DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-088

New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria

gueorguiev.borislav@gmail.com

Abstract

What has been happening in the human society since the Renaissance usually is being described through the following standard clichés: during the Renaissance human becomes the center of the attention – not God; since the Renaissance man begins to align himself with God. Since the beginning of the history, until nowadays, the intellectuals have been working over one giant project to repeat what God (whatever may be hiding behind this name) has once managed to do according to the different Holy Scripts: to spell by series of performatives a world alternative to the already existing one (i.e. to the one which has been created by God) with all its characteristics: with its own cosmogony, cosmology, theogony, theology and eschatology. Expressions like “Newton’s picture of the world”, “Einstein’s picture of the world” and so on and so on; the scientific figure of the psychoanalytic who duplicates the trust spent figure of the confessor; the scientific figure of the doctor who duplicates the mythical and sometimes terrifying figure of the quack, of the fortune teller (e.g. the late Vanga created respect and through her terrifying appearance) proved this thesis.

The statement about the resemblance between the mathematical model of the Big Bang and the beginning of the Genesis is not new. It is far more interesting to point that one and the same, in its essence, cosmogony is being described with the tools of two languages –of the universal through the use of a number of performative utterances and of a ‘language for special purposes’ containing a lot of terms. In order to understand the second description one must have specific knowledge. For the first one – this knowledge is not needed: it is understandable by itself.

Of course there were times when even the Old Scripture’s description was esoteric: in those times when the official Biblical languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old-Bulgarian) were strictly defined and non-understandable for those who don’t have the knowledge how to use them.

And so once more we get to the primary Old Scripture performative, an analogy of the Big Bang theory that created everything that follows and which we described from a certain point of view.

This is the moment to answer the question why did I take John Austin and “How to do things with words” as a symbol of all that I lay down here. In my opinion, as an artifact, John Austin’s lectures in Harvard conjoined under this title have a foundational meaning but not in the sense which usually is being put in such statement. According to me the Austin’s theory is the bottom which the profanation that began about 200 years ago could reach, because it reveals the main mechanism of the Creation throughout the words inherent according to the tradition in God and God’s Son.

John Austin’s speculations on the performative utterance begin from speech events that don’t describe anything, don’t say anything, don’t claim anything, that are neither “true”, nor “false” and in which, as he says, exists an ordinary verb in present tense, first person, singular, active, indicative mood. And which represent realization of an action, or some part of it, which cannot be described in natural way as speech.

The “How to do things with words” project in some intellectual circles becomes as famous as, let’s say, Aristotle’s “Poetics” and “Rhetorics”, or at least Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Cours de linguistique générale”.

John Austin’s lectures publisher, John Urmson, is a prominent Aristotle’s expert and an active figure in the Aristotle Society. And, as it’s known, John Austin himself is an English logician, professor in Moral Philosophy in Oxford during the period of 1952–1960, who, while he is alive, publishes only a few articles and becomes famous after his death as a founder of the Oxford school, which worked on the philosophy through analysis of the everyday language (so called “Analytical Philosophy”).

 All these facts eloquently lead to the thought that John Austin – being a British, a philosopher and logician, – and his publisher couldn’t be unfamiliar with the Holy Scripture of Jewish and Christians, and not to be aware of the fact that the beginning of the Old Testament contains circumstantial description of the performative theory (for which, by consensus, John Austin is being considered a founder,) but not the anonymous observer and narrator in the book of Genesis.

What do I mean? Through the whole First and in the beginning of the Second chapter of the book of Genesis somebody describes how God, using performatives, has created the life on the Earth (and not in the Universe, as it is wrongly stated) because for its creation is said:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

In both Bulgarian and English texts of the Holy Scripture the performative verb is in the Past Tense and according to Austin’s theory for true performative utterance it is only possible when the statement is in present tense, 1p., sg., active, indicative mood (or at least concerning Bulgarian grammar).

Why do I say “describe”, but not “report in CNN style, for instance” how God creates the life on Earth?

Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

Why do I say “full synopsis”?

Then God said,” Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.

According to the original Austin’s theory about the performative it can’t be either “true” or “false” but can instead be deemed "felicitous" or "infelicitous" according to a set of conditions. In this case apparently felicity performatives have been described because the positive result has been demonstrated. Therefore, all the conditions for felicity of the performative utterance one of which (in this case) is too important are fulfilled: concrete persons and circumstances must be eligible for implementation of the concrete procedure, which we use through the performative. Apparently in this case the eligible one to create a new world through performative statements is God himself.

