My Academic Apex, and the Girl Who Was Not There

It was a warm spring day.  It may have been in the spring of 1972, more likely the spring of 1973, which was my last term at Cornell.

I was studying philosophy, with a particular focus on philosophy of mind and language.  (This, I thought, was the secret to everything.)  And I had discovered within that field a man -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- whom I found to be utterly compelling in both his philosophy and his person.  As luck would have it, Wittgenstein's closest American friend was Norman Malcolm, an eccentric son of the prairie who had sat in on Wittgenstein's famed lectures at Cambridge in the early 1930s.  Forty years later, with Wittgenstein at the peak of his power in the academic world (he had died the year I was born -- 1951), I was assigned Professor Norman Malcolm as my academic advisor.

By this time I had exhausted the undergraduate course catalog when it came to my narrow field of concentration.  I had developed another love, for Russian language, that more than filled my plate, but I also wandered into existentialism and ethics, without much passion for either.  Further, as a natural complement to all this, I took introductory and intermediate courses in linguistics.

In the early 1970s, linguistics was undergoing a revolution (there were many others).  On the wane was descriptive linguistics, which arose out of anthropology.  It featured what purported to be a universal "script" that told you how to pronounce words in virtually any language.  (I forget how, or whether, it really dealt with tonal languages like Chinese.)  And it provided and fleshed out the standard taxonomy of tongues, grouping them into familiar families and sub-families, and tracing back their histories where that was possible.  ("Old Church Slavonic" was to Modern Russian perhaps as Middle English was to Modern, but don't hold me to that.)

On the rise was something entirely different.   A young radical at M.I.T. of all places, whose name was Noam Chomsky, had puzzled over the fact that any random child of two or three could be plunked into a community anywhere in the world, and in short order and with relative ease that child would master the language of his or her community.  This could only be possible if there was a common core underlying every language, and only if every child maintained within his/her brain some sort of template upon which disparate languages could be mapped.  Chomsky called this core "deep structure."  Having mapped, say, Swahili onto this deep structure, the child, in fact if not on any conscious level, had plotted out a series of "transformations" that strictly, rigorously brought one from the common deep structure to the "surface structure" of Swahili, which is to say actual Swahili sentences spoken by actual human beings (hence the term "transformational grammar," used to describe the new linguistics that was to displace the old.)  Chomsky and his minions could actually plot out on paper what these transformations looked like, which was largely like trees, with branchings most but not all of which were binary-- male/female, statement/interrogation, but also past/present/future.

This whole process was, of course, innate.  You couldn't ask little Billy which subliminal path he had taken from the common core to get to "Momma! Daniel bit me on the nose!"  In this sense, in old philosophical terms, it was very much in the tradition of Cartesian idealism, which counseled us to look inside ourselves for the ideal truth (Descartes himself grounded in this respect in Platonism). 

And here is where Chomsky bumped up against Wittgenstein, among whose most famous aphorisms was "nothing is hidden."  Wittgenstein saw language as intertwined with life and culture.  One of the collections of his thoughts, gathered by his acolytes and published after his death, was called "Remarks on Colour."  If memory serves, it was especially in these remarks that he attacked the idea that, to recognize a fire engine as red, we somehow compare the color of the engine to a perfect template of red that we maintain ... anywhere, it matters not whether we situate it in it mind, subconscious or brain.  For how were we to know that the template itself was red!?  Were we comparing it to a further, deeper red template and, if so, did that process go on ad infinitum?  Did we have a little homunculus within our heads that was doing all of the real thinking for us, just subliminally? 

I had a further problem with Chomsky and his minions that went to their academic integrity.  All of their work, all of their boring little tree structures, purported to explain syntax -- the rules for combining words into phrases or sentences.  But it should go without saying that the purpose of language is to convey meaning.  Accordingly, no account of language can be complete without accounting not only for syntax but also for semantics.  Here, Chomsky and the troops posited that something very similar to what his syntactical rules were doing was happening in the world of meaning as well.  Atomic elements of meaning at the deep level bubbled up into atomic expressions of meaning at the surface level.  (By "atomic" I mean that there are sharp edges to all of these semantic components, even in actual spoken languages.)  But when asked to describe these transformations, Chomsky and his pals pulled a carnival trick, in effect saying "those beautiful little beans are under that other walnut shell over there!"  And the beans would never be revealed; rather, the revolutionaries made reference to what amounted to a mere dictionary, and then tried to dress it up as the Holy Grail of Meaning. These moves were not only misguided, they were dishonest.

