The Language Animal by Charles Taylor review – how words change our world

Over the past hundred years, philosophical interest in language has become, as Charles Taylor puts it, “close to obsessional”. The obsession goes back to a remark made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1915: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If Wittgenstein was right, then language is not so much a device for recording and communicating information, as the framework of all our knowledge and experience.

But the philosophers who drew inspiration from Wittgenstein’s remark could not agree about what it implied. The positivists among them thought of language as a strict map of impersonal facts, dismissing everything else as rhetoric, emotion or superstition. The humanists, on the other hand, saw it as a creative force that gives wings to our perceptions and opens us to the unknown. For the positivists, you might say, language aspires to the condition of natural science, but for the humanists it is essentially a poem.

Taylor is on the side of the poets, and in his latest book he makes the case with eloquence, force and broad historical sweep. He starts with Étienne de Condillac, the 18th-century proto-positivist who suggested that language came into existence when our ancestors got bored with instinctive grunts and gestures, and decided to share their ideas by means of artificial vocal sounds. A few years later, the proto-humanist Johann Gottfried Herder attacked Condillac for presupposing what he intended to explain: how could his savages have known that they had ideas to communicate if they did not already have a language to express them? Herder was right, in Taylor’s opinion: there would be no such thing as “consciousness” without a leap from mechanical cycles of stimulus and response to a “new plane”, where language enables us to “grasp something as what it is”.

The standoff led to several other fateful differences, according to Taylor. In the first place, Condillac thought of language “atomistically”, imagining that we pick it up one word at a time, but Herder understood it “holistically”, recognising that words do not make sense except as parts of larger linguistic networks. Second, Condillac saw language as rooted in private experience, while Herder saw it as a collaborative enterprise based on “the primacy of conversation”. Finally and most significantly, Condillac regarded words as labels for entities we can already identify, whereas Herder realised that some things – loyalty, for example, or laws or promises – would not exist if we did not have words for them.

Taylor wheels out some of the heavy artillery of 20th-century philosophy – Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as Wittgenstein – to vindicate Herder against Condillac. The bleached language of the natural sciences could not supply us with its “disengaged” representations of an objective world, he argues, if it was not situated in a colourful landscape of personal, impassioned and playful linguistic practice. (“We couldn’t learn to write a treatise before we learned to converse,” as he puts it.) Language grows over time not so much through the addition of new words as through the force of narrative and metaphor – a point illustrated by the classical idea of civic equality, which was transformed by the American and French revolutions, and by various socialist movements, before receiving further twists in the contemporary politics of sexual, religious, cultural and national identities. Language “changes our world”, in short: it “introduces new meanings into our lives” and “opens us to the domain it encodes”.

The Language Animal comes close to being a definitive statement of the case for humanism as opposed to positivism, but readers could be forgiven for finding it rather slow and repetitive. Taylor admits that he started work on it 30 years ago, only to be waylaid by “numerous self-interruptions”. This is his way of confessing that he has written a dozen other books in the interim. Some of them remain close to his home turf (problems in Catholic belief and in progressive Canadian politics) but many involve bold excursions into the conceptual and political problems of multiculturalism and the modern self. But while he has ranged widely, he has always taken his bearings from his humanist view of language.

Taylor is nothing if not consistent: 40 years ago he published a pioneering book on Hegel, presenting him as a follower of Herder, for whom language was an “expression of self”, as opposed to Condillac, who saw it as a “vehicle of ideas”. A decade before that he brought out a critique of positivistic psychology, arguing that human behaviour cannot be captured in the “atomistic” language of natural science. In fact, his key concerns can all be traced back to the early 1950s when he was a left-leaning Canadian Catholic with a scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he got caught up in a whirlwind of enthusiasm for the work of the recently deceased Wittgenstein.

Taylor is one of the sanest and most sympathetic of contemporary philosophers, but after six decades his variations on humanist approaches to language have become a little tired. Wittgenstein himself warned against attempts to generalise about language as if it was a single entity – abstract, uniform and homogeneous – and he worried about a glut of vacuous books with the word “language” in the title. Taylor may be right to castigate the positivists for underestimating the creative grandeur of language as such, but it is worth remembering that, from Condillac on, they took a practical interest in less rarefied questions, such as the peculiarities of sign languages, the merits of different writing systems, and problems of multilingualism and translation. They also threw themselves into matters of linguistic policy: the standardisation of national languages; the education of the deaf; and even the effect of patriarchal surnames on the formation of family sentiment, a topic that surely deserves to be put back on the political agenda. The positivists may have been mistaken, but they do not deserve the enormous condescension of philosophy.