Immanuel Hermann Fichte: Outline of a system of philosophy. First division: knowledge as self-knowledge – Language

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.

Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise vicomte de Bonald - Philosophical researches on the premier objects of moral cognitions (1818)

I’ve already discussed de Bonald’s ideas about the proper form of state - to summarise, he was a conservative thinker, who preferred hereditary monarchy over democracy, because the former provided a unifying element required for stabilising society and keeping it running according to necessary laws. I am now about to discuss his opinions on the more theoretical side of philosophy and particularly his work Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales.

De Bonald begins his discussion with a summarised account of the history of philosophy, starting with Thales and ending with Kant and his school. While his account is at first quite diverse, he is finally quite willing to divide all philosophy into two rough classes, according to the question of the source of our ideas - those de Bonald calls Platonists, who believed in the possibility of innate ideas, and those he calls Aristotelians, who upheld that all ideas are ultimately derived from sensations. This is strikingly similar to the ideas of Saint-Simon, which makes one suspect that both thinkers relied on some common tradition in French historygraphy of philosophy.

It is no wonder that de Bonald, with his conservative take on philosophy, prefers the platonistic side of the dispute. This can be seen especially in his attitude toward the question of the origin of language. On the one side of the question, de Bonald sees linguistic atheists, who deny any peculiar origin of language and regard human speech as a mere haphazard accident that has arisen through happy circumstances. At the other side, then, are linguistic theists, who insist that skill language has been created together with the creation of human beings, just like the biblical story of Adam naming animals reveals. Finally, there is also the deistic middle stance, which supposes that human language has arisen gradually over time, from a state of complete silence, but also that humans have had a natural tendency for speech, not to be found with other animals.

De Bonald insists that the proper answer to the question is the theistic one, simply because language is something that could not have been invented - invention would have already required thinking, but human beings simply cannot think without the aid of words. A particular target of his criticism is Condorcet’s notion of the development of human culture, which undoubtedly was highly speculative account. Of course, nowadays we would quickly discount de Bonald’s explanation by saying that it is equally speculative, based on mere unverified myths, while the seemingly separate realms of silent animality and linguistic rationality seem in our eyes to be more like two points on an unbroken continuum.

De Bonald goes even further and suggests that even writing is something humans cannot have invented by themselves, pretty much for the same reason as language couldn’t have been invented - to distinguish sounds within words, one must already have letters to indicate them. What might have been invented was hieroglyphical writing, in which all words were indicated by one picture, but like other thinkers of the time had said, such a manner of writing expressed a stagnation of human development. The truly innovative alphabetical writing, de Bonald insists, must have been of divine making. Indeed, its very purpose was to counteract the all too human habit of forgetting such important things as divine law.

On basis of these considerations, it is no wonder that de Bonald is against any materialistic theories of human constitution. He notes as a physiological fact that human brain plays a crucial role in the formation of human consciousness, because all the nerves clearly transmit sensations to it. Yet, he notes, this does not necessarily mean that brain is the source of thoughts, because it might as well be just the means by which the proper source of thinking - intelligence - receives sensations and transmits commands to various parts of the body. Indeed, de Bonald says, the latter theory bears striking resemblance to the proper form of state, in which a monarchic ruler uses noble ministers to guide the body of state.

De Bonald finds three different aspects in the intelligence: imagination, or the faculty of making mental representations corresponding to sense objects, understanding, or the faculty of conceiving ideas of non-sensuous, intellectual objects, and finally, sensibility, or the faculty of sensing pleasure and pain. Now, all of these aspects have their own form of language, de Bonald continues: imagination makes gestures and pictures, understanding creates articulated speech, while sensibility is shown in involuntary movements and cries.

What de Bonald tries to achieve by distinguishing these three faculties is, firstly, to argue against the Condillacian theory that all thoughts are just modifications of sensations. Especially he wants to say that ideas - say, like of justice or goodness - are not mere sensuous images. Of course, we have learned through senses the linguistic expressions, which refer to these ideas, but the ideas themselves must be innate in us, at leas as innate capacities to think such things, de Bonald concludes.

The second reason for this trivision of mental faculties, lies in de Bonald’s wish to undermine the materialistic philosophy of mind presented by Cabanis. While Cabanis had suggested as significant evidence for materialism that such things like age, gender or climate affect one’s mental constitution, de Bonald suggests that such matters affect only things like taste in foods, which belongs more to sensibility, but not ideas, which should be universal. Indeed, de Bonald states, seeming counterexamples of cultures having different moral norms are not dependent on material influences, like climate, but simply on the moral state of the culture in question.

