Table Of ContentContents
Front matter
Title page i
Publisher Information ii
Foreword, Lance Kirby iii
Body matter
Emotion in Language, John Bolender 1
Rousseau and Derrida on Liberty and on Language,
the First Social Institution, Barry Stocker 64
Reply to “Rousseau and Derrida on Liberty and on
Language, the First Social Institution”,
John Bolender 114
Reply to “Emotion in Language”, Barry Stocker 131
Back matter
References 138
Rousseau on Language and Writing:
Two Perspectives
by Barry Stocker and John Bolender
with a foreword by Lance Kirby
2014 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www andrewsuk com
Published in 2014 by
ROUSSEAU, ETC
Piketon, Ohio
www rousseau-etc com
“Emotion in Language” and “Reply to ‘Rousseau and
Derrida on Liberty and on Language, the First Social
Institution’” © John Bolender
“Rousseau and Derrida on Liberty and on Language,
the First Social Institution” and “Reply to ‘Emotion
in Language’” © Barry Stocker
“Foreword” © Lance Kirby
Cover art: Blombos Ochre by Simon Max Bannister,
used with permission: www simonmaxbannister com
Foreword, Lance Kirby
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has always been a richly divisive thinker,
the contradictions of his life almost displaying a split-personality
It is therefore fitting that this duality is mirrored by the essays
gathered in this volume upon one of Rousseau’s lesser known
works, the Essay on the Origin of Languages Here Rousseau
sought to argue, making wild and brilliant philological and
sociological speculation along the way, that originally language
developed in warm southern climes where it held a musical and
emotional character that, with its migration to the north, would
become more coldly rational and utilitarian If we agree with
this hypothesis, it may go a long way in explaining the decline
of poetry from its period of greatest flowering in the antiquity
of Greece, to its diminishment to the humble lyric of today For
Rousseau, ours is an age for the cold businessman’s prose of the
account books not for the singing of epics
It would be no stretch to claim that all of Rousseau’s work is one
sustained attack upon inauthenticity in human relations In this,
the Essay on the Origin of Languages is just one small continuation
of that project We all wear masks, and language is just one more
mask we wear to hide our true selves from one another In the
“linguistic turn” of twentieth century philosophy and the rise
of the Analytic/Continental divide, Rousseau was thus in a way
prescient in reminding us that too often language can be as much
a shield of self-protection as it is a means of conveying ideas In a
manner similar to C P Snow’s “Two Cultures”, it becomes merely
a tool of defense, where both parties talk past one another instead
of genuinely engaging, as the recent commotion between Noam
Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek might suggest In this, Professors
Barry Stocker and John Bolender have rendered a service in
helping to spur just such a dialogue Bolender, writing from the
Analytic perspective, and Stocker from the Continental, have
produced essays from their respective domains, each in turn
then has contributed a separate essay upon these two original
interpretations
Barry Stocker gives us an absorbing study pairing Rousseau with
Jacques Derrida, exploring a deconstructed investigation of the
Essay With a subtle and nuanced analysis Stocker explains that,
due to the indeterminacy of language that a flawless definition of
concepts such a liberty and community can never be achieved but
that political language must remain in constant discussion with
its self John Bolender asks how does emotion in language create
solidarity in a community and, further, challenges the Chomskian
view against oratory as a positive and perhaps necessary force for
political cohesion, speculative insights that present an excellent
example of philosophy’s ability to offer new lines of scientific
research and inquiry
The book as a whole is a wonderful demonstration of the
limitless possibilities that a great philosopher can elicit even two-
hundred years after his death, and the still greater possibilities
for cross fertilization and experimentation across the, perhaps,
artificial gap of the so called Analytic/Continental divide
Regardless, if this volume does not achieve its hoped for aim and
ignite similar attempts at such dialogue, it remains a unique and
stimulating exchange upon a much under-appreciated work by
one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment
Emotion in Language, John Bolender
If you do not feel a thing, you will never guess its
meaning
— Emma Goldman, quoted in Ferguson (2011, 198)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages
anticipates some very recent developments in linguistics, while
also suggesting means of further developing linguistic research
The value of the Essay today lies largely in the fact that these
means of development may not be immediately obvious to us
without Rousseau’s help These potential benefits to cognitive
science are not limited to linguistics The Essay suggests a
means for linking the study of language with the study of social
cognition, specifically in Rousseau’s attempts to link language
with politics The potential benefit to philosophy of language is
also significant Rousseau’s emphases are radically different than
the emphases of today’s recent philosophy of language However,
despite the differences in emphasis, a strong commitment to
naturalism unites Rousseau with many of today’s philosophers
including philosophers of language (Stephen Neale’s numerous
references to generative grammar (1990), for example, show that
he aims to be doing philosophy of language in a scientifically
informed manner ) Perhaps this common ground will suffice for
them to begin to consider Rousseau’s Essay seriously, as a source
of questions and proto-hypotheses In doing so, they will find
themselves breaking into some possibly surprising new territory
Modern philosophy of language owes its origins largely to the
work of Gottlob Frege whose main concern was semantics As
