This essay reflects on Werner Herzog's documentary subject Timothy Treadwell and his twelve summers living among Alaskan bears, arguing that Treadwell's fatal flaw was a sentimental romanticization of nature. The paper then connects this observation to Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, suggesting that even a shared language would not bridge the fundamental gap between human and animal understanding. Drawing on T. S. Eliot's concept of a "peace that passes all understanding," the essay explores what language can and cannot accomplish, ultimately raising deeper questions about human consciousness, self-knowledge, and what distinguishes humans from other creatures in the natural world.
My own take on Timothy Treadwell and his twelve summers among the bears in Alaska is similar to Herzog's. I feel that Treadwell, on some fundamental level, had sentimentalized nature and thought that he could become one with this brute force. In reality, he had to keep some measure of distance — at least during the rougher times of year when the bears were less likely to be indifferent to him as they were in summer, when food was plentiful. For a hungry bear, Treadwell is not a friend but a source of food. Unfortunately, that is the reality.
The opening shot of Timothy talking to the camera and describing his manifesto displays his lack of maturity and his own ego. He is often grinning at his own perceived greatness and poeticism, and he grows excited about his love for the bears and his feeling of kinship with them. It is almost as if he is so overwhelmed by the environment, the scenery, the beauty, and the nature around him that he loses a proper and grounded sense of himself. He seems very naïve at the beginning of the film, and without any prior knowledge of what would happen to Timothy, I felt immediately a strange foreboding — as though I knew he was going to die. It was as if, in his romanticizing of nature, he was bound to meet his doom.
Wittgenstein's quote, to me, means that everyone and everything uses language to communicate — man and animals alike. Even in nature, among the trees and the sky and the clouds, there is a language. Perhaps this sounds romantic too, but it seems to be true. There is a language in the world that is universal — and, yes, it is poetic. I believe it is the "peace" that T. S. Eliot describes in The Waste Land — the peace that passes all understanding.
I think this peace that passes all understanding is what Wittgenstein is getting at. Language helps us to communicate on a number of levels: we can express need, or we can express ideas that carry meaning for us. But at some point, language can do no more. We are still left at a great expanse — like standing at an immense prairie or on the edge of a beach with the wide ocean spread out before us. That is like the gap between us and the object we seek to know. So even if we could communicate with a kind of mythical beast — the lion, the king of the jungle — it makes sense that we would still not fully understand the creature we are speaking with, just as we still do not fully understand one another, or even ourselves.
"How language explains life only partially"
"Consciousness, self-knowledge, and human distinctiveness"
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