Who am I? How did I get here? Who are these others? What do they want? What do I want? What should I want? These are primal questions. We would do a grave injustice to our ancestors to presume that because we have more knowledge of biological and social processes than they, their grappling with exactly the same questions was any less profound than ours.
A phrase often attributed to Aristotle to describe human beings is zoon logon echon. The phrase is often translated as “rational animal,” following a detour from the ancient Greek to English by way of Latin. A more direct rendering is “the animal that talks.” That leaves us as heirs to and custodians of a set of questions about who we are and how we should live—something we do indeed have the capacity to talk about—without necessarily granting us the capacity to arrive at a final, “rational” answer we must all agree to.
“The animal that talks” takes us in the right direction: language is a shared understanding that enables, through interchange, further and deeper shared understanding. Of course language also allows for the expression of disagreement, and may at times even contribute to disagreement, as terms get confused and people harden their positions in opposition to each other—to say nothing of the possibility of lying. Disagreement is prior to language, even if language often expresses disagreement and leads to new disagreements. But language is also a means to bridge disagreement.
Where did language come from? The answer common to the ancient world was: from God, or the gods. Interestingly, the matter that seems most to have vexed our forebears, according to the texts and traditions that have come down to us, was the multiplicity of languages. In many accounts, all people originally spoke the same language—until a deity intervened, dividing tribe from tribe by means of language. The implication is that the ability to speak with one another was once a common property of all human beings. A world in which people are divided one from another by language therefore represents a falling away from a better prior condition.
In the ancient understanding, human beings are not only created in the image of God, as the Genesis account and many others hold. They also speak the language of God or the gods, an understanding that does not seem to have struck our forebears as especially noteworthy at the time. In the ancient world, there appears not to have been much additional curiosity about the initial human acquisition of language. The doings of the gods were explanation enough. There would have been no need, prior to Darwin, for an account of how human beings became the animals that talk. The stories about God (or the gods) giving speech to human beings, or simply talking to a comprehending human being, were sufficient explanation.
We, who do not accept as literally true the biblical or mythological accounts of creation and the speech that comes to human beings along with it, need a little more detail in the account of the origin of speech, and thus the dawn of the human. Yet we can have no direct access to the origin or invention of speech. Even stories about humans brought up without speech—say, the feral child of myth and story (Tarzan, Mowgli) and, alas, occasionally reality (Danielle Crockett, a seven-year-old girl found stashed away in a Florida basement in 2005)—take place in a world in which others can speak. There is no going back. Our only recourse is speculation.
At the origin of speech must have been a terrible struggle to say anything at all and make it understood. In the Genesis account (2:19–20), God puts the animals He has created before Adam to see what Adam will call them. Thus the animals get their names. A conventional interpretation here is that God thereby grants man the power to create language. That can’t be quite right, however, because God has already spoken to the man (2:16), telling him to feel free to eat the fruit of any tree but one. On the other hand, the imputation to man of the naming power does at least gesture toward a world in which things have no names—in which man is not yet but is about to become the animal who talks, by his own labor. And emphatically, the naming is associated with a grant of power: God has given man dominion over the plants and animals.
Yet in the absence of a benevolent god to speed the process along, it is hard to imagine the origin of language as anything but an epic struggle taking place in the context of a preverbal epic struggle—for simple survival for oneself and for the band of primate protohumans in which one found oneself, and for dominance within that band. Who knows what kind of force might (or must) have accompanied the first-ever assertion, “Mine!”? In the grunt of the caveman lies the origin of property and the demand for recognition, or justice. Perhaps we have cavewomen to thank for the first discourse unconnected to the sheer assertion of power.
With language comes a quantum leap in the power of imagination—envisioning the world around us as something different from what it is. Imagination is surely preverbal: perhaps cavepeople sometimes dreamt they could fly and remembered the dreams when they woke up. Surely such a dream would color one’s impression the next time one observed a bird in flight. But language offers a more comprehensive possibility for the imagination.
Behold the corpse of a member of your cave clan, alive yesterday, dead today. When there is no possibility of saying anything about this brute fact, it’s hard to see how the imaginative capacity could extend much beyond recalling the corpse as a living being and projecting that image forward in contrast to the dead thing at hand. This might produce sadness or grief at the loss (or, depending on one’s relations with the recently departed, it might produce memories of fear and a sense of relief). One might also look at the living and imagine them dead, with similar effects on one’s mood.
A preverbal curiosity about what exactly happened to the living element of the now-dead seems inescapable. And indeed, here we are but one step away from the birth of metaphysics. But it’s hard to see how such postulates as the immortality of the soul and the contours of the afterlife would come up in the absence of the ability to talk the problem over. The development of increasingly sophisticated language was certainly a useful tool in everyday life for the cave clan. But for the purpose of speculation about the meaning of life and death, it was absolutely essential. “In the beginning was the Word”: well, yes.
In accounting for the development and spread of language, we moderns, being of a generally utilitarian cast of mind, are probably inclined to emphasize the practical utility of language to the cave clan—its productivity-enhancing element in the cave. No doubt the efficiency of both hunting and gathering improved with the development of language.
But we should at least entertain the possibility that the bigger impetus to speech was the necessity of language to cave clan metaphysics. There were certain facts available to preverbal protohumans that really did call out for a deeper shared understanding, life and death first among them. Because language to grapple with these facts did not exist, it was necessary to invent it.
Speculative anthropology—including speculation about the anthropogenic moment, the point at which hominids became human—is a risky and necessarily inconclusive business. But it is likely fair to conclude that at some distant prehistoric point in the gazing of the living upon the newly dead, it first occurred to human beings to imagine beings somewhat like themselves but different in one decisive respect: they would not die. They would be immortal. And with this quality, these speculative beings would have a vast, inestimable superiority to the mortal beings speculating about them. The mortals would have to invent a new name to distinguish beings of this kind from themselves. They would have this need for a name quite apart from the question of whether such immortal beings actually exist or had made their existence manifest to mortals. “Gods” would do.
I take no position here on whether God created man in His image, or for that matter whether a superior and divine power called “God” or anything else was in fact responsible for the creation of human beings by whatever means. I would only note that prior to the anthropogenic moment and the human acquisition of language, any revelation by God or the gods of His or their existence would have fallen on, so to speak, deaf ears. There would have been no capacity to process the revelation, or to develop a shared understanding of it with others.
Of course, if God created man precisely in the manner described in Genesis, with language present at the creation, then God would have had no trouble making His presence known and significance understood. Speculative anthropology in that case would