Watch Your Language, Please

A Language of God Reflection

In the third episode of our Uniquely Unique podcast series, Colin and I continue the search for what it means to be human. After talking to several biologists in the previous episode, in this one we’re looking at some aspects of human life which emerge from and transcend our biology. Most interesting to me is our ability to use language.

Being able to communicate is not unique to humans — lots of creatures communicate (even trees!) in the sense of conveying information to other individuals. But what we do is massively different. We don’t just alert our community to potential threats from the sky, or ground, or trees the way vervet monkeys do; or point the way to a good food source the way bees do; or indicate that we’re interested and ready to mate the way about everything does. We enter into a fully symbolic mode of communication, and this opens up a vastly different way of being and experiencing the world.

There’s a really interesting book I’ve read a couple of times by philosopher Charles Taylor called, The Language Animal (Harvard U.P., 2016). In it he compares two different views of what language does for us. In one — the descriptive view — language functions simply as a system of labels we have for the things we encounter in the world: that’s a “tree”, there’s “Natasha”, when we wake up it will be “tomorrow” and we’ll eat “breakfast”, etc. That’s a pretty thin view of what language does.

More persuasive to me is the constitutive view of language, according to which the words we use shape our experience of the world to a significant degree. This isn’t a postmodern-there-is-no-reality view where anything goes, but rather understands language as a kind of filter through which reality is understood by us. Wittgenstein is famous (notorious?) for saying, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” And he said a bunch of other stuff about language amplifying and giving nuance to that view.

But in case philosophizing about language isn’t that interesting to you, consider an actual example of what it would be like not to have any language. Helen Keller provides a really fascinating case study in this. In her autobiography she reflects back on what her existence was like before she had words. She said:

"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. . . My inner life, then, was a blank without a past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith” (The World I Live In, p. 113-114).

Without attempting careful exegesis, I think there’s something deeply resonant about what it means to be human at the beginning of John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word. What would we be without words? Just another animal.