## 1. Humboldt's Life


### 1.1 Education and Early Writings



Humboldt's father was of German middle class background whose family
had been granted the status of nobility with the title of
"Freiherr" (Baron) in 1738 whereas his mother (maiden name
de Colomb) was of middle class, mainly French Huguenot and
German-Scottish extraction. Neither Wilhelm nor his younger brother
Alexander (1769-1859) ever attended a public primary or
secondary school. Instead their father, and after his untimely death
in 1779, their mother employed private tutors at the family estate in
Tegel who were recruited from among the leading figures of the Berlin
Enlightenment scene. Among them were Joachim Heinrich Campe,
well-known educational writer, Ernst Ferdinand Klein and Christian von
Dohm, two leading political thinkers who brought enlightenment
orientation and ideas to the areas of constitutional law and public
policy. Johann Jakob Engel, the renowned philosopher and writer,
introduced the young Humboldt to modern and contemporary European
philosophy in the areas of logic, aesthetics, metaphysics and
language.



With Engel, Humboldt read and discussed works by Leibniz, Hume, Locke,
Harris, Herder, Condillac and Rousseau. Yet at the same time both
Humboldt brothers were deeply immersed in the study of the Greeks.
Wilhelm's first publication (at the age of 19) dealt with Socrates and
Plato's idea of divinity ("Socrates und Plato uber die
Gottheit") in which he defended the enlightenment ideal of
natural religion. As adolescents the two brothers began frequenting
the literary salon of Markus and Henriette Herz in Berlin where they
came into contact with intellectual luminaries of the city. It was
here that Wilhelm first met Moses Mendelssohn's eldest daughter
Brendel Veit, the subsequent Dorothea Schlegel, Schiller's future
spouse Charlotte von Lengefeld and his own bride-to-be, Karoline von
Dacheroden. After only one disappointing semester at the narrow
and provincial Prussian University at Frankurt-on-Oder, the Humboldt
brothers transferred to the University of Gottingen in 1788,
arguably the most distinguished University in all the German-speaking
territories at the time. Besides jurisprudence, Wilhelm studied
classical philology with Christian Gottlieb Heyne, natural science
with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (who counted him "among the
brightest intellects" he had ever met), and immersed himself
deeply in the study of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In
Gottingen he met and became friends with August Wilhelm Schlegel,
George Forster and the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi. In August 1789
shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution and accompanied by
his former teacher Campe, Wilhelm visited Paris, the Rhineland and
Switzerland and captured his observations in a travel journal that he
kept (GS Vol 14: 76-236). In response to the challenge of the
encounters with Forster and Jakobi, Humboldt was lead to articulating
his own philosophical position in "On Religion"
("Uber Religion", GS Vol 1: 45-76), his first
important writing.



After having successfully passed his examinations in jurisprudence, he
entered the Prussian civil service in Berlin in January of 1790 and
was appointed councillor (*Legationsrat*) soon afterwards. But
he found the position and the prospects it entailed uninspiring and
boring and already in May 1791 decided to take leave from the service.
In June he married Karoline von Dacheroden and spent the
following years on his wife's family estates in Thuringia in the
vicinity of Jena devoting his entire time and energy to his scholarly
and philosophical pursuits while at the same time establishing
life-long personal and intellectual ties with the poets Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. He also befriended the
famed Homeric scholar Friedrich August Wolf, author of the
*Prolegomena ad Homerum*, and debated politics and political
philosophy with the statesman and Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, Karl
Theodor von Dalberg. In 1792 he spelled out his views on key issues of
the social and political philosophy of the period in a series of
articles for the *Berlinische Monatsschrift* and for Schiller's
journal *Neue Thalia*. Among these were the "Ideas
concerning constitutions occasioned by the new French
Constitution" and the programmatic "What should be the
Limits of the Government's Concern for the Well Being of its
Citizens?"



These writings formed part of a book-length manuscript that, because
of the fear of censorship for its radical liberal position, was
published only posthumously in 1851 under the title *Versuch die
Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen* (Engl. transl.,
1854: *The Spheres and Duties of Government*). It represents
the classical statement of the liberal humanist tradition in German
political thought which, however, seems to have found a more
appreciative readership in nineteenth century England (Matthew Arnold,
John Stuart Mill), than in Humboldt's native Germany. The Marxists
(Lasalle) and conservative nationalists (Treitschke) alike rejected
his ideas and his staunch defense of the rights of the individual.
John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, used a quote from Humboldt's text
as motto for his own treatise *On Liberty*.


### 1.2 Writings and Studies in Jena



In June 1794 Humboldt settled in Jena at a time when the city and its
University became the center of German idealist philosophy and the
Romantic movement and entertained contacts with the philosopher Fichte
and with Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. He assumed the role of
philosophical adviser and critical collaborator of Goethe and
especially Schiller. Through his discerning criticism he furthered the
production of some of their important works, for example Schiller's
*Briefe uber die Asthetische Erziehung des Menschen*
of 1795 (*Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man*), and his
philosophical poems as well as Goethe's epic *Herrmann und
Dorothea* and his novel *Wilhelm Meister*. For Schiller's
newly created journal, *Die Horen*, he authored two important
contributions, "*Ueber den
Geschlechts-Unterschied*" ("On Sexual
Difference") where he formulated a gender theory on the basis of
contemporary natural philosophy and "*Ueber mannliche
und weibliche Form*" ("On the Male and Female
Form") where he extended this theory into the realm of the arts
and culture (1794, 1795, GS Vol 1: 311-34, 335-69). While
in Jena he joined forces with his brother Alexander and Goethe and
together the three men engaged in a study of the evolving new
discipline of comparative anatomy at the University. Humboldt used the
insights he had gained from this study to create a comprehensive
blueprint for a future comparative anthropology ("Plan einer
vergleichenden Anthropologie" (1797, GS Vol 1: 377-410).
But only years later when he attempted to lay the foundation for his
newly conceived discipline of general and comparative linguistics, he
would return to it and rework his ideas.



Guided by his anthropological interests, however, Humboldt became
involved in the problem of what constituted national character and how
precisely one could within the context of modern Europe determine its
essential features. Thus in 1797 he composed an extensive study in a
genre of what we might call today "cultural and historical
criticism" entitled: *Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert*
(*The Eighteenth Century*, GS Vol 2: 1-112). He would
soon have the opportunity to gather his own observations on those
issues, when in the fall of 1797 he and his family moved to Paris
where they would remain until the summer of 1801. This extended
sojourn was interrupted by two extended journeys to Spain, from
November 1799 to April 1800 and again in the spring and summer of
1801, the purpose of the latter being a visit to the Basque country in
order to study the Basque language and culture.


