Cartesian Linguistics

by Noam Chomsky

  The two Cartesian tests (possession of language, diversity of action) are interrelated by Herder, in an original way, in his influential Prize Essay on the origin of language.24 Like Descartes, Herder argues that human language is different in kind from exclamations of passion and that it cannot be attributed to superior organs of articulation, nor, obviously, can it have its origins in imitation of nature or in an “agreement” to form language.25 Rather, language is a natural property of the human mind. But nature does not provide man with an instinctive language, or an instinctive faculty of language, or a faculty of reason of which language is a “reflection.” Man’s fundamental quality is, rather, weakness of instinct, and man is clearly far inferior to animals in strength and certainty of instinct. But instinct and refinement of sense and skill correlate with narrowness of the scope and sphere of life and experience, with the focusing of all sensitivity and all power of representation on a narrow fixed area (pp. 15–16). The following can be taken as a general principle: “the sensitivity, capability, and productive drive of animals increase in power and intensity in inverse proportion to the magnitude and diversity of their sphere of activity” (pp. 16–17). But man’s faculties are less acute, more varied and more diffuse. “Man does not have an unvaried and narrow sphere of activity, where only one task awaits him” (p. 17). He is not, in other words, under the control of external stimuli and internal drives and compelled to respond in a perfect and specific way. This freedom from instinct and from stimulus control is the basis for what we call “human reason”: “. . . if man had the drives of animals, he could not have in him what we now call reason, since such drives would unknowingly pull his forces towards a single point, so that he would have no free sphere of awareness” (p. 22). It is this very weakness of instinct that is man’s natural advantage, that makes him a rational being. “If man cannot be an instinctive animal, he must – enabled by the freely working positive power of his soul – become a reflective creature” (p. 22). In compensation for his weakness of instinct and sense, man receives the “advantage of freedom” (p. 20). “No longer inevitably a machine in the hands of nature, he himself becomes the purpose and the objective of his efforts” (p. 20).

  Free to reflect and to contemplate, man is able to observe, compare, distinguish essential properties, identify, and name (pp. 23f.). It is in this sense that language (and the discovery of language) is natural to man (p. 23), that “the human being is formed to be a creature of language” (p. 43). On the one hand, Herder observes that man has no innate language – man does not speak by nature. On the other hand, language in his view is so specifically a product of man’s particular intellectual organization that he is able to claim: “If I were to gather up all the loose ends and display that fabric called human nature: definitely a linguistic weave!” The resolution of the apparent paradox lies in his attempt to account for human language as a consequence of the weakness of human instinct.

  Descartes had described human reason as “a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations”26 and which therefore provides for unbounded diversity of free thought and action.27 Herder does not regard reason as a “faculty of the mind” at all but defines it rather as the freedom from stimulus control, and he attempts to show how this “natural advantage” makes it possible – in fact, necessary (p. 25) – for humans to develop language.

  Somewhat before Herder, James Harris had given a characterization of “rationality” in terms rather similar to his, that is, as freedom from instinct rather than as a faculty with fixed properties. Harris distinguishes between the “Human Principle,” which he calls “reason,” and the “Brutal Principle,” which he calls “instinct,” in the following passage:

  MARK then . . . the Difference between Human Powers and Brutal – The Leading Principle of BRUTES appears to tend in each Species to one single Purpose – to this, in general, it uniformly arrives; and here, in general, it as uniformly stops – it needs no Precepts or Discipline to instruct it; nor will it easily be changed, or admit a different Direction. On the contrary, the Leading Principle of MAN is capable of infinite Directions – is convertible to all sorts of Purposes – equal to all sorts of Subjects – neglected, remains ignorant, and void of every Perfection – cultivated, becomes adorned with Sciences, and Arts – can raise us to excel, not only Brutes, but our own Kind – with respect to our other Powers and Faculties, can instruct us how to use them, as well as those of the various Natures, which we see existing around us. In a word, to oppose the two Principles to each other – The Leading Principle of Man, is Multiform, Originally Uninstructed, Pliant and Docil – The Leading Principle of Brutes is Uniform, Originally Instructed; but, in most Instances afterward, Inflexible and Indocil.28

  Thus we may say “that MAN is by Nature a RATIONAL ANIMAL,” meaning by this nothing more than that he is free from the domination of instinct.29

  A concern for the creative aspect of language use persists through the romantic period, in relation to the general problem of true creativity, in the full sense of this term.30 A. W. Schlegel’s remarks on language in his Kunstlehre31 give a characteristic expression to these developments. In discussing the nature of language, he begins by observing that speech does not relate merely to external stimuli or goals. The words of language, for example, may arouse in the speaker and hearer ideas [Vorstellungen] of things that they have not directly perceived but know only by verbal description or that they “aren’t able to intuit sensuously at all because they exist in an intellectual [geistigen] world.” Words may also designate abstracted properties and relations of the speaker to the hearer and to the topic of discourse, and relations among the elements of the latter. In combining our “thoughts and ideas” we use “words with such subtle meanings that to clarify them would disconcert a philosopher.” Still, they are used freely by the uninstructed and the unintelligent:

  We fit all these words together in ways that allow others to not merely understand our purpose but glimpse our innermost feelings; in this way we excite the most diverse passions, affirm or negate moral decisions, and incite a crowd to collective action. The greatest things as well as the least significant, the greatest marvel never before heard – indeed the most impossible and unthinkable things – slide off our tongues with equal ease.

