GA, which was originally modeled on the French anthropologie génétique, but which could not be called “genetic anthropology” since the English word refers to genes whereas the French includes the non-biological sense of genesis, has been from the outset an attempt at minimalism, relying on minimizing the number of components required to define the difference between the human and the animal, in particular with respect to our possession of (human) language. This attempt has been generally met with skepticism, as in “you can’t prove it.”
And I observed a yet more unfriendly reaction when I sought to find a similar minimal definition of antisemitism, if only to explain why both these attempts of mine at definition aroused much the same irritation among the cognoscenti, as though any such attempt was ipso facto oversimplifying. Indeed, those concerned about antisemitism reacted almost with hostility to my efforts, as though the very attempt at a definition were a kind of sacrilege.
Recently, having reached the final phase of my career, I have resuscitated this minimalism, having decided that in the age of AI, we should leave complexity to the computers and focus on sharpening Occam’s razor, making use of our uniquely human judgment.
Jacques Derrida’s notion of la différance, “deferral,” provides a minimal explanation of “significance” as including, at a minimum, signification in the broad sense of requiring a sign to refer to a referent, and maximally, sacrality, as the mark of what can be possessed by the mind only under the strictest form of deferral of appetite, which Judaism magnifies by assigning to the divinity a name that cannot be pronounced nor, in the strictest interpretation, even written—its written sign being conceived as unpronounceable—such that it must only be even imaginarily spoken under deferral. Which is, after all, a maximal, hyperbolic expression of différance.
And Derrida himself, who withdrew a prior promise to discuss these ideas with us, could be said to be obeying the same principle. Indeed, his respect for the limitations of the philosophical stance, which in its pure form puts worldly sciences like anthropology “in parentheses,” was a supreme gesture of deferral—ensuring that never in his lifetime would he face a challenge to philosophy from… anthropology.
These two disciplines, while clearly different, are not usually presented in the form of an either-or, as somehow mutually exclusive. And yet to examine philosophical discourse is to discover two implicitly antithetical understandings of language. For the anthropologist, language is an evolved behavior that must be explained as responding to a need emerging in the species’ worldly experience. That actual anthropologists have not sought a minimal explanation of language, which one might imagine should be the point of departure for their science, given that language is a/the unique distinguishing feature of our species, reflects the “social science” nature of anthropology, for which language and culture are givens, as established in the pre-Darwinian era in which anthropological investigations first took on a systematic form. In simple terms, an anthropologist does not begin by defining the minimal difference between humans and other animals, but with the study of prehistoric and then historical human societies. Which fact helps explain the skepticism that has met my attempts to define the minimal conditions under which human language, in contrast to animal communication systems, most likely arose.
As I observed in Chronicle 870, the modern philosophical tradition inaugurated by Descartes takes language-using self-consciousness as its point of departure, in particular for establishing the very sense of reality. Thus the cogito starts by affirming “I think.” Thinking, needless to say, requires language, but, also needless to say, the individual speaker uses language but does not think about it: it is a—in fact, the—means that permits him to confirm his being. That the acquisition of language is in the first place a historically determined phenomenon is understandably irrelevant to the philosopher’s self-consciousness, along with the—generally unmentioned—fact that human language is not innate but must be learned in childhood from adults. But the fact that language had come into being—needless to say, well before Descartes’ time—although it need not concern the philosopher, must concern the anthropologist, since it is a, if not the, defining attribute of humanity.
What might be called the constitutive myth of philosophy is the perfect lucidity of the philosophizing self, which begins with the, or a, cogito. But between the self and its self-expression in language there is of necessity a distance, a différance, given that this expression is not a spontaneous manifestation of the self, a secretion of its intimate essence, but a set of signs not innate but learned from others. The self cannot “express itself” spontaneously “in its own tongue”; it must be taught signs from a world that existed before it.
