ВИДАТНІ ВІТЧИЗНЯНІ МИСЛИТЕЛІ

ПОТЕБНЯ АЛЕКСАНДР Potebnja, Alexander (1835–1891)

N Kerecuk, London, UKß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Alexander Potebnja (or Oleksander O. Potebnia) was a Ukrainian philosopher of language and mind, a linguist, a historian of ideas, an editor, and a publisher. Potebnja abandoned his law degree to read history and philology at the Kharkiv University, where he would later become a charismatic professor.

There have been many references to his achievements and originality, as well as varying ideologically tainted references often repeated in Eastern/Western accounts in the 19th and 20th centuries. He was regarded as the most important linguist in the Old Russian Empire among the three main ones (the other two being F. F. Fortunatov and I. O. Baudouin de Courtenay). Potebnja was the inspiration for the Kharkiv School of linguistics and poetics. The Institute of Linguistics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences is named after him. From 1878 to 1890, Potebnja was the president of the Kharkiv HistoricalPhilological Society (founded in 1876 and, under Soviet rule, forced to close in 1919). He was a member of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and the Czech Scientific Society. His wife, Maria Potebnja, ensured that his original manuscripts were published Potebnja’s works were a study of the evolution of human knowledge and consciousness encoded in language. Indeed, his oeuvre was likened to that of Darwin. His philosophy encompassed a theory of the mind, of consciousness, of knowledge, of perception,

of speech acts, of symbolic thinking, of aesthetics.

Literature was included in his theory of language as part of the whole of language and its functions. He was critical of positivism. He seems to have sought to resolve the Cartesian problem of consciousness and the physical world.

Language is the subjective activity of a cognizing individual, and it exists only in speech, in the communication within a speech community that shareshistory and culture. Mind (dukh – intellect andspirit/soul) in Potebnja should be understood ‘‘in thesense of conscious mental activity,’’ ‘‘higher ordercognizing activity’’(1862: 37); ‘‘language is the passage from unconsciousness to consciousness’’ (1862:37). Every speech act is simultaneously an act ofunderstanding, of objectivization, of consciousness,of interpretation of thought, of cognition (1862,1874, 1888). He stated that many forms of thoughtexist and develop without language. However, thereare mental activities that require language. Potebnjaargued that ‘‘language is necessary for mental activityso that the mental activity can become conscious’’(1862: 37). Man develops the capacities for symbolicthinking and for language concomitantly. These capacities also enable man to choose to substitute naturallanguage for symbolic forms of thinking (e.g.,in mathematics, music, the visual arts). Potebnja’sworks were a wide-ranging critical review of thoughtsabout language – by grammarians, linguists, and philosophers – from the pre-Platonic and Aristotelian

traditions in both Western and Eastern Europe tothe 19th century. He was well attuned to thoughtsfrom other fields of knowledge. He regarded mathematics as fundamental for linguistics as it is for othersciences, with two underlying concepts of magnitudeand form. He used a number of mathematical concepts: groups/sets, invariance (variant, invariant),zero marking, commutation, and transformation,among others. Potebnja argued that in the historyof the development of knowledge, ‘‘our times are anexample of the interaction of sciences and of choice ofthe middle way pathways: linguistics and physiology,linguistics and psychology, linguistics and history,psychology and physiology. Il faut cultiver notre ardin [quote is from Voltaire’sCandide]. In this way we will cross-fertilize adjacent fields’’ (1905/ 1970:114).

A sophisticated theory of signs and semiotics was contained in his theories. For example, he argued that every word ‘‘consists of three elements: (i) the unity of the articulate sounds, i.e. the external sign of meaning; (ii) representation, i.e. the internal signof meaning and (iii) the meaning itself’’ (Potebnja’s emphasis). In his works, the term ‘word’ was often  interchangeable with ‘language’ as faculty, competence. Equally, the term ‘etymology’ stood for what would be termed ‘semantics’ when the latter was coined in the last decade of the 19th century.

Potebnja argued for a separation, in an innovative way, of the inherited amalgamation of logic and language, postulating the psychological sentence in opposition to the proposition of logic (1874). His works contained both an account of the parts of speech and a history of the evolution of the IndoEuropean sentence – a comprehensive ‘Thesaurus syntacticus’ (1874, 1888,1941, 1958).

Children’s language acquisition was an essential axiom in his theory. As a linguist has no access to how language is formed, nor is it possible to remember how one acquired language as a child, Potebnja postulated instead the observation of child language acquisition. For him the development of language in the child was a process accompanied by conscious  thinking that at the same time was symbolic and was cognitive development.

His writings were characterized by a lack of jargon and by his use of memorable metaphors (e.g., triangle, shroud, spider web and weaving, chessboard).

His works on linguistics were centered on Ukrainian at the time of secret Imperial Russian edicts against  Ukrainian. It is worth noting that the word ‘Great Russian’ was used for 19th-century Russian; therefore, in Potebnja, ‘Russian’ should be read as ‘East Slavic.’

His seminal Thought and language (1862) offered a critique of the earlier language theories, and he elected Humboldt as a point of departure for the development of his own philosophy and theory of language. However, he did not limit himself to Humboldt, using in addition much of the received and contemporary scholarship. He was credited with introducing Humboldt to the Old Russian Empire.

Potebnja’s influence was significant among students, followers, critics, and borrowers in both the

former Soviet Union and the West in such fields as linguistics, philosophy, literature, aesthetics, semiotics, psychology, music, and ethnoscience. Much of his work foreshadowed, for example, that of Sapir-Whorf, Croce, and Vossler. Vygotsky borrowed liberally from Potebnja (especially in Mysl’ i Rech, Theory of psychology of art), Kristeva spoke about Potebnja’s role in discourse analysis and pragmatics, and Jakobson was allegedly his advocate and even gave a lecture about Potebnja at Harvard.