Daily Inspiration Quote by Ferdinand De Saussure

Saussure is drawing a border patrol line around linguistics, and he does it with the calm authority of someone who knows the discipline is still wet cement. The intent is defensive and aspirational at once: linguistics must “define itself” not as a loose annex of philosophy, philology, or psychology, but as a field with its own objects, methods, and standards. That word “aims” matters. He’s not describing a settled science; he’s laying out a program for how one gets to be a science.

The subtext is a rejection of the then-common temptation to explain language primarily by rummaging around inside the speaker’s mind. Saussure doesn’t deny that psychology is relevant; he demotes it to a supplier rather than a sovereign. “Indirectly” is the key modifier: linguistic analysis should not be reduced to introspection, individual mental states, or speculative theories of thought. Instead, it should treat language as a system that can be described on its own terms - regularities, oppositions, conventions - even if those conventions are lived through human cognition.

Context sharpens the move. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars were obsessed with language history and with finding mental or biological roots for everything. Saussure’s intervention is modernist: stop treating language as a messy byproduct and start treating it as a structured social fact. The payoff is intellectual independence, but also disciplinary power: once you claim a distinct domain, you get to set the rules of evidence, and you stop having to borrow legitimacy from neighboring sciences.