The most active phase of Saussure’s scholarly and teaching career (at least outwardly speaking) comprised approximately a decade and a half between the late 1870s and mid-1890s. It was a time dominated by “positivism” in philosophy, the natural sciences, and social studies. In 1844 Auguste Comte had proclaimed the end of the “metaphysical” era of abstract philosophical speculation and the beginning of the “scientific” era of concrete or “positive” knowledge and exploration. To Comte also belonged the credit for introducing the principles of empirical science into the sphere of social studies; this new perception of the social element as something that can and should be studied with essentially the same methods and criteria of demonstrability as natural phenomena became one of the pillars of the positivist ideology. Following Comte’s basic principles, Herbert Spencer presented a compendium of modern sciences in the framework of positivist methodological postulates in his monumental System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862–1897), whose ten volumes presented the foundations of biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics. Appearing in the wake of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Spencer’s compendium particularly emphasized the principle of causality in development, an emphasis that triggered or reinforced a shift toward the historical approach in many disciplines, notably in linguistics. Like Comte, Spencer was inspired by the goal of wresting the study of “human” phenomena—fields such as sociology and psychology—from the speculative humanities and forging them into full-fledged sciences.
This positivist tide was rising high in linguistics, too, in the last third of the nineteenth century. One can see the impact of Comte’s and Spencer’s emphasis on sociology in Whitney’s view of language as a social convention. As has often been pointed out, Whitney’s idea of conventionality inspired Saussure, who saw in it a remedy for the despised idea of language as an “organism.” But unlike Saussure’s later concept of arbitrariness, Whitney’s idea of conventionality was a “positive” concept: a social contract regulating speakers’ linguistic behavior. Whitney’s protobehaviorist approach tended toward Bloomfield’s (1926) “postulates for the science of language” more than toward Saussure’s “general linguistics.”1
However, it was the Leipzig Neogrammarians whose works embodied the spirit of “positive” science in linguistics in the most radical and uncompromising way. The Leipzig “Young Turks’” strict adherence to a causal explanation of the historical past of languages, coupled with a rejection of anything that lay beyond empirical observation, exemplified the very core of positivist ideology. The school’s central theoretical claim, that laws of phonetic change must work like laws of physics, “without exception,” reflected the positivist aspirations of the social sciences.
So why, after a year of study at the University of Geneva, did Saussure decide to move to Leipzig? He obviously felt uneasy in Leipzig, since he strove, under various pretenses, to minimize his physical presence in the program. Saussure’s sensational first book was written during his stay on leave in Berlin, in an almost surreptitious way that baffled his Leipzig teachers, while the work he officially submitted as his dissertation turned out to be (excepting some embryonic thoughts whose meaning would come to light much later) a rather pedestrian, if solid, manifestation of generic “positive” scholarship. With very few exceptions, his subsequent relationships with his former teachers remained cool at best. As for the school’s doctrine and the concrete results it yielded, Saussure’s favorite epithets, whenever he spoke about it in his notes, were obtus and stupide. His efforts to formulate the premises of language and linguistics always implied, as their negative antipode, the unreflective empiricism of Leipzig scholarship.
Perhaps the answer to the puzzle of why Saussure moved to Leipzig—besides the obvious, namely, that its program indeed stood at the forefront of linguistic studies at the time—lies in what Saussure was leaving behind with this decision. Remember that at the age of fifteen, after two years of intense studies with Adolphe Pictet, Saussure produced a treatise in which he offered a universal key to the protoroots of all words in all languages. After his first effort fell apart, Saussure abandoned linguistics altogether for a few years—in fact, until Leipzig; he never touched on any linguistic subject in his year at Geneva. Perhaps there was more at stake in this abrupt withdrawal than wounded adolescent pride.
A clue to what this early episode meant for Saussure’s inner development may lie in the word with which he referred to it in his memoirs in 1903: enfantillage. In his notes, Saussure employs the epithets enfantine or puerile with the same generosity as stupide, yet typically he applies them to a separate category of things. What Saussure usually considers enfantine is the aspiration to capture language in a single all-encompassing picture. The mature Saussure’s approach, on the contrary, lay in trying to divide the cognition of language into mutually exclusive facets, an effort accompanied by constant reminders (to himself as well as to others) that there exists a plethora of alternative perspectives on language, yielding different snapshots that are equally valid yet mutually incompatible.
