Speech on the CrossPeter J. Leithart, February 13, 2007 SR = Speech and Reality; OS = The Origin of Speech; PKS = Practical Knowledge of the Soul; CF = Christian Future. GRAMMAR In a chapter of Speech and Reality, he claims that the ancient dogma of grammar is the final bastion of antiquity: "The schools have shelved Euclidean geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy, Galenian medicine, Roman law and Christian dogma," but cling to "ancient grammatical dogma" (SR 98). He complains particularly about the "Alexandrian table of grammar" that every beginning Latin student employs: amo, amas, amat, etc. The problem with this is that "all persons are put through the same drill. They all seem to speak in the same manner." But the implication that "all these sentences can and should be treated as of the same social character" is a "fatal error" (SR 100). It is not true that we can line up first, second, and third persons in a line, as if each were equivalent: "In our modern society, amo and amas are treated as though they too were mere statements of fact as amat" (SR 108). On the contrary, the social consequences of amo and amas are radically different from the social consequences of amat (SR 100). We utter "amat" or "amatur" without any stake in the sentence we utter. These can be uttered only by someone on the outside of the relationship of love, only by someone for whom the love spoken of is powerless. Third-person discussion of love, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is "no small achievement" as it "neutralizes the power of love." If we speak of God in the third person, we attempt something similar with Him: "God in prayer, God in the ten commandments – is the living God. God as the object of theology is powerless, a mere third person" (SR 101). Rosenstock-Huessy wants especially to emphasize that the negation of the third person is a double-negation. It not only abstracts the speaker from his speech, but abstracts the listener as well. An objective statement "is a two-fold negation of relationship" (SR 101). What he means by this that in a third-person utterance, neither the speaker nor listener is involved in the truth or falsity of the statement. Bill and Ted might debate the truth of amat concerning Al, but the outcome of the debate is indifferent to Bill and Ted. Only when we recognize this double negation can we see "the abyss between the objective third person in amat and the two conversing people who exchange their views about him as subject and preject" (SR 102). Amat carries no risk for either the speaking subject or the hearing praeject. We're talking about "him" and "his" love, not our own. Amo, on the contrary, is risky business. Whenever we say amo, we admit that we are involved in the act of which we speak. We cannot say "amo" without a self-commitment, cannot say it in a detached way. At the same time, saying "amo" is a confession, and anyone who speaks that way "runs a risk which he does not run in speaking of somebody else! He runs the risk of destroying the act to which the sentence testifies" (SR 102). A man who says amo risks interference – from a rival, from parents, from the law. A man who acts as he speaks runs the risk of being stopped in his act (SR 103). Not only is amo riskier and radically more self-involving than amat, but it is also an act on the social world. A report that says "amat" doesn't change anything; it simply describes what is already the case. It is conservative. But "the speaker of a sentence in the first person cannot help changing his own social situation simply by divulging any act, thought, feeling, intention of himself" (SR 103). Think of the difference between gossiping about an engagement and asking a girl to marry you. Because of the risks, amo tends to be uttered in the safety of a private space: "To the world, if I am intelligent at all, I shall not say amo but uxor mea est. That is, I shall transform the first person sentence into a third person sentence," since the latter does not invite interference, rivalry, jealousy, wrath (SR 104). The first person expresses the inner secret desires of our heart, and we are often ashamed to bring those desire out in public. To utter the first person, one must break through a natural reluctance to express what is within. To utter a second person sentence, we have to break through the reluctance of a hearer to hear. To speak a sentence in the second person is always to assume an office; there is an implicit hierarchy in saying "you." Even if the you is simply "you have bad breath," it assumes that the speaker has some authority to speak, or it will be greeted with a response ranging between indifference and a punch in the snoot: "Why is advice unasked for never given successfully? Because it has no power to unlock the recipient's ear" (SR 106). To utter a second-person sentence, we have to convert the hearer into a listener" (SR 106). In sum, "the speaker of amo has made up his mind to break his silence about himself although this means running the risk of intervention. The listener of amas has made up his mind to invite interference. The speaker and listener of amat have nothing to readjust in their own political attitude before they listen to this fact. They are neither defying nor inviting interference