Wittgenstein was right in a great many ways, but certainly wrong (it seems to me) in one.

When he remarked that

If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.

he was mistaken.

After all, wouldn’t we get Wittgenstein’s lion perfectly well if he were to exclaim hungry! or horny! or cold!?

Surely there are a good number of elemental things that he and I (and you) all feel in the same fundamental way — sleepy, irritated, sated, snug, itchy, sore, for example. And even torn, unsettled, fresh, perplexed, secure, etc.

Those are all states of mind/body, and as such pretty simple to designate: a single word does the trick.

But what about stringing a number of words together in a sentence? Well, I’ve just eaten so I’m full and feel like lying down over there on that warm grassy patch in the sun wouldn’t be beyond the reach of our mutual understanding.

 

Translation

This all works for one main reason. I can translate the lion’s thinking to mine because I can translate my body to his.

The lion and I, each of us a mammal living on the planet Earth, have quite a few things in common: a heart, a spine — a pair of lungs, of eyes — nose, mouth, teeth, tongue — throat, stomach, gut, anus.

We each have four limbs, and if all of his are legs while two of mine are arms, still, I know from crawling what it’s like to be down on all fours. It’s true that I can only crawl clumsily, but still, I can imagine doing so superbly — spine parallel to the ground, lungs filling with air, heart beating, eyes alert, ears perked, tail twitching.

I can think my way from this body to that.

 

Bats

Much harder to think my way into bodies that have, for example, a very different relation to gravity, on the one hand, and to the sensory world, on the other — as this provisional text from Other Bodies suggests.

Also hard to imagine the thoughts and sensations of an electric eel — or (as Marc suggests) any eusocial animal, like an ant or a termite.

 

Woman

One last thought about Wittgenstein’s remark.

If it were true, you know, then it would also be true that when a woman speaks to me, I don’t get her either.