to the fact that his thoughts on æsthetic have reached us in an
inchoate form, very far from a mature development. But if on the other
hand we wish to cast up the sum of his very striking merits, it will
suffice to run over the list of accusations heaped upon him by the two
historians before mentioned, Zimmermann and Hartmann. Schleiermacher
has denuded Æsthetic of its imperative character; he recognizes in it a
form of thought differing from logical thought; he gives this science
a non-metaphysical and merely anthropological character; he denies
the concept of beauty, substituting that of artistic perfection, and
actually affirms the æsthetic equivalence of small and great works of
art, so long as each is perfect in its own sphere; he considers the
æsthetic fact as pure human productivity: and so on and so forth. All
these criticisms are meant for blame and are really praise; for what
is blame to the mind of a Zimmermann or a Hartmann, is to ours praise.
In the metaphysical orgy of his day, in the perpetual building and
pulling down of more or less arbitrary systems, Schleiermacher the
theologian, with philosophic acumen, fixed his eye upon what was really
characteristic of the æsthetic fact and succeeded in defining its
properties and connexions; when he failed to see clearly and wandered
from the track, he never abandoned analysis for fantastic caprice.
By his discovery that the obscure region of immediate consciousness
is also that of the æsthetic fact, he seems to bid his distracted
contemporaries listen to the old adage: _Hic Rhodus, hic salta._
[1] _Vorlesungen üb. Ästhetik_ published by Lommatsch, Berlin, 1842
(_Werke,_ sect. iii. vol. vii.).
[2] Zimmermann, _G. d. A._ pp. 608-634.
[3] E. von Hartmann, _Deutsche Ästh. s. Kant,_ pp. 156-169.
[4] _Vorles. üb. Ästhetik_ pp. 1-30.
[5] _Op. cit._ pp. 35-51.
[6] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 51-54.
[7] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 55-61.
[8] _Op. cit._ pp. 61-66; cf. _Dialektik,_ ed. Halpern, pp. 54-55, 67.
[9] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 67-77.
[10] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 79-91.
[11] _Op. cit._ pp. 123, 143-150.
[12] _Op. cit._ p. 505; cf. p. 607.
[13] _Op. cit._ p. 505.
[14] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 506-508.
[15] _Op. cit._ pp. 156-157.
[16] _Op. cit._ pp. 550-551.
[17] _Op. cit._ p. 608.
[18] _Op. cit._ pp. 684-686.
[19] _Op. cit._ pp. 191-196; cf. pp. 364-365.
[20] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 209-219; of. pp. 527-528.
[21] _Op. cit._ pp. 98-111.
[22] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 635-648.
[23] Cf. _e.g._ p. 467 _seqq._
XII
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE: HUMBOLDT AND STEINTHAL
[Sidenote: _Progress of Linguistic._]
About the time when Schleiermacher was meditating on the nature of the
æsthetic fact, a movement of thought was gaining ground in Germany
which, tending as it did to overthrow the old concept of language,
might have proved a powerful aid to æsthetic science. But not only had
the æsthetic specialists--if we may so call them--no notion of the
existence of this movement, the new philosophers of language never
brought their ideas into relation with the æsthetic problem, and
their discoveries languished imprisoned within the narrow scope of
Linguistic, condemned to sterility.
[Sidenote: _Linguistic speculation at the beginning of the nineteenth
century_.]
