Wilhelm von Humboltd

Humboltd, Wilhelm von (1767–1835)

Along with Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt was one of the chief representatives of Weimar classicism, a movement that aspired to revive German culture along the lines of ancient Greece. Humboldt’s philosophical significance resides mainly in two areas: political theory and the philosophy of language. In political theory he was one of the founders of modern liberalism; and in the philosophy of language, he was among the first to stress the importance of language for thought, and of culture for language.

Born into an aristocratic family in Prussia, Humboldt received a private education by some luminaries of the Berlin Enlightenment (see Enlightenment, Continental). As a young man he frequented the literary salons of Rahel Levin and Henriette Herz, where he cavorted with some of the leaders of the Romantic movement. Humboldt spent much of his career in the service of the Prussian state. From 1802 to 1810 he was the Minister of Education in the Prussian Reform Administration of Baron von Stein; and from 1813 to 1815 he acted as Prussian representative at the Congresses of Prague and Vienna. His most important achievements were as Minister of Education. In this role he founded the University of Berlin, and created the first unified school system in Germany, whose broad outlines still exist.

Like Kant, F.H. Jacobi and Georg Forster, Humboldt was one of the founders of German liberalism. His Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (The Limits of State Action), which was written in 1792 but not published until 1851, later became a classic of the liberal cause. Strictly speaking, it is anachronistic to regard Humboldt as a spokesman for liberalism, given that liberalism was not a self-conscious and organized movement in Germany until the 1840s. Nevertheless, his ideas proved influential for later liberals. The Ideen inspired much of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty and Edouard Laboulaye’s L’État et ses limites (The State and Its Limits).

The distinguishing feature of Humboldt’s liberalism is its humanism, its ethic of perfection, the development of individuality (Eigentümlichkeit) and wholeness. Humboldt contended that the main aim of the state should not be to promote happiness, but excellence or individuality. The central argument of the Ideen is that the best state to achieve this end is the minimal one that permits everyone to do whatever they want, as long as they do not interfere with a similar liberty for others. Since the chief condition of individuality and excellence is freedom of choice, the best state is the smallest.

It is important not to confuse Humboldt’s view with other doctrines later associated with liberalism. Unlike most German liberals of the 1840s, Humboldt had little sympathy for democracy, and held that the best government for the protection of liberty is a constitutional monarchy. Although Humboldt approved of a market economy, his liberalism was also not a defence of laissez-faire. He deplored the doctrine that the main aim of the state should be to create wealth or prosperity, for he feared that such materialism undermined the pursuit of excellence. Finally, unlike later liberalism, Humboldt’s individualism was not at the expense of communal values, because he insisted that people develop their powers only through cooperation with others.

Humboldt’s role in the development of the modern philosophy of language has been the subject of dispute. It is too much to claim that he is ‘the father of modern linguistics’ (Ernst Cassirer), since this ignores the many earlier contributions to this field (F. Bopp, J. Degerando, E. Condillac, F. Schlegel and J. Herder). Humboldt’s philosophy synthesized, however, many of the most advanced ideas on the nature of language in the early nineteenth century. At the very least, Humboldt was one of the leading figures behind the development of comparative linguistics, the detailed study of the different forms of language.

The characteristic conception behind Humboldt’s theory is his view of language as an organism. Like many early nineteenth-century thinkers, Humboldt believed that human activities are best explained in organic rather than mechanical terms. He held that language, like any organism, is an indivisible whole. It is a whole in two respects: the main unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence; and each language is unique, having a distinctive meaning that cannot be completely translated into another language. Humboldt also maintained that, like any living thing, language is dynamic. We cannot understand it simply as a static collection of rules and words, because it is an activity, the attempt to express thoughts in symbols. Because it is an activity, language is constantly evolving and changing.

Rejecting the older rationalist view that words are only arbitrary symbols to designate already fixed concepts, Humboldt stressed the unity of thought and language. He insisted that we discover, define and develop our concepts only through words. Thinking consists in a dynamic interchange between words and concepts. After expressing an idea in a sign, that sign takes on an existence of its own that also partially determines the shape of our ideas. Both concept and sign shape each other until there is at least an approximate correspondence between them.

Humboldt also emphasized the cultural dimension of language. Each language is a unique form of thought, expressing the whole way of life of a people. This view led him to a doctrine of linguistic relativity, which he never fully explored. According to this doctrine, there are as many ways of thinking about the world as there are cultures.

The most controversial aspect of Humboldt’s philosophy of language is his typology, which evaluates languages according to the degree that their matter is subordinate to form. He imagined a hierarchy beginning with the purely agglutinative languages, where matter dominates form, and ending with the inflected languages, where form subjugates matter. Such a typology, however, presupposes that there is some ideal or universal language, which is incompatible with the cultural dimension of language. It also clashes with two facts: that some peoples who have an agglutinative language have a highly developed culture (the Chinese); and that some inflected languages, such as English, tend to become formless by losing their endings. Humboldt attempted to meet these difficulties by revising and refining his typology. In the end, however, he never perfected his theory, which remains scattered in many unfinished writings spanning several decades.