Wordless

1

When you look out of the window of your home or monade, you won’t see words there, but things. Those would also be there, we assume, when you’re not looking, or if you weren’t there at all. Perhaps the things can’t miss us, from a certain point of view, but that one person more or less won’t make much of a difference to them. So what we can ask ourselves is: what would that lone watcher see, if he didn’t have words to name the things he sees, and could merely watch speechless without providing them with the fitting label? Can we, talkative as we are, see without labelling? Can we distinguish things without making that distinction explicit in a difference of words? Do we look at the world with a haze of texts, words and names in front of our eyes? The omni-present imagination has a hard time shifting into this situation of merely looking without reading.

Still we have to assume that the majority of our fellow inhabitants of earth watch things this way, without words, or with the background of totally different words, and that they in their own way see the same things. And every human has experienced a time in which this must have been familiar: watching things and experiencing all kinds, without having words for those things and those experiences that inevitably pop up, and without even knowing there are words that are connected to them. At most the voices around them raised the suspicion that one belonged to the other, and that they in turn belonged to the one who spoke these words. 

From the moment that we have words available to us ourselves, that early situation seems to be irretrievably erased from our memories, and has become inaccessible to our imagination. For that too is inhabited by words. There is, strangely enough, not a trace remaining of a genesis or the learning process in the self-evident way in which we handle language. That’s why we can’t think it away, or in our imagination leap away from it. Language seems to have always been there, and be omni-present.

Words seem not to tolerate any competitors: where they appear, they displace the original occupants of the soul, amongst whom amazement and wordless perception, so that it will permanently start murmuring with words that slowly take on the density of the things themselves and their representation. What is up there, becomes something that flies, what flies becomes a bird, the bird becomes a finch or a falcon, that one particular finch gets a name, just like that one particular human gets a name. We then see and recognise no longer something that flies or is human, but that particular bird or that particular person: we see their name. The more specific the name is, the more the things coincides with its name and the more its existence becomes self-evident. 

Without words the things seem to get orphaned or lose their identity, and even their existence can be doubted: things seem to be what they are called to be, a tree, a bird. And mostly: as words they are not there, in a world outside of us, but here, inside us. What is there, has a name and what doesn’t have a name and doesn’t fit in that schematics of our categories and our verbalisation, is supposed not to be there. Or its existence is seen as not relevant, as long as we haven’t turned it into a concept. In the words we conquer an autonomy that makes the world superfluous, precisely because of its verbal manageability. Language threatens to make the things superfluous. 

 

2

There is an old and stubborn quarrel, whether people can think without language, so not merely silent and without explicitly expressing what they might as well say, but without their heads being full of a verbal murmuring that wants to become words and complete sentences, and prepares to spread itself over the things like a verbal veil behind which the things get magicked away.

In all likelihood we would do well not to think too much of such a wordless thinking, if only because it can’t be the basis of any form of communication. For sure we can’t make of such a thinking the demands we usually make of accurately articulated thoughts in which reality has been trapped as in a network of words, and is involved in the mutual communication. For that articulation is in language and destined to be communal and communicated. And just like nobody has a language of their own, so too nobody has a world of their own. The real world, whatever it may be, is a shared world. And words, maybe only them, make the world shareable and into a communal property. 

That is why that articulation is so exposed to verbalism and royally creates the possibility for words without thoughts and without any reference to any reality, therefore words that are pushed along by the dynamics of their own self-evidence and their own order. Within that order and without a support point outside of it, it often turns out you can communicate excellently and reach a consensus. Nobody can point at something that isn’t there, but verbal communication turns out to offer possibilities for which the real existence of the things is not a stipulation. 

Whoever starts the discussion about wordless thought can’t lose sight of those possibilities. If indeed words take their meaning from that which they mention, from the things that are present, in the space around us or in the network between us, then there is a reason, for as long as possible, at least as an experiment, to grant priority to the existence of things over words, over thought, and even over the consensus. 

Those things we can localise and point out, pinpoint them in the space we all communally see before us, before we can name them. We can only call that pointing ‘language’ if we fully intend to call everything that has to do with communication ‘language’. Then we have to conclude that animals too have a language, and the question of thought outside language shifts to the thoughts of animals and to the way they understand each other in a shared world that isn’t one of words, but for example of shared hearing or watching. 

 

3

There is, even when we’ve long since installed ourselves into language, a situation in which the things demand priority or the last word emphatically, and in which the machine of encompassing and totalising speech turns quiet for a moment. That situation can be guilelessly indicated as ‘wonder’, but it can also manifest itself as bewilderment or annoyance. And once we assume that animals communicate and have a language, there can also be no objection to ascribe to them a sense of wonder.

In that wonder we not only stand still, but we also become speechless and language loses its grip on things. We can then once again say that words fail us and that we are faced with the inexpressible riddle, at the borderline of language; but usually we see people getting very expressive just there. The inexpressible itself has become the source of indomitable eloquence, a zone in which verbalism grows rampant, not hindered by any earthly gravity.

The question is if wonder is pre- or rather extralingual. To answer that question, or even to ask it the right way, we first have to get rid of a persistent habit, forced upon us by the omnipresence of language. Namely that we’ve gotten used, especially in philosophy, to wonder immediately expressing itself in the shape of a question of the how and the why of things. In that question a start is made to repair reality as fast as possible by the verbality of an answer. When we radicalise wonder and truly make it the first principle of philosophy, then perhaps we should distance ourselves from that and keep in mind that wonder in the first place concerns the ‘pure existence’ of things, outside of us and outside of language.