### 1.3 A Linguistic Turn in Paris



During his Parisian sojourn Humboldt met and had contact with the
foremost French politicians, scholars and intellectuals of the period
such as Sieyes, Tracy, Roederer, Garat, Cabanis,
Degerando, La Romiguiere, Dupont de Nemours, Benjamin
Constant and Madame de Stael whose literary salon he frequented.
He attended meetings of the *Institut National* (as the
*Academie Francaise* was called then) and debated
Kantian philosophy with the leading French philosophers (GS Vol 14:
483-87), visited the theater regularly, and from a cultural
anthropologist's point of view, he observed and analyzed its different
forms and varieties from the *Comedie Francaise*
and the *Theatre de la Republique* to the
*Vaudeville*. Meanwhile he studied and commented upon
effectively the entire canon of classical and modern,--i.e.,
eighteenth century--French literature and philosophy, for example
Rousseau, Diderot and Madame de Stael. His comments on these
writers and his astute critique of the philosophy of Condillac and his
followers found in his Parisian diaries offer important clues for an
understanding of his own philosophical position. Goethe meanwhile
published two essays by him on French theater and art in his journal
*Die Propylaen*. Humboldt's Parisian diaries reveal the
extraordinary scope and intensity of his involvement with the complex
cultural, social, political and cultural life-world of France under
the *Directoire* (GS Vol 14: 361-643; Vol 15:
 1-46).[1]



In Paris, Humboldt completed his major work on aesthetics, his
*Aesthetische Versuche I. Ueber Goethes Herrman und Dorothea*
(*Essays in Aesthetics I. On Goethe's Herrmann und Dorothea*)
in 1799. In the same year he also published in French for the benefit
of Madame de Stael and her circle a concise summary of its major
arguments with emphasis on his new theory of the imagination in the
Parisian journal *Magasin Encyclopedique*. A decisive
turning point in his intellectual career occurred with his discovery
and pioneering investigations of the Basque language, an idiom whose
origin and structure had defied hitherto all attempts at an
explanation by historians, philosophers and linguists following
conventional methodologies. He disproved all existing theories about
its descent and affiliation but instead of advancing new theories he
decided first to set out to study the language itself using all
possible means at his disposal, from written documents, native
informants, statistics, historical, ethnological and sociological
information to inventing and actually conducting what is known today
as "field work". His Basque studies coincided with his
formulation of a new conception of language questioning and defying
the representational view of language that had been dominant in
Western thinking from Aristotle all the way to the empiricist and
rationalist thinkers of his day. This new conception would find its
expression in Humboldt's philosophy of language and linguistics that
from this moment on became of central concern to him.


### 1.4 Rome: the World of Antiquity and the Languages of the New World



From 1803 until the end of 1808 he served as Prussian envoy (Minister
Resident) to the Vatican in Rome, a post whose diplomatic chores he
dispatched with skill and efficiency leaving him enough time for his
own work. Besides his Basque studies he turned his attention again to
ancient Greek language and literature, translating from the poetry of
Pindar (*Olympic Odes*), Aischylos tragedy *Agamemnon*
as well as smaller pieces from other authors (GS Vol 8: 3-270).
The introduction to his German version of *Agamemnon* includes
a succinct statement of his theory of translation where he formulated
a new approach to the problem of translation and developed concepts
that have been taken up again only in modern (Walter Benjamin) and
contemporary translation theories. But Humboldt's life in the Eternal
City also lead him to reflect deeply about the fate of ancient culture
and its history, a concern that found expression in his two essays
"Latium und Hellas" 1806, and "Geschichte des
Verfalls und Untergangs der griechischen Freistaaten"
("Latium and Hellas", "History of the Decline and
Fall of the Greek Republics") 1807-1808 (GS Vol 3:
136-70; 171-218). Under the impact of Schiller's untimely
death in 1805 he composed the elegy "Rome" (published in
1806), the best known of his poems. His stay in Rome unexpectedly
added yet another dimension to his linguistic interests that would
become significant for his future linguistic research endeavors: the
native languages of the Americas. He had already asked his brother
Alexander before he set sail for the New World to be on the lookout
for linguistic materials during his travels in South and Central
America. In Rome he had the opportunity to meet and befriend the
former chief of the Jesuit Missions in the Americas and head of the
Papal Quirinal Library, the Spaniard Lorenzo Hervas
(1753-1809). His new acquaintance was himself a renowned
linguist with whose work (for example his *Catalogo des las
lenguas de las naciones conocidas*, 1787) Humboldt was already
familiar. He was given the chance to consult and eventually to copy
the entire collection of Hervas' extensive holdings of Native
American grammars and materials. These would form the basis for his
own study of the American languages. While he was perusing his
linguistic researches, Humboldt's residence in the Villa Gregoriana
became a popular gathering place for the members of the European
artist colony, which harbored figures like Bertel Thorwaldsen,
Christian David Rauch, Gottlieb Schlick, Karl Ludwig Fernow and Johann
Georg Zoega. Among the European visitors who came to see Humboldt were
Madame de Stael, August Wilhelm Schlegel and the English poet
Coleridge. Although he lost two of his sons in Rome (of the Humboldt's
eight children three died at an early age) he considered the Roman
years as the happiest of his life.


### 1.5 Return to Germany: Public Education and Politics



After Napoleon's decisive victory at Jena and Auerstedt and the
resulting collapse of Prussia Humboldt returned to Germany in the fall
of 1808 and reluctantly accepted the position as head of the section
for ecclesiastic affairs and education in the ministry of the
interior. Yet in the short period from 1809 to 1810 he was able to
institute a radical reform of the entire Prussian educational system
from elementary and secondary school to the University which was based
on the principle of free and universal education. His idea of
combining both teaching and research in one institution that guided
him in establishing the University of Berlin in 1810 (today's Humboldt
University) and the structures he created for this institution would
become the model not only throughout Germany but also for the modern
university in most Western countries. Predictably, Humboldt soon ran
into difficulties with the established landed aristocracy in Prussia
when he insisted that the University be endowed with landed property
in order to insure its independence from the state and the changing
winds of politics. After quarreling with his superiors he was asked to
resign his post and in 1810 was sent to Vienna as ambassador where,
however, he soon became instrumental in convincing Austria to join the
Grand Coalition of the European powers against Napoleon. But during
the initial diplomatic lull in Vienna he still found time for his
linguistic studies. His recently discovered Viennese note books
contain sketches of grammars for several South and Central American
languages written in French that were intended to become part of his
brother's American Travel account. In 1811 he produced his first
extensive philosophical and methodological statement, the *Essai
sur les langues du Nouveau Continent* (*Essay on the languages
of the New Continent*) that was to introduce his study of the
Indian grammars of the Americas (GS Vol 3: 300-341).



