Chomsky

Where does a student of literature grab a handle on Noam Chomsky?

Chomsky himself denies a useful connection between his linguistic work and literature, further denies tight links between his linguistics and his political work, and makes little of any connection between his political work and literature. This in some ways seems consistent with his assumptions of species-universal, species-specific observations based on similar perceptive and cognitive equipment in humans. Yet even accepting some of these assumptions, I find myself moved to deny the divisions.

Chomsky calls the 17th Century his "favorite century," and one takes little trouble in identifying John Locke as among his favorite people in it. The ideas laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding make a nice basis for Chomsky's assumption that an inherited organ produces language. Chomsky points out repeatedly and usually patiently observations that Locke made before: that human brains share similar structures and might reasonably assumed to share substantially common observations.

Chomsky further extends this to suggest that we share moral judgments in a similar way. While he consistently presents this idea of the source of moral judgment as speculative, Occam's razor suggests that something like this will turn out to be correct: the separate evolution of vastly different cognitive equipment for different cognitive problems seems so unlikely historically and so impractical from the standpoint of engineering a viable organism that one has to at least suspect that cognitive systems are mostly similar. The complication does remain that similarly designed and evolved subsystems might yield pragmatically distinct results, but the assumption of a common system, of a similar pattern, should allow for the generation of testable hypotheses much as did Chomsky's initial assumption of a universal grammar.

If that is the case, one would expect to find that moral and aesthetic judgments will form or flow similarly to language. Moral and aesthetic relationships could then be posited by correspondence with linguistic patterns, with relative hope of success and of ultimate verifiability by the standards we understand as scientific.

Of course, one might object that we know what we find moral like we speak without being linguists. But then, given the hedging, prevarication, and disagreements about such things, one might not.

Some qualifications do seem inherent in this. The good, the sublime, and the beautiful establishable in this way could not be understood as metaphysical or theological or universal as most people seem to understand these. They would be species-specific and species-universal in whatever sense the language faculty might be described as such. But establishing and describing fixable values for such attributes might make huge differences in both the appraisal and the support of human events.

I am aware of no extensive or systematic effort to correspond a "deep structure" of human literature with a deep structure of human language on the one hand or with human moral judgments on the other. But a glance suggests similarities may be more than superficial. Similar moral and aesthetic ideas prevail among extensively varied social systems in various physical circumstances across the planet. A basis for Chomsky's proposition of a universal grammar is the extensive similarities of human grammars across the same social and physical range. And moral judgments vary in the specific just as do human languages. Cultures, classes, and individuals vie in part out of varied self-interest, but also in apparent fidelity to moral schemata as distinct and similar as English and Swahili. The tendency of humans to twist or deny moral judgment to suit convenience blurs any comparison, but does not obviate the suggestion of central similarities -- such as these just observed.

Given these factors and possibilities, a science of literature or culture might describe and correspond relations between poetics and the formal requirements of physical media on the one hand, the relation between poetics and the moral-aesthetic demands of the species and social-physical situation on the other.

Granted, speculative correspondence does not equal established or absolutel correspondence. It does not equal no correspondence either.