The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

Language and Culture
As we have seen, language is a matternot only of hardware but even more
crucially of software. The leap from proto-language to full language was of such an order
that no gradualist account can do it justice. It could not have just gradually become more
effective, otherwise other primates would have made the transition too and there is no
evidence of their having done so or doing so. Whichever way one looks at the problem,
it involved the kind of evolutionary change that could only be brought about by cultural,
that is to say, spiritual factors. The alternative is to believe in some crucial mutations of
such complexity that no one has yet been able to provide a reasonable explanation of
them. Biological adaptation provided the means of expressing this new formation, but the
impulse to evolve full language and its conceptual corollaries could only have evolved
through inner forces of the kind that express themselves in culture. Language evolved
when mankind needed it to express our elaborate needs and only when we were ready
to do so. Language evolved in tandem with society and at the pace that human faculties
permitted. It also shaped both society and human faculties.
William Noble and Iain Davidson argue that “there can be no such thing as culture
without language and the socially determined sharing of meaning and value.” 60 This begs
the question as to what culture is. They see no meaningful culture before fully modern
humans. In terms of outer culture, as identified by archaeologists, they are probably right.
Culture as an expression of spirituality may predate Upper Palaeolithic art and artifacts,
but it will not, in geological time, be that much before it. As soon as humanity began to
take hold of materials, transform them and create not only practical tools out of them,
but representations or symbols, as soon as people began to consciously set out to live in
other places and solve complex problems such as boat building and using unfamiliar food
resources, and as soon as it became necessary to communicate inner questions, discuss
things not immediately present, then full language emerged.
The Logos was there waiting, as it were, for humanity to have the means to
express it, as Jos Verhulst put it (in Chapter 5). And yet even that metaphor is too passive.
As a spiritual formative force, the Logos helped form and shape and structure the organs
and processes that make language possible. The capacity to express the Logos came with
the incarnation of the “I,” which is another way of saying when the human being had
emancipated him- or herself sufficiently from biological determinants to give expression
to the spirit.
Language gave mankind the freedom to escape from the tyranny of the present. It
gave humankind a means to conceive and to articulate the past in the form of conscious
memory and mental pictures. It opened up the future by giving humankind a means to
express wishes, intentions and hopes. Language gave us the means to construct complex
systems through combining categories. It also vastly speeded up the process of learning
and cultural transmission. It gave the mind a space to expand into, a space that reached
back into the past and some way into the future.
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60
Noble and Davidson, 1989, p137.
211