The essayist George Steiner has lamented the increasing importance and power of the language of mathematics in today’s world, as well as the concomitant decline of the written word. The written word is considered vague by the modern technocrat, while mathematics and the vocabularies of science suggest a high degree of precision.
It is precisely due to its vagueness that the word is truer to life than the language of mathematics. Its chemical description is H2O, but water is more than that. Water as an idea is endlessly rich in words and allusion – wet, cold, black, silver, cascading, calm, reflective, deep, troubled. Scientific language is narrow. Words are broad. Words include a kind of natural chaos and remind us of their own imprecision and the illusory nature of communication. Scientific language, that is to say, mathematics, pretends to be beyond illusion and yet is thoroughly enamored of the myth of reason. It believes its closed system is the world – a belief both highly deluded and effective.