Language before Critique. Figures of Aesthetics from Leibniz to Herde

This dissertation examines the relation between theories of language and the emergence of the new discipline of aesthetics in the "pre-critical" period, the late German Enlightenmen before Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Primarily through Leibniz and Kant, but also Wolff, Baumgarten, and Lambert, I demonstrate how the rise of aesthetics alters the position of language both as an object of study and subjective means of expression, particularly with respect to logic and mathematics as dominant modes of rationality. In the age of critique, I argue, language shifts from a universal to a particular, precipitating a new "logic" of singularity that in the late eighteenth century extends across literary criticism, theological speculations, and poetic practice in authors such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann and Friedrich Klopstock. Without such an analysis, I argue, the place of language in the subsequent revolutions of Romanticism and Idealism cannot be understood: Romanticism proper--the first article in the journal Athenaum--begins, after all, with a response to the language theories of Klopstock. My analysis departs from Leibniz's writings on language and explores their influence in the works of Kant himself, along with the critical practices of his contemporaries Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Georg Hamann, and the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Leibniz's study of language, I argue, requires a new, post-Cartesian form of analysis that accounts for natural and artificial languages, mathematical combinatorics, and Baroque poetry, expressed in the idea of the knot, in an idea of human understanding based on entanglement and perplexity. For Kant, this is a problem of orientation in thinking that, as the capacity to judge, I show, is first and foremost an orientation in language; in Herder, Hamann and Klopstock, this orientation in language as both a repository for culture and an injunction to always, creatively, begin again, gives rise to aesthetic theories and practices that sought neither to found a discipline of linguistics nor a philosophy of language, but to liberate language from the tyranny of its present speakers and enable language's free use of its own, singular qualities--qualities that can only manifest themselves in a language's potential and future use.