*This is a script for a short podcast episode. Podcast audio is also available below.

“It is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.”

This is a quote by Franz Fanon, an African American philosopher, in his book Black Skin, White Masks, which was banned when it was first published due to its progressiveness. The book critiques how Black identity and the concepts of race are actually socially constructed, meaning that they’re not inherent to human beings, but are concepts formed by human language. What resonates with me the most is his comment on our understanding of language. “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language” he writes. “But it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” To speak is thus to symbolize a culture. By culture, I mean the most mundane performance in daily life, such as using small talk to show American people your politeness, to show that you fit in with most people although you don’t really enjoy going over weather conditions and your classmates’ majors. Commanding that language is to assent to cultural norms like these. That’s why Fanon points out the paradox of Black men speaking English: Those who try to speak English well are also trying to assimilate themselves into the American culture, thus alienated from their own people. It feels like that they’re neither here nor there; it feels like that they’re an impersonator of the American mainstream culture.

So what is language? Why is language so essential to the understanding of ourselves and others? Martin Heidegger is one of the first to talk about philosophy of language, although his arguments are scattered in various works starting from “Letter on Humanism.” The human being, on Heidegger’s account, is fundamentally not the Subject that has language at their disposal; rather, language brings beings to light in the first instance. It is not humans as Subjects who speak, nor are humans the masters of language, rather language itself speaks and humans become such only in response to language. This might seem a radical argument. After all, is our existence nothing but a phenomenon of language? But if we take Heidegger’s account into different aspects in life, it becomes more sense-making.

Throughout the history of philosophy, one of the biggest problems that people have been arguing is whether there is an ultimate reality, whether there is a truth of everything we get in touch with. This is the field of metaphysics. However, Ludwig Wittgenstein, after reading Immanuel Kant’s long book on metaphysics Critique of Reason which tries to categorize all forms of human experience we have in life, points out that the study of metaphysics comes down to a language game. While Kant is obsessed with making distinctions between things like transcendental and transcendent, concepts and sensations, to make sense of our experience, Wittgenstein suggests that creating these jargons of logic are meaningless. As long as we understand one another through language in the context of our conversation, we don’t have to bother creating certain rigorous terms for an experience. From my understanding, I want to expand Wittgenstein’s argument further by saying that due to our respective subjectivity, we can’t all have the same kinds of experience, which means that we can only use language to try to bridge our experiences closer, forming human communication, but language isn’t something that is objective and determinant.

Language can thus be something that is beyond objective words. As Walter Benjamin writes in his On Language as Such and the Language of Man, every expression in life is language. Every performance symbolizes something of us, consciously or subconsciously. Language conditions us.

In this vein of thinking, many animal mind theorists may think that language is what distinguishes humans from other animals. One of the earliest philosophers to have said this is Aristotle, who claims that humans have the ability to construct political societies because they possess the capacity of language. However, I think, instead of making an anthropocentric argument that humans own language, we may think of how language enables us to form these humanly relationships, to exist in such ways.

I believe that we do not command language; in fact, language influences us in subtle ways. Many may claim that they command the use of language well when they eloquently debate against others in philosophy classes or debate tournaments. People take pride in their ability to conceptualize things through language, in their ability to organize language cleverly so that others around them seem to be convinced. Yet, in fact, people feel assured in the way that they use the language only because they are familiar with how the society is taught to use language, meaning that they are familiar with the semantics, the culture, the traditions, the norms of a society, that they take the center, privileged stage of that society. Language sometimes alienates us from ourselves and sometimes brings us closer to ourselves. This ambiguity of language, its potential to condition us and colonize us in some ways, I guess, is the essence of it and why we, as humans, have the desire to articulate our feelings with language so much. We want to connect with and impact others through the use of language.