Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai

NAGLIS KARDELIS Vilnius University Research interests: ancient and medieval philosophy, reflections on classical philosophy in contemporary philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, ancient culture, ancient literature, ancient languages, history of civilizations. LIGHT WINGS OF THE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE WINGS1 WINGS1 For us, Lithuanians, our native language is not a heavy burden, imposed by fate on our shoulders and bending us to the ground like a heavy stone. No—it is light wings that lift us higher than the wings of other languages we learn later in life. The wings of our native language are lighter because we do not have to put them on our arms like airplanes—they are given to us by nature itself and grow from our shoulders, and when we soar high, they do not melt like wax. This is our natural wealth—wings that lift us to the heights of the spirit and carry us toward the most distant horizon of meaning. Unfortunately, we most often forget that we have these wonderful wings of the spirit, and drag our native language across the field of life like a heavy stone. Not only ordinary thinkers, weighed down by the burdens of everyday life, but also scholars of language and writing—those who ought to fly on the wings of language—most often think about language in an excessively mundane and instrumental way, claiming that language is simply a means of communication, since this is supposedly its principal function. How dreary and shallow such a conception of the nature of language is can easily be understood by noting that the word “communication,” derived from the Latin communicatio ‘sharing, intercourse, transmission, conveying’, reveals that communication is merely a formal sharing of something to which we are not mutually bound: it is as though one were sharing something that might be useful, but such things are shared only formally, without the spiritual connection and commitment that we generally do not feel when we merely communicate. Moreover, to recognize or overemphasize only the cognitive, cognitive, function of language would also be to say too little: by limiting the significance of language to the domain of cognition, we 1This article was published in the journal Metai, and excerpts from it were read at the Press Breakfast on May 8, 2017. Acta Linguistica LithuanicaThe editorial board considers it appropriate to publish this text in a linguistics journal as well. Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 11 NAGLIS KARDELIS we would not properly understand the nature of language or appreciate the value of these wings of the spirit for the individual and the nation. When considering language from an ontological perspective and emphasizing the need to become conscious of it, we are no longer speaking merely of communication—interaction based solely on the transmission of pure information—but of communion—true and complete fellowship, a fellowship among people at a level that binds us in our whole being and in the full scope of our spiritual identity. This is the true spiritual communion experienced in the element of the mother tongue, of which the authors of old Lithuanian literature and contemporary Lithuanian poets and prose writers speak in quietly wise words, without elaborate theoretical concepts. But I do not have writers alone in mind—in every Lithuanian’s heart, the understanding of language as a communion in language shared by us all, and as a field of shared meanings that brings us all closer together, is very much alive and very close to the heart. Our venerable philosopher Antanas Maceina noted that every language opens up a unique view of the world, a distinctive angle from which to see it. This idea was first expressed by the German-language philosopher and eminent thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, and later developed by A. Maceina, who initiated the tradition of professional Lithuanian-language philosophy. Through his works devoted to the philosophy of the Lithuanian language, A. Maceina showed how original and profound it is to think about the Lithuanian language from a philosophical perspective, bringing into relief the distinctive angle on the world that the Lithuanian language opens up. But this time I would like to reflect on another matter, no less connected with philosophy: the closeness and distance from reality beyond language that the mother tongue reveals to us, as well as some other particularly painful and pressing problems connected with the fate of the mother tongue. I will begin with the observation that language is at once a natural (native, pertaining to nature) and a cultural organism. The connection between language and nature is clearly apparent whenever we utter the Lithuanian phrase “mother tongue,” so infinitely dear and precious to us all. Innateness is an essential feature of the mother tongue. Especially since language is also the most universal medium for the existence of all cultural meanings. The uniqueness of the mother tongue and, we might say, its distinctive ontological feature, vital to every person’s existence, lies in the fact that the mother tongue, in the experience of its speaker, joins the innate and cultural dimensions—joining them in a way that no non-native language could, one that enters our world solely from pure culture and solely through culture. At the same time, however, it is important to realize that not only everything we traditionally associate with culture, cultural creation, and cultural progress, but also the very things of nature, must be regarded not so much as self-evident givens of existence