The author and his intellectual context
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is one of the central figures in the history of modern psychology, most often remembered as the founder of the first laboratory dedicated to experimental psychology, established at the University of Leipzig in 1879. Trained originally in medicine and physiology, Wundt moved from the study of sensation and perception toward an ambitious program that sought to make psychology an independent scientific discipline, distinct from both physiology and philosophy. His experimental work concentrated on those mental processes he believed could be studied under controlled laboratory conditions—sensation, perception, attention, reaction times, and the immediate contents of consciousness.
Alongside this experimental enterprise, however, Wundt held that a large domain of mental life could not be reached by laboratory methods. The higher mental processes—language, myth, religion, custom, and the collective products of human communities—were, in his view, the achievement of peoples rather than of isolated individuals, and had to be studied through their objective historical and cultural manifestations. To this second wing of his psychology he gave the name Völkerpsychologie, a term usually rendered in English as “folk psychology” or “cultural psychology,” though neither translation captures its full sense. Wundt devoted the last two decades of his long career to this project, producing a monumental multi-volume Völkerpsychologie published in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The opening portion of that work was given over to language, which Wundt treated as the most accessible and revealing of the collective mental creations.
The Language of Gestures belongs to this later, cultural-psychological phase of Wundt’s thought rather than to his experimental period. It is not an independent monograph that Wundt himself issued under that title, but a self-contained treatment of gesture drawn from his large-scale study of language within the Völkerpsychologie. In this treatment gesture serves a double purpose: it is an object of psychological interest in its own right, and it is a strategic case through which Wundt argues broader theses about the nature of expression, the relation of thought to its outward signs, and the psychological foundations of language.
The work and its place in Wundt’s writings
The material that circulates in English under the title The Language of Gestures is a translation of Wundt’s discussion of gesture (in German, die Gebärdensprache) from the language volumes of the Völkerpsychologie. It was brought out in the twentieth century as a compact volume in the semiotics book program associated with Thomas A. Sebeok, appearing in the series Approaches to Semiotics published by Mouton in The Hague, with an introduction supplied by the psychologist and historian of psychology Arthur L. Blumenthal, who did much to revive scholarly attention to Wundt’s psychology of language in the English-speaking world. The publication reflects a renewed mid-twentieth-century interest, within linguistics and semiotics, in nonverbal communication and in the historical antecedents of the study of gesture, and it made available to readers without German a portion of Wundt’s thought that had long been neglected.
Within Wundt’s own oeuvre the gesture material sits inside his theory of language, which itself forms the first major installment of the Völkerpsychologie. Wundt approached language not primarily as a system of grammatical rules or as a repository of etymologies, but as a psychological process—an expression of mental life shaped by the community that speaks it. His account of gesture is therefore continuous with his general theory of expressive movement and with his central psychological concept of apperception, the active process by which the mind organizes and focuses its contents. Gesture, for Wundt, is one of the primary forms in which inner mental states are given outward, communicable shape, and its study illuminates the same processes that operate, in more developed and conventionalized form, in spoken language.
Subject and argument
The central subject of the work is the nature, classification, and psychological significance of gesture understood as a means of communication. Wundt treats gesture as a genuine “language”—a structured system of expression—rather than as a mere accompaniment to speech, and he draws on the systematic gesture systems that had attracted attention in the nineteenth century. Among the bodies of evidence that inform his account are the sign systems of the deaf, the developed sign language used among the Plains peoples of North America (a topic that had been documented in detail by nineteenth-century observers of Native American life), and the conventionalized gesturing of southern Italy, especially the Neapolitan gestures that had earlier been catalogued by antiquarian and ethnographic writers. From such material Wundt sought to extract general principles about how gestures signify and how gesture communication is organized.
A key feature of Wundt’s treatment is his classification of gestures according to the manner in which they refer to their objects. He distinguishes gestures that point to or indicate something present (demonstrative or deictic gesturing), gestures that depict or imitate the form, movement, or character of what they represent (imitative or depicting gestures), and gestures that stand for their meaning by a more indirect, conventional, or symbolic relation. This typology allows Wundt to describe how gesture systems can range from direct, transparently motivated signs to more abstract and conventionalized ones, and to trace a psychological continuum between spontaneous expressive movement and fully developed symbolic communication. The analysis is bound up with his conviction that the outward sign and the inner mental process are intimately connected: gestures are not arbitrary labels attached to ready-made ideas but expressions that arise from, and reflect the structure of, the mental states they convey.
This concern with the relation between expression and thought connects the study of gesture to Wundt’s larger theory of language. In his psychology of language Wundt gave particular emphasis to the sentence, which he regarded as a psychological whole—a unified total impression or configuration in the mind—that is subsequently analyzed and articulated into its parts, rather than being built up mechanically from independent words. Gesture language, with its characteristic ways of sequencing and combining signs, provided Wundt with material for examining how such wholes are expressed and how the order and combination of signs relate to the organization of thought. In this way his account of gesture is not an isolated curiosity but an integral element of his broader argument about the psychological nature of linguistic form.
Significance and reception
The significance of Wundt’s treatment of gesture lies partly in its place within the history of the study of nonverbal communication and partly in its influence on later theorists of the sign. Wundt brought to the subject the systematic ambition of a psychologist seeking general laws of expression, and his discussion stands as one of the more substantial theoretical treatments of gesture produced before the twentieth-century flowering of research into sign language and nonverbal behavior. His insistence that gesture constitutes a structured, analyzable mode of communication, and his attempt to classify gestural signs by their mode of meaning, anticipated later scholarly interest in the semiotics of gesture and in the linguistic status of the sign languages of the deaf.
Wundt’s concept of the gesture also had an important afterlife in social psychology and social philosophy. The idea that gesture is the elementary form of communicative interaction—that a gesture by one individual calls out a response in another and thereby becomes the germ of shared meaning—resonated strongly with thinkers in the tradition of social behaviorism, most notably in the American development of theories of the self and of symbolic interaction, where the gesture was taken as the starting point for an account of how meaning and mind arise in social interplay. Wundt’s work thus forms part of the background to twentieth-century discussions of communication, meaning, and the social origins of the self.
Its reissue in translation within a semiotics series reflects the way Wundt came to be read in the later twentieth century: less as the laboratory founder of experimental psychology and more as a theorist of language, expression, and cultural mind whose Völkerpsychologie contained insights of continuing relevance. Arthur Blumenthal’s advocacy in particular helped to correct a long-standing tendency to remember only Wundt’s experimental program and to overlook the cultural-psychological writings, of which the study of gesture is a representative and accessible portion. For readers today the work is valuable both as a document in the history of psychology and linguistics and as an early, serious attempt to treat gesture as a language in its own right and to relate it to the deeper psychological processes underlying human expression.
