Let me begin by explaining why I chose to title this post as I did. It's a bit humbling to read monumental thinkers like Marx, Freud and Saussure and even more humbling to try to criticize and refute their arguments. I often think to myself "I'm only a simple college kid, what do I really know about psychology or linguistics? And compared to the very best of those who have devoted their lives to those fields, what do I really have to say?" Yet when reading Saussure's "Linguistic Value", I found I could not be silent. Not because it wasn't an awesome contribution to linguistics, but because I took issue with the philosophical values within it.
What complicates things all the more is that, in many ways, Saussure is right on target. A systematic analysis of how language functions is very fruitful. I, too, am firmly convinced that all human intellectual activity depends on language and would be impossible without language. Humans probably wouldn't have much of an existence beyond animal instinct if there was no language. And language is a system of differentiation. As I write these sentences, I think them out in words and those words are simply units in a system. This system is composed of individual words, but it is the differences between those words that give them meaning within the system. And the signifier to signified relationship is a bit arbitrary. There is nothing about the word "tree" that has any relationship to the plant life we call a tree other than that the English language groups a certain type of plant life under the name "tree". Both in spoken language and in writing, the sounds and written characters simply stand for concepts, they do not have an real relationship to them. For my money, Saussure's analysis of language as a system is correct.
What I take issue with is the loaded philosophical value of his article. Structuralist and, a generation later, deconstructionist approaches to language are intrinsically philosophical. All ideas, intellectual efforts, beliefs, religions and philosophies are expressed in language. Language is our only entrance to meaning in the world. If you undercut language and expose it as an arbitrary system, then you undercut all possibilities of truth, objectivity, beauty, value and ethics. The world of thought is reduced to total relativism. If language doesn't touch reality, then reality is unknowable to humans. But, if this is the truth, then we might as well face it. Which is why I have a stake in arguing that it is not the truth.
At this point I will stop and say that, having read the Sassure article twice, I'm not sure whether he would say that language has no relationship to reality. I'm pretty sure the deconstructionists would, but Saussure is not one of them. I am unsure what Saussure means when he says that the complete sign, unlike the signifier or signified, does have positive content. Does that mean the references of language to a reality outside language are valid? I am also interested in his assertion that language is a form and not a substance. Certainly this is a philosophical assertion, the terms are from classical philosophy. I would guess that Saussure means that language is sort of like a container waiting to be filled with reality, but it has no reality in of itself.
Either way, I will argue that any theory of language which completely denies its relationship to reality is wrong. It is wrong because it ignores the "lived level" of language as a phenomenologist might term it, our every day use of it as we go about our lives. No matter how ardently a thinker like Derrida might deny any positive content to language in his writings and his academic career, at the end of every day he still went home and followed the streets signs to his house, believing they would not lead him astray. He still probably asked his family and friends how their days went, believing that his words inquired into some reality beyond language and that the words they replied to him stated some objectivity. He lived, worked, loved, suffered and felt joy and expressed it in language believing that his language had some relationship to reality. He probably doubted it all a lot too. His convictions forced him to. But he had to live in it. As do we all. If you deny the power of language to unlock reality, you deny of a lot of what it means to be human.
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Part 1.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, this is a great post, Calvin! Your reader can really appreciate how you are thinking through this difficult conceptual terrain.
My first question spurs from your statement: "Humans probably wouldn't have much of an existence beyond animal instinct if there was no language." Yet what if language *is* our "animal instinct"? What happens if we do not say that language is what separates humans from animals, but rather that language is an animal trait that we humans have? It is worth putting pressure on this human/animal conceptual divide, and all the assumptions located therein.
When you say that "As I write these sentences, I think them out in words and those words are simply units in a system," Saussure might step in to point out that your words are not "simply units" at all—they are *complexly* units, that is, they are units in multiple ways, involved with themselves (signifier/signified) as well as involved with the language system of which they are part. Again, the words do not "simply" stand for concepts—the relation is incredibly complex, and very lively—and *lived*, too. The relationships between words and concepts are very real, and they take place in the world. Saussure just wants to insist that we should not confuse relationships between signs and the world with relationships between signs and other signs (or the internal configuration of a sign, for that matter). Does this make sense?
