Hovering over Alexander Stern’s ambitious volume about Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein on meaning is the thesis promoted by Charles Taylor’s 2016 The Language Animal. According to Taylor, we have inherited two abiding conceptions of language. On the one hand, there is the “designative” or instrumental notion of language issuing from the likes of John Locke’s 1689 An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s 1746 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. On the other hand, there is the “constitutive” or holistic construal of language derived, for example, from such works as Johann Gottfried von Herder’s 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s 1836 On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Stern ultimately aims to demonstrate that not only is Benjamin operating within the latter framework, a largely Germanic nineteenth-century tradition, but also that Wittgenstein so operates despite being acclaimed a major figure of the twentieth-century Anglo-American analytical tradition.

          Broadly speaking, the two conceptions of language betray major contrasts. The designative arises from within the Cartesian context of separating body and mind in which language aims to correlate the physical and the mental realms. Its principal task centres upon classifying, defining, or describing what can be experienced independently of language. Without clinging to Cartesian presuppositions, language from a constitutive point of view aims to portray how the mental and the physical realms cohere. Its principal task consequently tends to centre upon what can be expressed through language by our maturing ability not only to master it, but also to develop and enlarge it.

Noticeable, however, is that Stern appears not to challenge Taylor’s thesis. Several issues need raising from the very outset. For instance, has there been a far greater melding of designative and constitutive theoretical positions rather than a mere dichotomy? Is there too singular a focus upon Herder’s 1772 treatise at the expense of his subsequent texts and thinking? Is there a slippage when applying constitutive theories of language to thought and meaning and to the phenomena they may involve? Finally, as school children quickly realise, Hesperos, son of the goddess Eos, refers to the Evening Star as does Venus, a planet within our solar system. Yet if different languages can refer to the same object, do they do so, conceptually speaking, with the same sense?

          Issuing from Taylor’s thesis, Stern adopts a distinctive perspective largely unfamiliar to Anglophone readers. He proposes that the highly rhetorical, if not “impenetrable” (142), texts of Johann Georg Hamann from 1759 onwards are directly pivotal to comprehending Benjamin’s often “obscure” and rather “idiosyncratic” theory of language (133) beginning with “On Language as Such…” (1916). Much of Stern’s energy is devoted to a detailed exegesis of published and unpublished writings of both men, a scholarly exegesis ranging from teasing out verbal nuances to locating textual fragments in support of influences adduced (e.g. 40-55, 141-152, 189-196). Within the space available here, perhaps readers of Metapsychology new to Hamann may be better served if this review left extended comparative and exegetical aspects aside. The same aspects also re-emerge in the case of the later Wittgenstein (e.g. 219-222, 239-243, 245-248, 355-362), although largely moderated through Fritz Mauthner’s 1901/1903 multi-volume critique of language.

Heeding Stern’s warning that we are entering “a thicket in which the approaching reader must expect to get lost” (133), we shall firstly pinpoint crucial theoretical linguistic factors common to Hamann, Herder, and von Humboldt affecting Benjamin. Next, we shall briefly consider how Wittgenstein is used by Stern and why. Thereafter, we shall end with more explicit psycho-linguistic issues recognisable to the majority of Metapsychology‘s readers when Benjamin’s 1935 paper “Problems in the Sociology of Language” enters Stern’s purview whilst contending that Lev Vygotskii’s “line of research…accords with a broadly Benjaminian understanding of language” (169).

I

Without implying unanimity in their specific claims, emphases, and conclusions, a summary of key theoretical linguistic questions confronting Hamann, Herder, and von Humboldt should enable readers unfamiliar with these intellectuals to appraise the force of Stern’s more specific interpretations of Benjamin figuring in The Fall of Language:

[1] To what extent is thought fundamentally dependent upon and constrained by language? In other words, can we only think if we have a language and can we only think what we can express linguistically (which, it should be added, is not to say that thought is purely identifiable with language)?

[2] Can meanings or concepts ever be equated with entities or things separate from language such as the referents or objects involved or subjective mental or inner ideas? Or are concepts or meanings more appropriately construed as the uses of individual or groups of words, be they spoken, written, or signed?

[3] To what degree are our acts of conceptualisation imbricated with our affective and perceptual sensations? If so, are our non-experiential or non-empirical notions developed by means, say, of metaphorical extensions of our experiential or empirical ones?

