Language and Self-Determination#

Richard Dien Winfield\Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia

DOI 10.55167/8532311bdc27

Why Language Cannot Oppress#

Language and freedom seem to be inseparable, together forging the frontier separating human autonomy from the bondage of brute animals. Brute animals certainly may signal one another with calls, but, as Hobbes tells us, communications by “animals of the same species are in all lands the same, while those of men are diverse”.¹ Moreover, “among animals there is a limited variety of calls”, which arise “not by their will but out of necessity of nature” whereby “these calls by which hope, fear, joy and the like are signified, are forced out by the strength of these passions”.² By contrast, in genuine speech “the connection of names” is “constituted by the will of men for the purpose of signification”.³ Their meaning is a matter of convention, depending upon the chosen association of sign with what is signified, whose meaning has no intrinsic connection to a sign’s own configuration. For just this reason, speech may vary among different groups of humans, just as it may undergo historical changes, independent of any genetic developments among speakers. Animal communication, with the exception of some songs sung by different pods of whales of the same species, will hold fast so long as the animals in question retain the same genetic inheritance.

The freedom that underlies the local variety and historical flux of language is not just the mental freedom of semiotic imagination, with which an intelligent animal can repeatedly associate the same intuitable sign with the same object of reference. That purely subjective freedom of imagination cannot foster any communicable language unless it be combined with a perceivable expression that is apprehended by other language users to refer to some objects that they recognize in common. Those language users can only signal the success of communication by outwardly expressing the same sign in perceivable connection with the same intended meaning. Both participants in this minimal establishment of verbal communication must wield the will to express their signs to one another, a will that wields the autonomous bodily control to outwardly communicate whatever sign has been chosen to signify whatever meaning has been chosen to be expressed. All further communication of meanings rooted in the connection of signs depends upon analogous engagements of the same inner and outer freedoms.

Linguistic interaction thus depends upon both the subjective autonomy of semiotic imagination and the bodily control to will perceivable communications to others. Nonetheless, all too many thinkers have regarded language as a cage that somehow dictates what we can think and value.⁴ Allegedly, every language constitutes of form of communal life, whose fundamental epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic norms are automatically shared by anyone who joins in the conversation of that language. On this basis, language deprives each of its users of any independence of thought, conduct, and aesthetic judgment by binding them to values that are supposedly ingrained in their common linguistic activity. The possibility of genuine critical discourse between language groups becomes problematic, for if language is a form of communal life, speakers can never endorse, let alone understand, the norms to which members of other linguistic communities are entrapped, nor call into question what norms prevail in their own community. Moreover, for any community to undergo a revolution of thought, conduct, or taste, it would have to somehow relinquish its current language and somehow adopt another.

All these consequences reflect the complete absurdity of treating language itself as having any juridical significance for its users. Insofar as thought and the apprehension of universal norms depends upon language, linguistic competency is an enabling condition for having any principles of knowledge, conduct, or aesthetic value. The same, of course, can be said of innumerable factors, such as a livable biosphere, including enough nutrition and sufficient health to make possible the existence of a thinking animal. Indeed, precisely because language is conventional, all exercise of normative affairs, such as knowing, conduct, and fine art, depend upon the individuals involved belonging to a particular linguistic community within which they have a language at their disposal.

Nonetheless, any attempt to make a particular language, or any other enabling factor a juridical condition of theoretical, practical, or aesthetic norms is incoherently problematic. It involves making an unconditioned claim about what that enabling factor is and that it has the privileged role of determining what we can hold to be true, right, or beautiful. At the same time, this transcendental move undercuts the validity of its own global claim by making all normativity relative to the particular factor it privileges. Whatever is an enabling condition of knowing, conduct, and fine art leaves undetermined what distinguishes truth from untruth, right from wrong, and beauty from what lacks aesthetic worth precisely because that condition makes equally possible true and false thinking, good and bad conduct, and worthy and unworthy artistic activity.