as tasks—as things that, having received them from nature and possessing them innately, we must continue to cultivate and disseminate through our own personal efforts, 12 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI Lengi lietuvių kalbos sparnai endeavor and dogged hard work, so that the shoots of Lithuanian nature may blossom in our lives into splendid flowers of Lithuanian culture. The natural character of the mother tongue also means that it alone can reveal to us the absolute authenticity of linguistically mediated experience and the naturalness of each of our personal existential stances. The mother tongue, as the universal medium for the birth and existence of all cultural meanings, is uniquely capable of providing us with the ultimate context for interpreting human existence and all reality, a context that can—and need not—be expanded further by any means. By giving us this ultimate context for interpreting all reality and our own being, the mother tongue also gives us, along with the naturalness of our existential stance, a sense of the fullness of being—a feeling that nothing else in the world can bestow. We can regard this unique state of fullness, accompanied by feeling, as an essential feature of fulfilled, authentic being. When reflecting on the ontology of language, we have in mind the philosophical connection between language and being. But we should not understand being as a burden that bends us toward the ground, or as mere physical existence or some banal, vegetative sort of human life. Rather, we should conceive of true being—complete in every respect, fulfilled or leading toward fulfillment—as a way of human existence in the world that opens up a horizon of ultimate meanings: a horizon beyond which there is no need for another, more distant horizon or another, broader context to explain the narrower one. Language—above all, the mother tongue—opens up precisely such a perspective on our being and self-awareness, giving our lives full meaning and realizing the possibilities of our spiritual development up to their ultimate teleological limit. That is why, at the moment of fulfillment, we feel that we no longer need a broader context. We call this feeling the experience of happiness, of fullness. Although, on the one hand, the context of language is the whole world, which we naturally perceive as broader than language and as if encompassing it from the outside, we can nevertheless see, from a somewhat different perspective, that in a certain respect language itself—especially the mother tongue—is the context of the rest of the world. The boundaries of language are sometimes broader than those of the world, and so it can give meaning not only to our existence but to the whole world. The mother tongue is the ultimate boundary of our horizon of meaning. When thinking about the relationship between language and the world, we must take into account the dialectic of nature and culture inherent in language, which reveals that we are able to continue creating the mother tongue, which we have by nature, naturally, through the conscious cultural efforts of our own spirit, and to use it as a powerful weapon with which we defend our own being against senseless invasions. But can the mother tongue really become our weapon? Let us examine this question in a little more detail, recalling our earlier hint that it is precisely the mother Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 13 NAGLIS KARDELIS language gives us the opportunity to come closest to the world and, if necessary, to move farthest away from it; to become its closest friend and, if this becomes unavoidable, to become most alienated from it. Language is capable of bringing us closer to the world when it seems dear to us and we therefore long to approach it as closely as possible. On the other hand, language can distance us from the world by a safe margin when, having appeared in brutal forms, it suddenly becomes unappealing to us. Poetry protects us from the world’s punishments—the shield of the poetic word, which, in moments of trial, welcomes us like a new and cozy home, becoming a new world and a new reality for us. Our native language in particular gives us the opportunity to move at very different distances from the world. For instance, it lets us approach nonverbal reality—the reality of things—more closely than any other language, because when we utter the words of our native language, to which we have grown accustomed since childhood as though they were separate things in the same real world, fully coinciding with the nonverbal things they name, in our thoughts we see not the words spoken, but the things themselves. We could put it more radically: when we utter the words of our native language, we in fact pronounce not the words themselves, but the very things they name. One might say that our native language enables us to speak not in words but in things themselves—for instance, when we say the word “tree,” to which we have grown so accustomed since childhood that we no longer notice the word itself and instinctively identify it with the living thing it names—a tree—we immediately see the tree in our thoughts or imagination, not the word “tree.” When we utter any name in our native language, we immediately see in our imagination the thing that lies beyond it and that it names. The words uttered by our native language open up for us the most authentic understanding of nonhuman reality that is possible for a human being. When speaking any other language—not our native one—the distance between us and nonhuman things, and the entire nonhuman world made up of them, always remains greater. When we utter words in a foreign