During the negotiations for the first and second Paris peace treaty
and subsequently at the Congress of Vienna he was successful in
defending Jewish rights but failed in his attempt to secure a liberal
constitution for the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) to be based
on a statute of fundamental principles (Grundgesetz) that would have
guaranteed the rights of all citizen. After representing Prussia at
the newly constituted *Bundestag* in Frankfurt on Main for a
short time, he was appointed Prussian ambassador to the Saint James
Court in London where, besides studying Sanskrit at the British Museum
Library in his spare time, he was able, with the help of the Banking
House of Rothschild, to organize a financial aid program for the
reconstruction of the war-ravished Prussian economy. He returned to
Berlin to the ministry of the Interior to head a committee to draft a
new Prussian constitution in 1819. But his carefully designed
comprehensive plan for introducing a liberal constitution (GS Vol 2:
389-455) that would have transformed Prussia into a genuine
constitutional monarchy did not have a chance to be adopted. When
Humboldt strongly resisted the repressive measures taken by the royal
government in the wake of the Karlsbad decrees and in the ensuing
assault on civil liberties, King Friedrich Wilhelm III on New Years
Eve of 1819 summarily dismissed him from all his duties. His dismissal
marked not only the end of his political career but the *de
facto* elimination in Prussia of the chances for the development
of a true civil society, the creation of democratic institutions and
thus for the middle classes to participate actively in the political
life of the country. Aside from a prolonged visit to Paris and London
in 1828, Humboldt spent the rest of his life at the family estate in
Tegel which he had renowned architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel remodel
in classicist style. There he concentrated his energy on his scholarly
and linguistic work.


### 1.6 Later Writings: General and Comparative Linguistics



Already in June 1820 he was able to submit to the Berlin Academy a
bold plan for the creation of the new discipline of comparative
linguistics and to outline the philosophy and methodology on which it
was to be built in a paper entitled: "On the Comparative Study
of Language and its Relation to the Different Periods of Language
Development" ("*Ueber das vergleichende Sprachstudium
in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der
Sprachentwicklung*", GS Vol 4: 1-34). In this compact
yet highly complex presentation he offered a brief summary of his
previous endeavors and proceeded to lay down the principles and the
blueprint for a comprehensive research program that would guide his
work during the following years but at the same time defined the tasks
of a future linguistics. Humboldt viewed the function of language as
not limited simply to representing or communicating existing ideas and
concepts but as "formative organ of thought" (*das
bildende Organ des Gedankens*, GS Vol 6: 152) and thus
instrumental also in the production of new concepts that would not
come into being without it. The differences between languages for him
were not those of "sounds and signs" (*Schallen
und Zeichen*) but ultimately of "differences of representing
the world" (*Verschiedenheit der Weltansichten*), GS Vol
4: 27. Therefore it seemed obvious to Humboldt that a categorical
separation between philosophy of language and empirical linguistics as
it developed during the nineteenth century and still exists today, was
unacceptable. For not only could there be no discipline of linguistics
without a conceptual base and firm philosophical grasp of its
many-faceted object of inquiry but, Humboldt maintained, empirical
research into actual language use in different languages with quite
diverging structures would provide the philosopher with concrete
insights into the nature of human language that would otherwise not be
attainable. One is reminded here of Kant's dictum that "concepts
without intuition" (*Anschauung*, i.e., empirical
content) "are empty and that intuitions without concepts are
blind."



His wide-ranging and ambitious empirical investigations into the
cosmos of human languages covered practically the entire globe.
Alexander von Humboldt said about his brother that it had been granted
to him



> 
> 
> to penetrate more deeply into the structure of a larger number of
> languages as probably have ever been grasped by one human mind.
> (Humboldt 1836: viii)
> 
> 
> 



But Humboldt did not labor by himself in isolation, as some of his
interpreters have claimed to this very day, but communicated with and
entertained lively contacts with leading scholars in both Europe and
America: with, for example, Franz Bopp in Berlin, August Wilhelm
Schlegel in Bonn, Jean-Francois Champollion and Jean-Pierre
 Remusat[2]
 in Paris, Alexander Johnston in London and Peter S. Du Ponceau and
John Pickering in Philadelphia and Boston in the United States.
Humboldt himself has utilized and understood his correspondence with
the leading scholars of the world as an integral part of his ongoing
research work.



He managed, with the help of his brother Alexander initially, to
acquire what was probably the largest collection of linguistic
materials in Europe for his time. There was in effect no language
group on the globe that did not attract his attention. Among the
European and Indo-European languages Humboldt knew and studied
classical Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, all of the Romance languages,
English, Basque, Old Icelandic, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovenian,
Serbo-Croatian, Armenian but also Hungarian. He was familiar with
Hebrew, Arabic and Coptic (of which he wrote a grammar). From among
the Asian languages he studied Chinese, Japanese, Siamese and Tamil.
Yet in the center of his work stood, besides Basque (he is considered
the founder of Basque Studies), the native languages of South, Central
and North America, and increasingly from 1827-28 the languages
of the Pacific from the East Coast of Africa to Hawai'i and the South
Sea Islands. These form what we call today the Austronesian language
group whose existence Humboldt was the first to demonstrate
conclusively. Among the papers in his remains we find studies, notes,
analyses, observations and materials relating to well over two hundred
languages. In his private and public life he mastered and used
(besides his native German) French, English, Italian and Spanish.



A self-imposed commitment to report on the progress of his research
efforts to the Berlin Academy at regular intervals induced him to
devise his own specific style of presentation that allowed him freely
and creatively to combine elements of the philosophical essay with
those of a scholarly exposition. Among the important of his academy
addresses marking the progress and direction of his investigations
belong his "On the Task of the Historian"
("*Ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers*") of
1821 (GS Vol 4: 35-56); "On the Origin of Grammatical
Forms and their Influence on the Development of Ideas"
("*Ueber das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen und ihren
Einfluss auf die Ideeentwicklung*") of 1822 (GS Vol 4:
285-313); "On Alphabetic Script and its Relation to the
Structure of Language" ("*Ueber die Buchstabenschrift
und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau*") of 1824 (GS Vol
5: 107-133); "On the Grammatical Structure of the Chinese
Language" ("*Ueber den grammatischen Bau der
Chinesischen Sprache*") of 1826 (GS Vol 5: 309-325);
"On the Dual Form" ("*Ueber den
Dualis*") of 1827 (GS Vol 6: 4-30); "On the
Languages of the South Sea Island" ("*Ueber die
Sprachen der Sudseeinseln*") of 1828 (GS Vol 6:
37-51); and two presentations on the Indian Bhagavad-Gita poem
(*Ueber die Bhagavd-Gita*) of 1826 (GS Vol 5: 158-89; 325-44).
These and his other presentations formed part of the published
proceedings of the Berlin Academy.



