Acta Structuralica

international journal for structuralist research

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Jakobson's philosophical background

Elmar Holenstein

pp. 287-303

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Despite their pathetic rebuttal of the “generals of classicism” the Russian Futurists are flesh of the flesh of the Russian literary tradition.Jakobson, On Majakovskij (1930)

1Originally published in Krystyna Pomorska et al. (eds) Language, poetry and poetics - the generation of the 1890s, The Hague, Mouton de Gruyter (1987): 15-32.

2Of two remarks of Roman Jakobson’s meant to characterize himself, one is older and often quoted, the other is more recent and less well-known. The older one reads as follows: “Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto — I am a linguist and hold nothing that has to do with language to be alien to me”. The more recent one was spoken in 1976 in answer to the following question of an interviewer: “You speak and write in so many languages. You have worked, taught and lived in so many countries. Who are you?” Jakobson’s answer was laconic and obviously considered: “A Russian philologist. Period”. This epitaph, in Russian, is now inscribed on his gravestone in Cambridge: “Roman Jakobson — Russkij Filolog”.

3Those who do not know Jakobson are likely to suppose that the alteration of Terence’s dictum, with its claim to universality, is of greater philosophical relevance than is the profession of a particular tradition. But those who know Jakobson better are likely to think of another expression which Jakobson often used in the twenties and thirties and which has a direct connection to philosophy, indeed to a particular line of thought in philosophy. Reflecting on his scholarly standpoint, Jakobson used to speak during these years of the “Russian ideological tradition”. This is itself a rather Russian turn of phrase; in English a more apt expression would probably be “Russian history of ideas”, or, shorter still, as Marx would have put it, “Russian ideology”.

4All experts in the field of the history of Russian ideas are unanimous in the view that it has been inseparably bound to Hegelian philosophy since the 1840’s, the era of the inception of the world-famous Russian intelligentsia. The adoption of Hegel’s philosophy in Russia was embedded in the dissemination of Romanticism. Indeed, the general principles that Jakobson associates with Hegel’s name are hardly less typical of Romanticism. The intensity of the adoption, so stressed by all authorities — indeed, it is no exaggeration to speak of absorption — the intensity of this adoption or absorption of Romanticism in general and of Hegelianism in particular by the Russian intelligentsia can probably only be explained by the affinity of this movement with the indigenous tradition, which had been molded by Byzantium. The cause and effect relationship was in this case dialectical, as is appropriate to Romanticism and Hegel. The affinity with the indigenous tradition promoted the adoption of Romantic and Hegelian philosophy; conversely, Russia’s Byzantine heritage was dealt with in the categories of Romanticism and German Idealism.

5With respect to Jakobson we must add at this point a modification that can hardly be stressed enough: Jakobson was not so much a philosopher or a linguist as he was an aesthete, who had grown up among artists, painters, and poets. Correspondingly, his earliest and most important sources of inspiration are to be looked for in the realm of art and not in philosophy. The philosophers — first Russian Hegelians, then Husserl and finally Peirce — afforded him only the means to express intuitions that were the fruit of his association with art and artists. Similarly, Jakobson’s own interest in Byzantine-Greek culture and its Church-Slavonic successor cannot be seen only in the context of the affinity of this culture with the Romantic and Hegelian world of ideas. An equally strong motive was the conspicuous affinity between the emergent avant-garde art of the decades before the First World War and the art of Byzantium and medieval Russia, an affinity that was confirmed to him by the painter Matisse on the occasion of a visit to Moscow in 1911. It is significant that Jakobson used to recommend a book by Aragon about collages as an introduction to the specific structure of Byzantine poetry.

6It can be regarded as characteristic of the Russian ideological tradition, rooted as it is in a Byzantine world view on the one hand and in German Romanticism and Hegelian philosophy on the other, that its manner of research is structural, that is, at once holistic, dialectic and apt to stress the dynamic, further that it is historical in the sense of nomogenetic and teleological, and also realist, antireductionist and antipositivist. In addition, it pays particular attention to universal, intersubjective, unconscious and especially aesthetic aspects.

