can we really express everything we feel ?

 


Have you ever felt the difficulty of expressing everything you feel to the love of your life, telling them that words are not enough to convey what you're feeling? Or have you ever had trouble answering when the doctor asks “What hurts?” while touching a specific spot? Can we say that words are truly insufficient to express the entirety of our feelings?

A. Definition of Concepts

Language and Feeling:

Language: It is the ability to express one's thoughts and communicate with others based on conventional vocal or graphic signs¹. And signs are, in fact, what allow me to know, recognize, guess, or anticipate something². Why are they conventional? Because if we can say one word and not another (if we see a tree, we will say it's a tree and not a rock), it’s because the linguistic community agreed that it would be so (probably with a reason, justification, or motive) with the goal of communicating and understanding each other. Without this convention, we would not understand each other, and everyone would have their own language.

If we say “a tree” vocally or graphically, it is because we decided, by convention, that it is a tree.



Feeling: To have a keen awareness of a subjective state³.

B. Response

What makes expressing all our feelings difficult?

After telling the doctor how you feel when he asks you in order to analyze you, you might feel dissatisfied after having described your sensations, thinking it was inaccurate. And it’s precisely this inaccuracy between the word used and the actual feeling that leads us to believe that there is no word to express everything we feel. But it goes further than that. It’s not that there are no words to express what we feel — words may exist that match our exact feeling — but rather that there is an infinity of things to express and only a limited number of expressions. In other words, we have not yet established words that correspond to an infinite range of experiences.

Now you may ask: why does the infinite expressibility of things matter here? Well, if our language had enough words to correspond to the specific feelings of each person — whether those that already exist or those that are potential (that will come to exist) — then our language would be infinite (at least until a certain period, in my view), because it would result from the sum of the specific feelings of each current and future individual. But this raises a question: what would be the consequences of such an event?

And what if we had an infinite number of expressions?

Let’s suppose we found a way to have an infinite number of expressions corresponding to an infinite number of expressible things. Consequently, we could express everything we feel! But don’t be too quick to celebrate the idea of writing everything you feel to the love of your life, because you might guess — it comes at a cost!

The price to pay for expressing everything we feel: sacrificing the general aspect of language in favor of the subjectivity of feeling. Indeed, the challenge of language is to maintain a balance: to allow the expression of as many things as possible while remaining as understandable as possible to the greatest number of people. And if every person’s full range of feelings could be expressed, this balance would be disrupted, because in the end, each person would only fully understand their own feelings.

(If David feels "Gno PIouf" when he is happy, and someone else feels “a pleasant internal burn,” only they can truly understand each other, because others — even if they feel the same — will have different ways of expressing it.)

And by understandable, we mean: what is easily conceivable. The most understandable aspect among the infinite expressions of everyone’s complete feelings is that they are all subjective. Thus, anything that stems from this subjectivity would disrupt the balance of language. To avoid disturbing this balance, it is therefore IDEAL to accept the fact that everything that stems from feeling is subjective.

In short, if we had an infinite number of words to express exactly everything we feel, the problem would no longer be the insufficiency of words, but rather being misunderstood.

This is a concept we find in Bergson's Laughter and Wittgenstein's notion of private language.

C. Conclusion

We can express everything we feel, but doing so would disturb the balance of language — the balance between being easily conceivable by as many people as possible and allowing the expression of as many things as possible. Disturbing this balance (with the “expression of many things” outweighing “understanding by many”) would lead to misunderstanding. This opens the door to other topics such as: Should we say everything we think? or Does language limit our thought?

Sources:

  1. Larousse

  2. Larousse

  3. CNRTL

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