Language, Culture and Cognition from Descartes to Lewes (Value Inquiry Book / Cognitive Science, 375) 900450723X, 9789004507234

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Language, Culture and Cognition from Descartes to Lewes

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-​in-​Chief J.D. Mininger

volume 375

Cognitive Science Edited by Francesc Forn i Argimon, University of Catalonia

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​vibs and brill.com/​cosc

Language, Culture and Cognition from Descartes to Lewes By

Timo Kaitaro

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Bear suckling a child, an engraving from Bernard Connor’s The History of Poland, in several letters to persons of quality, giving an account of the ancient and present state of that kingdom, 2 vols. London, 1698. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://​catalog.loc.gov lc record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/2021063045​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 0723-​4 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 0724-​1 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by Timo Kaitaro. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  Preface ix  Acknowledgements xi  Introduction 1

part 1 From the Institutions of Nature to Symbolic Cognition 1  The Natural and Artificial Body in Cartesian Philosophy 9 1  Descartes and the Bodily Institutions 10 2  La Forge and Malebranche 18 2  Hobbes and the Citizens of the Realm of Truth 22 1  From Marks to Signs 23 2  Access to the Realm of Truth 26 3  From Ideas to Representations 28 3  Locke: Combining Ideas with a Little Help from Words 32 1  The Portion of Nature 32 2  The Architecture of Ideas 34 3  The Role of Language in Human Understanding 36 4  Distinctions Created by Human Institutions 38 4  Leibniz, Wolff, and Symbolic Cognition in the German Tradition 41 1  Leibniz 41 2  Christian Wolff 44

part 2 The Natural and the Artificial Human during the Enlightenment 5  Daniel Defoe and the Wild Boy 53 6  Hume and the Artificial in Human Understanding 58 1  The Natural Mechanisms of Human Nature 59 2  Personal Identity 61 3  Passions and Nature 67

vi Contents

4  Vice, Virtue and Taste 70 5  Morals and the Artificial Nature of Humans 72

7  Condillac and Diderot on the Role of Artificial Signs in Cognition 81 1  Locke’s Error 82 2  Needs, Will and Social Interaction 88 3  The Architecture of Memory 94 4  After the Essai 96 5  The Problem of Inversions 100 6  Diderot and the Deaf 102 7  Languages as Methods of Analysis 107 8  The Discursive Order and the Art of Reason 115 8  La Mettrie: Man as an Artefact 119 1  Man a Machine 121 2  Homo Duplex 124 9  The Nature of Morality: Diderot, Helvétius and Rousseau 127 1  Diderot and the Vices and Virtues of Nature 128 2  Helvétius vs. Diderot 129 3  Rousseau 133 4  Condillac and the Natural Needs 140 10  Maupertuis and the Debates in the Berlin Academy 141 1  Maupertuis and the Lack of Correspondence between Language and Ideas 141 2  The Debates at the Berlin Academy 145 11  Herder: From the Language of a Silent Loner to Human Perfection 148 1  Men and Animals 150 2  The Word as Recognition 153 3  Sounds and Other Sensations 157 4  The Innateness of Language Ability 161 5  Herder, Hamann and Kant 167 12  Hamann and the Primacy of Language and Tradition 173 1  The Problem of Word Order 174 2  The Origin of Language 175 3  The Transcendental Perspective 178

Contents

part 3 The Condillacian Heritage and Beyond 13  The Idéologues: The Semiotics and Physiology of Culture 183 1  Cabanis’s Social Physiology 183 1.1  Sensations and Language 186 1.2  Nature and Art 188 1.3  Holistic Organicism 190 2  Destutt de Tracy’s Ideology: Back to the Lockean Order, with a Twist 193 2.1  Sensing and Thinking 193 2.2  Thought and Language 197 2.3  Language as Calculus 200 3  Maine de Biran and Signs in Action 206 3.1  From Impressions to Ideas 207 3.2  Imagination, Language and Memory Again 210 3.3  Mind Playing Hide-​and-​Seek with Itself 216 3.4  Reclaiming Passions by Signs 217 3.5  The Two Sciences of Man 220 3.6  Maine de Biran and the Condillacian Tradition 225 14  The Divine Origins of Language 227 1  Süßmilch’s Proof of the Divine Origin of Language 227 2  Bonald and Language as the Deliverer of Ideas 232 3  Animals and Humans 235 4  The Impossibility of Inventing Language 236 5  Bonald and Condillac 240 15  Back to the Institutions of Nature: Gall and Spurzheim 244 1  Faculties and Organs 245 2  Men and Animals 249 3  Language and Ideas 253 16  Humboldt: Language and the Creation of National Character 257 1  Concepts and Language 258 2  The Origins and Development of Language 263 3  Overcoming the Limits of Language 265 4  The Perfection of Language by Inflection 268 5  The Holistic Nature of Language 272 6  Nationality, Individuality and Language 275

vii

viii Contents

7  Writing as the Analysis of Language 277 8  Humboldt and His French Predecessors 279

17  G. H. Lewes and Symbolic Thought 281 1  The Social Organism 282 2  Ideation as the Algebra of Feeling 284 3  From Sensations to a Historical a Priori 287  Conclusions: From the Institutions of Nature to History and Culture 289 1  Words and Ideas in the Empiricist Tradition 290 2  Symbolic Thought and Sensation 292 3  Language, Nature and Society 296 4  From Collections to Structures –​From Individuals to Historical Wholes 298 5  Language, History and Nationhood 300 6  Telling a Different Story on the Origin of Ideas 301 Appendix  Translations of French and German Quotations 307  Bibliography 315  Name Index 324

Preface The present book is a result of gestalt switch. In my earlier research on the history of philosophy and the history of neurosciences, I had studied the use of various technological and semiotic metaphors and models in attempts to naturalise the mental and to propose reductionist explanations of mental phenomena. I was interested in the ways in which one introduced representations in the brain or presented man or his brain as a machine.1 Writing on La Mettrie, I had usually defended him by claiming that despite his use of the machine analogy, he was not a mechanist.2 Gradually, I came to realise that comparing the human mind to the function of a mechanism, such as a clockwork, was more ambiguous than I had thought.3 When I later returned to La Mettrie, I came to realise that I might, in fact, as well claim that he was not a reductionist because he compared man with a machine. Since a machine is a cultural artefact, the claim that man is a machine can also be taken to mean that man is a cultural artefact.4 And this was exactly what La Mettrie emphasised in his L’homme machine and elsewhere. Eventually, I became interested in early modern and modern theories that link explicitly the origin, development and functions of the human mind to language and culture. These theories, which emphasise the artificial aspects of human cognition, obliged me to have second thoughts concerning my earlier view that theories which postulate images or representations in the brain, or model the brain as a machine, were based on misleading or even illegitimate 1 Timo Kaitaro, ‘Biological and epistemological models of localization in the nineteenth century: From Gall to Charcot’, Journal of the History of Neurosciences 10, no. 3 (2001), pp. 262–​ 276, and Timo Kaitaro, ‘Brain-​mind identities in dualism and materialism –​A historical perspective’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 35, no. 4 (2004), pp.627–​645. 2 Timo Kaitaro, ‘ “ Man is an admirable machine” –​A dangerous idea?’, La Lettre de la Maison française d’Oxford, no. 14 (Michaelmas Term 2001), pp. 105–​120, and Timo Kaitaro, ‘Diderot and La Mettrie: The unacknowledgeable debt’, in Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Ansichten und Einsichten, ed. Hartmut Hecht (Berlin: Berliner Wissenshafts-​Verlag, 2004), pp. 63–​73. 3 Timo Kaitaro, ‘Eighteenth-​Century French Materialism Clockwise and Anticlockwise’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, no. 5 (2016), pp. 1022–​1034. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1080/​ 09608​788.2016.1159​178 (accessed 20.1.2021), and Timo Kaitaro, ‘L’homme comme artefact chez La Mettrie et Diderot’, in La Mettrie: philosophie, science et art d’ecrire, ed. A. Pashoud and F. Pepin (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques, 2017), pp. 255–​267. 4 Vincent Sullerot, in Mots Clés de la Culture, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 2013, contains articles from the Dictionnaire culturel en langue française), s.v. ‘machine’, Adobe Digital Editions epub.

x Preface metaphors. I had tacitly assumed that the brain, as a scientific physiological object, does not possess any of the symbolic, intentional or purposeful characteristics that signs, symbols, tools or machines possess. Consequently, I thought that the brain should be described in causal, non-​intentional and non-​representative terms, just like any other material object. But if we accept the cultural-​historical view of the human mind, then cultural metaphors and models begin to seem rather pertinent. So, in this book, I propose to study both implicit and explicit ways of treating the human mind and brain as cultural artefacts in the modern era, starting from Descartes. The tradition linking the functions of the human mind to language and culture proved to be much richer than I had expected on the basis of reading the traditional histories of philosophy. Indeed, some of the major figures in this story have not been regarded as central figures, or sometimes have not even been mentioned in the traditional histories of philosophy. I also found out that there is a certain continuity in this tradition, constituted by personal contacts and common references and influences. Interestingly, this tradition seems to fade away at the end of the nineteenth century but to flower again in Vladimir Vygotsky’s writings and later in what we now call cultural psychology.

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Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the Kone Foundation for the generous four-​year grant that enabled me to collate the material for the book and to complete writing it. I am also greatly indebted to the National Library of Finland for the beautiful space to work in and for the always friendly, knowledgeful and helpful staff. I want to thank various people who have contributed to this study by reading parts of it and/​or by suggesting interesting sources, especially Professor Emerita Lilli Alanen, M. Phil. Gareth Griffiths, Dr Huw Elfed Price, Adjunct Professor Markku Roinila, Professor Gabriel Sandu and Professor Charles T. Wolfe. I have also benefitted from the pertinent and useful comments of the participants at the History of Philosophy Research Seminar at the University of Helsinki, the Intellectual History Seminar at the Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History, as well as the 6th Finnish-​Hungarian Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy held at the University of Helsinki on 6–​7 June, 2019. I am grateful for the anonymous referee for the insightful and inspiring reading of my work. I also wish to thank my wife Ulla Tuomarla for her affectionate presence, and my daughter Catrin Kaitaro for providing support, movement and peace of mind. And finally, my apologies to Mai Moët and her canine colleagues for neglecting the magnificent cognitive, social and emotional capacities of her species in this study.

Introduction There are evidently many ways to indicate the artificial nature of man and his or her cognitive functions. One implicit, and often unintentional or unacknowledged, way of doing this appears in the form of the constant use of metaphors and models related to diverse cultural, semiotic or technological artefacts when speaking about the human mind and the brain. One postulates signs, images or representations in the brain or sees the body as a machine. This is eventually compatible with various metaphysical and epistemological commitments. A dualist can model the brain as a machine and speak of ‘images’ in the brain. This is what the Cartesians did, and many later materialists followed suit.1 In this case the cultured nature of the human mind or the brain is, however, distanced and moderated by the use of metaphors and analogies: the mind or the brain is not literally taken to be a human artefact, although artefacts can serve as theoretical models in explaining its functions. However, there are more radical, less metaphorical claims on the artificial nature of the human mind. One can, in the manner of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–​1934), claim that language and culture play a key role in forming our mental processes, and not only forming existing ones but also giving rise to novel psychological structures and functions that we do not naturally possess.2 Language is thus not merely a means for communicating our thoughts but also an essential tool in forming them in the first place.3 But if language and culture form our mental functions, and these in turn are realised by our brains, it also follows that culture forms our brains as well, an essential fact that Vygotsky’s colleague the Russian neuropsychologist Aleksander Luria (1902–​1977) had taken account of in his neuropsychological theory.4 Likewise, the archaeologist Lambros Malafouris insists that all social, cognitive and affective neuroscience is cultural neuroscience and that the human brain is in fact a culturally situated bio-​psycho-​social artefact. In addition, Malafouris 1 See Timo Kaitaro, ‘Brain-​ mind identities in dualism and materialism –​A historical perspective’. 2 Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. M. Cole, V. John-​Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 23. 3 Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, ed. and trans. by E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1967). 4 Michael Cole, ‘A.R. Luria and the Cultural-​Historical Approach in Psychology’, in A.R. Luria and Contemporary Psychology, eds. T. Akhutina, J. Glozman, L. Moscovich and D. Robbins (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005), pp. 35–​41.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_002

2 Introduction suggests that this may be even valid in the biological and evolutionary perspective, in so far as human brains and technology have been co-​evolving for at least two million years.5 Lisa Feldman Barrett, on the basis of research on the construction of emotions, concludes not only that emotion concepts are cultural tools but also that, in so far as our culture actually wires our brain, our brains are cultural artefacts.6 Such a view, that our minds and our brains are cultural artefacts, is not a modern invention. There is a long, although rather neglected, tradition in the philosophy of mind stretching from the seventeenth century onwards emphasising the role of language and culture in human cognition. It is this tradition that is the subject of the present book. Despite its overarching theme, the study should be approached as a collection of separate studies focused on some of the most important participants in the debates concerning the role of language and culture in human cognition, rather than as a complete history of all the relevant discussions from the second half of the sixteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century. I cannot pretend to cover all the relevant source material in Europe from this period within the limits of a single monograph, but I will instead present close readings of the chosen authors. The main focus will be on the French tradition, starting from Condillac and continuing until the Idéologues and Maine de Biran. But I will certainly not neglect their German predecessors, critics or followers, or their British colleagues approaching similar themes. The focus will be on authors who not only thought that language influences cognition, but who saw the role of language as constitutive for human cognitive capacities or functions, or at least for those that distinguish us from animals. They thought that language and culture allowed man to radically transform the ‘natural’ mental functions shared with animals, such as sensation, or even to develop completely novel functions. The present book will thus focus on the influence of language and culture on the functions of the mind and brain and not merely their influence on cognition in general. The theories in which I am primarily interested comprise notably at least one of the following elements:

i) Language is not merely a means to communicate our thoughts but has a role in forming them in the first place, at least in certain limited areas, for example, in the case of abstract or complex ideas.

5 Lambros Malafouris, ‘The Brain–​Artefact Interface (BAI): A Challenge for Archaeology and Cultural Neuroscience’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5, issue 2–​3 (1 June, 2010), pp. 264–​273. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​scan/​nsp​057 (accessed 20.1.2021). 6 Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (London: Macmillan, 2017), pp. 146, 148, 173 and 178. Digital Editions epub.

Introduction



3

ii) Language has a fundamental or constitutive role in forming our thoughts. iii) Learning language gives rise to new cognitive abilities that would not have been possible without it. iv) Language is a social institution which could not have been invented by an individual without social interaction with other humans.

Subsidiary questions related to these claims were concerned with the cognitive differences between men and animals, the origin of language and the thesis that language influences how we see the world (linguistic relativity). These will be discussed in so far as they were often closely linked with the above claims. The central place given to Condillac in this study is a consequence of the fact that he agreed with all four claims, which together result in the claim that the human mind and its cognitive capacities, at least those that distinguish the human from animals, have a social origin. In addition, Condillac’s works acted as a junction connecting the earlier German writings on the subject and the later French, German and British developments of these ideas. Part One deals with late sixteenth and early eighteenth-​century authors who had paid attention to the role of culture and language in cognition. Although Descartes thought that the possession of language is a criterion for being able to think,7 neither he nor his followers actually considered that thinking depends on language. Nevertheless, they thought that due to the close union of the soul with the body, culture and language do affect our mind by causing changes in our body, mainly in the brain, which in turn affect the mind. Hobbes discussed the role of signs in human cognition without, however, insisting on the necessity of culture for this to take place. Locke’s place in the story is justified by his discussions of the way language helps to build complex ideas and by provoking some of his later readers and critics such as Condillac into presenting more radical views on the necessity of language for human mental functions. And finally, Leibniz and Wolff are at the origin of the German discussions on the subject, which evidently provided the impetus for the eighteenth-​century French writers who insisted on the role of language in human cognition. They were also responsible for introducing empirical material relevant to this 7 See Descartes’s letters to Newcastle, 23 November, 1646, and to Moore, 5 February, 1649, in René Descartes, Œuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols (Paris: Cerf, 1897–​1913), vol. 4, pp. 568–​576 and vol. 5, pp. 267–​279 (hereafter cited as at); The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–​1991), vol. 3, pp. 302–​304 and 360–​367 (hereafter cited as csm).

4 Introduction discussion: the cases of deaf and dumb people and feral children, which, as we shall see, remained a constant reference in these discussions. The second part, concerning the eighteenth-​century discussions, starts with Daniel Defoe, who picked up the theme of feral children and the deaf and dumb, and used them as evidence for the necessity of language for human cognitive faculties. This fundamental role of language was something that French authors such as Condillac and La Mettrie insisted on in their discussions on human cognition. The possibility or impossibility of reducing human nature to functions that are natural, mainly sensation, was also an important theme and subject of disputes in the writings of Hume, Helvétius, Diderot and Rousseau. The last mentioned provided the formulation of a conundrum concerning the naturalistic explanation of the human origins of language: if human reason requires language, how could beings without reason have ever acquired language. The remainder of Part Two turns attention back to Germany, where the questions of the role of language in cognition and the origins of language were present in the essay contests of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Maupertuis, Herder and Hamann discussed the relations between language and thought as well as the origins of language. Herder also prefigured some of the more Romantic visions of the role of language in building nationhood developed later by Humboldt. Part Three presents the continuing influence of Condillac among post-​ revolutionary French philosophy. The Idéologues, Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and Maine de Biran followed in his footsteps, making some modifications to his doctrine. Although this distorts the strict chronological order, a separate chapter is here dedicated to two writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, who insisted on the role of language in ­cognition and who held similar views on its origin, Süßmich and Bonald. They shared the Condillacian view of the necessity of language for human reason, but they reacted to the Rousseauan conundrum by denying the possibility of the human origin of language. They insisted on the difficulties of the natural explanation for the origin of language and instead argued for its divine origin, and thus disagreed with the Condillacians who wanted to explain the origin of language naturalistically. Another response to the difficulties in explaining the invention of language was to view it as being instituted by nature, in a manner innate to natural instinct. As Hamann had already insisted, this was actually what Herder had done with his theory of Besonnenheit as an innate capacity, a kind of a language instinct. But a more radical departure from the Condillacian naturalism was provided by the organology of Gall and Spurzheim, who presented another kind of naturalism based in the innate nature of all human faculties, including those involving a cultural aspect, such as language or religion.

Introduction

5

Their solution is at the same time a variant of the divine origin theory, only now language and culture were bestowed by God to man with the anatomy of his brain. Their theory combines neatly the ideas of Herder and of those supporting the divine origins of language. The two last figures discussed are Wilhelm von Humboldt and G. H. Lewes. Humboldt provided the ideas regarding the role of language in human cognition with detailed empirical linguistic material. Lewes attempted to build up a synthetic view of man, which takes account of the fact that he or she is at the same time a biological organism and a social being whose psychological faculties depend on society.

pa rt 1 From the Institutions of Nature to Symbolic Cognition

∵

­c hapter 1

The Natural and Artificial Body in Cartesian Philosophy Apparently, Cartesian philosophy deals with the human body just as it deals with any other bodies, as natural objects subject to the laws of mechanics. But Descartes also compares the human body to a machine. And, as we well know but often forget, machines are artificial objects designed for a purpose, as opposed to natural formations like stones, flowers or planets. Although we can explain the mechanical interaction between the parts of a machine by physical laws, in their case what we are actually interested in is not only how they work but also what functions they serve (or fail to serve, as the case may be). And these questions related to the functions of an artefact take us inevitably to the sphere of human institutions. Thus, machines can be viewed from two different angles: as physical objects studied by the natural sciences or as cultural objects endowed with meanings and functions understandable in the context of human goals and interactions. We can find something similar to this distinction between a pure mechanism and its human and cultural context in Descartes’ view of the human body. As we know, Descartes made a radical conceptual and metaphysical distinction between the mind and the body. But that should not make us forget that he used large amounts of ink showing that they are in fact closely joined to each other. And this substantial union of mind and body actually resembles in many respects a cultural or semiotic object. The Cartesian body is not only a physical object but it also has meanings inscribed in it. And when Descartes describes the traces carrying these meanings in the brain, he repeatedly refers to the concept of ‘institution’. He supposed regular connections between thoughts and the movements and dispositions of the body instituted by nature. But not all of the movement or dispositions have been (metaphorically) instituted by nature. Descartes also refers to traces in the brain that are not ­instituted by nature, but which instead depend on the arbitrary conventions (literally) instituted by men.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_003

10  1

Chapter 1

Descartes and the Bodily Institutions

In his letter to Chanut dated 1 February 1647,1 Descartes discusses the different forms of love and distinguishes the purely intellectual or rational love, which is a voluntary action of the mind, from the one which is a passion. He continues by observing that when our soul is joined to a body,2 intellectual love is usually accompanied by sensual or sensitive love. Descartes describes sensual love, which is an appetite or a sentiment, as a ‘confused thought excited by certain movements of the nerves’. It disposes us to the clearer thoughts, of which reasonable emotions consist. These two kinds of emotions can exist separately, but usually they are joined to each other, so that when one is aroused, it gives rise to the other.3 In this manner, certain movements in the body are naturally associated with certain thoughts, which do not in any way resemble them. The dryness of the throat disposes one to the desire to drink, without being this desire. Similarly, in the case of love, the warmness around the heart and the abundance of the blood in the veins provokes certain movements of the body, making us perhaps open our arms and embrace the object, and all this inclines us to join by the will the object to ourselves. But the confused thought of this bodily emotion (a passion) is not the same as the act of will (an action of the soul), which inclines us to join by the will the object to ourselves.4 So, Descartes observes that certain bodily movements are naturally joined to certain thoughts, to which, however, as he repeatedly emphasises, they do not bear any resemblance. Thus, he claims, for instance, that the dryness of the throat induces the desire to drink, despite the fact that one pertains to the body and the other to the soul. Descartes observes also that in addition to our thoughts being in this way naturally associated with certain movements or dispositions of our bodies, our soul is also capable of having all of its thoughts joined to movements and dispositions of our bodies to which they are not joined by nature.5 When thoughts are in this manner artificially associated with certain movements and dispositions of the body, these bodily movements induce our soul to have the corresponding thoughts and, reciprocally, when we

1 Descartes, at 4, pp. 600–​617; csm 3, pp. 305–​314. 2 As is always the case with us humans, in contrast to angels or other disembodied spirits. 3 See also, Descartes, Passions de l’ame, art. 90 and 91; at 11, pp. 395–​397; csm 3, pp. 360–​361. 4 ‘[…] joindre à soi de volonté l’objet qui se presente.’ at 4, pp. 601–​603; csm 3, pp. 306–​307. 5 ‘[…] elle a aussi cette propriété que chacune de ses pensées se peut tellement associer avec quelques movements ou autres dispositions de ce corps […].’ at 4, p. 603–​604; csm 3, p. 307. Thus, Descartes does not claim that the soul can create these associations by itself, just by willing, but that they can be made. I return to this issue later.

The Natural and Artificial Body in Cartesian Philosophy

11

are having the same thoughts our body tends to have the same dispositions. Regarding this phenomenon, Descartes gives the obvious example of language acquisition: we learn to join certain thoughts, significations to impressions made by series of letters or pronounced words.6 Descartes observes, however, that in fact the acquisition of such connections between thoughts and dispositions of the body predates language acquisition. He refers to the fact that the first dispositions of the body we had on entering the world, such as those produced by nourishment or the lack of it, that have accompanied our thoughts in this manner, are more closely joined to our thoughts than the ones that accompany them later. In this manner the dispositions of the body which are the first causes of passions tend to accompany our passions of love, hatred, sadness or desire, even in their less bodily and more intellectual forms. It is these four passions that Descartes considers to be the first passions, the only ones that we have had, as embodied beings, even before birth. Although these passions were thus originally related to the suitable nourishment of the body, similar bodily movements that accompany them come later to accompany also other, more intellectual emotions that result from completely different kinds of causes.7 Something else that follows from Descartes’ observations is that the other passions, in contrast to the four mentioned above, are not natural in the sense of being innate. This is completely evident in the case of the passions that Descartes describes in his Passions de l’âme, where he mentions, in addition to six primitive passions (admiration,8 love, hate, desire, joy and sadness), some passions which are not directly related to our bodily needs, but which refer instead to our social life. Passions such as anger, shame, pride or jealousy, require a social context, and obviously they develop later and differ from those of the more basic emotions which we already have at birth. Descartes observes that in the case of natural connections between mental states and states of the body, we cannot find any reasons for them being thus joined together. It is a contingent fact that a feeling of pain follows sadness, that joy produces a feeling of pleasure, that a certain emotion in the stomach makes us want to eat, that the dryness of the throat results in the need to drink. There is no affinity or relationship that would make the connections between these two series of events comprehensible. These connections nevertheless make us form judgements about objects before we have the possibility 6 at 4, pp. 603–​604; csm 3, p. 307. 7 at 4, pp. 604–​606; csm 3, pp. 307–​308; see also Passions, art. 107; at 11, pp. 407–​408; csm 1, pp. 375–​366. 8 In its earlier sense of ‘wonder’, ‘amazement’. See Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 3 vols. (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1998), s.v. ‘admiration’.

12 

Chapter 1

to weigh or consider any reasons for making them.9 Although we cannot find any logical or intelligible connections between these series of phenomena, Descartes suggests that we can perhaps give some kind of teleological reasons for them.10 These connections contribute to an end: the conservation of the body, or rather that of the mind-​body union as a whole.11 He observes that these sentiments have been put into him to signify things that are convenient or damaging to the mind-​body union.12 To sum up, the first connections between the mind and the body are established by nature (or ultimately by its creator, God), but in addition to these innate connections, novel links between our thoughts and the movements and dispositions of our bodies can also be established. Descartes usually gives mechanistic physiological explanations for the formation of these acquired or artificial connections. Although we cannot form such connections by mere acts of will,13 we can learn new habits, so that, for example, pronounced or written words, which according the institution of nature do not represent anything to the soul but their sound or the form of the letters, make us consider their meaning.14 In his Traité de l’homme Descartes describes how these new habits are formed. Animal spirits (the subtle particles of blood which according to Descartes circulate in the pores of the brain and in the nerves) pass more easily in the nerves when they have already passed along the same channels. In addition, if different passages are opened at the same time, then when one of the these is later opened the others will tend to open, too. In this way memories and associations can be conserved in the brain.15 And this explains, not only

9 6th meditation, at 9, p. 60; csm 2, p. 52–​53. 10 In his Passions de l’âme, Descartes writes that passions serve to conserve the body or to make it in some sense more perfect. Passions, art. 137; at 11, pp. 429–​430; csm 1, pp. 376–​377. 11 For a detailed discussion on teleology in Descartes’ thought, see Alison J. Simmons, ‘Sensible Ends: Latent Teleology in Descartes’ Account of Sensation’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 39, no. 1 (2001), pp. 49–​75. 12 ‘[…] quæ proprie tantum a natura datæ sunt ad menti signifiacandum queænam composito, cujus pars est, commoda sint vel imcommoda […]’, 6th meditation, at 7, p. 83; csm 2, p. 83. ‘[…] pour signifier à mon esprit quelles choses sont convenables ou nuisibles au composé dont il est partie […]’, at 9, p. 66 (my emphasis). 13 In the Passions (art. 50; at 9, p. 369; csm 1, p. 348), Descartes observes that such habits can be acquired as a consequence of a single action, but not by the action of the soul. He gives the example of the reactions following eating spoiled meat, in which case an aversion is formed on the basis of just one occasion. This is clearly a passion of the soul: it is the action of the body that causes the aversion. 14 Passions, art. 50; at 11, pp. 368–​370; csm 1, p. 348. 15 De l’homme, at 11, pp. 177–​179; csm 1, p. 107.

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13

how we can associate thoughts with shared linguistic signs, but also some idiosyncratic connections between thoughts and actions of the body: for example, strange aversions can be born in this way as a consequence childhood experiences, without us having any conscious memories of these experiences.16 It is worthwhile to take a closer look at the term ‘industrie’ that Descartes uses in the Passions de l’âme when he discusses how we can acquire power over our passions by joining our thoughts to certain movements in the brain to which they are not naturally joined or by separating them from those movements to which they are joined and then joining them to completely different ones. In the sixteenth century the term ‘industrie’ still had its ancient pre-​ industrial meaning, which disappeared later during the nineteenth century. It referred to ‘skill’, ‘ingenious means’ or ‘cunning’.17 In the Passions Descartes is referring to the fact that we obviously cannot excite or stop passions at will.18 This is simply because not all of our bodily movements are voluntary, and this concerns especially those associated with passions. We cannot arbitrarily cause certain movements in our bodies by merely willing, in so far as these movements are not joined by nature to our thoughts in the way required for this to happen.19 For example, we cannot enlarge our pupils at will, because nature has not joined this movement to the volition to enlarge or contract our pupils, but to the volition to look at distant or nearby objects. But what we can do is to use indirect means: by looking at distant or near objects we can influence the size of our pupils. And, in this manner, we can also acquire new habits by training our bodies so that, for example, by merely thinking of certain words we can make our tongue and lips pronounce them much faster and better than if we would think of moving them in all the diverse ways which are required to pronounce them.20 In a similar way, we can control the passions indirectly.21 Descartes compares the controlling of our passions to training a dog in order to replace its natural behaviour with completely different behaviours. The natural behaviour of a dog is to run after a partridge but to run away when a gun is shot. But setters can be trained to stop when they see a partridge and to run towards it only after they hear the shot. In an analogous manner, we can with a little cunning acquire a mastery over our passions, if we ‘use

16 17 18 19 20 21

Passions, art. 136; at 11, pp. 428–​429; csm 1, pp. 375–​376. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, s.v. ‘industrie’. Passions, art. 45; at 11, pp. 362–​363; csm 1, p. 345. See also Passions, art. 41; at 11, pp. 359–​360; csm 1, p. 343. Passions, art. 44; at 11, pp. 361–​362; csm 1, p 344–​345. Passions, art. 45; at 11, pp 362–​363; csm 1, p. 345.

14 

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sufficiently ingenious means to train and manage them’.22 We can transform our own ‘nature’ just like we can transform the natural tendencies of animals, by adding new habits or replacing natural habits with artificial ones. In his Traité de l’homme Descartes is establishing a scientific and causal perspective on the functioning of the human body. But, as we have already observed, we should not forget that this mechanical explanation does not necessarily rule out the teleological perspective. Concerning machines, to which Descartes compares the human body, we can actually ask two kinds of questions: What are they for? and How do their mechanisms work? And, indeed, when Descartes describes the bodily movements accompanying the passions, he often indicates what they are for, or to what purpose they serve.23 The teleological perspective helps us to identify the movements that are pertinent for achieving the purpose (instead of being mere side-​effects). Among all the movements happening in the body simultaneously, it is these functional movements which we are primarily interested in. So, instead of being an obstacle to the study of causation, the teleological perspective can in fact aid in the pursuit of efficient causation.24 In enabling the study of efficient causation, the assumption of regular connections between our thoughts and the movements in our bodies instituted by nature for the conservation and well-​ being of the mind-​body union, constitutes a precondition for the scientific study of these connections. These connections can be subjected to scientific study only in so far as they are lawful and same in all humans. But this is obviously not the case concerning the arbitrary connections between the mental and bodily established by habit. The latter connections established between thoughts and bodily events are arbitrary and depend on the will of humans. Thus, they obviously cannot be the proper subject of a natural science, aiming at general laws.

22

23

24

‘[…] si l’on employait assez d’industrie à les dresser et à les conduire.’ Passions, art. 50; at 11, pp. 368–​370. Cf. csm 1, where ‘industrie’ is in this passage curiously, and to my mind erroneously, as ‘with a little effort’ (csm 1, p. 348, see also art. 44, p. 344). Stephen Voss translates the term as ‘artifice’ (Passions, art. 44 & 47) and ‘skill’ (Passions, art. 50 & 121), which is more exact, in Passions of the Soul (Cambridge MA, Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), pp. 42, 46, 48 and 133. See, for example, Passions, art. 106 (at 11, pp. 406–​407; csm 365), where Descartes observes how the movements caused by desire send animal spirits to the brain to maintain and to fortify the idea of the will, as well as to make the animal spirits flow to the organs needed for obtaining what is desired, or, in art. 110 (at 11, p. 410; csm 1, p. 367), where he describes how the movement of spirits in sadness serve to (servent à) cause the bodily movements that usually accompany sadness. See, Simmons, ‘Sensible Ends’.

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15

But, on the other hand, the connections instituted by nature between thoughts and traces in the brain are similar to the connections of artificial signs with what they represent, since in neither case is it necessary for the signs to resemble what they represent, or to have any logical or ‘natural’ connection with what they represent. In his Dioptrique, Descartes criticises the views of philosophers who suppose that in order to perceive the soul one should consider images of objects sent from them to the brain, or alternatively, he observes that we should at least consider the nature of these images in a completely different manner from the way these philosophers do, that is, as resembling the objects they represent. Instead, Descartes suggests that we consider them analogous to signs and words, which in no way resemble the things they signify. And he strengthens his argument by observing that complete resemblance is in fact not necessary, even in the case of pictures, which represent three-​dimensional objects in flat surfaces. For example, in perspective drawing circles are represented by ovals. Descartes observes that in order to best function as images, they should in fact not resemble the objects they represent. We should thus think likewise of the images that are formed in our brain.25 In his Traité de la lumière Descartes uses the same analogy for language, and asks: if words, which as such, without human institution, do not signify anything, can make us conceive objects which they in no way resemble, why cannot we suppose that nature has instituted similar signs?26 And since secondary qualities such as colours are not properties of extended bodily objects, one could conjecture that nature has a code for translating the real properties of bodies to such experienced qualities, in order for the latter to be represented in our bodies, as traces or images of them. Thus, for instance, in the Regle xii of the Règles pour la direction de l’esprit Descartes gives an example of how colours could be represented by different figures. In so far as there exists an infinity of possible figures, all sensible differences can represented in this way.27 So all the different sensible qualities can end up being figures on the surface of the pineal gland, figures which Descartes terms ‘ideas or images’ that the mind 25

26 27

at 6, pp. 112–​113: csm 1, p 165. For the claim that the codes of pictorial representation are no less arbitrary and culturally conditioned than those of linguistic representation, see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1969), and Umberto Eco, La production des signes (Paris: Le livre de Poche, 2005). at 11, p. 4; csm 1, p. 81. at 10, p. 413: csm 1, p. 40–​41. In his Passions de l’âme, Descartes refers to the unique condition for this kind of representation to function: the signs representing must contain as much variety as the things represented. Passions, art. 13 and 34; at 11, p. 338–​339 and 354–​355; csm 1, pp. 333 and 341.

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immediately considers when it senses or imagines something.28 Even though the natural connections between the mind and body instituted by God are universal, invariable, systematic and law-​like, they are, as institutions of nature, nonetheless essentially institutions like language, which means that we cannot give any reasons why x is represented by y. A later dualist, Charles Bonnet, who spoke in this context of ‘natural signs of ideas’, observes that even if there are lawful connections between mental events and physiological events, these laws are beyond our understanding.29 So, at least for us, these natural signs are as arbitrary as the conventional ones. Michel Beyssade has analysed the double meaning of the term ‘ideas’, which Descartes uses to refer both to corporeal figures in the body and to mental ideas to which these correspond. Beyssade poses the question of whether the primitive sense of the term ‘ideas’ (in the sense of ideas of the senses or of the imagination) is to be sought in their corporeal aspect (as figures, forms or images which have a geometrical similitude to some other material objects) or in their mental aspect (as thoughts which have an intentional relationship to the objects they represent or, by extension, to the corporeal figures towards which the rational soul turns in order to consider them when it has these thoughts).30 In neither case resemblance is required. As Nelson Goodman has pertinently observed and convincingly argued, pictorial representation is not based on similarity: even a perfect similarity between objects does not yet constitute pictorial representation.31 Instead, a system of encoding is required. Thus the ideas, traces or images that Descartes hypothesised in the brain have the same curious double nature as other cultural objects such as pictures: they are material objects, but they are not representational because of their material properties or their resemblance with material objects, but rather because they acquire non-​natural, intentional properties in the manner that artefacts

28

29 30 31

De l’homme, at 11, pp. 176–​177; csm 1, p. 106. It is important to note that Descartes often uses the term ‘idea’ for the material traces or figures in the brain, which occasion ideas in the mind. See Jean-​Marie Beyssade, ‘Le sens commun dans la Règle XII: le corporel et l’incorporel’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 96, no. 4 (Octobre-​Décembre 1991), pp. 497–​514. Charles Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les faculties de l’âme (Copenhagen: Frère Ch. & Ant. Philibert, 1760), pp. xx–​xxii and § 6, and Raymond Savioz, La Philosophie de Charles Bonnet de Genève (Paris: J.Vrin, 1948), p. 141. J. M. Beyssade, ‘Le sens commun dans la Règle XII’, p. 504. For example, two completely similar cars are obviously not representations of each other, whereas a certain string of letters without any resemblance succeeds perfectly well in representing them. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 3–​43.

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or artificial signs or symbols do when they are used for a purpose by willing agents, be it human or divine. The double nature of ideas or mental representations is evident also in Descartes’ description of the passions, which he describes on two levels: the causal, physiological level and the intentional-​representational level.32 For example, joy and sadness are described in terms of representation: something good or bad is represented as ours. What is important to note in Descartes’ description is what actually carries out this representation: they are the impressions of the brain.33 These representational impressions are material events in the brain. And when Descartes describes the causes of these passions, he describes two kinds of causes. On the one hand, he says that they are caused by certain opinions (i.e. those possessing something good or bad).34 On the other hand, they are said to be caused by movements of the blood and the animal spirits.35 Interestingly, he observes in the context of the former kind of causes that the soul is not necessarily involved: it need not consider the things as good or bad, but rather perhaps in some other aspect, so that we can have corresponding passions even if the good or the bad make their impressions in the brain without the intervention of the soul, without the soul distinctly noticing the good and bad that causes them (i.e. regarding them instead under some other aspect).36 Pleasurable sensations (chatouillements) and pains are passions aroused by the good and bad which regard the body alone. The resulting joy or sadness does not result from any function of the understanding. They result merely from the impressions that the movements of the animal spirits make in the brain. But, in so far as the soul is united to a body, these impressions represent the movements caused in the nerves by the objects as some good or bad belonging to it.37 The simultaneously representational and causal nature of passions is likewise evident in Descartes’ description of esteem and scorn. They are described both in terms of the inclination of the mind to represent value or the lack of value of something and in terms of the movement of spirits in the brain that causes this inclination and fortifies the corresponding idea.38 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

See Sara Heinämaa and Timo Kaitaro, ‘Descartes’ Notion of the Mind-​Body Union and its Phenomenological Elaborations’, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 25–​44. Passions, art. 91 and 92; at 11, pp. 396–​397; csm 1, pp. 360–​361. Passions, art. 93; at 11, p. 398; csm 1, p. 361. Passions, art. 96; at 11, p. 401; csm 1, pp. 362–​363. Passions, art. 93; at 11, p. 398, csm 1, p. 361. Passions, art. 94; at 11, pp. 398–​400; csm 1, pp. 361–​362. Passions, art 149; at 11, pp. 443–​444.

18  2

Chapter 1

La Forge and Malebranche

Later Cartesians, La Forge and Malebranche both clarified and systematised what is implicit in Descartes’ model. The intentional and systematic semantic properties attached to the movements or traces in our brains are related to the will, be it either divine or human. The natural connections between the movements in our bodies and our thoughts can in the final analysis be traced to the will of God aiming at the conservation of our bodies or of the mind-​body union. The non-​natural ones result from the will of people aiming at living in a society. Nature and culture are thus distinguished, but they both use signs to achieve their aims. Like Descartes, La Forge observes that there are connections between our thoughts and certain movements of animal spirits which are immutable and cannot be separated by the mind or by our will. These connections serve to conserve us in our present state. They are identical in all people: the same thoughts are connected in all people to the same movements.39 But although we cannot separate the thoughts and the movements of the spirits that nature has joined together, we can associate certain thoughts with certain movements of the pineal gland and the animal spirits which had earlier not been thus joined. This fact lies at the bottom of our capacity to communicate: La Forge observers that it is only in this way that we have the faculty to make our thoughts known.40 La Forge distinguishes consequently between two ways in which ideas are connected to the ‘species’ or traces in our brains. In the case of the ideas of the imagination, which present sensible objects, this connection does not depend on our will and comes immediately from nature. In contrast, the connection of the ideas of the understanding with the movements of the pineal gland depends, in so far as it is mediated by linguistic signs, on our will, or at least on the will of those who have previously established these artificial connections. These conventional connections are not natural. But once these connections have been formed, the connections between ideas and movements of the animal spirits work similarly to the those instituted by nature, in a causally efficient way. For example, when we have joined the thought of a spiritual thing, such as a perfect being, with a corresponding corporeal species, this species and all the causes that produce it, also produce this same idea in our minds.41 39 40 41

Louis de la Forge, Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, in Œuvres philosophiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), pp. 227–​227. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., pp. 265–​266.

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Malebranche distinguishes three kinds of causes for the connections between our ideas and the traces in our brains. One of them, which also the other two require, is nature, or the constant and immutable will of God. As examples of this, he mentions the connections between the traces in our brains produced by a tree or a mountain and them respectively as ideas. But Malebranche also refers to some natural signs and sentiments, such as the traces produced in our brains by the cry of a suffering animal, a man in pain, or the face of a man who is threatening us or who is afraid. These traces produce in us respectively the ideas of pain, strength or weakness, and eventually the sentiments of compassion, fear and courage. These connections are similar in all humans and they are necessary for the conservation of their lives. They do not depend on our will in the manner of connections of certain ideas with the sounds of language or letters. The latter kind of artificial connections are not necessary for life. They are necessary only for people who wish to live reasonably in a society. These artificial connections Malebranche explains by referring to two, less stable and divine kinds of causes. One is simply the identity of time. For example, if one is thinking of God at the same time as the letters iah or the corresponding sounds affect one’s brain, the activation of the traces that these letters or sounds produce in one’s brain suffices to make one think of God. And vice versa, one cannot think of God without the confused traces of these letters or sounds accompanying these thoughts. The second artificial cause of the connections between ideas and traces, and which obviously supposes the above-​mentioned causes, is the will of humans. This will is necessary in order to make the non-​natural liaisons between traces and ideas regular and in accord with usage. Otherwise, the liaisons would be irregular, imperfect, too feeble and useless for humans living in society.42 Here Malebranche is obviously referring to human institutions, which presuppose common meanings attached to the same signs, even though not necessarily for all people, but at least for those living within a certain community. And so, just like La Forge, Malebranche observes that the liaison of spiritual ideas with the traces in one’s brain is not natural, and thus not similar in all humans. When humans see the shape of a square, each of them thinks of a square, since this connection is natural and universal. But when they hear the word ‘square’ they do not all have the same ideas.43 Malebranche also makes a rather surprising claim for a cartesian philosopher. One would expect that a radical dualist would think that grasping 42 Malebranche, De la recherché de la verité, ii, i, v; Œuvres, ed. Genèvieve Rodis-​Lewis, 2 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade /​Gallimard, 1979, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 160–​162. 43 Ibid., p. 162.

20 

Chapter 1

connections between abstract ideas would require an ability to separate those thoughts from imaginations and the corresponding material traces in the brain. However, Malebranche instead explains the difficulties in understanding and retaining spiritual and abstract things by the difficulties in fortifying their liaison with the material traces in the brain by continuous meditation. This is because otherwise they would not strike the mind with the same vividness.44 Consequently, in order to become a great metaphysician or a mathematician –​just like when one wants to become a great musician –​one should ­cultivate one’s body; to make it literally a machine, to submit its material organs to spiritual ends instead of, or in addition to, those instituted by nature. So, taking note of all the various ways, the natural and the cultivated, in which Descartes and his followers joined the mental to the material events in the brain, the claim that they separated the refined spiritual operations of the mind from the structure and operations of our bodies seems rather farfetched.45 We can see that they relied on two models in order to understand the human mind-​body union. On the one hand, we have the machinery of our bodies explainable by mechanics. On the other hand, to account for the more psychological aspects of the mind-​body union, the Cartesians relied on a semiotic model in which meanings are, arbitrarily but with certain functions in mind, attached to figures or movements of matter. The human body, according to the Cartesians, is indeed a machine, a machine which has been designed by nature with a purpose in mind, but which humans themselves have also tinkered with in order to permit abstract thought and communication. According to Descartes, culture can change nature and we can even gain mastery over the latter. In order to achieve this mastery, Descartes recommends, instead of speculative scholastic philosophy, a practice which permits us to know natural bodies ‘as distinctly as we know the skills of our artisans’.46 Instead of just staring passively and speculatively at nature’s workings, we could follow the example of artisans and try to turn nature into an artefact. In this way, we can also complement or even replace institutions of nature with cultural institutions within our bodies. But culture is always dependent on nature in the sense that the artificial mind-​body connections are based on those given by nature and require the machinery of our bodies that permits learning new habits. All of this natural machinery can be studied by Cartesian science. But the important part of our bodily mechanisms which are not the 44 45 46

Ibid., pp. 163–​164. See, for example, António Dámasio’s characterisation of ‘Descartes’ error’ in Descartes’ Error: Mind, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), pp. 249–​250. Discours de la méthode, vi; at 6, pp. 61–​62; csm 1, 142.

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21

appanage of nature but that of culture lies outside the purview of Cartesian science in so far as it cannot claim to explain the artificial in our bodies in the same manner as it can explain the movements of inanimate matter or the movement of animals, as mere matter in motion. Of course, Cartesian science can study the mechanisms of the ways by which our bodies are cultured and filled with thoughts, meanings, memories, concepts and unnatural passions. But in so far as the resulting traces and the corresponding thoughts or traces are formed by artificial and arbitrary human institutions, they cannot be studied scientifically in the same way as we can study the permanent and immutable institutions of nature. But even if the artificial aspects in our brains and bodies are outside the purview of Cartesian science, they are certainly not outside Cartesian philosophy as a whole. Descartes did indeed make ample room for artifice in describing what we are as the substantial union of a mind and a body. In this union, as we have already seen, meaning and mechanism are inexorably and inseparably united. Just like in cultural and semiotic artefacts, in which materiality and spirituality are inextricably and intimately conjoined. In this way, it is after all logical that meanings and purposes continue to haunt the Cartesian science of man, which is essentially based on models and metaphors based on cultural artefacts. It treats the body as a machine and the motions in the brain as ‘ideas’, that is, as representations, signs or signifiers.

­c hapter 2

Hobbes and the Citizens of the Realm of Truth In his De Corpore Hobbes presents his conception of ratiocination as computation, that is, as a form of addition and subtraction. His idea is based on a rather loose analogy between arithmetical operations and the way we add or subtract different qualities in order to identify things. For example, if we identify something as being a body, animated and rational, the result of the addition is a human. Or, likewise, having four sides of equal size and at right angles, adds up to a square. In this way, the conceptions of the mind are compounded of more primitive elements into which they can be analysed. This kind of ratiocination is something that we can, according to Hobbes, do silently, without words.1 However, in the chapter titled ‘On names’ Hobbes observes that some kind of ‘marks’ are necessary in order for us to recall past thoughts: For no man is able to remember Quantities without sensible and present Measures, nor Colours without sensible and present Patterns, nor Number without the Names of Numbers disposed in order and learned by heart. So that whatsoever a man has put together in his mind by ratiocination without such helps, will presently slip from him, and not be revocable but by beginning his ratiocination anew. From which it followes, that for the acquiring of Philosophy some sensible Moniments are necessary, by which our past thoughts may be not onely reduced, but also registred every one in its own order. These Moniments I call marks, namely, sensible things taken at pleasure, that by the sense of them such thoughts may be recalled to our mind, as are like those thoughts for which we took them.2 Due to the weakness of memory, without such marks one could not reason properly and extensively, that is, ‘to go from principles beyond a syllogism or two’. Thus, if a man who had discovered on seeing a triangle that its angles together equal two right angles, and was thinking this merely tacitly without 1 Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, the First Section, Concerning Body (London: R. & W. Leybourn, for Andrew Crocke, at the Green Dragon in Paul’s Church-​yard, 1656.), chap. 1, § 2–​3. Early English books online: http://​name.umdl.umich.edu/​A43​987.0001.001 (accessed 20.1.2021). 2 Elements, chap. 2, § 1. x.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_004

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words as marks at his disposal, he would not, on seeing afterwards a new triangle, know whether his discovery applies to this triangle as well. Without names, he would be forced to begin his contemplation anew. Thus ‘marks’ permit man to remember his own inventions.3 However, as mere ‘marks’ they do not yet permit him to share them with others. Such marks serve memory, but their uses are limited, since, unless these signs are made common, the science that is registered by such marks will disappear with its author and will not be of use to others. In order for the science to be communicated to and shared with others one needs signs.4 In the Leviathan Hobbes also uses the example of calculation and geometry to show how turning calculations of things into calculations of names permits one at the same time to pass from the particular to the universal: But he that hath the use of words, when he observes, that such equality was consequent, not to the length of the sides, nor to any particular thing in his triangle but onely to this, that the sides were straight and the angles three; and that that was all, for which he named it a Triangle, will boldly conclude Universally that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in these generall terms: Every triangle hath its three angles equall to two right angles.5 In this way, the use of words ‘discharges our mental reckoning of time and place’.6 It permits us to make general conclusions from particular experiences. Mental ‘reckoning’, that is, calculation or reasoning, is possible without words, but it can only be done for particular things, for example when reasoning what is likely to have preceded or to follow a particular thing.7 1

From Marks to Signs

In order to be useful for the general good of mankind, names must become ‘signs’, by which the discoveries of humankind can be manifested and made known to others. Hobbes divides signs into natural and arbitrary. Of the 3 Elements, chap. 6, § 11. 4 Elements, chap. 2, § 2. 5 Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4; The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, vols. 4–​5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), vol. 4, pp. 52 and 54 (Hobbes’s emphasis). 6 Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 54. 7 Leviathan, part 1, chap. 5; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 68.

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Chapter 2

former, Hobbes gives as an example clouds, which are a sign of rain to follow. The latter signs are those of which ‘we make a choice of at our own pleasure’, such as a stone marking a boundary.8 The names of which speech consists of are obviously also of the latter kind. Names act both as marks and as signs, but Hobbes takes care to indicate that the former function is primary: words can act as marks before they act as signs. A man living alone could use words in helping him to remember things, although he could not teach others. So, words could act as marks by ‘standing singly by themselves’ because they serve to recall our thoughts, but in order to become signs they must be ordered and disposed in speech, as parts of speech. And speech Hobbes defines as ‘words so connected, as that they become signs of our thoughts’.9 So, signs are something more than marks. Being a mark is primary in the sense that we could have marks without having signs, but not signs without having marks. This is evident in Hobbes’ characterization of a word: it is a ‘mark taken for memories sake’, but which serves ‘also by accident to signify to others what we remember ourselves’.10 So he defines a name as an arbitrary sign which serves as a mark and which, when pronounced, becomes a sign: A name is a Word taken at pleasure to serve for a Mark, which may raise in our Mind a thought like to some thought we had before, and which being pronounced to others, may be to them a Sign of what thought the speaker had or had not before in his mind.11 As one can observe from the above formulation, names ordered in our speech are not signs of the ‘things themselves’.12 Instead, they refer to something in the mind. Hobbes explains this curious view, which for him, however, was obvious, by observing that, for example, a person who hears the word ‘stone’ assumes that the person pronouncing it is thinking of a stone. In this sense, names ordered in our speech are signs of our ‘conceptions’ only and not of things themselves.13 Another reason Hobbes gives for the fact the words are not names of things themselves, is the fact that it is not necessary that a name should be a name of some thing at all: 8 9 10 11 12 13

Elements, chap. 2, § 2. Elements, chap. 2, § 3. Elements, chap. 2, § 3 (my emphasis). Elements, chap. 2, § 4 (Hobbes’s italics). Elements, chap. 2, § 5. Elements, chap. 2, § 5.

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For as these, a Man, a Tree, a Stone, are the Names of the Things themselves; so the Images of a Man, of a Tree and of a stone, which are represented to men sleeping, have their Names also, though they be not Things, but onely fictions and Phantasmes of things.14 In so far as we can remember these ‘phantasms’, we need names to mark and to signify them, just as we do for things in general. Other examples presented by Hobbes of the fact that names need not be names of anything are ‘future’, ‘impossible’ and ‘nothing’. In these cases, the mind ‘feigns’ these things, and Hobbes observes that it is in this sense permissible to apply the word ‘thing’ to whatsoever we name, whether it really exists or is merely ‘feigned’.15 So, Hobbes often distinguishes classes of names psychologically by reference to what goes on in the mind of the speaker or the hearer. He not only distinguishes names that serve to remember things and those that serve to signify our conceptions to others, but he also makes other distinctions based on what goes on in our minds –​or does not, as the case may be. He refers, for example, to the distinction between particular and indefinite names, which he insists, however, are both –​in relation to what goes on in our minds –​of uncertain signification, since the speaker cannot know what thing the speaker would have him conceive. Words denoting particularity or universality, such as ‘all’, ‘every’ and ‘some’, are according to Hobbes not names at all but rather ‘parts of names’. He analyses the meaning of the expressions ‘every man’ and ‘some man’ as being respectively equal to ‘the man the hearer conceives in his mind’ and ‘the man that the speaker thought of’ respectively.16 Hobbes also observes that there are parts of speech, like abstract names, which only get their meaning from their use in propositions and from the copula involved in these propositions. Instead of naming things, their use consists in the fact that they are necessary for computing the properties of bodies.17 Instead of taking Hobbes’s references to psychological facts in the context of logical matters as symptoms of some kind of ‘psychologism’, one could alternatively take them as indications of the way words and language act as tools that enable cognitive processes, which go beyond the particular and individual mental images in our minds.

14 15 16 17

Elements, chap. 2, § 6 (Hobbes’s emphasis). Elements, chap. 2, § 6. Elements, chap. 2, § 11. Elements, chap. 3, § 4.

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Access to the Realm of Truth

It is eventually through their use of language and the consequent ability to form propositions that humans acquire a capacity that animals lack. As truth and falsity are, according to Hobbes, characteristics of speech, they belong only to beings who use speech. Thus, he concludes that animals do not make errors related to truth and falsity. For example, although animals can be deceived by images and react to the mirror image of a man as if it were a real man, they do not mistake a mirror image of a man for a real man, because they do not form any propositions concerning the truth or falseness of their perception of the image, but merely apprehend its likeness. And in so far as this likeness is concerned, they are not deceived, as Hobbes pertinently remarks. But humans, who owe their ratiocination to the right understanding of speech, owe their errors to the misunderstanding of language.18 Hobbes seems to separate the invention of semiotic objects, such as his ‘marks’, from language proper. Words can be used as aids in cognition, especially in memory and in ratiocination. However, reasoning does not involve the mere manipulation of words. When Hobbes describes what happens when we reason, it seems that ‘phantasms’ play an important role: […] when this Syllogisme is made, Man is a Living Creature, A Living Creature is a Body, therefore Man is a Body, the Mind conceives first an image of a Man speaking or discoursing, and remembers that that which so appears, is called Man; then it has the image of the same Man moving, and remembers that that which appeares so is called Living Creature; thirdly, it conceives an image of the same Man as filling some place or space, and remembers that what appeares so is called Body; and lastly, when it remembers, that that thing which was extended, and moved and spake, was one and the same thing, it concludes that the three Names Man, Living Creature, and Body, are Names of the same thing, and that therefore Man is a Living Creature is a true Proposition.19 Although we can use signs as tools in our reasoning, what we actually compute are our phantasms.20 However, although conceiving the truth of a proposition involves the manipulations of images in the mind, language is essential for propositional thought. When one starts to use marks as proper linguistic signs 18 19 20

Elements, chap. 3, § 7–​8. Elements, chap. 4, § 8 (Hobbes’s emphasis). Elements, chap. 7, § 1.

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in communication, a new dimension for cognition arises: truth and falsity. In the Leviathan, Hobbes sums this up as follows: ‘where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood.’21 On the level of phantasms, there is only likeness. So, Hobbes concludes from the preceding description of syllogistic reasoning that one must have language in order to have thoughts: From whence it is manifest, that Living Creatures that have not the use of Speech, have no Conception or Thought in the Mind, answering to a Syllogisme made of Universall Propositions; seeing it is necessary to Thinke not only of the Thing, but also by turnes to remember the diverse Names, which for diverse considerations thereof are applied to the same.22 Corresponding to the distinction between having phantasms and thinking proper, Hobbes distinguishes two kinds of error. He observes that people err not only in affirming or denying, but also in perception and in silent cogitation. Of the former kind of error, Hobbes gives the example of seeing the sun in the sky and its reflection in water and applying to both the name ‘sun’, and consequently judging that the there are two suns. Hobbes deems that only this kind or error deserves the name of ‘falsity’. He again refers to the fact that only humans are capable of this falsity, since no other living creatures are capable of using names. Importantly, this kind of error does not arise from the senses or the things themselves, but ‘from pronouncing rashly’. Hobbes explains this by referring to the fact that names have their constitution from ‘the will and consent of men’, and not from the species of things. The falsity lies thus in departing from the agreed appellations of things, instead of being deceived by the things or by the senses. A person mistaking the reflection for the sun does not see that the reflection is called ‘sun’, but names it thus by their own will and agreement.23 We see here that Hobbes’ distinction involves a reference, in addition to language, to the will. What distinguishes sensory errors from falsity proper is the fact that, unlike sensations, making a false judgement is a voluntary act. And as a voluntary act –​which in addition, departs from what is agreed –​it can also be reproached as a failure in a manner which sensory errors cannot.

21 22 23

Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 54. Elements, chap. 4, § 8. Elements, chap. 5, § 1.

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From Ideas to Representations

In contrast to our judgements, the things or our imaginations cannot, according to Hobbes, be false. Natural signs can lead us astray when, for example, we see clouds and imagine that it will rain. This imagination turns into falsity only when we say that it will rain, when we form a proposition. Our imaginations themselves cannot be false. Our errors thus proceed either from the want of ratiocination or from affirmations or negations gone amiss.24 Here Hobbes makes an interesting distinction that we will encounter also in a slightly different form in the theory of Condillac. This is the distinction between sensory representation and linguistic representation. Even if we are tempted to think that our sensations represent something beyond them, the way that language represents things is something altogether different. In his Leviathan, Hobbes explains this distinction between pictorial representation based on resemblance and representation which does not require resemblance. He defines ‘image’ in the strict sense as ‘the resemblance of something visible’. In this sense the term includes all fantastical forms, apparitions or ‘seemings’ of visible bodies, such as reflections, which arise when we see things in places where they are not, or in dimensions that are not true. These images are, according to Hobbes, those which are originally and most properly called ‘ideas’, from which also the faculty of imagination gets its name. The imagination can also represent diverse creatures which we have never seen yet we can materialise these when we make images of them. Such images need not resemble any corporeal things. They resemble merely the ‘fantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker’. So, in this case the likeness of the image lies merely in its resemblance to the original in the brain. But Hobbes adds that there is a larger use of the word ‘image’, as, for example, when the sovereign may be taken as the image of God or an inferior magistrate as the image of an earthly sovereign. In this way, an image can represent a god or Virgin Mary without resembling anything real, and let each person ‘apply a mental image of his making’. This largest sense, as distinct from resemblance, Hobbes terms ‘representation’.25 The distinction between resemblances of imagination and representation proper entails the distinction between imagination and understanding. The latter is the imagination ‘raised in man (or any other creature induced with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signs’. This kind of

24 25

Elements, chap. 5, § 1. Leviathan, part 4, chap. 45; Clarendon Edition, vol. 5, pp. 1030–​1032.

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understanding is common for both humans and animals in so far as dogs, for example, can learn to understand the call or the scolding of their master. But the understanding proper to a human is something different: That Understanding which is peculiar to man, is the understanding not onely his will, but his conceptions and thoughts, by the sequell and contexture of the names of things into Affirmations, Negations, and other forms of Speech.26 In other words, unlike dogs or other animals, humans can understand not only the will, but also the conceptions and thoughts of other humans.27 This kind of human understanding requires more than the capacity to understand separate words. It requires the mastery of language in order to be able to form propositions and thus to gain access to the realm of truth and falsity. Hobbes also writes that understanding means that one is having the thoughts that the words of speech are ordained or constituted to signify. And since understanding is thus nothing but conception caused by speech, it is peculiar to humans.28 Another difference between the mental capacities of humans and animals concerns the trains of thoughts which are regulated by desire or design. Humans and animals are both able to imagine an effect and look for the causes to produce that effect. But what is lacking in animals is the curiosity to proceed from the cause to the effect and to look for all the possible effects that could be produced by it. From this also develops the human capacity to reduce, through the use of words, the consequences they find into general theorems or aphorisms. A living creature having only sensual passions such as hunger, thirst, lust and anger is not capable of this kind of curiosity.29 But prudence, that is, the presumption of the future on the basis of the past, is a natural act shared by humans and animals.30 So, in addition to such natural faculties that humans share with animals, they have acquired faculties that distinguish themselves from animals. These faculties all proceed from the invention of words and speech.31 As we have already seen, these faculties permit generalisations. In

26 27 28 29 30 31

Leviathan, part 1, chap. 2; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 36. The Latin version runs thus: ‘Intellectus qui homini peculiardis est, est Intellectus non solum voluntatis, se etiam conceptuum & cogitarium aliorum hominum.’ Leviathan, part 1, chap. 2; Clarendon Edition, p. 37. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4, Clarendon Edition, p. 62. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 3 and 5; Clarendon Edition, pp. 40, 42 and 68. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 3; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 44. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 3; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, pp 44 and 46.

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addition to working as an aid in reasoning and calculating properly, speech is also essential for establishing society. If humans could not register their thoughts, to recall them when they are past and to declare them to others, there would be no commonwealth, society, contract or peace among them.32 This seems logical enough, since language establishes the domain of truth and falsity, without which trust would not make sense, and without trust no contract would be possible.33 One thing that seems to be particularly novel in Hobbes, and pregnant with future possibilities, is that he raises the notion of language and its specific way of representation to a central position in distinguishing and describing the specificity of human thought. However, all this seems to proceed from the individual mind: an individual who had invented speech could have started by using ‘marks’ in order to register his or her thoughts and then ‘also to declare them to another for mutual utility and conversation’.34 We have to wait for a century or so before someone starts to suspect that the means used for symbolic social interaction do not proceed from what goes on in the individual’s mind, that is, that language does not just give names to ideas but constitutes them. But although in Hobbes’s scheme, inventing if not a full-​blown language then at least some kind of elementary signs or marks all by oneself seems quite conceivable, there are things that could not exist without humans having formed societies. In the natural condition there would be –​to mention just a few of the things Hobbes lists –​no craft, agriculture, arts, letters, or society.35 And among these things absent in the state of nature, one notably finds also justice and injustice, which are things that relate only to human society.36 So we could perhaps surmise that even before the establishment of society, humans could ­possess most of the intellectual virtues but no moral ones. What Hobbes calls ‘natural intellectual virtues’ can be acquired purely through experience, without 32 33

34 35 36

Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4; Clarendon Edition, vol. 5, p. 48. Philip Pettit has convincingly demonstrated in Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) how Hobbes’s novel conception of the relation between thought and language works as the foundation for the whole of his political theory. Pettit also remarks that this constitutes an essential distinction between the Hobbesian and the Rousseauan state of nature: the latter’s state of nature is a state in which humans have not yet learned language or developed the capacity to think, whereas for Hobbes it is a state where humans have already mastered language. Made with Words, p. 98. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 4; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 48, my emphasis. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 13; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 192. I have translated Hobbes’s term ‘industry’, according to its ancient meaning, ‘skill’, ‘ingenuity’, ‘craft’, etc. See oed, s.v. ‘industry’. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 13; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 196.

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method, development or instruction.37 In addition to these natural intellectual virtues, there is also what he calls ‘acquired wit’, that is, wit acquired by method and instruction, and of which he claims the unique example is reason, which is grounded on the right use of speech.38 And reason is not innate or acquired merely by experience, but rather achieved through work. Unlike sense and memory, which deal with brute facts, reason gives access to the knowledge of consequences and the dependence of one fact on another.39 For Hobbes, reason was obviously an artificial skill requiring language instead of a natural human endowment.40 37 38 39 40

Leviathan, part 1, chap. 8; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 104. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 8; Clarendon Edition, vol, 4, p. 110. Leviathan, part 1, chap. 5; Clarendon Edition, vol. 4, p. 72. However, Hobbes sometimes uses the term ‘natural reason’, and this not only in order to refer to something not requiring supernatural inspiration, but also to refer to the capacity to learn and master the artificial skill of reason. See Pettit, Made with Words, note 4 in chap. 3, pp. 159–​160.

­c hapter 3

Locke: Combining Ideas with a Little Help from Words It is the understanding that sets humans above the rest of sensible things, writes Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.1 In this seminal work, Locke, unlike the Cartesians, does not propose to ‘meddle with the physical consideration of the mind’. He further writes that he will not trouble himself with the motions of spirits or other motions or alterations in our bodies that give rise to sensations in our organs or ideas in our understanding.2 Consequently, even if he does not have much to say about how and in what measure the movements of animal spirits in our brains depend on nature or culture, he has something to say concerning the question in what measure our ideas come from nature or culture, and whether our understanding is a natural entity or a product of culture. 1

The Portion of Nature

In his discussion of innate ideas, Locke deliberates on the principles that are universally assented when humans come to the use of reason. He observes that this universal assent does not constitute any proof that these ideas are innate and adds that we could just as well have started from another prerequisite: that of coming to the use of speech. In order to understand the supposedly innate general propositions, children ‘must have learned the general and abstract ideas with their names’. This happens when ‘they are by their ordinary discourse and actions with others acknowledged to be capable of rational conversation’.3 In so far as learning the relevant words and the rules of rational conversation require a thorough assimilation of language and culture, the supposed innate principles could hardly be considered to proceed from nature. What Locke terms the ‘discursive faculty’ requires that the mind is furnished with more than just particular ideas. It must also have learned to abstract them and to use general names.4 The general terms and the ideas they stand for are, 1 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book i, chap. i, § 1. 2 Essay, i, i, § 2. 3 Essay, i, ii, §14. 4 Essay, i, ii, § 15.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_005

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as Locke pertinently observes, no more innate than those of a cat or a weasel.5 Thus one cannot imagine that the generally assented maxims one usually puts forth as examples of innate ideas could be assented without any teaching.6 Even if the human mind has no innate principles, whether speculative or practical, Locke admits that nature has put into the human ‘a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery’. He observes that ‘these indeed are innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing’. Locke adds, however, that ‘they are inclinations of the appetite to good, not impressions of truth on the understanding’. Locke thus admits such ‘natural tendencies imprinted on the minds of men’, but observes that this ‘makes nothing for innate characters of the mind, which are to be the principles of knowledge, regulating our practice’.7 Locke also argues against the innateness of practical principles on the grounds there are no moral rules for which one cannot justly demand a reason, and innate principles should in fact be self-​evident without need of proof.8 In addition, against their innateness he invokes the variability of moral rules and practices.9 And finally, he argues that some candidates for innate moral principles are simply commands, and not propositions, which can be true or false.10 And to make them duties requires the ideas of God, law, obligation, punishment, and a life hereafter –​and these should obviously be innate too, in order to make the moral principles innate.11 Locke claims that the innate principles of action that regulate the actions of humans independently of the aforementioned ideas related to the omnipotent law-​giver are immoral and left to themselves would overturn all morality. Instead of an innate moral law, Locke proposes moral principles of which we can attain knowledge by the use of our natural faculties –​without having to rely on positive revelation.12 In so far as, according to Locke, all our ideas result from sensation or from reflection, instead of being innate, they are comparable to cultural institutions: ‘ideas and notions are no more born with us than arts and sciences.’13 But how far does this analogy with the arts and sciences apply? That is, do 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Essay, i, ii, § 16. Essay, i, ii, § 17. Essay, i, iii, § 3. Locke’s emphasis. Essay, i, iii, § 4. Essay, i, iii, § 6–​12. Essay, i, iii, § 12. Essay, i, iii, § 12. According to Locke, not even the notion of God is innate. Knowledge of God’s existence is demonstrative. Essay, iv, iii, § 21. Essay, i, iii, § 13. Essay, i, iv, § 22.

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all acquired ideas arise naturally by the use of our natural faculties or are some ideas artificial in a more fundamental sense than just being acquired or learned? Since simple ideas are received passively and cannot be made, the answer, in so far as they are concerned, seems to be negative.14 But what about the formation of complex ideas, do some of them arise from human conventions and institutions? And does artifice extend even further, in other words, could the human mind actually develop faculties that are artificial? 2

The Architecture of Ideas

Among the ideas that we receive by both sensation and reflection, Locke mentions the ideas of pleasure and pain. His explanation for their existence is similar to Descartes’, in so far as it refers to God and provides teleological reasons for them. Locke mentions the usefulness of pain in avoiding things that are harmful.15 But his first explanation for pleasure is slightly different from that of Descartes: instead of referring to the function of making us approach things that are useful or convenient for us like Descartes, Locke refers to the more general function of motivating thought and action. Without pleasure we would neither move our bodies nor pay attention to anything. Instead, we would just let our thoughts wander without direction.16 But later in the Essay Locke refers to the symmetrically opposed functions, wisely ordered by nature, of pleasure and pain: these sensations make us notice what hurts or advantages the body.17 But although nature has given as such natural pleasures and pains, humans can through good consideration, practise, application, habit, fashion or common opinions make naturally displeasurable or indifferent things pleasurable.18 To the objection that referring all our knowledge to the simple ideas received by sensation and reflection sets too narrow bounds for the mind of man, Locke answers with a linguistic analogy. He observes how the twenty-​four letters of 14 15 16

17 18

Essay, ii, xii, § 1. Essay, ii, vii, § 2. Essay, ii, vii, § 3. In addition, Locke mentions one theological reason why God has scattered different degrees of pleasure and pain in the things affecting us and blended them so that we find imperfections and dissatisfaction in them. Lacking complete happiness, we eventually seek happiness in the enjoyment in God himself. In addition, they also give us due sentiments of the wisdom and goodness of God. Essay, ii, vii, §§ 5 and 6. Essay, ii, x, § 3. Locke also concludes that our Maker has put in us uneasinesses, such as hunger and thirst, which determine our will for the preservation of ourselves and the continuation of our species. Essay, ii, xii, § 34. Essay, ii, xxi, § 69.

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the alphabet can provide us with a wealth of different words. Similarly, a few simple ideas can provide us, when combined, with materials for an endless variety of complex ideas.19 Like Descartes, Locke denies that ideas should be considered as images: they need not resemble the ‘things outside us’ any more than the names that stand for them.20 And like Descartes, he refers to God who has annexed ideas to the movements of particles affecting our sense organs.21 But although ideas do not have to resemble the qualities of objects, according to Locke there are ideas of qualities that do resemble the qualities of objects: these are the primary, original or real qualities, which are in the things themselves.22 Locke’s linguistic analogy does not apply so much to the arbitrariness of the representational code of ideas as to their combinatorial nature. However, Locke’s linguistic analogy is less simple and more ambiguous than it appears at first sight. We should of course ask how far and in what manner this linguistic analogy applies to the combination of sensations. If the way in which simple ideas are combined into complex ideas is comparable to the manner in which letters are combined to form words, we should consider whether this happens in the manner that letters form nonsense words or in the way they form real words. In the case of the former, their ‘meaning’ (being merely the way they are pronounced) is, at least ideally, simply a function of the letters composing them. But in the case of real words, which have meanings that cannot be deduced from the letters of which they are constituted, the situation is more complex. So, one question we should pose to Locke concerning complex ideas is whether they observe the principle of compositionality, which when applied to complex linguistic expressions states that their meaning is determined by the meaning of their constituent parts according to combinatory rules –​which, of course, does not apply to the structure of the words in a natural language (to which Locke’s analogy refers to). Are complex ideas formed of simple ideas according to some kind of compositional rules? The absence of any discussion on the ‘grammar’ of the human mind, that is, of the rules that govern the combination of ideas, and the way Locke describes the formation of complex ideas as simply the joining or ‘putting together’ of simple ideas, suggest the absence of any combinatory rules of the kind encountered

19 20 21 22

Essay, ii, vii, § 10. Essay, ii, vii, § 7. But he also writes: ‘[…] for methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let external visual resemblances, or ideas of things without […].’ Essay, ii, xi, § 17. Essay, ii, vii, § 12. Essay, ii, vii, §§ 15 and 17 and ii, viii, § 23. The primary qualities, which produce simple ideas in us, are solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Essay, ii, viii, § 9.

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in the grammar of languages.23 In fact, as far as the origin of such combinatory rules or principles is concerned, they would have to be either innate or originate from experience in the same manner as the simple ideas of sensation and reflection are combined into complex ideas, which is exactly what they were supposed to explain. The first solution does not seem satisfactory from the empiricist point or view and the second would seem a bit circular. Some kind of innate basic mechanisms for combination seem, however, to be required even from the empiricist point of view –​of the kind provided later by Hume’s laws of association. Instead, however, of the passivity implicit in the idea of association, Locke’s description of the formation of complex ideas seems more like an activity involving signs. But this activity does not seem to produce anything that could not be reduced to a combination, by simple concatenation, of simple ideas. In the final analysis, there is nothing in the mind which is not made from a combination of simple ideas.24 In this way simple ideas constitute also the limits of our mind beyond which it cannot reach.25 3

The Role of Language in Human Understanding

Occasionally Locke’s Essay also discusses the role of language in the constitution of human understanding. Locke picks up this theme when he discusses whether animals are capable of comparing ideas. He conjectures that though animals may compare some ‘sensible circumstances annexed to objects themselves’, the power of comparing ‘belonging to general ideas’, which is required for abstract reasoning, is a human prerogative.26 Locke supposes also that even if animals can retain combinations of several simple ideas which occur concurrently (such as the shape, smell and voice of their master), animals lack the capacity to actively compound simple ideas into complex ideas.27 After discussing the limits of the intelligence of animals, Locke describes the role of language not only in providing names for particular ideas but also in abstracting these particular ideas into general ideas, and thus giving birth to universals.28 Animals are not capable of abstraction and this fact Locke attributes clearly to the lack of language: 23 24 25 26 27 28

Essay, ii, xii, § 1, and ii, xiii, § 1. Essay, xvii, § 1, and ii, xxii, § 9. Essay, ii, xxiii, § 29. Essay, ii, xi, § 5. Essay, ii, xi, § 7. Essay, ii, xi, § 9.

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For it is evident we observe no footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general signs.29 Locke concludes, against Descartes, that animals are thus not ‘bare machines’. Nevertheless, the ideas of animals are limited to particular ideas received from their senses.30 Signs are thus useful in making abstractions. Despite this, Locke, occasionally describes the process of abstraction as if it would be independent of and preceding language; for example, when he says that the mind abstracts an idea ‘and then gets a name to it’.31 Be that as it may, signs are useful for distinguishing abstract ideas or making mental operations on them. In discussing ­arithmetic, Locke makes some remarks concerning the usefulness of signs in distinguishing mathematical units. Thus, for example, without names or marks for numbers we could hardly make use of numbers in reckoning: without a name or a mark to distinguish it, a great multitude of units could ‘hardly be kept from being a heap in confusion’.32 Locke seems, however, to prefer thinking without words. He distinguishes mental and verbal propositions, with their respective signs, ideas and words. Consequently, he thinks one must also differentiate between the truth of thought and the truth of words. He admits that this is difficult, since one cannot treat mental propositions without using words and because people tend, when thinking and reasoning, to make use of words instead of ideas, at least when their thoughts contain complex ideas. What is significant from the point of view of the problem concerning the constitutive role of language for reasoning is, however, that Locke writes that we can form mental propositions without words. He claims that the mind can put ideas together, separate them and perceive or judge their agreement of disagreement without the use of words. The truth of verbal propositions is thus secondary and depends on the agreement or disagreement of the ideas that the signs stand for.33 So, Locke 29 30 31 32

33

Essay, ii, xi, § 10. Essay, ii, xi, § 11. Essay, ii, xxxii, § 7, my emphasis. Essay, ii, xvi, § 5. Curiously, the title of the paragraph and the next one seem to make a stronger claim: ‘Names necessary to numbers.’ But this is justified in the next paragraph (§ 6), where Locke discusses the defective numbering system of American Indians and concludes that distinct names are necessary for numbering, so that one can get ideas of them more easily and signify them more plainly to others. Essay, iv, v, §§ 2–​5.

