Educational Review

Vol. 61, No. 2, May 2009, 181195

Vygotskys Enlightenment precursors

John Hardcastle*
Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy, Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK
Educational
10.1080/00131910902846890
CEDR_A_384861.sgm
0013-1911
Original
Taylor
202009
61
j.hardcastle@ioe.ac.uk
JohnHardcastle
000002009
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Article
Francis
(print)/1465-3397
Francis
Review
(online)

This article seeks to recover a history of ideas about the role of signs in the
development of mind that connects Vygotsky to major traditions in Enlightenment
language studies. It offers historical perspectives on ideas about thinking and
speaking that shed light on the scope and trajectory of Vygotskys conception of
signs as psychological tools. The Soviet thinker was schooled in German
humanities, philology and philosophy. He was also indebted to thinkers of the
European Enlightenment, especially Bacon, Locke and Condillac, for ideas about
the role of signs in the formation of mind. I explain how ideas about the
relationship between words and ideas set down by Locke were taken up and
extended by Condillac in a seminal theory of knowledge. According to Condillac,
signs play a key role in the development of mind. Later, Herder and von Humboldt
built on Condillacs ideas. Herder suggested that individual psychologies are
shaped in concrete, historical circumstances, and pictured an organizing, creative
force driving linguistic activity. I give a brief account of the way that the concept
of genesis migrated from biology into German philosophy of language, history
and cultural theory. According to von Humboldt, language is an activity through
which worlds are disclosed. His work on thinking and speaking, the inner sense
of language and the constitutive role of signs in development is discussed. In some
ways, however, it stands against the instrumental-communicative picture of words
handed down from Locke. By bringing Locke and Condillac into conjunction with
Herder and von Humboldt I aim to offer a picture of the Soviet psychologists
indebtedness to Enlightenment linguistic thought.
Keywords: Vygotsky; Enlightenment; language studies

Introduction
In a letter to Alexander Luria in 1926 (Van der Veer and Valsiner 1991, 153) Vygotsky
asked ruefully, Who reads us here? He feared that Soviet psychology was deeply
provincial, isolated from the research community in the West. Yet Walter Benjamin
read Vygotsky. Problems in the sociology of language: An overview, reviews scientific research in language studies extending across several fields philosophy, animal
psychology, child psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philology and sociology
(Benjamin 2002, 6893). Benjamin discovered Vygotskys article, The genetic roots
of thinking and language, in a journal, Under the Banner of Marxism (1929). It is
essentially the same as the fourth chapter of Vygotskys posthumously published
book, Thought and language (1986 [1934]), which concentrates on the role of signs
in the formation of concepts.

*Email: j.hardcastle@ioe.ac.uk
ISSN 0013-1911 print/ISSN 1465-3397 online
2009 Educational Review
DOI: 10.1080/00131910902846890
http://www.informaworld.com

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The question behind all of the writings Benjamin reviewed concerns the
Sisyphean problem of eighteenth century semiotic thinking (Mueller-Vollmer 1990a,
18): where does language come from? Paradoxically, the standard work that Benjamin
cites at the beginning of his piece, Le langage et la pense [Language and thought],
by Henri Delacroix (1936) expresses serious doubts about whether the question is
answerable at all. In point of fact, Le langage et la pense reflects a history of reaction
among French linguists against German philology that began at a time when German
scholarship dominated Europe. In the German tradition, hugely influential in Russia,
the question of the origin of language was invariably linked to the story of Mankind.
However, by the early decades of the twentieth century, new work in structural
linguistics had weakened the hold of German comparative-historical philology on
European language studies. Moreover, in a post-Darwinian world, it was apparent that
comparative-historical inquiries were unlikely to reveal the empirical origins of
language. Indeed, it was generally recognized that the so-called primitive and
ancient languages were in reality well developed and relatively recent when placed
on an evolutionary time-scale. Yet for ethno-psychologists the question of the origins
of mind remained closely linked to questions about language and cultural-historical
development.
In connection with Wolfgang Khlers pioneering study of chimpanzees,
Benjamin (2002, 81) writes, the special achievement of Vygotsky is that he pointed
out how this research on chimpanzees impinged on the foundations of linguistics.
Khlers work threw new light on the interface between practical consciousness in
primates and conceptual thinking in humans. His findings indicated a transition from
tool-making activity in primates to human symbolizing. Indeed, his book, The
mentality of apes (Khler 1926) was received in Europe as a major contribution to
understanding the emergence of specifically human culture. Benjamin saw Khlers
study in a tradition of inquiry going back to the eighteenth century. His own longstanding interest in the philosophy of language had been awakened by lectures on
Wilhelm von Humboldts writings (Benjamin 2004, 381) and he grasped the significance of Vygotskys theory about the changing function of egocentric speech and the
role of inner speech within traditions of philosophical inquiry inherited from the
Enlightenment.
Vygotsky returned to the problem of the relationship between thought and word at
the end of his life, after Alexander Luria and A. N. Leontev had left Moscow for
Kharkov (Van der Veer and Valsiner 1991, 290). He had become interested in the
problem before he started his career in psychology through his reading in Alexander
Potebnja and Gustav Shpet (Van der Veer 1996, 458). Potebnja and Shpet were inheritors of von Humboldts ideas about the relationship between thinking and speaking
and, whereas Leontev and his associates in Kharkov increasingly emphasized the role
of object-oriented activity (labour) and the mechanisms of externalization in line with
official Soviet ideology, Vygotsky concentrated on the relations between thought,
word and meaning.
Von Humboldt claimed that language is the formative organ of thought (von
Humboldt 1988 [1836], 54). Language, he said, is an activity (Energeia) and not a
product (Ergon). He also claimed that thought and language are one and inseparable from each other. It is hardly surprising then that Ren van der Veer (1996) took
issue with Nicolopoulou and Weintraub (1996) when they doubted the extent of the
relevance of the Humboldtian tradition for Vygotskys work. In support of his original
claim that the Humboldt tradition is centrally important, Van der Veer cites Kozulin

