by Noam Chomsky
29 In this discussion, Harris appears to be making the gratuitous assumption, typical of the modern variants of this doctrine, that, since man is capable of “infinite directions,” he is therefore completely plastic; that is, the assumption that innate factors govern his intellectual development only marginally, if at all. Obviously this further assumption has no connection to the observation regarding freedom from the control of instinct and drives and regarding the infinite range of potential skill and knowledge. With this independent assumption, Harris is, of course, very much outside of the framework of Cartesian thought.
Elsewhere, Harris expresses himself in a manner which is susceptible to a rather different interpretation. In discussing the interplay between creative genius and rule (Philological Inquiries (1780) in Works, vol. II), he rejects the view “that Geniuses, tho’ prior to Systems, were prior also to Rules [e.g., the unities of time and place, in the theory of drama], because RULES from the beginning existed in their own Minds, and were a part of that immutable Truth, which is eternal and everywhere” (p. 409). Genius and rules are “so reciprocally connected, that ’tis GENIUS which discovers Rules [these being implicit in the mind]; and then RULES, which govern Genius.”
30 One would not refer to an act as “creative” simply on the basis of its novelty and independence of identifiable drives or stimuli. Hence the term “creative aspect of language use” is not entirely appropriate, without qualification, as a designation for the property of ordinary language that concerned Descartes and Cordemoy.
It is interesting, in this connection, to note that Galileo described the discovery of a means to communicate one’s “most secret thoughts to any other person . . . with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper” as the greatest of all human inventions, comparable with the creations of a Michelangelo, a Raphael, or a Titian (Dialogue on the Great World Systems (1630) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 116–117). I am indebted for this reference to E. H. Gombrich.
Compare the reference in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée to “this marvelous invention of composing from 25 or 30 sounds an infinite variety of words, which although not having any resemblance in themselves to that which passes through our minds, nevertheless do not fail to reveal all of the secrets of the mind, and to make intelligible to others who cannot penetrate into the mind all that we conceive and all of the diverse movements of our souls.” (p. 27; PRG, 65–66). [Translations of passages in the Port-Royal Grammaire here, and subsequently, are from Arnauld and Lancelot 1975 (abbreviated PRG).]
31 Cf. note 25. References are to pp. 233–234 of the edition cited there, which is vol. II of a collection of Kritische Schriften und Briefe. [Translations of Chomsky’s quotations from the works of A. W. Schlegel, and of one quotation from the work of F. Schlegel, are by Susan-Judith Hoffmann; references remain as they were in the original edition.]
32 Briefe über Poesie, Silbenmass und Sprache (1795). In Sprache und Poetik, vol. I of Kritische Schriften und Briefe (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1962), p. 152.
33 “. . . the natural media of art are ways [Handlungen] for human beings to outwardly manifest what is inward.” (Die Kunstlehre, p. 230 – the only such means are “words, sounds, gestures”); therefore it is natural for Schlegel to conclude that language itself is a primordial art form and that it is, further, “from its inception onward the primordial substance of poetry” (p. 232).
34 For Schlegel (Die Kunstlehre, p. 225), “‘Art’ is ‘a boundless thought’”; “its purpose, that is, the direction of its striving can surely be indicated in general terms, but what it can and ought to achieve over the course of time no concept of the understanding can grasp because it is infinite.” The passage that is paraphrased in the text then continues as follows:
In poetry the expressive potentiality that is found in the arts is found to an even higher degree since other arts do after all have in light of their restricted media or means of representation [Darstellung] a determinate sphere of activity that could allow itself to be circumscribed to some degree. The medium of poetry is precisely the medium through which the human spirit awakens to itself at all, and through which it fastens on to its presentations [Vorstellungen] in arbitrary associations and expressions – that is, language. Poetry is therefore not even bound to objects, it rather makes its own object for itself; it is the most comprehensive of all the arts and is, as it were, the omnipresent universal spirit in them. That which, in the representations of the remaining arts raises us up out of everyday reality into a world of fantasy, is called their poetical element. Poetry therefore designates in this general sense artistic invention, the wondrous act whereby it enriches nature; as its name asserts, it is a true creation and bringing forth. Every outward material representation is preceded by an idea in the mind of the artist in which language always comes into play as the mediator of awareness; consequently one can say that they always emerge from the womb of poetry. Language is not a product of nature, rather it is an imprint [Abdruck] of the human mind which exhibits the emergence and connections of its presentations as well as the operating mechanism [of the human mind]. Thus in poetry what has already taken shape is given shape again, and its plasticity is just as limitless as spirit’s ability to turn back on itself in reflections of ever-increasing potentialities.
35 For further discussion of the character, sources, and general development of romantic aesthetic theory, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). There is some discussion of the philosophy of language of romanticism in the first volume of E. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923), trans. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). See also E. Fiesel, Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1927).