Language is a proper medium of thinking and everything dependent upon rational principle because it is a vehicle of rational communication that constitutively leaves our thought free. Language not only cannot dictate a way of life, but it cannot limit what its users may choose to communicate. On the one hand, the lexicon of each and every language is inherently open ended. Language users can always give new nuances of meaning to the words they employ. Moreover, they can always introduce new words, thanks to the freedom of their semiotic imagination and their ability to communicate these semiotic novelties through their bodily control of the means of linguistic expression. On the other hand, the grammatical structure of any language is, as Chomsky properly emphasizes, a generative framework that allows language users to create innumerable novel expressions. Grammar may impose a structure on which intelligibility rests, but it leaves entirely open what truths and values grammatical speech will endorse or reject. Although language acquisition and use depend upon the ability of speakers to imitate the words and sentences of others, language competency is not reducible to the rote imitation of a parrot, that can duplicate the speech that it hears. Linguistic competency instead consists in a free creative ability to make new communications that a speaker may never have heard before and that may have never been expressed by anyone else. Both with respect to lexicon and grammar, language is an entirely free instrument of expression. It cannot help but enable members of every linguistic community to question the “way of life” that prevails and communicate revolutions in knowing, conduct, and fine art, without having to give up their language.

The Limits of Brute Agency#

Whereas imagery is always confined to particulars, words can signify universals. Associations of images can present relations of factors with respect to common marks and repeated patterns, but only verbal expressions can adequately convey universal principles, with either descriptive necessity and universality or prescriptive universal authority. Insofar as normativity involves universal rational principle, individuals lacking language can neither comprehend, communicate, or act in respect of any genuinely normative standards, be they theoretical, practical, or aesthetic.

Brute animals, children who have yet to acquire language, and humans who lack linguistic capability due to congenital deficiency, illness, or accident, all are unable to think and act in respect to rational principle. Provided they are endowed with memory and can associate current with past perceptions, brute animals and linguistically incapable humans will be able to modify their behavior in light of the imagery they perceive and associate, provided they have sufficient control of their bodies to act in light of what their reproductive and productive imagination represents. Beyond being bound to instinctual responses triggered by current perceptions, these agents will be able to imagine behavior that they can pursue, learning from past experience. Some will be able to act with insight, plotting in their inner field of imagination how to respond to a situation without having to rely upon trial and error.

The faculty of choice need not be denied to brute animals or children and adults lacking language, as Aristotle recognized in attributing arbitrariness, but not rational deliberation to these thoughtless agents.⁵

They do not need concepts to choose to act upon one impulse rather than another. Their choice can simply follow from a non-verbal comparison of the relative strength of their attraction as well as from remembering the past outcomes of pursuing one rather than another.

So, too, they need not conceptualize to imagine different options for fulfilling the impulse on which to act and, having opted for one course of action, then modify it along the way if perceived circumstances so suggest.

In both levels of selection pertaining to choice a certain freedom is wielded, but in neither respect do the agents exercise self-determination. Whereas instinct is all embracing when impulse, combined with appropriate perception, triggers a specific pattern of behavior, it begins to be superseded when goal directed behavior proceeds upon the comparison of impulses and their possible fulfillments in the inner arena of imagination. Nonetheless, the resulting freedom from instinctual dictate is both formal and negative in character. The choosing agent here selects among impulses to achieve different goals that are all given either by feelings rooted in natural requirements of metabolism and reproduction or elicited by past memories or present perceptions. No matter what the impulse is, the choosing agent wields the same freedom to embrace it or not. The content of the impulse that is acted upon is not intrinsic to the form of choice itself. The faculty of choice has no positive filling of its own but only the negative power to not be automatically at the service of any one impulse. The choosing will is formal, since it comprises the same capacity to opt or not opt for an impulse whatever it be. Accordingly, the will to act in behalf of one impulse rather than another is not a product of choice, but rather the given capacity on which each and every choice depends. It is therefore not just formal but given by nature rather than being an artificial agency determined by will.

The same negative formality and natural character applies to the selection of what course of action to take to fulfill whatever impulse has been chosen. The alternatives are just as given by independent circumstances as are the impulses themselves.⁶

Self-determination is lacking in both respects because the willing at play neither determines its own form of agency nor the content it wills. To be self-determined, agency must will itself and thereby at one blow independently determine who it is and what it wills.

