The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language 9781138907133, 9780429282461

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The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a milestone in twentieth century philosophy. Promoting a philosophical vision informed by Kant, it incorporates the philosophical advances achieved in the nineteenth century by German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, whilst acknowledging the contributions made by his contemporary phenomenologists. It also encompasses empirical and historical research on culture and the most contemporary work on myth, linguistics and psychopathology. As such, it ranks in philosophical importance along with other major works of the twentieth century, such as Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the first volume, Cassirer explores the symbolic form of language. Already recognized by thinkers in the tradition of German Idealism, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, language is the primary medium by which we interact with others and form a common world. As Cassirer emphasizes in the famous Davos Debate with Heidegger, ‘there is one objective human world, in which a bridge is built from individual to individual. That I find in the primal phenomenon of language.’ The famous trias Cassirer discerns in the functioning of language – the functions of expression (Ausdruck), presentation (Darstellung), and signification (Bedeutung) – has become paradigmatic for accounts of language, philosophical, linguistic, and anthropological alike.” Sebastian Luft, Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University, USA This new translation makes Cassirer’s seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index. Ernst Cassirer was born in Germany 1874 in the city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). He taught at Hamburg University from 1919 to 1933, and then at All Souls College, Oxford, before emigrating to Sweden and then to the United States. Through its creative interpretation of Kant’s philosophy combined with a deep knowledge of the role of language and culture, Cassirer’s work is regarded as indispensable to understanding the relationship between the two major traditions in twentieth-century philosophy, the “analytic” and the “continental”. Cassirer’s philosophy is unique, as it sought a common

ground between the scientific and humanistic worldviews which frequently divided these two traditions, exemplified in his famous debate with Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929. His work resulted in the monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as well as several books on the philosophy of humanism and the Enlightenment. He taught at the universities of Yale and Columbia in the early 1940s and died in New York in 1945. Steve G. Lofts is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College, Canada. He is the translator of Cassirer’s The Logic of the Cultural Sciences and The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology.

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1 Language

Ernst Cassirer Translated by Steve G. Lofts

This edition first published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business English Translation © 2021, Routledge Foreword © 2021, Peter E. Gordon Translator’s front matter, Preface, and Introduction © 2021, Steve G. Lofts The right of Steve G. Lofts and Peter E. Gordon to be identified as the authors of their work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First published in German as Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Die Sprache Auflage by Bruno Cassirer, Berlin, 1923 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-90713-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28246-1 (ebk) Typeset in Joanna by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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Foreword by Peter E. Gordonvii Translator’s Preface by Steve G. Loftsxv Translator’s Introduction: The Question Concerning the Human – Life, Form, and Freedom: On the Way to an Open Cosmopolitanism by Steve G. Loftsxviii Translator’s Acknowledgments by Steve G. Loftslxxvii Prefacelxxix Introduction and the Framing of the Problem 1 1. The Concept of Symbolic Form and the Systematization of the Symbolic Forms 1 2. The General Function of Signs: The Problem of Signification15 3. The Problem of “Representation” [Repräsentation] and the Construction of Consciousness 24 4. The Ideal Significance of the Sign: Overcoming the Picture Theory [Abbildtheorie]38 VOLUME 1:  TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LINGUISTIC FORM

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I

53

The Problem of Language in the History of Philosophy 1. The Problem of Language in the History of Philosophical Idealism (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz)

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table of contents

2. The Position of the Problem of Language in the Systems of Empiricism (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley) 69 3. The Philosophy of the French Enlightenment (Condillac, Maupertuis, Diderot) 76 4. Language as an Expression of Affect: The Problem of the “Origin of Language” (Giambattista Vico, Hamann, Herder, Romanticism) 84 5. Wilhelm von Humboldt 93 6. August Schleicher and the Progress toward the “Natural-Scientific” View of Language 101 7. The Grounding of the Modern Science of Language and the Problem of “Phonetic Laws” 106 II Language in the Phase of Sensible Expression 1. Language as Expressive Movement: Gesture Language and Word Language 2. Mimetic, Analogical, and Symbolic Expression

123 123 133

III Language in the Phase of Intuitive Expression 148 1. The Expression of Space and Spatial Relations 148 2. The Representation of Time 165 3. The Linguistic Development of the Concept of Number 177 4. Language and the Domain of “Inner Intuition”: The Phases of the I-Concept 201 a) The Working out of “Subjectivity” in Linguistic Expression201 b) Personal and Possessive Expression 210 c) The Nominal and the Verbal Types of Linguistic Expression216 IV Language as the Expression of Conceptual Thinking: The Form of Linguistic Concept and Class Formation 1. The Formation of Qualifying Concepts 2. The Basic Tendencies in Linguistic Class Formation V

247 247 265

Language and the Expression of the Pure Forms of Relation: The Sphere of Judgment and the Concepts of Relation [Relation]277

Glossary of German Terms 297 Index306

Foreword

Peter E. Gordon Some works of philosophy reflect the time in which they were written, others recall an earlier age, and still others seem to anticipate a time yet to come. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms has suffered the peculiar fate of a work that seemed unzeitgemäß, or out of tune with its time. First published in the 1920s during the brief and troubled era of the Weimar Republic, it was intended for a cultured readership that was either rapidly disappearing or had not yet appeared, an intellectual world in which the memory of German Idealism could still inspire and the last embers of European humanism had not ceased to glow. Its author, Ernst Cassirer, belonged to that distinctive stratum of the German-­Jewish bourgeoisie, a small fragment of the Central European educated classes or Bildungsbür­ gertum for whom culture had become a kind of ersatz religion and who held fast to the values of Universalism and the Enlightenment even as the surrounding culture succumbed to nationalism and intolerance. Cassirer was among the hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and artists whose careers in Germany came to an end by the brutal fiat of National Socialist legislation in 1933. He fled with his wife into exile, and after two years in Oxford and a longer stay in Göteborg, Sweden, he spent his final years in the United States. Since his death in 1945, his philosophical legacy has survived in the uncertain twilight of a culture that can no longer identify with his ideals. But no work of philosophy should suffer the ignominy of being turned into a mere monument of the past. The crucial question is whether we can still read it today and, if so, how.

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“The human mind,” wrote Goethe, “will not be confined to any limits.” Cassirer was Goethe’s spiritual stepchild. His masterpiece, The Philos­ ophy of Symbolic Forms, was a belated contribution to a philosophical genre that Goethe would have admired, especially for its readiness to break with academic convention by exploring all domains of human expression, from language to myth, from religion to science. Cassirer came from an accomplished family of artists and scientists: among his cousins were Richard, an esteemed neurologist, and Paul, a gallery owner and art collector who played a major role in promoting the works of the Berlin Secession and Postimpressionists such as Van Gogh and Cézanne. In his philosophy, these seemingly disparate domains are understood as stemming from a common source, the expressive capacity or formative principle that belongs to the human being as an animal symbolicum. For Cassirer, the mind is not a passive faculty that merely receives impressions from the external world but rather an active faculty that constitutes those impressions by investing them with order and meaning. The symbolic is the very principle of intelligibility whose powers leave nothing untouched. As it presses outward into all domains of experience, the mind comes to recognize itself in its own symbolic achievements. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is nothing less than the philosophical record of these efforts. Cassirer came to this task well equipped with conceptual instruments that he had already honed to precision after years of philosophical research. His earlier works reflect a rigorous training in the philosophical methods associated with Hermann Cohen and the so-­called Marburg School of neo-­Kantianism, which first emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a philosophical reaction against the preceding age of metaphysical extravagance. The neo-­Kantians were a diverse group but united in the conviction that philosophy could only move forward only if it went “back to Kant,” and this meant reconceiving philosophy as a rigorous inquiry into the transcendental conditions for objective knowledge. Thanks to the reawakening of Kant’s philosophy at Marburg, Cassirer first turned his attention to the philosophical foundations of the natural sciences. He was especially keen to understand the epistemolog­ ical principles of classical and modern physics, in which obsolete and metaphysical concepts of “substance” had been gradually supplanted by modern concepts of pure “function.” In Einstein’s theory of relativity,

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for example, our basic concepts cannot be construed as mere “copies” of immediate material data; they are instead “represented as constructed projects” of our own thinking. The concept of being is replaced by the concept of order. This insight into the epistemological revolution in modern physics first permitted Cassirer to realize the unique importance of the symbolic. In the early 1920s, Cassirer also made the acquaintance of Aby Warburg, whose unusual library at Hamburg became a kind of spiritual home and the place where he came to appreciate the richness and diversity of world culture and mythological belief. In fact, it would not be misleading to describe The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as an attempt to provide the Warburg Library with a transcendental foundation. Here Cassirer presented his famous address, “The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences” (his inaugural publication for the Warburg Library), in which he laid out his definition of a symbolic form as “every energy of spirit by which the content of spiritual signification is linked to a concrete and intrinsically appropriate sensuous sign.”1 Symbolic forms serve as the common intellectual framework for all systems of human meaning  – in myth, religion, language, and ­science – all of which bear witness to the idea that “our consciousness does not content itself with receiving impressions from the outside, rather it links and penetrates every impression with a free activity of expression.”2 When they are understood as the fruit of human symbolization, even the most “primitive” or “irrational” moments in human culture are revealed as belonging to a shared world of “self-­created signs and images.” In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, this general principle serves as the point of departure for a transcendental inquiry into the most diverse forms of symbolic expression. However, we must not mistake this project for a mindless celebration of cultural diversity that would blur all essential distinctions between science and myth, reason and unreason. Cassirer is committed to a deeper and more expansive kind of r­ationalism – a humanism without limits. But he organizes his philosophical inquiry in a developmentalist narrative that charts the self-­education of the human species. We can think of the book as an attempt to historicize the Kantian theory of form: myth can play a crucial role in the structuring of experience only until it yields dialectically to the more sophisticated symbolic

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forms of monotheistic religion, and in the very same way religion must yield to the consciously self-­created forms of modern science. In this narrative of symbolization, each stage is assigned a suitable role, though none of them can compromise the underlying narrative of human enlightenment. Unsurprisingly, the third volume of Cassirer’s project is called The Phenomenology of Cognition, an implicit homage to the Hegelian idea of a phenomenology as a story of the mind’s progressive efforts to achieve the fullest and most rational form of self-­realization. For Cassirer, as for his German idealist antecedents, this narrative of self-­realization is not only epistemological but also cultural and political: the human being comes to know itself only if it also comes to recognize itself as the author of its own fate. Cassirer’s work thus implies a strong commitment to modern democracy. Nearly a century has passed since the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms appeared in 1923, and over this broad timespan, certain features of Cassirer’s work have grown antiquated and unpersuasive. For those who can no longer accept Enlightenment-­inspired appeals to progress in a modern world that made Auschwitz a possibility, the evolutionist principle that underwrites Cassirer’s philosophy may seem altogether intolerable. But we should not hasten to dismiss him too quickly as a thinker from a more optimistic age. At the end of his life, in his last and posthumously published study, The Myth of the State (1945), he acknowledged the contemporary power of modern political myths, such as those that had become official ideology in the Third Reich. He specifically warns that these myths are not organic products of the human mind; although ancient myths served proto-­rational aims, the modern myths are artificial things that can be manufactured at will. It is an insight that he shared with the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, who compressed the dialectic of regression into an aphorism: “myth is already enlightenment, but Enlightenment reverts to myth.” Nor should we neglect the striking affinities that connect Cassirer’s philosophy of language and myth to later themes in French structuralism. A neglected line of argument runs from Cassirer’s analysis of the symbolic forms of mythical thinking to the unconscious rules of totemism and myth examined by Claude Lévi-­Strauss in his structuralist anthropology. Cassirer’s philosophy also anticipates a methodological perspective that we now associate with Michel Foucault. The suggestion is not as



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philosophy at least since Kant. Cassirer, by contrast, had little interest in surrendering this doctrine, since his entire philosophy was premised on the notion that symbolic forms are the manifestation of the “pure activ­ ity of spirit.” Without this notion, he feared that the ideal of objectivity in both scientific knowledge and ethics would collapse. Unlike Heideg­ ger, he emphasized mental spontaneity, the mind’s uninhibited freedom in the constitution of its world. Cassirer accused Heidegger of turning his back on objectivity and retreating into a kind of pragmatic relativism where space and time were reduced to merely “existential” categories without objective form. History has not been kind to Cassirer, but we should ask ourselves if his criticism was so wide of the mark. It was Cassirer, after all, who grasped the philosophical implications of the natural sciences and especially modern mathematics and physics, whereas Heidegger betrayed the superficiality of his thinking on all such matters when he declared that “science does not think.” Today when so many of our contemporary problems confront us with the need to move beyond the unfortunate divide between the natural sciences and the human­ ities, Cassirer’s philosophy may offer greater promise. All the same, Heidegger may have been right to suggest that the old dogma of transcendental humanism could not be sustained without a covert appeal to metaphysics. Cassirer occasionally reads as if he meant to give up on metaphysics to develop a kind of phenomenology without foundationalism. But most of these gestures are only half-­convincing. The urgent point of dispute at Davos remained unsolved: can there be objectivity without metaphysics? One solution was developed by philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who delivered a lecture in Hamburg in 1995 on the dual occasion of the rededication of the Warburg Library and the fiftieth anniversary of Cassirer’s death. Habermas expressed in his lecture great admiration for Cassirer and extoled him as a champion of democracy and Enlightenment at a moment in German history when such champions were all too few. But he also suggested that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms did not succeed in liberating itself from the conventional paradigm of a “philosophy of consciousness.” For Habermas, the philosophy of consciousness is the name for any philosophical doctrine that describes meaning from the isolated perspective of a transcendental subject who

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comes to know the world primarily through representations. Over the course of the twentieth century, many philosophers have come to see this paradigm as antiquated and indefensible, chiefly because it relies on a crypto-metaphysical conception of a transcendental subject who stands beyond its own field of operation. It serves as the grounds of meaning but can give no account of its own genesis. Habermas tries to resolve this dilemma without following the path of metaphysical skeptics such as Heidegger and Foucault. Instead, he understands objective meaning as the shared creation of an irreducible plurality of subjects who build up the world through intersubjective communication and praxis. This solution helps to secure the objectivity of our language and our moral-political commitments even though it is an objectivity that has dispensed with the need for metaphysical grounds. This ideal of an intersubjectively validated objectivity derives originally from the German idealists, but one can glimpse in Cassirer’s thinking a certain anticipation of Habermas’ solution. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is an ambivalent work that sits at the boundary between two epochs in the history of philosophy. It points in the direction of a post-metaphysical theory of the symbolic without wholly liberating itself from the older paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness. We can occasionally glimpse its author as he struggles to overcome his own philosophical inheritance, even if its authority remains too strong. This may help to explain the strange feeling of untimeliness that seems to emanate from the pages of this unusual work. Cassirer himself was a man between epochs, a contemporary of Einstein who could effortlessly call to mind lines of poetry from Schiller and Goethe. Though unashamed of his origins, he was indifferent to the claims of nation and tribe; he saw in Judaism only one source for the rational universalism that was the common inheritance of all cultures. A humanist philosopher in an age of extremes, he was in many ways the supreme representative of a world in eclipse. Although he was fortunate enough to escape the European catastrophe, he did not live long enough to see the new world that would emerge from the ruins. Whether he could have felt at home in this new age of specialization is doubtful. Erudition today is a rare commodity, and it has become just one commodity among others. For good or for ill, philosophers these days no longer have the habit of quoting Goethe. But if we look past

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these marks of old-world erudition, we may yet find that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms can come alive with new insights that even its author may never have anticipated. No genuine work of philosophy belongs only to the past.

ENDNOTES 1 Cf. Cassirer, “The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. Steve Lofts with Antonio Calcagno, 76. 2 Ibid., 76.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Samantha Matherne (Philosophy, Harvard University) for her comments and insights on this Foreword.

T r a n s l at o r ’ s P r e f a c e

Steve G. Lofts The following translation has been made from both the original Bruno Cassirer editions and volumes 11, 12, and 13 of the Gesammelte Werke: Ham­ burger Ausgabe, edited by Birgit Recki and with text and notes prepared by Claus Rosenkranz and Julia Clemens. The translation of “‘Geist’ und ‘Leben’ in der Philosophie der Gegenwart” (“‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy”) that appears in the Appendix to Volume 3 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms has been made from volume 17 of the Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe. This paper is mentioned by Cassirer in the Preface to Volume 3 and has been included to provide the reader new to Cassirer with an idea of the problematic that would come to preoccupy him. The original pagination of the Hamburg edition is found in the margins of the translation. All the footnotes that appear within brackets are translator’s notes. As the Hamburg edition is a critical edition, its editorial apparatus is extensive and as such contains a great deal of detailed information. Only the footnotes that seem most appropriate for this translation have been included. Unless a reference to an official English translation appears, all translations of the material quoted in German or French by Cassirer are my own. Official translations have often been amended so that the language of technical terms is consistent. Substantial changes to the translation have been noted. English translations for the Greek and Latin are included in parentheses where the translation was not given by Cassirer.

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An attempt has been made to produce a translation that is close and faithful to the original German and to preserve the original feel of Cassirer’s voice and style while providing a readable text in contemporary English. Cassirer writes in a clear, elegant, and poetic German. As with any translation, decisions have been made as to when it was more important to remain faithful to the letter of the text and when it was necessary to side with the spirit of the text. Beyond the typical challenges encountered in any translation, the translator of Cassirer is confronted with a particular problem. Other than “symbolic form” and “symbolic pregnance,” Cassirer does not coin a new technical language; rather, he employs the language of German Idealism as well as the technical language of scientific research, bringing a number of thinkers and scientific disciplines into dialogue. He often, however, provides these terms with a new sense. Where possible, the standard translations of these technical terms have been adopted. In some cases, however, there are differences in translation traditions. For example, Erkenntnisse is rendered as “knowledge” or “cognition” by different translators. It has, therefore, often been necessary to choose, among the alternative, standard translations on the basis of what was the best overall fit in the context of Cassirer’s thought. At times it has been necessary to deviate from standard translations of certain German terms to capture subtle distinctions that would appear to be synonyms and thus would normally be translated by the same English term. As it is not always possible to translate a German term by using only one English term, in some cases more than one translation has been adopted. Like most philosophers, Cassirer has a tendency to select terms that allow him to make allusions or connect terms through the structure or morphology of the word, such as Gestalt (gestalt, figure or shape), gestalten (to configure), and Gestaltung (configuration); Bild (image), bilden (forming), Bildung (formation), etc. Where it was thought important to the understanding or simply to the appreciation of the nuances of the text, the German has been included in parentheses. While a translation should not attempt to remove an author’s genderbased language, by the same token, it should not introduce gender-based language where it does not exist. There are three genders in German: the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter. The problem occurs when we translate terms like der Mensch (the human or the human being) or das Einzelne (the individual). If we employ the pronoun “he” in these cases, we



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are in fact introducing gender-based language that does not exist in Cassirer’s text. The concern here is not one of political but of philosophical correctness. When we speak of “the human,” we are speaking not of individual human beings but of what it means to be human qua human. When speaking of the “individual,” the problem is compounded by the fact that Cassirer is at times speaking of the individual qua individual and at times he is speaking of an individual as a unique person. Whereas the individual qua individual is neither he nor she, an individual as a unique person is always he or she. As a basic principle, this translation endeavors not to introduce gender-specific language where it did not already exist. A number of strategies have been employed toward this goal. “Der Mensch” is translated as “the human” or “the human being” – the term “man” appears only when it is in an English text quoted by Cassirer or in one of his English works. In some cases, a simple restructuring of the sentence was needed to remove the pronoun or permit a repetition of the noun “the human.” Generally, “the human” and “the subject” have received the pronoun “it” and the possessive pronoun “its.” In a handful of cases, where it was clear that the subject of the sentence was singular, the words “they,” “their,” or “themself” has been used as a singular pronoun to refer to the subject or individual of an unspecified gender. This praxis dates back to the sixteenth century and is currently widely employed in informal language usage and more and more in formal contexts. Finally, in a handful of cases where Cassirer was clearly speaking of a concrete individual, both pronouns have been employed since the assumption is that the point being made would be true for women and for men. The goal of a translation should not be to interpret for the reader but rather to facilitate the reader in undertaking their own interpretation. This said, there is always a degree of interpretation that cannot be avoided. Here is not the place to go through all of the reasons for translating a term one way as opposed to another. Other translations are possible, and some choices cannot be made except on the bases of an interpretation of Cassirer’s philosophy as a whole, and in some instances, the German has been included in parentheses so that the reader is free to interpret the text differently.

T r a n s l at o r ’ s I n t r o d u ct i o n The Question Concerning the Human – Life, Form, and Freedom: On the Way to an Open Cosmopolitanism

Steve G. Lofts 1. THE PROJECTS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS The philosophy of symbolic forms refers not only to the three volumes that bear its name published between 1923 and 1929 but also to a series of interconnected philosophical projects that unfolded over the course of Cassirer’s life that worked out a new normative image of the human being. The philosophy of symbolic forms is not a finished philosophical system; rather, Cassirer considered his work only as a beginning, as a Wegweiser that shows the way to a philosophical and interdisciplinary field of inquiry into the dynamic creative energy of life, form, and the human spirit. As a “critique of culture,” the philosophy of symbolic forms extends the neo-Kantian transcendental project to an epistemo-critical analysis of the a priori source, nature, and limits of the different cultural sense-bestowing horizons in and through which the I  and the world are separated and through which a common understanding of an intelligible reality is constructed and reconstructed. It establishes the role and function of language, art, myth, religion, and science within the a priori systematic unity of



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culture. As a “phenomenology of cognition,” the philosophy of symbolic forms establishes the dynamic process of the life of the cultural forms in and through which thinking as a life-form emerges and frees itself from its embodiment in the lived body and in concrete praxis, progressing toward the expression of its significance in art, religion, the theoretical sciences, mathematics, and philosophy. As a “systematic philosophy,” it establishes the foundations for the natural, human, and cultural sciences. As a “historical project,” it establishes a new understanding of the creative energies of the past in the light of contemporary theoretical, moral, and social concerns that serves as an impulse to intellectual and social life. As a “metaphysics of the symbolic,” the philosophy of symbolic forms moves beyond the antinomies of classical metaphysics, situating the human in the dynamic process of the self-forming coming-into-being of life as the life of form. As a “philosophical anthropology,” the philosophy of symbolic forms articulates a normative image of the human being as a symbolic animal that does not level down the human into a homogenous mode of being. This conception of the symbolic animal serves as the basis for a symbolic humanism that is not based on liberal subjectivity. To this end, the philosophy of symbolic forms provides an intersubjective ethical project that points the way to an open cosmopolitanism that is not based on a Eurocentric conception of either the human being or culture.

2. THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF CASSIRER’S WORK Ernst Cassirer was without doubt among the most important thinkers of the early twentieth century. However, against the background of the intellectual context of the late twentieth century, dominated, on the one hand, in the continental tradition, by phenomenology, Heideggerian philosophy, existentialism, deconstruction, anti-humanistic and posthumanistic modes of thinking and, on the other hand, in the analytical tradition, by a certain mode of logical positivism, it is not surprising that Cassirer’s work would appear to many readers today to be little more than the vestige of an outmoded and bygone mode of thought that has been surpassed and has little to contribute to our contemporary intellectual and socio-political preoccupations. Although Cassirer’s work has been eclipsed and marginalized by philosophical trends in the later part of the

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century, one finds references and traces of influence in a number of seminal thinkers of the twentieth century both in and outside of philosophy: Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Nelson Goodman, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Susanne Langer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, Thomas Kuhn, Erwin Panofsky, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Leo Strauss, and Wilbur Urban, to mention but a few. The historical importance and possible influence of Cassirer’s work aside, the contemporary reader will find that his work has a great deal to say to us today. As fruitful as many of the current movements in philosophy have been, there is a growing sense that a new direction is needed today. A  number of readers see in Cassirer a thinker situated between the seemingly irreconcilable projects of analytic and continental philosophy. Michael Friedman, for example, closes his study, A Parting of the W   ays: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, by way of the suggestion that “those interested in finally beginning a reconciliation of the analytic and continental traditions . . . can find no better starting point than the rich treasure of ideas, ambitions, and analyses stored in [Cassirer’s] astonishingly comprehensive body of philosophical work.”1 While there are merits to the post-modern critique of subjectivity and the decentering of the human that has taken place in the twentieth century, these projects are not without their limitations or difficulties. Some readers of Foucault, for example, see in the later Foucault a turning back to some sort of humanism in positing a prediscursive or nonarchaic “subject” that escapes the subjugating discourses that construct a “subject.” Whether this is so or not is a question for Foucault scholarship. There is, however, at least some prima facie support for this view, and more importantly, it points to a more general issue with the project of post-humanism itself. A certain construction of “the human” as a liberal “subject” may be effaced and disappear like a face in the sand, as Foucault says, but does not a new conception of “the human” have to replace it? A renaissance of Cassirer’s work is timely in this context.2 In 1929 Cassirer met with Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland. The Davos encounter was much more than an ivory tower debate about the proper interpretation of Kant and more than a confrontation between Germany’s two most important thinkers: it was a clash between two antithetical conceptions of philosophy and the human. The central question of the



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debate was what is the human being? Cassirer was seen as defending the classical humanistic tradition, whereas Heidegger was seen as pointing the way forward to the new anti-humanistic tradition to come. At the time, most, including Levinas, saw Heidegger as the victor. For Levinas, it was like “participating in the creation and the end of the world” that marked the “end of a certain humanism.”3 The Davos debate has become emblematic of the end of modern humanism and the beginning of post-modern anti-humanism. Since Cassirer was Jewish and Heidegger would join the National Socialist Party, the debate has also become a polemical foil against the post-modern anti-humanist project. Peter E. Gordon offers in his book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos a detailed philosophical reconstruction of the seminal debate between Cassirer and Heidegger, its origins, and its aftermath that disentangles the substantive philosophical issues from an allegorical interpretation that understands these issues as a manifestation of political perspectives, as a debate between Cassirer’s Weimar liberalism and Heidegger’s Nazism. The real philosophical issue between them was a choice between two fundamentally different “normative images of humanity”: between thrownness and spontaneity. In the end, however, Gordon reminds us “that neither Cassirer nor Heidegger can be rightly understood as an unremitting advocate for only one of these two principles.”4 For while it is true that Cassirer was an advocate of classical humanist values reaching back through Humboldt, Kant, and Vico to Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 manifesto on humanism, De hominis dignitate (On the Dignity of the Human), he was by no means unaware of the limitations and problems with modern Enlightenment humanism or with the liberal subject that emerged from it. Cassirer’s entire philosophical project must be understood as a critical rethinking of classical humanism and the nature of enlightenment. This, however, did not lead Cassirer, as it did many of his contemporaries, toward a form of anti-humanism or post-humanism; rather, it brought him to the construction of what we might call an open non-subjectcentered symbolic humanism. As we shall see, while Cassirer provides a reconstruction of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism, he does not situate himself fully in that tradition. Rather, his reconstruction is also a transformation of the humanist tradition that undertakes the construction of a non-subjectcentered symbolic humanism. Cassirer, too, acknowledges a historical

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thrownness and subjugation of the individual by cultural discourses that construct a certain identity of the self while establishing the conditions of the possibility of a critical attitude that questions this subjectivity and thus is able to resist and reconstruct these cultural discourses. The reader interested in critical theory will find in Cassirer’s work a method of analyzing the deep intellectual ideas and socio-political-economic mechanisms that subjugate individual freedom through the construction of a framework of understanding that configures the emotional internal life of the individual as well as the tools and the ethical principles for a socio-political project of self-liberation. We are for Cassirer, to speak with Foucault, subjugated to and by culture and yet the subjects of culture, able to construct and reconstruct the culture that determines the historical situatedness into which we are thrown. The very project of determining the nature of the human in the singular does not always sit well with readers sensitive to the dangers of cultural hegemony in all its forms. While we must always be cognizant of the danger of cultural hegemony, the very concept assumes a plurality of cultures and modes of being human and thus assumes something like “the” human as a cultural being. What it maintains is simply that one historical culture cannot function as the paradigm for culture as such, that one historical mode of being human cannot be the model for all modes of being human. To recognize the other in their difference, however, we must also be able to recognize the humanity we share with them. Readers interested in comparative and intercultural studies will find that Cassirer’s theory of culture provides a robust and dynamic conception of culture that avoids the dangers of cultural and intellectual hegemony: in illustrating his points, Cassirer moves quickly from one culture to another, from one historical period to another. Cassirer’s philosophy points the way to an open cosmopolitanism as a regulatory ideal that expresses itself in the idea that we are “all” human and thus are all members of humanity.

3. THE ODYSSEY OF CASSIRER’S LIFE AND THOUGHT 3.1 – Marburg and the Cosmopolitan Culture of Berlin Ernst Cassirer was born July  28, 1874, in Breslau (today Wroclaw). Cassirer began his university studies in law at the University of Berlin in 1892. Cassirer’s interests, however, quickly led him to the study of



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German literature (especially Goethe), history, and in particular art history, before finally bringing him to philosophy. In his lectures on Kant, Georg Simmel cited the works of Herman Cohen, the founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, as being without doubt the best works on Kant but also the most difficult. Two years later, Cassirer moved to Marburg, where he studied with Cohen and Paul Natorp. Under the direction of Natorp, who supervised his doctoral thesis, titled “Descartes’ Kritik der mathematischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis” (1899), Cassirer received his doctorate with the rare grade of summa cum laude. In 1902, his work on Descartes was published as the introduction to his Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, which won second place in the prestigious competition of the Berlin Academy: no first prize was awarded. Along with Kant, Hegel, and Goethe, Leibniz provides one of the main intellectual sources of Cassirer’s thought. In 1903, Cassirer returned to Berlin and began work on the first two volumes of his Das Erkenntnisproblem (1906 and 1907), which treated the period from Nicholas of Cusa to Kant. These works rapidly became, and have remained, standard references in the history of epistemology and the problem of knowledge, and we can already recognize in them the systematic problem of a critical phenomenology of cognition that will be undertaken in the philosophy of symbolic forms. In 1906 Cassirer presented his candidacy for Privatdozentur at the University of Berlin. The first volume of his Das Erkenntnisproblem was presented as his Habilitation. Following its acceptance, Cassirer gave a public lecture titled “Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff.” Four years later, Cassirer would publish Substance and Function (1910), which forms the foundations for his critique of culture. According to Dimitry Gawronsky (a close friend of the Cassirer family), Cassirer once told him that in 1917, just as he entered a street car to ride home, the conception of the symbolic forms flashed upon him. . . . Suddenly the one-sidedness of the Kant-Cohen theory of knowledge became quite clear. . . . It is not true that only human reason opens the door which leads to the understanding of reality, it is rather the whole of the human mind, with all its functions and impulses, all its potencies of imagination, emotion, volition, and logical thinking . . . which determines and molds our conception of reality.5

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It is not difficult to appreciate how the cosmopolitan culture of Berlin shortly after the turn of the century would have been the ideal environment for the inception of the project of a “critique of culture” – for at the fin-de-siècle, Berlin, along with Vienna, formed one of the main cultural hubs of Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Berlin was the site of a relentlessly self-renewing modernity; it was, as the art historian Karl Scheffler puts it in almost Cassirerian terms, “always to be in the process of becoming and never to be.”6 Through his family, Cassirer would have had a unique insight into the rich cultural life of Berlin: the worlds of art, music, film, cabaret, and literature as well as the worlds of science, economics, and politics. The Cassirer family were affluent assimilated Jews and held a prominent position in Berlin society: Max Cassirer and Cassirer’s father were influential businessmen; his cousins, Richard Cassirer and Kurt Goldstein, were famous neurologists; Fritz Cassirer was a composer and conductor at the Berliner Komische Oper; Bruno Cassirer ran a publishing house for art and literature and published Cassirer’s tenvolume edition of Kant; and Paul and Bruno Cassirer, together with the painter Max Liebermann, were the founders of the Berliner Secession. Through the Berliner Secession and the Cassirer Gallery, Paul Cassirer brought the works of Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Munch, and Van Gogh to Berlin and so introduced impressionism, post-impressionism, and expressionism to Germany. In this context, immersed in all the different forms of culture, Cassirer developed the project of a critique of culture. During the First World War, Cassirer worked in the War Press office in Berlin, where he was able to follow the development of the war from various non-German perspectives in the different foreign newspapers. Cassirer wrote a short work titled Freiheit und Form (Freedom and Form) (1916), a wonderful study that establishes the historical, and even dialectical, course of the concepts of freedom and form from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, as quintessential to German thought and, therefore, to German culture: the work presents Kant and Goethe (and by extension German culture) as part of a larger European intellectual tradition and culture. In the lived context of World War I, the political importance of Cassirer’s book would not have been lost on its readers, and in the juxtaposition of Kant and Goethe, of freedom and form, we find the theoretical seeds of the philosophy of symbolic forms as a “critique of culture” and a “morphology of spirit.” We also



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see here a classic example of the fusion between systematic, historical, and socio-political questions that is characteristic of Cassirer’s philosophical method and outlook.

3.2 – The University of Hamburg and the Kulturwissenschaft liche Bibliothek Warburg After the war, Cassirer secured a position at the University of Hamburg and so left his beloved Berlin. The choice was a fortunate one: for just as Berlin, with all its diverse cultural forces and its relentlessly self-renewing becoming, had been the ideal cultural environment for the inception of the critique of culture, Hamburg, and in particular the Warburg Library for the Cultural Sciences (Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg), would prove to be the ideal environment to realize this project. Although Cassirer’s work was already conceptually well advanced by the time he arrived in Hamburg, there was still a considerable amount of concrete research to be done. As destiny would have it, the Warburg Library contained all the concrete material on art, myth, religion, and language that would be indispensable to this research. Cassirer immediately recognized in the structure of the library itself the reflection of his own philosophical perspective. All of the concrete-historical work of spirit was there, ordered and classified systematically according to the same internal logic of cultural forms that he was developing. Cassirer quickly became close friends with the library’s director, the art historian Fritz Saxl, as well as Aby Warburg himself, and was soon one of the institute’s most important contributors. Perhaps more important than the concrete-material resources of the library, however, was the intellectual community of scholars that worked at the Warburg Library and the collaborative, interdisciplinary ethos that it fostered. Not only did Cassirer meet a number of new and important colleagues in Hamburg, but he also closely collaborated with them. Among them there was the art historian Erwin Panofsky, whose lectures Cassirer attended and whose work has clearly been influenced by Cassirer.7 Cassirer would also meet the psychologists William Stern and Heinz Werner, whose work on the psychology of language figures prominently in Cassirer’s own writings of this period. Stern and Cassirer organized together the twelfth congress of the German Society of Psychology, which took place in Hamburg in 1931. Cassirer also attended

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the lectures of the biologist Jacob Uexküll during this period. In his later work, Cassirer draws a clear parallel between his own theory of symbolic forms and Uexküll’s theory of organic forms. The Warburg years were the most productive years of Cassirer’s life.8 In the first two years, he published his Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1921) and the third volume of Das Erkenntnisproblem that focused on the systems of philosophy after Kant up to and including Hegel. The first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on language was published in 1923, and the second volume on myth was published two years later, in 1925. Although the manuscript for the third volume had already been completed by 1927, it was not published until 1929. During this time, Cassirer continued to struggle with the conclusion that was to bring his philosophy into dialogue with the contemporary philosophical movement of Lebensphilosophie; however, he finally decided to postpone this critical part so as to not make the volume longer than it already was with issues that went beyond the primary focus of the volume. Cassirer, nevertheless, promised to publish it under the title “‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’ – Toward a Critique of Contemporary Philosophy.” In 1929, Cassirer gave a lecture on spirit and life in Max Scheler’s philosophy at Davos. A version of this paper appeared in 1930 in Die neue Rundschau and was originally translated into English in place of “The Philosopher’s Reply” in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Cassirer.9 In the end, this final chapter had become a work unto itself and drew Cassirer to consider the metaphysics of the symbolic in what was to be a fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The chapters and notes for this volume have been published as the first volume of his Nachlass and translated into English by John M. Krois as The Metaphys­ ics of Symbolic Forms. Finally, Cassirer wrote four seminal studies on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment during this period: Individual and Cosmos in the Renaissance (1927), The Case of Jacques Rousseau (1932), Platonic Renaissance in England (1932), and The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932).

3.3 – Life in Exile From 1929 to 1930, Cassirer served as Rector of Hamburg University, and while he was not the first Jew to hold this position, given the sociopolitical context of the times, this fact speaks to the great esteem in which



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Cassirer was held. Only three years later, however, on January 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In the first weeks of the Third Reich, it was announced in the newspapers that “The law is what serves the Führer”; by March of the same year, the first concentration camp at Dachau had been opened; in April, the Laws for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service were established, which barred all Jews from holding civil service, university, and state positions; on April 27, Cassirer wrote the university informing them that he was taking a leave of absence, and with this, the Cassirers, like many other German intellectuals of Jewish descent, left Germany to take up a life in exile; by July, the University of Hamburg, the same university that had only a few years before made him rector, officially informed Cassirer that he had been retired from his post. The University of Upsala in Sweden, Oxford in England, and the New School of Social Research in New York all offered Cassirer safe haven. After some reflection, Cassirer accepted the invitation from All Souls College at Oxford and left for England. After two years at Oxford, Cassirer accepted a post at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. Of the massive body of work that was produced during this period, only five monographs were published during Cassirer’s lifetime. Deter­ minism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, which continues the project of grounding the mathematical natural sciences, was published in 1936. An introduction to the Swedish philosopher Alex Hägerström (Alex Häger­ ström) and an essay on Descartes’ influence on the seventeenth century and in particular on the Swedish queen Christine (Descartes. Lehre – Persön­ lichkeit  – Wirkung) were both published in 1939. Cassirer was clearly rethinking his entire philosophical project during this period. In the summer of 1940, however, destiny forced his hand: the time for reflection had come to an end, and in this “dreadful moment in world history,” as Toni Cassirer calls it in her biography of her life with Cassirer, Cassirer wrote in the space of four months The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) and the fourth volume of The Problem of Knowledge (1942).10 Each in their own way addresses the “failure of philosophy” since the “death of Hegel” to establish the “unity of science” and to address the facticity of reality and thus establish the firm foundations of rationality. On May 20, 1941, the Cassirers left Sweden on the steamer Remarren destined for New York. Yale University had invited Cassirer to come as a visiting professor. The new world was full of old friends also living

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in exile: Panofsky, Einstein, Wind, his student Solmitz, and the gestalt psychologist Wertheimer, to mention but a few. But true to his nature, Cassirer quickly made new friends and learned about new perspectives. Already on the dangerous voyage (the Remarren was the last passenger liner to make the crossing until after the war), he had met and passed the time with the structural linguist Roman Jacobson. It is not without some importance that positive references to linguistic structuralism immediately began to appear in Cassirer’s work.11 Cassirer remained active and productive. Teaching and participating in seminars, he still found time to publish numerous articles and write two books. An Essay on Man is more than a simple résumé of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. It is the product of a profound rethinking and reframing of the project in the light of new knowledge and the realization, as Cassirer expresses it at the end of The Myth of the State, that “human culture is by no means the firmly established thing that we once supposed it to be.”12 Cassirer’s philosophy has clearly become a philosophical transcendental anthropology, and the “critique of culture” has become a critique of the animal symbolicum. In The Myth of the State, Cassirer furthers his analysis of the reasons for this failure through his study of the modern “technique of myth” employed by the architects of National Socialism. Cassirer found himself marooned in the new world. Although Yale University was able to extend its invitation for another year, it was unable to do so for a third. Cassirer was therefore invited to Columbia University for one year. The following year, he was to continue west, to the University of California. However, on April 13, 1945, Cassirer died of a heart attack on his way to the Columbia University Faculty Chess Club.

4. THE HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC UNFOLDING OF THE PROJECTS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS AS A RESPONSE TO THE CRISIS 4.1 – The Historical Context of the Crisis at the Fin-de-Siècle The nineteenth century experienced a radical restructuring and reorientation of socio-economic-political life; it also witnessed a rapid and profound progress and transformation in the positivist sciences. A new debate on the form and direction that our socio-political life should take



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began: if modernity was to bring about self-autonomy, it remained to determine the shape that this self-governance would take. Within a few years of each other, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill had established the discourses of the left and the right that would form the basic framework of socio-political thinking for the next century. The relentlessly self-renewing progress of modernity, however, increasingly challenged and eventually undercut the fundamental principles of the substantialist ontology on which it had been grounded. A crisis in the foundations of mathematics broke out when it became apparent that mathematics was unable to account for its most basic principles. Given that the sciences had been modeled on mathematics since Descartes, this crisis quickly escalated into a crisis in the foundations of science. Since European culture had been founded on the concept of rationality, the crisis in the foundations of both the natural and human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] undermined the principles of rationality that had grounded Western civilization since the Greeks. And since modernity was based in large part on the modern philosophy of the subject, which had been built on the principles of ancient ontology, the collapse of a substantialist reading of these ontological principles threw into doubt the whole philosophical, and with it socio-political, project of modernity. The crisis was anything but a merely ivory tower affair: such popular works like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) attested to the growing sense of malaise as the ontological ground gave way, ushering in the end of a world. This crisis would form the intellectual and socio-political context of a whole generation of artists, theologians, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers. The debate among Dedekind, Frege, Russell, Poincaré, Hilbert, and Cassirer must be understood against the background of the crisis in the foundations of mathematics. Heidegger undertook the project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time in response to the crisis in Western ontology, and Husserl developed transcendental phenomenology in response to a crisis in the European sciences. And like Husserl, Cassirer came to see the crisis not merely as “a grave theoretical problem” but as “an imminent threat to the whole extent of our ethical and cultural life.”13 For Cassirer, the crisis was above all a crisis in human self-understanding, a crisis in ethical freedom. It is as a response to this crisis that Cassirer’s work must be read.

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4.2 – Substance-Concepts and Function-Concepts: A Response to the Crisis in the Foundations of Mathematics and the Relationalist Framework of Cassirer’s Philosophy The central aim of Substance and Function is to establish the foundations of mathematics and the mathematical natural sciences. The source and the nature of the crisis in the foundations of mathematics and the mathematical natural sciences, as well as Cassirer’s response, are clearly stated in the title of his 1910 work. A more precise translation of Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff would have been Substance-Concept and Function-Concept, as Cassirer demonstrates and argues in this work for the primacy of functionconcepts over substance-concepts. In terms of the grounding of mathematics, the central issue concerns the relationship between mathematics and pure logic. In keeping with the main tenets of the Marburg School, Cassirer sees mathematics as grounded on pure formal logic. This formal logic is, however, understood by Cassirer in terms of a theory of relations and an idea of a functional unity. Concept formation is rooted in ontology, and the shift from substance-concepts to function-concepts marks a transition from an ontology of substance to an ontology of relation. Cassirer is effectively inverting the relationship between relation and being as it has been understood in the Western tradition. The source of the crisis is traced back to the tradition’s reliance on substance-concepts that are rooted in an ontology that takes substance as the ground of being. As such, concept formation is seen as a process of abstraction of the common characteristics inherent in the pre-conceptual and even pre-cognitive existence of a self-identical substantial being, and truth is a correspondence between the judgment and the reality that exists independently of the concept that copies it. A logic grounded on substance can only be a logic of concepts and abstractions.14 The problem with this traditional logic of abstraction and the correspondence theory of truth is that it leads to an empty formalism, whereby the conceptual and logical are separated from the real by a gulf that can never be bridged. The pure mathematical manifestation of this function relation takes the form of φ(x). The φ of the propositional function represents the structural law of the ensemble of a pure differentiated relational structure. Let us consider a simple example of the whole-number series 1, 2, 3, . . . . In terms of a function relation, we can write this as (x+1)(0, 1,



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2, 3, . . .). The sense (Sinn) of the numbers 1, 2, 3. . . is nothing other than the open-ended series of positions in which each stands in the differentiated relational structure (x+1) that produces them. The significance (Bedeutung) of 2 is therefore that it comes after 1 and before 3. The number 2 has neither an intrinsic value nor an extrinsic value, and neither does it exist immanently in itself nor is it grounded in some higher existence that transcends it; rather, its value is determined by the relational position that it occupies as a member of the differentiated unitary whole as an ensemble of all the elements of the series. The law (x+1) constitutes the sense (Sinn) of the whole-number series in its unitary whole, in which the number 2 is understood as the thing that it is, the number two. If (x+1) constitutes the universal and 2 the particular, then there is no dualism that separates them as in classical metaphysics. Cassirer characterizes this relationship in his 1913 article “Erkenntnistheorie nebst de Grenzfragen der Logik.” The paragraph is remarkable in its anticipation of the concept of “symbolic pregnance,” which stands, as we shall see, at the heart of Cassirer’s critique of culture: If one follows this view further through, it would seem that the sense [Sinn] of all objective judgments reduces to an ultimate originaryrelationship [Urverhältnis], which can be expressed in different formulations as the relationship [Verhältnis] of “form” to “content,” as the relationship of “universal” to “individual,” as the relationship of “validity” to “being.” Whatever designation one may ultimately choose here, what is truly decisive is that the basic relation itself is to be retained as a strictly unitary relation, that can only be designated through the two opposing elements [gegensätzlichen Momente] that enter into it, but can never be constructed out of them, as if they were in themselves presently available pieces of a consistent existence [Bestand]. The originaryrelationship is not to be defined in such a way that the “universal” somehow “exists” next to or above the “individual,” as if the form were somehow separated from the content, as if the two were then melded with one another by means of some or another fundamental synthesis of knowledge [Wissen]. Rather, the unity of mutual determination forms the absolutely first datum, behind which one can go back no further, and which can only be dissected [zerlegen] into the duality of two “view-points” [Gesichtspunkte] in an artificially isolating process

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of abstraction. It is the basic error of all metaphysical epistemologies that they repeatedly attempt to reinterpret this duality of “elements” [Momente] as a duality of “elements” [Elemente].15

Central to Cassirer’s entire philosophical outlook, and this is in keeping with the Marburg school that rejected Kant’s two-stem doctrine, is that differences in validity or sense cannot be understood by tracing them back to ontically real differences. Whoever . . . converts the Kantian “dualism” of form and matter, which is a difference of significance and transcendental “validity,” into a divergence and juxtaposition of things in real existence, has thereby already missed the decisive point of view needed for the profound understanding of this difference. For us, in any case, it is certain that pure phenomenological “sensation” and “sense-bearing” are only given as an indivisible unity. We can never completely separate the sensory as such, as some naked “raw material” of sensation, from the whole complex of sense (Sinnverbände).16

Rather than recognizing the apparent dualism as the result of a necessary duality of sight (Sicht), the metaphysical tradition continually tears this unitary interconnection asunder and treats each of the two “elements” (Momente) of this “originary-relationship” as if they existed in themselves, independently of each other and of the relational structure that determines them in their being (Wesen). Metaphysical systems differ, for Cassirer, only in terms of which of the two elements they privilege: which they see as the ground of the other. Metaphysical thought, however, always ends in unresolvable antinomies that can be overcome only through a quasi-mystical transcendence and fusion of the two elements or by the negation or sublation of one of the elements by the other. However, both strategies end, for Cassirer, in the destruction of their own position. Throughout Cassirer’s work, we see the same strategy of reading that follows the historical process by which the metaphysical isolating and privileging of one of the elements of this “originary-relationship” is forced by the internal logic of its own position to acknowledge the marginalized element and even transition into it. We see this concretely in the way that Cassirer presents the history of philosophy as the history of a struggle between



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polar dichotomies: between rationalism and empiricism, between idealism and materialism, between philosophy and myth; between form and matter, being and nothing, thought and reality, life and spirit, freedom and form. Cassirer is clear that each position is equally one-sided and exists as a position only in its opposition to the other position. In reading Cassirer, it is necessary to be aware of this dialectical and dialogical movement between diametrically polar positions. Finally, this “originary-relationship” will become the central concept of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms  – namely, “symbolic pregnance” (discussed later) – and prefigures one of the essential elements in his metaphysics of the symbolic form – namely, the Urphänomena “behind which one can go back no further.” Substance and Function thus addresses the crisis in the foundations of mathematics and the mathematical natural sciences by grounding mathematics in pure formal logic and by understanding pure formal logic in terms of a theory of relations as a complex functional unitary ensemble of differentiated relational positions that can be expressed by the mathematical expression φ(x). The transition from substance-concepts to functionconcepts that takes place in modern mathematics marks a transition in ontology; the object (x) is no longer a substantial being to be copied but a relational being whose sense is the logic that governs the whole in which it is located. In Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1921) and Determinism and Indeter­ minism in Modern Physics (1936), Cassirer extends his functional analysis to the general theory of relativity and to quantum mechanics, respectively.

4.3 – The Critique of Culture: A Response to the Crisis in the Foundations of the Human Sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] (i) From the Mathematical Function to the Symbolic Function: From a Critique of Reason to a Critique of Culture Having established the foundations for mathematical and natural-scientific thinking, Cassirer turned his attention to the structure and foundations of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). There is no ideal translation for Geisteswissenschaften, and while “the human sciences” has been adopted, it is not without problems. Another possible translation in the context of Cassirer’s work might have been “the cultural sciences.” However, it is necessary to keep clear the difference between the transcendental

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philosophical project of the “critique of culture” (Kritik der Kultur) that is to provide the foundation for the “Geisteswissenschaften.” Cassirer also employs, as we shall see, the term “Kulturwissenschaften” (the cultural sciences) in other later works, and the focus and scope of the Kulturwissenschaften differs from that of the Geisteswissenschaften. It is also important to distinguish the Geisteswis­ senschaften (in the plural) from the Geisteswissenschaft (in the singular). In the singular, the Geisteswissenschaft suggests Hegel’s project of “the science of spirit”; in the plural, the Geisteswissenschaften suggests Dilthey’s project of the “human sciences.” In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer distances himself from other schools of neo-Kantianism – e.g., Heinrich Rickert’s theory of the Kulturwissenschaften – and aligns himself with Dilthey; thus, while there are differences between Cassirer and Dilthey on the methodological nature of the Geisteswissenschaften, the standard translation of the Geisteswissenschaften in Dilthey’s work has been adopted. It is important not to think of the Geisteswis­ senschaften or the Kulturwissenschaften in terms of the contemporary conception of the “humanities.” The Geisteswissenschaften would include such disciplines as history, economics, politics, psychology, the law, the study of religion, architecture, sociology, and social anthropology, none of which would be included in what is traditionally understood by “the humanities.” Part of the problem is that “science” has come to be equated in English with “the natural sciences,” and there is no current equivalent to the Geisteswis­ senschaften today. The main debate at the beginning of the twentieth century centered on the methodological foundations for the Geisteswissenschaften that would distinguish them from the “Naturwissenscahften” (the natural sciences). The central problem for Cassirer was that the dominant methodological paradigms of the human sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century – positivism, naturalism, psychologism, and historicism – were reductionistic in their approach to the human and unable to establish the condition of the possibility of objective validity; this leads to the fragmentation of the human and to intellectual and socio-political relativism and skepticism. The crisis stems from the fact that these approaches were not grounded in a theory of the human sciences and by extension in an adequate concept of the human as such: in short, the crisis is a crisis in the self-understanding of the human. We see throughout the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer engaging positivism, naturalism, psychologism, and historicism. Cassirer quickly recognized, however, the limitations of the traditional approach to the problem. To establish the foundations for the human



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sciences, it would be necessary to broaden, reframe, and differentiate his philosophical response to the crisis in the mathematical natural sciences: Rather than investigating only the general presuppositions of the scientific cognition of the world, it was equally necessary to differentiate the different basic forms of “understanding” of the world and comprehend each one of them as sharply as possible in their distinctive tendency and spiritual form. Only when such a “morphology” [Formenlehre: theory of forms] of spirit had been established, at least in general outline, could we hope to ground a clearer methodological view and a more secure principle of grounding for the individual disciplines of the human sciences.17

The first reference to the project of the philosophy of symbolic forms is found in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The passage is important to understanding the project of a critique of culture: It is the task of systematic philosophy, which extends far beyond epistemology, to free the worldview from this one-sidedness. It has to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms, the application of which produces for us the concept of a structured reality, and by virtue of which subject and object, I and world are separated and opposed to each other in determinate configurations, and it must refer each individual in this totality to its fixed place. If we assume this problem solved, then the rights would be assured, and the boundaries designated, of each of the particular forms of the conceptual and cognitive forms such as the general forms of the theoretical, ethical, aesthetic, and religious understandings of the world [Weltverständnis]. Each particular form would be “relativized” with regard to the others, but since this “relativization” is throughout reciprocal and since no single form but only the systematic totality can serve as the expression of “truth” and “reality,” the limit that results appears as a thoroughly immanent limit, as one that is removed as soon as we again relate the individual to the system of the whole.18

A number of elements in this citation merit emphasis. The project of a “critique of culture” is a “systematic philosophy” that establishes the “whole system of symbolic forms” as a systematic unity in which each form has its own function in the dynamic, creative process of objectification.19 As a

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transcendental project, the epistemo-critical analysis begins from the basic factum of the different cultural manifestations and seeks to establish their a priori source, nature, and limits or boundaries. Each symbolic form is a unique mode of the symbolic function possessing its own logic of sense that determines its own understanding of objectivity. Each symbolic form thus performs a specific function within the unity of culture as the objective expression of the symbolic function. Together, the symbolic process undertakes the formation, configuration, and structuring of reality in and through which the I and the world are separated, opposed, and interconnectively related: as Cassirer often puts it, the great process of “the setting asunder (Auseinandersetzung) of the I and world” (for a discussion of Ausein­ andersetzung, cf. below). One of the main tenets of Cassirer’s philosophy is that neither the world of objects nor the inner world of the subject exists prior to or independently of the symbolic. We are always already in the symbolic, and all intuition, perception, emotion, and thinking are structured and constructed by the symbolic “energies” of objective spirit. There is therefore no pre-symbolic truth that can act as the measure of absolute truth by which the truth claim of each of the different modes of understanding can be measured. What is more, no one symbolic form possesses a monopoly on the truth; only the systematic totality of the different modes of understanding can serve as the expression of “truth” and “reality.” It is important to keep in mind that a transcendental critique of culture is concerned with only the conditions of the possibility of the factum of culture and can say nothing about the facticity of any specific culture. It can inquire only into the function and structure of the different cultural forms and their function in the ensemble of symbolic forms as the a priori conditions of the possibility of any given historically concrete culture. In the aforementioned 1917 quotation from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, we should also note that Cassirer speaks, following Cohen’s account of culture,20 of “theoretical, ethical, aesthetic and religious understandings of the world,” but he does not speak of language and myth. The inclusion of myth marks an important evolution in Cassirer’s thinking that will distinguish his understanding of culture from that of Cohen’s and Natorp’s, and it is no doubt in part a result of his reading of Schelling and the influence of Aby Warburg’s Nietzschean views on myth. We see as late as 1923 Cassirer reframe his project so as to widen its scope. Krois draws our attention to the fact that in 1923 Cassirer changes the title on



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the proofs for volume one from The Phenomenology of Cognition: Groundlines for a Theory of the Spiritual Forms of Expression to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.21 The project of a phenomenology of cognition, which will become the title of the third volume, is now situated in a larger project and must begin from a transcendental critique of language and mythical thought.

(ii) The Symbolic Forms as the Energies of Objective Spirit and the Construction of the Organs-Sights of Reality In 1936, Cassirer clearly states the purpose and limits of a transcendental critique of culture: What we are searching for are not the historical phenomena themselves. We try to analyze and to understand the fundamental modes of thinking, of conceiving, of representing, imagining, and picturing that are contained in language, myth, art, religion, and even in science. Instead of following up the phenomena singly and stringing them together on the thread of history, instead of considering them in their succession or in their connection of cause and effect, we inquire into the nature of the different functions on which the phenomena, taken as a whole, depend. We are no longer studying artworks, the products of mythical or religious thought, but the working powers, the mental (geistig) activities that are required in order to produce these works. If we succeed in gaining an insight into the character of these powers, if we understand them, not in their historical origin, but in their structure, if we conceive in what way they are different from each other but nevertheless cooperate with each other, we have reached a new knowledge about the character of human culture.22

The factum for Cassirer is the symbolic activity of objective spirit in all its diversity – i.e., the activity of culture which is trans-individual. For Cassirer, all “seeing” (Sehen) is made possible through the “sight” (Sicht) of spirit that functions as a hermeneutical horizon that forms a mode of understanding that posits (setzen), configures (gestalten), and thus conditions (bedingen) the object seen: intuited, perceived, felt, or thought. Symbolic sight thus determines the basic tendency or direction of seeing as well as the modes of givenness of the object but it also conditions the

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subject who sees. The task (Aufgabe) of philosophy is thus to return from the “forma formata” (from that which has become) to the “forma formans” (the principle of becoming). It moves from the products or works (Ergon) of culture to the creative energies (Energeia) that construct them  – for example, from the artwork to the work of art. Throughout his work, Cassirer repeatedly emphasizes that the symbolic forms do not picture (abbilden) an already-existing reality, be it subjective or objective, but are the original, and therefore transcendental, energies by which the I and object, the I  and you, are separated, conditioned, and rendered intelligible: the symbolic forms as “form-bestowing” are “sense-bestowing” and as such bring about the “construction” (Aufbau) of the world of the objects as well as the world of subjects, which do not exist independently of the hermeneutical horizons that construct and condition them. Hence, we should not see the symbolic as mediating per se but rather as the “between”: as the notion of mediation suggests the poles that are joined by mediation already exist before the bridge of mediation, whereas the “between” operates in the differentiation and relating of the two poles (we will return to this in a later section).

(iii) A General Semiotic Theory of the Logic of Sense and the General Problem of Signification (Bedeutung) Cassirer, looking back at his own philosophical development, states the nature of the transition from his earlier work in establishing the foundations for mathematics to his project of a critique of culture: More and more we have been forced to recognize that the area of theoretical sense (Sinn) that we designate with the name “cognition” (Erkenntnis) and “truth,” no matter how significant and fundamental, represent only one layer of sense (Sinnschicht). In order to understand it, in order to recognize its structure (Struktur), we must compare and contrast this layer with the other sense dimensions. We must, in other words, conceive the problem of cognition and the problem of truth as particular cases of the more general problem of significance [Bedeutung].23

In Substance and Function, mathematics is grounded in pure formal logic, which is in turn understood in terms of a theory of relation whose ideal



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symbolic expression is the mathematical function relation φ(x). Cassirer now grounds the mathematical function relation in a general theory of sense (Sinn) and situates it in the context of the general problem of signification (Bedeutung) as a distinctive mode and ideal manifestation of the symbolic function. A symbolic form as a symbolic function thus operates as an ensemble of relations that constitutes a referential totality or a coherent interconnectional context [Zusammenhang] that forms a hermeneutical horizon of sense in and through which a specific mode of Weltverständnis, an understanding that constitutes the intelligibility of a world, is determined. Each symbolic form possesses its own logic of sense, of which the logic of rational theoretical sense is but one. While the project of the critique of culture is to lay the foundations for the human sciences, it also relativizes the theoretical rational sense of the globus intellectualis of the neo-Kantian project and marks an important transformation in the sense of culture that operates in the project of a critique of culture. Culture is, for Marburg neo-Kantianism, produced by rational agents and is, therefore, the objective form of reflective rationality itself. Cohen had broadened the notion of a critique of reason to include all the rational forms of culture. In Cassirer’s view of culture as the ensemble of diverse modes of sense-bestowing forms, however, we find a far broader sense of culture. Culture is now understood as “a life ‘in’ sense (Sinn),”24 and these rational forms of culture that formed the totality of reflective rational culture for Cohen are but modes of sense-bestowing among others that form the ensemble of senses that is the life of objective spirit in which the human always already finds itself. Two things merit emphasis here. First, reason, as a specific mode of sense-bestowing, is now grounded in culture as a particular mode of cultural sense. Like Foucault, Cassirer focuses on the different logics according to which different sense-bestowing forms, symbolic forms or discourses, determine their own sense of objective truth and experience of reality. The rational forms of culture that are the objective forms of reasons now stand alongside other modes of objectifying and experience. If we wish to speak of the rational structure of the different cultural strata, then we must speak in the plural of rationalities. Whereas Kant speaks of understanding and experience in the singular, here we must speak of understandings and experiences. For Cohen, the products of rational culture are given as the objects of scientific experience and form the factum from which the reconstruction

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of reason begins. In An Essay on Man, however, Cassirer reminds us that “reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man’s cultural life in all their richness and variety.”25 As Cassirer points out, myth is not a factum that neo-Kantianism could recognize, and in fact, a “critique of mythical consciousness” must appear not only as a precarious venture but even as a paradoxical one, considering the present state of critical and systematic philosophy. . . . Is the world of myth . . . a factum . . . in any way comparable to the world of theoretical cognition, the world of art, or that of ethical consciousness?26

Strictly speaking, myth is not “irrational” but “non-rational” – and, in fact, while Cassirer does employ the term “irrational” in the context of myth, he often puts the term in scare quotes. Myth is a mode of sensebestowing whose validity and logic of sense are different from the logic of sense that operates in other modes of sense-bestowing. The philosophy of symbolic forms, as a phenomenology of cognition, reconstructs how the reflective rational forms of culture emerge out of and beyond other, more-concrete modes: this will involve the self-reflectivity not of reason, as in the case of Hegel, but of the self-reflectivity of culture. For the concept of culture that conditions a cognitive theoretical sense of the lifeworld of meaning itself can be said to be a concept of culture – i.e., a concept that belongs to a historical cultural world of meaning. The second thing to be emphasized here is that this broader concept of culture does not commit Cassirer to a Foucauldian historicization of the transcendental that would result in a historical relativization of logical validity. As a transcendental account of culture, the critique of culture establishes the objective validity of the different sense-bestowing forms involved in the construction and constitution of a world of meaning. There are, however, many historical worlds, and between these historical worlds will be an incommensurability. Greeks and Greek things will belong to a Greek world and a Greek experience conditioned by an intelligibility unique to it. Culture is the referential totality of relations that constitutes the lived, historical world in which one always already finds oneself with others and with objects that, like oneself, belong to that world: culture in the widest sense means simply



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the surrounding world (Umwelt) in which one “lives.” The critique of culture is a transcendental account of the formation and configuration of the world of sense: where one finds the human, one finds a being living in a cultural world of sense. Thus, while the system of historical, significative contents that is found in each world is unique to it, the sense of the world is the same. Cassirer thus generalizes what Humboldt says about language to the whole of culture: by the same spiritual act by which the human spins culture out of itself, the human spins itself into culture – so that in the end the human communicates and lives with intuitive objects in no other manner than that shown by the medium of culture. And although historical cultures may differ in their perspectives of reality, there is a perspective that is unique to the human that distinguishes itself from the world of an animal in that the inner form of these worlds is the same. Cassirer makes this clear in speaking about language: For, as languages distinguish themselves from one another by way of a particular “standpoint of the view of the world,” there is a view of the world of language itself, by virtue of which language stands out from the totality of the spiritual forms and in which language partly connects itself with the view of the world of scientific cognition, art, and myth, and also partly distances itself from them.27

During the 1920s, then, the project of a philosophy of symbolic forms was conceived of as a “critique of culture” that would provide a transcendental morphology of the different form-bestowing energies of spirit that functioned as the sense-bestowing hermeneutical horizons in which the intelligibility of a world comes to be understood as the world that it is and, by the same token, as the modes of world-making by which a world – objective as well as subjective – comes to be. In the introduction to volume I, Cassirer explicitly situates this project in the context of the “general function of signs” and the “problem of signification”: the sign is no mere accidental cloak of thought, but its necessary and essential organ. It serves not merely for the communication of a finished given content of thought, but is an instrument, by virtue of which

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translator’s introduction this content itself developed and by virtue of which it initially gained its full determinacy. The act of conceptual determination of a content goes hand in hand with the act of its fixation in some characteristic sign. Thus, all truly rigorous and exact thinking is sustained by the symbolism and semiotics on which it is based.28

Cassirer generalizes what is said here to the whole of culture: each symbolic form as “form-bestowing” is “sense-bestowing,” and this “sensebestowing” is achieved through the function of “sign-bestowing.” Sense is constituted in and through the ensemble of sensible signs as an interconnection of relations. Cassirer employs the terms Sinn and Bedeutung as terminus technicus throughout his philosophy without explicitly defining them as such. Both are synonymic translations of “meaning”; however, translating them into English as meaning is not without problems. Bedeutung can also be used in German to designate “significance” or “signification”; there is, however, an important difference between these two terms. The term “significance” designates the meaning, relevance, or importance of something. “Signification,” on the other hand, refers to that which is signified by something: meaning, import, implication. The “significance” of an emblem, word, image, or pure sign is an evaluation of the importance or meaning of these signs in a subjective context that exceeds their objective signification. The “signification” of an emblem, word, image, or pure sign is, on the other hand, what each signifies, their meaning, what is intended to be understood by the sign. The signification is thus something objective. In both cases, it would be possible to speak of the “meaning” of the emblem, word, image, or pure sign, but this would level down the difference between their signification and significance. Frege employs Bedeutung for the referent of an expression and Sinn for the general meaning or sense. By contrast, Husserl uses the term Bedeu­ tung where Frege uses Sinn, and Husserl uses Gegenstand to stand for the referent of an expression. For Husserl, then, Sinn designates the ideal content of an act, its noematic Sinn. Sinn is a more general concept than is Bedeutung. This, of course, only raises the question as to Cassirer’s own use of these terms and how to render them into English. It would seem that the emblem, word, image, or pure sign each has a meaning that includes both a Sinn and a Bedeutung: in fact, what we call “meaning” in



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English is a product of this interconnection. As with Husserl, though perhaps for different reasons, Sinn is a more general concept for Cassirer than is Bedeutung. Sinn designates the general relational context that functions as a hermeneutical horizon in which something is understood as the thing that it is. Symbolic forms are Sinn-bestowing and not Bedeutungbestowing, and all Bedeutung belongs to a specific mode of symbolic formation and thus to a specific mode of Sinn. The “sense” of a word is more general and open to determination through interpretation than is the signification that it gains in the context of use or from a dictionary. What is more, in numerous places, Cassirer plays on the relation between Sinn and Sinne, which can be captured only if they are translated as sense and senses, respectively. Finally, it would seem that Cassirer employs the term “Bedeutung” at times in the sense of significance and at times in the sense of signification. At times it would appear, as in Frege, that the referent of a sign is its Bedeutung. All fact is a product of a theoretical act: thus, the object, as sign, is its Bedeutung. This is clearly the case, for example, when we speak of the pure signs of mathematics: the referent is the pure signification of the sign as it has been defined and determined by the law of its generation. What becomes clear is that each symbolic form, as sense-bestowing, is sign-bestowing and that each of the different modes of signs (emblem, word, image, or pure sign) possess a Bedeutung content. Only in the case of pure signs is this a pure Bedeutung. Now, by “pure” what is meant in critical philosophy is that it is independent of lived-experience: hence, there is, for example, a sense of a pure objectivity in mathematical signs. It is not, therefore, a question of evaluation or interpretation or of a subjective context. The pure signifying (bedeuten) act produces a sign that possesses a pure objectively valid signification (Bedeutung) that stands beyond the subjective context of its use. The pure mathematical sign as pure sign, of course, also possesses a certain significance in that it is understood by a subject as a pure mathematical sign that is important in a given context: pure signification thus possesses a certain significance that determines it. In the case of other modes of sense-bestowing, the sign is bound to a historical subjective context that determines its Bedeutung. Take a religious sign or ritual, for example. It is possible to understand the objective signification (Bedeutung) of a religious sign or ritual without having access to their lived significance (Bedeutung), which only

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takes place in a historically concrete subjective situation. Here, the true signification of the religious sign or ritual is its significance for a subject in a lived context whose sense constitutes a religious lived-experience and not an aesthetic one. Where the same religious sign is encountered outside of the lived context in which it obtains its religious significance, when, for example, it is seen only as an aesthetic ornament, it loses its religious significance and gains an aesthetic one. This said, we can still speak, for example, of the signification of the religious sign within a specific religious tradition. Here, however, we have moved the religious sign from the religious context into that of the scientific context that determines its pure objective signification independently of the context of the lived-experience of religious consciousness. Religious studies, as a science of religion (Religionswissenschaft), has as its factum a scientific experience and thus is itself not the lived-experience of a religious praxis; it provides an objective factual account of the system of significations of religious signs and rituals that make up a religion but which are, from the perspective of religious consciousness, entirely void of significance. The significance of a sign is its signification, and while the nature of this Bedeutung is determined by the sense (Sinn) of the symbolic form as a mode of Bedeutung – be it religious, mythical, aesthetic, linguistic, or scientific – it is also determined by a historical subjective context. And in the case of the pure signs of science, this historical subjective context is increasingly negated in an attempt to create a system of pure signs that provides a system of pure signification.

(iv) Symbolic Pregnance and Cassirer’s Critique of Immediate Presence In volume 3, Cassirer establishes the role of the sense-function in the construction of concrete lived intuition, perception, and cognition of ourselves, others, and the world as well as a scientific thinking that posits the pure relational system of signs as a mode of pure signification. The issue now arises about the nature of the “immediately given.” To express the incarnated symbolic value of intuition, perception, emotion, and cognition, Cassirer introduces the concept of symbolic pregnance to designate how “a lived-perceptive-experience, as a ‘sensible’ lived-experience, always already contains in itself at the same time a certain non-intuitive ‘sense’ and brings it to immediate concrete presentation.”29



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The term “pregnance” is borrowed from gestalt psychology and designates the lawful process in the formation of visual objects through the recognition of a pattern, a holistic image, that is pregnant in individual parts determining and conditioning them. The gestalt experience is a holistic one. In the case of Cassirer, the whole that is experienced is that of the symbolic form that provides the sense of a “sensible” lived-experience. In “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics” (1945), Cassirer remarks that when “Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, approaches those problems that in our modern scientific terminology we should call ‘Gestaltprobleme,’ he does not use the German word. He goes back to the Greek term σχῆμα and writes his chapter on the schematism of the pure understanding.”30 For Kant, the imagination unites the sensible and intellectual components that make experience possible through schematization. The sensible schema is the rule of synthesis employed in the production of sensible figures as the mediation of the sensible and conceptual. These sensible schemata are the “monogram” of the productive imagination, and they provide the basic outline or gestalt that present the concept in sensible form. Kant gives the examples of a triangle and a dog. The schema provides the gestalt figure of the generic elements of the concept of dog: four-legged, furry, etc. And in fact, Kant does employ the term “gestalt” in this context. In the case of symbolic pregnance, it is a question of how concepts are given a sensible form according to a specific horizon of sense-bestowing. In Cassirer’s examples of symbolic pregnance, the sensible figure acts as a bearer of diverse modes of signification (Bedeutung) depending on the horizon of sense (Sinn) in which it is situated and by which it is understood. [The sensible figure’s] pure visibility [Sichtbarkeit] is never to be thought outside and independently of a certain form of “sight” [Sicht]; as a “sensible” [sinnlich] lived-experience it is always the bearer of a sense [Sinn] and stands as it were in the service of that sense. Precisely in this way, however, it is able to perform very different functions and by virtue of them to “represent” [vorstellig macht] very different worlds of sense [Sinnwelten].31

Whereas Kant posits the transcendental apperception as the condition of the possibility of perception, Cassirer, in moving from a substantial condition to a functional condition, goes beyond Kant and argues that signification and existence are moments in the sense-function that cannot

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be separated. As we have already seen, the logical status or validity of the difference between the signification and the existence of the content of intuition, perception, emotion, or cognition cannot be understood to represent an ontic difference in being. Symbolic pregnance thus goes beyond the classical one-sided metaphysical presuppositions of both rationalism and empiricism that separate signification (thinking) from existence (being) and as a consequence always ends in unresolvable antinomies. Symbolic pregnance is a generalization and reformulation of that “ultimate originary-relationship [Urverhältnis]” we saw earlier between “form” and “content,” “universal” and “particular,” “validity” and “being.” As Cassirer states in Substance and Function: the possibility disappears of separating the “matter” of cognition from its “form” by referring them each to a different origin in absolute being. . . . Matter is only with reference to form, while form, on the other hand, is valid only in relation to matter.32

Symbolic pregnance, however, is not a generalization of the mathematical function: rather, the mathematical function is an extension and manifestation of the more originary symbolic function that operates at the core of all presencing. Cassirer makes his critique of the metaphysics of presence (the immediately given) by way of a critique of Husserl, whose whole project of phenomenology seeks to move beyond metaphysical questions. Husserl distinguishes within consciousness between an element [Element] of sensible experience (the hyle) and an element [Element] of intentionality or meaning (the morphe). When Husserl then inquires, however, into how the two elements [Elemente] can be brought together and form a meaningful whole, he deviates, Cassirer maintains, from the very principles of his own philosophy that equates sense with the whole of consciousness. Cassirer expresses the interconnection between the two elements [Momente] of symbolic pregnance and thus of intentionality, by considering the fundamental sensory lived-experience as always already determined and configured by the various “symbolic forms.” If we may distinguish, by employing Husserl’s terminology, between the sensory material and “animating acts,” between the sensual ὕλη [hylé] and intentional μορφή [morphé], this abstract difference can never



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mean that these may be separated in the phenomenon or that in itself formless matter, which is gradually taken up into various forms of sense-bestowing and subsequently configured by them, is given. . . . For us, in any case, it is certain that pure phenomenological “sensation” and “sense-bearing” are only given as an indivisible unity. We can never completely separate the sensory as such, as some naked “raw material” of sensation, from the whole complex of sense.33

Each of the corresponding elements [Momente] in the “dualism” must not be understood according to the reifying and hypostatizing tendency of classical metaphysical ontology as autonomous entities possessing their own self-identical substantial existence that must, somehow, be related and joined together. This dialectic of the metaphysical theory of being can be avoided only if, from the very start, “content” and “form,” “element” [Element] and “relation” are not comprehended as independent determinations of each other, but appear as given together with one another and thought of in a reciprocal determination. . . . Only in and through this representation [Repräsentation] does what we call the givenness and “presence” [Präsenz] of the content become possible. . . . Only because we are able in this way to hold onto a not-being [Nicht-Seiendes] within the actual being [Sein] of consciousness, are we able to hold onto the not-given within the given – does there exist for us that unity that we designate on the one hand as the subjective unity of consciousness and, on the other, as the objective unity of the object.34

In a quotation that could have been found in Voice and Phenomena, Cassirer concludes his critique of the metaphysics of the given: “For no content of consciousness in itself is merely ‘present’ [präsent], nor it is in itself merely ‘representative’ [repräsentativ]; rather, every actual livedexperience subsumes both moments within itself in an insoluble unity. Every presence [Gegenwärtige] functions as re-presentation [Vergegenwärti­ gung], as every re-presentation [Vergegenwärtigung] requires a link to a presence [Gegenwärtige] in consciousness.”35 As Rudolf Bernet has pointed out: That function of representation which is common to perception, imageconsciousness, and the manner in which a sign refers to a signified,

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effaces the opposition between “presentation” (Gegenwärtigung) and “re-presentation” (Vergegenwärtigung) on which Husserl’s entire theory of perception rests.36

It does, however, because Husserl has departed here from his own radical association of sense with consciousness and returned to a traditional metaphysical dualism, which is the real target of Cassirer’s critique.

(v) The Neo-Hegelian Slant of Cassirer’s Critique of Culture Thus far, we have presented Cassirer’s “critique of culture” within the general framework of the neo-Kantian project of a transcendental theory of culture.37 There is, however, a clear Hegelian undertone to the critique of culture that is important to recognize. (a) Determinative Negativity, Auseinandersetzung, and the Logic of the Symbolic Function

Although Cassirer never explicitly designates or defines the term “Aus­ einandersetzung” as a terminus technicus, it is clear that it operates in Cassirer’s work as a vox signata and goes to the core of his conception of symbolic reality. Each symbolic form is said to participate in the “great Auseinander­ setzung of the I and the world” according to its own sense of objectivity. Each symbolic form is said to constitute itself only in and through its Auseinandersetzung with each of the other symbolic forms; science and philosophy, for example, come about in and through their Auseinandersetzung with the linguistic and mythical worlds and by setting themselves in dialectic opposition to both. Historical epochs also constitute themselves in and through an Auseinandersetzung with other historical epochs. Finally, all truly philosophical thought comes about in and through an Auseinanderset­ zung with the thought of other thinkers. Auseinandersetzung designates an encounter, a discussion, a debate, a division or separation, a conflict, a confrontation, a polemic, a war, a strife, a battle or clash. One can speak, e.g., of an Auseinandersetzung between protesters and the police or of an Auseinandersetzung with Hegel’s philosophy. Both Cassirer and Heidegger, e.g., refer to their 1929 debate at Davos as an Auseinandersetzung. Auseinandersetzung was originally a



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legal term that referred to the settling or settlement of legal relations between individuals divided in a conflict over some common property in which both had a share, as in the case of a debtor and their creditors. An Auseinandersetzung is the strife that divides and unites two antagonistic positions of a conflictual relationship of opposition. The Auseinanderset­ zung only appears at first to have a negative and defensive character: in truth, it is productive of the positions. Thus, it is not that two alreadyexisting unrelated positions clash but that the positions themselves are a product of the strife of opposition and thus exist only in the unity of their antithetical opposition to each other. Like the Auseinandersetzung, the symbolic is the “in-between” that differentiates as it integrates. It is composed of Auseinander and Setzung. Auseinander signifies that things differ, are apart or asunder. Setzung is the substantive form of setzen (to set or to posit) and therefore signifies a setting or positing. Thus, we have the idea of a setting apart or putting asunder. For German idealism, what reason posits (setzt) as true is a law (Gesetz). Auseinander can be further broken down into three parts: aus (out of/from), ein (one), and ander (other). In this way, Aus-ein-ander-setzung becomes a (lawful) setting asunder of one out of/from another that takes place and manifests itself only in and through the strife of a confrontational encounter: a polemos, Heraclitus says. The logos of opposites of Heraclitus operates at the heart of Cassirer’s entire philosophical outlook. The unity of reality, be it of the symbolic, the world, or the human, is for Cassirer “a dialectic unity, a coexistence of contraries.”38 As we have seen, the reification and hypostatization tendency of classical metaphysical ontology posits entities as self-identical substantial existents. This logic of self-identity repeatedly takes the duality of “elements” [Momente] of the symbolic function as a duality of self-identical and autonomous “elements” [Elemente] existing in separate worlds, which no amount of mediation can bridge. As a result, substantial metaphysics always ends in antinomies. For Cassirer, there is no outside the symbolic. The duality within being is a duality of sight, a duality of logical validity within the symbolic itself and not an ontic-ontological duality. Cassirer’s theory of the symbolic thus goes beyond classical substantialist metaphysics and the ontology of self-identity by replacing a substantialist with a functional unity of self-contradictory oppositions. What the concept of Auseinandersetzung adds to Cassirer’s understanding of the symbolic

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function is the element of negation that functions as a productive negativity that introduces an identity-in-difference that cannot be sublated, that is unsublatable – an identity of self-contradictory elements. In this productive negativity, we find one of the Hegelian tenets of Cassirer’s critique of culture. Hegel, at first sight, seems to break from the ontology of self-identity: within the logic of being, something is what it is because it is not something else. It possesses an identity-in-difference: “Being” is because it is not “nothing”; identity is because it is not difference. Hegel introduces the “determinate negativity” of difference into the forming and configuring of being. In the final analysis, however, the determinate negativity is domesticated and proves to be only a logical moment in a more encompassing ontological identity. Every identity-in-difference is “sublated” (aufgehoben) into a higher ontological reality. This Aufgehoben, this “negation of the negation,” continues until all difference has been sublated into the identity of Absolute spirit until all reality has taken the form of an “identity of identity-and-difference.” Absolute spirit is, in the final analysis, a “being-in-and-for-itself”; it is both Substance and Subject – a “living substance,” as Hegel calls it. “Absolute spirit, while an identity that is eternally self-contained, is likewise an identity that is returning and has returned into itself” (Hegel 1991, § 554). Within the logic of the symbolic, the Auseinandersetzung forms a complex relational operation in which the oppositions of difference coexist as the mutually defining and opposing limits of each other; each is defined in its being, not through some self-identical essence that it contains in itself, nor by being a logical moment or element in a higher, overarching ontological identity, but through the strife of opposition as the confrontation with the limit of the other it is not. Consequently, each element carries within itself the trace of the other, the other who remains absolutely other, which defines its position in the play of differences; or, in Hegelian terminology, it is the determinative negativity that sets apart and yet constitutes the relationship of belonging-together in the opposition of thesis and antithesis that operates within the identity-in-difference of the symbolic function but which cannot be sublated into a higher ontological identity as the identity of identity and difference – i.e., as moments or elements within a pure ontological self-identity. In opposition to the logic of a substantialist ontology of self-identity where something is what it is because it is



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self-identical to itself and is thus both in-itself and conceived through itself: here, something “is” because it is not something else and thus can be conceived only in opposition to what it is not. The logic of this Aus­ einandersetzung of the symbolic function frustrates the classical logic of the substantialist ontology of self-identity as the arché and logos of being. (b) Culture Is Said in Many Ways: Hegel, Cohen, and Cassirer

The philosophy of symbolic forms is a critique of culture: however, culture is said in many ways, and we must pause to make clear what is being spoken about when we employ the term “culture,” because there are similarities and dissimilarities in Hegel’s use, Cohen’s use, and Cassirer’s use. It is important to realize that there are at least three synonymic German translations for the English term “culture”: Kultur, Geist, and Bildung. For Hegel, culture (Kultur) designates the finite historical existence of a social community such as the Athenian Greeks. Geist is the essential energy, the active essence (Wesen) that undertakes the Bildung of individuals into the unity of a culture (Kultur). Bildung designates the processes and reality of the objectification of Geist and can be translated as “training,” “cultivation,” or “formation,” depending on the context. Through Bildung, the individual is subjugated into the different levels and stages of objective spirit; thus, Bildung is the ethical training of the child in the family; the cultivation of the individual into the language, customs, etc. of civil society; and the formation of the individual as a member of the state as the highest manifestation of Reason in the world. As such, however, the objectification of Reason in the forms of objective spirit, and with it the process of Bildung, always contains a moment of estrangement (Entfremdung). For, while objective spirit is the manifestation (Äußerung) of Reason, Reason does not recognize in these products its own activity. This estrangement can be overcome only in and through absolute spirit – that is, through art, religion, and philosophy as the reflective modes of Reason in which Reason moves toward the overcoming of its alienation in that Reason as the logic of being comes to know itself as the whole of being. For Hegel, Absolute spirit, Reason, is thus the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the historical process that is the being of reality as a whole; for the truth is the whole.

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The Hegelian nature of Cassirer’s project becomes clear if we ask whether culture for Cassirer is the terminus a quo or the terminus ad quem of the historical process. For Cohen and Natorp, culture is clearly the terminus ad quem of self-conscious rational consciousness. Artistic creation, theology, and philosophy are the moments of the self-awareness of human rationality as they were in Hegel’s Absolute spirit. For Cassirer, the situation is more complex: it would seem that life and culture are both the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the historical process. There are at least three basic senses of culture operating in Cassirer’s work. Like Hegel, Geist is, for Cassirer, the essential energy, the active essence (Wesen) that undertakes the Bildung of individuals into the unity of a culture (Kultur). The first sense of culture refers to the ensemble of the cultural forms that makes up the whole life of spirit in which we always already find ourselves. There is no outside the symbolic for Cassirer, no pre-symbolic existence of the human: we are always already immanent within the symbolic and conditioned by it. This larger sense of culture as the whole is thus the truth of cultural life and as such must be seen as a type of terminus a quo. This brings us to the metaphysics of the symbolic as grounded in the Urphänome of life. In “‘Life’ and ‘Spirit,’” we see that Cassirer takes up the young Hegel’s concept of life. However, already in the introduction to volume 3, Cassirer writes: A self-awareness [Selbsterfassung] of life is only possible if it does not simply remain absolutely within itself. It must give itself form; for it is precisely by this “alterity” of form that it gains if not its reality then its “visibility.” To detach the world of life absolutely from the world of form and oppose the two means nothing other than to separate its “reality” from its “visibility.” . . . Must all form as such necessarily signify concealment rather than manifestation [Ausprägung] and revelation?39

This oft-quoted citation of Cassirer goes to the heart of the metaphysics of the symbolic. The question posits Hegel for whom form is the manifestation [Ausprägung] of life against Lebensphilosophie for which form is the concealment of life. In “‘Life’ and ‘Spirit,’” Cassirer quotes Hegel and then goes on to make his position clear: “The force [Kraft] of spirit is only as great as its expression and manifestation [Äußerung], its depth is only as deep as it dares to spread out and



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lose itself in its exposition [Auslegung: interpretation].” The realization of this principle demands not only that spirit and life come to know themselves as opposites, but that, at the same time, on account of this very opposition, they seek and demand each other. The polarity between the two remains, but it loses its semblance of absolute estrangement [Entfremdung].40

Life, for Cassirer, is never the “formless life” of the élan vital of Bergson, any more than culture is the dead product of Simmel. The question is how “the transcendence of the idea [can] be reconciled with the immanence of life.”41 The sense (Sinn) of life is always an organized structured livingexperience (Erlebnis) of significance and purpose. Even if Cassirer disagrees with the ultimate pessimism of Simmel’s view of the tragedy of culture, he agrees with Simmel’s basic assessment of life. For Cassirer, “life’s actual movement consists in the oscillation between two extreme phases. It is never at one with itself except by being beyond itself at the same time.”42 It is, Cassirer says, quoting Simmel, “at once flux without pause and yet something enclosed in bearers and contents, formed about midpoints, individualized, and therefore always a bounded configuration [Gestaltung] which continually jumps its bounds. [In short, it is an] ‘immanent transcendence in life.’”43 “In this inner and necessary duality,” Cassirer sees that “life seems to be not only the original source of Geist but also its archetype and prototype. For the same duality is present in a newly heightened figure [Gestalt] in the being of Geist.”44 Cassirer parts paths with Simmel and Bergson, however, in that the fatal dichotomy that they posit between life and spirit is foreign to his entire philosophical outlook: “We meet up with completely formless life as seldom as we meet up with a completely lifeless form.”45 The life of cultural form is the cultural form of life. Life and form, continuity and individuality, diverge radically as soon as we take one of them to be absolute as soon as we see in them different metaphysical kinds of being. But this gulf is closed if we instead put ourselves in the midst of the concrete process of formation and its dynamics, if we take the opposition of the two aspects as an opposition not of beings, but of pure functions. . . . The apparent dualism, the rupture in the fabric in “existence,” (Riss im “Dasein”) is in truth nothing other than the result of a necessary duality of “sight” (“Sicht”). This means that life, without breaking away from itself, without becoming

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The life of culture is an ever-renewing immanent transcendence, a constant process of coming into being. Each symbolic form contributes to the internal differentiation and configuration of the presencing of life in this movement from “mere being-in-itself to being-for-itself.” The “turn to idea” comes from within life itself, from a “trend toward idea” (Zug zur Idea) that exists originally within itself, which brings life to its own self-disclosure, its own “visibility.” [This] “turn to idea” cannot be described as life bidding itself farewell in order to go forth into something foreign and distant from itself; rather, life must be seen as returning to itself, it “comes to itself” in the medium of the symbolic forms.47

Life as a cultural life is thus a historical process of self-realization in a twofold sense: in the sense of its self-actualization and in the sense of its self-awakening. The life of culture thus must be understood as the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the historical process. This brings us to the second sense of culture, which refers to the reflective forms of spirit that are cognizant of their creative energies. The productive imagination and reproductive imagination, the construction and reconstruction of the world, cannot coexist in thought at one and the same moment. Language and art form the primary originary forms of objectification, and myth is both the pre-reflective and the sub-reflective life of spirit. Art, religion, and science are the three symbolic forms that form the reflexive self-cognizant activity of spirit’s self-understanding. And while each of these symbolic forms is cognizant of its own formative activity, they do not understand themselves as cultural forms of formation (Bildung). This occurs in philosophy, in particular in the philosophy of symbolic forms in which the concept of life and culture is the terminus ad quem. The philosophy of symbolic forms is thus also a phenomenology of culture in which the life of spirit comes to its own self-awareness in the concept of culture. This might be one reason why Cassirer changed the title of the project from The Phenomenology of Cognition to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: the phenomenology of cognition is now situated in the



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larger project of a critique of culture that provides the logic of objective spirit. On the one hand, the logic of spirit moves progressively toward its own self-realization through a recognition of its own activity in the objective products of its productive activity. Cassirer speaks of each symbolic form as moving through three stages or levels: mimetic expression, analogical expression, and symbolic expression. And the whole system of the symbolic moves through three stages or levels: expression, presentation, and pure signification. Cassirer employs the Hegelian terms “Moment” and “Stufe,” which refer at once to a permanent structural element (Moment) that forms a level (Stufe) of sense that marks a moment (Moment) in the historical process of the manifestation (Äußerung) of spirit as a stage (Stufe) in its becoming cognizant of its own activity. The earlier stages and levels of expression and myth are not negated and left behind but sublated in and through the critical turn of culture toward its selfunderstanding. In fundamental agreement, Cassirer quotes Hegel: The life of present spirit [gegenwärtigen Geist] is a cycle of stages which on the one hand still exist next to one another and only on the other hand appears as past. The moments [Momente] that spirit seems to have left behind it, it has in its present depths [gegenwärtigen Tiefe].48

On the other hand, because there is no substantial pre-existing ground as in the case of Hegel, the cultural process is open-ended and unending. It is open-ended in that the functional unity of the symbolic determines the sense of language, art, myth, religion, and science but not the concrete significance or signification of an historically concrete-cultural event. This is why we can orient ourselves in another culture: we can understand the sense of the different modes of understanding a world, even if we do not understand the particular world that these modes create. We can understand that the person before us is speaking a language even if we do not understand the signification of what is being expressed; and even if we do understand the linguistic signification, we do not necessarily grasp the significance of what is said, because we do not live in the world that this language opens up; we are able to mechanically repeat a ritual act without being able to enter into the subjectivity that the performance constructs. We see that, like Hegel, Cassirer turns to different cultures to

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provide ideal examples of the work of the cultural forms as the creative dynamics of life and spirit; though, in difference to Hegel, there is no attempt to set out a metanarrative of the logic of worldspirit that situates these different cultures into the logic of Absolute spirit as it unfolds in world history. The logic of culture does not move, as in Hegel, to a dialectical conclusion. Rather, Cassirer speaks of the “drama” of history. The functional unity of Cassirer’s theory of culture allows, therefore, for a plurality of worlds that are substantially different while providing a common logic of sense that is constitutive of the transcendental structure of every possible human world. And the cultural process is unending, because there is no concrete culture that would bring the cultural process to an end. There is no end to the creativity of spirit to form new modes of being and thus no cultural event whose selfunderstanding would sublate all other cultural events, all other modes of being human. This brings us to the third sense of culture operating in Cassirer’s work. Culture, as we will see in the next section (4.5), also refers to the facticity of a unique historical existence, to a specific Weltverständnis as a radically unique cultural event possessing its own sense of life that is expressed in the style of a unique zeitgeist that constitutes a “unity of direction” or a “common task” that is unlike any other cultural event: what Hegel designated as Kultur.