I should say that this latter criticism was largely of my own making, with echoes, no doubt, from an essay or two, in counterpoint to the great Chomsky, that was included in our readings in Linguistics 204.  I had no friends or even acquaintances among my colleagues in the faculties of philosophy or linguistics with whom I could discuss such things, and I never took advantage of the opportunity to engage, one on one, with my professors, except for two or three mandatory sessions in the chambers of Professor Malcolm.  I was intensely shy, and I considered my very presence at Cornell to have been a gift that I was to take in hand and thereafter just do the work and keep my mouth shut.  "Domine, non sum dignus ..." we used to say before the host was put on the tongue.

And so in that spring, with the special dispensation of Malcolm, I had been allowed to take the only graduate-level course I ever took at Cornell, Philosophy 40X, which was called something like "Advanced Studies in Wittgenstein."  I recall that the class was small, maybe fifteen students, and I have a mental picture only of one of the students, a young woman with short-cropped blondish hair and a hippie mien.  Hardly anyone spoke in the class except for Malcolm himself unless Malcolm invited it; the overall mood, as in many of my philosophy courses, was oddly sullen!  And I myself could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in my entire career up to that point when I had volunteered to say something in a philosophy class.

It is sometimes said that Wittgenstein was such a powerful personality that some of his teaching eccentricities, like stopping mid-sentence for two or three minutes with a grimace, demanding, it seemed, further inspiration from the gods before completing the sentence, rubbed off on his disciples, and it was also said that Malcolm was among them.

So here we are.  On that day and in that class, Malcolm got around, eventually, to the heart of the course as he saw it.  He gave his own short explanation of the Chomsky revolution.  (Even though this was a graduate course, I might have been better schooled in the subject than most of the Ph.D candidates in the room, who would have seen this subject as a detour from some esoteric thing that they would address, as no one had ever quite done before, in a brilliant dissertation.)  

Malcolm paused.  "What," he asked, "would Wittgenstein have said about Chomsky?"  After a little pause, on sudden impulse, I raised my hand.  "Yes, Donovan."  (It was a vestige of his Oxbridge days for Malcolm to refer to students by their last names, with no honorific "Mr." or, at the time, "Miss.")  With uncharacteristic confidence I replied -- "Wittgenstein would say that Chomsky's entire enterprise is itself in need of interpretation; it is not self-interpreting."

Malcolm just kept lecturing, as if the question had not been asked, let alone answered.  But after five, maybe seven, minutes, he circled back.  "As Donovan said ..."  My reaction to this was inner elation.  Here was a very profound question that required some authentic understanding of perhaps the greatest thinker of the 20th century and also of the upstart who would dominate linguistics (and, of course, leftist political theory) for the remainder of my life, and I had answered it correctly, even elegantly perhaps, notwithstanding the fact that Wittgenstein died before Chomsky's linguistic revolution, and Chomsky, so far as I know, never directly confronted Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and meaning.

But after class, walking back toward my dubious Collegetown digs on the south side of campus, my elation gave way to something else.  With whom would I share this little triumph?  There was no one.  It would be impossible to provide the context for it in my letters home, to siblings or to my mom and dad, both of them high school graduates only.  I had good friends at Cornell, but they were struggling with engineering, the pre-med curriculum, or economics; they did not have even a theoretical interest in what I was studying.  And I knew that I had no need even to credential myself in philosophy, to build a reputation among the faculty, because I would go to law school, not to graduate school.  So this would just be an ephemeral little bauble that I could clench in my palm for a bit.

Since I was a melancholic, and never more so than in those days, during that walk I thought about an alternative life, one in which there was a pretty girl waiting for me in my crummy Collegetown apartment.  In her arms, in post-coital pillow talk, I would lay all of this out for her.  She would be proud of me.  Perhaps she would reciprocate with a story of having won some classroom debate about whether Dickens was essentially British and whether Proust was essentially French.  I would be equally proud of her!  And our little bubble would insulate us from the prevailing Ithaca loneliness.