Research into the relations between thought and speech, between the
unity of logic and the multiplicity of languages, had been promoted,
like many other things, by the _Critique of Pure Reason_: the earliest
Kantians often tried to apply the Kantian categories of intuition
(space and time) and of intellect to language. The first to make the
attempt was Roth[1] in 1795; the same who wrote an essay twenty years
later on _Pure Linguistic._ Many other noteworthy books on this subject
appeared in quick succession: those of Vater, Bernhardi, Reinbeck and
Koch were published one after another in the first ten years of the
nineteenth century. In all these treatises the dominating subject is
the difference between language and languages; between the universal
language, corresponding with Logic, and concrete, historical languages
disturbed by feeling and imagination or whatever other name was applied
to the psychological element of differentiation. Vater distinguishes a
general Linguistic (_all gemeine Sprachlehre_), constructed _a priori_
by means of the analysis of the concepts contained in the judgement,
from a comparative Linguistic (_vergleichende Sprachlehre_) which
attempts by means of induction to reach probable laws through the
study of a number of languages. Bemhardi considers language to be an
"allegory of intellect" and distinguishes it as functioning either
as the organ of poetry or that of science. Reinbeck speaks of an
Æsthetic Grammar and a Logical. Koch, more energetic than the others,
asserts positively that the character of language is "_non ad Logices
sed ad Psychologiae rationem revocanda._"[2] Some few philosophers
speculated on language and mythology: for example Schelling considered
them to be the products of a pre-human consciousness (_vormenschliche
Bewusstsein,_) presenting them, in a fantastic allegory, as diabolic
suggestions which precipitate the ego from the infinite to the
finite.[3]
[Sidenote: _Wilhelm von Humboldt. Relics of intellectualism._]
Even the famous philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was unable to detach
himself entirely from the prejudice of the substantial identity and
the purely historical, accidental diversity between logical thought
and language. His celebrated dissertation, _On the Diversity of
Structure of Human Languages_ (1836),[4] is based on the notion of a
perfect language split up and distributed amongst particular tongues
according to the linguistic or intellectual capacity of various
nations. "For," says he, "since disposition towards speech is general
in mankind, and all men must necessarily carry within themselves the
key to the comprehension of all languages, it follows that the form
of all languages must be substantially equal and all must attain the
same general end. Diversity can exist solely in the means, and within
the bounds permitted by the attainment of the end." Yet this same
diversity becomes a real divergence not only in sounds, but in the
use of sound made by the linguistic sense in respect to the form of
language, or rather, in respect to its own idea of the form of the
determinate language. "Languages being merely formal, the operation
of the linguistic sense by itself should produce mere uniformity;
the linguistic sense must exact from every tongue the same right and
legitimate construction that is found in one of them. In practice,
however, the facts are quite otherwise, partly owing to the reaction of
sounds, and partly by reason of the individual aspect assumed by the
same internal meaning in phenomenal reality." Linguistic force "cannot
maintain its equality everywhere or show the same intensity, vivacity
or regularity; it cannot be supported by an exactly equal tendency
towards the symbolic treatment of thought or by exactly equal pleasure
in richness and harmony of sound." These, then, are the causes which
produce in human languages that diversity which manifests itself in
every branch of the civilization of nations. But reflexion on languages
"ought to reveal to us a form which of all possible forms best fits the
purpose of language" and approaches most closely to its ideal; and "the
merits and defects of existing languages must be estimated by their
nearness or remoteness from this form." Humboldt finds the nearest
approximation to such an ideal in the Sanskrit tongues, which can
therefore be used as a standard of comparison. Setting Chinese apart in
a class by itself, he proceeds to the division of the possible forms of
language into inflective, agglutinative and incorporative; types which
are found combined in various proportions in every real language.[5] He
also inaugurated the division of languages into inferior and superior,
unformed and formed, according to the way in which verbs are treated.
He was never able to rid himself of a second prejudice connected with
the first, namely that language exists as something objective outside
the talking man, unattached and independent, and waking up when needed
for use.