In your next paragraph, you state: "If you undercut language and expose it as an arbitrary system, then you undercut all possibilities of truth, objectivity, beauty, value and ethics." Saussure is not trying to "undercut" language—he's trying to describe how it works. And he is not saying that it is an arbitrary system so much as he is suggesting that the internal links between signifier and signified are arbitrary. The system certainly needs rules that are anything but arbitrary: you cannot participate in a language very well if you are going to speak arbitrarily. Saussure is neither advocating this nor arguing for this. We can certainly talk about things like truth, objectivity, values, and ethics—we're doing it right now. The point for Saussure is that a word like "objectivity" does not stand for something in the world really called 'objectivity', but rather it stands in differential relation to words like subjectivity, neutrality, relativity, inner-subjectivity...that's how we know what it 'means' (to us speakers of the word). We are not describing a thing in the world, we are articulating a concept that travels in a certain language system. The word/concept gains its value from its relation to other words/concepts. So of course we can talk about these things—what we don't want to do is think that through language we get closer to the Real Things called "value" and "truth." Instead, we dwell on (and in) language—and that's fine and useful. So it is not that "The world of thought is reduced to total relativism."—quite the opposite: the world of thought is called attention to and taken seriously. Saussure is definitely not calling for relativism; I'm not sure where this comes from, but threatens to make Saussure sound like some kind of free-for-all anarchist, which he was not.
Part 2.
ReplyDeleteThis passage is very well explained: "I am also interested in his assertion that language is a form and not a substance. Certainly this is a philosophical assertion, the terms are from classical philosophy. I would guess that Saussure means that language is sort of like a container waiting to be filled with reality, but it has no reality in of itself." I might just add that language's reality relies on its being a container, rather than it's being the liquid inside. The liquid inside would be our thought, which is also ‘real’—but not really identifiable outside of its container. The key thing for Saussure is that you could never find an *exact point* where the liquid becomes the container, or the container merges with the liquid, even though, together, they are inseparable. (This is where his two-sides-of-the-paper example is perhaps more useful.)
Toward the end of your post, you risk a dangerous conflation of two very different thinkers. Derrida in many ways builds on Saussure and puts pressure on his ideas, but there are many crucial distinctions. And we have to be careful not to rush into rash generalizations about the entirety of a thinker's work. I don't want to spend time on Derrida here (we'll get there in a few weeks!), but when you say that he must have believed that language could state "some objectivity," this exposes a troubling ambiguity in your own logic. What kind of true 'objectivity' could be parsed into 'more' or 'some' or 'less'? Are you sure that 'objectivity' is what is at stake for you? It sounds more like you are defending a basic idea of meaningfulness, communicability, or significance. Neither Saussure nor Derrida are attacking these things or saying they don't exist; but they do have different theories for how they actually take place.
Agreed with Dr. Schaberg Calvin, this is a great comment overall and this very issue is something that I think will be confronted and addressed by our generation specifically. However, what this signals is exactly the historical truth of and import of the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy. I think it is important to analyze the views of language with which Saussure is dealing:
ReplyDeleteIt was absolutely necessary to 'de-label' reality as such. Nomenclaturism, the view that language labels reality is simply a correlate to the view that the Mind in some way 'mirrors' reality. This has been spelled out in two main ways, either that the Object exists in a totality in the realm of the sensible or of the intelligible, and thus the object ‘reflects’ itself onto the mind (the object is the Real, the Mind as imitational and passive), or, that the Subject actively over and against the object seeks to know it. Language in both views is simply a tool that one uses in order to refer to properties that the object may or may not possess. Language is primarily denotative, referential. Truth in both accounts would be the correspondence of the Subjective concepts (which are internal and innately rational, or external and acquired through sense-experience) to the Objective facts inhering in the Thing whether by rationally justified account or evidence verified by sense perception. Objectivity is simply the name for the end-result of this process. Subjectivity: the name for what resists or counteracts this result. Consensus in questions of “truth, objectivity, beauty, value and ethics” has no place in the nomenclaturist/foundationalist epistemologies of the modern period precisely because what is True, Beautiful, Good, or Right inheres “in” the Thing in question. Neither would significance matter much because it is not what language invokes in the world that matters. Meaning as the ‘sense’ (of a word, concept) doesn’t factor.
To this view one might argue that language cannot simply be a tool to label a full and completely pre-existing reality, to help us to mirror reality through our concepts, after all we communicate and indeed formulate our concepts through language. If it is a river that separates Subject and Object, then certainly our concepts and ourselves would get ‘wet’ when swimming across. We are affected by language. We fit reality into certain concepts built up through language, like time, space, and causality. Yet even to hold this would be to hold that language may ‘rigidly designate’ certain objects as such independent of differentiation through articulated concepts. Water is ‘rigidly designated’ as H2O in all possible worlds. Language in this view ‘fixes’ concepts to reality. Language thus not as label, but as a two-sided hook which fixes the thing on one side to our concepts on the other. But the signifier “water” does not bespeak the essence of that thing. Nor the signifier “the Good” refer. Rather it Signifies, that is, it connotes (rather than denotes). Language discloses the possibility of being able to speak of water at all. It reveals. As Heidegger says, “Language is the house of being”. Truth is primarily a disclosing, and not a correspondence. To disclose allows for the possibility of speaking referentially at all.
