ABSTRACT
There is one immediate and obvious response to that last question: it is language that could act as the cutting edge between the death of the animal and the birth of man. For what else but the power of speech could enable man to ‘present perfectly the genus’? There are passages in Hegel’s Anthropology that would support such a conclusion, pre-empting the inquiry already underway: ‘Seen from the animal world, the human figure is the supreme phase in which spirit makes an appearance. But, for spirit, it is only its first appearance, while language is straightaway its perfect expression (sein vollkommener Ausdruck).’1
