# “Chapter 1. Language” in Alfred Tomatis (1996). The Ear and Man Man stands in awe of the gift of language. Yet at the same time he feels that language is inherent and that it is a characteristic trait of humanity. He is not so astonished at his marvelous ability that he cannot take it for granted. It does not cross his mind that language could be taken away from him. and although the term language includes any and all means of expression, attention in this book is directed toward oral language, the most highly developed and by far most adaptable form. A man alone, without speech, risks losing his human quality without being able to express his thoughts. Language is his masterpiece. Now the eternal question - which produced the other? Was language born of man, or did language transform the underlying animal into the human? The question seems destined to remain unanswered because, at our level, no real answer exists. For our purpose here, let us assume that an exceptional combination of circumstances endowed us with that good sense to adopt language for our communal use, in family and social life. It came from a desire for communication, and the need to impart ones impressions to others and to receive and remember the knowledge gathered by others. Imagine to what extent man has since affected language and how language has helped to shape man. Word as creator is inconceivable apart from thought. Word and thought are not disassociated in the Logos. The Word existed before the creation of the world. The divine issue of the Word set in motion the first Thought, object of the supreme Point of Creation. Word-Thought preceded the Word, origin of all light. This Word, immaterial, disembodied, in existence before the world, was nevertheless one day made manifest. It marked the beginning of the world, and by its modulation the world proceeds. All human thought is indivisible from world Thought. Mans cosmic presence makes him a cell inseparable from its environment. His word, his language in short, will be part of the cosmic Word whose creative force guides his will to live and will act as a unit within the milieu that engulfs him. As the diminished and surely imperfect image of a cosmic whole, man has become aware of the Word-Thought within him. The Word enables him to externalize the pre-existing Word-Thought, giving him the deeply rooted feeling of having created something. We know the consequences of this line of reasoning, or perhaps we should call it raving! Man can create with the spoken word a way to increase his human potential. Through it he can observe and know himself. Day by day his mode of expression expands, along with his powers of self-investigation. As he participated in a social structure, its collective tolerances define and impose personal limitations within a somewhat rigid framework. These limitations are true borders to his individual freedom, yet his participation provides him with the possibility of expanding the level of his consciousness to the very limits of human Thought. Language is the vehicle that carries man ever farther and higher in the development of thought. It is his springboard into a dimension where words are no longer useful, where Word-Thought can exist unsupported, beyond the gravitational pull toward matter that is exerted by the spoken word. The phenomenon of language thus occurs between two poles of silence. At one end is the muteness of one who knows nothing and cannot say anything, whose main concern is to hide his lack of desire to communicate lest it betray his low humanization level. At the other end is the silent pinnacle of meditation of one whose power and refinement of language take him to the utmost heights of the Word of man. Depending on his human level of growth attained, man ranges between these two extremes. He uses the instrument of language to reconcile the animal he knows himself to be, which belongs to the material world, with the cosmic thought that constantly affects him and in which he bathes. Specialists from varied backgrounds turn to the problem of language. Often they reach it after a long journey, during which they retain strong ties to their original training. Their prior knowledge filters the areas they illuminate with whatever clarity and vividness are born in the shadows of their former preoccupations. ### Language and the Philosopher Wise men give answers that fail to satisfy our eternal, irrepressible need for unity. We are ceaselessly driven back and forth between the search for a point of origin and our quest for the universal container. Can we be satisfied when the problems under attach deal with human phenomena? If the philosopher ever spoke the whole truth, in this or any other instance, he would cease to be a man, and all these problems would disappear in obvious solutions and no longer be considered. We need not worry, for anyone who claims to have reached this point will not be understood, because he will have exceeded mans perspective. As Pythagoras liked to think, “No man is wise, only God.” Like other men, therefore, the philosopher has to solve problems, and his solutions depend wholly upon the parameters he selects using his essentially human mental equipment. Choice of factors are all-important. If too many are selected, they scatter and quickly lose their coherence, and the philosophers field of consciousness has trouble following them. If too few, the consequent polarity grotesquely deforms his judgment of the results. We deliberately avoid mentioning that enormous distortions arise when a problem is badly framed or when the