These limitations of the choosing will hardly seem overcome when the agents in question have acquired language and thought. Certainly, linguistic intelligence provides for an explosion of calculative understanding, where the use of mathematics and scientific knowledge opens a new field for the practical domination of nature. Language also enormously enhances the dissemination of learning by enabling the communication of acquired knowledge in speech. Moreover, language facilitates cooperative activity by means of spoken commands and agreements.⁷ On all these accounts, the acquisition of language allows humans to overcome our impoverished instincts and approach and sometimes exceed the instinctual achievements with which evolution has equipped the most unintelligent animals. Yet even when talking animals make choices informed by thought, this does not in and of itself remove the formality, negative, and natural character of the choosing agent. So long as the choosing individual acts upon other things or with respect to other agents as given externalities to be unilaterally acted upon, the form of agency remains a natural capacity undetermined by choosing just as what is chosen remains externally given.

The very possibility of self-determination appears hopelessly incoherent if it is considered as a engagement of a single agent. Socrates posed the problem in its simple mind-numbing form in the Republic in considering the perplexity of self-control.⁸ How, he asks, can one and the same agent both act upon itself and be acted upon? Self-determination requires that what is determined and what determines be indistinguishable, yet achieving this seems to require the individual to enter into contradiction with itself, being at once agent and patient. Socrates’ solution is to forego self-determination as an impossible conundrum and to instead treat agency as aways wielded upon something other than itself. Accordingly, he divides the soul into ruling and ruled parts (reason and the irrational element), while foregoing political self-rule by dividing the polis into a ruling element governing a subject element.

Language and the Transition from Behavior to Conduct#

Although rational agents cannot engage in any conduct without making choices enabled by the natural endowment of a faculty of choice, they can determine themselves to have a self-imposed conventional agency by engaging in the coordinated chosen actions in which the exercise of rights consists. By willing in respect to the volitions of others, so that each participant freely wields a circumscribed domain of choice that is in harmony with the same prerogative of others, they mutually establish artificial agencies that facilitate one another’s new conventional autonomy. Since each participant in an exercise of right engages in a willing that has the same range of choice as those with whom it interacts, they all engage in a volition that is objectively respected, that is lawful, and that gives them a certain type of free agency that has its actuality in the practice in which they all engage. By contrast, the uncoordinated, unilateral exercise of choice is a merely subjective freedom, whose volitions may always be nullified by the conflicting choices of others, none of which share the same boundaries of the intrinsically lawful exercise of rights.

Property right, the most basic right on which all other rights depend, exhibits how the intersubjective convention of rights enables individuals to determine both the form and content of their agency and, in doing so, to achieve a freedom that is objectively recognized and lawful. By engaging in the interaction in which property relations consist, individuals determine themselves as owners by mutually recognizing one another as embodying their respective wills in non-conflicting objects. They thereby give their agency the non-natural conventional status of owner, individuating their new form of agency by achieving an individual actuality of embodiment in the factor that is recognized to belong to them. Insofar as the respect for that embodiment consists in other individuals determining themselves as owners through property that does not overlap with that of anyone else, they determine their own agency as owner in an individual factor by exercising a form of willing that is lawful, having the same form of right as that of all the other individuals who determine themselves as owners. In willing themselves as owner by taking ownership of some factor as the objectively recognized embodiment of their will, individuals not only determine who they are qua owner, but also determine what they will in a manner that is not given by anything independently of their willing. Although the object of property has features of its own given independently of the will of owners, they will it to be property, a character that is not given by nature but solely through the interaction of property relations constituted by their respective volitions. This is why taking ownership has no determinate relation to the independently given character of the factor that becomes property. That factor need not be an object of natural or conventional need. The factor enters into the relation of property solely as a receptacle for the embodiment of the owner’s will. The individual’s self-determination as owner is not an exercise of appetite, conditioned by desire, but a determination of the individual as self-determined, as gaining an objective reality of freedom that is respected by other self-determined owners in virtue of their concordant acquisition and disposal of property.

