A Conversation With Prof. Noam Chomsky

Language Is An Art Form

This week I had the pleasure of conversing with Prof. Noam Chomsky for our blog at WikiBrains.No matter your opinion regarding his political views, you have to admit that the man is an outstanding academician and extremely sharp for his age (86!).

The conversation was around the questions of creativity, language, poetry and technology, not politics, and it lasts around 15 minutes. Really interesting points were raised so I wanted to share the post here, as I’m sure the Medium readers will enjoy the conversation as much as we did!

You can listen to it on SoundCloud, or read the slightly modified transcript below:

WB: What’s your source of inspiration to come up with questions, ideas and topics to explore?
NC: I think nothing but the simple qualities that all of us have if we choose to exercise them: hard work, critical attitude, an effort to discern the significance of the information you are presented with and trying to determine the weaknesses and the aspects that are open to correction and modification. Having the willingness to pursue quite serious questions with an open mind and dedicated commitment. That’s all it takes –we all can do it.

WB: In your opinion, does language influence creativity? If so, how?
NC: Well it’s pretty hard to distinguish them [language and creativity]. If you look at human evolution -to the extent that it is known, it appears to be the case that, sometime within the last hundred thousand years, there was a kind of burst of creativity illustrated in the archeological record. Complex family structures, use of numerical symbols, innovative tool making…all of these had a fairly sudden appearance from an evolutionary standpoint –kind of a wink of an eye. It’s generally assumed that this burst of creativity is the result of the appearance of language among contemporary Homo sapiens, which distinguished them from predecessors and any other creatures. It’s a pretty reasonable surmise, since it’s hard to see how these creative acts could have been carried out without language as an instrument of thought. So in that sense language is at the core of creativity…it’s what distinguishes us from other animals, including other hominids and species that with time disappeared.

There are also other considerations, one of the leading classical theorists of aesthetics, G.W.F Hegel, observed that when we speak of the creative, imaginative element of any art we call it the “poetic element” -not the musical element. Somehow poetry is associated with creativity and imagination in a way in which other media are not. The reason he suggested for this is that every art form has some substance that it uses (sculpture = clay, painting = colors + surfaces, music = sound)…but poetry uses language as a medium for its creative work. From all of these mediums, the only one that has an inherently creative aspect is language. Language has a fundamentally creative aspect, which clay, sound or surfaces don’t have. The creative aspect of language is its fundamental nature -something recognized by Galileo and Descartes (a crucial element of Cartesian philosophy.) Language is based on a creative component.

Every person’s language provides the ability to produce and understand an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions that are expressed thought, new thoughts –it’s unbounded. The use of these expressions is not caused by situations; it’s not determined by the situation you are in (external or internal) but rather, its appropriate to situations. For example, I’m not going to start talking now about the baseball game last night, but if I were, others who have the same language capacity could immediately understand it. These array of properties are the core creative aspect of language, and Hegel’s argument is that because the medium of poetry is language (inherently creative) it has a uniquely creative and imaginative aspect. We speak of the poetic aspect of a piece of music or painting…and that’s a recognition of the way in which language itself is inherently creative, and hence arguably at the core of many other aspects of human creativity.

WB: So Poetry can be considered the purest art form?
NC: Language itself is kind of an art form…which clay is not!

WB: So if language is an instrument that gave way to civilization, are there sharper languages, in your opinion?
NC: Not as far as we know. Human linguistic capacity is uniform across the species –as far as anyone knows. If an infant from some isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea is brought up in Boston, it will have the same linguistic capacities as my grand children. Not every case has been tested, but evidence is pretty overwhelming. This would mean that, since language emerged roughly 75,000 years ago, there has been no evolution of the language capacity –it has essentially stayed the same.
Different languages may vary in the extent to which they make use of the inherent capacities. For example, many languages don’t have number words past four, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t have numerical arithmetical capacities –they do, and are instantly evoked when they are placed in market circumstances. There are other ways of expressing numerical concepts (e.g. fingers of the hand.) This was studied pretty effectively by the astounding linguist anthropologist Ken Hale, a faculty member and close friend who passed away in 2001.

WB: How will the rise of connectivity impact society, assuming that Internet does not get balkanized?
NC: Technology is not inherently liberatory or repressive –it’s a question of how it is used. In the case of the Internet, it permits connectivity of various kinds. It permits close, intimate, creative and meaningful connectivity and it permits extremely superficial connectivity. It can become an extremely superficial form of interchange, which can displace authentic friendship and intimacy. Or on the contrary it can be used to enhance it. The Internet does not care, it’s how we use it that matters.
WB: Lets hope the better angels will prevail and eventually we’ll mature with the technology and use it advantageously.