Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment 9781501737343

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Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment

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Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment ROBERT E. NORTON

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1991 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New \ork 14850. First published 1991 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2530-1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-55759 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

©The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard tor Information Sciences—Permanence

of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39-48-I984-

For Merey

Contents

Preface A Note on Translations

Introduction 1

Enlightenment Philosophy and the Problem of Mediod:

Lx xiii

i n

The Origins of Herder’s Aesthetic Theory 2

The Ideal of a Philosophical History of Aesdietics:

51

The Diverse Unity of Nature re,

The Philosophy of Language and Its Relation to Aesthetic

82

Theory 4

Toward an Ontology of the Arts: The First Kritisches

119

Waldchen 5

The Psychology of Aesdietic Perception: The Fourth

155

Kritisches Waldchen 6

Herder’s Theory of Sculpture: Vision and Touch and the Outline of a Philosophical “Anaglyphies”

203

Vlll

Contents Conclusion

233

Bibliography

239

Index

251

Preface

A

little more than one hundred years ago, Julian Schmidt, a promi. nent literary historian of the time, announced the appearance of the first critical edition of Johann Gottfried Herder’s collected works with a notable mixture of hortatory optimism and muted admonition. “No one of our classical writers,” Schmidt wrote, “so thoroughly needs a historical and critical revision, no one would reward it to such an eminent degree, and for no one has to this day so little been done.” There is not a single word of this remark, including the reference to the potential rewards of such a revision, that would not hold true today as well, a century of scholarship later. Compared with the sheer number of studies that continue to be devoted to Herder’s other “classical” con¬ temporaries, above all to the works of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, the amount of attention Herder has so far received seems strangely incom¬ patible with his acknowledged historical status within German letters. Herder, who lived from 1744 to 1803, is generally regarded as having been one of the most important thinkers of the eighteenth century in Germany, and his contributions to the philosophy of both history and language are still considered to have been seminal for the modern developments of these disciplines. Yet, even though there has been a marked increase of interest in Herder in recent years, the process of reevaluating his historical position, as well as of reexamining the sub-

X

Preface

stance of his thought itself, has not always led to the equally necessary questioning of the assumptions that long governed our understanding of Herder and his role in German, and hence European, culture. This book offers an account of Herder’s aesthetic philosophy as he expressed it during the first period of his intellectual activity, from 1763 to 1778. To speak of Herder’s “aesthetic philosophy” as if it were a unified, systematic exposition already implies, however, a particular interpretation. Herder was not a systematic writer in any normally accepted meaning of the word. As even the titles of the works in which he presented his ideas on aesthetics almost defiantly announce, he never produced a comprehensive statement of his theory of aesthetics, but only “fragments,” “torsos,” “collections,” and “essays.” But this theory did exist, imbedded in the interstices of the works I discuss here, and supported by the often unspoken intellectual environment in which Herder wrote. By attending to this environment, the European En¬ lightenment, and the ways in which Herder responded to its inspiration and challenge, I have tried to extract the outline of a coherent philoso¬ phy. I have thus intended this book to be a contribution toward the sort of historical-critical revision that Julian Schmidt had already recognized as necessary at the end of the previous century. My main purpose has been to show through analyses of the works Herder wrote during the first fifteen years of his career that he explicitly attempted to develop a theoretically unified philosophy of aesthetics. Moreover, I show that this philosophy can be properly understood only when it is seen as participating in a constant, constructive dialogue with the Enlighten¬ ment Herder was long thought to repudiate. In order to define the terms of this dialogue, I have also examined those eighteenth-century English, French, and German philosophies of psychology, history, and language that had the greatest formative effect on Herder’s thought. At the same time, I have tried to demonstrate how Herder transformed these ideas with the express intent of creating a flexible and yet accurate tool for the investigation of all artistic phenomena. Parts of Chapters 1 and 3 first appeared in Speculum Instoriopfraphiac linffuisticae, cd. Klaus D. Dutz (Munster: Nodus Publikationen, 1989), pp. 263—73. I express my thanks to the editor and publisher for the permission to reprint this material. I am also grateful to the Gei manistic

Preface

xi

Society of America and the Fulbright Commission, which financially supported the year I spent in West Berlin conducting research for the first draft of the manuscript. And I received the generous assistance of the Whiting Foundation for the final stages in completing the original manuscript. In addition, I acknowledge my gratitude to the individuals who made it possible, both through their active and immediate support and through the inspiration of their example, for me to complete this book. It is conceivable that I would never have been drawn to the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century were it not for my former teacher Stuart Atkins. And I convey my warmest thanks to Walter Hinderer, who directed the research leading to the original manuscript, for all that he has done to help me bring this work to its present form. I also feel especially indebted to Hans Aarsleff, who gave generously of his time and advice in reading the manuscript at various stages. David Ellison, my friend and former colleague at Mount Holyoke College, read the final version of the text, lending encouragement and criticism in the needed proportion. I thank, too, Jochen Twele, who assisted me with problems of bibliography and made certain that every new pub¬ lication concerning Herder quickly found its way into my hands. In a more general fashion, I owe a substantial debt of gratitude to Theodore Ziolkowski, Michael Jennings, and Stanley Corngold, who have liber¬ ally offered their counsel and assistance in matters that have been less visibly, but nevertheless essentially, related to my work. And I par¬ ticularly thank my parents for their constant encouragement and sup¬ port throughout the years of my studies. Finally, I express my love and deepest appreciation for Meredith Gill, to whom these pages are dedi¬ cated. Robert

Poughkeepsie, New York

E.

Norton

A Note on the Translations

I

have, of course, quoted extensively from Herder’s works, the major¬ ity of which are unavailable in English. Where I have referred to the existing translations, I have indicated their source, but I have modified them where it seemed appropriate to me. All other translations of Herder’s writings are my own. Wherever possible, I have also located translations of the works by the eighteenth-century French and German writers I have discussed. Again, when I was unable to find translations of this material, I trans¬ lated it into English myself.

Introduction

H

erder’s status within German intellectual history has largely rested on the premise that he, along with his friend Johann Georg Hamann, brought about a profound reorientation in German culture, one that was to a great extent responsible for creating the conditions that enabled the rise of German idealism and romanticism. The “Sturm und Drang,” that important, though short-lived, epoch during the third quarter of the eighteenth century for which Herder was seen as both the progenitor and prime exemplar, was said to be chiefly characterized by a dissatisfaction with the ability of the rational mind alone to fathom the full nature of reality and human experience. Thus Herder was long portrayed as the advocate of those aspects of experience which were excluded by the rationalist optimism and facile secularism that sup¬ posedly characterized the Enlightenment. Herder came to be seen as the founding priest of the cult of individual emotion and of the ineffable in artistic creation and response. This traditional view of Herder as an irrational iconoclast, as the irresistible opponent of a moribund Enlightenment, has by now lost much of its argumentative force and integrity. There once was undoubt¬ edly something of a historical necessity in this interpretation, an expres¬ sion of the nineteenth-century desire to define the distinct outlines of a specifically Germanic culture by setting it off against Romanic civiliza-

2

Introduction

tions, and in particular against that of France. But just as this interpre¬ tive model gradually ossifies into a historical curiosity, so are we left with the momentous task of redefining Herder, which also necessarily means reevaluating those broader cultural and intellectual movements of the eighteenth century within which his work acquired its peculiar form. This book represents the attempt to contribute one part to that larger enterprise. In Herder’s fourth Kritisches Waldchen (Critical Grove)1 of 1769, the most important single statement he made on his aesthetic philosophy, he exclaimed at one point with a burst of apparently characteristic enthusiasm: “O Aesthetics! the most fertile, most beautiful and, in many cases, the newest among the abstract sciences: geniuses and art¬ ists, philosophers and poets have scattered flowers in all of the arts of beauty for you—.”2 The rhetoric of the passage seems familiar, suggest¬ ing the exuberance we have come to associate with the impassioned rebellion of the “Sturm und Drang.” Within a single sentence, Herder managed to invoke the presence of poets, artists, and that deity before which a generation bowed, the mighty creative Genius. Yet the true object of Herder’s fervent apostrophe is “aesthetics,” or the “newest among the abstract sciences.” Less than twenty years before Herder wrote these words, in 1750, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who was one of the most rigorous practitioners of German eighteenth-century dogmatic philosophy, had developed a new branch of abstract specula¬ tion for which he had coined the term “aesthetica.”3 Herder, for whom 1. The word “Waldchen” (“grove” or “silva”) in Herder’s title has a history extending to antiquity. As we read in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 990, “Silva . . . could mean raw material, and, perhaps widt a suggestion of its Ciceronian sense of a forest-like abundance, was extended as a literary title to work of varied content (cf. Suetonius' Pratum). Quintilian (Inst. 10.3.17) explains it as a rapid draft, and this applies to Statius' Silvac, which are occasional poems hastily composed. Ben Jonson’s definition, "the Ancients call’d that kind of body Sylva ... in which there were workes of divers nature, and matter congested,’ indicates why it remained an appropriate title for miscellaneous verses into the Renaissance.” 2. Herder, Sdmmtlichc Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. IV (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877), p. 21. All further references to Herder’s works from this edition will be incorporated into the text in parentheses, e.g., (SW IV, 21). 3. Actually, the term became widely recognized only with the appearance of the first two volumes of the Aesthetica, 1750-58. Baumgarten had, in fact, first introduced the term in 1735 in his work, Mcditationcs philosophicac dc nonnullis ad poema pertinentibns. See

Introduction

3

abstraction and rationalistic philosophy—if indeed not reason itself were ostensibly anathema, here appears to be falling before the altar ol reason like the most zealous “philosophe.” This apparent tension lies at the heart of Herder’s thinking about the philosophy ol art. That a simple solution to this problem may not be so easily given becomes obvious if one considers the situation that confronted Herder when he began to look for answers to his own queries concerning the nature of art and poetry. In the introduction to the collection titled Ueber die neuere deutsche Littemtur. Fragmente (On Modern German Literature: Fragments) of 1767, Herder gave vent to his dissatisfaction with the lack of an authoritative center or a unified intellectual direction that would give guidance to the philosophical and artistic endeavors of his time: “We are laboring in Germany in a situation that is similar to the famous confusion of languages in Babylon: sects of taste, parties of poetry, schools of philosophy all squabble with one another; there is no capital city, and no interest which is generally shared; there is no great universal patron, nor a universal genius with legislative authority (SW Although Baumgarten had established a new philosophical discipline on the basis of which one might investigate poetry and the psychologi¬ cal processes that accompany our understanding of it, he had not, of course, actually invented the practice of dieorizing about the nature of art. By the middle of the eighteenth century, aesthetics, if not yet known by that name, had already become a rather fashionable preoccupation of European thinkers. Virtually every major Enlightenment writer had produced his own theory of taste or the beautiful, resulting in an eclectic abundance of “essays,” “treatises,” “inquiries,” and “dialogues” on every imaginable aspect of ancient and modern art.* * * 4 During the eigh¬ teenth century in Germany alone, a span of about thirty years produced the famous, yet largely fatuous, controversy between Johann Christoph Gottsched and his Swiss antagonists, Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger; it spawned the “school” of philosophical aesthetics, Reflections on Poetry: Medttationes philosophicac de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, trans. and ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University ot California Press, 1954). 4. For a general overview of Enlightenment aesthetics, see Jacques Chouillet, L 'esthetique des lumieres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974); curiously, in the “chronologie des principes oeuvres du XVIIIe siecle concernant Pesthetique at the end of the book, Chouillet does not mention any ot Herder’s works.

4

Introduction

represented primarily by Baumgarten himself, his pupil Georg Fried¬ rich Meier, and Moses Mendelssohn; it witnessed the birth of modern art history in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums\ it occasioned the critical endeavors of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and it created a sympathetic and eager audience to support the less brilliant, but no less active, pens of many others. In France and England the proliferation of works about art and literature was even greater than in Germany. Shaftesbury’s inspiring works created an immensely fertile following of their own, infusing the writings of Francis Hutcheson, James Harris, and Edmund Burke with a decidedly theoretical orientation, whereas a more historically minded group of thinkers, including Thomas Blackwell, William Warburton, Lord Karnes and John Brown, admixed a greater density of factual material to the more abstract speculations of their colleagues. A list citing the names of the writers in France who devoted their energies to uncovering the secrets of the arts would include most of the leading minds of the French Enlightenment. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, the Abbe Charles Batteux, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Diderot—to mention only the most prominent—all contributed important and widely read works to questions of taste and the understanding of art. And to complicate matters further, some of the works that most de¬ cisively influenced Herder’s aesthetic philosophy were not even dedi¬ cated exclusively to art. Among these are, most significantly the Abbe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essai sur Porigine des connoissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge) of 1746, and both Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind) of 1749 and his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (Letter on the Deaf and Dumb) of two vears later. Even this very superficial list of contemporary philosophers gives at least an indication of the almost overwhelming diversity of viewpoint that existed during the early 1760s as Herder entered the field of aes¬ thetics. And it partially explains Herder’s desire for a single authorita¬ tive model that would exert some order in the chaos of contemporary opinion. Yet, if there was a single assumption common to all of these writers, it was that art could and ought to be viewed as a subject of independent study, with the understanding that some form of positive knowledge would thereby result. Although Herder also shared this basic assumption, he was unwilling to accept unreservedly any of the

Introduction

5

theories that had been proposed as the means for gaining such knowl¬ edge. He thus quickly came to perceive that any future aesthetic philos¬ ophy, including his own, could only be conducted dirough mediation and synthesis, whereby he would unify what he felt were the most useful and persuasive theoretical tenets of his time widiin a broad, universal conception. One of the principal and guiding dieses of diis book is that Herder did in fact envisage, if not finally complete in a systematic fashion, just such a unified philosophy of aesthetics. It was a philosophy diat he thought could, moreover, claim for itself absolute scientific exactitude and die verifiable truth of its results on the basis of its methodological procedure. There was a great deal at stake for Herder in this enterprise. For he, along widi his contemporaries, believed that die knowledge to be gained from such an investigation of aesthetic phenomena would cast substantial light on some of the most far-reaching questions of his day about the relationship between human beings and their world as it found expression in works of art. Since he viewed aesthetic philosophy as a privileged instrument for addressing such questions, Herder did not think of it as a codex of rules that were intended to inform and guide artistic practice. He conceived of it, radier, as a descriptive, explanatory science that was strictly objective in the sense that it ought to account for phenomena that already demonstrably exist. Above all, he wished to discover and establish a few fundamental principles that were at once comprehensive enough to embrace the totality of artistic expression he found throughout die known history of humanity, and yet refined enough to provide the explanatory subtlety required for an analysis of every individual work of art. Herder’s philosophy of aesdietics repre¬ sents the attempt to achieve an even balance between the apparently conflicting demands of intense philosophical rigor and a broad histor¬ ical awareness. One of the primary intentions of this book, dierefore, is to demonstrate how Herder merged die knowledge and assumptions represented by die dominant traditions of eighteenth-century meta¬ physics and logic with contemporary philosophies of history and lan¬ guage. For out of this synthesis arose a totally novel conception of aesthetic philosophy, and one that possessed a remarkable singleness of purpose and dieoretical coherence. In order to show in what this coherence consists, I will simulta¬ neously pursue two different, but necessarily related, goals in die pages

6

Introduction

to come. The first is the examination and description of what I have termed Herder’s “aesthetic philosophy” itself.5 And here I mean that Herder formulated a “philosophy” that was consistent with the term’s eighteenth-century sense in that it was an internally consistent body of thought dedicated to the patient exposition of truth.6 But in order to show how his aesthetic theory acquired its general continuity and meaning, I simultaneously demonstrate both its underlying and explicit affinities to the endeavors of the writers who collectively embody the European Enlightenment. Proposing to lay bare both the foundations and structure of Herder’s philosophy of aesthetics in its connection with the thought of his European precursors and contemporaries has therefore made it necessary to arrange my interpretations of his own works next to analyses of several texts that represent the “Enlighten¬ ment” in its widest sense. Yet, as already indicated, this need to include a field of thought outside of Herder’s own writings was motivated by more than just formal considerations. The placement of his ideas con¬ cerning aesthetics in such close proximity to those of Enlightenment thinkers did not merely emerge as a convenient expedient for locating a particular historical context against which the individuality of Herder’s own works would be more clearly revealed. My juxtaposition of Herder to the Enlightenment arose, in addition, and perhaps most important, from my concern to reintegrate his life’s work into the larger intellectual tradition from which it had been systematically, and more or less suc¬ cessfully, excluded. The mechanism of this exclusion was first activated by the nationalis¬ tic ideological tendencies of German neohumanistic scholars following the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Throughout the last half 5. To date, only three monographs have been devoted solelv to Herder’s aesthetic philosophy: Gunther Jacoby, Herders undKantsAsthetik (Leipzig: Verlagder Diirr’schen Buchhandlung, 1907); Heinz Begenau, Grundziige der Asthetik Herder? (Weimar: Her¬ mann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1956); and Joe K. Fugate, The Psychological Basis of Herder's Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). The most recent shorter study of Herder’s aesthetics is by Hans Dietrich Irmscher, “Zur Asthetik des jungen Herder,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987), pp. 4376. But, in the first footnote of this article, on p. 43, Irmscher rightly points out: “We lack a comprehensive description of Herder’s early aesthetics.” 6. H. B. Nisbet, “Zur Revision des Herder-Bildes im Fichte der neueren Forschung,” in Buckeburger Gesprdchc iiber Johann Gottfried Herder 1971, ed. Johann Gottfried Maltusch (Btickeburg: Grimme Verlag, 1973) •> p. 102, asserts that, because of what he sees as the contradictory nature of his thought and the constant change of his point of view, it is impossible to speak of any one “philosophy” of Herder.

Introduction

7

of the nineteenth century, there was a growing need to identify and defend a distincdv German cultural tradition that went hand in hand widi the political efforts to consolidate Germany into something more than just a geographical designation. It was die time of the great histories of national literatures, a concept that was itself an invention of that era’s particular ideological creed. And such men as Julian Schmidt, Rudolf von Gottschall, and Wilhelm Scherer, as well as many others, wrote dieir histories in the same spirit of national unification diat Bismarck personified in his statecraft. It was here a matter of tracing and shoring up die boundaries of a specifically German literary sphere diat was obviously meant to correspond in its autonomous unity to die newly formed independent German state. But the attempt to define German literary culture, and most especially its greatest achievements in classical Weimar, as die confluence of wholly indigenous forces also meant, almost inevitably, that increasingly artificial lines of demarcation were being drawn between German letters and those produced in die rest of Europe. By the end of the century, for example, Wilhelm Dildiey could alreadv confidendv affirm the existence of an eighteendi-century intellectual tradition the origins of which he located in the supposedly anti-Enlightenment—or more specifically anti-French—movement of the “Sturm und Drang.” The trajectory of this movement then culmi¬ nated in the closed autonomy of Weimar classicism and romanticism. Aldiough diis mythical historical construction of a uniquely German literary and cultural tradition has come under increasingly skeptical scrutinv and attack in die last twenty years or so, its powerful influence can still be felt and has yet to be fully overcome.7 This pattern has been J

7. Some of the most important of these “revisionist'’ efforts within the research on Herder are those by Werner Krauss, Die franzdsische Aujldcimng im Spiegel dev deutschen Litemtur des 18. Jahrh under ts (Berlin: Akademie, 1963), and, by the same author, Studien zur deutschen und franzosischen A u fid fining (Berlin: Riitten & Loening, 1963); Heinz

Stolpe, “Die Handbibliothek Johann Gottfried Herders—Instrumentarium eines Aufklarers,” in WcimnrcrBcitrdge, XII (1966), pp. ion—1039; Hans Robert Jauls, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 19^0); Claus Trager, Die HerdcrLegende des deutschen Historismus (Berlin: Yerlag Marxistische Blatter, 1979); Rainer Rosenberg, Zchn Kapitel zur Geschichte dev Gennanistik (Berlin: Akademie, 1981); Mi¬ chael Zarembay Johann Gottfried Herders hunmmtcircs Nations- und Volksvcrstandnis: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Kultur dei" Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: Peter Oberhofer, 1985); Bernhard Becker, Herder-Rezeption in Deutschland: Eine Idcologiekritischc Untcrsuclmng (St. Ingbert: Werner Rohrig, 1987), and by the same author, “Phasen der Herder-Rezeption von 1871—19+5,” in Johann Goufricd Herder, 174+-1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 198^), pp. +23—36.

8

Introduction

particularly true of studies on Herder, whose greatest distinction was long thought to have been his contribution to the awakening of Ger¬ man self-identity in the early 1770s, at the dawn of the “Sturm und Drang.” As part of the steadily advancing supersession of this view, Herder will not appear in these pages as the great opponent of the bloodless rationality and easy optimism that has so often been considered to have characterized, but really only caricatured, the Enlightenment. Herder never fundamentally opposed anything except ignorance and intellec¬ tual ineptitude. To be sure, Herder’s relationship to the thinkers who immediately preceded him was often complicated and subtle, and he was by no means wholly immune to the symptoms attending the anxiety of influence. But to see Herder’s intellectual entrenchment within the context of the European Enlightenment is absolutely crucial for an adequate understanding of the substance of his own thought. Above all—it must again be stressed—Herder was a European thinker who both unconsciously relied on and knowingly extracted what he could use from the labors of other Enlightenment thinkers.8 And Herder did not conceive of his philosophy of aesthetics particularly as a rejection or reversal of this tradition. On the contrary, it represents an attempt to fulfill in a specific sphere the Enlightenment’s most general and ambitious goal: to elucidate, to illuminate fully those realms of human experience that had before remained inaccessible or obscure to the comprehension of a mind encumbered by received dogma and supersti¬ tion. Herder’s true “originality” should thus be sought not so much in the priority of his “discoveries” or in the exuberance of his style, but, rather, in his efforts to apply the ideas he had learned in new and fruitful ways.9 More specifically, his writings on art grew out of his wish to realize the 8. This point has only begun to be emphasized in the scholarly literature in the last ten to fifteen years. See, for example, H. B. Nisbet, “Zur Revision des Herder-Bildes im Lichte der neueren Forschung,” p. 104. 9. Michael Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unit)' and Diversity in “On Diligence in Several Learned Languages” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), claims that Herder constructed his argument on two levels at once: that of conventional logical reasoning, or what Morton calls the “discursive” level, and that of figurative language and rhetorical devices, or what Morton terms the “gestural” level of the text. Of interest on the same issue is Ulrich Gaicr, Herders Sprachphilosophic und Erkenntniskritik (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1988), who sees 1 lerder’s style of argumentation as an intertwined “logic” of the senses, the imagination, and reason.

Introduction

9

capacities of philosophy, history, language, and aesthetics to comple¬ ment and illuminate one another. During the fifteen-year period being examined here, aesthetics was his primary interest, for he saw in works of art the densely focused expression of every aspect of human life. That is, he believed that art and poetry themselves arose from the confluence of psychological, historical, and linguistic structures. A work of art could therefore be understood and explained only through a conscien¬ tious and thorough analysis of each of these constituent elements. So while his mind ranged widely during these years over the specialized concerns of contemporary metaphysics, the diversity of foreign cultures and climes, and the relations between language and thought, his ideal of aesthetics was to combine the perspectives produced by these individual studies into a generous, panoptic view. As far as possible, my own presentation of Herder’s philosophy of aesthetics has mirrored this ideal organization of its conception, a procedure that is aligned with my contextualist approach. Although I have devoted separate chapters to philosophy, history and language, the reader is asked to remember that no one of these main aspects of Herder’s work can be described completely independently of the others without seriously rending the complex fabric of his thought.10 I have thus conceived all six chapters as actually constituting successive layers of one continuous argument, so that it becomes possible in the course of its unfolding to see how they all form only parts of a single, if stratified, whole. For, just as one cannot separate Herder’s thought from that of the Enlightenment generally, no one of these topics ought to be seen as ever truly independent of the others in Herder’s, and hence in my own, treatment of them. In fact, as Herder himself emphasized at the begin¬ ning of the Fragmente, they are so closely intertwined that they may not be divisible at all: “language, the sciences of taste, history, and philoso¬ phy are the four provinces of literature, which serve to strengthen one another, and are almost inseparable” (SW I, 142). Accordingly, Chapters 1 through 3 provide an analytic exposition of the problems that inform Herder’s philosophy of aesthetics. They focus on several problems of English, French, and German cognitive theories and philosophies of both history and language while relating these 10. This basic criterion for an adequate understanding of Herder’s thought is being recognized in the more recent research devoted to Herder. See, for example, Jochen Schiitze, Die Objektivitat der Sprache: Einijye systematische Perspektiven auf das Werk des jungen Herder (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1983), p. 60.

IO

Introduction

problems to the overarching theme of Herder’s developing aesthetic philosophy as expressed in the works he wrote between the years 1763 and 1778. The most important of these include Herder’s first essay, the Versuch iiber das Sein (Essay on Being), both versions of the Fmjjmente of 1767—68, the Abhandlung iiber den Ur sprung der Spracbe (Treatise on the Origin of Language) of 1772, and the essay on Shakespeare in the collection titled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Style and Art) of the following year. The final three chapters then synthesize the perspectives developed in the first three in order to provide an extended examination of his philosophy of aesthetics proper. They are thus con¬ cerned exclusively with his aesthetic theory as he elaborated it in both the first and fourth of the Kritische Walder of 1769 and in his essay on sculpture, the Plastik of 1778. But, in the desire to defend Herder against the charge—or praise—of irrationalism, one should not forget that it was precisely because of the nature of his assumptions and the inherent demands of his elected method of philosophical procedure that his plan to construct a com¬ prehensive theory of aesthetics was never completed in its intended form. In order to satisfy the provisions he placed on his own aesthetic theory, he would have needed the resources quite literally of every thinker of his age, as well as an organizational ability of unimaginable proportions. While I do assert that Herder’s aesthetic philosophy ex¬ hibits an inner unity of design and intent, this philosophy remained nonetheless a fragment, a torso, a collection of ideas that lacks the apparent closure of a complete, systematic expression. During his trip to France, upon which he rather impetuously embarked in 1769, Herder himself appears to have become aware of his inability to fulfill the requirements of the task he had set for himself. It was perhaps more for this reason than any other that he never published his single most important treatise on aesthetics, the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen. After his return from France, his predominant interest in aesthetics began to wane and he soon turned to other fields, finding his way back to aesthetic philosophy only three years before his death, in the Kallipfonc of 1800. Although several works dealing with aesthetic issues did appear in the intervening years, the major portion of these works was largely conceived, if not actually written, in that fertile first phase of Herder's creative life between 1763 and 1778.

I

Enlightenment Philosophy and the Problem of Method: The Origins of Herder’s Aesthetic Theory It is the task of the Philosopher to discover the origin of things.

—Diderot

T

he eighteenth century, and in particular that highly self-conscious movement we call the Enlightenment, presents anything but a comfortably homogeneous image to the observer willing to perceive its disparate nature. When reading die works of the “philosophies,” one is immediately struck by the breadth of dieir concerns, the fine discrimina¬ tion of their arguments, and the often strident struggles between sepa¬ rate factions. The Enlightenment, it quickly becomes obvious, was not complacent about itself or the success of its endeavor, and its prac¬ titioners—both individually and collectively—often enough had a change of mind in matters minor and major. Nor did the Enlighten¬ ment, or, as it is known in its German incarnation, the “Aulklarung,” exhibit the same complexion in all of the European states; indeed, there was no one German state, no single cultural or political tradition, that could have served as a context or foil for its development. It is thus not a simple matter, and perhaps inherently suspect, to speak of “Enlighten¬ ment philosophy” as if it were a unified and self-contained entity. Nevertheless, it is possible to isolate themes, or motifs, or even a general tenor of thought that one can identify as being characteristic of the period. The pages that follow are devoted to such an attempt, but they serve the further and more immediate intention of providing an extended introduction to the work with which Herder entered into the exchange of eighteenth-century philosophy. The short essay in question

12

Herder’s Aesthetics

is titled Versuch uber das Sein (Essay on Being), which he wrote in 1763 at the age of nineteen; Herder wrote it in Konigsberg while under what must have been the powerful impress of his teacher, Immanuel Kant. As one would expect, it strongly echoes Kant’s ideas, even as it criticizes them, and Herder’s style is hermetic to the point of being solipsistic, reflecting the relatively narrow circle of a student’s vision. Yet, despite its closeness and brevity, the Versuch uber das Sein contains several of the ideas that determined the content of much of his later thought, and in particular that of his aesthetic philosophy. It also, and more significantly for the present purposes, led Herder to fix the discursive mode, or method, through which his thinking would assume its form. As Herder’s first work—and written with a very limited audience in mind—the Versuch uber das Sein thus presupposes much more than it obviously states. Accordingly, as Herder himself later advised, one must try to discover the submerged origins of what seems to lie unam¬ biguously open before us: “One of the most pleasant fields upon which human curiosity verv readily loses itself is this: to perceive the origin of that which exists. ... It is, however, not only entertaining, it is also necessarv to inquire into the origin of those objects which one wishes to understand at all well” (SW, XXXII, 85—86). It is generally agreed that the major proponents of the European Enlightenment, however one might evaluate their achievements, largely understood themselves to be laboring toward the common goal of liberating humanitv from the tyrannical authorities and restrictive con¬ ventions of the past. But it is no less true that the ways in which dais most abstract goal was pursued were as varied as the thinkers who were advocating it. Bv demonstrating the rightful power of the mind when it was at libertv to judge every matter for itself without the burden or aid of external opinion, the “philosophies” acted on a shared desire to attain both truth and the limitless freedom to disclose it wherever it lay. “Liberty of action and thought alone,” d’Alembert thus programmat¬ ically wrote, “is capable of producing great things.”1 But the philoso¬ phers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that the discovery of truth was too important to be left to mere chance or erratic 1. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trails, and intro. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Mcrrill, 1963), p. ft’.

The Problem of Method

i3

good fortune. The finding of truth, and the further dissemination and the improvement of knowledge as a whole, essentially depended, they thought, on the method one employed. Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Locke, Condillac, and Kant each advanced his own conception of method as one of the distinctive aspects of his philosophical system. And it was the application of their various methodological premises that gave rise to a large part of the diversity setting their works apart. As a late recipient of Enlightenment philosophy, Herder also consciously embodied this self-reflexive search for truth and certain knowledge, and, as we will see, his own intellectual career commenced in an atmos¬ phere of intense preoccupation with this central problem of philosophi¬ cal method. Despite the contentious debate his ideas later unleashed among the thinkers of the Enlightenment, it was Rene Descartes himself who had provided the terms and the context within which these subsequent conflicts took place. In his Discourse on Method of 1637, Descartes had not only pointedly insisted on a radically individualistic departure for his own ideas, he had also actively dissuaded others from imitating it too closelv lest they should inadvertently relinquish that freedom of thought he had valued most highly for himself. He thus gave these cautionary words to his readers even as he explained his motives for placing his reflections before the public gaze: “My plan has never gone beyond trying to reform my own thoughts and construct them upon a foundation which is all my own. If I am sufficiently pleased with my work to present you with this sample of it, this does not mean that I would advise anyone to imitate it.”2 In a sense, Descartes’s caveat proved to be largely successful, though in a fashion he could never have foreseen. For while he profoundly affected the course of European philosophy in the next century and beyond, his influence, as is so often the case with the great agents of historv, was verv frequently exerted through the negative force of op¬ position to his views. His ideas remained firmly embedded in the philosophical discourse of the eighteenth century by being frequently held up as an example of the type of thinking one ought to avoid. At a

2. Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoft, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 118.

Herder’s Aesthetics

14

certain level, then, even the most energetic dissent his opinions would encounter from the pens of Voltaire, Condillac, Diderot, d’Alembert, and others was actually consonant with Descartes’s express intentions. D’Alembert, who was always conscious of this peculiar dialectic, recog¬ nized that “the arms which we use to combat him belong to him no less because we turn them against him.”3 The Enlightenment, that discord¬ ant, passionate call for the sovereignty of independent reason, repre¬ sented precisely through the varied character of its proponents a tribute to Descartes’s ultimate triumph. As the tide of the Discourse clearly announced, Descartes set out to establish his own examination of philosophical concepts upon the firm dictates of a particular method. As he saw it, the philosophy that preceded him appeared to be plagued by the obscurity and imprecision engendered by centuries of unquestioned dogma and half-understood beliefs. He felt that philosophy had stagnated in his own day through the uncritical acceptance of doctrines sanctioned and enforced by tradi¬ tion, and it was from this perceived sophistic sterility that Descartes sought to free his own thinking. When in the second section of the Discourse he formulated his famous four rules of logical procedure, he therefore stipulated that his first point of departure “was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgements than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no reason to doubt it.”4 The model he chose as the most reliable and proven means to provide such “clear” and “distinct” notions in the study of metaphvsics, as well as in the other philosophical sciences, was that of mathematics.5 In his biographical sketch in the first section of the Discourse, he confessed to his early affection for “mathematics, because of the certainty and self¬ evidence of its reasonings.”6 But he had discovered that philosophy 3. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 80. 4. Descartes, Discourse, p. 120. 5. On the history of the concepts of “analysis” and “synthesis,” see the ground¬ breaking book by Hans-Jurgen Engfer, Philosophic als Analysis: Studien zur Entnncklunjj philosophischerAnalysiskonzeptioncn untcr dem Einflufs mathcmatischcrMcthodninwdclle im 17. undfruhen 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1982). On Descartes in particular see Leslie J. Beck, The Method of Descartes: A Study of the Rctjulae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), csp. the chapter “The Rules of Analysis and Synthesis,” pp. 155-71.

6. Descartes, Discourse, pp. 114-20.

The Problem of Method

15

exhibited no such unassailable principles and that, as he said, the “most strange and incredible things” could be found in the writings of even the most renowned philosophers. When he thus turned to the question of his approach to his own investigations, the answer for him was already at hand: “I had no great difficulty in deciding which things to begin with, for I knew already that it must be with the simplest and most easily known. Reflecting, too, that of all those who have hitherto sought after truth in the sciences, mathematicians alone have been able to find any demonstrations—that is to say, certain and evident reason¬ ings—I had no doubt that I should begin with the very things that they studied.” Once Descartes had stripped experience to its inexpugnable core of the “cogito, ergo sum” by rendering doubt universal, he felt that he had cleared the ground for the construction of a new edifice of philosophy that had the advantage of being founded on indubitable principles.7 By strictly observing the methods of mathematical demonstration based on established axioms and general theorems, Descartes thought that he had found the way to unravel the perennial questions of philosophy. And because of its general applicability, he also felt that this method would lead to the discovery of new knowledge in areas that before had been veiled in an intractable cloud of obscurity. In more specific terms, Descartes formulated his conception of math¬ ematical method in overt analogy to geometrical and algebraic analysis. The analysis or “resolutio” of a geometrical theorem or demonstration was a method that had long been familiar. Basically it entailed resolving a complex construction into its constituent parts in order to uncover its most fundamental or simple elements. But the “resolutio” was really only the first step of investigation. For, after having isolated these individual components, one then had to advance to the synthesis or “compositio” of these primary parts by recombining them and ascend¬ ing to ever greater degrees of abstraction. Finally, one reached that realm of greatest generality which characterized the original proof.8 This distinction of cognitive processes, and the order in which they are to be performed, underlie the second and third rules of the Discourse, even if the words “synthesis” and “analysis” do not themselves occur. 7. See Aram Vartanian, Descartes and Diderot: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), P- I28. See the essay by Giorgio Tonelli, “Analysis and Synthesis in XVIIIth Century Philosophy prior to Kant,” Archiv fur Begrijfsgeschichte, XX (1976), p. 179-

l6

Herder’s Aesthetics

The second, to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better. The third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex, and by supposing some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence.9

As we will see, analysis and synthesis, or the twofold procedure of breaking down concepts and then reconstituting them into a larger whole, became the terms around which the Enlightenment also con¬ ducted its methodological arguments, although both their significance and role underwent constant reinterpretation and they were applied to various ends.10 The issue of whether Descartes’s philosophical pro¬ cedure actually conforms in every respect to the mathematical model he elected as the only source for certainty in the pursuit of truth is thus irrelevant to a historical understanding of the way in which it was perceived by his followers and later critics. More important here is the functional and rhetorical status of Descartes’s methodological claims. For the promise they contained of obtaining the “clear” and “distinct” ideas of secure knowledge by adhering to a specific method was so compelling that this belief was upheld by every philosopher who came after him. Only through a faithful and rigorous adherence to method, they all agreed, could one hope to locate and ascertain truth. As we find under the article for “Methode” in the Encyclopedic more than one hundred years after Descartes’s death, “Method is essential for all of the sciences, but above all for philosophy.”11 Yet it was also with explicit reference to the necessity of following a particular method when one addressed philosophical problems that the very different theories of Descartes’s successors assumed their characteristic guise. In histories of philosophy, it is usually said that the appearance in 1690 of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding marked a decisive break with past traditions, and most especially with the one stemming from Descartes. Locke accomplished this radical reorienta9. Descartes, Discourse, p. 120. See also Beck, The Method of Descartes, p. 156, who writes that it “is generally accepted usage amongst writers on Cartesian philosophy to describe the second rule of the Discours as the 'rule of analysis’ and the third rule is then described as ‘the rule of synthesis’.” 10. See Engfer, Philosophic als Analysis, p. 27. 11. Denis Diderot, ed., L 'encyclopedic on dictionnaire raisomic des sciences, des arts et dcs metiers, vol. X (Neufchastel: 1765), p. 4+s.