His paper "On the Task of the Historian", besides dealing
with the problems the historian has to confront in writing history,
offers a theory of historical research that is augmented by
observations on the nature of historical understanding. The piece
occupies a special place in the development of the hermeneutics of the
human sciences. The historian Droysen called Humboldt "the Bacon
of the historical sciences" in his influential *Historik*
(theory of historical studies) and some of his own concepts and
distinctions echo Humboldt's formulations (Droysen 1958: 324). Whereas
Droysen speaks of the method of the historian as "understanding
by investigation" (*forschendes Verstehen*), Humboldt
sets off historical understanding from mere deductive rational
procedures by calling it an assimilation of the *investigative
capability* (*forschende Kraft*) and the object under
investigation (GS Vol 4: 39). Furthermore, with his notion of a
"preexisting basis of understanding"
("vorgangige Grundlage des Begreifens") Humboldt
clearly anticipated Heidegger's and Gadamer's respective notions of an
ontological or historical pre-understanding as necessary condition of
all formal understanding and interpretation in the human sciences (GS
Vol 4: 48), even though Gadamer in his *Truth and Method*
gravely misrepresents the hermeneutic dimensions of Humboldt's thought
omitting the fact that for Humboldt (and Schleiermacher) understanding
was grounded in language and linguisticality and was perceived by them
as the correlative of the act of speaking.



In 1830 Humboldt edited and published his correspondence with the poet
Schiller and included a lengthy essay "On Schiller and the Path
of his Intellectual Development" ("*Ueber Schiller und
den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung*", GS Vol 6:
492-527). In the same year appeared also an extensive essay on
the late Goethe in the form of a review of the concluding part of the
poet's Italian *Journey* that had been published the previous
year. There he attempted, as he had done before in his Schiller essay,
to interpret the various sides of the poet from one central point of
view: this time from the poet's perception of art and nature
("*Rezension von Goethes Zweitem romischen
Aufenthalt*", GS Vol 6: 528-550). During the remainder
of his life most of his time and energy was spent on what was to be
his *magnum opus*: a monumental study of the Kavi Language on
the island of Java within the context of the entire Austronesian
language group of the Pacific. But he was only able to complete the
"Introduction" and *Book 1* of the work. His
research associate Buschmann published these parts in 1836,
constituting the first volume of what came to be known as Humboldt's
*Kawi Werk* (*Kavi-Work*). Buschmann also edited and
published the remaining two volumes in 1838 and 1839. About this work
the American linguist Bloomfield wrote:



> 
> 
> The second volume of Humboldt's great treatise founded the comparative
> grammar of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. (Bloomfield 1933:
> 19)
> 
> 
> 



At the behest of Alexander von Humboldt, who had written a
"Preface" to the entire work, a separate edition of the
"Introduction" was brought to publication to serve as a
memorial to the deceased, its text shortened and adjusted by the
editor to its new purpose which made it appear as an independent
treatise containing a summary of Humboldt's theoretical views on
language. Therefore, the word "Introduction" was dropped
from its title altogether: *The Diversity of Human
Language-Structure and its Influence on the intellectual and spiritual
Development of Mankind* (*Ueber die Verschiedenheit des
menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluss auf die geistige
Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts*) (Berlin, 1836). This text,
often confused with the "Introduction" proper or even with
the whole work, became the single most important text for the Humboldt
reception throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth
 century.[3]
 While in this text Humboldt elaborated broadly on his understanding
of language and human speech, it is no longer evident that he intended
it as a clearing of the ground for the large-scale empirical
investigations that were to make up the body of the work. Yet from a
strictly philosophical perspective this text does not measure up in
its organization, articulation of issues or its philosophical
stringency to some of Humboldt's earlier posthumous treatises. These,
however, were not published until the twentieth century. Among these
groundbreaking works (of which no English translations yet exist) must
be counted the *Grundzuge des allgemeinen Sprachtypus*
(*Fundamentals of the Linguistic Prototype*) and *Vom
grammatischen Baue der Sprachen* (*On the Grammatical Structure
of Languages*). It is only in the light of twentieth century
linguistics, anthropology and philosophy, that is, after Saussure,
Cassirer, Jakobson, Whorf, Chomsky and Wittgenstein, that the true
scope of Humboldt's linguistic philosophy has become visible and its
actuality been perceived. During the nineteenth century Humboldt was
for the representatives of the academically established discipline of
linguistics with its positivistic historicist and strictly
Indo-European orientation nothing but the odd man out. What separated
him from the mainstream was his philosophically grounded understanding
of language and linguistics and his decidedly non-Eurocentric
orientation, which preserved the enlightenment Universalist tradition
by providing it with a new philosophical base.



Before he died Humboldt bequeathed his entire collection of linguistic
materials, including his own manuscripts, to the Royal Prussian
Library in Berlin so that it would be accessible to the public for
further research. Yet soon after his death in 1835 the integrity of
the collection was violated, its contents were divided and dispersed
and many items sent to different locations. Thus some of Humboldt's
books, with his marginal comments and annotations, could still be
found in general circulation in libraries of the former East Germany.
It was also wrongly believed until recently that the greater part of
the collection, including Humboldt's own manuscripts, was destroyed in
Berlin or otherwise lost during the last months of World War 2.
Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries with few
exceptions, his papers did not attract the curiosity of professional
linguists whose attention was focused mainly on Indo-European
languages. Astonishingly, the extensive body of his posthumous works
and papers was not ever systematically examined or properly
catalogued, let alone studied in depth until recently. As a
consequence, all existing editions have virtually excluded Humboldt's
empirical work, a situation that will be remedied with the appearance
of the comprehensive critical edition of Humboldt's linguistic works
that is under way (Humboldt 1994-).


