Arbitrariness in Language

“Arbitrariness in language” constitutes one of the great themes of modern linguistic thought. We feel all the more sensitive to this problem in that our orientation as an audio-psycho-phonologist places us in daily confrontation with everything pertaining to language, to the act of speech, to the underlying psyche, to creative thought… and, thereby, to the notion of the arbitrary.

A recent introduction, the word “arbitrary” acquired its full linguistic value only through the weight that Ferdinand de Saussure was to grant it. This “gravity” was nevertheless to lead its author into the windings of a labyrinth from which he perhaps never found his way out.

The Course in General Linguistics, carefully gathered together by a few of his disciples, reveals to us how far Saussurean thought was, from the very outset, centred upon the arbitrary aspect of the sign. This fact is all the more important in that the orientation linguistics seemed to be taking at that period thereby found a most emphatic support in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, and saw consolidated the foundations it had been trying to establish for some decades. And so, from that moment on, the word became essentially arbitrary. Thanks to this incontestable affirmation issuing from the best informed, man is henceforth called upon to raise himself to the very place where he may claim, by virtue of his genius, to make the word spring forth.

The arguments delivered by Ferdinand de Saussure are simple, even striking. This author thus highlights the fact that one and the same animal receives two names on either side of one and the same border. At first glance, it seems easy to assent blissfully. How indeed are we not to admit that our mammal, arbitrarily named “ox”, finds stuck upon it a second label, no less arbitrarily conceived, which designates it under the term “bœuf”, and that within a few metres. Though it is no doubt the same in its skin, our bovine has nonetheless, over the course of time, enjoyed the double arbitration of differing “naming” authorities. This statement is certainly irrefutable, all the more so as the insistence with which this innovator founded his assertions was matched only by his authority of the moment in matters of language. In reality, what Ferdinand de Saussure meant was that nothing had inflected the choice of one term rather than another, and that, as a consequence, every pre-existing determinism was to be eliminated. For him, it was a matter of a purely and simply “unmotivated” choice.

Here was something clear-cut, beyond reply, that put an end to the various tribulations linguistics had known until then. The latter was indeed losing itself in endless wanderings into which it was plunged by etymological research which, sustained by the vain hope of reaching the very genesis of language, regularly ended in the univocal solution of a divine origin. Such an approach assuredly eliminated any introduction, even minor, of the concept of the arbitrary.

Nothing is so simple, it is true, and yet in the best of worlds everything is always far more complex. One never considers the texts themselves closely enough; and if authors such as Saussure were able to let drop, in lapidary fashion, that the word was arbitrary, they nonetheless found themselves constrained to carry out, during the greater part of their lives, a very thorough analysis of this idea cast out at a stroke, in order to provoke, after a long series of reservations, a reflection capable of calling into question the various linguistic concepts. A brutal break with previously established ideas is certainly sometimes necessary, but it must inevitably open onto a multitude of new paths elaborated with meticulous care, studied with rigour, and showing to what extent measure must be introduced into assertions so deliberately put forward.

I was saying, a moment ago, that Saussure seemed never to have emerged from his impasse, to the point of leading one to believe that he had intimately grasped his own wanderings. As I advance in the study of his work, I become, indeed, increasingly persuaded, by a thousand and one details, that he had at the very least sensed his error, feeling with ever greater acuity over the course of time that he had set out upon a false trail.

Indeed, “the arbitrary” that he so manifestly highlighted took on the colouring of undeniable obviousness only for the neophyte. A careful, more attentive re-reading of the assertions of the master of Geneva called, in effect, for other interpretations, while there settled within him a thought at once more subtle and more matured.

Ferdinand de Saussure already knew the criticisms that his initial assertion, so abrupt, so lapidary, risked raising. He himself announced, as exceptions seeming to confirm the rule, onomatopoeias and the syllabic plays that derived from them. He pointed out, in a most measured manner, the presence of those words of dual belonging, learned or vulgar according to their origin. The current penchant which consists in explaining everything through the socio-cultural side certainly finds there one of its most solid buttresses.

And yet, as the field of investigation widens, there settles within de Saussure a silence whose scarcely conceivable depth leads us to think that this man, so sensitive to the aspects of discourse, suddenly sank, then became mired, in the arcana of the maze that the reality of language represents. While he was filling to satiety notebooks whose object was the study of the myth of the Nibelung, or while he plunged into endless research on the play of letter combinations arising from anagrams, Saussure no doubt found himself gradually confronted with the unreality of the arbitrary, and was able to measure the magnitude of the illusion through which he had let himself be seized, and which led him to believe, at first approach, that man was master of the word, when he was in fact merely its instrument.

