Language exists as a tool to facilitate empathy

Language evolved as a tool to facilitate empathy.

Think of the following situation: a baby is crying.  You, as one of the baby's parents, are desperately trying to comfort the baby.  You've been trying for hours.  But you don't know what's wrong.  You try feeding the baby.  The baby doesn't want food.  You check the baby's diaper.  Dry as a bone.  You try burping the baby.  You hold the baby, rock the baby, sing songs to the baby, gently stroke the baby's back.  You worry that the baby's sick, but you see no evidence of symptoms.  You're exhausted, panicking, googling.  No clue.  And yet, the baby keeps on crying.  I'm sure you can imagine the frustration of a parent in this situation.  Maybe you've faced a similar situation yourself.  

There's something that would help these parents: language.  If the baby just knew how to speak in sentences, the parents might know what was bothering them so much.  

As a parent in this situation, you know that there's something going on inside the baby's mind, and you want to know what it is - you want it to be in your mind, too.  In other words, you want to empathize with the baby.  You have the will to empathy, and yet empathy is failing.

This tells us something about the nature of empathy.  Empathy isn't perfect.  Just because you want to understand how another person feels, doesn't mean you actually do.  You may be projecting completely incorrect intentional stances onto other conscious beings.  

Thus empathy is not a perfect foundation for ethical action.  Because if you project an incorrect intentional stance onto another conscious being, the action you perform in order to help them may not be a real help - it may even hurt them.

Into this gap, language evolved.  With language, a person can ask another person what they are thinking or feeling, and then that other person can tell them.  A superpower!  Humans, with their capacity for complex language, have developed a hypercompetency for empathy.  Not only is it possible for humans to empathize with each other on a one-to-one, face-to-face basis, but through language, we can even pass feelings and thoughts and ideas forward from one generation to the next, so that it becomes possible to empathize with a person who lived decades or centuries ago, and even, through language, to empathize with fictional characters we make up in our stories and myths and epic poems and sacred scripture.  And with our super empathy, supercharged by language, we have been able to develop small primate bands into large and complex social groups, develop civilization and science and technology and medicine and the division of labor and industry and allowed us to go to the moon and soon beyond.

Language is a means of communication. 

But just because language is a profound aid to empathy, that doesn't mean that language is perfect.  Even if two people are using language to communicate, they may still misunderstand each other.  They may still be projecting attitudes and beliefs and entire personalities onto each other that aren't really there.  The evolution of language is gradual, and it is far from over.  From languages of only a few hundred words, we have gradually evolved languages of many thousands of words, which allow us to specify more clearly shades of meaning and precision that got lost in ambiguity for our ancestors.  And specialized fields require and indeed produce highly specialized jargon - but this does not ensure that even the most competent users of this specialized vocabulary won't find some way to misunderstand each other.

Also, just because you can empathize with a person doesn't mean that you agree with them.  Far from it.  And here language can be useful, too - to establish clearly how two people disagree, to clarify the differences between their points of view.  This, too, is a form of empathy, and an important one.  If you assume that everyone else's perspective is exactly the same as yours, you aren't really empathizing with them.  The difficulty - and the importance - of empathy lies precisely in the ability to empathize with people who are different from you.

I am tempted to play something like a Wittgenstinian game here, that is, to derive from this empirical claim a normative injunction: that any attempt to use language for any purpose other than the facilitation of empathy constitutes a misuse of language (in something like the way that Wittgenstein's epigones like to claim that certain traditional philosophical questions are meaningless and that to ask them constitutes a misuse of language).  That is, any lack of clarity in communication constitutes a misuse of language.  I think there are some analytic philosophers who might say something like that.

But no - I will not make that normative claim.  Evolution by natural selection is not teleological.  I would not claim, or even imply, that the "purpose" of language is to facilitate empathy, and that to deviate from this purpose is somehow wrong.  There are many instances in evolution where a trait that was selected for its adaptedness in one capacity is repurposed for something quite different.  For instance, the ancestors of bats likely used the patagia - the webbed skin between their fingerlike digits - to hunt insects, almost like a fly swatter.  They may have been used, also, in signalling, perhaps in mating rituals.  Later, these tree-climbers may have accidentally discovered that spreading out their patagia could slow a fall, almost like a parachute.  From here, the patagia evolved into machines for gliding, and ultimately flying.  Similarly, the air sacs that certain early aquatic vertebrates used for buoyancy in water may later have been repurposed for breathing on land - that is, they evolved into lungs.  The aquatic ancestors, of course, did not need lungs, because they breathed water, not air, through their gills.  Maybe something similar is happening with language: it evolved as a tool for facilitating empathy, but as it turned out, it can be put to other uses as well.  As a case in point, my favorite novelist, William S. Burroughs, seems to have been an extraordinarily empathetic person, who used language not to increase his empathy - his prose style cannot be considered particularly clear communication - but rather to establish his independence.  As such, his tropes often serve to subvert communication - and the communities that are established through communication.  So be it.

It's symptomatic of Wittgenstein that he hated Shakespeare.  The lack of clarity in Shakespeare - the fact that Shakespeare delighted in language to such an extent that he could "permit himself anything," as Wittgenstein put it, undoubtedly offended Wittgenstein, ever the moralist.  Shakespeare played games with language that Wittgenstein could not play.  He was as insensible to them as someone who cannot understand the lion's roar.