4.5 – A Turn to Facticity and the Response to a Socio-Political Crisis By the end of the 1920s, Cassirer’s thinking had begun a “turn” that would lead him into two problem domains that, strictly speaking, lay beyond the reach of the project of a transcendental critique of culture. First, as Krois argues, there is a “turn to metaphysics.”49 Cassirer now sought “to explicate the metaphysical basis of the symbolic forms.” This turn grew out of Cassirer’s efforts to engage the basic philosophical tenets of Lebensphilosophie. Although Cassirer continued to work on his metaphysics of the symbolic well into the 1930s, this work was never published in Cassirer’s lifetime. Second, the turn in Cassirer’s thinking brings his philosophy closer and closer to critical theory as an application of the project of the philosophy of symbolic forms to the facticity of his own culture.



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(i) Cassirer’s Historical Thrownness: The Crisis in Human SelfUnderstanding and the Construction of a Non-Subject-Centered Symbolic Humanism One did not have to wait for the events of 1933 to understand the historical situation: like many, Cassirer was fully cognizant of the socio-political crisis that had for many years been unfolding. From the beginning of the late 1920s, Cassirer turned to an analysis of this socio-political crisis, to determining its source, and to combating it in the only way he knew how: through a philosophical construction of an open non-subject-centered symbolic humanism based on an understanding of the creative forces of spirit. Here more than anywhere, Cassirer seems to speak of and to our contemporary socio-political preoccupations. Cassirer was concerned by the growing cultural pessimism that he considered to be inherent in the position of Lebensphilosophie, and from 1930 on, Cassirer repeatedly engaged its basic tenets. In The Myth of the State, Cassirer criticized the philosophical tendency that manifested itself most notably in Spengler’s work Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) and in Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit (thrownness). Admittedly, neither Spengler nor Heidegger had directly brought about the political ideas and events of Nazi Germany, but the basic tendency of the direction of their ideas had enfeebled and slowly undermined the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths. A philosophy of history that consists in somber predictions of the decline and the inevitable destruction of our civilization and a theory that sees in the Geworfenheit [thrownness] of man one of his principal characters have given up all hopes of an active share in the construction and reconstruction of man’s cultural life. Such philosophy renounces its own fundamental theoretical and ethical ideals.50

The crisis, as Cassirer argues in the opening chapter of An Essay on Man, is a crisis in human self-understanding brought about by the failure of philosophy. The question, “What is the human?” is not one philosophical question among others: it is the philosophical question par excellence, whose answer determines human self-understanding and by extension the human understanding of the world. This understanding determines the sense of our actions and our socio-political institutions. The source of

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the crisis is the failure of philosophy to remain true to its vocation of establishing a normative concept of the human around which the critical forces that seek the reflective and critical self-understanding of the human – be they aesthetic, theoretical, or ethical – can be organized and fostered. “Of all the sad experiences of these last twelve years,” Cassirer writes in The Myth of the State, “the most dreadful” was to have seen his colleagues, “men of education and intelligence, honest and upright men . . . suddenly give up the highest human privilege. They [had] ceased to be free and personal agents.”51 The force of critical reason, weakened by the “cultural pessimism” of the times, had failed to fulfill its theoretical and ethical duty in the moment that it had been most urgently needed. In his inaugural address at the University of Göteborg in 1935, Cassirer already spoke of the problem of the “unity of knowledge” and of the “failure” of philosophy to achieve its ethical vocation: “in the hour of peril” Cassirer said, quoting Schweitzer, “the watchman slept, who should have kept watch over us. So, it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.”52 Cassirer means to say “we” – for as remarkable as it is, Cassirer held himself responsible for the decline of reason: I do not exclude myself and I do not absolve myself. While endeavoring on behalf of the scholastic conception of philosophy . . . we have all too frequently lost sight of the true connection of philosophy with the world. But today we can no longer keep our eyes closed to the menacing danger. Today the urgency of the time warns us more strongly and more imperatively than ever that there is once again a question for philosophy which involves its ultimate and highest decisions. Is there really something like an objective theoretical truth, and is there something like that which earlier generations have understood as the ideal of morality, of humanity? . . . In a time in which such questions can be raised, philosophy cannot stand aside, mute and idle. If ever, now is the time for it again to reflect on itself, on that which it is and what it has been, on its systematic, fundamental purpose, and on its spiritual-historical past.53

The crisis, therefore, stems from a failure of philosophy to establish a regulatory idea of the human being that would ground human selfknowledge and a culture of critical thought and action that could resist a culture of pessimism, a culture of fear and resignation that marks the rise of the myth of the modern totalitarian state. Cassirer’s turn from



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systematic philosophy to a philosophical anthropology is a return to the ethos of philosophy. Cassirer’s thinking now turns more and more to a critique of the facticity of his historical situatedness, to rethinking the project of philosophy, and to establishing a concept of ethical and creative freedom that could function as a regulative ideal in the inception of a neo-enlightenment culture in an age of growing darkness.

(ii) “Form and Technology” (Form and Freedom): A Critique of Contemporary Culture In “Form and Technology” (1930), Cassirer engages contemporary Lebens­ philosophie on an “urgent” contemporary issue: the growing “primacy” and dominance of “modern technology” and the construction of the contemporary “technological culture” that is undermining those critical forces (in particular philosophy) and bringing about the “alienation of human beings from their own essence” and the fact that “today, many consider this subju­ gation the ultimate goal of modern culture and its inevitable fate.”54 Cassirer’s approach to the question concerning technology is to provide an epistemo-critical analysis of its spiritual form and determine its nature and limits. In many respects, this is a continuation of the critique of culture. The form of “modern technology” is, however, a historically specific form, and this sets it off from the forms that are analyzed in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which as the conditions of the possibility of culture are necessarily universal to all human existence: wherever one finds the human, one finds a linguistic-aesthetic being living out its mythical sense of life, caught up in the dialectic of the immanencetranscendence of self-awakening or enlightenment. The phenomenon of “modern technology,” however, is a specific thought-form that defines a particular historical culture, namely “technological culture.” Perhaps for this reason, Cassirer does not actually say that technology is a symbolic form tout court. We have here the historicization of the transcendental a priori form. Technology can be a source of liberation and need not involve the alienation of the worker. The problem, it turns out, is not with technology itself but with a certain form and order of an economic system and that every attempt at improvement must begin here. This connection does not originate in the spirit of technology. It is more the case that this spirit is made

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What is necessary, Cassirer concludes, is to render technology ethical so that it is employed for the betterment of life and does not end in the alienation of the worker. We are not interested here in unpacking Cassirer’s analysis of technology. What is important for our purposes is only to illustrate the direction that Cassirer’s thinking takes in the 1930s: toward an epistemo-critical analysis of the facticity of culture or of the concrete-historical circumstances of a specific mode of thinking that defines a unique cultural event – in this case, “technological culture” or, as it turns out, “a certain form and order of an economic system” that defines the concrete-historical facticity of our times.

(iii) The Historical (Re)construction of the Humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment In a flurry of “historical” studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cassirer pens four seminal works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The aim of historical thought for Cassirer is to develop a “new understanding of the past” that “gives us at the same time a new prospect of the future, which in turn becomes an impulse to intellectual and social life.” A  genuine renaissance of the past does not simply repeat it but instead penetrates the historical works of the past to revitalize the creative energies that gave expression to these works. A  historical reconstruction, then, is not a passive transition and preservation of the past but a triumph of spontaneity and a moment of that twofold selfrealization spoken of earlier: Whenever a subject – whether an individual or a whole epoch – is prepared to forget itself, in order to be absorbed by another and completely give itself away: then it always finds itself in a new and deeper sense.56

These works must be read in light of Cassirer’s historical situatedness and as a manifesto of an open symbolic humanism for his (our) time.



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On the eve of the Third Reich and the birth of fascism in which the Aryan race as the Herrenvolk (master race) was placed at the center of the cosmic order, displacing all others as subhuman to the margins, Cassirer returns in Individual and Cosmos in the Renaissance to Pico’s “The Dignity of the Human” and writes: The dignity of the human cannot reside in its being, i.e., in the place allotted to the human once and for all in the cosmic order. The hierarchical system subdivides the world into different levels and places each being in one of these levels as its rightful place in the universe. But such a view does not grasp the sense and the problem of human freedom.57

As a charismatic cultural hero spoke of the greatness of the German Volk, of its “spiritual” and “divine creation,” and of its “historic mission,” Cassirer argued in The Case of Jacques Rousseau for a concept of freedom and individual responsibility that was based on a rational and ethical foundation: The human cannot be relieved of the task of ordering its world; and in shaping and guiding it, the human neither can nor ought to rely on help from above, on supernatural assistance. The task has been put to the human – who must solve it with its own, purely human means. But precisely as the human penetrates into the character of the problem before it, it acquires the certainty that its self is not confined to the limits of the world of sense. From immanence and from ethical autonomy, the human now pushes forward into the core of ‘intelligible’ being.58

As people began to believe in German “exceptionalism” (Sonderweg), Cassirer provided in The Platonic Renaissance in England a genealogy of the ideas of humanism from Italian humanism to the Cambridge Platonists and their influence on Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and Kant – thus reminding people of the importance of this tradition in the work of the principle architects of German culture. In Cassirer’s account of Shaftesbury’s apology for humor, we find the “liberating, life-giving, and life-forming power of the soul”59 that constitutes the good life that can combat the cynicism of a totalitarian discourse of pessimism and fatalism that constructs a culture of fear: in humor, as Cassirer writes in An

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Essay on Man, “things and events begin to lose their material weight; scorn is dissolved into laughter and laughter is liberation.”60 In his seminal work, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cassirer provides a forceful defense of the role and function of critical philosophy in the construction of an enlightenment culture, not a “shallow Enlightenment” but a profound creative Zeitalter der Kritik of which the Enlightenment was but a historical example. On the eve of madness, thrown into a winter of despair, a voice spoke out in the name of reason against the decline (Untergang) of civilization and an unquestioning resignation to a pessimistic fatalism: More than ever before, it seems to me, the time is again ripe for applying . . . self-criticism to the present age, for holding up to it that bright clear mirror fashioned by the Enlightenment. . . . The slogan: Sapere aude (think for oneself) . . . also holds for our own historical relation to that period. Instead of assuming a derogatory air, we must take courage and measure our powers against those of the age of the Enlightenment and find a proper adjustment. The age which venerated reason and science as the human’s highest faculty cannot and must not be lost even for us. We must find a way not only to see that age in its own shape but to release again those original forces which brought forth and molded this shape.61

(iv) The Logic of the Cultural Sciences In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942), Cassirer’s turn to the facticity of culture brings the philosophy of symbolic forms to a new project: the establishment of a philosophy of culture based on a cultural anthropology that lays the foundations for the cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften), understood as an interdisciplinary field of research that investigates not only the modes in and through which a concrete-historical “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, and social relations but also how concrete-historical individuals create and transform their culture. The concrete-cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) cannot be separated from the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), nor can a philosophy of culture as a cultural anthropology be separated from a critique of culture. In the context of a critique of culture as an epistemo-critical



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analysis of the sense-bestowing forms of objective spirit (Geist), Cassirer spoke of a “life ‘in’ sense”: in the case of the logic of the cultural sciences, the epistemo-critical analysis concerns the facticity of a particular cultural event (what was Kultur for Hegel) and the existential situation of a zeitgeist that grounds it, and so here Cassirer speaks of a “life in significations.” The two levels are linked through the historical schematic horizons of Stilbegriffen (style-concepts) that represent the “pure ‘being’” of symbolic forms.62 The critique of culture must determine and organize the various “cardinal directions” of the “symbolic function” as it unfolds in human culture, and “it is the totality of these structures that identifies and distinguishes the specifically human world.”63 A symbolic form is a particular mode and direction of objectification, an energy of objective spirit. The cultural sciences, through the use of form-concepts taken from the critique of culture and its own style-concepts, must determine and organize the divergent directions that determine the concrete being of a cultural process: “Each particular cultural science develops certain concepts of form and style and uses them to establish a systematic survey, a classification and differentiation of the phenomena with which it concerns itself.”64 The form-concepts and style-concepts of the sciences of culture possess a certain “characteristic indeterminateness that they are unable to overcome.”65 Cassirer illustrates this by way of Jacob Burckhardt’s classic portrayal of the Renaissance individual. No one individual living during the Renaissance embodies all of the qualities contained in Burckhardt’s concept. If we consider the individuals of a culture, we “perceive them to be not only thoroughly different, but even opposed.”66 [However,] this opposition notwithstanding, and indeed perhaps just through it, they stand in a certain ideal connection to one another; that each in his or her own way cooperates in the construction of what we call the ‘spirit’ of the Renaissance or the culture of the Renaissance.67

The style-concepts of culture thus represent a “unity of direction,” a “common task,” not a “unity of being.” They “characterize” but do not “determine” the individuals. What is more, this “common task” does not level all individuals down into the same; rather, they possess an identityin-difference; they belong together in and through their difference to each other. The aim of the sciences of culture is to establish the structure

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and form of this common task and activity that defines a concretehistorical cultural event. A few things should be emphasized. First, Cassirer introduces here a new concept: “style” as the concrete historical existence of form. Cassirer speaks of the style of art, language, thinking, science, an epoch, and a culture. But what is “style”? Paradoxically put, style is an idiosyncratic and historical-transcendental structure that determines the unique, intelligible form of the becoming of a particular concrete existence – be it the existence of an idea, a mode of thinking, a people, an epoch, or an individual: to speak with Comte de Buffon, “le style c’est l’homme même.”68 As such, a style-concept is an open regulative idea, a schematic horizon, that provides the teleological trajectory of human history and thus guides but does not determine human creativity. Because style is only a regulative idea of a future possibility, there is a certain indeterminacy in the being of a culture as in the being of an individual, a creative freedom to interpret the regulatory idea actualizing it through a wide variety of diverse expressions. Art, for example, is a sense-bestowing symbolic form: the Baroque is a style that defines a historical period; the style of Caravaggio is a further extension, interpretation, and concretization that expresses itself in his artworks. And the dynamic process of determining the sense and significance of art, the Baroque and the works of Caravaggio, is taken up and furthered by the viewer of the artwork who reinterprets it. The works of Caravaggio derive their twofold sense as artworks from the work of art as a symbolic form and from its concrete expression as a historical style of being that conditions the Baroque and the intersubjective context of the cultural work. There is here a constant process of coming into being of the work of art and the style into the artwork that never ends. The same can be said for the other symbolic forms and for the symbolic as a whole – that is to say, for culture tout court and by extension the human. The second thing we should note is the importance of the role of the individual. As Cassirer moves from a theory of objective spirit to a cultural anthropology, the focus turns from an analysis of the structural components and energies of objective spirit (language, art, myth, religion, science) to the agency of the individual human being in the construction and reconstruction of culture. The artwork exists at the intersection between the work of art, the work of the artist, and the individual contemplating the work of art that it opens up.



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The third thing of interest is that Cassirer provides here an alternative account of the life of culture that opposes the apocalyptic fatalism of Spengler and the tragedy of culture of Simmel; an account that roots culture in an intersubjective ethical relationship with the other. For Cassirer, the cultural process of a “manifestation (Äußerung) . . . does not signify an act of alienation (Entäußerung) but an act of self-discovery and selfdetermining,”69 of twofold self-realization, and the cultural process of objectification does not end in the death of the life of the mind. Against Spengler, Cassirer argues that the life of culture revitalizes itself in and through a renaissance of the creative forces that gave rise to it. We have already considered the structure of this renaissance and seen how Cassirer’s work undertakes the revival of an enlightenment humanism as a symbolic humanism. Cassirer also grounds the cultural process in an intersubjective relationship. Cassirer recognizes a certain estrangement in the cultural process. Like Simmel, Cassirer sees the creative energies, the effective activity, of the I objectified in the work that it produces: be it the work of art, language, science, or something else. In becoming objectified, there is a certain “distancing (Entfernung) from the ‘I’; in a certain sense even, an estrangement (Ent-Fremdheit) from it; but one would be mistaken and too quick to read into this expression of ‘strangeness’ (Fremdheit) only a negative sense”70 – as is the case in the mystical tendency of Lebensphilosophie – and understand it as an alienation (Entäußerung). The dynamic creative process never ends in an alienation, because the end of the process is not the self but the other: For the work, in whose enduring existence the creative process congeals, does not stand at the end of this path, but rather the “you,” the other subject who receives this work in order to incorporate it into their own life and thus transform it back into the medium from which it originates.71

The creative process is one in which the activity of one subject is awakened in another by means of the active exchange of cultural works: “the thing created does not simply stand vis-à-vis or over against the creative process; on the contrary, new life continually pours into these ‘molded forms,’ preserving them and ‘preventing their rigidification.’”72 The preservation of the works of culture requires their constant renewal

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through their re-creation. “The recipient does not take the gift as he would a stamped coin. For he can take it up only by using it, and in this use, he imprints upon it a new shape.”73 Each subject thus actualizes the life of culture in a unique way, and through these different ways the life of culture is transformed from within and thus revitalized. The works of culture are therefore never completely fixed once and for all; they exist only in their constant transformation in and through the intersubjective relationship that they create. And through this transformation occurs the revitalization of the spiritual force from which they first emerged and of which they constitute the objective expression. This drama of culture never becomes a complete “tragedy of culture”; for just as little as there is no ultimate victory, so too is there no ultimate defeat. Every individual modifies the universal form of which it is a particular representative. “It has rightly been emphasized that there is perhaps no individual act of speaking that has not in some way influenced ‘the’ language.”74 Not only do “the great historical figures of world history” possess, as Hegel and Heidegger would say, but each and every individual possesses “an active share in the construction and reconstruction of human cultural life,”75 and as such, each has a role in the formation of world history.

(v) A Critical Theory and the Struggle Against the Technology of Myth and the Subjugation of the Individual In The Myth of the State, Cassirer gives an account of the reasons for the rise of fascism as the emergence of mythical thought over rational thought. Cassirer’s analysis, however, points beyond the facticity of his times to that of our own; for the decisive factor that contributed to the rise of totalitarianism was a new mode of oppression. Even when subjected to the cruelest modes of traditional political oppression, it was still possible for the individual to assume a stoic attitude toward the world and retreat into the freedom of inner life as a mode of resistance to this oppression. The technique of modern political myths, however, has destroyed this mode of resistance before it could even begin. The development of a new “technique of myth,” the ability to construct political discourses is able to sublate the powers of the spontaneous force of mythical expression, imagination, and emotion and imbue them with a political purpose.



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Myth was no longer a free and spontaneous play of imagination. It was regulated and organized; it was adjusted to political needs and used for concrete political ends. What formerly appeared to be an ungovernable unconscious process was subjected to a severe discipline. It was brought under control and trained to obedience and order. Myths were brought into being by the word of command of the political leaders. They could be made at will, becoming an artificial compound manufactured in the great laboratory of politics. The twentieth century is a technical century. It invented a new technique of myth and this invention proved to be decisive in the final victory of the National Socialist party in Germany. . . . Henceforth, myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon – as machine guns or airplanes. That is a new thing – and a thing of crucial importance. It has changed the whole form of our social life.76

Cassirer’s analysis of this new technique of myth brings into play his entire project and perhaps more than anything else warrants our attention today. For the technique of myth did not disappear with the defeat of Nazism. Once we have understood the role and function of the word, image, the cultural hero, and ritual in the construction of our emotive being, our intuition of reality, our very perception and understanding of ourselves, others, and the world, then we have the tools to construct those discourses in such a way as to construct the reality and truths that serve a political or economic end. The technique of myth is the fabrication of words, images, and rituals that construct a certain subjectivity and reality, a certain understanding of the world, a certain life-form, that contains its own truths and alternative facts. The magic word takes precedence of the semantic word. . . . New words [are] coined; and even the old ones are used in a new sense; they have undergone a deep change of meaning. This change of meaning depends upon the fact that those words which formerly were used in a descriptive, logical, or semantic sense are now used as magic words that are destined to produce certain effects and to stir up certain emotions. Our ordinary words are charged with meanings; but these newtangled words are charged with feelings and violent passions.77

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We have no shortage of contemporary examples of this technique of myth as it is used in branding and political spin: “breaking news,” the “War on Terror,” but also “It’s Miller time,” “U.S.A.,” “You deserve a break today,” and “Yes we can” “make America great again.”78 In fact, it is not difficult to recognize in Cassirer’s analysis of the technique of myth the blueprint for what has recently become known as the Cambridge Analytica project. Christopher Wylie (the whistleblower who revealed the nature of the project) summarizes the doctrine behind the development of the “cultural weapon to fight a cultural war” as follows: If you want to change politics, you first have to change culture, because politics flows from culture . . . so if you want to change culture you first have to understand what the units of culture are, people are the units of culture: so if you want to change politics, you have to change the people to change the culture.

Given the critique of culture, Cassirer’s analysis shows how the new technique of myth is able to construct worldviews and configure lifestyles that serve political and economic ends; how a simulacra of the sacred is embodied in a new savior, a new hero who speaks of a people’s true identity and great destiny; how individuals are enslaved through a discourse that determines their own self-understanding as part of a general common understanding of the world that is governed by a certain rationality that justifies certain actions as basic common sense; and how, in other words, individuals are “subjected” (assujetti), to borrow a term from Foucault, through the construction of artificial myths and above all the modern myth of the state. Here, there is no longer any true individual: there is only the mythical “identity thinking” and identity politics of “the they” (Das Man), to speak with Heidegger: “They act like marionettes in a puppet show – and they do not even know that the strings of this show and of man’s whole individual and social life are henceforward pulled by the political leaders.”79 Subjected to the discourse of myth, the individual “no longer questions his environment; he accepts it as a matter of course.”80 However, also given his critique of culture, Cassirer argues that this system of subjectification that exploits the emotional structures of mythical



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thought and feeling can be defeated by promoting the creative critical forces of human ethical-creative freedom that tempers the fatalistic and homogenizing forces that level down the individual into an unthinking tool of political and economic hegemony. As long as these forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic, are in full strength, myth is tamed and subdued. But once they begin to lose their strength, chaos comes again. Mythical thought then starts to rise anew and to pervade the whole of man’s cultural and social life.81

Cassirer is not caught in the paradox that a resistance to discourse is but a discourse of resistance, because Cassirer does not level down all discourses to the same function.

5. CONCLUSION: ON THE WAY TO AN OPEN COSMOPOLITANISM All too often, we speak of culture in terms of a nationalistic, ethnic, or racial identity, implicating us in some form of identity politics and ensuring a clash of civilizations as a clash of cultural identities. Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea of a “multicultural culture” would appear to be an oxymoron. In Cassirer’s analysis, however, it would seem clear that there is always a plurality of worlds of understanding: there are worlds within worlds that at times clash, at times function in harmony, at times continue on oblivious to the existence of the other. Identity is not, nor has it ever been, a homogenous, stable state of being. The sense of Greek identity in antiquity clearly mutated from the ethnicity-based identity of the Athenian or the Spartan to a culturally, linguistically, and even geographically defined identity of the Helen. If we attempt to determine more locally in history what it means to be “Athenian” as opposed to “Helene,” if we attempt, as Burchardt has, to provide a concept of the “Renaissance individual” in general or speak of the Jew, the Christian, the Muslim, or the Buddhist, we are quickly forced to acknowledge that no one individual answers to all the properties of this concept, and we are constantly in danger of furthering cultural stereotypes and clichés. Every cultural world is always composed of many cultural worlds that belong together, forming an identity-in-difference.

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What they share is a common normative image of what it means to be human. What it means to be human is the fundamental question, and its answer forms the crystal through which life refracts and differentiates itself into the spectrum of its different manifestations opening up different worlds. The crisis in all its variations is for Cassirer a crisis in the self-understanding of the human being. The crisis is provoked by the overturning of a substantialist ontology that had operated as the ground of human understanding throughout the Western tradition. Whether the human was understood as a creature of God, as the subject of a king, or as the autonomous liberal subject: in each case, the idea of an essential nature forms the substantive content of the normative image in question. Once this assumption of an essential existence is thrown into doubt, the sense of God, king, or liberal subject appears to be little more than a historical construct whose significance is limited to a historically contingent situation and thus lacks any objective validity. Much of what passes for post-humanism or anti-humanism is a rejection of an essentialist understanding of the human, especially one that situates the human at the center of being. The philosophy of symbolic forms as a critique of culture does not and cannot attempt to answer this question. The critique of culture, rather, demonstrates how worlds and subjectivities are created, the dynamic significance of living in a world of sense and significations and why the question of the human is always a problem. For Cassirer, the human being “alone is capable of questioning,” and for this reason, it is the only being that is “thoroughly problematic to itself . . . forever worthy of questioning.”82 As a philosophical transcendental anthropology, however, the philosophy of symbolic forms indeed sets out an answer to the question, “What is the human?” The human is a symbolic animal. Cassirer’s symbolic humanism does not define the human substantially as a rational being or as a liberal subject, nor does it define it existentially as the being thrown into a senseless existence, nor theologically. The human is no longer defined along the lines of a nationalistic, ethnic, racial, economic, or historical identity. Symbolic humanism is a functional and not substantial notion that realizes itself in an open and unending series of individual manifestations: the human is always to be in the process of becoming and never to be. Individuals are thrown into historical cultural situations that subjugate them as members of a community, as sons



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and daughters of a zeitgeist and of an historical understanding of what it means to be human. The Athenian Greek world, the Christian world, and the modern world are each defined by the sense of the human that actualizes the functional symbolic humanism, understanding it in its historical situatedness. No one cultural world, however, can exhaust the infinite possibilities that are inherent in the functional notion of symbolic humanism. One may define the human as the creature of a God, as a liberal subjectivity possessing a radical autonomy, or as a Dasein thrown into the world. Cassirer’s central concepts are often vague and ill-defined. This is not only because they are operative within his understanding of culture and the human but also because they are operative in the construction of the human itself and as such must be open and forever in the process of being worked out through their interpretation in the construction and reconstruction of concrete-historical human existence. The critique of culture, however, also shows us that the normative image of the human that functions as the regulative idea of a cultural event always substantializes itself into an originary and essential sense of life, into a mythical substantial identity. This mythical identity is by its very nature unable to recognize other modes of the human as human, or if it does, it sees them as subhuman, primitive, or barbaric and thus as not fully human. Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism is often rejected as Eurocentric and elitist; the universal values it posits as “human” values and morals are said to be those of a privileged European male. There is no doubt that Kant’s understanding of cosmopolitanism reflects the values of his world and its understanding of the human. From the perspective of a symbolic humanism, however, this ideal can be restated as an open cosmopolitanism that moves toward a point where we are able to recognize the humanity in the culturally other in such a way that it does not pose a threat to our own. But this ideal can only ever be a regulatory principle. Cassirer ends his article “The Myth of the State” in a section titled “The Antidote to Myth,” by invoking the revolutionary call of Kant and reminding us of the social ethical responsibility we have to the other that gives our autonomy its sense: There remain only two active emotions: fortitude and generosity. They are the fundamental virtues of man; for they are those affections by

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which alone he can reach the supreme goal: philosophical and ethical freedom. This freedom means not only freedom from violent desires and emotions. It means freedom from false conceptions, from inadequate ideas, from all sorts of prejudices and superstitions. . . . the Sapere aude! – ‘Dare to think for yourself!’ Fortitude is the courage to be wise, to live an independent, active, and rational life. But it is not enough that we reach this goal for ourselves. We must freely communicate the good that we have acquired for ourselves to others. And to do this we need the active passion of generosity. Fortitude and generosity are the only means to attain and secure the freedom of the individual mind and of human society. By the former we win the mastery over ourselves, by the latter we build up a social, a truly human order.83

ENDNOTES   1 Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2000), 159.   2 In The Space of Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Culture (Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer), Sebastian Luft argues that Cassirer’s own philosophy of symbolic forms as a “critique of culture” must be seen, despite its differences from the work of Cohen and Natorp, as a continuation and culmination of the project of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. The real thrust of Luft’s work, however, is “to lay the grounds for a new occupation with culture from a transcendental-philosophical perspective,” and he clearly sees Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as the best starting point for this project. The motivations for his interest here are evident throughout his book. Luft is seeking a humanistic philosophy that is pluralistic in its conception and able to facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue among different scientific and academic disciplines – a humanism that at once embodies and promotes the Enlightenment ideal of tolerance while providing a secure ethical position from which to critique culture. In other words, Luft sees in Cassirer’s philosophy a retrieval and transformation of the unfinished project of modernity that would move us beyond the overused and worn-out concept of post-modernity. Sebastian Luft, The Space of Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Culture (Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).   3 Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, in ed. J. Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 35.   4 Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2010), 364.   5 Dimitry Gawronsky, “Cassirer: His Life and His Work,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 25.



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  6 Karl Scheffler, Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1910), 219.   7 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991).   8 The most important essays from this period have been translated and published in Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Cassirer: The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).   9 Ernst Cassirer, “‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 857–880. 10 For further details cf. translator’s Introduction to Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. Steve Lofts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 11 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, vol. 1 (1945), 99–120. 12 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), 297. 13 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943), 18. An understanding of Aristotle’s logic is thus conditioned by an under14 standing of his conception of being. . . . Thus he . . . expressly distinguishes the existence, which is indicated by mere relations in judgment, from existence after the fashion of a thing; the being of a conceptual synthesis, from that of a concrete subject. . . . The category of relation especially is forced into a dependent and subordinate position by this fundamental metaphysical doctrine of Aristotle. Relation is not independent of the concept or real being; it can only add supplementary and external modifications to the latter, such as do not affect its real ‘nature.’ Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relatiity (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1923), 8. 15 Ernst Cassirer, “Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik,” Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, 152ff. For the difference between “element” [Moment] and “element” [Element] see below, 30. 16 Enrst Cassirer, “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy,” in The Warburg Years, 260/8. 17 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, lxxvii. 18 Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relatiity, 447 [my emphasis]. 19 In “Philosophy as Science: ‘Function’ and ‘Energy’ in Cassirer’s ‘Complex System’ of Symbolic Forms,” The Review of Metaphysics, 61 (December 2007), 317–377, Fabien Capeillères has set out in great detail what Cassirer understands by systematic philosophy as a rigorous science of the globus intellectualis that contains both the natural and human sciences, the interconnection of unity, systematicity, and scientificity that operates at the heart of the critique of culture as it seeks to establish the complex systematic ensemble of spiritual energies and finally the transition that takes place from the function relation to the symbolic function of

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the symbolic form and how the function relation discussed in Substance and Function serves as a model for this complex systematic totality of intellectual energies. 20 Cf. Luft, The Space of Culture, 58–68. 21 John M. Krois, “The Priority of ‘Symbolism’ over Language in Cassirer’s Philosophy,” Synthese, vol. 179, no. 1, 2011, 13. 22 Ernst Cassirer, “Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture,” in Cassirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer: 1935–1945, ed. Donald Verne (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1979, 80 f. 23 Ernst Cassirer, “Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik und Denkpsychologie,” Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17, 16. 24 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 205. 25 Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 26. 26 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, lxxviii. 27 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 244–245. 28 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 15. 29 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 205. 30 Ernst Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, vol. 1 (1945), 118 (Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke, 24, 318). 31 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 236. 32 Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relatiity, 310‑311. 33 Ernst Cassirer, “The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 260. 34 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 29. 35 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 236. 36 Rudolf Bernet, “Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy,” in NeoKantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Sebastian Luft (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 48. 37 To what degree Cassirer’s thought remains neo-Kantian is a subject of debate within Cassirer scholarship, and no attempt has been made to clarify this issue here. 38 Cassirer, Essay on Man, 222-223. 39 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 44. 40 Ernst Cassirer, “‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’,” in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 578. 41 Ibid., 569. 42 Cassirer, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 9 (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 10). 43 Ibid., 9 (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 10). 44 Ibid., 10 (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 11). 45 Ibid., 15 (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 16). 46 Ibid.



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47 Ibid., 19 (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 18). 48 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 90. 49 John Michael Krois, “Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Metaphysics,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 97e Année, no. 4, Cassirer (Octobre-Décembre 1992), 441 and 444. 50 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 293. 51 Ibid., 286. 52 Ernst Cassirer, “The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,” in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945, ed. Donald Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 60. 53 Ibid., 60–61. 54 Ernst Cassirer, “Form and Technology,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933 – Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 272. 55 Ibid., 315. 56 Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, 112. 57 Ernst Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 84. 58 Ernst Cassirer, The Case of Jacques Rousseau (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 115. 59 Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 183. 60 Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 150. 61 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, xi. 62 Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, 63. 63 Ibid., 26. 64 Ibid., 58. 65 Ibid., 70. 66 Ibid., 72. 67 Ibid. 68 Comte de Buffon, Discours sur le style, 1753. 69 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 43. 70 Cassirer, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, 141 (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 137): translation amended. Cassirer ends the sentence here by referring to mysticism. However, in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, he equates the position of Lebensphilosophie, which seeks to do away with all symbolic expression, with that of the mystic. 71 Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, 110. 72 Ibid., 113. 73 Ibid., 104. 74 Ibid., 127. 75 Cassirer, Myth of the State, 293. 76 Ibid., 235 f. 77 Ibid., 283.

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78 Noam Chomsky provides us with an example. The 1938 invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland were framed as “defending Germany, and civilized values, against the terror of the Czechs and Poles and carrying out ‘defensive actions against the Jewish world-criminals.” The expression coined for this defense of Germany and civilization was “Terror gegen Terror” (terror against terror). 79 Albert Speer writes in his autobiography, Inside the Third Reich: Only a few months before I had been carried away by the prospect of drafting and executing buildings. Now I was completely under Hitler’s spell, unreservedly and unthinkingly held by him. I was ready to follow him anywhere. . . . Years later, in Spandau, I read Ernst Cassirer’s comment on the men who of their own accord threw away man’s highest privilege: to be an autonomous person. Now I was one of them. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2015), 49. 80 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 286. 81 Cassirer, “The Myth of the State,” Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke, vol. 24, 298. 82 Cassirer, “‘Life’ and ‘Spirit,’” The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 579. 83 Cassirer, “The Myth of the State,” Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke, vol. 24, 265.

T r a n s l at o r ’ s A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Steve G. Lofts A number of institutions have provided the material support without which this translation could not have been possible. I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its fellowship and King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario for its generous research grants and a sabbatical leave to complete this project. My thanks also go to Dr. Volker Peckhaus and the Universität Paderborn, Germany, and Dr. Ryugo Matsui and the Faculty of International Studies at the Ryukoku University, Japan, for the warm welcome into their scholarly communities and for providing important logistical support during my stay as a visiting professor. A number of individuals have contributed in different ways to the production of this translation. Although this translation departs in many ways from that of Ralph Manheim’s, it has benefited greatly from his often-elegant solutions to difficult translation problems. Sadly, John M. Krois will never know that this translation was finally completed. It was his great desire that a new translation of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms be undertaken. I am grateful for his encouragement, for his generosity as a thinker, and for his friendship. Fabien Capeillères, Pierre Keller, and Sebastian Luft have all been patient with the unending questions concerning the translation of technical terms, and their insights have helped make this a better translation. Antonio Calcagno, Fabien Capeillères,

lxxviii translator’s acknowledgments

Pierre Keller, Sebastian Luft, Samantha Matherne, Ingmar Meland, and Carmen Metta graciously commented on an early draft of the Introduction, and I am grateful for their time and philosophical engagement with this project. The translation has also profited from feedback on previous translations of Cassirer and from the insightful comments of the four reviewers. I would also like to thank my colleagues Jonathan Geen, Antonio Calcagno, and Mark Yenson for their support and friendship. Finally, I  cannot express my gratitude enough to my wife, Agnieszka Chuchrowska, whose wonder at the beauty of nature reminds me daily that there is more to life than philosophy.

Preface

The first draft of this work, whose first volume I am here submitting, goes back to the investigations that are summed up in my book Substance and Function (Berlin, 1910). When I  attempted to apply my findings of these investigations, which focused essentially on the structure of mathematical and natural-scientific thinking, to the problems that concerned the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften], it became increasingly clear to me that the general theory of cognition [Erkenntnistheorie], in its traditional approach and limitations, was not sufficient to provide an adequate methodological foundation for the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]. If such a foundation were to be acquired, then the plan for this theory of cognition [Erkenntnistheorie] would need to be fundamentally broadened. Rather than investigating only the general presuppositions of the scientific cognizing of the world, it was equally necessary to differentiate the different basic forms of “understanding” [Verstehen] of the world and apprehend each one of them as sharply as possible in their distinctive tendency and spiritual form. Only when such a “morphology” [Formen­ lehre] of spirit had been established, at least in general outline, could we hope to ground a clearer methodological view and a more secure principle of grounding for the individual disciplines of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]. It seemed to me that the theory of the formation of concepts and judgments of the natural sciences, by which the “object”

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[Objekt] of nature is determined in its fundamental constitutive features and by which the “object” [Gegenstand] of cognition is apprehended in its conditionality through the function of cognition, must be amplified by an analogous determination for the domain of pure subjectivity. This subjectivity does not solely consist in the cognitive contemplation of nature and reality but also proves itself to be effective everywhere where the whole of the appearance is posited and configured from a specific spiritual perspective. It must be shown how each of these configurations fulfills its own task in the construction of spirit and how each stands under a particular law. The plan for a general theory of the spiritual forms of expression, which is expounded more fully in my introduction, developed out of my pursuit of this problem. As for the detailed arrangement of this study, this first part is limited to an analysis of the linguistic form; a second volume which, I hope, will appear in approximately one year, is designated to embody the framework for a phenomenology of mythical and religious thinking; and the third and last volume will arrive at the presentation of a proper “theory of cognition [Erkenntnistheorie],” i.e., the morphology [Formenlehre] of scientific thinking. A consideration of language according to its purely philosophical content [Gehalt] and from the standpoint of a certain philosophical “system” is a risk that has already been undertaken in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s seminal works. If Humboldt, as he wrote to Wolf in 1805, believed that he had uncovered the art of how to use language as a vehicle to work us through the deepest and highest manifold of the whole world, then it seems that the direction that has been taken by linguistics and the philosophy of language in the nineteenth century has progressively pushed back such an aspiration. At times, language seemed to become the proper and strongest instrument of philosophical skepticism rather than a vehicle of philosophical cognition. However, even if we disregard the conclusions of the modern critique of language, which for the philosophy of language become synonymous with the disavowal and denouement of its spiritual content [Gehalt], we find an increasing conviction that a philosophical foundation of language, if possible at all, would have to be achieved by means of psychological research. The ideal of an absolutely universal, “philosophical” grammar, which the empiricists and rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had pursued in different ways, seemed to have been destroyed with the foundation

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of scientific comparative linguistics: the unity of language could no longer be sought in its logical content [Gehalt], but only in its emergence and in the psychological laws of this emergence. Wundt’s great work on language, in which for a long time he attempted to subject the totality of linguistic phenomena to a certain intellectual [geistig] interpretation, derives the principle of this interpretation from the concept and methodology of ethnopsychology. Along the same lines of thought, Steinthal had, in his Introduction to the Psychology and Linguistic Science (1871), attempted to prove Herbart’s concept of apperception to be the foundation for the consideration of language. Subsequently, Marty (1908), in conscious and sharp opposition to the foundation of Steinthal’s and Wundt’s view of language, returned to the idea of a “general grammar and philosophy of language,”1 which he regarded as the framework for a “descriptive theory of signification.”2 However, he too attempted to accomplish the construction of this theory of signification by purely psychological means; indeed, he explicitly limited the task of the philosophy of language so that all the general and legitimate problems directed at the linguistic phenomena belong to it insofar as they were “either of a psychological nature or at very least could not be solved without having recourse primarily to psychology.”3 Thus, it appeared that in this domain – despite the opposition encountered to this outlook in the sphere of linguistic research itself, above all by Karl Vossler – psychologism and positivism not only seemed to be established as a methodological ideal but also seemed to be raised to a universal dogma. Philosophical idealism has certainly not ceased to fight against this dogma; it has, however, also not recaptured the autonomous position that language possessed with Wilhelm von Humboldt. For, instead of understanding it as an independent spiritual “form” based on a distinctive law, it had attempted to trace it back to the general aesthetic function of expression. In this sense, Benedetto Croce had classified and subordinated the problem of linguistic expression to the problem of aesthetic expression, while Hermann Cohen’s philosophical system treated logic, ethics, aesthetics, and finally the philosophy of religion as independent members but only occasionally touched on the fundamental question of language and this in connection with the fundamental question of aesthetics. Given this state of affairs, the present exposition could not move, philosophically speaking, within an already delimited sphere of thought

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but instead had to attempt to forge its own methodological path. The development of linguistic science that has taken place since the days of Wilhelm von Humboldt, however, has provided richer resources for the implementation of its theme. If the idea of a truly universal view of language still appears in Humboldt to be a postulate of philosophical idealism, then this postulate would seem to have progressively approached its concrete-scientific fulfillment. Of course, this wealth of material or empirical-scientific research places philosophical contemplation before an insuperable difficulty. For it can no more disregard these details than it can wholly submit to them and still remain entirely faithful to its own intention and task. This methodological dilemma left no other choice than to formulate the questions that were addressed in linguistics with systematic generality, but in each case to extract the answers to these questions from the empirical research itself. It had to attempt to secure the broadest possible overview, not only of the phenomena of a single linguistic sphere but also of various linguistic spheres that differed in structure and were widely divergent from each other in their basic mode of thinking. The scope of the literature in linguistic sciences that had to be consulted in the working out of these problems became so vast that the goal initially set out for this investigation receded further and further into the distance, so that I asked myself whether this goal was at all attainable for me. If I have, nevertheless, continued along this trodden path, it is because the more the manifold of linguistic phenomena opened up before me, the clearer I believed to perceive the individual details that mutually illuminate each other and how, as it were, they inserted themselves into a general interconnection. The following investigations are directed at the consideration of the development and elucidation of this interconnection and not with any isolated instances. If the basic epistemo-critical idea by which they are oriented is established – if the presentation and characterization of the pure form of language, as it is attempted here, proves sound – then many individual details that I have overlooked or missed will easily be supplied or rectified in a future reworking of the subject. In working on this book, I have become keenly aware of the difficulty of the subject matter and the limits of my own powers, not to welcome the criticism of experts in the field. To facilitate this criticism, I have, in interpreting and employing the detailed material from the linguistic sciences, always expressly indicated my authorities and sources so as to make immediate verification possible.

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It remains for me only to express my thanks to all those who have helped me in the working out of this book, either by the general interest that they have taken in it or by their expert advice. In my attempt to gain a more accurate insight into the structure of the so-called primitive languages, I have been guided from the beginning by the works of Carl Meinhof and by those of Boas and Seler on the Native American languages. After my call to Hamburg in 1919, I had at my disposal not only the rich library of the seminar led by Meinhof on African and South Sea languages but was also allowed to avail myself of Professor Meinhof’s cordially proffered and extremely helpful advice on many of the most difficult cases. I also owe thanks to my colleagues Professor Otto Dempwolff and Professor Heinrich Junker for insights gained through conversations with them. Finally, Ernst Hoffmann in Heidelberg and Emil Wolff in Hamburg assisted me far beyond simple encouragement. Above all, these two men, themselves situated in the midst of philological and the sciences of language, share with me the fundamental view on which this book rests: the conviction that language, like all basic spiritual functions, can be elucidated by philosophy only within a complete system of philosophical idealism. I also owe heartfelt thanks to Ernst Hoffmann for reading the proofs of this first volume despite the heavy pressure of his own work. Unfortunately, certain important references and additions that he offered me in the process could not, for technical reasons, be included in the published book, but I hope to make use of them in a future treatment of the subject. Hamburg, April 1923 Ernst Cassirer

ENDNOTES 1 Antonn Marty, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeine Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, I (Hall: Niemeyer, 1908). 2 Ibid., 53. 3 Ibid., 19.

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I NTRODU CT ION AND TH E FR AMIN G OF T HE P ROB L EM 1. THE CONCEPT OF SYMBOLIC FORM AND THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF THE SYMBOLIC FORMS The initial starting point of philosophical speculation was marked by the concept of being [Sein]. In the moment that this concept was constituted as such, in the moment that the consciousness of the unity of being [Sein] as opposed to the multiplicity and diversity of beings [Seiende] was awakened, the specifically philosophical tendency of contemplating the world arose. This view remained, however, bound for a long time to the ambit of beings, which it strove to leave and overcome. The beginning and origin, the ultimate “ground” of all being [Sein] should be expressed [ausgesprochen]; however, as clearly as this question was posed, the concrete, determinate answers given were not adequate to this supreme universal formulation of the problem. What was designated as the nature [Wesen], as the substance of the world, did not, in principle, reach beyond the world but rather was only an extract from the world itself. An individual, particular, and limited being [Seiende] was picked out, and everything else was generically derived from it and “explained by it.” Thus, as varied as the contents of this explanation may have been configured, its general form nevertheless remained within the same methodological boundaries. At first, it was still an individual-sensible existence, a concrete “primal matter” that was set up as the ultimate ground of the totality

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[Gesamtheit] of appearances; then the explanation became more ideal, and there emerged, in place of this matter, a purely intellectual “principle” of deduction and grounding. Upon closer consideration, however, this “principle” hung in midair between the “physical” and “spiritual.” Despite its bearing the color of the ideal, it remained closely imprisoned in the world of existents. In this sense, the number of the Pythagoreans, the atom of Democritus, though far removed from the primal matter of the Ionians, remained a methodological hybrid that had not found its proper nature and had not, as it were, chosen its true spiritual home. This inner uncertainty is finally overcome only in Plato’s theory of Ideas. The great systematic and historical achievement of this theory consists in the fact that here, for the first time, the basic and essential spiritual presupposition for all philosophical comprehension and every philosophical explanation of the world emerged in an explicit shape. What Plato sought under the name of “Idea” had been effective as an immanent principle in the earliest attempts at explanation, in the philosophers of Elea, in the Pythagoreans, in Democritus; Plato was, however, the first to be aware of what this principle was and what it signified. Plato understood his philosophical achievement in this way. In his late works, in which he raises the logical presuppositions of his theory to its greatest clarity, he characterizes the crucial difference that separates his speculation from that of the Pre-Socratics: whereas with the Pre-Socratics, being [Sein], in the form of an individual being [Seiende], was taken as a fixed starting point, with Plato, being was for the first time recognized as a problem. He no longer simply inquired into the organization, into the constitution and structure of being, but rather inquired into the concept of being and the significance of this concept. Against this sharp question and its strict demand, all earlier attempts at explanation faded into fables or myths about being.1 It was time to abandon this mythical-cosmological explanation for the truly dialectical explanation that no longer adhered to its mere consistent existence [Bestand] but made visible its intelligible sense, its systematic-teleological construction [Fügung]. And with this, thinking, which in Greek philosophy since Parmenides had appeared as a concept interchangeable with that of being, acquires a new and more profound significance. Only when being receives the sharply determinate sense of a problem does thinking receive the sharply determinate sense and value of a principle. Thinking no longer runs parallel to being, a mere reflection “about” being, but by its own inner form, it now determines the inner form of being.



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The same typical basic feature is repeated at different stages in the historical development of idealism. Where a realistic view of the world was content with some ultimate constitution of things as the foundation for all cognizing, idealism turned this very same attribute into a question for thinking. This process is discernible not only in the history of philosophy but in the individual sciences as well. Here too, the way does not lead solely from “facts” back to “laws” and from “laws” back to “axioms” and “basic principles”; rather, these axioms and basic principles, which at a certain stage of cognition stand there as the latest and most complete expression of the solution, must once again, at a later stage, become a problem. Accordingly, what science designates as its “being” and its “object” ceases to appear as a simple and indivisible consistent fact; rather, every new manner and direction of contemplation discloses in it a new element. With it, the rigid concept of being appears, so to speak, to dissolve into flux, into a general movement – and it is possible to think the unity of being in general only as the goal and no longer as the beginning of this movement. To the degree that this insight unfolded and infiltrated science itself, the naïve picture theory [Abbildtheorie] of cognition is deprived of its soil. The basic concepts of every science, the means with which it poses its questions and formulates its solution, no longer appear to be passive pictures [Abbilder] of a given being but self-created intellectual symbols. It was, in particular, physicomathematical cognition that was the first to clearly become aware of this symbolic character of its basic means.2 In the preliminary considerations with which he introduces his Principles of Mechanics, Heinrich Hertz has brought the new ideal of cognition, to which this entire development points, to its most pregnant expression. He designates it as the closest and most important task of our cognition of nature that enables us to anticipate future experiences; however, the procedure, which serves to derive the future from the past, consists in the fact that we make for ourselves “inner simulacra or symbols” of external objects, which are of such a nature that the necessary consequents in the thought of images [Bilder] are always the images of the necessary consequences in the nature of the objects pictured [abgebildet]. When from our accumulated previous experience, we have finally succeeded in deducing images of the desired constitution, we can then in a short time develop by means of them, as by means of models, the

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introduction and the framing of the problem consequences which in the outer world only arise in a comparatively long time, or as the result of our own intervening. . . . The images [Bilder], of which we speak, are our representations of things; they have one essential correspondence with the things themselves, namely the fulfillment of the above-mentioned demand; however, it is not necessary for their purpose that they have some further correspondence with things. As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have any means of experiencing, whether our representations of things are in agreement with them in any other way than in this one fundamental relation.3

Thus, we have here the natural-scientific theory of cognition [Erkennt­ nistheorie] that stems from Heinrich Hertz – the theory of “signs,” as it was first thoroughly developed by Helmholtz, continued to speak the language of the picture theory [Abbildtheorie] of cognition – however, the concept of the “image” has now in itself undergone an inner transformation. For in place of the vague requirement for a similarity of content between the image and the thing [Sache], we now find expressed a highly complex logical expressive relationship, a general intellectual condition that the basic concepts of physical cognition must satisfy. Its value lies not in the reflection of a given existence but in what it accomplishes as a means of cognition, in a unity of appearances, which the appearances must produce out of themselves. A system of physical concepts should be able to survey the interconnection of objective objects and the manner of their mutual dependency, but this survey is possible only insofar as these concepts already pertain from the beginning to a determinate, uniform line of sight of cognition. The object cannot be regarded as some naked in-itself [Ansich], independently of the essential categories of the cognition of nature; rather, only within these categories, which first constitute its proper form, can it be brought to presentation. In this sense, the basic concepts of mechanics, particularly the concepts of mass and force, were for Hertz “simulacra” which, since they are created by the logic of the cognition of nature, were subjected to the general demands of this logic, among which the a priori demand for clarity, freedom from contradiction, and unambiguousness of account takes first place. It is true that with this critical insight, science has to give up the hope and aspiration to an “immediate” apprehension and rendering of the actual. It understands that all objectivization, of which it is capable, is in



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truth a mediation and must remain a mediation. In this insight, there is found a further and momentous consequence of idealism. If the definition and determination of the object of cognition can be made only ever through the medium of a conceptual structure with a distinctive logic, then the conclusion cannot be denied that a diversity of these media will correspond to a diversity of the construction [Fügung] of the object, to a different sense of “objective” interconnections. Even within the ambit of “nature,” the physical object will not coincide absolutely with the chemical object, nor the chemical with the biological – for physical, chemical, biological cognition each frame the question from their own particular standpoint and, in accordance with this standpoint, subject the appearances to a specific interpretation and forming [Formung]. It almost appears as if through this result the development of idealistic thought thwarted once and for all the expectation with which it had begun. The end of this development seems to negate its beginning – for the unity of being that was desired and demanded now threatens once more to disintegrate into a mere manifold of beings. The one being, to which thinking holds fast and from which it seems unable to relinquish without destroying its own form, withdraws more and more from the domain of cognition. The more its metaphysical unity as a “thing in itself” is asserted, the more it evades all possibility of cognizing, until at last it is relegated entirely to the domain of the uncognizable and becomes a mere X. This rigid metaphysical absolutum, however, now stands over against the realm of appearances as the proper domain of the knowable and recognizable in all its unrealizable multiplicity, in its conditionality and relativity. Upon closer scrutiny, however, in this irreducible diversity of the methods and objects of knowledge, the basic demand of unity is not rejected by this as such, but rather, it is posited here in a new form. The unity of knowledge can now, of course, no longer be guaranteed and secured in that it is based in all its forms on a common “simple” object that is related to all of these forms as the transcendent archetype [Urbild] to the empirical pictures [Abbilder]. However, rather than this, the other demand is now given: to apprehend in one system the diverse methodological directions of knowledge in all their recognized particular nature and autonomy, such that the individual members, precisely through their necessary diversity, will complement and require one another. The postulate of a purely functional unity replaces the postulate of the unity of a substrate

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and the unity of an origin that essentially dominated the ancient concept of being. Out of this, a new task is set forth for the philosophical critique of cognition. It must follow and survey as a whole the path taken by the individual trends of the particular sciences. It must pose the question whether the intellectual symbols, by means of which the particular disciplines consider and describe reality, are to be thought of as a simple juxtaposition or whether they are to be understood as different manifestations of one and the same basic spiritual function. And if the latter presupposition should prove itself, then a further task appears: to establish the general conditions of this function and to explain the principle governing it. Instead of inquiring with dogmatic metaphysics into the absolute unity of substance to which every particular existence must be reduced, it would now inquire into a rule that governs the concrete manifold and the diversity of the functions of cognition and, without sublating and destroying them, combine them into a unified doing, a self-contained intellectual action. Once again, however, this point of view widens as soon as one considers that cognition, however universally and comprehensively its concept may be taken, only ever exhibits one of the modes of form-bestowing present in the whole of the spiritual apprehension and interpretation of being. A configuration of the manifold is led by a specific but therefore at the same time clearly and sharply delimited principle. All cognition, however different it may be in its ways and orientation, aims ultimately to subject the multiplicity of appearances to the unity of a “principle of sufficient reason.” The individual as individual must not be left to stand alone; rather, the individual must join an interconnection in which it appears as a member [Glied] of a “framework” [Gefüge], be it logical, teleological, or causal. Cognition remains essentially directed toward this essential aim, toward the incorporation [Einfügung] of the particular into a universal form of law and order. However, beside this form of intellectual synthesis, which exhibits and operates within a system of scientific concepts, the whole of spiritual life knows other modes of configuration. They, too, can be designated as certain modes of “objectivization” – i.e., as means of raising an individual to the generally valid; however, they achieve this goal of general validity in a completely different way from that of the logical concept and the logical law. Every genuine, basic spiritual function has one decisive feature in common with cognition:



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it is inherent in an original-formative force and not merely an imitative force. It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present [Vorhanden] but rather contains an independent energy of spirit through which the simple existence of the appearance assumes a determinate “signification,” a distinctive ideational content [Gehalt]. This is as valid for art as it is for cognition; it is as valid for myth as for religion. They all live in distinctive image-worlds, which do not simply reflect the empirically given but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle. And thus, each of them creates its own symbolic configurations, which if not of the same kind as the intellectual symbols are, nevertheless, equal as to their spiritual origin. None of these configurations can simply be reduced to, or derived from, the others; rather, each of them designates a determinate mode of spiritual apprehension, in and through which it constitutes its own aspect of the “actual.” They are not different modes in which some actual reveals itself to spirit but rather paths by which spirit proceeds in its objectivization  – i.e., its self-revelation. If we grasp art and language, myth and cognition, in this sense, then a common problem immediately emerges that opens up a new approach to a general philosophy of the human sciences [Geisteswis­ senschaften]. The “revolution in the way of thinking”4 that Kant undertook within theoretical philosophy was based on the basic idea that the relationship between cognition and its object, which has generally been assumed, required a radical inversion. Instead of starting out from the object as the known [Bekannten] and given, it was, rather, necessary to begin with the laws of cognition as what alone, in a primary sense, is truly accessible and certain; instead of determining the most general properties of being, in the sense of ontological metaphysics, we must, through an analysis of reason, ascertain the basic forms of judgment as the condition under which objectivity alone is positable [setzbar], ascertained, and determined in its manifold branches. According to Kant, only this analysis can disclose the conditions on which all knowledge [Wissen] of being and the pure concept of being depend. However, as the correlate of the synthetic unity of the understanding itself, the object, which the transcendental analytics situates before us in this way, is a pure logically determined object. As a result, it does not designate all objectivity as such, but only that form of objective lawfulness that can be grasped and exhibited by the

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basic concepts of science, particularly the concepts and basic principles of mathematical physics. Thus, as soon as Kant progresses, in the totality of the three critiques, to develop the true “system of pure reason,” he already proves that this form of objectivity is too narrow. The mathematical natural-scientific being, in its idealistic version and interpretation, does not exhaust all reality, because it is by no means concerned with all the effectiveness and spontaneity of spirit. In the intelligible realm of freedom, whose basic law is developed by the critique of practical reason, in the realm of art and the realm of organic natural forms, as exhibited in the critique of aesthetics and teleological judgment, a new aspect of this reality emerges. This gradual unfolding of the critical-idealistic concept of reality and the critical-idealistic concept of spirit belongs to the most distinctive features of Kantian thinking and is grounded in a kind of stylistic law of this thinking. The proper, concrete totality of spirit is not designated in a simple formula and given, as it were, readymade from the beginning; rather, it develops and finds itself only in the continuous advancing progress of critical analysis. The ambit of spiritual being can be designated and determined only as a result of being pursued in this process. It lies in the nature of this process not only that its beginning and end are broken asunder but also that they must apparently conflict with each other; however, the conflict is none other than that between potency and act, between the mere logical “predisposition” of a concept and its complete development and impact. From the standpoint of the latter, the Copernican revolution, with which Kant began, takes on a new and wider sense. It no longer refers only to the logical function of judgment but extends, with equal justification and right, to every tendency and every principle of spiritual configuration. The crucial question always remains whether we seek to understand the function by the formation [Gebilde] or the formation [Gebilde] by the function, which we choose to “ground” the other. This question forms the spiritual bond that connects the most diverse problem domains with one another; it constitutes their inner methodological unity, without ever letting them lapse into a factual one-and-the-sameness [sachliche Einerleiheit]. For the basic principle of critical thinking, the principle of the “primacy” of the function over the object, assumes in each special domain a new shape [Gestalt] and demands a new and dependent grounding. Alongside the pure function of cognition, there stands the



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function of linguistic thinking, the function of mythical-religious thinking, and the function of artistic intuition, comprehended in such a way as that it is evident how in all of them a specific configuration, not so much of [der] the world as rather toward [zu] the world, toward an objective interconnection of sense and an objective-intuitive whole that can be apprehended as such takes place. With this, the critique of reason becomes a critique of culture. It seeks to understand and demonstrate how the content of culture, insofar as it is more than a merely individual content, insofar as it is grounded in a general principle of form, presupposes an original act of spirit. Herein the basic thesis of idealism finds its true and complete confirmation. As long as philosophical contemplation takes up the analysis of the pure form of cognition and limits itself to this task, the force of the naïve-realistic view of the world cannot be completely discredited. The object of cognition may in some way be after all determined and formed in and through cognition and its original law; however, beyond this relation [Relation], it must, nevertheless, also appear to be present and given as something independent of the basic categories of cognition. If, however, we begin not with the general concept of the world but rather from the general concept of culture, then the question immediately assumes a different shape. For the content of the concept of culture cannot be detached from the basic forms and tendencies of spiritual productivity: “being” is graspable here nowhere else than in “activity” [Tun]. Only insofar as there is a specific tendency of aesthetic fantasy and intuition is there a domain of aesthetic objects, and the same is valid for all of those other spiritual energies by virtue of which the form and outline of a specific domain of objects takes shape [sich gestaltet] for us. Even religious consciousness, convinced as it is of the “reality” [Realität], the truth, of its object, transforms this reality into the lowest level, to the level of purely mythological thinking, into a simple tangible existence [Existenz]. At higher levels of contemplation, it is more or less clearly aware that it “has” its object only in that it relates to it in an absolutely distinctive way. The ultimate guarantee of this very objectivity is contained in a type of self-comportment [Sich-Verhalten], in the tendency that spirit gives to an intended objective [ein gedachtes Objektive]. Philosophical thinking confronts all of these tendencies  – not just with the intention to pursue each one of them separately or to survey them as a whole but also with the presupposition that it must

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be possible to refer them to a uniform focal point, to an ideal center. When regarded critically, however, this center can never be located in a given being [Sein], but only in a common task. Thus, with all their inner diversity, the different products of spiritual culture – language, scientific cognition, myth, art, and religion – become members of one large problem nexus: they become manifold approaches, all of which are oriented toward one goal: to transform the passive world of mere impressions, in which spirit at first seems imprisoned, into a world of pure spiritual expression. For just as the modern philosophy of language had established the concept of the inner form of language to secure the proper starting point for a philosophical consideration of language, so too it can be said that an analogous “inner form” of religion, myth, art, and scientific cognition is to be presupposed and sought. And this form would signify not simply the sum or subsequent combination [Zusammenfassung] of the individual appearances of these domains but also the conditioning law of their construction. Of course, in the end, there is no other way to assure ourselves of these laws than to demonstrate them in the appearances and “abstract” them from these appearances; however, at the same time, this very abstraction shows the laws to be a necessary and constitutive moment of the consistent content of the individuals. In the course of its history, philosophy has remained more or less cognizant of the task of such an analysis and critique of the particular cultural forms; however, in most cases, it has taken up only part of this task and addressed it, to be sure, more in its negative than in its positive intention. The endeavor that went into this critique was often less about the presentation and grounding of the positive achievements of each individual form than it was about the defense of wrong claims. Since the days of the Greek Sophists, there has been a skeptical critique of language and a skeptical critique of myths and cognition. This essentially negative attitude becomes understandable if we consider that in fact every basic form of spirit, in that it appears and develops, is a unique endeavor to give itself not just in part but as a whole and consequently to claim for itself not a merely relative validity but rather an absolute validity. Not contenting itself with its special precinct, it seeks, rather, to imprint the distinctive stamp, with which it conducts itself, on the whole of being and spiritual life. The conflicts



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of culture and the antinomies of the concept of culture ensue from this striving for the unconditioned, which is inherent in every single tendency. Science originates in a form of contemplation that, before it could get going and assert itself, was everywhere compelled to establish those first combinations and separations of thinking that had found their earliest expression and sedimentation in language and in general linguistic concepts. However, in that it makes use of language as material and as a foundation, science at the same time necessarily proceeded beyond language. A new “logos,” which is guided and governed by a principle other than that of linguistic thinking, now emerges and forms itself ever-more clearly and independently. And measured by it, the formations of language now appear as restraints and limits that must gradually be overcome by the force and particular nature of the new principle. The critique of language and the linguistic thought-form becomes an integrated component of the advancement of scientific and philosophical thinking. And this typical course of development is repeated in the other domains. The individual-spiritual tendencies do not move peacefully side by side, seeking to complement one another; rather, each becomes what it is only by demonstrating its own peculiar force against the others and in a struggle with them. Religion and art are so close to one another in their purely historical-effective action, and so informed by one another, that sometimes the two seem indistinguishable in their content [Gehalt] and in their inner principle of forming. It has been said that the gods of Greece owed their origin to Homer and Hesiod. And yet, on the other hand, as the religious thinking of the Greeks progressed, it separated more and more from its aesthetic beginnings and originary-ground. After Xenophanes, it rebelled more and more resolutely against the mythical-poetic and the sensible-plastic concepts of the gods, which it recognized and rejected as anthropomorphic. In such spiritual struggles and conflicts  – as they constituted themselves throughout history in evernew and ever-greater potentiation [Potenzierung] and intensification  – the ultimate arbitration appears to be expected from philosophy alone, as the highest instance of unity. However, the dogmatic systems of metaphysics only imperfectly satisfied this expectation and demand. For in most cases, they stood amid the battle that was taking place and not above it: despite the conceptual universality toward which

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they strove, they represented only one side of the opposition instead of apprehending and mediating the conflict in its whole breadth and depth. For most of them are nothing other than metaphysical hypostases of a determinate logical, aesthetic, or religious principle. The more they imprisoned themselves in the abstract universality of this principle, the more they closed themselves off from individual aspects of spiritual culture and from the concrete totality [Totalität] of their forms. Philosophical reflection will be able to avoid the danger of this conclusion only if it is able to find a standpoint situated above all of these forms and yet not located as such beyond them – a standpoint that would seek to make it possible to encompass the whole of them in one glance and that would seek to render visible in this one glance nothing less than the pure immanent relationship that all of these forms have to each other and not the relationship that they have to an external, “transcendent” being or principle. We would, then, have a philosophical systematization of spirit in which each particular form would obtain its sense purely from the position in which it stands, a systematization in which its content [Gehalt] and its significance would be designated by the wealth and particular nature of the relations and entanglements in which they relate to other spiritual energies and ultimately to allness [Allheit]. From the beginnings of modern philosophy and since the foundation of modern philosophical idealism, there has been no lack of attempts and promising steps toward the establishment of such a systematization. To be sure, although Descartes’ methodological manifesto Regulae ad directionem ingenii [Rules for the Direction of the Mind] already indicated that the attempt of the old metaphysics to survey the totality [Gesamtheit] of things and to penetrate the ultimate mysteries of nature was fruitless, it insisted all the more emphatically that it must be possible to exhaustively measure the universitas of spirit in thought; “ingenii limites definire,” to define the whole domain and limits of spirit: this maxim of Descartes has become the watchword of all modern philosophy. The concept of spirit is, however, still conflicted and ambiguous; for it is used sometimes in a narrow sense, sometimes in a much wider sense. The philosophy of Descartes begins from a new, comprehensive concept of consciousness but then, with the term cogitatio, allows this concept to coincide once again with pure thinking – thus, for Descartes, and for all rationalism, the systematization



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of spirit coincides with thinking. The universitas of spirit, its concrete totality [Totalität], shall therefore be deemed to be truly apprehended and philosophically penetrated only if it is possible to deduce it from a single logical principle. Thus, the pure form of logic is once again erected as the prototype and model for all spiritual being [Sein] and every spiritual form. And just as with Descartes, with whom the series of the systems of classical idealism began, so likewise with Hegel, with whom this series concluded, this methodic interconnection stands before us once again in full clarity. More sharply than any thinker before him, Hegel set out the demand to think the whole of spirit as a concrete whole and, thus, not to stop with its simple concept but rather to develop it into the totality [Gesamtheit] of its manifestations [Äußerungen]. And yet the phenomenology of spirit, which strove to fulfill this demand, prepared only the terrain for logic and the way to it. The manifold of spiritual forms, as they are set up in the phenomenology, finally culminate in a highest logical summit, and it is only in this endpoint that they attain their consummate “truth” and essential being. As rich and varied as they are in their content, their structure is subordinated to a single and, in a certain sense, uniform law – the law of dialectical method that constitutes the steady rhythm of the self-movement of the concept. Spirit concludes all the movements of its shapes in absolute knowledge, in which it acquires the pure element [Element] of its existence: the concept. All the earlier stages that it has passed through are, to be sure, contained as elements [Momente] but also sublated into mere moments [Momente]. Thus, of all the spiritual forms, only that of the form of the logical, the form of the concept and of cognition, appears to have been ascribed a real, true autonomy. The concept is not only a means to present the concrete life of spirit but also the true substantial element [Element] of spirit itself. Accordingly, however much all spiritual being [Sein] and events [Geschehen] is apprehended in its specific particularization [Besonderung] and should be recognized in this particularization, it is, in the end, reduced to and based on a single dimension – and only in this relation is its most profound content [Gehalt] and its real significance initially apprehended. And in fact, this ultimate centralization of all of the spiritual forms in the one logical form seems to be necessarily demanded by the concept of philosophy and in particular by the basic principle of philosophical idealism. For if we renounced this unity, then, in general, there would

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appear to be no way to speak about a rigorous systematization of these forms. Thus, only a purely empirical procedure remains as the counterimage [Gegenbild] and counterpart of the dialectical method. If we are unable to demonstrate a general law by virtue of which one spiritual form emerges necessarily out of another, until finally the whole series of spiritual configurations is passed through in accordance with this principle, then it would seem that the ensemble of these configurations could be thought of only as nothing more than a self-contained cosmos. The individual forms would simply stand next to each other: their ambit could be surveyed and their particularity described, but they would no longer express a common ideal content [Gehalt]. The philosophy of these forms must eventually lead to their history, which, according to its objects, would present and specify itself as the history of language, the history of religion, the history of myth, the history of art, etc. Thus, at this point, a peculiar dilemma arises. If we adhere to the demand for a logical unity, the universality of the logical form ultimately threatens to blur the particularization of each individual domain and the particular nature of its principle; if we immerse ourselves in this individuality and persevere in our examination of it, we run the risk of losing ourselves and of finding no way back to the universal. A  way out of this methodological dilemma can be found only if it is possible to grasp and demonstrate an element that is repeatedly found in each basic spiritual form and yet which recurs in none of them as such in the same shape [Gestalt]. Then, with regard to this element, we might assert the ideal interconnection of the individual domains  – the interconnection between the basic functions of language and cognition, of the aesthetic and the religious  – without losing the incomparable particularity of any one of them. If a medium could be found through which each configuration – as it occurs in the basic individual-spiritual tendencies – passes, while nevertheless preserving its particular nature and its specific character, then the necessary intermediary link necessary for an examination, similar to the one the transcendental critique has provided for pure cognition, would be established for the totality [Allheit] of spiritual forms. Thus, the next question we have to ask ourselves is whether in fact there is such a middle territory and mediating function for the manifold tendencies of spirit and whether this function exhibits certain typical, basic features by virtue of which it can be recognized and described.



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2.  THE GENERAL FUNCTION OF SIGNS: THE PROBLEM OF SIGNIFICATION To answer these questions, we will first return to the concept of the sym­ bol, as Heinrich Hertz has postulated and denoted it from the standpoint of physical cognition. What the physicist seeks in appearances is the presentation of their necessary connection. This presentation, however, can be accomplished not only by leaving behind the immediate world of sensible impressions but ostensively by turning away from them entirely. The concepts with which the physicist operates, the concepts of space and time, of mass and force, of material point and energy, of the atom or the ether, are free “simulacra” that cognition designs to dominate the world of sensible experience and to survey it as a lawfully ordered world that directly corresponds to nothing other than itself in the sensible data. However, although no such correspondence takes place – and perhaps precisely because it does not take place – the conceptual world of physics is completely closed up in itself. Every single concept, every particular simulacrum and sign, resembles the articulated word of a language in that it is, in itself, significant, meaningful, and ordered according to fixed rules. Already in the initial inception of modern physics, already in Galileo, we find the metaphor that the “book of nature” is written in mathematical language and can be apprehended only through mathematical ciphers. And since Galileo, the entire development of exact natural science shows how, in fact, all progress in the framing of the problem and its conceptual means has gone hand in hand with the increasing refinement of its system of signs. A clear apprehension of the basic concepts of Galileo’s mechanics was achieved only when the general logical place of these concepts was, as it were, determined and a generally valid mathematical-logical sign for them was created by the algorithm of differential calculus. And from the problems connected here with the discovery of the analysis of the infinite, Leibniz could immediately determine with clarity the general problem that is contained in the function of sign-bestowing and to raise its universal “characteristic” to a truly philosophical significance. According to the basic conviction that he held and represented, the logic of things [Sachen] – i.e., of the basic concepts and relations of content that underpin the construction of a science, cannot be separated from the logic of signs. For the sign is no mere accidental cloak of thought

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but rather its necessary and essential organ. Not only does it serve for the communication of an already-finished given product of the content of thought, but it is also an instrument, by virtue of which this content developed and by virtue of which it initially gained its full determinacy. The act of conceptual determination of a content goes hand in hand with the act of its fixation in some characteristic sign. Thus, all truly rigorous and exact thinking is sustained by the symbolism and semiotics on which it is based. Every “law” of nature assumes for our thinking the shape of a general “formula”; every formula, however, can be presented in no other way than through a connection of general signs and specific signs. Without the universal signs, as they are provided by arithmetic and algebra, no particular relation [Relation] of physics, no particular law of nature, would be expressible. In them, the basic principle of cognition in general is graphically manifested, as it were, in the fact that the universal can be beheld only in the particular, that the particular can be thought only with regard to the universal. This interrelationship, however, does not remain limited to science but runs through all the other basic forms of spiritual creating. For in each case, they can bring to bear only their appropriate and proper mode of apprehension and configuration in that they equally create a specific sensible substrate for themselves. This substrate is so essential here that it sometimes appears to envelop the entire content [Gehalt] of signification, the real “sense” of these forms. Language would appear to be completely defined and thought of as a system of phonetic signs – the world of art and that of myth would appear to be exhausted in the world of the particular, sensibly tangible shapes that both place before us. And here, in fact, an all-embracing medium is given in which all of the most-diverse spiritual formations meet. The content [Gehalt] of spirit discloses itself only in its manifestation; the ideal form becomes known only in and through the ensemble of the sensible signs that serve it for its expression. If it were possible to acquire a systematic overview of the different tendencies of this mode of expression – if it were possible to show their typical and consistent features as well as their particular gradations and inner differences – then the ideal of a “universal characteristic,” formulated by Leibniz for cognition, would be fulfilled for the whole of spiritual creativity. We should then possess a kind of grammar of the symbolic function as such, by which the particular expressions and idioms that we



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see before us in language and art, in myth and religion, would be comprised and in general be codetermined. The idea of such a grammar implies a broadening of the traditional historical-doctrinal concept of idealism.This doctrinal concept has always aimed at opposing to the “mundus sensibilis” [sensible world] another cosmos, the “mundus intelligibilis” [intelligible world], and at distinguishing with confidence the boundaries between these two worlds. The boundary, however, essentially runs in such a way that the world of the intelligible was determined by the element of pure doing, whereas the world of the sensible was determined by the element of undergoing [Leiden]. In the former, the free spontaneity of the spiritual ruled, and in the latter, the bondage, the passivity [Passivität] of the sensible ruled. However, for the “universal characteristic,” whose problem and task has now been set before us in its most general outline, this opposition is no longer immediate and exclusive. For a new form of interrelation and correlation establishes itself between the sensible and the spiritual. The metaphysical dualism seems to be bridged as long as it can be shown that precisely the pure function of the spiritual itself must seek its concrete fulfillment in the sensible and that in the end it is able to find it only here. In the extent of the sensible itself, a sharp difference must be made between what is mere “reaction” and what is pure “action,” between what belongs to the sphere of “impression” and what to that of “expression.” Dogmatic sensationalism does not see that it misjudges the significance and achievement of the purely intellectual factors, but above all, even though it proclaimed sensibility as the real basic force of spirit, it did not apprehend the whole breadth of its concept or the totality of its achievements. Dogmatic sensationalism portrays an inadequate and distorted image [Bild] of sensibility insofar as it limits it to the world of “impressions,” to the immediate givenness of simple sensations. In so doing, it fails to appreciate that there is also an activity of sensibility itself, that, to speak with Goethe, there is also an “exact sensible imagination [Phantasie]”5 that operates in the most-diverse domains of spiritual creating. In all of them, alongside and above the world of perception, we find in the act a truly free image-world that is the true vehicle of their immanent progress: a world whose immediate constitution still completely bears the color of the sensible, a world, however, that exhibits an already-formed sensibility and therefore a sensibility already governed by spirit. It is a question

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here not of something simply sensibly given and encountered but rather of a system of a sensible manifold that is created in some form [Form] of free forming [Bilden]. The process of linguistic formation thus shows, for example, how the chaos of immediate impressions is illuminated and organized [gliedert: articulated] for us only in that we “name” it and so permeate it with the function of linguistic thinking and expression. In this new world of linguistic signs, the world of impressions acquires an entirely new “consistent existence,” because it acquires a new spiritual articulation. The differentiation and separation, the fixing of certain elements of content by speech-sounds, not only designates a determinate-spiritual quality through them but actually endows them with such a quality, by virtue of which they are now raised above the mere immediacy of so-called sensible qualities. Thus, language is one of the fundamental spiritual means by which we are able to progress from the world of mere sensation to the world of intuition and representation. It contains in embryonic form that intellectual labor that is further expressed in the formation of concepts, as scientific concept, as the determined logical unity of form. Here lies the first beginning of that general function of separation and connection that finds its highest conscious expression in the analyses and syntheses of scientific thinking. And next to the world of linguistic and conceptual signs now stands the world of figures [Gestaltenwelt] that are created by myth and art, incomparable with it and yet related to it in spiritual origin. For as deeply rooted as mythical imagination [Phantasie] is in the sensible, it is also beyond the mere passivity of the sensible. If we measure it by the customary empirical standards as it is served up by our sensible experience, then its formations [Gebilde] must appear as simply “unreal”; however, the spontaneity and inner freedom of the mythical function manifests itself precisely in this unreality. And this freedom in no way coincides with lawless caprice. The world of myth is no mere formation [Gebilde] of whim or chance but rather has its own fundamental laws of forming [Bilden] that are effectively at work in and through each of its particular manifestations. It is, therefore, altogether clear that in the domain of artistic intuition every apprehension of an aesthetic form [Form] in the sensible is possible only through the fact that we produce the forming [bildend] of the basic elements [Grundelemente] of form. All understanding of spatial figures [Gestalten], for example, is



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ultimately bound to the activity of their inner production and to the lawfulness of this production. Thus, we see without exception how the highest and purest spiritual activity known to consciousness is conditioned and mediated by determinate modes of sensible activity. Here too, we always possess the real and essential life of the pure idea only in the colorful reflection of the appearances. The system of the manifold of the manifestations of spirit is comprehensible for us in no other way than by tracing the different tendencies of its original image-force [Bildkraft]. In this reflection, we catch sight of the essential being of spirit – for this can present itself to us only by operating in the configuration [Gestaltung] of sensible material. And indeed, it is a pure activity of spirit that is manifested in the creation of the different systems of sensible symbols, which is also expressed in the fact that all of these symbols emerge from the beginning with a certain claim to objectivity and value. They all reach beyond the circle of the merely individual consciousness of appearances, and they claim to situate them against the generally valid. This claim may possibly prove to be untenable in the light of subsequent critical-philosophical contemplation and its developed and refined concept of truth; however, in general, it belongs to the nature [Wesen] and character of the basic individual forms. They see their formations [Gebilde] not only in general as objectively valid but in most cases literally as the proper core of the objective, of the “actual.” In this way, it is as characteristic of the first, so to speak, naïve and unreflective manifestations of linguistic thinking as it is of the thinking of myth that they do not clearly distinguish between the content of the “thing” [Sache] and the content of the “sign,” but rather, both tend to merge into one another in complete indifference. The name of a thing [Sache] and the thing [Sache] itself are inseparably fused together – the mere word or image contains within itself a magical force through which the essence of the thing [Ding] gives itself to us. And we need only transfer this intuition from the real to the ideal, from the tangible to the functional, in fact, to discover in it a justifiable core. For in the immanent development of spirit, the acquisition of the sign actually forms an initial and necessary step toward the acquisition of the objective cognition of essence. The sign forms for consciousness, as it were, the first stage and the first evidence of objectivity, because through it the constant flux of the contents of consciousness is for the first time halted because in it

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something enduring is determined and emphasized. No mere content of consciousness as such recurs in strictly identical determinedness once it has passed and been replaced by others. Once it has vanished from consciousness, it is gone once and for all as that which it was. However, to this incessant alteration of the contentual [inhaltlich] qualities, consciousness now juxtaposes the unity of itself and the unity of its form. Its identity is truly demonstrated not in what it is or has but rather in what it does. Through the sign that is linked to a content, the content itself acquires a new, consistent existence and a new duration. For the sign, in contrast to the real alteration of the individual contents of consciousness, has a certain ideal signification that endures as such. It is not like the given of simple sensation, a punctual singularity and uniqueness, but rather, it stands as the representative [Repräsentant] of a totality [Gesamtheit], as an ensemble of possible contents, against which it thus presents a first “universal.” In the symbolic function of consciousness, as it operates in language, art, and myth, certain constant basic gestalts that are of a partly conceptual nature as well as a purely intuitive nature are lifted out of the stream of consciousness; a self-contained and enduring unity of form takes the place of fleeting contents. It is a question here, however, not of a merely individual act but rather of a progressive process of determination that gives the entire development of consciousness its imprint. At the first stage [Stufe], the fixing of the content through the linguistic sign, the mythical or artistic image, seems to do no more than hold it fast in recollection; it does not go beyond simple reproduction. Here the sign seems to add nothing to the content to which it refers, but only captures and repeats its simple, pure consistency. Even in the history of the psychological development of art, it has been thought possible to identify a phase of mere “recollective art,” in which every artistic configuration worked in a single tendency that emphasized certain features of the sensually perceived and offered it to recollection in a self-created image.6 However, the more clearly the basic individual tendencies emerged in their specific energy, the more evident it likewise became that all apparent “reproduction” always has for consciousness an original and autonomous capacity for presupposition [Leis­ tung zur Voraussetzung]. The reproducibility of the content is itself bound up with the production of a sign in which consciousness operates freely and independently. The concept of recollection thus acquires a richer and



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deeper sense. To recollect a content, consciousness must have previously internally made it its own in another way than as mere sensation or perception. The mere repetition of the given at another point in time does not suffice; rather, in this repetition, a new kind of apprehension and forming [Formung] must likewise be asserted. For every “reproduction” of a content already includes a new stage [Stufe] of “reflection.” Even though consciousness no longer takes this content as something simply present [gegenwärtig] but posits it for itself in an image of something past and for it yet not vanished, consciousness, by this altered relationship to the content, gives to itself and to the content a modified ideal significance. And this emerges ever-more precisely and abundantly the more the proper image-world [Bildwelt] of the I  differentiates itself. The I  now not only exerts an original activity of forming [Bilden] but also comes to a deeper understanding of this activity. The boundaries [Grenzen] of the “subjective” and “objective” worlds truly emerge clearly and sharply for the first time. It is one of the essential tasks of the general critique of cognition to demonstrate the laws according to which this delimitation [Abgren­ zung] in the purely theoretical domain is accomplished with the methods of scientific thinking. This critique shows that “subjective” and “objective” being are not from the beginning strictly separate spheres of fully defined content but that both become determined only in the process of cognition and in accordance with its means and conditions. The categorical separation between “I” and “not-I” thus proves to be a consistent, effective function of theoretical thinking, whereas the manner in which this function is fulfilled, how the contents of “subjective” and “objective” being are delimited against one another, is different depending on the stage [Stufe] of cognition achieved. For the theoretical-scientific view of the world, the consistent and necessary elements [Elemente] of experience are the “objective,” whose contents are, however, awarded this consistency and on which necessity depends, on the one hand, on the general methodological standard that thinking applies to experience and, on the other hand, on the state of cognition at that time – i.e., conditioned by the totality [Gesamtheit] of the empirical and theoretical insights that it has secured. Seen in this context, how we apply and implement the conceptual opposition of “subjective” and “objective” in the configuration of the world of experience and in the construction of nature shows itself to be not so much the solution to the problem of cognition as, rather, its

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perfect expression.7 This opposition, however, appears in all its richness and its inner diversity only when we follow it beyond the boundaries of theoretical thinking and its specific conceptual means. Not only science but language, myth, art, and religion as well provide the building blocks from which the world of the “actual,” as well as that of the spiritual, the world of the I, are constructed for us. They too are not simple formations [Gebilde] that we can insert into a given world; rather, we must comprehend them as functions by means of which a distinctive configuration of being and a particular division and separation takes place. Just as the means that each function employs is different, each one presupposes and applies entirely different standards and criteria, such that the result is also different. The scientific concepts of truth and reality are different from those of religion or art; thus, it is a particular and incomparable basic relationship that is not so much designated as founded between the “inner” and the “outer,” between the being of the I and the being of the world. Before it can be decided between all of these manifold, intersecting, and conflicting views and claims, they must first be differentiated with critical rigor and precision. The achievement of each one must be measured by itself and not by the standards and demands of any of the others – and only at the end of this consideration can the question be raised as to whether and how all of these different forms of the apprehension of the world and of the I are compatible with one another. But if they do not portray one and the same “thing” existing in itself, might they not, however, contribute to a totality and to a unified systematization of spiritual activity [Tun]? For the philosophy of language, this way of considering things was first apprehended and carried out with full clarity by Wilhelm von Humboldt. For Humboldt, the phonetic sign that presents the material of all language formation is, in a sense, the bridge between the subjective and objective, because in it the essential elements of the two are united. For, on the one hand, the sound is spoken – i.e., brought forth and formed by ourselves; on the other hand, as a sound heard, it is a part of the sensible reality that encompasses us. We apprehend and know it as something both “inward” and “outward” – as an inward energy that expresses and objectifies itself in something outward. For in that in language the spiritual striving breaks open a path through the lips, the product of that striving returns to one’s own ear. The



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representation is transformed into actual objectivity, without being deprived of subjectivity on that account. Only language is able to do this; and without this transformation, occurring constantly with the help of language even in silence, into an objectivity that returns to the subject, the act of the formation of the concept, and with it all true thinking, is impossible. . . . For indeed, language cannot be regarded as a material that just sits there, surveyable in its totality, or communicable little by little, but must be seen as something eternally producing itself, where the laws of production are determined, rather the scope and even to some extent the nature of the product remains totally unspecified. . . . As the individual sound stands between the object and the human, so the whole of language steps in between the human and the nature that operates, both inwardly and outwardly, upon the human. The human surrounds itself with a world of sounds, so as to assimilate and process within itself the world of objects.8

An element that is valid for every mode and every form of symbolbestowing is designated in this critical-idealistic view of language. In each one of its freely projected signs, spirit apprehends the “object” by apprehending at the same time itself and the proper lawfulness of its own act of forming [Bilden]. And this distinctive interpenetration prepares the ground [Boden] for the deeper determination of subjectivity as well as objectivity. On the first stage of this determination, it appears as though both opposing elements simply stand separately next to one another and over against one another. In its earliest formations, language can be grasped equally well as the pure expression of the inner or the external, as an expression of mere subjectivity or mere objectivity. In the former case, the speech-sound seems to signify nothing more than the sound of excitement and emotion [Affekt]; in the latter case, it seems to signify nothing more than the simple imitation of sound. The different speculative views that have been expressed on the “origin of language” in fact move between these two extremes, neither of which reaches the core and spiritual nature [Wesen] of language itself. For what language designates and brings to expression is neither one-sidedly subjective nor one-sidedly objective; rather, it effects a new mediation, a distinctive reciprocal determination between the two factors. Neither the mere discharge of emotion [Affekt] nor the repetition of objective phonetic stimuli

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constitutes the characteristic sense and form of language: language arises, rather, only where the two ends are combined into one, thus creating a new, not previously given, synthesis of the “I” and the “world.” And moreover, an analogous relation is produced in every truly independent and original tendency of consciousness. Art, too, can no more be defined and comprehended as the mere expression of the inner than as the reproduction of gestalts of external reality; rather, in it, too, the decisive and distinguishing element is to be sought in how the “subjective” and “objective,” pure feeling and pure figure [Gestalt], merge into one another and acquire precisely in this merging a new, consistent existence and a new content. In all of these examples, we see more clearly than is possible if we limit ourselves to the purely intellectual function that in analyzing the spiritual forms we cannot begin with a rigid, dogmatic demarcation of the subjective over against the objective but that the delimitation and establishment of their regions are accomplished only through these forms. Each particular spiritual energy shares in this establishment in its particular way and consequently contributes to the constitution of the I-concept as well as the world-concept. Neither cognition nor language, myth, and art act as a mere mirror simply reflecting images of a given inward or outward existence [Sein] as it produced them in itself; they are not indifferent media but rather the real sources of light, the conditions of seeing [Sehen] as well as the origins of all configuration.