in their own affairs" (SR 106). All three types of statements are debatable, but in different registers: "whereas amat is debatable as to truth, amas is debatable as to authority, amo is debatable as to wisdom" (SR 107). We can't use the same standards to evaluate the three types of utterances; "truth-value" is the right standard for the third-person, but not for the first or second. From these three persons, Rosenstock-Huessy derives three powers: the power to know, the power of authority, and power to reveal our secrets. The third person faces problems of fact, the second confronts the freedom of the listener, and the first must break through the reticence of the speaker (SR 107). The social sciences are off-kilter, he argues, because of "the false dogmas planted in the grammar school and high school," because the social and political differences of language are flattened out into a table. As soon as students become self-conscious about language, they are being trained in wrong views of human society, and Rosenstock-Huessy argues that "it is simpler to tell the truth from the beginning" by discarding the Alexandrian table of grammar. When we reduce all persons to the third person, we destroy human society: "Human relations thrive where we attribute secrets of communication and loyalties of listening. Human relations die when all our statements only contribute facts" (SR 109). The Alexandrian list teaches children "to believe that I love and you love and we love may be said in a similarly flat voice as he loves or they love." The result is predictable: "our educated classes have come to deny emphasis" (SR 111). Rosenstock-Huessy reinforces this point by introducing a fourth focus of discussion, the plural "we." By uttering "we," we establish unity between speaker and listener, and this is the driving force of history: "All history is the tale of acts in which some speaker and some listener become one." History is only history if it is "the inside story of a We group" (SR 109). In part, Rosenstock-Huessy is arguing that human beings can have a sense of a unified history only through telling history as a series of "we" events. When history is told in the third person, it proliferates: "'They' can be said of any group and nation, big or small. Harlem has a history, the Bronx has a history, Manhattan has a history, it would appear. The subdivisions of a third-person-history crave multiplication" into a multicultural extravaganza (SR 110). Earlier historians didn't write third-person history; Thucydides, Tacitus, Gregory of Tours, and Voltaire each "felt himself a faithful child of history which he tried to rewrite as 'our history'" (SR 110). LANGUAGE AND RELATION As he explains in the "Practical Knowledge of the Soul," the primacy of the Ego is embodied already in Greek grammar, which makes the "I" the "first person." But "all our experience teaches us exactly the opposite of this Greek premise, that the single 'I' is primary." A child develops by "gradually stak[ing] out its borders as an independent entity," by siphoning out the "thousand cares, impressions, and influences which surround, flow around, and beset it." What a child first recognizes is not a world, nor father and mother, but "that it is spoken to": "It is smiled at, entreated, rocked, comforted, punished, given presents, or nourished. It is first a 'you' to a powerful being outside itself – above all to its parents" (PKS 16). Goethe said that a father is always his daughter's first god; Rosenstock-Huessy agrees, adding that "He is so because he is present for his daughter before her own 'I' is, and because he bestows on her the consciousness of herself, by addressing her as 'you'" (PKS 16). Before we can articulate anything about our own existence, we hear "other say that we exist and mean something to them." Thus, "we develop self-consciousness by receiving commands and being judged from outside. In the face of these commands and judgments, we perceive that we are someone special, and being something different or special is the fundamental experience of the 'I'" (PKS 16). We become Egos in response to commands. A child may describe himself in third person, but in response to a command, he is forced to a Yes or No: "These two words are only apparently mere interjections. Actually, they are expressions of the truly divine 'I' personality, the foundations of the omnipotence given us. To say 'yes' and 'no' means to create and resist, to suffer and to create suffering" (PKS 17). The parental command is one imperative that confronts us before we come to say "I." Love is another transforming imperative by which we find ourselves: "Love doesn't dally like a flirt, playing around with small talk. Love transforms. It implores and commands. So the 'you' is virtually discovered for the first time in the imperative which arises from the transformation love creates." Philosophy cannot encompass the second person: As soon as there is an effort at a philosophy of "you," it ceases to be philosophy (PSK 21). Again, "All self-recognition, all of an 'I-s' self-knowledge, is produced by summons, by an individual's definite feeling that a concrete challenge has hit home. His childhood gods want, as do those of his father and mother, or of anyone else. . . . The imperative may erupt