Language and Passions

Or: 'I'm lost for words'

Lia Formigari

1. Significar per verba . . .

That language can evoke passions and influence behaviour is generally taken for granted and stated by a long tradition, from Aristotle to the art of advertising. The relationship between language and passions is much less obvious however, when formulated in these terms: can language speak passions? What is immediate cannot be expressed without losing its immediacy. It can, if anything, be shown, indicated per exempla. "Transumanar significar per verba Non si poria", writes Dante ('Paradiso', I, 70--72), "per6 l'esemplo basti A chi esperienza grazia serba". The example, to be effective, requires that the hearer himself has experienced that state of consciousness: a state of grace in Dante's words, a state of receptiveness in any case, the influence of an acting cause which produces an alteration or transmutatio organica. Philosophers have sometimes given theoretical dignity to the c o m m o n expression "I'm lost for words", taking up an old theme of the Logosmystik and talking about language as of a device which unveils but at the same time veils and dims the mind's contents, as an impoverished transcription of intuitive richness. Wir k6nnen unsere Gef[ihle nicht anders in uns befestigen, als mittelst eines Begriffes, den wieder nut das Wort lest h~ilt . . . . Das Wort aber ist unverm6gend, das Gefiihl jedes mal wieder zu erwecken, und so geschieht es, das wir misstraulich werden gegen das Wesen, und es selbst fiir ein blosses Wort halten (Jacobi, FB, pp. 164--65). We instinctively try to solidify our impressions in order to express them by language, and thus we end up confusing our feelings with the words which express them, we end up living them through their verbal translation. Le mot aux contours bien arr&ds, le mot brutal, qui emmagasine ce qu'il y a de stable, de commun et par consequent d'impersonnel dans les impressions de l'humanit~, 6crase ou tout au moins recouvre les impressions d61icates et fugitives de notre
Topoi 6 (1987), 99--104. 9 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.

conscience individuelle. Pour lutter h armes ~gales, celles-ci devraient s'exprimer par des mots pr6cis; mais ces mots, fi peine form6s, se retourneraient contre la sensation qui leur donna naissance, et invent6s pour t6moigner que la sensation est instable, ils lui imposeraient leur propre stabilit~ (Bergson, 1889, p. 87). Unlike things then, feelings and passions cannot be spoken. Unlike things: this is the point. To maintain the unspeakability of passion and feeling, one has to state the speakability of things "as they are". Only by starting from this premise is it possible to establish the impotence of language when confronted with everything which is not a thing: the stream of consciousness, for instance, states of mind, feelings and passions. And so, paradoxically, conscientialism ends up meeting with that rough form of empiricism which one may call intuitive materialism. Just like this, in fact, it conceives things and events as objects which are separated from every subjective activity, simply proposed to the subject by passive receptivity. A consequence of this kind of empiricism is the theory of the specularity of language, the idea that language is a range of names, of labels, to be attached to things or classes of things and events. Philosophy has dealt with many versions of intuitive materialism, from that of naive prescientific realism to the m o r e refined one of logical atomism. And this conception of language has been supported for a long time by the ability of science to grasp essential forms, as affirmed by traditional metaphysics. In the 17th century, criticism of scholastic epistemology proceeds at the same rate as the elaboration of the theory of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, and attempts to limit the extent of linguistic arbitrariness accompany every restoration of a metaphysics of substances. Projects of artificial or "philosophical" language are also rooted in the idea of language as nomenclature, as a large table on which counters representing things may be placed and classified in categories (the parts of speech) and arranged syntactically according to logical universal laws.

