Zen and Grammar

I was walking to get coffee one day (in the not-so-merry month of December), and I realized that there is a similarity between Zen and the relation between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. (Yes, I know, everyone's thinking it these days – I'm a little slow on trends.) So, descriptive grammar would say that whatever people say is what is grammatical. After all, what is understood is what is understood, and language is what actually communicates and not merely what the grammar books say ought to communicate. “They” is a single, gender-neutral pronoun in additional to a plural one, and the phrase “I could care less” is meaningfully its opposites.

On the other hand, prescriptive grammar would hold that there are correct ways of speaking. How prescriptive one wants to get may differ, but there at least are some norms of speaking which are correct and deviances from this norm which are incorrect.

I don't wish to get into debates over which is correct (especially because the answer is obviously descriptive grammar), but I wish to point out that there is a tension between the two. In my daily speaking, I resist the use of the word “irregardless”. It is meaningful, because it means something. Even people who detest the word know what was intended by its use. However, I do not use it, preferring the more aesthetically pleasing “regardless”, and this alone already influences the linguistic world around me. I will also mark it on students' rough drafts, perhaps point it out to other people when I feel snobbish, and so on.

In any case, I can't help but talk in one way rather than another, and this influences the speech patterns of other people. So even while everything that communicates, communicates (and so absolutely everything that is not babbling, and perhaps even that on occasion, is grammatical in a sense), I naturally choose some ways of communication over others (and so make a prescriptive choice).

Similarly, in Zen, everything is already as it is. It is ultimately Parmenidean – what is not, is not in any way, so why talk about it? If everything truly is one, there is nothing to talk about or reject concerning this ultimate truth. However, we still act in some ways instead of others. We have natural dispositions and practical situations,. Until we are dead and so no longer agents we will choose some ways of acting over others, even if this is the decision to not act.

Everything therefore is perfect in being “imperfect”. When I am hungry, I do not exist less; however, my state of being hungry is not something to be held on to, either. It is self-obliterating. When I am hungry, I go and get myself some pizza and so cease to be hungry. So everything is lacking and incomplete, because of the fact that it is what it is. Hunger is not hunger, because it essentially drives us to become full, and therefore it is hunger. So this lack, this drive to eat which makes itself cease, is its own perfection: I am perfectly hungry in ceasing to be hungry.

So too in language. My grammar is perfectly descriptive in being prescriptive. My use of words is not a static dictionary of meanings, but is what it is in influence, change, and force. My prescriptive changing of linguistic norms is the descriptive state of things, despite the fact that there is no single prescriptive reality. No matter what "grammar" actually is on a descriptive level, we are still caught up in the midst of things and working things out in our own conversations.

Similarly, a fire is not a fire, therefore it is a fire. It is entirely outward-focused: it is fire not because of anything in itself, but because of how energy is given off to everything around it. It is what it is only because of how it affects the world around it; that is, insofar as it makes what it is not what they are. The eye does not see itself, therefore it is an eye; it is how the eye responds to what it is not that makes it what it is.

So too is language descriptive in not being descriptive. Precisely because it is the ebb and flow of meanings can we have descriptive grammar. If we tried to be grammatical according to a descriptive grammar, it would become prescriptive. After all, grammar books start off talking about how language is actually spoken; it is after that they become bulwarks against the change of words. Grammar is descriptive because it is prescriptive. But it is also prescriptive because it is descriptive: we have the power to change language, and so prescribe something within our own conversations, precisely because there is a way of speaking which is beyond any of these norms we are trying to enforce. The norms we enforce aren't bootstrapping themselves, but rather rely on the changeable nature of language to change from something to something else.