Why Can't We Communicate?

Every human being is unique. No matter if you are an identical twin with the same physical appearance as your sibling, for that is not what signifies your identity.  At your core, your soul, your inner being, you are different from every other person that has, is, and will exist in time. The way you see the world is distinct and altered from the person next to you. As a person lives their life and comes to interact in the world and gain experiences, they form distinct ideas about everything, thus creating their individualistic thought process. For John Locke, the nature of ideas begins by creating ideas through sensations and the things we experience (815). Therefore, the words we use to communicate and express ourselves are simply signs of our ideas. In the Book III excerpt from his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke points out the extreme difficulty of communication between individuals based on the simple fact that every person is inherently diverse from the next. Since every person thinks and experiences the world differently, how can correctly communicate our ideas to others? In Locke’s philosophy, this question remains at the very core as the downfall of language.

Going off of Locke’s theory of ideas, it is relevant to note that making connections among simple ideas forms complex ideas and words are the medium through which complex ideas are expressed. However, complex ideas are not universal: “The language barrier when communicating disrupts the ability to successfully convey a complex idea” (815). Therefore, Locke insists on the need for clarity, going on to declare:

We should cast off all artifice and fallacy of words, which makes so great a part of business and skill of the disputers of this world, pretending to the knowledge of things, we hinder as much as we can the discovery of truth, by perplexing one another al we can by a perverse use of those signs which we make use of to convey truth to one another” (815).

In this same vein of thought, we approach Jacques Derrida’s essay “Differance”. Derrida’s work from 1968 highlights the many problems of expressing and clarifying complex ideas when translated from another language. In his essay, Derrida confronts monumentally challenging ideas that have plagued the human race since consciousness, time and space, in conjunction with words and language. At the start of his essay, Derrida’s immediately points out the many complex associations made with the verb “to differ”. He states, “on the one hand it indicates the difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing that puts off until ‘later’ what is presently denied, the possible that is presently impossible”(279). While Derrida’s ideas in and of themselves are complex and hard to grasp, the language barrier from English to French only works to complicate things. What if the French word Derrida was thinking of to express an idea about “differ” or “difference” did not have an equal counterpart to an English word? Would that not change the idea at its core? Here is where Locke points out the imperfection of language:

The chief end of language in communication being to be understood, words serve not well for that end, neither in civil nor philosophical discourse, when any word does not excite in the hearer the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker… That then which makes doubtfulness and uncertainty in the signification of some more than other words, is the difference of ideas they stand for” (817).

While Locke notes those imperfections and abuses of words, and their inability to perform as vehicles for expressing ideas, he does not taint the perfection of the idea itself.  How then, if words often fail can we successfully communicate with one another? Surely it would be much easier if we could simply exchange brains for a short time, experience and understand the other person’s idea, and then live on, knowing full well what they were trying to say. Unfortunately, with all the wonderful things modern science has provided for us, that is not one of them. So where is the space where ideas speak when words fail? Perhaps in the realm of music, which contains the ability to transcend language and speak to the soul of the listener. Or art, which can capture intense emotions without speaking a syllable. Or even dance, which allows both the dancer and the audience to understand the depths of the human soul simply through movement. While it is certain that words and language will never be obsolete, one can only hope that one day we as human beings will truly be able to understand one another.

-Clare Davis