We are the speaking animals. To take a leaf from Aristotle’s book, the permanently mute or unremittingly taciturn are inferior beasts or superior gods; to be a person is to be gregarious, and to associate in the human fashion is to speak among ourselves. Indeed, creation and discovery of the individual self are conditional on locating this self among other selves; but since these others are nodes in a linguistic network, a society of speakers, acquisition of a language and entry into a community necessarily proceed intandem.

This skeletal delineation of linguistic essentialism will strike some as at best tendentious, at worst grotesquely unscientific, bereft of empirical foundations. No matter: for overwhelmingly many others, the absolute centrality of language is a truism so conspicuous as barely to deserve acknowledgment, before one passes on to the burgeoning questions to which it immediately gives rise: is all thought linguistic? Do the expressive resources of all languages come to the same sum, or do different languages manifest characteristic (dis)advantages? With such linguistic relativism, we are moving from what appears to be strictly theoretical to issues with ethical import; consideration of the possibility that language might encode, enshrine, confirm, or even partially comprise various sociopolitical asymmetries takes us further along the spectrum. Participants in such debates may hotly disagree, while fundamentally agreeing that language is always, inevitably at the core of their dispute. Profound insight, or profound delusion: if the latter, this chapter is a modest foray into the pathology of our exaggerated logocentric proclivities.

Introduction

Readers of ‘The China Syndrome’ might well feel inclined to complain of a glaring omission in its consideration of ‘guidance and constraint’. A moderate sceptic about the hypothesis could readily concede that the case-studies of the first chapter are effective against Sinological relativism, yet suggest that I have ignored the most massive presence in the history of philosophy: Aristotle. The contention is that his thought is permeated throughout by a variety of linguistic influences rarely recognised as such by Aristotle himself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Categories. Although the Categories stands in the first rank of the Western philosophical tradition, its students ancient and modern are in doubt over its status. Is it (primarily) a work of dialectic; of semantics; or of ontology? The sceptic contends that this chronic perplexity is no accident. The Categories puzzles us because it, and much later philosophy in its wake, has indeed been guided and constrained by language. The moral of ‘The China Syndrome’ is that we should fight shy of formulating too specific a hypothesis concerning just how Greek (or Indo-European) leaves its mark on Aristotelian doctrines. We should nevertheless remain confident that a deep imprint is there, even without a detailed explanation of how it was made.