 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Papa Don't Teach. Augustine on Language. There are certain things that fathers are expected to do with their sons, even though mothers can do these same things with their daughters equally well. Playing ball, going fishing, going to a football match, flying a kite, sitting round a campfire quoting memorable jokes from philosophy podcasts. In the ancient world though, things were a bit different, at least if your dad was Augustine. His idea of a father-son activity was to explore the nature of language together and to prove after long philosophical debate that all our knowledge derives from God. He wrote up a record of such a dialogue with his son Adeodatus in a work called De magistra, On the Teacher. In the Confessions, he tells us that it accurately represents Adeodatus's contributions. If this is true, then Adeodatus was a talented lad. His name means gift of God, but what God gives he can also take away. Adeodatus was Augustine's son by his mistress, the one sent away when a marriage was arranged for Augustine, and he lost the boy too when he died before reaching even 20 years of age. In his dialogue with the teenaged Adeodatus, we see Augustine picking up themes from earlier ancient philosophy and anticipating distinctions still made by philosophers of language today. The most obvious precedent is Plato's theory of recollection. In his dialogue The Meno, Plato had Socrates argue that we cannot actually acquire new knowledge through learning. Rather, teachers prompt us to remember forgotten knowledge that is already within our souls. Augustine would not have been able to read The Meno, but he did know a summary of the relevant passage from Cicero. In his own dialogue, he is going to argue for a similar conclusion. We never gain knowledge from human teachers, but find it in ourselves. On the other hand, he rejects Plato's idea that we are recollecting knowledge from before we are born. Instead, it is God himself who is teaching us from within, though we do not necessarily perceive this when we are learning. Augustine's path towards this conclusion is also very different from what we find in The Meno. On the Teacher is devoted mostly to the philosophy of language, and in particular how language can lead people to knowledge, if it does so at all. Augustine begins by asking Adeodatus what language is for, and the two agree that we use language to teach others and to remind ourselves. Language is, apparently, able to perform this task because it consists of signs. Not all signs are linguistic, for instance there are traffic signs and gestures, like pointing with the finger, but all words are signs. Even such words as if and nothing are agreed to be signs, even if it is hard to say what they are signs of. The father and son team notice that many puzzles arise here. When we are talking, it is not always clear whether we are talking about signs or the things they signify. Augustine gives the example of a statistical argument such as, if I get you to say lion, then a wild beast has just come out of your mouth, or if you are a man, in Latin homo, then you are made of two syllables. Such ambiguities plague any attempt to get clear about how exactly language works. In a lovely analogy, Augustine compares using language to philosophize about language to someone who is scratching an itch in his own fingers so that he can no longer tell which fingers are itching and which are scratching. Nonetheless, the two arrive at an appealing idea about how we might learn. We use signs, which are usually, but not always, linguistic, to teach people about things, and also about other signs. This leads our listener to gain knowledge of the things we are signifying. Thus I might tell you giraffes are tall, and if you had managed to get this far into the podcast without knowing that, you would thereby gain some new knowledge about giraffes. I can also use signs to tell you about other signs, as when I say, the word giraffe is a noun. Augustine has no quarrel with this second case where signs teach about other signs, but he raises doubts about whether signs can really give us knowledge about things. Certainly, this does not happen if I teach you the meaning of a word. Rather, it is the reverse. If I am to teach you what the word giraffe signifies, you must already know what a giraffe is. I might, for instance, point and say, look, that graceful creature with a long neck is a giraffe. In this sort of case, I am using a thing to teach you about a sign, not vice versa. Nor does my pointing at the giraffe, which is also a sign, give you knowledge about giraffes. It only draws your attention to the giraffe, and your sense perception does the rest. In fact, Adeudatus and Augustine find that there are puzzles even as to how I could use things to teach about signs. For instance, if I want to show you what the word dancing means, I can get up and dance for a minute. But you might conclude that the word dancing signifies dancing for one minute, or dancing like someone doing a bad imitation of James Brown. You wouldn't necessarily realize that this word refers to dancing in general. This problem of indeterminacy, that is how we can ever convey to someone the exact meaning of a word, reappeared much later in 20th century philosophy of language. A philosopher named Quine raised a puzzle to suggest that all translation is indeterminate. We are to imagine a linguist studying the language of a native tribe. The natives point and say, gavagai, when a rabbit runs past. The linguist might infer that gavagai means rabbit, but there are other possibilities. For instance, it might mean a part of a rabbit, or I could go for a nice stewed rabbit. Only once he has learned the language can the linguist engage with the natives so as to rule out these possibilities. But it's a puzzle how this is going to be possible, if the linguist cannot get started by learning what individual words mean. Augustine actually doesn't spend too much time worrying about this problem of whether we can use things to learn the meanings of signs. He perhaps underestimates the difficulty and assumes that a person of sufficient intelligence will be able to infer what a sign signifies, even if someone else might get the wrong idea. More difficult in his view is the question of how to teach about things using words. Suppose you already know what the words giraffe and tall mean, and I tell you, giraffes are tall. At best, my saying this is going to give you a belief that giraffes are tall. If you want to know that giraffes are tall, just hearing me utter these words is not enough. You must go do some empirical