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The Difficulty of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

José Ortega y Gasset

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To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:

  1. 1. Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.

  2. 2. Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 7 , Issue 28 , December 1959 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © 1959 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. [Diogenes having expressed the desire to publish an unedited text of José Ortega y Gasset, his heirs have sent us the following pages which form the beginning of a rough draft destined to be entitled "Commentary on the Symposium of Plato." It consists of a body of notes which have been prepared not for publication but to accompany the reading of the text of Plato during a university seminar. Although neither finished nor in shape for publication, the first part, which we present here, the only one which is assembled, adds interesting elements to the author's doctrine on linguistics and ontology.]

2. See in my book in preparation, Velázquez, chap. i, "The Resuscitation of Pictures," which will soon appear (collected in the volume Papeles sobre Velázquez y Goya). See also on this theme chaps. xi and xii of El Hombre y la gente.

3. The philosophical concept of "situation" as a constitutive ingredient of human life already appears in Auguste Comte (see, e.g., Discours sur l'esprit positif).

4. Laws 803C.

5. See J. Huizinga, Homo ludens.

6. At various points at the same time, unconnected to each other, a prodigiously micro scopic tendency is now penetrating this level. Such are linguistic geography, the study of language from dialects, patois, argots, languages of professional groups, stylistics, etc.

7. The subject, then, has nothing to do with the problem of the origin of language.

8. Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, discussion of November 22, I922.

9. Note that this optimism—whose meaning and origin we are going to detect in this commentary on the Symposium —is not linguistic only. Because language is a typical func tion of society, it means that the latter is a reality normally perfect, since it satisfies its ne cessities sufficiently. There is, then, an underlying sociological optimism. This ingenuous belief that what exists simply because it exists has to be perfect comes to us from Plato by way of the Scholastic aqueducts. In the words of Meillet, it is taken for granted that a civilized people is capable of expressing its philosophical theories, which is a pious illusion.

10. It is the most substantial difference between the thinking of today and that of a half-century ago, which was still "positivistic." The latter was being set up, suddenly, in the realities (the famous "facts"); present-day sciences, however, especially the physical sciences, in the face of a problem begin by constructing the system of its possibilities and only after ward arrange the facts in that formal quadricle. He who sees the reality of a subject cannot see its shape, because he lacks a background against which its silhouette may stand out— that is, its form. This background is the map of the possibilities (and of course impossibili ties). Real language can only be investigated fundamentally on the basis of possible-im possible language.

11. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, V, 3I9. Quoted in Stenzel, Filosofía del lenguaje (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, I935). For example, imagine a sentence composed only of nouns in which, for example, by the word "race" we had to understand the idea "he ran," together with all the other modes, tenses, numbers, and persons of the verb "to run."

12. Still in New York (Harlem) the Negro preacher who preaches the Palm Sunday sermon, when he says that Jesus mounted upon a young she-ass to enter Jerusalem, places himself astride the pulpit. "In Loango every one moves his tongue in his own fashion or— better, the language comes out of the mouth of each one according to the circumstances and the disposition in which he is. This use of language is—I do not think of a better compari son—as free and natural as the sounds emitted by birds" (Peschnel-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, III, 9I-95). In other terms, the words are not something rigid and fixed once and for all, but the buccal gesture discloses, sketches, and expresses graphically, in the same way as the gesture of the hands (Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés in ferieures [Paris: Alcan, I9I0], pp. I82 and I86). Let it be added to this that many primi tive languages consist not solely of words but also of fixed gestures of direct and formal grammatical signification. They are languages which, therefore, cannot be written, at least in the sense in which the classical languages and ours are written. "The fact that gestures have not been studied does not prevent us from being forced to recognize that certain appar ent obscurities of the written language would not be obscure in the spoken language" (L. Homburger, Les Langues négro-africains [Paris: Payot, I94I], p. 64).

Many years ago I said that if English and Spanish adults are, at least among Occidentals, the men who have the greatest difficulty in learning foreign languages, it is because their feeling of personal dignity is more overdeveloped than that of others, although both for different and in part antagonistic reasons. The bond between these two phenomena, appar ently so far apart, is that, in learning another language, if it is not in childhood, one has to act imitatively, abandon one's own personality, and "play" at being the German or the Frenchman, etc. Imitation, in adults, implies indefectibly a certain amount of histrionism, farce, and clowning, which, of course, is resisted by two peoples so terribly serious as these two, so incapable of transmigrating from their own ethos to the foreign one, finding it so difficult to be anything but themselves. Now this would not be the case if language were only pronunciation—movements technically useful for their end—and not, as happens, effective gesticulation—expressive movements which emanate lyrically from our personality which has been forming itself since infancy in the collective mold of our nation. In a word, the Englishman and the Spaniard are ashamed to speak other languages. It is for this reason that a language is in truth most radically an idio-ma.

13. This is what I should chiefly have to oppose to this opinion of Vendryès: "Whatever may be the variations of intonation and gesture which the same phrase undergoes, the lin guist may disregard them if they do not modify the grammatical structure of the phrase."

Macroscopic grammar, perhaps, might think thus, but present-day grammar, let it not be forgotten, already has, in addition to others less highly developed, a new dimension—stylis— tics—which investigates finer "modifications in the grammatical structure of the phrase" which in many cases originate in intonation and gesture.

