Abstract
Throughout his philosophical career, Herder emphasized two themes in philosophy of language. One was the tremendous variety to be found across human tongues; the other was the relationship between language and thought. At times, Herder is tempted by the idea that sophisticated thinking requires an external, social language which the agent internalizes. (Given the great variety of languages, human thought would vary greatly as well – a very important conjecture for later German Romanticism.) In the article included here, on the origin of language, he pursues instead the view that language arises as a result of a distinctively human but pre-rational cognitive capacity: the individual’s capacity to single out and become aware of a particular mental state within her stream of consciousness. That capacity allows her to focus on a characteristic sensory mark of something – the bleating sound of sheep, say – and to treat it as a sign thereof. Thereby do inner words of the soul arise, these being prior to public language spoken words.
Text from: Forster, M.N. ed. 2002. Herder: Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Notes
- 1.
[“Egoistic” mainly in the sense solipsistic, as frequently in Kant.]
- 2.
Süßmilch’s Attempt at a Proof that the First Language did not have its Origin in Humans but solely in the Creator (Berlin, 1766), p. 21.
- 3.
[J. H. Lambert, New Organon (1764).]
- 4.
The best text for this material, which has in part still not been worked out, is Wachter’s Concordance of Nature and Scripture (Hafn., [Leipzig and Halle,] 1752), which is as different from Kircher’s and so many others’ dreams as ancient history is from fairy stories.
- 5.
Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those who See.
- 6.
Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, vol. 2.
- 7.
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Mankind, part 1.
- 8.
[P. L. M. de Maupertius, Philosophical Reflections on the Origin of Languages and Signification, (1747).]
- 9.
Süßmilch, Attempt at a Proof, appendix 3, p. 110.
- 10.
[Diodorus Sicilus (first century BC), Greek historian.]
- 11.
[Vitruvius (first century BC), Roman architect and theorist of architecture.]
- 12.
Treatise on Animals.
- 13.
On the Origin of Inequality.
- 14.
Reimarus, On the Technical Drives of Animals [i.e., General Consideration of the Drives of Animals, principally their Technical Drives, (1760).]
- 15.
[I translate the two key terms Besinnung and Besonnenheit as taking-awareness and awareness respectively. One main reason for this translation is that, as will become clear later in the present essay (see especially the beginning of the second part), and rather contrary to what one might have inferred from the normal linguistic value of these terms, for Herder Besonnenheit is a precondition of Besinnung but not conversely (pace normal usage, which would if anything have suggested the converse dependence).]
- 16.
A favorite dichotomy in a new metaphysical work: Search, Light of Nature Pursued (London, 1768).
- 17.
Rousseau, On Inequality etc..
- 18.
One of the finest essays to throw light on the essence of apperception from physical experiments – which so rarely get to clarify the metaphysics of the soul! – is the essay in the publications of the Berlin Academy of 1746. [This refers to J.G. Sulzer, On Apperception and Its Influence on our Judgment.]
- 19.
Süßmilch, op. cit., sec. 2.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 52. [Suphan corrects this to: p. 49.]
- 21.
[Footnote added by Herder in the second edition of 1789: “It is clear from Camper’s dissection of the orangutan (see his translated short writings) that this claim is too bold; however, formerly, when I wrote this, it was the common opinion of anatomists.”]
- 22.
[E.g. Greek, in which the word logos can bear all these meanings.]
- 23.
[alogos: without speech, without reason.]
- 24.
[“Turn out to be” translates werde which seems to hover between a merely epistemic sense (which, note, would leave a real contradiction between the present principle and the preceding one in quotation marks) and a developmental sense (which, note, would promise an escape from that contradiction). The translation tries to preserve this ambiguity. The second edition inserts a sei, and thereby opts for yet a third sense which could have been expressed by the original wording in the first edition (though somewhat less naturally from a linguistic standpoint, and again leaving a contradiction with the preceding principle): “there is also no condition in the human soul which neither is [sei] susceptible of words nor actually gets determined by words of the soul.”]
- 25.
Section 3.
- 26.
Pp. 80–81.