7(1) Structural. This first keyword can be regarded as a sort of inclusive term for those that immediately follow. Jakobson used the nominalized form “structuralism” in 1929 as a catchword for the new linguistic current of which the Cercle linguistique de Prague came to be the most active center between the wars, thanks not least to its Russian members, namely, aside from Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Bogatyrev and Karcevskij. Noteworthy is Jakobson’s interpretation of this ambiguous and therefore misleading expression. By “structural analysis” is usually understood a description of the relationships characteristic of a range of objects; by “structuralism” is usually understood a philosophy according to which the relations between the objects and not the objects themselves are constitutive of such a range. Jakobson used to quote an artist, Georges Braque, and a mathematician, E. T. Bell, simultaneously in this connection. Braque: “I do not believe in things, I believe only in their relationship”. Bell: “It is not the things that matter but the relations between them”.

8(2) Holistic. It is characteristic of Jakobson’s conception of structuralism that he regards a particular form of relationship as constitutive, namely that between the whole and its parts. For him, the two catchwords “structuralist” and “holistic” belong together. For the explication of the relationship between parts and the whole he oriented himself on Husserl. He chose the following quotation from Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1901) as the motto for his pioneering study of child language (1941): “The only true unifying factors are relations of ‘foundation’”.

9What Husserl called relations of foundation are now better known as relations of implication. Both kinds of foundation relationship that Husserl discusses, the one-sided and the reciprocal relations of implication, are, according to Jakobson, constitutive for the system of natural languages. The reciprocal relations of implication find expression in the binary organization of the phonological system, the one-sided relations in its hierarchical organization. Distinctive features in a phonological system such as acute and grave, voiced and unvoiced, rounded and unrounded imply each other reciprocally. The pairs of features for their part imply each other one-sidedly in the organization of a phonological system. Thus, the opposition between pharyngealized and non-pharyngealized consonants presupposes that between palatal and velar, this presupposes the opposition between velopalatal and labial as well as dental, and this finally presupposes the fundamental opposition between dental and labial consonants. The phonological systems of natural languages owe their systematic or holistic character to these relations of implication, formulated under Husserl’s influence.

10(3) Dialectic. The binary opposition between distinctive features of the sounds of languages can also be called a dialectic relationship if we understand a dialectic relationship to be one of reciprocal implication of features that in themselves are mutually exclusive. Light and dark are in themselves mutually exclusive: a thing cannot be at the same time and in the same respect both light and dark. On the other hand, light and dark are mutually inclusive: I do not know what light is unless I also know what dark is. I can perceive something light only if it stands out against a dark background. The distinction between logical and phenomenological struc|turalism can be elucidated by such examples. Those who offer a purely logical analysis of the structures of language, such as André Martinet, define an opposition as a relationship of mutual exclusion. Those who analyse the structures of language phenomenologically, as these structures appear to speakers or as speakers become aware of them, as does Jakobson, who follows the Dutch phenomenologist Hendrik Pos in this respect, define opposition dialectically as at once exclusion and inclusion.

11A dialectical relationship obtains not only between the distinctive features that are grouped in binary pairs, but also, and more strikingly, between these substantial features and their formal organization in the phonological system of natural languages. According to Jakobson, the assumption that form and substance are not independent of each other distinguishes a structuralist from a formalist. A formalist is unable to explain why compact vowels are more fundamental than and occur prior to diffuse vowels in a phonological system, and why, conversely, diffuse consonants are more fundamental than and correspondingly occur prior to compact consonants. Seen from a purely formalist point of view, all these sound patterns are equivalent. Two features are sufficient to identify them. Instead of [+ compact], one can write [- diffuse], and conversely. [ + ] and [ - ] are of equal standing for the logician. The specific structure of the phonological system can only be explained materially with recourse to the phonetic nature of the sound features.

12This appeal to the material, substantive features of language sounds seems to contradict the maxim quoted above that according to structuralist philosophy not the things but the relations between things matter. There are two responses to this misgiving. (1) Substance is only a relative concept. Something is called substance or matter if it is construed to be the subject of a relation, whether formal or functional. As soon as such a substance is analyzed for its own part, it turns out to be itself a network of relations. (2) It is said to be characteristic of the Russian ideological tradition that it matches each principle, including the one at issue here, that not the things but the relations between things are constitutive for a system, with a contrary principle that appropriately modifies the first: in this case it is the postulate that form and substance are not independent of each other.

