Schleiermacher and Schlegel inherited the recognition of another obstacle from Herder. The latter expounded a ‘principle of radical difference’.37 There is an ‘immeasurable’ and ‘absolute’ difference38 between different human societies, cultures, and languages, both synchronically and diachronically. Worse still, there are even conceptual differences between different contemporaneous members of a single speech-community.39 Acknowledging conceptual diversity marks a salutary break with the universalism that unites Kant’s transcendental system of forms of intuition and understanding with Davidson’s attack on the conceivability of alternative conceptual schemes. It is a plausible (though not inevitable) development of lingualism. If our conceptual scheme is constituted by language, it would appear to inherit two features of language-diversity and change: synchronically, there are genuinely different natural languages, and diachronically, these languages change over time. Yet two notes of caution are in place. Conceptual pluralism does not entail the conceptual relativism condoned, among others, by Herder in a moderate and by Nietzsche in an emphatic fashion. It is perfectly compatible with holding that some conceptual schemes are superior to others in logical, metaphysical, or epistemological respects, an idea to which otherwise diverse figures like von Humboldt, Hegel, and Frege were committed. Secondly, the question remains whether there are nonetheless conceptual and/or anthropological limitations to conceptual diversity, and whether a common core of concepts and ultimately of forms of behaviour is not a precondition of the possibility of understanding linguistic utterances.40
How then is understanding to be achieved in the face of these obstacles? Schleiermacher’s response lies in a holistic approach, which revolves around two aspects of understanding: ‘Just as any speech stands in a two-fold relation, to the totality of language and to the entire thinking of its author, all understanding consists of two aspects, understanding the speech as taken from language, and understanding it as facts within the thinker’.41 To these two aspects of understanding there correspond two aspects of interpretation. The ‘grammatical’, that is, linguistic, side considers words in the contexts of sentences and places such larger units within the context of a shared linguistic practice. The ‘technical’, that is, psychological, side reconstructs the genesis of an utterance or text from the mental biography of the author.42
According to Schleiermacher, the two sides roughly correspond to two different methods, which he took over from Herder.43 The linguistic side of interpretation employs the ‘comparative method’, which is one of extrapolating the rules of use from specific uses. By contrast, the psychological side is at least partly a matter of a ‘divination’ into the author’s soul. In one respect, this is less problematic than it may sound, since it means that psychological interpretation is a process of fallible hypothesis;44 but it is mistaken to imply that extrapolating semantically relevant rules of use reduces to induction by enumeration and is bar of hypothetical conjectures.
Schleiermacher’s paradigm of divination influenced Dilthey, who suggested that interpretation is a matter of projecting oneself into the interpretee’s subjective frame of mind by reliving his experiences.45 Something similar was suggested by Herder: psychological interpretation requires Einfühlung, which involves reproducing the interpretee’s sensations in the imagination. These subjectivist approaches have been criticized by objectivist hermeneuticians like Gadamer. Indeed, ever since Schleiermacher and Dilthey, there have been heated debates about the relative importance of objective linguistic vs. subjectivepsychological factors, both exegetically as regards the writings of eminent hermeneuticians and substantively, as regards the nature of meaning and understanding.46
Some of the sting can be taken out of the second debate by heeding the aforementioned idea that understanding comes in degrees, and may indeed have distinct objects. Thus the linguistic side concerns lexical meaning and what token utterances literally say, whereas the psychological side concerns different phenomena like speaker’s meaning, illocutionary force, and conversational implicatures. As regards the former, intersubjective conventions in force in the speaker’s linguistic community are decisive. As regards the latter, Herder, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey are right in that something like the intentions of a speaker or author are relevant to what she meant to say, the thoughts she meant to convey, irrespective of what she actually said, given the conventions of a speech community. It is wrong, however, to maintain that the relevant intentions can be read off sensations, mental images or words that cross a subject’s mind when she speaks or writes. What a speaker or author means depends instead on the sincere explanations that she would or could give of her words—it is a matter of linguistic potentialities rather than mental actualities.47 But it took Wittgenstein’s radical transformation of Frege’s anti-psychologism to attain that prima facie counterintuitive insight. Furthermore, in cases in which we cannot ask the speaker what she meant, something like Einfühlung has a legitimate role to play, not in the literal yet abstruse sense of ‘feeling one’s way into’ another person’s mind, but in the sense of empathy informed by knowledge of the subject’s biography and her social context.
