BIRDS’ LANGUAGE
(Notes regarding a Platonic dialogue)

“All we can say about language, and also about death is, in a certain sense, an unaccessible truth.”
(GEORGE STEINER, “After Babel”, Bucharest, 1983)

They say about Prussia’s Frederic the Great that, tempted by the thought of an EXPERIMENTAL recovery of the “original language”, he decided to raise two newly-born children in princely conditions, but isolating them from any verbal stimulus, from any contact with the sphere of human utterance. So, the two children were being perfectly taken care of, but no-one spoke to them and no-one spoke within the space surrounding them. The king hoped that, urged by an innate need of communication and bereft from any exterior linguistic model, the two “subjects” should end up conversing spontaneously in humanity’s original language, the one before the Tower of Babel. After a few years, very few actually, despite a permanently checked bodily health and an irreproachable physiological administration, both the children died, sucked in an abyss of silence. Therefore, Frederic the Great found nothing about the original language. But he found out – with a price that kings could only pay – something far more important: that language is not an ANNEXE of human condition, an auxiliary piece in its biological and social economy; for the man, language is a reality having the same rank as food and air: it’s nutritional and therefore VITAL. To speak is not doing a simple exercise of “communication” – as an important section of modern linguistics is pleased to believe. To speak is to vitalize (or to poison) your interlocutor. Words are not a derived phenomenon of life and of intelligence: on the contrary, it is the source of them both, their rhythm of maintenance, in short their “breathing”.

This is how, it seems, the old famous testamentary passage, in which man is defined as animate dust, must be understood (Genesis, 2,7). Gershom Scholem refers to the Aramaic version of the text, according to which, by God’s breath, man “resuscitated”, becoming not an “alive soul” (as the Greek version says), but “speaking spirit”. So, there is a total identity between the breath of the spirit, the animation of life and the spirit of the word. To be alive and to have the gift of speaking are two SIMULTANEOUS effects of the same cause. There is no Life without Word and no Word without Life at a human level. The word is not only THE SIGN of a sense but also THE LIFE of a truth. It disposes of an autonomous energy, independently active from its philological being, from its “signification”. Without this efficient energy, the lyric poetry of the world – to take a single example – would be nothing more than a frozen desert, a land of strict information, of white enunciation. Merleau-Ponty is right to say, in a late writing, that “in a certain sense, language turns its back to signification, and that phonologists have the merit to have intuited this “underlinguistic life” of its. Life – yes! But why “underlinguistic? The POWER of the word is wider than its linguistic value: it’s paralinguistic and superlinguistic; the word is not only significant but edifying and fortifying as well; it can communicate the ineffable, a fact rarely taken into account by current research, but fact lived as an evidence full of the mystery of its ecumenism / ecumenicity (?) by writers of always and of everywhere.

In Homeric epos, the trading between gods and heroes is often a TRANSFER OF POWER from the former to the latter. And this transfer of power (MENOS), of “ardour” and “bravery”, is frequently made by VERBAL incentives, or – like in the Biblic text – by “insufflation” and “animation”. To the word wearing MENOS, wearing strength, Socrates referred when, before his death, he reminded to his friend Criton that “the wrong use of words (TO ME KALOS LEGEIN) is not only a language error, but also a way to hurt souls” (Phaidon). And if he knew that, if the magical power of the language was a fact of experience for Plato – fact also proven by choosing dialogue, meaning the exchanging of SPOKEN and HEARD words, as a privileged form of philosophical searching – how can we believe that in CRATYLOS, the Platonic text frontally approaching the language problem, we have to strictly deal – as numerous commentors have been saying, since Willamowitz – with EIN LUSTIGES BUCH, an ironic and autoironic game, a fantasy without consistency? However, the commentors’ opacity is eloquent: it also says something about the philological blockage broadly appearing in speculative comments on old texts, not to mention a certain “discontinuance of level” between Platonic understanding of language and today’s linguistic thinking. Yvon Bres is right: “It can be said that CRATYLOS is one of Plato’s texts existing at the farthest distance from modern problems.” In the following, we propose a comment that should be able to place the dialogue in its own universe, in the spirit of its time and, if possible, in the unfading spirit of Logos itself.

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