On a Philosophy of Expression by Brice Parain, Albert Camus
On a Philosophy of Expression by Brice Parain1
It is not certain that our time has lacked gods. Many have been proposed, usually stupid or cowardly ones. Our time does, on the other hand, seem to lack a dictionary. At least, this is obvious to those in this world in which all words are prostituted—who hope for justice that is unambiguous and liberty that is unequivocal.
The question Brice Parain has just raised is whether such a dictionary is possible, and, above all, whether it is conceivable in the absence of a god to give the words in such a dictionary their meanings. Parain’s recent books are concerned with language.2
But even his early essays took the unreliability of language as their subject matter.3 Parain’s long and scrupulous reflection would be enough to earn him attention and esteem. But his books are timely and important for many other reasons, which I shall mention in my conclusion; and despite the apparent speciality of their subject, they are always pertinent.
What is Parain’s originality? He makes language a metaphysical question. For professional philosophers, language poses historical and psychological problems. How did it originate, what are its laws—these are the limits of the inquirer’s ambition. But there is a primary question that necessarily concerns the very value of the words we use. We must know whether our language is truth or falsehood: this is the question Parain chooses to discuss.
Yet talking is apparently the easiest thing in the world. We lie when we want to and tell the truth when we must. This is not the problem. What we need to know is whether or not our language is false at the very moment when we think we are telling the truth, whether words have flesh or are merely empty shells, whether they mask a deeper truth or are merely part of a wild-goose chase. Actually, we already know that words fail us sometimes at the very moment when our heart is going to speak, that they betray us even more often in our moments of greatest sincerity, and that at other times their only use is to trick us by appearing to leave no problems.
We know quite well that “to pay one’s debt to society,” “die on the field of battle,” “put an end to one’s days,” “make total war,” “be rather weak in the chest,” and “lead a life of toil” are ready-made expressions whose purpose is to camouflage heart- breaking experiences. But the questions Parain asks are even more imperious. For the problem is to know whether our most accurate expressions, our most successful cries are not in fact empty of all meaning, whether language does not, in short, express man’s final solitude in a silent universe.
What this adds up to is a search for the essence of language, and a quest for words that can give us the same reasons we require of God. For Parain’s basic premise is that if language is meaningless then everything is meaningless, and the world becomes absurd. We know only by means of words. If they are proved useless, then we are finally and irredeemably blinded.
But indulging in metaphysics means accepting paradoxes, and the metaphysics of language follows this rule. Either, in fact, our words translate only our impressions, and, partaking of their contingency, are deprived of any precise meaning; or else our words represent some ideal and essential truth, and consequently have no contact with tangible reality, which they can in no way affect. Thus we can name things only with uncertainty, and our words become certain only when they cease to refer to actual things.
In neither of these cases can we count on words to tell us how to behave. And tragedy begins as a consequence. “We cannot,” says Parain, “accuse language of being the instrument of falsehood and of error, without at the same time, and for the same reasons, accusing the world of being bad and God of being wicked.”4
And, quoting Socrates in the Phaedo: “The misuse of language is not only distasteful in itself, but actually harmful to the soul.”5
The situation Socrates faced is analogous to our own. There was evil in men’s souls because there were contradictions in communication, because the most ordinary words had several different meanings, were distorted and diverted from the plain and simple use that people imagined them to have.
Such problems cannot leave us indifferent. We too have our sophists and call for a Socrates, since it was Socrates’ task to attempt the cure of souls by the search for a dictionary.
If the words justice, goodness, beauty have no meaning, then men can tear one another to pieces. Socrates’ effort, and his failure, lay in seeking this impeccable meaning, for the lack of which he chose to die. The value of Parain’s Recherches lies in a similar concern for these urgent consequences.
His first effort is one of honesty. He sets out, with the greatest clarity, the paradox of expression: “If man chooses the sensualist hypothesis, he will obtain the external world but lose knowledge; if he chooses the idealist hypothesis, he will obtain knowledge, but will not know how to deal with tangible reality and his knowledge will be useless.
In the first case, his language will become literature; in the second, the logical system, developed from a few simple propositions, will soon appear as the fruit of a dream, or as the appalling amusement with which a prisoner might occupy his solitude.”6 We understand now why language for Parain is not only a metaphysical problem but indeed the root of all metaphysics.
And it is not without good reason that he offers his researches both as an inquiry into our condition and as an introduction to the history of philosophy. Any philosophical system is, in
the last analysis, a theory of language. Every inquiry about being calls into question the power of words.
The history of philosophy for Parain is basically a history of the failures of the mind, confronted with the problem of language. Man has not managed to find his words. And perhaps it is possible to think of the metaphysical adventure as both an obstinate and sterile quest for the masterword that would illuminate everything, for an adequate “Open Sesame,” the equivalent of “Aum,” the sacred syllable of the Hindus.
In this respect, Parain’s researches show that from classical Greek philosophy to modern dialectic, considerations of language have moved toward an attitude of acceptance and resignation.
Attempts at justification have been replaced by a study of the rules of expression. This evolution is paralleled by the one which, in our century, has replaced metaphysics with the cult of action, the quest for knowledge with the humble wisdom of pragmatism. “Knowledge and becoming are mutually exclusive,” wrote Nietzsche. Thus, if we want to live in “the becoming,” we must give up all hope of knowledge.
The Greeks, however, those great adventurers of the mind, tackled the problem head on. The pre-Socratics began by defining a motionless and transparent universe, in which every object had its corresponding expression. Nor did they recoil before the consequences of this initial claim.
For if each word is guaranteed by an object in this world, nothing can be denied, and Protagoras is right to proclaim that all is true. Knowledge is inseparable from sensation and discussion becomes impossible. This world cannot be objected to, and we need only speak to tell the truth.7
But Gorgias can just as well say that all is false, since in fact there are more real objects than words to designate them. No word can give a complete account of what it designates, nothing can be proved since nothing can be exhausted.
Greek thought oscillated for a long time between these extreme conclusions. And it is not without significance that it should have found its purest literary form in the dialogue, as if Protagoras and Gorgias had to confront each other tirelessly through centuries of Hellenic thought. Socrates’ object, and Plato’s, was to find the law that transcended our acts and our expressions. We are not very certain about Socrates’ conclusions.
We know that he chose to die, perhaps proof he believed more in the virtue of example than in verbal demonstration. But as for Plato, Parain correctly remarks that the Dialogues are nothing but long struggles between language and reality, in which, paradoxically, reality is the loser.
For the theory of Ideas marks the victory of words, which are more general than objects and closer to that ideal land of which this world is but a pale copy. For words to have meaning, their meaning must come from somewhere else than the tangible world, so fleeting and so changeable. This “elsewhere,” to which so many Greek minds appealed with all their strength, is Being. Plato’s solution is no longer psychological but cosmological.8
He makes language an intermediary stage in the hierarchy that proceeds from matter to the One. The logos is a species of being, one of the spheres of universal harmony. Next to it, this world has no importance.
Thus, from the fifth century B.C., the definitive problem is laid out: the world or language, nonsense or eternal light. This is the sharp division that Aristotle, anxious to remain within the familiarity of earthly things, rejects. The Aristotelian theory of proof, whereby words are correct only by convention, but by a convention that rests on an accurate intuition of essences, is an ambiguous compromise.
This is the choice Pascal brings back in all its cruelty. Uncertain of language, trembling before the enormity of falsehood, incapable of making paradox reasonable, Pascal merely convinces himself that it
