The Noblest Animate Motion: Speech, Physiology, and Medicine in Pre-Cartesian Linguistic Thought (review)

Jeffrey Wollock. The Noblest Animate Motion: Speech, Physiology, and Medicine in Pre-Cartesian Linguistic Thought. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, ser. 3, vol. 83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1998. xlix + 462 pp. Ill. $160.00.

Why study stuttering? Of what interest are the ways in which the tongue, the muscles of the mouth and throat, teeth, saliva, and vocal cords work together to produce particular sounds? This is, no doubt, heady grist for the mills of medical researchers, linguists, and physicians who treat patients suffering from speech disorders. The historian of science or of ideas, however, might be tempted to pass over such esoteric subjects as a mere footnote in the history of medicine, the purview of a small and inconsequential subspecialty. But even a cursory glance at the list of thinkers who have studied the physiology of speech should give us pause before exiling this discipline to the dusty attic of historical inquiry. Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates all devoted considerable thought to speech. The Roman orator Cicero discussed the implications of speech defects for rhetoricians, and counseled cutting the tongue with a scalpel as a cure. Inspired by the idea that God could be thought of as Word or Verb, Saint Augustine sought to understand the relationship between thought and speech in the production of spoken language. Erasmus addressed speech defects in a treatise on the proper pronunciation of Greek and Latin entitled De Recta Latini Graecique Sermonis Pronuntiatione.

Jeffrey Wollock's book traces the history of the study of speech from antiquity through the seventeenth century. He reconstructs the intellectual framework first developed by Aristotle and Galen to explain how human beings produce speech, and he follows the evolution of their ideas in the pages of medieval and early modern commentaries. The point of departure of his argument is his claim that the seventeenth century was a moment of abrupt rupture in the history of medical thought. Where premodern medical theories saw body and soul as inseparable, Cartesian thinkers abandoned this view and posited a radical mind/body duality in its stead. Wollock sets out to rescue the older model, by demonstrating that Aristotle and Galen, assisted by their medieval and early modern commentators, had developed a rich and coherent model capable of explaining a range of medical phenomena. The Aristotelian focus on dialectic and Galen's theory of the humors allowed classical and medieval thinkers to treat physiology and language as seamless parts of a single whole.

As Wollock explains in a lengthy introduction, his book's purpose is twofold. First, its reconstruction of the humoral theory as a coherent system of knowledge contributes to our understanding of premodern scientific thought. The second aim is considerably more ambitious: by characterizing the Cartesian intellectual revolution as a misguided turning point in the history of medical knowledge, Wollock develops a critique of twentieth-century linguistics and cognitive psychology. He argues that contemporary explanations of the physiology of speech share a conceptual vocabulary inherited from the seventeenth-century Cartesian opposition between "mind" and "body." Behaviorists consider humans to be biological mechanisms, and thus deny that the "mind" has any role in the production of language; linguists working in the Sapirian tradition see language as an autonomous cultural system best understood without any reference to the body; and Noam Chomsky's transformational-generative linguistics posits a distinction between internalized abstract grammars and language performance (analogous to the Cartesian mind/body opposition) but fails to explain how the abstract grammar actually produces language. Wollock believes that the field of linguistics, as represented by these three traditions, is imprisoned within a sterile opposition between "mind" and "body." By historicizing the discussion, he explains that the current impasse in linguistics has its roots in the seventeenth-century rejection of the Galenic theory of the humors. Were contemporary linguists and psychologists to put...