“Words can’t tell.”

The impossibility to verbalize experience and its consequence on human rights

Let us suppose we are in an accident, suffer brain damage and lose our ability to reason and talk properly. It can happen to any of us at any moment. Taking a less radical, yet a most ‘democratic’ example: we grow old, we start forgetting, mixing up facts, stories, we lose our ability to communicate sensibly. Although neither the accident nor old age can be said to be desirable or pleasant, in fact it is very difficult both for the person and the family to accept such situations, the question that begs an answer is about the loss of self. Do we lose the woman/man we love after such incidents? Is that person in a disabled state the same as the one we are attached to? By not being able to reason and verbalize, is she any ‘lesser’ than she was?

It seems like our western world with a value system based on reason and conceptualization is struggling to come to terms with such conditions. Not many years have passed (1987) since the American Academy of Pediatrics officially announced that it is unethical to do major medical surgery on babies without anesthetics, and even in the year 2000s a third of medical interference where anesthetic should have been required were done without one, arguing that babies have such underdeveloped physique that it is uncertain whether they can sense any pain.(1) The treatment of those, who cannot conceptualize and express themselves verbally was equally traumatizing in other segments of society. Highly developed countries such as Japan, Sweden or Denmark stopped the forced sterilization of the mentally handicapped (or those who were claimed to be so) as late as the end of the 1980s – or actually the date is 1996 for Japan. (2)

All this suggests that our society has been attributing a ‘full right to life’ only to those people only who can reason and verbally communicate properly. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that no matter how advanced old-age care or the treatment of mentally handicapped people becomes, in our society we still tend to think that people who cannot conceptualize properly, recall events or express themselves accurately are ‘lesser’ individuals, than those who are able to think, speak, act and are active agents of society, accumulating GDP. People with such disabilities become ‘secondary citizens’, on the basis of not being able to contribute effectively to the world economy for which reasoning and verbalizing are essential. The ideological support to such treatment is the same as it was for those babies in the operation theatres, or the sterilized handicaps of Japan, namely that by not being able to express themselves properly, they do not have an inner world.

Yet, how do we know what is going on in the inner world of a human being who, from the outside, looks withdrawn? Can we fully share even our own ‘healthy’ conscious experiences with someone else? In the following, I argue that conceptualization and verbalization, which, subsequently I call self-reflection and narration, show us almost nothing about how we receive the world. Although we think we relate to one another through talking, telling, verbally and sensibly communicating, and that brings a form of exchange and develops relationships and social network, this is just an extremely shallow fragment of how we relate to one another and the world. Moreover, it is not us, relating to each other (whatever this ‘us’ might be), but it is the verbalization, the narrative that connects with one another. This actually does not have much to do with how we really grasp the world. In this paper I attempt to elaborate on why conceptualization and verbalization cannot access what we experience. I do this with the intention to demonstrate that if we cannot even share our own conscious experience with one another, we ought not come to judgments (and irreversible actions) about what is going on in the inner world of people existing in different states of consciousness.

Lots of research has been done on narrative, on how we tell things (behavioral psychology, neuroscience, memory studies etc.), and, for instance, the Assman, a couple of scholars of cultural memory studies has articulated very clearly in examining the politics of remembering that the narrating mind is simply different from the experiential mind. (3) It has also been stated and used extensively in management that the collective memory of a particular experience depends on the nature of the episodical parts of the process, for example the experience with which we leave the situation is always remembered with more intensity than the total experience itself.

Whenever there is an experience, we create a narrative about it. About, might not be the relevant term here though, as we do not create the narrative about the experience, nor we create it from the experience, we rather construct the narrative on top of the experience. The narrative is based on the judgment of the reflective self that constantly monitors and narrates in our mind what we are going through. So how something ‘occurred, felt like, took place’ etc. and the recitation of the experience is distanced twofold from the actual experience: there is the reflective self that observes and judges the experience and on top of it there is the narrating self which narrates selected encounters of the reflective self, not all of them, some. Remembering becomes just as difficult, as it is uncertain whether we remember the experience, the judgment of the reflective self about the experience or the narrative about it. Let me try to illustrate the complexity of this issue with an example.