36 In particular, in his Über die Verschiedenheit des Menschlichen Sprachbaues, published posthumously in 1836. A facsimile edition appeared in 1960 (F. Bonn: Dümmlers Verlag). Page references here are to this edition. Parts are translated into English in M. Cowan, Humanist without Portfolio (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963). A full translation and commentary are in preparation by J. Viertel. Backgrounds of Humboldt’s linguistic theories are discussed in R. L. Brown, “Some Sources and Aspects of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity,” unpublished University of Illinois doctoral dissertation (1964). [Most of the translations in this edition are by Susan-Judith Hoffmann, but some are P. L. Heath’s translations in Humboldt 1999.]
Bloomfield refers to Humboldt’s treatise as “the first great book on general linguistics” (Language, p. 18). Considered against the background that we are surveying here, it seems to mark the terminal point of the development of Cartesian linguistics rather than the beginning of a new era of linguistic thought. See Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, for some discussion of Humboldtian general linguistics, its relation to the work of the following century, and its reemergence in contemporary studies of language and cognition.
37 The German translations are Humboldt’s. These concepts of Humboldt’s do not seem to me to be entirely clear, and I will focus attention here on one aspect of them. That a single consistent interpretation of these notions is clearly determined by the text is not obvious. Despite this qualification, it seems safe to conclude that what will be outlined here is at least one of the central strands in Humboldt’s thought. I am indebted to J. Viertel for many observations and suggestions regarding the interpretation of the text.
38 For Humboldt, to speak of a word in a language as “articulated” is to refer it to the system of underlying elements from which it is constructed, elements that could be used to form infinitely many other words according to definite intuitions and rules. It is in this sense that a word is an “articulated object,” grasped, in perception, by the exercise of the “human power of speech” rather than by some process analogous simply to “animal sensory capacity.” See p. 7
1:
But now what articulation adds to the mere evocation of its meaning [Bedeutung]. . . [i.e., of the meaning of a perceived word] . . . is that it presents the word directly through its form as a part of an unbounded whole, a language. For even in single words, it is by means of this that we are given the possibility of constructing, from the elements of the language, a truly indefinite number of other words according to specific intuitions and rules, and thereby to establish among all words an affinity corresponding to the affinity of concepts.
(Humboldt 1999: 57–58 (with modifications))
He then clarifies his meaning further, pointing out that it is only the generative processes that are grasped by the mind, and that language cannot be regarded
as a material that sits there, surveyable in its totality, or communicable little by little, but must be seen as something that eternally produces itself, where the laws of production are determined, but the scope and even to some extent the nature of the product remain totally unspecified.
(Humboldt 1999: 58)
Compare A. W. Schlegel’s definition of “articulation” (Kunstlehre, p. 239):
The articulation (the articulated moments of discourse, as it were) consists in arbitrary deliberate movements of the organ and therefore corresponds to similar spiritual activities.
He points out that articulated language is different in kind from animal cries or expressions of emotion – that it cannot be approached by a series of “crude imitations” but requires a new principle.
See also note 30.
39 See pp. 58–59: “The constant and uniform element in this mental labor of elevating articulated sound to an expression of thought, when viewed in its fullest possible comprehension and systematically presented constitutes the form of language” (Humboldt 1999: 50). It seems to me that Humboldt’s “form of language” is essentially what would in current terminology be called “the generative grammar” of a language, in the broadest sense in which this term has been used. See note 2 and p. 83 below.
40 For example, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean coast; or, we may add, animal communication systems or “language games” of the sort referred to by Bougeant, Bloomfield, Wittgenstein, and many others and proposed by them as typical and paradigmatic – as the “primitive forms” of language.
41 In identifying a particular state of a language as an object of description with “psychological reality,” we depart from Humboldt, who is extremely unclear about the relation of synchronic to diachronic description.
42 In his Hermes, Harris perhaps comes closest to the Humboldtian conception of “form” in a citation from Ammonius, which relates motion to dance, timber to a door, and “the power of producing a vocal sound” (as the material basis for speech) to “that of explaining ourselves by Nouns, or Verbs” (as its form, which derives from man’s unique soul as the material basis derives from nature). Cf. Harris, Works, vol. I, p. 393, footnote.
Elsewhere, in another connection, Harris discusses a conception of “form” that is much richer, however. In his Philosophical Arrangements (1775; Works, vol. II) he develops the notion of “form” as “animating principle”: “the animating form of a natural body is neither its organization, nor its figure, nor any other of these inferior forms, which make up the system of its visible qualities; but ’tis the power, which, not being that organization, nor that figure, nor those qualities, is yet able to produce, to preserve, and to employ them” (p. 59).
43 Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), translated by John Black, p. 340 of the second edition, (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892).
