Between Language and Reality

In a previous post, I wrote about how language shapes reality. Indeed it does. We associate elements of consciousness with words, which have meaning–but these meanings are not the whole truth. Three other processes occur before we use language to organize information: sensation, perception, and appraisal. Through these processes, we lose parts of the whole story. We never actually experience ‘reality.’

‘Reality’ is consciousness in its truest form; it is what exists without observation, before we interpret it.

The gap begins with sensation. We sense the world with eyes, ears, skin, nose, and mouth, detecting light, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Only a small amount of what is actually happening is received. We are limited not only by our inability to take in tremendous amounts of sensations, but also by our physical incapability to sense certain spectrums of light and frequencies of sound. The relatively meager data we gather here is transmitted to the brain.

The gap only widens with perception. We interpret transmitted data by perceiving patterns and making basic associations. Needless to say, what we perceive is highly individual. Associations, after all, are merely a connection between prior experiences. At this stage, we can identify things such as objects and emotions but still don’t have language for them.

Our appraisal of perceptions, once again, amplifies the distance between how we see the world and how it truly is. We assign emotional valence to our perceptions based on memories, the only context we really have. This evaluation is exacerbated by our variable moods and states of mind.

Finally, we have language. We put words to our appraisals, making them transmissible. What we communicate with our words, however, seems a paltry representation of reality. In the course of processing the world around us, we filter out lots of stuff!

If we can’t communicate everything through language, then how do we communicate the rest, if at all?

 We strum, dance, paint, draw, weave, film, sculpt… you name it. We use art to communicate what words cannot. People want to be understood and will go to great lengths to be heard. So much of what we experience is intangible, unable to be articulated. For that which seems impossible to communicate, we just need another avenue. Art fills the gap between language and reality.