WHITNEY, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

WHITNEY, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

  Following the publication of Schleicher’s Compendium (1861), Bréal had slowly moved away from comparative philology to create a new branch of linguistics: semantics. For Whitney, too, the publication of this book, together with Max Müller’s lectures on linguistics (1861, etc.), had been a decisive turning-point. His anti-Schleicherian stance was reinforced by the publication of Schleicher’s two treatises on Darwinian linguistics (1863, English transl. 1869; 1865).

  The 1860s for Whitney were the beginning of an obdurate witch-hunt, a sustained effort to destroy the reputation of these two writers. Why this strong reaction? Apart from

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  an unacknowledged struggle to gain popularity in his own right (the structure of his books and the examples used strongly resemble both the form and the content of Müller’s books), Whitney attacked Schleicher and Müller for two reasons: Schleicher was too good a comparative linguist and there was a danger that people reading his books would not only accept and absorb the hard data and formulas, but also the philosophy underlying them, which for Whitney was an unacceptable hybrid of Hegelianism and Darwinism. As for Müller, the reasons for opposing him were the converse: he was too bad a linguist, a dilettante, who bewitched the public with his fluent style, but whose philosophy of language was as wrong as Schleicher’s. Both Schleicher and Müller held that linguistics was a natural science and both ignored the speaker in the linguistic inquiry, that is they denied, destroyed, so to speak, his free will.

  Another of Whitney’s victims was Steinthal, who did not regard linguistics as a natural science, who did not regard language as an organism, and who stressed the importance of the speaking subject and of society in his psychology of language. He had derived his philosophy of language not from Hegel or Darwin, but from Humboldt. This, in Whitney’s eyes, was his error. Whitney regarded Humboldt as one of the most impractical and unreadable philosophers of language.

  Whitney’s own philosophy of linguistics, thus opposed to Schleicher’s, Müller’s, and Steinthal’s, was a pragmatic, inductive, and realistic philosophy. This will become clear in his critiques of these three writers. All three were accused of not contributing to the science of language on the one hand, and to the philosophy of language on the other. Having no sound philosophical foundation, the science of language they wanted to establish was built on sand.

  His experience with the works of Schleicher, Steinthal, and Müller (the German-born professor at Oxford) made him sceptical about the merits of German linguistics in general:

  In Germany itself, where the methods of comparative philology have received an elaboration and a definite and fruitful application elsewhere unequaled and unapproached, linguistic science remains far behind; opinions are still in a state almost to be termed chaotic, and one comparative philologist of rank and fame after another comes forward with doctrines that are paradoxical or wholly indefensible.

  (OLS: vi)

  But while Germany is the home of comparative philology, the scholars of that country…distinguished themselves much less in that which we have called the Science of language.

  (LGL: 318)

  The science of language is an historical one, and not as German scholars seem to believe,

  a natural one. Regarding philosophy of language, he wrote: ‘Germany is the home of philology and linguistic study; but the Germans are rather exceptionally careless of what we may call the questions of linguistic philosophy, or are loose and inconsistent in their views of such questions’ (LI: 715). He believed that there ‘needs to be, perhaps, a radical stirring up of the subject, a ventilation of a somewhat breezy, even gusty, order, which

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  shall make words fly high, and dash noisily against one another, before agreement shall

  be reached’ (ibid.). This is exactly what Whitney tried to do by introducing some philosophical principles into linguistics, such as the arbitrariness and conventionality of signs, the definition of language as a social institution and an instrument of thought and communication, the stress on the speaker and hisher will to speak and to act so as to satisfy hisher most basic needs. He also insisted that change is a fundamental property of language. Its study should not be reduced to the atomistic listing of changes of isolated linguistic forms, but broadened so that it could embrace the general principles of change. The life and growth of language for him is a dialectical process, governed by two forces: the conservative force, governing the transmission of language from generation to generation, and the alterative force that makes it continually change through use (cf. LGL: ch. 3). These forces give language its particular semiotic character: continuity in alteration. In effect Whitney prefaces what Saussure will call the most fundamental principle of semiotics (cf. CLGE: 169, 171):

  So far as language is handed down from generation to generation by the process of teaching and learning, it is stable, and by this means it does remain nearly the same; so far as it is altered by the consenting action of its users, it is unstable, and it does in fact change.

  (LI: 719)

  By defining language as intelligent behaviour, Whitney elegantly avoids falling into one of the antinomic traps, noted by Victor Henry. Behaviour that must be learned can also be altered; signs that are by nature conventional are alterable (cf. LGL: 48).