44 “Lectures and Notes of 1818,” in T. Ashe (ed.), Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and other English Poets (London: George Bell and Sons, 1893), p. 229. Some of Coleridge’s comments on the nature of mind foreshadow Humboldt’s observations on language in their emphasis on the diversity of creative potential within the bounds of finite rules. In the same lecture he denies that genius must be opposed to rule (again paraphrasing Schlegel – cf. also note 29) and argues that “no work of true genius dares want its appropriate [organic] form.” “As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless: for it is even this that constitutes its genius – the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.”
Elsewhere, he states that “the mind does not resemble an Aeolian harp, nor even a barrel-organ turned by a stream of water, conceive as many tunes mechanized in it as you like, but rather as far as objects are concerned a violin or other instrument of few strings yet vast compass, played on by a musician of Genius” (quoted by R. Wellek, Kant in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), p. 82). For much additional relevant material, see Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp.
45 It should be noted that this topic does not seem to have been raised in any explicit way in the Schlegel–Humboldt correspondence. See A. Leitzmann (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen W. von Humboldt und. W. Schlegel (1908). This correspondence contains much discussion of “organic” and “mechanical” form but in a different connection, namely, with reference to the relation between inflection and agglutination as linguistic processes, a topic that is also developed at length in Humboldt’s Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues.
The question of how the form of language arises from and determines individual “creative” acts is a not uncommon one during this period. Cf., for example, Coleridge: “What a magnificent History of acts of individual minds, sanctioned by the collective Mind of the Country a Language is . . . a chaos grinding itself into compatibility.” Quoted in A. D. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), p. 138.
46 The significance and origins of this notion are described in R. Berthelot, Science et philosophie chez Goethe (Paris: F. Alcan, 1932), and R. Magnus, Goethe als Naturforscher (Leipzig: Barth, 1906), trans. H. Norden, Goethe as a Scientist (New York, 1949). As is well known, the concept of organic form develops in biology, as well as in philosophy and criticism, during the period that we are now reviewing. Compare, for example, Schlegel’s notion of organic form with Blumenbach’s concept of “Bildungstrieb” in biology, namely, the concept of a living, generative, formative principle internal to an organism that determines its ontogenesis and leads it from germ to adult (cf. Berthelot, p. 42; he states that this influenced Kant’s similar formulations in the Critique of Judgment). Berthelot characterizes Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as conceiving of nature “as a dynamic qualitative transformation producing new forms irreducible to previous ones, by the action of a spontaneous, internal, primitively unconscious activity” (p. 40). Many other references might be given to illustrate the parallel and interplay. These matters are discussed in various places, e.g., A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1936) and Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp. For further background and many references, see E. Mendelsohn, “The Biological Sciences in the Nineteenth Century: Some Problems and Sources,” History of Science 3 (1964), pp. 39–59.
47 Quoted in Magnus, Goethe als Naturforscher, p. 59. In The Great Chain of Being Lovejoy traces the idea of a logical “Urbild” to J. B. Robinet’s De la Nature (1761–1768). He quotes Robinet (p. 279) as defining the notion “prototype” as “an intellectual principle that changes only in so far as it realizes itself in matter”; this notion Robinet then elaborated with respect to all animate and even inanimate nature.
48 The title of Humboldt’s major work should not lead one to assume that he would be sympathetic to the view that each language is a unique historical product that may, in principle, have any imaginable structure. This view, in one form or another, has been expressed by many post-Humboldtian linguists. To mention just the temporal extremes, it can be illustrated by W. D. Whitney’s critique of Humboldtian linguistics (“Steinthal and the Psychological Theory of Language,” North American Review, 1872; reprinted in Oriental and Linguistic Studies (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874)). in which he concludes that “the infinite diversity of human speech o
ught alone to be a sufficient bar to the assertion that an understanding of the powers of the soul involves the explanation of speech” (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, p. 360) and that language is strictly a “historical product,” nothing other than “the sum of words and phrases by which any man expresses his thought” (p. 372); or M. Joos’s summary of what he calls the “Boasian” tradition of American linguistics as adopting the view “that languages could differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways” (M. Joos (ed.), Readings in Linguistics (Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1957), p. 96). Humboldt, in contrast, repeatedly expresses his opinion that, in their general structural features, languages are cast to the same mold. It seems to me that he is consistent in adopting the position that he expresses clearly in a letter to A. W. Schlegel (1822, cf. Leitzmann, Briefwechsel zwischen W von Humboldt und A. W. Schlegel, p. 54): “That all languages, in terms of grammar, look quite similar to each other is indisputable, if one investigates their inner workings profoundly, rather than superficially.” Furthermore, this is clearly the only view compatible with his Platonistic theory of language acquisition (cf. pp. 101–102 below).
