LINGUISTIC TURN.

"Where word breaks off no thing may be": this is the line from a poem by Stefan George repeatedly cited by Martin Heidegger to indicate his version of the linguistic turn, which affected many philosophers in the early twentieth century—literary scholars already having made the turn, whether consciously or not (Heidegger, p. 60). The phrase "linguistic turn" is actually Gustav Bergman's, given new currency by Richard Rorty, but the phenomenon is far from unprecedented. Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of "the infinite interpretability of all things" is an analogy drawn from language, and a century earlier there was what H. G. Gadamer called "Herder's ill-fated criticism of the Kantian transcendental turn"—that is, his "metacriticism" of Immanuel Kant, which Jacques Derrida likewise recalled. Renaissance humanism, too, was in part a linguistic—a philological, a rhetorical, and a literary—protest against the excessive abstraction of Scholasticism, following the lead of the ancient Sophists and orators.

The "linguistic turn" has been made by many philosophical movements by now, even analytical and Marxist philosophy, and as usual this has been done in the search for foundations and a universal standpoint from which to pass judgments on the human condition. Linguistic criticism certainly undercuts the spiritual world of ideas; but "language," when divorced from the particularities of different linguistic traditions, can also be "reified" and made into a philosophical fetish. Martin Heidegger speaks of language but in practice regards German and Greek (rather than, say, Sanskrit or Chinese) as closer to Being than any other. His former pupil Gadamer, while regarding hermeneutics as universal, is more self-critical, speaking of "trying to draw out of one's mother tongue new ways of thinking." The implication is that there is not only no Ding an sich (thing in itself) but also no Geist as sich (spirit) and moreover that "there is no meaning where expression fails." Language is the ocean in which we all swim—and whatever our dreams of rigorous science, we are fishes before we can become oceanographers.

Literary Aspects

The linguistic turn was apparent in other connections, one the "new rhetoric" of the past generation, which draws attention to the habits and conventions of language, like Michel Foucault calling into question the control of speakers and writers over their own discourse. The arts of speaking and writing are both based on conscious imitation, but every literate person is moving in linguistic channels carved by predecessors, deposited in the memory, and repeated in different contexts. Particular languages produce semantic fields that make possible communication and dialogue; and linguistic usage—particular topoi, copulas, and word combinations—has its own inertial force that acquires meaning apart from the intentions of users. This is one reason for being wary of the "intentional fallacy" in interpreting texts.

One of the most impressive vistas opened up by the linguistic turn is the modern philosophy of hermeneutics in the form given by Gadamer, who, following Heidegger, extended the line of thought in the direction suggested not by Friedrich Nietzsche (as did Heidegger and Derrida) but rather by Wilhelm Dilthey. Rejecting revolutionary ruptures as a condition of understanding, Gadamer preserved belief in a kind of continuity making communication and "dialogue" possible not only between speakers but also over time. There are no absolute beginnings, no understanding without prejudice, without "forestructures of understanding" provided by language and the "life-world." Pursuing Friedrich Schleiermacher's old quest for "the I in the Thou," Gadamer accepts the horizon-structure of experience but doubles it to accommodate the contexts of the past as well as the inquiring present. Language is a continuum making interpretation possible, but it does not permit the sort of retrospective mind reading assumed by the "empathy" of Romantic hermeneutics. That meaning must always be constructed in the present is the hermeneutical condition of Gadamer's kind of historicism. To understand, in short, is always to understand differently.

An important offshoot of hermeneutics is reception theory, or reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte ), which follows Gadamer's line by shifting attention from writing to reading. In fact intellectual history is more concerned with the original intention of authors and meaning of their texts than with their "fortune" in later contexts. What Paul Ricoeur calls the "semantic autonomy" of texts is the condition of the interpretations and misinterpretations that accompany the reception of writings. For Ricoeur the poles of interpretation are the hermeneutics of tradition and the hermeneutics of suspicion, the first locating the position of Gadamer (and of Arthur Lovejoy), who seeks an experience of tradition, the second that of Foucault, who is devoted to the critique of ideology. For Gadamer "tradition" and continuity make possible the common ground of understanding and communication that, via ideas, connects present and past (the Western past); for Foucault they mean entrapment in or complicity with ideology and a denial of the ruptures between the successive epistemes that represent decipherable codes (critically fabricated Weltanschauungen ) of culture and patterns of underlying power relations.