The Problem of Method

17

don, historians have written, by doing away with the doctrine ot innate ideas and by thus redirecting philosophical attention away from a priori reflection on the internal ideas of the mind toward immediate sensate experience. While both of these latter assertions are at least partially true, they fail to represent the substantive aims Locke explicitly sought to achieve. Indeed, in their one-sided emphasis, they actually distort the nature of his efforts. Like Descartes, Locke was above all concerned with establishing the principles on which certain and universal knowl¬ edge could be based. And, again like his French colleague (and, in tact, like most of his contemporaries), Locke looked to mathematics as the only reliable source of methodological certitude: We must therefore, if we will proceed, as Reason advises, adapt our methods of Enquiry to the nature of the Ideas we examine, and the Truth we search after.

General and certain Truths, are only founded in the Habitudes and Relations ot abstract Ideas. A sagacious and methodical application of our Thoughts, for the finding out these Relations, is the only way to discover all, that can be put, with Truth and Certainty concerning them, into general Propositions. By what steps we are to proceed in these, is to be learned in the Schools ot the Mathemati¬ cians, who from very plain and easy beginnings, by gentle degrees, and a continued Chain of Reasonings, proceed to the discovery and demonstration of Truths, that appear at first sight beyond humane Capacity.12 But, even though he concurred in his estimation ot the proper method of philosophy, Locke felt that Descartes and his followers had not taken the analysis of cognition far enough. This is the import of the wellknown first lines of the Essay in which he declared that his primary purpose was “to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge.”13 These words encapsulate the broad diesis of the Essay, for Locke was less concerned with building a universal system of philosophy than widi revealing the range and first properties of human knowledge as he found it. He wanted “not to teach the world a new way of certainty . . . but to endeavour to show wherein the old and only way of certainty consisted.”14 And it was in Locke’s attempt to 12. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), IV, xii, § 7. Ct. the still very useful book by James Gibson, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and Its Historical Relations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917) • 13. Locke, Essay, I, ii, § 2. 14. From the Third Letter to Stillingfleet, in Works, vol. IV, p. 459; cited from Gibson, Locke’s Theory, p. 209.

18

Herder’s A esthetics

uncover the actual origins of our knowledge, together with the nature of its fundamental principles, that he made his most distinctive contri¬ bution to philosophy and exerted his greatest influence on the thought of the following century. Locke’s reliance on the traditional conception of philosophical method as basically consonant with that of mathematics becomes evi¬ dent in the first book of the Essay, although he too did not explicitly refer to the procedures of analysis and synthesis. In order to compre¬ hend the full nature of the entirety of abstract knowledge, Locke ar¬ gued, one had to analyze each of the individual features of which it was composed into its first or simplest properties, beyond which no further analysis would be possible. One had to descend, that is, to the “original” components of our ideas, to the basic materials of all cognitive activity, before one could advance to a consideration of the various relations that connected them. And it was the fullest range and integration of these relations, in the increasingly complex combination of notions, that formed the structure of what we call knowledge.15 Here, then, is the background to Locke’s famous suggestion in the first book of the Essay that the mind was like “white paper,” and he asked, “How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From Experience: In that, all our Knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives it self.”16 As he specifically stated, the fundamental data, or simple ideas (David Hume had complained that Locke used the word Idea “in a very loose sense . . . standing for any of our perceptions, our sensations and passions”), out of which knowledge arose thus come to us from what Locke termed “Experience.”17 Everything that exists in the mind can be resolved, in other words, into the basic ideas we originally receive through the channel of immediate experience. But Locke explicitly distinguished between two different kinds of experience. He thus claimed, on the one hand, that: “Our Senses, conversant about particular 15. See Gibson, Locke’s Theory, pp. 47-+8; although Gibson does not greatly empha¬ size the role of analysis, he gives a precise description of its function in Locke. 16. Locke, Essay, II, i, § 2. 17. David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Prin¬ ciples of Morals, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 22.

The Problem of Method

19

sensible Objects, do convey into the Mind, several distinct Perceptions of things, according to the various ways, wherein those Objects do affect them .... This great Source, of most of the Ideas we have, depending wholly upon our Senses, and derived by them to the Understanding, I call SENSATION T18 Locke very specifically stipulated that sensation is the source of only “most” of our ideas and, indeed, in the next paragraph of the Essay Locke revealed that second element of which experience was composed and which has often been thought to exist in logical tension with sensation. There is, in addition, “the other Fountain, from which Expe¬ rience furnisheth the Understanding with Ideas, [which] is the Percep¬ tion of the Operations of our own Minds within us ... I call this REFLEC¬ TION .”19 It would be a mistake, however, to think that Locke thus unwittingly introduced an irreconcilable dichotomy into his theory. Although he had affirmed the role of the senses and of the ideas they deliver to the mind in the cognitive process, Locke would never have entertained the notion that humans were entirely passive beings who only received external sensations and possessed no inherent powers of their own to act on and transform these stimuli. He therefore attached the condition that the faculties of “Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Be¬ lieving, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different actings of our own Minds . . . every Man has wholly within himself.”20 The political and ethical philosopher Locke wanted to preserve for human beings a distinct rational autonomy and volitional freedom in their relation to the world around them. Human beings must not be thought of as wholly passive creatures at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control, but as free to exercise their will in acting on their inclinations and environment. Locke’s insistence that sensation and reflection were the two mainsprings of cognitive activity was therefore an intended and essential feature of his philosophy. In this way he could show how we gain, by means of the former, the ideas of the material world of objects, and, through the latter process of reflection, how we obtain the ideas concerning the operations of our own minds. And it was with the basic constituents of sensation and reflection alone, he insisted, that one’s mind, through the various processes of combining and abstracting its 18. Locke, Essay, II, i, § 3. 19. Ibid., § 4. 20. Ibid.

20

Herder’s Aesthetics

contents, produced its total assemblage of knowledge: “In this faculty of repeating and joining together its Ideas, the Mind has great power in varying and multiplying the Objects of its Thoughts, infinitely beyond what Sensation or Reflection furnished it with: But all this is still confined to those simple Ideas, which it received from those two Sources, and which are the ultimate Materials of all its Compositions/’21 It is obviously not my purpose here to provide a comprehensive description of Locke’s entire philosophy, but only to point out some of those particular features that composed its significance for the thinkers of the Enlightenment, and hence, through the various channels of its transmission, for Herder himself. We have seen that for Locke the method appropriate to investigating human knowledge, or to isolating both the simple and abstract ideas of which it was formed, was identical to the one practiced in the mathematical sciences. But in the fourth book of the Essay he warned about “how little general Maxims, precarious Principles, and Hypotheses laid down at Pleasure, have promoted true Knowl¬ edge P22 He realized that, if not employed with circumspection and always measured against the standard of observable fact, the postulation of certain principles as the rule of philosophical procedure might lead not to truth, but to the subjective errors of empty conjecture: Not that we may not, to explain any Phenomena of Nature, make use of any probable Hypothesis whatsoever: Hypotheses, if they are well made, are at least great helps to the Memory, and often direct us to new discoveries. But my Meaning is, that we should not take up any too hastily (which the Mind, that would always penetrate into the Causes of Things, and have Principles to rest on, is very apt to do,) till we have very well examined Particulars, and made several Experiments, in that thing which we would explain by our Hypothe¬ sis .. . at least that we take care, that the Name of Principles deceive us not, nor impose on us, by making us receive that for an unquestionable Truth, which is really, at best, but a very doubtful conjecture, such as are most (I had almost said all) of the Hypotheses in natural Philosophy.23

Locke’s remarks signal an important event in the history of the status of method during the Enlightenment. For they introduced an element of polemic and critique that had not previously been a dominant part of 21. Ibid., II, xii, § 2. 22. Ibid., IV, xii, § 12. 23. Ibid., § 13. Cf. in this regard the article by Laurens Laudan, “1 he Nature and Sources of I .ocke’s Views on I lypotheses,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVIII (1Q6-), pp. 211—23.

The Problem of Method

21

philosophical considerations of die issue. By illustrating the possibilities of error that might result from an incautious use of deductively gener¬ ated methodological principles in the form of hvpotheses, Locke brought the problem of mediod itself, and not just what mediod was generally supposed to achieve, into an even sharper focus. As a conse¬ quence of Locke’s influence, the question of what constituted the “im¬ proper” or “proper” method of philosophv became more frequently the object of independent philosophical reflection. And die matter of what was the improper and proper, the unreservedly false and die only reliably true mediod, came to be svmbolized for the “philosophies” by Descartes and Isaac Newton.24 It remained a constant and often-repeated gesture diroughout the course of the eighteenth century to compare the mediodologies of Descartes and Newton, most often at the expense of the former. As the validity of his ideas was more widelv recognized, Newton’s method gradually came to represent to virtually everyone who identified himself with the Enlightenment die only scientifically legitimate means to dis¬ cover and verify truth. In 1727, the year of Newton’s death, die perpetual secretary of the French Academy and a loval adherent of Cartesian philosophy, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, was the first to place Descartes and Newton side by side and, in his Elojje de M. Newton, to weigh impartially the relative merits of their diought.25 In 1732 New¬ ton’s star began its ultimately victorious ascendance in France when Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis (who later became the first president of the Berlin Academy under Frederick II) published his Discours sur les differentesfigures des astres, “the first book by a Frenchman fully to accept and clearly expound Newton’s theory of gravitation.”26 A few years later, Voltaire had made his voyage to England and returned a com¬ mitted proponent and propagandist of Newtonian natural philosophy. He noted with obvious satisfaction in his Elements de la philosophic de Newton of 1738 that he saw “minds in quite a great ferment in France, and the names of Descartes and Newton seem to be the words with

24. See the chapter by Alexandre Koyre, “Newton and Descartes,” in Newtonian Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 53—114. 25. See Vartanian, Descartes and Diderot, p. 140. See also Koyre, in “Newton and Descartes,” who cites, in a footnote on p. 53, die English translation oIElogium of Sir Isaac Newton (London, 1728). 26. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. II (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 136-37.

22

Herder’s Aesthetics

which the two parties scoff at one another”27 But by the time d’Alem¬ bert wrote his Preliminary Discourse in 1751, he was so confident that the superiority of Newton’s method was universally acknowledged that he could say with some equanimity of Descartes that while “his method alone would have sufficed to render him immortal,” it was nevertheless true of Newton (“that great genius”) that he “gave philosophy a form which apparently it is to keep.”28 The most concise and influential expression of the form Newton gave to philosophy comes at the end of the third book ol his Opticks of 1704. Here Newton explained the reasons for his adoption of a very particular method for physics, or what was then known as “natural philosophy”: As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting ot no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experi¬ ments, or other certain Truth. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing trom Experiments and Observations by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no Exception occur from Phenomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. . . . By this way ot Analysis we may proceed trom Compounds to Ingredients, and trom Motions to the Forces producing them; in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the argument end in the most general. This is the Method ot Analysis.29

By comparing his method to the one commonly practiced in mathemat¬ ics, Newton also stipulated that the process of resolution must precede the composition of all the elements under consideration.30 But New27. Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Elements de la philosophic dc Newton, in Oeuvres completes, vol. XXVIII (Paris: Antoine-Augustin Renouard, 1819), p. 320. 28. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, pp. 78—79- Sec the final chapter in the book by Ferdinand Rosenberger, Isaac Newton und seine physikalischen Prinzipicn: Ein Elauptstuck aus der Enwicklungsgeschichte der modemen Physik (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1895), titled “The Final Victory of Newtonian Physics,” pp. 507-26. 29. Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (New York: Dover, 1952), pp. +04-5- It is significant, though no surprise, that this passage was reproduced in French under the article "Analyticjue in the En¬ cyclopedic, vol. I, pp. 403—4. 30. On Newton and his concept of analysis, see Tonclli, “Analysis and Synthesis,” p.

The Problem of Method

23

ton, in contrast to either Descartes or Locke, quite expressly gave his method a particular name, calling it very purposefully the “Method of Analysis.” This fact in itself would illustrate at the very least a height¬ ened sensibility with regard to the significance of the method one used. But even more striking is Newton’s way of describing this “analytic” method. Quite beyond its objective content, Newton’s pronouncement on method is carried by a rhetorical pathos that was designed to under¬ score the distinctive advantage of his procedure as opposed to all others. He clearly implied that ail other methods, by virtue of their nonanalytic nature, were condemned to produce only confusion and speculative chimeras. Most particularly, Newton explicitly rejected the use of de¬ ductive hypotheses as explanatory principles in the investigation of natural phenomena.31 With that, Newton introduced a strongly polem¬ ical element into the discussion that had been only vaguely intimated by Locke and would soon dominate the methodological debates of the later Enlightenment. As d’Alembert, one of Newton’s most energetic followers in France, categorically asserted, “in a well-constructed phi¬ losophy, any deduction which is based on facts or recognized truths is preferable to one which is supported only by hypotheses.”32 After Newton, it was no longer just a matter of employing any method; it was now a question of whether one’s method was the “right” one or not. As Peter Gay has put it: “Newton was right, and hence the Enlightenment, basing itself on Newton’s method as much as on Newton’s discoveries, must be right as well—it was as simple as that.”33 Even though Newton of course intended his remarks to apply—if not exclusively, then primarily—to physics, one of the most significant aspects about the reception of his ideas in the ensuing century was that they were perceived as having implications not only for the study of natural science, but for the study of all of the human sciences as well. They were seen as having equal validity for the investigation of moral, political, social, philosophical, and, by extension, aesthetic issues.34

31. See, however, the chapter by Koyre, “Concept and Experience in Newton’s Scien¬ tific Thought,” in Newtonian Studies, p. 32, in which he reminds us “ . . . that the term ‘hypothesis’ is never a term with a univocal meaning and that it covers a whole gamut of meanings which, moreover, slide very easily one into the other.” 32. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 7. 33. Gay, Enlightenment, vol. II, p. 137. 34. In Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophic und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. II (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911), p. 401, Ernst Cassirer notes that, for his eighteenth-

24-

Herder’s Aesthetics /

The Abbe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, who was one of the Enlight¬ enment’s most accomplished and influential students of philosophical method, is a unique figure in this regard, for while he acknowledged Locke as his philosophical mentor, he also consciously attempted to apply Newton’s methodological principles to the study of human knowledge in particular. The title of his first work, the Essai sur I’origine des connoissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge) of 1746, already implies a great deal of Condillac’s basic approach, for he translated the familiar title of Locke’s Essay into French with the signifi¬ cant addition of the subtitle: “A Work in which Everything that con¬ cerns the Understanding is reduced to a Single Principle.” Condillac wanted before all else to align epistemology with the rigors of the method practiced in the natural sciences, and, in analogy to Newton’s law of gravity, to find the “one principle” governing all cognition.35 Yet his method of revealing this single principle was arguably as important as that principle itself. In his Essay, Condillac expressly preserved Locke’s distinction be¬ tween the two “Fountains of Knowledge” that Locke had called sensa¬ tion and reflection. But Condillac sought to show more precisely than Locke had done how every operation of the mind—distinguishing, comparing, abstracting and compounding our ideas—arose from the relations struck by the interplay of those basic elements of our knowl¬ edge. In one of the first paragraphs of the Essay Condillac thus postu¬ lated that both “the sensations . . . and the operations of the mind, are the materials of all our knowledge; materials which our reflection em¬ ploys, when by compounding it seeks for the relations which they contain.”36 One of Condillac’s greatest achievements, not least of all in the eyes of his contemporaries, was to have elaborated in a more consistent fashion than Locke the implications ot his philosophy by carefully applying a particular method. This method was what he, in conscious reference to Newton, called analvsis.3 As Condillac stated in century followers, “Newton was not in the first place the discoverer of the law ot gravitation, but rather the founder of a new way of investigating.” 35. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19X2), p. 199. 36. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1756; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, i9"’0, I, 1, i, § 537. For a broad survey of the philosophical importance of analysis for the thinkers ot the Enlightenment, see the introduction in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlighten-

The Problem of Method

25

his Essay: “The only means of acquiring knowledge, is to ascend to the origin of our ideas, to trace their formation, and to compare them under all their possible relations, which is what I call to analyze .”38 In this description of its meaning, the analytic method is the frame¬ work around which Condillac constructed his entire philosophy. “Anal¬ ysis,” as he once wrote on a different occasion, “is the only method by which accurate knowledge is to be acquired.”39 In Condillac’s under¬ standing of the term, analysis meant the inductive process of isolating the individual constituents of complex concepts and, after breaking these down into their simplest elements, then tracing them back to their original properties or essential characteristics. But analysis also included for Condillac, as it had for his predecessors as well, the process of recomposition that examines the development of ideas as they are combined into the ever more abstract and refined structures of knowl¬ edge. Condillac phrased this necessity more clearly in his Logic, in which he explained that “we make this decomposition only because an instant is not sufficient for us to study all those objects. But we only decompose in order to recompose, and when the knowledge is acquired, the things instead of being successive, have within the mind the same simulta¬ neous order which they have without.”40 As we have seen, the ultimate purpose of analysis, and Condillac’s declared aim in the Essay, culmi¬ nated in the inductive formulation of a single principle that would embrace all of the phenomena from which it was extracted. To this end, he thus recognized both the decompounding and compounding of ideas as being essential in the discovery of their origin and the relations among them.41 Yet Condillac’s definition of analysis, like that of Newton, also reveals an emphatically polemical cast. Condillac claimed that, whereas analysis was the only means by which one could discover new truths, synthesis was, in contrast, the pernicious source of misunderstanding and mis¬ leading fictions. And Condillac drew this distinction quite openly along ideological lines: the Newtonians proceeded analytically, or according ment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). 38. Condillac, Essay, I, 2, vii, § 67. 39- Condillac, The Logic, trans. and intro. W. R. Aibury (New York: Abaris Books, 1980), I, ii. 40. Ibid., p. 16.

4i- See the detailed discussion of Condillac’s conception of analysis in the introduc¬ tion to Condillac, The Logic, p. 21.

26

Herder’s Aesthetics

to experimentation and verifiable observation, whereas the Cartesians reasoned synthetically by beginning with “truths” that were deductivelv generated from hypotheses, abstract principles, and general axioms.42 Condillac made several explicit attacks in his Essay against the svnthetic method, as for example when he criticized the use of first principles as the starting point of one’s investigation: “The inutility and abuse of principles appears especially in the synthetic method; in which truth seems to be forbid to make her appearance, unless she has been pre¬ ceded by a great number of axioms, definitions, and other propositions of pretended fertility.”43 Thus, even while asserting his allegiance to inductive analysis, Con¬ dillac was at the same time distancing himself from the Cartesian prac¬ tice of reasoning that he equated solely with synthesis. But it was obviously not the case that Condillac objected to the formation of principles per se. His own Essay, as its subtitle stressed, was a clear enough statement of his belief in their usefulness. He insisted, rather, that explanatory principles should arise out of an analysis of particular instances and not provide, as in the example of hypotheses, the measure by which one conducted the train of reasoning: If therefore we must have principles, this does not imply that we ought to begin with them in order to descend afterwards to less general notices; but that we ought to have made a diligent study of particular truths, and to have ascended bv different abstractions up to universal propositions. This kind of principles are [sic] naturally determined bv the particular ideas that conducted us to them; 42. In a footnote to the Essay, I, 2, vii, § 63, Condillac writes: “Has DesCartes, for example, thrown any farther light on his metaphysical meditations, by attempting to demonstrate them according to this method? Is it possible to find worse demonstrations than those of Spinosa? I might likewise mention Mallebranche, w ho has sometimes made use of the synthetic method; Arnaud, who used it in a yen’ bad treatise on ideas, and in other places; and the author of the action of God upon his creatures, as well as several others. One would think that those writers, in order to demonstrate geo¬ metrically, imagined it was sufficient to range the different parts of an argument in a certain order, under the title of axioms, definitions, postulates, 43. Essay, I, 2, vii, § 63. In a footnote to the previous paragraph, Condillac explained what he meant here by “principles”: “I do not understand here by principles those observ ations which are confirmed by experience. I take this word in the usual sense of philosophers, wffio give the name of principles to general and abstract propositions, on which they build their systems.” Condillac’s campaign against the Cartesian school of rationalism culminated in his Traite dessystcmcs of 1749. See in this regard Ellen McNiven Hine, A Critical Study of Condillac's “Traite des Systemes" (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), esp. the “Introduction,” pp. 1-21.

The Problem of Method

27

their full extent is perceived, and we may be sure of using them with the utmost exactness.44

In Condillac’s hands, then, analysis was at once a tool to consolidate and strengthen the implications contained within the premises of Locke’s philosophy—namely diat all our knowledge is derived from the compounding and comparing of the original ideas we receive through the experience of sensation and reflection—and at the same time it was a means to repudiate in practice those tenets of Cartesian rationalism that fell under the name of synthesis. It is indicative of the success of Condillac’s attack on synthesis and his persuasive advocacy of analysis as the only acceptable form of philosophical discourse that his arguments were reproduced, at some points verbatim, in the article “Analyse” for the Encyclopedic.45 The constructive, or positive, aspect of Condillac’s use of the analytic method arose from his interest in the actual genesis of knowledge, in the stages of its development, and in the specific influences that contributed toward forming its current character. In order to understand the present condition of human knowledge, he felt we must try to uncover its past and explain how the transition from one to the other occurred. Tracing the origin of human knowledge also meant illustrating how it evolved out of its original state to assume its modern complexity. Condillac’s analytic procedure thus entailed, as it were, the philosophical recon¬ struction of the history of the human mind. This involves (as I will show later) Condillac’s intense preoccupation with language, because he be¬ lieved that, without the use of signs, the transition from the merely passive registering of sense impressions to their apprehension through the activity of reflection could not take place. Condillac accordingly spent a large portion of his first work in showing that, in the absence of signs, human reason would never be able to progress beyond a very primitive level, much less be capable of theoretical knowledge.46 It is true that this approach was at least implied in Locke’s intention to show how the simple ideas of experience developed into more complex and 44- Condillac, Essay, I, 2, vii, § 68. See also the discussion of Condillac in Tonelli, "Analysis and Synthesis,” pp. 186-87. 45. See the article “Analyse” in the Encyclopedic, vol. I, p. 401, in which, in addition to its definition, analysis is described as the “enemy of vague principles and of all that which could be contrary to exactitude and precision.” 46. See the introduction by Albury, The Logic, p. 22.

28

Herder’s Aesthetics

general notions. Yet, as in the case of analysis, Condillac felt compelled to refine into systematic purity what he perceived to have been only unclearly suggested or inadequately fulfilled by what d’Alembert had called Locke’s “experimental physics of the soul.”47 As crucial as their ideas and basic approach were to become for Herder’s aesthetic theory, neither Condillac nor Locke ever wrote any¬ thing approaching a theory of aesthetics, although one finds isolated comments regarding art and the beautiful scattered throughout both thinkers’ works. But it was more the way in which these thinkers, and especially Condillac, viewed philosophy as a discipline—and in particu¬ lar the claim he made for the scientific status of his labors due to the method he acknowledged—that allowed his thought to become dis¬ seminated within most of the social sciences.48 Through the broad influence of his ideas, Condillac thus contributed decisively to the intimate association of aesthetics with theories of cognition that was so representative of aesthetic philosophy during the later Enlighten¬ ment.49 The person who definitively cemented this relationship, for the Germans at least, was the Prussian professor of logic, Alexander Gott¬ lieb Baumgarten, the thinker whom Herder once somewhat precipi¬ tously hailed as “the true Aristotle of our time” (SW XXXII, 83). Until well after the mid-eighteenth century, the German school of institutional philosophy generally referred to as the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition remained resistant to the developments that were taking place in England and France. One of the main reasons for the initial inability of these new ideas to gain the sort of following they enjoyed in the French and English Enlightenment is above all attributable to the enormous authority commanded by, as Kant expressed it, die “strict method of the famous Wolff, the greatest of all dogmatic philoso¬ phers.”50 Christian Wolff’s influence and prestige appeared all the more unassailable when, after having been banned from Prussia in 1723 by 47. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 84. 48. See Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i960), p. 165. 49. See Herbert Dicckmann, “Asthctische Theorie und Kritik in der Aufklarung. Einige Beispiele fur moderne Tendenzen,” in Diderot and die Auflddrumj: Aufsdtze zur europdischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts, trans. Senta Metz and Karin Kersten (Stutt¬ gart: Metzler, 1972), p. 4450. Kant, from the “Preface to the Second Edition” of the Kritik der rcinen Vemunft, in Werhause/abe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. Ill (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 36.

The Problem of Method

29

King Frederick William I, he triumphandy returned to Halle at the behest of Frederick II in 1740, which was tantamount to an official endorsement of his thought.51 In his reliance on Leibniz and, ultimately, on Descartes, Wolff ex¬ pressly equated his method of philosophy with that of mathematics, since the latter ensured by its very nature the certainty and evidence of its results.52 Wolff’s “strict method” thus consisted primarily in the demonstration and application of deductive principles, axioms, postu¬ lates, and theorems, or in precisely what Condillac had called the syn¬ thetic method. Neither empirical evidence nor actual experience, Wolff taught, but the calculable and abstract certainty of the deductive proof constructed in analogy to mathematical demonstration was the reliable basis of philosophical practice. Baumgarten, as one of the most success¬ ful students of Wolff, was certainly no less accomplished in manipulat¬ ing this method than his teacher.53 It was in this regard that Kant, for example, also especially praised Baumgarten “for the richness and the precision of his doctrine,” and Kant used Baumgarten’s Metaphysica and Ethica as the bases of his lectures on these topics.54 But the indirect 51. In his magisterial work, Geschichte der Komglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900), pp. 232—33, Adolf Harnack refers to “that infamous cabinet decree of November 8, 1723 . . . , according to which Wolff was forced to leave Halle within 48 hours or face hanging.” See also Max Wundt, Die deutsche Scbulphilosophie im Zeitalter der A ufkldrung (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1945), pp. 199-200. 52. On Wolff’s concept and use of method, see the essay bv Hans-Jurgen Engfer, “Zur Bedeutung Wolffs fur die Methodendiskussion der deutschen Aufklarungsphilosophie: Analytische und synthetische Methode bei Wolff und beim vorkritischen Kant,” in Christian Wolff, 1679-1754: Interpretationen zu seiner Philosophie und deren Wirkung, ed. Werner Schneiders (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), p. 53, and Engfer’s book, Philosophie als Analysis, p. 227. See in addition the article by Giorgio Tonelli, “Der Streit fiber die mathematische Methode in der Philosophie in der ersten Halfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Entstehung von Kants Schrift fiber die ‘Deutlichkeit’,” Archiv fur Philosophie, IX (i959), esp. pp. 51—5353. In the essay Von BaumgartensDenkart in semen Schriften [On Baumgarten’s Mode of Thinking in his Writings], (SW XXXII, 183), Herder noted, with obvious approval, that even during the period of Wolff’s ostracism, Baumgarten had loyally followed his mentor’s teachings: “Baumgarten’s academic studies appeared at just the time in which Wolff’s philosophy was deemed heretical in Germany—, motive enough for a head that was born for reflection, and until then prevented from it by theology and word studies. He broke through, through the obstacle of this disreputable name: it was precisely the obstacle that encouraged him; his genius became active, and thus Baumgarten the philosopher was formed by Wolffs writings.” 54. Kant, Nachricht von der Einnchtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre, von 1765-1766, in Werkausgabe, vol. II, p. 911.

30

Herder’s A esthetics

influence of Locke’s philosophy emerged nonetheless through Baumgarten’s proposal of the new science he called “aesthetica,” which was devoted to the investigation of that “Fountain of Knowledge” that Locke had called sensation. Like Wolff, Baumgarten owed his principles of human psychology in large part to a treatise published by Leibniz in 1684, titled Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis (Meditations on Cognition, Truth, and Ideas).55 In this work, Leibniz sought to improve on Descartes’s por¬ trayal of cognition as consisting only in the varying degrees of “clarity” or “distinctness” with which ideas were represented within the mind.56 Leibniz argued that at the lowest level of conscious attention were the “dark” impressions that were insufficient to allow us to retain and to recall an object or idea, and for this reason were relatively unimportant to the operations of the intellect. “Clear” cognition, on the other hand, already possesses enough characteristics, or “requisita,” for the mind to recognize an object again. Clear cognition can then be of two sorts, “confused” or “distinct.” Here “confused” means that, although the object is perceived per se, its characteristics are not sufficiently determi¬ nate to allow one to distinguish it from other objects, and it merely enabled one to register only the very imprecise sensible qualities of color, smell, taste, and so on, all of which have certain properties, but not such that we can attach to communicable marks or “notae.”57 We have a “distinct” concept, then, when we can enumerate by means of such marks several distinguishing characteristics of a perception that 55. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Meditationes de Cojynitione, Veritate et Ideis, in Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt, vol. IV (Berlin: Weidmann, 1880), pp. 422— 426. For a careful exposition of Leibniz’s specific influence on Wolff, see the introduction by Arndt to Christian Wolff', Vernunftiqe Gedanken von den Krdften des menschlichen Verstandes und ihrem richtiqen Gebrauche in Erkenntnis der Wahrheit (Deutsche Logik), vol. I of Gesammelte Werke, ed. J. Ecole, J. E. Hofmann, M. Thomann, H. W. Arndt (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965), p. 19. See also Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 342. 56. Leibniz, Meditationes, p. 422: “Cognition is thus either dark or clear, and clear cognition is either confused or distinct, distinct cognition, however, is either inadequate or adequate and, similarly, the latter is either symbolic or intuitive; if, however, cognition is simultaneously adequate and intuitive, then it is the most perfect.” 57. Interestingly, Leibniz compared confused cognition with the way in which artists judged what was “right” or “wrong” in a representation without being able to give the reason for their judgment (ibid., p. 423): “Similarly, we see that painters and other artists appropriately recognize what is correct and what is erroneous often without being able to give the reason for their judgment and say to their questioner, they miss something, I know not what, in the object that displeases them.”

The Problem of Method

31

allow us to set it apart from all similar perceptions, and Leibniz called this a “nominal definition” (definitionem nominalem). Complex con¬ cepts, which may or may not be resolvable into such distinct concepts, give rise then to an “inadequate” or “symbolic” cognition. A “symbolic” cognition exists when we use a sign to mark a complex concept whose individual characteristics we cannot conceive at once (Leibniz gives the example of a thousand-sided polygon) but that, with careful analysis, can in fact be made distinct. Although Leibniz doubted that it could ever be achieved, he postulated that the most perfect cognition would result if one could render each part of a complex concept absolutely distinct, thus producing a completely “adequate” cognition, while one simultaneously retained the whole intuitively before the mind.58 Now, it is evident that Leibniz’s epistemology, like every other psy¬ chological theory that appeared during the Enlightenment, also entails the assumption that each concept could be resolved into several constit¬ uent parts. But Leibniz was not interested in tracing each concept to its original properties and showing how these were combined in the cogni¬ tive process. Instead, he was concerned with the ways in which complex concepts were deductively manipulated, or synthesized, in forming new abstract concepts. In essence, he was involved in the analysis of the operation of synthesis.59 Leibniz explained that there are two ways in which one may determine the truth—or, in his terminology, the possi¬ bility—of a complex or symbolic concept, a procedure he called the construction of “definitiones reales.” The first sort of “real definition” is an a priori procedure in which one analyzes the components of a concept in order to determine if there is an inherent contradiction involved in its “requisita.”60 That is, a complex concept is only possible, or true, when all of the simpler or more distinct concepts that are adumbrated by symbolic cognition are not logically incompatible with one another, thus making the concept possible.61 The other sort of real 58. See Robert McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought (Toronto: Uni¬ versity of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 69-93. 59- See also Leibniz’s essay, De Synthesi et Analysi universali sen Arte inveniendi et judicandi, in Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. VII, pp. 292-98. 60. Leibniz, Meditationes, p. 425: “Finally, it is also apparent which idea is true and which is false, for it is true when its concept is possible, false when it contains a contradic¬ tion. We recognize the possibility of a thing, however, either a priori or a posteriori; and, indeed, it is a priori when we resolve the concept into its requisites or into other concepts whose possibility is known, and when we know that nothing is incompatible in them.” 61. See the introduction to Wolff by Arndt in Vemiinftipfe Gedanken, p. 65.

U

Herder ys A esthetics

definition is an a posteriori procedure in which one simply determines whether that which die concept represents can be experienced as actu¬ ally existent.62 By performing such “real definitions,” Leibniz felt that one could solve the difficulty of ascertaining the truth of even' proposi¬ tion in a manner that went beyond Descartes's relatively narrow criteria of producing only clear and distinct ideas. Demonstrating and perfecting this logical procedure, then, consti¬ tuted the traditional province of systematic philosophy as it was taught in Wolff's more methodical version at German Protestant universities during the first half of the eighteenth century.63 Although the funda¬ mental role of sensation was certainly acknowledged within this system, the merely “clear" and “confused" impressions that the senses delivered into the mind w ere generally considered to be too particular, disjunc¬ tive, and transitory, and hence an obstacle in the deductive pursuit of stable, abstract truth. It is one of Baumgarten’s foremost distinctions that, in the first volume of his Aesthetica of 1750, he for the first time proposed the systematic studv of just these sense impressions, or what in the language of Leibniz wrere described as “sensate cognition.” But by thus concentrating on the so-called lower faculties that governed sen¬ sate cognition, Baumgarten did not effect a radical departure from the accepted practices and assumptions of institutional logic.64 He sought, rather, to elaborate the implications of traditional philosophical inquiry for the study of artistic beauty, and specifically of poetic beauty, while staying within the theoretical boundaries that Leibniz and Wolff had already systematically circumscribed around the realm of the clear and confused perceptions of sensate cognition. '‘AESTHETICS,” Baum¬ garten therefore proclaimed in 1750, “is the science of sensate cogni¬ tion."65 In further defining aesthetics as an “art analogous to reason¬ ing," Baumgarten emphasized that his science wras intended to be in complete theoretical conformin' with the psvchological assumptions 62. Leibniz. Meditatwnes, p. 425: “We recognize possibility a posteriori, however, when we learn that a thing actually exists, for what actually exists or has existed is in any case possible.-" 63. See on this development Wundt, Die deutsebe Schulphilosopbie, p. 153. 64. On Baumgarten’s relationship to his predecessors, see Ernst Cassirer, Freibeit und Form (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaff, 1975), p. 74. Cf. also Ursula Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis: Die Rolle der Sinnlicbkeit in der Astbctik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumpfarten (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 19^2). 65. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Theoretiscbe Astbctik: Die pfrundlcjjendcn Abscbmtte aus der “Aestbetica” (1750IS8), ed. and trans. Hans Rudolf Schweitzer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), § 1.

The Problem of Method

33

and deductive method that were familiar from Wolffian logic; merely the objects of inquiry were different.66 Thus Baumgarten specifically provided that the goal of aesthetics did not consist in achieving the perfection of metaphysical truth, which was the goal of logic, but rather in the “perfection of sensate cognition ”67 A poem that meets the criteria of Baumgarten’s definition of beauty is therefore a “perfect sensate discourse.”68 A large part of his Aesthetica is therefore occupied with demonstrating how one determines the possibility, or truth, as well as its opposite, of sensate cognition as it is manifested in poetrv. Bv insisting that, in addition to the synthetic operations of pure reason, sensation could also constitute an object of serious philosophical in¬ quiry, Baumgarten nevertheless solidified the connection between the philosophy of art and theories of cognition that would characterize aesthetic theories during the rest of the century and into the next. When Herder went to Konigsberg in 1762 and, after a brief venture in the study of medicine, turned to theology and metaphysics under Kant, he was initiated into a heady atmosphere of transition in the orientation of German philosophy, in which Kant himself would come to play a substantial role. Although the Leibniz-Wolffian school continued to thrive at many universities, including Konigsberg, it was being forcibly challenged in several quarters by representatives of the French and English Enlightenment. This was occurring most visibly and influen¬ tially in the Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters in Berlin, which, twenty years before, Frederick II had begun to invigorate after it had stagnated for nearly a quarter of a century. In his history of the Berlin academy, Adolf Harnack noted that it was a matter of the highest importance that the two Frenchmen who exerted such an enormous influence on the intellectual climate of mid-eighteenth-centurv Prussia, namely Maupertuis and Voltaire, were devoted adherents of both New¬ ton and Locke.69 When Maupertuis became president of the academy in 66. Ibid. See the informed discussion of Baumgarten in Alfred Baeumler, Das Irrationalitdtsproblem in der Asthetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), pp. 195-96. 67. Baumgarten, Theoretische Asthetik, § 14. 68. Baumgarten first formulated this definition in 1735 in the Meditationes philosophical de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, § 9. See Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 350. See also Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis, p. 18. 69. See Harnack, Geschichte der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, p. 410. Cf. also Harcourt Brown, “Maupertuis philosophe: Enlightenment and the Berlin Academy,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, XXIV (1963), pp. 255— 269.

