How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things

The underlying issue – the relationship between language and feeling – has long created debate in philosophy. Some thinkers have proposed that feelings are independent of words: babies, for example, can feel things long before they know how to pin words to their sensations. But other philosophers have insisted that certain feelings would remain essentially unknown to us if we didn’t have the words to help us recognize them.

The truth – as so often – lies somewhere in an intriguing middle zone. Language may not wholly create feelings, but it most definitely and beautifully deepens and clarifies them. The right words help us to know ourselves; through their agency, we can more accurately and securely identify the contents of our inner lives.

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