The function of language is relational. But for it to function relationally requires a fixed concept. That fixed concept is subjective experience. On the most fundamental level, it is the raw experience of sensory input fixed as a concept built on the first instinctive interpretation of those raw feels: pleasure/pain/privation. Thus, "I" is born as the imagined object to which sensations of pleasure/pain/privation occur, and the imagined creative consciousness which gives them order and meaning. This is reinforced through socialization until this "experiencing I" becomes fixed and concrete, i.e. "I" as a "thing" becomes unquestionably real.
What the construct aware or the mystic realizes is that this fixed concept can't be anything but symbolic. Self cannot be experienced in any way other than its relation to objects and doings constructed by social reality, which necessarily makes it symbolic. Who or what "understands" and uses these symbols? It seems inordinate and paradoxical, but nothing understands the symbols. To "understand" them would require the loss of the fixed concept of self, and then there'd be no fixed concept for the social reality by which such an "understanding" could be expressed or ordered in thought and language.
At the simplest and earliest stage of language acquisition, self is the product of the experience of dependence on social reality to meet a need. That social reality is built upon the instinctual. A baby needs food and it cries, whether it "understands" the reason it cries or not. The crying brings food, and the experience is stored in memory. The memory, which is the relationship between crying and getting the food, is strengthened by repetition. What is the relation? The fixed experience of a privation (hunger) is associated with a doing (crying) and an external object (food) and the illusion of power in the cry is created by this relational memory. By taking on an illusion of power, the cry has become a symbol. It now has social reality.
Social reality then gradually begins requiring a more sophisticated "form" to the cry to satisfy the need. The child repetitively hears, "Say, 'mama' and I'll give you the cookie." At this stage, the child may have no fixed relational memory to associate the symbols "mama" or "cookie." But the language process (form) is to build a stored relational memory that the sensory experience associated with the symbol "cookie" brings an instinctive pleasure (or absence of privation). Thus, the child can be conditioned to develop its cry into "Mama. Cookie." even though the fixed relational point of the child's experience of self is still little more than the sensory experience of a privation, and corresponding illusion of power of thought projected into reality reinforced by relating "Mama. Cookie." to the chemically stimulated pleasure of tasting sugar, chocolate and flour and the negation of the privation of hunger.
Arguably, the experience of pleasure/pain/privation is all identity ever really is despite the complex means by which we expand identity to better achieve pleasure, and minimize pain. This storing of relational memories by associating a doing with an object, and an object with a privation or pleasure is the foundational "form" of social reality. From there, the relationships between objects become more sophisticated as instinct and survival drive the need for a more developed social reality. The experience of pleasure and privation concretizes in self identity. Objects relationally associated with one another through memory of their specific traits (as those traits themselves take on a symbolic power associated with pleasure and privations) become abstractions based on those traits, and become common nouns instead of proper ones. I gradually learn the useful traits that give the symbol "cookie" its power in social reality. Eventually, I remember the relationship between a set of traits that determine what is and is not a "cookie."
It's all about method and form rather than content. The content is never "understood" because the sine qua non of thought is always the form or method of connecting abstractions of language from subjective experiences to create social reality. As Cassirer tells us: "Instead of devoting itself to particular things and events, thought seeks and apprehends a totality of relations and connections; instead of material details, a world of laws opens up to it. Through the 'form' of signs, through the possibility of operating with them in a definite way and combining them in accordance with fixed and constant rules, the character of theoretical self-certainty opens up to thought."