from unexpected sources, but it is always the imperative which forces a soul to come forward and which unfolds its powers into the realm of the body as well as that of the spirit" (PKS). In the Origin of Speech, he argues that the modern separation of act and speech dishonors both: "Speech is made a tool of thought. Both are contrasted with action. But no society knows of any social act without a division of labor as Marxians say, or without the Word as the Christians claim. Both are right, the godless and the godly. There is no social action which can be contrasted with speech. All acts are embedded in speech and the movement created by the first imperative 'March into Germany,' carries all the actions of millions of men until it can die in the last platoon's report" (OS 51). In the course of developing this point, Rosenstock-Huessy highlights the physicality of human language. Language is a "physical medium of social intercourse to establish relations," in a way that words are analogous to handshakes (SR 116). Rosenstock-Huessy insists on the physicality of language, and its embeddedness in society: "The relations between people are established by physical and physiological processes. . . . The functioning of the larynx, the mouth, the ear, in functioning for this purpose, cannot be isolated from the social system into which it fits. Without a system of respiration, the function of our lungs cannot be interpreted. Without a system of social relations, our phonetics and our linguistic technique remains meaningless" (SR 116). Shaking hands establishes an intimate physical connection, so much that the Greeks described shaking hands as "being planted into each other's hands." Rosenstock-Huessy wants to say that language, speech and listening, also employs physical means to establish relations (SR 115). Different postures, and different intonations, are suitable to different sorts of speech: "All language exploits large parts of our body, in making us serve as cosmic agents of news. In singing, however, more and deeper parts are set in motion than in parliamentary debate or scientific discussion. The reason probably is that in singing we are carefree, disarmed, and can let go. In rational discussion, we barely move our lips, and, with the rest of our body, we sit tight. In telling a story, the tale of things past, the epic rocking chair tone is that of the man who has spent his real energy in the past of which he is going to tell a story right now." When giving commands, we use "a different intonation" because "it takes years to acquire the voice of command that is without flaw and effort, neither shrieky nor embarrassed but irresistible" (SR 127). How? In various works, Rosenstock-Huessy describes the relational effect of language in different ways. In Speech and Reality, he notes initially that there are four basic forms of relation when two or three are gathered: unanimity, one spirit; split, dubious, strangers; the speaker depends on the listener, because the listener is supposed to act on what the speaker says; or the listener depends on the speaker, because the speaker has acted already (SR 117). Similarly, there are four forms of silence, which means a lack of relation: When there is no audience to address, when there is no one to issue a command, when two persons are strangers, when two people are so close that nothing need be said (SR 118). Situations 1 and 2 await the right time, situations three and four await a proper scene. What does he mean here? The four forms of relation need to be unpacked a bit. The first form of relation is one in which there is already agreement between speaker and listener. They already share one spirit, and don't need to achieve one spirit. This is, to think of the Cross of Reality, the situation of a unanimous "inside" group. The situation of strangers is that of a speaker and listener who are "outside" one another, with no common spirit and no common language. The lines of dependence between speaker and listener can go in either direction; the speaker is at one moment at the top of the hierarchy, and the listener is at the top in another moment. These relations occur along the temporal axis of the cross of reality: The speaker issues a command, and then is dependent on the listener for the command to be fulfilled; and he will remain dependent on the listener until the listener returns with a report that the command is accomplished. In the last of the relations, the listener is dependent on the speaker who has already spoken. Speech forms their relations with one another, and forms their relations in a specific way. The particular kinds of relations are dependent on achievements or failures in speech. Rosenstock-Huessy says that speech forms and nurtures relation because speech transfers some action. If I have experienced something and narrate a story, I am transferring the action of my experience; I might transfer the experience so that my action is reinforced through a song or through an invitation; I might transfer it in a way that eliminates objections, when I say that so-and-so is doing thus-and-such; or, I may transfer the action by commanding someone else to do it, so that I don't have to do it myself (SR 120). These four types of speech thus point to four types of relation: Old and