  However, it was not until Saussure, who did not try to overhaul linguistics radically, but whose followers used his ideas to challenge other linguists, that most of the philosophical principles discussed earlier became established in linguistics. If Saussure had published his obituary of Whitney, written in 1894, this revolution in linguistics arguably would have occurred earlier. Saussure could have joined forces with Whitney, with whom he shared not only a philosophy of language and most of its principal axioms, but also a certain animosity against German linguistics. He wrote:

  For all time it will be a subject for philosophical reflection that during a period of fifty years linguistic science, born in Germany, developed in Germany, cherished in Germany by innumerable people, has never had the slightest inclination to reach the degree of abstraction which is necessary in order to dominate on the one hand what one is doing, on the other hand why what one is doing has a legitimacy and a raison d’être in the totality of sciences; but a second subject of astonishment is to see that when at last this science seems to triumph over her torpor, she winds up with the ludicrous attempt of Schleicher, which totters under its own preposterousness. Such was the prestige of Schleicher for simply having tried to say something general about linguistics, that he even today seems an unrivaled figure in the history of linguistics.

  (Quoted by Jakobson, in Silverstein 1971: xxx; CLGN: 4)

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  Grandiose rhetoric! That it remains unpublished is a mixed blessing.

  Schleicher and the physical theory of language

  Anna Morpurgo Davies writes in her major contribution to the history of nineteenth- century linguistics that ‘Schleicher’s work had brought the organic view of language (in the ontological sense) to the point where compromise was no longer possible’ (1975:638)—and Whitney was certainly not a man for compromises. What was so peculiar about Schleicher and so infuriating for men like Whitney, Bréal, and Saussure? Morpurgo Davies provides a masterly summary of Schleicher’s peculiarities and achievements:

  According to most histories of linguistics a rather curious combination of approaches and results marks Schleicher’s contribution to the study of language. His system seems to embrace a Hegelian belief in a process of prehistoric growth followed by historical decay, a Darwinian theory of evolution, a greater rigour in the application of sound laws, the Stammbaumtheorie, and finally an interest in the reconstruction of Ursprachen. Together with this goes his claim that linguistics, or Glottik, is a natural science and not a form of historical knowledge (a task reserved to philology) and that all languages may be classified into three classes (isolating, agglutinative and inflectional).

  (Morpurgo Davies 1975:633)

  We have seen that Whitney started to attack Schleicher’s concept of language and linguistics as soon as Schleicher was dead. But his criticism was set out most clearly in an article written in 1872 and reprinted in the Oriental and Linguistic Studies (1873). Whitney opens his critique by a quote from Schleicher’s book Die Deutsche Sprache:

  Languages are natural organisms, which without being determinable by the will of man, arose, grew, and developed themselves, in accordance with fixed laws, and then again grow old and die out; to them, too belongs that succession of phenomena which is wont to be termed ‘life’. Glottik, the science of language, is accordingly a natural science; its method is on the whole and in general the same with that of the other natural sciences.

  (1860:6f.)

  For Whitney everything is wrong with this definition of language and of linguistics. Language is not a natural organism, but the cultural and historical product of men’s action, an institution (OLS: 316). Like all human action, speech is voluntary, an ongoing process by which language as a product comes into being and is changed. There are no fixed laws that structure language from without, but procedures of change and variation that structure language from within and work ‘in lively phrase’ (OLS: 305). The constant everyday actions of speakers keep language ‘alive’. Language has thus no life of its own; it lives only through its speakers. This is a continuous process that has nothing to do with birth, growth, and decay. Finally, linguistics is not a natural science, but an historical and

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  cultural one. To make this point clear, Whitney challenges the reader to ask whether language, like a ‘pyramid is a work of human art or rather a stupendous natural crystal, undeterminable by the will of man, and developed under the government of the eternal laws of regular solids’ (OLS: 302). For Whitney the answer is clearly that language is comparable to a work of art, but not to a crystal, say, and that the laws that govern language are human laws of action, not natural laws. ‘Every law of speech has its foundation and reason in the users of speech—in their mental operations, their capacities, their wants and preferences’ (OLS: 315). According to Whitney, language is an organism only by analogy, as Lyell had said in the Antiquity of Men (1863; cf. OLS: 316).

  If one wants to understand the nature and life of language, one can turn to geology (Lyell) or biology (Darwin) for methodological inspiration, but one should be careful not to turn their theories upside down, as Schleicher seems to do, reverting to a pre- Darwinian position. To speak of growth and decay, writes Whitney, ‘looks like Darwinism reversed: the apes not so much represent a condition out of which man has arisen as that into which creatures that might have been men have fallen through simple neglect of learning to talk’ (OLS: 329). But talk of birth, growth, and death conceals an even deeper misunderstanding of Darwin, who did not intend developing a new theory of embryology or of individual evolution, but rather a general theory of the evolution of species, based on the principles of variation and selection. Lyell, the geologist, so much admired by Whitney, outlined a theory of the life of language that was built on these principles. This theory is much sounder than Schleicher’s Darwinian speculations and we shall return to it in chapter 3, pp. 61–5.

