Book Review
I See a Voice
Stuart Shanker
Deafness, Language, and the Senses—A Philosophical History by Jonathan Rée (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999, xvi, 399 pp., cloth, $27.50)
How much does philosophy really matter? To be sure, philosophers are nothing if not industrious. But how important are the outpourings of a field that has not only formally renounced many of the tools of modern science but indeed regards itself as the final arbiter of empirical research? Have these a priori reflections really had any impact on, let alone contributed to, the advance of Western culture? University administrators everywhere are currently pondering this question. And what is even more telling, philosophers themselves are finally starting to address this issue.
Understandably, philosophers may be the last quarter one would turn to for an objective assessment of the field’s significance, for from Plato onward we have enjoyed what can be described only as a healthy regard for our own social and intellectual importance. But Jonathan Rée has put the lie to the familiar picture of philosophers as “forlorn remnants of a discredited sect, perpetuating [their] obsolete texts and empty rites merely because [they] cannot imagine anything else to do” (p. 379). Rée has produced a thoughtful and provocative study of the influence of philosophical ideas on an area of profound moral as well as scientific importance: the history of Western attitudes toward deaf people. [End Page 93]
Of course, one might feel that, since the Enlightenment, philosophy has appeared as more of a lagging than a leading indicator. In other words, the philosophers who have pronounced on the cognitive impairments resulting from deafness or the impossibility of formulating and expressing abstract ideas in a sign language were only reflecting rather than shaping contemporary views. This is a question that Rée examines closely, and the result is an invaluable study of how “metaphysical notions about the human voice” vitally influenced the fate of countless generations of deaf children (p. 382).
Rée displays several gifts that enable him to carry out this ambitious enterprise. First is his ability to explain complex philosophical ideas in a manner that conveys not only the author’s intentions but also the reasons the ideas were so seductive. He also possesses a keen phenomenological eye that he uses to clarify some of the more subliminal aspects of Western philosophy’s preoccupation with hearing and speech. Perhaps most important is Rée’s commitment to scholarship and the depth of the research that grounds his history of philosophical misperceptions of what it means to be deaf. As a case in point, take the role that the Abbé de l’Épée played in the evolution of French Sign Language (Langue des Signes Française [LSF]). Popular legend (first recounted by Desloges) tells the following tale:
- The abbé de l’Épée had been walking
for a long time through a dark night. He wanted to stop and rest
overnight, but he could not find a place to stay, until at a distance
he saw a house with a light. He stopped at the house and knocked
at the door, but no one answered. He saw that the door was open,
so he entered the house and found two young women seated by the
fire sewing. He spoke to them, but they still did not respond. He
walked closer and spoke to them again, but they failed again to respond.
The abbé was perplexed, but seated himself beside
them. They looked up at him and did not speak. At that point, their
mother entered the room. Did the abbé not know that her
daughters couldn’t hear? He did not, but now he understood
why they had not responded. As he contemplated the young
women, the abbé realized his vocation. (Lane, Hoffmeister,
and Bahan 1996, p. 52)
The importance of this version of the story is that it suggests that the twins were members of a flourishing Parisian sign language community and that de l’Épée failed to appreciate this fact and misguidedly forced his deaf students to learn an artificial system that he [End Page 94] devised. But Rée’s meticulous research reveals that the real story was far more complicated.
The twins had in fact already been taught for some years by Father Vanin, and, as de l’Épée himself recorded, when Vanin died “the two girls were utterly helpless: quite a long time had passed, and no one had come forward to continue [his] work or start it over again. Realizing therefore that these two children would live and die in ignorance of their religion if I did not try to find some way to teach it to them, I was filled with compassion. I said they could be brought round to me, and I would do what I could to help them” (p. 145). Whether the girls were speaking to each other with homesigns or with a Parisian precursor of LSF or a system that Vanin had taught them, de l’Épée was convinced that their signing lacked the syntactic complexity of modern French and set about teaching them a manual system based on French morphology. But de l’Épée did not believe that the twins lacked language (on the grounds that language is coextensive with speech). On the contrary, he argued that the twins were using a primitive language to communicate with each other and indeed that “every deaf and dumb child . . . is already fluent in a language”—not a spoken language, of course, but “the language of signs” (p. 148).
