Rousseau on Language and Writing: Two Perspectives

By Barry Stocker and John Bolender

Two contemporary philosophers take two very different approaches to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, and then each reflects upon the approach of the other. Barry Stocker takes a deconstructionist approach, discussing the importance of Rousseau in the work of Jacques Derrida. John Bolender approaches Rousseau's Essay in terms of cognitive science, most especially in light of the theories of Noam Chomsky and Alan Page Fiske. Both authors agree that Rousseau's Essay still has much to teach us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rousseau, etc.
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989328012

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Title page

Rousseau on Language and Writing: Two Perspectives

by Barry Stocker and John Bolender

with a foreword by Lance Kirby

Publisher Information

2014 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Published in 2014 by

ROUSSEAU, ETC.

Piketon, Ohio

www.rousseau-etc.com

Emotion in Language and Reply to ‘Rousseau and Derrida on Liberty and on Language, the First Social Institution’ © John Bolender

Rousseau and Derrida on Liberty and on Language, the First Social Institution and Reply to ‘Emotion in Language’ © Barry Stocker

Foreword © Lance Kirby

Cover art: Blombos Ochre by Simon Max Bannister, used with permission: www.simonmaxbannister.com

Foreword, Lance Kirby

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has always been a richly divisive thinker, the contradictions of his life almost displaying a split-personality. It is therefore fitting that this duality is mirrored by the essays gathered in this volume upon one of Rousseau’s lesser known works, the Essay on the Origin of Languages. Here Rousseau sought to argue, making wild and brilliant philological and sociological speculation along the way, that originally language developed in warm southern climes where it held a musical and emotional character that, with its migration to the north, would become more coldly rational and utilitarian. If we agree with this hypothesis, it may go a long way in explaining the decline of poetry from its period of greatest flowering in the antiquity of Greece, to its diminishment to the humble lyric of today. For Rousseau, ours is an age for the cold businessman’s prose of the account books not for the singing of epics.

It would be no stretch to claim that all of Rousseau’s work is one sustained attack upon inauthenticity in human relations. In this, the Essay on the Origin of Languages is just one small continuation of that project. We all wear masks, and language is just one more mask we wear to hide our true selves from one another. In the linguistic turn of twentieth century philosophy and the rise of the Analytic/Continental divide, Rousseau was thus in a way prescient in reminding us that too often language can be as much a shield of self-protection as it is a means of conveying ideas. In a manner similar to C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, it becomes merely a tool of defense, where both parties talk past one another instead of genuinely engaging, as the recent commotion between Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek might suggest. In this, Professors Barry Stocker and John Bolender have rendered a service in helping to spur just such a dialogue. Bolender, writing from the Analytic perspective, and Stocker from the Continental, have produced essays from their respective domains, each in turn then has contributed a separate essay upon these two original interpretations.

Barry Stocker gives us an absorbing study pairing Rousseau with Jacques Derrida, exploring a deconstructed investigation of the Essay. With a subtle and nuanced analysis Stocker explains that, due to the indeterminacy of language that a flawless definition of concepts such a liberty and community can never be achieved but that political language must remain in constant discussion with its self. John Bolender asks how does emotion in language create solidarity in a community and, further, challenges the Chomskian view against oratory as a positive and perhaps necessary force for political cohesion, speculative insights that present an excellent example of philosophy’s ability to offer new lines of scientific research and inquiry.

The book as a whole is a wonderful demonstration of the limitless possibilities that a great philosopher can elicit even two-hundred years after his death, and the still greater possibilities for cross fertilization and experimentation across the, perhaps, artificial gap of the so called Analytic/Continental divide. Regardless, if this volume does not achieve its hoped for aim and ignite similar attempts at such dialogue, it remains a unique and stimulating exchange upon a much under-appreciated work by one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Emotion in Language, John Bolender

If you do not feel a thing, you will never guess its meaning.

