A Question for the Human Mind — Is Language Limiting Us From Having a Full Spectrum of Life Experience?
To know how, look at the emotion ‘Awe’
There is a scene in the 2019 animated movie Abominable where the teenager Yi along with her buddies takes the lost lil’ Yeti across China to his home on Mount Everest.
Among the various idyllic locales that the unusual foursome traveled en route to the Himalayas, there was one destination that intrigued me the most — the towering statue of the Leshan Buddha, a humongous sculpture of the teacher in a seated slumber.
My breath caught in my throat when Yi craned her neck to see the giant Buddha carved on the rock face with the height of the statue half-buried in moseying clouds. The image was spectacularly stunning so much so that when Yi said ‘wow’ with her eyes wide in awe, I too said a stupefied ‘WOW’ quietly in my mind.
The Emotion called Awe
Research psychologists consider awe to be an epistemic emotion. It means like surprise, curiosity, or a feeling of knowing, Awe is an emotion that is responsible for knowledge building.
Two of awe’s defining features are —
- a perception of vastness, like experiencing something larger than self, be it literally or figuratively, and
- the need for accommodation, which is then being forced to revise our existing knowledge to accommodate the new experience into our understanding.
Awe usually leaves people dumbfounded and lost for words.
A grand view of the night sky, an architectural marvel, or a panoramic sweep of a landscape, all elicit a humbling quietness that begs us to open our minds and transcend our existing perceptions. As much as this feels spiritual, it is also scientific because it encourages us to step into uncharted territories and look for answers to explain what we saw.
Interestingly, therein seems to lie the rub, because the “tool” we use to interpret and describe a moment of Awe, the tool called Language, is not exactly an effective one.
Firstly, language is not meant for communication
“A general assumption is that language is primarily a means of communication. Probably that is totally false. It seems that language evolved and is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. It can be used to communicate, but communication doesn’t seem to be a part of its design.”
I have been one among God-knows-how-many that assumed human language is for communication.
But thanks to Prof. Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, I’m starting to wonder if human language, unlike animal cries, gestures, or chemical exchanges of other species, is not designed at its core for communicational efficiency.
For example, when bean plants infected by aphids release odorous chemicals in the air, the neighboring plants know it is a specific alert to the presence of a predator.
Communication implies that every action/message relates to a definite, unambiguous interpretation. To paraphrase Matthew 5:37, a ‘yes’ is a clear yes, and a ‘no’, is a clear no. There are no mixed signals here. There is no room for “I-know-you-said-this-but-I-thought-you-meant-that” faux pas.
On the contrary, human language is rife with literal, abstract, and metaphoric interpretations that lack the rigidity, and consequently, the reliability found in non-human communication systems.
Secondly,
“Language doesn’t give us the full capacity to express what we are thinking, feeling, or hoping for.”
Prof. Noam Chomsky
Language is rich in scope with its generative and recursive qualities where finite words and symbols can be permuted and combined to construct an infinite array of ideas.
But for all of its abundance, language surprisingly does a very sloppy job of expressing thoughts in their entirety.
Language tends to be ambiguous when it comes to expressing feelings and emotions. Sometimes it is much easier to engage in abstract thinking rather than articulate what we are experiencing. Surreal artworks and haunting music have a deeper reach into complex emotions than language.
Language is the instrument of thought
Take a random thought for instance — “What should I have for dinner?”
You did not create this thought. The thought simply appeared in your mind in whatever abstract, amorphous form and you only realize it as a thought after you put it in words as, “What-should-I-have-for-dinner?”
We do not create thoughts; we simply become aware of them.
Language is the tool used to interpret our thoughts to ourselves first, and only then, it is used as a tool to communicate that interpretation, in whatever half-baked, compromised form, to others.
How Language Limits our Worldly Experiences
So when language is used to interpret thoughts, but also limited in its capacity to express thoughts efficiently, is it fair to assume that in the face of extreme emotion like awe, language is completely out of its depth?
When language is limited in the case of even our everyday thoughts, how can it prove useful in expressing an entirely new experience that originally rendered us speechless?
Humans have a sickly habit of fitting everything into logical boxes to make sense of reality and yes, language is a crucial tool for that purpose. But when we experience something beyond our language capacity are we interpreting it with our limited vocabulary and thus restricting its scope?
Just by bringing in language are we compromising the full extent of what would’ve otherwise been an unimaginable experience?
If so then how many concepts are out there that we have already misread and imprisoned within the restricted capacity of the language in the process of knowledge expansion?
How is it expansion when the tool in itself is limited?
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