Geoffrey Galt Harpham - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

How do we know what we are?
The science of language &
human self-understanding

Where do we get our basic concep-

tions of ourselves as human beings?
How do we know what we are? In one
respect, this does not seem like the right
question to ask, because we neither have
nor need any fully articulated concepts
of our humanity. In der Tat, a determined
obliviousness to such questions, punc-
tuated perhaps by occasional abstract-
ed musings–“What a piece of work
is man!” or, “Who am I? Why am I
Hier?”–seems entirely adequate for
most purposes. We have a functional
Verständnis, tacit but effective, von
what a human being is, an understand-
ing that snaps into focus when we talk
about “the sanctity of human life," In-
sist on “human rights,” register shock
at “crimes against humanity,” or reflect
that “nobody deserves to be treated like
that.” On occasion, this understanding
acquires institutional force: The Rome
Statute of the International Criminal
Court de½nes crimes against human-
ity as “particularly odious offences in
that they constitute a serious attack
on human dignity or grave humilia-
tion or a degradation of one or more
human beings,” and prohibits them
on that basis.1 We must know what a
human being is, and what rights it has,

in order to frame such a de½nition and
expect it to compel universal assent–
which it largely has, with the exception
of Israel and the United States, welche
½rst signed the document and then, In
2002, “unsigned” it, declaring them-
selves exempt from its restrictions. Pre-
sumably, these two nations demurred
because they found the restrictions in-
convenient, not because they had doubts
about the implied account of the human.
One reason we never get beyond im-
plication is that one of the most durable
elements of our species self-understand-
ing is the conviction that human beings
transcend all positive or constraining
descriptions: we are, we feel, various,
inventive, and free to explore or extend
our own capacities. Our nature includes
an ability to exceed, negate, modify, oder
refuse nature as such; our particular in-
stincts, unlike those of the octopus, Die
bluebird, the mosquito, or the lemur,
lead us away from the hardwired repeti-
tions and nonnegotiable demands of
animal nature. But again–where do we
get this implicit yet deeply held belief?
How is a general atmosphere of sugges-
tion formed, and what particles make
it up? The argument I will pursue in
this paper is that because of the ways in
which it is conceptualized, articulated,
and disseminated, academic discourse

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Geoffrey
Galt
Harpham
on being
menschlich

plays an influential role in forming our
species self-conception.

All disciplines that deal with human
beings place certain aspects of the hu-
man within their purview, on the pre-
sumption that these aspects represent
core attributes of the human. The study
of the arts inquires into human creative
behavior; philosophy studies the human
capacity for reflective thought and anal-
ysis; history considers the capacity for
signi½cant or meaningful action. Aber es
is in the “human sciences”–psycholo-
gy, economics, anthropology, Soziologie,
and linguistics–that the articulation of
the human becomes most explicit. To
appropriate a term Michel Foucault uses
often in The Order of Things, science pro-
ceeds by positing “models” that guide
and inform the inquiry. In most of the
human sciences, the operative model
is an abstraction, a selective reduction.
But because in the most venerable tra-
ditions of Western thought language has
been considered the de½ning mark of
the human, the discipline of linguistics
employs a model that is not sectoral but
holistic: it is the study of language that
comes closest to registering our essential
self-conception as distinct from other
Spezies. For without some prior under-
standing that language sets the human
species apart, there would be no linguis-
tic object that a scientist could study.
Anything capable of bearing meaning–
animal noises, Gesten, thunderclaps,
markings on a rock, the sound of the sea,
well-formed sentences uttered by com-
petent speakers–could be considered
Sprache. It is only when we posit hu-
man beings as the sole possessors of
language that a bounded and integrat-
ed ½eld comes into view: language is
de½ned as the means by which humans
and humans alone express and commu-
nicate their thoughts. The study of lan-
guage begins with a model of the human

as the linguistic animal and ends by pro-
ducing support for this model, which be-
comes a scienti½cally validated model of
the human as such. In the course of con-
troversies that are often technical in na-
tur, an image of the human becomes
visible.

In a brief essay, I can only indicate how

this large claim might be supported by
relating a few suggestive incidents in
which a theory of language, claiming
the authority of science, contributed to
an articulation of the concept of the hu-
man. The ½rst incident centers on the
½gure of Darwin, the full dimensions
of whose radicalism are still being ex-
plored. How did Darwin make the case
for what Daniel Dennett has called his
“dangerous idea”2–or, eher, how did
he make it persuasive, how did he win
over readers who must have felt the full,
unbuffered impact of a theory that, Wie-
ever based on careful observation and
majestic in scale, was still blasphemous,
humiliating, and counterintuitive? And
how did he persuade himself that his
wide but scattered observations of plant
and animal forms could ground a new
understanding of organic nature, inkl-
ing a radically new understanding of hu-
manity?