3.  THE PROBLEM OF “REPRESENTATION” [REPRÄSENTATION] AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS The first problem that confronts us in the analysis of language, art, and myth is to explain how, in general, a certain sensible individual content can be made into the bearer of a general spiritual “signification.” If we content ourselves with grasping only the material existence [Bestand] of all these domains, with describing the physical constitution of the signs that they employ, then we are led back to an ensemble of particular sensations, to simple qualities of sight, hearing, or touch as the ultimate basic elements [Grundelemente]. However, now the miracle occurs: through the manner in which it is considered, this simple sensible material acquires a new and multifaceted spiritual life. When the physical sound – distinguished as such only by pitch and tone, intensity and quality – is formed into



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a speech-sound, it becomes the expression of the finest intellectual and emotional differences [Differenzen]. What it immediately is completely recedes behind what it mediately accomplishes and “means” [besagt]. The concrete-individual elements [Einzelelemente], out of which the work of art is constructed, also clearly exhibit this basic relationship. No artistic formation [Gebilde] can be understood as the simple sum of these elements [Elemente]; rather, in each a determinate law and a specific sense [Sinn] of aesthetic form-bestowing are at work. The synthesis, in which consciousness connects a sequence of tones into the unity of a melody, is obviously entirely different from the synthesis in virtue of which a manifold of speech-sounds fit together into the unity of a “sentence.” They all share, however, one thing in common: in both cases, the individualsensible details do not stand by themselves; rather, they are integrated into a conscious whole, from which they receive their qualitative sense. If we attempt to set out before us an initial general overview of the totality [Gesamtheit] of relations by which the unity of consciousness is designated and as such constituted, then we are first led to a series of certain basic relations [Grundrelationen] that confront one another as distinctive and autonomous “modes” of connection. The element of “juxtaposition” [Nebeneinander] as it appears in the form of space; the element of “succession” [Nacheinander] as in the form of time; and the connection of determinations of being in such a way that one is grasped as a “thing,” the other as a “property,” or of successive events [Ereignissen] in such a way that the one appears as the cause of the other are all examples of such original types of relation. Sensationalism attempts in vain to derive and explain them from the immediate content of individual impressions. “Five tones on a flute” may, after all, according to Hume’s well-known psychological theory, “give us” the representation of time9; however, this result is possible only if the characteristic element of the relation and order of “succession” has already been tacitly incorporated into the content of the individual tones and with it if the general structure of time is already assumed. For psychological as well as epistemo-critical analysis, the real fundamental forms of relation show themselves in the end to be just those simple and irreducible “qualities” of consciousness as the simple sensible qualities, the elements [Elemente] of visual, auditory, or tactile sensation. And yet philosophical thinking cannot content itself with accepting the manifold of these relations as such, as a simple factual

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state of affairs. With sensations, we may content ourselves with simply enumerating their different basic classes and arranging them before ourselves as an unconnected multitude; by contrast, what pertains to relations [Relationen], so it would seem, what they accomplish as individual forms of connections, comes to be grasped and understood by us only if we think of them as connected with one another through a higher mode of synthesis. Since Plato formulated this problem of the κοινωνία τῶν γενῶν [community of the forms] in The Sophist, the systematic “community” of pure ideas and form-concepts, it has remained alive throughout the history of philosophical thinking. The critical and the metaphysicalspeculative solutions to this problem, however, differ in that they presuppose different concepts of the universal and hence different senses of the logical system. The former view goes back to the concept of the “analytic-universal,” the latter aims at a “synthetic-universal.” In one, we content ourselves with combining the manifold of possible forms of connection into the highest concept of a system and, thus, subordinating them to determinate fundamental laws; in the other, we seek to understand how the totality [Totalität], the concrete totality [Gesamtheit] of particular forms, developed from a single originary-principle. If the latter point of view permits only one starting point and one endpoint – which are connected with one another by the constant application of one and the same methodical principle to a synthetic-deductive demonstration – then the other point of view not only tolerates but also calls for a plurality of different “dimensions” of consideration. It posits the problem of a unity that, from the beginning, renounces simplicity. The different modes of spiritual forming [Formung] are recognized as such, with no attempt at making them fit into a single, simple progressing series. And yet such a view in no way renounces an interconnection of the individual forms; rather, the idea of system is exacerbated by the fact that the concept of a complex system displaces the concept of a simple system. Each form is, so to speak, assigned to a particular plane, within which it affects and in which it unfolds its specific particular nature in complete independence; however, even in the totality [Gesamtheit] of these ideal modes of efficacy now emerge, at the same time, certain analogies, certain typical modes of conduct that are singled out as such and can be described. The first element that we encounter is a difference that may be designated as the difference in the quality and modality of forms. By the “quality”



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of a certain relation, we understand here the particular type of connection, by virtue of which it creates a series within the whole of consciousness, whose members are subjected to a special law of correlation. Thus, for example, “togetherness” over against “succession,” the form of a simultaneous connection over against that of a successive connection, forms one such independent quality. As a result, one and the same form of relation can, however, undergo an inner transformation if it is situated within another form of interconnection [Formzusammenhang]. At the same time, each individual relation always belongs – regardless of its particularity – to a totality of sense [Sinnganze], which possesses its own “nature,” its selfcontained law of form. Thus, for example, the general relation [Relation] that we call “time” exhibits itself just as much as an element [Element] of theoretical-scientific cognition as it does as an essential element [Moment] in certain formations [Gebilde] of aesthetic consciousness. Time – as explained in the beginning of Newton’s Mechanics, as the stable basis of all events [Geschehen] and as the uniform measure of all alterations in themselves – seems, at first sight, to have nothing more than the name in common with the time that prevails in a musical artwork and its rhythmic measures. And yet this unity of naming implies a unity of signification at least insofar as the general and abstract quality is posited [gesetzt] in both, which is designated by the term “succession.” However, there prevails in the consciousness of the laws [Gesetzen] of nature as the laws of the temporal form of events [Geschehen] and in the comprehension of the rhythmic measure of tonal formations a “mode” of succession proper to each. Analogously, we can apprehend certain spatial forms, certain complexes of lines and figures [Figuren], in one case as an artistic ornament and in another as a geometrical drawing, and by virtue of this apprehension bestow one and the same material with an entirely different sense. The unity of space that we construct in aesthetic vision and generating, in painting, sculpture, and architecture, belongs to a completely different stage [Stufe] from that which is presented in certain geometrical theorems and in a determinate form of geometrical axioms. In the one case, we have the modality of the logical-geometric concept; in the other, we have the modality of artistic spatial imagination. In the one case, space is thought of as an ensemble of mutually [voneinander] dependent determinations, as a system of “grounds” and “consequences”; in the other case, it is apprehended as a whole, in the dynamic interplay [Ineinander] of its

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individual moments, as an intuitive and emotional unity. And even with this, the series of configurations that the consciousness of space passes through is not yet exhausted; for, in mythical thinking, a distinctive view of space is exhibited; a mode of organization and “orientation” of the world according to spatial criteria that are sharply and characteristically separated from the way the spatial organization of the cosmos is accomplished in empirical thinking.10 Likewise, for example, the general form of “cau­ sality” appears in a completely different light once we consider it on the level of scientific thinking or that of mythical thinking. Myth, too, knows of the concept of causality: it employs it both in its general theogonies and cosmogonies as well as in interpreting a wealth of individual appearances that it mythically “explains” on the basis of this concept. The ultimate motive of this “explanation” is, however, quite different from that which governs the cognition of causality by means of theoreticalscientific concepts. The problem of the origin as such is common to both science and myth; however, the type and character, the modality, of the origin alters as soon as we move from the one domain to the other – as soon as we grasp the origin not as a mythical potency but to use it as a scientific principle and come to understand it as such. We see, then, that to characterize a determinate form of relation in its concrete application and signification, not only is the description of its qualitative constitution as such required but so is an indication of the complete system in which it stands. If we designate the different kinds of relation [Relation] – such as the relation of space, time, causality, etc. – as R1, R2, R3 . . ., then to each one there belongs a special “index of modality,” µ1, µ2, µ3, indicating the functional interconnection and context of signification in which it is to be taken. For each of these contexts of signification, language as well as scientific cognition, art as well as myth, possesses its own constitutive principle that imprints its signet, as it were, on all the particular configurations within it. The result is an extraordinary manifold of form-relationships, whose richness and inner entanglements, however, can be surveyed only through a rigorous analysis of each individual total-form [Gesamtform]. However, even apart from this particularization, the most general consideration of the whole of consciousness already leads back to certain fundamental conditions of unity, to the conditions of connectability, those of spiritual combination [Zusammenfassung], and those of spiritual presentation as such. It belongs



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to the nature [Wesen] of consciousness itself that no content can be posited in it without, through this simple act of positing, a total complex of other content being already co-posited. Kant once formulated, in his treatise on negative quantities, the problem of causality as to understand [verstehen] why because something is, at the same time something else, completely different ought and must be. If with dogmatic metaphysics, we take the concept of absolute existence as our starting point, then indeed this question must appear as ultimately insoluble. For an absolute being calls for ultimate absolute elements [Elemente], each of which is a substantial rigidity for itself [für sich] and must be comprehended for itself [für sich]. However, this concept of substance offers no necessary or even comprehensible transition to the multiplicity of the world, to the manifoldness and diversity of its particular appearances. Even in Spinoza, the transition from substance, as that which in se est et per se concipitur11 [in itself and is comprehended by itself], to the series of singular, dependent and changeable modi is not so much deduced as arrived at surreptitiously. Generally, metaphysics sees itself, as its history shows, ever-more clearly placed before an intellectual dilemma. Either it must conceptually take seriously the basic concept of absolute existence, in which case all relations [Relationen] evaporate, in which all multiplicity of space, time, and causality threatens to dissolve into mere semblance, or it must let these relations [Beziehungen] – in that it recognizes them as merely exterior and contingent, as “accidents” – ensue in being [zum Sein hinzutreten lassen]. However, metaphysics then at once encounters a peculiar setback: it becomes increasingly apparent that this same “contingency” is accessible to cognition and can be apprehended in its forms, while the naked “being” [Wesen], which should be thought of as the foundation of the particular determinations, is lost in the void of mere abstraction. What began as the “all [All] of reality [Realität],” as what should be understood as the ensemble [Inbegriff] of all reality [Wirklichkeit], proves ultimately to be something that is still only a moment of sheer determinability but contains in itself nothing more than an independent and positive determination. This dialectic of the metaphysical theory of being can be avoided only if, from the start, “content” and “form,” “element” [Element] and “relation,” are not comprehended as independent determinations of each other but appear as given together with one another and thought of in

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a reciprocal determination. More sharply in the history of thinking, the modern “subjective” turn of speculation has brought this general methodological demand increasingly to the fore. For the question assumes a new shape once it is displaced from the ground [Boden] of absolute being to that of consciousness. Every “simple” quality of consciousness has a determinate content [Gehalt] only insofar as it is, at the same time, apprehended in a thoroughgoing unity with others and in a thoroughgoing separation from others.The function of this unity and this separation cannot be removed from the content of consciousness; rather, it constitutes one of its essential conditions. Accordingly, there is not “something” in consciousness that does not eo ipso [by (or from) the thing itself] and without further mediation give rise to “another” and to a series of others. For every single existence [Sein] of consciousness has its determination through the fact that in it, at the same time, the whole of consciousness is in some form co-posited and represented [repräsentiert]. Only in and through this representation [Repräsentation] does what we call the givenness and “presence” [Präsenz] of the content become possible. This becomes immediately evident when we consider even the simplest instance of this “presence” [Präsenz] – the temporal relation and the temporal “present” [Gegenwart]. Nothing would seem more certain than that everything that is actually, immediately given in consciousness refers to a single point of time, to a determined “now,” and is beheld in it. The past is “no longer” present [vorhanden] in consciousness, and the future is “not yet” present [vorhanden] in it: neither seems to belong at all to its concrete reality, its true actuality; rather, they dissolve into mere intellectual abstractions. And yet, the content that we designate as the “now” is nothing other than the eternally fluid boundary dividing the past from the future. This boundary cannot be posited independently of what it bounds: it exists only in this act of division and not as something that could be thought before this act and detached from it. The individual temporal moment [Augenblick], insofar as it can be determined as temporal, can be apprehended only as the fluid transition from past to future, from the no– longer [Nicht-Mehr: nothing no more] to the not-yet [Noch-Nicht: as yet nothing], and not as static substantial existence. Where the now is different, where it is taken absolutely, it, in truth, no longer forms an element [Element] of time but the negation of time. The temporal movement now appears to be halted in it and as a result annihilated. For a thinking, such



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as that of the Eleatic, that aims entirely at absolute being and strives to remain in it, the flying arrow rests – because in every indivisible “now,” it belongs to [zukommen] only one unequivocally defined and indivisible “location.” In contrast, if the temporal moment [Moment] is thought of as belonging to temporal motion, then instead of singling it out and opposing to it becoming, it should really be situated in becoming, and this is possible only in that the process as a whole is at the same time co-thought in the moment [Moment] as singular and in that both, moment and process, merge together for consciousness into a perfect unity. The form of time itself can in no other way be “given” for us then by illustrating the timeelement [Zeitelement] forward and backward in the time series. If we think an individual cross-section of consciousness, we are able to apprehend it as such not by just dwelling in this cross-section, but by going beyond it in the different directions of relation by means of certain spatial, temporal, or qualitative functions of ordering. Only because we are able in this way to hold onto a not-being [Nicht-Seiende] within the actual being [Sein] of consciousness are we able to hold onto the not-given within the given and only because of this ability does there exist for us that unity that we designate, on the one hand, as the subjective unity of consciousness and, on the other, as the objective unity of the object. The psychological and epistemo-critical analysis of the consciousness of space leads us back to the same originary-function of representation [Repräsentation]. For initially, every apprehension of a spatial “whole” assumes the formation of a whole time series: even though the “simultaneous” synthesis of consciousness accounts for a real and original essential factor of consciousness, it can complete and present itself only ever on the basis of the successive synthesis. If certain elements [Elemente] are to be combined into a spatial whole, then they must pass through the sequence of consciousness and be related to one another in accordance with a determinate rule. Neither the sensationalist psychology of the English nor the metaphysical psychology of Herbart have been able to render comprehensible how the consciousness of spatial connection arises from the consciousness of temporal connection – how the consciousness of “togetherness” can form itself from a mere sequence of visual, tactile, and motor sensations, or from a complex of a simple series of representations. However, one thing is certain: despite their entirely different points of departure, these theories are consistent in

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recognizing that space in its concrete configuration and organization is not “given” as a ready-made possession of the psyche [Seele] but comes into being only in the process of consciousness and, so to speak, in its movement as a whole. However, this very process would disintegrate for us into sheer, isolated, opposing and unrelated individual details, permitting of no combination [Zusammenfassung] into one result, if there were not, here again, the general possibility of apprehending the whole in the part [Element] and the part [Element] in the whole. Here too, the “expression of the many in the one,”12 the multorum in uno expressio, as Leibniz characterized consciousness in general, proves to be decisive. We attain the intuition of certain spatial formations [Gebilde] only in that, on the one hand, we combine into one representation the groups of sensible perceptions that mutually displace one another in immediatesensible lived-experience and, on the other, we allow this unity to break up into the diversity of its individual components. Spatial consciousness is initially constructed in this interplay of concentration and analysis. The shape [Gestalt] appears as potential motion, while motion appears as potential shape [Gestalt]. In Berkeley’s investigations into the theory of seeing [Sehen], which forms the starting point of modern physiological optics, he compared the development of spatial perception to the development of language. There is a kind of natural language  – i.e., a fixed correlation between signs and significations – by which, according to him, spatial intuition can initially be acquired and secured. It is not that we picture [abbilden] a readily available tangible archetype [Urbild] of “absolute space” in our representation but rather that we learn to use the different, intrinsically incommensurate impressions of the manifold domains of the senses – in particular, those of sight and touch  – as representatives [Repräsentanten] and signs for one another, that the world of space as a world of perceptions that are interrelated and systematically linked together arises for us. Berkeley has attempted here, according to his basic sensationalist’s presuppositions, to understand the language of spirit, which he demonstrated to be a condition of spatial intuition, exclusively as a language of the senses. However, upon closer scrutiny, this approach negates itself. For it is already located in the concept of language itself that it can never be purely sensible, but rather, it exhibits a distinctive interpenetration and interaction of sensible and conceptual factors, so long as in it the



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fulfillment of the individual-sensible signs is always provided with a general intellectually significant content. The same is true of every other kind of “representation” [Repräsentation] – the presentation of an element of consciousness in and through another. We think that the sensible foundation of the construction of the representation of space is given to us in certain visual, motor, and tactile sensations; however, the sum of these sensations contains no trace of that characteristic form of unity that we call space. Rather, this form of unity manifests itself in a kind of correlation through which each of these individual qualities can be merged into their totality [Gesamtheit]. In this way, we think an infinity of possible directions as already posited in each element [Element], provided that we posit it as spatial, and the ensemble of these directions constitutes the whole of spatial intuition. The spatial “image” that we possess of an individual empirical object – of a house, for example – comes about only in that we extend an individual, relatively limited perspectival view in this way, in that we employ it only as a starting point and suggestion in order to construct from it a complex whole of spatial relations [Relati­ onen]. In this way, space is understood less as a static vessel and container into which ready-made “things” enter than as exhibiting an ensemble of ideal functions that mutually complement and determine one another into [zu] the unity of a result. Just as earlier and later as the fundamental directions of temporal progress were already expressed in the simple “now” of time, so too are a “there” and an “over-there” as already posited in every “here.” The individual isolated position is not given before the system of positions; rather, it is given only in respect of it and in a correlative relation to it. A third form of unity, which is raised above spatial and temporal unity, is the form of the objectifying connection. When we join together an ensemble of determinate properties into [zu] the whole of a stable thing with multifarious and varying characteristic traits, then this combination presupposes the connection in juxtaposition and succession, without, however, merging into it.The relative constant must be distinguished from the variable; certain spatial configurations [Konfigurationen] must be apprehended before the concept of the thing, as the constant “bearer” of the variable properties, can form itself. However, the thought of this “bearer” adds a characteristic new element of independent significance to the intuition of spatial togetherness and temporal succession. The empiricist’s analysis

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of cognition has, of course, always repeatedly attempted to deny this independence. It sees in the thought of the thing nothing other than a purely external form of connection; it attempts to show that the content and form of the “object” are exhausted in the sum of its properties. However, the same basic lacuna that adheres to the empiricist’s dissection of the I-concept and I-consciousness immediately becomes apparent. When Hume explains the I as a “bundle of perceptions,”13 this explanation – which, even though it retains in it the fact of combination in general, says nothing whatsoever about the particular form and type of synthesis into [zu] the I – distinguishes itself because in the concept of perception, the concept of the I, which apparently should have been analyzed and disassembled [zerlegt] into its components, is included still completely reassembled [unzerlegt]. What makes the individual perception a perception, what distinguishes it, for example, as a quality of “representation” of any thing-quality, is precisely its “belonging to [zu] the I.” This “belonging to [zu] the I” does not originate in the subsequent combination [Zusam­ menfassung] of a plurality of perceptions but is already initially inherent in each individual perception. A completely analogous relationship exists in the connection of manifold “properties” into [zu] the unity of a “thing.” When we combine the sensations of extension, sweetness, roughness, and whiteness into the representation of “sugar” as a unified tangible whole, then this is possible only insofar as each individual one of these qualities is originally thought as determined in reference to this whole. The fact that whiteness or sweetness or any of the rest is not apprehended merely as a state in me but rather as a “property,” as an objective quality, already completely includes in itself the sought-after function and perspective of the “thing.” Thus, a basic general schema already prevails here in the positing of the individual, which, then, in the ongoing experience of the “thing” and its “properties” is filled with ever-new concrete content. Just as the point, as a simple and individual location, is possible only “in” space (i.e., logically speaking under the presupposition of a system of all determinations of location) – just as the thought of the temporal “now” can be determined only in regard to a series of moments and to the order and sequence of succession that we call “time” – the same, therefore, also applies to the relationship of things and properties. In all these relationships, whose closer determination and analysis [Zergliederung] is an object [Sache] of a specialized theory



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of cognition, the same basic character of consciousness displays itself: the whole here is not first extracted from the parts, but rather, every positing of a part already includes in itself the positing of the whole, not its content but its general structure and form. Every individual already originally belongs here to a determinate complex and brings the rule of this complex itself to expression. The totality [Gesamtheit] of these rules, however, constitutes the true unity of consciousness, as a unity of time, space, objective connection, etc. The traditional psychological concept of language scarcely features an entirely appropriate expression for the designation of these states of affairs because only recently, in its transition into the modern “gestalt psychology,” has psychology torn itself away from the presuppositions of the basic view of sensationalism. For the latter, which resolves all objectivity into “simple” impression, every connection consists in nothing more than mere combination [Zusammenfassung], in the “association” of impressions. This term is broad enough to uniformly encompass every possible relation that exists in consciousness; however, at the same time, by its very breadth, it renders its particularity and particular nature unrecognizable. Relations of the most diverse quality and modality are indiscriminately designated by it. “Association” means the combination of elements [Elemente] into the unity of time or the unity of space, into the unity of the I or the object, into the whole of a thing or of a sequence of events [Ereignissen] – into a series whose members are combined through the standpoint of cause and effect and as such through the standpoint of “means” and “end.” “Association” also passes as an adequate expression of the logical law of linking individuals into the comprehensible unity of cognition, as, for example, the forms of configuration that prove effective in the construction of aesthetic consciousness. However, it now emerges that this concept designates at best only the naked fact of combination in general, without revealing anything whatsoever about its specific mode and rule. As a result of this, the diversity of paths and directions by which consciousness arrives at its syntheses is totally concealed. If we designate the “elements” [Elemente] as a, b, c, d, etc., there is, as we have seen, a precisely graduated and intrinsically differentiated system of manifold functions F (a, b), Ψ (c, d), etc. in which their connection declares itself but that in the allegedly generic concept of association is not so much brought to expression as, on the contrary, made to vanish because it

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brings about a leveling down. And there is still another essential lacuna that adheres to this designation. As closely as the contents connect, and as intimately as they “fuse” together with one another, the contents that can occur in association with each other remain separable in terms of their sense and origins. In the progress of experience, the contents are joined together into increasingly stable associations and groups; however, their consistent existence as such is not initially given through the group, but rather, it is already given prior to it. And yet this relationship of the “part” to the “whole” is principally overcome in the genuine syntheses of consciousness. In this genuine synthesis of consciousness, the whole does not originate [entsteht] from the parts, but rather, it constitutes them and gives them their essential signification. Thus, as has been shown, when we think of any limited segment of space, the tendency of the whole of space is co-posited with it; in every individual temporal moment [Augen­ blick], the general form of succession is co-posited with it; and the positing of any particular property grasps the general relationship between “substance” and “accident” and thus the characteristic thing-form in itself. It is, however, this very interpenetration, this intensive “beingconditioned-through-one-another” that association, as an expression of a mere togetherness of representations, leaves unexplained. The empirical rules for the mere flow of representations that it sets up fail to render intelligible the specific basic formations [Gebilde] and basic figures [Gestalten] in which the representations band together and the unity of “sense” that arises between them. The rationalist’s theory of cognition set out to recover and demonstrate the independence of this “sense.” One of the essential historical merits of this theory is that by virtue of one and the same intellectual turn, it has established a new and deeper view of consciousness in general and a new concept of the “object” of cognition. It confirmed Descartes’ dictum that the unity of the objective, the unity of substance, could not be apprehended in perception, but only in the reflection of the mind [Geist] on itself, in inspectio mentis [inspection of the mind]. The basic theory of rationalism stands in the sharpest opposition to the empiricist theory of “associations” – and yet here too, the inner tension between two fundamentally different essential elements [Elemente] of consciousness, between its mere “matter” and its pure “form,” are not sublated. For the ground for the con­ nection of the contents of consciousness is also sought in an activity that in



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some way approaches the individual contents from the outside. According to Descartes, the “ideas” of outward perception, the ideas of lightness and darkness, roughness and smoothness, colored and sonorous, are in and for themselves only pictures [Bilder] in us (velut picturae) and, in this sense, are merely subjective states [Zuständlichkeiten]. What leads us beyond this stage, what enables us to progress from the manifold and variability of impressions to the unity and constancy of the object is the function of judgment and “unconscious inference,” which is entirely independent of these impressions. The objective unity is a purely formal unity that, as such, can neither be heard nor seen but rather can be apprehended only in the logical process of pure thinking. Descartes’ metaphysical dualism is ultimately rooted in his methodological dualism: the theory of the absolute division between the extended substance and the thinking substance is only a metaphysical expression for an opposition that is already discernible in the presentation of the pure function of consciousness itself. And even with Kant, in the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, this opposition between sensibility and thinking, between the basic “material” and “formal” determinations of consciousness, is retained in its old, undiminished force, although here the idea immediately arises that perhaps the two may be interconnected in a common root unknown to us. However, the principal objection to this formulation of the problem shows that the contraposition expressed in it is a product of abstraction, whereas the unity of the matter and form of consciousness, of the “particular” and the “universal,” of the sensible “elements of givenness” and the pure “elements of order,” constitutes precisely originally certain and originally known phenomenon; the logical estimation and evaluation of individual factors must be based on the analysis of each element of consciousness. If we wished to make this state of affairs clear with a mathematical simile and allegory – though, of course, it goes beyond the boundaries of the mathematical – we might, in opposition to mere “association,” choose the term “integration.” The element of consciousness [Bewußtseinselement] is to the whole of consciousness not as an extensive part to a sum of parts but as a differential to its integral. Just as the differential equation of movement expresses its course and its general law, we must think of the general structural laws of consciousness as already given with each of its elements [Elemente], in any of its crosssections – not given with, in the sense of real and independent contents but in the sense of tendencies and directions that are already inherent in

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the sensible individual. Every “existence” in consciousness consists precisely in the fact, and only in the fact, that it immediately goes out beyond itself in such a different direction of synthesis. Just as the consciousness of the moment [Augenblick] already includes in itself the pointing to the time series and the consciousness of a single spatial position already includes in itself the pointing to “the” space as the ensemble and allness [Allheit] of every possible determination of location, there prevail in general many relations through which the form of the whole is expressed in the consciousness of individuals. The “integral” of consciousness is constructed not from the sum of its sensible elements [Elemente] (a, b, c, d. . .), but from the totality [Gesamtheit], as it were, of its differential relation and differential form (dr1, dr2, dr3 . . .). The full actuality of consciousness unfolds only what was already included as “potency” and as a general possibility in each of its separate elements. With this, we obtain the most general critical solution for Kant’s question as to how it is thinkable that because “something” is, something “other,” totally different from it, must also be. The relationship, which inevitably seemed more and more paradoxical the more sharply it was examined and analyzed from the standpoint of absolute being, becomes necessary and immediately intelligible when it is looked at from the standpoint of consciousness. For here, there is not from the beginning an abstract “one” that confronts an equally abstract separated and detached “other”; but rather, here the one is “in” the many, just as the many is “in” the one: in the sense that each reciprocally conditions and reciprocally represents [repräsentieren] the other.

4.  THE IDEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SIGN: OVERCOMING THE PICTURE THEORY [ABBILDTHEORIE] The previous considerations set out to give a kind of epistemo-critical “deduction”; a grounding and justification of the concept of representation [Repräsentation], inasmuch as representation, the presentation of one content in and through another, should be recognized as an essential pre­ requisite for the construction of consciousness itself and as a condition of its inherent formal unity. The following study, however, will not be directed toward this general logical significance of the representative function.The problem of the sign will be pursued not backward to its ultimate “grounds” but forward to its concrete unfolding and configuration



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[Ausgestaltung], which it undergoes in the manifold of the different cultural domains. For this treatment, a new foundation must now be established. We must go back to “natural” symbolism, to that presentation of the whole of consciousness that is necessarily contained or at least inherent in every individual element and fragment of consciousness, if we want to comprehend the artificial symbols, the “arbitrary” signs that consciousness creates in language, art, and myth. The force and achievement of these mediating signs would remain a mystery if they did not have their ultimate root in an original spiritual process that is grounded in the nature [Wesen] of consciousness. That a sensible individual, such as the physical sound of speech, can be the bearer of a purely spiritual significance can ultimately be intelligible only if the basic function of signifying itself is already present and effective [vorhanden und wirksam] before the positing of individual signs, so that they are not first created in this positing but only fixed and applied to an individual case. Because every separate content of consciousness is situated in a network of manifold relations, by virtue of which, in its simple being and self-presentation, it also includes in itself a pointing to other and still-other contents, there can and must be certain formations [Gebilde] of consciousness in which the pure form of pointing to is, as it were, sensibly embodied. Hence the distinctive dual nature of these formations [Gebilde]: their dependence on the sensible, however, also includes in itself a freedom from the sensible. In every linguistic “sign,” in every mythical or artistic “image,” a spiritual content [Gehalt], which in and for itself points beyond everything sensible, is transformed into the form of the sensible, into something visible, audible, or tangible. An independent mode of configuration emerges, a specific activity of consciousness, which is differentiated from the givenness of all immediate sensation and perception but which makes use of this very givenness as a vehicle, as a means of expression. This “natural” symbolism, which we have found inherent in the basic character of consciousness, is, on the one hand, utilized and retained and, on the other hand, surpassed and refined. For in this “natural” symbolism, there is always a certain component of consciousness that, though lifted out from the whole, nevertheless retains the force to represent [vertreten] this whole and through this representation [Vertretung], in a certain sense, reestablishes it. An available content possessed the capacity to make present not only itself but, at the same time, another content not

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immediately given but given only through its mediation. The symbolic signs that we encounter in language, myth, and art, however, “are” not first and then, beyond this being, acquire a determinate signification; rather, their being first arises out of signification. Their content [Gehalt] merges purely and completely into the function of signifying. Here consciousness, to apprehend the whole in the individual, no longer depends on the stimulus of the individual, which must be given as such; rather, here consciousness creates the determinate concrete-sensible contents as an expression for a determinate complex of signification. Because these contents, as self-created contents, are also entirely in the forceful power of consciousness, so it is able, through them, to also “evoke” freely, as designating the expression of all those significances anew. When, for example, we link a given intuition or representation [Vorstellung] with an arbitrary linguistic sound, initially we seem to have added almost nothing to its proper content. And yet upon closer scrutiny, in this creation of the linguistic sign, the content also assumes a new “character” for consciousness because it receives a new determination. Its sharp and clear spiritual “reproduction” proves to be literally bound to the act of linguistic “production.” For the task of language is not merely to repeat determinations and differences that are already present in the representation [Vorstellung] but also to posit them as such and render them recognizable. And so in every sphere, through the freedom of spiritual doing, the chaos of sensible impressions initially begins to clear up and to assume for us a fixed gestalt. The fluid impression acquires form and duration for us only through a forming confrontation [bildend gegenübertreten] in some tendency of sign-bestowing. In science and language, in art and myth, this transformation into the gestalt is accomplished in different ways and according to different principles of formation; however, they all correspond in that which ultimately stands before us as the product of their activity [Tun], which in no way resembles the mere material with which they initially began. Thus, in the basic function of the sign-bestowing in general and in its different tendencies, spiritual consciousness first truly distinguishes itself from sensible consciousness. The passive abandonment [Hingegebenheit] to some outer existence is replaced by an independent imprinting that we give it and by which it separates for us into different regions and forms of reality. Myth and art, language and science, are, in this sense, imprintings toward [zu] being: they are not simple pictures



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[Abbilder] of an available [vorhanden] reality but present [darstellen] the main directions of spiritual movement, the ideal process in which reality is constituted [konstituiert] for us as one and many – as a manifold of configurations that are ultimately held together by a unity of signification. Only if we look ahead to this goal does the particular determination of the different systems of signs and the use that consciousness makes of them become intelligible. If signs were nothing more than a repetition of a determinate, in itself finished, individual content of intuition or representation, then it would be unclear both what would be accomplished by a mere copy [Kopie] of something available [Vorhanden] and how, strictly speaking, such a copy should be achieved. For it is obvious that an imitation can never approach the original, can never replace it for spiritual contemplation. From the presupposition of such a norm, we are necessarily led to an attitude of fundamental skepticism toward the value of the sign in general. If, for example, we considered it as the true and essential task of language to once again only bring to expression in the foreign medium of speech-sounds the very reality that we have before us already complete in individual sensations and intuition, then it can immediately be seen how infinitely far from this task every language must be. Compared to the unlimited abundance and multifariousness of intuitive reality, all linguistic symbols must appear as empty; compared to their individual determination, they must seem abstract and vague. In the moment [Augenblick] in which language attempts to enter into rivalry with sensation or intuition in this respect, its impuissance must appear unmistakable. The πρῶτον ψεῦδος [first falsehood] of the skeptical critique of language is precisely that it assumed this standard as the only valid and possible one. In truth, however, the analysis of language – in particular, if we start not from the mere individual details of words but from the unity of the sentence – shows every linguistic expression to be far removed from a mere impression of the given worlds of sensation or intuition and contains in itself, rather, a determinate independent character of sense-bestowing. And the same relationship applies to signs of the most diverse type and origin [Herkunft]. In a certain sense, it can be said of them all that their value consists not so much in what they retain of the individual concrete-sensible content and its immediate consistent existence as in what in this immediate consistent existence they suppress and abandon. The artistic drawing becomes what it is and distinguishes

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itself from a purely mechanistic reproduction, only through what it omits from the “given” impression. It is not the reproduction of this “given” impression in its sensible totality but rather the singling out of determinate “pregnant” elements  – i.e., elements through which the given is amplified beyond itself and through which the artisticconstructive, synthetic spatial imagination [Raumphantasie] is conducted in a determinate direction. What constitutes the real force of the sign, here as in other domains, is thus precisely that as the immediate, determinate contents recede, the general element of form and relation [Relation] attain ever-sharper and ever-purer expression [Ausprägung]. The individual as such is apparently delimited; however, this is precisely so that the achievement that we have designated as “the integration into the whole” is accomplished more determinately and more forcefully. It has already been shown that every individual of consciousness “exists” only in that it potentially includes in itself the whole and, as it were, is comprehended in constant transition into the whole. The use of the sign, however, initially liberates this potentiality for true actuality. Indeed, one blow now strikes a thousand connections that resonate more or less forcefully and clearly in every positing of the sign. In this positing, consciousness disengages more and more from the direct substrate of sensation and sensible intuition; however, precisely therein it demonstrates more resolutely that inherent, original force of connection and unification. Perhaps this tendency emerges most clearly where it is manifested in the function of the scientific systems of signs. The abstract chemical “formula,” for example, which is used as the designation of a determinate material stuff, contains nothing of what direct observation and sensible perception teaches us about this material stuff; however, instead, it places the particular body in an extraordinarily rich and finely structured complex of relations, of which perception as such knows nothing. It no longer designates the body according to what it sensibly “is” and according to what it immediately gives to us sensibly but grasps it as an ensemble of further possible “reactions,” of further possible causal interconnections that are determined by general rules. The totality [Gesa­ mtheit] of these lawful connections coalesces with the expression of the individual in the chemical formula, and through this, this expression obtains an absolutely new characteristic imprint. As in other cases, the sign serves here to create a mediation for the transition from the mere



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“matter” of consciousness to its spiritual “form.” Precisely because it arises without its own sensible mass, because it, so to speak, floats in the pure ether of signification, it has the ability to bring to exposition the entire complex totality of movements of consciousness rather than just its individual details. It is not the reflection of a fixed consistent existence of consciousness but the guideline of such movement. Thus, the physical substance of the word of language is accordingly only a mere breath of air; however, in this breath prevails an extraordinary force for the dynamic of representation and thoughts. This dynamic is intensified as much as it is regulated by the sign. Already the Leibnizian design of the “characteristica generalis” [general characteristic] emphasizes the fact that an essential and general advantage of the sign is that it serves not only the presentation but, above all, the discovery of certain logical interconnections  – that it not only serves as a symbolic abbreviation for the already known but opens new paths into the unknown, non-given. With each concentration of its content [Gehalt] that it achieves, which at the same time expands its existing boundaries, the synthetic force of consciousness in general is proven from a new angle. The combination [Zusammenfassung], which is given in the sign, not only grants us a mere retrospective but at the same time allows for a new prospective. It posits a relative closure, which, however, immediately contains a challenge to advance further and free the way for this further advancement by making evident its general rule. In particular, the history of science offers the most-diverse evidence for this state of affairs – it shows how significant it was for the solution of a certain problem or complex of problems when it was possible to convey them in a clear and fixed “formula.” Thus, for example, most of the questions, which found their solution in Newton’s concept of fluxion and in Leibniz’ algorithm of differential calculus, were around before Leibniz and Newton and had been tackled from the most diverse directions  – from the angles of algebraic analysis, geometry, and mechanics. All of these problems were truly manageable, however, only once a consistent and comprehensive symbolic expression had been obtained for them: with this, they no longer formed a loose and fortuitous sequence of merely individual questions; rather, the common principle of their origin was designated in a determinate, generally applicable method, in a basic operation whose rules were established.

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The presentation and mediation of an opposition that is given and grounded in the simple concept of consciousness itself are, thus, found in the symbolic function of consciousness. All consciousness displays itself to us in the form of temporal events [Geschehen], but amid these events [Geschehen], certain realms of “gestalts” are lifted out. The element of constant alteration and the element of duration tend to transition into each other and merge into one another [ineinander aufgehen]. This general demand is fulfilled in different ways in the formations [Gebilde] of language, myth, and art and in the intellectual symbols of science. All of these formations [Gebilde] appear, as it were, to immediately belong to the living, constantly renewed process of consciousness, and yet at the same time, there prevails in them the spiritual striving to obtain fixed points or resting places in this process. Thus, consciousness retains in them a character of continuous flow; however, it does not lapse into the indeterminate but structures itself around fixed centers of form and signification. Each such form, in accordance with its pure “in-itself” [Ansich] as a αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτό [itself by itself] in the Platonic sense, is lifted out of the flow of the mere course of representations, but at the same time, to appear at all and to acquire an existence “for us,” it must be represented [repräsentiert] in some way in this flow. In the creation and use of the different groups and systems of symbolic signs, both conditions are fulfilled, insofar as here an individual-sensible content, without ceasing to be such, in fact acquires the force to depict a general validity for consciousness. Here, therefore, the sensationalist axiom “nihil est in intellectu, quod non antea fuerit in sensu”14 [nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses] loses its validity as well as its intellectual inversion. For it is no longer a question of whether the “sensible” precedes or follows the “spiritual” but of the revelation and manifestation [Äußerung] of basic spiritual functions in the material of the sensible itself. Looked at from this standpoint, what appears as the one-sidedness of abstract “empiricism,” as well as the onesidedness of abstract “idealism,” is precisely that this basic relationship is not developed in either to full clarity. On the one hand, a concept of the given and individual is established without it being recognized that all such concepts must, explicitly or implicitly, always already contain in themselves the element and determination of something universal, but on the other hand, the validity and necessity of these determinations in general are asserted without designating the medium by virtue of which



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alone they are able to present themselves in the psychological givenness of consciousness. If, by contrast, we begin from the concrete foundational form of life rather than from abstract postulates, then this dualistic opposition seems sublated. The semblance of an original separation between the intelligible and the sensible, between the “idea” and the “appearance,” vanishes. Of course, we still remain caught up here in a world of “images”; however, it is not a question of images that reproduce some in itself consistently existing world of “things” [Sachen] but of imageworlds whose principle and origin are to be sought in an autonomous creation of spirit. Through them alone do we catch sight of what we call “reality,” and in them alone do we possess it: the highest objective truth that is accessible to spirit is ultimately the form of its own activity [Tun]. In the totality [Totalität] of its own achievements and in the cognition of the specific rule, by which each of them is determined, as well as in the consciousness of the interconnection that combines all of these particular rules into the unity of one task and one solution – in all this – spirit possesses the intuition of itself and that of reality. As for the question, however, as to what absolute actuality is beyond the totality [Gesamtheit] of these spiritual functions, as to what the “thing in itself” might in this sense be, this question, of course, cannot be answered except to say that we learn more and more to recognize it as an ill-formed problem, as a hallucination [Trugbild] of thinking. The true concept of reality [Realität] cannot be squeezed into the mere abstract form of being; rather, it arises in the multiplicity and abundance of the forms of spiritual life, but such a life that is imprinted by the stamp of inner necessity and thereby the stamp of objectivity. In this sense, to speak with Goethe, each new “symbolic form” – not only the conceptual world of cognition but also the intuitive world of art, as well as that of myth or language – signifies a revelation issuing from the inner to the outer, a “synthesis of world and spirit,”15 which first truly assures us of the original unity of the two. At the same time, new light is cast on one final fundamental opposition, with which modern philosophy has always struggled from its initial beginnings and which it has formulated with increasing sharpness. The “subjective” turn that took place in modern philosophy led it more and more to center the totality [Gesamtheit] of its problems in the concept of life rather than in the unity of the concept of being. However, even though this seemed to appease the opposition of subjectivity and

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objectivity in the form in which it appeared in dogmatic ontology and seemed to initiate its ultimate reconciliation, now, in the ambit of life itself, a still more radical opposition emerged. The truth of life seems to be given nowhere else than in its pure immediacy and seems to be enclosed in it; however, all comprehending [Begreifen] and all apprehending [Erfassen] of life seems to threaten and sublate this very immediacy. Of course, if we start from the dogmatic concept of being, then here too, the dualism of being and thinking becomes more and more pronounced as we advance in our reflections; however, there nevertheless appears to linger the possibility and the hope that the image [Bild], which projects [entwirft] the cognition of being, will hold onto at least a remnant of the truth of being. It would seem as if being did not enter into this image of cognition fully and adequately but only with a part of itself, as it reaches over with its own substance into that of cognition, in order to produce in it a more or less faithful reflection of itself. The pure immediacy of life, however, admits of no such separation and decomposition. It can, it seems, be seen wholly or not at all; it does not enter into mediated presentations that we attempt of it, but it continues to stand as a fundamentally other beyond them as their opposition. The original content [Gehalt] of life cannot be apprehended in any form of representation [Repräsentation]; rather, it can be apprehended only in pure intuition [Intuition]. It would seem, therefore, that every view of the spiritual must choose between these two extremes. The decision must be made as to whether we seek the substantial of spirit in its pure originality precedes all mediated config­ urations – or whether we abandon ourselves to the abundance and diversity of these very mediations. Only in the former view do we seem to touch on the actual and genuine kernel of life, which, however, appears as an absolutely simple, in itself enclosed kernel; whereas in the latter view, we allow the entire spectacle [Schauspiel] of the development of spirit to pass by before us. But the deeper we immerse ourselves in it, the more clearly it dissolves into a mere spectacle [Schauspiel], into a reflected picture [Abbild] possessing no independent truth or essential being. The gulf between these two oppositions – it would seem – is never bridged by any effort of mediating thinking, which itself remains entirely on one side of the opposition: the further we progress in the direction of the symbolic, the merely significative [Signifikative], the more we separate ourselves from the originary-ground of pure intuition [Intuition].



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Not only has philosophical mysticism repeatedly stood before this problem and this dilemma, but the pure logic of idealism has repeatedly and most vehemently apprehended and designated it. Plato’s statements in his Seventh Letter concerning the relationship of the “idea” to the “sign” and the necessary inadequacy between the one and the other strike a motif that will continue to recur in all sorts of variations. In Leibniz’ method of cognition, “intuitive [intuitive] cognition” is separated from merely “symbolic” cognition by a sharp cut. Even for the author of the characteristica universalis, all cognition through mere symbols sinks down to the level of “blind cognition” (cogitatio caeca) when compared to intuition [Intuition], as pure vision [Schau], as the actual “sight” [Sicht] of the idea.16 Human cognition can nowhere dispense with images and signs; however, it is thus precisely as human – i.e., characterized as delimited and finite – that it stands opposite the ideal of the perfect, archetypal, and divine understanding. And even Kant, who has assigned this ideal its precise logical place by determining it as a mere boundary concept of cognition, and who believed that in so doing he had critically come to terms with it – even Kant, in a passage that constitutes the purely methodological climax of the Critique of Judgment, once again works out in a fundamentally incisive way the opposition between the “intellectus archetypus” and the “intellectus ectypus,” between intuitive, archetypal understanding and discursive understanding “in need of images.”17 From the standpoint of this opposition, it would seem necessary to show that the richer the symbolic content [Gehalt] of cognition, or of any other spiritual form, becomes, the more its essential content [Gehalt] must wither away. The abundance of images does not designate but rather conceals and veils the imageless-One, which stands behind them and at which, albeit unsuccessfully, they aim. Only the sublation of all figurative [bildlich] determination, only a returning to the “nothing but nothing,”18 as it is called in the language of mysticism, can lead us back to the real originary and essential ground. From a different perspective, this very opposition presents itself as a conflict and as a constant tension between “culture” and “life.” For the necessary fate of culture is that everything it creates in its constant process of configuration and “formation” progressively distances us from the originality of life. The more richly and more energetically spirit is active in forming, the further this very doing seems to remove it from the originary-source of its own being. It shows itself more and more entangled in its own creations – in the words of language, in the images of

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myth or art, in the intellectual symbols of cognition  – which are like a delicate and transparent but nevertheless unbreachable veil. The actual and most profound task of a philosophy of culture, a philosophy of language, cognition, myth, etc., seems to consist, however, precisely in raising this veil – in penetrating the mediating sphere of mere signifying and designating back once more into the original, intuitive looking [intuitiven Schauen]. However, the specific, and only, distinctive organ at the disposal of philosophy conflicts with this task. For philosophy, which finds its fulfillment only in the sharpness of the concept and in the brightness and clarity of “discursive” thinking, the paradise of mysticism, the paradise of pure immediacy, is closed. As a consequence, there is no other way out for philosophy here than to reverse the direction of consideration. Rather than to retrace the path,19 it must seek a way forward to its completion. If all culture proves effective in the creation of certain spiritual imageworlds, of certain symbolic forms, then the aim of philosophy is not to go behind all of these creations but rather to understand and to make conscious their basic forming [gestaltend] principle. The content [Gehalt] of life rises up to its true form only in this consciousness. Life emerges out of the sphere of purely natural given existence: it remains, however, no more a part of this existence than a mere biological process, but rather, it transforms and accomplishes itself toward the form of “spirit.” Thus, instead of apprehending the content [Gehalt] of life, the negation of the symbolic forms would, in fact, destroy the spiritual form with which this content [Gehalt] necessarily proves to be bound for us. If we take this the other way around – i.e., if we no longer pursue the ideal of a passive vision of spiritual realities but rather situate ourselves amid their activity [Aktivität] – if we apprehend them not as the static contemplation of a being [Seiende] but as the functions and energies of forming [Bilden], then in this forming [Bilden], as different and dissimilar as the gestalts [Gestalten] arising from it may be, we may extract certain common and typical basic features of configuration [Gestaltung]. If the philosophy of culture succeeds in apprehending and making visible such basic features, then it has thus fulfilled, in a new sense, its task of demonstrating the unity of the nature [Wesen] of spirit as opposed to the multiplicity of its manifestations; for this nature [Wesen] shows itself most clearly in the fact that the manifold of its products does not affect the unity of its producing but rather, to the contrary, proves and confirms it.



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ENDNOTES   1 Cf. especially Plato, The Sophists, 243Cff.   2 This is discussed in greater detail in my book Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1920); cf. especially the first section on “Maßbegriffe und Dingbegriffe.” [Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1923), chap. 1, “Concepts of Measure and Concepts of Things,” 361–366.]   3 Heinrich Hertz, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt (Leipzig: F. A. Barth, 1894), xff. [Heinrich Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, trans. D. E. Jones and J. T. Walley (New York, NY: Macmillan and Co., 1899), 1.]   4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xi.   5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Ernst Stiedenroths Psychologie zur Erklärung der Seelenerscheinungen,” in Werke, ed. by order of the Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen: Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1893), vol. XI, 73–77: 75.   6 Cf. Wilhelm Wundt, “Die Kunst,” in Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Mythus, Sprache und Sitte (2nd ed., Leipzig: Engelmann, 1904), vol. 3, 115ff.   7 For a more detailed treatment, see my book Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1910), chap. 6. [Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relatiity.]   8 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, ed. Albert Leitzmann, Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 7, no. I, 55ff. See Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (3 vols. Berlin, 1836–39), vol. I, “Einleitung.” [Humboldt, On Language (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 56, 58, 62.]   9 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, book 1, part 2, section III: Of the Other Qualities of Our Idea of Space and Time. 10 Cf. my study Die Begriffsform im Mythischen Denken, vol. 1 (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg) (Leipzig und Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1922). [Ernst Cassirer, “The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking (1922),” in The Warburg Years (1919– 1933 – Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 1–71.)] 11 Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics, I, Def. 3. 12 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Specimen inventorum de admirandis naturae generalis arcanis,” in Philosophische Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), 309–318: 317. 13 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (book I, part 4, section 6). 14 See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (book III, chapter 1, section 5). 15 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Über Naturwissenschaft im Allgemeinen, einzelne Betrachtungen und Aphorismen,” in Werke, vol. XI, 103–163: 128.

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16 Cf. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis,” Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 4, 422ff. 17 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5: 408. 18 [Angelus Silesius: – “Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn ruhrt kein Nun noch Hier; Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir.”] 19 [“den Weg zurückzutun” cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xiv.]

Volume 1 Toward a Phenomenology of the Linguistic Form

I THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 1 1.  THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM (PLATO, DESCARTES, LEIBNIZ) The philosophical question about the origin and nature [Wesen] of language is basically as old as the question about the origin and nature [Wesen] of being. For what characterizes the initial conscious reflection on the whole of the world is that for it language and being, word and sense, have not yet been separated from each other but rather appeared to it as an indivisible unity. Because language is a prerequisite and condition of reflection, because philosophical “awareness” [Besonnenheit] is awakened only in and through language, the initial mindfulness of spirit, thus, also always already finds language present as a given reality [Realität], as a “reality” [Wirklichkeit] that is physically commensurable and on par with it. The world of language surrounds the human in the moment [Augenblick] in which the human first directed its regard [Blick] toward it with the same determinateness and necessity, the same “objectivity,” as does the world of things that confronts it. Like the world of things,

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language stands before the human as a whole, which possesses its own nature [Wesen] and its own entirely individual discretion disconnected from bonds. No more than the constitution of things or the immediate constitution of their sensible impressions, the being and significance of words do not return, at this initial stage of contemplation, to the free activity of spirit. The word is not a designation and denomination, nor a spiritual symbol of being; rather, it is a very real part of being. The mythical intuition of language, which always precedes philosophical intuition, is consistently characterized by this indifference of word and thing [Sache]. For it, the being [Wesen] of each thing [Sache] is decided in its name. The magical effects are attached immediately to the word and its possession. Whoever seizes possession of the name and knows how to use it has acquired power over the object – has made it their own with all its forces. All word and name magic is based on this presupposition that the world of things and the world of names is a single reality, because it is a single undifferentiated context of effective action. It is the same form of substantiality and causality that takes effect in each of them and that connects them into a self-contained whole. This distinctive “wholeness” [Ganzheit] of the mythical worldview, this sublation of every particularization of things into a mythical-magical circle of effective action, possesses as well, then, a significant consequence for the apprehension of language. As soon as myth rises above the stage [Stufe] of the most primitive magical “praxis” – which strives to bring about a particular effect through the application of a particular means [Mit­ tel], which thus links one individual with another individual in immediate activity [unmittelbar Tun] –, as soon as it seeks, even in the crudest and most imperfect form, to understand its own activity [Tun], it has already penetrated to a new sphere of universality. As a form of cognition, the tendency [Zug] toward unity is as essential to it as it is to every other form of cognition. If the essential being and forces of spirit in which myth lives are to be controllable by human activity [Tun], then they must already exhibit in themselves certain constant determinations. Thus, the first immediately sensual and practical constraint that the human exerts on the environmental things of nature contains the germ for the thought of a theoretical necessity intrinsically prevailing in them. The more mythical thought advances, the more the individual daemonic forces cease to be mere individual forces, mere “gods of the moment” or “special gods” –



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and the more a kind of superordination and subordination, a hierarchical organization manifests itself between them. The mythical view of language sets out in the same direction, though it progressively raises from the intuition of the particular force that is contained in the individual word and in the individual magical formula to the thought of a general potency that the word as such and “speech” as a whole possess. The concept of language as unity is initially comprehended of in this mythical form. This thought recurs with characteristic uniformity in the earliest religious speculation of the most disparate regions. For the Vedic religion, the spiritual force of the word forms one of the basic motives from which it sprung: it is through the use of the sacred word that the knowing one [Wissende], the priest, makes himself lord over all being, over gods and humans. In the Rigveda, the lord of the word is already identified with Soma, the all-nourishing force, and designated as the one who commands with power over everything. For eternal and imperishable speech [Rede], the celestial Vāc, grounds human speech, which comes into being and passes away. “I go,” says this heavenly speech in a hymn,

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with the Vasus, with the Rudras, with the Adityas and the All-gods. . . . I am the queen, the assembler of treasures, the wise, the first of the worshipful ones. In manifold places did the Gods divide me, who dwell in many abodes, causing me to penetrate many regions. Through me, he eats food who perceives, who breathes, who hears what is spoken. . . . I blow forth even as the wind, reaching all beings, beyond heaven, beyond this earth. Such have I become through my greatness.2

At first sight, the concept of logos, as it first takes shape in Greek speculation, seems to be closely twinned with this mythical view of the dignity and omnipotence of the heavenly word. For here too, the word is eternal and imperishable; here too, the unity and consistent existence of beings in general is traced back to the unity and indestructibility of the word. Thus, logos is for Heraclitus the “ruler of all.”3 Like the cosmos that it governs, logos was created neither by god nor by humans; rather, it always was, is, and will be. However, at the heart of the language of myth, which Heraclitus still speaks, an entirely new tone is now discernible. For the first time in full consciousness and lucidity, the basic philosophical-speculative thought of the uniform and indivisible

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lawfulness of the all [All] confronts the mythical view of worldly events [Geschehen]. The world is no longer the plaything of daemonic powers who govern it according to their whim and caprice; rather, it is subject to an absolutely general rule that binds all individual being [Sein] and all individual events [Geschehen], assigning them their unchanging measure. “The sun will not transgress his measures; otherwise the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find him out.”4 And it is now this one intrinsically immutable law of the cosmos that is expressed in different forms and yet intrinsically the same in the world of nature as it is in the world of language. “The wise is one, to know the intelligent plan by which all things are steered through all – ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην, ὁτέη ἐκυβέρνησε πάντα διὰ πάντων.”5 With this, the magic-mythical context of force has now been transformed into a context of sense. However, this is not, of course, accessible to us as long as we continue to apprehend the one being as separated and fragmentary, as shattered into a multiplicity of particular “things,” rather than to look (anschauen) at and apprehend it as a living whole. Language also unites both views: depending on how we look at it, we find expressed only an accidental and particular view of being, or we find a truly speculative and general view of being. If we consider the logos of language only in the form in which it is presented and reflected in the individual word, it thus appears, on the contrary, that every word delimits the object that it intends to designate and falsifies it in this delimitation. Through the fixation in the word, the content is lifted out of the continuous stream of becoming in which it stands; hence, it is not apprehended according to its totality but only presented according to a one-sided determination. If we want to advance to a deeper cognition of the true nature [Wesen] of the thing, there remains for us no other way than to once again sublate this one-sided determination into another, so as to confront every word that grasps in itself an individual concept with the opposition of this very concept. And it can indeed be seen in the whole of language that every signification is bound to its opposite, every sense [Sinn] to its counter-sense [Gegensinn], and unified with it into an adequate expression of being. The spiritual synthesis, the unification that takes place in the word, resembles the harmony of the cosmos and expresses it in that it is a “counter-striving”: παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης [It is a backward-turning attunement like that of bow and lyre].6 And here, we encounter the basic law of the all [All]



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in a more intensified, more potentized form. For what appears in beings as an opposition becomes in the expression of language a contradiction, and only in such an interplay of positing and sublation, of saying [Spruch] and contradiction [Widerspruch], is it possible to reproduce in language the true law and the inner structure of beings. Thus, on the basis of Heraclitus’ comprehensive view of the world, we can understand the basic form of his style, whose reputed “obscurity” is not accidental and arbitrary but rather the adequate and necessary expression of his thought. Heraclitus’ linguistic style and his style of thinking condition one another: both present different aspects of the same basic principle of his philosophy, the principle of the ἓν διαφερόμενον ἑαυτῷ [the one is at variance with itself]. They point to that “invisible harmony” that, as Heraclitus says, is better than the visible harmony, and they want to be measured by it. Heraclitus situates the individual object [Objekt] in the constant stream of becoming and allows it at once to be both destroyed [vernichtet] and preserved; thus, the individual word, too, should relate to the whole of “speech” in the same way. Even the inner ambiguity that adheres to the word is, therefore, not a mere lacuna of language but rather an essential and positive element that is situated in the force of its expression. For in this ambiguity, we see that the boundaries of language, as those of beings, are not rigid but fluid. Only in the mobile and diverse spoken word, which, as it were, constantly breaks through its own boundaries, does the fullness of the world-forming [weltgestaltend] logos find its counter-image [Gegenbild]. Every separation that language performs and has to perform must be recognized as provisional and relative, as one that language will withdraw provided it reconsiders the object from a new perspective. “God is day, night, winter, summer, war, peace, satiety, famine; however, he changes like fire which, when it mingles with the smoke of incense, is named according to each pleasure.”7 And similarly: “Thus, immortals are mortal, mortals are immortal: each lives the death of the other, and dies their life.”8 As a consequence, whoever wants to speak with understanding must not permit themselves to be deceived by the particularity of words but must penetrate behind them to that which is common to all, to the ξυνόν καὶ θεῖον.9 For only when the sense [Sinn] and the counter-sense [Gegensinn] of words are in this way understood and connected with each other can the word become the leader and guide of cognition. Thus, we understand as well that most of the “etymologies”

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with which Heraclitus plays infer this twofold turn of phrase: they let the word and thing [Sache] be associated with one another and bounded together per antiphrasin rather than through any similarity. “The bow is called life, but its work is death” ( . . . τῶι οὖν τόξωι ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος).10 Every individual linguistic content is always at once the unveiling [Enthüllung] and veiling [Verhüllung] of the truth of being; it is always at the same time pure signifying [bedeutend] and mere intimating [andeutend].11 In this view of the world, language is, to speak with Heraclitus, like “The Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she reaches out over a thousand years with her voice because of the god in her.”12 It contains in itself a sense that remains closed off from it, which it is only able to decipher forebodingly in the image and metaphor. If, however, in this view of language there is expressed a unified total conception of being and spirit, which admittedly is vague and unclarified but which nevertheless is fully self-contained, then Heraclitus’ immediate successors, who made his theory their own, pushed its original significance further and further back. What, in the ultimate depths of metaphysical intuition, was still felt by Heraclitus as immediately one disintegrates – in the discursive consideration and treatment of the problem of language – into heterogeneous components, into individual logical theses conflicting with each other. The two motives that Heraclitus’ metaphysics had seen together and had forced together as one unity – the theory of the identity of word and being and the opposition between word and being – now experienced their independent development.The problem of language was thus first formulated with true conceptual sharpness – however, at the same time, by attempting to reformulate Heraclitus’ basic thought from the form of a symbolic hint [Andeutung] into that of an abstract concept, it was, as it were, smashed and reminted into small marketable coins. What for him was a carefully guarded secret [Geheim­ nis], at which he only dared to point while keeping his distance, now progressively became the actual object of the philosophical topic and disputation of the day. In his Memorabilia, Xenophon draws a vivid image of how this popular theme of the ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων [correctness of names] was discussed by the Athenians of the fifth century over wine and dinner.13 Does there exist a natural or only a mediate and conventional interconnection between the form of language and the form of



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being, between the nature [Wesen] of words and that of things? Do words express the inner framework [Gefüge] of being itself, or do they reveal no other law than that imprinted on them by the caprice of the first formers of language? And if the latter is true, must not  – if in general we assume some interconnection between word and sense, between speech and thinking – the element of arbitrariness that is inevitably attached to the word also render the objective determination and necessity of thinking and its content questionable? To be able to assert their principle of the relativity of all cognition, to be able to argue that the human was the “measure of all things,” the Sophists seem, therefore, to have borrowed their most effective weapons from the consideration of language. Indeed, from their first beginnings, they were very much at home in that middle region of words that is situated between “objective” and “subjective” reality, between humans and things; they entrenched themselves here in order to conduct their struggle against the claims of allegedly “pure” generally valid thinking. Their masterful play with the ambiguity of words allowed them to take things into hand and to resolve their determination into the free movement of spirit. Thus, the first conscious reflection on language and the first conscious mastery that spirit acquired over it leads, at the same time, to the mastery of eristics; however, here, the mindfulness of the content [Gehalt] and originary-ground of speech also gave rise to the reaction that brought about a new foundation and a new methodology of the concept. While the Sophists apprehended and stressed in words the element of ambiguity and arbitrariness, Socrates, for his part, apprehended the determinacy and unambiguity, which, admittedly, is not given in them as a fact but rather lies in them as a latent demand. This supposed unity of the significance of words was the point of departure for his characteristic question, the question of τί ἔστί [what is it?], the search for the identical and inherently enduring sense of the concept. Even if the word does not immediately contain this sense in itself, it nevertheless constantly points to [hindeuten] it, and the task of Socratic “induction” consists in understanding [verstehen] this pointing-to [Hindeutung], in taking it up and making it progress toward the truth. Behind the fluid and indeterminate word-form [Wortgestalt] should be exhibited the constant, identical concept-form [Begriffsgestalt], as the actual eidos initially grounding the possibility of speaking as well as thinking. Plato is rooted in

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these basic Socratic assumptions, and his attitude toward words and language is determined by it. In his youth, he studied with Cratylus, who, in opposition to the Sophists, represented the positive reverse side of Heraclitean thought, since he looked upon words as the true and authentic means of cognition, expressing and encompassing the nature [Wesen] of things. The identity that Heraclitus had asserted between the whole of language and the whole of reason is transferred here into the relationship of the individual word to its individual intellectual content. However, this transference, this conversion of the metaphysical content [Gehalt] of the Heraclitean concept of logos into a pedantic-abstruse etymology and philology, was precisely that reductio ad absurdum that Plato was to develop with all his dialectical and stylistic mastery in the Cratylus. With surpassing irony, this dialogue inherently demolishes the thesis that there is a “naturally” correct designation for every being (ὀνόματος ὀρθότητα εἶνι ἑκάστῳ τῶν ὄντων φύσει πεφυκῦιαν) [every  being has a right name, which comes by nature; 383A], eliminating it forever in this naïve form. With this insight, however, the relation between word and cognition is not severed for Plato; rather, a deeper, mediated relationship takes the place of the immediate and untenable relationship of resemblance between the two. In the construction and the series of stages [Stufengang] of dialectical knowledge, the word retains a unique place and value. The fluid boundary, the merely relative stability of the content [Gehalt] of the word at any moment, is an incentive for the dialectician to raise up in opposition and in the struggle with opposition to the demand for the absolute stability of the content [Gehalt] of the signification of pure concepts, to the βεβαιότης [stability] of the realm of ideas.14 This basic view was, however, fully elaborated only in a positive and a negative sense, in Plato’s later philosophy. Perhaps nothing else more clearly proves the authenticity of Plato’s Seventh Letter than the fact that, in this respect, it is directly linked with the conclusion of the Cratylus, and first brings it to full methodological clarity and provides it with a rigorous systematic grounding. The Seventh Letter distinguishes four stages of cognition, which only in their totality [Gesamtheit] lead to the intuition of true being, to the object of cognition as the γνωστὸν καὶ ἀληθῶς ὄν [the knowable and true being; 342b]. The lowest stage is given through the name, by the linguistic definition of the object, and by its sensible picture [Abbild], ὄνομα [noun], λόγος [logos], and εἴδωλον [image]. Thus, for example,



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we can apprehend the nature [Wesen] of the circle in this threefold way: first, by simply pronouncing the name “circle”; second, by determining and delimiting through an explanation what is meant by this name – in that we, for instance, “define” the circle as a formation [Gebilde] for which all points are equidistant from the center point; and third, by taking some sensible shape [Gestalt], whether drawn in the sand or turned on a lathe, as an image or model of the circle. None of these three presentations – the word, the definition, or the model – attain and grasp the true essential being of the circle – for they all belong to the realm of becoming and not to the realm of being. Just as the word is variable and ephemeral, in that it comes and goes, the drawn image of the circle can be effaced and the model formed by the lathe can be destroyed; the circle itself (αὐτὸς ὁ κύκλος), however, is in no way affected by any of these determinations. And yet the fourth and final stage  – namely, that of scientific cognition and its object – is reached only through these inadequate preliminary stages. In this sense, name and image, ὄνομα and εἴςωλον, remain sharply separated from rational insight, ἐπιστήμη [science], and conversely, they belong to its presuppositions, to the vehicles and means by virtue of which we can raise up in steady progress and by successive stages to cognition (δι’ ὧν τὴν ἐπιστήμην ἀνάγκη παραγίγνεσθαι). Knowledge of the object and this object itself appear, therefore, equally as something that goes beyond these three stages, as something that internally concerns it – as its transcendence and its synthesis.15 In these developments of the Seventh Letter, for the first time in the history of thinking, an attempt has been made to determine and delimit the cognitive value of language in a purely methodical sense. Language is recognized as the first beginning of cognition; however, it is nothing more than a starting point. Its existence [Bestand] is even more ephemeral and variable than the existence [Bestand] of the sensible representation; the phonetic figure of the word or of the linguistic sentence constructed out of ὀνόματα [names] and ῥήματα [verbs] grasps even less of the true content [Gehalt] of the idea than is captured by the sensible model or picture [Abbild]. And yet a certain interconnection between word and idea is preserved: just as sensible contents are said to “strive” toward the ideas, so too are such a pointing to and, as it were, such a spiritual tendency toward the ideas also recognized in the formations [Gebilde] of language. Plato’s system was particularly ready and able to make this relative recognition

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because in it a basic element that is essential for all language was, for the first time, recognized in its fundamental determination and in its full significance. All language, as such, is “representation” [Repräsentation]; it is a presentation of a determinate “signification” through a sensible “sign.” As long as philosophical contemplation remains in the circle of mere existence, it can find essentially no analogy or appropriate expression for this distinctive relationship. For in the things themselves, whether we consider them in their consistent existence as the ensemble of “elements” [Elemente] or trace the effective interconnections between them, there is nothing that corresponds to the relation of “word” to “sense,” to the relationship of the “sign” to the intended “signification.” For Plato, as he shows us in the Phaedo, a characteristic reversal in the way of framing the question has taken place; the path of philosophical thinking leads not from πράγματα [pragmata, things] to λόγοι [definitions] but from λόγοι [definitions] to πράγματα [pragmata, things], since the reality of things can be apprehended and beheld only in the truth of concepts.16 For Plato, the concept of representation [Repräsentation] has acquired, for the first time, a truly central systematic significance. For it is precisely in this concept of representation [Repräsentation] that the basic problem of the theory of ideas is finally encapsulated and by which the relationship between the “idea” and the “appearance” is expressed. From the standpoint of idealism, the “things” of the common view of the world, the sensible, concrete objects of experience become “images,” whose truth content [Gehalt] lies not in what they immediately are but in what they mediately express. And this concept of the image, of the εἴδωλον, now creates a new spiritual mediation between the form of language and the form of cognition. To designate clearly and sharply the relationship between the two, to delimit the “sphere” of the word from the sphere of pure concepts and, likewise, to retain their connection, Plato had only to fall back on the central thought of the theory of ideas, namely that of “participation.” The obscurity surrounding Heraclitus’ metaphysical theory of the unity of word and sense and the opposition between them now seemed to be clarified by this new methodical concept of μέθεξις [participation].17 For, indeed, “participation” contains an element [Moment] of identity as well as an element [Moment] of non-identity, a necessary interconnection and unity of the elements [Elemente] as well as a sharp fundamental keeping apart [Auseinanderhaltung] and differentiation



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between them are posited. The pure idea of “self-sameness” remains other, something ἕτερον [other or different], as compared to the same stones or pieces of wood by which it is represented [repräsentiert] – and yet from the standpoint of the conditioned sensible view of the world, this other can be apprehended only in this presentation. In the same sense, the physical-sensible content [Gehalt] of the word becomes, for Plato, the bearer of an ideal signification, which, as such, is still not inserted within the boundaries of language but remains outside of them. Language and the word strive to express pure being; however, they never attain it, because in them the designation of something other, of an accidental “attribute” of the object, is mixed with the designation of this pure being. This means, therefore, that what constitutes the real force of language is also its real weakness, that which makes it incapable of presenting the highest, truly philosophical content [Gehalt] of cognition.18 The history of logic and the problem of cognition in general show us, to be sure, that the sharp boundary that Plato drew between the two significations of λόγος [logos], between the concept “in itself” and its linguistic representative [Repräsentant], threatens to be blurred. This is already the case, even in the first systematic foundation of logic – although, as it has been said, it is certainly too much to claim that Aristotle obtained the essential basic differentiations, on which his theory of logic was constructed, from language. However, to be sure, the designation of the “categories” already indicates how closely the analysis of logical forms and the analysis of linguistic forms converged with each other. The categories constitute the most general relationship of being, which at the same time signify as such the highest genera of statement [Aussage] (γένη or σχήματα τῆς κατηγορίας [schemata of the categories]). Grasped ontologically, they are the basic determinations of the actual, the ultimate “predicates” of beings; these predicates, however, can be considered and developed equally well from things as from the general forms of predication. In fact, the configuration of the sentence and its decomposition into word units and classes of words thus seems to have been exemplary for Aristotle in the establishment of his system of categories. We clearly discern in the category of substance the grammatical significance of the “substantive”; and we clearly discern in quantity and quality, in the “when” and “where,” the significance of the adjective and of the adverbs of time and place and, in particular, the last four categories –

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the categories of ποιεῖν [poïesis, to act] and πάσχειν [to be acted on], the categories of ἔχειν [having] and κεῖσθαι [being in position] – appear to be completely transparent only if we consider them in reference to certain basic differences that the Greek language makes in its designation of verbs and verbal action.19 Logical and grammatical speculation would seem, therefore, to thoroughly correspond here to each other and to reciprocally condition one another – and following Aristotle, the Middle Ages held onto this correspondence between the two.20 However, when modern thinkers began to attack Aristotelian logic, when they contested its right to be called “the” systematics of spirit, the close alliance into which it had entered with language and general grammar proved to be one of its most vulnerable points. Assailing it at this point, Lorenzo Valla in Italy, Lodovico Vives in Spain, and Petrus Ramus in France all attempted to uphold Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy. In the beginning, this struggle was limited to linguistics and the treatment of language: it was precisely the “philologists” of the Renaissance who, on the basis of their profound insight into language, demanded a new “theory of thought.” What the Scholastics apprehended in language was now argued to be only the outward, grammatical relationships, while its actual core, which is to be sought not in grammar but in sty­ listics, had remained concealed to them. From this perspective, the great stylists of the Renaissance attacked syllogistics and its “barbarous” forms, not so much from the logical as from the aesthetic angle. However, this battle of the rhetoricians and stylists against the mere “dialecticians” in, e.g., Valla’s Dialectical Disputations, gradually took on another form; for the more Renaissance scholars returned to the actual classical sources, and the Scholastic view of dialectic was replaced more and more by the original Platonic concept. In the name of this concept, a descent from words back to “things” [Sache] was now demanded; however, among the “factual sciences” [Sachwissenschaften], the basic view of the Renaissance, which gradually and more decisively asserted itself, accorded primacy to mathematics and to the mathematical theory of nature. There emerges, even within the pure philosophy of language, an increasingly conscious and resolute demand for an orientation opposed to the grammatical orientation.21 It seemed that the truly systematic view and configuration of language could be achieved only if it made reference to the systematization [Systematik] of mathematics and borrowed its standards.



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As a consequence, Descartes’ theory, which provided the universal philosophical grounding for the new ideal of knowledge of the Renaissance, saw the theory of language in a new light. In his principal systematic works, Descartes did not make language the object of an independent philosophical reflection; however, in a letter to Mersenne, the only place where he touches on the problem, he gives a characteristic approach, which was to be highly significant in the ensuing period. The ideal of the unity of knowledge, of the sapientia humana [human wisdom] that always remains one and the same, regardless of how many different objects it may encompass, is now also applied to language. To the demand for a mathesis universalis [universal mathematics] is added the demand for a lingua universalis [universal language]. Just as there recurs in every instance of cognition that can lay claim to the name only one identical, basic form of cognition, that of human reason, so too must every instance of language be based on the one, general, rational form of language which, though cloaked by the abundance and diversity of word-forms, cannot, however, be rendered completely unrecognizable by them. For just as there exists a specific order between the ideas of mathematics, e.g., between numbers, so too does the whole of human consciousness, with all the contents that can ever enter into it, form in general a strictly ordered ensemble. And similarly, just as the whole system of arithmetic can be constructed out of relatively a few numerical signs, it must also be possible to designate the totality [Gesamtheit] of contents of thought and their structure also through a limited number of linguistic signs, provided only that they are connected according to certain generally valid rules. Descartes, it is true, distances himself from carrying out this plan; for as the creation of a universal language would presuppose the analysis of all the contents of consciousness into their ultimate elements [Elemente], into simple constitutive “ideas,” it could be successfully undertaken only if this analysis had been completed and the goal of the “true philosophy” thus attained.22 The epoch immediately following, however, did not let itself be swayed by the critical caution expressed in these words of the founder of modern philosophy. In rapid sequence, there emerged the most diverse systems of artificial universal languages, which, though different in execution, were in agreement with each other in their basic idea and the principle of their construction. It was always assumed that there are a limited number of concepts, that each of these concepts

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stands to the others in a specific factual relationship – namely, in a relation of correlation, superordination, or subordination – and that the goal of a truly perfect language consists in bringing this natural hierarchy of concepts to an adequate expression in a system of signs. Starting from this presupposition, for example, Delgamo, in his Ars signorum, classified all concepts under seventeen supreme generic concepts, each of which was designated by a specific letter that served as the first letter for each word that fell under the relevant category; similarly, the subclasses that could be distinguished within the common genus were each represented by a particular letter or sound that came close to the first letter. Wilkins, who strove to complete and perfect this system, established forty principal concepts in place of the original seventeen and expressed each of them with a special syllable, consisting of a consonant and a vowel.23 All of these systems passed rather hastily over the difficulty of discovering the “natural” order of basic concepts and of clearly and exhaustively determining their reciprocal relationships. The methodical problem of the designation of concepts was progressively transformed into a purely tech­ nical problem; they were satisfied to work with any purely conventional classification of concepts as a basis and, by progressive differentiation, make it serve for the expression of the concrete contents of thinking and representation. It was only with Leibniz, who restored the problem of language to the context of a universal logic – which he recognized to be the prerequisite for all philosophy and all theoretical cognition in general – that the problem of a universal language was grasped in a new depth. He was fully aware of the difficulty to which Descartes had pointed; he believed, however, that the progress that philosophical and scientific cognition had made since Descartes provided him with entirely new means of surmounting this difficulty. Any “characteristic” that is not restricted to an arbitrary linguistic sign but that aspires to be a characteristica realis, to bring to presentation the truly basic relationships of things, requires a logical analysis of the contents of thinking. The establishment of such an “alphabet of thought,” however, no longer seemed to be an unlimited and insoluble task, provided that one proceeded logically to the end of the path that the newly founded combinatorics and the newly founded mathematical analysis had indicated rather than starting with random, more or less accidental organizations of the whole conceptual substance. Algebraic analysis teaches us that every number is constructed from certain



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original elements [Elemente], that it can, in a straightforward way, be broken down into “prime factors” and presented as their product and that this applies equally to any content of cognition in general. The breakdown into prime numbers corresponds to the breakdown into primitive ideas, and one of the basic tenets of Leibniz’ philosophy is that essentially the two can and must be accomplished in accordance with the same principle and by virtue of a single all-encompassing method.24 Thus we have a circle, in that the form of a truly universal characteristic seems to presuppose the content and construction of knowledge as already given, whereas it is only by virtue of these same characteristics that this construction is intelligible and comprehensible for us. For Leibniz, this circle is resolved by the fact that we are not at all presented here with two separate tasks that might be undertaken one after another; rather, the two are thought by him in terms of a pure, factual correlation. The progress of analysis and the progress of characterization demand and condition one another; for every logical positing of a unity and every logical differentiation that thinking performs exist for thinking in true clarity and sharpness only when a universal characteristic has been fixed in a certain sign. Leibniz grants Descartes that the true universal language of cognition is dependent on cognition, thus on “true philosophy”; he nevertheless adds that language need not await the completion of philosophy and that the analysis of ideas and the production of signs would develop each other.25 He is speaking here only of the basic general methodological conviction and, as it were, of the basic methodological experience that was confirmed for him by the discovery of the analysis of infinity: the algorithm of differential calculus had proven to be not merely a convenient means for the presentation of that which had already been discovered but also a true organ of mathematical research; thus, in general, language should also perform the same service for thinking – it should not merely follow in its path but also prepare and advance this path. Leibniz’ rationalism receives its ultimate confirmation and completion in the consideration of language, which is seen purely as a means of cognition and as an instrument of logical analysis; however, in comparison to Descartes’ rationalism, this rationalism acquires at the same time a kind of concrete form. For the correlation that is asserted between thinking and speaking thrusts the relationship between thinking and sensibility into a new light. While sensibility requires the progressive decomposition into the distinct ideas of the understanding, from the standpoint

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of the finite spirit, the converse relation also equally applies. Even our “most abstract” thoughts always contain a supplement of imagination [Einbildungskraft], which, admittedly, can always be further unfolded, and although our analysis never arrives at a final boundary, it can and must progress ad infinitum.26 We find ourselves here at the juncture where the basic idea of Leibniz’ logic merges with the basic idea of his metaphys­ ics. For this metaphysics, the hierarchical structure [Stufenbau] of being is determined by the gradation [Stufengang] of cognition. The monads, as the only truly substantial essential beings, point to no other difference among themselves than exists in the varying degree of clarity and distinctness of their representational contents. Only the Supreme Divine Being is capable of perfect cognition, a cognition that is purely intuitive and in no way a merely representative [repräsentativ] – i.e., one which no longer contemplates its objects mediately through signs but looks at [anschaut] them immediately in their pure and original essential being. By comparison, even the highest stage to which the knowledge of finite spirit raises, even the distinct cognition of figures [Figuren] and numbers, only appears as inadequate knowledge; for instead of apprehending the spiritual contents, it must, for the most part, content itself with their signs. In any mathematical proof of any length, we must have recourse to such substitution. If we, for example, think of a regular chiliagon figure, we are not always cognitive of the nature of the sides, of their equality, and of the number “thousand”; rather, we use these words, whose sense is only vaguely and imperfectly present to us, instead of the ideas, since we recall that we knew their significance but do not consider a closer clarification as necessary for the present moment. Here then, we are dealing not with a purely intuitive cognition but with a “blind” or symbolic cognition which, like algebra and arithmetic, governs almost all the rest of our knowledge.27 Thus, we see how in striving more and more to encompass the whole of cognition, language limits this whole and draws it into its own condition [Bedingtheit]. However, this condition [Bedingtheit] has by no means a merely negative character; rather, it contains within itself a very positive element. Just as every vague and confused sensible representation contains within itself a genuine, rational content of cognition, which merely requires development and “unfolding” [Auswicklung], so too is every sensible symbol the bearer of a purely spiritual signification, which, to be sure, is given only “virtually” and implicitly in it. The true ideal of the “Enlightenment” consists not in



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casting off these sensible cloaks in one stroke, not in casting away these symbols, but rather in gradually learning how to understand them for what they are and, thus, to master and permeate them. The logically and metaphysically comprehensive view that Leibniz integrates here into language is, however, so broad and universal that its particular content is in danger of perishing in this universality. The plan of a universal characteristic is not limited to any single domain; rather, it means to include every type and group of signs, from the simple phonetic and word signs to the numerical signs of algebra and the symbols of mathematical and logical analysis. It seeks to embrace equally as well those forms of utterances [Äußerung] that seem to be derived from a natural, involuntarily erupting “instinct,” as well as those that have their origin in a free and self-conscious creation of spirit. However, for this reason, the specific peculiarities of language, as a language of sounds and words, seems, in the final analysis, not so much acknowledged and explained, as eliminated. If the aim of the universal characteristic were achieved, if every simple idea were expressed by a simple sensible sign and every complex representation by a corresponding combination of such signs, then the particularity and contingency of the individual languages would be dissolved into a single basic universal language. Leibniz does not displace this basic language – this lingua adamica [original language], as he calls it, borrowing an old expression of the mystics and of Jacob Boehme28 – back into a paradisiacal past of humanity, but rather, he regarded it as a purely ideal concept, which our cognition must progressively approximate in order to achieve the goal of objectivity and general validity. Only in its ultimate, supreme, definitive shape will language emerge as what it essentially is: the word will no longer be a mere veil of sense but rather will appear as a true witness to the unity of reason that is a necessary postulate underlying all philosophical apprehension of a particular spiritual existence [Sein].

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2.  THE POSITION OF THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE IN THE SYSTEMS OF EMPIRICISM (BACON, HOBBES, LOCKE, BERKELEY) Philosophical empiricism seems to take up another way of considering language, while, in accordance with its basic tendency, it strives, not to relate the factum of language to a logical ideal but rather to comprehend

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it in its simple and sheer factuality, in its empirical origin and purpose. Instead of letting language merge into some utopia, be it logical or metaphysical, language must be recognized solely in its consistent psychological existence and be appreciated in its psychological achievement. Of course, even in this formulation of the task, empiricism assumes one essential presupposition from the opposing rationalistic systems in that it considers language exclusively as a means of cognition. Locke explicitly stresses that his plan for a critique of understanding did not originally contain the idea of a distinct critique of language, that it became evident to him only gradually that the question of the signification and origin of concepts could not be separated from the question of the origin of naming.29 However, once this interconnection was recognized, language became for him one of the most important witnesses to the truth of the basic view of empiricism. Leibniz once said that nature loved to reveal its ultimate secrets at some point, to set them before our eyes in a visible demonstration, as it were. Locke looked upon language as such a demonstration of his general view of spiritual reality. Locke begins his analysis of words [in the following way]:

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It may also lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas; and how those, which are made use of, to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obviously sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses: e.g., to “imagine,” “apprehend,” “comprehend” . . ., etc., are all words taken from the operations of sensible things and applied to certain modes of thinking. Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath, angel, a messenger: and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas. By which we may give some kind of guess what kind of notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds who were the first beginners of languages; and how nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their knowledge . . . we having, as has been proved, no ideas at all but what originally come either from sensible objects



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without, or what we feel within ourselves from the inward workings of our own spirits, of which we are conscious to ourselves within.30

We have identified here the basic systematic thesis on which all discussion of the problem of language within empiricism is directly or indirectly related. The analysis of language here is also not an end in itself but is intended only to serve as a means and a preparation for the real main problem: the analysis of ideas. For all linguistic naming never serves as the immediate expression of things but rather refers solely to the ideas of spirit, to the speaker’s own representations. Hobbes had already formulated this as the most general principle of all reflection on language, believing that he had, with this formulation, definitively withdrawn the philosophy of language from the sphere and dominance of metaphysics. Since names are signs for concepts and not signs for objects, whether they designate the matter or the form of things, or some compound of the two, could be set aside as an empty metaphysical question. Locke bases his investigations on this decision, to which he returns again and again and which he amplifies in all its aspects. The nature of objects – as he, too, stresses  – is never expressed in the unity of the word; rather, what is expressed is only the subjective manner by which the human spirit proceeds to the combination [Zusammenfassung] of its simple sensible ideas into one concept. In this combination [Zusammenfassung], spirit is not bound by any substantial model, by any real essential being of things. It can arbitrarily emphasize one or another representational content or combine different groups of simple elements [Elemente] into general associations. Everything depends here on how differently the lines of combination are drawn and how differently the points of separation are set; however, the various classes of linguistic concepts and significations, which are, therefore, only ever a reflection of this very subjective process of combination and separation, cannot be, however, the objective constitution of being and its construction according to real species and genera, according to logical-metaphysical species and genera. Thus, compared with rationalism, the theory of the definition takes on a new twist. The opposition between nominal definition and real definition, between verbal explanation and factual explanation, vanishes; for every definition can claim to be only the transcription of the name of the thing, not a presentation of its consistent ontological existence and its

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ontological constitution. For not only is the nature of every being [Wesen] in particular unknown to us, but also we can combine no determinate representation with the general concept of what a thing in itself should be. The only concept of the “nature” of a thing to which we can connect a clear sense has no absolute significance, only a relative significance; it contains within it a relation to ourselves, to our psychic organization and our powers of cognition. To determine the nature of a thing means for us nothing other than to develop the simple ideas that are contained in it and that enter as elements [Elemente] into its total representation. In its expression, this basic view seems to go back to the Leibnizian form of analysis and to the Leibnizian demand for a universal “alphabet of thought”; however, behind this unity of expression, a sharp systematic opposition is concealed. For between the two views of language and cognition stands the decisive change in spiritual signification that has taken place in the term “idea” itself. On the one hand, the idea is grasped in its objective-logical sense, but on the other hand, it is grasped in its subjective-psychological sense; on the one side stands its original Platonic concept and on the other its modern empiricist and sensationalist concept. For the rationalists, the decomposition of all contents of cognition into their simple ideas and their designation signifies a return to ultimate and generally valid principles of knowledge; for the empiricists, it stands for the derivation of all complex spiritual formations [Gebilde] from the immediate givenness of the inward or outward senses, from the elements [Elemente] of “sensation” and “reflection.” For this reason, however, the objectivity of language, like that of cognition in general, has become a problem in an entirely new sense. For Leibniz, and for rationalism as a whole, the ideal being of concepts and the real being of things are connected through an insoluble correlation: “truth” and “reality” are one in their ground and ultimate root. Every empirical existence and every empirical event [Geschehen] is intrinsically connected and ordered as the intelligible truths demand it, and herein consists its reality, herein consists what distinguishes being and semblance, reality [Realität] and dream, from one another. For empiricism, this interrelation – this “pre-established harmony” between the ideal and the real, between the domain of general validity and necessary truths and the domain of particular and factual being – is sublated. The more sharply it took language not as an expression of things but as an expression



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of concepts, the more determinately and imperiously the question, thus, had to arise as to whether the new spiritual medium that is recognized here did not falsify rather than designate the ultimate, “actual” elements [Elemente] of being. From Bacon to Hobbes and Locke, we can progressively follow the development and increasing exacerbation of this question, until at last it stands before us in full clarity in Berkeley. For Locke, however, as much as cognition was grounded in the particular data of sense perception and the perception of the self, it was still intrinsically a tendency toward “universality,” and the universality of the word accommodates this tendency toward the universal in cognition. The abstract word becomes the expression of the “abstract universal idea,” which, apart from the individual sensations, is still recognized here as a psychic reality of a distinct kind and of independent signification. The progress and consequence of the sensationalist view necessarily lead, however, beyond this relative recognition and this leastwise indirect toleration of the “universal.” The universal has no truer and more grounded existence [Bestand] in the domain of ideas than it does in the domain of things. However, this, as it were, places word and language as such totally in the void. No model or “archetype” is found for what is expressed in them in either physical or psychological being, in either things or ideas. All reality – psychological as well as physical – is by its nature [Wesen] concrete, individually determinate reality: in order to penetrate to their intuition, we must therefore above all divest ourselves of the false and illusory, the “abstract” universality of the word. This conclusion is most emphatically drawn by Berkeley. Every reform of philosophy must be constructed primarily on a critique of language, must above all clear away the illusion in which it has for ages imprisoned the human mind. It cannot be denied that words are of excellent use, in that by their means all that stock of knowledge which has been purchased by the joint labors of inquisitive men in all ages and nations may be drawn into the view and made the possession of one single person. But at the same time, it must be owned that most parts of knowledge have been so strangely perplexed and darkened by the abuse of words, and general ways of speech wherein they are delivered, that it may almost be made a question whether language has contributed more to the hindrance or advancement of the sciences. . . . It was, therefore, to

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toward a phenomenology of the linguistic form be wished that everyone would use his utmost endeavors to obtain a clear view of the ideas he would consider; separating from them all that dress and incumbrance of words which so much contribute to blind the judgment and divide the attention. In vain do we extend our view into the heavens and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. We need only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.31

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On closer consideration, however, this radical critique of language clearly contains at the same time an indirect critique of the sensationalist ideal of cognition on which it is based. From Locke to Berkeley, a peculiar reversal has taken place in the position of empiricism vis-à-vis the problem of language. If Locke found in language his basic view of cognition confirmed and authenticated – if he invoked it as a witness to his general thesis that nothing could be in the understanding that was not previously in the senses, then it becomes apparent, rather, that the real and essential function of the word has no place within the sensationalist system. There is no other means of adhering to this system than to contest and exclude this function. The structure of language is no longer used as an illustration of the structure of cognition but forms its precise counterpart. Far from including even a conditional and relative truth content [Gehalt], language is, rather, a magic mirror that allows us to recognize the true forms of being only in a peculiar falsification and distortion. Here a dialectical development and reversal has taken place within empiricism; the clearest and most striking example of this is when the two historical extremes in the empiricist philosophy of language are juxtaposed against each other. If Berkeley strives to sublate the truth content [Gehalt] and cognitive content of language, if he sees in it the ground of all error and self-deception of the human spirit, then with Hobbes, language not only is the truth, but all truth has been affirmed [zugesprochen]. Hobbes’ concept of truth culminates in the thesis that truth lies not in things but uniquely and alone in words and in the use of words: “veritas . . . in ditto, non in re consistit” [Truth consists in speech, not in the things spoken].32 Things are and exist as real individual minutiae that are made known to us in concrete-sensible-individual sensations. However, neither the individual thing nor the individual sensation can ever account for the true object of



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knowledge [Wissen]; for all knowledge [Wissen] that deserves the name will be – rather than merely historical knowledge [Kenntnis] of the particular – philosophical – i.e., necessary cognition [Erkenntnis] of the universal. If, therefore, sensibility and memory are limited to the factual, then all science progresses toward general relations and inferences, toward deduc­ tive connections. The organ and instrument that it employs here, however, can be none other than the word. For our mind [Geist] can acquire deductive insight only into those contents that are not, like things or sense sensations, given to it from outside but that are created and freely produced. However, it enjoys such freedom not toward the actual objects of nature but only toward their ideal representatives [Stellvertretern], toward designations and denominations. The creation of a system of names is, therefore, not only the precondition for any system of knowledge, but all true knowledge consists in creating names and linking them into sentences and judgments. Accordingly, truth and falsehood are not attributes of things but attributes of speech [Rede], and a spirit that lacks speech [Rede] would as a consequence also lack all of these attributes, would not be able to differentiate and juxtapose the “true” and the “false.”33 For Hobbes, language is a source of error only insofar as it is at the same time, according to his basic nominalistic view, the condition of conceptual cognition in general, the source of all general validity and all truth. In Berkeley’s critique of language and cognition, however, this last cornerstone seems to be deprived of universality, and, thus, the method of rationalism, which is still unmistakable throughout the writings of Hobbes, seems, at last, to have been definitively refuted and uprooted. However, while Berkeley’s system now progressed and strove to develop further from its initial beginnings, a peculiar turning back and reversal once again took place within it. It is as if the initially denied, violently restrained force of “logos,” which is living in language, gradually freed itself and counteracted the constraint of the sensationalist schema into which Berkeley attempted to force all speaking and thinking. Through his consideration and analysis of the function of the sign and through a new positive appreciation that the sign acquired for him, Berkeley came, gradually and unawares, to another basic view of cognition. Particularly in his last work, the Siris, Berkeley now made the decisive turn: he freed the “idea” from all its sensationalist-psychological entanglements and restored it to its basic Platonic significance. And in this last phase of

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his system, language also regained a dominant, truly central position. If previously the value of language had been disputed on the general grounds of Berkeley’s psychology and metaphysics, then we now stood, in the final form [Gestalt] of this same metaphysics, before a remarkable spectacle: here, all reality, spiritual as well as sensible, was transformed into language. For the sensible view of the world had been reconfigured more and more into a purely symbolic view of the world. What we designate as the reality of perceptions and bodies is, more profoundly apprehended and understood, nothing other than the sensible sign language in which an all-embracing, infinite spirit communicates to our finite spirit. In the struggle between metaphysics and language, language has, therefore, been victorious; initially rejected from the threshold of metaphysics, language, in the end, not only permeates the metaphysical sphere, but also decisively and essentially determines the form of this very metaphysics.