language, we cannot approach the nonhuman world as closely as we would like. On the other hand, we can think of language as the medium of poetic creation. Just as no poetry is possible without language at all, so truly authentic poetry is impossible without one’s native language. Poets often write not only in their native language but also in various foreign languages; yet the deepest poetic insights and the most profound emotional nuances emerge only when the words of one’s native language are truly spoken. The world of poetry is truly distinctive and unlike any other—Josif Brodskis and Tomas Venclova have perceptively observed more than once that the worlds of language and poetry are absolutely autonomous and even autarkic. Words can create an alternative reality, and this can become a counterweight to the “real” world, which at one moment or another in life, especially when we are struck by severe trials, often proves unappealing, unpleasant, brutal, repellent. If the world offends us, we can withdraw into another, alternative world, one bestowed on us by poetry. 14 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai Thus, whenever an existential need arises for us to withdraw from the world by a safe margin into another, alternative world, we can once again turn to our native language. Poetry written in any other language—not one’s native language—lacks the authenticity characteristic of poetry written in the language bestowed by nature itself, and is therefore no longer capable of creating such a radical and ontologically autonomous alternative to the existing world; consequently, it cannot distance us from the world revealed in brutal forms as much as we would like. It is very important to understand language as a living, constantly growing organism. To better understand the connection between the nature of language and the powers of growth characteristic of it, it is worth noting that the ancient Greeks understood nature not statically or as a thing—as some kind of given that had been arrested in its development and completed once and for all—but as a process: at once both a process of growth and a result of growth, continually renewed in the course of the very process of growth. Let us note that the Greek noun phus ‘nature; the natural world’ is derived from the root phu-, from which the Greek verb phūō ‘to grow’ and its passive form phuomai ‘to be grown; to grow’ are also derived. Incidentally, we recognize this same Indo-European root in the Lithuanian verb būti ‘to be’ and the noun būtis ‘being’—an especially important circumstance that we must bear in mind when considering the ontology of language and the being-related foundations of language. Thus, the wisdom of language itself tells us that the semantics of growth are very important when thinking about the nature of anything—including language. Language is a living organism that spans thousands of years, and every word is a remarkable living fossil, with not merely a history of several millennia but a continuous history of living development stretching back several millennia. Although the Lithuanian language itself did not yet exist when the Indo-European roots arose, they have been perfectly preserved in Lithuanian words—as if conserved by some kind of linguistic paleontology. We must understand the very archaic words of our native language not only as linguistic organisms of nature that have already finished growing, bearing witness to a certain result of thought and its linguistic formulation—much less merely as the rock of a once-hot, fluid linguistic mass, cooled and hardened into solid stone—but also as continuing to grow and being further nurtured by all of us. The words of our native language, still growing and nurtured by us as organisms of a distinctive linguistic nature, compel us by their still-fluttering vitality to defend and protect them. Together they rise before us as one living linguistic body—as an insistent call to continue expanding our native language, for it is neither dead nor completed once and for all by our ancestors: it continues to grow and develop, spreading like a mighty oak of the Lithuanian spirit. Language is characterized by a complex dialectic of stasis and dynamism. If we view language from the perspective of its system, as a synchronically fixed cross-section, we are of course compelled to understand it as static; however, we must not forget that such Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 15 NAGLIS KARDELIS A mental fixation of language development, which compels us to look not at the living trunk of the growing oak of language but at one or another cross-section of its felled trunk (of course, felled not in reality, but in the mind of the language theorist), recording just one synchronic slice of the language system, is essentially a purely instrumental act that facilitates the theoretical understanding of real language processes but in itself has little to do with the reality of language itself. Language, viewed as a static synchronic system, is more an abstract theoretical idealization than something that actually exists in reality, because, as we have already mentioned, language is by its very nature dynamic rather than static. Moreover, language, especially one’s mother tongue, must be considered not only from the standpoint of language as an object of theoretical analysis, but also from the standpoint of the subject of language. On the one hand, language grows as if of its own accord—in a certain sense, it is not we who cultivate language, but language that cultivates us, and it is not so much that we speak through language as that it speaks through us (paradoxical as that may sound). On