On the Origin of Language

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, John H. Moran, Alexander Gode, John H. Moran, Alexander Gode

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226923284
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, and both essays are valuable historical and philosophical documents.

AFTERWORD

For Rousseau, the “origin of languages” is a peculiarly enigmatic but crucial element in his speculative account of how things came to be as they are: the transition from a state of nature through institutional forms to civil society. This etiology of the human condition, a secular version of the Fall, is the dominant theme of his work. With respect to language, he is mainly concerned with distinguishing and clarifying the conditions that motivate men to speak: the differences that language makes in men’s lives, and changes in the basic character of language wrought by changes in our ways of living.

Rousseau’s is a prominent voice, that of a soloist standing out from the chorus of the great refusal, the great rejection of demands externally imposed upon individuals in the formal, conventional, artificial, political, frequently arbitrary environment of civil society. But he does not simply reject civil society, of whose benefits as well as impositions he is a keen and eloquent analyst. He objected less to life according to law, than to life under law posited and applied by the will of another; an alien will.

His critique of the “moral” world, the world designed and fabricated by men, is expressed positively as a paean to nature, which he tends to contrast with art. For him, nature is a primitive, interior, dynamic principle, at once proper to each individual and to the physical world as a whole. Art, manifesting itself in the political, military, pedagogical and industrial domains, as well as in “fine” arts, is the peculiarly human agency of actively dominating, exploiting, and transforming what is “natural” both in men and in things.

That these very expressions of human activity, by which men contrive intelligently to satisfy their needs, might be a basic source of human misery and corruption—the sweeping tragedy that men might be the prisoners of their own products and thus of their freedom—was a sad possibility that Rousseau confronted, explored, analyzed, and eloquently communicated.

Assessment of the human condition in terms of “opposite” categories such as nature and art, seems destined to issue in paradox. If “nature” is the inner source of all activity, then art is derivative of nature and to that degree “natural.” This suggests, at least, an original division of nature against itself. What then of primitively pure nature corrupted by alien art?

We may merely hint at a reply. First, for Rousseau, as for a hoary tradition to which he belongs, an individual is not merely a replaceable unit, an instance of an abstract universal essence. Rather, each individual is unique, possessed of, even in some ways identical with, his own nature or “essence” while participating in the whole of nature, the whole of reality, so to speak. In so far as there is a plurality of individuals, and one individual (or group) practices any of the arts on others, there is a basis for contrasting nature (the nature of one) and art (the art of another).

Second, if one envisions nature as the inner dynamic of the whole of reality, while granting on empiric grounds that there is conflict, one will probably incline toward one of the following: (1) Empirically given conflicts constitute a division of nature against itself (2) Empiric conflicts belong to a realm of mere appearance; nature is (must be) one, though its unity does not appear, and (3) Nature, originally one, has suffered a rupture (or ruptures) that may be healed in a future renewal of unity, though the renewal would not be a simple repetition.

Of these three, the last most nearly fits Rousseau. Unwilling or unable to make a traditional resignation of his individuality to the immediate (political) universal, he turned his art to the achievement of a reunified nature, according to his own vision. This brought his art into conflict with that of others, most significantly though not exclusively with the practitioners of statecraft.

Undoubtedly cosmopolitan in spirit, Rousseau at his best objected to particular, fragmentary “universals” in the name of a universal universal, that is, nature. Yet his conceptions of social order apply only to a society that would be one among others. The notion of nature thus functions for Rousseau as a critical foil against authoritarianism and all forms of externalism, and as the key concept in his advocacy of interiority or liberty, which he conceived as strict obedience to self-imposed law.

In the “state of nature,” men made only immediate responses to immediate situations, according to physical impulse, but in civil society their lives attain a new kind of stability as they live in terms of general categories, according to right and duty, justice and law, which transcend the immediate in both space and time. But concomitantly, there arises the possibility of wrongs, injustice, illegality, all of which are similarly transcendent. Beyond natural, physical liberty, the conditions are now present for moral liberty, the highest stage of which would amount to spontaneous universal cooperation, each individual obedient to all, but none subject to any particular and therefore private will or authority.