a result, philosophy of language today is also largely concerned
with semantics, only addressing issues of form and structure
insofar as they directly relate to semantics An exception would
be Jerrold Katz who was concerned with the ontological status
of syntactic structures (1996), but even Katz was at one with
most philosophers of language in having virtually no interest in
phonetics or emotional content If today’s philosophy of language
had owed its origins to Rousseau, rather than Frege, the focus of
research would be very different indeed Rousseau’s focus was on
the sound of language and how sound relates to emotion Even
when Rousseau discusses meaning, such as in his treatment of
figurative language, the emphasis is still on emotion, namely how
emotional forces lay behind metaphorical uses of language
Of course, in some sense the emotional content of language,
or that component of language which evokes feeling, is a kind of
meaning Even Frege appreciated this, as shown in his discussing
a sort of meaning which
is often said to act on the feelings, the mood of the
hearer or to arouse his imagination Words like “alas”
and “thank God” belong here Such constituents of
sentences are more noticeably prominent in poetry,
but are seldom wholly absent from prose They occur
more rarely in mathematical, physical, or chemical
than in historical expositions What are called the
humanities are more closely connected with poetry
and are therefore less scientific than the exact sciences
which are drier the more exact they are, for exact
science is directed toward truth and only the truth …
[T]he constituents of language, to which I want to call
attention here, make the translation of poetry very
difficult, even make a complete translation impossible,
for it is in precisely that in which poetic value consists
that languages differ most (1956, 295; see also Frege
1997, 239–40)
Rousseau was largely concerned with meaning, but this is an
affective meaning, a kind of meaning at least partly transmitted
through the more musical elements of language, especially rhythm
and inflection It would not enter into truth conditions, and hence
would play no role in meaning as conceived by Davidson While
most philosophers of language, in the last 130 years or so, are
concerned with the sort of meaning which survives translation,
Rousseau was also interested in the sort of meaning which is
often extinguished by it There is potential here for linking the
psychological study of emotion with the study of language, a
cross-disciplinary field which should be of philosophical interest
due to its political dimension, as will be discussed more fully at
a later point The connection with politics was anticipated by
Rousseau
Someone who can read a little Arabic smiles when
leafing through the Koran, had he heard Mohammed
in person proclaim it in that eloquent and rhythmic
language, with that sonorous and persuasive voice
which seduced the ear before the heart, and constantly
animating his aphorisms with the accent of enthusiasm,
he would have prostrated himself on the earth while
crying out: great Prophet, Messenger of God, lead us to
glory, to martyrdom; we want to conquer or to die for
you (1998, 317)
Recalling Frege’s distinction between the sort of meaning which
survives translation versus the sort which does not, let us refer
to the latter as affective or emotive meaning Let us use “Fregean
meaning” to mean the former, bracketing questions about what
form such meaning takes, e g not delving into matters of sense
versus reference or meaning as use, etc
The huge outpouring of literature, the primary sources
appearing mainly in the 1960s and ’70s, on indeterminacy of
translation, and to an extent also incommensurability, betray a fear
that Fregean meaning might be a chimera Without translation,
there is no Fregean meaning What would remain, presumably,
would be emotive meaning, as apparently illustrated by Kuhn’s
emphases on the use of non-rational forms of persuasion It
is remarkable that Willard Van Orman Quine did not address
this issue Without an authoritative translation manual (Quine
1960; 1969), and hence without determinate communicated
content, how could one rationally convince another to change
their theory? Quine’s discussions of belief revision, as in his “Two
Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), often sound solipsistic Without
Fregean meaning, there would be no truth except perhaps in a
pragmatic sense Paul Feyerabend’s skeptical attitude toward
truth is not surprising, given his somewhat similar belief in
incommensurability “And as regards the word ‘truth’, we can at
this stage only say that it certainly has people in a tizzy, but has not
achieved much else” (Feyerabend 2010, 175) With doubts raised
about Fregean meaning, progress toward knowledge is revealed
to be “a complex process of growth that contains gestures, jokes,
asides, emotions” (Feyerabend 2010, 279)
What is especially striking about this recent history, in light
of Rousseau, is that the emotive component of language only
became interesting when Fregean meaning looked as though
it might vanish There seemed to be a tacit viewpoint that, if
there is Fregean meaning, then emotive meaning would be of
little or no philosophical interest The tacit viewpoint, in turn,
is presumably the consequence of a deeper assumption: the
philosophical interest of language lies in its use for rational
persuasion and perhaps also calculation (Harman 1975) It is
only when one concludes that language cannot fulfill rationalistic
uses that the modern philosopher even begins to consider the
possibility that the emotive component of language might be
of some philosophical interest Rousseau, by contrast, heavily
emphasized the philosophical interest of the emotive component,
but without invoking such specters as translational indeterminacy
or incommensurability This is because Rousseau recognized the
philosophical interest of emotion, and emotional persuasion,
without denying the existence or importance of rationality It
is true that Rousseau cast reason in an unflattering light in his