We know how far this eminent linguist gradually became silent, fading away, according to some, in a crypto-alcoholism that allowed him to avoid, to forget, the verbalising thought he was beginning to glimpse, that creative thought of the word, alone capable of juggling with the letter it had conceived.

Here we are then, once again, placed before the problem of language, a two-sided panel which the master of Geneva, in the manner of Plato, succeeded so well in bringing to light. The giant of Athenian thought, however, very skilled at handling controversy by means of an artfully conducted dialectic, very practised at confronting current ideas, was able admirably to introduce, through the intermediary of the truth-sayer Socrates, his reflections on language. He ventured only with prudence upon certain positions concerning a possible arbitrariness. If man knows how to innovate in matters of language, he thought, if he moreover knows how to grant the object its design, its form, its colour, if he also manages — he added — to strip from it its “sonorous definition”, a sonic correspondence in some way determining its acoustic form, if therefore man apparently becomes deliberately, by his own will, the creator of the word, it nonetheless seems necessary to Plato to surround himself with extreme rigour, by attributing this elective faculty to the lawgiver.

Thus, in the mind of Socrates and according to the words of Plato, the logos is open only to him who is plugged directly into that transcendent consciousness. Set in resonance by the latter, and through a body become instrument, the Being thus succeeds in expressing the utterance of the logos. From then on, the word sings the form to be designated.

Socrates, however, faced with the resistance of Hermogenes — his interlocutor together with Cratylus — was able skilfully to win over to his side this young man so steeped in the philosophy of Heraclitus, by revealing to him the play of the mechanisms animating the letter.

The commentators concerned with linguistics are so far from understanding the import of this brief description that they go so far as to think, in all good faith moreover, that there is in Plato either a fabrication, disconcerting it is true, or a deliberate exaggeration, or else a mere jest. And yet the propositions advanced regarding certain letters such as (ρ, φ, ψ, σ, δ, λ) for example, do not fail to remind us of the mechanisms of analysis which once allowed the Ancients to create a whole “literal” technique for the comprehension of the letter itself, as a symbol seeking to awaken at one and the same time a sound, a signifying image, and a hidden evocation, that with which the Egyptians and then the Hebrews knew how to juggle so superbly. It is in Hebrew writing that, with unequalled pertinence, the letter recovered at once its value as a bodily image, its universal symbolic component, and its profound signification.

The dangers introduced by the notion of the arbitrary are particularly noxious, enclosing man within a presumptuous idea that leads him to believe himself the creator of language, and that directs him toward a path at whose turning he claims to hold at his mercy both the force that gave him life and that which breathed into him both letter and language and spirit.

The critical point that emerges as the common denominator of these considerations is, as we see, the place where the egotic thrust of each man is revealed — the man who wants to be the leading thinker and the absolute founder of his own reason. There is in fact nothing so unreasonable, and it is there indeed that delirium begins.

There is no freedom in matters of language, just as there exists no freedom at the level of our relationship with the Universe itself. We are dependent, and our free will resides in the possibility of accepting or not this relationship, and of being thenceforth destined either to progress along the path on which the signification of the letter is revealed to us, or to remain deaf to that evocation and thereby to remain outside the law.

The vision that the audio-psycho-phonological approach projects onto language takes on an aspect that largely converges with this conception of interdependence with the distant, even cosmic, environment. Indeed, the processes of listening that our speciality knows how to develop open wide paths onto the awakening of consciousness, which itself seems, in its ultimate state, to reflect only what the logoi dictates or reveals to it. In other words, the Universe discloses itself to whoever wishes to see it, and speaks to whoever is willing to listen to it — although, in order to reach this last stage of evolution, certain potentialities seem necessary. They are precisely those that we solicit by means of the techniques perfected over the course of the last thirty years.

From then on, from such a springboard, language no longer constitutes anything but a response, or a reproduction in verbal form, of what the logoi unveils or enunciates in manifesting itself. This verbal language can only be, as one may conceive, parallel, analogical, since we have only words with which to signify it — it which is signifying by its very essence. And so our language, like the information that answers the received incitement, the perceived arrow, will be called parable or else speech; but the latter will have value only if the relationship is exercised directly, without intermediary, with the logos itself, any integration being of course only parallel, evoking simultaneously the synchronous mental representation, or symbol, that true imagery of reality, the support of dialogue in its very definition.

