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Chomsky and Humboldt All of this is crucial to an understanding of Chomsky's position on human nature, human language, and even politics. And in order to comprehend his intellectual development, it is vital to relate his earlier work to his Cartesian historical studies. Chomsky traces the Cartesian viewpoint through the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, and stresses its value as a means of grasping creative discourse.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt

He ultimately dwells upon the work of Humboldt, who serves as another context for Chomsky's work on linguistics and his postulations on what constitutes appropriate societal makeup. Humboldt focuses on the creative aspects of human language from what could be construed as a Cartesian perspective in that he considers language to be a manifestation of thought and self-expression rather than simply a form of functional communication. Perusing his writings, one may find that they yield a sense of his insight and range, as well as ­ by extension ­ the key to the relationship between Humboldt's work and that of Chomsky. For example, Humboldt claims that "language . . . must be looked upon as being an immediate given in mankind. . . . Language could not be invented or come upon if its archetype were not already present in the human mind. For man to understand but a single word truly, not as a mere sensuous stimulus (such as an animal understands a command or the sound of the whip) but as an articulated sound designating a concept, all language, in all its connections, must already lie prepared within him. There are no single separate facts of language. Each of its elements announces itself as part of a whole" (Humanist 239 ­ 40). It is rather startling to compare this kind of reflection with the behaviorist and structuralist approach that dominated the field during this time. Here is Humboldt on language acquisition: "Everyone when he learns a language, most notably children who create far more than they memorize, proceeds by darkly felt analogies which allow him to enter the language actively, as it were, instead of just receptively" (Humanist 243). On the relationship of language to the functions of the mind: "The mutual interdependence of thought and word illuminates clearly the truth that languages are not really means for representing already known truths but are rather instruments for discovering previously unrecognized ones" (Humanist 246). On general considerations of human development: "The production of language is an inner need of mankind, not merely an external vehicle for the maintenance of communication, but an indispensable one which lies in human nature, necessary for the development of its spiritual energies and for the growth of a Weltanschauung which man can attain only by bringing his thinking to clarity and definition by communal contact with the thinking of others" (Humanist 258). On the nature and attributes of language: "the whole of language lies within each human being, which only means that each of us contains a striving, regulated by a definitely modified capacity, which both stimulates and restricts, gradually to produce the entire language, as inner or outer demands dictate, and to understand it as it is produced by others" (Humanist 290 ­ 91); also: "A further proof that children do not mechanically learn their native language but undergo a development of linguistic capacity is afforded by the fact that all children, in the most different imaginable circumstances of life, learn to speak within a fairly narrow and definite time span, just as they develop all their main capacities at certain definite growth stages" (Humanist 292). And finally, adopting a generative approach to linguistics, von Humboldt, in Chomsky's words, suggests that the lexicon is "based on certain organizing generative principles that produce the appropriate items on given occasions," and he develops "the notion of `form of language' as a generative principle, fixed and unchanging, determining the scope and providing the means for the unbounded set of individual `creative' acts that constitute normal language use," thereby making "an original and significant contribution to linguistic theory . . . that unfortunately remained unrecognized and unexploited until fairly recently" (Cartesian Linguistics 20, 22). Discussing deep and surface structures in Cartesian Linguistics, Chomsky points out the value of a universal or philosophical theory for a study of transformational generative grammar. He does so with reference to both the grammar and the logic described in the Port-Royal Grammaire générale et raisonnée, which dates back to 1660: Such a theory is concerned precisely with the rules that specify deep structures and relate them to surface structures and with rules of semantic and phonological interpretation that apply to deep and surface structures respectively. It is, in other words, in large measure an elaboration and formalization of notions that are implicit. . . . In many respects, it seems to me quite accurate, then, to regard the theory of transformational generative grammar, as it is developing in current work, as essentially a modern and more explicit version of the Port-Royal theory. (38 ­ 39) This theory was formulated by a group that was associated with Port-Royal, a Parisian monastery. Daniel Yergin explains: "In 1660, influenced by Descartes, [the Port-Royal group] produced a `philosophical grammar' that suggested a distinction between deep and surface structures, and argued for psychological rules which, like Chomsky's, would permit us to make infinite use of finite means" (53). Chomsky elaborates the ways in which the rationalist theory of mind and the Cartesian approach to linguistics offer valuable support for studies of the acquisition and utilization of language as described by certain factions of the linguistic community (most of whom worked in building 20 at MIT). Such studies ­ of common forms of language, of general grammars, and of the conditions that prescribe the forms of human language ­ build on work undertaken by Cartesian linguists, and, in the process, acknowledge "the quite obvious fact that the speaker of a language knows a great deal that he has not learned" (Chomsky, Language and Responsibility 60). Making reference to the work of Herbert de Cherbury, and then to works by Descartes, the English Platonists, Leibniz, Kant, and the Romantics ­ notably Schlegel and Humboldt ­ Chomsky takes a fresh look at "the preconditions for language acquisition and at the perceptual function of abstract systems of internalized rules" in order to demonstrate the ways in which contemporary linguistic studies were "foreshadowed or even explicitly formulated in earlier and now largely forgotten studies" (Language and Responsibility 73).