This essay is about dogs. Or, rather, about things in general, but I’m going to start with dogs. The idea of dogs, not the real thing: what you might call a dog thought. Whatever mysterious event happened in your head when you read the fifth word at the start of this essay.
Actually, I’m looking at the real thing right now as I write. As is his habit at this time of night, he has placed his muzzle across my left foot. Now, I’m absolutely certain the fifth word up there did not elicit a little flashbulb image of Caesar sprawled out under my desk. Nonetheless, it elicited something and it’s worth asking what that something was.
One way of putting it would be to say the idea of dogness entered your mind (you’ll see I’ve given up saying “entered your head” – it was simply too peculiar to claim things about your head, when we’ve never met). To be completely explicit, I was responsible for this. I controlled your thought processes. Yes, I agree the claim is quite peculiar, even a little spooky, but that’s writing for you.
So we’re talking about dogness. You can call it dogitude if you insist.
Your reading that word up there was not actually like looking at a dog, was it? It’s just four letters, none of which is remotely dog-like. I’ve just looked at mine to check this claim. The tip of Caesar’s tongue is visible. He has managed to lick the fur on his right paw so that it’s sticking up in little grey lines. That’s the paw with the slightly bent claw – the result of an encounter with his cage when he was very little.
I made dogness arrive in your mind but you didn’t see any of that fur and claw stuff (come to think of it, you didn’t see anything at all doglike). If you had asked me to send you a drawing to convey the essential dogness of Caesar, it would not have included that unfortunate claw detail. A drawing is a kind of writing, nonetheless. You may well have looked at it and said “dog.” Indeed, a kind of writing with one rather strange property, because where I live you would be more likely to have said “chien”. A drawing of the right kind seems to be a kind of universal writing: one that is language-free.
I said a drawing of the right kind. Why those weasel words? As a form of writing, pictures of dogs (in particular, photographs) will suffer from what I call the curse of particularity. For example, a photo of Caesar inevitably includes that unfortunate claw detail. As a way of conveying dogness, his photograph can’t stop you thinking a bent claw as something common to all dogs. We somehow need to abstract the essential properties of what it takes to make a dog and it’s hard to see how a picture, drawing or photograph could do that (a cartoon might - you will see why in a minute).
So what is dogness?
Let’s make a list. I’m only going to start it – we shall have to finish it some other time. Dogs are animate (albeit mine isn’t particularly very animated right now). Animate things are either human or not human. The non-humans come in two flavours, domesticated or wild. Some non-human domesticated animate things have four legs, rather than two, six or eight (it’s usually an even number). Some of those have shaggy skin (pelt, coat … whatever). How am I doing? Do you want to add a muzzle? Feel free.
Now … is an animate, non-human domesticated, four-legged, furry thing a DOG? Perhaps not, but we’re getting pretty close. At the very least, we’ve excluded crabs, windmills and caterpillars … that’s a great start. With a bit more work, we’ll surely get the list of features complete. Actually, I’ll go further than that – if you can’t get the list complete, you simply don’t know what a dog is! But I don’t want to become boring on the matter.
Let’s simplify things by using symbols. How about “&” for animate “%” for non-human, “$” for domesticated and so on. I’m only using these because they’re on my keyboard. You can pick whatever symbols you like.
Let’s say we’ve ended up with &%$*+.
&%$*+ has two rather striking peculiarities, one to do with writing, the other with reading. First, unlike the letters in a word, it doesn’t matter in what order you put the symbols. I could just as well have written $%&*+: it would have come to exactly the same thing.
And what is this “thing”? It is, of course, DOGNESS.
The second peculiarity is even more striking. Assuming you learned these symbols (and that really doesn’t seem so very complicated, does it?), you look at &%$*+ and dogness enters your mind. You may even say something like “dog” or “chien”.
In no time at all we seem to have invented a completely new writing system - one that has nothing to do with speech. A way of conveying the essential nature of objects. It is a completely universal writing system - not what a particular language happens to call these things, but what they really are. At a stroke we have overcome the curse of babel. Isn’t that wonderful?