The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity by Charles Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Demonic Divinity

Birds sing to each other, lions roar at enemies, cats purr with their owners. These are all communications. But none of these communications involves language. It’s easy to miss the fundamental character of language and presume that it emerged from some more primitive form of communication, that some ancient hominid species progressively developed a vocabulary of sounds and gestures which at some point became recognisable as what we call a language.

Didn’t happen. Birds and lions and cats don’t use a form of proto-language which in the course of evolution turned into human speech and writing. No one knows when human language began (or for that matter the precise hominid remains that we might designate as human). But whenever it happened, it was abrupt, decisive, and representative of an entirely distinct and unique mode of being: animal being certainly but not as had been previously known.

This is not to say that language appeared in its entirety - vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatic uses - in some sudden linguistic Big Bang. Language developed and evolved as any other cultural trait. But language-ability, the realisation that words (or sounds, or symbols, or gestures) exist independently of the things which they refer to, is an evolutionary singularity. A species does not ‘ease into’ a language. It either has it or it does not. The line is sharp and it is decisive. Once it is crossed, the entire species is effectively absorbed into language and has no way out, no return to a garden of oneness with nature for example. The biblical story of exile is profound.

Two twentieth century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, are the most well-known thinkers about language. Heidegger called language the ‘house of being’ of mankind. We live solely within it, both protected and trapped by its existence. Wittgenstein showed how language exists only as a whole and can only be employed in relation to itself not in terms of its relation with what is not-language. He famously called these uses ‘language games,’ not in the sense that they lack seriousness but because they are governed by rules of deployment and context into which we are indoctrinated.

Charles Taylor’s thesis is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein are the intellectual descendants and heirs of the German Romantic philosophers of the early nineteenth century, particularly Herder, Hamann, and Humboldt. In a typically Taylorian move, he sets up a dialectic in order to establish the point. This is an interesting and creative move in that he avoids the tired old argument between Rationalists and Empiricists. He understands the next stage in intellectual development to be the opposition between the mighty Kant, who as far as Taylor is concerned synthesised a solution to that historical debate, and this new group of philosophers who took Kant one step further.

Kant, in Taylor’s view, understood that the empiricism of thinkers like Hume and Condillac had a fatal flaw: the ‘atomisation’ of perception. Perceptions are never isolated, they are always in a context of myriad other perceptions both contemporary and historical. Kant also showed the fault in the idea of Cartesian rationality with its mind/body distinction. The ‘laws’ of reason are not something to be discovered in ‘nature.’ They are constructed and imposed upon the world by human beings. What Kant didn’t recognise about his own philosophy was that he atomised language in the same way that the Empiricists had atomised perception. His focus on the ‘epistemological’ connection between words and things the Romantics considered an intellectual dead end.

And indeed, it has so turned out: after more than two centuries of thought and analysis, no one has been able to suggest a credible way to judge the correctness of the connection between a word and the ‘thing in itself’ (thus implying that our entire species is delusional). And it was the German Romantics who first understand why. Kant took language to be solely a human tool. The Romantics recognised language as having its own power, which it quietly exercised over those who thought they were using it. Eventually this recognition emerged as Heidegger’s pithy dictum: ‘Language speaks Man.’ Words are defined not in terms of what are not-words but only in terms of other words. Whatever we do with words is always about other words, however much we pretend to be talking about the ‘real world.’ The only world there is is the world of language. And every word in a language implicitly refers to every other word.

The clue which prompted this insight by the Romantics is indeed rather romantic, namely that the the world within language is much bigger than the world without it. Language is the cosmic Tardis of Dr. Who. It looks small and restrictive from the outside, even in the 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. But the space which language opens up is potentially infinite viewed from the inside. Certainly no individual has ever been more constrained rather than less in perceptions of places, people, and times by language. Language, just language, can evoke tears and laughter. And yet there is nothing ‘objective’ that is sad or comic. Language is what allows me to know about black holes and Bognor Regis although I have been to neither. I have no doubt that both are real because of the way both are used in scientific and everyday discussion. The language game, one might say, vouches for them. I don’t need to visit. A blessing.

The Romantics also intuited that there were things beyond language. Not just in terms of missing words or expressions, but more importantly that those things that were not-language were, as Kant concluded, not knowable in a fundamental sense. Language may mask its character by pretending that it is merely an intermediary between the thing-in-itself and us. But this is only an expression of its absolute power over us. We aren’t able to escape from it. It is a cage as well as a house. It shapes our perceptions as much as it expresses them. It is therefore convenient to mistake linguistic truth for reality. Convenient because language allows us to manipulate words into plausible self-justification for just about anything we do from fraud to fratricide.

I must admit that I always suspect Taylor of hidden religious objectives in whatever he writes. It’s when he discusses that which is beyond language that I begin to detect his attempt to make philosophical room for God, particularly the God of the Christianity. In this regard it is notable that he chooses not to mention at all one of the most influential of the early 19th century Romantics, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theologian concerned with reconciling Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy. Schleiermacher developed the idea of God as a sentiment in the human heart, literally a word to which emotions attached. This was certainly a romantic if decidedly heretical concept. Yet it became a central tenet of so-called Liberal Protestantism during the 19th century and of the fundamentalist reaction against this movement in the 20th.

So, the battle over words continues apace. Largely because there is nothing other than words to fight about. Language does seem to be malignantly mischievous from time to time. Perhaps demonically divine is the most apt description.

For more on Heidegger’s Language as The House of Being: https://ibb.co/F6JdxHN

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