Continental Philosophy Of Language Research Paper

In general terms, one of the crucial differences between the Anglo-American and the continental philosophies of language is the explicit attempt found in all the authors of the continental tradition to break with what Humboldt termed the ‘primacy of logic over grammar,’ that is, the predominance given from the very beginnings of Greek philosophy to the cognitive function of language at the expense of its communicative function. As a consequence of conceiving language less as a vehicle of knowledge and more as a means of understanding, this tradition analyzes the role that language plays not only in our relationship with the objective world (by allowing us to have propositional knowledge about it) but also in our relationship with the social world (which is constituted through communicative interaction) and with our own subjective worlds (which are expressible through linguistic articulation). In this way, language is considered in its multidimensional world-disclosing function. In keeping with this focus, continental philosophy of language has always concentrated on the analysis of natural languages, developed through contingent historical processes, and has considered these as constituti e of our experience of the world.

In order to understand the roots of the distinctive features of the continental conception of language, it is important to keep in mind that this conception was developed against the background of an explicit confrontation with Kant’s philosophy. This is important because, in spite of all criticisms of Kant, continental philosophy of language remains to this day under the decisive influence of transcendental philosophy. This influence explains two of its most characteristic features: its idealist tendencies (which in some cases lead to a clear hypostatization of language, most remarkably in the work of the late Heidegger) as well as one of the crucial problems that have concerned the authors of this tradition from the very beginning, namely the problem of linguistic relativism. The connection between these features can be understood best through an analysis of the different historical phases of development within this tradition.

1. The Hamann–Herder–Humboldt Tradition

As already suggested above, most of the reflections on language found in the works of the authors of this tradition take place in more or less explicit confrontation with Kant’s philosophy. In the cases of Hamann and Herder this confrontation takes the specific form of a metacritique of Kant’s critique of pure reason (see Hamann 1784 1988, Herder 1799 1960). One important target of both metacritiques is Kant’s attempt to purify reason from its internal connection with language. The constant reference that Hamann and Herder make to the common origin of both expressions ‘language’ and ‘reason’ in the Greek word logos is by no means a merely etymological remark. With the explicit identification of language and reason (i.e., the claim that ‘reason is language, logos’ or ‘without the word, neither reason nor world’), these authors initiate a way of thinking about both language and reason that moves constantly between the extremes of universalism and relativism, rationalism and irrationalism. On the one hand, the identification of language and reason supports the attempt to transform Kant’s idea of a critique of reason into the romantic idea of the essential limitations of reason (due to the limits of the natural languages that contingently developed in history). This is a powerful motive behind the critique of the Enlightment in which many authors of this tradition participate (from Hamann to Heidegger and Gadamer). On the other hand, however, the identification of language and reason also supports the attempt to preserve the universalism of Kant’s conception of reason in an equally universalist conception of communicative rationality (from Humboldt to Apel and Habermas). But beyond the remarkable differences in the philosophical programs among the authors of this tradition, the common presupposition behind their identification of language and reason is the view of language as constitutive of our experience in the strict sense given by transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, language is conceived as having the transcendental power to constitute experience that Kant erroneously ascribed to an abstract, transcendental ego.

Hamann’s critique of Kant can be seen in retrospect as the initiator of such a view. Hamann identifies language as the common root of sensibility and understanding, which was sought by Kant without success. In this way, he considers language as both empirical and transcendental at the same time. By conceding to language such a quasi-transcendental status, Hamann certainly disagrees with Kant’s view of language. However, he does not disagree with the most basic assumptions of transcendental philosophy. Hamann is actually taking for granted Kant’s transcendental idealism, namely, the idea that the conditions of possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience. As a consequence of Hamann’s critique, this idea is now understood to mean that the conditions of possibility of our linguistically mediated experience of the world are, at the same time, the conditions of possibility of that which is experienced in the world. Now, the claim that language does not merely mirror but actually shapes our experience of the world faces a problem completely foreign to transcendental philosophy. For the various historical languages do not seem to offer an equivalent for the Kantian transcendental ego. First of all, these languages are plural. Second, they do not allow for a sharp distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, between that which is supposed to count as valid in them a priori (knowledge of the language) and that which is valid a posteriori (knowledge of the world). Thus if languages shape our experience of the world, they do so in merely contingent and plural ways. As Hamann points out, the meaning and use of words of different languages is a priori arbitrary and indifferent, but a posteriori necessary and indispensable. Seen in this light, Hamann’s critique of Kant seems to force the relativist conclusion that Humboldt will express later in one of his most famous theses, namely, that ‘every language contains a peculiar world-view.’

