ECCB
The Eighteenth-Century Current
Bibliography
General Editors: Kevin L. Cope and Robert C. Leitz, III
Volume 33
ISSN 0161-0996
Set ISBN-10: 0-404-62200-3
Set ISBN-13: 978-0-404-62200-8
Your Citation is
“The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759-1801.” ECCB
The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography 2007, ed. by Kevin L. Cope and Robert C., III
Leitz (AMS Press, New York, 2011), pp. 491-93.
Terezakis, Katie, The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759-1801. New York &
London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. iii + 260; bibliography; index.
The period of Enlightenment represents the movement towards reason in Early Modern History. It brings
Kant’s ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ to mind and in terms of language
philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason. Although the traditional canon taught today in German philosophy
and literature suggests a smoothed version of the historical scholarly discourse in philosophies of language, The
Immanent Word by Katie Terezakis recommends yet a more complex take.
Terezakis argues: ‘By the early 1770’s no definite theory of language found wide support, and the question of
linguistic origination had become the center of a debate about language that was itself entrenched in wider,
independent discussions of human origins, the origin and scope of reason, and the status of the divine creation
and creationist accounts’ (75).
Terezakis evokes the turn to language in German philosophy in works of Hamann, Lessing, Lessing,
Herder, Kant, Fichte, Novalis and Schlegel. Furthermore, she argues against contemporary theoretical works by
John Milbank, Cristina Lafont, Charles Taylor, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, and
suggests the development of the transcendental-empirical hybrid model of language.
The Immanent Word consists of three parts and seven chapters altogether. In part one, named the
Radical Tradition: Johann Georg Hamann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Terezakis discusses Hamann’s
Socratic Memorabilia, 1759, and Lessing’s Letters Concerning Recent Literature also published in 1759: In the
Socratic Memorabilia we find thoughts that refer to ancient philosophy as well as to early modern skepticism.
However, Hamann demands to analyze the languages of philosophy, religion, and metaphysics, as symbolic
configurations, and therefore sets the stage for modern philosophy of language. He develops new perspectives:
a ‘[…] great insight is that the only being that may mediate its own immediacy is language; language is the only
entity whose naming necessarily implies its existence’ (41). Lessing and Hamann did not work together on their
1759 publications, they did not even know about each other’s work in the beginning. It is interesting to see that
they agreed on contesting the traditional way of ideas. However, they remained entirely divided about the
relationship between reason and religious faith. Hamann writes to Jacobi in 1786 that ‘reason and scripture are
basically the same species: the language of God’ (44). In contrast Lessing suggests: ‘[…] religious language be
analyzed specifically as a language in which meaning has undergone revision and progressive, critical
advancement […]’ (71). This point is continued in the works of future philosophers.
‘Lessing’s Letters, from the outset, stood in the midst of the founding debates of aesthetics, […]
[Bodmer, Breitinger, Wolff, Pope, Mendelssohn, Nicolai, Abbt, BR]’ (48). However, ‘Lessing’s turn to the
nature of language, the medium of the highest art of poetry, happens progressively’ (61). Lessing and Hamann
phrase similar positions on the principle of expressive speech: it ‘[…] creates meaning and actively unites the
cognitive and the sensuous’ (64).
In part two, chapter three, ‘The Divided Heart of Naturalism’, the author goes into considerable detail
to show the importance of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) to the
development of philosophy of language: ‘Although Herder argues vehemently for a human-origin thesis, and
forays into philology, etymological speculation, empirical psychology, his early essay never leaves the
framework of the divine/human discussion; it never stops explaining how the human origin of language relates
to theological matters, whether in attack or support’ (76). Herder challenges for example both Hamann’s and
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s opposing versions on the origin of language. Finally he rejects Condillac’s
account, since he ‘[…] is guilty of defending the most naïve naturalism […]’ (80). Herder inquires in
humanity’s original interest in language and into the real interests of its innovators. In contrast to the divineorigin thesis, Herder insists in his Treatise ‘[…] by explaining the human derivation of language’ (102). He
remains though within a dual origin proposal: ‘[…] the one that is ‘linguistically inexpressible,’ to which
Herder does no more than refer, and the one that is concurrent with the distinctively human awareness that
proceeds the way of characteristic marks’ (123-124). Terezakis concludes for Herder’s Treatise that language’s
origin cannot be outside of a human awareness and that ‘[…] human origin is coincident with our ability to
express it’ (124).
Part two, chapter four describes the philosophical relationship between Immanuel Kant and Herder
that started when the latter became his student in the 1760s, and came to an end with Kant’s review of the Ideas
in 1785. Kant did consider language to be a topic worthy of specific concern within philosophy. However,
‘Kant saw in Hamann and later Herder just the sort of dogmatic fideism and keenness for speculative theology
that he found most threatening to enlightenment ideals and he lambasted in the Critique of Pure Reason’ (127).
He did go further in rebuffing the contemporary concept of genius since it could neither be taught nor
understood nor controlled. Therefore he did consider the diligence and industry of science superior. Language
has its only worth in ‘purposiveness’ and is a tool for successful communication. Unlike poetry ‘successful
communication is the communication of a shared structure of consciousness and the rules of its meaningful
associations, foremost, its abiding by a notion of purposiveness’ (133). This can be read already in his third
Critique though and especially in his Anthropology in 1798. ‘[H]e retains the Cartesian distrust of language as
potentially detrimental to pure thought’ (133). In the phenomenology of subjective consciousness, Terezakis
points out that [in Critique of Pure Reason, BR] ‘[…] Kant did not realize or acknowledge how much his
system already depended upon linguistic matters. Kant never explains why, even given his own powerful
schematism of analogy and universal communicability, he deems language conceptually superfluous. Explicitly,
he called language a merely sensible crutch at every turn’ (141). Kant’s demoting language and rejection of
linguistic philosophy collides with the concepts of many others at the time.
