Mickiewicz – przewodnik w sporze o pochodzenie języka
MICKIEWICZ’S GUIDANCE IN THE DISPUTE ON THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE

Author(s): Olaf Krysowski
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: God; human being; dialectics; philosophy; language; Adam Mickiewicz; revelation; Slavdom
Summary/Abstract: In the 18th century two main theories on language perception emerged which Johann Gottfried Herder juxtaposed with each other in his Treaties on the Origin of Language (1772), rendering them as contrary. The first theory assumed that language had been God – sent and granted to the mankind in the very act of creation. The other theory believed that language was an invention of a human being as he possessed this natural inclination to explore and describe the surrounding world in terms of reflexive and conceptual categories. Both suppositions on language origins had their followers among philosophers, linguists and poets as well. Herder was the advocate of the latter one which suggested that the origins of language lay in human beings’ inventive nature and thereby he withstood Condillac, Süssmilch and Hamann’s way of thinking who favoured the conviction that language had come into being due to divine interference. Mickiewicz referred to this dispute in his lectures on Slavic literature (Slavic Literature, Course I, lecture 7), shedding light on these two schools of thought which dominated the 18th and the first half of the 19th century philosophy of language. As opposed to Herder, Mickiewicz did not submit to any of the two theories because he recognised the early Slavic language in terms of dialectics as a product within which mystical and sensible, ideal and real, divine and humane elements confronted. As a consequence, Mickiewicz could discern traces of both theories in the Slavic language – the one that advocated divine revelation of language as well as the one which supported the idea that language derived from human beings.

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