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can claim that the best and surest way to attain clear and distinct knowledge is to examine the ideas themselves and lay aside their names. However, since this is seldom practiced, he thinks that it is necessary to consider words and propositions in the treatise on knowledge.34 So words do not seem to be indispensable after all. 4

Distinctions Created by Human Institutions

In so far as Locke takes the real essences of things to be unknown to us, he discusses the distinction between humans and animals as a distinction of nominal essences, made by the mind and not by nature.35 He observes that, on the one hand, there are creatures similar to us in shape, but which are hairy and lacking reason or even language. On the other hand, there are people who have perfectly identical bodily shapes as the rest of us, but lack reason or even language. In so far as our ‘measures of species’ are merely abstract ideas based on what we know, and not on an internal constitution or real essence (which, according to Locke, is unknown to us), the distinction between humans and animals is not so clear-​cut as it seems: changelings and drills are distinguished by certain anatomical details, but both lack speech and reason characteristic of humans. As we will see, this is one of the Lockean themes that La Mettrie picks up and develops further. Locke does not conclude, like La Mettrie, that it is language and culture and not external form which distinguishes humans from animals. Instead, Locke refers reasonably to the common practise of classifying species according to shape. But in so far as Locke claims that the concept of ‘man’ is a nominal essence, and as such man-​made and not natural, this makes humanity itself into an artifice, since the distinction between humans and brutes, which determines important decisions starting from baptism, is itself artificial.36 In addition, Locke clearly distinguishes two senses of the word ‘man’: one complex idea made on the basis of the outward shape (such as Plato’s ‘animal implume bipes latis unguibus’) and the other referring to rationality.37 Evidently, the first kind of definition has its uses in natural history, but Locke refers to the fact that the second can turn out be necessary for moral practises, for example, in deciding whether killing monstrous births could be 34 35 36 37

Essay, iv, vi, § 1. Essay, iii, vi, §§ 22–​27. According to Locke, the boundaries of species in general are ‘as men, not as nature, makes them’. Essay, iii, vi, § 30. Essay, iii, xi, § 20.

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excused from the charge of murder.38 In this case it is not so much a question of making scientific classifications but rather of making moral distinctions. The role of human institutions in the formation of ideas is, according to Locke, especially evident if we examine the ideas of relations pertaining to the moral notions of rights, powers, privileges or obligations, involved in such concepts as a citizen, a burgher or a general. They all depend on the wills or the agreement of people living in society: they are instituted or voluntary in contradistinction to the natural.39 Such notions are evidently not natural properties of the person concerned but voluntary or instituted relations between people. The notions of moral good and evil are drawn from the power of the law-​maker, be it divine or human.40 Notions and words pertaining to moral ideas do not thus reflect nature or the ‘reality of things’ but they are proportioned to ‘the notions men have, and the commerce of thoughts familiar to them’.41 Curiously, Locke makes use of somewhat incongruous linguistic coordinations, such as ‘chance or custom’, ‘voluntarily or by chance’, which seem to suggest that will is as arbitrary as chance.42 This is understandably due to the conceptual and etymological connections between the voluntary and arbitrary. But he observes that once these arbitrary customs determine the will or the motions of the animal spirits in the body, these movements become easy, ‘as it were natural’.43 According to Locke, the signs of language serve merely to name simple ideas or to abstract general and complex ideas whose existence or possibility as such in no way depends on language. In this way, language does not actually create any ideas, but it helps us to combine them and to communicate them to others. Words are unable to generate any new ideas; custom can only make words act as signs that excite and revive latent ideas that already existed.44 But as we have seen, language has also a significant role in helping us to manage and abstract ideas. Locke refers also to the function of language in artificial memory: words serve men also ‘to record their thoughts for the assistance of their own memory’.45 Interestingly, when Locke refers to the double use of language, 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Locke mentions, as an example of arbitrary distinctions of mixed modes which have no foundation in nature, the distinction between killing and murdering. Essay, iii, v, § 6. We kill sheep and murder men. The acts are not naturally distinct, the only distinction resulting from our moral conceptions. Essay, ii, xxviii, § 3. Essay, ii, xxviii, §§ 5–​7. Essay, ii, xxviii, § 2. Essay, ii, xxxiii, §§ 5–​6. Essay, ii, xxxiii, § 6. Essay, iv, xviii, § 3. Essay, iii, ii, § 2.

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he mentions first its role in recording our thoughts and only secondly its function in communicating our thoughts to others. In this passage Locke also refers indirectly to the role language as the foundation of our reflective capacities by observing that in recording our thoughts by recourse to language we ‘as it were, talk to ourselves’.46 And concerning mixed modes,47 he observes that ‘no such species are taken notice of or supposed to be unless a name be joined to it’.48 It thus seems that language serves not only to complement memory but also to direct and form our attention. In so far as ideas themselves can be considered as signs for absent things, Locke writes that the mind makes use of signs not only for communicating ideas but also ‘for the understanding of things’.49 Despite the fact that for Locke ideas come before words –​which thus cannot create anything which does not already exist in ideas –​his theory contains, as John Hardcastle has pointed out, elements that indicate that language has an instrumental role in gaining mastery over memory, a feature which Condillac will later radicalize and develop further.50 46 47 48 49 50

Essay, iii, ix, § 2. Mixed modes are complex ideas consisting of several combinations of simple ideas of different kinds, distinguished from simple modes which consist of simple ideas of the same kind. Essay, ii, ii, § 1. Essay, iii, v, § 11. Essay, iv, xxi, 4. John Hardcastle, ‘Vygotsky’s Enlightenment Precursors’, Educational Review 61, no. 2 (May 2009), pp. 181–​195.

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Leibniz, Wolff, and Symbolic Cognition in the German Tradition Before examining the French tradition emphasising the constitutive role of language in human cognition, we must examine some of its Germanic roots. The writings of Leibniz and Wolff probably provided the impetus to French eighteenth-​century discussions on the role of language in human cognition. Both La Mettrie and Condillac refer to this German tradition and pick up some important elements from it for their own use –​or misuse, as the case might be. As is to be expected, sometimes the content and meaning of the terms picked up changed as they were imported to a different context. For example, La Mettrie refers to the contrast between symbolic and intuitive knowledge of the ‘Leibnizians’, but seems to have a quite different understanding than Leibniz had of the meaning of this distinction.1 Condillac uses and develops Wolff’s corresponding distinctions and ideas for his own purposes in Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines.2 1

Leibniz

In a short early Latin text ‘Meditationes de cognitione, veritate, et ideis’ (Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas, 1684) Leibniz distinguishes between obscure and clear knowledge. Knowledge is clear when we can distinguish the thing represented. Clear knowledge can be confused or distinct. When we have a distinct concept of something, we can enumerate one by one the marks that differentiate the thing in question from others. Furthermore, within clear and distinct knowledge Leibniz distinguishes between inadequate and adequate knowledge. If the components of a concept are themselves

1 La Mettrie, L’homme machine (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 162; Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 13. 2 Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines, i, iv, ii, §§ 23 and 27. Paragraph 23, starting from the second phrase onwards, is an almost literal translation of a passage from Wolff’s Psychologia rationalis, sect. i, cap. iv, § 461. See the note in the edition of Condillac’s Essai by Jean-​Claude Pariente and Martine Pécharman (Paris: Vrin, 2014), p. 161.

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known distinctly the knowledge is adequate. Adequate knowledge, in turn, can be symbolic or intuitive. The most perfect knowledge would be adequate and intuitive. Leibniz explains the difference between symbolic and intuitive knowledge with an example. If we are thinking about a chiliagon, that is, a polygon with a thousand equal sides,3 we do not always consider the nature of a side, or of equality, or of thousandfoldness, but we use the word, whose sense appears obscurely and imperfectly in our minds, in place of the ideas we have of these things. We simply remember that we know the meaning of these terms, and it is in this way, Leibniz observes, that we usually proceed in algebra and arithmetic. This is what Leibniz calls symbolic or blind knowledge. When we able to consider all the component notions of a complex notion at the same time, we have knowledge that Leibniz terms intuitive. He adds that all knowledge of distinct primitive notions is intuitive, while thinking about composites for the most part is symbolic.4 It is thus quite evident that for Leibniz signs were not only a means of communicating thoughts but also an instrument for forming them in the first place –​or at least some of those involving composites. Likewise, in Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, Betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der Deutschen Sprache, Leibniz observes that words are used not only to manifest our meaning to others but also to aid us in our thoughts. Here he compares language to paper money, Zettel, or Marcken, which can be used instead of real money, Geld, until the final payment. In a similar way, one uses signs in order not to be obliged to examine every time the thing itself.5 In this way, signs serve as instruments to facilitate our thinking. The comparison implies, however, that we could perhaps just as well get along without signs, and that eventually they have to be interpreted in terms of their references, the ‘things’ themselves. In one of his manuscripts, Leibniz writes that the majority of our reasoning happens by playing with characters, just like we play the harpsichord by habit, without being especially conscious of it or attending reflectively to reasons. He also observes that this kind of thinking by means of characters ‘can go far, and

3 Leibniz is here using the example of a chiliagon, which Descartes had also used in explaining the distinction between imagination and understanding. Descartes, at 7, pp. 71–​73, and at 9, pp. 57–​58; csm 1, pp. 50–​51. As we shall see later, Condillac used this same example in explaining the difference between imagination and memory. 4 Leibniz, ‘Meditations on knowledge, truth and ideas’, in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1989), pp. 23–​27. Latin original in Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften, vi, 4, A (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), pp. 585–​592. 5 Leibniz, Opera omnia, 6 vols., ed. Ludv. Dutens (Genève: Fratres de Tournes, 1768), vol. 6, p. 7.

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indeed goes far, up to a point that we could not think of abstract things without the help of arbitrary characters’.6 This reference to the impossibility of thinking abstractly without artificial signs seems to indicate that Leibniz held the role of signs to be constitutive of human reason. In so far as Leibniz insisted on the notion of eventually ‘cashing’ the symbolic knowledge in clear and distinct intuitive knowledge, one could nevertheless claim that in this respect thinking that has recourse to signs is not really autonomous. For example, in regard to demonstrations made in calculus, eventually the results of the calculation must be cashed by replacing the characters with corresponding ideas according to definitions, otherwise ‘symbolic’ knowledge would not only be ‘blind’ but also semantically empty. Indeed, some of Leibniz’s formulations concerning the role language in cognition seem to indicate that he thought of its role merely as a way of making thinking more orderly, shorter and more efficient. For example, in his essay ‘On the demonstration of primary propositions’, he observes that ‘reasoning and demonstration do not amplify our thoughts, but only order them’.7 He takes the use of signs to be a universal characteristic of all human reasoning and refers to the economy that the use of signs results in reasoning: All human reasoning is performed by means of certain signs or characters. Indeed, it is neither possible nor desirable that the things themselves or even the ideas of them be always distinctly observed by the mind. So, for reasons of economy, signs are used for them.8 Marcelo Dascal has described Leibniz’s position on the question of the autonomy of symbolic thought as oscillation. Dascal observes that Leibniz’s ­conception of a purely formal calculus as well as his interest in incommensurable numbers, asymptotes, differentials, or sums of infinite series, where the required conversion of signs into notions and things is indefinitely postponed, could permit upholding the autonomy of symbolic thought, but that, on the other hand, Leibniz was merely on the verge of doing so.9 Nevertheless, in this case real autonomy would seem to be achieved only in a fully developed calculus, where the terms get their meaning from (or their meaning is defined 6 Leibniz, Handschrifen, iv, vii, B, 3, 16r, cited in Marcelo Dascal, Leibniz. Language, Signs and Thought (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987), p. vi. 7 Leibniz, ‘On the demonstration of primary propositions’ (1671–​1672), in Dascal, Leibniz, pp. 147–​159; ‘Demostratio propositionum primarum’, in Sämtliche Schriften vi, 2, pp. 479–​486. 8 Leibniz, ‘Thought, signs, and foundations of logic’ (after 1684), in Dascal, Leibniz, pp. 181–​188. 9 Dascal, Leibniz, pp. 13–​22 and 75.

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by) their syntactic role in the calculus. This kind of autonomy would thus not necessarily be a general property of symbolic thought. Even if it could be achieved in a formal calculus, it would not necessarily apply to reasoning that depends on natural language. As we shall see, this difference between formal symbolic systems and natural language is a theme which later writers on the subject, such as Destutt de Tracy and Maine de Biran, will return to in order to highlight the differences between formal calculus and reasoning relying on ordinary language. Leibniz also refers to the role of characters in ‘orienting’ the analysis of thoughts, which is made possible by rendering this analysis sensible, by providing a certain ‘mechanical thread’.10 Here we can see the germs of Condillac’s ideas on language as a tool permitting the analysis of ideas, as well as Destutt de Tracy’s idea that it is by their sensible nature that signs make it easier to manipulate ideas.11 For Leibniz the contrast between intuitive and symbolic knowledge was related to the limits of human knowledge and to those of our cognitive capacities; to the fact that we cannot always analyse all knowledge into clear and distinct ideas. But even if we cannot always have immediate intuitive knowledge that gives us not only clear but also distinct ideas, we can enlarge the sphere of knowledge by relying on symbolic knowledge, on ‘blind’ knowledge mediated by symbols.12 Following Leibniz, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartner and Moses Mendelsohn related the symbolic knowledge to the limitations of the human mind.13 In this way, symbolic knowledge could be used to salvage sections of knowledge that could not be accessed by the rationalistic ideals of clarity and distinctness, such as religious mysteries or aesthetic experience.14 2

Christian Wolff

In Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele der Menschen, Auch aller Dingen übehaupt (1719), Wolff calls attention to the fact that words permit a special kind of knowledge, which he calls ‘figured knowledge’ (figürliche Erkenntniss), and in his later works, written in Latin, Psychologia rationalis, he 10 11 12 13 14

Leibniz, ‘The analysis of languages’ (1678), in Dascal, Leibniz, pp. 161–​165. See, below, pp. 201–​202. Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 40–​43. Ibid., p. 53. On Leibniz’s strategy in salvaging religious mysteries, see ­chapter 6 in Dascal, Leibniz.

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terms ‘symbolic cognition’.15 Wolff explains that we can represent things in two distinct ways: either we represent the things themselves or through words or other signs. Wolff calls the former intuitive knowledge (anshauende Erkentniss), for which he gives an example: when we think of a man who is absent and of which we have no picture before us, we represent in our minds the person itself. But when we think about the concept of virtue with the words ‘it is the ability to guide one’s actions by the Natural Law’, we are thinking of virtue through words. When our thoughts are thus mediated by words, this constitutes figured or symbolic knowledge. When Wolff discusses the clarity and distinctness of thoughts, he connects the latter to language. Thoughts are clear when we know well what we are thinking about and are able to distinguish it from other things.16 In defining the nature of distinctness, Wolff writes that thoughts are distinct when we are able to define the distinction and, if required, to explain it to others. When one is able not only to distinguish a triangle from a quadrangle, but also to explain this distinction by the number of its angles and sides, one’s thought concerning it can be said to be distinct. He concludes that in this way our thoughts become distinct through words.17 Wolff also observes that distinctness belongs to understanding (Verstand) and indistinctness to sensation and imagination. The representations of the latter can be, at most, clear but not distinct. It is understanding which can raise them to the point of distinctness. One can thus imagine things that one does not understand. But only when someone is able to tell us what he imagines of the thing represented, can we say that he understands it.18 Because language has such an important part in constituting understanding, Wolff says that learning one’s maternal language is not merely learning to speak, it is also learning to understand.19 Although the figured or symbolic knowledge lacks the capacity to make things present, as if in front of one’s eyes, so that one can see clearly what they are and how they are related to others, it has its advantages, at least compared to an incomplete intuitive knowledge, which is unable to present everything in a way that permits one to see what its object contains and how it is related to others. Insofar as one’s sensations are for the most part indistinct and obscure

15 16 17 18 19

Vernünftige gedanken (1719/​1751), § 316, in Christian Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, I Abteilung, Band 2 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1983), and Psychologia rationalis (1734/​1740), § 461, in Gesammelte Werke, ii Abt., Band 6 (1971). Vernünftige gedanken, § 198. Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 205 and 206. Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 277 and 282. Vernünftige gedanken, § 299.

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(undeutlich un dunkel), words and signs can help one to make them more distinct (deutlich). They permit one to distinguish what differentiates one thing from another. And as making these distinctions also sheds some light on their similarities, one can in this manner form general concepts. In this manner, general knowledge becomes distinct through means of words.20 The disadvantage of symbolic thought is that, if one does not pay attention, one takes empty words –​which are not joined to any concept –​for knowledge and lets words to take the role of things.21 On the other hand, Wolff emphasises that words and signs serve to clarify judgments. When one makes a judgement, one considers that a property, change, effect, or reaction to other things applies or fails to apply to a thing. In doing this, one simultaneously separates the thing and its properties to establish a link between them. Judgments thus consist essentially in making connections between different things. For the distinctness (deutlichkeit) of the judgments in the intuitive knowledge, it is not enough that one distinguishes the concepts that one either separates or connects, one must also properly represent the action of the soul that considers this separation or connection. Now, it is words that convey the joining or the separating of the concepts. Thus, the symbolic knowledge shows more clearly than the intuitive knowledge the distinction between judgment and mere concept, and this is what makes it more distinct.22 Wolff explains our preference for symbolic knowledge over the intuitive knowledge by giving examples of cases when we move from the latter to the former. When we form, or merely want to clarify, a general concept regarding the nature of a thing we see or sense, or when we want to form a judgment concerning it, we move from intuitive to symbolic thinking and ‘speak to ourselves’, or at least think of the words that are necessary for doing this.23 Wolff claims that there are some words, such as ‘truth’ which signify (bedeuten) something without involving any clear representation of them (vorstellen). They are therefore merely understandable (blos verständlich), in so far as we recall that they signify a certain thing of which we have a concept, that is, of which we have in

20 21 22

23

Vernünftige gedanken, § 319. Vernünftige gedanken, § 320. Vernünftige gedanken, § 321. Wolff explains the distinction between having a mere concept of something and making a judgment by discussing the example of glowing iron. When one is merely forming the concept of glowing iron, one merely has to put together (mit einander stellen) the concepts of iron and that of glowing, whereas in making a judgement one also represents and understands their connection (Verknüpfung). Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 288 and 289. Vernünftige gedanken, § 322.

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memory an intuitive knowledge. In this way, the symbolic knowledge that is based on ordinary language has its own certainty and clarity.24 Wolff writes that it is possible to bring symbolic knowledge into a clarity and distinctness comparable to the one which strikes the eye on seeing a thing and which permits one to distinguish it from others. By certain combinations of signs, arbitrarily joined with concepts, one is able to determine how things are related to each other. This is the way, for instance, that sciences like algebra work. In such combinatory arts, one can separate concepts from all sensual images and from all powers of imagination and then introduce them by signs only, through the skilful combination of which one can produce all kinds of truths.25 Wolff also examines the role of language in perception. He makes a distinction between merely having a visual impression (blosses Sehen) and seeing, that is recognising, something as something, and relates this distinction to language. He describes how making perceptual judgements, that is, when seeing something as something, requires, in addition to having sensations, that one knows the name of the object and judge that it has the characteristic features that the use of the word requires. Thus, seeing something as something is a judgement.26 Another function dependent on language, demonstrative knowledge, permits us to enlarge our representations beyond what senses alone are able to provide. Wolff observes that when one grasps how some thoughts inevitably follow others, then demonstrations represent to us something that is not present to our senses.27 Wolff defines reason as the ability to see the connections between truths.28 However, this is not the only way to gain knowledge: another way is through experience. What reason adds to the latter, by permitting one to see connections, is distinctness.29 Although Wolff agrees with the philosophers who deny reason in animals, he admits that there is something approaching reason in animals.30 That animals lack reason follows from two facts. Firstly, it is words that serve to make general knowledge distinct. Secondly, reason is grounded on the distinctness of knowledge. In this way, words or other arbitrary signs support (befördert) reason. Wolff refers to the difficulties one encounters when

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Vernünftige gedanken, § 323. Vernünftige gedanken, § 324. Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 333–​336. Vernünftige gedanken, § 341, my emphasis. Vernünftige gedanken, § 368. Vernünftige gedanken, § 377. Vernünftige gedanken, § 377.

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trying to bring forth (herausbringen) in the intuitive knowledge the connections or the coherence (zuhammenhang) of knowledge without words or other corresponding signs, especially if drawing conclusions is required. This is, according to Wolff, the reason why humans, before they learn language, do not properly arrive at the possession of reason, why children brought up among wild animals or persons deaf and dumb from birth have no use of reason, and also why, when they have learned to speak, they are unable to reflect on their former state.31 For reasons pertaining to the lack of linguistic abilities, animals also lack in their thinking the distinctness that reason requires, and thus reason cannot be attributed to them.32 However, animals have imagination and memory, and thus they are able to establish connections between sensations that are sufficiently simultaneous or close to each other. Thus, a dog learns to associate an action of someone rising a staff and the pain of being hit and starts to wail and run away on remembering and representing the first sensation.33 This proves, according to Wolff, that animals have imagination and memory.34 Wolff refers also to the fact that animals can be trained to perform tasks which seem to require understanding (Verstand). However, when we know how they have been trained, we see that these actions can be explained by the imagination.35 Since expecting that events follow each other in a similar order requires nothing more than senses, imagination and memory without full understanding, Wolff concludes that this ability can be granted to animals. But since this ability, in establishing connections between things, is in some way similar to reason, which establishes connection between truths, Wolff is willing to admit that animals possess something that is similar to reason, or, as it were, the ‘lowest grade of reason, the step below reason, or even the beginning of reason’.36 Wolff also believes that since the sensations of animals are also clear and distinct, animals are conscious of them and also of themselves.37 Animal also have desires and affects originating in the senses and the imagination, but not will, which requires understanding and reason.38 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Vernünftige gedanken, § 867 and 868. Vernünftige gedanken, § 869. This example was used by Leibniz in his Monadologie, § 26. Vernünftige gedanken, § 870. Vernünftige gedanken, § 871. ‘[…] die niedrigste Grad der Vernunfft, oder die nächste Staffel zur Vernunfft, oder auch der anfang der Vernunfft.’ Vernünftige gedanken, § 872. Vernünftige gedanken, p. § 794. Wolff also considered it credible (glaublich) that animals also have souls, although not immortal ones. Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 789 and 926. Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 888–​889.

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Wolff’s description of how general knowledge, depending on language, is incorporated within our bodies is interesting, since it shows that the capacity to represent does not necessarily depend on the soul. As we have seen, Wolff thought that in general knowledge one represents things with words. Since there are certain movements in the body and in the brain corresponding to these words and to the general knowledge they represent, it follows that this general knowledge is also represented in our bodies. When we are thinking symbolically there is nothing taking place in our minds which would not have a corresponding movement in our bodies. Likewise, all deductions are represented in the brain and thus explainable as bodily movements. In this way, our bodies, as machines or mechanisms, are able to do all these mental operations without the participation of the soul, the only difference being that these representations, unlike mental ones, lack consciousness.39 In this way, our bodies are not only natural machines, in the manner of all assembled bodies (zusammengesetzten Dinge),40 but also artificial machines formed by culture. Language and culture not only form our minds but our bodies as well. Wolff returns to the dependence of the use of reason on the use of speech in his later work, written in Latin, Psychologia rationalis (1734). Here he claims that speech facilitates and even extends the use or reason. In this text, Wolff confirms his thesis a posteriori by referring to descriptions of persons having grown up with no or limited access to speech: a feral child found in the woods between Russia and Lithuania 1694, as described by Bernard Connor in his Evangelium Medici (1697), and a deaf and dumb young man who gained his hearing described in the reports of French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1703.41 As we shall see, these descriptions will be picked up and used by Condillac and his followers. Leibniz’s formulation that in symbolic knowledge we use signs in place of ideas implies that symbols replace mental representations of ideas.42 In Wolff’s texts there are some difficulties and ambiguities in this respect. It is not always clear what it means to cognize ‘through words and other signs’. This could be read to imply a strong conception of symbolic cognition, according to which we can represent things through words without forming a representation of

39 40 41

Vernünftige gedanken, §§ 834–​844. Vernünftige gedanken, § 560. Psychologia rationalis (1734/​1740), § 461, in Christian Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, ii Abt., Band 6, pp. 376–​381. 42 ‘[…] vocabularis istis […] utor loco idearum de iis habeo […].’ Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften, vi. 4. A., p. 587; Leibniz, ‘Meditations on knowledge, truth and ideas’, in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, p. 25.

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the thing itself (as in intuitive cognition). A weaker conception of symbolic cognition would insist that the difference between intuitive and symbolic cognition does not lie in the presence or absence of ideas but rather in the presence or absence of words.43 In the latter case the words or signs would have a merely instrumental role in retrieving the ideas of things, instead of supplanting them. Wolff’s Psychogia empirica (1734) resolves the ambiguity in favour of the latter alternative, that is, that in symbolic thinking the content of ideas is expressed in the mind by means of words or other signs without the intuition of the ideas themselves.44 43

44

See Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, ‘What is symbolic cognition? The debate after Leibniz and Wolff’, in Linguaggio, filosofia, fisiologia nel’età moderna, eds. Christina Marras and Anna Lisa Chino, Atti del convegno in Roma 23–​24 gennaio 2014, pp. 163–​175. iliesi digitali. Riehcerche filosofiche et lessicali: http://​www.ili​esi.cnr.it/​pubbli​cazi​oni/​ Ricer​che-​01-​Marras​_​Sch​ino.pdf (accessed 20.1.2021). Matteo Favaretti Camposampiere, ‘Symbolic cognition’, in Handbuch Christian Wolff, eds. Robert Thies and Alexander Aichele (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018), pp. 115–​135.

pa rt 2 The Natural and the Artificial Human during the Enlightenment

∵

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Daniel Defoe and the Wild Boy In the spring of 1726 a wild boy found the previous year in the woods of Hameln near Hanover was taken to London. For a while he actually lived with King George i in St. James’s Palace, whence he was moved to Leicester House, the home of the king’s son. There he was put under the charge of Dr. John Arbuthnot in order to be taught to speak and made sociable. It was at Leicester House that the boy, whom Arbuthnot gave the name Peter, also met the doctor’s friend Jonathan Swift. The boy was naturally the subject of wide attention, including accounts in satirical pamphlets, some of which may have been penned by Swift.1 This feral child also caught the attention of Daniel Defoe. In his pamphlet Mere Nature Delineated (1726), Defoe tried to analyse what could be learned from the nature and development of human mental capacities by observing and educating this youth, who, as he was found uneducated, represented ‘mere nature’. This is all served with long satirical interludes on Defoe’s contemporaries, whom he often describes as soulless fools, comparable or even worse than the feral child.2 Defoe describes the boy as being ‘like a body without a soul’, that is, deprived of the faculties of the soul, or at least of their exercise. Defoe observes, however, that there are two testimonies of the child possessing a soul: he can think and he can laugh.3 But the boy’s mental faculties were clearly limited. He was lumpish, dull, phlegmatic, sullen and incapable of using his vision to distinguish objects of pleasure or pain. Neither would any object he saw awaken in him an emotion like delight, compassion, desire, and aversion, not to mention such social passions as envy or malice.4 Likewise, for want of instruction, his hearing could not convey any notions to his understanding of the things he heard or of their differences. Defoe concludes that in this condition the boy was so far from distinguishing things that he could not 1 Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 24–​52. 2 [Daniel Defoe, attributed] Anonymous, Mere Nature Delineated: or, a Body without a Soul. Being Observations upon the Young Forester Lately Brought to Town from Germany. With Suitable Applications. Also, A Brief Dissertation upon the Usefulness and Necessity of Fools, whether Political or Natural (London: Warner, 1726). 3 Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 16–​20. However, Defoe observes later that, although the boy laughs, it is by mere imitation: he does not understand the reason why he does so. Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 34–​35. 4 Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 29 and 33.

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even form images in his mind of the things that occur to him. Not even a noisy battalion of soldiers with guns firing evoked any reaction in him.5 What Defoe has to say on the deaf and dumb, and the ‘dumb part’ of the wild boy is especially interesting for our present theme. He writes that words are for us the medium of thought, and that we cannot ‘conceive of things but by their names, and in the very use of their names’.6 He lists the things that we are unable to do without words: […] we cannot muse, contrive, imagine, design, resolve, or reject; nay, we cannot love or hate, but in acting upon those passions in the very Form of Words; nay, if we dream, ‘tis in Words, we speak every thing to ourselves, and we know how to think, or act, or intend to act, but in the Form of Words; all our Passions and Affections are acted in Words. And we have no other Way for it: […].7 Defoe’s list covers practically all intellectual functions, cognitive and volitive, except that of memory. His list describes what ‘we’, that is, humans possessing the medium of language, are unable to do without words. But then he poses the question: But what do these silent People do? ’tis evident they act their Senses and Passions upon Things, both present, and to come, and, perhaps upon Things past also; but in what Manner, and how, that we are intirely at a Loss about; […]. Defoe underlines that not every dumb man is a ‘fool’ and that it is well known that some of them have ‘understanding as large and capacious, and their reason in as full exercise, and as clear, as, perhaps, any other’. This can also be seen in the fact that these persons attain the medium of conversation by expressing themselves in ‘want of voice’. Defoe mentions the teaching methods of a Mr. Baker, who had taught congenitally deaf and dumb not only to speak but also to understand when others speak to them.8 What intrigues Defoe are the questions of how these dumb people were able to think when they did not possess any articulated language, and what ideas they could have had of things without their names –​something he considers 5 6 7 8

Mere Nature Delineated, p. 34. Mere Nature Delineated, p. 38. Mere Nature Delineated, p. 39. Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 39–​40.

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inconceivable. He does not seem convinced of the explanation proposed by others, that is, that the dumb can form no idea or conception of things in their imagination. Defoe writes that it is absurd to think that all mutes are ‘fools’ just because they cannot hear. This he considers evident on the basis of the fact that the deaf and dumb are able to fence, fight, learn diverse handicrafts such as carving, painting, sewing, embroidery, weaving or knitting, which do not require hearing to perform or learn them. Defoe concludes that they can act upon material objects and even some immaterial ones too, just as well as we can, but in a different and perhaps superior way. Consequently, they must think without the agency or interposition of language. Defoe suggests that in order to solve this inconceivable mystery, it would be ideal to have a deaf and dumb person with intact understanding who could be taught to conceive of things as we conceive of them, or who could convey to us the knowledge of conceiving as he or she does. Defoe thinks that the crucial part of the affliction lies not in the lack of hearing or of speech but rather is due to the want of conversing with mankind.9 Defoe also pays attention to the way in which the deaf and dumb are able to make up for their loss.10 In a chapter written in verse, ‘On the deaf and dumb being taught to speak’, he describes different compensatory mechanisms for the lack of hearing. By such means one can acquire a different sense of things, think without the agency of words and form images without names –​a feat which Defoe describes as ‘a flight so high, and so above our speech, as all the babbling world can never reach.’11 Although Defoe admits the possibility of thought without articulate language, this does not mean that a human is capable of thinking naturally in images, since all the compensatory mechanisms are actually based on the interactions and conversations with one’s fellow beings. They are not natural like the vocalisations of animals.12 Defoe elucidates the roles of nature and nurture by a comparison that La Mettrie would have recourse later: The soul is plac’d in the Body like a rough Diamond, which requires the Wheel and Knife, and all the other Arts of the Cutter, to shape it, and polish it, and bring it to shew the perfect Water of a true Brilliant. If Art be

9 10 11 12

Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 40–​42. Mere Nature Delineated, p. 42. Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 40–​42. Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 46–​47.

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deficient, Nature can do no more; it has plac’d the Capacity in the Jewel but till the Rough be remov’d, the Diamond never shews itself.13 Defoe further argues that any more than a person can speak, read, write, swim or fence without being taught, he cannot perform such purely mental operations as knowing, thinking, retaining, judging, discerning, distinguishing or determining, without instruction. Thus, a creature in human shape without instruction is, according to Defoe, ten thousand times more miserable than a brute. He is incapable not only of understanding the speech of others but also the reasons for their actions. He has the ability to see but does not know what he sees. Not only he is cognitively limited but also emotionally: he does not know ‘the use of his own passions’, nor the proper objects of grief, joy, fear or anger, or their meaning.14 It should be noted that by using the construction ‘the use of own passions’, Defoe is not necessarily denying that such a person has no emotions, but that he cannot control or understand them. The lack of language results in a general lack of control, or as Defoe describes a man limited to ‘mere nature’, he is ‘a ship without a rudder, nor steered of managed, or directed by any pilot’.15 Even though Defoe discusses the possibilities of compensating for the lack of articulate speech by other means, he is also conscious of the limits of those means. Not all things can be transmitted by them. When he describes a case of a child with intact hearing having grown up with its deaf and dumb siblings who had not learned articulated language, he observes that the child had no other notions of things than those that a deaf and dumb person could have. Among the notions inaccessible for such a person, he especially mentions religious ones.16 On the other hand, he reports that this child made more progress in learning language compared to the wild boy on account of it having the advantage of mute conversation with its civilized and instructed mute siblings.17 In claiming that one cannot even know the sensations one is having without language, Defoe seems definitely to be going further in his insistence on the pervasive influence and necessity of language for human cognitive faculties than most of the writers we have discussed so far. His insistence on the 13 14 15 16 17

Mere Nature Delineated, p. 61–​62. Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 63–​64. Mere Nature Delineated, p. 24. Mere Nature Delineated, p. 67. For the lack of religious notions (at least without the aid of divine inspiration) in the deaf and dumb, see also, ibid. pp. 39–​40. Mere Nature Delineated, pp. 73–​74.

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thoroughgoing influence of language for the cognitive, emotional and volitive functions of the human mind and on the necessity of social intercourse for their development prefigures the ideas of Condillac and La Mettrie. The similarity of the comparisons used by Defoe and La Mettrie would even suggest a direct influence, but as far as I know there is no evidence that La Mettrie, nor for that matter Condillac, would have been familiar with Defoe’s pamphlet.

­c hapter 6

Hume and the Artificial in Human Understanding Although Hume considered that in explaining the relations between ideas he might have advantageously profited from making an ‘imaginary dissection of the brain’, and showing how in conceiving of any idea the animal spirits run into all contiguous traces in the brain and rouse up related ideas, he seems more often than not to avoid speculating on what happens in the brain when we think. This is evident even when he exceptionally does speculate on this issue. In his account in A Treatise on Human Nature (1739) of the mistakes that arise concerning the relations of ideas, he writes, revealing his reluctance, that ‘he is afraid’ that he must on that occasion have recourse to anatomical explanations.1 Hume’s discussion on how impressions and ideas are associated or related to each other is confined mostly to the psychological level of description, referring only occasionally to the traces in the brain. As we have seen, these traces –​by the fact that they are considered traces –​had, according to the Cartesians, semantic properties; that is, they referred to things existing outside themselves. For the Cartesians the idea of imagination involved a code, established by nature or by the will of men, and thus the traces could be described on two levels, the material and the semantic. But Hume seems unwilling to risk venturing outside the sphere of ideas or impressions proper: As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and t’will always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d from the author of our being. Nor is such a question any way material to our present purpose. We may draw inferences from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or false; whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the senses.2

1 Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Book i, part ii, section v; ed. L. A. Selby-​Bigge, second edition with text revised and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 60 (hereafter cited as sbn). 2 Treatise, i, iii, v; sbn. p. 84.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_008

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According to Hume, ideas can only be particular, but they can by custom and with the use of words become general in their representation.3 What is important for Hume is the coherence of perceptions resulting from them being associated by resemblance, contiguity and causation. An extremely important principle in building up a consistent world from separate and particular impressions is causality, which is reduced by Hume to a constant temporal conjunction. Causal connection is in this way comparable to the connection between a word and an idea. As a result of the habitual, a constant union of certain sounds with certain ideas, we pass from hearing the word to the corresponding idea.4 Since the connection between word and idea is conventional, there is no necessary connection between them. But according to Hume, neither is there any necessary connection between cause and effect, just the constant conjunction. Our mind is in a sense made up of these connections between ideas. In Hume’s philosophical anthropology, it is not so much the building blocks, that is, ideas, that count. What we are lies more in the manner in which these ideas are connected. Bricks are necessary for building, but architecture is more than just building materials. In addition to the constant conjunctions provided by nature, Hume recognises also artificial influences responsible for the architecture of our minds. According to him, the influence of education prevails on many occasions over the one that arises from the constant and inseparable union of causes and effects. He is persuaded that we owe more than half of our opinions to education, and that these overbalance those that we owe to abstract reasoning or experience. Hume complains that philosophers have neglected this ‘artificial and not natural cause’, although it is ‘built on the same foundation of custom and repetition as our reasoning from causes and effects’. As the reason for the neglect of this artificial cause, Hume evokes the fact that the maxims received by education are frequently contrary to reason and variable in different times and places.5 1

The Natural Mechanisms of Human Nature

In studying human nature, one is obviously obliged to look for some invariances behind the multiplicity of connections between ideas as well as 3 Treatise, i, i, vii; sbn, pp. 20–​24. For the concept of custom, see ibid., i, iii, viii; sbn, pp. 102–​103. 4 Treatise, i, iii, vi; sbn, p. 93. 5 Treatise, i, iii, ix; sbn, p. 117.

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behind the complex architecture of our minds. In describing the formation of this complex architecture, Hume refers to the common mechanisms that preside over the formation of the connections between ideas, that is, to ‘the necessity and uniform principles of human nature’.6 According to Hume, the human mind has certain organs ‘naturally fitted’ to produce certain passions.7 Although the contents of our mind result from experience, the effect of this experience depends on the basic mechanisms of our minds, that is, on custom and habit. Likewise, it depends on the perception of pain and pleasure, which is implanted in the human mind as the ‘chief spring and moving principle of all its actions’.8 We know that for Hume the principal function constituting human nature was not reason but the imagination. However, in order to distinguish his philosophy from the ancient philosophers whom he had criticized for imagining inexistent entities, he distinguishes different ways of using the imagination. There is nothing wrong in having recourse to imagination, but one must distinguish between use and misuse: I must distinguish in the imagination betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible, and universal; such as the customary transition from causes to effects, and from effects to causes: And the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular […]. The former are the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, so that upon their removal human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin.9 In making the imagination the foundation of human nature and in distinguishing its two forms, Hume also distinguishes two senses of the word ‘natural’ in relation to the human. In one sense it refers to these necessary principles which form the foundation of all our thoughts and actions, and which thus constitute human nature. But there is also another sense of the term ‘natural’, in referring to anything that arises from natural causes, and in this sense a malady is said to be natural. For Hume, however, malady is not natural in the sense of being the ‘natural situation of man’.10

6 7 8 9 10

Treatise, ii, iii, i; sbn, p. 402. Treatise, ii, ii, xi; sbn, p 396. Treatise, i, iii, x and ii, iii, i; sbn, pp. 118 and 399. Treatise, i, iv, iv; sbn, p. 225. Treatise, i, iv, iv, sbn, p. 226.

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Personal Identity

Although Hume seems, according to the often-​quoted phrase, to reduce the existence of the self to a ‘bundle’ of perceptions,11 one must not forget that he takes these perceptions to be joined to each other by an association based on contiguity, resemblance and causation. In addition to mutual dependence by causation, he uses two comparisons that provide this ‘bundle’ with an organised structure, making it actually something more than a mere unorganized bundle. Hume distinguishes two varieties of personal identities: on the one hand, as it regards our thoughts or imagination and, on the other hand, as it regards our passions, or the concern we take for ourselves. The section of the Treatise titled ‘Of personal identity’, where he uses his famous bundle metaphor, deals, as he takes care to note, only with the first kind of identity.12 Hume refers to the analogy of the identity of a self or person with the identity which we attribute to plants and animals.13 He first observes that our imagination has the propensity to attribute identity to variable or interrupted objects, especially if the changes are gradual. But when the changes become considerable, we hesitate to ascribe identity to such changing objects.14 Hume suggests a remedy for these centrifugal forces that threaten the identity of the object. This unifying factor is something that we encounter in technological artefacts: ‘a reference of the parts to each other, and a combination to some common end or purpose.’15 In this way, a ship that has had most of its parts changed over time during numerous reparations is still considered to be the same identical ship. The common end to which the parts conspire aids the imagination to retain the identity despite the changes. But even a stronger model for a permanent identity in the midst of change can be found in the sphere of biological phenomena: But this is still more remarkable, when we add a sympathy of parts to their common end, and suppose that they bear to each other, the reciprocal relation of cause and effect in all their actions and operations. This is the case with all animals and vegetables; where not only the several parts have a reference to some general purpose, but also a mutual dependence on, and connexion with each other. The effect of so strong a relation 11 12 13 14 15

Treatise, i, iv, vi; snb, p. 251. Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 253. Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 256. Treatise, i, iv, vi, sbn, pp. 256–​257. Treatise, i, iv, vi, sbn, p. 257.

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is, that tho’ every one must allow, that in a very few years both vegetables and animals endure a total change, yet we still attribute identity to them, while their form, size, and substance are entirely alter’d. An oak, that grows from a small plant to a large tree, is still the same oak; tho’ there be not one particle of matter, or figure of its parts the same. An infant becomes a man, and is sometimes fat, sometimes lean, without any change in his identity.16 But obviously, Hume supposes that real identity would consist of something more complete, deep and metaphysical. He thinks that the identity of the kind we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies, ships and houses is fictitious, in so far as it proceeds from our imagination.17 Another comparison that Hume presents is ‘commonwealth’, where several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination. The individuals forming the commonwealth may change, and even its laws and constitutions, just like an individual can change his character and disposition without losing his identity.18 The fact that the parts are connected by causation, together with the resemblance of perceptions in the memory, is enough to build up a consistent identity. And to this identity based on imagination and memory, Hume adds the second mechanism producing personal identity, based on our passions: ‘And in this view our identity with regard to passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures.’19 Interestingly, Hume’s models and metaphors for personal identity are often based on human artefacts or institutions: ships, houses or commonwealth. The strongest forms of identity seem, however, to be found in biological phenomena. These have, according to Hume, ‘a sympathy of the parts to their common end’. Their parts are characterized by ‘the reciprocal relation of cause and effect in all their actions and operations.’ But these features could apply to machines as well –​unless, of course, we read some vitalist overtones into the idea of the sympathies of the parts.20 Anyway, the fact that personal identity is, according 16 17 18 19 20

Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 257. Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 259. Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 261. Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 261. In fact, there are some good reasons why we should read vitalist overtones into Hume’s text, and not only into this passage but also into the Treatise as a whole. See Tamás Demeter, ‘The anatomy and physiology of mind. David Hume’s vitalist account’, in Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, eds. Manfred Horstmansoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill, 2012),

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to Hume, ‘fictitious’ should not worry him or us since as a product of our imagination it is as real as physical causality. We should not forget that some products of the imagination are not merely figments but ‘permanent, irresistible, and universal’ principles. The fact that personal identity results from an organised structure of ideas and not from an underlying simple substance, makes personal identity a complex structure. This makes one wonder why Hume uses the term ‘bundle’, which in light of his biological and technological comparisons seems completely inadequate and misleading: living organisms are not bundles of organs, nor organs bundles of tissues. Like technological artefacts, they are organised structures. Hume seems to have noticed this himself, since in his abstract to the treatise he discards the term ‘bundle’ and describes the soul instead as a system or train of different perceptions, ‘all united together, but without any perfect simplicity or identity.’21 In introducing his bundle metaphor, Hume writes: ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I stumble on some particular perception’.22 That is, he is describing things that can be discovered by introspection. Thus, what we can actually conclude from this, as Lilli Alanen has pointed out, is that self-​ identity may be impossible to establish with the tools Hume avails himself of in Book i, and that once the role of passions and their natural and social context is taken into account, the problem of personal identity based on the idea of an inner unitary self, forged by understanding and imagination, seems to vanish.23 That is, the fact that we cannot discover any identical self within ourselves does not mean that we could not discover one by turning one’s gaze into a larger embodied and social context, just as easily as we can discover the functional unity of living organisms or human artefacts by looking at their functions in a larger context. In the larger sense, which ‘regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves’, personal identity could also, if these passions and concerns include factors that are not natural but cultural, turn out to be, at least in part, a cultural artefact, making Hume’s references to artefacts in the context of personal identity rather pertinent. As passions reflect our concern pp. 217–​240, and Catherine Wilson, ‘Hume and Vital Materialism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 5 (2016), pp. 1002–​1021. 21 Abstract; sbn, p. 658. Hume uses the term ’system’ once in a passage of Treatise concerning the role of the relation of causation in the construction of the Human mind: ‘[…] we may observe, that the true idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of different perceptions, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other.’ Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 261. 22 Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, p. 252. 23 Lilli Alanen, ‘Personal identity, passions, and “the true idea of the human mind” ’, Hume Studies 49, no. 1 (2014), pp. 3–​28.

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with ourselves and as the self proves later to be a central element in many passions, it is obvious that passions have a powerful effect in organizing ideas into complex teleologically or functionally organised structures, instead of merely providing separate and occasional associations between two ideas. Although Hume, in the section of Book i of the Treatise titled ‘Of personal identity’, appears to claim that we do not have any idea of the self,24 in Book ii, titled ‘Of the passions’, he writes in contrast that: The idea of ourselves is always intimately present to us, and conveys a sensible degree of vivacity to the idea of any other object to which we are related.25 This is evidently no slip of the pen. Hume repeats the expression later and even writes that it is evident that ‘the idea, or rather impression of ourselves is always present with us’.26 The apparent contradiction between this and what Hume had said in the section concerning personal identity can be resolved by taking into account the distinction between the purely mental self, which is available to introspection, and the whole person as a bodily being. In Book ii Hume is no longer referring to introspection. Instead, there the self involves both mental and bodily qualities.27 Since particular ideas can by custom, and with the use of words become general in their representation, there is no reason one could not have an idea of the self as an embodied being. Anyway, the quote shows definitely that for Hume the idea of ourselves enjoys a central place in the architecture of our minds. One could even say that one of its principal functions is to give structure to our minds and to prevent it being just a ‘bundle of perceptions’. It is also involved as the object of such passions as pride and humility.28 The idea of ourselves that is always intimately present to us is also involved in the conversion of ideas into impressions.29

24

25 26 27 28 29

I write ‘appears’, since one must not forget that each time Hume denies the idea of self, he qualifies the expression, for example: ‘nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d.’ Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, pp. 251. In the Appendix, Hume writes: ‘We have no idea of them [of substance or self], in that sense [as something simple and individual].’ sbn, p. 633. All emphases mine. Treatise, ii, ii, iv; sbn, p. 354. Treatise, ii, i, xi; sbn, p. 317. ‘But tho’ pride and humility have the qualities of our mind and body, that is self, as their natural and more immediate causes […]’, Treatise, ii, i, ix; sbn, p. 303. Treatise, ii, i, ii; sbn, p. 277. Treatise, ii, i, xi and ii, ii, iv; sbn, pp. 317–​320 and 354.

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The idea of self is obviously connected with sympathy, too. It is in the context of his discussion on sympathy that Hume insists on the constant presence of the idea of the self. Sympathy depends on observed similarities between the tempers and dispositions of people and as well as on their common mental operations. Such interpersonal comparisons evidently involve the notion of the self.30 Just like the idea of self, sympathy also involves the conversion of ideas into impressions, and this conversion derives naturally from the relation of the object to ourselves: In sympathy there is an evident conversion of an idea to an impression. This conversion arises from the relation of object to ourselves. Ourself is always intimately present to us.31 Sympathy is without doubt the central element in Hume’s theory of social cognition as well as of morality. It transforms the ideas concerning the possible experiences of others into impressions concerning ourselves: Sympathy being nothing but a lively idea converted into an impression, ’tis evident that, in considering the future possible or probable condition of any person, we may enter into so vivid conception as to make it our own concern; and by that means be sensible of pains and pleasure, which neither belong to ourselves nor at the present instant have any real existence.32 Since its power in transforming ideas into impressions derives in the last instance from the idea of ourselves, there is no doubt that, after Book i, when Hume turns his gaze towards passions and morality, the idea of ourselves plays a central role in his theory concerning the way the human mind works. In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume returns to the theme of personal identity in a more sceptical vein, by confessing that, in so far as this question is concerned, he is involved in such a labyrinth that he does not know how to correct his former opinions or to make them consistent. In presenting his arguments for denying the ‘strict and proper identity and simplicity of a self or a thinking being’, he qualifies his denial of the impossibility of not having an idea of the self:

30 31 32

Treatise, ii, ii, iv and iii, iii, i; sbn, pp. 354 and 575. Treatise, ii, i, xi; sbn, p. 320. Treatise, ii, ii, ix; sbn, pp. 385–​386.

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[…] we have no impression of self or substance, as something simple and individual. We have no idea of them in that sense.33 This gives us a clue that maybe Hume is using the term ‘idea’ in various senses. For example, Galen Strawson has distinguished two uses of the term ‘idea’ in the Treatise: on the one hand, a normative use in which only clear and distinct mental ideas qualify as ‘ideas’ and, on the other hand, a non-​normative use in which any mental elements can be called ideas, whether they are empirically respectable or not.34 So, one way of getting rid of the contradiction between what Hume says in the passage on personal identity in Book i and the later references to the idea of the self is to distinguish between various senses of the term ‘idea’. But still, Hume felt that there were insurmountable problems in his analysis of the self as a bundle.35 After the above quotations, Hume turns to the possibility that the self is formed of a composition of perceptions and avows that he senses that his own account of this is defective: I am sensible that my account is defective, and nothing but the seeming evidence of the prec’dent reasonings cou’d have induc’ed me to receive it. If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. But no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding. We only feel a connexion or determination of the thought, to pass from one object to another. It follows that, therefore, that the thought alone finds personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions, that compose the mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other.36 This all sounds consistent enough, but Hume confesses that he cannot find any satisfactory theory that would explain the principles that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or in our consciousness. He is not willing to renounce either of two principles that he cannot make consistent (obviously not with each other, but with his account of the mind), that is, that all our perceptions are distinct existences and that we never perceive any real 33 34 35 36

Treatise, Appendix, sbn p. 633. My emphasis. Galen Strawson, The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011), doi: 10.1093/​acprof:oso/​9780199608508.001.0001, pp. 8–​9, 52 and 116. The diffuculties are analysed in detail in Strawson’s Evident Connexion. Treatise, Appendix; sbn, p. 635.

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connection between distinct existences.37 Since he cannot admit that our perceptions would inhere in something simple and individual, nor that the mind would perceive some real connection between them, he pleads the privilege of the sceptic and to confess that the problem is too hard for him.38 However, the passages concerning personal identity in Hume’s Treatise do not necessarily support a reading according to which Hume is making there an ontological claim about the nature of the human mind or claiming that the mind would consist of a bundle of perceptions without a subject.39 3

Passions and Nature

Hume describes in his Treatise how our mind is formed by imagination into an interconnected whole comparable to an artefact or an organism. The organic or biological model naturally implies that he believes that the mind has certain original qualities to start with. These original qualities make the acquisition of secondary qualities possible: Unless nature had given some original qualities to the mind, it cou’d never have any secondary ones; because in that case it would have no foundation for action, nor it could even begin to exert itself.40 In so far as Hume distinguishes the causes of passions from their objects, the question concerning the naturalness of these qualities has correspondingly two aspects. For example, the self is the object of the passions of pride and humility, but not their cause.41 In addition Hume distinguishes in the cause of these passions the quality, which operates on these passions, from the subject,

37

38 39

40 41

Treatise, Appendix; sbn, p. 636. As Galen Strawson (Evident Connexion, p. 112) pertinently observes, the two principles are not mutually inconsistent. Hume’s text is, however, ambiguous, so that one can also read Hume claiming that these principles are mutually inconsistent. For the latter kind of reading, see Alan Schwerin, Hume’s Labyrinth: A Search for the Self (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. 55ff. Treatise, Appendix, sbn, p. 636. See Strawson, Evident Connexion, p. 41 et passim, and Udo Thiel, ‘Hume and the bundle view of the self’, in The Early Modern Subject: Self-​Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2012. doi:10.1093/​acprof:oso/​ 9780199542499.001.0001. Treatise ii, i, iii; sbn, p. 280. Treatise, ii, i, ii; sbn, pp. 277–278. So just like Descartes, Hume describes passions as having both causal and semantic aspects: they have a cause and an object.

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in which it inheres. The original quality or primary impulse which determines the object of pride and humility is original, it is inseparable from the soul. It is also natural in so far as it constant and steady in its operation.42 But although the causes of pride and humility are in Hume’s terminology ‘plainly natural’, they are not original: many of them are effects of art and arise partly from industry, caprice or people’s good fortune. We can thus be proud of houses and furniture, and the particular causes that determine of which kind houses are determined by caprice in a manner which is not foreseen or provided by nature. The causes do not partake in any distinct and general quality that is the cause of pride, but there are circumstances common to all of them on which their efficacy depends.43 Hume refers to certain properties of human nature which influence all operations of the understanding and the passions. The two most important of these are certainly the association of ideas and of impressions. In this way, all passions, which are impressions, tend to pass into another passion that resembles it in some way. This association of resembling passions is assisted by the association of ideas, so that there is an easy transition from one passion to another having the same object.44 All the variations in the causes of passions can be explained by the same properties of human nature. As the natural capacities of animal bodies are often based on having proper organs (or, in fact, more often systems of organs) corresponding to these functions, Hume refers analogously to the ‘organs’ of human nature when he wants to demonstrate that these capacities are original and not acquired: […] nature has given to the organs of the human mind, a certain disposition fitted to produce a peculiar impression or emotion, which we call pride: To this emotion she has assign’d a certain idea, viz, that of self, which it never fails to produce.45 Here Hume is comparing the mind again to a body and its organs and their dispositions. He refers to the fact that the nerves of the nose and palate are so disposed as to produce certain sensations in the mind. Likewise, the sensations of lust and hunger always produce in our mind the ideas of those objects 42 43 44 45

Treatise, ii, i, iii; sbn, p. 280. Treatise, ii, i, iii; sbn, pp. 280–​282. Treatise, ii, i, iv; sbn, p. 283–​284. Ideas are according to Hume associated by resemblance, contiguity and causation, whereas impressions only by resemblance. Treatise, ii, i, iv; sbn, p. 280. Treatise, ii, i, v; sbn, p. 287.

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which are suitable to these appetites, that is, which satisfy them. These two mechanisms producing first passions and then ideas are united in pride: The organs are so dispos’d as to produce the passion; and the passion, after its production, naturally produces a certain idea.46 The mind is like the body with its organs and their natural dispositions. So, Hume not only refers to the anatomy of the mind, that is to its ‘organs’, but also provides physiological models for its functions: As nature has given to the body certain appetites and inclinations, which she encreases, diminishes or changes according to the situation of the fluids or solids; she has proceeded in the same manner with the mind.47 In this way we can have ‘an arbitrary and original instinct implanted in our nature’, for example, the desire for the happiness or misery of others, according to the love or hatred we bear them.48 Likewise, Hume explains the amorous passion, or the love between the sexes, by the fact that the mind has ‘certain organs naturally fitted to produce’ certain passions, which then naturally turns to view a certain object. But this alone is not enough to produce the passion, which requires in addition that some ‘other emotion, which by double relation of impressions and ideas may set these principles in action and bestow on them their first impulse.’ Hume refers to the fact that although sex is the object and the cause of the appetite, this cause loses its force by too great frequency and requires, in order to be awakened, a new impulse, which arises from the beauty of the person.49 What is remarkable in Hume’s theory of the ‘organs’ of the mind is that instead of explaining the mental functions by bodily organs as the materialist did, he transposes the organic model to the mind directly. But perhaps it is this aspect of his theory which permits him to describe how natural instincts are transformed by artificial elements: in the eighteenth century it was (as it often seems to be the case in the 21th century as well) perhaps easier to consider the mind, instead of the body, as permeable to cultural influences. The body was, after all, considered merely as the part that we owe to nature and not to culture.

46 47 48 49

Treatise, ii. i, v; sbn, p. 287. Treatise, ii, ii, vi; sbn, p. 368. Treatise, ii, ii, vii; sbn, p. 368. Treatise, ii, ii, xi; sbn, p. 396.

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Hume distinguishes between direct and indirect passion. Direct passion arises immediately from good or evil, that is, from pain or pleasure.50 Direct passions, such as desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, result from the mind’s original instinct to unite with the good and to avoid evil.51 Besides good and evil, the direct passion comes frequently from ‘a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable’, as is the case not only with bodily appetites such as hunger and lust, but also with the desire for punishment to our enemies, and happiness to our friends. Instead of proceeding from good or evil, like other affections, they produce good and evil.52 In addition to the natural passions, there are indirect passions, such as humility, ambition, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice or generosity.53 They arise from the double relation of impressions and ideas.54 So, the structure of the mind resembles that of the body, which has certain organs and natural functions and dispositions corresponding to them. But these natural dispositions alone do not produce the passions immediately. They must be assisted by other causes. Anything that gives a pleasant sensation and is related to the self excites the passion of pride. For example, a house, if it is beautiful and belongs to oneself, produces pride –​or humility, if its beauty is transformed into deformity. At the root of both passions, pride and humility, Hume finds, in addition to the reference to the self, also respectively references to the pleasantness or uneasiness of sensation.55 So these indirect passions tend to be a mixture of nature and culture: pleasure coming from nature and a reference to the self from some relation to it, such as ownership, which is cultural. This dependence on social conventions is equally evident in the other indirect passions that Hume mentions: for example, one could not be vain or humble without society, whereas a creature living outside society could still have desires and fears. 4

Vice, Virtue and Taste

In so far as the most obvious causes of pride and humility are vice and virtue, and these in turn produce pleasure and pain, the latter lie, according to 50 51 52 53 54 55

Treatise, ii, i, i; sbn, p. 276. Treatise, ii, iii, ix; sbn, p. 438. Treatise, ii, iii, ix; sbn, p. 439. Treatise, ii, i, i; sbn, pp. 276–​277. Treatise, ii, iii, ix; sbn, p. 439. Treatise, ii, i, v; sbn, pp. 285–​290.

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Hume, also at the root of morals. Hume observes that even if morality had no foundation in nature, vice and virtue would produce real pain and pleasure, either from self-​interest or from the prejudices of education. Thus, the very essence of virtue is to produce pleasure and that of vice to give pain.56 In this way, it is only through taste that we can form moral judgements.57 This moral taste is analogous to the taste that recognises beauty or deformity, which in turn is derived from the idea of convenience and utility.58 Although natural and moral beauty have nothing in common, they both have the power to produce pleasure.59 And here again, Hume’s examples and models refer to artefacts and animals and to their structures and functions: the shapes of buildings that result in their security and stability are experienced as beautiful, as are animals whose shape produces or is a sign of strength or agility. A beautiful structure produces pleasure, while a deformed, non-​functional structure produces pain.60 The crucial difference between natural and moral beauty lies is the fact that the latter has a near relation to ourselves: this is why virtue can be the cause of pride.61 In so far as Hume explains the passions by some basic mechanisms of the human mind without reference to anything but the natural ‘organs’ of the human mind, he does not exclude animals from having similar passions. Since the psychology of animals works similarly to humans by associations based on resemblance, continuity and causation, they have many of the same passions as humans. Although animals have ‘little or no’ sense of virtue and vice, many of the passions that Hume describes as characteristic of the human mind, such as pride and humility, are according to him shared by animals as well.62 Animals are also capable of love and hatred, and envy and malice.63 Despite animals being, according to Hume, ‘but little susceptible either of the pleasures or pains of the imagination’,64 the force of sympathy is equally observable through the whole animal creation.65 It is actually this sympathy that makes us sensible to the beauties of objects that are not directly useful to us. It is by sympathy that we can enter into the 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Treatise, ii, i, vii; sbn, pp. 295–​296. Treatise, ii, i, vii; sbn, p. 297. Treatise, ii, i, viii; sbn, p. 299. Treatise, ii, i, viii, sbn, p. 300. Treatise, ii, i, viii; sbn, p. 299. Treatise, ii, i, viii; sbn, p. 300. Treatise., ii, i, xii; sbn, p. 326. Treatise, ii, ii, xii; sbn, pp. 397–​398. Treatise, ii, ii, xii; sbn, p. 397. Treatise, ii, ii, v; sbn, p. 363.

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interests of others through the force of the imagination.66 It is by sympathy that lively ideas are converted into impressions, or rather, as Hume insists, sympathy is a lively idea converted into an impression.67 The importance of sympathy lies in the fact that by its action the pleasures related to moral or aesthetic taste are not necessarily reducible to our interest in the narrow sense of satisfying our natural instincts and appetites. 5

Morals and the Artificial Nature of Humans

We have seen that Hume thinks that animals share many cognitive capacities and passions with humans. When it comes justice and some other artificial virtues, however, it is obvious that he is describing specifically human characteristics. There are good reasons to claim, for example, that Hume identifies the capacity of justice as a unique human quality.68 Paradoxically, the particularly human moral qualities are attributed to nature, in so far as Hume refers them to “human nature.” But he further insists that forming societies and establishing artificial institutions and moral rules are also part of this human nature. Hume refers repeatedly to ‘the principle(s) of human nature’. The expression is repeated like a refrain throughout the Treatise.69 The variations in the sentiments and manners, which are due to their different social roles and status, also ‘arise necessarily, because uniformly, from the necessary and uniform principles of human nature.’ Immediately after this formulation, Hume continues by observing that men cannot live without society and cannot be associated without government.70 For Hume, there is no contrast between the ‘nature’ of humans and their state in a governed society. Rather, he seems to imply that the latter results from the former. Anyway, this originally social nature of humans seems obvious in the light of Hume’s observation that humans could not exist in a state of nature without social organization. And in fact, the ‘instincts originally implanted in our natures’ include some social

66 67 68 69 70

Treatise, ii, ii, v; sbn, p. 364. Treatise, ii, ii, ix; sbn, pp. 385–​386. Denis G. Arnold, ‘Hume on the moral difference between humans and other animals’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 12, no. 2 (July 1995), pp. 303–​316. Treatise, Introduction; sbn, p. xvi /​i, ii, ix; sbn, p. 113 /​i, iii, xiii; sbn, p. 150 /​i, iv, ii; sbn, p. 188 /​i, iv, iii; sbn, p. 219 /​ii, ii, x; sbn, p. 390 /​ii, iii, i; sbn, p. 402 /​iii, ii, iii; sbn, p. 513 (note 2, p. 509) /​iii, ii, vi; sbn, p. 533 /​iii, ii, ix; p. 551 /​iii, iii, i; sbn, p. 590. Treatise, ii, iii, i; sbn, p. 402.

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virtues as well: benevolence and resentment, the love of life and kindness to children, appetite to good and aversion to evil. These are usually calm and not violent, and thus according to Hume often falsely taken to proceed from the same faculty, which judges of truth and falsehood, that is, reason.71 According to Hume, morality, although artificial, is deeply embedded in our nature and in our emotions. Vice and virtue are not qualities of objects but perceptions of the mind.72 Morality is, therefore, more properly felt than judged.73 An action, sentiment or character is virtuous or vicious according to whether it ‘causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.’74 Pleasure is involved in our moral judgements, but this is not just any kind of pleasure. Hume applies to virtue the observation often made concerning the relationship between beauty and aesthetic pleasure, according to which aesthetic objects are not judged beautiful because they produce pleasure but rather that they produce pleasure because they are beautiful: We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases. But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.75 And this ‘particular manner’ in which it pleases is related to it being viewed in a disinterested manner. In order to denominate a character to be morally good or evil, it must be considered without reference to our particular interest.76 Hume observes that it would be absurd to imagine that this sentiment which enables us to distinguish moral good and evil would be ‘produced by an original quality and primary constitution.’77 This leads him to the conclusion that vice and virtue are equally artificial in the sense of the word being opposed to the natural.78 This artificial nature of vice and virtue is due to the fact that when we judge them we must not look at human actions objectively as natural objects. It is not the external performance that counts, but what actions signify: that is, what they tell about the agent and his motives. Hume observes that when 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Treatise, ii, iii, iii; sbn, p. 417. Treatise, iii, i, i; sbn, p. 469. Treatise, iii, i, ii; sbn, p. 470. Treatise, iii, i, ii; sbn, p. 471, my emphasis. Treatise, iii, i, ii; sbn, p. 471. Treatise, iii, i, ii; sbn, p. 472. Treatise, iii, i, ii; sbn, p. 473. Hume’s emphasis. Treatise, iii, i, ii; sbn, p. 475. The other two senses of ’natural’ Hume refers to are those in which it is opposed to the unusual or to the miraculous (ibid).

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we consider the merit of actions, we consider them as signs –​signs of their motive.79 The merit of actions cannot be reduced to their natural, objective features. Neither can justice be reduced to interest. And this applies also to public interest. Public interest is not naturally attached to the rules of justice, but only after an artificial convention for their establishment.80 Hume writes that ‘the sense of justice and injustice is not derived from nature, but arises artificially, though necessarily from education, and human conventions.’81 And again, he refers to the model of aesthetic taste: we consider ‘the natural and usual force of the passions’ when we make judgement concerning virtue or vice. Hume compares making such judgements to the way we judge the beauty of animal bodies, by reference to the economy, that is, the physiology of the species.82 Beauty arises from the proportion common to the species.83 But in morality the point of reference is, instead of a physiology given by nature, an artificial human nature and human institutions. But although the rules of justice are artificial, Hume remarks that they are not arbitrary and so it is not improper to call them Laws of Nature, if natural is understood to mean that which is common to, or inseparable from the species.84 This meaning of ‘nature’ is probably also that which Hume has in mind when he refers to ‘human nature’, which could thus in principle contain artificial aspects as well, in so far as these are common to all humans. Living in a society according to the conventions of justice is natural, it constitutes the ‘nature’ of man qua man. And in fact, we see the point clearly if we look at the way Hume deals with the state of nature supposedly preceding the formation of society. Hume is critical of the ‘supposed state of nature’, as he calls it. For Hume, it is ‘a mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never could have any reality.’ Slightly before this, he states: […] ‘tis utterly impossible for men to remain a considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteem’d social.85

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Treatise, Ibid., iii, ii, i; sbn, p. 477. Treatise, iii, ii, i; sbn, p. 480. Treatise, iii, ii, i; sbn, p. 483. In the eighteenth century the term ‘animal economy’ referred to physiology. Treatise, iii, ii, i; sbn, p. 483. Treatise, iii, ii, i; sbn, p. 484. Treatise, iii, ii, ii; sbn, p. 493.

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This is because the human nature is composed of two parts, which are both requisite for all human actions: affections and understanding.86 Humans simply could not live in society without the understanding directing the blind motions of the former. The state of nature is thus a fiction comparable to the golden age.87 Hume also explains that the natural passions could never have resulted in the institutions of justice as determined by humans merely reasoning on their own interest. For him it was obvious that the sense of justice is not founded on reason. It is founded on impressions and not on ideas. And the impressions that give rise to it are not natural to the minds of humans but rather arise from artifice and human conventions.88 The interest that gives rise to them could not be pursued by the natural and inartificial passions of humans.89 Although Hume admits that self-​interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice, the source of moral approbation attending to justice is sympathy with public interest.90 In this way, moral appreciation is not reducible to personal interest.91 Sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions. It is also the source of our approval of justice: public good is indifferent to us, except by sympathy. Virtuous actions appear so independently of the profit we can reap from them. But by sympathy we can enter into the happiness it produces in others. And the happiness of strangers (who profit from virtuous action) affects us by sympathy alone.92 As another example of practises which, according to Hume, cannot be reduced to the natural faculties of the mind are promises. Hume observes that the rule of morality, which enjoins us to keep promises is not natural and that a promise is ‘naturally something altogether unintelligible’.93 The will never creates new obligations or sentiments, and fidelity is not a natural virtue antecedent to human convention.94 Hume explains that the will alone cannot cause 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94

Understanding for Hume being for all intents and purposes more or less the same as imagination: ‘Imagination or understanding, call it which you please.’ Treatise, ii, iii, ix; sbn, p. 440. Treatise, iii, ii, ii; sbn, p. 493. Treatise, iii, ii, ii; sbn, p. 496. Treatise, iii. ii, ii; sbn, p. 479. Treatise, iii, ii, ii; sbn, pp. 499–​500. ‘All this seems to me a proof that our approbation has, in those cases, an origin different from the prospect of utility and advantage, either to ourselves or others.’ Treatise, iii, iii, iii; sbn, p. 604. Cf. what Hume says of natural virtues, which are esteemed because they tend to be useful to the person who possesses them, although not always to us or even to society in general. Treatise, iii, iv, iv; sbn, pp. 606–​614. Treatise iii, iii, vi; sbn, pp. 618–​619. Treatise, iii, ii, v; sbn, p. 517. Treatise, ii, ii, v, sbn, pp. 518 and 519.

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any obligation, but must be expressed by words or signs.95 So the obligation of promises, which is a human invention for the convenience of society, can never be explained as arising naturally from any action of the mind or body.96 And what is not natural is almost magical: Hume compares this capacity of certain forms of words to change human nature to transubstantiation.97 Although the passions and inherent principles of human nature referred to by Hume are inalterable, the conduct that depends on them is not necessarily so: it is always possible to give these natural passions a new direction. People can learn to satisfy their appetites in an oblique and artificial manner.98 The restraints imposed on passions by the laws of nature that social life requires are in fact just more artful and more refined ways of satisfying them, or as Hume writes metaphorically, they are the ‘offspring of those passions’.99 Promises are also an example of actions and of the symbols and signs instituted for the purpose of mutual advantage.100 Interest is the ‘first obligation’ in keeping promises, but joined to this afterwards is a sentiment of morals, which concurs with interest.101 In this manner, laws of justice arise from natural principles in an oblique and artificial way. Although they arise from self-​love and tend to public interest, this does not prevent them from being artificial, purposely contrived and directed to a certain end.102 Regarding the fact that they are universal and inflexible –​instead of being like other actions that always proceed by taking account of particular situations –​Hume concludes that they cannot be derived from nature or be the immediate results of any natural motive or inclination.103 Artificial rules of justice allow for no exceptions, and in this respect they are in fact ‘contrary to the common principles of human nature, which accommodate themselves to circumstances’.104 Once the interest in observing these rules of justice is acknowledged and established, a sense of morality in their observance follows naturally. Afterwards, this sense of morality is augmented by a new, second-​degree artifice: the public instructions of politicians and the private education of parents.105 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

Treatise, iii, ii, v; sbn, p. 523. Treatise, iii. ii, v: sbn, p. 524. Treatise, iii. ii, v; sbn, p. 524. Treatise, iii. ii, v; sbn, p. 521. Treatise, iii, ii, vi; sbn p. 526. Treatise, iii, ii v; sbn p. 522. Treatise, iii, ii, v; sbn, p. 523. Treatise., iii, ii, vi; sbn, pp. 528–​529. Treatise, iii. ii, vi, sbn, pp. 531–​532. Treatise, iii, ii, vi; sbn, pp. 532–​533. Treatise, iii, ii, vi; sbn, pp. 533–​544.

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Hume admits that government could upon its first establishment derive its obligations from the laws of nature, in particular from that concerning the performance of promises.106 However, Hume considers that we cannot apply this to government in all ages and situations. Although the duty of allegiance to government and its magistrates is originally grafted to the obligation of promises, it is erroneous to consider that the establishment of all later governments could derive the duty of allegiance from this obligation. The reason for this is that although this duty originates and is for some time supported by this obligation, it ‘quickly takes root in itself’ and acquires an ‘original obligation and authority, independent of all contracts.’ According to the contractual theory Hume criticises, people’s consent could impose upon them new obligations unknown to the laws of nature.107 Hume refers then to philosophers who have consequently judged that the three fundamental laws of nature are as ancient as society, and deny that they are artificial and voluntary inventions.108 But since Hume thinks that natural as well as civil justice derives its origin from human conventions, he deems it fruitless to resolve one to the other and to seek within the laws of nature a stronger foundation than interest and human conventions.109 And since the principal object of government is to constrain men to observe the laws of nature (one of them being the performance of promises), the obligation of promises is the effect of the institution of government and not vice versa, that is, the obedience to the government the effect of the obligation of a promise.110 Consistent with this, Hume claims that private duties are more dependent on public duties than the latter on the former.111 So the obligation to submit oneself to the government is not derived on a promise on the part of the subject.112 And since government is a human invention made for the interest of society, tyranny, which removes this interest, removes the obligation to obedience. In other words: ‘The moral obligation is founded on the natural and must cease where that ceases.’113 The appreciation of virtues is always based on sympathy. In appreciating virtue, we consider sympathetically the good that results from the acts in 106 The three laws of nature which make society possible and precede the establishment of government are, according to Hume, the stability of possession, its translation by consent, and the performance of promises. Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn. p. 541. 107 Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn, pp. 541–​542. 108 Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn, p. 542. 109 Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn, p. 543. 110 Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn, p. 543. 111 Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn p. 546. 112 Treatise, iii, ii, viii; sbn, p. 547. 113 Treatise, iii, ii, ix; sbn, pp. 552–​553.

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question, just like we judge works of art or natural objects beautiful on the basis of their utility for man. This applies both to natural virtues, which do not depend on the artifice and contrivance of men, and artificial virtues, such as justice. There is, however, a difference in the way this sympathy works in the two cases. The private or public good that results from the former arises from every single act separately, whereas a single act of justice may, considered in itself (as a single act), be not only contrary to private interest but also to public interest. Justice is advantageous only when considered as a general scheme or system of action.114 But once it is established by conventions, it profits from the moral sentiments proceeding from sympathy, although not from sympathy directed toward individual people, but rather from sympathy directed towards the interest of society.115 Hume concludes that though justice is artificial, the sense of morality is natural –​‘a principle inherent in the soul’. He deems it impossible that convention could ever produce this sentiment.116 And he observes that although justice is a human invention, it does not depend on people’s humour and caprice, since it is founded on universal interest and thus it is immutable, extending to all times and places.117 Its universality is not based on reason or nature, as some of Hume’s contemporaries tended to conclude, but on its being based on an interest extending to all times and places and which is necessary for the formation of any society. In this way, the rules of justice are immutable, or as Hume adds ‘as immutable as human nature.’118 The crucial question I would like to pose Hume is: do human institutions create new artificial functions in the mind or do they merely provide new contents for a mind acting according to its natural capacities? In other words, are there any artificial functions in the hum(e)an mind? It seems to me that despite some evidence to the contrary, this is the case. Although all the artificial aspects of human constitution are built on the basis of the original principles of human nature, what is built on these foundations is in the final analysis a complex architecture contrived in order to achieve certain ends. In this way, the artificial passions and moral sentiments could be considered as complex functional systems formed by the associations of ideas and impressions. In fact, the personal identity or the self, could also be described in functional terms according to the hints provided by Hume in the passage discussing specific 1 14 115 116 117 118

Treatise, iii, iii, i; sbn, p. 579. Treatise, iii, iii, i; sbn, pp. 579–​580. Treatise, iii, iii, vi; sbn p. 619. Treatise, iii, iii, vi: sbn, p. 620. Treatise, iii, iii, v; sbn, p. 620.

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identity (as distinct from the numerical). A church rebuilt from new materials and in a different architectural style can, according to Hume, be said without breach of the propriety of language, to be the same church because its relation to the inhabitants of the parish remains the same.119 In this sense, personal identity or self does not necessarily require any permanent single perceptions or even permanent bundles of them; all that is needed is a system of perceptions that can perform a specifically identical functions in relation to society. This brings in the following question: Are the ends pursued by the artificial passions and moral sentiments natural or artificial? In other words, are the motives that arise in a society really only indirect ways of satisfying natural appetites, as the passage we have referred to above and the term ‘indirect passions’ seem to imply? I would, despite this evidence to the contrary, hesitate in answering with an unqualified ‘yes’, since for Hume moral sentiments are not reducible to interest in this narrow sense, although they ‘concur’ with it. In addition, as we have indicated, Hume claims that the laws of justice arise from natural principles in an artificial way. The comparison with Helvétius’s explicitly reductionist theory is enlightening in this respect. The Frenchman explicitly claims that all human motives can be reduced to physical sensations and personal interest. In Hume’s cases we have nothing of the kind. Instead, Hume’s theory of sympathy removes all clear boundaries between the sensations or impressions of individuals. Another interesting feature in Hume’s system in respect to the role of artificial institutions in forming the human mind is constituted by the occasional references to the role of signs in his discussion of obligation and the evaluation of morality. We will see in the following chapters that the role of signs and language will have an even greater role in some later theories, such as those of Condillac or La Mettrie. Despite the fact that Hume mentions in passing the role of language in transforming particular ideas into general ideas and its constitutional role in such acts as promises, he does not explicitly discuss the essential or constitutive role of language in the establishment of humanity in general, in the manner of Hobbes or Condillac, in whose theories language plays a central role. On the other hand, as far as personal identity is concerned, we have seen that for Hume it resembles in its structure an artefact, although for him this comparison remains more or less metaphorical, instead of developing into a full-​blown theory concerning the way in which culture forms the functions of the human mind.