People are persuaded of radically new

ideas by degrees and often by indirec-
tion. Darwin began in just this manner
by remarking, in a collection of notes he
made during the Beagle voyage, Das:

At least it appears all speculations of the
origin of language.–must presume it orig-
inates slowly–if their speculations are
utterly valueless–then argument fails–
if they have, then language was progres-
sive.–
We cannot doubt that language is an al-
tering element, we see words invented–
we see their origin in names of People.–

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sound of words–argument of original for-
mation–declension etc often show traces
of origin.–3

At the time he wrote these words, Dar-
win little understood the signi½cance
that the origins of language would hold
for his own work; In der Tat, the jottings
quoted here are contained in a notebook
he later titled “Old and Useless Notes.”
But he was beginning to assemble the
elements of his theories of descent with
modi½cation and natural selection, Und
was keenly interested in solid informa-
tion about origins of any kind.

Darwin undoubtedly thought that “we
cannot doubt” the progressive nature of
linguistic development because it had
been so persuasively demonstrated by
the “new philology” that had been de-
veloped since the end of the eighteenth
Jahrhundert, when F. A. Wolf published his
Prolegomena to Homer. Wolf had applied
the comparative and historical methods
developed for the “higher criticism” of
the Bible to the texts of Homer, mit dem
result that the Homeric texts were re-
vealed to be not the work of an inspired
solitary genius, but rather a compilation
of many texts written at different times
and assembled into a unity whose appar-
ent integrity masked its own complex
Geschichte. Wolf focused exclusively on
Homer, but his ultimate goal, er sagte,
was to articulate “the philosophy of the
history of human nature in Greece.”4 His
successors extended his project in an
attempt to discover the common root
of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, welche
became known as Proto-Indo-Europe-
ein. In pursuit of this Ursprache, philolo-
gists in the early nineteenth century
constructed elaborate language “fami-
lies” and their genealogies, basierend auf
principle of “progressive” development
Darwin noted. Like Wolf, they were in-
terested in human nature. If we could

get some sense of Proto-Indo-Europe-
ein, they thought, we would be standing
in the dazzling presence not just of the
½rst human language, but of the origi-
nal–that is, the natural–forms of hu-
man thought and expression.

By the time he was ½nally ready to
publish On the Origin of Species, In 1859,
Darwin was con½dent that his convic-
tions were supported not only by his
own researches and those of other nat-
uralists, but by the accumulating force
of analogies that linked linguistic and
species development.5 These analogies
come into play at key moments in Ori-
gin, as when Darwin notes that “a breed,
like a dialect of a language, can hardly
be said to have had a de½nite origin”;
or when he begins an exposition of the
idea that a natural system is “genealogi-
cal in its arrangement, like a pedigree,”
with the comment, “It may be worth
while to illustrate this view of classi½ca-
tion, by taking the case of languages.”6
But the analogies between language
and nature were far more important
than these almost incidental comments
vorschlagen. Origin is concerned only with
Pflanzen und Tiere, with but a single
passage near the end indicating the real
target, which would be revealed only
twelve years later with the publication
of The Descent of Man: “In the future, ICH
see open ½elds for far more important
researches. . . . Much light will be thrown
on the origin of man and his history.”7
One reason that the extravagantly cau-
tious Darwin was able to move from
plants and animals to the far riskier
subject of human beings was that the
de½ning human trait, Sprache, hatte
already been proven by philology to
behave in “Darwinian” ways.

The impact of those few passages in
Origin on philologists themselves can
hardly be overstated. The fact that Dar-
win had enfolded language into an over-

The science
of language
& menschlich
self-under-
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Dædalus Summer 2009

Geoffrey
Galt
Harpham
on being
menschlich

arching and compelling theory of nature
represented an invaluable vote of con½-
dence for a linguistic science still striv-
ing to establish its own scienti½c creden-
tials. Darüber hinaus, they recognized that
the theory of natural selection provided
something philology badly needed and
did not have: an explanation of why cer-
tain variations were preferred over oth-
ers. The London-based, German-born
philologist Max Müller immediately
integrated Darwinian rhetoric into his
own work. In the ½rst series of his wild-
ly popular Lectures on the Science of Lan-
Spur (1861), he described the scene of
language as a “struggle for life . . . welche
led to the destruction of the less strong,
the less happy, the less fertile words,
and ended in the triumph of one, as the
recognised and proper name for every
object in every language.”8 In 1863, Au-
gust Schleicher, a botanist and a philol-
ogist who pioneered in the construction
of linguistic “trees,” published a small
tract with the title Die Darwinische Theo-
rie und die Sprachwissenschaft (Darwinian
theory and the science of language),9 In
which he argued that Darwin’s theory
and philology corroborated each other,
with the latter providing direct empiri-
cal evidence for Darwin’s ingenious
suggestions and hypothetical scenarios.
What Stephen G. Alter calls “the meta-
phoric mind of nineteenth-century sci-
ence” produced a number of “striking
conceptual transfers,” of which the
easy flow of analogy between biology
and language was perhaps the most
consequential.10