A currently popular maxim is Quine’s and Davidson’s (mislabelled) ‘principle of charity’, according to which interpretation must avoid attributing to a speaker or text beliefs that are obviously or predominantly false. Ironically, this ‘hermeneutic’ principle does not make an appearance in classical Germanophone hermeneutics. Indeed, Schlegel explicitly defended the possibility of attributing to a text views which are not just confused but downright inconsistent.48 Now, there is a strong case for denying that a subject can believe explicit contradictions.49 Nevertheless, one can hold beliefs which turn out to be contradictory, that is, which defy being spelled out in a coherent fashion. And when it comes to interpreting texts, even the ascription of explicit contradictions is not off limits. For a text is not an immediate expression of a single doxastic state. It may instead manifest beliefs which the author held at different stages of composition. Because of inattention an author may also fail to recognize that a view expressed on page X is incompatible with one expressed on page Y, or he may simply have committed a slip in writing down the text. Furthermore, the principle of charity entreats interpreters to project their own beliefs and desires onto the interpretees. Closing one’s heart to such misguided charity makes room not just for counting the interpretees wrong, for instance on account of radically divergent practices. It may transpire that on some issues they not only hold different views, but that they are right and we are wrong! In approaching a foreign text or culture, we must keep in mind the possibility that we might have something to learn. That is one lesson of the hermeneutic tradition which its analytic admirers have yet to assimilate.50
On this issue the Herder-tradition differs from Quine and Davidson, for better rather than worse. On a related issue, it joins hands with them, for worse rather than better. Schleiermacher notoriously opines that ‘misunderstanding’ rather than mutual understanding ‘occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point’.51 This view was endorsed by Dilthey.52 Both were motivated by the desire to promote hermeneutics as a universal discipline, whose complex canons apply to all (Dilthey) or at any rate to all linguistic (Schleiermacher) manifestations of meaning, humdrum exchanges within a single speech community included. In a similar vein, though for different reasons, Quine and Davidson contend that ‘radical translation’, that is, the kind of interpretation from scratch occasionally performed by field linguists, ‘begins at home’. These positions grossly overintellectualize the basic and paradigmatic case of everyday communication, by assimilating it to the challenges facing philologists or anthropologists. Although misunderstandings can always arise in a specific case and occasion the need for (re-)interpretation, it does not follow that they do arise in every single case. It does not even follow that they could arise in all cases. Without shared conventional meaning, communication would have to be based on
immensely complex mutual conjectures by speakers of different idiolects. Even if that were feasible in principle, it would be the very opposite of linguistic communication. Natural languages are shared practices that we have mastered through enculturation and that allow us to understand the utterances of subjects, without sharing most of their convictions or intentions, and without complex theory-formation.53
19.5 THE BIRTH OF WESTERN LINGUISTICS: SCHLEGEL AND VON HUMBOLDT
Von Humboldt’s perspective on language is anthropological in the spirit of Herder and Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. It unites a priori with empirical reflections54 in a way that is both stimulating and problematic, foreshadowing a similar combination in Chomsky. Its guiding theme is the contrast between universality and particularity, especially in three areas: first, language in general vs. specific natural languages; secondly, linguistic communities vs. individual speakers; thirdly, language as a system of syntactic and semantic rules vs. language as speech (de Saussure’s langue vs. parole contrast). Language is central to the anthropological equation, since we are ‘human exclusively through language’.55 Humboldt adumbrates lingualism by insisting that language is not just an ‘instrument’ for the communication of prefigured thoughts, but an organon, quite literally an inner ‘organ which shapes thought’.56 Like Herder, Humboldt regards the specifically human capacity for reflection as the driving force behind the formation of language. But his gloss on this idea is distinctively Kantian. Language is a precondition for an individual recognizing distinct objects within the flux of experiences: ‘The essence of language consists in moulding the world of appearances into thoughts; its whole aim is formal’. Language is also a precondition for the individual recognizing himself as a subject distinct from these objects.57 Through language, the subject constitutes (bildet) both himself and the world, yet only in the innocuous sense of becoming conscious of himself by separating (abscheiden) himself from the world.58 The subject becomes even more of an object for himself through having his own linguistic expressions reflected by other ‘representing and thinking creatures’. This step constitutes the essential intersubjective dimension of language: ‘All speech rests on dialogue (Wechselrede)’.59