I had wild mushrooms and eggs this morning for breakfast. I got both ingredients from the local farmers market.
Background story: I got the mushrooms from the market, from a very kind man who picked them himself. I enjoyed supporting him with my purchase, as I think small local business initiatives should be encouraged. I was not buying my mushrooms from Tesco, I boycotted a multi-national company in a sense, and this added to the value of my breakfast.
The narrative that I tell you: It was a nice meal, it tasted nice, I enjoyed it. If you call me on the phone, I will tell you that “jeee, I had such as nice wild mushroom breakfast this morning.”
The experience (as I already said, it is impossible to articulate this in language, nonetheless this is a written text so I must try): warmth, pain, sunlight caress, smell of the soil, kindness, yellow and kind, care, being held, regret, rage, tears, helplessness, press on the teeth, crunch, thick soft texture in mouth, taste of forest and eggs, my late grandma and her love, the closure we had, feeling she is my ancestor… and many other in timeless space.
Reflection on the experience: hashtag: goodjobdelia, kindoldman, ilove scrabmledeggsand mushrooms, goodtoeatsustainably, nicetoremembergrandma.

So my mushroom breakfast is much more than just me telling you I had a good breakfast, it is a tribute to my grandma, it is realizing what it means to belong to an ancestor, a fight against economical injustice and other. My breakfast is not only a representation of this all, it is also agential, an active, formative act. It will have various consequences on my close and broad environment, starting with how I talk to my mom in the afternoon, to the point of what I communicate to my students next week.

Now the question is: do you know this about my breakfast? Do you really know what that breakfast felt like to me? Do you know what I experience when eating my breakfast? Of course you do not, and not only because I only tell you that ‘I had a nice mushroom breakfast this morning, I really enjoyed it.’ This is the narrative that you learn. You hear this, a terribly shallow, one-sided recitation built only on a tiny segment of a simple, yet extremely complex experience. Now, you might say that you do not know this about me because I do not tell you these things, but even if I told you, you would know nothing about me, because, and this is important, the experience itself does not happen on a cognitive, verbal level. I can tell you that I am sad, or I am happy or angry, you will not really have any idea about how that is personally to me. If I adapt this to my breakfast example and the experience of it, you will not see me and my grandma in the forest, you will not sense the air, the leaves, the smell of the soil, the warm autumn afternoon, her smile, the little knife she used, searching in the duff that created a sense of eternal peace. No matter how I write this down here over and over, you will not have any access to my inner world.

In other words, the narrative never covers the experience as they take place simply on different realms. The narrative lives in itself, it is mounted onto the experience it is not more than a sign/ signifier of the experience. It is not even an index, because it has no common properties with the experience. It is like a road sign. Therefore, it is not the case though that without language there is no experience. Experience can happen on various levels, but expressing it verbally, that is another matter. From this, we can also hopefully see that life has nothing to do with the narrative. Life takes place especially beyond the narrative. What and how we do to each other has very little to do with what is actually being thought or said. We think that those who cannot express (reflect and narrate) are somehow lesser individuals than those who can. Although their ability to do so might be compromised, it has nothing to do with how they receive life.

 

Notes:

[1] Rodriguez McRobbie, L. (2017). When babies felt no pain. Bostonglobe. Available at:  https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-felt-pain/Lhk2OKonfR4m3TaNjJWV7M/story.html

[2] Rich, M., Inoue, M. (2019) Japan to Compensate Forcibly Sterilized Patients, Decades After the Fact. Available at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/world/asia/japan-sterilization-eugenics-compensation.html

[3] see for instance Assman, Aleida (2012). Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. or several publications by Jan Assman.