d yet words carry the gravity of human history. Barfield maintains that language reveals the evolution of consciousness.
Entire cultures of thought can be traced along the lines of language, which, like consciousness “arises from an interpenetration of thinking and perceiving.” It can be seen from the transformations in language that as time progresses from the earliest evidence of language to our present day vocabulary, intellectual thought (what Alan Watts calls “chatter in the skull”) begins to eclipse direct perception. And thus begins our modern neurosis.
Every modern language, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning association, is apparently, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors.
For a culture with amnesia such as our own (having forgotten the practices that once anchored us to a rich relationship with the earth) words may be a branch we can follow back toward its root and the beginnings of human consciousness. We might learn something there, at the animate origins of our modern mind. There might be hints of how we arrived at this place of profound disillusionment.
We can see, for example, from the things that were named and not named in different civilizations that Romans were interested in outward achievement, while Greek’s fascination lay in the interior realm of human feeling. Both civilizations used the familiar aspects of life to tread into the territory of the unknown. The Romans knew well agriculture and war. In order to express a new idea, they balanced on these foundations as they attempted to reach into the vaporous realm of abstract thought. The word “spoil,” for example, is a Latin term which at one time meant only to “strip a conquered foe of his arms.” As the Roman consciousness grew and changed, the singular definition grew to accommodate minds which had enough distance in their relationship to the land to extrapolate the purely physical into the mental, emotional and even metaphysical. This is how humans began “realizing the unknown in terms of the known.”
If we consider the effort required to turn “a vague feeling into a clear thought” we may gain a new respect for the language that is so casually used, and how necessary it must have been for the mind to shift its engagement from the outer phenomena of the living world to the inner realm of reflexive thought in order to have something to say about it.
Here it may be important to understand exactly what we are turning away from when we begin to give precedence to the human world of thoughts, ideas and emotions. How did humans, in the first place, come to define their world through words? Unlikely as it may seem, an ecologist has something to say on the matter.
David Abram asserts in Spell of the Sensuous that spoken language evolved from our relationship with the “more-than-human-world.” It was our physical interaction with the terrain that sustained us which generated the first human sounds that became words with meaning. “For meaning…remains rooted in the sensory life of the body—it cannot be completely cut off from the soil of direct, perceptual experience without withering and dying.” And so, at a certain point in history, the human voice began to echo and amplify the sounds of their animate environment in a way that must have been entirely participatory with the terrain.
A friend in India once told me that his grandmother can tell him what time it is down to the minute based on the quality of sunlight. As we become more removed from the sensate realities of the earth we are funneled into the void of abstraction. It is here that we are lost, for our greatest compass lies in our senses: the threshold between inner and outer. A living language requires a continuously renewed relationship with the physical. One need only glance at the morning newspaper to see what happens to a materialistic culture with no conscious relationship to the matter it is using to build its empire.
The history of language, described by British philosopher and poet, Owen Barfield, is a painful proces