On Semantics

And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph (1945)

What is sustainability, really? Here we have a term, so central to contemporary progressive philosophy that it serves as a catch-all for energy, ecology, urbanism, cars, environmental policy—you name it. We don't actually hear the term out loud very often. It doesn't always need to said out loud if only because its subsidiary terms ? Sustainability is no math problem; it is a product of language(!)—one which is due some analysis to bring its true meaning to light. ¹

Two major treatments on meaning and language come to mind: one of them Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and the other lies somewhere in the depths of mid-twentieth century Post-Structuralism. There is a tension between the two systems that we’ll discuss here, but they are also two sides of the same coin—and both are indispensable to having any real discussion about sustainability on local or world stages.

part one: noumena

Immanuel Kant coined the term noumenon to describe the concepts that represent and categorize the ideas we derived from the world. For instance: according to Kant, we can’t possibly describe every dog on Earth with a single word, but we try anyway. We use the word 'dog' when we’re talking about some subset of the Canine family, and most people get the picture, because dogs are pretty common. But! If a dog walked into your house and you were interacting with it, Kant would say—that dog—in particular, was a phenomenon, an actual instance, of the noumenon dog.

So phenomena are the actual instances of things, and noumena are the high-level concepts describing them. They're very often the same word, as it was in the case just described—we just rely on additional language to instantiate a phenomenon from the noumenon from which it is derived. If someone asked you: “Hey uh, who came over to your house today?”, and you replied: “Dog!” you’d sound nutty—mostly because English sounds ridiculous without articles—but also because you tried to use a general, high-level concept (a noumenon) to describe a real-life phenomenon. If the other person wasn’t there to experience the exact same phenomenon you did, we have to use details and all sorts of explanatory language to elaborate. ²

phenomenon; the "thing-as-it-appears," that frisky chocolate-colored Dachshund, Franky, who somehow entered your home, who you are petting right now

noumenon; the "object-in-itself," the concept 'dog', attempting to describe all dogs, from every universe and from every possible timeline.

Why is this important? Well, because patriarchy, racism, fake news, fascism, and of course, sustainability, are all noumena. We have no perfect collective experience of these concepts, and language—according to Kant—is fundamentally incapable of capturing the true essence of all the phenomena these words are trying to describe. Human experience is but a sliver of reality; language is but a sliver of all possible meaning. The noumenon is unknowable. I might have seen a Norwegian Lundehund one time, but you've only ever experienced traditional American breeds; since our subjective experiences color our understandings differently, neither of us have a complete or even parallel understanding of what that noumenon truly represents.

Much of the time, people are using the most controversial noumena differently as a function of their own experience. In doing so, they fail to communicate their true intent—the pure, platonic form of the word. Those who haved experienced something like racism many times over have a much more complete understanding of what it looks like; those who haven't struggle to integrate it into their worldview. We live in a world where ignorance appears more rampant, undoubtedly because noumena are moving so freely. People are often right and wrong at the same time.

With regard to sustainability: it’s a personal least-favorite word of mine, not least for its awkward affixes and general inelegance; that said, it is a useful concept, even if our internal versions of 'sustainability' tend to merge with the popular, simplified conception of it. Furthermore, society at large seems unwilling to acknowledge what a deceptively complex idea it is, and as such the term loses value.

part two: post-structuralism

Almost two hundreds years after Kant, in the early 1900’s, philosophers started looking more closely at language and meaning in the context of Structuralism, which discards the idea of universal platonic concepts, and says that we really only understand the meaning of words as they relate to other words. No concept is original—it merely inhabits pre-existing structures. We can’t understand the concept of 'democracy' without building onto the structure of the word 'government,' which in turn is built onto so much extant scaffolding: collective decision-making, taxation, bureaucracy, etc.

Some decades later, the French Post-Structuralists of the 1960’s came along and deconstructed Structuralism. A good explanation comes from Corey Mohler: Post-structuralism is an internal, structuralist critique of structuralism itself. [Derrida] claims that even the structure of the words is not adequate to understand the meaning of a word, since the meaning of a word always depends on its context, both current and historical, and that context is never stable. Therefore it is impossible for words to have fixed meanings or be understood completely.

Post-structuralism, therefore, injects new layers into our collective conception of 'sustainability.' The older proxies we once used to signal our concern for the earth—rainforest destruction, the 'hole in the ozone,'' acid rain, global warming—have generally been discarded in favor of 'climate change.' In a post-structuralist world, we encounter the collision of context, connotation, power, hierarchy, and even enunciation when we try to agree on new ideas and their place in society.

The material landscape is changing too: Tesla is arguably the most powerful private company ever to take the reigns on reducing emissions; Democrats and Republicans are polarized on a massive 'Green New Deal.' We now view sustainability almost solely in the context of corporate production and federal policy, and now that the potential of alternative systems and individual action are reduced to nothing, conversation on the whole is a series of overt simplifications and virtue signaling. Likewise, there is no marginal value in deeper investigation; I can encourage a friend to read McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, but no one believes it's worth the effort to chug through The Journal of Industrial Ecology every month.

part three: a sustainable definition

In 2019, it feels as if no one has much to say about sustainability beyond “making sure the Earth doesn’t get a few degrees hotter, at all costs” but certainly—a number of intellectuals have made an attempt at defining the term. The most famous, in academic circles, was offered in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, a committee appointed by the UN as a means of rallying countries together on the issue: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

We find a number of problems with this definition, not least that it reduces sustainability to a human-centric resource allocation problem. Also: “future generations”? How many? Are we talking about the next fifty generations or the next fifty years? Time is left open-ended, and every following measure of sustainability breaks down. Should we be striving to create sustainable Earthly systems until the Sun explodes? If so, what are the real barriers and goals associated with humanity meeting its own basic needs until solar collapse? While 'agreeing on a definition' is half the battle, the other half really is figuring out what to do about it. Sustainability is now popularly conceived as a problem of government policy, meaning that climate change is now everyone's problem—but not one we can tackle without forcing everyone to comply. I, however, largely disagree; there is so much more potential for innovation. Stay tuned.