LYDIA PATTON CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE An der Schwelle einer neuen geistigen Welt CASSIRER STUDIES VII/VIII-2014/2015 BIBLIOPOLIS LYDIA PATTON CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE* If it is true that there are but two kinds of people in the world – the logical positivists and the god-damned English professors – then I suppose I am a logical positivist1. 1. The expressive function A divide in contemporary readings of Cassirer brings to mind the cultural differences in Wittgenstein reception. One group emphasizes Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff and Cassirer's relationship to Hermann Cohen and Rudolf Carnap; this group resembles those Wittgensteinians who prefer the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Another group emphasizes The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Cassirer's relationship to the hermeneutic tradition; this group resembles the Wittgensteinians who favor the Philosophical Investigations. A key question that divides the two interpretive traditions is the role of what Cassirer calls the "expressive function" of consciousness, embodied in language and myth. The logical positivists eschew the expressive function; the English professors embrace it2. The debates between Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger have trained our focus on whether sentences * The paper was first given at a workshop, «On Cassirer and the Neo-Kantian Legacy», at the APA Central meeting on February 18th, 2015. The workshop was organized by Fabien Capeillères, Steven Lofts, and Sebastian Luft, and I am grateful to them for the invitation and for the opportunity. Comments by Frederick Beiser, Pierre Keller, Simon Truwant, and the organizers resulted in material improvements to the project. 1 C. GLYMOUR, Theory and Evidence, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1980, p. IX. Glymour credits the first statement to Nelson Goodman. 2 That division is too facile. The well known linguist Leonard Bloomfield published work in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as did Charles Morris and Otto Neurath on signs and semiotics. Nonetheless, the division has stuck, and is used regularly to characterize these intellectual trends. Cassirer Studies VII/VIII-2014/2015 Bibliopolis containing certain terms can be derived from others, and on the related – but distinct – question of whether knowledge claims ought to be reducible to physical statements3. Cassirer himself is responsible for situating his critique of culture in this way. As Ikonen remarks, «Cassirer's critique [of culture] can be seen as an effort to find a middle path between Lebens philosophie and the positivism of the Vienna Circle»4. Among the tacit assumptions, and explicit assertions, of discussion of Cassirer's place in philosophical history are that the Lebensphilosophie side is associated with Dilthey, Herder, and hermeneutics, and leads to Husserl and Heidegger, and that the "positivist" or empiricist side is associated with Carnap and Quine, and leads to logical empiricism. Cassirer's Kulturkritik thus can be seen as a step along the road to Davos. Work by Damböck5, Kalmar6, Köhnke7, and Patton8 emphasizes the connection between Hermann Cohen, Cassirer, and the Völkerpsychologie LYDIA PATTON100 3 Among the logical empiricist texts that explain this latter view: R. CARNAP, Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, ed. by O. NEURATH, R. CARNAP, and C. MORRIS, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1938, pp. 42-62, reprinted chapter 21 in The Philosophy of Science, ed. by R. BOYD et AL., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1991, pp. 393-404; O. NEURATH, Physicalism: The Philosophy of the Vienna Circle (1931), in Philosophical Papers 1913-1946, ed. by R.S. COHEN and M. NEURATH, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht 1983, pp. 48-51; C. HEMPEL, The Logical Analysis of Psychology, in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. by H. FEIGL and W. SELLARS, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York 1949, pp. 373–384, reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, ed. by N. BLOCK, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1980, pp. 14-23. 4 S. IKONEN, Cassirer's Critique of Culture, «Synthese», 179 (1), 2011, pp. 187-202. Luft (S. LUFT, The Space of Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Culture (Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer), University Press Oxford, Oxford 2015) is a sustained discussion of Cassirer's Kulturkritik. Matherne (S. MATHERNE, Marburg Neo-Kantianism as Philosophy of Culture, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment, ed. by S. LUFT and J.T. FRIEDMAN, De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, pp. 201-232) investigates the Marburg School's philosophy as a philosophy of culture. Capeillières (F. CAPEILLIÈRES, Philosophy as Science: "Function" and "Energy" in Cassirer's "Complex System" of Symbolic Forms, «Review of Metaphysics», 61 (2), 2007, pp. 317-377) is a treatment of the concepts of "function" and "energy" in the philosophy of symbolic forms. 5 CH. DAMBÖCK, <Deutscher Empirismus>. Studien zur Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum 1830-1930, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis, Springer, Dordrecht 2016. 6 I. KALMAR, The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture, «Journal of the History of Ideas», 48 (4), 1987, pp. 671-690. 7 K. KÖHNKE, "Unser Junger Freund". Hermann Cohen und die Völkerpsychologie, in Hermann Cohen und die Erkenntnistheorie, hrsg. von W. MARX and E.W. ORTH, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, pp. 62-77. 8 L. PATTON, Hermann Cohen's History and Philosophy of Science, Dissertation, McGill University, Montréal 2004. movement spearheaded by Heymann (Chajim) Steinthal and Moritz (Moses) Lazarus. The particular position Ernst Cassirer takes on the critique of culture builds on this earlier and less well known intellectual tradition. Paying close attention to the influence of Völkerpsychologie, especially of Steinthal, leads away from a primary emphasis on questions of "validity" and "objectivity" in Cassirer's Kulturkritik, an emphasis that reflects the concern with later debates about logic as the "language of science" and about physicalism9. Instead, I will argue, Cassirer can be read as defending a position on the influence of language on the development of science that has at least two aspects: 1. Humans build the conceptual categories of science, including those employed in language itself and in myth. We can understand these categories because we constructed them (a hermeneutic moment in Cassirerpoint that has an explicit source in Lazarus and Steinthal). 