“The Language Animal” by Charles Taylor

This is slight departure from Taylor’s usual oeuvre. At first glance, this is a more scientific than philosophic endeavor. The book specifically deals with how, teleologically and historically, humans have used language—specifically how our species has used language to separate our mental representations from other animals. Taylor begins, “Linguistic beings are capable of new feelings which affectively reflect their rich sense of the world…. Linguistic beings can be sensitive to distinctions which are lost on prelinguistic animals. Important among these are distinctions involving moral or other values…. Only language beings can identify things as worthy of desire or aversion. For such identifications raise issues of intrinsic rightness. They involve a characterization of things which is not reducible simply to the ways we treat them as objects of desire or aversion. They involve a recognition beyond that, that they ought to be treated in one way or another…. Being in the linguistic dimension not only enables a new kind of awareness of the things which surround us, but also a more refined sense of human meanings…. Speech is the expression of thought. But it isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could exist independently. It is constitutive of reflective, that is, linguistic thought…. Our power to function in the linguistic dimension is tied for its everyday uses, as well as its origins, to expressive speech, as the range of actions in which it is not only communicated, but realized.”

Taylor makes the case that it is impossible to separate the growth of language from the evolution of human culture. “We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value…. We acquire the range of meanings which make up our world through an interplay of embodied expression, and of articulation…. Language allows us to think in universals, as we might say, using concepts and not just proper names…. To understand reality is to break it down into its component parts, and then map how they combine…. This epistemology stressed that our knowledge of the world was built from particulate “ideas”, or inner representations of outer reality. We combine them to produce our view of the world…. Reasoning is combining, and language helps us to do this expeditiously and on a grand scale.”

Language is more than just a third person-objective scientific description of the outer world and of nature. It is embodied in human reality and as such cannot be entirely separated from the subjective viewpoint. Taylor asks, “Would it be possible for us to drop all these other things: tropes, images, symbols, templates, and of course, gestures and literature, and just have this austere language of description and explanation? (I won’t even ask the question whether this would be desirable.) This is a question about human beings; we are not asking whether some kinds of beings which could be imagined could meet these austere and limiting specifications…. It is one of my basic claims in this book that this kind of restricted language is a human impossibility…. [There is an] impossibility of human language in the narrow sense outside the whole range of “symbolic forms”.”

Human language cannot be completely separated from subjective human expressions. “Possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation. In other words, we always sense that there are things we cannot properly say, but we would like to express.” Taylor quotes the polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt, “[There is always a] feeling that there is something which the language does not directly contain, but which the [mind/soul], spurred on by language must supply.” Taylor continues, “This endless striving to increase articulacy is the real point behind the famous Humboldt saying about using finite means to infinite ends. The “finite means” here doesn’t refer to an existing stock of words, as the Chomskian interpretation seems to assume; rather it is the finite stock of sounds at our disposal, with which we can find expression for an unlimited range of phenomena…. What Humboldt is on to here is the experience of wanting to say what we cannot yet satisfactorily express…. We need to find a formula which figures the phenomenon we are trying to disclose, be this through metaphor, or analogy, or creative extension of existing terms, or whatever…. The “right word” here discloses, brings the phenomenon properly into view for the first time…. We devise an expression which allows what we are striving to encompass to appear.”

In using language to map our reality, Taylor is describing a generative process. “To grasp a new meaning is to discover a new way of feeling, of experiencing our world. This cannot precede expression…. The constitutive power of language operates here in different ways, one might say at a different level, than it does in our description of independent objects…. In the realm of metabiological meanings, expression opens new and unsuspected realms. The new enacted and/or verbal expressions open up new ways of being in the world. We are in the domain of cultural innovation…. Many of the meanings in our lives come to exist for us when we mark distinctions heretofore unnoticed in our life experience…. After articulation, it becomes part of the explicit shape of meaning for us…. Articulation here alters the shape of what matters to us. It changes us…. The new articulated descriptions allow the world to impinge on us, to moves us, in new ways. That is why we call them “constitutive”.”

