How Things Become Intelligible: The Life of Concepts

“Psychologically, setting aside its expression in words, our thought is simply a vague, shapeless mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed that were it not for signs, we should be incapable of differentiating any two ideas in a clear and constant way. In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure. But do sounds, which lie outside this nebulous world of thought, in themselves constitute entities established in advance? No more than ideas do.”

— Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

I. When a Word Becomes a Thing

We normally think of a concept as the name of a thing. Something exists; the concept identifies it; language gives it a name. Once named, it can be described, compared, and judged.

Consider three familiar expressions: human nature, the subject, and human rights. We tend to hear them as though they referred to clearly identifiable objects. Human nature names something about human beings. The subject names the person who thinks, acts, chooses, and takes responsibility. Human rights names rights possessed by human beings.

This picture makes language appear transparent. The word seems to stand between us and an object that is already there, clearly defined and waiting to be named.

But this assumes that the thing has already been separated from everything else before we give it a name.

History makes that assumption harder to sustain. What counts as a subject, for example, has not always been understood in the same way. The legal and philosophical conditions under which someone can be recognized as a rights-bearing subject have changed. Categories acquire boundaries, and those boundaries can change.

A concept, then, may do more than label something already identifiable. It may help establish the distinctions through which something becomes identifiable in the first place.

That shifts the question from What does this concept name? to What makes what it names intelligible?

II. Making Things Identifiable

Saussure provides a useful starting point because he challenges the assumption that language simply labels pre-existing units.

In the Course in General Linguistics, he describes thought before linguistic organization as “a vague, shapeless mass.” Without signs, we would be unable to distinguish ideas from one another “in a clear and constant way.”

His point is not that language creates the world. It is that linguistic structure makes distinctions possible. Language does not simply attach names to ideas that already exist as clearly bounded units. It participates in delimiting them.

This is why the familiar picture of the word as a label is inadequate. A label presupposes an object already separated from its surroundings. Saussure instead describes language as establishing reciprocal delimitations between thought and sound. A linguistic system gives form to differences that would otherwise remain undifferentiated.

The same question can be asked when what is being distinguished is not an ordinary linguistic sign but a conceptual category: What is a subject? What counts as human? What makes something a right rather than a desire, a claim, or a privilege?

The issue is no longer simply what a concept means. It is how the distinctions that make the concept intelligible have been established.

This is where Foucault's treatment of human nature becomes illuminating.

III. Human Nature: Foucault's Indicator

In his 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault makes an unusual claim about human nature. In the history of knowledge, he says, the notion has mainly functioned as an “epistemological indicator,” designating certain types of discourse “in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history.”

The word indicator is important. Rather than treating human nature as a self-evident object whose properties can simply be discovered, Foucault directs our attention to the field in which the concept acquires its function.

Instead of asking first, What is human nature?, we can ask: Under what conditions can “human nature” function as an object of knowledge?

Foucault gives us part of the answer himself. The concept appears in relation to theology, biology, and history. Its role therefore becomes clearer when we examine the relations surrounding it: the forms of knowledge being produced, the distinctions being drawn, and the kinds of explanation being invoked or opposed.

The concept becomes a clue to the arrangement of knowledge in which it operates.

This does not require the claim that human beings have no characteristics apart from discourse. The point is narrower: whatever realities a concept may describe, its status as an object of knowledge has a history.

We therefore do not have to begin by deciding what human nature really is. We can first ask how it became intelligible as something that could be known.

Derrida approaches a related problem through another apparently self-evident concept: the subject.

IV. The Subject: A Historical Center

The subject occupies a powerful position in philosophical thought. It is commonly understood as the stable entity to which experiences, actions, intentions, and responsibilities can be attributed. I may acquire new beliefs, lose memories, change roles, or undergo profound transformations, yet the person undergoing these changes is presumed to remain the same.

The structure is familiar: unity → identity → continuity → responsibility

The subject functions as the point that remains constant while its properties change.

Derrida's question is not simply whether such a subject exists. It is how the concept acquired this position and what assumptions allow it to function as a stable center.

Discussing “the deconstruction of the subject,” Derrida describes deconstruction as a genealogical analysis of the trajectory through which a concept has been “built, used, legitimised.” He immediately adds that “deconstruction doesn't mean dissolution.”

To deconstruct the subject, then, is not to make the human being disappear. It is to examine the historical and conceptual construction of the category: the assumptions that sustain it, the uses to which it has been put, and the distinctions through which it has acquired its authority.

The point is therefore not that subject has no meaning, but that its meaning and authority cannot be separated from the history through which the concept has been formed and transmitted.

The question becomes even more consequential when the category determines who can appear as a bearer of rights.

V. Human Rights: When Universality Has a History

At first glance, human rights seems almost perfectly transparent:

human beings → possess → human rights

But the formula leaves an important question unanswered: under what conditions can someone be recognized as a bearer of rights?

The historical issue is not whether excluded groups were ever human. It is how legal and political institutions have defined the status, capacities, and forms of participation associated with the rights-bearing subject, and how those definitions have changed.

The category of the subject of rights therefore has a history. That history does not make human rights unreal. It shows that the content and application of a universal claim have been worked out through particular declarations, institutions, struggles, and interpretations.

Derrida makes the historical dimension explicit when he describes human rights as “a set of concepts, laws, requirements” that were not “given in nature, from the beginning.” Their formulation developed through historical processes rather than simply being discovered as ready-made facts of nature.

This does not reduce universality to fiction. It introduces a historical question into the idea of universality.

If rights belong to human beings as such, then the category human cannot simply be treated as self-explanatory. We can ask how it has been defined, what conception of the subject it presupposes, and how its boundaries have been drawn and redrawn.

Derrida's différance becomes relevant here because a concept does not contain its meaning as a self-sufficient property. Its force depends on differences and relations, and those relations unfold through time. Meaning is neither simply fixed nor freely invented.

Human rights can therefore be understood as a universal claim whose conceptual and institutional form has a history.

That history does not invalidate the claim. It makes the claim available for examination.

VI. Concepts Are Not Final

We can now return to the question with which we began.

A concept distinguishes. Those distinctions make something recognizable. And because those distinctions have histories, they can be examined.

This does not mean that concepts are arbitrary, or that nothing exists outside language. It means that concepts are not self-sufficient. Their intelligibility depends on distinctions and relations that have taken particular historical forms.

That is why a concept can be questioned without simply being discarded. Its boundaries can be examined, its assumptions exposed, and its uses revised when the distinctions through which it operates become restrictive or open to challenge.

To examine a concept is therefore not to deny what it names.

It is to ask how what it names became identifiable in the first place.

References

Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1995). The gift of death (D. Wills, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1971). Human nature: Justice versus power. In N. Chomsky & M. Foucault, Human nature: Justice versus power (debate transcript). International Philosophers’ Project.

Saussure, F. de. (1986). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.; C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds., with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger). Open Court. (Original work published 1916)