I.1 Framing the Question
Despite the scope and demands of his critical philosophy, Kant provided no systematic account of language. In Kant’s works the discussion of language is nowhere close to the attention he gives to other major fields of philosophical inquiry such as cognition, science, human agency, or art. This apparent neglect is mirrored in the literature on Kant and Kantian themes. Contemporary debates on Kant’s ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics typically ignore linguistic presuppositions and implications.
Yet, Kant’s critical philosophy includes important lessons for the philosophy of language on at least two levels of inquiry. First, according to Kant, the very possibility of metaphysics as a science relies on the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, and more generally, all activities of our human understanding can be traced back to judgments (A 69/B 94), which motivates the question about the link between the synthesis of intuitions in a concept and the propositional move according to which a predicate relates to a subject. In the Anthropology, Kant defines ‘thinking’ in terms of ‘talking’ (7: 192), and in some lecture notes he is said to have given hints at “a transcendental grammar, which builds the ground of the human language” (28: 576). Regarding moral philosophy, Kant insists on the first person of the “rule of judgment under laws of pure practical reason: ask yourself whether […]” (5: 69). Can we identify a ‘transcendental grammar’ of imperatives and maxims of action? Even one step further, may we conceive of verbal communication and discourse as morally relevant kinds of agency? In the context of Kant’s critique of taste, we may wonder about the role of verbal expressions with respect to the communicability of the feeling of pleasure. Is the verbal expression – together with a shared language – a necessary condition for the subjective universality of judgments of taste? Furthermore, how can poetry, as well as architecture, painting and sculpture tell us something by means of (non)verbal images and symbols?
These and similar questions show the centrality of language in Kant’s philosophy: ranging from the relationship between the logic of cognition and the propositional character of thought to the possibility of meaning and the different modalities of its expression; from the prescriptive character of moral language granted by transcendental principles to the fluidity of aesthetic communication based on the idea of a ‘common sense’ distinctive of finite reasoners like us.
On a second level of inquiry, three further aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy and its implications for the philosophy of language are worth mentioning. 1) The sources of Kant’s philosophical terminology (his redefinition of several concepts coming from different traditions and languages) as well as the reception of Kant’s views in subsequent theories (from Hegel’s criticism up to the linguistic turn in philosophy). 2) Kant’s own linguistic habits: his use of metaphors, analogies, and examples, and, relatedly, his own idea of a philosophical lexicon. 3) The role of linguistic abilities within a human environment where we inherit and develop our attitudes towards life, civilization, and culture.
It seems evident, first, that Kant deals – though often implicitly – with the issue of language in multiple contexts and, second, that the issue of language in Kant’s philosophy can be addressed from various perspectives. While a few interpreters share the idea of the possibility and legitimacy of dealing with Kant’s heterogeneous, nonsystematic and even fragmentary thoughts on language, the attention so far paid to the genuinely linguistic implications of several fundamental topics in Kant’s works does not do justice to the key role language plays within the system of critical philosophy.
Although Kant’s approach to the question of language is by no means comprehensive, he provides more than “seductive hints concerning the use and nature of language, if only on the rarest occasions,” and we can certainly find more than “only a trace of the importance of language throughout his writings” (Schalow/Velkley Reference Schalow and Velkley2014: 3). The point, we believe, is not so much whether language is a topic of fundamental philosophical relevance for Kant but, rather, to adequately reconstruct and discuss the topic of language throughout Kant’s system. At the same time, Kant’s own use of language is no peripheral issue either. To the contrary, making its philosophical implications explicit may provide some interesting clues to the whole of Kant’s critical philosophy.
The chapters in this volume bring to the fore the linguistic ramifications of some of Kant’s most important philosophical concerns and investigate Kant’s views on language from a variety of historical and philosophical vantage points. The fact that Kant’s account of linguistic structures and practices is not sufficiently explicit and, hence, cannot be found in any dedicated section of his works requires the reader to reconsider Kant’s most fundamental ideas and undertake an interpretive reconstruction of his philosophy of language. The Leitfaden for this reconstruction could be the idea that the issue of language systematically relates to a variety of topics and, hence, can be used as a lens that affords a clearer view on these topics. Each chapter of this volume contributes to this task by providing insights into the multifaceted foundations of Kant’s critical philosophy.