3.  THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT (CONDILLAC, MAUPERTUIS, DIDEROT) In the history of empiricism, however, the last phase of Berkeley’s system remained only an isolated episode. The general development advanced in another direction; more and more, it clearly aspired to replace the logical and metaphysical perspectives in which the relationship of speaking and thinking had predominantly been considered, by purely psychological perspectives. For the concrete consideration of language, this led to a direct, and at first unquestionable, gain: for alongside the consideration of language as a spiritual total-form [geistige Gesamtform], there now emerges an increasing interest in the individuality, in the spiritual particularity of individual languages. If the basic logical view, as though compelled by its method, repeatedly led to the problem of a universal language, then psychological analysis chose the opposite path. Even Bacon, in the treatise De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, had called for a universal form of “philosophical grammar” in addition to the usual empirical study of language and Grammatica litteraria. This philosophical grammar was not, however, intended to disclose any necessary interconnections between words and the objects that are named through them; for as tempting as such an undertaking may seem, it would prove dangerous and elusive in



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view of the elasticity of words and the uncertainty of all purely etymological investigations. Rather, it would provide the noblest form of grammar, if someone versed in a large number of both vernacular languages and learned languages were to treat the languages’ various peculiarities and show wherein consisted the advantages and deficiencies of each. In this way, not only would it be possible to sketch out an ideal image of a consummate language through the comparison of the individual languages, but it would likewise also be possible to provide the most significant insights into the spirit and customs of the various nations. In the realization of this idea and in his brief characterizations of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, Bacon anticipated a project that was to be fully realized only with Wilhelm von Humboldt.34 The philosophical empiricists, however, followed this lead only insofar as they became more sharply and clearly cognizant of the specific imprint [Prägung] and particularization of concepts within each individual language. If the concepts of language are not simply taken as signs for objective objects and events but rather as signs for the representation that we form of them, then what is reflected in them must not so much be the constitution of things as the individual mode and direction of the apprehension of things. This would be done with particular emphasis where it is not a question of the retaining of simple sensible impressions in sound but rather where the word serves as the expression of a complex total-representation. For every such representation, and accordingly every name that we ascribe to such “mixed modes,”35 as Locke calls them, goes back ultimately to the free activity of spirit. While spirit is, as such, passive vis-à-vis its simple impressions and need merely receive them in the gestalt in which it is given to it from outside, it exhibits in the combination of these simple ideas its own nature far more than that of the objects [Objekte] outside it. There is no need to inquire after the real model of these connections; rather, the genus and species of the “mixed modes” and the names that we give them are created by the understanding without models, without any immediate connection with actual existing things. The same freedom that Adam possessed when he created the first names for complex representations according to no model image [Musterbild] other than his own thoughts consists and exists ever since for all human beings.36 Here, as we see, we find ourselves at the point where the spontaneity of spirit is gaining recognition in the system of empiricism, even if it is

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only tentatively conditional and mediated. And this essential limitation of the picture theory [Abbildtheorie] of cognition could not but react immediately on the total-intuition [Gesamtanschauung] of language. If language, in its complex conceptual terms, is not so much a mirror image [Spiegelbild] of sensible existence, but rather a mirror image [Spiegelbild] of spiritual operations, then this reflection [Spiegelung] can and must be accomplished in infinitely diverse and distinct ways. If the content [Gehalt] and expression of the concept are not dependent on the matter of the individual-sensible representations but on the form of their connection, then every new linguistic concept basically constitutes a new spiritual creation. Consequently, no concept of one language is simply “transferable” to another. Locke had already insisted on this inference; he already emphasized that in a close comparison of different languages, one will almost never find words that fully correspond to each other and that coincide perfectly with each other in the whole sphere of their sense.37 This is, however, the problem of an absolutely “universal” grammar exposed as an illusion from a new angle. With every greater clarity, the demand rises that instead of seeking such a universal grammar, one should seek out the particular stylistic of each individual language and comprehend it in its particularity. The center of the consideration of language shifted from logic not only toward psychology but also toward aesthetics. This is particularly evident in that thinker who, as no other empiricist, combined the sharpness and clarity of logical analysis with the liveliest feeling for individuality, for the finest shadings and nuances of aesthetic expression. Diderot in his “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb” takes up Locke’s observation; however, what in Locke had been an isolated aperçu is now attested to by an abundance of concrete examples from the domain of linguistic and, in particular, that of literary expression and exhibited in a style that is an immediate proof of how every truly original spiritual form creates its own linguistic form. Beginning with a specific stylistic issue, the problem of linguistic “inversion,” Diderot methodically progresses, and yet with the freest movement of thought, to the problem of the individuality of linguistic form. To designate the incomparable particularity of poetic genius, Lessing had recalled the saying that one might sooner take from Hercules his club than from Homer or Shakespeare a single verse, and Diderot also begins from this dictum. The work of a true poet is and remains untranslatable; we may translate thought, and we may even have the good fortune to find here and



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there an equivalent expression; however, the comprehensive presentation, the tone and sound of the whole, remains forever a single, subtle, and untranslatable “hieroglyph.”38 And such a hieroglyph, such a formal and stylistic law, not only is realized in each particular art, in music, painting, and sculpture, but also dominates each particular language and imprints its spiritual seal, its intellectual and emotional stamp, on it. Here the consideration of language is set into immediate contact with the central problem that dominated the entire intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The concept of subjectivity underwent the same characteristic transformation that we encounter in the theory of art and artistic creation. With increasing clarity, a deeper and more comprehensive view of subjectivity wrestles itself forth out of the narrow, empiricist-psychological version of subjectivity, through which subjectivity is removed from the sphere of mere accidental existence and arbitrary doing and recognized for its specific spiritual “form” – i.e., for its specific necessity. In the aesthetic theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this whole movement was more clearly and consciously focused into a single center. The concept of genius is the linguistic and intellectual bearer of the new view of the spiritual that bursts the boundaries of the empirical-psychological, the merely reflective view. In Diderot’s “Lettre sur les sourds et muets” [A Letter upon the Deaf and Dumb], the concept of genius, though not explicitly stressed, forms the animating principle of all theoretical discussion of language and art and provides the ideal point of unity toward which such discussion is oriented. Beyond this one example, however, it can be traced how from various angles this concept entered into the consideration of language. Already by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, the empiricalpsychological description and explanation of spiritual events that strove to dissect them into their sensible [sinnlich] and material factors by no means ruled alone; rather, another view confronted it, one that was oriented toward the “form” of these events and that strove to apprehend this form in its original and indivisible totality [Ganzheit]. This view found its systematic and philosophical focal point in English Platonism, with Cudworth and the thinkers of the Cambridge School; it achieved its complete literary presentation in Shaftesbury. All external formation of sensible existence – and this is the common basic conviction Shaftesbury held with the English Platonists – must be based on certain inner proportions

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(interior numbers39); for form can never be created from matter, but rather, it is and exists as if it is without-becoming and unchanging, as a pure ideal unity that imprints itself on multiplicity and first gives it its specific gestalt. It is these inner and spiritual proportions, not the accidental existence [Existenz] and accidental constitution of empirical things, that the true artist presents in their work. Such an artist is, in fact, a second creator, a true Prometheus under Jupiter. Like that sovereign artist or universal plastic nature, he forms a whole, coherent and proportional in itself, with due subjection and subordinacy of constituent parts. . . . The moral artist who can thus imitate the Creator, and is thus knowing in the inward form and structure of his fellow-creature, will hardly, I presume, be found unknowing in himself, or at a loss in those numbers [and measures] which make the harmony of a mind.40

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What the consideration of every natural organic body reveals to us becomes irrefutable certainty as soon as we regard our own I, the unity of our consciousness: that truly consistent being does not receive its gestalt from its parts but is and functions as a formed whole prior to any division. In our I, each one of us can immediately apprehend an individual principle of form, our own distinctive “genius” that we find again, in the particular as in the whole, as the always-different and yet intrinsically identical form-giving power, the “genius of the universe.” Both thoughts correspond and condition each other – correctly understood and interpreted, empirical subjectivity necessarily surpasses itself and culminates in the concept of universal spirit. What this aesthetic-metaphysical concept of “inner form” has done for the view on language is made clear in a work that has arisen from the immediate circle of the English Neoplatonists and that clearly reflects their general view of the world. If we look at the general plan of Harris’ Hermes: Or A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751), it initially seems to move along the path of the rationalist’s theories of language, but it also seems to follow the same ideal as the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of Port Royal. A grammar is also to be created here that, without regard for the various idioms of particular languages, targets only the universal principles that are identical for all languages. A general logic and a



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general psychology should serve as the foundation of the organization of the material of language and reveal this organization as necessary. Our psychological faculties, for example, exhibit an original dichotomy – the faculty of representation is confronted with the faculty of appetite. Thus, every linguistically formed sentence must either be a “sentence of assertion or a sentence of volition,”41 and, on this foundation, the question why language contains precisely these and no other parts of speech and why these parts take this shape or this number and no other must be clearly answered in principle. Of strange interest in particular is Harris’ attempt to extract a general schema for a presentation of the tense formation of verbs out of a logical and psychological analysis of the representation of time.42 The further he proceeds, however, the clearer it becomes that the psychology on which he relies for his consideration and classification of linguistic forms is a pure “structure psychology,” sharply opposed to the element psychology of sensationalism. In his defense of “universal ideas” against their empiricist critics, Harris immediately shows his kinship with the Cambridge school.43 Harris remarks: For my own part, when I read the detail about sensation and reflection, and am taught the process at large how my ideas are all generated, I seem to view the human soul in the light of a crucible, where truths are produced by a kind of logical chemistry. They may consist (for aught we know) of natural materials, but are as much creatures of our own, as a bolus or elixir.44

Against this view of the production of “form” out of “matter,” Harris opposes his own, which is based on Plato and Aristotle, in which he insists on the absolute primacy of form. All sensible forms must be based on pure intelligible forms that are “prior” to sensible forms.45 And in this context, Harris – who, as Shaftesbury’s nephew, had no doubt long been close to his ideas – goes back to Shaftesbury’s central concept, the concept of genius. Every national language has its own linguistic spirit, and each contains a distinctive form-giving principle: We shall be led to observe, how nations, like single men, have their peculiar ideas; how these peculiar ideas become the genius of their language, since the symbol must, of course, correspond to its archetype;

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toward a phenomenology of the linguistic form how the wisest nations, having the most and best ideas, will consequently have the best and most copious languages.46

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Just as there is a nature, a genius of the Roman, the Greek, and the English people, there is a genius of the Latin, the Greek, and the English language.47 There appears here – perhaps for the first time in this determination – the new version of the concept of the “spirit of language” that will henceforth dominate all philosophical contemplation. Rudolf Hilde­ brand has given in two articles on “Geist” and “Genie” in Grimm’s dictionary a step-by-step account of how this concept entered into German cultural history [Geistesgeschichte] and gradually gained its rightful spiritual and linguistic place.48 A direct path leads from Shaftesbury and Harris to Hamann and Herder. As early as 1768, Hamann wrote to Herder in Riga that he had ordered from the publisher “Hermes” for himself and speaks of it as “a work that struck me as indispensable for your plan” to treat language in the fragments on recent German literature.49 And Herder, who in his “Kritischen Wäldchen” [Critical Groves] invokes Harris’ aesthetic theory in attacking Lessing’s Laocoon, also repeatedly refers to his theory of language. In his preface to the German translation of Monboddo’s work on the origin and development of language, he expressly states that a new and secure path to the consideration of language had been opened up by Monboddo and by Harris: Enough . . . the path is cleared: the basic principles of our author and his friend Harris strike me not only as the only true and secure ones but also his first attempts to compare the languages of several different peoples at different levels of culture, will always remain the pioneering work of a master. Someday (though certainly not too soon) a philosophy of human understanding, developed out of its most characteristic work, the different languages of the earth, will be a possibility.50

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Perhaps Herder was most attracted to Harris’ view of language by the very feature that he had stressed in his judgment of Harris’ aesthetic theory. In his “Dialogue on Art,” to which Herder expressly refers in his earliest discussion of aesthetic problems in the “Kritische Wälder” [Criti­ cal Forests],51 Harris restored the Aristotelian difference between ἔργον [ergon, function, work] and ἐνέργεια [energeia, activity] to the center of



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the theory of art. From here, it exerts influence on the theory of language until it receives its most determinate formulation and its most rigorous systematic form by Wilhelm von Humboldt. No more than art, language cannot be comprehended as a mere work [Werk] of spirit but must be thought of as a distinctive form and “energy.” Both motives, the “energetic” theory of language and the energetic theory of art, found their ideal agreement again in the concept of genius and in the characteristic development that it underwent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For what was decisive for this development was the continuous tendency to trace all spiritual existence [Sein] back to the original creative process in which it is rooted, to trace all “formations” [Gebilde] back to basic forms and tendencies of “forming’ [Bilden].”52 As for language, at first glance, this tendency seems to have already been effective in those empiricist and rationalist theories of the origin of language that, instead of regarding language as a divine work completed in a single blow, wanted to conceive it as a free creation of human reason. However, as reason retained here without exception the character of subjectivearbitrary reflection, the problem of the “formation” of language was once again reduced to the problem of its “invention.” In the invention of the first linguistic signs, and in their configuration [Ausgestaltung] into words and sentences, the human being carries out a conscious, purposeful procedure. The theory of language of the French Enlightenment liked to directly compare and parallel this gradual progress of language with the methodic construction that spirit accomplishes in science, particularly in mathematics. For Condillac, all of the individual sciences that the human mind encounters are only a continuation of the same process of analyzing ideas that begins with the human formation of language. In addition to the initial language of phonetic signs, there emerges a language that serves as general symbols, in particular as arithmetical and algebraic symbols; alongside the language of words enters the “language of calculation.” However, the same principle of dissection [Zergliederung], connection, and ordering of representations prevails in both languages. Just as the sciences in their totality [Gesamtheit] are nothing more than well-ordered languages (langues bien faites), so too are our language of words and sounds nothing but the first science of beings [Seiende], the first manifestation [Äußerung] of that originary-impulse of cognition, which moves from the composite to the simple, from the particular to

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the universal.53 Maupertuis attempted to follow in detail, in his “Philosophical Reflections on the Origin of Languages,” this path of language as it crept along: to show how it passes from its first primitive beginnings when language only had at its disposal a few designations for complex sense representations, through an ever-more-conscious comparison and differentiation of the parts of these representations, to a gradually richer treasure of denominations, of word forms and parts of speech.54 To this view of language, which banished language into the sphere of abstract intelligibility, Herder opposes a new intuition of “linguistic reason.” Here again, the profound interconnection between basic spiritual problems appears with surprising sharpness: the battle that now begins corresponds blow for blow with the battle that had led Lessing into the domain of art against Gottsched and French classicism. The formations [Gebilde] of language are, in the highest sense, also “regular,” without, however, being derived from and compared to an objective conceptual rule. By virtue of the agreement of all the parts to a whole, they are also purposively formed through and through; however, there prevails in them that “purposiveness without purpose”55 that excludes all mere caprice and all merely subjective “intent.” Consequently, in language, as in the creation of the artwork, elements that shun one another in mere rational reflection interpenetrate in a new unity that, admittedly, at first only confronts us as a problem, as a new task. The opposition of freedom and necessity, individuality and universality, “subjectivity” and “objectivity,” spontaneity and binding obligation, first had to undergo a deeper determination and a new fundamental clarification before they could be employed as philosophical categories for the explanation of the “origin of the work of art” and the “origin of language.”

4.  LANGUAGE AS AN EXPRESSION OF AFFECT: THE PROBLEM OF THE “ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE” (GIAMBATTISTA VICO, HAMANN, HERDER, ROMANTICISM) Despite all of their internal dichotomies, empiricism and rationalism, the psychological and the logical theories of language, in the versions that we have encountered them, agree on one basic feature. They all consider language essentially according to its theoretical content [Gehalt]: according to its position in the whole of cognition and according to



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what it achieves in the construction of cognition. Whether it is taken as the immediate work of reason and as its indispensable organ, or whether it is considered as a mere veil that conceals the basic contents of cognition, the actual “originary perceptions” of spirit: theoretical knowledge and the expression of this knowledge is always seen as the goal of language – by which its positive or negative value is to be determined. Words are signs for ideas, and the latter are to be taken either as the objective and necessary contents of cognition or as subjective “representations.” However, the more the concept of “subjectivity” – which modern philosophy progressively developed – widened and deepened, the more clearly there emerged out of it a new, truly universal view of the spontaneity of spirit that proved itself equally in the spontaneity of feeling as will as in the spontaneity of cognition; and with this, another element in the accomplishment of language also now became prominent. For when we seek to follow language back to its earliest beginnings, language seems to be not only a representative [repräsentativ] sign of representation [Vorstellung] but also an emotional sign of affect and the sensible drives. The ancient theory already knew of this derivation of language from affect, from the πάθος [pathos, suffering] of sensation, pleasure, and pain. To conceive of the origins of language, we must, according to Epicurus, return to this common and, thus, “natural” originary-ground of the human and animal. This is not the work of a mere convention, of an arbitrary positing and agreement; rather, it is as necessary and natural as immediate sensation itself. Just as seeing and hearing, the feeling of pleasure and pain, are particular to the human being from the beginning, so too is utterance [Äußerung], which is connected to our sensible sensations and feelings. To the same extent that the sensations of human beings are different, as they changed depending on the diversity of their physical organization and according to their spiritual and ethnic differences, there necessarily arise changes in sound that, for the purpose of simplification and mutual understanding, were only gradually contracted into more-general types of words and languages.56 In the same way, Lucretius traces the alleged miracle of speech production back to the general and particular laws of human nature. Language develops as a particular domain of the general drive for sensible-mimic expression, which is innate in and indigenous to humans, which is not a work of reflection but unconsciously and unintentionally inherent.57

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Modern philosophy, both in natural philosophy and in epistemology, hearkened back to Epicurus. In the seventeenth century, the old “theory of natural sounds” underwent a most remarkable renewal, equally original in its form and in its theoretical justification, particularly with that thinker who first ventured a comprehensive, systematic design of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]. Giambattista Vico in his Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni [Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations] posed the problem of language within the ambit of a general metaphysic of spirit. From the “poetic metaphysic” that was to reveal the origin of poetic art and mythical thinking, he passed through the intermediary link of “poetic logic,” in which he strove to explain the genesis of poetic tropes and metaphors, to the question of the origin of language, which for him was synonymous with the question of the origin of “literature” and of the sciences in general. He also rejected the theory that the originary-words of language could be traced back simply to conventional positings; he also called for a “natural” interconnection between them and their signification. If the present phase in the development of language, if our lingua volgare [common language], no longer recognizes this interconnection, then the reason is simply that it has moved further and further away from its actual source: the language of the gods and heroes. Even in today’s obscurity and fragmentation, however, true philosophical vision still unveils the original connection and kinship of words to what they signify. Since nearly all words are derived from the natural properties of things or from our sensible impressions and feelings, then the idea of a spiritual “universal dictionary” that demonstrates the significations of words in all the different articulated languages and traces them all back to an original unity of ideas is not presumptuous. Vico’s own attempts in this direction reveal, to be sure, that all the naïve arbitrariness of a purely speculative “etymology” is in no way limited by critical or historical considerations.58 All of the originary-words were monosyllabic roots, which were either the onomatopoetic reproductions of an objective natural sound or the sound of pure sentiment, such as the immediate expressions of affect: interjections of pain or pleasure, joy or sorrow, wonder or terror.59 Vico found evidence for his theory that the originary-words were simple and monosyllabic interjections, in, for example, the German language, which he – like Fichte after him – regarded as a true originary-language, as a lingua madre [mother tongue], because the Germans, who had never been dominated by foreign conquerors,



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had preserved the character of their nation and their language pure from time immemorial. The formation of interjections is followed by that of pronouns and particle, which in their basic shapes also go back to monosyllabic roots; the nouns developed next, and only then the verbs, the ultimate creation of language; and in the speech of children and pathological cases of speech disturbance, it can be clearly seen that nouns precede verbs and belong to an earlier linguistic stratum.60 Strange and baroque as this theory may appear when considered only from its particular implementation, it nevertheless contained an important and fruitful embryo for the comprehensive view of language. A dynamic relation replaces a static relation between sound and signification: language was traced back to the dynamics of speech, which was ultimately traced back to the dynamics of feeling and affect. The more decisively the eighteenth century emphasized the special position of feeling, the more it pressed forward to taking on within it the very foundation and originary creative potency of the spiritual and thus the more it appeared in the theory of the origins of language to be rejected on the basis of Vico’s theory. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Rousseau first took up this theory and attempted to develop it in detail.61 However, in another and more profound sense, Vico’s views operated in the man who, from all the thinkers of the eighteenth century, stood closest to his symbolic metaphysics and his symbolic view of history and who, like him, considered poetry as the mother tongue of the human race. However, this thinker, Johann Georg Hamann, spurned any rational form of grounding the expression of his basic view, so his theory appears to mock all attempts at an intelligible systematization; however, in that he consistently related all its parts to one basic problem of language, it formed itself, in spite of him, into an unintended immanent system, as it were. From the beginning, Hamann’s thinking here – which, with its emphasis on the features of immediate feeling and momentary impression, stood in constant danger of losing itself in the particular, the accidental, and peripheral – found a specific center that it not so much fixed as continuously circumscribed. Hamann himself stressed: For me it is neither the discourse [Rede] of physics nor of theology, but language that is the mother of reason and revelation, its Alpha and Omega. . . . If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language,

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toward a phenomenology of the linguistic form λόγος [logos]. I gnaw on this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. It is still always dark over these depths for me: I am still awaiting an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.62

Here lies, for Hamann, the true being [Wesen] of reason, with its unity and inner dichotomy. “What Demosthenes calls actio, Engel mimicry, Batteaux imitation of nature’s beauty, is for me language, the organon and criterion of reason, as Young puts it. Here lies pure reason and at the same time its cri­ tique.”63 However, this very being [Sein], in which the divine logos seems to immediately reveal itself to us, closes off that sphere that we designate with the name “reason.” For language is, as is history, “like nature a sealed book, a veiled testimony, a riddle that cannot be solved unless we plow with a heifer other than our reason.”64 For language is not a collection of discursive conventional signs for discursive concepts; rather, it is the symbol and counterpart of the same divine life that everywhere surrounds us visibly-invisibly, mysteriously and revealingly. Therefore, for Hamann as for Heraclitus, everything in it is at once manifestation [Äußerung] and alienation [Entäußerung], unveiling [Enthüllung] and veiling [Verhüllung]. The whole of creation, nature as well as history, is nothing other than a discourse [Rede] by the Creator to the creature through the creature.

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It belongs to the unity of Divine revelation, that the spirit of God should have abased itself and divested itself of its majesty through the human stylus of the holy men who were driven by it, just as the Son of God through the form of a servant, and just as all creation is a work of supreme humility. To admire the all-wise God only in nature is perhaps an insult similar to the one shown an intelligent man by the rabble who judge his value by his cloak. . . . The opinions of the worldly-wise are variants of nature and the dogmas of the theologians are variants of Scripture. The author is the best interpreter of his words; he may speak through creatures – through events – or through blood and fire and incense, wherein consists the language of the sanctuary . . . . The unity of the author is reflected even in the dialect of his works; in all of them, there is one tone of immeasurable sublimity and depth!65

Herder cast, however, new light into these depths, which, according to his own confession, remained for Hamann in darkness. Herder’s



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prize essay on the origin of language was, thus, especially crucial for the general spiritual history [Geistesgeschichte] of the eighteenth century, because here the sharpest oppositions, which had previously confronted each other in the apprehension and interpretation of spiritual being and effective activity, found an entirely new methodological mediation. Just as Herder was based on Hamann, likewise, in the epoch preceding the prize essay, he had been a student of Kant and indirectly through him of Leibniz. Hamann writes in his treatise On the Cognizing and Sensing of the Human Soul, whose conception and development immediately suggests the prize essay, that it is imbued with the spirit of Leibnizian philosophy from one end to the other; indeed, it is nothing other than a summation of this philosophy as reflected in the spirit of Herder.66 How, however, was it possible to unite together in the apprehension of language the two extreme opposite poles of Hamann and Leibniz? How could the view that language was the supreme achievement of the analytic capacity of thinking, the actual organ for the formation of “distinct” concepts, be connected with the other, according to which its origin evades all reflective understanding and must, rather, be traced back in the darkness of feeling and its unconscious poetic creativity? Herder introduced both his question and with it his new solution to the problem of language. Even if all language is rooted in feeling and its immediate-impulsive utterances [Äußerungen], even if it originates not in the need for communication but rather in cries, tones, and wild, articulated sounds, such an ensemble of sounds can never account for the being [Wesen], the actual spiritual “form” of language. This form arises only in that a new “basic power of the soul,” which separates from the beginning the human from the animal, proves effective. In his presentation of this basic power of “reflective awareness” that is specific to human beings, and in the role that he assigns to it, Herder clearly takes up that basic concept that connects Leibniz’ logic with his psychology. According to Leibniz, the unity of consciousness is possible only through a spiritual doing, through the unity of connection in which spirit apprehends itself as a persistent and identical monad, and in which, furthermore, it recognizes one and the same content, when it encounters it at different times, as one and the same being [Wesen]. This form of “recognition” that Leibniz calls apperception, Herder calls reflection [Reflexion], and it is grasped by Kant as the “synthesis of recognition”:

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toward a phenomenology of the linguistic form The human being demonstrates reflection [Reflexion] when the force of his soul works so freely that in the entire ocean of the sensations that flows into it from all the senses, he can, in a manner of speaking, isolate and stop one wave, and direct his attention toward this wave, conscious that he is doing so. He demonstrates reflection when emerging from the complete nebulous dream of images flitting past his senses, he can in a wakeful moment voluntarily dwell on one image, observe it calmly and lucidly, and distinguish the characteristic trait proving that this and no other is the object. He also demonstrates reflection when he not only cognizes all properties vividly and clearly but can recognize one or more distinguishing properties: the first act of this recognition yields a clear concept; it is the soul’s first judgment – and what made this recognition possible? By a characteristic trait, which he had to isolate and which, as a characteristic trait of mindfulness, clearly came to him. Forward! let us cry εὔρηκα [eureka]! The first characteristic trait of mindfulness was the word of the soul! With it, human speech was invented! 67

It is in this sense that language can, for Herder, be grasped entirely as a product of immediate sensation and, at the same time, entirely as the work of reflection, of mindfulness: precisely because the latter is nothing external that is subsequently added to the content of sensation but because it is included in the content of sensation as a constitutive element. “Mindfulness” first makes the ephemeral sensible stimulus into something determinate and differentiated and thus into a genuine spiritual “content.” Here perception is not, as in Maupertuis and Condillac, a ready-made and self-contained psychological existence [Sein], to which expression in the concept and in the concept-word is only connected; rather, here the determination of the mere impression into “representations” and their denomination take place in one and the same act. The natural givenness of perceptions no longer merely stands over against an artificial system of signs; rather, here perception already contains within itself, by virtue of its particular spiritual nature, a distinctive element of form that, when fully developed, exhibits itself in the form of words and language. Thus, although Herder continues to speak of its “invention,” language is for him never something merely made but rather something that has internally and necessarily become. It is a factor in the synthetic



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construction of consciousness, by virtue of which the world of sensible sensation is first shaped [gestaltet] into a world of intuition; consequently, it is not a thing [Sache] that is produced but rather a manner and determination of spiritual engendering and forming. The general concept of form, under which language is apprehended, has, therefore, undergone a decisive transformation. Herder’s prize essay sharply and precisely designates the boundary where the older rationalistic concept of “reflection-form” [Reflexionsform], which had dominated Enlightenment philosophy, transitioned into the Romantic concept of organic form. The new concept was for the first time definitely introduced into the consideration of language in Friedrich Schlegel’s essay On the Language and Wisdom of India. We do not, however, do justice to the deeper motives of this view if we see in the designation of language as an organism only an image or poetic metaphor. As pale and vague as this designation may appear to us today, for Friedrich Schlegel and his epoch it provided a concrete and substantive expression of the new position that language was now assigned in the whole of spiritual existence [Sein]. For the concept of the organism, as the Romantics understood it, did not serve to designate a single factum of nature, a particular and delimited domain of objective phenomena, with which linguistic phenomena, it is true, could be compared only indirectly and inaccurately. This concept was taken not as an expression for a particular class of phenomena but rather as an expression of a general speculative principle that actually designated the ultimate goal and systematic focus of Romantic speculation. The problem of the organism formed the intellectual center to which the Romantics repeatedly found themselves drawn and led back from the most diverse domains of inquiry. Goethe’s theory of metamorphoses, Kant’s critical philosophy, and Schelling’s first drafts of the Philosophy of Nature [Naturphilosophie] and of the System of Transcendental Idealism seemed to move together in this one point. In the Critique of Judgment, this problem already appears as the actual medius terminus [middle term] through which the dualistic opposition between the two structures within the Kantian system were reconciled. Nature and freedom, being and ought, which previously were able to appear not only as separate but as antinomic worlds opposing each other, were now related to one another through this intermediary member and in this relation disclosed a new content [Gehalt] for both. If Kant primarily grasped this content

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[Gehalt] methodologically, if he determined the two extremes in the criticaltranscendental sense, essentially as a “point of view” for the examination and interpretation of the whole phenomenal world, then for Schelling, the basic concept of the organic became the vehicle for an all-embracing speculative explanation of the world. Nature and art, like nature and freedom, were united in the idea of the organic. This closes the gulf that seemed to divide the unconscious becoming of nature from the conscious creation of spirit; here for the first time, the human gained an intimation of the true unity of its own nature, in which intuition and concept, form and object, ideal and real, are originally one and the same.

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Hence the distinctive semblance that surrounds this problem, a semblance that the philosophy of mere reflection, which proceeded from the separation, is never able to develop, whereas pure intuition, or rather, the creative imagination, long since invented symbolic language that one only has to interpret in order to discover that the less we think of nature in a merely reflective way the more nature speaks to us intelligibly.68

Only from this systematic total-meaning [Gesamtbedeutung], which the idea of the organism possessed for the philosophy of Romanticism, can it be appreciated in what sense it must have proven fruitful for the consideration of language. Once again, there arise those great oppositions around which this consideration has hitherto moved, opposing each other with all their strength; however, between them, between “conscious” and “unconscious,” between “subjectivity” and “objectivity,” between “individuality” and “universality,” a new mediation seems to manifest itself. For the explanation of organic life, Leibniz had already forged the concept of individual form, and through Herder, it was extended to the whole breadth of spiritual existence: from nature to history, from history to art and the concrete consideration of modes of art and artistic styles. Everywhere, a “universal” was sought; however, this universal is not grasped as a being [Seiende] in itself, as the abstract unity of a genus that stood over against the individual cases, but as a unity that constitutes itself only in the allness of particularizations. This allness and the law, the inner interconnection that is expressed in it,



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now appear as the true universal. This signified for the philosophy of language that the quest to discover the general structure of a fundamental and originary-language behind the individual manifold and historical contingency of the individual languages had to be renounced once and for all and that the true universal “nature” [Wesen] of language was no longer to be sought in the abstraction from particularizations but in the totality of these particularizations. This combination of the idea of organic form and the idea of totality designated the path on which Wilhelm von Humboldt would establish his philosophical view of the world, which likewise included a new foundation for the philosophy of language.69

5.  WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT Early in his career, the consideration and study of language became the center of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s intellectual interests and endeavors. “Basically,” he wrote as early as 1805 in a letter to Wolf, “all that drives me is the study of language. I believe that I have discovered the art of how to use language as a vehicle by which to explore the heights, the depths, and the manifold of the whole world.”70 Humboldt practiced this art in a vast number of monographs on the science and history of language, culminating in the synoptic introduction to his Kavi-Work, his last and most brilliant endeavor. Of course, nothing in any of the parts of his works on the philosophy and science of language corresponds with Humboldt’s awareness of the brilliant exercise of this art in which it presents itself to him. His work, as a spiritual creation, often goes beyond anything that he himself predicates in sharp and clear concepts. However, even the much-criticized obscurity of some of Humboldt’s concepts always carries a productive content [Gehalt], which often cannot be captured in a simple formula, in an abstract definition, but which proves effective and fruitful only in the whole of Humboldt’s concrete view on language. In any presentation of Humboldt’s basic ideas, it is, therefore, just and necessary to group the whole of these thoughts around certain systematic centers, even if Humboldt did not designate and emphasize these centers as such. Ultimately, Humboldt was a thoroughly systematic thinker; however, he was hostile to any purely external technique of

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systematization. Thus, in an endeavor to set up the whole of his view of language before us at every single point of his investigation, he resists any clear and sharp separation of this whole. His concepts are never the detached and pure products of logical analysis; rather, there always resonates in them a note of aesthetic feeling, an artistic mood, which animates the presentation but which, at the same time, veils the articulation and structure [Gliederbau] of his thought. If we seek to expose this structure, we discover above all the three great fundamental oppositions that determine Humboldt’s thinking and for which he hoped to find a critical balance and speculative reconciliation in the consideration of language. It is above all the separation of the individual and “objective” spirit as well as the re-sublation [Wiederaufhebung] of this separation that immediately exhibits itself for Humboldt in the image of language. Each individual speaks their own language, and yet, precisely in the freedom with which they employ it, they are aware of an inner spiritual bond. Language is everywhere a mediator, first between infinite and finite nature, and then between one individual and another – simultaneously and through the same act, it makes union possible and arises from this union. We must free ourselves completely from the idea that language can be separated from what it designates, as, for example, the name of an individual [Mensch] from their person, and that like a conventional cipher it is a product of reflection and agreement or, in general, the work of the human being (as we take the concept in experience) or the work of the individual. Like a true, inexplicable wonder, it bursts forth from the mouth of a nation, and no less amazingly, though this is repeated every day and indifferently overlooked, it springs from the babble of every child; and . . . it is the most radiant trace and certain proof that the human being does not possess an intrinsically separate individuality, that I and you are not merely reciprocally demanding concepts, but, if we could go back to the point of separation, they are truly identical concepts, and that, in this sense, there are spheres of individuality, from the weak, helpless, perishable individual down to the primeval tribe of humanity, because otherwise, all understanding would be eternally impossible.71



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Thus, a nation is, in this sense, also a cultural [geistig] form of humanity, characterized by a specific language and individualized in reference to ideal totality. Individuality is shattered, but in such a miraculous way that it is just this separation that awakens a feeling of unity, indeed it appears as a means of producing unity, at least in the idea. . . . For in the deep inner struggle for unity and allness, human beings seek to surpass the separating barriers of their individuality, but must, because like the giant who possesses his strength only from contact with mother earth, they possess power only in their individuality, it must enhance it in this higher struggle. Thus, the human continuously progresses in an inherently impossible quest. It is here that language comes to its aid in a truly miraculous way in that it connects at the same time that it isolates and encloses in the cover of individual expression the possibility of universal intelligibility. . . . The individual, wherever, whenever, and however they live, is a fragment torn from their whole race, and language proves and sustains this interconnection that governs the fates of the individuals and the history of the world.72

Elements [Elemente] of Kant and Schelling are strangely intermingled in this first metaphysical approach of Humboldt’s philosophy of language. On the basis of the critical analysis of the cognitive faculties, Humboldt seeks to advance to the point where the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, between individuality and universality, sublate into pure indifference. The path he takes in the demonstration of this ultimate unity is not, however, the path of intellectual intuition, which is said to raise us immediately above all the barriers of the “finite” analyticaldiscursive concept. Like Kant, as a critic of cognition, Humboldt, as a critic of language, stands in the “fertile bathos of experience.”73 Again and again, he stresses that if it is not to be chimerical, contemplation, even though it was determined to lead to the ultimate depths of humanity, must begin from the dry, even mechanical analysis of the physical. For that original agreement between the world and the human, on which the possibility of all cognition of truth is based, and which, therefore, we must certainly presuppose as a universal postulate in any investigation of particular objects, can be recovered for us only piecemeal and

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progressively by way of the appearances. In this sense, the objective is not the given but rather always remains to be achieved.74 With this determination, Humboldt draws the consequence of Kant’s critical theory for the philosophy of language. The metaphysical opposition of subjectivity and objectivity is replaced by their transcendental correlation. Just as for Kant, the object, as “object in appearance,” does not, as something external and otherworldly, stand over against cognition; rather, it is initially “made possible,” initially conditioned and constituted, through its own categories, so now the subjectivity of language no longer appears as a barrier that cuts us off from the apprehension of objective existence [Sein] but rather appears as a means of forming [Formung], of the “objectification” of sensible impressions. Language, no more than cognition, begins with the object [Objekt] as something given in order simply to “imprint” it within itself; rather, it harbors within it a mode of spiritual apprehension that enters as a decisive element [Moment] in all our repre­ sentations of the objective. Of course, the naïve-realistic intuition, because it constantly lives, weaves, and acts in objects [Objekte], hardly takes note of this subjectivity; it arrives only with difficulty at the concept of a subjectivity that reconfigures the objective, not accidentally, capriciously, or arbitrarily but according to inner laws, so that the apparent object [Objekt] itself becomes only a subjective point of view and yet given full right to make claim to general validity. Thus, for the naïve-realistic intuition, the diversity of languages is only a diversity of sounds, which it considers only as a means to achieve its constant pointing to things [Sachen]. This tangible-realistic view, however, hinders the expansion of our knowledge of language and makes the actually available dead and barren.75 The true ideality of language is grounded in its subjectivity. Thus, it was, and always will be, futile to attempt to exchange the words in the various languages for universally valid signs such as those possessed by mathematics in its lines, numbers, and algebraic symbols. For this can only ever exhaust a small part of what can be thought, can only designate those concepts that are formed by purely rational construction. However, where the matter of inner perception and sensation can be stamped into concepts, it all depends there on the individual faculty of representation of the human being, which is inseparable from their language. The word, which first makes the concept into an individual [member] of the world of thought, significantly adds something of its own to it,



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and as the idea receives its determination through it, the idea is also held captive within certain limits. . . . Through the mutual dependency of thought and word to each other, it is evident that languages are not really the means of presenting an already cognized truth, but much more, they are the means of uncovering the previously uncognized. Their diversity is not one of sounds and signs, but a diversity of views of the world itself.76

Here is found, for Humboldt, the ground and ultimate purpose of the investigation of language. Historically, a remarkable process takes shape that once again shows us how truly fertile and fundamental philosophical ideas continually prove to be effective even beyond the immediate formulation that they first received through their authors. For here, Humboldt, by way of Kant and Herder, had found his way back from Leibniz’ narrow logical view of language to a deeper, more comprehensive, universal-idealistic apprehension that is grounded in the general principles of Leibniz’ theory. Just as for Leibniz, the universe is given only in its reflection by the monads, just as each one of them depicts the totality of the phenomena from an individual “point of view” – and yet, on the other hand, just as the totality of these perspective views and the harmony among them constitutes what we call the objectivity of appearances, the reality of the phenomenal world – so here, for Humboldt every individual language is an individual view of the world of this sort, and only the totality of these views of the world renders the concept of objectivity attainable for us. Thus, as subjective, language is comprehended such that it stands in the way of the cognizable, while as objective, it confronts the human being as an empirical-psychological subject. For each language is an echo of the general nature of the human: “The subjectivity of the whole of humanity, yet again, becomes something intrinsically objective.”77 With this view of objectivity  – not as something simply given and there to be described but as something to be achieved through a process of spiritual forming [Formung] – the second basic element underlying Humboldt’s consideration of language is postulated and posited. Any consideration of language must proceed “genetically”: not in the sense that it pursues the temporal emergence of language and attempts to explain its becoming from determinate empirical-psychological “causes” but rather in the sense that it recognizes the finished framework [Gefüge] of linguistic

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formation as derived and mediated, which is understood only if we succeed in constructing it out of its factors and in determining the mode and direction of these factors. The breaking up of language into words and rules will never be more than a dead concoction of scientific dissection, for the nature [Wesen] of language is based not on those elements [Elemente] that abstraction and analysis highlight in it but exclusively on the eternally repetitive work of spirit, the capability to make articulated sounds into the expression of thought. In every single language, this work posits particular centers and spreads out from it in different directions, and yet this manifoldness of products ultimately merges, not, to be sure, into the objective [sachlich] unity of a product but into the ideal unity of an intrinsically lawful doing. Just as the existence of spirit in general can as such be thought of only in activity, so too can every particular existence that is possible and comprehensible be thought of only through the existence of spirit. What we call the being [Wesen] and form of a language is, therefore, nothing other than the constant and uniform element that we can demonstrate not in something but in the work of spirit that raises the articulated sound to the expression of thought.78 Even that which might appear in language to be its actual substantially consistent existence, even the simple word detached from the context of the sentence, does not communicate something, such as a substance, already produced, nor does it possess a self-contained concept; rather, it merely suggests to form such a concept with autonomous energy and in a determinate way.

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Human beings do not understand one another by actually offering the signs of things, nor even by the fact that they mutually decide to produce precisely and completely the same concept; rather, they do so by touching in one another the same link in the chain of their sensible representations and internal production of concepts, by striking the same key on their spiritual instrument, whereupon corresponding, but not the same, concepts spring forth [hervorspringen] in each. . . . If . . . the link in the chain, the key on the instrument, is touched in this fashion, the whole vibrates; and what issues from the soul as a concept is attuned to everything that surrounds the individual link, even to the remotest distance.79



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Thus, here too, the harmony in the infinitely varied production of the words of language and the terms of concepts, not the simplicity of an existence reproduced in it, is the stable support and the guarantee of objectivity. Basically, therefore, the true bearer of linguistic sense is never the individual word but rather only the sentence; for only the sentence reveals the original force of synthesis on which all speech as well as all understanding are ultimately based. This general view is most sharply and succinctly expressed in Humboldt’s famous formulation that language is not a work (ergon) but an activity (energeia) and that, as a result, the true definition of it can be only a genetic one. Strictly speaking, this definition clearly applies to every instance of speech; however, in its essential and true sense, we can regard the totality of this speech, as it were, only as “the” language, and we can consider the function and its general, lawfully determined exercise only as that which constitutes its substantiality, its ideal consistent existence.80 With the concept of synthesis, we also arrive at the third of the great pairs of oppositions by which Humboldt considers language. This opposition, the differentiation of matter and form, which dominates Humboldt’s general view, is also rooted in the sphere of Kantian thought. For Kant, form is only an expression of a relationship; however, for this very reason, because all our knowledge of appearances ultimately dissolves into a knowledge of temporal-spatial relationships, it constitutes the actual objectifying principle of cognition. The unity of form, as the unity of connection, grounds the unity of the object. The combination of a manifold can never come to us through the senses; rather, it is always an “act of spontaneity of the power of representation.” Thus, we can represent nothing as combined in the object [Objekt] without having previously combined it ourselves, and among all representations, combination is the only one that is not given through objects [Objekt] but that can be executed only by the subject itself.81 To characterize this form of combination – which is grounded in the transcendental subject and its spontaneity and yet is strictly “objective” because it is necessary and universally valid – Kant had based himself on the unity of judgment and, thus, directly on the unity of the sentence. For him, judgment is nothing other than the mode of bringing given cognitions under the objective unity of apperception, though this unity is grammatically expressed in

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the copula of judgment, in the little word of relation “is” that combines subject and predicate. Only by this “is” is a fixed and unsublatable [unauf­ heblich] consistent existence of the judgment posited; what is expressed here concerns a belonging together [Zusammengehören] of representations, not their mere being together [Zusammensein] according to fortuitous, psychological associations.82 Humboldt’s concept of form expands what is said of a single linguistic determination to the whole of language. In every complete and thoroughly formed language, the act of designating a concept by certain characteristic material traits must be joined by a distinctive work and a distinctive formal determination by which the concept that is transposed into a certain category of thinking is designated, for example, as substance, property, or activity. This transposition of the concept into a determinate category of thinking is a new act of linguistic self-consciousness, through which the isolated instance, the individual word, is related to the totality of possible instances in language or speech. Only through this operation, carried out with the greatest possible purity and depth and firmly embedded in the language itself, is an adequate fusion and articulation created between its independent activity, arising from thinking, and that purely receptive activity that follows from external impressions.83

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Here too, matter and form, receptivity and spontaneity  – like the aforementioned oppositions “individual” and “universal,” “subjective” and “objective” – are not pieces broken asunder out of which the process of language is composed but elements [Momente] in the genetic process, which necessarily belong together and which can be separated from each other only in our analysis. The priority of form over matter, which Humboldt asserts with Kant and finds most clearly and sharply expressed in the inflected languages, is thus apprehended as a priority of validity and not as a priority of empirical-temporal existence, because in the existence of every language, even in the so-called “isolating” languages, both determinants, the formal and the material, are necessarily posited together with one another, not one without the other or one before the other.84 All of this denotes, of course, only the external outline of Humboldt’s view of language and, as it were, its intellectual framework [Rahmen]. What gave this view its gravity and fertility was,



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however, the manner in which it was filled out by Humboldt’s linguistic research into this framework [Rahmen], the twofold direction by which he constantly passed over from the appearance to the idea and from the idea to the appearance. The basic idea of the transcendental method, the consistent relation of philosophy to science, which Kant had undertaken with respect to mathematics and mathematical physics, now seemed confirmed in a totally new domain. The new fundamentally philosophical view of language called for, and made possible, a new configuration of the science of language. In Bopp’s general view of language, he reaches back to Humboldt: already the very first sentences of his Com­ parative Grammar, published in 1833, invoke Humboldt’s concept of the linguistic organism in defining the task of the new science of comparative linguistics.85

6.  AUGUST SCHLEICHER AND THE PROGRESS TOWARD THE “NATURAL-SCIENTIFIC” VIEW OF LANGUAGE As the concept of the “organism” advanced beyond the domain of the speculative treatment of language into the domain of empirical research, it was once again believed, however, that just because of its breadth an indeterminacy and ambiguity was inherent in it that threatened to make it unusable for the treatment of individual, concrete problems. If philosophical speculation had seen in this concept essentially a mediation between opposing extremes, it seemed, therefore, to obtain some share in the nature of each of these extremes. However, can such a concept that shimmers, as it were, with every color, still be used as a ground, if it concerns this – not a general metaphysics of language but a specialized meth­ odology? If, from the standpoint of their basic methodological character, it came to deciding whether the laws of language should be designated as natural-scientific or historical laws; if the share of the physical and of spiritual factors in the formation of language, as well as their mutual relationship, could be ascertained; if, in the end, it could be determined to what extent conscious and unconscious processes played a part in the formation of language, then, the mere concept of “the languageorganism” [Sprachorganismus] must still appear unable to provide an answer to all of these questions. For precisely the middle position that it takes up, hovering, as it were, between “nature” and “spirit,” between unconscious

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effective action and conscious creation, would seem to allow it to move back and forth between the two perspectives. It needs only a slight alteration in order to disturb the delicate equilibrium in which it maintains itself and, depending on the direction in which this alteration takes place, to bestow on it an altered content [Gehalt] and an altered, indeed, an opposing methodological significance. In fact, the history of the philology of language [Sprachwissenschaft] in the nineteenth century sets before us in concrete determinacy the process that we have attempted to suggest in a general, schematic form. The philology [Sprachwissenschaft] carries out the same transition that is simultaneously accomplished in the historiography [Geschichtswissenschaft] and in the systematization of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] in general. The concept of the organic retained its central position; however, its sense and its tendency underwent a radical transformation once the biological concept of the development of modern natural science had opposed the concept of development of Romantic philosophy. In the consideration of the phenomena of life itself, the speculative concept of organic form was gradually displaced by its purely natural-scientific concept, and this immediately affected the consideration of linguistic phenomena. This process of intellectual transformation is, in particular, reflected with typical clarity in the scientific development of August Schleicher. In his view of language and the history of language, Schleicher not only took the step from Hegel to Darwin but also passed through all of the intermediary stages between these two outlooks. We see in Schleicher not only the beginning and the end but also the individual phases of that movement by which the speculative consideration of language transitioned into a purely empirical one and also by which for the first time the concept of the lawfulness of language gradually acquired distinct content. In Schleicher’s first important work, Investigations in Comparative Philology (1848), he assumes that the proper nature [Wesen] of language, as an articulated sound expressing spiritual life, is to be sought in the relationship by which the expression of signification and the expression of relation remain together. Each language is characterized by how it expresses signification and relation: beyond these two elements [Momenten] absolutely no third element [Element] forming the nature [Wesen] of language can be thought. On the basis of this presupposition, languages are divided into three main types: the isolating (monosyllabic) language, the agglutinative



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language, and the inflected language. Signification is material, the root; the relation is the formal alteration made to the root. Both elements must be included as necessary constituents in language; however, although neither can be totally lacking, the relationship that they strike up together can be different: it can be merely implicit or more or less explicit. The isolating languages express signification only phonetically, while the expression of relation is decided by the position of the word sounds and by the accent: the agglutinative languages possess relational sounds in addition to significative sounds, but the two are only externally bound together, in that the designation of relation is annexed only materially and superficially to the root, which undergoes no internal alteration. Only in the inflected languages are the two basic elements not only strung together but also truly connected to and permeating one another. The first is characterized by the undifferentiated identity of relation and signification or, one might say, by the pure in-itself [Ansich] of relation; the second is characterized by differentiation into relational sounds and significative sounds, thus the emergence of relation in a separate phonetic existence for itself [für sich]; the third, therefore, is this sublation of that difference, that joining together of the same. The return to unity, however, is a return to an infinitely greater unity, because it presupposes the difference out of which it arises, and it apprehends this difference as sublated within itself. If thus far, the reflection of Schleicher has strictly followed Hegel’s dialectical schema, which dominates equally well the determination of the being [Wesen] of language as a whole, as well as the view of its internal organization, then already in A Compendium of the Com­ parative Grammar, this attempt at a dialectical classification is accompanied by an attempt at a natural-scientific classification. The systematic dimension of linguistic research  – Schleicher expressly points out  – possesses an unmistakable similarity to the natural sciences. The entire habitus of a family of languages can, like that of a family of plants or animals, be reduced to certain specific criteria: As in botany, certain characteristic traits – cotyledons, types of blossom – more than others prove suitable as the bases of classification, precisely because these characteristic traits usually coincide with others, and the phonetic laws seem to fulfill this roll in the classification of languages within a single linguistic family, e.g., the Semitic or Indio-Germanic family.86

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Initially, however, the consideration, of course, does not follow this empirical path but rather follows a purely speculative direction. The monosyllabic languages, because they do not know of the organization of words, resemble the simple crystal that, in opposition to the more highly organized organisms, appears as a strict unity; the agglutinative languages, which have achieved the organization into parts but have not yet fused these parts into a true whole, correspond to the organic realm of plants; on the other hand, the inflected languages, in which the word is a unity in the manifold of its members, correspond to the animal organism.87 And for Schleicher, this is not a question of mere analogy but rather of a highly significant objective determination that springs from the very being [Wesen] of language itself so that the methodology of philology [Sprachwissenschaft] is decided. If languages are natural beings [Naturwesen], then the laws according to which they develop must be the laws of natural science and not the laws of historical science. Indeed, the historical and language-forming process disintegrates both temporally as well as in terms of its content. History and the formation of language are not simultaneously reciprocating but rather superseding faculties of the human spirit. For history is the work of the self-conscious will, whereas language is the work of an unconscious necessity. If in history freedom exhibits itself, gives itself its own reality, then language belongs to the unfree, natural side of human beings. Admittedly, language is also a process of becoming that may, in the broader sense of the word, be called history: a successive emerging of moments; however, this becoming is so little a characteristic trait of the free spiritual sphere that it emerges most unspoilt [ungetrübt] even in nature.

Once history has taken place, once spirit no longer produces sound but confronts it and uses it as a means, language can develop no further; on the contrary, it now increasingly refines itself. The formation of language occurs before history [Geschichte], and the decline of language begins in historical [historisch] time.88 Language is, therefore, for human spirit what nature is for world spirit: the state of its being other [Anderssein]. “Its agreement with history begins with its spiritualization, from that point in time after which it



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will gradually lose its corporeality, its form. The natural-scientific part of linguistics is, in opposition to the historical part, the systematic part.” If the philologist [Philologe], who needs language only as a means by which to penetrate into the spiritual being [Wesen] and life of a people, deals with history, then, by contrast, the object [Objekt] of linguistics [Linguistik] is language, whose constitution lies beyond the willful determination of the individual; it is likewise impossible, for example, for the nightingale to exchange its song for that of the lark. That, however, which can no more be changed in an organic way by the will of the human than its bodily constitution, does not belong to the domain of free spirit, but rather to that of nature. Consequently, the method of linguistics is also totally different from that of any of the historical sciences and essentially assumes the methodology of the other natural sciences. . . . Like the natural sciences, its task is the exploration of a domain in which we discern the rule of unalterable natural laws in which the will and caprice of human are able to change nothing.89

We see that only one step is needed so that the consideration of language dissolves entirely into the consideration of nature, so that the laws of language dissolve into the pure laws of nature, and this step was taken twenty-five years later by Schleicher in his Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language [Sprachwissenschaft]. In this work, which took the form of an “open letter to Ernst Haeckel,” the opposition between “nature” and “spirit,” which had hitherto governed Schleicher’s view of language and its position in the system of the sciences, was dropped as obsolete. Schleicher notes that the direction of thinking in the modern period is “unmistakably toward monism.”90 Dualism, construed as an opposition between spirit and nature, content and form, being [Wesen] and appearance, had, he declared, been entirely superseded in the outlook of the natural sciences. For this outlook, there was no matter without spirit, just as little, however, as there is no spirit without matter; or there was neither spirit nor matter in the usual sense but rather only one entity that was both at once. From this, the science of language must draw, therefore, the simple inference that it, too, must renounce any sort of special position for its laws. The theory of evolution, whose validity Darwin had demonstrated for the species of animals and plants, must be equally valid for the organisms of language.

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To the species of a genus there corresponds the languages of a tribe, to the subspecies there corresponds the dialects of a language, to the varieties and variants there corresponds the sub-dialects and concurrent dialects, and finally, to the single individuals there corresponds the mode of speech of the individual, the language of the speaking human being. And here too, in the linguistic domain, we also find the origin of the species by gradual differentiation and the survival of the more highly developed organisms in the struggle for existence, which seems to have established Darwin’s idea far beyond its original domain and shown it to be the foundation of both the natural and human sciences.91

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From a methodological standpoint, we find ourselves here at the opposite extreme from Schleicher’s original point of departure. Anything that is constructed a priori – he now expressly declares – is, at best, an ingenious game that is, however, worthless junk for science. Once it is recognized that “observation is the foundation of our present knowledge,” once empiricism is granted unlimited rights, then everything that has hitherto passed for the philosophy of language is as dead as the dialectical philosophy of nature [Naturphilosophie]: it belongs to a past phase of thinking, whose framing of the questions, like its solutions, lie behind us. Of course, Schleicher, even in this last formulation of the problem of language, only fulfilled in small part the demand that he sets up here; it is easy to see that, in turning from Hegel to Haeckel, he merely exchanged one form of metaphysics for another. The actual step into the promised land of positivism was reserved for a new generation of researchers, who, instead of attempting a total monistic or evolutionistic explanation of all reality, strove to apprehend the methodological problems of the science of language in their special particularity, in their sharp and clear isolation.

7.  THE GROUNDING OF THE MODERN SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE AND THE PROBLEM OF “PHONETIC LAWS” To be sure, in this sense, it was not possible through such a limitation that the problem of language would in a single stroke be disengaged from its involvement and entanglement with, on the one hand, the



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methodological issues of historiography [Geschichtswissenschaft], and, on the other, with those of natural science. For even positivism – to which the solution of this problem now seemed to have been entrusted once and for all – when it negates the possibility of metaphysics is, precisely in this negation itself, still philosophy. As such, however, it could not content itself with a mere manifold of particular facts or the particular laws governing these facts but was compelled to seek a unity for this manifold that could be found nowhere else than in the concept of law itself. That this concept possessed in the various domains of knowledge a uniform, unchanging significance was initially simply assumed; however, as the more methodological self-determination advanced, the more this presupposition necessarily became the problem. If we speak of linguistic, historical, and natural-scientific “laws,” we take for granted a certain logical commonality of structure among them all; however, from the standpoint of methodology, the specific imprinting and nuanced shading that the concept of law undergoes in each individual domain was more important than this commonality. If the whole of the sciences is to be apprehended as a truly systematic whole, then, on the one hand, a general task of cognition must be stressed in all of them; however, on the other hand, it must be shown how this task undergoes in each of them a particular solution under certain particular conditions. The development of the concept of law in the modern science of language has been determined by both of these considerations. If we now follow the transformations of this concept from the perspective of the general history of science and the general critique of cognition, then it becomes evident in a remarkable and characteristic way how the individual domains of knowledge ideally conditioned one another even where we cannot speak of any immediate influence. The different phases that the concept of natu­ ral law passed through correspond, with almost unbroken continuity, to the different conceptions of the linguistic laws. And it is a question here not of a superficial transference but of a deeper commonality [Gemeinsam­ keit], of the impact of the specific basic intellectual tendency of the time in completely different spheres of inquiry. The theory of principles that dominated exact natural science in the middle of the nineteenth century received its most pregnant expression in those celebrated sentences with which Helmholtz introduced his treatise On the Conservation of Energy. While Helmholtz identified that the task

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of this work was to prove that all effects in nature can be traced back to attractive and repellent forces, whose intensity depends only on the distance between the points affecting one another, he meant not to put forward this principle as a mere factum but rather to derive its validity and necessity from the form of the concepts of nature. The principle that any alteration in nature must have a sufficient cause, according to him, is truly fulfilled only if we succeed at tracing all events [Geschehen] back to their ultimate causes, which act in accordance with an absolutely immutable law, which consequently produce [hervorbringen] the same effect at all times under the same external relationships. The discovery of these ultimate immutable causes is in every case the proper goal of theoretical natural sciences.

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Now whether all events can really be traced back to such causes, whether nature must be fully comprehensible, or whether there are alterations in it that evade the laws of a necessary causality, that is to say, which fall into the domain of spontaneity or freedom, need not be decided here; in any case, it is clear that science, whose purpose it is to comprehend nature, must proceed from this presupposition of its comprehensibility and continue to investigate and draw inferences under this presupposition until perhaps compelled by irrefutable facts to recognize its limitations.92

It is well known how this presupposition that the comprehensibility of nature coincides with its continuous explicability by mechanical principles spread from the domain of “inorganic” being into that of the organic events [Geschehen] and how also descriptive natural science came to be wholly dominated by it. The “boundaries of the cognition of nature” now coincided with the boundaries of the mechanical worldview. To identify a process in inorganic or organic nature meant nothing other than to dissolve it into its components and ultimately into the mechanical motions of atoms: whatever did not submit itself to such a dissolution seemed destined to remain an absolutely transcendent problem for the human mind and for all human science. If we consider this basic view – which, within the natural sciences, was stated most clearly by Du Bois-Reymond in his celebrated lecture “On the Boundaries of the Cognition of Nature” (1872) – applied to



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the consideration of language, then a concept of language can be spoken about only if it is possible to reduce its complex phenomena to simple alterations of ultimate elements [Elemente] and if it is possible to establish generally valid rules for these changes. Such an inference was far removed from the older speculative way of thinking about language-organisms, for precisely because the organic events [Geschehen] were located for them between nature and freedom, it did not appear to be subjected to any absolute necessity; rather, a certain amount of free play appeared between the different possibilities. Bopp had on occasion expressly stressed that in language one should not seek laws offering more solid resistance than the shores of rivers and oceans.93 Here Goethe’s concept of the organism prevails: language is subjected to a rule that, as Goethe put it, is fixed and eternal but, at the same time, living. Now, however, since in natural science the idea of the organism seemed to have dissolved utterly into the concept of the mechanism, no room remained for such a view. The invariable lawfulness that governs the entire becoming of language may appear obscure in the complex appearances; however, in the actual elementary processes of language, in the phenomena of phonetic change, they must emerge unveiled. As is now emphasized: “If we admit of arbitrary accidental deviations that cannot be brought together into some interconnection with one another, then we are basically saying that the object [Objekt] of our investigation, language, is inaccessible to scientific cognition.”94 As we can see, it is a general presupposition regarding concepts and comprehensibility in general – it is an entirely determined ideal of cognition  – that is required by a certain framing of linguistic law. This postulate of the exceptionlessness of elementary laws was given its sharpest framing in Brugmann and Östhoff’s Morphological Investigations. Every phonetic change, inasmuch as it occurs mechanically, takes place according to laws that admit no exception: that is to say, the direction of the movement of sound is always the same for all the members of a linguistic community . . . and all words, in which the movement of sound appears in the same relationship, are affected by the change without exception.95

However, if this view of the “neogrammarian tendency” was more and more now firmly grounded, and if it gave the entire scientific

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consideration of language in the second half of the nineteenth century its proper imprint, then the concept of phonetic law was, nevertheless, gradually subjected to the same transformations that were likewise to be recognized in the view of the general concept of natural law. As the pure positivist ideal was more strictly applied in science, the demand to explain the natural events [Geschehen] by way of the general laws of mechanics was pushed back: in its place emerged the more modest task to describe it in terms of such laws. Mechanics – according to Kirchhoff’s famous definition – is now nothing more than the complete and unambiguous description of the motion events that occur in nature.96 What is given are not the ultimate, absolute grounds of events [Geschehen] but only the forms in which these events [Geschehen] take place. Therefore, if the analogy between the science of language and the science of nature is asserted, we should expect and demand more from the laws of language than just a comprehensive expression of empirically observed regularities. Here again, if we remain strictly within the sphere of given facts, it cannot be a question of demonstrating the ultimate forces of the formation of language but merely of ascertaining certain uniformities in it through observation and comparison. For this reason, however, the alleged “natural necessity” of phonetic laws only now gains a different character. Thus, Östhoff still formulates in 1878 the principle of exceptionlessness of phonetic laws: Everything that has been determined from the methodologically stricter studies of our own day makes it increasingly clear that the phonetic laws of language work, as it is said, blindly, with a blind natural necessity, that there are simply no exceptions to them or exemptions from them.97

The mode of validity unique to the phonetic laws was, however, determined by the scholar Hermann Paul in a much more sober and critical manner. “Phonetic law,” he emphatically stresses, “does not tell you what must repeatedly happen under certain general conditions, but only states the uniformity within a group of certain historical phenomena.”98 A view of this sort, which sees in the concept of law only the expression of certain facts [Fakta] of linguistic history, not the expression of the ultimate factors [Faktoren] of all language formation, was free to ascribe observed uniformities to entirely different forces. Alongside



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the elementary physical processes of phonetic development, the complex psychological conditions of speech must now, once again, emerge in their own right. Now, the constant uniformities of phonetic change were traced back to the physical factors, while the apparent exceptions were traced back to psychological factors. The strict and exceptionless elaboration of the physiological laws that regulate phonetic change is confronted by the drive of the linguistic formation of analogies that is directed to the phonetically holding together, the formal belongingtogether of the words of language and to their assimilation in one another. Meanwhile, this recognition of the psychological, “spiritual” factors in the formation of language clearly upheld itself within relatively narrow boundaries. For the concept of spirit no longer signifies what it had for Humboldt and for idealist philosophy. It bears an unmistakable naturalistic imprint: it has passed through the concept of mechanism and is determined by it. The psychological laws that govern the “mechanism of representations” now appear, therefore, as the basic laws of spirit. Considered from a purely fundamental point of view, it amounts to the same whether we formulate these laws as they are defined by Wundt or Hermann Paul or as they are defined in Herbart’s psychology. In either case, it is the type of “lawful association” back to which one traces the laws of language and from out of which one attempts to comprehend them.99 For this reason, however, the contents of the various factors of the formation of language stand methodologically on the same level and belong, as it were, to the same dimension of consideration. Language constructs itself in the psyche [Seele] of the individual through the intertwining of the various physiological mechanisms of sound production and of the psychological mechanisms of associations; it is a whole that can be understood by us in no other way than by progressively dissecting it into physical and psychological elementary processes.100 Thus, language continues to be classified here as a natural event; however, the mechanistic concept of nature has been replaced by a broader concept, the “psychophysical” nature of the human being. This shift is expressly emphasized in the most comprehensive and consistent presentation of linguistic phenomena that are found from the standpoint of modern psychology. The way phonetic laws and analogy formation constantly intertwine, Wundt stressed, is obviously much more comprehensive if

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we regard them not as disparate forces opposing one another but as conditions, both of which are in some way ultimately grounded in the unitary psychophysical organization of the human being. So it is that, because of the memory-like reproduction of forms governed by phonetic law, we must presuppose, on the one hand, a concurrence of the verbal associations that have been brought to the explanation of analogy formation, and, on the other hand, that associations, like all psychological processes, are modified by repetition into automatic combinations, so that those phenomena, which at the outset are characterized as psychological elements, come with time to be numbered among the physical elements. And the change is not merely successive as here illustrated, where a psychological element thus called by us on the basis of certain obvious characteristic traits is transformed into a physical factor and vice versa, but from the very beginning the two are so intimately intertwined that they cannot be separated, because with each factor of one type a factor of the other type would have to be eliminated.101

Here the idealistic demand for “totality” – the demand not to piece language together out of disparate elements [Elemente] but to always see in it the expression of the “whole” person [Mensch] and of their spiritualnatural being – reappears in a new form; however, at the same time, it turns out that for the present this demand is only vaguely formulated and inadequately fulfilled in what is designated here as the unity of the “psychophysical nature” of a person [Mensch]. If we look back over the whole development of the philosophy of language from Humboldt to the “neogrammarians,” from Schleicher to Wundt, we see that with all its increased specialized knowledge and insight, it has, from the purely methodological point of view, moved in a circle. To establish the same inner certainty as the science of nature, in order to acquire the same content [Gehalt] of exact, inviolable laws, the science of language should be based on natural science, and it should be oriented toward its construction. However, the concept of nature that was chosen as a basis proved, more and more, to be only an apparent unity. The more sharply it was analyzed, the clearer it became that this concept harbored within itself elements of an entirely different signification and origin. So long



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as the relationship between these elements was not transparent and conclusively determined, the different naturalistically colored concepts of language were in danger of a dialectical shift into their opposite. This transformation can be followed in the concept of phonetic law  – for though it was initially determined to designate the rigorous and uniform necessity that prevails in every linguistic alteration, it ultimately became more and more estranged from this determination. Phonetic change and shift ceased to be regarded as an expression of “blind” necessity and were referred back to mere “statistical rules of chance.” In this view, the alleged laws of nature become mere laws of fashion, created by some individual arbitrary act, stabilized by habit, and extended by imitation.102 Thus, the very concept that should have created a firm and unified foundation for the science of language still harbored within itself unmediated oppositions that would set the philosophical consideration of language before a new task. How this not only shook but ultimately shattered the positivist schema of consideration is shown with particular clarity in the writings of Karl Voßler. Voßler builds on Hegel in his two books, Positivism and Idealism in Linguistic Science (1904) and Language as Creation and Development (1905); however, equally clear as this connection is the line that connects him to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt’s idea that language is never to be comprehended of as a mere work (ergon) but rather as an activity (energeia), that the “facts” [Tatsache] of language become fully intelligible only if we trace them back to the spiritual “fact-act” [Tathandlungen] from which they arose, finds here, under different historical conditions, its renewal. Even for Humboldt, this principle is meant to designate not so much the psychological “origin” of language as rather its enduring form that is working through all the phases of its spiritual construction. This construction does not resemble the mere unfolding of a given natural germ but rather bears the thoroughgoing character of spiritual spontaneity that is manifested in a new way at every new stage [Stufe]. In the same sense, Voßler compares and contrasts the concept of language as creation to the intrinsically ambiguous concept of the “development” of language. What is in it, as the given lawfulness of a certain state of affairs, can be retained in the form of rules; however, behind this merely “having become” [Gewor­ den] now stand the true constitutive acts of becoming, the constantly renewed acts of the spiritual act of generation. And in this act, on which

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the whole of language is essentially based, the true explanation of individual linguistic phenomena should be found. The positivistic tendency of observation that seeks to progress from the elements [Elemente] to the whole, from sounds to words and sentences and from here to the distinctive “sense” of language, is accordingly now inverted into its opposite. We must start from the primacy of “sense” and from the universality of the construction of sense [Sinnfügung] to comprehend the individual phenomena of the development and history of language. Spirit that lives in human discourse constitutes the sentence, the component part, the word, and the sound. If this “idealistic principle of causality” is taken seriously, then all the phenomena described by such lower disciplines as phonetics, the theory of inflection, morphology, and syntax, must find their ultimate and true explanation in the supreme discipline – i.e., sty­ listics. The grammatical rules – the “laws,” as well as the “exceptions” in formation of forms and in the syntax – are to be explained through the “style” that prevails in the construction of each language. The linguistic usage – insofar as it is a convention (i.e., an already-congealed rule) – exhibits syntax; the linguistic usage – insofar as it is a living creation and formation – examines [betrachtet] stylistics; the path must run from the latter to the former, not from the former to the latter, since in everything spiritual, the form of becoming renders accessible for us the intelligibility of the form of the having become [Gewordenen].103 Insofar as we are concerned with the mere ascertainment of the facts of the history of language, with the cognition of the given, positivism can continue to be recognized as a principle of research, as “methodological positivism.” What is rejected is only that a positivistic metaphysics that believed that with the ascertainment of facts it had also fulfilled the task of their spiritual interpretation. It is replaced by a metaphysics of idealism, in which aesthetics appears as the central member. “If the idealistic definition – language = spiritual expression – is justified,” Voßler concludes, “then the history of linguistic development can be nothing more than the history of spiritual forms of expression, that is to say, a history of art in the broadest sense of the term.”104 However, in this conclusion, in which Voßler joins Benedetto Croce, there lies a new problem and a new danger for the consideration of language. Once again, it is taken into the whole of a philosophical system; however, this taking up seems to include at the same time the condition that language be identified with



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one of the members of this system. As in the idea of general and rational grammar, the particular nature of language was ultimately dissolved into a universal logic and was in danger of being merged with aesthetics and so considered as the general science of expression. However, is aesthetics, as Voßler assumes with Croce, actually the science of expression per se, or does it signify only one of the sciences of expression  – a “symbolic form” having equal stature alongside others? Does there not consist analogous relations to those between the form of language and the form of art, as between them and all other forms that, like myth, construct a proper spiritual world of signification through the medium of their own image-world? With these questions, we have returned back to the basic systematic problem from which we started. Language stands in a focal point of spiritual existence [Sein], a point at which rays of quite diverse origin [Herkunft] converge and from which lines of influence radiate to every domain of spirit. From this, however, it follows that the philosophy of language can be designated as a special branch of aesthetics only if aesthetics has previously been detached from all specific relation to artistic expression – if, in other words, the task of aesthetics is grasped so generally that it expands to what we have here attempted to define as the task of a universal “philosophy of symbolic forms.” If language should be shown to be a truly independent and original energy of spirit, then it must take its place in the totality [Ganze] of these forms, without falling together with any of the other already-existing individual members; thus, with every systematic connection into which it enters with logic and aesthetics, it must be assigned its distinctive position in the whole and in this way have its “autonomy” secured.

ENDNOTES   1 A summary presentation of the history of the philosophy of language is still a desideratum: the most recent (eleventh) edition (1920) of Friedrich Überweg’s Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie, apart from the general presentations on the history of philosophy, an abundance of monographs on the history of logic and epistemology, on the history of metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics, but does not mention a single work on the history of the philosophy of language. Only the ancient philosophy of language has been treated in any detail, in the well-known works of Lersch and Steinthal and in the literature on classical grammar and rhetoric. Of course, the following brief historical introduction does not claim to fill this gap; it purports

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merely to trace the most important steps in the philosophical development of the “idea of language” and suggest certain lines that might be followed in a detailed study.   2 Rigveda, X, 125. Vedic Hymns, trans. Edward J. Thomas (London: J. Murray, 1913), (923), 88–89. On the mythical and religious significance of the Vāc, cf. particularly Brihadâranyaka-Upaaishad, 1, 5. 3ff. in Paul Deussen, Sechzig Upanishad’s des Veda (3rd ed., Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1921), 401ff.   3 Heraclitus, Fragment 72.   4 Heraclitus, Fragment 94, in H. Diels, Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker. [Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948).]   5 Heraclitus, Fragment 41.   6 Heraclitus, Fragment 51.   7 Heraclitus, Fragment 67.   8 Heraclitus, Fragment 62.   9 ξύν νόωι λέγοντας ἰσχυρίζεαθαι χρὴ τῶι ξυνῶι πάντων, ὅκωσπερ νόμωι πόλις, καί πολὺ ἰσχυροτέρως. τρέφονται γὰρ πάντες οἱ ἀνθρώπειοι νόμοι ὑπὸ ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου. κρατεῖ γὰρ τοσοῦτον ὁκόσον ἐθέλει καὶ ἐξαρκεῖ πᾶσι καὶ περιγίνεται (Fragment 114). “Those who speak with understanding (nous) must rely firmly on what is common to all as a city must rely on [its] law, and much more firmly. For all human laws are nourished by one law, the divine law; for it has as much power as it wishes and is sufficient for all and is still left over.” 10 Heraclitus, Fragment 48. 11 Cf. in particular Fragment 32: ἓν το σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα. [That which alone is wise is one; it is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.] 12 Heraclitus, Fragment 92. 13 Xenophon, Memorabilia, book 3, chap. 14, § 2; for further historical material on this question, cf. H. Steinthal, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern (Berlin: Dümmler, 1890), vol. I, 76 f. 14 Cf. particularly Cratylus 386A, 438D6. 15 See Seventh Letter, 342 aff.; concerning the authenticity of the Seventh Letter, see in particular Wilamowitz, Platon, 1, 641ff.; 2, 282ff., the penetrating analysis of the philosophical stage in Julius Stenzel, “Über den Aufbau der Erkenntnis im VII. Platonischen Brief,” Socrates (1847), 63ff., and Ernst Howald, Die Briefe Platons (Zurich: Füssli, 1923), 34. 16 Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 99Dff. 17 For the methodic position of the concept of μέθεξις in the whole of Plato’s philosophy, cf. Ernst Hoffmann’s excellent article, “Methexis und Metaxy bei Platon,” in Sokrates: Zeitschrift für das Gymnasialwesen, Neue Folge, vol. 7 (1919), Jahresberichte des Philologischen Vereins zu Berlin, 45. 18 Cf. in particular Seventh Epistle, 3420–3433: πρὸς γὰρ τούτοις ταῦτα (scil. ὄνομα, λόγος, εἴδωλον) οὐχ ἧττον ἐπιχειρεῖ τὸ ποιόν τι περὶ ἕκαστον δηλοῦν ἢ τὸ ὄν ἑκάστου διὰ τὸ τῶν λόγον ἀσθενές· ὧν ἕνεκα νοῦν ἔχων οὐδεὶς τολμήσει ποτὲ εἰς αὐτὸ τιθέναι τὰ νενοηένα ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ.



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19 Cf. particularly Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, De Aristotelis Categoriis (Berlin: Bethge, 1833); and “Geschichte der Kategorienlehre,” Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, vol. I (1846), 23ff. 20 Cf., e.g., Joannes Duns Scotus, “Tractatus de modis significandi seu Grammatica speculativa,” in Opera omnia, ed. L. Wadding, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Vivès, 1891–95), 45–76. 21 For historical documentation see my book, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. I (3rd ed., Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), 120–135. 22 See René Descartes’ letter to Mersenne of November 20, 1629, in Correspondence, ed. Adam-Tannery, 1, 80ff. 23 If, for example, the letter P designates the general category of quantity, the concepts of magnitude in general, of space and measure, are expressed by Pe, Pi, Po, etc. Cf. George Delgarno, Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica (London: Hayes, 1661), and John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Red Character and a Philosophical Language (London: Gellibrand & Martyn, 1668). A brief outline of the systems of Delgarno and Wilkins is given by Louis Couturat in La Logique de Leibniz (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901), notes 3 and 4, 544ff. 24 For further details, see my book, Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1902), 105ff., 487ff., and Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz, especially chap. 3–5. 25 See Leibniz’ remarks on Descartes’ letter to Mersenne, Opuscules et fragments indédites de Leibniz, ed. Couturat (Paris: F. Alcan, 1903), 27ff. 26 “Les plus abstraites pensées ont besoin de quelque imagination: et quand on considère ce que c’est que les pensées confuses (qui ne manquent jamais d’accompagner les plus distinctes que nous puissions avoir) comme sont celles de couleurs, odeurs, saveurs, de la chaleur, du froid, etc., on reconnaît qu’elles enveloppent toujours l’infini.” Réponse aux réflexions contenues dans la seconde Edition du Dictionnaire critique de M. Bayle, article Rorarius, sur le système de l’Harmonie préétablie, Philosophische Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, vol. 4, 563. 27 See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis,” in Philosophische Schriften, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Acta Eruditorium, 1684), 422ff. 28 On the idea of the lingua adamica, cf. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 7, 198–199, 204–205; Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, book 3, chap. 2 (Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 260). 29 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 3, chap. 9, § 21. 30 Ibid., book 3, chap. 1, section 5. [“Spirit” and “breath” are included in brackets by Cassirer.] 31 George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), Introduction, § 21–24. 32 Thomas Hobbes, De corpore, part 1: Computatio sive Logica, chap. 3, § 7. 33 “De homine,” chap. 4: “Nam verum et falsum attributa sunt non rerum sed orationis. Ubi autem oratio non est, ibi neque verum est neque falsum.” 34 See Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (Würzburg: Apud Jo. Jac. Stahel, 1780), book 6, chap. 1: “Innumera sunt ejusmodi, quae justum

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volumen complere possunt. Non abs re igitur fuerit; grammaticam philosophantem a simplici, et literaria distinguere, et desideratam ponere.” 35 [Originally in English.] 36 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chap. 22, § 1ff.; book 3, chap. 5, § 1–3; chap. 6, § 51, etc. 37 Ibid., book 3, chap. 5, § 8. 38 Denis Diderot, “Lettre Sur Les Sourds Et Muets: A L'Usage de Ceux Qui Entendent and Qui Parlent,” in Œuvres, ed. Jacques-André Naigeon (Paris: Viehweg, 1798), book 2, 322 f. 39 [Originally in English.] 40 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd. Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. I, ed. John Mackinnon Robertson (London: G. Richards, 1900), 136. 41 [Originally in English.] 42 James Harris, Hermes (3rd ed., London: J. Collingwood, 1771), book 10, chap. 6, 97ff.; on the above see especially book 1, chap. 2, 17 ff; chap. 3, 24ff. 43 Ibid., book 3, chap. 4, 350ff. Compare with R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Printed for Richard Royston, 1678), book X, chap. 4. 44 Harris, Hermes, book 3, chap. 5, 404ff. 45 Ibid., chap. 4, 380ff. 46 Ibid., chap. 5, 409ff. 47 Ibid. 48 Cf. Jacob Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, vol. 4, no. 1, § 2, cols. 2727ff and 3401ff. 49 Johann Georg Hamann to Herder, September 7, 1768, Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Friedrich Roth (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821–43), 386. 50 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Vorrede zu Des Lord Monboddo Werk von dem Ursprunge und Fortgange der Sprache, ” trans. E. A. Schmidt (1784), in Werke, vol. 15, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1900), 183; Herder expresses a similar judgment on Harris in his Verstand und Erfahrung: Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799), vol. 21, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 57. As early as 1772, Herder in his Allgemeinen Deutschen Bibliothek, vol. 5, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 315, expressed the desire for a German version of excerpts from Hermes. 51 Herder, “Kritische Wälder: Oder Betrachtungen, die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen betreffend, nach Maasgabe neuerer Schriften,” in Werke, vol. 3, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1900), 159ff., in conjunction with James Harris, “Three Treatises: The First Concerning Art: The Second Concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry: The Third Concerning Happiness” (London: Printed by H. Woodfall, 1744). 52 Cf. my book Freiheit und Form: Studien Zur Deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), especially chap. 2 and 4. 53 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, “La langue des calculs,” in Œuvres, vol. 23 (Paris: Houel, 1798).



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54 Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, “Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots,” in Œuvres, vol. 1 (Lyon: Jean-Marie Bruyset, 1756), 259ff. 55 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5: 226. 56 Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Book 10, § 10, § 24, par. 75: ὅθεν καὶ τὰ ὀνόματα ἐξ ἀρχῆς μὴ θέσει γενέσθαι, ἀλλ’ αὐτὰς τὰς φύσεις τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καθ’ ἕκαστα ἔθνη ἴδια πασχούσας πάθη καὶ ἴδια λαμβανούσας φαντάσματα, ἰδίως τὸν ἀέρα ἐκπέμπειν, στελλόμενον ὑφ’ ἑκάστων τῶν παθῶν καὶ τῶν φανασμάτων, ὡς ἄν ποτε καὶ ἡ παρὰ τοὺς τόπους τῶν ἐθνῶν διαφορὰ εἴη· ὕστερον δὲ κοινῶς καθ’ ἔκαστα ἔθνη τὰ ἴδια τιθῆναι, πρὸς τὸ τὰς δηλώσεις ἧττον ἀυφιβόλους γενέσθαι ἀλλήλοις καὶ συντομω-τέρως δηλουμένας. 57 See Titus Lucretius, De rerum natura libri sex, ed. Albert Forbiger (Leipzig, 1828), book 5, 1026ff. 58 How widespread this naïve view of the sense and task of “etymology” remained even among the philologists of the eighteenth century is shown, for example, by the reconstruction of the originary-language [Ursprache] undertaken by Hemsterhuis and Ruhnken of the celebrated Dutch school of philologists. For details, see Theodor Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und orientalischen Philologie in Deutschland (Munich: Cotta, 1869), 255ff. 59 Cf. the characteristic example in Giambattista Vico, La Scienza nuova (Napoli: Francesco d’Amico, 1811), book 2, 70ff., book 2: “Della sapienza poetica,” vol. 2, chap. 4: Seguitarono a formarsi le voci umane con l’interjezione, che sone voci articolate all empito di passioni violente, che ’n tutte le lingue sono m ­ onosillabe. Onde non è fuori del verisimile, che da primi fulmini incominciata a destarsi negli uomini la maraviglia, nascese la prima Interjezione da quella di Giove, formata con la voce pa, e che poi restò raddoppiata pape, Interjezione di maraviglia; onde poi nacque a Giove il titolo di Padre degli uomini et degli Dei, etc. [Human words were formed next from interjections, which are sounds articulated under the impetus of violent passions. In all languages these are monosyllables. Thus, it is not beyond likelihood that, when wonder had been awakened in men by the first thunderbolts, these interjections of Jove should give birth to one produced by the human voice: “pal”; and that this should then be doubled: “popel.” From this interjection of wonder was subsequently derived Jove’s title of “father of men and gods.” Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 135.] 60 Ibid., 73ff. 61 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” in Œuvres, vol. I (Paris: Hachette et cie, 1877). 62 Hamann letter to Jacobi, October 22, 1785 in Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, ed. Hermann Gildemeister (Gotha, 1868), 122; letter to Herder, August 6, 1784 in Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Fr. Roth, 151 f.

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63 From a letter to Scheffner, February 11, 1785, in Hamann, Schriften, vol. 7, 216. 64 Johann Georg Hamann, “Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten,” Schriften, vol. 2, 19. 65 Johann Georg Hamann, “Kleeblatt hellenistischer Briefe,” Schriften, vol. 2, 207, “Aesthetica in nuce: Eine Rhapsodie in Kabbalistischer Prose,” Schriften, vol. 2, 274ff. Concerning Hamann’s theory of language and its position within the whole of his “symbolic view of the world,” see Rudolf Unger’s excellent presentation, Hamanns Sprachtheorie im Zusammenhang seines Denkens (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1905). 66 Rudolf Haym, Herder, vol. 1 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1880), 665. 67 Johann Georg Herder, “Über den Ursprung der Sprache” (1772), in Werke, vol. 5, ed. B. Suphan, 34ff. 68 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, “Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft (1797),” in Sämmtliche Werk, vol. 2 (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1857), 47. [Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 35.] 69 The following the presentation of Humboldt’s philosophy of language is based in part on my article “Die Kantischen Elemente in Humboldt’s Sprachphilosophie,” published in Festschrift zu Paul Hensels 60. Geburtstag. [Ernst Cassirer, “The Kantian Elements in Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language (1923),” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933) – Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 101–129.] 70 Humboldt, a letter to Friedrich August Wold on June 16, 1804, in Werke, vol. V (Berlin: Reimer, 1846), 266 f. 71 Humboldt, Werke, vol. III, 296 f. 72 Humboldt, “Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues” Vorstudie zur Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk, in Werke, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Berlin: Behr, 1907), no. 1, 125ff. 73 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis; New York: The Bobbs Merrill Company, The Library of Liberal Arts, 1950), 122 (374). 74 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung” (1820), in Werke, vol. 4, 27ff. 75 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues,” in Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 19ff. 76 Humboldt, “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium,” in Werke, vol. 4, 23 and 27. 77 Ibid., vol. 4, 21ff.; cf. “Grundzüge des allgemeinen Sprachtypus,” in Werke, vol. 5, 386ff., and “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 59ff. 78 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 46ff. 79 Ibid., 169ff. [Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152: trans. modified.]



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80 Ibid., 46. 81 Kant, “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” § 15, in Critique of Pure Reason, B 130. 82 Kant, “The Logical Form of All Judgments Consists in the Objective Unity of the Apperception of the Concepts Contained Therein,” § 19, in Critique of Pure Reason, B 140. 83 Humboldt “Vorwort zum Kawi-Werke,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 109. [Humboldt, On Language, 100: trans. modified.] 84 Cf. Humboldt’s remarks on the Chinese language in “Lettre à M. Abel Rémusat sur la nature des formes grammaticales en général, et sur le génie de la langue Chinoise en particulier,” in Werke, vol. 5, 284ff.; on the grammatical structure of the Chinese language, cf. Werke, vol. 5, 309ff. 85 In this book, I intend to give a comparative description of the organism of the languages named in the title, a compendium of all their related features, an inquiry into their physical and mechanical laws, and into the origin of the forms designating grammatical relations. Franz Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, lateinischen, litthauischen, gothischen und deutschen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1833), 1. 86 August Schleicher, Zur vergleichenden Sprachgeschichte, Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen, vol. I (Bonn: H. B. König, 1848), 28. 87 August Schleicher, Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen (Bonn: H. B. König, 1848–50), vol. 1, 7ff.; vol. 2, 5ff. 88 Ibid., vol. 2, 10ff.; cf. vol. 1, 16ff. 89 Ibid., vol. 2, 2ff.; cf. vol. 2, 21ff. and vol. 1, 24ff. 90 August Schleicher, Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Dr. Ernst Häckel, a. o. Professor der Zoologie und Director des zoologischen Museums an der Universität Jena (Weimar: Böhlau, 1873), 8. 91 Ibid., 12. 92 Hermann von Helmholtz, Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1847), 2ff. 93 Cf. Berthold Delbrück, Einleitung in das Sprachstudium: Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte Und Methodik Der Vergleichenden Sprachforschung (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1884), 21. 94 August Leskien, Die Deklination im Slawisch-Litauischen und Germanischen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1876), xxviii. 95 Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann, Morphologische Untersuchungen, vol. I (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1878), xiii; Leskien, xxviii. 96 Gustav Kirchhoff, Vorlesungen über mathematische Physik, vol. I, ed. Mechanik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1876), 1. 97 Hermann Osthoff, Das Verbum in der Nominalcomposition im deutschen, griechischen, slavischen und romanischen (Jena:  H. Costenoble, 1878), 326. 98 Hermann Paul, Principien der Sprachgeschichte (2nd ed., Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1886, 3rd ed., 1898), 61, Paul, Principles of the History of Language, trans. H. A.

