[MD] Sympathy for the Devil

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[Ian]
Just to be clear, before I respond to the rest of that long para ... I don't have a problem, and I don't see those things (words or static patterns) as limiting - UNLESS we allow ourselves to be limited by them (which I don't).

[Arlo]
I'm saying we don't have a choice, those things are both enabling and constraining, they both sent boundaries (limits) and enable us to act within those limits. 

Consider  the oft-quoted passage from LILA: Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history? If Descartes had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am," he would have been correct.

But, of course, some "menus" are better than others, some menus allow us greater agency, some expand the lines of constraint, and this is because "menus" aren't just abstractions that happen in a realm separate from 'lived real life', but- just like inorganic, biological and social patterns- are a part of lived real life, and have effects on both agency and structure, on both ability and limit. 

And, of course, the levels themselves are evolutionary ways to expand agency and overcome lower-level "limits", and the next evolutionary step in levels will no doubt help us overcome the innate limits of the intellectual level- but even this level will impose its own set of limits just as it affords expanded agency.


TL/DR; you are limited by language, but you are also enabled, nature of the beast.