Resonance

At the tender age of fourteen I asked my High School French teacher, Alex Cason, who was Belgian, if the way particular languages were structured influenced the way people thought, if by the very nature of the language a French speaker, a Russian speaker - Alex was also my Russian teacher - and an English speaker might simply form different concepts in thinking about the same topic purely as a result of their individual languages, at the time we were reading All About Language by Mario Pei. Alex dismissed my question as irrelevant and we moved on. Now, nearly better than four decades later the dismissal still stings, but I have the beginnings of an answer that seems to indicate that my question might have had some merit.

Without sharing certain attitudes towards the things around us, sharing a sense of relevance and responding in similar ways, communication would be impossible. It is important, for instance, that nearly all of us agree nearly all the time on what colors things are. Such agreement is part of our concept of color, Wittgenstein suggests. Regularity of the use of such concepts and agreement in their application is part of language, not a logically necessary precondition of it. We cannot separate the life in which there is such agreement from our concept of color. Imagine a different form or way of life and you imagine a different language with different concepts, different rules and a different logic.

This raises the question of the relation between language and forms or ways of life.

Gently lifted from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 6. Rules and Private Language

A dear friend once commented decades ago about my distinct lack of learning in Liberal Arts, "that a good liberal arts education would have added so much resonance to your life". Now nearly in my sixth decade a little resonance is coming around. Perhaps, it is never too late to learn, but this late in life, resonance comes with a distinct feeling of embarrassment at having known Wittgenstein's name for years but little else.