Origin of Language

* Book: he Origin of Language (Eric Gans)

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Review

IP:

When Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, it was not considered a work of science, but a work of natural history. One thinks that in the transition of evolutionary biology to being a hard science, something has been lost, because as a work of history first and foremost, it provides us with a narrative, and a narrative is a powerful thing.

This is what Eric Gans did in the field of anthropology with his Generative Anthropology (GA)—providing a narrative account of our origins. ...

Gans follows René Girard’s mimetic account of the origins of humanity. Humans are the most mimetic of animals, which generates conflict as the person we’re imitating becomes our rival over a finite resource. When such mimetic rivalry gets out of hand, this can lead to crisis which threatens the whole community. In Girard’s account, just such a crisis leads a group of proto-humans to mark out one member of the group as the “scapegoat” whose murder is required to diffuse the crisis.

Gans accepts the basic theme of the mimetic crisis, but sees it unfold in terms of language — the birth of the human is an essentially linguistic event.

In this “originary scene”, the community’s mimetic rivalry has built up to where the normal pecking order (Gans gives the example of a recent kill) threatens to devolve into general violence. One member is seen by the rest to hesitate, and this gesture of hesitation diffuses the crisis as others imitate it. It also becomes the first linguistic sign — the ostensive—and since proto-humans don’t have agency, no other agency could have diffused the situation than the object of desire itself, thus will is imputed on to this object which becomes a sacred centre—God. ...

The originary hypothesis set out above is not particularly intuitive, but the important takeaway is that the ostensive is at the root of all language. From this follows the imperative which is derivative of the ostensive, and from the imperative follows the declarative which is derivative of both. Rather than seeing these on a continuum of primitive/developed, we should see them in terms of fundamental/derivative.

Where all of this starts to have obvious implications is in realizing that there are also ostensive, imperative, and declarative cultures. Every historical culture is of course a mix of all three, but it’s clear that, for example, societies whose religion involves a shamanic element are strongly ostensive, since the shaman ecstatically participates in the divine just as the ostensive sign is inextricable from the thing it describes (“man overboard!” is only ever said in the presence of the man fallen overboard). Likewise, societies with a cultic religion are very strongly imperative, since the heroic cults of say, the early Greek city-states, were almost exhaustively ritualistic, with only a bare minimum of propositional content. So, what does declarative culture look like? We have here the proposition nation.

We can pinpoint the birth of the proposition nation with relative precision — these cultures were born out of the Axial age. This shift happened in many places, but the paradigmatic shift was from the Indo-Iranian cultic religion, characterized by orthopraxy, lineage, and cyclical history, to the Zoroastrian reforms, characterized by orthodoxy, universalism, and eschatology. No longer was the religion based on exclusive and inherited cultic imperatives, but on truth — and because the truth is the same no matter who apprehends it, religion ceased to be a valid constitutive principle for a distinct people. One was a Zoroastrian as long as one accepted the truth of the prophet’s revelation; no longer did the creed grow out of the folk, but the folk out of the creed. This propositionality, which I have discussed in my article In Praise of Gullibility has been a major current of liberalism and has proven corrosive to ethnic boundaries.

Gans’ thought gives us the tools to put propositionality in its place. As it turns out, both linguistically and culturally, propositionality comes only very late, and stands upon a much deeper foundation, without which it is nothing. While propositional identity is useful, especially for power centralization across ethnic lines, societies that ignore and even reject their foundations are not long for this world. Gans gives us the conceptual framework to articulate why."

(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/ten-books-required-to-understand-977)