Humboldt not only proposed a new rationale for a communitarian perspective. Under the influence of Schlegel, he also devised a more comprehensive version of holism. Language is more than an aggregate of elements, not just as regards its lexicon, as in semantic holism, but also as regards its grammar. In fact, it is the grammar of a language that individuates it (unifies it and sets it apart from others). A language is like a ‘web’, ‘meshwork’, or ‘net’, and each uttered expression ‘intimates [antönt] and presupposes the whole of language’.60 This holism extends the idea of language as an organ of individual reflection to the idea that intersubjectively shared languages are in fact akin to organisms—the so-called ‘organic model of language’. The invocation of a super-individual agent is reminiscent of the Hegelian ‘spirit’. Humboldt and Schlegel also link it to the idea that languages are the genuine and defining expression of something like a Volksseele, an idea already mooted by Herder.61
The organic model is intimately linked to von Humboldt’s conviction that there is a universal human nature, yet one which is characterized precisely by the variety of its manifestations in different societies and languages.62 ‘Thought is dependent not just on language as such, but, up to a certain point, on each individual language’.63 Natural languages ‘are not really means of presenting the already discovered truth, but, far more, of discovering the previously unrecognized truth’. As a result, their diversity is not just the superficial one of different ‘sounds and signs, but a diversity of worldviews (Weltansichten) themselves’.64 The main task of linguistics is therefore ‘comparative grammar’. The idea that different natural languages constitute radically distinct modes of thought and even perception was later picked up by Whorf. At the same time, there is a countervailing tendency. Von Humboldt reckons with an underlying universal grammar—a view famously reclaimed by Chomsky. But while Chomskian universalism is definitely incompatible with the linguistic relativism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, von Humboldt’s own position is coherent and anticipates insights of contemporary interactionism.65 The features shared by all languages are rooted in requirements on communication imposed by a common human nature, while the important differences are due to a cultural diversification which other aspects of human nature strongly favour.66
Like human nature so conceived, language is essentially dynamic; ‘it is not a product (Ergon) but an activity (Energeia)’.67 Among other things, this implies an interdependence between speech and language. While speech-communities provide individual speakers with the organon of shared natural languages, the latter are in turn constituted by the speech-acts of individuals. ‘Language exists only through articulated speech, grammar and lexicon are barely comparable to its dead skeleton’.68 Nicely summing up this Janus faced character, von Humboldt writes: ‘language creates itself…out of speech’.69
19.6 LANGUAGE AS THE CONDUIT OF GEIST: THE GERMAN IDEALISTS
The German Idealists were frustrated by Kant’s restriction of metaphysics to a second-order reflection on the preconditions of experience. According to Kant, the mind imposes a priori structures on the world we think about (‘appearances’), yet the content of our knowledge is a posteriori, and depends on the impact on our cognitive apparatus of ‘things as they are in themselves’, to which we have no access. Exploiting various tensions in this ‘transcendental idealism’, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel took idealism to extremes. The subject furnishes not just the form of cognition, but also its content. Reality is a manifestation of a spiritual principle which transcends individual minds, such as Hegel’s ‘absolute spirit’ (previously known as God). Since reality as it is in itself is entirely mental, it can be fully grasped by the mind. Philosophy once more turns into a super-science, as for traditional rationalism. It can gain insights into an ultimate reality and encompasses all other disciplines. All genuine knowledge is a priori, since reason can derive even apparently contingent facts, notably through the method of ‘dialectic’, which was rehabilitated in the face of Kant’s strictures.
