The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  19.9 THE CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE

  This strand shares with the logical strand the conviction that language is at the same time indispensable to human thought and a source of intellectual error and confusion. The inevitable moral is that proper attention to language is at least a propadeutic prerequisite of clear and sober thought. Accordingly, both strands give a linguistic twist to the Kantian idea that reason is both essential to human thought and a source of metaphysical illusions. But there are two important differences. Historically, whereas the logical strand follows the rationalism of Leibniz, the critique of language stands in the empiricist tradition of Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley. Methodologically, Frege and subsequent ‘ideal language philosophers’ sought the remedy for linguistic confusions in constructing a formal language that avoids the actual or perceived shortcomings of natural languages (referential failure, ambiguity, vagueness, category confusions) and replaces the latter, at least for the purposes of philosophy and science. By contrast, the critique of language sticks to the vernacular, while at the same time warning of the traps hidden within it. Sometimes this caution is inflated into a linguistic scepticism that denigrates language as an insurmountable obstacle to knowledge. The critique of language also inveighs against real or alleged misuses of specific expressions, and often these animadversions form part of a wider critique of cultural tendencies.

  Just as the hermeneutic strand of the nineteenth century builds on Hamann and Herder, the critique of language continues along lines drawn by the physicist G. Chr. Lichtenberg. His aphoristic Sudelbücher appeared posthumously in 1801 and impressed figures as diverse as Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kraus, Musil, and Wittgenstein. He may also have influenced Herder. As regards the futility of an ideal language, at any rate, both see eye to eye. ‘A completely philosophical language would have to be the speech of the Gods’. Since that is unattainable, one must use German (aka one’s mother tongue) as the instrument of philosophical reflection. One ought to ‘start out from the ordinary use of a word, try to develop, determine and explain its concept, and wherever necessary, to improve it through the assimilated philosophy of other languages’. In this context, Herder mentions Lichtenberg among others.112

  Lichtenberg was hostile to the system building of academic philosophy. Genuine philosophy is a critical activity in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Instead of reaching firm conclusions, it forever questions assumptions through the ‘art of analysis’. ‘Our entire philosophy is the correction of the use of language’.113 As regards the Cartesian cogito, he famously challenged the license to postulate a subject of thought like Descartes’ res cogitans. ‘We become aware of certain representations, which do not depend on us; others believe that we at least depend on ourselves; where is the boundary? We are acquainted only with the existence of our sensations, representations and thoughts. It thinks, one should say, as one says it thunders’.114 The language of science strives to be pure and exact—as in Frege’s ideal of the determinacy of sense that a Begriffsschrift has to fulfil. But given the dynamic nature of thought and speech, rigid definitions are more of a hindrance than a help. Ordinary language is often more intelligible and hence more propitious to philosophical clarity than artificial terminology or languages. ‘Philosophy, when it speaks, is always forced to talk the language of non-philosophy (Unphilosophie)’.115

  The most paradigmatic though least famous proponent of an empiricist critique of language is O. F. Gruppe, who was influenced by Bacon, Lichtenberg, and Herder. He targets ‘[traditional] metaphysics and speculative philosophy [German idealism] in general’, since they seek to achieve ‘cognitions through mere concepts’.116 The root cause of their aberrations is the ‘infatuation’ with and ‘mystification’ through language, which seduces us and leads us astray.117 Metaphysical speculations like those of Hegel are not so much false or unfounded, but ‘sheer nonsense’.118 Expressions like ‘being’, ‘nothing’, and ‘becoming’ are misappropriated when Hegel uses them outside of their everyday context in a ‘metaphysical meaning’.119 More generally, the majority of philosophical questions ‘are of the kind one should never have meddled with, since they contain in themselves something misunderstood, distorted, false, indeed thoroughly nonsensical and thus…never permit hope for a reasonable solution’.120 All uses of language rely on tacit assumptions. The critique of language has to scrutinize the assumptions underlying philosophical questions in order to establish whether they are ‘meaningful at all’.121 It is striking to what extent Gruppe anticipated the metaphilosophical aims—though not the logico-semantic methods—of analytic philosophers like Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ryle.122

  Nietzsche is a more ambivalent representative of the critical tradition. He came to philosophy through classical scholarship (Klassische Philologie), which explains his keen interest in language. Another crucial influence on his early philosophy of language was provided by the twofold impact of Schopenhauer and Wagner. In the early work leading up to Geburt der Tragödie he adopts a very uncritical stance. In line with broad expressivism, he includes art under the general rubric of language. Whereas language proper represents the Apollinian element of reason, music, in particular, represents the Dionysian element of instinct and emotion. Language is an ‘infinitely inadequate symbolism’. By contrast, music constitutes a kind of primordial language. It is capable not just of ‘an infinite clarification’, but of directly capturing Schopenhauer’s thing in itself—das ‘Ureine’.123 Language is but an ephemeral manifestation of a primordial force. Nietzsche occasionally refers to it as grammar or logic, but more felicitously as ‘instinct’. For this primordial force is ultimately a feature of human physiology, yet also the result of a teleology without designer, rather than a merely mechanical phenomenon. In this context Nietzsche even has a good word for his bogey Kant, whose Critique of Judgement allows that something may be ‘fit for purpose without a consciousness’. Language is ‘neither the conscious creation of individuals nor of a majority’, since all conscious thought presupposes language.124

