Herder

Descartes’s second test for determining whether automata are “real men” is also reinterpreted, within the context of the “great chain of being.”

Descartes argues that animal behavior is a matter of instinct. The perfection and specificity of animal instinct make it subject to mechanical explanation.

A characteristic subsequent view is that there is a gradation of intelligence and that perfection of instinct varies inversely with intellectual ability.

To La Mettrie, for example, it seems to be a universal law of nature “that the more one gains in intelligence [du côté de l’esprit], the more one loses in instinct” (p. 99). (Cf. notes 7, 29.)

The 2 Cartesian tests (possession of language, diversity of action) are interrelated by Herder, in an original way, in his influential Prize Essay on the origin of language.24

Like Descartes, Herder argues that human language is different in kind from exclamations of passion and that it cannot be attributed to superior organs of articulation, nor, obviously, can it have its origins in imitation of nature or in an “agreement” to form language.25 Rather, language is a natural property of the human mind.

But nature does not provide man with an instinctive language, or an instinctive faculty of language, or a faculty of reason of which language is a “reflection.”

Man’s fundamental quality is, rather, weakness of instinct, and man is clearly far inferior to animals in strength and certainty of instinct.

But instinct and refinement of sense and skill correlate with narrowness of the scope and sphere of life and experience, with the focusing of all sensitivity and all power of representation on a narrow fixed area (pp. 15–16).

The following can be taken as a general principle: “the sensitivity, capability, and productive drive of animals increase in power and intensity in inverse proportion to the magnitude and diversity of their sphere of activity” (pp. 16–17).

But man’s faculties are less acute, more varied and more diffuse.

“Man does not have an unvaried and narrow sphere of activity, where only one task awaits him” (p. 17). He is not, in other words, under the control of external stimuli and internal drives and compelled to respond in a perfect and specific way.

This freedom from instinct and from stimulus control is the basis for what we call “human reason”: “… if man had the drives of animals, he could not have in him what we now call reason, since such drives would unknowingly pull his forces towards a single point, so that he would have no free sphere of awareness” (p. 22).

It is this very weakness of instinct that is man’s natural advantage, that makes him a rational being. “If man cannot be an instinctive animal, he must – enabled by the freely working positive power of his soul – become a reflective creature” (p. 22). In compensation for his weakness of instinct and sense, man receives the “advantage of freedom” (p. 20).

“No longer inevitably a machine in the hands of nature, he himself becomes the purpose and the objective of his efforts” (p. 20).

Free to reflect and to contemplate, man is able to observe, compare, distinguish essential properties, identify, and name (pp. 23f.).

It is in this sense that language (and the discovery of language) is natural to man (p. 23), that “the human being is formed to be a creature of language” (p. 43). On the one hand, Herder observes that man has no innate language – man does not speak by nature.

On the other hand, language in his view is so specifically a product of man’s particular intellectual organization that he is able to claim: “If I were to gather up all the loose ends and display that fabric called human nature: definitely a linguistic weave!” The resolution of the apparent paradox lies in his attempt to account for human language as a consequence of the weakness of human instinct.

Descartes had described human reason as “a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations”26 and which therefore provides for unbounded diversity of free thought and action.27

Herder does not regard reason as a “faculty of the mind” at all. Instead, he defines it as the freedom from stimulus control.

He attempts to show how this “natural advantage” makes it possible – in fact, necessary (p. 25) – for humans to develop language.

Before Herder, James Harris had given a characterization of “rationality” in terms rather similar to his, that is, as freedom from instinct rather than as a faculty with fixed properties.

Harris distinguishes between the “Human Principle,” which he calls “reason,” and the “Brutal Principle,” which he calls “instinct,” in the following passage:

MARK then … the Difference between Human Powers and Brutal – The Leading Principle of BRUTES appears to tend in each Species to one single Purpose – to this, in general, it uniformly arrives; and here, in general, it as uniformly stops – it needs no Precepts or Discipline to instruct it; nor will it easily be changed, or admit a different Direction.

On the contrary, the Leading Principle of MAN is capable of infinite Directions – is convertible to all sorts of Purposes – equal to all sorts of Subjects – neglected, remains ignorant, and void of every Perfection – cultivated, becomes adorned with Sciences, and Arts – can raise us to excel, not only Brutes, but our own Kind – with respect to our other Powers and Faculties, can instruct us how to use them, as well as those of the various Natures, which we see existing around us.

In a word, to oppose the two Principles to each other – The Leading Principle of Man, is Multiform, Originally Uninstructed, Pliant and Docil – The Leading Principle of Brutes is Uniform, Originally Instructed; but, in most Instances afterward, Inflexible and Indocil.28

Thus we may say “that MAN is by Nature a RATIONAL ANIMAL,” meaning by this nothing more than that he is free from the domination of instinct.29

A concern for the creative aspect of language use persists through the romantic period, in relation to the general problem of true creativity, in the full sense of this term.30 A. W. Schlegel’s remarks on language in his Kunstlehre31 give a characteristic expression to these developments.

