Seminar 2: Is There Thought Without Language (in art)?

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Saturday, August 21, 2004, 5pm – 7pm

Auditorium, Parramatta Campus, University of Western Sydney
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Admission is Free

Is There Thought Without Language (in art)?

Convenor:

Anthony Uhlmann (Humanities, UWS)

Panel:

Anne Boyd (Composer, Professor of Music, Uni of Sydney)
J. M. Coetzee (Nobel Prize winning Novelist)
John Sutton (Philosopher, Macquarie Uni)
Anna Wierzbicka (Linguist, ANU)

Convenor’s Introduction

The question for today’s seminar brings a good deal of baggage with it. The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that words have a ‘taste’; that they carry the flavour of how they have been used before. Things get stuck to words, we associate objects, events, and contexts with them, and these associations can change the meaning of the words themselves. The word ‘terrorist’ for example, had a slightly different meaning before September 11, 2001 than it did after this date: to an extent, its meaning has now changed.A word like ‘thought’, then, carries contexts. More than this, though, it is a word which different groups might be seen to disagree about. There is something of a conflict here. What do we mean when we use the word ‘thought’, or the verb ‘to think’, and why is this of interest to the arts?

Bakhtin’s insight can be linked with something which a French philosopher of science, Michel Serres, has said about words more recently, in a book entitled Atlas. Serres suggests that words have memories. He means it quite literally, because, in this book, he explores the suggestion that it is not only people who think; even more than this, that it is not only ‘conscious beings’ which think; rather, he suggests that the universe itself could be understood to think. Things act upon other things in the physical world, and this process is deviously complex, so that each part might be understood to be in contact with every other part (something touched upon by quantum physics). Seen from a certain point of view, kinds of memory inhere in things other than people, and responses to signs are possible by things other than human beings (indeed, other than living things). For Serres, the rings of trees hold memories (as indeed would our bones and flesh); memories of what have gone before, as do rock formations, accumulations of ice and soil. Scientists can ‘read’ some of these memories. Inanimate things, for Serres, are equally able to act on signs: he gives the example of weather patterns which develop in response to particular circumstances. So too, microbes, plants, insects and animals witness signs in their natural environment and respond to them.

Serres’ argument is more complex, of course, but one of the questions he wants to ask is why we have come to believe that we human beings are the only things in the universe which think. Wouldn’t it be more rational to claim that our thought, our consciousness, and the language which (to an extraordinary degree) develops our ability to organise and direct our perceptions, came into being because it follows the laws of nature and the ineffably complex rules of causation set down by these laws? That is to say, is our thought just one kind of thought? Is it just a small part of a Universe which, without being understood to be ‘conscious’, nevertheless itself ‘thinks’, in that it interprets signs and acts upon them?

We have become a little sidetracked, and I moved away from Serres’ other idea; that words carry memories. You can trace these memories, he argues, through etymology. Think about the days of the week, for example. How many of us stop to think that when we say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we are invoking a number of Norse Gods: Tiw, Woden, Thor, Frei, a Roman God, Saturn, and the Sun and the Moon (as gods as much as things). We forget this, but the words haven’t yet forgotten. They remember, in some sense, some of the flavours they have carried, and put us into contact with our own history, which exists in those words like the rings in a tree-trunk, the strata of rock formations, and these associations, these memories which are not ours alone, continue to act in some sense, on our thoughts, directing, in part at least, what it is possible for us to think.

This is one view of a question which has many sides. Today we will be attempting to look at the question from a number of different angles. It is worth offering some sort of brief overview, however, of why the question is now re-emerging with new force.

The twentieth century, in many areas of the arts and humanities, including philosophy and various kinds of theoretical approaches to the arts, has been profoundly affected by a tendency to focus upon the importance of language to our thought, human thought. The tendency has been so pronounced that a term ‘the linguistic turn’ has been coined to describe it. Analytic philosophy and Structuralism, two of the most important 20th century critical movements, while otherwise divergent, have at their base theories of language, and these have come to dominate debates on what it means to think.

The discipline of linguistics does not yet have a very long history, having begun to emerge only in the late 19th century, and having been given particular impetus by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. At the very beginning, however, as is still the case today, there were important areas of disagreement about the nature of signs. An American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, working separately from Saussure, developed a theory which is in many ways quite different from that of Saussure in that it attempts to develop a theory of signs which goes beyond and outside language. Peircean semiotics contends, much like Michel Serres, that many things can work as signs to other things. This possibility is also left open in the work of Saussure, but, for Saussure, human language is taken as a model against which other sign systems are measured.

There has been a tendency, then, to discount notions that there can be thought outside language. Many issues arise because of this tendency. Do animals think, for example? Can what they do be called thought if it lacks the engines provided by language, which allows one to focus concepts, to organise ideas, to develop abstractions, and to store and retrieve information with astonishing efficacy? Do they have language (our kind of language)? If not, can they develop it?