Taylor concludes, “The basic thesis of this book is that language can only be understood if we understand its constitutive role in human life…. I have tried to explain this constitutive force of language in terms of the “linguistic dimension”, where the uses of either words or symbols, or expressive actions, is guided by a sense of rightness…. Linguistic awareness is not limited to that facet of the semantic dimension, where the designative logic prevails; in other words, to that set of language games where we are concerned with accurate description of independent objects…. Language is also used to create, alter, and break connections between people. This is indeed, ontogenetically its “primordial” use…. And language can also open new spaces of human meanings: through introducing new terms, and/or through expression-enactment…. It is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Chronicles” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter introduces the last book of the Hebrew Bible, “Chronicles, fixed in Jewish tradition as the conclusion of the Bible, is, at least from a modern perspective, the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. In all likelihood, it was composed sometime in the late decades of the fifth century B.C.E., after the Return to Zion…. It was probably written by a priest…. The main focus of the book in on the kings of Judah…. Linguistically, because Chronicles hews so closely to the Deuteronomistic History, it does not exhibit a great many features of Late Biblical Hebrew, as one might expect, though not infrequently it reflects a certain loosening of syntactic and idiomatic norms that is characteristic of this late period…. Most prominently, this is a historical account that is intended to highlight the eternal legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty and its firm integration with the priestly hierarchy, which traces its own origins back to Aaron…. This is, in sum, a representation of David as an exemplary establishment figure, unswervingly virtuous, providing precedents and a model for the political and cultic tradition that he is seen as having founded…. It should also be noted that Chronicles incorporates a variety of narrative details that appear nowhere in the Deuteronomistic History. Where they come from remains a matter of conjecture…. In the end, Chronicles offers an object lesson in how as a tradition evolves it may be prone to domesticate the unruly and challenging traits of its own origins…. The national history is painted in black and white, and the haunting shadows, the chiaroscuro, the sudden illuminations of classical Hebrew narrative, vanish in this work.”

Chronicles is, if anything, primarily a list of names and details of the history of the Davidic dynasty. Alter notes that in 1 Chronicles 1:1, “Adam, Seth, Enosh. Chronicles begins abruptly with a patrilineal genealogical list that runs from the first man to Saul, his sons, and his grandson, at the end of chapter 9…. For the modern reader, this is scarcely an inviting way to begin a book.” In 1 Chronicles 4:9, Alter describes a bit of word choice detail and playfulness, within the original Hebrew, “I have born him in pain. Like many naming-speeches in the Bible, this one features a loose approximation between the name and its purported meaning. The Hebrew of her son’s name is ya’bets, and the word for pain is ‘otseb, the same three consonants that appear after the initial yod but in a different order.” Alter explains the main emphases of the book in 1 Chronicles 6:1, “The sons of Levi. The Chronicler appears to have had two special interests in compiling his lengthy lists—marking out the line of David, presumably in the hope of a restoration of the Davidic dynasty, and accounting for the priesthood, probably because he himself belonged to the priestly circles.”

In 1 Chronicles 12:2, Alter alerts us to a historical tidbit, “with either their right hand or their left. The Benjaminite warriors may in fact have trained themselves to be ambidextrous. In Judges 3, the Benjaminite Ehud is able to kill the Moabite King Eglon because, in a surprise attack, he suddenly pulls out his hidden short sword with his left hand.” In Chronicles 21:1 Alter notes another historical and vocabulary detail, “And Satan stood up against Israel…. In 2 Samuel 24 it is God Who incites David, but the Chronicler, not wanting to represent God as perverse, makes Satan the agent. At this late period, it looks as if “The Adversary “ (hasatan) is moving into becoming a demonic figure, and he appears here without the definite article ha, suggesting it has become a name, not just a function.”

Alter describes a bit of history revealed in 2 Chronicles 30:1, “to all Israel and Judah. Hezekiah came to the throne in 715 B.C.E., six years after the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians. If the report here is grounded in historical fact, it provides evidence that, although many of the subjects of the northern kingdom were deported by the Assyrians, substantial numbers of them remained. Hezekiah’s political move, then, is to unite the whole Israelite population, north and south, around the Temple cult in Jerusalem.” In 2 Chronicles 35:1, Alter alerts us to a vocabulary choice, “And Josiah made a Passover to the Lord in Jerusalem, and they slaughtered the paschal lamb. The same Hebrew word, pesah, sometimes refers to the festival and sometimes to the sacrifice of the lamb that is the key element in the celebration of the festival. The meaning must be judged according to context.”

Finally, Alter ends his annotations with 2 Chronicles 36:23, “and let him go. This is a single word in the Hebrew, weya’al, and according to the Hebrew canonical order, which this translation follows, it is the very last word of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition has accordingly made much of the appearance of this word at the very end: it is the verb used for “going up” from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel (and retained as such in modern Zionist usage), and it concludes this story of exile and Scripture as a whole on a literally upbeat note, Cyrus’s urging the exiled people to go back up to its native land.”

“The crisis of narration” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han always riffs on similar themes—the end of ritual, the decay of culture, and the effects of modernity. This short treatise revolves around the topic of narration and the purpose of stories in shaping man. Han suggests, “We live in a post-narrative time…. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments…. Without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times—no festive moods with their intensified feeling of being. All that is left are work and free time, production and consumption…. Ultimately, a narrative is an expression of the mood of a time…. Narration is a concluding form. It creates a closed order that founds meaning and identity…. Narratives create a community…. Wisdom is embedded in life as narrative.”