13Looking for the origin of this postulate, one comes across two possible suggestions, namely Romanticism and (avant-garde) poetry. August Wilhelm von Schlegel calls a form that is only contingently — that is, irrespective of the nature of the substance — attached to a substance “mechanical”. “Mechanical” and “mechanistic” were just as negative for Jakobson as they were for Romantic science. But independently of such possible literary models, Jakobson noticed in his studies of free verse that its form is different in Russian and French, obviously because the underlying linguistic structures are different. Thus he speaks first of all in poetics of a “pressure of the material on the form”.

14(4) Dynamic. Dialectics, dynamics and historicity are closely connected to each other. Languages have various functions, which stand in a relationship of productive tension to each other. Someone whose primary aim is communication will accommodate himself, his code, his manner of expression to his interlocutor. But someone who primarily wishes to indicate his origin, his social status, his age and the like, whether consciously or unconsciously, uses and emphasizes what is specific to it, the appropriate shibboleths. Whatever initially, at a certain time — i.e. synchronically — distinguishes old from young, conservative from progressive in a dynamic relation of conflict, becomes in the course of time — i.e. diachronically — a distinction between two different periods.

15(5–7) Historical, nomogenetic and teleological. The historical develop|ment of languages proceeds in Jakobson’s view according to laws and towards an end. Languages can only develop in a direction and sequence that conform to the laws of the system. The development is called teleological because it is dependent on the functions that the users of the language pursue and because these functions are subject to the laws of self-regulation that are characteristic of natural systems without the users being aware of it. Nikolaj Trubetzkoy, Jakobson’s scholarly mentor in the Moscow and Prague periods, the son of a Slavophile philosopher, had a penchant for the expression “logic of development”.

16Nomogenesis and teleology of history both call to mind Hegelian philosophy. But the Russian tradition functioned as a corrective in the use of these categories. Jakobson saw in both of them a primarily Russian heritage, especially manifest in Russian anti-Darwinist biology, in the case of Leo Berg, for example, from whom Jakobson borrowed the term “nomogenesis”. If there is a category of Hegelian philosophy that Jakobson and Trubetzkoy clearly disavowed, then it is the category of progress, and if there is an idea of Romanticism that they reject, then it is the idea of a paradisiacal primal state of culture, compared with which the subsequent development only looks like a decline. Absolutizing an era, especially one’s own, contradicts the historical perspective on the totality. The Russian Hegelians were simply too realistic to follow the “master thinker” in this matter. As Jakobson said around 1930, “in a few decades we shall receive the epithet ‘people of the past millenium’”.

17With Hegel and against Darwin, the Russian theoreticians of evolution advocated the view that history does not change in continuous small steps, but by abrupt revolutionary transitions after relatively stable phases. However, Jakobson uses the schema of development “thesis — antithesis — synthesis” only for the history of linguistics, not for the history of language. In structuralism he saw a synthesis of the thesis Romanticism, which indulges in global conceptions, and of the antithesis positivism, which gets lost in an agglomeration of facts with meager theory; further, in the Prague School a synthesis of the Neogrammarians, the thesis, who explain in terms of genesis, atomism and mechanism, and of Saussure’s Geneva School and Baudouin de Courtenay’s Kazan' School, the antithesis, which describe statically, systematically and teleologically; finally, in Chomsky’s linguistics a synthesis of the older European philosophical grammar, the thesis, and of American structural linguistics of the recent past, the antithesis.

