Chomsky, Noam - Language and Freedom (1970)

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Language and Freedom

(1970)

HEN I WAS INVITED TO SPEAK ON THE TOPIC "LANGUAGE

and freedom," I was puzzled and intrigued. Most of my

professional life has been devoted to the study of language.

There would be no great difficulty in finding a topic to discuss in that

domain. And there is much to say about the problems of freedom and

liberation as they pose themselves to us and to others in the mid-twen-

tieth century.

What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the con-

junction. In what way are language and freedom to be interconnected?

As a preliminary, let me say just a word about the contemporary study

of language, as I see it. There are many aspects of language and language

use that raise intriguing questions, but-in my judgment-only a few

have so far led to productive theoretical work. In particular, our deepest

The Chomsky Reader

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140

insights are in the area of formal grammatical structure. A person who

knows a language has acquired a system of rules and principles--a "gen-

erative grammar," in technical terms--that associates sound and mean-

ing in some specific fashion. There are many reasonably well-founded

and, I think, rather enlightening hypotheses as to the character of such

grammars, for quite a number of languages. Furthermore, there has been

a renewal of interest in "universal grammar," interpreted now as the

theory that tries to specify the general properties of those languages that

can be learned in the normal way by humans. Here, too, significant

progress has been achieved. The subject is of particular importance. It

is appropriate to regard universal grammar as the study of one of the

essential faculties of mind. It is, therefore, extremely interesting to dis-

cover, as I believe we do, that the principles of universal grammar are

rich, abstract, and restrictive, and can be used to construct principled

explanations for a variety of phenomena. At the present stage of our

understanding, if language is to provide a springboard for the investiga-

tion of other problems of human nature, it is these aspects of language

to which we will have to turn our attention, for the simple reason that it

only these aspects that are reasonably well understood. In another

sense, the study of formal properties of language reveals something of

the nature of humans in a negative way: it underscores, with great clarity,

the limits of our understanding of those qualities of mind that are appar-

ently unique to humans and that must enter into their cultural achieve-

ments in an intimate, if still quite obscure, manner.

In searching for a point of departure, one turns naturally to a period

in the history of Western thought when it was possible to believe that "the

thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy has

emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships, and ... has given

to science in all its parts a more powerful reorientation than any earlier

revolution."1

The word "revolution" bears multiple associations in this

passage, for Schelling also proclaims that "man is born to act and not to

speculate"; and when he writes that "the time has come to proclaim to

a nobler humanity the freedom of the spirit, and no longer to have

patience with men's tearful regrets for their lost chains," we hear the

echoes of the libertarian thought and revolutionary acts of the late eigh-

teenth century. Schelling writes that "the beginning and end of all philos-

ophy is--Freedom." These words are invested with meaning and urgency

at a time when people are struggling to cast off their chains, to resist

authority that has lost its claim to legitimacy, to construct more humane

and more democratic social institutions. It is at such a time that the

philosopher may be driven to inquire into the nature of human freedom

and its limits, and perhaps to conclude, with Schelling, that with respect

to the human ego, "its essence is freedom"; and with respect to philoso-

141



Interpreting

the

World

phy, "the highest dignity of Philosophy consists precisely therein, that it

stakes all on human freedom."

We are living, once again, at such a time. A revolutionary ferment is

sweeping the so-called Third World, awakening enormous masses from

torpor and acquiescence in traditional authority. There are those who

feel that the industrial societies as well are ripe for revolutionary

change--and I do not refer only to representatives of the New Left.

The threat of revolutionary change brings forth repression and reac--

tion. Its signs are evident in varying forms, in France, in the Soviet Union,

in the United States--not least, in the city where we are meeting. It is

natural, then, that we should consider, abstractly, the problems of human

freedom, and turn with interest and serious attention to the thinking of

an earlier period when archaic social institutions were subjected to criti-

cal analysis and sustained attack. It is natural and appropriate, so long as

we bear in mind Schelling's admonition that man is born not merely to

speculate but also to act.

One of the earliest and most remarkable of the eighteenth-century

investigations of freedom and servitude is Rousseau's

Discourse on Inequal-

ity

(1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract. In it, he seeks to "set forth

the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of

political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the nature

of man by the light of reason alone." His conclusions were sufficiently

shocking that the judges of the prize competition of the Academy of

Dijon, to whom the work was originally submitted, refused to hear the

manuscript through.

