I’m currently a masters student in Medieval Studies at Columbia University. I recently begged my way into a Medieval Animals class, thinking it would cover things like falconry, hunting dogs, knights’ horses, and things of that sort, or else the symbolic significance attached to real animals like lions and stags and imaginary ones like unicorns and griffins. Unfortunately, I have discovered that the class has a strong political bent to it. Specifically, my professor and fellow students are highly critical of medieval peoples’ “logocentrism,” a term I’ve never heard before. Apparently “logocentrism” is the belief that the possession of language puts humans in a superior plane than animals. My class seems skeptical that humans should be “privileged” over animals. They seem scandalized by medieval attention to the story of Adam naming the animals–a story I always thought of as rather sweet–and the idea that man has dominion over animals. I’ve been completely silent through the first few classes because, to be honest, I’m flabbergasted. What they call “logocentrism,” I’ve always thought of as basic common sense. Has anyone else heard the term “logocentrism” before? Am I misunderstanding something here? If I’m not, how can I argue for something that should be self-evident, like the essential distinction between humans and animals? This argument seems to me to be crazier than the medieval belief in werwolves–at least medievals realized that blurring the lines between man and wolf was a bad thing for the man!
Common sense has become so common now as a kind of
mantra that even those using forget what it signifies. “Common” is right there in the term! If you are going to rely on just “common sense” or common sense over rigorous knowledge and educated conjecture, you have no reason to blowing your hard-earned money down a hole at an institution of higher learning.
That is why it’s called “higher learning”, because it aims at something “higher” than the vulgarity of common sense.
Before science, it was “common sense” to think the world was flat. It turns out that a “flat earth” actually is a pretty effective first-order approximation of the reality of our world, for most common and practical senses. Flat earthers way back when weren’t stupid, they were just ignorant, and did not have the benefit of tools and methods that freed them from the ignorance of “common sense” to have a deeper, more performative approximation of the world around them. Someone a thousand years ago may have been “flabbergasted” to learn that the world is really roughly spherical, or that the earth goes around the sun, rather than the other way around, which is what “common sense” told the masses.
On logocentrism, yeah, per science, it does indeed look like a conceit humans love to indulge. No animal can approach human levels of sophistication in terms of grammar, syntax, semantics or meta-representation, so far as we know. But while humans are clear and away the “world champs” of language, and linguistic thinking, the scientific discovery of the past century or so makes our language skills exceptional, but only as a matter of
degree, and not of kind.
If you go check out what science has learned about the proto-linguistic capabilities of animals, you will see what is seen on so many levels regarding man and animals – a continuum. The modern snail doesn’t give much sign of even rudimentary linguistic capabilities, never mind meta-representational cognition. But the orangatan, the bonobo, the chimpanzee and the gorilla, there you have species that show not just “use” of language in a pragmatic way (do the requested trick, get a cookie!), but grasp of meaning and sentence semantics. Cruder forms of linguistic process in the way humans do, that is.
And given the nearness to us of those primates on the species graph, the “tree of life”, we understand ourselves to be quite amazing with language (and we are very proud, indeed!), but even so, a “branch that sticks out” on that feature from this tree of life, which has the evolved rudiments of grammar and streams of lexemes clustered all around the species closest to us.
In any case, I wouldn’t worry about logocentrism, or any other “-ism” if you are hung up on “common sense”, here. You’re at a university or college now. Real knowledge awaits, and clinging to “common sense” for it’s own sake is just defeating the purpose of being there in the first place.
-TS
