Language and Freedom, Chomsky’s Darlings
This is my summary of a fantastic essay, ‘Language and Freedom’ by Noam Chomsky, that would thrill any of his fans, in which you’ll find an account of some of the philosophical views of America’s most important public intellectual. In turn, the essay serves to bolster the social democratic claim for freedom which is perversely in the dominion of the right, waved around menacingly like a stick by free marketers against anyone wishing to push taxation in a more progressive direction or for those who wish to protect their right to say offensive things.
Chomsky poses the question, “in what way are language and freedom to be interconnected” and in answering it jumps between esoteric jargon on the study of linguistics to grand quotes from Enlightenment-era libertarians, and what emerges is a compelling case for the importance of inquiry into human nature when contemplating the formation of our societies. Freedom is the ultimate goal to Chomsky, freedom that can only be expressed through collective means.
Freedom, like language, functions as limitless possibilities of expression, association and self-perfection within the constraints of a set of rules. The purpose of society is to ensure this can occur and to intervene when necessary in the case of oppressive power, be it authoritative states or nebulous, sprawling corporations. The essay fuses his specialism of linguistics with his famed political insight and through various extracts clearly sets out what Chomsky advocates for politically, at least at the time of writing (c1973).
Chomsky, a paragon in the field of linguistics, famously postulated a “universal grammar” — a genetic component innate to humans that sets out general properties or structural rules of the language faculty. The principles of universal grammar are “rich, abstract, and restrictive, and can be used to construct principled explanations for a variety of phenomena”. He acknowledges that scientific understanding of these principles is still limited, but argues that the study of language is uniquely placed to allow profound inquiries into human nature. Linguistics is a “springboard for the investigation of other problems of human nature”.
Sketching out a brief history of freedom as a philosophical ideal, Chomsky outlines the views of a number of philosophers and revolutionary thinkers of the late eighteenth century, when people rose throughout the Americas and Europe to argue against and resist the illegitimate power of their rulers and sought to form new, more representative systems. In this period, freedom was elevated to be the sum and apex of Western thought and values as philosophers enquired into the nature and limits of human freedom. To Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, freedom was “the beginning and end of all philosophy”.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality’ (1755) was one of the earliest critiques of modern civil society to be written; it is still considered to be one of the most radical philosophical tracts ever published, setting out a scathing attack on the concept of private property and deducing from the nature of man the illegitimacy and abuse of political societies.
Property and wealth are “usurpations… established only on a precarious and abusive right… having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without (the rich) having grounds for complaint”. Rousseau even denied the argument that property gained through personal industry was legitimate. To him it was contrary to the law of nature that “a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.”
To Rousseau, civil society is a conspiracy, in place only to ensure that the affluent retain their wealth. Although institutions of society are to be abided by all, rich and poor alike, civil duties administered to which all must comply, the rich benefit inordinately and the poor are further subdued:- society and laws “gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude and misery”. Power is, says Rousseau, “by its nature illegitimate”.
To reach these conclusions Rousseau harnessed“reason alone”, beginning with his ideas of what the quintessential qualities of human nature are. As a natural law proponent, he argued that the political order must be founded upon these principles, principles which express man’s highest human potential.
In order to determine the nature of man, Rousseau compared animals with humans to discern what makes us different. In respect of animals, “nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast”. An animal is “an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to revitalise itself and guarantee itself … from all that tends to destroy or upset it.” “Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys”
Man, on the one hand, is chained to his instincts and physical needs. However, crucially, he has the capacity for choice and is “free to acquiesce or resist”. It is from this distinction that Rousseau developed the unique quality of humankind. Whereas the phenomenon of senses and the formulation of ideas can be given physical and mechanical explanations, man’s power of choice and willing are “purely spiritual acts” and it is “above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown”. Thus, to Rousseau, the essence of human nature is his freedom and his consciousness of this freedom.
Rousseau described freedom as “the most noble of man’s faculties”; he enquires “[is it not] degrading one’s nature, putting oneself on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, even offending the author on one’s being, to renounce without reservation the most precious of all his gifts”.
In this case he is referring to war. To Rousseau, society and in particular private property was the cause of war and other such tragedies. Property divides human beings, creating unnecessary inequalities within peoples of nation states and eventually between nation states themselves. Rousseau claimed that through private property the first political societies were created and with them arose a state of tension between nations, eventually culminating in war:
With “the division of the human race into different societies”, Rousseau concluded “the most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellowmen; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth”.
Rousseau’s description of man’s freedom and consciousness of freedom, which distinguishes man from animal and lies outside of the realm of physical explanation, follows a Cartesian model. To Descartes and his followers, such as Cordemoy, the knowledge that another creature has a mind, i.e., a consciousness and free will that cannot be observed as a physical process, lies in its capacity for language. Language, says Chomsky, “in the normal, creative human fashion, free from control by identifiable stimuli, novel and innovative, appropriate to situations, coherent, and engendering in our minds new thoughts and ideas”. To the Cartesians, the essence of the mind is thought, and creative use of language reflects the freedom of thought.