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(1990), Wertsch (1985) and Yaroshevsky (1989, 1993). He also recalls James
Wertschs remark (Van der Veer 1996, 459) that no other aspect of Vygotskys work
has been as consistently ignored or misinterpreted by psychologists as his semiotic
analysis and the intellectual forces that gave rise to it. My aim here is to augment
existing work on these intellectual forces by giving a history of relevant developments in the history of language studies. By bringing Locke and Condillac into
conjunction with Herder and von Humboldt I aim to offer a fuller picture of
Vygotksys indebtedness to the Enlightenment than is currently available. Essentially,
I agree with Van der Veer (1996, 459) that Vygotsky attempted to integrate different
strands of thought, the one consisting of ideas originally developed by von Humboldt,
the other developed by Marxist thinkers. My focus is the first strand. A further article
would be needed to tease out connections between the two strands.
One recent discussion of the influence of the Humboldt tradition on Vygotskys
thought confirms its continuing relevance. Vladimir Zinchenko (2007, 223) notices a
curious lack of consistency in Vygotskys writings about pure meanings by which
he means thoughts with no words attached. Sometimes Vygotsky speaks as if a
separation is possible between thoughts and words. At other times, he talks about
embodying and expressing thoughts in words. Further, he notes that Vygotsky largely
ignored von Humboldts concept of the inner form of the word. And he goes on to
say that Potebnja and Shpet, who discussed the inner form of the word intensively,
interpreted the original formulation in different ways. There was no single authoritative interpretation of von Humboldts concept of inner linguistic sense available to
Vygotsky at the time. My point is that specific knowledge about von Humboldts
formulation and its complicated roots in Enlightenment linguistic thought could throw
much needed light on Vygotskys intentions as well as illuminate a fundamental
problem for the human sciences.
Benjamin remarks that inner-speech is the precursor, indeed the teacher, of
thought. He appreciated the significance of Vygotskys contribution within a tradition of inquiry. He knew von Humboldts work well and, indeed, wrote perceptively
about it (Benjamin 2004, 4245). My contention is that we need to restore neglected
historical perspectives on the mediating role of signs in the formation of mind to
appreciate the scope and trajectory of Vygotskys project. My strategy is to give a
history of the role of language in thinking in four seminal thinkers, Locke, Condillac,
Herder and von Humboldt, and to describe the evolution of their ideas as a whole. My
story differs from existing accounts of Vygotskys precursors that have concentrated
on the influence of individual thinkers. V. V. Davydov and L. A. Radzinkhovskii
(Wertsch 1985, 54) writing about Vygotsky and activity-oriented psychology claim
that the historical linguistics of von Humboldt, Steinthal, and Potebnja had a strong
influence on the Soviet psychologist. Historical linguistics was a chief source of
the idea of the sign as a psychological tool and therefore I shall turn to linguistic
historiography.
Linguistic historiography
Hans Aarsleff (1983, 1984) offers a breathtaking overview of the problem of signs in
human development from the perspectives of a rich historiography of European
linguistic thought. Roy Harris and Talbot Taylor (1997) match his scholarship. My
discussion of Locke, Condillac, Herder and von Humboldt draws extensively on their
work. Crucially, Aarsleff takes an unusually inclusive view of the field (1983, 6). By

