Archive Post: Gesture, Poetry, Language, Philosophy, Math.
[This is a copy-paste of something I wrote years ago. But I'm posting this to share with a friend, and it's a line of thought that I'm still actively playing with. It's very much a draft and more of an exploration of terrain than something I am committed to right now]: I want to explore an idea I'm only just beginning to work through, but might make for some interesting takes. Basically the idea is that if you really want to understand the nature of language, two seemingly marginal areas need to be investigated: math and gesture. My intuition is that all three terms - gesture, language, and math - all stand on a continuum of increasing abstraction, and that to understand each, we need to understand the other(s). Or to put it differently, gesture and math stand at opposite ends of a line on which language occupies the centre: they are the limit-points though which language must be understood. Gesture : gesture is primarily a matter of specific movement in space an