34

Herder’s Aesthetics

1746, he energetically continued his efforts to propagate the views of these English thinkers on German soil. Maupertuis unavoidably found resistance, however, among the principal representatives of the Leib¬ niz—Wolffian school that formed the traditional basis of the academy. There thus arose, at the very moment when Frederick the Great was attempting to rejuvenate the floundering academy, a sharp ideological ^division between those of its members who professed allegiance to one of these two main philosophical camps. As an almost inevitable result, the Berlin academy soon proved to be a focal point of the debate concerning the proper method of philosophical discourse, and, not surprisingly, the terms around which the controversy revolved were those of synthesis and analysis. Herder’s own thought, and more specif¬ ically his philosophy of aesthetics, was born in the context of the diminishing influence of the Leibniz-Wolff-Baumgarten school as it was being modified by the English and French theories of cognition and psychology that were then developing an increasingly strong presence in the rest of Germany. In what follows, my objective will be to show how this was reflected in Herder’s earliest known work, the Versuch iiber das Sein. Because the Versuch iiber das Sein was excluded from Bernhard Suphan’s authoritative edition of Herder’s collected works, it has until recendy remained practically unknown among Herder scholars.70 In this short work of 1763, Herder critically examined one of Kant’s more well-known precritical works, Der einzig mdjjliche Beweisjjrund zu einer Demonstration desDaseins Gottes (The Only Possible Basis of Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God), which Kant had published early in 1763. The way in which Herder sought to expose the logical flaw 70. See Hans Dietrich Irmscher, “Eine Ausgabe von Herders 'Studien und Entwiirfen’,” in Biickeburpfer Gesprdche iiber Johann Gottfried Herder (Rinteln: C. Bosendahl, 1980), p. 147, in which he explains that Bernhard Suphan, according to the predilections of his time, was primarily interested in complete and fully rounded works, and not in their stages of composition. In Herder nach seinem Leben and seinen Werken darqestcllt, vol. I (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1877), p. 32, Rudolf Haym saw the Versuch iiber das Sein essentially as nothing more than a mere precis of Kant’s work and ignored it. Beate Monika Dreike, Herders Naturaujfassunjj in ihrer Beanflussuncj dutch Leibniz' Philosophic (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973), p. 7, is one of the few scholars to mention the Versuch iiber das Sein after Haym’s dismissal of the work. The text was first published by Gottfried Martin, “Herder als Schuler Kants,” in Kant-Studien, XEI (1936), pp. 294-306. It has only recently been made widely available, with an excellent commentary by Ulrich Gaier, in: Herder, Werke, vol. I (Frankfurt a/M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), pp. 9-21. All references to the Versuch iiber das Sein will be to this edition and incorporated into the text within parentheses, e.g., (W 844).

The Problem of Method

35

in Kant’s ontological proof of God’s existence dramatically reveals that Herder had already begun to assimilate the contemporary issues we have been discussing so far concerning philosophical method and the origins of knowledge. Although the Versuch iiber das Sein represents the first time Herder attempted to focus his intellectual energies on a specific philosophical problem, this very early work came to determine (as previously indicated) a significant part of his subsequent thought, including the direction his aesthetic theory would take. But in order to understand Herder’s essay we must first briefly examine the work of Kant to which Herder responded. In Der emzig rndgliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins

Gottes, Kant began, following the logical procedure of a Leibnizian “definitionis realis” a priori, with a demonstration of the existence of external reality in order to establish a basis from which he could show how the Divine Being must therefore necessarily exist.71 We must posit the possibility of a reality outside of our minds, Kant reasoned, for if there were no such reality, or “Being,” then there would be no material for our thought, thus negating the grounds of all possibility.72 The existence of reality is thus assured a priori. In order to explain this external reality itself, however, we must determine its ultimate ground, its real cause, which provided the original possibility of all existence. Thus, from the logical requirement of this contingency, flowed the only possible proof of God’s existence.73 In Kant’s words:

Because the

necessary Being contains the real basis of all other possibilities, every other thing will only then be possible in so far as it receives its ground from it. Accordingly, every other thing can occur only as a result of this necessary Being, and thus the possibility and existence of all other things depends upon it.”74 71. In the “Conclusion” to the first section of Der einzig mqtjliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, in Werkausjjabe, vol. II, p. 653-, Kant states this explicitly. “The proof of the existence of God which we give is merely built on the fact that something is possible. Accordingly, it is a proof that can be developed completely a priori.” 72. Kant, Der einzipj mdjyliche Beweisgrund, p. 638: “Now it all existence can be can¬ celled [iaufyehoben], then nothing at all is posited, it is not even given, no material for anything to be thought, and all possibility completely falls away.” See also Gaier’s commentary, p. 845, et passim. 73. On Kant’s distinctive contribution to the history of ontological proofs of God’s existence, see Dieter Henrich, Der ontolojyische Gottesbeweis\ Sein Problem und seine Geschichte in derNeuzeit (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, i960), p. 185. 74. Kant, Der einzipj mopliche Beweisprund, p. 644.

36

Herder’s A esthetics

The necessary “Being” that contains the “final real basis” of reality is, Kant finally concluded, what we call God.75 What should interest us here are not so much the particulars of Kant’s argument, but rather the way in which he constructed it. How did Kant arrive at the definition of the concept of existence itself on which his argument rests? The ques¬ tion of method, always present in eighteenth-century philosophical treatises, is thus implicitly raised in this argument as well. But it was a question that had already occupied Kant for some time and for which he had provided specific answers. On May 28,1761, the Berlin academy had announced a prize topic that demanded an explanation of whether metaphysics could attain the same certainty of which the science of geometry was capable, and if it were incapable of a similar degree of certainty, what then the nature of its method was.76 Johann Georg Sulzer, a respected proponent ofWolffian philosophy, was then the head of the philosophical section of the academy and, under his aegis, Moses Mendelssohn was awarded the prize in 1763 for his essay Uber die Evidenz in metaphysischen Wissenschoften (On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences). Put briefly, Men¬ delssohn argued that, while metaphysical truths may possess the same certainty as is evident in the truths of mathematics, they are not capable of the same intelligibility.77 Although Mendelssohn maintained that the “analysis of concepts” was the proper way of proceeding in meta¬ physics, he nevertheless conformed to the Cartesian and Leibnizian tradition of equating the method of mathematics with that of philoso¬ phy.78 Kant, then less well known than Mendelssohn, also wrote an

75. Kant (ibid., p. 651), concludes that "''Something absolutely necessarily exists. This something is unified in its essence, simple in its substance, a spirit according to its nature, eternal in its duration, unchanging in its condition, complete with respect to all possible and real things. There is a God.11 76. “We wish to know: Whether metaphysical truths in general, and in particular the first principles of natural theology and moral in’, are capable of the same distinct proofs as geometric truths, and, if they are not capable of the aforementioned proofs, what the actual nature of their certainty is, what degree of certainty one can achieve, and whether this degree is sufficient for complete conviction.” Cited in Engfer, Philosophic alsAnalysis, p. 26. 77. Moses Mendelssohn, Uber die Evidenz in metaphysischen Wisscnschaften, in Sclmftcn zur Philosophic, Aesthetik und Apolojjetik, ed. Moritz Brasch, vol. I (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), pp. 45-104. SeeTonelli, “Der Streit fiber die mathematische Methode in der Philosophic,” p. 6r. 78. Mendelssohn, Uber die Evidenz, p. so. See Engfer, “Zur Bedcutung Wolffs fiir die Methodcndiskussion in der dcutschcn Aufklarungsphilosophie,” p. 59.

The Problem of Method

37

essay in response to the prize topic, titled Untersuchunjj iiber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsdtze der natiirlichen Theologie und der Moral (Inves¬ tigation of the Distinctness of the First Principles of Natural Theology and Morality), which he also published in 1763. In his essay Kant decisively broke with this tradition and declared; The true method ot metaphysics is basically identical with the one Newton introduced into the natural sciences.”79 With that proclamation, a new age in German philosophy, and one that had the greatest consequences for Herder, formally commenced. Even during the earliest years of his professorship at Konigsberg, Kant had followed the developments taking place in English and French philosophy with great interest and sympathy. He not only shared their preoccupation with the problem of method but also began to assume a similar stance toward the particular method of synthesis. We see this even in Der einzig rvw£fliche Beweisjjruwd in which he disparaged “the mania for method, the imitation of mathematicians.”80 In his contribution to the academy’s prize competition, he sharply distin¬ guished between the procedures of metaphysics and mathematics as being characterized, respectively, by the analytic and synthetic methods. “Mathematics arrives at all of its definitions synthetically, philosophy, however, analytically.”81 Newton, as we know, harbored a severe dis¬ trust toward synthesis in the elaboration of the concepts of philosophy, as did Condillac and the leading representatives of the French Enlight¬ enment following him. This skepticism similarly motivated Kant to limit the synthetic procedure entirely to mathematics, as he claimed that it was in keeping with the nature of that discipline that one deductively generated definitions on the basis of already proven principles. The concepts produced by a mathematical definition do not exist prior to the definition itself, he argued, but arise from the synthesis of the compo¬ nent parts of the object being defined. Just the opposite, however, is true of philosophy: “With the definitions of philosophy it is an entirely different matter. Here the concept of a thing is already given, but confused or not adequately defined. I have to analyze [zerpfliedern\ it, compare the separated properties with the given concepts in every sort 79. Kant, Untersuchung iiber die Deutlichkeit dev Grundsdtze der natiirlichen Theologie und der Moral, in Werkausgabe, vol. II, p. 756. 80. Kant, Der einzig mogliche Beweisgrund, p. 630. 81. Kant, Untersuchung iiber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsdtze, p. 744-

38

Herder’s A esthetics

of case in order to make this abstract thought comprehensive and definite.”82 Analysis, not synthesis, was according to Kant the only secure method of metaphysics. The task of philosophy is to explain concepts that are already given—but the meanings of which were obscure—by breaking down these concepts into their fundamental constituents, or “proper¬ ties,” in order to render their various parts, and the relations that obtain between them, into the distinct ideas that we more readily grasp. Philos¬ ophy does not strive, therefore, for a quantitative or synthetic increase of human knowledge, but for the more precise understanding of the knowledge and concepts we by nature acquire through experience. Without the exhaustive analysis of each concept employed in a logical proof into absolutely distinct and certain ideas, a philosopher’s argu¬ ment would thus precariously rest on possibly false assumptions. And it was in the failure of previous thinkers to observe this dictum, Kant observed, that metaphysics as a whole stood on such uncertain ground.83 This is precisely the point at which Herder, in his Versuch iiber das Sein, set about to attack Kant’s ontological proof of God’s existence. We have already seen how Kant based his demonstration of God’s existence on the general concept of “Being.” According to Kant’s own criteria. Herder argued, one would therefore expect that this concept of exist¬ ence itself would be subjected at the outset to a rigorous and thorough analysis. Yet, in the Der einzipf mojyliche Beweisjyrund, Kant himself al¬ lowed: “If one realizes that our entire store of knowledge finallv ends in unanalyzable [unaufloslich] concepts, then one must also grasp that there will be some that are almost unanalyzable, that is, where the properties are only slightly clearer and simpler than the thing itself. This is the case with our explanation of existence.”84 Thus Kant admitted that his concept of existence could not be further 82. Ibid., p. 744. On the importance of this essay by Kant for the later course of German philosophy, see Engfer, “Zur Bedeutung Wolffs fur die Methodendiskussion in der deutschen Aufldarungsphilosophie,” p. 51. 83. In the Nachricht von der Einrichtunc\en seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre, von 176S-1766, in Werkausyabe, vol. II, p. 910-11, Kant referred again briefly to his essay on the “distinctness of principles,” stating with regard to metaphysics: “I have tried to show in a short and rapidly written work: that this science, despite the great efforts of scholars on its behalf, is still so imperfect and uncertain because its proper procedure has been mistaken in that it is not synthetic, as that of mathematics, but rather analytic” 84. Kant, Der einzipj mocjlichc Bnveistjrund, p. 633.

The Problem of Method

39

analyzed, but that he had only proffered an a priori proof of its pos¬ sibility. In his Versuch fiber das Sein, Herder, using Kant’s own concep¬ tual armature, followed the logical implications of Kant s admission to their natural conclusion and thereby sought to dismantle the crux of Kant’s argument. If the very basis of one’s proof is “unanalyzable” and therefore lacking the certainty of a distinct concept, then it is as if one were to build one’s house on wet sand. If existence itself cannot be proven, Herder pointedly reasoned, then it is logically impossible to prove thereby the existence of God: “If Existence cannot be demon¬ strated—neither can the existence of God” (W 19). But Herder did not believe that ‘Being’ itself was unprovable, he just thought that Kant had gone about it in the wrong way. In reality, Herder felt, there is a much simpler solution, one that dispensed with a priori proofs and depended solely on the touchstone of experience. It is significant that, in order to establish the terms of his own argument, Herder began the Versuch fiber das Sein with general epis¬ temological reflections by making a somewhat playful reference to Locke’s Essay: “It is a well-known truth that once accidentally flowed from the beard of Aristotle and, ever since Locke raised it again, was parroted everywhere: that all of our concepts are sensate [sinnlich], and the empty tablet which our soul resembled at birth was repeated every¬ where” (W 9-10). While allowing for the somewhat playfully satirical motive of his remarks, we can nevertheless already see that Herder recognized the fundamental importance of that source of our ideas which Locke had identified as sensation. Yet like Locke, and everyone who counted himself among his adherents, Herder also acknowledged the twofold origin of our ideas as the confluence of the ideas of both sensation and reflection, that is, of the ideas we have of external reality and of the operations of our own minds. “It is another question,” he thus wrote, “whether our concepts can be nothing other than sensate, whether there is not another path to our inner sense than through the recesses of our external ones” (W 10). After rehearsing the “truth” that was first sug¬ gested by Aristotle and given new currency by Locke, Herder therefore added this crucial qualification: “meanwhile there is an egoistic world of thought, a Something, free of all sensate impressions, devoid of all given concepts, without the least premise a posteriori, that perhaps alone can say to itself: T” (W 11).

40

Herder’s A esthetics

This is, admittedly, a rather cumbersome circumlocution for what other philosophers had straightforwardly called reflection or, more generally, reason. But Herder seems to have had a penchant, or a passion really, for coining new terms as a means to set his own discourse apart from that ol others. If we make a small mental leap to the year 1769, we may perceive in this “Something,” which exists before and beyond any external influence of sensate ideas, the germ of Herder’s most famous neologism to designate the activity of reason in the

handlung iiber den Ur sprung der Sprnche

Ab-

(Treatise on the Origin of

Language). For it was here that he created the term “presence of mind”

(Besonnenloeit)

to characterize the necessary determinant enabling the

production of language as an innate, characteristic quality of humanity. And—returning to the

Versuch iiber das Sein—although

he did not

mention language itself, he did make explicit that the difference bet\\ een humans and beasts lies mainly in the human possession of con¬ scious or self-aware reflection: “But this constitutes the characteristic advantage our thinking has over that of animals.—Animals think in their way; human beings are conscious of their thinking! Fine. The external sense can thus exist without the internal one: animals see the

their own images” (W 10). Yet Herder’s interest in the Versuch iiber das Sein was not directed toward the general nature of knowledge or the abstract process of its formation, but rather only toward those fundamental perceptual mate¬ rials that allow us to gain our concept of external realitv. Herder thus returned to the question of sensation by asserting that “all of my representations are sensate—they are dark—sensate and dark were long ago proven to be synonymous expressions” (W 11). The identity of sensate and “dark” concepts was an assumption long familiar from traditional logic, and Leibniz himself had argued that they were at the lowest level of conscious attention and hence incapable of being broken down, or analyzed, into any further parts. “Dark” cognition, which exists at a virtually identical level with immediate experience, thus represented the absolute boundary of analysis. Herder used precisely this argument to show that, even when one has reached this lowest limit in the analysis of concepts, there is still some remainder, something unaccountable that must nevertheless possess a particular quality: “I abstract them, refine them of sensate matter until they cannot be refined any more, the coarse lump remains, you see: that was unanalyzable. images of their senses, human beings see

The Problem of Method

4i

Sensate and unanalyzable are thus synonyms. The more sensate a con¬ cept, the more unanalyzable it is—and if there is one concept that is the most sensate of all, then we will not be able to analyze anything in it1" (W 11). So while Herder, like Kant, allowed that the process of analysis encounters an increasing degree of resistance as the ratio of sensate facticity, as opposed to abstract ideality, becomes ever greater, he at¬ tached a far different significance to what appears to be absolutely indemonstrable in a priori terms. That is—even though the more “dark” or sensate a concept is the progressively more difficult and uncertain the analysis of its individual characteristics becomes—Herder felt that the very density of real experience possessed its own compelling and persuasive force: “Are not sensate concepts certain?—do they not possess just as much power of convincing us as analyzed concepts possess certainty? This is because they have a power ofproof (W11). By the very power of its immediacy and undeniable presence, sensate cognition offered a unique kind of certainty that, while different in nature from logical certainty and wholly indemonstrable, was no less legitimate and convincing in itself. But, Herder asked, is there not in fact a single concept “that is the most sensate of all11? Is there not an original, fundamental notion that, although not capable of being analyzed itself, would provide the center of certainty for everything else? Kant himself had argued that logically there must be the possibility of some “final real basis” of existence, and Herder shrewdly agreed with this logical neces¬ sity. “Unity demands this, since a ‘quid1 has to lie at the basis of every ‘aliquoties1; and what is this One Thing? That which also lies at the basis of this Something: The concept of Being” (W 12). Herder thus deftly turned Kant’s line of reasoning back on itself, showing that it was not necessary to prove the concept of existence according to its logical possibility. The indisputable fact of real existence tells us much more directly what the efforts of the mind can only give us in a mediated way: “Common sense shall be our teacher here: one never attempts to prove a concept of experience a priori11 (W 17). Everyone of us has, wrote Herder, a concept of “Being” simply by virtue of our existence, thus making the proof of its possibility a rather grotesque redundancy. If we examine the origin of the concept, we realize that “the concept of Being is, subjectively speaking, doubtlessly prior to that of possibility, and real possibility is prior to the logical one, since human beings existed before

42

Herder’s Aesthetics

philosophers1’ (W 15). It is subjective experience itself, therefore, that is at once “the most sensate concept” and also provides us with the greatest certainty we have, a certainty we possess, moreover, from the moment ot birth. It is "the first sensate concept, whose certainty lies at the basis of everything: this certainty is innate in us; nature relieved philosophers of the burden of proving it since it has alwavs already convinced us:—it is the center of all certainty” (W 19). Herder transformed, then, the very uncertainty that toppled Kant’s thesis into a new, persuasive basis of existential and philosophical certi¬ tude.85 Existence itself is the absolute origin of our certainty, and, owing the experiential nature of all ideas, it is the basis, the material of certain knowledge as well. It would be safe to assume that Herder also quite consciously meant for this to sound like a provocative reversal of the Cartesian formula for philosophical certaintv—the “cogito ergo sum,” that is, becomes for Herder “sentio ergo sum.” In a draft that Herder wrote in 1769 for his essay on sculpture, titled Plastik, he left no doubt about this intention and he exclaimed: “Ifeel my own self I ami” (SW, VIII, 96). The insistence on the philosophical certaintv that stems from the immediate awareness of one’s physical existence was, in fact, a a constant theme in Herder’s writings throughout. He asserted repeat¬ edly his belief in the unerring reliability of this most basic awareness of ourselves and the world, and at the beginning of the unpublished fourth Kritisches Waldchen he developed his aesthetic theorv on the grounds of the assertion that "immediately, through an inner feeling, I am actuallv convinced of nothing in the world except that I am, that I feel myself” (SW IV, 7). Herder retained this conviction until the end of his life. In his later critique of Kant, thcMetakritik der aKritik der reinen Vemunft” (Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason) of 1799, the work that describes a circle with his earliest essay and provides evidence of die essential continuity of his thought, the aging, embattled Herder once more maintained thatuBeing is the basis of all cognition” (SW, XXI, 62). Although Herder also considered the concept of existence as incapa¬ ble of an exhaustive analysis, he still believed that certain of its funda85. It is worth noting that in the Preliminary Discourse, p. 8, d'Alembert wrote sim¬ ilarly: “The fact of our existence is the first thing taught us bv our sensations and, indeed, is inseparable from them.” D’Alembert goes on to say (p. 10), that “of all the objects that affect us by their presence, the existence of our body strikes us most vividly because it belongs to us most intimately.”

The Problem of Method

43

mental properties could be identified and isolated, even if they remained themselves ultimately obscure. Here again he borrowed from Kant who, in the essay on the Untersuchunjy iiber die Deutlichkeit, had men¬ tioned the impossibility of analyzing the basic concepts of space and time.86 In the “Concluding Observation” to the Versuch iiber das Sein, Herder briefly referred rather obliquely to these concepts and included an important third term: “Thus, after the concept of Being, 'juxta,’ ‘post,’ and 'per7 will perhaps be least capable of being analyzed: in the meantime I can break down all three into their existence (from thence comes the concept of 'quoties7) and all three have, in addition to this existence, something individual, which, in the first case is called cubi,7 in the second 'quando7 and in the third 'per7 77(W 20). A few years later, in the Frajymente of 1767, Herder abandoned the scholastic Latin terminology he used in the passage just quoted and explicitly claimed that “perhaps immediately under the concept of being there are three concepts which cannot be analyzed: space, time and force [Kraft]: that is, next to, after, and through one another” (SW I, 419).87 Throughout his writings, Herder continued to insist that the phenomenal world is governed by the three concepts of space, time, and force, which themselves could not be analyzed into any further subcom¬ ponents. It is essential to emphasize that Herder did not conceive of these concepts only as a priori forms of intuition, as Kant would later describe them, but as the actual structuring principles of reality and thus as part of physical experience itself. By considering these three concepts as describing die integral ordering elements of the world of experience 86. Kant, Untersuchung iiber die Deutlichkeit, pp. 748-49, writes that “In all of its disciplines, especially in metaphysics, every analysis [Zergliederuna] that can occur is also necessary, for both the clarity of cognition and the possibility of certain conclusions depend upon it. Yet one sees immediately that it is unavoidable to arrive at concepts that cannot be resolved [unauflosliche Begriffe] and that will exist either in and of themselves or for us, and that there will be an extraordinary number of them in that it is impossible that general cognitions of such great manifoldness [.Mannigfaltigkeit] should be composed of only a few basic concepts. Thus many of them cannot be decomposed [aujgeloset]—for example the concept of representation, continuity, successivity, and others only partially, as with the concept of space, of time, of the many feelings of the human soul, the feeling of the sublime, the beautiful, the repugnant, etc.—without a precise knowledge of them; and the composition of the springs of our soul is not well enough known, for a careful observer will become aware of the fact that their analysis is greatly insufficient.” 87. See Gaier’s remarks regarding this connection in his commentary, pp. 868 and 1164. Gaier also draws attention to the use to which Herder puts these concepts in his aesthetic theory.

44

Herder’s Aesthetics

and sensation, which Herder had just proved in the Versuch iiber das Sein to be the first philosophical certainty we have. Herder established his thesis of the basic structure of reality and of the conditions of our understanding. The modal qualities of successivitv, contiguity, and (as I will call it) "motivity”—which are the sensible manifestations of the conceptual categories of time, space, and force—become the funda¬ mental resources of Herder’s philosophical work, giving him a relatively simple, yet, as we will discover, impressively flexible set of structuring principles. It is also possible to see here how Herder laid the theoretical groundwork for his later conclusion that there were individual senses that w ere responsible for perceiving those modal qualities related to the categories of space, time, and force. Following the guidelines estab¬ lished by these assumptions, Herder adduced that sight was the faculty of perceiving things that are, in his words, “next to one another,” hearing for those that are “after one another,” and feeling was the faculty of perceiving things "through one another.” As he wrote in a short wrork of 1767, UeberBild, Dichtung und Fabel (On Image, Poetry, and Fable), a philosophical aesthetic theory would necessitate the anal¬ ysis of each sense and art form in order to determine the fundamental laws by wrhich thev wrere effective: Every sensation, just as every object of the same, has, namely, its own rules of perfection within itself, which philosophers must search for in order to find the point of its highest effect and from that derive the rules of its art. To this end, they must of necessity compare the sensations of several senses, they must observe what in each is original and derivative, and

especiallv

be aware of how

one sense supports, corrects and enlightens the other. Could this beautiful part of philosophy find a better name than

aesthetics,

since this name precisely

designates both the scope of its objects, as well as the subject of their effect?

(SW XV, 524).88 As we will see in the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen of 1769, Herder devel¬ oped the consequences of these notions in their broadest implications and elaborated an entire theory of aesthetic perception based on the just-mentioned tripartite taxonomy of the senses. 88. UeberBild, Dichtunq und Fabel is contained in the third collection of the Zerstrcute Blatter [Scattered Leaves}. Although these were first published in 178^, Herder mentions in the introduction that much of what follows is “in some parts 20 years old" (SW XV, 517), and that in particular the material for UeberBild, Dichtnnq und Label was quite old, “for the ideas about Aesop’s Fables, for example, were supposed to appear in the second part of the Frajjmente Ubcr die ncucrc Deutsche Literature that is in 176*7" (ibid.).

The Problem of Method

45

Looking back over the Versuch iiber das Sein, it becomes obvious that, both in terms of the first stirrings of his own thought and with respect to what he considered to be the ultimate cause of all that we know, Herder’s philosophy originated with the theoretical problem of sensa¬ tion and reflection.89 In this regard, as well as in the substance of most of his conclusions, Herder obviously, indeed inescapably, had a great deal in common with a number of the leading thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Yet, almost as a natural consequence of his basic point of departure, Herder was also confronted with the same pressing issue with which all other contemporary philosophers were faced concerning the proper method of inquiry. The suggestion that the young Herder would have seriously enter¬ tained the question of philosophical method, much less that he would have sought to adopt a particular method as his own, had until recently never been seriously considered in the interpretation of his thought.90 The assumption that Herder displayed a basically desultory attitude excluded from the outset the possibility that he should have been capable, let alone desirous, of cultivating a consistent and reliable method. However, Herder’s discussion of Kant’s essay provides con¬ vincing evidence that he was not only conscious of, but also admirably 89. Indicative of older research on Herder is the governing thesis of Hannsjorg A. Salmony, Die Philosophic desjungen Herder (Zurich: Vineta Verlag, 1949), p. 9, in which the claim is made that the beginnings of Herder’s philosophy were governed by the problem of language. As I have argued. Herder’s thought began with and was based on contemporary problems of ontology and epistemology, and his contribution to the philosophy of language, as I will show in greater detail in Chapter 3, grew out ot this initial preoccupation, rather than the other way around. 90. There has never been any sort of consensus about Herder’s method in the literature, most probably due to the shared assumption that Herder’s thought was basically antithetical to the very notion of “method.” See Kurt May, Lessings und Herders kunsttheoretische Gedanken in ihrem Zusammenhange (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1923), p. 15, who denies with particular reference to Herder’s aesthetic writings that he ever had a single method; Salmony, in Die Philosophic des jungen Herder, pp. 54—55, on the other hand, claims that Herder’s use of polemics was itself Herder’s method; Hans Dietrich Irmscher, “Johann Gottfried Herder,” in Deutsche Dichter des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1977), P- 54b briefly remarks that Herder thought “analogically”; H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge, Eng.: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970), p. 2, rightly identifies the importance of analysis and synthesis, but he associates the terms solely with their later (and different) definitions in Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason]; in an article by Hans Dietrich Irmscher, “Zur Asthetik des jungen Herder,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder, pp. 50—57, Irmscher acutely describes Herder’s use of the “analytic method,” but, apart from a few references to Kant, we have no sense from Irmscher’s account of the important and complex tradition behind Herder’s decision to adopt this method.

46

Herder’s Aesthetics

proficient in wielding his teacher’s own methodological apparatus. And Herder was in fact quite explicit with regard to the method he deemed suitable for all philosophical investigation. In the Versuch iiber das Sein itself, Herder exhibited an awareness of Kant's rigorous distinction between synthesis and analysis when Herder referred to what he called “the chasm between philosophy and mathematics” (W 13). But in another essay he wrote in early 1765, and that was also unpublished in his lifetime, Wie die Philosophic zum Besten des Volkes allpemeiner und niitzlicher werden kann (How Philosophy Can Become More General and More Useful for the Good of the People), Herder turned again to the relationship between philosophy and math¬ ematics. Although it shows an unmistakable dependence on the views of Kant, his description is delivered with a rhetorical verve that is Herder’s alone: These two sciences have constantly been enemies . . . philosophy, the weaker of the two, borrowed the poise of mathematics, the tempo of its expressions, and in the process lost its spirit. Even in individual men its spirit could not survive; with Spinoza and Descartes, philosophy became a web of unhappy hypotheses; Leibniz composed with greater felicity; and WolfF—the great spokesman of its discoverer—gave it mathematical orders of combat and batde cries. . . . Where does the internal conflict between philosophy and mathematics come from? How can it be reduced? As if one science could be compared with another so as to demand mathematical certainty, evidence and usefulness from philosophy. How can one science flow into the other without doing it the sort of damage we have seen in the unification of these two? (W 106). It is thus obvious that Herder was from the beginning very much aware of the contemporary methodological disputes taking place in Germany and elsewhere; moreover, he made it clear on which side of the contro¬ versy he stood. Following the passage just cited. Herder announced his wish “to transfer the spirit of physical analysis, instead of that of mathe¬ matics, into philosophy: in short, an Analysis [Zertfliederunjj] of the products of our mind, whether these be errors or truths. In physics, Descartes’s hypotheses were followed by a Newton; let the mathemati¬ cal era in philosophy be followed by the physical one” (W 106-7). Even in his juxtaposition of Descartes and Newton as the respective antihero and redeemer of modern philosophy. Herder expresses here a preference for the analytic method, as opposed to mathematical synthe¬ sis, in a manner that allows us to place him not only within the context of the methodological debate that had been taking place in the Berlin

The Problem of Method

47

academy, but in that of the English and French Enlightenment as a whole. Very early in his career Herder clearly aligned himself with the Newtonian faction by declaring that analysis was the only method by which one could attain philosophical truth. In the Fragmente of 1767, Herder accentuated his promotion of analysis by insisting that it was particularly appropriate for German philosophy, and he therefore ex¬ tolled the “heirloom of our nation: the analytical decomposition [Auflo-

sunjj] of concepts is the best method of German philosophy” (SW I, 222). Yet, although Herder eagerly adopted and promulgated the induc¬ tive method of analysis, by the end of the 1760s, the term “analysis” was already universally recognized as a sufficient designation of the method¬ ological procedure of philosophy in general.91 By the time Herder wrote the Frajymente and the Kritsche Walder, analysis was no longer primarily regarded as a weapon against the Cartesian variety of deduc¬ tive reasoning widely referred to as synthesis, but had already ascended to absolute supremacy as the philosophical method par excellence.92 It is entirely in keeping with this more general development, then, that later in the Fragmente Herder would make the pronouncement with such absolute conviction that: “The only true method of philosophy is thus the analytic one. ... All truly philosophical concepts arzgiven to the philosopher; . . . They are given to him sensately clear, and every

sound understanding must therefore, as it were, be led higher by philos¬ ophy. But they are given to the mind as confused; we ought to render them distinct through abstraction, and thus analyze them as far as we can” (SW I, 418).

The next step followed easily enough. Herder wanted, as he would say in the fourth Kritisches Waldchen, for aesthetics to be “philosophy, strict, precise philosophy itself” (SW IV, 26). If aesthetics was indeed to become a truly philosophical discipline, then it had to conform to the practice he had already recognized as the only true method of philoso¬ phy. Thus Herder would later proclaim in the fourth Kritisches Waldchen\ It [i.e., aesthetics] chooses the method of philosophy, strict analysis; it exam¬ ines as many products of beauty of every sort as it can; it attends to the whole, undivided impression; it returns from the depth of this impression to the 91. H. B. Nisbet, “Zur Revision des Herder-Bildes 1m Lichte der neueren Forschung,” in Buckeburger Gesprdche iiber Johann Gottfried Herder, p. no, denies that Herder ever possessed any theoretical apparatus to substantiate his findings. 92. See Engfer, Philosophie als Analysis, p. 27.

48

Herder’s A esthetics

object; it observes its parts individually and working in harmony; it does not compromise on a merely beautiful half-understood idea; it brings the sum of the ideas rendered distinct under general concepts, and then these under their own; finally, perhaps, this will result in a general concept in which the universe of all beauty in both the beaux arts and belles lettres is reflected (SW IV, 21).

Herder intended to merge aesthetics—the science born of the German school of philosophy—with the understanding of analysis that had its origin in Newton’s ideal of experimental procedure and that had found philosophical application in English and French epistemological theo¬ ries. Aesthetics, Herder thought, had to begin by descending to the “original” in two senses. As “physical analysis,” aesthetics first de¬ manded the investigation of the basic elements of the empirical field of objects that fell within its purview; it stipulated, in other words, the decomposition of art works themselves in order to reveal their basic ontological constituents. Second, such a philosophy of aesthetics neces¬ sitated exploring the fundamental psychological and even physiological processes that determined our understanding of artistic objects. Only after every part of the aesthetic experience had been resolved into absolutely clear and distinct concepts, only after all intellectual phe¬ nomena had been submitted to an exhaustive analysis, could one dis¬ cover the hidden principles that organized and directed these various elements. And if we are able to determine these laws and principles, only then would we be able to advance to the highest level of abstraction and explain the most general concepts of aesthetics with any certainty and validity. In the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen, Herder criticized those phi¬ losophers who, by imitating the mathematical method of constructing definitions by combining already familiar concepts, began where they ought to end up: “The definitions begin from the top down, with beauty and sublimity, and thus they begin with that which should be precisely the last thing, namely beauty” (SW IV, 55). Thus my argument throughout this study will be that by consistently applying the method¬ ological procedure of analysis, which we have seen was one of the distinctive possessions of the European Enlightenment, Herder sought to establish an aesthetic theory that was in every respect a truly philo¬ sophical science. In one of the Fraqmente einer Abhandlunpf iibcr die Ode (Fragments of a Treatise on the Ode) of 1765, Herder had in fact already begun to apply the general insights he had acquired during his critique of Kant’s

The Problem of Method

49

philosophy to the study of aesthetics in particular. Using the same terms with which he treated the concept of existence in the Versuch uber das

Sein, Herder declared that even though the sensate concepts of the aesthetic experience are more certain in proportion to the degree of immediacy with which they come to us, the very opacity characteristic of this direct experience of art provides an obstacle to its complete analysis:

The more the doctrines of all of philosophy approach experience and the subjective concepts of Being: the more certain they become, to be sure, but also the more inexplicable; in like manner, the unanalyzability of the first principles of aesthetics seems to grow the more they descend to the sensation ol beauty. Indeed, since aesthetics in general is closely related to our bosom, since it deals with the subdest experiences of sensation, instead of with the principles ol reason, its coil is also more difficult to unwind than that of other, more complex metaphysical concepts (SW, XXXII, 61).

This was of course by no means intended as a declaration of the futility of aesthetic inquiry, but rather as a plaidoyer for the fundamental validity and philosophical legitimacy of the actual sensations that constitute the aesthetic experience. In fact, the implications of this statement lie at the core of Herder’s entire theory of aesthetics. For the very reason that the experience of art was so powerful, that aesthetics in its

subjective

sense was so intimately connected with our “bosom,” aesthetics called for an even greater degree of objectivity and analytic precision than metaphysics itself, in which one properly dealt with concepts that were already abstract and determined. Herder thought that the fine fluctua¬ tions of sensate perception, the overwhelming immediacy of the effect art has on us, necessitated all the more a scrupulous adherence to methodological rigor. As his familiarity with Enlightenment psycho¬ logical theories grew, Herder became more confident in the philoso¬ pher’s ability to analyze and give an adequate explanation of even the most basic, original sensations relative to all the arts. Herder did realize, though perhaps not fully at this point, that this sort of analysis was not, however, without its attendant difficulties. In the Journal meiner Reise (Diary of My Journey) from the year 1769, he conceded that “it is a difficult matter to retrace all of the concepts in every science and all of the words in every language to the senses from which, and for which, they arose, and yet this is necessary for every science and language” (SW

50

Herder’s A esthetics

IV, 454)- At some point, analysis must either run against some absolute barrier, as in Herder’s concept of being, or, much like Zeno’s paradox, it will forever separate and divide the data of experience without the prospect of ever arriving at some final, indivisible unit of matter or mind. But Herder, if he recognized the latent impossibility of fulfilling the ultimate demands of his enterprise, was too beguiled by the promise of making new discoveries about the experience of art to care about vague fears of future failure. Instead, he openly invited and even, it seems, relished the challenge of incalculable complexity. In the early Frctpfmente einer Abhandlung iiber die Ode, he pointed out that there was still another kind of difficulty that the aesthetic philosopher had to face, namely the problem presented by history. Indeed—Herder went on to write—if one were to enrich the principles of Baumgarten’s aesthetics with the broader perspective afforded by history, then a new sort of poetics, undreamt of in his philosophy, would present itself: If one would later write a universal aesthetic poetics according to its first principles, then the previous modulation of analysis would be shown, even if its theory would leave the analysis of the concepts of the beautiful to aesthetics, and the practical part would merely define the types of poems in general terms, without examples. ... In short! one could perhaps generate out of the ode the original traits of all poetic types, their various and often paradoxical progress: the richest and least explained problem! (SW XXXII, 62).

Here, then, Herder has introduced that other dimension of his thought that was destined eventuallv to overshadow his aesthetic the¬ ory, namely the impulse to trace the historical “progress” of all cultural phenomena. In his lifelong efforts to conquer this “richest and least explained problem” concerning historical development. Herder cou¬ pled the Enlightenment belief in the explanatorv power of origins with an analytic zeal that, in its scope and passionate intensity, remained a truly singular achievement during his time.

2 The Ideal of a Philosophical History of Aesthetics: The Diverse Unity of Nature I believe this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation.