Analogies flowed particularly freely
in the work of the German naturalist
and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, one of
those distinctively nineteenth-century
titans who, like Müller, published in a
wide range of ½elds. Three years before
the appearance of The Descent of Man,
Haeckel proposed a speculative theory

of human evolution from primates.11
Many of the particulars of his account
were controversial from the outset, In
part because they lacked adequate schol-
arly support–he assured his readers, für
Beispiel, that “the Caucasian, or Medi-
terranean man has from time immemo-
rial been placed at the head of all races
of men, as the most highly developed
and perfect”12–but Haeckel was able
to buttress his broad claim about evolu-
tion by pointing out that it was entirely
consistent with the ½ndings of philology.
The crucial evolutionary leap, Haeckel
sagte, took place when “Man-like Apes”
acquired “articulate human language”
thereby becoming transformed into
“Ape-like Man.” As “the highest author-
ities in comparative philology” had de-
monstrated, the acquisition of language
had an “ennobling and transforming
influence upon the mental life of Man,”
constituting a “real and principal act
of humani½cation.”13 Writing six years
later on The Evolution of Man, Haeckel
again called attention to the “remark-
able parallelism” between the evolution
of languages and that of organic species:
“Indeed it is hardly possible to ½nd an
analogy better adapted to throw a clear
light on many obscure and dif½cult facts
in the evolution of species, which is gov-
erned and directed by the same natural
laws which guide the course of the evo-
lution of language.”14

Not all the highest authorities in
comparative philology agreed. Müller,
Zum Beispiel, was a thoroughly commit-
ted scientist, but he committed his sci-
ence to such purposes as demonstrat-
ing the presence of the divine scattered
throughout nature, revealing Christiani-
ty to be the unconscious goal of human
Geschichte, and disproving Darwin’s theory
of human evolution. Under the guise of
a scholarly debate about the origins of
Sprache, Müller and Darwin conduct-

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ed a heated discussion about the nature
of man. Praising “the genius of Darwin,”
Müller argued that natural selection
could never explain the emergence of
Sprache, much less the appearance on
earth of human beings.15 Language and
humanity, he insisted, appeared at the
same moment, when God endowed the
“original pair” with the gift of speech.
Proleptically rejecting the argument
Darwin would make in The Descent of
Man, Müller wrote in 1863, “It is not
any accidental variety that survives and
perpetuates itself,” but, eher, “the in-
dividual which comes nearest to the or-
iginal intention of its creator, or what is
best calculated to accomplish the ends
for which the type or species to which it
belongs was called into being, that con-
quers in the great struggle for life.”16
For Müller and others, the notion
of a struggle for life, which was con-
½rmed everywhere by observation and
provided no serious challenge to theolo-
gy or to the socio-economic status quo,
was intellectually and ideologically ac-
ceptable; the idea of descent from pri-
Kumpels, which would have meant surren-
dering man’s place in God’s chain of
creation and the authority of revealed
religion, was not. For Müller, Darwin-
ism was both indispensable and inimi-
cal: it provided a powerful explanation
of linguistic change, but did so at the
cost of human distinctness. Das war
too high a price for Müller to consider
paying. “Language is our Rubicon,” he
wrote in a memorable phrase, “and no
brute will dare to cross it.”17 For his
Teil, Darwin seemed to take no notice
of this resistance. He cited Müller, mit
whom he had by then been correspon-
ding for many years, in support of his
own theory in The Descent of Man, reach-
ing what Alter calls an “analogic zenith”
in his claim that “the survival or preser-
vation of certain favoured words in the

struggle for existence is natural selec-
tion.”18

Both Müller and Darwin were altered

by their exchanges. From the moment
Darwin accepted the premise that lin-
guistic change was a scienti½cally prov-
en analogy for processes of natural se-
lection in the organic world, he was set
on the course that would eventually cul-
minate in the argument of The Descent
of Man: that human evolution was gov-
erned by the same principles as those
observable in plants and animals. Wenn
Darwin was encouraged by Müller to
develop his scienti½c thinking in the
most radical and controversial way,
Müller responded to the challenge of
Darwin by retreating to fundamental
and unscienti½c principles. When Mül-
ler accepted natural selection (welche
he rechristened natural elimination) als
the explanation for why some linguistic
forms endured and others did not, Er
committed himself to a naturalistic un-
derstanding of language, the full impli-
cations of which he would never endorse
because they threatened his model of the
human as the linguistic lord of creation.