2. The development of conceptual and linguistic categories depends partly on an exercise of the expressive function of consciousness that is autonomous of logic and of a priori thought, and is itself a part of the science of language – which is distinct from the language of science. Here I will build on a reading of Steinthal's 1871 work Outline of the Science of Language (Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft). 2. History and the human sciences Ernst Cassirer's place in the history of the philosophy of science is increasingly assured. My chosen theme is Cassirer's narrative regarding the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) or critique of culture (Kulturkri101CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 9 A leading narrative in Cassirer studies – on both sides of the narrative divide described above – evaluates the (limited) extent to which Cassirer can account for the validity of the cultural sciences or the objectivity of the claims of the human sciences (See: M. FRIEDMAN, A Parting of the Ways, Open Court, Chicago 2000 and Ernst Cassirer and Thomas Kuhn: The Neo-Kantian Tradition in History and Philosophy of Science, «The Philosophical Forum», 39 (2), 2008, pp. 239-252; J.M. KROIS, Cassirer. Symbolic Forms and History, Yale University, New Haven and London 1987 and Validity in the Cultural Sciences?, in Discourse on a New Method, ed. by M. DOMSKI and M. DICKSON, Open Court, Chicago 2010, Chapter 11, pp. 261-278). The negative aspects of this reading for Cassirer reception should not be over-emphasized. As Richardson points out, in A Parting of the Ways «the real hero of the tale [...] is not Carnap but Cassirer», and Cassirer's inability to account for the independent validity of the Geisteswissenschaften is seen as a noble failure of a promising program (A. RICHARDSON, Ernst Cassirer and Michael Friedman: Kantian or Hegelian Dynamics of Reason?, in Discourse on a New Method, cit., Chapter 12, p. 282; see also J.M. KROIS, Validity in the Cultural Sciences?, cit.) tik). Here, as Michael Friedman remarks, Cassirer can be seen as a mediating figure: His work pays equal attention to foundational and epistemological issues in the philosophy of mathematics and natural science and to aesthetics, the philosophy of history, and other issues in the "cultural sciences" broadly conceived. More than any other German philosopher since Kant, Cassirer thus aims to devote equal philosophical attention both to the (mathematical and) natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and to the more humanistic disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften). In this way, Cassirer, more than any other twentiethcentury philosopher, plays a fundamental mediating role between C. P. Snow's famous "two cultures"10. Cassirer even presents himself as taking a middle ground between Wilhelm Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie and Rudolf Carnap's logical empiricism. But Cassirer's purpose was not to take a middle ground; he did not take the positions he did in order to be a mediator. Moreover, a substantial portion of Cassirer's work in this vein predates the heyday of logical empiricism and Lebensphilosophie. What was the intellectual impetus for his conception of the relationship between the natural and the cultural sciences11? In The German Historicist Tradition, Frederick Beiser reveals the source of Dilthey's distinction between explanation and understanding (erklären und verstehen), often seen as central to Dilthey's defense of the independence of the human from the natural sciences: the nineteenth century historian Johannes Droysen. While there were a number of German materialists who argued for reductive positions in physiology and even in history and politics (Moleschott, Czolbe, Büchner, Vogt), Droysen responds directly to the historian Henry Thomas Buckle12. Buckle defended views similar to those of the German materialists, arguing that human behavior follows natural laws just as predictable, and just as materially grounded, as the laws of planetary motion. Droysen's Outline of the Principles of History (1867) is a response to Buckle, in which Droysen argues LYDIA PATTON102 10 M. FRIEDMAN, Ernst Cassirer, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by E. N. ZALTA. 11 As Stephen Lofts remarks, Cassirer uses the term Geisteswissenschaften in the preface to the 1923 edition of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, while his major 1942 work is called the Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. According to John Michael Krois, «Cassirer uses the terms Geisteswissenschaften and Kulturwissenschaften as interchangeable designations» (J.M. KROIS, Cassirer. Symbolic Forms and History, cit., p. 125; S. LOFTS, Ernst Cassirer, SUNY Press, Albany 2000, p. 237, note 6). 12 See: F. BEISER, The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, pp. 298 and passim; W. KLUBACK, Wilhelm Dilthey's Philosophy of History, Columbia University Press, New York 1956, p. 30. that historical phenomena cannot be dealt with in the same way as physical or material phenomena. As Droysen remarks in his lecture notes, To know is to derive from first principles; to explain (erklären) is to subsume under general mathematical laws; and to understand (verstehen) is to interpret or translate, to make someone's meaning comprehensible to me by putting it in my own terms13. Dilthey extends Droysen's argument that the methods used to build historical understanding are distinct from methods used by the physical sciences to explain14. As the unjustly neglected appreciation of Dilthey by William Kluback explains, Dilthey emerges from the hermeneutic tradition of Herder and Schleiermacher. That tradition is entangled with the neo-Kantian tradition, but comes to quite distinct conclusions, as Beiser describes. In particular, while the Southwest school of neo-Kantianism came to superficially similar conclusions about the independence of the human sciences from the natural sciences, the basis for the argument for independence was not only distinct, but in conflict – a conflict that would come to a head in the debates between Dilthey and Windelband at the end of the nineteenth century15. In 1894, Wilhelm Windelband gave a "Rektoratsrede" in Strasbourg, in which he defends Kant's principled separation of the foundations and methods of the a priori sciences of mathematics and philosophy from those of the empirical sciences: The empirical sciences either seek the general in the form of the law of nature or the particular in the form of the historically defined structure. On the one hand, they are concerned with the form which invariably remains constant. On the other hand, they are concerned with the unique, immanently defined content of the real event [...] scientific thought is nomothetic in the former case and idiographic in the latter case16. 103CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 13 F. BEISER, The German Historicist Tradition, cit., p. 298. 14 See W. DILTHEY, Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), vol. I, tr. by R. BETANZOS, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1988. For discussion of Dilthey's distinction see Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen, ed. by U. FEEST, Springer, Dordrecht 2009. 15 See L. PATTON, Methods of the Sciences, in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by M. FORSTER and K. GJESDAL, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 594-606. 16 W. WINDELBAND, History and Natural Science [Strasbourg Rectorial Address: Geschichte und Naturwissenschaften (1894)], tr. by G. OAKES, «History and Theory», 19 (2), 1980, pp. 169-185, here p. 175. Kant had argued in the Metaphysical Foundations that only nomothetic sciences were true sciences. Windelband concedes, implicitly in the above quotation, that idiographic inquiry can be scientific. But he maintains Kant's strict distinction between kinds of science, and between kinds of scientific methods. This distinction is maintained later in the Southwest School, when Heinrich Rickert defends the notion that natural science is concerned with laws, while human science is concerned with value. Windelband and Rickert agree that, even if the human sciences are to be conceded to be scientific, their methods and subject matter cannot be unified with the methods and analysanda of the natural sciences. The university at Berlin was founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt on the principle that the sciences can be unified in practice, that the faculties should work together in the interest of a regimented pursuit of knowledge17. Nonetheless, by the time Cassirer writes Logic of the Cultural Sciences, he is aware that a "logical" gap has been defended between the natural and the human or cultural sciences. In an essay published in 1942, Cassirer writes: If we accept the theory of many modern logicians, mathematical and historical thought are separated from each other by an unbridgeable gulf. Science and history can never be brought under one and the same common denominator. The structure of history and the structure of the so-called "Geistes wissenschaften" are of quite different types from the structure of mathematics or natural science [...] in this paper I do wish to indicate a way by which we may hope to bridge this logical gap18. What did Cassirer mean by the word "logic"? The title of his 1942 book, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, was deliberately provocative, as if he had called it The Logic of Discovery. In both cases, there is a substantive philosophical position according to which there is, and can be, no such logic. But that depends on what you mean by "logic". On one view, associated with the logical positivists, Frege's and Russell's logic was one source of the "universality" of logic for the sciences. Certain logical derivations are inescapable in all scientific reasoning, such as conditional (if-then) inferences19. LYDIA PATTON104 17 See L. PATTON, Methods of the Sciences, cit., including for further references. 18 E. CASSIRER, The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought, «The Journal of Philosophy», 39 (12), 1942, pp. 309-327; The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought, in Aufsätze und kleinen Schriften (1941-1946), Text und Anmerkungen bearbeitet von C. ROSENKRANZ, in Gesammelte Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, Bände 1-26, hrsg. von B. RECKI, Meiner, Hamburg 19982009 (= ECW), 24, pp. 115-134. 19 For a discussion of Carnap in this connection, see A. RICHARDSON, Carnap's Construction of the World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, pp. 27-28: Cassirer would have had another source for the use of the word "logic", however: his mentor, Hermann Cohen. Cohen's three major works of philosophy were called the Logic of Pure Knowledge (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis), the Ethics of Pure Will (Ethik des reinen Willens), and the Aesthetics of Pure Feeling (Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls). Cohen recasts Kant's three Critiques as a logic, an ethics, and an aesthetics, rather than as critiques of pure reason, of practical reason, and of judgment. Cohen sees the fundamental epistemological practice as that of solving problems revealed in experience – experience reveals, not the given, but the factual structure of problems. Discovering the formal structure of those problems is the task of pure thinking, and this, for Cohen, is the function of logic in justifying claims to knowledge20. Tracing the notion of "logic" even further backward, we find that Cohen's treatment owes a great deal to his engagement with a school that emerges in the 1860s and 1870s, called Völker psychologie. 