Humboldt

Humboldt’s tries to develop a comprehensive theory of general linguistics using the Cartesian emphasis on the creative aspect of language use.36

Humboldt’s characterization of language as energeia (“activity” [Thätigkeit]) rather than ergon (“product” [Werk]),37 as “a generative activity [eine Erzeugung]” rather than “a lifeless product” [ein todtes Erzeugtes] extends and elaborates – often, in almost the same words – the formulations typical of Cartesian linguistics and romantic philosophy of language and aesthetic theory.

For Humboldt, the only true definition of language is “a productive activity” [eine genetische]:

“It is the ever repeated mental labour [Arbeit des Geistes] of making articulated sound capable of expressing thought (p. 57). 38 There is a constant and uniform factor underlying this “mental labour”; it is this which Humboldt calls the “Form” of language.39 It is only the underlying laws of generation that are fixed, in language.

The scope and manner in which the generative process may operate in the actual production of speech (or in speech perception, which Humboldt regards as a partially analogous performance – see pp. 105–106 below) are totally undetermined. (See note 38.)

The concept of Form includes the “rules of speech articulation” [Redefügung] as well as the rules of “word formation” [Wortbildung] and the rules of formation of concepts that determine the class of “root words” [Grundwörter] (p. 61).

In contrast, the substance [Stoff] of language is unarticulated sound and “the totality of sense-impressions and spontaneous mental activities that precede the creation of the concept with the aid of language” (p. 61). The Form of language is a systematic structure.

It contains no individual elements as isolated components but incorporates them only in so far as “a method of language formation” can be discovered in them (p. 62).

The fixed mechanisms that, in their systematic and unified representation, constitute the form of the language must enable it to produce an indefinite range of speech events corresponding to the conditions imposed by thought processes.

The domain of language is infinite and boundless, “the essence of all that can be thought” (p. 122). Consequently, the fundamental property of a language must be its capacity to use its finitely specifiable mechanisms for an unbounded and unpredictable set of contingencies.

“It must therefore make infinite use of finite means, and is able to do so through the productive power that is the identity of language and thought” (p. 122).

Not even the lexicon of a language can, according to Humboldt, be regarded as an “inert completed mass.” Even apart from the formation of new words, the use of the lexicon by the speaker or the hearer involves “a continuous generation and regeneration of the word-making capacity” (pp. 125–126).

This is true of the original formation of the language and its acquisition by children, and it is also true of the daily use of speech (cf. note 25). He thus regards the lexicon, not as a memorized list from which words are simply extracted as language is used (“No human memory would be equal to this, if the soul did not simultaneously carry by instinct within itself the key to the formation of the words themselves”), but rather as based on certain organizing generative principles that produce the appropriate items on given occasions.

It is from such an assumption that he develops his well-known view that (in modern terms) concepts are organized in terms of certain “semantic fields” and that they receive their “value” in terms of their relation to the principles that determine this system.

Speech is an instrument of thought and self-expression. It plays an “immanent” and “constitutive” role in determining the nature of man’s cognitive processes, his “thinking and, through thought, creative power” [denkende und im Denken schöpferische Kraft] (p. 36), his “world view” and processes of “tying together thoughts” [Gedankenverknüpfung] (p. 50).

More generally, a human language as an organized totality is interposed between man and “the nature that affects him, both inwardly and outwardly” (p. 74).

Although languages have universal properties, attributable to human mentality as such, nevertheless each language provides a “thought world” and a point of view of a unique sort. In attributing such a role in the determination of mental processes

to individual languages, Humboldt departs radically from the framework of Cartesian linguistics, of course, and adopts a point of view that is more typically romantic.

Humboldt does remain within the Cartesian framework, however, in so far as he regards language primarily as a means of thought and self-expression rather than as an animal-like functional communication system – when he maintains, for example, that man “surrounds himself with a world of sounds, so as to take up and process within himself the world of objects” (p. 74).

Thus even in its beginnings, “language … is extended unthinkingly to all objects of casual sense perception and inner concern” (p. 75; Humboldt 1999: 60). He regards it as a mistake to attribute language primarily to the need for mutual assistance. “Man is not so needy – and inarticulate sounds would suffice for the rendering of assistance.” There are, to be sure, purely practical uses of language, as, for example, if a man orders a tree to be felled and “thinks of nothing by that term but the trunk that he designates” (p. 220).

The same words might, however, have an “enhanced significance” if they were used in a description of nature or in a poem, for example, in which case the words are not used simply as instruments or with a purely referential function, are not used “in a localized activity of the soul for a limited purpose” but are rather referred to “the inner whole of thought-association and feeling” (p. 221; Humboldt 1999: 156).

It is only in the latter case that the full resources of language are used in forming or interpreting speech, that all aspects of the lexical and grammatical structure of an utterance make their full contribution to its interpretation. The purely practical use of language is characteristic of no real human language, but only of invented parasitic systems.40

In developing the notion of “form of language” as a generative principle, fixed and unchanging, determining the scope and providing the means for the unbounded set of individual “creative” acts that constitute normal language use, Humboldt makes an original and significant contribution to linguistic theory – a contribution that unfortunately remained unrecognized and unexploited until fairly recently.41

The nature of Humboldt’s contribution can be appreciated by comparing his notion of “form” to that developed in Harris’s Hermes (1751), for example. For Harris, a language is essentially a system of words. Their meanings (the ideas of which they are the symbols) constitute the form of language;

their sound, its matter (substance). Harris’s notion of form is modeled on a classical pattern, the underlying conception being that of shape or orderly arrangement. But in his work on language, Harris does not suggest that a description of its form requires more than a specification of elements, categories, and the association of “content elements” to “expression elements.”