[4] In so far as individuals within different, or even within the same, times and places, communities and cultures express different concepts, beliefs and so forth, is the task of interpreting and translating tantamount to attending to the uses of words within the salient, if not interactive, conventions or purposes at work (and, by implication, reconstructing the affective and perceptual sensations involved)?

[5] Do our acts of interpretation ultimately commit us to a holistic stance? For instance, is the holistic approach manifested when attempting to resolve ambiguities in expression by the enveloping text or utterance; or when trying to fathom the range of possible meanings or uses of an expression where collocations have to be sought beyond the text or utterance itself; or again when recognising the meaning of a text or utterance need not be simply conveyed in particular segments as if reducible to a single syllogism but unfolds as a whole?

For a recent response to these kinds of questions that “shares a great deal with Benjamin’s view,” Stern (161-162) directs us to the initial chapter of Taylor’s book discussed above.

          Against the foregoing, Stern’s account of Benjamin’s principal contentions can, although not effortlessly, be more securely grasped. This is immediately evident when considering one or more of the following half-a-dozen examples gleaned from the opening two chapters: the need to move “the locus of knowledge from consciousness—the supposed possessor of knowledge—to language—the medium of its expression” (17); the re-orientation of “non-scientific forms of experience….not as subjective, psychological projections onto a world of objects, but as translations of meaning already present in reality” (18); the “kind of ideal naming-language,” allegorically conveyed by Genesis 2.19-20, “must be regarded as the foundation of human language” such that “other capacities of human language—designation, concept-use, abstraction—can only be properly seen as derived from this foundation” (54); the development of language cannot only “reflect, or influence the development of the human relationship to the world” because both are “inextricabl[y]” connected (60); the “restricted” view of translation “exaggerates the differences between human language[s] by isolating them from each other and ignoring the fact that they are all themselves translations of the same thing, namely language as such” (63); and, finally,

Pure meaning is an ideal…we never reach. Still, in the act of translation…we

are provided a partial glimpse of the totality from which individual words are

fallen (68).

II

Wittgenstein—whose exploration of language-games, private language, and aspect-perception to mention those probed by Stern, has permeated disciplines distinct from philosophy and psychology—enters Stern’s monograph from the sixth of its nine chapters onwards. Stern immediately states his rationale for including Wittgenstein as one whose “philosophy is indebted to the same expressivist tradition that informs Benjamin’s theory of language” (216). Meanwhile, he concedes that the sceptical Mauthner can be regarded as “the most important figure connecting Wittgenstein to the expressivist tradition” (218). Indeed, Stern interprets the later Wittgenstein as being “a member of the ‘Hamann wing’ of the expressivist tradition”—one who “relies upon a similar conception of unity” drawn from religion in order to investigate philosophy and its limits as an “historical phenomena” (355)—although Wittgenstein is “a unique member with roots in the early analytic tradition and its logical analyses of language” (217).

          What is meant by the “expressivist tradition”? Because the “mode of apprehending words” is, according to Benjamin, originally “an expressive and non-conceptual way of giving mimetic expression to the world,” then

It is only by re-orienting the word toward a kind of aesthetically complete experience passed down by religion and grouping it with other words—aesthetic translations of the same object—that something like the name can be constituted (133 [“aesthetics” covering “sensory perception more generally” (50, n. 23)]).

Because our “available conceptual interpretations” supposedly exclude the “connections” amongst our particular classifications of “social and historical experience,” then our critical or philosophical focus ought to orient “works” employing them towards

an ideal, holistic vision of this historical experience; and grouping them together…[so] they can each serve as fragmentary expressions of this experience and together bring the whole into view (132).

Stern’s exposition continues:

The presentation of ideas—philosophy—is understood as an attempt to remediate the (necessary) damage done to our understanding by our very means of expression. Our language gives us a world, but at the same time it narrows it down, essentializes aspects of it, over-privileges certain categories that gain purchase in our own time, and distances us from reality, while rendering [it] invisible…and…distance[d]… (132).

Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, also objects to language being reified with such terms as “thinking” and “experiencing” amongst our pervasive “illusions”:

Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each (1945, §96; cf. §92).