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LIA FORMIGARI 16th-century interpreters (Della Volpe, 1956) as well as in the tradition of humanistic anti-aristotelianism (Apel, 1963; Grassi, 1977) -- but as the very principle of linguistic production. This is a decisive moment for the crisis of referentialism in semantic theory. It is not difficult to trace the reasons which led 17th-century philosophers to stress the importance of metaphorical thinking, adopting a principle which philology and, particularly, etymological studies had so often used to explain the "cause" of primitive roots. Philosophers, after Descartes, have to explain the mutuus quasi foedus, that sort of reciprocal compact, as Clauberg says (ThC I, p. 188), which holds between the two substances, the body and the mind; and they find in language the only device which allows sense experience to be represented by concepts. This is an element of psychologism characteristic of many so called "cartesian" logics: the stress on subjective conditionings which makes them analize mind's behaviour rather than the contents of thought. Modes of the mind can be known only by comparing them with modes of the body: this gnoseological principle that we find in one of Descartes' followers, La Forge (1666, p. 174), we also find as a foundation of Locke's and his followers' psychologism. Even Vico, in spite of his anti-empiricist and anti-cartesian attitude, has at least this in common with his adversaries: the urge to explain the mutual action between the two "eternal principles", the mind and the body. And language once again resolves the dualism, introducing the laws of subjectivity into the structures of; thought, turning thought itself into a process of interpretation of things (SNS, p. 445). The hermeneutical behaviour of thought and its semiotic tools is described also in Locke's philosophy of knowledge. Signs, Locke taught, refer to entities which they themselves define and build, shaping the essence together with the name. Names certainly do not cover all the properties of the object: indeed, they include some and exclude others under the influence of historicalempirical motivations. The linguistic act, which can never rely on the real essence of the object, is therefore an act largely determined by practical factors. This is, in extreme synthesis, the content of the third book of Locke's Essay on H u m a n Understanding, and a theoretical presupposition of any further reflection on language. Language therefore becomes a hermeneutical device in two respects: in that it constitutes objects and classes of objects in speech production, and in that it proceeds

In 1765 James Harris put a head of Hermes as an emblem on the title page of his celebrated ~hdosophical grammar, because -- he explained -- "no other part of the human figure but the h e a d . . , was deemed requisite to rational communication". The image and its explanation have been recently commented on by Roy Harris in these words: The beheaded Hermes may be seen as symbolical of a fallacy which threatens to distort the perspective of much modern linguistic theorising. It is the idea that language is somehow separable from the rest of man's bodily activities and physical behaviour; the idea that a linguistic community is just a congregation of talking heads (Harris, 1980, Preface).

2. Mutuus quasi foedus. . .

This accusation of mentalism may be justified in the case of the tradition of grammatical and syntactical studies, but it needs a closer examination when considering the history of semantic theories. With the spreading of the notion of linguistic arbitrariness in western thought, the use of names -- both as primeval onomathesia and as a reiterated creation of meanings in common speaking -is more and more frequently and consciously presented as an act of interpretation of reality. And more and more frequently the hermeneutical act which supports the semantic function becomes the place where the bodily dimension breaks into the network of concepts, giving back to thought that historical-empirical import which rationalist tradition tended to obliterate. The "dualism of pathos and reason" -- to use an expression by Ernesto Grassi (1969), is mediated by linguistic devices, primarily by metaphor. Metaphor is presented as an instinct, embodied by a genius named Pantomimus, who leads us to project into things that sensitivity which is our own legacy (Geulincx, 1652, p. 45). Vico, in a well known passage of Scienza Nuova (SNP, p. 273, SNS, pp. 447, 484--86), points out the tendency to "explain spiritual things in relation to the things of the bodies" -a necessity which is inborn in the corporeal nature of man -- and he makes it (SNS, p. 447) the "universal principle of etymology of all languages". The same assumption of metaphorical thinking as a general semantic principle is put forward by Locke when he refers to the sensitive origin of meanings, even the most abstract ones (1690, III, i, 45). In 17th-century philosophy, metaphor comes to be seen no longer only as a cognitive tool -- as it was already for Aristotle and his