In conclusion, Kant’s thought does not just have a linguistic dimension. Kant on Language rather demonstrates that Kant’s notions of thinking, knowing, communicating, and acting have linguistic implications: from the problem of concept-formation to the categorial structure of experience, from the revolutionary idea of a transcendental logic to the constitution of empirical meanings. From the exhibition of aesthetic ideas to the role of analogies and metaphors. From the status of poetry as the art of language to the moral relevance of rhetoric and the problem of persuasion. And finally, from the source of Kant’s philosophical vocabulary to the role of language in answering the question ‘what is the human being?’
The two parts of this volume are set up according to its peculiar interpretive targets, and each contribution provides an original and distinctive view that will enrich the debate and help build a new interpretive context in which Kant’s approach to language can be further appreciated not only by Kant scholars, but also by philosophers of language working outside a strictly Kantian framework.
I.2 Overview of the Chapters
The idea that Kant relates to core problems in the philosophy of language is key to the purpose of Kant on Language. The chapters in this volume are divided into two parts, the one (I) tracing the Linguistic Implications of Kant’s Thought, the other (II) titled Historical and Philosophical Implications. The former is devoted to exploring the ways in which Kant in his critical philosophy invokes elements that can be relevant from a genuinely linguistic point of view. The latter, in a complementary way, explores Kant’s historical context, the anthropological outcomes of his own views on language and linguistic abilities, and points towards a philosophical understanding of language-related issues in Kant through the lens of contemporary debates.
I.2.1 Linguistic Implications of Kant’s Thought
The first chapter in Part I, by Mirella Capozzi (Kant on Language: Semiotics and Heuristics) focuses on the role of sensible signs for the very possibility of language and the distinction between acoustic and figurative signs. Whereas acoustic signs are key to thinking itself, according to Kant, figurative signs may be (mis-)used for persuasion by replacing sound arguments. Capozzi also touches upon Kant’s sketch of a heuristic that employs symbolic language to facilitate and promote inventions and discoveries.
Claudio La Rocca (The Rise of Empirical Meaning) argues that Kant’s account of cognitive synthesis is best understood as producing empirical signification, rather than as the mere connection of representations flowing from different faculties. By showing how Kant both relates to, but also departs from the rationalist tradition, La Rocca sheds light on Kant’s argument for the unity of synthesis as the key step towards the constitution of an empirical concept. According to La Rocca, Kant connects the functions of thinking and the propositional core of language to the effect that concepts may co-originate with words.
The following two chapters, by Clinton Tolley (Kant and the Idea of a Language in ‘the Senses’) and Peter Thielke (Grammar, Categories, and the Structure of Experience) focus on the two sides of the cognitive synthesis and, relatedly, the different interpretive options concerning how the possibility of experience relies on linguistic elements and procedures. On the one hand, the goal of Tolley’s contribution is to identify the basic structures of the linguisticality of sensibility (invoking Kant’s predecessors, Berkeley and Baumgarten) and to frame a balance between the activities of sensibility and understanding, whereby both interact according to their respective codes. On the other hand, Thielke focuses on the categories and the grammar of thinking in order to intertwine the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience with certain elements of our empirical cognition and the way we shape it by means of language.
Alfredo Ferrarin (A Liberated Language: Kant on Hypotyposis, Symbol, and Analogy) expands on the linguisticality involved in the exhibition of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique and provides a comprehensive reading of § 59 that makes the case for a broader understanding of language not limited to propositions and verbal signs. Ferrarin concludes that, according to Kant, making sense of the order of the contingent, including history, politics, living nature, and culture requires an analogical language, and that analogy is the logic of reflecting judgment.
Starting within the same framework of Kant’s aesthetic, in her contribution Expressing the Unnamable: Poetic Language, Humanity and Sociability in Kant’s Third Critique, Iris Vidmar Jovanović accounts for poetry as the most eminent and effective expressive means for ideas that seem to lie beyond the capacities of language. Vidmar Jovanović goes even further as to claim that by means of poetry it is possible to access a unique kind of human communication that in turn plays a positive role by promoting the human being’s cognitive and moral capabilities, and hence supporting and sustaining human sociability.
Sofie C. Møller’s chapter (Kant’s Metaphors and Analogies) closes the first Part by discussing Kant’s own employment of analogical thinking in his attempt to illustrate philosophically relevant notions and thus to clarify, rather than define, their meaning. According to Møller’s interpretation of Kant’s critical philosophy, analogies become key to approximating the objective reality of ideas such as reason’s architectonic, organization, and legislation, as well as aesthetic ideas that are unnameable by a single expression.
