The Metaphysics of Language – Part I
The Four Levels of Speech according to Abhinavagupta
Despite more than one and a half-century of speculations and research, the origin of human language remains a highly debated and controversial issue. The quest to unravel language's inception is an enduring intellectual journey that has fascinated linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers alike. Theories range from those proposing that language evolved gradually from primitive vocalizations and gestures to more complex hypotheses suggesting that a single, transformative event or genetic mutation played a pivotal role in the emergence of language as we know it. The debate over whether language is primarily a product of biological evolution or cultural development further deepens the controversy.
One of the most notorious linguistic theories is that of American linguist and philosopher Naom Chomsky’s "transformational-generative grammar". According to this view, language is a product of the mind. Chomsk’s theory is based on a biolinguistic conception. The mind is genetically predetermined for the faculty of language which it developed in time with environmental interactions until it reached a state of knowledge and language. The mental human ability to use complex forms of learning is something pre-wired in the brain. It is an ingrained mental skill he calls the ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD). This premise led him to conjecture about the existence of a universal grammar, with the core syntactic linguistic knowledge genetically inherited by us. The hypothesis is that when we learn our native language we do so by recognising a universality of linguistic structures and of sound patterns common across all cultures. In this sense, syntax could be investigated by mere sounds—that is, by phonemes and morphemes. It is about a general theory of language concerned with syntax and semantics based on similarities across all human languages whose origin could be found in the human mind.
Chomsky’s is only one example among many of the several competing theories that have emerged over the years (for a summary see good old wiki,) but any definitive answer to the question of the origin of language remains elusive. However, what they have all in common to a greater or lesser extent, is that they are based prevalently on a mechanistic and rationalistic conception of life and cognition. Language is seen as a product of a neurological, and genetic outgrowth in the frame of Darwinian evolution (Chomsky argues that a single chance mutation 100,000 years ago led to the brain’s language faculty) or from an anthropological and societal perspective. Even though these theories are often competing with each other, and despite all their differences, their commonality is that they are rooted in a strictly naturalistic paradigm. Any metaphysical innuendo is considered anathema.
But, if we admit only for a moment that the origin of language may be tightly connected with the origin of consciousness, and that consciousness is not explicable in a naturalistic theoretical framework, then all these theories can’t be correct, or at least must be far from complete, just because of a matter of principle.
Therefore, let us admit a metaphysical and post-material perspective, and then see if and whether it may have a deeper explanatory power than a strictly materialistic worldview. Here we will change our view from an exclusive third-person perspective of materialistic science that sees everything in terms of brain-based Darwinian processes to an inner first-person position that can complement and eventually expand it. In this regard, two personalities who developed a profound vision of the origin of language were Sri Aurobindo and Abhinavagupta.
As a preamble, it is important to keep in mind that, even though they are usually considered ‘philosophers,’ both Abhinavagupta and Aurobindo, were not philosophers in the ordinary sense. What they were talking about always came from the perspective of the mystic, not the thinker. The same fit for their theories of language, which were based primarily on an inner introspection and a spiritual vision, rather than on intellectual constructs and speculations. Their description of the origin of language came as a natural consequence of how they saw the world, human psychology, and its development from the perspective of higher states of consciousness that are beyond the analytic mind. It is in this sense that it would be inappropriate to speak of a ‘theory’ as a speculative intellectual construct in the philosophical sense. On the other side, while their ‘theories’ of the origin of speech, like everything else they wrote, could be communicated with a philosophical language, they can’t be considered ‘scientific’ either, since they rely on a personal subjective experience that can’t be communicated as a mathematical formula or reproduced with an experiment. This is why Abhinavagupta’s and Aurobindo’s metaphysical visions were scarcely considered in an academic world that is almost entirely based on a Western analytic mindset that struggles to get rid of its positivistic worldview. Nevertheless, while linguists and philosophers don’t need to embrace their theory of language, I believe that they should at least be aware of their existence. No more and no less than a philosopher doesn’t need to be a Platonist but should at least learn something about Plato.
Having said that, let us investigate their vision. I will discuss the point of view of Sri Aurobindo in a later post. Let’s study Abhinavagupta’s four levels of speech first.