the other hand, looking at it somewhat differently, we must acknowledge that, in a certain sense, each of us is a creator and cultivator of our mother tongue, with no right to shirk this difficult yet highly noble task. Thus, although language grows as if by itself, it nevertheless has a cultivator—not any one individual, but all nations as a collective subject of language cultivation—though this does not negate the conclusion that each of us can and must contribute to the work of cultivating our mother tongue: after all, in the end, we are all, as individually responsible persons, cultivators of our own mother tongue. We are responsible for words whose roots are at least six or seven thousand years old—only an approximate estimate of their age, since Indo-European studies can reconstruct a time horizon of roughly this length. For example, when we look up at the starry sky, we see light that left its star several thousand years ago, if the distance to that star is several thousand light-years. We marvel at enormous trees thriving in ancient lands—sequoias, cryptomerias, and bristlecone pines—that are already several thousand years old, and can scarcely believe that, despite their incredible age, they are still alive and still growing. Yet we find it hard to grasp, or simply fail to notice in our short-sightedness, that Lithuanian words are just as old and just as alive—and that they are the spiritual heritage of us all, which now we ourselves must cultivate for the future, for generations to come. And it is precisely they—the millennia-old words of our mother tongue—that give us the vital breath of nature with which our distant ancestors, too, breathed. The words of our mother tongue are indispensable; they give us the ultimate horizon of meaning, one that needs no wider horizon, and the broadest context for interpreting reality, one that needs no still broader context to explain it. Language sets the boundaries of our authentic being and defines the contours of our being’s identity. Being the property of the entire linguistic community, 16 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai it is also, at the same time, each of our greatest personal treasures. This dialectic between the communal and the personal that is characteristic of language is also very important: language not only expresses abstract thoughts that can be clearly grasped by the mind and accurately conveyed—communicated—to other members of the linguistic community, and not only uses concrete words to refer to familiar physical referents that can be experienced through the senses, but also expresses the subtlest shades of feeling, which we are no longer able to convey to one another in any other—non-linguistic—way. Of course, we are not capable of directly feeling another person’s feelings (or, to put it more precisely, though not entirely correctly, of feeling another person’s feelings without mediation feel)—we can only observe from the outside as they feel them, while another person’s own feeling remains inaccessible to us as a direct experience. Nevertheless, when a person speaks through language, especially their mother tongue, they communicate those feelings to us—and not merely communicate them, but, we might say, share them with us through a mysterious communion of feelings, conveying at least in part their own painful and joyful experience of the lack and fullness of meaning. Thus, language is not only a means of understanding one another (ordinary informational communication), but also of sharing in one another’s feelings, a means, we might say, of emotional fellowship, a communion of feelings. This is an immensely important function of language, and in this respect language is a unique phenomenon in all of reality: the paradoxical uniqueness of the mother tongue stems from the fact that, while being communal—the property and shared treasure of the entire linguistic community—it is also the most precious personal treasure of each of us. I do not think I would be mistaken in saying that the Lithuanian language is both the greatest shared treasure of the entire Lithuanian nation and the greatest personal treasure of every individual Lithuanian. In the realm of the spirit, the possibilities of language are infinite. Every language contains a multitude of words; these words have many meanings and an endless array of even subtler shades of meaning, which in turn can be understood very differently by different people speaking the same mother tongue, and all the more so by members of communities using other languages, who try to speak foreign languages and understand their own being. Various cultural connections and semantic associations establish an extraordinarily diverse world of language; in all its diversity, it can convey the contours of our soul superbly, expressing our deepest essence and authentic identity. At the same time, this world of language enables us to communicate our thoughts and feelings to other people—or even to share with them a common meaning and the fullness of being experienced together, of meaningful being together: when we speak through language, especially our mother tongue, we become participants in a mysterious fellowship in meaning and the fullness of fellowship—in a communion of meaning and a communion of fullness. When reflecting on the philosophy of language, we must not assume that such theoretical questions should concern only philosophers and linguists. No—philosophical reflections on the nature of the mother tongue and its continued growth should matter to the entire linguistic community, to all members of the nation, and especially to politicians, an Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 