In the nineteenth century, western
philosophers began a serious study of the science of language. Vedic scholars had
started investigating the etymology and linguistic development (nirukta) about two millennium previous. Yāska
(fourth century B.C.E) noted the similarity between the roots of words in
different languages and created a collection of Sanskrit roots, similar to the recent
Proto-Indo European language development. Pāṇini (fourth century B.C.E) was a grammarian who is often considered the
earliest known founder of linguistics.
Psycholinguistics was first developed
by Bhartṛhari in the fifth century A.D. He taught that the language we use
indicates how we perceive and therefore how an individual creates their
personal reality- reality as perceived by them. Tāntric literature developed his
psycholinguistics more deeply and religiously.
Tāntric philosophy considered
the scripture (the tantra) to create reality. It was fundamental to them that reality
is perceived through concepts and language, therefore scripture (the tantra or āgama)
gives particular concepts and language which alter your individual
understanding of reality. A completely objective perspective of the world was
not possible through thought that was conditioned by the language we utilize.
Thinking requires
language/speech (vac), so thought has
linguistic form. Therefore thinking cannot exist independently of words/sound (śabda). Bhratṛhari used the terms ‘consciousness’
and ‘word/speech’ (vac)
interchangeably. Bhratṛhari believed that as our personal reality is created by
the perceiving consciousness, the world we live in is made of the words and
sounds which we learn.
Ken Wilber talks about the
great linguistic turn in western philosophy,
which is the realization that language constructs the world we perceive and is
not just a simple representation of an objective world. Wilber calls this linguistic
turn “just another name for the great transition from modernity to
postmodernity. Where both premodern and modern cultures simply and naively used
their language to approach the world, the postmodern mind spun on its heels and
began to look at language itself.” Wilber naively states that “in the entire
history of human beings, this, more or less, had never happened before.” He believes
that European-Americans are evolving from phylogenetic consciousness and
becoming transverbal since they are now aware of the limits of language and have
gained an ability to look at it.[i]
The issue with Wilber’s
belief here is that linguistics entered Europe in the nineteenth century from a
professor of Sanskrit. It existed for two millennia previous to that time. So
either the linguistic turn is not the
signpost of postmodernism or India was postmodern in the fifth century after
Bartṛhari.
The pioneering linguist Ferdinandde Saussure taught Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva. The
Germans found a great interest in the generative grammar of Sanskrit since it
explained many of the grammatical structures of many European languages. Saussure
lived in a time that India was a British colony. It would have been unscientific
to reference coloured skin Hindus for what would become the foundation of
modern linguistic science. The British campaign to degrade Indian philosophy
was still in vogue but Germany was translating more Sanskrit texts into German
than there are in English today. The first modern Sanskrit dictionary was made
in German. The importance to this is that all the major insights taught by
Saussure who founded the school of structuralism and hence postmodern poststructuralism
were translations of concepts belonging primarily to Bartṛhari. To not reference
the actual source of these concepts is to promote Euro-centric prejudice. Even
if there is a language and cultural barrier with Sanskrit, it is only
scientific to acknowledge the individuals who taught the great insights
translated into English by Saussure.
We will look at two
primary examples of Saussure’s translations. Saussure taught that a linguistic
sign is composed of three parts: a material signifier (written or spoken word),
the signified (a concept associated with the word), and the actual referent. Bratṛhari
taught that within the comprehension of sound there are three primary elements
to perceiving. The first is the sound or word (śabda) which denotes an object. Then there is the mental
apprehension (pratyaya) of the
meaning of the word, connecting the sound to the object. For example, if I say
‘chair’, you have the apprehension that I mean something you sit upon (an image
of a chair is created in the mind). Then there is the actual object (artha) denoted by the word. The
consciousness has pratyaya (apprehension) of artha (objects) and names those
objects by śabda (word). This concept was developed much more deeply in Tantra
and Yoga philosophy and is utilized to understand different levels and states
of consciousness.[ii]
In Sanskrit, words can
sometimes have over ten meanings. Freedom Cole’s perspective is that this is
because Sanskrit is a conceptual language not a literal language. A word indicates
a concept which can be made to refer to an object, not like European languages
that have words that refer to literal objects.[iii] While the English word ‘car’
refers to a specific thing, the word ‘vāhana’ in Sanskrit means that which carrying,
or conveying, or bringing. Therefore while a car can only be a car, a vāhana
can be a car, or a horse, or a poster that conveys a message. And a horse in
English only means an animal we know as a horse and it would be poetic to say, “he
has the stamina of a horse.” In Sanskrit one would normally just say, “he has horse-stamina”
as the concept of horse would be natural to use as an adjective. Because the
words have so many possibilities, the meaning is derived from the context.
Context creates the meaning. This is standard Sanskrit grammar, not a new
discovery of the nineteenth century.
Deeper than this Bratṛhari
gave his opinion about how we get meaning from the words in the sentence which
I would call psycholinguistics. There was the nyāya philosophy that believed
that each word was taken into the consciousness, analysed, understood and then
made into meaning. Bratṛhari believed that there was a deeper level of
consciousness that ‘intellectually-intuited’ what the sentence was meaning. He
called this pratibha (intelligence-intuition). As a grammarian and psycholinguist
he felt that the grammar was the method of allowing the words to come together
in a way that conveyed a concept, and that the higher intellect gets that concept
(even before a sentence is complete sometimes).
If linguistics is the
sign of postmodernity, was fifth century India postmodern or is the concept
that the linguistic turn as the
signpost of postmodernism an incorrect statement. The opinion of Freedom Cole
is that the nomenclature of modernism and its pre and post development is only temporally
appropriate and will be called something much different by future generations.
Proper nomenclature will remove the question itself, and proper sourcing of Saussure’s
concepts will give a less Eurocentric world for the future.
[i]
Wilber, Integral Psychology, 164-165
[ii]
Which Freedom plans to write about in some upcoming works speaking on the anatomy of
consciousness from the perspective of Tantra, Yoga and Āyurveda. Linguistics is a very important element
of traditional Tāntric
and Āgamic literature.
[iii]
It is for this reason that there are no ancient Sanskrit dictionaries. There
are collections of word roots, and thesauruses and manuals describing how they
are using their terminology, but there are not dictionaries as they taught the
concepts of the base root word and then understood how the grammatical changes influenced
how that word would be utilized. Then context was required to make meaning of
this creation. Sanskrit does not have a static dictionary of words, they have
rules about how words are made, and new words can be made even today following
those rules.
Excellent! OmnamahShivaya!
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