Steiner's name for the language things themselves cannot utter: what falls silent as matter hardens outwardly comes to sound again inwardly as human speech.
The Silenced Speech of Things in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of where human language comes from, given in the linguistics lecture of 7 April 1921 at the Goetheanum in Dornach and printed in GA 76, The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences. Steiner set it against the two explanations then current: the Wauwau or bow-wow theory, which derives words from imitated animal cries, and the Bimbam or ding-dong theory, which derives them from the ringing of struck objects. Neither works, he argued, because a thing's own language is exactly what cannot be heard from outside. As a being becomes external and material it falls silent, and that silenced content becomes audible again in the human interior, where the rhythmic and limb organisation meets the head organisation, and there it sounds as the word. Speech is the muted side of the world arriving at voice.
The silenced speech of things is the principle Steiner offered linguistics in 1921: every thing carries a language of its own, and that language goes mute to the degree that the thing becomes physical. What has fallen silent outside does not vanish. It surfaces in the human being as speech, which is why Steiner treated the forming of words as a birth rather than a copy of anything heard.
In Steiner's Own Words
This inward experiencing of what is outwardly present leads to the fact that what remains outwardly mute in things as their own language begins to resound as the human language in the human inner being. Please proceed from this sentence as from a regulative principle. Proceed from this sentence that what is in things, as they become external, material, falls silent, that in dematerialization it becomes audible in the human being and comes to speak. Then you will find the way in which you do not develop a yap-yap or a bim-bim theory, but on which you see that which is external to things – and cannot be perceived by external observation because it is silent and only exists in a supersensible way – as language in the human interior.
What it Means Today
Experimental psychology reached the same doorway from the other side. In Gestalt Psychology (1929) Wolfgang Köhler asked observers to match two invented words, takete and baluba, to a spiky figure and a rounded one, and found the pairing was not free. Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard revived the test in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2001, renaming the words bouba and kiki, and reported that roughly 95 percent of respondents, American undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India alike, gave the jagged shape to kiki and the rounded one to bouba. Neither drawing makes a sound, so no one was imitating anything. What the participants matched was the inward gesture of the shape, felt in the mouth as a rounding or a break, which is the move Steiner asked philology to make: stop hunting for an outer model of the word, and attend to what in the thing has no outer voice at all. The residue embarrasses Ferdinand de Saussure's doctrine of the arbitrary sign.
Thalira synthesis: the bouba effect is the silenced speech of things caught in the laboratory at its smallest scale, one syllable wide, and it keeps being rediscovered. Steiner's own heirs took the principle into art instead, through the speech formation work he developed with Marie Steiner-von Sivers in the Speech and Drama course of September 1924 (GA 282).
Where to Read More
- The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences, GA 76
- Speech and Drama, GA 282
- Find Speech and Drama at SteinerBooks
- Deepening the Silence: Advanced Meditation Techniques for Mastery
- Silent Yoga: The Power of Mauna (Noble Silence)
- Meditation Retreats in Alberta: Mountain Silence and Prairie Peace