From the rather clear that fact that a person can wish for one’s own death, de Bonald draws the rather strong conclusion that human soul must be immortal. De Bonald’s reasoning is based on the assumption that soul or human personality can never really hope for its own destruction. Indeed, when one desires death, one desires merely separation of soul from the shackles of body, de Bonald says. Of course, one can quite well suspect such a statement, because we might well assume some suicidal people would really want to destroy their very consciousness.

De Bonald also notes the universal recognition of the existence of God. Indeed, he notes this on each of the three aspects of human cognition: different cultures have had images of divinity, they have talked about gods and they have surely had sentiments of the creator. De Bonald suggests this universal recognition as a premiss in a Cartesian proof of God’s existence - if humans have had cognitive stances about God, God must be possible, which means that he must also exist. Yet, as he himself appears to understand, the most convincing argument he could use is more emotional - the universality of belief in God seems hard to explain, unless God really existed. Indeed, de Bonald notes, even hardline materialists cannot but fail to speak of such matters as the order of the world, thus implicitly already assuming the existence of someone to order matter.

It is no wonder that as a conservative thinker de Bonald doesn’t try to introduce any novelties in his philosophy, but defends a tried worldview. Thus, it is to be accepted that after bringing God into the equation, de Bonald notes that he has organised the world teleologically for the sake of human beings. In another analogy with state, de Bonald calls humans ministers of the divine monarch, leading all the other living beings. This does not mean that humans could despotically rule over animals, because they should be more like guardians to animals. Still, de Bonald sees humans as clearly above animals, because animals are, de Bonald says, perfect and cannot become any better, while humans are perfectible.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, Third part, Logic (1805)

The main feeling after reading the third part of Destutt de Tracy’s magnum opus is one of futility - why did he have to write the book or at least why did he have to use so many pages for it? The main point of the work is so simple and could have been said in far fewer words.

Destutt de Tracy’s first point is that traditional logic has followed a completely misleading route. The aim of logic should have been to find the ultimate reasons why we sometimes stumble into error and methods for avoiding such errors. After Aristotle had put so much effort in classifying the various species of valid syllogisms, every logician was under the impression that these rather quaint formulas were the essence of logic, although they were sterile and quite useless in producing new truths.

Destutt de Tracy’s second point is that the true source of certainty can actually be found in the two previous parts of his ideology. All human thinking is just sensation, and in a sense, all sensations are as such reliable. Although this might appear rather far-fetched, Destutt de Tracy’s point appears to be simply that when we sense or experience something, we are certainly having that experience and something either outside or inside us is making us experience things in that manner. This means especially that simple sensations of things present are a completely reliable source of knowledge - if we sense red, then we are sensing red and something is making us sense red.

An error comes into the picture only with judgement. There’s no question about it that we sense red and that something makes us see red, but the question is can we say what this red-sensation-making thing is and whether it is even an object outside us or just some hallucination inducing state within us - or, to take another object, if we see a crooked stick, whether this sensation of crookedness is caused by a truly crooked stick or by a straight stick together with the refraction of water.

Now, judgements are also, Destutt de Tracy said, sensations - they are experiences of one idea being connected to another idea. Thus, there is no particular reason why judgements as such couldn’t be as reliable as ordinary sensations. For instance, if we note that a certain sensation must be produced by an external object, because it resists our efforts to change it, we can be fairly certain that this judgement is reliable.

The reason making certain judgements unreliable, Destutt de Tracy suggests, is essentially our bad memory. We have a sensation and are convinced that this sensation resembles sensations we used to have. If our memory of these earlier sensations were faulty, we would then be in error. Since all our general concepts are just abstractions from earlier sensations, according to Destutt de Tracy, this source of error can easily cause much damage in our cognitive state.

“Base your knowledge on present sensations and try to avoid faulty memories” is then the simple answer to most questions of logic - Baconian empiricism is the solution to everything. The only other thing we need to take into account is the role of language, since most of our cognitive processes happen through words. Indeed, when we learn things just through reading - a favourite point of ridicule, of which scholastics used to be accused - we are just having sensations of certain signs, which have the ability to induce in us some ideas, although these ideas might have no resemblance with our direct sensations. Language is thus another possible source of misinformation, but it is also a possible source of correct information, as long as we just know the semantics of the language used.

And this was it! No further methodology is required, Destutt de Tracy appears to say, and a more cynical reader might ask if experience and semantics is truly enough for finding new truths, although they are undoubtedly good tools for avoiding errors.

Apparently just to add some more pages to his book, Destutt de Tracy chose to give a general outline of what his ideology should contain. Despite its supplementary nature, this is by far the most interesting piece of the work. The three books Destutt de Tracy had published thus far formed only the first third of the whole ideology, or in more detail, the part dealing with human cognitive capacities. Even in this part Destutt de Tracy had noticed that human beings had something beyond mere cognition or sensations, namely, active drives, which we sense as volitions. The second part of ideology should then be formed by the study of our volitional side. Since this part of ideology Destutt de Tracy managed to at least partially publish, I shall not handle it now.

