Mind and Language

Reflecting yesterday on the wonderful nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and this in the context of two public events, caused an old conviction of mine to come to the fore again. The two public events were Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the Executive Branch would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday on the privacy rights of corporations. For more on these see my post today on Ghulf Genes here. Both of these cases are intimately concerned with language, with definitions, in the first case of “marriage” and in the second of “personal privacy.” And in the case of Alice, we have a nonsense tale in which the intended meaning is as much hidden by the language of the book as it is revealed in an aura that surrounds it. Humor, generally but not alone, illustrates my conviction that mind uses language but isn’t created by it.

Exactly the opposite is claimed by evolutionary linguists, of whom a representative figure is Derek Bickerton, and his book, Language and Human Behavior, is a classical example.

My endless fascination with language arises precisely because we are forever judging, weighing, and choosing words, thus that we stand over them like sovereigns, that they serve us and not we them. This is vividly obvious in all manner of contexts. The letter of the law stands in contrast to its spirit, for example, and we see endless instances where some insist on the letter, others on the spirit. Language does not compel—people do. The two legal cases I mention above are telling examples as well.

The application of the word “person” to a legal entity, a corporation, is a kind of attempt to compel behavior by expanding the meaning of a word. A corporation is never a person in the sense in which I am. The mind knows that perfectly well. In DOMA Congress attempts to limit the meaning of marriage to a male and a female, but the words of the law do not compel—unless the sovereign mind that hears those words agrees. In both of these cases the spirit behind the definitions is the interesting aspect. In commercial law the spirit that turns corporations into persons is a spirit claiming rights it does not naturally have. In the case of DOMA, the spirit is similarly reactive, at minimum, and makes me cringe just a little. Do I think that breathing is the intake of air and its release again? Yes, I do. But do we need a Congressional act to know that? Do I think that marriage means the union of a man and woman? Yes, I do. But have we exhausted that meaning? “Let me not,” said Shakespeare in Sonnet 116, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Belay, belay. The thoughts are free—and unless real harm is done, let them use whatever words they choose to voice them. We don’t have to agree. You respirate, I breathe.

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.

The Case

To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Discussion

Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”

Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?

My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.

The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.

Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.

Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.

Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.

Understanding and Intellectual Grasp

At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.

This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.

The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.

Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.

Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.

One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.