Why we think so peculiarly: Some reflections on meaning and thought in the French and the American English languages

There are at least two linguistic differences that help explain those between American and European culture and the dominant styles of thinking, for instance, in philosophy.

One is the marking or effacing of the difference between polite ("vous") and familiar ("tu") address. The other is that between the priority of naming and reference versus syntax and the syntagmatic relationships of similar and different terms. 

Failure to mark a semantic distinction between familiar and more distant relationships has consequences for our culture that make both private and public social life uniquely complicated. Americans like to be very informal and familiar, and social distance, which at the moment of this writing is being proposed and enforced as dictating a purely physical separation and distance that does not change in essence how we think and feel about people, though it can enforce an interdiction on physical proximity much as an earlier viral crisis, that of AIDS, caused many people to avoid casual sex. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt thought that modern culture tends towards totalitarian forms in effacing the public/private distinction and therefore both true privacy and solitude and the active concern for the common good and shared form of life of the citizen who has a public life distinct from his private one. Without this distinction, people will tend to feel violated if someone speaks to them in the disinterested and critical way that a fellow citizen might in a society democratic enough that some large, if not absolute, measure of social antagonism based on conflict interests or beliefs is tolerated as part of an idea of how people who are neighbors and strangers and not intimate friends.

(At this time, in being expected, and required, to keep a protective social distance from friends and strangers alike, what is emphasized in this as a relational trait is the attitude that is required to comply with the demand. That attitude is respect. Depending on how you would think of it, people have either more or a different kind of respect for people who either are above them in any hierarchy (something we Americans typically disavow while observing nonetheless) and for fellow citizens who as such are both equal and normatively strangers, and strangers we want to leave in their strangers, as friends also let their friends be as they are more than needing to change them, as one is apt to do with lovers, children, and sometimes very close friends. To keep a distance from the persons I like to be around or love and care about, and to do so because I care about them, is to emphasize respect over the causal enjoyment that drives many childhood and youth friendships. We all want to be considerate of our friends and their needs, and partly let them be and not try to interfere with and change them, but in this crisis this attitude is necessarily brought to the fore. In normal times, you might look up a friend to go to a party with and hang out and enjoy yourselves together. Now people must do this not only from a distance, in the way that we are distanced by media like the Internet; but we also are forced to thematize this distance and make it a special priority. If you could still go drinking with a friend, you would have to go to bars where people sit 6 feet part, and to date, that’s a rare restaurant and even rarer bar counter. If you “meet up” by mediation of a device like the phone or Internet, you know that you are doing so in order to meet in a distanced way, and because you and your friend not only want to share an enjoyment, but because the distance expresses both prudent self-management and kindness. This might be thought not unlike pushing relationships towards the formal, “vous,” pole and further from the casual and familiar “tu” one, and the reason would be the importance of the respect that leaves the other his distance.)

Americans may be unsure about identities, especially in matters of gender and sexuality, but they are also often prepared to do public battle for their private personas. The old feminist call to make the personal political could express a desire to efface boundaries that are better recognized and kept. Here it suffices to note that Americans also do not like to attribute distinct properties to persons of different generations.

It is also worth noting that French society has about the same amount of gender parity in the professions as its fellow one-time revolutionary republic the United States, but there is much less sense in France that masculinity and femininity have needed to be rethought. The Americans deserve much credit for what has been done along such lines in popular culture, particularly music, where many women lyricists have innovated in understanding lyric subjectivity, personality, and ways of thinking about self/other and self-world relationships.

Some such distinctions may well be related to American pragmatism, the dominant philosophical tendency in the United States historically, which may be partly caused by it, along with of course English dissenting Protestantism, and the liberal political theory that shows the influence of early modern physics and drove the English and American revolutions.

The reason would be the theory/practice distinction, and the claim would be that it is defaced and with it theory forgotten, or theory not allowed a life of monastic separation, such that theory might be used to rule the state, which from a purely American point of view is an apt image of modern France from Descartes to the present (or rather, of its own image of itself in thought). 

English has more words than any language, and became a mongrel tongue because of a plurality of influences, including both Germanic and Romance languages. What French has that English lacks is both an inflected grammar with its division of all things into two artificial "genders"; French has a greater reliance on forms of similar words, which it shares with other European languages as well as Biblical Hebrew. In this syntagmatic framework, a word does not just "mean" the thing that is its referent, but also has associative connections to all similar words evoked in the phrase or sentence. In Hebrew, one form of this tendency is developed such that most words require for their explanation a grasping of consonantal roots that group many words into little semantic families. The poet then can freely play on these associations to construct poetic meanings even within a presumably essentially denotative prose. In German, where words are often formed as compounds, a paralllel trait led some to say that German is the truest language for philosophy. Not a fascist belief, this view was shared by Heidegger and the neo-Marxist Adorno. 

