To Speak or Not to Speak?
The Inextricable Link Between Human Nature and Human Language
Happy Wednesday!
Did you know that the word “wednesday” is allegedly derived from the phrase “wodens-day?” Woden himself was the anglo-saxon equivalent of Mercury, the Roman god, who was, as many people know, the messenger of the gods. Mercury was also apparently the god of commerce and financial gain, so I guess that’s appropriate for the middle of the work week in American culture.
To be quite honest, the following piece is the (edited) first chapter of my senior thesis from Christendom College, so I apologize in advance for the seemingly pretentious, academic tone. I will be posting the following two chapters in the next few weeks, so, in the very small likelihood (I’m estimating 0.0003%) that you actually enjoy reading this, I look forward to sending more philosophical meanderings through the world of linguistics your way.
To Speak or Not to Speak?
What is it about all of the various human languages, whether scientific, political, philosophical, cultural, etc., that is different? What is it about all of them that is the same? Hidden under all of these questions is the fact that below all the differences and varieties in human languages there is a fundamental truth that needs discerning and clarification: that man, at root, is a speaking creature and a “symbol-user.” As the author Walker Percy states, man is a homo loquens or a homo symbolificus; the philosopher Robert Sokolowski proposes, in his own unique terms, that man is fundamentally an “agent of truth.” [1] At root, however, both philosophers are saying the same thing in different ways (like two flowers from the same tree). Both notions of man would seem to be based upon Aristotle’s concept of man as a rational animal. In summary, as Percy writes, “The theory of language should precede and elucidate the theory of man.”[2] By discussing the notions, first, of Aristotle’s theory of meaning and language compared to the modern scientific view of language, second, of the inseparability of speech and thought, and, third, that man participates in the phenomenon of naming, it becomes much clearer, then, that human language is not simply an accident of human nature, but an essential, inextricable, and elucidating component of it.
What is held as true today is heavily based on scientific theories, i.e., energy exchanges, subatomic interactions, psychology, and utility, or that which is the most efficient and useful to the greatest number of people. In his critique of the modern age, Charles Taylor points to modernity’s, “primacy of instrumental reason,” meaning, “the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical applications of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency...is its measure of success.” [3] Hence, if truth lies only in the empirical and the efficient, the language used to express such ‘truths’ will likewise be only empirical and for the sake of efficiency (which, it seems, is essentially the Nietzschean will to power). However, as Walker Percy writes, “the importance of the study of language, as opposed to a scientific study of a space-time event...is that as soon as one scratches the surface of the familiar and comes face to face with the nature of language, one also finds himself face to face with the nature of man.”[4] Language expresses something quintessential about the nature of man, yet, in the modern world, the classical notion of man’s nature has been rejected and profaned in favor of a more mechanistic and empirical tenure. As 20th century semanticist Alfred Korzybski writes,
The structure of the world is, in principle, unknown; and the only aim of knowledge and science is to discover this structure. The structure of language is potentially known, if we pay attention to it. Our only possible procedure in advancing our knowledge is to match our verbal structures...with empirical structures, and see if our verbal predictions are fulfilled empirically or not, thus indicating that the two structures are either similar or dissimilar.[5]
In this text Korzybski clearly states a contemporary view of language: language should be based upon the material reality of the world. Yes, language should express a structure as similar to the structure of reality as possible, but Korzybski, epitomizing the modern empirical stance, disregards a paramount facet of reality, i.e., the immaterial facet, and he reduces reality to the merely material.
Such a view is only one side of the coin, however, and lacks something essential in the theory of language. Percy writes that such an empirical, scientific-obsessed view of language unfortunately devalues language for one of its chief purposes, the ‘something essential’, that of communicating the direct truth of things.