In other words, de l’Épée accepted that the twins’ gestural communication system contained basic grammatical constructions, but he felt that “sign language was still in a ‘brute state,’ rough and irregular and incapable of expressing many of the fine distinctions enshrined in modern speech” (p. 149). One thus could not convey the full range of expressible ideas in French in this primitive natural language. Repudiating the widespread view that the “deaf and dumb” were forever consigned to subsist at “the level of the brutes,” de l’Épée was convinced that deaf children could be taught a sign language that was capable of translating any French expression. Hence, “just as peasants had to cultivate and transform natural crops, teachers of the deaf must cultivate and transform natural sign language: they must ‘perfect it . . . by subjecting it to rules’ ” (ibid.).
De l’Épée has become famous for his role in advancing the rights of deaf people. But as far as he himself was concerned, his motivation in all this was not to emancipate them: It was to elevate his pupils’ cognitive level so they could learn “the truths of religion” (ibid.). [End Page 95] The abstract principles of Christian faith could not, he believed, be translated into the primitive sign language first used by human beings. To attain salvation, deaf children must reach the linguistic level of those who had mastered speech. Even Deschamps, who was one of de l’Épée’s fiercest critics, insisted that “it was of the most urgent spiritual importance that deaf children should [learn] reading, writing and speech, because these provided the only means of equipping the human soul with the abstract ideas that are essential to religion and morality” (ibid., p. 158). The debate was thus not over the status of sign language per se; rather, it was over which tool would best provide deaf children with the means to grasp those higher religious truths: a system of signing (based on French) or the oralist tradition.
Why did Enlightenment thinkers in general, and the Philosophes in particular, place so much emphasis on speech? Why were they so convinced that “without speech no reason, without reason no speech” (ibid., p. 272)? Part of the reason may be that they confounded very different cases of deafness. For example, a child such as Victor of Aveyron was grouped together with normal deaf children. Recent research, however, suggests that Victor was severely autistic and displayed the impulsive behavior and social deficits that encouraged the view of his condition as a “lower order” of cognitive development (Lane 1979). But a deeper reason is that the Philosophes were convinced that gestures are a residue of our primitive linguistic origins and as such play only a tangential communicative role in spoken language (e.g., to convey affect). Because of the metaphysical view that speech—unlike gestures—enables human beings to control the ideas coursing through their minds, speech was accorded preeminence in Enlightenment thought.
The Philosophes believed that the “natural language of gestures” could communicate thoughts but that an iconic system was severely limited in both its capacity to represent abstractions and the speed with which one could convey one’s thoughts. The transition from this natural gestural language to speech was thus regarded as of the utmost importance for the emergence of the modern mind. Only speech, it was believed, enabled one to speak nearly as quickly as one can think and convey far more abstract concepts than is possible in a purely mimetic system. More important, unlike the natural language [End Page 96] of gesture, speech forces one to analyze one’s mental processes—to break down complex thoughts into their component parts, which can then be named, recognized, recalled, reflected on, recombined and expressed in novel ways (Taylor 1992).
In the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (I, 2, 4), Condillac argued that “a man who has only accidental and natural signs, has none at all at his command. . . . Hence we may conclude that brutes have no memory; and that they have only an imagination which they cannot command as they please” (quoted in Harris and Taylor 1989, 120). Without speech, deaf people—like animals—were thought incapable of analyzing and ordering their ideas. It was even believed unlikely that they, any more than animals, possess free will (i.e., that their actions are purposive). Counter instances of deaf children (or animals) behaving in an apparently intentional manner were explained away in terms of instincts or the association of ideas.
De l’Épée overturned all this: He showed that, if given the proper instruction, deaf children are capable of matching the cognitive and linguistic achievements of hearing children. In John Flournoy’s words, de l’Épée had demonstrated “we are not beasts, for all our deafness. We are MEN! The era of de l’Épée has been the epoch of our birth of mind” (p. 200). Parents who had once sent their deaf children away (in de l’Épée’s own words) to the “secrecy of a cloister, or the obscurity of unknown lodgings” could now proudly show them off to their peers (ibid., p. 166). Moreover, despite its obvious limitations, de l’Épée’s manual sign system may well have played a pivotal role in the evolution of LSF. And by helping to create an environment in which deaf children would be nurtured by their caregivers and groups of deaf students could freely congregate and receive a proper education, it may also have fostered the growth of Deaf culture.
