Thinking Without Words

I’m using words here. But we can think without them.

Brain by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay. Background colors by Tucker Lieberman.

An essay centers the importance of words. But are words essential to thought?

Here are some words suggesting: No. Central, yes, but not always essential.

First, Sense Perception

José Saramago wrote:

“In order for the brain-in-the-head to know what a stone is, the fingers first have to touch it, to feel its rough surface, its weight and density, to cut themselves on it. Only long afterward does the brain realize that from a fragment of that rock one could make something which the brain will call a knife or something it will call an idol.”

There are “semantic universals,” Umberto Eco insisted—simple ideas that “can be expressed in all languages” — and all of them ‘refer to the position of our body in space.” They are directions like “up and down,” “right and left,” as well as ideas “of standing still and of walking, of standing up and lying down, of crawling and jumping, of waking and sleeping” and likely “seeing, hearing, eating or drinking, swallowing or excreting.” We all relate to “perceiving, recalling, feeling desire, fear, sorrow, relief, pleasure or pain,” and it is basic to make “sounds that express these things” (which surely is where language begins to come in).

Language began, Thomas Cahill speculates, “in the human attempt to mimic certain sounds, so that, for instance, the sounds ‘ma-ma,’ a form of which all languages use for ‘mother,’ began as an imitation of the sucking sound a baby makes at the breast.” Sounds correspond to real things we want. Thus “something inside us responds spontaneously to metaphor” which is the root of what it means to mean.

(Looking at that another way, as has been widely attributed to the comedian Lily Tomlin: “Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.”)

Words to Support Surviving and Thriving

The common words do not always convey degree, however. “We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things,” Primo Levi wrote, recalling a death camp in the snow. That is, each word took on a new meaning for the people in the death…