Hans Aarsleff and the uses of error

Hans Aarsleff, who was born in Denmark and spent most of his career at Princeton until his recent death aged 100, burst onto the scene in 1967 with a book based on his doctoral thesis, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860. There he told the gripping and often amusing story of a battle waged between two diametrically opposed theories of language – the philosophical speculations of the ‘Gentleman Radical’ John Horne Tooke, and the historically grounded comparative philology of William Jones. Both theories were born 240 years ago, in the year 1786. The stakes were high, in Aarsleff’s view, because one side was right and the other was wrong.

The foundation of Horne Tooke’s theory of language, as given in The Diversions of Purley (1786), was etymology, which could be used ‘like a microscope… [to] discover the minuter parts of language which would otherwise escape our sight’. Etymology can, of course, reveal truths about the nature and history of the words we use, but Horne Tooke’s system was simply an invitation to come up with fanciful connections between any words that sound similar. The sound bar, he thought, always signifies defence: a barn is a ‘covered inclosure’; a baron an ‘armed, defenceful, or powerful man’; a barge a ‘strong boat’; a bargain a ‘confirmed, strengthened agreement’; a bark a ‘stout vessel’, or the ‘defence’ of a tree, or, if referring to the sound that a dog makes, the means by which ‘we are defended by that animal’. It is a fun game, once one gets the hang of it, fit for long car journeys. We might continue playing it with barnacle (defended by its hard shell), barometer (which defends us against bad weather by providing us with precautionary information) or, more easily, barrister, a profession which can involve defending people.

For a long time this pseudoscience – that is Aarsleff’s word – exercised a grip over English learning. The enduring success of Horne Tooke’s system against a superior alternative was, indeed, the problem that Aarsleff’s book attempted to solve. For, while Horne Tooke’s theory predominated in England – while an army of Tookean apostles developed crazed theories of their own; one of them, Alexander Murray of Edinburgh, claimed to discover that the raw material for all the world’s languages consisted of nine short words, ‘ag’, ‘bag’, ‘dwag’, ‘gwag’, ‘lag’, ‘mag’, ‘nag’, ‘rag’, and ‘swag’ – while the more sober science of William Jones was gathering pace on the continent. Comparative philology was developed by the Germans Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Bopp, and the Brothers Grimm, and the Danes Rasmus Rask and N.F.S. Grundtvig. In the 1820s and 1830s, England was badly lagging behind. Jones’ ‘new philology’ had to redeem its native land.

It did so via the book review. One English whippersnapper, J.M. Kemble, had the benefit of studying under Jacob Grimm at Göttingen; he was therefore well acquainted with the cutting edge. Under cover of a complimentary review in the Gentleman’s Magazine of a work by his friend Benjamin Thorpe, who had studied at Copenhagen under Rask, Kemble launched a scathing attack on the state of philology in England. The controversy that followed had a Varsity spin: many of his targets were Oxford men, and Kemble had studied at Cambridge. Kemble, born into the famous acting dynasty, had a theatrical streak. He deserved his reputation for rudeness. ‘We could mention, were we so inclined, Doctors, yea, Professors of Anglo-Saxon, whose doings in the way of false concords, false etymology, and ignorance of declension, conjugation, and syntax, would, if perpetrated by a boy in the second form of a public school, have richly merited and been duly repaid by a liberal application of ferula or direr birch.’

Although, happily, he never called for his intellectual opponents to be caned, there was something similar afoot in Aarsleff’s own attitude towards error. He was not afraid to criticise the big beasts when they mangled the history of linguistics. In the late 1980s he was involved in fisticuffs in the LRB with Isaiah Berlin, over the originality and significance of Giambattista Vico. A bigger and bitterer controversy brought Aarsleff into conflict with the biggest beast of all – Noam Chomsky. In 1966, Chomsky had tried to flatter his own theory of language with an intricate pedigree, stretching back to Descartes: he cast himself as the reviver of some long-neglected tradition of ‘Cartesian Linguistics’. On every substantive point he turned out to be wrong. The tradition in which he placed himself was not ‘Cartesian’; the counter-tradition with which it was vying was not ‘Lockean’; many of the thinkers whom he revered as his precursors in fact explicitly presented themselves as Lockean. In 1970, Aarsleff accused Chomsky of ‘plain ignorance’. He had not read even the books he cited. ‘I must conclude with the firm belief that I do not see that anything at all useful can be salvaged from Chomsky’s version of the history of linguistics’; in terms redolent of his treatment of Horne Tooke in The Study of Language, he described Chomsky as having ‘significantly set back’ that field of study. The Study of Language in England cites a letter of Kemble’s, attributing Horne Tooke’s extraordinary success in linguistics to a ‘happy knack of outbullying his opponents upon subjects with which he and they were alike conversant’. Might Chomsky’s grip over the study of language in the mid-20th century merit a similar explanation?

Chomsky, at any rate, reacted with characteristic cantankerousness to this criticism from a man whose name he consistently misspelled as ‘Aarslef’. His bulldog, Harry Bracken, wrote that Aarsleff’s scholarship ‘differs in quantity but not in quality from that recently displayed by Trevor-Roper in identifying the Hitler “diaries”’. Bracken spun an elaborate theory, too, that Aarsleff was motivated to attack Chomsky because he ‘correctly sees that Chomsky’s efforts threaten liberalism itself’. In reality, though, Aarsleff was motivated by the same impulse that motivated Kemble: a sincere disdain for error.

‘Error’: it can be frustrating how seldom one comes across that word while reading works of intellectual history. When one does find it applied to past ideas, it is often a means of declaring them unworthy of study. ‘We are no longer bound’, Aarsleff wrote in the introduction to a collection of essays, From Locke to Saussure (1982), ‘by the dicta of the standard history [of linguistics], which made language study before 1800 a miserable story of error and delusion, barely deserving to be remembered.’ There was, to be sure, some error and delusion before 1800 – such as Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley – but this was certainly ‘deserving to be remembered’, on account of its success in its time.

It is not uncommon to find intellectual historians imagining that their task involves suspending all judgement; to think, that is, that they ought simply to explain certain arguments which were made in the past, to make a ‘steelman’ for them in order to explain why anyone ever found them convincing, without deigning to decide whether those arguments were good arguments or bad ones. It is, perhaps, the first step towards a kind of arbitrary relativism; and as Aarsleff once wrote: ‘I do not agree that the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of language study cannot be more than matters of opinion.’ ‘Error’ is, to this end, a good word in the historian’s lexicon. On the very first page of Aarsleff’s Study of Language, he articulates the discomfiting truth that, in the history of ideas, ‘Error may be as influential as truth’, as it was in England in the early 19th century. Such errors reveal themselves only in an ongoing dialectic, as in that which unfolded over the course of 80 years between the party of Horne Tooke and the ‘new philology’. There is a great deal to learn from Aarsleff’s pathbreaking work: about individual thinkers, such as Locke, Condillac and Humboldt, and about such massive subjects as linguistics and the philosophy of mind. But one of his achievements was to show us the value in sometimes sitting in judgement of past ideas and past errors – lest such errors be made, or false paths followed, today.