Language: Progress or Return?
Transcending a Familiar Debate
Let’s assume there are some things you think have gotten better over time (e.g., dental care) and some things that have gotten worse (presence and attention-span). What are areas where you think progress/regress is the wrong frame? Can there be progress in philosophy, for example? Or is it the case that for the most elemental aspects of the human condition “nothing is new under the sun”?
One area where I think progress is the wrong frame is “language.”
The progressive case for linguistic development is:
Over time, languages gain more words and phrases
Languages blend and borrow from other languages
Longer linguistic histories make for deeper expression
The conservative case for linguistic devolution is:
The increase in words and phrases indicates alienation from the simplicity of the original.
Hybridity of languages makes for more confusion.
Our increased linguistic output tracks with a deflated quality of output. I.e., where are today’s Homers, Virgils, Dantes, and Shakespeares?
If the progressive case sees vitality in the new, the conservative case finds it in the old. The one seeks more words to express more things; the other sees the power of a few words to express a variety of things. The one seeks increasing clarity and distinction; the other celebrates polysemy, density, poetry.
Perhaps the view of linguistic progress or regress is a matter of temperament. Perhaps it is a question of what we hope language to “do.”
Yet language cannot be said to improve or decline in the same way that technology, science, politics, or morality are said to improve or decline. Why?
One possibility is that language, unlike these other arenas, is not an instrumental good, but an end in itself. Tools can get better; but language is not reducibly a tool. Sure, we use words to communicate. And yet, as Heidegger argues, the task of words is not simply to express the “content” in our minds. Words disclose our world. They are bridges between mortals and their dwelling place. A language cannot get better or worse. Only a world or a being-in-the-world can get better or worse. Words merely are.
And yet languages are symptoms of the world we inhabit. And so if you want to take a temperature check of your age, consult the language. We should expect the values of an age to be reflected in the aesthetics of its language. But does a better age mean a better language? Or does our obsession with making everything “better” not betray an inability to be thankful for those things which need no improvement? Perhaps it is language’s refusal to be improved—contra Ezra Pound’s claim that poets are the “janitors of language”—that allows us to experience something like the eternal. The right word is always available and always just out of reach. The wholest language is the broken one.
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