Calling this a “good time” for anything might appear facetious. But the old saw about the “ill wind” has often been more relevant than would be expected. Perhaps GA’s hypothesis remains all but invisible, but that only means that its likely long-term effects will remain invisible to all but those able to detach themselves from the clichés of the moment. That people are arguing over the rights of trans-men to compete in women’s sports may simply be said to reflect a high level of confusion over basic issues that should “normally” be settled, but whose opening up to question reflects less a new problem to be solved than a new need to affirm one’s resentment of what had been normal reality.
That in 1981 I proposed a preliminary version of GA’s basic thesis in a less than minimal context, making my book unlikely to be read in its entirety by those who might have found its basic thesis of interest, is one of those “ironies of history” that can be appreciated only après coup. The distinction I attempted to draw between a formal and an institutional theory of representation was meant to forestall criticism from followers of Girard who understood the beginnings of humanity to emerge from a meurtre émissaire, the killing of a “scapegoat” arbitrarily chosen from the group as concentrating the aggressivity of the surrounding community to which his death and sparagmos would bring peace, following which, presumably, the possibility of scenic communication as it exists within all human communities would emerge. But continued reflection on the moment of emergence of the sign as preliminary to that of mature language’s basic syntactic forms has made clear that what had appeared to me at the time a significant categorical distinction was in fact without interest. What was essential was to define the minimal requirements for the emergence of a sign that was consciously, or we might say, conscientiously produced, in the sense that the substitution of the sign for the original gesture of appropriation was of necessity an act of conscience, the deliberate renouncement of a “natural” gesture under the influence of a will in the service of the community, the original manifestation of the sacred.
This might be said to be the last question on peoples’ minds in our time of emergent conflict that has brought the world arguably to its most troubled state since the end of WWII. But without seeking historical parallels, it seems to me that it is precisely at such times that radically new ideas, precisely because they go all but unnoticed, are most “naturally” generated. The traditional rules of academic judgment having been suspended in all but the most strictly empirical fields, there is no longer any pressure to adhere to the clichés of the moment, which have become infested with popular resentments that seek power rather than understanding.
Although the focus of The Origin of Language was the emergence of the syntactic structures of fundamental utterance-forms, from the elementary ostensive to the declarative sentence, from which emerges a notion of truth-value, in retrospect, the most important element introduced into what would become human culture was not the sign itself and its future evolution, but rather the scene of representation on which it appeared, or rather which the sign simultaneously evoked. In pointing to the producer(s) of the first sign, one would do the same for the scene on which the sign brought together the participants of this first “conversation.”
The scene is the implicit backdrop of all cultural communication. This means, as is still not generally recognized, that not only do animals not have signs in the semiotic sense, but above all, they do not have scenes. I have made this point many times, and note that in most cases this appears as a new idea for my audience, although it is just as obvious that the scene of communication/representation is a purely human configuration as that the sign itself is a purely human creation. The newness of this idea, however obvious in retrospect, is brought home by an example I have previously cited: Frisch’s famous bee-dance that informs other bees of the hive of the position of new sources of pollen is not communicated by the returning bee, as we tend to imagine it, in the center of a circle surrounded by an audience as in a theater, but through its physically transmitting a chemical signal to each of the several bees who needs to know the location of these sources.
It is curious in a different sense that Jean-Paul Sartre, the Western philosopher who can be said to have theorized the notion of the scene in his magnum opus L’Etre et le néant (1943), never thought to associate it with language, although he insisted on limiting it to the human. Indeed, the most striking revelation of the parallel discovered between Sartre’s néant and the “nothingness” referred to by Nishida and other Japanese-Buddhist philosophers is that in neither case was any connection made between the notion of “empty space” as constitutive of a “realm of freedom” and the scene of language, although a minimum of reflection makes obvious the relation between Sartre’s description of the pour-soi as the human mind characterized by this space and the nature of the scene on which humans exchange signs, whether visual or vocal. Why indeed would Sartre insist that the pour-soi applied only to humanity? Here we observe the limitations of metaphysics at the historical moment when it is about to be transcended; for Existentialism is at its root a critique of metaphysics, of the notion of Ideas as receptacles of truth.
But it is useless to seek to explain the defects in Sartre’s (or Nishida’s) notion of nothingness once we understand the fundamental source of this concept in the minimal ontology of the originary hypothesis. Nor is what is lacking simply the word/idea “scene.” The reason why Sartre never saw the relationship between human language and the pour-soi is that this term was translated from Hegel without seeking to penetrate beneath its quasi-logical terminology, which remains confined to the mind of the isolated individual. The for in the for-itself implies a whole different ontology from the “in” in the in-itself (en-soi); in the latter there is indeed no “self” at all, merely the potential referent of an “idea,” or more simply, a sign. The self with for attached is truly a self simply by that very fact, so that the soi/itself/sich is wholly different in the two cases, but no thought is given to its dependence on the protohuman community from which it emerges. It is here that metaphysics prolonged itself for another generation in the language of Existenzphilosophie.
