Summary: Today we have a twin review by the philosopher Kelley Ross, looking at the use of language as the driving force in the book Stranger in a Strange Land and the film Arrival. Heinlein is one of the great science fiction authors (his worst works are excellent). Arrival is powerful film based on a science fiction story, staring Amy Adams — one of the great actresses of our time.
“The Whorfian Hypothesis in
Stranger in a Strange Land and Arrival.“
Review of the book and the film.
Arrival stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Written by Eric Heisserer. (2016.)
Stranger written by Robert Heinlein (1961).
Review by Kelley L. Ross. Posted at Friesian.
Re-posted with his generous permission.
In the novel Stranger in a Strange Land
In Heinlein’s book, Michael Valentine Smith, who was orphaned on Mars when his astronaut parents died (or were murdered) there, was raised by Martians and then later was returned to Earth by a subsequent expedition. He does not know that human beings, without the benefit of the Martian language, do not experience reality in the same way that he does and that they lack abilities that he takes for granted. Thus, levitation and control of ambient conditions are things that he does not find remarkable or in need of explanation. Most dramatically, if he perceives or “groks” (glossed as “to taste,” like Latin sapio, “to taste” or “know”) “wrongness” in anything, including people, he can, remotely, tip them out of our universe of three dimensional space. They disappear. When he realizes that humans cannot do these things, he cannot explain how he is able to do them without teaching his human friends the Martian language, which he begins to do. They are then able to perform similar feats.
Heinlein, of course, cannot explain what it is about the Martian language that makes interaction with the physical world so different. Ex hypothese, he could not. Eventually, Smith turns his language instruction into a religion (like Heinlein’s science fiction colleague L. Ron Hubbard?) and allows himself to be martyred to the faith. It is not clarified whether the circumstance that his spirit survives death is also due to the Martain language or is just true in general, as it appears to be.
The film Arrival, based on the science fiction story “Story of Your Life” {at Amazon
Whitaker plays some of the alien sounds for Adams, apparently thinking that because she speaks Persian (which the movie calls 
Whitaker’s reaction is pretty much “you’re no fun,” and he initially withdraws his offer, which is silly, since nobody can do what he seems to want.
The movie also creates the deceptive impression that everyone in linguistics is a polyglot, and the single reference to Sanskrit by Adams leads reviewers to conclude that she also knows Sanskrit. But few people in linguistics are actual polyglots, although my own Persian professor from UCLA, Donald Stilo, now at the Max Planck Insitute in Germany, is one. Writing a dissertation on Persian in linguistics, Stilo was also designing a course in Persian, and was teaching it. I recently discovered that Stilo’s name came from a historically significant city in Calabria.
Adams, accompanied by physicist Jeremy Renner, discovers that alien “speech” is actually a kind of writing, with the aliens squirking ink into the air that forms into largely circular glyphs, which look a lot like just inkblots. The form of the glyphs contains semantic elements that express, all at once, entire sentences. Adams is eventually able to analyse and identify these elements, reproduce them (digitally!), and engage in dialogues, although often with confusing and even dangerous ambiguities.
Since the glyphs contain whole sentences all at once, it is noted in the movie that they are free of time. And this is what leads into a Whorfian metaphysics — with the explicit identification of the “Sapir-Whorf” theory in the movie. As it happens, in the metaphysics of the alien language, time does not exist in the strictly linear fashion known to us. As Adams begins to learn the language, she also begins to experience episodes of seeing things that are not in the present. Actually, she knows so little of the language at that point, and is so intent on translating it into English, that it is not believable that she should already be experiencing reality is such a different way. In Stranger in a Strange Land much is made of the circumstance that the word grok represents a concept that resists translation into human speech. Although, as we have seen, simple glosses are possible for it, the word tends to be used in English unchanged by those learning the Martian language.
We see nothing of the sort in Arrival, although there easily could have been a sequence where Adams points to part of a glyph and voices some perplexity about what it could mean. But perhaps there is something like that, since she and Renner keep seeing a glyph they translate as “timeless.” Of course, the amount of time this all would take is not something easily accommodated in a movie, so the rapid transformation of Adams’ world can be excused as poetic license.