So usually we don’t immediately ask ourselves a question, when we wonder about something. Perhaps formulating a question, on closer inspection, is exceptional and is wonder a situation that can last your whole life. For example, we’re watching a movie about life in the deep sea and turn off the sound, because it doesn’t fit the silence of this world. And it is probably precisely that silence within the scene that robs us of our words and makes us waive them.

The silence of the universe bewildered Pascal and made him speechless: it itself, in its impressive massiveness, was the superior language of reality as a significant given, beyond all arbitrary verbalism. In such a situation of perplexed contemplation there is no need for explanation or some other verbal supplement, because it can only be very meagre in comparison to the spectacle itself, on which it illegitimately parasitises. There is no relationship between the words of an insignificant being on a dust speck in space and the silent endlessness of the universe. 

 

4

That’s only part of the question. It is not sufficient to pose human speech against the fathomless silence of the cosmos and cross it out all too simply in the face of that. We do it more justice by evaluating the worth of the word within the context in which it rings. And this goes specifically about the word in which an explaining thought is expressing itself about the world.

It’s not the how of the world that is the mystery, said Wittgenstein, but the that of the world. That, in all its unimaginability, we can ascertain wordlessly, without torturing ourselves with questions, and it’s likely that many animals can do that too. Their curiosity seems to have the disinterestedness of amazed witnesses and doesn’t always seems to be geared towards acquiring food of the continuation of the species. They too don’t have a full time job with that. Perhaps it is so that we view them as having that job because of our own, learnt allergy for affairs that aren’t self-evident.

With the question why we enter a domain that is much more articulated and specific than the wordless wonder that precedes every language and perhaps remains its backdrop permanently. It is more a rule than an exception ever since Aristotle, that whoever directly identifies speechless wonder and verbal questions and doesn’t allow for any respite between one and the other, whoever too expects an immediate answer after a question, or only allows for questions when the answer is already in sight and the jump across the silence can be dared, they are busy wheeling in the world, diligently verbalising it and gobble it up verbally. At this moment they ought to remember the silence of which Pascal speaks.

 

5

One thing is for sure: the world outside and up there is wordless, and what speaks volumes about it, it will speak in a language other than ours, a language we don’t immediately understand. There is no continuity between word and world. Animals live in there without problem and are capable of establishing communities that can provide an example to ours in many ways. With our words we involve the things into our world and our intentions in a way that possibly doesn’t do those things justice. 

Alongside with our verbality there seems to be the conception that the word is of a higher order, or at least that in the end everything is word or wants to become word. In the word the being of things would evaporate, but on the contrary culminate and reach their final destination. Humans have to be mediators in that process. Everything is about their decisive word. So if the beginning wasn’t a word already, then the last will be a word, the final confirmation of being, from the position of the speaker who has appointed himself to the centre and creator of the world. 

There is such a last word for the final ‘yes’ and the definitive confirmation; and something notable is going on with it. It is ‘amen’ and that is Hebrew for ‘certain’ or ‘it is so’. What is notable about it in the first place is that it mostly gets used in a religious context. The word is situated at the border of the human world, at the edge of silence. With this word we not only hand over the things, but also the unilateral naming of them. The question is if this also implies that past that border a form of existence starts that can only be indicated with the term ‘religious’. Not only has the religious apparently still become a terrain of of almost unlimited loquacity, but also does it seem quite premature to for example correlate the silence of the deep sea directly with the higher powers. 

In the second place this word renounces every explanatory pretension and every form of verbal appropriation. If you only confirm that the things are there and that they are as they are, you distance yourself from every claim of ownership or influence of them. ‘Amen’ is the final word of an otherwise silent consent, a remaining realisation. 

In the third place there is the question if, for the people who pronounce the ‘amen’, that word has any meaning other than that it it comes at the end of words. In its incomprehensibility this word is no longer part of a sequence of words that can be continued undisturbed, but it sooner represents the frayed edge of an area where words still matter. What’s outside of that area, is of a different order; the continuity with the verbal order gets broken, but it would be a mistake to think that reality itself ends there too, or changes character under the influence of our wordlessness. 

 

6

Perhaps what comes after that is of the same order as what was in us before and what is always there outside of us. Possibly all of this verbal activity is just an overconfident and fascinating but destined to fail episode between an original silence and the quiet that comes after a storm of words, which might barely recollect any of it.

The ‘inner conversation’ that people surrender to as a preparation of communicative use of language or as a late, waning echo of it, that too doesn’t self-evidently stand closer to the silent world than to loud and perky speech. Or rather: the inner talk as a preparation and as a dying echo do belong to language in its whole scope, but it doesn’t necessarily reach as far and as wide as the wordless realisation of an enigmatic reality.

“Reality’ in the end is the irreducible and therefore unexplainable fact that the things are there. The realisation of that, the most fundamental and most serious form of thinking, is wordless. Language, including its mumbling practise period or its run-up, and its muttering aftereffects, might just be an island in an ocean of silence. Therefore it seems to me that it’s a depressing mistake to equate language and thought, to let language reach as far as life and to regard the silence as the domain of death and what comes after that.