  So characteristic of language is this freedom from external control or practical end, for Schlegel, that he elsewhere32 proposes that “anything by means of which the inner manifests itself outwardly is rightly called language.”

  From this conception of language, it is only a short step to the association of the creative aspect of language use with true artistic creativity.33 Echoing Rousseau and Herder, Schlegel describes language as “the most marvelous creation of the poetic faculty of the human being” (Sprache und Poetik, p. 145). Language is “an ever-becoming, self transforming, unending poem of the entire human race” (Kunstlehre, p. 226). This poetic quality is characteristic of the ordinary use of language, which “can never be so completely depoetized that it should find itself scattered into an abundance of poetical elements, even in the case of the most calculating and rational use of linguistic signs, all the more so in the case of everyday life – in impetuous, immediate, often passionate colloquial language” (ibid., p. 228). There would have been little difficulty, he continues, in demonstrating to Molière’s M. Jourdain that he spoke poetry as well as prose.

  The “poetical” quality of ordinary language derives from its independence of immediate stimulation (of “the physically perceivable universe”) and its freedom from practical ends. These characteristics, along with the boundlessness of language as an instrument of free self-expression, are essentially those emphasized by Descartes and his followers. But it is interesting to trace, in slightly greater detail, the argument by which Schlegel goes on to relate what we have called the creative aspect of language use to true creativity. Art, like language, is unbounded in its expressive potentiality.34 But, Schlegel argues, poetry has a unique status
among the arts in this respect; it, in a sense, underlies all the others and stands as the fundamental and typical art form. We recognize this unique status when we use the term “poetical” to refer to the quality of true imaginative creation in any of the arts. The explanation for the central position of poetry lies in its association with language. Poetry is unique in that its very medium is unbounded and free; that is, its medium, language, is a system with unbounded innovative potentialities for the formation and expression of ideas. The production of any work of art is preceded by a creative mental act for which the means are provided by language. Thus the creative use of language, which, under certain conditions of form and organization, constitutes poetry (cf. p. 231), accompanies and underlies any act of the creative imagination, no matter what the medium in which it is realized. In this way, poetry achieves its unique status among the arts, and artistic creativity is related to the creative aspect of language use.35 (Compare Huarte’s third kind of wit – see note 9.)

  Schlegel distinguishes human from animal language in the typical Cartesian manner. Thus he observes that one cannot attribute man’s linguistic ability to the “natural disposition of his organs”:

  Various species share to a certain extent with human beings the ability, although totally mechanical, to learn language. By means of training and frequent repetition a stimulus towards certain reactions is brought about in their organs, but they never use the words they learned autonomously (even though it might seem so), in order to designate, and their speech is just as little an authentic language as the sounds produced by a speaking machine.

  (p. 236)

  We cannot draw analogies between human and animal intellectual function. Animals live in a world of “states of affairs” [Zustände] not of “objects” [Gegenstände] in the human sense (the same is true, in part, of young children, which accounts for the confused and incoherent character of even the liveliest childhood memories). The “animal dependency” [tierische Abhängigkeit] is, for Schlegel, sharply opposed to the “spontaneous principle” [selbsttätige Prinzip] of “rational volition” [verständige Willkür] that characterizes human mental life. It is this principle that provides the basis for human language. It leads to a search for coherence and unity in experience, to comparison of sensible impressions (which requires mental signs, of some sort), and to the unique human capacity and need “through language to want to refer to even those things that cannot be given in any sensuous intuition.” What results is a human language, which serves primarily “as the organ of thought, as a means of reflection” and only derivatively for the purposes of “social communication” (pp. 237–241).

  The Cartesian emphasis on the creative aspect of language use, as the essential and defining characteristic of human language, finds its most forceful expression in Humboldt’s attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of general linguistics.36 Humboldt’s characterization of language as energeia (“activity” [Thätigkeit]) rather than ergon (“product” [Werk]),37 as “a generative activity [eine Erzeugung]” rather than “a lifeless product” [ein todtes Erzeugtes] extends and elaborates – often, in almost the same words – the formulations typical of Cartesian linguistics and romantic philosophy of language and aesthetic theory. For Humboldt, the only true definition of language is “a productive activity” [eine genetische]: “It is the ever repeated mental labour [Arbeit des Geistes] of making articulated sound capable of expressing thought (p. 57). 38 There is a constant and uniform factor underlying this “mental labour”; it is this which Humboldt calls the “Form” of language.39 It is only the underlying laws of generation that are fixed, in language. The scope and manner in which the generative process may operate in the actual production of speech (or in speech perception, which Humboldt regards as a partially analogous performance – see pp. 105–106 below) are totally undetermined. (See note 38.)