The secret is this: Science cannot utter a single word about an individual molecule, thing, or creature in so far as it is an individual but only in so far as it is like other individuals. The layman thinks that only science can utter the true word about anything, individuals included. But the layman is an individual. So science cannot say a single word to him or about him except as he resembles others. It comes to pass then that the denizen of the scientific-technological society finds himself in the strangest of predicaments: he lives in a cocoon of dead silence, in which no one can speak to him nor can he reply. [6]
If a scientist can only speak in terms of resemblance and negations, Percy believes, then he has nothing truly positive to speak about and is hence exiled to a fabricated world of non-affirmation and alienated disconnect. In this world, one can only posit what a thing is not, for the most part, by comparing it to other negated things; but, in this case, the “essence” of things is defined only relatively, which would be contradictory. As such, discerning the essential from the accidental would no longer the method of discovering truth in language, and any notion of essence would be dismissed as accidental in such a strictly relative world. Thus, the revolution of scientific language, i.e., science, as an accidental character of truth and language, has ultimately become the ultimate arbitrator, the judge of truth and half-truths. (By half-truths, what is meant is not that science is a false method, but it simply does not have the capability to address the metaphysical notions of truth. As already stated, it can really only see one side of the coin, the material). As such, science can only speak of things quantitatively and descriptively, e.g., the weight, dimensions, and characteristics of a horse. Science dissects things into certain orders, but orders that are separated from their natural context; science might distinguish all the accidents, but it does so in a way that separates the accidents from the wholeness of the form, which is where the essence is found. Science cannot say anything as to what the horse really is, it can only speak of the traits, which, ironically, spring from, and subsist in, the essence. Thus, science cannot place the truths of things within the proper contexts and within the hierarchical realm of beings. Any one thing and all things are simply things among others in a dyadic, as opposed to triadic, plane of matter.
Aristotle’s theory of meaning and language would seem to strike against the science-centric view of language, especially as proposed by Korzybski. According to philosopher Deborah Modrak, Aristotle believes that there is an unchanging basis beneath all the continual variances and developments of language.
The task of the philosopher of language as Aristotle construes it in the De Interpretatione, is to acknowledge the plasticity of natural language (the variety of languages, the many functions of utterances, etc.) while making sense of the use of words to express the unchanging truths of art and science...The speakers of a particular natural language might have chosen to adopt a different practice with respect to the written or spoken sign or with respect to the correlation of these with the idea that makes them meaningful. By contrast, the relation between the notion and the thing it represents is natural; a mark of its being a natural relation is that this relation is the same for all humans.
Aristotle is responding to the seeming opposition between the two basic linguistic theories addressed in Plato’s Cratylus: the first is the theory of “conventionalism,” which sees language as having its basis merely in the social and the changing; the second is the theory of “naturalism,” which sees language as being based in the unchanging and the natural. Although these two theories were explicated thousands of years ago, their arguments still apply to the discussion on language today. It is in Aristotle’s reconciliation of the two views that one finds his primary theory of language. It is, furthermore, a theory that still carries the same weight for modern man today as it did in Aristotle’s day.
The conclusion that Aristotle draws from the arguments of the Cratylus is that an adequate philosophy of language would distinguish between the language of thought (universal concepts) and the spoken language (particular sounds); and the claim of natural language to be a tool for understanding the world would be explicated in a way that allowed the historical phenomenon of language change and growth. [7]
This conclusion of Aristotle clearly illustrates the distinction between what one could call the essential component of language, the “natural language,” and the accidental, changing component, which is based upon the natural language. This, then, is Aristotle’s account of the fundamental level of language alluded to in the introduction of this chapter. His theory of meaning and language purports much more than mentioned here, and more of it will be addressed in chapter two, but for now, in regard to the distinction being made at hand between the essential and accidental components of language, ample Aristotelian weight has been added to the scale.
What is important for this present discussion, now, is the second anchor point made in this chapter’s introduction, i.e., that speech and thought are inseparable. Percy asserts that “Language, symbolization, is the stuff of which our knowledge and awareness of the world are made the medium through which we see the world.” [8] While Percy’s notion here is most surely taken as granted and would most likely be widely accepted, its occupancy in this argument is essential and its key implications must be expounded for the sake of illustrating its relation to human nature. What, then, are its key implications? One could dare say that they are as follows: the medium between thought and both the mental and the extramental worlds is words; and not only are thought and speech inseparable, but they are, in a sense, synonymous.