3. Völkerpsychologie The founders of Völkerpsychologie, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, argued that «communities, like individuals, share in the common consciousness of a historical period, a Zeitbewusstsein» or consciousness of a time21. This Zeitbewusstsein or Volksgeist has clear Hegelian echoes, but Lazarus and Steinthal saw the Zeitbewusstsein as determined by, and dependent on, the culture of a time. The "law-governed behavior and development of inner activity" of a Volk was the Volksgeist. Defined in this way, Volksgeist was thus something quite similar to, if not identical with, the modern concept of "culture". Volksgeist was an instance of "group spirit" in general[,] Gesamtgeist or Gesamtheitsgeist [...] Gesamtgeist was also referred to as objectiver Geist or "objective spirit". By "objective" Lazarus and Steinthal meant merely "supraindividual, given by the social or natural environment", as opposed to the "subjective", by 105CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION «The new logic is, thus, not a tool to use in pursuit of a reductive epistemological-cumontological project bequeathed to us by the British empiricists, but rather a way of reformulating the whole question of what is at stake in philosophy. Carnap's antimetaphysics is surely the consequence of a much more fundamental understanding of "logic as the essence of philosophy" than is Russell's empiricism of 1914». 20 See S. EDGAR, Hermann Cohen, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by E. N. ZALTA, § 5. 21 I. KALMAR, The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture, cit., p. 674. which they meant the individual. Volksgeist thus corresponded to the usual modern use of culture as the social heritage of an ethnic group22. Lazarus and Steinthal explained that one way to engage in the study of culture was to examine cultural products and artefacts, principal among which are history and language. In 1863, Lazarus gave a talk, "On Ideas in History", in which he explains how we can give an account of ideas as productive and effective in history without succumbing to Hegelian dialectic or to Humboldtian empiricism23 : It should arrest the critic's attention compellingly that the great force of ideas is equally strongly emphasized in two such fundamentally different points of view as Hegel's and Humboldt's. Certainly one of the most important ways that ideas are determined is in relationship to acting and productive people, to the individuals that appear to have them. However, whereas in Hegel conscious or unconscious generality comes into the foreground, with Humboldt [it is] personal individuality. For the former [Hegel], the individual is only a medium [...] for the latter [Humboldt] the individual is the higher expression, the true life of the idea; for the former the expression: "we do not have ideas, but they have us" is common; for the latter the doctrine is that only in the productive personality do ideas attain a productive existence24. Lazarus conceived of the effectiveness of reasoning as coming neither directly from the process of thought in the individual, nor from the analysis of concepts. Rather, the impact of reasoning (of ideas) is found in their influence on the relation between individual and cultural structures. Lazarus locates the contribution of reason to history in the influence of ideas on individual thought and action: Ideas in history are the ideas that are effective in the lives and activities of men, that is, of individuals and peoples, and thus in the life of humanity. They are not transcendental powers found outside the human mind (Geist), which somehow affect it from outside, but are actual ideas, that is, ideas that appear within people as acts of their mental agency. They are produced, shaped, and developed within the human mind (Geist), and are partly realized in action and productivity 25. LYDIA PATTON106 22 Ibid., p. 675. 23 M. LAZARUS, Über die Ideen in der Geschichte, Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1865 (Inset: "Rectoratsrede am 14. November 1863 in der Aula der Hochschule zu Bern"). 24 Ibid., p. 41n. 25 Ibid., p. 73. The only materials available to the psychologist for analysis are the empirical data of experience and of recorded history. Though he insists on the productive (schöpferisch) aspect of reason, Lazarus continued to argue that this aspect could be analyzed only in its empirical manifestation. In particular, ideas in history are the ideal forms26 of the phenomena: The content of these ideas consists in all the norms of the will, in the criteria for action that keep the natural impulses of human life within certain bounds, describe goals and ends for it, and give form to individual and common human life [...] Thus structuring ideas (Ideen der Gestaltung) are the true ideas in history27. Individual psychology constrains conceptual analysis to a description of psychological processes, which Cohen derisively called the "Vorgang und Apparat" or "process and faculty", picture of cognition. Locating intellectual history in an analysis of collective cultural structures such as history and language allowed for evaluating the impact of ideas in a broader context than individual psychological processes. It also allows for the historical examination of the development of ideas. 4. Steinthal: Language and Thought, Grammar and Logic. Chajim (Heymann) Steinthal's major work was the 1871 Outline of the Science of Language, hereafter Abriss28. The main thesis of Chapter IVthe fourth section of the introduction, "Language and Thought, Grammar and Logic" (Sprechen und Denken, Grammatik und Logik), is that language, «independently of logic, establishes its forms in complete autonomy»29. That thesis is supported by means of a detailed analysis of what is meant by "language" and by "logic". At the outset, Steinthal defends a claim central to Völkerpsychologie: thinking and observing are psychological processes, they develop in the thinking and observing person, and they are not based on innate ideas30. 107CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 26 Here meaning just Gestaltungen, not the Eternal Forms. 27 M. LAZARUS, Über die Ideen in der Geschichte, cit., pp. 73-75. 28 H. STEINTHAL, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1871. Background on Steinthal, including further references, can be found in: CH. DAMBÖCK, Deutscher Empirismus. Studien zur Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum 1830-1930, cit., §4.1; L. PATTON. Hermann Cohen's History and Philosophy of Science, cit., §2.2. Translations from the Abriss are for this essay. 29 H. STEINTHAL, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, cit., p. 62. 