Despite the fact that Herder’s work has seen a dramatic resurgence of interest of late in the English-speaking world, little attention has been paid to Herder’s contributions to philosophical aesthetics. Michael Forster and Charles Taylor, in their recent writings on Herder, have focused primarily on his philosophy of language, while commentators such as Vicki Spencer have related these developments in our understanding of Herder’s conception of language to his political philosophy. While these projects have certainly functioned to improve our understanding of Herder and his importance as a philosopher, in pushing his writings on aesthetics to the side, they neglect Herder’s role as a foundational figure in the Sturm und Drang movement and therefore his influence on German Romanticism. Rachel Zuckert’s Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics aims to remedy this significant gap in the literature, and it does so with an impressive scope – not only providing deep insight into Herder’s positions in aesthetics, but also thoughtfully connecting these positions to his broader philosophical project.
As Zuckert sees matters, Herder’s philosophical project is defined by his commitment to naturalism. The first chapter of her book distinguishes three distinct commitments of Herder’s naturalism: methodological naturalism, explanatory naturalism and normative naturalism. Methodological naturalism amounts to the view that philosophy should be ‘responsive to empirical claims from the natural sciences and elsewhere’ (p. 22). Explanatory naturalism is the view that empirical explanations, be they from the natural sciences or the social sciences, constitute the best mode of explanation. Together, these two ideas drastically reconstrue the aim and methodology of philosophy. Rather than establishing a priori truths, philosophy systematizes the empirical knowledge provided to us by the natural and social sciences. It should be emphasized that Herder’s naturalism includes a distinctive form of humanism which makes data from the social sciences particularly relevant; man, as well as his environment, is defined, in part, by his culture, and Herder draws as much from travelogues and early ethnography as he does from biology in developing a naturalistic conception of humanity. Finally, normative naturalism, in Herder’s distinctive sense, is the view that ‘the human good consists in organic flourishing within an environment’ (p. 22). This form of naturalism is particularly important to Zuckert’s project, for the good ‘centrally involves’ aesthetic value (p. 22). There are three constituents, on Zuckert’s reading of Herder, of an organism’s flourishing: the organism’s powers are ‘fully active’ (as opposed to impaired in some way), these powers are ‘in harmony with one another’ and they are ‘adapted to the environment in which it lives’ (p. 33). Organisms are characterized by their powers: nutrition, reproduction, locomotion and so on. For an organism to flourish is for these powers to be exercised in harmony, both with one another and with their environment.
The second chapter of Zuckert’s book begins to make the case for Herder being a ‘hinge point’ between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics by demonstrating both how his conception of aesthetics synthesized the views of the rationalist and empiricist traditions that preceded him and how it pointed forwards (p. 55). Herder draws from both the rationalist and empiricist traditions a ‘psychological’ approach to aesthetics, focusing on the experience of art rather than the art object or the object imitated by an artwork. To Herder, this approach is justified because it illuminates how art can ‘contribute to human flourishing’, and thus fits Zuckert’s normative naturalism (p. 62). Herder takes the tasks of philosophical aesthetics to be to ‘identify which characteristics ground or arouse which sort of feelings’ and ‘to understand that connection of feeling to object and why it is valuable’ (p. 65). From the rationalists, Zuckert argues, Herder borrows a conception of aesthetic value as derived from systematic order within an object. From the empiricists, he borrows an ‘attentiveness to the particularities of sensible experience and responsive feeling’ (p. 13). His account is, furthermore, empiricist in its methodology of beginning from empirical study of particulars and generalizing, following a bottom-up approach, rather than starting from general principles of aesthetics and deducing. These elements of the rationalist and empiricist picture fit together, along with Zuckert’s understanding of normative naturalism, into a picture of aesthetic experience in which ‘we feel the fit of the object (given its character, its form of unity) to the flourishing (vibrant, unified) activity of our sensible capacities’ (p. 192). However, both the rationalists and the empiricists err, on Herder’s account, in going too far with their psychologism, which leads them to an overly uniform picture of aesthetic experience, missing the unique qualities of particular forms and media of art. Aesthetics must take the form of a systematic philosophy of art, treating the diverse forms of art in their particularities. While an account of aesthetics must allow for the psychological nature of aesthetic experience, it must do so by acknowledging the particular modes in which distinct forms of art affect us. This systematic approach, as well as Herder’s attentiveness to the cultural specificity of artworks, to be discussed in more detail below, points ahead to nineteenth-century aesthetics.