Narrative is an essential component of humanity. It is how we make sense of our world. Han states, “Human beings do not exist from one moment to the next. They are not momentary beings. Their existence comprises the whole temporal range that opens up between birth and death. In the absence of external orientation and a narrative anchoring in being, the energy to contract the time between birth and death into a living unity that encapsulates all events and occurrences must come from the self. The continuity of being is guaranteed by the continuity of the self.” The Self is made up of episodic memories, not an all-encompassing span. “Human memory is selective. This is how it differs from a database. It is narrative…. A narrative depends on a selection and connection of events. It proceeds in a selective fashion…. The narrated or remembered life is necessarily incomplete…. Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories necessarily have gaps…. To be able to narrate or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal.”

This book would not be a Han treatise if he did not explicitly condemn modern life. Han opines, “Life in late modernity is utterly naked. It lacks narrative imagination. Pieces of information cannot be tied together into a narrative…. The coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other…. By establishing strong connections between events, a narrative overcomes the emptiness and fleetingness of time. Narrative time does not pass…. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of life…. The eye of the modern city dweller is overburdened with protective tasks. It unlearns contemplative lingering…. Stories create social cohesion. They offer meaning and bear values that create community…. Myths are ritually staged shared narratives…. Shared action, the we, is based on narrative.”

Han espouses the essentiality of theory to cut through the thickets of modern data. “Correlations are the most primitive form of knowledge. They do not allow us to understand anything…. As a narrative, theory designs an order of things…. It develops conceptual contexts that make things intelligible…. Theory is a form of closure that takes hold of things and thereby makes them graspable…. The end of theory ultimately means the end of concept as spirit [Begriff als Geist]…. Only spirit is capable of a reordering of things, of creating a new narrative…. Data-knowledge marks the degree zero of spirit. In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers…. Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates—even risks to suggest—a new form of life and being…. New narratives allow for new forms of perception…. The world is, so to speak, re-narrated, and as a result we see it with fresh eyes…. Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent…. We lack the courage for philosophy, the courage for theory, that is, the courage to create a narrative. We must always bear in mind that, in the final analysis, thinking is also a narrating that progresses in narrative steps.”

“On Giving Up” by Adam Phillips

This is another short collection of essays by Phillips around the theme of giving up. Phillips begins, “We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. And so a giving up is always some kind of critical moment…. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future…. Giving up is at once a risk and a prediction.” He continues by describing the feeling of wanting, “It would be crude, but not wildly inaccurate, to see human history as a history of creatures tormented by their appetites…. Acculturation, we can see, has now become the really quite quick proliferation of wants…. Parenting and education teaching us what to want, and what to not want…. Modern people, we take it—at least in so-called detraditionalized societies—leave home to find, and to find out, what their parents can’t give them; the family circumscribes and defines and tries to fashion the child’s wanting, and then the modern child’s wanting exceeds what the family can provide…. Anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse…. In this account, we are always found wanting—in a state of dependent, and therefore ambivalent, need for others—and we are always and only preoccupied by what we need and want.” Phillips always selectively riffs (and attempts to modernize?) Freud, while paying due respect to the master, “Fulfillment and non-fulfillment of a vital necessity or desire, Freud suggests, may not be as different as they seem; the satisfaction of a wish and the frustration of a wish both entail suffering…. If wanting sustains us, it also threatens to destroy us; if not wanting starves us, it keeps us safe. In the Freudian story, what you most want is what you must not have.”

Phillips has an essay on the feelings involved with being left out. He explains, “It was Freud’s contention that we are involved in the lifelong project of leaving ourselves out of our own lives, that we can only survive by exclusion. Our unconscious includes us and excludes us at the same time…. In Freud’s view, people want to have as little in common with themselves as possible…. No one is remotely acceptable to themselves. Human beings, as Freud sees it, are radically at odds with who they take themselves to be…. He was looking at what we are tempted to leave unattended to in ourselves and others, at our passion for ignorance, our fear of our own desire…. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting…. There are all the ordinary accidents and catastrophes and frustrations of childhood: being left out of the satisfactions one seeks, the safety one requires, the unmet needs, the unrecognized preoccupations that will inform the child’s entire life…. We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want…. An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of self-identification. We try to make ourselves recognizable to ourselves and others.”

Finally, Phillips deals with the concept of projection, “From a psychoanalytic point of view traditional distinctions begin to attenuate and blur; there is no them and us, the sane and the mad, the good and the evil, the primitive and the sophisticated, reality and fantasy; or there is no them and us now, because we are described, by Freud, as projecting the unacceptable, the inadmissible, parts of ourselves, of which there are many, into other people. That what we are also really up against is the unacceptable and inadmissible in ourselves.” Freud, himself, proclaims, “We have recognized that it is not scientifically feasible to distinguish between what is psychically normal and psychically abnormal.” Phillips concludes, “What would it be, Freud gets us to wonder, to live in a society that believed in the unconscious? What could it possibly mean to believe in the unconscious? Which, of course, is not like believing in God, or love, or justice. It would be to believe that we are largely unaware of who we are, and that we mostly want to keep it that way because we are too disturbed by who we experience ourselves as being.”