At the level of the model, the disagree-

ments between Darwin and Müller ran
deep, but they shared a fundamental
conviction: that the most revealing ap-
proach to the question of the human
was through an inquiry into origins.
But by the end of the nineteenth centu-
ry, thinkers were turning away from
deep time as the source of ultimate ex-
planations, and were looking instead to
Systeme. One of the clearest instances
of the new emphasis is the work of the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
who began his career as a precocious
comparative philologist, but ended it as
a prophetic postmodernist–helping, In
zwischen, to found modernism. Saussure
argued that language should be studied

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& menschlich
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Dædalus Summer 2009

Geoffrey
Galt
Harpham
on being
menschlich

as a “synchronic” system of commu-
nication established and enforced by
“the collective mind of the linguistic
community.”19 In his 1906–1911 series
of lectures, which were posthumous-
ly assembled, edited, and published as
Course in General Linguistics, Saussure
sought to turn the attention of linguis-
tics away from the philological empha-
sis on linguistic genealogy and toward
what he called language alone. The new
object of attention for linguists should,
he insisted, be the “sign,” a sound fused
on an “arbitrary” basis with a concept,
and the conventional system of signs
that made communication possible.
One way to describe Saussure’s work
is to say that he sought to make linguis-
tics a science by drawing a bright line
between language and the human be-
ings who use it.

Another way to describe it, Jedoch, Ist

to say that he made humanity available
to scienti½c study by making language
into an object. As a scientist, Saussure
was indifferent to nineteenth-century
forms of humanism, but he was wholly
invested in the concept of human socie-
ty. The task he set for his new science
of “semiology” was to study “the role of
signs as part of social life,” a project that
½t neatly into a context in which think-
ers such as Freud, Durkheim, Gabriel
Tarde, George Dumas, and others were
formulating new understandings of the
human condition that emphasized com-
munally determined conventions and
Werte. The reception of Saussure’s work
undoubtedly bene½ted from this conver-
gence, but his extraordinary influence
on subsequent thinking about the hu-
man owed some of its force and dura-
bility to the fact that he represented his
work as a science of language.

What is man, according to Saussure?

What model of humanity informs his
arbeiten? The model is never explicit, von

course, but one clue may be found in
the famous diagram of the “speaking
circuit,” which consists of line drawings
of two virtually identical male heads fac-
ing each other, with dotted lines repre-
senting the career of a thought originat-
ing in the brain of A, passing through
A’s mouth, where it is conjoined with
a sound, and swooping in the line of a
hammock toward the brain of B, WHO
receives the sign, understands it, Formen
his own thought, and replies by the same
route. Saussurean man is not de½ned by
his origins, Wettrennen, Klasse, Geschlecht, Alter, reli-
gion, Familienstand, ethnische Zugehörigkeit, nationali-
ty, body type, or any other marker of in-
dividual or social identity. In der Tat, he is
scarcely de½ned at all, for his thoughts
and utterances conform strictly to social
conventions. In Saussure’s linguistics,
the individual is accident rather than es-
sence, a mere node in the system, Und
conventional by communicative necessi-
ty. As Saussure says, the masses (la masse
sociale) are not consulted in the determi-
nation of signs, which are “chosen by
the language.” Saussure seems to ap-
prove of this arrangement in the same
way that a conservative political think-
er might approve of tradition and cus-
tom; his work gives little evidence of
any desire to disturb what he calls “the
normal, regular existence of a language
already established,” or to disrupt–in
the name, Zum Beispiel, of “creativity”
or “freedom”–the “collective inertia”
of the communicational consensus.20

Outside of linguistics, Saussure’s work

found an immediate audience in those
engaged in the study of society. Marcel
Mauss was one of the ½rst to cite Saus-
sure as a predecessor in the study of sys-
tems of exchange that involved not only
signs but symbols, classi½cations, Und
other kinds of representations. Claude
Lévi-Strauss cited Mauss’s influential
work on kinship and “the gift” in his

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own equally influential work on mythol-
ogy and “the savage mind,” noting that
“the analogy with language, so strongly
asserted by Mauss, could enable us to
discover the precise rules by which, In
any type of society, cycles of reciproci-
ty are formed whose automatic laws are
henceforth known.”21 With such power-
ful theorists advocating the linguistic
analogy, advanced thinking in the ½elds
of sociology and anthropology was for
several decades anchored in linguistics.