The third planned, but never published part should have then dealt with things external to humans. As we saw already with the first part of Ideology, Destutt de Tracy thought our belief in things external to us was based on our volition and especially on the feeling of resistance we have, when we are prevented from getting what we want. This resistance and its various kinds form then in Destutt de Tracy’s view the basis on which physical sciences would have to be founded.

In addition to physical sciences and concrete bodies, this third part of ideology would deal with the abstraction of distance, which we measure with our movement. Thus, we get the ideas of spatial dimensions and shapes, which form the topic of geometry.

Finally, the third part would have to deal with the imaginary world of numbers, which we create from the abstraction of units and an imagined collections of such units. On basis of this simple beginning can be built more and more complex ways to manipulate numbers, which retain their certainty because of their connection with these original notions of unit and addition and because of precision involved in mathematical language. Despite this world of numbers being completely imagined, Destutt de Tracy said, it could be used in real world, just because and when we could find suitable items to take as units.

Next time, we shall see the conclusion to the story of ideology.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, Second part, Grammar (1803)

Although second part of Destutt de Tracy’s grand work is supposedly about grammar, it is more a book about language in general. Thus, it contains, among other things, an account of the genesis of language. Destutt de Tracy thinks that human beings come with a natural language, consisting of cries, signs and tactile impulses. One might find here a delightful admission that a language need not be aural, but could be something like a sign language or Braille writing. Yet, Destutt de Tracy does not really develop the implications of this idea and considers only speech as a fixed and conventionalised modification of the original language of action

In a quite believable manner Destutt de Tracy considers the original speech to consist of individual expressions indicating whole sentences, somewhat like a child could cry “Milk”, when she wanted to drink milk. The development of language means then a sort of analysis of parts implicit in these original interjections. First, Destutt de Tracy says, language users differentiated a subject from verb, making subject-verb the general form of all language. Here, subject indicates an existing thing and verb signifies its mode of existence (e.g. “Bob runs” says that a thing indicated by the name Bob exists runningly). With the invention of the general and neutral verb “being”, it is possible to abstract attributes or adjectives, which are otherwise like verbs, but lack the idea of existence. Further developments include the introduction of more complex noun and verb forms through the use of prepositions and the capacity to subjunct sentence to other sentences with the general conjunction “que” (that) and later with other, derivative conjunctions.

One can see from this short summary of Destutt de Tracy’s account of grammar that he is engaging in a sort of attempt at universal grammar in the fashion of Chomsky. As with Chomsky, the problems in Destutt de Tracy’s account are evident when one looks beyond the restricted number of languages he considers. One can e.g. argue that subject-verb is not the general form of all sentences (indeed, there are languages, in which subject is not required at all and one might insist that in sentences like “It rains” there is no real subject) and that verbs do not always convey the idea of existence (like when one is discussing fictional things).

It is not just the generation of grammar in speech Destutt de Tracy considers, but also the generation of written signs representing speech. It had been a pet idea of 18th century thinkers like Leibniz that a system of ideogrammatic symbols, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters, which represented complete ideas, would be a perfection of written language, since it would allow turning language into a direct calculation. By the beginning of 19th century, this idea had lost its charm, since ideograms were so obviously difficult to work with. Destutt de Tracy considered them to have a stunting effect to a culture of a nation - ideograms formed a sort of second language, which required years of learning and the use of which was thus restricted to a certain class.

Destutt de Tracy was thus convinced that phonogrammatic symbols, like regular alphabets, which represented sounds of speech, were more suitable for development of sciences. Still, he did not believe that alphabets would have developed out of hieroglyphs - so certain he was that a culture with ideogrammatic writing could invent anything. Instead, he regarded alphabets as an alternative line of development. While hieroglyphs were invented for the purpose of expressing ideas, Destutt de Tracy insisted, alphabets were invented for the sake of music, which required signs by which to indicate different sounds in singing. Although a rather beautiful idea, it is most certainly quite false, since e.g. Hebrew alphabets were a direct development out of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Just like Destutt de Tracy appeared to dream of a universal grammar, he was also keen on finding a universal alphabet, which would be able to represent all kinds of sounds used in human languages. It doesn’t require much consideration to notice how utterly unmanageable as a practical writing tool such a universal phonetic system would be. Indeed, when one looks at phonology of a single language, one sees how utterly confusing it might even be - a single language doesn’t use all possible sounds humans can produce, and in fact, some sounds are alternatives, which to a language user sound just like arbitrary variations of the same sound (phoneme, in technical terms).

