“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ecstasies
Thomas Aquinas was a priest, philosopher, and Scholastic thinker of the thirteenth century who dedicated most of his life to recording the entirety of Christian theology in a single body of work titled the Summa Theologica. Writing for nearly 10 years, the Summa grew to encompass multiple volumes spanning nearly two-million words.
In 1274, Domenic of Caserta witnessed Aquinas levitating in prayer, in the throes of whats known as “religious ecstasy”. While in the chapel of Saint Nicholas he was visited by Christ, who asked Aquinas “What reward would you have for your labour?” to which Aquinas replied, “Nothing but you, Lord.”
He continued writing.
In December of that same year Aquinas was again visited during an ecstasy. Yet after this experience, he found he could no longer write anymore. He found it altogether impossible. When begged by his close companion Reginald to resume his work on the Summa Theologica, he replied
“Mihi videtur ut palea—I can write no more, for all that I have written seems like straw to me.”
During that same year he made his way to the Council of Lyon by invitation of Pope Gregory X. Whilst travelling along the Appian Way Aquinas struck his head on a branch, fell off his horse, and was gravely injured. Taken to a nearby Cisterian Monastery, he told Reginald,
“Here is my resting place, for ever and ever.”
Frail and dying, it is said he passed giving commentary to the Cisterian monks on the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs.
The Summa Theologica was never finished.
What did Aquinas see that day in 1274? What vision so moved him to reduce his life's work to mere straw?
Dreams
Carl Gustav Jung was a prolific Swiss psychologist, psychiatrist, and writer famous for founding analytic psychology, and his myriad studies of human nature through psychological concepts he coined archetypes. Particularly famous for his study of dreams and their symbolism, he once wrote “The activity of consciousness and the unconscious can impinge upon each other. When the unconscious impinges on consciousness, we experience the resulting effects in the form of dreams, visions and compulsive feelings.”
This was no better exemplified than by Friedrich August Kekulé, a German organic chemist who discovered the structure of the Benzene molecule. After struggling with the problem for a considerable time, the shape came to him in a dream in the form of the mythological symbol of a snake devouring its own tail – the Orobouros.
It was a ring!
American author Cormac McCarthy liked to tell the story of Kekulé to reinforce his idea that the unconscious is older than language. There are many noted examples of solutions coming to individuals in their dreams, but they always speak through image and metaphor.
Why do our dreams, and by extension our unconscious, not speak to us in language?
Or as McCarthy writes in his compelling essay, why does the unconscious not merely say “Hey Kekulé, it’s a ring.”
Language
In casual conversation we find our sentences flow from our mouths quite fluidly, but there is no prior construction in speaking that you’d find in, let’s say, an essay. Back and forth conversation happens naturally. Sometimes, it feels almost thoughtless. Intuitive. Yet each word requires a stimulus from the brain prior to speaking. Regardless of how engaged you are with a conversation, speech is linked with thought. This begs the question – where does the substance of speech originate? Not merely which neurons in the brain fire and signal to engage your mouth in action, but the origin of this stimulus itself.
Where does it all begin?
When do we decide to start a sentence, and from where? When you think about the chain, it seems each starting point succeeds the former, all the way back in an unbroken chain of cause and effect.
It’s an infinite regress, or what McCarthy calls “a mystery opaque to total blackness.”
Human beings in our current evolutionary state have existed for around two hundred thousand years, and our ancestry has existed in some form for millions. Spoken language as we know it is rather new, on an evolutionary timeline. Our unconscious, by comparison, precedes the origin of language by millions of years. McCarthy’s answer to Kekulé’s Benzene molecule revelation appearing through dream imagery and not language was that the unconscious is simply not used to giving verbal instructions. From an evolutionary standpoint, millions-of-years-old habits are simply hard to break.
Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment in which he sought to determine the origin of decision-making in the human brain. The “unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act.”