French acquired the quality of marking numerous forms of inference (as well as, secondarily, attitudes of the speaker to what is said or known; there are many markers, often using “que” (that): not just parce que, but puisque, bien que, alors que, étant donné que, and numerous others, marking different types of semantics-logical relationship where the presumed or possible truth of one statement bears some relationship to that of another, and this whole is internal to a single sentence and statement), and so is perhaps the most logical language, in a loose and grammatical sense that considers as nuances of propositional and sub-propositional entailment as semantically distinct forms of what logic simplifies into the derivation of one element from another. Which is also a crude way to think of interpretation; this is what Susan Sontag in "Against Interpretation" criticized: the object or work or event or thing is explained by treating it as a theatrical mask: X is (really) Y. Which is also Platonist, since the "is really" is the privileged insight of the enlightened seer. French also became the langauge of clarity, Descartes' "clear and distinct ideas." These must make more clear something important to us, and that surely does mean a "X is Y" formula, but it might be an indulgent explication, unfolding, telling us more about X, not negating it and then awaiting that negation's redemptive overcoming in the Y that is both not-X and more truly and fully X. It happens that French philosophy and theory tends to seem illuminating (which partly means relevant, or important: we are at least persuaded to care much about the matter), while English philosophy and thought always tends to enforce a clarity that is so prosaic it risks being pedestrian. 

Saussure's linguistics is French in insisting on associations, and part of Lacan's superiority to Freud is that cruder Freudianisms focus on represenational symbols rather than more analogical allegories, and free plays of association that are by no means merely prosaic. 

The traditional idea of truth is that of the correspondance of statement and situation or reality, and this paradigm was destined to be problematic because something linguistic is compared in and with language alone to something that is not and cannot be. Realist versus idealist or antirealist debates have centered on the question of this relationship, which is perhaps impossible to formulate clearly rather than merely show. This problem finds its way into theories of arguentative rationality because it always relies on both a structure of inferences or reasons, and the ultimate exhibition of a particular in an evidence or something like an intuition. It is easy to say that the correspondence theory treates the proposition like a name. 

The more syntatic approach to meaning should lend itself to narrative. And even to thinking of hte sentence as like a story. 

Americans don’t usually like to argue, nor do they know how, thinking wrongly that an argument is a fight. The democracy that originated in ancient Greece was in a culture that valued that highly. We treat disagreement as assault, and worry that people will damage us by their opinions, as we think that speech with others in public really is mostly about its being policed so that no one is offended, in a forum where we all are competing but above all just want to be welcomed and worry that we may not be. But most tellingly, we think that opinions are only expressions of the individual’s inner self and preferences, and these cannot be argued, contrary to Kant, who argued in the Critique of Judgment that opinions that are preferences must have reasons and be arguably, and we must think we are right when we hold them and not just expressing our private taste; otherwise, to put the matter in a 20th century idiom, the judgment would have no real meaning. That we think a statement that is about something that we utter is true and yet might not be, and is important such that the interlocutor should recognize its truth upon understanding the argument with its reasons, these are conditions of the meaningful utterance of statements.

We also place a high value on performative utterances, or commands. Often, maybe always, when someone says that something is the case, they are telling us what they want us to do. American culture always verges nearly on the impossible extremes of pure denotation, represented in the declarative statement, and that of pure command. Imagine that everyone is a player on a baseball team, and every statement is like throwing or catching or hitting the ball. The ideal must be to play social life the way the New York Yankees made famous: efficient moves with no noise or wasted movements; just do what is to be done, don’t ask questions; we are here to get the job done. There is no room in such a world for democracy, because that would mean not only wanting justice for themselves, like tennis player John McEnroe always arguing with the empire, but discussing the very game being played and maybe changing it somehow.

American thinking popularly tends to center on the exhhibition and representation of factual realities. Short sentences are preferred. The heart of meanign is the name and its relationship to a really existing and important thing. 

One could perhaps more useful divide the two possibilities between a cult of the image and one of the, not word, but statement.  An image as such is a situation given as a single thing, a correlate of a name in the field of the visible. What a statement correlates with in reality and what that looks like is endlessly mysterious or impossible to say, because statements contain terms other than names and descriptions that have no correlate in perception at all. The correspondance theory of truth was a necessarily failed attempt to think of writing as a kind of vision.

But a less salutary distinction would be between knowing and thinking. People today know too much, and the virtual archive on line knows everything, most of it though being irrelevant and absolutely boring. 

American Buddhism is largely about denying faith in statements for a great faith in perception. And this seems to fit our dominant ideas of work and business, even now, with the hegemony of elites specializing in mathematical disciplines like infotech and finance. 

The popularity of a business-oriented Buddhism in America reveals among other things that we have no faith in that property of statements that is rationality. Ideas either express our own will and choice, or are noise we would like to free ourselves of. So we have disciplines of the mind that aim to free it of thinking. For an economy of mind that refuses to tarry with its own presentations will suit a culture where thinking at all is the province of specialists. Everyone else should just shut up, set aside any attitudes, do what they are told or what they see is there to be done, and get on with the ballgame.

To be continued.