Carson Spratt theorizes…

I’ve been thinking about the relation between language, self-knowledge, and power over the physical world. While this might seem a little erudite at first, it can actually be fascinating.

My thoughts on this started when my family began to attend a new church when I was ten years old. I walked in the doors, and was presented with an entirely unfamiliar phenomenon: everyone was blurred. No, not in the visual sense, but in the mental sense: I could not see anyone. A large, jostling crowd flowed around me as I tried to comprehend this. Why did everything look so strange? Later that day, the answer snuck up behind me and hit me over the head. The factor which had changed everything was my lack of names. I knew no one, and therefore I had no idea what they were called. Without the ability to name people, my ability to distinguish them from one another failed completely. Of course, I came up with temporary names like “the guy with the blonde hair”, or “that tall girl in the green dress”, and I began to see the people as individuals for the first time. Before that, it had been a mob of unrecognizable flesh. Now, it began to distill into persons. As we attended that church for a longer and longer period of time, I learned everyone’s names. The blond boy was Nathaniel, the girl with the green dress was Riley: now I could single them out, and separate them from the rest of the world, labeling them as individual entities.

Then, a couple years ago, I reread C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. During the course of my perusal, a line from Out of the Silent Planet, and then one from That Hideous Strength leaped out at me.

“He saw nothing but colours – colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.”

“He (Mr. Bultitude, a bear) did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred, and he tasted it. And that was all.”

The first quote re-affirmed my first observation, that Language is connected with the idea of recognition, and is key to distinguishing and labeling the items in the world around you. The second one, I thought, was another clue. The bear has no self-recognition, and therefore, he has no language with which to express the idea of self, or of anything else, for that matter. Alternatively, think about humans. When we are babies, we do not speak. When we are adults, we do speak (some of us profusely.) What has changed? The idea of self. Babies are like animals, in that they cannot distinguish one thing from another in the world. One day, however, a new idea (they’ve never had one before) suddenly pops into their heads: what is this…this thing? And immediately, they are forced to come up with a word to describe this thing, which is separate from the world and under their control: I. From there, their vocabulary begins to grow, and as they begin to name things, they can separate them from the huge blur which is the world to them.

The third thing which I thought about language is that language gives power over the physical world. We see a prime example of this in Genesis. Adam, having been created, does one particular task even before he has a wife: he names all the animals. When does he do this? Immediately before he is given dominion over them. Naming is power: without a name for something, we can never deal with it in any sense. In order to firmly hold something in our minds, and work with it, we attribute a placeholder to it, an x to call it when we speak. Take, for example, mechanics. They have a special vocabulary all their own, to talk about engines. Why? Because they work with engines, and must be able to have power over engines: so they name the different parts. Imagine a conversation between mechanics without the names of the engine. “1st mechanic: What’s the problem here? 2nd mechanic: Erm…that thing there. 1st mechanic: This one? (wrenches it out) 2nd mechanic: No! the other one! The sort of round doohickey…” These mechanics are going nowhere. Without the ability to name the parts, they have no power over the engine, or even the ability to communicate with each other. Without names, every part would be indistinguishable from any other, until the mechanics began to describe, and name it.

So, the three things I am trying to say are that: A. Language is essential to the recognition of everything in the world. B. Self-recognition is the origin of our personal grasp of language, and C. Language gives power over the world. And why would these things be so? There can only be one reason: because God spoke the world into existence, and therefore, language is intimately connected with everything we do. (For further thought, consider human languages, the language of DNA, and the language of mathematics. Enjoy.)