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Poetic Language and Scientific Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Jean Starobinski
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Extract

It was a tenacious dream: the first language spoken by man was music, poetry and science, all at the same time. In the beginning the same word, given by God or dictated by Nature, stood for things, feelings and laws. And in the cherished image of this dawning faculty not only had the distinction between word and song, the difference between expressive power and objective designational power (or “referential function,” as the linguists say) not yet appeared, but the sacred and profane uses of speech had not yet established their separate kingdoms: in the great festival of the earliest days each word was a celebrant and contained the substance of reality. The word, invested with an integral meaning, hit the mark and rejoiced at the contact. Everything to which man gave a name was a god to him or the delegate of a god, so that by virtue of a benevolent revelation or of an exact inspiration the earliest vocal expression combined the fullness of knowing with the musical fullness of its expressive power. But this language of Paradise, witness to an age when man was not separated from man or removed from Nature or from God, has long been forgotten, dismembered, dispersed. Multiple and incompatible idioms have taken its place. The clear light of meaning has become clouded.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 25 , Issue 100 , March 1977 , pp. 128 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Frain du Tremblay, who formulated this hypothesis, soon rejected it. Cf. Traité des Langues, Paris, 1703, p. 46.

2 Condillac, La Langue des Calculs, Book II, Chap. 1, and Book I, Chap. 15.

3 See Eric Weil, Problèmes Kantiens, Paris, 1963, pp. 57-107.

4 Owsei Temkin, Galenism, Cornell University Press, 1973, pp. 156-157.

5 Pedro Lain Entralgo, Historia de la medicina moderna y contemporanea, Barcelona, 1963, p. 157.

6 Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l'esprit scientifique, Paris, 1938, p. 90.

7 Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, Tübingen, 1932, II, Chap. 7, p. 386.

8 Joachim Ritter, "Ästhetik," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel-Stüttgart, 1971, Vol. I, 558.

9 Joachim Ritter, "Landschaft," in Subjektivität, Frankfurt, 1974, pp. 155-163.

10 Ibid. For the consequences to be drawn with regard to the modern situation of aesthetic experience one should read the very important work of Hans Robert Jauss, Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, I, Munich 1977.

11 Quoted by Marcel Raymond, "Le Sens de la qualité," in Etre et dire, Neuchâtel, 1970, p. 273 et seq. See also Graham Dunstan Martin, Language, Truth and Poetry, Edinburgh, 1975.

12 In the text appearing in this issue.

13 Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, XII.

14 Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, Paris, Pléiade, Vol. III, pp. 878-880.

15 Henry Michaux, Face à ce qui se dérobe, Paris, 1975, p. 10. The spelling of Michaux, coenesthésie, comes closest to the etymology. It concerns "general sensibility."

16 In the first part of the third volume of his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1929.

17 Fragment 116 of the Athenäum.