Speech’s apparent impersonal life is borrowed from the personal freedom of speakers.
Evidence
It has been maintained recently that there is a sort of living order of words, of the dynamic laws of speech, an impersonal life of the logos—in short that speech is a Nature and that to some extent man must obey it in order to make use of it as he does with Nature. But this is because people in considering speech frequently will take speech that is dead (i.e., already spoken) and infuse into it an impersonal life and force, affinities and repulsions all of which in fact have been borrowed from the personal freedom of the for-itself which spoke. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1217
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: This is the crux of Sartre’s anti-structuralist position: the ‘life of language’ is a projection backward from free acts. It resists one-sentence summary and has been argued against by an entire continental tradition (Saussure, structuralism).
- XREF: This is the foundational counter-position to the structuralist linguistics Sartre is arguing against — a direct setup for how Beauvoir’s ethic of situated freedom inherits this anti-structuralist stance. — connects to: A being possessing speech cannot coherently imagine its own prior absence. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 504; Everyday speech conceals society’s domination over language as hidden meaning — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 669; Language’s laws arise only through the free synthetic project of the speaker — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1218
Broader Connections
- Language’s laws arise only through the free synthetic project of the speaker
#expands(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1218 - Everyday speech conceals society’s domination over language as hidden meaning
#contradicts(0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 669 - A being possessing speech cannot coherently imagine its own prior absence.
#qualifies(0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 504