Abhinavagupta was an Indian mystic and philosopher, who lived in the 10th-11th century and is regarded as one of the most significant figures in the history of Kashmir Shaivism, a philosophical and spiritual tradition that emphasizes the non-dual nature of reality and the direct experience of divinity. He articulated a complex metaphysical system that emphasized the ultimate unity of the individual soul (Atman) with the Supreme Consciousness (Brahman or Shiva). He made significant contributions to the understanding and practice of Tantra, a spiritual and ritualistic tradition that seeks to harness and channel spiritual energies for self-realization and transformation. His works, such as the ‘Tantrāloka’ and the ‘Tantrasāra,’ are considered foundational texts in the Tantric tradition. Abhinavagupta highlights the importance of direct spiritual experience (anubhava) and the realization of one's divine nature through meditation, ritual, and self-inquiry. His teachings inspired many practitioners to explore the inner dimensions of consciousness, and his profound insights into the nature of consciousness and the path to self-realization have made him a revered figure in the history of Indian thought and spirituality.
One of the most significant mystic and philosophical teachings regards the ‘four levels of speech’ in his Tantrāloka and ‘Para-Trisika-Vivarana’ (PVT). It starts from the Rig Veda which speaks of the Universe created by ‘sound’ or cosmic vibrations. The central thesis is that everything in the Universe is ultimately created by immaterial transcendent vibrations, and that language expresses these with physical sound vibrations in the form of phonemes, words, and sentences. This is in line with the Indian tradition that considers the sacred syllable and sound Aum, or Om, the seed of the transcendent sound and sonic representation of the Brahman, the Absolute of the Vedic texts. It is reminiscent of the meaning of the ‘Word’ in the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” [John 1:1]. The whole manifestation is an expression of the unmanifest formless transcendental Word. This vision is present in different religious scriptures and in the reports of several mystical experiences, and accounts of a transcendental or ‘etheric sound,’ an ultimate universal vibration, as at the origin of all things. It is what the repetition of a mantra during a spiritual practice is said to accomplish: the energy-laden words and sounds help the practitioner transcend the mind.
Thus, according to this mystical experience, speech is only a very particular application of a sound principle that transcends the material vibration and has its origin in a physically inaudible and ‘voiceless’ domain. Words, which linguists call ‘signs’, with their sounds composed of phonemes—their unit sounds—are expressions of some vibration that goes beyond the physical sound. In the material realm, the forms of matter and their changes are realized by material vibrations. Likewise, in the mental realm, mental forms and their changes are realized by mental vibrations. In a sense, like all material objects are the result of a combination of physical vibrations, likewise all thoughts are a combination of mental vibrations. These are inaudible to the physical ear but are perceivable to the mind. The same rationale applies to even higher planes of consciousness beyond the mind. All mental vibrations we call a ‘thought’ and all physical sounds we call ‘words’ owe their origin to ‘voiceless,’ ‘unvoiced,’ ‘unheard’ subtle vibrations beyond the gross physical, and, ultimately to the highest supraphysical timeless and spaceless universal consciousness which casts them into thought-forms and matter-form by a descent to the mental and physical planes. In their origin, however, words are subtle trans-rational vibrations that still haven’t dressed themselves in language. Language is adopted only later, at the level of the surface mind. In their original form, words are in a ‘consciousness-form’ that precedes apprehension, comprehension, conception, perception, and intellectual analysis.
While this is something that goes way beyond an ordinary human understanding, we still can intuitively relate to it. For example by recalling our experiences of the proverbial ‘aha moments.’ Everyone has had sooner or later the experience of suddenly realizing a deeper truth that appears like a flash of intuitive light and insight in all its clarity in our conscious awareness. But it still hasn’t been framed in terms of spoken words, and we might even struggle in doing so. Contrary to what reason and analytic mind would like us to believe, true knowledge isn’t something that allows itself to be caged into rigid conceptual forms. In fact, if the spoken word is charged by a spiritual vibration, it can still carry within the memory of its ‘root-meaning’—that is, its ‘root-sound’—that one can be apprehended if one has developed an awareness of the ‘sound-idea’ and is able to hear the ‘internal sound’ standing behind the word. Its recognition is immediate and doesn’t need further explanations. On the highest level of cognition, ‘hearing’ is a comprehensive and undifferentiated understanding of all relations in one meaningful unity.
Therefore, the unspoken, formless, and unmanifest Word in its original vibrational etheric state isn’t a passive and inactive trans-physical sound without power and force. The Word of the Indian Vedic rishi is a living thing, that has creative and formative powers beyond the physical and, thereby, also in the physical domain. This principle can be extended to all the cosmos: It is the immaterial vibrations on higher planes of existence that determine the creation, change, and dissolution of all forms on the material plane of existence. The essence of all vibrations is ultimately the vibration of a supreme consciousness that charges them with an inherent supreme knowledge, vision, and creative power, projecting them into the manifestation by descending from plane to plane. It is the divine Will that manifests its creation by the means of the creative sound.
