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Since the late 18th century the notion of an "organism of language" has been dominating the views of the essence of language in Germany. It was a crucial aspect of this notion that languages were something living and had to be described as living beings. It was this aspect in particular that was severely criticized in the second half of the 19th century as no longer meeting the standards of a more sophisticated biological concept of life. It must be borne in mind, though, that the notion of organism developed in the intellectual context of German natural philosophy, where one basic assumption was that all three kingdoms of nature—plants, animals, and minerals as well— breathe life, and are manifestations of a living earth in a living cosmos. Corresponding to the assumed unity of life processes was the aspiration after uniform philosophical and scientific principles of their investigation; and there accordingly was little hesitation to exchange terminologies, conceptions, metaphors, methods, and speculations between disciplines. This provides the backdrop also for the rapprochement of linguistics and the geosciences among adherents of natural philosophy, mediated by Carl Ritter's anthropological geography and Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos.
The notion of life could be applied in classification and periodization in relatively concrete ways (as for example, when speaking of the youth, adulthood, and old age of both languages and the earth), or could be made use of in more abstract speculative schemes (evident for example, in Jacob Grimm's preference for triads), whose impact has so far been little investigated. In the 19th century, advances in the geosciences lead to entirely new insights into the course of the history of the earth. What was emerging more slowly was a realistic picture of the time spans to be taken into account in anthropology and linguistics. Authors such as Adelung and Grimm still saw it as their task in principle to account for linguistic developments throughout the entire history of mankind, subject to certain geographical limitations. Such ambition was premature, though, since serious anthropologically orientated research into tens of thousands of years of linguistic and cultural prehistory, reaching well beyond the limits of traditional reconstructions, is only beginning today.
,AUFKLÄRUNG‘ ist ein Schlüsselkonzept im Demokratiediskurs der späten 60er Jahre. Aber ,AUFKLÄRUNG‘ kann vieles bedeuten. Erst mit dem neuartigen Paraphrasenmodell der Diskurslinguistik und mit der Einbeziehung des Begriffs der Intertextualität gelingt es, das Verbindende wie das Besondere jeder einzelnen Diskursäußerung darzulegen. Während für die studentische Linke die Verpflichtung zur Aufklärung bedeutet, die Gesellschaft in ihrer ganzen Breite mit Hilfe politischer Protestaktionen aus ihrer Unmündigkeit zu befreien, sehen linksliberale Intellektuelle im Gebot der Aufklärung eher eine demokratische Erziehungsformel, die den Einzelnen auf eine moralisch begründete Vernunft festlegt, welche jede materiell-physische Gewalt ausschließt. Indem so der Begriff der Aufklärung einerseits zur Rechtfertigung sozialen Umbruchs, andererseits zur Begründung gesellschaftlicher Stabilität instrumentalisiert wird, verliert er seine Wirksamkeit und verschwindet allmählich aus dem Diskurs. Der Diskurs bleibt dabei nie stehen. Bedeutungen wandeln sich fortwährend. Ruth Mell trägt mit diesem Band ganz wesentlich zur Entwicklung einer Methodologie für die Analyse der diachronen Dimension von Diskursen bei.