problem-solving strategy is poorly carried out. Furthermore, the philosophers only purpose in defining the Logos is to fit human existence into the general frame of his world concept; our unconscious tend to drag us along with him irresistibly, toward the origin of all things. From this point, which marks the genesis of man from the beginning of time and space, we see man as born either of God or of Earth, depending on our deepest personal tendencies. “If man is of divine origin”, said Goethe, “so is language; if man is an earth being, then language is also a natural fact.” In either case the philosopher has plenty of metaphysical proofs upon which to base his theories. His arguments gravitate toward some favorite point, which is peculiar to his fundamental resonance. Thus we find ourselves pulled in opposite directions. On one side are fanatical defenders of homogenesis, which may or may not be founded on theological concepts. On the other side, promoters of empiricism push to extremes against their opponents determinism. The commanders of determinism and empiricism fight for their cause, each beneath his own flag, but without necessarily using the same arguments. The determinists back the theory of homogenesis and deny all human intervention in the origin and development of language. This extreme position is adopted by W. Wundt who neither sees any human intervention in the origin of language nor admits that, once acquired, language can evolve on its own. W. von Humboldt leans toward the same conception, stating that “language was human from the beginning.” The absence of the same anthropological factor also characterizes the opinion of E. Renan on the origin of language, when he tells us that nature has endowed man with speech, which he considers a mere faculty, like that of sign or interpretation. H. Steinthal and Benedetto Croce took the same stand. To admit that man is as he is provides no solution to the origin of language nor enlightenment about the origin of man himself. The question of what preceded language in mans prehistory remains in total darkness. With no prior step, this speaking animal springs up out of a soup, like a thousand-faceted crystal bloc, securely enriching us when we want to penetrate this initial mystery. Whether he is of divine origin, the finite creation of a single will, as stated by Plato in Cratylus and Aristotle in On Interpretation (viewpoints blindly backed by certain theologians such as Juste Lipse, Vossius and Dom Calmet) or of earthly extraction (the fruit of a conjectured anomaly, locked in place by an obscure catalysis, as stated by Wundt, von Humbolt, Steinthal, and Max Muller), man as we know him seems to rise out of the dawn of time without prehistory. Spontaneous generation is obviously hard to accept, especially since some of its supporters reject the creative genius of man. It therefore provides an easy target for the violent objections of its adversaries, who have taken full advantage, to the point that they are guilty of an easy and abusive extremism. The empiricist grounds his opposition on mans will and intelligence and bases the construction of the act of speech on experience. Imitation, analogy, invention, and the biological and social need for communication are advanced in turn. “Every step in the formation of language is conscious”, declares A. Marty, thus taking a firm stand directly opposed to Wundt. Marty later rephrased this statement under pressure of Wundts violent attack labeling him the champion of the “theory of pure invention”. Marty, however, was only zealously counting himself among the line of empiricists who had gone before him: Condillac, Tiederman, Darwin, Spencer, Geiger, Taylor, Carus, Schlegel, Michelet, and Madvig. So we are poised between two assumptions: on the one hand, that language existed from the start without any contribution by man, and on the other, that man gradually fashioned language through increasingly complex communal and social experimentation. Regardless of whether it is an inherent human faculty or the discovered and evolved tool essential to becoming human, language is difficult if not impossible to separate from thought. We cannot determine at what precise moment language came into being in its own right. Perhaps it sprang up one day, like fire shooting out of the first spark, from between the hands of man. Why not a Word Age, preceding in time the Iron Age, the Fire Age, or the Stone Age. According to a definition borrowed from Revesz, “Language is a set of meaningful signs making it possible to distinguish objects of the external world and states of mind by means of a fixed coordination between the signs and their meaning”. Revesz reveals his wish to abolish the no-mans-land separating determinists from empiricists. Undoubtedly he is right in thinking that both groups fanatically support positions backed by pertinent but insufficient and incomplete arguments. He wants to bridge the gap and show that when the explanations are conjoined, they may throw light on a wider field of investigation. Biological and social elements result in a contractual theory that says language occurs as the consequence of the need to communicate, emanating in turn from the instinct for communal life. In man more than in any other animal, psychism, the condition of being psychic, makes possible the development of this method of relating, which is used by man to externalize and expand his inborn tendency toward symbolism.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 15:52:45 +0000
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