Move to language is clearly an important stage for Fichte in the development of consciousness, because it does not refer directly to things of the sense world, but to our different modes of consciousness of these things, whether they be sensations, perceptions or representations. Thus, he says, language is required for us to become conscious of the order of our representations, by fixing words and their connections. Indeed, he underlines, internal thinking would be impossible without speaking our thoughts in our mind. In language, consciousness becomes for the first time an object to itself and raises its unconscious functions to consciousness: language gives fleeting representations stability.
Despite this importance, Fichte’s account of how language is formed is somewhat sketchy and he is satisfied by saying that the development of language mirrors the development of consciousness. First, language expresses individual sensations, intuitions and representations. At its lowest level, language produces images in sounds, in other words, the first words are tonal images, or as we would nowadays say, they are onomatopoietic: Fichte goes even so far as to assign individual sounds a natural meaning. While the first words are nouns, expressions of movement, activity and change develop into verbs. These natural onomatopoietic and semantic relations form what Fichte calls Ur-Sprache or original language: not the historically first language, but the concept or a paradigmatic model of language, which should work as the ideal foundation of all concrete languages.
While the words are originally very tied to sensations and images derived from sensations, in the course of time they are used more and more metaphorically, Fichte notes, and their original sensuous meaning is ignored. A further development occurs, when the words are related to one another and ordered according to a grammar: the words are inflected, verbs are especially determined temporally and modally, nouns and verbs are combined to sentences and conjunctions are used to connect sentences to further wholes. All of this grammar, Fichte insists, is already an unconscious expression of thinking, and language can thus be seen as containing logic in it, with words corresponding to concepts, sentences with judgements and periods of sentences with deductions. The next step is then that we become conscious of these unconsciously used forms in our language and move from mere representations to the level of thinking.
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