119 Treatise, i, iv, vi; sbn, pp. 257–​258.

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There are obviously various ways in which one could explain Hume’s dissatisfaction with his account of personal identity and the inconsistences discussed in the Appendix to his Treatise. For my purposes, the main question is, however, why did he not make more use of the working analogies with living organisms and technological artefacts that he had used in Book i. He discards these as fictions, never to return to them, although they would certainly have been even more pertinent when he discusses personal identity in relation to our passions, our concerns with our pains and pleasures. I believe that the explanation must be looked for in his epistemological atomism, which allows as real only separate ideas and impressions or at most local associations between them. Organized structures –​the parts of which are really constituted by their functional role in the whole structure, and which cannot properly even exist as such (as functional elements) without the whole structure –​lie beyond the purview of Hume’s empiricism. Condillac later follows in Hume’s traces in putting the emphasis on the connections between ideas rather than ideas themselves. But Condillac adds explicit considerations on the hierarchic and organized structure of the system of ideas around needs. Hume’s notion of the idea of ourselves that is always present to us, conveying vivacity to our ideas and transforming them into impressions, could certainly have provided him with a theoretical basis for a similar theory of the human mind as a structured system of ideas organised around the idea of the self and its passions –​instead of seeing it merely as a bundle of perceptions.

­c hapter 7

Condillac and Diderot on the Role of Artificial Signs in Cognition Condillac’s project could be described as a radicalisation of Locke’s empiricist epistemology. In his Traité des sensations (1754) the French sensualist wants not only to derive the contents of the mind from sensations, but also to show how its functions are derived from sensations. But while Condillac continues Locke’s empiricism in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746),1 he also discards some central features of empiricist psychology. For example, he disagrees with Locke’s conception on the nature of memory and its relationship to imagination. This disagreement has some rather far-​reaching consequences concerning the nature of ideas and the role of language in human cognitive faculties. For Locke, memory consists in the power of reviving past sensations stored in the repository of memory.2 Remembering is in this scheme closely related to the imagination: when we remember past sensations, they are presented again in our imagination. Thus, Hume could think that the only difference between memory and imagination is a difference in degree: memories differ from imaginings merely in their ‘force and vivacity’.3 In contrast to the British empiricists, Condillac makes a clear-​cut distinction between imagination and memory. Imagination consists in the subsistence of perceptions of objects in the mind in the absence of these objects: they are represented as if they would be present to our senses. Condillac describes this as a passive process due to the liaison of perceptions in our experience: these perceptions are revived in the mind by the action of an external object or a word. For example, in this way the name of an object will cause a representation of it ‘as if one had it in front one’s eyes.’4 But Condillac claims that we can well remember things without being able to evoke past perceptions: memory

1 The first English translation of Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines even presented it as a supplement to Locke’s work. It was titled An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding (London: J. Nourse, 1756). 2 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. 2, Chap. x, §§ 1 and 2. 3 Hume, Treatise, i, i, ii, and i, iii, v; sbn, pp. 8 and 85–​86. 4 Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, part i, sect. ii, chap. ii, § 17. The liaison itself is formed by attention. Ibid., i, ii, i, §17 and i, ii, iii, § 27.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_009

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can consist merely in recalling the name, some of the circumstances that had accompanied the perception, and an abstract idea of perception. Thus, for example, to remember the odour of a flower, it is not necessary to be able to revive the perception itself, it is enough that we can evoke the name of the flower, the circumstances when we saw it and the representation of the smell subsumed under the general idea of a perception that affects our nose. This is what Condillac calls memory, rather than the evocation of past sensations.5 But, if memory is not reducible to sensations evoked in the imagination, obviously something else is involved. These other things we can find implicitly listed in Condillac’s analysis of the memory of the odour: language, a larger context provided by circumstances and the ability to form generalizations. The latter two factors are intimately related to the first, language, whose fundamental role Condillac emphasises in the formation of the human mind. He even reproaches Locke for having missed, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, this constitutive role of language in human cognitive faculties. 1

Locke’s Error

We can see from Condillac’s description that memory proper involves, instead of the revival of particular sensations, more complex mental functions involving language and abstraction. He explicitly blames Locke for confusing imagination and memory, and thus being the source of an erroneous conception of memory that is common among philosophers.6 Condillac makes some fundamental distinctions between things that Locke tends to assimilate. Firstly, he distinguishes between the fact that complex ideas are analysable into simple ideas and the conception according to which they would, when we contemplate them in our minds, originally consist of a collection of simple ideas. And secondly, in distinguishing imagination and memory, he also distinguishes between sensations and ideas, claiming that ideas are not just revived sensations. In his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines Condillac claims that ideas depend on mental functions that cannot be reduced to mere sensation or imagination. He also claims that ideas are dependent on language and the ability to use artificial signs. In order to make the first point, Condillac has recourse 5 ‘[…] on se rappellera le mot, on souviendra des circonstances où l’on l’a vue, on s’en représentera le parfum sous l’idée générale d’une perception qui affecte l’odorat; mais on ne réveillera pas la perception même.’ Essai, i, ii, ii, § 18. 6 Essai, i, ii, ii, § 20.

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to the example that Descartes had used to distinguish between imagination and understanding. Descartes had observed that our reason can understand the distinctions between complex polygons, such as the one between a ciliogone and a myriogone, but our imagination cannot catch these differences.7 Condillac observes that when we think about a polygon with a thousand sides and one with 999 sides, it is not perception that allows us to distinguish between them, but their names. This happens, according to the French sensualist, always when we are dealing with complex notions. He observes that we can well evoke in our imagination successively the simple ideas these complex notions consist of, but this is not what takes place in memory. Evoking the simple ideas of which complex ideas consist must be attributed to a different function.8 Condillac picks up Descartes’ example, but uses it for a completely different purpose: instead of using it in order to distinguish between imagination and understanding, he uses it to distinguish between imagination and memory. Neglecting this distinction leads to ‘Locke’s error’, which led some philosophers to think that perceptions leave images or ‘imprints’ of themselves, which we can evoke when we remember them.9 Condillac follows the British empiricist in considering that the principle and source of all our knowledge lies in the connection of ideas with each other or with signs. Of central importance for Condillac is the connection of ideas with signs, and he sets out to prove that it is only by ideas being joined to signs that ideas themselves are joined to each other.10 Hence, he reproaches Locke, who in his Essay discusses ideas (in Book ii, titled Of ideas) before dealing with language (Book iii, Of words). According to Condillac, the discussion of language should have been the object of the second book. Condillac is convinced that ‘the use of signs is the principle that develops the germ of all our ideas.’11 Condillac distinguishes between three kinds of signs: the accidental, the natural and the instituted.12 The first kind are objects that are accidentally joined by some circumstances to our ideas and which thus acquire the capacity to evoke them. Of the second kind of signs, Condillac mentions cries that nature has established to express certain sentiments. But for Condillac the most important signs for our cognitive abilities are of the third kind: the signs that we have arbitrarily instituted to refer to our ideas. He claims that without 7 Descartes, at 7, pp. 71–​73, and at 9, pp. 57–​58; csm 1, pp. 50–​51. 8 Essai, i, ii, ii § 21. 9 Essai i, ii, ii § 20. 10 Essai, i, ii, xi, § 107. 11 Essai, Introduction. 12 Essai, i, ii, iv, § 35.

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artificial signs we could have imagination and reminiscence or recognition,13 but not memory proper. Imagination and reminiscence depend on external stimuli, which passively evoke the corresponding perceptions. Accidental signs involve learning, but some essentially human cognitive abilities are lacking in a being whose semiotic repertoire is limited to them and to natural signs. Without artificial signs one cannot evoke ideas at will and thus be able to control one’s imagination.14 In so far as animals have not instituted any artificial signs, it follows that they do not have memory. They are not masters of their imagination. Absent objects are presented to their imaginations only when the image of the object is joined in their brains to a present impression.15 This passivity applies also to the attention in animals, which drifts depending on present impressions, whereas we humans are able to control and direct our attention.16 The possibility to direct our attention at will is also the factor that makes us capable of reflection.17 And with reflection comes the increased faculty to separate and distinguish ideas from each other, and finally to abstract, compare, compose and decompose ideas.18 Eventually, when one is able to compare ideas, one can also judge, that is, to affirm or deny propositions, which in turn permits one to enchain judgments, that is, to reason.19 In so far as language was for Condillac a necessary condition for memory, directed attention, judgment and reason, it is quite obvious that for him language is much more than just a means for communicating ideas. Condillac observes further that it is reflection that transforms sensations into ideas: sensations become ideas proper when they are not merely sensible impressions, but when they are considered images. And this possibility is dependent on the acquisition of artificial signs.20 Thus animals do have perceptions, but since they are not capable of reflection, they do not have ideas. Only beings capable of reflection can have ideas and notions of things.21 As language conditions the possibility to reflect, it follows 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Condillac defines reminiscence as the simple recognition of a perception one has had before. Essai, i, ii, § 16 and 25. Essai, i, ii, iv, §§ 36–​39. Essai, i, ii, iv, § 40. Essai, i, ii, iv, § 45 and i, ii, v, § 47. Essai, i, ii, v, § 48. Essai i, ii, vi, §§ 55–​60. Essai i, ii, vii, §§ 69–​70. Essai, i, iv, ii, §§ 18 and 25. Notions are defined by Condillac as (complex) ideas that we have produced ourselves, in contrast to ideas which consist simply in the awareness of sensations as images. Essai, i, iii, § 16.

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that we actually could not even have ideas without language. So, Locke’s order which proceeds to study how we retain and combine ideas before discussing the role of language is obviously putting the cart before the horse. Among the things that would not be possible without the use of signs, Concillac mentions arithmetic. Without numbers we would not be able to conceive or distinguish ideas of unities above those that we can distinguish perceptually (and imagine), which Condillac thinks amounts up to six units.22 Only by having recourse to signs are we able to build unities out of more units than this. We cannot imagine the multiplicity of the parts that such complex unities consist of, but we know the rules of their construction.23 Condillac imagines a solitary man without signs for communicating his thoughts to others, and claims that this man could not in fact even calculate mentally by himself without inventing signs, because these signs are not merely necessary for communicating calculations but for calculation itself. And the same applies to other sciences as well. Metaphysics or morality would not be possible without signs for fixing our ideas.24 Thus, the same argument that Condillac applies to numbers also applies to the Lockean notion of substances. Condillac takes up the English philosopher’s favourite example, gold. We could not conceive such a complex collection of simple ideas as a unity without a proper sign for it.25 And evidently this is even more true for complex notions that do not have models in nature, for example those pertaining to laws, morality and human activities.26 In order to confirm his theory concerning the importance of language for human cognition, Condillac got out of the philosopher’s armchair and presents, in addition to philosophical analyses of mental processes, empirical material concerning children who have grown up without language. He discusses first a case of a deaf and dumb young man, aged twenty-​three or twenty-​ four, who later gained hearing and started to speak. The case was presented in the reports of the Académie des sciences in 1703. According to the report, the young man had obviously no idea of God, the soul, moral good or evil, or religion and its symbols, although he had grown up among Catholics. Condillac regrets that the young man was not systematically interrogated concerning the lack of ideas from which he suffered before learning to speak. Condillac imagines the mental state of the young man before he learned to speak as a 22 23 24 25 26

Essai, i, iv, i, § 1. Essai, i, iv, i, § 4. Essai, i, iv, i, § 5. Essai, i, iv, i, § 7. Essai, i, iv, i, § 8.

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kind of mental lethargy: he was incapable of fixing or determining the ideas he received from the senses, he could not compose or decompose ideas nor build notions of them. He could not compare even familiar ideas, nor make judgments and he probably was completely unable to reason at all during the first twenty-​two years of his life, because he did not master the use of conjunctions or particles connecting the different parts of discourse. His behaviour was determined by habit and by imitation, especially in actions not directly related to his needs: for example, he did not give any thought to the motives of the religious devotion his parents demanded from him, and he ignored the fact that they should be accompanied by intention.27 The young man’s sensations guided him in looking for things that are useful for conserving his existence and in avoiding harmful ones, but he followed these sensations without reflecting on what it is to conserve one’s existence or to let oneself be destroyed. He had no distinct ideas of death, and, according to Condillac, consequently neither of life. So, in order to know what life is, it is not enough to be and to sense.28 Condillac adds that he risks stating a paradox in saying that this young man had hardly any idea of life.29 But this, of course –​taking account of his idea that sensations are not ideas before being reflected on and turned into images of something –​is not paradoxical at all, but a logical consequence of the linguistic limitations of the young man. Condillac admits that the young deaf and dumb man had some feeble traces of mental operations other than those which, according to Condillac, are possible without language, that is, perception, consciousness, (involuntary) attention, reminiscence (in the technical sense given to the word by Condillac) and (uncontrolled) imagination. But Condillac claims further that one would not find a trace of these other faculties in a healthy individual completely deprived of interaction with humans and brought up, for example, among bears. Condillac imagines the limited mental life of such an individual: almost without reminiscence, he would be repeatedly in the same mental state without recognizing that he has been in this state earlier, without signs for evoking absent things he would lack memory, and having only an imagination which he could not control, his perceptions would awaken only when he was accidentally presented with objects joined to them by some circumstances. He would receive impressions from his senses without being able to reflect on them and he would obey them by instinct. Furthermore, because of our human habit to 27 28 29

Essai, i, iv, ii, §§ 13–17. Condillac observes that if the young man would have known what life is then he could have seen immediately that death is its privation. Essai, i, iv, ii, § 18. Essai, i, iv, ii, § 18.

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imitate, he would walk on all fours as bears do –​even if he would be Descartes, adds Condillac.30 All this Condillac could derive from his theory, but in so far as cases of feral children were known during his times, he could add that he was not limited to presenting conjectures. He refers to a case of a boy found in 1694 in the forests on the border between Lithuania and Russia. This child, approximately ten years of age at the time he was found, had supposedly been living among bears before this. His mental state confirmed Condillac’s conjectures: he presented no signs of reason, walked on all fours, and had no language but formed sounds that bore no resemblance to those emitted by humans. After being taught to speak, he could not remember anything from his anterior state, any more than we can remember what happened to us in the cradle.31 Thus, what we now recognize as infantile amnesia extended for him to up to the point that he started interacting with humans and learned to speak.32 As we have already observed, Wolff had quoted the same two cases of children deprived of linguistic means in support of his view that language facilitates and extends the use of reason. Condillac writes that Wolff had remarked that it is very difficult for a person not having instituted signs at his disposal to use reason and refers also to the fact that the German philosopher had supported his claim with the same descriptions as he had used. But Condillac concludes. however, that Wolff had not recognised the absolute necessity of signs or the manner in which they concur to the progress of the operations of the soul.33 Condillac thinks that artificial signs are also necessary for establishing stable connections between perceptions. In Book ii of the Essai he imagines two children having lost themselves in the desert after the Biblical Deluge, before they have learned any use of signs. He uses this fictional story in order to imagine how language could have been acquired by the nation born of their descendants.34 He observes in this context that connections formed by 30 31 32

33 34

Essai, i, iv, ii, § 19. Essai, i, iv, ii, § 23. This absence of autobiographical memory for early infancy is today usually explained in a way similar to the explanation provided by Condillac: it is considered to be due to the lack of appropriate inner frameworks for organizing information or to the lack of linguistic competence required for encoding autobiographical memories. See, Yadin Dudai, Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts, and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 127. Essai, i, iv, ii, § 27. Condillac refers to Wolff’s Psychologia rationalis, § 461. One might wonder about this curious detour: why not start simply from Adam and Eve? The reasons Condillac evokes for not referring to Adam and Eve are religious: according

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happenstance between perceptions without any support from reflection are instable and of a very short duration. Thus, even if these two children could form connections between their needs and the objects that satisfied them, the following day these connections would have been replaced by others. Their imagination would be at the mercy of their circumstances and not under their own control.35 When describing the cognitive limits of the feral child, Condillac refers in a note to a passage in Locke’s Essay where he observes that animals are incapable of forming abstractions.36 In this passage Locke observes, however, that animals are able to reason about particular ideas. But Condillac observes that if Locke would have realized that one cannot reflect without having mastered the use of artificial signs, he would have realized that animals are absolutely incapable of reasoning and that their actions which seem to be due to reasoning can be explained as the effects of the imagination.37 Language was thus for Condillac not only a means of communicating ideas: without artificial signs humans would simply not have any ideas at all. And since they cannot establish signs unless they live together, Condillac concludes that the origin of the formation of their ideas and of their minds is uniquely to be looked for in their reciprocal dealings. Their minds are formed as they master the use of signs and they develop in proportion to the use of signs. Thus, in Condillac’s scheme of things, it is not possible to conceive that the minds of humans could first exist outside society and then subsequently form societies and learn to communicate with each other, since before these developments they would actually not be psychologically humans at all. Although they could, of course, be identified as belonging to the same animal species, they would not be the subjects studied in volumes with titles such as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding or the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. 2

Needs, Will and Social Interaction

We have seen that Condillac refers to the social life of humans when discussing the origin of language. Although he sometimes refers to a fictional story

35 36 37

to the scriptures, they had been created capable of reflecting and communicating their thoughts by God’s direct intervention. Essai, ii, i, i, § 1. Essai, ii, i, i, § 1. In Locke’s Essay, ii, xi, §§ 10 & 11. Essai, i, iv, ii, § 25, note 1.

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of a man inventing signs all by himself, Condillac realised that this is not the way language could have really developed naturalistically, and the way he wanted to explain its development.38 So, it is not merely language as such that is responsible for the development of the mental capacities of humans. This development depends on the social interaction between people in general, which is both a condition for and a consequence of the development of language, in a circular, mutually reciprocally reinforcing genetic relationship similar to the one which Condillac observes as obtaining between the development of mental abilities and that of language.39 When Condillac discusses the problem of the freedom of the will in a letter to Gabriel Cramer, he returns to the case of the man who grew up among bears that he had already discussed in his Essai. He observes that, in contrast to this feral man, his own imagination and memory, being those of a man having grown up among other men and having mastered language, obey his will and thus cease to be necessary in this respect. But the feral man cannot ‘take his ideas on a walk’, as Condillac metaphorically describes the control of ideas that language permits. The ideas of the wild man follow immediately from his needs. Thus, they do not obey his will but precede it, and in this way his will is, writes Condilllac, hardly developed at all. If he could, like civilised men, anticipate his needs, he could subject the operations of his mind to his will and he would be free. But as long as he is deprived of social interactions (commerce)40 with other men, he cannot anticipate anything.41 In another letter to Cramer, Condillac explains in more detail how the artificial signs liberate and extend the interactions between humans and how this in turn is reflected in their capacity to reflect on their own experience. The interactions permitted by the development of signs provides humans with occasions to compare their experiences with those of others. This develops the capacity to attend to experiences that are not immediately present and 38

Essai, ii, i, iii, § 29. In this fiction he describes what could have resulted if God would have created a fully-​grown man with a perfect mastery of his reason and who could thus invent signs all by himself. 39 Essai, ii, i, i, §§ 3–​4. 40 The French term ’commerce’ that Condillac uses refers not only to trade but also to the reciprocal relations between humans in a more general sense. See Dictionnaire Historique de la langue française. 41 Letter to Cramer, dated 6 July, 1747, in Condillac, Lettres inédites à Gabriel Cramer, ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 1953), pp. 39–​41. Condillac adds that his claim concerns merely the freedom of mental operations and not that of the will. Whether will itself is free is another question, which he deems useless to discuss (loc. cit.).

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consequently extends their capacity to reflect on their own experiences as well. It permits them to direct their attention not only to their present situation but also to their past or to their future. As they learn to attend to the needs of others, they also gain the capacity to attend to their own needs that are not actually present. In this way, it is the interaction with other humans that lifts humans above their present situation, so that they can consider the needs they no longer experience or those that they could experience in the future. And Condillac adds that in this way, by being liberated from the dependence on the objects affecting him, a human gains freedom.42 Consequently, the consciousness of oneself as a continuous subject, having a biography and projecting oneself into the future, is based on the capacity to experience the subjective life of others. This kind of self-​consciousness depends on understanding the mental life of others, and not vice versa. We do not understand the mental life of others by projecting on to others our subjective and private mental experiences, but rather the contrary: being able to attend to own experience depends on our capacity to understand the experiences of others. In the short Mémoire joined to the correspondence with Cramer, Condillac also explains why a person without any instituted signs and consequently without any interactions with other people would forget all his experiences as they pass. If he has no needs or desires, his attention is caught by the liveliest impression, which disappears from his mind as soon as something else catches his attention. If he has a need, his attention is caught by the object that can satisfy it, but as soon as the need is satisfied, there is no reason anymore to attend to the object. If the need arises again, this can evoke the object again in his imagination, but even in this case his imagination is at the service of his immediate needs. His imagination is occupied with the idea only as long as the need subsists. So, this man lives in a lethargic state, as his ideas drift from one object to another according to the needs he experiences or to the impressions he receives. He does not dispose of his attention and acts merely by instinct. But, Condillac continues, when many humans like this commence to live together their needs begin to multiply: they not only feel the need to satisfy their own hunger but feel the need to relive that of others and to establish themselves signs, which they could not have used before their reciprocal interaction.43 42 43

Undated letter to Cramer, Lettres inédites, pp. 84–​85. Lettres inédites, pp. 102–​104. See also Essai, ii, ii, i. Note that Condillac, once again, uses the term ‘idea’ for something which, according to his own doctrine, is not properly an idea. He also writes that humans begin to establish signs among themselves ‘naturally’, again a good example of the multiple meanings of the term ‘nature’.

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To Cramer’s question concerning the importance Condillac has given to artificial signs at the expense of natural signs, he replies that this is because the latter are not properly signs at all, in so far as they are produced instinctually, according to our bodily constitution: Mais, me demanderez vous, les signes naturels ne sont donc rien ? Je réponds qu’avant le commerce les signes naturels ne sont point proprement des signes ; ce ne sont que des cris qui accompagnent les sentiments de douleur, de joye, etc., et que les hommes alors poussent par instinct, et par la seule conformation des organes. Il faut qu’ils vivent ensemble, pour avoir occasion d’attacher des idées à ces cris et de les employer comme des signes. Alors ces cris se confondent avec les signes arbitraires.44 The interactions between humans permit this transformation of natural gestures and cries into artificial signs and subsequently the invention of novel artificial signs. In this way, the distance between natural signs and artificial ones is not great, and in the letter Condillac reproaches himself in mistakenly having given the impression to the contrary.45 This close genetic relationship between natural and artificial signs and the possibility of transforming one into the other does not, however, permit them being identified: what Condillac indicates here is merely that the same sign can act as a natural sign and as an artificial one. In his Essai he had already described how artificial language originated in ‘giving the natural signs the character of instituted signs’, that is, by humans starting to use their spontaneous natural gestures and cries on purpose in order to express their sentiments. In this way, natural and artificial signs were for a long time mixed together.46 But this genetic connection and coexistence does not annihilate their essential difference. Once the natural sign is used as an artificial one, it is also transformed into a proper sign: the natural signs are signs only in a metaphorical sense. What thus distinguishes Condillac from his empiricist colleagues on the other side of the channel is his strong emphasis on language and society in the formation of the human mind. Condillac reproaches Locke for supposing that the mind can make mental propositions and separate or unite ideas without having recourse to words, and for proposing that the best method to arrive at knowledge would be to consider the ideas themselves. Condillac wonders equally about Locke’s comment that without signs distinguishing each 44 45 46

Lettres inédites, pp. 85–​86. Cf. Essai, i, iv, ii, §§ 23–​24, and ii, i, i, §§ 2–​3. Lettres inédites, p. 86. Essai, ii, i, ii, § 13.

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collection of units we could hardly make use of numbers, especially in combinations involving a multiplicity of units.47 Here, Condillac, who thought that without signs we could not calculate mentally at all, is objecting simply to the word hardly, which from his point of view seems inexact, or at least, a case of a rather heavy and pregnant understatement, revealing that Locke actually underestimates the role of language in human cognition. Condillac observes that without linguistic means of expressing the relations between different propositions, one would not only be incapable of communicating one’s reasoning but to reason at all.48 In his description of the development of articulated language, he observes that when humans did not have conjunctions, they were incapable of reasoning.49 And correspondingly, Condillac attributes genius and talent in modern times to the development of the linguistic means available. As the exercise of imagination and memory depends entirely on the connections between ideas, and these in turn are formed by relations and analogies of signs, a language lacking these analogies does not support memory or imagination, and is consequently unfavourable to the development of talent. Condillac compares this to the development of mathematical tools in geometry, without which Newton’s success would not have been possible. Even the most talented genius is dependent and limited by the language that is available during his time and on which new developments in creative thinking depend.50 In so far as Condillac emphasises the analogies provided by language, he gives special credit for the development of language to poets.51 But of course, on the other hand, it is language which provides for the genius of poets: born in another century and writing in a different idiom, Corneille could never have shown the same talent.52 What differentiates Condillac and Locke is that whereas Locke thought words might sometimes be useful in handling our ideas, Condillac claims that words or artificial signs are absolutely necessary in order to reflect on our sensations and to distinguish, separate or unite ideas in our minds. In fact, as we have seen, as Condillac also makes a clear distinction between sensations and ideas, he further claims that we cannot actually have any ideas at all without

47 48 49 50 51 52

i, iv, ii, § 27. Condillac refers to the following passages in Locke’s Essay: iii, v, § 10, and iv, v, §§ 3–​5. Essai, ii, i, x, § 105. Cf. the observation concerning the inability to reason of the deaf and dumb man above. Essai, ii, i, xiv, § 138. Essai, ii, i, xv, §§ 147 and 152. Essai, ii, i, xv, § 153. Essai, ii, i, xv, § 160.

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artificial signs. Condillac gives the Englishman credit for taking sensations as a starting point, instead of innate ideas like Descartes did, but he observes that Locke had not examined in detail the origins of the progress of the mind’s operations (les premiers progrès des opérations de l’âme), and that consequently he has tried to do what Locke had forgotten, and in doing this, he had discovered the absolute necessity of signs and the principle of the connection of ideas.53 Diderot had criticised Condillac by observing that when his friend derives everything from sensations, which are subjective experiences, he ends up dangerously close to the subjective idealism of Berkeley.54 But, in defence of Condillac one could reply that in so far as these sensations become ideas in the context of social interaction, they are not merely subjective but intersubjective. This intersubjective emphasis is evident also in Concillac’s explanations concerning the social determination of the meaning of words. Considering that Condillac follows Locke in thinking that complex ideas are analysable into simple ideas, one could suppose that it is these simple ideas, considered as subjective impressions of which one cannot be mistaken, which would in the final analysis determine the precise meaning of words. However, when Condillac discusses the fixing of the meaning of words, he refers, instead of subjective sensations, to usage and to circumstances.55 Thus, in so far as the similarity of these circumstances is taken care of in the usage of words, we can use them in communication and understand each other even if our sensations were different. Condillac observes that even if a person would, on seeing an object he calls blue, have the same experience another person calls green, and on seeing an object he calls green have the same experience the other calls blue, these two persons would agree in their use of the terms and in the circumstances of this use: for instance, both would agree that the grass is green and the sky blue.56 In this way, the names of simple ideas, those referring to sensations well as those referring to the operations of the mind, can be sufficiently determined by circumstances. Thus, a philosopher should not only avoid imagining that sensations lie in the object, but also that the same object always produces the same sensations in different individuals.57 Incidentally, this emphasis on circumstances throws light also on Condillac’s theory of

53 Essai, ii, ii, iii, § 39. 54 Diderot, Œuvres complètes, ed. J. Assezat et M. Tourneux, 20 vols. (Garnier: Paris 1875–​1879), vol 1, pp. 304–​305 (hereafter cited as at); Diderot, Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Dieckman, J. Proust and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1975–​), vol 4, p. 45 (hereafter cited as dpv). 55 Essai, ii, ii, ii, § 2. 56 Essai, ii, ii, ii, § 17. A corresponding argument can be found in Locke’s Essay, ii, xxxii, § 15. 57 Essai, ii, ii, ii, § 18.

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memory, in which he observed that the capacity of memories to refer to past incidents does not rely so much on sensations as on circumstances. By its intrinsically relational and holistic nature, the notion of ‘circumstances’ works as an effective counterweight to the epistemological atomism of Condillac’s analytical sensationalism, which, as Diderot remarked, might otherwise risk being indistinguishable from the subjective idealism of Berkeley. Condillac’s emphasis on the importance of language for human cognition makes the mind dependent on pre-​existing human history. Certainly, this is sufficient in preventing epistemological solipsism. 3

The Architecture of Memory

The biggest challenge in explaining memory is not necessarily how sensations are able to leave traces in the brain, but rather how we are able to find anything in this extensive and constantly enlarging library of sensation and ideas.58 Memory consists in both retention and recovery of past experiences. Philosophers have traditionally discussed how memories are stored but significantly they have tended to neglect the more arduous problems related to their recovery. We should not only be able to explain how memories are evoked accidentally by sensations or other ideas, but also how we are able to evoke them at will, that is, to explain memory in the sense that Condillac uses the term. Empiricist psychology, the tradition to which Condillac himself belongs and which he develops further, had evidently paid a lot of attention to the connections between ideas. The formation of these connections was often explained as a more or less passive result of the co-​occurrence of ideas in our experience or on the basis of their similarities. In this way, association can obviously give rise to haphazard and irrational combinations. No wonder then that Locke starts his chapter on the association of ideas by discussing the extravagances and madness of men.59 For Hume the progression and order of our ideas is not determined by reason but by the laws of association, which work according to contiguity, resemblance or a cause-​effect relationship.60 Condillac observes, however, that it is not merely the order in which ideas are presented to our 58

The physician Antoine Le Camus, a contemporary of Condillac, wondered in his Médecine de l’esprit (Paris: Ganeau 1953, vol. 1, pp. 90–​91) that if all our memories would be stored as images engraved in our brains, like pictures piled up in a printmaker’s shop, then how could we ever find anything there? 59 Locke, Essay, ii, xxxiii, §§ 1–​4. 60 Hume, Treatise, i, i, iv; sbn, pp. 10–​11.

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mind that determines their associations. Something else is required: attention. We must pay attention to the ideas that are joined together and this attention in turn is determined by our temperament, passions, and state, that is, by our needs. Attention is directed simultaneously to our needs and the things that are related to them.61 Condillac considers our needs, which are all related to each other, as the organizing principles of our ideas. He takes the perception of these needs as forming a sequence of fundamental ideas, to which all of our knowledge is connected. Above these fundamental ideas rise other chains of ideas, in which sometimes quite disparate ideas are strongly bound together by the analogy of signs, the order of perceptions, and the circumstances connecting them. Needs are joined to the things which satisfy them, and these in turn are joined to the place where they can be found, to persons seen there, and joined to them are the ideas of pleasure or sorrows caused by them, and so on. Condillac describes such chains of association as hierarchic structures, where each chain is subject to more and more subdivisions as one progresses: one fundamental idea is joined to two or three others, these to others, and so on.62 The same objects and ideas could be joined to many fundamental ideas and to many needs. In this way, our knowledge forms a great chain.63 Thus, in order to find a familiar idea, one needs only to pay attention to some of the fundamental ideas to which they are attached, and which are in fact constantly activated in our minds by our temperament, passions or state of mind. If they are joined to more than one of our needs, this makes their retrieval even easier.64 Condillac gives here some examples of everyday situations and conversations that show how this kind of associative network enables our minds to pass quickly from one idea to another that is relevant in that situation, or to find the ideas we need in specific situations easily and effortlessly.65 In order for such a network to work properly, it should maintain a balance between too few or too many connections: increasing the amount of connections indefinitely does not necessarily make it more effective. Condillac observes that having too much imagination and memory, that is, having too many connections and associations between ideas would be as fatal as having none.66 It is not the amount of connections that matters but their organised and hierarchic structure, which 61 62 63 64 65 66

Essai, i, ii, iii, § 28. Essai, i, ii, iii, § 29. Essai, i, ii, iii, § 30. Essai, i, ii, iii, § 31. Essai, i, ii, iii, § 32. Essai, i, ii, iii, § 34.

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enables the relevant memories to be found. And in so far as it is the signs that connect ideas, while the other, more haphazard connections between sensations are not durable, it is obvious that the whole architecture of memory is built using materials provided by language and by other cultural institutions. 4

After the Essai

After the Essai sur l’origines des connaissances humaines (1746) Condillac wrote two other works in which he further develops his sensationalistic theory of mind: Traité des sensations (1754) and Traité des animaux (1755). In these works, he seems to reconsider his radical claim on the importance of signs for cognition. Traité des sensations is famous for Condillac’s ‘statue’ that gets ideas and mental functions by acquiring different senses, one at a time. Curiously, and in complete opposition to what Condillac had written in his Essai, his statue acquires memory immediately after it has acquired the sense of smell and when its attention lingers on a removed odorous object. This happens without it having learned language. In addition, Condillac writes that memory is nothing but ‘a manner of sensing’, which also contradicts what he had claimed in Essai.67 Condillac was evidently conscious of this contradiction. In a section he later added to the beginning of the fourth part of the Traité des sensations,68 he admits that taking account of the fact, which he himself had demonstrated in his Essai, that signs are necessary for having distinct ideas of all kinds, he has given his statue more knowledge than it can acquire. He solves the problem by making a distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge. Practical knowledge consists of ‘confused ideas’, which guide our actions without us being able to notice how they make us act. He writes that they consist ‘rather of habits that result from our judgments, than of judgments themselves.’ Learning to use one’s senses involves judgements that one makes by instinct, without knowing how. Condillac considers such capacities to be some kind of judgments, but judgments that are not articulated, as long as one is lacking language:

67 68

Traité des sensations, i, ii, §§ 6–​8. This section was included in the Œuvres de Condillac published in 1798, the text of which was edited and revised by Condillac before his death. The text of this edition is reedited in Condillac, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Georges Le Roy, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–​1951, hereafter cited as op). The passage cited from the beginning of the fourth part is in vol. 1, p. 298 of this edition.

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Or ces jugemens, qu’elle [la statue] ne remarque pas, sont l’instinct qui la conduit ; et les habitudes d’agir qu’elle a contractées d’après ces jugements, sont ce que j’entends par connoissances pratiques. Si pour faire connoître ces jugemens, je suis obligé de les développer, je ne prétends qu’elle les développe elle-​même. Elle n’en peut pas, parce que n’ayant point du langage, elle n’a pas de moyens pour en faire analyse.69 Thus, even if one would be able to make such implicit and unarticulated practical judgements without mastering the use of artificial signs, one could not know them or analyse them without language. But if these primitive elements of our experience can be known only after we have acquired language and become capable of analysing them, this evidently also means that the results of the analysis of sensations are not the original elements of knowledge but rather something we can develop from them. So, while the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines deals with the knowledge of sensations and the Traité de sensations with sensations as such, before any knowledge and analysis of them, there is still perhaps no contradiction between these two works.70 But evidently there are variations concerning the use of such a term as ‘memory’ and ‘ideas’, used in slightly different ways in these works. That Condillac, in his later works, uses the word ‘memory’ in the common standard sense, which includes mere recognition and learning in general, might also explain the fact that in the Traité des animaux he writes, contradicting what he says on this matter in the Essai, that animals have memory.71 However, he had already described in his Essai the way in which animals seem to able to learn from past experience and thus in a sense remember things without having explicit memories that they could retrieve at will. For example, he had described how animals learn how to find food in certain places or to avoid dangers by associations formed in their imagination, without them having memory in the technical sense that he reserved for this term in the Essai. Animals are able to represent absent objects only if they are joined closely with present objects. This is all that is required for being able, for example, to associate the sentiment of hunger with a certain route or a place where they

69 Ibid. 70 This is also the conclusion of Jacques Derrida, who observes that the Traité does not correct the Essai but merely traces the generation of knowledge back to practical knowledge. Jacques Derrida, The Archeology of the Frivolous. Reading Condillac (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980), pp. 95–​96; Jacques Derrida, L’acheologie du frivole (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 92–​93. 71 Traité des animaux, i, v; op 1, pp. 347–​348.

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can find food. In this way, one can also explain why, when animals have seen one of their species devoured, the pain naturally associated with the cries of the devoured fellow is awakened by the vision of the carnivore. But in the Essai Condillac states explicitly that it is not memory that makes them act in these circumstances.72 In so far as animals too, in the Traité des animaux, have memory, this memory was according to Condillac also organized, although not in the same way as the memory of men. In his treatise on animals, he asks rhetorically what use would memory be without order, connections, or determined impressions.73 So, if animals have memory it must be organised as well, but it is organised differently and weaker than that of humans. The memory of animals is organised by their needs, just like human memory, as described in the Essai. But because the needs of animals are changing all the time and as they are also more limited than those of humans, their memory is likewise more unstable and chaotic that that of humans.74 And since animals lack developed means for communicating their thoughts and sharing their inventions, they and their needs remain similar from generation to another, whereas language permits mankind to accumulate knowledge and transmit it from one generation to another, that is, to make progress, to have what we would now all cultural evolution.75 Because of the extreme imperfection of their language, the knowledge of animals is limited to what they learn individually, or as Condillac puts it aphoristically: ‘They live together, but always think apart.’76 However, it is not only by their cognitive faculties that animals differ from humans. Since animals are not capable of reflection, discernment, taste or invention characteristic of men, Condillac reasons that their passions could not be similar to ours. Our superior intelligence is reflected in the domain of passions. Even the passion of self-​love (amour-​propre) that we share with animals, differs in animals from the corresponding passion in humans. Animals, which, just like the feral child described by Condillac in his Essai, ignore the notion of death, and thus for them self-​love is limited to the avoidance of pain. But for humans, who are aware of their mortality, self-​love includes the desire 72

73 74 75 76

Essai, i, ii, iv, § 40. That the terminology of Condillac is not completely systematic and can fluctuate even within one work is evident in this paragraph, too: for instance, he speaks of ‘the ideas of place and route’ in the case of animals, which, in so far as it is the artificial signs that transform sensations into ideas, cannot have ideas. Obviously, he lacks a proper term for the imagined sensations of animals (‘ideas’ in the Lockean sense). Traité de animaux, i, conclusion; op 1, p. 355. Traité de animaux, ii, ii; op 1, pp. 357–​358. Traité de animaux ii, iii; op 1, p. 359. Traité de animaux, ii, iv; op 1, p. 361.

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to conserve one’s being. In addition, Condillac thinks that life in a society with its various conditions gives humans a multitude of needs that animals are not susceptible of. In addition, our self-​love acquires moral dimensions as well, and it can be virtuous or vicious. Along with the virtuous or vicious inclinations arise corresponding agreeable or disagreeable sentiments. From this fact, Condillac deduces a major difference in the nature and extent of human desires in comparison to the limited natural needs of animals and to the physical sensations of pleasure or pain corresponding to these. Since for humans living in a society there are practically no moments in which they would not have occasions to make some virtuous or vicious action, they can never satisfy all of their desires. On the contrary, Condillac insists, giving us all we need would deprive us from our most pressing needs, that is, to desire. Only an overwhelming emptiness and ennui would remain. Thus, our passions succeed each other, multiply and renew themselves continually, whereas the activity of the animal mind ceases and recommences only according to their bodily needs, and so they spend the greatest part of their lives without desiring anything.77 Despite Condillac’s consistent insistence on the differences between humans and animals, and despite his attempts to smoothen out the apparent contradictions between the Essai and the later treatises on sensations and animals, some evident inconsistencies remain, for example, when he observes that his statue is capable of ‘active attention’ and of comparing different sensations.78 In a letter to Maupertuis dated 25 June 1752, written when he had already been working on his Traité de sensations, Condillac writes that he would have hoped that Maupertuis (who had sent him his work on the origin of languages) would have shown how much the progress of the mind is dependent on language. This, as he points out in his letter, was something he himself had undertaken to do in his Essai, but in this letter he continues by confessing that he had been mistaken and ‘given too much to signs’.79 However, after this confession, he turns once again to present arguments for the fact that the invention of language supposes a need to communicate with others. He writes that he could not imagine, as Maupertuis does, why a solitary man would invent signs for his ideas all by himself, since he could distinguish his ideas without them in the manner required for satisfying one’s needs. Such a man would eat fruit or flee wolves whenever he would see them, without being obliged to distinguish corresponding propositions by signs: ‘I see a fruit’, or ‘I see a wolf’. Condillac remarks that even if he could, no one would understand these signs. 77 78 79

Traité de animaux, ii, viii; op 1, pp. 371–​373. Traité des sensations, i, ii, § 14. op 2, p. 536.

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He also remarks that it is evident that one has first named sensible objects and only later started to use signs to describe perceptions (‘I see’, ‘I hear’, etc.).80 Communication with others concerning objects is genetically primary in relation to the description and analysis of one’s own propositional mental states. 5

The Problem of Inversions

One obvious way of looking at the influence of cultural institutions on cognition is to ask whether the grammar of the language one speaks has any influence on how we perceive and think, how we make distinctions, how we are able to perceive analogies, or to remember and imagine things.81 Such problems were evoked in Condillac’s time in the context of the problem of grammatical inversions, which were supposedly common in ancient languages, but lacking in French, in which the subject usually precedes the verb and its object.82 This debate juxtaposing the natural order of things and the order instituted by grammar had its roots in the so called Port-​Royal Grammar, Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660). The authors Arnauld and Lancelot claimed there that, in contrast to Latin and Ancient Greek, the French language observes the natural order.83 The reasons the authors gave for this were related to metaphysical and logical principles supposedly underlying all languages. They claimed, for example, that in so far as the subject refers to a substance and an adjective to accidents, and as the latter are ontologically dependent on the first, it is natural the subject comes first.84 This opinion, that the French observes

80

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82

83 84

In the Essai Condillac explains how terms denoting mental activities were originally created by extending the signification of expressions denoting the effects of sensible objects. Thus, instead of considering seeing as the action of the object on the soul, one extends, after having distinguished the body and the soul, the use of the verb to the action to the mind, so that the expression ‘I see’ can refer to purely mental activity. Essai, ii, i, x, § 103. This thesis was later presented and supported by linguistic evidence by, among others, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, and since then is often referred to as linguistic relativism or the Sapir-​Whorf hypothesis. See Whorf’s selected writings in Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1951). Overviews of the debate can be found in Abbé Froment’s supplement to the Port-​Royal Grammar, Réflections sur les fondements de l’art de parler, Pour servir d’éclaircissement & de Supplément à la Grammaire Générale et raisonnée (Paris: Prault, 1769), pp. 388–​414, and in Nicolas Beauzée’s Grammaire générale, facsimile of the 1767 edition in 2 vols. (Stuttgart-​ Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromman, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 461–​566. [Arnauld & Lancelot], Grammaire générale et raisonnée (Paris: Bailly, 1769), pp. 236–​237. Ibid., pp. 68–​70 and 232.

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the natural order and Latin inverts it, was also shared by the grammarian Du Marsais.85 A reverse solution was provided by Charles Batteux, who thought that it is the French that inverts. Batteux distinguished the moral order based on our interests and the metaphysical order, and admitted that from the purely speculative metaphysical viewpoint the subject may well take precedence over the adjective, but in the moral order we can prefer to draw attention to the adjective –​something which the free word order of Latin permits. Thus, as the moral order is more natural that the speculative, Batteux concluded that it is in fact French which inverts and not Latin or Greek.86 In so far as Condillac thinks that the connections between ideas and the order of our ideas is created by artificial signs and by our needs, one would not expect him to suppose that there is a natural order of ideas, independent of language or of our needs. Instead of supposing a natural order of ideas or of words, he starts his discussion concerning the problem of inversions by observing that ideas in a proposition consisting of a subject, a verb and its object are present in the mind either simultaneously or successively. In the first case there is no (temporal) order at all and in the second the order could vary since it is just as natural to start with the subject as it is to start with the object: Alexander vicit Darium and Darium vicit Alexander are both equally natural. In this way, word order is no more natural than the other. What misleads one to think otherwise is the habit that our own language makes us contract.87 Even in the order which breaks the immediate connection between subject and the verb, Vicit Darium Alexander, the terminations of Latin are able to re-​establish the connection.88 Thus, as we have seen, Latin grammar has, in fact, the advantage in permitting different stylistic effects by varying the word order.89 The problem of inversion leads Concillac to consider the relative and distinct merits of different languages. By permitting different things or by being obstacles to others, languages can be good at different things, depending on one’s needs and purposes. If the inversions of ancient language are unfavourable to reasoning, analysis and exactness, these languages excel at works of the imagination, where the possibilities provided by the grammar permitting

85 86 87 88 89

Cesar Chesneau du Marsais, Exposition d’une méthode raisonnée pour apprendre la langue latine (Paris: Etienne Ganeau, Guillau Père et Fils, Jean Desaint, 1722), pp. 9 and 10–​11. Charles Batteux, ‘Lettres sur la phrase françoise comparée avec la phrase latine à Monsieur l’abbé d’Olivet’, published at the end of the second volume of the Cours de belles-​lettres, 4 vols. (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1747–​1750), pp. 13–​15. Essai, ii, i, xi, § 117. Essai, ii, i, xi, §§ 117–​120. Essai, ii, i, xi, §§ 121–​123.

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inversions is an advantage. And correspondingly, French, lacking inversions, is good for precise analysis and reasoning.90 These distinctions between the characteristics of different languages and the consequent suitability for different purposes was one of things that inspired Condillac’s friend Diderot to analyse the way language affects the order of our thoughts in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets. 6

Diderot and the Deaf

Diderot was a close friend of Condillac and his discussions on language in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751) is indebted in many ways to Condillac’s Essai and probably also to private discussions between the two philosophers, who knew each other already at the time of the publication of Condillac’s Essai (for which Diderot in fact helped to find a publisher).91 Like Batteux’s solution, from whom Diderot borrows some of his examples, Diderot’ solution to the problem of inversions is based on distinguishing different kinds of orders: the natural and the instituted. He starts by turning his attention to the way in which languages were originally formed and, in a Condillacian manner, he does this by examining the order in which the qualities of objects affect the senses. Obviously, at least for Diderot and according to the prevalent empiricist prejudice, the first to affect our senses are the sensible qualities, and since it is the adjectives that name these qualities, adjectives come before nouns. Nouns appear later when, by abstracting, one arrives at general and metaphysical notions such as colour, form, and impenetrability, which are mostly nouns. Later these notions are attributed to substances and, when one starts to take these abstractions for real beings, the qualities that adjectives name come to be seen as accidents of these substances. Diderot observes that if one considers the word order of French in relation to this philosophical or scientific order of things, one can really say that inversions are rarer in French than in the classic languages. But if one considers the natural or genetic order, one must conclude that the French inverts. Diderot attributes this tendency to invert the genetic order to peripatetic philosophy, taking care to add that with such a term he does not refer to that of the ancient Greeks, but rather to that of Aristotle’s 90 Essai, ii, i, xv, § 156. 91 For Diderot’s and Condillac’s personal relations, see Arthur Wilson, Diderot, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 66–​68, and Isabel F. Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven, CN and London: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 9–​10.

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later followers during the period when the French language was formed, that is, during the reign of Louis xiii and Louis xiv.92 What intrigues Diderot is how and why inversions first appeared in languages. Instead of speculating on the origins and development of language, Diderot’s thoughts turn to experiments on the language of gestures, which is not organised along the syntax of articulated language. One could thus try to observe how a subject who is prevented from speaking would use gestures to communicate his thoughts. However, Diderot eventually interrupts the description of the experiment that one could undertake with such muets de convention, remarking that there is a problem in the experimental set-​up. The thoughts that the subjects are obliged to translate into gestures might already be ‘dressed up’, that is, the subjects might succumb to the temptation we can commonly observe when people translate into a language that it not their own: they arrange signs according to the order of their habitual language. Thus, it might be better to have recourse to people who have been deaf and dumb since birth and thus supposedly without linguistic prejudices concerning the order in which one should present one’s thoughts.93 Diderot’s observations on the deaf and dumb point to at least one criterion for an easily comprehensible construction in the language of gestures: one should begin with the principal idea to which others are subordinate. The reason he gives refers implicitly to the limits of what we now call short-​term or working memory. Putting subordinate ideas first instead of announcing the principal idea at the beginning will leave suspended the application of the signs subordinated to the principal idea.94 In this way, languages which make a lot of inversions, but having different cases and terminations (which permit free word order), place a burden on memory: the phrase, instead of being understood as it unfolds, makes sense only when one reaches the end.95 In this way, a word order that puts the principal idea first is ‘natural’ in the sense of the word, which refers to pragmatic considerations related to human cognitive abilities and which is opposed to the artificially convoluted and complicated. This is, of course, a different sense of ‘naturalness’ than the one referring to metaphysical primacy of certain categories of words. The reason Diderot gives for the original introduction of inversions into articulated languages is related to the fact that the latter tends originally to follow the order already instituted by gestures. Articulated forms of language 92 Diderot, at 1, pp. 349–​351; dpv 4, pp 134–​138. 93 Diderot, at 1, pp. 353–​354; dpv 4, pp. 141–​142. 94 Diderot, at 1, p. 360; dpv 4, pp. 149–​150. 95 Diderot, at 1, p. 372; dpv 4, pp. 165–​166.

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that developed later still give preference to the order of the more primitive language of gestures, as a kind of birthright belonging to the eldest.96 It is in relation to this order that speakers of Latin invert too, by transposing this order into a different order according to the habits dictated by their language, just as the French do, even though they, as Diderot observes, believe that they observe the natural order.97 Diderot adds that the inversions the grammatical or scientific order makes in relation to the order of ideas are in fact determined by the speakers’ interest: sometimes the same ideas affect us differently. He picks an example from Batteux:98 in the Latin phrase serpentem fuge someone could pretend that the principal idea is the snake and someone else that it is the fleeing. Diderot says that they are both right: for a person afraid of snakes it is the snake, but for a person giving a warning it is the fleeing. Oratorical inversion consists, in fact, in taking account of the different orders of ideas in the mind of the speaker and in that of the hearer by presenting the audience precisely the one that is most pertinent to them, or, as his example from Cicero’s speech shows, by profiting from the psychological suspense resulting from the linguistic suspension of reference due to deviation from the order determined by subordination.99 It thus appears that no language is free of inversions, if one considers the pragmatic and naturalistic criteria Diderot gives for naturalness. In this sense, the French speakers practice inversions too, although, as he admits, to a lesser extent than the Latin speakers.100 But when Diderot continues his considerations on the transposition involved in arranging the natural succession of ideas according to the habitual order of one’s mother tongue, he ends up observing that there is, in fact, even a more radical transposition involved. When one considers the transposition between the language of gestures and articulated language, this is simply a transposition involving two languages. But what about transposition involved in translating the pre-​linguistic experience into language? When Diderot observes that what is inversion for the speaker may not necessarily be that for the audience, he adds that it is, nevertheless, difficult to determine what in fact is the order of ideas in the mind of the speaker in so far as his ideas can present themselves almost simultaneously in his mind.

96 Diderot, at 1, p. 362; dpv 4, p. 153. The same idea was presented by Condillac in his Essai, ii, i, ix, § 84. Condillac had also explained the ‘natural’ order of signs in gestural language by referring to the burden on memory (loc. cit.). 97 Diderot, at 1, p. 364; dpv 4, pp. 154–​155. 98 Batteux, ‘Lettres sur la phrase Françoise’, p. 17. 99 Diderot, at 1, pp. 364–​365; dpv 4, pp. 155–​156. 100 Diderot, at 1, p. 371; dpv 4, p. 164.

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If they are really simultaneous, it may be impossible to determine their order. Diderot gives the following example: when a hungry man sees a fruit he may say ‘Le beau fruit! J’ai faim. Je mangerais volontiers icelui’, although he is actually reporting one indivisible sensation. But language obliges him to divide this into successive elements and, what is more, different languages do this differently. Latin has one word, esurio, where the French uses three: J’ai faim. Je mangerais volontier icelui indicates different modes of one sensation by separating the experiencing person (je), the desire and the nature of the experienced sensation (mangerais) and its intensity (volontiers), and the presence of the desired object (icelui). Diderot observes that the sensation itself does not have this analytic, successive structure of discourse. It is language with its exigencies of precision and successive ordering that forces us to distribute the unity of experience into successive parts. This has unfortunately resulted in the mistaken belief that our experiences are characterized by the same successive structure as their linguistic expressions. When we express and analyse our experiences, we also transform them by this successive and detailed attention we submit them to. Diderot exclaims in a Condillacian vein about ‘how much our understanding is modified by signs’.101 After describing how language obliges us to analyse our experiences and sensations, Diderot continues by discussing different literary devises for expressing the original simultaneous and holistic nature of experience. He returns once again to consider what we now call working memory, and which he calls memoire actuelle. He compares this kind of memory, which is able to retain many sensations available for a while, to bells resonating simultaneously. The sound of the bells does not die off immediately, but continues to resonate, forming accords with the following tones. It is this resonance that permits us to judge the consonances and dissonances of ideas and then to express these in judgements exposed in the successive order of discourse.102 Without this ability to have many perceptions simultaneously in our minds, we could not reason or discourse. And Diderot adds that this simultaneity applies evidently not merely to sensations but also to abstract ideas as well.103 The successive order of logic is thus dependent on a more basic level of experience characterised by simultaneity, so that when we analyse our experience we should not make the mistake of supposing that the results of this analysis pre-​existed as such in our original sensations or in our pre-​linguistic experience. In the Éléments de physiologie, Diderot states bluntly that there are, in fact, no simple 1 01 Diderot, at 1, pp. 365–​368; dpv 4, pp. 156–​162. 102 Diderot, at 1, p. 368; dpv 4, p. 160. 103 Diderot, at 1, p. 370; dpv 4, pp. 162–​163.

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sensations, adding that if there are no simple sensations there are no simple thoughts either. Sensations are always complex; they become simple by a process of habitual and quick abstraction, of which one is not aware. One’s language, the words of which usually denote simple ideas, adds to this confusion and contributes to the erroneous belief in simple sensations.104 Diderot discusses the crucial role of language in the birth of genius by differentiating –​just like Condillac had done previously –​languages in terms of the kind of genius they are able to support. One cannot just say that one language is better than another, since they are good at different things. The French, with its scarce inversions, may gain a clarity and precision required by discourse, but this takes place at the expense of the warmth, eloquence and energy in which the ancient languages and English excel.105 In the end, Diderot admits, however, that a genius can produce poetic miracles in French, too.106 What is particularly special about Diderot’s and Condillac’s discussions concerning experience and language is that though they both follow Locke in considering sensations as the source of one’s ideas, they refuse to identify sensations and ideas or to derive all one’s ideas from simple sensations. The unsigned article ‘Idée’ in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie follows Condillac in distinguishing sensations and ‘ideas proper’ (l‘idée proprement dite).107 In the article titled ‘Locke’ that Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie, he writes, after first evoking Locke’s role in renewing the ‘ancient axiom’ that there is nothing in the understanding that has not been in sensation before as well as the empiricists’ principle that all expressions which do not correspond to any sensible object are meaningless: Il [Locke] me paroît avoir pris souvent pour des idées des choses que n’en sont pas, & qui n’en peuvent être d’après son principe ; tel est, par exemple, le froid, le chaud, le plaisir, la douleur, la mémoire, la pensée, la réfléxion, le sommeil, la volonté, &c, ce sont des états que nous avons éprouvés, et pour lesquels nous avons inventé des signes, mais dont nous avons nulle idée, quand nous ne l’éprouvons plus. Je demande à un homme ce qu’il entend par plaisir, quand il ne jouit pas, & par douleur,

104 Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, ed. Jean Mayer (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1964), p. 227; dpv 5, p. 458. 105 Diderot, at 1, pp. 371–​372; dpv 4, p. 164–​165. 106 Diderot, at 1, p. 392; dpv 4, p. 191. 107 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton & Durand 1751–​1765), vol. 8, p. 489a.

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quand il ne souffre pas. J’avoue, pour moi, que j’ai beau m’examiner que je n’apperçois en moi que des mots de réclame pour rechercher certains objets ou pour les éviter. Rien de plus.108 Diderot adds that if words would always evoke the sensations or ideas, instead of being just sounds referring to these, we could be happy just by pronouncing or meditating on the word ‘happiness’. Ultimately, the reference to the vanity of examining one’s mind at the end of the argument quoted above points out that the meaning of words should not be searched for in the subject’s consciousness, en moi. Diderot also rejects the idea that sensations, or thoughts for that matter, could be originally simple: they just become simple by a process of abstraction, of which we are not conscious.109 By distinguishing the order of sensations and the conceptualised order of ideas created and organised by language, Condillac and Diderot distinguish at the same time two different levels meaning: the level of sensations and the level of ideas or propositional linguistically expressed thoughts. They also try to spell out how these orders are related to each other. It is quite obvious that, even if sensations are not identical with the conceptualized notions that can be expressed by linguistic means, they have their own intentionality, which acts as the foundation for conceptualized meanings expressed and articulated by language. Thus, Condillac’s admission of having given too much to signs and turning in his later works towards describing the level of mental functioning prior to (and underlying) language can be seen as a logical development. Certainly, Diderot’s Lettre sur les souds et muets points to the same direction by attempting to show not only how language forms and influences what goes on in one’s mind, but also how this linguistic and discursive order is at the same time dependent on a level that precedes it and on which it is founded. 7

Languages as Methods of Analysis

If Diderot seems to be having a discussion with Condillac in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, Condillac in turn continues this discussion on inversions, the 108 Encyclopédie, vol 9, p. 626b. The article is unsigned, but we have the evidence of Naigeon’s edition that the author is Diderot. Mots de réclame were words that printers used to indicate at the end of each sheet the first word of the following sheet. 109 Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, p. 227; dpv 5, p. 458. See also the anonymous article ‘Sensation’ in the Encyclopédie (vol. 15, pp. 34b–​35a), which criticises the Lockean notion of ‘simple sensation’.

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simultaneity of experience and the nature of gestural language in his later works. In his Grammaire, Condillac observes that the language of gestures seems to come to humans naturally on account of the common conformation of their bodies. In this way, a person who cannot speak is able to express the object he desires by pointing to it, as well as the desire this object arouses in him by other gestures. Condillac continues, however, that this is not natural in the sense that it would not require learning: if this person had not observed what his body does in a case like this, he would not have learned to recognise this desire in the movements of others. Nor would he be able to understand the movements made in front of him, or to make them himself on purpose in order to make himself understood.110 According the Condillac, the language of animals is limited to natural gestures and cries that organisms with a similar bodily structure can understand, but those of a different species and with a different kind of anatomical structure cannot.111 Such gestures, although learned, are, however, not conventional. So, they are natural in the sense of the word ‘natural’ contrasting with conventional, artificial or arbitrary. Condillac observes that humans have not chosen these first signs: they have been given by nature, along with the conformation of the body’s physical organs. But once nature has shown the way, one can oneself imagine new artificial signs, and in this way one could in fact express all one’s thoughts by gestures as well as by words, with a gestural language consisting of natural and artificial signs.112 When Condillac returns to the language of gestures, langage d’action, in Grammaire, he makes exactly the same point as Diderot concerning the way in which articulated language transposes into a succession of words the experiences which are originally simultaneous. As this transposition becomes habitual, one ends up thinking that one’s thoughts have the same successive structure: Nous sommes faits une si grande habitude du langage traînant des sons articulés, que nous croyons que les idées viennent l’une après autre dans l’esprit, parce que nous proférons les mots les uns après les autres.113

1 10 Grammaire, i, i; op 1, pp. 428–​429. 111 Traité des animaux, ii, ii; op 1, pp. 360–​362. 112 Grammaire, i, i; op 1, p. 429. Condillac takes care to distinguish the artificial and the arbitrary. What is artificial need not be arbitrary: artificial signs are not selected randomly, but with reason (loc. cit.) 113 Grammaire, i, i; op 1, p. 430.

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But if articulated language is characterised by succession, then the language of gestures is able to catch something of the simultaneity in one’s thoughts. Condillac observes that there is no succession of ideas in natural signs determined by the confirmation of the human body’s physical organs. Here ideas appear simultaneously. One can understand such gestures at first sight, although it would require a long discourse to translate them.114 And in this sense such a language, which presents ideas simultaneously, is the only really natural language. When articulated language, which turns this simultaneity into a succession of ideas, becomes habitual it has the effect of slowing down and, in fact, also changing the nature one’s cognitive faculties: one is no longer able to see things at a glance but is forced to see things the way one speaks, that is, successively.115 In this way, language and analysis go together. Analysis is done in discourse. In fact, Condillac sees languages first of all as methods of analysis, more or less precise, depending on the quality of the language.116 The gestural langage d’action was in Condillac’s scheme the first and natural language. Although Condillac denies the existence of innate ideas, this original and natural gestural language, in so far as it depends immediately on one’s innate bodily structure, can in fact be deemed innate. However, Condillac claims that it too can be developed into an artificial language and a tool for analysis: Le langage que je nomme inné est un langage que nous n’avons point appris, parce qu’il est l’effet immédiate de notre conformation. Il dit à-​la-​ fois tout ce que nous sentons : in n’est donc pas une méthode analytique ; il ne décompose pas donc les sensations ; il ne fait donc pas remarquer ce qu’elles referment ; il ne donne donc point d’idées. //​Lorsqu’il est devenu une méthode, alors il décompose les sensations, et il donne des idées : mais, comme méthode, il s’apprend, et par conséquent, sous ce point de vue, il n’est pas inné.117

114 Grammaire, i, i; op 1, p. 430. However, in a later chapter of Grammaire, Condillac describes how one can begin to analyse and decompose simultaneous sensations into a succession of signs by using only gestural language. But at this point, the gestural language is transforming itself into an artificial language. Grammaire, i, vii; op 1, p. 443. 115 Grammaire, i, i; op, i, p. 430. 116 Grammaire, ‘Objet de cet ouvrage’; op, i, p. 427. 117 Logique, ii, ii; op 2, p. 398.

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One can also see here that it is only when this language has developed into an artificial system of signs that it gives rise to ideas and enables one to notice, analyse and decompose sensations. Condillac observes that one’s eyes too can learn to analyse. He describes how one’s eyes can, when one directs one’s attention to details, analyse a complicated and confused visual scene, formed of a multitude of objects presented simultaneously, into a succession of sensations that one observes one after the other. He observes that without this analytic vision one would not even remember these details.118 Thus having eyes is not enough in order to see, one must be able to use one’s sight in order to really see and notice things. So, Condillac observes that one can see a lot of things, without learning anything. Seeing is an active process and not an immediate intuition. If one has a quick look at a landscape, one is not able to describe it in detail, and this is not, as Condillac emphasises, only due to the insufficient amount of time allowed for looking at it: if one would just passively stare at the landscape for a while, the result would be the same. In order to get a detailed and truthful vision of the landscape, one must direct one’s gaze in an orderly and systematic way. The resulting knowledge of the landscape, according to Condillac, depends exclusively on the way one has directed one’s gaze. In this way one’s gaze analyses the landscape, the diverse objects in it and their various relations with each other. Condillac observes that analysing one’s thoughts is a similar process.119 Just as one can analyse one’s sensations, one can also analyse the ideas and operations of the understanding. If one is able to decompose one’s sensations by representing successively the parts of which they are composed, one can likewise render successive the simultaneous ideas and operations of one’s mind. In this way, ideas which are simultaneous in one’s mind become successive in one’s discourse.120 Despite the possible changes in his overall views on the role of signs, we can see that Condillac still distinguishes between sensations and ideas. He still considers that sensations do not automatically turn into ideas that can be stored in one’s memory, but that this requires directed attention and analysis. And what is more, artificial signs are necessary for decomposing the operations of the mind and for acquiring distinct ideas.121 In the Logique (1780) he states categorically that ‘words are absolutely necessary to have all kinds of ideas’ and that ‘we think only with the aid of words.’122 1 18 119 120 121 122

Grammaire, i, iii; op 1, pp. 435–​436. Logique, i, ii; op 2, pp. 374–​375. Grammaire, i, iii; op 1, p. p. 436. Grammaire, i, iv; op 1, pp. 436–​437. Logique. ii, ii; op 2, p. 396, ‘[…] les mot nous sont absolument nécessaires pour nous faire des idées de toutes espèces, […] nous ne pensons qu’avec le secours des mots.’

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Now, since Condillac had earlier declared that artificial signs are a precondition for having ideas at all, we should pose the question of whether the ideas that result from the analysis of sensations were there all the time or whether they are the products of the process of analysis. Condillac’s text is sometimes rather ambiguous in this respect: Car si l’attention, la comparaison, le jugement etc. ne sont que la sensation transformée, c’est une conséquence que ces opérations ne soient que la sensation décomposé ou considéré successivement sous différens points de vue.123 Condillac observes at the same time that sensations are transformed in the process of analysis and that these transformed sensations are actually nothing but the original sensations decomposed –​which is not very helpful in answering our question. But Condillac clarifies his point by distinguishing two senses of the terms ‘reasoning’ and ‘making judgements’. One can well judge and reason without being aware of these judgements or reasons. When one perceives things as wholes, without having analysed them into their constituent elements, one has already reasoned and made judgements of which one is not conscious. Condillac writes that the decomposition of a thought supposes the existence of such thoughts, that is, of judgements that one is not conscious of. He continues that it would be absurd to claim that one begins to judge and reason only when one can represent successively to oneself what one knows when one judges and reasons.124 This obviously corresponds to the distinction between implicit, confused and instinctual judgments involved in one’s practical knowledge and language-​dependent theoretical knowledge. Condillac illuminates the distinction between two kinds of judgements with the following example. When one perceives a big tree, one’s perception makes a kind of a judgement in connecting two ideas: the tree and bigness. But if one makes the same judgment concerning this connection independently of one’s perception, then it becomes an affirmation or a proposition claiming that the greatness belongs really to the tree. The perceptual judgement concerns perceptual relations only and the affirmation considers the ideas that one compares: the judgement as an affirmation refers not only to the perception but also to the real tree and its properties. It is the latter kind of judgement that is made possible by the use of artificial signs. Without these signs, one could

1 23 Grammaire; i, iii; op 1, p. 436. 124 Grammaire, i, iii; op 1, p. 436.

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not analyse one’s thoughts or even know them perfectly.125 This corresponds to the idea already presented in the Essai, that language makes it possible to treat sensations as representations. And it is evidently also this capacity to make judgments in the sense of affirming something concerning objects beyond one’s perceptions, something which these perceptions represent, that distinguishes humans from animals.126 The ambiguities between the original elements of ideas and the results of analysis are evident in Condillac’s Logique. He writes that all intellectual functions are contained in the faculty of sensation, but also that they arise successively from sensation.127 However, these ambiguities are resolved when he points out to an important additional condition for the birth of ideas and intellectual faculties: En considérant nos sensations comme représentatives, nous venons d’en voir naître toutes nos idées et les facultés de l’entendement […].128 And since what makes sensations representative is language, it is evident that the faculties of understanding owe as much to signs as they do to sensation. That ideas and intellectual functions originate in sensations does not necessary mean that they are reducible to sensations considered as organic or physiological facts before they are interpreted and analysed by language. For Condillac, language is more than just a means of communicating one’s ideas, it is the basic tool for thinking, that is, analysing one’s thoughts. He goes actually so far as to give primacy to the latter function: ‘We can talk to others only because we can talk to ourselves.’129 The less one has words, the less one has ideas, and the less one is able discover their reciprocal relationships.130 In Grammaire Condillac tries to reconstruct the development of this marvellous tool, starting from natural signs, which are transformed into artificial signs so that they permit one to decompose simultaneous sensations. A person using natural and non-​conventional gestures in order to express his desire by pointing to the object of his desire is beginning to analyse his thoughts, but he is not 1 25 Grammaire, i, iv; op 1, p. 437. 126 Grammaire, i, iv; op 1, p. 438. 127 ‘Vous voyez que toutes les facultés de l’âme que nous venons d’observer sont renfermés dans la faculté de sentir.’ Logique i, vii; op 2, p. 385; ‘Nous avons expliqué comment les facultés de l’âme naissent successivement de la sensation […]’ Grammaire, i, viii; op 2, p. 386. 128 Logique, i, viii; op 2, p. 386. 129 Grammaire, i, vi; op 1, p. 442. 130 Grammaire, i, vi; op 1, p. 442.

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doing this for himself but for others. Thus, when others do not immediately understand what he wants, they transfer their attention successively from the expression of the desire to its object, thus giving rise to two separate and distinct ideas. The next step towards language proper is taken when someone, who has in this manner learned to use analysis in order to comprehend the gestures of others, realises that he can make his own gestures more easily understood by rendering his gestures successive instead of simultaneous. He thus learns to decompose his thoughts. And it is at this precise point that Condillac situates the transformation of the natural gestures, langage d’action, into an artificial language.131 From this modest beginning language develops further by supplementing the language of action with articulated language, first by giving names to the things that gestural language had already distinguished and enabled to be taken notice of successively.132 Of course, one could object to the idea that it is language that makes human cognition possible by observing that without developed mental faculties one could not in the first place master language and in this way the cognitive faculties must come first. But Condillac refuses to see this problem in terms of a chicken-​or-​egg dilemma. Instead of considering cognitive abilities and the mastery of signs as independent and causally connected faculties, he considers them as two mutually interdependent and intricately connected processes. In the Essai Condillac had described this development as a joint and reciprocal development of cognitive abilities and signs: developing the use of signs extends the capacities of the mind, and the development of these capacities enables one to develop more and more complex systems of signs, and so on.133 The whole process is described naturalistically as a continuous and gradual process, which results, however, in obvious qualitative leaps by permitting the emergence of new abilities, ones that animals do not possess, despite the fact that they otherwise have basically similar mental abilities, based on sensations, as humans. But since animals do not have systems of artificial signs at their disposal, they are unable to transform the practical knowledge based on sensations into representational ideas. According to Condillac, the basic mechanism permitting the development and enlargement of languages are analogy and metaphor. From the sensualist point of view, it is obviously easy to imagine how men came to name sensible 131 Grammaire, i, vii; op 1, p. 443. Condillac had already described in his Essai the transition from natural signs to artificial signs. At the beginning, natural signs are simply transformed into artificial ones: humans begin to give the natural signs the character of ­artificial signs. Essai, ii, i, ii, § 13. 132 Grammaire, i, viii; op 1, p. 445. 133 Essai, ii, i, i, § 3–​4.

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objects, their qualities, or even their own senses. But how about naming mental operations, which are not sensations? Condillac evokes here the possibility of extending language by figurative expressions and observes that in fact the names of the operations of the mind are figurative, metaphorical expressions such as ‘attention’, ‘reflection’, ‘imagination’ or ‘thought’, derived from words originally referring to concrete physical or bodily operations.134 Condillac’s emphasis on the role of language in developing and ordering our ideas is reflected in his solution to the problem of grammatical inversions. In his Grammaire he observes that what is ‘natural’ is in fact relative to a language. Even in cases in which the subordinated idea comes first, which leaves its meaning in suspension, the order is not contrary to the ‘natural order’; this reversed order is merely different from the so-​called direct grammatical order of a specific language and not from any natural order. Be it direct or reverse, both orders are equally natural. But Condillac admits, of course, that in so far as it was equally ‘natural’ for Cicero to speak Latin as it is for the French to speak French, it was more natural for him to make more inversions than the French speakers. Condillac adds that the word ‘natural’ here is not used in its proper sense: it does not mean that something is in ‘conformity with what nature has provided us with’, but that it results from the habits we have contracted.135 This is obviously a direct and inescapable consequence of the idea that it is language that creates the discursive successive order. When the mind is judging, it apperceives the ideas that the judgement concerns simultaneously, and if it would pronounce them as it apperceives them then it would pronounce them simultaneously. And, Condillac adds, this was the case when it knew only the gestural language of action. Consequently, the distinction between the direct and reverse order can be made only in discourse, because it is only there that the ideas making up a proposition succeed each other. Since there is no natural order independent of discourse, all orders that the syntax of a language permits are equally natural.136 In analysing a passage from a speech by Jean Racine, Condillac observes further that when one presents complicated trains of thought, the whole can only be presented in a reversed order and thus in

134 Grammaire, i vii; op 1, p. 446. In French, even the word for thinking, penseé, derives from a concrete physical operation: from Latin, pesare, to weight. The other examples have obvious common etymologies in French and English: attend, reflect, and image. For other examples of analogy in extending the meanings of words, see Grammaire, ii, i and xiii; op 1, pp. 462 & 479–​480. 135 Grammaire, ii, xxvii; op 1, pp. 502–​503. 136 Grammaire, ii, xxvii; op 1, p. 503.

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this case one must have recourse to inversions. Thus, in so far as they are necessary, they must also become natural.137 8

The Discursive Order and the Art of Reason

In his Histoire moderne Condillac refers to Locke’s observation that false associations (liaisons d’idées) result in madness. But Locke’s French disciple continues by remarking that one could conclude from this that correspondingly true associations constitute reason, and that in reflecting on this Locke would have noticed that an association of ideas is the unique cause of all the qualities of the mind.138 And as we have seen, this joining together of ideas, as well as separating and analysing them, depends on language. Condillac observes that this is the important point that Locke had missed. He reproaches the Englishman for thinking that the mind is able to make mental propositions just by joining or separating ideas without the mediation of words and, what is more, for pretending that this is in fact the best way to arrive at knowledge.139 Condillac emphasises that this kind of joining and separating of ideas, which constitutes reason, is possible only by means of joining them first to signs: Les idées se lient avec les signes, et ce n’est que par ce moyen, comme je prouverai, qu’elles se lient entre elles.140 Thus, for Condillac, it is not only madness that results from the associations of ideas. All the positive qualities too, such as common sense, wit and reason (le bons sens, l’esprit, la raison), derive from the same source: from the connections between ideas, which, in turn, are produced by the use of signs.141 It is also noteworthy that here Condillac translates Locke’s term ‘association of ideas’ with his term ‘liaison d’idées’ (connection of ideas), which has a less passive ring to it.142 1 37 138 139 140 141 142

Grammaire, ii, xxvii; op 1, p. 504. Histoire moderne, livre xx, chapitre x; op 2, p. 221. Essai, i, iv, ii, § 27. Essai, Introduction. Essai, i, ii, xi, § 107. Hans Aarsleff has pertinently drawn attention to the fact that Condillac’s ‘connection of ideas’ (liaison d’idées) is not to be identified with the association of ideas, the latter being a passive and involuntary process and the first an action subject to voluntary control. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982), pp. 155 and note 2, pp. 221–​222. I would disagree, however, with Aarsleff’s idea that

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One could characterise the difference between Locke and Condillac by stating that, whereas Locke starts with separate sensations received passively and takes for granted their transformation into ideas, Condillac turns his attention to the connections between ideas and examines the ways in which language, by transforming sensations into representations –​that is, ideas –​permits connections that are not subordinated to the immediate sensations or needs of the organism. These connections which are at one’s disposal, instead of being under the immediate control of present sensations, constitute theoretical knowledge. They also make history possible by offering endless possibilities of extending the connections of sensations, ideas and signs by analogy and metaphor. By permitting reflection, language permits the transformation of sensations into representations, and eventually it permits us to form what Condillac, following Locke, calls ‘notions’, that is, ideas of our own construction. It is these ideas and notions that distinguish humans from animals, which have only sensations and perceptions.143 In Condillac’s terminology, perceptions that have not been the objects of reflection are not properly ideas at all, they are merely impressions that sensations make on the mind. To become ideas these impressions need to be considered as images, that is, representations of something else.144 It follows from this that sensations, before being turned into ideas, as mere impressions that do not represent anything beyond them, cannot deceive, nor can they be said to give us ‘obscure or confused ideas’, as the Cartesians had claimed.145 And this is not because sensations would provide us true and infallible knowledge, but follows directly from their non-​representational nature: truth and falsity belong only to ideas proper. In this way, it is language which eventually creates the discursive domain involving truth and falsity. But underlying the discursive order or reason lies the level of non-​discursive order of practical knowledge, or tacit knowledge as it has been termed more recently. Condillac seems to think that in some sense this kind of knowledge is, at least genetically, primary in the sense that it is at this level that we first this connection of ideas would be, according to Condillac, like reason behind it, natural, innate and beyond explanation (ibid., pp. 108 and 155), or that it was Condillac’s basic axiom that reason and reflection are primary, innate and given in the nature of man, prior to language (ibid., pp. 108–​109, 163–​164, note 18 on p. 223, and p. 287–​288). In the passage cited here Condillac explicitly observes that reason arises from the connection of ideas and this in turn from the use of signs. And as we have observed above, Condillac also attaches the development reflection to language use. 143 Essai, i, iii, xi, § 16. 1 44 Essai, i, iii, § 16 and i, iv, ii, §§ 18 and 25. 145 Essai, i, i, ii, § 11.