  Lyell was not only a source for Whitney’s better understanding of linguistic evolution according to the uniformitarianist model, his books were also a model of a new type of science—modern inductive science, for which induction alone, or pure positivism, is not enough, especially when dealing with such problematic topics as the origin and life of language:

  Strict induction from the determinate items of knowledge is no longer applicable; its place is taken by inference from general views and theoretical conditions—these views being themselves, of course, not arbitrarily assumed, but derived by inductive process from facts of language and human history.

  (OLS: 284–5)

  This is why Whitney always stressed the importance of general linguistics and the philosophy of language: it is in a sound, logically consistent theory of language that the linguist can find the general principles and theoretical conditions on which to base his inductive knowledge of particular linguistic facts. It is only by a careful balance between induction and deduction that one can avoid the construction of absurd or obscure theories of language:

  The more thorough we are in our study of the living and recent forms of human language, the more rigorous in applying the deductions thence drawn to the forms current in ante-historic periods, the more cautious about admitting forces and effects in unknown ages whereof the known

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  afford us no example or criterion, so much the more sound and trustworthy will be the conclusions at which we shall arrive. It is but a shallow philology, as it is a shallow geology, which explains past changes by catastrophes and cataclysms.

  (LSL: 287)

  Steinthal, the next victim of Whitney’s vituperation, violates precisely these principles:

  he does not establish his theory of the origin of language on induction or on inductively- directed inferences and theoretical insights. He relies solely, in Whitney’s view, on wild metaphysical and psychological speculations.

  Steinthal and the psychological theory of language

  The controversy between Whitney and Steinthal started in 1868 and lasted until 1875 and beyond. It can be regarded as a gradual increase in misunderstanding. In 1868 Steinthal wrote a warm appraisal of Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language (1867), which was published in the fifth volume of his Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. In 1872, Whitney reviewed Steinthal’s Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1871), and this was first published in the North American Review under the title ‘Steinthal on the origin of language’ (Whitney 1872b) and reprinted in the OLS under the title ‘Steinthal and the psychological theory of language’. The review was anything but friendly. Steinthal answered with an ‘anti-critique’ that he called a ‘friendly dialogue’ (1875), but which was in fact a most vehement outcry of fury and hurt pride. We shall concentrate on Whitney’s review of the Abriss because he used it as a convenient vehicle to express his own views most clearly.

  But what did Steinthal have to say about Whitney in 1868? Steinthal remarks upon the clarity of Whitney’s writing (something that cannot be attributed to Steinthal himself); he admits that he prefers Whitney’s theses to Max Müller’s because they are sound and sober without false pretence (cf. 1868:365). What he cannot accept are the two basic principles of Whitney’s work: his uniformitarianism (though Steinthal does not use this term), that is the view that the same forces of change are at work now that existed in the past, and his belief in the gradual evolution of language. Both views were opposed to his own belief in revolutions or catastrophes. Steinthal clings to a pre-Darwinian, even pre- Lyellian view of language evolution, conceived as a transition from an embryonic state to one of mature growth and death. Accordingly, he holds that the process of change— especially phonetic change—differs during these different stages. Steinthal maintains an essentially pre-Darwinian conception of language-evolution, most probably influenced by Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was a geologist who, in opposition to Lyell, held that the formation of the earth and the evolution of species was structured by successive terrestrial cataclysms or catastrophes (cf. Christy 1983:6 and Cuvier 1818).

  A brief perusal of this early review offers a foreshadowing of Whitney’s reaction to Steinthal’s subsequent writings. First, Steinthal’s work is not easy to read. It demands, as Whitney says, ‘hard reading, even for the practised linguistic scholar’ (1872b:273). This is due in part to the influence of Humboldt’s thought on Steinthal,

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  a man whom it is nowadays the fashion to praise highly, without understanding or even reading him; Steinthal is the man in Germany, perhaps in the world, who penetrates the mysteries, unravels the inconsistencies, and expounds the dark sayings, of that ingenious and profound, but unclear and wholly unpractical, thinker.

  (ibid.)

  Impractical. That will be the final judgement on Steinthal’s work. But what is it that makes Steinthal so impractical? First, according to Whitney, he endorses the wrong methodology; and second, he holds the wrong view about the origin of language—both his methodology and his theory of the origin of language are ‘metaphysical’, or better, speculative.

