Debating Human Nature
On 22 October, 1971, the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders hosted Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault in a debate on human nature at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The Pentagon Papers had been released just a few months before, and American opposition to the Vietnam War was at a high-water mark. Sitting across the street from the world headquarters of Philips Electronics—the multinational corporation known especially at that time for its audio-visual and information-storage technologies—Chomsky began with a deliberate account of his position:
A person who is interested in studying languages is faced with a very definite empirical problem. He is faced with an organism…who has somehow acquired an amazing range of abilities [which] enable him…to say what he means, to understand what people say to him, to do this in a fashion that I think is proper to call highly creative.
Chomsky briefly considered empiricist and typological research on language. He concluded in response that because children begin with, a “highly organized and…restrictive schematism,” they are able to “make the huge leap from scattered and degenerate data to highly organized knowledge.” For Chomsky, this innate schematism was the stuff of universal human nature.
Hands clasped, jaw set, Foucault listened attentively. He sipped orange juice and jotted a few notes. When it was his turn to speak, he started talking about the history of scientific disciplines—about the ways in which disciplines are built around organizing and peripheral concepts. Foucault presented a short history of biology, and discussed, in particular, the concept of life. Focusing in on the end of the eighteenth century, he said,
[l]ife was a concept that served to point out new fields of study that science still had to discover. I would say, as a historian of science, that the concept of life was an epistemological indicator; an index of the problems that still had to be uncovered. And I ask myself whether perhaps one could say the same thing about human nature.
This was a structuralist account and a structuralist’s challenge. It was a “système où tout se tient”: microscopy, chemistry, physiology, and the organizing concept of life. Foucualt’s opening move, in other words, was to pull the rug out from under the debate by relegating “human nature” to discourse, distancing it from extra-linguistic reality. He cast doubt on Chomsky’s theory of innate organization and creativity by referring it to a recent stratum in a long succession of overlaid discursive grids. Whereas Chomsky addressed himself to the ahistorical individual; Foucault was preoccupied with collectives over time.
This exchange introduces key themes concerning twentieth-century linguistics, scientific disciplines, and the history of science. It invites us to reflect not only on how linguistic research was cultivated during the Cold War period (by diverse publics and with respect to the cognitive turn) but also on the extent to which the historiography of science is imbricated by the history of linguistics.
The full video is freely available on YouTube, which is where I grabbed this screenshot.
After the opening moves just described, Chomsky and Foucault quickly moved to debate the kinds of social structures that “human nature” might entail, raising a number of further questions along the way. Should we attempt to understand techno-scientific systems in terms of power or resistance? In terms of structures or contingencies? Should research translate into political action or not? And to what extent can researchers tolerate the hostile values of their host institutions, or vice versa? All of these issues were debated in Eindhoven just as they have been in recent conversations about the history of science.
Works cited:
Chomsky, Noam. 2006 [1974]. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature. New York: New Press.
Cohen-Cole, Jamie. 2014. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chapter 5.
Marchand, Suzanne. 2014. “Has the History of the Disciplines Had its Day?” In Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, Eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 131-152.
