4/10/ · On the origin of language: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the origin of languages Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the origin of language. This edition was published in by F. Ungar Pub. Co. in New blogger.com: 3/6/ · An essay on the origin of language, based on modern researches. by. Farrar, Frederic William, Publication date. Topics. Language Pages: Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. In this Book. Additional Information. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music; Jean Jacques Rousseau ; Book This graceful translation remedies both those failings by bringing together the Essay, which John T. Scott says "most clearly displays the
Essay on the Origin of Languages - Wikipedia
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So, this post is really rough and sorely in need of editing, but I need to get it up and running for my Phil of Music course, which starts Monday.
Social relations, artworks, everything ought to reflect the organization of the natural world. Rousseau pretty much scoffs at the very idea: cultural discourses—like language or science—shape the very physical phenomena they purport to merely observe.
Tonality abstracts a system of musical organization from a particular interpretation of acoustics, namely, the overtone series. In tonality, chords essay on the origin of languages on each scale-degree do, re, me, fa, sol, or I-ii-III-IV-V, etc.
But how is relative consonance or dissonance determined? What is the standard or measuring device? Enlightenment music theorists like Rameau used the overtone series—that is, essay on the origin of languages, the acoustic properties of a fundamental pitch and its harmonics—as this gauge.
Each tone is composed of a fundamental tone, the main pitch, and a series of decreasingly intense loud harmonics.
These harmonics sound at an octave above the original tone, a fifth above that, a fourth above that, and so on. This series of intervals I, V, IV… is the hierarchy theorists like Rameau used to determine the relationships among chords and chord functions.
In this way, the organization of musical works reflected the hierarchies present in the physical structures of sound. Similarly, Enlightenment concepts of race and gender also grounded social hierarchies in supposedly natural ones. Philosophers—like, for example, Kant—thought that the organization of society ought to reflect the naturally-given organization of bodies. Human bodily difference is naturally given—it is caused by the physical features of the earth.
Next comes Asian ones, and African ones are last. Comparing sound to light, Rousseau uses a prism as a metaphor for the overtone series:. Here you have the resolution of light, the primary colors, their relations, their proportions, the true principles of the pleasure you derive from painting.
All this mysterious talk about drawing, representation, shape is pure imposture on the part of French painters who think that with their imitations they can arouse I know not what movements in the soul, then it is well known that there are only sensations. People understand and are affected by paintings not just, and not even primarily, because of the way artworks refract specific essay on the origin of languages of light at our eyeballs.
Voice and Affect:. Passions—social and affective needs arising from intersubjective relations—are the origin of spoken language; they are catalyzed by social pressures, essay on the origin of languages. However, because we have complicated social needs and desires, we speak, we communicate with our voices. Voices, however, have to be trained. In the Essay, there are.
three states of man considered in relation to society. The savage is a hunter, the barbarian a herdsman, civil man a tiller of the soil. So that regardless of whether one inquires into the origin of the arts or studies the earliest morals everything is seen to be related in its principle to the means by which men provide for their subsistenceand it is for those among these means that unite menthey are a function of the climate and the nature of the soil.
Geographic conditions create a situation to which social systems must respond—but these responses are not directly caused or determined by the physical properties of the enviornment. They are contingent, essay on the origin of languages methods of addressing problems.
Convention is a human response to enviornmental conditions. The PHYSICAL causes of the differences in languages e. Passion—the need for help, the need for love—is social responsiveness, not bodily immediacy it is bodily, just mediated. So, I can find random sounds interesting, but only those sounds situated in interpretive discourses and contexts are really meaningful.
Music is pleasurable and meaningful because it engages our affective implicit knowledges—our internalized and shared cultural discourses. Rousseau is warning that the Enlightenment is a cultural formation that distances us from precisely what civilization gives us—passion, convention which is what animals lack.
Affect not immediate or natural; Rousseau thinks there are no affects in the state of Nature. In a way Rousseau is arguing that Enlightenment rationality returns Europe to a more primitive, ancient episteme—a visual episteme this time analytical rather than gestural, essay on the origin of languages. This objectivity misses the point:. Whoever wishes to philosophize about the force of sensations must therefore begin by setting the purely sensory impressions apart from the intellectual and moral impressions we receive by way of the senses, but of which the senses are only the occasional causes: let him avoid the error of attributing ot sensible objects a power which they either lack or derive from the affections of the soul which they represent to us In other words, Rousseau thinks Rameau attributes to nature—to the relationships among sound frequencies—a power that is actually cultural.
So why should anyone other than Rousseau scholars care about this? But what Rousseau does is show that this type of reasoning, this epistemic framework, also grounds Enlightenment tonality. The same general epistemic framework is present in both classical tonality and classically liberal political theory. So, Rousseau helps us understand the relationship between ways of thinking about music, musical practices, and ways of thinking about politics and political practices.
Instead of theorizing from actual politics, Rousseau is theorizing from actual musical practices, essay on the origin of languages. Kant also uses geographic differences as the basis of what, in his work, is racial difference. As I mentioned earlier, Kant engages in precisely the sort of reasoning-from-nature that Rousseau is critiquing here. Rousseau is not using geography to ground a hierarchy of bodies—geography compels people to respond to it, and its these responses that are different.
So you might say essay on the origin of languages the Essay is not using the sort of reasoning we find in Enlightenment race theory and Kant is.
big up, great analysis. A great prompt for further work for all of us. Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Must be a philosophy conference. And what does this have to do with women?
Origins of Language - Linguistics
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4/10/ · On the origin of language: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the origin of languages Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the origin of language. This edition was published in by F. Ungar Pub. Co. in New blogger.com: 1/1/ · The history of the english language is split up into three periods that are normally called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English and Modern English. Old English was the first form of blogger.com did not look or sound like the English we know today. The native English speakers nowadays would find it very difficult to understand Old English "On the Origin of Language" is a Romantic take on a most controversial subject. Rousseau's argument is that language did not originate as an evolutionary need to communicate thoughts for pragmatic social or economic purposes but for passionate reasons.4/4(9)
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