14. The clear notion of what are the specific characteristics of language as compared to the other signs or symbols of expression will be found, for the first time, in the eminent book of Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie (Karl Bühler, Teoria del lenguaje [Madrid: Revista de Occidente, I950]). Bühler, however, limits himself to bringing out the "significative" character of verbality, which is, in fact, what constitutes the part of speech sensu stricto that language possesses. In this way he succeeds, marvelously in my judgment, in creating a discipline which rigorously deserves to be called "theory of language" and represents a level of consideration more elevated and abstract not only than a particular grammar but than general linguistics. But automatically it omits the radical reality of langauge or speech which can be contemplated only on an ultimate level, that is, "philosophical." (See on this radical reality of language the author's El Hombre y la gente, chaps. xi and xii.)

15. Nor even this with sufficient purity. Grammar is a theory which, like all theories, was born of a need—more precisely, of a new need originating in the invention of a new technique: writing. This pleasant idea—of representing the heard words with visual signs and of bringing to pass deliberately that a world of visualities should function as a symbol of a world of auditions—has a development with an inspiring history, as every great tech nique always has. In the development and progressive perfecting, a critical point was reached which required a new technical idea, opposed to the initial one, which fortunately tran scends and negates the initial one: the substitution of the alphabet for the ideogram. But this was impossible if the complex sounds which words are were not first analyzed in order to discover in them primary sounds which are repeated in them. Probably this caused the discovery of the idea of "element" which was to be so infinitely fertile in the whole field of the human mind. To the elemental sound was assigned an elemental symbol: the letter—gramma—and, lo, grammar is invented. Having originated during the invention of writing, grammar abandons its primary attention to the heard word and consists more and more, until the nineteenth century, of a consideration of the written word. Not in vain is it called "grammar"—and not logática or epeática, which is what a linguistics would have been which was chiefly concerned with audition and even one which might have resulted from ideographic writing. So much for the origin. In regard to its first organization into a body of doctrine, the principal labor was due to the necessity of studying the Homeric text in a form which facilitated its transmission to educated boys. The text was unintelligible because of its archaism and conventionality.

16. An exceedingly ingenious and interesting attempt to return to the auditive theme is the discipline which, as opposed to phonetics, has been called "phonology," initiated a few years before the war by Prince Trubetzkoy in the school of Prague. It would not be useful to our subject for us to attempt here a brief explanation of the phonological point of view.

17. This idea is beginning to find experimental confirmation. Dr. Oscar Russell and R. A. S. Paget have demonstrated that the larynx and neighboring cavities change their "expression" when "the expressive gesture of the face changes" (see International Con gress of Phonetic Sciences [Amsterdam, I932] and Psychology of Language [Paris: Alcan, I933], p. 99). Elsewhere Sievers has given evidence of a different intonation when the same word is used in the nominative and in the accusative.

18. The "why" of all this, which sounds so like a phrase, is not to be explained here.

19. The question of whether it is the sentence which precedes the word or vice versa brings up innumerable questions which cannot even be touched upon here. What I say above tries to express only something which no one disputes: that the sentence is the central form of language, to which all the rest lead or from which all the rest descend.

20. The phenomenon of ambiguity, or mutiplicity of meanings of words, is a good ex ample from which to realize the necessity for a discipline which may study languages on a level more profound (or more elevated) than the linguistic level. This reveals, as the most natural thing in the world, that this fact is true of all languages. But what would indeed be natural, then, is that linguistics should take another step and should consider the phenomenon as a constitutive character of languge which would be the equivalent of recognizing in language a new consubstantial defect. But in this case it would be obliged to explain this congenital infirmity of language by causes also constitutive, and the least it could do is try to derive it from the change in meaning which happens to words. But, with the phenomenon of change of meaning, linguistics acts in the same manner. It declares the normality of its presence in all languages; but, when it arranges its facts and explains them, it treats them as though they were mere accidents which happen to words, just as an automobile accident could happen to a linguist.

Read, to refer to a masterly work, the chapter (xii) entitled "Wandel der Wortbe deutung" ("Change of Meaning") which Hermann Paul dedicates to the subject in his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, a book truly enchanting, in addition to being magnificent as a work of science.

21. These themes will be discussed during the reading of the Symposium, where more than in any other writing of Plato the fiction of dialogues and the fiction of discourses are united. Among the evils which the domination of the book has brought, let us mention here only the most immediate and material: the diminution of the vocabulary, in spite of the fact that the invention of printing, coinciding with the high tide of humanism, dumped upon the Romance dictionaries its load of Latinisms.

22. Of course it is not a book of Thucydides but the work of Thucydides, the ergon of his life. It is not written in order to write; it is consubstantial with him.

23. Therefore, as in our seventeenth century, the "parts" of Lope de Vega were pub lished and the collections of the "most famous comedies." It would seem that the dramatic work would have its maximum form of existence on the stage, and it would be less urgent than for any other production to give it another form of life in a book. In both cases, how ever, the contrary happened and this fact invites us to reflect upon the phenomenon, be cause it may perhaps put us on the track of what is the true (and problematical) condition of dramatic art.

24. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Plato (I9I9), I, 389.

25. Let us not speak of the Laws which Plato left unfinished and which is two-fifths larger than the Republic.

26. The relative impersonality and dehumanization of the written word, at the same time that it makes the elocution ghostlike, lends it a distance and anonymity, an "objec tivity," which are indispensable for the transmission of, for example, theories.

27. Therefore, the only thing we can do is to construct imaginatively the body of Plato, his carnal appearance, and, if we lack data which permit us to decide what shape he had, we shall be forced to imagine several different ones and to compare the different results which they give when placed behind his writings. Let no one grimace. This simply means using in history the hypothetical method which has permitted the forging of physics.