I've begun to think that getting a glimpse of what a non-linguistic existence would be like is not as impossible as it might seem. I've been engaging in some phenomenological reflection along these lines and have really started to make progress. What I do is simply try to block language from my experience-that is, to block language from the outside world and from the inside one as well. For anyone who hasn't tried this, it's definitely worth a try.
Escaping language from the outside is relatively straightforward, and it happens to us regularly throughout the day (although not as often as many of us might like). Just avoid hearing speech or written words. Blocking off language from the inside is easy as well, but it's not something that we regularly do. There may be different approaches to this, and I may be missing something major, but what I've been doing is consciously avoiding attaching words to my experience (not all the time of course). When I reflect on the role of language on my thoughts, I find that I frequently bring words up in my mind to apply to either whatever is going on around me, or whatever I'm thinking about. By doing this, I've noticed that I don't really have access to concepts as I normally do. I just can't bring them into my mind. I'm using concepts here in a broad sense. Basically I mean any discrete mental entity that can be brought to mind when its not present in my immediate surroundings (e.g., in my field of vision). I don't know yet if this means that I wouldn't be able to make decisions with them in the ways that I'm used to. For example, if I'm struck with an important decision that would affect my family, would I be able to take them into account if I wasn't able to use language?
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