At the end of his treatise on the sublime and the beautiful,
Edmund Burke gives us a short essay on language, on the power of words. And what
he's particularly interested in here is the question of how words can have such
a powerful effect on us, even though they lack substance. If you think, for instance,
of something you see in nature -- so imagine that you are looking at the
mountains, right (there's some mountains), well, the simple sight of these things
can give you a sublime experience. You can stand in awe of this. You see there
that the senses are directly impacted by nature. But words words are insubstantial.
They don't have that kind of reality, and yet they affect the ear, they affect the
mind, in very physical and emotional ways. That's Burke's primary concern at the
end of this essay, where he tries to figure out, well, how does this work then?
Because it doesn't quite seem to fit with his Lockean view. So remember
that he's very influenced by John Locke, and Locke had given us an empiricist
account, where our understanding of the world comes through our senses. Burke then
tries to kind of make sense of this, and he suggests that first of all we can
talk about three different kinds of words. The first kind of word he
describes is what he calls an aggregate word. Okay, so an aggregate word. And an
aggregate word is something that's actually made up of smaller things. He
gives the example of a tree. So if we if we draw a tree here -- okay, there's the
trunk, and a branch. I'll give it some leaves here. There we go: there's
our tree. Burke would say, well, if you look at this tree, it actually consists
of many different things. There are leaves,
there's the color green, there's a branch, and a trunk, and so on and so forth. So
that's what we call then an aggregate word. Other examples would be things
like "horse" and "man" and so on. The idea is that this is made up of lots of
smaller units. These smaller words then can be called simple words -- so simple
words -- and that would be things like, for instance, the color green, which is really
just one kind of feature here. They can be shapes: round, square, that kind of
thing. So, lots of different simple words as well. And then the last type of word
that Burke talks about is what he calls a compound abstract word. By the
way, all of these are variations on Locke. Locke has a slightly different
configuration, slightly different order, but it's it's actually quite similar. Now,
a compound abstract word is a kind of combination of aggregate and simple
words. A bit hard to explain here, but let me give you some examples. So if we take
the word "woodcutter," you can see how this is not just "man,"
an aggregate word, but we combine the word "man" or "woman" (woman can be a
woodcutter too!) with the idea of cutting, chopping something down. And so we come
up with this compound abstract word. Another example might be something like
"foolishness," and if we think about this tree here, we might think, okay,
"tree ... climbing ... fear ... fear of falling." You know, all of these kinds of things together,
they add up to this word "foolishness." That's a quick summary of the way in
which Burke defines the different levels of language. Now he then comes up with
two problems that he wants to discuss in the
rest of the essay, and the first of these, so problem number one, is that there's no
clear referent for a lot of words. The referent in linguistics is typically
the object in the real world that we are referring to, and we know that in
language there are lots of words that don't really have a referent. If we say
"the," for instance, what does that refer to? So this has always been a problem for
linguistics: how does language refer to the outside world? But for Burke it's
also part of a bigger problem, which is the fact that when we hear words we
often don't even think of the referent, even when there is one! If somebody says
the word "tree" to us, do we really imagine a tree? Do we think about a specific tree
or does the word sort of register without that mental image? So those are
some of the things that Burke is talking about here. Problem number two
... is how do we learn the meaning of words? How do we learn the
meaning? This is a very Lockean problem, again, because Locke is always talking
about how our minds are somewhat like computers, which we need to input data
into, and then over time the computer starts to make sense of more
and more information. So we are kind of like advanced computers where we can
also put ideas together ourselves, but we need that data, and if words can function
without having a referent, or without really referring to things, and also if
we can learn the meanings of words without even seeing that particular
thing, well then how does that work? As an example, I have never been to Antarctica,
but I have a pretty good sense of what it's like. I have, you know, some
indication of how it might work or what it might look like! Locke, by the way, when
you read his work he does suggest that some words you really have to experience
to know what they are, because you cannot explain them otherwise. If you
said, well, the color green, if you try to give a definition of the
color green for somebody who is blind, that would be very very difficult to do!
Those are the two problems that Burke really struggles with. He gives the
example of how through education some words are taught to us, and again we may
not at this point even experience them. There's no experience or sensation of
them and yet we have a sense of whether they are good or bad. So if we think of
something like adultery. Somebody in our youth might say, well,
don't commit adultery. Don't do it. It's not fun. It's not good. It's
going to lead to lots of grief and it's bad. But we haven't even tried it yet.