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learn things, before we are able to analyse what we are actually doing. In this way we also learn to use our senses. In the Logique Condillac observes that even if the faculty of sensation is necessary for knowing the objects of nature, it is not sufficient: one must also learn to use the senses, to be able to use our sense organs properly. Of course, this knowledge is more practical than theoretical: we learn to use our senses by experience, making mistakes and correcting them.146 We can also learn to reason in the same way. Condillac compares reasoning to a mechanical art147 or craft: it is not sufficient to understand it in theory, one must have the skill, one must know how to operate in practice. And, furthermore, once one has learnt the skill, rules become useless: one does not need to think about the rules, once one has learnt to do the thing, so to speak, naturally.148 In this sense, the rules of reasoning are not innate, but learnt by experience. But of course, we should not forget that the experience Concillac is describing here does not consist in receiving sensations passively or in reasoning on such sensations, but experience in the sense in which we use the term when we describe someone who has learnt a skill: ‘he is an experienced mountain climber’, for example. Thus, it is important to note that even if Condillac refuses to consider the rules of logic or mathematics as innate principles, and traces their origins to sensations, their validity cannot be reduced to sensations by means of logical operations, as a conclusion that would result from the premises. They are related to sensations in a more pragmatic manner, that is, by our attempts in trying out what works and what does not, and in perfecting the instrument by making corrections as one progresses. Furthermore, Condillac does not even claim that all of our knowledge of nature is reducible or analysable to simple sensations. He gives the example of the concept of force, which we know to exist as the cause of movement, but which we cannot sense and of which consequently we have no idea, but which we can measure and talk about. Neither do we have any idea of God, the ultimate cause of the universe.149 Since reasoning is not always a conscious process that consists in following explicit rules, but can involve practical judgements based on habits, and since Condillac does not believe in unconscious perceptions,150 it follows that the practical judgement or reasoning one is capable of, but are not always aware 1 46 Logique, i, i; op 2, pp. 372–​323. 147 The term ’mechanical arts’ referred in the eighteenth century to manual arts and crafts, in opposition to the more theoretical ’liberal arts’ such as grammar or geometry. 148 Logique, i, i; op 2, p. 374, note 1. 149 Logique, i, v; op 2, p. 382. 150 Essai, i, ii, i.

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of, should be eventually located somewhere outside the mind. One obvious candidate to act as the support for these faculties would, of course, be the body or more precisely the brain. However, Condillac refers rather rarely to cerebral mechanisms. Considering the limitations of the neurophysiological knowledge in his times, the empirically-​minded Condillac is careful not get involved in detailed speculations on the exact mechanisms of the brain. He discards the two hypotheses fashionable in his time: that of considering the nerves as vibrating cords, as well as seeing the brain as a soft substance in which animal spirits leave traces. But Condillac accepts the general idea that habits formed in the brain are the physical cause of memory.151 Nevertheless, he refuses to postulate that ideas themselves are in some way preserved in the mind or the body. He observes that asking where these ideas are located when we are not thinking about them, is as absurd as asking where the tones of the harpsichord are located when the instrument has stopped resonating: obviously nowhere. When we are not thinking about an idea, it is nowhere, but the mechanisms of our brain will reproduce it as soon as the corresponding movements are repeated.152 The way Condillac uses this musical comparison –​used by Diderot too –​oscillates interestingly between comparing the habits formed in the brain to the mechanisms of the instrument and to the habits formed by the musician. He writes that our ideas follow one another in the same way as the habitual movements of the musician follow each other automatically. The first sound the musician produces will determine his fingers to continue to move in a manner which reproduces the melody and harmony without effort or attention. In this way, a first movement in our brains can produce movements which will retrace a long suite of ideas.153 In other words, our brains are simultaneously complicated instruments and trained musicians producing complex cultural resonances and harmonies. 1 51 Logique, i, ix; op, pp. 387–​389. 152 Logique, i, ix; op 2, p. 390. 153 Logique, i, ix; op 2, p. 390.

­c hapter 8

La Mettrie: Man as an Artefact If Diderot is clearly having a dialogue with Condillac, La Mettrie seems to encounter the abbé as if by chance, just by walking along the same streets, reaching similar or sometimes practically identical conclusions concerning language and the formation of the human mind without any explicit or implicit reference to the abbé’s works. In his Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745) La Mettrie had already cited and discussed the case studies that Condillac was to analyse a year later in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), that is, those of the deaf and dumb from Chartres and the feral child found among bears as described by Connor.1 And in his L’homme machine (1747) La Mettrie’s draws conclusions concerning the role of language and culture in the formation of the human mind similar to those that Condillac had reached by analysing these reports. This kind of intellectual tennis seems to imply close-​knit intellectual connections, but as far as I know La Mettrie and Condillac never met each other nor referred to each other’s works.2 Of course, they were contemporaries and both readers and admirers of Locke, but in fact their ideas meet most surprisingly when they distance themselves from Locke by emphasising the role of language in human cognition. However, they had both read Wolff, who, as we have seen, had developed similar ideas.3 In the Histoire naturelle de l’âme, La Mettrie discusses the case of the deaf and dumb young man from Chartres who gained hearing. He does this in the context of other case studies presented in support of his claim that the intellectual functions of a human are basically just different forms of sensation.4

1 Jean Offray de La Mettrie (under the pseudonym ‘M. Charp’), Histoire naturelle de l’ame (La Haye: Jean Neaulme, 1745), pp. 344–​348 and 379. 2 Aram Vartanian considers it unlikely that La Mettrie would have been influenced by Condillac, see his La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine: A Study in the Origin of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 120–​121. 3 La Mettrie’s Abrégé des systêmes, which was attached to Histoire naturelle de l’âme, published with the new title, Traité de l’âme, in La Mettrie’s Œuvres philosophiques (London: Jean Nourse, 1751), contains a chapter on Wolff (§ iv). On the attribution to the printer Jean Nourse, see Elena Muceni, ‘John/​Jean Nourse. Un masque anglais au service de la littérature clandestine francophone’, La Lettre clandestine, no. 24 (2016), p. 203–​219. 4 Histoire naturelle de l’âme, pp. 312, 326 and 342.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_010

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But this text contains already some passing remarks that point towards the ideas presented in L’homme machine concerning the importance of social interaction and language for the development of the human mind. For example, in the Histoire naturelle de l’âme he describes how the child’s capacity to reason develops through the interaction and communication with others.5 In quoting the report on the deaf and mute young man from Chartres, he adds a note to the sentence quoted from the report (‘le plus grand fond des idées des hommes est dans leur commerce réciproque’) to the effect that in fact it is not just the greatest part but all of men’s ideas that result from their reciprocal interactions.6 In describing Johann Konrad Amman’s methods to teach the deaf to speak, he describes how we acquire ideas and ways combining them while we learn to join speech sounds arbitrarily to ideas.7 While extolling the virtues of Amman’s method, he observes how a congenitally deaf child, originally more an animal than a child, has already learned to speak thanks to it.8 La Mettrie discusses also the descriptions and reports of orangutans, or as they were then called hommes sauvages (“wild men”) because of their close anatomical resemblance to humans. Despite this appellation, La Mettrie qualifies them as animals.9 However, he considers them as potentially human. La Mettrie remarks that their perfect resemblance to humans makes him believe that that the brains of these so-​called animals (animaux pretendus) are originally made to sense and think like ours.10 When he discusses Plutarch’s story of a ‘satyr’ (which La Mettrie identifies with an orangutan), who made sounds like the neighing of a horse or the bleating of a goat, La Mettrie writes that the vocalizations of children who have been lost in the woods are no more human. Neither do these feral children, as Conor’s report shows, have any idea of morality or of their own state, which has passed as if in a dream, or more precisely, La Mettrie adds, in the manner of the proverbial rêver à la Suisse, that is, thinking of nothing. And La Mettrie continues by remarking that nevertheless they are humans, as everybody concedes. Why then should the ‘satyrs’ be mere animals? he asks. La Mettrie supposes that in so far as they have well-​ formed organs of speech, one could easily teach them to speak and to think, just like other wild men (Sauvages). La Mettrie supposes that educating them

5 6 7 8 9 10

Histoire naturelle de l’âme., p. 340. Histoire naturelle de l’âme, p. 347. Histoire naturelle de l’âme, pp. 359–​360. Histoire naturelle de l’âme. p. 370. Histoire naturelle de l’âme, pp. 379–​383. Histoire naturelle de l’âme, pp. 383–​384.

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would even be easier than teaching the congenitally deaf.11 To this he will soon return in his L’homme machine. 1

Man a Machine

The metaphor involved in the title of La Mettrie’s most commonly cited work L’homme machine (Man a Machine), is often taken to imply a mechanistic view of man, in the manner of some kind of physicalist reductionism or a mechanistic materialism that applies the Cartesian animal-​machine hypothesis to man.12 One can, however, take a different and less reductionist approach to this metaphor by emphasising the fact that machines are cultural artefacts, and as cultural artefacts they involve aspects that cannot be studied by the natural sciences or reduced to physics. In other words, machines have a functional level of description that is not reducible to mechanism. In addition to questions pertaining to the physical mechanisms involved, there are questions related to their function within the context of human practices.13 Instead of the causal interactions between its parts, what interests us in a machine we have not seen before is, first of all, what is it for? Even if we know everything that physics can tell us about the artefact, we are still left with the question pertaining to its use. And in order to do this, we must know and understand it within the context of a culture. Canguilhem refers to the dual nature of machines by observing that ‘if the functioning of a machine can be explained by pure causal relations, its construction cannot be understood without purpose or without man.’14 Thus we could read La Mettrie’s metaphor as pointing not so much to the physical nature of man, but to the fact that man is a cultural artefact. In fact, La Mettrie’s text is full of indications that this is exactly what La Mettrie thought. 11 12

13 14

Histoire naturelle de l’âme, pp. 384–​345. This interpretation can be traced back to Marx’s Die Heilige familie. See Marx and Engels, Werke, 39 vols. (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961–​1969), vol. 2, p. 133. Marx had picked it up from Charles Renouvier, who in turn had picked it up from Victor Cousin. See Olivier Bloch, ‘Sur l’image du matérialisme français du XVIIIe dans l’historiographie philosophique de la première moitié du XIXe siècle’, in Images au XIXe siècle du matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Olivier Bloch (Paris: Desclée, 1979), pp. 37–​54. Timo Kaitaro, ‘Can matter mark the hours? –​Eighteenth-​century vitalist materialism and functional properties’, Science in Context 21, no. 4 (2008), pp. 581–​592. ‘[…] si le fonctionnement d’une machine s’explique par des relations de pure causalité, la construction d’une machine ne se comprend ni sans finalité ni sans homme.’ Georges Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1985), p. 114.

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One reason for La Mettrie’s reliance on the machine analogy was obviously that he did not want to invoke any immaterial entities like the soul in order to explain mental functions.15 He claims that mental functions depend on the specific organisation of the brain and of the whole body, and so he goes on to identify them with this organisation.16 But this is not the whole story, as he also writes that even if organisation is the first asset of man, and the source of all the others, instruction is the second asset. La Mettrie further claims that without instruction even the best constructed brain would be wasted.17 Elaborating on a simile he had already had recourse to in L’histoire naturelle de l’âme18 comparing the education of a child having first spent his childhood outside human society to polishing a rough diamond, La Mettrie sums up that what constitutes humanity are the artificial human institutions: Les mots, les Langues, les Loix, les Sciences, les Beaux Arts sont venus ; & par eux enfin le Diamant brut de notre esprit a été poli.19 In order to prove his point, he refers again to feral children and apes. In support of the claim that it is not so much the anatomy or bodily structure that makes man a man but education and culture, he refers to two symmetrical experiments. He supposes that if we could teach an ape to speak –​which he obviously deemed quite possible –​it would no longer be a ‘wild man’, in fact not even a rudimentary man (l’homme manqué) but a perfect man.20 Correspondingly, he argues that feral children who had grown up outside human culture are actually animals with a human face.21 The first experiment La Mettrie suggests was in his time merely a thought experiment, but as regards the second experiment, he could refer to the case studies he had already cited in L’histoire naturelle de l’âme. La Mettrie concludes that before the invention of languages, man would have been an animal that would have differed from ape and other

15 16

17 18 19 20 21

Timo Kaitaro, ‘Eighteenth-​Century French Materialism Clockwise and Anticlockwise’. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine, critical edition in La Mettrie’s L’homme machine. A study in the origins of an idea by Aram Vartanian, p. 180. English translation in Machine Man and Other Writings, translated and edited by Ann Thomson (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996), p. 26. L’homme machine, p. 167; Machine Man, p. 16. Histoire naturelle de l’âme, note a, pp. 390–​392. L’homme machine, p. 162; Machine Man, p. 13. L’homme machine, p. 162; Machine Man, p. 12. L’homme machine, p. 170; Machine Man, p. 18.

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animals merely in the way apes differ from other animals, that is, by their exterior appearance and physiognomy.22 La Mettrie also claims that without language man would not only lack a means of communication, but also his cognitive abilities would be limited and animal-​like. Lacking symbolic knowledge, he would be limited to what Leibniz, according La Mettrie, called intuitive knowledge: he could see forms and colours without being able to distinguish between them. He would remain a child throughout his life, expressing his sensations and needs in an elementary way, in the manner similar to a dog.23 La Mettrie’s insistence on the social constitution of humanity is evidently incompatible with the mechanistic reductionism often attributed to him. One obvious reason for the common supposition that his title refers to mechanistic reductionism is probably that the title of work has had a more successful career in comparison to its actual content. The ‘vitalistic’ and non-​reductionist aspects of eighteenth-​century French materialism are unfortunately not very well know, at least outside French scholarship.24 In addition, the way we interpret the materialism of eighteenth-​century French philosophers is often distorted by an anachronistic understanding of the meaning of the term materialism: we tend to identify materialism with its later forms, so called identity-​ theories which pose identities between mental events and physical events. This was certainly not typical of eighteenth-​century French materialists.25 When they relied on mechanical analogies or metaphors, their point was not that we can explain brain functions mechanistically but rather that we need not have recourse to supernatural immaterial entities in order to explain mental functions. Comparisons referring to clockworks were used to point out that the relationship of the mind to the body is comparable to that of the function of the machine to the physical properties of its parts. The point was that just like machines which can have functions that cannot be predicted or understood by examining the physical properties of their constituent parts, the human brain can produce functions which cannot be reduced to its physical properties.26 22 23

L’homme machine, p. 162; Machine Man, p. 13. L’homme machine, p. 162; Machine Man, p. 13. As Aram Vartanian correctly observes in his note to this passage in his edition, La Mettrie’s description of the Leibnizian intuitive knowledge is not exact. 24 See the special issue ‘Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment’, ed. Charles T. Wolfe, Science in Context 21, no. 4 (2008). 25 Timo Kaitaro, ‘Brain-​ Mind Identities in Dualism and Materialism –​A historical perspective’. 26 Timo Kaitaro, ‘Can matter mark the hours?’

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That there is nothing supernatural in our mental faculties, does not mean that they are natural in the restricted sense, as opposed to the artificial.27 2

Homo Duplex

As I have already indicated, La Mettrie shared with Condillac the emphasis on the role of language in the constitution of human nature and in the formation man’s mental capacities. There is, however, an important difference in the way they consider the relationship between the natural and social nature of man. La Mettrie tended to emphasise their separateness or even their contrast, whereas Condillac wanted to show, on the one hand, how the artificial arises from the natural and, on the other hand, how nature is at the same time transformed in the process.28 In his Discours préliminaire La Mettrie distinguished radically between the two distinct meanings of the term ‘man’. He contrasted man as a natural, anatomically distinguishable entity with man as a social being constituted by human institutions.29 The man studied by the philosopher is the man as a natural entity. The rest, being artificial and thus arbitrary, lies outside the jurisdiction of philosophy. The philosopher who is merely interested in truth and in the study of nature, does not interfere with artificial human institutions, such as laws and morality, which constitute the objects studied by legislators and moralists only.30 For him, there is no ‘natural morality’ or ‘natural law’ that could act as a measure in judging the justness of existing laws: he warns us not to attribute to nature things that are the result of education, and this applies also to the ‘pretend natural law’ –​to which he himself, in fact, had had recourse in his L’homme machine.31 The only moral 27 28

29 30 31

See next chapter. In the Traité des sensations (i, iv, § 3) Condillac remarks that we cannot do anything intentionally (avec dessein) unless we have already done the same thing without premeditation, i.e. naturally. In this way, he concludes, it is nature which commences everything in us. Thus, in his Essai he is obliged to look for the origin of language in natural gestures, which men transform into artificial signs, when they start to use them intentionally for communication. Essai, ii, ii, §§ 2–​3. See, Timo Kaitaro, ‘Diderot and La Mettrie: The unacknowledgeable debt’, and Timo Kaitaro, ‘L’homme comme artefact chez La Mettrie et Diderot’. La Mettrie, ‘Discours préliminaire’, in Œuvres philosophiques, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1753), vol. 1, pp. 4–​15; Œuvres philosophiques (London: Jean Nourse), 1750, pp. v–​xiii. La Mettrie, Anti-​Senèque ou Discours sur le bonheur (1748), p. 47 (in Œuvres philosophiques, 1753, vol. 2, with separate pagination). In this text, La Mettrie reproaches the anonymous author of L’homme machine for having had recourse, when attributing remorse to animals, to the notion of ‘natural law’ (ibid, p. 48).

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law that we get from nature is what he calls the ‘morality of nature’, which is distinct from and often actually in contradiction with ‘artificial morality’, which is concerned with moral values and normative claims. The purpose of artificial morality is not to reach the truth by using one’s reason but to secure the peaceful interaction of men with each other.32 In contrast, the morality of nature is merely interested in the pleasures of the senses. La Mettrie compares the relationship between natural morality and artificial morality to the (inexistent) relationship between truth and arbitrary conventions, thus establishing a radical dualism between fact and value and between the concerns of a philosopher and those of moralists and legislators.33 Thus, one could perhaps sum up the difference between La Mettrie and Condillac, by saying that for La Mettrie a human is an animal to which one had superadded a lot of artificial embellishments, a heavy cultural varnish, without changing his or her fundamental nature as a sentient animal pursuing sensual pleasures, whereas for Condillac a human is a natural being transformed into a cultural artefact in toto. For La Mettrie the cultivated and artificial human and the sensual natural human with its voluptuous ‘morality of nature’ seem to lead their separate lives side by side, and often in conflict with each other, but for Condillac culture permeated sensations as well. For Condillac sensations themselves are transformed from mere impressions of pleasure or pain controlling behaviour into ideas, that is, images referring to an objective world constituted by a system of signs with artificial grammatical rules. Thus, by their social nature they are transformed into representations that involve the notion of truth. In La Mettrie’s system, in contrast, truth seems to be natural in the sense that he contrasts it with things that involve cultural institutions. For him, truth was on the same side of the nature-​culture divide as sensual pleasures. Despite this difference, neither of them could be considered as a reductive naturalist, reducing the artificial and cultured man to the natural.34 One of the essential questions in the context of the Enlightenment was indeed the relationship of the various social passions to the ‘natural’ passions related to human bodily existence and bodily needs. One could treat them as 32 33 34

La Mettrie, ‘Discours préliminaire’, in Œuvres philosophiques, 1751, pp. vi–​ix and xii; Œuvres philosophiques, 1753, vol. 1, pp. 5–​9 and 13–​14. ‘Discours préliminaire’, 1751, pp. vii–​viii; 1753, vol. 1, pp. 7–​8. As Edward Nye has pertinently observed, Condillac’s idea of tracing the origin of language to such fundamental faculties as sensation, imagination or reminiscence is not reductionistic, but is better understood as radically developmental. Edward Nye, Literary and Linguistic Theory in Eighteenth Century France: From Nuances to Impertinence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 93. For La Mettrie’s alleged reductionism, see Timo Kaitaro, ‘Eighteenth-​Century French Materialism Clockwise and Anticlockwise’.

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distinct or then one could try to explain the emergence of the former from the latter. In trying to explain this emergence, one could emphasise the autonomy of the social passions of humans or try to reduce them to the natural. After a short encyclopaedic interlude on the variety of meanings of the term ‘nature’ in the eighteenth-​century, we shall examine a variety of solutions to the problems related to the relationship of man as a natural entity and man as a member of society.

­c hapter 9

The Nature of Morality: Diderot, Helvétius and Rousseau So far, we have concentrated on the question of whether, and to what degree, the cognitive faculties of humans are natural. We have analysed discussions pertaining to the role of culture and language in the constitution of these faculties. But the context in which the role of nature was discussed most actively during the eighteenth century was that of morality. What occupied philosophers was the nature of the passions and other motivating forces of humans. In discarding the theological foundations of morality and in criticising prevailing moral rules, one tended to rely on nature as a yardstick of what was rational. Thus, the term ‘nature’ had also an epistemological use: it was often used to refer to what was deemed good and rational.1 The eighteenth-​century philosophers were, however, not unaware of the multiplicity of senses in which one could use the terms ‘nature’ or ‘natural’. For example, in the article ‘Naturel (Métaphysique)’ in the Encyclopédie, the author –​probably Diderot –​distinguishes between different senses of the term ‘natural’, depending on what it is opposed to.2 As ‘natural’ can, on the one hand, be opposed to ‘supernatural’ and, on the other, to ‘artificial’, some things can be natural and not natural at the same time, depending on the sense in which the term is used. The article defines as ‘artificial’ those things that are subject to the ordinary laws of nature, that is, which are not supernatural, but which have appeared due to the ingenuity of the human mind: L’artificiel n’est donc que ce qui part du principe ordinaire des choses, mais auquel est survenu le soin & l’industrie de l’esprit humain, pour atteindre à quelque fin particulière que l’homme se propose.3 The article presents some examples of artificial things that are due to the diligence and industry of men, but in which nothing miraculous takes places. 1 See Paul Hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle ([Paris]: Fayard, 1963), p. 117. 2 Encyclopédie, vol. 11, pp. 44b–​46b. Concerning the attribution of the article, see J. Lough, ‘The problem of unsigned articles in the Encylopédie’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 32 (1965), pp. 327–​390. 3 Encyclopédie, vol. 11, p 45a.

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Raising immense amounts of water with pumps is one and pruned and artificially grown trees is another. In addition, the article takes up the example of wine, which is in principle always as artificial as brandy, but which can be said to be natural in the sense that there is nothing unusual or extraordinary in its fabrication compared to what is habitual in the area where is produced. This is, in fact, already a third sense in which the term can be used, a sense in which it is opposed to the unusual or unaccustomed. Finally, the article discusses the senses in which a human mind can be natural. In this case the author evokes two possible oppositions with their corresponding and normatively distinct meanings: cultivated or affected. The last example shows clearly that being natural is not always for the better. 1

Diderot and the Vices and Virtues of Nature

In Diderot’s Le rêve de d’Alembert (1769) one of the protagonists, the physician Bordeu,4 observes that nothing that exists ‘can be against nature nor outside nature, not even chastity or voluntary continence, which would be first crimes against nature, if it would be possible to sin against nature.’5 Likewise, another of Diderot’s protagonists, in a dialogue presented in the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1796), objects to a remark of his companion ‘A’, who proposes that ‘A’ is claiming that some European habits and sentiments, such as coquetry, constancy and jealousy are not natural. To this the interlocutor ‘B’ replies that all is equally in nature, including vice and virtue.6 Here we can find La Mettrie’s attitude towards nature and its study: one should not expect to find answers to moral questions concerning right and wrong by turning to nature. However, there is a strong temptation to read Diderot’s text as doing just this: as a primitivist depiction of a happy Tahitian society, where laws and moral customs are in accord with nature.7 But as I have argued elsewhere, a closer reading reveals that instead of freeing sexuality from moral rules and 4 Théphile de Bordeu (1722–​1776) was a real person, a physician who wrote medical articles for the Encyclopédie, see Dominique Boury, ‘Théophile de Bordeu: source et personnage du Rêve de D’Alembert’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 34 (april 2003), [online] document 3, uploaded 24.2.2011, consulted 6.9.2017. url: http://​rde.rev​ues.org/​154; doi: 10.4000/​ rde.154. 5 Diderot, at 2, pp. 187–​188; dpv, xvii, pp. 202–​203 (my translation). 6 Diderot, at 2, pp. 242–​243; dpv, xii, p. 632. 7 For such a primitivist reading, see, for example, Colas Duflo, Diderot, philosophe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), pp. 426–​437, or W. E. Rex, ‘Contrariety in the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville’, Diderot Studies 27 (1998), pp. 149–​180.

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taboos, Diderot’s Tahitians had strict rules and taboos of their own, curiously based on values resembling more those of contemporary utilitarian Europeans than primitive societies.8 Culture seems thus inescapable for us humans: what seems natural turns out in the end to be merely another form of culture, which is also trying to legitimize itself by referring to nature. From the definition and examples of ‘artificial’ given in the Encyclopédie cited above, it follows that at the moment humans start using natural objects according to their customs, these objects are transformed into artefacts: En sens là, in n’est presque rien dans l’usage des choses, qui soit totalement naturel, que ce qu n’a point été à la disposition des hommes.9 Planted and pruned trees are no longer a part of nature, in so far as they are the result of the care and ingenuity of the human mind. In this way it is obvious that human beings, in so far as they too have been cultivated, are, despite their animal organisation, no longer natural beings in the sense discussed in the Encyclopédie. The care and ingenuity of human minds transforms nature by assimilating and incorporating it into cultural practices and into the human world of means and ends. Among the objects thus transformed, we find of course also the human mind itself and its needs. Consistently with this view, Diderot emphasised in his Réfutation d’Helvétius (1773) that human passions and motives are not reducible to physical sensation in the way his friend and fellow materialist Helvétius claimed. 2

Helvétius vs. Diderot

In contrast to his friend Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–​1771) had a more reductionist view of the relationship between the natural endowments of humans and their artificial and socially determined passions and motives. Helvétius presented his ideas in two works De l’esprit (1758) and De l’homme (1773). The former caused a sensation and the latter was printed illegally without official permission (privilege royal). In principle, Helvétius accepted that humans have two kinds of passions, those given by nature and those that are due to the establishment of societies. The natural passions are based on such 8 See Timo Kaitaro, ‘Nature and morality in eighteenth-​century French materialism’, in The Enlightenment: Critique, Myth, Utopia, eds. Charlotta Wolff, Timo Kaitaro and Minna Ahokas (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 55–​70. 9 Encyclopédie, vol. 11, p. 45a.

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natural bodily needs as hunger and thirst. In addition to these, humans have artificial passions, such as envy, avidity, pride, ambition, love for one’s country, the passion for glory, and magnanimity. Helvétius included love among the artificial passions, in so far as this is not merely a natural need, but is associated with vanity. Helvétius believed that the artificial passions originate in our natural needs and in our desires related to physical pains and pleasures. Ultimately, they are merely developments of the faculty of sensations.10 Of course, the fact that the artificial passions ‘originate in’ or ‘develop’ from sensations, does not necessarily mean that the former could be reduced to the latter. However, Helvétius claims also that the artificial passions can really, in the final analysis and despite appearances, be reduced to physical pains and pleasures: Je vais donc, en suivant la métamorphose des peines & plaisirs physiques, en peines & plaisirs factices, montrer que dans des passions, telles que l’avarice, l’ambition, l’orgueil & l’amitié, dont l’objet paroît les moins appartenir aux plaisirs de sens, c’est cependant toujours le douleur & la plaisir physique que nous fuyons ou que nous recherchons.11 Physical sensibility is thus the only real cause of human actions.12 The different varieties of social passions or motives are for Helvétius merely disguised forms of natural passions. For example, if people pursue honours or wish to make friends or money, this is not because these things would have any value in themselves, but because they are instrumental in getting pleasurable physical sensations.13 According to Helvétius, there are only two kinds of pleasures: pleasures of the senses and the others which are means to acquire these sensual pleasures.14 That is, there are two kinds of needs, artificial and natural, but in the final analysis the former are just indirect expressions of, or devious ways of satisfying, the latter. This kind of sensualist reductionism differs radically not only from Diderot’s explicit anti-​reductionism,15 but also from Condillac’s philosophical anthropology, which posited sensations merely as the origin of all of our faculties and who writes, after having demonstrated how his famous statue (which had not

10 [Helvétius], De l’esprit (Paris: Durand, 1758), discourse iii, chapter ix, pp. 321–​325. 11 De l’esprit, p. 325. 12 Helvétius, De l’homme, (‘Londres’, 1773), vol. i, section ii, chapter ix, pp. 321–​325. 13 De l’esprit, discours iii, chapitre x–​xv, pp. 336–​367. 14 De l’esprit, discourse iii, chapitre xiii, p. 349. 15 See Timo Kaitaro, Diderot’s Holism.

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even yet acquired the ability to speak) had acquired the various novel operations of the understanding: […] il est raisonnable de conclure que nous n’avons d’abord eu que des sensations et que nos connoissances et nos passions sont l’effet des plaisirs et peines qui accompagnent les impressions des sens.16 One should pay attention to the pluperfect tense, indicating action completed in the past, and the word d’abord. In his conclusion to Traité des sensations Condillac eloquently describes how we gradually develop delicate and novel pleasures, leaving behind the few original crude sensual pleasures. He explains how, after the developments he has described, we no longer enjoy merely with our senses, our sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell, but also with the other faculties that we have developed: we get enjoyment from our memory, imagination, reflection, passions, hope, that is, by all our faculties.17 Helvétius’s idea which reduces human motivation to the pursuit of physical sensations did not appeal to Diderot, who wrote a detailed refutation of Helvétius’s De L’homme. In the book, Helvétius had identified sensations and judgements and observed that judgements comparing objects suppose an interest to compare them. Helvétius continues to reason that this interest, based on our ‘love of happiness’, cannot result from anything but physical sensation, which is the source of all our pleasures and pains.18 In Diderot’s opinion, the conclusion is somewhat far-​fetched, in that it could apply to any animal as well as to humans. Passing quickly from physical sensibility to the love of happiness and from the love of happiness to interest, from interest to attention and from attention to comparison of ideas, this is all too general for Diderot. He writes that he is a man and needs to have causes appropriate to man. He asks provocatively, what use would he have of a series of consequences which could just as well apply to a dog, a weasel, an oyster or a dromedary.19 Diderot would admit that physical sensations could be the only causes of the behaviour of animals, but he questions the idea that this would apply to humans as well. He admits that sensations are necessary and primitive conditions, sine qua non, for human action, but refuses to admit that they would be the immediate and proximal motives of our aversions or desires. What Diderot is actually reproaching Helvétius for is taking conditions for causes, 16 Condillac, Traité des sensations, iv, ix, § 1 (my emphasis). 17 Condillac, Traité des sensations, iv, ix, §§ 1–​2. 18 Helvétius, De l’homme, section ii, c­ hapters 5 and 6, pp. 184–​200. 19 Diderot, at 2, pp. 300–​301; dpv 24, pp. 522–​523.

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which according to Diderot can result only in childish paralogisms.20 Diderot parodies Helvétius’s logic by comparing it to someone who reasons from the premises that one must exist in order to sense, to sense in order to be an animal or a man, and to be an animal or a man in order to be miserly, ambitious or jealous, and concludes that the original cause or ‘principle’ of these passions is organisation, sensibility and existence.21 So, if physical sensation is not sufficient to explain human action what then, according to Diderot, would constitute the real causes or motives of human action? He starts by making some distinctions. He admits that everything humans do is done in order to have agreeable sensations or to avoid painful ones. However, not all pleasures or pains are physical. Diderot refers to the distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘moral’, where the latter refers to the spiritual faculties of the human mind, contrasting with things related to the human physical or bodily nature.22 Diderot considers this distinction to be as solid as that between a sensing and a reasoning animal. He argues, for instance, that the pleasure involved in possessing a beautiful woman is not merely physical. Neither is the pain that one experiences when losing a friend merely physical pain.23 Diderot claims that there are ‘pains and pleasures of pure opinion’ that distress or send us into raptures without any connection, implicit or explicit, to physical consequences.24 And even in the case of physical needs, such as hunger, he insists on the fact that the human capacity to anticipate adds to these physical needs something that is not reducible to physical sensation: he observes that physically felt bodily symptoms of hunger have eventually very little in common with the anxiety and despair involved in anticipating hunger.25 Diderot presents some examples of the ‘pains and pleasure of opinion’ that he finds irreducible to physical pains and pleasures and incompatible with the ‘sophisticated suppositions’26 of Helvétius. Some people would give up everything else in order to acquire public esteem.27 And not only that; some people have motives that go far beyond those related to the opinion and esteem of others. Diderot observes that scholars like Leibniz enjoy metaphysical and 20 Diderot, at 2, p. 302; dpv 24, p. 525. 21 Diderot, at 2, p. 303. See also p. 310; dpv 24, pp. 525–​526. See also, p. 538. 22 Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, s.v. ’Moral, -​aux’. 23 Diderot, at 2, 302–​303; dpv 24, p. 526. 24 Diderot, at 2, p. 304; pdv 24, p. 530. 25 Diderot, at 2, pp. 305–​306; dpv 24, pp. 531–​532. 26 Diderot, at 2, p. 312; dpv 24, p. 541. 27 Diderot, at 2, p, 307; dpv 24, p. 534. Diderot refers here to his contemporary Antoine-​ Léonard Thomas (1732–​1785).

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geometrical meditations and studies, and would certainly not give up them in exchange for riches or bodily enjoyments. Neither would Leibniz, according to Diderot, have preferred public esteem or glory to the possibility of pursuing his studies. Diderot denies that such intellectual pursuits could be reduced to a means to realize some other goals related to sensual pleasures: Leibniz was enjoying these intellectual pursuits in themselves.28 Then there is, of course, a sublime, but here also valid, argument ad hominem: the case Helvétius himself, who was well off and who, without any need for riches or means to procure sensual pleasures, wrote his De l’esprit, which resulted merely in him being persecuted. And further, Helvétius’s work De l’homme was only published posthumously. Diderot asks pertinently how the author can profit from a work knowing that it will not be published during his or her lifetime. And he pursues his attack, asking about the writers of anonymous works, who take risks in publishing them instead of getting any glory or profit from them.29 Diderot’s arguments are not only meant to show that human motivation is not reducible to the motives derived from natural needs, and that we should look instead for his socially determined needs. He also wants to insist on the natural variability of human motivation, a variability which is there even before education, due to an innate variation in physiological organisation. Diderot compares the variability of humans to the variety in the animal kingdom. Just as fish swim and birds fly, men have in common the faculty of combining ideas, but they each have their own preferences for combining them, determined by their organisation, character or natural aptitude.30 However, education plays a role too. In evoking people who not only have a need to reflect and meditate, but voluntarily endanger their freedom, fortune, honour or even their life in order to expose errors that torment people and who appeal for the amelioration of the fate of humankind, he refers to ‘penchants received from nature cultivated by education’.31 3

Rousseau

In his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755) Rousseau makes a pertinent criticism of philosophers who, after examining the foundations of society, have felt the need to speculate on the ‘state 28 Diderot, at 2, pp. 310–​312; dpv 24, pp. 538–​540. 29 Diderot, at 2, pp. 313–​315; dpv 24, pp. 542–​545. 30 Diderot, at 2, p. 312; dpv 24, p. 540. 31 Diderot, at 2, p. 314; dpv 24, p. 544.

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of nature’ preceding the establishment of societies. These philosophers have supposed that humans living in the state of nature had notions of justice or injustice, or had such passions as avidity or pride, which implicitly refer to social organisation and which could thus not exist in a state preceding it.32 Thus Rousseau proposes, as a kind of thought experiment, to reconstruct man as he was, not only without the supernatural gifts he has received, but also without all artificial faculties that he may have progressively acquired, that is, ‘as he must have left the hands of nature.’33 Just like the author of the Essai sur l’origine des connaissainces humaines, Rousseau considers that reflection is an acquired and artificial faculty and thus not natural in the strict sense of the word. But Rousseau goes a bit further and observes that reflection is not only unnatural but even ‘against nature’ and that ‘a man who meditates is a degenerate animal’.34 Rousseau describes the uncultured wild man (l’homme sauvage) as a creature whose existence is limited to the present, with no ideas of the future. The projects of such a man do not extend beyond the end of the day.35 Rousseau observes that animals, too, have ideas. They are also, to a certain extent, capable of combining them. So, it is not so much understanding that distinguishes humans from animals but their quality as free agents. Animals obey nature, but humans are free to assent or resist. It is the consciousness of this freedom that testifies to the spirituality of the soul.36 Instead of attempting a naturalistic explanation of the origin of the human capacity to distance oneself from immediate and natural reactions to external stimuli and to gain one’s freedom by subjecting the operations of the mind to one’s will, Rousseau considers this specific human attribute as a supernatural endowment. In addition to freedom, Rousseau adds another specific quality that distinguishes humans from animals, and this is their faculty to improve themselves, that is, their perfectibility. And paradoxically, and in a very Rousseauian manner, this perfectibility is the source of all human misfortunes. But let us not forget, if 32 Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 24 vols, eds. Frédérick Eigeldinger and Raymond Trousson (Genève: Slatkine; Paris: Champion, 2012), vol. 5, pp. 85–​86 (hereafter cited as oc). 33 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 99. 34 ‘[…] l’homme qui médite est un animal dépravé.’ Rousseau, oc 5, p. 104. As Christophe Van Staen observes in his introduction to the 5th volume of Rousseau’s Œuvres complètes (p. 25), this remark should be situated in its context: discussion on the natural constitution of men and the claim that progress has resulted in more evils than medicine has found remedies for. 35 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 113. 36 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 110.

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Rousseau considers it as the source of the vices of humans, he also admits it is the source of their virtues.37 In addition to these general remarks on the preconditions on human perfectibility, Rousseau refers to some more concrete factors in order to explain how humans have been able to cross the huge gap from pure sensations, limited to present realities, to simple knowledge. He observes that a solitary person could not have covered this distance without communication and without being spurred by necessity. And, on the other hand, without humans quitting the state of nature and starting to co-​operate, agriculture would not have been possible. In this context, Rousseau refers to the important role of speech. In a very Condillacian vein, he reminds the reader about ‘how much grammar exercises and facilitates the operations of the mind (esprit).’38 Considering the embarrassing question concerning the origin of languages, Rousseau observes that he could in fact have contented himself with repeating what Condillac had written on the subject. He states that Condillac’s writings confirm his own opinion and admits that they have perhaps also given him the first ideas that led to his own opinion on the matter. Rousseau nevertheless reproaches Condillac for solving the difficulties in explaining the origin of instituted signs by supposing some kind of a society already established between the inventors of language,39 and then goes on to analyse the difficulties involved in explaining the origin of language. If humans were not already interacting with each other, then how could one explain the need and the necessity of this invention in the state of nature? And even if this difficulty could be solved, another problem remains: if men have to have language in order to think, they also have to be able to think in order to invent the art of speech.40 Rousseau’s story of the way in which language develops from natural cries and gestures resembles that of Condillac, but for the fact that Rousseau supposes that humans had at the beginning named only individual objects instead of using general names: for example, each oak had its own name.41 Unlike La Mettrie who thought that apes could be transformed into humans by teaching them language, Rousseau believed that animals are incapable of forming

37 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 110–​111. 38 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 114–​115. 39 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 116. 40 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 115–​117. For Condillac’s response to this problem, see above, pp. 112–113. 41 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 119–​120.

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general ideas and thus acquiring the perfectibility that depends on them.42 Rousseau explains this fact in a seemingly circular way, by referring to the fact that general ideas can only be acquired by having recourse to words, and that the understanding grasps general ideas only by the use of propositions. An ape could never form a general notion of, say, fruit, since, according to Rousseau, all general ideas are purely intellectual, and as soon as the imagination intervenes ideas always end up particularised. Purely abstract beings can only be conceived in discourse (par le discours), from which Rousseau concludes that one must speak in order to have general ideas.43 The seeming circularity of Rousseau’s explanations can, of course, be resolved by filling in the implicit assumption that animals cannot learn language because they lack the innate perfectibility characteristic of humans (as distinct from the acquired perfectibility dependent on language). Since the inventors of language could only give names to ideas they already had, it follows that the first substantives could only have been proper names.44 Rousseau admitted that he cannot conceive how one could then have succeeded in extending ideas and generalizing words. He writes that he is ‘frightened by the increasing difficulties, and convinced of the almost demonstrated impossibility of language being established by purely human means.’45 This ambiguous statement has often been read as a concession to the partisans of the divine origin of human language, but other readings are possible, especially since at the end of the sentence referring to this impossibility, Rousseau refers to the chicken-​and-​egg dilemma concerning the establishment of societies and the institution of languages.46 Since Rousseau thinks that the primitive state of a human was –​contrary to the miserable creatures described by Hobbes –​as a free, carefree and healthy being, he finds it hard to grasp what could have motivated humans to establish social ties and language. Nature has done very little to make humans approach each other, he observes.47 In this context, Rousseau subscribes to the view that in the primitive state before the establishment of moral relations and duties, humans were neither 42

This acquired perfectibility dependent on language should evidently not be confused with the general innate perfectibility that man has originally, discussed above. See Christophe Van Staen’s note, Rousseau, oc 5, p. 121, note 1. 43 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 122. 44 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 121–​122. 45 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 122–​123. 46 Christophe Van Staen proposes in his note that ‘human’ is here does not contrast with the divine but rather with the artificial and acquired aspects of human nature, as distinct from his essential human nature. Rousseau, oc 5, p. 123, note 1. 47 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 124.

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good nor bad. They could not have had virtues or vices, except in the physical sense of qualities that would be useful or harmful in view of their survival.48 Here Rousseau’s conclusions concur with his materialist contemporaries like Diderot or La Mettrie. His point was obviously not that a human is naturally good, but rather that vice and virtue are distinctions contingent on the establishment of societies. The problem with the civilisation was not that it was itself vicious in comparison with the virtuous state of nature, but that even if civilisation gives rise to both vices and virtues, the former weighs in the balance more that the latter.49 And although humans are not naturally virtuous, Rousseau believed that they have a natural tendency to pity, which they share with animals and which balances the ferocity of their self-​love, amour-​ propre.50 He observes also that the whereas the spontaneous commiseration involving identification with the other is stronger in the state of nature, amour-​ propre is fortified by reason.51 Rousseau not only distinguishes passions that are of social origin and which were unknown in the state of nature, such as vanity, consideration, respect or contempt, from natural passions, but also analyses ways in which natural passions are transformed after the establishment of society. This is evident in his treatment of the passion of love, which in society is transformed into something which is more than the original sexual instinct. Rousseau distinguished in the sentiment of love between the physical and the moral aspects. On the one hand, there is the desire which makes the opposite sexes unite with each other, and, on the other hand, there is the moral motive which determines this desire to attach itself exclusively to one preferred object. The latter is, according to Rousseau, an artificial sentiment born from the customs of a society and based on notions of merit and beauty, which the savage ignores, and on comparisons that the savage is incapable of making.52 Human perfectibility and the social virtues and other faculties the ‘natural human’ had received as a potentiality (puissance) could never have developed by themselves. They require some fortuitous external factors without which they could not develop and without which humans would have remained eternally in their primitive condition.53 In the second part of the Discours 48 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 125. 49 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 125. 50 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 127–​129. 51 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 130–​131. See also Essai sur l’origine des langues, oc 12, pp. 440–​441. 52 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 132–​133. Rousseau writes also that the moral sentiment of love is ‘celebrated by women with a great amount of ruse and care in order to establish their empire and to give dominance to the sex that was meant to be dominated.’ Ibid. p. 133. 53 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 138.

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Rousseau makes some conjectures about the events which may have contributed to the transformation of humans to their present state. One of them is the establishment of property, which according to Rousseau took place when someone enclosed a patch of terrain and said ‘this is mine’54 So even this transformation presupposes the fundamental institution of language. Metallurgy and agriculture were important factors that contributed to the introduction of private property and the disappearance of equality.55 And as humans invented different arts and as languages progressed, their faculties developed: memory, imagination, self-​interested self-​love (l’amour-​propre intéressé), as well as reason and intelligence.56 Rousseau’s criticism concerning the possibilities of explaining human behaviour by sensations bear some similarity to those of his former friends. Like Diderot, he is critical of explaining human action by physical sensations, and like Condillac he emphasises the transformation of sensations into signs or representations. In his posthumously published work Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781) he observes: L’homme est modifié par ses sens, personne n’en dout ; mais faute de distinguer les modifications, nous en confondons les causes ; nous donnons trop et trop peu d’empire aux sensations ; nous ne voyons pas que souvent elles ne nous affectent point comme sensations, mais comme signes ou images, et que leurs effets moraux ont aussi des causes morales.57 Forgetting that sensations affect us by their semiotic properties and not as physical stimuli, makes one overemphasise the role of the latter and ignore the role of transformed sensations. In this context Rousseau discusses not only verbal language, but also music and painting as forms of imitation, as cultural products whose understanding requires a familiarity with the language used. Music does not affect us as physical sound: ‘it is a language, for which we need a dictionary.’ In order to understand melody and harmony we must have ears that have been properly trained.58 Rousseau admits that animals, too, can use sounds to express their emotions. But in speaking of music, he refers to the role of culture by observing that we are sensible to impressions which have no effect on ‘barbarians’ and that in music one must understand its language in 54 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 140. 55 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 152. 56 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 155. 57 Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. xiii; oc 12, pp. 482–​483. 58 Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. xiv; oc 12, pp. 493–​494.

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order to understand it. And this he applies to both music and painting, where sounds or colours are used as representations and signs.59 Rousseau’s remarks concerning the transformation of physical sensations by culture are meant as an antidote to the habit of ‘materialising the operations of the soul.’60 However, like Condillac, Rousseau considers that language, as the first social institution, owes its form only to natural causes.61 As the first institution, its importance lies in the fact that it is the necessary condition for being able to institute laws, choose leaders, invent arts or establish commerce.62 Rousseau remarks also that only humans have conventional language and that it this fact which permits them, unlike animals, to make progress –​in good and bad.63 Rousseau, like La Mettrie, refers to the descriptions of orangutans and ‘wild men’, whose humanity posed a problem for his contemporaries, as well as to the case of the child found among bears described by Condillac (to whose description he refers).64 In view of the limitations and deficiencies of these reports, Rousseau is not willing to draw any definitive conclusions concerning the linguistic capacities or the humanity of orangutans or other similar creatures. His discussion shows, however, that his criteria are similar, although not identical, to those of La Mettrie. Like the materialist, Rousseau refers to differences that are not directly related to anatomical features. He observes that apes are not human, not only because they lack the faculty of speech, but above all because the species does not have the faculty that distinguishes humans: the faculty to improve itself (la faculté de se perfectionner). Thus, in order to decide whether orangutans are humans or not, Rousseau suggests that, instead of trying to teach them to speak, one should try to ascertain whether they possess this faculty to perfect themselves. But Rousseau observes that such an experiment would be impracticable and require the observation of many generations.65 For Rousseau, a human is essentially a historical being, different in different ages. This explains, according to him, the failure of Diogenes, who was ‘looking 59 60

Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. xv; oc 12, pp. 500–​505. Essai sur l’origine des langues, oc 12, p. 505. See also, the second Discours, where Rousseau writes that although the physical sciences (la physique) can explain in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas, the power of the will to choose freely and the sentiment of this power are purely spiritual acts, which cannot be explained by the laws of mechanics. oc 5, p. 110. 61 Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. i; oc 12, p. 385. 62 Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. i; oc 12, p. 395. 63 Essai sur l’origine des langues, chap. i; oc 12, p. 399. 64 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’égalité, notes iii and x, oc 5, pp. 182–​183 and 201–​210. 65 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 204–​206.

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for a man’ without finding one: the Greek philosopher was looking among his contemporaries for a man of bygone ages. Human nature changes all the time, and passions, needs and pleasures change in the long run. The passions of the ‘artificial man’ do not have any foundations in nature, and the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilised man’ are completely distinct and different creatures.66 But nature can still serve as a measure of right and wrong. Rousseau claims that moral inequality based on positive laws is contrary to the natural law.67 4

Condillac and the Natural Needs

There is still another way to refer to human nature which we have not yet discussed. If a human is an artificial creature dependent on the institution of society, one could look for the necessary conditions for this institution. In his Le commerce et le gouvernement (1776) Condillac distinguishes two kinds of needs. He deems natural those needs that result from our bodily conformation, which makes us dependent on nourishment. Then there are needs that result from our habits and which he calls factices, observing that they can, however, become so habitual that they end up being as pressing (necessaires) as those due to our conformation. The first factitious needs are those that humans contracted when they started practicing diverse arts, such as agriculture, to satisfy their natural needs by novel means. Such factitious needs remain as close to the natural needs as possible, but slowly humans form new ones that move more and more away from these natural needs, that is, the arts of satisfying the latter with more are more various and affected means. In this way, the artificial needs end up distancing themselves from nature and corrupting it. Condillac observes that some of the first, the artificial needs adopted by humans, can actually be deemed natural in so far as they constitute the essence of human society. Even if they are not necessary to the wandering savage, they are absolute necessary for humans living in a society. Thus, Condillac calls them natural along with those that result from our constitution, and terms factice only those that are not necessary for the social order and without which civil societies were possible.68 Thus what is natural in humans, includes habits that are necessary for a human as a social being and not merely as an animal organism. 66 Rousseau, oc 5, pp. 177–​178. 67 Rousseau, oc 5, p. 179. 68 Condillac, Le commerce et le gouvernement, i, i; op 2, p. 244.

­c hapter 10

Maupertuis and the Debates in the Berlin Academy An essential link between the French and German debates on thought and language is provided by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–​1756). We have already seen how Condillac reacted to Maupertuis’s writings. Maupertuis in turn reacted to Condillac’s writings and presented the latter’s ideas to German scholars while he was staying in Berlin. He was appointed president of the Académie des sciences de Berlin in 1746, a post which he occupied for eight years. During this period, he wrote two texts dealing with the relationship between thought and language, Reflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots (1748) and Dissertation sur les differentes moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leus idées (1754/​1756). 1

Maupertuis and the Lack of Correspondence between Language and Ideas

In Reflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots, Maupertuis begins by observing that some languages ‘cut ideas in the same manner’. The French expression ‘pain’ and the English word ‘bread’ appear to be simply translations of one another. But Maupertuis observes that some languages of more distant peoples can be so different from ours that it may be almost impossible to translate their expressions into our languages.1 Maupertuis believes that we can find in the ‘jargon’ of the savages the first steps taken by the human mind. Thus, we would be able to trace the simple beginnings of language, as well the ‘first ideas’, which our established and advanced vocabulary tends to hide under a layer of prejudice. All languages have started from this simplicity, but it tends to become obscured as generations pass, so that we have eventually lost all memory of these ‘first ideas’.2 In order to access these first ideas, Maupertuis has recourse to the common eighteenth-​century method of reconstruction of the origins by inventing a hypothetical story of how things may have originated naturally without divine intervention. In his thought experiment, he supposes that, while still possessing 1 Reflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots [1740], § 2. Edition without author’s name nor place or date of publication. 2 Reflexions philosophiques, §§ 3–​4 and 6.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_012

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all his faculties of apperception and reasoning, he has lost all memory of previous perceptions and reasonings. In such a state he could apply different signs to the different perceptions that he could distinguish. In this way the expressions ‘A’ and ‘B’ could correspond to the perceptions that we express by saying ‘I see a tree’ and ‘I see a horse’.3 Maupertuis proceeds from this holistic language to describe the possibility of a more analytical language: after remarking that certain perceptions are in some respect similar, one could subsume them under the same sign. In this way one could, for example, use three distinct simple signs to express the three elements of perceptions such as ‘I see two lions’ and ‘I see three ravens’: one for having a visual perception, one for the number of objects and one for their nature. One could then continue the analysis by analysing the perceptions of a lion or a raven in terms of their elements.4 And at this of point of the presentation, Maupertuis suddenly jumps back to the real world by stating that ‘it is in this way that languages have formed’.5 Maupertuis is thus simultaneously trying to describe the origin of propositions and that of language. Sometimes the temporal relationship between these two is ambiguous: […] il est de la plus grande importance de bien connaître l’origine des prémières propositions, ce qu’elles étoient avant les Langages établis, ou ce qu’elles seroient si l’on avait étably d’autres Langages.6 Maupertuis refers here in the same breath to the ‘first propositions’ existing before the establishment of languages and to the fact the propositions would have been completely different, if one had chosen different signs for the ‘first perceptions’.7 Propositions seem to present in two different guises: as something preceding language and as something dependent on it. To complicate matters further, in the following paragraph Maupertuis claims simply that it seems that one would never have made any questions or propositions if one had stuck with the ‘first simple expressions’. By this he means that if one could have referred to each perception by a simple sign, this would have saved us from many embarrassing questions. The reason for us not having done this is our limited memory capacity: we can retain in memory only a limited amount of signs. In claiming that in this way ‘memory is opposed to 3 4 5 6 7

Reflexions philosophiques, § 7. Reflexions philosophiques, §§ 8–​9. Reflexions philosophiques, § 12. Reflexions philosophiques, § 12. Reflexions philosophiques, § 12.

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judgement’, Maupertuis observes that a concatenation of simple signs, which he designates by letters A, B, C, D and so on, would not, unlike their analytical translations in our developed language, actually form any propositions.8 This implies also that, without the grammatical structures, there would be no propositions, and without propositions there would be no questions to which they are answers to and without questions there would be no sciences. The mistake we have made, after having composed our expressions or propositions consisting of different parts, is, according to Maupertuis, that we have mistaken each part of the expression for a thing. Moreover, we have built our sciences on this supposition. But supposing that we would have only a limited number of sensations to which one could refer with simple signs, we would not have any idea of the questions and propositions that our sciences occupy themselves with. The same result could be arrived at if we had a memory capacity large enough to be able to designate all perceptions with simple signs.9 The problem with established languages for Maupertuis consists in the fact that instead of designating our perceptions our signs refer to abstracted parts of sensations. Maupertuis traces all kinds of metaphysical problems related to such notions as ‘substances’ and ‘modes’ to our habit of taking the referents of complex sensations to be simple things existing in themselves. In order to show how artificial and conventional such distinctions are, he notes that in observing that a perception called ‘extension’ is present in many things and that others such as ‘colour’ and ‘figure’ vary, one has taken the former for a ‘substance’ and others for ‘accidents’. But Maupertuis remarks that with similar reasoning one could have argued that if all the objects in the world would have been green, then one would just as well have taken greenness for a substance.10 To the counterargument, that greenness unlike extension can detached from a tree, Maupertuis replies that if our language would be different and greenness would be part of our concept of a tree, then greenness could not be separated from the tree. Such metaphysical presuppositions can thus eventually be traced to the established language instead of being founded on the nature of things.11 Maupertuis concludes from all this that the philosophies encountered in different countries could be traced to the differences in the language spoken in them. The way signs are used to refer to different parts of perceptions

8 9 10 11

Reflexions philosophiques, § 13. Reflexions philosophiques, § 13. Reflexions philosophiques, § 15. Reflexions philosophiques, §§ 16 and 16.

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is largely arbitrary and can be done in many different ways, which eventually influences our knowledge.12 In the Reflexions Maupertuis relied on the empiricist strategy of analysing everything into sensations, even the notion of the existence of permanent things.13 In his Dissertation sur les differentes moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leus idées read at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1756, Maupertuis returns to problems related to the origin and development of languages and their effect on cognition.14 By this time, he has read Condillac’s essay, and his description of the origins of language opening his text follows closely that of Condillac. But after this, in discussing and comparing different writing systems, Maupertuis returns to the idea of an ideal analytic language in which each sign would correspond to the simplest ideas so that ‘the composition of these figures would render the composition of ideas’. In such a language, each character would constitute a definition of the thing it refers to.15 When he returns to the established historical languages, he poses the ‘embarrassing question’ of why all the peoples of the world, which originally formed one family, now speak different languages. Maupertuis answers by referring to the Bible and the divine punishment for the temerity of Noah’s children: when the families were dispersed, they were not yet in possession of a completely formed language and thus had only the natural means expression of gestures and cries at their disposal.16 Maupertuis considers that the diversity of language in incommodious. However, despite his speculations on a language whose order would correspond to that of ideas, he is sceptical about remedying the diversity of languages with utilisation of a universal language, which some of his contemporaries had dreamed of. In order to function, it would be required of such a language that the nature of ideas be fixed in the order corresponding to their priority, generality and limitation. In this way, one could establish characters whose relations with each other would correspond to those of ideas themselves. But since philosophers cannot agree on the order and value of ideas, this would not be feasible: a universal writing formed by Descartes and Malebranche would be

12 13 14 15 16

Reflexions philosophiques, § 19. Reflexions philosophiques, §§ 14 and 15. Maupertuis, ‘Dissertation sur les differentes moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leus idées’, in Histoire de l’académie royale des sciences et des belles-​lettres de Berlin, 1954 (Berlin: Académie royale des sciences, 1756), pp. 349–​364. Maupertuis, ‘Dissertation’, § xxvii. Here too, Maupertuis mentions the fact that this would require more memory than what humans actually have. “Dissertation,” §§ 30–​32.

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illegible to Newton and Locke.17 However, if it would be merely a question of a small number of ideas, then different nations could easily agree and use a common language. This we can see in the case such languages as algebra, arithmetic and music (that is, musical notation), ‘the universal languages of Europe’ according to Maupertuis. He continues by remarking that the universality of these languages is due to the small number of ideas they express, and that it would hardly be possible to treat other subjects than extension, numbers or musical sounds in a similar way.18 Finally, Maupertuis formulates his negative answer to the possibility of a universal language by carefully avoiding dogmatic statements, and states that probably each nation will keep its own language for a long time.19 Thus, we will continue to suffer from the inconveniences resulting from linguistic relativity due to the fact that languages combine ideas differently and thus cut the world into different kinds of objects. If we compare the way Maupertuis deals with the role of language in cognition to that of Condillac, he seems to be more concerned with the inconveniences and limitations resulting from language for our thinking than with how it enhances our cognitive faculties. In fact, Condillac’s comments on the Reflexions, which Maupertuis had sent him, deal in part with this aspect.20 In his letter dated 25 June 1752, Condillac complains that he had hoped Maupertuis would have shown how the progress of the human mind depends on language, as Condillac himself had done in his Essai. He also criticises Maupertuis’s way of presenting the origins of language by supposing a solitary person. 2

The Debates at the Berlin Academy

Debates on language and its relation to thought were very much present in the essay contests of the Académie royale des sciences et belles lettres de Berlin. The topic of the contest in 1759 (announced on 9 June 1756) was the reciprocal influence of language and opinions. As already mentioned, Condillac’s ideas on language and its relations to cognition had been presented in Berlin by Maupertuis already in his Dissertation sur les différens moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leurs idées, which he read at the Academy on 13

17 18 19 20

‘Dissertation’, §§ 34–​40. ‘Dissertation’, § 41. “Dissertation,” § 42. Condillac, letters to Maupertuis dated 12 August, 1750, and 15 June, 1752, in op 2, pp. 535–​538.

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May 1756.21 A German translation of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes had been published at the beginning of that same year.22 Among the audience of Maupertuis’s lecture was a Berlin pastor and demographer Peter Süßmilch (1707–​1767).23 Süßmilchs’s critical reaction to the naturalistic explanations of the origins of language was presented in two papers delivered at the Berlin Academy on 7 and 15 October, 1756.24 These papers were combined in published form in 1766 under the title Versuch eines Beweis, das die erste Sprache ihre Ursprung nicht vom Menschen, sondern allein von Schöpfer erhalten habe. In this work, Süßmilch, as the long title reveals, defends the thesis on the divine origin of language (to which we will return in a later chapter). The topic of the contest of 1759 deserves to be quoted in full, since it involves an important shift from seeing language as a means of analysis and acquiring knowledge to seeing it more as an obstacle to knowledge. The topic was titled: What is the reciprocal influence of the opinions on language and of the language on opinions.25 The participants were asked to demonstrate this influence by selected examples. The question involved two aspects which were presented in the following manner:



21

1. How many strange turns of phrase and expressions there are in Languages, born manifestly from certain opinions received among the peoples where these Languages were formed: this first point will be the easiest. 2. It will be essential to show, in certain turns of phrases typical of each language, in certain expressions, and even in the roots of certain words, the seeds of this or that Error or the obstacles to the reception of this or that truth. This double point of view should give rise to very important reflections. After explaining how a turn of mind forms a Language, which then imparts to the mind an outlook more or less favourable to true ideas, one could

Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 77. 22 Ibid., p. 94. 23 Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 87. Carhart dates Maupertuis’s lecture in 1754, but in fact it was delivered in 1756 and published in the academy’s proceedings for the year 1754, published in 1756. See Livschitz, Language and Enlightenment, p, 77. 24 Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment, p. 83. 25 Quelle est l’influence réciproque des opinions du people sur le langage et du langage sur les opinions?

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search for the most practical means of remedying the inconveniences of language.26 In 1769 the Berlin Academy announced another essay contest related to the question concerning the relation of language and the mind. The focus of the contest, the entries for which were submitted in 1771, was on the evolutionary aspects of the following question: Abandoned to their natural capacities, would human beings be in a condition to invent a language. And by what means could they achieve this invention of their own? We require a hypothesis explaining the matter clearly and satisfying all the difficulties.27 The question obviously addressed the difficulties evoked in naturalistic accounts raised by Rousseau in his Discours and the challenge posed by Süßmilch’s theory defending the necessity of divine intervention. Johann David Michaelis accepted the challenge and defended the naturalistic account of language as a human invention.28 The prize for the 1771 competition was awarded, however, to Herder’s essay, which provided an original reformulation of the naturalistic account, and which we will now discuss in detail. 26 Ibid., p. 93. 27 Ibid., p. 178. 28 Ibid., p. 179.

­c hapter 11

Herder: From the Language of a Silent Loner to Human Perfection After a poetic description of the natural expression of emotions and sensations in animals and humans in his Abhandlung über den Ursprung de Sprache (1772), Herder begins his treatment of human language proper by presenting a short criticism of Condillac’s theories. He refers to the beginning of the second part of the latter’s Essai sur les connoissaince humaines, where the abbé describes the thought experiment concerning the two children lost in the desert before they had learned the use of signs. The basic drift of Herder’s criticism is that Condillac has presupposed the invention of language and that one finds on every page of his essay things that could not have taken place in the formation of a developing language. Herder takes Condillac’s supposition literally as a hypothesis of what has really happened and is worried first of all about how these children could have survived in the desert. More pertinent, although mistaken, is Herder’s observation concerning the fact these children were supposed to have lost themselves in the desert before ‘the use of any natural signs and without any knowledge of them’.1 In fact, here Herder misquotes Condillac by adding the qualification ‘natural’. Condillac had in fact written ‘without knowing the use of signs’.2 Condillac was obviously referring to the artificial signs, which are for him the only signs in the proper sense of the word and also the only ones used knowingly. When natural signs are used for communication, they have already become artificial.3 On the basis of his misreading, Herder insists that all children a few weeks after birth know and are able to use natural signs. Consequently, he wonders, why one should make such unnatural and contradictory suppositions as Condillac does in order to trace the development of human knowledge. Further, Herder remarks that the children getting together without any knowledge of signs are said to interact with each other, and that during this interaction they learn ‘to 1 ‘[…] vor der Gebrauch jedes naturliches Zeichens und gar vor allem Kenntnis desselben […]’ Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung de Sprache, in Sämmtliche Werke, 33 vols, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877–​1913), vol. 5, pp. 18. 2 Condillac’s original formation is ‘[…] avant qu’il connussent l’usage d’aucun signe.’ Essai, beginning of the second book. 3 See, above, p. 91.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_013

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attach to the cries of passion the perceptions of which they are natural signs’.4 And again, having read ‘natural signs’ in the passage where Condillac speaks of the absence of ‘the knowledge of signs’ and referring there merely to signs used in communication, Herder pretends he does not understand whether these children learn thus to use natural signs through their interactions with each other, or whether they learn to join thoughts to these natural signs (the latter being the correct answer, although the first is true also, if one insists on the word ‘use’). Herder continues his critique: ‘and yet in the first instance of their coming together, before having the knowledge that the stupidest animal possesses, they interact, are able to learn, what thoughts are associated with certain signs?’5 But here Herder misses the point, that Condillac does not deny that animals, as well as these children before learning to speak, express their emotions by natural signs. This does not, however, yet constitute knowledge of these signs. Herder also quotes the passage where Condillac describes how these children learn to associate to the cries of passion and the diverse actions of the body, the perceptions of which they are the expression, and how they thus slowly learn to do on purpose (avec réflection) what they earlier did by instinct, and how the use of these signs develops their mental faculties.6 Herder bluntly rejects Condillac’s ideas by observing that he does not understand anything of the passages of Condillac he cites. To Condillac’s explanation of how humans could agree on the meanings of their first words by referring to the fact they used them in circumstances where everyone was obliged to associate them to the same perceptions, Herder retorts that this amounts to saying that words came into being because words were already there. Basically, what Herder objects most to in Condillac’s theory is that he does not see how cries expressing passions could be transformed into a language proper consisting of arbitrary sounds. He considers Condillac’s explanations hollow (Hohle).7

4 The passage Herder quotes verbatim is from the Essai: ‘[…] leur commerce réciproque leur fit attacher aux cris de chaque passion les perceptions dont ils étaient les signes naturels.’ Essai, ii, i, i, § 2. 5 Abhandlung über den Ursprung de Sprache, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 19. My translation. 6 Condillac, Essai, ii, i, i, § 3. Herder’s quotation is actually a summary composed of sentences from this passage. 7 Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 19–​20. Hans Aarsleff has suggested that Herder might have read only the second part of the Essai. This would nicely explain Herder’s misconstruction and his lack of understanding of Condillac’s point of view. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1982), p. 198.

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Men and Animals

Having dealt with Condillac, Herder brings in the next object of criticism by observing that in order to cast doubt on Condillac’s explanation, no Rousseau was needed. Herder gives Rousseau credit, however, for contributing to the discussion by his denial of the possibility of the human invention of language, which of course would, according to Herder, also explain the failure of Condillac’s explanation. According to Herder, Rousseau started, just like his predecessor, by looking for the origin of human language in the ‘cry of nature’ (Geschrei de der Natur). And as we know, this Herder deems impossible.8 Thus Rousseau’s discussion turns into a kind of reductio ad absurdum of this theory. In the same way, Herder dismissed Maupertuis’ disssertation on the subject, which he had not read, but of which he had read enough from secondary sources (Süßmilch) in order to know that Maupertuis too had not sufficiently differentiated the origin of language from the sounds animals make. Consequently, Maupertuis was on the same mistaken track as Condillac and Rousseau. Herder argues that both Condillac and Rousseau erred concerning the origin of language by the errors they made regarding the distinction between humans and animals. According to Herder, they had both missed the distinction, although in different ways: the former by turning animals into humans and the latter in turning humans into animals.9 For Herder the essential difference between humans and animals lies in the relative intensity and breadth of their sensitivities, abilities and instincts. The intensity of these faculties is in inverse proportion to their breadth or the variety of their sphere of action. The sensations and representational faculties (Vorstellungkräfte) of animals are concentred instinctually within a very narrow sphere of action, whereas the powers of the human mind span the world.10 This is also the explanation for the fact that animals have little use for language. The sharper their senses, the more narrowly focused their representations (Vorstellungen) and the stronger their instincts, the more focused will their mutual understanding of the possible sounds, signs or expressions that they have recourse to. Their language, in so far as they have one, is, just like their desires, senses and representations, innate and immediately given by nature. Humans lack such a natural language. Notwithstanding screaming that results from their sensitive machinery, new-​born children do not, according to Herder, express their representations or desires in the way that animals do. In 8 9 10

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 20. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 20–​22. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 22–​24.

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this way, human children are ‘orphaned children of nature’, weak, unarmed, miserable, without nature to guide themselves –​and lacking even a language to express their needs. But then they must, Herder reasons, have other hidden forces in order to compensate for this.11 Herder observes a strange disparity between man’s senses and his needs, between his powers and the sphere of the activity required of him, or between his organs and his speech. Herder is looking for a missing link or a middle term (Mittelglied) joining these disparate qualities together, something that would be as essential to humans as instinct is to animals. He is interested in finding out what sets humans above animals, not in terms of a quantitative difference, that is, having more or less of something, but something that constitutes a qualitative difference. Herder expects this character to explain the emergence of human speech in beings possessing it, in a similar manner as the instincts of animals form the basis of the language of each animal species. Also, he is looking for something that would make human speech as essential for humans as their humanity itself. And furthermore, he is not trying to develop this out of any arbitrary or social forces, but out of general animal economy (allgemeinen tierishe Ökonomie), that is, physiology.12 The sharpness of the senses characteristic of animals results from the narrowness of their sphere of action. Consequently, Herder reasons that what compensates for this in the sensitive faculties of humans is that, due to their larger sphere of action, their senses have the advantage of freedom. Instead of being limited to one kind of work, such as building honeycombs or spiders webs, the human imagination (Vorstellungskraft) opens up to a free space of action in which the person can perfect himself endlessly. And in this way, Herder sums up that a human is no longer “an infallible machine in the hands of nature but an aim and an end to himself.”13 For Herder it does not matter whether one calls this special disposition of the powers of humans ‘understanding’, ‘reason’ or ‘reflection’ (Verstand, Vernunft, Besinnung) as long as one does not take these as isolated faculties (Kräfte) or merely as increased versions of the capacities of animals (Stufenhöhungen der Tierkräfte). It is this positive power of thought –​naturally, as Herder takes care to add, associated with a specific organisation of the body –​that constitutes the reason and the freedom characteristic of humans: 11 12 13

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 24–​26. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 26–​27. In the eighteenth century, the term ’animal economy’ referred to physiology. ‘Nicht mer eine unfehlbare Machine in den Händen der Nature, wird er sich selbst Zweck und Ziel der Bearbeitung’. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 28.

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Es ist die ganze Einrichtung aller Menschlichen Kräfte, die ganze Haushaltung seiner sinnlichen und erkennenden, seinen erkennenden und wollenden Natur, oder vielmehr –​Es ist die einzige positive Kraft des Denkens, die mit einer gewissen Organisation des Körpers verbunden, bei den Menschen so Vernunft heißt, wie sie bei den Tieren Kunstfähigkeit wird: die bei ihm Freiheit heißt, und bei den Tieren Instinkt wird.14 So despite the fact this specific set-​ up or the economy (Einrichtung, Haushaltung) of the sensual, knowing and willing nature of humans is not to be understood as consisting merely in the increment of the faculties which we can observe in animals, Herder seems to take the animal and the human capacities to be distinct expressions of the same ‘power of thought’ (Kraft des Denkens), which appears in the form of reason and freedom in humans and as specific practical abilities and instincts in animals. He certainly dismisses the idea that reason should be considered as a new and completely distinct power of the soul. All the powers of the human and animal souls are mere metaphysical abstractions resulting from our inability to grasp them all at once (auf einmal). As Herder puts it, they are presented in separate chapters, not because they work separately in nature, but in order to make the lesson easier to grasp for students. We also have distinguished and given names to their distinct manifestations, such as ‘wit’, ‘acumen’, ‘imagination’, or ‘reason’, but Herder insists rather pertinently that there is no action of the mind where wit or reason alone would act. It is always the same whole undivided soul that acts.15 But from this argument emphasising the unity of the soul, Herder derives an argument for the distinctness of the human soul from that of animals. If a human could perform one single act in which he would think like animal, he would definitely cease to be human and would no longer be capable of human action. If a human would be for one moment without reason, his soul and nature would be completely transformed, and Herder does not see how he could ever think using reason again. Reason determines the human’s being in way that is incompatible with animal instincts: if a human would have animal instincts, he could not have reason. And the same applies to animal senses. Animal instincts and sensitivity would simply not leave any room for calm deliberation or reflection (Besonnenheit), the specific characteristic of a human.16

14 15 16

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 28–​29. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 29–​30. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 30–​31.

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Reason is thus not for Herder any separate and independent faculty or power (Kraft), but the specific direction of all the powers or faculties of human beings, which a human must have in the first instance in order to be human.17 Thus, Besonnenheit must show itself even in the first thought of a human child. Of course, Herder admits that an infant does not reason like a sophist or a statesman, but remarks that this objection merely reveals differences between more or less educated uses of the same powers of the soul. And in order that something can develop, one must always have a seed that germinates and develops. Although an infant does not think like an adult, he or she is already thinking like a human (menschlich), and Besonnenheit is the direction of his mental powers right from the start.18 In this context, Herder objects to Rousseau’s idea of ‘potentiality of an ability’ (Vernunftfähigkeit, reflexion en puissance): if reason does not exist at the beginning, whence does it appear? Just like a human is from the very beginning characterised by Besonnenheit, even if to a lesser degree, animals in their sensitive nature are always lacking it.19 The reason why Herder emphasises the character of reflection or Besinnung as the essential and distinctive feature of the human mind in a treatise on the origin of language is that he believes that as soon as this reflection is effective (frei wirkend) man has already invented language. In other words, in so far as reflection is essential to him as a species, language and its invention are that as well. The invention of language is as natural to man as it is for him to be a man.20 Now we can easily see why Herder is critical of Condillac, who in Essai referred the human capacity for reflection to the invention of language and not vice versa, as Herder does. 2

The Word as Recognition

Like Condillac, Herder emphasises the human ability to control one’s attention, that is, to separate as it were one wave from the ocean of sensations, to separate one image from the dreamlike flux of images, to linger on it voluntarily and to take note of its distinctive features and thus to recognise it. This recognition, which gives rise to a clear concept, is the first judgement of the 17 18 19 20

‘Ist nämlich die Vernunf keine abgeteilte, einzelnwürkende Kraft sondern eine seiner Gattung eigne Richtung alle Krafte: so muss der Mensch sie im ersten Zustande haben, da er Mensch ist.’ Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 31. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 31–​32. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 33–​34. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, p. 34.

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soul. The first distinctive feature thus discovered is the ‘word of the soul’ (Wort der Seele), and this discovery constitutes, according to Herder, the invention of language.21 Thus, unlike Condillac, who was looking for the origin of language in the spontaneous cries or gestures, Herder is looking for the origin of language in the distinctive features of objects, which he takes to be first of all acoustic ones. For example, a lamb bleats, and this sound distinguishes it from other animals and provides at the same time a name for this animal, whether humans have tried to pronounce it themselves or not. Thus, in trying to understand the origin of language, one does not have to take into account or discuss the state articulatory organs of humans or those of orangutans. Even if man would remain dumb, he would still possess speech in his soul.22 Herder sums up: Hier ist’s kein Geschrei der Empfindung: denn nicht eine atmende Maschine, sondern ein besonnendes Geschöpf erfand Sprache.23 Thus, what Herder must have found objectionable in the theories of his French colleagues were the claims that the invention of language could be reduced to bodily functions and organs related to articulation. Nor is any intercourse with other humans required: a person living alone in the woods would have thus found language all by him-​or herself, even without speaking. No social agreement was needed, merely agreeing with oneself. So, Herder concludes, humans would have necessarily discovered language even without a mouth or a society.24 Even a blind and dumb person left alone on a desert island would develop an elementary language. His or her senses and the world would provide for his or her education.25 Herder criticises equally the supporters of the divine origin of language, such as Süßmilch, who had argued that the use of language is necessary for the use of reason. Herder denies this and claims on the contrary that the use of language follows naturally from the first act of reason. Against the divine origin, he evokes a variant of the vicious circle he has already referred to: without language humans have no reason and without reason no language. Likewise, without language and reason humans are evidently incapable of receiving the divine instruction and without this instruction they have no reason nor 21 22 23 24 25

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 34–​35. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, pp. 35–​38. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 38. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 38. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 101.

