Humboldt
grammatical form and "Weltansicht"
pp. 51-75
in: Martin Gustafsson, Lars Hertzberg (eds), The practice of language, Berlin, Springer, 2002Abstract
It is commonly acknowledged that during the transition from the 18th to the 19th century there occurred a change of paradigms in the understanding of the relations between the mind, the object and language. The Cartesian dualism between res cogitans and res extensa is abolished by the introduction of a third being, named either language or society, which is seen as a condition for the possibility of the two Cartesian substances. Hacking2 (1975 and 1988) describes this transformation as the step from the heyday of ideas to the subsequent heydays of meanings and sentences. Foucault3 (1974) describes the transformation as the step from the episteme of representation to the episteme of man and history. Foucault characterizes the new historical episteme, which he sees as being introduced through the 1790's, by saying that the transcendentals become situated with the object4. In connection with Humboldt (whom he does not treat), the object that contains the transcendentals is language.
