ABSTRACT. I show a consistent line of anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian philosophies established by Herder, Humboldt, Hamann, and Vossler transformed the sign-character of human expressions into an expression of style by concentrating on the German term 'Art' as a sort of habitus. Especially Humboldt concentrates on the non-natural and non-functional character of language in defining it as a cultural product. Herder, Humboldt, Hamann, and Vossler recognize the insignificance of grammar as long as it is regarded as an abstract foundation for linguistics. Style is of utmost importance for all of them since they undermine the representation-theory by means of an open rhetoric using flexible rules and defining a sort of creative structural analysis. Die Art or the how of language gives linguistic expression the status of something spiritual and non-static. All four thinkers formulated their opposition philosophical abstractions in terms of a philosophy of life and attempted read signs as expressions of a historical and cultural reason.Keywords: Wilhelm von Humboldt; Gottfried Herder; Johan Georg Hamann; Karl Vossler; structuralist stylistics; representation theory1. IntroductionIn this article I show a consistent line of anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian philosophies established by Herder, Humboldt, Hamann, and Vossler attempted transform the sign-character of human expressions into an expression of style by concentrating on the German term 'Art' as a sort of habitus. First, this is opposed Kant's view, which dismisses language in favor of purity of reason. However, it is also different from contemporary structuralist stylistics. In the twentieth century, structuralists concentrate on language as a cultural product, but they do so only in order find a kind of pure reason in language. The paradoxical character of this constellation will be made clear through an examination of style, habitus, and the German term Art. Charles Taylor held the main work of linguistic understanding is to see the place representation has in culture (1985: 291). Taylor, the skepticism of the above three philosophers of language (whom he calls the HHH) towards any autonomy of linguistic representation corresponds exactly the skepticism modem philosophers have towards (linguistic) norms. As a matter of fact, the essential critical part of the HHH-philosophy consists in undermining the representation-theory by means of an open rhetoric using flexible rules and defining a sort of creative structural analysis. On the other hand, the French linguist Oswald Ducrot is able point Humboldt's linguistics as an initial movement of a structuralist variation of stylistics relying on the theory of representation or sign theory when writing: For Humboldt (...) a language's organizational mode, even though arbitrary, is a means fulfill its representational function. It is, in a way, the style and the way any people choses express the most universal spiritual power. Ducrot concludes that nineteenth century linguistics had a concept of structure or a system (these two words are central for linguists of this epoque) (Ducrot 1973: 32).This is surprising if one considers Humboldt's dynamic innere Form has indeed been used as a weapon against static methods of French linguistic theories focusing on external structures (cf. Hutton 1998: 19). Most commonly, Humboldt's anti-sign linguistics has been opposed Saussure's structuralist linguistics (Trabant 2001) because inner form implies the word is not a copy of the object but a mental image produced by the speaker, which links language ways of thinking. The paradox is the innere Form remains a form; there is nothing in Humboldt suggesting a romantic unity of language and people producing mystical, intimate connections between both or even the formulation of a national soul as advanced by Fichte and Schelling later (cf. …