Before speech develops as such, the baby makes use of all kinds of signs, eye contact, cries and other body language, to exteriorise its wants. In the same way, it is clear that before the earliest hominids could speak, they must have used other means to signal to one another. The rudiments of such communication exist in other animals, especially the higher primates, but only in humans does speech exist as such. The long struggle of the child to master speech, with its complex underlying patterns and logic, is synonymous with the acquisition of consciousness. A similar road must have been traversed by early humans.
The throat of the human infant, like that of apes and other mammals, is so constructed that the vocal passage is low down. In this way, it is capable of making the kind of cries that animals make, but not articulate speech. The advantage of this is that it can cry and eat at the same time, without choking. Later on, the vocal passage migrates upwards, reflecting a process that actually occurred during the course of evolution. It is unthinkable that human speech would have arisen all at once, without all kinds of transitional forms. This took place over millions of years, in which there were undoubtedly periods of rapid development, as we see in the development of the human infant.
Can thought exist without language? That depends on what is meant by “thought”. The elements of thought exist in animals, especially the higher mammals, which also possess certain means of communication. Among the chimpanzees, the level of communication is quite sophisticated. But in none of these can we speak of either language or thought anything remotely on the human level. The higher develops from the lower, and could not exist without it. Human speech originates in the incoherent sounds of the baby, but it would be foolish to identify the two. In the same way, it is a mistake to try to show that language existed before the human race.
The same is true of thought. To use a stick to get hold of an object that is out of reach is an act of intelligence. But this appears quite late in the development of the child – about 18 months. This involves the use of a tool (a stick) in a coordinated move, in order to realise a preconceived aim. It is a deliberate, planned action. This kind of activity can be seen among apes, and even monkeys. The use of objects found ready to hand – sticks, stones, etc. – as adjuncts to food-gathering activities is well documented. At twelve months, the child has learnt to experiment by throwing an object in different directions to “see what happens”.
This is a repeated purposeful activity, designed to get results. It implies an awareness of cause and effect (if I do this, then that will happen). None of this knowledge is innate. It is learned through experience. It takes the child 12-18 months to grasp the notion of cause and effect. A most powerful piece of knowledge! It must have taken early humans millions of years to learn the same lesson, which is the real basis of all rational thought and purposeful action. All the more absurd that, at a time when our knowledge of nature has reached such dazzling heights, certain scientists and philosophers should wish to drag thought back to what is really a primitive and childish state, by denying the existence of causality.
In the first two years of life, an intellectual revolution takes place, in which the notions of space, causality and time are formed, not, as Kant imagined, out of thin air, but as a direct result of practice and experience of the physical world. All human knowledge, all the categories of thought, including the most abstract ones, are derived from this. This materialist conception is clearly proven by the development of the child. Initially, the infant does not distinguish between reality and itself. But at a certain point, the realisation dawns that what it sees is something outside itself, something which will continue to exist even when it is no longer seen. This is the great breakthrough, the “Copernican revolution” of the intellect. Those philosophers who assert that the material world does not exist, or that this cannot be proven, are, in a literal sense of the word, expressing an infantile idea.
The baby who cries when its mother leaves the room shows that it understands that she has not disappeared just because she is no longer in its field of vision. It cries in the certainty that this action will bring about her return. Up to the first year, the child believes that what is out of sight has, in effect, ceased to exist. By the end of the second year, it already recognises cause and effect. Just as there is no Chinese Wall separating thought from action, so there is no absolute dividing line between the intellectual life of the child and its emotional development. Feelings and thoughts are, in fact, indivisible. They constitute the two complementary aspects of human behaviour. Everyone knows that no great enterprise is achieved without the element of the will. Emotions are a most powerful lever for human action and thought, and play a fundamental role in human development. But at every stage, the intellectual development of the child is inextricably bound up with activity. As intelligent behaviour emerges, emotional states of mind are associated with actions – cheerfulness or sadness are linked with the success or failure of intentional acts.
The emergence of language represents a profound modification in the behaviour and experience of the individual, both from an intellectual and emotional standpoint. It is a qualitative leap. The possession of language creates, to quote Piaget, “the ability to reconstruct his past actions in the form of narration and to anticipate his future actions through verbal representations.” With language, past and future become real for us. We can rise above the restrictions of the present, plan, predict and intervene according to a conscious plan.
Language is a product of social life. Human social activity is unthinkable without language. It must have been present, in one form or another, in the earliest truly human societies, from the very earliest times. Thought itself is a kind of “internal language”. With language comes the possibility of real human social intercourse, the creation of a culture and tradition which can be learned and passed on orally, and later on in writing, as opposed to mere imitation. It also makes possible genuine human relations, where feelings of antipathy, sympathy, love and respect can be expressed in a more coherent, developed way. In embryo, these elements are present from the first six months in the form of imitation. The first words are pronounced, usually isolated nouns. Then the child learns to put two words together. Nouns are gradually connected with verbs and adjectives. Finally, the mastering of grammar and syntax entails extremely complex patterns of logical thought. This is a tremendous qualitative leap for every individual as it was for the species.
Very young children can be said to have a “private” language, which is not language in the real sense, but only sounds which represent experiments and attempts to copy adult speech. Articulate speech grows out of these sounds, but the two must not be confused. Language, by its very nature, is not private, but social. It is inseparable from social life and collective activity, in the first place, co-operation in production, which lies at the basis of all social life from the earliest times. Language represents a colossal leap forward. Once the process started, it would have enormously speeded up the development of consciousness. This can be seen also in the development of the child.
Language represents the beginnings of the socialisation of human activity. Before this, early pre-humans must have communicated by other means: cries, body language and other gestures. Indeed, modern humans continue to do so, particularly in moments of great stress or emotion. But the limitations of this kind of “language” are self-evident. They are hopelessly inadequate to convey more than immediate situations. The level of complexity, abstract thought and planning needed for even the simplest human societies based on co-operative production cannot be expressed by such means. Only through language is it possible to escape from the immediate present, recall the past, and foresee the future. Only through language is it possible to establish a really human form of communication with others, to share one’s “inner life” with them. Thus we talk of “dumb animals” as a distinction from humans, the only animals that possess speech.