Is this dependence an “exciting” idea? For the reader who takes it seriously it marks the birth of what I have called “a new way of thinking.” But the reader must first accept that no “authority” was needed to make this claim, only its reasonableness with respect to the facts of the human situation—the human scene. To situate this scene in the first place in the individual mind is a metaphysical gesture that even the following generation, that of Derrida, was unable to transcend. It is only once one understands the human as defined by the scene on which its representations are shared that a rational ontology of the human can be constructed, one which also allows for the sense of the sacred or conscience that accompanies the deferral of the act of possession, and makes it, or rather, allows it to become, a sign.
Only once this is accepted can we seek to explain why this self-evidence was so long deliberately ignored. Why even the theorizers of “joint shared attention” who pointed out that pointing in the human sense is not done by chimpanzees et al, why Derrida who spoke of différance as allowing for the differentiation of signs never realized that the first difference/deferral is not between sign a and sign b, but between the sign and the appropriative gesture that it forecloses.
Why were these questions not asked? The rule in philosophical discussions is to focus on logical consistency, while judging assertions in their own terms. It would not be proper, for example, to make the point I made above that Sartre’s néant is only understandable in anthropological terms as in the first place a space of communication where objects are represented rather than accessed directly. The real-world basis of the pour-soi “at a distance” from “its” object is the separation of the user of language from the object/being to which he refers, rather than, as with all prehuman animals, seeks to possess or to flee or even to observe. Sartre rightly intuits that an animal’s observation still belongs to the en-soi, the world without “free space,” because it is not a scene of representation, a mental “space” in which the object is not simply observed but contemplated as belonging to a human, and in principle communal, context.
To say such things today is not simply to criticize Sartre as would another philosopher; it is to impose on philosophy an anthropological context that its very essence denies, a context in which language is not a given but an invention of the human community in its effort to minimize the conflicts that at a certain point could no longer be resolved by animal reflexive mechanisms, thereby giving rise to the sense of sacred interdiction/conscience that obliged the proto-human to defer his individual attempts at appropriation to allow for the sharing of, e.g., a supply of food, among the members of the community.
None of these originary details were part of philosophical discourse as it first emerged in Greece in an attempt to understand the polis through the analysis of the Ideas that constitute its operative principles. The classical philosophers had no idea of biological evolution and could not have conceived of a historical moment of the origin of language as the origin of our species. The polis was the first self-conscious model of the human community, and the persistent relevance of classical philosophy depends upon the fact that it still remains an approximate model of a self-contained society today. But we cannot expect to find in the works of the philosophers a pre-philosophical understanding of language as the foundation of human society in the absence of an understanding of the emergence of our species from that of non-speaking animals.
Indeed, it is far from accidental that classical Greek philosophy, as opposed to the speculations of the pre-Socratics, begins precisely in the context of the scene of human representation, that is, as a series of dialogues in the agora. This is the real source of philosophy and its “Ideas,” not the “Cave” in which we see their shadows on the walls. Plato/Socrates seeks the origin of the human community via the conversations the agora permits, through which Socrates’ wisdom can presumably extract the “essence” of terms like courage or piety and convey these truths to his fellow Athenians. That he was forced to drink the hemlock creates a prima facie opposition between the world of everyday politics, with its imperfect grasp of the “Ideas” by which the polis should be ruled, and that of the political/philosophical ideal, which Socrates is depicted as embodying.
But this dialectical method is not that of empirical science in that it does not see the human itself as an object of inquiry whose emergence from the prehuman must be defined. Only after Darwin could we begin to reflect on the human in its minimal distinction from the prehuman, and this understanding would necessarily come into conflict with the philosophical tradition that had been based on the existence of “mature” humanity as its point of departure.
Which explains why Sartre could understand the pour-soi, which is so obviously based on the scene of human communication, as a metaphysical construct within the individual’s mind that guarantees his “freedom” independently of the human community. The idea that such a construct must exist in the real world and must therefore itself have an etiological history is altogether outside consideration.
Which tells us a great deal about why the era of metaphysics is coming to an end. Plato-Socrates’ agora was a reasonable empirical point of departure for human reflection on the human mind in the context of the polis; but once abstracted from any notion of a human collectivity, the pour-soi is an artificial construct whose key element, the néant, is a mere abstraction that cannot be situated in a (pre-) history of the human scene, as it must in order to figure in a generative anthropology.
What this analysis implies is the necessity for a wholesale rereading of the Western philosophical tradition in the light of the originary hypothesis. Not that rival hypotheses need be excluded; but what is essential is that any such hypotheses take into account the real-world emergence of the human from the prehuman world through the discovery of the scene and the sign, or their equivalents.
**This Chronicle was written before the Trump assassination attempt that has left so many questions unanswered. Whatever the future of our troubled civilization, it is reassuring to know that at least these fundamental questions can finally be given reasonable answers.