Noam Chomsky, one of the most famous and respected intellectuals in the world, turned 96 on Saturday. For more than half a century, large numbers of people have read his works in various languages, and many have relied on his commentaries and interviews to gain insight into intellectual debates and current events.
Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023, which severely limited his movement, made speech difficult and prevented him from traveling. His birthday provides an opportunity to reflect on the vast body of work he has produced over the years and to reflect on the many ways in which his texts and recordings continue to engage critically in contemporary discussions across disciplines and fields.
Noam Chomsky's vast body of work includes scientific research on language, human nature, and the mind, as well as political writings on American imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Central America, the Vietnam War, repressive institutions, the media, and the many ways in which people's needs are subordinated to the interests of profit and control. .
As a humanities and law graduate, I have studied Chomsky's work from various perspectives and written a biography called "Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent" and a book about Chomsky's influence called "The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower." . One of the important themes in his wide-ranging oeuvre is his lifelong fascination with human creativity, which explains his vocal criticism of those who seek to "keep the masses under control."
Early days
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia. He and his younger brother, David Chomsky, grew up in a vibrant household led by Else Simonofsky and William (Zev) Chomsky, progressive educators deeply involved in a wide range of Jewish and Zionist cultural activities.
Chomsky often attributes his interest in teaching and learning to careful study of the Hebrew works with his parents and to the vivid educational experience he gained at the experimental Oak Lane County Day School. This school relied on the approach of John Dewey, who advocated experiential learning and encouraged individual creativity rather than competition among students.
A precocious and talented student, at age 12 Chomsky proofread his father's book on David Kimhi, a 13th-century Hebrew grammarian. It was the beginning of a life devoted to philology, philosophy and the study of language and mind. From the very beginning, Chomsky sought to understand the innate human tendencies toward freedom, dignity, and creativity, which inspired him to encourage these traits of human nature.
Although Chomsky's parents were, as he called them, "normal Roosevelt Democrats", he was attracted to more radical approaches to society and the promotion of non-violent social structures. At the age of ten, he read about the Spanish Civil War, which inspired him to write an editorial about the fall of Barcelona for the school newspaper. It was an early hint of his public intellectual work and fierce opposition to repressive systems and illegitimate governments.
As a young man, he joined the socialist wing of the Zionist youth movement, which opposed the Jewish state, and in discussions advocated Arab-Jewish class cooperation in socialist Palestine. His deep knowledge of Palestine and Israel, along with the fact that he was fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, shaped his sharp criticism of Israeli state power.
Radical pedagogy
After an early education focused on self-knowledge and free exploration, Chomsky was faced with rote learning, competition with other students, and the mainstream value system in high school. He reacted to this by regularly going to New York where he visited bookstores. He regularly visited a relative who had a kiosk on 72nd Street and who was an intellectual center for emigrants interested in radical approaches to society.
Noam Chomsky graduated from high school in 1944 and entered the University of Pennsylvania. Although he expressed disillusionment with the conformism and acceptance of the status quo in the academic environment, he found inspiration in professors such as the philosopher C. West Churchman, the linguist Giorgio Levi Dela Vida, and, especially, Zelig Harris. Chomsky knew members of the Harris family because Jewish services were held in the home of Zelig Harris's father, which the Chomsky family occasionally attended.
Father Noam Chomsky's approach to the study of languages had similarities with the work of Zelig Harris in the field of Semitology, which deals with the study of Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Harris invited Noam to proofread his book Methods in Structural Linguistics. That long-awaited book was based on the idea that the function and meaning of linguistic elements depend on their relationships with other parts of a sentence. Although he tried extremely hard to understand Harris's linguistic paradigm, Chomsky later abandoned it. However, he remained fascinated by Harris's political ideas and the creative debates he encouraged.