## 2. Examining Humboldt's Writings: Contours, Scope, and Categories



Reflecting the extraordinary range of his intellectual interests and
concerns, the corpus of Humboldt's writings consists of a wide
spectrum of diverse types and genres of texts of which only a small
portion was ever published during his lifetime. Until this day all
editions of his works have remained incomplete. His texts consist of
philosophical reflections, fragments, studies of varying types and
length, notes, diaries, as well as entire treatises and monographs
with themes ranging from political theory, anthropology, aesthetics,
educational theory, literature and history to hermeneutics, ethnology,
and last but not least, to philosophy of language and linguistics. Not
to be omitted are the political memoranda produced at the time
Humboldt held public office, many of which must be counted among his
outstanding literary and intellectual achievements. There is in
addition also a sizable corpus of translations from the works of
Lucretius, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and others (GS Vol 8) and
of non-Western works such as the *Bhagavad Gita* as well as his
own poetic productions (GS Vol 9). Last but not least, must be
considered Humboldt's extensive and extraordinarily rich
correspondence that he maintained with a large number of the important
personalities of the age throughout his entire life. Noteworthy among
these are his correspondence with his wife Caroline (7 vols.), his
brother Alexander, Franz Bopp, Karl-Gustav Brinkmann, Charlotte Diede
(*Briefe an eine Freundin*), Friedrich Gentz, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Henriette Herz, Friedrich Jacobi, Christian Gottfried
Korner, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Germaine de
Stael, Friedrich Welcker and Friedrich Wolf. An entire group of
his correspondence consists of exchanges with scholars in different
parts of the world and is concerned with specific issues and problems.
The bulk of these communications can be found among his extant
linguistic papers where they have come down to us in the order in
which Humboldt filed them. His political correspondence forms a
separate category and has been published as part of the Academy
edition in GS Vol 16, 17.



Among his published writings only the *Ideen zu einem Versuch die
Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen* (*The Spheres
and Duties of Government*) 1792, the *Aesthetische Versuche
I* (*Essays on Aesthetics I*) 1799, *Prufung der
Untersuchungen uber die Urbewohner Hispaniens* (*On the
Early Inhabitants of Spain*) 1821, and the
*Kawi-Einleitung* (*Introduction to the Kavi Language*)
1836, constitute complete works in the traditional sense. The majority
of his writings consist of essays, articles or presentations produced
for specific occasions on the one hand and of a large body of
sketches, studies, notes, expositions and entire treatises on the
other. Humboldt used the medium of writing as a vehicle of
intellectual exploration to untangle the complex and diverse aspects
of a specific problem or set of problems rather than attempting to
state a fixed and definite position or opinion, and he would often
bring to bear different view-points onto the matter at hand and
utilize varying formulations. It is characteristic of his intellectual
style that he would with consistent philosophical and methodological
astuteness develop a specific type of questioning that made it
possible for him to bring to view particular phenomena or sets of
problems in their inherent complexity. What lends a sense of unity to
the large variety of his writings devoted to so many different domains
of knowledge, is his consistency in articulating questions, in
applying a specific viewpoint and perspective, and a recurring use of
specific key concepts and their concomitant terminology.


## 3. Humboldt's Approach to Anthropology, Political Philosophy and Aesthetics



In his essay "On Religion" (1789) Humboldt drew the
outlines of a historical typology that would make it possible to study
the relationship between religion and state power from the Greek
city-states to present times and envisaged the purpose of the modern
state as enabling its citizens to realize fully their "human
vocation" (*Bestimmung als Mensch*, GS Vol 1: S.54). It
would be necessary for this purpose, Humboldt thought, to accord a
positive value to human sensuality and give it a freer and more
creative rein. Consequently, he rejected the traditional dualistic
view of human nature with its mind/body dichotomy and the Cartesian
notion of the human spirit as a kind of ghost in the machine. Instead,
he maintained, mind and body form a vital unity and what we call
spirit (*Geist*) for him was nothing but "the finest
ramification of sensuality." The path to self-determination that
Kant had demanded in his moral philosophy must therefore proceed
through the cultivation of man's sensuality (*Sinnlichkeit*).
Hence the realm of aesthetics is granted a key function in any attempt
to overcome the inherited mind/body dichotomy, in which Humboldt saw a
major obstacle in the path of achieving individual self-determination.
Schiller, in the central sections of his *Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man of 1795* would take up Humboldt's ideas. In the
twentieth century members of the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert
Marcuse in his book *Eros and Civilization*, would infuse these
ideas with a renewed sense of relevancy and importance by linking them
to Freudian psychology in their "Critical Theory" and
philosophy. In his two contributions for Schiller's journal *Die
Horen*, Humboldt took the additional step of characterizing sexual
difference as basic biological and anthropological givens of human
culture and society.



His political writings from this period take issue with the eighteenth
century absolutist idea of the state while at the same time offering a
critical analysis of the political situation in contemporary France.
Humboldt tried to explain the unsuccessful attempts by the French
National Assembly to create a lasting constitution and civic order by
its unrealistic absolutist reliance on principles of abstract reason.
As early as 1791 he predicted the fate of the new French constitution
when he argued that "constitutions cannot be grafted upon human
beings as sprigs on a tree." Where time and nature had not
prepared the ground, he argued "it would be like tying blossoms
on trees with pieces of twine: the first sunlight at noon will scorch
them to death" (GS Vol 1: 80). In order to safeguard the freedom
of the individual from government encroachment, Humboldt proposed to
limit the functions and the authority of the state. This included the
state's endeavors to provide actively for the welfare of its citizens
whenever this would cripple or hinder the free development of the
individual's own potential for self-realization. For the "true
end of man", Humboldt wrote, was "the highest and most
harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent
whole". To reach that goal, freedom was the indispensable
condition (GS Vol 1: 107). Yet the free development of the
individuals, their self-realization, or *Bildung*, their
"self-culture", as the American Transcendentalists would
translate the term, for Humboldt necessarily implied a social and
political dimension. Self-culture demanded "a manifold of
situations" (*eine Mannigfaltigkeit der Situationen*) for
the individual citizens, so that they would be able to enter freely
into relationships of association and cooperation with one another,
because, Humboldt argued, humans can realize their potential as
individuals only in society. For this reason, Humboldt maintained, a
government should not be evaluated solely by its legal system that
granted freedom and liberty to its citizens but equally by how much
and to what degree it helped assure the creation of such a manifold of
situations and opportunities for the individual citizens to develop
their human capacities in actual reality.



In his *Aesthetische Versuche I* (*Essays in Aethetics
I*) of 1799 Humboldt employed an unusual and original approach
that enabled him to combine successfully three different tasks, namely
a close interpretation of Goethe's epic poem *Hermann und
Dorothea*, the laying of the foundations of a new aesthetics and
poetics proceeding from Kantian transcendental principles and finally
the formulation of a theory of literature and literary genres. His
starting point is the question: 



> 
> 
> What makes it possible for an artist to produce aesthetic effects? (GS
> Vol 2: 318) 
> 
> 
> 



Combining a Kantian questioning from the *Critique of Judgment*
with the performative model of the human mind presented by Fichte in
his *Science of Knowledge* (*Wissenschaftslehre*),
Humboldt advanced a theory of the imagination
(*Einbildungskraft*) that enabled him to explain aesthetic
effects as an interactive process involving the triad of artist, work
of art and recipient. 