30 Cf. ibid., p. 45. The categories of thought found in Aristotle, Plato, and Kant are not inborn, but developed. As Steinthal asks, how do we develop the categories of thing, of substance, or of cause? How do we come to use these categories without consciously doing so, in experience and in observation? Steinthal links the categories that Kant and Aristotle had called "logical" (in Kant's case part of transcendental logic) to the process of developing a language in which to express spatiotemporal relationships, including relations between substances and causes. Steinthal argues against the thesis that language is just the external, sensible counterpart of thinking, conceived as an internal process. According to the view Steinthal opposes, «Language [...] is thought itself, a word is a concept itself, a proposition is a judgment itself, just expressed in language at the same time, phonetically perceptible, made corporeal»31. More pithily, as Steinthal paraphrases from Plato's Sophist, «Language is thinking aloud, as thought is silent speech»32. Steinthal argues against these views, and for a thesis that language and grammar are independent of prior thought. Initially, Steinthal gives a rather weak, Humean argument against this view: that someone who does not know what sweetness, or red, or music is will not learn it by being told in language. Shortly, though, he gives a better one. All those whom he's mentioned, including Aristotle and Plato, begin from a fact: that «people convey, and thus represent, their consciousness through sounds»33. Steinthal agrees with this fact. He disagrees with the conclusion they draw from it: that «the forms of thought are also the forms of language»34. The inference they draw has the following structure, as found in Steinthal: Since language = representation of thought, thus the forms of language = forms of representation of thought35. Steinthal opposes this inference. The premise can be true – language can be a representation of thought – and the conclusion be false. The forms of language may be distinct from, and develop independently of, the forms of representation of thought: «Thus, the expression certainly is not quite like what is expressed»36. LYDIA PATTON108 31 Ibid., p. 46. 32 Ibid., p. 47. 33 Ibid., p. 55. 34 Ibid., p. 56. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.: «Also ist der Ausdruck doch nicht ganz wie das Ausgedrückte». Steinthal defends a notion of "expression" in language that has a "form" that develops, and is independent of, the thought of which it is a representation. It is a very short step from this account to a notion of the "expressive function" akin to the one defended by Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Steinthal concedes that language and grammar can be represented as an interconnected, logical system. In particular, as Steinthal summarizes Wilhelm von Humboldt's position, The categories of language are for the most part logical entities, general forms of thought and observation, which form a closed system. However, this system of grammatical or grammatical-logical forms, because it is a logical one, does not belong to linguistics (Sprachwissenschaft), at least not actually and strictly speaking; rather, it forms its general background. It contains results (Lehnsätze) from logic that are indispensable to linguistics. Now, that is what one calls philosophical or general grammar, which is still not grammar at all, but only a compilation of logical categories that come into consideration in grammar. On the other hand, this category-system certainly is no longer purely logical either, because it doesn't just contain pure results from logic; rather, the categories are brought already into a determinate relationship to each other not given by logic, and are modified in ways not anticipated by logic37. Steinthal responds critically to this view. Logic does not govern grammar as a background or foundation. Grammar is not the corporeal form of thought. However, Steinthal does support the concluding view that, in grammar, the categories are modified in a way that cannot be anticipated by logic. Here, Steinthal appeals to Hermann Lotze38 and to Karl Becker's Organism der Sprache39 – but, again, critically. Becker argues that «if one wants to deny that the general formal laws of thought are found again in language, then one not only denies the organic nature of speech, but also the organic nature of thought»40. Steinthal responds, «Neither: one just separates the two, the organic nature of language from that of thought»41. There is a key distinction that Steinthal thinks is missing from this discussion, a distinction that has been implicit in his own discussion up to this point. The word "logical" has two meanings: «that which belongs to 109CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 37 Ibid., p. 63. 38 Cf. ibid., p. 66. 39 K. BECKER, Organism der Sprache, zweite umgearb. Auflage., G. F. Kettembeil, Frankfurt a.M. 1841. 40 Ibid., p. xv. 41 Ibid., p. 68. logic, for example, a logical question, a logical law», or «what is generally rationally established in conformity with the laws of logic»42. In the first sense, organic language is not logical; in the second sense, it is. If we treat language as an organic phenomenon, not as a direct embodiment of Platonic thought, then the science of language comes to resemble other sciences, in not being logical in Steinthal's first sense. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, and so on are not logical, nature is not logical, that is, no logical facts, categories, and laws are given in them; but they certainly are very logical, because their developments are carried out according to the laws of logic [...] The object of the special sciences is specific to them, not only their matter (Stoff), but also the general relationships that appear in them, which one even calls categories, like the knowledge of chemical substances (Stoffe) and the relationships according to which they are connected to each other, like sphere, circumference, diameter [...] Insofar as our capacity for rational thought stretches to these objects and their relationships, then here it proceeds in a way in which the forms of logic are visible; for logic is the analysis of thought, that is, of the capacity of thought, in abstraction from he objects to which it is applied. Even more: nature produces objects, and carries this out through media and methods that the special sciences have as their particular object to represent. Insofar as we represent this methodology (Verfährungsweise) in thought and represent the real path of the becoming (des Werdens) of the thing by a subjective, conceptual copy (Abbilde), we perceive in thought not bare logical relationships, but [logical relationships] in actual