Fichte did not take a linguistic turn; reason rather than language remains central. But he applied his version of transcendental philosophy to the origins of language. He was convinced that one could ‘construct’ language through a ‘history of language a priori’. This enterprise purports to show that language was not just capable of coming into being, but ‘that and how it had to be invented’.70 It even seeks to demonstrate from non-empirical first principles that grammar must possess certain detailed features. The inference ticket is provided by the requirements of beings that are at once rational and embodied, and hence need to interact to become individuals.71
Schelling subscribed to a variant of lingualism, maintaining that ‘without language it is impossible to conceive not merely philosophical consciousness but consciousness in general’.72 He was exercised by the idea that language epitomizes the interplay between the individual and particular on the one hand and the general and universal on the other. Language turns into the ‘symbol of the identity of all things’, it is the ‘the ideal unity as the dissolution [Auflösung] of the particular in the universal, the concrete in the conceptual’. In this respect it resembles works of art; indeed, it is ‘the most perfect work of art’, the ‘eternal effect of the absolute act of cognition’ and hence comprehensible only by reference to ‘the whole of the universe’.73 In so far as sense can be made of these arcane pronouncements, it is that language enables at one and the same time the elevation of the ideas of something individual into something objective or intersubjective, and of something sensory into something conceptual. The common denominator appears to be that both the intersubjective and the conceptual are more general than their respective counterparts.
Although Hegel’s reflections on language cannot outdo Fichte and Schelling
as regards grandiose pretensions, they are more sustained. This holds in particular for the early period. For Hegel, absolute spirit comprises and explains everything, and history is nothing but the process of the self propelled development and realization of absolute spirit. Language is essential to this self-constitution. Like Hamann, Hegel exploits the ‘beautiful ambiguity’ of logos: ‘reason and at the same time language. For language is the pure existence of spirit; it is a thing, heard and turned back onto itself’.74 Hegel’s spirit is a personified version of logos. It requires language in order to achieve the self-awareness that is its telos. Naming things is the ‘primordial force’ of spirit. It is not just that consciousness without language remains ‘silent’. Because of its inevitable embodiment, consciousness is tied to language; it has ‘its being in language’.75 Furthermore, language ‘only exists as the language of a people, and so do understanding and reason’.76 Specific languages—Volkssprachen—are required, since they enable different flesh-and-blood humans to become aware of themselves as distinct subjects.77
These themes come to full fruition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The self-realization of spirit is among other things a process of self-objectification, or alienation, and hence requires language.78 Exploring a communitarian perspective on both subjectivity and language, Hegel insists that even absolute spirit is an instance of the kind of mutual recognition familiar from the famous master–slave dialectic, but one which requires language as its medium.79 He connects this idea not just to Pauline ideas from the New Testament, but also to the subject-predicate structure of sentences. In ordinary sentences, the two are connected yet remain separate. In ‘speculative’ sentences, by contrast, subject and predicate interpenetrate one another and become a genuine unity.80 Such passages are reminiscent of a rationalist identity theory à la Leibniz, according to which true propositions, at least those of a respectable, philosophical kind, simply unpack predicates that are already contained in the subject. Hegel also denies that one can have a clear concept of something without being able to cast it in words,81 and he promoted the use of German rather than Latin for philosophical purposes. Alas, he excelled at employing familiar vocabulary in unfamiliar and confusing ways, for the most part without clear explanations. The fact that he deliberately promoted ‘doing violence to language’ hardly provides an excuse for stretching syntax, morphology, lexicon, and the patience of his readers beyond breaking point.82
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 71