—David Hume

I

n a review in 1771 of Johann Georg Sulzer s encyclopedic work, the

Allgemeine Theone derschonen Kiinste (General Theory of the Beauti¬ ful Arts), Herder warmly praised the author for his ability to illuminate the “dark” and “confused” psychological moments of the aesthetic experience. Although Sulzer was considerably indebted to the Leibniz— Wolffian school for the framework of his thought, Herder still admired what he took to be the clarity and accuracy of Sulzer’s presentation. Yet Herder’s general enthusiasm for Sulzer was not wholly unqualified, and on one account in particular Herder reprimanded the academician rather severely. Sulzer seemed to treat the concepts of art as if they could be arbitrarily determined in a fashion similar to the way in which mathematical or logical definitions were derived. Herder objected strongly to this, insisting that a theory of aesthetics demanded a method that could account for the independent development and naturally occurring diversity of the objects and concepts of art it is by definition intended to explain:

It is simply impossible for there to be a philosophical theory of the beautiful in all arts and sciences without history. . . . Why? Never, or rarely, are there ideas here that are definite in themselves, let alone arbitrarily given ones, as in mathematics or in the most general metaphysics; rather, its concepts have arisen from a great variety of ‘concretis,’ concepts that appear in numerous kinds of phenomena, concepts, therefore, in which ‘genesis’ is everything (SW V, 380). In addition to or beyond their basic ontological character, Herder deeply understood that works of art are subject to and reflect the

52

Herder’s Aesthetics

external forces of time and environment that give them their unique appearance. He felt that history, in other words, in all of its complexity, must be an integral part of any philosophy of aesthetics worthy of the name. Perhaps more than any other single aspect of his entire oeuvre, Herder’s contribution to the philosophy of history has ensured him the reputation of having played a substantial role in the development of modern thought.1 As one of the most recent interpretations of Herder’s “historical sense” states, “Herder’s philosophical significance doubt¬ lessly has to do with the fact that he shifted history into the center of philosophical thinking.”2 And yet it is equally true that there are few other facets of Herder’s work that have been subject to more misunder¬ standing and distortion.3 According to the traditional account, Herder 1. The literature on Herder’s concept and philosophy of history is of course vast, but a great deal of what has been written has tended to concentrate on the issue of the originality or priority of Herder’s ideas and his opposition to the Enlightenment. See Robert T. Clark, Jr., Herder. His Life and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), p. 179. On Herder’s ostensible role in the development of “historicism,” see the classic account in Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1965), pp. 355—410. However, Peter Gay’s reservations, in Enlighten¬ ment, vol. II, p. 657, should always be remembered when reading Meinecke: “to my mind Meinecke . . . gravely underestimates the historical urge of the Enlightenment and equally gravely overestimates the contribution of German Protestantism, and German thought in general, to historical ways of thinking.” Cf. also Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Rudolf Stadelmann, Der historische Sinn bei Herder (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928); and the very thorough Max Rouche, La philosophie de Phistoire de Herder (Paris: Societe d’Edition Les Belles Lettres, 1940). Concerning the relationship between Vico and Herder see: Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), and the newly published reconsideration of this rela¬ tionship by Wolfgang Proft, “Herder und Vico: Wissenssoziologische Voraussetzungen des Historischen Denkens,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder, pp. 88-113. 2. See Josef Simon, “Herder und Kant: Sprache und ‘historischer Sinn’,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder, p. 3. 3. For a critique of what has been said about Herder’s historicism, or “genetic method,” see Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, p. 68. There are a few recent scholarly works that call Herder’s historicism into question: Heinz Stolpe, “Die Auffassung des jungen Herder vom Mittelalter,” in Beitrage zur deutschen Klassik, I Weimar (1958); Otto Mann, “Wandlungen dcs Herder-Bildes: Eine Kritik seiner Inter¬ pretation aus dem Historismus,” Der Deutschunterricht, X (1958), pp. 27-48; William Robson-Scott, “The Legend of Herder’s Medievalism,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, XXXIII (1963), pp. 99—129; Claus Trager, Die Herder-Legende des deutschen Histo¬ rismus, and Janos Rathmann, “Der gesellschaftliche Fortschritt in Herders Geschichtsphilosophie,” in Biickeburger Gesprdchc iiber Johann Gottfried Herder (Rinteln: C. Bosendahl, 1980), pp. 94-101.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

53

introduced the notion of historical relativism into an era that until then had judged the past as an imperfect prelude to the superiority ex¬ emplified by its own “Age of Reason.”4 Herder’s “historicism” was thus presented as his unique creation, as the fulfillment of his critique and supersession of a fundamentally unhistorical Enlightenment. But both the assertion of his singular achievement in establishing our modern conception of history and the thinly veiled discredit of all previous philosophies of history have prevented us from seeing Herder within a broad and complex tradition of thought and in this way have directed our attention away from the actual aims of his reflections on the prob¬ lem of history. Given his predilection for pursuing the origin of a matter as the key to its understanding, it would seem reasonable that Herder would have also wanted simply to analyze aesthetic issues according to their histor¬ ical beginning and gradual development. And this was indeed an essen¬ tial part of his program. But it must also be seen within a larger theoretical context. Herder’s philosophy of history, and in particular the application of the sort of genetic method to questions of aesthetics that he demanded with reference to Sulzer, was an immediate outgrowth of his confrontation with the subjects and methods of Enlightenment philosophy as a whole. Herder’s insights concerning the philosophy of history arose in conjunction with his adoption of the general method of analysis that he, along with his contemporaries, had chosen as the ideal of philosophical procedure. For Herder—but not only for Herder— history was a supremely philosophical discipline, and as such it was to be conducted by observing the most strict philosophical method avail¬ able. This, and not the advocacy of an absolute cultural relativism, is the authentic aspect of Herder’s historical thought that lived on to influence scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the following comment by Ernst Robert Curtius vividly demonstrates: A narrative and enumerative history never yields anything but a cataloguelike knowledge of facts. The material itself it leaves in whatever form it found it. But historical investigation has to unravel it and penetrate it. It has to develop analytical methods, that is, methods which will “decompose” the material (after the fashion of chemistry with its reagents) and make its structures visible. The 4- See Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 30.

54

Herder’s Aesthetics

necessary point of view can only be gained from a comparative perusal of literatures, that is, can only be discovered empirically. Only a literary discipline which proceeds historically and philologically can do justice to the task.5

Curtius’s description of the aims and method of literary history can be traced directly to its origin in the Enlightenment, and the terms in which it is formulated have more than a coincidental resemblance to the words and intentions of Herder himself. In the following I will show, by examining not Herder’s philosophy of history per se, but only that part of it which contributed direcdv to his developing aesthetic theory, that his “historical sense” was in fact the result of his attempt to harness the greatest diversity of empirical data within a single theoretical model. In general, as Hume’s self-assured claim that his was the “historical age” would attest, thinkers of the Enlightenment not only were fas¬ cinated with the problems of history, they conceived of themselves as eminendy historically minded as well. But it was a particular kind of historical thinking that began to emerge during the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a new way of approaching the facts that had been meticulously gathered and compiled by the antiquarians of the two preceding centuries. The great erudition of what Axnaldo Momigliano has termed the “traditional school of learned historians,” which was represented by such scholars as Bayle, Le Clerc, Montfaucon, Mabillon, Spanheim, and Muratori, was being challenged by the “new school” of philosophical history embodied in the writings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet, and Hume himself.6 We therefore find d’Alembert advising that his contemporaries “gratefullv make use of the work of these industrious men,” but at the same time somewhat pa¬ tronizingly suggesting that “erudition” was “necessarv to lead us to belles-lettres.”7 While the antiquarians compiled great masses of facts and catalogued the events and figures of the past, the “philosophies” saw themselves as trying to understand the greater forces that shaped and 5. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), P-15. See also Jaufi, “Geschichte der Kunst und Historic,” in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, p. 212. See also Robert S. Mayo, Herder and the Beginnings of Comparative Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), esp. pp. 104-40. 6. Sec Arnaldo Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method," in Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 42-43. 7. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 64.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

55

governed culture in the broadest sense.8 It fell to the heirs ot these two main currents of eighteenth-century historical thought, among whom Herder occupies a prominent position, to unify die concerns of exact scholarship and detailed research with a philosophical elaboration of the actual causes for historical change and development. It is indicative of the age that was equally fascinated with the theory of art that the resultant emergence of a distinctly new way of approaching the historical record coincided with, or perhaps even resulted from, a reorientation of perspectives within contemporary poetic theories.9 Whether the two facts are intrinsically related or not, it is remarkable that, as Alfred Baeumler observed, “the rise of the historical view of life in the eighteenth century is inextricably connected with the genesis of modern aesthetics.”10 Near the end of the seventeenth century, the dawning realization that one could not simply ignore the inalterable effects of history took place alongside the growing dissatisfaction and eventual abandonment of “normative” or classicist poetics. In the wellknown “doctrine classique” of seventeenth-century France, history, un¬ derstood as an inevitable process of fundamental change, was vigorously or very deliberately disregarded.11 The poetic theory of Nicolas Boileau, whose Art poetique of 1674 stood as the authoritative expression of the principles of this “doctrine” for nearly one hundred years, essentially relied on the rationalistic view that human beings are endowed with certain invariable, innate capacities of reason that, when allowed to flourish, would uniformly govern human habits and thoughts.12 Ac-

8. See Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contribution,” p. 439. See Krauss, Studien zur deutschen und franzosischen AufMdrung, p. 176. Cited from Hans Robert Jaub, “Asthetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion in der ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’,” in Parallele desAnciens et desModernes en ce qui regarde les Arts et les Sciences. ParM. Perrault (Munich: Eidos, 1964), P- ii10. Baeumler, Das Irrationalitdtsproblem, pp. 53—54. Baeumler specifically credits Du Bos for initiating the increase of eighteenth-century historical consciousness. See, how¬ ever, Jaub, “Asthetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion in der 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’.” See also Karl Menges, “Herder and the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’,” in Eighteenth-Century German Authors and Their Aesthetic Theories: Literature and the Other Arts, ed. Richard Critchficld (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1988), pp. 147-83. 11. See Rene Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique en Trance (Paris: Nizct, 1951)-, especially the “Seconde Partie,” pp. 63-190. 12. D’Alembert, Eloge de Despreaux, in Oeuvres, II, p. 355, called xhcArt poetique “the code ot good taste in our language, as that of Horace is in Latin.” Cited in the translator’s footnote 8 to the Preliminary Discourse, p. 67.

56

Herder’s Aesthetics

cording to this basic assumption, that which is manifestly true, good, and beautiful at the present moment possessed—or should have pos¬ sessed—the same value at every other time in human historv. Similarly, the things that the people of past eras had valued most highlv when human reason was not obscured bv ignorance and superstition must logically have equal validity and legitimacy for us as well. And, for the classicist, the supreme model of such a perfectly rational past was, of course, the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Johann Christoph Gottsched, who in 1730 gave these ideas their German stamp in his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (Essav on a Critical Poetics), was therefore able to cite Aristotle as an absolute authoritv not onlv on the drama of Sophocles, but on the poetry of Gottsched’s own day as well. Not only is Aristode the most trenchant critic ever to have lived, Gottsched thus wrote, but the rules he set forth were also eternally valid: “He most profoundly understood the essence of eloquence and poetrv, and all of the rules he prescribes are based both on the unchanging nature of humanitv and on sound reason.”13 The consequences of this highly abstract and intentionally static view of human nature for a theorv of artistic production were obvious enough. In order to create a beautiful work of art, one had to abide bv the rules that had been established as inhering within the great works of the classical past. Gottsched was also very explicit in this regard: “The universal approbation of a nation is thus not a valid judgment of the talent of a master in the liberal arts until the good taste of that nation has been demonstrated. And this occurs when one shows that this taste corresponds to the rules of art which have been derived from reason and nature.”14 But Gottsched mentioned that the rules governing a work of art were derived from both reason and nature. In the appeal to this last source of authority we find the common element that reappears, always some¬ what varied in its meaning, in every eighteenth-centurv theorv of aes¬ thetics.15 In classicistic poetics, nature, which was understood less as J

J

13. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962), p. 97. 14. Ibid., p. 9515. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, “‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm,” in Essays on the History of Ideas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 69-77, in which he presents an analytic charting of the senses of the term “nature.”

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

57

the physical reality of “rocks and valleys” than as the embodiment of certain functions and laws, was always regarded as the ultimate guaran¬ tor of truth and artistic beauty.16 Within this dictum there is contained the theoretical justification for the principle of the “imitatio naturae” as the foremost criterion for artistic creation. Since the concept of antiq¬ uity as an inviolable model and the concept of nature were not ob¬ viously distinguished from one another in the mind of the classicist, Gottsched also maintained without apparent contradiction that the poet “has this as one of his main qualities: that he imitates nature and lets her be his only model in all of his descriptions, fables and ideas.”17 The laws of nature and the rules of ancient poetry were thus virtually synonymous in the “doctrine classique.”18 Poets were therefore advised to imitate nature as closely as possible, for in so doing they would inevitably receive direct instruction from that natural source of author¬ ity which had guided the hands of the artists who produced the ac¬ knowledged masterpieces of antiquity. There was simply no interest in the question of significant historical change or cultural progress in the classical doctrine. If the issue of historical variations did arise in conjunction with works of poetry, these were treated as aberrations from the one valid standard represented by nature or—what was virtually the same thing—the theory and works of classical antiquity. Historical documents were thus primarily employed as a source of examples against which the superiority of the ancients could be more easily and clearly demonstrated. As it often happens when popular ideas are transplanted from one cultural context into another, the precepts that Gottsched introduced to the German-speaking public in 1730 had by then already lost much of their authority in the country from which they issued. The first sign of rupture arose from Charles Perrault, whose Par allele des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui regarde les Arts et les Sciences (Comparison of the Ancients and Moderns in All That Regards the Arts and the Sciences) 16. See Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 281. Das Irrationalitatsproblem, p. 74, Baeumler points out the continuity of this concept of nature in all eighteenth-century forms of classicism. 17. Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, p. 9918. On the gradual separation of the two concepts during the eighteenth century, cf. Herbert Dieckmann, “Die Wandlung des Nachahmungsbegriffes in der franzosischen Asthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Naxhahmung und Illusion, ed. Hans Robert Jaufi (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 28-59-

58

Herder’s Aesthetics

appeared in four volumes from 1688 to 1697. Perrault’s practice of favorably comparing the moderns to the ancients enraged Boileau, against whom it was primarily aimed. Encouraged and emboldened by Boileau’s loss of inviolability, others soon followed Perrault’s example. In 1719 the French Abbe Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, who was a correspon¬ dent and personal acquaintance of Locke, then subjected the principles of normative poetics to an even more persuasive critique in his Reflex¬ ions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture (Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting).19 Under the general influence of Locke’s philosophy, the Reflexions critiques represent perhaps the first work that attempted to provide an objective explanation of the “original” of historical diversity, of the reason why cultures differed from one another, rather than to condemn them for not resembling the Greeks or Romans.20 A signifi¬ cant part of Du Bos’s theory, which found an enthusiastic reception both within and outside of France, rested on his belief that, in addition to the so-called moral sphere, the immediate physical environment in which the members of a culture find themselves had a direct and power¬ ful impact on the formation of their national identitv. The sum of the various influences that constituted this phvsical environment, for which Du Bos used the broad, though convenient, designation of “climate” or “air” was thus manifested in the collective character of the people who are immediately affected by it.21 Du Bos confidentlv concluded that “the difference of the character of nations is attributed to the different qualities of the air of their respective countries; in like manner the changes which happen in the manners and genius of the inhabitants of a particular country, must be imputed to the alterations of the qualities of 19. The standard work on Du Bos is still A. Lombard, LAbbeDu Bos: Un initiateur de lapensee wiodeme (1670-1742) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), first published in 1913. 20. Ibid., p. 194. 21. Cf. Armin H. Roller, The Abbe Du Bos—His Advocacy of the Theory of Climate: A Precursor of Johann Gottfried Herder (Champaign, Ill.: Garrard Press, 1937). See also the essay bv Gonthier-Louis Fink, “Von Winckelmann bis Herder: Die deutsche Klimatheorie in europaischer Perspektive,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803, ed. Gerhard Sauder, pp. 156-76. Krauss, p. 35, however, is of the opinion that the climate theory is among the most often discussed and the most overevaluated intellectual possessions of the early Enlightenment. Cited from Jaufi, “Asthetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion,” p. 15. I agree with Jauft’s counterargument, in which he points out that what is decisive is not whether the climate theory is convincing from our point of view or whether it was “really” gained from immediate empirical observation, but rather the philosophical and historical explanatory power that contemporary thinkers like Du Bos invested in it.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

59

the air of that same country.”22 Obviously, these characteristics would never be precisely identical for any cultural group, and the manner of self-expression of the inhabitants of certain “climates” would likewise differ according to their respective habitat. The individuality of artistic expression was therefore, in Du Bos’s view, a necessary and unavoidable product of geographical and temporal differences. The critical intent of Du Bos’s Reflexions critiques was immediately apparent: rather than judge works of art according to their resem¬ blance—or their lack of it—to Greek and Roman models, he proposed diat one ought to understand and explain them as products of their given milieu. Criticism should consist, he suggested, in determining the individual circumstances that prevailed when a work of poetry was created, for he thought that in these circumstances lay the first causes for its particular appearance.23 The traditional critic’s role of exhorting poets to imitate nature and of fixing the rules by which they should do so was thereby rendered defunct and replaced by something approach¬ ing a model of scientific descriptive analysis.24 Du Bos’s appeal for a dispassionate investigation into the original causes of artistic difference marked in this way a first step away from the classicist ideals embodied in prescriptive poetics and toward the kind of impartial historical anal¬ ysis that Herder later also espoused. Significandy, however, the regulative concept of nature, in the guise of the multiform “climate,” still found a prominent place in Du Bos’s critical work. Even though he no longer cast it in the form of the “imitatio naturae” that stood as the governing precept in classicist prescriptive poetics, Du Bos’s description of the relationship between nature and art reveals his retention of the belief that nature followed the basic laws of cause and effect, that it exhibited uniformity, simplicity, regularity, and symmetry—in short, that nature conformed to rational paradigms. The underlying assumption sustaining Du Bos’s Reflexions critiques is that, although the external accidents manifested by nature 22. Cited from Abbe Jean Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, trans. Thomas Nugent, vol. II (London: Nourse, 1748), p. 224. 23. See Lombard, L’Abbe Du Bos, p. 260. 24. Ibid., p. 189. In “Diderot’s conception of genius,” in Studien zur europdischen Aufklarung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1974), first published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, II (1941), p. 16, Herbert Dieckmann criticized this aspect of Du Bos’s theory, saying that “we are faced with a vague pseudoscientific naturalism which believes that scientific conceptions used in a merely descriptive way are already explanations.”

60

Herder’s Aesthetics

will vary from region to region, the laws it embodies and imposes on humanity remain forever the same. Du Bos’s conception of nature implies, then, an abstraction and an idealization of both nature and artistic production that was not unrelated to the more overtlv rationalis¬ tic doctrines of his predecessors. Although the concept of nature had certainly been a central component in poetic theories since Aristotle, during the Enlightenment nature became through Du Bos’s example, in addition, increasingly intimately associated with the concept of his¬ tory.25 Nature, or that infinitely complex bundle of external circum¬ stances into which each person was born, came to be seen as a central cause of cultural diversitv and even of historical change itself. Ab¬ stracted to an even finer degree of pure functionality, this concept of nature would thus also leave its evident traces in Herder’s own literarvhistorical writings. This theorv of the formative effects of climate on the character and fortunes of humankind, of which Du Bos was only one of its most influential exponents, found its way into almost every historical work of the centurv. The concept of climate plavs a considerable role, to name onlv the most conspicuous examples, in Montesquieu’s De Vesprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws) of 1748, Winckelmann’s Geschichte derKunst des Altertums (Historv of the Art of Antiquity) of 1764, and in Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which appeared in 1776. None was satisfied, however, that the climate was the only agent responsible for all the apparent differences between cultures. Thomas Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Ho¬ mer, which was published in 1735 and greatlv impressed and influenced Herder, was one of the first attempts to apply this nascent historical sensibility to an extended study of particular works of ancient poetry.26 Although he adopted Du Bos’s theory of climate, Blackw ell also com¬ pensated for its relative narrowness by enumerating still other "Circum¬ stances” that he claimed served to shape the character of a people. These included what he called the "Manners,” the "Constitution civil and religious,” "Education,” and a host of other sociopolitical influences that were effective on both the individual and communal levels.27 Re25. See Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 199. 26. Inexplicably, historians have often made short shrift of Blackwell, as does Meinecke, in Die Entstehung des Historismus, who devotes precisely one page to his ideas under the heading of “English Preromanticism.” 27. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London: pp. 11—12.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

61

markable in Blackwell’s account, however, is his concentrated effort to explain the more abstract idea of historical development, to give an account of the phenomenon of die progression of time as it is man¬ ifested in die alteration of those “manners” he mentions. In his intro¬ duction Blackwell wrote: There is ... a thing, which, tho’ it has happened in all Ages and Nations, is yet very hard to describe. Few People are capable of observing it, and therefore Terms have not been contrived to express a Perception that is taken from the widest Views of Human Affairs. It may be called a Progression of Manners; and depends for the most part upon our Fortunes: as they flourish or decline, so we live and are affected; and the greatest Revolutions in them produce die most conspicuous Alterations in the other: For the Manners of a People seldom stand still, but are either polishing or spoiling.28

This “thing” that Blackwell found so difficult to explain is of course the actual process of historical change itself. Yet Blackwell did not merely describe a single, straight, and continuous march of progress, stretching from the beginning of time to culminate in the munificent perfection of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Radier, he isolated a predictable, regular sequence diat he claims necessarily occurs in every cultural formation. That is, depending on its current state, he thought diat each culture will “flourish or decline,” and will be found to be either “polishing or spoiling.” Aldiough Blackwell did not use die traditional analogy of the stages of life (“Lebensalter”) that Herder later favored to describe the nature of the historical process, die implications of his historical scheme are neverdieless readily apparent.29 Just as an organ¬ ism cannot return to a previous state of its existence, but must follow the 28. Ibid., pp. 13-14. 29. Herder’s “Lebensalter” analogy, which he first uses in the Fragmente (SW I, 151— 53.), has received a great deal of attention and emphasis in the scholarly literature. See Emil Staiger, “Der neue Geist in Herders Friihwerk,” in Stilwandel: Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Goethezeit (Zurich: Atlantis, 1963), p. 163; and Eugen Kiihnemann, Herder (Munich: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1917), p. 52. The clear implication is that Herder was the first to coin the analogy, or at the very least to realize fully its significance. St. Augustine was one of the first to apply it as a sort of heuristic device for the understanding of the whole of humanity. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 20, Curtius mentions St. Augustine’s “history of philosophy,” in which die six days of creation are harmonized with the six stages of life. In the eighteenth century this analogy can be found in the writings of almost every thinker; it was used, among others, by such otherwise incompatible figures as Gottsched, Warburton, Condillac, Diderot, Abbt, and, though not explicitly, by Blackwell as well. See also Gaier’s commentary, pp. 1034-35-

Herder’s Aesthetics

62

course of its growth and decay, so is a culture determined to pass without fail through its own proper stages until it reaches the inevitable end of exhaustion and, finally, death.30 In order to conform to the biological analogy, this kind of teleology forces one to assume that at the beginning of a particular development lies all the freshness and vitality we associate with the innocence of unspent youth. In speaking of early Greece, therefore, Blackwell contrasted the natural simplicity he perceived in Greek “manners” with the “refined but double Characters” of modern people in terms that remind one of the elegiac opening words of Schiller’s great essay, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry). Blackwell extolled the Pleasure which we receive from a Representation of natural and simple Manners: It is irresistible and inchanting; they best shew human Wants and Feelings; they give us back the Emotions of an artless Mind, and the plain Methods we fall upon to indulge them: Goodness and Honesty have their share in the Delight; for we begin to like Men, and wou’d rather have to do with them, than with more refined but double Characters. . . . Innocence, we say, is beautiful; and the Sketches of it, wherever thev are truly hit off, never fail to charm.31

Implied in Blackwell’s praise of the “Emotions of the artless Mind” is that “art” is the forced and feeble version of what was at first effortlessly or naturally accomplished. “Artful” is the attribute of those who are somehow alienated from nature, and through the temporal process of polishing and increasing refinement, this division between nature and art can grow more acute. The antagonistic opposition of art and nature was thus a direct result of Blackwell’s particular deterministic concep¬ tion of history, and it found its corollary in his notion of artistic 30. See “Herder and the Enlightenment Philosophy of History,” in Essays on the History of Ideas, p. 181, where Lovejoy maintains that Herder’s ideas “stand out sharply” against “these widely current attitudes towards history'.” One of the thinkers whose ideas are made to represent “these widely current attitudes” is Bolingbroke and his Letters on the Study and Use of History, which was published in the same year as Blackwell’s book, in 1735 31. Blackwell, Enquiry, p. 24. Blackwell goes on to write: “But on the contrary, when we consider our own customs, we find that our first Business, when we sit down to poetize in the higher strains, is to unlearn our daily way of Life; to forget our manner of Sleeping, Eating and Diversions; We are obliged to adopt a Set of more natural Manners, which however are foreign to us; . . . Nay, so far are we from enriching Poetry with new Images drawn from Nature, that we find it difficult to understand the old." -

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

63

production. Poets can portray most easily and naturally that which is most familiar to them, Blackwell maintained. The poetry that we esteem the most will thus not be an artful dissimulation or pretense, but of the kind that delivers an accurate reflection of “Nature," by which Blackwell meant the totality of the poet’s individual cultural and physical environ¬ ment. Once again, the idea of nature, now given only the unity of an abstract conception of an organic whole made manifest by the change of appearances, provides the backbone of the theory: “So true it is, That every kind of Writing, but especially the Poetick, depends upon the Manners of the Age in which it is produced. The best Poets copy from Nature, and give it such as they find it. When once they lose Sight of this, they write false, be their natural Talents ever so great.’’32 Yet neither is this a restatement of the principle of “imitatio naturae,’’ nor is it simply a superficial refinement of Du Bos’s theory. Despite the element of deterministic necessity contained within his biological no¬ tion of historical change, Blackwell, unlike Du Bos, recognized that individual poets may not in fact be rigidly and absolutely determined by the immediate effect of their respective “natural climate.’’ Poets, that is, may indeed try to write about matters outside of their natural sphere. Because of this possible “cultural infidelity,” as it were, Blackwell sug¬ gested that poets must consciously resolve to devote themselves to their own time and surroundings. Obliquely—for he wanted to avoid pro¬ nouncing dogma—Blackwell thus recommended to contemporary po¬ ets that they also represent what is familiar from their own experience and cease trying to imitate distant or foreign manners. Thus, in making what appears to be a purely descriptive comment on historical fact, he was simultaneously formulating a general postulate for modern poetry as well. It seems a fitting expression of the irony of an age that was only just becoming aware of the practical disadvantages of a fawning adora¬ tion of antiquity that Blackwell should have made his affirmation of modernity within the pages of a study of Homer. Simply noting that the ideas of historical development, of cultural progress and deterioration, and of the inimitable individuality of every civilization were being energetically discussed long before Herder was born would be trivial in itself. But this observation gains greater signifi¬ cance when coupled with the realization that these very ideas constitute 32. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

64

Herder’s A esthetics

a part of that preeminently critical tradition which represents the En¬ lightenment he would inherit. My insistence that Herder was not the first to discern the importance of these notions does not—or should not—in any way diminish his stature. On the contrary, the ways in which he implemented them are perhaps even more deserving of our admiration than the originality of invention that has been claimed for him. For it was here, in Herder’s application of Enlightenment philo¬ sophical conceptions of history to the studv of aesthetic questions, that he exhibited a complex understanding of their implications even as he raised them to a greater level of abstraction and generality. We have seen that, in every case, the concept of nature occupies a place of special significance in the new approach that writers of the Enlightenment took toward poetry and its creation. The relinquish¬ ment of the doctrine of “imitatio naturae,” which coincided with the effort to understand the past according to criteria not arbitrarily exter¬ nally imposed, had not, therefore, exorcised the central importance of nature and its functional, indeed normative, status. The introduction of a historical consciousness had not reallv suppressed the conception of nature as a distinct system of regular laws and rules; it had merely clothed these laws in a greater variety and abundance of attire. In 1765 Herder made his debut in the Enlightenment debate concerning the relationship between poetics, history, and nature in a short work that, like his earlier essay on Kant, constitutes a critical assessment of the thought of a close acquaintance. This time he turned to the work of Johann Georg Hamann.33 Herder’s essay, titled Dithymmbische Rhapsodie iiber die Khapsodie Kabbalistischer Prose (Dithvrambic Rhapsody on the Rhapsody of Cabalistic Prose), contains an explicit and occasionally vehement rejection of most of the basic tenets Hamann had espoused in his Aesthetica in nuce, which had appeared three years earlier, in 1762, in the famous collection tided Kreuzziige des Philologen (Crusades of the Philologist).

33-

Herder’s short essay on Hamann shares an additional similarity with the one devoted to Kant in that it, too, was not published in Suphan’s edition of Herder's works and has therefore remained all but unknown. It has been included in the new edition of Herder’s works edited by Ulrich Gaier, to which I will refer in my text. The essay was first discovered and published by A. Warda, “Ein Aufsatz J. G. Herders aus dem Jahre 1-64," Euphorion, 8. Erganzungsheft (1909), pp. 75-82. Albrecht Schone, “Herder als HamannRezensent: Kommentar zur Dithvrambischen Rhapsodie," Euphorion, LIY (i960), pp. 195-201, also reported on the manuscript, which had bv then become lost. Cited in Gaier’s commentary, p. 877-

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

65

Hamann, not unlike the many eighteenth-century French and espe¬ cially English philosophers (including Blackwell) whom he admired, believed that earlier, more “primitive” peoples enjoyed a more immedi¬ ate and authentic relationship with nature. They were not fettered, he believed, by the “unnatural” constraints imposed by reason, which were seen as afflicting more advanced civilizations. Hamann, however, deriv¬ ing inspiration from the mystical writings of Bohme and Swedenborg, admixed to this eighteenth-century anthropological platitude an idio¬ syncratic religious vision. Central to Hamann’s religious primitivism was his belief that the original, unspoiled relationship with nature that was supposedly indicative of uncivilized peoples was fundamentally linguistic in character.34 Hamann characteristically portrayed the world as the physical manifestation of God’s creative word. As the famous lines of the Aesthetica in nuce tell us: “Speak so that I may see You!— This wish was fulfilled by Creation, which is a discourse addressed to the Created by the Created.”35 By understanding the ancient metaphor of the “book of nature” in this eminently literal fashion, Hamann conceived of the people of earlier cultures as having had the ability to comprehend and commune with this “language of nature.” And by thus conversing both with and in nature, these first people had been afforded the linguistic paradise of an uninhibited and constant access to God.36 Nature, always a cipher of the Divine in Hamann’s writings, could thus acquire vital significance only for those who had not, through the overcultivation of their rational faculties, destroyed their ability to understand it. Aimed at just such people, the Aesthetica in nuce therefore amounts to an extended indictment of the linguistic, which is to say moral depravity Hamann perceived in modern humanity: “We have nothing left in nature for our use other than disordered verses and the ‘disiecti membra poetae.’ It is the modest task of the scholar to collect them; the philosopher’s to interpret them, and to imitate—or, more 34- See James C. O’Flaherty, “Hamanns Begriff vom ganzen Menschen,” in Sturm und

Drang, ed. Manfred Wacker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), p. 179. 35. Johann Georg Hamann, “Aesthetica in nuce,” in Samtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, vol. II (Vienna: Herder, 1950), p. 198. All further references to Hamann’s works will be incorporated into the text within parentheses indicating the editor, volume, and page, for example, (N II, 198). 36. Concerning the history of the metaphor of “the book of nature,” see Curtius, “The Book of Nature,” appendix to European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Cf. also Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1983).

66

Herder’s Aesthetics

boldly!—to bring them into play is the role of the poet” (NII, 198-99). As these short quotations sufficiently show, Hamann’s style itself served as part of his argument against the linear logic of conventional ra¬ tionality. Indeed, his writing is so dense and metaphorically allusive that no one less than Hegel, in his review of Hamann’s works, accused him of deliberately obscuring his meaning and fostering “unintelligibility” in his writings.37 Like almost everyone else who wrote on the subject during the eighteenth century, Hamann thought that poetry chronologically pre¬ ceded prose as the natural form of human expression. Hamann’s cele¬ brated remark that “Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race” (N II, 197), was in fact a commonplace in the works of many Enlighten¬ ment thinkers.38 Nevertheless, this notion acquired a distinct meaning in Hamann’s pseudomystical writings. He seemed to believe that through a Rousseau-like return to the kind of ecstatic language that he thought characterized the poetic tongues of primitive peoples, a par¬ tial—if not complete—return to this original state of linguistic inno¬ cence might be possible: “We must become children if we are to receive the spirit of truth” (N II, 202). Thus a step toward earthly redemption could be taken by casting aside the linguistic trammels laid on by reason and culture in order to receive once again an intimation of the Divine through the immediate apprehension of God’s “Word-become-Nature.” Hamann’s express wish, therefore, was “to resurrect the extinct language of nature from the dead” (N II, 211). Until this occurred, however, Hamann saw the activity of the modern poet, scholar, and philosopher as a very privative and even damnable undertaking. One of the most deeply held beliefs of scholarship devoted to Her37- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. XVII (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1835), p. 89. See also the helpful essay by Sven-Aage Jorgensen, uZu Hamanns Stil,” in Johann Georg Hamann, ed. Reiner Wild (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978). 38. Blackwell, Enquiry, for example, pp. 38—39, claimed: “That Poetrv was before Prose. The Geographer Strabo, a wise Man, and well acquainted with Antiquity, tells us, that Cadmus, Pherecydes, and Hecataeus first took the Numbers, and the Measure from Speech, and reduced that to Prose which had always been Poetry before.” One can find many other examples in the eighteenth century in which Strabo (>63 b.c.-?23 A.D.) is cited as an authority on the issue. For instance, John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music, (London: 1763), refers to Strabo, p. 50, but he writes with more caution: “ ‘Their (i.e., the Greeks’] earliest Histories were written in verse.’ This Fact is indisputable; but seems not, as yet, to have been resolved into its true Cause.”

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

67

der’s thought maintains that he was decisively, indeed predominantly, influenced by Hamann. Herder met the “Magus of the North”39 when he went to Konigsberg, and he quickly became his friend and admirer. But this personal sympathy has been seen as having had great conse¬ quences for Herder’s writing as well. While it has usually been allowed that Herder may have added depth and clarity to Hamann’s obscuran¬ tist ideas, the implication is that Herder remained essentially true to his friend’s antirational aims.40 In actuality, Herder’s Dithymmbische Rhapsodie shows him distancing himself as early as 1765 from Hamann and offers evidence that his ideas played a relatively minor role in the formation of Herder’s conceptual universe. In tact, there is (to my mind) convincing confirmation that Herder had criticized Hamann, and specifically his Aesthetica in nuce, even before he wrote the Dithyrambische Rhapsodie, namely in the Versuch iiber das Sein of 1763- In an oblique allusion to “a nut” (in nuce means “in a nut”) that is worthy of Hamann himself. Herder accused Hamann of simply rebelling against philosophical systems without submitting himself to the necessary labor of mastering them on their own terms and thus criticizing them without personal familiarity. Failing to do this, Herder wrote, one just makes oneself “ridiculous”: A few fine minds who perceived the

end of philosophy and the endless efforts of

the philosophers threw them a nut to show them their finiteness: they disavowed the Being which Mother Nature had convinced them of long ago; see how they prove our orthodox writers—become ridiculous—and revile them with venom in their mouths; instead of showing them the impossibility of analyzing this concept, which would fulfill the purpose of their problem

(W 13 )-41

As we discover from his footnotes to the Dithyrambische Rhapsodie, Herder had by 1765 already read and assimilated at the very least the historical notions of Winckelmann, Condillac, Blackwell and Du Bos, whose Reflexions critiques is extensively quoted in Condillac s Essay.42 39. Hamann first received this epithet from Karl Friedrich Moser (1723—98). See James O’Flaherty, Hamann’s “Socratic Memorabilia? A Translation and Commentary (Balti¬ more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), P; 440. See, as a kind of compendium of scholarly opinion, Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, Johann Gottfried Herder (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970), pp. 22—23. 41. Gaier—mistakenly, I believe—thinks these lines refer only to Pascal and Des¬ cartes. See his commentary, p. 859. 42. Condillac cites Du Bos in the Essay, I, i, §§ 16—61, et passim.