At first, this might sound much too mystical. However, in the light of modern physics, this isn’t a too far-fetched vision. Waves in their mechanical form (pressure waves in a solid, liquid, or gaseous body), or electric, magnetic, or electromagnetic waves (light waves, radio waves, X and gamma rays, etc.) are the backbone of all classical physics. What often isn’t realized is that all waves are ultimately ‘immaterial.’ Because, mechanical waves in matter are vibrations propagating between molecules by an exchange of momentum mediated by electromagnetic waves as well, and which are not material (in the sense that photons have no mass.) In quantum physics things become even more subtle because the waves that are considered in this context are ‘probability waves’—that is, abstract mathematical functions that are neither material nor immaterial but represent the probability a certain quantum event will take place (that’s also why you might have heard about the famous Schrödinger wave equation which is at the base of such probabilistic description.) These form ‘probability standing waves’ around atomic nuclei—so-called ‘orbitals’—and which ultimately are the model with which physics represents atoms and molecules, and all matter. Moreover, in quantum field theories, all the fundamental constituents of all matter and all forces are represented by vibrating quantum fields. At the bottom, all is some sort of vibration. And that waves have the power to create and dissolve regular patterns in resonant structures by means of standing waves is a well-known fact beginning with 19th-century physics (a nice example is illustrated with the Chladni plates— see the YouTube video—or so-called ‘Faraday wave patterns’ in water.) From vibrating forces, forms arise with order, structure, and symmetry.
But, while this analogy is certainly suggestive, from a metaphysical perspective this view is far from complete. Because neither according to the Veda, nor in Abhinavagupta’s theory of speech, this original vibration is physical. Its origin and primary nature are always transcendent, supra-material, beyond matter, space, and time. The rhythms of cosmic vibration become physical only at the most material level. In line with the tantric tradition, Abinavagupta posited the foundation of all creation not in matter but in spirit. Consequently the primary vibration or ‘sound,’ is something transcendent that is issued forth from a supreme consciousness downwards, through four universal levels of manifestation, and where the physical manifestation is only the last plane in a series of descending planes. For Abhinavaguota, the word articulated with its sound in the form of physical air pressure vibrations with the organs of speech is only the very last stage of differentiation manifesting a mental idea, or concept, or names and forms of objects. But the real source of every spoken word and phoneme is way beyond any physical or mental plane where an original ‘seed-idea’ or ‘real-idea’ is expressed that the human mind can only vaguely intuit but not really comprehend, unless one ascends to higher cognitive states by means of a spiritual practice.
From this perspective, words and sounds are not just means of expression of an intellectual idea. They are the reflection of an original ‘seed-sound’ or ‘real-sound,’ that was formed beyond the material and mental domain capable of representing it only imperfectly. Consciousness uses vibrations as a form of pre-reflective self-expression because every form, quality, quantity, and property is itself an expression of a vibrational power on one or another plane of existence. Words, with their audible vibrations composed by a series of phonemes expressed by mechanical sound waves, are only a partial and reduced reflection of an original creative power. Yet, they retain in potentiality the latent original knowledge and creative (sound) power, which, however, remains mostly unexpressed on the physical plane.
This, in a nutshell, is the particularity of Abhinagupta’s description of the origin and essence of all speech and languages. Let us see in more detail Abhinavagupta’s four levels of speech. These levels correspond to the Vedic theory of the four levels of ‘Vāk,’ the theory of sound (in Sanskrit vāc, or vak means “to speak”, in Latin corresponds to the word vox—that is, voice—but its real meaning is sound).
Parā Vāk - The level of pure Consciousness
The supreme level of Parā Vāk consists of prakāša (the pure light of changeless Consciousness) and vimarša (the pure power of Consciousness holding the Word). It is the pure consciousness of Cit-Tapas, or Cit-Shakti—the Consciousness-Energy that carries within the luminous vibration (sphurattā) of complete knowledge. Parā vāk is present also on all the other levels, “for without her, darkness and unconsciousness, would prevail”, otherwise everything would fall into an inconscient state. If it would withdraw its supreme Consciousness—that is, its luminous Word—all the cosmos would fall into darkness.
This is the supreme level of the Word without subject-object distinction. Here the Word is transcendental and beyond creation, archetypical and undifferentiated, carrying within itself the whole significance, power, and essence of that which has to be expressed in its potential state. It is known only by an introspective awareness that still hasn’t been cast into a mental representation. There is no distinction between artha (meaning) and šabda (Word). Meaning and sound are one. Sound is meaning, and meaning is sound. There is a vibration of knowledge and power that precedes the spoken word, pre-existing in an undifferentiated state before it descends from plane to plane. The form and meaning of the form are one. A perfect unity exists between the object of sense and sense. There is an identity of what Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the two founders of semiotics (a subject I will discuss soon) called the signified and the signifier. It is a level where words are verbally and mentally unexpressed and exist only in a state of potency, not in physical sound phonemes, letters, or written words.