I.2.2 Historical and Philosophical Implications
Moving to Part II, the opening chapter by Courtney D. Fugate (Kant’s Vocabulary in Context: Eighteenth-Century Canons for Building a Philosophical Language) reconstructs the origin and development of Kant’s philosophical lexicon. Fugate identifies a tension between the obscurity and even emptiness of some of the philosophical terms coming from Latin and the fact that the languages available to eighteenth-century European philosophers were not yet philosophically charged. By contextualizing Kant’s account of a philosophical language within his predecessors’ frameworks – prominently Leibniz, Wolff, Crusius, and Tetens – Fugate argues that Kant’s canons for building a philosophical lexicon can be understood as corollaries of the more fundamental “Copernican” turn of his critical philosophy.
Sebastian Luft (Cassirer on Kant and W. v. Humboldt on Language: “Die Freiheit und Selbständigkeit des geistigen Tuns”) brings Kant’s critical philosophy into dialogue with Humboldt and Cassirer’s theories of language. Luft argues that, beyond the explicit and implicit Kantianism in Cassirer, it is more specifically Humboldt’s transcendental interpretation of language that provided some of the indispensable tools for Cassirer to develop the notion of symbolic form and thus to transform the “critique of reason” into a “critique of culture.”
Raphaël Ehrsam’s and Huaping Lu-Adler’s chapters share an anthropological perspective and deal with the sources of Kant’s views on deaf-mutism and the relationship between linguistic abilities and the human being’s cultural development. Ehrsam (Anthropology and the Deaf and Dumb: Investigating Kant’s Sources) highlights the Cartesian tradition and contrasts it with Kant’s account of the relationship between thought and language in order to better understand why in the Anthropology Kant argues that the deaf and dumb is doomed to have nothing more than an analogue of reason. Lu-Adler (Not Those Who “All Speak with Pictures”: Kant on Linguistic Abilities and Human Progress) critically focuses on the way Kant relates a people’s development and employment of a language to its cultural and moral progress. She introduces “Kant’s exclusionary view of progress, according to which the Occidental whites alone are equipped with the requisite discursive skills,” and advocates a comprehensive critique of his “ultra-rationalist perspective” on the primacy of discursive language over symbolic expression.
Rhetoric plays a central role in the chapters by Adam Westra (Like Entering a Bright Room? Kant and the Challenge of Lucidity) and Scott R. Stroud (Kant and the Moral Challenges of Rhetoric). On the one hand, Westra highlights the relevance Kant attributes to lucidity as the combined ideal of discursive and aesthetic clarity in the expression of philosophical contents. Taking his cue from the Anthropology Westra outlines a structure of the Critique that exhibits the reformation of speculative reason on the analogy of Kant’s conception of moral character (trans-)formation. On the other hand, Stroud deals with Kant’s view of rhetoric as a morally relevant practice, and more specifically as a functional term in Kant. He argues for a differentiated view, according to which what he calls manipulative rhetoric is restricted to traditional ars oratoria, which leaves room for a nonmanipulative rhetoric that Kant deals with under the names of eloquence (Beredtheit) and well-spokenness (Wohlredenheit).
The last two chapters of the volume situate Kant’s critical philosophy relative to contemporary debates in epistemology and semantics. Taking into account Brandom’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, Michael N. Forster (Kant’s Inferentialism) argues that Kant’s version of inferentialism is philosophically superior to Brandom’s. Moreover, he criticizes Brandom, on the one hand, for misrepresenting the post-Kantian reception of Kant’s principle that concepts only have a use within judgments, and on the other, for missing the linguistic turn in Kant’s late philosophy that was taken up and further developed by W. v. Humboldt. Karl Schafer (Was Kant an Expressivist? Should He Have Been?) delves into Kant’s different employments of ‘cognition’ in order to understand to what extent Kant – especially his practical philosophy – can, or cannot, be read as a form of expressivism. Schafer’s idea is to read Kant’s different understandings of ‘cognition’ as flowing from one unified account of cognitive capacities – whereby this more comprehensive view shows relevant structural similarities between the Kantian framework and some noncognitive aspects of expressivism in general.