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Strong (New York: Macmillan, 1889), 57. We occasionally find in Delbrück a paradoxical formulation of the same idea, namely that the “pure phonetic laws” are without exception but not the “empirical phonetic laws.” See “Das Wesen der Lautgesetze,” in Ostwald, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, vol. 1 (1902), 294.   99 On this dominant position of the concept of association and of the laws of association, see in addition to Wundt’s work, e.g., Paul, 3rd ed., 23ff., 96ff., etc. 100 Cf. Hermann Osthoff, Das physiologische und psychologische Moment in der sprachlichen Formenbildung (Berlin: Habel, 1879). 101 Wilhelm Wundt, “Die Sprache,” in Völkerpsychologie, vol. I (2nd ed., Leipzig: Engelmann, 1904), 369. 102 This essentially is the view of phonetic law advocated by Delbruck, op. cit., Annalen der Naturphilosophie, vol. 1, 277ff., 297ff. On phonetic laws seen as “laws of fashion,” see also F. Müller, “Sind die Lautgesetze Naturgesetze?” in Techmer’s Zeitschrift, I (Leipzig and New York, 1884), 211ff. 103 Cf. Karl Voßler, Positivismus und Idealismus in der Sprachwissenschaft: eine sprach- philosophische Untersuchung (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1904), 8ff. 104 Ibid., 10 f.; cf. 24ff.

II LANGUAGE IN THE PHASE OF SENSIBLE EXPRESSION 1.  LANGUAGE AS EXPRESSIVE MOVEMENT: GESTURE LANGUAGE AND WORD LANGUAGE To determine with certainty the particularity of any spiritual form, it is necessary first that it be measured by its own standards. The perspective, according to which it is to be judged and its achievement assessed, may not be introduced from the outside but must be taken from its own basic lawfulness of forming [Formung]. No fixed “metaphysical” category, no determination and classification of being derived elsewhere, however certain and firmly grounded these may appear, can relieve us of the necessity for a purely immanent beginning. The right to apply this category is secured only if we do not prepend this category as a fixed datum to the characteristic principle of form but rather are able to derive it from this principle and to understand it in this light. In this sense, every new form constitutes a new “construction” of the world that is carried out according to a specific standard of measure that is valid for it alone. The dogmatic view, which begins from the being of the world as a given and fixed point of unity, is of course inclined to let all these inner differences of spiritual spontaneity merge into some general concept of the “being”

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[Wesen] of the world and in this way make them disappear. It creates fixed partitions of being [Sein]: it divides being, for example, into an “inner” and “outer,” a “psychic” [Seele] and a “physical” reality, into a world of “things” and a world of “representations” – and again the same differences are repeated within each of these opposing delimited districts. Consciousness, the being of the “psyche [Seele],” is also divided into a series of separate, opposing independent “faculties.” The progressive critique of cognition teaches us not to take these divisions and separations as absolute determinations inherent once and for all in things but rather to understand them as mediated by cognition. It shows, in particular, that the opposition of “subject” and “object” [Objekt], of “I” and “world,” is, for cognition, not simply to be accepted but rather justified by its preconditions and determined in its significance. And this applies equally to the construction of the world of knowledge as to every truly independent foundational function of spirit. The consideration of the artistic, as well as mythical or linguistic, expression is in danger of missing its mark if from the outset; instead of immersing itself unbiasedly into the individual forms and laws of expression, it begins from the dogmatic assumptions regarding the relationship between “archetype” [Urbild] and “picture” [Abbild], “reality” and “semblance,” the “inner” and “outer” world. The question must rather be whether these differences are not coconditioned through art, through language, and through myth and whether each of these forms does not proceed in the positing of the differences according to different perspectives and consequently must draw the boundary lines differently. The representation of a rigid substantial separation, of a sharp dualism between the “inner” and “outer” world, is, in this way, thrust more and more into the background. Spirit comprehends itself and its opposition to the “objective” world only in that it brings certain differences situated in itself into phenomena as differences of consideration and, as it were, injecting them into phenomena. Thus, language, too, initially persists in a strange indifference toward the separation of the world into two clearly separated spheres, into an “outward” and an “inward” being, but it also almost seems as if this indifference belongs necessarily to its being [Wesen]. The psychic content and its sensible expression appear set here into one, so that the former does not exist as such before the other as something independent and self-sufficient, but rather, it is only completed in it and with it. The two, the content as well



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as the expression, become what they are only in their reciprocal interpenetration: the significance that they receive through their relation to one another is not outwardly added to their being, but this significance first constitutes their being. Here no mediated outcome is given; rather, there exists that very fundamental synthesis from which language as a whole springs forth and through which all its parts, from the most elementary sensible expression to the supreme spiritual expression, are held together with each other. And not only the formed and articulated phonetic language but even the simplest mimetic expression of an inner event [Geschehen] shows this indissoluble integration  – shows that this event [Gesche­ hen] does not in itself form a finished, closed-off sphere, out of which consciousness emerges only accidentally, as it were, for the purpose of conventional communication to others but that its apparent alienation constitutes an essential factor in its own formation and configuration. In this sense, the modern psychology of language was right to assign the problem of language to the problem of a general psychology of expressive movements.1 We have here, considered purely methodologically, an important approach: by starting with movement and the feeling of movement, the sphere of conceptual means at the disposal of traditional sensationalist psychology has basically already been surpassed. From the standpoint of the sensationalist view, the fixed and rigid state of consciousness is the first given; indeed, in a certain sense, it is all that is given: the processes of consciousness, insofar as they are acknowledged and appreciated at all in their own particularity, are reduced to a mere sum, to a “combination” of states. If the movement and feeling of movement are considered as an element [Element] and a fundamental factor in the construction of consciousness itself,2 then in this, it is recognized that here too the dynamic is not based on the static but rather the static on the dynamic – that all psychological “reality” consists of processes and alterations, while the fixation into states constitutes only a subsequent work of abstraction and analysis. Thus, mimetic movement is also an immediate unity of the “inward” and “outward,” the “spiritual” and the “bodily,” insofar as it directly signifies and “means” [besagt] in them something other than what it directly and sensibly is but which it makes present [Gegenwärtige] in them. We find here no mere “transition,” no arbitrary addition of the mimetic sign to the affect it designates; rather, both the affect and its utterance [Äußerung], inner tension and its discharge, are given in one and the same temporally

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undivided act. Every arousal of the interior expresses itself by virtue of an interconnection that can be described purely physiologically and interpreted originally in terms of a bodily movement, and further progress in this development exists only in a sharper differentiation of this relationship: specific movements are linked to specific arousals in an increasingly accurate correlation. Of course, this form of expression [Ausdruck] does not at first appear to lead beyond the mere “imprint” [Abdruck: impression] of the inner in the external. An external stimulus passes from the sensible to the motor function, which, however, seems to remain entirely within the domain of merely mechanical reflexes, without announcing a higher spiritual “spontaneity.” And yet this reflex is the first indication of an activity in which a new form of concrete I-consciousness and a new form of concrete object-consciousness begins to be constructed. Darwin attempted in his work on the “expression of the movement of the emotions” to create a biological theory of expressive movements in which he interpreted these movements as a residue of originally purposeful actions. The expression of a specific affect would be nothing more than an attenuation of a previous concrete-purposeful action; the expression of anger, for example, would be an attenuated and faded image of a former movement of aggression, the expression of fear, the image of a movement of defense, etc. This view is open to an interpretation that leads beyond the restricted circle of Darwin’s biological framing of the problem and places the question in a more general context. Indeed, every elementary expressive movement forms an initial demarcation of spiritual development, insofar as it is still entirely situated in the immediacy of sensible life and yet, at the same time, goes beyond it. It implies that the sensible drive, instead of pushing forward directly toward its object [Objekt] and satisfying itself and losing itself in it, undergoes a kind of inhibition and reorientation, in which a new consciousness of this very drive is awakened. In this sense, the reaction contained in the expressive movement prepares the way for a higher stage [Stufe] of action. As the action [Aktion] withdraws, as it were, from the immediate form of effective action [Wirken], it acquires a new room to move [Spielraum] and a new freedom; it is, therefore, already in transition from the merely “pragmatic” to the “theoretical,” from physical to ideal doing. In the psychological theory of gesture language, it is customary to distinguish two main types of gestures. On the one side, there are indicative



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[hinweisend] gestures and on the other imitative gestures: content and psychological genesis. These classes can be clearly delimited from each other. The indicative [hinweisend] gesture is derived biologically and – from the evolutionary point of view – from the movement of grasping. As Wundt states: From the earliest development of the human being, arms and hands have been active as the organs with which objects are grasped and mastered. From this evidently original use of the grasping organs, in which the human is superior only in degree but not in nature [Wesen] to the higher animals with analogous activities, there follows, however, one of those gradual alterations, which at first are of a regressive nature, but in their effects provide important components of a progressive development, leading to the first primitive form of pantomimic movement. . . . Genetically considered, this is nothing more than the grasping movement reduced to an indication [Andeutung]. We still find it among children in every possible transition from the original to the later form. The child still clutches for objects that it cannot reach because they are too far away. In such cases, the clutching movement changes to a pointing movement. Only after often repeated . . . attempts to grasp the objects, is the pointing movement as such established.3

And this seemingly simple step toward gaining independence now forms one of the most important stages on the path from animal development to specifically human development. For no animal advances to the characteristic transformation of the grasping movement into the indicative [hinweisend] gesture. Even among the most highly developed animals, “clutching into the distance,” as pointing with the hand has been called, has never gone beyond the first, incomplete beginnings. Even this evolutionary fact indicates that a feature of typical, general spiritual significance is hidden in this “clutching at the distance.” It is one of the first steps by which the sentient and desiring I removes the imagined and desired content from itself and configures it into an “object,” into an “objective” content. In the primitive stage of affects and drives, every “apprehending” [Erfassen] of the object is only its immediate-sensible grasping [Ergreifen] and taking possession of it. The foreign being is brought into the forceful power of one’s own being; in a purely material sense, its substantiality is drawn into the sphere of the I. Even the first beginnings

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of sensible cognition are still entirely within this sign: it believes, according to Plato’s pregnant and characteristic expression, that it is possible to literally grasp the object with both hands (ἀπρὶξ ταῖν χεροῖν).4 However, all progress in concepts and pure “theory” consists precisely in overcoming this first sensible immediacy. The object [Objekt], the object [Gegenstand] of cognition, recedes more and more into the distance, so that, for the critical mindfulness of knowing, it can appear as an “infinitely remote point,” an infinite task of knowing; at the same time, however, it first achieves in this apparent distance its true ideal determinacy. In the logical concept, in judgment and inference develops that mediate apprehending [Erfassen] that accounts for the genuine character of “reason.” Indeed, a continuous transition thus seems to lead genetically and actually from “grasping” [Greifen] to “comprehending” [Begreifen]. Sensate-physical grasping becomes sensual interpretation; however, the latter already contains the first approach toward the higher functions of signification as they emerge in language and thinking. To measure the extreme range of this opposition, we might say that the sensible extreme of mere “showing” [Weisen] stands over against the logical extreme of “demonstration” [Beweisen]. From the mere exhibiting [Aufweisen], by means of which an absolutely individual something (a τόδε τι [a this, fully specified particular] in the Aristotelian sense5) is designated, the path leads to a continuously more general determination: what in the beginning was a mere deictic function becomes the function of “apodeixis.” Language seems to preserve this interconnection in that it connects the expressions for speaking and saying with those for pointing out [Zeigen] and showing [Weisen]. In the Indo-European languages, the verb “to say” [Sagen] is derived for the most part from the verb “to point out” [Zeigen]: “dicere” stems from the same root that is contained in the Greek δεικνυμι [point out, show, reveal] (Gothic “*teihan, ga-teihan,” Old High German “zeigôn”), while the Greek φημί [say, sagen] goes back to the root φα (Sanskrit bhâ), which originally designated “shine” and “appear” as well as “making-appear” (Cf. φαέθω, φῶς, φαίνω, Latin fari, fateri, etc.).6 Of course, the assessment of gesture language would seem to develop differently, if we start not from the consideration of indicating [hin­ weisend] gestures but from the second fundamental class, from the class of imitating gestures. For imitation as such forms a counterpart to any free form of spiritual activity. In imitation, the I  remains caught up in the



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external impression and its constitution; the more accurately it repeats this impression, excluding all spontaneity of its own, the more fully the aim of imitation has achieved its purpose. The richest and most highly differentiated gesture languages, those of the natural peoples, show this bond in the strongest way. The gesture languages of cultural peoples contain, in addition to the immediate-sensible, imitative signs, an abundance of so-called symbolic gestures, which do not directly picture the object or activity to be expressed but designate it only indirectly. However, in these gesture languages – in, for example, the language of the Cistercian monks and in the Neapolitan gesture language described in detail by Jorio7 – it is evidently not a question of primitive forms but of highly complex formations [Gebilde], on which the form of phonetic language has already profoundly and determinately acted. The further back we go, however, to the actual and independent content [Gehalt] of gesture languages, the more all mere “concept signs” seem to recede and seem to be replaced by simple “thing signs.” The ideal of a purely “natural” language, in which all conventional arbitrariness is eliminated, seems as a consequence to be realized here. Thus, for example, it is reported that in the gesture language of the North American Indians, only a few gestures are “conventional” in origin: the vast majority, rather, consist in the simple reproduction of patent natural phenomena.8 If we consider only this feature of the pantomimic reproduction of given sensibly perceivable objects [Objekte], then we do not seem to be on the path to language as a free and original pursuit of spirit. It must be noted here, however, that neither “imitation” nor “indication” [Hinweisung] – neither the “mimetic” nor the “deictic” function – constitutes an absolutely simple and entirely uniform achievement of consciousness but rather that in the one as in the other elements [Elemente] of diverse spiritual origin and significance interpenetrate each other. Even with Aristotle, the words of language are designated as “imitations,” and it is said of the human voice that of all organs it is the best suited and formed for imitation.9 For Aristotle, however, this mimetic character of the word does not stand in opposition to its purely symbolic character; rather, the symbolic character of the word is equally and strongly stressed by emphasizing that the inarticulate interjection [Empfindungslaut], as we find in the animal world, becomes speech-sound only through its being used as a symbol.10 The two determinations unite with each other, in that

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“imitation” is used here in a broader sense and in a deeper significance according to which, for Aristotle, it appears not only as the origin of language but also the origin of artistic activity. Understood in this way, μίμησις [mimesis] belongs to the domain of ποίησις [poïesis, production], of the creative and configuring activity. It no longer concerns the mere repetition of something outwardly given but a free spiritual projection [Entwurf]: the apparent “reproducing” [Nachbilden] in truth presupposes an inner “pre-forming” [Vorbilden]. And, indeed, upon closer observation, it becomes evident that this element, which emerges purely and independently in the form of artistic configuration, extends down to the elementary beginnings of all seemingly purely passive reproduction. For this passive reproduction never consists in a mere retracing, feature for feature, of a determinate content of reality but rather in singling out a pregnant element and thereby extracting a characteristic “outline” of its shape [Gestalt]. However, with this, imitation is on its way to becoming a presentation, in which objects [Objekte] are no longer simply received in their finished formation but are constructed by consciousness according to their basic constitutive features. To reproduce an object in this sense does not mean simply putting it together from its individual-sensible characteristic traits but comprehending it in its structural relationships, which can be truly understood only if consciousness constructively produces them. Gesture language already features the rudiments of such a higher form of reproduction, provided that, in their developed formations, they disclose a transition from the merely imitative to the presentative gesture, in which, as Wundt characterized it, “the image of an object is more freely configured, in the same sense as fine art [bildende Kunst] is freer than mere imitative technique.”11 This function of presentation, however, emerges in an entirely new freedom and depth, in a new spiritual actuality when for the gesture it uses the sounds as the means and as the sensible substrate. In the historical development of language, this process of detachment does not take place all at once. Even today, in the language of natural peoples, it can be clearly recognized not only how in them the language of gestures continues to exist alongside phonetic language but also how it still decisively determines it in its forming [Formung]. We find everywhere here this characteristic penetration in accordance with the “word concepts” of these languages, which can be completely comprehended and



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understood only if they are understood at once as mimetic and “manual concepts.”12 The gesture is so closely connected with the word, the hands with the intellect, that they truly seem to form a part of it.13 Likewise, in the development of children’s speech, the sound only gradually detaches itself from the totality of mimetic movements: even at relatively advanced stages [Stufen], it remains embedded in this mimetic totality [Ganze].14 However, once the separation has been accomplished, language has also acquired, with the new element [Element] in which it now moves, a new basic principle of its construction. Its truly spiritual spontaneity develops only in the physical medium of sound. Both now mutually condition each other: the organization of sounds now becomes the means for the organization of thoughts, whereas the latter creates for itself a more and more differentiated and sensitive organ in the formation [Ausbildung] and forming of sounds. Compared to all other means of mimetic expression, the sound possesses the advantage that it is capable of a greater degree of “articulation” [Artikulation]. Its very fluidity, which contrasts with the sensible-intuitive determinacy of the gesture, gives it an entirely new capacity for configuration, making it capable of expressing not only rigid determinations of the contents of representation but also the subtlest vibrations and nuances of the process of representation. If with its plastic imitation the gesture seems better adapted to the character of “things” than, as it were, the disembodied element [Element] of sound, then sound acquires its inner freedom precisely by the fact that in it this relation is broken off, that it is a mere becoming, which can no longer immediately reproduce the being of objects [Objekte]. On the objective side, it now becomes capable of serving, not only as an expression of content-related qualities but above all as the expression of relations and the formal determinations of relationships; on the subjective side, the dynamic of feeling and of thinking are imprinted on it. For this dynamic, the language of gestures, which is restricted to the medium of space and thus is able to designate movement only by dividing it into individual discrete spatial figures, has no adequate organ. In the phonetic language [Lautsprache], however, the individual discrete element [Element] enters into a completely new relationship with the whole of sound production [Lauterzeugung]. Here the element [Element] exists only through its constantly coming into being anew: its content merges in its product [Hervorbringung]. This act of sound production, however, now structures itself ever-more sharply

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into particular differentiated determinations. In particular, to the qualitative separation and gradation of sounds is added a dynamic gradation through accent and rhythmic gradation. Attempts have been made to demonstrate in this rhythmic organization, as it exhibits itself, particularly in primitive work songs, an essential moment of artistic development and linguistic development.15 Sound is still immediately rooted here in the purely sensible sphere; however, because what it springs from and what it serves to express is not merely passive sensation but a simple sensible doing, it is ready to surpass this sphere in the concept. The mere interjection, the individual sound of affect and arousal extracted from an overwhelming momentary impression, now passes over into an internally coherently ordered sequence of sounds, in which the interconnection and order of the doing are reflected. Jacob Grimm writes in his essay on the origin of language: The ordered unfolding of sounds means for us organizing, articulating, and the human language appears as an organized language; with this the Homeric epithet of human being coincides: οἱ μέροπες, μέροπες ἄνθρωποι or βρoτοί – from μείρομαι or μερίζω, those who divide, articulate [gliedernd: organize] their voice.16

Only now is the material of language so constituted that a new form can become imprinted on it. The sensible-affective state transposes itself and as it were parishes in mimetic expression; it discharges in mimetic expression and therein finds its end. While this immediacy is impeded during the progressive development, for this reason, the content, at the same time, stabilizes and internally configures itself. A  higher stage of consciousness, a sharper apprehension of its inner differences, is now required if it is to reveal itself toward the outside, if it is to bring itself to a determinant and clear appearance in the medium of organized sounds. By inhibiting the direct outbreak into gestures and inarticulate sounds of arousal, an inner measure, a movement within the sensible desire and representing erects itself. From the mere reflex, the path ascends, evermore resolutely, to the various stages [Stufen] of “reflection.” In the development of the structured sound, in the fact that, to speak with Goethe, “the clang rounds itself into a tone,”17 presents us in ever-new form with the most general phenomenon that we encounter in different domains



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of spirit. Through the particular nature of the linguistic function, we perceive the universal symbolic function, as it unfolds with immanent lawfulness in art, in mythical-religious consciousness, in language, and in cognition.

2.  MIMETIC, ANALOGICAL, AND SYMBOLIC EXPRESSION Like the theory of art and the theory of cognition, the theory of language freed itself only gradually from the constraint of the concept of imitation and the picture theory. The question of the κυριότης τῶν ὀνομάτων [ordinary names of things] stands at the center of the ancient philosophy of language. And the problem as to whether language should be regarded as a φύσει [by nature] or a νόμω ὄν [by custom] initially concerned not the emergence of language but the truth and reality of its content [Gehalt].18 Do language and the word remain entirely within the sphere of subjective representing and opinion, or does there exist a more profound interconnection between the realm of naming and that of actual being; is there an inner “objective” truth and correctness in naming? The Sophists rejected, whereas the Stoics affirmed, such an objective validity of the word; however, in both the rejection and the affirmation, the form of the framing of the question itself remains the same. The basic presupposition that is assumed in the defense as well as in the disavowal of its value is that the task of cognition is to reflect and reproduce the essential being of things, whereas the task of language is to reflect and to reproduce the essential being of cognition. The Sophists strive to show that both tasks are unattainable: if there is being – as it says in the Gorgias – then it is for the human incomprehensible and unknowable; if it is cognizable, then it is unpronounceable and incommunicable. Just as by their nature, the senses of sight and hearing each remain enclosed in a certain sphere of qualities – just as the one is only able to perceive brightness and colors and the other can only perceive tones – so too can speech never transcend itself in order to grasp its opposing “other,” in order to seize “being” and truth.19 The Stoics attempted in vain to escape this consequence by asserting a natural affiliation between being and cognition, as well as a natural interconnection, a correspondence between κατὰ μίμησιν [imitation], between word and sense. The view that the word wholly or partly reflected being, that it forms its genuine ἔτυμον [true sense of a word

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according to its origin], leads itself by ad absurdum to transform into its development into its opposite. In addition to the relationship of “similarity,” its converse is now admitted as the etymological basis of explanation: not only ἀναλογία [analogy] and ὁμοιότης [similarity] but also ἐναντίωσις [opposition] and ἀντίφασις [contradiction] passed as formative principles of language. “Similitudo” became contrarium; “analogy” became “anomaly.” The devastating effects of this infamous “explanation by opposition” on the progress of etymology are well known:20 on the whole, however, they make it clear that any explanation of language that is based on the postulate of similarity must, in the end, necessarily arrive at its polar opposite and with this sublate itself. Even where words are taken as imitations not of things but of subjective states of feeling, where, as in Epicurus, they are said to reflect not so much the constitution of objects as rather the ἴδια πάθη [proper passions] of the speaker,21 the consideration of language, though it has changed its norm, is still essentially subordinated to the same principle. If the demand for picturing [Abbildung] is sustained as such, then it is ultimately the same whether the pictured [Abgebildete] is itself an “inner being” or “outward appearance,” whether it is a complex of things or of feelings and representations. Indeed, under the latter presupposition, not only must skepticism toward language recur, but it must also assume an ever-sharper framing [Fassung]. For language can claim to grasp the immediacy of life even less than it can the immediacy of things. On the contrary, even the slightest attempt to express this immediacy has already sublated it. “The soul speaks, so speaks, alas, the soul no more.”22 Thus, language already forms its pure form in contrast to the abundance and concretion of the world of sense sensation and feelings. Gorgias’ objection that “the speaker speaks the speaking, but not the color or the thing”23 is applicable to a heightened degree if we replace “objective” reality with “subjective” reality. A thoroughgoing individuality and the highest determinacy dominate in subjective reality; in contrast, a thoroughgoing generality – i.e., indeterminacy and ambiguity – of merely schematic signs, dominate in the world of words. As the “general” significance of the word effaces all the differences that characterize actual psychic events [Geschehen], it would, therefore, seem to us that the path of language, instead of raising us up into the spiritually general, leads us, rather, downward into the common; for only this, only that which is not



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distinctive to an individual intuition or sensation but that which is held in common with others, is graspable by language. This remains, therefore, only a pseudo-value – only the rule of a game that becomes more compelling as more players subject themselves to it but that, as soon as it is critically understood, must renounce every aspiration to present, let alone to know and to understand, anything actual, whether it belongs to the “inner” world or the “outer” world.24 Basically, however, in the critique of cognition as in the critique of language, this radical version [Fassung] of skepticism admittedly contains within itself the overcoming of skepticism. Skepticism seeks to expose the nullity [Nichtigkeit] of cognition and language, but what it ultimately demonstrates is the nullity of the standard by which it measures them. It is the inner dissolution, the auto-deconstruction of the basic presuppositions of the “picture theory” reflected methodically and consistently in the development of skepticism. The further the negation is driven in this matter, the more clearly and more determinately a new positive insight results from it. The final semblance of any mediate or immediate identity between reality and the symbol must be effaced; the tension between the two must be enhanced to the extreme, for in this tension the distinctive achievement of symbolic expression and the content [Gehalt] of each individual symbolic form can become visible. Indeed, this cannot be made manifest as long as we hold fast to the belief that we possess “reality” as a given, self-sufficient being, as a whole, be it that of things or that of simple sensations, prior to all spiritual forming [Formung]. If this presupposition were true, then admittedly the forms as such would have no other task than one of mere reproduction, which, however, must necessarily fall short of the original. In truth, the sense of each form cannot be sought in what it expresses but only in the manner and mode, in the modus and inner lawfulness of the expression. In this lawfulness of formation, and thus not in nearness to the immediately given but in progressive distance [Entfernung] from it, lie the value and the particular nature of linguistic configuration and the value and particular nature of artistic configuration. This distance [Distanz] from immediate existence and from immediate lived-experience is the condition of its visibility, of its spiritual awareness [Bewußtheit]. Language, too, begins only where our immediate relationship to sensible impression and sensible affectivity ceases. The sound is not yet a speech-sound so long as it gives itself

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purely as repetition, so long as the will to “signification” as well as the specific element of significance are lacking in it. The aim of repetition lies in identity [Identität]; the aim of linguistic designation lies in difference [Differenz]. The synthesis that is undertaken in it can be only a synthesis of differences [Verschiedenen], not a synthesis of what resembles or is similar. The more the sound resembles what it expresses, the more it still “is” this other, the less it is able to “signify” it. The boundary is sharply drawn not only from the side of spiritual content but also from that of the biological and genetic content. Even among the lower animals, we encounter a great number of original sounds expressing feeling and sensation, which, in the development of the higher species, become more and more differentiated, which unfold into determinate articulated and mutually delimited “linguistic utterances” [Sprachäußerungen], cries of fear or warning, lures or mating calls. However, between these sounds of the cry and the sounds of designation and significance characteristic of human language remains a separation, a “hiatus” that has been newly confirmed by the sharper methods of observation of modern animal psychology.25 The step toward human language  – as Aristotle initially emphasized – could be taken only once the pure significatory sound had gained primacy over the sounds of affect and arousal: a primacy that, in the history of language, is expressed by the circumstance that many words of the highly developed languages, which at first sight seem to be mere interjections, prove, on closer analysis, to be regressions from more-complex linguistic formations [Gebilde], from words or sentences with a certain conceptual significance.26 In general, language can be shown to have passed through three sequential stages [Stufen] in maturing to its proper form, in achieving its inner self-emancipation. If we designate these stages [Stufen] as mimetic expression, analogical expression, and truly symbolic expression, then this tripartite division contains at first nothing more than an abstract schema; however, this schema fills with concrete content [Gehalt] to the extent that it is shown not only that it can serve as a principle of classification of given linguistic phenomena but also that the functional lawfulness of the construction of language that is exhibited in it has its very determinate and characteristic counterpart in other domains, such as art or cognition. The more we are able to approach the actual beginnings of phonetic language, the more we seem to become stranded in that circle



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of mimetic presentation and designation in which gesture language is also rooted. What the sound seeks is an immediate nearness to the sensible impression and as faithful a rendering as possible of the manifold of this impression. This striving not only governs for a long time the development of the language of children but also emerges most vigorously everywhere in the language of “primitive peoples.” Language here closely follows the concrete-individual event, and its sensible image and attempts to exhaust, as it were, the individual with sound, which does not allow itself to be satisfied with a general designation; rather, each particular nuance of an event is accompanied by a particular nuance of sound specifically designed for this case. Thus, for example, there are in Ewe and certain related languages adverbs that designate only one activity, one state, or one property and that, consequently, can be combined with only one verb. Many verbs possess an abundance of such qualifying adverbs pertaining to them alone, and most of them are phonetic reproductions of sensible impressions. Westermann counts in his Grammar of the Ewe Language no fewer than thirty-three such sound-images for the single verb “to walk,” each designating a particular manner and particularity of walking: slouching or sauntering, limping or dragging the feet, shambling or waddling, forceful and energetic or weary. However, as he adds, this does not exhaust the series of adverbs that designate walking; for most of these can occur in a doubled, usual, or diminutive form, depending on whether the subject is big or little.27 Although this type of sound painting recedes as language develops, no language, no matter how sophisticated the cultural sphere, has not preserved numerous examples of it. Certain onomatopoeic expressions occur with striking uniformity in all the languages of the globe. They prove their force not only in that once formed they resist alteration through phonetic alterations and through otherwise generally applicable phonetic laws, but they also emerge as new creations that take place immediately in the bright light of the history of language.28 Given these facts, it is comprehensible that empirical linguists have often been inclined to assume the principle of onomatopoeia, so harshly maligned by the philosophy of language, and to attempt at least a limited rehabilitation of that principle.29 The philosophy of language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still believed that onomatopoeic formations offered the key to the basic and originary-language of humanity, to have immediately in hand the “lingua

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adamica.” Today, to be sure, the dream of this originary-language has gradually faded away with the critical progress of linguistic analysis; however, we still find the occasional attempt to prove how in the earliest periods of language formation the classes of signification and those of sound corresponded to one another – that the totality [Ganze] of o ­ riginary-words were divided into certain groups, each of which was linked to certain phonetic materials and constructed out of them.30 And even where we can no longer be hopeful of attaining by this path an actual reconstruction of the originary-language, the principle of onomatopoeia continues to be recognized as a means by virtue of which an indirect representation of the relatively oldest strata of the formation of language can be acquired. Georg Curtius, for example, makes the following observation in the sphere of Indo-European languages:

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Despite all change, an impulse for conservatism is also recognizable in language. All the peoples of our tribe from the Ganges to the Atlantic Ocean designate the representation of standing by the sound-group sta; in all of them, the notion of flowing is linked with the sound-group plu, with only unessential changes. This cannot be an accident. No doubt the same representation remained associated with the same sounds through all the millennia because there consisted for the feeling of the peoples a certain inner bond between the two, i.e., because for it, an impulse to express this representation with these sounds was present. The contention that the oldest words presuppose some relation of sounds to the designation of representation has often been mocked and ridiculed. It is difficult, however, to explain the origin of language without such an assumption. In any case, the representation also lives like a soul in the words of far more advanced periods.31

The attempt to apprehend this “soul” of the individual sound and class of sounds has always exasperated philosophers and researchers of language. The Stoics were not the only ones to take this route: Leibniz too attempted to trace the originary-sense [Ursinn] of individual sounds and sound groups.32 And after him, the finest and most profound students of language believed themselves able to clearly show the symbolic value of certain sounds, not only in the material expression of individual concepts



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but also in the formal presentation of certain grammatical relations. Thus, not only did Humboldt find this interconnection confirmed in the choice of certain sounds for the expression of certain feeling values – how, for example, the sound-group st regularly designates the impression of consistency and stability; the sound l that of melting and flowing; the sound w the impression of fluctuating and unstable ­movement – but he also believed that it was encountered everywhere in the means of the linguistic formation of form of inflection and gave special attention to this “symbolic character in grammatical sounds.”33 Jacob Grimm also attempted to show that, for example, the sounds used in the Indo-European languages for the formation of words for questions and answers were closely connected with the spiritual significance of the question and the answer.34 The use of certain differences and gradations of vowels as the expression of certain objective gradations, in particular the designation of the greater or lesser distance of an object from the speaker, is a phenomenon that is rediscovered in the most diverse languages and linguistic regions. Almost without exception a, o, and u designate the greater distance and e and i the lesser.35 Differences in time interval are also indicated in this way by differences in vowels or by the pitch of vowels.36 In the same way, certain consonants and groups of consonants are used as “natural sound metaphors” to which an identical or similar function of signification is attached in almost every linguistic region – e.g., with striking regularity, the resonant labials indicate a direction toward the speaker and the explosive linguals indicate a direction away from the speaker, so that the former appear as a “natural” expression of the “I” and the latter of the “you.”37 However, in these later phenomena, no matter how much they inherently bear, as it were, the color of immediate-sensible expression, they nevertheless have basically already transcended the sphere of mere mimicry and the imitative means of language. For now, it is a question no longer of an individual-sensible object or an individual sense impression retained in an imitative sound but rather of a qualitative gradation in a serial totality [Gesamtreihe] of sounds that serves the expression of a pure relation. There no longer exists a relationship of direct material similarity between the form and particular nature of this relation and the sounds in which it exhibits itself, since the mere material of sound as such is in general incapable of reflecting the pure determinations of the

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relationship. Rather, the interconnection is mediated in that an analogy of form is apprehended in the relationship of sound, on the one hand, and that of the designated content, on the other, by virtue of which a determinate correlation of the content of an entirely different series takes place. This brings us to the second stage [Stufe], which, in opposition to the mere mimetic expression, we can designate as the stage [Stufe] of analogi­ cal expression. The transition from one to the other is perhaps most clearly exhibited in those languages that employ musical tones for the differentiation of the signification of a word or for the expression of formalgrammatical determinations. We still seem very close to the mimetic sphere, insofar as the pure function of signification still adheres entirely to the sensible sound and cannot be detached from it. Humboldt tells us that, in the Indo-Chinese languages, the differentiations of pitches of the individual syllables and the variety of accents between syllables makes speech into a kind of song or recitative and that the tonal gradations in the Siamese, for example, are quite comparable to a musical scale.38 Particularly in the Sudanese languages, the most diverse nuances in signification are expressed by tonal variations, by a high, middle, or low tone or by composite shadings, such as the low-high rising tone or high-low falling tone. In part, there are etymological differences that are, in this way, referred to – that is to say, the same syllable serves, according to its tone, to designate entirely different things or events. And, in part, determinate spatial and quantitative differentiations are expressed in the diversity of syllabic tones; for example, the high-pitched words are used for the expression of greater distances and swiftness, low-pitched tones for the expression of nearness and slowness, etc.39 In addition, however, purely formal determinations and oppositions can in this same way find their linguistic presentation. Thus, for example, with only a mere change in tone, the affirmative form of the verb can transition into its negative form40 – or, however, the determination of the grammatical category of a word ensues by means of this principle, in that otherwise identical syllables may be identified as nouns or verbs by how they are pronounced.41 We are led one step further by the phenomenon of vowel harmony that, as is well known, dominates the entire construction of certain languages and linguistic groups – above all the construction of the Ural-Altaic languages. The aggregate of vowels are broken down here into two sharply separate classes, into the class of hard and soft vowels,



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whereby, when consistently done according to a rule so that with the proliferation of a root by the vowel suffixes, the root syllable must meet and correspond to one of the same classes as the root syllable.42 Here the phonetic assimilation of the individual components of a word, thus a purely sensible means, serves to formally combine these parts and to enable the progression from a relatively loose “agglutination” to a linguistic whole, to a self-contained word or sentence formation [Gebilde]. In that the word or sentence-word is constituted by virtue of the principle of vowel harmony as a unit of sound, it gains in this vowel harmony its initial true unity of sense: an interconnection, which initially simply concerns the quality of individual sounds and their physiological production, becomes the vehicle by which to connect these sounds into the unity of a spiritual whole, into the unity of a “signification.” This “analogical” correspondence between sound and signification is shown even-more clearly and distinctly in the function of certain widespread and typical basic means of language formation, as for example, the use made of the phonetic means of reduplication for the word-formation and morphology [Wort- und Formenbildung], as well as for syntax. At first sight, this reduplication seems to be governed entirely by the principle of imitation: the doubling of the sound or syllable seems intended merely to reproduce with the greatest possible fidelity a certain objective constitution of the designated thing or event. In the repetition, the sound huddles together with that which is given immediately in sensible existence or the impression. The repetition of sound has its proper place where a thing presents itself repeatedly to the senses with the same constitution or where a temporal event takes place in a sequence of identical or similar phases. On this very elementary foundation, a system of astonishing diversity and the finest shades of signification is, however, now constructed. The sensible impression of “plurality as such” first breaks down into an expression of “collective” and “distributive” plurality. Certain languages, which have no designation for the plural [Plural] in our sense, have instead developed the idea of distributive plurality [Mehrheit: moreness] to the utmost sharpness and precision by meticulously distinguishing whether a certain act presents itself as an indivisible whole or falls into several separate acts. If the latter is true, and the act is either performed by different subjects or effected by the same subject in different segments of time, in individual “stages” [Stadien], this distributive

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division is expressed by reduplication. Gatschet has shown in his presentation of the Klamath language how this basic differentiation has actually become the dominant category of language, permeating all its parts and determining the whole “form” of the Klamath language.43 In other language spheres, we can also trace how the duplication of a word, which in the beginning of the history of language served as a simple means of designating quantity, gradually emerged as an intuitive expression for such quantities that were not given as a cohesive whole but were divided into separate groups or individuals.44 The intellectual achievement of this linguistic means is, however, far from exhausted. Like the presentation of plurality and repetition, the reduplication can also enter into the presentation of numerous other relationships, particularly the relationships of space and magnitude. Scherer designates it as a grammatical originary form that serves essentially the expression of three basic intuitions: the intuition of force, the intuition of space, and the intuition of time.45 In a proximate transition, the purely intensive signification develops out of the iterative signification, as is constituted by the adjective in the formation of comparative form, by the verb in the formation of the intensive forms, which then frequently passes over into causatives.46 Extremely subtle modal differences in an action or event can also be suggested by the simple means of reduplication – for example, in the different American Indigenous languages where the reduplicated form of the verb is used to designate a kind of “unreality” in the action, to express that it exists only in an intention or a “representation” but has not arrived at real completion.47 In all these cases, reduplication has evidently passed far beyond the phase of mere sensible description or indication to objective being. Among other things, this emerges in the peculiar polarity of its use by virtue of which it can be the expression and bearer not only of different modalities of signification but also of directly opposed modalities of signification. Apart from the intensifying signification, the exact opposite sometimes occurs – an attenuating of signification – such that it is used in the formation of the diminutive form of adjectives, in the formation of the limitative forms of verbs.48 In the determination of the temporal stages of an action, it can serve just as well as an expression of the present or the future, as an expression of the past.49 This is the clearest indication that it is not so much a reproduction of a fixed and limited content of representation as, rather, a



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determinate direction of apprehension and reflection, as well as a certain movement of representation that takes shape in it. The purely formal achievement of reduplication becomes even-more evident where it passes from the sphere of quantitative expression to the sphere of pure relational determination. It then determines not so much the substantive signification of the word as its general grammatical category. In languages that do not recognize this category in the mere word form, a word is often transferred from one grammatical class to another – for example, transformed from a noun into a verb – by the mere reduplication of a sound or syllable.50 In all of these phenomena, which other similar ones could be placed alongside, it becomes clear how language, beginning from purely imitative or “analogical” expression, constantly strives to extend and finally surpass its own sphere. It makes a virtue of necessity of the ambiguity of the phonic sign. For precisely this ambiguity will not tolerate that the sign remains a mere individual sign; this ambiguity compels spirit to take the decisive step from the concrete function of “designation” to the general and universally valid function of “signification.” In this function, language emerges, as it were, from the sensible covering in which it has hitherto appeared: mimetic or analogical expression gives way to pure symbolic expression, which, precisely in and by virtue of its alterity, becomes the bearer of a new and deeper spiritual content [Gehalt].

ENDNOTES   1 As early a writer as Johann Jakob Engel attempted, in his “Ideen zur Mimik,” Schriften, vols. 7 and 8 (Berlin, 1804), to establish a complete system of expressive movements on the basis of the psychological and aesthetic investigations of the eighteenth century; on the interpretation of language as expressive movement, see Wundt, Die Sprache, Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. I, 37ff.   2 This idea of the “primacy of movement” was put forward with particular force and sharpness in the psychology of Hermann Cohen; cf. in particular Cohen’s Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, vol. 1 (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1912), 143ff.   3 Wundt, Die Sprache, Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 129ff.   4 Cf. Plato, Theaetetus, 155E.   5 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII.1 1042a26–31, and De Anima II.1, 412a6–9.   6 Cf. Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (5th ed., Straßburg:  K.J. Trübner, 1894), 415 (s.v. “zeigen”); Georg Curtius, Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie (5th ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1878), 115, 134, 296.

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  7 Andrea de Jorio, La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel Gestire Napolitano (Napoli: Stamp. del Fibreno, 1832); on the language of the Cistercian monks, see Wundt, Die Sprache, Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 151ff.   8 Cf. Garrick Mallery, Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared with That Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1881), Annual Report, no. 1, 334.   9 Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, book III, 1, 1404 A, line 20ff.: “τὰ γὰρ ὀνόματα μιμήματά ἐςιν, ὑπῆρξε δὲ καὶ ἡ φωνὴ πάντων μιμητικώτατον τῶν ἡμῖν·.” 10 Cf. τερι ἑρμηνείας [On Interpretation] (book 2,16A, line 27): “. . . φύσει τῶν ὀνομάτων οὐδέν ἐστιν, ἀλλ’ ὅταν γένηται σύμβολον ἐπεὶ δηλοῦσί γέ τι καὶ οἱ ἀγράμματοι ψόφοι, οἷον θηρίων, ὧν οὐδέν ἐστιν ὄνομα.” A definite difference between “imitation” and “symbol” (ὁμοίωμα and σύμβολον) is also found for example in Ammonius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretation, fol. 15B, ed. August Busse (Berlin: Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1897), 100. 11 Wilhelm Wundt, Die Sprache, Völkerpsychologie, vol. 1 (2nd ed., Leipzig: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1922), 156. 12 [Cassirer provides English translation for Handbegriffe.] 13 Regarding the “manual concepts” of the Zuñi Indians, see Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Manual Concepts,” American Anthropologist, 5, 291ff.; on the relation between gesture language Gebärdensprache and verbal language among primitive peoples, see the copious material in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les société inférieures (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1910). [Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1926).] 14 Cf. Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache Eine psychologische und sprachtheoretische Untersuchung (2nd ed., Leipzig: Barth, 1920), 144ff. 15 Cf. Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (4th ed., Leipzig: Reinicke, 1909); for the influence of work and “working rhythms” on the becoming of language cf. Ludwig Noiré, Der Ursprung der Sprache (Mainz: Victor von Zabern, 1877); idem, Logos-Ursprung und Wesen der Begriffe (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1885). 16 Jacob Grimm, “Über den Ursprung der Sprache” (1851), in Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dümmler, 1864), 266. The etymological connection set forth by Grimm is, to be sure, contested: for details, see Curtius, Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, 5th ed., 110 and 330. 17 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Dreistigkeit,” in West-östlicher Divan, Werke, vol. VI (Weimar, 1888), 23. 18 For further material concerning this original sense of the opposition φύδει and νόμῳ, for which φύδει and φέδει were substituted in the Alexandrian period, see Heymann Steinthal, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dümmler, 1890), 76ff., 114ff., and 319ff. 19 Cf. Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus, Advesus Mathematicos VII, 83ff. Quoted in: Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 76 B, 554, 555): “  . . . ὧι γὰρ μηβύομεν, ἔστι λόγος δὲ οὐκ ἔστι τὰ ὑποκείμενα καὶ ὄντα ὄντα μηνύομεν τοῖς πέλας ἀλλὰ λόγον, ὅς ἔτερός ἐστι τῶν ὑποκειμέων.”



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20 For characteristic examples, see Curtius, Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, 5th ed., 5ff.; Steinthal, op. cit., vol. 1, 353ff.; Laurenz Lersch, Die Sprachphilosophie der Alten, vol. 3 (Bonn: H. B. König, 1838–41), 47ff. 21 Cf. Ibid., 148ff. 22 Friedrich Schiller, “Sprache,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. I (2nd ed., Stuttgart and Berlin, 1904), odes I, 149. 23 De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgia, chap. 6, 980 A, 20ff.: “. . . ὅ γὰρ εἶδε, πῶς ἄν τις, φησί, τοῦτο εἴτοι λίγῳ; ἢ πῶς ἄν ἐκείνῳ δῆλον ἀκούσαντι γίγνοιτο, μὴ ἰδόντι; ὣσπερ γὰρ οὐδὲ ἡ ὂψις τοὺς φθόγγους γιγνώσκει οὕτως οὐδὲ ἡ ἀκοὴ τὰ χρώματα ἀλλὰ φθόγγοθς· καὶ λέγει ὁ λέγων, ἀλλ᾿ οὐ χρῶμα οὐδὲ πρᾶγμα.” 24 Cf. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, especially I, 25ff., 70, 175, 193. 25 For the “language” of the highest apes, cf., e.g., Wolfgang Köhler, “Zur Psychologie des Schimpansen,” Psychologische Forschung, vol. 1 (1921), 27: It is not easy to describe in detail how animals make themselves understood. It is absolutely certain that their phonetic utterances without any exception express “subjective” states and desires, that they are so-called affective sounds and never aim to delineate or designate the objective. However, so many “phonetic elements” [Elemente] of human speech occur in the chimpanzee phonetics that it is assuredly not for peripheral reasons that they have remained without language in our sense. The same is true of the facial expression and gestures of animals: nothing about them designates anything objective or fulfills any “function of presentation.” 26 Examples of this are in Archibald Henry Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. 1 (2 vols., London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), 109; for the IndoEuropean languages, see particularly Brugmann, Verschiedenheit der Satzgestaltung nach Massgabe der seelischen Grundfunktionen in den indogermanischen Sprachen (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1918), 24ff. 27 Diedrich Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1907), 83ff., 129ff.; analogous phenomena as those reported here are found in Indigenous peoples’ languages; cf., e.g., the transition from purely onomatopoeic sounds to general verbal or adverbial terms, described by Boas in the Chinook language, in Handbook of American Indian Languages (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1911), Bulletin no. 40, part. 1, 575, 655ff. 28 A list of such relatively late onomatopoeic formations in German has been given by Hermann Paul in Principien der Sprachgeschichte, 3rd ed., 160ff.; for examples from the Romance languages, see Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, Einführung in das Studium der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft (2nd ed., Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1909), 91ff. 29 See, for example, Wilhelm Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1868), 38. 30 Carl Täuber in “Die Ursprache und ihre Entwicklung,” Globus, Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde, vol. 97 (1910), distinguishes six main groups: liquid food, solid food, atmospheric liquids, wood and forest, forage and watering place, and animal world and seeks to show that in the most

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divergent languages in the world – e.g., in Sanskrit and Hebrew – they were originally designated by similar phonetic combinations (m + vowel; p-sound + vowel; n + vowel; t-sound + vowel; i or r; k-sound + vowel). 31 Curtius, Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, 5th ed., 96. 32 See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, book 3, chap. 3. 33 Cf. Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” Werk, vol. 7, part 1, 76ff., and the work itself: Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (hereafter cited as KawiWerk), vol. 2, part III, 153, and elsewhere. 34 See Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, book 3, chap. I: Among all the sounds of the human voice, none is so capable of expressing the essence of the question, which is perceived at the very beginning of the word, as k, the fullest consonant of which the throat is capable. A mere vowel would sound too indefinite, and the labial organ is not as strong as the guttural. T can be produced with the same force, but it is not so much expelled as pronounced and has something more solid about it; it is therefore suited to the expression of the calm, even an indicative answer. K questions, inquires, calls: T shows, explains, answers. 35 See examples from various language groups, in Friedrich Müller, Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. I (Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1876–88), part 2, 94 f.; vol. 3, part 1, 194, etc.; Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 153; also see chap. 3 of this volume. 36 See Müller, vol. 1, part II, 94. Heymann Steinthal, Die Mande-Neger-Sprachen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1867), 117. 37 In the Ural-Altaic languages, for example, which strikingly resemble the IndoEuropean languages in this respect, the phonetic elements ma, mi, mo, or ta, ti, si serve as the basic elements of the personal pronouns: cf. Heinrich Winkler, Das Uralaltaische und seine Gruppen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1885), 26; for the other linguistic groups, see Wundt’s compilation (Völkerpsychologie, vol. 1, 345) on the basis of the material in Müller, Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. 38 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 300. 39 Cf. Diedrich Westermann, Die Sudansprachen (Hamburg: L. Friedrichsen, 1911), 76ff.; Die Golo-Sprache in Liberia (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen and Co., 1921), 19ff. 40 Cf. Westermann, Die Golo-Sprache in Liberia, 66ff. 41 In Ethiopian, for example, according to August Dillmann, Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache (Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1857), 115ff., verbs and nouns are distinguished solely by the pronunciation of the vowels. Intransitive verbs of a passive character are also distinguished from verbs of pure action by the same means. 42 On the principle of vowel harmony in the Ural-Altaic languages, see Otto von Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten (Petersburg: Buchdr. der K. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1851), xxvi, 103; and Heinrich Winkler, Das Uralaltaische und seine Gruppen, 77ff. Grunzel points out that the tendency toward vowel harmony is common to all languages, though it has achieved regular



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development only in the Ural-Altaic. In a certain sense, vowel harmony has resulted here also in a “consonant harmony.” See Josef Grunzel, Entwurf einer vergleichenden Grammatik der altaischen Sprachen (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1895), 20ff., 28ff. Examples of vowel harmony in other language families: for the Indigenous peoples’ languages, see Franz Boas, Handbook, part I, p. 569 (Chinook); for the African languages, see, for example, Carl Meinhof, Lehrbuch der Nama-Sprache (Berlin: Reimer, 1909), 114ff. 43 Albert Samuel Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, Contributions to North American Ethnology (Washington: Government Print Office, 1890), vol. 2, part I, 259ff. On the significance of the “ideal of severalty or distribution,” as Gatschet calls it, see chap. 3. 44 Cf. in particular the examples from the Semitic language family in Karl Brockelmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen, vol. 2 (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1908), 457ff. 45 Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 354 f. 46 Documentation is found in the work of August Friedrich Pott, Doppelung (Reduplication, Gemination) als eines der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache (Detmold: Meyer, 1862); see also the abundant material in Renward Brandstetter, Die reduplikation in den indianischen, indonesischen und indogermanischen sprachen (Luzern, 1917). 47 Reduplication is also used to express the diminutive of nouns, the idea of a playful performance of an activity, and the endeavor to perform an action. It would seem that in all these forms we have the fundamental idea of an approach to a certain concept without its realization. Franz Boas, “Kwakiutl,” Handbook, part 1, 444–45; cf. 526ff. 48 For examples from the South Sea languages, see Robert Henry Codrington, The Melanesian Languages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 147; Sidney R. Ray, “The Melanesian Possessive and a Study in Method,” American Anthropologist, vol. 21 (1919), 356, 446; for the American Indian languages see Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 526, and elsewhere. 49 Such as in the tense formation of verbs in Tagalog. Cf. Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 125ff. 50 Examples from Javanese are in Humboldt’s Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 86-7.

III LANGUAGE IN THE PHASE OF INTUITIVE EXPRESSION 1.  THE EXPRESSION OF SPACE AND SPATIAL RELATIONS 147

In the consideration of language, as in the theory of cognition, it is not possible to draw a sharp boundary between the domain of sensibility and that of the intellectual, such that both would be designated as opposing separate districts, each of which being defined as a separate and self-contained mode of “reality.” The critique of cognition shows that mere sensation, in which a sensible determination of quality is posited, would, if not for the form of order, in no way be a “factum” of immediate experience but rather merely the result of an abstraction. The matter of sensation is never given purely in itself and “prior” to all forming; rather, it already includes in its first positing a relation to the space-time-form. In the continuous progress of cognition, however, this initial, simply undetermined pointing to receives its progressive determination: the mere “possibility of being-together” and the “possibility of succession” unfold into the whole of space and time as a simultaneously concrete and general positing of order. We may expect that language, as a reflection of spirit, will also reflect this fundamental process in some way. And indeed, Kant’s statement that concepts without intuitions are empty applies as



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much to the linguistic designation as it does to the logical determination of concepts. Even the most abstract configurations of language still clearly exhibit their interconnection with the primary intuitive foundation in which they are originally rooted. Here too, the sphere of “sense” is not as such separated from that of “sensibility”; rather, the two remain intimately interwoven with each other. The step from the world of sensation to that of “pure intuition,” which the critique of cognition demonstrates to be a necessary moment in the construction of cognition, a condition of the pure I-concept as well as the pure object-concept, therefore has its precise counterpart in language. Here too, these are “forms of intuition,” in whose construction the mode and tendency of spiritual synthesis prevailing in language first manifests itself, and only through the medium of these forms, only through the mediation of the intuitions of space, time, and number is language able to carry out its essential logical achievement: the configuration of impressions into representations. It is, above all, the intuition of space in which this interpenetration of sensible and spiritual expression in language most thoroughly proves itself. Even in the most general expressions that language creates to designate the spiritual process, the decisive participation of the representation of space emerges clearly. Even in the most highly developed languages, we encounter this “metaphorical” reproduction of spiritual determinations through spatial determinations. In German, this interconnection proves effective in such expressions as Vorstellen [to represent], Verstehen [to understand], Begreifen [to conceive/comprehend], Begründen [to explain/ ground], Erörtern [to debate/discuss], etc.,1 and it is found almost identically not only in the related languages of the Indo-European spheres but in linguistic families far removed from it. In particular, the languages of natural peoples are everywhere distinguished by the preciseness with which they bring to expression, as if immediately painting and mimicking all the spatial determinations and differences of events and activities. Thus, for example, Native American languages seldom have a general designation for “walking”; rather, they possess special expressions for “walking up” and “walking down” as well as for multifarious nuances of movement, and similarly, the expression for the position of standing below or above, inside and outside of a certain district, standing near something, standing in water, in the woods, etc. are precisely distinguished and separately designated. Whereas here language either leaves

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a large number of differences that we express through verbs entirely undesignated or places little weight on those verbs, all determinations of place, situation, and distance are meticulously designated by particles of original local [örtlich] signification. The strictness and precision with which this designation is carried out are often regarded by specialists of these languages as their basic principle and the genuine essential feature that characterizes them.2 Crawford tells us that in the Malayo-Polynesian languages, the different positions of the human body are so sharply distinguished as to provide an anatomist, painter, or sculptor with useful indications – the Javanese, for example, render ten different varieties of standing and twenty of sitting, each with its own specific word.3 Various Native American languages are able to express a sentence like “the man is sick” only so as to connote whether the subject spoken about is at a greater or lesser distance from the person speaking or the person spoken to and whether he is visible or not visible to them; and often the place, location, and position of the one who is sick are indicated by the form of the word-sentence.4 All other determinations withdraw behind the sharpness of the spatial characterization, or they come indirectly to presentation only through the mediation of the determination of place. This applies equally for temporal, qualitative, and modal differences. In concrete intuition, the purpose of an action, for example, always stands in close relation to the spatial goal that it posits and the direction in which this goal is pursued: accordingly, the “final” or “intentional” form of the verb is often formed through the infliction of a particle that serves, actually, the toponym [Ortsbezeichnung].5 In all this, a common, even highly significant epistemo-critical feature of linguistic thinking is revealed. To make for the application of the pure concepts of understanding to sensible intuitions, Kant called for a third, middle, element in which both, even though they are entirely dissimilar, must come to an agreement – and he finds this mediation in the “transcendental schema,” which is, on the one hand, intellectual and, on the other, sensible. In this respect, he distinguishes the schema from the mere image: the image [Bild] is a product of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination – the schema of sensible concepts (such figures [Figuren] in space) is a product, and, as it were, a monogram of the pure a priori



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imagination, through which and in accordance with which images first become possible, but which must be connected with the concept, to which they are in themselves never fully congruent, always only by means of the schema that they designate.6

In its naming of spatial content and relationships, language possesses such a “schema,” on which it must designate all intellectual representations, in order to render spatial content and relationships sensibly graspable and presentable. It is as though all intellectual and ideal relations are graspable by linguistic consciousness only in that it projects them onto space and analogically “pictures” [abbilden] them in it. The relationships of togetherness, juxtaposition, and apartness provide it with a means of presenting the most diverse qualitative interconnections, dependencies, and oppositions. This relationship is already recognized and clarified in the formation of the most original spatial terms known to language. They are still entirely rooted in the sphere of immediate-sensible impression; however, they contain the first germs from which the pure expressions of relation will grow. Thus, they are oriented as much toward the “sensible” as toward the “intellectual”; for if they are entirely material in their beginnings, then by the same token they unlock in the first place the distinctive form-world [Formwelt] of language. With respect to the first element, it already becomes evident in the phonetic configuration of spatial terms. Aside from mere interjections, which, however, still “mean” [besagen] nothing, which still do not contain any objective significant content, there is scarcely any class of words on which the character of “natural sounds” is more deeply imprinted than the words for the designation of here and there, the near and the distant. The deictic particles that serve for the designation of these differences can, in the configuration that they undergo in most languages, still be recognized as the residual effect of direct “phonetic metaphors.” Since in the various modes of pointing out and pointing to, sound serves only as an intensification of the gesture, its entire constitution has still not emerged from the domain of vocal gesture. It is thus seen that almost everywhere the same sounds are used in a variety of languages to designate certain local [örtlich] determinations. Apart from the fact that vowels of different qualities and nuanced intensities serve in the expression of spatial distance, certain consonants and groups

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of consonants are inherent in an entirely determinate sensible tendency. In the first babblings of the speech of children, a group of sounds with an essentially “centripetal” tendency are sharply distinguished from a group with an essentially “centrifugal” tendency. The m and n still clearly bear a direction toward the interior, whereas the discharging explosive sounds toward the outer, such as p and b, t and d, express the opposite striving. In the one case, the sound designates a striving that turns back to the subject; in the other case, it contains a relation to the “outside world,” a pointing to [Hinweisen], a showing away [Fortweisen], a rejection [Zurück­ weisen]. Where there the gestures correspond to a will-to-seize [GreifenWollen], will-to-grasp [Umfassen-Wollen], will-to-gather-toward-onself [Zu-sich-heranziehen-Wollen], here the gestures correspond to indicating or pushing away. From this original difference, we can account for the astonishing similarity that is prevalent among the first “words” in the speech of children all over the world.7 And the same phonetic groups are found in essentially corresponding or similar functions when we inquire into the origin and earliest phonetic shape of the demonstrative particles and pronouns in different languages. For the beginnings of Indo-European language, Brugmann distinguishes a threefold form of pointing to. “I-deixis” stands, in terms of its content and linguistic designation, in opposition to “you-deixis,” which again merges with the general form of “that-deixis.” You-deixis constitutes itself through its direction and through the characteristic sound corresponding to this direction, the ur-Indo-European demonstrative root *to, while the consideration of nearness and distance plays as yet almost no role in it. Only the “opposite” to the I, only the general relation to the object [Objekt] as object standing over against [Gegenstand], is retained in it; only the sphere exterior to one’s body is emphasized and delimited. Further development leads then to a clearer drawing out of individual areas [Bezirke] in opposition to each other within this total-sphere.8 It includes the this and the that, the here and the there, the nearer and the more distant. With this, the simplest conceivable linguistic means of organizing the spatial intuition of the world is reached, whose spiritual consequences are of incalculable significance. The first framework [Rahmen], in which all further differentiations will be integrated, is created. That such an achievement can fall to a group of mere “natural sounds” can be completely understood only if we consider that at this stage the act of showing



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[Zeigen], which is emphasized in these sounds, possesses a pure spiritual side alongside its sensible side – that in it, a new independent energy of consciousness manifests itself that goes beyond the domain of mere sensation of which the animal is capable.9 Accordingly, we see that even the configuration of demonstrative pronouns belongs to those original “elementary thoughts” of language formation that recurs in a similar way in the most diverse linguistic regions. We find everywhere the practice that certain differences in the location or distance of the object [Objekt] that are alluded to are expressed by the simple alteration of vocalic or consonantal sound. For the most part, the softer vowels express in most instances the place of the person addressed, the “over-there,” whereas the place of the speaker is designated by a sharper vowel.10 As concerns the formation of demonstrative elements [Elemente] through consonantal elements [Elemente], the role of pointing into the distance falls almost uniformly to the groups d and t, or even those of k and g, b and p. In this respect, the Indo-European, Semitic, and Ural-Altaic languages show in their practices an unmistakable similarity.11 In some languages, one demonstrative element serves for the designation of whatever lies within the sphere of the perception of the speaker and another for what lies in the sphere of the perception of the person spoken to; or one form is used for an object close to the speaker, another for an object [Objekt] equally distant from the speaker and the person addressed, and a third for an absent object [Objekt].12 Thus, for language, the precise differentiation of spatial positions [Sellen] and spatial distances forms the initial point of departure from which it continues to the construction of objective reality, to the determination of objects. The differentiation [Differenzierung] of contents is grounded on the differentiation of places [Orte] – the place of the I, you, and he, on the one hand, and the place of the physical object [Objekt] sphere, on the other hand. The general critique of cognition teaches that the act of spatial positing and spatial separation is the indispensable precondition for the act of objectivization in general, for the “relation of the representation to the object.”13 This is the core idea according to which Kant wrote his “Refutation of Idealism” as an empirical-psychological idealism. Already the mere form of the intuition of space bears within it a necessary pointing to an objective existence, to something actual “in” space. The contraposition of “inner” and “outward,” on which the representation of the

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empirical I is based, is possible only in that an empirical object is at the same time posited with it: the I can become aware of the changes in its own states only in that it refers to something permanent, to space and to something persistent in space.14

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Not only can we perceive all time-determination only through the change in outer relationships (motion), in relation to persistence in space (e.g., the motion of the sun with regard to the objects on the earth); we do not even have anything persistent on which we could base the concept of substance, as intuition, as merely matter. . . . Consciousness of myself in the representation I is no intuition at all, but a merely intellectual representation of the self-activity of a thinking subject. And hence this I also does not have the least predicate of intuition that, as persistent, could serve as the correlate for timedetermination in inner sense.15

The fundamental principle of Kant’s proof consists in his demonstration that the particular function of space is a necessary means and vehicle for the general function of substance and for its empirical-objective application. Only through the reciprocal interlocking of both functions is the intuition of a “nature,” a self-sufficient ensemble of objects [Objekte], configured for us. Only when a content is spatially determined, when it is distinguished by positing fixed boundaries from the undifferentiated totality [Gesamtheit] of space, does it acquire its own real configured being: the act of “setting out and setting forth” [Herausstellen] and isolating, of ex-sistere [standing out], first gives it the form of independent “existence” [Existenz]. In the construction of language, this logical state of affairs takes shape in that here too the concretion of place and space serves as the means by which to linguistically carve out ever-more clearly the category of the “object.” This process can be traced in the various directions of linguistic development. If the assumption is true that the nominative endings in the masculine and neuter of the IndoEuropean languages are derived from certain demonstrative particles,16 then a medium for designating place served here to bring to expression the characteristic function of the nominative, its position as a “subjective case.” It could become the “bearer” of the activity only when a determinate local [örtlich] characteristic, a spatial determination, was attached



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to it. This interpenetration of both moments, this spiritual reciprocity between the category of space and that of substance emerges, however, in a particular linguistic formation [Gebilde] that appears to have grown directly out of this reciprocal determination. Wherever language has developed the use of the definite article, the aim of this article consists in the specific formative development of the representation of substance, whereas its origin unmistakably belongs to the domain of spatial representation. Given that the definite article is a relatively late linguistic formation, this transition can therefore often be rendered immediately clear in it. In the Indo-European languages, the emergence and spreading of the article can be followed historically in detail. The article is lacking not only in Old-Indian, Old-Iranian, and Latin but also in archaic Greek, particularly in the Homeric language; it first came into regular use only with Attic prose. In the Germanic too, the use of the definite article was established as a norm only in the Middle High German period. The Slavic languages never developed the consistent application of an abstract article.17 The similar relationship shows itself in Semitic languages in which, in general, the article admittedly is applied. At the same time, certain individual languages, such as Ethiopian, which in this respect has remained at an earlier stage, make no use of it.18 Wherever this use has developed, it can be clearly recognized as a simple splintering off from the sphere of demonstrative pronouns. The definite article arises out of the form of “that-deixis” – the object, to which it refers, is denoted as found [Befindlich] “outside” and “there,” and is locally [örtlich] divorced from the “I” and the “here.”19 From this genesis of the article, it becomes understandable that it does not attain its most general linguistic function, to serve as the expression of the representation of substance, immediately, but only through a series of intermediaries. The force of “nominalization” [Substantivierung] that belongs to it is formed only gradually. In the languages of natural peoples, certain demonstrative pronouns are used entirely in the sense of the definite article; however, this use no longer clearly points to the class of “nominative” words. In Ewe, the article, which here follows the word it modifies, is used not only with nominatives but also with the absolute pronoun, with adverbs and conjunctions.20 And even where it upholds the original “objective” representation in the circle of thing designation, the general expression of “objectification” that it includes only gradually

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unfolds from more-specific significations. The further back we follow the use of the article, the more “concretely” this use appears to become: instead of a universal form of the article, we find here diverse types, which vary according to the quality of the particular objects [Objekte] or object classes. The general function that it linguistically and intellectually serves is not yet detached from the particularity of the contents to which it is applied. In addition to the neuter article, the Indonesian languages have a special personal article, which stands before the names of individuals and tribes, and also before designations of kinship, not to qualify them in any way but merely to identify them as personal names, as a proper name.21 The language of the Ponca Indians sharply distinguishes between the “articles” used for animate and inanimate objects: among the latter, such classes as horizontal and round objects, scattered objects or collective objects, each have a particular article; whereas in the application of the article for an animate being [Wesen], a sharp difference is made as to whether this being is sitting, standing, or moving.22 In a peculiarly remarkable and instructive manner, however, certain phenomena of the Somali language reveal the basic concrete-intuitive significance that originally appertains to the article. Somali possesses three forms of the article that are distinguished from one another by the final vowel (-a, -i, and -o [respectively -u]). The factor determining the use of one or the other form is the spatial relationship of the person or thing [Sache] that is spoken about to [zu] the speaking subject. The article ending in -a designates a person or thing [Sache], which is found immediately near the subject, visible to the subject, and even actually seen by the subject; the article ending in -o refers to a more or less distant person or thing [Sache], but which in any case is in sight of the speaker; and the article ending in -i designates a content that is somehow known by the subject but is not at present visible to the subject.23 We can clearly and concretely grasp24 here how the general form of “substantiation,” the configuration of a “thing,” is expressed in the article, how it springs from the function of spatial pointing to, thus remaining at first attached to it – how it adheres most closely to the various modes of demonstration and their modifications until finally, at a relatively late stage, the detachment of the pure category of substance from the particular forms of spatial intuition takes place.



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If we attempt to follow still further how language progresses from its first sharply defined local [örtlich] differentiation to the general determination of space and the designation of space, we seem to find here again that the direction of this process goes from the inner toward the outer. The “differentiations of the regions in space” take their departure from the point where the speaker finds themself and it advances out in concentric, expanding circles toward the organization [Gliederung] of the objective whole, toward the organization [Gliederung] of the system and ensemble of local [örtlich] determinations. The differences of places are initially closely connected with certain material differences  – and from this, in particular, the differentiation of the limbs [Gliedmaßen] of the actual lived body serves as the beginning point for all further determinations of place. Once the image of the actual body has taken shape for the human being, once it has been apprehended as a self-enclosed and intrinsically structured organism, it serves, as it were, as a model according to which the whole of the world is constructed. The human possesses here an original set of coordinates that are constantly returned to and referred to in further progress and from which the determinations will accordingly also be taken that will serve to linguistically designate this progress. Indeed, it is an almost universally observed fact that the expression of spatial relations is grounded in certain concrete nouns [Stoffworte], among which, once again, the words for the designation of the individual parts of the human body are most prominent. Inside and outside, before and behind, and above and below receive their designation through the fact that each is linked to a certain sensible substrate in the whole of the lived body of the human being. Where the more highly developed languages tend to use prepositions or postpositions for the expression of spatial relationships, in the languages of natural peoples, the use goes back almost without exception to nominal expressions that are either names for parts of the body or clearly derived from such names. According to Steinthal, the Mandingan languages express our prepositional concepts in “a very material way”: for “behind,” it makes use of an independent substantive that signifies “back” or “rear end”; for “before,” it makes use of a word that signifies “eye”; “on” is rendered by a word for neck and “in” by belly; etc.25 In other African languages, and in the South Sea languages,

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such words as “face” and “back,” “head” and “mouth,” “loin” and “hip” perform the same function.26 And if at first sight, this may seem as a peculiarly “primitive” mode of designation, we find that it has its exact analogy and counterpart in far-more-advanced stages of language formation.27 On the other hand, of course, language does not thereby remain content with using the designations of the limbs and organs of the human lived body as “spatial substantives” but rather proceeds, in that it emphasizes the principle of this designation, to a more general application of the principle. Rather than through the word “back,” the designation of “behind” can be brought to expression through a word like “track”; likewise, “under” may be designated by a word such as “ground” or “earth” and “over” by a word such as “air.”28 The designation is no longer limited to the ambit of one’s own lived body; however, the procedure that language follows in its presentation of spatial relations has remained the same. The representation of concrete-spatial objects dominates the expression of spatial relations [Rela­ tionen]. This emerges with particular clarity in the configuration that the words for spatial relations undergo in most of the Ural-Altaic languages: here too, nominal expressions such as “top” or “summit,” “bottom,” “trace,” “middle,” or “vicinity” [Umkreis] are used for the designation of “over” and “under,” “before” and “behind,” “around,” etc.29 And even where language has arrived at great freedom and abstract clarity in the expression of purely intellectual relations, the old spatial and thus fundamentally sensible-material signification from which the designation initially began still gleams through rather clearly. That “prepositions” were originally independent words in the Indo-European languages is made evident by the fact that in their combination with verbal roots, the connection remains extremely loose, so that, for example, “augment” and “reduplication” are with such combinations placed between the preposition and the verbal form.30 The development of certain individual Indo-European languages, such as the Slavic language, also shows, however, that new “pseudo-”prepositions were able to arise in which the material significance either remains alive in the linguistic consciousness or is immediately demonstrated by historical-linguistic examination.31 In general, we find that the Indo-European case forms have always served for the presentation of external spatial-temporal or other, more-intuitive determinations and that they have only gradually later acquired an “abstract” sense. Thus, the instrumental is originally the



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with-case, which then through the intuition of spatial accompaniment transitions into that of the accompanying and modifying circumstance, the case came to indicate the means or basis of an action. From the spatial “whence,” the causal “whereby” develops and from the “whither,” the general idea of aim and purpose.32 Of course, some have contested the localist [lokalistisch] theory of cases not only on the grounds of historical linguistics but also on the grounds of general epistemological considerations, whereas others have attempted to support and ground it through similar considerations. If, from the localist [lokalistisch] point of view, it is pointed out that the whole development of language, as well as that of thinking in general, must proceed from the intuitive, from the “concrete-will-tolive” to the conceptual and that the originally local [örtlich] character of all case determinations was, as it were, to be proven a priori,33 then this argument may be countered in that there is no justification for narrowing down the concept of intuition to the one specific individual domain, to the domain of spatial intuition. Not only a movement in space but also the manifold of other dynamic relationships, such as victory and defeat, effective action and effect, are given immediately and intuitively  – as being something that is seen with the eyes.34 This objection, however, which was raised by Berthold Delbrück, is, of course, untenable – at least in the form that he gave it. For since Hume’s analysis of the concept of causality, it is certain that there is no sensible impression and no immediate intuition of what we call the event of “effective action” [Wirken]. All that is ever “given” to us of the relation between cause and effect is wrapped up in the ascertainment of certain local [örtlich] and temporal relationships, in relationships of juxtaposition and succession. Wundt, who opposes the localist [lokalistisch] view on the grounds that the spatial in no way exhausts all the sensible-intuitive properties of objects, also breaks with his own objection by immediately recognizing that spatial properties have one characteristic difference over all others: all other relations are at the same time spatial, while only spatial relationships can by themselves form the content of an intuition.35 With this, it is likely that from the outset language can progress to the expression of purely “intellectual” relations only after it has detached and, as it were, “separated” them from their connection with the spatial. In the finished structure of our inflected languages, each of the principal case forms also reveals, of course, a certain logical-grammatical function that it essentially serves.

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The bearer of the action is designated through the nominative, its object [Objekt], insofar as it is entirely or partly affected by the action, is designated through the accusative or genitive, and even the local [lokal] cases, in the more restricted sense, can be fit into this schema, insofar as, apart from their specific local [örtlich] sense, they express at the same time a general relationship in which the substantive concept adheres to the verbal concept.36 Although, seen in this way, the logical-grammatical sense may appear as opposed to the spatial-intuitional sense as πρότερον τῇ φύσει [first according to nature], the epistemo-critical as well as historicallinguistic considerations lead us to regard the latter as truly πρότερον πρὸς ἡμᾶς37 [first according to us]. Indeed, the more we consider those languages that have unfolded the greatest fertility in the formation of “case forms,” the more valid the domination of the spatial signification over the grammatical-logical signification becomes. Aside from the Native American languages, the Ural-Altaic languages possess, in this respect, the most elaborate inflections of nouns.38 However, even they have not given the three “strictly grammatical” cases a form so that the relationships expressed in the Indo-European languages by the nominative, genitive, and accusative are intimated here solely by the context. A true nominative or subjective case is lacking, while either the genitive has no formal expression or it is represented by a pure “adessive form” that designates nothing but local presence [örtliche Anwesenheit]. The proliferation of expressions for purely spatial determinations is, however, positively luxuriant. Next to the designations of place [Ort] as such is found the largest manifold and precision in the particular designations for the position [Stelle] of a thing or for the direction of a movement. In this way, there emerges the allative and adessive; inessive and illative; and translative, relative, and sublative cases, through which the rest within an object, the being among [bei] it, the penetration into it, the issuing from it, etc. come to presentation.39 These languages, as Friedrich Müller describes the spiritual process underlying them, do not simply remain standing beside the object [Objecte], but penetrate, one might say, into the interior of the object [Objecte] and bring the interior to the exterior, the top of the object to its bottom in a formal opposition. . . . Through the combination of the three relationships – rest, motion toward the object, and motion away from the object – with



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the categories of inside and outside, and in some languages above – an abundance of case forms emerge for which our languages have no feeling at all and which, therefore, we cannot adequately render them.40

For the vicinity in which this purely intuitive expression of case relationships still adheres to mere sensible expression, with all the subtlety in the differentiation of spatial relationships, they are still rendered throughout by substantive concrete nouns [Stoffworte]. Of course, the expression of direction and differences of direction, however sensually they may always be configured in language, nevertheless always contain a new spiritual moment as opposed to the mere expression of being, of the persistence of a place. In many languages, spatial verbs, as well as spatial substantives, designate relationships that we customarily render through prepositions. Humboldt clarified this use in Kawi-Werk through examples from the Javanese, adding that, in comparison to the application of spatial substantives, it would appear to manifest a subtler linguistic sense than is the case in the designation through a mere thing word.41 Indeed, in opposition to the substantivisitic expression, which is always somewhat rigid, spatial relationships begin to become, as it were, fluid. The still entirely intuitive expression of a pure action prepares for the future intellectual expression of pure relations [Relationen]. Again, the determination is for the most part closely linked here to one’s own body, but now it is no longer the parts of the body but its movement – or, one might say, it is no longer its purely material being but its doing – that supports language. From the perspective of historical linguistics, we also see that in certain languages in which spatial verbs emerge alongside spatial substantives, the spatial verbs exhibit a relatively late formation.42 Initially, the difference in the “sense” of movement, the difference of the movement from one place here and toward that place there, was rendered through the choice of verb and its substantive signification. These verbs then appear in attenuated form in the type of suffixes by which the type and direction of movement are characterized. Native American languages are able to bring to expression through such suffixes whether the movement occurs inside or outside of a certain space, particularly inside or outside of the house, whether over the sea or over land, whether through the air or through the water, whether from inland toward the coast or from the coast toward the inland, whether carried out by a

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fireplace in the house or from the house to a fireplace.43 From the abundance of all these differences, which are given by the point of origin or arrival of movement and through the mode and means of its execution, there is above all one specific opposition that emerges and that moves more and more to the heart of designation. The natural, in a certain sense “absolute,” system of coordinates for all presentation of movement is, for language, evidently given by the place of the speaker and in the place of the person addressed. It is often distinguished with great precision and sharpness whether a particular movement ensues from the speaker to the person addressed, from the person addressed to the speaker, or from the speaker to a third person or thing [Sache] not addressed.44 On the basis of such concrete differentiations, as they are given through the connection in some sensual thing or through the connection to the “I” or “you,” language develops more-general and more-“abstract” designations. Certain classes and schemata of suffixes and direction can now emerge that divide the totality [Ganze] of possible movements according to certain principal points of space, particularly according to the cardinal directions of the heavens.45 In general, it seems that different languages are able to follow different paths in how they delimit the expression of rest and that of direction against each other. The accents may be distributed between the two in the greatest variety of ways: if languages of the purely “objective” type or nominal form were given priority to the designation of place over the designation of movement, the expression of rest over the expression of direction, so that in general the inverse relationship prevails in the verbal types of language. A middle position is perhaps occupied by those languages that admittedly adhere to the primacy of the expression of rest above that of direction and by contrast configures it verbally. Thus, for example, the languages of the Sudan apply throughout only spatial nouns for the expression of spatial relationships such as above and below, inside and outside, which, however, contain within them a verb that designates dwelling and place [Ort]. This “local verb” is always used to express an activity that occurs in a specific position [Stelle].46 It is as if the intuition of activity cannot tear itself away from the intuition of the pure local [örtlich] existence, as if it remains, as it were, imprisoned in it.47 However, this existence [Dasein], the mere existence [Existenz] in a place [Ort], also appears as a kind of active behavior of the subject that is situated in it. Here again, we see how much the



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original intuition of language clings to the “givenness” of space and how it is, nonetheless, driven out from it as soon as it turns to the presentation of motion and pure activity. The more energetically reflection turns toward motion and pure activity and the more sharply it apprehends them in their particular nature, the more the pure objective, the substantial unity of space is reconfigured into the dynamic-functional unity, the more space is constructed as the totality [Ganze] of directions of action, of the principles and lines of the force of motion. Here a new factor enters into the construction of the world of representation, which up to now we have followed essentially according to its objective aspect. What is established in this unique domain of language formation is the general law of every spiritual form according to which their content [Gehalt] and achievement consist not simply in portraying an objective presence [Vorhanden] but rather in creating a new relation, a genuine correlation between “I” and “reality,” between the “subjective” and the “objective” sphere. In language, too, by virtue of this reciprocal relation, “the way toward the outside” becomes at the same time “the way toward the inside.” In it, in the growing determinacy that the outward intuition gains in it extends also to the true development of the inner: even the configuration of spatial words becomes for language the medium for the designation of the I and for its delimitation over against other subjects. Even the oldest stratum of spatial designation clearly recognizes this interconnection. In nearly all languages, the spatial demonstratives have formed the starting point for the designation of personal pronouns. The connection between the two classes of words is etymologically so close that it is difficult to decide which of them we are to consider as earlier or later, which as the fundamental and which as the derived. While Humboldt has sought in his seminal treatise “On the Affinity of Local Adverbs [Ortsadverbien] with Pronouns in Several Languages” to prove that the designation of personal pronouns in general goes back to words of local [örtlich] sense and origin, modern linguistics often tends to reverse the relationship, tracing the characteristic trichotomy of the demonstratives, found in most languages, to the original and natural trichotomy of the persons “I,” “you,” and “he.” However, this genetic question may ultimately be decided, it shows, in any case, that the personal and demonstrative pronouns, the original designations of persons and space, are closely related in their whole structure and belong, as it were, to the

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same stratum of linguistic thinking. It is the same half-mimetic, halflinguistic act of pointing to, the same basic forms of “deixis” from which follow the opposition of here [Hier], there [Da], and over-there [Dort] and to that of I, you, and he. As Georg von der Gabelentz remarks: Here is always where I am, and what is here I call this [dieses], in opposition to that-here [dem] and that-there [jenem], which is there [Da] and over-there [Dort]. This accounts for the Latin usage of hic [here], iste [this], ille [it] = meus [my], tuus [your], eius [its]; and, in Chinese, for the coincidence of the second person pronouns with conjunctions of local [örtlich] and temporal proximity and of similarity.48 167

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In the aforementioned treatise, Humboldt demonstrated the same relationship for the Malayan languages, Japanese, and Armenian. And in the whole development of the Indo-European languages, the third-person pronoun is not yet separated from the corresponding demonstrative pronoun. Just as the French il [it/he] goes back to Latin ille [it/he], Gothic “is” (modern German “er” [it/he]) corresponds to the Latin “is” – and the I-you pronouns of the Indo-European languages also show an unmistakable interconnection with indicative [hinweisend] pronouns.49 Exactly corresponding relations are found in the Semitic and Altaic languages50 as well as the Indigenous languages of North America and Australia.51 The Australian Indigenous languages, however, reveal a highly characteristic feature: it is reported that when, in certain Indigenous languages of South Australia, an action is stated in the third person, a spatial qualifier is attached to both the subject and the object [Objekt] of this action. If one wants to say, for example, that a man has struck a dog with a spear, then the sentence must say rather that the man “at the front there” [da vorn] has struck the dog “back there” [da hinten] with this or that weapon.52 In other words, there are no general and abstract designations for “he” or for “this”; rather, the word that serves their expression is still fused with a certain deictic phonetic gesture, from which it cannot be detached. The same relationship underlies those languages that have expressions for designating the individual that is spoken about in a specific situation, such as sitting, lying or standing, coming or going, but lack a unitary expression for the third-person pronoun. The language of the Cherokee, in which such differentiations are particularly pronounced,



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possesses nine third-person pronouns instead of one.53 Other languages distinguish in the first as well as the second and third person whether the subject is visible or invisible, and they use a different pronoun accordingly.54 In addition to spatial differences of situation or distance, temporal presence or non-presence is often expressed by a particular form of the pronoun; other qualifying characteristics can also be joined to the local [örtlich] and temporal characteristic traits.55 In all of these cases, as we see, the expressions that languages use for the purely “spiritual” difference of three persons initially retain an immediate-sensible and, above all, spatial coloration. According to Hoffmann, Japanese has coined a word for “I” from a locative adverb that implies “focal point” [Mittelpunkt] and a word for “he” from another word that signifies “there” or “over-there.”56 In phenomena of this kind, we immediately see how language draws, as it were, a sensible-spiritual circle around the speaker, and it assigns the “I” to the center and the “you” and “he” to the periphery. The distinctive “schematism” of space that we previously observed in the construction of the object [Objekt] world operates here in the converse direction – and only in this double function does the representation of space initially undergo its complete formation [Durchbildung] within the whole of language.