Hamann never addressed the problem of linguistic relativism entailed in his transformation of transcendental philosophy. Moreover, given the decisively antisystematic impulse behind his critique of Kant’s philosophical system, he never attempted to work out this new view of language into a systematic conception. His reflections on language are limited to more or less isolated remarks spread throughout his writings. A much more elaborate account of this new conception of language can be found in Humboldt’s work. Although Humboldt’s general reflections about language do not amount to a philosophical theory of language—they are mostly confined to the introductions to empirical works in comparative linguistics—one of their specific aims is to bring about a radical break with the traditional conception of language. Humboldt is convinced that without such a break a science of language is not possible at all. Thus his writings contain a very articulated account of the essential features that distinguish the new conception of language from the received view.

In the context of criticizing the traditional conception of language in his work Ueber den Nationalcharakter der Sprachen, Humboldt enumerates the basic features of his own conception of language when he remarks ‘that the diversity of languages is more than a mere diversity of signs, that words and their syntax simultaneously shape and determine our concepts and that, given their systematicity and their influence on knowledge and sensibility, different languages are in fact different world-views’ (Humboldt 1903–36, IV, p. 420). In this brief summary, we can see the three fundamental claims that separate Humboldt’s position from the received view: (a) the rejection of the view of language as a mere system of signs, as a tool for the transmission of prelinguistic thoughts or the designation of objects that exist independently of language, (b) the thesis of the identity of thought and language that justifies the critique of the instrumental conception of language, and as a consequence (c) the claim that different languages are in fact different world-views. The problem of linguistic relativism implicit in this consequence can be traced back to the very core of Humboldt’s critique of the instrumental conception of language.

The traditional view of language as a mere instrument for the designation of entities independent of language is based on an assimilation of two relations that are actually irreducible to one another: the relation of designation between a name and an object and the relation of satisfaction between a predicate and the objects to which the predicate applies. From this assimilation there arises the problem of determining what the predicates actually ‘designate,’ a problem encountered already in the Middle Ages; the ensuing dispute over the universals offers clear testimony as to its depth. Nonetheless, this highly problematic conception of language can be considered as the ruling view from Aristotle to Kant. Humboldt seeks a decisive break with this reduction of the powers of language to their designating function, advocating a more stratified analysis of language. In contemporary terms, such an analysis would have to deal not only with the name object distinction, but also with the distinction between concept (or class) and object. By the same token, concerning the interpretation of signs, this analysis would have to differentiate between their meaning and reference. Humboldt states this last distinction as follows: ‘The word acts in such a way that the object given in it is represented by the soul. This representation must be distinguished from the object; … along with the objective part that relates to the object, it has a subjective part that lies in its manner of conceiving. … In turn, we scarcely need to mention that this division rests upon [an] abstraction; [further,] that the word can have no place outside of thought, and neither can its object, if it is non-physical.… This remains so even in the case of material objects, since it is ne er the objects directly, but always only the representation of them provided by the word, that is made present in the soul’ (Humboldt 1903–36, V, p. 418).

It is important to note that by introducing the useful distinction between the referent of the word and its meaning, Humboldt also excludes every possibility of a pure designating relation between a name and its object, which was the paradigm for the traditional explanation of the functioning of language. He generalizes the meaning reference distinction as applicable to all linguistic signs. Accordingly, Humboldt extends this distinction even into the realm of names, including proper names. He continues: ‘The word conceives of every concept as general, always designating, strictly speaking, classes of reality, e en if it is a proper name; for thus it comprehends … all the various states, with respect to time and space, of that which it designates’ (Humboldt 1903–36, V, p. 419).

