Accueil | Cours | Recherche | Textes | Liens

Centre de recherches en histoire et épistémologie comparée de la linguistique d'Europe centrale et orientale (CRECLECO) / Université de Lausanne // Научно-исследовательский центр по истории и сравнительной эпистемологии языкознания центральной и восточной Европы

Patrick SERIOT
(University of Lausanne) : «The impact of Czech and Russian biology on the linguistic thought of the Prague Linguistic Circle», Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague, vol. 3, p. 15-24.


[15]
I propose in this paper to explore one poorly known aspect of Jakobson's and Trubetzkoy's ideal library, or intellectual world : the biological background, in its relationship with what would be called nowadays «global, or holistic ecology». As a matter of fact, an important part of the scope of interest of the so-called Prag Russians is to be put within the framework of controversies of this period in the domain of evolutionnism in biology, a science which for a long time played the role of model-supplier for human sciences before linguistics itself took up this role after World War II.
A superficial reading of Jakobson's manysided work could make believe that his numerous criticisms against Schleicher's naturalism link him with the sociological tendency in linguistics, which was widespread in Meillet's time.
Nonetheless, the thesis I will present here is that the two main Russian representatives of the Prague Linguistic Circle, far from following the sociological model that Saussure and Meillet had borrowed from Durkheim, relied upon a biological metaphor, just like Schleicher, with this difference that this metaphor was explicitely anti-darwinian. The problem will be to figure out whether this anti-darwinian line was typical of the period in general, or of Russian or Czechoslovak science, or of all those factors altogether. The second problem will be to know if it actually was a metaphor, and not a real way of thinking. The last thesis I will uphold is that a misunderstanding should be avoided when one speaks of structure about the Prague Linguistic Circle, because at that time a structure was often confounded with a totatity (celostnost’, celek, Ganzheit).

[16]
1) teleology or causality?

It has been said by J. Toman that anti-darwinism is a typical emanation of the Russian culture. But one should be extremely careful with cultural determinism of scientific attitudes.
Darwin's book The Origin of Species, published in 1859, was translated in Russia in 1864. The darwinian theory was accepted with enthusiasm, as a global world outlook, by the «radical» Russian intelligentsia, who finds in it a support for its anti-idealism and anti-romanticism. Actually Darwin rejected any teleological vision, in favor of an explanation of evolution in terms of causality (struggle for life, natural selection and survival of the fittest). Darwinian theories were developed in Russia by such scholars as Timirjazev.
As in the other European countries, an anti-darwinian reaction soon arose, not only in theological, but also in philosophical and scientifical circles. Among the latter , the most important was probably the naturalist from Baltic origin Karl von Baer (1792-1876). He upheld a notion of universal development of nature, formulated in the spirit of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. He viewed evolution as a gradual expansion of the domination of spirit over matter, and would bring forward aristotelian teleology instead of Newton's causality, and advocated an anti-mechanistic explanation of evolution. But a peculiarity of the Russian situation seems to be a sort of symbiosis between natural sciences and slavophile conservatism. So N. Ja. Danilevskij (1822-1885) is known as a philosopher of history with strong panslavist opinions. Nevertheless he was also a naturalist, and one of von Baer's pupils. In his book «Darwinism» (1885) he refuted causality as an external factor, and asserted that teleology is the only explanatory factor of evolution. What is important to note is that his argumentation is based on the fact that darwinism is a product of «Western materialism».
If Jakobson occasionally refers to Danilevskij (for instance in The French myth in Russia, 1931), it is von Baer who is most often quoted by him, every time when it is necessary for him to base his attacks against a paradigm which was still considered as most modern in the 20s and 30s : the principle of strictly causal explanation of change in language by the neo-grammarians. But the main reference in the world of biology for Jakobson in his Prag period is the Russian biologist L. S. Berg (1876-1950). L. Berg sets out an explicitely anti-darwinian conception of evolution in 1922 in his book «Nomogenesis» (evolution according to laws), where he grants an important place to the notion of conformity to an aim (celesoobraznost', in German Zielstrebigkeit) as a
[17]
propriety of everything alive. According to him, the course of evolution is predetermined by a spreading of preexisting rudiments. Jakobson constantly refers to Berg when he strives to fight the Neo-grammarian principle of strict causality, and puts forward his own anti-darwinism. For instance, in 1927, in his Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian?, he explicitely opposes Darwin's conception of evolution by divergence to Berg's conception of evolution by convergence of non related species on the same territory.
In this text one can find Jakobson's main theses on the evolution of languages, which allow him to refute Saussure's views, that he assimilates to the Neo-Grammarians in an epistemological perspective. He asserts that modern science (and especially Russian science) can be defined as having replaced the question why (warum?) by the question in what aim (wozu?), and in 1928 proposes «a substitution of a teleological approach for the mechanical view» (The teleological criterion…, SW-1, p. 2).
It is noteworthy here that if Jakobson does not make an analogy on the object like Schleicher, for whom languages actually are living organisms, he makes an analogy in method : it is possible to study the evolution of languages in the same way as one can study the evolution of living beings.

