Language and the cognitive subject: Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

How did different concepts of language influence the way Heymann Steinthal and Friedrich Nietzsche regarded the cognitive subject? This paper historicizes an element of the recent 'linguistic turn' in the humanities by analyzing how two predecessors to Michel Foucault undermined the idealist assumption that concepts originate in the activity of a sovereign consciousness. Applying psychology to linguistics, Steinthal insisted that language originated in the unconscious and therefore limited man's epistemological autonomy. Nietzsche further destabilized conceptual thought as the product of instinct and aesthetic impulses. For him, the cognitive subject was a linguistic fiction - a grammatical convention that had assumed unwarranted philosophical authority.