68

Herder’s Aesthetics

The most important lesson that Herder’s predecessors taught him, though, was that no one of those external manifestations of history’s flow, neither the “moral” nor the “physical causes” of change, could be legitimately used as an absolute rule of measurement in determining the intrinsic worth of any other moment in history. The truth of history lay rather in observing the more deeply submerged but omnipresent laws that gave dais natural diversity its intelligible form. In comparison with the incandescence of Hamann’s patchwork of furious tirades against a Godless age, one breathes the cool air of detached reflection in Herder’s Dithyramhische Rhapsodie. What strikes one immediately is Herder’s calm acceptance and resolute affirmation of precisely those aspects of the modern situation which Hamann had so severely criticized. Throughout his essay, Herder opposed a tranquil recognition of the historical necessity of our present condition against Hamann s paroxysms of impotent rage. Herder accepted the thesis that poetry was the original human language. He rejoined, however, that the antithesis was no less true: “If poetry is the mother tongue: then ours is prose—” (W 31). Herder insisted that we live in an age when prose is spoken naturally, not verse, and whether one thinks this state is welcome or lamentable, it is a historically necessary circumstance that cannot be blithely dismissed. Convinced of the basic correctness of the sort of organic determinism he found within the works of Du Bos, Blackwell, .Montesquieu, and many others, Herder never entertained Hamann s illusory and unhistorical hopes that a return to a previous stage of cultural development would ever be possible. Moreover, not only did Herder deny that human beings could escape their historical determination, but he also willingly embraced what he perceived to be the proper mission of the eighteenth century: to write philosophy and history, and to leave all yearning for primitive poetry behind. Herder thus wrote, referring to the just-quoted passage from Hamann: “And why do we want to rebuild poetically dismembered bodies; let us collect them as scholars and interpret them as philosophers in order to write a history from them: since poetry became prose, painting became writsong became recitation, dancing became measured stride; thus we stop making poetry, painting, singing, dancing, and behold! Lessing’s swallow, which could not sing, learned to build!” (W 33). Herder thus clearly dissociated himself from Hamann’s unhistorical demand for a return to a kind of poetry that Herder believed his era was

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

69

no longer capable of producing. In its place, Herder advocated the ideal of a scholarly and philosophical history of the arts, with this explicit end: “let us ... at least secure our aesthetics: for our poetic tongue is bewildered!!!” (W 37). Herder was already too imbued with the histor¬ ical spirit of the Enlightenment to have made the self-contradictory claim that anything like the poetry of primitive peoples would have been conceivable or even desirable in eighteenth-century Germany. The European states had already passed through their own tumultuous “childhood” and “adolescence” and had laboriously achieved a sober, dignified, and philosophical maturity. This is not to say, as Herder emphasized, that poetry per se was no longer feasible. A few years later, in the second edition of the Fragmente of 1768, when this conclusion seemed to be raised as an objection to his thesis, he asked with rhetorical incredulity: “I thus say that I deny poets to this manly age? I am dismayed! For I would be denying something contrary to all history, contrary to the entire nature of language, contrary to all reason!” (SW II, 79). Poetry will indeed continue to be written, but we must under¬ stand, he insisted, that modern poetry can in no way be commensurable with the ecstatic songs of ancient or uncivilized peoples. For at that advanced stage of Europe’s development, it would have been highly anachronistic and even somewhat foolish to expect that poetry could be a natural means of immediate, individual expression. Modern Euro¬ peans speak an entirely different language, the prose suited to discursive thought. And this language itself is responsible for what Herder called an “immense chasm” between our own origins in the poetic age and the late, prosaic present. Hamann’s hope that we could recapture and not merely attempt to understand that age was no more than an idle selfdeception. Prose is the only natural language for us, and this has been the case from time immemorial, and our poetry—it may otherwise be whatever it wants—is in any case not the singing Nature it was, and had to be, when it was close to its origin. It has so little of singing Nature that we can hardly cross over into the Poetic Age, we can hardly traverse such an immense chasm to understand and appro¬ priately feel it. And precisely the astonishment that greeted my hypothesis shows how far away we are from this land of the poets; to be sure, it is far away, and too far for us ever to enter it and to be able to view it as our Fatherland; but not too far away to get to know it and use the information we receive from it

(SWII,

76).

70

Herder’s Aesthetics

Herder’s “hypothesis” will no doubt still occasion “astonishment” in the minds of those readers who see him as the “priest in a long black silk coat. . . who, although not yet old, was already in full possession of his mysteries.”43 Precisely because of his secular and unmystical historical standpoint, it was clear to Herder that the “land of the poets” had irretrievably vanished, to appear no more in identical form within his own time and culture. Only four years later, in the Journal meinerReise of 1769, Herder once again wrote fervently about this “great theme,” namely “to be what one should be ... exactly the enlightened, informed, fine, rational, educated, virtuous, joyous human being which God de¬ mands at our stage of culture (SW IV, 364~65). Thus Herder was simply unable to accept Hamann’s idea of a lost natural immanence that could be recaptured through a return to some original form of poetic language, and he proposed instead an endeavor more in conformity with his own historical station. If poetry is out of our reach, he wrote, “then our century in Germany is at least a philosophical one. Even if we possess no original geniuses in odes, dramas and epics, and even if none could be hoped for: then one should explain this barren poetic strain, one should set forth the entire original trait of every poetic genre and determine its multifarious and often so paradoxical progress in every age. Not poetry, but rather aesthetics should be the field of us Germans, who—at best—can be original in didactic poems” (SW XXXII, Si).44 Philosophy, and in particular aesthetics, was thus in Herder’s opinion the historically necessary activity for a people who had moved past their own poetic age. This belief gave aesthetics a powerful historical justifi¬ cation and the dignity of being the most appropriate occupation for a modern writer who felt an interest or inclination toward the arts. In particular, the idea of a philosophical literary historv, as part of a general aesthetics, is already contained within the sentiment just cited. And, in fact, at the very time when Herder wrote his critique of Hamann, he was exploring the concrete possibilities of these insights in a series of essavs, or “fragments,” devoted to the history of die ode. 43- Max Kommerell, Der Dichter als Fiihrer in dcr deutschen Klassik: Klopstock, Herder,

Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1928), p. 63. 44- In “Elements de la philosophic,” in Oeuvres, vol. I,

p. 122, d’Alembert also wrote:

“Every century that thinks well or poorly, provided that it believes that it thinks and that it thinks differently than the century that preceded it, adorns itself with the title of philosophical:; . . . Our century has consequently called itself supremely the century of philosophy.”

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

7i

The ode was, to the minds of eighteenth-century writers, the oldest form of poetrv of which there was any surviving record, and its conse¬ quent proximity to the absolute origins ol human culture made it an attractive object of speculation.45 In Edward Young’s Discourse on Lyric Poetry, for instance, which first appeared in English in 1728 and was translated into German in 1759, Young enumerated diose aspects ot the ode that could not fail to excite Herder's imagination as well, \oung explained diat “the Ode, as it is the eldest kind of poetry, so it is more spiritous, and more remote from prose than any other, in sense, sound, expression, and conduct.”46 But \oung did not seem to diink diat these qualities of the ode were in any way historically bound to a particular level of civilization, and he continued his description with die tone and gesture of prescriptive poetics: “Ode should be peculiar, but not strained; moral, but not flat; natural, but not obvious;... diick, but not loaded with numbers, which should be harmonious. 4 Encapsulated within the one word “should” lies all of die difference between Young and Herder. By including die word “should,” Young implied diat it was still possible, if perhaps difficult, to write this kind of ode it one only fulfilled the necessary requirements he named. Those attributes, which were supposed to characterize only the “oldest kind ot poetry,” tiius undergo in Young’s Discourse a subtle hypostasis to become the timeless essence of the form, and it was tiiis last step diat Herder, with his historical acumen, had no choice but to reject. Herder would also claim in one of his fragments on die ode, “since imitation certainly was not originally the essence ot poetry, . . . the first ode, the second child ot nature, certainly remained die most loyal to sensation ’ (SW XXXII, 72). But he meant for diis to apply only to die odes ot a particular historical moment, not to be understood as an essential characteristic ot die ode in general. In words that hark back to his critique ot Hamann, Herder also plainly stated his reasons for making such a consistent and precise 45. On the importance ol the ode to eighteenth-century and particularly German writers, see Karl Vietor, Geschichte der dcutschen Ode (Munich: Drei Masken, 1923), p.

+ .

1 2

46. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (Man¬ chester: Manchester University Press, 1918), appendix B, “On Lyric Poetry, pp. 57—58. See also Vietor, Geschichte, p. 134. He notes diat the German translation appeared in the second volume ot the Sammlunjj vermischter Schriften zur Beforderutip dev schbncn U issenschaften und derfreyen Kiinste (Berlin: 1759), p. 210. 47. Young, “On Lvric Poetry,” Conjectures, p. 60.

72

Herder’s A esthetics

distinction: “The more the subjects are enlarged and human intellectual powers developed, the more the faculties of the sensible animal soul die out. The spread of the sciences constricts the arts, the formation of poetics likewise with poetry; finally we have rules instead of poetic sensations; we borrow remains from the ancients, and poetry is dead!” (SW XXXII, 69). It is not just that the generic form of the ode had undergone a profound transformation in the course of its history; the most basic human capacities themselves, which find expression in works of art, have also gradually changed their aspect, making the imitation of odes produced at an earlier time and in a different culture a question¬ able, indeed impossible, venture. Nevertheless, Herder never abandoned the notion that there must be a common thread that inconspicuously, but undeniably, linked the poetic works of various epochs and nations and made comparison among them at all possible. For without the existence of some shared resource, he thought, the historian would perceive only the thin shell of surface appearance and never fathom the necessary similarities that allowed one to juxtapose works of a particular genre that had been written in completely different historical circumstances.48 Herder’s efforts to reconcile both of these perspectives—the awareness of the historical specificity of every poetic work and the simultaneous assertion that there must be a shared principle that underlies each unique artistic creation form the philosophical basis of the Frajymente einer Abhandlmi£f uber die Ode. This simultaneous consideration of the historical uniqueness and abstract uniformity of the ode is immediately apparent in the following well-known words: If any one type of poetry is a Proteus among nations, then it is the ode, which has so changed its spirit and content and features and rhythm in terms of its sensations, its subjects and its language that perhaps only the magic mirror of the aesthetician could recognize the same living thing in so many forms. Nevertheless, there still is a certain universal Unity [Eins] of sensation, expres¬ sion and harmony that enables a comparison between them all (SW XXXII, 63).

Usually cited as early evidence of Herder’s historical “relativism,” this passage is most often rendered without the crucial final sentence. For it was toward the discovery of this “certain universal ‘Eins’,” which as48. See the discussion by Klaus R. Scherpe, Gattunqspoetik im 18. Jahrhundcrt: Histonsche Entwicklunpf von Gottsched bis Herder (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), p. 235.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

73

serted an inner unity among the variegations of factual data, that his entire aesthetic philosophy ultimately tended. Herder did in tact believe that there were constant, basic forces always present in history that molded the materials of a culture into its unique and individual form. And while it is true that he wished to study these cultures in and of themselves and to isolate the unique ways in which each historical moment expressed itself, he primarily wanted to identify the most elemental modes of the forces and laws of history in general, and to avoid taking the concrete, manifest expression of these qualities to be the “essence” of any cultural artifact. The difficulty resided in trying to combine the acknowledgment of the manifest diversity of the historical past with the desire to discover the most general laws that allowed us to comprehend this apparently infinite variety. In 1766, one year after Herder’s intensive work on the ode, he wrote another relatively short essay titled Von der Verschiedenheit des Geschmacks und der Denkart unter den Aienschen (On the Variation of Taste and Mentality among Peoples). More explicitly than before, Herder stressed here that, while change constituted the primary outward characteristic of history, the task of the philosopher resided in finding the underlying motivating causes of this change and in unifying them in a comprehen¬ sive vision: The spirit of change is the kernel of history' and whoever does not take this as his main consideration: to distill, as it were, this spirit, to combine the taste and character of every epoch into ideas, and to travel through the various periods of world events with the penetrating gaze of a wanderer hungry for knowledge, he sees, like every blind man, people as trees and dines on history as on a meal consisting of husks devoid of grain, and ruins his stomach (SW XXXII, 27).

In the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen of i769-> Herder broadened the terms of this basic approach by no longer limiting his inquiry to specific genres but by extending it to the most general questions concerning beauty and taste. In a turn of thought one might be tempted to call dialectical, Herder argued that the phenomenon that certain causes are always responsible for the universal and inevitable changes of taste is itself proof of some basic unity—the “Eins”—of beauty: And is it [i.e., “taste”] not to be explained by the times, customs and people? and does it not thus always have a first principle that has just not been under¬ stood well enough, just not felt with the same intensity, just not applied in the

74

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correct proportion? and does not even this Proteus of Taste, which changes anew under every stretch of the heavens, in every breath it draws in foreign climes, does it not itself prove by the causes of its transformation that there is only One Beauty [dafi die Schonheit nur Eins sey], just like Perfection just like Truth? (SW IV, 40-41).

It is worth emphasizing that Herder conceived of this unity or “Eins” in an extremely abstract fashion. He fixed no specific predicative at¬ tributes to it that could in any way be affected by the vicissitudes of time or place. Rather, this unifying principle was deliberately cast very much in terms of a natural law, in that the law was only evident through its effects and not itself available to immediate perception. As we have seen in his critique of Hamann, Herder advocated the biological notion of historical development, which he had gathered from the works of other Enlightenment thinkers, in order to explain the way in which a culture maintained its unique identity through the stretch of time. If we gener¬ alize on the implications of his argument concerning the respective stages that poetry and prose represent within the development of a particular culture, then the way in which he conceived of this “Eins” will become more apparent. Herder thought that, as a culture moved through its own organic course of growth and decline, each of its “ages” conformed to a particular paradigm of specific qualities that necessarily excluded all those other possibilities that were not compatible with that immediate stage. Or, to put it in more modern terms, Herder believed that at every point along the diachronic axis of cultural progression each of the successive synchronic possibilities was exhaustively and neces¬ sarily determined. This sort of teleological conception obviously gives the historian a very convenient and clearly defined interpretive model. Since the laws are already known, one does not look for the laws that govern historical necessity. Rather, it is the particular way in which they are expressed that becomes the object of interest. In another version of his reflections on the ode, the Versuch einer Geschichte der lyrischen Dichtkunst (Essay on the History of Lyric Poetry), Herder accordingly stated that his motivating wish was to understand “how these things could have arisen according to their similarity to other times and accord¬ ing to the conditions of their own, and whether one could not, while considering certain circumstances, come upon something like a necessity of how they had to arise” (SW XXXII, 92). Applied specifically to the understanding of poetry, this approach to

.-1 Philosophical History ofAesthetics die past would thus entail analyzing each complex cluster oi intertwined circumstances diat contributed to die creation oi a particular work so diat one might uncover die original and fundamental components ot its eventual genesis. From here, it is implied, we would proceed to analyze the works of entire cultures, dien whole epochs, until we reached die point at which die most general laws oi poetic production would finally stand revealed before us. At tins point, then, die connection between Herder's earliest philosophical studies in epistemology and die subse¬ quent formation of his philosophy of history becomes evident. An empirically grounded, historical analysis of art must carefully sort dirough and separate each complex bundle oi given data with die intention of locating die fundamental principles diat were responsible for organizing diis historical material into its particular form. Such an analytic approach would allow die historian not only to identify die inner law's diat organized history, but simultaneously to appreciate for its own sake anv cultural diversity as well. Ii we make a small chronolog¬ ical leap to die beginning of die i~os and take a glance at Herder's essay on Shakespeare, w e can observe how he first set diese ideas into effective critical practice. Herder's famous Shakespeare essay, which appeared in i ; in what has been called die “manifesto of die Sturm und Drang movement,"49 tided Von deutscherArt und Kunst, has often been thought to exemplify the exhilaration of die young German spirit wresting itself from its supposed inner servitude to rationality.50 In more sober interpretations of die work. Herder is given credit for being die first to abolish die contemporary practice ol applying classicistic poetic criteria to die evaluation of Shakespeare's plays by introducing a completely "new" historical viewpoint.51 Common to almost every one, however, is die assumption diat Herder's primary aim was to prove diat Shakespeare +9. This epithet of die “‘manifesto” was suggested by H. A. Korff, Grist tier Gocthczrit, vol. I (Leipzig: J. ]. Weber, 1923), p. 150. Teter Szondi, ““Antike und Moderne in der Asthetik der Goetiiezeit,” in Poetik und Gescbiehtspbilosophie, vol. I (Frankfurt a M: Suhrkamp, i9_+h p. 6+, also refers to die Shakespeare essay as a fundamental work ot die ““Sturm und Drang.” 50. See Friedrich Gundoll, Shakespeare und der deutsehe Grist (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1923), pp. 19S—99. See also Gottfried Wener, Herder und das Drama: Eine literarhistorisehe Vntersucljung (Weimar: A. Duncker, 1922I, p. 33. 51. See May, Lessinas und Herders Kunsttheoretische Ge dan ken, p. 9S. Szondi s inter¬ pretation, ““Antike und Moderne,” p. 6~, also rests on die assumption diat Herder broke with this ““prejudice” bv choosing a new perspective ot evaluation, namely that of history.

76

Herder’s Aesthetics

and his creations are in every way utterly and irreconcilably different from the character and works of the Greeks.52 Herder himself is partly responsible for this confusion. For at the beginning of the Shakespeare essay, he emphasized with great rhetorical flourish the evident differences that distinguish ancient Greek drama from that written in Elizabethan England. This in itself should not surprise us, for the first priority of an analytically guided inquiry was to break down the elements of the chosen field of study into its distinct and individual constituents. But Herder’s argument is also further obscured by die performative allure of his rhetoric. A careful examination will show, however, diat the reason he so strongly emphasized the dis¬ parities between the dramas of Shakespeare and Sophocles was to allow the deeper, hidden similarity to appear with all the more force and persuasive effect. Herder thus began with a reflection that was familiar to his contemporaries: Drama arose in Greece in a way that it could not arise in the North. In Greece things were as they cannot be in the North. In the North things thus are and cannot be the way they were in Greece. The drama of Sophocles and Shake¬ speare are therefore two things that, in a certain respect, hardlv even have the same name in common. . . . one can observe the genesis of one thing through another, but one simultaneously sees change, so that they no longer remain the same (SW V, 209-10).

Herder did not intend for these words to criticize those of his con¬ temporaries whom he felt had failed to note the obvious differences between the two dramatic worlds. He delivered them, rather, as a sort of resume of common and accepted knowledge. The thinkers of die Enlightenment were, of course, not unaware of or insensitive to the gulf separating antiquity from modern Europe. Indeed, we have seen that a number of English and French writers of the first part of the century, beginning with Perrault, had devoted their labors to discerning wherein these differences lay and the causes for dieir development. If anything, their researches had created an even wider divide between ancient and 52. Thus Gundolf, Shakespeare and dev deutsche Geist, p. 202; Szondi “Antike und Moderne,” p. 67; and Roy Pascal, The German Stunn and Draucj (Manchester: Manches¬ ter University Press, 1953), pp* 256—57. The essay by Mann, “Wand 1 ungen des Hcrdcrbildes,” Deutschunterricht, X (1958), pp. 27-48, marks an important exception to this general tendency in that the writer refutes all facile portrayals of Herder as a historical relativist. See also Fugate, Psychological Basis of Herder's Aesthetics, p. 225.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

77

modern times, leaving the Renaissance tradition of appropriating the culture of antiquity as one’s own appear ever less tenable. Herder clearly attended to this sense of growing alienation from the cultures of the past, a sense that resulted from both the insight into the individuality of every culture and a sharper perception ol the ineluctable pull of time. This sense of irretrievable loss is eloquently expressed in the closing lines of the essay, in which he spoke of Shakespeare in a manner that is reminiscent of his earlier thoughts on the vanished poetic age: The thought is sadder and more important that this great creator of history and world soul is growing older and older! that his words and customs and ages are withering and falling as leaves in autumn, that we are already so tar away trom the great ruins of this age of chivalry, . . . and soon, perhaps, since everything draws to a close and vanishes so completely, even his drama will no longer be capable of exciting lively representations and will be like the ruins of a colossus or a pyramid which everyone stares at in wonder and no one understands (SW V, 231).

But here, as always, Herder was far from succumbing to any kind of romantic resignation or despair. He applied himself instead to a rational understanding of the past, which he thought properly befitted an eigh¬ teenth-century mind. Unlike Young or Lessing, who had made polem¬ ical pleas for Shakespeare in the context of a general reluctance to consider him seriously as a playwright, Herder desired to proffer a more objective evaluation of the English poet. Herder emphasized that he wanted “neither to excuse, nor to defame him, but to explain him” (SW

V, 208). Herder had said at the beginning of his essay that the drama of Sophocles and Shakespeare were two things that “in a certain respect hardly even have the same name in common.” In the first part of the work, he thus contrasted the original natural circumstances that ostensi¬ bly gave rise to the drama in Greece with those of Shakespeare’s time in order to illustrate how one could think that in a “certain respect” these works were hardly deserving of the same name. The irony of this phrase is that it appears that in every conceivable fashion the plays produced by the two cultures are totally different. To make clear the extent of their disparity, Herder first provided what amounts to a catalog of contem¬ porary notions about the nature of ancient Greece. Like Winckelmann and Blackwell before him, Herder stressed the “simplicity” and the

78

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“sobriety of the Greeks,11 and he thought that their art was “not art! It was nature!” (SW V, 210-11). That is, Herder believed that Greek drama was not “artful11 in Blackwell’s sense of the word, but that it was a faithful reflection of life. Against this placid background he then op¬ posed the necessarily different milieu that confronted the English writer: “—and Heavens! how far away this was from Greece! History, tradition, customs, religion, spirit of the times, of the people, of emo¬ tion, language—how far away from Greece!” (SW V, 218). The gulf between Shakespeare and Sophocles had never seemed any greater. Quite literally everything, the historical circumstances, the manners, customs, religion, and whole “spirit of the time,” had changed their entire complexion. It followed, Herder thought, that the works of poetry must necessarily reflect this change in both their substance and their form. The Aristotelian rules of classicist drama thus do not and cannot possibly be expected to apply to Shakespeare for the simple reason that his plays were written under such completely different conditions. Still, there is nothing revolutionary or surprising in Her¬ der’s words so far, nor did he intend for there to be. He wanted only to define the extreme boundaries separating the respective objects of his investigation in order to render his conclusion more irresistibly and impressively striking. Herder worked toward this conclusion by adopting the notion that the artist represents most faithfully what he finds within his own natural sphere. As Blackwell had said: “Here . . . was Homer’s first Happiness; He took his plain natural images from Life: He saw Warriors, and Shepards, and Peasants, such as he drew; and was daily conversant among such People as he intended to represent.”53 Herder extracted die principle contained within this characterization of Homer, which Blackwell had attributed to the ancient poet alone, and applied it to his more modern equivalent: “Shakespeare did not find a chorus about him; but he did find the games of states and marionettes—fine! He dius fashioned out of these games, out of such poor material! the magnifi¬ cent creation that stands and lives before us!” (SW V, 218). Shake¬ speare’s plays are different from those of Sophocles because the world he saw was different. Like the Greek, Shakespeare “took his plain natural images from Lifef but since this “life” was entirely unlike that 53. Blackwell, Enquiry, p. 34.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

79

which Sophocles had experienced, the English dramatist’s “natural im¬ ages” have no equivalent in the works of the ancients. Yet while Herder elicits nodding agreement from his reader in this regard, he has already intimated the secret affinity, the submerged law of artistic production that would enable one to locate where the parallel may be drawn between the Greek and the Englishman. The concept of nature, which is the essential component of virtually every Enlightenment theory of poetics, here assumes a central position in Herder’s work as well. We saw how, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the idea of nature became at once more variegated and rich in its characteristic attributes, yet at the same time more abstractly refined with respect to its functional status. That is,c nature came to represent the totality of the world that poets found before them, the concentrated sum of their cultural and physical environment, and it was precisely this natural complexity that served as a stabilizing and unifying agent in the explanation of how poetic works were created. Nature—that is, the manners, the political state, religion, climate, and so on—always changes, and poets always follow it. This is obviously a very abstract principle. But it seemed to eighteenth-century thinkers to be the only one that allowed one to recognize and appreciate the realities of “the varying experiments of time” and simultaneously pre¬ vented the historian from losing every point of comparison and orienta¬ tion. Herder had made this view his own, and in the Shakespeare essay he triumphantly displayed the one basic modus operandi that united the otherwise apparently so dissimilar playwrights: “Shakespeare is thus Sophocles’s brother even where he apparently seems to be so dissimilar, and is just like him at heart \im Innern\ .... Sophocles remained true to nature because he treated One action of One place and One time: Shakespeare could only remain true to nature by having his world events and human fate tumble through all of the places and times where they— well, where they happened” (SW V, 225-26).54 The functional concept 54. For the probable source of Herder’s assertion that Shakespeare was Sophocles’s “brother,” see Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, p. 34: “Shakespeare mingled no water with his wine, lower’d his genius by no vapid imitation. Shakespeare gave us a Shakespeare, nor could the first in antient fame have given us more! Shakespeare is not their son, but brother; their equal, and that, in spite ot all his faults. See also Martin William Steinke, Edward Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition in England and Germany (New York: F. C. Stechert, 1917)-

8o

Herder’s A esthetics

ot nature and of poets1 creative relationship to the nature that surrounds them thus also lie at the center of Herder’s work. Herder could allow for the greatest range of artistic freedom, the disparity of style, manner, the broadest dissimilarity of both the content and form of their drama and still assert that, because this very diversity issued from a single source, they could be explained according to the same theoretical principle. The entire Shakespeare essay builds up to this conclusion, and Herder had very carefully shown how Sophocles and Shakespeare were literally worlds apart in every other respect but in their representative fidelity to nature. In a sense, then, the discussion of the individual dramas them¬ selves was incidental to Herder’s real objective, which was to find the “certain universal Unity [EinsY he had already theoretically envisioned in the fragments on the ode.55 The announcement of this single princi¬ ple was therefore not an error or a slip on Herder’s part, but the intended and essential core of his essay.56 The essay on Shakespeare is an example of the young Herder’s ideal of historical analysis at its practical best. But it was the last time that he would limit his investigation of the problem of history solely to art or aesthetics. Excited by the prospects that opened before him. Herder began to add more concrete detail to his theoretical plans in his next 55. One of the most often raised criticisms against Herder’s essay is that he does not pro\ ide an analysis ot Shakespeare’s plays themselves. This reproach is prompted by Herder himself, who \\ rote at the end of the essay; “Now would be the place where the heart ot my investigation would begin, what? In what artistic and creative manner could Shakespeare have composed such a lively whole from such a sorry romance, novella and table? What laws of our historical, philosophical, dramatic art lie in each of his steps and artistic techniques? What an investigation! How much for our construction of history, philosophy of human souls and drama” (SW V, 229). Havm, Herder nach seincm Leben, vol. I, p. 439, was the first to find fault with Herder for not delivering what he himself had indicated was not going to appear. Since Haym’s work appeared, this reproach has become almost a ritual gesture in the scholarly literature, often accompanied by the suggestion that it was due to some inherent inability that Herder “recoils,” as Pascal, in German Sturm and Drang, p. 259, says, from providing an analysis of Shakespeare’s plays. See further Alexander Gillies, “Herder’s Essay on Shakespeare: ^Das Herz der Untersuchung’,’'Modem Language Review, XXXII (1937), pp. 262-80; and Szondi “Antike und Moderne,” pp. 78—79. 56. In “Antike und Moderne,” p. 53, Szondi argues that Herder’s use of the concept of nature links him, in a way he was not conscious of, with the “normative thought of Enlightenment aesthetics.” The notion of a single, unified “Enlightenment aesthetics” is a questionable abstraction that, even if it did exist, was certainly not representative of normative thought. And, as I have tried to demonstrate. Herder did not unconsciously fall back on this conception of nature, but very determinedly guided his argument toward its revelation.

A Philosophical History of Aesthetics

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major work, Auch cine Philosophic der Geschichte zur Bilduncj devAleusch-

heit (Another Philosophy of die History for die Formation ol Human¬ ity) of 1774. This essay also marks the beginning of a new era in Herder’s intellectual life, for after its publication he began to devote himself increasingly exclusively to history, a trend that culminated in what many still consider to be his greatest work, the Ideen zur Philosophic der

Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of die History of Humanity), the several volumes of which appeared intermittently be¬ tween die years 1784 and 1791. The ideas concerning the historical variation and development ol cultural phenomena, coupled widi die desire to discover die necessary laws that guided these processes, permeate Herder’s writings on all ol the subjects that captured his interest. This is especially true ol his treatment of language, which he considered to be the most profound historical achievement of human culture and reason.

3

The Philosophy of Language and Its Relation to Aesthetic Theory The Birth of Philosophy

A rustic sheep gives me a frightened stare As if I were the first man anywhere. Its gaze takes hold; we stand as if asleep; It seems the first time I had seen a sheep. —Christian Morgenstern

ow we turn to the third, and last, major strand of the theoretical ± > network that supplies the internal cohesion of Herder’s aesthetic philosophy. In a short essay written in 1767, but posthumously pub¬ lished under the tide Von Btmmgartens Denkart in seinen Schriften (On Baumgarten’s Mode of Thinking in His Writings), Herder expressed his desire for ua true philosophical lexicon in our language.” He felt such a lexicon would aid in the formation of a genuinely “classical philosoph¬ ical language” based on the strengths and character of his native Ger¬ man language. In this connection he again mentioned Sulzer’s am¬ bitious Allgemeine Theorie as an analogous endeavor to compile such a “philosophical lexicon” in the field of aesthetics, and again it was not without a revealing qualification. As a reference tool, die Allgemeine Theorie possesses practical worth, Herder wrote, but it lacks the sort of philosophical analysis of language itself from which both philosophy and aesthetics would profit: “If I give my approbation to Sulzer’s plan for his aesthetic lexicon, dien it is merely in this respect, for, in every other, one would prefer an analytic, coherent investigation; yet for my purposes, aesthetics would learn a great deal from language, and lan¬ guage from philosophy” (SW XXXII, 180). Herder’s philosophy of language, and in particular his famous Abhandlunq uber den Ursprunpf der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of

The Philosophy of Language

83

Language) of 1770, has always been thought to have been one of his distinctive contributions to intellectual history. The claims made on behalf of the originality of Herder’s philosophy of language have been even more extravagant than those made with regard to his alleged “historicism.” Beginning in the late nineteenth century, it became a central tenet of German scholarship to maintain that, through his dis¬ missal of the supposed superficialities of Enlightenment language theory, it was Herder’s Abhandlungf, “with which not only a new chapter in the history of the problem of language origin begins, but the history of language philosophy in general.”1 In recent years, reaction to this exag¬ gerated assertion has tended to result in views approaching the opposite extreme. By emphasizing die contemporary context of language philos¬ ophy to which the Abhandlung obviously owes a great deal, some scholars have denied that Herder demonstrates any originality what¬ soever and diey have attempted to reduce die status of his treatise to that of a merely flamboyant repetition of familiar ideas.2 Yet the inevita¬ ble outcome of bodi this misplaced praise and unjust denigration of Herder’s philosophy of language has been that our vision was obscured from perceiving its actual nature and aims. Contrary to the sweeping statements like the one just cited, we now know that Herder does not in fact stand at the beginning of language philosophy, and he was himself conscious of his position as a beneficiary of a rich and diverse inheritance. No major representative of the En¬ lightenment in England or France failed to make a contribution to the philosophy of language, and the most important works by such diinkers as Du Marsais, Voltaire, Condillac, La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Alembert, Rousseau, Helvetius, and Turgot all contain substantial reflections on 1. Salmony, Die Philosophic des jungen Herder, p. 55. See also Gustav Konrad, Herders Sprachproblem im Zusammenhang der Geistesgeschichte: Line Studie zur Entwicklung des spmehliehen Denkens der Goethezeit (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1937), p. 11, and Emil Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufkldrung (Vienna: Europa, 1968), p. 129. See, too, die intro¬ duction to Herder’s Sprachphilosophische Schriften, ed. Erich Heintel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, i960), p. xv; and Bruno Liebrucks, Sprache und Bewufstsein, vol. I (Frankfurt

a/M: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1964), p. 43- Hayden White, “The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 146, also claims that, as opposed to Herder, “language was not a problem” for the “Enlighteners.” 2. This is the view put forth by Bruce Kieffer, The Storm and Stress of Language: Linguistic Catastrophe in the Early Works of Goethe, Lenz, Klinger, and Schiller (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), p. 10.

84

Herder’s Aesthetics

every conceivable facet of the problem.3 4 Herder himself certainly did not think that his notions about language were in fundamental opposi¬ tion to all of the theories of his time. On the contrary, as we will presently see, he followed a middle ground between the predominant linguistic conceptions of his day in order to provide a unified logical argument that addressed the particular problem of language origin. Wishing to avoid the pitfalls of absolute extremes, Herder wrote con¬ fidently that only those thinkers were on the path to truth who, “warned by both byways [Abwege], choose the middle road” (SE I, 254).4 But since Herder did not concern himself at length in his Abhandlung with such specific contemporary topics as universal grammar, the names of mixed modes and relations, or the names of substances, of particles, and so forth, but only with the problem of origin and its attendant perplex¬ ities, the perspective here will be accordingly limited. And since it was Condillac’s Essai sur I’origine des connoissances humaines of 1746 that actually unleashed, as it were, the Copernican revolution in eighteenthcentury language philosophy and gave it its characteristic shape, this work will demand our careful consideration.5 Yet, in order to appreciate the Abbe’s unique achievement it is necessary to begin with a brief excursus on Condillac’s own point of departure, the third book of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, titled “Of Words.” Generally uninterested in the philosophical significance of origins, philosophers of the seventeenth century were also mainly indifferent to the particular problem of the origin of language. Language to them was a given; it was assumed to constitute the distinctive nature of humanity,

,

,

3. See Ulrich Ricken, Spmche Anthropologic Philosophic in dcr franzosischcn Aufklarung: Ein Beitrag zur Gcschichtc dcs Vcrhdltnisscs von Sprachtheorie und Weltanschauung (Berlin: Akademie, 1984), pp. 77—78. 4. The advantages of the “middle road,” or the Horatian “aurea mediocritas” (“Golden Mean”), were very much on the minds of contemporaries. This was preciselv the definition of virtue we read in the final version of Christoph Martin Wieland, Gcschichtc des Agathon, vol. I (Leipzig: Georg Joachim Goschen, 1794), p. 256, book 5, chap. 7: “Virtue (one tends to say after Aristotle or Horace) is the middle road between two detours, both of which ought to be studiously avoided.” 5. See the essay by Aarsletf, “The Tradition of Condillac,” in From Locke to Saussure pp. 146-209; and Ellen McNiven Hine, “Condillac and the Problem of Language,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CVI (1973), pp. 21-62. On Herder’s relationship to Condillac, see Jorn Stiickrath, “Der junge Herder als Sprach- und Literaturtheoretiker—ein Erbe des franzosischcn Aufklarers Condillac?” in Sturm und l)rang\ Ein literanschcs Studicnbitch, ed. Walter Hinck (Kronberg/Ts: Athenaum, 1978), pp. 81-96. See also Rudolf Schotlander, “Die verkannte Lehre Condillacs vom Sprachursprung,” Beitrdge zur Romamschen Philologic, VII (1969), pp. 158—65.

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The Philosophy of Language

85

the necessary correlative of our innate and God-given powers oi reason, and the question of its origin was therefore irrelevant, or at any rate tautological.6 Of greater significance to the seventeenth-century thinker was the precise nature of the relationship that obtained between lan¬ guage and reason, or, more specifically, between the individual word and the idea it was intended to convey. Given the absolute priority that reason was assumed to occupy over the word, language took on a purely functional or instrumental cast, and it was viewed primarily as the imperfect but only available vehicle for the communication of our thoughts to others. Christian Wolff, for instance, typified this view when he asserted that “we normally render our thoughts intelligible to others through words. And they are thus nothing other than the signs of our thoughts by which another can know them."7 Ideally, each word ought to be employed so as to evoke in the mind of one’s interlocutor an idea that is identical to one’s own intentional representation. The cen¬ tral preoccupation of rationalist language philosophy, then, was to provide a logical classification of the signs we have come to institute as the marks of our ideas so that we can thereby improve the way we use these signs and avoid the pitfalls of misunderstanding and error.8 Locke was of course generally very interested in origins, but with regard to the origin of language he was in perfect accord with his predecessors: “we may conceive how Words, which were by Nature so well adapted to that purpose, come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas; not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain Ideas, for then there would be but one Language amongst all Men; but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such mldea. The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate Signification."9 6. See Isabel F. Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbe de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 147. 7. Christian Wolff, Vemunftige Gedanken von den Krdften des menschlichen Verstandes und ihrem richtigen Gebrauche in Erkenntnis der Wahrheit, in Gesammelte Werke, sec. I, vol. I, I, ii, § 1. 8. See Ulrich Ricken, Probleme des Zeichens und der Kommunikation in der Wissenschafts- undIdeologiegeschichte der Aufkldrung (Berlin: Akademie, 1985), esp. p. 10; see also Lessings Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 24, in which David E. Wellbery offers an interpretation of these ideas as they were expressed in the philosophies of Wolff, Baumgarten, Meier, and Mendelssohn. 9- Locke, Essay, III, ii, § 1.