Thus, Humboldt counteracts the problematic reduction of predicates to mere names in the traditional view with the inverse reduction, namely, the assimilation of names to predicates. This move can be considered the systematic point from which the problem of linguistic relativism arises. If this is not immediately evident, it soon becomes clear by analyzing its implications. According to this assumption, names are actually general concepts. Instead of designating an object, they too, by strict analogy with predicates, can relate only in a mediated fashion to their referent, as if to an object falling under a concept. Humboldt explains: ‘the picture of language as merely designating objects, already perceived in themselves, is also not sustained by examination of what language engenders as its product.… Just as no concept is possible without language, so also there can be no object for the mind, since it is only through the concept, of course, that anything external acquires full being for consciousness. But the whole mode of percieving things subjectively necessarily passes over into cultivation and the use of language. For the word arises from this very perceiving; it is a copy, not of the object in itself, but of the image thereof produced in consciousness’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VII, p. 60). Seen in this light, the idealistic conclusion that Humboldt draws from this assumption seems entirely consistent: namely, that ‘man [lives] with the objects … exclusively in the way that they are conveyed to him by language’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VII, p. 60). This in turn explains why different languages are in fact different world-views. As Humboldt remarks in a similar context: ‘In this way, in words of identical meaning that are found in a number of languages, there arise diverse representations of the same object, and this characteristic of the word contributes chiefly to the fact that e ery language yields a particular worldiew’ (Humboldt 1903–36, V, p. 420).

However, once the diversity of conceptual systems or world-views contained in the different languages is recognized, it is no longer clear how speakers of different linguistic communities can talk about the same things and thus communicate successfully. Humboldt has to admit that ‘every language places definite boundaries upon the spirits of those who speak it, and insofar as it provides a determinate orientation, excludes others’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VII, p. 621). The commensurability of different linguistic world-views does not become a problem for Humboldt because he has skeptical doubts about the possibility of translation between languages. Actually Humboldt remarks repeatedly that ‘experience with translation of the most diverse languages … shows that it is possible to express e ery concatenation of ideas in e ery language’ (Humboldt 1903–36, IV, p. 17). Instead, the problem of linguistic relativism originates in the fact that through his criticism of the traditional conception of language Humboldt has destroyed the plausibility of the traditional answer to this problem. His conception of language as world-disclosing precludes the possibility of explaining interlinguistic understanding by appealing to a world-in-itself accessible to all human beings in the same way and to which all speakers refer through the different conventions of their languages.

Humboldt is aware of this challenge and indeed tries to articulate an alternative answer to the question of interlinguistic understanding. His answer is also based on a criticism of the traditional view of language, but this time from a different angle. Humboldt opposes the reduction of language to a mere system of signs entailed in the traditional view. In the introduction to his work on the Kawi language, Humboldt expresses this opposition with the help of one of his most famous claims, namely that language is not a product (ergon) but an activity (energeia). To take this claim seriously implies transforming the traditional conception in two important respects.

First, in the sense already mentioned, Humboldt’s view of language as an acti ity underscores the fact that language does not passively mirror the world but it is actually world disclosing. Language is what makes the world appear as an ordered whole. For it is through the web of linguistic concepts that what would otherwise be a disconnected flux of perceptions is transformed into an order of objects properly so called. In this sense Humboldt claims that ‘the generation of language is, from the beginning, a synthetic process in the most genuine sense of the term, where the synthesis creates something that did not exist before in any constituent part’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VII, p. 95). Humboldt terms this genuine synthesis ‘articulation’ and regards it as ‘the authentic essence of language, the lever through which language and thought are produced, the culmination of their intimate mutual connection’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VI, p. 153).