18The characteristic appreciation for creative syntheses makes Jakobson’s conception of the history of science less similar to Thomas Kuhn’s conception, which is dominant nowadays, than to that of Jakobson’s Harvard colleague Gerald Holton. According to Holton, it is characteristic of the great figures of the history of science such as Newton and Einstein that they do not think in terms of a uniform and closed paradigm, but are haunted by key ideas in productive polar tension to each other. Thus, in connection with Jakobson the corresponding opposite of each of the key ideas listed in this essay must always be kept in mind. As a dialectician, Jakobson strove to think in terms of opposites. The key ideas listed are only the dominant elements of such pairs of opposites. The opposite to structuralism was atomism for Jakobson. But his anti-atomistic attitude did not prevent him from choosing the ultimate constituents of language as his most important area of research. As a structuralist he insisted only that these smallest constituents cannot be analyzed independently of the nexus of relations in which they are intertwined. Such was the case with most of the other key ideas, very clearly, for example, with teleology: the opposing concepts here are teleological and mechanistic. But it is an ancient doctrine that the teleological explanation does not exclude, but includes the mechanistic: Cuiuscumque est causa finalis, eius est causa efficiens — Whatever has a final cause also has an efficient cause” (Duns Scotus). Only in the case of one pair of opposites did Jakobson resist conceding even a subordinate role to the negative concept: he offers no opposing concept to nomogenesis. From the pair of opposites necessity and chance he assumed only the first, thus allied to Einstein. He did this against a strong tradition in linguistics that has declared the arbitrary nature of signs to be a linguistic axiom. Thus, Jakobson adhered to Joseph de Maistre’s admonition in Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg: “Ne parlons donc jamais de hasard ni de signes arbitraires — Let us never speak of chance nor of arbitrary signs”.

19(8) Realistic. Jakobson’s view of teleology is a good example of his realism: linguistic phenomena do not merely behave “as if they were goal-directed, they are goal-directed. Teleological structure is not just a theoretical fiction but in this case a psychological reality. The same holds of the distinctive features of the sounds of language: they are not just metatheoretical concepts invented by the linguist for better classification of sound phenomena, but realities that can be shown to be psychologically operative.

20(9) Antireductionist. Jakobson was a decided enemy of any sort of “nothing but” reductionism. Phonology cannot be reduced to acoustic or physiological phonetics, semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, nor linguistic multiplicity to a formal dimension that is agreeable to the theory of science that happens to be dominant. In Jakobson’s work the place of reductionisms is occupied by the conception of a hierarchically ordered system in which the relative autonomy of each level is to be respected. Considering what enabled Jakobson to withstand the reductionism dominant in the empirical sciences until a few decades ago, one comes across time and again his functional perspective. The phonological system is to be elucidated in terms of the function of the sounds of language to distinguish meanings, a point of view that nineteenth-century phonetics did not want to assume as being unscientific because it is teleological. In rebuttal of the tendency of American structuralism and older analytic philosophy to describe the structure of language purely in terms of syntax, Jakobson pointed out, “The primary function of the sign is to signify and not to figure in certain given constellations”, a truism well enough, but ignored for the sake of overrated theoretical postulates. Above all, he used the explanation of the aesthetic function of language, the reality of which was a fact of experience for him, as a measure of the theories. The reductionist theories degrade the richness of the aesthetic function to a banality.

21(10) Antipositivist. The functional perspective also led to the discovery that not only the positively given elements of a language can have a function, but also supposed gaps, provided that the missing elements are noticeable as such. This led Russian linguists to discover the opposition between unmarked and marked, which now plays such a central role in modern linguistics. It is instructive for the history of philosophy that these elements were designated “negative elements” before Trubetzkoy introduced the German expression merkmallos (unmarked).

22Jakobson always saw the antipositivist attitude as fundamental to Russian science. In this regard, it is striking that he cited “negative philosophy” (on a par with the Russian Revolution, the principle of relativity and Futurism) as a characteristic of the then beginning era in a student pamphlet on “Futurism” (1919). On the occasion of the French translation of the pamphlet (1973) he was no longer able to remember the origin and his previous use of the expression “negative philosophy”, which the late Schelling had used to dissociate himself from Hegel’s philosophy. Whatever Jakobson might have meant by this expression, the historian of science Alexandre Koyré, a close friend of Jakobson’s in Prague and later in New York, attributed, quite probably under Jakobson’s influence, the discovery of the “negative elements” in the language system by the Russian philosopher Konstantin Aksakov (1817 — 1860) to his Hegelianism. In the early thirties, the historiographer of Russian Hegelianism, Dimitrij Čiževskij, another Russian (or rather Ukrainian) member of the Cercle linguistique de Prague, announced a book about Aksakov’s philosophy of language entitled The Dialectics of Language, with Jakobson as co-author. According to Koyré, Aksakov’s philosophy of language belongs indisputably to the most positive of the products of Russian Hegelianism. Considering how deeply Jakobson was rooted in the Russian ideological tradition in general, and considering his contribution to the clarification and exploitation of the unmarked (alias negative) elements of the language system in particular, one can well extend Koyré’s judgment to include Jakobson: his linguistics is one of the most positive products of Russian Hegelianism.