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language study, he says, I refer not only to philology in the conventional sense but
to any reasonably coherent and clearly formulated discussion that is specifically
directed toward problems that arise in relation to language. Aarsleff has mined
neglected work in linguistic inquiry that modern linguistics largely ignores. Essentially, linguists have ignored this work primarily because, in order to establish linguistics as an independent science on a par with the natural sciences, they have wanted
to discount metaphysical and merely speculative questions about the nature of
signs. Yet such methods of inquiry once constituted a way of doing philosophy.
Thinkers laboured to reconstruct the originary moment when language first
appeared. Where there was no historical evidence, they imagined what must have
happened.
Aarsleff (1983, 4) has recovered a depth of perspectives on why language studies
mattered to those who were engaged in them. A striking feature of his account of the
growth of language studies during the Enlightenment is his reappraisal of the work of
Etienne Bonnot, Abb de Condillac. Condillacs picture of language influenced the
philosophes, as well as the ideologues, who were chiefly responsible for designing
Europes first national state education system. The encyclopdie was built on the
foundations of Condillacs epistemology. Von Humboldt, who was the chief architect
of the Prussian education system, was in direct contact with these developments.
Crucially in our context, Condillac evolved a psychological theory about the role of
signs in developing mastery over mental operations.
It is widely known that Vygotsky linked semiotic mediation to human development. But it is rarely appreciated that theories about the mediating role of linguistic
signs in the genesis of human consciousness were advanced first during the Enlightenment. Indeed, the intellectual history of cultural-historical psychologys antecedents
in the Enlightenment is rarely discussed. [A notable exception is to be found in an
excellent article by Chris Sinha (1989).] As far as I am aware, Vygotsky never
mentions Condillac. Did he know the French writers work? I had assumed that he was
schooled in German philology, which for ideological reasons played down the
influence of French thinkers. But it emerges that Vygotsky probably met Condillacs
ideas during his time at the Shanyavsky Peoples University in Moscow. According
to V. P. Zinchenko, who claimed recently [at the International Society for Cultural and
Activity Research (ISCAR) conference, San Diego, California, September 2008] that
Vygotskys ideas about semiotic mediation go back to Condillac, Shpet, who was
Vygotskys teacher in Moscow, made available his private library containing key
French texts.
Vygotsky knew German traditions of thought well and, like Benjamin, he would
have appreciated how themes in, say, Herders work were assimilated and extended in
the writings of Hegel and Marx, especially the notion that we are agentive in producing ourselves in history and culture. This is an important consideration in connection
with shifts in the meaning of the term activity. For Herder and von Humboldt
activity (Energeia) speaks of a Promethean, dynamic, constitutive sense of selfcreative processes. Von Humboldt talks about an interactive dynamic between man
and his world. Indeed, the German thinker moved beyond the Cartesian separation of
mind and body towards a social view of individuation through acts of conjoining
(Verbindung) with others. Marx inherited these ideas, but he was critical of the philosophical idealism they represented. Subsequently, especially in Marxist-Leninist
theory, the meaning of activity was inflected towards a notion of labour and the
material conditions of human productivity.

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Origin of language
Seventeenth century discussions about the origin of language were linked to the
debates about the new science. These debates turned on the claims of scientific as
opposed to revealed knowledge, where such claims involved challenging the status
of orthodox scriptural interpretation in accounts of the natural world. It was in the
context of discussions about new ways of producing reliable knowledge that Francis
Bacon first called attention to the mediated nature of mental operations and the role
of what he called, instruments of the mind as psychological tools. Bacon (1965
[1620], 44) claimed that such instruments and helps augment our natural
understanding.
For Ren Descartes, Man was composed of two substances, mind and matter.
Whereas the human body is substantially the same as in animals, mind is composed
differently. According to Descartes, knowledge resides in innate ideas given to mind
by God. However, La Mettrie, the author of Lhomme machine (1994 [1751]), a
founding figure of modern materialism argued the case that humans, like other
species, are the products of nature and that their actions are traceable to physical
causes. For La Mettrie there was no separation between mind and matter. The
transition from animals to man is not abrupt (1994 [1751], 41), he wrote. He went on
to say that the transformation that made us fully human turns on the use of arbitrary
signs. With the aid of signs, he says, men acquired what our German philosophers
still call symbolic knowledge (1994 [1751], 41). La Mettries materialist, preDarwinian story of human development hinged on his account of the mediating role
of words in the transmission of ideas, where everything [all knowledge] is reduced
to sounds or words which fly from the mouth of one through the ear of another into
the brain (1994 [1751], 41). But he could not explain how language came about in
the first place. He was not alone in this. The question of where language comes from
was debated in France and then in Germany throughout the eighteenth century.

