Descartes inaugurated modern Western philosophy with a curious syllogism: je pense, donc je suis. As though one could doubt one’s “being” without already… being! And above all, as though the language in which he expressed this idea could have existed if not preceded by the conscious deferral of his “Pavlovian” reflexive interactions with the outside world.
Western philosophy has been characterized by its refusal to consider the hypothesis that human language emerged in response to its speakers’ emergent need for a voluntary, self-aware mode of communication. The solipsistic vision of language espoused as a matter of course by post-Cartesian philosophers is that of a human being who, when faced with some element(s) of reality, whether internal or external, is driven to express his awareness/understanding of it, as though its interpersonal, communicative function were in fact secondary. But our originary hypothesis is surely more faithful to reality.
Humans learned to use language because they had first been persuaded by fear of potential conflict to defer their “natural”/appetitive relation to some object of (say, alimentary) interest when faced with the symmetry of another’s parallel relationship. Whereas animals are able to automatically avert such conflict via Pavlovian inhibitions, humans, being under greater mimetic tension and consequently less susceptible to physiological control mechanisms, have of necessity acquired the means to seek such avoidance consciously, while concomitantly making their choices known through the signs of language.
What I have found most revelatory with respect to the general resistance to GA’s theory of language origin is philosophers’ near-instinctive reluctance to understand thinking in Descartes’ sense as motivated from the beginning by humans’ need to avert potential conflict with their fellows. And indeed, all of human culture, from religion to art to politics, is focused on mediating our relationship with worldly reality by our need to bring to mutual awareness the possibilities of its peaceful sharing with others by means of meaning-bearing signs—in the first place, the signs of language.
Language must have emerged as a means of expression of what Jacques Derrida called the différance or deferral of our potential act of appropriation of an—appetitively attractive—referent by provoking in our emergent moral conscience a sense of interdiction. In the place of a possibly conflict-inducing action, the human emits a sign—the first version of which being simply an aborted gesture of appropriation, that is, an ostensive pointing—by means of which he shares that object’s “idea” or signifier (in thought and/or perception) with one or more others in lieu of securing it for himself. That this obviously plausible explanation for the need for language arouses so much resistance reflects the depth to which we have “repressed” language’s interactive nature, conceiving it as though it sufficed to understand its embodiment in the relationship between the signifiant and the signifié.
In this context, we should recall the great first-century rabbi Hillel’s “golden rule,” which he insisted was “the entire Torah”: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation, which expresses in a few words the means by which society is able to avert internal conflict.
Along this line, we can grasp this common element of deferral in its minimal and maximal forms: on the one hand, the temporary renunciation via the use of language of appropriating an object of common desire, and on the other, the collective worship by an entire community of a sacred object/being/divinity—while noting as well the common association of such worship with communal feasts in which the individual participants’ appetites are satisfied under the auspices of the presiding divinity/ies. (NB: This is being written on the Tuesday before Lent, or in French, mardi gras.)
The primary element in both cases is prevention of potentially violent rivalrous conflict over an object of desire by means of the deferral/différance of any individual attempt to appropriate it. Once we understand the originary model of linguistic designation as ostension or pointing, we must then recall that the fact that humans alone perform this act of establishing “joint shared attention” provides a simple demonstration that it is not enough to have fingers—or even point with them. “Look at the moon and not at my finger!” is not operative among chimpanzees. What humans have that our ape friends do not is a conscious awareness of the frequent need to defer individual possession of a designated object in order to avert potential conflict.
We should recall that in Genesis 2, God does not give Adam and Eve a power of instinctive avoidance of the fruit as a potentially conflict-generating object, but utters a verbal interdiction whose actualization requires their conscious decision to conceive and reject the fruit’s possession. This marks the emergence of human moral judgment—our “conscience”—and along with it, the possibility of its failure—of “sin.”
In a word, our reluctance to accept a biological explanation of language origin as reflecting a new need, generated in humans by the increase of (mimetic) desire along with intelligence, is a product of our philosophical tradition’s focus on the human mind as a self-contained totality rather than the possession of an individual within a community of like individuals. And for the benefit of this solipsistic self-containment, we conveniently ignore the obvious fact that no human individual invents language as his own “tool for thought.” We are all taught language as children by adults, which is to say that from the very outset our minds are initiated by our elders into human specificity, marked by both language and moral conscience, or more broadly, religion—as intuited by Roy Rappaport in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999).
The solipsistic mind of “I think therefore I am” can arise only through a deliberate forgetting/”bracketing” of this originally communal origin—which not all that long ago commonly led to philosophical meditations on language origin in which a lone spirit sees or conceives something that he yearns to communicate with his fellows and thereupon invents language for that purpose.
Nor has modern philosophy, even when language-focused, fully disencumbered itself of this solipsistic fiction. Human speech was not invented by proto-philosophers motivated by the desire to share ideas about the world, but by apes in the process of outgrowing the stage at which Pavlovian inhibitions could protect them from intraspecific conflict, and who therefore needed a more subtle mechanism under conscious control for avoiding hostilities motivated by rivalrous appetites in the process of mutating into desires in which natural appetites were enhanced by mimesis.
I have always regretted that my late teacher René Girard, the pioneering theoretician of mimetic desire, refused to recognize the direct link between human language and both desire and its moral/religious antidote, leading to a quite unnecessary divorce between GA and “mimetic theory.” Hopefully the followers of these related ways of thought will one day come to recognize that there is no fundamental incompatibility between them.
Once the causal link between the deferral of instinctive appropriation and language/worship is understood, the role of what we call “human culture” as a means for avoiding intraspecific violence becomes obvious. The scenic nature of all cultural phenomena, whether consumed in groups, as we assume was originally the case, or in more advanced civilizations, also by isolated individuals, needs no further explanation. Whether consumed in solitude or collectively, the content of any cultural experience is designed to reconcile the members of its audience in one way or another to some problematic aspect of human social interaction, whether through vicarious participation in a fictional world or more direct participation in a realized human collectivity, say, of worshipers. Or, for that matter, through its members’ participation in political activity explicitly designed to generate decisions concerning the conduct of their society.
I would stress that these generalities are outlined here merely as possible points of departure for specific analyses. The crucial point of these remarks is to rectify our anthropology: our fundamental understanding of the human, after centuries of what are at best the highly distorted visions of the foundations of the human and its culture entertained by philosophers.
Generative anthropology depicts the human social order as founded on conscious moral choices by which our conduct in various contexts should be judged, with the understanding that the originary function of language, and along with it, of religion and secular culture, is to facilitate these choices—starting with the minimal model that I like to illustrate by imagining two guests at a party who hesitate and then renounce attempting to take the last canapé on a tray.
Which is only to repeat that language, and in its wake, the whole sphere of culture that is unique to humanity, begins with the deferral, Derrida’s différance, of our instinctual animal interaction with the common objects of our desire.