Saussure’s own enfantillage was indeed a childishly naive example of the “grand narrative” about language he later strenuously opposed. The truth was that, for all the difference in the level of scholarly competence, the work of his early mentor represented the same mindset. It is not difficult to see how Pictet’s sweeping reconstruction of the life of the “Indo-European people” inspired the adolescent Saussure to a no less awesome reconstructive venture. In his later judgment of Pictet’s book—beginning with his review of its second edition a year after Pictet’s death and followed by quite a few remarks in his notes and lectures—Saussure always sounds as if he is reluctant to say anything negative about his old teacher but unable to say anything substantially positive either, beyond the ambiguous assertion that his work was better than many others of its class. The very idea of an inner link between the structure of a language and the culture and mentality of its speakers never failed to trigger Saussure’s vehement refutation, although on such occasions he usually avoided mentioning Pictet, reserving all his sarcasm and fury for les allemandes. Saussure’s personal sympathies or antipathies aside, he abhorred the holistic vision of language—a product of Schellingian organicism that became a trademark of high Romanticism, German and French alike, in the 1820–1850s.
Saussure’s own predisposition toward an essentialist, revelatory solution—a trait that remained palpable behind the immaculate logic of the Mémoire and the impassive epistemological inquiry of the Course—made him easy prey to the temptations of late Romantic grandiloquence in his adolescent years, with laughable consequences. One could not imagine a better remedy than the one offered by Leipzig, with its stern scientist ideology, its cult of the concrete, even its human atmosphere of no-nonsense academic camaraderie. It would be futile to muse on how consciously the nineteen-year-old Saussure sought this antidote, but in Leipzig he certainly found it. Later he would assault the oblivious empiricism of his Leipzig mentors with the same fury he used to tear down vestiges of wide-eyed Romantic fascination with the organic “wholeness” of language. But a Leipzig substratum persisted in his thought and, moreover, proved to be indispensable for his formulation of the fundamental categories of linguistic inquiry.
Saussure’s construction of la langue was, of course, diametrically opposed to the militant empiricism of the 1860–1880s. But his training in the empirical atomism of Leipzig scholarship, with its willingness to concentrate on one tangible task at a time, can be sensed in his modeling efforts. Saussure approaches language with a twofold strategy: as a philosopher, striving to formulate the essential nature of language, and as a linguist, concerned with presenting language as a describable phenomenon. While penetrating into the essence of what language “is” required the utmost generalization that would set aside all its specific features without universal transcendental value (an operation somewhat like the Kantian critique of knowledge and its modernist echoes), approaching language as an object to be described required, on the contrary, a division of labor between the different facets of inquiry approached from different perspectives. While Saussure the philosopher strove toward the ultimate properties of the sign, Saussure the linguist exposed the futility of any efforts to find a general “truth” about language that could serve as a common denominator for its description. On the contrary, the only way to approach language, Saussure argued, was to set up polarized categories and proceed according to the strict division between descriptive domains ensuing from those categorical divisions: language versus speech, synchrony versus diachrony, or both of them together as opposed to “history”; the “phonetic” principle of spontaneous and continual development vs. the “morphology” of the consciously recognized shift from one systemic state to another—and above all, language “in itself” versus its cultural contexts and psychological background. One can see the substratum of Neogrammarian doctrine in the latter aspect of Saussure’s thought. Even the choice of “phonetics” and “morphology” for one set of oppositional categories (one in fact rather ill-suited to Saussure’s own goals) reflected the division between phonetic changes, ostensibly proceeded according to strict (natural) laws, and morphological changes, directed by analogy (i.e., stemming from conscious perceptions), which constituted the core of the Neogrammarian methodology.
It was the Neogrammarian in Saussure that did not allow him to remain in the domain of pure philosophy of language—in the company of such younger contemporaries as Frege, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, or Bakhtin. He was as interested in the “matter” as in the “principles”; moreover, at least, in the beginning, he had perceived his task of clarifying the foundational principles of language as a means for him and his colleagues to stand on more solid ground when dealing with the concrete data. Thus he was devastated when, in the end, his philosophical inquiries showed him irrefutably that it would never be possible to reach the elusive substance of language. Saussure’s Leipzig training made him unable to go along with the sweeping revelations and peremptory logical constructions that mushroomed around him in the era of early modernism.2 In a sense, Brugmann’s complaint about Saussure’s reluctance to put a “made in Leipzig” label on his work was not entirely groundless.
