Condillac's Other Ambitions: Scholarship after the Heyday of Heydays

If we were to sketch out a standard history of ideas of language to determine, within it, the place of Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, he would probably not shake out as a major player—not insignificant, surely, but not a fundamentally original thinker. Given his epistemological concerns, this story goes, Condillac is an Enlightenment thinker in the tradition of John Locke. His primary accomplishment, even for Condillac supporters such as Hans Aarsleff, is an ancillary one—the development and expansion of Locke's insights in specialized areas, notably the question of origins. Most revealing in this context is the subtitle to the 1756 English translation of Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746): A Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. Condillac's project, as initially set forth in the Essai, would be to trace knowledge to its origins in order to set right the misdirection in reasoning brought about by ill-conceived language. Because the symbiosis of language and knowledge is a necessary and delicate one, it must be monitored constantly. For the entire "Classical age," Foucault wrote, language represents things by making "them visible in the transparency of words." ¹ Foucault's well-known claim that "before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist" is based on the view that, for the eighteenth century, man is the "sovereign subject of all possible knowledge." ² In other words, "man" does not exist as an object of representation because the world is reproduced in language as a mental discourse representing sensible objects.

The faith of eighteenth-century philosophers in reason, and their struggle against forms of irrationality, go hand in hand with their understanding that language functions as the direct expression of ideas. Language is thus a crucial element for Enlightenment thinking (where Enlightenment is defined as combat against superstition in the cause of truth), either because reason is natural and can be recovered through attention to the true and proper development of language, or else because reason can be guaranteed by a language engineered by science. The former view is attendant upon a search for the origins of language, the latter upon creation of a universal character. These two views were synthesized by the late-eighteenth-century idéologues, who held important posts during the revolution and largely designed the modern French education system. Destutt de Tracy, for example, who presented himself as Condillac's successor, believed that by determining the principles of thought, pointless controversies and disputes, even war, might be avoided altogether. In his Elémens d'idéologie, Destutt de Tracy argued that, "once certain of the formation and genesis of our ideas, all that we subsequently say about the manner of expressing these ideas, of combining them, of teaching them, of governing our sentiments and our actions, and directing those of others, will be but consequences of these preliminaries, and will have a constant and invariable foundation in the very nature of our being." ³ Idéologie died out quickly, and thus also Condillac's legacy, with the rise of German linguistics in the nineteenth century: in contradiction of eighteenth-century philosophy, the post-Enlightenment linguists put strong emphasis on historical questions and gave the study of language its autonomy by divorcing it from epistemology, pedagogy, and logic.

Condillac's project is generally seen to fit snugly within this history as entirely consonant with utopian Enlightenment views of a transparent language of representation and communication. In the categorization of Hans Arens, Condillac is representative of French "rationalistisch-psychologische Betrachtung," a doctrine that reduces the mind, and therefore also language, to a reality-processing machine. ⁴ Georges Gusdorf finds Condillac's ideas even more rigidly representationalist than those of Locke: a veritable "totalitarian machine," "Condillac's doctrine is an intellectualism whose goal is to realize the axiomatization of the universe of discourse" representing experience. ⁵ Ian Hacking also places Condillac...