Any language that does not establish itself at this level will be as if absorbed by the reverberation of the word itself in its most prosaic signification. The symbolic evocations will disappear, and while the tongue effects a conversion increasingly oriented toward a concrete and material description, conscious thought will then become dependent upon a linguistic universe without abstraction, without poetry, and paradoxically without rigour, since it is rapidly stripped of any real communicability and answers essentially to the preoccupations of one and all. Under a false aspect of generalisation, each man will therefore speak his own linguality in its egotic form. And thenceforth, each word will seem drawn from the quiver in which the dialectical arrows are held in reserve; we shall willingly call them the dia-boles (from diabolos). We see thus how far we are from the communication engaged in dialogue.

What then of the arbitrary? Always sustained by the ever-unsatisfied desire to see his own action, his own will, spring forth, man insists on deliberately creating the word that names the object. This fact seems so anchored in his human nature, in his presumption to designate and to hold for a reality suspended upon his verbalisation “the thing” evoked, that he inevitably associates with it his condition as a man of today. But this fact, inherent in his mental mechanisms, belongs in reality to all times. Let each man decide to build a language: it is his own that he builds. But from the moment this idiom must become communicable and thereby acceptable to the surrounding community, appeal will then be made to the man of the art, to the inspired one, to him who knows how to enunciate the true word, filled with sense, with good sense. Is it not the man of the law, in the Platonic sense, who thus reappears? How many neologisms, arisen “arbitrarily”, without contact with the intimacy of the “Thing”, have known an ephemeral life in the round-dance of the evolution of words! The roots with profound evocation are those that resist indefinitely the wear of time.

There is nothing arbitrary in the word but the desire to create it. Thereafter, it is the business of experts — one would once have said of initiates or of sages.

Thus, in matters of arbitrariness at the level of language, it will always be necessary to be extremely prudent and to venture into no categorical affirmation. For nothing is less sure than this certainty. As we have just seen, many precautions are to be required. It is not, indeed, a matter of brandishing this or that argument whose sole foundation rests upon a word or a verbal image which is in fact merely the mental representation one is willing to grant it. Thus, to say of the word that it is the tool, the instrument of thought, is hardly to progress in the knowledge of language. Plato knew how to offer one and the same evocation, while illuminating his discourse on language with a thousand other comparative images from which an analogical idea might arise. Whereas our present-day dialectician linguists, arguing from the expression introduced by Marx — a little belated, no doubt — concerning the material notion of the instrument in matters of language, polarise all their efforts toward wishing to prove that there is nothing more material than the word. Do they not strive, at the same time, to affirm vehemently that any linguist of value is, if not a marxist in potential, at all events a man of the left. The study of language accommodates itself very well to neutrality in the domain of politics, and the laws that govern it remain what they are outside of all incidence emanating from the right or the left.

Far be it from us the idea of refusing any notion of progress — a notion that in no way resembles, I wish to make this clear, the regressive one of so-called “progressivism”. Our audio-psycho-phonological approach allows us to think — apart from any non-objective consideration — that man is the instrument of language. It is therefore toward a reversal of conceptual polarity that our discipline leads us.

It is for the logoi of which we spoke a moment ago to express itself through man; and it is for the latter to build himself, to individualise himself, to entitle himself by means of this verbalisation. As the word becomes incarnate in him, as verbal power encodes his nervous system, the universe unveils itself in a procedure that becomes more and more scientific. In fact, ought not the man of science of today to be the theologian who studies the world — this world ready to deliver itself to him to the point of confiding to him the secrets of creation? If the word theologian encumbers us, why should we not pronounce the word logologist?

In conclusion, we shall say that any approach to the arbitrary in matters of language demands extreme prudence, coupled with the full awareness that the data are and will remain limited, so true is it that at a certain degree of knowledge man is led to penetrate into the unfathomable domain of mystery, the very manifestation of his limits and an inexhaustible source of humility.

Dr Alfred A. Tomatis President of the International Association of Audio-Psycho-Phonology France

Source: Alfred A. Tomatis, “Arbitrariness in Language”, a paper given at the IInd National Congress of the French Association of Audio-Psycho-Phonology. Transcription from the facsimile.