Not least significant in this view is the notion it entails that “human nature” changes or at least develops according to changing needs and conditions of human life. Thus to the degree that men can know and control these conditions, they should be able to direct the process of human nature toward optimum conditions of liberty, in which art has become a second nature: not an original state of being, but a condition such as will allow the human potential to be fully realized.

Neither in style nor in fact was Rousseau detached from the problems he treated. It is not difficult to relate even the most abstract and general of his works to personal involvement. While the circumstances of his life may have determined the direction of his interests and the intensity of his preoccupation, they neither account for his genius nor vitiate his insights. His mother died several days after his birth in Geneva in 1712. During his childhood, he and his father, a watchmaker, often read novels together; sometimes, fascinated by the romantic tales, they stayed awake all night. At the age of seven, he began to read more serious works from the library of his maternal grandfather, a minister of religion.

When his father went into exile rather than go to prison for fighting with a French captain, the young Rousseau was left in the custody of his uncle. The latter sent him and his cousin to board with a young pastor, who served as their tutor for two years, after which they lived in the uncle’s house for several years. Then, after a brief, boring stint in the city registrar’s office, Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver, who frequently beat him. There came an evening when Rousseau returned to the city after the gates were closed for the night, whereupon he decided to leave Geneva.

He found his way to Annecy where he met Mme. Warens, a Catholic convert under whose influence he became a Catholic. She sent him to Turin where he worked as a valet and received instruction in Catholicism. Returning to Annecy, he spent five months in a seminary, then lived for about six years with Mme. Warens who afforded him leisure for study and, though he regarded her as a mother, she eventually became his mistress.

At thirty, he presented a new system of musical notation to the Academy of Science in Paris. There followed a year as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, after which he returned to Paris where he agreed to write articles on music for the Encyclopedia projected by Diderot and D’Alembert. At that time he met Thérèse Le Vasseur who became his mistress and the mother of his five children, each of whom was abandoned at a foundling home.

In 1750, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts won the essay competition of the Dijon Academy on the question whether the restoration of sciences and arts (the Renaissance) had been advantageous to morality. Arguing forcefully to the contrary, Rousseau now began a voluminous literary output, developing variations on his major theme: the relationships of nature and freedom.

In 1753, his short, highly mannered, pastoral opera, Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), a favorite of the King, was first performed at the Paris Opera House.

In his Discourse on Inequality of 1755 he sought the origin of social artificialities which, he considered, derived from the institution of private property and from human efforts to cope with growing necessities. It was his view that the progress of human “perfectibility,” through the development of skills and other abilities, exaggerated men’s natural differences, and that by trying to satisfy our needs we increase them.

The enormously popular La Nouvelle Héloïse, a novel in which Rousseau depicted his ideal lovers and developed a morality of sentiment, appeared in 1761. The following year, two incalculably influential works, The Social Contract and Émile, were published. In the first, Rousseau sought to determine how a social order, inevitable in any case, might be constituted on a legitimate rational basis of popular sovereignty. The latter, a dissertation on natural education in the form of a novel, contains the fullest expression of Rousseau’s thoughts on natural religion, the “Creed of a Priest of Savoy.”

But Rousseau enjoyed little triumph. After a quarrel with his benefactress, Mme. d’Epinay, he departed from his beloved country retreat, L’Ermitage. Émile was condemned in Parliament, and in Paris it was burned. Further, having resumed his Genevan citizenship and membership of the Church of Geneva, he was to suffer the confiscation and burning of Émile and of The Social Contract, and the threat of arrest in that city. Indeed his life was now to be unsettled to the end, which came in 1778 at Ermenonville where he was the guest of the Marquis de Girardin.

The sections on music in the Essay on the Origin of Languages were written in 1749, apparently for the Encyclopedia. The remainder apparently belongs to the period of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. It seems Rousseau kept the Essay from publication in order to avoid further conflict with authority.

While accepting the view of the Encyclopedists that human institutions, including languages, arise to meet human needs, Rousseau opposed their restriction of such needs to immediate physical necessities. On the contrary, the latter, instead of drawing men into association, tend to disperse them. While their natural, physical needs tend to scatter men over the globe, what unites them into specific peoples, sharing common forms of life, are needs of a different and superior kind—moral needs, the need of people to relate to each other, which Rousseau sees as somehow independent of their need for food, shelter, clothing, and sexual gratification.

