​Chapter 20

Replace it with a verb, then. Say that a person frees — or coin something worse and more honest, freeding, the ongoing occurrence rather than the possessed state. The gain lasts for a sentence. A process has a characteristic way of running, resists in its own manner, keeps to its channel; a river flows, and flowing is the nature of a river. Bergson put movement where substance had been and produced a nature that moves: duration is continuous, the past survives automatically in it, and what is described is a flux with its own manner of flowing. The trouble is not that things were too static. It is that the axis from stillness to flux lies inside repetition too, and shifting along it changes the rate at which something repeats itself. What is needed is to step off the axis.

Whitehead's decision, from decidere, a cutting-off, names a different move: an actual entity determining itself by excluding what it will not take up, with the data of the past not fixing the subjective form in which they are taken. That is a settling, and what it settles is not derivable from what was inherited.

Yet freeding still wants a subject — something that does the freeding — and hiding the subject does not remove it, since an impersonal construction leaves the hearer reconstructing an agent by default. Predication is "A is B" or "A does B," and both require an A, a thing. Impersonal constructions suppress the grammatical subject without eliminating the semantic bearer. "There was a knock at the door" leaves the knocker unnamed, yet the knocking is still understood as an act with some bearer. Language can hide the bearer of an action; it cannot hold a pure doing with no bearer at all.

If a word captured freedom exactly, a repeatable type would serve every occasion. A type cannot contain a singular. So the unavailability of the word is not a lexical shortfall awaiting a better coinage; it belongs with the other two: not derivable by proof, not identifiable by any mark. Freedom does not enter the systems of the derivable, and language is one of them.

Speech that cannot name what it addresses has several ways of proceeding.

Apophasis speaks by negation, ringing the empty place with denials: not a substance, not a process, not a subject, not freeding. As a method, apophasis clears away false names and lets the unclosed remainder stand out. Its danger begins afterward. The unsayable, having been circled long enough, acquires a presence: negation piles up until the emptiness at the center is taken to be full, and the God beyond every predicate is more real than any predicated thing, not less. Denial becomes a mode of praise. The Neoplatonic One is not diminished by having no attributes; it is exalted by their absence. So the technique that removes names installs a sanctity in the place where the names were, and what began as the refusal to say ends as a shrine — and a shrine is a deposit, hardened past the point where anyone remembers laying it down. A sanctified unsayable is a nature placed beyond questioning, the strongest possible form of hardening.

Pointing keeps the gesture and drops the shrine. A finger indicates the moon, and the word shows where to stand to catch freedom happening without claiming to hold it. Freeding is useless as a name and serviceable as a direction: look there, act so. Terms such as "the cut" and "the settling" work as instructions about where to look and fail as definitions. The finger is not the moon, and that is what makes it usable.

Silence follows the pointing, and it is a form of precision rather than defeat. At the place where a further word could only miss, saying another thing means positing another noun. Wittgenstein's injunction is usually read as a prohibition and works better as a performance: the silence here is the only speech that does not falsify. The remark closes itself, which makes it honest and insufficient: silence falsifies nothing, yet it cannot guide anyone toward what remains unsaid.

One form does hold a singular. A proper name subsumes nothing: Lily is not a member of a class the word marks out, and whoever uses it is not classifying her. Language is not short of the resource, and the resource does not carry. Say her name to her and the saying is an address — someone doing the pointing, someone present to be pointed at, the two of them party to it. Write the same four letters here and every trace of that is gone. The word survives; anyone may take it up; nothing has been indicated to anybody. What lies on the page is the sediment of an addressing, available to be repeated by people who have never met her, and repeatable is what a singular cannot be without ceasing to be one.

The failure is not that language lacks a form for what is unrepeatable. It has one, and the form works while it is being performed. What gets transmitted is what remains when the performing is over, and a word remains.

Another move gives up the thing rather than the word. What resists saying is a separateness — B outside A, the joint between them unbridged — and denying the separateness leaves nothing apart to be unsayable. The Whole has no seam and therefore no silence in it.

Frank takes this route. B is not contained in A; the joint between them cannot be explained by anything external; the gap will not be crossed by an added link. Therefore A and B were never separate; they are distinctions inside the continuous Whole, All-Unity prior to everything distinguished within it. But unity is a second-order code, extracted by the very apparatus of distinction from comparisons among distinctions, so the Whole is a cut too — to say "all is one" requires separating one from not-one, absolute from relative. His Absolute is a noun, a hardened cut signed with the name of a source. Dissolving the separateness also dissolves the positor: if A and B are modes of the Whole, so are the will and its sediment, and nothing stands apart from what it lays down. He presents his wager as a conclusion — connection is impossible except through unity — and the conclusion is not forced. The joint can also be closed by an act instituting the connection each time, a possibility excluded by the monism with which Frank begins, despite his description of it as "antinomian monodualism."

Any monism must remove the joint, since a joint is a place where something is not derived from the Whole, and a whole with an underived seam in it is not One. So freedom is reduced to nature, and what remains under the name is a rebranding: the illusion of an act, or an act that turns out to have been the Whole moving through a part, or the merging of the part back into what it never left.

Nor can personality be saved by intending to preserve it. A monism can grant the individual a place in the Whole; what it cannot offer is an act the Whole did not make, since nothing lies outside the Whole from which such an act could come. The person is then a determinate region of the cosmos, distinguished from other regions by its properties — furniture, arranged with care, capable of being described in full and of originating nothing.