nature itself that live within it, logical laws that it follows faithfully 43. Just as with nature and the natural sciences, language and linguistics are also logical and not logical: namely, their object with its relationships is specific to them; but insofar as one thinks this object and these relationships, the logician perceives both that the linguistic researcher acts according to logical laws, and that logical considerations and laws have unconsciously governed the process of language, in forming its elements and combining them according to their specific laws. These logical laws, which language and linguistic researchers, chemists and physicists and nature follow, are the common logical laws, whose demonstration the researcher into language and nature presupposes, that he does not investigate, that are not his particular object (Gegenstand)44. I have cited Steinthal at such length to emphasize his own account of the two-sided relationship between logic and natural science. Steinthal explicitly draws an analogy between natural science and linguistics, an analLYDIA PATTON110 42 Ibid., pp. 68-69. 43 Ibid., pp. 69-70. 44 Ibid., p. 70. ogy motivated by the "organic" conception of language and of thought. On the one hand, logic governs natural science and linguistics, and the laws and concepts of logic unconsciously influence the methods of the sciences. On the other hand, not only the objects, but also the relationships found in the natural sciences and in linguistics develop independently of logic, because they are influenced by the objects in nature, and by their relationships. Here the natural "objects" include humans and their behavior, including their linguistic behavior. Do the views in the Abriss make Steinthal an "English professor"? To know that, we would have to have a set of criteria for being an English professor. It's instructive in this context to cite another scholar who expresses views partly consistent with those above. Let us take "physics" as a common name for the non biological field of science, comprehending both systematic and historical investigations within this field, thus including chemistry, mineralogy, astronomy, geology (which is historical), meteorology, etc. How, then, are we to draw the boundary line between physics and biology? It is obvious that the distinction between these two branches has to be based on the distinction between two kinds of things which we find in nature: organisms and non organisms. Let us take this latter distinction as granted; it is the task of biologists to lay down a suitable definition for the term "organism": in other words, to tell us the features of a thing which we take as characteristic for its being an organism. How, then, are we to define "biology" on the basis of "organism"? We could perhaps think of trying to do it in this way: biology is the branch of science which investigates organisms and the processes occurring in organisms, and physics is the study of non organisms. But these definitions would not draw the distinction as it is usually intended45. In natural science, at least, this person Carnap in 1938 sees the distinctions between fields of study as being given at least partly by the progress of research, and the distinctions between concepts ("organisms" versus "nonorganisms") as being given by analysis of phenomena found in nature. Carnap does not allow for an expressive function of the "language of science" that develops autonomously of logic. As he puts it: The term "language of science" is meant here to refer to the language which contains all statements (i.e., theoretical sentences as distinguished from emotional expressions, commands, lyrics, etc.) used for scientific purposes or 111CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 45 R. CARNAP, Logical Foundation of the Unity of Science, cit., p. 395. For a discussion of the objections Carnap had to Cassirer's positions, see TH. MORMANN, A Virtual Debate in Exile, in Rudolf Carnap and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism, ed. by R. CREATH, Springer, Dordrecht 2012, pp. 159-165 and passim, and M. FRIEDMAN, A Parting of the Ways, cit. in everyday life. What usually is called science is merely a more systematic continuation of those activities which we carry out in everyday life in order to know something46. If we flatten Steinthal's "language" to include the "language of science" only, then Steinthal's project cannot get off the ground. But it is not clear at all that Carnap would have wanted to do that, even in 1938. After all, Carnap explicitly aims to argue against the «old magical and later metaphysical mind-body dualism»47. Would he, then, have opposed the idea of a science of language itself as a natural, organic phenomenon? Steinthal's "Sprachwissenschaft" is a science of language, not an explanation of the language of science. One of the main theses defended in the Abriss is that, if we consider logic the language of science, the language of science is independent of language as a natural phenomenon. Even a quick look at the titles and descriptions of the chapters of the Abriss shows that Steinthal thought linguistics was a natural science, and that language is an organic phenomenon: "Comparison of Human and Animal Minds", "Representations are not independent entities in the mind, but only the mind's reactions". One can be a thoroughgoing physicalist or naturalist, and yet think that language develops independently of logic, in the sense that human linguistic categories developed in actual epistemic engagement with nature engenders, and relies on, distinctions, relationships, natural divisions, and variables that are not anticipated by logic, considered as a purely formal system of laws of thought. If one thinks of humans as natural beings, and of language and thought as organic phenomena, then empirical, scientific research into language itself is natural science. I am not arguing that Steinthal was a thoroughgoing physicalist, only that his position is not inconsistent with at least some logical empiricist positions on language and logic. In fact, Steinthal would be on the more naturalist side of many of the twentieth century debates about whether, for instance, beliefs and desires can be explained as natural human mechanisms. 5. Cassirer and the Science of Language That is Steinthal. What about Cassirer? In The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought, he remarks: LYDIA PATTON112 46 R. CARNAP, Logical Foundation of the Unity of Science, cit., p. 395. 