Pašyantī Vāk - The level of the will to know
The active part of vimarša—the power of consciousness and will—awakens. Still, there is no distinction between subject and object, ‘I-ness’ (ahantā) with ‘This-ness’ (idantā), the signified and signifier. There is no separation yet, but the first moment of cognition of wanting to know and a will to remember emerges. The power of will and intention (icchā shakti) becomes active by an aspiration towards the power of cognition (jnāna shakti) and the power of action (kriyā). An intention of speech appears. It is a flash of intuition that comes from above. The characteristic aspect of the level of pašyantī is its power of will, which carries within herself the power of cognition, jñāna šakti, and the power of action, kriyā. Each word is still capable of a large number of significance but leans toward a self-manifestation in name and form. Yet, šabda and artha—that is, the word and the meaning of the word—still constitute one vibrational semantic whole.
Madhyamā Vāk - The mediating level
Madhyamā, means ‘mediating’ or the ‘middle.’ This level mediates between the undifferentiated and differentiated levels of word, the pure subtle sound of the highest undifferentiated planes of consciousness of parā vāk and pašyantī vāk. It is the level of the intellect (buddhi) where the first differentiation between infinite and finite, transcendental and immanent, subject and object, word and meaning appears. It is the level at which the signifier and the signified become distinct. Language appears in the form of phonemes, words, and sentences with a “thisness” objective apprehensive cognition. On the level of parā vāk and pašyantī vāk, the creative element with its meaning and its power, the expressive element in the word, and the knowledge it contains—that is, artha and šabda—are still unspoken, involved, and transcendent. While on the level of madhyamā vāk they acquire name and form as spoken and explicit mental vibrations. Signs with its syntactic structures proper to linguistics, with its distinct intellectual language categories, emerge. The split of form-images and form-sounds emerges. There still is a oneness in meaning but a difference in the form of objects and of forms of language. Each word acquires its unique significance.
Vaikhari Vāk - The pragmatic-material level
Finally, the vibration concretizes in the form of physical sounds on the material plane, with speech, spoken language, and written words pointing at objects. The original Word is not only manifested in terms of the speech-production but also in terms of objectification of reality. Vaikhari is a manifestation of speech in time and space with all the distinct features of language: phonemes, words, and sentences.
These are the four levels of language according to Abhinavagupta.
Thus, spoken words and sentences capture only a very pale essence of their original true meaning and true power of expression. Vocal speech obstructs the original and divine knowledge and power and that no longer can be fully conveyed. In this view, the perception of meaning does not emerge from mere symbols, letters, words, or text but rather is the perception of a transcendent ‘seed-sound.’ External symbols, signals, and words point to an internal domain. Only in this inner domain, their true original meaning is revealed, and it is where they acquire a greater creative and expressive power than it is usually recognized. Nevertheless, the Parā Vāk is always latent on all levels but is only active as potentiality, not necessarily as actuality.
Western linguistic theories emphasized so much rational thinking and analytic philosophy that they did not allow themselves to even consider the hypothesis of the trans-rational origin of language. This led to a whole set of paradoxes and mysteries in consciousness studies and cognitive science.
An example is the so-called “symbol grounding problem,” discussed by Stevan Harnad in 1990. Essentially it points out that it remains a highly problematic issue wherefrom symbols (words, numbers, streams of bits, signals, etc.) get their meaning. There is a hiatus between symbols, signals, number crunching, and semantic awareness, intuition, understanding, or knowing, that remains outside a formal description of any computational model. Abhinavagupta’s answer is that šabda (the word) is unified with artha (meaning) only at the level of Pašyantī Vāk. We are no longer in a realm that physical sciences can grasp.
Another prominent issue in the philosophy of mind is the so-called ‘binding problem.’ The question is how the brain integrates or ‘binds’ together various sensory experiences and pieces of information into a unified and coherent conscious perception and semantic whole. It essentially deals with the challenge of explaining how the brain ‘binds’ a multitude of sensory inputs (such as visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) and other cognitive processes to create a single, spatial, and feature-bonded unified conscious experience of the world. Despite the brain processing information from multiple independent sources occurs in very different ways and brain areas, conscious experience seems seamless and integrated. For instance, when you look at a red apple, your brain processes visual information about the apple's color, shape, texture, and location, in separate brain regions, yet leading to an integrated experience, also integrating this information with your prior knowledge and experiences related to apples. Researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind have proposed various theories that involve the idea that there must be specialized neural mechanisms or processes that allow for the integration of information from different sources, but the mystery remains unsolved more than ever.