2) Nomogenesis or chance?
A peculiarity of the Russian criticism of darwinism is the insistence on the conflict between evolution relying on mere chance and evolution governed by laws. There is no doubt that it is a biased reading of Darwin : Darwin constantly asserts that evolution is subdued to laws and regularities. But those laws relying on causality cannot satisfy his Russian disparagers : only a determinist and predictable model can be considered as a law.
Danilevskij reproaches Darwin for neglecting the telelological and predetermined meaning of evolution, which he names orthogenesis.
Berg refers to Danilevskij and thinks it is possible to replace Darwin's chance by the idea of nomogenesis, or evolution relying on laws. It is an «autogenetic» theory of evolution, which postulates that evolution is a development of rudiments or preexistent potentialities (as in the model of embryology), rather than a series of adaptative answers of species to their surroundings, with random formation of new characteristics, like for Darwin.
One must add to this internal determinism an external determinism, due to the «geographic landscape» or «landšaft», which has a constraining action, and
[18]
forces all species to «vary in a determined direction» (Berg, 1922, p. 180). But this is another source of inspiration for Jakobson's and Trubetzkoy's view, coming from the eurasianist geographer living in Prag P. N. Savickij. I think P. Savickij's influence on Trubetzkoy and Jakobson should not be underestimated. It does deserve attention. For Savickij, and Trubetzkoy, at least up to the beginning of the thirties, a structure is not a set of negative oppositions like for Saussure, it is a link between already existing but genetically not connected things. The famous formula un système où tout se tient can underly both definitions of the concept of «structure».
We are here in the heart of a classical problem of epistemology, which concerns the mode of being of the objects of knowledge. For Trubetzkoy there was a link between Turk languages, Turk mentality, Turks songs, Turk ornament. The Turk, or Turanian world is a positive totality. And the aim of scientific work is the empirical verification of the ontological existence of this totality. I even think that the philosophical problem of the existence of Russia for Trubetzkoy has to be taken into account to understand the history of the notion of structure. But what I want to stress is that this structuralism was a theory of correspondences, or coincidences.
When one examines attentively Jakobson's criticisms of Saussure's view of linguistic evolution, either in the proposition 22 for the Congress in The Hague (1928) or in the «1929 Thesis» it is possible to bring out the strict opposition between both paradigms. Jakobson insists on the fact that Saussure's conception of linguistic evolution is based on «random changes without any goal» (Remarques..., SW1, p. 17., p. 110). He drives the source of thoses ideas in Saussure's work back to Schleicher and the Neo-Grammarians.
It is thus possible, by reversing the arguments one by one, to rebuild the nomogenetic model of evolution advocated by Jakobson. But this insistance on the random character of evolution attributed to darwinism is curious, and must be thoroughly examined.
Jakobson repeats many times in the 20s and 30s that nomogenesis, according to which languages can evoluate only in one direction, and according to the laws of the system, is something totally new if compared to preceding theories. Those preceding theories are Scheicher's naturalism and the Neogrammarians' positivism. But what is most striking is that both Schleicher and the Neogrammarians constantly insist upon the fact that they deal with laws.(One can think of the Ausnahmlosigkeit principle of the Neogrammarians [1]). But this gap is not only temporal. For Jakobson the scientific paradigms also have a spatial, i.e cultural dimension : there is a so-called «European ideology), which
[19]
 he opposes to the so-called «contemporary ideology», where «Russian science» plays a peculiar role. The former recognizes only blind chance in evolution, the latter puts forward a goal-oriented evolution. This theory of the two sciences is explicitely exposed in a most fascinating article that Jakobson published in Slawische Rundschau in 1929 : «Über die heutige Voraussetzungen der russische Slavistik».
It must be noted, finally, that this controversy about chance or necessity in evolution, which raged at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, took nowhere such passionate forms as in the USSR, where Lyssenko declared that «chance is alien to science» and rejected the notion of random variation, or mutation. Lyssenkism in Soviet biology is contemporary to the developpement of anti-darwinian conceptions among certain members of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

