INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE AND CONSCIOUSNESS BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY VOLUME 44 IRAN Due IHAO INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE AND CONSCIOUSNESS Translated by Daniel J. Herman and Robert L. Armstrong D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication. Data Tran, Duc Thao. Investigations into the origin of language and conscioumess. (Boston studies in the philosophy of science; v. 44) Translation of: Recherches sur I'origine du Iangage et de 1a conscience. Includes index. I. Language and languages- Origin. 2. Psycholinguistics. I. Title. II. Series. Q174.B67 voL 44 IPI161 SOls [401 '.91 83-17726 ISBN-l 3; 978-94-009·6238-5 c-ISAN-I 3: 978·94·009-6236-1 DOl: 10.1007/978·94-009·6236·1 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kiuwer Academic Publishers, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrechl, Holland. This edition of Tran Duc Thao's Recherches sur /'origine du kmgoge er de fa conscience (Paris: Editions sociales, 1973) has been edited by Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen. All Rights Reserved. e 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company and copyright holders as specified on appropriate pages within. Soflcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1984 No part of the material protected by this copyright nolice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright ownel. T ABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE vii FIRST INVESTIGATION: THE INDICATIVE GESTURE AS THE ORIGINAL FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SECOND INVESTIGATION: SYNCRETIC LANGUAGE 31 Introduction 33 I. The Development of the Instrument 35 From Prehominid to Homo Habilis 35 From the Preparation of the Instrument to its Elaboration 38 The Genesis of Stone Working - The Kafi«In as the Second Stage of Prehominid Development 41 From the Elaboration of the Instrument to its Production - The Olduvian as the Final Stage of the Gestation Period 44 II. The Birth of Language 48 Introduction 48 The Developed Indicative Sign 49 The Beginning of Language in the Prehominids 55 The First Signs ofR epresentation 59 A. The beginnings of representation in the child 60 B. The origins of the sign of representation in prehominid development 63 C. The composite indicative sign 70 D. The general formula of the representation of the absent object 71 E. The sign of syncretic representation of the instrumental furm 72 F. Deferred imitation as insistent syncretic sign of represen- tation of the motion of the absent object 79 v vi CONTENTS The Functional Sentence 80 A. The elementary forms of the functional sentence 82 B. The beginnings of the functional sentence in phylogenesis 92 C. Developed types of the functional sentence 99 D. The disengagement of the form and the birth of the name 107 III. The Alveolus of the Dialectic of Knowledge 127 Introduction to Sentence Formation 127 THIRD INVESTIGATION: MARXISM AND PSYCHO ANALYSIS - THE OR.IGINS OF THE OEDIPAL CRISIS 145 I. The Origin of the Pre-Oedipal Stage 148 II. The Genesis of the Oedipal Crisis 150 III. The Biological Tragedy of Woman and the Birth of Homo Faber 158 IV. The Sign of the Phallic Woman and Oedipal Semantics 169 V. The Castration Symbol and the Female Oedipus 175 VI. From the Neanderthal 'Oedipus' to the Infantile Oedipus 190 NOTES 199 INDEX OF NAMES 213 EDITORIAL PREFACE Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human consciousness already presuppose the very form of consciousness which they are supposed to explain. It was reasoning of this sort that led Hegel to develop a theory of the mind which made consciousness itself the presupposition, the very originating condition, for production, indeed for the existence and the coming-into-being of the objects of consciousness. These objects, or perhaps better said, these objectifications, become the means by which consciousness then becomes aware of itself, as self-consciousness. But if this Hegelian primacy of con sciousness is plainly an idealist solution to the problem, what would the alternative materialist solution be? Indeed, if we take Marx at his word here, then he would appear to propose idealist presuppositions for the explanation of the elementary forms of consciousness, and this would then seem to be in stark contradiction to the materialist, praxis-oriented account which Marx and Engels have developed in their historical materialism. vii viii EDITORIAL PREFACE There is, however, another way to ask the question, and it is in fact com patible with the historical materialist account: deny that the architect, in contrast to the bee, represents the most elementary form of consciousness, and then propose that representation, as the essential precondition of human consciousness, itself has its genesis, which is to be found in still more elementary forms of pre-representational consciousness, which exists prior to the fully human forms of production, and prior to the making and use of tools. This is the path taken by Tran Duc Thao in this incisive and imaginative study. He turns, as we see, to the pre-hominid development oflanguage, to that crucial (and dramatic) moment which is, in his account, the act of signifying an object, i.e., the development of the primitive linguistic sign. He begins, therefore, in the First Investigation, with his analysis of the indicative gesture. With that, we are