In this way, says Chomsky, we can connect freedom with language. Language is the way in which we can deduce that another being has a human mind, with free thought and self-expression, a mind with the crucial need for freedom from external constraints and repression. Moreover, following on from language, we can continue on a useful enquiry into the mind and human nature, and use our findings, as Rousseau believed, as a basis for a rational social order.
Chomsky cites libertarian and linguist, Wilhelm von Humboldt in order to conclude and Humboldt’s writing attests to the interconnectedness of freedom and language. Bildung, the German tradition of self-cultivation, was fundamental to the philosophy of Humboldt, which he framed as the development and potentiality of individuals, community and humanity in general.
Humboldt wrote in 1793–94: “Education [Bildung], truth and virtue” must be disseminated to such an extent that the “concept of mankind” takes on a great and dignified form in each individual. However, this shall be achieved personally by each individual, who must “absorb the great mass of material offered to him by the world around him and by his inner existence, using all the possibilities of his receptiveness; he must then reshape that material with all the energies of his own activity and appropriate it to himself so as to create an interaction between his own personality and nature in a most general, active and harmonious form”.
His libertarian social thought and study of language both had at their foundation a dignified concept of human nature. He wrote:
“The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes”
So freedom is the means by which true human development must occur and to Humboldt the freedom to inquire and create are the “centres around which all human pursuits more or less revolve”. As with Rousseau, Humboldt was adamant that freedom must not be exclusive to the elite and said “there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of refusing to any man the right to be a man”.
Education is vital to the realisation of self-fulfilment. But to Humbroldt, education needs to provide the conditions, opportunities and stimulation for self-fulfilment. He would be critical of education systems which are more concerned with the transmission of knowledge than the cultivation of a critical spirit, due to the fact that such education systems function to maintain existing economic and social structures.
If education could be reorganised to give more room for spontaneity, in line with language acquisition, perhaps our education systems would have a more Bildung-quality. Language cannot be taught, but only “awakened in the mind: one can only provide the thread along which it will develop of itself”.
Freedom as a presupposition of Bildung, which relates not just to individuals but communities as a whole, offers a broad critique to imperialism and the efforts of European powers and subsequently America to steer other nations into strict determined paths aligned with their economic and hegemonic interests.
Humboldt was a classic liberal, writing in the late 18th Century, so his views on suppression of freedom and oppression were grounded in the conception of the state. But his focus on spontaneity relates to the question of labour and exploitation.
He said “the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a true sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits”. Labour can be edifying and a part of the self-perfection of humankind that Humboldt advocated for. “…peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists” Through labour people can “cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures”.
But to Humboldt, such effects of self-fulfilment were contingent on freedom.
“…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature”.
Despite his emphasis on the importance of freedom in the undertaking of work, Humboldt was opposed to state interventions. To him, most such mechanisms “make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes”.
He was unaware as to the effects of industrial capitalism and had little concern for the dangers of private power. He did not foresee that state intervention would be absolutely necessary to protect individuals from the predatory nature of corporate capitalism, not only human existence but also the decay of the planet. Nor did he see that capitalist economies maintained another form of bondage in which labour and thus human life is commodified. Without the conditions of production, labourers are compelled into labour by the need to live.
But even at this time some of his contemporaries were able to see this. In 1767, Simon Linguet had the following to contribute:
“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. . . . What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him?. . . . He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsmen cost nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him. . . . These men, it is said, have no master– they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”
In any case, Humboldt’s criticisms of bureaucracy and the autocratic state can be applied to modern institutions of coercion. To Chomsky, Humboldt was far ahead of his time and presented an anarchist vision, calling for people to strive to break free from mechanisms of coercion and forge independent communities in order to flourish as individuals.
Humboldt diverts from Rousseau on the notion of primitive individualism. Whereas Rousseau scorned “the sociable man, [who] knows how to live only in the opinion of others”, to Humboldt people should seek to form social bonds and community, for “the isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered”.
Humboldt’s writings on social formations have a common grounding with his work on language. To Humboldt there is a “fixed form of language” in the nature of the mind, from which language acquisition and production stems. Although the laws and principles of language are fixed, the way in which such principles are used is free and infinitely varied.
There is no contradiction to the idea that free creation occurs within a system of constraints, governing laws and principles. To Chomsky, “without this tension between necessity and freedom, rule and choice, there can be no creativity, no communication, no meaningful acts at all”.
To Chomsky, activism, reform and efforts to build a different society must involve a vision of the future society and value judgements of the character of a future society. He concedes that capitalism has resulted in industrial systems with advanced technologies and it has enabled an extension of democratic systems and certain liberal values, though the extent of this is limited and more must be done to foster liberal values. Capitalism is outdated and unable to satisfy human needs, which “can be expressed only in collective terms”. “The concept of the competitive man seeking to maximise wealth and power is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense”.
An autocratic state is not the answer and nor would an expansive centralised welfare state be an acceptable goal of existence. He ponders that perhaps modern technology and science could provide some of the answers and relieve people of meaningless labour, and combined with enquiry into human nature may provide the basis for “a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it”.