2.  THE REPRESENTATION OF TIME To attain the precise difference and designation of temporal relationships, language has to fulfill an essentially more difficult and complex task than it did in the working out [Ausbildung] of the determination and designation of space. The simple coordination of the form of space and the form of time that has often been sought in epistemological consideration finds no confirmation in language. Rather, it is clear here that it is a determination of another kind and, as it were, of a higher dimension that thinking in general and linguistic thinking in particular have to accomplish in the construction of the representation of time, in the differentiation of temporal directions and temporal stages. For “here” and “over-there” can, in a much simpler and more immediate way, be grasped together in an intuitive unity than is the case with the individual moments of time, with the now, the earlier, and the later. What characterizes these moments as moments of time is precisely that they are never, like things

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of objective intuition, given to consciousness at once [zugleich] and “at the same time” [zumal]. The units, the parts, which in spatial intuition seem to combine of themselves into a whole, here, on the contrary, exclude one another: the being of one determination signifies the non-being of the others, and vice versa. The content [Gehalt] of the representation of time is a consequence that is never contained in immediate intuition; rather, here the decisive aspect of separating and connecting, analytical and synthetic thinking, asserts itself to a far greater extent than it applies to the representation of space. The elements [Elemente] of time are, as such, only because consciousness runs through them and in running through differentiates one against the other, so that in this very act of running through, this “discursus” [a running about] enters into the characteristic form of the concept of time. However, with this “being,” which we designate as the being of succession, as the being of time, appears raised to a completely other level of ideality than merely locally [örtlich] determined existence. Language cannot immediately arrive at this level, but rather here too, it is subject to the same inner law that governs its entire formation and progress. It does not create a new means of expression for every new sphere of signification that is opened up to it; rather, its force consists in its ability to configure a determinate given material in different ways, that it is able, without, in the first instance, changing its content to place this content in the service of another task and thus is able to imprint it with a new spiritual form. The consideration of the process that language employs in the formation of original spatial terms has shown how language constantly makes use here of the simplest means. The transposition from the sensible to the ideal is carried out ever so gradually that at first the decisive change in the general spiritual attitude that it embodies is hardly noticeable. From a very limited sensible material, from the difference in the shadings of vowels and from the particular phonetic and emotional constitution of the individual consonants and consonant groups, the designations for local [örtlich] oppositions and for the oppositions of direction in space are formed. The same process is reflected from a new angle in the development of language when we consider how it arrives at its original particles of time. As the boundary between sensible-natural feeling of sounds and the simplest spatial terms appeared as thoroughly fluid, the same continuous and imperceptible transition is found between the



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linguistic spheres that encompass local [örtlich] determinations and those that encompass temporal determinations. Even in our modern cultural languages, these two often form an inseparable unity: even here, it is a normal phenomenon to find the same word used to express spatial as well as temporal relationships. The languages of natural peoples provide even more abundant evidence of this interconnection, which in a large number of cases do not appear to possess any other formative means for the expression of the representation of time. The simple local adverbs are used indiscriminately in a temporal sense, so that, for example, the word for “here” coalesces with the word for “now,” the word for “over-there” with that for “earlier” or “later.”57 Attempts have been made to explain this on the grounds that spatial and temporal proximity or distance objectively condition one another, that what has occurred in spatially remote areas tends, in the moment [Augenblick] in which it is spoken of, to be temporally past and gone by. It is, however, apparently less a question of real and factual interconnections than it is of purely ideal ones – of a level [Stufe] of consciousness that is still relatively undifferentiated and as such not yet sensitive to the specific differences of the forms of space and time. In the languages of natural peoples, even relatively complex temporal relationships, for which the developed cultural languages have created their own expressions, are often designated by the most primitive spatial means of expression.58 As long as this material bond exists, the distinctiveness of the form of time as such cannot emerge purely in language. Also, the structural relationships of time now involuntarily transform into the structural relationships of space. For the “here” and the “over-there” in space, there exist only a simple relationship of distance; there is here simply the apartness [Auseinander], the separation of two spatial points, while there is, in general, no preferred direction in the transition from one to the other. As elements of space, the two points possess the “possibility of being together”59 [Beisammensein] and, as it were, sustain one another; the “over-there” can through a simple movement be changed into a “here,” and the “here,” after ceasing to be such, can be restored to its previous form by the reverse movement. However, in opposition to this, time shows, along with the being apart and the reciprocal distance of individual elements [Elemente], a determinate, unique, and irreversible “sense” in which it runs. The direction from the past into the future or that from

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the future to the past is distinctively its own [Eigen]. However, where consciousness still largely remains in the sphere of spatial intuition and apprehends temporal determinations only to the extent that it can apprehend and designate them through spatial analogies, this particularity of temporal direction must necessarily remain in the dark. As in space, here too all other differences are reduced to the simple difference of far and near. The only essential difference [Differenz] that is grasped and clearly brought to expression is that between “now” and “not-now” – between the immediate point of presence [Gegenwartspunkt] and that which lies “outside” it. This point, of course, is not thought of here as a strict, simple mathematical point but rather possesses a determinate extension. The now, not as a mathematical abstraction but rather as a psychic now, encompasses the whole of the contents that can be beheld together in an immediate temporal unity, that can be thickened into the whole of the moment [Augenblick] as an elementary unity of lived-experience. It is no merely thought-limiting point that separates earlier from later, but rather it possesses in itself a certain duration that extends as far as the immediate recollection [Erinnerung], as the concrete memory [Gedächtnis]. For this form of primary intuition of time, the whole of consciousness and its contents fall, as it were, into two spheres: a bright sphere, illumined by the light of the “present” [Gegenwart], and another, dark sphere. However, between these two basic stages, there are as yet no mediation or transition, no shadings or degrees. Fully developed consciousness, in particular the consciousness of scientific cognition, is distinguished by the fact that it does not remain in this simple opposition of the “now” and the “not-now” but brings it to its richest logical development. It yields an abundance of temporal stages which are, nevertheless, encompassed in a unitary order in which every moment is assigned its specific position [Stelle]. Epistemo-critical analysis shows that this order neither is “given” through sensation nor can be drawn from immediate intuition. It is, rather, a work of the understanding – and in particular the work of causal inference and deduction. The category of cause and effect reshapes the mere intuition of succession into the thought of a unitary temporal order of events [Geschehen]. The simple difference of individual positions of time [Zeitstellen] must be transformed into the concept of a reciprocally dynamic dependence between them: time as a pure form of intuition must be permeated with



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the function of causal judgment before this thought can be developed and stabilized before the immediate feeling of time can be transformed into the systematic concept of time as a condition and content of cognition. How long the road is from one to the other and through what difficulties and paradoxes it leads has been shown most clearly in the development of modern physics. Kant regarded the “analogies of experience”60 – the three basic synthetic principles of substantiality, causality, and reciprocity – as the intellectual condition and foundation for the positing of the three different possible temporal relationships, for the constitution of permanence, succession, and simultaneity. The progress of physics toward the general theory of relativity and the transformation that the concept of time underwent in this theory has shown that this relatively simple schema, which is drawn from the basic form of Newtonian mechanics, must be replaced epistemo-critically by more-complex determinations.61 In general, three different stages can be discerned in the progress from the feeling of time to the concept of time, which are also of crucial significance for the reflection of the consciousness of time found in language. In the first stage, consciousness is dominated by the opposition of “now” and “not-now,” which has undergone no further differentiation; in the second, certain temporal “forms” begin to stand out against one another – the completed action from the incomplete, the constant action from the temporary – and begin to separate, so that a determinate difference of temporal modes of action emerge; until third, the pure relational concept [Relationsbegriff] of time as an abstract concept of order is obtained, and the various stages of time clearly emerge in their opposition and in their reciprocal conditionality. For it is even truer of relations [Relationen] of time than those of space that they do not come to consciousness at once as relations [Beziehungen] but that their pure relational character always emerges in the fusion and concealment with other determinations, particularly those that have the character of a thing or a property. If, as opposed to other sensible qualities by which things are differentiated, the local [örtlich] determinations possess certain distinguishing characteristics, then they nevertheless stand on one and the same plane with them as qualities. The “here” and the “over-there” adhere in the same way to the object of which they are predicated as any other “this” and “that.” Thus, all designations of spatial form must take certain material designations as their starting point. While

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this apprehension is transferred from space to time, even here the differences of temporal signification first initially appear as pure differences of property. Because of this particular characteristic, these differences emerge not only in the verb but also in the noun. For the approach that has prevailed in our developed cultural languages, the determination of time adheres essentially to those parts of speech that include the expression of an event or activity. The sense of time, and the manifold relations that it intrinsically grasps, can be apprehended and fixed only in the phenomenon of alteration. The verb, as the expression of a determinate state from which the alteration begins or as the designation of the act of transition itself, thus appears to be the one and only bearer of temporal determinations: it seems to be the “temporal word” [Zeitwort: verb] κατ’ ἐξοχήν [par excellence]. Still, Humboldt sought to prove that this interconnection of the nature and particularity of the representation of time, on the one hand, and of the verbal representation, on the other, was necessary. The verb is, according to him, the concentration of an energetic attributivum (not a merely qualitative attributivum) through being. In the energetic attributivum lies the stages of action, in being lies the stages of time.62 Alongside this general consideration, which can be found in the introduction to the Kawi-Werk, there is also found the hint that not all languages coin this relation with the same clarity. While we are accustomed to think of the relation of time only in combination with the verb as part of the conjugation, the Malay languages, for example, have developed a usage that can be explained in no other way than by the fact that they link this relation to the noun.63 This usage emerges with great clarity where a language immediately appropriates the same means that it had developed for the differentiation of local [örtlich] relationships for the differentiation of temporal determinations. Somali uses the aforementioned differentiation in the vowels of the definite article in order to depict not only differences of spatial position and situation but also temporal differences. The development and designation of temporal representations parallel precisely those of local representations. Pure nouns, which do not possess even the slightest temporal determination for our representations – e.g., words such as “man” or “war” – can be provided with a certain temporal index by means of three article vowels. The vowel -a serves to designate the temporally present [Gegenwärtig]; the vowel -o designates the temporally absent; and no difference is made between the



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future and the not-yet-distant past. On the basis of this separation, there is only an indirect differentiation in the expression of action as to whether it is complete or incomplete, momentary or of greater or lesser duration.64 Such a stamping [Ausprägung] of purely temporal characteristics on the noun might easily be interpreted as proof of a particularly acute and subtle sense of time – if it were not shown, though, that precisely here the sense of time and the sense of place still flow completely into each other, as the consciousness of the specific temporal directions is still quite undeveloped. Just as in the case of the content of here and over-there, the contents of now and not-now clearly separate from each other; however, the opposition of past and future lags far behind this differentiation, and with this, precisely that element [Moment] that is decisive for the consciousness of the pure form of time and its particular nature is impeded in its development. The development of the language of children shows that the formation of the adverbs of time takes place much later than the adverbs of space and that expressions such as “today,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” initially have no sharply defined temporal sense. “Today” is the expression of the present in general, but “tomorrow” and “yesterday” are the expressions for the future and past in general: thus, certain specific temporal qualities are distinguished, but a quantitative measure, a measure of time intervals, is not achieved.65 With a step further, we appear to be lead back to the consideration of individual languages in which the qualitative differences of past and future are often totally blurred. In Ewe, one and the same adverb serves to designate both “yesterday” and “tomorrow.”66 In the Shambala language, the same word refers both to the earliest time and to the distant future. Remarks by one of the researchers of this language are significant: This phenomenon, which for us is so striking, finds its natural explanation in the fact that the Ntu-negro looks at time as a thing, so that for them there is only a today and a not-today; whether the latter was yesterday or will be tomorrow is all the same to them; they do not reflect about it, since this would require not only an intuition, but a thinking of and a conceptual representation of the nature [Wesen] of time. . . . The concept “time” is alien to the Shambala, they know only the intuition of time. How difficult it was for us missionaries to emancipate ourselves

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toward a phenomenology of the linguistic form from our concept of time and to understand the temporal intuition of the Shambala, can be seen from the fact that for years we searched for a form that designated only the future; how often we rejoiced at having found this form, only to recognize later, sometimes after a period of months, that our joy was premature, since in each instance it developed that the form we had found was also used for the past.67

This intuition of time as a thing expresses, among other things, that the relationships of time were rendered by nouns that originally adhered to a spatial signification.68 And just as the whole of time consciousness basically only ever apprehends each piece of time [Zeitstück] that is present and sets it opposite the other non-present parts, so too does the same tangible fragmentation assert itself in the apprehension of action and activity. The unity of an action literally “disintegrates” into tangible individual pieces of this sort. At this stage, an action can be portrayed only in that language disassembles it into all of its individual details and provides each of them with a separate presentation. And this decomposition does not constitute an intellectual analysis – for such an analysis goes hand in hand with a synthesis, with the apprehension of the form of the whole that forms its correlative element; here, rather, the action is, so to speak, materially broken up into its components, each of which is now regarded as a separate [für sich], consistent, objective existence. Thus, it is a common characteristic of a large number of African languages, for example, that every event and every activity be broken down into its parts and that each part be portrayed in an independent sentence. The doing is described in all of its individual detail, and each of these individual actions is expressed by a particular verb. An event, for example, that we designate by the single sentence “he drowned,” must here be rendered by the sentences “he drank water, died”; the activity that we designate as “to cut off” becomes “to cut, to fall”; the action of “bringing” by “take, go there.”69 Steinthal has attempted a psychological explanation of this phenomenon, for which he cites examples from the Mandingo languages, imputing it to a “deficient thickening of representations.”70 This “deficient thickening,” however, clearly points to a basic peculiarity of the representation of time in these languages. Because there exists only the simple separation between now and not-now, it is thus only the relatively small segment of consciousness that is immediately illumined



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by the light of the now that is present for consciousness in the strict sense. The whole of an action cannot, therefore, be apperceived, cannot be apprehended in thought or language, unless consciousness has literally “envisioned” [vergegenwärtigt] it in all its individual details, that it moves each of these stages, one after another, into the light of the now. Thus, a plethora of designations arises here; one mosaic tile is set beside another. However, the product possesses no unity, and it is only the image of variegated chroma of an image. For each individual detail is taken for itself and only punctually determined: such an aggregate of pure, simple, punctual presents cannot give rise to the representation of a true temporal continuum. Indeed, Zeno’s paradox applies to the form that these languages possess for the expression of movement and action: the flying arrow is basically at rest here, because in every moment of its movement, it possesses only one fixed location. The developed consciousness of time frees itself from this difficulty and paradox by creating an entirely new means for the apprehension of temporal “wholeness.” It no longer pieces together the whole of time as a substantial whole out of the individual moments [Augenblicken] but comprehends it as a functional and dynamic whole: as a unity of relation and as a unity of effect. The intuition of the temporal unity of action starts out, on the one hand, from the subject who is comprehended in it and, on the other hand, from the aim toward which it is directed. Both moments are situated on entirely different planes; however, the synthetic force of the concept of time prevails precisely in the fact that it transforms their opposition into a reciprocal relationality. The process [Prozeß] of doing can no longer disintegrate into individual phases, because from the beginning, it now has behind it the unitary energy of the active subject and before it the unitary purpose of doing. In this way, the moments of action are joined together into a causal and teleological serial totality [Gesamtreihe], into the unity of a dynamic connection and a teleological signification, and only therefrom does the unity of temporal representation indirectly spring forth. This new general view takes shape in fully developed linguistic consciousness in that from now on language in order to characterize the whole of a process [Vorgang] or doing no longer requires the intuition of all the individual details of its course but contents itself with fixing the beginning and end points: the subject from which the doing arises and the objective goal toward which

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it is directed. Its force now proves itself in that it is able to encompass the whole expanse of this opposition in a single glance and to reconcile it: the tension between the two extremes has been intensified, but at the same time, a spiritual spark, as it were, crosses over and reconciles them. Of course, this view of the relatively complex and mediate character of the pure concept of time seems, at first sight, to be contradicted by our information about the “form of time of verbs” found in the grammar of “primitive” languages. The languages of “primitive peoples” are credited with what for us is an almost-incomprehensible wealth of “tense forms.” In the Sotho language, Endemann lists thirty-eight affirmative tense forms, twenty-two potential forms, forty conditional forms, four optative or final forms, a great number of participial forms, etc. Roehl’s grammar distinguishes a thousand forms in the active indicative alone in Shambala.71 The difficulty that is found here seems to dissolve, however, when we consider that in such differentiations, according to the statements of the grammarians, we are dealing with only the determination of essentially temporal nuances. We have seen that in Shambala the basic temporal nuance, the opposition of the past and future, is in no way developed – and as for the so-called tenses [Tempora] of verbs in the Bantu languages, the grammarians expressly state that they cannot be considered as tenses [Zeitformen] in the strict sense, that for them only the question of earlier or later can be taken into consideration. An abundance of these verb forms express not the pure temporal characteristic of action but rather certain qualitative and modal differences that are made in it. “A temporal difference,” Seler has emphasized with reference to the example of the verb in American Indigenous languages,

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comes to be through different particles or through some combination with other verbs but is far from playing the role in language that the conjugations drawn up by the various clerical grammarians would lead us to suppose. And because the differences of tenses are unessential and accessory, we also find the greatest differences between tense formation . . . in otherwise closely related languages.72

However, even where language begins to express temporal determinations more clearly, it does not happen in the sense that it builds up a sharp and logically consistent system of relative temporal stages. The first



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differences that it makes do not bear such a relative character but rather, as it were, an absolute one. Psychologically speaking, what is first apprehended are certain temporal “gestalt qualities” that are discovered in a process [Vorgang] or an action. There is one if an action is committed “suddenly” or if it is developed gradually; another if it occurs abruptly or continuously wears down; and yet another if it represents a single undismantled whole or if it takes place in similar, rhythmically recurrent phases. However, for the concrete apprehension that comes with language, all of these differences are neither conceptual nor intuitive, neither quantitative nor qualitative differences [Differenzen]. Before proceeding to a sharp differentiation of “tenses” as genuine stages of relation, language brings them to expression by determinately giving shape to the diverse “types of action.” Here it is now a question of the apprehension of time as a general form of relation and order that encompasses all events [Geschehen], as an ensemble of positions, each of which possesses a determinate, unambiguous relationship of “before” and “after,” “earlier” and “later.” Rather, here too, each individual process [Vorgang] that is depicted by a determinate mode of action has, as it were, its own time – a “time for itself” [Zeit für sich] in which certain distinctive forms, certain determinate modes of its configuration and its sequence are stressed. As we know, individual languages differ from one another in the emphasis that they place at one moment on the differences in the relative stages of time, at another moment on the difference of pure modes of action. Instead of the trichotomy of past, present, and future, the Semitic languages start out from a simple dichotomy in which they consider the opposition of completed and uncompleted action. The “perfect,” the tense of a completed action, can be used equally for the expression of the past as for the expression of the present, namely when an action should be designated that has already begun in the past but continues into the present and extends immediately into it – on the other hand, the “imperfect,” which expresses an action already in the process of becoming but still not yet a completed action, can be used for a future as well as a present or past action.73 However, even that linguistic domain in which the pure relational concept of time and the expressions of pure temporal differences of action have reached the relatively high level of formation [Durchbildung], this formation does not attain to this level without numerous intermediary and in-between stages. The development of the

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Indo-European languages shows that here too the differentiation of the modes of action preceded those of the proper “tenses.” In the pre-history of the Indo-European, as Streitberg, for example, has emphasized, there are no “tenses” at all – i.e., no formal categories whose original function it was to serve as the designation of relative stages of time.

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The formal classes that we are accustomed to call ‘tenses’ have in themselves nothing whatsoever to do with relative temporal stages. All classes of the present, all aorists, all perfects in all their moods are timeless, and distinguished from one another only by the type of action that they characterize. In contrast to this abundance of forms that served for the differentiation of the modes of action, the means that the Indo-European brought to the designation of the stages of time in the application look modest, indeed quite impoverished. For the present, there was no particular designation in general, timeless action sufficed. The past, however, was expressed by a temporal adverb attached to the verbal form: the augment. . . . The future, finally, does not seem to have been expressed in any uniform way in the Indo-European primeval. One of the means of expressing it, perhaps the most original, was a modal form of probably voluntative signification.74

This primacy of the designation of modes of action over stages of time is also clearly evident in the development of the individual Indo-European languages, albeit to a different degree.75 Many of these languages have developed a proper phonetic means for the difference between momentary and continued action; inasmuch as the forms that serve the expression of momentary action are formed from the verbal stem with a simple root vowel, the expression of the continued actions was formed from the verbal stem with an enhanced root vowel.76 It is generally customary in the grammar of the Indo-European languages, since Georg Curtius, to distinguish the “punctual” action from the “cursive” action, that is then further differentiated into other differences of the perfect tense, iterative tense, intensive tense, the terminative action, etc.77 The individual languages of the Indo-European sphere differ considerably from each other here in the sharpness with which they give shape to these differences [Differenzen], and in the degree of the cultivation [Ausbildung] that they obtained in contrast to pure temporal determinations78; however, it



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is always clear that the precise designation of relative stages is a comparatively late product, while the designation of the general “gestalt of time” of a process [Vorgang] or action seems to belong to an earlier stratum of thinking and speaking. Farthest removed from the primary stage of temporal intuition are ultimately those linguistic expressions that already presuppose for their formation a form of time measurement, which thus seizes time as a precise determinate value of quantity. Here, to be sure, we find ourselves before a task that, strictly speaking, goes beyond the sphere of language and that can initially find its solution only in the “artificial” system of signs occurring in conscious reflection as is formed in science. And yet language includes a decisive preparation for this new achievement: the development of the system of numerical signs, which forms the ground of all exact mathematical and astronomical measurement, is bound to the previous working out [Ausbildung] of numerical words. In three diverse – but closely connected to one another and mutually dependent on each other  – phases, language develops the three basic intuitions of space, time, and number; and, thus, it first creates the condition to which every attempt at the intellectual mastery of phenomena and every attempt at the synthesis of these phenomena into the unity of a “world-concept” remains bound.

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3.  THE LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF NUMBER If we advance from the representation of space to that of time, and from these two further to the representation of number, then we seem to complete the sphere of intuition; however, with each new step, we see ourselves more and more pointed beyond to something outside this sphere. For in this progress, the world of graspable and tangible forms recedes more and more, and in its place, a new world is gradually constructed: a world of intellectual principles. In this sense, the “being” of number is already determined by its actual philosophical and scientific discoverers, the Pythagoreans. Proclus praised Pythagoras for first raising geometry to the level of a free science in that he had ascertained deductively (ἄνωθεν) its principles and exhibited its theorems immaterially and intellectually (ἀύλως καὶ νοερῶς).79 With this, the general tendency that

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was imprinted on scientific mathematics by its first founder has since then been further intensified and deepened. Through the mediations of Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz, it has been imparted to modern mathematics. Even more than the mathematics of antiquity, the modern view, in that it attempts to configure geometry and analysis from one principle, finds itself forced back on the concept of number as its actual center. And now, all the work of intellectual grounding turns more and more determinately to this central point. In the mathematics of the nineteenth century, there emerges an ever-more-general endeavor to penetrate to a logical, autonomous configuration of the concept of number. This aim was pursued along different paths by Dedekind and Russell and by Frege and Hilbert. Russell attempted to trace back all the basic elements on which the number is based to pure “logical constants”; Frege saw it as “property” but as one that, as it is non-sensual, also adheres to a nonsensible content that is not the property of a “thing” but rather the property of a pure concept. With the same focus and determination, Dedekind discarded any connection to the intuitive relationships, to any intervention of measurable quantities in the foundation and deduction of the concept of number. The realm of number is to be constructed not on the intuition of space and time but rather, on the contrary, the concept of number, as an “immediate emanation of the pure laws of thought,” must be set in place, in order that we gain truly accurate and precise concepts of space and time. It is only by creating the pure and continuous realm of numbers through a finite system of amply logical operations, free from any representation of measurable quantities, that spirit develops a clear representation of continuous space.80 All of these are rooted in the exact sciences; critical logic aspires to sum them up only when it proceeds from the assumption that the first precondition for the understanding of number lies in the insight that number does not deal at all with given things but with pure laws of thought. Natorp thus stresses: To derive number from things is clearly circular reasoning if by derive we mean to explain. For the concepts of things are complex concepts, into which number enters as one of their indispensable components. . . . Indeed, nothing can be given for thinking that would be more original than thinking itself, that is, than the positing of relations. Whatever else



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might be taken as the ground of number would include precisely this positing of relations and can only appear to be the ground of number because it contains as a presupposition this true ground, this positing of relations.81

However, as firmly as “pure” scientific thinking posits itself here and as consciously as it renounces all support and assistance from sense sensation or intuition, it nevertheless seems to be spellbound in the sphere of language and linguistic concept formation. The reciprocal bond between language and thinking emerges once more in the phenomenon, in the logical and linguistic development of the concepts of number – and it receives, here, perhaps its clearest and most characteristic expression. Only through the configuration of number into a logogram [Wortzeichen] is the way free to the apprehension of its pure conceptual nature. Thus, the numeral [Zahlzeichen], which language creates, constitutes, on the one hand, the indispensable presupposition for the formation [Gebilde] that determines pure mathematics as “numbers”; on the other hand, there of course exists between linguistic and purely intellectual symbols an inevitable tension and an opposition that can never be fully sublated. If ultimately language only prepares the way for these symbols, then it is unable to continue along this way to its end. That form of “relational thinking,” on which the possibility of positing the pure concepts of number is based, constitutes for language an ultimate goal, which it continuously approaches in its development but can never fully attain within its own domain.82 For mathematical thinking demands this decisive step of the concepts of number, namely their distinctive detachment and emancipation from the foundations of intuition and the intuitive representation of things, which language is unable to complete. It adheres to the designation of concrete objects and concrete processes [Vorgänge] and remains bound to them even where it seeks indirectly to give shape to the expression of pure relations. However, the same dialectical principle of progress is again confirmed here: the more language seems, in its unfolding, to be engulfed in the expression of the sensible, the more it becomes the means of the spiritual process of liberation from the sensible. The new form and the new intellectual force established in number unfolds itself in the material of the countable, however sensibly, concretely, and delimitedly it is initially taken.

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This form, however, does not emerge all at once as a complete whole but rather must gradually be constructed from its individual elements [Momenten]. And this is precisely why the consideration of the linguistic emergence and evolution of the concepts of number is so useful for logical analysis. The logical content [Gehalt] and origin of the number are accordingly derived from a penetration, from an interpenetration of entirely different methods and demands of thinking. The element of multiplicity merges here with the element of unity, that of separation into connection, that of the thoroughgoing differentiation into pure similarity [Gleichartigkeit]. All of these oppositions must be posited together in a purely intellectual balance [Gleichgewicht] so that the “exact” concept of number can form itself. This goal remains beyond the reach of language; however, we can nevertheless clearly trace how the threads that ultimately intertwine into the artful weave of number individually tie themselves and work themselves out before they join together into a logical whole. Different languages undertake this working out [Ausbildung] differently. At one moment it is one motive and at the next moment it is another motive in the formation [Bildung] of number and plurality that separates out and gives over to all others a preferred and increased significance; however, the ensemble of all these particular, and in some respects onesided, views that language obtains before the concept of number finally constitutes a totality and a relative unity. Although language is unable by itself to penetrate and fulfill the spiritual-intellectual circle in which the concept of number lies, it is able to circumscribe it in all its ambit and thus mediately prepare the determination of its content and limits. We encounter, here, the same interconnection that initially confronted us in the linguistic apprehension of the simplest spatial relationships. The differentiation of numerical relationships starts out, like that of spatial relationships, from the human body and its limbs, in order to progressively radiate from here out over the whole of the sensible-intuitive world. Everywhere, the proper [eigen] lived body forms the basic model of the first primitive counting: “to count” initially means nothing other than to designate certain differences found in any external objects [Objekte], by transferring them, as it were, to the body of the counter and so make them visible. All numerical concepts, accordingly, are purely mimetic hand concepts or other body concepts before they become word concepts. The counting gesture does not serve as a mere



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accompaniment to an otherwise independent numeral [Zahlwort]; rather, it is fused, as it were, into the signification and into the substance. The Ewe, for example, count on their outstretched fingers, beginning with the little finger of the left hand and turning back the counted finger with the pointer of their right hand. After the left hand, they do the same with the right hand; then they either begin again from the beginning or squat on the ground and continue counting on their toes.83 In Nuba, the gesture that accompanies counting usually consists, beginning with “one,” in pressing first the little finger, then the ring finger, middle finger, index finger, and thumb of the left hand into the fist of the right hand and then reversing the hands. At the number twenty, the two fists are pressed together horizontally.84 Similarly, von den Steinen reports that among the Bakairi, the simplest attempt at counting was doomed to failure unless the object [Objekt] counted – for example, a handful of corn kernels – was immediately present to the touch. The right hand felt, the left hand reckoned. Without using the fingers of the right hand, it was completely impossible, even with three pieces, to count on the fingers of the left hand according to a consideration of the kernels alone.85

As we see, it is not sufficient here that the individual counted objects [Objekte] are somehow referred to the parts of the body, but they must, as it were, be immediately transposed into the corporal parts or corporal feelings so that the act of “counting” can take place in them. The numerals [Zahl­ worter], therefore, do not so much designate any objective determinations or relationships of objects as rather embody certain directives for the corporal movement of counting. They are expressions and indices for each position of the hands or fingers, which are often cloaked in the imperative form of the verb. In Sotho, for example, the word for “five” actually signifies the “complete hand,” and the word for “six” signifies “spring” – i.e., “spring over to the other hand.”86 This active character of the socalled numerals [Zahlworter] emerges clearly in those languages that form their expressions of numbers by how they designate the manner and way the grouping, setting out, and setting up of objects to which the counting is applied. The Klamath language, for example, has a wealth of such designations that are formed from verbs of setting, laying, and placing and that

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bring to expression each particular type of “sequencing” according to the particular nature of the objects [Objekte] to be counted. To be counted, a certain group of objects must, for example, be spread out on the ground, while another must be set on the other in layers; one must be divided into heaps, another arranged in rows  – and to each such determinate “placement” of the objects corresponds a different verbal numeral [Zahl­ wort], another “numeral [numeral] classifier.”87 By virtue of this method, the movements involved in arranging the objects are coordinated with certain corporeal movements that are thought of as proceeding in a given sequence. These movements do not need to be limited to the hands and feet, the fingers and toes; rather, they can be extended to other limbs of the human lived body. In British New Guinea, the counting runs from the fingers of the left hand to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, the left side of the neck, the left breast, the chest, the right breast, the right side of the neck, etc.; likewise, in other regions, the shoulder, the clavicular hollow, the navel, the neck, or the nose, eye, and ear are used.88 The spiritual value of these primitive counting methods has often been disparaged. Steinthal writes, for example, the following in his discussion of the counting methods of the Mandingos: That . . . is the consequence . . . that encumbers the spirit of the Negro, that in order to go beyond ten he must not only abandon the sensible support, duplicating the ten himself by his own free creation, extending the short series from itself into a long one, but adhering to the lived body, he descended from the hand, that noble tool of tools, the servant of spirit, to the dust-burrowing foot, the slave of the lived body. As a result, number remains bound in general to the lived body and does not become an abstract number-representation. The Negro has no number [Zahl] but only a quantity [Anzahl] of fingers, fingers of the hand and foot; his is not the spirit which, impelled by a striving for the infinite, always going beyond any determinate quantity [Anzahl], adding one from out of itself; rather, the existing individuals, the things of nature, led him from one to one, from the little finger to the thumb, from the left to the right hand, from the hand to the foot, from one human being to another; never did his spirit intervene, creating freely, but rather crawled around in nature. . . . That is not the act which our spirit performs when it counts.89



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However, the half-poetical, half-theological pathos of this rebuke forgets that it is richer and far more fruitful to seek out and recognize the intellectual content [Gehalt] of this method, however slight, than to measure it by our fully developed concept of numbers. Here, of course, we cannot speak of any systematic concept of numbers, of their classification into a general interconnection. However, one thing is accomplished: in running through a multiplicity, even though the content of this manifold is determined in a purely sensible way, an entirely determinate order, a sequence of transitions from one member of a manifold to another is lingered on. In the act of counting, one part of the body does not follow another arbitrarily; rather, the right hand follows the left, the foot follows the hand, and the neck, breast, and shoulder follow the hands and feet in accordance with a schema of succession that, though conventionally chosen, to be sure, is, in any case, strictly observed. The setting up of such a schema, though far from exhausting the content [Gehalt] of what developed thinking understands by “number,” nevertheless constitutes the indispensable precondition for it. For even a pure mathematical number dissolves into the concept of a system of positions, into the concept of an “order in sequence” – an “order in progression,”90 as Hamilton has called it. Now, of course, the crucial lacuna of the method of primitive counting seems to be that it does not freely produce this order in accordance with a spiritual principle but draws it solely from given things, particularly the given organization of the counter’s own lived body. However, even in the undeniable passivity of this behavior, a distinctive spontaneity still stirs, which is, sure enough, visible only in its embryonic form. In that spirit apprehends sensible objects [Objekte] not only according to what they individually and immediately are but according to how they are ordered, spirit begins to advance from the determinateness of objects to the determinateness of acts – and in these acts, in the acts of connection and separation that it performs, it will ultimately arrive at the authentic and new principle, the “intellectual” principle of number formation. At first, however, the ability to observe in the transition from one object [Objekt] to another the order in the sequence of the transition remains an isolated element, which has not yet been connected and set in harmony with other elements leading to the formation of the pure concept of number. Admittedly, a certain correlation takes place between

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the counted objects [Objekte] and the parts of the human body that function as expressions of number. However, this correlation retains a vague character: it remains, so to speak, a correlation lock, stock, and barrel, as it is not possible to organize the compared series in itself and divide it into sharply determinate “unities” [Einheiten]. The essential prerequisite for the formation of such a unity, however, would consist in considering the counted elements [Elemente] as strictly equal, so that each element [Ele­ ment] is different from the others through nothing other than the position that it occupies in the counting and not through any sundry sensibletangible particularity or property. For the present, however, we are far removed from the abstraction of such a “homogeneity.” Not only must the counted things be present in all their palpable determinacy, so that they can be immediately touched and felt, but also the units [Einheiten] by which the counting progresses must display without exception concretesensible differences and delimit themselves through one another. In place of pure intellectually comprehended uniform units [Einheiten] of positing, there are only those natural units [Einheiten] of things as are offered by the natural organization of the human body. As its elements [Elemente], primitive “arithmetic” knows only such natural groups. Their systems differ depending on the tangible given standard. The use of one hand as a model of counting gives rise to the quinary system, the use of both hands gives rise to the decimal system, and the use of hands and feet gives rise to the vigesimal system.91 Other counting methods are inferior even to these simplest attempts at group and system formation. Such boundaries in “counting,” however, should not be interpreted as boundaries in the apprehension of concrete pluralities and their differences. Rather, even where actual counting has not progressed beyond the first meager beginnings, the differentiation of such pluralities can be sharply and thoroughly formed – because, for them, a general qualitative characteristic should adhere for each particular plurality in which it is recognized and apprehended in its particular nature but should not be structurally and in this way quantitatively determined as a “quantity of units.” It is said of the Abipones, whose capacity of “counting” is only partially developed, that their ability to differentiate concrete totalities is nevertheless finely developed. If any of the dogs from a large pack that they took with them on a hunting expedition were missing, it was noticed at once, and likewise, the owner of a herd of four to five hundred



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cattle could recognize even at a distance whether any were missing and which ones.92 Individual pluralities are recognized and differentiated by a particular individual characteristic trait; insofar as one can speak in general of “number,” it appears not in the form of a determinate and measured numerical magnitude but as a kind of concrete “numerical gestalt,” as an intuitive quality adhering to a completely inarticulate general impression of quantity.93 This basic view is clearly reflected in language that originally knows, as such, no general numeral terms that are applicable to every countable object but rather that appropriates a particular, corresponding numerical designation for particular classes of objects [Objekte]. As long as number is still taken exclusively as a thing-number [Dingzahl], there must basically be as many diverse numbers and groups of numbers as there are different classes of things. The number of a quantity of objects is intended only as a qualitative attribute that belongs to the things in exactly the same way as a certain spatial configuration or any sensible property, thus eliminating the possibility of language to separate it from other attributes and to create for it a generally valid form of expression. In primitive stages of language formation, we actually find that the designation of number is fused with the designation of things and property. The same content of designation serves at once as the expression of the constitution of objects as well as the expression of its numerical determination and character. Some words simultaneously bring to expression a particular class of objects [Objekte] and a particular group character of these objects [Objekte]. Thus, in the language of the Fiji Islands, for example, a unique word is used to designate groups of two, ten, a hundred, or a thousand coconuts or a group of ten canoes, ten fish, etc.94 And even after the dissolution has occurred, after the designation of the number has become independent of the designation of things and properties, it still attempts to conform as much as possible to the manifold and diversity of things and properties. Not every number applies to everything; for the sense of number is to express not abstract multiplicity as such but rather the modus of this multiplicity, its mode and form. In Indigenous languages, for example, a different series of numerals [Zahlworte] is used, depending on whether people or objects [Sachen], animate or inanimate things, are counted. A particular series of numerical expressions can occur when it is a question of counting fish or bellows or when the operation of counting

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is applied to objects that are standing up, lying, or sitting down. The Moanu Islanders have different numbers from one to nine for coconuts or human beings, spirits and animals, trees, canoes and villages, houses, poles, and plantations.95 In the Tsimshian language of British Columbia, there is a particular series of numbers for counting flat objects and animals, for counting round objects and time intervals, human beings, boats, long objects, and measurements96 – and in other neighboring languages, the differentiation of the various number series goes even further and are practically almost unlimited.97 As we see, the endeavor of counting is by no means oriented toward “homogeneity.” Rather, the tendency of language is to subordinate the quantitative difference to the generic difference expressed in its classifications and to modify the expression of quantitative difference accordingly. This tendency clearly occurs even where language has progressed to the use of more-general numerical expressions and nevertheless continues to render every such expression followed by a specific determinative that denotes the particular class of collection coherence as a specific expression of quantities. Considered intuitively and concretely, it is obviously something different whether human beings are united into a “group” or whether stones are united into a “heap”; whether a “row” presents resting objects or a “swarm” presents moving objects, etc. Language seeks to retain all such particularizations and nuances in the choice of its collective terms and in the regularity with which it combines such words with actual numerical expressions. Thus, in the Malayo-Polynesian languages, for example, numerical expressions are not directly grasped together with the appropriate substantives, but rather a certain determinative word must always be joined to the substantive that brings a particularization of the “collectivization” to expression. The expression for “five horses” is literally “horses, five tails”; for “four stones,” it is literally “stones, four round bodies”; etc.98 In Mexican languages, the expression of number and of the enumerated objects are likewise still followed by a designation that renders the type and form of the sequence or conglomeration knowable and that, for example, is different for round and cylindrical objects like eggs and beans or for long rows of persons, things, walls, and furrows, etc.99 Japanese and Chinese have also developed a particularly refined application of such “numeratives” differentiated according to the class of objects counted. In these languages, which lack the general grammatical difference between singular and



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plural, particular attention is taken to ensure that the collective context as such is clearly denoted in its specific direction and particular nature. If in the process of abstract counting, the units [Einheiten] must be emptied of all proper content before they can be connected with one another; here, such a content continues to exist and condition each particular kind of context into collective associations, quantities, and multiplicities.100 The linguistic-intellectual determination directs far more attention to bringing out certain forms of groups and sharply delimiting them against each other than with breaking up these groups into units [Einheiten] and individualities: the characteristic of the multiplicity as such takes place in that the intuitive total content is apprehended and distinguished from others, not in that it is constructed logically and mathematically from its individual constitutive elements [Elemente]. The same basic view confronts us, if instead of using the procedure that language follows in the formation of numerals, we consider the means with which language implements the formal and general differentiation of “singular” and “plural.” If we think of the idea of plural [Plural] as implying the logical and mathematical category of “plurality” [Mehrheit: moreness], so that the category of a multiplicity is constructed from clearly separate, similar units [Einheiten: onenesses], then it turns out that the plural, understood in this way, is lacking in many languages. A great number of languages leave entirely undesignated the opposition between singular and plural. In its basic form, the substantive can be used equally well as the designation of the genus, which is as such concerned with an indeterminate multiplicity of instances, as the expression of a single instance of the genus. It lies midway between the signification of the singular and that of the plural and, as it were, does not decide between the two. Only in a few individual cases, where this differentiation seems essential, is it designated by particular linguistic means, and often the signification of the singular rather than that of the plural is distinguished in this way. Thus, for example, the Malayo-Polynesian languages, according to Friedrich Müller, “have never risen to the concept of number as a category encompassing a multiplicity in a living unity [Einheit],” so that their substantives are neither truly concrete nor truly abstract but are a hybrid of the two. For the Malay, “human” applies neither for “a human being” in concreto nor for “human being” = “humanity” in abstracto, rather “human”

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is used as the designation for human beings that one has seen and knows. The word . . . (ôran) corresponds, however, more to our plural than to our singular, and the singular must be indicated by a word signifying “one.”101

Here too, mere individuality is initially not conceived [konzipiert] – in which case, individuality is converted into a signification of plurality [Mehrheit] through a linguistic formula – from the undifferentiated multiple to which a signification of the plural [Plural] can be given by the addition of certain nouns with a general collective sense, while from a signification of the singular by the use of certain individualizing particles.102 The same intuition of the unity-plurality-relationship [EinheitsMehrheits-Verhältnisses] is to be found in many of the Altaic languages, where one and the same word without grammatical differentiation can be used for the expression of both unity [Einheit: oneness] and plurality [Mehrheit: moreness]. This appellative can designate on one side the single individual and the whole genus or on the other side an indeterminate quantity of individuals.103 However, even in those language spheres that have cultivated a clear formal difference between singular and plural, a number of phenomena make it apparent that this strict separation was preceded by a stage of relative indifference. One can often find here that a word that already bears the outward imprint of the plural is used in its grammatical construction in the opposite sense and thus is associated with the singular form of the verb, because its basic signification is felt to be not so much a discreet plurality [Mehrheit] as a collective totality [Gesa­ mtheit] and thus as a collective simplicity.104 This explains the fact that in the Indo-European languages, in Aryan and Greek, the neuter plural is bound, as is well known, with the singular [Einzahl] of the verb: the ending -ă of these nouns originally had no plural meaning but went back to the feminine singular ending -a, which was used as the designation of collective abstractions. The forms in -a were originally neither plural nor singular but simply collectives, which could be comprehended in either way as the need arose.105 Analogously to what has been observed in the process of counting, we find that in the form of the formation of the plural that language does not abruptly juxtapose an abstract category of unity [Einheit] to an abstract category of plurality [Mehrheit] but finds all manner of gradations and



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transitions between them. The first multiplicities that it distinguishes are not multiplicities in general but specific multiplicities that bear a particular and distinctive qualitative character. Aside from the use of dual and trial, many languages distinguish a double plural: a narrow form for two or a few objects and another for many objects. This usage, which Dobrizhoffer found in the language of the Abipones,106 has its exact counterpart in the Semitic languages, for example, in Arabic.107 In his presentation of the forms of plurality [Mehrheit] in Arabic (which beside the dual has a limited plural for three to nine and a multiple plural for ten and over, or for an indeterminate quantity of objects), Humboldt remarks that the underlying view here, which in a sense situates the generic concept outside the category of Numerus [number], so that both singular and plural are distinguished from it by inflection, must “undeniably be called a very philosophical one.”108 In truth, however, this generic concept does not seem to be comprehended in its generic determinacy and, by virtue of this determinacy, to have been lifted out from the differentiation of Numerus [number] as it has, in fact, not at all arisen in this form of differentiation. The difference that language expresses by singular and plural has not been sublated into the genus; rather, it has not yet been sharply drawn; the quantitative opposition of unity [Einheit] and multiplicity has not yet been overcome by an all-embracing qualitative unity [Einheit] because initially this opposition is not definitively posited. The unity [Einheit: oneness] of the genus signifies a distinct one [Ein], opposed to the no-less-distinct multiplicity of its species – in the indeterminate significance of the collective, from which both the signification of the singular like that of the plural has crystallized in a large number of languages, the indistinctness forms the decisive element. The multiplicity is apprehended as a mere horde, as a heap or a mass, thus as a sensible and not as a logical whole. Its universality is that of an impression, which has not yet been laid out into its individual elements [Elemente] and components, not that of an overarching concept that grasps in itself the particular as separated [Gesondertes] and “distinct” [Ersondertes]. It is, however, precisely through this basic moment of separation by virtue of which the strict concept of number can arise from the mere concept of a heap or multiplicity. The present consideration has shown us two paths and directions by which language approaches this concept, which according to its particular nature it can apprehend in no other

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way than through a sensible cloak. On the one hand, linguistic thinking, even in those primitive counting methods oriented toward the limbs of the human body, fixed the moment of “ordering in succession” [Folge]. If these methods of counting were to produce any result at all, they could not pass arbitrarily from one limb of the body to another but had to observe some rule of sequence [Abfolge]. On the other hand, the impression of multiplicity as such, the consciousness of a still-indeterminate whole, was in some way dissected into “parts,” and guided language in the formation of its general designations of the collective. In both cases, the thinking of number and its linguistic expression seem bound to the basic forms of intuition, to the apprehension of spatial and temporal being. An epistemo-critical analysis shows how the two forms must work together in order to produce the essential content [Gehalt] of the concept of number. If, in the apprehension of collective “togetherness,” number is based on the intuition of space, then it requires, however, the intuition of time to form the characteristic counterpart of this determination, the concept of distributive unity [Einheit] and individuality [Einzelheit]. For this is the intellectual problem that had to be solved: not only must it fulfill both requirements, but it must also conceive them as a single whole. Every genuine numerically determinate multiplicity is at the same time thought and apprehended as a unity [Einheit], and every unity [Einheit] as a multiplicity. Admittedly, this correlative unification of opposing elements is now found again in every basic spiritual act of consciousness. The elements [Elemente] that enter into the synthesis of consciousness are not simply left to stand side by side but are comprehended as the expression and product of one and the same basic act – connection is made to appear as separation, separation as connection. However necessary this double determination may be, one or the other of the two factors may assert its preponderance in the total synthesis, according to the particular nature of the problem involved. If, in the exact mathematical concept of number, a pure equilibrium seems to be achieved between the function of connection and that of separation, the requirement of uniform combination [Zusammenfassung] into a whole and the requirement of thoroughgoing discreteness of elements [Elemente] are both ideally fulfilled; in the consciousness of time and space, however, one of these motives predominates over the other. In space, the element of being-together-with [Beieinandersein] and being-within-each-other [Ineinandersein] of elements



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[Elemente] are exhibited; in time it is the moment of their being-afterof-one-another [Nacheinandersein] and being-asunder-from-one-another [Auseinandersein]. We cannot intuit or conceive an individual spatial gestalt without at the same time thinking with it the space as a whole “in” which it is contained: the particularity of the gestalt is possible here only as a limitation of an all-encompassing “unitary” space. Although the temporal moment [Augenblick] is what it is because it appears as a moment [Moment] in a sequence, as a member in a succession, this sequence can be constituted only if every single moment [Moment] excludes all others, if a simple, indivisible “now,” a pure punctual present that is absolutely differentiated from every past and all future is posited. The concrete thinking of number, as it finds its expression in language, makes use of these achievements that were used in the consciousness of space and the consciousness of time and employs them for the working out [Ausbildung] of the two different elements in number. From the differentiation of spatial objects [Objekte], language arrives at its concept and expression of collective multiplicity – from the differentiation of the temporal act, it arrives at its expression of particularization and isolation. This twofold character of the spiritual apprehension of plurality [Mehrheit] clearly manifests itself in the form of plural-formation. The formation of the form of plurality [Mehrheit] appears to be conducted, in the one case, through the intuition of tangible complexes and, in the other case, through the intuition of the rhythmical-periodic recurrence of phases to a determinate temporal process. In the one case, it is directed predominantly toward objective totalities [Ganzheiten] consisting of multiple [Mehrheit] parts; in the other, it is directed predominantly toward the repetition of events or activities that connect together into a continuous sequence. Indeed, those languages that exhibit in their whole structure [Bau] a predominantly verbal structure [Struktur] have developed a distinctive, purely “distributive” view of plurality, which sharply sets it apart from the collective view. Here the sharp elaboration and characterization of verbal acts becomes the proper vehicle for the apprehension of plurality [Mehrheit]. The language of the Klamath Indians, for example, has formed no means of their own in order to distinguish between the designation of individual objects [Objekte] and the designation of a plurality [Mehr­ heit] of objects [Objekte]. However, what comes to be held and respected with great accuracy and consistency is, rather, the difference that exists

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between a doing that exhausts itself in one unique temporal act and a doing that grasps in itself a plurality [Mehrheit] of temporally different but, in terms of content, similar phases. “For the spirit of the Klamath Indians,” Gatschet writes: the fact that various things appear to be repeatedly done, at different times, or that the same thing was repeatedly done by various persons, appeared much more important than the pure idea of plurality [Mehrheit], as we have it in our languages. This category of separateness made such a strong impression on them that language brings it to expression above all through a particular symbolic-phonetic means, namely through a doubling.

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In the Klamath, every expression of the “plural” [Plural] in our sense is of demonstrably recent origin, whereas the thought of the separation of an act into a plurality [Mehrheit] of similar processes through the specified means of reduplication that permeates the entire language down to its postpositions and certain adverbial particles is always sharply and unambiguously called for.109 Hupa, a language of the Athapaskan language group, in many cases uses the singular where we would have expected the plural [Plural]: whenever a plurality [Mehrheit] of individuals participates in an action but the action appears as a unity. The distributive relationship is always precisely designated by the choice of a special prefix.110 In particular, the reduplication also occurs in the same function in languages outside the sphere of Native American languages.111 Here again, an intrinsically intellectual form of apprehension has created its immediate-sensible expression in language. The simple phonetic repetition is, at the same time, the most primitive and the most effective means to designate the rhythmic recurrence and organization of an act, particularly of a human activity. Perhaps we find ourselves at a point where, if anywhere, we can gain a glimpse into the earliest motives of language formation and into the mode of the interconnection between language and art. Attempts have been made to trace the beginnings of poetry back to those first primitive work songs of humanity in which, for the first time, the felt rhythm of one’s own corporeal movements turned, as it were, toward the outside. Bucher’s compendious study of work and rhythm has shown how these work



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songs are common throughout the whole world, and they maintain a similarity to one another in their basic form. Every form of physical work conditions, already when it is performed by the individual but even more when it is performed by the community, an appropriate coordination of movements, which for its part urges immediately toward a rhythmic interconnection and rhythmic division of the individual phases of work. This rhythm exhibits itself to consciousness in a twofold mode: first, it finds its expression in the pure sensation of movement, in the alternation of muscular tension and relaxation, and second, it finds its expression in objective form, in the perceptions of the sense of hearing, in the symmetry of the sounds and noises that accompany work. The consciousness of doing and its differentiation are connected to these sensible differences: milling and grinding, pushing and pulling, and pressing and trampling differ with respect to their specific purposes and to their own proper meter and tone. In the abundance and diversity of work songs [Arbeitslieder], in the songs of spinners and weavers, threshers and oarsmen, millers and bakers, etc., we can, as it were, still immediately hear how a particular rhythmic sensation, which is determined through the particular direction of work [Arbeit], can exist and be implemented in the work [Werk] only in that it is at the same time objectified in sound.112 Perhaps some forms of reduplication are even descended from the verb as expressions of an act that contain in itself a plurality of rhythmically recurrent phases, of such an utterance that originally takes its beginning from the proper doing of the human being. In any case, language could acquire a consciousness of the pure form of time and the pure form of number in no other way than by linking them to specific contents, to certain basic rhythmic lived-experiences, in which the two forms were given in immediate concretion and fusion. That here it was not so much the differentiation of things as the differentiation of acts that gave rise to the separation and “distribution” as one of the basic moments of enumeration seems to be confirmed by the fact that in many languages the expression of plurality with the verb is used not only where an actual plurality of perpetrators is present but also where an individual subject directs one and the same doing toward different objects [Objekte].113 For an intuition of plurality that is directed essentially toward the pure form of the act, it is, indeed, of secondary significance whether only one individual

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or several were involved in the action, whereas the decomposition into individual phases of the act is always of crucial importance. If, up to now, we have considered the basic forms of pure intuition, the forms of space and time, as the starting points for the formation of numbers and plurality, for this reason we have perhaps not yet touched on the most original and deepest stratum in which the act of counting is rooted. For our consideration cannot begin from the object [Objekt] alone and from the differences within the objective spatiotemporal sphere; rather, it must also retrace the basic oppositions that originate from pure subjectivity. A  whole series of indications suggest that language drew its first numerical separations from this domain; it has not been so much in the tangible juxtaposition and apartness of objects or occurrences as, rather, in the separation of the “I” and the “you” that the consciousness of number first unfolded. It is as if in this domain there dominated a greater subtlety of differentiation, a greater sensitivity to the opposition between the “one” and the “many,” than was the case in the circle of mere thing-representation [Sachvorstellung]. Many languages that have not developed a true plural form of the noun nevertheless mint this plural with the personal pronoun114; others possess two plural signs, one of which is used exclusively for pronouns.115 Often the plurality of a noun is expressed only in the case of animate and rational beings [Wesen] and not in the case of inanimate objects.116 In Yakut, garments and parts of the body usually stand in the singular, even though two or several of them are present in one individual; they are maintained, however, in the plural if they belong to more than one person.117 Thus, the differentiation of number is also developed more sharply for the intuition of individuals than it is for the intuition of mere objects [Sachanchauung]. Here too, those reciprocal relations that exist in general between number and the enumerated manifest in the designation of number that originates from this personal sphere. It has been generally shown that the first designations of numbers created by language arose from entirely determinate concrete counting and still bear, as it were, the color of this concreteness. This distinctive and specific coloration is most clearly recognizable where the determination of number originates not from the differentiation of things but from that of people. For here, number does not initially appear as a generally valid intellectual principle or as an unrestricted, continuable process; rather, it is restricted here from the



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outset to a specific sphere, whose boundaries are designated not only through objective intuition but even more sharply and clearly through the pure subjectivity of feeling. By virtue of the latter, the “I” is separated from the “you,” and the “you” from the “he”; however, there is initially no reason and no necessity to progress beyond this sharply determinate triad, which is given in the differentiation of “three persons,” to the intuition of a further multiplicity. Insofar as such a multiplicity is comprehended and linguistically designated, it does not bear the same character of “distinctness” per se that is expressed in the reciprocal separation of the personal spheres. Beyond “three,” there begins, so to speak, the realm of indefinite plurality, of mere collectivity, that is not itself further divided. Indeed, we see everywhere in the development of language that the initial formations of number are subject to this limitation. The languages of a number of natural peoples show that the activity of separation, as it unfolds the opposition between “I” and “you,” progresses from “one” to “two” – that it is a further significant step when the “three” is included in this sphere but that beyond this, beyond the power of keeping apart, of the achievement of “discretion” that leads to the formation of number, it would appear to be paralyzed. Among the Bushmen, the expression of numbers, strictly speaking, extends only to “two”; already the expression for “three” means nothing more than “many” and is used, in conjunction with finger language, for all numbers up to ten.118 The aboriginals of Victoria, too, have not developed any numeral [Zahlwort] beyond two. In the Binandele language of New Guinea, only the numerals [Zahlworter] one, two, and three are available, while numbers above three must be formed by circumlocutions.119 All of these examples, to which many others might be added,120 make it clear how closely the act of counting originally clung to the intuition of I, you, and he, from which it detaches only gradually. This seems to be the ultimate basis of the particular role played by the number three in the language and thinking of all peoples.121 It has been said of the apprehension of number among natural peoples that each number has its own individual physiognomy, that each number possesses a kind of mystical being and mystical property; this is particularly true of the numbers two and three. Both are particular kinds of formation [Gebilde]; they each possess, so to speak, a specific spiritual tonality by virtue of which they rise out of the uniform and homogeneous numbers series. Even in those languages that

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possess a richly developed and thoroughly formed “homogeneous” system of numbers, this special position of the numbers one and two – in some cases, the numbers from one to three or one to four – is clearly recognizable in certain formal determinations. In Semitic, the numerals [Zahlwort] for one and two are adjectives, whereas the rest are abstract nouns that are subordinated to what is counted in the genitive plural and thereby possess the opposite gender of that which is numbered.122 In the originary Indo-European languages, as the Indo-Iranian, BalticSlavic, and Greek languages all indicate, the numerals from one to four were inflected, while the numerals from five to nineteen were rendered by uninflected adjectives and the numbers beyond nineteen by substantives commanding the genitive of the counted objects.123 Such a grammatical form as the dual persisted much longer in personal pronouns [Fürwörter] than in other word classes. The dual, which otherwise disappeared from the whole declension, was preserved up to a relatively late period in the German first-person and second-person pronouns;124 likewise in the development of the Slavic languages, the “objective” dual was lost much earlier than the “subjective” dual.125 In many languages, the etymological origins of the first numerals would also seem to point to this interconnection with the roots that were developed from the differentiation of the three persons: in particular, the expression for “you” and the expression for “two” seem to disclose a common etymological root in the Indo-European languages.126 With reference to this interconnection, Scherer concludes that we stand here at a common linguistic source of psychology, grammar, and mathematics: the root of duality [Zweiheit] leads back to the originary dualism [Urdualism] on which the possibility of speech and thinking are grounded.127 For according to Humboldt, the possibility of speech is contingent on address and response, and it is also based on a tension and split that arises between I and you, in order then to counterbalance in the act of speech, so that this act appears as the true and authentic “mediation between the power of thought and the power of thought [Denkkraft und Denkkraft].”128 On the basis of this basic speculative view of language, Wilhelm von Humboldt has – in his treatise on the dual that grammarians had hitherto regarded as mere ballast, as a useless linguistic refinement – been able to illuminate this form from within. He allocated the dual to a twofold origin – subjective on the one hand and objective on the other – and



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thus, accordingly, to an origin that was part sensible and part originary spiritual signification. According to Humboldt, wherever the dual is employed predominantly as an expression of a purely intuitive thing [Sache], language follows the first direction – i.e., takes duality as a sensibly tangible fact given in nature. This usage is widespread in almost all linguistic families. The duplicity of available things exhibits itself for linguistic sensitivity as a particular, generically connected whole. In the Bantu languages, for example, such duplicity of available things as the eyes, ears, shoulders, breasts, knees, feet, etc. form a unique class that is characterized by a particular nominal prefix.129 In addition to these natural dualities [Zweiheiten], there emerge also artificial dualities [Zwei­ heiten]: language stresses, for example, the pairing of corporeal limbs as well as that of certain equipment and tools. However, this use of the dual within the sphere of pure nominal concepts proves, in the development of most languages, to be steadily in decline. In Semitic, it belonged to the basic language; however, more and more, it begins to dwindle in the individual languages.130 In Greek, the dual had disappeared from several dialects before the end of the prehistoric period, and in Homer, we find it in a state of decomposition. It survived relatively late only in the Attic dialect but was dying out by the fourth century BCE.131 In this relationship, which is not connected to a particular domain or to particular conditions, a general linguistic interconnection is clearly expressed.132 The decline of the dual coincides with a gradual, steady transition from the individual and concrete number to the numerical series. The more the thought of the number series as a whole that was constructed according to a strictly unitary principle prevailed, the more each individual number represented not a particular content but a mere position that was equivalent to another. Heterogeneity began to give way to pure homogeneity. However, it is conceivable that this new point of view penetrated the personal sphere much more slowly than it did the sphere of mere things. For in its origin and its being [Wesen], the personal sphere is established according to the form of heterogeneity. The “you” is not equivalent to the “I”; rather, the you confronts the I as an opposite, as a not-I: the “second” [Zweite] does not come into being here through a simple repetition of unity [Einheit] but is qualitatively “other.” Admittedly, the “I” and the “you” join together into the community of the “we”; however, this form of uniting into the “we” is completely different from

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a collective-tangible combination [Zusammenfassung]. Jacob Grimm has already stressed the difference between the concept of the tangible plural and that of the personal plural developed by language; he has already pointed out that while it is possible to consider a tangible plural as a sum of equivalent elements [Elemente] – it is possible to define men, for example, as “man and man” – the “we” is in no way presented as such a sum, since it must be grasped not as “I and I” but rather as “I and you” or “I and he.”133 The purely “distributive” motive for the formation of numbers, the motive for the pure separation of unities, emerges here more poignantly than in that form of counting that begins from the intuition of time and temporal occurrences.134 The same endeavor to preserve the elements [Elemente] that are grasped together in the unity [Einheit] of the “we,” not simply in order to merge them into this unity but to preserve them in their particularity and specific determination, is evinced in the usage of the trial and of the inclusive and exclusive plural. Both of these are closely kindred phenomena. The use of the dual and trial is particularly strict in the Melanesian languages, which insist that in every instance in which two or three persons are spoken of that care is taken that a corresponding determination of number is used – and here too, the form of the first-person pronoun is given another shape depending on whether the speaker includes themself in the designation “we” or excludes themself from it.135 Australian Indigenous languages also tend to interpolate dual and trial forms between the singular and plural; dual and trial each possess one form that includes the person addressed and another who excludes them. The “we both” can signify either “you and I” or “he and I”: “we three” can signify either “I and you and he” or “I and he and he,” etc.136 In many languages, this differentiation is expressed in the phonetic form of the designation of plurality; in the Delaware language, for example, the inclusive plural is formed, according to Humboldt, from an assemblage of the pronominalphonon for “I” and “you,” while the exclusive form is formed out of a repetition of the pronominal-phonon “I.”137 In the end, the working out [Ausbildung] of the homogeneous number series and the homogeneous intuition of number sets a limit to this, in the strict sense, individualizing apprehension. In place of the particular individual, there emerges the genus that embraces them as a whole and in the same way; in the place of the qualifying particularization of elements [Elemente], there emerges



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the uniformity of procedure and the rule by which they are grasped together in a quantitative whole. If we look back over the whole process by which language has followed in the formation of the representation of numbers and numerals, we find that a single element can be derived per antiphrasin from the exact method of number formation prevailing in pure mathematics. We find that before the logical-mathematical concept of number can become what it is, it must first be configured from its opposition and contrary. The essential logical properties of the mathematical number series have been designated as its necessity and universality, its uniqueness, its infinite continuability, and the absolute equivalence and homogeneity of its individual members.138 None of these characteristic traits, however, applies to that first procedure of number formation that finds its first expression and sedimentation in language. Here, no necessary and generally valid principle makes it possible to encompass all numerical positions [Set­ zungen] in one spiritual glance and to master them by a unitary rule. Here there is no unicity of “the” number series per se – rather, as we have seen, each new class of enumerable objects [Objekten] basically requires a new approach and a new means of counting. There also can be no talk of the infinity of numbers: the necessity as well as the possibility of numbers extends only as far as does the capacity of intuitively and representatively connecting objects into groups with an entirely determinate intuitive group character.139 The counted no more enters into the act of counting as something affected with no qualitative properties than it does as a unity without determination; rather, it preserves its specific character as thing and property. With the concepts of property, this expresses itself in the fact that with them the form of gradation and of the serial interconnection develops ever so gradually. If we consider the form of the comparison of adjectives, the forms of the positive, the comparative, and the superlative that are developed in our cultural languages, there is in each of them a general concept, a certain characteristic generic trait that varies only in its quantity, in the comparison. In most of these languages, however, we can still clearly recognize, side by side with this difference of pure determination of quantity, another approach, in which the quantitative difference is comprehended as a substantial, generic difference. The phenomena of the suppletive, which appears in the comparison of adjectives in both the Semitic and Indo-European languages, are the

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linguistic witnesses of this apprehension. If, for example, in the IndoEuropean sphere certain concepts of property – such as good and bad, sick and sad, large and many, little and few – are formed not from a single basic root but from entirely different word stems (e.g., our “good” and “better,” Latin bonus, melior, optimus, Greek ἀγαθός, ἀμείνων ἄριστος, βελτίων and βέλτιστος κρείττων and κράτιστος) – then this phenomenon has been attributed to an older “individualizing” view that has not been entirely submerged by the later view of “grouping,” to the original “qualitative linguistic forming” that had resisted the growing tendency toward “quantitative linguistic forming.”140 In place of the abstraction of a uniformly comprehended and phonetically uniformly designated concept of property, which is differentiated only in degree of gradation, we encounter a basic intuition in which each “degree” of a property retains its own unique inexchangeable being, which is not seen as something that is merely “more” or “less” but as something separated and “other.” This view appears still more clearly in languages that have not developed a specific form of adjective comparison in general. In the vast majority of languages, the forms that we call “comparative” and “superlative” are totally lacking. Here the relationship of the degree of differentiation can be indirectly rendered only ever by paraphrasing, either by verbal expressions such as “exceed,” “surpass,” etc.141 or by the two determinations between which the comparison may be undertaken appearing next to one another in a simple parataxis.142 Adverbial particles – which express that a thing is large or beautiful, etc., in comparison with another thing or in “opposition” to another thing – can also be employed in this sense.143 Many of these particles have originally a spatial sense, so that the qualitative gradation seems to be based on local [örtlich] relationships of high and low, above and below.144 Here too, whereas linguistic thinking introduces a spatial intuition, abstract-logical thinking seems to demand a pure concept of relation. And so the circle of our consideration closes. Again, it becomes evident that concepts of space, time, and number are truly the basic frameworks of objective intuition as it is constructed in language. They can, however, fulfill their task only because their overall structure situates them in an ideal middle region – because, by holding fast to the form of a sensible expression, they progressively imbue the sensible with spiritual content [Gehalt] and configure it into a symbol of the spiritual.



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4.  LANGUAGE AND THE DOMAIN OF “INNER INTUITION”: THE PHASES OF THE I-CONCEPT a) The Working out of “Subjectivity” in Linguistic Expression The analysis of language has up to now essentially been directed at displaying the categories with which language operates in the construction of the objective world of intuition. Even here, however, it was found that this methodologically set boundary was not in reality strictly adhered to. We have already seen ourselves led back throughout the presentation of each of the “objective” categories to the subjective sphere; everywhere it was found that each new determination of the world of objects received within language was also reflected in the determination of the I-world. For, in truth, correlative spheres of intuition mutually determine each other’s boundaries. Every new gestalt of the objective – such as, for example, its spatial, its temporal, or its numerical apprehension and separation – thus, likewise, results in an altered image of subjective reality and also includes new features in this purely “inner” world. In addition, language also has its own independent means that serves the pure development and configuration of this other “subjective” existence [Dasein], and they are no less firmly rooted and no less originary than the forms by which it apprehends and presents the world of things. Even today, of course, we frequently encounter the view that the expressions with which language renders personal existence [Sein] and relationships in it are only a derived and secondary significance compared to others that belong to the determination of objects [Sache] and things [Ding]. Attempts at a logical and systematic classification of the different word classes frequently proceed from the view that the pronoun is not an independent word class with its own spiritual content [Gehalt] but only a simple phonetic substitute for the noun [Dingwort], the substantive, that it does not belong to the authentically autonomous ideas of language formation but rather merely depicts the substitution for another.145 Humboldt has, however, already raised decisive arguments against this “narrowly grammatical view.” He stressed that it was entirely incorrect to view the pronoun as the latest part of the speech of language: the first element in the act of speech is the personality of the speaking [Sprechend] that stands in constant, immediate contact with nature and is impossible to omit; in speech, the expression of the I confronts nature. “However,

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in the I, the you by itself is given, and through a new opposition the third person, who, now that language has gone beyond the circle of feeling and speaking, is extended to dead things.”146 On the basis of this basic speculative view, empirical linguistic research has frequently even attempted to demonstrate that the personal pronoun is, as it were, the “bedrock of language creation,” the most ancient and obscure, though also the firmest and most persistent constituent of every language.147 However, if Humboldt emphasized in this context that the most original feeling, the I, could not be invented after the fact and, more generally, could not be a discursive concept, then we must consider whether this original feeling must not be sought exclusively in the explicit designation of the I as the first-person pronoun. The philosophy of language would reduce itself to the narrow, logical-grammatical view that it combats, if it strove to measure the form and configuration of I-consciousness solely by the development of this designation. In the psychological analysis and assessment of the language of children, the mistake has often been made of identifying the earliest articulation of the sound ‘I’ [Ichlaut] with the primary and earliest stage of the I-feeling. However, it is overlooked that the psychic-spiritual content [Gehalt] and its linguistic form of expression never fully coincide and that, in particular, the unity [Einheit] of this content [Gehalt] in no way needs to be reflected in the simplicity [Einfachheit] of expression. On the contrary, in order to convey and exhibit a certain basic intuition, language has at its disposal a plethora of miscellaneous means of expression, and the direction of determination that they possess is clearly recognizable only from the perspective of the whole and the synergy between them. The configuration of the I-concept is, therefore, not bound to the pronoun but rather takes place equally through other linguistic spheres, such as the medium of the noun and through the medium of the verb. It is particularly in the verb that the finest particularizations and shadings of the I-feeling are expressed, since the objective apprehension of an event is most characteristically permeated with the subjective apprehension of doing in the verb and since in this sense verbs, as the Chinese grammarians put it, are truly “living words” in difference to nouns, which are “dead words.”148 At first, the expression of the I and the self seems to require the support of the nominal sphere, the domain of substantial-objective intuition, from which it is able to liberate only with great difficulty. In the most



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diverse language spheres, we find designations of the I that are derived from objective designations. In particular, language shows how at first the concrete feeling of self is entirely bound to the concrete intuition of one’s own lived body and individual limbs. We find here the same relationship that we encountered in the expression of spatial, temporal, and numerical determinations, which likewise exhibit this thorough­going orientation toward physical existence and in particular toward the human body. This system of designating the I is especially apparent in the Altaic languages. All of the branches of this linguistic family show a tendency to designate whatever we express through personal pronouns by nouns provided with case endings or possessive suffixes. The expressions for “I” or “me” are replaced by others that mean “my being,” “my nature [Wesen],” or also in a “drastically material manner,” “my body” or “my bosom.” Even a purely spatial expression – for example, a word whose basic significance might be rendered approximately as “center” – can be used in this sense.149 In Hebrew, for example, the reflexive pronoun is rendered in a similar manner not only by words such as “soul” or “person” but also by words such as “face,” “flesh,” or “heart,”150 while, similarly, the Latin “persona” originally signified the actor’s face or mask and was long used in German to designate the outward appearance, figure, and stature of an individual.151 In Coptic, “self” is rendered by the noun “lived body,” to which possessive suffixes are attached.152 Likewise in the Indonesian idioms, the reflexive object is designated by a word that can imply “person” and “spirit” as well as “lived body.”153 Finally, this usage extends even to the Indo-European languages where, for example, in Vedic and classical Sanskrit, the self and the I are rendered sometimes by the word for “soul” (aˉtamàn) and sometimes by the word for “lived body” (tanu).154 It is apparent in all this that where the intuition of the self, the soul, the person begins to come to light in language, it clings to the body – just as in mythical intuition, the soul and self of the person [Mensch] is at first comprehended as a mere repetition, as a “doppelgänger” of the lived body. Even in their formal treatment, the pronominal and the nominal expression remain in many languages undifferentiated for a long time, while they are inflected by means of the same formal elements [Elemente] and approximate one another in number, gender, and case.155 If, however, we inquire not so much into the form in which language clothes the I-representation [Ichvorstellung], as rather into the spiritual

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content [Gehalt] of this representation, then it turns out that the spiritual content [Gehalt] can attain a more acute designation and a clearer determination within the domain of purely nominal or verbal expression. In almost all languages that undertake the differentiation of nouns into specific classes, we find that the opposition between a class of people and a class of objects [Sachen] is clearly determined. And it is not a question of a simple biological delimitation between the domain of the animate and the inanimate, which, as such, would still belong entirely to the intuition of nature, but with often surprising subtleties in the apprehension and shadings of personal existence. In the Bantu languages, one’s own is designated through a particular prefix stressing the class of people [Menschen] as independent acting personalities, while another class contained animated but not personal beings [Wesen]. The person [Mensch] was always classified in the latter class when they appeared not as independent agents but as the instrument and representatives of another – e.g., as a messenger, an envoy, or a chargé d’affaires. Language, thus, separates the types and degrees of personality according to the function that it exercises and according to the independent or dependent form and direction of the will that takes shape in it.156 A germ of this basic view can also be found in those languages that distinguish the naming of personal beings [Wesen] from those of the mere designation of things [Sache] by preceding them with a special “personal article.” In the Melanesian languages, such an article regularly precedes the names of individuals and tribes; it is also used with inanimate things, such as trees or boats, ships, or weapons if they are considered not as mere representatives [Ver­ treter] of their genus but are grasped as individuals and provided with a specific proper name. A  few languages have developed two personal articles, which are attached to the different classes of animate beings [Wesen], based evidently on a kind of value gradation within the concept of personality.157 A  feeling for the circle of purely subjective affiliated differences is also manifested by certain Australian Indigenous languages that select a different form of the nominative, of the subjective expression when it is a question of designating a being [Wesen] merely existing [daseind] or when it is a question of designating a being [Wesen] as acting [tätig], as independently acting [selbständig handelnd].158 Analogous differences can be designated in the verb; a particular prefix, for example, is used to express whether the occurrence [Vorgang] that is stated by the



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spoken word concerns a simple “natural” event [Geschehen] or whether it concerns the influence of an active [tätig] subject or is a common action undertaken by several such subjects.159 What we have here are not external differentiations that are made into the pronoun by language; however, it is nevertheless evident that the pure concept of personal being and effective action are clearly apprehended and implemented in the manifold of spiritual gradations. The extraordinary abundance of these gradations becomes visible particularly in the rich possibilities that language possesses for the differentiation of the so-called generic differences in verbs. From the standpoint of the purely logical analysis of doing, only a single, clearly pronounced difference seems at first glance to be apprehensible: the independent doing stands in opposition to merely being acted on, the active form in opposition to passive form. Even the Aristotelian table of categories has sought to raise the grammatical difference that we express by the opposition between “active” and “passive” to a generally logical and metaphysical significance. It is, however, by no means accurate, as has been done, to claim that insofar as Aristotle places at the center the basic opposition between effective action [Wirken] and being acted on [Leiden], between ποιεῖν [poïesis: to act] and πἀσχειν [to be acted on], that he had been guided only by the tendencies that were directly given to him, and in a sense imposed on him, by the form and the particular nature of the Greek language. Rather, language in itself would have pointed in a different direction: precisely in Greek, the “passive” is not sharply distinguished from the other voices of the verb either morphologically or semasiologically. The passive voice has also functionally developed here only gradually, in part from the active voice and in part from the middle voice.160 When we fully consider other linguistic families, it would seem clear that the simple opposition of doing and being acted on [Erleiden] is not alone determinative or decisive in the development of verbal expression but that it is constantly crossed by an abundance of other antithetical motives. Even where languages have clearly developed this opposition, where they clearly distinguish between “active” and “passive” forms, this difference is only one among many: it belongs to a totality [Gesamtheit] of conceptual gradations that are verbally expressed. In other languages, this opposition may be entirely absent, so that here, at least formally, no particular passive use of the verb is available. Determinations for which

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we are accustomed to deploying a passive expression are rendered here by active verb forms, particularly by the third-person plural of the active verb.161 In the Malay languages, according to Humboldt, the so-called passive formation is in actual fact the transposition of the verb into a nominal form: there is no true passive, because the verb is not thought of as active but rather has a nominal character. The designation of the event initially inheres neither in the relation to an acting [tätig] nor in the relation to an object acted on [Leidenden]: the verb merely takes note of the occurrence of the event, without expressly connecting it to the energy of a subject or indicates, in the form of the verb, the relation to the object that is affected by it.162 That, however, the development of the abstract opposition of doing and undergoing [Leiden] is lacking is not, for example, due to the fact that here the concrete intuition of doing and its nuances are still missing: it can be seen that this intuition of doing can often be astonishingly varied in those same languages that lack a formal differentiation between the active and the passive. The “genera” of a verb not only are often sharply determined individually but can also overlap each other in a great variety of ways and combine together to form more-complex expressions. At the apex are initially found those forms that designate a temporal character in the action; however, as we saw earlier, it is not so much a question of the expression of their relative temporal stage as rather of the expression of the kind of action. A sharp separation occurs between “perfective” and “imperfective,” “momentary” and “cursive,” unique or iterative kind of action: a difference is made as to whether the action is accomplished and completed at the moment of speaking or whether it is apprehended as yet in progress; whether it is limited to a specific moment [Augenblick] or extends over a greater duration of time; whether it takes place in a single act or in multiple repeated acts. To be able to designate such determinations, each one requires – in addition to the previously mentioned means for the expression of the “type of action” – its own specific form genus of the verb.163 To designate a simple state as such, a “stative” can be used; a gradual becoming can be expressed by an “inchoative”; the conclusion brought about by an action can be expressed by a “cessative” or “conclusive.” If the action is to be characterized as prolonged and regular, as habitual or customary, the form of the “habitualis” is used.164 Other languages have developed the differentiation of momentary verbs



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[Zeitwörter] from frequentative verbs to a high degree.165 Apart from these differences, which essentially concern the objective character of the action, the inner attitude that the I takes toward the action can above all acquire expression in the verb form. This self can be either of a purely theoretical or practical nature, and it can originate in the sphere of pure volition or even in the sphere of judgment. In the former case, the action can certainly be characterized as desired, requested, or demanded; in the latter, it can certainly be characterized as assertoric or problematic. Just as earlier, the differences in the naming of the types of action, the construction of the actual “modal” differences follow this direction. It develops the “subjunctive,” which has a “volitive,” “deliberative,” and “prospective” significance – the “optative,” which is used partly in the sense of a wish, partly as the expression of a precept or a simple possibility.166 Even the form of desire [Verlangen], from the simple wish [Wunsch] just to the command, is capable of various gradations that, for example, can be express in the differentiation of a simple “precative” from the “imperative.167 Apart from imperative, desiderative, and obligative moods, which express that an action should be done, many Native American languages have purely theoretical modes that are designated by grammarians as “dubitative” or “quotative” and that imply that the action is doubtful or is reported on the basis of someone else’s testimony.168 Often here too, it is through a suffix that is unique to the verb that makes it clear whether the subject has personally seen the occurrence or has heard about it, or knows of it not through immediate sense perception but through conjecture and inference; sometimes familiarity with an occurrence that one has obtained in a dream is distinguished in the same way from familiarity obtained in a waking state.169 Here the I  – in willing or demanding, doubting or questioning  – already opposes itself to objective reality: this confrontation obtains its sharpest relief when what is talked about is the influence of the I on the object and of its different possible forms. Many languages, which are relatively indifferent toward the difference of active and passive, distinguish instead with the utmost precision the stages of this influence and its greater or lesser mediacy. A simple phonetic means (such as the doubling of the middle radical in the Semitic languages) can, for example, be used to derive from the basic root of a verb a second root that is at first intensive but then goes on to possess a general-causative significance;

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alongside both there occurs still a third root, which specifically possesses this latter function. From causatives of the first degree may be formed causatives of the second and third degree, which give an originally intransitive verb a doubly or triply transitive significance.170 It is apparent how an ever-increasing potentization is reflected in such linguistic phenomena that the intuition of personal effective action undergoes: the subject and the object of a doing are no longer simply kept apart, but more and more intermediate links insert themselves between the effective acting and the effected that serve, even personal nature, to transfer, as it were, the action from its initial origin into a willing I and transpose it into the sphere of objective being.171 This intuition of the plurality of subjects who collaborate in an action can, in addition, find a different expression depending on whether the simple fact of this cooperation is designated or rather the difference of their form is reflected. In the first case, language uses the “cooperative form” of the verb, or it forms a proper “cooperative or social stem” that implies that one person is in some way involved with the activity or state of affairs of another.172 A number of languages employ particular collective-infixes in order to intimate the fact that some action is not undertaken by an individual but is undertaken in the community.173 As concerns the form of collaboration [Zusammenwirken] of several individuals, it is above all important whether this collaboration is directed only outward or whether it is directed inward – i.e., whether a plurality of subjects confronts a simple tangible object [Objekt] or whether the individuals in their doing are reciprocally subject and object [Objekt] for one another. From the latter intuition arises the form of expression that language creates for reciprocal action. Even primitive languages sometimes distinguish sharply whether the activity of the subjects is directed toward an outward object [Sache] or whether it directs them against each other.174 And here the preparation for a further momentous step is manifestly already given. Already in reciprocal action, the agent [Wirkende] and that which is acted [gewirkt] on are, in a certain sense, together in one: both belong here to the personal sphere, and it only depends on the direction of consideration as to whether we want to regard the doing as subject or as object [Objekt]. The relationship further deepens when a plurality of subjects is replaced by a single subject, so that the starting and endpoint of an action, having been separated from each other, once again substantially coincides in one



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point. This is the character of reflexive action, in which the I determines not so much one or the other as rather itself  – in which it redirects its doing back onto itself. In many languages, this reflexive formation replaces the missing passive voice.175 This pointing and turning back of the action on the I, and the energetic consciousness of subjectivity that manifested itself in it, emerges most clearly in the use that the Greek language makes of the middle verb forms. The possession and use of the medium have with good reason been regarded as an essential and distinguishing character of Greek, such that it was stamped as the truly “philosophical” language.176 The Indian grammarians have created a distinctive expression for the difference between the active form of the verb and the middle form of the verb, by which they name the former “a word for another” and the latter “a word for oneself.”177 Indeed, the basic significance of the middle is that it considers the occurrence as located in the proper sphere of the subject and stresses the inner participation of the subject in it. Jacob Grimm writes:

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For each simple activum [act] it remains doubtful whether an intransitive or a transitive concept is dominant, e.g., “I see” is able to signify either “I see with my eyes” or “I see something”; kλαίω [to cry] implies either inward weeping or to beweep another. The middle removes this doubt and refers the meaning necessarily to the subject of the sentence, e.g., κλαίομαι [I weep about myself, for myself ]. . . . The true and proper middle is in general created to designate that living taking place in the inner soul and in the lived body, so that all languages by a wonderful coincidence include in it concepts such as to rejoice, to grieve, to wonder, to fear, to hope, to dwell, to rest, to speak, to clothe, to wash, etc.178

If we now look back over the variety of differentiations of verbal genera and consider that most of these genera can be combined together into new complex unities – e.g., the passive and the causative into a causativepassive, the causative and the reflexive into a reflexive-causative or a reciprocal-causative, etc.179 – we recognize that the force that language manifests in such formations lies in the fact that it does not grasp the opposition between subjective being and objective being as an abstract and rigid opposition between two mutually exclusive domains but that

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it thinks of this opposition as dynamically mediated in the most diverse ways. Language does not exhibit the two spheres in themselves but reveals their intertwining and their reciprocal determination; it creates, as it were, a middle realm through which the forms of existence are referred to the forms of doing, the forms of doing are referred to the forms of existence, and both are fused together into a spiritual unity of expression.

