Philosophy is a Rain Forest

I had the good fortune to tour Costa Rica in the Fall of the year 2000. The tour was built around exploring the virgin rain forest preserves that cover one third of Costa Rica.

I did not know the name of one single plant or animal inhabiting the Costa Rican rain forest when I arrived. Our tour guide had recently received his degree in zoology from a Costa Rican university. I don’t recall his name or the name of the university. I do recall his expert explanations of the places and environments we visited. He knew the names of every flower, tree, and animal we saw, and could explain each in detail.

I do not recall any of the names of the plants and animals I saw in the rain forest. I do have two wonderful photo albums of what I saw courtesy of someone who was on the tour with me.

One day we were riding the bus on a highway cut into the mountains at the center of a large rain forest. Our guide explained to us that if we were to enter too deeply into the forest covering the mountains we would never find our way out, nor most likely would we ever be found. The forest would disorient our sense of direction making it useless to find the narrow band of highway on which we traveled. Every direction in which we looked would be undifferentiated rain forest, and the forest canopy would prevent us from viewing any landmark such as the sky. I wondered if a person who could climb a 300 foot tree unaided might have a chance for survival.

If I had been born and raised in that rain forest, say 2,000 years ago, I would possess a rich vocabulary that described and explained the rain forest and my relation to it. That vocabulary would be as rich as the densest vocabulary used by the philosophers of today. The vocabulary of the rain forest would mirror the complexity of the rain forest, but not capture the rain forest in its entirety.

The reason why I write about this is because I was thinking about a metaphor that goes like this, “thinking is language.” I don’t subscribe to the metaphor because I believe thinking is much more complex than merely using language. Whatever one’s philosophy of language might be, it does not capture the richness of thinking.

Philosophy is a rain forest. It possesses its own vocabulary that is rich and dense and describes and explains the philosophical rain forest. However, language does not fully penetrate the rain forest in all its complexity.

When I penetrate the rain forest, my sensori-motor and perceptual abilities are primary. My conceptual and language skills are linked and depend on my sensori-motor and perceptual systems. My language and conceptual thinking are grounded in my sensori-motor and perceptual systems.

I must master different vocabularies when reading Plato, Hegel, or Derrida. However, if I am unable to ground those vocabularies in my basic experience of the world and my actions in the world, I have not mastered those vocabularies, nor have I done any creative or critical thinking about the ideas of those philosophers.

I don’t subscribe to the “thinking is language” metaphor even though language is useful, and language is impossible to untangle from thinking. However, thinking about the rain forest and negotiating the rain forest demands something more primary and basic than language while walking about it.