ABSTRACT
Hübsch was writing against the ideas of episteme or style championed by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand in his Précis des leçons d'architecture données à l'Ecole polytechnique and its graphic addendum (1821). Language is created and controlled, inventive and narrowing, as has been argued by Humboldt and a host of thinkers since. Discussing the ways in which the people of the Torah indirectly caused God to proclaim his sentience by investing themselves in the making of non-sentient idols and graven images, Elaine Scarry writes: "Though the people's making of idols always fails, their remaking of God and of themselves does not fail: the material statue is a tool or lever across whose surface they reach, repair, and refashion the primary Artifact. The rapid development and flourishing of Romantic language were a response to the relative dearth of language capable of communicating the breadth of human experience and was sustained by the pleasure of having so old and so powerful a need filled.