The opposing view concerning language, namely that it constitutes a given reality, it constructs and out of the construction a 'world' exists (a world which would be total and not capable of being spoken of outside of that language and thus wholly relative) – is also not really Saussure’s point. This is more Berger and Luckmann (Social Construction of Reality). ‘Reality’ is instead structured from language, it is there but not much can be said of it without language, without difference. The issues/questions that I offer up is if language is composed of signs (which are composed of signifier-signified relation built on arbitrariness and negation) what can be said of language’s revealing aspect, of language’s presence, e.g. ‘this “is” a chair’ which then allows for us to speak referentially and not just in terms of difference? In my average everyday ‘lived world’ I speak metaphysically all the time.
ReplyDelete"In my average everyday ‘lived world’ I speak metaphysically all the time."—are you sure about this, Bryan? What does it mean to "speak metaphysically"? How would we be able to recognize this sot of language? I think that Saussure would say that when you think you are speaking referentially you are in fact speaking differentially. I also think there is a crucial distinction to be made here between "negation" and "opposition." It isn't so much that language is a *void* as much as it is a structure without a foundation: it is forever floating, and held afloat by air bubbles that oppose one another in order to achieve cohesive structural buoyancy. Perhaps my language is getting too figurative here. I return to my original question: what does it mean to speak metaphysically?
ReplyDeleteThanks Dr. Schaberg for catching me at the end. I played a little fast and loose with my phrasing. However, I maintain that in my everyday experience with (and of) the world (and this is where Calvin's questions/issues become of central import) I describe reality in a language that is inscribed in its most basic grammar with metaphysical baggage. If I say, "Hello, Dr. Schaberg how are you?" the system of language is of course built on opposition (indeed a multiple opposition of signs), but nonetheless I am positing a metaphysics of being when I even speak of a 'You', that there is a 'you' and not aggregates of causal processed effects to which I may speak of in an series of oppositions (You are not me, I am not her, she is not him, etc). To say that I am not really referring to an eternal objective Real Tree when speaking of its beauty but rather that I am making sense of the oppositional/differential signification present within language is fine (and that I should dwell on this), but to even to do this, I have to, in some sense, 'be' in language, that is, I have to understand the metaphysical implications of a "concept" in the first place. It is fine if Saussure argues that when I think that I speak referentially, I am in fact speaking differentially, but the fact that I think that I speak referentially in the first place means I carry metaphysical baggage, and in my everyday lived-world it seems to be the case that it matters to me not that I speak in a system of differences. Again I am tempted to make too daring a claim, but I will say that when it comes to language... although it may be built on absence, Presence matters more.
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent conversation, and I'm going to bring it back around to Calvin's post at the end of my comment here.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Bryan, what is "metaphysical baggage"? I still am not quite clear on what you mean by 'metaphysical' here, and the 'baggage' claim just seems to add an odd figurative quality. (Where are we, in an airport?)
Plenty of people have no problem 'being' in language without understanding "the metaphysical implications of a 'concept' in the first place." It sounds as if you are mostly defending an everyday experience of language, which seems to be special for how it happens so effortlessly. And as long as it (mostly) works, what is so upsetting about the idea that works differentially? (Maybe it's in that parenthetical 'mostly'—maybe this way of thinking of language is frustrating because it means that we can never achieve perfect language, immediacy, or direct communication?)
To say that Presence matters "more" is to completely miss Saussure's point: no presence without equal and always accompanying absence all around (or rather, inside). When Saussure says that language has no positive terms, remember that he is explaining the signifier/signified circuit, which cannot be broken and is irreducible. Where it comes to language "in its totality" (which sounds like how you are using it), Saussure does say that, then, "we have something positive in its own class" (22). What is important to note here is that we have two relations in play, and that they are imbricated: language depends on a core of negatively defined relations (signs) that comprise a positive system. We cannot talk simply about pure presence or pure absence, but we can talk about what goes on in the system, and I don't think we need any metaphysical baggage to travel in this land.