3) Convergences or divergences?

a) Fishes and whales
During the founding meeting of the Prague Linguistic Circle (October 6th, 1926) in Mathesius 's office in Charles University in Prague, Jakobson, Mathesius and four other colleagues had gathered to discuss the paper by Henrik Becker, from Leipzig : «Der europäische Sprachgeist», which he had just given that day. The point was that Czech and Hungarian, two languages without any genetic relationship, were in fact deeply marked by their permanent contact through territory : they were linked «by culture», and not «by nature» [2]. This problematics was in total opposition with the genetic theory of the «family tree», which had been generally accepted in the 19th century. But this new approach casts a new light if one links it with a contemporary biological controversy.
Once again by rejecting the idea of random evolution of living beings, L. Berg had come to the theory of evolution by convergence. For him the probability of random appearance of the same characteristics in two different species at the same time is near zero (Berg, 1922, p. 105). He had discovered that, on the contrary, non genetically linked organisms could acquire common characters. He gives a very simple example : the whales are mammals, but they have developped characteristics similar to those of fish : they have «become» a sort of fish by living in the same environment as they. The same idea is to
[20]
be found in a book written by a Czech philosopher, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Prague : Emanuel Rádl (the book The history of biological theories was written in German in 1909, translated into English in 1930, cf. p. 109-115).

b) Chains and bricks
The notion of adquired affinities had entered the spirit of the time since, after the war of 1870 the French, the Germans, and the Italians had begun studying areal linguistics. Hugo Schuchardt proposes the notion of «linguistic affinity» (Sprachverwandschaft), and this terminology will be directly taken up by Jakobson, with the term jazykovoe srodstvo.[3]
Between the two wars attempts are made in Europe to study the mutual influences of neighbouring dialects, to determine why, in a same geographical context, languages from totally different origins look like one another. The Dutch linguist C. C. Uhlenbeck (1866-1951) looks at a language family as the result of a long assimilation of languages in contact. He applies the notion of linguistic family to the anthropological concept of acculturation, which consists in the adaptation of cultural characters borrowed from a culture to another one. This type of research will be taken up by the school of the neo-linguists in Italy at the end of the 30s.
As early as 1923, Trubetzkoy had coined the term of «league of languages» (jazykovoj sojuz), in a theological essay on the plurality of languages «The Tower of Babel and the confusion of Tongues» (Evrazijskij Vremennik III; cf. Trubetzkoy 1991, p. 147-160). In 1928 he proposed the term of Sprachbund in The Hague. Our colleague J. Toman has thoroughly studied this theme, I shall deal here only with the biological background, by reminding that, when Jakobson speaks in 1936 of a necessity in the phonological affinities between languages, he is very near the ecological notion of botanic association : «the area of polytony generally borders upon an arear with glotal stop» (Affinités..., SW-1, p. 245).
Now the notion of hybridization had been a very current issue in biology since the end of the last century. This interest was paralleled in linguistics with the notion of Sprachmischung, used by Schuchardt, Baudouin de Courtenay and Ščerba. The Soviet linguist N. Marr also used this notion, under the name of language crossing (skreščenie). This notion, deeply rooted in the spirit of the time, finds an extreme expression in a paper by Trubetzkoy at the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1936 : «Gedanken über das Indogermanenprob-
[21]
lem». For Trubetzkoy, formerly different languages, which had no genetical link became Indo-European by convergence because of their territorial contact, and they now look like bricks in a wall.
For Trubetzkoy, on the other hand, the evolution of the Slavic languages is totally different : they arose by divergence from a common ancestor, and now their geographical repartition forms the links of a chain (or rather a chain mail).
This text of 1936 must be understood as an argument against nazi theories on the genetic and ethnic origins of the «Indo-Aryan, or Indo-Germanic people». But it takes its sense on the background of an older debate, on the evolution of languages, which itself is a part of the discussion on the evolution of living species.
I think one has to take seriously the neo-lamarckian opposition to darwinism at the beginning of the 20th Century. Lamarckism is known for two theses : the changing of organs through exercise or lack of exercise, and the inheritance of acquired characters. But another aspect of lamarckism must be taken into account : it is its goal-orientedness, its idea of an inner force, not far from vitalism.
If one carefully reads Trubetzkoy's papers, his peculiar terminology like «the logic of evolution», «the subjects of evolution» acquires a new sense on the background of neo-vitalist views on evolution.
This is why I think that for Trubeckoj and also Jakobson in the pre-war period, a totality was before all not a set of negative oppositions like for Saussure, but a real thing, with a real ontological existence.
The peculiarity of neo-lamarckism intellectual atmosphere of the Prague Linguistic Circle is that for Trubetzkoy, Jakobson and Savickij, it was not important to know if a cultural organism chosed its physical environment or on the contrary if the physical environment thoroughly determined the cultural organism.

