. Language
.. Language and expression
‘Language comes into existence with imagination, as a feature of experience at the conscious level. . .
‘. . . It is an imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion. Intel- lectual language is this same thing intellectualized, or modified so as to express thought.’
A symbol is established by agreement; but this agreement is established in a language that already exists. In this way, intellectualized language ‘presupposes imaginative language or language proper. . . in the traditional theory of language these relations are reversed, with disastrous results.’
Children do not learn to speak by being shown things while their names are uttered; or if they do, it is because (unlike, say, cats) they already understand the language of pointing and naming. The child may be accustomed to hearing ‘Hatty off!’ when its bonnet is removed; then the child may exclaim ‘Hattiaw!’ when it removes its own bonnet and throws it out of the perambulator. The exclamation is not a symbol, but an expression of satisfaction at removing the bonnet.
.. Psychical Expression
More primitive than linguistic expression is psychical expression: ‘the doing of involuntary and perhaps even wholly unconscious bodily acts [such as grimac- ing], related in a peculiar way to the emotions [such as pain] they are said to express.’ A single experience can be analyzed:
) sensum (as an abdominal gripe), or the field of sensation containing this; ) the emotional charge on the sensum (as visceral pain);
) the psychical expression (as the grimace).
We can observe and interpret psychical expressions intellectually. But there is the possibility of emotional contagion, or sympathy, whereby expressions can also be sensa for others, with their own emotional charges. Examples are the spread of panic through a crowd, or a dog’s urge to attack the person who is afraid of it (or the cat that runs from it).
Psychical emotions can be expressed only psychically. But there are emotions of consciousness (as hatred, love, anger, shame): these are the emotional charges, not on sensa, but on modes of consciousness, which can be expressed in language or psychically. Expressed psychically, they have the same analysis as psychical emotions; for example,
) ‘consciousness of our own inferiority, ) ‘shame,
) ‘blushing.’
Shame is not the emotional charge on the sensa associated with blushing. ‘The common-sense view [that we blush because we are ashamed] is right, and the James–Lange theory is wrong.’
Emotions of consciousness can be expressed in two different ways because, more generally, a ‘higher level [of experience] differs from the lower in having a new principle of organization; this does not supersede the old, it is superimposed on it. The lower type of experience is perpetuated in the higher type’ somewhat as matter is perpetuated, even with a new form.
‘A mode of consciousness like shame is thus, formally, a mode of consciousness and nothing else; materially, it is a constellation or synthesis of psychical expe- riences.’ But consciousness is ‘an activity by which those elements are combined in this particular way.’ It is not just a new arrangement of those elements— otherwise the sensa of which shame is the emotional charge would have been obvious, and the James–Lange theory would not have needed to arise.
‘[E]ach new level [of experience] must organize itself according to its own principles before a transition can be made to the next’. Therefore, to move beyond consciousness to intellect, ‘emotions of consciousness must be formally or linguistically expressed, not only materially or psychically expressed’.
.. Imaginative Expression
Psychical expression is uncontrollable. At the level of awareness, expressions are experienced ‘as activities belonging to ourselves and controlled in the same sense as the emotions they express.
‘Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, insofar as they come under our control and are conceived by us in our awareness of controlling them, as our way of expressing these emotions, are language.’
‘[A]ny theory of language must begin here.’
The controlled act of expression is materially the same as psychical expression; the difference is just that it is done ‘on purpose’.
‘[T]he conversion of impression into idea by the work of consciousness im- mensely multiplies the emotions that demand expression.’
‘There are no unexpressed emotions.’ What are so called are emotions, already expressed at one level, of which somebody is trying to become conscious.
5From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James-Lange_theory, November , :
The theory states that within human beings, as a response to experiences in the world, the autonomic nervous system creates physiological events such as muscular tension, a rise in heart rate, perspiration, and dryness of the mouth. Emotions, then, are feelings which come about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being their cause.
Corresponding to the series of sensum, emotional charge, psychical expression (as in red color, fear, start), we have, say,
) bonnet removal, ) feeling of triumph, ) cry of ‘Hattiaw!’
The child imitates the speech of others only when it realizes that they are speaking.
.. Language and Languages
Language need not be spoken by the tongue.
‘[T]here is no way of expressing the same feeling in two different media.’ However, ‘each one of us, whenever he expresses himself, is doing so with his
whole body’, in the ‘original language of total bodily gesture’—this is the ‘motor side’ of the ‘total imaginative experience’ identified as art proper in Book I.
.. Speaker and Hearer
A child’s first utterances are not addressed to anybody. But a speaker is always
ness does not begin as a mere self-consciousness. . . the consciousness of our own existence is also consciousness of the existence of’ other persons. These persons could be cats or trees or shadows: as a form of thought, consciousness can make mistakes [§ .].
In speaking, we do not exactly communicate an emotion to a listener. To do this would be to cause the listener to have a similar emotion; but to compare the emotions, we would need language.
The single experience of expressing emotion has two parts: the emotion, and the controlled bodily action expressing it. This union of idea with expression can be considered from two points of view:
) we can express what we feel only because we know it;
) we know what we feel because we can express it.
‘The person to whom speech is addressed is already familiar with this double situation’. He ‘takes what he hears exactly as if it were speech of his own. . . and this constructs in himself the idea which those words express.’ But he attributes the idea to the speaker.
This does not presuppose community of language; it is community of language. If the hearer is to understand the speaker though, he must have enough expe- rience to have the impressions from which the ideas of the speaker are derived.
