reality. The 10,000 things represent the multiplicity of phenomena in the world. So naming is what creates our diverse world out of oneness.