The mediating words and expressions we use can be found in thoughts, whispers, statements, declarations, shouts, or songs, but, in summary, they are the mediators of men’s thoughts, ideas, and feelings. As Sokolowski writes, “Thought and speech are inseparable from each other and thinking occurs in the medium of words.” [9] This same sentiment is beautifully articulated by philosopher Walter Ong, who writes, “Man communicates with his whole body, and yet the word is his primary medium. Communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech.” [10] As such, words manifest themselves in two ways: through thought and through speech. Spoken words as compared to “thought-words,” however, would simply be the incarnation of the thought-words on the tongue. This incarnation is ephemeral, however, and either they enter the mind of another subject as thought-words or they do not. They do not remain vocally incarnate for longer than they are spoken; to incarnate thought-words longer than speaking them is the task of the written word, yet that is another subject altogether. What is most important about this aspect of speech and thought, is to ask why words necessarily need to be the medium of thoughts? Why do we feel the need to vocalize our thoughts? To put the answer succinctly, it so that we can communicate with other subjects, viz., other human beings; is so that we can interact with another mind, or minds, and to share ideas, and I daresay, facts and truth.
Words, then, in practice, are the synonymous media for our ideas, our concepts, and our feelings; their purpose is to express our ideas to a recipient. Such a recipient could either be another mind, or our own. One would be hard pressed to find another destination other than these two. Just as a note, nothing said would exclude minds other than human minds from the various ‘other minds’, or subjects, out there, whether humane or merely spirited. Indeed, there is perhaps a Mind out there that would be detrimental to exclude in one’s philosophy and one’s life. Regardless of whoever’s mind is out there to be engaged, there remains the fact that there are human minds with whom we must communicate, not just for the sake of survival, not just for the sake of utility, but for the sake of truth and flourishing. As Swiss writer Max Picard states, “Language contains more than man can use; therefore, language has a life of its own. Language has not been created for merely utilitarian ends.” [11] Naturally, of course, most of the time one speaks for the sake of utility, but that is not language’s ultimate raison d’etre, and there exists a facet of language beyond useful facts and information: language can also be a medium of the truth. “What do we talk about?” asks philosopher Josef Pieper: “Indeed, we can talk only about reality, nothing else.” [12] This, then, is why words exist as the medium of thoughts: to express the truth of reality, through all language’s different forms, whether scientific, philosophical, Japanese, or French. Each language manifests varied facets of the same objective reality. The concepts rational animal and homo loquens are so much intertwined, the latter elucidating the former, as Percy writes above, that they are synonymous. One could almost quip playfully, tongue-in-cheek, with Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, by modifying this statement to the likes of “cogito ergo loqui, “I think...therefore, I speak.” Speaking for the sake of truth and, hopefully, for the sake of others.
Delving deeper into this notion of semantic synonymity, the concepts ‘reason’ and ‘speech’ seem to share a very strong etymological connection. As Sokolowski, again, writes, “human speech is the primary expression of human reason.” [13] Continuing from there, he quotes St. John Henry Newman who writes that the Greek word logos, “stands both for reason and for speech, and it is difficult to say which it means more properly. It means both at once: why? Because really they cannot be divided...because they are in a true sense one.” [14] From this it would seem that the logos is the source of the synonymous nature of thought and speech. Man discerns the logos in reality, viz., he tries to capture reality itself, and captures it in varied forms of language, and some languages succeed in this effort, to a greater or lesser degree, more than others do. Furthermore, Sokolowski writes that man, as an agent of truth, impresses himself, i.e., his rationality, into language. The logos of reality is not truly synonymous with speech, of course, but it does carry a type of latency which is born and expressed, and should be expressed, through man when he interacts with it. Speaking analogically, languages are like the children of the logos, all of them representing features of it to a greater or lesser degree. This interaction between man and the logos is diverse and rich, and points to the diversity of nationalities, communities, and personalities as illustrated by the multitude of dialects even within the multitude of languages. As Sokolowski states, “The grammatical articulation of words in the sentence corresponds to an articulated display of something in the world.” [15] Taking a step back, then, the logos is something so ubiquitous to man, yet also so limited within language. Like a small fish in a vast ocean, the water is everywhere, yet he can only capture so much of it through his gills. As such, the logos transcends man, but he adds something to it through his nature as a rational animal and, to paraphrase Charles Taylor, as a counterpart within the logos, within the created order.[16] Hence, man’s fundamental being as homo loquens entails his existing within, and interacting with, the logos.