47 Ibid., p. 396. We do not feel inclined to think of language and mathematics as kindred branches of knowledge. They seem to be very far from each other and to belong to entirely different spheres. They are, so to speak, the opposite hemispheres of our "globus intellectualis". Mathematics belongs to science and is the very foundation of science. Language is an historical phenomenon that can be studied and explained only by historical methods. If we accept the theory of many modern logicians, mathematical and historical thought are separated from each other by an unbridgeable gulf. Science and history can never be brought under one and the same common denominator. The structure of history and the structure of the so-called "Geisteswissenschaften" are of quite different types from the structure of mathematics or natural science. I do not wish to enter into the details of this vigorously debated question, but in this paper I do wish to indicate a way by which we may hope to bridge this logical gap48. In building a "constructive theory of nature", Cassirer argues, Aristotle was among the first to achieve a critical perspective on the use of language in scientific thought. Language has made the first fundamental distinctions. It has classified the phenomena of nature according to certain points of view. We need only to follow its example in order to find out the true elements of things. But, like Socrates in his ethical investigations, Aristotle is perfectly aware of the fact that every philosophical use of language at the same time demands a criticism of language. We have to examine, to complete, and to correct its discriminations and classifications. It is not until such a critical examination has been made that we are entitled to trust them49. In the chapter of the Abriss discussed above, Steinthal also begins with a discussion of how Aristotle's conceptual categories influenced his account of substance, motion, and the like. Cassirer goes on to say that the medieval thinkers attempted to supersede Aristotle's constructive system of nature, but were unable to do so. Instead, Cassirer argues, the first step past Aristotle was made by Galileo, in The Assayer (Il Saggiatore). Language – declared Galileo – may be a very satisfactory and very useful instrument of thought if we pursue no other aim than to survey and classify the objects of our common experience, the world of sense-data. But [...] [f]or discovering the fundamental laws of nature, the principles of motion, we need other and more reliable modes of expression. The symbols of language have to be superseded by the symbols of mathematics. Geometry and arithmetic 113CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 48 E. CASSIRER, The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought, cit., pp. 309-310; ECW 24, pp. 115-116. 49 Ibid., p. 314; ECW 24, pp. 120-121. are the only true language of nature. Nature, says Galileo, is no secret to the human mind. It is an open book legible to everyone. But in order to read this book we first have to learn the letters in which it is written. These letters are not the ordinary sense-data: the perceptions of heat or cold, of red or blue and so on. The book of nature is written in mathematical characters, in points, lines, surfaces, numbers. By this postulate Galileo removed the keystone of Aristotelian physics50. Cassirer's argument here, though abbreviated, is a clear precursor of Kuhn's position, that shifts in conceptual categories – and even in ontological categories – accompany paradigm shifts in physics. Galileo cannot remove a «keystone of Aristotelian physics» without postulating that «the symbols of language have to be superseded by the symbols of mathematics» in the construction of a science of nature. Cassirer even concludes: «the new principles introduced by the dynamics of Galileo could not be found and could not be firmly established without a general logical and epistemological revolution»51. Here, again, Cassirer seems to be defending a view closer to Kuhn's, or perhaps to the perspective Carnap comes to adopt around 1950, when his essay Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology appeared52 53. But the concluding sections of Cassirer's essay are very revealing. Here, Cassirer stops speaking of the language in which science is expressed, and turns his attention to – grammar, and even to a philosophy of grammar. Like Steinthal, Cassirer rejects the traditional, Humboldtian view, that the structure of Latin, inflected grammar reflects the structure of rational thought54. The enlargement of linguistic knowledge, especially the study of the socalled primitive languages, has taught us that there are many languages of a fundamentally different type from our own Indo-European languages and that it would be a hopeless attempt to stretch all of them into the procrustean bed of our Latin grammar and our part-of-speech system55 . LYDIA PATTON114 50 Ibid., p. 316; ECW 24, pp. 122-123. 51 Ibid., p. 317; ECW 24, pp. 122-123. 52 Note that this does not mean, for any of these authors, that ontological categories can be overturned merely by postulation of novel conceptual or linguistic categories, in isolation from the construction of a novel theory. 53 R. CARNAP, Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, «Revue Internationale de Philosophie», 4, 1950, pp. 20-40. 54 E. CASSIRER, The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought, cit., p. 323; ECW 24, pp. 129-130. 