investigation. Check out a few giraffes and see if they are tall. But then, you'll be learning from your experience of the giraffes that giraffes really are tall, and not from my statement. In other cases empirical investigation will be irrelevant. I might say to you, justice is good. Again, even if you know what the words mean, this cannot induce knowledge, even if I try to convince you that I am right. Ultimately, you must consult your own understanding of justice and goodness to see whether the statement really is true or not. Whether you use sense experience or consider a more abstract subject within your mind, no human teacher will ever be giving you knowledge. All the teacher can give you is belief and encouragement to consider things for yourself. Any knowledge you get from this process is not innate, as Plato claimed, but comes from God himself. It was after all God who created the things that we experience through the senses. So, when you look at a giraffe to see whether it is tall, you are depending on God's creative act to make it possible for you to gain knowledge. In the more abstract cases, like the one about justice, you are consulting an inner truth, as Augustine puts it. Adeodatus is himself doing that, as he makes up his mind whether Augustine's argument about language is compelling. This inner truth, by whose light we achieve knowledge, is nothing other than God dwelling within us. So, it is God the Father, not Augustine the Father, who is in a position to bring Adeodatus to knowledge. Is language, then, like war in the opinion of Edwin Starr, good for absolutely nothing? Well, we have already seen that signs can serve to teach about other signs, but apart from that they seem only to give us belief. Even in the case where you tell me what you yourself believe, I will not thereby know whether you really believe it. You might be lying or misspeaking. For instance, if you say I love Buster Keaton, I might believe you love Buster Keaton, but maybe you are just trying to persuade me that you have good taste, and secretly you have never even seen one of his movies. If so, stop listening now and go watch one. The podcast will still be here when you get back. The upshot is that signs can only ever bring us to have beliefs about things, but this does not imply that signs are useless. They lead us to examine the things themselves and to examine our own sense of the truth. Furthermore, a human teacher can use language to dispel misconceptions and errors by showing their inconsistency or implausibility. This is what Socrates usually did in his conversations, and it is also a common occurrence in the dialogues that Augustine himself wrote early in his career. For Augustine, then, signs in general, and language in particular, do have an important role to play in bringing us to the truth. It's worth noting, by the way, that Augustine's argument for all this could be accepted even by an atheist. The atheist will simply reject Augustine's assumption that the truth that dwells within each of us is to be identified with God. But the atheist would not share Augustine's belief that one body of linguistic signs in particular serves to bring us to knowledge, the text collected in the Bible. The conversion scene from Augustine's Confessions, in which he hears a voice telling him to take and read and then comes across a particularly apt passage of the New Testament, is a vivid example of how signs can lead someone to truth. The Bible Augustine seized on that occasion would have been in Latin. He did know some Greek but complains in the Confessions that he never enjoyed studying it as a child. As for the Hebrew of the Old Testament, this was for Augustine a closed book, if you'll pardon the expression. One might therefore expect him to welcome his contemporary Jerome's project of returning to the Hebrew for a new Latin Bible, and he did point out the usefulness of Latin translations that render the Scriptures in slavishly accurate, word-by-word fashion. On the other hand, Augustine also defended the claims of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament which had supposedly been made with the assistance of divine inspiration. He discusses these points in a kind of handbook he wrote entitled Deoctrina Christiana, meaning On Christian Teaching. He tells us in its prologue that this work provides general instructions for interpreting the Scriptures, much as you might teach someone to read language in general. For more detailed exegesis of the Bible, one can turn for instance to his so-called literal commentary on Genesis. Here, literal, in Latin ad litiram, means that Augustine avoids allegorical or symbolic interpretation. But in On Christian Teaching, he does accept the need for such interpretation, at least regarding certain passages. But how do we know which passages should be read allegorically, and how do we know which allegorical interpretations we are to accept? Augustine answers this question with a kind of key to understanding the Bible, which he establishes in the first book of On Christian Teaching. His central claim is that all of Scripture has a single overarching purpose, to lead its reader to karitas. For Augustine, this word, usually translated charity, means a two-fold love, towards our neighbor and towards God. We should also bear love towards ourselves, but Augustine thinks that no one needs to be instructed in that respect. All humans naturally love themselves, as we can see from their instinct for self-preservation. We do need to be taught, indeed constantly reminded and persuaded, to love God and our fellow man. This message is conveyed so clearly and emphatically in the Bible that it can serve as a measuring stick against which to assess interpretations of any specific passage. If the overall point of the Bible is to lead us to charity, we can be certain that no interpretation inconsistent with charity could be correct. Most obviously, if a passage seems to imply that we should harm our fellow man, then we must resort to allegorical interpretation. Of course, there might be more than one allegorical interpretation possible. But, so long as these interpretations would promote charity, we can be relaxed about accepting any or even all of them. Augustine even suggests that God predicted that different readers would adopt these various interpretations so that in a sense, all of them could be correct. Let's try to bring together this work on Christian teaching with the theory of learning we found in On the Teacher. There, we saw Augustine saying that signs cannot give us knowledge but only beliefs. We may then reflect for ourselves and ultimately turn those beliefs