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language.26 Herder applies the same argument to the situation of parents and children: parents could not teach their children language unless their children had already discovered it themselves, in the manner he had described, by finding distinctive features and marking them with word-​signs (Wortzeichen). Herders sums up his arguments by observing that in order to understand God’s word as a word, one must already possess reason.27 And, since according to Süßmilch, this is not possible without language, the idea of the divine instruction of language does not work. Herder refers also to the case of children having grown up among bears that Süßmilch had also discussed and asks, citing the latter, whether they were in fact men. Herder’s answer is affirmative, but that they were men in an unnatural state, degenerate men (Menschen in Verartung), comparable to a plant over which one has put a stone, and which consequently has grown crooked. Herder presents also an interesting argument to the effect that it is this possibility of degeneration that reveals human nature: it is only in so far as humans lack instincts that they can change nature in this way. The fact that these children learned to behave in a bear-​like fashion proves that they possessed reason: the same reason that permits them to learn naturally to walk on two feet and to speak makes them capable of learning unnaturally to walk on all fours and to growl. Obviously bears could not learn the children’s behaviour this way. So Herder asks: how could these children have been provided with reason and humanity, if they did not already possess these features?28 Herder thinks that Rousseau’s hypothesis regarding the inequality of humans is built on a similar case of deviation (Abartung). Rousseau’s man in the state of nature is just a phantom. Herder refutes the idea that the being supposed by Rousseau could, through his ability to reason and his perfectibility, learn from all animals. Herder denies that such being could think and reflect on the characteristics of animals. Nor could he have imitated them. He could not have all these thoughts that Rousseau attributes him, if he did not already possess a language in his soul and the capacity to think, which gives him language. Here Herder makes a distinction between aping and imitation, the latter requiring Besonnenheit, choice and intention. Apes can ape but not imitate. So, despite his apish figure, this being that could imitate was in the inside already a human.29

26 27 28 29

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 38–​4O. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 40–​41. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 42–​44. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 44–​45.

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Herder refers to some ‘good-​ natured primitivists’ (Negerbrüder)30 in Europe, who speculate on the possibility of apes speaking. But in so far as Herder believes, like La Mettrie, that orangutans have a similar anatomy of the head and vocal apparatus required for speech as humans, he concludes that if they could have spoken, they would also have done so. And here again, Herder insists that it is not a question of the external sound of the word, but of the ‘inner, necessary genesis of the word, as a distinguishing character of distinct consciousness’.31 He remarks that dogs can learn to understand many words and orders, but only as signs joined to gestures or actions, and adds jokingly that if they possessed one word in the human sense of the word, they would create art, a republic and language. Herder sums up his criticisms of the theories concerning the origin of language by remarking that one has supposed language to be either so superhuman that one needs God to invent it or so inhuman that any animal could learn it if it took the trouble to do so. In Herder’s opinion, the error on both sides is immeasurably great.32 For Herder, language was the external distinguishing feature of humans, just like reason was the internal. He refers to the fact that some languages have only one term meaning both ‘word’ and ‘reason’, ‘concept’ and ‘word’, or ‘language’ and ‘cause’ –​a fact, he claims, which points to a common origin. He also mentions the idiom of some oriental languages in which the verb ‘name’ can be used in the sense of ‘recognize’, and adds that in the soul these actions are basically identical. Likewise, a human is called a ‘speaking animal’ and animals are referred to as ‘dumb’. Language and cognition are thus closely joined and internal language is also the instrument of thought: according to Herder one cannot think a human thought or form a reflected judgement without having or trying to have a dialogue in one’s soul. The first distinguishing feature which was a cue (Merkwort) for oneself becomes a means of communication for others (Mitteilungsworte).33 So Herder agrees with Condillac in so far as they both consider that language serves as an instrument of cognitive operations. But whereas Condillac thought that this interior language develops from the social

30

The term ’Negerbüder’, which cannot be found in any of dictionaries I have consulted, is rather difficult to translate. I have used here Alexander Gode’s translation in Johann Gottfried von Herder and Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Two Essays on the Origin of Language, trans. with afterwords by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 129. 31 ‘[…] der innern, nothwendiger Genesis einer Wort, als das Merkmal einer deutlichen Besinnung […].’ Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 45. My translation. 32 Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 45–​46. 33 Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 47.

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language in the context of interaction with other humans, for Herder, just like Hobbes, the interior speech is primary and its communicative use secondary. 3

Sounds and Other Sensations

Even if Condillac’s theory pays a lot of attention to sensation as the foundation of all human knowledge, in discussing the origin of language he insists equally on the role of action and gestures.34 We have seen that Herder discards the idea that language could have originated in visual or auditory gestures and focuses instead on sensations, and not just any sensations but primarily on sounds. What makes sounds so special that they provide humans with the distinctive features of objects and thus the vocabulary to the soul? One could object to Herder’s story of the origin of naming, which refers to a sheep bleating, by insisting that not all objects produce sounds. Herder acknowledges this objection by posing the question himself: if one starts naming things by the sounds they make, how does one arrive at naming inanimate things which do not, like sheep, speak in their natural language and give their names in this way? How can man find a way to transform that which is not sound into sound?35 In providing an answer to these questions, Herder refers to two primitive features of mankind: an inclination to animism and a natural tendency to synaesthesia. Humans have a tendency to relate everything to themselves and thus everything seems to speak to them and to appear to them as a friendly or a hostile being. The first dictionary was thus, according to Herder, a resounding Pantheon of animate beings.36 But although this animism explains many features of language, such as the gender of inanimate beings in many languages, Herder would still have to explain how one arrives at naming things which do not make any sound. How do colours or smells, for example, relate to hearing? How can they make themselves heard? Herder finds objectionable the idea that one could choose names arbitrarily without any reason. Human nature is simply built in a way that doing anything without reason is unnatural for it. So, one should find a language for silent visible or palpable things. Herder finds the solution to this 34

35 36

This is also true in the case of the Traité des sensation, where the sense of touch has a similar role as language in the Essai in making sensations representational. In the Traité the role of touch is central mainly because it is closely and visibly joined to the exploration of space through movement. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 59–​60. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 53.

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problem in the fundamental unity of all sensations. In so far as they are all sensations within us, they communicate with each other. Hence he claims that eventually all ‘dissections’ (Zergliederungen) of a human as a sensing being, such as Buffon’s and Condillac’s, are merely philosopher’s abstractions.37 Different sense modalities are in reality connected and thus the sensations of one sense are connected and even translatable to the others. Language bears testimony to this: we describe sounds as sweet, as if they would have a taste, or harsh or sharp, as if they were felt. Here Herder remarks that all senses are basically just different forms of feeling.38 But Herder does not, for this reason, elevate the sense of touch to a central position among the senses, a position which for him belongs definitely to hearing. The importance of hearing for Herder lies in the fact that it enjoys a middle position among the senses. By being related to this central sense modality, the other sensations are associated with the distinctive features (Merkmal) that inner speech requires.39 Herder lists six different ways in which the central position of hearing is evident. It enjoys the middle position in terms of the sphere of its sensitivity to the outside word, clarity, liveliness, temporality (succession vs. simultaneity), need to express itself, and development. The central position in these dimensions explains why hearing is the sense of language, Sinn der Sprache. So, for example, in so far as the sphere of their sensitivity is concerned, Herder observes that sensitivity of the sense of touch is concentrated in itself and its organ, whereas sight spreads itself into a multiplicity of seen things. But hearing occupies a middle position in this respect, a fact which makes it ideal for language. And, in so far as clarity is concerned, the sense of touch is too vague, and sight too clear, providing such an abundance of distinctive qualities that makes recognition difficult. So, what is seen is literally unspeakable (unausspechlich). And so on: in all the dimensions Herder examines, its middle position makes hearing the ideal sense for language.40 So, because of its ideal middle position among the senses, hearing is able to express all other sensations. The older the language is, the more this interpenetration of senses is evidence. The analogies between the senses are ­conspicuous in the etymological roots of words in these languages.41 The etymological study of languages also reveals national differences in their respective

37 38 39 40 41

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, pp. 60–​62. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, pp. 63–​64. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 64. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 64–​68. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 70–​71.

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worldviews, Denk-​und Sehart des Volks.42 Furthermore, they throw light on the dark recesses of the human mind: […] wo sich die Begriffe durchkreuzen und verwickeln! Wo die verschiedenste Gefühle einander erzeugen, wo eine dringende Gelegenheit alle Kräfte der Seele aufbietet und die ganze Erfindungskunst, der sie fähig ist, zeiget.43 Herder is thus harking back, though perhaps not without nostalgia, to the past, to the creative and poetic powers of primitive language, the remnants of which can still be seen in modern and developed languages. The older the language, the more we find such poetic and bold metaphors.44 Here he makes, just as Condillac and Diderot before him, some observations on the national differences in the possibilities that languages permit. So, for example, Herder notes that French poets cannot go further than the inventors of their language: their whole language is the prose of sound reason (gesunde Vernnunft), and has originally no poetic words which the poets could claim as their own.45 The metaphoric nature of human language constitutes for Herder a further proof of its human origin. If it were of divine origin, one could ask, was God so poor in ideas and words that he had to have recourse to such confused use of words, or whether he was so fascinated by hyperbolic and metaphoric expressions that he grounded his language on these.46 Like Condillac, who considered the principle of analogy as a means to develop language and enlarge concrete meanings into abstract concepts, Herder makes the poetic and creative dimension of language responsible for the possibility abstraction. Abstract and general concepts have originally started as metaphors based on sensible things: in the oriental languages spirit is ‘wind’, ‘breath’, and so on. General concepts result from abstraction, wit, fantasy, metaphor and analogy. Instead of abstractions emerging in the human mind in a Platonian manner as reminiscences of the realm of spirits, they are all awakened on the occasion of sensations. Thus, Herder concludes, no language has abstractions which were not derived from sound or feeling (Gefühl). And the more original the language, the more feelings (Gefühle) are involved.47

42 43 44 45 46 47

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 72. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 73. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 74. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 74. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 71. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 78.

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In this context Herder also refers to primitive (ungebildeten) languages such as Sami, Finnish or Estonian, and to the difficulties the missionaries had had in explaining such Christian concepts such as ‘holiness’ or ‘spirit’ to people speaking languages which do not possess words for these (Barantola and Hottentot respectively). Herder draws attention to the fact, however, that not having a word for an abstraction does not necessarily imply the absence of the thing itself. Thus, according to the descriptions of de la Condamine and Maupertuis, the peoples from Peru, the Amazon district, or Lapland do not have words for ‘time’, ‘duration’, ‘space’, ‘entity’, ‘substance’, ‘body’, ‘virtue’, ‘justice’ ‘freedom’ or ‘gratitude’, but they are still able to reason with these concepts and their actions demonstrate that they indeed possess these virtues. As long as they have not made these ideas into clear distinctive features for them (Merkmal), then they do not have any words for them.48 Having distinct ideas is primary and language, in the sense of spoken audible speech, depends on this interior language built on distinctive features. On the other hand, the study of ‘wild men’ (Wilde) shows, according to Herder, the sensual aspect of even abstract thought: when a wild man thinks that a thing possesses a spirit, there must be a sensible thing present from which he abstracts the spirit. This point is primarily directed against the supporters of the divine origin of language: Herder asks whether one can point out one single general concept which has come to men from heaven.49 This does not seem to be even necessary in so far as language is a necessary attribute of men. Since there is no reason without abstraction and no abstraction without language, Herder concludes that every language must already possess abstractions, the tools of reason.50 Although Herder disagrees with Condillac on the primacy, as a tool of reason, of artificial, socially acquired speech over internal speech, he sees the mutual influence of language and reason as a similar ‘virtuous circle’ as Condillac: reason progresses through the use of language and language through the use of reason. Likewise, as the habit of reflection depends on language and at the same time its use develops language, the continuing development of language is natural to man.51 And this is where progress steps in. There is no limit to the fecundity of the human mind.52 Man does not cease to develop, progress and improve.53 48 49 50 51 52 53

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 78–​79. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 80–​81. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 82. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 101–​102. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 88. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 98.

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The Innateness of Language Ability

According to Herder, man is a creature of language, Geschöpf der Sprache.54 This does not mean, however, that it is language that creates the human but rather the other way round. A human is necessarily already at birth a conscious being, who is capable of the inner development of language. Herder compares this to the development of the embryo: the genesis of language proceeds by a similar inner urge which makes an embryo to leave the womb when it has sufficiently matured.55 And this development results in the radical difference between the thoughts of humans in comparison to those of animals. In addition to having blind instinctual mechanisms that humans lack,56 animals too can think, more or less clearly. But they cannot think distinctly (deutlich). Their thought is always sensual, a dreamlike sequence of individual sensible events (Fälle) that have not been joined together or ordered by reflection or wakeful clear consciousness.57 Herder admits that, in addition to having their instincts, animals can also learn from experience, but they do this without reflection –​whereas the succession of ideas in the human mind is always ordered by reflection, Besonnenheit.58 People’s thoughts are always, even in their dreams, ordered and distinct; thinking always like a human being, and never wholly like an animal.59 In so far as the initial state of consciousness is not possible without the spiritual word (Wort der Seele), all states of calm reflection (Besonnenheit) can be expressed in language: their chain forms a chain of words. Herder adds, however, that this does not mean that humans always transform their most obscure feelings into words or that they can experience them only by means of words. Rather the contrary, that which can be experienced merely as an obscure feeling cannot be expressed in words, in so far as it does not give rise to any distinguishing feature (Merkmal). In this way, the basis of humankind is, in terms of arbitrary language, ineffable.60 But even if the human mind would involve such obscure depths beyond language as its foundation, Herder asks rhetorically, perhaps referring to Condillac’s statue, whether the plinth is the whole statue? So, this animal-​ like part of human nature does not make the whole human into an obscurely

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 93. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, pp. 94–​96. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 93. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 96. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 97. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 99. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 99–​100.

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feeling oyster.61 Where calm reflection has weaved his thought into a whole, there is nothing which is not consciousness or at least capable of being made conscious: Lasset uns also den ganzen faden seiner Gedanken nehmen; da er von Besonnenheit gewebt ist: da sich in ihm kein Zustand findet, der im ganzen genommen, nicht selbst Besinnung sey oder in Besinnung erklärten werden könne […]62 Thus, humans are not ruled by feeling. In the centre of human nature lies the finer senses of sight and hearing, which continuously provide language. From this Herder concludes definitely that in the human soul there is no condition that cannot be articulated in words. In order to think wholly without words, one should be the obscurest of dreamers or cattle, the most abstract visionary Götterseher or a dreaming monad, and such a state is not possible in a human soul, not even in dreams or in madness.63 Thinking without words seems for Herder to be either divine or beastly. Words are an inescapable the part of humanity. The more humans are obliged, because they lack instincts, to distinguish what is useful and what dangerous, the more this develops their language, and the richer and more ordered it gets. Herder imagines how a dumb man with the intelligence (Verstande) of an animal, unable to think words in his soul, would be the unhappiest, most useless and forsaken creature. And a living contradiction as well. Herder remarks that humans must either be lowest of all, nothing, or reign over everything with their wisdom. They must either rule over everything or perish.64 In order to be able to do this, a certain kind division of labour is necessary: in a society the powers of the soul are divided among its members. This is something that could not be possible in the ‘natural state of man’. So, a philosopher brought up in a society which has merely developed his thinking and writings skills, could never have survived and learned everything he needs to know in order to survive in unknown surroundings, in surroundings where he would not know, for example, anything about the properties of plants or animals. Herder observes how difficult it would be to learn everything one needs in order to survive before one had perished in

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Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 100. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 100. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 100. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 101–​103.

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trying to eat a poisonous plant or being eaten by a lion –​these being just those experiences by which he could learn to avoid such things.65 Herder continues by remarking that one does not need an abstracting philosopher for the invention of language, but a raw natural man who feels his soul as well as his body as if it would be one whole. And here Herder returns once again to his arch enemy Süßmilch, and the latter’s objections against the possibility of the human origin of language. Süßmilch argues that even if humans could have invented language by imitation, they could never have been able to develop it further. Herder takes it to be proven that the invention of language by mere imitation, without a human soul, is impossible. Thus, Herder argues that if the supporter of the divine origin of human language would have realised that this supposition concerning the invention of language by imitation is absurd, he would not have paraded in opposition to it the mass of half-​truths that do not constitute any proofs against the invention of language by understanding (durch Verstand). According to Herder, the problem with Süßmilch’s argumentation is basically that the latter had overlooked the naturally developing nature of human language and the capacity of the human soul to educate itself.66 He then quotes a passage in which Süßmilch speculates on the development and improvement of language. Herder replies by asking whether one needs a thousand generations to realise what language is. Herder thinks that the first human knew the answer when he thought the first thought. One does not need a thousand generations to realize that language is something that can be improved. This was something that the first humans realized, when they were ameliorating, ordering, distinguishing and putting together their first distinguishing features, and, by doing that, were improving their newly acquired language.67 The ability to invent language should be looked for in the courageous and passionate inventiveness of the human mind confronted with needs and dangers, when it has not yet been slowed down into progressing by abstract rules. This is the human responsible for the invention of language, not the human mind in its fine, social, versatile and learned form.68 One could wonder why must it be the human in its primitive and ‘natural’ state and not the cultivated mind that possesses the mental strength that the invention and development of language requires? Herder’s answer is that the less developed the powers of the soul are, the narrower their sphere of action, and the stronger they work together, the more intensively they are able to focus. 65 66 67 68

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 104–​105. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 106. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 106–​107. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 109–​110.

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This explains why such a mind can do what a philosopher with all his gifts for abstraction cannot. And curiously, and in complete contrast to Condillac, Herder takes society and interaction with other beings to be –​instead of factors contributing to the development of language –​something that is in fact detrimental to it. The forces of the human were most sharply focused and inspired when they were not distracted by the incentives of society but worked by inner urge and external demands.69 Herder reproaches his century for having lost himself in the artificial world of workshops without seeing the light of the ‘unimprisoned nature’. In revering the rules of later grammarians, one has forgotten the real divine genius of speech, Sprachnatur,70 which was formed in the heart of man with his mind.71 However, even if Herder minimises the role of human intercourse in the invention of language, he does not neglect it in its further development. His ‘second law of nature’ states that man is destined to be a social being: Der Mensch ist in seiner Bestimmung ein Geschöpf der Herde, der Gesellschaft: die Fortbildung einer Sprache wird ihm also natürlich, we­ sentlich, notwendig.72 But once again, for Herder everything originates in nature, which makes this development natural, essential and necessary. Herder refers to such facts as the need for protection of a pregnant mother or of the helpless human infant. Thus humans are naturally endowed to associate, and this behaviour is, as Herder observes, as close to instinctual as it can be for a reflecting (besonnenen) creature –​‘nature’s household-​management’ showing the way.73 He challenges the Epicureans, who want to explain everything by blind pleasure or immediate self-​interest, to explain the feelings of parents for their offspring and the strong ties they give rise to.74 The disinterested care that parents bestow on a child elevates humans above all animals and makes mankind into a intrinsically bound whole.75 However, according to Herder this kind of care should not be identified with animal instincts, which each animal has at birth and takes to 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 110–​111. For the concept of ‘Sprachnatur,’ see Andreas Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland: Vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 110–​111. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 111–​112. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 112. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 113. Herder’s uses here the expression ’Haushaltung der Natur zur Gesellung der Menschheit’. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, pp. 113–​114. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 115.

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the end of its life without propagating it (ohne sie fortzuplantzen). For an animal everything remains particular and is the immediate work of nature. Thus, there is ‘no progression of the soul of the species’. And Herder adds there is no whole, ‘kein Ganzes, wie es die Natur am Menschen wollte’.76 Interestingly, once again we see Herder distinguishing humans from animals by referring to the fact that they do not act by the instincts given by nature and yet, in the same breath, referring this distinction to nature. In addition, however, he refers to the ties created by necessity and ‘anticipating parental instinct’, to instruction and education.77 Thus, no one person is there for only himself, but joined intimately to the whole species, to the succession of generations.78 So, for Herder, the development of human education starts within the family. He gives a teleological reason for the fact that the human infant is so weak and ignorant at the mother’s breast or sat on the father’s knee. This is so the child would be eager to learn and, of utmost importance, learn language. The child is weak in order for its species to be strong. Here language also steps in: with language the child shares the soul, the whole mind-​set of its progenitor.79 With its mother tongue the child receives, in addition to the clear principal idea attached to a word, the affective connotations, which remain with the child and affect it even more than the principal idea.80 One of the reasons why Herder starts with the family is undoubtedly that family ties can be considered more natural than those related to the society at large, which tend to be more arbitrary and conventional. Hence he refers to a passage from Rousseau, where the Frenchman wonders how humans could have imposed on others the arbitrary language they had discovered and have made them accept their laws. Herder refers to the way one learns one’s mother tongue in the context of the family and remarks that here again the laws of nature are stronger than conventions.81 For Herder, language is also a kind of a living organism which develops and creates new idioms in different climates and circumstances, and this naturally, as language is the human’s mind and soul.82 The diversity of circumstances

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 115. ‘Den band sie also durch Not und einen zuvorkommenden Elterntrieb […] zusammen, und so wurde ein Band des Unterrichts und der Erziehung ihm wesentlich.’ Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 115. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 116. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 116. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, p. 117. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol 5, pp. 117–​118. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 125.

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results ultimately in different national languages for each nation.83 The continuing changes and different varieties of language constitute for Herder further proof of its human origin.84 And the same argument applies to the observable development of languages.85 Despite all variety, however, language is also something that binds human souls together, it holds the chain of generations together: thus the first human thought is connected with the last thought of the last human.86 Herder presents here a biological comparison: humans do not have speech innately, like bees building honeycombs, each one separately. Through language and education, the generations of humans constitute an unbreakable chain, so that a thought in a human soul is never lost. And also, in this way, a skill of the species is never there once and for all, in the manner of the skills of animals, but rather is always in progress, always in movement. Language is the treasure chamber of human thought and the sum of the activity of all human souls.87 And finally, Herder refers to the development of needs in a human society, which also distinguishes humans from animals. He observes that a man living alone without pressing needs and living a leisurely life, would on that account –​irrespective of him having the leisure to do so –​not be prolific in developing language. On the contrary, he would become wild and soon languish in idleness as his activities would first have circled around satisfying his most pressing needs. But put him in a society and his needs multiply: he has to take care of himself and others. And in this way the social ties, instead of binding him, paradoxically set him free, in so far as this restlessness keeps his soul in movement.88 In his afterword to his translation to Herder’s essay, Alexander Gode sums up nicely the basic problem with Herder’s explanation of the origin of language. The fundamental dilemma in Herder’s thought, according to Gode, is that nothing can arise unless it exists.89 So, in explaining the invention of language as naturalistically as Condillac had done, without any divine intervention, Herder is forced to introduce some kind of a pre-​existing linguistic seed in the human’s soul, which develops naturally, resulting inevitably in

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Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 127. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 128 and 133. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 143–​144. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 135. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, pp. 135–​136. Abhandlung, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 140. Alexander Gode, ‘Afterword’, in Johann Gottfried von Herder and Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau, Two Essays on the Origin of Language, p. 171.

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the invention of language, even without the intercourse and interaction with other humans. His comparisons and his way of thinking is basically biological or organic. 5

Herder, Hamann and Kant

Herder seems to have taken seriously Hamann’s critique concerning his use of the concept of Besonnenheit in Abhandlung über den Ursprung de Sprache (1772),90 since in his later work Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–​91) the term appears only twice and in neither case in the same role as in the earlier work.91 Consequently, his conception starts to resemble more and more Süßmilch’s, since language becomes more an immediate gift of God, instead of a donation being mediated by the instinct-​like faculty of Besonnnenheit.92 In this later work, Herder considers it inexplicable that man would have cultured himself and invented language and the first sciences without ‘higher instruction’ (höhere Anleitung).93 He explains that in leaving the invention of language itself unexplained as a problem of divinity, he does not exclude the guidance of a higher being: he is merely explicating

90 See the next chapter. 91 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, pp. 160, and vol. 14, p. 146. 92 Herder, Sprachphilosophische Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1964), p. 163; Sämmtliche Werke, 13, p. 138. For the close friendship, and disagreements, between Herder and Hamann, see Joseph Nadler, Johann Georg Hamann 1730–​1788, Der Zeuge des corpus mysticum (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1949), pp. 192–​197, 202–​205 and passim. In contrast to Nadler, who describes Herder’s and Hamann’s intellectual relation more as an interchange of ideas and reciprocal inspiration (op. cit., p. 401), Michael N. Forster tends to insist on the influence of the former on the latter. See Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 9, 16–​ 17, 56–​57, 65–​67, 91, 132, 155, 290 and 301–​302. Forster remarks, however, that as far as the thesis of the dependence of thought on language is concerned, it was not Herder’s invention, but that variants of it had been presented already before him by other writers with whom Herder was familiar. Forster refers mainly Herder’s German predecessors and considers Condillac’s influence ‘marginal’. Forster, After Herder, pp. 59–​61. For Herder’s and Hamann’s reciprocal relations and influences, see also Robert T. Clark, Jr., Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), pp. 46–​ 50, 156–​162, 212–​213 and 394. Clark also discusses the hypothesis that there was an ironic dimension in Herder’s essay. Hamann even considered it as a joke at the expense of the Academy or as a clever piece of hack work with the aim of gaining the substantial prize (Clark, pp. 158 and 160). 93 Sprachphilosophische Schriften, p. 168; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 196.

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how the human soul works, under whatever teaching this occurs.94 So it does not really matter whether one explains how a child learns language from its parents or how God taught humans to speak. But without God having spoken to man and given him thus the gift of speech, man’s language abilities would have remained lifeless.95 In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit Herder insists that we all come to the possession of reason through language, and to the possession of language by tradition, by believing the word of our parents.96 But he still insists that nature has built humans for speech. Humans who have grown up among animals have lost not only language but partially also the capacity to learn language.97 Instead of referring to a specific capacity like Besonnenheit in order to solve Rousseau’s conundrum, he now relies on the more general idea that humans are organised for the capacity to reason (Vernunftfähigkeit) and for language.98 As far as reason is concerned, the most significant difference between humans and other animals lies, not so much in the size of specific parts of his brain as in the human’s upright posture. The advantageous form of the human brain depends on its bodily organisation as a whole and in the final analysis on its upright posture.99 In addition to the traditional idea that this posture permits humans to turn their gaze to heaven instead of the earth, Herder refers to some more anatomically and scientifically valid and rational reasons. For example, the human body’s upright posture and the corresponding skull structure permits the senses of vision and hearing to enter the inner brain, to the ‘holy chamber of ideas’, the seat of consciousness.100 Herder observes also that with its upright position the human becomes a creature of arts (Kunstgeschöpf): it permits the human to learn everything and become a living skill or art (eine lebendige Kunst). The upright position permits the human to use its skilful hands as tools.101 It is also this upright posture which permits the proper use of its speech organs. It is also by referring to this fact that the feral children have lost the capacity to learn 94

Sprachphilosophische Schriften, p. 178; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 367. From a crossed-​ out passage in an earlier transcript. 95 Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts: eine nach Jahrhunderten enthüllte heilige Schrift (1774), in Sprachphilosophische Schriften, pp. 228–​229; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7, pp. 30–​31. 96 Sprachphilosophische Schriften, p. 175; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 362. 97 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 141. 98 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, pp. 115 and 136. 99 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, pp. 127–​128. 100 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, pp. 129–​130. For the conception of the inner brain as the ‘workshop of ideas’, where different sensations and organic forces are united, constituting higher consciousness (der höhere Besinnung), see ibid., pp.124–​125. 1 01 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 137.

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language: their throats end up being deformed. Human language can develop only in the upright position.102 With its organisation permitting the acquisition of language, the human has received the seed for reason.103 So instead of an instinct-​like faculty like Besonnenheit, Herder is now referring to specific anatomical structures which have prepared the human to receive language. Michael N. Forster has quite convincingly argued that in some respects Herder’s essay on the origins of language presents a temporary lapse from a more radical doctrine concerning the relation between language and thought that consists of two claims: that one can think only if one has language, and that meanings or concepts are identical with word usages instead of some language-​independent items such as mental ideas. According to Forster, in the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache Herder’s position waters down to something that is closer to the ‘standard Enlightenment position’ that thought and meaning are prior to language. Thus, Hamann’s critique is actually playing back Herder’s earlier position against the latter’s position in the Abhandlung.104 Indeed, Herder had already insisted in his Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur (1766/​1778) that thinking is ‘almost nothing else’ than speaking and that each nation speaks like it thinks and thinks as it speaks.105 Herder later also recognised the speciousness of his arguments considering the recognition of characteristic marks as the basis of language.106 In Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit Herder admitted that no human can become human by itself. A human being is the result of both tradition and organic forces. Education is based on imitation and practice, but the one that imitates must have the capacity to absorb what he is imitating.107 Herder did not, however, consider the naturalistic explanations related to the human’s physiological organisation sufficient for explaining his nature and its acquisition. Whatever advantages and tools the upright position may have given humans, Herder claims that without language they would all have remained without effect. God must have provided the necessary driving force, speech, that sets everything in movement. It is speech which awakens the slumbering reason, considered as a mere ‘naked faculty’ (nackte Fähigkeit). Speech also unites sight, hearing, and other senses, into creative thinking, to

1 02 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 141. 103 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 142. 104 Forster, After Herder, pp. 58, 132 and 306. 105 Johann Gottlieb Herder, Sprachphilosophische Schriften, p. 100; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 18. 106 Foster, After Herder, p. 64. 107 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 345.

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which the hand and other bodily members are submitted. Here Herder again evokes the dumb and the deaf and observes how little people can achieve ideas or reason without language, even if they are among their fellow creatures.108 Even when living in a world of gestures and other signs of ideas, they behave like children or human animals. So, Herder wonders: ‘How strange, that a turbulent breath of air should be the only, at least the best resource of our thoughts and sensations.’109 He compares the elaborate human speech organs to the steering rudder of our reason.110 In Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit Herder describes ­language also as the mother of inventions, of ties of sociability and of new artificial needs. It is by language, and by language alone, that perception, recognition, remembrance, appropriation (besitznehmung), or a chain of thoughts are made possible, and with these eventually all sciences and crafts.111 Each new craft and science provides new ties of sociability in the form of shared needs, without which artificial men can no longer live.112 We can see that despite references to divine intervention in his later works, Herder is simultaneously developing naturalistic explanations for the appearance of language ability in humans. He does this by evoking, besides innate instinct-​like mental capacities such as Besonnenheit, also biological or physiological features whose role in language development have been popular in later explanations of the development of language in humans: for instance, neoteny and upright position with the consequent development of speech organs.113 He admits that humans do have innate instincts. A human child is born with all animal instincts, although subject to organisation and moderation: that is, they are ordered by the child’s nerves and finer senses (sight and hearing notably). Herder connects this fact to the slow development of the human offspring compared to animals. In so far as reason is not an inborn instinct but something the child must learn, the child comes into the world weaker than any animal.114 That Herder’s thinking is influenced by biology is evident not only in the metaphors he uses but also in his explanatory models. As we have seen, however, this did not prevent him from giving divine intervention its due. 1 08 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, pp. 138–​139. 109 ‘Wie sonderbar, daß ein bewegter Lufhthauch das einzinge, wenigstens das beste Mittel unsrer Gedanken und Empfindungen seyn sollte.’ Sprachphilosophische Schriften, pp. 172–​ 173; Sämmtliche Werke, xiii, p. 356–​357. 110 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 139. 111 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 368. 112 Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 372. 113 See, for example Alain Prochianz, Singe toi-​même (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2019). 114 Sämmtliche Werke, vol 13, pp. 142–​144.

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So, although Herder states that reason is an analogon of instinct,115 it should be emphasised that for Herder of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, reason is not an innate faculty. Reason is a later acquisition, and humans are not born into the world capable of reasoning. They could not possess or acquire it autonomously.116 Herder considers it inexplicable that a human, who is for the most part an animal, could have acquired culture, language and the first sciences without higher guidance.117 One can detect the role of Hamann, a close friend of Herder’s, in the development of the latter’s ideas on the origins of language. In his Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (1799), Herder varies the title and argumentation of Hamann’s critique of Kant’s project, based on the idea that latter had forgotten the role of language in his criticism of pure reason. Like Hamann in his Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernunft (1784),118 Herder argues that thinking about space and time relies on language, although in a different way and with more linguistic detail than Hamann. Herder brings up the words by which we distinguish spatial relations and the elements of verbs, conjugations, which distinguish temporal relations.119 A similar argument could be applied to other concepts of human understanding (menchlicher Verstandsbegriffe). As thinking is regarded as inner speech, nothing can be thought of without distinguishing marks (Merkmahl).120 When Herder discusses the concepts related to forces, he refers also to the fact that expressions related to understanding (Verstandssprache) are derived from verbs related to acting and suffering (Tun und Leiden), thus joining these concepts to our bodily activities, instead of merely to intellectual faculties.121 Likewise, when discussing the standard units of measures, Herder remarks that these are originally, like the unit of the foot, related to the dimensions of the human body, and that counting originates in counting with one’s fingers.122 Herder concludes that the categories of human understanding that make experience possible do not arise a priori without an object but rather are expressed in a human language.123 In 1 15 116 117 118 119 1 20 121 122 123

Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 319. Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, p. 174. Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 13, pp. 196 and 198. Hamann’s work was actually published posthumously in 1800, but Herder had a copy of it already in 1784. See Joseph Nadler, Johann Georg Hamann, p. 350. Herder, ‘Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der Reinen Vernunft’, in Sprachphilosophische Schriften, pp. 186–​188; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 21, note on p. 49 and pp. 57–​58. Ibid., in Sprachphilosophische Schriften, pp. 188–​199; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 21, p. 88 ff. Ibid., in Sprachphilosophische Schriften, p. 199; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 21, p. 106. Ibid., in Sprachphilosophische Schriften p. 201; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 21, pp. 108–​109. Ibid., in Sprachphilosophische Schriften, p. 204; Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 21, p. 112.

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the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Herder more or less rejoins Hamann’s opinion concerning the impossibility of pure reason.124 124 ‘Eine reine Vernunft ohne sprache ist auf Erden ein utopisches Land’. Idéen, in Sprachphilosophische Shriften, p. 173; Sämmtliche Werke, 13, p. 357.

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Hamann and the Primacy of Language and Tradition One of the writers who reacted to Herder’s prize-​winning essay in 1771 was Johann Georg Hamann.1 Before this, in his Versuch über eine akademische Frage (1760), Hamann had already commented on the 1759 essay contest on the mutual influence of language and opinions, mainly by insisting on the ambiguities involved in the terms of the problem. Hamann refers briefly to abbé Pluche’s La Mécanique des langues et l’art de les enseigner (1751) and to Diderot’s Lettre sur les sourds et les muets (1751) and concludes on some examples of the reciprocal influence between language and opinions.2 However, he observes that some writers are more dependent on the language and the opinions it expresses than others: Ein kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt, wird immer Eingriffe in der Sprache thun; ein Autor hingegen auf Rechnung einer Gesellschaft, lässt die ihm vorgeschriebene Worte wie eine Mietsdichtern die Endreime (bouts-​rimées) gefallen, die ihn auf die Gleise derjenigen Gedanken und Meynungen bringen, so sich am besten schicken.3 Hamann thus refers to the fact that language tends to guide thought along certain predetermined traces, observing however, that it is possible for creative and individual writers to modify language. This is an idea that we will see later developed in more detail by Humboldt.

1 Haynes’s introduction to Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, trans. and ed. Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: University Press, 2007), p. xxii. 2 Johann Georg Hamann, ‘Essay on an academic question’, in ibid., pp. 9–​19; ‘Versuch über eine academishe Frage’, in J. G. Hamann, Schriften zur Sprache, with an introduction and notes by Josef Simon (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1967, pp. 87–​94; Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, 6 vols. (Wien: Herder, 1947–​1953), ii, pp. 119–​126 (hereafter cited as N). 3 Schriften zur Sprache, p. 94; N 2, p. 126.

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The Problem of Word Order

In his Vermischte Anmerkungen über die Wortfügung in der Französishen Sprache (1760) Hamann discusses the traditional problem concerning word order.4 This essay on word order, with its references to Maupertuis, Diderot and Rousseau, shows that he was familiar not only with Leibniz’s writings on language but also with the French discussions on the subject of language and word order. Hamann starts by referring to Leibniz’s parallel between money and language, and argues that money and language stand in a closer relationship to one another than it might be thought. The theory that explains one also explains the other, and they thus appear to be derived from a common ground. With an apt sense of metaphor, he concludes: ‘The wealth of all human knowledge rests on the exchange of words.’ He then goes on to state that it should come as no surprise that eloquence was just as important in the operations of the state in ancient times as finances are in the discretion and fortune of his own time. Hamann compares languages that permit inversions, such as Latin or German, to those that do not, such as French. He observes that the habit of ‘construing’ (that is, reconstructing) the phrases of ancient writers –​using the free word order permitted by their language –​deprives students of the melodious character of the phrases of these ancient authors. Furthermore, emphasis is usually lost. This sense of emphasis is important, as it awakens and maintains the required levels of attention of the reader or listener through the placement of the words. Inversions serve both intellectual and aesthetic purposes: they are not arbitrary but subject to the judgement of the intellect and the sense of hearing. Hamann explains the fact that some languages permit altering word order through the composition of their grammatical etymology: Je mannfaltiger und je sinnlicher der Veränderungen der Beweglichen Redetheirle, nämlich Nenn-​und Zeitwörtern durch die Etymologie der Sprachkunst bezeichnet werden: desto ungebundener kann ihre syntactische Zusammenziehung sein.5 One could consider the rigid word order of French as a handicap, but Hamann reminds those who would accuse that language of a monotonous word order

4 Schriften zur Sprache, pp. 95–​104; N 2, pp. 127–​136. 5 Schriften zur Sprache, p. 99; N 2, p 131.

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that in Latin the audible endings and frequent meetings occurring in its case endings also produce a certain monotony. Hamann then puts the blame on authors! The defects that languages are burdened with result from the incompetence of authors in their choices and treatment of the material at their disposal. He finishes his text by referring to the French Academy and warning that the purity of language deprives it of its wealth, and that an all too rigid correctness deprives language of its strength. 2

The Origin of Language

In Des Ritters von Rosenkreuz letzte Willensnemeynung über den göttlichen und menschlichen Ursprung der Sprache (1772) Hamann comments on the question posed in the 1771 essay contest on the origins of language. The original title page of Hamann’s essay gave the false date of 1770, implying that it had been submitted to the contest.6 In this text Hamann, in so far as he can be said to answer to the question, gives an ambiguous answer, to say the least: ‘Happy the man who waits two or three, even four years, until the testimony [Meynung] of this last will is revealed, whose hidden sense is still sealed!’7 Despite the voluntary obscurity of certain passages dealing with Frederic the Great, and the fact that one cannot find a direct answer to the question of whether language is of human or divine origin, the text does provide an interesting and perspicacious commentary on the terms in which the question is posed. Hamann questions the simplicity and validity of the contrast made between human and divine origins. He reminds the reader of the fact that God is supposed to be the origin of all effects in things great and small and that thus everything is divine, the instruments of language, the gifts of the alma mater, nature included. And certainly, in so far as God as the creator of these instruments obviously desired and was obliged to implant likewise their use, language is also divine. Further, he observes that if a higher being or an angel is supposed to take effect through our tongue, it must be expressed, like the talking animals in Aesop’s Fables, in analogy with human nature. And thus, in this respect, the origin and the progress of language cannot be but human. After this, Hamann starts to deconstruct avant terme the supposed clarity between things that are natural and things that are artificial in humanity. 6 Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, p. 96 (fn. 1). 7 ‘Will and testament of the Knight of the Rose-​Cross concerning the Divine and human origin of Language’, in Georg Johann Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, pp. 96–​110; Schriften zur Sprache, pp. 137–​147; N 3, pp. 25–​33.

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He discusses a long list of things that appear natural but which on closer inspection are perhaps not so natural. He starts by mentioning the claim of a learned doctor, presented at the Anatomy Theatre in Pavia, to the effect that the vertical two-​legged gait of man is inherited (in the cultural sense of the word) and artificial. Likewise, there is an element of artificiality in the way humans eat and drink. Thus, even these cannot be considered innate ideas of the human species but inherited and artificial customs. Human hunger and thirst are directed at different things among different peoples and in different circumstances. Here he reminds the reader of Hume’s conclusion that there is no physical connection between cause and effect, and between means and intent. Hamann implies that this applies to physical needs and the ways to satisfy them: the connection here too is based on custom and habit. But just as the reader might expect Hamann to argue that language is a human invention, he turns his argument surprisingly in a different direction, and for obvious reasons: it would be somewhat absurd to conclude from the fact that walking on two legs, eating and drinking are not impermeable to cultural influences, that they would thus be human inventions: Wenn also der Mensch, dem allgemeinen Zeugnisse und Beispiele aller Völker, Zeiten und Gegenden zu Folge, nicht im Stande ist, von sich selbst und ohne den geselligen Einfluss seiner Wärter und Vormünder, das heißt, gleichsam iussus auf zwey Bienen, noch das tägliche Brot ohne Schweiß des Angesichts zu brechen, all allerwenigsten aber das Meisterstück des schöpferischen Pinsels zu treffen: des kann es jemanden einfallen die Sprache, cet art leger, volage, demonical, (mit Montagne aus des Plato zu reden) als eine selbständige Erfindung menschlicher Kunst und Weisheit anzusehen.8 Hamann considers it absurd to attribute the invention of language –​about whose structure learned people like Beauzée and Harris have written so much without understanding much –​to ‘crooked patriarchs of the autochthones and aborigines’. He observes that according to ‘the oldest document’ even the inequality and the social contract are consequences an ‘original institution’. And here he refers to the fact that a very old event described in this document gave cause long ago for woman to submit to the will of her husband. The world is finished by the word of God:

8 Schriften zur Sprache, pp. 142–​143; N 3, pp. 30–​31.

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Adam also war Gottes; und Gott selbst führte der Erstgebornen und Altesten unsers Geschlechts ein, als Lehnträger und Erben der durch das Wort seines Mundes fertigen Welt.9 In this uncorrupt state, every natural phenomenon was a word, sign or symbol and communion of divine energies and ideas: Alles was man in Anfang hörte, mit Augen sah, beschautem und sein hände bestasteten, was ein lebendiges Wort; denn Gott was das Wort. Mit diesem Worte im Mund und im Herzen war der Ursprung der Sprache so natürlich, so nahe und leicht, wie ein Kinderspiel.10 As far as the question of whether language is of natural, divine or human origin, it seems that Hamann simply refuses to play the game that obliges one to choose. The point of the analogy drawn between such things as walking on two legs, eating or drinking and language –​based on the fact that they all involve learning and cultural influences –​is, I think, that just because languages are as different as the alimentary habits of diverse people, it does not mean that language would be any more a human invention than eating –​or alternatively, if the former, in some sense, is a cultural invention, then the same argument applies to the latter. In addition, as God’s creation already was God’s word, the transition to human language is no great step to take. In Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel über eine akademische Preisschrift (1772), Hamann continues the discussion on the origins of language from a different perspective, by explicitly criticising Herder’s essay.11 In this text he presents Herders arguments and presents the latters proof as a supernatural ‘platonic proof for the human origin of speech’. He starts by dividing Herder’s platonic proof into two parts: the negative and the positive, the negative being that the human is not an animal and the positive that the human is nevertheless an animal. Hamann’s point is that Herder is at the same time denying that a human has any animal instincts while explaining the invention of language by besonnenheit, as an innate capacity natural to humans, just like instincts are for animals: and thus, the invention of language is as natural for humans as spinning the web is for spiders or building honeycombs is for bees. So, a human thinks and speaks by instinct. By making up the neologistic word Besonnenheit, Herder introduces a synonym for a platonic concept of reason (which he was 9 Schriften zur Sprache, p. 144; N 3, p. 32. 10 Ibid. 11 Schriften zur Sprache, pp. 147–​165; N 3, pp. 35–​53.

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supposed to avoid, in order to escape the chicken-​and-​egg dilemma between reason and language). This justifies in calling his theory platonic. 3

The Transcendental Perspective

In his earlier writings, Hamann had limited himself to discussing some specific reciprocal influences between language and thinking, but it is only in a posthumously published text that he explicitly discusses his more radical ideas concerning the fundamental and constitutive role of language for thinking. In his critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy, Hamann is basically doing to Kant the same as Condillac had done to Locke: reproaching the transcendental philosopher for forgetting the fundamental role of language in knowledge. Hamann observes that the first purification of reason consisted in the ‘partly misunderstood, partly failed attempt to make reason independent of all tradition and custom and belief in them.’12 The second, even more transcendent purification results in its independence from experience and ‘everyday induction’. The third and highest purification involves language, the first and last organon and criterion of reason, which, as Hamann correctly observes, has no other credentials than tradition and usage. In answer to the Kantian question how thought is possible, Hamann observes that no deduction is needed to demonstrate the genealogical primacy of language over the seven Kantian functions of logical propositions and inferences. According to him, the entire faculty of thought is founded on language. So, evidently, if reason depends on language, and language on tradition and usage, it can hardly be pure in the Kantian sense. While geometrical idealisations –​points without parts, lines and surfaces in ideally divided dimensions –​are fixed by empirical signs and figures, metaphysics abuses our vocabulary and the figures of speech of our empirical knowledge by treating them as hieroglyphs and types of ideal relations.13 To the question of how the faculty of thinking is possible or, as he formulates it in his typical rhetorical style, how is it possible ‘to think right and left, before and without, with and beyond experience?’, Hamann replies, that it all depends on language.14 For Hamann it is the sounds and letters of language 12

13 14

‘Metacritique on the purism of reason’, in Georg Johann Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, trans. and ed. by Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 205–​218; ‘Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernunft’, in Schriften zur Sprache, pp. 219–​227; N 3, pp. 281–​289. Schriften zur Sprache p. 223; N 3, p. 285. Schriften zur Sprache, p. 224; N 3, p. 286.

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that constitute the pure forms a priori; containing nothing belonging to sensation or to the concept of an object, they are the ‘true, aesthetic elements of all human knowledge and reason.’ Like Condillac, he relates the origin of language to music, the original bodily image of all temporal measures and intervals. Correspondingly, drawing and painting were the original forms of writing, revealing the economy of space. It is from these origins that Hamann deduces the matrices of intuitive knowledge, space and time: Daher haben sich die Begriffe von Zeit und Raum überschwänglich beharrlichen Einfluss der Beyden edelsten sinne, Gesichts und Gehörs, in die ganze Sphäre des Verstande, so allgemein und notwendig gemacht, als Licht und Luft, für Aug und Ohr und Stimme sind, das Raum und Zeit [z]‌war nicht ideae innatae, doch wenigstens matrices alles anschauliches Erkenntnis zu seyn scheinen.15 Here we see not only the precedence that Hamann gives to aesthetic forms of experience and expression over conceptual ones, but also how he deconstructs avant terme the dichotomy and radical separation between sensibility and understanding. Hamann objects to the Kantian ideas of separating sensibility and understanding and conceiving them as the two stems of human knowledge with a common root. Hamann would rather see knowledge as a single stem with two roots, one in the air and the other below the earth. He compares the union of the sensible and the intelligible to the theological hypostatic union, inviting the reader to see ‘the hosts of intuitions ascend to the firmament of pure understanding and hosts of concepts descend to the depths of the most perceptible sensibility’.16 This union of sensibility and intelligibility is based on words, which possess both an aesthetic and a logical faculty. As visible and audible objects they belong to the elements of sensibility and intuition. By the institution or their meaning, they belong to conceptual understanding. Words are thus pure and empirical intuitions as well as pure and empirical concepts. They are empirical because the sensations of vision or hearing are affected by them and pure since their meaning is determined by nothing that belongs to those sensations. They become determinate objects for the understanding only through their institution and meaning in usage. Hamann locates the basic mistake of Kant’s critical idealism in supposing that one could obtain the form

15 Ibid. 16 Schriften zur Sprache. pp. 224–​225; N 3, pp. 286–​287.

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of an empirical intuition without its object or without a sign denoting it, from the pure and empty quality of our outer and inner sensibility (Gemüt).17 Hamann’s sometimes rather baffling play with Kantian vocabulary ends up in tracing our cognitive faculties not to ahistorical a priori structures, but rather to language and history, to usage and to tradition. Language is for him of central importance. It provides the foundations of reason and religion, and eventually of mind and society: Ohne Sprache hätten wir keine Vernunft, ohne Vernunft keine Religion, und ohne diese drei wesentliche Bestandtheile unserer Natur weder Geist noch Bande der Gesellschaft.18 Thus, transcendental insights and philosophy lead inevitably to the conclusion that the truths and prejudices of grammar and dogma are connected to politics.19 This philosophy Hamann contrasts with the form of rationalism where it is reason that provides the necessary foundations for Catholicism and despotism, for religion and law, but at the price of depriving religion of its sanctity and law-​giving of its majesty.20 17 18

Schriften zur Sprache, pp. 226–​227; N 3, pp. 288–​289. Schriften zur Sprachen, p. 201; N 3, p. 231, ‘Zwei Scherflein zur neuesten Deutschen Litteratur’, (1780), in Schriften zur Sprachen, pp. 199–​213; N 3, pp. 229–​242. 19 Ibid. 20 Schriften zur Sprache, p 222; N 3, p. 284.

pa rt 3 The Condillacian Heritage and Beyond

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The Idéologues: The Semiotics and Physiology of Culture Mediated by the so-​called Idéologues, Condillac’s philosophy and the idea of language as an essential tool for human mental faculties continued to influence French philosophy after the Revolution and during the first half of the eighteenth century. The philosophy that was taught in the post-​revolutionary Écoles centrales, which replaced the ancient collèges, was essentially that of Condillac.1 However, the ‘ideologists’ were not uncritical followers of Condillac. They also subjected Condillac’s ideas to criticisms and amendments, sometimes departing quite radically from Condillacian ideas. Perhaps the most important figures in the formation of the ideological school and in the process of reworking Condillacian ideas were Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and eventually also Maine de Biran, although Maine de Biran later tended to distance himself from the sensualistic aspects of Condillac’s doctrine as well as its materialistic interpretation by Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy. 1

Cabanis’s Social Physiology

The most important statement of the medical materialism of Cabanis is titled Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802),2 and half of the twelve dissertations of which it consists are mémoires that he had started to read out at the newly founded Institut National on the 27th of Pluviose, in the year iv, according to the revolutionary calendar.3 In this work Cabanis is trying to amalgamate what La Mettrie had radically distinguished: the moral and the physical.4 Cabanis is looking for a common principle that would unite organic 1 Serge Nicolas, Histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe sièle. Naissance de la psychologie spiritualiste (1789–​1830) (Paris: L’harmattan, 2007), p. 60. 2 I think that the term ‘medical materialism’ describes adequately the physiological doctrine of Cabanis, which never invokes the existence of the soul. One must bear in mind, however, that this does not necessarily imply that he was also a metaphysical materialist. See Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 298–​307. 3 Cabanis read out the six first memoires to the Institut between 1796–​1797. Staum, Cabanis, p. 5. 4 In the eighteenth century ‘moral’ had a more general sense than it does today. It was usually used in a sense contrasting with the merely ‘physical’ in man.

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functions, instinctual determinations and intellectual operations. This principle, he claims, can be found in the ‘moral sympathy’ of Scottish philosophers. This sympathy permits ideas, sentiments and passions to pass from one individual to another. For Cabanis, the importance of this conception of moral sympathy lies in the fact that it would permit the attachment of moral relations to the organic properties common to all living creatures, that is, to the fundamental laws of sensibility (sensibilité). This would provide a common origin for the operations of the intellect and the will as well as other vital movements, so that moral science would enter the domain of physics and would eventually end up being a branch of the natural history of man. The moral sciences (les sciences morales) would in this manner rid themselves of vague hypotheses and gain the certainty they did not possess earlier. In this context, Cabanis insists on the necessity of taking account of the constant and universal human nature.5 He also refers to the progress of the physical and natural sciences, and concludes that it is by imitating them that the other sciences and arts could achieve a similar success.6 This may all sound like an early version of physical reductionism, but in so far as it is sensibilité which acts as the foundation of moral and vital phenomena, it would be better characterised as physiological or biological reductionism. But even this would be misleading since Cabanis does not claim to explain sensations by vital movements, but rather vice versa. The function he deems fundamental is sensation, which is half-​way between biological and psychological phenomena, or both at the same time. This common foundation, which grounds both the physical and moral phenomena related to man, is something which is in fact not merely physical but not yet moral either.7 Knowing the mechanism of intelligence and the passions, as well as the circumstances that alter or modify them, proves useful, according to Cabanis, when one is considering ideas relative to public morality. It is by taking human nature as one’s starting point and by studying human organisation and the direct phenomena of human sensibility, that one grasps how much morality forms an essential part of human needs.8 Despite the seemingly reductionist strand in his thought, Cabanis refers here not only to constant human nature

5 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Claude Lehec and Jean Gazeneuve, 2 vols,(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 113–​115. 6 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 116. 7 For Cabanis, the unity of science is not, as Martin S. Staum pertinently remarks, incompatible with the physician’s concern for the uniqueness of life and human diversity. Staum, Cabanis, p. 3. 8 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 117–​118.

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but also to the extension of his sensibility resulting from his relations with his fellow creatures: On reconnoît bientôt que le seul côté, par lequel ses jouissances puissent être indéfiniment étendues, est celui de ses rapports avec ses semblables ; que son existence s’agrandit à mesure qu’il s’associe à leurs affections, et leur fait partager celles dont il est animé.9 Thus, even if moral matters are in the final analysis organic phenomena pertaining to sensibility, they cannot be reduced to the passions or needs of an individual organism. The moral sympathy extends the enjoyments of human beings beyond those procured by satisfying their individual needs. In so far as physiology is thus ‘socialised’, explaining things pertaining to moral sciences by physiology is not so reductionist as is sounds, since it is an essential feature of human nature that a person’s sociability is inscribed in his or her physiology. Cabanis believed that sympathy is already at work in animals, but in a human being this sympathy is cultured. The cultured forms of sympathy mix inextricably with the natural ones. Cabanis observes that in humans, in so far as they have more culture and live in a more advanced social regime, one can no longer separate what in sympathy is simply an organic element and what results from their relations with their fellow beings and with other beings of the universe. In this way, Cabanis argues, the phenomena related to organic sympathies, when they are combined with intellectual operations, end up being a far cry from the primitive animal attractions on which they are based. They retain little resemblance with pure instinct.10 But the organic basis always remains there in the background. Moral sympathy can exert its action through diverse signs, ranging from the expression of the eyes, facial expressions, or bodily movements to articulated language and its accents. The effect of these signs is not merely moral, there is always a mixture of direct organic influence involved, independent of reflection. Cabanis adds that despite this, one cannot deny that the most important part in the art of signs is subject to culture and proportional to intellectual capacities. On the other hand, the faculty of imitation, which is characteristic of all sensitive nature and which plays an important role in education, is at its origin inextricably imbricated with sympathetic tendencies on which all moral sentiments are based.11 This all clearly implies that there are no impermeable limits between the organic 9 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 118. 10 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 575. 11 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 577–​578.

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and the artificial: once the artificial is assimilated into an organism it becomes organic as well; and correspondingly, the organic becomes artificial. 1.1 Sensations and Language Cabanis observes that physical sensations depend immediately on physical organisation, and asks whether this does not hold true also for moral needs, although in a more indirect manner. He observes that a human being has, in addition to the faculty of sensation, the faculty to distinguish and to compare sensations. Here he refers Condillac’s idea that in order to distinguish and analyse sensations one must be able join them to signs that represent them. Cabanis accepts Condillac’s claim that one cannot think or fix one’s sensations without the aid of language, but he waters down Condillac’s idea by adding that one must here give the word ‘language’ an extended sense. Cabanis thinks that children have signs which they can use to represent to themselves the objects of their needs, pleasures or pains, even before they have heard a word of their maternal language. He claims that ‘one can think without using any known idiom, and without doubt there are figures (chiffres) for thoughts like there are for writing.’ So, he seems to think that a child is naturally endowed with some kind of language of his own, which he or she can use to distinguish and compare his or her sensations. Despite this departure from Condillac’s insistence on the social origin of the signs that permit the analysis of sensations, Cabanis agrees with the abbé that without signs there is ‘no thought, and perhaps even no sensation, that is, sensation clearly apperceived and distinguished from other sensations.’12 Signs enable one to compare sensations and thus to transform them into thoughts.13 One could of course read the previously analysed passage by having recourse to the Condillacian distinction between natural and artificial signs and read Cabanis’s qualification as a reference to the fact that the child has natural signs at his or her disposal. This interpretation would seem especially appropriate, since Cabanis’ description of these signs refers to them as expressions of needs, pleasures and pains, which is more or less what Condillac claims that natural signs are capable of doing.14 However, Cabanis does not refer here to the distinction between natural and artificial signs. Instead, he uses the term 12 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 156–​157. 13 ‘[…] signes, qui sont le vrai moyen de comparer les sensations, et de les transformer en pensées […].’ Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 189. 14 Condillac had written that nature has established signs for sentiments like joy, fear or pain. Essai, i, ii, § 35.

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‘language’ (langue) to describe the signs used by the children who have not yet learned their mother tongue. Furthermore, he definitely attributes these signs functions which, according to Condillac, belong to the artificial and not natural signs. So, Cabanis follows Condillac in claiming that signs are necessary in order to fix sensations and thoughts, to retrace and to retrieve them, a function on which, he observes, memory is based. In a note he adds, however, that this does not mean that signs precede ideas. The materials for ideas, that is, perceived sensations, exist certainly before ideas, but in order to become ideas it is necessary for them, or rather their relations (rapports), to be displayed in signs. Cabanis relates ideas to the perception of relations between sensations, and since such judgments are not perceived without artificial signs, he concludes that ‘without signs there are no ideas.’15 Here he repeats that he has given the term ‘sign’ a larger extension than others. This again indicates that he supposes that children possess some kind of an innate language of thought before they learn their maternal language. He insists that signs make one recall sensations, and in this manner sense them again (‘font sentir de nouveau’). Instead of distinguishing between natural and artificial signs, Cabanis makes a different distinction among signs. There are, on the one hand, those hidden inside the individual and, on the other hand, those that are manifested externally and serve to communicate with others. This distinction evidently differs from the Condillacian distinction between natural and artificial signs. The hidden, internal ones are obviously those that permit one to distinguish and compare one’s own sensations. Among the latter, of the communicative variety, there are also the signs of pleasure and pain that we can observe in the traits, attitude or cries of diverse animate beings. Moreover, Cabanis observes –​ again following Condillac –​that we are especially susceptible to take part in the affections of our fellow creatures, who are organised to sense like us and whose gestures, voices, regards, and physiognomy remind us more distinctly of what we have experiences ourselves. Cabanis refers to ‘pantomime signs’ which constitute the true universal language, preceding all spoken languages. This makes children run towards each other, to smile back at those that smile at them, and to participle in simple affections that they are familiar with.16 And this tendency to mime develops further and constitutes the social nature of men:

15 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 157. 16 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 158.

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A mesure que nos moyens de communication augmentent, cette faculté se développe de plus en plus : d’autres langues se forment ; et bientôt nous n’existons guère moins dans les autres, que dans nous-​mêmes.17 This, according to Cabanis, is the origin of the faculty that many philosophers have believed to depend on a sixth sense and which they have referred to by the term ‘sympathy’. In so far as the faculty of imitation derives from it, it is also at the root of human perfectibility.18 1.2 Nature and Art Cabanis writes that although the first objects to be examined in his physiological studies are the instruments we have received immediately from nature, one must also study the means that modify, correct and perfect these instruments. Nature provides a human being with certain specific organs and faculties, but art can increase these faculties, change or direct their use and thus, in a sense, even create new organs.19 And it is the art of signs which principally distinguishes humans from animals, which for the most part are lacking it. But notwithstanding this difference, Cabanis thinks that humans share the instinctual faculties of animals, which for their part share to a certain point the intellectual faculties of humans.20 However, despite this lip service to art and signs, most of the Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme tends to describe the influence of physiological factors on the moral characteristics of humans. For example, the fifth memoire of Les rapports discusses the influence of the sex or gender on ideas and moral affections. In this context, Cabanis describes the passion of love and his text acquires an almost Rouseauian flavour. He opposes natural love (L’amour tel que le dévéloppe la nature) to the ‘theatrical phantom nourished by its own brilliance’ and to the ‘cold gallantry playing with itself and its object which denatures, by a mannered expression, tender and delicate sentiments’.21 The whole sixth memoire derives masculine and feminine roles from biological factors by referring to the moral effects of the organs of generation, or to the effects of lactation or pregnancy on moral characteristics and phenomena.22 17 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 158. 18 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 158–​159. 19 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 159. 20 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol.1, p. 189. 21 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 313. 22 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 301 and 305.

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Despite this biological or physiological emphasis, one must not forget that when Cabanis speaks of ‘physical’ he does not refer merely to the world of physics with its eternal and fixed laws, which, he thinks, is the only invariable part in the ‘physical’ nature of man. In contrast to this immutable physical nature, the part which he characterises as ‘the part which one terms more particularly physical in man’ is subject to change. It is subject not only to the actions of a variety of external agents, but furthermore a human being can learn to foresee, calculate and direct this action and thus become a docile instrument in his own hands. So, even if a human’s possibilities to influence the physical universe governed by physical laws are few, he can influence his own physical, that is, physiological nature. As to the ‘moral nature’ of humans, Cabanis considered it to be entirely subject to people’s own choice of direction. People are free to modify their ideas, affections and penchants. New habits or discoveries can suddenly change all of their previous relations.23 A human being is also able, through observation, to acquire the means not only to change the disposition of organs but also to re-​establish or sometimes even to perfect the order of natural movements. This can result, not only in finding remedies for particular ailments, but also in improving one’s physical state as well as the reason and the inclinations of individuals, and in the long run also ideas and habits of mankind as a whole.24 One of the mechanisms by which humans changes their own nature is labour. Cabanis describes how different occupations influence the moral dispositions of individuals, and not only of individuals, but of whole nations as well.25 Work itself as such tends already to develop reason, orderliness and probity.26 But different occupations and their respective instruments have different moral effects: people handling weapons tend to become commanding and despotic, butchers acquire hard, pitiless and ferocious habits, and so on.27 Likewise, different peoples acquire different intellectual and moral characteristics depending on their principal occupations. For example, hunters develop audacity and ruse, nomadic pastoral people acquire different notions of property than those who practice agriculture. As far as agriculture is concerned, Cabanis considered it to have an extremely beneficial effect on the moral and intellectual qualities of people as well as on social stability. The trade that follows will gradually efface prejudices, spread enlightenment, develop ideas and 23 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 361. 24 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol 1, pp. 361–​362. 25 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 458. 26 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 449. 27 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 451–​454.

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the habits of liberty.28 Since Cabanis is discussing here the influence of regime, he limits himself to the description of the influence of manual and mechanic labour, adding, however, that if one would take the word labour (travaux) to include intellectual labour as well, the influence on the human being’s intellectual and moral characteristics would obviously be even greater.29 Cabanis observes that it is actually difficult to separate the habits of a people from its labours. In many nations some labours have determined habits, and even more often habits result directly from the work done.30 In this manner, the differences in the characters of nations are not of biological origin, but rather depend on the principal occupations of each of them. Thus, if the Athenians would have devoted themselves to similar occupations as the Spartians, they would have become haughty and cruel, and, likewise, industry and commerce and the cultivation of philosophy and arts would have made the Spartians amiable and polite.31 Another factor of which Cabanis, following Condillac’s example, emphasises the influence on the intellectual and artistic achievement of diverse people is language. Discovering important truths requires the purification of language and an unformed language poses limits to the sciences and arts that the people is capable of.32 1.3 Holistic Organicism Although the manner in which Cabanis traces changes or differences in ‘moral’ characteristics and functions to organic factors may occasionally appear to be reductionist, one must remember that he is not so much reducing moral operations to physical modifications as tracing these both to their common basis, which is constituted by the action of the organs or by the action of the living system as a whole.33 One must not forget that his physiology continues the holistic tradition of the Montpellierian vitalists, who saw the organism as a hierarchic structure formed of organic centres (foyers) consisting of organs in close interaction and in ‘sympathy’ with each other and with the

28 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 445–​448. 29 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 450. 30 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques. vol. 1, p. 500. 31 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 502. Cabanis shares the traditional Hippocratic view on the influence of climate on the character of peoples, but emphasises that this influence is mediated by the regime and by the occupations that the climate requires. Ibid., pp. 496–​504. 32 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 507–​508. 33 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 392.

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common centre constituted by the brain.34 Like the Montpellerians, he was critical of mechanistic explanations and writes –​referring obviously to the Montpellerians –​that the ‘most enlightened physicians’ had with reason banished from the study of living beings all hasty applications of purely mechanistic, physical or chemical explanations. These physicians had, according to Cabanis, had provided evidence to show that physiology (économe animale) is governed by its own laws and that the laws governing the other, non-​living bodies concern physiology only in some aspects of minor importance. The properties of sensible bodies, resulting from their organization, do not resemble at all those other properties that characterise their parts.35 And due to the human’s superior neural and cerebral organisation and the exercise of its nobler faculties in producing ideas and sentiments, human life seems to depend less than that of other animals on the mechanical and material state of the organs.36 In his physiological materialism, Cabanis is in fact closer to the holistic or vitalist materialism of Diderot than the sensualism of Condillac, whom he criticizes for taking the isolated sensations as the starting point instead of the organism as a whole.37 Or alternatively, we could see his theories as a synthesis of these two traditions. Anyway, perhaps the most radical departure from the Condillacian sensationalism in Cabanis’ thought is that he does not accept the claim that all ideas and moral determinations depend only on sensations, understood as impressions that humans receive from the external senses. This kind of sensationalism would neglect the internal sensations whose role Cabanis emphasizes.38 These internal impressions are important in so far as they play an essential role in instincts.39 And their significant role in Cabanis’s 34

For the Montpellierian vitalist physiology, see Roselyne Rey, Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIème siècle à la fin du Premier Empire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000). For Cabanis’s version of the theory, see Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 363–​364. It is important to remember that although the Montpellierian vitalists insisted on the irreducibility of the phenomena of life to physical or chemical phenomena, their vitalism should not be confused with later metaphysical varieties of vitalism, which postulated spiritual vital forces. For the history of vitalism, see Charles Wolfe, La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie: Une histoire du vitalisme (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019). 35 Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 527, 529 and 539. 36 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 535. 37 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 551–​558. For Diderot’s materialism see, Kaitaro, Diderot’s Holism. 38 Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 174–​178. 39 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques. vol. 1, pp. 182–​189. And it is exactly by referring to his own explanation of the instincts, which refers them to internal impressions instead of external ones, that Cabanis explains the difference between his own and Condillac’s conception of the instincts. Ibid., pp. 165 and 186.

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physiological materialism is obviously constituted by the fact that they connect the mental phenomena not only with the external physical world but also with the living body. And it is this physiological existence which also connects humans by sympathy with their fellow humans. We have seen that Cabanis does not neglect the role of social factors in the constitution, development and perfection of the human mind. However, he does not discuss them extensively or in detail in the manner that Condillac did. This can perhaps be traced to the fact that he was a primarily a physician and a physiologist and thus wanted primarily to discuss the physical and medical aspects of humans. In fact, he characterises the Rapports du physique et du moral simply as physiological studies, with no moral or metaphysical pretensions.40 But in so far as Cabanis’s holistic physiology, based on sensibility and sympathy, transcends the limits of the individual and connects the human body intimately with its natural and cultural surroundings, it permits Cabanis to enlarge the scope of physiology. In addition, Cabanis’ short discussion of the influence of material work on the moral characteristics of humans seems to open novel perspectives for materialism, in so far as the considerations of material factors are broadened to include not only physiological factors but also the material aspects of culture. In this respect, he is preparing the ground for Marx. To the extent that Cabanis insists on the close integration and imbrication of organic and social factors, his views are original also with respect to thinkers that admit the contribution of culture on the faculties of the human mind, but who think that these cultural aspects are simply added over and above the natural characteristics of the human mind, which remain intact and natural under this cultural veneer. Cabanis tends towards the view that, if there is nothing purely social or cultural in humans, there is nothing purely natural either. Instead of adding a cultured superstructure to human nature, culture transforms this nature all the way down to the organic level. And correspondingly, the most intellectual operations of the human mind are organic as well. The famous quotation from Cabanis comparing the brain as an organ and its function to other bodily organs is often circulated in a simplified form: ‘the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.’41 This sounds like a very crude and vulgar form of materialism. In order to justice to this passage, let us quote it here in its original form: 40 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 120–​121. 41 ‘Le cerveau secrete la pensée comme le foie secrète la bile.’ See, for example, the entry ‘Esprit’ in Wikipedia: https://​fr.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Esp​rit, last modified August 17, 2020,19:28.

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Pour faire une idée juste des opérations dont résulte la pensée, il faut considérer le cerveau comme un organe particulier, destiné spécialement à la produire la pensée ; de même que l’estomac et les intestins à opérer la digestion, le foie à filtrer la bile, les parotides et les glandes maxillaire et sublinguales à préparer les sucs salivaires.42 Obviously, this does not mean that thought is a material, chemical product like bile, but that it is a function of an organ, just like digestion is that of another. Organs have their functions, although perhaps radically different ones, and those of the brain are cognitive. In addition, for Cabanis the brain, in its role as the ‘common centre’ of the organism, was not just an organ among others, but one that was responsible for the unity of the organism as whole;43 and which, in addition, mediated the influence of culture on the functioning of the human organism. 2

Destutt de Tracy’s Ideology: Back to the Lockean Order, with a Twist

‘To have ideas, to express them and to combine them are three different things, but intimately linked among themselves’, writes Destutt de Tracy in the introduction to his Éléments de idéologie, published in four volumes between 1801–​ 1815.44 The sciences that deal with these three functions, one concerning ideas themselves (idéologie), one concerning their expression (grammaire générale), and one concerning their combination (logique), are thus subtly linked and subsumable under the generic term idéologie. Ideology proper deals with the subject matter, general grammar pays attention to the means, and logic is concerned merely with the goal.45 2.1 Sensing and Thinking Destutt de Tracy does not hesitate in articulating his sensualism, which reduces all thought to sensation, by stating emphatically in the first chapter of his Élements de idéologie that thinking is always sensing and that it is sensation which in fact constitutes our existence.46 The only difference between

42 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 195. 43 Cabanis, Rapports, in Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 606–​607 and 616. 44 Destutt de Tracy, Élémens d’idéologie, 4 vols (Paris: Mme Ve Courcier, 1817–​1818), vol. 1, p. 3. 45 Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, note 1, pp. 1–​2. 46 Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 24.

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the words ‘sense’ and ‘think’, according to him, is that we use the first to refer to the first impressions that strike us and the latter to the secondary impressions that these give rise to: memories, observed relations between sensations or desires originating in them.47 Although from this perspective it would be more appropriate to refer to the faculty to think by the term ‘sensibility’, and also to call its products ‘sensations’ or ‘sentiments’, Destutt de Tracy agrees to follow the common usage and call this faculty ‘thinking’ and its products ‘perceptions’ or ‘ideas.’ But he warns of the tendency to be misled by the term ‘idea’, which comes from the Greek word meaning ‘image’, which is at the root of the mistaken belief that ideas are representations of the things that cause them.48 Corresponding to the above distinction between different kinds of impressions, that is, immediate sensations, memories, perceived relations between sensations and desires, Destutt de Tracy divides the faculty of thinking into four distinct sub-​faculties: sensation, memory, judgement, and will.49 In turn, judgement is characterised by its propositional structure, and concerns always –​and only –​two ideas, namely the subject and its attribute.50 So it is not surprising that grammar and logic are involved in ideological studies. The science of thought is intimately linked with the science of speech. Destutt de Tracy observes that these two sciences are indispensable to each other. But despite this reference to reciprocity, he concludes that it is dangerous to occupy oneself with the manner in which ideas are expressed before one has studied how they are formed in the mind.51 This seems to imply that the formation of ideas is independent of speech and precedes it. However, Destutt de Tracy also writes that complex ideas (idées composées) have no supports or connecting links that unite their elements other than words, which both express them and fix them in our memory. He thus remarks that an idea and the word representing it are in fact one and the same thing, because whatever happens to one happens to the other.52 47 48 49 50

51 52

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 25. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 26–​27. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 27. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 54. If there were many subjects or attributes, that would mean that there were actually many judgements. In addition, Destutt de Tracy remarks that these two ideas can, of course, be complex ideas formed from a collection of simpler ideas, but in a proposition, they are treated as a single idea (ibid., p. 54–​56). To those who claim that propositions are formed of three parts, one being the copula, he remarks that the verb être refers merely to the existence of the subject, of which one obviously could not say that it is such and such unless it exists. In this way, the copula is actually a part of the attribute (ibid., p. 58–​59). Likewise, negation is a part of the attribute (ibid., p. 62–​63). Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 61. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 97.

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After having described how we acquire complex ideas –​abstract and concrete –​by combining ideas, Destutt de Tracy observes that the account he had given of this process described the progress of an isolated person, forming his ideas all by himself without the aid of others. This would, of course, be a slow process with somewhat limited results, compared to the way ideas enter into the minds of people who can profit from the efforts of many generations. Instead of entering the problems related to the possibility of inventing a private language all by oneself, Destutt de Tracy draws attention to the handicaps and limitations that emerge due to the fact that, instead of being the sole authors of our language, we enter as children into an already perfected language. Thus, instead of creating our ideas we receive them in a haphazard and unsystematic manner. It is with words and according to words (sur les mots et d’après les mots) that we acquire our ideas. This results in errors, false connections, and an ignorance stemming from a sequence of certain results. This is not something to be wondered at –​in so far as we have put, during a few years in our childhood, in our heads ideas which have been created since the beginning of the human race.53 Thus the central role of words in the acquisition of ideas appears to be simultaneously a blessing and a burden. Words are a burden and a source of error in so far as they represent the acquisition of tradition. As a fictional remedy to this, we encounter once again a familiar figure: a solitary individual developing a language all by himself in order to arrange and fix his ideas. When Destutt de Tracy traces the development of judgement and all the other mental faculties from sensation or, to be more precise, from the sensation of voluntary movement and the resistance of objects, he does not mention at all the role of language.54 However, he does refer to the role of artifice in the creation of our mental faculties in his discussion, in Chapter xiv of the first part of the Élements, of the formation of habits, which make bodily movement as well as intellectual action easier and faster, and at the same less and less sensible (that is, conscious). He observes how much of our intellectual capacities we owe to practice, concluding that in fact we are completely products of art: Ainsi nous sommes entièrement les ouvrages de l’art, c’est-​à-​dire de notre propre travail ; et nous ressemblons aussi peu aujourd’hui à l’homme de la nature, qu’un chêne ressemble à un gland, et un poulet à un œuf. 55

53 54 55

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 105–​106. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 125–​147. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 289.

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The human being is thus an artefact, a product of its own work. Destutt de Tracy suggests that in order to distinguish in our intellectual faculties the part which has always been as it is now, and the part which we owe to the perfection of ourselves as individuals, or to the perfection of the human race in general, we should observe persons who have never been in contact with their fellow beings. But he adds that unfortunately this is not possible, since no human is born or lives in isolation. Destutt de Tracy was of course familiar with the literature concerning feral children, such as the Sauvage de l’Aveyron described by P.-​J. Bonnaterre, but he observes that these children have obviously lived among other men, at least at the beginning of their lives. They would thus prejudice the answer to the question by exaggerating the perfection which a human being could attain all by itself. In addition, Destutt de Tracy observes that these children may have been abandoned for reasons related to their originally deficient physical or moral organisation, which would lead to an error in the opposite direction. Thus, Destutt de Tracy resignedly concludes that no certain conclusions could be drawn from these cases.56 But even if Destutt de Tracy admits that we do not have direct means to see how far our intelligence could develop all by itself, he believes that we can easily see the limits it could not surpass by examining the less civilised societies. The ideologist refers here to the fact that even the simplest person among the savages owes a lot to his fellow beings: ideas, knowledge, traditions and, first of all, language. Thus a person left completely to his or her own devices, would remain far behind the ‘stupidest savage’.57 Destutt de Tracy adds that humans in their original primitive or natural state are limited not only in their knowledge but also by the slowness and the difficulty of their mental operations, especially those that are not habitual.58 In this they resemble animals which, without any communication with their fellow beings and reduced to the their own devices, achieve more or less quickly the degree of development of intelligence which permits them to survive, but never more than that. They have their remarkable and promptly formed instincts, which are, however, characterised by the narrowness of their scope and immutability.59 Destutt de Tracy speculates that humans may have passed through many transformations before arriving at their present physical organisation, but even if the first human would have been born adult and as well organised as we are now, he would have been in a state of absolute ignorance, because all of our knowledge 56 57 58 59

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 289–​292. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 292–​293. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 294. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 294–​295.