One response might be: are we using the right model of sign system here? Do all sign systems have the same structure; do they need to share all the properties of human language? Or should we take a different approach? While Linguistics is a recent discipline, Philosophy has a long tradition of considering questions concerning thought, the mind, and consciousness. Like Linguistics, it might be claimed that dominant traditions have argued that there is something special about human thinking. That we think in ways that other beings do not think. Much of this tradition has tied the central importance of human minds to theories of the soul and the religious significance of our human being, which, in western traditions, has set us above the animals, in god’s image. There are important dissenting voices, of course. The Ancient Stoics, and Spinoza, for example, offer different models of thought and being which do not put human being firmly in the centre. Outside the western tradition, indeed, there are long and continuing traditions which integrate human being more fully with that of nature.

More recently, there has been a different approach to the problem, passing through theories of, and scientific modelling of, the brain (predominantly, but not exclusively, the human brain). This kind of work, which had already begun to develop to quite a high theoretical degree in the work of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James in the late 19th century, considers questions of consciousness. To simplify, one might argue that consciousness, in many ways, takes the place of, or stands in for, thought. To think is to be conscious. One could even read René Descartes’ famous formulation in this way, ‘I think therefore I am’. What is, and what comprises consciousness, however, is a difficult question, one which continues to exercise cognitive scientists.

Cognitive science has developed into an extremely important discipline, and it might be argued that it has come to challenge, though not head on, the dominance the discipline of linguistics has held over questions of thought and thinking in the humanities. Does to be conscious necessarily imply having language? The question, are animals conscious? Seems somehow different to the question, do animals think (like we think)? Are infants conscious before they speak? Other questions follow: when we are conscious, are we always conscious in language? Are there other ways in which we interact with our environment, respond to signs, and so on? Cognitive scientists have contributed to debates around the arts, by suggesting that we think through the emotions and sensations as much as through language. Contemporary philosophers, such as Martha Nussbaum, have taken up the challenge: she contends that life and art can involve processes which she terms ‘non-linguistic cognitive appraisal’. That is, we can think about things, evaluate them and respond to them, outside of language.

These questions are of immense importance to the arts. Yet the problems are extremely difficult, the knots almost Gordian. Samuel Beckett, in The Unnamable, wrote, ’silence once broken will never again be whole’, that is, once we are in language everything is touched by language, in a sense sullied by it, and mediated through it. The question of how, through art, it might be possible to get beyond language, was one which occupied Beckett for his entire career: he mentions explicitly in a letter he wrote in 1937. But Beckett was by no means alone in this. It is sometimes forgotten how many of the artists of the early 20th century were profoundly affected by models of thinking developed by Henri Bergson and William James, models which spoke of the image as something which could act directly on our senses and be immediately apprehended, without passing through the logic of language. Bergson spoke of intuition as this kind of immediate apprehension of the true.

That there are things we can feel but not express in words, has, however, since the linguistic turn, come to be looked upon as uncool and romantic in a pejorative sense. Yet wouldn’t it be paradoxical if one came to the view that when things really work on us as art, when they really affect us, they somehow do it by bypassing the surface of words, acting in our guts or through sensation. Maybe even language can get us beyond language: it can create music; it can create images which, like life, somehow elude simple, clear, sense. Wouldn’t it be ironic if it turned out that such a view was not at all naive, that, in fact, it was squarely based on models of perception which recognise that a conscious brain forms a part of the physical universe, a by no means isolated part. Wouldn’t that mean that rather than just being simply self-indulgent or ignorant, the Romantics, or the Modernists, for example, were responding not only to some contingent product of their cultural moment, but also to the immediate, impossible, real (which still, improbably, confronts us). That rather than artefacts they are thinkers, who remain our contemporaries.

One of the ongoing assertions made by this series of seminars is that art itself is a way of thinking; a way of thinking different to other ways. Bakhtin, whom I mentioned at the outset, suggests that certain kinds of novels are different to other forms, other ways of conceptualising the world, in part because they allow us to see an overview of different points of view, without judging between them. We, as the audience, are required to look at the various points of view offered by this kind of novel and decide for ourselves what we think about a given situation or problem. This is the model of thought the Sydney Seminar is based upon.

Today we have four speakers who are each extremely distinguished in their own fields. Each of these necessarily has an interest in the question of the relation of language to thought, or their own disciplines to thought. We have two artists, one a novelist, the other a musician and composer; we also have a linguist, and a philosopher who takes a special interest in cognitive science. While in no way hoping to reach consensus, and even expecting quite diverse views to be put forward and diverse approaches to be taken, we do expect that some thinking will be done today, much of it by you in the audience in the gaps between the speakers.

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Seminar 2