Are Appeals to Etymology Regressive?
On Leon Wieseltier, Radical Liberalism, and the Politics of Home
Read this stirring and compelling defense of liberalism by Leon Wieseltier. It’s a masterpiece of style and a heartfelt polemic. The author celebrates the co-existence of universalism and particularism, telling us that any one-sided choice between them is “phony.”
At one point, Wieseltier attacks the Russian reactionary thinker Aleksandr Dugin for his political appeal to etymology:
The terms to designate ‘freedom’ in different languages,” Dugin writes, “have sometimes completely different meanings.” The term svoboda in the Slavic languages, he instructs, originally designated only a certain familial relation. It means nothing more. “The word svoboda has nothing to do with the individual.” It refers to the collective, to the group.
I have no idea if Dugin is correct about all this. I am quite sure that this is all beside the point. (It reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s unintentionally hilarious remark that there is no word for détente in Russian.) Dugin’s assumption is that the original meaning of a word is its truest meaning, and that the distance travelled away from an original meaning is a fall into inauthenticity. But this is a prior philosophical position, not a conclusion that can be drawn from the history of languages, which richly illustrates the scope of their evolution and their flexibility. Why should the first be the best? What has philology to do with politics? We do not live in the old world, even if a growing number of peoples and leaders wish that we did.
Just as words evolve in their meaning, so must we, says Wieseltier. To cling to the original meaning of a word as its truest is a stand-in for the kind of regressive localism and nativism that tells us we can’t change, we are stuck with the fixed essences into which we are born.
I was struck by Wieseltier’s (not uncommon, but well articulated) observation that illiberal politics often go hand in hand with purist views of language.
His argument seems to be that appeals to the past lead away from liberalism, because liberalism is indifferent to origins. Liberalism focuses not on where we come from, but on where we are going.
The cultural and historical burdens that words carry is no argument against their being repurposed for new aims.
What weight, then, if any, should we give to the past? What role can etymology play in our self-understanding? How important is it?
Perhaps etymology is indeed a dangerous game, but it also seems to be something that great thinkers, poets, and theologians turn to for insight and meaning. For Wieseltier, Dugin’s claim for the particularism of Russian language smacks of “blood and soil” politics. Do you agree with Wieseltier that appeals to the original (and particular) meanings of words leads directly to illiberalism? And if you do, in what contexts is it appropriate to appeal to etymology, nonetheless?
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