  The concept of Form includes the “rules of speech articulation” [Redefügung] as well as the rules of “word formation” [Wortbildung] and the rules of formation of concepts that determine the class of “root words” [Grundwörter] (p. 61). In contrast, the substance [Stoff] of language is unarticulated sound and “the totality of sense-impressions and spontaneous mental activities that precede the creation of the concept with the aid of language” (p. 61). The Form of language is a systematic structure. It contains no individual elements as isolated components but incorporates them only in so far as “a method of language formation” can be discovered in them (p. 62).

  The fixed mechanisms that, in their systematic and unified representation, constitute the form of the language must enable it to produce an indefinite range of speech events corresponding to the conditions imposed by thought processes. The domain of language is infinite and boundless, “the essence of all that can be thought” (p. 122). Consequently, the fundamental property of a language must be its capacity to use its finitely specifiable mechanisms for an unbounded and unpredictable set of contingencies. “It must therefore make infinite use of finite means, and is able to do so through the productive power that is the identity of language and thought” (p. 122).

  Not even the lexicon of a language can, according to Humboldt, be regarded as an “inert completed mass.” Even apart from the formation of new words, the use of the lexicon by the speaker or the hearer involves “a continuous generation and regeneration of the word-making capacity” (pp. 125–126). This is true of the original formation of the language and its acquisition by children, and it is also true of the daily use of speech (cf. note 25). He thus regards the lexicon, not as a memorized list from which words are simply extracted as language is used (“No human memory would be equal to this, if the soul did not simultaneously carry by instinct within itself the key to the formation of the words themselves”), but rather as based on certain organizing generative principles that produce the appropriate items on given occasions. It is from such an assumption that he develops his well-known view that (in modern terms) concepts are organized in terms of certain “semantic fields” and that they receive their “value” in terms of their relation to the principles that determine this system.

  Speech is an instrument of thought and self-expression. It plays an “immanent” and “constitutive” role in determining the nature of man’s cognitive processes, his “thinking and, through thought, creative power” [denkende und im Denken schöpferische Kraft] (p. 36), his “world view” and processes of “tying together thoughts” [Gedankenverknüpfung] (p. 50). More generally, a human language as an organized totality is interposed between man and “the nature that affects him, both inwardly and outwardly” (p. 74). Although languages have universal properties, attributable to human mentality as such, nevertheless each language provides a “thought world” and a point of view of a unique sort. In attributing such a role in the determination of mental processes to individual languages, Humboldt departs radically from the framework of Cartesian linguistics, of course, and adopts a point of view that is more typically romantic.

  Humboldt does remain within the Cartesian framework, however, in so far as he regards language primarily as a means of thought and self-expression rather than as an animal-like functional communication system – when he maintains, for example, that man “surrounds himself with a world of sounds, so as to take up and process within himself the world of objects” (p. 74). Thus even in its beginnings, “language . . . is extended unthinkingly to all objects of casual sense perception and inner concern” (p. 75; Humboldt 1999: 60). He regards it as a mistake to attribute language primarily to the need for mutual assistance. “Man is not so needy – and inarticulate sounds would suffice for the rendering of assistance.” There are, to be sure, purely practical uses of language, as, for example, if a man orders a tree to be felled and “thinks of nothing by that term but the trunk that he designates” (p. 220). The same words might, however, have an “enhanced significance” if they were used in a description of nature or in a poem, for example, in which case the words are not used simply as i
nstruments or with a purely referential function, are not used “in a localized activity of the soul for a limited purpose” but are rather referred to “the inner whole of thought-association and feeling” (p. 221; Humboldt 1999: 156). It is only in the latter case that the full resources of language are used in forming or interpreting speech, that all aspects of the lexical and grammatical structure of an utterance make their full contribution to its interpretation. The purely practical use of language is characteristic of no real human language, but only of invented parasitic systems.40

  In developing the notion of “form of language” as a generative principle, fixed and unchanging, determining the scope and providing the means for the unbounded set of individual “creative” acts that constitute normal language use, Humboldt makes an original and significant contribution to linguistic theory – a contribution that unfortunately remained unrecognized and unexploited until fairly recently.41 The nature of Humboldt’s contribution can be appreciated by comparing his notion of “form” to that developed in Harris’s Hermes (1751), for example. For Harris, a language is essentially a system of words. Their meanings (the ideas of which they are the symbols) constitute the form of language; their sound, its matter (substance). Harris’s notion of form is modeled on a classical pattern, the underlying conception being that of shape or orderly arrangement. But in his work on language, Harris does not suggest that a description of its form requires more than a specification of elements, categories, and the association of “content elements” to “expression elements.” He does not, in other words, give any indication of grasping Humboldt’s insight that language is far more than “patterned organization” of elements of various types and that any adequate description of it must refer these elements to the finite system of generative principles which determine the individual linguistic elements and their interrelations and which underlie the infinite variety of linguistic acts that can be meaningfully performed.42