Thought without language

My friend M. proposed this question since she wonders if it can be reality without language.

I remember asking something similar to my former teacher Edgar Bravo (a man who gave me some lessons of Philosophy) I asked him if it was possible to embrace reality with no words so he answered that words are necessary as there must be a way to apprehend all things. Well, I think it was like that. Anyway, it was since then that the word “apprehend” got into my vocabulary. That term is better comprehended if we say it with the gesture of taking something with the hand and taking it close to us.

If we refer ourselves to thinking as a linking of those ideas we have flowing inside our minds, at once we will say “there is not thought without language”. That is clear. In the same time, the mind is continously splitting our “self” from “everything that is not itself” We all recognize almost everything we see during the day; what we don’t at least we can relate it by its appearance to other things we do know or in the worst case we can make a bare description of them. For example, we all know a table is a table, if we see one of them we don’t even need to define to ourselves what a “table” is. Seems simple, isn’t it? WELL IS NOT! The brain, which is really an amazing machine, has browsed an unimaginable number of concepts, including... shape, square shape, round shape, wood, metal, etc; associations (the pretty little coffee table in our house, the writing table in our room, the dirty desk at school) Not only that: it has differentiated tables from other tables, a table from other objects... Who knows what other things the brain has done to locate one simple table within our reality!

And... well, to the brain being able to do such wonders it needs a method of storage, classification and processing of information. Yes, like computers but in a macro giga mega super... huge scale. A very useful tool is verbal language. Of course, mind can use images, sounds and abstract ideas, but maybe we should say that our letters are the zeroes and ones that keep running that complex piece of software called “consciousness” and make it interact with the phenomena to form reality.

Well then, leaving behind the matter of reality, let’s try to go to something more general, taking thinking as the simple use of the brain (which allude to others animals besides humans) and language as something beyond verbal. What happens with thought in animals who lacks consciousness in relation to language? Well, they do think and they do use language. If not, tell me about the little dog smelling a possible partner on heat, interpreting her smell as “sex”.

Language and thinking cannot be separated. In the act of thinking, language is inherent. In other words, animals with brain are continuously interpreting phenomena around by associating them with something familiar by reason (humans) or instinct... and that, “amiguitos”, is an act of language.

Well, dear M., I expect this was useful for you in anyway. Remember that my motto is “what I don’t know I invent it my self”. Adieu.

Nov. 6, 2005 - El jardín lúgubre