In the early 1890s, Saussure took a deep retreat from the buoyant world of Indo-European linguistics in which he had shone so brilliantly both as scholar and teacher. He did so with the same decisiveness he had demonstrated some fifteen years earlier when he cast off the vestiges of late-Romantic megalomania. Suddenly—or so, at least, it seems from the outward evidence of Saussure’s letters and notes—the relentless pursuit of explanatory “formulas,” without asking where those formulaic patterns fit in a strategic picture of the metaphysical nature of language, appeared futile or, to use his vocabulary, “stupid.”
Saussure’s awakening to the limitations of a purely “scientific” approach to language was timely; it coincided with the first surge of modernism, with its rejection of positivist empiricism, its highlighting of the difference between matters of nature and matters of spirit, and, finally, its strong emphasis on the essential, a priori features of phenomena hidden beneath their observable surfaces.
The modernist philosophical revolution of the 1890s–1910s rejected positivist complacency about the unequivocal existence of empirical “facts,” to be observed and described, and embarked on a critique of the foundational premises of scientific description, building above all on Kant’s critique of cognition. Its principal argument was that the object of a study is not given in itself, based on its substantial features; rather, it is always constructed by certain categorical premises postulated at its foundation. The only choice one has is whether to accept certain postulates implicitly, without giving any account of them—as with the positivists and their “facts”—or to construct them consciously through epistemological critique. From this starting point the foundational categories of different disciplines were laid out—beginning with the foundations of mathematics (Frege 1884; Russell 1897); spreading from there to the natural sciences (Avenarius, Ostwald) and to universal oppositions between “sciences of nature” and “sciences of the spirit” (Natorp 1910) or between “descriptive” and “historical” sciences (Rickert 1902); and, finally, leading to a new compendium of the sciences as “symbolic forms” (Cassirer 1923–1929)—an explicit counterpoint to Spencer’s positivist compendium.
The awareness that any study is of necessity built on certain postulates led to a sober—if often implicit—acceptance of the fact that every choice of postulated categories imposed its limitations. Ultimately this approach pointed to the universal boundaries of cognition set explicitly by Kant. In this respect the new trend was reductive: by postulating certain features as constitutional for a certain object, it stripped that object of everything that lay outside this constructed approach to it.
It is interesting to note that Saussure’s exposure to the new epistemological awareness came, at least in part, in a “Neogrammarian” way—as the result of an encounter with a mass of language data that refused to be sorted out. Curiously enough, the strong commitment of empirical studies to tangible data resulted in a limitation of the scope of that very data. In particular, until the end of the century, historical linguistics dealt almost exclusively with written texts, disregarding the fact (which Saussure later emphasized in his lectures) that writing offers an impoverished and somewhat artificial picture of the language it represents. Saussure’s own reconstruction of the Indo-European vowel system had operated within the limited pool of facts of acknowledged relevance; in effect, it was the work of a member of the guild, elaborating, on the same factual basis, on the findings of his predecessors. It was only in the late 1880s that Saussure did field research of his own in Lithuania. The chaotic variety and mobility of the picture of language he found there shook his faith in the work he and his colleagues had been doing and convinced him of the urgent necessity of revising the methods and goals of the whole discipline. This personal experience echoed the rising general disenchantment with the premises and goals of empirical research. Saussure seems to strike down both empirical scientism and the idealist metaphor of language as an organism with one stroke when he speaks about a “ridicule doctrine,” according to which linguistics belongs to the natural sciences and linguists work like “botanists”: “this is what has been said, and taken seriously” (ELG, 116/80).
Saussure’s “oppositive and negative” model of language clearly corresponded to the new philosophical trend. While champions of linguistics as a “positive” science saw their principal goal as amassing empirical knowledge about the subject, Saussure’s reexamination of the foundations of linguistics was essentially reductive. He strove to strip language of all “outer” vestiges of its existence—the multitude of physical, social, and psychological phenomena with which it is entangled—to reach its inalienable features, which could then be laid out as a priori postulates of linguistic studies. In this quest for the transcendental properties of language, Saussure’s critique came particularly close (whether knowingly or not) to Husserl’s transcendental reduction.