6Collingwood’s footnote to the section title is ‘In this section, whatever is said of speech is meant of language in general.’
conscious of himself as speaking, so he is a also a listener.
The origin of self-consciousness will not be discussed. However, ‘Conscious-
However, misunderstanding may be the fault of the speaker, if his consciousness is corrupt.
.. Language and Thought
Language is an activity of thought; but if thought is taken in the narrower sense of intellect, then language expresses not thought, but emotions. However, these may be the emotions of a thinker.
‘Everything which imagination presents to itself is a here, a now’. This might
be the song of a thrush in May. One may imagine, alongside this, the January
song of the thrush; but at the level of imagination, the two songs coalesce into
one. By thinking, one may analyze the song into parts—notes; or one may relate
it to things not imagined, such as the January thrush song that one remembers
having heard four months ago at dawn (though one may not remember the song
to express any kind of thought (again, in the narrower sense), language must be adapted.
.. The Grammatical Analysis of Language
This adaptation of language to the expression of thought is the function or business of the grammarian. ‘I do not call it purpose, because he does not propose it to himself as a conscious aim’.
. The grammarian analyzes, not the activity of language, but ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’, the supposed product of speech. But this product ‘is a metaphysical fiction. It is supposed to exist only because the theory of language is approached from the standpoint of the philosophy of craft. . . what the grammarian is really doing is to think, not about a product of the activity of speaking, but about the activity itself, distorted in his thoughts about it by the assumption that it is not an activity, but a product or “thing”.
. ‘Next, this “thing” must be scientifically studied; and this involves a double process. The first stage of this process is to cut the “thing” up into parts. Some readers will object to this phrase on the ground that I have used a verb of acting when I ought to have used a verb of thinking. . . [but] philosophical controversies are not to be settled by a sort of police-regulation governing people’s choice of words. . . I meant cut. . .
àBird songs are wonderful to hear; but I am not sufficiently familiar with them, or I live in the wrong place, to be able to recognize seasonal variations in them. Looking for my own examples, I can remember that, last summer, I became drenched in sweat from walking at midday in the hills above the Aegean coast, before giving a mathematics lecture; but I need not remember the feeling of the heat.
itself ).
Analyzing and relating are not the only kinds of thought. The point is that,
. ‘The final process is to devise a scheme of relations between the parts thus divided. . .
a) ‘Lexicography. Every word, as it actually occurs in discourse, occurs once and once only. . . Thus we get a new fiction: the recurring word’. ‘Meanings’ of words are established in words, so we get another fiction: synonymity.
b) Accidence. The rules whereby a single word is modified into dominus, domine, dominum are also ‘palpable fictions; for it is notorious that excep- tions to them occur’.
c) Syntax.
‘A grammarian is not a kind of scientist studying the actual structure of lan- guage; he is a kind of butcher’. Idioms are another example of how language resists the grammarian’s efforts.
.. The Logical Analysis of Language
Logical technique aims ‘to make language into a perfect vehicle for the expression of thought.’ It asssumes ‘that the grammatical transformation of language has been successfully accomplished.’ It makes three further assumptions:
) the propositional assumption that some ‘sentences’ make statements; ) the principle of homolingual translation whereby one sentence can mean exactly the same as another (or group of others) in the same lan-
guage;
) logical preferability: one sentence may be preferred to another that has
the same meaning. The criterion is not ease of understanding (this is the stylist’s concern), but ease of manipulation by the logician’s technique to suit his aims.
The logician’s modification of language can to some extent be carried out; but
it tries to pull language apart into two things: language proper, and symbolism.
‘No serious writer or speaker ever utters a thought unless he thinks it worth
uttering...Nor does he ever utter it except with a choice of words, and in a
tone of voice, that express his sense of this importance.’ The problem is that
written words do not show tone of voice.
One is tempted to believe that
scientific discourse is what is written; what is spoken is this and something else,
emotional expression. Good logic would show that the logical structure of a
proposition is not clear from its written form.
Good literature is written so
8Collingwood imaginatively describes Dr. Richards, who writes of Tolstoy’s view of art, ‘This is plainly untrue’, as if he were a cat shaking a drop of water from its paw. Dr. Richards is Ivor Armstrong Richards, to whose Principles of Literary Criticism Collingwood refers; ac- cording to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._A._Richards (accessed December , ), ‘Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English’.
9In a footnote, Collingwood mentions an example of Cook Wilson: ‘That building is the Bodleian’ could mean ‘That building is the Bodleian’ or ‘That building is the Bodleian.’
that the reader cannot help but read it with the right tempo and tone.
The proposition, as a form of words expressing thought and not emotion, is a fictitious entity. But ‘a second and more difficult thesis’ is that words do not express thought at all directly; they express the emotional charge on a thought, allowing the hearer to rediscover the thought ‘whose peculiar emotional tone the
speaker has expressed.’
.. Language and Symbolism
Symbols and technical terms are invented for unemotional scientific purposes, but they always acquire emotional expressiveness. ‘Every mathematician knows this.’ Intellectualized language,
• as language, expresses emotion,
• as symbolism, has meaning; it points beyond emotion to a thought.
‘The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into a scientific symbolism, thus represents not a progressive drying-up of emotion, but its progressive articulation and specializa- tion. We are not getting away from an emotional atmosphere into a dry, rational atmosphere; we are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressing them.’
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