Beyond Pure Reason

Ferdinand de Saussure's Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents

Boris Gasparov

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231504454
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) revolutionized the study of language, signs, and discourse in the twentieth century. He successfully reconstructed the proto-Indo-European vowel system, advanced a conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs made meaningful through kinetic interrelationships, and developed a theory of the anagram so profound it gave rise to poststructural literary criticism.

The roots of these disparate, even contradictory achievements lie in the thought of Early German Romanticism, which Saussure consulted for its insight into the nature of meaning and discourse. Conducting the first comprehensive analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, Boris Gasparov links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of "progressive" cognition and child cognitive development. Consulting a wealth of sources only recently made available, Gasparov casts the seeming contradictions and paradoxes of Saussure's work as a genuine tension between the desire to bring linguistics and semiotics in line with modernist epistemology on the one hand, and Jena Romantics' awareness of language's dynamism and its transcendence of the boundaries of categorical reasoning on the other. Advancing a radical new understanding of Saussure, Gasparov reveals aspects of the intellectual's work previously overlooked by both his followers and his postmodern critics.

Voluble Silence	PART 1
Saussure and His Legacy

The Person

ONE

Despite the appearance of impassive objectivity that characterizes the rhetorical surface of both celebrated books of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)—his early Note on the Original System of Indo-European Vowels (1879) and the posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916)—his life and personality always attracted keen interest among those who were stirred, one way or another, by his ideas. Emile Benveniste expressed this sentiment admirably in an article dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of Saussure’s death: “A certain mystery surrounds his human life [sa vie humaine], which withdrew so early into silence”;¹ we are invited, as it were, to muse about the mystery of another, transcendent life of Saussure beyond the silence of the “human” one. Even before the mass of Saussure’s private notes came to light, one could always sense behind the impersonal calm of his published works something that hinted at their author’s kinship with the kind of charismatic intellectual figures, so typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose Werk would remain incomplete without the text of their Leben—a paradoxical perception, given Saussure’s extreme reticence, even shyness, a trait that deepened through the years, leading eventually to his almost complete withdrawal from any public expression save that directed at a tiny group of disciples in a classroom.

Thanks to the tremendous research efforts of those who have made accessible and commented on all the relevant correspondence, reviews, obituaries, official documents, and memoirs, all crowned by Saussure’s own sketchy “Souvenirs” of 1903 about his early years,² we now know more about Saussure’s life and career than perhaps about any other personality in the history of linguistics and philosophy of language, with the possible exception of Roman Jakobson. And yet this factual knowledge neither alters the impression of an almost enigmatic silence surrounding Saussure nor diminishes the intensity with which his human presence can be felt in his work. It therefore seems unavoidable that yet another attempt at reading Saussure should begin with an assessment of his life and personality.

THE ROOTS

One aspect of the biographic data about Saussure that has always been available in abundance concerns his family. The Saussures traced their lineage back to the fifteenth century. The family originated in Lotharingy, whence it migrated to Geneva in a time of religious turmoil in the sixteenth century.³ The migratory pattern of Saussure’s remote ancestors replicated events of the sixth century (in which Saussure showed keen interest late in his life): the political and religious turmoil in Burgundy that forced one section of its population to move to the Helvetic area. In the 1900s Saussure sought traces of the Germanic language of their origin in various toponyms in the Vaudois area (the locality of the Saussures’ summer residence). The way a German and a French element were melded together in this story was characteristic of Saussure’s own intellectual biography.

Many generations of the Saussures belonged to an exclusive circle of the most prominent Genevan families. Saussure grew up in a patrician atmosphere in which material opulence, even luxury, was combined with an intensity of spiritual life, a high ethical sensibility, and a strong sense of familial tradition. When Saussure submitted his doctoral dissertation in Leipzig in 1880, one of his reviewers, the renowned philologist Georg Curtius, added to his praise of the author’s scholarship a few words of somewhat naive admiration for a young scholar so profoundly dedicated to his studies despite the “shining material circumstances” of his life.⁴ This little episode is characteristic of the cultural rift between Saussure the patrician and the Bürgertum of German academia. That sociocultural alienation resulted in a certain antipathy on both sides, which occasionally erupted in professional and personal confrontations. The overt frictions, exacerbated by German-French political antagonisms of the time, are usually highlighted in the (predominantly francophone) Saussure biographical literature, with the effect of obfuscating Saussure’s profound indebtedness to the German philosophical and scientific tradition.

From the second half of the eighteenth century on, the Saussures were known as a family of outstanding scientists. Both Saussure’s grandfather Nicolas-Théodore and his father Henri were eminent scholars; so was his younger brother René, a distinguished mathematician. At the beginning of that tradition stood the towering figure of Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799), of whom it was suggested that he was second only to Rousseau among the famous Genevans of the century.⁵ Like his great-grandson a century later, Saussure the elder was precocious in his academic career, becoming a professor of philosophy and natural sciences at the age of twenty-two. Horace Bénédict’s most important scientific discovery (which involved a celebrated ascent of Mont Blanc) concerned the contingency of surface temperature on the density of the atmosphere; as he demonstrated in ingenious experiments, it is not the amount of sun heat itself, which is the same at zero altitude and the top of Mont Blanc, that accounts for the difference in temperature between the two points, but the different atmospheric conditions under which they receive the energy.