Shouldn't we try it first so that we can use our sense experience to tell us if
this is a good idea or not? Is this really bad or evil? Well, Burke points out
that over time we might actually find out that some of the things that our
nurses, our teachers, our educators tell us (and of course we don't have nurses
anymore -- most of us -- but that's his language), if they tell us that something
is bad later we might find out, well, it's actually pleasurable! And this
presents a problem for an empiricist like Burke, because he has rooted so much
of his theory in the basic ideas ... the basic sensations of pain and
pleasure. And we learn through those, so pain leads to the sublime, pleasure leads
to beauty. These are very educational and positive experiences. But if we find out
that that word that we have been taught is a bad thing -- is actually pleasurable --
how does this actually match up? Aren't the senses now lying to us? Okay, these
are some of the problems that we have to deal with. Well, Burke does
provide a kind of solution. It's not entirely satisfactory, but his basic
solution is that words affect us -- words still affect us, and I'll try write
this sort of out as a summary here: words affect us through custom and usage.
With this he tries to resolve both of his problems at the same time. And this
is kind of how it works. Because we hear a word lots (we
might hear the word "adultery" dozens of times when we grow up, we have an
association with it. The word simply calls forth an emotional
response, and it does that through the ear. So there's still a kind of
empiricist account, I suppose (a partial one), because we do use our senses here.
But the word affects us because we hear it so many times and we become somewhat
like Pavlov's dogs, where we just have an immediate response. What this means then
is that a mental image is not necessary. The mental image not necessary or
required. You don't have to think of what adultery looks like. Most of us when we
hear the word, we don't imagine this kind of picture of two people in
bed together, and so and so on. Well, let's hope not.
In that case there's no mental image, but the word simply works. It tells us
what the meaning is and in this way we have solved the problem of not having a
clear referent, and we learn the meaning. This does work over time. There is
still this niggling kind of doubt though whether this is a good thing, because
doesn't it suggest that the meaning itself is arbitrary? It simply comes down
to us through the generations and over time, and we accept it as it is. And from
that perspective we're not actually far removed from somebody like Nietzsche,
who argues that words like good and evil are merely conventions. So over time
we've ascribed these two different things, but we have to make up our own
minds about what is good and evil and perhaps there is no such thing to begin
with. So these are really arbitrary notions. It's maybe also not far to
Humpty Dumpty, who talks about making up the words himself and giving them their
meanings. That's the problem, then: if we don't have a reference we can go
quite a ways down the rabbit hole and end up with some of these these big
problems. Now just to finish up here, there are some interesting outcomes of
this way of looking at language. For instance, when you go on in literary
studies you might find that in the 20th century, as an example, you have writers
like TS Eliot ... and you have the Imagists in the
early 20th century. These are writers who are very much in favor of
concrete language. We have to return to the image. TS Eliot
complains about how in literature there has been this dissociation of
sensibility. ...
Sensibility is feeling, and what he means by this is the idea
that in the past when a poet would describe a rose they would have that
sense of smell in their nostrils. They would imagine the colour and
then the rose would be real to them. But over time people people would write,
or they would think, well, I have to write a poem, but love love is associated with
roses. I'll just write about a rose or say you're so as beautiful as a rose, but
no image of the rose actually springs to mind. T.S. Eliot sees this as a huge problem,
that the referent is gone, but if you look at somebody like Burke, Burke says,
well, that's not a problem at all, because you have lots of poetry that
it's perfectly fine without a referent. An example would be something like
Sonnet 18. He himself gives a different example, but if you read Shakespeare's
opening to this poem, he writes, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art
more lovely and more temperate." Do you have any indication of
what the beloved looks like from that? There is no actual physical description!
There is no real referent here [as] to what this person looks like, and we have
to imagine this ourselves. For Burke this is not a problem at all. Words can
be extremely powerful without referring back to reality. What we can conclude,
then, is that words are powerful for a number of reasons. The first one, and the
most important one, is that words evoke passion. They evoke passion without a
referent (sometimes they do have a referent but they don't need it) or a
concrete mental image. You don't have to think up an image or look outside to
what it refers to to still have a passionate response. And then Burke adds
a few other things as well. He says our words give us sympathy. They evoke great
sympathy for others. They also are not limited to reality ...
In other words, if we want to describe something metaphysical, let's
say, like God or the angels, in that sense we can use words for things that are
invisible, that we have not experienced with our senses, which is what reality is
for Burke. We can also make up new combinations ...
of things with our words. And if we add this all up then we have a picture of
language being extremely evocative and powerful and yet
doesn't come to us through the traditional channels, through our senses,
and Burke has been able to deal with this by suggesting that over time we
become used to the meanings of words and so the words evoke these meanings
automatically.