86

Herder’s Aesthetics

With his distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” signs, Locke wanted to exclude the possibility that words would be understood as the products of chance circumstance or of the imitation of natural sounds, rather than as the artificial, conventional constructs he thought they must necessarily be.10 Human beings must not be conceived of as passive vessels indiscriminately formed by the coincidence of random occurrence, but rather as the active masters of their rational existence, free to exercise their will in shaping their mind and extrinsic destiny. It is also clear from Locke’s description that he, too, considered the idea that a sign immediately signified as wholly independent and prior to the act of signification itself The free and rational mind therefore chooses, or, as it were, invents “ex instituto” arbitrary marks for the ideas it has already otherwise obtained.11 For Locke it was self-evident that words were merely “the Signs of Men’s Ideas; and, by that means, the Instru¬ ments whereby Men communicate their Conceptions, and express to one another their Thoughts and Imaginations.”12 Despite the general premise of his philosophy, which postulated the origin of knowledge in both the sensate perception of external objects and the awareness of the internal operations of reflection, Locke took pains to exclude the sensate formation of words from the cognitive process itself. This important fact is usually overlooked in interpreta¬ tions of Locke’s theory of language, in which the following passage is frequently cited as evidence of the contrary: It may also lead us a little towards the Original of all our Notions and Knowl¬ edge, if we remark, how great a dependence our Words have on common sensible Ideas; and how those, which are made use of to stand for Actions and Notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible Ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for Ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; vg. to Imagine, Apprehend, Comprehend, Adhere, Conceive, Instill Disgust, Disturbance, Tran¬ quillity, etc. are all Words taken from the Operations of sensible Things, and applied to certain Modes of Thinking.13

The volitional implication of the verbs “taken” and “applied” that Locke used in the last clause above leaves no doubt that, although they may be io. See Aarsleff, “Tradition of Condillac,” p. 63. n. See Lessing’s Laocoon, p. 38, where Wellbery also makes this observation, but only explicitly in relation to the German semiotic tradition. 12. Locke, Essay, III, ii, § 6. 13. Ibid., Ill, i, § 2. See Sprache, Anthropologic, Philosophic, p. 86, for example, in which

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metaphors of sensible things (Locke translated the Greek verb metapherein as “to transfer”), he thought that all words were originally quite consciously and deliberately coined. Language was and had to be in Locke’s opinion a completely posterior product of human cognition and played no discernible role in its development. For Locke the main task of the philosophy of language consisted, then, in the perfection of our system of signs so as to improve their efficacy as instruments of communication and as tools in the discovery of truth.14 Condillac’s Essay altered the entire prospect of eighteenth-century lin¬ guistic thought by emphasizing just those aspects Locke had refrained from allowing into his philosophical theory. Reproaching Locke for having perceived its significance too late, Condillac boldly declared that the progress of the human mind depended solely on the proficiency we demonstrate in the use of language. He thus wrote in the preface to the Essay: Our first aim, which we ought never to lose sight of, is the study of the human understanding; not to discover its nature, but to know its operations; to observe with what art they are combined, and how we ought to conduct them, in order to acquire all the knowledge of which we are capable. We must ascend to the origin of our ideas, we must unfold their formation, and trace them to the limits which nature has prescribed, to the end that we may fix the extent and boundaries of our knowledge. ... I think I have found the solution of all these problems in the connection of ideas.15

As we have already seen, Condillac recognized both sensation and re¬ flection as the elemental components of human knowledge, and through the firm adherence to the method of analysis he proposed to show precisely how the mind came to form all of its ideas and abstract faculties. Condillac’s explicit purpose therefore was “to reduce to a single principle whatever relates to the human understanding.”16 But this “single principle” was not simply that ideas gradually develop out of sense impressions, as most commentators have maintained, but pre¬ cisely the “connection of ideas” he mentioned in the quotation above.17 Ricken cites this passage as proof that the original reference of these words to concrete things is a further indication of Locke’s belief that all cognitive materials arise from the senses. 14. See Aarsleff, 'Tradition of Condillac,” p. 69. 15. Condillac, Essay, pp. 5—6. 16. Ibid. 17- See Aarsleff, “Tradition of Condillac,” p. 199-

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For, according to Condillac, it was a specific kind of “connection of ideas11 that constitutes the one specific means by which human reflective cognition was able to free us from the immediate moment of sensate experience and mark simple ideas that one could then recognize again and recall at will.18 As he goes on to write, “the ideas are connected with signs, and it is only by this means, as I shall prove, they are connected with each other.1’19 Only because of this ability to connect ideas through mental signs, which is an innate human characteristic in Condillac’s view, are we able to combine the most simple data and eventually to form complex ideas and abstract notions, or knowledge in its fullest sense. And the most sophisticated system of signs we have is what we call language. Introducing sign use into the inner sanctum of the cognitive process was an ingenious and revolutionary solution to the problem of explain¬ ing precisely how our ideas actually developed, which Condillac felt Locke had largely ignored. Condillac was in fact fearful (as it turned out, justifiably so) that the very newness of his conception would be a source of confusion and misunderstanding.20 But by asserting that the “connection of ideas11 through the means of signs was the one process that linked the moment of sensate perception with the activity of reflec¬ tion, Condillac had established a forceful, yet simple model that not only allowed him to trace, step-by-step, the progress or genetic evolu¬ tion of human knowledge but also illustrated the specific difference between humans and beasts.21 Although a number of animal species did possess the same organs of speech as humans, only human beings have the capacity of reflection to produce and manipulate signs, enabling human beings alone to control their memory and all of the other attendant operations of the mind.22 In Condillac’s view, language, or 18. Ibid., p. 155. Wdlbery, in Lessing’s Laocoon, pp. 39—40, also confirms that this was the implication of German semiotic theory. See also Herbert Dieckmann, “Asthetische Theorie und Kritik in der Aufldarung,” in Diderot und die Aufklarung, p. 45. 19- Condillac, Essay, p. 7. 20. In the introduction of Essay, p. 11, Condillac mused that “perhaps the design of explaining the origin of the operations of the mind, by deriving them from a simple perception, will appear so new, that the reader will have difficulty to comprehend, in what manner I shall execute it.” 21. Condillac, Essay, I, 2, iv, § 46. 22. It is important to emphasize this fact for two reasons. The first is that a large part of Herder’s argument in the Abhauditing depends on his—as we have seen in no way unique—distinction between man and animal, and that he locates the crucial difference between humans and beasts in the characteristic human quality of reflective reason (Besonnenheit), and hence our ability to form language. The second reason is that.

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sign use, was not just the natural and inevitable product of human rationality, it was the necessary condition for our reason to assume its ch aracteristic form. The development of language was at the same time, then, the development of reason itself23 As remarkable as Condillac’s basic idea was, at this point it is still quite abstract and as yet lacks an explanation of how language advanced from its most primitive level to acquire the clearness and precision of communication that most modern languages exhibit. Condillac broached this difficulty by postulating that the original occasion for the use of signs was pressed by the simple but inescapable and immediate needs of normal existence: “The connexion of ideas can arise from no other cause, than from the attention given to them, when they pre¬ sented themselves conjunctly to our minds. Hence as things attract our attention only by the relation they bear to our constitution, to our passions, to our state, or to sum up all in one word, to our wants; it follows that the same attention embraces at once the idea of wants, and of such things as are relative to these wants, and connects them to¬ gether.”24 While the purely internal operation of the connection of ideas ex¬ plained well enough the consolidation of an individual mind as it focused on its wants or needs, it did not elucidate how these require¬ ments were externalized and made known to others. For this, Condillac had to introduce human beings into common society, for only then did the necessity arise to issue some perceptible (i.e., visible or audible) sign

beginning with Rudolf Haym, German scholars have consistently maintained that Condillac did not consider language the sole privilege of humans. See Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, p. 403. See also Salmony, Die Philosophie desjungen Herder, p. 42; Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufkldrung, p. 125; and Walter Dietzc, Johann Gottfried Herder. Abrifiseines Lebens und Schajfens (Berlin: Aufbau, 1980), p. 34. 23. See James H. Stam, Inquiries into the Origin of Language: The Fate of a Question (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 4924. Condillac, Essay, I, 2, iii, § 28. It is very interesting, in this connection, to read a passage from Herder’s fourth Kritisches Waldchen that simultaneously exhibits a close familiarity with Condillac’s Essay and also contains perhaps the source of Herder’s misrepresentations of the same work. Herder writes: “To be sure, music is, as a language, not as natural to human beings as song is to birds; this is shown by our first needs, by our organs of language to express these needs, the analogy between us and other unmusical animals, and the history of all peoples. If the first needs are painful sensations, then the first language consists of cries of unarticulated tones; and if the satisfaction of these needs provides joy, then language is just as much the language of sensation, unarticulated tones. Both resound in a high and strong fashion, penetrate the ear and soul, and become powerful accents of sensations—they are the first basis of language” (SW IV, 114).

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of one’s otherwise hidden needs. Condillac wished to avoid any approx¬ imation to the rationalist notion that for each requirement a word was arbitrarily invented, since this of course would implv that reason had to be fully developed before sign use began. Thus, in order to illustrate the gradual progression of spoken language, and also to provide the svmbolic equivalent of language in its infancy and subsequent growth, Condillac suggested the famous example of the two children alone in the desert, famous now because of Herder’s vituperative ridicule of the idea in his Abhauditing. Condillac himself, however, attached no more importance to the example than to anv other heuristic principle, and it serves his purpose tolerably well. The two children are, we might sav, just an abstract device introduced for the sake of simplifying his expla¬ nation, roughly equivalent to the function of the statue in his later Traite des sensations (Treatise on the Sensations). Condillac maintained that, although by definition naturally endowed with the basic human capacity of being inherently able to connect ideas through signs, these children had not yet learned to use signs in the intentional wav necessary for communication. Once they are placed in the situation of mutual dependence, they discoyer how to understand yarious gestures and cries as expressions of their needs, joys, and sufferings as external signs to which they learn to respond and which they gradually learn to use with deliberate intent.25 The crucial section of the Essay reads: When they came to live together, they had occasion to enlarge and improve those first operations; because their mutual converse made them connect with the cries of each passion, the perceptions which they naturally signified. They generally accompanied them with some motion, gesture or action, whose expression was yet of a more sensible nature. For example, he who suffered, bv being deprived of an object which his wants had rendered necessary to him, did not confine himself to cries or sounds only; he used some endeavours to obtain it, he moved his head, his arms, and every part of his body. The other struck with this sight, fixed his eye on the same object, and perceiving some inward emotions which he was not yet able to account for, he suffered in seeing his companion suffer. From that very instant he felt himself inclined to relieve him, and he followed this impression to the utmost of his power.26

Thus, Condillac explained, spoken language, but not the conditions enabling language, naturally evolved out of the interaction of humans 25. Condillac, Essay, II, I, i, § 2. 26. Ibid.

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with one another in the pursuit of satisfying their basic and mutual needs. The second part of the Essay is then devoted to showing how lan¬ guage developed through its various levels, moving from this first simple language of emotive actions and gestures, through the poetic and musical language of primitive peoples, which is dominated by the imagination, to the late stage of precision and accuracy characterized as the “philosophical” stage of language. Condillac thus eventually agreed with Locke that one of philosophy’s most urgent and necessary respon¬ sibilities is the perfection of the signs we employ, but the entire Essay represents his prolonged effort to prove that this is in every way a historically relative endeavor. Toward the end of the Essay, Condillac even wrote that, with respect to their general contribution to the forma¬ tion of a language, we probably owe more to the poets than to the philosophers: Our first, and perhaps greatest obligation, is owing to our poets; for as they are subject to the restraint of rules, their imagination makes stronger efforts, and necessarily produces new turns of expression. And indeed the sudden improve¬ ment of a language is generally the aera of some eminent poet. Philosophers do not carry it to perfection till a long time after: they have indeed given to ours that precision and perspicuity which form its characteristic, and which by furnishing us with the signs most convenient for analyzing our ideas, enable us to discern the subtilest and minutest part of every object.27

Condillac’s Essay became instantly famous, giving rise to the imitation that fame attracts, and it ultimately precipitated the debate in the Royal Academy in Berlin.28 The difficulty Condillac’s thesis caused, and the reason why it sparked the controversy in the academy, lay foremost in his neglecting to state unmistakably the precise point of the origin of language itself. Was the single principle of the inward, silent “connec¬ tion of ideas” already language, his readers wondered, or did language 27. Ibid., II, I, xv, § 153. 28. After the appearance of Condillac’s book there was a flood of works written in its spirit. To name only a few: Maupertuis, Reflexionsphilosophiquessur Vorigine des langues et la signification des mots (1748); Antoine-Yves Goguet, De Vorigine des lois, des arts, et des sciences et leurs progres chez les anciens peuples (1758); Nicholas Sylvestre Bergier, Les elements primitifs des langues (1764); Charles de Brasses, Traite de la formation mecanique des langues et des principes physiques de Vetymologie (1766); Claude Francois de Radonvilliers, De la maniere d’apprendre les langues (1768); Abbe Copineau, Essai synthetique sur Vorigine et la formation des langues (1774). Cited from Knight, Geometric Spirit, pp. 150—51.

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exist until it became manifested as speech? And if the latter were true, would isolated human beings invent language if they were devoid of other human contact and thus bereft of the occasion to externalize their desires? These were the questions that prompted the prize compe¬ tition of 1770 and that Herder set out to resolve. Herder’s ideas about language not only deftly combine some of the most pertinent elements of Enlightenment theories of language thus far outlined, but they also draw on and focus the resources he had alreadv acquired through his continued studies in the related disciplines of philosophy and history. We will find all of the motifs collected here and seamlessly fused, his fascination with origins and their explanatory potential, his constant refinement and sharpening of the methodological tools of analysis, and the consistent application of a specific historical perspective to the discussion of the products of human culture. More¬ over, all of these issues themselves were not reallv independent of one another in Herder’s mind, and his successful addition of yet another variable into this already complex equation testifies at the very least to his talent for integration. In fact, in a very dramatic way, theAbhandhtJijj presents a composite picture and taut refinement of the most important components of Herder’s thought at the time of its writing. But prior to Herder’s writing of the Abhandlunq, which was to remain his longest and most systematic treatment of the problem of language, he had already invested a considerable amount of intellectual energy—most notably in the second, revised version of the Erajyyyieyite— in sorting out various questions concerning the proper use of language in both poetry and philosophical exposition. As we saw in the previous chapter. Herder had read at least the second part of Condillac’s Essay by 1765 at the verv latest, and its influ¬ ence on his thought, like on that of Diderot and Rousseau as well as countless others, was enormous.29 The immediate effect resulting from 29. The question of exactly when, and how much. Herder knew of Condillac’s Essay has long been a matter of some disagreement in the scholarly literature. It was important to German scholars to believe Herder’s statement at the end of the Fragmented at which point he had written: The German Library [Deutsche Bibliotbck] has called my attention to a work, which I am now perusing with pleasure. The second part of the Essai sur I’oriefine des connoissances humaines contains observations that illuminate my fragment on the stages in the life of languages” (SW 1,529). The reason being, of course, that if Herder truly read the essay only after he finished the Frajjmentc in 1767, the originality of his idea ol the stages in the life of languages” would be preserved. However, it is evident that, for whatever reason. Herder was mistaken—or prevaricating—about the date of his

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his study of Condillac can be felt in Herder’s first major work, the Fragmente of 1767-68, which were devoted to examining, among many other things, the intimate relationship that exists between language and thought. As the very title of the collection indicates, Herder’s Fragmente were not a systematic philosophical investigation in the manner of Condillac’s Essay, and Herder did not intend for them to be. Herder envisioned another ideal of philosophical discourse, one that was in¬ debted to the Abbe’s theory but differed measurably from his practice. The circumstances surrounding the publication of Herder’s Frag¬ mente, including his almost frantic efforts to preserve his anonymity (which were not unrelated to his acerbic criticisms of the powerful Klotz and his cronies in Halle), are too well known to bear repeating here.30 The relationship of the Fragmente to the Litteraturbriefe by Lessing, Mendelssohn, Nicolai, Abbt, and others has also been thor¬ oughly documented.31 Of greater and more immediate interest to us here are Herder’s specific ideas about the nature of language in its relationship to the problems of philosophy, history, and poetic practice. At the very beginning of the Fragmente, Herder declared his alle¬ giance to the genetic-historical description of the character of a lan¬ guage by drawing the familiar analogy between its progression and an organic or biological kind of determinism. The essence of Herder’s conception is contained in these words: “The entire human race, indeed the ancient world itself, every nation and every family exhibit the same laws of change: from the bad to the good, from the good to the excellent, from the excellent to the worse, and to the bad: this is the circular course of all things. And thus it is with every art and science: it acquaintance with the Essay. In 1763 the Breslau Vermischte Beytrage zur Philosophic und den schonen Wissenschaftcn had published a translation of the first eight chapters of the second part of the Essay. Aarsleff, “Tradition of Condillac,” p. 152, already pointed out the likelihood that, on the basis of this widely read publication, Herder was probably familiar with at least these crucial chapters of the second part the Essay several years before 1767. In “Der junge Herder als Sprach- und Literaturtheoretiker,” in Sturm und Drang, p. 84, Stiickrath argues that we cannot prove that Herder read the Essay before 1766. The footnote in the essay “Dithyrambische Rhapsodie” of 1765, in which Herder mentions Condillac’s Essay by title (W 31), finally solves this difficulty. But considering that Condillac’s ideas were quickly disseminated and appeared in various forms in countless works. Herder could hardly have been ignorant of the contents of the Essay at any time during his intellectual life. 30. See Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, pp. 217-18, and Clark, Herder. His Life and Thought, pp. 61—63. 31. See Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, pp. 123—27.

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germinates, buds, flourishes and fades. So it is with language as well” (SW I, 151—52). By this time, this idea had lost the appeal of its novelty and, much like the status of the analytic method, the mere mention of the stages-of-life (.Lebensalter) analogy served to identify the author as belonging to one of several competing literary or philosophical camps. Herder also accepted what logically followed from this teleological conception and, as we observed in the previous chapter, he recognized within this scheme the prosaic, indeed philosophical, nature of the modern German idiom: “A language in its adulthood is actually no longer poetry; rather, it is beautiful prose” (SW I, 154). And, finally: “Advanced age knows, instead of beauty, merely correctness . . . This is the philosophical age of language” (SW 1,155). The rest of the Fragmente represents the attempt to establish precisely the point at which the German language found itself in its own internal history and thereby determine the sort of indigenous literature it was and was not intrin¬ sically able to support. One thing was certain. As he had already demonstrated in his essay on Hamann, the “poetic age” and its language of wild ecstasy and un¬ bridled passion had slipped by long ago. Although it had imparted a warm richness of expression and imagery to the language, all of these original elements slowly became crystallized as the language assumed the qualities of eloquence. This is not to deny that poetry could still be composed, Herder was careful to add, but the poetrv of modern, eighteenth-century Europe necessarily reflected this inevitable histor¬ ical development of language. In his discussion of Klopstock in the Fragmente, Herder emphasized the intellectual character of modern poetry that had thereby resulted: “In any case, the poetic sense proper to us paints concepts rather than images, and even our poetic metaphors reveal themselves, measured by the former, more in the light of a proof.. .. We remain colder than the Greeks, who had tender senses, or the Orientals who had passionate ones: even in the flight of poetrv we remain more loyal, like the ostrich, to the ground of the True, and we often come to emotion via reflection” (SW I, 271-72). According to the genetic scheme of linguistic development that Herder endorsed, the earliest languages were by nature best suited to appeal to the senses, whereas the poetry of the present age more closely approximated the transparency of a philosophical proof. Even though modern poetic diction is essentially characterized by reflection, Herder nonetheless did

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not exclude the possibility that “emotion/1 or the stirring of the pas¬ sions, can be achieved through this deliberative medium. Explaining how this could be accomplished, however, presented itself as somewhat of a problem. The notion that a varietv of emotional excitation somehow accom¬ panies or even determines die experience of a work of art had been postulated ever since antiquity, most famously exemplified by Aris¬ totle’s definition of catharsis as the end of tragic drama. Thus when in 1719, for instance, Du Bos began his Reflexions critiques with die observa¬ tion “that a sensible pleasure arises from poems and pictures, is a trudi we are cominced of by daily experience,”32 he was consciously drawing not onlv on “dailv experience” but on a well-established and familiar tradition as well. The sticking point remained die explanation of that in which this “sensible pleasure” actually consisted, and Du Bos continued with the somewhat glib admission: “yet "tis a difficult matter to explain the nature of diis pleasure.” In 1751 Diderot confronted the same diffi¬ culty when he published his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (Letter on the Deaf and Dumb), a work diat Herder knew well and repeatedly praised.33 Diderot’s Lettre was in large part inspired by die work of his friend Condillac, but Diderot exploited Condillac’s principles for their ability to illuminate aesthetic questions rather than for dieir purely epistemological value. Predictably, perhaps, Diderot also recognized the “Lebensalter” analogy with regard to language, and he divided it into the three basic stages “that all languages pass dirough”: “These three phases are birth, development, and perfection .”34 The original, “nas¬ cent” mode of language is again portrayed as one in which the rhydi32. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, trans. Thomas Nugent, p. 1. 33. Herder first mentions the Lettre sur les sourds et muets in die "Dithvrambische Rhapsodie” of 1765 in a footnote (W 32). In the Journal rneiner Reise of 1769, Herder elaborated a plan for aesthetics in which he explicitly mentioned die work of Diderot as a "model”: "That is a plan which I have already sketched out, but which needs to be enlivened a great deal bv a [consideration of] society' and the study of die blind and the deaf and dumb! Diderot can be a model in making experiments, but don’t simply build upon his experiments and systematize them! A work of diis kind can become the first psychology' and, since all sciences follow' upon this one, it could thus become a philoso¬ phy or encyclopedia to them all” (SW IV, 445). On Herder’s relationship generally to Diderot, cf. Karl-Gustav Gerold, Herder undDiderot: IhrEinblick in dieKunst (Frankfurt a/M: M. Diesterweg, 1941). 34- Diderot, Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, trans. and ed. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago: Open Court, 1916). This and following quotations from pp. 192-95.

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mic, melodious tones of poetry were the natural medium of an unculti¬ vated imagination. Such primitive signs achieved their effect through the direct sensate appeal of their vivid imagery, musical qualities, and onomatopoeic resources. As language reaches its stage of so-called perfection, its signs become more suited to the expression of ordered thought, but at the same time they lose the immediacy of the sensible qualities that Diderot believed constituted the “sensible pleasure” of which Du Bos had so easily written. How, then, Diderot asked, do poets achieve their desired effect when, in its state of mature perfection, a language has forfeited its youthful pliancy and natural vigor? Diderot provided an ingenious solution to this problem by striking a comparison between “musical harmony and harmony of style.” “Style” signifies for Diderot the logical order of thought in which authors compose their words, stringing them together in the sequence best adapted to reasonable discourse. Similarly, he wrote, musical notes are arranged according to the strict rules of melodic succession. Sometimes, however, these rules are briefly suspended for a particular purpose. The expected order of the words or notes is often momentarily upset, producing a sensible “shock” of surprise or astonishment. Yet, accord¬ ing to Diderot, whereas stylistic license in the order of words is some¬ times permitted for the sake of euphony or rhyme, musical license most often is taken as the most direct way to communicate the natural order of the musician’s ideas: When, for instance, we are about to describe some great or supernatural events, the harmony of style must be sacrificed or at least disturbed ... In a similar manner in music we must sometimes shock the ear in order to surprise and please the imagination. We may also observe, that though these licences in die order of words are only permitted for the sake of the harmony of style, licences in harmony, on the other hand, are chiefly taken to arouse and give rise in the most natural order to the ideas which the musician wishes to express.

Thus in music the expression is identical with the thought it is intended to convey. With music, in short, the medium is well and truly the message. In the case of language, in contrast, these two properties must be thought of as being distinct from one another, although they arc both present in any sort of discourse. “In speech,” Diderot stipulated, “we must distinguish between thought and expression.” Language, and most especially poetry, can fulfill the dual function of imparting distinct

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and abstract ideas to the mind of the receiver while eliciting striking images in the mind’s eye through the use of vivid metaphors and while caressing the ear with pleasing sounds. Assembled together in the correct proportion, the “esprit” of poetry is achieved: There is a spirit in the poet’s language which moves there and breathes life into each syllable. What is this spirit? I have felt its presence, but find it difficult to describe. I may say that it states and paints objects at the same time; it appeals not only to the understanding, but to the soul which it stirs and the imagination that sees and the ear that hears. The lines are not merely a chain of vigorous words [termes energiques] which express the thought both forcibly [avec force] and nobly, but a series of hieroglyphs, one after another, which picture the thought to us vividly. I might say that all poetry is symbolic [emblematique].

Diderot thus sought to identify the secret of poetry’s effect in the harmonious arrangement of bodi the sensible and abstract qualities inherent in words. But what is missing from Diderot’s description is the consistent adherence to a historical perspective of the kind that Herder perfected. Diderot failed to differentiate clearly between the manner in which, for instance, Homer and Virgil composed their verse and the way in which Corneille and Racine constructed theirs. In Diderot’s estimation, no matter in what age or in which country it is written, “all poetry is symbolic.” For Herder the situation was made more complex by his adamant refusal to assign any particular qualities to poetry as the essential distin¬ guishing marks that would be valid throughout all time and for all cultures. What he missed in Diderot’s otherwise agreeable formulations was thus an indication of the necessarily altered status of the latter-day poet. With direct reference to Diderot, Herder complained in the Fragmente diat “the Frenchman at best superficially analyzes a few beauties, forms his author according to the taste of his own native country and then already considers himself to be the best critic” (W 304—5). In Herder’s opinion die crucial difference between the earliest poetic age and the philosophical present was that the modern artist must deliberately, or “reflectively,” recreate through the skillful manip¬ ulation of the resources of his language diose effects which were orig¬ inally unconsciously produced. Later in the Fragmente, Herder acutely perceived this rift created by our modern consciousness and sympathet¬ ically addressed the dilemma diat faced the poet of his own time:

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Now, poor poet! and you are supposed to paint your feelings on paper, let them flow through a channel of black liquid, you are supposed to write so that we feel, and you are supposed to renounce the true expression of sensations ... you are supposed to paint your entire living soul in dead letters, and “parley” instead of express .. . You have to represent artificially the natural expression of feelings, as one draws a cube on a flat surface; you have to express the entire tone of your feelings in the periodic sentence, in the control and connection of words: you have to paint a picture so that it speaks to the imagination of the other without your assistance, so that it fills the imagination and burrows to the heart through it: you must have the simplicity and wealth, the strength and color of language at your command in order to use them to produce the effect you wanted to achieve with the language of tone and gesture (SW I, 395).

Herder transferred, then, the “reflection” that he had described as the course that we moderns take to “emotion” into the very production of literature itself. Forced to represent the immediate presence of “sensa¬ tion” through the artificial and alienating medium of writing, poets must now acquire virtuosic technical control of every nuance of lan¬ guage in order to evoke the desired effect in a reader they may never see. Thus it seems that in the hands of the modern, philosophical poet language almost assumes the instrumental character that Locke had previously identified as the nature of language as such. Only here, instead of merely distinct ideas, the perfection of poetic language is designed to enable, in addition, the effortless communication of a parti¬ cular emotional content between poets and their distant audience.35 But poetry, especially in modern times, constituted only an isolated and relatively infrequent use of language. And Herder was keenly concerned with every level of language, particularly as it affected the 35. That Herder retained this theory of poetic production in the modem age is evidenced by a comment he made in the preface of the first part of what manv consider to be his major work, the Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte derMcnschheit of 1784. Herder writes: “An author reveals in his work, if it contains ideas which he, if he didn’t invent them (for how little that is truly new can be invented in our time?), at least found them and made them his own, indeed lived in them tor years as it in the possession of his own mind and heart: an author of this kind, I say, reveals in his book, whether it be good or bad, a part of his soul to the public. He not only reveals what had occupied his mind at particular times and on particular occasions, the doubts and dissolutions he experienced in the course of his life which gave him sorrow or consolation; rather he also counts (for what attraction could there otherwise be in the world to become an author and to communicate the concerns of his heart to a wild multitude?) he counts upon some, perhaps a few like-minded souls for whom, in the labyrinth of their years, the same or similar ideas became important. He invisibly converses with them and communicates his feelings to them” (SW XIII, 5).

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discipline of philosophy and, hence, of aesthetics. Herder was never entirely satisfied with any work he completed. No sooner had the Trggmente been printed and released into the world than he undertook to revise them, often tediously repeating what he had said in the first version, but just as often measuring the depth of new and untested waters. In the first “collection” of the revised Fragmente, Herder de¬ voted himself exclusively to questions of language, paring away much of the detritus of parenthetical remarks, quotations, and digressions that had cluttered the previous edition. Immediately we perceive the in¬ creased perspicuity of thought that arose as a result ol this newly enforced tautness of argument. In words that reflect an awareness of the English and French traditions, Herder was satisfied merely to assert in the earlier Fragmente of 1767 that “Language is an instrument ol belles lettres’ and a part of them: whoever writes about the literature of a country must not disregard its language” (SW I, 147)- A year later, however, he was ready to extract the latent philosophical potential irom this rather trivial recognition and, in so doing, he propelled himself far beyond his earlier position. Engaging in a private dialogue with his own words, he then wrote in the second edition: “One must not see language solely as an instrument of literature, but rather as its contents and quintessence; indeed, one must see it as a form according to which ‘belles lettres’ take their shape—“ (SW II, 8). By arguing that language represented not just the means to transmit but also the actual constitutive form of our knowledge, Herder lent his voice to the critique, initiated by Condillac, ol the rationalist philoso¬ phy of language that had postulated the absolute primacy of cognitive activity before any sort of language, or sign use, began. If, as Condillac had assumed, a process of signification did in fact accompany even the most subtle and mute motions of thought, then it followed, Herder concluded, that the largest and most imposing edifices of knowledge— supremely, systems of philosophy—must also rely on the plan laid out by the patterns of language. Constituting far more than simply the subordinate instrument of reason, language in Herder’s view defined the very compass and design of every construct of human knowledge. Now it is true that every Enlightenment philosopher of language had maintained that a close correlation existed between language and the scope of the understanding. In his Unvorgreifliche Gedanken (Disin¬ terested Thoughts) of 1717, Leibniz had also given famous expression to

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this belief by claiming “that language is a mirror of the understanding” and that this “mirror” reflected back on the understanding as well.36 But Herder, responding to the impetus of Condillac, took this acknowledgment a decisive step further by explicitly erasing the priority of thought to language and thus the boundaries that were thought to separate the two. Since we are actually taught to think by learning words, he reasoned, it cannot simply be the case that words only express the preexistent ideas of reason: “If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts, and that we learn to think through words: then language gives all of human knowledge its limits and contour” (SWII, 17). Although this conclusion had certainly been implied in Condillac’s theory, the Abbe had stopped just short of making a generalized equa¬ tion of language with thought. Even if the gradual formation of a language at first limited the human ability to manipulate its signs according to our will, Condillac wanted to grant at least to the speakers of a highly developed or philosophical language complete autonomy to wield it with rational sovereignty. Condillac thus thought that ianonce out of its awkward infancy, did in fact fall under the sway of reason, of which it then became only the manifest and adequate expres¬ sion.37 In a sense, then, Condillac became unfaithful to his own genetic method at the point at which a rigorous adherence to it was most decisive. Herder, on the other hand, leveled this slight discrepancy and insisted that at every stage of its development, as well as in all of its applications, language stakes the absolute limits within which under¬ standing can take place. Thus even the most deliberate and precisely controlled use of signs in modern philosophical discourse—the analysis of objects and concepts—can proceed only as far as the currently avail¬ able resources of language will allow: “We think in language .. . Thus a thing may be analyzed as long as there are words for its subordinate concepts [TbeilbejjriJfe] and an idea can be explained as long as new combinations of words place it in a brighter light” (SW II, 18). A thought never exists, therefore, that was not originally also already a word.38 36. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, betreffend die Ausiibunq mid Verbesserun.fi der deutschen Sprache, ed. Uwe Porksen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), p. 5. See also the afterword, pp. 116-17. 37-

In The Geometric Spirit, p. 163, Knight pushes this point, I think, a bit too far and says that Condillac’s theory was ultimately rationalistic. 38. In fact. Herder envisioned the study of language as the privileged means of philosophical inquiry into the nature of humanity, a plan that he called the only truly

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This was a bold idea, which until the present day has preserved its subversive character. It has repeatedly ascended into prominence as a means to dislodge complacent notions about the sell-sufficient purity ol reason. It appears, for example, in various guises in die critical language philosophies of Fritz Mauthner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in die deconstructive writings of Jacques Derrida. 39 But despite what one might call Herder’s own penchant for polemical agitation, he was primarily interested in the positive and constructive task ol transforming German into a fluent yet accurate medium of expression. Throughout the rest of the Fragmente Herder therefore concentrated on die various ways in which his native language and—in accordance with his estimation of the total interdependence of language and diought—German culture as a whole might be strengthened and improved. To diis end Herder stipulated that audiors carefully distinguish die particular purpose for which they employed dieir words, for, as he had insisted, these very words themselves determine die ideas diey embody. He thus castigated those among his contemporaries who used metaphors, literary allu¬ sions, pleasing turns of phrase, and abundant images while purporting to write philosophical treatises. There is, wrote Herder, too much at stake in true philosophical discourse to indulge in these kinds of amuse¬ ments: “We are not speaking here of couching ideas in accessible words, of euphony, grace, sensations of the heart, readability, etc.: rather, of intellectual perfection in which correctness takes the place of beauty, where there is truth instead of emotion and distinctness instead of all ornamentation” (SW II, 96). The precise and bare frame of prose, although insufficient for poetry, was the proper vehicle for philosophy, which depends on the univocal meaning of each of its terms. This distinction represents one of the most important, and most neglected, intentions of the entire Fragmente. Herder wanted for his native country to refine German into a language philosophical “semiotics.” As he wrote at the beginning of the new Fragmente-. “There is a symbolics that is common to all human beings—a great treasure house in which the knowledge is stored that belongs to the entire human race. The true language philoso¬ pher, whom, however, I do not yet know, has the key to this dark chamber: he will, when he comes, unlock it, bring light into it and show us its treasures . That would be a semiotics which we now only find by name in the indexes ot our philosophical encyclope¬ dias: a deciphering of the human soul trom its language” (SW II, 13). 39. In view ol this affinity, it is thus not surprising that Derrida was interested enough in Condillac to write a lengthy and brilliant introduction to the Essay. Jacques Derrida, The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. with intro. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980).

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that possessed enough flexibility to allow one to perform exact philo¬ sophical analyses, and, if one desired, to compose poetry that could effectively stir the passions as well. Never simply advocating one of these two extremes to the exclusion of the other, Herder envisaged a language that contained every advantage of both poetry and prose: I wanted to show that a language, as it is required by the highest poetry and by the most strict philosophy, are two end points and that between them there is room for all genres, which I place under the category of an easy, comfortable language. Just as beauty and perfection are not the same thing: so too is the most beautiful and the most perfect language not possible at the same time* the middle order [mittlere Grofie] is incontestably the best place because one can move in both directions from there (SW II, 102-3).40

The middle order, from which it would be possible to shift with equal ease into any one of several modes of discourse, is thus an abstract, ideal model and not a form of language that could be actualized per se.41 40. In his Essay, II, I, xv, § 156, Condillac may have also suggested to Herder this idea of a “middle language” that spans the extremes of poetry and philosophy: “Between these two extremes we might represent to our minds all the languages possible, we might see them assuming different characters according to the extremity to which they ap¬ proached. . . . The most perfect should take possession of the middle, and those who spoke it would be a great people.” Elsewhere in the Essay, I, II, iii, § 34, he also stated: “Between these two extremes we might suppose a medium ... Perhaps this medium is so very difficult to find, that men of the greatest genius have only come near it.” See also on the problem of the “middle” in Herder’s works Wilhelm Dobbeck, “Die Kategorie der Mitte in der Kunstphilosophie Johann Gottfried Herders,” in Worte und Werke, ed. Gustav Erdmann and Alfons Eichstaedt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1961), pp. 70—78. 41. Gaier, “Poesie als Metatheorie,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803, p. 218, claims that, according to Herder’s theory: “modernity should concentrate on ‘beautiful prose,’ and not the imitation of Greek poetry, narrative and drama.” That is, Gaier claims that Herder intended to write on all levels at the same time, writing philosophy that was “beautiful” and thus exemplifying his theory through practice. Gaier, however, bases his interpretation on a passage from the first version of the Frajymente that underwent a significant revision in the second edition. The original passage reads: “If [language] is best suited to poetry, then it cannot be a highly philosophical language. Just as beauty and perfection are not the same thing, so too is the most beautiful and most perfect language not possible at the same time; the middle order, beautiful prose, is incontesta¬ bly the best place because one can move in both directions from there” (SW I, 155). We have seen that Herder repeated this thought in die Fraymcntc of 1768 with the single, but crucial omission of the phrase “beautiful prose.” As in the case of the two deceptively similar quotations about the instrumentality of language discussed earlier in this chapter, the difference between the two versions represents an important advancement of Herder’s thought and cannot be so blithely ignored. Herder’s abandonment of the idea of beautiful prose” was, I think, the result of two primary considerations. First, as became clear. Herder believed that the German language could only be improved if the

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Since language is always employed with a view toward a specific end, the “best” language would possess all of the resources its speakers require to achieve their purpose in the most effective manner. The “middle order” therefore designates the point of mediation between all potential linguistic usages, as near to the formal exactitude of philo¬ sophical prose as to the equivocal, metaphorical language of poetry. In purely historical terms, of course, Herder thought that German, and other modern European languages, were closer to the former than to the latter: “Compared to the ancients and primitive languages, the dialects of Europe are more suited to reflection than to the senses and the imagination” (SW I, 158). Yet, as we have discovered, Herder thought that, with great skill and application, writers could learn to manipulate and control the inherent qualities of language to achieve a poetic effect. The kind of literature that Herder imagined would be possible at the level of cultural development on which Germany then found itself was, he thought, perfectly exemplified by the works of Wieland and Klopstock: “serious prose, thoughtful poetry: this is the place which our nation could perhaps most characteristically occupy. It can¬ not occupy it anymore: it is already there” (SW II, 50). Yet Herder’s notion of the “middle order” reveals, in addition, his tendency to steer a course of critical mediation, to unify seemingly disparate elements within a single conception and in this way to suggest a new and fruitful approach to familiar problems. This, as we will presently see, was also one of the greatest merits of Herder’s Abhandlung iiber den Ursprung der Sprache, which, in its exemplary method¬ ological importance, has immediate relevance for his philosophy of aesthetics. It has by now, I hope, become evident that little justice would be done to either Herder’s essay or the Enlightenment philosophies of language if one would interpret the Abhandlung as a profoundly origi¬ nal repudiation of shallow contemporary ideas. Such was not the case, particular use one was making of it was formulated in a mode of discourse appropriate to one’s immediate end. The notion of “beautiful prose” thus worked against Herder s main intention, for “beautiful prose” would tend to blur, rather than emphasize, such distinc¬ tions. Second, since Herder was describing an “ideal” language, or the abstract idea of language in its totality, the concept of “beautiful prose” undoubtedly seemed too con¬ crete and specific to Herder, and he therefore opted for the less definite, but more accurate designation of a “middle order.” That is, it represented a sort of “type” of which each manifestation of language was a “token.”