Art in its most basic sense is to be understood as the transformation
of what is real into an image (*Das Wirkliche in ein Bild zu
verwandeln*, GS Vol 2: 126, *de transformer en image ce qui,
dans la nature est reel*", GS Vol 1: 1). The art of
the poet, more specifically, "consists in his ability or
competence (*Fertigkeit*) to render the imagination creative
according to rules", to incite the imagination through the
imagination (GS Vol 2: 127) and thereby create "a live act of
communication" (*lebendige Mitteilung*) (GS Vol 2: 132).
Among all the arts poetry occupies a special position in Humboldt's
view, because the material from which it is fashioned is not like
ordinary material, as the stone or marble the sculptor uses, but
instead consists of something already endowed with form, namely
language. Poetry therefore "is art through language".
Through his imagination the poet creates works that represent "a
world" embodying a totality of their own that differs in
principle from the world of reality. In his definition of art Humboldt
no longer looks at artworks as objects in order to gather from them a
list of quasi objective qualities from which the nature of art could
then be derived, but instead focuses on the process of aesthetic
production and the rules by which it is governed and on how these
rules are revealed in the poet's art. In other words, a generative one
has replaced the traditional mimetic or objective concept of art. 


## 4. Some Essentials of Humboldt's Understanding of Language



Subsequently, in his linguistics and philosophy of language Humboldt
would advance a similar generative view of human language and speech.
Because he understood linguistic form as procedural rule and
direction, as *forma formans*, (*Form von Form*, GS Vol
5: 455) rather than as some kind of material shape or fixed objective
entity (*Form von Materie*), the structure and organization of
a language for him could not be gathered from the actual verbal forms
of its construction, its grammar. It was to be obtained rather from an
analysis of the procedures language employs in its generation of
speech (*Verfahrensweise der Sprache bei der Erzeugung der
Rede*). For, as Humboldt put it



> 
> 
> ... language in actuality only exists in spoken discourse, its
> grammar and dictionary are hardly even comparable to its dead skeleton
> (*Die Sprache liegt nur in der verbundenen Rede, Grammatik und
> Worterbuch sind kaum ihrem todten Gerippe vergleichbar*, GS
> Vol 6: 147)
> 
> 
> 



How such an analysis of the process of speech production is to
proceed, what it encompasses, what it is able to achieve and how it
will enable the linguist to study and describe different natural
languages, Humboldt has discussed in great depth and detail in several
of his larger linguistic treatises, as for example in his
*Fundamentals of the Linguistic Prototype* (*Grundzuge
des allgemeinen Sprachtypus*, GS Vol 5: 400ff.) 



To understand his approach to linguistics and to appreciate the
empirical linguistic investigations that will follow from it, it is
necessary to take a closer look at his conception of language at its
formative stage where philosophy and linguistics intersect in a
distinct manner. During Humboldt's Jena period the problem of the
relationship between thinking, language and reality that seemed to
have been settled once and for all by rationalist (Descartes, Leibniz)
and empiricist (Locke, Condillac) thinkers alike, became an open
question again for Humboldt, who looked at it from the new perspective
that Kantian and Fichtean philosophy had opened up. In 1795 he wrote a
series of sixteen theses on *On Thinking and Speaking*
(*Ueber Denken und Sprechen*, GS Vol 7: 581-83) in
response to a recent essay by Fichte "On the origin of language
and human language ability". In this, his first major statement
on language, he takes issue with the concept of the linguistic sign,
which had been one of the cornerstones of seventeenth and
eighteenth-century philosophy of language. In both the rationalist and
empiricist schools of thought it was assumed that signs constituted a
special class of objects outside the mind existing independently from
it to which convenient labels agreed upon by society had been
attached. The relationship of these signs to the mental ideas they
were supposed to represent were therefore understood as
"arbitrary" or "conventional". Although
empiricists and rationalists agreed that speaking required the use of
signs and that without them mental operations whether they derived
from sensations or not were not possible, they were unable to explain
as Herder had put it, how "the sound of roundness was able to
represent the idea of roundness". But Herder himself had not
been able to advance a plausible solution to the problem, either, even
though he connected the origin of language with reflection
(*Besonnenheit*), claiming that it was through reflection that
humans had first created language. 


## 5. Transcendental Semiotics: The Overturning of the Traditional Objectivist Concept of the Sign



Humboldt's approach differs radically from that of his predecessors.
"The Nature of thinking consists in reflecting", he states
in thesis 1, "that is, in the act by which the thinking subject
differentiates itself from its thought" (*im Unterscheiden
des Denkenden vom Gedachten*). This basic fact that every person
can easily verify by performing such an act is the starting point of
Humboldt's deliberations. Now, to reflect we must in our mind
arrest the continuous flow of impressions in order to concentrate on
something, comprehend this something as a separate "unit"
(*Einheit*), and set it as an object over against our thinking
activity (thesis 2). As a next step, the mind can now proceed to
compare several of these "units", divide and combine them
in different ways. In drawing the conclusion (thesis 4) from this
state of affairs, Humboldt lays the ground for a radically new notion
of the sign that anticipates (and points beyond) Saussure's definition
given in his *Cours de Linguistique Generale*.
Thinking consists for Humboldt



> 
> 
> in segmenting its own process, thereby forming whole units out of
> certain portions of its activity, and in setting these formations
> separately in opposition to one another, collectively, however, as
> objects, in opposition to the thinking subject.
> 
> 
> 



In other words, in this process of segmentation not only are different
objects are created, but with it the very subject of this thinking
activity constitutes itself. Up to this point we seem to have been
moving very much along the lines of Fichte's
*Wissenschaftslehre*--the "I" positing itself
in the act of thinking--but in thesis 5, Humboldt's argumentation
takes a sudden Kantian turn:



> 
> 
> No thinking, not even the purest, can occur without the aid from the
> general forms of our sensibility (*allgemeinen Formen unsrer
> Sinnlichkeit*); only through them can it be apprehended and, as it
> were, arrested.
> 
> 
> 



What Humboldt is saying, then, is that the mental acts he has
described would not have been possible without assistance from the
general forms of our sensibility. But how precisely do they make these
acts possible? Thesis 6 offers an unexpectedly suspenseful answer that
builds up to its culmination in the very last word which is:
"language":