In the study, he asked participants to randomly flick their wrists while measuring their brain activity. To measure when the subjects felt the exact moment to flick their wrist, he had them follow the second-hand of a clock and report the position in which they felt the moment of compulsion. The brain scans found that “The onset of cerebral activity clearly preceded by at least several hundred milliseconds the reported time of conscious intention to act.”
The brain activity corresponding to the action occurred prior to the conscious action itself.
The results of the experiment were that “cerebral initiation of a spontaneous, freely voluntary act can begin unconsciously, that is, before there is any (at least recallable) subjective awareness that a 'decision' to act has already been initiated cerebrally.”
The findings show that the unconscious seems to make decisions before you're aware of the subjective feeling of making a choice. Which means, by all definitions, our unconscious is filtered by the feeling of free choice.
Is subjective choice an illusion?
Is the free-will in which we construct our entire understanding of reality and Being an illusory function of our evolution? Are we simply vehicles of the unconscious mind? And in the case of speech, do these findings indicate that within the deeply rooted nucleus of our unconscious thought – the stimuli that conduct our every movement – that what we say is being decided for us, long before we ever get to speaking it?
Who’s to say.
Language Games
Language is more than the sum of its parts. It is more than the conglomeration of symbols corresponding to certain meanings. And in the case of speech, it is not merely communication of spoken symbols with certain meanings, but is action interpreted, and action demonstrated.
For example, we begin to interpret and understand simple language at the age of 4-5 months. The earliest example of this occurs between parent and child.
We reach down to pick up a baby and it raises its arms in anticipation. This interpreted action constitutes a “conversation” between parent and child. The language of parent and child originates in action, which are also known as a private language games. There are many such cases of private language games between parent and child. A specific look, sound, or action can be construed to mean any number of things. Many have come to know “the look” of their parent and what it entails, or the fear instilled when hearing your full name uttered out loud.
Wittgenstein wrote that the “ostensive teaching of words can be said to establish an association between the word and the thing.”
He goes on to elaborate on how the ostensive teaching of words can differ based on the action associated with such words. I’ll give an example involving Parent A and Parent B in the action of picking up their child.
Parent A’s child is sitting on the floor. Parent A reaches down to pick up their child and while doing this says “Up,” and so the child begins to associate the word “Up” with the action of being picked up. The child eventually learns to say “Up” when it wants to be picked up.
Parent B’s child is sitting on the floor. Parent B says “Down” when reaching to pick up their child. The child begins to associate the word “Down” with being picked up, and will eventually start saying “Down” when it wants to be picked up.
Due to the definitions associated with each word “Up” and “Down”, Parent A would be considered correct in their usage while Parent B would be considered incorrect. But there is nothing inherently “wrong” with either of these examples. The words understood in the language game between parent and child make perfect sense in their individual contexts. The colloquial usage and definition of “Up” to mean “I want to be picked up” makes the usage by Parent A “correct,” while the usage of “Down” by Parent B appears nonsensical to anyone but them, but there is no lack of understanding by the children in either case. We can see by this brief example how so many small misconceptions can develop through language.
This is a microcosm of Wittgenstein’s thesis in the Philosophical Investigations of “meaning in use.” He believed that language was deceptively simple, and that we overcomplicate things. He believed that Philosophy had needlessly abstracted language by asking unnecessarily complex questions.
There is no “objective” meanings of a word. The meaning of a word is simply in its use in language, and this changes in context and time.
This sounds like a truism, but its obviousness obfuscates its deeper meaning. We think of language as having laws in which we operate daily, whether speaking or writing, and these laws are self-governing and repeatable throughout society, but there are no intrinsic “laws of language,” only common use. We have language systems, dictionaries, and grammar, but these are not laws, only conventions. Language is constantly developing in isolated “language games” in which their meaning is defined through their use. “Slang” is a common example of this.
Wittgenstein shows that language is unfixed and constantly developing as certain languages die out and new ones arise.
“Language-game” in itself means a form of activity.
Everything in life is a language game.
Kind of like what you’re reading right now.