Knowledge and ideas

In his treatise, An essay concerning human understanding, John Locke (Locke 1993
[1690]) claimed that knowledge comes to us in two ways: first, through the senses;
and second, through reflection. The combined processes of sensing and reflecting
gives rise to ideas. Further, simple ideas are re-combined into complex ones through
the actions of mind. According to Locke, sense-derived, simple ideas are combined
into what he calls ideas of mixed modes and he (1993 [1690], 250) drew attention
to the workmanship of mind in the combining the essences of ideas. Mind, he
says, ties them together by a name (1993 [1690], 224). Thus words were assigned a
role in tying ideas together bundling is Lockes word.
Lockes discussion of language in Book Three of An essay concerning human
understanding (1993 [1690]) is part of a larger argument against the doctrine of innate
ideas. He developed a psychological theory to explain how ideas are derived
from experience. His focus was on human rather than divine knowledge and his
interest was driven by his epistemological concern with the origin and nature of
knowledge. Locke was not a linguist. The question of language was always subordinate to the problem of knowledge. Above all he wanted to identify imperfections in
language design to establish what we might know and communicate and that is why
he insisted that commonly defined terms are needed. Definitions carried huge political

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significance where concepts such as liberty, equality and justice were publicly
contested.
For Locke, signs were neither natural nor God-given. Rather, they were manmade and conventional. People invented artificial signs (indifferent is the word he
uses) to communicate. The concept of the arbitrariness of the sign was a linguistic
commonplace in Lockes day. Locke (1993 [1690], 45) claimed that all ideas are
traceable either to sense impressions or to reflections. According to Locke, although
simple ideas derive from sense impressions, our capacity to transform these into
complex ideas, our capacity to think, depends on the faculty of reflection. For Locke
reflection was a providential gift. Thus he struck a compromise with the doctrine of
innate ideas.
On Lockes view, sense derived, pre-formed ideas exist separately from words.
Existing ideas in the minds of speakers are conveyed to the minds of listeners by
attaching them to words. Words refer to ideas rather than to things, and we can never
be completely sure that what one person means is the same as another since they form
their ideas independently. Locke (1993 [1690], 132) says this about the freedom to
attach ideas to words of our own choosing:
[A]nd every Man has so inviolable a Liberty, to make Words stand for what Ideas he
pleases, that no one hath the Power to make others have the same Ideas in their Minds,
that he has, when they use the same Words, that he does.

We use the same words, but sometimes we mean different things by them. There is no
exact match. Different words can designate the same things. We choose our own
words by virtue of there being indifferent (arbitrary) signs available to communicate
ideas because the same meaning can be conveyed by various means. There is an
element of creativity in the way we attach our thoughts to signs just as there is a
corresponding creativity in attaching our own ideas to other peoples words. The
price we pay is a degree of indeterminacy.
Later, interest shifted towards the role of words in expressing ideas. The emphasis
fell on the internal processes of producing thoughts rather than communicating preexisting ones. For certain German thinkers, expression involved giving shape and
substance to the fluid inner meanings of words what Vygotsky, following in the
German tradition, called their inner sense. The problem of the pre-history of expression, the question of what goes before the articulation of ideas, figures centrally in
Vygotskys thought. The creative process involved in producing signs was given a new
valuation during the eighteenth-century, particularly in theories of art. But for Locke,
the chief concern remained with the limitations of language and the endemic problem
of misunderstandings. One mans complex idea he says, seldom agrees with another.
To summarize, Locke assumed that the chief purpose of language was communication and that man-made, indifferent (arbitrary) signs were both artificial and
conventional in character. The main function of words was the transference of ideas
from one individual to another and language was regarded instrumentally as the great
conduit, or the vehicle of thought. On this view, language is the chief tool by
which we make our thoughts known to others. Words do not play a significant role in
generating concepts since language enters the process post facto, after our ideas have
been formed. Ideas come first: words follow.
But this is not the whole story. According to Locke, language has another psychological function. Words, he notes, provide the means by which we fix and record our
thoughts for the help of our own memories (1993 [1690], 269).

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As to the first of these, for the recording of our own thoughts for the help of our own
memories, whereby, as it were, we talk to ourselves, any word will serve the turn. For
since sounds are voluntary and indifferent signs of any ideas a man may use what words
he pleases to signify his own ideas.