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comes from sensations and his faculties would have been in a such rigid state, which only exercise could dispel. Without language and without being able to profit from the experience, example and the knowledge of others, such a human being would remain below the level of the dullest savage.60 2.2 Thought and Language Having said that much concerning the importance of language and society in the formation of the human mind, it may come as a surprise that Destutt de Tracy has left the discussion of signs and their effect to the last two chapters of his Éléments de idéologie. By language he means all kinds of ways of presenting ideas: gestures, speech, drawing and arithmetic. He concludes that what is common to all of them is that they are all, at least in their details, absolutely conventional.61 But since convention supposes that we have already arrived at an understanding of each other, there must be a way to make oneself understood without language. And just like Condillac reasoned, this can only result, he believes, from our organisation.62 The natural signs from which we can, by observing others, gather what goes on inside them –​their thoughts and sentiments –​are the beginning of language. As examples, Destutt mentions such gestures as stretching one’s hand towards a desired object, cries of surprise or of pain, striking irritating objects, caressing pleasing objects, and so on. Although this kind of langage d’action is the least developed of languages, it is also the most energetic and to which we have recourse when the violence of our sentiments and passions deprives us of purely conventional signs.63 Destutt the Tracy follows Condillac in observing that this natural language can be made artificial by the intention to express a thought or a sentiment, and that it can in this way become more varied and detailed, and reach finally the state of a real erudite (savant) language. This is what has happened most of all to our vocalisations, which have developed into a state of almost complete artificialness, having conserved remains of their natural origins only in our interjections, or in some etymological vestiges in the roots of some words.64 Language is for Destutt de Tracy essentially a means of communication. So, he claims that an isolated human being could never have experienced the need

60 61 62 63 64

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 297–​298. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 316. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 316–​317. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 317–​318. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 318–​320.

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to create for itself a language. However, he adds that the transmission of ideas is not the only function of language, and not even the principal one. He gives Condillac credit for having shown that languages are as necessary for thinking as they are for speaking. But he then disagrees with Condillac, and writes that the latter should have presented his discovery differently. Instead of describing languages as methods of analysis which guide our intellect, Condillac should have said that signs are the expression of a calculation carried out, or an analysis already done which only fixes and notes the result. Consequently, language is really a collection of found formulas, which then facilitate and simplify further calculations and analyses –​just like algebra.65 This qualification explains naturally the fact that Destutt de Tracy returns to the Lockean order that Condillac criticised and discusses the analysis of ideas first and language only afterwards. But despite this, Destutt de Tracy thinks that the role of language is crucial in so far as it is only by means of signs that we can combine our ideas into complex ideas and fix them in our memory. Without signs we could not remember nor combine our ideas. When we think we are not meditating directly on ideas but on words, we arrange words, sense the different nuances of their significations and pronounce them silently. Destutt de Tracy admits that when an object is present, it can well play the role that its name usually performs, but even in this case we fix our attention on the words that express the qualities we want to examine in it, the effect it has produced, the circumstances one must take note of, or the aim of our research, and so on.66 Destutt de Tracy emphasises that this way of proceeding is not merely an artificial necessity resulting from the habit of the mind having been accustomed to the use of words, but a necessity founded on the nature of the intellectual operations executed.67 And then he describes in a Condillacian manner the impossibility of making calculations when having only the notion of a unity but lacking numbers. One could of course calculate using stones or one’s fingers, but then this would transform these into signs, and we still would need a noun by which we could name and identity the result of the calculation.68 Destutt de Tracy admits that in the case of other kinds of words, it is not so easy, as with numbers, to show their effect on the combinations of relations between one’s ideas, that is, it not so easy to mark the point where one’s mind would be obliged to stop without words. But in so far as all our knowledge is the result of our judgements, which result from comparing ideas, it becomes 65 66 67 68

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 322–​323. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 524–​530. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 325–​326. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 326–​328.

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evident that two marginally complex ideas could not be present in our mind simultaneously with their circumstances in order to be compared, if the results of previous judgements which have formed them would not have been fixed by signs. Without signs these consequent judgements and the knowledge that results from them could not have been formed.69 Although Destutt de Tracy reproached Condillac for considering languages as methods of analysis instead of expressions of analyses already performed, in the second part of the Éléments de de l’ideologie, titled Grammaire, he uses the Condillacian idea of language as a method of analysis when he discusses the differences in cognitive faculties between humans and animals. Instead of attributing the cognitive limitations of animals to the lack of language as such or to the complete lack of propositional thought, Destutt de Tracy attributes these limits to the limited nature of the languages of animals considered as methods of analysis. In Grammaire he discusses briefly in a note the language of animals, that is their gestures or their cries. He observes that just like human language, it consists of propositions enouncing judgements instead of simple names of ideas. Thus, he sees no reason to deny that animals are capable of sensing, remembering, judging and willing. What distinguishes human language from that of animals is, however, that humans have the capacity to analyse, that is, to isolate partial ideas from complex impressions and to separate the subject from its attributes. In contrast to the gestures and cries of animals, even the gestural languages of humans have separate gestures to represent names or separate ideas, and others for verbs or the attributes of ideas. Lacking this capacity to analyse impressions into their constituent elements, the language of animals is but a series of interjections or implicit propositions. As a result, they cannot reason using signs in the manner of humans. Destutt de Tracy thus concludes that the distinction between animals and the ‘intelligent species par excellence’ lies in the decomposition of propositions into their elements.70 In order to have proper propositions and not just implicit ones we need something more than just signs. What we need in order to think properly is a system of signs with syntactic and combinatory structure. In Grammaire

69 70

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 334–​335. Élemens d’ideologie, vol. 2, Grammaire (Paris: Mme Ve Coursier, 1817), note 1, pp. 33–​35. That Destutt de Tracy considers the language of animals to consist of judgements is logical in so far as he also claims, when he discusses elliptical expressions, that all ideas by the simple act of being represented by signs end up being judgements (ibid., p. 50–​51). In this manner, interjections and words like ’yes’ and ’no’ are in fact elliptical propositions (ibid., pp. 68–​70).

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Destutt de Tracy observes that if we had distinct and separate signs for all the impression we receive, for all judgements that we make, and for all affections of pleasure or pain, our ideas would be isolated and unconnected, not only in our discourse but also in our heads. In this case our perceptions would, even if numerous, not be very useful, since we could not make any combinations or apperceive any connections between them. But with the combinatory rules of syntax, we are able to arrange them and make novel combinations of them, just like we can form many words from a limited number of characters.71 In this context Destutt de Tracy also takes a stand on the problem of inversions. In contrast to Diderot and Condillac, his solution to the problem of inversions is that the direct order in which the subject comes before the attribute corresponds to the order of our thought (marche de notre pensée). He admits that great transports of emotion can change this habitual order, and that this is natural. But when we are calm and expressing judgements calmly, there is nothing more natural than to start with the subject and make the attribute follow it.72 So, he agrees with Diderot and Condillac that different word orders are all natural, but in contrast to them he supposes that only one of these corresponds to ‘the order of thought’, an order that is independent of language. 2.3 Language as Calculus In thinking that languages are instruments of analysis, Destutt de Tracy compares language to algebra, in that the rules of grammar correspond to the rules of calculus.73 However, in a long note he also examines the differences. The language of algebra deals only with the ideas of quantity, that is, ideas which are distinct and immutable, and which have among themselves extremely fixed and precise relations with each other, so that there is never any uncertainty, obscurity or variation in the values of the elements of discourse. Once one obeys the rules one does not have to pay attention to the meaning of these elements. Starting from true propositions, one arrives at equally true propositions. But in ordinary language this is not the case: the combinations of ideas designated by words are more variable and less measurable. For example, the comprehension, that is, the number of ideas involved in the meaning of nouns, as well as their extension, the number of objects to which they apply, can vary and with this variation also the truth values of the expression in which they

71 72 73

Élemens d’ideologie, vol. 2, Grammaire, pp. 154–​158. Élemens d’idéologie, vol. 2, Grammaire, pp. 158–​166. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 340.

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are used. Destutt de Tracy quotes Maine de Biran, who had written that in languages, other than algebra, one is obliged to carry a double burden of signs and ideas, whereas in algebra one can combine signs by following mechanically the syntactic rules of calculus and ignore the meaning of the signs manipulated in this way. However, the solution to the imprecision of our ideas cannot, according to Destutt de Tracy, consist in developing an ideal language like algebra. He writes that it would be vain to imagine that one could develop and perfect other languages so as to give them the same ideal properties that algebra has. Even if the signs of algebra allow us to dispense partially, during the calculation, with the ideas the signs refer to when reasoning with other languages, we cannot dispense with representing the ideas to which they refer.74 Despite the differences between algebra and ordinary language, they tend to have the same effect, although in different measures. When using signs as instruments in thinking, we often combine signs and not ideas, and let our minds be led by words.75 Destutt de Tracy asks, however, if it is so that we can judge that, for instance, the bread is good by combining the ideas of bread and goodness, then what use do the words ‘bread’ or ‘good’ serve in thinking or judging. One should be able to explain why we have recourse to signs and why signs eventually permit us to make combinations that we could not make with ideas themselves.76 The reason for this is that our memories, judgements or perceptions of relations strike us less vividly and less durably than purely sensible movements. They produce less sensible impressions and are to a lesser extent accompanied more by pleasure or pain than sensations proper. Especially abstract ideas which are far removed from our sensations are difficult to fix and are thus liable to produce obscurity and confusion. Small sensible distractions, such as small noises or present pleasures are able to make us lose track of remembered things with which we are occupied most intensively. Thus, in so far as most of our ideas are complex assemblies of memories and judgements, that is, memories of received impression or of combinations thereof, they are fugitive and unstable, and liable to appear and then disappear. One way to prevent this is to have recourse to a gesture or a word, that is, 74

75 76

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, note 1, pp. 340–​349. (The notes have been added to the edition of 1804, see ‘Avertissement’, p. v.) Despite the fact that the first volume of Éléments d’idéologie (1801) was published before Maine de Biran’s Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (1802), Destutt de Tracy’s ideas concerning the difference between ordinary language and calculus have probably been influenced by Maine de Biran. Destutt de Tracy had read Maine de Biran’s essay and written a report on it for the Institut des Sciences et des Arts, when the latter had submitted his text for the essay contest in 1801. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 340–​341. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 346–​349.

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a sensible sign to represent them, and so to associate them with a sensation. Bringing them in this way closer to sensible perceptions makes them stronger. In addition, sensible signs referring to complex ideas are immediately distinct in a manner in which complex ideas are not. In the case of complex ideas, we are obliged to examine their elements and analyse their formation in order to distinguish them, whereas the signs denoting them are immediately distinguishable. Thus, joining ideas to sensible signs makes it easier both to remember and to manipulate them.77 Signs permit mental operations that would ­otherwise be too difficult or impossible. So, for Destutt de Tracy too, signs serve not only to communicate ideas, but also to form them.78 As to the question of whether we can think without signs, Destutt de Tracy divides the question into two different questions, depending on whether one refers to natural or artificial signs. As regards whether we can think without natural signs, he remarks that is impossible to answer by direct experience. What one can say is that although we could in this case have the faculties of sensation and perception, our capacities would be limited, and we would lack the ability to manifest our perceptions. Our knowledge would be very limited.79 And as regards whether we could think without artificial signs, it depends according to Destutt de Tracy on the sense we give to thinking (pensée). For him, who attributed the term ‘idea’ or ‘perception’ generally to all that we sense –​from the simplest sensation to the most complex ideas –​and for whom thinking means simply having perceptions –​thus making it synonymous with sensing –​there is no question here at all. But of course, for the Ideologists who have claimed that that signs are necessary for thinking and for having ideas in the first place, and for whom simple sensations are not yet ideas and who used the term ‘idea’ to refer to complex ideas, and who use the term ‘thinking’ to refer only to the action of combining original perceptions, things look different. Destutt de Tracy seems to consider the disagreement as merely terminological: he writes that this opinion in actually not far removed from his own, but that he dislikes this way of expressing things. He sees no reason not to extend the term ‘thought’ to perceiving a sensation.80 77 78 79 80

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 350–​354. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 356–​357. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 359. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 360–​361. Destutt de Tracy does not mention any names when referring to certain ideologists, but one should perhaps add that in the case of Condillac the difference was even bigger, although possibly also reducible to a terminological difference. For Condillac, the dividing line between ‘sensation’ and ‘idea’ was not merely related to complexity, even simple sensations are not properly ideas before they have been made into images by the use of artificial signs (see above, pp. 84–88 and 116).

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Having made these terminological points, Destutt de Tracy returns to the original question, though now reformulated as in terms of how far would our faculty of thought reach without having recourse to any of these artificial signs He admits that there is no certainty in the matter, but that on the basis of what he has already observed on the influence of signs, it is evident that our ideas would dissolve as soon as formed, the relations between them would equally evaporate as soon as perceived, and consequently all further combinations would be impossible. And thus he is willing to admit, along with the Ideologists he had mentioned, that “without signs we would almost be without thinking” (sans signes nous ne penserions presque pas).81 From the question concerning the necessity of signs for thinking Destutt de Tracy proceeds to deal with a related and ‘even more delicate’ question concerning the ideas and combinations that specific classes of signs can give rise to. He thinks that artificial signs, whatever their nature, gestures or speech, can express all kinds of ideas, abstract as well as concrete, in all kinds of complicated combinations. It all depends of the perfection of these signs.82 Destutt de Tracy observes that it is not realistic to examine separately all kinds of possible systems of signs and to evaluate how far they would permit the advance our knowledge. However, what one can do is to work backwards by gradually stripping a spoken language down, by removing something from its expressive powers, and by imagining what kind of knowledge it would in this reduced form permit. We could imagine what would be left of language were one to remove successively first all conjugations and all declinations, then articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and so on, until only nouns and invariable verbs would remain, of which one would retract all derived and compound words. Although Destutt de Tracy admits that we could not give a precise answer to the question of how far this language would permit us to develop our knowledge, he nevertheless observes that with each diminution the language would become more difficult to handle and less capable of guiding us in our reasoning, less capable of comparing ideas or combining them or of observing their differences. Eventually we would be limited to representing some strongly differing groups of principal ideas and to make some extremely crude and almost tangible judgements about them. Destutt de Tracy observes also that such an articulated language would be far below a perfected gestural language.83

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Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 361–​362. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 362. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 364–​365.

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Destutt de Tracy remarks that a language can never have more signs than those who institute it have ideas. But gradually the language, as it develops, increases the amount of possible ideas. Ideas give rise to signs and signs in turn give rise to new ideas. In this way, for Destutt de Tracy, just like for Condillac, the perfection of knowledge goes always hand in hand with the development of language.84 But this evidently requires a language which is well suited for growth and successive modification. It is here that Destutt de Tracy localises the advantage of articulated language. Even the perfected forms of gestural language developed for the deaf and dumb owe much to articulated language, since they have been invented and developed as translations of their inventors’ articulated language, instead of being developed directly from ideas.85 This leads Destutt de Tracy to analyse the particular properties of articulated signs which give them an advantage over other varieties of signs. The first advantage he mentions is expressive variety, that is, the capacity to express a multiplicity of ideas and fine distinctions. Since this is not a unique feature of articulate signs but one that it shares with gestures, Destutt de Tracy concludes that the reasons for the superiority of articulate language must lie elsewhere. So, he refers to the fact that making sounds is natural to our physiological organisation. We produce sounds spontaneously and they express well our diverse affections, which makes them reliable and distinct natural signs for these affections. In addition, they leave our hands free for other activities and can be used without a direct visual contact in darkness or at a distance.86 In addition, they can be transformed and fixed in permanent signs, in writing. This permits the preservation of ideas to be used in other places and times.87 In this way, language permits us not only to form ideas but to transmit them to others.88 In conclusion, Destutt de Tracy sums up the things that language permits: Il est aisé de voir que cette propriété qu’ont les signes d’être un moyen de communication avec nos semblables est l’origine de nos relations sociales, et par conséquent a donné naissance à tous nos sentiments et à toutes nos jouissances morales.89 84 85

86 87 88 89

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 365–​366. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 567–​568. This is obviously true of all sign languages developed by non-​deaf pedagogues for the deaf. However, today we also know of gestural ­languages with syntactic structure, such as the Nicaraguan Sign Language, that have developed spontaneously among the deaf. See David F. Armstrong and Sherman E. Wilcox, The Gestural Origin of Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 127–​130. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 369–​370. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 371–​372. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 377. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 377–​378.

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Destutt de Tracy thinks that we owe everything we are to this possibility to communicate with our fellow beings.90 Language permits us to act, think and choose not only for ourselves but also for others.91 It also broadens the scope of our pleasures, by joining ‘moral’ pleasures to purely physical ones. After having discussed the advantages of language, Destutt de Tracy mentions also its disadvantages: we tend to use signs before we understand their precise meaning, we tend to attach different ideas to the same signs, or the meanings of signs tend to change. These inconveniences are inherent in the nature of signs and in our intellectual faculties and it is impossible to eradicate them definitely.92 Destutt de Tracy’s ideology illustrates once again the basic ambiguity of the Condillacian project of analysing ideas by the use of signs. In this ideological system simple sensations tend to be present in two distinct roles: as the origin of our symbolic knowledge, but also as the results of the analysis of sensations that we can perform by means of signs. Condillac’s insistence on the fact that even simple sensations become ideas only by the use of signs, entails the notion that ideas do not precede signs. Destutt de Tracy, by insisting on the role of signs merely in the formation and manipulation of complex ideas and by discussing language after the formation of ideas, would seem to return to the Lockean scheme in which language is useful but not constitutive of thinking, remembering, judging or reasoning about ideas. It does not so much change the nature of our cognitive processes, as it permits it to gain in complexity. Destutt de Tracy also writes, however, that none of the innumerable ideas in one’s head are simple ideas, that is, ideas which are the effect of only one intellectual act. They are all formed by the intervention of many elementary faculties. A simple sensation ceases to be simple as soon as we take it to be more than just a sensation, when we judge it to be produced by some object (par tel être).93 This observation seems to be making exactly the same point as Condillac makes when he says that sensations become ideas only when they are treated as representations. So, despite terminological differences, Destutt de Tracy appears in fact to be rather close to Condillac in thinking that practically all our properly cognitive faculties depend on language. Only sensations, considered as simple modifications of our being without any cognitive content remain outside language, as the mute and inexpressible foundation of the complex architecture of our cognitive faculties and their respective results. Destutt de Tracy refuses, however, to say that we could not have ideas without

90 91 92 93

Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 378. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, p. 381. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, pp. 382–​386. Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, (extrait raisonné), p. 398.

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signs, because he thinks that it is evident that an idea must precede the sign instituted to represent it.94 Simple sensations seem to be liminal creatures, which we must postulate to provide references for signs, but which vanish once we start talking about them. This necessity is obviously a consequence of the empiricist or sensualistic presupposition that knowledge starts with sensations and which does not permit signs to refer directly to objects themselves. However, one could also remark that the Condillacian idea that sensations need signs in order to be able to refer to objects provides a corrective for this primacy given to sensations, transforming the study of sensations into a semiotic study. 3

Maine de Biran and Signs in Action

In year v of the Revolutionary calendar, the ‘Section of the analysis of sensations and ideas’ of the newly created Institut des Sciences et des Arts proposed an essay competition with the title Déterminer l’influence des signes sur la formation de idées, inviting the writers to discuss questions such as: ‘Would humans lack all ideas if they were deprived of language?’; ‘Are signs necessary, not only for communicating ideas or for combining acquired ideas and forming new ideas, but equally for having first ideas, the ideas that result most immediately from sensations?’; ‘Is it true that sensations can be transformed into ideas only by means of signs?’; ‘Is the uncontended truth of certain sciences due to the perfection of signs that constitute them?’ and so on –​all of which were Condillacian themes and claims. Maine de Biran worked on an essay submission but did not have the time to finish it. The prize was awarded to Joseph Marie Dégerando.95 On 15th of Vendémiaire viii (6 October 1799) the Institut proposed a new essay competition on the role of habits in thinking: ‘Déterminer l’influence de l’habitude sur la pensée, ou, en d’autres termes, faire voir effets que produit sur chacune de nos facultés intellectuelles la fréquente répétition des mêmes opérations.’ However, as none of the essays sent during the year ix, including one by Maine de Biran, was considered worthy of awarding the prize the same subject was proposed anew for a competition on 15th of Germinal ix (6 April 1801).96 This time, in the year x (6 July 1802), Maine de Biran won the prize with his essay Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, which was published that 94 Élémens d’idéologie, vol. 1, (extrait raisonné), p. 422. 95 Nicolas, Histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, pp. 50–​52. 96 Ibid., pp. 53–​54.

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same year. In the essay, Maine de Biran develops and renews the Condillacian tradition by insisting on a feature which was more or less implicit in Condillac’s discussion of the role of touch in the construction of objects in space and in Diderot’s discussion of the way in which a blind person gains knowledge of objects by exploratory movements. In Maine de Biran’s theory that which was implicit to the point of being invisible in Condillac, that is, the role of movement and activity in the perception of tactile objects, is transformed into a general principle which forms the basis of perception (as opposed to mere sensation or sentiment). Although Maine de Biran’s philosophy gradually distances itself from its Condillacian and Idéologue sources, it is quite evident that in many respects he takes them as his starting point and instead of discarding them develops them further. So, one should not let the fact that he himself tends to criticise his predecessors mask the fact that his philosophy belongs to the Condillacian tradition. In an essay dated two years before the prize-​winning essay, Premier mémoire sur Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (1800), he introduces the subject by observing that one of the first things to attract the attention of ‘metaphysical observers’ has been how much the human faculties owe to the perfection of signs.97 In his competition essay, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (1802) he gives credit to the method of the Idéologues and to the examples set by Condillac and Bonnet.98 In this essay Maine de Biran sets out to study the hidden mechanisms of the human mind, especially the part that remains hidden from reflection. With practise we end up doing lots of things by habit, without reflecting. Maine de Biran begins by observing that when we submit our chaotic thoughts to analysis in order to find their elements, the hardest resistance we encounter results from habits.99 Just as habits allow us to perfect our faculties, they also tend to hide them from our conscience.100 3.1 From Impressions to Ideas Maine de Biran first makes reference to signs in Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de pensée when he distinguishes between two different modes of production of impressions. This he does in the context of his theory on the role of organic or motor activity in the transformation of impressions into ideas

97 98 99 100

Maine de Biran, Œuvres, 29 vols (Paris: J. Vrin, 1987), vol. 2, p. 30. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 132. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 128–​129. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 130.

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proper. He describes the role of the motor component in the formation of ideas, not only in the case of the sense of touch, where the motor component is quite evident in the exploratory movements of hands, but also in other sense modalities. Our eyes move in order to fix our gaze or to converge, our nose sniffs, and tasting is associated with oral movements which analyse the texture of the food. Even in the case of hearing, which seems to provide us with a form of perception consisting merely of passive reception, we can observe that we are able to perceive most distinctly the sounds that we are able to form or imitate ourselves.101 He claims that without the part of motor determination in perception, there is neither reminiscence nor ideas.102 In fact, he distinguishes sensation and perception by the motor component attached to the latter. He claims consequently that there are no ideas corresponding to pure sensations, but only to perceptions.103 In the context of his analysis of memory, Maine de Biran distinguishes correspondingly between two forms of reproduction of impressions, one distinguished from the other by the fact that it depends on our activity: Ces observations nous conduisent à distinguer deux formes différentes de reproduction : l’un, qui se rapporte aux diverses idées tirées du ­mouvement, de la résistance et de ses formes, des sons vocaux, s’exécute tou­jours avec un effort volontaire plus ou moins sensible, il est essentiellement accompagné du jugement de réminiscence.104 The second, passive variety of reproduction is related to the production of images, and resembles reminiscence only by the moderate degree of vivacity, which depends on the nature and intensity of the organic causes that determine the spontaneous apparition of images.105 Maine de Biran calls the active form of reproduction ‘recall’ (rappel), and the second, passive form of reproduction, which applies mainly to visual images, he calls ‘imagination’. The faculty of recalling en mouvant, that is, with effort, he calls ‘memory’. The voluntary movements which have formed active impressions, or made them distinct, are the only means of recall. These movements are, according to Maine de Biran, signs of the impressions they distinguish and of the ideas they recall.106 In this 1 01 102 103 104 105 106

Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 139–​148. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 151. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 283. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 152. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 152. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 152.

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way, we recall spatial forms by the exploratory movements by which we tend to configure them. The idea of solid figures is formed by their resistance. These movements that serve to recall are, according to Maine de Biran, ‘natural or first sign’s’. But just like Condillac, he adds that when one extends and connects these by reflection to ‘other manners of being’ that have only indirect or conventional connections with them, these first signs are transformed into ‘artificial or secondary signs’. In this way one multiplies the means to communicate with others or, as Maine be Biran significantly adds, with one’s own thoughts. This contributes also to our memory by making the fugitive modifications of our affective states and interior feelings available to be recalled at will.107 Thus, just like Condillac, Maine de Biran concludes that signs are necessary for our first ideas and that they are the only support of memory –​for a being limited to sensation would lack not only signs, but also ideas and memory.108 That Maine de Biran attaches recall to motor activity is logical, since mere passive sensation, without the active voluntary and motor component, cannot due its passive nature be reproduced at will, whereas we can reproduce the active component, if not as complete external movement, at least as an implicit simulation in the brain: Lorsque, par exemple, je me représente la figure ou la forme d’un corps, que je me rappelle en moi-​même une suite de sons, mon cerveau est disposé, sans doute, de la même manière (au degré près) que si l’œil et la main parcouraient actuellement les dimensions du solide, ou l’ouïe était frappée des vibrations sonores : or, les perceptions de formes et de sons n’ont pu avoir lieu sans mouvements réels et sensibles, volontairement exécutés dans les organes, dans les muscles de la main et de l’œil, de l’ouïe et de la voix ; donc la production des idées correspondantes doit dépendre aussi de déterminations semblables, ou d’une réaction motrice analogue.109 Evidently Maine de Biran does not mean that recall requires movement in the sense of actual muscular movements, such as those involved in perception. He refers to an act of will, manifesting itself merely in the consciousness of effort or in the mobilisation of the forces of the corresponding cerebral motor centres, which need not manifest itself in actual movement.110 1 07 108 109 110

Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 153. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 154. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, note, p. 154. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, note, pp. 154–​155.

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Real activity commences for Maine de Biran in the ‘ideological’ sense, as he qualifies it, with the use of signs voluntarily joined to impressions, with the intention to communicate with others, or with one’s own thoughts, as he again takes care to add.111 Thus, just like for his predecessors starting from Condillac, it is evident that language for him too is something more than just a means of transmitting our thoughts to others: language also makes them accessible to ourselves in the first place. This faculty to convert natural movements or signs into artificial ones, is specific to humans. This faculty creates habits which, although not essentially different from natural movements, appear to follow their own laws.112 Maine de Biran argues against the viewpoint that one could have Lockean simple ideas of sensation, which are conscious phenomena and received passively without the proper activity of the subject.113 Maine de Biran’s system admits the existence of immediate sensible impressions as physiological ­phenomena, but they are not phenomena belonging to the sphere of consciousness. They enter into the circle of consciousness only by the action of voluntary signs.114 But once transformed in this manner into conscious phenomena mediated by language, they are no longer immediate impressions. Maine de Biran denies that sensible images or intellectual ideas enter into our minds in the manner of immediate impressions of objects, by direct sensation. Instead of resembling sensations or ideas, the most intimate modes of our mental life have simply disappeared once the former have appeared. Their relationship to consciousness is basically liminal. Maine de Biran expresses this through a poetic comparison: the immediate sensible impressions disappear once the conscious images and ideas appear, just as the stars disappear in the light of the sun.115 3.2 Imagination, Language and Memory Again Just like Condillac had done, Maine de Biran distinguishes between imagination and memory and connects this distinction to a further distinction between two kinds of signs. He considers that signs consisting of voluntary movements associated with sensible impressions form the basis of memory. The other kinds

1 11 112 113 114 115

Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 160. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 160. De l’aperception immédiate, in Œuvres vol. 3, pp. 33–​35. De l’aperception immédiate, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 64–​65. De l’aperception immédiate, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 31 and 68.

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of signs consist merely of habitually associated impressions, which acquire the capacity to evoke one another. These signs form the source of the imagination. What is important in the context of Maine de Biran’s theory, with its constant emphasis on activity and will, is that in contrast to the signs of imagination, which are not at our disposal but originate always in external objects instead of our will, the signs of memory are at our disposal. However, habituation make this activity involved in their formation invisible. Habit makes us confound two kinds of impressions of different nature and origin, thus hiding, along with our own activity, the distinction between simple sensation, on the one hand, and perception and judgement, on the other. Voluntary signs of recall end up appearing as passive signs of the imagination.116 So, when our perceptual judgements become habitual and effortless, our perceptual capacities are perfected, but at the same time their exercise becomes passive and unconscious. Our reflective capacities are masked by habits. This happens when habits make the action of the voluntary signs as automatic as that of the natural signs. However, we can regain our reflective capacities by redoing intentionally what we have learned to do habitually.117 In this way we are again able to disentangle, in the workings of our minds, our own activity from passive impressions.118 This permits us also to discover the origin of the habits of memory in the articulated sounds, in the first associations of the linguistic signs with ideas.119 Maine de Biran has recourse to the fiction of a solitary man examining his sensations and affections by using articulated sounds which he associates with the objects of his perception or with his own states.120 Maine de Biran concludes that language permits one to regain the activity of consciousness that habit had lost or hidden: Que les signes, secondairement associés avec les perceptions, remplacent les mouvements premiers, devenus insensibles par leur répétition continuelle, renouvellent l’activité de conscience, perdue ou voilée par l’effet de l’habitude, approprient les impressions à la faculté motrice du rappel, et les font passer du domaine de l’imagination sous celui de la mémoire.121

1 16 117 118 119 120 121

Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 216. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 216–​217. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 218. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 219. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 217–​224. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 224.

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But language too is a capacity that tends to gain facility and rapidity with practise. As a faculty that tends to turn itself into a blind mechanism, it can hide itself and obscure the origin of the functions for which it serves as the foundation. Thus, we lose track of the connections uniting our signs and our ideas and forget the necessity of language for thought, whereas in reality our thoughts are often just a kind of silent speech.122 Maine de Biran distinguishes between three functions of signs and correspondingly in memory between three kinds of recall: mechanical, sensitive and representative.123 First, mechanical memory consists in mere repetition of movements, such as learning by rote a list of words in a fixed and determinate order, in isolation of their meaning.124 Second, in sensitive memory the sign expresses an affective modification or a vague concept which cannot be reduced to sense impressions, but which by this fact has an excitative property. Third, in representative memory the recall of signs is, in contrast to sensitive memory, accompanied by a clear and definite idea.125 Maine de Biran also observes that although sensations and sentiments are too vague and indeterminate to constitute by themselves a representative language, they can, by being associated with articulate sounds, acquire a consistency similar to real objects. The exercise of the sensitive memory can, with the repetition and recall of available articulate sounds, acquire singular powers of excitation.126 The signs made available by language permit one to reproduce at any time the particular fantastic ideas that are evoked by the use of these signs and which would not exist without these signs.127 According to Maine de Biran, both mechanical and sensitive memories, despite being based on opposing forces (motor vs. sensitive), tend to the same result. They both minimize the role of will and they are uncongenial to the exercise of attention and reflection, and all of this at the expense of the representative faculty.128 However, De Biran claims that signs acquire their representative value by being associated with ideas, while ideas in themselves cannot be but images or copies of perceptions. What ideas and signs have in common is the fact that they both belong to the class of active impressions.129 122 ‘[…] que c’est ainsi que nous parlons trop souvent à vide, en croyant penser, ou que nous pensons avec la rapidité de la parole sans nous douter de sa nécessité […].’ Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 224. 123 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 225. 124 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 226–​231. 125 For the definition of sensitive memory, see Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 225. 126 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 233. 127 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 234. 128 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 238. 129 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 239.

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By their common function of constantly recalling one another, they acquire a fixity and invariability that the instable illusions of sensitive memory lack. And by the constant use of the signs of language, the mind of an individual breaks out from the narrow circle of perceptions, images and signs directly associated with objects by submitting them to various operations, by grouping, combining and separating them. In this way the individual person creates a new world of ideas from the materials gained from the real world.130 As evidence for his claim that memory depends less on the affective force with which objects strike our attention than on the voluntary attention we grant them, Maine de Biran refers, in a handwritten note added to his Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, to the case of the feral child found in the forests of Lithuania, which Condillac had already discussed. The child had forgotten everything that had happened to him during his ‘purely sensitive life’. The strange fact that he would have forgotten even strong or painful feelings, sentiments and passions, Maine de Biran explains by observing that this is simply because there is no direct memory of sensation. Memory works merely for ideas. But sentiments that are joined with ideas can be reproduced with the aid of these ideas. However, as we have seen, ideas depend on signs. Signs are able to reproduce sentiments by putting the system in the same state that it was when the sensation was experienced. Thus memory was for Main de Biran essentially a central function depending on motor reactions and the use of signs, instead of a being passive and peripheral function like sensation.131 As we have already noted, Maine de Biran too had had recourse to the fiction of an isolated individual acquiring the capacity to reflect and to ‘communicate intimately with his thoughts’. According to Maine de Biran himself, this requires language and so one might ask how an isolated individual could develop language all by himself. But in fact, Maine de Biran adds a note to the effect that this hypothesis is inadmissible.132 In a manuscript note added later, he explains in more detail why this is impossible, in the manner of Condillac, by referring to the necessity of observing the mental states of others in order to be able to understand our own: Nos sentiments, nos opérations et tous les modes de notre être ne se transforment en idées et ne peuvent recevoir des noms qu’autant que nous en puisons les modèles extérieurs dans les sentiments et les opérations de nos semblables avec lesquels la nature nous à lies par une étroite 1 30 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2. p. 240. 131 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 151 and note 30, p. 300. 132 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 217.

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sympathie. Ainsi les sentiments moraux et les idées intellectuelles ont une même origine, mais ces sentiments avant d’être convertis en idées ont un fondement en nous-​mêmes.133 That is, the hypothesis of gaining self-​consciousness by transforming one’s sentiments into ideas is not possible without social interaction with one’s fellow humans. One cannot observe one’s own mental states before one has learned to understand those of others. In another manuscript note to his Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, Maine de Biran also makes an interesting observation concerning the necessity of two distinct levels of signs in order for us to exercise our memory at will: those given immediately, or by first habits, and those that extend and translate these. The latter level is instituted by reflective action. For this reason, the signs that the deaf and dumb have practiced originally are not singly sufficient for the development of their faculties; they must be joined to other instituted gestures or arbitrary written characters, which are available at will (disponibles) and thus appropriate for reflection. Written language has a similar role in relation to speech. Writing permits us to analyse and distinguish the ideas themselves that the speech sounds alone, without writing, evoke too immediately for us to reflect upon them. Without this kind of cascade effect of signs, Maine de Biran thinks that the unique sign would be so closely identified with the idea that it represents that the mind would lose sight of the idea and would no longer have the necessary means reflect on itself. As the meaning of signs becomes habitual enough, their representation becomes as immediate as that of natural signs, and when they are experienced as natural, their nature as instituted signs is hidden. They become as invisible as the objects in one’s home that are constantly under one’s eyes but which never attract attention. In this way, our imagination is based on double representation, and memory on two levels of instituted signs.134 Once we have learned to express and arrange our experience and manipulate our ideas by the aid of signs, then we acquire novel faculties. Language forms our thoughts, for good and bad. Maine de Biran does not forget that this influence gives rise also to illusions when we project the symbolic order that we have created by our own activity on to the real world beyond us. This results, 133 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, n. 119, pp. 324–​325. Maine de Biran adds here a short characterisation of the different sciences that study man and his ideas: ‘Or, c’est ce fondement ou ces conditions qui le déterminent qui sont l’objet de la science de l’homme. La logique s’occupe des idées et la grammaire des signes correspondants.’ 134 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 325, note 121.

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for example, in peopling the world with abstract entities, such as essences and substantial forms. And when we attach verbs to inanimate beings, this entices us to think of them as animate beings.135 In addition, habitual repetition and mechanical recitation of accepted truths turns the habit into a conviction of their truth without any contact with, or examination of, the proper signification and motivation for these judgements.136 From such dangers of mechanical judgements, Maine de Biran does not conclude that we should always re-​ examine reflectively everything we have learned, but rather that in granting our belief in these judgements we should at least recall having made such an examination, instead of simply having blind faith in them. We should have at least once have made a reflective judgment based on the perception of evidence.137 However, Maine de Biran admits also that even this need not be conclusive, since we can always doubt that we made the first judgement based on real evidence.138 (Sometimes reading Maine de Biran gives the reader the impression of reading a proto-​phenomenologist enjoining us to return repeatedly zu den Sachen selbst.) Since Maine de Biran emphasised the radically transformative role of language in human cognition, it may come as a surprise that in his Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée he claims that instituted language does not create any novel faculties for the individual.139 He writes that humans can sense, perceive, imagine and represent other existences without instituted signs. However, he adds that in speaking and in hearing or understanding themselves, humans are able to double images and impressions by associating them to articulated sounds, and as a result they can apperceive and think. This permits us to become conscious and to have ideas of the first order intellectual operations and faculties, that is, to impose the character of reflective apperception on the direct and simple apperceptions. Even the consciousness of our self (moi) depends on linguistic signs, personal pronouns, expressing and identifying the speaking person.140 In the light of the fact that apperception and thinking are not possible without language, the claim that instituted language does not create any novel faculties seems odd, unless apperception and thinking do not count as faculties. However, elsewhere in the same work Maine de

1 35 136 137 138 139 140

Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 255–​257. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 258–​260. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 160. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 263. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 237. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 270–​271. See also note 122 above.

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Biran divides mental faculties into affective, representative and apperceptive or reflective.141 He had also previously claimed that the last-​mentioned faculty depends on language.142 So he seems indeed to be contradicting himself when he states that instituted language does not create any new faculties. 3.3 Mind Playing Hide-​and-​Seek with Itself One of the main points of the Condillacian doctrine with which Maine de Biran agrees is that one cannot reason without conventional signs, just as one cannot calculate without them. For Maine de Biran too, the operation of reasoning consists in recalling signs with their precise values and in the correct order. However, what Maine de Biran wishes to insist upon is that the reasoning and the recall of signs, in so far it is an operation, is an action, and as an action it is movement (that is, not passive sensation).143 The reason why he is especially interested in habits, which are not actions in the proper sense, is that habits are what tends to hide this activity in favour of the results of the operation. In this way perceptual habits give us the results of perceptual judgments, hiding from us the activity that makes them possible. Our visual system, hiding its own activity, tends to give an image of the world as if were a passively and directly received by sense impressions. In order to make this activity involved in perception visible, Maine de Biran has recourse, just like Diderot, to the way blind persons perceive objects by their exploratory movements.144 The movement of the blind make us see what our eyes hide from us. What is true of judgements, is equally true of an organised series of judgements, that is reasoning. Habits turn reasoning into a quick and automatized process which hides our own activity. In this way, our mind flies from the premises to the conclusion, losing sight of all intermediate steps and making it all seem an immediate intuition.145 Habit makes complex terms seem simple and unanalysable.146 Reflected judgements end up as simple reminiscences. As habit has hidden these judgements, it is not easy recover them. In this way, there are lot of things that we know but which are hidden in our habitual judgments and there is much to be learned by analysing and

1 41 142 143 144 145 146

Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 296. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 234. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 265. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 184–​185. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 266–​267. Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 268.

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reflecting on what we think we already know. Maine de Brian quotes here Condillac, who said that what we could know is included in what we already know. But what usually prevents gaining this knowledge is our blindness for the complexity of our habitual knowledge disguised under the appearance of simplicity.147 Maine de Biran distinguishes in human reasoning between the form and the content (la forme et le fonds), correlating this distinction with the formal mechanical part of reasoning, which does not require paying attention to the meaning of the terms or signs used, and the reflected part which does. In fields such as mathematics, which deals with indeterminate quantities, signs gain a mobility which permits us to manipulate them in formulas mechanically without paying attention to their meaning. Our ordinary language does not have, and cannot have, such mobile signs, and so we cannot reason formally, disregarding the meanings of the terms used.148 From this Maine de Biran concludes that we cannot actually use analytical methods outside arithmetic, in contexts where there are no unknown terms, where the X of mathematics is lacking. This allows him to provide a negative answer to Condillac’s question of why we could not solve metaphysical problems in the same manner as arithmetical ones.149 In reasoning using ordinary language we are obliged to operate constantly on two levels. On the one hand, we must recall signs in a certain order determined by our linguistic habits. This mechanical operation is a kind of calculus. But we must at all times, as we advance, pay attention to the meaning of the terms, to the ideas the signs refer to. And this latter, semantic aspect of reasoning cannot be entirely mechanised. This is why Maine de Biran thinks that the notion of a Leibnizian universal language modelled on algebra is demonstratively unrealisable.150 3.4 Reclaiming Passions by Signs We have seen that despite the fact that we cannot formalize our thinking into a mechanically proceeding calculus, Maine de Biran thought that we can use language to clarify, and to reflect on the passive and habitual mechanisms of our perceptual and cognitive faculties. In this way we can in a sense reclaim them by making habitual actions conscious and transparent, at least to a 1 47 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 269. 148 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 274–​276. 149 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 276–​277, note. Condillac poses this question in his Langue de calculs, i, xvi; Condillac, Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 2, p. 468. 150 Influence de l’habitude, in Œuvres, vol. 2 pp. 277–​278.

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certain extent. The same can be applied to emotions and passions. We can in some measure analyse and submit them to the active powers of the will. Maine de Biran takes passions to result from a mixture of the phenomena of simple affectivity and of intellectual phenomena. The simple affective states –​related to the state of internal organs –​interact sympathetically with cerebral centres. In passions certain images excite affections and determine the tonus (ton) of the internal organs and often alter the order of vital functions. Reciprocally these affections result –​in the centre close to that of intelligence –​in the production of images corresponding to the organic state. Now, when these images are associated with instituted signs, this gives the will some hold on the passions, so that it can join novel elements to them (des produits d’une autre ordre) and sometimes even to change their course. But this kind of influence, being mediated and distant, is always uncertain and variable, subject to the disposition of organs outside the sphere of the will. However, in this way we can, by directing our attention to an image of which we have a sign at our disposal, produce a passing emotion that can be converted into a real passion or a durable sentiment, by the repetition of the same act. Despite the fact that we often fail to divert the persistent images, we sometimes manage to do this by using such signes de réclame to ‘appease storms as well as to contribute to rising them.’151 Maine de Biran’s advice for controlling one’s passions by such indirect means bears some similarity to those of Descartes, but he makes the role of artificial signs in controlling organic phenomena explicit. In his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1811) Maine de Biran explicitly states that the will has absolutely no control over affections. Neither it has any direct influence on moral sentiments, except by the mediation of ideas or images, especially in so far as they are linked to instituted signs.152 It is in the context of the possibility of voluntary control that Maine de Biran examines the distinction between the moral and the physical. A passion, although showing certain apparent signs of intelligence, should in his opinion be characterised as physical if the acts involved in it result merely from the dispositions or the workings of the organic machinery.153 With this criterion Maine de Biran distinguishes between three varieties of passions. The first are affections or general sensations, which are hardly different from the instinct of 151 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, Œuvres, vol. 3, pp 243–​245. Maine de Biran, however, criticises Descartes for considering the relation between the organic part of passion and intelligence as that of an effect to its cause (loc. cit.). On the expression ‘signe de réclame’, see above, note 108, p. 107. 152 Maine de Biran, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, in Œuvres, vol. 6, p. 148. 153 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 245.

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nutrition or conservation. In these affections, imagination is regulated by the internal organs. In their case, the desire identifies itself with the immediate need as an affection, distinguishing itself from this need merely by the experiential judgement that provides it with an external object or attaches it to a memory image. The second category of passions consists of artificial passions which can only come into existence with a certain degree of moral development and social organisation. As examples of such artificial passions, Maine de Biran names greed, ambition, love, glory, distinction, and so on. In them, it is the imagination and intellect that are in control. They motivate people to certain pursuits and make them stick to them by habits or by the influence of novel kinds of needs, distinct from primitive and natural ones. However, despite their being fixed by habits, Maine de Biran remarks that habits themselves do not yet constitute passions proper. Passions need to have deep organic roots in affective centres, modifying them so that their sympathetic action causes the repeated appearance of the same images, commands attention and forces the repetition of the same acts in the intellect. In this way the acts of the intellect end up, after being determining causes, as necessary effects. In such passions, everything seems thus to remain in the physical sphere, but since their original motive is not merely physical and neither is their object, they are moral in the sense that consciousness and will are involved. The third kind of passions or affections Maine de Biran calls mixed or social. They are related to a natural affective social instinct, which lies at the base of all morality and which is the source of all benevolent passions.154 The essential difference between moral sentiments and other passions lies in their relationship to reflection. Although moral sentiments can in principle be as immediate and spontaneous as other passions, they are strengthened by reflection and work towards reflection, whereas the affections whose roots are merely and primitively organic absorb reflection or disappear on its exercise.155 When he discusses imagination, Maine de Biran observes that when its spontaneous products are associated with voluntary signs, they become more intellectual and persistent. They can thus contribute to our more active faculties, creating what he calls système intuitif intellectuel. Maine de Biran thinks that imagination –​the mixed faculty of producing and combining sensible images –​by being the most sensitive part of ourselves, constitutes and contributes to our passions and to the spontaneous creations of art. In a sense, this system also lies beyond our control: it tends to disappear as soon as the will

1 54 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 246–​247. 155 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 247.

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wants to submit it under its control. Its spontaneous nature seems to be incompatible with calm reflection.156 However, in combining the sensitive and the intellectual workings of the human mind, intuition is able to see the abstract in the concrete and concrete in the abstract. This kind of thinking is guided by analogy and appears often in the form of an inspiration. Sometimes the analogies are suggested by signs themselves. Maine de Biran enumerates such inspirations of a genius, which consist in suddenly grasping analogies between phenomena previously considered as distinct, for example, between the periods of planets and their distances from the centre of revolutions (Kepler), between the force that makes an apple fall and that which keeps planets on their orbits (Newton), or between the flash of lighting and the spark created by electricity (Franklin).157 Maine de Biran analyses the differences between the forms of inventive genius in poetry and in science, but observes that despite these differences they have in common their reliance on signs and formulas.158 In summation, according to Maine de Biran, signs and language play an important role in the control of passions. In addition, although he emphasises their role primarily in the active faculties of the soul, they also have an important role in the creation of habits and in the establishment and stabilization of artificial passions; not even the intuitive thinking involved in scientific discoveries and poetic creation is free from their constitutive role. 3.5 The Two Sciences of Man In his Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, Maine de Biran distinguishes between two branches in the science of the soul (science de l’âme). On the one hand, there is the study of ideas. This branch had, since Condillac, been attached to signs, which were considered to be indispensable for the formation of ideas and for making them available for mental operations. But Maine de Biran observes that before art there is nature, and before judgement and reasoning there are sensations or sensible impressions, which the signs transform into ideas. Because of this duality in the origin of ideas, the science of ideas is linked, in addition to the sciences concerned with language and expression, to the science studying the organic functions of life and sensitivity (sensibilité), that is, physiology. Maine de Biran observes that the first branch of the science of the soul was developed by Condillac and the second by Cabanis.

1 56 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 251. 157 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 252–​523. 158 Mémore sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 253–​254.

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Maine de Biran is trying to grasp the reciprocal articulation and dependence of these two aspects of the study of the human mind. In this context he also poses some methodological questions. He asks whether the decomposition of ideas should proceed by analysing them as abstract or complex terms, whose value is formed by the conventions of language, or whether one should study the formation of thoughts by examining their supposed productive causes, as the functions of an organ.159 Maine de Biran clearly opts for admitting the legitimacy of both ways in studying the human mind. The science studying the faculties of the mind involves two different varieties of analyses, corresponding to the distinctions established by Maine de Biran between the passive and active faculties. The science of thought, science de la pensée, which analyses the active faculties, does not alone constitute the whole of the science of human faculties. It needs to be complemented by the study of passive faculties, that is, by physiology –​which of course would not, as Maine de Biran again observes, suffice without the other, which takes as its object the acting and willing subject as it is revealed in reflection.160 In his essay for the Berlin Academy titled De l’aperception immédiate (1807), he makes a corresponding distinction between subjective and objective idéologie, and reproaching modern philosophers in neglecting the former.161 Maine de Biran insists on the fact that these two sciences have different methods of collecting facts, in classifying them and in determining their causes. This difference is evident in the determination of causes. In the physical sciences, phenomena are given independently of their causes in the sense that the cause does not enter into the observation or the identification of the phenomenon.162 In the reflective science of our faculties this independence of causes and effects does not apply: effects are not given independently of causes. In the case of voluntary action, the cause is not an unknown x we could identity independently of its effect, but –​by definition –​the effect results from

1 59 160 161 162

Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 22–​24. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 45–​46. De l’aperception immédiate, in Œuvres, vol. 4, pp. 9–​10. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 46. In this context Maine de Biran does not separate physiology from the other physical sciences. But in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1811) he distinguishes three varieties of science: one studying the properties or movements of brute matter, one studying the functions or the phenomena of organised living beings, and one studying the phenomena related to beings possessing intelligence and will, that is, respectively, physics, physiology and psychology. Rapports du physique et du moral, in Œuvres, vol. 6, p. 91.

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the effort of the willing self (moi). It is not permissible to transform this cause into an abstract notion of a class of modifications considered from an external, third person perspective. In this case the rule of proceeding from effects to causes does not apply, since the cause is known before the effect. By this argument, Maine de Biran refers obviously to the phenomenological fact (or a conceptual truth) that voluntary acts cannot take us by surprise since in our knowledge the intention to perform them necessarily precedes the act itself.163 In so far as the cause of voluntary action is not independent of the effect, one should not construct causality in this case as a simple passive succession of phenomena. Otherwise, Maine de Biran adds, metaphysics ‘would march under the banner of physics, or follow the torrent of habits against which its title would oblige it to swim against.’164 Maine de Biran’s metaphors and comparisons here reveal two essential aspects of his anthropology; one should look for the origin of habits in voluntary action, which is their source, while at the same time he seems to imply that in some sense habits, in their passivity, end up, despite their origins in action, being assimilated into the universe of passive successions of phenomena. From his examination of the ‘mixed science which takes man as its object’, Maine de Biran concludes that the unity of the analysis of the human faculties cannot be founded on the unity of method. As there as two different orders of facts –​those related to the passive faculties and those related to the active faculties of the mind –​there must also be two distinct methods, whose cooperation is required for the foundation of the real ‘science of man’. Cooperation requires a strict division of tasks: Maine de Biran takes care to note that in making use of these complementary methods, one must also be careful in their application, lest one applies them to the domain of the other, which could only result in the idealisation of nature or in the objectification of the mind.165 He also insists that one cannot neglect physiology and study the activity of the self (moi) in abstract, merely as it appears in consciousness, since the active powers of the mind appear only in relation to the resistance and inertia of the organic instruments through which they realise themselves and make themselves known.166 Maine de Biran distinguishes the domain of physiology as an objective science in a gesture which simultaneously defines the other ‘science of man’ involving ideas and signs. He writes that the obscure modifications inside 1 63 164 165 166

Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 47. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 51. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 48–​49. Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 110.

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oneself that signs have not elevated to the status of ideas, exist as direct impressions in the living organisation. At the same time, he insists that despite the fact that they are pure affections, they should not be confused with the fundamental apperceptions of Locke, nor with the forms of space and time that Kant attributes pure sensibilité, or even with the generative sensation postulated by Condillac.167 Maine de Biran contrasts the purely physiological aspects of humans with their properly intellectual activities, which he deems cannot be properly analysed without reference to the institution of conventional or artificial signs.168 Maine de Biran’s distinction between the two ‘sciences of man’ involves a corresponding distinction between two kinds of facts: first the externally observable facts, and second the facts related to our self (moi) that are available to us in reflection. However, although these two orders of facts are distinct, Maine de Biran insists that we cannot separate them from each other –​but nor we can identify them.169 Thus he reproaches certain German metaphysicians who, having paid attention merely to the reflective, that is, subjective facts, have neglected their ‘organic collaterals’. This kind of approach, according to Maine de Biran, leads only to abstractions and finally to complete idealism. The inverse error of paying attention merely to the physiological or organic facts leads to confounding signs and the things signified, resulting in what appears, according to Maine de Biran, to superficial observers as a ‘materialisation of thought’. But Maine de Biran insists that this kind of materialism is materialism only nominally (dans l’expresssion). The geniuses that have made physiological observations and correlated these observations with facts concerning immediate sentiments, cannot be charged with materialism. Maine de Biran thinks that they may well be guilty of neglecting the reflected facts and of being too disposed to identify these with the facts that they occupy themselves

167 Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 82. Maine de Biran makes a distinction between organic, holistic and non-​localisable affections reflecting the state of the organism (and related to appetites), and localised sensations, which always involve, in varying degrees, a motor component (ibid., pp. 141–​142). It is this motor component that produces the representative aspect of sensations. Each perception has an affective and a representative component. All clear and complete perceptions involve thus indivisibly a primitive duality between subject (moi) and object (non-​moi), which is founded on the motor activity of the soul. Thus, the first ideas of sensations are not simple nor passive, as Locke had claimed. Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, in Œuvres, vol. 4, p. 115. Sensible impressions act as signs of their external cause, while remaining themselves among the most obscure affections (ibid., p. 125). 168 Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 234. 169 Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, p. 118.

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exclusively. But they have the advantage of not placing themselves above the order of real facts.170 Now, if we compare Maine de Biran’s ideas concerning the science of the soul as the study of ideas and its relation to physiology, we may see some striking similarities with the way in which the Cartesians considered the role and limitations of physiology. But whereas for the Cartesians there was basically only one kind of science studying the facts concerning man, modelled on the natural sciences, Maine de Biran is sketching an idea of another ‘science of man’, distinct from physiology, which studies the mechanisms of the human body: a science that is concerned with expression, aiming at understanding signs or systems of signs, languages. In addition, Maine de Biran refers to the specificity and non-​causal nature of explaining voluntary action by referring to what we now call intentions. What I find most fascinating in Maine de Biran’s philosophy is that unlike most of the philosophers insisting on the irreducibility of the mental to the physiological, he does not deny the importance of the latter. In fact, he seems even to consider it at least as big a problem to neglect physiology as the reverse tendency to neglect the specificity of the mental. His insistence on the importance of physiology can be explained, I think, by the fact that for him there are purely physiological and organic facts, which, in so far as they are correlated with merely immediate sentiment, can be studied without reference to higher order reflective mental phenomena. In contrast, the latter are always dependent on inertia or the resistance of the passive organic phenomena in order for them to exist as activity. Physiology seems thus inescapable, whether one is studying the passive or active faculties. Now we are perhaps in a position to summarise the role of physiology in the tradition started by Condillac and culminating in Maine de Biran’s philosophy. As we have seen, Condillac did not pay much attention to physiology in studying ideas, whereas with the Idéologues, especially Cabanis, physiology became an essential part of the study of ideas. It fell to Maine de Biran to distinguish methodologically between the ‘science of man’ studying the artificial aspects of humans, dependent on instituted signs, and the ‘science of man’ studying a natural entity or a living organism. Admirably, he did this by showing at the same time the necessary close and irreducible articulation of the intellectual functions of humans with the organic and the physiological.

170 Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, in Œuvres, vol. 3, pp. 118–​119, a marginal note in the manuscript 2125.

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3.6 Maine de Biran and the Condillacian Tradition In conclusion, it seems that Maine de Biran is critically transforming Condillac’s sensualism by emphasising the active role of the will. However, in doing this, he is evidently continuing a trend implicit, and sometimes even quite explicit, in Condillac, who had (in his Essai) insisted not only on the importance of the active mental faculties made possible by language but also (in his Traité de sensations) on the role of the sense of touch and movement in the constitution of objects from sensations. And in fact, Maine de Biran admits that Concillac had given much attention to the activity of the mind, but still he reproaches the latter for making sensations the pivot of his doctrine and for submitting thus the mind to exterior causes and not being able to explain how our will is able to free itself from their determination.171 Maine de Biran’s critique is perhaps most pertinent with regard to the beginning of Traité des sensations, where the statue is able to analyse sensations while lacking not only language but also bodily movement.172 Also, one could say that Condillac is partly himself to blame for the common misinterpretation of his sensualism as a doctrine which reduces all mental functions to sensations considered as passively received sense impressions. Some of his programmatic statements certainly may give the false impression that this was his position. Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and Maine de Biran are, despite some minor disagreements, part of the tradition originating in Condillac’s philosophy. Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis documented their views on Maine de Biran’s essay on habits. Destutt de Tracy wrote a report for the Institut, in which he observes that it merits the prize.173 The principal reproach that Destutt de Tracy makes to Maine de Biran’s essay is that in the first part –​dedicated to the knowledge humans receive from nature without having recourse to the communication of ideas –​he discusses knowledge that one could not acquire without the use 171 Journal of Maine de Biran, 5 June, 1815, in Ernest Naville, Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Ligaran, 2015), p. 149. Adobe Digital Editions epub. 172 In the manuscript notes that Maine de Biran had added to a passage in his Mémoire, in which he gives credit to some of Charles Bonnet’s works and to Condillac’s Traité des sensations, he observes that there are, however, some lacunae or even contradictions in these, especially in Condillac’s Traité (Maine de Biran, Œuvres, vol. 2, 292, note 3). In another note, he reproaches Condillac for having unfortunately forgotten the distinction he himself had made in his Essai between active and passive faculties (ibid., pp. 292–​293, note 8). See also note 25, p. 299, where Maine de Biran criticises Condillac for giving his statue the faculties of observing and reflecting on his modifications, with which it is supposed to identity itself. 173 Maine de Biran, Œuvres, vol. 2, appendice i, Rapport de Destutt de Tracy, pp. 338–​352.

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of signs. Maine de Biran had in this part of his essay distinguished between evident and factual knowledge and in the latter category had discussed physical and moral facts separately. Destutt de Tracy thus reproaches Maine de Biran for underestimating here the influence of signs. For his part, Cabanis’s main criticism concerns the identity Maine de Biran poses for the reaction that occurs between the cerebral centre and muscular activity, which according to the terminology of Cabanis is between ‘perceptivity’ and ‘irritability’.174 But notwithstanding this terminological remark referring to a lack of exactitude, Cabanis too seems to think highly of Maine de Biran’s two essays on habit.175 Interestingly, the eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin, a staunch critic of both sensualism and materialism, recognised in Maine de Biran’s both essays on habits these two doctrines and took the author to be a disciple of Cabanis.176 Although his disciples and followers, such as Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and Maine de Biran, also criticised and corrected Condillac’s doctrine, they often did so by developing and sometimes radicalising points that Condillac himself had already made. Even if Condillac had referred all mental functions to sensations, he had also insisted on the activity of the human mind and role of artificial signs in transforming sensible impression into ideas. He had further insisted on the role of movement when he had emphasised the role of the sense of touch in transforming sensations into representations of an external reality. 174 Cabanis’s ‘irritability’ obviously refers to Albrecht von Haller’s (1709–​1777) distinction between ‘sensibility’ (depending on the nerves and the brain) and the ‘irritability’ of muscle tissue (not necessarily requiring the influence of the nerves). See Dominique Boury, ‘Irritability and Sensibility: Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu’, Science in Context 21, no. 4 (2008), pp. 521–​535. 175 Maine de Biran, Œuvres, vol. 2, appendice iii, pp. 360–​363. 176 Maine de Biran, Œuvres, vol. 2, appendice iv, pp. 344–​346.

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The Divine Origins of Language During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some authors attributed, just like Condillac and his followers, an important role to language in human cognition. And like Condillac, they considered that it is the use of language and artificial signs that gives rise to the mental functions and capacities that distinguish humans from animals. But instead of providing naturalistic or historical accounts of the origin of language, they attributed it to direct divine intervention. For example, Johann Peter Süßmilch (1707–​1767) had claimed that language or other arbitrary signs are necessary for the use of reason. But, he continues his reasoning, since speech or the use of vocal signs is a mark of reason, the one that had created language must already have had reason. So, that if humans are supposed to have invented language, they must already have had reason before this invention, which, of course, Süßmilch believes he has already demonstrated to be impossible. The evident conclusion is that a human cannot have invented or created language.1 In France, after the restoration, when the influence of the ideologists was waning and their materialist philosophy replaced by more spiritualistic doctrines, Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald (1754–​1840) followed Condillac in his considerations on the importance of language for human cognition, but definitely refuted the abbé’s explanations of the human origins of language. 1

Süßmilch’s Proof of the Divine Origin of Language

Süßmilch takes care to note that his argument against language being of human origin is not historical or biblical but derived from the nature of language itself. He argues that language originates either in humans or in God, the creator of all things. If it is of human origin, it arises either from natural impulses or it is based on understanding and reason. Against the former possibility, Süßmilch insists that human language differs radically from the sounds that animals make, which are necessary and invariable. Human language, in contrast, is arbitrary, changeable and divided into divers idioms. The articulation of words

1 Johann Peter Süßmilch, Versuch eines Beweises dass die erste Sprache ihren Ursprung nich von Menschen, sondern vom Schöpfer erhalten habe (Berlin, 1766), Vorrede.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_016

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is arbitrary, and they are joined to concepts at will, without any natural necessity. The words of a human language are also structured regularly and orderly, which presupposes, according to Süßmilch, reflection, reason and wisdom. Such order cannot be due to accident, any more than any other purposeful and orderly structures such as clocks or buildings. So, the inventor of language must have been able to reason, which, however, according to Süßmilch, is impossible without signs, speech or writing –​which humans obviously, by definition, did not possess before the invention of language. Consequently, language cannot be of human origin, but must have been bestowed on humans miraculously by God.2 Although Süßmilch clearly disagrees with Hobbes and Condillac on the origin of language, he nevertheless agrees with their opinion that language is necessary not only for communication but also for reasoning, or in Süßmilch’s exact wording, for ‘the use of reason’.3 Just like Condillac, he insists that one cannot have general ideas without language. Nor can one link propositions in order to form deductions, that is, to do things that depend on the use of reason.4 Concepts, judgements and deductions, which constitute understanding (Verstand), are necessary in order to think and act with reason. Perceiving or apperceiving, of which also animals are capable, is not sufficient for the use of reason. One must also attend, reflect and abstract.5 Süßmilch also mentions the importance of signs as tools by which we can represent absent things, that is, things which no longer affect our senses.6 Süßmilch claims that, in order to reflect, to be able to deal with many objects simultaneously and to observe their similarities and differences, as well as to prevent the imagination from drifting along associations, the human mind needs external aids. Sounds, strokes in the sand, paper or bark, whatever 2 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 13–​17. Süßmilch adds that this miraculous origin is not to be wondered at, since the whole world was created miraculously. He also adds that if one insisted that man could have invented language himself, man would have been obliged to stay for a long time in a bestial and childish state. Here he also refers to the Mosaic account of Creation in support of his theory. 3 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 20 and 30. Süßmilch mentions Hobbes but not Condillac in his discussion on previous opinions on the origins of language (ibid., p. 13). Later in a note, he confesses that he had not seen Condillac’s work, or felt the need to consult it, and that it is sufficiently well known through Rousseau’s refutation (ibid., p. 118). Süßmilch’s consistent use of the expression ‘the use of reason’ (instead of merely ‘reason’), stems from Wolff. See the quote below (p. 229), where Wolff distinguishes between reason, as a hidden potentiality, and its use. 4 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 33–​34. 5 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 34–​35. 6 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 36.

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sensible things, audible or visible, aid in evoking the concepts joined to them. Such signs strengthen memory and they also fix imagination by restraining it from its tendency to wander about.7 Signs are indispensable for producing material concepts by abstraction. Sensible signs are also obviously indispensable for creating immaterial, spiritual or moral concepts. Signs bring order into the confusion of our representations and act as ‘guides in the labyrinth of our representations’.8 Symbolic cognition, that is, the art of thinking by using signs, differs from the intuitive knowledge that takes place without them. Süßmilch observes that both forms of knowledge are necessary, but he remarks that it is the ability to use signs that raises us above animals and makes us human, the essential difference between which consists in the use of reason.9 Süßmich relies heavily on Wolff’s writings concerning the necessity of signs for memory and for all the actions of the soul involving abstraction.10 Süßmilch also presents and discusses the familiar cases of the Lithuanian child described by Connor and the deaf and dumb young man who gained his hearing after hearing the sound of a big bell, as described in a report of the Parisian Académie des sciences. He notes how the latter had learned the movements and gestures made in religious rituals (making the sign of a cross, kneeling and so on), without having any idea of their meaning. According to Süßmilch, this shows how a human can perform without reason things that others do with reason. He further claims that the young man performed these acts without reason, because he was lacking language and with it all general concepts and the use of reason. Süßmilch cites Wolf’s conclusion concerning the necessity of words or arbitrary signs for the actions of the soul.11 And what is more, he quotes Wolf’s comment on the necessity of interaction with other human beings for the higher functions of the soul: Die höhern Kräfte der menschlichen Seele liegen dergestalt verdeckt und begraben, daß man auch nicht eine Spur deren entdecken kann, so lange als solche nicht durch den Umgang mit andern Menschen aufgeweckt warden. Da nun aber ohne Gebrauch der Sprache der Umgang fast für nichts zu rechnen, so können die höhern Kräfte ohne die Sprache weder wirken, noch so weit in Uebung gesetzed werden, als zum Gebrauch der Vernunft nöthig ist.12 7 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 37–​39. 8 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 40–​42. 9 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 43. 10 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 44–​47. 11 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 47–​49. 12 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 49.

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Wolff concludes from all this also that it is not nature which makes human beings rational but they themselves.13 To this conclusion, which may seem too naturalistic, Süßmilch objects: ‘but this instruction could not have taken place without language’ (my emphasis). Since this is something that Wolff had in fact already stated in the quote, one wonders about the ‘but’ indicating a contrast, which is absent in Wolff’s text. But Süßmilch obviously wants to draw attention to the fact this language must first be given to the human in order for this instruction to work, and that language is something that the human cannot acquire on its own. Making humans rational presupposes speech or other arbitrary signs.14 And it is here that divinity steps in to solve the chicken-​and-​egg dilemma: inventing language requires reason and reason requires language. Süßmilch’s constant use of the expression “use of reason” instead of “reason” makes one suspect that there is a reason behind this convoluted expression. This reason is perhaps related to a variant of the chicken-​and-​egg dilemma. Not all creatures can learn language and gain the use of reason. Thus, human beings must, in order to be able to learn language and learn to reason, possess something that the other living beings do not have. Süßmilch supposes that human children have an innate capacity to become rational.15 He also clarifies the distinction between humans and animals by observing that one can well have a limited kind of understanding (Verstand) and think without language while being unable to think rationally. This means that one can, without the use of speech or other arbitrary signs, have such rudimentary forms of thinking as having sensory representations and imaginings. But without language one could not make deductive chains, see connections between abstract truths, prove things, find new truths or make wise choices between alternatives. In such a state without language, there would be little to distinguish us from animals –​except perhaps the already mentioned greater innate capacity to reason (angeborner Wermögen de Vernunft).16 Since animals also can up to a certain point think, Süßmilch does not deny that a human being can, even without language, have a limited kind of understanding (Verstand), although not reason (Vernünft). Such a human being could have sensible representations and lower forms of memory and imagination. He could also possess general notions of concrete sensible objects such as a tree or a man, and make rudimentary conclusions on their agreement, such as ‘a man is not a tree’ or ‘a man is not a four-​legged animal’. Süßmilch admits that perhaps a human would in 13 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 50. 14 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 50. 15 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 51. 16 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 52.

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this case even be the most understanding of animals (das veständigste Thier), if one takes understanding in this limited sense.17 But what Süßmilch absolutely denies is that a human being could without language reach such a clarity in concepts that he could separate in thought the parts of a whole phenomenon without thinking of the other connected parts, which may simultaneously make even a greater impression on the senses. Consequently, he could not analyse phenomena or represent the similarities between individuals, species and genera, and thus he could not make the corresponding classifications. And this is enough in Süßmilch’s mind to refute theory of the human origins of language postulated by Jacob Carpov (1699–​1768), in so far as it supposes such complex reasoning and reflection that is not possible for a being without language.18 He also argues against Carpov’s claim that the original primitive language consisting in the imitation of natural sounds could be perfected. Süßmilch maintains that such primitive ‘Lucretian men’ could not have experienced the need to perfect their language any more than animals, once their existing naturals needs are satisfied, feel any need to arise above their condition.19 Thus Süßmilch evidently thought that perfectibility and the possession of language are somehow related: without a full-​blown language, one remains in a state of nature, with a limited amount of natural needs and without any need to escape this natural condition. Süßmilch discusses the possibility of animals rising above the lower forms of understanding and acquiring reason, but concludes that no animal has learned language and certainly could never learn one. He describes how baboons can learn the concepts their masters refer to with words and learn to obey commands like some dogs, but no ape has ever learned to imitate a single word or spoken, despite the fact that their vocal apparatus is similar to a human’s. Süßmilch concludes that even the most intelligent animals lack the inner capacity to learn a language or the use of other arbitrary signs. Since ­animals are unable to learn language as the means to ennoble their mental powers (Seelenkräfte) and to gain the use of reason, language remains the unsurpassable wall separating humans and animals. Disputes concerning the soul of animals are thus futile: whatever souls they may have, the distance between their souls and ours is immeasurable.20 Süßmilch’s place in the history of the conceptions of the artificial nature of human cognitive capacities is peculiar. In so far as he emphasises the 17 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 67. 18 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 68. 19 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 87–​91. 20 Süßmilch, Versuch, pp. 102–​104.

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importance of language in human cognition, he belongs evidently to the same tradition as Condillac and his followers. He also agrees with Condillac in thinking that it is the possession of language the finally distinguishes humans and animals. However, as regards the origin of language, he belongs to a completely different camp in that he discards the possibility of naturalistic or historical explanations of the development language and takes it to be a miraculous gift of God. He compares language to a human artefact, such as a clock or a building, with its manifold parts submitted to a purpose in an orderly, beautiful and rule-​governed way.21 But due to this perfection alone, the artisan cannot have been a human being. 2

Bonald and Language as the Deliverer of Ideas

A later French supporter of the divine origin of language thesis, Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald emphasised the importance of language as the basis of human knowledge.22 Language was for him a necessary instrument for all intellectual operations and the means of all moral existence.23 He insists that the fundamental principle of the moral sciences cannot be found in the ‘interior man’ but rather in the ‘exterior or social man’, and more precisely in the primitive and necessary donation of language to humankind.24 Humans can invent all kinds of things, such as geometry, music or poetry, but not speech. This is because ‘speech, which serves us to know our own thoughts, is the means and instrument of all inventions’.25 The dividing line between the knowledge that we can have as individuals and as members of a linguistic community is drawn by Bonald between particular, individual, or physical truths or facts, and general, moral or social truths. The former are transmitted to us by our senses and the latter by society,26 and originally the latter were given to mankind through language. From the simultaneous necessity of language and thought, Bonald concludes that moral ideas are given to humankind through the language that expresses them.27 These ideas, such as the knowledge of first cause and its

21 Süßmilch, Versuch, p. 16. 22 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques sur les premièrs objects des connoissances morales [1818], 2 vols (Paris: Librairie d’Adrien Le Clere & Cie, 1826), vol. 1, p. 85. 23 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 144. 24 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 86. 25 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 88–​90. 26 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 101–​104. 27 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 97.

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attributes or the distinction between good and evil, which are irreducible to sensible images, form the basis of the social order.28 Bonald observes that learning one’s maternal language is a completely different process than the one involved in learning a second language, when one’s maternal language works as an interpreter between a language one already knows and the one being learned. In learning one’s maternal language we are not merely translating or substituting words with other words; one is learning to think, to join thoughts to words and words to thoughts. And in learning to express one’s thoughts and in making them sensible in this way, one also learns to know one’s own thoughts.29 Language alone allows understanding to distinguish ideas. Bonald compares its role to light in relation to vision; it makes ideas perceptible to the human mind.30 He observes that when we are searching for ideas, what we are actually searching for are words, a fact which the French language expresses nicely with the expression that the word delivers the idea.31 This means that we do not first have ideas, which we then translate into words, but that it is the words that give us the ideas in the first place. Bonald writes that the relation of expressions to our mind is like that of silvering to a mirror. Without the silvering we could not see objects reflected in the mirror, nor could we see ourselves. Ideas would pass through our mind without leaving a trace.32 Here Bonald criticises Cabanis, who had claimed, as discussed earlier, that one can ‘think without any known idiom’. Bonald admits that this is true in cases when one is thinking in images and about an object that can be figured, but it does not apply to objects that cannot be figured in images.33 Bonald also refers to the apparent contradiction between the quote and another quote from Cabanis: ‘Without signs there is no thought.’34 For Bonald the necessity of having words that represent incorporeal and non-​sensible objects available mentally is comparable to the necessity of 28 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 100–​101. 29 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 200–​202. 30 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 369–​370. 31 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 372. The French term is ‘rendre’. 32 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 375–​376. This comparison also provides an answer to the question whether ideas exist at all without words. Bonald writes in fact that expressions are acquired, but ideas are innate (ibid., p. 390). Bonald insists, however, referring to the opinion of Descartes and his disciples, that innate ideas are not actually but potentially in our minds: innate ideas are ideas that the human mind can ‘apperceive by means of certain conditions required for this mental perception, these conditions being the knowledge of the expressions which dress up and name these ideas; so that one can say that there are no innate ideas without acquired expressions’ (ibid., p. 395). 33 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 379. 34 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 381.

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having images that represent material objects in order to think about them. Quoting Rousseau, who wrote that when imagination stops the mind can only go forward by discourse, Bonald limits his claim that humans can only think by means of words to cases when they are not thinking in images.35 Analysing different varieties of expressions, Bonald emphasises their essential differences. Gestures and drawings are the natural languages or expressions of imagination, whereas articulated language is the natural language of understanding. And as for sensations, their natural expressions are spontaneous movements and involuntary cries.36 These different forms of expression cannot substitute for each other. For example, one cannot express sensations with rhetorical figures which we use to express the impressions received by our imagination. Neither can one make them present in the way one can make an intellectual idea present by expression. Neither could a gesture, drawing or movement directly figure an abstract idea such as order or justice, although one can, by making emblems, translate them into the language of imagination, for example, by presenting justice as a woman blindfolded and holding a sword and a set of scales.37 However, in addition to insisting on these distinctions between means of expression and their limitations, Bonald emphasises the general and comprehensive nature of articulate language. In addition to being the natural expression of the ideas of one’s understanding, articulate language is the common language of all three faculties: one can always discourse on external objects, on the sensations one experiences, as well as on the ideas of one’s understanding.38 Bonald argues that the faculties differ not only in terms of their natural expression, but also in terms of memory. His distinction is similar to Condillac’s distinction between imagination and memory in relying on the notion of voluntary control. Bonald writes that one recalls ideas and images, whereas one remembers sensations.39 The difference between the two modes of memory lies in the voluntary nature of recall. One can recall ideas and images at will, whereas one can only remember having experienced agreeable or painful sensations, but one cannot, by naming them and thinking about them, recall or revive them.40 Bonald thus makes a clear and

35 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 125. 36 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 342. 37 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 342–​343. 38 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 343–​344. 39 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 146. The corresponding French terms used by Bonald are ‘rappeler’ and ‘se souvenir’. 40 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 348, see also note on page 349.

