Essay 40 - Can Life Without Language Have Meaning?

I thought I would wrap up with some controversial points rather than by tying everything up with a nice little bow. Is meaning a product of the universe? Is it a product of life? Or is it a product of language? Since meaning is ultimately a feeling that we have when we feel that our lives make sense, if you remove human emotions, it makes sense that you remove meaning. This is like saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder so if there are no beholders there is no beauty.

Still when we feel that something is meaningful there is something that we are perceiving as meaningful. What is that?

Well, we talked about patterns, metaphors and archetypes which are products of language. We organize our experiences in language, perceive the organization, and feel meaning.

Language is an important element of being human. In Tom Wolfe’s book The Kingdom of Speech, he asserts that when we acquired language, we became human. Yuval Noah Harari says that what allowed our species to dominate the globe was our ability to create imaginary worlds and cooperate flexibly in large numbers through stories about the imaginary worlds. This would not be possible without language. Language made us human and allowed us to dominate the planet. It is not so far-fetched to say that language brought us meaning as well. So, in answer to the question – no meaning is not possible without language and with language we are able to construct meaning.

This essay is 259 words long and the audio is just short of 2 1/2 minutes.