We represent ideas of things to our selves using arbitrary signs. Signs enable us to
store our ideas of things and to refer to them later when they (things) are no longer
there. Implicit is the assumption that signification plays an instrumental role in gaining mastery over memory. Crucially, this notion was taken up by Condillac and developed into a theory about the role of semiotic mediation in the development of mind.
Semiotic mediation
Condillac took up Lockes picture of language and turned it in a striking way. Essai
sur lorigine des connaissances humaines [Essay on the origin of human knowledge]
(Condillac 2001 [1756]), what I shall call here the Essay, was written forty years after
Lockes Essay on human understanding. In it Condillac argued that it is chiefly by
means of man-made signs that we gain conscious control over our psychological functions. He ceased to think about language as the vehicle of thought, as Locke had
done, once he grasped the role of signs in gaining mastery over mind.
Condillac was uncompromisingly anti-Cartesian. He derived the faculty of reflection itself from sense experience, claiming that the faculties reflection, attention,
imagination and memory and so on have their origins in sensations. The French
thinker (Condillac 2001, 30) drew a fine distinction among three psychological
functions: imagination, which revives perceptions; reminiscence, reporting on perceptions we have already had; and memory, recalling the signs we have attached to
perceptions. It is signs and not the traces of perceptions we bring to consciousness in
memory. Thus signs play an instrumental role in gaining mastery over mind. Without
the use of man-made signs, Condillac argues, we could never achieve voluntary
control over our psychological functions. Language is not just an instrumental tool for
communicating ideas, but rather a means of producing psychological selves. He says
this about reminiscence:
When objects attract our attention, the perceptions they occasion in us become linked
with our sentiment of our being and to everything that can bear some relation to it. It
follows that consciousness not only gives us knowledge of our perceptions, but furthermore, if those perceptions are repeated, it often makes us aware that we have had them
before and makes us recognise them as belonging to us or as affecting being that is
constantly the same self despite their variety and succession. Seen in relation to these
new effects, consciousness is a new operation which is at our service every instant and
which is the foundation of our experience. Without it every moment of life would seem
the first in our existence, and our knowledge would never advance beyond an initial
perception. I shall call it reminiscence. (Condillac 2001 [1756], 25)

At an early stage, imagination and reminiscence operate beyond our conscious

control. Mind simply reacts to external stimuli. At a later stage, mind gains mastery
over its reactions by attaching signs to them that can be consciously manipulated.
Consciousness, he says, is a new operation which is at our service every instant and
which is the foundation of our experience. In the use of signs, consciousness opens
up a space for reflection unconstrained by immediate circumstances. He condensed
this insight into a striking formulation: To gain a full understanding of what activates

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imagination, contemplation and memory, we must study what assistance these

operations draw from the use of signs (2001 [1756], 36).
Condillac distinguished among three kinds of sign: accidental, natural and
instituted (arbitrary) signs. Crucially, he claimed that the invention and use of instituted or arbitrary signs is necessary for mastering recall. The development of
voluntary control over signs of our own choosing he says, enables us to recover
ideas at will. He continues,
So long as imagination, contemplation, and memory have no exercise, or so long as the
first two have none that we control, we cannot by ourselves govern our attention. In fact,
how could we govern it when mind does not as yet have the operation in its power? Thus
it does not go along from one object to another except as it is carried along by the impression that things make. But as soon as someone begins to attach ideas to signs he has
himself chosen, memory is formed in him. Once memory has been acquired, he begins
to gain mastery of his own imagination and to give it new exercise. For by the assistance
of signs he can recall at will, he revives, or at least is able to revive, the ideas that are
attached to them. In due course he will gain greater command of his imagination as he
invents more signs, because he will increase the means of exercising it. (Condillac 2001
[1756], 40)

In summary, Condillac makes three inter-linked claims that informed the theory of the
role of signs in development that Vygotsky inherited, although it would be a mistake
to suppose that their ideas were exactly the same. First, Condillac claims that signification creates the necessary preconditions for the emergence of specifically human
consciousness. Second, he suggests the constitutive role of man-made signs in the
genesis of the faculties. Third, he indicates the direction that the developmental path
must follow in its passage from the lower to the higher mental functions. According
to Aarsleff, Condillac regretted that his picture of the origins of language gave too
much to signs and that it was insufficiently social in its orientation. Subsequently,
Vygotsky (1986 [1934], 255), following Marx, would stress languages origins in
social activity and practical consciousness for others.

Inner language
Herder reconfigured Condillacs ideas about the mediating role of signs. The German
thinker pictured an organizing, creative force driving linguistic activity, what he called
der Kraft der Seele (the souls power). This force animates the whole person and
works continuously to sort and combine incoming sensory perceptions. According to
Herder, we engage with the world as active agents, producing ourselves as psychological beings by transforming the incoming flood of sensations into experience. For
Herder (2002, 210), the faculties reflection, imagination, prescience, memory and
so on were not so much separate domains of mind as they were products of a
dynamic, unified process:
One will never get deeply to the bottom of these forces [faculties] if one merely treats
them superficially as ideas that dwell in the soul, or worse still, separates them from one
another as walled compartments and considers them individually in independence. In
imagination and memory, recollection and foresight, too the single divine force of our
soul, inner activity that looks within itself, consciousness, apperception, must reveal
itself. In proportion to the latter does a human being have understanding, conscience,
will, freedom: the rest are inflowing waves of the great world-sea.