  Steinthal’s method, unlike Lyell’s, is philosophical, aprioristic, and as such it runs against the ‘current scientific method’, which relies on observations, facts, induction, and sound inferences, thus gradually progressing ‘from the known and familiar to the obscure and unknown’. His other mistake is to rely on psychological rather than strictly historical insights (cf. 1872b:286). According to Whitney, the origin of language cannot be understood by attempting a retrospective investigation of the primitive mind, as Steinthal wishes to do, but only by inferring from current practice to practice then: ‘If such is to be the result of the full admission of psychology into linguistic investigation, then we can only say, may Heaven defend the science of language from psychology!’ (ibid.: 287)

  Steinthal’s theory of the origin of language is based on the view that language or meaning starts with understanding or interpretation. Language-understanding, based on the interaction between speaker and hearer, is of vital importance to him—a point that will be rediscovered by the symbolic interactionists. Mead, for example, would write in 1934 in not altogether clear terms:

  There is, then, a great range in our use of language; but what ever phase of this range is used is a part of a social process, and it is always that part by means of which we affect ourselves as we affect others and mediate the social situation through this understanding of what we are saying. That is fundamental for any language; if it is going to be language one has to understand what he is saying, has to affect himself as he affects others.

  (Mead 1934:75)

  Steinthal wrote in the Abriss: ‘Seeing oneself understood by the other, one understands oneself: this is the beginning of language’ (1871:386). Unfortunately, this almost modern theory of language as symbolic interaction was marred by being coupled with a theory of the reflex movement, which resembled Heyse’s and Müller’s ‘ding-dong’ theory (cf. Steinthal 1871:363), and Whitney only saw this flaw and not the positive achievements. As Morpurgo Davies writes: ‘Whitney’s criticism was justified, but one-sided’ (1975:668).

  Against Steinthal’s metaphorical and metaphysical talk of the ‘birth of language’ Whitney argues:

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  Every single item of existing speech had its own separate beginning, a time when it first came into men’s use; it had its preparation, in the already subsisting material and usages of speech, and the degree of culture and knowledge in the community, where it arose, and it obtained currency and maintained itself in existence because it answered practical purposes, subserving a felt need for expression.

  (Whitney 1872b:285)

  This is Whitney’s ‘practical’ solution to the problem of the origin of language, which he regards as vastly superior to the impractical, metaphysical one proposed by Steinthal. The history of the development of language for Whitney is the sum of the histories of words, and the linguist has to study these in order to understand ‘the gradually advancing condition of mind and state of knowledge of the language-makers and language-users’ (1872b:285). Language for Whitney is an instrument of thought and essentially an instrument of communication. Its use, and the development and change of its use, follow the same laws that ‘govern human action in general in the adaptation of means to ends’ (ibid.: 289). The acts of language-making and language-use are not only mental acts, but acts of the mind and acts of the body (cf. ibid.: 293). As such they operate consciously and unconsciously (cf. ibid.: 292), ‘consciously, as regards the immediate end to be attained; unconsciously, as regards the further consequences of the act’ (ibid.), such as the creation and change of ‘language’. This view of the origin and development of language can be called ‘pragmatic evolutionism’: the laws of language change are nothing other than the laws of human action.

  Whitney’s practical, pragmatic, or instrumentalist view of language is intimately linked to a sound evolutionary view of the development of language. And although Whitney is sometimes too harsh in his critique of Steinthal, who had (unlike Schleicher) insisted on the importance of the speaker, of society, and of symbolic interaction, one is tempted to agree with Whitney when he writes:

  In fact, we think our appreciation of the wondrous character of language a vastly higher one than Professor Steinthal; for while he holds that any two or three human beings, putting their heads together, in any age and under any circumstances not only can, but of necessity must, produce it in all its essential features, we think it a possible result only of the accumulated labor of a series of generations, working on step by step, making every acquired item the means of a new acquisition.

  (ibid.: 304)

  ‘The constant reproach, that of obscurity, wooliness, and metaphysical inclinations, levelled at him [Steinthal] by some of his contemporaries has stuck’ (Morpurgo Davies 1975:666), and invectives such as this, hurled against Whitney by Steinthal, did not really help to destroy that image: ‘Whitney has nothing at all to do with Common Sense [English in the original], Induction, natural science or history; these are only shields held up to cover his haughty vanity…we are dealing here with a snobbish and pretentious individual of unrestrained pride’ (Steinthal 1875:234). Linguistics will have to wait for

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  Wegener to bring together the positive aspects of Whitney and Steinthal, to integrate the insights of both men into a new theory of language and communication (cf. Part two).