Humboldt’s book turns on two “inseparabilities”: that of language and thought, and that of language and the other.
1. Language is the organ that forms thought
Language is not a tool for “conveying” thought. It is the organ that makes it.
Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken.
Language is the formative organ of thought. (German quotations throughout; Japanese and English are L/LAB working translations.)
And a word is not a label on an object.
Das Wort ist also nicht ein Abdruck des Gegenstandes an sich, sondern des von diesem in der Seele erzeugten Bildes.
The word is thus not an imprint of the object in itself, but of the image produced from it in the soul.
Object → image in the soul → word. It is this middle term (the image) that makes the “elephant” example of the previous piece work: with the same object, a different image grasped gives a different word. Thought becomes distinct (deutlich) only through language — a vague notion gets its outline by being bound to articulated sound. The articulation of sound and the articulation of thought run in parallel.
2. “I” contains “thou”
Language is not completed inside an isolated individual. “All speech rests on dialogue (Wechselrede)” — Humboldt put this most sharply in his essay Über den Dualis (1827). Speaking always consists of address (Anrede) and reply (Erwiederung). So the first person “I” already contains the second person “thou” that hears it. The grammatical dual (a form that singles out “two” of the second person) is, on Humboldt’s reading, a trace of this root duality of language. Speech is turned toward the other from the start.
3. Self-active — between the individual and the community
Language stands above this duality in turn. It is the individual’s — there is no language without the working of one speaker’s mind. It is at the same time the whole people’s — one person can neither make nor change a language. And, owned by neither, it is self-active (selbstthätig): the people form the language, and the language forms the people’s spirit. This aspect — “a social fact that confronts each speaker as given” — is later rebuilt with different tools by Saussure as “langue” and by Wittgenstein as “a rule cannot be followed privately”.
In sum
| Humboldt’s claim | restated |
|---|---|
| Language is the organ that forms thought | not a tool for conveying thought, but what makes it |
| A word is an imprint of “the image in the soul,” not of the object | object → image → word (there is a middle term) |
| Thought becomes distinct only through language | the articulation of sound and of thought run in parallel |
| All speech rests on dialogue; “I” contains “thou” | speech is turned toward the other at its root (Über den Dualis, 1827) |
| Language is both the individual’s and the community’s, and self-active | → Saussure’s “langue,” Wittgenstein’s “rule” |
Why it is still read
- The unity of language and thought — one of the most classic objections to the tool view, “language merely conveys thought.”
- Intersubjectivity — Humboldt’s “I contains thou” is a distant forerunner of twentieth-century dialogism and pragmatics (speech acts, deixis, politeness).
- Language as a social fact — the “self-active” language sits in the same problem-space as Saussure’s langue and Wittgenstein’s rule.
The Humboldt feature: overview / energeia / inner form / worldview / infinite use of finite means / this essay / typology and ranking.
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