23(11) Universal. Jakobson cites the relations between unmarked and marked elements as outstanding examples of universal phenomena of natural languages. Of all the keywords cited to characterize Jakobson’s philosophy, “universal” is the one that can least easily be brought into connection with Hegel and Romanticism. Hegel’s judgment of Lull’s ideal of a universal language was very disparaging, and Romanticism was wont to give prominence to the individual character of each natural language. Universal and particular, invariance and variation, however, belonged together for Jakobson. His second monograph was devoted to contrastive poetics, namely to the difference between Czech and Russian verse (1923). But the universalist attitude soon came to the fore in his phonological work. Jakobson’s specific contribution to modern research in universals consisted in the discovery of a type of universals that unites invariance and variation: his implicational universals are invariant laws of variation. If one language is distinguished from another by having only one of two categories that stand in a relation of marked and unmarked to each other, then it is the unmarked category. If a language has only one of the grammatical numbers plural and dual, then it will be the plural. There are many languages with a singular and a plural and no dual, but there is no language with a dual and no plural. The implicational chain is universally valid: dual implies plural and plural implies singular.

24As has already been mentioned, Jakobson could not draw on Hegel and Romanticism to formulate the universal laws of implication; but he could draw on Husserl. The way he went about this can be taken to be characteristic of his free, self-assured treatment of philosophical texts. Husserl’s doctrine of a universal grammar in the fourth of his Logical Investigations is thoroughly traditional. It is typical of the traditional doctrines of universals from Aristotle to the great projects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their immediate successors that (in medieval terminology) only the substantia sermonis but not the articulatio vocis, (in Leibniz’s terminology) only the ideas but not the words; (in Husserl’s terminology) only the categories of meaning but not those of expression could be taken into consideration as universals, whereas it is characteristic of modern research in universals as initiated by Jakobson and Trubetzkoy that precisely the disdained categories of expression constituted the point of departure. The first universals that the two discovered were phonological, followed by morphological.

25Husserl had discussed the one-sided relationship of foundation, which cleared the way for Jakobson in the formulation of the implicational universals, not in the fourth Logical Investigation about the philosophy of language, but in the purely ontological third Investigation. Jakobson’s second step beyond Husserl consisted in the application of his abstract ontological analyses to concrete linguistic phenomena.

26(12—13) Intersubjective and unconscious. Aside from language, Russian structuralists had a particular predilection for folklore. It is common to language and folklore that their “subject” is for the most part collective and unconscious. Prague structuralism was never antipsychologistic in the manner of American structuralism. If Jakobson can be said to have an antipsychological attitude, then only with respect to a particular form of psychology, one that absolutizes two things, the individual and consciousness. For Prague structuralism, sociology was more fundamental than the psychology of the individual, and psychology of the unconscious more fundamental than psychology of consciousness.

27Not being fixed in writing, a work of folklore is dependent for its very existence on intersubjective acceptance, which, according to Jakobson and Bogatyrev’s hypothesis, predetermines its form by a sort of preventive censorship. One of the splendid accomplishments of Jakobson’s folklore research was the discovery that abstract grammatical categories play a role in the metrical structure of folk poetry. He noticed that a word never ends before the fourth syllable of the ten-syllable verses of Yugoslav folk epics, but always after it: a rule which none of the mostly illiterate rhapsodists could be brought to break. This was impressive evidence not only of the psychological, but also of the aesthetic relevance of abstract grammatical categories.