Since speech and writing are crucially social, their origins will be those of society; rather than deriving from the efforts of reason to satisfy physical necessity, they occur, in hospitable climates at least, primarily as musical and poetical expressions of emotion. The device of origin and development, the emphasis on the role of gesture and on signs other than verbal ones, help to make Rousseau’s account of language more human than any treatment along static, essential lines. In our own day, its family resemblances to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are sometimes striking. On the other hand, it also bears an unmistakable kinship to Wittgenstein’s earlier work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and to Bertrand Russell’s “logical atomism,” for Rousseau seems uncritically to share the common assumption that language can be meaningful only by being referential. In this respect, he is concerned only with broadening the essential scope of referents, beyond the physical and conceptual, to include the moral and passional. However, he does not attempt anything approaching Wittgenstein’s or Russell’s elaborate, ex professo systematic treatment of the referential relations, supposedly crucial to any meaningful use of language.

Since men unite socially even when they are under pressure to diverge, war is not natural to them: their interest in each other’s attitudes, feelings, and wills is manifest in communion as well as competition. Far from being a necessary means to peace, as Hobbes argued, human society is the necessary precondition to war.

Although he emphasized moral and passional factors at the source of language, Rousseau himself is unable to understand sympathetically how men would take upon themselves the yoke of social forms unless pressed by direst necessity. It seems to be Rousseau’s view that, since physical needs can both unite and disperse people under different circumstances, the two positions might be complementary. If not, he would be left with the paradox that confronted him in the Discourse on Inequality: society presupposes language and language presupposes society. Further, the most primitive beginnings of language imaginable would, in Rousseau’s view, consist of a few gestures and inarticulate sounds, such as grunts and cries, proper to family groups. But genuine languages, the scope of whose use would be at least interfamilial, would presuppose or form part of, a wider social bond.

In general, the development of language corresponds for Rousseau to successive stages of social organization: savage, barbaric, civilized. The transition is from immediacy and spontaneity to generality and convention. The highest stage belongs to civilization, where increasingly the conventional utterances of our languages replace even the spontaneous cries of joy and pain proper to the childhood of both race and individual.

The three levels of social order are based upon three modes of getting a livelihood. The savage, who lives by hunting and fishing, needs only rudimentary implements which he can produce for himself. Barbarians live the pastoral life of herdsmen, which is virtually self-sufficient. Agriculture, in which civilization has its beginnings, presupposes a stable family structure, stimulates the development of many skills, gives birth to foresight and reason, the institution of private property, and trade and “knowledge of good and evil.”

With respect to music and painting, Rousseau attacks a reductionist aesthetic that tends to treat these arts in terms of a sterile, mechanical analysis of the elements of products. By contrast, he emphasizes what he considers to be the crucial role of “form”—that is, of drawing in art and melody in music, for he considers both, along with language, to be meaningful only through imitation or representation. Painting is directly representative of external objects, while melody indirectly represents and evokes feelings such as joy and sorrow.

In the final chapter, Rousseau sketches briefly a remarkable distinction between liberal and slavish languages. The latter favor authoritarian obscurantism; but he suggests further that one could not speak clearly in, say, the King’s French. Although he sarcastically exaggerates it while failing to develop it, this distinction is an important variation on the theme that languages develop according to forms of life.

J.M.

Johann Gottfried Herder

ESSAY

on the

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Translated by

ALEXANDER GODE

SECTION ONE

While still an animal, man already has language. All violent sensations of his body, and among the violent the most violent, those which cause him pain, and all strong passions of his soul express themselves directly in screams, in sounds, in wild inarticulate tones. A suffering animal, no less than the hero Philoctetus, will whine, will moan when pain befalls it, even though it be abandoned on a desert island, without sight or trace or hope of a helpful fellow creature. It is as though it could breathe more freely as it vents its burning, frightened spirit. It is as though it could sigh out part of its pain and at least draw in from the empty air space new strength of endurance as it fills the unhearing winds with its moans. So little did nature create us as severed blocks of rock, as egotistic monads! Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling—I must use this image because I know none better for the mechanics of sentient bodies—even the chords whose sound and strain do not arise from choice and slow deliberation, whose very nature the probing of reason has not as yet been able to fathom, even they—though there be no awareness of sympathy from outside—are aligned in their entire performance for a going out toward other creatures. The plucked chord performs its natural duty: it sounds! It calls for an echo from one that feels alike, even if none is there, even if it does not hope or expect that such another might answer.