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What Herder (2002, 2045) calls the souls robe or raiment is spoken about in
terms of an activity of the spirit that depends for its effectiveness on the mediating
potentials of inner language:
The human being gapes at images and colours until he speaks, until he, internally in his
soul, names. Those human beings who, if I may put it this way, have much of this inner
word, of this intuiting, divine gift of designation, also have much understanding The
more one strengthens, guides, enriches, forms this inner language of a human being, then
the more one guides his reason and makes alive the divine in him. (Herder 2002, 211)

Inner language replaces Condillacs static picture of signs and foreshadows

Vygotskys conception of inner sense. Herder speaks of inner activity and the intuiting, divine gift of designation. This quasi-metaphysical picture of inner language
makes reflection possible in that it frees us from the confines of our immediate surroundings. Thus, the use of mediating signs opens up a space for a specifically human way
of orienting oneself towards the world. Herder took up an idea that was already present
in Condillacs writings when he claimed that mind gains mastery over its reactions
by attaching signs that can be consciously manipulated. But he went further than the
French thinker when he claimed that speech human expressivity is a fundamentally
self-constitutive activity.
On this view, expression is the process by which people make themselves. As
Charles Taylor argues, for Herder signs had meaning not because they designate
certain things or ideas, but rather because they express or embody a certain
consciousness of selves and things (Taylor 1979, 17). [For Herder] Language, says
Taylor, is not seen as a set of signs, but as a medium of expression of a certain way
of seeing and experiencing through which we constitute ourselves as selves.
Human language structure
Von Humboldts story of human development concentrated on language. His major
work, On language: The diversity of human language structure and its influence on
the mental development of mankind, also known as The Kawi introduction (von
Humboldt 1988 [1836]) reveals how questions about the nature and origins of
language shaped the philosophy of history. The Kawi introduction was intended to
prepare readers for the main work, an investigation, in three volumes, describing the
relations between people and languages across the Malayan Archipelago. It was
driven by von Humboldts quest for an organizing principle of world history, a universal principle of human development. In essence, he aimed to tell the story of the
growth of mans mental powers from lower into higher forms:
My aim is a study that treats the faculty of speech in its inward aspect, as a human
faculty and which uses its effects, languages, only as sources of knowledge and examples
in developing the argument. I wish to show that what makes a particular language what
it is, is its grammatical structure Thus, I connect the study of language with the philosophical survey of humanitys capacity for formation [Bildung] and with history. (1988

[1836], xvi)
Language was no longer, as it had been for Locke, merely a conduit, a vehicle or
a tool for transporting ideas from one mind to another. Rather, it was an active, selfconstitutive process, through which worlds are disclosed. Von Humboldt (1988
[1836], 110) speaks about the inner sense of words connected to a specifically

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human need for developing thought. Language, he says, stems from a deep creative
drive:
The bringing forth of language is an inner need of man, not merely an external necessity
for maintaining communal intercourse, but a thing lying in his own nature, indispensable
for the development of his mental powers and the attainment of a world view . (von
Humboldt 1988 [1836] 27)

Von Humboldts conception of inner need corresponds broadly to Herders notion

of expression. But in contrast with Herder, he insisted on the inter-subjective
nature of the production of linguistic meaning. Indeed, he foregrounds the social
dimension of language production. Additionally, for von Humboldt (1988 [1836], 27),
intellectual development was not an individual but rather a dialogical process: [Man]
can only bring his thinking to clarity and precision, he says, through communal
thinking with others.
Von Humboldts picture of language as the formative organ of thought was
indebted to Herder, but it was more than just a reworking of Herders ideas. He insisted
on the heroic, self-constitutive, Promethean aspects of linguistic activity, but also
wrote knowledgeably about languages forms and structures. The significant point for
von Humboldt was the shaping and ordering influence of languages on the development
of the mentalities (Weltanshauung) of the peoples that speak them their whole orientation towards the world. This, he said, held the key to understanding the hidden nature
of cultural formation and what he calls the secret evolution of mankind.
Further, von Humboldt reconfigured Herders basic insight that signification and
cognition are two sides of the same coin by attending closely to speech itself. Von
Humboldt was the founding figure of German philology. He was a capable linguist
who set himself the task of comparing the forms and structures of world languages in
order to grasp peoples mentalities. In due course, he came to question the very
nature of the sign, paving the way for the Saussurean breakthrough and for those
philosophies that went beyond it.
For Locke and Condillac, signs refer to ideas rather than things themselves. Words
(signs) were given entities to which meanings are attached. The German thinkers
challenged this view, reconsidering the very nature of the sign.
According to von Humboldt, the act of signification requires the combination of
two indivisible, structured elements, two sides of the same coin: the acoustic image
(speech/sound) and the ideational content (the thought referred to). To recast his
insight in structuralist terms, the signifier and the signified combine to make up the
sign. But in contrast to Saussures abstract system of differentiated signs, von
Humboldt insisted that language was a living, dynamic process. He assiduously
avoided semiotic reductionism. What is more, he refused to see language as one
among many systems of signs when it came to concept formation. He writes, the
concept receives its completion through the word, neither of them is separable from
the other (cited in Lafont 1999, 17). According to Christina Lafont (1999, 24), he
refuses to reduce language to some other term from which it could have developed.
In von Humboldts words (cited in Lafont 1999, 24): No matter how natural it seems
to suppose a progressive development of language, its invention could only take place
all at once. Man is only human through language; but in order to invent language, man
would have to be already human. Of course, von Humboldts paradox does not
square with Marxs confident assertion that the origin of language lies in practical
consciousness-for-others.