I really want to push you on this, Bryan: What do you mean by 'metaphysical'? Why is this concept important to you? Calvin, is this what you are worried about when, in your last sentence, you say: "If you deny the power of language to unlock reality, you deny of a lot of what it means to be human"? Do we want language to be a pathway or a tool or a vehicle (an airplane) that will help us get to 'reality'? What do we think is out there that needs to be 'unlocked' or brought into Presence? Why should presence need to become Presence? Is there an apocalyptic urge or impulse motivating these desires?
Thanks for pushing this Dr. Schaberg. When I stand in line at an airport waiting yet again to take off my shoes, and the security guard asks me, "Are those Your shoes?", is it not the case that the security guard is not only differentiating me from him, her, it, etc. (these multiple sets of oppositions that have no positive content) but also assuming a 'You' - a unified something(someone) that underlies the multiple appearances and moments of becoming that will hopefully answer, "Yes these shoes are Mine". In this simple, ordinary, even banal of situations one finds that we carry these 'bags' around with us all the time. Language as a system of differences includes the different conceptions of reality, and while I agree that no language can correspond directly, refer absolutely, or be either a path or tool to get us 'in touch' with reality, I nevertheless also think (at this moment in "my" life) that language has to disclose something of reality, e.g. that there is a 'you' and not just fleeting impressions, or that you are an automata, or figure in my solipsistic game.
ReplyDeleteI especially agree that because of the very structure of language I don't have to carry a 'chair' around to indicate something but instead may simply deploy the word. In other words, the presence of a word indicates the absence of X. Language is constituted by absence. So you are right to critique me for thinking of language in terms of manifestation. There can never be a co-incidence in language. If I say, "this is a pen" I no more 'labeled' it perfectly, than I did bring it into existence; "this is not a pipe" is an image (and not an actual entity that we call a 'pipe'), but the same works for a sentence. The sentence: 'this is a pipe' is itself Not a pipe, but a sentence...a Form, not a Substance.
But while it may be a Form, that Form has to connect in some way back to the order of being, so that when I am speaking to you and I say that, "I've found out that Water is composed of two atoms Hydrogen one atom Oxygen", I am not just speaking of the multiple series of oppositional differences within that sentence (and from that sentence the entirety of the english language), but in some way disclosing, or uncovering something which happens to be essential to reality itself (seeing how important water is to life on earth and throughout the universe).
The apocalyptic comes in whenever we are seeking what you called 'pure presence', which I think Derrida noted as 'Necessity' which he notes that a pure presence would be death itself.
I think he speaks of this here: http://www.amazon.com/Deconstruction-Necessity/dp/B001BWGV2W
Thanks for taking the time to flesh this out, Bryan. Nice extension of the airport example. But I guarantee that the TSA agent is thinking more about when her shift is over than about the relation of her words to 'reality'.
ReplyDeleteI'm still not sure what is actually at stake for you in wanting to posit that language must "connect in some way back to the order of being" and that language must be "in some way disclosing, or uncovering something which happens to be essential to reality itself."
I think that Saussure's system of language would never be 'disconnected' from the order of being: that's why it's described as a synchronic cut through language in action (i.e., being). Also, to talk about disclosing and uncovering is to really make hiding and concealing a given or 'natural' state of things. I know that you are getting this in part from Heidegger, but I'm not seeing how or why you need to make recourse to these descriptors here.
Water is not 'important' to life on earth and throughout the universe—rather, water just *is* part of life on earth and throughout the universe. If there were no water, the earth just would be different (perhaps no 'life' or not an earth at all but a shriveled-up ball). 'Importance' raises questions of value that seem rooted in an anthropomorphic impulse.
You say: "language has to disclose something of reality, e.g. that there is a 'you' and not just fleeting impressions, or that you are an automata, or figure in my solipsistic game." I don't think that Saussure is suggesting in any way that language is indicative of solipsism—certainly not: language is an elastic social *and* psychological 'form'. If it is a "game" it is only in the sense that with rules in place, people can play it pretty well. Neither is Saussure concerned about being an "automata"; he definitely sees language as something that real people affect and engage in in spontaneous acts of everyday life. Finally, as for language threatening to cast the human subject as a set of "fleeting impressions," this worry seems to hinge on questions of mortality and scales of perception rather than questions of language per se. To return to your "throughout the universe" phrase, everything is fleeting, in a certain sense. It is a matter of temporal and scalar perspective how much 'fleetingness' we choose to see in things (or people). But I don't think this is a useful category for philosophic justification.
I return to my question: What does 'metaphysical' matter to you, Bryan? What do you lose without it? Answer as simply and directly as possible.
Sorry, I meant at the end of the last comment both A)Why does 'metaphysical' matter to you? and B) What does 'metaphysical' *mean* to you?
ReplyDelete