Subjectively, I don't feel like I can distinguish shades of joy or anger with infinite precision. I can't properly express my feelings the same way I can't properly express exactly where between blue and green a certain turquoise I'm looking at is. But I know a scientific instrument can give a number for the later and I don't feel I have any basis for ruling out the idea that some future scientific instrument can quantify the former.
> They developed writing, as did we. But their writing soon began to no longer just mean what it said. For them, the writing was what it said and their words were what they meant. The flow of the language froze and they began to stack individual concepts one onto the other like stones. Their language lost its spirit. They were still very clever, but without spirit. They built the tower of their words higher and higher and converted everything magical, which they feared, into dead material, and filled it with new, spiritless life. But they completely control this undead material.
> Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience.