28(14) Aesthetic. Hermeneutic philosophers such as Gadamer, who are wont to attend immediately to the semantic content of a poem without going into the ingenious intertwining of this content with the phonic and grammatical structure, have the impression that Jakobson looked to poetry to find language. Seen on the biographical level at least it was precisely the other way around: Jakobson looked for poetry, the poetic, the aesthetic, in language. In answer to Heidegger’s famous dictum, “Only as dialogue is language essential”, Jakobson said, “Only as poetry is language essential”. Just the same, he found the most important principles of his linguistics in poetry. The significance that he attributes to relations, especially dynamic relations, part-whole relations, reciprocal dependencies, the connection between invariance and variation, and similarly the teleological perspective with the emphasis on the plurifunctionality of language structures and the concomitant focusing on the (ap)perceptive aspects of language: all of these have their roots in his earliest poetic studies. Again, parallels to this union of poetics and linguistics and the inspiration of the latter by the former can only be found in the Romantic tradition.

29There is also a Romanticist claim that language has its origins in poetry. After Jakobson’s utilization of Husserl’s theories has been briefly illustrated with the example of the problem of universals, the claim of the poetic origin of language can serve as an even more vivid example of how he approached speculative theories of the ideological tradition in which he grew up: he was an empirical scientist and philosophical theories served him only as heuristic guides which must be both theoretically specified and empirically underpinned. He did this with respect to the relationship between language and poetry in three regards. First, he insisted on the universality of the poetic use of natural language. In analyses of poems in over twenty languages he offered tentative proof that there are poetic devices that are universally used despite great differences of language and period. Second, with the distinction between poetic text and poetic function he was able to show that poetic components are exceedingly prevalent in non-poetic texts. Jakobson developed a genuine sensorium for the poetic aspects of even the commonest patterns of ordinary language. He heard, for example, iambic meter in the simple sign in a Swiss restaurant, “In diesem Teil wird nicht serviert” (literally “No service in this section”), and began to speculate on whether the meter had been consciously or unconsciously chosen. Third, and closest to the claim of the poetic origin of language, he drew attention to spontaneous poetic language games in child language and their probable significance for the acquisition of language. Together with this thesis of the aesthetic attitude of language users to language from the earliest phases on, he advocated the thesis of a metalinguistic attitude to language, from very early phases of its use on, and therefore of great probable significance for the ontogenetic development of language.

30The combination of the theses of the poetic and the metalinguistic attitude to language can serve as evidence that Jakobson follows the Hegelian line when Romantic and Hegelian thought diverge. It is characteristic of the modern age, according to Hegel, that the relationship to art is a relationally mediated one. Thus, too, is the relationship to language and its aesthetic use not an immediate, naive one, but one that is mediated in metalinguistic reflection. Jakobson’s position is not too distant from such a view, though with the important difference that according to him the reflective relationship is not (ontogenetically) an accomplishment of the adult, mature person and (phylogenetically) of the modern age, but is rather a diachronic universal. Claims that something is the achievement of the modern age are suspicious to him as being the product of egocentrism, or, as one would more likely say nowadays, of (Western) ethnocentrism.

31He used to react touchily — Trubetzkoy was even more vehement — to such ethnocentrisms. A noteworthy example is the claim that the idea of the self-determination of nations originated in late medieval movements in Western Europe and then marched to victory in the Enlightenment. According to Jakobson, the right of national self-determination was already bindingly established in Eastern Europe in the ninth century by the two Greek apostles to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius, against Latin pretentions to ecumenical jurisdiction. Cyril (827–869) was for him “a thinker and language researcher without equal” for whom he pointedly chose the title “enlightener” in one of his last publications.

32So far this has been a very sketchy synopsis of Jakobson’s most funda|mental philosophical ideas, most of which were for him associated with Romanticism in general and Hegel in particular, mediated, whether directly or indirectly, by the Russian ideological tradition. The last remarks were intended as further evidence of the fact that this stock of ideas not only is rooted in the older Russian tradition going back to Byzantium, but also occasionally contained a corrective to the Romantic and Hegelian versions.

