Trần Đức Thảo: A Marxist Theory on Origins of Human Language?

My paper will explore Trần Đức Thảo’s work from historical, philosophical, and linguistic points of view, most notably it will focus on his Recherches sur l’origine du langage et de la conscience (1973). Thảo's Recherches had rarely caught the attention of the scholars of linguistic ideas’ history (Baribeau 1986; Barthes 1951 (about his philosophy); Federici 1970; McHale 2002; Herrick 2005). Indeed, Thảo’s sources require a multidisciplinary approach. In this book, Thảo suggested a theory on origins of human language, in which the Marxist tradition is put in relation with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the background of Darwinism. Already in 1970s, the critical role assigned to biological and social subject of communication in Thảo’s theory of language represents an alternative paradigm to both Chomskian and Stucturalist trends. Thảo (Từ Sơn, Bắc Ninh, 26 September 1917 – Paris, 24 April 1993) had been studying with Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure since 1936 (see the works of Merleau- Ponty in the same years: Merleau-Ponty 1942; 1945; 1948; 1949-50; 1951). Thảo probably learned from Merleau-Ponty that corporeity is fundamental to the constitution of consciousness: the bodily relation to the world is intrinsically expressive and communicative. Moreover, the non-linguistic context, in which we speak, is as important as the message. In the same period, he studied the philosophical works of Marxist traditions. So, Thảo goes beyond the limits of Husserl's account of consciousness thanks to Marxist account of labor and society. In Marx, Engels and Lenin’s writings (Sériot 1986; 1999), Thảo discovered the role played by social and working dimension in language and he suggested a theory on cooperative origins of human language. His book on origins of language and consciousness combined materialist, biological, and cognitive accounts of subjectivity and consciousness with the Marxist account he had elaborated earlier. In this theoretical frame, the reflection on Saussure’s legacy gains importance: Thảo has to resolve some problems related to the bodily disposition of speakers, the social and pragmatic dimension in which they speak and communicate, the role of extra-linguistic context, etc. In Thảo’s thought, linguistic comprehension is like the construction of a shared space. Like recent scholars, Thảo argues that cooperative hunting, social learning, and communication share the same cognitive skills. For this reason, language and cognition are related to the context in which humans live. According to him, the hominid evolution was the result of the development of complex imitation system, realized through protosigns and protospeech in cooperative working or in manipulative contexts and based on shared bodily-schemata. In this theoretical scenario, Thảo interprets hominid's language by itself, its own code and its own original semantic which is not immediately similar to human language. From a phenomenological point of view, deictic gestures could be considered the original form of consciousness because they exactly express the intentional relation towards external object(s). Following Marx and Engels, Thảo argues that language is originally constituted on the activity of labor and the beginning of consciousness coincides with the appearance of first tools. Thus, the first expression of consciousness is the gestural and verbal indication involved in task-oriented cooperative activities already in hominid societies. Trying to integrate Piaget's (1923; 1926) child-development psychology with the findings of Spirkin's (1960) and Leroi-Gourhan's (1964-65) anthropology, Thảo describes six stages of evolution of genus Homo according to tools used by hominid and pre-human ancestors, their representations of external objects and their communicative systems.