However, there is a second, more radical sense in which Humboldt sees language as an activity. According to Humboldt, the synthetic process through which both language and thought are produced is not something given once and for all, i.e., fixed through the grammar and lexicon of a language. It is rather the result of a praxis, namely the process of communication between speakers. As he remarks repeatedly: ‘Language only exists in ongoing speech; grammar and lexicon are hardly comparable to their dead skeleton’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VI, p. 148). Humboldt opposes the reduction of language to a mere vehicle of thought that underlies the analysis of language in logic. In this context language is considered in abstraction from the use of language in speech for the purposes of analyzing the general structure of thoughts. But Humboldt’s opposition to this abstraction is not based on the obvious fact that language, in addition to being a vehicle of thought, is also a means of communication. His view is rather that language can only be a vehicle of (intersubjective) thought to the extent that it makes communication and understanding between speakers possible. Thus a proper analysis of the cognitive function of language is impossible if language is considered in isolation from its communicative function. Behind Humboldt’s claim is the idea that the different communicative perspectives, generated through the system of personal pronouns present in all languages, are the condition of possibility of any intersubjectively valid thought. For these different perspectives make it possible that speakers both express their views in their irreducible singularity and achieve a common understanding through conversation as well. Thus the commesurability of linguistic world-views is not guaranteed in advance by a unique syntax or lexicon; it is actually the result of a different feature of all languages, namely its dialogical structure. It is in virtue of the pragmatic structure of speech that a free synthesis of perspectives among speakers can come about in conversation.

Humboldt is fascinated by the double nature of language as the source of both generality and Individuality. Due to its general character language makes it possible that different speakers share identical concepts (and in this way fulfills a socializing function). But due to its expressive potential it also allows speakers to maintain their genuine individuality (i.e., it makes individualization possible). Humboldt explains: ‘in language the Individualization within a general conformity is so wonderful, that we may say with equal correctness that the whole of mankind has but one language, and that every man has one of his own’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VII, p. 51). However, there is an obvious tension in this view. On the one hand, Humboldt claims that in virtue of its intrinsic generality (the fact that we can share it), language entails the condition of possibility of understanding among speakers. It guarantees, in Humboldt’s words, that: ‘nobody may speak differently to another from the way in which the latter, under similar circumstances, would have spoken to him’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VII, p. 47). But on the other hand, the possibility of understanding among speakers is not a mere function of a shared grammar or lexicon. Given that the only reality of language is speech, genuine understanding can only be the lucky outcome of the process of communication itself, in which different individuals express their individuality or particular world-view. For ‘only in the individual does language get its last determination.… A nation as a whole has indeed the same language, but not all the individuals in it have … exactly the same one, and if one looks more carefully, every person actually has his own’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VI, p. 183). But given that speakers’ linguistic differences are actually differences in worldview, it is not clear within Humboldt’s account how speakers can talk about the same things despite their genuinely different linguistic world-views. Without such an explanation the possibility of understanding in dialogue remains puzzling. Humboldt has to recognize that ‘nobody means by a word precisely the same as his neighbor does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all agreement in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence’ (Humboldt 1903–36, VI, p. 183). The tension present in Humboldt’s writings between the roles ascribed to language in its world-disclosing and in its communicative dimensions remains a characteristic feature of the works of most of the authors of this tradition.

2. Further Developments In The Twentieth Century

1. Heidegger is undoubtedly the most influential defender of Humboldt’s conception of language as world-disclosing in twentieth century philosophy. However, despite the deep similarities between the conceptions of language developed by both authors, Heidegger was rather critical of Humboldt’s approach to language at different times during his philosophical development and for different reasons (see Heidegger 1927, 1986). The view of language as responsible for world disclosure is not articulated explicitly in Heidegger’s early writings, although some features of what would be his later conception of language already appear in them, including in Being and Time (see Lafont 2000). Most of Heidegger’s reflections on language are contained in a collection of articles that appeared in English under the title On the Way to Language.

