by David Hoyt
Reading the Boghossian report on current state of the humanities in American higher education I was, as I am sure were many others, struck with a sense of déjà vu. Relativism versus realism, an irresponsible academic left versus a scolding academic right, even the same malefactors singled out, as if a cold case from the 1990’s had been exhumed by a prosecutor determined to win the conviction that had escaped them years ago. A few admittedly cringe-worthy declarations of the subjective basis of all thought, together with Inquisitorial assertions of a single truth as the measure of all knowledge lend the document a theological tenor. And as history shows, theological debates tend to conclude only when both parties exhaust themselves and the terms of the debate are somehow shifted. Until this happens, skirmishes such as this one will probably continue to flare up along an ontological front drawn a little more than a century ago, in the context of similar cultural battles, and on either side of which stand opposing models of language.
Those opposing models, based on a then-emergent “ontological Yalta” (the phrase is French anthropologist Philippe Descola’s) between the sciences of nature and the sciences of culture, a sort of Great Divide between Nature and Spirit, emerged across an axis running between Vienna-Prague and Paris-Geneva at the turn of the 20th century. They shared a similar negative relation to the intellectual world of the previous hundred years, as well as a certain methodological orientation emphasizing logical coherence freed of and independent of historical determinations. The study of language, which had underwritten the historicism of the 19th century on the basis of comparative grammar, was being reworked and tested for its potential to provide a theoretical framework for the practice and meaning of science itself.
In light of the Boghossian report’s concern with what it claims is the politicization of scholarship in the humanities, it is important to recognize that what took shape in Saussurian linguistics and the philosophical enterprise of the Vienna Circle in the first three decades of the 20th century were two explicitly political projects. This is most evident in the case of the Vienna Circle, but demonstrable as well in the case of both Saussure and among those who took up his ideas in Prague beginning in the 1920’s. The formalist, ahistorical approach marshalled by both enterprises was pursued as a counterweight to the growth of racialist and nationalist political mobilization in France and Central Europe from the 1890’s to the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933.
Given this history, it is mildly ironic that the Boghossian report singles out the field of contemporary analytic philosophy, nominally affiliated with the pioneering thinkers of the Vienna Circle, for not allowing ‘background political considerations’ to distort their analyses of subject matter. At the time of the Vienna Circle, background political considerations were fundamental to the selection of, and methodological approach initially taken to, the wide range of subjects dealt with, often with explicit political outcomes in view. This should not be as shocking at it is often taken to be: Rudolf Carnap, a leading figure of the Circle, allowed for intuition, emotion, and chance in the formulation of a research question – at which point, he made clear, all must be put before the court of reason. Such is, in abbreviated and historicized form, the argument made in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the full text of which is included in the second volume of the Foundations of the Unity of Science, a sort of encyclopedia of logical positivism.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein stand as curiously similar figures in relation to the fields which they were to influence decisively. Although a generation apart, (Saussure was a contemporary of the Marshal Philippe Pétain, Wittgenstein a classmate of Adolf Hitler); both published only one book in their lifetime, with second book, considered to be the more important of the two, published posthumously. Both were intellectual migrants, occupying outsider positions within an adopted community – Saussure, a Swiss in France, and Wittgenstein, an Austrian in Britain.
Wittgenstein’s family was nearly consubstantial with fin de siècle Viennese modernism in all of its dimensions, a cultural milieu that has been closely linked to the crisis of liberal politics in late Austria-Hungary, a crisis acutely felt by the Empire’s Jewish population. Ludwig, the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, was to find inspiration at the Cambridge of Bertrand Russell rather than in his native Vienna. Saussure and Wittgenstein were thus both outsiders not only in terms of nationality, but in terms of religion as well. Wittgenstein, like a number of the Vienna Circle’s members, was of Jewish descent, while Saussure was from an old Huguenot family that had fled France during the religious wars of the 16th century. Both are seen today as somewhat oracular figures, single-handedly articulating new ways of thinking that subsequent generations would work to develop.
Saussure’s insistence on language as an autonomous object of study had its own context in the French professoriat’s delicate relationship with rising nationalism in France. Since its defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870, the modernization of French higher education had been led by a handful of philologists who sought to model it on the German university system without, at the same time, importing German race theories such as those positing language as a biological organism tied to distinct racial groups. Saussure was closest to a number of scholars of language involved in this modernization effort. The most prominent among them was the man who Saussure succeeded in his position at the Parisian École Pratique des Hautes Études, Michel Bréal, who was a committed supporter of the French Third Republic’s project of universal secular education. They are among those who came together in 1898 to publically support the falsely convicted Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus through the formation of the League of the Rights of Man. The classical philologist Louis Havet, who recommended Saussure for his teaching position in Paris based on Saussure’s doctoral thesis, later provided expert testimony which disproved the allegation that Dreyfus had written a treasonous note intended for German intelligence.