No doubt Descartes claims only to think, not to invent his own means of expression. But his thinking exists only as the product of a history in which language was first invented—presumably via a pointing gesture—and then improved over the millennia, reaching him in a mature, if never final, state. The significance of “think” as opposed, for example, to “breathe,” is that the I who breathes is not implicit in Descartes’ deduction, but only in its surrounding conditions, whereas thinking is the operation carried out by the sentence itself as a deduction: a, therefore b. Whether or not you are breathing is irrelevant to the necessity that, if you utter/think a syllogism, you are of necessity thinking—or in any case, your sentence is a thought. Hence, to follow the cogito’s logic, the thinker cannot deny that he thinks, and consequently that he… is. But the real point isn’t that someone could not nevertheless deny that he is, or even that he is thinking: at what point must you, my interlocutor, be able to oblige me to admit that I am thinking and therefore, that I am? The Pyrrhonism that Descartes seeks to refute has in fact an infinity of resources, since the interlocutor has no way of getting him to admit the truth of even the most tautological reasoning.
But precisely, there is no interlocutor but the philosopher himself, who is not perversely seeking to deny his “proof,” but only to persuade himself that he can be sure that he “is.” And curiously enough, the sense of mere existence does not suffice to “prove” this being; it could presumably be an illusion, whereas the sense of thinking is somehow unassailable, since merely thinking about whether the proof is valid implicitly admits… thinking about it… Yet to claim that thinking implies being as something more/other than thinking… ? How can one even conceive a demonstration of the truth of this assertion?
What needs to be made clear is that one cannot “derive” the distinctive human traits of language/religion/culture from a solipsistic view of the isolated thinker in Descartes’ “poêle” (a room heated by a stove). The very idea is absurd, since this family of human institutions is entirely made up of means of inter-human communication. Yet philosophers have been known to speculate about language origin as the result of a genetic mutation (the “language gene”), at first affecting discrete individuals but which must await the intermarriage of two such individuals in order to spread…
Whence the importance of constructing, not a “thought experiment,” but a plausible worldly scenario, as I have tried to do, that can be connected to actual human cultural practices and that illustrates the tried but true proverb, applicable to virtually all significant examples of human progress: Necessity is the mother of invention. If humans learned to defer their appetitive drives for the benefit of mutual communication concerning their objects, this deferral must have at some point become necessary, presumably in order to avoid intraspecific conflict.
As a result of the growth of our mental capacity, our sensitivity to the appetites of our fellow humans, and their conflicts with our own, will have reached the point that the merely reflexive inhibitions that Pavlov taught his dogs no longer sufficed to prevent conflict within the Alpha-Beta hierarchies that still functioned among our ape cousins. (Whether or not this occurred before or after we evolved “mirror neurons” that allowed us to anticipate these conflicts is a matter for paleontology that, at the very least, suggests a growing susceptibility to what Girard named mimetic desire.) What Sartre observed as the freedom of the human pour-soi finds here its anthropological basis. To defer an appetitive drive is not merely to postpone its satisfaction, but to free oneself from physiological pressure and to bring to bear one’s moral conscience, the most fundamental principle of which is Hillel’s Golden Rule, which affirms, all other things being equal, the equal moral weight of human desires. Thus a group of hunters surrounding their prey, and no longer following “instinct” to divide it up in hierarchical order of rank, learn to defer the distribution until all understand that the prey must be divided “equally” as much as possible, that it belongs to no individual, but to the community whose members must possess and consume it only as equals.
And in consequence, in the deferral of our drive to satisfy our appetite, we create what I have simply called the human scene, on which all cultural/communal phenomena from collective feasts to language to religion to the arts take place. This scene—whether in reality or in the creative imagination—must be understood as the privileged locus of cultural creation: of conversations, narratives, stories, works of religion, art and science… all that distinguishes humanity from other species. On this scene, appetites are deferred and appropriation is replaced by designation via signs, semantic or iconic—words or images or patterns of sound and/or color.
I realize that the reader of these Chronicles has no doubt heard all this before in somewhat different words. Let us then consider this, at least for the moment, as a minimal statement of the principles of Generative Anthropology, in order that we may now move on to other matters.