LANGUAGE AND PASSIONS by trial and error so as to make enunciation coincide with understanding in social communication. We speak as if there were in the mind of the hearer the same notion of the object as there is in ours (Locke, 1690, III, x, 34). The ability of words to convey meanings is based on this tacit presupposition. If there is no one-to-one relationship between name and thing, interpretation is made necessary in the subjective act of thinking as well as in the dialogical act of speaking. In this double hermeneutical procedure, there is evidently ample room for the intervention of subjectivity. All the history of 18th-century linguistics might be told from this point of view. Subjectivity imposes itself by the abuse of words, this frequent and often unconscious device of social action against which philosophers never tire of warning us. It imposes itself as a cause of diachronic and diatopic variation of languages. Finally, a problem arises which, beneath its gnoseological appearance, hides a linguistic substance: how do we pass from intuition to concept or, which is the same thing, how does it happen that the name, which is always general, is applied to experience, which is always particular? Herder, who was particularly concerned with the hermeneutical function, not only of language but of every activity of our "ganzer empfindender Mensch" (Herder, 1799, p. 83), realised the equivalence of the two formulations -- Kant's gnoseological and Locke's linguistic formulation. To Herder, passions are a particular case of the "idiosyncrasies" which generate that "Eins in Vielem durch vorrufende Merkmale" (p. 85), the semiotic unification of experience which holds at every stage of psychic life, from perception to verbal thought. An einem kleinen Merkmal wacht eine Welt der Gef/ihle in uns auf; was mit ihm gesagt wird, ist uns innig gesaget, da ohne dergleichen m~chtige Einheiten, denen die ganze Seele zu Gebot steht, der ganze Mark andrer Significationen uns ein todter Wortkram bleibet (p. 86) The "idiosyncrasy" H e r d e r was talking about was to be elevated to a category of collective thought in Humboldt's philosophy of language and in the developments which Vrlkerpsychologie provided in the second half of 19th century. The theory of "Weltbild", which is the extreme and consequent enunciation of the principle of interpretation related to semantic activity, is referred there to historical-natural languages more than to language in general. This means that the linguistic subject is no longer the individual; it is rather the

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community of speakers. Semantic categories, bearers of collective subjectivity, become world-interpreting forms.

3. Language and diairesis

Humboldt's philosophy of language is an obligatory step in the study of the theme of subjectivity in the theories of speech production. The emphasis with which Humboldt stresses the synthetic function of language mediating between spontaneity and receptivity is unprecedented in the history of linguistic theories. In speech, the entire mode of subjective perception is operating, and this makes the word something different from a mere copy of things. Language "beruht immer nothwendig aus der Gesammtkraft des Menschen; es l~isst sich nichts von ihr ausschliessen, da sie alles umfasst" (Humboldt, "1830-35, p. 412). Language not only expresses but also stimulates and strengthens feelings and passions, which the speaker puts into it but also finds already shaped there by the memory of the linguistic community. Language is not merely passive; indeed, it chooses from the infinite variety of conceptual tracks a particular one and follows it (p. 412). Die Verkniipfungen wachsen aber den Begriffen nur dann wirklich zu, wenn das Gemiith in innerer Einheit th/itig ist, wenn die voile Subjectivit~it einer vollendeten Objectivitfit entgegenstrahlt. Dann wird keine Seite von welcher der Gegenstand einwirken kann vernachlfissigt, und jede dieser Einwirkungen l~isst eine leise Spur in der Sprache zuriick. Wenn in der Seele wahrhaft das Gefiihl erwacht, dass die Sprache nicht bloss ein Austauschungsmittel zu gegenseitigemVerst~indiss, sondern eine wahre Welt ist, welche der Geist zwischen sich und die Gegenst~indedurch die innere Arbeit seiner Kraft setzen muss, so ist sie auf dem wahren Wege, immer mehr in ihr zu finden und in sie zu legen (pp. 566--67). Heymann Steinthal, the most enthusiastic among Humboldt's followers of the first generation, attempted a "positive" transcription of these doctrines shaping his master's metaphysical idealism into a gnoseological phenomenism. This allowed him to stress the theme of the hermeneutical nature of language and experience in general (in the direction which will later be that of Gestalpsychologie), without running into that "protagorism" of which he accuses the great authors of classical German philosophy and Humboldt with them. I shall not discuss here whether or not Steinthal was

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LIA FORMIGARI historical-natural language. And finally we find there that reflexive metalinguistic component in the use of our words (De Mauro, 1985) which always accompanies speech. In all these procedures non-verbal thought is not an element of incidental disturbance but an essential ingredient of linguistic interaction; there where it seems to disturb communication ("I'm lost for words") it is searching for new points of view and tricks and devices; it is working by attempts (versuchend) towards that selfverification through someone else's understanding which is what Humboldt is talking about in the passage quoted above; it is, in fact, activating the metalinguistic component which is inherent to speech9 With his insistence on the mutual influence of nonverbal and verbal experience, Humboldt's follower Steinthal had advised the linguistics of his time to research into the birth of "sprachliche Darstellung", into the elements of linguistic activity which are rooted in the vast dominion of feeling ("das weite Gebiet des Gemiiths": Steinhal, 1881, I, p. 3). This was the way 19th-century psychologism was going in general, and Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms is one of its developments. But Cassirer reformulates its problems from the standpoint of a linguistic transcendentalism which goes back to the idealistic side of Humboldt's philosophy which Steinthal (1848; 1888) had rejected. In so doing he sets the theoretical premises of that teleological subordination of all symbolic behaviour to the theoretical form where knowledge reaches its highest level of universality. This idealistic outcome has probably contributed to prevent modern linguistic theorizing from recovering the body of the beheaded God, as Roy Harris complains in the passage quoted above. Now the recovering or reconstruction of that body presupposes the working out of a model of communication which rejects the idea of language "with job secure words" (Harris, 1981, p. 175); a model, indeed, where semantic indetermination becomes a condition of the use of words 1. It presupposes a consideration of that trial and error procedure which always involves the metalinguistic component of speech, and which allows to build and rebuild the object through verbal interaction. Plato thought that the dialectician had the function of controlling the work of the name-giver 2, that is of verifying within speech the "rightness of names". But in