Saussure shared his mentor Bréal’s sensitivity to biological reductionism and stated as much in his Course of General Linguistics. By the time Saussure returned to his native Geneva and gave the lectures that would form the basis of the Course between 1907 and 1911, he had vicariously participated in the Dreyfus Affair. Although he had initially been taken in by the case against Dreyfus, he began to reverse his position shortly after Emile Zola’s famous open letter of 1898, denouncing a miscarriage of justice (“J’accuse!”), to which Bréal and Louis Havet were some of the first signatories. Bréal, a naturalized French Jew of German origin, had been a high-profile target of leading French anti-Semites since well before the Dreyfus Case, but thereafter became closely associated with alleged Jewish perfidy. Like Saussure, Bréal’s work stressed the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, as well as the semantic multivalence of words, or polysemia, a term he coined to illustrate the historically mixed and ‘impure’ basis of semantics, and which was later picked up by Derrida in his project to critique the presumptions of semantic stability.
It may be that Saussure’s collegial relations with prominent mentor figures in the French linguistic establishment helped to sway his initial anti-Dreyfusard position into accord with that of the League of the Rights of Man. He did not intellectually reject his Parisian colleagues in the uncompromising way he was to later break with his German teachers in Leipzig, the seat of German comparative grammar. According to Saussure, his transition to the Dreyfusard cause was ‘instantaneous’, as if a new reality suddenly became apparent all at once – using the same word, as the classical scholar Michael Lynn-George documents, that he would employ in the Course to describe the way language must be understood as a system – instantaneously.
Saussure was absolute in his insistence that language could only be understood as a closed system without reference to any external factors; it was a self-referential hypostatization on the order of a Durkheimian ‘social fact.’ What made language generate meaning was the opposition between units of sound that were independent of both written and spoken language. The logic of language was not to be found in grammar or in sentences. The linguistic sign, written or spoken, was arbitrary – it did not hook onto to anything outside of language.
Wittgenstein, in contrast, treated language in his early philosophy as providing a picture, ein Bild, that could, through the proper and careful use of language, be made to refer directly to the elements of the external world. The logic internal to language could be mapped onto the logical relation holding between things in the world. Language, when sufficiently polished and cleaned of impurities, necessarily points outside of itself.
In one of the many striking examples used by Saussure to illustrate his ideas, he notes in the Course of General Linguistics that the French word for ‘bird’ (oiseau) contains no single symbol that refers to any of the sounds of which the word is composed (which would otherwise be rendered ‘w-a-z-o’). For this reason, he wrote, ‘writing obscures language,’ a notion which neither Wittgenstein, Carnap, nor Otto Neurath would have disputed. Where they differed would have been in the implication: for Saussure, neither the textual basis of philological and grammatical reconstruction nor the physiological expression of a word in speech was where the essence of language was to be sought. For the Viennese, language was to be purified of all that obscured it and clouded its inner logic so that it could better serve as a mirror of reality. This could not be further from Saussure’s understanding. As he wrote in the Second Course, “Our ‘parts of speech’… division of words into nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. does not correspond to any undeniable linguistic reality.” Much less so does the word oiseau link with the feathered flying animal singing outside the window. Some other logic was at work.
Saussure’s target in this exposition was the school predominant at the time, mostly in Germany, which studied the evolution of languages by looking at the way historical changes in pronunciation led to specific alterations in a given language’s grammar. This historical emphasis could not account for the internal structure of a language at a specific time – what allowed it to function in the here and now, or instantaneously. Saussure argued that logical structure could not be imposed on language from without; indeed, language, though a social fact, was entirely beyond the control of any individual. “History shows that interference by experts is of no avail in linguistic matters.” Language is not a map, nor a picture of the world. In these respects, the Saussurian model is the antithesis of that posited by Wittgenstein in the latter’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The Course of General Linguistics and the Tractatus were published within five years of each other, the interval between them being filled with the events of the First World War. Saussure’s ‘Course’, in its argumentation reconstruction from student notebooks, suggests how modern linguistics might have emerged organically from within an established scholarly community. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, written in a wartime prison, reads like an insurgent, mitteleuropäisch manifesto born in a flash of insight. In introducing his idea of language as a series of logical propositions, he echoes Saussure: “Language disguises thought.” But Wittgenstein quickly diverges from semiology of the French school. “A proposition is a picture [ein Bild] of realty.” (4.01) “A proposition constructs the world with the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the proposition how everything stands logically if it is true.” (4.023) “A proposition communicates a situation to us, and so it must be essentially connected with the situation. And the connection is precisely that it is its logical picture.” (4.03) And, “The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives.” (4.0312)
Thus, for Wittgenstein at the time of writing the Tractatus (and this was to change in later years) the linguistic sign points outward, to an object, to the world. The system of logic in a linguistic proposition can map more or less closely to the logic of relations among objects in the world – a sort of analogism of micro- and macrocosm. If Wittgenstein reads somewhat like a shaman, that may be because he conveys a sort of mystical state necessary to serve as intermediary between the world of signs and the world of objects. Therein lies the possibility of evaluating the truth or falsehood of propositions in one influential text of early logical positivism.