into knowledge thanks to the light of inner truth. Augustine seems to be thinking more or less along the same lines in his handbook on interpreting Scripture. At least, he says in one striking passage that someone who has been confirmed in faith, hope, and charity has no further need of the Scriptures unless it is to teach others. Furthermore, he again states here that God's assistance is needed to benefit from teaching. And yet, it is worthwhile for one human to teach another, especially if the teaching is based upon the Scriptures, just as it is sensible to administer medicine even if no one recovers from illness without God willing it. Something we did not find in On the Teacher, though, was the idea that there is really only one thing worth learning. Now, in On Christian Teaching, Augustine not only rejects readings of Scripture inconsistent with charity, he seems to dismiss any intellectual activity except insofar as it helps us to achieve this aim. This emerges in a sustained discussion of what is and is not worth keeping from pagan writings. Augustine begins with the admirable sentiment that whatever truth has been found by the pagans should be embraced by Christians. But if all truths are equal in this respect, some truths are apparently more equal than others. Detailed knowledge of astronomy, for instance, is to be avoided because it doesn't help us understand Scripture and might also lead us along the wicked paths of astrology. These were paths Augustine himself traveled as a young man, as we know from the Confessions. Overall, Augustine tells his fellow Christians, the right approach to pagan wisdom is the attitude the Israelites took towards Egyptian treasure. They spurned the Egyptians' pagan idols but happily made off with their gold and other valuables so as to make better use of them than the Egyptians themselves could. Augustine mentions the Platonists in particular as having provided material worth commandeering for use in Christian teaching. Here too, the Confessions provide a fine example, when the books of the Platonists help free Augustine from his materialist beliefs. The Confessions also illustrate that, for Augustine, the Platonist books are good enough to help interpret the good book. He puts a finish to his autobiography not only with the philosophical discussion of time we looked at in the previous episode but also with a detailed reading of the opening verses of Genesis. At least three of the points he makes here are drawn from his study of Platonist philosophy. First, God is eternal, in Plotinus' sense of not being subject to time, even if Genesis gives the contrary impression by speaking of days of creation. In fact, time was created along with the physical universe. Second, we can understand the opening sentence of Genesis, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, with the help of Platonist metaphysics. Augustine connects this heaven to a phrase found in the Psalms, the heaven of heaven. This represents for him an intelligible realm of forms created by God but still eternal, again in the sense of being above time. Third, Genesis goes on to speak of earth being without form. This, Augustine understands in light of a theory of matter like that of Plotinus as being utterly formless. Again, he opposes this Platonist idea to the more crass physical imaginings of his own youth when he was under the sway of the Manicheans. In keeping with the interpretive theory of on-Christian doctrine, here in the Confessions Augustine is open to the possibility that other interpretations may be possible. So long as the message that emerges from an interpretation is true, mission accomplished. In fact, Augustine seems to suggest that the Bible necessarily gives rise to multiple interpretations. So concise is its expression, here in Genesis and elsewhere, that it is like a powerful jet of water coming from a confined source. Thus, many interpreters may be needed to unfold its entire meaning. But, of course, one needs to be careful that one does not defend an interpretation out of pride of ownership rather than because one's interpretation is true. Reading the Bible should be a cooperative effort carried out by the whole community, not a competition. In a circle that is presumably virtuous rather than vicious, the charitable attitude taught by Scripture is necessary if we are to take the right attitude towards the very task of interpreting Scripture. Augustine's openness to other interpretations is of course itself an example of this correct charitable attitude. So, how do the Platonist philosophical points that Augustine extracts from the opening of Genesis fit into his overall account of the Bible? In what sense do I become a more charitable person by realizing that matter is formless, or that God is eternal and beyond time? The answer is simple, because it helps me love God. When Augustine came to recognize God as a transcendent Creator who creates formless matter and then fashions a world out of that matter, he left behind the dualist teachings of the Manicheans. This meant accepting that the entire world is itself a kind of sign, pointing towards a Creator who has no opposing principle. This is only one example of Augustine's conviction that even rather advanced metaphysical truths of philosophy are inextricably bound up with issues of morality. To believe in a principle of evil is to fall short of an appreciation of the good, and thus to fall short of goodness. Augustine therefore sees a powerful link, if not an identity, between the search for knowledge and the search for goodness. So, we should not be surprised to discover a parallel between his views on language and his famous teaching on the will. We've seen in this episode that for Augustine, language by itself cannot bring us to knowledge. For that, we need the involvement of God dwelling within us. Likewise, he believes that we cannot be good without the assistance of God. All humans are born into a state of sin, and no matter how admirable their intentions, they will fall back into sin over and over again if left to their own resources. Even once someone converts to Christianity and receives baptism, every day will still be a struggle against temptation. Augustine makes this point vividly in his Confessions. What he confesses is not just youthful weakness and indiscretion, but an ongoing susceptibility to the allure of sin. But if only God's help can allow us to avoid evil, can we really say that we retain morally significant freedom? That question gives us a graceful transition to the next episode, when we'll be looking at Augustine on free will, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.