Saussure’s oppositive predisposition of mind, his emphasis on differentiation (in part, an inheritance of his Leipzig schooling) resulted in his highlighting the negative aspects of a reductionist model. Like Husserl in his reductionist critique of consciousness, Saussure finds in the end of the process of transcendental reduction no positive substance that could be acknowledged as given a priori. The only “positive” feature of language that is transcendental (i.e., belongs to language “in itself”) turns out to be the absence of any positive substantial features. It is fair to say that Saussure perceived the ultimate state of aporia toward which this postulated model is, of necessity, headed with more devastating sobriety than most of his modernist contemporaries, with whom he shared the fundamental conviction of the postulated character of cognition.
Looking at the psychological underpinnings of the modernist spiritual revolution at large, one could call them essentialist or revelatory. The era of modernist “dawns” showed a great penchant for revelatory insights;3 it was rife with messianic figures who declared, with great charismatic energy, a radically new order of things—be it theoretical physics, psychology, the social order, or the theory and practice of literature, art, and music. The new vision often looked counterintuitive to conventional “common sense.” With a single stroke, it penetrated the empirical surface of the matter to an essential “core” that was invisible to ordinary sight, suddenly reordering things into a picture strikingly different from what straightforward observation had hitherto been able to show.
The essentialist side in Saussure was as characteristic of the turn of the twentieth century as his reductionist epistemological efforts. The revelatory lightning-bolt effect of Saussure’s postulates about language was instantly recognizable in the intellectual and emotional environment created by Einsteinian physics or Freudian psychology, Schoenberg’s dodecaphony, Khlebnikov’s transrational poetic language, or Malevich’s suprematism. It was in this vein that Saussure’s “teaching” was received by the following generation (itself rich with figures of messianic proportions, such as Hjelmslev, Piaget, and Jakobson). Saussure’s posthumous destiny as the founder of structuralism was that of a messiah whose word of revelation redeemed linguistics and semiotic studies as a whole, and did so all the more effectively, for that matter, because his “good news” reached the world only in a rendition—perhaps uncomprehending, perhaps even apocryphal—passed down by his disciples.
The aphorism at the head of this section belongs to Friedrich Schlegel.4 It reflected the Athenaeum’s critique of cognition, one even more radical than that put forth by the modernist epistemological revolution. The latter, following Kant’s critique of pure reason, subverted belief in empirical reality by showing how it is contingent on underlying transcendental categories. The Athenaeum’s critique, however, subverted the categories themselves by showing cognition as an essentially unregulated “progressive” process that evolves in a free flow of fragmentary cognitive acts. The principal achievement of the Athenaeum consisted of rejecting any universal key to the absolute that could be declared once and for all. In its response to Kant the Athenaeum sought the remedy for the limitations of pure reason he exposed not in building a “supercategory” that would supersede the boundaries drawn by Kantian categories (as Fichte did), but in reclaiming the fundamental “impurity” of reason, that is, its mixed and fleeting character.
The key idea behind the Athenaeum’s proclamation of “Romantic poetry” was that of merging critical reflection and free-flowing “romantic” creative fantasy. What Kant’s first and third critiques strove to distinguish as pure reason, enframed in the transcendental categories, on the one hand, and the free creative element of “genius,” on the other, was transformed by early Romantic metaphysics into a volatile symbiosis in which every vestige of order elaborated by reason becomes dissolved in a running stream of creative imagination, while every visionary leap is undermined in its turn by a reflective “afterthought” (Nachdenken). The Athenaeum’s reflection on the human experience corresponded to the fundamentally heterogeneous and rhapsodic nature of that experience itself; the “Romantic” quest for the absolute readily embraced the mixed and the imperfect as fundamental conditions of existence. As Schlegel put it, “only in a mixed atmosphere can one breathe normally; inhaling pure oxygen makes one dizzy.”
This position allowed the Athenaeum to embrace Kantian critique while avoiding its crystallization into a fixed system. The Jena Romantics rebelled against all “systems” of categorical cognition, which Schlegel sarcastically compared with military parades,5 and Novalis with shoemaking.6 Commingled with the free flow of “Romantic” creativity, pure spirit loses its purity, but, along with it, its constitutional limitations. Any cognitive state (“system”) it produces proves to be limited, doomed to crumble under the pressure of the incessant motion of creative genius; yet that motion itself has neither limits nor any prescribed and predictable way of proceeding.
