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Articles

Herder, Humboldt, Heidegger: Language As World-Disclosure

Audrey Borowski follows the twists of a German Romantic linguistic turn.

Although the span of a couple of centuries separated them, the German philosophers Herder, Humboldt and Heidegger shared a similar conception of language. Departing from the classical conception of language as merely for communication, they all proposed that language, and not ‘transcendental reason’ (as previously advanced by Kant) was responsible for the formation of thought and, by extension, of knowledge. Conceived in this light, language was held to be constitutive of men’s (and by extension, nations’) various worldviews. One major upshot of this was to place all viewpoints on an equal footing: henceforth, there was no longer one universal, ‘objective’ way of knowing the world.

This turn culminated in the early Twentieth Century, under Heidegger.

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