What English Does Not Know It Is Doing
Begin with a suspicion. When a grammatical argument feels universal—when it seems to reveal something true about the nature of thought itself—it is worth pausing to ask whose grammar generated it. The claim that participles hold activity open in a way that nouns and infinitives cannot is a real claim.
It describes something genuine about how certain grammatical forms in English work, and what that working reveals about process and relation and the kind of knowing that somapatheia names. But English is one language. It is a language with a particular history—Germanic roots, Norman overlay, centuries of mercantile and imperial expansion, a resulting tendency toward abstraction that other linguistic traditions have noticed and sometimes found baffling. To treat what English does with its participles as a discovery about consciousness or reality is to make the mistake that Western philosophy has been making for long enough that the mistake now feels like method.
English has a peculiarity that it rarely acknowledges: it is unusually comfortable with nominalisation. It takes verbs and turns them into nouns with a facility that many languages find grammatically strange or stylistically ugly. Failure. Displacement. Embodiment. Knowledge. These are all actions that English has frozen into things, and it does this so fluently, so invisibly, that an English speaker may not notice it happening. The grammatical form produces the ontology—turns processes into objects, turnings into things turned—and then the philosophy inherits the ontology and takes it for the structure of reality. The argument about participles is, in part, an argument against this tendency within English. Treeing rather than tree. Relating rather than relation. It tries to recover the verb that the noun buried.
But the recovery assumes that the burial happened in the first place. And in many languages, it did not.
Mandarin Chinese does not mark its verbs for tense the way English does. The action does not carry a timestamp indicating when it occurred; context, aspect markers, and temporal adverbs do that work instead. What this means, grammatically, is that the verb already exists in a kind of permanent present that English can only approximate through the present participle. To say in Mandarin that something is happening and to say that it happens in general require additional markers to distinguish them, rather than separate verb forms. The distinction English makes between the simple present and the continuous—between he runs, which implies habit or type, and he is running, which implies ongoing specific activity—is not built into the Mandarin verb itself. The activity is not frozen into a type by default. It remains, in a sense, perpetually in the process of occurring. English reaches toward this through the participle. Mandarin starts there.
Hopi, the language of an indigenous people of the American Southwest, presented Benjamin Lee Whorf—whatever the subsequent controversies about his broader claims—with evidence that a language could organise time and action in ways that made the English distinction between thing and activity look like a local preference rather than a cognitive universal. Hopi verbs, Whorf argued, do not map onto a container-model of time in which events are located at points on a line. They encode something more like the nature of the activity itself—its duration, its completeness, its mode of manifesting—rather than when it occurred relative to the speaker. Whether or not Whorf’s analysis holds in every particular, the observation remains: a language can be built in a way that makes process primary without needing to reach for a special grammatical form like the participle to recover the process from under the noun. The process is the starting position.
Yoruba, spoken across West Africa and its diaspora, uses a verb-centric structure in which what English would express as nouns often remain verbal in form. The ease with which English nominalises—turning to know into knowledge, to relate into relation, to fail into failure—does not transfer. A Yoruba speaker encountering a page of English philosophy, with its dense stacking of abstract nouns, finds herself reading through a filter that her own grammar does not provide. Not because the concepts are alien, but because the grammatical habit of freezing process into object runs so deep in the English text that it constitutes an argument for a particular ontology whether or not the philosopher intends it. Western philosophy has, without always noticing, been doing metaphysics through grammar.
Aymara, spoken in the Andes, encodes in its verb forms information about epistemology—about how the speaker knows what they are asserting. A speaker does not simply say something happened; they inflect the verb to indicate whether they witnessed it directly, heard about it, or infer it from evidence. The knowing is built into the saying. Somapatheia, in this light, is not a concept that needs to be introduced into the grammar from outside, as a specialist philosophical term for a kind of knowing that the standard grammar overlooks. The standard grammar already carries the epistemological distinction. The grammar asks, with every utterance: how do you know this? And it requires an answer in the inflection of the verb itself.
The significance of this for somapatheia is considerable. Somapatheia names a form of knowing that is not mediated by discursive thought—knowing through the body, through felt relation, through the accumulated intelligence of encounter. English has to work against its own grammatical grain to hold this kind of knowing in view. It tends to nominalise it immediately—to turn the knowing into knowledge, the relating into relation—and in doing so it turns a process into a possession, an activity into a thing someone has. The philosophical effort of the participle is to resist this. But many languages do not experience the pull in the same direction. They do not begin from the noun. They do not freeze by default. For a speaker of Hopi or Yoruba or Aymara or many others, the argument for the participle does not name a recovery but a normal condition—the way the language already works.