launched into one of the most sophisticated and anthropologically informed treatments of the origins of language and of consciousness, set forth within a broadly Marxist framework. Tran Duc Thao proceeds from the indicative gesture, which is of course at once the elementary linguistic sign, to the development of self-recognition and to the possibilities of self-reference on the basis of reciprocal recognition of the other, and then to the forms of 'echoic representation' - his interpretation of the classical dialectic of self-consciousness within the terms of pre-hominid and early hominid praxis and social interaction. He pursues the stages of this dialectic from what he neatly characterizes as 'sporadic cognizance' to collective cognizance, and thence to individual cognizance, in a way reminiscent of both Vygotsky's and Wallon's theories of cognitive development in the child; and then he traces the praxical origins of the 'ideality of consciousness'. In the Second Investigation, Tnin Duc Thao develops his theory of signif ication, the crucial relation of meaning to instrumental activity, and explores the progress from the indicative sign to genuine representation. "The qualitat ive leap" he writes "is realized only with the transcendence of the present perception through the beginning of representation" (p. 59). In a detailed analysis, combined with a close discussion of the work of Piaget and that of Gvosdev, he traces the beginnings of representation in the child; and we see thereby the development of the representational sign and the functional sentence, in both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic context. Throughout this impressi~e analysis of the development of language and meaning, Tran Duc Thao embeds it within an account of the forms of praxis in which such a linguistic development might plausibly have taken place: in the transition from the production of the 'instrument' to the production of the 'tool' as such, from Homo habilis to Homo faber. EDITORIAL PREF ACE ix With his Third Investigation, a striking essay on 'Marxism and Psycho analysis on the Origins of the Oedipal Crisis', Thao again proceeds with a socio-historical reconstruction of the genesis of the Oedipal. Here, as we see, he questions Freud's Oedipal theory, not indeed in the post-structuralist way of Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipe, but rather in terms of a histor ical materialist critique and reconstruction of the hypothetical origins of Oedipality in a pre-Oedipal stage. He traces this to the social, rather than biological, development of the transition from what may be called animal 'jealousy' to the suppression of this 'zoological individualism' as a condition for the formation of the first social group necessary for the beginning of human production; and the further drama of human history follows, the 'reawakening of jealousy' and the emergence of the Oedipus Complex as a later stage, developing along with the transition from the communalization of women to the pairing family. In all of these 'Investigations', Tnln Duc Thao weaves a rich and complex argument from the strands of anthropology, lingUistics, archeology, cognitive and developinental psychology and epistemology. He has, of course, his profound familiarity with the thought of Marx and Engels, Hegel, and an impressive list of contemporary thinkers, European, American and Soviet. Thao moves, often magisterially, sometimes daringly and riskily, among these fields, with a striking suppleness of mind and with great originality. He has written a work which should stimulate a new and deeper approach to the origins of human consciousness, the origins of all of us. * Tran Duc Thao is author of the seminal series of studies of Husserl and Marx which were published in the 40s and 50s, and which have been gathered into his modern classic, the Phenomenologie et materialisme dialectique (Editions Minh-tan, Paris 1951; soon to appear in a fine English translation by Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano within our Boston Studies). The present work, written in the 60s and early 70s, and published in Paris in 1973 by Editions sociales, continues and modifies the account of the origin of con sciousness given in the essay on dialectical materialism in the earlier book. Whether a phenomenological mode of analysis is thoroughly replaced in the book before us, or perhaps is aufgehoben by a socially articulated, which is to say by a historical materialist, analysis, or whether there are still phenom enological and also biological elements, will be debated by Tran Duc Thao's attentive readers. To say with Marx, once again, that "language is practical x EDITORIAL PREFACE consciousness" is also to welcome Thao's instructive exploration of a social and evolutionary theory of what is latent as well as manifest in human nature. * We are most grateful for the exemplary achievement of Professor Daniel J. Herman and Dr. Robert L. Armstrong in their translation of the Recherches sur I 'origine du langage et de la conscience. We are also pleased that circumstances have enabled us at last to present the pioneering work of this distinguished philosopher from Viet Nam to the English-reading scientific public in our own country and world-wide. Center for Philosophy and History of Science, ROBERT S. COHEN Boston University Department ofP hilosophy, MARX W. WARTOFSKY Baruch College of the City Un(versity of New York