I think everyone has had at least one moment when conversation with another person just wasn't going very smoothly. Perhaps you and the other person were discussing the same topic, but you both had very different perspectives which ended in the two of you talking past one another. Maybe you couldn't get the ideas in your head to reflect lucidly in your speech. Or perhaps you just weren't understanding what your interlocutor was trying to say, or vice versa. The reason language often times doesn't work very well, why it doesn't always convey concepts and ideas clearly, is because language is meant to be vague, astonishingly vague.

Language and rocks

A 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote an essay once about the vagueness of language. He provided an example which, I think, reveals the nature of language and how vague it really is. The example is, roughly, as follows. Consider the word "rock." The word "rock" designates, or picks out, all rocks. It designates all past, present and future rocks. The word "rock" designates, for the layman, all different types of rocks -- igneous, sedimentary, etc. It is interesting to note, however, that each rock is an individual thing, unique in its own right. No one rock is the same as another rock, and yet we use the same word for all the things that are designated by the word "rock." The same can be said for other things as well--trees, people, birds, etc.

Language is intentionally vague -- it must be, otherwise it wouldn't work. It is simply not reasonable or practical to give each thing a separate name because then none of us would ever communicate effectively. While it has always been useful for humans to use language as a general and vague expression of ideas, it sometimes fails when a speaker needs to convey a specific idea or concept. It is one thing to talk about material things, such as rocks, trees, people, etc., in a vague way, but it is an entirely different thing to speak about non-material things, like justice, society and love, in a vague way.

While the scientists are preoccupied with being as specific as possible about the material universe around us and all the material things in it, it is up to the philosophers to be as specific as possible (as specific as language allows) about the abstract concepts and ideas which fill our minds.

Language and love

Let's consider, as an example, the abstract notion of love. Nobody, as far as I have seen, has an easy time lucidly expressing in words what love is; probably because love doesn't exist in any strict, objective sense. In other words, there is no one thing that we can point to, like a rock or a tree, and call it "love." In a physical sense, the feeling of love is nothing more than the firing of neurons in the brain, but that doesn't account for the abstract notion that people have of love.

Everyone has a different interpretation of love, which is another hint that it doesn't have an objective reality, only a subjective one. I think intimate love is a mutual feeling of affection between two individuals who act for the benefit of the relationship. I think there is also a temporal aspect of love, and it [love] must last until the two individuals either cease to exist or their brains are no longer capable of rational thought. So intimate love is, for me, a forever-lasting, mutual feeling of affection between two people who act to benefit the relationship in various ways. The Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky convinced me that love is something that ought to last forever, so I suppose my conception of love is tainted by literary utopia, but I'm okay with that.

I once thought that I loved my first high school girlfriend, but after we broke up, my feelings subsided. I realized it was not love because love isn't a temporary feeling for me. However, I've heard from others that a person can love many times, that it can happen and subside. Under this view, I really did love my high school girlfriend, but I no longer do. Under my view, I never loved my high school girlfriend, since it didn't last; I only thought I did.

It is difficult for me to talk about love with another person, since I have a very specific and idiosyncratic definition of love. Love, unlike rocks, trees, and birds, cannot so easily be generalized and designated by the word "love" because that is when language begins to fail. Abstract notions, which are subject to myriad interpretations, will always be the bane of human language.