Hans Aarsleff

Ha ha, oh man. Hans Aarsleff and Konrad Koerner are two Germans each of whom sees himself as the saviour–arbiter of linguistic historiography, fighting back against reduction and presentism, making the past come to life for ungrateful present-day scholars to see it in its own vivid and surprising terms, making a place for different lifeworlds and extending the human tapestry. They're both brilliant, and on the same side, and pursuing essentially the same project--they even focus on different centuries, so you'd think they'd not have any reason to clash. But they hate each other and want to take each other's lives. Here, Aarsleff takes high dudgeon at a bunch of unjustified accusations from his doppelgänger and defends himself defensively. It's undignified if understandable and kinda hilarious but also dispiriting. I'm sure there's an article somewhere where Koerner does the exact same thing in reverse. Anthropological Linguistics 15(3).… (mais)

Aarsleff is full of opinions and needless vitriol and I can imagine situations in which that would be appealing, but here he doesn't really have anyone to fight against because who knows or cares about forgotten scholars with perplexing ideas like Horne Tooke or Reid or Trench or Dugald Stewart? They're all so much more forgotten than even Condillac, who is his main hobbyhorse, and it starts to seem a bit perverse. (This book was a PhD thesis originally, it should be noted, and maintains some of that forbidding insider's austerity.) The flip side, though, is passion, and Aarsleff can lead us with aplomb through all the weird debates of the age--the old vs. the new etymology, English lexicalism (the word as a base) vs. German system orientation (tha sentence), where language comes from and how science (comparative etymology) ended up being enlisted in the service of Victorian countersecularism (it proves it about the Tower of Babel! Proves!). Anyway, I found this quite entertaining, as you will too if your interests bend this way, but you will also have to put up with a lot (a lot) of untranslated passages in French and German.… (mais)

There's that bittersweet thing of becoming a little more versed in any field of endeavour and recognizing the faltering places or blustering coverups in that in which you formerly delighted uncritically. Like the first time you beat your dad at Scrabble.

Luckily, the flaws in Hans Aarsleff's From Locke to Saussure are small, and of a sort I can easily forgive--overstatements due to passion, as well as, perhaps, due to his semi-founder status in re the history of the philosophy of language, which makes/made him hard to gainsay--as in his convincing and needed takedown of the polemical Chomskyan version of said history in Cartesian Linguistics (which makes John Locke out unfairly to be a total buffoon and villain in matters of language, with deleterious effects not so much on the history of ling as a discipline, because I don't think people were reading Chomsky as such, but certainly on linguistics as practiced in mid-20th century America, namely the tendency to disesteem empirical Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics as simpleminded and go for deductive stabs at linguistic universals instead ... interestingly, as Aarsleff tells us here, something similar happened to Lock in the nineteenth century, although for sharply different reasons. Human fear of data. Anyway, Aarsleff is at his best in the essay in question, "Professor Chomsky and the History of Language"; smiting an easy target, he doesn't feel the need to fly the flag of properly contextualized understanding of these historical figures too insistently or sing the national anthem too loud.

Some other great essays in the collection: "Leibniz on Locke on Language", which figures Leibniz to be compatible in the particulars of his linguistic thought with the "Adamicist" version of linguistic history, where languages are the way they are because we can use them to reconstruct the language that Adam spoke, and thus learn about God's creation--leading to Leibniz's insistence of the importance of what would later be called comparative linguistics, but for mostly religious rather than ethnographic reasons.

"Condillac and the Berlin Academy Debate", in which the Berliners debated the questions of how language and culture affect one another and how, without divine intervention, humans could bootstrap their way into language. Aarsleff demonstrates, very convincingly, the way the framing of the question stems from the underappreciated influence of the French language philosopher Condillac, whose Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge imagines language as born out of spontaneous cries of fear and desire, which humans then learn to manipulate out of sympathy with one another and the desire to express harmony--a well-adjusted and loving philosophy that Aarsleff takes as key to understanding language theory in the eighteenth century. If language is social, then it flourishes into different cultural forms; if it is developing, then let's look at earlier languages to see what it might be developing from and toward. Thus begins the Romantic study of language as expression of a Volksgeist: Herder, Humboldt, &c.

Aarsleff makes the connection a little too strongly sometimes, as in a short paper on Condillac and Wordsworth which basically says "there's no evidence for any of this, but isn't it suggestive?", which you could basically do for anything and anything. He is partisan, which is interesting because there's not really an opposing party: the Condillacian influence that Aarsleff argues so convincingly for here has been less reviled than ignored. But he makes a strong case, rooted deep in the literature, as well as unpublished letters and the type of sources that a lot of scholars are insufficiently multilingual or, let's face it, too lazy to properly take up.

Since this is a collection, there's a certain amount of repetition, but taken on their own, most of the lesser essays--on the anti-Adamicism of John Wilkins and how it may have affected the foundation of the Royal Academy, in which he played a key role; on Taine and Bréal, unjustly forgotten French scholars of the later nineteenth century who pushed back against the out-and-out racism of the extreme versions of Volksgeister-philology purveyed by Germans like Schlegel; on their influence on Saussure, and the way in which his famous signifier-signified distinction can be related via Condillac to Locke's "double conformity", between the thing and the idea and then between the idea and the word. Don't mistake this book for a work of linguistics, but if you're interested in why modern linguistics looks the way it does, this is its prehistory, and if you're interested in the history of Western thought, this survey shows convincingly that theory of language is one essential proving ground.… (mais)

Magisterial. I suspect there's nobody in the world who knows as much about the intellectual history of Western approaches to language as Aarsleff; and certainly nobody who can bring together linguistic scientism and rationalist essentialism and empiricist conjecturism and even pre-Lockean mysticism and slap them each down and yet offer each a hand back up. That's the big-picture lesson here: every tradition has a piece of the truth, something to give.


The smaller lessons are many and varied. Many of them revolve around Condillac. There is a needed smackdown of Chomsky's 'Cartesian linguistics'--a fight still being fought on behalf of the historicists and the philologists and the sociolinguists on blogs like Language Hat and a certain very special "Chomsky vs. Labov" facebook group. There is a world of hard work represented re that most mindboggling of questions, the origin of language, and what it means if (or to the degree that) it comes from careful ideation and reflection, the production of concepts; or if/to the degree that it comes first, busting out of onomatopoeia and reflex action. There is a world of contextualization, which is so valuable--it's the easiest thing in the world for the modern scholar to just go "well, this came before that, and it looms large in our heuristic reconstruction of the intellectual environment of the era now, and there are certain homologies ... so let's just assume Warburton and Vico" or whoever "were reading each other and go get lunch."And then you read and realize that they weren't, and Warburton was coming out of a very practical English tradition and Vico was ... well, singular. And neither of them was reading Condillac, and yet he's so relevant: Zeitgeist shit. I'm not doing this justice, and the reason I'm not is because I am ignorant and impatient and sleep-cravy and Aarsleff is happy just to tend his garden and grow the BIGGEST TOMATOES EVER.… (mais)