The Philosophical Blobfish

My friend and I often talk about philosophy and gender, and we discovered a very helpful shorthand when talking about complex topics - the blobfish.

The idea of the blobfish came about when we were discussing this post of mine, which is about how the meaning of a word precedes any definition of it. In other words, what a word means, the thing/category/action/trait it represents, is already understood by speakers of a language, who then attempt to describe this pure meaning using more/other words - by writing a definition. We compared the process of forcibly dragging the pure meaning out of its native home (the psychic realm) and placing it in the linguistic realm (as a definition) as being similar to how moving a blobfish out of its deep sea habitat and onto the surface will depressurise and mutilate it, leaving only a mockery of its original form.

In this sense, a “blobfish” is any concept that exists primarily as some shared understanding between people, which is what I referred to in the previous paragraph as the “psychic realm”. Attempts to describe these concepts linguistically will never be successful. Basically all words are blobfish, but some words’ blobfishiness are much more profound than others. For example, “woman” is a blobfish. “Sandwich” is a blobfish. “Grief” is a blobfish. But blobfish aren’t limited to just words. The personal experience of your own gender is a blobfish. The difference between the smell of the air at 6am and the smell of the air at 10am is a blobfish. These things are all blobfish because we, as humans, understand them more completely than words could ever describe.

The psychic realm where blobfish live is similar in concept to Laplanche’s mythosymbolic. Laplanche asserts that the mythosymbolic is where the psychic attachments to gendered norms come from. The mythosymbolic is the set of codes transmitted from adults to children, indoctrinating them with ideas of what masculinity is, what femininity is. I believe this idea can be extended to all concepts, not just gender.

In any one moment, mythosymbolic codes are transmitted from a single adult to a single child, but there are millions of moments of transmission, causing a smoothing out of the understanding of each concept in the child’s brain, constructing the illusion of an objective reality. Also, I believe that this transmission effect continues for adults. Everyone is constantly transmitting their understanding of the mythosymbolic to each other, causing an “averaging” effect, and making the mythosymbolic essentially into a shared dream world, each person carrying a copy of it in their mind. These copies aren’t exact, but they’re close enough that they might as well be, and they’re constantly being synchronised.

The problem is that the shared dream-world understanding of what anything is (e.g. a sandwich) is not inherently linguistic. Which means that by attempting to define one of these concepts linguistically, the concept will become damaged beyond repair. You can’t possibly write a linguistic definition for “sandwich” which includes everything you would consider a sandwich (banh mi, open face sandwich, ice cream sandwich) and excludes everything you don’t (hot dog, cheese and crackers, gyros). Hence, blobfish.