Some Brief Thoughts on Thought and Language

1. Every thought about anything whatsoever is developed, clarified, crystalized, and expressed through words and the linking of words together into sentences.¹ To a perhaps limited but real extent, one can attend to anything whatever–a rock, a tree, a sensation, an image or an idea, or the doing of something–without words or sentences, and without the explicit use of words one can imagine and remember things, reflect upon and recognize this or that; but one cannot gather remembered images and sensations, recognitions and recollections, into coherent thoughts about anything at all, even initially, without the gathering together of the stuff of thought into and under a provisional judgment–this is that, that is not this, these are probably those, those might not be that, etc.–and that is not possible without language. (Try it! Attend to your own thoughts, and see!)

2. What is true of thought is as true, if not moreso, of the activity of thinking, of the process taken as a whole of attending to things, noticing this or that about them, reflecting upon what one has noticed in light of memories of other things and thoughts once had about them, and developing new or corrected thoughts about them or unfolding thoughts about them one has already had. Without language, without the actual ability to use words and to link together words into sentences, one cannot think fully about anything. Without language, one’s condition is little better than that of a dog or a cat, a sensate being that actively senses, and that has memories of what it has sensed, but that is immersed in the flow, from moment to moment, of immediate sensation and what immediate sensation elicits from memory and engenders as regards feeling, as well as what it induces one to desire or not desire, to do or not do, to avoid or not avoid; through language, one gets distance from the immediacy of sensation and the flow of sensation, as well as distance from what sensation engenders or elicits in one by way of feeling and memory and desire, and one is able to mull over things, to get clarity about things, to judge of things, and to determine which courses of action would be good to follow and which would be good to avoid.

3. Having the use of language gives one the ability to actually think, and this gives one freedom, for it gives one distance between oneself as one who is thinking and the things one is thinking about; as language is contingent and not necessary in its existence or use (there are different kinds of language, from English to Italian, from Japanese to Hindi, and there are a variety of ways to express even one thing in each language; moreover, as the existence of feral children indicates, one is not deterministically fated to learn any by virtue of the way the world is), there is freedom in how one goes about working through or over this or that thought about anything whatever in any given language

4. While language gives freedom, and while thought, or anything approaching full thought, is not possible except one have the use of language, it is in fact difficult to think about anything well on account of language and the use of language. For while having and understanding the use of words and the way to string together words allows one to actually think, and while we cannot think but through the use of words and the stringing together of words into sentences, what one thinks about is not the words used to think about it. Pick up something, anything–a water bottle nearby, an envelope, a paperweight or a pen–and attend to it, as best you can, as if you were a feral child without language or one who has forgotten the use of language. Words will perhaps crowd their way in in the form of descriptors of the thing in hand, expressions of what the thing is and what it is or has been used for, and words will surely be active beneath your attentive perception of the thing such as to form your very perception of it, but the thing is not the words and string of words that would offer themselves for use regarding it or that attempt to intrude into your attentive focus on it. One way to see all this is to remember what you can of the relevant words from other languages you have studied: you will notice that different words are at hand for use regarding the thing you are attending to, but, as the thing remains regardless of what words you use to describe it, you are actually able to notice that the thing remains regardless of changes in language, which entails that the thing is not the words you might use to describe it. Yet, we attend to language and our use of it, and we think on it and analyze it using language, as if doing so will reveal to us the deep-down nature, the ultimate origin, of things as they are apart from language and thought undertaken through language–as if, that is, there were some special or intrinsic connection or relationship between language and the things one talks about or thinks about through that language.