Should physiology ever progress to a point where it can demonstrate psychology—which I greatly doubt—it would derive many a ray of light for this phenomenon, though it might also divide it in individual, excessively small, and obtuse filaments. Let us accept it at present as a whole, as a shining law of nature: “Here is a sentient being which can enclose within itself none of its vivid sensations; which must, in the very first moment of surprise, utter each one aloud, apart from all choice and purpose.” It was, as it were, the last motherly touch of the formative hand of nature that it gave to all, to take out into the world, the law, “Feel not for yourself alone. But rather: your feeling resound!” And since this last creative touch was, for all of one species, of one kind, this law became a blessing: “The sound of your feeling be of one kind to your species and be thus perceived by all in compassion as by one!” Do not now touch this weak, this sentient being. However lonesome and alone it may seem to be, however exposed to every hostile storm of the universe, yet is it not alone: It stands allied with all nature! Strung with delicate chords; but nature hid sounds in these chords which, when called forth and encouraged, can arouse other beings of equally delicate build, can communicate, as though along an invisible chain, to a distant heart a spark that makes it feel for this unseen being. These sighs, these sounds are language. There is, then, a language of feeling which is—underived—a law of nature.

That man has such a language, has it originally and in common with the animals, is nowadays evident, to be sure, more through certain remains than through fullfledged manifestations. But these remains, too, are incontrovertible. However much we may want to insist that our artful language has displaced the language of nature, that our civilized way of life and our social urbanity have dammed in, dried out, and channeled off the torrent and the ocean of our passions, the most violent moment of feeling—wherever, however rarely, it may occur—still time and again reclaims its right, sounding in its maternal language, without mediation, through accents. The surging storm of a passion, the sudden onslaught of joy or pleasure, pain or distress, which cut deep furrows into the soul, an overpowering feeling of revenge, despair, rage, horror, fright, and so forth, they all announce themselves, each differently after its kind. As many modes of sensitivity as are slumbering in our nature, so many tonal modes too.—And thus I note that the less human nature is akin to an animal species, the more the two differ in their nervous structures, the less shall we find the natural language of that animal species comprehensible to us. We, as animals of the earth, understand the animal of the earth better than the creature of the waters; and on the earth, the herd animal better than the creature of the forest; and among the herd animals, those best that stand closest to us. Though in the case of these latter, contact and custom too contribute their greater or lesser share. It is natural that the Arab, who is of one piece with his horse, understands it better than a man who mounts a horse for the first time—almost as well as Hector in the Iliad was able to speak with the ones that were his. The Arab in the desert, who sees no life about except his camel and perhaps a flight of erring birds, can more easily understand the camel’s nature and imagine that he understands the cry of the birds than we in our dwellings. The son of the forest, the hunter, understands the voice of the hart, and the Lapp that of his reindeer—. But all that follows logically or is an exception. The rule remains that this language of nature is a group language for the members of each species among themselves. And thus man too has a language of nature all his own.

Now, to be sure, these tones are very simple, and when they are articulated and spelled out on paper as interjections, the most contrary sensations may have almost a single expression. A dull “ah!” is as much the sound of languid love as of sinking despair; the fiery “oh!” as much the outburst of sudden joy as of boiling rage, of rising awe as of surging commiseration. But are these sounds meant to be marked down on paper as interjections? The tear which moistens this lusterless and extinguished, this solace-starved eye—how moving is it not in the total picture of a face of sorrow. Take it by itself and it is a cold drop of water. Place it under the microscope, and—I do not care to learn what it may be there. This weary bre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Bibliographic Note
• Essay Two
• Notes