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explicit distinction between ideas and images. He claims that in the analysis of the human mind, the difference between the two faculties of ideation (facultés d’idéer), conceiving and imagining, has been ignored, or at least not developed sufficiently. We cannot imagine what we conceive, nor conceive what we imagine. We cannot form images of our ideas, nor can we form ideas of our images.41 Language and the understanding that it gives rise to allows humans not only to think about immaterial things that cannot be figured, but also to submit material impressions to novel cognitive operations. In addition to expressing the impressions received from material objects, that is, images, sounds, odours or tastes, a human is also able to reflect on these impressions, observe the qualities of the objects that give rise to them and to compare these with each other. He is able to study the relations of these bodies with each other and with his own body. Bonald insist on the fact that this faculty belongs to the understanding and not to the imagination. The immaterial relations that only the understanding is able to penetrate, he adds, cannot be figured independently of the object.42 3

Animals and Humans

Bonald characterises the difference between animals and humans by observing that for animals nature appears merely as images for the senses and as materials for their needs. But language permits us to create sciences which, according to Bonald, are basically collections of words. He quotes Condillac’s ideas that sciences are languages well or badly made. Among the things language makes possible, Bonald mentions, in addition to making ourselves understood by others, remembrance of things past, knowledge of the present and foresight concerning the future. Thus, nature is for us something different from what it is for animals. It is the object of our studies and the subject of our experiences and systems. Words permit us to express ideas concerning the relations that objects have among themselves and with us. Without words we

41 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, p. 78. I cannot resist observing that in claiming that one has neglected the difference between conceiving and imaging, Bonald seems to forget one well known French philosopher, Descartes, and his followers. But perhaps the expression ‘analysis of the human mind’ addresses this critique, especially to the Idéologues. 42 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 383–​384. Bonald really uses here the verb ‘figure’, which is, of course, slightly baffling since he is speaking of things that cannot literally be figured. He refers here to Malebranche’s intellectual extension.

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could not reason on space, calculate extension, analyse infinity in greatness or smallness. We could probably not even count above the number three.43 Another essential difference between humans and animals, according to Bonald, is that an animal is born perfect, or rather finished, whereas a human is born perfectible. There is an infinite difference between the intelligence of a human and the instinct of an animal. A human being is capable of learning from his fellow beings all that he needs to know, but an animal has at birth all the instruction that it needs and has nothing to learn from its species. Bonald admits that domesticated animals can learn new things, but this is no proof of their intelligence but of ours. The things that they learn serve our needs and pleasures and not those of their own species.44 Because animals have all they need to know at birth and are unable to profit from their communications with their fellow beings they are always alone, even when they live with their fellow creatures, whereas humans, knowing God and other men, are never isolated since they have known society and live in it in their thoughts, even if they are bodily distanced from it.45 4

The Impossibility of Inventing Language

In insisting that memory does not necessarily consist in reviving sensations, Bonald is obviously following in the footsteps of Condillac. On the other hand, Bonald insists on the radical distinction between ideas and images, and thus reproaches the modern Idéologues for confounding these.46 And since thinking that relies on images and that involving ideas differ, as we have seen, in their respective expressions, language has a role in thinking but not in such a thoroughgoing way as it had for Condillac and his followers. Its necessity for Bonald is limited to thinking that goes beyond material and sensible objects. For Bonald language was not necessary for thinking in general, but only for thinking ideas of which we cannot form images in our minds.47 Its role is

43 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, p. 66. Here Bonald refers sceptically to the results published by the Academié that showed that magpies could count up to three or even to nine. He comments that in this case we would be obliged to attribute magpies the faculty of expressing their thought in their own language. 44 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, pp. 244–​245. 45 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, p. 282. 46 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 346. 47 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 365.

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limited to understanding, instead of having a role in the analysis of sensations or their transformation into ideas. It is on relying on this radical and insurmountable difference between thinking in images and in thinking in ideas, that Bonald argues that even if humans would have first existed in a miserable stage without language, they could not have had any needs other than corporeal needs, which they could satisfy with the sensible objects at their disposal. The images of these objects received through their senses would be traced involuntarily in their imagination. But they would not have found any necessity to give them names or dissertate on their properties.48 Being obliged to look always for a more perfect state even in the midst of abundance is, according to Bonald, a blessing or a curse belonging to our social state.49 In addition to his argument concerning the absence of a motive to develop language in human beings lacking it, Bonald observes that the partisans of the invention of language suppose that humans observe each other, reflect, compare and make judgements, when they are inventing language. But Bonald asks how they could do this when they did not have available any expressions that would permit them to become conscious of their thoughts. Reflecting, comparing and judging simply cannot take place without words.50 In so far as thinking is, according to Bonald, ‘internal speech’, and speech correspondingly thinking made external and sensible, it follows that the inventor or inventors of language must have been able to think and express their thinking, while they actually, in lacking expression, were unable to have even the thought of invention.51 One must possess mental language (parole pensée ou mentale) in order to be able to think about the combinations of language or even to think about inventing language.52 Bonald admits that one could form some nouns onomatopoetically, as many languages still do, but verbs with their temporal modes is something completely different. A savage person lacking language would live in the present moment with his present needs, whereas language gives humans access to the past and to the future.53 This remark also throws some light on Bonand’s claim that a pre-​linguistic human could not invent anything, since inventing requires obviously that one is not only able to reflect on past experiences but also to pay attention to future needs and to plan actions 48 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 132–​133. 49 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 133–​135. 50 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 136–​137. 51 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 138–​139. 52 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 168. 53 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 143.

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in advance. Seeking shelter in case of a storm is a relatively simple thing compared to building a house, not to mention inventing a house. In addition, Bonald argues that language cannot have existed except for in its complete form; that is, it could not have developed and evolved slowly and successively. Bonald admits that one can develop language indefinitely by adding new words, and in this sense language is never complete. But in so far as language has all the necessary parts of speech, it is complete in another sense. If it has all the grammatical elements to indicate persons, their number and their qualities, as well those that distinguish actions that are accomplished, or perfect, from imperfect, the past from the present or future, and so on, then it has all that is required in order to make a number of human individuals form and subsist as a people.54 Bonald is obviously referring here to the structures studied by grammaire générale, common to all languages and systemic in nature. Such systemic elements are based on oppositions and they could not, unlike words, have arisen separately and successively, one at a time. So, although Bonald denies that humans could have invented language, this does not mean they do not have any role in its development. We have seen that he allowed humans the possibility of inventing new words; there can be changes in pronunciation, in word order and so on, without this changing the basic constitution of language.55 What he denies, however, is that humans could have invented what is essential and fundamental in any language: its general structure as described by grammaire générale. What humans have done is that they have added changes and variations to this essential and fundamental basis.56 The identical basic constitution of language constitutes for Bonald evidence that language has been given to the ‘first man’, although later this language has been subject variation and change.57 Bonald also presents an interesting variant of the chicken-​and-​egg dilemma concerning the dependence of the existence of society on that of language. The idea of an individual genius who suddenly invents a language may sound incredible and Bonald remarks that it would be extremely strange that history is silent on such geniuses, since there are plenty of stories of other inventors.58 Of course, one could alternatively attribute the invention of language, 54 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 136 and 152–​160. 55 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 161. 56 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 169–​170. 57 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 171. 58 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 168 and 170.

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or rather languages, to societies. Bonald argues, however, that if language could not have been invented by an individual, neither could it have been invented by a people, since the existence of a society requires convened or imposed laws, conventions or injunctions, which in turn cannot exist without language.59 Bonald applies his arguments against the human origin of language to writing as well. He claims that it is impossible to decompose speech into distinct sounds without having signs or letters to characterise them.60 However, there is one essential difference between speech and writing; the former is necessary for society, but the latter is not. Writing was given to humans later than speech, and as Bonald remarks not for humans but rather against them, in order to make divine laws inalterable against the human tendency to corrupt them.61 In fact, it is not only language and writing that Bonald attributes to divinity, but all important human practical arts such as agriculture, metallurgy, and the physical and the moral sciences. God has instructed the first humans in these arts and they have merely developed them further.62 Bonald writes that the fact we have to teach these arts to savages is not an argument against this fact, since these people are, according to Bonald, not primitive but degenerate: they have just forgotten what others have retained. Bonald takes them in fact to prove his point, since they are now incapable of inventing these arts anew or even imitating them when entering into contact with us, civilised people.63 Bonald summarises the consequences of his doctrine on the necessity of language for the production, revelation and conception of ideas, by observing that society could never have existed without language any more than a human being could have existed without society. From this follows, he argues, inevitably that a human or humans could not have invented language.64 Bonald observes also that if a human would have naturally, without society, the faculties of thinking and that of speaking, society would, instead of being necessary, would have been impossible, since each person could have found naturally his own language.65

59 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 169. 60 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 248–​256 and 278. 61 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 261–​262. 62 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 323–​326. 63 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 326–​227. 64 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 406. 65 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, pp. 134–​135.

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Bonald and Condillac

Bonald presents a detailed critique of Condillac’s description of how language could have developed naturally.66 He reproaches Condillac mainly for supposing that the savage human without language is capable of the thoughts, sentiments, affections, intentions, needs and spirit of invention and ingenuity of the social and civilised human.67 As evidence he presents a long quotation from Condillac’s Essai describing how natural signs which are used first by mere instinct without reflection can gradually give rise to artificial signs.68 Significantly, Bonald cuts the quotation in the middle, leaving out precisely the passage describing how this transformation could have taken place through the use of natural signs gradually coming to be used with reflection and on purpose. The truncated quotation gives the impression that Condillac simply jumps from natural signs to artificial ones without further ado. In discussing Concillac’s thought experiment concerning the two children lost in the desert after the Biblical deluge, Bonald also reproaches the Frenchman for writing that these children ‘lived together’. As they were lacking language, they were, according to Bonald, on the level of animals, who cannot ‘live together’, which supposes communication of thoughts by means of words.69 Likewise, he objects to Condillac’s reference to their ‘reciprocal interaction’ (commerce réciproque), which is not possible without language. Bonald also denies that they could have been sensitive to the suffering of others, as Condillac allegedly supposes; such sensitivity is not a natural quality of human beings, and compassion is a virtue resulting from education.70 Bonald also objects to Condillac’s idea that language could have developed from the conventionalisation of natural cries or natural signs. For Bonald, the problem here is that, in contrast to animals which have characteristic cries for different needs or affections, such natural signs for different passions simply do not exist in humans.71 And even if humans had such natural signs, Bonald asks what use would humans living in the natural state have had for arbitrary signs in order to understand each other, since the natural signs would have certainly sufficed for all their natural needs, as they do for animals.72 When

66 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 20 ff. 67 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 218. 68 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 215–​217. 69 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 214. 70 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 219–​221. 71 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 223–​224. 72 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 226–​227.

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he comments on Condillac’s description of how the descendants of those two children, who had started to communicate with each other after the deluge, repeat the words their parents pronounce, Bonald remarks that Condillac had, in supposing them to have descendants, obviously taken for granted that they have those natural needs which make the opposite sexes approach each other. Bonald further states that he believes that even the union of the sexes is in humans an effect of society.73 Bonand denies all natural ties between humans, be it natural instincts or sympathies. Thus, we should not listen to nature, which does not give us any personal certainties. The truths and laws that we share with others and which make living in a society possible, we receive by authority or confidence. Everything that forms our will and actions we receive from education, starting from language, which exercises a strong and durable influence on us since it is the expression and depot of all our thoughts.74 What Bonald and Condillac had in common was their emphasis on the dependence of human cognition on language, and on the necessity of education and culture in making humans what they are. However, Bonald is obviously even less willing to grant savage or natural humans any primitive social tendencies, such as a primitive sympathy or a tendency to interact with their fellow beings, which might make the natural development of language plausible. For someone wishing to prove its divine origin, this is naturally to be expected. And whereas most defenders of the idea that human specificity is of a cultural origin granted all kinds of animal instincts and capacities for the primitive human, Bonald takes care to strip human nature of all natural characteristics and features, so that he ends up, at least in this respect, being even more radical in his denial of innatism and insistence on a human being a tabula rasa for God and society to write on. For Bonald, society is the real, and only, nature of humans, and they do not or cannot exist outside of society.75 Bonald agrees with Rousseau that there is no society in nature. Bonald also agrees that even domestic society is artificial and purely adventitious. Since there is no paternity or filiation in nature, there is no society either, since society has developed from them.76 Like Condillac, Bonald discusses the connection between language and the progress of the sciences and arts. However, Bonald does not see the development of language as the cause of progress but rather as the result or the index. In addition, he writes that one must distinguish between the language of 73 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 230. 74 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, pp. 15–​18. 75 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, p. 232. 76 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, p. 202.

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imagination and arts and the language of understanding and morality. When an artist or a physicist invents or discovers something, they extend their art as well as language by a new word, or at least by a new meaning given to an existing word. However, consistently with his conservative morality, which sees moral notions as God-​given and unchangeable, Bonald warns against inventing new words in morality. New words express new ideas, which, in the context of Christian morality, are false and only cause perturbation and corruption in society instead of improvement.77 Despite the fact that Bonald tends to see the causal dependence of the improvement of language and that of that sciences and arts going rather in the opposite direction than what Condillac had in mind, he agrees with Condillac that ‘science is a well-​formed language’. Bonald thinks that this is the reason why chemistry, botany, medicine or tactics have constantly renewed their language –​just like morality in deteriorating has changed its language, he adds. As far as politics is concerned, Bonnald admits that its language needs to be renewed. In contrast, religions should shun such changes. By changing language, one changes ideas. This, according to Bonald, is the reason why the church, although teaching its morality in vernacular, has retained Latin, a dead language –​‘immobile as its speakers’ –​as the liturgical language. This permits it to transmit faithfully its eternal truths, safe from the influence of local opinions.78 Although Bonald disagrees with Condillac and the ideologists in his opinions concerning the merits and causes of linguistic change, his examples show that he agrees with them on the influence of language on thinking. The supporters of the divine origin of language, such as Süßmilch and Bonald, use the dependence of human cognitive capacities on language as a central element in their arguments that language cannot have had a human origin, as Condillac and his followers had claimed. And it appears that in doing this, Bonald goes even further than Condillac in making humans creatures of society and language and in stripping them of all natural elements of sociability. Although Condillac and Diderot had also discussed the distinct possibilities offered by different national languages, we can see in Bonald how this theme comes to have more and more romantic overtones, which refer more and more to their historical traditions instead of progress. Bonald speaks of national literary styles and refers to the fact that the language of a nation carries traces of its political and religious constitution, its physical situation as

77 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 1, pp. 382–​383. 78 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, pp. 9–​10.

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well as diverse elements of its social life. Although the parts of speech (parties d’oraison) forming the basis of universal language are practically identical in all languages, each nation combines them in a different manner. Thus translations, especially those of poetry, are always imperfect. One can translate the thought of an author but not the style, which is that of his time or nation.79 79 Bonald, Recherches, vol. 2, pp. 6–​9.

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Back to the Institutions of Nature: Gall and Spurzheim Faudrait-​t-​il alors jeter la pierre au physiologiste qui, dans son étonnement s’écrie : Dieu et cerveau, rien que Dieu et cerveau !1

∵ Süßmilch and Bonald explained the origin of language and the cognitive faculties it permits by divine intervention or donation that has taken place during the history of humankind. Another way of deriving human nature, language included, from divinity is to derive it indirectly from divinity as the author of the original physiological organisation of humankind. In the nineteenth century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–​1828) and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–​1832) created a doctrine they called organology, which derived the human nature specifically from the structure and organisation of the brain. Organology constituted an important critical reaction to the Condillacian tradition, and also an important precursor of the later conceptions which transpose the questions concerning the origin and specificity of human cognitive capacities from the context of social world to that of cerebral anatomy and physiology. Although Condillac himself rarely occupied himself with physiology, his insistence on learning and language was evidently not incompatible with studying the physiological aspects of mental functions, as the physiological interests of his Idéoloque followers such as Cabanis clearly show. The physiology of the Idéologues was a dynamic physiology emphasising the changes and transformations of biological organisms and organs, and which was able to incorporate the moral dimensions and historical transformations of humanity. Gall’s organology, which insists on the innate structure of organs, provides a different approach to the biological foundations and the development of human faculties. For Gall and Spurzheim, the formation of organs precedes

1 F. J. Gall and G. Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux, 4 vols. (Paris: F. Shoell, 1810–​1819), vol. 4, p. 366.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_017

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their functions.2 The ‘dispositions of the properties of the soul’ are innate. Gall and Spurzheim wanted to avoid the accusation of materialism by denying that these faculties would be, as the materialists had claimed, products of organisation. Instead, they claim that their manifestation depends on organization.3 All the mental faculties of humans, those particular to them as well as those that they share with animals, have a similar origin. One must guard oneself, they argue, from taking the sublime and specific moral or intellectual faculties of humankind to be human inventions or the results of external influences. Instead, the essential and universal features of mankind have been predetermined by God.4 1

Faculties and Organs

The differences between humans and animals result from the differences in the anatomical structure of the brain. Gall and Spurzheim disagree with Buffon who had claimed that the brain of an orangutan has the same parts as that of a man. The human brain contains a number of particular organs that is equal to the fundamental moral and intellectual faculties of a human.5 When a child acquires different faculties, the order of apparition is explained by the development and maturity of the corresponding organs, rather than by environmental differences in learning or their hierarchical dependence on one another.6 This notion of the separate development of organs is in part made possible by the fact that the organological theory made them independent by discarding traditional classifications of functions, which distinguished such functions as the apperceptive faculty, attention, memory, imagination or judgement. Instead, Gall claimed that these functions are in fact not distinct faculties, but common attributes of the fundamental faculties.7 Each fundamental faculty has its own separate perceptual or mnestic faculties. In this way, there is actually no such general function as memory but separate memories for localities, melodies, numbers or mechanical arrangements, each belonging to different fundamental faculties: the senses of locality, tones, numbers, or mechanics.8 Once each 2 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 2. 3 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 6–​7. 4 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol, 2, p. 14. 5 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 35–​36. 6 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 15–​20. 7 Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau, 6 vols. (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1825), vol. 6, p. 392; Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 319 and 323–​328. 8 Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau, vol. 6, pp. 398–​399.

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faculty has all it takes –​attention, memory, imagination and judgement of its own –​it can work independently of other functions. There is, however, one spesific function for which Gall uses the term memory and which has a specific cerebral organ: ‘the memory of things, the memory of facts, the sense of things, educability, perfectibility’. Since this faculty includes other capacities than purely mnestic ones, such as the facility of comphrehension and the desire for knowledge and instruction, Gall actually prefers the terms ‘sense of things’, ‘educability’ and ‘perfectibility’.9 Perfectibility had traditionally been a purely human characteristic, but Gall takes pains to show that it is shared, in various degrees by animals as well.10 But in this context he also defends himself against the criticism that organology would deny human perfectibility and the possibilities of education. He merely denies the creation of ‘primitive faculties’ by education. He does not deny that these faculties could be ‘cultivated, neglected or reduced’ by education. But it is the innate organisation and not education which makes human beings what they are: in his most natural state (l’état le plus brut) a human is already clearly above animals and even after falling into degradation cannot be reduced to their level.11 One must note, however, that Gall does not actually deny that a human is an artificial creation (ouvrage d’art); what he denies is the viewpoint that faculties result from sensations and the resulting conclusion that a human being is entirely artificial.12 Gall eventually explains human perfectibility by two distinct factors, the structure of the brain and some cultural factors and influences. What distinguishes humans from animals is the development of the anterior-​inferior-​ medial convolutions and the organs, specific to humans, situated in these parts of the brain.13 But Gall also observes that in addition to the human’s innate organisation it also has at its disposal some external aids that contribute to perfecting his faculties: tradition, language, writing, printing, social interaction, leisure and so on. These cultural factors permit the perfection of the human’s faculties, a perfection which profits from the experience of many generations.14

9 10 11 12 13 14

Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 14–​17. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 17–​32. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 33. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 35. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 39–​42. The organ of educability and perfectibility is situated in the anterior-​inferior-​medial convolutions. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 37–​38.

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Gall and Spurzheim criticise those who have insisted on the role of education in the development of human faculties and penchants. They discard the evidence based on feral children by claiming that these children had originally a deficient organisation.15 Of course this argument does not work in the case of the Lithuanian feral child that Condillac and others had referred to, since he was later seen to profit from education. In this case, Gall and Spurzheim claim that even if such children have not acquired any knowledge that depends on education, they have exercised human faculties and that once they find themselves in society their human dispositions are revealed not only by their prompt imitation of social customs but also by their capacity to profit from education.16 Gall also adds another perhaps less convincing argument that, since humans are destined to live in society, such cases, even if they were not congenitally idiots, cannot serve as general examples.17 Despite their criticism against those who have in their opinion exaggerated the role of education, Gall and Spurzheim do not to deny that environment and education can have a modifying role on the expression of innate faculties or needs. In fact, they write that: La naissance, l’état, l’éducation, les lois et les usages, la religion ont la plus grande influence sur les occupations, sur le perfectionnement et l’exercice des organes, ainsi que sur le caractère moral de l’homme […].18 So, our organologists do not want to deny the influence of education or other social factors on our capacities or on our character. But what their organology absolutely denies is that humans could acquire novel mental faculties or needs in addition to those that they have received from nature in the form of cerebral organs.19 Needs cannot exist without a corresponding faculty and faculties cannot exist without a corresponding organ.20 This biological model contrasts with the socially embodied physiology of Cabanis, who claimed that we can,

15

16 17 18 19 20

Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 41–​42. Gall and Spurzheim refer to Rousseau and Destutt de Tracy, who, according to them, have made the same remark. As we have seen, Destutt de Tracy had made a similar remark, but for completely different purposes. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 43–​44. Here they also refer to the heredity of acquired characteristics. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 36. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 126. See also, vol. 3, p. 251. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 352. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 56.

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by developing the faculties and organs given by nature, even, so to speak, create new organs.21 Thus, Gall and Spurzheim did not deny the influence education. Nor did they neglect environmental and social circumstances in their analysis of the causes of human behaviour. For example, when they discuss women who have murdered new-​born children, the emphasis is on the unfortunate social circumstances that have made these women to perform such acts.22 Nor did the organologists deny the role of sensations. Gall and Spurzheim write that humans receive their sensations and ideas from two sources: from their innate moral and intellectual faculties or from their external senses and accidental outside factors.23 In addition, humans have a double or ‘mixed’ nature in so far as they have, in addition to the organs that they share with animals, organs that are specific to them, which give them the superior characteristics and make them moral creatures.24 There is a corresponding duality also in a human’s moral conscience. There is the natural conscience, which makes people regret a crime committed in a moment of momentary folly or despair, and the artificial conscience created by prisons and other punitive institutions, which aim at creating beneficial habits in people whom one cannot make naturally good.25 As many people do not have in themselves sufficient motives for goodness, then education, religion, punishment and reward must supplement what is lacking in internal qualities.26 When discussing people who are unable to observe the delicate differences in skulls that organology studies, Gall remarks that in all kinds of studies one must first learn to use one’s senses properly, just like one must learn to listen to music or to look at paintings.27 Although the faculties he mentions are both innate and depend on a specific cerebral organ, learning to use them and perfecting them seems to require training. Likewise, exercise and models, although unable to create talent, can perfect the products of the arts.28 Interestingly, when Gall and Spurzheim wish to criticize books that refer to the natural state of humans and which presume that the vices and virtues 21 Cabanis, Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, p. 159. 22 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. vol. 2, pp. 165–​170. 23 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 135. 24 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 134. 25 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 146–​149 and 210. In Volume 4 Gall mentions, in addition to the knowledge of the harm that one may cause to oneself, the knowledge of the effect of actions on others as a constituent of artificial morality. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 211–​217. 26 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 143. 27 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 126. 28 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol, 4, p. 151.

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arise only with the establishment of society, they support their criticism of the supposed acquired or artificial faculties of humans by citing two long passages from Condillac’s Logique;29 first where he explains how humans must be first capable of doing things naturally before they learn to transform these behaviours into voluntary and purposeful actions, and secondly where he observes that although laws concerning the goodness or viciousness of our actions are conventional, they are not all arbitrary, since, although they are our creations, we have not made them alone but with nature according to our needs and faculties.30 Gall and Spurzheim are evidently practising détournement avant la lettre; that is, using the quotes for purposes that Condillac did not intend. But the quotations show that although Condillac did not attribute innate faculties to the human soul, he insisted on the dependence of the artificial faculties and their development on the innate bodily organisation. The difference between Gall and Condillac lies in the fact that instead of attributing a human’s innate features to a soul or innate cerebral organs, Condillac attributes them instead to the bodily structure in general. 2

Men and Animals

Gall and Spurzheim count among the innate dispositions inclinations whose very existence seems clearly to depend on society and its norms, such as the dispositions to steal or to murder.31 However, this problem is perhaps merely nominal, since they write that when they speak about the penchant to murder (penchant au meurtre) they are not referring to an organ that tends to homicide. According to them, the organ of murder refers merely to the natural tendency characteristic of carnivorous animals, humans included, to kill other animals, and that it is the degeneration or abuse of this tendency that leads to homicide.32 Their strategy is thus to find natual behavioural characterics of animals analoguous to the normatively defined human behaviours, and eventually to rename the fundamental faculties after these animal faculties. Later, Gall prefers the term ‘carnivorous instinct’ to ‘instinct for murder’.33 A similar

29 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 66–​70. 30 Condillac, op 2, pp. 398 and 382–​383. 31 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, pp. 92–​93. 32 Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 2, p. 120. 33 Gall’s principle in naming the fundamental faculties common to animals and men was always to choose a denomination that can be applied to animals as well as to men. For this reason, and because of the tendency of the people to confuse murder and homicide,

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strategy is at work when Gall discusses marriage, which, he observes, is usually considered a human institution. Thus, his claim that it also exists in animals might sound surprising. But Gall observes that many animal species have stable, life-​long sexual relations.34 It is likewise symptomatic of Gall’s tendency to identify analogous behaviours in humans and animals that, when he discusses the instinct of belligerence and combativeness, he takes it to be an excessive form of the instinct of the self-​defence and defence of property.35 Here again, in order to permit the attribution of animal and human behaviour to one and the same organ, the notion of property, dependent on conventions, is attributed to animals. In a similar vein, relying on analogies and metaphoric associations, Spurzheim makes the animal instinct to hide oneself physically as well as to hide one’s intentions depend on the same fundamental faculty, and consequently on the same organ.36 When Gall discusses the tendency to theft and its corresponding organ, he responds to the objection that property is the result of social conventions. Gall’s answer to this objection is to deny that property depends on laws and social conventions. He claims that property exists also among animals, who lack laws and conventions defining it. For example, animals consider their own domicile and the terrain they occupy as their own and defend themselves against intruders. In this sense, property is an ‘institution of nature’.37 And it is this natural sentiment that explains the laws against theft and not vice versa. And since society cannot give rise to sentiments or rights, what Gall explicitly denies is the possibility of artificial qualities.38 According to him, no human qualities can be derived from the state of civilisation.39 The guiding principle in Gall’s organology in identifying his faculties and organs seems to be analogy. And due to his emphasis on innate faculties, he is especially interested in analogies between social institutions and natural, biological functions. Sometimes

34

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he later prefers the term ‘instinct carnassier’ to ‘instinct de meurtre.’ Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 247–​248. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 170–​174. However, in contrast to Spurzheim, who was willing to explain this by a unique cerebral organ, Gall is having some doubts about this. Gall also considers the possibility that marriage results in the simultaneous action of many cerebral organs. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, p. 191. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 266–​267. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 280–​282. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 285–​286. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 354–​355. Gall denies that such institutions or passions as property, ambition, pride, and vanity, which had often been presented during the Enlightenment as being of social origin, could be derived from the state of civilisation.

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these analogies are also supported by linguistic metaphors, as in the case of the association and attribution to the same organ of the predilection for physical height and moral haughtiness.40 In the preface to the third volume of the Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux, Gall proposes an answer to the question concerning the origin of the arts and sciences.41 Later in this work, when he refuses to explain differences between the sexes in their sexual instincts by education, he goes as far as to claim that also education and human institutions in fact result from our innate organisation: […] on ne doit pas oublier que même l’éducation, les institutions et les lois sont un résultat de notre organisation ; ce n’est pas nous qui produi­ sons tout cela, c’est l’auteur de notre être qui le produit par nous.42 Here we again encounter the epistemological obstacle of which we saw some symptoms already in La Mettrie, who emphasised the role of education and culture in differentiating humans from animals. Evidently there was no problem in imagining that culture and education play a role in forming our minds, but it was evidently more challenging to admit that culture can change our bodily organisation, even in the case of the organ whose purpose is to learn from experience and to preserve the results of this learning. The passage also situates Gall outside the naturalistic tradition which is interested in explaining the origin and development of human mental faculties naturalistically without reference to divine intervention. When Gall denies that the formation of societies could be explained by a need or by calculated self-​interest, he refers to the ‘institutions of nature’, of which all diverse forms of animal societies are different modifications.43 In so far as humans and social animals possess qualities which are convenient for living in a society, these qualities have been given to them because nature has destined them to live in society.44 Thus one cannot give any natural-​historical 40 41

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Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 311–​322. Gall & Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, p. xi. In the parts written after his collaboration with Spurzheim ended, Gall switches to the singular “je” instead of “nous” (op. cit. ii, p. 213). I follow this practice and speak of Gall and Spurzheim only when referring to the earlier parts of the work, and of Gall for the rest of the Anatomie et physiologie. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, p 103. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 175–​176. He also observes that although the different modifications of sociability are dependent on the different modifications of the ‘organ of attachment’, it is difficult to deduce marriage and sociability from the same source. Ibid., p. 176. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, p. 286.

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accounts explaining the origin of these qualities in humans, in the manner attempted by many eighteenth-​century philosophers. It should also be noted that many of the fundamental faculties or instincts put forward by Gall were exactly the same as those that many other thinkers had considered to be of social origin, for example pride, ambition, vanity or love of glory. Gall also insists on the fact that since the Creator created the organ of the sense of arts in order to make us communicate with the universe as subject to the laws of movement, drawing, sculpture and taste, the arts are not a result of our sensations or reflections, but rather they too are institutions of nature.45 Although the majority of the faculties and characteristics of animals and humans can be reduced to the action of the organs that they have in common, Gall also describes, as we have already mentioned, a number of organs that are specific and exclusive to humans and which constitute the essential and distinctive character of humanity, giving humans their ‘immense superiority’ among animals.46 These faculties, located in the anterior-​superior and anterior-​superior-​lateral parts of the brain,47 are: sagacity or perspicacity in making comparisons, analogies and resemblances, a sense of metaphysics, wit, poetic talent, benevolence or moral sense, the faculty of imitation, religiosity and perseverance.48 Because of its capacity to animate language, the sagacity or intelligence involved in making comparisons is especially important in view of the educability of man.49 Gall writes that it is reason, resulting from the development of the organs situated in the anterior superior parts of the brain, that constitutes the essence of humans. Animals can profit from their experience but they can never acquire general principles.50 When speaking of poetry, whose laws one could imagine to be cultural inventions, Gall writes that they too are revealed to us by a particular organisation.51 Strangely enough, he discusses the goodness of animals in the context of the organ for benevolence,

45 46 47 48 49 50

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Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 157. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 161. In addition, Gall also believed that it is unlikely that animals have the organ enabling one to judge the harmonies and contrasts of colours necessary for any talent in painting. Ibid., pp. 97–​100. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 162–​163. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 163–​278. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 167–​171. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 178–​179. But Gall does admit the presence of some amount of understanding (entendement) in the instinctual behaviour of animals; and symmetrically, he allows that the intellectual faculties of humans can function instinctually, that is, involuntarily without reflection or judgement. Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 335–​339. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 181.

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an organ counted among those specific to humans. Consequently, this organ should actually be counted among those that humans share with animals and not those that are peculiar to the former.52 The explanation for this is that Gall, in discussing it in the context of the organs specific to humans, wanted to follow the (spatial) order that nature follows in the arrangement of organs in humans (he localized the organ of benevolence in the anterior-​superior part of the brain).53 As far as desires and will are concerned, what distinguishes humans from animals is that while animals for the most part have only desires without will, the will triumphs in the cultivated human. Desires are specific to each fundamental faculty, but the will is one. It is the result of the simultaneous action of superior intellectual forces, requiring attention, reflection, comparison and judgement. The distinction between the intelligence that all organs possess separately, and of which animals are also capable, and reason, which only humans possess, is that the latter results from the simultaneous action of all intellectual faculties.54 It is perhaps interesting to note that the triumph of will is said to be characteristic of the cultivated human, as if the existence of the intellectual faculties given by nature as such would not alone suffice. In order to make a human into a morally free agent who has reasonable and voluntary motives that can be judged morally, his inferior faculties must be cultivated, external motives multiplied, ennobled and enforced. Consequently, the virtues and crimes of humans can as well be imputed to the those who are charged with their education and government, as to those who prove to be virtuous or criminal.55 3

Language and Ideas

In addition to having particularly human faculties, for Gall the perfection of humans is evident in the fact that it is only they that possess all of the faculties that they share with animals; in animals they are dispersed among the different species.56 Slightly surprisingly, in Gall’s organology such linguistic faculties as memory of words and the sense of speech and philology are counted among those that humans share with animals.57 Gall observes that there are reasons 52 53 54 55 56 57

Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 221–​229. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 193. See also, vol. 4, pp. 220–​221. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 340–​342. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 340 and 346–​347. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 3, pp. 364 and 365. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 68–​93.

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to presume that it is the latter organ that is responsible for the development of spoken language in humans and for the immutable rules of grammaire générale.58 Based on the distinction between natural and arbitrary language, Gall observes that animals have both: the language of gestures and that of speech (parole). Since animals can express their sentiments or ideas by producing certain sounds, animals do have speech, but this language is natural to them. It is the same for all the individuals of the species. In addition, animals are capable of learning to understand the arbitrary languages created by humans, and not only separate words but also whole sentences comprising many ideas. And animals can also learn to understand the natural languages of other animals.59 The differences in the linguistic capacities between animals depends naturally on the anatomical differences in the development of the organ of the sense of language.60 The only thing that animals seem to lack, according to Gall, is the invention of artificial languages. By admitting the notion of artificial signs as the distinctive feature of humanity, Gall seems not to disagree in this respect with Gondillac and the Idéologues. However, he disagrees with the Condillacian tradition as far as the importance of speech and of signs in general for the formation of our ideas and of our knowledge is concerned. He criticises Condillac and his followers for claiming that without signs we would be unable to think, that only articulated words can lead us into abstract ideas, that signs and language develop our faculties and give birth to our penchants and our sentiments, and that without signs we could not compare our simple ideas or analyse our complex ideas, that is, that language is as necessary for thinking as it is for speaking.61 Gall’s description of Condillac’s position is exact, except for the claim that only articulated words can give rise to abstract ideas.62 Gall blames Condillac and his followers for taking symptoms for the malady, and he quotes a passage from Destutt de Tracy for support. This is the passage we have already cited, in which Destutt de Tracy states that Condillac should have expressed his discovery differently, that is, that all signs are expressions of an already executed calculation, and that language is a collection of found formulas, which facilitate later calculations and analyses. Gall also adds that all signs, gestures as well as speech, are 58 59 60 61 62

Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 82. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 86–​91. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 91. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 91–​97. According to Condillac, a language of gestures can equally be developed into an artificial language capable of analysing ideas. See the chapter on Condillac, pp. 109–​110.

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the product of the faculties, penchants, affections and passions of humans and animals, and that it is in the nature of both humans and animals to produce sounds as soon as they feel the need to communicate with their own kind. This is for Gall a necessary effect of their organisation. Instead of claiming that signs give rise to ideas or sentiments, Gall claims that a language can never have more signs than those that institute it have ideas and sentiments. So it is knowledge, penchants, sentiments and talents that produce signs and not vice versa: a sign could never give rise to a penchant, a sentiment or a talent.63 Interestingly, in order to show the independence of thinking and language and prefiguring the later descriptions of aphasia, Gall presents cases of persons who suffered loss of speech due to a cerebrovascular attack (apoplexie) but whose intellectual capacities were otherwise intact.64 Although one might be tempted to regard the Condillacian tradition, which emphasises the role of language and culture in the constitution of human mental capacities, and the biological approach of Gall, with its emphasis on innate faculties depending on specific organs, as completely opposite theories, one should not forget what they have in common. They both share the attempt to articulate the imbrication of higher mental faculties, such as language, in the biological mechanisms or bodily structure. However, Condillac was looking for the imbrication in the specific features and structures of the human body instead of the common organic structures shared by humans and animals. To use the modern jargon, despite his dualism Condillac saw mental functions as essentially embodied. He was interested in the body as a functional and moving whole, whereas Gall concentrated in stable innate structures in a specific organ considered as the material seat of mental functions. But Condillac did not neglect the influence of bodily structure, nor did Gall deny the role of culture in the development of innate mental faculties. But their differences are significant symptoms of a transition from theories emphasising the cultural origins of human cognition towards a more neurocentric approach based on the biological model of organ-​function correspondence.65 The opposition between historical accounts and biological accounts of human specificity appear clearly when Gall discusses the origin of the arts

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Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie & physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 93–​95. See also, vol. 4, p. 317. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 96 and 83–​85. Of course, these descriptions of aphasics do not necessarily contradict Condillac’s claim, in so far as they were almost all cases of acquired aphasias. They could have already developed their mental functions before suffering the attacks, which affected linguistic functions only. Timo Kaitaro, ‘Biological and epistemological models of localization in the nineteenth century: From Gall to Charcot’.

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and sciences. Gall’s account differs radically from those of most thinkers of the Enlightenment. He criticizes theories that attribute the origin of the arts and sciences to accident, needs or reflection, and asks why these factors did not have the same effect in animals. He concludes that the true source of the arts should be looked for in our instincts, penchants, innate faculties and internal needs. Just like animals whose instincts are the works of nature, a human being owes everything to the author of his organisation, that is, God, whose instruments his organs are.66 A human being is not perfectible in the sense that he could develop artificial qualities or faculties. His moral qualities or intellectual faculties do not result from that fact that he lives in a community, but the other way round.67 And since the moral and intellectual capacities depend on the organisation of the brain, the questions previously belonging to the domain of history and philosophy concerning the motives of our actions –​as well as the origin of the sciences and arts, and the perfectibility or the extension of the experienced world of each living creature –​enter into the domain of the physiology of the brain.68 Thus Gall’s answer to the question of who knows best about the nature of a human being, his needs, his physical and moral aspects, is simply: the physician.69 And in this respect he is continuing the medical materialism exemplified by La Mettrie, Diderot and Cabanis, albeit in a more biologically reductionist vein. 66 67 68 69

Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, pp. 347–​349. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 353. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 4, p. 384. Gall and Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie, vol. 1, préface, pp. lvi–​lviii.

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Humboldt: Language and the Creation of National Character Differences in languages and their influence on the culture of different nationalities was one of the themes that the philosophers of the French Enlightenment had discussed at length. This same theme was taken up by German scholars in the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. As far as the relationship between language and thought is concerned, their views were quite similar to those of their French colleagues in insisting on the necessity of language for essentially human cognitive faculties. However, the nineteenth century German scholars tended to focus more insistently on the role of language in constituting nationhood. It was no longer so much a question of studying how language affects the cognitive development of an individual, but how different linguistic structures affect the character of a nation on the one hand and how language reflects the spiritual life of nations on the other. This development was naturally related to the development of comparative philology. In his Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes (1836) Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–​1835) insists that the highest interest of comparative philology lies in showing the connection between language and the formation of the national Geisteskraft (Gestaltung der nationellen Geisteskraft). As the organ of inner being (das Organ des inneren Seyns), language has deep roots in the national Geisteskraft, which influences language and contributes to the regularity and richness of its development.1 On the other hand, thought is not only dependent on language in general but also, up to a certain point, on the resources of each specific language.2

1 Wilhelm Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke in Fünf Bänden: 3, Schriften Zur Sprachphilosophie, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1963), pp. 383–​384. 2 ‘Über die Vergleichendes Sprachstudium in beziehung auf die Verschiedenen Epocher der Sprachentwicklung’, in Werke in Fünf Bänden, vol. 3, p. 16.

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Concepts and Language

Humboldt emphasises that language contributes not only to communication and interaction between people. It is likewise indispensable for the development of a human being’s intellectual capacities (geistigen Kräfte) and the production of a world view (Weltanschauung).3 For Humboldt, thinking without language is simply not possible.4 The relationship between conceptual thinking and language is, however, not simple or unidirectional. The need for a concept and its consequent clarification must always precede the word, which is merely the completion of its clarification.5 Humboldt thus warns against judging the conceptual resources of a people on the basis of a dictionary of their language: one can always express many, especially non-​sensual (unsinnlicher) concepts, by metaphors or paraphrases.6 A nation can make an imperfect language into a tool for the creation of ideas for which it originally did not provide any stimulus. But language cannot cancel out its inner limitations, which are deeply grounded in it. The progressive formation of language cannot cross the limits posed by its original construction.7 Humboldt observes that humans need to co-​operate with each in order to survive –​and this requires language. Language is thus inextricably involved in human development. Humboldt insists that language determines the way in which we conceive our sensations and thoughts and that human intellectual development, even in the most lonely and closed recesses of the soul, is possible only through the medium of language.8 He summarises the role of language by stating that language is ‘the organ of the formation of thought.’9 3 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 390. Sometimes Humboldt uses the term ‘Weltansicht’ and sometimes ‘Weltanschauung’ in similar contexts and in an apparently similar meaning. In reading Humboldt, one should, however, pay attention also to the possible differences between Weltanschauung and Weltansicht, both of which are usually translated as ‘worldview’. According to James Underhill, the Weltanschauung consists of affirmations of the world, which can be shared by different linguistic communities, whereas Weltansicht constitutes the individual form of a language which permits us to form concepts by which we think. See James W. Underhill, Humboldt, Worldview and Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 55–​56. 4 ‘Über Buchstabenshrift und ihren zusammenhand mit dem Sprachbau’ (1824), Werke, vol. 3, p. 89. 5 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 398. 6 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 399. 7 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 400. 8 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 407–​408. 9 ‘Die Sprache ist die bildende organ des Gedankes’, Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 426.

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The connection between intellectual activity and the sounds of language is not only required for making thought externally perceivable, it is also necessary for gaining clarity and transforming representations (Vorstellungen) into concepts (Begriffe).10 Language has an equally important role in the constitution of objects, or as Humboldt summarises in a poetic image ‘the cutting sharpness of speech sound is indispensable for the understanding in conceiving objects.’11 Representations cannot be recognized generically by merely receiving them passively. The action of the senses must be complimented by the synthetic activity of the mind, which binds the subjective representations into objects. For this, language is indispensable.12 And without objectivity there is no proper thought, and so, apart from permitting communication between people, language is necessary even for a secluded and solitary individual in order for him or her to be able to think.13 In so far as language is involved in the representation of objects, expression matters and concepts are not independent of speech.14 From the mutual dependence of ideas and words, it follows that languages are much more than a means to present known truths. They are also means to discover previously unknown ones. So the diversity of languages is not that of sounds or of signs but of worldviews (Veltansichten).15 How words are formed and connected with each other affects human cognition on all levels. Words and their formation build and determine concepts and language influences knowledge and sensation, so that the variety of languages implies a variety of world views (Weltansichten).16 Humboldt also insists on the basically social nature of language development and observes that it is only when a person tests the comprehensibility of his words with others, that he understands himself. It is through this kind of sharing that the objectivity of thinking increases. But interestingly, despite this objectivity thus gained, Humboldt insists that subjectivity is not deprived of anything; on the contrary. He claims that sharing representations with others 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Über die Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 246. See also ibid., p.192. ‘Die schneidende Schärfe des Sprachlauts ist dem Verstande bei der Auffassung der Gegenstände unentbehrlich’, Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 427. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 428. Identical passage in Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 195. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 429. Vergleichendes Sprachstudium, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 19. Vergleichendes Sprachstudium, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 19–​10. ‘Über den Nationalcharacter der Sprachen’ (a fragment), in Werke, vol. 3, p. 64.

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and transforming them, through language, into intersubjective representations no longer exclusively belonging to one subject, in fact strengthens subjectivity.17 This rather paradoxical claim is understandable in so far as a subject with intersubjective representations of an object is able at the same time to separate itself from the stream of representations instead of identifying with them. Language is thus not the free creation of an individual but belongs always to a nation.18 Human thought is, according to Humboldt, essentially linked to people’s social being. In order to think, a person needs a ‘you’ corresponding to the ‘I’. Concepts achieve their determination and clarity by being reflected back from another thinking being. A concept arises when something separates itself from the moving mass of representations and forms a subject in front of an object. It is, however, necessary that this split within the subject takes place not only within the subject. Objectivity is complete only when the one representing sees the thought outside itself, in another representing and thinking being.19 Humboldt thus thinks that the concept of society is indispensable even for analysing the simplest act of thought. Social communication grants people conviction and stimulation. Thinking with conviction requires something that is both similar and different from oneself. The similar stimulates and the different provides the touchstone for the substantiality of one’s inner creations.20 Humboldt writes that all objective perception is unavoidably mingled with subjectivity, so that each individual can be said to look at the world from his own viewpoint. This is true independently of language, but language strengthens this tendency. Words makes their own contribution by bringing out specific aspects of the object, by adding a subjectivity that is specific to a nation. In this way, each language involves its own worldview (Weltansicht).21 Language determines how we react to and deal with objects: Der Mensch lebt mit der Gegenstanden hauptsächlich, ja, da Empfinden und Handlen in ihm von seinen Vorstellungen abhängen, sogar aus­ schließlich so, wie die Sprache ihm zuführt.22

17 18 19 20 21 22

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 429. The corresponding passage in Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 223–​224. ‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 18. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 201. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 217. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 433–​434. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 434.

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In so far as each language involves its own fabric of concepts and ways of representation (Vorstellungsweise), learning a new language results in gaining a new viewpoint within one’s worldview: Die Erlernung einer fremden Sprache sollte daher die Gewinnung eines neuen Standpunkts in der bisherigen Weltansicht seyn und ist es in der That bis auf einer gewissen Grad, da jede Sprache das ganze Gewebe der Begriffe und die Vorstellungsweise eines Theils der Menschheit enthält.23 Significantly, Humboldt’s careful formulation does not actually claim that in learning a new foreign language one learns a new worldview but merely a new viewpoint within the previous one. This is because when one learns a new language one tends to carry something of the ways of representing of one’s own language (Sprachansicht) over to the new one.24 This limitation of the effects of learning a new language on cognition does not, however, mean that Humboldt is downplaying the effect of language on one’s worldview. He is just insisting on the decisive and determining role of one’s mother tongue in this respect. Humboldt emphasises that language never represents objects directly, but only through the concepts formed by the production of language: Denn die Sprache stellt niemals die Gegenstände, sondern immer die durch den Geist in der Spracherzeugung selbsttätig von ihnen bildeten Begriffe dar […]25 From this follows that different languages can present the world differently. This concerns not only details but also the general orientation of language. In this context Humboldt takes up one dimension of such differences in orientation: languages can differ in their typical orientation either towards objective reality or towards subjective interiority, a difference which Humboldt illustrates by referring to the difference between Greek and German.26 The influence of the national particularity in language27 appears in the formation of 23 24 25 26 27

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 434. Corresponding passage in Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 225. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 434. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 468. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 469–​470. ‘[…] Einflüss der nationellen Eigentümlichkeit in der sprache […]’, Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 470.

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individual concepts on the one hand and the relative differences in the richness of concepts of a certain kind on the other. Of the latter kind of variety, Humboldt gives the example of the richness of religious-​philosophical vocabulary in Sanskrit, which in its formation also reveals the tendency of the nation to abstraction.28 In Über des Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues (1827–​1829) Humboldt sums up the different ways in which language affects cognition. It affects the formation of concepts and leaves in this manner its stamp on them. It also gives the representations their coherent and regular form. It is likewise responsible for the construction of inner and outer speech and determines thus the manner in which ideas are joined to each other.29 Notably Humboldt realised that the influence of language on cognition is not limited to differences in vocabulary. Some differences in conceptualizing experience can be encoded in grammar. One of Humboldt’s examples of how language and our vision of the world are interweaved is taken from Native American languages in which one does not distinguish genres but instead one distinguishes grammatically animate and inanimate objects. From the fact that stars are included in the former category, one can conclude, according to Humboldt, that the natives believed that the stars moved due to their own forces and were perhaps endowed with a personality. Thus, language bears traces of the inner representations (Gestaltung) of a nation.30 Humboldt also refers to the fact that words are associated not only with the object that they denote. The sounds of which they consist of, the other words with a similar meaning or the transitional concepts incorporated in the newly denoted concept, all this creates a certain impression that contributes to the individuality of the concept. Each word representing an object, evokes, although often unnoticed, in addition to the sensations related to the object, a rich network of associations (Empfindungsfolge), which is determined by words and by language.31 Humboldt insists that language is the necessary foundation for the progressive development of the human mind. Language and the human mind are thus in reciprocal interaction.32 So obviously Humboldt did not propose merely to explain the nature and varieties of the human mind by language and its varying structures, but also the latter by variations in national mental powers. Language reflects the central preoccupations and achievements of a nation, 28 29 30 31 32

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 470. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 154. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 563. ‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 17–​18. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 475.

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and thus the deficiencies of a language can often be explained by the ‘lack of national mental power (Geisteskraft)’.33 On the other hand, language has a central, foundational role in the formation of other aspects of culture. It is the universal means of education of humankind. As humans only live, feel and live in language, it is through language that they must be educated to understand even the arts that are not expressed through language.34 2

The Origins and Development of Language

Humboldt takes care to observe that since languages ‘spring from the depths of humanity’, language should not be considered as the genuine creation of nations or peoples (Völker). Language possesses an evident, though in its essence inexplicable, autonomy, and should thus be treated as a spontaneous emanation of the spirit (Geist) rather than as the product of an activity. It is a gift of fate to the nations instead of being their own work. The nations make use of language, without knowing how they have formed it.35 Instead of contingent historical explanations for the appearance of language, Humboldt refers to a language-​forming power (sprachbildende Kraft), an inner need of mankind.36 However, Humboldt takes care to insist that this kind of developing life-​principle (entwickelnde Lebensprincip) should not be construed too teleologically, in the manner of a plan with a set goal. It is not a question of discovering a prearranged goal but rather a cause recognised as unfathomable (unergrüdlich anerkannten Ursache). This kind of cause cannot explain the forms it has given rise to, in so far as it could have as well realized itself in another form. The origin of the intellectual power (geistige Kraft) of humanity is as impossible to explain as it is to calculate its effects. So, neither is there any historical teleology in the sense that the highest form produced would necessarily be the latest.37 One of the issues where Humboldt disagrees with some of his predecessors, who had insisted on the importance of language for human cognition, concerns the origin of language. He considers it a mistake to believe that language originated in a primitive and limited language serving the needs of a human in a state of nature. To this end, unarticulated signs would have been 33 34 35 36 37

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 475. ‘Über den Nationalcharacter der Sprachen’ (a fragment), in Werke, vol. 3, p. 77. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 386. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 390. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 388–​389.

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sufficient. Humboldt believes that language is already in its beginnings ‘all human’ (durchaus menschlich) and extends to all objects of sensory perception and inner examination. Humboldt refers here to the language of so-​called savages, who, he thinks, are almost living in a state of nature. Their vocabulary shows a richness and a variety of expressions that by far exceeds their needs; or, as Humboldt poetically expresses it: ‘Words pour forth, without necessity or intention, from the breast and there is no horde wandering alone in the desert which does not have already have its songs.’38 He insists that a human being is necessarily led to articulated sounds by an urge of his soul (Drang seiner Seele). If animals would be animated by the same urge, they would be able to do the same. From this Humboldt concludes that language is, in its first and indispensable elements (articulated sounds), grounded in the spiritual nature of a human being.39 It is not a human being’s reason that permits language acquisition, but rather his language ability (Sprachfähikeit).40 Humboldt describes how language has two dimensions. On the one hand, there is the dead mass of already formed elements, the already known and thought, and, on the other hand, inexhaustible possibilities for the mind to discover the unknown and to have perceptions (Empfindungen) not felt before. The latter, creative aspect of language appears in all novel and inspired uses of language, which reveal new appearances in reality.41 So, language appears, on the one hand, as a given supply of words and rules, as an object that exerts an influence on the subject, and on another as something which humans are able to shape and modify.42 The language accumulated over many generations exerts an influence, in relation to which the powers of the individual seem small indeed. However, the balance can in some measure be restored by having recourse to the extraordinary malleability and plasticity of language, which permits the individual to use the ‘power that the living human mind has over all material handed down to death.’ This possibility of creative use and the renewal of the petrified forms of language also appears at the level of generations, bringing forth changes in language. These changes do not necessarily concern forms or words themselves but their use. However, these changes, especially when written and literary sources are lacking, are challenging to

38 39 40 41 42

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3 pp. 434–​435. The corresponding passage in Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 197. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 440. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 441. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 436. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 437.

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discern. The power of the individual over language, the possibility to appropriate language and use it to express one’s individuality is on the other hand clearly apparent in art.43 Concept formation, speech production and sentence formation are primarily social creations and expressions of a national spirit or character. But, as we have already observed, Humboldt considered that the rules of language do not completely determine an individual’s expression but allow some leeway for the speaker or writer. In addition to the diversity of ready-​made expressions or turns of phrases which language provides, there is always the possibility to create these on the spur of the moment. Thus, one can enrich language without altering its sounds, forms or rules. This enrichment results in the corresponding development of ideas, increased power of thought and deeper emotional capacities for feeling. This creative aspect is less evident in science than in literature and philosophy. Gifted writers give words new ‘enhanced meanings’. When such metaphorical amplifications of language are taken into general use by the nation, they eventually became a part of the language and their metaphorical nature is finally lost.44 The same happens when in some languages two concepts, expressed by a monosyllabic word, are combined into a two-​syllabic word in order to provide a word for a new concept, for example the sun as ‘the eye of the day’, or milk as ‘the water of the breast’: eventually these sensual and charming metaphors lose their effect and vanish from the speakers’ attention. When the origin of these expressions disappears from the memory of the nation, the meaning of the word is no longer a function of these constituent elements but of the word as a whole.45 Thus languages and concepts are extended through metaphors: one refers to new objects by having recourse to comparisons with already known objects and incorporating the new concepts into language.46 3

Overcoming the Limits of Language

For Humboldt, the powers of the mind that generate thought are identical with those that generate language.47 He observes that a concept can no more be 43 44 45 46 47

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 438–​439. Corresponding passage in Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 227. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 471–​473. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 727 and 754. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 728. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 475.

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detached from the word than a man can cast off his facial features. The word is the individual form of the concept, and if the concept loses this form, it can only be rediscovered in another word.48 However, in so far as words constitute in a sense the outer limits of the rich individual inner feelings of the soul, the soul must always try to make itself independent of the sphere of language. Language threatens to suppress the individual nuances of the latter by the material nature of its sounds and by the too general nature of meanings. Humboldt believes, however, that one can resist this tendency by treating the word more as a clue to the mind’s inner activity instead of letting oneself being shut inside its limits. What is gained in this manner is reflected back into words. In this way, one is supplementing, improving and enriching language. This can be seen in more highly developed languages where the words gain more extended and penetrating meanings in proportion to the momentum gained by thought and feeling.49 Humboldt observes that languages possess the adaptability and flexibility that permits them to absorb anything and to find an expression for it. Thus, no language can constitute any absolute limits to humankind.50 Considered as a developing and living entity language appears as a tool to enhance the capacities of the mind, but specific languages considered as a dead mass of given elements evidently also appear as a limiting factor. Here Humboldt refers to language used in the practical and limited contexts of everyday actions and needs. In such practical contexts, words are immediately replaced by the things and actions in the speaker’s mind. In contrast to such language, Humboldt refers to speech’s original capacity to express feelings, which he thinks is the first and original function of language. Humboldt gives an example of different ways of referring to an object. A tree is present, but in a completely different manner, to the mind when the word is used in the context of falling a tree and when it appears in a description of nature or in poetry. The different manner in which the object is grasped in the latter case results in the same sounds acquiring a different and an enhanced application and effect. Language can be used, on the one hand, merely in the context of a limited, focalised and self-​contained activity, or, on the other hand, it can be directed to an inner whole consisting of associations and feelings. The language of science belongs to the former category, at least in so far, as Humboldt takes care to add, that it is not subjected to the guiding influence of a higher idea. Scientific

48 49 50

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 478. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 478–​479. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 656–​657.

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language is, according to him, even more limited than everyday speech, in so far as the latter involves feelings and passions.51 But even if all languages always leave some regions that lie outside their sphere, Humboldt observes that language is not a closed system, but a creative resource. This creativity is propelled by the feeling that there is something that language does not cover and by the drive to express everything the mind feels in sounds; that is, there is a presentiment that there is something that transcends language, something to which language poses limits. However, the only means to conquer these regions is through language itself. This happens by improving and perfecting language so that it can assimilate progressively an increasingly larger proportion of these regions.52 There is nothing in the deepest recesses of human subjectivity that is not accessible to language: […] nichts in dem Inneren des Menschen ist so tief, so fein, so weit umfassend, das nicht in die Sprache übergienge und in ihn erkennbar wäre.53 However, since the individual is necessarily a member of a linguistic community, a nation, the limits of language are not only individual, nor are the prospects of overcoming them merely individual. Humboldt’s observation that the work of nations must precede those of the individual,54 applies here as well. In so far as language and national character are tightly interweaved,55 nations are also limited by the path chosen by the development of their language. This is why a nation could not animate or fertilize the language of another with its own spirit without by this fact alone transforming it into a different one. But although languages all follow a distinct path that excludes the others, they may have a common goal. This means that one could not, from the differences in their character, make conclusions on the absolute advantages of one language over another.56 In Über die Verschiedenheiten des Menschlichen Sprachbaus (1827–​1828) Humboldt concludes that the advantages languages have over each other are only relative and that even defective characteristics can give rise to peculiar advantages.57 But on the other hand, Humboldt seems to think that Sanskrit is the language nearest to perfection. Representing the purest form of

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 565–​566. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 567. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 464. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 414. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 560–​562. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 565. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 158.

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inflecting language, it provides the richest possibilities for the advancement of human culture.58 4

The Perfection of Language by Inflection

Humboldt pays a lot of attention to the grammatical differences between languages and the way in which these are reflected in cognition. At the centre of his meditations on the relationship between thought and language is the idea that the ideal way to present grammatical relations between words, and consequently also between ideas themselves, is inflection. When Humboldt compares the inflecting languages to agglutinating or incorporating languages,59 he refers to the congruence of the sound-​forms (Lautformen) with the laws of thinking. The differences between languages in this respect, and consequently in their degree of perfection, can depend either on the defective emergence of the laws of thinking in the soul or on the insufficient adaptability of the sound-​ system (Lautsystem). Of course, the deficiencies in either of these points will evidently always affect the other. Humboldt reasons that the perfection of language requires that each word is marked as a specific part of speech and has the composition that the philosophical analysis of speech requires. And this is why he concludes that the perfection of language requires inflection. As to the origin of this feature of language, Humboldt observes that one cannot presuppose a reflective consciousness of language at its origin. All advantages that a language possesses in this vital part of its organism proceed originally from the living sensory world view.60 Since the highest powers of the mind, of which language is the most ideal flowering, proceed from the harmony of all 58 59

60

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 653. Inflecting languages (e.g. Sanskrit) are languages in which words distinguish grammatical categories, whose realisations cannot or cannot easily be separated. In agglutinating languages (e.g. Finno-​Ugric languages) words are easily divided into separate segments with separate grammatical functions. In incorporating languages (e.g. various Native American languages) lexical units, which are syntactically complements of verbs, can also be systematically realized as elements within the verb itself. In isolating languages (e.g. Chinese) each grammatical category is represented by a separate word. See, P. H. Matthews. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 544–​545. Here Peter Heath translates Weltanshauung as ‘world-​outlook’, which I think is appropriate in so far as the term is qualified by the term sinnlich. In Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-​Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 140. See also note 3 above.

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mental capacities, what is produced by the world view affects in its turn language. Humboldt observes that objects of external intuition (Anschauung), as well as inner feelings, appear in two aspects: in their qualitative constitution, which distinguishes them as individuals, on the one hand, and as they appear subsumed under a general category, on the other. He claims that inflection springs from this double aspect of objects.61 When Humboldt compares incorporating languages to inflecting languages, he observes that the former proceed from the whole and the latter from the constituent parts (Einzelnen). He claims also that in incorporating languages objects are not presented with the clarity and distinctness they are in inflecting languages. But Humboldt admits that the incorporating languages achieve on the other hand a peculiar force and liveliness of combination.62 For example, the language of Native Americans from Delaware, which builds up words synthetically by combining separate and meaningful elements (that is, other words), is deficient in so far as it lacks the clarity required by reason, which consists in complete and clearly defined concepts and clearly marked logical relations in speech. But what it loses by its method of construction in this respect, it gains by stimulating the imagination by presenting the mind with a collection of concepts joined together.63 Likewise, Humboldt admits that Chinese, as an isolating language which, in so far as it does not mark the grammatical relations in sounds, has its own merits resulting from the radical separation of the formal relations and the material meanings. Paradoxically, the absence of grammar develops in this nation a sharpened sense of formal relations which, as they are not marked in sounds, the mind must discover in words without the aid of any material grammatical marks.64 However, despite such relative merits of less perfect languages, what proves the ideal for Humboldt is the explicit relationship of objects to their most general categories (Gattungsbegriffe) corresponding to the parts of speech.65 And as we have already observed, it is exactly here that inflection achieves perfection by marking this relation out clearly. Humboldt admits that there is no perfect language: no language has achieved the peak where articulation and symbolisation reach their highest grade.66 However, in comparing Sanskrit to Semitic languages, he observes that in the first mentioned flection is developed 61 62 63 64 65 66

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 545. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 546–​547. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 670–​671. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 672–​674. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 546–​547. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 551.

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to a degree that the unity of the word is in all parts of speech saved from all traces of agglutination.67 The genius of inflection springs from the correct intuition of the language-​producing principle. Its merits appear also in comparison with incorporating languages, in which the parts cannot be separated from the whole.68 While Humboldt admits that isolating, agglutinating or incorporating languages, such as Chinese, semitic languages or the language of Native Americans from Delaware, can have their own merits, he adds that these examples only show that whatever biased path the human mind takes, it is always able to reap something fruitful and inspiring. But the real advantage of language lies not in such single features, but rather in developing itself from a unique principle, which allows to develop the freedom that permits the active thriving of all intellectual capacities. It is this standard by which all languages should be measured and compared with each other.69 Thinking gains clarity when the logical and grammatical relations correspond accurately with each other. When the language habituates the mind to sharp distinctions, this particularly strengthens pure and formal thinking.70 Humboldt attributes the weakness of incorporating and agglutinating languages to the ‘weakness of the language-​forming impulse’.71 Further, in describing the factors that can obstruct the formation of a language, Humboldt explains that the language-​forming principle can be prevented from developing freely by external forces, for example, when the purity of its formative principle is mixed with elements that are not grounded in the speech-​form, or when the principle does not permeate the audible form (Laut) of the language, or when organically contaminated material is joined with equally ill-​formed material that deviates its evolution. The most successful development of linguistic structures results when the formation of words and constructions are not subject to any other restraints than those that are necessary in coupling regularity and freedom.72 The real advantage of a language consists in developing itself freely from a principle. In this way, it permits the full activity of a 67 68 69 70

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 552–​553. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 552. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 553. ‘Über das Entstehen des Grammatisihen Formen und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwicklung’, (1822) in Werke, vol. 3, p. 41. 71 ‘[…] Schwäche des sprachbildende Triebs […]’, Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 552. 72 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 548–​549. For the distinction between these two factors, the weakness of the language-​forming impulse and the diverse external obstacles, contributing to the lesser development of some languages, see ibid., pp. 658–​659 and 678.

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human being’s intellectual capacities and serves as their organ.73 Humboldt compares the formation of a language to that of crystals, which are built gradually but lawfully.74 Although diverse external and accidental historical influences can have an inhibiting or a beneficial effect on the flowering of language in literature, the real impulse must come from within, or as Humboldt puts it: Es muss ein Funke geweckt, ein band, welches gleichsam die Federkraft der Seele sich auszudehnen hindert, gelöst werden und dies kann urplötz­ lich, ohne langsame Vorbildung geschehen. Das wahre und immer unbegreiflich bleibende Entstehen wird darum nicht erklärbarer, dass man sich seinem ersten Moment weiter hinaufschiebt.75 Humboldt evokes a spiritual force, which seems thus to be beyond historical explanation, in order to explain the power that brings forth the successful organisation that gives the inflecting languages their power of synthesis, which is responsible for the complete agreement of the progression of thought with the speech that accompanies it.76 Humboldt attempts to describe the representations of a human being close to the natural state and to analyse the way in which his experience would differ from the someone in a more developed and civilised state. If the elements of language are not sufficiently distinguished, the meanings tend to be cumbersome in so far as they represent things too widely and in a diffuse manner: all objects and actions are thought with all the accompanying circumstances, and as language is burdened with all this, the result is that the mind becomes overwhelmed. One can lighten the material weight of such material meanings by including the different roots of the words as formulas in a whole, instead of just mixing them together. In this way, they become lighter and, as the mind is thus able to distance itself from language, it gains at the same time more control over it.77 This is obviously one of the reasons for Humboldt’s preference for inflecting languages over agglutinating languages; the former are more analytical in this sense.

73 74 75 76 77

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 553. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 554. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 635–​636. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 634. ‘Vergleichende Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 14.

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The Holistic Nature of Language

Like many of his predecessors, Humboldt also discusses the deaf and dumb, but instead of discussing the nature of their gestural language, he refers to their ability to learn articulated speech. He insists that language is not formed of external, natural sounds. Speech sounds are internal in the sense that they are essentially articulated. The deaf can learn this system of articulation, even though they cannot hear the sounds. Speech appears for them as positions and movements of articulatory organs. Thus, as Humboldt puts it, they have the internal hearing intact despite the fact that their ears are closed to external natural sounds (Geräushe). Instead of hearing, they have the ability to analyse speech sounds down to their articulatory components. They are thus able to learn language, not because they have reason, but because they have the Sprachvermögen, the ability co-​ordinate their thoughts with their articulatory organs (Sprachverkzeugen). Humboldt distinguishes articulated sounds (Ton) and natural sounds (Geräusche) and observes that the deaf who have learned language lack only the latter. When the ear hears articulated sounds, it receives them as actions of a living being and not just as movements of air in the ear.78 For Humboldt it was essential to understand that language sounds are not definable by their physical characteristics. Their differences arise from the particular coordinated movements of articulatory organs.79 In fact, one could take this as an explanation of the fact to which Maine de Biran had referred: we are able to perceive most distinctly those sounds that we are able to form and imitate. And this is evidently related to the fact that these are articulated according to a cultural code, which distinguishes them from noises, in a similar way as musical sounds differ from noises. Humboldt insists in this connection equally on the fact that language is not formed of separate elements, but forms a systematic whole. Hearing words as articulated sounds is different from hearing mere noise in so far as words appear immediately through their form as parts of a boundless whole, a language.80 This is also why language cannot be learned mechanically.81 78 79 80

81

Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 193–​194. ‘Über Buchstabenshrift und ihren zusammenhand mit dem Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 92–​93. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 220. By infinity, Humboldt refers to the fact that language is boundless, in the sense that from the elements of each individual word an indefinite number of other words can be built. He refers elsewhere to the fact that language permits us to make an infinite use of finite means. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 477. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 221–22.

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Humboldt compares language to an enormous fabric in which all parts are joined with each other and with the whole with more or less clearly distinguishable connections.82 Language is not composed of separately existing words, but words emerge from speech as a whole.83 So, the essential starting point of Humboldt’s philosophy of language is that language is a whole, comparable in this respect to a living organism: Es giebt nichts Einzelnes in der Sprache, jedes ihrer Elemente kündigt sich nur als Theil eines Ganzen an.84 The generation of language is a synthetic process in the strict sense of the word: the synthesis creates something which was not present in the elements that comprise it bound together.85 The elements of language do not have meanings as separate units but only as elements of the whole of language. Humboldt claims that it is paradoxically just this organic quality that permits language to analyse, or rather, quite literally, to articulate the world of experience. Just as there are no words without the whole phonological system of language, there is no distinction between the subject and verb without the material expression of person and time.86 The originality of Humboldt’s idea consists in thinking that instead of the parts of speech, or their order, reflecting the metaphysical structure of reality, the grammatical structures participate in structuring our experience into objects and actions. As language forms a continuously developing whole, it is only appropriate that Humboldt regards language acquisition not so much as a process of the mechanical assimilation of separate elements but as an organic development of an existing power or capacity. He insists on the fact what when children learn language, it does not happen ‘mechanically’. It cannot consist merely in them learning to pronounce and remember separate words, since understanding each word, as an element of language, involves comprehending the rules of the construction of an indefinite number of other words. Learning language is to be understood as the development of a capacity (Entwiclung der Sprachkraft). Certainly, Humboldt does not deny that language learning requires external stimulation, but he insists that it proceeds from the internal forces of the human organism. It does not proceed merely from external 82 83 84 85 86

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 446. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 448. ‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 10. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 473. ‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 13.

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stimuli but also as if from the inside. As evidence for this, Humboldt mentions the fact that all children, in diverse circumstances, when they are in the appropriate developmental stage, more or less at the same age, start to speak and understand speech within a relatively short time span.87 The fact that language is a whole, is also a reason for Humboldt’s denial that humanity could arise gradually from an animal condition.88 Language must emerge once and for all, in so far as it must at each moment possess everything that constitutes it as a whole.89 The creation of language cannot be explained as an invention of a human as a conscious being possessing reason, in so far as to be such, humans have to have language, or as Humboldt puts it bluntly: ‘man is man only through language’ (Der Mensch ist nur Mensch durch Sprache). To circumvent this problem by referring to a gradual development does not work for Humboldt because, according to the holistic nature of language, it cannot be learned in a simply cumulative step-​by-​step way. Humboldt claims that to suppose that language, and humans along with it, could have developed gradually shows only that one has not understood indivisible (untrenn­ bar) nature, the nature of language and the human mind. Such a gradualist hypothesis is incompatible with the nature of the mental act that is involved in understanding one single word, but which is (due to the holistic nature of language) already sufficient to understand the whole of language. This does not mean, according to Humboldt, that language should be conceived as something ready-​made and given, since this would be as incomprehensible as its gradual development: in this case, one could well ask how a human being could understand and use the given language. Language emerges by itself and, evidently, Humboldt admits, also little by little, but not so that its organisation (Organismus) would be already there as a dead mass in dark recesses of the human mind, but instead as a law which guides mental functions and by which the first word evokes the whole of language: Sie geht nothwendigt aus ihm selbst hervor, und gewiss auch nur nach und nach, aber so, dass ihr Organismus nicht zwar als todte Masse in Dunkel der Seele liegt, aber als Gesetz die Funktionen der Denkkraft bedingt, und mithin das erste Wort schon die ganze Sprache antönt und voraussetzt.

87 88 89

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 431–​433. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 279. ‘Vergleichende Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 2.

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Although Humboldt admits that there is actually nothing equivalent to this phenomenon among conceivable things, he permits himself to compare it to the natural instinct of animals: it is an instinct of reason.90 One of Humboldt’s formulations in this connection is that language could not be invented if its type did not pre-​exist in the human understanding.91 We can recognise in Humboldt’s discussion the traditional Rousseauan chicken-​or-​egg dilemma, but Humboldt’s holism evidently changes the terms of the problem. The holistic nature of language has consequences also for its scientific study. Even the most primitive forms of language must be studied as organic wholes, rather than examining them with an arbitrarily fragmented and piecemeal approach.92 Evidently language can develop and gain complexity, but it must possess its systemic nature even in its most primitive or simplest forms, otherwise it would not be language at all. 6

Nationality, Individuality and Language

For Humboldt language is inseparable from the notion of a people.93 Referring to the cases of known feral children, he observes that human life requires society and that an isolated human would probably always have remained in the darkness of animal life. Thus, one cannot consider humanity at any stage of history but consisting of a diversity of peoples (Volk), and as individuals within these. Humboldt thinks consequently that this individuality is, like society, dependent on the emergence of language.94 But as individuals have different positions in society, this results evidently in differences in their languages.95 In addition, people obviously have also diverse individual experiences, which influence their language. It is the holistic nature of language which Humboldt uses to explain how we are able to understand each other, despite having different experiences related to words and their meanings. As different languages involve different conceptualisations of the world or different worldviews, the basis of communication

90 91 92 93 94 95

‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 10–​11. ‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 10. ‘Vergleichendes Sprachstudium’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 8. ‘Eine Sprache lässt sich daher nur in Verbindung mit ein Volk denken’, Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 235. Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 253. For example, between the sexes or different age groups, see Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 253ff.

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does not lie in the fact that people live in the same world or that they necessarily experience the world in the same way. Humboldt argues that when humans use language, their mutual understanding is not based on actually sharing the signs of things, nor on their having agreed to produce completely identical concepts. Understanding is based on the fact that they agitate reciprocally the same links in the chain of sensible representations or inner conceptualizations, or as he puts it in a more metaphorical vein, by striking the same key in their spiritual instruments and producing a corresponding but not necessarily identical concepts.96 So Humboldt here again applies the holistic principle that it is not the elements that count but their order, their place in the chain; just as pressing the corresponding keys of two different instrument can produce physically distinct sounds as far as their absolute height or timbre (determined by the relative strength of their overtones) can differ, while they both have the same relative position in the musical scale. Similarly, two persons can agree on the meaning of words although they do not join exactly the same meanings and associations to them. And as far as different languages are concerned, Humboldt makes a similar point concerning understanding without sharing completely identical meanings. Just as individuals can attach different meanings to the words referring to the same concepts, nations which have different worldviews (Weltauffassungen) can refer to the same (or similar enough for the purposes of translation) concepts with words that are not completely identical in their meaning. He insists thus that the words of different languages referring to the same concepts are never really synonymous.97 As each individual uses language in a slightly different way and never gives the words exactly the same meaning as another individual, Humboldt concludes, in his famous dictum, that ‘all understanding is at the same time not understanding’.98 But if language is what makes us individuals, it is also that which unites us and permits communication and understanding.99 Humboldt compares language to the sea which separates nations but also connects them by allowing navigation.100

96 97

Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 559. Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 581. Humboldt qualifies the identity of concepts by the expression ‘on the whole’ (im Ganzen): ‘ […] wenn sie auch im Ganzen gleiche Begriffe bezeichnen […].’ 98 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 439, and in Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 228. 99 Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 156 and 160–​161. 100 Vershiedenheiten des menschlichen Spachbaues, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 158–​159.

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277

Writing as the Analysis of Language

The analysis of language itself requires tools. So just like Maine de Biran, Humboldt insists on the cognitive effects of writing in terms of our grasp of language and its structure. He claims that writing in characters, which represent the sounds of language, differs in this respect from pictorial writing, Bilderschrift. As pictorial signs represent at the same time the word and the object, they tend to turn the mind’s attention away from the word as an element of language, whereas, according to Humboldt, the representation of the object should be kept subordinated to the representation of the form of the word. The articulated form of a word is a link in the endless chain by which thought, through language, reaches out in every direction. In limiting this expansion, the pictorial language diminishes the power of the subject. The object overwhelms the subject by means of all its complex properties and elements (Beschaffenheiten) instead of affecting it by the properties that the individual character of the language brings together. The written word should be a sign of a sign (i.e. the sign of a word). Being at the same time a sign of an object, disturbs this function.101 This drawback of pictorial writing does not, however, apply to Figurenschrift, in which arbitrary signs represent concepts. This kind of writing might seem ideal in so far as it does not distract thought from itself. The internal regularity of the formation of these signs leads thought back to itself. However, such a language works against the ideal, as Humboldt sees it, which is to transform the outside world into ideas. The Figurenschrift misses the material and individual form of the word.102 It can be seen as an attempt to free oneself from language, that is, at least from a specific language and its sound structure, missing thus something essential in the articulated structure of language. Humboldt remarks on the utopian and impoverishing nature of such a project: Das Bemühen, das sich von einer bestimmten Sprache unabhängig zu machen, muss, da das Denken ohne Sprache einmal unmöglich ist, nachtheilig und verödend auf den Geist auf einwirken.103 Writing in proper alphabetical characters, Buchstabenschrift is free of the fault of missing the material and individual form of the word. The advantages of 101 ‘Über die Buchstabenshrift und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau’ (1824), in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 86–​87. 102 ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 87. 103 ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 89.