Destutt de Tracy actually isn’t so bold as to suggest that all languages in the world should start to use a phonetically perfect alphabet, because he knows that such innovations would not be easily accepted by the majority of language users. Indeed, even a more modest attempt to turn the writing of a given language into phonologically perfect terms, in which one phoneme were represented by a single letter, might be quite difficult to achieve. In fact, what Destutt de Tracy suggests is to use this phonetic writing as a tool for language learning - if words were written with such phonetic signs, one could instantly know how to pronounce a word of foreign language. Of course, even this is a bit too idealistic notion - even phonetic signs don’t teach you to actually pronounce the required sounds, let alone make speaking a language completely natural.

On the whole, Destutt de Tracy is critical of any idea to artificially construct a more perfect language, in which one could just calculate what connections of ideas are true - another pet idea of Leibniz. Destutt de Tracy admits that such a language can exist in a limited setting, such as algebra, but it could never form a complete and living language. Even if one would be able to overcome the resistance of the common people, one would still face a great obstacle. The very structure of thinking varies widely from one person to another and there is no guarantee that two different persons would have even remotely similar ideas of the same things. Thus, in building a perfect language, one would not have any single system of ideas to represent. Indeed, the best one could do in aiding thinking was to cultivate a science of good thinking or logic - the topic of the next part of the series.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac: Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746)

Enlightenment thinker Condillac (1714 - 1780)

If one wanted to name one philosopher as the strongest influence on works of abbé Condillac, it would clearly be John Locke, which is shown well by Condillac's first book, which investigates the origin of human knowledge. Almost all other modern philosophers are discarded, because they have based their philosophies on abstract principles, which Condillac considers to be a completely topsy-turvy method, because such principles are usually the most difficult topic to master properly. Condillac makes especially fun of Christian Wolff's metaphysics: Wolff defines e.g. existence as a complement of possibility, although this statement tells us almost nothing about existence or possibility, and indeed, fails to note that existence is actually the more fundamental notion.

It is then no wonder that Condillac instead wants to begin with what we experience. Experience provides us with ideas, which we then can use as building material for further ideas (e.g. we can abstract the idea of horseness from ideas of individual horses, or we could combine idea of a headless body of a horse and idea of human head to form the idea of centaur). It is by analyzing the genesis of our ideas that we make them clearer and gain a better understanding of what we actually know, while of abstract principles and concepts we usually have only a very murky idea. This is all very Lockean, as is the division of ideas into simple (certain shade of green) and complex (green apple).

What Condillac develops more than Locke is the psychological framework of different mental capacities required for turning perceptions into knowledge and complete science. What is truly remarkable is Condillac's attempt to reduce all mental phenomena into nothing more than sensation and attention. It is undoubtedly to be expected that according to an empiricist sensation would be the origin or basis of knowledge, but it truly appears radical to say that sensation is almost all there is to human mind. Thus, we sense things and we can choose some object as the focus of our sensation, but we can also focus our attention on the fact that what we now sense is something that we have sensed earlier – this is just what memory is about and therefore, Condillac concludes, memory is just another form of sensation.

Now, I find this reduction of all mental faculties into sensation deeply problematic, because there could be organisms that sense, but still fail to have e,g. memory. Such an organism could, for instance, note the presence of a certain chemical, detrimental to its condition, in its environment and then react with a movement taking its backwards, away from the source of that chemical. There's no need for any memory, just an unpleasant feeling and an automated reaction to that feeling. The existence of such an organism would be even evolutionarily reasonable, because this capacity would greatly enhance the survival of such an organism.

Indeed, a capacity for memory appears to require something else – some way to storage features of past sensations. Of course, this requirement of memory storage seems more imminent in a materialistically grounded theory of consciousness. Condillac, in yet another move away from Locke, commits himself to a non-materialistic theory of soul, and for reasons that strikingly remind one of Wolffian psychology: self-consciousness just cannot be explained through a complex substance. It is probably more reasonable to suppose that to such an immaterial soul it is just a matter of directing your attention to view some sensation as resembling past sensations.

Yet another area in which Condillac goes beyond Locke's philosophy is the role of language, which Condillac admits is almost a necessity for more abstract ideas and required, for instance, in advancing mathematics beyond simple calculations. Condillac even provides the reader with a hypothetical history of forms of language, starting from what Condillac calls a language of action, by which he apparently means a language using natural gestures and cries for communicating one's thoughts and emotions to others.

It might be that Condillac understood the importance of language from the example of ”wolf kids” who had grown up outside human communities and learned language only later in their life – at least this is a topic Condillac was quite interested of. It might also be an inspiration for Condillac's main work, in which he experiments with the idea of a person born without all the senses and upbringing of an average Frenchman – but this is a topic I'll return to later.