[Sidenote: _Language an activity. Internal form._]
But Humboldt opposes Humboldt: amongst the old dross we detect the
brilliant gleams of a wholly new concept of language. Certainly his
work is for this very reason not always free from contradictions
and from a kind of hesitation and awkwardness which appear
characteristically in his literary style and make it at times laboured
and obscure. The new man in Humboldt criticizes the old man when he
says, "Languages must be considered not as dead products but as an act
of production. ... Language in its reality is something continually
changing and passing away. Even its preservation in writing is
incomplete, a kind of mummification: it is always necessary to render
the living speech sensible. Language is not a work, _ergon,_ but
an activity, _energeia._ ... It is an eternally repeated effort of
the spirit in order to make articulated tones capable of expressing
thought." Language is the act of speaking. "True and proper language
consists in the very act of producing it by means of connected
utterance; that is the only thing that must be thought of as the
starting-point or the truth in any inquiry which aims at penetrating
into the living essence of language. Division into words and rules is a
lifeless artifice of scientific analysis."[6] Language is not a thing
arising out of the need of external communication; on the contrary, it
springs from the wholly internal thirst for knowledge and the struggle
to reach an intuition of things." From its earliest commencement it is
entirely human, and extends without intention to all objects of sensory
perception or internal elaboration.... Words gush spontaneously from
the breast without constraint or intention: there is no nomad tribe in
any desert without its songs. Taken as a zoological species, man is a
singing animal which connects its thoughts with its utterances."[7]
The new man leads Humboldt to discover a fact hidden from the authors
of logico-universal grammars: namely the internal form of language
(_innere Sprachform_), which is neither logical concept nor physical
sound, but the subjective view of things formed by man, the product
of imagination and feeling, the individualization of the concept.
Conjunction of the internal form of language with physical sound is
the work of an internal synthesis; "and here, more than anywhere else,
language by its profound and mysterious operation recalls art. Sculptor
and painter also unite the idea with matter, and their efforts are
judged praiseworthy or not according as this union, this intimate
interpenetration, is the work of true genius, or as the idea is
something separate, painfully and laboriously imposed upon the matter
by sheer force of brush or chisel."[8]
[Sidenote: _Language and art in Humboldt._]
But Humboldt was content to regard the procedure of artist and speaker
as comparable by analogy, without proceeding to identify them. On the
one hand, he was too one-sided in his view of language as a means
for the development of thought (logical thought); on the other, his
own æsthetic ideas, always vague and not always true, prevented his
perception of the identity. Of his two principal writings on Æsthetic,
that on _Beauty Masculine and Feminine_ (1795) seems to be wholly
under the influence of Winckelmann, whose antithesis between beauty
and expression is revived, and the opinion expressed that specific
sexual characters diminish the beauty of the human body and that beauty
asserts itself only by triumphing over differences of sex. His other
work, which is inspired by Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothee,_ defines
art as "representation of nature by means of fancy; the representation
being beautiful, just because it is the work of fancy," a metamorphosis
of nature carried to a higher sphere. The poet reflects the pictures
of language, itself a complex of abstractions.[9] In his dissertation
on Linguistic, Humboldt distinguishes poetry and prose, treating
the two concepts philosophically, not by the empirical distinction
between free and measured or periodic and metric language. "Poetry
gives us reality in its sensible appearance, as it is felt internally
and externally; but is indifferent to the character which makes it
real, and even deliberately ignores that character. It presents the
sensuous appearance to fancy and, by this means, leads towards the
contemplation of an artistically ideal whole. Prose, on the contrary,
looks in reality for the roots which attach it to existence, the cords
which bind her to it: hence it fastens fact to fact and concept to
concept according to the methods of the intellect, and strives towards
the objective union of them all in an idea."[10] Poetry precedes
prose: before producing prose, the spirit necessarily forms itself in
poetry.[11] But, beside these views, some of which are profoundly true,
Humboldt looks on poets as perfecters of language, and on poetry as
belonging only to certain exceptional moments,[12] and makes us suspect
that after all he never recognized clearly or maintained firmly that
language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a distinction
not of æsthetic form but of content, that is, of logical form.