Yet later in his life Saussure took pains to distance his theoretical approach to language from the outright scientific paradigm professed by most of his contemporaries, most notably his teachers at Leipzig; again and again he reiterated in his notes that language is fundamentally different from any object of the natural sciences because of the unlimited freedom (arbitrariness) of its inner structuring, which causes its systemic values to be permanently in flux. The inapplicability of a scientific approach to language seemed to leave Saussure at once dismayed and gleeful. He missed no occasion to condemn attempts to build an artificial international language, expressing his conviction that all efforts to shape language rationally were futile: the moment such a creation, however brilliant, was put to use, it would dissolve into an unpredictable and uncontrollable spontaneous development. The “familial” subtext of these assertions becomes clear if we remember that Saussure’s brother René was a prominent champion of Esperanto (at one point, he served as the president of the International Esperanto Association); in 1911 René published a book on the subject under a characteristic title, Principes logiques de la construction des mots en esperanto, in which he extolled the “modernity” of artificial languages, in contradistinction to the idiosyncratic backwardness of natural ones.

The tension between rationalist universalism and an exceptionalist vision of language constituted the fundamental contradiction around which Saussure’s theoretical thought revolved. The complexity and originality of the Saussure phenomenon comes from the fact that no matter how much he might wish to succeed in casting language as a succession of “theorems,”⁶ he never lost sight of its other side—the one that condemned any rationally built systemic model to dissolution upon encountering the volatile “mystery” of language usage.

This “other side” of Saussure also had its roots in the familial tradition. While Saussure’s biographers habitually dwell on the male lineage of Saussure’s family and its formidable scientific credentials, another outstanding representative of the family’s intellectual tradition has so far attracted little attention. I mean Saussure’s great-aunt (Horace Bénédict’s daughter), Albertine Adrienne Necker de Saussure, a prominent figure of early Romanticism. Necker de Saussure’s most notable achievement, her book L’éducation progressive (three volumes, 1829–1837), offered a bold revision of Enlightenment ideas about education, from Kant to Rousseau, in the spirit of early Romanticism. Her “progressive” (i.e., evolutionary) vision of education was deeply rooted in early Romantic ideas about language and cognition, particularly those held by Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. We will return to the question of Saussure’s intellectual relationship to his great-aunt—and through her, and together with her, to the world of Jena Romanticism—in more detail later.

Albertine Necker de Saussure died before Saussure was born. (Her library, apparently containing works by the Schlegels, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Jean Paul, Germaine de Staël, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Benjamin Constant, remained at the Saussures’ summer residence in Vufflens: Stancati 2004:186). The key figure in the continuity of this lineage of the family tradition was Adolphe Pictet, a younger friend and distant relative of Necker de Saussure,⁷ who played a crucial formative role in Saussure’s adolescent years: it was Pictet who introduced the thirteen-year-old Saussure to the theoretical foundations of Indo-European linguistics.

Pictet was a dedicated champion of German Romanticism and idealist philosophy. Like French, English, and Russian Romantics since the beginning of the century, he made a journey to Germany, where he became acquainted with A. W. Schlegel (with whom he maintained an important correspondence over the course of many years), Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Schelling. Pictet’s early “absorption,” in his words, in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics is reflected in his book The Beautiful in Nature, Art, and Poetry (1856). While closely following Schelling’s system of transcendental idealism, the book was also clearly influenced by L’éducation progressive, in particular, by its vision of the ability to admire the beautiful as the principal force for spiritual freedom that resists the rationalist drive toward conformity (originally a Schillerean idea adopted by the Jena Romantics). In the spirit of earlier wars between “romantics” and “classics” (a little outmoded by the 1850s), Pictet envisioned Romanticism, with its embrace of pluralism and freedom of invention, as standing in sharp opposition to Classicism, the embodiment of systemic compactness and uniformity.

True to his profession of Romantic versatility, Pictet established himself as a person of many interests and vocations. But first and foremost, he was an accomplished Indo-Europeanist. Pictet’s Indo-European studies naturally led to his intimate acquaintance with Sanskrit and Vedic poetry. In accordance with his Romantic philosophical predisposition, he perceived in the Rig Veda a proto-“Romantic” phenomenon, which he counterpoised to the proto-“Classical” Homeric epos—an opposition that would surface many years later in Saussure’s notes.