The influence of Saussure on the
forms of structuralism and poststruc-
turalism embraced by many disciplines
around the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury was vast and diffuse. That influence
was especially marked in what came in
the United States to be known as “crit-
ical theory,” whose heyday was from
the mid-1960s to approximately 1990.
As one thinker said of the ethos of that
Zeit, “the paradigm of language . . . replaced
the paradigm of consciousness.”22 The pre-
siding geniuses of this genius-driven
movement objected on theoretical, po-
litical, and even moral grounds to an
older humanism, enlisting the elusive
and enigmatic Saussure–the genius
behind the geniuses–in support of
their various positions and values, alle
of which, it was claimed, could be ex-
tracted from the Course. Thus Jacques
Lacan, in proposing a revolutionary
shift from Freudian psychoanalysis to
ein neuer, scienti½c understanding of the
Thema, could point to Saussure as the
man responsible for enabling language,
and therefore the subject, to “[attain]
the status of an object of scienti½c in-
vestigation”; Louis Althusser could sub-
sequently embrace Lacan as the thinker
responsible for making psychoanalysis
into a science by assimilating it to Saus-
surean linguistics; Paul de Man could
say that advanced literary theory in-
volved nothing other than the applica-

tion of Saussure to literary texts; Jacques
Derrida could base his attack on West-
ern “logocentrism” on his reading of
Saussure; Stuart Hall could refer to the
long-dead Saussure as the source of “re-
cent work on the nature of language”
that supported his rewriting of Marx-
ism; and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe could identify Saussure as the
fountainhead of “contemporary” sci-
enti½c authority on language, welche
proved, they contended, the “relation-
al” character of all personal and social
identity.23

The Saussure who emerged from this

orgy of appropriation was not merely
a scientist but a savant, a great philoso-
pher of the modern and postmodern hu-
man condition. He achieved this status
not despite, but because of the fact that
his exclusive focus was on language. Er
began with a conviction about what con-
stituted real science in the ½eld of lin-
guistics, developed this conviction with
single-minded purpose and no larger
aims, and was adopted by those seeking
a broader truth of humanity because
they felt that language revealed the truth
about the human.

Ironisch, by the time Saussure

achieved this apex of influence, he had
been completely superseded in his own
½eld, and was accorded even less respect
by linguists than Freud by his heirs and
descendants in psychoanalysis. Post-
Saussurean linguists approached their
task from another point of view alto-
gether, guided by a completely differ-
ent model of the human. In the work
of Noam Chomsky, this model comes
very close to direct and explicit articu-
lation. Rejecting virtually every one of
Saussure’s premises about the object
of linguistic research, Chomsky sought
to redirect linguistics away from signs,
society, communication, arbitrary

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Geoffrey
Galt
Harpham
on being
menschlich

conventions, and obedience to rules, Und
toward the human brain. The communi-
ty of language-oriented theorists that ap-
propriated Saussure has ignored Chom-
sky not because they doubt the adequacy
of his science (which they do not pre-
tend to understand), nor even because
they disagree with his politics (in many
Fälle, they do not). They ignore Chom-
sky because his model of humanity con-
flicts with theirs, in that it is based on
unconscious biological necessity cen-
tered in the individual rather than in
the unconstrained invention of the lin-
guistic community.

According to Chomsky, human be-
ings are endowed with a cognitive appa-
ratus capable of learning and using lan-
Spur, a capacity for understanding and
generating an in½nite number of gram-
matically well-formed, but never-before-
heard, Sätze. This capacity for “rule-
governed creativity,” which is univer-
sal by biological necessity, Ist, Chomsky
maintains, the key to human singulari-
ty; and linguistics, considered as a biol-
ogy-based branch of cognitive science,
is the key to a general and authoritative
science of the human. This science be-
gins with a study of the rules of syntax,
posits a theory of how those rules arose
and took root, infers from that theory
the innate structure of the brain, Und
extrapolates from that structure a posi-
tive description of human nature. Seit
his high argument is grounded in biolo-
gy, it would seem that Chomsky ought
to embrace a Darwinian, das ist, natu-
ralistic account of human evolution.
He has instead raised a series of objec-
tions to thinking of natural selection
as the means by which language devel-
geöffnet, and to biological reductionism
and naturalism more generally.24 His
resistance to Darwin has created a ten-
sion in his theory that after half a cen-
tury remains unresolved.

Various reasons for Chomsky’s ob-
durate and, to some, mystifying resist-
ance to a Darwinian account of the hu-
man capacity for language have been
proposed, but most of them direct at-
tention to the wrong place, to some ar-
gument Chomsky has made about evo-
lution, epistemology, or genetics. Der
real driver of Chomsky’s Darwin-skep-
ticism is not to be found in his science
selbst, but in another compartment of
his thinking where the model of the
human that informs his science resides.
That compartment is not scienti½c at
alle, but political and moral. Chomsky
has situated his work in a philosophical
tradition that includes Descartes, Rous-
seau, Kant, von Humboldt, Herder, Und
Schelling.25 This Enlightenment tradi-
tion supports, in his account, a linked
series of arguments: that the essence
of humanity is freedom; that language
is the faculty that de½nes mankind by
placing humans beyond the limits of
mere physical explanation; that beasts
are incapable of freedom because they
do not possess language; and that an
understanding of the creative princi-
ple in language should guide us in con-
structing a rational social order in which
human beings could enjoy full scope
for expressing their inherent nature.26
Chomsky may have scienti½c reasons
for believing that natural selection can-
not explain the origin of language; Aber
one cannot ignore the possibility that
Darwin does not make the list of ap-
proved thinkers because Darwin’s un-
derstanding of organic life as a cease-
less struggle resulting in the flourish-
ing of the ½ttest species and the extinc-
tion of “less improved forms” does not
support the values of creativity and free-
dom Chomsky wants to promote.