As is characteristic of all the authors in this tradition, Heidegger articulates his view of language as world-disclosing in direct opposition to the traditional conception of language as a mere tool for the designation of objects that exist independently of language. He argues that the linguistic activity of naming something with a word cannot be understood as a pure relation of designation between a name and an entity. It does not consist of the fact ‘that something already familiar to us is provided with a name, rather … through this naming, the entity is first nominated as that which it is. It is in this way that it is known as an entity’ (Heidegger 1944). In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger explains: ‘When language names the entity for the first time, such naming alone brings the entities to word and to appearance. This naming nominates the entity to its being from out of this being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which it is announced as what the entity comes into the open’ (Heidegger 1986, pp. 59–60). In On the Way to Language he expresses the same idea in a much more provocative way using a line of Stefan George’s poem, namely, that ‘there is no thing where the word is lacking.’ Heidegger explains: ‘The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the thing. Only in this way is it.… The word alone supplies being to the thing, [for] … something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existing and in this way institutes the particular entity as such.… The being of that which is resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being’ (Heidegger 1986, pp. 164–6).

As Humboldt had already argued before, entities can only be identified as such once they are linguistically categorized. It is in this sense that language is responsible for world-disclosure: language determines our possible experience with entities and thus determines in advance what kind of world is disclosed to us. With regard to the world-disclosing power of language, Heidegger basically agrees with Humboldt. However, on this very same basis he criticizes Humboldt’s view of language as an activity. As mentioned above, Humboldt tried to conceive the production of a linguistic world-view as a result of the human activity of speech. This would explain how speakers can synthesize their different world-views and revise them through dialogue. However, as Heidegger argues, in order for a dialogue to be possible at all, it is first necessary that one and the same world be disclosed to all speakers. As he had already claimed in Being and Time, ‘only he who already understands can listen.’ Heidegger interprets Humboldt’s emphasis on the communicative dimension of language as just a reminiscence of the instrumental conception of language. Heidegger directs one of his most provocative claims against any attempt to transfer language’s power of world disclosure to the human activity of speech. He writes: ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the mistress of man … For strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal’ (Heidegger 1954, p. 184).

As a result of this extremely idealistic conception of language, Heidegger sees world disclosure, which is anchored in the language of a specific people or culture, as the most significant event of their historical development (see Heidegger 1980). Based on this idea, Heidegger interprets the history of Western culture as the fateful development of the understanding of being as presence, which is disclosed in Western languages and may bring this culture towards its own destruction. From a Humboldtian point of view, the reification of language implicit in Heidegger’s view seems just a consequence of ignoring that language is not a product but an activity, i.e., that language is nothing other than the communicative activity between human beings. However, it is hard to question Heidegger’s criticism of this Humboldtian claim, given that for both authors language has the power to constitute our experience in the strict sense set by transcendental philosophy. So long as this presupposition is not questioned, achieving the balance sought by Humboldt between the world disclosing and the communicative dimensions of language remains an unresolved task in this tradition.

H.-G. Gadamer, Heidegger’s most influential student in contemporary German philosophy, tries to achieve this balance in his main work Truth and Method. In this work Gadamer articulates the essential features of the approach to philosophy that he calls ‘philosophical hermeneutics.’ At the core of this approach is an analysis of hermeneutic experience, i.e., of the interpretative relationship that human beings entertain with each other and with their symbolic products (e.g., texts, works of art, and the like). To support his account of hermeneutic experience he appeals to the conception of language developed in the Hamann–Herder–Humboldt tradition, to which he wishes to contribute with his own reflections on language. He uses the Humboldtian model of dialogue between speakers who try to reach agreement about something in the world and generalizes it as the appropriate model for describing any hermeneutic experience whatsoever (e.g., the understanding of canonical texts, works of art, and any other symbolic products by an interpreter, most significantly in the context of the human sciences). In this respect, Gadamer explicitly focuses on the communicative dimension of language. However, he looks at the Humboldtian model of dialogue with Heideggerian eyes.