correct in reading Humboldt from a phenomenistic point of view. It is certain, however, that few authors in the history of language theories lend themselves as Humboldt does to such diverse and contrasting interpretations. And in the vast and complex body of his linguistic writings, we may find plenty of hints which justify an interpretation of Humboldt's philosophy of language as a study of speech "in der Erscheinung". I should like to emphasize one in particular. Man, writes Humboldt, .. versteht sich selbst nur, indem er die Verstehbarkeit seiner Worte an Andre versuchend gepriifthat. Denn die Objectivit~it wird gesteigert, wenn das selbstgebildete Wort aus fremdem Munde wiedert/Snt. Der Subjectivifiitaber wird nichts geraubt . . . . ja auch sic wird verst~irkt, da die in Sprache verwandelte Vorstellung nicht mehr ausschliessendEinem Subject angeh6rt (Humboldt, 1830--35, p. 429).
9

I would like to stress in this passage the expression

versuchend (by attempts), which refers both to the

production and the understanding of language. The thesis of the uncommunicability of subjective states, exemplified in the words of Bergson, implies, in addition to the crude semantic referentialism I mentioned above, a simplified version of the enunciation-understanding procedure, conceived as a sort of pouring out of psychic contents from one subject to another, operated through the conduit of language. Words are conceived as repositories: this is what Bergson does when he ascribes the discrepancy between interior states and language to the spatial character of the latter. This is a standpoint which ignores two essential aspects of communication procedures. The first -- and we must again go back to Humboldt's lesson -- is the fact that historical-natural languages, being objective formations, give speech directions which are in some way known to the speakers; the second is the return effect which Humboldt refers to, of the understanding of others. Both aspects are inherent to the dialogical nature of speech, which is never pure enunciation of its object, but a construction of it. Linguistic strategies tie enunciations down to significances which have already been built and are rooted in the historical-natural languages. Amongst those strategies there is the example, as Dante says; there is the deviating denomination, the impertinent predication, the creation of new semantic pertinence so well described by Ricoeur (1975). There we find all linguistic tricks and transgressions apt to redescribe a situation; the entire repertoire of heuristic potentialities of a

L A N G U A G E AND PASSIONS actual speaking every o n e is at the same time a n a m e -

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giver a n d a dialectician. If o n e n o longer has as a term of

reference that ontological structure already classified p e r genera to which the Platonic dialectician could refer, all the m o r e r e a s o n for h i m to integrate what he says with the series of p r e s u p p o s i t i o n s which are n o t explicitly f o r m u l a t e d in the semantic structure of the e n u n c i a t i o n ; with contextual linguistic factors (what has b e e n said elsewhere, what c a n b e said otherwise, what is implicitly said, what the d i c t i o n a r y of his n a t u r a l language makes him say a n d m a y b e he d i d n ' t want to s a y . . . ) . T h e "dialectician" will have to judge the "rightness of n a m e s " from their heuristic-resolutive p o w e r o n the c o m m u n i c a t i v e situation of that m o m e n t . A n d this holds true w h e t h e r we are speaking of "things" or feelings a n d passions. In a n y case diairesis will i n t e r v e n e as the metalinguistic d i m e n s i o n of speaking.