This fundamental form of being, this homo loquens, as Percy coins the human being, carries an implication of the most paramount importance, furthermore, and is that which distinguishes man from all the rest of creation: man names things within this world, the third point of my argument. As Sokolowski argues, “when we speak about things we take in their intelligibility, which we capture and carry in the names that we use,” and not much further after he states, “The use of words reveals the good and the best in what we name.” [17] In his seminal work The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton uses an analogy of an excellent horse-rider, which is supplemental to the importance of what Sokolowski speaks of when he remarks on words carrying the ‘good and best’ in names. That is, as Chesterton posits, one needs to see something in its proper functioning, e.g., the excellent horse-rider, in its proper form and context to understand best what it is so that the concept and the name coincide more perfectly with the reality. [18] In opposition to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of “language-value,” the philosopher Etienne Gilson purports the same argument as Chesterton.
Everyone knows that the meaning of a word depends on its context, and to be mistaken as above is not a "misvalue" [contre-valeur); it is simply what is called a misinterpretation [contresens). The value here is the modification of meaning undergone by the word by reason of its context, and what the word signifies is real; but since the meaning of a word depends almost always on its context, the idea of value does not add anything to that of meaning. [19]
One can only truly see a thing for what it is by seeing it in its proper function and context, such as what a boat is, what a soldier is, or what a parent is; there is “seeing” but, more importantly, there is seeing, and this second type of seeing is always done within a context. This returns us to the earlier point about science’s incapability to express what something really is; it cannot discern its essence, it can only speak of its accidents, of certain factual instances. Science can only “see,” that is, see something at the surface value, see a thing’s atomic, material value. Words, in terms of their proper function, are meant to express, to encapsulate, somehow, the true meaning of what they represent in the real world, and seeing the true meaning makes all the difference in our naming of things.
More modern and contemporary linguists have said otherwise, however, and have sought to debase the idea that words and concepts hold any tenure within reality. Friedrich Nietzsche antithetically writes, “The strength of conceptions does not...depend on their degree of truth, but on their antiquity, their embodiment, their character as conditions of life.” [20] Nietzsche’s stance on linguistics seems to favor a more conventionalist view of language, granted the historical nuance, i.e., the ‘antiquity’. Nietzsche’s argument, although not postmodernist or deconstructionist per se, is a harbinger and jackhammer for Derrida, who is postmodern and deconstructionist, and who holds, it would seem, the same belief as Nietzsche. They both believed that conceptions, and thus words, have no grounding in present reality; they are artifacts of the past and only hold meaning in regard to the past, and their relations to other things which they are not. Picard, however, writes that “Language is pure being...it is more than the sum total of all the things which it mediates and effects.” [21] Language has pure being because of the logos. Language’s pure being is determined by man, yet, in a reciprocating manner, language also determines man in many ways. Furthermore, for Picard, language has a transcendent character above its use and varieties and is not defined by negation: language a positive thing. Language transcends sheer utility, mundane descriptions, and its socially constructed history of meaning, which, as an essential component of language, is not all that composes language.
Furthermore, this notion of naming ties in with what was discussed above in Aristotle’s reconciliation of naturalism and conventionalism, both of which are a method of naming things. His solution involved words as capturing the essential character, i.e., the substance, of the things that they represented while allowing them the flexibility to vary; the form changed but the content remained intact. It could certainly be argued also that one form of a word could be better than another in its explication, its description, of a certain concept, such as the difference between logic and logos, the former deriving from the latter. (One of these two words describing a certain concept certainly carries greater insight and depth as to what it symbolizes, a richer understanding of reality.) In other words, good language brings forth, it makes manifest in a representative way, that which is true in nature. The perfecting of words’ true meanings involves establishing the means between the two extremes of both naturalism and conventionalism.
There is also another facet to this argument that would seem to bolster the Aristotelian viewpoint of language, and that is Percy’s terra incognita of language, the phenomenon of naming seen in the presence of the copula “is.” Percy, regarding the former point, writes that the terra incognita lies somewhere between the corpora of language and the stimulus-response of the communicating subjects.