Gadamer emphasizes that a genuine dialogue by its very nature is not just the product of the speakers’ activity. First of all, as Gadamer remarks, ‘no one knows in advance what will come out of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us’ (Gadamer 1960, p. 383). But more importantly, a conversation is only possible if the participants share a linguistically disclosed world. Thus, a shared world disclosure, i.e., a common tradition, is the precondition for any understanding or agreement that speakers try to bring about in conversation. Although Gadamer opposes, as much as did Humboldt, the thesis of the incommensurability of different linguistic world disclosures, he has never seriously confronted the challenge of explaining how intercultural understanding is possible, that is, how a dialogue between participants who do not belong to the same tradition and thus do not share the same linguistic world disclosure is possible at all.

More recently, K.-O. Apel and J. Habermas have tried to work out Humboldt’s and Gadamer’s model of dialogue into a systematic theory of communication (see Apel 1994, Habermas 1981). Both authors identify in the communicative function of language a specific kind of rationality (communicative rationality) that allows participants in communication to reach a rational agreement about something in the world. Although they share the view of language as world disclosing that characterizes the continental tradition, their approaches introduce a strong dichotomy between form and content that aims to conceive rational understanding as a universal possibility (and thus to avoid the problem of incommensurability between different linguistic world disclosures). In clear opposition to Heidegger and Gadamer’s claim that understanding is only possible on the basis of a factual agreement among speakers with a shared linguistic world disclosure, Apel and Habermas claim that understanding depends only on a ‘counterfactual agreement’ that all speakers share just in virtue of their communicative competence. This agreement is based on formal presuppositions and thus it does not depend on a shared content or shared world disclosure among the participants in conversation. A rational reconstruction of these formal presuppositions of communication is the core of the analysis of language that these authors offer in their respective approaches. Apel understands this analysis as a transformation of transcendental philosophy within the linguistic paradigm and thus calls it ‘transcendental semiotics.’ Habermas disagrees with Apel’s claim that the formal presuppositions of communication have a transcendental status in the strict Kantian sense; thus he prefers the designation of ‘formal pragmatics’ for his approach. But beyond these methodological differences their reconstructions of the formal presuppositions of communication are very similar.

According to both approaches, speakers who want to reach an agreement about something in the world have to presuppose the truth of what they are saying, the normative rightness of the interaction they are establishing with the hearer through their speech acts, and the sincerity or truthfulness of their speech acts. Complementary to these three validity claims (truth, normative rightness, and truthfulness), speakers share the notion of a single objective world that is identical for all possible observers. This is just a formal notion that is freed of all specific content. It is important to note that this presupposition does not correspond to the naıve belief in a world-in-itself accessible to all speakers that characterizes the traditional conception of language. As Habermas argues, if speakers had such a naıve belief they would identify the contents of their respective linguistic world-views with the assumed world-order itself. But with such a dogmatic attitude they would not admit the possibility that in case of disagreement the claims raised by other speakers may turn out to be right about the way the world is. In order for a rational discussion to be possible at all, speakers have to be able to adopt a hypothetical attitude vis-a-vis their own beliefs about the world. This is only possible if they distinguish, however counterfactually, between the assumed world-order itself and their respective claims about how the world is. Seen in this light, the formal presupposition of a single objective world is just a consequence of the universal claim to validity built into the speakers’ speech acts. It is just an expression of the communicative constraint that makes rational criticism and mutual learning possible, namely, that from two opposed claims only one can be right. Thus the formal notion of world and the three universal validity claims build a system of coordinates that guides the interpretative efforts of the participants in communication towards a common understanding, despite their differences in beliefs or world-views.

It is an open question whether this proposal is actually successful in explaining the possibility of interlinguistic understanding, as much as it is open whether any current theory within contemporary philosophy of language is so successful. However, Apel’s and Habermas’ approaches are intentionally designed to meet this challenge in a way unprecedented in prior continental philosophy of language. Equally unprecedented is the scope and sophistication of the philosophical analysis of language and communication that these authors offer. This is in part due to the reception and creative integration in their own work of most of the approaches developed within contemporary philosophy of language across the borders of the different philosophical traditions.

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