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Sixteen theses on language was a tightly compressed essay (von Humboldt

1989) that was probably written during the winter of 17951796. The essay title,
Thinking and speaking, will recall Thought and language (Myslenie i rech). A link
connecting von Humboldt and the Soviet thinker exists, but actually, von Humboldts
original piece bore no such title. The editor of the collected works supplied the
German, Denken und Sprechen in 1907. Von Humboldt visited Paris after the Great
Terror (November 1797) where he read Condillac intensively. However, he addressed
the Sisyphean problem of eighteenth century semiotic thinking, (the question of
where language comes from) from the standpoint provided by Kants critical philosophy (Mueller-Vollmer 1990b). For von Humboldt, the ordering and shaping processes
of language what he calls, the general forms our sensibility are very much like
the Kantian synthetic a priori categories. But as Lafont (1999) argues, von
Humboldts theory of language also contains a critique of Kantian transcendental
reason. According to von Humboldt, who was also the founding figure of modern
hermeneutics, the general forms and structures are not given to mind a priori in the
same way as the categories in Kants critical philosophy. Rather, they have been
produced in history and culture through the sensory medium of living speech.
We reanimate signs to generate new meaning within the web-work of language
viewed as a historical totality. As Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (1990b, 16) shows, von
Humboldt raised Herders picture of the Promethean, creative dimension of linguistic activity to a higher philosophical level:
[von] Humboldt maintained against this [Condillacs] position that signs do in fact order
our thinking, but not because certain objects have naturally [by habit] come to represent
certain ideas of things, but because signs, together with their corresponding thoughts
are shaped and fashioned by the human mind at one and the same time and in the very
same act.

The notion of words and thoughts coming together in the very same act, the simultaneity of thinking and speaking, takes us to the core of the problem that Vygotsky
(1986 [1934], 257) addresses in the final pages of Thought and language, which is the
problem of the relation between word and consciousness. He says this about the
simultaneity of thought:
A speaker often takes several minutes to disclose thought. In his mind the whole thought
is present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively. A thought may be
compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words. (Vygotsky 1986 [1934], 251)

Actually, it was Condillac who remarked the fact that what is grasped in an instant
takes time to recount due to the linearity of speech (Aarsleff 1984, 30). After Condillac, the notion of the linearity of speech became a staple of Enlightenment linguistic
thought.
I spoke at the outset about certain inconsistencies that Zinchenko noticed in
Vygotskys writings about pure meanings and thoughts with no words
attached. At times, Vygotsky writes as though a separation is possible between
thoughts and words, as if there is a stage of pre-linguistic thought; and at other
times he speaks about embodying thoughts in words and words bringing thoughts
to completion. According to Mueller-Vollmer (1990b, 8): For [von] Humboldt the
act of Artikulation in his terminology, is at one and the same time the constitutive
act for the consciousness of self of the speaking individual. Speaking subjects

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differentiate themselves from the objects that are their own voiced thoughts. On
this view, to be conscious of the object is also to become conscious of ones self.
For von Humboldt there is no separation between thoughts and words where
language is constitutive of our understanding of the world and mediates our whole
intuition of it.
What does von Humboldt mean by language? He writes:
I take the practice of language here in its widest extent, not merely in its relation to
speech and the stock of its verbal elements, which are its direct product, but also in its
connection with the capacity for thought and feeling. We are to consider the whole route
whereby, proceeding from mind, it reacts back upon the mind. (von Humboldt 1988
[1836], 54)

He read Condillac from the Kantian perspective of subjectobject relations.