Chapter 3 develops Herder’s approach to a systematic philosophy of art in more detail. The arts are understood in terms of the senses they relate to: painting is the art of sight, music the art of hearing and sculpture the art for touch (p. 87). Here, Herder’s naturalism guides his understanding of the functioning of the distinct forms of art by providing him with a physiological account of the different senses and how distinct forms of art affect these senses. The experience of aesthetic value, or beauty, is understood as ‘a special, unified, and intensified case of sense experience’ for the relevant sensory system (p. 92). In perceiving the relevant form of unity, the subject also perceives the object’s fitness to her flourishing. Part of what allows Herder to make the connection between aesthetic experience and flourishing, on Zuckert’s reading, is his understanding of the senses as defined by their relationship to aesthetic experience; Zuckert says that the senses are ‘capacities “for”’ or ‘forms of openness to’ the beauty of their objects (p. 100). Zuckert also develops this connection between aesthetic experience and the flourishing of the senses with the claim that works of art can present more perfect forms of sensation than ordinary experience. For example, painting, she writes, ‘provides us with a more clearly recognizable portrayal of what vision gives us, what it is “for”, than does ordinary experience: surfaces’ (p. 100). To illustrate this point, she cites the historical difficulty of developing a sense for perspective in painting. The thought here is that vision borrows from the other senses (namely touch) in presenting depth, but painting, in its refined form, presents it clearly in a purely visual manner. In this way painting presents a more perfect case of vision than ordinary experience.
The fourth chapter of Zuckert’s book analyses Herder’s belief in the culture-specificity of aesthetic value as it relates to his naturalism. She begins by presenting and analysing Herder’s claim that expression is itself a natural activity. Animals express themselves by crying out in pain, and even plants express themselves with their flowers – they are ‘expressions of the youth, vitality, and fertility of plants’ (p. 117). While expression is natural in the sense of existing in the non-human world, human expression is distinctive in being (potentially) linguistic. Linguistic expression is ‘natural’ for human beings in that it allows us to develop our inner powers. As Herder famously argues in the ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’, we require linguistic concepts in order to develop our capacity to understand the world around us, and, furthermore, linguistic activity is essential to self-understanding as well as self-consciousness. Artistic activity as expression contributes to human flourishing insofar as it allows the artist to transform her environment into something that reflects her and her culture. Zuckert writes, ‘In reshaping objects to render them manifestations of the “inner”, it also transforms one’s environment, making it reflect one’s self, one’s needs, desires, ways of perceiving, and so forth’ (p. 121). Zuckert develops this view with an analysis of Herder’s writing on Egyptian art. Egyptian art uses straight lines ‘to convey their meanings (ideals of social stability), as well as to promote an experience of correlative aesthetic value (e.g. a sensible experience of stability and so pleasurable restfulness’) (p. 122). Thus, Egyptian cultural values are reflected in their art, which promotes a harmony between the subject and her environment. Because humans are essentially social and formed by their culture, on Herder’s view, the self-understanding that can arise from a work of art is not local to the artist, but to anyone ‘living in the same context, with similar states of mind’ – that is, to anyone within a certain linguistic community (p. 123). Because different cultures have different characters, or systems of values and beliefs, aesthetic taste is, to a large degree, local to a culture. This does not entail, as Zuckert emphasizes in the coda following the chapter, that we cannot recognize that the artforms of other cultures have value, but rather that we must accept that we may be limited in appreciating their value (p. 151). Furthermore, we can develop a taste for the artworks of other culture by means of Herder’s notion of Einfühlung, or ‘feeling into’ an interpretational practice by which one imagines oneself as belonging to the character of another culture, and this practice can contribute to the good for a subject insofar as it affords her ‘a complex self-understanding of oneself as member of an immensely varying species’ (p. 157).