The entire edifice of property relations, as well as all other conventions of right, builds upon the primary self-determination of individuals as owners, which consists in their mutual recognition of one another as exclusive owners of their own bodies. Without this reciprocal self-appropriation, nothing any individual does can count as an act juridically belonging to them, rather than to some external master. Only once individuals have succeeded in determining themselves as proprietors of their own given facticity, can they then engage in the interactions in which they take ownership of external factors that belong to no one, following which they can relinquish such property, with or without entering into property exchanges with others. Any further self-determination of individuals necessarily incorporates their abiding recognition as owners of at least their own facticity. Only on this basis can they engage in the further conventions of right, where they mutually determine themselves as moral subjects (holding one another accountable for what they do on purpose and for what consequences of their deeds they intended), as co-determining spouses and parents, as economic agents engaging in the reciprocal relations of commodity exchange, as legal subjects of a civil administration of law, and, finally, as citizens determining themselves as citizens by engaging in the activities of self-government.

All these exercises of right necessarily depend upon linguistic interaction. Unless individuals have linguistic competence, they cannot apprehend the lawful universal prerogatives to which they are entitled as participants in the conventions of ownership, moral community, household autonomy, civil freedom, and democracy. This applies both to their apprehension of their own rights and the correlative rights of others. Without the conceptualization that only language provides, individuals cannot will any of the universal volitions in which their various modes of self-determination consist, nor recognize the self-determinations of others. To act as an owner, which entails respecting the ownership of others, an individual must be able to aim at giving its will a lawful objectification. Imagery may suffice to recognize the physical possession of an object, but only thought can understand the title to ownership, which remains even when a thief takes hold of property. In order for any act of will to count as a self-determination, be it of ownership, morality, spousal prerogative, civil action, or political conduct, the agent must communicate its rightful status to others. This can only be done through language or through expressions whose juridical meaning has been specified in words.

Brute animals, and children and adults who cannot use or understand language may interact with others in the most elaborate relations. These relations, however, can never have the juridical significance of an exercise of right due to their inability to comprehend or communicate the lawful, universal, and objective character of actual self-determination. Individuals lacking speech may certainly choose to take hold of objects and perceive how others have done so as well, but they cannot choose to determine themselves as owners and make something an object of property that juridically belongs to them. To exercise any type of right and determine the form of their own agency, individuals must will the concept of themselves as right holder, in whatever mode that may be. For example, to act as citizens, individuals must determine themselves as entitled to wield the political equal opportunity that every citizen is recognized to have. This requires willing oneself as engaging in the activities by which one acts as a citizen per se. For this, thought is required, as well as the ability to express one’s thoughts to others and understand their conceptual communications of their own rights and duties.

Brute animals can have no rights precisely because they lack the linguistic capability to apprehend and act in respect to the universal agencies in which consist the exercise of rights.

Language without Self-Determination#

Since language cannot possibly constrain what language users can think or value, its necessary role in the exercise of right cannot undermine the self-determined character of conduct. Yet, if language itself cannot be developed or acquired without individuals having freedom of semiotic imagination and the autonomous bodily self-control to communicate signs to one another, are we facing a paradoxical impasse, such as perplexed Rousseau when he considered the origin of language? Rousseau had suggested that individuals would never have needed to develop language unless they were engaged in the social relations that depend upon language. If, however, those social relations could not be unless their participants already had command over language, then language itself could never have arisen.⁹

Similarly, if self-determination consists in the conventions of right and these necessarily involve the use of language, with its lexical and grammatical liberty, how can language be formed or learned unless individuals already have autonomy? The answer to this question revolves around whether the freedom of semiotic imagination and of linguistic communication is identical to self-determination, as constituted in the practices of rights.

Self-determination proper, in which agents determine their own agency as well as the content of what it wills, requires reciprocal relations among agents. This is lacking in the freedom of semiotic imagination, where an individual intelligence freely associates meanings with intuitable contents that it thereby renders signs for those meanings. The production of a sign is in itself incommunicable unless the individual who has made the association of intuitable content and meaning expresses that connection to others. They must actually observe that connection by perceiving the intuited expression of the sign and its relation to matters perceivable in common by those who seek to communicate its meaning. This latter minimal “triangulation” by which a sign communicates is chosen to be undertaken by the participants. In so doing, these participants acquire a communicable sign that they acknowledge in common, but they do so by employing their faculties of choice with which they are endowed. The meanings are given to them both and what sign signifies these meanings is a matter of choice, where that choosing retains its formal, given nature. In establishing, as well as learning language, individuals do not thereby achieve any self-determination. This is evident in how slaves can participate in developing and learning language without thereby achieving any new status for their agency. Slaves, after all, can both speak and philosophize. Although this capability is sufficient to enable them to participate in conventions of rights, it is not equivalent to the actuality of that participation. The linguistic competence of slaves, however, does signal that slavery is inherently unjust by depriving capable individuals of their exercise of self-determination for which no reason can be legitimate, given the normativity of freedom. Contra Aristotle, slaves, simply as competent language users who are not pathologically irrational, do not by nature have need of a master,¹⁰ but rather deserve emancipation. That emancipation, however, merely begins with the freedom from enslavement. It becomes a positive achievement only through engagement in the conventions of right by which the former slaves determine themselves as owners, moral subjects, co-determining spouses, autonomous economic agents, legal subjects, and self-governing citizens.