young are in succession, as the old utter sacramental words to be repeated by the young; friends are in agreement, so that their relation is like a soloist and a chorus; strangers are people in disagreement, and depend on question and answer; and leader and led are in a command and response relationship (SR 124). Each of these relations also points to a particular pole of the Cross of Reality. Imperatives are not "placed in the future" but "the future is what needs action." Thus, imperatives are directed toward the future. In the inner circle, we sing together, and "in singing, we are less remote from other minds than in other forms of communication." Outside, everything is at a distance from everything else, and the indicative and language of the eyes dominates. The interrogative mood is for strangers, and for mental strangers, participants in a Platonic dialogue, for instance (SR 124-6). In sum, "Magister and disciple, singer and chorus, leader and respondent are of equal originality in their linguistic situation as the interlocutors of a discussion in the form of question an answer. By isolating the interrogatory mood, the origin of question and answer was inexplicable until today. As soon as we compare the prosaic process of question and answer to its parallels in historical tradition (formula and repetition), in musical unanimity (singer and chorus), in political challenge (imperative and response), question and answer are disclosed as one application of the general principle of social relations to be established through speech, the application to the meeting of two people from different spaces, and therefore of a different standard of objectivity" (SR 126). In the Origins of Speech, Rosenstock-Huessy elaborates this point somewhat differently. Speech, he says, removes the skin that separates human beings and unites together. His specific point has to do with imperatives. An order given by one person initiates a series of actions by those who are under his orders; but the action is not done until it is reported back – not in an imperative but in an indicative. The order-and-report sequence creates "one common time" between the commander and the one obeying the order, a "suppertime" that "neglects the separation of two bodies and their biological times." Speech creates a single time. This is not accurately described as a "common frame of reference" since a "'frame' seems to exist outside our sayings or acts." It is rather a "field of correspondence" that "breaks down the separation of two 'self-contained' bodies; it gets 'under the skin,' and they act as a single will from the moment the order is given to the moment it is reported fulfilled. After this, the field collapses and disappears." The dissolution of "skin barriers" that separate individuals has been symbolized in various ways: Ancient peoples "expressed the experience that they formed one body with one skin. They went together under one hid, or they spoke of the body politic, or they drank each other's blood" (OS 47). NAMES AND WORDS What motivates action is not a "set of words" but a name, a sacred name. Liberalism is paralyzed because it mocks the sacredness of names, but at the same time wants to motivate us to act, and act strenuously, for something. But the only thing that will motivate is a call in the "name" of some hope for the future. At the center of Dewey's error is his confusion of "the consumption of words and the creation of compelling names." In the commercial world, words are "like poker chips," and "so they are consumed just as we eat our daily bread – in the form of descriptions, advertising, propaganda, bills." An advertiser takes up pre-existing names, attaches them to his product, and sells his goods. For the businessman, a name is an arbitrary label that helps him increase sales (CF 8). Dewey and all idealists think that names always function as they do in commerce. But there's a difference between a "Lincoln" car and the "Lincoln" who lends his name to the car. Lincoln became a usable commercial word because in his life Lincoln combined words and deeds: "Names are so sacred because they constitute the unity of the conflict of words and deeds in human life. Hence names are priceless; words have their price. Words can be definite, names must have an infinite appeal. Names must make us act in ways which seemed unbelievable before they were done; words express the things which are to be had at a known price in figures" (CF 8). In a discussion of "speech versus reflection" in The Origin of Speech, Rosenstock-Huessy develops his treatment of names. Names are not labels but rather "promises and commands, invitations to the bearer and to the spirit invoked upon the bearer and to the community calling the bearer by this spirit's power" (OS 34). Names are taboos, protecting a "child against abuse by its parents" as "an amulet and a charm." They are appeals to responsibility. And they are means for offering praise to God (OS 35). A name, like all genuine speech, is always a triune event, involving the public, the speaker, and the inspiration that animates the speaker. To speak, or to name, involves affirming the truth of what is said, being willing to stand up for what is said, and insisting that what is said should be accepted by everyone in the