> 
> 
> The sensory designations of those units, into which certain portions
> of our thinking are united, in order to be opposed as parts to other
> parts of a greater whole as objects to the subjects, is called in the
> broadest sense of the word: language (*Sprache*).
> 
> 
> 



What Humboldt describes here is a dual process of segmentation: that
of the mental stream of impressions and a corresponding one of sensory
order, exactly what linguists today refer to as the "principle
of double articulation" (Martinet 1963: 22f). Through reflection
we single out "certain portions" from the unending and
amorphous flow of impressions and mental images while at the same time
imposing an order upon them. This imposition of order is the work of
the sensory medium of language: word sounds function as structured
units (*Einheiten*) through which we discern and secure the
mental units in the flow of impressions and images. Human speech,
therefore, is no longer seen by Humboldt as applying and manipulating
a fixed system of arbitrary signs as was assumed by both rationalists
and empiricists, but consists rather of the operation of joining
together these two different sets of orders: that of the articulated
sound, the signifier, and that of the "thought" or
signified. Over a century later Saussure in his *Cours de
Linguistique Generale* would define language and the
linguistic sign with almost the same words. What constituted language,
according to Saussure, was



> 
> 
> the somehow mysterious fact that the thought-sound implies the
> divisions which are the ultimate units of linguistics. Sound and
> thought can be combined only by means of these units. (1916/1968:
> 252-3)
> 
> 
> 



It is Humboldt who deserves the credit for having first discovered the
triadic nature of the linguistic sign: Signification (speaking) is
defined by him as the synthesis (Saussure's *combination*) of
sound and idea--*Ton* and *Vorstellung*.


## 6. The Anthropological Side of Language Production and the Humboldtian Model of Communication; Laying the Basis of Modern Structural Linguistics



But there is yet another important facet in Humboldt's account that is
lacking in Saussure and that Humboldt already had referred to in
thesis 5. There he had shown the act of language production, or
*Articulation* to be at one and the same time the constitutive
act for the consciousness of self of the speaking individual. Thus
there arises in the act of speaking the distinction between subject
and object as mutually constitutive correlatives of this act.
Subsequently, in thesis 7 we learn that besides the linguistic and
epistemological angle there is still an anthropological side to this
process. For language begins simultaneously with "the first act
of reflection", Humboldt argues, and



> 
> 
> precisely when man awakens from the stupor of desire (*Dumpfheit
> der Begierde*), in which the subject devours the object, to
> self-consciousness, the word is there also the first impulse, as it
> were, which man gives himself to stand still, to look around and to
> orient himself.
> 
> 
> 



His notion of the rise of human self-consciousness is therefore quite
the opposite of Hobbes' and particularly Hegel's view as depicted by
the latter in the life and death struggle of the master/slave
dialectics in his *Phenomenology of the Spirit*. For Humboldt
it is language instead that serves as the civilizing force leading the
individual to self-consciousness and societal interaction and thus
involves a positive relation to the other. In his later linguistic
writings, discussed below, he developed a communicative model of human
speech that can be seen as an extension and transformation of the
Fichtean concept of the intersubjective "I". In the
twentieth century the philosopher Jurgen Habermas attempted to
incorporate Humboldt's model in his theory of communicative action.




Humboldt's notion of articulation first introduced in his
"On Thinking and Speaking" of 1795 formed the theoretical
basis also for his empirical work into the phonemic structures of
natural languages where his research anticipated modern linguists',
e.g., Trubetzkoy's and Jakobson's, conception of phonology. Already in
1795 he drew a clear distinction between the physical sound of nature
on the one hand and the "articulated" sounds that
constitute language on the other. In his empirical studies he
discovered that the latter alone would form a clearly discernible
"unit" (*scharf zu vernehmende Einheit*), capable
of embodying features to allow these sounds to enter into specific
relationships with each other and any other sound (GS Vol 7: 67). What
this means is that for Humboldt, the individual sound of a given
language can be formed only "in relation to the others"
(*in Beziehung auf die ubrigen*) that make up the entire
"sound system" (*Lautsystem*) of that language (GS
Vol 7: 67). He thought it possible and desirable to set up schemata
accounting for the different classes of phonemes
(*Buchstabenlaute*) found in the world's languages, and the
different relationships into which these may enter according to their
affinities (*Verwandtschaft*) or their mutual opposition
("*in Verschiedenheit einander
gegenuberstellen*" GS Vol 7: 69). In working with over
a dozen native South and Central American languages, Humboldt created
one such schema enabling him to describe and to compare the phonetic
systems of these different
 languages.[4]



## 7. Humboldtian and Cartesian Linguistics



If linguistic signs no longer function as instruments for
communicating independently existing thoughts and ideas from one mind
to another, as Descartes, his followers and the empiricists believed,
this raises the question of how individuals can communicate with each
other through language, a question that becomes even more urgent if,
as Humboldt maintained, states of consciousness cannot be transmitted
from one individual to another at all, for "there can be nothing
in our mind than that which is the result of its own activity"
(*eigne Thatigkeit*) (GS Vol 5: 382). However, any
communication between individuals presupposes a shared foundation:
"We understand the word we hear only, because we could have said
it ourselves" (GS Vol 5: 382). The words we hear and those that
we utter are the stimuli for our language capacity to generate
participatory responses. However, shared language capacity and
linguistic competence cannot guarantee that one individual understands
what the other is saying. Only through dialogue with the other can
they test their understanding, amend and correct it, if necessary.
Every understanding is therefore also a non-understanding, Humboldt
argued. Thinking, in other words, is by its very nature tied to man's
social existence which means that it requires "a Thou that
corresponds to the I". A concept, Humboldt argued, can attain
its distinctness and clarity only through its being reflected back
from the intellect of another person (*einer fremden
Denkkraft*, GS Vol 5: 380) with language as the only mediator
between one intellect and another. At this point it becomes evident
how radically Humboldt's linguistic philosophy and his language
studies part company with the traditional Cartesian way of
understanding language. There existed for him a communicative
prototype of human speech that is embedded in the structure of
language itself manifesting itself in the different languages. This
"prototype of all language" (*Urtypus aller
Sprachen*) finds expression through the personal pronoun, that is,
by the differentiation between the second and the third person. All
speech is directed at someone and its structure cannot be understood
by applying Cartesian grammatical analysis to it, because from a
logical and grammatical point of view, it makes no difference whether
I use the first, second or third personal pronoun, when in each case
these pronouns function as the subject of a sentence. But for Humboldt
I and he really are different entities, and with them, he argued, all
possibilities are exhausted: because they constitute the I and the
not-I. Thou is also a not I but unlike he, not in the "sphere of
all beings", but rather in another sphere of common action and
interaction. In his empirical investigations Humboldt therefore paid
special attention to the system of personal pronouns in a given
language because it was from there that one could reconstruct the
specific manifestation of the prototypal speech situation. Following
this line of research in his Academy addresses "On the Dual
Form" (1827) and "On the Relationship of the Adverbs of
Place with the Pronoun in some Languages" (1829) Humboldt
analyzed several dozen languages of different language groups from
around the globe. It is in these texts that the marriage of philosophy
of language and empirical linguistics that characterizes his work, can
best be studied. 



