On Wednesday, 22 April, I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Lausanne as part of a course taught by Stéphanie Pahud, who teaches linguistics there.
The lecture focused on the way generative AI is reshaping our relationship with language.
I recalled the crucial importance of language for the proper functioning of our faculties. Language is consubstantial with our intelligence in the broadest sense. Language and thought work together, an insight that inspired Merleau-Ponty's expressions "speaking thought" and "thinking speech", formulations that attest to the impossibility of conceiving one without the other.
Language is also bound up with our imagination and our capacity for understanding. It allows us to transform needs into images and to tame our instincts. For Ernst Cassirer, this is how we move from body to mind, or from beast to human. Language provides a symbolic counterpart to what is no longer, what is not, or what cannot be. As such, it is the lifeblood of our freedom and our fulfilment.
"To speak is to come into the world," said Georges Gusdorf. Emile Benveniste, likewise, argued that to be a subject is to say "I". In other words, there is no subjectivity without enunciation. We realise ourselves as individuals each time we begin a sentence, and just as much when we lend our ear — and our mind — to another's words.
Speech is also a bringing to light of our latent ideas. In speaking, in writing, I am compelled to give form to what I merely sense intuitively, thereby enacting the intelligibility of feelings that were waiting for the aid of words. Language uncovers, untangles, and unfolds the secrets of our inner life.
To put an experience into words is to make that experience exist in a different way, to appropriate it, to understand it, and to realise what it means to us. This is why we must beware of the temptation to delegate our discursive capacities entirely to the machine, for doing so surrenders us to a logic of optimisation that inevitably leads to an existential dead end. Language, and everything it carries with it, is not merely a means to an end — it is, in many respects, an end in itself: the place where our fantasies, our anxieties, and all that nourishes our agency come to fruition and find expression.
In a sense, one might say that the meaning of life is to speak. Hence the irrepressible urge to narrate what happens to us, as though the finest moment were the moment of telling.
To the ardent defenders of ambient utilitarianism, one must reply that there is nothing more remarkably useful than reading, writing, and speaking.
Beware the sirens of efficiency, for after all that time saved, there will still be life to live…