33One objection comes immediately to mind: the principles listed here are currently far beyond the bounds of the Russian ideological tradition and Romantic and Hegelian philosophy. To a great extent they are nowadays shared by the majority of leading scholars. In short: one need not be Hegelian to hold them. This observation must be conceded. Jakobson himself repeatedly pointed out the convergence of this tradi|tional stock of ideas with scientific developments in this century. Indeed, Jakobson’s recognition and success, above all in the United States, would hardly be imaginable without this convergence. His conception of phonology, especially the phenomenologically motivated analysis of the sounds of languages into binary structured features, would hardly have been able to gain acceptance so rapidly and almost universally against distributionalism in American structuralism without convergence with developments in early information theory.

34The same holds of his teleological perspective, which has become acceptable due to the cybernetic formulation of teleological relationships. However, it is a historical, biographically conditioned fact, which must be respected as such, that for Jakobson most of the ideas mentioned were associated with the name of Hegel through the mediation of the Russian ideological tradition. (If one were not apprehensive of the misunder|standings such a catchword would inevitably lead to, one could say in historical perspective that his is a “Hegelian Linguistics”.)

35A second objection suggests itself here: Hegel is not the only philosopher on whom Jakobson drew. The names Husserl and Peirce occur just as often. If Jakobson availed himself of “modern philosophy” for his linguistic conceptions after the First World War, then Husserl’s phenomenology was meant. After the Second World War he called Peirce “the most powerful source of inspiration” that he had found in the United States. These two philosophers have figured prominently in philosophical literature about Jakobson until now. How are we to see their relationship to Jakobson’s Hegelianism? The way Jakobson quotes Hegel on the one hand and Husserl and Peirce on the other can serve as an indication. The references to Hegel are consistently of a global, very fundamental nature. Such general statements as “The true is the whole” are quoted. From Husserl and Peirce he quotes more specific theorems, from Husserl, for example, not just the postulate of holism, but the particular formal laws of foundation that are decisive for the holistic character of a region of objects; from Hegel almost exclusively abstract philosophical principles, but from Husserl and Peirce also concrete linguistic and semiotic analyses. The significance of Hegel and the Russian ideological tradition is broached mostly in the thirties in essays on cultural history and policy, the significance of Husserl and Peirce conspicuously also more in technical papers.

36The following view seems to be appropriate: The general frame of his philosophical world view was pegged out by the Russian ideological tradition and through it by Romantic and Hegelian philosophy. When it came to elaborating his philosophical ideas, however, Jakobson no longer relied on Hegel and his schools — with the exception of some Russian Hegelians — but rather on philosophers such as Husserl and Peirce and on theoretical developments within the empirical sciences themselves, especially on those in the field of biology and on such as were connected with the terms “cybernetics” and “information theory” in the forties and fifties. But it would be completely wrong to underestimate Husserl’s and Peirce’s influence and that of these fields simply because it was secondary. The fact that Jakobson’s structuralism did not suffer the same fate as Naturphilosophie must be attributed not only to his approach as an empirical researcher, but also to the synthesis of the stock of ideas of Romantic and Hegelian philosophy with this ‘secondary literature’.

37The attempts in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology in the first half of the nineteenth century to establish the speculative ideas of German Idealism as principles that determine nature in every detail are called Naturphilosophie. The rather inglorious failure of this “philosophy of nature” cannot be explained simply by the enormity and groundlessness of its general principles, which are more or less identical with Jakobson’s key ideas as listed. The failure must be diagnosed more discriminately. Two reasons can be named: (1) The general principles had not yet received a theoretical formulation that could satisfy scientific standards; this was achieved in this century by Husserl’s doctrine of foundation for holism and by the cybernetic and information theoretical versions for teleology. (Whenever Jakobson found a more precise version of a Hegelian idea, he relied on it.) (2) From these general principles the Naturphilosophen derived in a purely speculative manner a series of specific theorems for which the state of research at that time already offered alternatives. A good example is the recapitulation theory of the Naturphilosophen, according to which ontogenesis is a faithful repetition of phylogenesis. This was precipitately derived from the two general postulates of universal evolutionism and the uniformity of nature and of natural laws. The derivation from the two postulates — which are still guiding ideas — was logically correct but empirically refutable even then.