- 27.
[Süßmilch] #31, 34.
- 28.
[The second edition omits this redundant “even.”]
- 29.
[Parental love.]
- 30.
Rousseau.
- 31.
[The first edition includes the following interesting continuation after “father Fingal:” “For the philosopher there appears on precisely this path, especially at points more remote from this warm family feeling, a source of the most harmful errors of the human species, namely because through the tradition of language errors do not merely get transmitted and eternalized, but also get made and newly produced, so that the human spirit eternally fights for breath under a load of them. If every person invented his language for himself or brought it with him into the world as the animals bring their drives to art, then nature would have taken care of them or at least they would have gone wrong in a way that was peculiar to themselves and original and, so to speak, at their own expense. But as things are, what a great heap of errors and prejudices exists at the expense of their fathers. Children learn language, and children have learned it from the beginning–who were therefore not in the least able to think over, to test, who accepted all truths and prejudices of the inventors on the basis of their teachers’ prestige, and swore them eternal loyalty. Here, as has been shown, along with words viewpoints got established as shrines for youthful adoration at the same time, so that the world should be regarded from these viewpoints and no others for a whole lifetime! [These were] the Pillars of Hercules marked with the holy oracle: Let no one venture further! Here, with the words of tradition, the most popular truths and prejudices flowed down on the river of time like light chaff; what was heavy perished and perhaps only reveals itself by having clouded speech and left behind strange word combinations, paradoxes beyond human understanding, which, however, only became such monsters through the transmitter and the receiver, like some old philosophical systems! Here it was especially the idols of bold liars about the truth, the phantoms of hot-headed fanatics, and the prejudices which were mightiest in their effect and hence the most harmful for the human understanding that forced their way on down! Before we were able to think we were taught to fall down before linguistic concepts as before statues, instead of observing and studying them moving about in nature like living bodies. And here we get, as Bacon, the leader in sensitivity to this weakness of humanity, calls them: trade idols, idols from a dark cave, idols which are the seduction of the market, idols which are the drama of the stage, all of which are made eternal by nothing as much as by language. Here lie rules and laws [commanding people] to think in accordance with the analogy of their fathers and not in accordance with the analogy of nature, to read the images of the universe in the distorting mirror of tradition and not in nature. Here lie the forms of that cave in which the inventors of language and all their followers thought: the plastic shapes of those small worlds from out of which they looked into the great world, the puppets which through the usage of the centuries have become images of gods, linguistic fables and mere hollow vessels of expressions which through the loud noise of our dear habit from youth up have become forms in our heads. Whoever can, let him think his way beyond them, or rather right through them–for if one means to destroy all these images and prejudices (praeiudicata) as prejudices (praeiudicia) and empty idols, then indeed one has the easy work of the Goths in Italy or the Persians in Egypt, but one also leaves oneself with nothing more than a desert. Precisely thereby one has stripped oneself of the aid of all the centuries of one’s fathers, and stands there naked, in order to build from the small heap of materials that one has oneself gathered and of arbitrary words that one has perhaps oneself explored a little system which is as similar to that work of the centuries as the little temples which the worshipers of Diana had made for themselves to the great building of wonder at Ephesus. So, unless we want to follow the warning example of all those who make systems out of their own heads, there is nothing for us to do in such a case but to throw ourselves into the great ocean of truths and errors, and, with the help of all those who have lived before us, to see how far we get, then, in beholding and observing nature and in naming it through distinct linguistic ideas! There is nothing for us to do but to become children again in the footsteps of great people before us, and to learn to recognize and examine the great treasure that has come down to us with the language and the mass of thoughts belonging to all nations. What could be attempted here, but has been little attempted, from and concerning several languages for the benefit of the general philosophy of humanity is almost inexpressible.”]
- 32.
[Kabyles: members of a group of Berber tribes in Algeria and Tunisia.]
- 33.
[Ostyaks: members of a Finno-Ugric people living in Western Siberia.]
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Dyck, C. (2017). Johann Gottfried von Herder. In: Cameron, M., Hill, B., Stainton, R. (eds) Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_36
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