community (OS 34-35). To name is to face the public, to call the one named, and to invoke a spirit that will enable the one bearing the name to fulfill the calling. He summarizes the whole discussion in a few paragraphs in Speech and Reality. Nouns, he says, classify "the stone, the rain, the deer, the tree as beings outside, as objects of which we cannot be sure that they are brother sun and sister moon." But we don't deal with even external reality only as nouns. It's reasonable to have inside names as well as outside names; we give pet names to our spouses that we won't use in public, and nicknames to our children. So also, poets rightly consider sun, moon, stars, trees and tigers are people, but for the nominal-based scientist this is not appropriate. Inside the circle of friendship and love, we employ names, not nouns: "we all have two or three names. One is our name as a friend, inside one community; the other signifies our worldly existence, among a hostile world of demand and supply and the struggle for existence. By another name, or by the weight of a family name, we may trace our historical background, our past, or let it be traced by others. And that certain names given to us in the cradle, also contain a challenge to secure future action by the carrier of the name, is too well known." The notion that names are callings, pointers to a future, is in decline, and the result is that "we see him hide in his ancestors, his race, his country, or his class; and because he ceases to take his name as a challenge, he allows himself to be classified as determined by membership in a group, by exposure to environment, or by racial inheritance" (SR 129). We can make a similar point by noting that proper names have the quality of an imperative, and as imperatives form us as "Is" so do names: "A person's being addressed by his own distinguishing proper name precedes any thinking about himself the 'I' may do." To say "I" is to become an object to oneself, but that doesn't occur until we have first been addressed. A "man who is distinguished by a proper name, unlike the classifiable things of the outside world: trees, tables, stones, or houses," is table to come to consciousness of himself, to resist and say Yes or No. The "I" is a product of this resistance, but it presumes that the man has been addressed by name (PKS 17). SPEECH ON THE CROSS Analyzing this simple example yields two basic principles. First, if speech takes place only by using names and proper terms, then speech is always a participation in an ages-long stream of communication: "We never start all over again when we speak. Because the success of the speech depends on its being 'proper.' Proper language yields more power to his owner than property" (SR 48). The second lesson is that speech is never repetition between two speakers, but always involves both "identity and variation" (SR 49). The speaker may address another in several ways: He may give him direction in an imperative, with the intention of making him act; he may assert something as an objective fact, aiming at agreement; he might express something from within himself. The response, to be a response of speech, must be consistent with the speaker's intentions: It does no good to argue with someone who has merely expressed his internal desires, or to agree factually with an imperative. The speaker sets the terms of the exchange by the mode in which he gives his initial speech (SR 49). Though the responder must respond in kind, his response can never be mere repetition of the initial speech, else "they are a chorus and not interlocutors" (SR 50). Analyses of language often begin with the lonely Ego, but this is quite unrealistic. Rather, "Language means the liberty between two people to modulate in complimentary ways one and the same word or idea or topic or language." Whether strangers are talking about the weather, scholars are debating a point, an attorney is arguing a case in court, the two sides are always "committed to a ballet which they execute together": "No party speech, no theoretical innovation, no scientific discovery, no part of any dialogue in the world make sense if it is not understood as a variation of something the speaker and public have and hold in common, yet as a variation by which the speaker leads into a new future" (SR 50). In this initial discussion, we are already most of the way to the Cross of Reality. From the two features of his exchange with the neighbor boy, Rosenstock-Huessy draws the conclusion that his speech also expressed a desire ("I wished to attract the boy's attention"), and that his call was an "external process." My body causes vibrations on the air, which reach his ear. With these two, we have four dimensions of speech: It uses proper words, expects and answer, expresses a desire, and is an external process. And this places us at the center of the cross of reality: Looking back to earlier uses, looking forward to an answer, expressing a desire from within, and initiating an external process, changing the world outside. Every time we speak, "we assert out being alive because we occupy a center from which the eye looks backward, forward, inward, and outward" (SP 52). This cross works at several levels: It is a cross of persons, of moods, and of principal parts. Though there are variations on this model in various works, the basic themes can be summarized as follows: Past Inside Outside Future Parts adjective pronoun noun verb Moods narrative optative/subjunct indicative imperative Person 1st pl 1st sing third second