  A next step was to adopt an aesthetic perspective on language proper, according to which it is itself a kind of art. But this does not mitigate Nietzsche’s sceptical attitude, since the artistic spirit of language renders it unsuitable to the pursuit of objective timeless truths. Scientific and philosophical discourse aims at truth. But its conceptual apparatus is derived from prior artistic metaphors and aspirations. As a result, it is an illusion that ‘in language, we really have knowledge of the world’.125 The ‘conventions of language’ are not ‘adequate expression of all realities’; instead, they signify ‘relations of things to human beings’ and are ultimately nothing but ‘illusions and visions (Traumbilder)’.126 The artistic nature of language and the intuitive force behind concept formation manifests itself in our ‘instinct to form metaphors, the primordial instinct of humans’ which is then sublimated in mythology, science, and art. Nietzsche propagates not just recognizing this irrational foundation of language in metaphor, but giving it proper space in our lives.127

  In Nietzsche’s last writings, these themes turn into central components of his well-known ‘perspectivism’ (aka relativism). Scepticism about language fuels a general critique not just of metaphysics but also of traditional ethics. In both arenas language leads us astray because we forget the ethymology of central notions. Thus our general moral principles are based on ignoring that the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is geared only to its original purpose of keeping apart the consequences of specific actions; and our prejudice that the objects themselves possess secondary qualities ignores that terms like ‘hard’ and ‘green’ in their proper application signify effects rather than causes. ‘Words lie in our path’.128 A whole ‘mythology’ is laid down in our language,129 in that ‘seduction on the part of grammar’ misleads us into metaphysical illusions and gives succour to philosophical systems.130 Nietzsche tries to wean us off our ‘faith in grammar’, in particular in the distinction between subject and predi
cate, which tempts us to postulate divine agents for phenomena. Indeed, ‘reason’ is nothing other than the ‘metaphysics of language’ and ‘“Reason” in language: oh what a deceitful wench! I fear, we shall not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar’.131

  Although Nietzsche persists in at least alerting us to linguistic traps, he remains pessimistic. ‘Rational thought is an interpreting according to a schema which we cannot throw off’.132 And, sure enough, his own perspectivism is partly based on the kind of grammatical-cum-logical mistakes he sought to overcome. Thus starting out from the correct observation that word meaning is a matter of convention and that ‘as far as words are concerned, what matters is never truth’, he fallaciously infers that language cannot really express any truths.133 This conclusion is not just self-refuting, it ignores the difference between words, the meaning of which is indeed subject to conventions loosely understood, and the sentences we formulate on the basis of such conventions: whether what these sentences say (given their literal meaning) is true or false does not depend on these conventions, but on how things are. Nietzsche’s attempts to base his own pseudo-scientific anthropology on the critique of language are even less prepossessing. Thus he speculates that the ‘the lure of certain grammatical functions is in their final foundation the lure of physiological value-judgements and race-conditions’.134

  Fritz Mauthner recognized the potential of Nietzsche’s work for basing a critique of traditional ethics and metaphysics on reflections on the scope and limits of linguistic expressions, in particular the dangers of reification and unrecognized metaphors. But he also recognized that Nietzsche’s own amoralism evinced a novel variant of ‘linguistic superstition’. Nietzsche’s ‘distrust of language is unlimited; but only as long as it is not his language’.135 The label Sprachkritik came to prominence through Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache.136 Mauthner’s work was part of the so-called ‘crisis of language’, a general concern with the authenticity of symbolic expression in philosophy, science, art and public life at the end of the nineteenth century.137 Mauthner pursued a Kantian goal, the defeat of metaphysical speculation. But he surplanted the critique of reason with a critique of language, and his work owed more to Hume and Mach. His method is psychologistic and historicist: his critique of language is ultimately part of social psychology. The content is empiricist, indeed sensualist—the foundations of language are sensations—and the result sceptical. Reason is identical with language, yet the latter is unsuited for penetrating reality. Mauthner combines an extreme linguistic scepticism with the view that there are profound insights that defy being expressed in language. His ineffable truths, however, are not confined to art; instead, they culminate in a more general and ‘wordless mysticism’ with a religious trajectory.138 Mauthner recognizes that his linguistic diatribes against the idea that language is suited for expressing any kind of insight eventually result in a self-annihilation or ‘suicide’ of language that also engulfs any critique of language. Following the trajectory of Nietzsche rather than Lichtenberg or Gruppe, he pursues the critique of language to its limits and beyond.139

