What Are Words?

Words are strange things, when we stop to consider them.

They exist in our brains—or in what we call the soul or thought. In other words, they live “inside” us. Yet language was not there from the moment we were born. It came from outside, taught to us by other people.

Seen this way, language is “the other who has entered within.”

The self is one of the most mysterious phenomena. I am myself, not another. No one else can directly experience my consciousness, nor can I directly experience theirs. In that sense, an absolute distance separates self from other.

And yet language breaks through that distance.

Because language exists, we can speak with people whose being is utterly different from our own. Stranger still, the language within me also exists within others.

We are connected through this immense network of language. From something as ordinary as today’s lunch to mysteries as vast as the truth or origin of the universe, we are able to share our thoughts.

What, then, is this vast network that joins subject and object, self and other?

If this inquiry can bring us even slightly closer to that mysterious phenomenon—and make even a modest contribution to the future development of language—it will have served its purpose.