Abstract

What we know today as philosophy of culture has its very disparate beginnings in the reflections on language, which plays a significant role both as a marker of difference in the human form of life (natura altera) and as a central medium of cultivation (individual, people/nation, humanity). Here we encounter an ostensibly naturalistic a culturalistic use of the term nature in the theories of Humboldt and Hegel. The lines of this ambiguity converge with Ernst Cassirer.