Language, Thought, Relativism, Nationalism: An Interdisciplinary Study

Ms. Neumer and her team began their project with a critical analysis of the various theories of the relationship between language and thought. Their aim was to develop a theoretical position concerning the issue of universalism versus relativism. This issue is closely bound up with one of the main questions of the history of East and Central Europe, namely, the question of the nation, and the possibility of mutual understanding between national cultures. The team attempted to avoid falling into an all-too-common trap, that of allowing a political perspective to obscure the central theoretical issues. In a project whose outcome totalled over 1000 pages of manuscript in German, English and Hungarian, they touched on cognitive psychological, linguistic, semiotic, socio-semiotic, and other such themes. Their experience has convinced them of the fruitful heuristic possibilities of the interaction of scientific and philosophical approaches in this area of research. A preliminary analysis of the history of philosophy and inquiries into conceptual fields revealed that, in order to reach strong relativist conclusions concerning the unity of thought and language, it is required to take as a point of departure the widest possible sense of these concepts. But in fact, such an option ends up refuting itself: pursuing the premises to their final conclusion one arrives at the restriction of relativism. The team outlined a theory of the understanding of the Other which, borrowing from analytical as well as continental-hermeneutic trends, does not underestimate, on the one hand, the difficulties of understanding between various forms of life, cultures, and languages, but, on the other hand, can provide an alternative solution to the theory of incommensurabiltiy. Within the boundary of this problematic the team studied the problems of translatability, the acquisition of the mother and foreign languages, and natural or cultural determinacy of kind terms. The team regards its most original contribution to be the association of the problem of relativism-universalism and the language-thought relation with contemporary investigations into the question of orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Their conclusion was that, although certain connections can be revealed both between forms of communication and the thesis of the unity of language and thought, and between periods in the history of communication and the predominance of relativistic or universalistic tendencies, forms of communication do not unequivocally determine the answers to these questions.

Nationalism and Literature

Zunic investigated the relationship between nationalism and Serbian literature. He first analysed and evaluated the justifications for a number of critical accusations against Serbian literature. These included mythological and epic foundations (traditionalism), an obsession with national history and with the motif of the Serbian people as an eternal victim, the domination of the collective over the individual (populism), an anachronistic romantic conception of the social function of literature. In order to gain an unbiased judgement of the nationalistic role of contemporary Serbian literature, Zunic prepared a list of those books with the greatest number of copies issued in the decade 1985-1995, and constructed an appropriate hermeneutic procedure of understanding the meaning of the content and form of these works. He concluded that contemporary Serbian literature is in fact occupied with national history, and also with the unmasking of communist totalitarianism. The most influential books express and document either nationally-oriented or civil-oriented world views. The former, although mostly not militant works (with their realistic "closed" form), might have had an ideological influence on the Serbian national consciousness, while the civil-oriented works (with their "open" modern or post-modern form) could not neutralise all these extra-literary effects of the nationally-oriented works, since the predominant way of reading is a communication with the literary content (realised as a testimony of historical facts), and not with the literary form (as a carrier of the artistic value and a "moderator" of any content).