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When we turn from the implicit configuration that the I-representation undergoes in the sphere of nominal and verbal expression to its explicit linguistic formation, to the gradual development of the true pronouns, it thus becomes clear, as Humboldt emphasized, that although the I-feeling must be regarded as an original and irreducible constant of all language formation, the entrance of the pronoun into actual language was nevertheless attained by great difficulty. For the nature [Wesen] of the I consists in being subject, while in thinking and speaking every concept must become an object [Objekt] before the actually thinking subject.180 This opposition can, as a result, be mediated and resolved only if the same relationship observed in the nominal and verbal expression is now repeated on a higher level. A sharp designation of the I is also found in the sphere of pronominal expression only if it confronts the objective while passing through it. Even where language has already determinately given shape to the thought of the I, it must first give it an objective framing [Fassung] and shaping; it must, as it were, first find the designation of the I in the designation of the objective. This presupposition is confirmed when we consider the mode in which language expresses personal relationships, not immediately by using true personal pronouns but rather by means of possessive pronouns. Indeed, the idea of possession that is depicted in these pronouns occupies a peculiar middle position between the domain of objectivity and that of subjectivity. What is possessed is a thing [Ding] or object [Gegenstand]: a something that by the fact that it is the content of possession is recognizable as a mere thing [Sache]. However, insofar as this thing [Sache] is now acknowledged as a property [Eigentum], it thereby obtains for itself a new property [Eigenheit], and it passes from the sphere of merely natural existence into



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the sphere of personal-spiritual existence. It is, as it were, a first animation, a transformation of the form of being into the form of I [Ichform: first person]. The self does not apprehend itself in a free and original act of self-activity [Selbsttätigkeit], of spiritual and volitional spontaneity [Spontaneität] but rather sees itself, so to speak, in the image of the object that it appropriates as “its own.” The psychological side of this mediation of pure “personal” expression by “possessive” expression exhibits itself in the development of child language, in which the designation of the proper I appears to take place much earlier by possessive pronouns than by personal pronouns. However, more clearly than such observations, which are not at all reliable and unequivocal, certain phenomena in the general history of language also speak here.181 These phenomena show that a state of indifference precedes the actual sharp working out [Ausbildung] of the I-concept in language, a state in which the expression for “I” and “mine,” “you” and “yours,” etc. have not yet separated. The difference between the two – Humboldt remarks – is felt, but not with the formal sharpness and determinacy that is required for the transition to phonetic designation.182 Like most of the Native American languages, the UralAltaic languages also fashion the conjugations of the verb by adding a possessive affix to the indefinite infinitive form, so that, for example, the expression for “I walk” literally says “my walking” and the expression for “I build, you build, he builds” demonstrates exactly the same structure as those for “my house, your house, his house.”183 There is no doubt that a distinctive intuition of the relationship between “I” and “reality” underlies this distinctiveness of expression. Wundt sees the psychological cause for this persistence of the nominal form in the domain of transitive verbal concepts: in the transitive verb the object [Objekt] to which the activity is correlated is always immediately given in consciousness and thus everything else it presses forth to designation; thus, the nominal concept can stand here for the whole sentence expressing the activity.184 With this statement of facts, however, it is not so much explained psychologically as rather reformulated psychologically. It is a spiritually different view of doing that expresses itself in its designation as pure act, as actus purus, and that expresses itself in the designation of its objective goals and its objective outcomes. In the one case, the expression of doing refers back to the interiority of subjectivity as its origin and source; in the other, it concentrates on the product of doing, which it brings back,

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as it were, to the sphere of the I by means of the possessive pronoun. The relation of the I to objective content is present in both cases; however, in the one case, it bears, so to speak, the opposite sign as it does in the other case: the direction of movement goes, in one case, from the center to the periphery, while in the other, from the periphery to the center. This connection of the I and not-I, expressed in the possessive pronoun and thus mediated by the idea of possession, is especially close when the not-I is not a random object in the “outer world” but rather belongs to a domain in which the “inner” and the “outer” seem to touch and flow immediately into one another. Even speculative philosophers have identified the human lived body as the reality in which this transition takes place for us in unmistakable clarity. Thus, according to Schopenhauer, the I and the lived body are not two objectively recognized different states connected by a bond of causality; they do not stand to one another in a relationship of cause and effect but rather are one and the same, given only in two entirely different modes. The action of the lived body is nothing other than an objectified act of the will – i.e., an act of the will that has entered into intuition: the lived body is nothing other than the objectivity of the will itself.185 From this point of view, it is understandable that in the designations that language creates for the human lived body and its individual parts, language also lets objective and subjective expression directly penetrate each other – the expression of personal relation often fuses into an inseparable whole with a purely objective denomination. In particular, the languages of natural people frequently exhibit this characteristic in sharp expression [Ausprägung]. In most of the Native American languages, a part of the body can never be designated by a general expression, but rather, it must always be more closely determined by means of a possessive pronoun: there is, thus, no abstract and detached expression for arm or hand, but only an expression for an arm or a hand inasmuch as it belongs to a specific person.186 Karl von den Steinen reports that in seeking to ascertain the names for the individual parts of the body in Bakairi, it was necessary to distinguish carefully whether the body part whose name was inquired about belonged to one’s own body, to the body of the person questioned, or to a third party, since in each case the answer would be different. The word “tongue,” for example, can be rendered only in the forms “my tongue, your tongue, his tongue,” or perhaps “the tongue all of us who



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are here.”187 The same phenomenon is reported by Humboldt from the Mexican, by Boethlingk from the Yakut language.188 In the Melanesian languages, a different expression is selected for the designation of body parts when it is a question of the general naming of body parts or when it is a question of the naming of particular body parts of a specific individual: in the former case, a generalizing suffix had to be joined to the ordinary expression that has the individualizing significance, that signifying “my hand, your hand,” etc.189 This fusion of a nominal expression with the possessive pronoun in addition overlaps the designation of the human limbs onto another content provided that they are comprehended as belonging exceptionally close to the I and, as it were, as a part of its spiritual-natural being. Often particular expressions of natural degrees of kinship, the expression for “father” and “mother,” etc., appear only in a fixed connection with the possessive pronoun.190 We seem to encounter here the same relationship that confronted us earlier in the configuration of verbal expressions: namely, that for the intuition of language, objective reality does not form a single homogeneous mass that simply stands as a whole over against the world of the I, but rather, different strata of this reality exist; a general and abstract relation between object [Objekt] and subject is not present per se, but rather, different levels of objectivity exist, each clearly mutually separated from each other according to its greater “proximity” or the “remoteness” from the I. And from this concretion, in which the subject-object-relation [SubjektObjekt-Beziehung] is given, a further feature follows. The basic characteristic of the pure I, in opposition to everything objective and tangible, is that it forms an absolute unity [Einheit]. The I, apprehended as the pure form of consciousness, is incapable of further inner differences; for such differences belong to the world of contents. Wherever, therefore, the I is taken as the expression of the non-tangible in the strict sense, it must be comprehended as “pure identity. . . with itself.” In “On the I as a Principle of Philosophy,” Schelling drew this consequence with extreme sharpness. If the I is not identical with itself, if its originary form is not the form of pure identity, he points out, then the strict boundary that separates it from all factual-objective reality and that makes it into something unmistakably independent and unique is immediately blurred. The I, therefore, is to be thought of either not at all or only in this originary form of pure identity.191 However, language is unable to suddenly pass over

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into this intuition of the pure, “transcendental” I and its unity [Einheit]. Because the personal sphere only gradually grows out of the possessive, because the intuition of the person adheres to the intuition of objective possession, the multiplicity that is inherent in a merely possessive relationship [Besitzverhältnis: conditions of ownership] must retroactively effect the expression of the I-relation [Ichbeziehung: relation-to-the-self]. Indeed, my arm, which is organically bound up with the whole of my lived body, belongs to me in quite a different way than my weapon or my work tools – my parents, my children, are connected with me in a totally different, more natural, and more immediate way than my horse or my dog – and even in the domain of mere objective possessions consists a discernible difference between the mobile and the immobile possessions of the individual. The house in which I live “belongs” to me in another and firmer sense than the coat I wear. Language initially clings to all these differences [Differenzen]: instead of a unitary and general expression of possessive relationships, it seeks to develop as many different expressions as there are distinct classes of concrete possession. The result here is the same phenomenon that we pursued in the development and gradual working out of numerals. Just as the different objects [Objekte] and groups of objects [Objekte] originally have different “numbers,” so too do they have a different “mine” and “your.” The “numeral substantives” of many languages, which are employed with the counting of different objects [Gegenstände], have an entirely analogous diversity of “possessive substantives.” In the Melanesian and many Polynesian languages, in order to render the possessive relationship, a possessive suffix is appended to the designation of the possessed object, which, however, changes according to the class to which the object belongs. Originally, all of these diverse expressions of the possessive relationship were nouns, as is formally shown by the fact that prepositions can precede them. These nouns are gradated such that they differentiate various kinds of possession, ownership, or belonging. One possessive noun of this sort, for example, is added to names of kinship, to limbs of the human body, to parts of a thing, and another to things that one possesses or to work tools one uses  – one applies to all the things one eats, another to everything one drinks.192 Often a different expression is used for a possession coming from outside and for an object [Objekt] owing its existence to the personal activity of the possessor.193 In a similar way, Native American languages differentiate,



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for the most part, between two basic types of possession: between natural, untransferable possession and artificial, transferable possession.194 A multiplicity in the expression of the possessive relationship can condition even pure numerical determinations, by differentiating through the selection of the possessive pronoun whether there is one, two, or several possessors or whether one, two, or more possessed objects are present. In the Aleutian language, for example, these considerations and combinations of all these circumstances give rise to nine expressions of the personal pronouns.195 All this shows that the homogeneous expression of possession, like the homogeneous expression of number, was a relatively late product of language formation and also that it had to be detached from the intuition of heterogeneity. Just as number achieved its character of “similarity” by progressively transforming itself from an expression of things into an expression of pure relation, so too gradually did the simplicity and uniformity of the I-relation [Ichbeziehung] gain primacy over the diversity of the contents that can enter into this relation. Language appears to be on its way to this purely formal designation of the possessive relationship and hence on its way to a mediate apprehension of the formal unity of the I, wherever it expresses possession by the genitive rather than by possessive pronouns. For, although the genitive is rooted in concrete intuitions, especially in spatial intuitions, in its continued formation, it becomes more and more a purely “grammatical” case, the expression of the “possession in general” that is restricted to no special form of possession. A mediation and a transition between these two intuitions can perhaps be recognized in that sometimes in language the genitive expression still appears with a particular possessive character and that a unique possessive suffix belongs to a constant and in no way negligent completion of the genitive relationship.196 Language approaches the expression of the purely formal unity of the I by another road when, instead of characterizing the activity, essentially according to its objective goal and result, it goes back to the origin of doing, the acting subject. This direction is taken by all those languages that consider the verb as a pure action-word and link the designation and determination of the person with the personal pronoun. The I, you, and he are moved from the objective sphere into a completely different focus as the mere mine, yours, his. The subject of the doing can no longer appear as a mere thing among things or as a content among

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contents, but it is the living energetic nucleus from which the action begins and from which it takes its direction. Attempts have been made to distinguish types of language formation according to whether they designate the verbal event essentially from the perspective of sensation or from the perspective of the act [Tat]. In the first perspective, the expression of doing becomes a mere “it seems to me,” whereas under the second, the domination of opposite tendency holds sway, and even mere appearance is interpreted in terms of a doing.197 In the comparison of the expression of activity, however, the expression of the I also gains a new framing [Fassung]. The dynamic expression of the I-representation comes far closer than a nominal, objective expression to apprehending it as a pure formal unity. The I now transforms itself in the act [Tat], more and more clearly into the pure expression of relation. If not only all doing but also all undergoing [Erleiden], if not only every action [Handlung] but also every determination of state appeared linked in the I  and united in it through the personal form of the verbal expression, then this I is ultimately nothing more than this ideal center. There is no conceivable or intuitive content proper to it, but to speak with Kant, there is only the one “in reference to which representations have synthetic unity.” In this sense, the I-representation is “the poorest . . . of all,”198 because it seems emptied of all concrete content [Gehalt]; however, this absence of content [Gehalt] likewise implies an entirely new function and an entirely new significance. For this significance, it is true, language possesses no adequate expression; for, even in its highest degree of spirituality, it must refer to the sphere of sensible intuition and, hence, cannot attain to this “pure intellectual representation”199 of the I, to this I of “transcendental apperception.” However, it can, nevertheless, at least mediately prepare the ground [Boden] for the I, by developing more and more subtly and sharply the opposition between the tangibly objective being and personalsubjective being and by determining the relationship between the two in different ways and with diverse instruments.

c) The Nominal and the Verbal Types of Linguistic Expression The science and the philosophy of language have concerned themselves for a long time with the controversy as to whether the originary-words [Urworte] from which language began were of a nominal or verbal nature,



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whether they were the designation of things or the designation of activities. Opinions immediately and bluntly opposed each other here, and grounds from the history of language and reasons of a general speculative nature were adduced for both alternatives. Admittedly, for a long time, it seemed as if this controversy had died down since the concept that it turned around had become problematic. The modern science of language has gradually abandoned the attempt to return to a prehistoric time [Urzeit] and to immediately listen in on the mystery of the creation of language. For modern linguistic science, the concept of the “linguistic root” was no longer the concept of a real historical existence [Existenz], but rather, it saw in it – as, in fact, Humboldt had already done with his usual critical attention – only the product of grammatical analysis. The alleged “originary forms” [Urformen] of language thus faded into mere forms of thought, into formations [Gebilde] of abstraction. As long as we believed in an actual “root period” of language, we could attempt to trace the totality [Gesamtheit] of linguistic formations [Bildungen] back to a “limited number of matrices or types”200 – and in that this view was combined with the view that all speech has its origin in the communal performance of human activities, we could go further and show the traces of this doing in the basic linguistic figures of these types. It is in this sense that Max Müller, for example, following the procedure undertaken by Ludwig Noiré, attempted to trace the roots of Sanskrit back to a certain number of originary linguistic concepts [Urbegriffen], to the expressions for the simplest human activities, for braiding and weaving, sewing and binding, cutting and dividing, digging and thrusting, breaking and beating.201 Attempts of this sort seemed to have lost their sense, however, once the concept of root was no longer grasped in terms of its content but rather formally, once what is caught sight of in it is not so much the factual element [sachlich Element] of language formation as rather a methodological element [Element] of the science of language. And even if we did not go as far as this complete methodological dissolution of the concept of root – if we felt justified in assuming, for example, that in the Indo-European the roots had real existence [Existenz] in a time preceding inflection – it now seemed that we had to abstain from any pronouncement about the actual form of this real existence [Existenz].202 Nevertheless, even today there are indications in empirical linguistic research that the problem of the constitution and structure of the originary roots has

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once again begun to stir. Once again, the thesis of the verbal origin and verbal character of these roots emerges here with particular emphasis. In attempting to renew this old thesis already defended by Panini, a French philologist relies for its implementation explicitly on considerations that come not from observations on the history of language but from another sphere, namely from general metaphysics. According to him, language must take its beginning from the designation of verbal concepts and advance gradually from there to the designation of thing concepts, because only activities and alterations are perceived by the senses, because only they are given as phenomena, while the thing that lies at the base of these activities and alterations can be apprehended only mediately, disclosed always only as their bearer. Like the path of thinking, the path of language must pass from the known to the unknown, from sensible perception to the merely thought, from the “phenomenon” to the “noumenon”; as a consequence, the designation of the verb and of verbal attributes must have necessarily preceded the designations of substance, of the linguistic “substantives.”203 However, precisely this μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [transition to another genus], this surprising turn in metaphysics, makes clear the underlying methodological weakness in the framing of the problem. The entire demonstration rests on an unmistakable quaternio terminorum [fallacy of four terms]: the concept of substance, which provides here the middle term of the syllogism, is used in two different significations, once in a metaphysical sense and once in an empirical sense. The antecedent of the conclusion speaks of substance as the metaphysical subject of alterations and properties, as the “thing in itself,” which lies “behind” all qualities and accidents, and the conclusion speaks of the nominal concepts of language, which since they serve to express objects, they can take these natural objects in no other way than as “objects in appearance.” Substance, in the first sense, is the expression of an absolute essential being, while, in the second sense, it can be only the expression of a relative, empirical permanence. However, if the problem is taken in this latter sense, the inference drawn, insofar as it is based on epistemo-critical grounds, loses all cogency. For a critique of cognition does not teach us that the thought of the changeable property or changeable state is necessarily prior to the thought of the “thing” as a relatively permanent unity; rather, it shows that the concept of the thing, as well as the concept of the



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property or state are equally justified and equally necessary conditions in the construction of the world of experience. They are not distinguished from one another as expressions of given realities, according to the order that these realities assume, either intrinsically or with reference to our cognition, but as forms of apprehension, as categories that reciprocally condition one another. The viewpoint of permanence, the viewpoint of the “thing” is, in this sense, given neither before nor after that of alteration but absolutely only with it as its correlative element. And this perspective is valid in the inverse direction: it disproves not only the alleged necessary originality of verbs and verbal concepts but also the psychological arguments that have been adduced to demonstrate the primacy of purely objective intuition and mere nominal concepts. Wundt, for example, remarks:

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It is impossible to think that the human being ever thought solely in verbal concepts. On the contrary, that the human being thought only in objective representations might be more readily understood by psychological characteristics; and, indeed, there are distinct traces of such a state, not only in the speech of children but also in numerous existing languages that have preserved a more original state of conceptual development.204

However, the assumption that the human being ever thought in “mere” nominal concepts involves the same fundamental lacuna as the contrary thesis that awards verbal concepts a temporal and objective priority. We are confronted here with one of those problems that cannot be solved by a simple either/or but that can be decided only through a basic, critical rectification in the framing of the question. The dilemma that has long divided linguistic researchers into two camps is ultimately a methodological dilemma. If one sides with the picture theory [Abbildtheorie] – if it is thus assumed that language has no other purpose than to designate externally certain differences given in representation – then it is meaningful to ask whether it first emphasized things or activities, states or properties. Basically, however, this way of framing the question embodies merely the old error of an immediate reification of basic intellectual-linguistic categories. A separation that first takes place “in” mind [Geiste] – i.e., through the totality [Gesamtheit] of its functions – is looked upon as a substantially

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present and consistent existence preceding the whole of these functions. The problem acquires another sense if we reflect that “things” and “states,” “properties” and “activities,” are not given as contents of consciousness but are modes and tendencies of its forming [Formung]. Then it becomes apparent that neither the one nor the other is immediately perceived and can be linguistically designated according to this perception; what takes place is, rather, that an initially undifferentiated manifold of sensible impressions can be determined in the direction of the one or the other form of thought and language. This determination toward [zu] the object or toward [zu] the activity, not the mere naming of the object or of the activity, as in the logical work of cognition, is thus expressed in the intellectual [geistig] work of language. The question, then, is not whether the act of naming first grasps things or activities as intrinsically existent determinations of reality but rather whether it is erected in the sign of one or another linguistic-intellectual [gedanklich] category – whether, as it were, it is performed sub specie nominis or sub specie verbi. And it can be expected from the beginning that, faced with this question, an entirely simple a priori verdict will not be possible. If language is no longer apprehended as an unambiguous picture [Abbild] of an unambiguously given reality but rather as a vehicle of that great process of the “confrontation” [Auseinandersetzung] between I and world, in which the boundaries of both are positively first separated, it is evident that this task harbors in itself a wealth of diverse possible solutions. For the medium in which the mediation takes place certainly does not exist from the beginning in finished determinacy; rather, it is, and takes effect, only in that it configures itself. In this sense, it is not possible to speak of a linguistic system of categories or of an order and sequence of linguistic categories that is understood to include the setting up of a number of fixed forms in which, as in a prescribed track, all linguistic development must once and for all take its course. As in an epistemo-critical consideration, each individual category, which we single out and place in relief against the others, can, in fact, be apprehended and assessed only as a single motive, which may develop different concrete-individual configurations according to the relations into which it enters with other motives. The “form” of language, which is not, however, to be taken as a form of being but as a form of movement, not as a static form but as a dynamic one, results from the interpenetration [Ineinander] of these motives and from their



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different relationships in which they come together [zueinander]. There is, therefore, no absolute oppositions but only relative oppositions – oppositions of sense and of the direction of apprehension. The emphasis may fall now on one element, now on another element; the dynamic accents may be disseminated in any number of ways between the concepts of things, properties, states, activities, and the particular character of each linguistic form, because creative form exists only in this back-and-forth, oscillating movement. The more sharply we seek to apprehend this process as it operates in the particularization that it undergoes in individual languages, the more evident it becomes that the individual word classes that our grammatical analysis seeks to distinguish – the substantive, adjective, pronoun, verb  – are not available [vorhanden] from the beginning, acting on one another like fixed substantial units, but that they seem, as it were, to reciprocally emerge from each other and to delimit one and another. Designation does not develop in a finished object; rather, it is the advancement of the sign and through this advancement of the sign that an ever-sharper “distinction” of the contents of consciousness is attained and by means of this advancement of the sign that the world takes on for us progressively clearer outlines as an ensemble of “objects” and “properties,” of “alterations” and “activities,” of “people” and “things” [Sachen], of local [örtlich] and temporal relations. Thus, it is to be expected that the path that language takes, the path toward [zu] determination, is gradually and steadily worked out and configured from a relatively indeterminate stage. The history of language confirms this assumption: it shows us that the further back we can trace the development of language, the more we are led to a phase in which the parts of speech that we distinguish in the highly developed languages were separated from each other neither in form nor in content. At this phase, one and the same word can fulfill different grammatical functions, can be employed as a preposition or an independent noun, as a verb or as a substantive, according to the particular conditions. In particular, the continuous rule forms the indifference of noun and verb that determines the construction of most languages. It has sometimes been said that while the whole of language merges into both the categories of the noun and the verb that, on the other hand, very few languages have a verb in our sense. In the Indo-European and Semitic sphere, languages seem to be almost alone in their sharp difference between the two form classes – and

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even in them, in the configuration of the sentence, we still find the fluid transitions between the nominal and the verbal sentence forms.205 Humboldt identifies as characteristic of the Malay languages that the boundary between nominal expression and verbal expression is so blurred that one has, as it were, the feeling of the absence of the verb. He likewise emphasized that a language like Burmese, for example, completely lacks the formal designations of the verbal function, so that in speaking there apparently no longer exists any living penetration of the feeling of the true force of the verb.206 What still seems to be regarded here as a kind of anomaly of language formation has subsequently been shown, by the further expansion of philology, to be a general widespread phenomenon. Instead of the sharp separation of nouns and verbs, we repeatedly encounter a quasi-amorphous form.207 It also becomes evident that boundaries of the formal-grammatical treatment of the expressions of things and activities only gradually separated from each other. In their linguistic configuration, “conjugation” and “declension” initially flow over into each other. Wherever language adheres to the type of “possessive conjugation,” a complete parallelism between nominal and verbal expression is already given.208 Similar relations are to be found between the designations of activities and the designations of properties: one and the same system of inflection can include both verbs and adjectives.209 Even complex linguistic formations [Gebilde], even whole sentences, can sometimes be “conjugated” in this way.210 If we are inclined to regard such phenomena as proof of the “formlessness” of a language, should we not rather regard it as evidence of the characteristic “becoming toward form.” For it is precisely in the indeterminacy that still adheres to language here, in the lack of formation [Ausbildung] and separation of its individual categories, that there is found, rather, a moment of its proper plasticity and its essential inner force of formation. The determinateless expression still intrinsically contains all the potentialities of determination and leaves it, as it were, to the further development of particular languages which of these potentialities it will determine. Any attempt to advance a general schema of this development would certainly seem to be a futile effort, precisely because in the construction of its system of categories, each language proceeds differently, by which the concrete wealth of this development is decided. Nevertheless, without doing violence to this concrete abundance of expressive forms, we can



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refer it to certain basic types and group these expressive forms according to them. A few languages and language groups that have cultivated the nominal type into greater purity and rigor, in which the whole construction of the world of intuition through which the objective intuition appears governed and directed, stand over against others in which the grammar and syntax structure are determined and directed by the verb. And even in the latter case, there arises two forms of linguistic configuration, according to whether the verbal expression is taken as an expression of a mere event [Vorgang] or an expression of a pure activity, according to whether it immerses itself in the course of objective events [Geschehen] or whether it emphasizes the active subject and its energy and moves into the center. Regarding the first, the strictly nominal type has a sharp and clear manifestation [Ausprägung] in the languages of the Altaic family. Here the entire syntax is organized such that one objective expression simply follows the other and is linked with it attributively, whereas this simple principle of organization is carried out so rigorously and universally that it can provide a clear and self-contained presentation for the most complex determinations. Heinrich Winkler writes the following about this principle, which he illustrates through a discussion of the structure of the Japanese verb: I do not hesitate to call it a most wonderful structure. The manifoldness of relations of all sorts, the finest and most minute shadings that attain linguistic expression in the most succinct form, is inexhaustible; what we in our languages express by numerous circumlocutions, by subordinate clauses of all sorts, relative as well as conjuctional, is clearly rendered by a single expression or by a single substantive noun governing a verbal noun; a verbal noun of this sort . . . can clearly express what in our perspective requires a main clause and two or three subsidiary clauses, and moreover each of the three or four links can encompass the subtlest and most diverse differences of time, of active or passive, causative, continuative, in short, the most manifold modifications of action. . . . And all this is largely accomplished without recourse to most of the formal elements with which we are so familiar and which strike us as indispensable. Thus, Japanese is in our sense a formless language par excellence; by this, I do not mean to disparage this language but merely to indicate how greatly its structure diverges from that of our own languages.211

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The essence of this divergence is that while feeling for the conceptual nuances of action is by no means lacking, it can be expressed only insofar as the expression of action is enmeshed, as it were, with the expression of the object and enters into it as a further determination. The existence [Existenz] of the thing forms the center of designation, and all expression of properties, relations, and activities remains dependent on it. It is, therefore, in the genuine sense a “substantial” apprehension that we have before us in this formation of language. In the Japanese verb, we frequently find a pure statement of existence [Existenz], where we would expect to find, according to our way of thinking, a predicative statement. Rather than expressing a connection between subject and predicate, it accentuates and exposes the being-present [Vorhandensein] or not-being-present [Nicht-Vorhandensein] of the subject or predicate, the factuality [Tatsächlich­ keit] or non-factuality [Nicht-Tatsächlichkeit]. All further determinations of “what,” of effective action and undergoing, etc. take their starting point from this first establishment [Festsetzung] of being or non-being.212 This emerges most strikingly in the negative locution in which non-being is even grasped, as it were, substantially. The negation of an action is such that the non-being of the same is rather affirmatively established: there is no “not coming” in our sense but rather only a non-being or nonpresence of the “to come” [des Kommen]. The expression of this non-being [Nichtsein] is constructed [gefügt] in such a way that it actually implies “the being of the not [Nicht].” And just as here the relation [Relation] of negation turns into a substantial expression, so too is the same valid for the other expressions of relation [Beziehungsausdrücke]. For the Yakut, the possessive rela­ tionship is reproduced by asserting the existence or non-existence [Existenz oder Nicht-Existenz] of the possessed object: a locution such as “my house present [vorhanden]” or “my house not present [vorhanden]” expresses that I possess or do not possess a house.213 Likewise, the expressions of number are often configured such that the determination of number appears as an independent objective being – that instead of “many” or “all people,” one says “people of multiplicity” or people of “allness”; instead of five people, “people of fiveness, the five pieces, the fivehoodness”; etc.214 The modal and temporal determinations of the verbal noun are, in the same way, brought to expression. A  substantival expression, such as imminence, is designated by being linked with the attributive verbal noun that considers the designated action as futural. Thus, the verb is to be taken



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in a future sense215 – a substantival expression such as “longing” serves to form the so-called desiderative form of the verb, etc. Other modal nuances such as the conditional or the concessive are designated in accordance with the same principle.216 Language coins here a great many individual determinations of being, a great many independent objective constructions [Fügungen], in order that through their juxtaposition it can bring the wealth of possible intellectual connections and forms of connection to an indirect presentation. A completely other basic spiritual view confronts us where language, while still preserving the original indifference of noun and verb, nevertheless appropriates and accentuates the basic indifferent form in the opposite sense. If, in the cases just considered, all linguistic determination takes its departure from the object, then other languages assume with equal sharpness and conciseness the designation and determination of occurrence [Vorgang] as their point of departure. As with the noun, the verb appears here, inasmuch as it is the pure expression of an occurrence [Vorgang], as the true center of language: where, with the noun, all relationships, even those of events [Geschehen] and doing, were transposed into relationships of being, here, with the verb relationships of being are transposed into relationships and expressions of events [Geschehen]. In the first case, the form of dynamic becoming is, as it were, involved in the form of dormant, static existence; in the other, existence is apprehended only as it stands in relation to becoming. However, this form of becoming is not yet saturated with the pure I-form and, therefore, still possesses it with all its vitality, a predominantly objective, impersonal gestalt. In this respect, we are still in the tangible sphere; however, its center has shifted. The emphasis of linguistic designation is placed not so much on the existence [Existenz] as it is on alteration. We have seen that in the nominal languages, the substantive, as an expression of the object, dominated the structural whole of language; thus, we may expect to find the verb, as an expression of alteration, to be the actual center of power [Kraft]. While nominal expression endeavored to re-coin even the most complex relations into the substantival form, here language attempts to combine and, as it were, capture all of these relations in the form of a verbal expression of the events [Vorgang]. This seems to be the general approach of most Native American languages, and there have been attempts to psychologically explain it on the basis of the structural

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elements [Elemente] of the Indian spirit [Geist].217 Regardless of what position we take in this attempt at an explanation, the pure inventory [Bestand] of these languages already points to a unique method of linguistic configuration. The general outlines of this method were clearly delineated by Humboldt in his presentation of the procedure of incorporation in the Mexican language. As is well known, the core of this method consists in the fact that the relations, which other languages bring to expression in a sentence and in the analytical organization of the sentence, are here synthetically contracted into a single linguistic framework [Gefüge], into a complex “word-sentence.” The expression of verbal action forms the focal point of these word-sentences, which, however, link together the manifold, modifying determinations into a richer fullness. The governing and the governed parts of the verb, particularly the designations for its closer or more distant object [Objekt], are integrated into the verbal expression as a necessary complement. Humboldt thus remarks: According to its form, the sentence already appears completed in the verb and it is only afterwards that it is, as it were, more closely determined through apposition. According to the Mexican mode of representation, the verb cannot be thought at all without this complementary, ancillary determinations. If, therefore, there exist no determinate object [Object], then language combined the verb with a proper indefinite pronoun, with double form for persons and things: 1ni-2tla-3qua, 1I 3eat 2something, 1ni-2te-3tla-4maca, 1I 4give 2someone 3something.

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The method of incorporation thus forces the entire content of a statement into a single verbal expression, or where the statement is just too complex and this is not possible, it sends out “pointers, as it were,” from the verbal center of the sentence, “to indicate the directions in which the individual parts are to be sought in relationship to the sentence.” Even where the verb does not encompass the entire content of the statement, it thus contains the general schema of the sentence structure: here, a sentence is not constructed, not gradually built up out of its heterogeneous elements [Elemente] but is given at once as the unity of a stamped form. Language first arranges a connected whole that is formally complete and self-sufficient: it expressly designates what is not yet individually



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determined as an indeterminate something by means of a pronoun but afterwards goes on to individually sketch this indeterminate residuum.218 Later investigations of Native American languages have modified many of the features of the general picture that Humboldt gives here that sketches out from the incorporation process; they have shown that in individual languages, this method can be configured differently vis-àvis the type, degree, and scope of the incorporation;219 however, the general characterization of the unique way of thinking [Denkart: mindset] that underlies it is not significantly changed by such observations. To employ a mathematical image, we are able to compare the method that language forges here with the establishment of a formula in which the general relationships of magnitude are designated but the particular values of magnitude are left undetermined. Initially, the formula merely renders, in a unitary, comprehensive expression, the general mode of connection between certain sets of magnitudes; however, before it can be applied to a specific case, the indeterminate magnitudes, x, y, z, must be replaced by determinate magnitudes. Thus, here too, the form of the statement is fully projected [entworfen] and anticipated at the outset in the verbal wordsentence, and it undergoes a material supplement only in that the signification of the indefinite pronouns incorporated in the word-sentence is more narrowly determined by subsequent superimposed linguistic determinations. The verb as a designation of the event strives to concentrate within itself the living whole of the sense expressed in the sentence; however, the further it advances in this effort, the more, of course, there is the danger that it will be overwhelmed by the abundance of every new pressing material that it has to master and, as it were, sink into this material. There is spinning around the verbal core of the statement such a dense network of modifying determinations that give the mode and manner of the action – its accidental local [örtlich] or temporal circumstances, its more or less distant object [Objekt] – that it becomes difficult to liberate the content [Gehalt] of the statement from this entanglement and to apprehend it as an independent semantic content [Gehalt]. The expression of action never appears as generic but rather as individually determined, characterized by special particles and inseparably afflicted with their expression.220 If the action or event [Vorgang] is apprehended as a concrete-intuitive whole through the abundance of these particles,

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then the unity of events [Geschehen], and in particular the unity of the subject of a doing, has not yet come to a linguistically sharp difference and relief [Abhebung].221 The full light of language strikes, as it were, only the content of events [Geschehen], not the I  that actively participates in it. This also becomes apparent in the fact that in most Native American languages, for example, the inflection of the verb is governed not by the subject but by the object [Objekt] of the action. The transitive verb takes its number not from the subject but from its direct object [Objekt]: it must be in the plural form if it refers to a plurality of objects on which it has an effect. Thus, the grammatical object [Objekt] of the sentence becomes here its logical subject, which governs the verb.222 The configuration of the sentence and the entire configuration of language takes the verb as its point of departure, but even this remains in the sphere of objective intuition: it is the entrance and the course of the occurrence, not the energy of the subject, that manifests in action, that language brings out as the essential element and brings to presentation. A modification of this basic intuition manifests itself to us only in those languages that have progressed to a purely personal configuration of verbal action and in which the conjugation of its basic types does not consist in the combination of the verbal noun with possessive suffixes but in a synthetic connection between the verbal expression and the expression for the personal pronoun. What distinguishes this synthesis from the method of the so-called polysynthetic languages is that it is based on a preceding analysis. The connection that takes place here is no mere running together of opposites; rather, it presupposes these very oppositions and their sharp divergent stance and separation. With the development of personal pronouns, the domain of subjective being has separated in linguistic expression from that of the objective domain, and yet it combines the expression for the subjective being with that for the objective events [Geschehen] in the inflection of the verb into a new unity. Wherever we find expressed the essential and specific nature of the verb in this combination [Zusammenfassung], we must, therefore, logically conclude that this nature is completed only in the connection of the verbal elements [Elements] with the expressions for personal existence [Sein]. As Humboldt writes: For the actual being [Sein], which is characterized in the grammatical representation of the verb, cannot easily be expressed by itself, but can



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only announce itself as a being of a certain modality, of a determinate time and person and the expression of this constitution is inextricably woven into the root, into a sure sign that should be thought the same only with them and as it were transposed into them. . . . The verb’s nature lies precisely in this mobility, this inability to be fixated except otherwise than in an individual case.223

Nevertheless, neither the temporal [zeitlich] nor the personal determination, neither the temporal [temporal] nor the personal fixation of the verbal expression, belongs to its initial basic existence [Grundbestand]; rather, both refer to a goal that is attained only relatively late in the development of language. This has already been found for the determination of time224 – for, we might illustrate the gradual transitions of the relation to the I that takes place here, if we consider the mode in which individual languages differentiate the sphere of the “transitive” verbal expression from that of the “intransitive” expression, even through pure phonetic means. Thus, for example, in various Semitic languages, the intransitive or semi-passive verb, which expresses not a pure active action [tätige Handlung] but rather a state or a condition [Leiden], is designated by another vowel pronunciation. In Ethiopic, according to Dillmann, this differentiation of intransitive verbs by means of the pronunciation remains very much alive: all verbs that designate properties, living or spiritual determinations, passions, or unfree activities are pronounced differently from those in which a free and independent activity of the I is to be designated.225 Here, phonetic symbolism serves the expression of those fundamental spiritual processes that emerge ever-more clearly in language formation; it shows how the I apprehends itself in the counter-image of verbal action and how, in the ever-increasing elaboration and differentiation of the phonetic symbolism, the I initially and truly finds itself and comprehends itself in its unique position.

ENDNOTES   1 “‘BEGREIFEN’ like simple ‘greifen’ goes back originally to touching with hands and feet, fingers and toes.” Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, vol. 1, col. 1307. On the spatial origin of the term erörtern [to discuss], see Leibniz, “Unvorgreifliche Gedanken betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der teutschen Sprache,” in Deutsche Schriften, ed. Gottschalk Eduard Guhrauer, vol. 1 (Berlin: Veit, 1838), 468, § 54: see also Nouveaux essais, book 3, chap. 1.

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  2 E.g., Boas on Kwakiutl: “The rigidity with which location in relation to the speaker is expressed, both in nouns and in verbs, is one of the fundamental features of language.” Handbook, part 1, 445. Gatschet expresses the same opinion in his Grammar of Klamath Language; see especially 396ff., 433ff., 460.   3 John Crawford, History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. 2, 9; see Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 164ff.; “Everything and everybody spoken of are viewed as coming or going, or in some relation of place, in a way which to the European is by no means accustomed or natural.”   4 See Boas, Handbook, 43ff., 446.   5 Examples in Westermann, Die Sudansprachen, 72; Die Gola-Sprache in Liberia, 62, and elsewhere.   6 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 177 and 181.   7 See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 333ff.; and Clara and Stern, Die Kindersprache, 2nd ed., 300ff.   8 See Karl Friedrich Brugmann, “Die Demonstrativpronomina der indogermanischen Sprachen, Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung,” Abhandlungen der Philologisch-Historischen Klasse der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. XXII, no. 6 (Leipzig, 1904); see also Brugmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 2 (2nd ed., Strassburg: Trübner, l897–19l6), part 2, 302ff.   9 Ibid., 177–178ff. 10 For example, in the language of Tahiti, see Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 153; for the African languages, see, e.g., Meinhof, Lehrbuch der Nama-Sprache, 61; also Steinthal, Die Mande-Neger-Sprachen, 82; for the American Indian languages, see Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 538. 11 The similarity becomes particularly evident if we compare Brugmann’s indications in Indo-European languages (see note 8) with those of Brockelmann and Dillmann for the Semitic group (see Brockelmann, Grundriss, vol. 1, 316ff. and Dillmann, Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache, 94ff.; for the Ural-Altaic languages see Winkler, Das Uralaltaische und seine Grnppen, 26ff. 12 The difference in the designation of a visible and an invisible object [Objekt] is particularly sharp in many American aboriginal languages (see in particular the indications on the Kwakiutl, Ponca, and Eskimo languages in Boas, Handbook, 40 f., 445ff. and Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 538). The Bantu languages possess demonstratives in three forms: one indicates that which is shown is close to the speaker; the second that it is already known – that is, has entered into the speaker’s sphere of vision and thought; the third that it is far removed from the speaker or not visible (Carl Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1906), 39ff.). For the South Sea languages, see Humboldt’s indications with regard to Tagalog (Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 312ff.). 13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 63. 14 Ibid., B 275. 15 Ibid., B 278 trans. modified. 16 In Brugmann, Grundriss, 2nd ed., vol. 2, part 2, 475, expresses the belief that the nominative -s is identical with the demonstrative pronoun *so (ai: sa) and the -m of the neuter probably also goes back to a distant-deictic particle.



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17 See the section “Vom Artikel,” in Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1, 366ff.; on the Slavic languages see Miklosich, Vergleichende Grammatik der slawischen Sprachen, 2nd ed., vol. 4, 125. 18 See Friedrich Dillmann, Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache (Leipzig: Weigel, 1857), 333ff.; Brockelmann, Grundriss der Vergleichenden Grammatik der Semitischen Sprachen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1908), 466. 19 See Brugmann, Grundriss, 2nd ed., vol. 2, part 2, 315. 20 See Diedrich Hermann Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1907), 61. 21 See Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 108ff.; cf. Renward Brandstetter, Der Artikel des Indonesischen verglichen mit dem des Indogermanischen (Leipzig: E. Haag, 1913). 22 Boas and John Swanton, “Siouan,” Handbook, vol. 1, 939ff. 23 See Maria Tiling, “Die Vokale des bestimmten Artikels im Somali,” Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen, vol. 9, (1918), 132ff. 24 [gleichsam mit Händen greifen: as it were, grasp with the hand.] 25 Heymann Steinthal, Die Mande-Neger-Sprachen: Psychologisch und Phonetisch Betrachtet (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1867), 245ff. 26 See Diedrich Westermann, Die Sudansprachen. Eine sprachvergleichende Studie (Hamburg: L. Friedrichsen, 1911), 53ff.; Die Gola-Sprache in Liberia: Grammatik, Texte und Wörterbuch (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1921), 36 f.; Leo Reinisoh, Die Nuba-Sprache Sprachen von Nord-Ost-Afrika, Sprachen von Nord-Ost-Afrika, vols. 2–3 (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1879), 123ff.; for the South Sea languages, cf. Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanetischen Sprachen (Leipzig, 1861), 158, 230ff.; Sidney Herbert Ray, “The Melanesian Possessive and a Study in Method,” American Anthropologist, vol. 21, (1919), 352ff. 27 In Egyptian, which has developed true prepositions, their original nominal character is shown by their combination with possessive suffixes; an analysis of these “prepositions” often leads back to names for parts of the body. See Adolf Erman, Ägyptische grammatik, mit schrifttafel, litteratur, lesestücken und wörterverzeichnis (3rd ed., Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1911), 231, 238ff.; Georg Steindorff, Koptische Grammatik: mit Chrestomathie, wörterverzeichnis und Literatur (2nd ed., Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1904; New York, NY: Lemke & Buechner, 1904), 173ff. For the original nominal character of the Semitic prepositions, see Brockelmann, Grundriss, 1, 494ff. 28 Ewe, for example, has developed a great number of special and general “local substantives”; see Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache, 52ff. 29 See examples from Yakut in Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 391; from Japanese in Johann Joseph Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre (Leiden: Brill, 1877), 188ff., 197ff.; see also Heinrich Winkler, Der uralaltaische sprachstamm, das finnische und das japanische (Berlin: Dümmlers, 1909), 147ff. 30 See Georg Curtius, Das Verbum der griechischen Sprache seinem Baue nach dargestellt, 2nd ed., 1, 136. 31 See Franz Miklosich, Vergleichende Grammatik der slawischen Sprachen, 2nd ed., vol. 4, 196. Such new forms are common in other inflected languages, such as the Semitic; cf., for example, the list of “new prepositions,” which

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developed in the Semitic out of the names of parts of the body, in Brockelmann, Grundriss, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 421ff. 32 For further details on this, see Brugmann, Vergleichende Laut-, StammbildungsUnd Flexionslehre Der Indogermanischen Sprachen, 1904, vol. II, part 2, 464ff., 473, 518; Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntax der Indogermanischen Sprachforschung Sprachen, vol. I (Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der Indonesischen Sprachforschung Sprachen, vol. III) (Straßburg: K. J. Trübner, 1893), 188. 33 See Whitney, “General Considerations on the Indo-European Case-system,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 13 (1888): 88ff. 34 Berthold Delbrück, Grundfragen der Sprachforschung (Strassburg: Trübner, 1901), 130ff. 35 Wundt, Volkerpsychologie, vol. 2, 79ff. 36 Cf. the presentation of the Indo-European case system in Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntax, vol. 1, 181ff. 37 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 1.2, 71B33–72a1. 38 On the “case formation” of the Native American languages, see, for example, the compilation from the Eskimo language by William Thalbitzer in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 1017ff.: here, among other cases, “allative,” “locative,” “ablative,” and “prosecutive” are distinguished. Gatschet’s Grammar of the Klamath Language distinguishes an “inessive” and “adessive,” a “directive” and “prosecutive,” as well as an abundance of other relations, each expressed by a local case ending (Gatschet, The Klamath Indians, 479ff., 489). 39 See the copious material in Heinrich Winkler, Das Uralaltaische und seine Gruppen (Berlin: F. Dummler, 1885) (especially 10ff.), and the section “Indogermanische und ural-altaische Kasus,” in Uralaltaische Völker und Sprachen (Berlin: Dessau, 1884), 171ff.; see also Grunzel, Entwurf Einer Vergleichenden Grammatik Der Altaischen Sprachen: Nebst Einem Vergleichenden Worterbuch, 49ff. 40 Müller, Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 2, part 2, 204. 41 Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, 164ff., 341. 42 For the Melanesian languages, cf. Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 158. 43 See the examples from Athapascan given by Goddard, from Haida given by John Swanton, and from Tsimshian given by Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 1128., 344ff., 300ff. 44 For examples, see particularly Humboldt, who was first to point out this difference in “Über die Verwandtschaft der Ortsadverbien mit dem Pronomen in einigen Sprachen,” in Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 311ff.; cf. also Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, vol. 3, 312. 45 See, for example, a list of such suffixes in Nicobarese, in Wilhelm Schmidt, Die Mon-Khmer Völker: ein Bindeglied zwischen den Völkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens (Braunschweig: F. Viehweg, 1906), 57. 46 In these languages, the use of the “verb of locality and rest,” expressing “being in a place,” gives a sentence such as “He is working in the field,” a form such as “He works, is the inside of the field,” and “The children are playing on the street” becomes “The children play, are the surface of the street.” See Westermann, Die Sudansprachen, 51ff.



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47 In the Sudan and Bantu languages, as in most of the Hamitic languages, a movement that we designate according to its aim and result is designated according to its beginning and local starting point. See examples in Carl Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1912), 20. On analogous phenomena in the South Sea languages, see Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 159ff. 48 Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse (Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1891), 230f. 49 See Brugmann, Demonstrativpronomen der indogermanischen Sprachen, 30ff., 71ff., 129ff.; and Brugmann and Delbruck, Grundriss, 2nd ed., 2, part 2, 307ff., 381ff. 50 For the Semitic languages, see Brockelmann, Grundriss, 1, 296ff. and his Kurzgefasste vergleichende Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen, Elemente der Laut- und Formenlehre (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1908), 142ff.; Dillman, Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache, 98 f.; for Altaic languages see, for example, Grunzel, Entwurf einer vergleichenden Grammatik der altaischen Sprachen, 55ff. 51 Cf. Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 536 f.; Robert Hamilton Mathews, “Languages of some Native Tribes of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 36 (1902), 151. 52 Robert Matthews, “Language of the Bungandity Tribe, South Australia,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 37 (1903), 61. 53 See Humboldt, “Über den Dualis,” in Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 23; Müller, Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 2, I, 224ff. 54 Boas, “Kwakiutl,” in Handbook, vol. 1, 527ff. 55 Pliny Goddard, “Hupa,” in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 117; Boas, “Chinook,” in Handbook, vol. 1, 574, 617ff. 56 Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre, 85ff. 57 Cf. the examples from the Grammar of the Klamath Language in Gatschet, 582ff. and from the Melanesian languages in Codrington, 164ff. 58 The Sudanese languages generally express the fact that a subject is comprehended to be in an action by a turn of phrase that means that the subject is literally “inside” this action. However, since this “inside” is usually designated materially, it results in phrases such as “I am in the inside of walking,” “I am the belly of walking,” or “I am in the process of walking.” See Westermann, Die Sudansprachen, 65; Die Gola-Sprache, 37, 43, and 61. 59 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 374. 60 Ibid., B 218. 61 For a more detailed discussion of this matter, see my book Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1923). 62 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 223. 63 Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 286. 64 See Maria von Tiling, “Die Vokale,” Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen, vol. 9, 145ff. Such temporal indices in the noun are found frequently in American Indigenous languages; see Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 39; Goddard, “Athapascan (Hupa),” 110ff.

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65 See Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache, 231ff. 66 Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache, 129. The same phenomenon occurs in many Native American languages; see, for example, Karl von den Steinen, Die Bakaïri-Sprache (Leipzig: K.F. Koehler, 1892), 355. In Tlingit, one and the same prefix gu- or ga- is used to designate future and past (Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 176), just as the Latin olim (from ille) designates the remote past and the distant future (see German; einst). 67 Karl Rochl, Versuch einer systematischen Grammatik der Schambalasprache (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen & co., 1911), 108 f. 68 Cf. Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 164 f. 69 For examples from the Ewe and other Sudanese languages, see Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache, 95, and Die Sudansprachen, 48ff.; from Nuba, see Leo Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 52. 70 See Steinthal, Die Mande-Neger-Sprachen, 222. 71 See Rochl, Grammatik der Schambalasprache, 111ff., and Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 68, 75. 72 Eduard Seler, Das Konjugationssystem der Maya-Sprachen (Berlin: Unger, 1887), 30. Similarly, Steinen says that the Bakairi language (op. cit., 371 f.) definitely does not possess tenses in our sense but uses modal terms for its verb inflections, whose exact value, it must be admitted, cannot be determined from the present material and perhaps is altogether inaccessible to a European. A clear picture of the abundance of these modal shadings can be gained from Roeh’s survey (111ff.) of the verb forms in Shambala. 73 For the use of “tenses” in the Semitic languages, see Brockelmann, Grundriss, vol. 2, 144ff. With regard to the Ural-Altaic languages, Winkler (Das Uralaitaische und seine Gruppen, 159) points out that the abundance of determinative and modal qualificatives contained in the “verbal noun” overshadowed tense formation, the strictly verbal element, so much that the latter seemed secondary and almost incidental. 74 Wilhelm Streitberg, “Perfektive und imperfektive Aktionsart,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, vol. 15 (1891), 117ff. 75 For the Greek language, cf. Brugmann, Griechische Grammatik, 3rd ed., 469: From the ur-Greek period down, every verbal concept had to enter into some relation with the mode of action, not with the category of time relation. Since the ur-Indo-European period there had been many tenseless verb forms, but none without mood. (Ibid.)

A comparison of the Homeric with the old Attic language shows that it became the rule only gradually to express clear time relations by means of the verb. 76 In the Greek, for example, roots like λαβ, πιθ, and φυγ are used in the first function, while λαμβ, πειθ, and φευη are used in the second. See Curtius, “Zur Chronologie der Indonesischen Sprachforschung Sprachforschung,” in Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 5, Abhandlungen der Philologisch-Historischen Classe der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 5, no. 3 (Leipzig, 1867), 229ff.



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  77 See Curtius, “Die Bildung der Tempora und Modi im Griechischen und Lateinischen,” Sprachvergleichende Beiträge Zur Griechischen Und Lateinischen Grammatik, vol. 1 (1846), 150ff.   78 In the Germanic system of inflections, modal differences diminish in importance at an early date, although they remain clearly discernible in certain isolated phenomena. See Hermann Paul, “Die Umschreibung des Perfektums im Deutschen mit haben und sein,” Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Classe 1, vol. 22 (Munich, 1902), part X, 161ff. They still play, however, a prominent part in the Baltic-Slavic languages, which have preserved the difference between “perfective” and “imperfective” action and divide all verbs into two classes accordingly. See August Leskien, Grammatik der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslawischen) Sprache (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1909), 115ff.   79 Proclus in Euclid, ed. G. Friedlein, 64. (Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 279).   80 See Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? (1887); cf. Gottlob Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (Breslau, 1884); B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903).   81 Paul Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1910), 98f.   82 See chap. 5 in this volume.   83 Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache, 80.   84 Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 36 f.   85 Karl von den Steinen, Unter den naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und ergebnisse der zweiten Schingú-expedition, 1887-1888 (2nd ed., Berlin: D. Reimer, 1897), 86.   86 See Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 58; for similar examples from the Papuan languages, see Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, 373, etc. In the Eskimo language, the number 20 is expressed by the sentence “a man is completed,” i.e., all his fingers and toes are counted. See William Thalbitzer in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 1047.   87 John Wesley Powell, On the Evolution of Language, as Exhibited in the Specialization of the Grammatic Processes, the Differentiation of the Parts of Speech, and the Integration of the Sentence; from a Study of Indian Languages (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1879–90), ed. Powell, Annual Report, no. 1, 21; Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 532ff.   88 See Sidney Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, 364; cf. in particular the abundant material in Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 181ff.   89 Steinthal, Die Mande-Neger-Sprachen, 75ff.   90 William Rowan Hamilton, “Lectures on Quaternions: Containing a Systematic Statement of a New Mathematical Method; of which the Principles were Communicated in 1843 to The Royal Irish Academy; and Which Has Since Formed the Subject of Successive Courses of Lectures, Delivered in 1848 and Subsequent Years,” in The Halls of Trinity College, Dublin: With Numerous Illustrative Diagrams, and with Some Geometrical and Physical Applications (Dublin; London; Cambridge: Hodges and Smith, 1853), 2.

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  91 A rich collection of examples is to be found in August Friedrich Pott, Die quinare und vigesimale Zählmethode bei Völkern alter Weltteile (Halle, 1847).   92 Martin Dobrizhoffer, Historia de Abiponibus (Vienna, 1784); cf. Pott, 5, 17, etc.   93 Regarding this qualitative character of primitive “numbers” and of “counting,” cf. the excellent, richly documented expositions of Max Wertheimer in “Über das Denken der Naturvölker,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 60 (1912): 321ff.   94 Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanesischen Sprachen, 23; cf. Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 241. Similar collective terms are found in the Melanesian languages of New Guinea, which, for example, use a separate undivided word to designate four bananas or four coconuts, ten pigs, two long objects, etc. Cf. Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, 3, 475.   95 See Josef Meyer in Anthropos, 1, 228 (quoted by Max Wertheimer, op. cit., 342).   96 See John Wesley Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages (2nd ed., Washington: G.P.O., 1880), 25 and the compilation of different classes of numerals (numerals for flat objects, round objects, long objects, human beings, measurements) in Boas, “Tsimshian” (Handbook, 1, 396ff.).   97 Cf. the examples collected by Lévy-Bruhl from the linguistic and ethnological literature (Das Denken der Naturvölker, 169ff.).   98 See, for example, Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 275, 303; Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 148; Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanesischen Sprachen, 23, 255.   99 For details, see Johann Carl Eduard Buschmann in his notes on Humboldt’s Kawi-Werk, 2, 269ff. 100 Cf. the system of Japanese and Chinese “numeratives” in Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre, 149ff. 101 See Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 274ff.; cf. for the Australian languages, 246 f.; see also Müller, Grundriss, vol. 2, part 2, 114 f. 102 See Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 148 f.; Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanesischen Sprachen, 23, 253. 103 Cf. Otto von Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 340 f.; Winkler, Der Uralaitaische Sprachstamm, 137; on the “plural formation” in the Altaic languages, see also Josef Grunzel, Vergleichende Grammatik der altaischen Sprachen, 47ff. 104 In Egyptian, according to Erman (Ägyptische Grammatik, 108 f.), many concepts that are purely plural in their meaning are rendered by collective abstract nouns in the singular form, and the form of the verbal predicate is transposed accordingly. Similarly, in the South Semitic languages, according to Karl Brockelmann (Grundriss, vol. 1, 437ff.; cf. vol. 2, 77ff.), the boundaries between singular, collective, and plural are still in constant flux, so that collectives can revert to the singular by a slight phonetic shift and then form a new plural. For the Indo-European family, see the examples from the Romance languages given by Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, vol. 2, 69ff.; vol. 3, 26ff. 105 From the Indo-European period on, according to Brugmann, a noun was put in the singular if its content was conceived as unitary and no articulation of



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the unit was taken into account; the plural, on the other hand, was used where several members of a class or several separate occurrences and actions were distinguished or where a concept was regarded as plural in character. Karl Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1904), 413 f.; cf. Griechische Grammatik, 3rd ed., 369 f. 106 Dobrizhoffer, Historia de Abiponibus: equestri bellicosaque Paraquariae natione, vol. 2, 166ff. (quoted in Humboldt, “Über den Dualis,” in Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 19ff.). 107 See Brockelmann, Grundriss, 1, 436 f. 108 Humboldt, “Über den Dualis,” 20. 109 See Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 419, 464, 611. 110 See Goddard, “Athapascan” (Hupa), in Boas, Handbook, 1, 104; cf. Boas, “Kwakiutl” (op. cit., 1, 444): The idea of plurality is not clearly developed. Reduplication of a noun expresses rather the occurrence of an object here and there, or of different kinds of a particular object than plurality. It is, therefore, rather a distributive than a true plural. It seems that this form is gradually assuming a purely plural significance. 111 See the use of reduplication in designating the “distributive” plural in the Hamite languages. See Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, 25, 171. 112 See Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus. 113 This corresponds exactly to the reverse phenomenon which we have just observed in the Hupa language. Whereas there the singular of the verb is used even with a plurality of subjects if the action itself (such as the execution of a dance) is regarded as an indivisible unity, in most of the Native American languages a transitive verb occurs in the plural when its direct object [Objekt] is plural – that is, when the action is directed toward diverse objects and thereby seems to be split. In other languages as well, the use of the expression for the plural in the verb depends on the plurality not so much of the subject as of the object [Objekt] of the effective action or on both at once (examples from the Kivai, a Papuan language, are given by Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, 3, 311ff.); among the African languages, Nuba, for example, draws a difference in the verb form according to whether the object of the action is singular or plural (Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 56ff., 69ff.). Tagalog, which is described in detail by Humboldt in his Kawi-Werk, often attaches a certain plural prefix to the verb not only in order to indicate the plurality of the actor but also to indicate that the action consists in different parts or is repeated. In this case, the concept of plurality refers sometimes to the actors, sometimes to the action or its more or less frequent performance. Thus, for example, mag-súlat (from sulat “to write”) signifies the common plural meaning of “many write” and the frequentative meaning of “he writes much,” or it can express a “habitual mood” (“it is his business to write”). See Humboldt, 2, 317, 376. 114 For the American language, cf., for example, Roland B. Dixon’s presentation of Maidu (Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 683ff.): “Ideas of number are unequally

200

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developed in Maidu. In nouns, the exact expression of number seems to have been felt as a minor need; whereas, in the case of pronominal forms, number is clearly and accurately expressed” (708). In the Melanesian, as well as in the Polynesian and Indonesian languages, a sharp differentiation of number is also worked out only in the pronoun; see Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 110, and Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanesischen Sprachen, 37. Bakairi, which knows no difference between singular and dual and has no general designation of the plural, shows suggestions of a plural form in the first and second persons of the pronoun; cf. Steinen, Die Bakaïri-Sprache, 324, 349ff. 115 This is the case in Tibetan, for example; see Isaak Jakob Schmidt, Grammatik der tibetischen Sprache (Petersburg: Bei W. Gräff, 1839), 63ff. 116 Varied examples of this usage in Müller, Grundriss, vol. 2, part 2, 261, 314ff.; vol. 3, part 2, 50; for the Melanesian languages, see Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, op. cit., 87. In Hupa, only few nouns have a plural form: those that indicate a man’s age or rank or a relation of kinship (Goddard, “Athapascan,” in Boas, Handbook, 1, 104). In the Aleutian language, there are two expressions for plurality: one that is used for animate beings and the other that is used for inanimate objects. On this, see Victor Henry, Esquisse d'une Grammaire Raisonnée de la Langue Aléoute (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1879), 13. 117 See Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 340. 118 Cf. Müller, Grundriss, vol. 1, part 2, 26ff. 119 Cf. Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. 1, 412. 120 Such examples, particularly from the Papuan languages, may be found in Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, vol. 3, 46, 288, 331, 345, and 373; see also Friedrich Müller, “Die Papuasprachen,” Globus, vol. 72 (1897), 140. In Kivai, the same word (potoro) that serves to designate the trial is also used for four: its signification is probably “few,” while all numbers over three are rendered by sirio (“many”) (Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, 306). For the Melanesian languages, see Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanesischen Sprachen, 258. According to Steinen, there are clear indications that among the Bakairi, two was the “limit of the old arithmetic,” the term for multiplicity as such; he traces the word used for two back to a combination of words meaning literally “with you” (Die Bakairi-Sprache, 352ff.). 121 See Usener, “Dreizahl,” Rheinische Museum für Philologie, Neue Folge, vol. 58 (1903). 122 Cf. Brockelmann, Grundriss, 1, 484ff.; 2, 273ff. 123 Cf. Antoine Meillet, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indoeuropéennes (1st ed., Paris: Hachette, 1903; 7th ed., 1934, 409ff.; German trans. W. Printz from 2nd French ed., Leipzig and Berlin, X909, 252ff.); Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 369ff. 124 As everyone knows, the Westphalian and Austro-Bavarian dialects still retain vestiges of this use of the dual; see Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1, 339ff. 125 Miklosich, Vergleichende Grammatik der slawischen Sprachen, vol. 4, 40; on the analogous phenomena in the Finno-Ugrian languages, see József Szinnyei, Finnisch-ugrische Sprachwissenschaft (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1910), 60.



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126 Cf. on this question Theodor Benfey, Das indogermanische Thema des Zahlworts ‘Zwei’ ist du (Göttingen, 1876); Brugmann and Delbrück, in Grundriss, 2nd ed., vol. 2, part 2, 8ff., also assumes that the Indo-European *du “ultimately goes back to a personal intuition.” 127 Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 308ff., 355. 128 Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues, 160; and “Über den Dualis,” 26. 129 See Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 8 f. 130 See Brockelmann, Kurzgefasste vergleichende Grammatik, 222. 131 Brugmann, Griechische Grammatik, 3rd ed., 371; Meillet, Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 6; see also Müller, “Der Dual im indogermanischen und semitischen Sprachgebiete,” in Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-Historischen Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1861, vol. 35. 132 In Old Egyptian, the use of the dual is still extensive, whereas in Coptic, it has died out, except for certain vestiges (see Erman, Ägyptische Grammatik, 106; Georg Steindorf, Koptische Grammatik, 69, 73. 133 Cf. Grimm, “Über Den Personenwechsel in Der Rede,” in Kleine Schriften, vol. 3 (Berlin: Abhandlungen zur Litteratur und Grammatik, 1866), 239ff. 134 See Müller, Grundriss, 2, part 1, 76ff. In Die Sprachwissenschaft, 296ff., Gabelentz remarks: Grammatically speaking . . . family life embodies all the personal pronouns, singular, dual and plural; the family or clan has a sense of itself as a permanent unity, opposed to other families. “We” stands in opposition to “you” and “them.” I believe that this is no mere playing with words. Where better could the personal pronoun be rooted than in the habits of a continuous family life? Sometimes it even seems as though languages contained recollection of the interconnection between the representations of the woman and the representations of the “you.” Chinese designates both with the same word. . . . Likewise, in the Thai languages the syllable me combines the significations of “you” and “mother.” 135 Cf. Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 111ff.; Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, vol. 3, 428, and elsewhere. 136 See Robert Hamilton Matthews, “Aboriginal Languages of Victoria,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 36 (1902), 72, and “Languages of Some Native Tribes of Queensland,” etc., ibid., 155ff., 162. The personal pronouns also have more than one form in the Munda and Nicobarese languages (see Wilhelm Schmidt, Die Mon-Khmer-Vöker, 50ff.). For the American Indian languages, see the different examples of “inclusive” and “exclusive” in Boas, Handbook, 573ff., 761, 815; also, Steinen, Die BakaïríSprache: Wörterverzeichnis, 349ff. 137 Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 39. 138 See Gottlob Friedrich Lipps, “Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik,” in Philosophische Studien, vol. 9, 1894, 14.

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139 Cf. the apt remarks of Marx Wertheimer, op. cit., Zeitschrift für Psychologie, vol. 60, particularly 365ff. 140 See Hermann Osthoff, Vom Suppletivwesen der Indogermanischen Sprachen; Akademische Rede zur Feier des Geburtsfestes des Höchstseligen Grossherzogs Karl Friedrich am 22.  November 1899 bei dem Vortrag des Jahresberichts und der Verkündigung der akademischen Preise gehalten (Heidelberg, 1899), 49ff. 141 Examples particularly from the African languages in Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 84; Westermann, Grammatilik der Ewe-Sprache, 102, and Die Gola-Sprache, 39, 47; Karl Roehl, Grammatik der Schambalasprache, 25. 142 See examples in Karl Roehl, 25; Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 274; Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 520. 143 See Frederick William Hugh Migeod, The Mende Language, Containing Useful Phrases, Elementary Grammar, Short Vocabularies, Reading Materials (London: K. Paul, 1908), 65, etc. Of the Semitic languages only, the Arabic has developed a specific form of adjective comparison, a so-called elative; according to Karl Brockelmann this is a very late, specifically in Arabic, development (Grundriss, vol. 1, 372; vol. 2, 210ff.). 144 In the Nuba language, the comparative is suggested by a postposition that literally means “over” (see Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 31); in Fiji, the same function is performed by an adverb meaning “upwards” (See Heinrich C. von der Gabelentz, Die melancsischen Sprachen, 60 f.). The comparative suffixes of the Indo-European -ero and -tero are also derived, according to Brugmann (Kurze vergleichende Grammatik, 321ff.), from adverbs of local signification. 145 This view of the pronoun as a mere “idée suppléante” is put forward, for example, by Grasserie in Du verbe comme générateur des autres parties du discours (du phénomène au noumène) notamment dans les langues indo-européennes, les sémitiques et les ouralo-altaïques (Paris, 1914). The name “pronoun” or ἀντωνυμἰα, coined by the ancient grammarians, goes back to this conception; see, for example, Apollonius, De syntax, book 2, chap. 5. 146 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 103ff.; see “Über den Dualis,” in Werke, vol. 6, 26ff., and “Über die Verwandtschaft der Ortsadverbien mit dem Pronomen,” in Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 304ff. 147 Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, vol. 1, 355ff.; Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 215. 148 See Georg von der Gabelentz, Chinesische Grammatik mit Ausschluss des niederen Stiles und der heutigen Umgangssprache (Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1881), 112 f. 149 See Winkler, Der uralaltaische Sprachstamm, 59ff., 160 f., Johann Joseph Hoffmann, Japanisehe Sprachlehre, 91ff., and Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache (Petersburg, 1831), 44f. 150 On the general method by which the Semitic languages express the reflexive pronoun, see Brockelmann, Grundriss, vol. 2, 228 and 327; the reflexive must in most cases be indicated by the word for soul or its synonyms (man, head, being [Wesen]).



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151 See Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 7, cols. 1561–62. 152 Steindorff, Koptische Grammatik, 88; similarly, in Egyptian, see Erman, Ägyptische Grammatik, 85. 153 Cf. Renward Brandstetter, Indonesisch und Indogermanisch im Satzbau (Lucerne, 1914), 18. 154 Whitney, A Sanskrit Grammar (London: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1879), 179; Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen, 1, 477. 155 See Wundt, Die Sprache, Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 47f. and the examples here cited from Müller’s Grundriss. Those substantival and adjectival circumlocutions for the personal pronouns that have arisen out of considerations of etiquette and ceremony are not to be considered in the same light as the phenomena discussed here. According to Humboldt (Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 307f., and Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 335), they belong to a “state of half civilization.” Terms of exaltation (e.g., “commander” [Herrscher] “magnificence” [Herrlichkeit]) are used for the second person. The Japanese language has gone farthest in this direction. Here the personal pronoun has been entirely submerged by such polite circumlocutions, which are precisely graduated according to the rank of the speaker and of the person addressed. Hoffmann writes: The differentiation of the three grammatical persons (I, you, he), has remained foreign to the Japanese language. All persons, that of the speaker . . . as well as the person to whom one speaks, are considered as the content of the representation, that is according to our idiom, in the third person and it is for etiquette to decide, on the basis of the adjectives employed, which person is meant by which word. Etiquette alone distinguishes between I and not-I, abasing the one and exalting the other. (Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre, 75ff.) 156 See Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 6ff. 157 Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 108ff., and Renward Brandstetter, Der Artikel des Indonesischen, 36, 46. Among the American Indian languages, Hupa, for example, possesses a special third-person pronoun used for the adult male members of the tribe and another for children, old people, members of other tribes and animals; see Goddard, “Athapascan,” in Boas, Handbook, 1, 117. 158 The simple nominative that serves here solely to name a person or object is distinguished from the nominativus agentis, which is used where a transitive verb is connected with the subject: If, for example, one sees a person in the distance and asks: Who is that? – the answer will be kore (a man); but if one wishes to say, the man has killed the kangaroo, one uses another form, the subjective nominative, which must always be employed where the noun is represented as acting. See Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 247; see Matthews, “Aboriginal Languages of Victoria,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 36, 1902, 78, 86, 94. 159 Cf. Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 183ff. One Indonesian idiom, the Buginese, has two “passive prefixes,” which it attaches to the verb. One

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expresses the “unintentional” – i.e., an event that occurs “by itself” – without the intervention of an active subject. See Renward Brandstetter, Sprachvergleichendes Charakterbild eines indonesischen Idioms (Lucerne, 1911), 37ff. According to Reinisch (Die Nuba-Sprache, 63ff.), the Nuba language draws a sharp distinction between the passive and the inchoative form of the verb: the former is used when a state is induced by the active intervention of a subject, and the second is used when it is brought about by mere natural conditions, through a normal course of events. 160 See Brugmann, Griechische Grammatik, 3rd ed., 458ff. 161 Examples from the Melanesian languages in Codrington, 191ff.; from the African languages in Westermann, Die Sudanspraehen, 70; Migeod, The Mende Language, 82. The missing passive is often replaced by impersonal locutions or by active forms embodying a passive nuance. “He is struck,” for example, can be rendered by locutions such as “he receives or suffers striking” or by such a material formulation as “he eats blows.” (See examples in Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 98.) By means of an auxiliary verb whose basic meaning is “obtain, acquire,” the Japanese language forms verbs that indicate the acquisition of an action coming from outside and in this sense can be designated as passive verbs. (Cf. Hoffmann, Japanische Spraehlehre, 242.) Similarly, in Chinese, the “passive” is frequently formed by means of such auxiliary verbs as “see, find, receive” (e.g., “see hate” for “to be hated”). See Georg von der Gabelentz, Chinesische Grammatik, 113, 428. 162 Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 80, 85; see the parallels from Australian Indigenous languages in Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 254ff. See also Codrington, 192. 163 Ibid., 179ff. 164 For this usage of the “stative,” “inchoative,” and “habitual,” cf. the examples in Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 53 f., 58ff. and Adolphe Hanoteau, Essai de grammaire kabyle (Paris, I858), 122ff. 165 Particularly the Finno-Ugrian languages; see Szinnyei, Finnisch-ugrische Sprachwissenschaft, 120ff. Hungarian has eight frequentative suffixes; see Zsigmond Simonyi, Die ungarische Sprache. Geschichte und Charakteristik (Strassburg: Trübner, 1907), 284ff. 166 As in Indo-European, cf. Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik, 578ff. 167 Such a difference occurs, for example, in Mongolian; see Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache, 74. On the Sanskrit “precative,” see Albert Thumb, Handbuch des Sanskrit (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1905), 385ff. 168 See Powell, The Evolution of Language (Smithsonian Institution, Washington), Annual Report, 1879-1880, no. 1, 12. 169 Examples in Goddard, “Athapascan,” 105 and 124; John Swanton, “Haida,” 247ff., and Boas, “Kwakiutl,” in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 443. 170 Cf. Müller, Türkische Grammatik, mit Paradigmen, Litteratur, Chrestomathie, und Glossar (Berlin and New York, 1889), 71ff.; for the Semitic languages, see Brockelmann, Grundriss, 1, 504ff. According to Dillmann, Grammatik der



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äthiopischen Sprache, 116ff. Ethiopic contains, in addition to the basic root, an “intensive” and an “influential root”; from all three, causative roots can be derived by the addition of the same morphological element without altering their peculiarities. 171 Thus, for example, the Tagalog language uses double prefixes in the formation of causative verbs: one expresses the mere production of a thing [Sache], the sheer proper bringing about [Bewirken], while the other indicates the occasion [Veranlassung] of the action by another, so that we now have two active subjects. See Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 143. 172 See the examples from the Bedauye language in Reinisch, Bedauye, 2, 130ff. A cooperative form of the verb occurs also in Yakut; see Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 384ff. 173 E.g., the language of the Taoripi; see Ray, Torres Straits Expedition, 3, 340. 174 E.g., the Bungandity language of South Australia, described by Matthews in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 37 (1903), 69. 175 See for the Semitic languages, the Ethiopic (Dillmann, 115, 123) and Syriac Nöldeke, Kurzgefasste Syrische Grammatik (Leipzig: Weigel, 1880), 95ff. According to August Müller, the reflexive is also often used for the passive in Turkish (August Müller, Türkische Grammatik, mit Paradigmen, Litteratur, Chrestomathie, und Glossar, 76). 176 Cf. J. Julius Stenzel, “Über den Einfluss der griechischen Sprache auf die philosophische Begriffsbildung,” Neue Jahrbücher für das Klassische Altertum, (1921), 152ff. 177 “The Middle as Atmanepadam,” in Pânini, 1, III, 72–74; the first European grammarian to characterize the middle as a special genus verbi was Dionysius Thrax; see Theodor Benfey, Geschiehte der Sprachwissenschaft, 73 and 144. 178 Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1, 598ff. 179 Aside from the Semitic languages, examples can be found in Yakut (Böhtlingk, 291), in Turkish (August Müller, 71ff.), and in Nuba (Reinisch, Bedauye, 62ff.), etc. 180 See Humboldt, “Über die Verwandtschaft der Ortsadverbien mit dem Pronomen in einigen Sprachen,” in Werke, vol. 6, no. 1, 306 f. 181 Cf. Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache, 2nd ed., 41 and 245ff. 182 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 231. Steinen also points out that the “possessive and personal pronoun are still identical” in the Bakairi language. One and the same word (ura) means not only “I” but also “mine,” “that is mine,” and “that belongs to me.” Another means “thou” and “thine,” and a third means “he” and “his” (Die Bakaïrí-Sprache, 348 f., 380). 183 See Winkler, Der uralaltaische Sprachstamm, 76 f., 171; for examples from other languages, see Müller, Grundriss, e.g., vol. 1, part 2, 12, 116ff., 142, 153; vol. 2, part 1, 188; vol. 3. part 2, 278, etc. 184 Wundt, Die Sprache, Vöikerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 143.

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185 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Grisebach, 1, 151ff.; 2, 289ff. 186 See Johann Carl Eduard Buschmann, “Der athapaskische Sprachstamm,” Abhandlungen der Berliner Academic der Wissenschaften, (1854), 165, 231; Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, 2nd ed., 18; Goddard, “Athapascan,” in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 103. 187 Steinen, Unter den naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und ergebnisse der zweiten Schingú-expedition, 1887-1888, 2nd ed., 22. 188 See Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 357; even in Hungarian, according to Seigmund Simonyi, 260 designations of kinship and parts of the body are relatively seldom used without possessive personal suffixes. 189 Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 140 f. 190 Cf., for example, Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 45; for the American Indian languages, see Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, for example, Goddard, Athapascan (Hupa), 103. 191 See Schelling, “Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie,” in Werke, ed. O. Weiss (Leipzig, 1907), vol. 1, part 7, 177. 192 Cf. Ray, “The Melanesian Possessive,” American Anthropologist, 21, 349ff. 193 See Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 129 f. 194 Such different possessive suffixes for transferable and nontransferable possession occur, for example, in the Haidan and the Tsimshian languages, where a further difference is made between the transferable possession of animate creatures (my dog) and inanimate things (my house), and in the languages of the Sioux Indians; see Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 258, 393, 946 f. 195 Cf. Victor Henry, Esquisse d’une grammaire raisonnée de la langue aléoute d’après la grammaire et le vocabulaire de Ivan Veniaminov, 22. A similar condition prevails in the language of the Eskimo; see Thalbitzer, in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 1021ff. Szinnyei (115) remarks that in the Finno-Ugrian languages, there were originally two paradigms with possessive suffixes – one for singular, one for plural possession – but that in most of the individual languages, this difference has been obscured, being best preserved in the Vogul. 196 As in Turkish, where the phrase “the father’s house” is rendered as “the father’s his house.” Cf. Müller, Türkische Grammatik, 64. A similar construction occurs in the Finno-Ugrian languages; see Winkler, Das Uralaltaische und seine Gruppen, 7ff. 197 See Franz Nikolaus Finck, Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus, 13f. 198 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (§ 16), B 131–36. 199 Ibid., B 408. 200 Ibid., B 278. 201 See Noiré, Der Ursprung der Sprache, 311ff., 341ff., and Müller, Das Denken im Lichte der Sprache (Leipzig: Minerva Verlag, 1888), 371ff., 571ff. 202 This is the standpoint, for example, of Berthold Delbrück in Grundfragen der Sprachforschung, 113ff.



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203 See Raoul de la Grasserie, Du verbe comme générateur des parties du discours. 204 Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 594. 205 Cf. Theodor Nöldeke, Kurzgefasste syrische Grammatik, 215: The nominal sentence, i.e., a sentence having a substantive, adjective, or adverb as its predicate, is not sharply distinguished from the verbal sentence in the Syriac. The participle, which very frequently serves as a predicate, which is on its way to becoming a pure verbal form, but does not conceal its nominal origin . . . suggests a transition from the nominal to the verbal sentence. . . . And the nominal and verbal sentence do not reveal a great difference of inner structure in Syriac. 206 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” vol. 7, no. 1, 222, 280ff., 305; see Kawi-Werk, vol. 2, 81, 129ff., 287. 207 For examples, see Müller, Grundriss: from the Hottentot, vol. 1, part 2, 12ff.; from the Mandingan Languages, vol. 1, part 2, 142; from the Samoyed, vol. 2, part 2, 174; from the Yenisti-Ostyak, vol. 2, part 1, 115. 208 Ibid., 227. 209 For varied examples of this “adjectival conjugation,” see de la Grasserie, op. cit., 32ff. In Malay, every word without exception can be transformed into a verb by a suffix; conversely, one can turn any verb into a noun simply by preceding it with the definite article (Humboldt, Kawi-Werk, 2, 81, 348ff.). In Coptic, the infinitive form of the verb even has the gender of substantive nouns: the infinitive is a noun and can take a masculine or feminine form. In accordance with its nominal character, moreover, it has originally no direct object; this signification is expressed by a genitive that immediately follows the infinitive as it would a substantive (see Steindorff, Koptische Grammatik, 91ff.). In the Yenisei-Ostyak as in the Dravidian languages, verb forms can take case suffixes and are thus “declined,” whereas in some languages, the noun can be provided with certain indications of tense and are thus “conjugated” (see Müller, Grundriss, 2, part 1, 115, 180ff.; 3, part 1, 198). In the language of Annatom – according to Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, 160ff. – not the verb but the personal pronoun is conjugated. The pronoun opens the sentence and indicates whether we are dealing with the first, second, or third person and singular, dual, trial or plural and whether the action is present, past, future, volitive, etc. 210 E.g., in Aleutian, see Henry, Esquisse d’une Grammaire Raisonnée de la Langue Aléoute, 60ff. 211 Winkler, Der Uralaltaische Sprachstamm, Das Finnische und Das Japanische, 166 f. 212 A sentence such as “it is snowing” is consequently rendered in Japanese as “snow’s falling (is).” “The day has ended, it has grown dark” is rendered “the day’s having-grown-dark (is).” See Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre, 66 f. 213 See Winkler, 199ff.; Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 348. 214 Winkler, Der Uralaltaische Sprachstamm, Das Finnische und Das Japanische, 152, 157ff.

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215 See in Yakut (Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 299 f.): “My imminent cutting” = “the object subjected to my future cutting” but also “I will cut,” etc. Cf. the tense formation in the Japanese verb, where the forms that serve to express future or past, completion or duration, are all combinations of a dependent verbal noun, designating the content of the action, with a governing verbal noun indicating its temporal particularity. Thus, “to see” – “striving, willing, becoming” (for “will see”); “to see” – “going away” (for “to have seen”), etc. See Winkler, 176ff., and Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre, 214, 227. 216 For more details, see Winkler, Der Uralaltaische Sprachstamm, Das Finnische und Das Japanische, 125ff., 208ff., and Uralaltaische Völker und Sprachen, 90ff. 217 See the remarks of Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, 402ff. 218 Cf. Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 144ff. 219 Cf. in particular the investigations of Lucien Adam on “Polysynthesism” in the Na-huatl, Qucchua, Quiche, and Mayan languages, in his Études sur six langues Américaines (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1878). See also Daniel Garrison Brinton, “On Polysynthesis and Incorporation as Characteristics of American Languages,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, vol. 23 (1885); and Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 573, 646ff. (Chinook), 1002ff. (Eskimo), etc. 220 Cf. the characteristic remarks of Steinen on the Bakairi language: Unter den naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und ergebnisse der zweiten Schingú-expedition, 1887-1888, 2nd ed., 78ff.; Die Bakairi-Sprache, IX f. 221 Gatschet points out that the verb in Klamath expresses a verbal act or state only in the impersonal and indefinite form – comparable to our infinitive (572 f.). In a construction such as “thou-to-break-stick,” the verbal term designates breaking only as such without reference to its subject. Similarly, the Mayan languages possess no transitive active verbs in our sense: they have only nouns and absolute verbs designating a state, attribute, or activity, which are construed as predicates of a personal pronoun or of a third person acting as subject but can take no direct object. The words that represent a transitive action are radical or derived nouns, which as such are combined with the possessive prefix. In Mayan, sentences such as “thou hast killed my father” or “thou hast written the book” are rendered as “thy killed one is my father,” “thy written thing is the book” (see Edward Seler, Das Konjugationssystem der Maya-Sprachen, 9, 17ff.). In the verbal expression of the Malay, such “impersonal” locutions are also frequent – e.g., “my seeing (was) the star” for “I saw the star,” etc. See Humboldt, Kawi-Werke, 2, 80, 350ff., 397. 222 See Gatschet, 434 and in particular Seler. 223 Humboldt, Kawi-Werke, vol. 2, 79ff. 224 Cf. Ibid., 173. 225 Dillmann, Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache, 116ff.

IV LANGUAGE AS THE EXPRESSION OF CONCEPTUAL THINKING: THE FORM OF LINGUISTIC CONCEPT AND CLASS FORMATION 1.  THE FORMATION OF QUALIFYING CONCEPTS The problem of concept formation designates the closest point of contact between logic and the philosophy of language; at this point, they seem to merge into an inseparable unity. Every logical analysis of the concept ultimately seems to lead to a point where the consideration of concepts passes over into the consideration of words and names. Logically consistent nominalism combines the two problems into one: the content [Gehalt] of the concept merges with the content [Gehalt] and achievement of the word. Thus, the truth becomes a linguistic determination rather than a logical determination: veritas in dicto, non in re consistit [truth consists in words not in things]. It pertains to an agreement that is to be found neither in things nor in ideas but that correlates exclusively to the connection of signs and, in particular, the connection of phonetic signs. An absolutely “pure,” speechless thinking would not know the opposition between

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true and false, which is engendered only in and through speech. Thus, here, the question of the validity and origin of the concept necessarily leads back to the question of the origin of the word: the inquiry into the genesis of word significations and word classes becomes the only means of rendering intelligible the immanent sense of the concept and its function in the construction of cognition.1 Closer consideration, to be sure, shows this nominalistic solution to the problem of the concept to be a pseudo-solution, insofar as it forms a vicious circle. For if language is expected here to supply the ultimate and, in a certain sense, only “explanation” of the function of the concept, then it can, by the same token, never do without this function in its own construction. And the circle that is perpetrated here in the whole now turns again in the individual. Traditional logical theory lets the concept arise “through abstraction”: it instructs us to form a concept by comparing similar things or representations with each other and abstracting their “common characteristic traits.” The fact that the compared contents have certain “characteristic traits,” that they bear qualitative determinations in themselves  – according to which they can be divided into classes, genera, species – is, of course, usually taken as self-evident, requiring no special mention. And yet enclosed in this apparent self-evidence is one of the most difficult problems that concept formation offers us. First, the question arises here anew as to whether the “characteristic traits,” according to which we divide things into classes, are already given to us before language formation or whether, possibly, they are supplied to us only through language formation. As Sigwart rightly remarks: The theory of abstraction forgets that in order to resolve an envisaged object [Object] into its individual characteristic traits, judgments are already required, whose predicates must be general representations (as concepts are more commonly called); and that these concepts must ultimately be gained by some means other than abstraction, since it is they that make this process of abstraction possible. The advocates of this theory also forget that this process presupposes that the sphere of objects [Objecte] to be compared is in some way determined, and they tacitly posit a motive for combining this particular grouping and for seeking its common characteristic traits. Ultimately this motive, if it is not absolutely arbitrary, can only be that these objects [Objecte] have been



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recognized as similar a priori, because they all have a certain content in common, i.e., that there is already present a general representation by means of which these objects [Objecte] are distinguished from the totality [Gesammtheit] of objects [Objecte]. The whole theory of concept formation by comparison and abstraction makes sense only if, as often happens, the task is given to indicate the common of the factual by which general linguistic usage actually designates by the same word, and thus to elucidate the true signification of the word. If it is necessary to indicate, for example, the concept of animal, of gas, of theft, etc. one might be tempted to select the common characteristic traits of all the things that are generally called animals, of all the bodies that are called gases, or all the actions that are called thefts. Whether this is successful; whether this means of concept formation is feasible, is another question; it might be plausible if we could assume that there is no doubt as to what should be called animal, gas, theft – i.e., if we already have in truth the concept we are seeking. Thus, any attempt to form a concept by abstraction is tantamount to looking for the spectacles that are on your nose, with the help of these same spectacles.2

Indeed, the theory of abstraction solves the question of the form of the con­ cept only by referring it, consciously or tacitly, back to the form of language, with which, however, the problem is not so much solved as relegated to another domain. The process of abstraction can be carried out only with respect to such contents that have already been in some way determined and designated, which have been organized linguistically and intellectually. But how – we must now ask – do we arrive at this organization? What are the conditions of that primary forming [Forming] that takes place in language and that forms the foundation for all of the subsequent and more-complex syntheses of logical thinking? How does language succeed in escaping from that Heraclitean flow of becoming, in which no content recurs truly identically; how does language place itself, as it were, in opposition to this flow and extract from it fixed determinations? Here lies the genuine mystery of “predication” as a simultaneous problem of logic and of language. The beginning of thinking and speaking comes about not in that some differences given in sensation or intuition are simply apprehended and named but rather by the fact that determinate boundary lines are independently drawn, that determinate separations

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and connections are made by virtue of which separated individual figures emerge from the ever-same flowing progression of consciousness. Logic tends to locate the actual birthplace of the concept in certain intellectual operations, particularly in the process of “defining” according to genus proximum and differentia specifica, erecting a sharp demarcation and a clear fixing of the significative contents [Gehalt] of words. However, in order to arrive at the ultimate source of the concept, thinking must return to a deeper stratum, and it must seek the motives of connection and separation that prove themselves effective in the process of word formation and that are decisive for the subordination of all the material of the representations under certain linguistic class concepts. For the primary task of concept formation is not, as logic has in most cases assumed under the pressure of a centuries-old tradition, to raise the representation to ever-greater universality but to raise them to increasing determinateness. As long as “universality” is demanded of the concept, it is not an end in itself but only a vehicle that serves to arrive at the true goal of the concept, namely the goal of determinateness. Before any contents can be compared with others and ordered into classes according to the degree of their similarity, which includes the other, they must be determined as content. For this purpose, however, a logical act of posit­ ing and differentiation is required, through which a certain incision comes into being in the continuous flow of consciousness, through which the restless coming and going of sense impressions is, as it were, halted and certain resting points are obtained. Hence, the original and decisive achievement of the concept is not the comparison of representations and their combination [Zusammenfassung] according to genera and species but rather the forming [Formung] of impressions into representations. Among the modern logicians, Lotze especially has apprehended this relationship most clearly, although in his interpretation and presentation of it, he has not entirely freed himself from the fetters of the logical tradition. His theory of the concept assumes that the most original act of thought cannot consist in the connection of two given representations, but rather, the theory of logic must take a further step back. In order that representations may be combined into the form of thought, they individually require an antecedent forming [Formung] by which in general they become logical building blocks. We tend to pass over this first achievement of thinking, because it has already taken place in the formation



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of our inherited language and, because of this, therefore, it seems to be a self-evident premise that no longer appears to belong to the proper work of thinking. In truth, however, the creation of the words of language, if we disregard mere formless interjections and expressions of excitement, contains in itself precisely the basic form of thinking, the form of objectivization. This cannot yet produce connections of the manifold that are subordinated to a generally valid rule; rather, it must first solve the preliminary task of giving to each individual impression an intrinsically valid signification. As yet, this mode of objectivization knows nothing of the presupposition of the contents in a reality quite independent of cognition; rather, it concerns itself solely with fixing the content for cognition and characterizing it for consciousness as something self-identical and recurring in the mutations and variations of impressions. Thus, through the logical objectivization, which gives itself away in the creation of names, the named content is not moved into an external reality; the common world, in which others will re-find the content to which we point, is in general only the world of the thinkable; here, the first trace of a unique existence, and of an inner lawfulness identical for all thinking beings [Wesen] and independent of them, is ascribed.3

And now this first fixation of whatever qualities that can be apprehended by thinking and language is linked with further determinations, in which they assemble into certain relationships; in which they are jointed into orders and series. The individual quality not only possesses in itself an identical “what,” a distinctive consistent existence, but is also related to others by virtue of it – and this relation is not arbitrary but rather discloses a distinctive, objective form. However, although we cognize and recognize this objective form as such, we cannot juxtapose it with the individual contents as something independent and separable; rather, we can find it only in and through them. If, after we have fixed and named several contents as such, we combine them together into the form of a series, in so doing we seem to have posited something common [Gemein­ sam], which is specified in the individual members of the series, which is exhibited in all of them, yet in each one with a specific difference. This first universal [Allgemeine] is, however, as Lotze stresses, essentially of another sort than the ordinary generic concepts of logic.

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We impart the universal concept [Allgemeinbegriff ] of an animal or of a geometric figure [Figur] to others by prescribing a precise series of thought-actions of connecting, separating, or relating to be performed upon a number of singular representations assumed to be known; at the end of this logical work, the content that we wished to impart will stand before our consciousness. However, we cannot in this way explain wherein consists the general blue that we have thought with the thought of light blue or dark blue, or the general thought of color thought with red and yellow. . . . The common factor in red and yellow, by virtue of which they are both colors, cannot be separated from what makes red red and yellow yellow; that is to say, this common content cannot be separated and formed into the content of a third representation that would be comparable to the same kind and order as the other two. Sensation, as we know, is always only a certain, singular shade of a color, only a tone of a certain height, strength, and particular nature. . . . Whoever attempts to apprehend the general of color or tone will inevitably discover either that they have a specific color and a specific tone before their intuition accompanied only by secondary thoughts to which every other tone and every other color has an equal right to serve as an intuitive example of the same, non-intuitive, abiding universal [Allgemeinen]; or else they discover that their recollection must present many colors and tones in succession with the same secondary thought, that none of these individuals are themselves meant, but that what they have in common can be grasped in no intuition. . . . In truth, words such as color and tone are only designations of logical tasks that cannot be solved in the form of a self-contained representation. Through them we instruct our consciousness to represent and compare the individual, conceivable [vorstellbar] tones and colors, to grasp in this comparison the common factor that, as our sensation tells us, is contained in them but which no effort of thought can truly detach from that wherein they are different to make them into the content of an equally intuitive new representation.4

We have reported Lotze’s theory of the “first universal” [erste Allgemeine] at length, because, correctly understood and interpreted, it may provide the key to an understanding of the original form of concept formation that prevails in language. As the reformulation of Lotze’s remarks clearly



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shows, the logical tradition finds itself in a strange dilemma in regard to this problem. Traditional logicians are convinced that the aspiration of the concept must simply be oriented toward universality and that its ultimate achievement must be to provide universal representations; however, it then turns out that this essentially uniform striving for universality cannot be fulfilled everywhere in the same way. A twofold form of the universal must, therefore, be distinguished: the one in which the universal is given only implicitly, as it were, in the form of a relation disclosed by the singular contents; the other in which it emerges also explicitly after the manner of an independent intuitive representation. However, from here, it requires a further step only to reverse the relationship: to look at the consistent existence of the relationship as the authentic content and the authentic logical foundation of the concept, to consider the “universal representation” as a psychological accident that is not always desirable or attainable. Lotze did not take this step; instead of making a sharp and principled separation between the demand for determination set down by the concept and the demand for universality, the primary determinations had led him to the concept, even back into primary universalities, so that for him instead of the two characteristic achievements of the concept, there were only two forms of the universal: a “first” universal and a “second” universal. However, from his own presentation, it follows that these two types have little more than the name in common with one another and by contrast are sharply separated in terms of their distinctive logical structures. For the relationship of subsumption, which traditional logic regards as the constitutive relation through which the universal is interconnected with the particular – the genus with the species and individuals – is not applicable to the concepts that Lotze designates as the “first universal.” Blue and yellow are not particularizations under the genus “color in general”; rather, “the” color is nowhere but in them and in the totality [Gesamtheit] of other possible color shades and is thinkable only as precisely this serially ordered totality [Gesamtheit]. For this reason, we are referred by general logic to a differentiation that also passes through the formation of linguistic concepts. Before language can transition to the generalizing and subsuming form of the concept, it requires another, purely qualifying mode of concept formation. Here the naming of a thing ensues from the genus to which it belongs, but it is linked to some individual constitution that is apprehended in an intuitive

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total-content. The work of spirit does not consist in positing the content under another content, but rather, the content, as a concrete but undifferentiated whole, undergoes, in this respect, a further particularization as in it a determinate, characteristic element is stressed and becomes a focal point of attention. The possibility of “naming” rests on this concentration of the spiritual gaze: the new intellectual imprint [Prägung] that the content undergoes is the necessary condition for its linguistic designation. For all of these questions, the philosophy of language has created a characteristic concept, which admittedly is so ambiguous and discordant in its usage that instead of offering a definite solution, it seems to belong to one of its most difficult and controversial problems. Since Humboldt, the term “inner form” has been used to designate the specific law according to which each language, as set off from others, effects its concept formation. By this concept of inner form, Humboldt understood the consistent and uniform factor in the work of spirit to raise the articulated sound to the expression of thought – inasmuch as it is possible to fully apprehend in its coherence and to describe it systematically. However, even with Humboldt, this determination is not unequivocal: sometimes the form exhibits and expresses itself in the laws of linguistic connection and sometimes in the formation of roots. Thus, as has sometimes justifiably been argued against Humboldt, it is sometimes taken in a morphological sense and sometimes in a semiotic sense; it concerns, on the one hand, the relationship in which certain basic grammatical categories – e.g., the categories of noun and the verb that stand alongside each other in the formation of language – and, on the other hand, it goes back to the origin of the signification of words.5 If, however, we survey Humboldt’s determination of concepts as a whole, it is unmistakable that for him the latter standpoint was predominant and crucial. That each particular language has a particular inner form signified for him, above all, that in the selection of its designations, it never simply expressed the objects perceived in themselves, but this selection was determined primarily by an overall spiritual attitude, by the direction of the subjective apprehension of objects. For the word is not an imprint of the object in itself but the image engendered in the soul by it.6 In this sense, the words of different languages can never be synonyms, and their sense, strictly speaking, can never be encompassed in a simple definition that merely



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lists the objective characteristics of the object designated. There is always a unique mode of sense-bestowing that expresses itself in the syntheses and correlations underlying the formation of linguistic concepts. If the moon in Greek is designated as the “measurer” (μήν), in Latin the “glittering” (luna, luc-na), then we have here one and the same sensible intuition placed under entirely different concepts of signification and determined through them. Admittedly, it would not seem possible to provide a general presentation of how this determination is carried out in individual languages, precisely because this is a highly complex spiritual process that changes from case to case. The only road that seems to lie open for us is to place ourselves in the midst of the immediate intuition of the individual languages and, instead of describing the process they are following in an abstract formula, to feel it immediately in and through the particular phenomena.7 If philosophical analysis can, however, never claim to completely apprehend the particular subjectivity that expresses itself in languages, still the general subjectivity of language remains within the scope of its problems. For as languages distinguish themselves from one another by way of a particular “standpoint of the view of the world,” there is a view of the world of language itself, by virtue of which language stands out from the totality of the spiritual forms and in which language partly connects itself with the view of the world of scientific cognition, art, and myth, and also partly distances itself from them. In the strict sense, what primarily distinguishes the linguistic form of concept formation from the logical form of concept formation is that it never rests solely on the static examination and comparison of contents but that in it the mere form of “reflection” is always infused with certain dynamic motives; it does not receive its essential impulses uniquely from the world of being but also always, at the same time, from the world of doing. Linguistic concepts always stand on the border between action and reflection, between doing and considering. Here, there is no mere classification and ordering of intuitions according to certain objective characteristic traits; rather, there is expressed in this objective apprehension an active interest in the world and its configuration. Herder has said that language originally had been the same for the human as was nature: a pantheon, a realm of animated, active beings [Wesen]. It is, indeed, not the reflection of an objective environment [Umwelt] but the reflection of the life and doing of the human by which the worldview [Weltbild]

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of language, as the primitive mythical image [Bild] of nature, is determined in its actual basic and essential features. As the will and doing of human beings are directed toward one point, as consciousness strains and concentrates on it, the human becomes ripe, as it were, for the process of designation. In the stream of consciousness that seemed to flow along uniformly, waves arise with their crests and troughs: individual, dynamically stressed contents take form, and others group around them. And now that the ground [Boden] is first prepared for those correlations on which the recovery of any linguistic-logical “characteristic traits,” as well as their combination [Zusammenfassung] into determinate groups of characteristic traits, is based, the foundation is first given on which the formation of qualifying concepts of language can be constructed. This general direction of language formation already manifests itself in the transition from mere sensible sounds of excitement to the call. The call – e.g., as the call of anxiety or of pain – may belong entirely to the sphere of mere interjection; however, it already signifies more than this as soon as in it a just-received impression not only is turned toward the outside in an immediate reflex but also is the expression of a specific and conscious intentional goal [Zielrichtung] of the will. For now, consciousness no longer stands in the sign of mere reproduction but in the sign of anticipation: it no longer remains in the given and the present [Gegenwärtigen] but spreads into the representation of something to come [Künftig]. Accordingly, the sound no longer merely accompanies an existing [vorhanden] state of feeling and excitement but takes effect as a motive that intervenes in events [Geschehen]. The alterations of these events are not merely designated but, in the strictest sense, “called forth” [hervorgerufen: evoked]. When the sound takes effect in this way as an organ of the will, it has once and for all gone beyond the stage of mere “imitation.” In the development of the child, we can observe how, already in the period that precedes actual language formation, the child’s cry gradually transitions into a call. Because the scream is itself differentiated, because particular sounds, as yet unarticulated phonetic utterances [Äußerungen] for different affects and directions of desire, rise up, the sound thus inclines, as it were, toward certain contents in difference from others, and thus the initial form of its “objectivization” is prepared. In its development toward language, humanity as a whole advanced in essentially the same way, if the theory advanced by Lazarus Geiger and furthered by Ludwig



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Noiré is correct that all original speech-sounds take their departure not from the objective intuition of being but from the subjective intuition of doing. According to this theory, the speech-sound becomes capable and suitable for the presentation of the world of things only to the degree that it gradually stands out from the sphere of effective action and creation. For Noiré, it was, in particular, the social form of effective action that first made possible the social function of language as a means of understanding. If the speech-sound is nothing other than the expression of an individual representation generated in an individual consciousness, then it would also remain, as it were, captive within the boundaries of this consciousness and would possess, as it were, no ability to reach beyond it. There would be no bridge from the world of representation and the world of sounds, from one subject to another. However, while the sound comes into being not in an isolated but in a communal doing of the human being, it possesses from the beginning a truly communal, “general” sense. Language as a sensorium commune [common sense] could only grow out of the sympathy of activity. It was from a communal activity directed toward a common purpose, from the most primeval labor of our ancestors out of which language and rational life sprang forth. . . . In its emergence of the communal activity, the speech sound is . . . accompanied by the expression of the enhanced feeling of community. . . . For all the rest, for the sun and moon, tree and animal, human and child, pain and pleasure, food and drink, absolutely lacked any possibility of common apprehension, including a common designation; only this, only the common activity, not individual activity, was the solid, unchanging ground [Boden] upon which common understanding . . . could rise. . . . All things enter . . . into the human horizon, i.e., they become things only to the degree that they undergo human activity and through it receive their designations, their names.8

Of course, the empirical evidence by which Noiré strove to justify this speculative thesis has been discredited: what he argues concerning the original form of linguistic roots and human, originary-words remains as hypothetical and doubtful as the whole notion of an original “root period” of language. However, even if we give up the hope of being able

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to penetrate from this standpoint to the ultimate metaphysical mystery of the origins of language, the consideration of the empirical form of languages shows how deeply they are rooted in the domain of effective action and doing for their fertile ground and mother soil. This interconnection is particularly evident in the languages of natural peoples,9 and the cultural languages reveal it more and more clearly as we pass beyond the circle of general word concepts and consider the development that they underwent as particular “occupational languages” in the various domains of human activity. Usener has pointed out that a common element is expressed in the distinctive structure of these occupational languages that is indicative of the direction of linguistic concept formation, as well as of the direction of mythico-religious concept formation. The circle of the mythical “special gods,” as well as that of individual and particular “special names,” is only gradually superseded in that human beings progressed from particular activities to more-general activities and, at the same time, with this growing generality of their doing acquired an evermore-general consciousness of that doing – the raising to truly universal linguistic and religious concepts first stems from the extension of doing.10 The content of these concepts and the principle that determines their construction become fully transparent only if, beside and beyond their abstract-logical sense, we apprehend their teleological sense. The words of language are not so much reflections of fixed determinations of nature and of the world of representation as rather the designations of the directions and guidelines of determining itself. Here consciousness does not passively confront the totality [Gesamtheit] of sensible impressions but rather permeates them and fills them with its own inner life. Only what in some way touches the inner activity, what seems “significant,” also receives the linguistic stamp of signification. If it is said of concepts in general that the principle of their formation is a principle of selection rather than one of “abstraction,” then this is especially valid for the form of linguistic concept formation. Here, some existing [vorhanden] differences of consciousness that are given in sensation or representation are not simply fixed and provided with a determinate phonogram as a label of sorts, but rather, the boundary lines within the whole of consciousness are themselves initially drawn. The determinants and dominants of linguistic expression arise in virtue of the determination that the doing undergoes. The light does not simply pass from objects into the sphere of



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spirit but spreads progressively from the center of the doing11 and thus makes the world of immediate sense sensation into a world illumined from within, a world configured both in intuition and in language. In this process, language formation shows its kinship with mythical thinking and representing while retaining in opposition to them an independent direction: its own distinctive spiritual tendency. Like myth, language also begins from the basic experience and form of personal effective action; however, it does not, like mythology, weave the world in infinite variations around this one central point but rather gives it a new form in which it confronts the mere subjectivity of sensation and feeling. Thus, in language, the process of animation and the process of determination constantly pass over into one another and grow together into a spiritual unity.12 The gestalt and the demarcation of internal and external reality are produced in this twofold direction from the inner to the outer and from there back again, in this ebb and flow of spirit. Of course, with all of this, an abstract schema of linguistic concept formation is only initially set up; only its framework [Rahmen], as it were, has been identified without as yet entering into the individual features of the picture [Bild]. To advance to a closer apprehension of these individual features, we must follow how language progresses gradually from a purely “qualifying” apprehension to the “generalizing” apprehension, in which it progresses from the sensible-concrete to the generic-general. If we compare the linguistic configuration of concepts in our developed cultural languages with those in the language of natural peoples, the opposition of the basic intuition immediately becomes evident. The languages of natural peoples are all excellent at designating every thing, every event, every activity, with the utmost intuitive determinateness; they strive to bring to expression as clearly as possible all of the differentiated properties of the thing, all of the concrete particularizations of the event, all of the modifications and nuances of the doing. In this respect, they possess a fullness of expression that our cultural languages never even get close to reaching. As has been shown, the spatial determinations and relationships find their most careful expression [Ausprägung] here.13 However, in addition to the spatial particularization of verbal expressions, there also occurs its particularization according to the most diverse other perspectives. Every modifying circumstance of an action, whether it concerns the subject or the object [Objekt], whether it concerns the

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goal or the work tool with which it is accomplished, operates immediately on the choice of expression. In certain Native American languages, the activity of washing is designated by thirteen different verbs, according to whether it applies to the washing of the hands or face, of bowls, garments, flesh, etc.14 According to Trumbull’s data, no Native American language has an equivalent for our general term “to eat”; instead, there is an abundance of different verbs that are used in connection with, for example, animals and another with vegetable nutriment – one indicating the meal of an individual, another a meal eaten in common, etc. In the case of “to strike,” a different verb is applied for striking with the fist or the flat of the hand, with a rod or with a whip; “to break” is variously designated depending on the type of breaking and the instrument with which it takes place.15 And the same almost-unlimited differentiation applies to the concepts of things as well as to the concepts of activities. Here again, before the endeavor of language can create specific class designations and “generic concepts,” it is directed above all toward the designation of “varieties.” The aborigines of Tasmania had no word to express the concept of tree, but they had a special name for every variety of the acacia, the blue rubber tree, etc.16 Karl von den Steinen reports that Bakairi had different names for every variety of parrot and palm tree, but no equivalent for the general concepts of parrot and palm.17 The same phenomenon is also found in otherwise highly developed languages. The Arabic language, for example, has developed for individual animal and plant varieties such an amazing wealth of designations that one could cite it as an example of how the study of natural history and physiology could be founded immediately on philology and lexicology. In a separate paper, Hammer has listed no fewer than 5,744 names for camel in Arabic, varying according to sex, age, and the individual characteristic traits of the animal. There are special designations not only for the male and female, for the foal and the adult camel, but also for the subtlest gradations within these classes. The foal that has not yet grown its side teeth, the foal that is beginning to walk, and a camel between the ages of one and ten each has its proper name. Other differences have to do with mating, pregnancy, and foaling and still others with physical peculiarities: a unique name serves, for example, to designate a camel with big or little ears, with a cut ear or a hanging earlobe, with a large jawbone or a sagging chin, etc.18



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In all this, it does not appear as if we are dealing with the random luxuriation of some isolated linguistic impulse but rather with an original form and basic tendency of linguistic concept formation, which is still clearly visible in individual characteristic effects even after language has generally moved well beyond them. As a result, those phenomena of language history, which since the time of Hermann Östhoff have been called suppletive phenomena, are usually interpreted in this light. In particular, in the systems of inflection and of word formation of the Indo-European languages, a well-known phenomenon that certain words and forms of words that combine together to form a system of inflection, such as the individual cases of a substantive, the tenses of a verb, the degrees of adjectives, are formed not from one and the same linguistic stem but from two or more such stems. Alongside the “regular” formation of verbal inflection and the comparison of adjectives, we find such cases as fero, tuli, latum, φέρω, οἴσω, ἤνεγκον, which likewise seem to be mere “exceptions” as arbitrary breakings of the principle of designating the different forms of the same concept by words built from the same root. Östhoff was able to demonstrate the law governing these exceptions, by ascribing them in general to an older stratum of language formation, in which the “individualizing” apprehension still outweighed the “grouping” tendency. According to him, the closer that concepts and significations stabilized in the language lay to the natural representation sphere of human beings and to their immediate spheres of activities and interests, the longer the “individualizing” view would predominate: just as human beings with their physical eye differentiates most sharply what is closest to them in space, their mental eye, whose mirror is language, will apprehend the things of the world of ideas more sharply and more individually the closer they enter into the feeling and thinking of speaking, which most intensely and livelier they grip the mind, excite the psychological interest of the individual, i.e. be that of the individual person or an individual people.19

From this perspective, it indeed seems significant that precisely those concept spheres for which the languages of natural peoples exhibit the greatest diversity and versatility are also those for which, in the IndoEuropean languages, the phenomena of suppletives are most richly

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developed and endure the longest. Among verbs [Tätigkeitswort: activity word], it is first the verbs of motion – “to go,” “to walk,” “to run,” and “to race” – and then those of eating, striking, seeing, speaking, etc. in which we find the most varied particularizations. Georg Curtius has shown that in the basic Indo-European languages, for example, the vari­ eties of “walking” are differentiated before the general linguistic concept is founded, and he demonstrated that such representations of looking and peering, glancing, paying attention, and watching must have been separated earlier in the Indo-European languages than the designation of the various sensible activities such as seeing, hearing, and feeling. And such verbs as the post-Homeric αἰσθάνεσθαι, “sentire,” “perceive,” designating sense perception in general, developed last of all.20 Given that other families of languages, such as the Semitic, disclose phenomena quite analogous to the Indo-European suppletives, we must conclude that the form of word formation here in fact reflects a general tendency in the linguistic formation of concepts. In the strict sense, we can hardly speak of an original “individualizing” tendency of language, because every concretely grasped naming of an isolated intuition goes beyond the purely individual comprehension of that intuition and in a certain sense is opposed to it. However, different dimensions of universality can be expressed in the concepts of language. If we represent the totality of the world of intuition as a uniform plane out of which certain individual gestalts are singled out and differentiated from their surroundings by the act of naming, this process of determination at first affects only a discrete, narrowly delimited portion of the plane. Nevertheless, because all of these individual areas are adjacent to one another, the whole plane can progressively be apprehended in this way and covered, as it were, with an even-denser network of denominations. Thus, however fine the individual mesh of this net may be, it is for the time being only loosely assembled in itself. For each word has only its own relatively delimited radius of action, beyond which its force does not extend. There is no possibility of grasping together a plurality and diversity of different spheres of signification into a new linguistic whole designated by a unitary form. The power of configuration and isolation [Absonderung] that is inherent in each individual word begins but prematurely arrives at its end, and then a new ambit of intuition must be opened up by a new and independent approach. The summation of all these different individual impulses, each



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of which operates alone and independently, can form collective, but not truly generic, unities. The totality of linguistic expressions forms here, insofar as it is achieved, only an aggregate but not an in itself organized system; the power of organization has exhausted itself in the individual naming and is not adequate to the formation of comprehensive unities. A further step on the path toward generic universality is taken by language when, rather than contenting itself with creating specific denominations for specific circles of intuition, it proceeds to combine from the latter to imprint the factual belonging together of contents on the form of language. This endeavor to posit a stricter relationship between sound and signification so that a specific series of conceptual significations is assigned to a specific phonetic series as its correspondence [Entsprechung] characterizes the progress from the formation of purely qualifying concepts to the formation of classifying concepts. This occurs in its simplest form, where groups of different words are characterized as a unity in that they receive a matching linguistic mark through a common suffix or prefix. It now complements the particular signification of each word as such by adding a new element [Element] of determination that discloses its relation to other linguistic formations [Gebilde]. Such a group, held together by a specific classificatory suffix, is to be found, for example, in the Indo-European titles of family relationships: in the names for father, mother, brother, sister, and daughter. The common ending -tar (ter), which appears in them (pitár, mātár, bhrâ´ tar, svásar, duhitár, πατὴρ, μήτηρ, φράτωρ, θυγάτηρ, etc.), combines these names into a self-contained series and stamps it, thus expressing one and the same “concept,” which, however, does not exist as an independent and detachable unity outside of the series but whose significance lies in this function of combining [Zusammenfassung] the individual members of the series. It would be a mistake, however, if for this reason, we did not accept the achievement that language has performed here as an intellectual, logical achievement in the strict sense. For the logical theory of concepts clearly demonstrates that the “serial concept” is not inferior to the “generic concept” in force and significance but that it is an essential moment and an integral constant of the generic concept.21 If we keep this in mind, the principle that prevails in these formations of language at once emerges in all its significance and fecundity. And we shall not do full justice to the spiritual content [Gehalt] of this principle if we believe we have explained these

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formations by tracing them back to the psychological law of the mere association of similarities. The accidental tenor of associations, which is different from case to case, from individual to individual, can no more explain the ground and origin of the linguistic concepts of cognition than it can the purely logical concepts of cognition. Wundt remarks:

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Psychologically, the only possible way to think of the event of the formation of names of kinship in the Indo-European languages is . . . to reach over from the formation of names of kinship in the Indo-European languages to the formation of another association of both representations and the formation of the feelings accompanying them, and that this association brought about an assimilation of those phonetic elements of the word, which did not serve the expression of the particular content of the representation. Thus, such a determining phonetic sign, common to a whole class of ideas, could have arisen only by way of the successive associative assimilation and not through the simultaneous formation of inclusive conceptual signs; and the concept of a belonging together of objects [Objekte] did not precede the formation of these determinative elements [Elemente] but rather developed entirely simultaneously with them. For it is evidently the expression of togetherness immediately presenting itself in the transition from one object to another that constitutes the concept of affinity, so that this concept rests upon certain similarly colored attendant feelings rather than on an actual comparison.22

Nevertheless, it must be said that whatever may have been the original psychological motive in the combination [Zusammenfassung] of a specific group of names, the combination [Zusammenfassung] itself constitutes an independent logical act with a distinctive logical form. A determination that would remain exclusively in the sphere of feeling could not by itself create a new objective determination. For any sort of emotive associations can exist between even the most heterogeneous contents of consciousness, so that, consequently, such associations cannot lead to that kind of “homogeneity” that is established or at least called for in the logical and linguistic concept. Feeling can combine anything with anything; hence, it does not contain a sufficient explanation for the fact that specific contents are linked into specific unities. Rather, for this, an intellectual perspective of



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comparison is required that is clearly recognizable in the serial formation of language even where it finds its expression only in the form of a classifying suffix and not in some independent conceptual and substantive terms.23 If language brings to presentation the fact that certain contents belong together, then it serves as a vehicle of intellectual progress, regardless of whether or not it succeeds in apprehending and describing wherein this interconnection consists. Here too, it anticipates a task that can truly be fulfilled only by scientific cognition: it becomes, as it were, the presupposition of the logical concept. The logical concept not only asserts a correlation and belonging-togetherness of contents, but it also inquires into the “why” of this correlation: it wants to apprehend its law and “ground.” The analysis of the interconnections of concepts ultimately leads back to their “genetic definition”: to the statement of a principle out of which they originate, from which they can be derived as its particularizations. Language can rise to this consideration neither in its qualifying, in its “classifying,” nor in its strictly “generic” concepts. However, it prepares the ground [Boden] by creating the first schema of correlation in general. This schema may contain little of the objective belonging-togetherness of the contents, yet it seems to fix in it, as it were, the subjective aspect of the concept, to exhibit in it what it signifies as a question. Indeed, historically, the problem of the concept was discovered when we learned and appreciated the linguistic expression of concepts not as conclusive but as logical ques­ tions. This was the origin of the Socratic expression of the concept, the τί ἔστι x [what it (x) is]: the Socratic induction consisted in starting from the provisional and presumptive unity of the word form and thence “leading” to the determinate and definitive form [Gestalt] of the logical concept.24 In this sense, we may say that in the subjectivity that inevitably adheres to them, the coordinations and classifications of language likewise contain a certain ideality, a tendency toward the objective unity of the “idea.”

