Avi Lifschitz. Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century.

Abstract

At the opening of his study on language debates in the German Enlightenment, Avi Lifschitz invokes a comment by Johann Gottfried Herder that language, “the grand assistant of man,” had “enabled human beings to forge their entire material culture, as well as their intellectual endeavors” (p. 1). Lifschitz's study seeks to explore the context for Herder's remark. His account is framed by two prize contests sponsored by the Berlin Academy of Sciences: the 1759 essay contest organized around the question, “What is the reciprocal influence of the Opinions of a People on the language, and of the Language on Opinion?”; and the 1771 contest on the origins of language. In between the two contests the author discusses everything from ancient Epicurean views on language to ideas about symbolic cognition in the eighteenth century, the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the foundation of the Berlin Academy, and the cultural position of Huguenot refugees in Berlin. The result is a somewhat uneven book, which places its often insightful and informative readings of key interventions in the language debate in an unfocused narrative that darts back and forth in time.