In Language Animal and Cosmic Connections, Charles Taylor advances a theory of constitutive-expressive language. Taylor argues that this model developed in the 1790s, following Johann Herder’s theorisation of Besonnenheit ("reflective-awareness") in his Ursprung der Sprache ("Origin of Language") (1772) essay. Despite Herder’s dominant influence, Taylor names his theory after three contributors, labelling it the ‘HHH’ (Hamann-Herder-Humboldt) language model. Building on analysis of J.G. Hamann’s early essay, Socratic Memorabilia (1759), this article argues that the constitutive-expressive approach to language, attributed by Taylor to a post-Enlightenment language turn, was already operative, if unacknowledged, within Enlightenment philosophy itself. Taylor does not recognise that Hamann’s mimetic technique—labelled here ‘philosophical portraiture’—catches the period’s leading philosophers relying on constitutive-expressive language in the founding documents of the French Encyclopédie project, against their professed ideal of a transparent language that unveils “Truth.” Two implications follow from this correction: (I) the transitional period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism should be reevaluated, and (II) the longstanding debate about poetry as untruth and philosophy as truth should be revisited in light of philosophy’s unacknowledged ‘poetic’ practice.