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however, and this was certainly not the impression of those who read the treatise during Herder’s lifetime. In 1771 and 1781, for example, the Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters in Berlin commissioned J. B. Merian to write a summary of its activities in which he made the following report of the essay that had won the academy’s prize contest in 1771: “M. Herder inspected, with the same wisdom, all that Mr. Diderot, Rousseau and abbe de Condillac have said about this matter; and his name deserves to be associated with these philosophers as much owing to the force of reasoning with which he, like them, sounds the depdis of metaphysics as owing to the respect he shows toward them as he departs more or less from their views.”42 It is indeed difficult to reconcile this balanced and accurate description of Herder’s treatise with the attempts of later commentators to explain away its affinity to the intellectual climate of Herder’s time in order to underscore the ostensible singularity of the Abhandlunjy. Robert T. Clark, for instance, suspected that when Herder wrote the Abhandlung, he was really play¬ ing an esoteric and sardonic game, and that the essay was “written with a double purpose: to make a contribution and at the same time to make fun of the Academy.”43 In one of the more recent books on the problem of the origin of language, the point of this opinion is sharpened even further and Herder’s intentions are completely debased. “There is,” we read with dismay, “considerable evidence that the classic statement on language origin was a classic put-on.”44 Everything we know about Herder and the development of his thought until the composition oiAxzAbhcindlunfj points in the opposite direction, toward his impassioned and incessant search for philosophi¬ cal certainty and truth. This desire was no less active in the writing of the award-winning essay, and he illustrated the seriousness of his enterprise repeatedly. He in fact explained his initial attraction to the academy’s 42. Cited from Wolfgang Prof, Johann Gottfried Herder. “Abhandlung iiber den Ursprung der Sprache” Text, Materialien, Kommentar (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1979), p. 139. The quotation of Merian, the significance of which is also mentioned by Aarsleff, “Tradition of Condillac,” pp. 196-97, was taken by Prof from the book by Pierre Penisson,/. G. Herder, Traite sur l or ip in e de la languef suivi de V.analyse de Aienan et des textes critiques de Hamann. Trans, and ed. P. P. (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion Collection Palimpseste, 1977). 43- Robert T. Clark, Jr.,

Hamann s Opinion of Herder s Tlrsachen des gesunkencn Geschmacks’,” Modem Language Notes, LVI (1946), p. 99. See also Clark, Herder, p. 132. 44- Stam, Inquiries into the Origin of Language, p. 128. Elsewhere, p. 118, Stam refers to the Abhandlung as Herder’s “irreverent and ironical treatise.”

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question (for which he had been excellently prepared by the preceding Tragmente), by underscoring its universal implications: “since this great topic promises so many insights into psychology and the natural order of the human race, into the philosophy of languages and of all knowl¬ edge that was gained by language—who would not want to try his hand on it?” (SWV,2i) 45 It was indeed a “great topic” for the thinkers of the Enlightenment, for not only did they grant to language a central role in their philosophical endeavors, but by pursuing the specific question of its origin they also approached language in a manner that was highly characteristic of the age. Especially after Condillac, it was thought that because of the recognized centrality of language the determination of the origin of language in particular would illuminate countless other epistemological, historical, and even aesthetic concerns that found their realization through the medium of language. In view of its acknowl¬ edged significance, then, Herder set out to answer the prize question with all of the methodological rigor and stylistic elan of a person with a firm conviction of the legitimacy of his or her endeavor.46 Far from being a mere “put-on,” his solution is at once remarkably simple and impressively complex, for what he sought to provide was in essence a synthesis of contemporary opinion concentrated within a single diesis or principle (Satz) that would prove the true and precise origin of language. Thus Herder’s consuming ambition, which actually led him quite beyond the requirements of the academy, and his considerable philosophical talent animated him to formulate a single principle con¬ cerning language origin, “and to make the principle ... as certain as a philosophical truth can be” (SW V, 90). He could hardly have stated his aim more clearly. 45. I have profitably consulted the translation in On the Origin of Language. JeanJacques Rousseau: Essay on the Origin of Language. Johann Gottfried Herder: Essay on the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Code (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966). 46. See Harnack, Geschichte der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, p. 413, in which we read the shrewd observation that confirms my beliet that Herder would not have entered into so many prize contests if he only wished to ridicule the academy: “Four prize topics, which the Academy announced tor the years 1771, T775-> 1776 and 1780, are distinguished by that tact that Herder attempted to solve them and carried away the prize for three of them. That alone is already evidence that the Academy did not stand in such a distant relation to the intellectual development in Germany as is so often maintained. Would a Herder have been repeatedly inspired by the questions it posed if they did not deal with the most important problems diat occupied German minds at that time?’'’

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But what was this single principle? Confusion had arisen in the Berlin academy precisely because of the lack of any agreement about the origin of language, which in turn was caused by the conflicts generated by the divergent philosophical orientations of its leading representatives. Al¬ though Frederick II had intended for the academy to embody and transmit the precepts of Leibniz and Wolff, as well as those of Newton and Locke, factions had nevertheless soon arisen.47 The French presi¬ dent of the academy, Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis (who had, inciden¬ tally, in his official capacity helped to grant membership to Condillac in 1749), was frankly indebted to Condillac for manv of his ideas on the issue of language origin.48 And his lecture before the academy of 1756, the Dissertation sur les differents moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leu?s idees (Dissertation on the Different Means Human Beings Employ to Express Their Ideas), in which he attempted to show the manner in which human beings naturally invented and perfected lan¬ guage, revealed his fundamental reliance on his compatriot’s Essay and the larger English and French empirical tradition 49 His vocal and persuasive opponent, Johann Peter Siissmilch, was, on the other hand, despite Herder’s insinuations to the contrary, a gifted philosopher of the Wolffian school, which led him to suggest an opposing solution to the problem of language origin based on the argumentation of deduc¬ tive reasoning.50 As the title of his contribution of 1766 indicates, the Versuch eines Beweises, daft die erste Sprache ihren Ur sprung nicht vom Menschen, sondem allein vom Schopfer erhalten habe (Attempt to Prove That the First Language has Its Origin not in Human Beings but in the Creator Alone) represented the attempt to prove through a careful application of deductive logic that, given the structural perfection dem47- Ibid., p. 432. 48. See Ricken, Sprache, Anthropologic, Philosophic in dcr franzosischcn Aufklaruna p. 107 and p. 222. 49. On Maupertuis’s intellectual background, see Stam, Inquiries into the Origin of Language, p. 99. 50. See also Bruce Kiefter, “Herder’s Treatment of Siissmilch’s Theory of the Origin of Language in the ‘Abhandlung fiber den Ursprung der Sprache’: A Re-evaluation,” Germanic Renew, LIII (1978), pp. 97—98. However unjust Herder’s overall treatment of Siissmilch may be. Herder does at one point in the Abhandlung acknowledge Sussmilch’s abilities, calling him “the most thorough, the most comprehensive defender of the divine origin of language, for the precise reason that he penetrated through the surface which others only touched, is almost a defender of the true human origin. He stopped just before the proof” (SW V, 38).

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onstrated by language, human beings could not have been the unaided inventors of language.51 Siissmilch’s argument does not entail, there¬ fore, the simpleminded notion that God gave language lessons to Adam and Eve but is founded rather on a logical conclusion following two premises widely accepted during his day.52 Reduced to its essential syllogistic form, his argument went basically as follows: Since everyone admits that humans could not have invented language without being in possession of reason, Siissmilch argued, and the consolidation and employment of reason was not possible without some kind of linguistic capacity, God was therefore the only other conceivable necessary cause for language having come into being. It was a clever but ultimately not very convincing account. The academy’s debate concerning the nature of language was then carried into the wider public arena when, in 1757, the academy an¬ nounced its first prize topic on language: “What is the nature of the mutual influence of people’s opinions on language and of language on opinions?”53 Johann David Michaelis, a professor at Gottingen and an Old Testament philologist, won the prize in 1759 with a contribution that exhibited a close familiarity and sympathy with the thought of Condillac and Maupertuis.54 Michaelis, in turn, was the object of a riposte by Sulzer, who, as a respected and faithful proponent of Leibnizian philosophy, delivered a number ofAnmerkungen iiber den gegenseitigen Einflufi der Vernunft in die Sprache und der Sprache in die Vernunft (Remarks on the Mutual Influence of Reason on Language and of Language on Reason) in 1767. Although Sulzer’s work lacks the severe deductive cast reflected in the essay by Siissmilch, his philosophical leanings were still overtly partisan, and they inclined more toward the views of the founders of the academy than toward those of its present principals. 51. See Stam, Inquiries into the Origin of Language, p. 101, and Aarsleff, “Tradition of Condillac,” pp. 187—88. 52. Aarsleff, ibid., p. 188, also emphasizes this point. 53. Cited from Harnack, Geschichte der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie, p. 409. On p. 396 Harnack reminds us of the scholarly importance accorded the prize contests in the eighteenth century: “The prize topics which the academies issued yearly were considered to be the direct and actual means of promoting the progress of the sciences in general and of keeping them on the correct paths. Their importance cannot be overestimated.” 54. For a description of the essay by Michaelis, see Aarsleff, “Tradition of Condillac,” pp. 189-90.

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It was in the context of such conflicting opinions—which were stimulated, as we have seen, by the more general differences of philo¬ sophical allegiance among its members—that in 1769 the academy posed the famous question for its prize contest for the following year: “Supposing there are human beings left to their natural faculties: are they in a position to invent language? And by what means would they arrive by themselves at this invention? We demand a hypothesis that explains the matter clearly and that satisfies all difficulties.”55 We recall that Herder responded to this challenge by proposing to offer a single principle that stood upon the firmest philosophical foot¬ ing. But Herder's methodological statement possesses a polemical edge that is only fully revealed in the final paragraph of the Abhandlunpj. There he emphatically stressed that he had delivered “no h\pothesi.f” {keineHypothese) as the academy had specificallv demanded, but rather a principle that he had acquired and proved through inductive analysis. This distinction was not gratuitous, because, to the discriminating taste of an Enlightenment philosopher, “hypotheses” always smacked strongly of Cartesianism and dogmatic metaphysics.56 We remember that Newton himself, the supreme authority for so many Enlighten¬ ment thinkers, had insisted in the Opticks that: “Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy.” In his Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert had thus dutifully insisted “that the single true method of philosophizing” was “rigidly dissociated from any arbitrary hypoth¬ eses.”57 Fully conscious of Newton’s stance in the minds of contempo¬ rary philosophers, Herder very deliberately identified himself as belonging, as it were, to the post-Newtonian era of philosophv: “In physics, Descartes s hypotheses were followed by a Newton* let the mathemati¬ cal era in philosophy be followed by the physical one” (W107). Address¬ ing himself in the third person as the author of the just-completed work, 55. Cited from Harnack, Geschichte der Konipfhcb Preussischen Akadcmic, p. 414. 56. In the review of Herder’s treatise in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliotbek of 1773, the reviewer noted the importance Herder gave to his not having offered a hypothesis: uMr. Herder .. . takes an altogether different path, and following it he offers, as I have already mentioned, not a hypothesis, but a proof which can be taken as a demonstration that language had to originate in the way he indicates.” Cited in Johann Gottfried Herder and seine zeitpfcndssischcn Kritiker: Herder-Kritik in dcGAllycmcincn Dentscben Bibliotbek,” ed. Hans-Jurgen Gaycken, (Bern: Peter Lang, 1985), p. 120. In none of the commentaries on the Abhandlunpf by Irmscher, Profs or Gaier is any mention made of the significance of the term “Hypothese” for Herder or, indeed, for the Enlightenment. 57. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 25.

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Herder therefore announced in the closing lines of thcAbhandlung that, in place of a speculative hypothesis, he had attempted instead: ucto

collect data from the human soul, human organization, the structure of all old and primitive languages and from the whole economy of the human race' and to prove his principle in such a way as the most certain philo¬ sophical truth can be proven” (SW V, 147)Herder stressed that he had striven to prove the philosophical truth of his proposition by a scrupulous consideration oi all the relevant “data,” ranging from human psychology, physiology, linguistics, and even to cultural anthropology. Not without a trace ol pride, Herder thus repeatedly emphasized throughout the essay such phrases as: “I have proven” or “since I believe to have proven’ in order both to underscore the philosophical accuracy ol his argument and at the same time to defend himself proleptically from the accusation that he was engaging in mere hypothetical speculation. In Herder’s own eyes, then, the Abhandlung enacted in exemplary fashion the rigors ol the analytic method, inductively producing a single principle within a broad survey of all available facts and opinions. Even though the goal ol the treatise was to discover a single truth. Herder wanted to make his inquiry as broad, and therefore as complete, as possible. “The goal ol truth is only a single point!” Herder expansively asserted; “aimed toward it, we nevertheless look to all sides” (SW V, 46). The extent to which Herder attempted to encompass the widest possible range of information or “data” is demonstrated in the famous opening sentence: “Even as animals, human beings possessed language” (SW V, 5). It was a clever ruse, for in the course of the treatise, Herder analyzed each one of these terms and finally reversed the meaning of the entire statement. Humans never were simply “animals” for the simple reason that, by definition, they were always in possession of language. But, for the sake of a strict sequence of argument, this conclusion could not be made too hastily. Herder thus began the first section of the essay by examining the earliest, most primitive sounds that expressed the immediate sensations ol pain, joy, exuberance, and sorrow. Yet he insisted that, just as the ideas of perception only provide the material for reflection, these “natural tones” represent only the basic materials of language but do not constitute language per se. In conformity with his analytic procedure. Herder made a general statement only after cata¬ loguing a fair number of examples of such simple sounds—as he ten-

no

Herder's A esthetics

dentiously wrote: “Now I may turn to the application: In all original languages, vestiges of these sounds of nature are still to be heard; though, to be sure, they are not the principal fiber of human language. They are not the roots as such, but the sap that enlivens the roots of language” (SW V, 9). But this was only the first step of Herder’s argument, and he admitted that: “I will not be able to explain most of these phenomena until a later context” (SW V, io). Following his overview of the basic material components of primitive language. Herder then proceeded to counter Siissmilch’s ostensible hypothesis that the sounds of all known languages could be reduced to twenty letters. It is true that Herder did not at every point accurately represent Sussmilch’s line of reasoning. But this is actually rather insig¬ nificant for the moment, for we are mainly interested in the structure of Herder s own argument. For here he displayed a great wealth of exam¬ ples from now-obscure travel reports by Rasies, Chaumonot, Garcilasso de la Vega, De la Condamine, La Loubere, Lery, and Charlevoix about non-European languages in which it is shown that “the true tone of their organization cannot be painted with letters” (SW V, 12). Yet Herder cited these facts as much for their actual content as for method¬ ological reasons, and he expressly used them in order to condemn the hypothesis of letters (SW V, 14) with the accent primarily on the hateful notion of “hypothesis.” There is no denying that Herder gravely and unconscionably warped the views of his forerunners in the heat of his polemical zeal’, and his feelings of anxiety upon the publication oiAx^Abhandlung indicate that he was probably aware of his gross and unfair misrepresentations.58 Condillac, who received the brunt of Herder’s caustic, patronizing criticism, was the person to whom Herder was actually most indebted. The reasons for Herder’s vicious attacks no doubt lie as much within Herder s complex personality as in the peculiarlv eighteenth-century taste for pungent polemics.59 In any event, Herder’s objections to the supposed arguments of Condillac—who when named in theAbhand58. In a letter to Nicolai in Herder’s Rriefe, vol. 2, Herder wrote at the beginning of rebruarv, 1772: If only someone from the Academy had shown mercy with the fateful work how thankfully would I have accepted it;—now it is printed! there! black and WhltCL am ashamcd lt • • • 1 do not know of any other solution than a supplement with the same publisher. I could fill it with good things: I could at least indicate the errors I have made in the best way and preempt my opponents_.” 59- In his commentary, Gaier, p. 1294-, speculates that Herder was perhaps so causti¬ cally ironic because of the proximity of Condillac’s ideas to those of his own.

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lung is only a weak straw man of Herder’s own invention—still play an important role in the advancement of his argument by giving Herder’s ideas the appearance of marked contrast. At the end of his distorted, polemical precis of Condillac’s Essay, Herder concluded that in light of the French philosopher’s theory that language gradually developed merely “from the cries of sensation,” Condillac had de facto made “animals into humans” (SW V, 21). In order to lend his own views a more distinct contour in relation to this Active opponent, then, Herder turned to the question of the specific differences between human beings and animals. This discussion represents one of the great axes of the treatise, for it is immediately followed by the second section in which the true “goal”— the demonstration of language origin—is reached. Herder carefully constructed the terms that would lead him to this “goal” in a way that could not fail to convince his readers. Like most Enlightenment think¬ ers, Herder believed that human beings are essentially characterized by “reason” and “freedom,” whereas animals exhibit a kind of “artifactive skill” and mere “instinct.” Animals, he argued, are constrained by nature to a limited field of activity on which their entire being is concentrated. “Human beings do not have such a monotonous and narrow sphere,... the powers of their soul are spread out over the world” (SW V, 24). Human beings thus enjoy the freedom of applying their capacities in an infinite variety of ways; the spider, in contrast, although a master of technical perfection in its own restricted realm, may only spin its web. This difference between the respective capacities of humans and beasts is categorical according to Herder: Call this entire organization of human powers understanding, reason, reflec¬ tion \Besinnung\ etc., call it what you will. As long these names are not intended to stand for particular powers, or for no more than a stepped-up potentiation of animal powers, I shall not object.... The difference is not one of degree, nor one of a supplementary endowment of powers; it lies in a completely different orientation and development of all powers. Whether one is a Leibnizian or a Lockian, Search or Know-all, Idealist or Materialist, in consequence of the foregoing one has to admit, with the assumption of a certain agreement regarding the meaning of words, that there is ‘a distinct character of humanitf that consists in this and in nothing else (SW V, 29-30).

Herder thus painstakingly worked toward the actual point of interest without giving away too much too soon. He did not simply state that

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the difference between human and animal was that humans possess language and beasts do not, although philosophers from Aristode to Descartes had thought that this was in fact the one main determining characteristic that sets the two apart;60 rather, he distinguished humans by virtue of their absolutely unique intellectual and sensible capacities that are not controlled by blind instinct but can be subjected to the free will that human beings alone exhibit. Herder also used the term “ra¬ tionality (Vernunftmafsipfkeit) (SW V, 30) to characterize this peculiarly human capacity in order to show that one need not think that the earliest human beings could, for example, perform integral calculus, but that the potential for such an advanced use of reason was present from the very first moment of human existence. As is evident from the previous quotation, Herder obviously recognized that the definition of the peculiar character of humanity as possessing the active and free power of reason was acknowledged by both the “Leibnizians” and the “Lockians” of the Berlin academy. He was conscious, that is, of plying a path of communication between the two main schools of thought that were at odds with one another in the academy.61 He knew, therefore, that no one among them could have reasonably objected to any of Herder s formulations thus far. Once this conceptual basis of agreement had been established, once the peculiar human “rationality” had been defined, the next step of his argument—the “goal,” the single principle establishing the point of origin of language—was laid out before him. Herder had only to take it. Turning toward this goal, Herder apologized with rhetorical cunning that I have lost so much time just in determining and ordering mere concepts, . . . By clearing up these concepts I have not taken a detour: we are, rather, all of a sudden at our goal!” (SW V, 34). Immediately following this flourish is an admirable piece of analytic reasoning, in which Herder expertly conjoined concepts from both Wolffian psychol¬ ogy and the cognitive theories of Locke and Condillac. He suddenly 60. In Descartes, Discourse on the Method, p. 140, we read, for example: “Now in just these two ways we can also know the difference between man and beast. For it is quite remarkable that there are no men so dull-witted or stupid—and this includes even madmen that they are incapable of arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, however perfect and well-endowed it may be, that can do the like.” 61. Harnack indicates in Geschichte der Kdnijjlich Preussischen Akademie, p. 445, that this sort of an attempt at reconciliation between the two dominant schools was not unusual in the contributions submitted to the academy.

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introduced his proof by recapitulating and condensing his foregoing arguments: “Human beings, placed in the condition of reflection that is peculiar to them, with this reflection for the first time given full freedom of action, invented language” (SW V, 34) 62 In actuality, Herder had with this sentence already stated his solution to the problem, albeit in abbreviated form, and he could have ended the treatise here. But he had learned long ago from Kant the necessity of analyzing the main con¬ cepts of one’s proof, and he thus entered into the analysis of the two concepts on which everything else depended: “For what is reflection? What is language?... Let us just elaborate on both concepts! Reflection and language—” (SW V, 34). Herder first proceeded to define reflection as the cognitive activity of identifying individual features within one’s field of perception. Like every other Enlightenment philosopher, Herder described this process as the hierarchical refinement of knowledge in which distinct concepts are isolated from clear and confused perceptions. Thus the most basic cognitive act, the first application of reflection, consists in distinguish¬ ing fundamental characteristics from one another within an otherwise undifferentiated mass of perceptions, resulting in what Herder called the first judgment of the soul: “He thus manifests reflection if he is able not only to form lively or distinct cognitions of all characteristics [Eigen-

schaften]; but if he can also recognize one or several of them as differen¬ tiating characteristics for himself: this first act of recognition renders a distinct concept; it is the first judgment of the soul

and

’ (SW V, 35).

The suspense of the “and” surrounded by dashes, the “and” that both separates and unites the definitions of “reflection and language and that leads to the very center of the treatise, is finally relieved in the next paragraph: “By what means did this recognition occur? Through a

62. Herder’s neologism “Besonnenheit,” which I take as the attempt to translate the French or Latinate “reflection” (this is how Hamann—as reliable an authority as any— understood the term, for Herder actually uses the word Reflexion much more often than “Besonnenheit”) has stirred considerable disagreement and controversy in the scholarly literature as to its precise meaning. But in the review of Herder s treatise in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek of 1773, the reviewer equated “Besonnenheit” quite simply with “reason”: “Man is distinguished from all other animals by an articulated language which is used deliberately and arbitrarily; hence, its origin must be sought in the characteristic difference of man. This is reason, or as the author prefers to call it, ‘Besonnenheit,’ according to which human cognitive power expresses itself in larger realms, in a finer organization and more clearly.” Cited in Johann Gottfried Herder und seine zeitgenossischen Kritiker, Gaycken, p. 120.

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distinguishing mark [Merkmal] which he had to single out and which, as a distinguishing mark of reflection [Besinnung], struck him as being distinct. Well, then! Let us acclaim him with shouts of‘eureka’! This first

distinguishing mark of reflection was a word of the soul\ With it, human language was invented” (SW V, 34). This is, to borrow a phrase from Herder’s own Shakespeare essay, uthe heart of the investigation,” and the Archimedean exclamation of triumph was certainly Herder’s as well. From the first moment that human reflection became active—that is, as soon as it formed a distinct idea by connecting or marking a particular sense impression with a mental sign

language was simultaneously born. Thus the existence of

reflection, which is the active application of reason, both presupposes and necessitates the existence of language, so that the origin of the one is a necessary and sufficient cause for the existence of the other. The origin of reason, then, is identical with the origin of language: “I have proven that the use of reason is not only ‘not very well’ possible without signs, but that not even the slightest use of reason, not even the simplest distinct recognition, not the most basic judgment of human reflection is possible without a distinguishing mark: for the difference between two things can only recognized through a third” (SW V, 39). With his “secure principle” Herder knew that he had proved the point of origin of language not only to his own satisfaction, but also, perhaps more important, in a way that could not be disputed by either the

Leibnizians

or

Lockians” of the academy; its conferral of the

prize upon his treatise is also, one might safely assume, sufficient evi¬ dence of contemporary satisfaction with his success. In a sense, however, Herder could claim only a partial victory. Con¬ dillac, we recall, had also defined reflection as the innate ability of human beings to mark and retain for recollection particular moments or distinct features of the otherwise chaotic perceptions of experience. And he, too, had taken care to distinguish human from beast on the basis of this peculiarly human capacity to connect ideas wirii signs. But the uncertainty engendered by Condillac’s Essay was caused by his failure to state whether the purely cognitive operation of this “connection of ideas was already language, or whether this designation should only be applied to externalized signs of communication. The dispute in the academy centered on this lack of clarity, for if the latter were true, then some further explanation of the motivation for these externalized signs

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would have been required. The outstanding merit of Herder’s treatise was to have cleared away this uncertainty by insisting that the interior, silent cognitive activity of fixing an individual perception with a sign must be understood as already constituting language. It was here that Herder illustrated his point by using the example, which had a history extending from Plato to Moses Mendelssohn, of a human being first encountering a bleating sheep.63 He suggested that one imagine a sheep passing before the eyes of a human being for the first time. “It stands there, entirely as it manifests itself in his senses. White, soft, wooly—his soul in reflective exercise seeks a distinguishing mark [Merkmal]—the

sheep bleatsl His soul has found the distinguishing mark” (SW V, 35). The purpose of the example, whose unintentional humor Christian Morgenstern had so neatly parodied, was simply to show that at the moment this “distinguishing mark,” or sign, was isolated by human reflection was already the moment at which language was born. “He recognized the sheep by its bleating, it was a sign [Zeichen] he had

grasped, a sign with which his soul distinctly reflected on an idea—And what is that other than a word? And what is the entire human language other than a collection of such words?” (SW V, 36—37)Herder’s concept of the origin of language is thus extremely abstract, answering in essence a logical problem that had been raised inadver¬ tently by Condillac’s Essay. Herder’s response to the first half of the prize question: “Supposing there are human beings left to their natural faculties: are they in a position to invent language?” is therefore cast not in the form of a probability but in that of a necessary fact of human nature: “The savage, the hermit living alone in the woods, would have had to invent language, even if he never spoke it. His language was the agreement [Einverstiindnis] of his soul with itself, and it was an agree¬ ment that was as necessary as being human was to a human” (SW V, 38). 63. See “Cratylus,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Hunt¬ ington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 458: “we shall be obliged to admit that the people who imitate sheep, or cocks, or other animals, name that which they imitate.” Similarly, in Mendelssohn, “Sendschreiben an den Herrn Magister Lessing in Leipzig,” in Schriften zur Philosophic, Aesthetik und Apologetik, vol. II, p. 345, we read, “Given that natural human beings would have taken notice of their surroundings, they would have heard in their forests sheep bleating, dogs barking, birds singing and the ocean roaring; they would have heard this so often, and seen the objects at the same time, that the visual images in their soul would have acquired a kind of connection with the sounds so that they would never hear a sheep bleating behind them without representing to their minds the image of this animal.”

Il6

Herder’s Aesthetics

Since human reason is by definition linguistic in character, its first application—the first distinct idea that is seized on by reflection— naturally and necessarily produces signs, which Herder equated with what he called “notational-words” (Merkworter). In this respect, then, the society of other humans was unimportant or superfluous in the actual origin of language. Yet Herder was aware that so far in his argument he had only discussed an abstract, internal process of cogni¬ tion. He had as yet left the question unanswered of how this silent language was externalized as speech: “we are speaking of the inward, necessary genesis of a word as the mark of a distinct reflection” (SW V, 45)- As “a means of connection” (SW V, 47)—which is perhaps Her¬ der's version of Condillac's notion of the “connection of ideas”—the process of connecting a mental mark or sign with perceptions is, accord¬ ing to Herder, automatically or naturally transferred to the outer sphere of connecting an audible sign with these inner thoughts: “I cannot think the first human thought or progress to the first reflected judgment without entering into a dialogue with my soul, or at least striving to enter into one; the first human thought, by its very nature, thus pre¬ pares me to be able to enter into dialogue with others! The first distin¬ guishing mark I conceive is a distinguishing word for me and a word of communication for others!” (SW V, 47). Since we are fundamentally social beings, the human inclination and capacity for creating ccwords of communication” is thus inherent in the innate human faculty of reason that produces the “notational-words” that enable cognition to occur. Once again, on the basis of a single principle, Herder has shown that language, as both audible speech and silent cognition, is a natural, inevitable product of the distinctive rational nature of humanity. The following, third section of Herder’s Abhandlunpf is then devoted to the investigation of how these “words of communication" gradually evolve as a result of those innate human capacities that Herder had already defined. It is here, then, that Herder began his investigation of actual spoken languages and their historical development, which he calls the “genetic origin" of languages.64 The second half of the treatise 64. In the revised version of the Fragmente of 1768, Herder had already criticized Siissmilch for his having neglected to take this genetic or historical aspect into account, which only showed in Herder’s opinion “that he lacked the philosophical spirit of appreciating the true ideal of language, namely the spirit of history to investigate its various temporal advances and stages of life, and he lacked most of all the philosophical genius of being able to explain it as a development of reason and as the product of the human powers of the sold" (SW II, 67—68).

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is thus devoted to what might be called the demonstration of the possibility of synthetically reconstructing all known languages by fol¬ lowing his analytically derived principle. But the rest of Herder’s Ab-

handlung fiber den Ursprung der Sprache need not occupy us any longer. The real point of preeminent interest in the treatise—the determination of the origin of language—has already been settled. As Herder himself wrote at the beginning of the third section: “The burning point has been located where Prometheus’s divine spark was ignited in the human soul—language came into being with the first distinguishing mark” (SW V, 48). The remaining pages represent little more than an extended and thorough consideration of various aspects of the development and differences of known languages without adding to the theoretical in¬ sights that support these fundamental conclusions. Although he quite sensibly limited his discussion only to language, at one juncture Herder did allude to the possible perspectives his genetic explanation of language might open in other fields: “What I most unwillingly relinquish here would be the many prospects afforded by this genetic standpoint of language in the human soul that extend over the broad fields of logic, aesthetics, and psychology, especially as con¬ cerns the questions: how much can one think without language?—What

does one have to think with language?” (SW V, 46—47). When Herder wrote these words, he had just completed his Kritische Walder a year before, in 1769, and the wish was obviously still strong to place the concepts he had developed here in the service of a universal theory of aesthetics. Although he did not always systematically elaborate on the implications of his insight into the cognitive nature and function of language, he never forgot its importance. As late as the Kalligone of 1800, his ill-fated attack on Kant’s aesthetic theory, the Kritik der Urteils-

kraft (Critique of Judgment), we find Herder still insisting—though without further amplifying its significance—that: “Human language carries its cognitive forms within itself; we think, especially abstractly, only in and with language” (SW XXII, 7).

Above all, Herder’s reflections on language taught him to attend to the interrelation of language and thought and to the necessity of analyz¬ ing philosophical concepts, or all words, into their original, that is to say, metaphorical sense. Herder thus frequently criticized those philoso¬ phers, among whom he counted the later Kant as a prime offender, who employed, “instead of precisely defined words, hypostasized images, me¬ taphors thrown together from every discipline and chained to one an-

Ii8

Herder’s A esthetics

other, which, owing to a complete poverty or a voluntary relinquish¬ ment of all data of experience, become an eternal reverberation of the same echos of words, of the same foggy dreams” (SW XXII, 4). A substantial portion ol Herder’s philosophy of aesthetics, as it was ex¬ pressed in the Kritische Wdlder, sought to dispel such “foggy dreams” and to attend minutely to what he had called the “data of experience.”

4 Toward an Ontology of the Arts: The First Kritisches WUldchm To speculate subtly on art merely on the basis of general ideas can lead us to fanciful conclusions, which sooner or later and to our shame we should find refuted in the works of art.

—Lessing

I

n the conclusion to the second part of the Fragmente of 1767, Herder had mentioned in passing that “the fourth part should consider

aesthetics, history and philosophy, if this broad material does not go be¬ yond the boundaries of a section” (SW I, 355). Since such a fourth part never appeared, Herder quite obviously realized that this “broad mate¬ rial” far exceeded the limits even of the wide-ranging Fragmente and he apparently decided to devote separate treatises to each of the topics he had named. Only after the revision of the Fragmente in 1768, then, did Herder undertake his first genuine foray into the thicket of aesthetic philosophy, producing the often rather nettlesome Kritische Walder, the first three of which he published anonymously in 1769.

Like the Fragmente themselves, which were in large part a critical survey of contemporary German literature, all four of the Kritische Walder were not completely independent works. They grew, instead, out of Herder’s often mordant polemics leveled against several leading figures of the mid-eighteenth-century German literati. Although the first Kritisches Waldchen contains a careful and principally sympathetic analysis of the Laocoon by Lessing, for whom Herder showed the sincerest respect throughout his life, the leaves of the other three volumes embody some of the most acrimonious critical commentary to be found in the whole of German letters. With a ferocious energy that now appears strangely incommensurate with the objects of his attack, Her¬ der set out to expose the logical inconsistencies, contradictions, and

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naive assumptions in several of the works by Christian Adolf Klotz, a contentious professor of rhetoric in Halle, and by one of his proteges, Friedrich Justus Riedel. Yet, thcKritische Wdlder were not without their positive aspect. As he had often done before. Herder used the occasion ol his criticism ot others to develop his own ideas that, most especially in the fourth Kritisches Wcildchen, achieved a sudden and impressive cogency. Particularly in his earliest writings, Herder seems to have required the spindle of a previous work around which he could wind the thread of his own thought. With the fourth Kritisches Wcildchen in particular, he finally wove a tightly knitted text in which all of his interests were neatly interlaced. For it was here that he managed for the first time to tip the balance between unproductive commentary and independent reflection decisively toward the latter. This is not meant to imply, of course, that the first Wcildchen is in itself insignificant. On the contrary, it was here that Herder developed his theory of the ontological structure of the major art forms upon which he based his theory of the psychology and physiology of aesthetic perception in the fourth. In more general terms, furthermore, the first Wcildchen allows us to trace Herder’s earliest efforts to integrate the perspectives he had acquired from his studies of English and French philosophers and historians into the systematic aesthetic theories of the German school, represented primarily by Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Lessing himself. Nevertheless, as we will see in the next chapter, it was not until the fourth Wcildchen that Herder concentrated the full force of these ideas within a clear theoretical program. Although literary historians have frequently stressed the tremendous, if not singular, importance of the fourth Kritisches Wcildchen for Her¬ der’s aesthetic theory, its position within the specific context of the theories that Herder had been both tacitly supporting and explicitly developed in the works he had written in the years before has not yet been demonstrated in the detail necessary to understand it fully.1 In the i. The discussion of the Kritische Wdlder in the scholarly literature has often centered on the question of whether they or the later Kallicjone were to be seen as Herder’s most important statement on aesthetics. See Herder nach seincm Lcben, vol. I, pp. 259-60, in which Haym maintains that, although the fourth Kritisches Wcildchen was only an outline of a future aesthetics, it was presented much more coherently and systematically than in the later work. I his is also the thesis of the book by May, Lessings mid Herders kunsttheoretische Gedanken in ihrem Zusammenhanpf, p. 18. The opposite view is advocated by Jacoby (in Herders und Kants Asthctik, p. 76), who viewed the Kalliqone, and Herder’s

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fourth Waldchen Herder not onlv theoretically defined but also demon¬ strated in practice the specific purpose, method, and sphere of inquiry that would conform to his ideal of a rigorous philosophy of aesthetics. Unfortunately, Herder came to publish only the first three and, in comparative terms, the least interesting of the Kritische Walder, a deci¬ sion that mav have been due in large part to the unpleasant effects of Klotz’s counterattacks and the consequent lifting of the veil of Herder’s anonymity. Stung by these revelations, and dissatisfied generally with his life in the Baltic city of Pdga, Herder then hastily made preparations for his voyage to France in 1769 and abandoned his plans to publish the fourth Kritisches Waldchen.* 2 He thus left the work that in the opinion of Robert T. Clark, Jr., “could have changed the entire course of German aesthetics” lving in his drawer, where, unread and unknown, its immediacv and relevance gradually seeped away.3

For this reason, then, Herder’s most trenchant ideas on the philoso¬ phy of art were withheld from the exchange of ideas that took place during the subsequent flourishing of philosophical aesthetics in and outside of Germany. Yet it hardly need emphasizing that, at the very least, the Kritische Walder still deserve our closest scrutiny for what they mean within the totality of Herder’s oeuvre itself. For by the time he wrote the fourth Kritisches Waldchen, Herder could already look back on a half decade of reflection on the technique of philosophical analysis, the complex theories of the psychology of perception, the interrelation between historv and artistic production, and the constitutive role lan¬ guage played in the most basic cognitive activity. And it was this array of later work generally, as being far superior to his earlier efforts. A completely different opinion, although one that is not further substantiated, is offered by Roy Pascal, The German Sturm and Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 195?). P- 25Q, who insists that “Herder’s . . . Kritische Walder fails to develop in any significant way the suggestions of the Fragments. Herder gets bogged down in conventional concepts. The first silva is the most important.” 2. Clark, Herder. His Life and Thought, pp. 85-87., describes in detail the incidents leading up to Herder’s flight from Riga. In addition to the painful and embarrassing exposure of his authorship of the Kritische Walder, which Herder had even rather inexplicably publicly denied, there seems also to have been something approaching an affair with a married woman in Riga, making his departure all the more advisable in his own eves. Like Goethe’s later clandestine journey to Italy, Herder’s travels produced a literary document of eminent value, his Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, which, how¬ ever, was also never published in Herder’s lifetime. See also Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, p. 307, and the section entitled “Anonvmitat” in the book by Bruno Markwardt, Herders Kritische Walder (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1925), pp- 12—24. 3. Clark, Herder. His Life and Thought, p. 88.

