It might mean that tennis was a form of communication and that communication and tennis were related to one another by natural law. If that law had been imposed as a cosmic order by some god, we might think of talk as a higher entity than tennis, particularly since it seems clear that more humans talk than play racquet games. We might develop a discourse about the essential natures of talk and racquet games, and if we pursued it, we might find that our thinking led us to a conception of the world as an instantiation of timeless ideas. We might understand our language as a kind of lens through which we could look through the larger lens of the world at the timeless essences of things. If we thought this way, we might think of knowledge as matching our ideas up with the timeless ideas of things or with the mind of the god who thinks them.

We might argue later that our conception of natural law didn’t require a god to think it up. That some aspects of experience possessed essential natures and structures would have come to seem powerfully self-evident. Thus, even if the world became opaque because we lost the ability to think of it as divine thinking, we might still describe our own thinking as grounded in a reality whose most basic principles were self evident and unambiguous. Our theory of knowledge wouldn’t necessarily have to change from our former conception of matching our ideas up with real things. We could still think of our language as a lens and of the effort to know as a clarifying of our vision, a removal of ambiguity and uncertainty by careful procedure.

Notice that we have got completely away from tennis. Our thinking has opened up a gap between theory and practice because we made a sort of metaphysical leap in order to close the gap between the discourse, tennis, and the discourse about tennis. This is what conventional thinking about thinking does; it moves away from phenomena in order to give an account of them and may lose the phenomena as it proceeds. In time, essential accounts of phenomena tend to harden into orthodoxy. We can think of a variety of discourses about tennis that might harden so. If, for instance, we were to reflect on the fact that our practice of tennis is closed to outsiders (particularly if some of its exclusivity came to seem arbitrary and unnecessary) and if we sought a way to change some of our rules, we might seek to appeal to the presumed ground of those rules.

But those among us who retained the conviction that it was necessary to assume the existence of a god as the author of the rules might object that our attempt to change the rules was godless. Those who believed that rules could be grounded in self-evident principles of ethical behavior might also object, if their interpretation of the rules required that tradition be respected as a source of unambiguous authority. After all, interpretation is difficult and problematic. The ratification of a particular tradition of interpretation might seem less problematic. Ultimately, those of us who wished to change the rules might find ourselves facing expulsion from the tennis club as dangerous freethinkers who were proposing to overturn the established order of right teaching.

What if we answered with the argument that tennis=talk was only a metaphor, after all, and that tennis and talk are not at all implicated in a metadiscourse about god and essential ideas? And what if we argued further that the discourses tennis and about tennis are related discourses, but that the essentialists had it the wrong way around, because about tennis is derived from tennis, and the rules we wished to change were merely arbitrary parts of a derivative discourse? Here we would retain only the historicist assumption of the old essentialist view: that is, that what really happens is prior to any talk about it. Indeed, the metaphor tennis=talk might come to seem disingenuous, suggesting equivalence when the actual relationship involved is a symbiotic one. On this view, about tennis is criticism of tennis and parasitic upon it.

But when our essentialist opponents pressed us to explain how the rules are derived from the practice of tennis, we would likely be forced to claim that the rules record how we have always done tennis. And if we were pressed further to explain why we wished to change what we had always done: that is, why we wished to change tennis into something other than tennis, we might wonder whether we had taken a wrong turn. We might argue that we wished to make tennis better, more attuned to the present day in which esclusivity is distrusted. We might claim that all humans are potential tennis players; and at this point, our friend the philosopher might accuse us of trying to reinstate the old essentialist view of tennis through the back door. At the very least, our opponents would have forced us to pursue the argument on their terms.

But what if we attempted rigorously to defend the proposition that tennis and about tennis are two distinct discourses, neither derived from the other, having in common only a certain shared vocabulary. It seems obvious that about tennis has a certain vocabulary of which tennis has no real need (i. e. the discourse vocabulary). But what if tennis also possesses a vocabulary that has no function in about tennis (i. e. the entire lexicon of basic gestures, which don’t translate and cannot be taught in a way that is mediated by another language)? What arguments would such a defense require? What would be its premises and consequences?

[Posted At Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 23 March 1999]