— Emma Goldman, quoted in Ferguson (2011, 198)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages anticipates some very recent developments in linguistics, while also suggesting means of further developing linguistic research. The value of the Essay today lies largely in the fact that these means of development may not be immediately obvious to us without Rousseau’s help. These potential benefits to cognitive science are not limited to linguistics. The Essay suggests a means for linking the study of language with the study of social cognition, specifically in Rousseau’s attempts to link language with politics. The potential benefit to philosophy of language is also significant. Rousseau’s emphases are radically different than the emphases of today’s recent philosophy of language. However, despite the differences in emphasis, a strong commitment to naturalism unites Rousseau with many of today’s philosophers including philosophers of language. (Stephen Neale’s numerous references to generative grammar (1990), for example, show that he aims to be doing philosophy of language in a scientifically informed manner.) Perhaps this common ground will suffice for them to begin to consider Rousseau’s Essay seriously, as a source of questions and proto-hypotheses. In doing so, they will find themselves breaking into some possibly surprising new territory.

Modern philosophy of language owes its origins largely to the work of Gottlob Frege whose main concern was semantics. As a result, philosophy of language today is also largely concerned with semantics, only addressing issues of form and structure insofar as they directly relate to semantics. An exception would be Jerrold Katz who was concerned with the ontological status of syntactic structures (1996), but even Katz was at one with most philosophers of language in having virtually no interest in phonetics or emotional content. If today’s philosophy of language had owed its origins to Rousseau, rather than Frege, the focus of research would be very different indeed. Rousseau’s focus was on the sound of language and how sound relates to emotion. Even when Rousseau discusses meaning, such as in his treatment of figurative language, the emphasis is still on emotion, namely how emotional forces lay behind metaphorical uses of language.

Of course, in some sense the emotional content of language, or that component of language which evokes feeling, is a kind of meaning. Even Frege appreciated this, as shown in his discussing a sort of meaning which

is often said to act on the feelings, the mood of the hearer or to arouse his imagination. Words like alas and thank God belong here. Such constituents of sentences are more noticeably prominent in poetry, but are seldom wholly absent from prose. They occur more rarely in mathematical, physical, or chemical than in historical expositions. What are called the humanities are more closely connected with poetry and are therefore less scientific than the exact sciences which are drier the more exact they are, for exact science is directed toward truth and only the truth … [T]he constituents of language, to which I want to call attention here, make the translation of poetry very difficult, even make a complete translation impossible, for it is in precisely that in which poetic value consists that languages differ most. (1956, 295; see also Frege 1997, 239–40)

Rousseau was largely concerned with meaning, but this is an affective meaning, a kind of meaning at least partly transmitted through the more musical elements of language, especially rhythm and inflection. It would not enter into truth conditions, and hence would play no role in meaning as conceived by Davidson. While most philosophers of language, in the last 130 years or so, are concerned with the sort of meaning which survives translation, Rousseau was also interested in the sort of meaning which is often extinguished by it. There is potential here for linking the psychological study of emotion with the study of language, a cross-disciplinary field which should be of philosophical interest due to its political dimension, as will be discussed more fully at a later point. The connection with politics was anticipated by Rousseau.

Someone who can read a little Arabic smiles when leafing through the Koran, had he heard Mohammed in person proclaim it in that eloquent and rhythmic language, with that sonorous and persuasive voice which seduced the ear before the heart, and constantly animating his aphorisms with the accent of enthusiasm, he would have prostrated himself on the earth while crying out: great Prophet, Messenger of God, lead us to glory, to martyrdom; we want to conquer or to die for you. (1998, 317)

Recalling Frege’s distinction between the sort of meaning which survives translation versus the sort which does not, let us refer to the latter as affective or emotive meaning. Let us use Fregean meaning to mean the former, bracketing questions about what form such meaning takes, e.g. not delving into matters of sense versus reference or meaning as use, etc.

