On the Origin of Language by Jean-Jacques Rousseau & Johann Gottfried Herder

Author:Jean-Jacques Rousseau & Johann Gottfried Herder [Rousseau, Jean-Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-04-26T05:00:00+00:00

SECTION TWO

No, I am not jumping ahead. I do not suddenly ascribe to man—as an arbitrary qualitas occulta—a new power providing him with the ability to create language. Instead I shall just go on searching in the aforenoted gaps and wants.

It is not possible that gaps and wants should be the distinctive trait of the human species; else nature was to man the most cruel stepmother, while to every insect she was the most loving mother. To every insect she gave whatever and however much it needed: senses to form conceptions and conceptions shaped into drives; organs for language as far as it needed them and organs to understand this language. In man everything is in the greatest disproportion—his senses and his needs, his powers and the sphere of endeavor awaiting him, his organs and his language.—We must be missing a certain intermediate link to calculate such disparate parts in the proportion.

Were we to find that link, by all analogy in nature it would make good man’s loss and be peculiarly his, be the distinctive character of his race: and all reason and all fairness would require that we regard what we have found as what it is, a gift of nature, no less essential to him than instinct to the animals.

And were we to find in just that distinctive character the cause of those wants and precisely in the area of these wants—at the bottom of his great deprivation of artifactive drives—the germ of a corresponding replacement: then this fitting accord would be a genetic proof that here lies the true direction of mankind and that the human species stands above the animals not by stages of more or of less but in kind.

And were we to find in this new-found distinctive character of mankind possibly even the necessary genetic cause of the origin of a language for this new kind of being, as we found in the instincts of animals the immediate causes of a language for each species, then we have reached our goal. In that case language would become as essential to man as it is essential that he is man. I do not, it will be admitted, proceed on the basis of arbitrary or social forces but from the general animal economy.

And now it follows that if man’s senses, when applied to any small area of the earth, to work and to enjoyment within a segment of the world, are inferior in acuity to the senses of the animal which lives within that segment, then it is precisely this that gives his senses the advantage of freedom. Because they are not senses for one spot, they become generalized senses for the universe.

If man has powers of conception which are not confined to the construction of a honey cell or of a cobweb and which hence are inferior to the artifactive capacities of animals within that particular sphere, it is precisely for this reason that his powers of conception achieve a wider perspective. There is no

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