In it, Rousseau challenges the legitimacy of virtu-

ally every social institution, as well as individual control of property and

wealth. These are "usurpations... established only on a precarious and

abusive right ... having been acquired only by force, force could take

them away without [the rich] having grounds for complaint." Not even

property acquired by personal industry is held "upon better titles."

Against such a claim, one might object: "Do you not know that a multi-

tude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess,

and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race

to appropriate for yourself anything from common subsistence that ex-

ceeded your own?" It is contrary to the law of nature that "a handful of

men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks

necessities."

Rousseau argues that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by

the rich to guarantee their plunder. Hypocritically, the rich call upon

their neighbors to "institute regulations of justice and peace to which all

are obliged to conform, which make an exception of no one, and which

compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting

the powerful and the weak to mutual duties"-those laws which, as Ana-

The

Chomsky

der



142

tote France was to say, in their majesty deny to the rich and the poor

equally the right to sleep under the bridge at night. By such arguments,

the poor and weak were seduced: "All ran to meet their chains thinking

they secured their freedom...." Thus society and laws "gave new fetters

to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all

me, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a

clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few

ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work,

servitude and misery." Governments inevitably tend toward arbitrary

power, as "their corruption and extreme limit." This power is "by its

nature illegitimate," and new revolutions must

dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legiti-

mate institution.... The uprising that ends by strangling or de-

throning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed,

the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone

maintained him, force alone overthrows him.

What is interesting, in the present connection, is the path that Rousseau

follows to reach these conclusions "by the light of reason alone," begin-

ning with his ideas about human nature. He wants to see man "as nature

formed him." It is from human nature that the principles of natural right

and the foundations of social existence must be deduced.

This same study of original man, of his true needs, and of the

principles underlying his duties, is also the only good means one

could use to remove those crowds of difficulties which present

themselves concerning the origin of moral inequality, the true

foundation of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its mem-

bers, and a thousand similar questions as important as they are ill

explained.

To determine the nature of man, Rousseau proceeds to compare man

and animal. Man is "intelligent, free... the sole animal endowed with

reason." Animals are "devoid of intellect and freedom."

In every animal I see only an ingenious machine to which nature has

given senses in order to revitalize itself and guarantee itself, to a

certain point, from all that tends to destroy or upset it. I perceive

precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference

that nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast,

whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent.

The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act

143

Interpreting the World

of freedom, so that a beast cannot deviate from the rule that is

prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous for it to do so,

and a man deviates from it often to his detriment.... it is not so

much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man

among the animals as it is his being a free agent. Nature commands

every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but

he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all

in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul

is shown. For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the

senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or

rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are found

only purely spiritual acts about which the laws of mechanics explain

nothing.

Thus the essence of human nature is human freedom and the conscious-

ness of this freedom. So Rousseau can say that "the jurists, who have

gravely pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave, have

decided in other terms that a man would not be born a man."

Sophistic politicians and intellectuals search for ways to obscure the

fact that the essential and defining property of man is his freedom: "They

attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude, without thinking that

it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue-their value is felt

only as long as one enjoys them oneself and the taste for them is lost as

soon as one has lost them." In contrast, Rousseau asks rhetorically

"whether, freedom being the most noble of man's faculties, it is not

degrading one's nature, putting oneself on the level of beasts enslaved

by instinct, even offending the author of one's being, to renounce without

reservation the most precious of all his gifts and subject ourselves to

committing all the crimes he forbids us in order to please a ferocious or

insane master"-a question that has been asked, in similar terms, by

many an American draft resister in the last few years, and by many

others who are beginning to recover from the catastrophe of twentieth-

century

Western civilization, which has so tragically confirmed Rous-

seau's judgment:

Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals

which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horri-

ble prejudices which rank the honor of shedding human blood

among the virtues. The most decent men learned to consider it

one of their duties to murder their fellowmen; at length men were

seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing

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LanguageandFreedom(1970)HENIWASINVITEDTOSPEAKONTHETOPIC"LANGUAGEandfreedom,"Iwaspuzzledandintrigued.Mostofmyprofessionallifehasbeendevotedtothestudyoflanguage.Therewouldbenogreatdifficultyinfindingatopictodiscussinthatdomain.Andthereismuchtosayabouttheproblemsoffreedomandliberationastheyposethemselv...

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Chomsky, Noam - Language and Freedom (1970)

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