Talking Nonsense

In Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, one character, Ruzumikhin, comments that: "Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth!"

Naturally, the first thing I thought upon reading this was to wonder if it is true. Is talking nonsense really what differentiates me from a worm, a flower, or a dolphin?

Let's start with the bare fact of talking. Talking is a form of communication via the medium of sounds formed with our mouths, sounds which, when strung together, we often call words. However, myriad languages color the globe, and so we cannot restrict a language to merely one we understand. Yet something in it, despite that we do not recognize the words, glistens with enough familiarity to allow us to call it a language. This is the idea that nothing is ever completely different from something else. If something were to be so, you would not even have the capabilities of recognizing it. Saying that a language is completely different from another is improper labeling because if that were so, you would be unable to even identify it as a language. Some similarities must persist in order for differences to be comprehended and maintained. But I digress.

Back to talking. If talking is a communication with vocal sounds, couldn't animals be characterized by such speech? Dogs bark, dolphins click, and horses bray. It seems that talking, on its own, cannot be our differentiating factor, and thus Ruzumikhin qualifies his statement. It is in the talking of nonsense that humans maintain a different link of the chain of being.

Here is where we diverge from the philosophers of years past. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine... the list goes on, have differentiated human beings on account of their rational capacities. Ruzumikhin is doing the exact opposite. Or is he?

First I must ask: what is it we call nonsense? Quite simply, perhaps too simply, anything that doesn't make sense. Square circles and God making a stone so big He can't lift it. These are the things that the definition of one contradicts the definition of the other, things that can never meaningfully be joined.

But isn't nonsense also what we call things that have yet to make sense? For example, the Copernican system of the universe. Heliocentricity was regarded as pure nonsense, but as we know now, it is true. The calling of nonsense in this case, then, delegates the subject to something as semantically ridiculous as a square circle. It may be a rejection of the effort it takes to understand the subject, or merely that given one's cultural, intellectual, and other constructs, one simply cannot fathom such a subject as a possibility, as anything but nonsense.

Yet if there were not some people with less constructs or who broke out of the ones constraining them, we, as the human race, would not progress. Electricity would be deemed a nonsensical idea if posited to people of the first century. Even in the time it was birthed, growing first as an idea, it was certainly scoffed at. Why? Because we don't know what to do with the different. Instead, we term it the unattainable and, with such a definition, call any attempt to change pure nonsense.

In order to think something new, within a culture or within your own mind, you must think something different. Since the previous conception had been accepted as fact, this new and different conception naturally seems to be nonsensical. Only if we can engage in intellectually honest considerations by getting past our pre-judgements will we further our learning. The new conception doesn't even have to be right in order for us to so further ourselves. If it is untrue, we have still arrived at the truth of finding that which is false. If it is true, we have so discovered what is true.

So it seems that Ruzumukhin is right. Talking nonsense is the human ability to think new and different thoughts, as well as to categorize those thoughts as nonsense or otherwise. In order to so categorize, we must be rational, and thus it seems that Ruzumikhin is in line with the general consensus of philosophy. Furthermore, in talking nonsense, one can get at truth in two ways, whether the establishment of truth or falsehood.

In light of these conclusions, I must demand that we all risk talking a little more nonsense.