Bridge of Words

By the end of the seventeenth century, the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) delivered a death blow to philosophical language projects. For Locke, the notion of words (or characters) with transparent, universal meanings was worse than a fantasy: "It is a perverting the use of words," Locke wrote, "and brings unavoidably obscurity and confusion into their signification, whenever we make them stand for anything but those ideas we have in our minds." Locke's stark, uncompromising theory of language in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) sapped words of all their power: the power to infallibly represent and refer, the power to convey one person's ideas to another, above all, their power to propound and compound knowledge.

Wilkins and Locke are divided by the watershed between ancient and modern views of language. Where Wilkins had been invested in the notion of a divine "curse" of Babel, Locke grounded the human capacity to understand (or misunderstand) language in God-given liberty. "Every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases,"³ wrote Locke, that no one could possibly evoke his own ideas in another's mind. In Locke's view, such mental "liberty" is rarely disruptive of communication when dealing with simple ideas; but when it came to moral ideas "concerning honour, faith, grace, religion, church &c.,"

⁴ one was as likely to misunderstand a term in one's own tongue as in a foreign one: "If the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were applied to another ... [there would be] two languages."⁵

Locke approached this predicament as a trial for society rather than as a conundrum for consciousness. Human beings, he observed empirically, were willing to forgo the radical liberty of language in favor of convention and conformity, entering into a sort of linguistic social contract. Speakers of a language were to avoid abusing words (especially as metaphor, which he libeled, famously, a "perfect cheat"); otherwise "men's language will be like that of Babel, and every man's words, being intelligible only to himself,

would no longer serve to conversation and the ordinary affairs of life" (my italics). It was for a novelist, Laurence Sterne, to reveal both the darkness and the comedy in Locke's vision, suspending his characters in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) between "hobby-horse" solipsism and dire miscommunication. When the amorous, anxious Widow Wadman asks Uncle Toby where he was injured during the Siege of Namur, Uncle Toby does not point to his mauled groin. Instead, he builds her a scale model of the battlefield and points to a bridge.

Where?... There.

After Locke, the era of the a priori language project—a philosophically rigorous language created from whole cloth—gave way to reformist a posteriori projects, which involved rationalizing existing languages. Such projects were abetted by a new interest in discovering a "universal grammar," residing deep within existing languages; this, in turn, prompted the development of "laconic," pared-down, grammars of European languages. By 1784, a rationalized, regularized French was disseminated in Count Antoine de Rivarol's "On the Universality of the French Language." In the glare of the French Enlightenment, language became the spear of reason, renovation, and revolution, and the ensuing revolutionary- Napoleonic period became a crucible for the power of language to remake the social order. Not only were monuments, streets, towns, and playing cards renamed; so were the seasons, the months, and the days of the week. Those named for kings—the Louises and Lerois —took the names of Roman liberators.⁶

But whereas in France language was coopted for reason and revolution, German thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment regarded language as an inherited armor against reason's ruthlessness. Language, since it evolved in tandem with historical, environmental, and racial factors, was culturally particular. Yet, as Giambattista Vico had argued in the New Science

of 1725, language was also universal, insofar as it evolved in all cultures according to universal patterns. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) believed that language shaped the entire worldview of particular cultures; while Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) held language as the means by which the Volk would shape its destiny. That language and culture were utterly enmeshed suggested to Humboldt a pair of looming dangers: language could not only estrange us from one another; it could also be used to injure people and damage whatever they held dear.⁷

4. A "Vexed Question of Paternity"