In sum, language can never entrap our thinking and normative judgment, but proves to be an essential ingredient in the conventions of right that constitute the practical reality of self-determination. Whether language actually plays that role cannot be given by nature but always remains a matter of history for which we must be ever vigilant.

The Inexorable Normativity of Self-Determination#

As for the normativity of self-determination, this is something from whose validity we can never escape. The history of philosophy is dominated by the attempt to do just that by construing justification as always involving appeal to some foundation that confers validity upon what counts as true, right, or beautiful. Such foundationalism takes two logical forms.

One treats the validity-conferring foundation as a privileged given. Foundational ontology does so by rooting all objectivity and intelligibility in some alleged first principle of being that is supposedly unconditionally immediate and that from which everything derives its knowable reality. Teleological ethics does so in the domain of practice by rooting the legitimacy of conduct in a highest good that is both for its own sake and that to which all pursuits are subordinate. The aesthetics of mimesis does the same in the realm of beauty by founding aesthetic worth in the imitation of given reality.

The other approach to foundationalism treats the validity-conferring foundation as not a privileged given, but a privileged determiner, whose process of determining establishes what is objectively knowable, right, and beautiful. The foundational epistemology of transcendental philosophy does this by juridically privileging conditions of knowing that determine what can be known to be. The procedural ethics classically pioneered by social contract theory operates similarly by affirming some privileged form of willing from which valid conduct and institutions derive. Finally, the theory of aesthetic judgment pioneered by Hume and Kant roots beauty in a privileged determiner by asserting some process of reception as determinative of what counts as beautiful.

All these adventures in foundational justification fall prey to self-dissolution when their privileged foundation is subjected to its own validity conditions. Their common pitfall is that the foundation that confers validity on what is valid can only be itself valid on its own terms if it is the source of its own authority. In other words, to be valid, the foundation of justification must found itself. Then, however, the legitimacy of the foundation eliminates the distinction between foundation and founded, between what confers and what possesses validity, which is constitutive of foundational justification. Normativity ends up reverting to what is self-grounding, that is, self-determining. Self-determination, as that in which determiner and determined are indistinguishable, thereby overcomes foundational justification, which eliminates itself. Any attempt to escape the normativity of self-determination returns to the heteronomy of leaving what is true, right, or beautiful validated not in and through itself but by something else. This only reasserts the divide between what confers and what possesses validity, which falls prey to self-dissolution when the authority of the foundation is called into question.

Although the Enlightenment sought to replace all appeal to traditional dogma with the embrace of freedom, it treated freedom as a first principle, that is, as a privileged determiner of truth, right, and beauty. The critique of the Enlightenment by Nietzsche and his post-modern followers may have aptly exposed the arbitrariness of all foundations of knowing, conduct, and beauty. Nonetheless, Nietzscheans themselves fall prey to arbitrariness in reducing rationality to a will to power, where all values are arbitrary stipulations of some agency that seeks to impose its valuations as a universal authority lording over everyone else. What Nietzsche and his followers dogmatically presuppose is that justification always depends on foundations. They ignore how the foundation-free normativity of self-determination can never be refuted, for its alternative cannot help but subvert its own foundationalism when it applies its standard of validity to its own privileged ground.

Language and self-determination are therefore not just intertwined, but inexorably ingredient in what gives humanity its unconditioned worth.

DOI: 10.55167/8532311bdc27