In addition, I See a Voice raises an intriguing question: To what extent have we transcended these Enlightenment metaphysical notions about the voice? I am not referring here to the fact that deafness is still widely viewed as a tragic impairment—an attitude that not only imposes untold stresses on families with deaf children but indeed can do much to create the very deficits this attitude dreads by depriving deaf infants of the type of language-enriched communication [End Page 97] environment that we now know is essential for all aspects of development (see Shanker and Taylor forthcoming). Rather, I am referring to the fact that gestures are still widely viewed as a limited, paralinguistic mode of communication. Indeed, many language theorists continue to insist on a fundamental discontinuity between nonverbal communication and language (Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, and Taylor 1998). To what extent are these views inspired by Cartesian presuppositions that continue to infect scientific thinking about the nature of language and its relation to cognition (see Wilcox 1999)?
Rée accepts the standard nativist view that deaf children are born with the same language capacity as hearing children and that without the requisite linguistic input during the critical period, this innate ability will not be realized. Provided they are exposed to the appropriate linguistic input during the first few years of life, the nativist view also holds, deaf children will acquire language in exactly the same manner as hearing children—automatically, unconsciously, and effortlessly. Thus, on Rée’s reading, one of the major events in the liberation of deaf people was William Stokoe’s demonstration in 1960 that ASL satisfies all of the structuralist criteria by which formalists define language (as opposed to nonlinguistic communication systems). However, Rée dismisses the fact that in recent years Stokoe himself had come to question the conclusions of his early monumental work on ASL but not because he no longer wished to view ASL as a language. Rather, he did so because he was concerned that the structuralist criteria that governed his early thinking were based on the paradigm of written language and speech (Stokoe forthcoming). Along with other influential sign theorists, Stokoe had grown increasingly concerned that this structuralist framework distorts not only the richness of sign language but also the scope of what the study of sign language can teach us about the origins of language and the myriad factors that contribute to a child’s development of language skills (Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox 1995; Armstrong 1999).
This argument is part of a multidisciplinary movement that has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Cartesian framework that originally motivated Stokoe to try to prove (to the generativists’ satisfaction) that ASL meets the formal criteria for a language. As Chomsky made clear early on in his career, nativism is very much a product [End Page 98] of Cartesian views about the nature of language and its relation to the mind (Chomsky 1966). The hallmark of Cartesianism is the notion of a child as an isolated organism that—if it is to make sense of its world—must impose mental constructs on the chaos of sensations that confront it from birth. As far as language acquisition is concerned, Cartesianism sees the child as trying to infer the semantic content and syntactic patterns of the utterances made by the linguistic agents around it. It seemed that the only way the child could achieve such an extraordinary feat was to be born with innate knowledge of the fundamental principles and parameters of language (given the apparently incontrovertible logic of the well-known generativist arguments of the “poverty of the stimulus” and the “degeneracy of the data”) (Pinker 1994, 1999).
Nativism’s simple explanation of language acquisition (regardless of the sensory modality involved) explains why Rée is so drawn to it. Nativism views language acquisition as a maturational process (namely, a biological phenomenon directed by internal factors [genes] that contain a “blueprint” for the construction of a “language module” that processes linguistic data along the lines spelled out in generativist theory). In this maturational view, gene-environment interaction amounts to a form of gene-environment potentiation: “Language acquisition is a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions. The form of the [acquired] language . . . is largely determined by internal factors” (Chomsky 1966, 65). That is, the child must be exposed to the “right” kind of environment (whatever that is) in order to activate all of the information stored in the “language gene(s).”