In the first chapter of Genesis ideas are also contained which we can compare not only to John Austin’s ideas. Thus for example in it we could find the idea of constitutional rules as rules which create [and also regulate] activity which existence is logically dependent on these rules, and I shall remind the following statement of Searle: the language semantics could be seen as systematical series of constitutional rules:

In “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature” Northrop Frye points on this occasion that the myth of the Creation in the Bible is a myth about artificial creation in which the world is being made by one heavenly father in opposition of the sexual myths about the Creation where the life is created (more often) by a mother-earth; in Genesis the forms of life are being talked into existence so that while they were being made or created they have not been made of something else.

Out of the range of the speech act theorists not only the Holy Scripture remains but also the religion perceived as a certain kind of discourse (in this case through the term “discourse” we name a reality which is created by the language or through another sign system existing in parallel with the daily one, i.e. discourse is equal to possible world). Thus for example nowhere in the Standard Theory of the Speech Acts is mentioned the fact that the Eucharist sacrament during the Devine Liturgy  is  performed without excesses through a special kind of speech act which according to  John Searle’s classification we are able to define as a “declaration” (and which from another point of view we are able to define as a manifestation of this which Roman Jacobson calls “magical function of the language” understood as a conversion of the absent or the inanimate third person towards a receiver of a conative message), reproducing the words of the Savior during the Last Supper (when he inaugurates the Eucharist) and from this moment on truly religious people do believe that the bread and the wine are transformed into the body and the blood of Christ (according to what Searle has written a single criteria for successness of the declaration).

The institution of the Lord's Supper is recorded in the three Synoptic Gospels and in St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians. The words of institution differ slightly in each account, reflecting a Marcan tradition (upon which Matthew is based) and a Pauline tradition (upon which Luke is based). In addition, Luke 22:19b-20 is a disputed text, which does not appear in some of the early manuscripts of Luke.

A comparison of the accounts given in the Gospels and 1 Corinthians is shown in the table below. The performative declarations are in italic:

In the explanatory notes of the John Chrysostom’s Devine Liturgy on this occasion is said: in the holy Eucharist therefore the Son of God becomes Son of Man and the sons of men uniting with Holy Sacrament gain the opportunity to become sons of God. And in the quality of being “sons of God” after completing the Sacrament the people (this way in the liturgical “scenario” are called the laity participating in the Diving Service) kneeling pronounce the following series of explicit performatives:

We praise thee, O God:     we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.

The more interesting question is why so consciously the creators of the Theory of the Speech Act ignore texts which are founding for the human race.

Now I am going to make a confession – the idea of the parallel which I have been making until now came to me when I was reading “Logic and Conversation” by Herbert Paul Grice. The Cooperative Principle and its maxims sounded so much like The Ten Commandments that the analogy was just too obvious.

After that Geoffrey Leech’ statement came that the linguistic semantics is ruled by rules and his pragmatics is ruled by principles. The key word in this case is of course “ruled”. Finally comes a philosophical essay “The Aquarius Conspiracy” by Marilyn Ferguson (1991) in which the idea of the old and new paradigms in the world amazingly reminds of an Old and New Testament made between God and men.

Of course it is impossible to give away non-mentioning such as this to ignorance. For my part the reasons are of a totally different kind and the things actually are deeper than it looks at first sight.

In one of Isaac Asimov’s stories a computer engineer proudly declares: “We’ve managed to create such a positron brain which can make decisions, can rule, and so on.” His interlocutor ironically corrects him:” You are the second ones. First has been God.”

What has been happening in the human society since the Renaissance usually is being described through the following standard clichés: during the Renaissance human becomes the center of the attention – not God; since the Renaissance man begins to align himself with God, look for example at the Statue of David by Michelangelo and so on. The statements of course are true but in my opinion they don’t represent an adequate point of view over the things. When we are talking about the Statue of David we must have in mind that it represents the optimistic view over this development of the things. The pessimistic view appears later and perhaps the strongest antonym of the Michelangelo’s David is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which actually is in Michelangelo’s position and not in David’s (the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein is the grotesque analogue of David).

Since the beginning of the history, until nowadays, the intellectuals have been working over one giant project to repeat what God (whatever may be hiding behind this name) has once managed to do according to the different Holy Scripts: to create a world alternative to the already existing one (i.e. to the one which has been created by God) with all its characteristics: with its own cosmogony, cosmology, Theogony, theology and eschatology. Expressions like “Newton’s picture of the world”, “Einstein’s picture of the world” and so on and so on; the scientific figure of the psychoanalytic who duplicates the trust spent figure of the confessor; the scientific figure of the doctor who duplicates the mythical and sometimes terrifying figure of the quack, of the fortune teller (e.g. the late Vanga created respect and through her terrifying appearance).