Accordingly, the assumption will be made that current theory of language is incoherent, that the formal-descriptive disciplines of linguistics deal with the products, the corpora, of the language phenomenon, that the factual science of psychology deals with the stimuli and responses of organisms, and that between them lies the terra incognita of the phenomenon itself. [22]
Percy’s text here is an attempt to reconcile, in Aristotelian fashion, the radical idealism of modern German philosophers, who, according to Percy, had a propensity to, “let the world slip away,” in their obsessive pursuit of the symbol (e.g., “Kant’s unknowable noumenon”) and the psycho-centrism (or scientism) of American behaviorists, who, “kept a solid hold on the world of things and creatures, yet couldn’t fit the symbol in it.” This reconciliation culminates in the terra incognita, or, more briefly, the seemingly nugatory word “is.” Percy asks, “What is the natural phenomenon signified by the simplest yet most opaque of all symbols, the little copula “is”?” Percy coins this phenomenon, this instance of naming the “Delta Phenomenon” (“Delta” representing the Greek letter “𝚫” which signifies irreducibility).[23] Further expounding on it, Percy writes, “it is a pairing, an apposing of word and thing, an act the very essence of which is an “is-saying,” an affirming of the thing to be what it is for both of us.” Here, again, we find the marriage of both the conventionalist and naturalist approach to language; language is a social construct, yes, but one that is, and should be (but many times is not) grounded upon reality perceived as it is. Percy’s point here would appear, then, to supplement the Aristotelian view which also sought to speak of things as they are, and not so much as residue of another meaning or as negations.
To conclude, while language may perhaps, in some sense, have an existence independently from man, speech and thought do not. One could say that human language, at the baseline, is a speech-though composite. From what has been discussed it would further seem, then, that language’s function, in relation to man as a homo loquens and as an “agent of truth,” would seem to be none other than loquere verum (“to speak the truth”) through one’s analogue of the Logos (through one’s language of the Language); to be done not in an arbitrative, narrow manner, but as one having discerned and discovered the truth of things in proper contexts. Such a seemingly transcendent truth is incarnated, however, by the human language in all its various forms. As Percy writes, “John of St. Thomas observed that symbols [more specifically in language] come to contain within themselves the thing symbolized in alio esse, in another mode of existence.” [24] Yet while this existence can be distinguished from man, it is also inextricably united with him, thus the mystery of language. The irreducible structure of this union, then, is what will be the focus of my next chapter on this topic. This irreducible structure has already been mentioned and it is none other than Percy’s Delta Phenomenon, or, in other words, as it is named in the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition, the Semantic Triangle.
Chapter two: coming next week!
In mysterium Verbi,
James
[1]Robert Sokolowski, The Phenomenology of the Human Person (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1. All citations of The Phenomenology of the Human Person will henceforth be cited in the footnotes by author and page number.
[2]Percy, 17-19.
[3]Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5.
[4]Percy, 150.
[5]Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (Lakeville, Connecticut: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1958), quoted by Gerard I. Nierenberg and Henry H. Calero in Meta-Talk: How to Uncover the Hidden Meanings in What People Say (New York: Barnes & Nobles, 1996), 71.
[6]Percy, 22.
[7]Deborah Modrak, Aristotle’s Theory of Meaning and Language (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14-19. All citations of Aristotle’s Theory of Meaning and Language will henceforth be cited in the footnotes by author and page number.
[8]Percy, 151.
[9]Sokolowski, 39.
[10]Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, “The Terry Lectures” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 1.
[11]Max Picard, Man and Language, a Gateway edition (Chicago: H. Regnery Publishing, 1963), 4.
[12]Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, trans. by Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 16.
[13]Sokolowski, 39.
[14]St. John Henry Newman, Idea of a University (New York: Doubleday Press, 1959), Part 2, Discourse 2, §4, 270, quoted in Sokolowski, 39.
[15]Sokolowski, 31-32.
[16]Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 29-41.
[17]Sokolowski, 2, 4.
[18]G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 14-15.
[19]Etienne Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy: An Essay on the Philosophical Constants of Language, trans. by John Lyon (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 26.
[20]Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. by T. Common (Edinburgh & London: 1910), 151-156.
[21]Max Picard, Man and Language, a Gateway edition (Chicago: H. Regnery Publishing, 1963), 36.
[22]Percy, 17.
[23]Percy, 33, 40.
[24]Percy, 156.