What destines the whole process to remain forever a fragmentary patchwork is the need for every cognitive act to be externalized through semiotic representation. These semiotic bodies—signs—emerge as fragments; any effort to patch up the relations between the fragmentary bodies, to fill the gap between them, ends merely in a new idiosyncratic agglomeration. There is no way to hold the “mass” of fragmentary phenomena of signification and its spontaneous development within the confines of any general organizing principle.
Yet, for the Jena Romantics, embracing the perpetually “potentialized” state of the semiotic process did not mean giving up on deliberate cognitive efforts. To yield to chaos, giving up any effort to conquer it by reflection, would be as “deadening” as to declare a comprehensive “system” and then force any ensuing cognitive task within its framework (a move that bestows “papal” authority on the champion of the system, as Schlegel once remarked about Fichte).7 The spirit must perpetually strive for the absolute, “hunting” for meaning, trying to patch up the gaps between existing semiotic entities, while undermining every such effort with a reflective “afterthought” that exposes its fragmentary and transient character.
It is not difficult to see to what extent Saussure’s position matches the Athenaeum’s epistemological endeavor. In his critique of the empirical approach to language as a phenomenon of “nature,” Saussure was in line with the epistemology and philosophy of science of his time. Yet he stopped short of taking the next logical step in this direction, namely, postulating a stable and secure frame for linguistic studies grounded in the a priori properties of language. What Saussure found as a result of his strenuous critical labors was not an underlying logical order but a phenomenon of total freedom that ripped apart any orderly pattern. By arriving at this point of ultimate negativity, Saussure took a step further than his modernist contemporaries: not only did he mount a critique of observable reality from the vantage point of underlying categories but he also subjected those very categories to a critique that revealed them to be unsustainable. This was also what separated Saussure from his followers in the structuralist era, who were happy to use the universal categorical guidelines he had established, such as language versus speech, synchrony versus diachrony, signification as a relative phenomenon versus substantial denotation, to build a new systemic edifice of language and other semiotic systems in the true spirit of modernist science and philosophy. In Saussure’s thought, however, language abandons its empirical surface, only to prove incapable of coalescing into a categorized system.
The contradictory world of Saussurean thought—ever striving for an uninterrupted logical inference and ever falling apart into fragments, equally rife with powerful insights and embarrassing false starts, at once feverish and dejected—can be better understood, I believe, when its line of kinship with the spiritual world of the early Romantics is fully appreciated.
Let us now sum up the principal ingredients of Saussure’s intellectual world: its drive for differentiations, inherited from the age of empiricism; a reductive epistemological critique that reflected the dominant trend in turn-of-the-century metaphysics and philosophy of science, in which Saussure came particularly close to Husserl’s transcendental reduction, Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, and Frege’s (1892) distinction between the intrasystemic sense (Sinn) and the referential meaning (Bedeutung); and, finally, an inspiring yet disconcerting mixture of reflective sobriety and longing for the absolute, of devastating fragmentariness punctuated by moments of miraculous revelatory integration, which constituted a thread connecting Saussure to early Romanticism.
This volatile combination, whose diversity and inner tensions themselves recall the precarious Athenaeum moment, constituted a peculiar phenomenon in the intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a phenomenon that stood in manifold relations with many events and trends of the time, yet escaped identification with any of them.
The diverse facets of the intellectual world of modernism, from exacting critique of the foundations of cognition to stunning intellectual and aesthetic revelations by charismatic figures, had one feature in common: an assertive attitude toward every object under consideration, whose eventual transfiguration by an upsurge of spiritual energy was all but assured; the eventual triumph of the enterprise was never in doubt. Saussure’s cognitive anxiety, which rendered him unable to make his efforts public, set him apart from this aspect of the world of the 1890s–1910s, with which he otherwise showed a close kinship. The anxious, frustrated way in which Saussure pursued the elusive vision of language stood in conspicuous contrast to the assertiveness with which contemporary theories of science and cognition embarked on constructing their subjects. His dejection and perpetual false starts made him unable to claim the mantle of modernist prophet, one who could say of himself in Picasso’s words: “Je ne cherche pas, je trouve!”
