Language, Philosophy, and Culture

Language is a mysterious construct that after centuries of investigation we are only beginning to come to terms with. It is a thing that we have taken for granted to such a degree that its origins have been mythologized much like our own as a species, and yet even in those myths we know that we had Language previously still.

How does Language play into Philosophy and Culture? The simplistic explanation would be that Language facilitates communication which makes the latter two possible, or perhaps the other way around? The Theosophists allege that at some point in our deepest past we were a species of Mind, the implication being that telepathy was normal. Only later did we decide to pursue vulgar speech because we thought it artistic and over time it supplanted telepathy. I think this is a silly distraction, personally. Back to the question at hand, it is in truth much easier to analyze Language and Culture than it is Language and Philosophy, though I suspect this is more due to the nuances of Philosophy and its nature than anything else.

All cultures have their Philosophies and Languages. This is a fact that doesn't need elaboration where this subject is concerned, but it requires asserting on the outset. In the Anglo Traditions, I suspect that the legends of King Arthur are the mythologized origin of the English Language. English is a mutt language, a germanic creole in its origin and this is reflected in the stories. Arthur was a great king of likely Romano Welsh origin who defended England from Saxon invasion after being abandoned to his fate by the Empire in decline. Those invaders didn't just pack up and leave however, and Arthur's allies didn't share his pedigree. They were a hodge podge, much like the kingdom he forged and the kingdoms it would disintegrate into upon his demise. This collision and the ones to follow are how my Language came into being, as preserved by the ancestors of my Culture.

Philosophy is a bit more complicated for a number of reasons as a subject. The Greek Traditions are held in highest esteem in the west as the oldest to come down to us, at least until the Brits started taking a long and hard (snicker) look at India. This narrative is interesting in and of itself however. They didn't realize for quite some time thereafter that there was a connection from India to Greece and even Germany in the form of Language, which leads me to speculate that Philosophy is the bridge of Culture and Language, and the interplay of the three in concert is what produces Traditions.

George Orwell wrote a book (NO! REALLY!?) called Politics and the English Language wherein, among other arguments, he posited that we could benefit culturally by shifting away from Latin and back to our older German linguistic roots. He observed that German languages have an earthier aesthetic quality than Latin, which seem somehow to be more emotionally evocative in his view. He demonstrated this argument by observing how English supplies at least two words for nearly every concept, one more Latin and the other more German. One example for his point is the very word Earth. Terra is the Latin, Erde is the German. A brief effort at annunciation can illustrate sufficiently, in my opinion. Terra is soft and ephemeral, Erde on the other hand is more coarse and lower. This is etymology however, let's take a look at current English via Thesaurus! We can say Forest or Woods and be equally intelligible. The softer and more ephemeral word Forest is Latin in origin, whereas Woods is decidedly Welsh Germanic. Orwell contended that the softening of our language has led to a softening of our culture, a theory right in line with this thesis.

Another vaguely related observation comes from the Philosopher Wittgenstein. He noted that not all languages feature words for all colors. Indeed, there seems to be colors uniquely described by certain languages and none other. For example, the Sami have words for unique shades of blue and purple. This is evidence for unique cultural experience. Greek, for all its subtleties and nuance, apparently did not have a word for the number One. They described the monad, were advanced mathematicians, and yet the concept of an individual as such was never described in their arithmetic.

It is perhaps for the previous reasons that philosphers from the medieval period onward in the Western Traditions were expected to know Latin at a minimum. Language competency was prized among intellectuals with Latin being the language of academia until very recently (Thank you, Kant). While elitism was absolutely a thing then as now, there was also perhaps a dim awareness that there are concepts not at all universal amongst cultures and languages. Study of Latin provided not just a bridge but was also an initiation as it proved ones ability to engage with foreign concepts. If you can't handle the language, clearly you don't need to engage with the even greater mental rigors that follow.

In conclusion, as it seems that I could carry on if I don't take care, I think that Language is an outgrowth of Culture and that Philosophy is something similar. Perhaps it is a tool crafted to utilize the two and in time has become as much a culture bridge as Language itself. I think that the old Western Philosophers were multilingual not merely out of elitism, but out of a sincere effort to acquaint themselves with novel concepts and maximize their ability to precisely describe ideas. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is a master course in this older standard. Degradation of any of the three does seem to harm all three in time if my model is accurate. Culture is the lived experience, Language is the effort to describe this experience, and Philosophy is the effort to comprehend it. The less we live, the less we have to talk about. The less we have to talk about, the less we have to think about. I don't like where this leads, so here is where I shall conclude this post.