ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the elements of early linguistic philosophy that make it crucial for understanding concomitant developments in critical idealism and Jena romanticism, and that make it compelling from a contemporary perspective. The earliest texts of this form of linguistic philosophy do not always yield immediately recognizable methodological tools, but the proposals they do make are exceptional. Herder himself seems not to have grasped the potential of his suggestion, and did not pursue it, preferring to develop modern philology, etymology and anthropology. In Kant's suppression and appropriation of Herder's philosophy of language, the stakes of an immanent linguistic theory come into sharpest relief, perhaps because of all our scrutinized thinkers, Kant sees the furthest and thinks the most clearly about the competing claims of reason and language even though his assessment of language, or so I have argued, was regressive for both critical and linguistic philosophy.