Textualism

The linguistic turn prompted another and more severe tactic, which was the textualist turn. In this literary/philosophical game of one-upmanship Derrida substituted the transcendent phenomenon of language by the visible presence of "writing," through which—or rather through the hyper-textualist device of "traces"—he attempts not only to operate in the "margins" of texts but also speak in the realm of the unspeakable and in effect to "get behind the back of language" (in Gadamer's terms) and of philosophical discourse. Taking writing as the condition of knowledge is itself a traditional move, as illustrated in the Renaissance preoccupation with littera (letter-atura ) and scriptura and, more conspicuously, in the tradition of rabbinical (but also of Protestant) scholarship.

In this and other metalinguistic maneuvers of deconstruction, Derrida surpasses even Heidegger in claiming to be a "beginning thinker"—in the goal of transcending criticism or even, as in the notorious (non-)confrontation with Gadamer, dialogue. The very idea of situating Derrida's own writing in the history of philosophical thought, declares one devotee, "would amount to defusing its alterity and explosive potential." To be effective, it seems, cultural criticism, like philosophy, must be beyond the horizons of historical inquiry. Breaking with tradition is itself traditional in philosophical thought, as this Derridean adds, though without suggesting that the break and the "alterity" occur in the medium of rhetoric, or writing, rather than a transcendent tradition of thinking (in Derridean terms a transcendental state of "différance, née difference ")—or an antitradition of deconstruction—that is itself set beyond language, criticism, and perhaps even history.

Foucault, too, sought to transcend language and "the history of historians," hoping, with the help of his episteme, to uncover the structures of society and relations of power underlying social practice and discourse, but historians have questioned the methods and especially his attitude toward historical evidence. For Foucault learning does not enjoy high priority; and whether or not he himself was, by intention or vocation, a historian, his opinion was that history was too important to leave to such. Foucault had more important things on his agenda. Criticisms of the concept of episteme (and of "practice" and "discourse") must be of the same order as criticisms of other such collective abstractions as spirit (Welt- or Volksgeist ), Weltanschauung, mentalité, and other shorthand devices for grouping apparent homologies in various areas of behavior within a particular cultural horizon. Like Marxism, Freudianism, and Critical Theory, including the work of Jürgen Habermas, it is another effort of getting "behind the back of language," which had for centuries been the dream of "philosophy as a rigorous science."

Intellectual History

This is also to some extent the noble dream of the German approach to intellectual history that succeeded old-fashioned Geistesgeschichte or Ideengeschichte (history of thought, history of ideas). Like the French mentalités, German "history of concepts" (Begriffsgeschichte ) is an effort to reconstruct an intellectual field through the history of terms and families of terms like the English study of "keywords." In fact Begriffsgeschichte is a species of cultural history focusing on semantic change and the social and political context of ideas, and its program depends on metahistorical considerations to determine the meanings behind the keywords being analyzed. This enterprise began in the early 1970s, before databases like Proteus and ARTFL made possible a much more extensive searching of semantic fields, but it has nonetheless greatly enriched the practices of intellectual and social history.

The linguistic turn in women's studies allowed for the awareness of gender constructs throughout historical records as well as in the limited questions of historians. Words such as masculinity, femininity, and androgyny became keywords as gender studies scholars began new inquiries into the history of ideas. A last new frontier of intellectual history at the end of the twentieth century is the effort to understand cultures not only past but also alien. Philosophy has not been much concerned with alterity, what Michel de Certeau calls "heterology," which has been faced by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, mythographers, and other outward-and backward-looking scholars. "The course of history does not show us the Becoming of things foreign to us," argued Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "but the Becoming of ourselves and of our knowledge." But the hermeneutical philosophy of his contemporary Schleiermacher sought the thou as well as the I —the Other as well as the We—and this aim has been carried on and intensified by more recent followers. It is here that the methods of "anthropology," which had been found suspect by Immanuel Kant and Foucault alike, again become relevant, especially the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, which depends on a language model rather than a natural science model of understanding and that has made its way also into historical studies. Language is the "house of being," in Heidegger's famous aphorism, and the history of ideas, too, has taken up residence here.

See also Language and Linguistics ; Language, Linguistics, and Literacy ; Language, Philosophy of .

bibliography

Gadamer, H.-G. "Die Begriffsgeschichte und die Sprache der Philosophie," Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordheim-Westfalen 170 (1971).

Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982.

Jay, Martin. "Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?" In Modern Euopean Intellectual History: Reppraisals and New Perspectives, edited by Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Koselleck, Reinhard. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

Nelson, John S., Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Richter, Melvin. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.

Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Schrift, Alan D. Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Scott, Joan Wallach. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." In her Gender and the Politics of History. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976.

Donald R. Kelley