[Sidenote: _H. Steinthal. The linguistic function independent of the
logical._]
Humboldt's contradictions about the concept of language lost him his
principal follower, Steinthal. With the help of his master, Steinthal
restated the position that language belongs not to Logic but to
Psychology,[13] and in 1855 waged a gallant war against the Hegelian
Becker, author of _The Organisms of Language,_ one of the last logical
grammarians, who pledged himself to deduce the entire body of the
Sanskrit languages from twelve cardinal concepts. Steinthal declares it
is not true that one cannot think without words: the deaf-mute thinks
in signs; the mathematician in formulæ. In some languages, as in
Chinese, the visual element is as necessary to thought as the phonetic,
if not more so.[14] In this he may have overshot the mark, and failed
to establish the autonomy of expression with regard to logical thought;
for his examples only confirm the fact that if we can think without
words, we cannot think without expressions.[15] But he successfully
demonstrates that concept and word, logical judgement and proposition,
are incommensurable. The proposition is not the judgement but the
representation (_Darstellung_) of a judgement; and all propositions do
not represent logical judgements. It is possible to express several
judgements in a single proposition. The logical divisions of judgements
(the relations of concepts) find no counterpart in the grammatical
divisions of propositions. "A logical form of the proposition is just
as much a contradiction as the angle of a circle or the circumference
of a triangle." He who talks, in so far as he talks, possesses not
thoughts but language.[16]
[Sidenote: _Identity of the problems of the origin and the nature of
language._]
Having thus freed language from all dependence on Logic, having
repeatedly proclaimed the principle that language produces its forms
independently of Logic and in the fullest autonomy,[17] and having
purified Humboldt's theory from the taint of the logical grammar of
Port Royal, Steinthal seeks the origin of language, recognizing, with
his master, that the question of its origin is identical with that of
nature of language, its psychological genesis or rather the position
it occupies in evolution of the spirit. "In the matter of language
there is no difference between its original creation (_Urschöpfung_)
and the creation which is daily repeated."[18] Language belongs to the
vast class of reflex movements; but to say that is to look at it from
one side only and to omit its own essential peculiarity. Animals have
reflex movements and sensations like man; but in animals the senses
"are wide gates through which external nature rushes to the assault
with such impetus as to overwhelm the mind and deprive it of all
independence and freedom of movement." In man, however, language can
arise because man is resistance to nature, conqueror of his own body,
freedom incarnate: "language is liberation: even to-day we feel our
mind lightened and freed from a weight when we speak." In the situation
immediately preceding the production of speech man must be conceived as
"accompanying all his sensations and all the intuitions received by his
mind with the most lively contortions of body, attitudes of mimicry,
gestures, and above all tones, articulate tones." What element of
speech did he lack? One only, but a most important one: the conscious
conjunction of reflex bodily movements with the excitations of his
mind. If sensuous consciousness is already consciousness, it lacks the
consciousness of being conscious; if it is already intuition, it is
not intuition of intuition; what it lacks is in a word the internal
form of speech. When that arises, there arises too its inseparable
accompaniment, words. Man does not select sound: it is given him,
and he takes it of necessity, instinctively, without intention or
choice.[19]
[Sidenote: _Steinthal's mistaken ideas on art: his failure to unite
Linguistic and Æsthetic._]
This is not the place for detailed examination of the whole of
Steinthal's theory and the various phases, not always progressive,
through which he travelled, especially after the beginning of
his spiritual collaboration with Lazarus, with whom he studied
ethnopsychology (_Völkerpsychologie_), of which they both took
Linguistic to be a part.[20] But, while giving him full credit for
bringing Humboldt's ideas into coherent order, and for clearly
differentiating, as had never before been done, between linguistic
activity and the activity of logical thought, it must be noted
that Steintha! never recognized the identity of the internal form
of language (which he also called the intuition of intuition, or
apperception) with the æsthetic imagination. The Herbartian psychology
to which he clung afforded him no clue to such a discovery. Herbart and
his followers divorced psychology from logic as a normative science
and never succeeded in discerning the true connection between feeling
and spiritual formation, soul and spirit; they never understood that
logical thought is one of these spiritual formations: an activity, not
a code of external laws. The domain allotted by them to Æsthetic we
already know; for them Æsthetic too was only another code of beautiful
formal relations. Under the influence of these doctrines Steinthal
was led to regard Art as the embellishment of thoughts, Linguistic as
the science of speech, and Rhetoric or Æsthetic as a thing differing
from Linguistic since it is science of fine or beautiful speaking.[21]
In one of his innumerable tracts he says, "Poetics and Rhetoric both
differ from Linguistic, since they are obliged to touch on many
important topics before reaching language. These sciences therefore
have but one section devoted to Linguistic, which is the concluding
section of Syntax. Moreover Syntax has a character entirely different
from Rhetoric and from Poetics; the former is occupied solely with
correctness (_Richtigkeit)_ of language; the latter two sciences
study beauty or grace of expression (_Schönheit oder Angemessenheit
des Ausdrucks_): the principles of the first are merely grammatical,
the others must consider matters outside language; for example, the
disposition of the orator and so forth. To speak plainly, Syntax is
to Stylistic as is the grammatical measure of the quantity of vowels
to the theory of metre."[22] That speaking invariably means good or
beautiful speaking, since speech that is neither good nor beautiful is
not really speech,[23] and that the radical renewal of the concept of
language inaugurated by Humboldt and himself must produce far-reaching
effects on the cognate sciences of Poetics, Rhetoric and Æsthetic and,
by transforming, unify them, never entered Steinthal's head. After
all this labour and all this minute analysis, the identification of
language and poetry, and of the science of language with the science of
poetry, the identification of Linguistic with Æsthetic, still found its
least faulty expression in the prophetic aphorisms of Giambattista Vico.
