Language, Aldous Huxley
Language
I want to begin this discussion of language with a certain number of extracts from different authors which cast a lot of light on the subject. The first is from the autobiography of Helen Keller, where she describes how she discovered language as a child. She writes:
[My teacher] brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over my hand she spelled into the other the word ‘water’, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house, every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.
Let us now set a number of other quotations against this, beginning with some from Goethe. Goethe was one of the supreme masters of the word, and it is very interesting to find this great manipulator of words speaking constantly against language. He says in one place, ‘Gefühl ist alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch’ (Feeling is everything, name is merely sound and smoke). Then there is the famous quotation,
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
(Grey is all theory, green life’s golden tree.) And, again:
We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill, quietly awaiting its future, all these are momentous signatures. Indeed, a person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with spoken and written words altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even foppish about speech.
Talleyrand, the great French diplomatist of the early nineteenth century and one of the great masters of practical life, said that ‘Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts’—which was undoubtedly true in his case. Another interesting observation about language was made by the great Christian existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard, who said that the purpose of language is to assist and confirm people in refraining from action. This is, in a sense, a development of the phrase in the Gospel which says that ‘not all of those who say “Lord, Lord” will enter into the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 7:21).
What is required, then, is not devotion or theological speculation, but right action. On the other hand, we find that language can be most horribly effective in promoting action, especially bad action. As Hitler wrote, ‘All effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans.’
We find a number of remarks about language in relation to religion in the epistles of St Paul—remarks the more curious when one reflects that it is precisely the language of St Paul’s epistles which has dominated the whole Christian scene for nineteen hundred years. Paul says, in one well-known phrase, ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6). And, ‘We should serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter’ (Romans 7:6).
Finally, here is a passage from the works of John Locke on language in relation to philosophy. Although written nearly three hundred years ago it is still very much to the point:
Vague and insignificant forms of speech and abusive language have so long passed for mysteries of science and hard, or misapplied words have by prescription such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them that they are but the covers of ignorance and a hindrance to true knowledge.
These quotations indicate very clearly the curiously ambivalent attitude towards language which we always have had and certainly still have, and which has prevailed throughout the ages. The phrase which opens the Gospel according to St John, ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (John 1:1), is perfectly true in regard to the beginning of the strictly human world. There is no doubt at all that the strictly human form of life arose when it was possible for man to speak. Language is what makes us human. Unfortunately, it is also what makes us all too human. It is on the one hand the mother of science and philosophy, and on the other hand it begets every kind of superstition and prejudice and madness. It helps us and it destroys us; it makes civilization possible, and it also produces those frightful conflicts which wreck civilization.
Now human behaviour differs from animal behaviour precisely because of the fact that human beings can speak and animals cannot. And we find that even the most intelligent animals, because they cannot speak, cannot do things which to us seem absolutely rudimentary and which very small children, as soon as they learn to talk, would be able to accomplish.
There was a very interesting experiment carried out by the great German Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgang Köhler, who worked for many years with chimpanzees. Köhler found that his chimpanzees could use sticks as tools to pull down bananas which were hanging out of their reach. They were intelligent enough to see that this tool—the stick—could be used for extending their arm and getting the banana. But Köhler found that the animals only used the stick to get a banana when both stick and banana were in view at the same time. If the banana was in front of them and the stick was behind them, they could not use the stick; they could not bear the banana in mind long enough to look around and pick up the stick and then use it.
The reason for this is quit clear. We have words for banana and stick which permit us to think about these objects when they are not actually in sight. Even a small child, knowing the words ‘banana’ and ‘stick’, has a conceptual notion of their relationship and is consequently able to think of ‘stick’ in conjunction with ‘banana’ even when the stick is behind him and to remember this long enough to pick the stick up and use it on the bananas.
The fact that animals cannot retain their knowledge of things over a long period, and consequently lose interest in them, accounts for their (to us) preposterous behaviour in many situations. They constantly interrupt one line of action to do something else, and they may come back to the first activity or forget it altogether. Human beings, on the other hand, thanks to language, are able to pursue one purpose or to act in relation to a principle or to an ideal over long periods of time. In a certain sense we can say that language is a device for permitting human beings to go on doing in cold blood the good and the evil which it is possible for animals to do only in hot blood, under the influence of passion.
This continuity is illustrated not merely in the life of individual human beings; it is also illustrated very forcibly in the life of entire societies, where language may be described as a device for connecting the present with the past and the future. While it is clear that the Lamarckian conception of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is completely unacceptable, and untrue biologically, it is perfectly true on the social, psychological, and linguistic level: language does provide us means for taking advantage of the fruits of past experience. There is such a thing as social heredity. The acquisitions of our ancestors are handed down to us through written and spoken language, and we do therefore enjoy the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics, not through the germ plasm but through tradition.
Unfortunately, tradition can hand on bad as well as good items. It can hand on prejudices and superstitions just as effectively as it can hand on science and decent ethical codes. Here again we see the strange ambivalence of this extraordinary gift. It is like the fairy stories in which there is a good fairy and a bad fairy, but in this case the good fairy’s gift, which is this amazing gift of language, also turns out to be the bad fairy’s gift. It is one of the ironies of our destiny that the wonderful thing which Helen Keller so eloquently describes as a giver of life and creator of thought is also one of the most dangerous and destructive things that we can have.
In the beginning of human life, as a strictly human adventure, was the Word. But what happens when there is no language? What happens in very small children and