One of the foundational arguments

in the tradition of thinking in which
Chomsky places himself is voiced by

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Rousseau, who distinguishes between
humans and animals on the grounds that
a beast is (in Chomsky’s paraphrase)
“merely an ingenious machine, com-
manded by natural law,” unlike man,
whose “freedom and his conscious-
ness of this freedom distinguish him
from the beast-machine.”27 This con-
cept of the “beast-machine” has par-
ticular force in Chomsky because it
indicates both the non-human and,
more surprisingly, the human. Human
superiority is based on language, welche
gives people–all people, regardless of
their talents, aptitudes, or merits–the
capacity for free and open-ended cre-
Aktivität. Unlike other kinds of creativi-
ty, the generation of an endless string
of grammatical sentences does not re-
quire will, intention, or even awareness;
it operates automatically because it is
produced by what Chomsky calls a “de-
vice” in the human brain that is special-
ized to acquire or “grow” a language,
and that operates like a “machine.”28
For Chomsky, the linguistic capacity
is part of our biology, a “module” in
das Gehirn; but the operation of that ca-
pacity is mechanical and strictly un-
conscious. Human beings are neither
beasts nor machines because, nicht wie
ihnen, they are both. If we could unpack
the complex, even contorted thought
behind the phrase “beast-machine,”
we would be close to articulating the
model behind Chomsky’s linguistics.
Beasts and machines, we might say,
are both condemned to mindless repe-
tition–this is why we can conceive of
a “beast-machine”–but the combina-
tion of an animalian responsiveness to
the environment and a rule-governed
“device” in the brain that operates in-
dependently of any animal reaction or
response produces a distinctively hu-
man being that is both free and end-
lessly creative.

Attempting to deflect some of the
implications of Darwinian naturalism,
Chomsky has actually proposed an al-
ternative account of the genesis of lan-
guage that does not exactly contradict
Darwin, but still preserves human singu-
larity. Humans, he has suggested, share
with primates a primitive conceptual
System, but the capacity to conceive of
a “discrete in½nity”–the most obvious
example being the in½nite number of
natural numbers–is exclusively human.
This capacity, Chomsky speculates, Ist
the result of a fortuitous event in the dis-
tant past, when the conceptual system
was crossed with the computational ca-
pacity through a “mutation . . . vielleicht
for reasons that have to do with the bi-
ology of cells, to be explained in terms
of properties of physical mechanisms,
now unknown,” with the result being an
ability unique to the species to generate
an in½nite number of new sentences.29
With the acquisition of this remarkable
ability, we suddenly became a “totally
new organism,” living in “a total new
world.”30 Natural selection played no
role in producing this mysterious fluke,
a one-time accident punctuating the
slow evolutionary grind. Once it hap-
pened, Jedoch, the accident became
frozen in the species, which–also sud-
denly–acquired a distinctive nature,
with its own capacities, norms, Und
rights. The process may have been
merely biological, Chomsky grants,
but it produced a species that is “meta-
physically distinct from non-humans.”31
Chomsky’s commitment to a meta-
physical difference is not, vielleicht, what
one might expect from a scientist; Aber
even more surprising in this context is
his statement that we remain, at this late
Datum, encumbered by a not-fully-devel-
oped mental apparatus, and that more
work is required in order for us to reach
our full potential, which will be attained

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Geoffrey
Galt
Harpham
on being
menschlich