Rée therefore believes that deaf children were cruelly denied the appropriate linguistic input and thus rendered cognitively and linguistically impaired because of Western philosophy’s metaphysical preconceptions about the necessary connection between language acquisition and hearing. This picture of language development as a mechanical, maturational process has come under heavy fire in recent years. Interactionists of all stripes have sought to show that “language is learned not because it is a private symbol system, but because it is a means of communicating with others. Language is embedded in a social context, from the earliest rudiments of language learning to [End Page 99] subsequent adult use” (Goldstein and Hockenberger 1991, 402). Therefore, what we see here is a clash between two vastly different conceptions of the emergence of complex behaviors; it is a debate over the role that other aspects of development—such as socioaffective and communicative development—play in language and cognitive development.
This issue bears fundamentally on traditional attitudes of raising deaf children. For according to current developmental thinking, a “child with a severe auditory-processing problem, who doesn’t understand most of what is said to him, may experience even greater problems with interaction.” To such a child, “the world may be a hostile place, filled with sounds that make demands on him but to which he can’t respond. He may come to feel shut out from the world of people, or, worse, people may seem frightening, always yelling because he is so often angering and disappointing them” (Greenspan, Wieder, and Simons 1998, 42). If caregivers should fail to employ communication techniques that cater to that child’s unique biological profile, the child is likely to adopt behaviors that will exacerbate his communicational and/or attentional problems.
We are just beginning to understand how serious a breakdown in normal dyadic interaction can be for virtually every aspect of a child’s development (Greenspan 1999). But we have already learned enough to recognize the limitations of the nativist picture that deaf children are born with the same “language gene” as hearing children and that the language operations encoded in this gene are impartial to sensory modality. We now realize that “the minimum unit for developmental analysis” is not the isolated organism, struggling to make sense of reality. Instead, the focus must be on “the developmental system, comprised of both the organism and the set of physical, biological, and social factors with which it interacts over the course of development” (Gottlieb, Wahlsten, and Lickliter 1998, 260).
But then such an argument serves only to strengthen Rée’s view of philosophy’s pernicious influence on social misperceptions of deafness and deaf people, for the “metaphysical notions about the human voice” that Rée so eloquently depicts actually led caregivers to deprive their infants of the nurturing that all children need to develop. [End Page 100] The result of course was the very cognitive, social, and linguistic deficits that reinforced those metaphysical misconceptions. Moreover, once we have freed ourselves from the shackles of Cartesian thinking, we can develop a conceptual framework that regards language not as a decontextualized, biplanar code but rather as an essentially cultural phenomenon. This is an area in which we have much to learn from the study of sign languages. As sign language theorists have shown, a deaf infant exposed to ASL at birth is not simply acquiring a manual system for communicating her thoughts; rather, she is acquiring an identity as a member of Deaf culture.
For example, “the giving and receiving of a name sign is . . . an important event in acculturation in the deaf- world, and the name sign itself frequently reveals much about Deaf culture” (Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996, 74). Not only do the conventions for naming children or for greeting people vary from culture to culture, but so do the very things that a child must learn when she learns how to use proper names. In American Deaf culture, children receive a descriptive name sign in addition to their given names, which “frequently speak[s] quite bluntly about a person’s appearance or behavior” (ibid.).
Receiving a name sign is an important “rite of passage. Deaf children from hearing homes frequently arrive at the school for the deaf without a name sign. As their mastery of ASL and their acculturation proceeds, they receive their name sign” (ibid., p. 76). That is, a child acquires a name sign when she has learned their significance (the circumstances and the manner in which name signs are used). In short, when a child receives a name sign, she is no longer considered simply deaf but rather Deaf.
The implications of this view of language as an enculturation process makes Rée’s central thesis even more important and, for that matter, much more disturbing. Rée documents the way in which “metaphysical notions . . . infiltrate ordinary common sense and become real forces in the world, guiding our individual choice and even determining the destiny of whole groups or classes; for example the ideas about the five senses and the human voice which, until recently, ensured a miserable fate for most of those born deaf” (p. 382). [End Page 101] Anyone who is inclined to dismiss the relevance of philosophy to prevalent social and scientific thinking would do well to read I See a Voice.
Stuart Shanker, Ph.D., is a professor in the Departments of
Philosophy and
Psychology at Atkinson College, York University in North York, Ontario,
Canada.
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