The Slayers of Moses by Susan A. Handelman
Spoiler Warning:Â I talk about Arrival a lot in this post.
When Handelman describes at the beginning of the first chapter the limitations that Aristotleâs syllogisms apply to logic, thus straightjacketing logic in a way and separating it from science, I couldnât help but be reminded of the movie Arrival.
Handelman begins by affirming that, âAristotleâs great contribution to logic was, accordingly, the syllogism - which is not a method of investigation but of deductive proofâ (6). The great problem with the syllogism, at least according to William and Martha Kneale, Handelman says, is Aristotleâs ââ...overemphasis on the subject-predicate form of proposition which still restricted logical development in the time of Leibnizââ (6). Handelman further elucidates the problem with an overemphasis on the subject-predicate form by stating that Gadamer, as well, âexplains that Hegel also criticized the classical subject-predicate proposition, claiming that, in truth, it constitutes a âblockage of thought...ââ (7).
Now, the connection to Arrival is twofold in that, as the movie progresses, Louise Banks is attempting to communicate with two heptapods that have arrived on Earth. What she discovers, as she continues on, is that their language consists of sentences - if they can be thought of as sentences - that arenât necessarily constructed in the subject-predicate form in the same way that English is. Likewise, their concept of time is not linear, in the same way that those who speak English perceive time linearly. The movie taps into the theory behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the basis of which is that the structure of a language affects the speakerâs cognition and worldview - very similar to what Handelman is arguing in The Slayers of Moses.  In the movie, Louiseâs brain begins to change as she studies the heptapod language such that her cognition changes and her understanding of time comes to be non-linear, as well. This can be seen in the way that her daughter comes before the heptapod arrival, despite the fact that, at least linearly, her daughter is not born until after the heptapods have already disappeared.
Louiseâs daughter being introduced before Louise is in the movie, and the fact that Louise knows about her daughter before she is born, is perhaps a way of putting the predicate before the subject (that which comes after goes before), or a way of disrupting the subject-predicate relationship. In other words, time becomes circular and melded in the same way that the heptapod language is. Louise and her daughter are entwined.
It is important to note that, once Louise is able to enter into the heptapodsâ language - a circular form with an unidentifiable beginning and end - and once she moves past the subject-predicate way of thinking, she is able to get around that âblockage of thoughtâ that Handelman talks about.
Later on in the Slayers of Moses, Handelman says, âThe reductiveness of this [Aristotleâs] schema led to what has been called a âstraightjacketing of logicââ (13). It is very interesting how what Handelman says is relatable to Arrival, in that Louise is working alongside, and sometimes against, the mathematicians the United States government has assigned to work on the language. At one point in the movie, she erases complicated mathematical equations on a whiteboard to write her one simple sentence. (In other words, she is trying to break through the straightjacket they are placing on communicating with the heptapods). To point out the complication in the smallest of sentences, Louise illustrates just some of the problems that can arise when trying to get the question âWhy are you here?â across. Louise shows that the government wants to ask why are âyou,â as in the âheptapods,â here, rather than the specific âyou,â as one of the possible problems they might run into when trying to ask the question. Similarly, in The Slayers of Moses, Handelman, in her critique of Aristotle, shows that his four classes of general statements are only general - that they do not apply to specifics - which is another weakness. Both Louise and Handelman poke at the problem of singular versus general and how this changes meaning entirely.
It is just very interesting to me that these problems with language that Handelman deals with are somewhat apparent in the movie Arrival, and I wanted to point them out.
