The words of Helen Keller are instructive here. They would seem to support the hypotheses that language is in some way critical to consciousness. The lives of Victor and Genie and their inability to acquire language certainly indicates that this ability has a critical window in time. Just as babies with cataracts who have them removed after the first year have no improvement of vision because the vision tuning mechanism has shut down and they are unable to make sense of the light entering the retina.
Feral children without language, then, are essentially without thought, without ideas, without emotion, and without consciousness.
"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a noworld. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus . . . I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything before hand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation"
Again...
"When I learned the meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions" |