For Saussure, however, his object of study being not logic, nor math, nor philosophy, but language – language does not point to anything beyond itself. It is, instead, a ‘system in which everything holds together.” If it embodies a logic, it is not that of Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism, Rudolf Carnap’s constructionist reduction to the given, or Neurath’s excision of statements lacking a physicalist basis. We can see already, in these contrasts, the basis for incommensurable frameworks of knowledge of the sort disclosed in the Boghossian report.
Given what the Vienna Circle was up against – the völkisch obscurantism of the right and the dialectical-materialist propaganda of the left converging in the powder keg of interwar Vienna – their efforts are understandable, one might even say heroic. There are suggestive parallels between the perceived corruption of language in the heyday of ethno-nationalist chauvinism –attributed by many at the time to yellow journalism – and our own era of fake news, misinformation, and algorithmically manipulated opinion. But it is not clear that the invention of a logical language with which to dispel all false claims about the world is a solution to our political situation. Partly this is because, by drawing a sharp boundary between true and false based on a mathematical model of logic, there is plenty of room left to dismiss whatever is considered to be irrational. Bertrand Russell’s views of the religions of extra-modern, indigenous peoples as essentially based on fear and irrationalism, are particularly Victorian examples.
But, at its most ecumenical, in the writing of Otto Neurath, logical positivism shows a surprising degree of openness to multiplicity and a wariness of truth claims as the central preoccupation of scientific work (he appears to have been influenced by the pluriverse philosophy of American philosopher William James in this way).
In the end, however, logical positivism in the period in question responded to the irrationalism of politics with a project for which the logical order of nature, as mirrored in a reformed, logical language, was meant to function as a defense, a rebuttal, and a tool for the improvement of the world. Carnap is very clear in his The Logical Structure of the World as to what the consequences are for what we today call the humanities: culture reduces to nature. “Since all cultural objects are reducible to psychological, and all psychological to physical objects, the basis of the system can be placed within the domain of physical objects.” In considering the grounds for his system, Carnap, in an aside, admits that “a system form with a cultural basis appeared to be unworkable.” At least, it seems, he tried.
The realism – relativism antagonism (for it seems to have become something more than a debate) appears, in light of these early 20th century developments, somewhat of a travesty. To use language that might have pleased some in the Vienna Circle, this antagonism is logically premised on a metaphysical distinction between Nature and Culture which neither the logical positivists, nor the semioticians of structural linguistics, were able or interested in overcoming. Saussure had anticipated that the semiological approach could be employed wherever meaning was generated – in the field of religion, ritual, fashion, sports, or politics – opening the door to what would become an expansionist program in the later 20th century whose only limit seemed to be the ramparts of the hard sciences, leaving the moat between Nature-Culture as wide and deep as ever. His student and later the pre-eminent language scholar in France, Antoine Meillet, observed at the time of Saussure’s passing that, when detached from history, change, or the individuals who speak it, language becomes a pale abstraction. It was a comment that presaged the dismissal of structuralism as unaccountable, “language talking by itself.”
The logical positivists, on the other hand, had next to no theory of culture other than that of reductionism, a void which was initially filled by various species of Marxism. Their interest in the revolutionary developments of early 20th century theoretical physics was a large part of what brought the Circle together. One could imagine a similar formation crystallizing in the more recent era of molecular genetics, with Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene serving as a rallying cry, as had Einstein’s articles on relativity, and genetic determinisms of various stripes providing the framework with which the group tried to reassemble a social order they perceived to be thrown into chaos. Committed to Descola’s “ontological Yalta” of Nature and Culture, this tradition of thinking is limited to employing falsification as an engine for the generation of truth and falsehood. When confronted with something else – say, the hemispheric mythological structures documented by Claude Levi-Strauss among the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their endless transformations according to internal logical principles, the idea of reduction to a physical-material statement is not terribly fruitful.
That said, there are elements of early logical positivism that feel very contemporary, especially in the writing of that jovial, polymathic socialist, Otto Neurath. We should be skeptical, he wrote, of anyone who is too eager to bandy the word ‘truth’ in relation to scientific work, as truth itself is a metaphysical concept not reducible to the given. As he argued in his essay of 1944, ‘The Foundations of the Social Sciences’, “[I]n the republic of the sciences we had better abstain altogether from using the terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ and their substitutes or weakened derivatives.” We should be open to multiplicity “which appears even within physics,” in the sense that any complex of statements of the given are only a subset of possible statements, others of which could result in a slightly different complex. A historical narrative would need to acknowledge the possibility of plural Cromwells, plural Robespierres, and of plural Londons, each acting within a pluriverse of valid statements. We should abandon the terminology of cause and effect, and explore instead the metaphors used by various indigenous pre-literate peoples to express how things might be thought to follow each other in time without recourse to a logical notion inherited from Scholastic philosophy.
Neurath’s interest and wide reading in anthropology is an appropriate place to close this essay, since the Boghossian report identified anthropology as the field most guilty of politicization, or what I understand to mean, at its core, the propagation of unfalsifiable statements. It is from contemporary anthropology, interestingly, that the most cogent calls have come for a critique and surpassing of the Nature – Culture ontological split inherited from late 19th century philosophical debates. This alone is certainly enough to get the field in trouble, but anthropology as a field has been an engine of scandal from the very beginning.