In discussing the nature of language, he begins by observing that speech does not relate merely to external stimuli or goals.

The words of language, for example, may arouse in the speaker and hearer ideas [Vorstellungen] of things that they have not directly perceived but know only by verbal description or that they “aren’t able to intuit sensuously at all because they exist in an intellectual [geistigen] world.”

Words may also designate abstracted properties and relations of the speaker to the hearer and to the topic of discourse, and relations among the elements of the latter.

In combining our “thoughts and ideas” we use “words with such subtle meanings that to clarify them would disconcert a philosopher.” Still, they are used freely by the uninstructed and the unintelligent.

We fit all these words together in ways that allow others to not merely understand our purpose but glimpse our innermost feelings; in this way we excite the most diverse passions, affirm or negate moral decisions, and incite a crowd to collective action.

The greatest things as well as the least significant, the greatest marvel never before heard – the most impossible and unthinkable things – slide off our tongues with equal ease.

So characteristic of language is this freedom from external control or practical end, for Schlegel, that he elsewhere32 proposes that “anything by means of which the inner manifests itself outwardly is rightly called language.”

From this conception of language, it is only a short step to the association of the creative aspect of language use with true artistic creativity.33

Echoing Rousseau and Herder, Schlegel describes language as “the most marvelous creation of the poetic faculty of the human being” (Sprache und Poetik, p. 145). Language is “an ever-becoming, self transforming, unending poem of the entire human race” (Kunstlehre, p. 226).

This poetic quality is characteristic of the ordinary use of language, which “can never be so completely depoetized that it should find itself scattered into an abundance of poetical elements, even in the case of the most calculating and rational use of linguistic signs, all the more so in the case of everyday life – in impetuous, immediate, often passionate colloquial language” (ibid., p. 228).

There would have been little difficulty, he continues, in demonstrating to Molière’s M. Jourdain that he spoke poetry as well as prose.

The “poetical” quality of ordinary language derives from its independence of immediate stimulation (of “the physically perceivable universe”) and its freedom from practical ends. These characteristics, along with the boundlessness of language as an instrument of free self-expression, are essentially those emphasized by Descartes and his followers.

But it is interesting to trace, in slightly greater detail, the argument by which Schlegel goes on to relate what we have called the creative aspect of language use to true creativity.

Art, like language, is unbounded in its expressive potentiality.34 But, Schlegel argues, poetry has a unique status among the arts in this respect; it, in a sense, underlies all the others and stands as the fundamental and typical art form. We recognize this unique status when we use the term “poetical” to refer to the quality of true imaginative creation in any of the arts. The explanation for the central position of poetry lies in its association with language. Poetry is unique in that its very medium is unbounded and free; that is, its medium, language, is a system with unbounded innovative potentialities for the formation and expression of ideas.

The production of any work of art is preceded by a creative mental act for which the means are provided by language. Thus the creative use of language, which, under certain conditions of form and organization, constitutes poetry (cf. p. 231), accompanies and underlies any act of the creative imagination, no matter what the medium in which it is realized. In this way, poetry achieves its unique status among the arts, and artistic creativity is related to the creative aspect of language use.35 (Compare Huarte’s third kind of wit – see note 9.)

Schlegel distinguishes human from animal language in the typical Cartesian manner. Thus he observes that one cannot attribute man’s linguistic ability to the “natural disposition of his organs”:

Various species share to a certain extent with human beings the ability, although totally mechanical, to learn language. By means of training and frequent repetition a stimulus towards certain reactions is brought about in their organs, but they never use the words they learned autonomously (even though it might seem so), in order to designate, and their speech is just as little an authentic language as the sounds produced by a speaking machine. (p. 236)

We cannot draw analogies between human and animal intellectual function.

Animals live in a world of “states of affairs” [Zustände] not of “objects” [Gegenstände] in the human sense (the same is true, in part, of young children, which accounts for the confused and incoherent character of even the liveliest childhood memories).

The “animal dependency” [tierische Abhängigkeit] is, for Schlegel, sharply opposed to the “spontaneous principle” [selbsttätige Prinzip] of “rational volition” [verständige Willkür] that characterizes human mental life.

It is this principle that provides the basis for human language. It leads to a search for coherence and unity in experience, to comparison of sensible impressions (which requires mental signs, of some sort), and to the unique human capacity and need “through language to want to refer to even those things that cannot be given in any sensuous intuition.” What results is a human language, which serves primarily “as the organ of thought, as a means of reflection” and only derivatively for the purposes of “social communication” (pp. 237–241).