There is a scene in the animated movie Abominable where the teenager Yi along with her buddies takes the lost lil’ Yeti across China to his home in Mount Everest. It was interesting to see them travel through various idyllic locales en route to the Himalayas, but the one that intrigued me the most was the towering statue of the Leshan Buddha, a humongous sculpture of the teacher in a seated slumber. My breath caught in my throat as Yi craned her neck to see this giant Buddha carved on the rockface with the height of the statue half-buried in moseying clouds so much so that when Yi said ‘wow’ with her eyes wide in awe, I too said a stupefied ‘WOW’ quietly in my mind.
Research psychologists consider awe to be an epistemic emotion, which means like surprise, curiosity or a feeling of knowing, it is an emotion that is responsible for knowledge building. Two of awe’s defining features are a perception of vastness, like experiencing something larger than self, be it literally or figuratively and the need for accommodation, which is then being forced to revise our existing knowledge to accommodate the new experience into our understanding.
Awe usually leaves people dumbfounded and speechless. A grand view of the night sky, an architectural marvel or a panoramic sweep of a landscape all elicit a humbling quietness that begs us to open our minds and transcend our existing perception. As much as this feels spiritual, it is also scientific because it encourages us to step into uncharted territories and look for answers to explain what we saw.
Interestingly, therein seems to lie the rub.
An important cognitive concept that I have given very little thought to up until now saw a viewpoint reversal recently, thanks to Prof. Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics. This most-cited-scholar’s top shelf concepts on language have made me assume deep implications that are threatening to upend some concepts that I’m holding on a pedestal. Prof. Chomsky rightly commands an exclusive post just so I could sort through that shakeout which is due soon, but the part of his theory that is relevant to my ramble about awe is –
Firstly,
“A general assumption is that language is primarily a means of communication and that it evolved as a means of communication. Probably that is totally false. It seems that language evolved and is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. It is a system of thought basically. It can be used to communicate but communication doesn’t seem to be a part of its design”
Prof. Noam Chomsky
I have been one among God-knows-how-many that assumed human language is for communication. Turns out, unlike animal cries, gestures or chemical exchanges among other species, human language is not designed at its core for communicational efficiency. When bean plants infected by aphids release odorous chemicals in the air, the neighboring plants know it is an alert to the presence of a predator. In communication, every action relates to a specific interpretation. There are no mixed signals here. There is no room for “I-know-you-said-this-but-I-thought-you-meant-that” faux pas.
On the contrary, human language is rife with literal, abstract, and metaphoric interpretations that lack the rigidity, and consequently, the reliability found in non-human communication systems.
Secondly,
“Language doesn’t give us the full capacity to express what we are thinking, feeling or hoping for.”
Prof. Noam Chomsky
Language is rich in scope with its generative and recursive qualities where finite words and symbols can be permuted and combined to construct an infinite array of ideas. But for all of its abundance, language surprisingly does a very sloppy job in expressing thoughts in its entirety. Language tends to be ambiguous when it comes to expressing feelings and emotions. Sometimes it is a lot easier to engage in abstract thinking rather than articulate what we are experiencing. Surreal artworks and haunting music have a deeper reach into complex emotions than language.
So when language is the instrument of thought, but limited in its capacity to express thought efficiently, is it fair to assume that in the face of an extreme emotion like awe language is completely out of its depth? When language is limited in the case of even our everyday thoughts, how can it prove useful in expressing an entirely new experience that originally rendered us speechless.
Humans have a sickly habit of fitting everything into logical boxes to make sense of reality and yes, language is a crucial tool for that purpose. But when we experience something beyond our language capacity are we interpreting it with our limited vocabulary and thus restricting its scope? Just by bringing in language are we compromising the full extent of what would’ve otherwise been an unimaginable experience? If so then how many concepts are out there that we have already misread and imprisoned within the restricted capacity of the language in the process of knowledge expansion? How is it expansion when the tool in itself is limited?
I can gripe and squawk all I want, but it turns out that at the end of the day none of that is going to matter.
Cont.