Notes
In Roy Harris' criticism of "orthodox linguistics" and its assumption that we communicate by means of "internalized dictionaries" (1981, p. 187), a model of "hearer-speaker" is delineated, which is conditioned so little by historical-natural languages that he risks being no less "ideal" than the Chomskian hearer-speaker which he criticizes. It is not clear why in the simultaneous analysis of "relevant past experience" and of "current communication situation" which is the job of integrational linguistics, the values learnt through linguistic practice should be irrelevant. Interaction between subjectivity and objectivity in language, as both the creation of a speaker in current communication situation and a formation which is outside him, is certainly one of Humboldt's contributions which, once taken out of their idealistic context, remain in any "case valid "in der Erscheinung". 2 This point I have discussed with Donatella Di Cesare during a lecture on 'Logic and Language in Plato's Sophist' which she held in Urbino (Facolt~t di Lettere, April 21, 1986)..1 thank her for the suggestions.

References
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Della Volpe, G.: 1956, Poetica del Cinquecento, in 'Opere', V, Roma, 1973, pp. 103--190. De Mauro, T.: 1965, lntroduzione alia semantica, Bari. De Mauro, T.: 1982, Minisemantica, Bari. De Mauro, T.: 1985, 'Appunti e spunti in tema di (in)comprensione', Linguaggi 11.3, pp. 22--32. Formigari, L.: 1987, 'Pantomimo e i filosofi', in Le vie di Babele, a cura di D. Di Cesare e S. Gensini, Milano, pp. 10--15. Geulincx, A.: 1652, Oratio I, dicta in auspicio questionum quodlibeticarum, in 'SfimtlicheSchriften', hrsg. von H. I. de Vleeschauwer, I, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstat, 1965, pp. 11--66. Grassi, E.: 1969, 'Filosofia critica o filosofia topica? I1 dualismo di pathos e ragione', Archivio difilosofia, pp. 109--121. Grassi, E.: 1977, 'Preminenza del linguaggio razionale o del linguaggio metaforico? La tradizione umanistica', Archivio di filosofia, pp. 67--94. Harris, J.: 1765, Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar (Anglistica & Americana. A Series of Reprints Selected by Bernhard Fabian, Edgar Mertner, Karl Schneider, Martin Spevack, Hildesheim--New York, 1976). Harris, R.: 1980, The Language-Makers, London. Harris, R.: 1981, The Language Myth, London. Herder, J. G.: 1799, Verstand und Erfahrung, Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunfi, in 'S~immtlicheWerke', hrsg. von B. Suphan, Berlin, 1877--1913, Vol. XXI (Hildesheim, 1967-1968). Humboldt, W. von: 1830--1835, (Jber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, in 'Werke', hrsg. von A. Flitner and K. Giel, III ('Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie'), pp. 368--756. Jacobi, F. H.: FB = Fliegende Bldtter, in 'Werke', hrsg. von F. Koeppen, VI, pp. 131--242. La Forge, L. de: 1666, Traitt~ de l'esprit de l'homme, de ses facultez et fonctions, in 'Oeuvres philosophiques', 6d. prrsentre par P. Clair, Paris, 1974, pp. 69--351. Locke, J.: 1690, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in 'Works', I, London, 1714. Ortony, A. (ed.): 1979, Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge. Reddy, M. J.: 1979, The Conduit Metaphor, A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language about Language, in Ortony A. (ed.), 1979, pp. 284--324. Ricoeur, P.: 1975, La m~taphore vive, Paris. Steinthal, H.: 1848, Die Sprachwissenschaft Wilhelm yon Humboldts und die Hegelische Philosophie, Berlin. Steinthal, H.: 1860, f3ber den Idealismus in der Sprachwissenschaft, in 'Kleine sprachtheoretische Schriften', hrsg. von W. Baumann, Hildesheim--New York, 1970, pp. 380--414. Steinthal, H.: 1881--1893, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 2 vols., Berlin (Hildesheim--New York, 1972). Steinthal, H.: 18884, Der Ursprung der Sprache in Zusammenhang mit den letzten Fragen alles Wissens, Eine Darstellung, Kritik und Fortentwicklung der vorziiglichsten Ansichten, Berlin (prima ed. 1851). Vico, G. B.: SNP (= Scienza Nuova prima), 1725, Principi di una Scienza nuova intorna alia natura delle nazioni per la quale si

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ritruovano i principi di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti, in 'Opere filosofiche', Introduzione di N. Badaloni, testi, versioni e note a cura di P. Cristofolini, Firenze, 1971, pp. 169-338. Vico, G. B.: SNS (Scienza Nuova seconda), 1744, Principi di scienza nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni . . . . in 'Opere filosofiche', pp. 377--702.

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