Dramatic lyrical epical logical ama amemus amaverunt amor, amare These various moods and persons are also linked to various disciplines and courses of study. The grammatical method lays out a whole scheme of education and thought: Narrative Imperative Lyric Judgment Tradition, truth ethics, goodness aesthetics science
As he says more fully, "by speaking . . . man can evolve the boundaries of inner space in any given moment so that they become more and more inclusive. One rose is always a rose. But man is a member of a family, of a town, of a kingdom, of a race, of a civilization, or a church, of a human kind, as far as he cares to create the language that is appropriate in these communities of different size and destination" (SR 54). Speaking thus integrates inside and outside by articulating the boundary between them, and by extending and contracting the boundaries. Speech integrates past and future, as the command "come" yields to the past tense "he has come" (SR 55). Speech integrates the different poles of the Cross of Reality, integrating all the dimensions in every act of speech: "To speak means to be a leader (come), a scientific observer (he is coming), a historian or chronicler (He has come) and a poet (may he come), in the nutshell." This enables us to "recognize all events in time and space as coherent" (SR 55). Broadening the point, he notes that language always contains "scientific, political, historical (or institutional), and poetic elements." Men specialize in one or the other mode of speech, but in our specialized area (science, politics, history, poetry). To speak is to attempt to integrate all these demands, all language assumes the "unity of all these four types of language" (SR 56). None of these modes of language can flourish without the others, and when one or another gains the primacy there are both social and personal problems. Scientists and philosophers have expended a good bit of effort in an attempt to reduce all speech to scientific and philosophical terms. Normal language is "imperfect" in their view, because it's full of statements that can't easily be forced into the mold of indicative factual assertions. So, philosophers and scientists abandon normal speech in favor of mathematics or symbolic logic (SR 58). This "secondary language" of critical reflection is useful because it offers the possibility of "re-thinking of the things said before." But when one is a professional "second-thinker," he's liable to "superimpose this, his own aim, upon everybody who handles language and condemn all first and primary language as being a misfit." Thus, scientific and logical language filter out into everyday speech, and language as a whole becomes more analytical (SR 59). This is socially dangerous, as is any effort to impose one pole of the cross of reality on all speech: "A merely scientific, or a purely educational society or a ritualistic society or a poetical society – everyone of them would cease to live" (SR 61). Rosenstock-Huessy, of course, says that the scientific and logical and analytical speech is legitimate, but that it operates at only one pole of the Cross of Reality, dealing with the external world. Moreover, science and philosophy are never simply "externally" oriented anyway. We don't live by "reflection or by formula, alone," but instead find that our language is full of "suggestive invitation," the imperative "Come" that Rosenstock-Huessy places under the heading of "politics" and "education," speech oriented to the future. However analytical they attempt to be, "the pure scientist cannot help using suggestive invitations." Scientists are politicians too, since "there is no science without the political and educational act. For the scientific thought is trying to make its way into the world, and that means changing the world, changing society by getting a hearing, being given a chance, getting an endowment, getting students, becoming a textbook, and taking possession of the brains of unsophisticated young people. The 'actus purus' of science makes no sense without the 'actus impurus' of publication" (SR 61). Politics, in turn, is inherently poetic. Politics and education, oriented to the future, must be refreshed by the influx of inner speech and desire from writers and prophets, scientists and politicians. A political program originates as a poetical dream: "Politics without poetics are a failure" (SR 61). In short, "The life of mankind does depend on the integrity of all its members to shift between the four ways of speech freely. The liberty of man is to be found in his right to sing, to think, to invite or lead and to celebrate or remember. These four acts cover the four aspects of reality. By these four acts, the artist, the philosopher, the leader and the priest, within every human being, is regenerated daily. Whenever we use articulated speech we are artists, philosophers, leaders and priests of the universe." We cannot speak at all without using metaphor (poetry/inner), pronouncing a judgment (science/outer), memorializing (ceremonial/past), and selecting and seeking to govern the course of events (politics/future). Normal human beings can't fulfill all these demands fully all at once, and thus we move from one pole to another, in a constant dance, in constant tension, seeking to integrate our diverse demands by speech (SR 62). Speech attempts "to integrate one and the same cross of reality into every human heart and brain" (SR 64). When we speak, we declare our faith in the "essential unity of past experience, future destiny, inside feeling, and external sensations." The same language is modulated to "express emotions, register impressions, record historical facts, and meet future challenges." A single language covers all "four states of mind." But no individual (except Jesus) can do it all on his own. Instead, "it takes the common adventure of all mankind, and the constant translations of one type of language into all other types to save us from madness, indifference, hatred, and forgetfulness. These four deficiencies of all of us often block us. We have to overcome these obstacles to reach the level of speech. When we speak, despite our forgetfulness, our indifference, our stupidity, our fear and hatred, we fight for the unity of all future destiny, all past history, all human poetry, all scientific observations" (SR 64). In The Origin of Speech, Rosenstock-Huessy expresses how speech integrates the poles of the Cross of Reality in a complementary way. We've noted already how he describes speech as a means of dissolving the boundaries of skin that divide persons from one another, that divide the "inside" of the person from the "outside." At a sociological level, speech overcomes the inside-outside divide by aiming for communication, communion, a common language across the boundary that divides group from group. This is why Rosenstock-Huessy says that anyone who speaks "believes in the unity of mankind" and in the Holy Spirit who unites mankind (SR 184). When we speak convinced of the truth and importance of our utterance, we hope that not only our group but all mankind will hear, understand, and embrace what we have to say. But speech not only dissolves the internal/external boundary, and integrates the spatial axis of the Cross of Reality, but also creates a "cup of time" between past and future, integrating the temporal axis of the Cross of Reality. Imperatives, he argues, command the listener, but also "lights up an alley of time into the future." Alternatively, he says that the imperative forms time into a "cup, still empty but formed for the special purpose of being filled with the content demanded by the order" (OS 46). This order remains in force, and the time ordered by the order remains in force, until the listener responds with the indicative report that the order has been fulfilled: "the logic of speech demands that the two sentences 'march into Germany' and 'we have marched into Germany' are understood as two pieces which do not make sense apart from one another!" (OS 48). This poses a challenge to "all grammar, all linguistics, all formal logic," which have assumed that "sentences are the independent elements of speech." On the contrary, sentences are "interlocking" and mutually dependent: "Imperative and narrative are two aspects of one speech. Both have to be said before either makes sense or creates an epoch" (OS 48). "March" and "we have marched" are not "two different tools such as a hammer and a wrench I may have in my tool chest," but "correspond to each other as aspects of one process which forms a cup of time until it is fulfilled" (OS 48). Commands and reports thus integrate past and future: Commands are now, but lay out a path into the future; reports are now, but describe how orders have been fulfilled. Speech forms epochs, and speech closes epoch; we integrate time and future by speech, by imperatives and indicatives. Speakers and listeners are united in speech. An imperative may order time for centuries ("Let there be science" or "Let us not mix religion and politics" or "Let us vote for our leaders"), and those who obey and report their obedience may live centuries after the command was issued. And speech places the speaker and listener in time, places them as speakers and listeners in a drama in which they change places over time: "One speaks in advance, the other speaks afterwards. He who speaks first listens afterwards; he who speaks afterwards listens first" (OS 49). This again is radically at odds with the way language is normal analyzed. Speakers and listeners change place over time. The mood of their speeches changes from imperative to indicative. Finally, perhaps most importantly, "sentences are the beginnings and endings of actual changes in the physical world. They are not 'mental' or 'intellectual.' They are not thoughts communicated. They remove a barrier which physically divides two people, fuses them despite their bodily separation, and then closes this barrier again. The speeches are as much cosmic processes as the breaking of the twig. They proceed in the outer world as sound waves between mouth and ears." (OS 49). This leads us into the last big theme of the term – Rosenstock-Huessy's discussion of time, which we'll take up next week. CONCLUSION |
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