Cartesian linguistics is intimately connected with the notion of
Universal or Philosophical Grammar and, given its revival in Chomsky's
generative approach to language and his naming of Humboldt as one of
his immediate precursors, Humboldt's relation to this tradition needs
to be clarified. First of all, Humboldt was decidedly critical of all
attempts to construct a system of Philosophical Grammar supposedly
underlying all natural languages, because it was patterned after the
concepts of Latin and French grammar and in practice had resulted in
the writing of grammars that violated the nature of the Non-European
languages by forcing them into the procrustean bed of a Western
system, whose categories were completely alien to their own inherent
structures (GS Vol 5: 355). He did not, however, reject the idea of
linguistic universals. On the contrary, these constituted the backbone
of his concept of linguistic variety, the fact namely that each
language by its structure and formation was able to represent a
specific view of the world (*Weltansicht*). With Kant he
believed in the universality of the mental structures and Kantian
categories represented for him the rules and the laws of thinking that
were ultimately responsible also for the rule systems that govern our
linguistic utterances. But he rejected the idea that these structures
were themselves already a kind of logical grammar from which a
Philosophical Grammar could directly be deduced. Therefore, the
comparative study of the languages required some new kind of Universal
Grammar to serve as *tertium comparationes* for the linguist
not to lose himself in endless and aimless comparisons. Hence he
replaced the traditional principles with a radically different
conception that he had derived from his work in comparative anatomy at
Jena in 1794: the notion of type, used first in his *Plan for a
Comparative Anthropology* of 1795 and which he now adapted to the
study of language. As the title of his treatise *Fundamentals of
the Linguistic Prototype* (*Grundzuge des allgemeinen
Sprachtypus*) suggests, the term stands for the idea of a
prototype of language, similar in concept to Goethe's idea of a
*protoplant (Urpflanze)* which was not to be confused with a
real plant but instead embodied the essential features found in all
existing plants. But whereas Goethe's *Urpflanze* was something
quasi-real that could be perceived through one's mental eyes, Goethe
claimed, Humboldt's type is of a different
 nature[5]
 Since linguistic form is not something material or something
abstracted from natural languages, but pertains to a
*Verrichtung* (*performance*) namely the production of
speech, Humboldt's prototype embodies the ensemble of elements and
rule systems that must be considered common and essential for speech
production in all languages (*Verfahrensweise*); in short, it
is a generative rather than a substantive notion. Once established,
through a combination of philosophical-methodological reflection and
concrete linguistic analysis, the linguistic prototype was to serve
and did serve Humboldt as a guide and *tertium comparationis*
for the study and comparison of different languages and language
groups. In short, the prototype is not to be seen as an object, a list
of specific surface structure features, nor does it resemble any
existing actual language, but instead stands for the communality of
elements, rules, and structures that underlie all language production.
For example, the existence of phonetic elements in a given language,
constituting a *sound system* (*Lautsystem*) and its
individual word always combining a sound-unit with a thought-unit,
must be understood as part of the prototypal nature of language,
whereas the particular *Lautsystem* of that language as it
resulted from its historical development becomes the subject of
specific linguistic investigations. 



Similarly, but on a larger scale, Humboldt thought the investigation
of individual languages and their specific form and character should
be guided by the linguist's awareness of the prototypal element in
them while his work should also contribute to our knowledge of the
prototype. The task of the linguist was therefore "to study each
language as a fragment of the universal language of the human
species", ("*comme un fragment du langage
general du genre humain*") (*Essai sur les
langues du Nouveau Continent* in Stetter 2004: 238). Yet for
Humboldt languages do not differ from each other as species
(*Gattungen*) but as individuals; their character does not
pertain to the species but to them as individuals as conditioned by
and as a result of their own specific historical development (GS Vol
6: 150). The comparative study of the world's languages, as Humboldt
envisioned it, thus represented a constant challenge to the empirical
linguist and to the philosopher; namely, to discover in the linguistic
data that which relates to the prototypal in language and to increase
our knowledge of the nature of language and the human language
capacity. Furthermore, he saw the importance of linguistic studies
(*Sprachstudien*) in the discovery of the part language plays
in the formation and transmission of ideas (*Vorstellungen*)
not just in "the metaphysical sense" as conditioning the
creation of concepts, but also in the way in which an individual
language imparts its formative imprint on these concepts (GS Vol 6:
147). 



There are some critical distinctions that Humboldt employs in his
linguistic writings, which shed light on his understanding of language
and the approach he follows in his empirical investigations. Most
famous (and often misunderstood) is his distinction between language
perceived as product (*Werk*) or *ergon* on the one hand
and as activity (*Tatigkeit*) or *energeia* on the
other (Humboldt 1836: LVII). It is not identical with the distinction
introduced by Saussure between *langue* and *parole*,
since Humboldt's distinction cuts across both *langue* and
*parole* and both can be seen from the angle of either process
or product. Because Humboldt perceived language not as a fixed entity
or object, but as something transitory, something that is real only in
the moment of speaking, as an activity, he thought "its true
definition can only be a genetic one" (Humboldt 1836: LVVII).
Thus he distinguished sharply (as did his contemporary Schleiermacher)
before Saussure and twentieth-century linguistics, between language
(*Sprache*) and Speech (*Rede*). In his French
*Essai* of 1811 he also uses Saussure's third term,
*langage* in a similar manner as pertaining to language in a
general sense. 



Although he developed almost single-handedly against the tenets of his
time and of most of the Nineteenth Century a structural approach for
his investigation of dozens of mostly non-European languages, Humboldt
did not consider the study of a language's structure, its
*Bau*, the ultimate end of linguistics. Because language in its
fullest sense occurs only in the societal context in its acts of
speech production and in what is being said through them, its true
nature can only be intimated and perceived in living discourse
(*verbundener Rede*) and should be studied equally in its
lasting manifestations in the works of culture and of science, in
literature, poetry, and philosophy.



A comprehensive account and just assessment of Humboldt's achievements
in philosophy of language and linguistics will become possible only as
the new complete edition of his *Writings on Linguistics*
(*Schriften zur Sprachwissenschaft*), presently under way,
becomes
 available.[6]