Now go closer to home, and the argument complicates further. English is not one thing. Standard written English, the kind that generates philosophical prose and grammar textbooks and this sentence, is a particular social and historical construction—the dialect of institutions, of print culture, of legal and academic authority. It is a dialect that learned, over several centuries, to hide the fact that it is a dialect. It presents itself as simply English, the correct form, against which other varieties are measured as deviations or deficiencies. But other varieties of English carry different grammatical possibilities, and some of them do what the standard cannot.
African American Vernacular English has, among its grammatical resources, the habitual be. He be working names a different activity than he is working. The standard English present continuous—he is working—names what is happening at this moment. The habitual be names a recurrent pattern, a quality of how someone characteristically operates, a way of being in the world rather than a snapshot of a current state. This distinction does not exist in standard English grammar, which must reach for awkward locutions—he is always working, he tends to work—to approximate what the habitual be does cleanly and economically. The habitual be is a grammatical form that holds open the ongoing pattern in a way the standard does not provide. Standard English teachers have historically marked it as an error. It is not an error. It is a capability.
Irish English—the English spoken in Ireland with the deep influence of Irish Gaelic running beneath it—has its own resources for this. Gaelic lacks a simple verb to have in the way English uses it; possession in Irish is expressed through being, through the thing being at or on the person. When this structure migrated into Irish English, it produced forms like I do be thinking, using the auxiliary do be to mark continuous, habitual, ongoing activity that the standard English am thinking does not quite capture. Standard English grammar looks at this and sees redundancy, incorrectness, the Irish speaker failing to handle the language properly. But the Irish speaker is handling something the standard grammar cannot hold—the continuous and habitual at once, the activity as characteristic mode rather than momentary event.
Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and the English that has developed under their influence carry similar resources. Languages with aspectual systems that distinguish between types of action—completed, ongoing, habitual, inceptive—produce Englishes that find ways to encode these distinctions even when the standard grammar has no provision for them. The speakers are not making errors. They are being more precise than the standard allows.
And what of the tradition of thought that developed outside the grammatical inheritance of Indo-European languages altogether? Buddhist philosophy, arriving in translation into Western discourse, had to find English containers for concepts that the grammar resists. The anatta—no-self—of Buddhist thought is not simply the claim that the self does not exist. It is the claim that what we habitually treat as a noun-entity, a fixed thing called self, is actually a process, a stream of arising and ceasing, a relating that generates the appearance of a stable entity without the entity ever actually crystallising. The argument the participle makes in English—that treeing is truer than tree—is what Buddhist philosophy has been making since the fifth century BCE, in languages whose grammatical structures already inclined toward process rather than substance. It arrived in the West as metaphysics. In its home context it was closer to observation.
The Daoist tradition in China points in the same direction. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao—this is the first line of the Tao Te Ching, and its grammatical dimension is not incidental. The moment the process takes a noun, it has already misrepresented itself. Not because language fails, but because noun-language fails in a way that a language oriented toward process might fail less badly. The text itself enacts the problem: it must use nouns to gesture at what exceeds them.
Somapatheia, placed in this broader context, stops being a corrective to a universal problem and becomes something more interesting: a name for a kind of knowing that some linguistic and cultural traditions have always held central, that some grammatical systems already honour, and that the particular history of Western European thought—with its bias toward substance, its comfort with nominalisation, its tendency to treat the knowing-subject as a fixed entity with cognitive properties—has made harder to see and harder to say. The participle is not a solution to a problem inherent in language. It is a solution to a problem inherent in this language, and specifically in the abstracted, institutionalised, empire-freighted version of this language that learned to call itself simply English.
To recognise this is not to abandon the argument about participles. It is to understand its scope more honestly. Treeing, embodying, relating—these participles do hold activity open in English in a way the nouns and infinitives do not. This remains true and useful. But the recognition that many of the world’s languages begin from process, encode epistemology in their verb forms, resist nominalisation, and hold somapatheia not as a specialist correction but as a grammatical default—this recognition changes what the argument is for. It is no longer a discovery about the nature of language or consciousness. It is a locally specific recovery: English remembering something about activity and relation that its own grammatical history encouraged it to forget.
The rest of the world, in this respect, did not forget. Or forgot differently. Or never had the same forgetting to do. The knowledge that the participle tries to recover in English has been sitting, undisturbed, in the grammars and philosophical traditions and embodied practices of cultures that Western thought spent several centuries insisting it had arrived to educate. The traffic of knowing does not run in one direction. Somapatheia—the body knowing in the act of relating, the intelligence that precedes and exceeds articulation—is not a concept that Western philosophy discovered and now offers to the world. It is a concept that the world has been living, and that Western philosophy, slowly and with difficulty, is beginning to find words for. In finding those words, it might do well to remember that some languages already had them. Or did not need them, because the grammar already held the thing open.
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