The huge outpouring of literature, the primary sources appearing mainly in the 1960s and ’70s, on indeterminacy of translation, and to an extent also incommensurability, betray a fear that Fregean meaning might be a chimera. Without translation, there is no Fregean meaning. What would remain, presumably, would be emotive meaning, as apparently illustrated by Kuhn’s emphases on the use of non-rational forms of persuasion. It is remarkable that Willard Van Orman Quine did not address this issue. Without an authoritative translation manual (Quine 1960; 1969), and hence without determinate communicated content, how could one rationally convince another to change their theory? Quine’s discussions of belief revision, as in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), often sound solipsistic. Without Fregean meaning, there would be no truth except perhaps in a pragmatic sense. Paul Feyerabend’s skeptical attitude toward truth is not surprising, given his somewhat similar belief in incommensurability. And as regards the word ‘truth’, we can at this stage only say that it certainly has people in a tizzy, but has not achieved much else (Feyerabend 2010, 175). With doubts raised about Fregean meaning, progress toward knowledge is revealed to be a complex process of growth that contains gestures, jokes, asides, emotions (Feyerabend 2010, 279).

What is especially striking about this recent history, in light of Rousseau, is that the emotive component of language only became interesting when Fregean meaning looked as though it might vanish. There seemed to be a tacit viewpoint that, if there is Fregean meaning, then emotive meaning would be of little or no philosophical interest. The tacit viewpoint, in turn, is presumably the consequence of a deeper assumption: the philosophical interest of language lies in its use for rational persuasion and perhaps also calculation (Harman 1975). It is only when one concludes that language cannot fulfill rationalistic uses that the modern philosopher even begins to consider the possibility that the emotive component of language might be of some philosophical interest. Rousseau, by contrast, heavily emphasized the philosophical interest of the emotive component, but without invoking such specters as translational indeterminacy or incommensurability. This is because Rousseau recognized the philosophical interest of emotion, and emotional persuasion, without denying the existence or importance of rationality. It is true that Rousseau cast reason in an unflattering light in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, but it is also the case that he saw a positive role for reason in his On Social Contract.

As hinted at in the earlier quote from Rousseau, the affective component of language is important for understanding public persuasion, and the enthusiasm which often creates bonds of solidarity in a community. Hence it is relevant to political philosophy. The general will, even though it requires reason, also requires emotion, specifically compassion for the fellow members of one’s community and a feeling of defiance in the face of a potential tyrant attempting to lord it over the community, unconcerned with its interests. These emotional ties are a prerequisite for the use of reason in deciding which laws would be best for everyone. These are also the emotions which can create factional divisions, as will become more clear in the discussion of Communal Sharing later on.

The question of incommensurability raises the more general question of whether it is ever the case that a language lacks the resources to express a concept which can be conveyed in another language (Bowerman and Levinson 2001). Most researchers insist that this is never the case for any pair of natural languages, although doubts have been raised (Everett 1993; Gordon 2004). Rousseau’s Essay draws our attention to an analogous question which has received much less attention, namely whether or not there are certain emotions which can be expressed in some languages but not in others. A related question is whether a given emotion is better conveyed in some languages as opposed to others. Rousseau, for example, describes French and English as good for expressing anger but otherwise cold. Such questions require a dramatic change in focus. They do not merely concern the use of categories or labels in a language but also concern the expressive qualities of voice. They raise the question of how vocal expression can vary culturally, and even if it is ever useful to demarcate language communities according to the expressive qualities of speech. Rousseau was gesturing in this latter direction, albeit very roughly, in distinguishing northern languages from southern languages.

How the sound of language relates to affect is obviously of scientific interest, and Rousseau was a scientist in some manner, sometimes even considered the father of anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1963). Given the naturalistic trend in recent analytic philosophy, many philosophers of this persuasion may find value in Rousseau’s questions and in his emphases. Hence, the fact that Frege inaugurated analytic philosophy, and had little or no interest in affective or phonetic aspects of language, hardly means that analytic philosophers should ignore Rousseau on language. Their naturalism might even lead them in a Rousseauist direction.

If, contrary to fact, Rousseau had been the original impetus for today’s philosophy of language, the emphasis on sound and affect would likely lead to linking the study of language with the study of music, as it did for Rousseau. Some linguists have attempted to link language cognition with music cognition, but for philosophers of