Private Language

Home & Away today "What's up. Nothing. That doesn't sound like nothing, talk to me."

With language we can either tell people how we feel and think or we don't. Which means that other people are aware of this private space when we chose to remain silent.

Before language we had no way of suggesting this other world, there was no way to remain silent, it was non existent. People just did what they did.

So when language arose the possibility of being silent created the sense of a private world that was known only to us, but we didn't have to express it to others. This "private world" is the mirror image of the public quality that language has. Importantly however before language this private world did not exist.

So today a lot of thought goes into the sense of private individuality. Our existence which is unknown to other people. The private "me time" that is not available to others. Before language this was not a separate world, as we only ever occupied this world, and we interacted with other people in this world and they interacted with us in this world. We didn't have a second world of language to "speak to me" in.

Wittgenstein and Structuralists rather put it the other way around. We begin with language, and show that a private world cannot exist. But we can stretch the logic temporarily across an imaginary history and wonder what the advent of language brought to the party. Structuralists are right there is no "private world", but it is rather that language brought a "public world" which seems to entailed a "private world" split, and before language there was just one world which wasn't divided.

In Spirituality "silence" is central. People spend time being silent, stopping their thoughts, relating to the world in a simple non-linguistic way. Not reporting, not telling, not writing, just being way. But also in silence we do meditations on "all beings" and examine our experience in depth to discover a truth that is the same for all Buddhas but which is also our own. Kierkegaard would like this: a private truth that is the same for all i.e. which is universal.  So interestingly language opens the door to the spiritual world but raising awareness of silence. Perhaps I speculate it is not the silence of refusing to speak, but rather the silence that was there before language.

From Garden of Eden in Iraq to the Golden Emperor in China I suspect that much of our earliest myth actually recalls the time before the great technologies of farming and language. As Nietzsche I believe read into Genesis, the story is about the transition from animal to man, from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from the silent to the rational. There is a substrate of the world that is neither spoken nor silent, neither public nor private, neither group nor individual, neither collectivist nor individualist, neither lawful nor beyond law, an undifferentiated original space on which all this was built.