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alphabetic writing are based on the fact that it tends to take the logical analysis of language up to its smallest elements. Humboldt describes how ‘uneducated nations’, children and the savages tend excessively to bind elements together. In contrast, he suggests that one should take language apart, to analyse it into its constituent elements, and always remain suspicious that what one takes as simple is eventually a compound. Alphabetic script takes this process below the word into its formative sound elements. In this way it also stabilises the pronunciation of the speech sounds and makes them more distinct. The education of the ear and of the speech organs that results is for Humboldt of utmost importance. He claims that the isolation of sound elements (Lautelemente) has a profound influence on spoken language.104 By permitting the people to isolate and to indicate articulated sounds, the nation gains a completely new insight into the nature of speech. As articulation is the essence of language, without which it would not be possible, and as the concept of structure or organisation (Gliederung) pervades the whole of language, making the isolated sounds sensible, imaginable and recallable has an important role in the evolution of the sense of language (Sprachsinn).105 In this way, the invention of the alphabet influences the elaboration of poetry and the development of grammatical forms. Writing makes speakers more aware of the rhythm and sounds of language as well of the grammatical forms, for example, those involved in inflection.106 Humboldt sums up the benefits of the use alphabetical script by observing that they extend to the form of expressions and through them to the elaboration of concepts and the manipulation of ideas.107 Humboldt describes the limitations of American native languages lacking grammatical markings that could be considered as genuine grammatical forms. These languages tend excessively to heap up different qualifications of a concept when they are not necessary, that is, to use a specific expression instead of a more general one. Humboldt believes that a constant use of alphabetical writing would have contributed to getting rid of these limitations and to the restructuring of the language in this respect. The meticulous preservation of language in memory in the form of visible signs would have permitted one to reflect on it and to gain control over it. Due to the dependence of thought on language, one’s thoughts would have consequently gained more solidity, variability and freedom.108 In extolling the advantages resulting from 1 04 105 106 107 108

‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 89–​91. ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 92. ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 96–​99. ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 102. ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 102–​103.

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writing, Humboldt did not, however, ignore its possible disadvantages. If the language is worked excessively by the understanding (Verstand) instead of intuition (Anschauung), imagination or feeling, this may result in dryness and impoverishment. By making language more logically consistent, writing can also have a negative effect on it by diminishing its liveliness, which, in turn, has a detrimental effect on the mind.109 8

Humboldt and His French Predecessors

Although it is quite obvious that Humboldt’s conceptions owe much to Condillac, Diderot and the ideologists, whose writings he had studied during his stay in Paris,110 there is a difference in emphasis. For Condillac and his followers, the initial interest lay in the manner in which the development of different mental faculties develop through and depend on the acquisition of language, and this led them to discuss the influence of the diversity of languages on cognition. For Humboldt the main interest lies in studying the ways in which the structure of language influences the way one see the world. In this respect, his thought could be said to anticipate the linguistic relativity thesis of Sapir and Whorf,111 although, as Hans Aarsleff has claimed, in so far as Humboldt presented the highly inflected Sanskrit as the ideal form of language and measured other languages and national cultures by comparing them to this ideal, one should perhaps speak of linguistic absolutism instead of linguistic relativism.112 Humboldt actually refers to the fact that some languages are originally degenerate (entarteten).113 Considering their common interest in language and its role in cognition, it is quite surprising that in his diaries from his stay in Paris in 1797–​1799, Humboldt gives, in his lecture notes on Condillac and in the summaries of his 1 09 ‘Buchstabenshrift und Sprachbau’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 106. 110 See Hans Aarleff’s introduction to Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-​Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, pp. xxxii-​ lvi. Detailed accounts concerning Humboldt’s acquaintances and readings during his stay in Paris in 1797–​1799 can be found in his journals, Tagebücher, edited by Albert Leitzmann, in Gesammelte Werke, vols. xiv–​x v (Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1916 and 1918). See also Lothar Gall, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Eine Preuße der Welt (Berlin: Propyläen, 2011), pp. 86–​94, and Raymond Trousson, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt: un Allemand à Paris sous le Directoire’: . 111 See, Underhill, Humboldt, Worldview and Language. 112 Aarsleff, Introduction, p. xxxii. 113 Humboldt, ‘Über die Verschiedenheiten’, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 643.

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discussions with Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis, so little attention to the French philosophers’ ideas on the importance of language for thinking and reasoning. Instead, he concentrates on national differences in philosophy, notably on the lack of metaphysical thinking proper in French philosophy as compared to German philosophy and Kantianism.114 This obviously reveals another feature which distinguishes Humboldt from his French predecessors: Humboldt’s vitalistic references to internal principles and forces of that govern the growth of languages. The references to such forces, whether they are taken as metaphors or as metaphysical entities, give the reader the impression that despite the evident eighteenth-​century roots of Humboldt’s thinking a lot of water has passed under the bridge uniting the two banks of the Rhine since Condillac’s time. However, it is perhaps of interest to observe that both Condillac and Humboldt observe a similar contrast between languages that serve reason and those that serve imagination, although the former attributes this contrast to word order and the latter to grammatical factors related to the use of inflection.115 But Humboldt discusses word order, too. Like some of the French grammarians, he refers to a ‘natural order’, according which the verb goes after the subject and before the object.116 Like Diderot, he refers in his discussion of word order to the fact that postponing the appearance of the object of predication in a phrase puts strain on attention.117 A novel feature in Humboldt as compared to his eighteenth-​century predecessors is the way in which he pays attention to the various ways in which grammatical features, other than mere word order, affect cognition, supporting his claims with a detailed examination of the material provided by comparative linguistics available at his time. His extremely valuable and rich contribution to the discussion lies in his clear understanding of language as a systematic whole and in the detailed manner in which he discusses the ways in which the structure of language contributes to or sets limits to cognition. 1 14 See Humboldt, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, pp. 444–​449, 464–​468 and 483–​487. 115 But, of course, in fact it is inflection which permits the free and poetic word order. 116 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 703. See also his discussion of Barmanish and Chinese languages, pp. 707–​712. 117 Sprachbau und Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 704–​705.

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G. H. Lewes and Symbolic Thought The Englishman G. H. Lewes (1817–​1878), whose ideas concerning the irreducible and holistic nature of biological nature resemble those of the eighteenth-​century materialists and their Idéologue followers, also continues the Condillacian tradition by his insistence on the social and symbolic nature of human cognition.1 In the first volume of his monumental and partly posthumously published work Problems of Life and Mind (1874–​1879), he starts the exposition of psychological principles by stating that a human being is not simply an animal organism but also a unit in a social organism. It is thus mistaken to seek the data of human psychology, in the manner of the metaphysicians, in the introspective analysis of consciousness, or in the manner of biologists, who seek their data in the combination of such analysis with the interpretation of nervous phenomena. One must, however, observe that Lewes does not in any way deny the relevance of biology. He claims explicitly that the data of the science of psychical phenomena must be looked for in both biology and in sociology.2 What he opposes is starting with consciousness as a subjective and individual phenomenon without observing its social nature, and then proceeding by correlating this kind of data with physiological data concerning the nervous system. But life and mind are closely analogous since both are functions. Lewes also remarks that the mind is in fact nothing but a special form of life.3 Consequently, every mental phenomenon has its corresponding neural phenomenon. Lewes also takes care to add, with emphasis, that every neural phenomenon involves the whole organism.4 He does not explain the reason for the latter assertion, but since he defined function as the activity of an organ,5 it should also be obvious that the function of an organ can exist only in the context of the whole organism. The eye or the lungs serve their function only as parts of the whole organism. 1 For an overview of Lewes’s philosophy, see Elfed Huw Price, ‘George Henry Lewes (1817–​ 1878): Embodied Cognition, Vitalism, and the Evolution of Symbolic Perception’, in Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, eds. C.U.M. Smith and H. Whitaker (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 105–​123. 2 G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First Series: The Foundations of a Creed, vol. 1, (London: Trübner & Co., 1874), p. 109. 3 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 110. 4 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 112. 5 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 111.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_019

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Lewes insists that the organism is not simply an assemblage of organs, like a machine put together by the juxtaposition of different parts. The parts of an organism are not juxtaposed but differentiated. Here Lewes follows the Montpellierian vitalists and Diderot in characterizing the organs as groups of minor organisms, having a life of their own, but all sharing in a common life of the whole organism, and contrasting this with the mechanism of a machine where all parts are different and have mechanical significance only in relation to the whole.6 So, Lewes ends ups contrasting parts of an organism to those of a machine by insisting on their relative independence, at the same time as he is insisting on their being embedded in the whole organism. Organs and their functions are explicable only in context of the whole organism.7 1

The Social Organism

According to Lewes, the sensations of both humans and animals are mediated reactions determined by experience. However, in the case of humans one must recognize an important medium that animals lack: namely, the social medium. Humans do not only inherit a biological organization. In addition to this biological heritage, the social organism transmits ways of feeling and thinking, which are mediated by tools and instruments, by creeds and institutions, by literature, art and science. This distinction is related to the distinction between feeling and thinking as well as to that between feeling and perceiving. It took humans thousands of years before they could perceive the colour blue, instead of merely feeling the difference between a blue object and a brown one. And the possibility of this perception is, according to Lewes, due to language, which for its part exists only as a social function.8 Lewes characterises the distinction between thought and feeling also in a Condillacian way by referring to the distinction between representation and presentation or between a symbol and an object.9 Lewes writes that the mental life of a human being has thus two sources, the animal organism and the social organism. Detached from society, a human is simply an animal organism. Thus, the real development of humanity can 6 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, pp. 113–​114. 7 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, pp. 115–​117. 8 Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, pp. 122–​124. See also, ibid., pp. 152–​156. 9 Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind. Third Series: Mind as a Function of the Organism. The Sphere of Sense and Logic of Feeling. The sphere of Intellect and Logic of Signs (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1880), p. 443.

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be traced in the development of civilization. In this way, the soul of a human being has double roots and a double history, passing thus, as Lewes remarks, ‘quite out of the range of animal life’. Consequently, no explanation of mental phenomena can be valid which does not allow for this extension of range.10 He refers to Comte, who also combined the biological and sociological points of view. However, in a note Lewes indicates the point where he disagrees with Comte. Comte held that humanity does not develop any intellectual or moral attributes that could not be found in animals, whereas Lewes holds that the attributes of intellect and conscience are special products of the social organism. Humans and animals both possess the ‘logic of feeling’, but the latter are deficient in the ‘logic of signs’, which is a social and not an animal function.11 It is thus the social factor which elevates the animal psychology into human psychology, transforming at the same the sensible into the ideal world, knowledge into science and emotion into sentiment and appetite into morality.12 Lewes distinguishes ideas, in the sense of ‘conceptions’, from images, which are modified reinstatements of visual sensations. Ideas are substitutes for sensations. In his use of the term, ‘idea’ does not stand for images nor for copies of images. Lewes refers to the ‘unpicturable notions of intelligence’ with the term ‘conception’, which he finds preferable to ‘idea’, for the obvious reason that it is less tainted with the notion of an image.13 Sensations and images can act as signs in so far as they can stand for, and call up, other associated feelings. But unlike words, such signs are the products of sensation and of the direct physiological activity of the nervous system, whereas words are arbitrary symbols that substitute for all images and sensations that they integrate. They are capable of being resolved into the latter, but recalling the sensations or ideas is not necessary for them to works as substitutes.14 As an example, Lewis observes that animals and children have visual experiences of red, blue, brown, orange or other colours, but they have no conception of red, blue, or orange, let alone of colour in general. The abstraction involved in these concepts is possible only by means of language, in a logical process that is not constituted by the combination of visual feelings but by the substitution of a verbal symbol for these feelings. And Lewes emphasises that the symbol it not only a substitution, but also conventional and abstract, and that this abstraction is possible

10 11 12 13 14

Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 125. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 125, note. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, p. 443. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 463–​464. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 465–​466.

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only through language, and in language only through verbal and numerical symbols.15 2

Ideation as the Algebra of Feeling

Although symbolic thought cannot, according to Lewes, be reduced to sensation, it cannot be separated from it either. He compares the relation between the logic of feeling and the logic of signs to that between arithmetic and algebra.16 Algebra operates without the specific values of its general symbols, and symbolic thought without the specific sensations which its conceptions subsume. In this way thought, although it cannot exist without sensation, is very unlike sensation, in the same manner as algebra is unlike arithmetic. Just like algebra permits us to reason with square roots of negative or even of imaginary quantities, likewise in symbolic thought we can conceive of things we cannot feel or imagine, such as inexistence or infinity.17 Here Lewes presents similar examples as the Cartesians had done in order to separate imagination and understanding: one can have clear ideas of things that one cannot form images, such as God or modesty. This applies even to such concrete manifolds as a thousand sheep: whatever sensible images we may have in thinking about them, they are not distinguishable from what we may have in thinking about 999 sheep.18 Lewes admits that much of human cognition remains strictly within the sphere of images and sensations. It suffices, for example, for making practical judgements, when we avoid dangers by associating sensations and images, that is, when certain sensations act as signs of danger.19 Although Lewes claims that from the developmental point of view symbolic thinking is dependent on feeling or sensation, and in principle always translatable into images and experiences, this translation does not always take place or is performed only to a small extent. In order to understand complex reasoning formulated verbally, it is not necessary to consider images related to these symbols, since in reasoning, just like in arithmetic, we are not interested in their specific values, but in their relations. For purposes of calculation, such a translation is not only unnecessary but also hampering. The clusters of images related to the symbols are in no way necessary for understanding the relevant 15 16 17 18 19

Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 466–​477. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 152 and Third Series, pp. 368ff. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 470–​471. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 471–​472. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, p. 472. See also p. 481.

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logical relations.20 Lewes compares this to the way the properties of an object can determine our movements without us having any images of them, for example, the brittleness suggested by the sight of glass makes us move in a certain way without us having to think of its brittleness. If sensations can have this determining agency without the recall of the images of other sensations, then this effect, according to Lewes, must be even more striking in the case of symbols and substitutes, which do not possess any of the sensible qualities of the feelings they symbolise. Thus, the greater proportion of human thought takes place though reliance on logical relations with only an occasional translation of symbols into images.21 Lewes claims that sensations and images differ from ideas also in their determinants. Sensations and images are formed according to physiological and psychological laws, whereas ideas are formed according to physiological, psychological and sociological laws.22 In this way, we can obviously study ideas by physiological or psychological methods, but our study of them would obviously be incomplete if we would neglect to study them in relation to society. Although animals are not capable of symbolic thought, Lewes considers the logic of animals to be basically the same as that of humans, but instead of symbols it is performed on sensations and images only. A wolf concludes from a scent that its prey is near, but it is not capable of detaching this logical process and reflecting on it, that is, putting it into the form of a proposition. Neither can it draw such conclusions in the absence of the corresponding sensations.23 Lewes grants that animals have language in the widest possible sense, as a rudimentary communication that consists in the expression of feelings by gestures and cries. But unlike humans, they are unable to form theories or narratives. They are also unable to generalise beyond their actual experiences. They communicate merely their feelings and desires, and in this way their communication is individual and not social.24 By insisting on the social nature of human language, Lewes refers here to the fact that it constitutes a world of stable objects, considered abstractly apart from their attributes. Animals and infants are incapable of this kind of abstraction, and in this sense objects do not exist for them.25 This has consequences for their behaviour. Lewes gives an example of how in the behaviour of animals and infants, it is the dominant sensory 20 21 22 23 24 25

Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 474–​476. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 477–​479. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, p. 483. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 480–​481. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 484–​486. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 486–​467.

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attribute that dictates the action of the organism. A child who has tasted sugar later puts salt or chalk into his mouth, whereas a dog for which the dominant quality is scent does not do this. The action of both is guided by the dominant sensory quality. But language changes all this. The name takes the place of the dominant sensory quality and determines action.26 Language thus allows humans to construct objects in the philosophical sense of the term, that is, to separate subject and predicates, substance and attributes, object and qualities, and thing and relations. Animals and infants, whose minds work at the level of feelings, are incapable of such separation.27 Among abstract ideas which are possible through language, such as law, life, cause, force, and soul, Lewes also takes up the idea of death. Animals can see their other animals stop moving and start to rot, but they are unable to generalise the experience and consider their own death, because they lack the means to identify their organism with that of others, connecting remote causes or conceiving a future. Language records and generalises experience and also opens up a ‘vista of experiences to be’. This, Lewes concludes, makes a human being the only melancholy animal and also the only moral animal. Thus, death overshadows but also ennobles human life.28 Lewes also considers the role of language from the point of view of the history of human civilisation. He reaches conclusions not unlike those of Condillac on the role language and systems of signs for the progress of science. For him, just like for Condillac, the development of ideas is actually but one aspect of the growth and development of language. Lewes gives multiple examples of how new mathematical tools and methods of notation have permitted science to progress.29 Lewes thinks it is useless to explain the superiority of humans by endowing them with an imaginary agent, a spiritual soul, when one can explain it by a real agent: the social organism.30 In addition, the spiritualist hypotheses fail to cover the facts: a person possessing this spirit but isolated from society, could not manifest intelligence or morality any more than an animal would.31 But Lewes discards also the materialist hypothesis that postulates that the brain is the ‘organ or the mind’ and that the mental differences between humans and animals could be explained by differences in cerebral anatomy. Lewes thinks 26 27 28 29 30 31

Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 487–​489. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 489–​490. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 491 and 494. Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, pp. 495–​500. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 158. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 157.

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that looking for the organ of the mind would be as preposterous as looking for the organ of life.32 3

From Sensations to a Historical a Priori

Thus, according to Lewes, all the main conditions of the higher mental functions in humans are to be sought in the social organism. Thus, a human being is not only a collection of organs, that is, a biological organism, but also an organ in the collective organism. Language is the chief vehicle of symbolical operations and the only means of by which abstraction is effected. Without language there is no thought. Lewes admits that in so far as perception condenses many feelings into one, it is a form of knowledge. But language, as a symbol of a conception, condenses many perceptions into one, resulting not only in a wider range of knowledge, but also in a knowledge that is facultative and capable of transmission and preservation.33 By the term ‘facultative’ Lewes refers to actions that are spontaneous, instead of being fixed, that is, resulting uniformly from the excitation of the corresponding organs. In facultative action no organ is in control and the organism is controlling the organs.34 Language also permits humans to have not only knowledge of particular facts like animals but also of general facts.35 And as far as images are concerned, animals are capable reproducing them, but the logic of signs permits their facultative reproduction, which enables abstraction from the sensible order of presentation and thus allows for making novel combinations and re-​combinations of them.36 Lewes sums up his conception by claiming that instead of being reducible to the functions of a biological organism, let alone one organ, the intellect and conscience are social functions.37 On reading Lewes’s text one is surprised by the fact that, when he insists on the importance of signs for human cognition, he does not refer to Condillac or the Idéologues, whose writings he obviously must have known, at least from secondary sources.38 In his Biographical History of Philosophy he does not say a 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 160. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 167. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 139. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 168. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 169. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 174. Once Lewes remarks in passing that ‘I have more than once had the mingled pleasure and pain of finding results I had laborously reached, arrived by other writers.’ Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 146.

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word on this particular aspect of Condillac’s philosophy.39 Instead he criticises Condillac, referring mainly to the Traité des sensations, for the ‘monstrous error’ of supposing that our mental faculties are of sensuous origin. He asks, if these faculties are taken to be transformed sensations, then what is it that transforms them, and claims that Condillac had no answer to this question.40 In addition, following the footsteps of Victor Cousin and Charles Renouvier, who had reduced eighteenth-​century materialism to sensualism,41 Lewes assimilates Condillac and the ‘sensational school’ to materialism. In the Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes reproaches the ‘sensational school’, without mentioning any names, for treating consciousness as ‘transformed sensation’, without seeing the necessity of the ‘grouping faculty’ on which thought depends, and not being aware of the fact that an ‘organism is an evolution’, in the sense that it brings with it, in its structure, evolved modes of action inherited from ancestors. This inherited experience is antecedent to all direct relation with external influences and necessarily determines the results of individual experience. Thus Lewes compares the sensitive subject, instead of a tabula rasa to a palimpsest. He writes, relying on Kantian terminology, that there is an a priori condition in all sensation, but that this is, however, not transcendental but historical.42 Despite the addition of the influence of the new theories of biological evolution, which permitted scholars to solve some of problems related to the evolution and origin of language, one can with reason claim that Lewes forms one link in the long tradition starting from Condillac and continuing with the Idéologues –​despite his silence concerning his predecessors. One can only speculate on his reasons for the silence on Condillac’s theories concerning the influence of language on human cognition. In fact, Lewes seemed to think that he was original in discovering the social factor in psychology.43 In addition to emphasising his own originality, one could also speculate on the influence of the eighteenth-​century reception of Condillac and his followers which assimilated their doctrine to materialism. 39 40 41

42 43

See his Biographical History of Philosophy (London: Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton and, n.d.), pp. 521–​530. Of course, Condillac’s Essai gives an answer: language. See Olivier Bloch, ‘Sur l’image du matérialisme français du XVIIIe dans l’historiographie philosophique de la première moitié du XIXe siècle’. Judging by the fact that Lewes refers to Cousin in a note (Biographical History, p. 524), Cousin may well have been the source of Lewes’s interpretation. He had also met Cousin during his visit in Paris in 1842. See, Edward S. Read, ‘The separation of psychology from philosophy: Studies in the sciences of mind 1815–​1879’, in Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 7, The Nineteenth Century, edited by C. L. Ten (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 283. Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, vol. 1, p. 162. See also, ibid, pp. 215–​221. Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 271.

Conclusions: From the Institutions of Nature to History and Culture In the Cartesian scheme, the notion of the mind-​body union was explicated by a repeated reference to the concept of ‘institution’. In addition to having famously mechanized the human body, Descartes and the Cartesians that followed afterwards described the human body consistently in terms pertaining to semiotic artefacts. Some of the bodily movements, in addition to being changes in physical space, signify. The bodily movements related to sensations refer to objects or to their diverse qualities, and some movements in the body are related to the passions of the soul. Significantly, these meanings are, in so far as they have been instituted, dependent on the will, arbitrary. As we have seen, some of these arbitrary connections between movements and significations have been instituted by nature (ultimately by God). But some of them have been, according to the Cartesians, instituted by the will of humans. In both cases they have the stability belonging to institutions. But for the Cartesians the body was not only a semiotic artefact, it was also a technological artefact. In so far as God had intended the animal body to function in an appropriate manner, the Cartesians treated the animal body as a divine artefact. But the human body was more than a divine artefact, for its artificiality had two levels. In addition to being a divine artefact, just like the animal body, it was in part also a human artefact. In so far as humans train their bodies to acquire novel connections between the movements in their bodies and their ideas, their bodies also become human artefacts. Although humans are thus able to make the movements in their body acquire novel significations, there are no indications in the writings of the Cartesians that this would give rise to novel cognitive functions in the human mind. The functions of the mind are diverse modes of thinking, and these modes are either innate to the mind (thought) or a consequence of the mind being joined to the body (sensation and imagination). However, Descartes allows for the acquisition of passions other than the first and original innate ones. So, if we consider the different passions as functions of the soul, we acquire new artificial functions too. In addition, what is made explicit in the writings of Malebranche is the Cartesian idea that some of the mechanisms in our brains producing our thoughts result from connections being forged in our brain by the culture we are living. He pays attention also to the fact that learning to think properly in abstract matters requires that one trains one’s brain and forms proper connections in order to be able to think and remember abstractions more easily. This prepares the

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_020

290 Conclusions ground for the ideas developed later by Leibniz and Wolff, according to which the use of artificial symbols facilitates and develops abstract thinking. What is interesting with regard to the development of later materialistic theories of the mind is Descartes’s extension of the notion of representation to material entities or events, that is, to impressions in the brain. We have seen that also Wolff considered that symbolic thought or general knowledge is represented in the body. This idea, although a natural offspring of dualistic metaphysics, provides paradoxically the foundations of materialistic theories that identify mental events with material events in the brain.1 It is also one of the interesting aspects of the Cartesian way of dealing with the way in which culture is inscribed in us. Cultural aspects of the human mind are discussed predominantly in terms of the body, so that culturally learned meanings are literally embodied. Malebranche even describes how the material traces related to our imagination serve to perfect our ability to think about abstract and spiritual things. In this way, those sensible signs that we attach to abstract ideas which are not sensible or imaginable can be more easily retained and understood, a fact that was emphasised by many later writers such as Leibniz and Destutt de Tracy. 1

Words and Ideas in the Empiricist Tradition

The idea that words not only serve to communicate our ideas but also to manipulate or form them appears gradually at the latter half of the sixteenth century and is strengthened during the next one. Although Hobbes thought that we can reason without words, he conceded that words are useful for memory and, in this way, he allowed language a role in the development of our cognitive capacities. Words prevent the results of reasoning from slipping away from our minds once made. Without them humans would not only be unable to communicate the results of their ratiocinations to others, but also to progress with their thoughts in a systematic way and to build their knowledge into a consistent and progressive whole. Words also permit abstraction, that is, conclusions made on the basis of particulars that are valid not only for particulars but universally. Another interesting feature in Hobbes’s writings on the subject of language and thought is that for him the transformation of mere ‘marks’ into ‘words’, that is, into signs representing thoughts involves implicitly

1 See Timo Kaitaro, ‘Brain-​ Mind Identities in Dualism and Materialism –​A Historical Perspective’.

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the holistic aspect of language, in so far as these voluntary signs must be disposed in the context of the grammatical order of language, as parts of speech. This emphasis distinguishes him from empiricists like Locke, who does not evoke the role of grammar in thinking considered as an art of combining ideas. But perhaps the most significant of Hobbes’s ideas concerning the role of language in human cognition is the idea that what distinguishes humans from animals is that the former have access to the realm of truth and that thought in the proper sense of the word is possible only for creatures in possession of language. Locke seems to follow the Hobbesian idea that thinking consists in combining and adding ideas. In this process, as described by Locke, language serves merely a subaltern role in helping to retain and combine ideas. Language does not yet seem to have any constitutive role in so far as all our ideas are eventually combinations of simple ideas that exist independently of language. But one should also give Locke credit for showing that in addition to understanding the natural world of objects and their natural properties, humans institute an artificial world of moral distinctions and relations, which depends on the arbitrary will of the law-​giver. Although the Humean mind is apparently built of similar building blocks as Locke’s simple ideas through the use of such natural faculties as association, we should not forget that Hume also emphasises the complex structure and architecture of our mental apparatus instead of considering it merely as a simple concatenation, association or addition of simple elements. He favours analogies and comparisons referring to biological phenomena and cultural artefacts, that is, to structures involving the subordination of parts to a common end or purpose. Of course, such structures, existing independently of their changeable constituent elements are, as Hume remarks, ‘fictitious’ but they are as products of imagination still in good company; that is, on the same level of reality as physical causation. And although he insists on the natural organisation of the human mind with its own ‘organs’, which produce passions naturally, he explains how the double relation of impressions and ideas produces indirect passions that are dependent on culture. And like Locke, Hume distinguishes between the natural world of facts and the artificial man-​made world of vice and virtue, or of justice arising from human conventions. And when he speaks of making evaluations concerning justice, virtue or vice, he has recourse to comparisons referring to the aesthetic evaluation of organised structures. Our sense of justice, even though not derivable from reason, arises as if ‘naturally’ from artifice and human conventions. Words or signs have a key role in the establishment of obligations. One significant step in Hume’s system is that in addition to experience providing the content of the human

292 Conclusions mind by means of sensations, it seems to allow more than just the accumulation of ideas and their connections, but also the emergence of novel artificial structures: the self and indirect passions. These structures seem to give rise to novel functions or faculties, for example the capacity to be able to distinguish between vice and virtue, or justice and injustice, independently from one’s own interest. Hume’s insistence on the importance of sympathy is also very important historically, since it permits physiologically –​or medically –​oriented writers, such as Cabanis, to overcome the view as sensations as merely subjective phenomena and to see that they can be shared, thus providing their entry to the social world. Locke and Hume thus admit that some essential constituents or even functions of the human mind derive from culture. But what is lacking in their discussions, compared to later or contemporary French debates, is the notion of the essential, constitutive role of language in human cognitive faculties. This constitutive role in human cognitive faculties is a theme which has its roots in Germany and which is later developed further in France by Condillac and the post-​revolutionary Idéologues. As we have seen, this tradition went even further than Hobbes in extending the influence of language and insisting on its constitutive role in such functions such as memory, voluntary attention, reasoning, judgement and the analysis of sensations. They also started to emphasise the autonomy of symbolic thinking from the elements provided by sensations. For the British philosophers ‘simple sensations’ were the original building blocks of the human mind independently of language, but Condillac and Diderot refused to take their simplicity as an original given and insisted on the role of language in the analysis of sensations to their simple elements. The specific contribution of Condillac and Diderot lies perhaps in extending the influence of language beyond the traditional limits. Earlier, it was not uncommon to refer abstract thoughts and complex ideas to language and culture, but sensation tended to be viewed as a natural function. However, Condillac and Diderot considered that the same influence of culture and language that is responsible for higher mental functions of humans also extends to sensations, both simple and complex. In fact, the same phenomenon takes place in Hume, in so far as sympathy gives rise to impressions that are social. 2

Symbolic Thought and Sensation

Leibniz and Wolff are evidently important figures in the philosophical tradition that links language to cognitive functions. It is obvious that this tradition inspired the French philosophers, starting from Condillac and La Mettrie.

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What is characteristic of this German tradition is, however, that in contrasting symbolic knowledge with intuitive knowledge –​which is deemed to be more perfect –​the former is given merely a secondary role, as something to be relied on when the limits of one’s cognitive capacities make it necessary. In Wolff’s philosophy, however, one can already see elements which indicate that symbols do more than just order one’s thoughts; that they also add to one’s cognitive capacities. Wolff describes how words are necessary in order to make impressions into real perceptions; that is, words enable one to make perceptual judgements, which allow one to see something as something, instead of merely having visual impressions. Wolff also uses his conception of symbolic thought to highlight the cognitive differences between humans and animals and beings lacking language. He starts the long tradition of referring to the empirical evidence concerning feral children or the congenitally deaf and dumb in discussing the decisive influence of language on human cognitive capacities. An extremely interesting missing link between the writings of Leibniz and Wolff and those of Concillac and La Mettrie is provided by Daniel Defoe, who seems to be surprisingly familiar with the problems related to the role of language in human cognition. He also prefigures Condillac in insisting on the role of language in permitting one to control one’s mental processes. Were it not for the missing references, one could easily believe that he had read Wolff and would have been himself among the sources of Concillac and La Mettrie. Although the role of language and culture in the formation of the human mind and its cognitive functions had been discussed earlier by other philosophers, Condillac’s theory is perhaps the first to explicitly claim that language gives rise to completely novel psychic functions, such as deliberately directed attention, memory, abstraction, reflection and judgement, and to spell out in detail how and why this takes place. His Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines had in his time been considered as a supplement to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,2 and he is even today often considered as Locke’s French disciple. But as we have seen, Condillac not only supplements the Englishman’s essay but inverses some ideas, such as Locke’s precedence of ideas over language. Within the theoretical framework of most of the earlier –​and in fact also many later –​authors, we could easily imagine a cognitively fully developed human being without the possession of language.3 But in Condillac’s theory language actually has a constitutive role in the development of those human cognitive abilities that distinguish the human from 2 See note 1 in ­chapter 7. 3 Perhaps Hobbes is an exception because, just like Condillac, he deemed it impossible to make judgements without language.

294 Conclusions animals. In addition, Condillac shows how language is particularly involved in certain forms of memory, making a distinction which corresponds roughly to the distinction between procedural and declarative memory. Condillac and Diderot also discussed the role of short term or working memory in language processing. A feature that distinguishes Condillac from the British empiricists is that unlike Hume, who tended to assimilate reason and imagination, the former makes a sharp distinction between imaginative and rational functions. This could, of course, be taken simply to be a symptom of the latent Cartesianism of the abbé, but, just as he supplemented Locke with a twist, he uses Descartes’s arguments in order to reach his own, not very Cartesian, conclusions: the distinction between imagination and reason is no longer analysed in terms of the distinction between the body and soul, but is instead referred to the possession of language. So, one of the novel ways of thinking that we have seen to arise during the eighteenth century is the idea that language is constitutive of the human capacity to reflect. It is not merely an instrument for communicating but an instrument of reflection as well. For some reason, Charles Taylor attributes the idea that language is constitutive of reflection to Herder,4 but as we have seen it was also one of the central claims of Condillac’s theory. Taylor assimilates Condillac’s ideas to a composite theory combining the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Condillac, a theory which supposedly related linguistic expressions to some pre-​existing content and, according to which, words can only designate ideas that have arisen in the mind.5 Or to put it differently: words are introduced to designate features which have already come to one’s attention.6 But as we have seen, although this might be applicable to Hobbes or Locke, this is not true of Condillac, for whom there was no reflection and actually

4 Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 33. In one paragraph with two references to Condillac’s Essai (pp. 109–​110), Taylor dismisses Condillac’s theory as simply consisting of some additions or amendments to the Hobbesian and Lockean conception, calling their theory with a collective name hlc and contrasting it with the hhh, named after Hamann, Herder and Humboldt. If one looks at his definitions of these theories (pp. 3–​4), it is apparent that Condillac actually represents the second, ‘constitutive’ theory and not the first ‘enframing’ theory. A significant change in the meaning of the term ‘idea’ takes place between Hobbes and Condillac: for Hobbes ‘ideas’ in the proper meaning were the sensory ‘images’ contrasted with ‘representations’, whereas for Condillac ‘ideas’ in the proper sense were sensations turned into representations by the use linguistic signs. 5 Taylor, The Language Animal, pp. 36 and 106. 6 Taylor, The Language Animal, p. 170.

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no ideas at all without language. Furthermore, language has for Condillac an important role in controlling our attention and bringing things to our attention. Concillac’s conclusion that reflection depends on language, instead of being an innate capacity of the soul, was later applied to linguistic phenomena themselves by Maine de Biran and Humboldt, who emphasised the fact that one’s reflective consciousness of language itself depends on (meta)linguistic means, on the availability of signs that enable one to analyse language and its structures. But Condillac certainly was not innovative in drawing attention to the role of culture in forming the human mind. Philosophers had usually distinguished what human beings receive from nature and what from nurture. It had been commonly assumed that the human mind has a closed set of natural faculties, which allow for assimilating contents of cultural origin, but Condillac actually claims that culture provides a human being with completely novel faculties. Moreover, traditionally it had been considered that the cognitive abilities were more or less natural, and that it was the moral sentiments and faculties, albeit built on the basis of these natural cognitive faculties, that were contingent on culture. However, for Condillac both the cognitive and moral faculties of humans were definitely dependent on culture and language. Although La Mettrie’s philosophy, in its emphasis on the role language and culture in the constitution of the human mind, resembles that of Condillac, their ways of conceiving the relationship between the natural and the cultural aspects of the human mind are different. For La Mettrie, they remained distinct and even predominantly contradictory forces. But for Condillac the distinction between nature and culture is not so clear-​cut. Artificial signs arise from the use of natural signs, and learning cultural habits results in acquiring practical skills, such as reasoning, which end up eventually as bodily mechanisms resembling instincts in their action. Natural actions are transformed into voluntary and intentional actions, which then sediment as practical skills acquiring a second-​degree naturalness. The cultured aspect of the human mind arises from the natural and ends up permeating the natural –​sensations and needs included. An important consequence that the Idéologues drew from Condillac’s view was that there was no longer anything corresponding to the intuitive knowledge of Leibniz or Wolff. For Condillac, the only kind of judgements and reasoning not dependent on the use of signs were practical abilities, without the consciousness characteristic of intuitive knowledge. This makes symbolic knowledge more autonomous, since there is no knowledge in the proper, propositional sense of the word, preceding it, except, of course, practical knowledge, which lies beyond consciousness. Although Condillac himself was

296 Conclusions fascinated by calculus and mathematical thinking and tended to propose it as an ideal for all knowledge, it is evident that insofar as in his philosophy signs and knowledge are eventually always rooted and embedded in sensations, his thoughts could be used to reach completely different conclusions on the general applicability of calculus. And this was in fact one of points in which his Idéologue followers parted company with him. Leibniz, for his part, had tended to view the autonomy of symbolic thought paradigmatically in the workings of an abstract calculus realisable in mathematical theories, and, in a more utopian vein, in his projects of universal characteristics. In contrast, the Idéologues insisted on the irreducible difference between mathematical reasoning and reasoning taking place with the aid of natural language. Maine de Biran, and in his wake Destutt de Tracy, insisted on the difference between formal calculus and reasoning that uses natural language and concluded on the impossibility of a universal language. We can see that the positions of Leibniz and the Idéologues are actually two different or opposed strategies for maintaining the autonomy of symbolic thought. The former is working towards the notion of a formal calculus characterised by the absence of the need for a translation of the symbolic system in terms of non-​ symbolic thought. The latter maintains instead that outside such calculi, one simply cannot let oneself lose sight of the meanings of linguistic signs in reasoning, that we cannot escape natural language, which is the first and primary instrument of our reason. In the Leibnizian solution, it is in developing the calculus that symbolic thought reaches its autonomy. In the second solution, it is our natural reasoning and natural language that gains autonomy by not being reducible or translatable into a non-​symbolic knowledge –​in the proper theoretical and conscious sense of the word –​that would precede it. Whatever stand one took on the problem of the autonomy of symbolic thought, there was a growing insistence on the role of syntactic rules. In insisting, in the footsteps of Hobbes, on the role of syntactic structures in combining ideas, Destutt de Tracy transforms the Lockean idea of complex ideas into structures determined by grammatical structures, instead of being merely associated concatenations of sensations. This was an idea that was later picked up and developed further by German scholars such as Humboldt. 3

Language, Nature and Society

Hobbes and Condillac shared the idea that the functions of language are not limited to communication, and that language can also work as a tool for thinking. What distinguishes their positions concerning language is that they had

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different views as to which function is primary. One could claim, like Hobbes, that one could invent and use a private language of ‘marks’ as a memory aid without being involved in communication.7 But for Condillac, language is inextricably intertwined with the development of symbolic social interaction and that even our private knowledge and understanding of our own mental life as a continuum, instead of a series of separate moments, depends on having first acquired the capacity to attend to the experiences of others. The capacity to attend to the experiences of others has evidently consequences with regard to the motivation of humans. Consequently, many of the French philosophers of the Enlightenment insisted on the dependence of motivation on society. Diderot and his friends Condillac and Rousseau share the notion that human motivation cannot be reduced to bodily sensations and physiological needs. However, despite the fact that Condillac was not a materialist like Diderot, they both share a feature which distinguishes them from Rousseau. They both wanted to explain the development of human language and cognitive faculties naturalistically, without any reference to supernatural endowments or an immaterial soul or its intrinsic properties. Although Condillac refers the unity and indivisibility of the soul to its immaterial nature and concludes therefore, against Locke, that thought cannot reside in a material substance,8 he never invokes the immaterial nature of the soul in his explanations of the development of human language and cognitive faculties.9 In addition, Condillac does not, like Rousseau, refer the freedom involved in submitting one’s mental operations to voluntary control to an original capacity of the immaterial soul, but explains that too in terms of the natural development of the human faculties by the aid of language. Like Rousseau, Herder tended to think that men must have a certain specific innate cognitive faculty which distinguishes them from animals, and which does not depend on learning language or social interaction with other men. This is obviously the only solution available for him in so far as he cannot imagine how conventional signs could develop out of natural signs. Thus, at least in his Abhandlung über den Ursprung de Sprache, it is not nurture, that is culture, which constitutes humans but nature itself by endowing them with

7 Cf. Wittgenstein’s private language argument in Philosophical Investigations, §§ 244–​271. 8 Essai, i, i, i, §§ 6–​7. 9 However, rather strangely, he explains the empiricist dogma that all human knowledge derives from sensations by a theological consideration: this is not an original property of the soul but the result of the Fall, which has made the soul dependent on the body and incapable of acquiring knowledge without the senses. Essai, i, ii, i, §§ 6 and 8.

298 Conclusions Besonnenheit.10 In its absence, there is no way to teach an ape to speak, as La Mettrie had imagined. And likewise, according to Herder’s logic, even feral men have this special faculty, which distinguishes them from animals, even when they have been raised by animals. But for a materialist, or in fact for anyone who wishes to explain the development of human cognitive faculties naturalistically without referring them to an original feature of an immaterial soul, the only alternative for explaining the fact that animals, for example apes, cannot be educated so that they acquire these faculties, is physiological organisation. This was also the solution that Herder preferred in his later writings. Likewise, Diderot had referred to the differences in organisation between humans and animals, whereas La Mettrie thought that some animals at least have the organs and organisation required for acquiring humanity by learning language and participating in culture. Hamann had observed, with reference to Herder’s Besonneheit, that in such a ‘platonist’ theory humans speak by instinct. One can thus use the instinct of animals as an analogy and speak of an instinct of reason and coin a word for this special ability, Sprachvermögen, as did Humboldt. Another possibility to escape Rousseau’s conundrum was of course the divine origin of language. Or one could use biological models and postulate an organ or organs for language, in the manner of Gall and Spurzheim; but lacking a working evolutionary perspective for the gradual development of these organs, this ended up as a mediated version of the divine origin theory. 4

From Collections to Structures –​From Individuals to Historical Wholes

Association is evidently a strong explanatory tool by which one can explain a lot of human and animal psychology. But sometimes learning results in complex cognitive structures, which cannot be accounted for by simple association of ideas. Condillac discovered that this is what takes place in memory. When remembering, one does not just store ideas and associations but build complex structures. And likewise, for Hume the self could not be accounted for as a simple collection of ideas: it had an organised and teleological structure. Condillac considered that the way one stores memories is explicitly related to needs and the complex hierarchical structures built around them. However, 10

Incidentally, Charles Taylor seems to read the Abhandlung rather differently. He writes that Herder starts from the intuition that language makes possible a different kind of consciousness, which he calls ‘reflective’ (besonnnen). Taylor, The Language Animal. p. 6. For Taylor, it is thus language that makes Besonnenheit possible and not vice versa.

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in Hume’s Treatise this connection to teleology is implicit; it appears in the metaphors and analogies referring to organisms and artefacts to which he has recourse. One of the central tenets of modern cultural psychology is, to quote Michael Tomasello’s formulation, that ‘that the process of acquiring and using linguistic symbols fundamentally transforms the nature of human cognitive representation.’11 Thus, humans have, in addition to the sensory-​motor representations of the environment that they share with some animals, qualitatively different kinds of symbolic representations based on cultural and linguistic sign systems. That the existence of such representations constitutes the essential difference between humans and animals is something that both Condillac and Herder emphasise. However, due to the problems involved in explaining the origins of such novel kinds of representation naturalistically, on the basis of sensory representations, Herder tends to naturalise this capacity in a manner that differs radically from how Condillac explains its origin. Condillac’s explanation is naturalistic in the sense that it does not refer to anything supernatural or immaterial. But his explanation is not naturalistic in the sense that he sees language essentially as a human artefact resulting from social interaction. In contrast, Herder, in the Abhandlung, sees language according to a biological metaphor, as something that grows and develops in the human mind naturally, as a plant grows from a seed. Despite Herder’s tendency to situate the seeds of humanity in the individual mind, one of the important novelties in his conception is the emphasis on the historical dimension of the human mind; in the way the individual mind is joined to the history of humanity as a totality. Herder saw the development in the human mind as a continuous, cumulative and progressive historical process. Of course, this dimension was implicit already in Condillac’s emphasis on the dependence of genius on the historical development of language: genius may well be an exceptional individual but his genius is dependent on the genius of the language he receives from his cultural environment. So, it is not an overstatement to claim that some of the basic elements of a conception developed systematically in the nineteenth century by thinkers like Hegel and Marx, according to which the human mind is essentially a historical and cultural phenomenon, were present already in the eighteenth century. In addition, as biological and organic metaphors gained ground at the same time as the cultural nature of the human mind was emphasised, language was seen as

11

Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 123.

300 Conclusions an organic whole instead of a collection of separate signs. This holistic nature of language was made explicit by Bonald and Humboldt. 5

Language, History and Nationhood

While the French philosophers developed ideas concerning language and cognition originating in Germany, the Germans in turn picked up the results and developed some of them further, drawing conclusions which eventually provided for the transition from the philosophy of the Enlightenment to Romantic ideas concerning national identity. Herder’s metaphor of language as a developing organism constituting man’s soul, is a step towards a more historical point of view: one is no longer comparing nations synchronically but seeing nations as organically developing entities. From Condillac’s ideas on the dependence of genius on the linguistic means available and on the national differences in the characteristics of languages and their varying suitability to different scientific or literary uses, there is a short step to the idea of Christopher Meiner (1747–​1810) that, since poetic genius can in this way be attributed to the collective accomplishment that created the linguistic possibilities rather than to individuals, poetry and the arts are the expression of an entire nation.12 This is the direction that Herder and Humboldt took. The idea that human cognitive faculties are formed and developed in close interaction with the development of language and signs provides also impetus for the development of the separate study of humanity by interpreting and studying different systems of signs, their grammar and semantics in different cultures. This is an idea which starts to take shape in the philosophy of Maine de Biran. But again, the systematic development of the self-​understanding and specific identity of the human sciences took place in Germany, resulting in the development of hermeneutics, which insisted on the distinctness of the methods of the human sciences from those of the natural sciences.13 Lewes was an interesting figure in this respect, since he emphasised, like Maine de Biran, in addition to the distinctness of the physiological and social studies of man, also their complementary nature. One interesting aspect which gradually emerges from the discussions in the tradition I have presented here is related to the questions concerning the 12 13

Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, p 204. For a classic exposition of the distinction between the explanatory methods of natural sciences and those of the human sciences aiming at understanding see: Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).

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fixation of the meaning of words. Traditionally, this has been established as the identity of references or of perceptions to which the words are supposed to refer. Condillac had already indicated that meaning does not result from identical sensations among language users, and Humboldt had made this even more explicit by referring meanings to the language as a system. Humboldt’s significance lies in transferring attention from the referential nature of signs as separate units to the systemic nature of language. It is important to understand that his philosophy is not merely emphasising the subjective aspects of language production. His genius lies in giving this subjectivity a concrete meaning and content accessible to scientific research: the structure of language –​and thought. At the same time, his theories open up a space for creativity and art. Although Condillac and his followers had already separated sensations as physiological phenomena and ideas which depend on language and culture, Humboldt’s radical understanding of the holistic nature of language tends to make explicit that the elements of cognitive operations depend radically on language as a whole. This establishes the autonomy of the study of cultural and linguistic phenomena. Hence, our world view is not reducible to sensations as natural phenomena. When sensations are transformed into perceptions of objects, that is, conceptualised elements of a world view shared with other humans, the basic elements we deal with, words and their meanings, speech sounds, etc. become cultural products, artefacts. Like other artefacts, they depend on natural materials and their properties: phonology is limited by human articulatory organs, and one’s basic vocabulary depends on one’s bodily organisation and the physiology of one’s sense organs, and so on.14 But despite the limited means available, as Humboldt was one of the first to understand, the possibilities to produce different cultural worlds are infinite. 6

Telling a Different Story on the Origin of Ideas

To sum up these conclusions, I would like to try to situate the story presented here within the historiography of philosophy as I was taught it at university. Traditionally, histories of modern philosophy organise their narration around the question of whether ideas originate in reason or in sensation. This results in a consistent and didactically effective story starting from Descartes and other rationalist philosophers via the British empiricists to Kant. However, 14

On how our language and vocabulary are built on metaphors based our bodily existence, see: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

302 Conclusions as this study shows, during this same period there existed a tradition which emphasised the constitutive role of language and culture in the formation of ideas. This tradition considered neither sensations nor reason as the foundation or the sole origin of human knowledge, but saw them both as something that is formed by language and culture. Some of the major figures in this tradition, Hobbes, Leibniz, Wolff, Defoe, La Mettrie and Condillac are certainly well known, but mostly for other merits –​or demerits, as the case may be. They have usually been discussed, analysed and interpreted in terms of the previously mentioned scheme, or in terms of contributions to some other more traditional problems of philosophy, and not in terms of the original contributions they have made outside the box. Studying this tradition thus requires not only paying attention to forgotten texts, but also rereading well-​known texts in a different light. Due to the aforementioned logic, Condillac is often understood as a sensualist following in the footsteps of Locke. This is the role that is commonly attributed to him in the history of philosophy, neglecting that his Essai is not so much a supplement but a criticism of Locke’s conception, according to which all we need in order to have ideas is sensations –​language being chiefly a means for communicating them to others. At first sight, all of this may seem like a curiosity or a small branch parting from the main storyline in the history of philosophy. But a closer look has revealed that this idea has deep roots in German philosophy, in the writings of Leibniz and Wolff and that it continued in France in the writings of the Idéologues, Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and Maine de Biran until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This tradition developed, in a less evidently continuous manner, into a more Romantic strand in Germany, where Hamann, Herder and Humboldt emphasised the constitutive role of language for reason, religion and nationhood. And finally, in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth-​century, we have the writings of George Henry Lewes on symbolic thought. These developments seem to form a strange kind of parallel history running along with history of philosophers who continued to discuss human cognition and reason as if it could exist without language, or as Hamann put it, against Kant, as if reason could be ‘pure’ and independent of language and tradition. Although one may get the impression that we are dealing with relatively minor or even obscure and forgotten figures in the history of philosophy, we should not forget that at one point, after the French Revolution, the philosophical tradition of the Idéologues originating in Condillac was the dominant trend of philosophy in France. However, after the Restoration it became identified with materialism and rejected as such by French historiographers of philosophy like Victor Cousin and Charles Renouvier. As a result, the figures exemplifying

Conclusions

303

this tradition, such as Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy, have remained in the margins. And so too has Maine de Biran, although for different reasons. Neither has Lewes succeeded in achieving an important role in the history of philosophy. The same applies in part also to the German tradition represented by the writings of Hamann, Herder and Humboldt, who, although not actually forgotten figures, are hardly considered today as important figures in the history of philosophy. As we have noted, Charles Taylor has in The Language Animal drawn attention to this German tradition, but at the same time neglecting or misinterpreting the French tradition starting from Condillac. In addition to the marginal role of the eighteenth-​century and early nineteenth-​century avatars of this tradition in the later historiography, the silence of their later nineteenth-​century followers concerning their precursors, have further contributed to the invisibility of this bypath in the history of philosophy, despite the fact that it undoubtedly forms an important and continuous thread, which would certainly merit more attention. As a result of the above-​mentioned reasons, among others, the theories concerning the constitutive role of language in human cognition are often neglected in the traditional historiography of philosophy, to the point of them being almost invisible. For example, in Anthony Kenny’s four-​volume A New History of Western Philosophy, Hobbes and Leibniz are of course discussed at length, but Condillac, Cabanis, Humboldt and Maine de Biran are not mentioned at all, both Herder and Le Mettrie only once in passing and of Wolff, Kenny writes: ‘There was little that was original in Wolff, except for the system which he imposed upon his borrowings from earlier authors. […] Wolff is nowadays hardly ever read by English readers.’15 In the pages of the eleven-​ volume history of philosophy by Frederick C. Copleston concerning Condillac, the role of language is reduced to a few passing remarks, both of which give the impression that Condillac actually thought that we can have ideas before we are in possession of any signs or language.16 Copleston does mention the stress Condillac’s laid on language in his Essai sur les connaissances humaines, but his summation of the book is merely that ‘[t]‌he fundamental material of knowledge is the association of an idea with a sign.’17 Later, in the description of the Traité des sensations, Copleston writes that ‘the use of intelligence and 15 16 17

Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), vol. 3, p. 574. That Wolff is not read by English readers may simply be a consequence of the fact that many of his works have not been translated into English. Frederick C. Copleston, The History of Philosophy, vol. 6: Wolff to Kant. 3. impr ed. (London: Burns and Oates, 1964), pp. 28–​35. Copleston, vol. 6, p. 28.

304 Conclusions ideas precedes language, although language is necessary for the development of mental life beyond a rudimentary stage.’18 As far as the ideologists are concerned, in the pages concerning Cabanis there is no mention of the role of language at all, while in the passage concerning Destutt de Tracy, Coplestone describes ideology simply as ‘a study of the origin of ideas, of their expression in language and their combination in reasoning.’19 And the same silence on the part played by language in human cognition applies to the passage on Maine de Biran.20 As far as the German discussions are concerned, in the presentation of Leibniz’s philosophy, his ideas on the specific nature and significance of symbolic knowledge for human cognitive faculties are not properly discussed and in the presentation of Wolff’s philosophy, Copleston does not mention the role of language that Wolff attributes to language in human knowledge.21 Neither does Copleston’s presentation of La Mettrie’s materialism mention the role of language in his conception of the human mind.22 However, this theme is mentioned, and this time unambiguously, in the presentation of Herder’s philosophy and his ‘metacriticism’ of Kant. Copleston summarises Herder’s view thus: ‘[R]easoning is not only expressed in language, it is inseparable from it’, and that ‘[t]hinking is, according to Herder, inward speaking, and speaking, while speaking in the ordinary sense is speaking aloud or thinking aloud, whichever you like.’23 So, curiously, Copleston’s version this story is discontinuous, consisting of at best a few significantly ambiguous and sporadic mentions of the theme, without any indication of continuity. In addition, his text gives the impression that it actually all starts with Herder. One could imagine that, with the linguistic turn in philosophy and everything associated with it, things would have changed since Copleston’s day.24 However, if we consult Routledge’s six volume History of Philosophy of the Mind, where one would expect attention to be paid to the philosophers who had examined the role in language in human cognition, we find out that there is nothing at all on any of the philosophers 18 Copleston, vol. 6, p. 33. 19 Copleston, Frederick C. A History of Philosophy, vol. 9: Maine De Biran to Sartre (London: Search Press, 1975), p. 20. 20 Copleston, vol. 9, pp, 21–​36. 21 For Leibniz, see Copleston, vol. 5, pp. 265–​332, and for Wolff, see Copleston, vol. 6, pp. 103–​115. 22 Copleston, vol. 6, pp. 47–​48. 23 Copleston, vol. 6, p. 145. 24 For a concise analysis of the affinities between Condillac’s ideas and post-​Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, see Aliénor Bertrand’s introduction to Condillac, Philosophe du langage, ed. Aliénor Bertrand (Lyon: ens éditions, 2016), pp. 7–​24.

Conclusions

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discussed by Copleston, except, of course, the traditional canonised classics of Hobbes and Leibniz, with a passing mention of Wolff.25 In spite of this apparent discontinuity or invisibility, the idea of the constitutive role of language in human cognition runs as a persistent tradition covering the whole early modern and modern period. There is a certain amount of evident continuity in it, especially in the eighteenth century, formed by philosophers reading, commenting and referring to each other’s writings. Condillac refers to Wolff, La Mettrie to Leibniz and the Idéologues rely heavily on Condillac. But sometimes the authors have, for various reasons, especially in the nineteenth century, neglected or avoided referring to their predecessors. For example, Humboldt was familiar with the writings of Condillac, but he does not refer to him in his writings on the philosophy of language. Whether the continuities and influences are apparent or conjectural, we can trace a continuous thread or at least a tangle of threads from Leibniz and Wolff passing via Condillac and La Mettrie to the Idéologues, Süßmilch, Herder, Hamann, Humboldt, Bonald and Lewes. What I have been trying to do in this study is actually to produce a more linear story of the sometimes apparently disjointed tradition I have described and to make it more visible. In so far as there is a certain continuity in this history, one could perhaps imagine its relation to the traditional story as one of parallelism. One could imagine these stories being projected on to the same divided screen, with some of actors appearing on both halves of the screen but playing different roles in them. In contrast to the aforementioned continuity, in some ways this tradition seems, however, discontinuous. There are interesting shifts and transitions with regard to some of our central categories used in analysing the history of ideas. If we examine the French and German traditions on the constitutional role of language and culture in human cognitive processes in light of common oppositional categories of philosophy, such as, idealism vs. materialism, rationalism vs. empiricism or the Enlightenment vs. Counter-​Enlightenment, we can find a curious mix of figures. Some the philosophers involved in this tradition belong definitely to the Enlightenment and some belong definitely, arguably or supposedly to the Counter-​Enlightenment. In France this tradition starts from Condillac and La Mettrie, runs through the Idéologues to Maine de Biran and eventually to Bonald, mixing up materialists, sensualists, atheists and Christians, all agreeing on the important role of language. In Germany 25

The History of the Philosophy of Mind, eds. Rebecca Copenhaver and Christopher John Shields, 6 vols. (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2019), vol. 4: Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages, and vol. Vol. 5: Philosophy of the Mind in the Nineteenth Century.

306 Conclusions these ideas presented by Leibniz and Wolff end up in the hands of Süßmilch, Herder, Hamann and Humboldt. One could thus describe the line that this tradition forms as a diagonal running from the Enlightenment to the Counter-​ Enlightenment, which at the same time tends to blur the limits of these two. One could, indeed, see Hamann as continuing the Enlightenment’s critical project of studying the conditions and limits of our reason. If there is a straight line from Hume to Kant, there is one diagonal from Hume to Hamann as well.26 What is more, if we tilt the image, the line from Hume to Hamann becomes straight and that from Hume to Kant a diagonal. So, this tradition forms sometimes strange diagonals connecting opposite camps. In addition to these anomalous lines connecting the Enlightenment of Hume and Wolff and the Counter-​Enlightenment of Hamann, there is also the line that runs from the sensualistic anti-​metaphysical attitude of Condillac to the more metaphysical and romantic mind set of Humboldt. There is also the line connecting the sensualism and materialism attributed to the Idéologues to the spiritualistic philosophy of later Maine de Biran or to the overtly religious stance of Bonald. We can also distinguish zigzagging lines connecting empiricists like Hobbes to rationalists like Leibniz and back to empiricists like Condillac. And correspondingly, those who tended to neglect the role of language could be rationalists like Descartes or empiricists like Locke. We can, of course, aim at discerning a continuous and logical storyline, but the more one pays attention to details and neglected figures one gets, instead of one progressive line of development, a tangle of enmeshing lines. The history starting from Descartes through Locke and Hume to Kant may indeed be told as a logical history in terms of the development of the modern Enlightenment. But the history of the conceptions linking human knowledge to language, society and tradition, and finally also to religion, is certainly embarrassing from the point of linear development and progress as we understand it. One reason for this embarrassment perhaps being that it all tends to end up in an emphasis on tradition. 26

See Till Kienzel, Johan Georg Hamann: Zu Leben und Werk (Wien: Karolinger Verlag, 2019), pp. 112–​115, and Joseph Nadler, Johan Georg Hamann 1730–​1788. Der Zeuge der corpus mysticum (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1949), passim.

Appendix*

Translations of French and German Quotations

Chapter 7

p. 91: But you will ask me, are the natural signs then nothing? I answer that before social interaction the natural signs are not properly signs at all; they are nothing but cries that accompany the feelings of pain, joy etc., and to which men are prompted by instinct and by the mere conformation of their organs. They must live together in order to have the occasion to attach ideas to these cries and in to use them as signs. At this point these cries enter into the domain of arbitrary signs. p. 97: Now, these judgements that it [the statue] does not notice, they are the instinct that guides it; and the habits that it has formed according to these judgements are what I understand by practical knowledge. If in order to make these judgements known, I am obliged to elucidate them in detail, I do not claim that it itself elucidates them in detail. It cannot do that because, not possessing language, it does not have the means to analyse them. p. 106–​107: He [Locke] appears to me often taking for ideas things which are not, and which cannot be ideas according to his own principle; such as, for example, coldness, warmth, pleasure, pain, memory, thought, reflection, sleep, will, etc. which are states that we have experienced, and for which we have invented signs, but of which we have no idea, when we no longer experience them. I ask what man understands by pleasure, when he is not enjoying, and by pain, when he is not suffering. I admit, for my part, that it is in vain that I examine myself without apperceiving in myself anything but catchwords for seeking some objects and avoiding others. Nothing more. p. 108: We are so used to language dragging articulated sounds along that we believe that ideas come one after the other in the mind, because we pronounce words one after the other. p. 109: The language that I call innate is a language that we have not learned, since it is the immediate result of our conformation. It expresses simultaneously everything that we

* All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

© Timo Kaitaro, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004507241_021

308 Appendix sense: it is thus not an analytical method; it does not decompose sensations; it does not make us notice what is contained in them; it does not give ideas. //​When it has become a method, then it decomposes sensations, and gives ideas: but, as a method, it is learned, and consequently, from this point of view, it is not innate. p. 111: Since attention, comparison, judgement etc. are merely sensation transformed, it follows that these operations are merely sensation decomposed or considered from different points of view. p. 112: Regarding our sensations as representational, we see all our ideas and faculties of the understanding arise from them. p. 115: Ideas are joined to signs, and it is only by this means, as I will demonstrate, that they are joined to each other.



Chapter 8

Translation by Ann Thomson from La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Machine Man and Other Writings, translated and edited by Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). p. 122: Words, languages, laws, science and arts came, and thanks to them the rough diamond of our minds was finally polished.1



Chapter 9

p. 127: The artificial is thus that which has its origin in the common order of things, but which involves the application and ingenuity of the human mind, in order to attain some particular aim that man sets himself. p. 129: In this sense, there is almost nothing in practice, which would be completely natural, but that which has not been at the disposal of man. p. 130: I will thus, following the metamorphose of physical pains and pleasures into artificial pains and pleasures, demonstrate that in passions, such as avarice, ambition, price, 1 La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, p. 13.

Translations of French and German Quotations

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and friendship, the object of which seems the least attached to the pleasures of the senses, it is however always physical pain and pleasure that we avoid or that we pursue. p. 131: […] it is reasonable to conclude that we have at first had only sensations and that our knowledge and passions are the result of pleasures and pains that accompany the impressions of the senses. p. 138: Man is modified by his senses, no one doubts that; but failing to distinguish the modifications we confuse their causes; we attribute too much and too little influence to sensations; we do not see that often they do not affect us as sensations, but as signs or images, and that their moral effects have also moral causes.



Chapter 10

p. 142: […] it is of the utmost importance to know well the origin of the first propositions, what they were before established languages, or what they would have been if one had established other languages.



Chapter 11

p. 152: It is the whole organisation of human faculties, the whole economy of his sensory and perceiving, his perceiving and willing nature, or rather –​it is the unique positive faculty of thinking which, bound with a certain bodily organisation, that in men is called reason and is skill in animals; which in man is called freedom and which is instinct in animals. p. 154: Here it not a question of a scream expressing a feeling, for it was not a breathing machine but a reflecting being that invented language. p. 159: […] where concepts cross and entangle! where the most disparate feelings evoke one another; where an urgent occasion summons all the faculties of the soul and which manifests all the inventiveness that it is capable of. p. 162: Let us take the whole thread of his thought; where is has been weaved by reflection; where there is no state in it which, taken as a whole, is not consciousness or, anyway, could not be clarified in consciousness.

310 Appendix p. 164: Man is destined to a be a gregarious being, so that the development of language is for him natural, essential and necessary.



Chapter 12

Translations, unless otherwise indicated, from Georg Johann Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, translated and edited by Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 2007). p. 173: A head that thinks at its own expense will always trespass on language; but an author in the pay of a society approves the words that have been prescribed to him like a mercenary poet composing verses to set rhymes (bouts-​rimées), which lead him to the tracks of those thoughts and opinions that are most suitable.2 p. 174: The greater the diversity and sensuousness with which the etymology of grammar indicates changes in the movable parts of speech (namely nouns and verbs), the less rigidly bound its syntactic order can be.3 p. 176: Therefore if man, according to the universal testimony and example of all peoples, times, and regions, is not in a position to learn by himself and without the sociable influence of his warders and guardians (that is, iussus, as it were) how to walk on two legs, nor how to break daily bread without the sweat of his face, nor again, and least of all, to arrive at the masterpiece of the creative brush, how then could the idea come into anyone’s head to regard language, cet art legere, volage, demoniacle (to speak with Montaigne out of Plato) as an autonomous invention of human art and wisdom?4 p. 177: Adam was therefore God’s, and God himself brought the first begotten and the oldest of our race as the feudal tenant and heir of the world set in order by the word of his mouth.5 p. 177: All that man heard at the beginning, saw with his eyes, looked upon, and his hands handled was a living word; for God was the word. With this word in his mouth and in his heart the origin of language was as natural, as close and easy, as a child’s game.6 2 3 4 5 6

Georg Johann Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, p. 18. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid, p. 106. Ibid, p. 108. Ibid., p. 108–​109.

Translations of French and German Quotations

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p. 179: Thence, under the exuberant persistent influence of the two noblest senses of sight and hearing, the concepts of space and time have made themselves so universal and necessary in the whole space of the understanding (just as light and air are for the eye, ear, and voice) that as a result of space and time, if not ideae innatae, seem to be at least matrices of all intuitive knowledge.7 p. 180 (my translation): Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential components of our nature neither mind nor ties of society.



Chapter 13

p. 185: One recognises soon that the only direction in which his pleasures can be indefinitely extended is that of his relations with his fellow creatures; that his existence expands as he shares in their affects and makes them share those that animate him. p. 188: As our means of communication augment, this faculty develops more and more: other languages are formed; and soon we exist hardly less in others than in ourselves. p. 193: In order to have a just idea of the operations which result in thought, one must consider the brain as a particular organ, specially designed to produce thought; just like the stomach and intestines [are designed] to operate digestion, the liver to filter bile, the parotids and maxillary and sublingual glands to produce saliva. p. 195: Thus, we are entirely artefacts, that is, results of our own work; and we resemble today as little the natural man as an oak resembles a gland, and a chicken an egg. p. 204: It is easy to see that this property of signs of being a means of communications with our fellow beings is at the root of our social relations, and consequently, has given birth to all our moral sentiments and pleasures. p. 208: These observations lead us to distinguish two forms of reproduction: one that is related to various ideas derived from movement, from resistance and its forms, from vocal sounds, is always executed with voluntary effort, it is essentially accompanied by a judgement of reminiscence.

7 Ibid., p. 212.

312 Appendix p. 209: When, for example, I represent myself the figure or the form of a body, when I remember a series of sounds, my brain is, without doubt, (almost) in the same disposition as when my hands were actually moving along the dimensions of the solid body, or when my ears were hit by vibrations of sound: now, the perceptions of forms and sounds cannot have taken place without real and sensible movements, voluntarily executed in the organs, in the muscles of the hand and of the eye, of hearing and of the voice; thus the production of corresponding ideas must depend on similar determinants, or on an analogous motor reaction. p. 211: That signs, secondarily associated with our perceptions, replace the first movements that have become imperceptible by their continuing repetition, reintroduce the activity of conscience, lost or veiled as a result of habit, adapt the impressions for the motor faculty of recall, and make them pass from the domain of imagination to that of memory. p. 213–​214: Our sentiments, our operations and all the modes of our being are not transformed into ideas and cannot receive names but in so far as we draw external models for them in the sentiments and operations of our fellow beings with whom nature has joined us by close sympathy. Thus, our moral sentiments and intellectual ideas have the same origin, but these sentiments, before being converted into ideas, have their foundations in ourselves.



Chapter 14

p. 229: The highest faculties of the human soul are thus hidden and buried, so that one cannot find a trace of them as long as they are not awakened through the interaction with other humans. Since the interaction without language is negligible, so without language the highest faculties cannot be effective, nor can they be exercised in the measure that is necessary for the use of reason.



Chapter 15

p. 244: Should one throw a stone at a physiologist who cries, in his astonishment: God and the brain, nothing but God and the brain.

Translations of French and German Quotations

313

p. 247: Birth, social condition, education, laws and habits, religion, all these have the greatest influence on the occupations, on the perfection and exercise of the organs, as well as the moral character of men […]. p. 251: […]. one should not forget that even education, the institutions, and the laws result from our organisation; it is not us that produces all that, it is the author of our being who produces it through us.



Chapter 16

Translations by Peter Heath for the Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickung der Menschengeschlechtes, in Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-​ Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, translated by Peter Heath with an introduction by Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Translations from other works of Humboldt by the author. p. 260: Man lives primarily with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on his presentations, he actually does so exclusively as language presents them to him.8 p. 261: To learn a foreign language should therefore be to acquire a new standpoint in the world view hitherto possessed, and in fact to a certain extent is so, since every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind.9 p.261: For language never represents the object, but always the concepts that the mind has spontaneously formed from them in producing language.10 p. 267: […] nothing within man is so deep, so rare or so wide-​ranging that it may not pass over into language and be recognisable there.11

8 Humboldt, On Language, p. 60. 9 Ibid, p. 60. 10 Ibid., p. 84. 11 Ibid., p. 81.

314 Appendix p. 271: A spark must be struck, a bond that prevents, as it were, the soul from spreading its wings, must somehow be loosed; and this can happen in a moment, without any slow preliminaries. The true and forever incomprehensible upsurge is made no easier to explain by shifting its first moment further back.12 p. 273: There is nothing detached in language, all of its elements appear only as parts of a whole. (my translation) p. 274: It [language] necessarily emerges by itself, and certainly only gradually, but not certainly so that its organism is in the soul as a dead mass but as the law of functions on which the faculty to think depends on, and therefore the first word already announces and presupposes the whole of language. (my translation) p. 277: The effort to make oneself independent of a particular language has necessarily, as thinking without language is not even possible, a detrimental and weakening effect on the mind. (my translation) 12

Ibid., p. 201.

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Name Index Aarsleff, Hans 115n.142, 279 Alanen,Lilli 63 Amman, Johann Konrad 120 Anonymous  deaf and dumb young man from Chartres 49, 85, 86, 119, 120, 229 feral child described by Connor 49, 87, 89, 119, 120, 139, 155, 213, 229, 247 Armstrong, David F. 204n.85 Arnauld, Antoine 100 Arnold, Denis G. 72n.68 Arbuthnot, John 53 Ashton, Rosemary 288n.43 Barrett, Lisa Feldman 2 Batteux, Charles 101, 104 Baumgartner, Alesander Gottlieb 44 Beauzée, Nicolas 100n.82 Berkeley, George 93 Bertrand, Aliénor 304n.24 Beyssade, Jean-​Marie 16 Bloch, Olivier 121n.12, 288n.41 Bonald, Louis de 4, 227, 232–​243, 300, 305, 306 Bonnaterre, Pierre Joseph 196 Bonnet, Charles 16, 207, 225n.172 Bordeu, Théophile 128 Boury, Dominique 128n.4, 226n.174 Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges 4, 183–​193, 220, 224–​226, 233, 244, 247, 256, 280, 292, 302, 303 Camposampiere, Matteo Favaretti 50n.43, 50n.44 Canguilhem, Georges 121 Carpov, Jacob 231 Carhart, Michael C. 146n.23, 300n.12 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 104, 114 Clark, Jr., Robert T. 167n.92 Cole, Michael 1n.4 Comte, Auguste 283 Condillac, Étinenne Bonnot de 2–​4, 41, 80, 81–​102, 104n.96, 106–​118, 124, 125, 130, 131, 135, 140, 141, 145, 148, 149, 157, 183, 186, 203n.80, 207, 217, 220, 224–​226, 228n.3, 240, 244, 249, 255, 279, 280, 287, 288, 292–​305

Connor, Bernard 49, 119, 229 Copleston, Frederick 303–​305 Cousin, Victor 121n.12, 226, 288, 302 Cramer, Gabriel 89, 91 Damásio, António 20n.45 Dascal, Marcelo 43, 44n.14 Defoe, Daniel 4, 53–​57, 293 Dégerando, Joseph Marie 206 Demeter, Tamás 62n.20 Descartes, René 3, 9–​18, 20, 21, 42n.3, 83, 233n.32, 235n.41, 289 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude, comte de 4, 184, 193–​206, 225, 226, 247n.15, 280, 290, 296, 302, 303 Derrida, Jacques 97n.70 Diderot, Denis 4, 93, 102–​107, 127, 131–​133, 207, 256, 279, 282, 292, 297, 298 Diogenes 139 Dudai, Yadin 87n.32 Duflo, Colas 128n.7 Du Marsais, Cesar Chesneau 101 Eco, Umerto 15n.25 Engels, Friedrich 121n.12 Forster, Michal N. 167n.92, 169 Froment, Abbé 100n.82 Gall, Lothar 279n.110 Gall, Franz Joseph 4, 244–​256, 298 Gardt, Andreas 164n.70 Gode, Alexander 156n.30, 166 Goodman, Nelson 15n.25, 16 Haller, Albrecht von 226n.174 Hamann, Johann Georg 4, 167, 169, 171, 173–​ 180, 298, 302, 305, 306 Hardcastle, John 40 Haynes, Kenneth 173n.1 Hazard, Paul 127n.1 Heath, Peter 268n.60 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 299 Heinämaa, Sara 17n.32 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 4, 79, 129–​133 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 4, 5, 147, 148–​ 172, 294, 297–​300, 302, 305, 306

325

Name Index Hobbes, Thomas 3, 22–​31, 79, 290, 296, 297 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 5, 257–​280, 295, 296, 298, 300–​302, 305, 306 Hume, David 4, 58–​80, 81, 94, 291, 292, 298, 306 Johnson, Mark 301n.14 Kaitaro, Timo ix, x, 17n.32, 121n.13, 122n.15, 123n.25, 123n.26, 124n.29, 125n.34, 129n.8, 130n.15, 191n.37, 255n.65, 290n.1 Kant, Immanuel 171, 178–​180, 306 Kenny, Anthony 303 Kienzel, Till 306n.26 Knight, Isabel F. 102n.91 La Condamine, Charles Marie de 160 La Forge, Louis de 18 Lakoff, George 301n.14 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de ix, 4, 41, 57, 79, 119–​126, 251, 256, 292–​293, 295, 298, 305 Lancelot, Claude 100 Le Camus, Antoine 94n.58 Leibniz, Gottfried 3, 41–​44, 48n.33, 49, 123, 132, 133, 174, 290, 292, 295, 296, 302, 305, 306 Lewes, George Henry 5, 281–​288, 300, 302, 303, 305 Lifschitz, Avi 44n.12, 146n.21, 146n.24 Locke, John 3, 32–​40, 81, 83, 85, 88, 91, 92, 93n.56, 94, 106, 291, 292, 306 Lough, John 127n.2 Luria, Aleksander 1 Maine de Biran, Marie François Gontier de Biran, aka 2, 4, 183, 201, 206–​226, 272, 295, 296, 300, 302, 303, 306 Malafouris, Lambros 1 Malebranche, Nicolas 19–​21, 289, 290 Marx, Karl 121n.12, 299 Maupertuis, Louis Moreau de 4, 99, 141–​ 146, 160 Meiner, Christopher 300 Mendelssohn, Moses 44 Michaelis, Johann David 147 Muceni, Elena 119n.3 Nadler, Joseph 167n.92, 171n.118, 306n.26 Naigeon, Jacques André 107n.108 Naville, Ernst 225n.171 Newton, Michael 53n.1

Nicolas, Serge 183n.1, 206n.95, 206n.96 Nye, Edward 125n.34 Peter, feral child 53–​54 Pettit, Philipp 30n.33, 31n.40 Plutarch 120 Price, Elfed Huw 281n.1 Prochianz, Alain 170n.113 Racine, Jean 114 Read, Edward S. 288n.41 Renouvier, Charles 121n.12, 288, 302 Rey, Roselyne 191n.34 Rex, Walter E. 128n.7 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 4, 133–​140, 146, 150, 154, 165, 234, 247n.15, 297 Sapir, Edward 100n.81, 279 Savioz, Raymond 16n.29 Schwerin, Alan 67n.37 Simmonds, Alison J. 12n.11, 14n.24 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar 4, 244–​256, 298 Staum, Martin S. 183n.2, 183n.3, 184n.7 Strawson, Galen 66, 67n.37, 66n.39 Sullerot, Vincent ixn.4 Süßmilch, Johann Peter 4, 146, 147, 163, 227–​ 232, 305, 306 Swift, Jonathan 53 Taylor, Charles 294, 298n.10, 303 Thiel, Udo 67n.39 Tomasello, Michael 299 Trousson, Raymond 279n.110 Underhill, James W. 258n.3, 279n.111 Van Staen, Christophe 134n.34, 136n.42, 136n.46 Vartanian, Aram 119n.2, 123n.23 Voss, Stephen 14n.22 Vygotsky, Lev x, 1 Whorff, Benjamin Lee 100n.81, 279 Wilcox, Sherman E. 204n.85 Wilson Arthur 102n.91 Wilson, Catherine 62n.20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 297n.7 Wolfe, Charles T. 191n.34 Wolff, Christian 3, 41, 44–​50, 87, 119, 228n.3, 229, 230, 290, 292, 293, 303, 305, 306 von Wright, Georg Henrik 300n.13