'The Limits of my language mean the limits of my world'

'Ludwig Wittgenstein'

Language, the word, a gift to the human species, a gift that allows us to communicate our isolated experience to others, to conceptualize and begin to make sense of the data that streams into our senses. It is through language that we can begin to categorize and draw distinctions in our world, it is through language that we communicate and construct meaning, it is through language that we construct our own stories and the stories through which view the world. Sigmund Freud the infamous luminary of modern psychology understood the power of language also noting:

“Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.”

― Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

As noted by Freud this idea is not new, as Language 'the word', is in many ancient mystical traditions & cultures, what builds the world. Both in Sanskirt and Hebrew the letters of these alphabets are understood to be the basis of the manifest world. Looking at Hebrew in particular each letter, is a symbolic representation of an energy and set of qualities, or a particular frequency or vibration, and this is, in a sense, most certainly true as each letter produces a different sound which is inevitably a vibration of the molecules or air around us. The power of tone and sound, of vibratory frequency is a profound one, one that many of us know each time we listen to music that moves us, or an orator that transports us into the lofty heights of the realm of ideals....these are experiences that we all know, but taking this even further, these letters represent not just something random and meaningless, but energies and qualities that are understood at least within the relevant cultural context to be archetypal, reflective of deep psychological and spiritual truths.....Hence from this particular perspective once we begin to join these letters/symbols together into chains to make words we are creating symbolic chains, which take us from the world of archetypal or platonic ideals into representations of the '10000 things'. It is interesting that this idea, of the word, or language not only reflecting but also somehow constructing our reality is found not only in these ancient traditions but also in a slightly different form at the root of much post modern and post structuralist philosophy,

It is often hard to see the profound significance of language in our experience because it is so close to us...language provides not only one of the primary frameworks through which we communicate our experience, but also a primary way through which we conceptualize and think about our experiences. At its root it provides a group of narrow categories and visual and auditory symbols through which we must squeeze our experience. Now, interestingly the way that any particular language carves up and categorizes our experience can be understood as unique as within the structure of any particular language exist prevailing worldviews, hidden within its form.

'Every Language form carries a kind of dominant or prevailing world-view, which tends to function in our thinking and in our perception whenever it is used, so that to give clear expression to a world view contrary to the one implied in the primary structure of language is usually very difficult. It is therefore necessary to study any general language form to give serious and sustained attention to its world view, both in content and function...'

Bohm (1980, p46)

Implied here then in the idea that the structure of a particular language itself, not only has the potential to in some way reflect & communicate our experience but at the same time to provide the foundation & the limits for how we think, Hence we return to the quote at the outset of this post:

'The Limits of my language mean the limits of my world'

'Ludwig Wittgenstein'

Or an alternative translation might read 'The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. So when we start to look at the English language what is it we begin to find. Well we begin to find a preponderance and over emphasis on noun's(things in isolation) rather than verbs (processes) what this according to Bhom(1980) inevitably leads to is a world view that is fundamentally fragmentary, this language structure both has at its essence and creates in our thought a perception of reality that does not reflect its fundamentally interconnected relational and process based nature. Hence we are in the English language left with a particular form of logic....one that is primarily binary, which as can be easily seen in the structure of our society and its various institutions, and as the radical constructionists would assert, does not reflect the nature of reality itself but rather our conception or map of it...

More specifically According to Sapir cited in Collins & Chippendale(1991)

'Language......Powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone , nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the the medium of expression for their society. ....we see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choice of interpretation'...

what this implies then is that there may exist hidden within our common every day discourse, assumptions which lead to interpretations of our experience, that not only provide a poor approximation of reality as it is, but also, as a function of this fragmentation may have other quite real and profound side effects...So What are these particular interpretations of reality that our language and culture privileges and how do we begin to transform our view of the world and free ourselves from the linguistic prisons our our collective perception?

for now we will finish with a quote from Anthropologist Edward T hall:

“Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.”

References:

Bhom D.,(1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Collins, C. & Chippendale, P.(1991) New Wisdom, The Nature of Social Reality. Acorn publishing. Australia.

Edward, H.(1966) The Hidden Dimension. Penguin. Random House.

Freud, S.(2015) An Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Words Worth Editions Limited. Herts, United Kingdom.

Wittgenstein, L.(1960) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . London Routledge & Kegan Paul.