In this respect Saussure was not quite alone. The triumph of categorizing constructionism caused a sporadic but intellectually powerful reaction. An example of this rebellious undercurrent in the modernist epistemological culture can be found in Walter Benjamin, who began as a neo-Kantian and eventually found a powerful antidote to neo-Kantian complacency in the Jena Romantics. Characteristically, Benjamin did not pursue a full-fledged academic career, inscribing his critique of neo-Kantian critique “on the margins,” so to speak (as did Bakhtin sometime later); this position echoed the deliberate marginality of the Athenaeum in an intellectual world dominated by the polemic between Kant’s followers and the rising tides of idealist philosophy. Saussure, of course, held a regular academic position, yet the silent reticence and self-marginalization of his later years is quite telling.
Judging by appearances, Saussure seems as unlikely a companion for Benjamin or Bakhtin as he would have been for Novalis and Schlegel a century earlier. What reveals his spiritual kinship to the Athenaeum brand of Romanticism is his rebellion—uncompromising to the point of self-destructiveness—against any kind of cognitive safe haven, be it postulated categories or adherence to “facts” or simply giving in to the inscrutable volatility of the subject. Saussure discerned the full length to which the principle of the absolute freedom of language, grounded in arbitrariness, could carry the study of language and its development and had the presence of mind to accept the consequences of that principle—or at least proved unable to sweep them aside. Much as he longed for the hermetic refuge of postulated categories, within the shelter of which he would once again feel free to exercise his extraordinary ability for making order out of chaos, he could not be swayed from the principle of arbitrariness—that essence of the linguistic free will—which makes all the revelatory formulas in the world unsustainable or illusory.
His mode of spiritual existence was precarious, a perpetual striving toward a balance he knew could not be reached, yet it was the only antidote to succumbing either to the complacency of an objectified integral system or to the complacency of unchecked subjectivity. There was a heavy psychological price to be paid for the perpetual unresolved tension between fragmenting critique and visionary integration, between the ardent pursuit of a synthesis, on the one hand, and the sober realization of its impossibility, on the other. What I call the “Athenaeum moment” comprised a fleeting but precious span of time—roughly, the second half of the last decade of the eighteenth century. By the end of this period, Novalis was increasingly drawn to a vision of death—that sleep without dreams, to recall Saussure’s words—as the welcome terminal station of a restless spiritual journey; he died, without any apparent physical cause except exhaustion, in 1801, at the age of twenty-nine. Schlegel increasingly sought the ultimate solution in religion, in the last published series of his fragments, Ideen (1800), proclaiming religion to be the sun whose rays enlighten all earthly tumult. His book on “the language and wisdom of the Indians” (1808), while pivotal in launching the new epoch of comparative studies, reflected Schlegel’s new longing for the “organic” continuity of historical development, which he envisioned, predictably, with regard to German as well as Sanskrit and the classical languages.
What makes the case of Saussure truly unique is the length to which he was prepared to go in two opposite directions: toward the reductive construction of an object, on the one hand, and toward its release into unfettered and unceasing commotion, in the true spirit of early Romanticism, on the other. While carefully laying down the categories by which language could be constructed in its present or past state, Saussure did not lose sight of the chaotic fragmentariness in which the subject of his labor dissolves due to the fundamental heterogeneity that makes it unconquerable by “pure reason.”
And what made the matter even worse, and harder to endure, was the mystery with which moments of spontaneous integration suddenly appeared amidst the relentless commotion of fragments. As it turns out, language perpetually moves between arbitrary differentiations and tentative and coincidental integrations. The presence of revelatory moments of integration takes away from one the last possible comfort—that of the supposed inevitability of aporia. By keeping tantalizingly alive the promise that things might suddenly come together, those uplifting moments refuse to let one quietly bow to the uncognizable—yet sooner or later they are doomed to undergo the gnawing suspicion that the revelatory glimpses they allowed might be just another illusion, perhaps even a hallucination, a symptom of one’s failing intellectual faculties.
The intellectual stoicism with which Saussure endured this rending contradiction, his ability to confront all his doubts and despair in the face of the unachievable absolute, all the while maintaining a perfectly self-possessed composure in doing what could be explicitly done, was truly extraordinary. To be sure, like Novalis and Schlegel, he was able to endure the full force of this tension for only a few years. The “heritage” Saussure apparently believed he was leaving after him was one of dejection and defeat. Yet, as with the Athenaeum, this self-defeating volatility, grounded in the unbending freedom of the spirit, was the most precious aspect of what Saussure achieved. And, as in the case of the Athenaeum, it takes much time and interpretative labor for the full value of this achievement to be seen.