ABSTRACT
Johann Gottfried von Herder, a young intellectual just beginning to publish essays on popular philosophy and literature, and a former student of Hamann as well as of Kant, was dissatisfied with the explanations being fashioned on each side of the divide. His 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language won the Academy's essay contest and established Herder as an intellectual force. Herder uses the Academy's question to reshape the form of arguments that Hamann and Lessing first generated as well as others that were surfacing about language's divine- or human-origination generally. As a total, rational reflection is not an addition to animal awareness or a hypothetical classification of otherwise discrete perceptual and intellectual capacities. Hamann's anagogie proposal offers no promise of transcendence, just as his position against Herder on the origin of language offers no proof of the divinity of the Word and no plausible criteria by which the strictly human derivation of language be accepted.