No more than in Heinlein can Arrival explain how this alien language alters the apparent structure of reality, to the point where impossible things can happen. But the consequences of his are very different in Arrival than in Stranger in a Strange Land. Michael Valentine Smith has some kind of super-powers, but the effect on the character played by Amy Adams is of a much more personal form.
At the beginning of the movie we see what we take to be recollections by Adams of her young daughter, who subsequently had died of what looks like cancer. We don’t see a husband, and at the beginning of the main story she is quite alone and unattached to anyone. As the time displacement experiences begin to occur, most of them also involve her daughter. Still no husband, but we learn in one of them that the girl’s father has left because Adams has told him about the disease that will take their daughter’s life. This kind of thing happens with real people.
A large part of the dramatic payoff of the movie is when we learn that all these recollections of the daughter are actually in the future. The father of the girl is Renner, whom Adams has only met on the alien translation project. He later leaves because Adams has told him, long before the illness occurs, that their daughter is doomed and fated to die. He can’t handle it — although we wonder, since he has been learning the alien language himself, why he has not acquired a similiar familiarity with the future.
Thus, the much of the interest of the movie is in the moral issues of the fatalism implied by its metaphysics, which in turn is allowed by the Whorfian Hypothesis, which thus taken to strongly imply that a real metaphysics can be anything that a language in some sense “wants” it to be. The producers of the movie seem to be aware of these overtones. Thus, as Adams and Renner become intimate, and he voices a desire for a child, she asks him if there is anything about his life that he would change. He answers, “No,” perhaps not realizing that she means all of his life, including the future, even the tragic death of their child, which presumably could have been avoided by not having that child at that time. In Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965)
But it is hard to be consistent about this. The aliens tell Adams that they are teaching humans their language because in 3000 years they will need our help. So, because of this, the aliens have chosen to come to Earth? But then, knowing the tragedy of her daughter’s life, Adams choses to have the baby anyway? Or are there really no true choices involved? The aliens are compelled to come to Earth, as Adams is compelled to have the baby.
This is a paradox of free will and foreknowledge. If we have free will, and we know the future, then we can change the choices to produce a better future. This is what we try to do anyway, when all we have is speculation about the future and imperfect knowledge about the possible consequences of our actions. But if our knowledge of the future were perfect, has the future in a sense already happened, which means our choices have already been made for us? Elsewhere I have recently considered a physicist who stumbles into such a mess. This has long been a problem in theology. When God creates the world, he already knows that Adolf Hitler will murder millions of people. So why does he allow this person even to be conceived? If Hitler simply never exists, he will know nothing about it; and all the suffering he would have inflicted will not happen. And if somehow Hitler must exist, aren’t there going to be an infinite number of other possible individuals who simply won’t exist themselves? What have we, or God, got against them, especially if most will be better people than Adolf Hitler?
Thus, by way of the Whorfian Hypothesis, Arrival opens up a fountain of metaphysical, moral, and theological problems. Is it good that Amy Adams values her daughter’s short life? Or is it wrongful that she allows her daughter to exist and live a life that ends in intense suffering and tragedy? Sometimes there are dilemmas like this in the real world, when parents discover that they will or may have a child with grave birth defects or hereditary disease. Thus, we find that the Whorfian Hypothesis can lead into a tangle of larger issues, which may already exist without it, but which can appear for us if all we are doing is talking about the meaning of language.
The outright fatalism of Arrival might be compared with the confusion between determinism and teleology in the movie Knowing. There is no confusion in Arrival, just the consequences of the Whorfian Hypothesis; but both movies are, after a fashion, meditations on the meaning of life.
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About the author
Dr. Kelley Ross retired in 2009 after 22 years as an instructor at the Department of Philosophy of Los Angeles Valley College. See his LinkedIn profile. He joined the Libertarian Party in 1992 and has run several times for the California State Assembly and Congress.
He is the editor of The Proceedings of the Friesian School website, which has a wide range of fascinating material about philosophy, literature, film, and art. This school of philosophy is based on the work of Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843). See Wikipedia for details.
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Trailer for Arrival.
