Language, Thought and Reality - Integrated wisdom

Miscellaneous Quotations from Language, Thought and Reality - Benjamin Lee Whorf

"The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

'Common sense' is unaware that talking itself means using a complex cultural organization, just as it is unaware of cultural organizations in general.

"It is evident to a linguist that thinking as defined by Jung, contains a large linguistic element a strictly patterned nature, while feeling is mainly nonlinguistic, though it may use the vehicle of language, albeit in a way quite different from thinking. Thinking may be said to be language's own ground, whereas feeling deals in feeling values which language indeed possesses but which lie rather on its borderland. There are Jung's two rational functions, and by contrast his two irrational functions, sensation and intuition, may fairly be termed nonlinguistc.

It seems to be largely the type of grammar in our languages, worked up into logic by Aristotle and his school, that makes it compulsive for us to think of energy as transmitted from "source" to "receiver," and to shrink from the idea that what is transmitted may be a trigger-effect, adn the energy comes as much or more from the unlocalized limitless sink or reservoir upon which the trigger-effects knocks as it comes from the "source"--although the source did lose an equal amount of energy (MCMT 1.5: 12)

In mathematics we deliberately seek and progress toward a level of intellectual living. But we are not taught to aspire to the same freedom in speech. It appears to be possible to get into a higher mental-verbal world which is generalized, as algebra is generalised above arithmetic. Those original explorers, Whitehead and Russell, were so far ahead that they have been virtually useless to the body of mankind. Like some sort of Lief Erricsons, they will be known by an occasional monument noticed sometime later. (F. Kunz and Whorf, MCMT 1.7: 15)

Back in the middle of the last century Mendeleeff and Lothar-Meyer discovered what had also been a poet's intuition, that "the atoms march in tune," i.e. that they form an evenly graduated sequence, like the notes of a musical scale. Emerson was a student of chemistry as well as a philosopher and poet; he believed in a synthesis of awareness; that all ways of getting understanding, science, poetry, religion, intuition, are glimpses of the same ultimate vista. He and a few others succeeded in getting New England really excited about this integrated wisdom.

Certain psychically sensitive people get vivid and often amazingly correct impressions of the thoughts, emotions, and personal characters of others as moving, vibrating, spatial figures or designs, with the wave-charactersistic of color; and they see the cloud-like substance which bears these patterns impress them upon other cloud-like bodies--this being a crude description, naturally. Such people, who seem to "see" mechanistic force-like operations and configurations in a dimensioned space-field, may perhaps be more highly developed and nearer the truth of things than ordinary people who merely "feel" or "sense" qualities called emotions or thoughts. (MCMT 1.4: 11)

by ED. JOHN B. CARROLL, CAMBRIDGE: MIT PRESS, 1956