2.  THE BASIC TENDENCIES IN LINGUISTIC CLASS FORMATION The task of describing the different forms of concept and class formation that are effective in individual languages and of understanding them in their ultimate spiritual motives lies beyond the domain and methodological possibilities of the philosophy of language. It can be undertaken

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only by general linguistics and by special linguistic sciences. The paths that language follows here are so diversely entwined and so obscure that they can be elucidated only by the closest immersion in and through the subtlest empathy with the details of the individual languages. For the type of class formation is an essential element of the “inner form” by which one language differs from another. Although this rich and varied spiritual forming [Formung], which language fulfills here, cannot be captured once and for all in any finished, abstract schema, a comparison of the particular phenomena points to certain general aspects on the basis of which language arrives at its classifications and correlations. We may attempt to arrange these aspects by taking as a guiding principle the constant progress from the “concrete” to the “abstract” that determines the tendency of language development in general, although we must bear in mind that it is a question not of a temporal but of a methodological stratification and that in a given historical form [historischen Gestalt] of language, the strata that we shall attempt to differentiate may exist next to and with each other or may be intermingled in a variety of ways. We seem to find ourselves at the lowest step of the spiritual scale where the comparison and correlation of objects [Objekte] are based solely on some similarity in the sensible impression that they evoke. The languages of natural peoples offer a variety of examples of this process of combining [Zusammenfassung] that is dominated entirely by sensible motives. The most heterogeneous contents may be combined together into a “class,” provided that they reveal some analogy in their sensibly perceivable form. In the Melanesian language, and in many American indigenous languages, there is a tendency to employ particular prefixes for those objects that are characterized by their elongated or round form. In accordance with this tendency, the expressions for sun and moon, for example, are grouped with those for the human ear, for fish of a certain form, for canoes, etc., whereas the names for the nose and tongue stand as designations for elongated objects.25 An entirely different level of consideration would even seem to belong to such differentiations of class that are based not on a mere similarity of the content of individually perceived things but rather on some determinative relationship of objects [Objekte] that are differentiated from one another according to their magnitude, number, position, and location. In the first respect, the Bantu languages, for example, employ a particular prefix in order to designate



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particularly large things, while other prefixes serve as diminutives; objects that regularly occur as elements [Elemente] in a collective multiplicity, as “one of many,” are distinguished from those with a paired organization such as human eyes, ears, and hands as “doubly existing [vorhanden] things.”26 As concerns position and location, many American indigenous languages determine, for example, the class affiliation [Klassenzugehörigkeit] of a word according to whether the object that it designates is thought of as standing, sitting, or lying.27 Besides the organization of objects [Objekte] according to direct, intuitively graspable characteristic traits that take place here, we find a classification that uses a noteworthy intermedi­ ary principle of division in which the totality [Gesamtheit] of things is coordinated with the limbs of the lived human body and, by virtue of the affiliation [Zugehörigkeit] with one or another limb, is combined to different linguistic groups. We can recognize here the same motive already encountered in the construction of the intuition of space by language and in the formation of certain primary spatial terms: the human body and the differentiation of its individual limbs [Gliedmaßen] serve as one of the first and most necessary foundations of linguistic “orientation” in general.28 In some languages, the division of the parts of the body is used as the pervasive schema that determines the apprehension of the whole of the world and its organization [Gliederung], in that each individual thing that language names is first linked with some part of the body, such as with the mouth, the legs, the head, the heart, the breast, etc., and according to this basic relation, individual objects [Objekte] are divided into certain classes, into fixed “genera.”29 In such classifications, it is clear that the first conceptual differentiations of language are still thoroughly bound to a material substrate and that the relation between the members [Glieder] of this class, if it is to be thought, must, at the same time, somehow always be pictorially embodied. Yet the most richly developed and subtly structured systems of classes, such as we encounter in the Bantu languages, seem to have acquired a general view that extends far beyond this first circle of mere sensible differentiation. Language already reveals here the power to apprehend the whole of being, insofar as it is taken as a spatial whole, as a complex of relations, and to let it grow, as it were, out of those relations. Once in the precisely graduated ensemble of “locative prefixes” employed in the Bantu languages there is, on the one hand, a sharp definition of the varying distance of objects [Objekte]

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from the speaker, then there is also a sharp definition of the multifarious spatial relationships prevailing among objects, their “interpenetration” [Ineinander], “juxtaposition” [Aneinander], “separation” [Außereinander]; thus, the immediate form of spatial intuition begins here, as it were, to assume a systematic shape [Gestalt]. It is as if space is formally constructed here by language as a multi-determined manifold and as if, from the individual differentiations of place and direction, it were shaped [gestaltet] into a self-contained and yet differentiated unity.30 Such class division, therefore, already seems to demonstrate a drive and an energy for organization [Organisation] which, even where the object remains entirely within the sphere of intuitive being, surpasses it in principle and points to new and distinctive forms of “syntheses of the manifold.”31 It is, indeed, grounded in the very nature [Wesen] of language that each of these syntheses is governed not exclusively by theoretical but by imaginative factors as well and that, consequently, much of linguistic “concept formation” seems to be the achievement less of logical comparison and connection than of linguistic fantasy [phantasie]. The form of the formation of series is never solely determined by the objective “similarity” of the individual contents but also follows with the tendency [Zug] of the subjective imagination [Einbildungskraft]. The motives by which language is guided in the formation of classes seem to be closely related to primitive conceptual forms and the division of classes in myth to the degree that we are able to gain insight into them.32 Here too, it can be demonstrated that language, as a spiritual total-form, stands on the border between myth and logos and that it also constitutes a midway point and mediation between the theoretical view and the aesthetic view of the world. That the closest and most common form of linguistic class formation – the separation of nouns into the three “genders” of masculine, feminine, and neuter – is also permeated by such half-mythical, half-aesthetic motives still unmistakably emerges in the individual applications that this principle undergoes. Especially those philologists who combined the greatest depth and subtlety of artistic intuition with powerful and rigorous grammatical and logical analysis have, therefore, believed that they were able to apprehend the principle of linguistic concept formation at its very source and to be able, as it were, to directly eavesdrop on it. Jacob Grimm derived the difference of gender in the Indo-European languages from a transference of natural gender that had



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already taken place in the earliest period of language. He attributed a “natural beginning” not only to the masculine and feminine but to the neuter as well, whose source he sought in the “concept of the foetus or proles of living creatures.”33 If Grimm further attempted to show that the masculine designates the earlier, larger, more solid, more resistant, the active, mobile, and generative; that the feminine designates the later, smaller, softer, quieter, the suffering and receptive; and that the neuter indicates whatever is engendered, what is worked on, the material, general, collective, undeveloped, then, to be sure, modern linguistics have followed him only in part. Even in the sphere of Indo-European philology, Grimm’s aesthetic theory was countered by Brugmann’s more mundane theory that grounded the extending of the difference in gender to all nouns not in any essential general direction of linguistic fantasy but in certain formal and, in a certain sense, accidental analogies. In the working out [Ausbildung] and fixing of this difference, language was guided not by an intuition of the vitalization and ensoulment of things but rather by essentially insignificant similarities in phonetic form; thus, for example, from the circumstance that certain “natural Feminines,” certain designations for feminine nature [Wesen], ended in -a (-η), all nouns having this ending came gradually to be assigned to the class of the “feminine” by a process of pure association.34 There have been many attempts of establishing mediating theories that attempted to trace the working out [Ausbildung] of grammatical gender in part back to intuitive content, in part to formal motives and an attempt to delimit the effectiveness of both.35 Of course, the underlying problem here could be apprehended in its full significance and scope only as the expansion of linguistic research beyond the Indo-European and Semitic families made it increasingly evident that the difference of gender in these languages, as it exists in the Indo-European and Semitic languages, is only a special case and perhaps a remnant of far-richer and far more sharply elaborated class divisions. Judging from such divisions, in particular as they are present in the Bantu languages, it is beyond doubt that the differentiation of gender, in the sense of “sex,” takes up only a relatively small place in the totality of means that language operates in the expression [Ausprägung] of “generic” differentiations and that consequently it can be apprehended only as a discrete directional trend in linguistic fantasy and not a general and enduring principle. Indeed, many languages

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know nothing of the separation of nouns according to natural gender or any analogy based on it. In these languages, the masculine and feminine gender are not distinguished at all in inanimate beings [Wesen], whereas in the case of animals, it is either expressed by specific words or designated by the addition of a word to the general name of the species that contains the specific designation of gender. This designation occurs even in the human sphere; for example, by an addition of this sort, a general term such as child or servant is transformed into the expression for son or daughter, manservant or maidservant, etc.36 Humboldt, who, like Jacob Grimm, locates the origins of linguistic class division in a basic function of the linguistic “faculty of the imagination,” consequently interprets this faculty in a broader sense by starting not from the difference of natural gender but from the general difference between the animate and inanimate. He relies here essentially on his observation that although most of the American indigenous languages either do not designate at all the difference in natural gender or do so only occasionally and incompletely, they always manifest the keenest sense of the opposition between animate objects and inanimate objects. The whole structure of the Algonquin language is governed by this opposition. A particular suffix (-a) designates an object [Objekt] that conjoins the properties of life and independent movement; another (-i) designates objects lacking in these attributes. Every verb or noun must fall into one or the other of these classes: whereas, of course, the subordination not only is based on the characteristic traits that are presented by pure empirical observation but is also decisively codetermined by the tendency of mythical fantasy and the mythical vitalization of nature. Thus, in these languages, for example, a great number of plants – among them the most important plant types, such as corn and tobacco – are attributed to the class of animate objects.37 If elsewhere the heavenly bodies are grammatically displaced into the same class with humans and animals, then Humboldt sees here the clearest evidence that, in the thinking of these peoples, this identification takes place as they are, as moving by their own force and presumably also conducting human fates from above, regarded as beings gifted with a personality.38 If the conclusion asserted here were correct, it would prove that in such class divisions, language was indeed still immediately interwoven with mythical thinking and representing but that it had already begun to rise above the first



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basic, primitive stratum of this thinking. For whereas this stratum is still dominated by a form of “pan-animism” that uniformly embraces and permeates the whole of the world and every particular existence in it, in the application that language tends to make of the opposition between the class of persons and that of things [Sache], there gradually emerges from the general sphere of “life” an ever-more-determinate, personal, self-conscious existence, as a being endowed with a distinctive significance and distinctive value. In the Dravidian languages, for example, all nouns fall into two classes: one of which encompasses “reasoning” beings [Wesen], and the other encompasses “unreasoning” beings [Wesen] – to the first belong the human, gods, and demigods, to the second inanimate things and animals.39 The incision that is made here through the whole of the world is based on an essentially other principle than the conciliate and, as it were, differentlessness [differenzlos] mythical animation of the universe [All]. The Bantu languages also sharply separate in their system of classes between the human as an independently acting personality and every sort of animated but not personal being. They use a special prefix for spirits, inasmuch as they are thought of not as independent personalities but as what animates or as something that befalls a human and are furnished with the same prefix used for such natural forces, especially those of illness, distant smoke, fire, streams, and the moon.40 The apprehension of a personal-spiritual being and effective action in the restricted sense has created in language an expression of its own, by virtue of which it is able to separate itself from the merely animistic representation of life and the soul, from the view of the soul as a universal, but in this universality initially completely indeterminate mythical potency. As a result, we see here again that the separation into a particular class of people and a class of things [Sachen], as well as the correlation of individual objects to each one of these two classes, does not ensue according to “objective” criteria but that the conceptual-logical framework [Gefüge] of reality, as it presents in language, is still wholly permeated and imbued with purely subjective differences that can be apprehended only by immediate feeling. This correlation is never determined only by acts of perception or judgment but always, at the same time, by acts of the affect and will, by acts of inner attitudes. Accordingly, it is a frequent occurrence that the name of a thing [Ding] that belongs to the

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class of things [Sachen] is converted into the class of people so that the object spoken about is singled out for its value and its importance and to characterize it as particularly significant.41 Even in languages that, in the present structure that is known to us, have implemented the difference of nouns according to natural gender, sometimes reveal, by the manner in which they employ this difference, a glimmer that goes back to an older differentiation between the class of persons and the class of things [Sachen], which was also felt as a differentiation of value.42 As distinctive as such phenomena may seem at first glance, the basic principle of linguistic concept formation in general nevertheless discloses itself in them. Language never simply follows the tendency [Zug] of impressions and representations but confronts them with an independent action: it distinguishes, selects, and directs and by virtue of this approach first creates certain centers, certain focal points of objective intuition. This penetration of the world of sensible impressions with the inner measures of judgment and evaluation entails that the theoretical nuances of signification and the affective nuances of value initially tend to merge into one another. The inner logic of language nevertheless manifests itself in that the differentiation that it creates does not immediately pass and vanish but possesses a kind of tendency to persist, a distinctive logical consistency and necessity, by virtue of which it not only maintains itself but progressively spreads from particular spheres of language formation over the whole. Through the rules of congruence that govern the grammatical structure of language and that are present in the most precise formation [Durchbildung] – namely, in linguistic prefixes and classes – the conceptual differences applied to the noun are transferred to the totality [Gesamtheit] of all linguistic forms. In Bantu, every word that enters into an attributive or predicative relation to a substantive, every numerical determination, every adjective or pronoun by which it is designated in greater detail, must assume the characteristic class prefix of that word. Similarly, the verb refers through a special prefix to its nominative subject and to the word that it adheres to in the relationship of an accusative object [Objekt].43 Thus, the principle of class division, once formed, not only governs the configuration of nouns but subsequently spreads over the whole syntactical construction [Fügung] of language and becomes the actual expression of its interconnection, its spiritual “articulation.” Here the achievement of linguistic fantasy [Sprachphantasie] seems to



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be closely linked throughout with a specific methodology of linguistic thinking. Once again, language, with all its commitment to and entanglement with the world of the sensible and the world of the imaginative, reveals a tendency and force toward the logical-universal, through which it progressively liberates and attains to a purer and more independent spirituality of its form.

ENDNOTES   1 Cf. above, 71ff.   2 Christoph Sigwart, Logic, vol. 1, Die Lehre vom Urteil, vom Begriff und vom Schluss (Freiburg im Breisgau: J. C. B. Mohr, 1889), 320ff.   3 Hermann Lotze, Logik: Drei Bücher vom Denken vom Untersuchen und vom Erkennen (System der Philosophie, vol. I, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1880), 16.   4 Ibid., 14ff. and 29ff.   5 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 47ff.; cf. the remarks of Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntar, vol. 1, 42.   6 Cf. Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 59 f., 89 f., 190 f., etc.; see 158ff., above.   7 A highly interesting and instructive attempt to carry out this task was performed by James Byrne on the basis of an extraordinary wealth of empirical material. See General Principles of the Structure of Language (2 vols., London: Trubner & Co, 1885).   8 Cf. Lazarus Geiger, Ursprung und Entwicklung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft, 2 vols. (Stuttgart:  J.B. Cotta, 1868/1872); Noiré, Der Ursprung der Sprache, especially 323ff., idem, Logos-Ursprung und Wesen der Begriffe, especially 296ff.   9 Cf. Meinhof’s essay, “Einwirkung der Beschäftigung auf die Sprache bei den Bantustimmen Afrikas,” Globus, vol. 75 (1899): 361ff. 10 Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1896), especially 317ff. 11 We cite an example of this process from H. K. Heinrich Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Ägypter (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1888), 53: In ancient Egyptian the word kod designates successively the most diverse concepts: to make pots, to be a potter, to form, create, build, work, draw, navigate, travel, sleep; and substantivetly: likeness, image, metaphor, similarity, circle, ring. The originary representation, “to turn around, to turn in a circle,” underlies all these and similar derivatives. The turning of the potter’s wheel evoked the representation of the potter’s formative activity, out of which grew the significations “form, create, build, work.” 12 This twofold path can perhaps most clearly be followed in the configuration of the linguistic expression of activity, the verb, receives in the inflected languages. Two entirely different functions unite and permeate one another here,

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for the verb is the clearest expression of the power of objectivization, on the one hand, and of the power of personification, on the other. The first element was already noted by Humboldt, who regarded the verb as the immediate linguistic expression of the spiritual “act of synthetic positing.” By one and the same synthetic act, it joins the predicate with the subject in being, but in this fashion being, which with an energetic predicate passes into an activity, is attributed to the subject, so that what was thought of as merely linkable in thought becomes an existing thing or an event in reality. It is not merely that we think of the striking lightning, it is the lightning itself that strikes. . . . The thought, if one may express oneself in such sensible terms, leaves its inner dwelling place with the help of the verb and passes into reality. (Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. l, 214.)

On the other hand, Paul, for example, points out that the linguistic form of the verb as such embodies an element of animation of nature, akin to the mythical animation of the universe: “a certain degree of personification of the subject” is implicit in the use of the verb (Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 3rd ed., 89). 13 Ibid., 148ff. 14 Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. 1, 120. 15 James Hammond Trumbull, “On the Best Method of Studying the North American Languages,” in Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1869–70 (Hartford, 1871), 55–79; cf. Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, 2nd ed., 61. For details, see the examples from the Algonquin and Sioux languages in Boas, Handbook, I, 807ff., 902ff., etc. 16 Cf. Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. 2, 5. 17 Steinen, Unter den naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und ergebnisse der zweiten Schingú-expedition, 1887-1888, 2nd ed., 84. 18 Cf. Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, “Das Kamel,” in Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-Historischen Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vols. 6 and 7 (1855ff.). 19 Hermann Osthoff, Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen. Akademische Rede zur feier des geburtsfestes des höchstseligen grossherzogs Karl Friedrich am 22. november 1899, bei dem vortrag des jahresberichts und der verkündung der akademischen preise gehalten von Dr. Hermann Osthoff (Heidelberg: J. Hörning, 1899), 42. 20 Georg Curtius, Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, 5th ed., 98ff.; on the whole subject, see Osthoff, Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen. 21 Cf. my book, Substance and Function, especially chap. 1 and 4. 22 Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 15ff. 23 There is no doubt that many of these “classifying suffixes,” like other suffixes, go back to concrete substantives (cf. chap. 5), though in the Indo-European languages, etymological proof of this relationship seems largely impossible; cf. Brugmann and Delbrück, Grundriss, 2nd ed., vol. 2, part 2, 184, 582ff., etc. 24 Ibid., 58.



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25 Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 146ff. Among the Native American languages, Haida, for example, divides all nouns into groups distinguished by sensible characters; e.g., long, thin, round, flat, angular, thread-shaped objects, each form a separate group. Cf. John R. Swanton, “Haida,” in Boas, Handbook, 1, 216, 227ff. 26 See the account of the class prefixes in Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 8ff., 16ff. 27 Cf. Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, 2nd ed., 48. In the Ponca language, which distinguishes between animate and inanimate objects, special prefixes indicate a resting member of the first class, a moving member, a single animate being that is standing, one that is sitting, etc. Cf. Boas and John R. Swanton, “Siouan,” in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 940. 28 Ibid., 157ff. 29 Particularly characteristic of this process is the highly remarkable classification system of the South Andaman languages, described in detail by Edward Horace Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, with Report of Researches into the Language of the South Andaman Island by A. J. Ellis (London: Trubner, 1883). A supplement to this has been given by Maurice Vidal Portman, Notes on the Languages of the South Andaman Group of Tribes (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1898). In this system, human beings form a special class, which is distinguished from other nouns; next, the particular parts of the body and terms of kinship are divided into groups, which are sharply differentiated. Each group, for example, has its own set of possessive pronouns; its own special terms for mine, thine, his; etc. The parts of the body and the kinship groups are related by various coordinations and “identities.” (Cf. Edward Horace Man, 51ff., and Maurice Vidal Portman, 37ff.) 30 Cf. the presentation of the system of “locative prefixes” in Karl Meinhof, Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, 19ff. 31 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 104. 32 Cf. my essay Die Begriffsform im Mythischen Denken, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 1. [“The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 1–71.] 33 [J. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, vol. III, 317 f.] 34 Brugmann, “Das grammatische Geschlecht in den indogermanischen Sprachen,” in Techmer’s Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 4, 100ff.; cf. also Kurze vergleichende Grammatik, 361 f. 35 Cf. for example, Wilhelm Wilmans, Deutsche Grammatik, vol. 3, 725ff. 36 This method is most typical of the Finno-Ugric and Altaic languages, none of which have designations of gender in the Indo-Germanic sense, but it is also widespread in other groups. For the Altaic languages, see Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, 343 and Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache, 22ff. For other languages, see Heinrich C. von der Gabelentz, Die Melanesischen Sprachen, 88; Westermann, Die Sudansprachen, 39ff.; Matthews,

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“Languages of Some Native Tribes of Queensland,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 36 (1902): 148, 168. 37 On the classification of the Algonquin languages, see W. Jones, “Algonquin” (Fox), in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 760ff. 38 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. l, 172ff. 39 Müller, Grundriss, vol. 3, part I, 173; Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 1858, 83. 40 See, for example, Karl Meinhof, Grammatik der Bantusprechen, 6ff. 41 In the Gola language of Liberia (according to Westermann, Die Gola-Sprache, 27), a noun that ordinarily takes another prefix takes the o- prefix of the human and animal class if it is to be stressed as particularly large, outstanding, or valuable. These qualities place it in the class of living creatures: Side by side with kerie, oil palm, they say osie, thus characterizing this palm as one of the most important trees; kekul, tree, but okul, a particularly large, beautiful tree; ebu, field, but obuo, the beautiful, luxuriantly growing field. Trees or other objects which speak in fairytales are also put into this o-dass. In the Algonquin languages, small animals are often assigned to the class of “inanimate” objects, while particularly important plants are assigned to the “animate” class. See above 258f. and Boas, Handbook; I, 36. 42 Characteristic examples of this are cited by Meinhof and Reinisch from the Bedauye language, where, for example, ša’, the cow, as the main support of the whole economy, is masculine, whereas ša’, the meat, is feminine, because it is less important (see Karl Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, 139). Likewise, in the Semitic languages, according to Brockelmann, Grundriss, 1, 404ff., the division of nouns between the masculine and feminine genders probably had originally nothing to do with natural sex but was rather based on a differentiation of rank and value, vestiges of which are still discernible in the use of the feminine as a pejorative and diminutive. Cf. Brockelmann, Grundriss, vol. 2, 418ff., and Kurzgefasste Vergleichende Grammatik Der Semitischen Sprachen, Elemente Der Laut- Und Formenlehre, 198ff. 43 Cf. the account of the syntax of the Bantu languages in Meinhof, op. cit., 83ff. A similar phenomenon prevails in most of the American Indian languages; cf. Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, 2nd ed., 48ff.

V LANGUAGE AND THE EXPRESSION OF THE PURE FORMS OF RELATION: THE SPHERE OF JUDGMENT AND THE CONCEPTS OF RELATION [RELATION] For the epistemo-critical consideration, an unbroken path leads from the sphere of sense sensation to that of intuition, from intuition to conceptual thinking, and from there further to logical judgment. Yet in following this path, the critique of cognition is aware that as sharply as the individual phases of this path must be distinguished from one another in reflection, they must never be regarded as the independent givennesses [Gegebenheiten] of consciousness existing separately from one another. Rather, not only does each complex element here include the simpler ones, not only does each “later” element include the “earlier” one, but conversely the latter is prepared and laid out in the former. All of the components that constitute the concept of cognition are related to each other and to the common goal of cognition, to the “object”: a

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rigorous analysis can, therefore, discover in each one of them a pointing to all the others. The function of simple sensation and perception is not merely “combined” with the basic intellectual functions of comprehension, judgment, and inference but is already such a basic function – it implicitly contains what emerges there in conscious forming [Formung] and in independent configuration. It is to be expected that in language, too, the same indissoluble correlation of the spiritual means, with which it constructs its world, will prove that here too each of its particular motives already contains the universality of its form and specific totality [Ganze] of this form in itself. And this proves in fact that not the simple word but the sentence is initially the true and original element [Element] of all language formation. This cognition, too, is among the fundamental insights that Humboldt has contributed once and for all to the philosophical consideration of language. Humboldt stresses: It is impossible to think the origin [Entstehung] of language as beginning from the designation of objects by words and proceeding from there to their coalescence. In reality, speech [Rede] is not put together out of words that preceded it, rather words emerge from the whole of speech.1 281

The conclusion that Humboldt drew from a basic speculative concept underlying his systematic philosophy of language  – from the concept of “synthesis” as the source of all thinking and speaking2 – has been fully confirmed in all its parts by an empirical-psychological analysis. It, too, regards the “primacy of the sentence over the word” as one of its first and most secure findings.3 We are brought to the same results by the history of language, which at every point seems to teach that the separating out of individual words from the whole of the sentence and the delimitation of the individual parts of speech from one another were only gradually accomplished and were almost totally lacking in early and primitive configurations of language.4 Here too, language proves to be an organism in which, according to the well-known Aristotelian definition, the whole is prior to its parts. Language begins with a complex total expression that only gradually breaks down into its elements [Elemente] into relatively independent subsidiary units. As far back as we can trace it, language always already presents itself as a formed unity. None of its



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manifestations can be understood as a mere togetherness of individual material significant sounds; rather, in each of them, we likewise encounter determinations that serve purely the expression of the relation between the individual elements [Einzelelemente] and that structure and nuance this relation in a variety of ways. Indeed, this expectation does not seem to be fulfilled if we envisage the structure of the so-called isolating languages, which have in fact often been cited as direct proof of the possibility and reality of absolutely “formless” languages. The aforementioned relationship between the sentence and the word not only does not seem to be confirmed here but also appears to immediately change into its opposite. The word appears to possess that independence, that genuine “substantiality” by virtue of which it “is” in itself and from which alone it must be comprehended. The individual words simply stand side by side in the sentence as the material bearers of signification, without their grammatical relation made explicit in any way. In Chinese, which forms the principal example of this type of isolating language, one and the same word may serve as a substantive, adjective, adverb, or verb. Without this, the diversity of the grammatical category in itself is not recognizable in any way. And the fact that the substantive is used in this or that number or case, or a verb in this or that genus, tense, or mood, is in no way expressed in the phonetic form [Lautgestalt] of the word. Philosophers of language have long believed, by virtue of this configuration of Chinese, to be able to gain a glimpse into that originary period of language formation in which all human speech consisted in the stringing together of simple monosyllabic “roots”: a belief that has, to be sure, been progressively discredited by historical [historisch] research, which showed that the strict isolation prevailing in Chinese was by no means an original constituent [Bestand] but a mediated and derivative result. The assumption that the words in Chinese had never undergone a transformation and that this language had never possessed any kind of morphology becomes untenable, as Georg von der Gabelentz has pointed out, as soon as Chinese is compared to those languages that are most closely related to it. Here it at once becomes apparent that Chinese still contains a number of traces of an older agglutinative and even inflectional formation. In this respect, the development of Chinese has often been compared to that of modern English, where a transition from an inflected to a relatively

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uninflected state seems to have taken place before our very eyes.5 Even more significant than such historical transitions, however, is the fact that where pure isolation has finally prevailed, this by no means implied the progress to “formlessness,” but rather, in a seemingly resistant material, that forceful power of form has imprinted itself most energetically and with the greatest clarity. For the isolation of words from one another is far from sublating the content [Gehalt] and ideal sense of the sentence form, as long as the different logical-grammatical relationships of individual words are clearly expressed in the word order [Wortstellung], without recourse to phonetic changes in the words. This medium of word order [Wortstellung], which Chinese has developed to the highest consistency and sharpness, might indeed, from a purely logical point of view, be regarded as the only truly adequate medium of expressing grammatical relationships. For just as relationships, which themselves, so to speak, possess no proper representative substrate of their own but merge into pure relations, so too would it seem possible to designate them more certainly and more clearly by the mere relation [Relation] that expresses itself in position than through their own words and phonic constructions. In this sense, Humboldt, who in general regarded the inflected languages as the manifestation of the complete “pure lawful form” of language, said that the essential advantage of Chinese lay in the consistency with which it carried out the principle of inflectionlessness. Precisely, the ostensible absence of all grammar had to recognize the sharpness of sense, the formal interconnection of speech, raised in the spirit of the nation; the less outward grammar the Chinese language possesses, the more inner grammar inheres in it.6 Indeed, the rigor of the construction taking place here is so great that it has been said of Chinese syntax that in all its essential parts it is nothing other than the logically consistent development of a few basic laws, from which all special applications can be derived by pure logical deduction.7 If we compare this subtlety of the organization of language with other isolating languages of a primitive imprint [Prägung] – such as the pure isolating languages of the Ewe8 – it immediately becomes palpable how the most diverse gradations and extreme oppositions are possible within a single “linguistic type.” One of the flaws in Schleicher’s attempt to determine the nature [Wesen] of language on the basis of the relationship established between signification and relation, and, accordingly, to construct a progressive dialectical series in



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which the isolating, agglutinative, and inflected languages stand to one another as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,9 was that it distorted its own principle of classification by failing to consider the different configuration that this relationship between “relation” and “signification” could assume within one and the same type. Moreover, the rigid demarcation between inflected and agglutinative types has gradually broken down in the light of empirical historical [historisch] research.10 Here too, that relationship between “being” [Wesen] and “form,” which is expressed in the old Scholastic dictum forma dat esse rei [form gives being to the thing], is also confirmed for language. As it is not possible for a critique of cognition to extract the matter of cognition from its form so that both appear as independent contents that are only externally combined with one another; rather, here both elements can be thought and defined only in relation to one another. And likewise in language, pure and naked matter is nothing more than an abstraction – as a boundary concept of method to which no immediate “reality,” no real and factual consistent existence corresponds. Even in the inflected languages, in which the opposition between the expression of substantial signification and the expression of formal relation is most clearly manifested, the equilibrium between the two elements of expression shows itself to be to a certain extent an unstable equilibrium. For clearly as the categorial concepts are in general distinguished from the concepts of matter and thing [Sache], there is a constant transition between the two domains, as it is precisely the material concepts [Sachbegriffe] that serve as a basis for the presentation of relations. This state of affairs most clearly emerges when we consider the etymological origins of the suffixes that are used in the inflected languages for the expression of quality, property, type, character, etc. With a large number of these suffixes, the material significance that they descended from is immediately exhibited and secured through etymological consideration. A concrete, sensible-objective expression always appears here as a foundation, which, however, is stripped more and more of this initial character and transformed into a general expressive relationship.11 Only through this application of suffixes was the soil prepared for the linguistic designation of pure concepts of relation. What initially served as a special thing-designation transitioned into the expression of a categorial form of determination – e.g., into the expression of the concept

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of property as such.12 However, if, from a psychological standpoint, this transition bears, so to speak, a negative omen, then there is, nevertheless, expressed in this negation a positive act of language formation. At first sight, to be sure, the development of suffixes might seem to be essentially characterized by the fact that the basic substantial signification of the word, from which the suffixes are derived, is more and more thrust into the background and ultimately forgotten altogether. This forgetfulness often goes so far that new suffix formations may emerge that owe their origin to no concrete intuition but, so to speak, to what one might call a misguided impulsion of linguistic formation of form and analogy. Thus, as is well known, in German the formation of the suffix -keit goes back to a linguistic “misunderstanding” of this sort: in formations such as êwic-heit, the final consonant c of the stem of the word blended with the initial vowel h of the suffix, so as to form a new suffix, which was propagated by analogy.13 However, from a purely formal and grammatical point of view, such processes are regarded as “aberrations” of linguistic sense; they are not simply the wrong path of language but rather constitute the rising up to a new form of sight [Formansicht], the transition from substantial expression to the pure expression of relation. The psychological obscuring of the former becomes a logical means and vehicle for the progressive working out [Ausbildung] of the latter. Of course, to bring this progress to consciousness, we must not stop at the simple phenomena of word formation. Rather, its basic tendency and its law can be apprehended only in the relationships of sentence formation  – for, if the sentence as a whole is the actual bearer of linguistic “sense,” then only through an investigation of the sentence can the logical shadings of this sense clearly emerge. By its very form, every sentence, even the so-called simple sentence, embodies the possibility of such an inner organization and contains the demand of such an organization. This can take place, however, in different degrees and stages. The force of synthesis may at one moment outweigh that of analysis – or conversely, the analytical force of separation may attain a relatively high development [Ausbildung] without that it conforms to the combination [Zusammenfassung] of an equally strong force. What we call the “form” of each specific language originates in the dynamic interaction and tension between the two forces. If we consider, for example, the form of the so-called polysynthetic languages, then the impulse toward connection seems very much



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predominant here – an impulse that expresses itself, above all, in the striving to present, materially and outwardly, the functional unity of linguistic sense in a highly complex but self-contained phonetic construction [Fügung]. The whole of sense is condensed into a single word-sentence in which it appears, as it were, encased in a rigid shell. This unity of linguistic expression is, however, not yet a truly intelligible unity, since it can be achieved only at the expense of the logical universality of this expression. The more modifying determinations that the word-sentence acquires through the incorporation of whole words or individual particles, the more it serves for the designation of a particular concrete situation, which it seeks to exhaust in all its individual details but which it cannot connect with other, similar situations to form a comprehensive general context.14 By contrast, for example, we find in the inflected languages an entirely different relationship between the two basic forces of analysis and synthesis, separation and unification. Word-unity already contains here, as it were, an inner tension and its reconciliation [Ausgleichung] and overcoming. The word is constructed from two distinct yet insolubly interlinked and interrelated elements. One component that only serves the objective designation of the concept confronts here another whose sole function is to displace the word in a determinate category of thinking, to characterize it as a “substantive,” “adjective,” “verb,” as a “subject” or direct or indirect object [Objekt]. The index of relation, by virtue of which the individual word is connected with the totality of the sentence, is no longer attached here to the word from without but fuses with it and becomes one of its constitutive elements [Elemente].15 The differentiating into the word and the integrating into the sentence form correlative methods that join together into a single strictly uniform achievement. Humboldt, and the older philosophers of language, looked on this state of affairs as proof that truly inflected languages constitute the summit of language formation in general and that in them, and only in them, the “pure lawful form” of language expressed itself in ideal perfection. However, even if we possess a certain reservation and skepticism toward the establishment of such an absolute measure of value, it is obvious that the inflected languages provide a highly important and effective organ for the development of pure relational thinking. The more that this thinking progresses, the more determinately that it must configure the organization of speech after itself – because this organization reacts decisively on the form of thinking.

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And the same progress toward the ever-sharper organization, the same progress from the unity of a mere aggregate to the unity of a systematic “form,” is evident when we advance from the relationship of the word to the sentence to the connection among individual sentences. In the earliest stages of language formation, to which we can psychologically return, the simple parataxis forms the basic rule of the structure of the sentence. The language of children is everywhere governed by this principle.16 One sentence component threads to another in mere parataxis, and where several sentences come together, they disclose, for the most part, only a loose asyndetic combination. The individual sentences can follow each other as if strung on a string, but they are not yet inwardly linked with one another and “joined” [gefügt] into one another as long as there is no linguistic means by which to designate in sharp differentiation their superordination and subordination. If, therefore, the Greek grammarians and rhetoricians saw the hallmark of the style of speech in the development of the period, in which sentences do not run along in an indeterminate sequence, but bore and support one another like the stones of an arch,17 then indeed, this “style” of language is their ultimate and highest product. It is lacking in the languages of natural peoples18 but appears to have been acquired only gradually in the highly developed cultural languages. Here too, a complex intellectual relationship of a causal or teleological nature – a relationship of ground and consequence, of condition and conditioned, of ends and means, etc. – must be rendered by simple coordination. An absolute sentence construction [Satzfügung], comparable to the Latin ablative absolute or the Greek genitive absolute, often serves to indicate such complex relations as “while” and “after,” of “because” and “hence,” of “although” and “so that.” The individual thoughts that constitute speech lie here, as it were, on a single linguistic plane: there is still no differentiation of perspective between foreground and background in speech.19 Language demonstrates the force of differentiation and organization in the “togetherness” of the parts of the sentence; however, it never succeeds in raising this purely static relationship to a dynamic relationship of reciprocal-intellectual dependence and to bring it, as such, to explicit presentation. Rather than the layering and precise gradation of subordinate clauses, a simple gerundial construction may serve, without departing from the law of coordination, to express the most diverse determinations and modifications



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of action, joining them together into a stable but also distinctively rigid framework [Gefüge].20 This form of thought and speech finds a negative, but no less characteristic, expression in the absence of those classes of words that – as the grammarians’ term for them suggests – must be regarded as one of the basic mediums of relational thinking and of the linguistic expression of relation. The relative pronoun appears to be a late development of language and, if we survey the totality of languages, a rather rare development. Before language arrives at this formation, the relationships, which we express by relative clauses, must be rendered by more-complex or less-complex sentence constructions [Satzfügungen]. Humboldt has illustrated various methods of this description with examples from the American indigenous languages, particularly from the Peruvian and Mexican languages.21 The Melanesian languages also use a simple parataxis in place of subordination by relative sentences and relative pronouns.22 Heinrich Winkler points out that fundamentally the Ural-Altaic family has no room for independent subordinate units and that accordingly none of its members originally had relative conjunctions, or at most had feeble suggestions of them. Where such conjunctions were later used, they were usually, if not always, derived from pure interrogatives. Particularly, the Western FinnoUgrian group of the Ural-Altaic languages have developed such relative pronouns derived from interrogatives, but here Indo-European influence may have played a part.23 In other languages, independent relative clauses are formed by special particles but are felt to be substantive nouns and consequently preceded by the definite article or used as the subject or object [Objekt] of a sentence, as a genitive, after a preposition, etc.24 In all of these phenomena, it would seem clear how language grasps the pure category of relation [Relation] only hesitantly, as it were, and how it becomes intellectually comprehensible only indirectly through other categories, in particular through the categories of substance and property.25 And this is true even of those languages that had developed in their overall structure the proper “style” of speech, the art of hypotactic organization, to its highest refinement. Even in the Indo-European languages, which, thanks to their astonishing ability in the differentiation of the expression of relation, have been called the actual languages of philosophical idealism, developed this faculty only gradually and incrementally.26 A comparison, for example, between the structure of Greek and

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that of Sanskrit shows that in them the individual members of this group are on completely different levels with regard to the force and freedom of relational thinking and the pure expression of relation. In prehistoric times, the independent clause also seems to have been predominated over the subordinate clause, the paratactic over the hypotactic connection. If these prehistoric languages already possessed relative clauses, they still lacked, according to the evidence of comparative linguistics, a stable inventory of sharply delimited conjunctions by which to express ground, consequence, coordination, opposition, etc.27 In Vedic Sanskrit, conjunctions are almost totally lacking as a distinct class of words: what other languages, particularly Latin and Greek, express by subordinating conjunctions is tendered here by the almost-unlimited use of nominal composition and the amplification of the main clause by participles and gerunds.28 In Greek, however, the progress from the paratactic structure of the Homeric language to the hypotactic structure of Attic prose occurred only gradually.29 All this proves that what Humboldt called the act of automatic, synthetic positing in language, and what in particular he saw as distinctive (apart from the verb) in the use of conjunctions and relative pronouns was one of the last ideal goals of language formation that was attained only through a variety of mediations. In particular sharpness and clarity, this finally constitutes itself in the configuration [Ausgestaltung] of that form of language whose basic significance in principle separates itself from all tangible-substantive expressions in order to serve uniquely the expression of synthesis as such, as the expression of pure connection. In the use of the copula the logical synthesis, which is carried out in judgment, first obtains its adequate linguistic designation and determination. Kant already pointed to this interconnection in his analysis of the pure function of judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason. Judgment signifies for Kant the “unity of action,”30 by which the predicate is referred to the subject and connected with it to the totality of sense [Sinnganzen], to the unity of an objectively consistent and objectively grounded interconnection. This intellectual unity of action finds its presentation and counterpart in the linguistic use of the copula. In the section on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, Kant writes: If, however, I investigate more closely the relation of given cognitions in every judgment, and distinguish that relation, as something belonging



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to the understanding, from the relationship in accordance with laws of the reproductive imagination (which has only subjective validity), then I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception. This is the aim of the copula [Verhältniswörtchen] is in them: to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from the subjective. For this designates the relation of these representations to the original apperception, and also their necessary unity.31

If I say “bodies are heavy,” this means that corporality and heaviness are joined with one another in the object [Objekt] and not merely that they always coexist in subjective perception. Thus, even for Kant, the pure logician, the relation between the objective sense of judgment and the linguistic form of a predicative statement is close. It is certainly clear, however, that the development of language could only gradually advance toward the abstraction of that pure being that is expressed in the copula. For language, which originally remains entirely bound up with the intuition of substantial-objective existence, the expression of “being,” as a pure transcendental form of relation, can only be a late product arrived at through a variety of mediations. It can be shown that a great many languages knew nothing of the copula, in our logical-grammatical sense, and had no need of one. A unitary and general expression of what is designated in our “copula is” [Verhältniswörtchen: little word of relation], is not only lacking in the languages of natural peoples – as in most of the African languages, the indigenous American languages, etc. – but is not to be found in other, highly developed languages. Even where a differentiation of the predicative relationship from the purely attributive relationship is present, the former does not necessarily need to undergo a special linguistic attribution. Thus, in the Ural-Altaic languages, for example, the combination of the subject expression with the predicate expression is almost entirely undertaken by a simple juxtaposition of both, so that “the city big” means “the city is big,” “I man” means “I am a man,” etc.32 In other languages, we often encounter locutions that at first sight seem to correspond to our use of the copula but that in truth fall short of the universality of its function. Here as closer analysis reveals, the “is” of the copula does not have the sense of a universal, serving the expression of the relationship per se, but possesses a particular and concrete, usually local [örtlich] or temporal, secondary significance. Instead of a pure

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relational being, we find an expression that designates existence [Existenz] in this or that place, a being-here [Da-sein] or being-over-there [Dort-Sein], or else an existence [Existenz] in this or that moment. Accordingly, there occurs here a differentiation in the use of the apparent copula according to the diverse spatial situation of the subject or further intuitive modifications with which it is given – so that another “copula” is used when the subject is standing, another when they are sitting or lying, one when they are awake, another when they are asleep, etc.33 Formal being [Sein] and the formal sense of connection are replaced here by more or less materially comprehended expressions that still bear the color of an individual sensibly given reality.34 And even where language has progressed to the point of encompassing all these particular determinations of existence [Existenz] in a general expression of being [Sein], there always exists [bestehen] a palpable distance between each of the most comprehensive expressions of mere existence [Dasein] and “being” [Sein] as an expression of a purely predicative “synthesis.” The development of language reflects a problem that extends far beyond its own ambit, which has played a decisive role in the history of logical and philosophical thinking. In this point, more clearly than in any other point, we recognize how this thinking has developed with language but, at the same time, in opposition to it. From the Eleatics down, we can follow the great struggle carried on by philosophical idealism with language and with the ambivalence of its concept of being. The precise task that Parmenides had set himself was to resolve the controversy over true being by means of pure reason. However, is this true being of the Eleatics grounded purely in the sense of logical judgment; does it correspond solely to the ἔστι [is] of the copula as the basic form of every valid statement; or does it retain some vestige of another, a more concrete, originary signification [Urbedeutung], by which it is comparable to the intuition of a “well-rounded sphere”? Parmenides had undertaken to free himself from the fetters of the common, sensible view of the world, and the fetters of language. As Parmenides proclaimed: for this reason . . . all is mere name, what the mortals have established in the conviction it was true: namely to become and to pass away, to be and likewise not-to-be, like the alteration of place and the changing of luminous color.35



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And yet in the expression of his supreme principle, he, too, succumbed to the forceful power of speech and the dazzling diversity of its concept of being. In the basic Eleatic formula, in the sentence ἔστι τὸ εἶναι (being is), the verbal and substantival, the predicative and absolute significance of being immediately merge with one another. Plato, too, arrived at a sharper difference only after long intellectual struggles, which are most clearly reflected in the dialogue named after Parmenides. In the Sophists, which concludes these struggles, the logical nature of the concepts of pure relation is clearly worked out and their proper, specific “being” was determined for the first time in the history of philosophy. On the strength of this newly acquired insight, Plato was able to argue that although all earlier philosophers had sought the principle of being [Sein], what they had discovered and had taken as their foundation was not the true and radical origin of being [Sein] but only certain of its varieties, only determinate forms of beings [Seiende]. Even this pregnant formulation, however, did not sublate the opposition that is harbored in the concept of being, but only sharply designated it. This opposition runs through the entire history of medieval thought. The central problem of medieval philosophy concerns the question of how the two basic modalities of being, “essence” and “existence,” are mutually separated from each other, and how, despite this delimitation, they are to be united with one another. In the ontological proof of the existence of God, as the speculative center of medieval theology and metaphysics, this question undergoes its most extreme intensification. However, even the modern, critical form of idealism, which renounced the “proud name of ontology” and more modestly called itself the “analytic of the pure understanding,”36 found itself involved again and again in the ambiguity of the concept of being. Even after Kant’s critique of the ontological proofs, Fichte found it necessary to point explicitly to the difference between predicative and absolute being. In his Foundations [Grund­ lage] of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte sets forward the principle [Satz] “A is A” as the first, absolutely unconditioned grounding principle [Grundsatz] of all philosophy and added that this principle, in which the “is” has the sole significance of the logical copula, says [ausgesagt: predicated] nothing whatsoever regarding the existence [Existenz] or non-existence of A. Being without a predicate expresses something entirely different from being with a predicate: the principle “A is A” asserts only that if A is, then A is; it does not so much as raise the question of whether A truly is or not.37

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If, in this way, philosophical thinking continually wrestled with the differentiation between two concepts of being, it is understandable that in linguistic thinking the two occur from the beginning in the closest entanglement with one another and that the pure sense of the copula could only very gradually be disengaged from this entanglement. The fact that language used the same word to designate the concept of existence [Existenz] and the predicative combination is a widespread phenomenon, not limited to a few linguistic families. To consider only the Indo-European languages, we see everywhere that the manifold designations used in the presentation of predicative being are all based on the originary signification of “existence” [Dasein]: either in a very general sense [Sinn] as mere being-present [Vorhandensein] or in a particular and concrete sense as living and breathing, growing and becoming, enduring and dwelling. As Brugmann writes: The copula, was originally a verb of intuitive significance (the basic significance of *es-mi “I am” is unknown, the oldest demonstrable one is “I exist” [existiere] and the substantive or adjective stood in apposition to the subject that was posited in relation to the predicative verb (the earth is a ball = the earth exists as a ball). The so-called degeneration of the verb into a copula occurred when the emphasis shifted to the predicate noun, so that the representational content of the verb lost its importance and vanished. The verb, thus, became a mere wordform. . . . In the ur-Indo-European period, es- “to be” assuredly functioned as a copula, and probably forms of bheu- “to grow, to become,” which, at that time, entered into a suppletive relation with es-.38

The differentiation in the use of the two roots seems to have developed as follows: “es” (“as”) was taken as an expression of uniformly constant existence [Existenz] and accordingly used for the formation of durative forms of the present stem, while the root bheu, as the expression of becoming, was eminently used for such verb tenses [Zeitform] as the aorist and the perfect, designating an incipient or completed event [Geschehen] (cf. ἔ-φυ-ν, πέ-φύ-κα, “fui”).39 The basic and originary sensible significance of the latter root is still apparent in words such as φύω “I engender” and φύομαι “I grow.” In Germanic, the root bheu entered into the formation of the present stem (“ich bin, du bist,” etc.), and the



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auxiliary root “ues” (Gothic “wisan,” “I was,” etc.), with the original the sense of “dwelling” and “enduring” (OHG “wërên”), also came into use. Still different was the development in the Romance languages, where the expression of the concept of being appears attached to the intuitive significance of standing.40 And just as the expression of being is here based on the representation of local [örtlich] stability and rest, the expression of becoming is based on the representation of motion: the intuition of becoming is developed from that of turning.41 And the general signification of becoming can also unfold from the concrete signification of coming and going.42 All this shows that even those languages in which the sense of the particular logical nature of the copula is sharply developed, distinguishing itself from others in the designation where this sense is totally lacking, or which at least has not developed into a comprehensive and universal expression, has no need of the substantive verb. Here too, the spiritual form of expression of relation can present itself only in a certain material cloak, which ultimately comes to be so permeated and overcome that it appears no longer as a mere limit but now as the sensible bearer of a pure ideal semantic content [Bedeutungsgehalt]. Thus, the same basic tendency of language that we were able to follow in all linguistic configuration of the particular concepts of relation proves itself in the general expression of relation that presents itself in the copula. It is also the same reciprocal determination of the sensible through the spiritual, the spiritual through the sensible, that we find again here – as we previously found in the linguistic presentation of the relations of space, time, number, and the I. It would seem obvious to interpret in a sensationalist sense the intimate entanglement that the two elements in language enter into – and, in fact, Locke, on the basis of such an interpretation, has already claimed language as one of the main supports for his basic empiricist view of cognition.43 However, even for linguistic thinking, we must counter such interpretations by evoking the sharp difference that Kant, in his critique of cognition, made between “beginning with” [Anheben] and “arising from” [Entspringen]. If, in the emergence of language, the sensible and the intellectual seem insolubly interwoven in one another, then this correlation, precisely as such, does not justify the relationship of a one-sided dependency between the two. For intellectual expression would not have been able to develop through and out of sensibleness if it had not originally been contained in it; if not, to speak with

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Herder, even the sensible designation did not already embrace an act of “reflection,” a basic act of “mindfulness” in itself. The maxim πάντα θεῖα καὶ ἀνθρώπινα πάντα [all things, divine and human] may find nowhere such a ringing endorsement as in the theory of signification and form in the highly developed languages: the actual content [Gehalt] of language is not grasped in the opposition between the two extremes of the sensible and the intellectual, because in all its achievements and in every individual phase of its progress, language shows itself to be at once a sensible and intellectual form of expression.

ENDNOTES   1 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, 72ff.; cf. especially 143.   2 Cf. ibid., 104.   3 This primacy is asserted by Wundt and particularly by Ottmar Dittrich, Grundzüge der Sprachpsychologie, vol. I (1903); and Die Probleme der Sprachpsychologie (1913).   4 Cf. the remarks of Sayce in Introduction to the Science of Language, 1, 111ff. and Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 3, 5. In the so-called polysynthetic languages, no sharp difference can be drawn between the individual word and the whole of the sentence; cf. particularly the accounts of the American Indian languages in Boas, Handbook, vol. 1, 27ff., 762ff., 1002ff., etc. Winkler tells us that the Altaic languages have likewise been deficient in the development of word units, that in general the word becomes a word in these languages only in its membership in the sentence. (Das Uralaltaische und seine Gruppen, 9, 43, etc.) And even in inflected languages, we often find vestiges of an archaic state in which the boundaries between sentence and word were quite fluid; for the Semitic languages, cf. the remarks in Brockelmann, Grundriss, 2, 1ff.   5 Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, 252ff.; Chinesische grammatik, 90ff.; cf. also Delbrück, Grundfragen der Sprachforschung, 118ff.   6 Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, 271ff., 304ff.   7 Georg von der Gabelentz, Chinesische grammatik, 19.   8 Cf. Westermann, Grammatik der Ewe-Sprache, 4ff., 30ff.   9 Schleicher, Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen, vol. 1, 6ff.; vol. 2, 5ff.; cf. above, 108ff. 10 See as early a writer as Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten (1851), XXIV, cf. below, 270, n. 14. 11 In German, for example, this is borne out by the development of the suffixes -heit, -schaft, -tum, -bar, -lick, -sam, and -haft. The suffix -lich, which is one of the principal instruments of adjective formation, goes back directly to the



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substantive lika (= lived body, body): “The type of a word such as weiblich,” writes Hermann Paul in Principien der Sprachgeschichte, 3rd ed., 322 f., goes back to an old Bahuvrîhi-composite, ur-Germanic *wîbolîkis literally “woman’s form,” then metaphorically, “having woman’s form.” Between a composite of this sort and the simplex Middle High German lîch, New High German Leche, there is so great a discrepancy, first of signification, then of phonetic form, that all connection is annulled. From the material signification of the simplex “gestalt,” “outward appearance,” the more abstract “quality” had developed.

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In the case of the suffix -heit, the substantive from which it originated was still in use as an independent word in the Gothic, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Norse languages. Its basic signification seems to have been of person or rank and dignity, but the general signification of quality or manner (Gothic haidus) seems to have developed at an early date; transformed into a suffix, it served to designate any abstract attribute (cf. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 4, no. 2, col. 919ff.). The Romance languages formed their adverbs of manner on the basis of a different basic intuition but in accordance with the same tendency and principle. They did not, to be sure, employ a concept of bodily substance or form, but the term for spirit, which gradually assumed the character of a suffix of relation, was originally taken in a concrete sense (fièrement = fera mente, etc.). In Sanskrit, for example, the suffix -mayo originally goes back to a substantive (maya = substance, material) and was first used, accordingly, to form adjectives designating the substance of a thing – only later, as the noun became transformed into a suffix, did the general signification of attribute and “quality” develop from the special concept of material property (mrn-maya, made of clay, but maha-maya “built on delusion,” etc.) Cf. Brugmann and Berthold Delbrük, Grundriss, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Part 2, 13, and Albert Thumb, Handbook des Sanskrit, 441. The documentation is compiled in Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 5, cols. 500ff. (s. v. “keit”). Similar processes of suffix formation by “misunderstanding” are found in other linguistic families; for example, cf. Simonyi, Die ungarische Sprache, 276ff. Cf. ibid., 262f. on “concept formation” in the American Indian languages, and 244ff. Böhtlingk already stressed in his account of the Yakut language (1851) that this process admits of different degrees and levels and that in this respect no sharp and absolute dividing line exists between the inflected languages and the socalled agglutinative languages. He points out that although the Indo-European languages, in general, create a far-more-intimate bond between “substance” and “form” than the so-called agglutinative languages, certain of the UralAltaic languages, particularly Finnish and Yakut, are far from attaching the two as superficially as is often assumed. Here too, on the contrary, we find a constant development toward “formation,” and entirely different phases of this development are manifested in different languages – e.g., Mongolian, TurkishTatar and Finnish. (Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten, Intro., XXIV; cf.

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especially Winkler, Das Uralaltaische und seine Gruppen, 44 f., on the “Morphology” of the Ural-Altaic languages.) Cf. Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache, 182ff. Demetrius Phalereus, Demetrii Phalerei qui dicitur De elocutione libellus, § 11–13 (quoted in Humboldt, Werke, vol. 7, 223). Examples of the prevalence of parataxis in the languages of primitive peoples can be drawn from the accounts of most African languages and American Indian languages. For the former, see Heymann Steinthal, Die Mande-NegerSprachen, 120ff., 247ff. and Karl Roehl, Versuch Einer Systematischen Grammatik Der Schambalasprache, 27; for the latter, see Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 656ff. In Ewe, according to Westermann, Grammatik der EweSprache, 106, all dependent clauses are concluded with the article lá if they precede the main clause; they are thus regarded as nouns and not really as clauses. In the Nuba language, subordinate clauses are treated as nouns and take the same case endings (Reinisch, Die Nuba-Sprache, 142). The most characteristic examples of this seem to occur in the Finno-Ugrian and Altaic languages. H. Winkler tells us that the basic sentence structure of these languages leaves no room for subordinate clauses of any sort: the whole sentence is an adnominal, self-enclosed word-like complex or merely represents the gapless linking of a subject-like part with a predicate-like part. In both cases, everything that we consider secondary, such as temporal, spatial, causative, or conditional specifications, is placed between the two essential parts of the sentence or word-sentence. This is no fiction but is almost unmistakably the true nature of the sentence in most of the Ural-Altaic languages, for example, in Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkish and Japanese. . . . this strangely developed idiom [­Tungusic] seems to have no place for anything that suggests relative connection. In the Votyak language our Indo-European dependent conjunctional clause regularly takes the form of an interpolated phrase after the manner of the Indo-European genitive, ablative or accusative absolute. (Winkler, Der uralaltaische Sprachstamm, 85ff., 107ff.)

Similarly in Chinese, according to Georg von der Gabelentz (Chinesische grammatik, 168ff.), whole sentences are often simply strung together in such a way that one can gather only from the context whether the relation between them is temporal, causal, relative, or concessive. 20 Striking examples of such sentence structure are cited, for example, in Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache (especially 62ff. and 124ff.). A sentence such as “After I had obtained the horse from my elder brother and given it to my younger brother, the latter took it, mounted it while I went into the house to get a rope, and rode away without saying a word to anyone,” runs in Mongolian, literally translated as the following: “I obtaining the horse from my elder brother, having given it to my younger brother, the latter taking it from me, (while) I went into the house to get a rope, the younger brother, without saying a word to anyone, mounting it, rode away.” (Here, as Winkler points out (112), the word “while” in the





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translation has woven a conjunctional relation into the sentence, whereas the text itself contains no conjunction.) Other characteristic examples of sentence construction by means of gerunds, supines, and participle-like forms are cited from the Tibetan by Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Tibetanische Grammatik, 197. 21 See Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, no. 1, 253ff. The Grammar of the Klamath Language also uses a participial or verbal expression where we use interpolated relative clauses. See Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 657. 22 Examples in Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, Die melanesischen Sprachen, 1, 202ff., 232ff.; 2, 28; Robert H. Codrington, The Melanesian Languages, 136. 23 Winkler, Der Uralaltaische Sprachstamm, 86ff., 98ff., 110ff.; cf. also Seigmund Simonyi, Die ungarische Sprache, 257, 423. 24 Cf. Georg Steindorff, Koptishe Grammatik, 227ff.; similarly in the Semitic languages, the “substantivization of asyndetic relative sentences” is frequent; see Brockelmann, Gundriss, vol. 2, 561ff. 25 Thus, for example, Japanese (according to Hoffmann, Japanische Sprachlehre, 99) possesses no relative clauses but must transform them into adjectival clauses; similarly, in Mongolian, cf. Schmidt, Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache, 47ff., 127ff. 26 “Les langues de cette famille semblent créées pour l’abstraction et la métaphysique. Elles ont une souplesse merveilleuse pour exprimer les relations les plus intimes des choses par les flexions de leurs noma, par les temps ct les modes si variés de leurs verbes, par leurs mots composés, par la délicatesse de leurs particules. Possédant seules l’admirable secret de la période, elles savent relier dans un tout les membres divers de la phrase. . . . Tout devient pour elles abstraction et catégories. Elles sont les langues de l’idéalisme.” Ernest Renan, De l’origine du langage, 8th ed., 194. 27 Meillet writes in his Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indoeuropéennes (German trans., 231; French 7th ed., 377) that “Relative clauses are the only subordinate clauses that may properly be regarded as Indo-European. The other types, particularly conditional clauses, have a different form in every Indo-European dialect.” This relation is interpreted somewhat differently by Brugmann, who explains the lack of agreement by the theory that although conjunctional particles existed in the prehistory [Urzeit], they were not yet extensively used and had not yet been fixed as expressions for particular individual relations (Kurze vergleichend Grammatik, 653). 28 Examples in Whitney, Sanskris Grammar, 369, and Thumb, Handbuch des Sanscrits, 434, 475ff. 29 Cf. Brugmann, Griechische Grammatik, 3rd ed., 555f. 30 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 93. 31 Ibid., B 141. 32 Cf. Winkler, Der uralaltaische sprachstamm, 68ff.; for the Finno-Ugrian language, see, e.g., Simonyi, Die ungarische Sprache. 33 Examples of this occur particularly in the American Indian languages: the Algonquin languages, for example, lack a universal verb of “being” but pos-

296

toward a phenomenology of the linguistic form

sess a great number of words designating being in this or that place, at this or that time, or in this or that special condition. In the Grammar of the Klamath Language, the verb (gi) that is used to express copulative “being” is actually a demonstrative particle signifying being here or being there. (Cf. Gatschet, Grammar of the Klamath Language, 430ff. 674ff. and Trumbull, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1869–70.) The native languages of the Maya family also use certain demonstrative particles for predicative statement; when combined with tense signs, these particles very much resemble true substantive verbs. Yet none of them is equivalent to the universal and purely relational term “to be”: some express the nominal concept “given, postulated, present,” whereas others indicate situation in a certain place or happening at a certain time. (Cf. Edward Seler, Das Konjugationssytem der Maya-Sprachen, 8 and 14.) A similar differentiation occurs in the Melanesian languages and many of the African languages. Georg von der Gabelentz, for example, writes: A true substantive verb is lacking in Fiji; sometimes it is rendered by yaco, “to happen,” “to become,” tu, “to be there” or “present,” tiko “to be there,” or “to endure,” etc., and there always remains a secondary signification corresponding to the true concept of these verbs. (Gabelentz, Die melanesichen Sprachen, 40; cf. 106.)

For the African languages, cf., for example, the various terms for the substantive verb cited by Frederick-William-Hugh Migeod (The Mende Language, 75ff.) from the Mandingan and by Westermann (Grammarik der Ewe-Sprache, 75) from the Ewe. 34 In Nicobarese, for example, being as a mere copula is not expressed: the “substantive verb” always has the sense of “to exist,” “to be present,” particularly “to exist in a particular place.” See Frederik Adolph de Roepstorff, A Dictionary of the Nancowry Dialect of the Nicobarese Language (Calcutta, 1884), xvii, xxivf. 35 Parmenides, Fragments 7, 8, in Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 36 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 303. 37 Cf. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre,” in Werke, vol. 1, 92ff. 38 See Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 627. 39 Curtius, Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, 5th ed., 304, 375. 40 Cf. Italian stato, French été (from Lat. stare) as participles of essere and être. According to Osthoff, Vom Supplctivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen, 15, this auxiliary use of sta (“to stand”) was also known to Old Celtic. 41 Thus, Gothic wairpan (werden, to become) is etymologically linked with Latin vertere, and likewise, the Greek goes back to a root that in Sanskrit means “to move, wander around, travel.” Cf. Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 628 and Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen, 3, 12ff. 42 Cf. in the modern languages diventare, divenire, devenir, English, to become; cf. also Humboldt, “Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk,” in Werke, vol. 7, 218 f. 43 Ibid., 70f.

G lossary

of

G erman T erms

German English Abbild picture Abbilden picturing Absicht intention Abzeichen emblem Affeckt affect, emotion Ähnlichkeit resemblance Aktualität actuality Allgemeine universal Allgemeinheit universality Allheit allness Alltäglich everyday Anschauung intuition anzeichen indicate Aufbau construction aufbauen construct Auffassung apprehension, view Aufgabe task, problem aufheben sublate Aufhebung sublation Augenblick moment

298

glossary of german terms

Ausdruck expression Ausdruckswahrnehmung expressive perception Auseinanderlegung interpretative laying out Auseinandersetzung confrontation, setting asunder, Ausprägung expression Aussage proposition, statement Äußerung manifestation, utterance bedeuten signify Bedeutsamkeit significance Bedeutung significance, signification begreifen comprehend Begriff concept Begründung grounding, justification Beieinander togetherness Beieinandersein being together Benennung naming, denomination Beschaffenheit constitution, state Besinnung mindfulness besondere particular Besonderung particularization Besonnenheit reflective awareness Bestand consistent existence Bestandteil component bestehen subsist Bestimmtheit determinacy Bestimmung determination Betrachtung consideration, contemplation Bewußtheit state of consciousness Bewußtsein consciousness Beziehung relation Bezirk region, precinct Bezogenheit relatedness Bild image bilden form Bildung formation Bildwelt image-world



glossary of german terms

ground, ground soil Boden Dämon daemon darstellen present, exhibit Darstellung presentation Dasein existence Denken thinking Denkform thought-form Differenzierung differentiation Ding thing dinglich tangible Dingwahrnehmung thing perception Distanzierung distanciation Eigenart particular nature Eigenschaft property eigentümlich distinctive Einbildungskraft imagination Eindruck impression Einerleiheit one-and-the-sameness Einfühlung empathy Einheit unity Einheitlichkeit homogeneity Einordnung subordination Einteilung classification, division Einzelheit individuality Einzelne individual Element element Empfindung sensation Entäußerung alienation Entfernung distancing Entfremdung estrangement Entsprechung correspondence Entstehung emergence Entwicklung development entworfen project Ereignis event erfahren undergoes

299

300

glossary of german terms

Erfahrung experience Erfahrungsdenken experiential thinking Erfahrungserkenntnis experiential cognition erfassen apprehending Erfassung apprehension Erfüllbarkeit satisfiability ergreifen seize Erinnerung recollect erkennen recognize Erkenntnis cognition Erkenntnistheorie theory of cognition, epistemology Erklärung explanation Erlebnis lived-experience Erscheinung appearance, phenomenon Erschließung opening up erschlossen disclosed Erzeugung production Faktizität facticity Faktum factum fassen grasp Fassung framing, version Figure figure Form form Formenlehre morphology Formung forming Fragestellung framing the question Fügung construction, coincident Ganze whole, entirety, totality Ganzheit whole, totality Gebiet domain, region Gebilde formation Gedächtnis memory Gedanke thought, idea Gefüge framework Gefühl feeling Gegebenheit givenness



glossary of german terms

Gegenstand object Gegenwart present Gehalt content Geist spirit Geisteswissenschaft science of spirit Geisteswissenschaften human sciences geistig spiritual Gemeinschaft community Gepräge imprint, stamp Gesamtheit whole, totality Geschehen event, occurrence Geschick destiny Gesellschaft society Gestalt gestalt, figure, shape gestalten configure Gestaltgebung gestalt-bestowing Gestaltung configuration Gewalt forceful power, violent power Glied member gliedern organize Gliederung organization Grenzbegriff boundary concept Grenze boundary Grund ground, basis grund- basic, fundamental Grundlegung foundation Handlung action Herausbildung forming emergence hervorbringen bringing forth Hervortreten emergence hinstellen set out, posit Hinweis pointing to, indicate Idee idea Inbegriff ensemble Ineinandersein mutual interpenetration Inhalt content

301

302

glossary of german terms

inhaltlich contentual Kausalität causality Kennen know köperlich corporeal Körper body Kraft force, power Kreis circle, sphere Kulturbewußtsein cultural consciousness Kulturvölker cultural people Künftig coming Lage situation Lebensform life-form Leib lived body Leiden undergo, suffer Leistung achievement, performance Macht power Mannigfaltigkeit manifold Materie matter Mensch human being Moment element, moment Naturvölker natural people Nivellierung leveling down Objekt object Objektivität objectivity Offenbarung revelation Ordnung order Ort place örtlich local Phänomen phenomenon Prägnanz pregnance Quelle source Rahmen framework Realität reality Rede speech Reflexion reflection Relation relation



glossary of german terms

Repräsentant representative Repräsentation representation Repräsentative representative Richtung tendency, direction Sache thing sachlich factual, substantive Schau vision, showing Scheidung separation Schein semblance Scheinbild simulacrum Schema schema Schicksal fate Seele soul, psyche, mind Sehen seeing Sein being Seinde being, entity Selbsttätigkeit autonomous Setzen posit, set Setzung positing Sicht sight Sinn sense Sinnbild emblem Sinngebung sense-bestowing So-Sein being-a-certain-way Stelle position Stimmung mood Stoff stuff, matter, material stuff Struktur structure Tätigkeit activity Totalität totality Tun do, doing, activity Umfang extent Umgestaltung reconfiguration Umkreis ambit Unaufheblich unsublatable Unterscheidung differentiation

303

304

glossary of german terms

Unterschied difference Ur- originary Urbild archetype Urform originary form Urphänomen originary phenomenon Vergegenwärtigung re-presentification Verhältnis relationship Verknüpfung connection Verstand understanding Verständlichkeit intelligibility Verstehen understand [Verstehen] Vielheit multiplicity Voraussetzung presupposition, assumption Vorbild model Vorgang process, event Vorhanden present, available Vorhandenheit objectively present Vorstellung representation, idea Wahrnehmung perception Wechsel change Wechselbestimmung reciprocal determination Weltansicht view of the world Weltbild worldview Wesen essence, nature, being Wesenheit essential being Wiederholung repetition Wirken effective action Wirklich actuality Wirklichkeit reality Wirksamkeit effectiveness Wirkung effect Wissen knowledge Wissenschaft science wissenschaft Philosophie systematic philosophy Zerlegen break down Zerlegung analysis, decomposition



glossary of german terms

Zug trend Zuhandenheit at hand Zukünft future Zuordnung correlation, classification zusammenfassen concentrating, grasping together Zusammenfassung combination Zusammenghörigkeit belonging-togetherness Zusammenhang interconnection, coherence, context Zustand state, condition

305

I ndex

Abbildtheorie see picture theory Adam 77 Ammonius 144n10 analogical expression 136 animal symbolicum viii, xxviii Arendt, A. xx Aristotle 63, 81, 129 144n9 – 10, 205 Bacon, F. 73, 76 – 7 Bataille, G. xx Batteaux 88 Berkeley, G. 32, 73 – 6 Bernet, R. xlvii – xlviii Boas, F. lxxxiii, 147n47, 230n2 Boehme, J. 69 Böhtlingk, O. von 293n15 Bopp, F. 101, 109, 121n85 Bourdieu, P. xx Brinton, D. G. 246n219 Brockelmann, K. 236n104, 276n42 Brugsch, H. K. 273n11 Brugmann, K. 109, 269; and the expression of pure forms of

relation 290 – 1, 295n27; and the phase of intuitive expression 152, 230n11, 230n16, 236n105, 240n144 Bücher, K. 192 Buffon, Comte de lxiv Burckhardt, J. lxiii Buschmann, E. 236n99, 244n186 Byrne, J. 273n7 Capeillères, F. lxxvii, lxxiiin19 Caravaggio lxiv Cassirer, B. xv, xxiv Cassirer, E. vii – xiii, xvi – xvii, xix, lxxiiin16, lxxivn22, lxxvn58; contemporary relevance of the work of xix – xxii; and the crisis at the fin-de-siècle xxviii – xxix; critique of contemporary culture lix–lx; critique of culture xlviii–lvi; critique of immediate presence xliv – xlviii; a general semiotic theory of the logic of



308

index

Erman, G. A. 236n104 expressive movement 123 – 6 Fichte, J. G. 86, 289 Finck, F. N. 244n197 form xi, xxxi – xxxii, xxxv, xxxvii, xl, xli, xlv – xlvi, li, 4 – 12; concept-form 59; cultural form lii; formbestowing xxxviii, xli, xlii, 6, 25; form of cognition 9, 13, 54, 65; form of consciousness 37, 208; form of logic 13, 264; form of the objectifying connection 33; form of succession 36; form of temporal events 44; form of the whole 38, 172; life-form xix, lxvii, 302; and relation 42; sensible form xlv, 33, 81; thing-form 36; universal form lxvi, 6, 76, 156; word-form 59, 65, 290; see also form of language; philosophy of symbolic forms; spiritual form; symbolic forms “Form and Technology” (Cassirer) lix-lxxv Formenlehre (morphology) lxxix, 279; see also morphology form of language lxxvi, 10, 24, 58, 62, 115, 280; language as expression of conceptual thinking 247, 253 Foucault, M. x – xi, xxiii, xx, xxii, xxxix, lxviii freedom xxi – xxii, xxiv, lxx, 39, 91 – 4, 108 – 9, 130 – 1; see also “Form and Technology”; Freiheit und Form Freedom and Form (Cassirer) see Freiheit und Form Frege, G. xxix, xlii – xliii, 178 Freiheit und Form (Cassirer) xxiv Friedman, M. xx

Gabelentz, G. v.d. 164, 239n134, 245n209, 279, 294n19, 296n33 Gabelentz, H. C. v.d. 231n26, 236n94, 238n114, 238n116, 238n120 Gadamer, H-G. xx Galileo 15 Gatschet, A. S. 142, 192, 230n2, 232n38, 246n221 Gawronsky, D. xxiii Geiger, L. 256 gesture 123, 126, 164, 181; gesture language 123, 126 – 32, 137, 151 Goddard, T. 119n59, 238n116 Goethe, J. W. von viii, xiii, xxiii – xxiv, lxi, 17, 45; and language in the phase of sensible expression 132; and the problem of language in the history of philosophy 91, 109 Goldstein, K. xxiv Goodman, N. xx Gordon, P. E. xxi Gorgias 133 – 4 Gottsched, J. C. 84 Grasserie, R. 240n145, 245n209 Grimm, J. 82, 132, 139, 198, 209, 268 – 70; Deutsche Grammatik 146n34; Deutsches Wörterbuch 229n1, 293n11, 293n13; Kleinere Schriften 144n16 Habermas, J. xii – xiii, xx Haeckel, E. 105 – 6 Hägerström, A. xxvii Hamann, J. G. 82, 87 – 8, 120n65 Hammer, P. 260 Hanoteau, A. 242n164 Harris, J. 80 – 2 Haym, R. 120n66



310

index

Lacan, J. xx Langer, S. xx Leibniz, G. W. xxiii, 15 – 16, 32, 43, 47; language in the phase of intuitive expression 178; language in the phase of sensible expression 138; the problem of language 66 – 70, 89, 92, 97 Leskien, A. 121n94, 235n78 Lessing, G. lxi, 78, 82 Levinas, E. xx, lxxiin3 Lévi-Strauss, C. x, xx Lévy-Bruhl, L. 144n13, 235n88, 236n97 Liebermann, M. xxiv life xxxix – xl, lii–lvi, lix, lx–lxi, lxiii– lxxi, 45 – 9, 270 – 1; life-form xix, lxvii, 302 lingua adamica (original language) 69, 137 Lipps, G. F. 239n138 Locke, J. 69 – 71, 73 – 4, 77 – 8, 291 Lotze, H. 250 – 3 Lucretius 85 Luft, S. lxxiin2 Mallery, G. 144n8 Man, E. H. 275n29 Manet, E. xxiv Mann, T. xxix Marty, A. lxxxi Marx, K. xxix Matthews, R. 233n52, 239n136, 241n158, 243n174, 275n36 Maupertuis, P. L. de 84, 90 Mauthner, Fr. 145n24 Meillet, A. 238n123, 239n131, 295n27 Merleau-Ponty, M. xx Mersenne 65

Meyer, J. 236n95 Meyer-Lübke, W. 145n28, 236n104 Migeod, F. W. H. 240n143, 242n161, 295n33 Miklosich, F. 231n17, 231n31, 238n125 Mill, J. S. xxix mimetic expression 131, 132, 136, 140 mirror image (Spiegelbild) 78 Monboddo 82 Monet, C. xxiv morphology xxiv, xxxv, xli, lxxix–lxxx, 114, 141, 279; morphology of spirit xxiv Müller, Aug. 243n175, 243n179 Müller, Fr. 122n102, 146n35 – 7, 160, 187, 238n116, 245n209 Müller, Max 217 Munch, E. xxiv Myth of the State, The (Cassirer) x, xxviii, lvii, lxvii National Socialism vii, xxi, xxviii, lxvi Natorp, P. xxiii, xxxvi, lii, lxxiin2, 178 “natural-scientific” view of language 101 – 7 Nazism xxi, lxvii Neoplatonism 80 Newton, I. 27, 43, 169 Nicholas of Cusa xxiii Noiré, L. 217, 257 Nöldeke, T. 243n175, 245n205 open cosmopolitanism xix, xxii, lxix–lxxi origin of language 84 – 93 Östhoff, H. 109, 121 – 2, 240, 261, 296n40 Pânini 218 Panofsky, E. xx, xxv, xxviii



312

index

Schmidt, W. 232n44, 239n136 Schopenhauer, A. 244n185 Schweitzer, A. lviii science of language, modern 93, 101, 105 – 7, 110 – 13 Scotus, J. D. 117n20 Seiende (being) 1 – 2, 48, 83, 92, 289 sense-bestowing xxxviii – xlii, xlvii, lxiii, lxiv, 41, 255 sensible expression 124, 125, 139 Shaftesbury, Earl of 79, 81 Shakespeare, W. 78 Sigwart, C. V. 248 Simmel, G. xxiii, liii, lxv Simonyi, S. 242n165, 244n1893n13, 295n23, 295n32 Sinngebung (sense-bestowing) 303; see also sense-bestowing Socrates 59 Solmitz xxviii Speer, A. lxxvin79 Spengler, O. xxix, lvii, lxv Spinoza, B. 29 spiritual form xxxv, lix, lxxix, lxxx, 13 – 14, 47 – 8; the expression of pure forms of relation 291; language in the phase of intuitive expression 163, 166; language in the phase of sensible expression 123; the problem of language 78 spontaneity 17 – 18, 99 – 100, 123, 126 – 31, 183, 211 Steindorff, G. 231n27, 241n152, 245n209, 295n24 Steinen, K. von 181, 212, 234n72, 238n120, 243n182, 246n220, 260 Steinthal, C. lxxxi, 115n1, 144n18, 157, 172, 182 Stenzel, J. 116n15, 243n176

Stern, C. 144n14, 230n7, 234n65, 243n181, 294n16 Stern, W. xxv, 144n14, 230n7, 234n65, 243n181, 294n16 Strauss, L. xx Streitberg, W. 176, 234n74 Swanton, J. 231n22, 232n43, 242n169, 275n25, 275n27 symbolic expression 127, 135, 136 symbolic forms xviii, 1 – 14, 48; see also philosophy of symbolic forms; Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, The Szinnyei, J. 238n125, 242n165, 244n195 Täuber, C. 145n30 Thalbitzer, W. 232n38, 235n86, 244n195 Thrax, D. 243n177 Thumb, A. 242n167, 293n12, 295n28 Tiling, M. von 231n23, 233n64 Trendelenburg, F. A. 117n19 Trumbull, J. H. 260, 274n15, 296n33 Überweg, Fr. 115n1 Uexküll, J. xxvi Urban, W. xx Usener, H. K. 238n121, 258, 273n10 Valla, L. 64 Van Gogh, V. viii, xxiv Vico, G. xxi, 86 – 7, 119n59 Vives, L. 64 Voßler, K. 113 – 15 Warburg, A. ix, xxv, xxxvi Werner, H. xxv Wertheimer, M. xxviii, 236n93