Language: An Enquiry into its Meaning and Function ed. by Ruth Nanda Anshen (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Language: An Enquiry into its Meaning and Function. Planned and Edited by RUTH NANDA ANsHEN. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Pp. 366. The present book is the eighth volume of the Science and Culture Series. This series is aimed at an organic clarification of modern knowledge with an attempt to achieve something of an encyclopedic synthesis. Past volumes have dealt with· such topics as Freedom, Science and Man, The Family, and Moral Principles of Action. The present volume, as the title indicates., seeks to draw, in the words of the editor, "attention to the mystery, the miracle, and the magic of language." A further twofold purpose is suggested, one positive and the other more negative. The positive aim is " to give a perspective on what language is, its variability in time and place, its permanence, and its relation to the thought and history of man." The negative aim is " to discuss both the errors and the ineptitude of the exclusively empirical approach in understanding the problem of language and the fallacy of the assumption that thought is the action of language mechanisms." These are the words of Ruth Nanda Anshen in the foreword to the book. The volume divides into two main parts. Part One is " The Principle," pp. 3-15~. Part Two is " The Application," pp. 155-355. The purpose of a review will best be served, I believe, by indicating at least briefly the content of each chapter (each chapter constituting an independent essay by a different author), with a slightly more extended comment on several of the contributions which seem to deserve special emphasis for the magazine in which this review appears. I In the opening chapter on "Language as Idea," Ruth Nanda Anshen's insistence is on the point that it is " by virtue of the procreative power of language, which grasps, shakes, and transforms, that man is man." In her anxiety to stress this point, the author identifies language and thought by maintaining that words themselves are ideas. God, in fact, created language and language exists ab aeterno. " The name is the person, the expression of the mysterious essence of things, revealing or controlling the inner reality." Throughout this essay, presumably design~ to be a fundamental consideration of language ·itself, one has the impression that more attention should have been given to a literal analysis of langage as human expression, particularly its distinction from and relation to human thought. The value of language and its role in .human expression is not best 866 BOOK BEVIEWS 367 realized by an opening essay that tends to be more eulogistic and vaguely ontological than analytic and expository. Dr. Kurt Goldstein in" The Nature of Language" approaches his subject from his experience in pathological treatment of patients. He notes that the use of pathological material to gain understanding of normal behavior is open to criticism, but his conviction is that the careful use of pathological material still has significance for understanding any human behavior and language in particular. His starting point is the frequently observed deviation of language which occurs in aphasic persons, the incapacity to name objects. What makes a patient incapable of naming objects? The patient can only assume a concrete approach; an abstract attitude fails him. In the abstract attitude, language plays a primary role, and the essence of human language is meaning. Goldstein thereupon arrives at the basic principle which exhibits the nature of language: human language is understandable only if " one considers it from the point of view that language is not a simple tool but an expression of the nature of man...." The positive contribution of Goldstein is that, starting from particular facts and observations about abnormal speech activity of man, he can still arrive at a fundamental position with some reasoned assurance, namely, that language is an expression of man's very nature and that it is an expression of his symbolic power. N. H. Tur-Sinai's essay is on " The Origin of Language." Generation after generation, he notes, has been baffled by the problem of trying to discover how language developed in a particular way. He decides, almost at the outset of his essay, that "the road followed...