On Language & Consciousness

Image: Gustave Courbet - The Desperate Man (Le Désespéré) (1843–1845, Oil on canvas)

Trying to understand consciousness is well beyond my current scope of expertise. Although I am studying it, I am still an amateur when it comes to its intricacies. But I have my theories when it comes to thinking about thinking, and what it means to be aware.

One theory I find myself returning to is the idea that language did not create consciousness, but transformed it. Language gave us the ability to communicate feelings, needs, and wants, but more importantly, it gave us the ability to express who we are. And from that, the question of why we are begins to emerge.

When I say “why,” I am referring to our ability to consider our role in this universe, to reflect, to search for meaning. Language allows us to name experience, and in naming it, we begin to interpret it. Through language, we assign meaning. Through meaning, we begin to form a sense of purpose.

But this raises a question.

What exists before language?

Try to imagine an earthworm. Mute and blind. Does it assign meaning to its existence? Or does it simply exist within it? We might say it has a purpose: to survive, to sustain the ecosystem. But that feels different from meaning. That feels closer to instinct. A kind of organismic movement toward life, not a reflective understanding of it.

We, too, carry that instinct. But we also carry something else. The ability to step back and ask what it all means. That step back may be where language enters.

Other animals communicate. Dogs, dolphins, chimps, birds, and many others have systems of signaling and sound. Some may even resemble language in structure. But what seems distinct is not just communication, but symbolic abstraction. The ability to represent something that is not immediately present, and to build layers of meaning around it.

The written word deepens this even further.

Symbols that hold thought. Symbols that persist beyond the moment. Letters, numbers, signs. At some point, we agreed that these symbols pointed to something, and over time, they became stable enough to shape entire cultures. They allowed thought to move across time, to be revisited, refined, and shared.

For much of what we call the Middle Ages, access to these symbols was limited. Meaning was carried through story, ritual, and authority (mainly religious). The world was not simply explained; it was lived within, often experienced as something imbued with presence and depth.

Then something began to shift.

By the time of the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, literacy expanded, texts circulated, and individuals gained greater access to ideas beyond their immediate world. Thought could now be externalized, examined, and questioned.

And thinking itself began to take on a more structured form. Left to right. Cause and effect. If this, then that. Just like we read.

There is power in that. It gives us clarity, reasoning, and the ability to build systems of knowledge. But it may also come at a cost.

Something becomes quieter.

The nonlinear, symbolic, and mythic ways of knowing begin to recede. Not because they disappear, but because they are no longer centered.

And perhaps that is where something deeper fractures.

When everything must be named, defined, and explained, the world begins to lose its immediacy. What was once experienced as sacred becomes something to be analyzed. What was once lived becomes something to be interpreted from a distance.

This is where I cannot help but think of Friedrich Nietzsche and his declaration that God is dead.

Not as a literal statement, but as a psychological one.

A shift in consciousness.

A moment where the structures that once held meaning no longer carry the same weight. Where the language that once pointed to the divine begins to feel like it is pointing to nothing at all.

And perhaps language played a role in that.

Not as the sole cause, but as the medium through which we began to dissect the very symbols that once gave us life. In trying to understand everything, we may have stripped certain things of their mystery.

So the question is not whether language gave us consciousness.

It is whether language changed our relationship to it.

Whether in learning to name the world, we also learned to stand apart from it.

And whether meaning, as we understand it now, is something we discovered, or something we constructed after the silence that followed when the old gods stopped speaking.