‘In order to avoid the speculative religious frenzy he came to associate as much with Hamann and
Herder as with linguistic theory, Kant now tries not to ignore but to replace it, on its very own terms, with
rational religion as morality’ (144). Therefore, according to Kant’s Religion essay, the key question of
origination in general must be applied to morality not language. Kant feared in early linguistic philosophy an
immanent threat to a priori security and to metaphysical establishment: ‘Kant, Hamann suspects, wants to
cleanse language from language; […]’ (154). Kant wants a purely formal language that would make the
articulation of freedom and selfhood impossible. The fault line of late eighteenth century philosophy according
to Terezakis: ‘Kant’s critical idealism preserves God’s transcendence at the expense of any significant
discussion of his immanence. The linguistic programs of Hamann and Herder maintain that just this theological
failure properly leads to an immanent critique of transcendent belief and metaphysical philosophy, in terms of
their symbolic languages’ (155).
In chapter five, Fichte on Idealism and Language of part three, ‘Jena Romanticism, the promise of
logology and the production of incomprehensibility’, the author concentrates almost entirely on the linguistic
capacity and the origin of Language from 1795. Fichte saw his work as a radical reconstruction of Kant’s
critical project that would solve the persistent problems that Kant could not answer. ‘Fichte returns to the
question of origin, expressing dissatisfaction with the originary accounts in Rousseau and Condillac’ (163).
Furthermore, he criticizes Kant’s concept of the Ursprache (163), and against Herder he holds that ‘human
beings consciously and freely decided to invent a language […]’ (163)in . Human beings constantly produce
expressions of their own power. The ultimate principle for language is therefore to be always one with yourself.
Fichte continues ‘[…] that the inherent ‘drive toward self-harmonization [nach Übereinstimmung mit sich
selbst] […] leads man to seek rationality outside of himself’ (123). The invention of language is a necessity
where it is urgent to a rational being to associate further with another rational human being. According to
Fichte, the species concept was first and abstract concepts followed. However, Fichte criticizes Kant’s
‘essentially analogical conception of immortality and the soul’ (170). In the context of the philological
discourse on Spiritus and Geistigkeit though, Fichte claims ‘[…] that language, in remaining a sensible shroud
for ideas, presents an ever-present danger to science’ (172). Similar to Kant’s position is Fichte on superstition,
for example, where language is used unreflectively and where it is understood literally, enlightenment demands
that the layers of inherited linguistic meaning be exposed.
Chapter six, ‘Novalis and the renewal of Logology’, focuses on the Fichte Studies by Georg Philipp
Friedrich von Hardenberg [Novalis, BR] that were written between 1795 and 1796. Fichte’s ‘most potent
proposals—those regarding the original act of Tathandlung that is the source of consciousness and the identity
of the Ich […]’ (173) are being discussed. This chapter deals with Novalis’s use of the character and status of
language in confrontation with Fichte’s philosophy. ‘[…] Novalis appropriates Fichtean tools to further his own
reflections—is faithful, therefore, to Fichte’s most vehement demand: to observe one’s own conceptual
constructions and their conditions of possibility’ (177). Terezakis narrows Novalis’s point of view down to: ‘In
our infinite self-creation, idealism appears in the form of science and is reformed with the force of art; […]’
(186). The Logological Fragments I and II written in 1797-1798 are central to Novalis’s theory of
representation and meaning: ‘The logologist who Novalis wants to rally does the work of both the poet and the
philosopher’ (204), and ‘Novalis’s fragmentary or aphoristic style, as well as his carefully balanced literary
work, should provide instances of a language that is ‘breaking-free’ of narrow, conceptual declarations made on
its behalf’ (204). Regarding Novalis’s Monologue, a text that uses one of the major tools of romanticism, it
articulates its own doubling and ironic spirit. The author continues: ‘As a hieroglyphic text, the Monologue
confesses that its writer is powerless, witlessly using tools of intention and negation to grasp the whole he
seeks’ (202).
In chapter seven, ‘Friedrich Schlegel: On Incomprehensibility and Ideas’, a work published in 1799,
the author comes to her final discussion on the romantic school of thought in Germany at the turn of the
eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In mastering seven kinds of ironies, Schlegel concludes: ‘The irony of
irony is language’s irony, hence the irony of presentation, meaning and conceptual understanding threaten him
precisely as a writer and an editor’ (210). Though he does enjoy the playful take on incomprehensibility,
because it is the natural result of the irony of language, and the romantic project par excellence. ‘The whole of
language, in refusing to complete the fragment, to become it, or to destroy it, confirms the fragment’s identity
as a mere fragment’ (212). Schlegel’s transcendental philosophy means to close the circle of understanding.
Unfortunately, ‘[…] the end of the era of Jena romanticism involves the unmarked collapse of a form of
linguistic philosophy that thereafter virtually disappears from notice’ (226). It is the bleaker irony of Schlegel’s
role in the encounter of philosophical romanticism and modernity that he misapprehends the philosophical
undertakings of his fellows and fails to appreciate the potentially radical consequences of their turn to language.
Aside from the methodological tools that can be extracted from the philosophers and writers works
discussed in The Immanent Word, it focuses on the attempt to apply the ‘logological’ method or directive on
theories about language in the later eighteenth century. With the author’s re-introduction of the transcendentalempirical hybrid model to the eighteenth century she hopes to foster a proposal that was left undeveloped—
Berit C. R. Royer
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