When trying to explain how we feel we often use words. Words like anxious, hateful, resentful or just happy. Because of its descriptive value, language has become the primary way for us to express our emotions.
When we do this the specific word seems very important. Even if the feelings are close to each other they still need differentiation. When you’re feeling resentful you don’t say you feel angry, it isn’t exactly right, even though anger has many similarities with resentment, it is still different.
Putting an emotion in the negative category isn’t enough, we need to be very specific of the sensation going through our body and mind. However, some languages don’t have words for certain feelings or felt experiences. But what does this do to us, when we aren’t directly able to label our emotion?
Тоска, a Russian word, famously described by Nabokov for being untranslatable. Toска means feeling unfulfilled without knowing why. A longing for something that never even existed. A deep spiritual and existential anguish.
The English language doesn’t have such a word, perhaps dreadful, but the difference between feeling dreadful and тоска, is as big as the earlier described difference between anger and resentment. It doesn’t quite hit the spot. But does that mean that the English speaking population doesn’t or almost can’t feel тоска?
To answer this question I will draw on a personal experience of mine. My native language is Dutch and in the Dutch language there isn’t a word like anxiety. You have the word “paniek” but paniek is more of an intense and sudden anxiety and not exactly the gradual increasing tense feeling that is anxiety.
When I learned this word of anxiety I recognized it, I had felt it quite a lot but I was never able to pinpoint what it exactly was. The feeling came and went away and that was that. However when I learned about the word, something changed. Whenever I felt anxiety I knew what it was, I was able to categorize the feeling and as a result was able to deal with it more easily. I managed to give this mental and bodily sensation a place.
I think the same is true for тоска, it is there whether you name the emotional state or not. However, when naming it instead of it being a fleeing experience it becomes easier to recognize. Instead of being left in the dark with your feeling, you get a linguistic map which makes it easier to deal with your emotions.
Without this map you could feel that there is something wrong, but it becomes difficult to pinpoint.
Just like the government in 1984 tried to remove words in order to prevent people from critiquing the government, when you don’t have the words to critique something you can maybe feel that there’s something wrong but you can’t operationalize it. Which leads you to suffering from something you can’t quite pinpoint.
This is an exercise that can come in handy: the next time that you feel a difficult or specific feeling that is hard to pinpoint; write an in depth description of it and then give that description a name. The next time it shows up you recognize it and are able to navigate through it easily.
The fact that we need this shows us how complex we actually are. We need something to navigate a world that doesn’t explain itself. Just like we needed to invent mathematics in order to make sense of the structure of reality, we invented language in order to make sense of ourselves.
From the intense and overwhelming reality we abstract certain elements, label them systemize them and live with them. Dangers arises when we start to confuse the map for the landscape and sadly I think we already have.
When learning mathematics the common phrasing is this: “Nature follows these mathematical rules”. But that isn’t true. With these mathematical rules we can follow nature, not vice versa.
To come to an conclusion, I think that we need just like Husserl said, to go back to the things themselves and change our relationship with language(including mathematics). Not as something that is real like a tree is real. But as an abstract system which helps us makes sense of this incredible universe, from the weird sensations we feel all the way to how stars collapse.
I love this!!! The importance of language is so vital to connect with others!
I found your page just about 40 minutes ago, and within that time, I've gone through most of your articles and i love every one of them. A few days ago i had in mind to write an article on a topic very similar to this one, so it i was particularly surprised to find this article.
I very much agree with you on this. There's a lot of things we feel that can be very difficult to express with words—language. Sometimes it's only through shared experiences of a particular feeling/emotion that true understanding between people can be achieved.