“But what,” he asks (ironically echoing the purportedly designative philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651, ch. 8, 39; ch. 46, 379)), “are these words to be used for now? The language game in which they are to be applied is missing” (1945, §96; cf. §97). Here, Stern pointedly explains the “missing” language-game of “thinking” not as “a report of an event,” but, in its daily uses, as “letting someone know what to expect, weighing options, expressing doubt, explaining a misunderstanding, etc.,” without being converted into an entity with a “discoverable structure” (238-239). Subsequently when pursuing Wittgenstein’s broader handling of grammar beyond that of “words and sentences” towards “the structure of human activity” in which language plays a “central” role (249), Stern observes that “grammatical features” cannot

be regarded as determining the ‘worldview’ of a particular culture. They are rather, like words themselves, contingently developed and developing contrivances that function in various ways within various kinds of interaction we have with each other and our environment. Language is what it does (249).

          Not unexpectedly, Stern’s extensive probing of Wittgenstein’s understanding of private language ultimately leads him to distinguish how Benjamin and Wittgenstein approach the “medium of language”: the former as an “aesthetic” expressivist, the latter as a “practical” expressivist (291). In Stern’s words, “Whereas Benjamin follows Hamann in creating the biblical priority of the Word, for Wittgenstein, as for Goethe, ‘In the beginning there was the deed'” (291). Wittgenstein’s argument about private language “hinges on the fact that an inner object plays no role in the language-games that involve the language of sensation” (293; cf. 267ff.). It targets a “similar picture” to the conception of knowledge Benjamin finds infecting Immanuel Kant’s 1781/1787 Critique of Pure Reason where experience is construed as “an object acquired through our perceptual faculties and worked up into knowledge by our cognitive faculties” (293; cf. 33ff., 100ff.).

III

Stopping short of Stern’s examination of Wittgenstein’s contestable notion of aspect-perception and how it might connect with the nature of meaning, let us conclude this review with Benjamin (1935) who, pre-occupied with the “main problems” of “the origin of language and…the relationship of language to thought” (80-81), surveys pre-eminent entre guerre language theorists ranging from Karl Bühler to Kurt Goldstein. Vygotskii also figures here (1935, 81-83). However, he is only known to Benjamin by the 1929 German version of “Genetic Roots of Thinking and Speech” in the Berlin- and Moscow-based periodical Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, a paper forming the fourth chapter of his 1934 Thought and Language. A close reading of Benjamin reveals how tightly he attends to Vygotskii’s sixfold basis of analysis:

1.    Thought and speech have different genetic roots.

2.    The two functions develop along different lines and independently of each other.

3.    There is no clear-cut and constant correlation between them in phylogenesis.

4.    Anthropoids display an intellect somewhat like man’s in certain respects (the embryonic use of tools) and a language somewhat like man’s in totally different respects (the phonetic aspect of their speech, its [affective] release function, the beginnings of a social function).

5.    The close correspondence between thought and speech characteristic of man is absent in anthropoids.

6.    In the phylogeny of thought and speech, a prelinguistic phase in the development of thought and a preintellectual phase in the development of speech are clearly discernible. (1929, ch. 4.1, 85; trans. Hanfmann, Vakar & Kozulin)

However, Stern himself only circles around “Thought and Word,” the final chapter of Vygotskii (1934, 223-271), overlaid by contrasting Vygotskii and Herder and continuing to dispute Michael Forster’s recent account of Herder. Nor does Stern fully reckon with the implications of Vygotskii’s declared aim of “uncovering the problem of thought and speech as the focal issue of human psychology” and his hope that the findings presented “point the way to a new theory of consciousness” (1934, Preface, lxxvii; trans. Hanfmann & others), initially broached in Vygotskii’s 1925 article “Consciousness as a Problem for the Psychology of Behavior.”

          Reservations aside, this necessarily selective critique acknowledges the rich and provocative contribution Stern makes particularly to Benjamin’s early thinking and Wittgenstein’s later thinking about language. Despite his warning about the “thicket” confronting his “approaching reader” (133), he has drawn upon an history of philosophical writings that challenge our frequently unexamined assumptions about the nature of language and meaning.

 

© 2019 R. A. Goodrich

 

R.A. Goodrich is affiliated with the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions (University of Melbourne) and the A.D.I. Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group (Deakin University), co-edits the online refereed arts journal, Double Dialogues, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating linguistic, cognitive, and behavioural development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.