  19.10 INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION

  The hermeneutic strand continued into the twentieth century, when philosophical hermeneutics was transformed into the hermeneutic philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer. It also influenced Francophone structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. And through von Humboldt it marks the foundation of contemporary linguistics—both synchronic and diachronic. The hermeneutic strand is engaging, illuminating, and occasionally path-breaking. It deserves credit, in particular, for recognizing language as an intersubjective, historically developing practice. It is also to be praised for addressing philosophical problems concerning not just language in general but specific languages. At the same time it runs the risk of reifying both language and natural languages (Volkssprache) as super-individual subjects. Furthermore, it is perennially prone to potentially self-refuting forms of irrationalism and relativism. Finally, it often combines philosophy of language not just with philosophy of mind, philosophy of history, anthropology, and linguistics, but also with religious views. And these are none the better for being thickly disguised by assorted mixtures of Spinozist metaphysics, misappropriated Kantian terminology, and bad writing, as in Hamann and the German Idealists.

  As regards prose, the critique of language has the edge. And its cultural criticism has more to offer than most contemporary contributions to that genre. Both its quest for clarity and its critique of metaphysics would have profited, however, from closer attention to the different functions of distinct parts of speech. By paying such attention, the logical strand was able to develop more fruitful logical, semantic, and pragmatic categories. The quest for an ideal language is problematic, not least because natural language must remain the ultimate medium of explanation and clarification. But it had a profound and partly beneficial impact on the linguistic turn of the analytic tradition. Frege, together with Russell, pioneered logical analysis. They not only invented a powerful logical system, but also demonstrated its use in tackling philosophical problems, notably concerning existence. It is this twofold inspiration that gave real teeth to the project of analysing language which drove the non-psychologistic critique of language in Wittgenstein and the logical empiricists. In due course, Wittgenstein and so-called ordinary language philosophy also rediscovered central lessons of the hermeneutic tradition—independently, and with greater semantic sophistication and dialectical acuity. Last but not least, the philosophical prose and the style of argument of Bolzano and Frege provide a striking model of how complex problems can be discussed in a way which is clear, profound, and honest. In all these respects, the logical strand marks the beginning of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.140

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Apel, K. O., Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus. Bonn: Bouvier, 1963.

  Berlin, I., Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: The Hogarth Press, 1976.

  Cloeren, H. J., Language and Thought: German Approaches to Analytic Philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988.

  Forster, M. N., After Herder. Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  Forster, M. N., German Philosophy of Language. From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  Gipper, H. and Schmitter, P., Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1985.

  Glock, H. J., What is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

  Lifschitz, A., Language and Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  Janik, A. and Toulmin, S., Wittgensteins Vienna. New York: A Touchstone Book, 1973.

  Klassiker der Sprachphilosophie. Von Platon bis Noam Chomsky, ed. T. Borsche. München: C. H. Beck, 1996.

  Philosophie als Sprachkritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Textauswahl I, ed. H. Cloeren. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1971.

  Philosophie als Sprachkritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Textauwahl II, ed. S. J. Schmidt. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1971.

  * * *

  1 In general, I shall claim ties of influence between X and Y only in cases in which there is concrete evidence, not on currently popular grounds of the form ‘Y must have been familiar with X’.

  2 W. Hogrebe, Kant und das Problem einer transzendentalen Semantik, Freiburg: Alber, 1974; more circumspectly J. Simon, ‘Immanuel Kant’, in Klassiker der Sprachphilosophie, ed. T. Borsche, München: Beck, 1996.

  3 H. Schnädelbach, German Philosophy 1831–1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  4 H. J. Glock, ‘Philosophy, Thought and Language’, in Thought and Language, ed. J. Preston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  5 Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. J. Nadler, 7 Vols., Wien 1947–1957, Vol. III, pp. 281–9.

&
nbsp; 6 Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. M. Bollacher et al., Frankfurt am Main 1985, Vol. VIII, pp. 303–640.

  7 Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, p. 284. For Hamann, the focus on language avoids in particular the Kantian idea that sensibility and understanding constitute two separate branches of human cognition (albeit with a common root), since both are united in language. He also insists on the ‘genealogical priority’ of language over logic (‘Metakritik’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 286–7).

  8 Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, pp. 695–810.

  9 Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 697.

  10 For example, ‘Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 35–53. Hamann is also famous for opining that ‘poetry is the mother tongue of the human race’ (Aesthetica in nuce, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, p. 197).

  11 ‘Ritter von Rosencreuz’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 31–2; ‘Aesthetica in nuce’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, pp. 204–7; An Immanuel Kant, Dezember 1759, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer, Arthur Schenkel, Wiesbaden, 1955–79, Vol. I, p. 450.