[1] _Antihermes oder philosophische Untersuchung üb. d. reine Begriff
d. menschl. Sprache und die allgemeine Sprachlehre,_ Frankfurt and
Leipzig, 1795.
[2] For these writers, see accounts and quotations in Loewe, _Hist,
crit. gramm. univ., passim,_ and Pott, introd. to Humboldt, pp.
clxxi.-ccxii.; cf. also Benfey, _Gesch. d. Sprachwiss.,_ introd.
[3] In _Philos, der Mythologie_: cf. Steinthal, _Urspr._ pp. 81-89.
[4] _Üb. d. Verschiedenheit d. menschl. Sprachbaues,_ posthumous work
(2nd ed. by A. F. Pott, Berlin, 1880).
[5] _Verschiedenheit_, etc. pp. 308-310.
[6] _Verschiedenheit,_ etc., pp. 54-56.
[7] _Verschiedenheit,_ etc., pp. 25, 73-74, 79.
[8] _Op. cit._ pp. 105-118.
[9] Zimmermann, _G. d. A._ pp. 533-544.
[10] _Verschiedenheit,_ etc., pp. 326-328.
[11] _Op. cit._ pp. 239-240.
[12] _Op. cit._ pp. 205-206, 547, etc.
[13] _Grammatik, Logik und Psychologie, ihre Principien u. ihr
Verhältn. z. einand.,_ Berlin, 1855.
[14] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych._ pp. 153-158.
[15] See above, pp. 28-30.
[16] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych,_ pp. 183, 195.
[17] _Einleitung i. d. Psych, u. Sprachwissenschaft_ (2nd ed., Berlin,
1881), p. 62.
[18] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych,_ p. 231.
[19] _Op. cit._ pp. 285, 292, 295-306.
[20] Steinthal, _Ursprung d. Sprache_ (4th ed. Berlin, 1888), pp.
120-124. M. Lazarus, _Das Leben der Seele,_ 1855 (Berlin, 1876-1878),
vol. ii. _Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsych. u. Sprachwiss._ from 1860
onwards, edited by Steinthal and Lazarus together.
[21] _Gramm., Log. u. Psych,_ pp. 139-140, 146.
[22] _Einleit._ pp. 34-35.
[23] See above, pp. 78-79.
XIII
MINOR GERMAN ÆSTHETICIANS
[Sidenote: _Minor æstheticians in the metaphysical school._]
When we turn from the pages of methodical and serious thinkers such as
Schleiermacher, Humboldt and Steinthal, we are filled with distaste
by the books written in enormous quantities during the first half of
the nineteenth century by disciples of Schelling and Hegel. We are
fatigued and almost disgusted as we pass from this illuminating and
scientific study to something which oscillates between vapid fancies
and charlatanism; between the vanity of empty formulæ and the attempt,
not always free from dishonesty, to employ them in order to amaze and
overwhelm the reader or student.
[Sidenote: _Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse and others._]