As a figure widely regarded as the founder of cognitive science, Chomsky criticized the media hype around data warehousing, artificial intelligence and ChatGPT
Chomsky met Karol Doris Schatz at the Hebrew school where his father was the director and her mother was one of the lecturers. They got married in 1949. Four years later, they decided to move to an Israeli kibbutz, expecting to find a culture of free and creative thinking there. Instead, they were deeply disillusioned as they encountered what Chomsky described as ideological conformity to Stalinist ideology. After only six weeks, they returned to the US.
The young couple settled in Boston and started a family. Noam continued his postgraduate studies, while Karol temporarily stopped her education to devote herself to raising her children. She later returned to language acquisition research, eventually teaching and conducting research at MIT and Harvard. Karol Chomsky passed away in 2008, and Noam remarried Brazilian translator Valeria Wasserman Chomsky in 2014.
Chomsky revolution
When Chomsky was a student, most academic psychologists described human language as a system of habits, skills, or dispositions acquired through extensive training, induction, generalization, and association. According to this view, language develops gradually with experience, with rewards and punishments as mechanisms that encourage it.
This framework was at the very center of the structuralist paradigm, which analyzed the form and meaning of texts as different parts of the same thing. Every language, from this point of view, constrains the way in which phonemes and morphemes - the smallest units of sound and meaning in language - and other elements are arranged and distributed. According to this understanding, people have the ability to learn language in a similar way as they acquire other knowledge.
In his Ph.D., as well as in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, as well as in his New York Review of Books review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky challenged this paradigm and announced a revolution in linguistics, known as the Chomsky Linguistic Revolution.
Chomsky's starting point was the idea that humans are endowed with a universal grammar that is activated by exposure to natural language. Children acquire language skills by building on innate knowledge. This means that the capacity for language literally grows in the mind in a way similar to the development of organs in the body.
He developed these ideas in the book Cartesian Linguistics, in which he laid out his intellectual debt to the works of, among others, Descartes, Kant, Rousseau and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
In the early 1960s, Chomsky gained recognition in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. His research, as well as the work of a growing number of linguists who adopted his approach, led to significant advances in the study of syntax, generative grammar, language and mind, semantics, form, and the interpretation of language.
His political involvement is documented in what I believe to be a remarkable collection of interviews and books on American imperialism, the Cold War, the Middle East, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Confused by the American spirit of resigned consensus, he began collaborating with Edward S. Herman on books such as "Counterrevolutionary Violence," "The Political Economy of Human Rights," and "The Manufacturing of Consent," which was later turned into a popular film of the same name.
A common thread
The common thread that connects many of Chomsky's intellectual projects are the four "problems" that were the focus of most of his life's work. The first is Plato's problem, which considers how it is possible for people, whose contact with the world is short and limited, to know so much. Another is the Orwellian problem, which begs the question of how people know so little, given the amount of information they have access to. The third is the Descartes problem, which deals with the human ability to freely express thoughts in new ways through a myriad of means that are appropriate to circumstances but not a consequence of them. Finally, there is the Humboldt problem, which focuses on what constitutes language.
These problems relate to the ways in which people learn, to the impediments to human development, and to speculations about the initial state of language ability, which Chomsky has expounded in numerous works.
Extremely persistent and active, Chomsky continued to publish and present views on contemporary issues even into his mid-nineties. His ideas were evolving, but they were deeply rooted in his views on the nature of the human mind. He is one of the most quoted intellectuals in history and was named a leading living public intellectual in 2005. Millions of people have watched his debates and discussions with various famous figures, including William F. Buckley, Angela Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Michel Foucault, Howard Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Pearl, Jean Piot, Brianna Joy Gray and even Ali Ji.
As a figure widely regarded as the founder of cognitive science, Chomsky criticized the media hype surrounding data storage, artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.
As the voice of those oppressed and disenfranchised, he spoke from the perspective of human rights, intellectual self-defense, and popular struggle through independent thinking against power structures and oppression. Chomsky made remarkable achievements that reverberate around the world and will likely continue to influence future generations.
The author is a professor of humanities and law at Vanderbilt University
Theconversation.com
Translation: NB
Bonus video:
