Herder’s Transformative Account of the Linguistic Being

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between linguistic expression and human reason in Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language. I argue that additive theories of human language, which contend that the linguistic capacity is in principle separable from the other cognitive faculties of the linguistic being, cannot be brought into agreement with Herder’s distinctly transformative account of human language and reason. For Herder, the transformation of our sensible faculties through language is required in order to guarantee the unity of human cognition, and hence reason itself is understood as fundamentally linguistic. This positing of a strong unity between language and reason makes Herder an important, if still under-appreciated, precursor of the twentieth-century linguistic turn.