Conclusion
Even if it cannot be reduced to that, the structuralism of the so-called Prag Russians was deeply involved in an epistemological discussion pertaining to the natural sciences of the end of the 19th Century. This discussion was introduced into linguistics as a metaphor, but the metaphor itself was not far from being a model of thought. Despite of Jakobson's opposition between a «Euro-
[22]
pean science», which was supposed to be positivist, and a Russian science, which was supposed to be synthetic, holistic and «avant-garde», such themes as holism and teleology were widely spread in biology at that time (in the inter-war period) as in Western and Central Europe as in Russia. The specificity of the members of the PLC seems to have been able to feel the wealth of this source of inspiration. In this respect, biological thought in Czechoslovakia was in the spirit of its time, one can just say that holism was perhaps more widely spread in philosophy than in such countries as France.
Anyway, holism was a widespread trend among Czech biologists in the 20s and 30s. One of its most vigourous proponents was Prof. Jan Belehrádek, who wrote papers on «Holismus» and «Filosofie celku» in the late 30s.

It would be possible to quote other themes of the biological controversy of that time which served as a source of inspiration for Prag structuralism : the general disapproval of Darwinism in Czechoslovakia and in Russia, the opposition between catastrophism and unitarianism (for Darwin Natura non facit saltus, whereas for Berg, for Jakobson, but also for Marr, there are leaps, suddden changes in language evolution), or leftist opposition to darwinism in Russia, which opposed the idea of struggle for life in the name of the «principle of cooperation» (I have in mind the anarchist Kropotkin and Lyssenko). My conclusion will be that seeing a structure as a goal oriented totality was a necessary step backward which made possible a fantastic step forward toward a theory of systems like Von Bertalanffy's after World War 2, and later still the theory of complexity by Edgar Morin.
And finally I think it should be clear that Kuhn's notion of change of paradigm is hardly applicable to this type of objects, I mean structure and totality. Trubetzkoy's and Jakobson's structuralism functions in a balanced mouvement backward and forward, it relies on a notion which existed prior to the Neo-Grammarians : organicism, while denying it by saying that linguistics is a social science, and it uses it to jump to the modern notion of structure.


Notes
- [1] Cf. Leskien (1876) : «To admit haphazard deviations, impossible to coordinate, is to assert in reality that the object of our science, language, is inaccessible to science» (quoted by Harris & Taylor, 1991, p. 171).
- [2] Cf. Matejka, 1978, p. ix.
- [3] One should note that Jakobson also refers to Goethe as to a biologist, and transates Wahlverwandschaft (selective afinty) by «convergence of development» («Sur la théorie des affinités«», cf. SW-I, p. 236.