5. That there is no intrinsic, necessary, or otherwise special connection or relationship between language and the things one might use language to talk or think about can be gathered from simply attending to where our facility with words and the use of words comes from. Consider the infant: the infant comes into the world without language and the use of language; it is caught up in the immediacy of sensuous experience, drawn this way and that by what sensations are strong enough or placed well enough to grab its attention. Over time, those responsible for raising up that infant get it to associate sounds and strings of sounds with particular sensations, particular experiences, and to make these sounds in turn: this that is sensed is associated with the sound represented by “dad,” and that over there is “cat,” “fire,” “bad,” “good”–and so forth. From there, one is formed by repetition and various sorts of pressure over time to remember or to do certain things when certain sounds and strings of sounds–words and strings of words–are heard, and one is also so formed to utter such sounds and strings of sounds oneself to have certain things happen–to get someone to look somewhere and notice something, to get what one has learned to associate with the settling of certain uncomfortable abdominal feelings (hunger), and so forth. Over time, one becomes very adept at the system of sounds and their use, in speech and in writing, and finally in thinking, that has been provided one by his or her community; over time, one loses sight of where it came from and what it is, and one takes it for what sounds and the habitual use of sounds, as well as their representation in accepted sets of marks and squiggles, can never be: a mirror of the way things sounded about somehow are apart from those sounds.

6. This does not mean that the customary use of sounds and accepted customary representations of sounds the use of which is the use of language cannot be occasions for insight into the way things are: One can attend to words and the use of words and notice where they come from and how they are only different from whatever else is given through the senses of hearing and seeing because that is how we have been formed to take them–as were all those who so formed us, and as were all those who formed them, and so on. That is, it is an occasion for noticing what we do when we use language and the operations that go thereinto. It is, moreover, an opportunity to notice that noticing things is distinct from the things noticed as much as things talked about are distinct from the way they are talked about–and to notice the implications of and grounds for this distinction as made manifest in the experience of that distinction. Language may not reveal to us the deep-down nature of things, but its use can certainly be an occasion to better notice ourselves and the world we attempt to navigate through its use.

7. One must, however, be careful–very careful. For the gift of language, while making full thought and all that has followed from full thought possible, it makes noticing whether what one thinks one is noticing is a function of the language one has been formed to use (and not as the thing is revealed to be when carefully attended to) or if he is succeeding in noticing things as they are apart from language truly. Take, for instance, ascriptions of purpose. Over time, we experience this following that, or this resulting from that, and we are formed to say that the latter is the purpose of the former. A knife is used to cut, therefore, the purpose of a knife is to cut; a bird builds a nest and lays and incubates eggs therein, therefore, the purpose of a nest is the laying and incubating eggs; when we eat food, stomach pangs come to an end and the growling of our stomachs is quieted, therefore, the purpose of eating is for ending our hunger. That is, the use of “purpose” and related terms is shorthand for remembering that certain things follow other things and for getting other people to think about this or attending to this. And yet, a whole vast tradition of thought arose that took such talk as revealing profound and things about the things so talked about. Even highly intelligent people are apt to be tricked by language and the use of language.

8. It is not, however, altogether trickery: While talk of purpose reveals nothing about the world other than that we use the words involved in such in particular ways, it can lead us to notice something additional about ourselves, namely, that the customary use of sounds and marks that purpose-talk involves allows us better to attend to things, remember things, and this with the intention of formulating ideas about how things might concretely work out, followed by our engaging in efforts to make concrete the state or arrangement of things we most desire. I.e., it can help us notice that while purpose-talk reveals nothing particularly profound about what is given through sensation and subsequently talked or thought about (through language) in this or that way other than that such use of sounds and their accepted representation in squiggles and marks has been found helpful in navigating the world as given in and through sensation, the use of “purpose” and related words by us may reveal something about anyone capable of attending to things, remembering things, thinking about things, imagining things, and acting out of a desire to see things changed or maintained in harmony with the fruits of such acts.

9. But of course, even this will be difficult: For language never ceases to be language, and thinking never ceases to be dependent on and formed by language–and, through language, dependent on and formed by the community in which one was raised and, even now, the community one inhabits. As noted above, that we can notice this implies the possibility of freedom in relation to language and the origins of language for us; but this does not mean that attaining such freedom will be easy.

1. Header image: Claude Monet, Fishing Boats (1883)