17 NAGLIS KARDELIS on whose shoulders rests the very heavy burden of responsibility for the nation’s future, the future of its language, and the future of literature created in the mother tongue. Ultimately, it is also the burden of responsibility not only for the well-being of individual people, but also for establishing and preserving the guiding principles of the entire nation’s existential meaning. Constantly hearing that Lithuanian is the language of serfs, the language of peasants, or that it has no terms capable of expressing complex scientific concepts; continually being forced to listen to instructions telling humanities scholars to write scientific texts in foreign languages ritmus – to create, or, as bureaucrats would say, gaminti (as if in some scientific-language factory) the so-called prestižine moksline produkcija intended for publication in prestižiniuose journals published abroad, we Lithuanian humanities scholars have no right to remain silent, because this is—let us have the courage to admit it—a treacherous and even criminal stance toward the nation on the part of science bureaucrats, who should not be granted the right to educate and teach scholars in the first place. Speaking of this, it is worth recalling that the nature and intrinsic essence of the humanities are bound up with prasmėmis—their birth, understanding, interpretation, and sharing. And this is the fundamental distinction separating the humanities from the natural sciences, which, on the basis of empirical facts, make our existence on this earth physically possible; the humanities, by contrast, ought to ensure that our existence is not only physically possible, but also meaningful. Thus the humanities speak of entirely different things: the discovery and establishment of the horizon of the meaning of being, its preservation, and the conditions that make such discovery and preservation possible. The humanities deal in meanings, not bare facts. Admittedly, we often encounter facts in the humanities too, but they never become—or at least should never become—ends in themselves, <u>i</u>; they matter only insofar as they contribute to the search for meaning. The status of a bare empirical fact in the humanities is entirely different from its status in the natural sciences, which seek to determine the exact values of constants, the specific parameters of the states of physical, chemical, and other substances, and, more generally, a great many diverse empirical facts that are particularly important for developing technologies; and technologies, as we all know very well, provide tangible praktinę naudą. In the humanities, facts are of only secondary importance—they offer no praktinės naudos, cannot be used to develop technologies, and, taken by themselves, before any attempt is made to interpret them, say nothing about meaning. Yet meaning is precisely what matters—or ought to matter—to the humanities. For it is not so important when a particular writer was born and died, or when they wrote one work or another—the essential thing is the meanings that unfold in an author’s writing. At certain moments in our lives, for various personal reasons, any of us may unexpectedly discover these meanings as existentially vital, and they may continue to echo in the soul decades after we have read the work. Nor can these meanings be produced in any other way—only in the mother tongue. When writing 18 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai not only literary works themselves, but also scholarly works about literary works created in the mother tongue, it is no longer possible, in languages other than the mother tongue, to convey adequately—without losing essential shades of meaning and significance—the scholarly insights that seek to reconstruct the horizon of meaning of the texts being analyzed. No foreign language makes it possible to write a truly good scholarly text either about literature created in the mother tongue or about an authentic philosophy that springs from one’s very being—still less to think philosophically in an original way. Returning to the idea of language, it is worth recalling the dialectic of nature and culture and the hypothesis that linguistic abilities are innate: according to this hypothesis, every newborn seemingly “picks up” their parents’ mother tongue of their own accord and “installs” it within themselves. Here we see an obvious connection between nature and culture: what was given to us from the very beginning not culturally but, as it were, biologically—one might say, bestowed by human biological nature itself—must later, in the phase of conscious life, be completed through active cultural efforts, through vigorous cultivation of culture. I mean the mother tongue as a prigimtine endowment, which, sooner or later, once we become conscious human beings, must become a kultūrine task. Therefore, a very important task for all of us in the humanities—I would say, our direct responsibility and even a matter of our self-respect—is to explain to politicians and science bureaucrats that writing scholarly works in the humanities is different from writing texts in the natural sciences. Facts in the natural sciences are not only considerably more important than they are in the humanities; above all, they are impersonal and in no way mark a particular place where a nation lives, with respect to national identity and the fields of meaning associated with it. They are therefore kosmopolitiškai universalūs. By contrast, for the cultural meanings interpreted by humanists—even those that are universal (“cosmopolitan”) in significance—the vieta where they are established is always important, and in this