38The theory of recapitulation was refuted by Karl Ernst von Baer, a scholar from the Baltic who later taught in St. Petersburg and whose influence is in Jakobson’s opinion inseparably connected with Russian science. Baer, primarily an ontogeneticist, and often named, next to Darwin, as the most important biologist of the nineteenth century, adhered during his entire lifetime to the necessity of teleological explanation in biology. As a student he had been himself an adherent of Naturphilosophie for a short period; later, in an autobiographical retrospective he saw science “through observation, measuring and computing”, approaching the goal for which Schelling, the most prominent of the Naturphilosophen, had “set course in the Montgolfier of ‘intellectual intuition’”. One can consider Baer’s attempt to reach the goals of German Idealism by empirical means as a model for Jakobson’s attitude to Russian-Hegelian philosophy.

39In summary, the following theses can be formulated: there is a relatively coherent network of guiding ideas that for Jakobson are associated with Hegel through the Russian ideological tradition. Under the rubric Natur|philosophie this stock of ideas had failed almost completely and deplorably in natural scientific research of the nineteenth century. Its influence remained limited thereafter to the social sciences, aesthetics and theology, and even in these fields nothing approaching a general consensus was ever reached. In Jakobson’s phonology the Hegelian stock of ideas was able for the first time to make a breakthrough with far-reaching recognition and broad influence in an empirical discipline with a strong natural scientific component. Moreover, phonology in the form to which Jakobson made such an essential contribution has become an exemplary science in the field of linguistics and beyond.

40That this breakthrough occurred within linguistics may well have to do with the fact that ideas akin to German Idealism and Romanticism have, with only brief interruptions, remained alive in this field mainly due to the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt. That the breakthrough occurred in the inconspicuous discipline of phonology, however, is a surprise and an original accomplishment that must be credited to Roman Jakobson.

41Aside from the contrast with the Naturphilosophie of the last century, the contrast of the Prague Circle with the geographically and temporally proximate Vienna Circle sheds additional light on the originality of this accomplishment. Both Circles attained interdisciplinary and international influence. Language assumed a central position in both Circles, among the Prague linguists and literature scholars for thematic reasons, among the Vienna philosophers for methodological reasons. Both Circles had aimed at a renewal of their respective disciplines, of linguistics in the one case and of philosophy in the other. Both understood this renewal to be a structural description of the relations that are constitutive of a region of objects and the explanation of these with laws for which universal validity can be claimed. From this common basis they follow different paths.

42For the Viennese the constitutive relations were to be described formally. For the Prague Circle the content (the substance) of natural systems such as language was not without influence on the structure. The Viennese tried to reach the ideal of a universal unified science by reducing cultural, psychological and biological phenomena to their physical substrate. The autonomy of the single levels was just as dear to the Prague Circle as their integration in a hierarchy of phenomena, one founded on the other. The first reduction of the Viennese was of teleological connections to ordinary causal relationships, while the Prague Circle saw teleology as the proper key to the explanation of the specific structure of language. The Viennese were fascinated by the statistical aspects of quantum physics, whereas Jakobson was fascinated by “morphic determination” (e.g. phenomena of symmetry), which is no less characteristic of the quantum physical sphere. Correspondingly, whereas the Viennese were interested in statistics, and later game theory, Jakobson favored topology and Thom’s catastrophe theory. The Viennese mistrusted ordinary language, in which they suspected a major source of philosophical errors. In order to escape the temptations of natural language, a formal and universal language should be created, constructed according to logical criteria. For their part, the Prague Circle were convinced of nomogenesis, of a universally valid regularity in the structure of natural languages, and that this and its true functions could be tracked down if only one could find the correct standpoint.

43It can hardly be disputed today that, with respect to these points of divergence, the Prague Circle chose the philosophically more traditional but scientifically more revolutionary path. As Jakobson used to put it, “Tradition et révolution vont de pair — Tradition and revolution go hand in hand”.

Publication details

Published in:

Holenstein Elmar (2020) Phenomenological philosophy of language: collected papers, ed. Aurora Simone; Cigana Lorenzo. Genève-Lausanne, sdvig press.

Pages: 287-303

Full citation:

Holenstein Elmar (2020) „Jakobson's philosophical background“, In: E. Holenstein, Phenomenological philosophy of language, Genève-Lausanne, sdvig press, 287–303.