when “animal nature is transcended and
human nature can truly flourish.”32

By claiming that the language faculty

is part of our genetic endowment but
refusing to make his case in Darwinian
Bedingungen, Chomsky has created a problem
in his theory that others have tried solve,
a dispute that others have tried to medi-
aß, and a void that others have rushed to
½ll. Most of those making these efforts
are unaware of, or simply do not credit,
the philosophically and ethically deter-
mined model that has created the dif½-
culty, and so proceed as if the issue were
scienti½c rather than philosophical, po-
litical, or moral. In The Language Instinct,
Zum Beispiel, Steven Pinker provides a
cheerful and ingenious account of how
language might have evolved from non-
language and installed itself in the hu-
man brain as an instinct.33 Pinker rep-
resents himself as an ally, providing
evidence for Chomsky’s argument that
Chomsky himself has, for no reason
Pinker can divine, declined to provide.
But Pinker has in fact described a lan-
guage faculty that differs signi½cantly
from Chomsky’s. Pinker quietly substi-
tutes the evolutionarily advantageous
capacity for information sharing for
Chomsky’s rule-governed creativity, Er
mentions (and conceives of ) no meta-
physical difference between humans
and animals, and he does not appear to
entertain any post-bestial aspirations
for the human species. He has, in short,
gutted Chomsky’s account of its vitals,
and has done so with a clean conscience
because he has failed to grasp that the
real issue is not in the science, but in the
model informing the science. In der Tat, Wenn
he had fully grasped the signi½cance of
the model underlying Chomsky’s work,
Pinker might not have cast his work as
a friendly amendment, for he himself
seems more interested in and impressed
by an altogether different model, eins

based on the hard invariants of human
nature rather than in the human capac-
ity for open-ended creativity.34

Nor is Pinker the only one to get
Chomsky wrong by ignoring or under-
estimating the antipathy between Dar-
win and Chomsky. In his widely noticed
Buch, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed
Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
(2006), Marc D. Hauser argues that hu-
man beings are innately endowed with
“a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for
building speci½c moral programs” that
Ist, he says, precisely analogous to the
unconscious mechanical workings of
the grammar-based language faculty
on which Chomsky’s work is based.35
The book is built on this analogy: Er
announces in his second sentence that
“the blind hand of Darwinian selection”
has contributed to producing a species
uniquely capable of moral judgment,
and in his third that his entire argument
is modeled on that of Chomsky.36 In es-
sence, Hauser has detached Chomsky’s
linguistics from its Enlightenment mod-
Er, and has stapled it to the Darwinian
model Chomsky has always resisted.
It is an open question whether Hauser
is endorsing Chomsky’s ideas or Dar-
win’s, for while he gives Chomsky nam-
ing rights, sozusagen, to the supporting
evidence, the fundamental model of hu-
manity in Moral Minds is the one articu-
lated not in Aspects of Syntax, but in The
Descent of Man.

At the beginning of this essay, I sug-

gested that the science of language was
such a productive source of human self-
understanding because language itself
was widely considered to be the de½ni-
tive human trait. But it is now clear that
another factor is at work as well. Der
study of language requires an implied
model of humanity, but this model does
not merely set the parameters of inqui-

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ry; to an unusual degree, the model de-
termines the object of study itself. In
pursuit of the language spoken by the
original pair, Müller focused on etymol-
ogy and other historical features of lan-
Spur; seeking to understand the es-
sence of mankind as a communicating
Spezies, Saussure concentrated on the
system of signs; and as a way of grasp-
ing human nature as a structure of free-
dom and creativity, Chomsky priori-
tized syntax. All were con½dent that
their chosen emphases represented
the core of language, with everything
else being contingent or secondary.

Was, Dann, is language? Chomsky
voices a suspicion held by many of the
most serious students of the subject
when he explains his preference for
the term syntax over language by say-

ing, “There is nothing in the real world
corresponding to language. In fact it
could very well turn out that there is
no intelligible notion of language . . .
the notion [von] language might turn
out just to be a useless notion.”37 This
remarkable formulation actually re-
quires a small revision. There may be
nothing in the world designated by the
term language, but the notion, idea, oder
concept of language is, in fact, extraor-
dinarily useful, for it enables linguistic
scientists not only to lay claim to a sub-
ject of immense historical importance
and philosophical resonance, but also
to serve the larger purposes of human-
ity by enabling the idea of the human
to come, or almost come, to counte-
nance in the coded but accessible form
of rational discourse about an object.

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ENDNOTES
1 Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum, International Criminal Court, Bd. 1, 360. As of
Oktober 2008, 108 countries are party to the Rome Statute, including nearly all of Europe
and South America, and roughly half the countries in Africa. Forty more states have signed
but not rati½ed the treaty.
2 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1995).
3 “Early Writings of Charles Darwin,” in Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scienti½c
Creativity, Together with Darwin’s Early and Unpublished Notebooks, Hrsg. H. E. Gruber,
transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett, with a foreword by Jean Piaget (London:
Wildwood House, 1974), 383.
4 F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans., with introduction and notes, by Anthony
Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985), 233; Hervorhebung im Original.
5 An unpublished manuscript indicates that as early as 1844 Darwin implicitly paralleled
the Tree of Life to the family tree of language; cited in Stephen G. Ändern, Darwinism and
the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Balti-
mehr: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 20. Others were also urging Darwin to
think of linguistic analogies. His cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood wrote to him in 1857, sagen-
ing, “I have often thought that there is much resemblance between language & geology
in another way. We all consider English a very mixed language because we can trace the
elements into Latin, Deutsch &C. but I see much the same sort of thing in Latin itself &
I believe that if we were but acquainted with the previous state of things we should ½nd
all languages made up of the debris of former tongues just as every geological formation
is the grinding down of former continents”; “To Darwin from Hensleigh Wedgwood,
before September 29, 1857,” in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Bd. 6, 1856–1857,