55 Ibid., pp. 323-324; ECW 24, p. 130. The failure to find a universal linguistic or symbolic structure inspires empiricist, materialist, and intuitionist (Bergsonian) responses. Cassirer argues that these fail, in turn, because they "try to convince us that there is an ultimate reality that is beyond the power and the reach of all symbolic thought – a reality in itself and by itself", but we find that «Intuition can not be separated from expression – and expression always involves the function of language»56. Empiricism and sensationalism [...] argue from [...] a theory of imitation or reproduction. It is clear that even from such a point of view language must appear as a very poor and defective instrument. For how can we hope to reproduce by a small number of words, of general names, the totality and the inexhaustive richness of our individual perceptions? But knowledge depends neither on identification nor on reproduction. It means objectification – and in this process of objectification language is the first step. Without its help we could not come to an objective view, to a representation of the world; we would be bound and restricted to a dull feeling, an obscure impression of reality. It is by language that we pass from the passive acceptance of single sensedata to a new constructive and spontaneous view of the universe. Language proves to be indispensable not only for the construction of our world of thought but also for the construction of our world of perception57. The notion that the construction of concepts is fundamental to the historical and theoretical development of scientific systems was well established by 1942, and possibly even old news. Very early in the twentieth century, Cohen's Logic of Pure Knowledge (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis) and Heinrich Rickert's The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung), focus on the role of concept formation in the development of science and of epistemology. Cassirer argues that the evidence for his claim that language is indispensable "for the construction of our world of perception" comes from more recent empirical science, from research into aphasia, for instance. In his work on myth, moreover, Cassirer builds on Vico and others to argue that we develop the categories at work in mythical and mystical theories – a view clearly influenced by Steinthal. Moreover, Cassirer echoes Steinthal's method of differentiating logic from the science of language: We are always exposed to the danger of confounding some special properties of our own language with universal semantic properties when approach115CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 56 Ibid., p. 326; ECW 24, p. 133. 57 Ibid. pp. 326-327; ECW 24, pp. 133-134. ing the problem from a merely logical side. Our logical analysis must be completed and corrected by those observations gained by empirical methods, by a comparative study of linguistic facts58. The well-worn philosophical technique of generalizing from certain observed features of human language among Western speakers, to a universal, rational grammar, is subjected to searching critique by Steinthal and by Cassirer. In its place, we find a defense of language as a distinctly human action, as an instrument that develops, and makes possible, the engagement between humans and nature. Language is the distinctive mark of man – and even in its development, in its growing perfection it remains human – perhaps too human. It is anthropocentric in its very essence and nature. But at the same time it possesses an inherent power by which, in its ultimate result, it seems to transcend itself. From those forms of speech that are meant as means of communication and that are necessary for every social life and intercourse it develops into new forms; it sets itself different and higher tasks. And by this it becomes able to clear itself of those fallacies and illusions to which the common usage of language is necessarily subject. Man can proceed from ordinary language to scientific language, to the language of logic, of mathematics, of physics. But he never can avoid or reject the power of symbolism and symbolic thought59. Cassirer develops a thesis of the autonomy of the "power of symbolism", an "inherent power" of language. A mere defense of this thesis, as I have sketched above, does not require rejection of any particular logical empiricist position (nor need it require a rejection of Lebensphilosophie). In fact, if we see this thesis in its proper context as a defense of, essentially, Steinthal's position in the Abriss, we can recognize that the true opponent Cassirer had in mind, in this discussion, was Humboldt's, and Mill's, position that the structural grammar of actual languages expresses universal a priori truths about rational thought60. If this is a correct reading, Cassirer's aim was to show that actual languages develop independently of a priori rational presuppositions about fixed structures of thought, and instead are expressions of a capacity for symbolic expression and engagement with nature. LYDIA PATTON116 58 Ibid., pp. 322-323; ECW 24, p. 129. 59 Ibid., p. 327; ECW 24, p. 134. 60 And these are, in fact, the opponents Cassirer cites in The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought, cit. 6. Concluding Remarks Cassirer's focus on the expressive function of language should be read in the context of the earlier work of Steinthal. Steinthal distinguishes the expressive form of language, when language is studied as a natural phenomenon, from language as a logical, inferential system. Steinthal argues that language always can be expressed in terms of logical inference. But, Steinthal insists, that is not to say that language, as a natural phenomenon, is exhausted by logic or by the place of terms or relations in inferential structures. As Kalmar has emphasized61, the development of modern anthropology responds to the work of Lazarus and Steinthal on language and expression as natural phenomena. Cassirer and Steinthal insist that there is no privileged relationship between the expressive form of any one natural language and the form of logical inference or rational thought. Their view should be seen as in opposition to arguments along such lines from Humboldt, Mill, and "völkisch" interpreters of Herder62. While Cassirer and Steinthal defend what may seem to be a quasi-Heideggerian position on the independence of the expressive function, their view is equally consistent with that of Carnap. Thus, the expressive function should not be seen as a necessary conflict between Carnap's and Cassirer's views. Rather, Steinthal and Cassirer deal with a question that, as far as I know, Carnap does not address directly63: how should philosophers analyze human language as a natural phenomenon? And how might the expressive form of language influence the linguistic categories, kind terms, and other structures that develop within, and characterize, human language? 117CASSIRER AND STEINTHAL ON EXPRESSION 61 I. KALMAR, The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture, cit. 62 See, e.g., E. SKIDELSKY, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2011, p. 120. 63 Though one of Cassirer's influences, Giambattista Vico, does do so.