Introduction
"I feel awful," he said to me as he clasped his brow with both hands. "I'm so terrified I won't feel normal again." A friend of mine once sat with me in disbelief as he described the events of his summer. The unavoidable truth was that he too was depressed and was terrified of the new kaleidoscope view of the world he was developing. Everything had become distorted and he couldn't explain the depth of the pain he was feeling.
Trying to convey emotion intelligibly is part of everyday life, but it's near impossible to do. I find myself searching for words when asked what it feels like to be depressed. "Numb," I say. "It's like being followed around by a dark cloud everywhere I go. I can't seem to find the light any more."
I typically reach to simile and metaphor because my interlocutor likely understands what a "dark cloud" signifies. She must know what it feels like to touch "numb" hands and feel nothing. So, I lazily employ the expressions I've heard before because it's much too taxing to find the right words. It works. Culturally, these are symbols that we both implicitly understand. Of course, none of these descriptions is accurate, but they suffice in portraying general grief and pain.
As a younger guy, it always struck me as strange that we can collectively agree on words to describe an experience. How can this be? When I refer to "pain" and someone nods in agreement, can they fathom the feeling I am referring to? Isn't language just a complex adaptive series of sounds we use to convey primal urges and manipulate objects in our environment?
There are thousands of languages in existence. All of them developed over time to form a theory of other minds, which is our capacity for empathy and understanding of the emotional needs of our tribe. When I think about this deeply, it scares me. If language is the bedrock of culture, perhaps this is why I feel left behind by our cultural stance on mental illness.
What if our loved ones cannot fully understand our internal, private language? At a basic level, when I chomp on an apple and describe it to a friend who has never tasted one, does she gain a genuine appreciation for the tanginess of that Granny Smith? I don't believe so. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood. Otherwise, it remains esoteric.
Taking the apple example, now imagine conveying depression to your doctor or boss. They have never experienced it personally, and even if they had, would they have felt the exact bodily and mental sensations you feel at that very moment? Would your tears be enough to convey its effects?
As with all things that pique my curiosity, I began to search for answers. I stumbled on Ludwig Wittgenstein's body of work through Nassim Taleb. The serendipity books will provide you with is unique in this way. You think you are reading an abstract thinker's missive on finance and unearth the answer to a previously unanswered problem.
The Beetle in a Box
In his mind-bending work Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein uses a brilliant analogy to convey the idea of a private language. We conventionally think about the mind and language as over, and above the behaviours they produce.
He writes:
"Suppose everyone has a box that only they can see into, and no one can see into anyone else's box: we call it a 'beetle'. No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he [or she] knows what a beetle is only by looking at his [or her] beetle.
Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in their box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing." (1)
So, for a thing to be collectively understood, it must hold a form. We must be able to create an objective criterion for measuring whether an apple is an apple. We must be able to see it. Defining an objective criterion can't happen for emotions. Much like the beetle in Wittgenstein's thought-experiment they are invisible, so all we have is the abstraction of language as a poor substitute.
This phenomenon is most important when hearing about someone else's pain. We can sometimes take our feelings as absolute fact and then question the existence of others' feelings. When you realise that only you can know what your pain feels like, it breeds a stronger sense of empathy when you feel sceptical about others' pain. Scepticism is normal behaviour, but we must become aware of it.
Becoming aware of the abstract nature of language led me on to another thought-provoking experiment. This time, it's from Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American scholar influenced by Wittgenstein's work. This experiment takes the form of a story.
Dog Biscuits
One day, in a packed lecture hall, professor Korzybski decided he wanted to prove a point.
He paused mid-sentence, realised he had some biscuits in his briefcase and reached in to grab them. He quietly mumbled that he was peckish and needed to eat something before continuing to edify on General Semantics, his life's work.
"Would you like a biscuit?" he asked a few earnest students in the front row. They looked edible, so two willing students each took one biscuit from the professor. "Nice biscuits, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he munched on a second biscuit himself.
Much to the students' chagrin, professor Korzybski then removed the fake labelling he had used to cover the actual label. What he revealed, and proudly showed to the rest of the class was packaging for dog biscuits. Shocked, the two students bolted for the bin to spit out what they had left in their mouths.
"You see," Korzybski proclaimed as he held back his laughter, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter. " (2)
"I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter. "
This likely apocryphal anecdote is one of my favourite stories to tell people when discussing language as an abstraction of visceral emotion. We pay so much head to what we read in the media and hear during everyday conversations, but perhaps we should trust our internal sense of things more?
I hope you gain from reading these two intriguing thought experiments. Words are powerful, but our faith in them can sometimes be misplaced.
As with everything in life, try to investigate beyond the words we use. Understand that communicating how you feel and comprehending others' feelings is not as easy as a two-way conversation. Take a metaphorical step back and notice what is unsaid. This place between the words is where I try to direct my empathy.
Key Takeaways
- If you ever find yourself sceptical when listening to someone describe how they feel, understand language's limits. Build unconditional empathy as your default response.
- Words can often affect our perception. This ability to manipulate our perception of things is the basis of the advertising industry. Biscuits are just dog-biscuits with a different advertising plan.
- When experiencing sensations, acknowledge that explaining the feeling to your peers will never fully convey its essence.