respect all meanings are inevitably lokalios. All cultural meanings, even those that later become universal in significance, come into being and initially exist precisely as lokalios meanings, established at a particular time by specific cultural communities living in specific geographical places. Only the mother tongue is sufficiently attuned to the cultural rootedness of established meanings, capable of conveying what we might call a distinctive “wisdom of place.” Once we understand this, it becomes clear that writing a good work on physics, chemistry, or molecular biology is an entirely different task—different in kind, nature, and cultural purpose—from writing a good scholarly text about any subject in the humanities. This conclusion seems obvious simply in view of the fact that some of the more subtle insights of a humanities scholar into meaning—especially those connected with the very place where they are established and conveying “wisdom of place”—can in no way, and never, be adequately conveyed in any foreign language. Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 19 NAGLIS KARDELIS When national science bureaucrats and politicians finally understand the essential difference between the humanities and the natural sciences, perhaps the brutal practice of driving the Lithuanian language out of almost all fields of scholarship will come to an end, a practice that pushes Lithuania’s humanities scholars to the margins of an artificially created spiritual or virtual exile. Blindly pursuing internationalization, brutally imposed without any more organic strategic foresight as to how one scientific program or another should be carried out, risks leading to tragic consequences for national culture. Meaning is lost, and scholars, when writing texts in other languages, do not offer them to their own people. And how, say, will our descendants assess our contribution to Lithuanian culture in a hundred or two hundred years? For example, we can now look with pride at sixteenth-century Lithuanian literature, which seems very impressive compared with the written works produced in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. We can admire the authors who created this literature and hold them up as examples. But what will our descendants say about us when they see the many scholarly humanities texts written in foreign languages, as was fashionable at the time, but formulated in rather primitive language, as if uninspired and with clearly visible rot or even tears in the fabric of meaning? Thinking of us, they will surely ask: where are their (in other words, our) Lithuanian texts? Where is their contribution to world culture? It is far from being as some once told me—that the national language opens up only certain formal matters, insignificant in terms of content. In those days, it was constantly and insistently repeated: international culture is international in content and national in form. But this is certainly not so: every language opens up horizons of meaning that no other language is capable of opening up. Each language is like a path that allows one to climb the mountain of meaning. This mountain has many peaks, and each can be reached only by climbing the one and only path of some particular language. One such path, leading to a peak of the mountain of meaning seemingly intended for it alone, is precisely the path of the Lithuanian language—to reach that peak, one can ascend only along the path of this one language. It can also be put somewhat differently: there are certain scholarly, philosophical, and even the simplest everyday contents that cannot be thought or expressed in any way other than in Lithuanian. And indeed, by climbing the one and only path of the Lithuanian language, it is possible to discover and reveal to others distinctive philosophical insights that truly cannot be found by approaching that mountain of meaning along the paths of other languages. Our native Lithuanian language allows us to see horizons of meaning that we would be unable to see through the eyes of other languages. Therefore, we all bear a very great responsibility for our mother tongue—not only teachers, who have always stood out as examples of awareness for other humanities scholars, but also the entire academic community. And, of course, language policymakers: after all, we are speaking not simply about the successes or 20 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai failures of our state’s history—we are speaking about the survival of our nation, the continuity of our nation’s life. To speak Lithuanian as one’s mother tongue, and to nurture and cherish it in every way, is a great honor and, at the same time, a very great obligation. As we nurture, cherish, and protect our mother tongue, let us always remember that we do not do so in vain: the ontological purpose of the Lithuanian language is to be a profound source of being and of life’s vitality for the soul of each of us. If we preserve the Lithuanian language, the Lithuanian nation itself will endure. The wings of the mother tongue, growing from our shoulders in accordance with the laws of birth and nature, are light—and they lift our spirit to the very heights of the spirit. So whenever it seems that the responsibility for preserving our mother tongue weighs on our shoulders like an unbearably heavy burden, let us remember the lightness of the wings of the Lithuanian language, lifting us to the heights. Submitted on June 12, 2017. N A G L I S K A R D E L I S Filosofijos istorijos ir logikos katedra Vilniaus universitetas Universiteto g. 9/1, LT-01513 Vilnius, Lietuva [email protected] Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 21