Speakers, he says, not only use signs to apprehend their subjective inner
thoughts, but they also make them objectively available for further reflection as
externally expressed ideas. By the same sensible process by which speakers hear
their own articulations they shape the objectifications of their subjective ideas
moment by moment as they speak (von Humboldt 1988 [1836], 56). For von
Humboldt, there were no pre-linguistic, pure meanings; no thoughts without words
attached. No thinking, he says (1989, 212), not even the purest, can occur without the aid from the general forms of our [linguistic] sensibility: Only through them
can it [thought] be apprehended and as it were, arrested. Words and thoughts can
be separated for analysis by an act of reductive abstraction, but in reality they come
together in the same instant. The very condition of possibility for objective,
communicable experience is attained in and through the symbolizing potentials of
language. He writes:
Only language can do this [transform the presentation into real objectivity]; and without this transformation, occurring constantly with the help of language even in silence,
into an objectivity that returns to the subject, the act of concept-formation, and with it
true thinking, is impossible. So quite regardless of communication between man and
man, speech is a necessary condition for the thinking of the individual in solitary
seclusion. (von Humboldt 1988 [1836], 56)

As Lafont (1999, 24) puts it, the attempt to find some foundation prior to language
implies that its function of world-disclosure, its constitutive character is denied.
Von Humboldts picture of language might best be described as a primary human
disposition towards a meaningful (linguistically mediated) world, what Goethe calls
the basis phenomenon. It cannot be reduced to anything else, such as activitylabour. Vygotskys picture of language shares von Humboldts view of a world
replete with meaning, but he looks for languages empirical origins in human sociality. For the Soviet thinker, following Marx, language is practical consciousness-forothers and the word is the direct expression of the historical nature of human
consciousness (Vygotsky 1986, 256). Von Humboldt wrote in a pre-Darwinian
world. After the Great War, Khler (1926) showed how rudimentary consciousness is
present in the practical activities chimpanzees, enabling them to make and use tools.
His findings threw fresh light on the interface between practical consciousness in
primates and human thought within the time-scale suggested by evolution. In essence,
Khler sign-posted the transition from tool-making activity in primates to symbolizing in humans.

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Concluding remarks
In their article, Vygotsky and activity-oriented psychology, V. V. Davydov and
L. A. Radzinkhovskii (Wertsch 1985, 54) note, For Vygotsky, a sign is a symbol with
a definite meaning it has evolved in the history of a culture. They make the point that
this interpretation of the symbol came from Vygotskys early work on the psychology of art and from his training in humanities and philology. They go on to say that
the Soviet psychologist combined this view of the symbol with a notion of the
psychological tool:
In the analysis of the determination of mind through practical activity, Vygotsky
relied on a Marxist idea. He singled out the presence of tool mediation as the structurally and genetically central feature of labour activity. He proposed the possibility of
an analogue to this in the structure and genesis of mental functions. Vygotsky
consciously searched for psychological tools and gave them major significance.
(Wertsch 1985, 54)

Yet, having mentioned the early influences on Vygotskys semiotic thought, the
authors decline to offer further analysis, seeking instead to answer the question of the
extent to which this type of semiotic interpretation of psychological tools conforms
with the concept of activity as an explanatory principle in psychological theory
(Wertsch 1985, 567). They also note that it was in this respect that criticism of
Vygotsky arose among his students and associates. It is chiefly in humanities and
philology that the legacy in the four thinkers I have been discussing can be traced. My
aim here has been to shed further light on these early influences and to suggest both
the scale and complexity of the ideas about language, signs and symbolization that
Vygotsky inherited.
I have tried to show that there were (at least) two ways in which words and signs
could be seen by analogy as tools in the pictures of language coming down from
seventeenth and eighteenth-century language studies. I linked the first to Lockes
instrumental-communicative notion of the word as a conduit or as vehicle of
thought and went on to explained how Condillac took up Lockes picture of
language and developed it into a theory about the role of signs in mastering mental
operations. The quasi-metaphysical, constitutive picture of language that I attributed
to Herder and von Humboldt asserted the priority of the meaning-disclosing function
of speech over the instrumental-communicative picture they inherited from Locke
and Condillac. In some ways, the second way of seeing words as psychological
tools stands against the first. Modern structural linguistics has striven to purge
language studies of its metaphysical residue in order to delimit it as an object of
scientific inquiry. However, this has involved just the kind of abstractive reduction
and separation from history that von Humboldt so assiduously resisted. Perhaps,
the complicated and sometimes contradictory pictures of language, meaning and
development that Vygotsky inherited from his Enlightenment precursors were not
reducible to a unitary theory of labour activity. However, they were capable of
being reconfigured within an incomparably rich psychological theory of cultural
mediation.
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