As Chapter 1 showed, Aristotle confined the sign’s arbitrariness to sound and letter alone, assuming the concept behind it was the same for everyone. Chapter 2 showed how Port-Royal tried to derive a single “general and rational grammar” from that shared mental operation. In the nineteenth century, the Prussian diplomat and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt overturns both premises — that concepts are shared, and that grammar is a derivable, finished product.
Grammar books are “dead sediment”
Humboldt’s core thesis appears near the opening of his posthumous book:
Language, grasped in its true essence, is something continually and at every moment transient. … It is itself no product (ergon) but an activity (energeia).
(Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own.) This is a quiet but fundamental objection to Port-Royal’s entire project. Port-Royal derived every part of speech from the mind’s three operations — conceiving, judging, reasoning — and set out to write it all down as one system (Chapter 2). To Humboldt, any grammar book or dictionary written that way is nothing but the “dead sediment” of a living language. What actually exists is the act, performed anew each time, by which a speaker produces language — “the true definition [of language] can only be genetic.” Grammar isn’t a finished blueprint; it’s something that exists only inside the act of speaking.
The concept is no longer “shared”
Humboldt’s other reversal reaches further still. Aristotle had assumed that “the affections of the soul” behind a sign are the same for everyone (Chapter 1). Humboldt writes:
A word is not the copy of the object itself, but of the image the object has produced in the mind.
Not the object itself, but the image it produces in the mind of a speaker of a particular language — with this single line, Aristotle’s premise gives way. The concept isn’t shared by everyone; it takes a different shape in each language. Humboldt states this even more boldly:
Every language draws about the people to whom it belongs a circle, from which one can escape only by stepping over at the same time into the circle of another.
Language never stands alone
Humboldt’s other claim works quietly in the background. “Language is the formative organ of thought” — thought depends not just on language in general, but on the shape of one particular language. And that language can never exist for one person alone. “All speaking rests on dialogue.” The word “I” is only possible because “you” is already implied within it.
Here too, a quiet contrast with Port-Royal emerges. Port-Royal’s three operations — conceiving, judging, reasoning — were described as complete within a single mind. For Humboldt, language can only ever live between minds. Port-Royal’s project, which started from the individual mind, turns out, on Humboldt’s terms, to have been standing on a premise that never held in the first place.
What was carried forward, and what was reversed
What Humboldt kept was the conviction, inherited from Port-Royal, that language’s shape has a reason behind it. What he reversed was where that reason lives — not in a universal, fixed structure of mind, but only inside the diverse, living activity each individual language has cultivated for itself. In the terms of the overview, this is a clear move from the structure side of the axis to the activity side.
This turn left two legacies. One is the thesis “language equals worldview” itself — the idea that languages stand side by side, none superior, which an American anthropologist would pick up in the twentieth century, across the Atlantic (Chapter 5). The other is a phrase Humboldt himself used in passing — “the infinite use of finite means,” the insight that a speaker produces infinite sentences from a finite set of rules — which resurfaces, with entirely different tools, in the second half of the twentieth century (Chapter 6).
But what comes directly after Humboldt is a project that pushes this pendulum back the other way. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure deliberately sets aside language as activity (the living speech, parole, that Humboldt prized) and instead treats language (langue) as a synchronic system, existing outside any individual’s will. From energeia back to ergon — though not Aristotle’s static semiotics; something new.