If the mystic’s account of the origin of speech is correct, it couldn’t be otherwise. A science that focuses its attention only on the physical plane will never understand, not even in principle, how consciousness relates symbols to meaning and ‘binds’ or ‘integrates’ features into semantic wholes (more on my skepticism about these kinds of approaches you can read here.) Simply because the answer has to be found on other planes of existence. And also because the process goes the other way around. Not from a bottom-up logic where the sum of the parts builds up the whole, but rather from a top-down process: On the Parā Vāk level all is the one and undifferentiated truth of significance, and only later the distinctions, differences, and dissimilarities appear.
And, if Abhinavagupta's experience of the four levels of language is not just a hallucination but reflects a deeper truth about our cognitive nature, this could have potentially catastrophic consequences for the billion-funded research in the field of artificial intelligence (together with all the media hype surrounding it.) If the mind is beyond matter, and can’t be reduced to physical processes in the brain, but is something that resides on other planes of existence, then any hope to create a human-like conscious artificial general intelligence (AGI) will forever remain a self-delusion. Computers are unconscious material aggregates that compute, while according to the present vision, the mind is neither material nor computational and depends on something pretty much conscious. Perhaps, AI might get to the level of Madhyamā Vāk where cognition still works with the manipulation of words and sentences, distinguishing between object and subject (and I doubt that, since words—that is, signs and symbols—acquire meaning only by a cognitive binding act proper to Pašyantī Vāk) but it will certainly never rise to the semantic level of Pašyantī Vāk, let alone Parā Vāk, which are trans-physical, trans-rational and transcendental levels of conscious existence. Recent developments in AI suggest that, despite its enormous success, no matter how hard we try, machines remain utterly unable to have a semantic awareness of the world, and remain passive black boxes without agency and consciousness. Because, deep down, “understanding” is the hearing of the inaudible Word. Everything indicates that the AI hype is a modern fantasy. In other words, you can’t explain milk starting from butter and cheese. You must accept the eventuality that reason, the so cherished analytic mind of the Age of Enlightenment, has turned the world upside down because it is only a little speck of a much vaster domain of a universal form of cognition.
Nonetheless, Chomsky’s intuition of the mind’s centrality wasn’t completely at odds. The mind has built in a ‘language acquisition device,’ and there is something universal that is shared by all human languages. However, that universality doesn’t come from a genetic code or a neural pathway in the brain, but from an inner domain of universal consciousness. Only when the consciousness and the cognitive abilities of the first hominids were able to ascend to the mental level of Vaikhari Vāk, could language emerge. This doesn’t mean that before the mental stage of development, language is impossible (it is now widely recognized that animals have forms of communication that could be called ‘language’) and that in its first inception in the human race, speech may have been based still on infra-rational, emotional and instinctive utterances. Modern language may well have built upon a pre-linguistic symbolic activity common throughout the living kingdom. But the human language, as it is in its present complex form, needs the mind, the intellect, those cognitive abilities that distinguish humans from animals. The reason why language could develop in the human mind wasn’t so much a fortuitous genetic mutation (even though, some genetic predisposition is needed to develop the brain areas, such as Broca’s centers, involved in language and commanding the anatomy of its physical articulation in form of air pressure waves via the larynx), but comes from mind’s ability to capture the distant seed-sound in its shadow form on the mental and material plane, and which it perceives by a subject-object dichotomy. The mind then places words into a verbal syntactic context dependent on grammatical rules. In a sense, language is not a product but a discovery of the mind.
From the highest perspective, everything material we see, from stones, rivers, and stars to living creatures such as trees, non-human animals, and the human being, are the symbolic expression of a primal ‘Word’ that stands beyond time, space, and the physical sound. When we see things from this perspective, all physical vibrations, sounds, and oscillations may ultimately have a transcendent origin. Perhaps, what modern physics represents as waves is only the last word (literally) of a consciousness descending the increasingly dense planes of existence until it is involved in the inconscient matter that behaves with mechanical (i.e., unconscious) vibrational processes, but still retains a vibration with an original knowledge and creative power.
It may be no coincidence that sometimes we use to say that ‘silence speaks a thousand words.’ If we are open enough, we can capture the subtle vibrations coming from the higher levels of speech before the words are spoken. Communication beyond language exists.
Marco Masi
Acknowledgment: This post was inspired by “The four levels of speech in Tantra”, by Vladimir Yatsenko. See also his presentation on YouTube.
not only well written but evocative of that supramental word. Beautifully done.