The idea of the science as secular religion of the 20th century has of course many supporters. But is important for us to realize that we are talking about religion but not faith. Or in other words we are talking about secular institutionalized faith presented as institutionalized knowledge. In George Lucas’ and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones (archeology professor) Saga this view is presented through the two hypostasis in which this most charming archeologist of all times is presented to the public: once as a university professor who claims that 90% of the archeologist’s work is being done in the library and secondly as working archeologist whose actions completely deny his academic thesis about the essence of the archeologist profession. It is remarkable that exactly in his second hypostasis Indiana Jones finds the Lost Arc, the Holy Grail but with the purpose of these artifacts becoming elements of the religious world of science.

Because of the sense of the science as a kind of religion and the dangers which result from it, truly qualified scientists (such as the French linguist André Martinet) in the beginning of their important treatises agree on that the science must have only descriptive and not prescriptive function. The conclusion of André Martinet in most cases sadly remains only a beautiful wish. The intellectuals creating and developing special and ‘for special purposes’ languages have always strived for the approbation of their theories in practice including the management of the society.

The statement about the resemblance between the mathematical model of the Big Bang and the beginning of the Genesis is not new. It is far more interesting to point that one and the same, in its essence, cosmogony is being described with the tools of two languages –of the universal through the use of a number of performative utterances and of a ‘language for special purposes’ containing a lot of terms. In order to understand the second description one must have specific knowledge. For the first one – this knowledge is not needed: it is understandable by itself.

Of course there were times when even the Old Scripture’s description was esoteric: in those times when the official Biblical languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old-Bulgarian) were strictly defined and non-understandable for those who don’t have the knowledge how to use them.

An so once more we get to the primary Old Scripture performative, an analogy of the Big Bang theory that created everything that follows and which we described from a certain point of view.

This is the moment to answer the question why did I take John Austin and “How to do things with words” as a symbol of all that I lay down here. In my opinion, as an artifact, John Austin’s lectures in Harvard conjoined under this title have a foundational meaning but not in the sense which usually is being put in such statement. According to me the Austin’s theory is the bottom which the profanation that began about 200 years ago could reach, because it reveals the main mechanism of the Creation throughout the words inherent according to the tradition in God and God’s Son.

Of course we could measure the time of the profanation from a significantly earlier starting point: from the moment when the profaned Brahmanism emerges – Buddhism; or from the time when different profaned variants of Judaism emerge: the Christianity, the Islam. If we take for example the Christianity as a kind of profaned Judaism we will find out that the Christianity itself could be subjected to further profanation: Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Protestantism and why not Rationalism. The worldly intellectual is a profaned cleric. The university institution is organized as the religious one i. e. it is secularized and self-profaning. The names “rector”, “dean”, “cathedra” and so on and so on, are primary names which serve the religious establishment.

Meanwhile “How to do things with words” is also a little light at the end of the tunnel because it has for its object the daily universal language which according to Charles Morris is “contradictory” and “inconvenient” for certain “specific purposes”. And the daily language is the natural human language: the language of him who has been created by God’s image and likeness.

Usually the researches on linguistic pragmatics are presented as an antithesis of the systematic, structural approaches to language, as an antithesis of the Chomsky’s theory (who proved the anarchistic essence of the science, declaring himself as a political anarchist). Our statement about the essence of the “How to do things with words” contradicts to a statement such as this because the two trends are originated and developed in one and the same macro frame. It is also interesting to point the limits which the two theories reach in their development reach. The performative theory – pre-mystic and locative power of utterance which highly reminds of the mystical power which the Jedis own in the George Lucas’ epos “Star Wars” and the generatic-transformative linguistics – up to the idea of the innatism according to the English tradition or the inneism – according to the French tradition (and in Bulgarian) – the innatism – as mystical in its essence.

The fact that this project exactly made it possible for the postmodern situation (as Lyotard says) to be explained, that he let the knowledge to be explained as a kind of discourse and to perceive the things around us which are artifacts as certain discourses, says that “How to do things with words” is the end of one and the beginning of another stage in the rational thinking. The offered point of view on the essence of science actually comes down to one of the many discourses as the relations between these discourses are in no way hierarchized.

What can a man who has decided to devote himself to science do in this case i.e. decided to study, to use and to control the reality through the scientific discourses, through the ‘meta-languages of control and innovations’ (Basil Bernstein)? Unified recipe for this does not exist. But the man who has devoted himself to semiotics, discourse analysis, to linguistics can begin to study the different scientific discourses by emphasizing on the fact that the argumentation used in these discourses is mainly pragmatical and not logical, i. e. that the purpose of these discourses is to form a certain opinion, because after Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper is obvious that the idea of authentic knowledge doesn’t stand criticism.

Actually the big challenge for the science has just began.

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