Pictet represented the first, Romantic generation of historical linguists, for whom the history of language went hand in hand with the history of the material and spiritual being of the people who spoke it. His magnum opus was the two-volume Origines indo-européennes: Essai de paléontologie linguistique (1859–63); the second edition of the book appeared in 1877, two years after the author’s death and only a year prior to Saussure’s Mémoire. It was a monumental attempt, in the tradition of Friedrich Schlegel and Jakob Grimm, to reconstruct the whole world of the proto-Indo-Europeans. Largely speculative, as such a reconstruction (as well as all those that followed it) inevitably was, it nevertheless summoned a massive and diverse body of data concerning the language, mythology, religion, and material culture of scores of Indo-European nations, from the Indian peninsula to the western extremities of Europe. In his autobiographical essay (1960 [1903]:16), while giving a sober assessment of this work of his first mentor, Saussure speaks of the enthusiasm it inspired in him in his adolescent years: “The idea that one could, with the help of two or three Sanskrit syllables—for that was the idea of the book itself and of the whole linguistics of that epoch—retrieve the life of vanished people, inflamed me with an enthusiasm, unmatched in its naivety; and I have no memories more exquisite and truer to the joy of linguistic studies than those brought to me even today by a whiff of recollection of that childhood reading.” Later, in his review of the second edition of Pictet’s book,⁸ Saussure cast his recently deceased mentor’s quest for vanished civilizations in the likeness of “Oedipus in front of the Sphinx.” Saussure’s review spoke of Pictet’s willingness to make leaps from known facts to the unknown, shuttling between “science” and “imagination.” Needless to say, in his mature years Saussure far outgrew his first mentor in his understanding of the intellectual stakes involved in the dilemma of the rationally constructed versus the ungraspable, which he came to see as inherent in linguistic studies.

YEARS OF LEARNING

When Saussure first met Pictet—during summers in Vufflens, where they were neighbors—he was full of enthusiasm for the “magic” of etymology. According to Saussure’s own account, he caught the etymological fever from his maternal uncle, whose two hobbies—pursued “without a method, but with a wealth of ideas”—were building yachts after a mathematical system of his own devising and making etymologies; as Saussure noted wryly, both tended to sink equally fast (Saussure 1960 [1903]:16–17). (This healthy irony notwithstanding, Saussure never lost his own passion for venture-some etymologies.)

During the following two years, Pictet became Saussure’s principal intellectual mentor. At the age of fifteen, Saussure presented for his teacher’s judgment his “Essay on reducing words of Greek, Latin, and German to a small number of roots.”⁹ Using the three languages he knew well by that time, he first, with one stroke of the pen, “reduced” all vowels to a single proto-vowel. (Curiously enough, this was precisely what Saussure would do again—on the strength of an extremely sophisticated argument—six years later in his reconstruction of proto-Indo-European vowels.) The “Essay” then proceeded, with the same ease, to reduce the number of consonants, by grouping them according to their articulatory features: p, b, f, v = P; t, d, s, z = T, etc. The vocal and consonantal abstractions obtained by this method were then linked in twelve triple combinations (KAK, KAT, KAP, TAT, TAP, etc.), which Saussure proclaimed to be the twelve proto-roots. Each abstract formula of a proto-root could give rise to a multiplicity of concrete stems: for example, under Saussure’s formula, the proto-root PAK could accommodate a throng of words in various languages, from fog to bush. Each root was supposed to have a certain proto-meaning, which had to be extremely broad—broad enough to contain in a nutshell the whole spectrum of meanings featured in all its presumable later representations in a plurality of languages. For instance, Saussure suggested that the combination RAK had originally stood for a proto-idea of “violent power,” on the evidence of such words as Lat. rex “king,” Gr. ῥἠγνυμι “tear, crush,” Germ. Rache “vengeance” or rügen “to thrash,” and so on. It is curious the extent to which this naive exercise recalls Velimir Khlebnikov’s attempt to create a universal poetic language some forty years later, an intellectual event that (alongside Saussure’s Course) had a major impact on Jakobson’s theory of phonological universalia.¹⁰ As for Saussure himself, one gets a glimpse of his later feelings about the matter in a sudden and seemingly unmotivated outburst in one of his notes concerning the futility of studying “roots” (Saussure 1993a:195).

Perhaps the most interesting moment in this adolescent effort comes at its conclusion: “If I could be sure that the rest were true, naturally I would study all these difficult points in more detail. With this, I could have advanced further, especially if I knew Oriental languages, in grouping all the words along a dozen roots. But I see that I have lost myself in dreams, and need to recall the fable about the milk pot” (Saussure 1960 [1903]:101).

The La Fontaine fable in question tells the story of a milkmaid who was so excited by reveries about her future profits from selling her milk that she stumbled and broke her milk pot. The close cohabitation of defiant assertiveness and self-deprecating scepticism evident in this excerpt would become a trademark of Saussure’s thinking and writing.

Although Pictet’s criticism of his disciple’s opus was mild, Saussure’s experience with this enfantillage, as he would later call it (a word he did not hesitate to use in his private assessment of many past and contemporary linguistic theories as well), caused him to “forget” about linguistics for a while.^11...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Saussure, “Saussurism,” and “Saussurology”
• Part 1. Voluble Silence: Saussure and His Legacy
• Part 2. Postulates About Language and Their Demise
• Part 3. Language in Discourse
• Conclusion: Freedom and Mystery—the Peripathetic Nature of Language
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index