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Delivery and Returns see our delivery rates and policies thinking of returning an item? 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. 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. 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: Humboldt himself has utilized and understood his correspondence with the leading scholars of the world as an integral part of his ongoing research work.
2. Examining Humboldt’s Writings: Contours, Scope, and Categories
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. He was familiar with Hebrew, Arabic and Coptic of which he wrote a grammar.
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.
These and his other presentations formed part of the published proceedings of the Berlin Academy. The piece occupies a special place in the development of the hermeneutics of the human sciences. 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: During the remainder of his life most of his time and energy was spent on what was to be his magnum opus: Buschmann also edited and published the remaining two volumes in and About this work the American linguist Bloomfield wrote:. 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, These, however, were not published until the twentieth century.
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 the integrity of the collection was violated, its contents were divided and dispersed and many items sent to different locations.
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.
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. Noteworthy among these are his correspondence with his wife Caroline 7 vols.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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, 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.
Wilhelm von Humboldt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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.
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. 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.
In order to safeguard the freedom of the individual from government encroachment, Humboldt proposed to limit the functions and the authority of the state. To reach that goal, freedom was the indispensable condition GS Vol 1: 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.
His starting point is the question:. 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: In other words, a generative one has replaced the traditional mimetic or objective concept of art.
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: 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. 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.
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.
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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. 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. Thinking consists for Humboldt.
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. 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: 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: What Humboldt describes here is a dual process of segmentation: This imposition of order is the work of the sensory medium of language: 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: What constituted language, according to Saussure, was.
Sound and thought can be combined only by means of these units. It is Humboldt who deserves the credit for having first discovered the triadic nature of the linguistic sign: 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 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 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. Learn more about Amazon Prime.
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