Rene Descartes Is Flying On An Airplane...

i woke up at night and my language was gone

no sign of language no writing no alphabet

nor symbol nor word in any tongue

and raw was my fear - like the terror perhaps

of a man flung from a treetop far above the ground

a shiprewcked person on a tide-engulfed sandbank

a pilote whose parachute would not open

or the fear of a stone in a bottomless pit

and the fright was unvoiced unletteret unuttered

and inarticulate O how inarticulate

and i was alone in the dark

a non-i in the all-pervading gloom

with no grasp no leaning point

everything stripped of everything

and the sound was speechless and voiceless

and i was naught and nothing

without even a gibbet to hang onto

without a single peg to hang onto

and i no longer knew who or what i was

and i was no more

So, is language necessary for thought? Definitly.

René Descartes is flying in an airplane. The flight attendant asks him if he wants some coffee. He replies, “I think not,” and disappears. In the context of the poem by Aharon Amir, this is quite simple. Without language you cannot have thought. And when you don’t have thought, you cease to be who you are: calm, rational, and coherent. Language is absolutely necessary for thought. Without language, we would not be able to know anything; our lives would be completely instinctual, with no rationality to our actions. Without language, we cannot communicate with ourselves: reading, talking, writing.

First and foremost, language is used for communication. Not just communication with others, but with ourselves. Who do we communicate the most with? Ourselves. We need to tell ourselves to breathe. Even now, as I write this, I am thinking to myself, processing everything I can remember that I was told or I read over the course of this unit. My thoughts are my way of using language to process the data communicated to me, so that I may communicate my thoughts with you.

Some people subscribe to the school of “if you can’t say it, you don’t know it.” This is wrong for a few simple reasons. First off: dyslexia. The Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary defines dyslexia as: disturbance of the ability to use language. A dyslexic person has trouble putting words together, and comprehending written language. Just because a dyslexic person can’t express coherently what’s on their mind, doesn’t mean that they don’t know anything. Similarly, there are feelings that can’t be conveyed, and descriptions that can’t quite be expressed. In the case of feelings, the very fact that they can’t be conveyed should be able to tell us that that feeling is to the extreme, therefore we can know, somewhat, what the feeling is. The inexpressible description can come, for example, in the form of a movie. I can watch a movie on television, but have difficulty telling someone else what it’s about. I’ve watched it from the beginning, and I can understand the plot and follow what’s going on with relative ease, but I just don’t know how to describe it to someone else in a way that they would understand. The language I absorb helps me to know what is going on around me.

Amir’s poem describes a person engulfed in fear from waking up to having no language, no form of communication, and no way to know who they are. After all, what better way to define who we are than by the way we think, which in turn guides all our actions? When we cannot define ourselves, we cease to exist as people. Without language, we cannot express our thoughts. There are people who claim to have been discouraged from committing suicide thanks to a certain song or what have you. People have been known to explode with emotion from keeping their thoughts to themselves because they have no one to talk to. Without language to guide us, society becomes a massive, quivering, unstable crowd that will give in to its own violent impulses.

But when we do have language, but no will or means to filter through the muck, we also will have serious problems. Propagandists have been exploiting the vagueness within language for generations, using: word games with what some call “glittering generalities,” name calling, and euphemisms; false connections; special appeals such as “the common touch,” the bandwagon, and – perhaps the most powerful appeal – fear. We’ve seen extreme uses of propaganda before (Nazi Germany), and we still see it today in the manifestos and platforms of various political parties. To a lesser degree, even MADD uses fear propaganda to press their message, but in the case of MADD, is that really a bad thing? In the case of Nazi Germany, the people were led by a charismatic madman who understood the power fear could wield in people. Hitler identified a threat (the Jews), he had a specific recommendation for how the people should react (violence against the Jews), and his magnetism while speaking ensured that the people would listen. The majority of the German people, in turn, essentially gave themselves up to be used as pawns in the Nazi war machine.

This is justly the greatest purpose of language: to guide our thoughts to become the people who we choose to be, not the people that others would have us be. Like the last two lines of Aharon Amir’s poem state, “and I no longer knew who or what I was/and I was no more,” a lack of language is a lack of thought and therefore a lack of self.

Edit: To further back this up is a theory called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH). In the most general form, it basically states that the language one speaks has a direct influence on the way one thinks and acts. I read a paper written by a linguist who put SWH to the test by asking a Japanese-American woman questions. When he asked her questions in Japanese, "type a" responses were given. When the exact same questions were asked in English, she gave completely different, "type b" answers. To me, this suggests that languages also contribute to the unquie aspects of the different cultures in the world, which is a shame because so many are set to disappear in the next 100 years or so.