Bibliography

— BAER, Karl E. von (1876): Reden gehalten in wissenschaftlichen Versammlungen und kleinere Aufsätze vermischten Inhalts, Sankt-Peterburg : Schmitzdorff.
— BELEHRADEK Jan (1937) : «Holismus», Biologické Listy, 22, p. 169-179. [Holism]
— BELEHRADEK Jan (1937) : «Filosofie celku», Věda a Život, ročnik 4, p. 385-391.
— BERG Lev S. (1922) : Nomogenez (Evoljucija na osnove zakonomernostej), Petrograd : Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo (English translation : Nomogenesis, Cambridge Mass., 1966).
— BERTALANFFY L. von (1968) : General System Theory : Foundations, Development, Applications, New York : G. Braziller Inc.
— DANILEVSKIJ Nikolaj Jakovlevič (1885) : Darvinizm. Kritičeskoe issledovanie, t. 1-2, Sankt-Peterburg : Komarov.
— DARWIN, Charles (1859) : The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London : John Murray.
— HARRIS Roy; TAYLOR Talbot J. (1991) : Landmarks in Linguistic Thought (the Wester Tradition from Socrates to Saussure), London : Routledge.
— JAKOBSON Roman (1928) : «O hláskoslovném zákonu a teologickém hláskosloví», Časopis pro moderní filologii, 14, p. 183-184 [The Concept of the sound law and the teleological criterion]. - English translation see in SW-I, p. 1-2.
— JAKOBSON Roman (1929a) : Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée à celle des autres langues slaves (= TCLP, 2). - reprinted in SW-I, p. 7-116.
— JAKOBSON Roman (1929b) : «Über die heutigen Voraussetzungen der russischen Slavistk», Slavische Rundschau, 1, p. 629-646.
— JAKOBSON Roman (1931) : «Der russische Frankreich-Mythus», Slavische Rundschau, 3, p. 450-454.
— JAKOBSON Roman (1936) : «Sur la théorie des affinités phonologiques entre les langues», in Actes du Quatrième congrès international de lin guistes tenu à Copenhague du 27 août au 1er septembre 1936, p. 45-58, Copenhague : Munksgaad, 1938. - The rev. version from 1949 («Sur la théorie des affinités phonologiques entre les langues» in N.S. Troubetzkoy : Principes de phonologie, Paris, p. 351-365) see in SW-I, p. 234-246.  
— JAKOBSON Roman (1971) : Selected Writings, vol.1, The Hague - Paris : Mouton.
— LESKIEN, August (1876) : Die declination im slavisch-litauischen und germanische, Leipzig.
— MATEJKA Ladislav (1978) : «Preface», in Sound, Sign and Meaning. Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Ann Arbor : Michigan Slavic Circle.
— MORIN Edgar (1990) : Introduction à la pensée complexe, Paris : ESF.
— RADL Emanuel (1930) : The History of Biological Theories, Oxford : Oxford University Press.
— SERIOT, Patrick (1996) : «Troubetzkoy, linguiste ou historiographe des totalités organiques?», in : N.S. Troubezkoy, l'Europe et l'humanité, ed. P. Sériot, p. 5-35, Liège : Mardaga.
— SW-I = Selected Writings of Roman Jakobson, vol. 1. Phonological Studies, 2nd, exp. ed., 1971, The Hague & Paris : Mouton.
— Thèses 1929 = «Thèses présentées au Premier congrès de philologues slaves», TCLP-1, p. 5-29. - Reprinted in A Prague School Reader in Linguistics, ed. by J. Vachek, p. 33-58, Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana Universiy Press.
— TOMAN Jindřich (1981) : «The Ecological Connection : a Note onGeography and the Prague School», Lingua e stile, 16, p. 271-282.
— TRUBETKOY Nikolaj S. (1923) : «Vavilonskaja bašnja i smešenie jazykov», Evrazjskij vremennik, III, p. 107-124, Berlin. - English ranslation («The tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues») see in Trubetzkoy 1991, p. 147-160.
— TRUBETKOY Nikolaj S. (1939) : «Gedanken über das Indogermanenproblem», Acta Linguistica, I, p. 81-89.
— TRUBETKOY Nikolaj S. (1991) : The Legacy of Genghis Khan, ed. by A. Lieberman, Ann Arbor : Michigan Slavic Circle.



Retour à la Bibliographie de la recherche à la Section de langues slaves de l'Université de Lausanne