He does not, in other words, give any indication of grasping Humboldt’s insight that language is far more than “patterned organization” of elements of various types and that any adequate description of it must refer these elements to the

finite system of generative principles which determine the individual linguistic elements and their interrelations and which underlie the infinite variety of linguistic acts that can be meaningfully performed.42

The development of Humboldt’s notion of “form of language” must be considered against the background of the intensive discussion during the romantic period of the distinction between “mechanical form” and “organic form.” A. W. Schlegel makes the distinction in the following way:

Form is mechanical when, through external force, it is imparted to any material merely as an accidental addition without reference to its quality; as, for example, when we give a particular shape to a soft mass that it may retain the same after its induration.

Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, acquires its determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of the germ.43

In Coleridge’s paraphrase: The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; – as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened.

The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms, – each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, – its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror…44

The context, in both cases, is an investigation of how individual works of genius are constrained by rule and law. Humboldt’s concept of the “organic form” of language, and its role in determining the individual creations of speech, is a natural by-product of the discussion of organic and mechanical form, particularly in the light of the connection that had already been drawn between artistic creativity and the creative aspect of language use (cf. pp. 61–62, above).45

The parallel between Humboldt’s notion of “organic form” in language and Goethe’s much earlier theory of “Urform” in biology46 is also quite striking.

The concept of “Urform” was intended as a new dimension beyond the “static” concept of form of Linneaus and Cuvier, for example (namely, the concept of form as structure and organization).

But, at least at one stage of his thought, Goethe took this dimension to be one of logical rather than temporal order. In a letter to Herder, in 1787, Goethe writes:

The primordial plant is the most marvelous created thing in the world, and nature herself should envy me it. With this model and its key one is able thereby to invent other plants ad infinitum, which must be consistent with the model.

That is, even if these invented plants do not exist, they could exist. They are not, for example, pictorial or poetic shadows and illusions; they rather have an inner truth and necessity. The same law applies to all other living beings.47

Thus, the Urform is a kind of generative principle that determines the class of physically possible organisms; and, in elaborating this notion, Goethe tried to formulate principles of coherence and unity which characterize this class and which can be identified as a constant and unvarying factor beneath all the superficial modifications determined by variation in environmental conditions.

(Cf. Magnus, op. cit., chap. 7, for some relevant material.) In a similar way, Humboldt’s “linguistic form” constrains all individual acts of speech production or perception in a particular language, and, more generally, the universal aspects of grammatical form determine the class of possible languages.48

Finally, we should note that Humboldt’s conception of language must be considered against the background provided by his writings on social and political theory49 and the concept of human nature that underlies them.

Humboldt has been described as “the most prominent representative in Germany” of the doctrine of natural rights and of the opposition to the authoritarian state.50 His denunciation of excessive state power (and of any sort of dogmatic faith) is based on his advocacy of the fundamental human right to develop a personal individuality through meaningful creative work and unconstrained thought:

Naturally, freedom is the necessary condition without which even the most soul-satisfying occupation cannot produce any wholesome effects of this sort.

Whatever task is not chosen of man’s free will, whatever constrains or even only guides him, does not become part of his nature. It remains forever alien to him; if he performs it, he does so not with true humane energy but with mere mechanical skill. (Cowan, op. cit.,pp. 46–47)

[Under the condition of freedom from external control] … all peasants and craftsmen could be transformed into artists, i.e., people who love their craft for its own sake, who refine it with their self-guided energy and inventiveness, and who in so doing cultivate their own intellectual energies, ennoble their character, and increase their enjoyments.

This way humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, however beautiful they might be, degrade it. (ibid., p. 45)

The urge for self-realization is man’s basic human need (as distinct from his merely animal needs). One who fails to recognize this “ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines” (ibid., p. 42).

But state control is incompatible with this human need. It is fundamentally coercive, and therefore “it produces monotony and uniformity, and alienates people’s actions from their own character” (ibid., p. 41: “so bringt er Einformigkeit und eine fremde Handlungsweise.”).

This is why “true reason cannot desire for man any condition other than that in which … every individual enjoys the most absolute, unbounded freedom to develop himself out of himself, in true individuality” (ibid., p. 39). On the same grounds, he points to the “pernicious results of limitations upon freedom of thought” and “the harm done if the government takes a positive promoting hand in the business of religious worship” (ibid., pp. 30–31), or if it interferes in higher education (ibid., pp. 133f.), or if it regulates personal relations of any sort

(e.g., marriage; ibid., p. 50), and so on. Furthermore, the rights in question are intrinsically human and are not to be limited to “the few in any nation”; “there is something utterly degrading to humanity in the very thought that some human being’s right to be human could be abrogated” (ibid., p. 33).

To determine whether the fundamental human rights are being honored, we must consider, not just what a person does, but the conditions under which he does it – whether it is done under external control or spontaneously, to fulfill an inner need. If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is” (ibid., p. 37).51

It is clear, then, that Humboldt’s emphasis on the spontaneous and creative aspects of language use derives from a much more general concept of “human nature,” a concept which he did not originate but which he developed and elaborated in original and important ways.

As remarked above, Humboldt’s effort to reveal the organic form of language – the generative system of rules and principles that determines each of its isolated elements – had little impact on modern linguistics, with one significant exception.