Dædalus Summer 2009

Geoffrey
Galt
Harpham
on being
menschlich

Hrsg. Frederick Burckhardt and Sydney Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 458.
6 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909), 53, 459.
7 Ebenda., 527.
8 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 1st series (London: Grün, Longman, Und
Roberts, 1861), 368; emphases in original.
9 August Schleicher, Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (Weimar: Böhlau,
1863). On Schleicher, see Liba Taub, “Evolutionary Ideas and Empirical Methods: Der
Analogy between Language and Species in Works by Lyell and Schleicher,” British Journal
for the History of Science 26 (1993): 171–193; Ändern, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, 73–
79; and Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ide-
ological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

10 Ändern, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, 7.
11 Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation, 2 vols., trans. Sir E. Ray Lankester (1868; New York:

Appleton, 1925).
12 Ebenda., Bd. II, 429.
13 Ebenda., 398, 408, 410.
14 Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man, Bd. II (1874; New York: D. Appleton and Company,

1896), 20.

15 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain
im Februar, Marsch, April, and May 1863, 2nd series (1864; New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1890), 322.

16 Ebenda., 323.
17 Ebenda., 340.
18 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray,

1871), 60–61; Ändern, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, 51.

19 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Hrsg. Charles Bally and Albert Seche-

haye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. and annotated by Roy Harris (LaSalle,
Ill.: Open Court Press, 1997), 5.

20 Ebenda., 14, 72–73. On the ways in which Saussure’s views of man and society are inscribed
in his linguistics, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Moder-
nity (New York: Routledge, 2002), 16–34.

21 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (1950;

London: Routledge, 1987), 43.

22 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary

Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 208.

23 Jacques Lacan, “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud,” Ecrits:
A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 146–175, 148;
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Bd. 33, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 8; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gay-
atri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 30–73; Stuart
Hall, “The Problem of Ideology–Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication
Inquiry 10 (2) (1986): 28–43, 36; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Social-
ist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

24 For a sample of Chomsky’s comments, see Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 97–98; Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lec-
tures (Cambridge, Masse.: mit Press, 1988), 168–170; and Nature and Language (Nocken-

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Brücke: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46–49. Among the numerous responses to
Chomsky, see especially Dennett, “Chomsky Contra Darwin: Four Episodes,” in Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea, 384–392.

25 Chomsky has stated repeatedly that his work in linguistics is entirely independent of his

political interventions. But the connection is forged quite directly through his engagement
with his chosen philosophical tradition. In one revealing passage, bei 134, in a long chapter
called “Some General Features of Language” in Reflections on Language (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1975), he modulates without a break from a highly technical discussion of
what he calls the “extended standard theory” of transformational grammar, through a dis-
cussion that touches on Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Humboldt, and concludes with a stir-
ring defense of the belief that “human needs and capacities will ½nd their fullest expres-
sion in a society of free and creative producers, working in a system of free association.”
26 For Chomsky’s articulations of this tradition, see Noam Chomsky, “Language and Free-
dom,” in The Chomsky Reader, Hrsg. James Peck (New York: Präger, 1987), 139–155; Und
Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (Lan-
ham, Md.: University Press of America, 1966).

27 Chomsky, “Language and Freedom,” in The Chomsky Reader, Hrsg. Peck, 145.
28 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Den Haag: Mouton, 1957), 18. In The Language Ma-

chine (London: Duckworth, 1987), Roy Harris accuses Chomsky of being among those who
have perpetuated the astonishingly durable but fundamentally misleading metaphor of a
“language machine.”

29 Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge, 170.
30 Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky on the Generative Enterprise: A Discussion with Riny Hur-

bregts and Henk van Riemsdijk (Dordrecht: Foris, 1982), 21–22.

31 Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, based on conversations with Mitsou Ronat,

trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 92.

32 Chomsky, Reflections on Language, 134.
33 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995).
34 See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking,

2002).

35 Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
(New York: Ecco, 2006), xviii. See pages 37–55 for Hauser’s elaboration of the “analogy”
or “parallel” between language and the moral sense suggested by Chomsky and, in slightly
different terms, by John Rawls. For an argument that the discrepancy between Chomsky
and Darwin is based on a misunderstanding, and can easily be overcome, see William H.
Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the
Menschliches Gehirn (Cambridge, Masse.: mit Press, 2000).

36 Hauser, Moral Minds, xvii.
37 Chomsky, Noam Chomsky on the Generative Enterprise, 107.

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