The remainder of the book – chapters 5 to 7 – attends closer to particular details and cases within Herder’s aesthetic theory. Chapter 5, which focuses on the sublime, presents the sublime as a potential problem for Herder’s normative naturalism. If the good is nothing more than flourishing within one’s environment, how can we derive aesthetic value from an experience of the ‘terrifying’ or ‘overwhelming’, as Kant and Burke conceived of the sublime (p. 163)? Herder’s account of the sublime begins from two central disagreements with Kant. First, Herder does not draw a firm distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, and, second, Herder considers artworks such as sculptures and epic poetry to be examples of the sublime, in contrast to Kant, for whom the experience of the natural world, for example the stars above, is the paradigmatic example of the sublime. On Zuckert’s reading of Herder, what characterizes the sublime is that natural and artistic expressions of the sublime, in their greatness, inspire the viewer to overcome herself and improve herself – perceiving the greatness of this object in her environment, the observer rises to the challenge it poses (p. 177). Thus, in accordance with Herder’s normative naturalism, it succeeds aesthetically by promoting our flourishing.
The sixth chapter is dedicated to Herder’s surprising claim, mentioned above in the discussion of chapter 3, that sculpture is the medium of art related to the sense of touch. Herder, on the basis of childhood psychology, believes that the concepts of three-dimensional shape as well as weight and depth are derived from touch rather than sight. Our eyes thus function, virtually, as hands in providing a three-dimensional understanding of a sculpture – they provide the particular content to these general concepts which are derived from the sensation of touch. Zuckert writes, ‘In experiencing a sculpture, then, we do not in fact feel its weight … but we might use our visual experience in order to invoke, imaginatively, the felt … [e]xperience of weight’ (p. 196). Because vision only presents us with a two-dimensional ‘snapshot’ of a sculpture from a given perspective at any given instant, we rely on the sense of touch in constructing a three-dimensional understanding of the object, and therefore we only come to represent the statue as a unity by means of our sense of touch (p. 198).
The final chapter discusses Herder’s reading of the Ossian poems, poems published in the eighteenth century purportedly translated from ancient Scottish Gaelic sources, though they are widely believed to be inauthentic (written by their supposed translator). Herder, believing that the poems are authentic, takes these works to provide deep imaginative insight into the ancient culture as well as emotional resonance. It is easy to see this as an embarrassment for Herder, given the importance he places on literature as revealing the character of a particular culture at a particular point in time. Rather than dismissing Herder’s analysis of the Ossian poems as a poorly chosen example, Zuckert uses Herderian tools to analyse the successes and failures of the Ossian poems and, furthermore, to hint towards a Herderian approach to modern artforms. Taken in concert, these final three chapters successfully relate part of what distinguishes Herder from most philosophers of his time: his attention to the particulars, as well as his bottom-up approach to his subjects.
At times, the reader of Zuckert’s book may feel the need for the distinct conceptions of aesthetic value – deriving from a form of unity in the perceived object and from the expression of and solidarity with one’s culture – to be put into more direct dialogue with one another, although it is difficult to determine whether the blame for this lies in Herder’s writing or Zuckert’s analysis. One might also wish for a more in-depth discussion of Herder’s thoughts on literature: it primarily figures in Zuckert’s discussion of the Ossian poems, but Herder’s significance as a literary figure as well as a philosophical one does not feature in much detail in Zuckert’s book, nor does his relationship with German Romanticism. Further, Herder himself seems to take his conceptual holism, a hot topic in contemporary discussions of Herder’s work, to be deeply related to his aesthetic theory, as in the ‘Fourth Grove’ of Critical Forests, and these connections are sadly left unexplored by Zuckert’s book, even though it relates in interesting ways to her treatment of the role of touch in developing a conception of the three-dimensional. However, these are minor quibbles; Zuckert’s book provides an excellent survey of Herder’s aesthetic theory, situating it well both in relation to his predecessors and followers and in relation to Herder’s broader philosophical system. It provides a strong, systematic groundwork for any future research into Herder’s aesthetics.