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critical tools and assumptions, which themselves confirmed his alliance with the progressive movement of the European Enlightenment, that Herder sought to employ in every aspect of the study of art and the ways in which we understand it. In close affinity with that Faustian drive that his friend Goethe would soon give its most famous expression, Herder was striving to attain nothing less than complete and universal knowl¬ edge of the nature of artistic beauty. Among the scattered reflections that make up the Journal meiner Reise, which documents both the inner and physical flight from Riga he undertook in 1769, Herder intimated that he perceived the daunting complexity of his self-imposed agenda when he considered: Beauty, for instance: of how many ideas is it the ‘compositum’? out of how many ideas from entirely different things is it drawn? how subtly intertwined are all of these ideas, of which beauty is the result? and what sort of subtle concepts of order, quantity and proportion do they in turn presuppose? And what series of observations, customs and manners do these concepts themselves entail? how do they thus change according to manners, according to place, time, peoples, nations, centuries and varieties of taste? (SW IV, 457).

His attempt to dissect and reduce this “compositum” into all of its myriad parts was a fascinating undertaking, a Herculean task, really, and its very immensity ultimately proved too much even for someone of Herder's seemingly inexhaustible resources. D’Alembert, in more gen¬ eral terms, had also previously recognized that “the reduction of which we speak becomes more or less laborious in proportion to the degree of difficulty and the vastness of the object we embrace.” But, given the apparently unavoidable intransigence we encounter in the analysis of complex ideas or phenomena, d’Alembert conceded that the “only resource that remains to us in an investigation so difficult... is to collect as many facts as we can, to arrange them in the most natural order, and to relate them to a certain number of principal facts of which the odiers are only the consequences.”4 Despite his general agreement with this sentiment, Herder himself seemed gradually to grow weary of “collect¬ ing as many facts as he could” that pertained to aesdietic phenomena. Or perhaps he even began to doubt die feasibility or practicality of his aesthetic project as a whole. Whatever the final reason, after he com4- D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 23.

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pleted the fourth Kritisches Waldchen, he soon turned his attention away from the specific problems of aesthetics. We are left, therefore, with something like a philosophical equivalent to the famous Belvedere Torso in Rome. We admire these incomplete reminders ot a titanic effort of creative will, but not without simultaneously feeling the melan¬ choly wish and our manifest inability to reconstruct in our imagination what those mute fragments can only suggest. Lessing’s Laoeoon: Or, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, published in 1766, provided the immediate impetus and constant point of reference for the first of Herder’s Kritische Walder. Far from perceiving himself as the object of an unprovoked attack, Lessing generously returned the compliment of interest. As soon as he found out that Herder’s work was to appear, he wrote to his friend Friedrich Nicolai inquiring into the possibility of being sent the galley proofs of it.5 After he had received and read his copy of the three Walder, Lessing, norma y as reticent in the praise of others as Herder himself, was moved to writein another letter to Nicolai of April 13, 1769: “Since so many fools are now attacking the Laocoon, I have half a mind to lengthen my travels by a month or so by staying in Kassel or Gottingen to finish it. No one, not even Herder, has yet dreamed of what I intend. But Herder claims not to have written the Kritische Walder' . . . Nonetheless, whoever the author is: he is still the only one who makes it worth my while to bring my bag of tricks to light.’6 Yet, as we know, despite the apparent surge of excitement he felt at having discovered a critic who might truly understand his deepest intentions, Lessing never returned to his Laoeoon and it, like Herder s own theory, remained an essentially unfinished work. But Lessing s rather flattering comment should also make us wary of wanting to interpret Herder’s treatise as an “Anti-Laocoon,” or, indeed, of seeing, as Bruno Markwardt has suggested, “Herder’s attitude toward Les¬ sing . . . above all from the perspective of his opposition to the Enlight< Letter of October 21,1768. In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sammtliche Schnften cd. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, vol. XVII (Stuttgart: G. J. Goschen sche Verlagsbuchhandlung,

favorable mention ofthe first Kritisches WM-

chen in one'ifhis own campa.gns against Klotz, the treatise Wie toAtouU i T°dp.bn'det (How the Ancients Represented Death) of 1769, in Sammthche Schnften, vol. XI, p. 17.

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Herder’s Aesthetics

enment.”7 The first Kritisches Waldehen stands, instead, in a relationship to the Laocoon that is similar to that between Lessing’s work and Winckelmann’s first publication, the Gedancken uber die Nachahmung der Pfnechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture) of 1755. It does not constitute a fundamental rejection of the text that serves as its focus, but rather it embodies the attempt to make its formulations both more precise and more general in their potential theoretical application. Herder’s critical objections to individual points of Lessing’s essay are to be understood in this light, as his sustained—if sometimes overboldlv stated—efforts to build upon the foundations laid by his predecessors. But by now we have come to recognize this mediating tendencv to be a basic characteristic of Herder’s thought, and in the opening pages of the first Waldehen Herder dismissed the notion that a spirit of contradiction existed between the basic views of Winckelmann and Lessing and, by implication, those of his own: For me, the Laocoon has enough beauties in and of itself that it would gain nothing by contrasting it with another work. What is prior to and behind it, namely what L. has against W., is either nothing more than ‘parerga,’ which they will both consider them to be, or they at least do not affect Winckelmann’s primary purpose: art. Thus Laocoon, the essav on the limits of painting and poetry, has its own value and excellence; but to see it as a polemic, as a critical analvsis of all of Winckelmann’s works, is in my estimation the most erroneous criterion; and, in addition, the genius of both Lessing and Winckelmann is so different that I could not bring mvself to measure one against the other (SW III, 9). In all of the Kritische Wdlder, Herder, as always, was preeminent^ concerned with making provident distinctions and adding refinement to concepts he thought lacking in rigor. And it was in this constructive task that Herder’s first ICritisches Waldehen acquired its own ‘Value and excellence,” as well as providing an essential conceptual platform for his future project in the fourth. Lessing’s Laocoon is a masterpiece of svllogistic reasoning applied to practical criticism. Like his friend Moses Mendelssohn, to whom he was 7. The first quotation is in Erich Schmidt, Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, vol. II (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1892), p. 51. The second is from Markwardt, Herders Kritische Wdlder, p. 51. See also Fugate, Psychological Basis of Herder's Aesthetics, pp. 122-2;.

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frankly indebted for much of his theoretical perspective, Lessing wrote comfortably within the philosophical tradition of Leibniz and Wolff, which exerted a powerful influence on the intellectual climate in Ger¬ many until well after the middle of the century. Yet, whereas Alexander Baumgarten, who had first channeled the theoretical resources of this tradition into the study of poetry and the beautiful, had been an accom¬ plished logician, he had unfortunately not been much of a critic. As Lessing ironically mentioned at the outset of the Laocoon\ “Although my reasoning may not be so compelling as Baumgarten’s, my examples will at least smack more of the source.”8 But this statement should not lead us to suppose, as some have done, that Lessing actually followed the guidelines of inductive analysis.9 Although he purported to extract his principles from an examination of the works of art themselves, in actuality Lessing’s primary criteria and philosophical method were de¬ rived from precisely that school of thought which was represented by the works of Baumgarten, his student and popularizer Georg Friedrich Meier, and most especially by those of Mendelssohn.10 Both thinkers, while approaching the problems of art from this relatively abstract and theoretical point of view, also followed the broad gesture of prescriptive poetics and endeavored not only to understand the rules by which art is created but also, on the basis of these rules, to dictate how it “ought” to be produced.11 Although he was similarly drawn to Baumgarten’s aes¬ thetics, Fferder had learned from his studies of English and French 8. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. with intro, and notes Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 5. 9. This was, for example, the opinion of Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1985), which is based on the posthu¬ mously published fourth edition of 1912, p. 42. Lessing’s highly syllogistic procedure was not completely lost on his contemporaries. Christian Gottlob Heyne, for example, one of the most prominent classical philologists of his time, had this to say: “I, with my simple, straightforward feelings, never felt comfortable with Lessing’s assertions in the Laocoon, which at that time people unconditionally took to be the laws of art. . . My own views and feelings were served to good purpose when I noticed the penetration with which Herder examined Lessing’s principles and corrected his sophistries and hairsplitting.” Cited in Lessings Laokoon, ed. and notes Hugo Bliimner (Berlin: Weidmann, 1880), p. 121. 10. See Armand Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien zwischen Aufklavung und Klassik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, i960), p. 64. 11. See, on this issue, Gunter Gebauer, “Symbolstrukturen und die Grenzen der Kunst: Zu Lessings Kritik der Darstellungsfahigkeit kiinstlerischer Symbole,” in Das Laokoon-Projekt: Plane einer semiotischen Asthetik, ed. G. Gebauer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), p. 137.

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historians, and specifically from his own work on the ode, that objec¬ tive, scientific analysis and the determination of how art works ought to be made are not strictly compatible within a single theory. Thz judgment and creation of art—or what Herder would respectively call in the fourth Kritisches Waldchen “philosophy about taste” and the “art of taste”—are two entirely different matters and they must accordingly be kept carefully distinct when one addresses the individual questions of aesthetics. By so rigorously discriminating between the compositional elements of poetry and painting, Lessing’s primary intention in the Laocoon essentially consisted in the solution of a logical problem and in advocat¬ ing the application of this solution to actual artistic practice. Yet in determining the boundaries separating poetry from the plastic arts— that is, in isolating the contrasting ways in which the two arts are formally employed as means of imitation—Lessing was also very much engaged in that task of philosophy, which Locke had particularly em¬ phasized, of establishing clear concepts where he thought confusion had arisen as a result of an inaccurate use of language. The uncritical repetition of the main dictum of classicist poetics, the Horatian “ut pictura poesis,” had, in Lessing’s view, obscured the distinctions that exist between poetry and painting through their excessively close asso¬ ciation in a phrase that had lost its original meaning.12 As David Wellbery, who has delineated the semiotic theory of the German En¬ lightenment in relation to the Laocoon, has recently written: “The Lao¬ coon is a critique of wrong labels and false metaphors.”13 The Discourse der Mahlem of 1721—23 by Bodmer and Breitinger was a famous case in point, for the “painters” to whom the tide refers are none other than poets who ostensibly “paint” with words.14 But as the same scholar goes on to remind us, that “as regards the ctelos’ of the arts, Lessing still holds to the dictum he is so often said to have rejected: 'ut pictura poesis’.”15 The underlying assumption of the Laocoon remained, in other words, that both arts were manipulated so as to create the illusion of the presence of absent emotions and objects. Yet Lessing’s foremost 12. Sec the thorough study bv Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), esp. pp. 20-21. 13. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon, p. 100. 14. See Baeumler, Das Irrationalitdtsproblem, p. 145. 15. Wellbery, Lessings Laocoon, p. 105.

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goal consisted nonetheless in showing that the respective media of both poetry and the plastic arts (and therefore the laws that govern them) should be conceived of as being strictly distinct from one another. That is, while the objective of both arts—imitation (understood as a faithful depiction of observable reality)—may be the same, Lessing insisted that the various means for achieving this goal, which are made necessary by the particular art form in question, were irreducibly different. It was only through a protracted lax use of terminology that this crucial difference had become unacceptably muddled and blurred. This, then, forms the context of those first strategic remarks in the Laocoon in which Lessing introduced his theoretical disagreement with Winckelmann’s apparently careless identification of sculpture with po¬ etry. The nature of Lessing’s argument deserves our careful consider¬ ation for it was this section, in turn, that served as the focus for Herder’s quite different methodological procedure in his first Kritisches Waldchen. In the Gedancken iiber die Nachahmung, Winckelmann had rather innocently compared the emotional effect produced by the expression of woe depicted on the face of the famous Laocoon sculpture with the feelings stirred by Philoctetes’ cries of pain that occur in Sophocles’ dramatic work of the same name.16 Lessing found this comparison unjust not because of the effect these two representations call forth within us, which Lessing had defined as the excitement of similar feelings or “sympathy” (Mitleid) in the viewer, but because of the necessarily divergent means with which this effect is produced.17 It is true, Lessing claimed, that “a cry is the natural expression of physical pain. Homer’s wounded warriors not infrequently fall to the ground with a cry.”18 He argued, however, that we will find such violent cries only in poetic works, in which each moment is transitory and not frozen forever in stone. Since in Lessing’s opinion it was equally true “that 16. See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften. Vorreden. Entwiirfe, ed. Walther Rehm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), p. 4317. See Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien, pp. 103—4, on Lessing’s concept of “sympathy.” See also on this concept, Lessing: Epoche-Werk-Wirkung, ed. Wilfried Barner (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), pp. 214-38; Martin Schenkel, Lessings Poetik desMitleids im biirgerlichen Trauerspiel “Mifi Sara Sampson”: poetisch-poetologische Reflexionen, mit Interpretationen zu Pirandello, Brecht und Handke (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1984), pp. 60—82 and pp. 189—204; and Hans-Jurgen Schings, Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch: Poetik desMitleids von Lessing bis Buchner (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1980). 18. Lessing, Laocoon, pp. 8-9; the following quotations are from pp. 15,17, 23-24.

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among the ancients beauty was the supreme law of the visual arts,” the faithful representation of a cry of physical pain was not and, what is more, could not have been the sculptor’s aim. For, according to Lessing, this would have so disagreeably distorted the facial features of the Trojan priest that an unchanging image of ugliness, and not of beauty, would have been the result, leaving us ill-disposed to enter into a “sympathetic” emotional response with the representation. The sculp¬ tor was therefore compelled to work toward the “supreme law of beauty” by giving us only a subtle indication of Laocoon’s immense physical suffering through the less violent expression of a moan or a sigh: “The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgust¬ ing manner. ... It was a form which inspired sympathy because it possessed beauty and pain at the same time.” The expression Winckelmann had described on the face of Laocoon was thus not simply a subjective choice on the part of the sculptor to depict a “noble soul,” but rather, Lessing argued, it was produced in perfect conformity with the innermost laws of the sculptural art. To poets, on the other hand, the successive nature of their narrative art means that the representation of actions, not beauty, is the highest law to which they must conform, allowing even the portrayal of scenes and objects that are forbidden to painters and sculptors. Poets, therefore, “may, if they so choose, take up each action at its origin and pursue it through all possible variations to its end. Each variation which would cost the artist a separate work costs the poet but a single pen stroke; and if the result of this pen stroke, viewed by itself, should offend the hearer’s imagination, it was either anticipated by what has preceded or is so softened and compensated by what follows that it loses its individ¬ ual impression and in combination achieves the best effect in the world.” Yet it is important to remember that where Lessing used the more general designations of “painting” and “poetry,” he specifically meant, of course, the statuary of antiquity and the epic poems of Homer. By appealing to these sources of confirmed authority, which had acquired a canonical status in neoclassical theories of art, Lessing gave merely the impression of gathering empirical evidence from observed phenomena, when in reality he was drawing upon an established codex of recognized principles and weaving them together much in the way a mathematician would construct a definition with proven axioms and theorems. Thus, in reliance on these formulas, Lessing has argued in masterful deductive

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form that the occasion and final purpose of the work of art (the imitated suffering or “pathos” of the representation that then triggers “sympa¬ thy” in the soul of the viewer) are the determining influences in both poetry and sculpture, even though the nature of the plastic arts neces¬ sarily imposes specific requirements on the artist to which the poet would not be constrained, and vice versa. With the advantage of hindsight and a greater critical distance, we might think that Lessing’s introductory argument is perhaps more heuristically valuable than internally convincing. But Herder himself obviously considered the individual components of Lessing’s line of reasoning to be so important that he devoted fully one-third of the first WUldchen to a thorough analysis of these first six sections of the Laocoon. It is apparent that behind Lessing’s formulations stands the prescriptive demand that all art works, and not just those of antiquity, must conform to the rules he had described if they are to be seen as deserving of the predicate of “art” at all; herein lies the chief difference between Herder and Lessing. For, as we have seen, Herder always viewed works of art as the products of specific circumstances, and he therefore wished to understand the precise nature of their individual appearance rather than to dictate how they ought to be created. To a great extent, Herder suggested, history and the obvious activity of human beings had already implicitly answered the question of how art works are to be made. Because every culture had produced artifacts that it deemed to be beautiful, the expectation that they ought to conform to our own belated notions or laws that supposedly characterized the essence of beauty was wholly inappropriate to their true understanding. The ac¬ knowledgment of this left the philosopher and the historian the less imperious task of determining the objective conditions under which these art works arose and the manner in which one may comprehend them. To phrase it more succinctly, the disparity between Herder and Lessing is also, or primarily, the product of their respective methods of inquiry. Whereas Lessing deductively generated definitions out of ab¬ stract laws and rules and, on the basis of these, then judged works with the assurance of their unshakable validity, Herder proposed to analyze inductively every individual case within the context of the historical, cultural, ontological, and even psychological characteristics that con¬ tributed toward its creation with the hope of finally discovering the laws that inhered within the works of art themselves. With just this object in mind, Herder began the first Wdldchen by

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analyzing Lessing’s general statement that a cry is the “natural” or universal expression of pain, and that Homer’s warriors therefore re¬ spond with a loud cry when they are wounded. Herder objected to this generalization, saying that, on the contrary, Homer’s heroes cry out “I may say, very seldom,... and almost not at all, except when a more precise determination of this character demands it” (SW III, 17—18).19 The cry, Herder explained, appears only when it serves the function of charac¬ terizing the temperament of an individual figure, and it was therefore an economical means of distinguishing one hero from another. The cry is not merely the automatic response to pain but rather a trait or “sign” invested with a particular meaning; it is “a characteristic of the wounded hero” (SW III, 18). To substantiate his argument, Herder discussed a number of instances in which a hero did not cry when afflicted with pain, and he also showed how, if a figure did cry out, this cry played a greater role than merely that of a universal signal of physical suffering. By reanalyzing the poetic instances of a “cry” of pain through scrupu¬ lous attention to the facts at hand, Herder therefore replaced Lessing’s notion of a simply causal relationship between physical pain and its expression in a cry with the recognition that, in Homer’s works, a cry was a kind of sign that always has a specific content in relation to a figure’s character. Thus Herder, like Lessing, also identified a principle of composition in Homer’s epics. Yet it is a principle that emerged from a reevaluation of the evidence presented by the texts themselves and was not arbitrarily externally imposed. With this one example, Herder had already demonstrated in practice the necessity of first distinguishing between similar data before one advanced to a general rule.20 This analysis was only the first step in Herder’s full argument, for he then widened the scope of his inquiry7 even further. Until this point, he had limited his discussion to Homer’s works and to those of other classical authors because Lessing, who remained forever loyal to his classicist ideals, did not imagine that an appeal to any other authority7 or example was necessary7. Lessing’s comment that the cry is a “natural expression of physical pain” was in his opinion not only an adequate j

19. See Bliimner’s comments on the issue of character description, cited in Lessings Laocoon, pp. 489—90, in which he remarks that “Herder’s objections here are not unjustified.” 20. See Martin Schiitze, “The Fundamental Ideas of Herder’s Thought,” Modem Philology, XVIII (June, 1920), p. 12.

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characterization of Homer’s heroes, but, at least by implication, it should also be thought to apply to all human beings who found them¬ selves in a similar situation. Herder found this thesis impossible to accept: “The cry seems still less to me to be the important, unchanging characteristic trait that would have to belong to the unchanging expres¬ sion of a human emotion. . . . But it is least of all the necessary designa¬ tion of the hero such that he would have to be a monster if he did not cry out” (SW III, 19). If one recognizes, in other words, that Homer had only certain heroes cry out loud when they were injured as a way of defining a particular aspect of their character, then it is questionable whether such a cry could be classified as the “natural” and necessary expression of heroic pain throughout all time and for all people. In fact, Herder reminded his reader, such Greek heroes as Agamemnon, Hec¬ tor, and Menelaus remained stoically mute while in agony or pain all plain observations that nonetheless further weakened Lessing’s universalist claims. Herder went on to cite yet other examples from the literatures of Northern Europe and from different epochs, mentioning, among others, the ill-starred forgeries of James Macpherson: “I know of no poetic people on earth that would have combined great and tender emotions so entirely into One character, and would have possessed in One soul the heroism of noble and human feeling other than—the ancient Scots, according to their recently discovered songs” (SW III, 77). All of the historical facts and circumstances that Herder marshaled as evidence obviously meshed rather badly with Lessing’s deductive premise. The remarks Lessing had made apply, it is true, to some parts of the works of Homer; but it would be misguided to wish that the poetic works produced under completely different conditions would exhibit identical traits. We must assume, Herder concluded, that “the sensitivity to pain in the case of physical suffering is not, or at least not a Homeric, heroic trait; it is not a general, not a universal sign of human emotion” (SW III, 21). We have perceived how Herder not only subtly shifted the weight of emphasis but also arrived at completely different results by employing the method of analysis in the investigation of identical material. Less¬ ing, we have noticed, had constructed his explanation of Laocoon’s expression of pain very much in the form of a syllogism, carefully advancing two main propositions that logically led to a necessary con¬ clusion. All pain is expressed in a cry, Lessing reasoned; a cry, however,

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distorts the face, producing ugliness. The supreme law of the plastic arts \\ as the representation of beauty; therefore, the artist necessarily soft¬ ened the cry to the expression of a moan in order to produce a beautiful work that achieved his desired effect. In his analysis of the cry of pain. Herder had already called Lessing's major premise into question by enlisting the aid of data that quite evidently conflicted with his initial proposition. In the same manner, Herder then proceeded to examine the second premise of Lessing’s definition, in which he had claimed "that among the ancients beauty was the supreme law of the visual arts.” Herder agreed that this statement might be true, but only under certain conditions, and in order to ascertain what these conditions might be. Herder demanded that one also ask: "But among which ancients? since when? how long? what [are the] subordinate laws, what [are the] corollary laws? And why did it become the supreme law for the Greeks above all nations?” (SW III, 54). Herder never tired of repeating that it is not enough to formulate a principle or law based on deductive assumptions and premature generalizations. If one wished not merely to raise the facile claim that the representation of beauty was the highest law for the ancients with respect to the plastic arts, but also to under¬ stand why this might have been the case, then this statement must be accompanied by exhaustive historical research and a painstaking evalua¬ tion of all the relevant influences that necessarily contributed to the formation of such a law. Herder described in words that have a more than superficial similarity with those of Blackwell what would be re¬ quired before one could accept this principle: One would have to be able to derive from their causes how, w ith the ancients, the laws of art were not merely allowed, which is as far as Mr. Lessing takes it; but rather how they were necessary—how art and poetrv and music were much more essential to the state with the Greeks than it is now—how the state thus could not exist without them, as its main-springs, and how they could not exist without the state—how the effect of the nation on the art, and that of art on the nation, was not merely physical and psychological, but that it was also to a great extent political—how, with the Greeks, there were so many causes, and not only their national character, but also their education, their way of living;, the degree of their culture, religion and state, which were not only capable of producing these impressions with regard to the formation of beauty, but had to produce these impressions. It is an important problem whose solution requires more than a superficial knowledge of the Greeks (SW III, 54-55).

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Once again, Herder expressed here the desire to discover the influ¬ ences, the underlying constitutive elements that did not simply “allow” the Greeks to formulate their artistic rules but made their artistic expres¬ sion in the form in which we find it “necessary .” Only in this way can we gain an accurate and fair estimation of what caused Greek art to become what it was. And, by analogy, we would then be able to apply the same method to form theoretical, literary-historical principles with which we could evaluate the art produced by every other culture. The aspect of Lessing’s thought most sensitive to criticism was that, in his trust in the authority of ancient and especially Greek culture, he categorically excluded any consideration of historical change and of the differences necessarily manifested among various cultural entities.21 But it is important to underscore once more that Herder did not actually oppose the ultimate tendency of Lessing’s endeavors. As we have seen, like Lessing, Herder also wished to discover those fundamental laws that governed artistic creation. But he saw, or rather passionately be¬ lieved in, the necessity of extending the purview of inquiry beyond that of Lessing’s rather narrow, if brilliant, systematic reasoning. Although Herder sought to illustrate the inadequacy of Lessing’s method by disassembling the elements of his deductive proof and pointing out their inherent weaknesses when they were considered in a wider con¬ text, this critique was not simply an end in itself. Herder, too, was working toward a definite positive goal through the medium of his critical remarks. Given a broad enough historical, psychological, and philosophical basis it might indeed be possible, Herder thought, to locate even more general laws and principles that were not essentially shaped by the nature of any individual period—as for example that of ancient Greece or modern France—but were derived from the nature of humanity as a whole. This had been the impetus of Herder’s earlier works dealing with historical questions and especially of the treatise on the origin of language, and it represents the innermost motivation of his aesthetic philosophy as well. 21. Various scholars have pointed out this difference between Herder and Lessing, although it is usually mentioned as the breakthrough ol historical thinking in general within the Enlightenment. See, for example. May, Lessings und Herders Kunsttheoretische Gedanken in ihrem Zusammenhang, p. 17. Bruno Markwardt, Herders Kritische Walder, p. 135, also stresses the same point. See also Clark, Herder, p. 82.

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Now we can approach that most important section of Herder’s Waldchen in which he took issue with Lessing’s definition of the nature of the signs used in each of the arts. The sixteenth segment of the Laocoon, in which Lessing proposed this definition, constitutes the logical axis of the entire treatise, for in it he attempted, as he said himself, “to derive the matter from its first principles.” Here Lessing introduced the semiotic theory by which he explained that the peculiar differences between the arts depended on the type of sign (Zeichen) the artist has available for a mimetic representation, or “imitation.” The famous passage reads: “I reason thus: if it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive.” Objects or parts of objects that exist in contiguous space are called “bodies,” Lessing went on to write, and thus bodies with their visible qualities are the proper objects of the plastic arts. Similarly, those objects that take place in the successivitv of time are called “actions” and are the proper objects of poetry. It is true that a sculptor or painter may portray an ’’action.” But, Lessing explained, this may only be accomplished through the choice of a single “pregnant moment,” “from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible.”22 And, conversely, poets may depict extended bodies in their medium, but they must choose only one feature for their representation, namely, the one that best conveys the entire idea of the thing to which they are referring. Lessing relied heavily here, as elsewhere, on the works of Men¬ delssohn for the theoretical definition of the signs that are appropriate to poetry and painting. Although Du Bos was probably die first to apply the familiar distinction between “natural” and “artificial” signs to the study of art in his influential Reflexions critiques,23 and Diderot briefly touched on the question in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, it was Mendelssohn who developed their significance for a systematic aes22. Lessing, Laocoon, p. 78. 23. See the essay by Tzvetan Todorov, “Asthetik und Semiotik im 18. Jahrhundert. G. E. Lessing: Laokoonin Das Laokoon-Projckt, p. 10.

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thetic theory in his essay fiber die Hauptgrundsdtze der schonen Wissenschaften undKunste (On the Main Principles of Belles Lettres and Beaux Arts) of 1757. The signs used in poetry are “arbitrary,” Mendelssohn argued, and possess no necessary or imitative connection to the diing they signify. Those signs employed in the plastic arts, on the other hand, are “natural” in that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is based on certain qualities of the signified object itself.24 This traditional division of signs into two classes naturally conformed to the familiar bipartite system of the arts that Lessing also adopted. Men¬ delssohn wrote that from this consideration comes the first main categorization of sensate expres¬ sion into that of the beautiful arts and letters (‘beaux arts et belles lettres’). The beautiful letters, by which one normally understands poetry and eloquence, express their objects by the means of arbitrary signs, or audible sounds and letters. Now since a reasonable combination of a number of words is called discourse, then we here very naturally arrive at Baumgarten’s well-known definition of a poem as a sensately perfect discourse. And this explanation gives us equal occasion to locate the essence of the beautiful arts in general in an artificial, sensately perfect representation.

Besides the affirmation of his dependence on Baumgarten for his own definition of a poem, we see here Mendelssohn’s assumption diat the representation that is projected within the perceiving mind of the viewer or listener is die true locus of the aesthetic moment. The greater the equivalence between die intuitive representation created by the work of art and that produced by die actual object, the better or more “beautiful” the work of art is. Imitation, then, the mimetic depiction of reality, stood as the central supporting pillar of Mendelssohn’s theory. The way in which a work of sculpture or a painting called forth a mimetic or “sensate” representation in the mind of the viewer that corresponded to the intuition of the actual object was thus easily ex¬ plained. The natural signs appropriate to the visual arts—that is, the 24. Mendelssohn, “Uber die Hauptgrundsatze der schonen Wissenschaften und Kiinste,” in Schriften zur Philosophic, vol. II: “The signs by means of which an object is expressed can be eidter natural or arbitrary. They are natural when the connection of the sign with the signified thing is substantiated in the qualities of the signified thing itself.... On the other hand, those signs are called arbitrary which, owing to their nature, have nothing in common with the signified thing, but which have nonetheless been arbitrarily accepted as designating them” (diis and following quote from p. 153).

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paint used to depict the colors of nature, or the marble sculpted to resemble human forms—exhibited such a sufficient similarity with the things they signified that the success of the representation depended solely on the artist s ability to manipulate these signs in a convincing imitation. But in the case of the arbitrary signs of poetry, Mendelssohn acknowledged, the manner in which a sensate intuition of the signified objects was called forth in one’s mind was different, if not more com¬ plex, than in the case of the other arts. The problem was in explaining how the arbitrary signs of poetry, which had no such immediate connec¬ tion with the things they signified, could be made to give rise to an intuition of their content. Mendelssohn proposed the following solu¬ tion: “The means of making discourse sensate consists in the choice of such expressions that recall a large number of characteristics into mem¬ ory at once so that we perceive the signified thing in a more lively fashion than the sign itself. In this way, cognition becomes intuitive. The objects are immediately represented to our senses; the lower pow¬ ers of the soul are deceived in that they often forget the sign and believe they are looking at the thing itself.”25 In other words, through the use of onomatopoeic sounds, metaphors, allegorical images, and figures of speech, the poet is able to appeal directly or immediately to the senses and to make us “forget” the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, which allows us then to intuit effortlessly the signified object. Because they can encompass multiple associations (“a large number of characteristics”) of feelings, concepts, and images in a single, unitarv sign and can trigger these associations in the mind of the reader, these “natural” linguistic elements are therefore the exemplary vehicles of poetic expression. Lessing himself, even more explicitly than he had done in the Laocoon, concurred in this explanation, as we read in another letter to Nicolai from May 26, 1769: “Poetry simply must attempt to make its arbitrary signs into natural ones; and it is only in this way that it differs from prose and becomes poetry. The means bv which it accomplishes this are the sounds, the words, the order of the words, the meter, figures and tropes, metaphors etc. . . . and the highest kind of poetrv is diat which turns artificial signs entirely into natural ones.”26 The perfection of the representational effectiveness exemplified by the “visible” or audible 25. Ibid., pp. 153-54. 26. Lessing, 5ammtliche Schriften, vol. XVII, p. 291.

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nature of such signs, by which language’s effect is made to approximate that of natural signs, was thus thought by both Mendelssohn and Lessing to constitute the ultimate goal and essence of poetry as a whole.27 Lessing’s attempt in the Lcwcoon to create a formal classification of the arts based on the material signs used in their respective spheres, and his related demand that artists conform to the individual constraints that belonged to the nature of these signs, was, perhaps, the inevitable product of the particular philosophical tradition in which he and Men¬ delssohn moved. Herder’s response to their shared semiotic scheme, which so clearly derived its coherence from Wolffian thought, is also characteristic of his own efforts to integrate a broader and more dif¬ ferentiated perspective into the systematic framework of this tradition. He was, therefore, in fundamental accord with their tendency to divide all of the arts into various discrete categories, because this procedure also corresponded to the main dictates of the method of inductive analysis he espoused. But he felt that Lessing and Mendelssohn had not carried their own analvses far enough and, most damaging to their pronouncements, that they had thus preemptorily formulated restric¬ tive or narrowly defined conclusions. Herder began his own investigation with a theoretical survey of all the arts considered in their totality in order to avoid positing a similarly limiting framework at the outset. For this reason, Herder chose as his point of departure not an examination of specific characteristics or individual features of the separate art works themselves, but he began with a consideration of their existence as a whole, with a determination of their fundamental ontological status. The first division Herder per¬ formed was meant to support the rest of his own analysis. Taken together, all of the arts present themselves as an undifferentiated, com¬ plex mass. The first task of the philosopher, therefore, is to descend to this “confused” and indistinct field of phenomena and to discover the most elemental characteristics that would distinguish two basic groups. Once these two largest groups had been identified, one could then proceed to further subdivisions. Because of the obvious importance of this first step, Herder stressed that utmost caution is paramount: 27. See Todorov, “Asthetik und Semiotik, p. 19, and Wellbery, Lessings Laocoon, pp. 200—202.

i38

Herder’s A esthetics

“Nothing is more dangerous than transforming a delicacy of our taste into a universal principle and creating a law out of it: one good aspect results thereby in ten precarious ones” (SW III, 76). The philosopher of aesthetics must take extreme caution that this first division must not originate in fickle taste but that it be derived from the fundamental nature of the works as they are. In Herder's view, the most basic point of distinction that would divide the arts into two primary groups was that one was characterized by rest, the other by motion. One group con¬ tained works whose various elements were essentially stationary the other contained those arts which were realized in some sort of move¬ ment. It is well known that Herder was indebted to the English philoso¬ pher James Harris for this distinction between “work” and “energy,” which, in turn, was derived from Aristotle’s notions of “ergon” and “energeia.”28 But the terms “static” and “kinetic,” are preferable, be¬ cause these words more accurately describe the ontological condition— that is, the motion or rest—of the various subordinate parts of art works as well.29 The distinction between stasis and kinesis, or what Herder after Harris did call “work” and “energy,” thus formed the basis of his first major division of the arts: “Every work of pictorial art is, if we accept the classification of Aristotle, a work and not an energy; it is all there at once in all of its parts; its essence does not consist in change, in succession, but in coexistence. If an artist has made it perfectly so as to be grasped entirely and exactly in the first glance, which has to deliver a complete idea, then its purpose has been achieved, the effect remains eternal: it is a work” (SW III, 78). This first group thus consists of those arts which are constituted as “works” with elementary constituents that are static and available for immediate and instantaneous perception. A “work” is an object with individual parts that are static and therefore lends us what Herder termed “a complete idea” of the whole in a single moment. The other group contains the arts that are basically kinetic and 28. Sec James Harris, Three Treatises'. The First concerning Art. The Second concerning Music Painting and Poetry. The Third concerning Happiness (London: C. Nourse, 1744), p. 30, in which he says that every Art, according to its Genius, will of course be accomplished either in some Energy, or in some Work.” 29. Harris (ibid.) stressed this point as well, and, on p. 33, he made the relationship between these two fundamental categories clearer by writing that “every Production, the Parts of which exist successively, and whose Nature hath its Being or Essence in a Transition, call it what it truly is, a Motion or an ENERGY— ... On the contrary, call every Production, whose Parts exist all at once, and whose Nature depends not on a Transition for its Essence, call it a WORK, or a Thing done, not an Energy or Operation.—”

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are not bound to any one moment or place: “Those arts and letters, on the other hand, which produce their effect through time and change, which have energy as their essence, do not have to deliver a single moment, they never have to devour our soul in this momentary climax; for otherwise the agreeableness that is owing to succession, to the combination and alteration of these moments and actions is disturbed, and every moment is thus employed merely as a link in a chain and in no other way” (SW III, 80). We note that this initial division of the arts is very abstract; as yet, Herder has made no mention of individual art forms and his terms “work” and “energy,” or stasis and kinesis, refer only to the general modes of existence characterizing the various arts within each group. There were, as we shall see, essential logical advantages in positing this distinction as the basis of his analysis. For it shifted attention away from the subjective activity of the artist who employed one or the odier type of sign to the objective, or ontological, nature of the arts themselves. In this way, Herder circumvented the fallacy of looking toward the pro¬ ducer of art as the primary source of his knowledge about the condition of the independendy existing works. With subtle irony, Herder credited Lessing for having practically followed this distinction without his having stated so explicidy: “I wish Mr. L. had made Aristotle’s distinc¬ tion between work and energy the basis of his entire work: for in the end, all of the individual distinctions he mentions amount to this primary distinction anyway” (SW III, 82). Now Herder could advance to the particular art forms within these two general groups and undertake further subdivisions by examining the ways in which the individual arts differed from one another. Like Lessing, Herder distinguished the arts by investigating the types of signs appropriate to each art form according to the effect diey produced. But Herder was not so much interested in the content of this effect as in how it was functionally produced. Above all, Herder wished to understand precisely the medium or means through which an art work transmitted its effect to the reader or viewer. Lessing, again following the example of Mendelssohn, had defined the mechanism of this transmission as one of “sympathy” or “Mitleid” in which one was brought into an identical emotional state to that portrayed in the artistic representation. It was here that poetry and the visual arts exhibited their actual identity even though the means or signs employed to accomplish

i+o

Herder’s Aesthetics

this end were necessarily different.30 Herder agreed that the signs of painting and sculpture were “natural” and those of poetry “arbitrary” and conventional. But he denied that the difference between poetry and the figurative and pictorial arts was sufficiently explained solely by the opposition of contiguity and successivitv that were said to characterize the two sign types. The comparison between the arts on this basis, he argued, was not completely just: “The succession of the articulated sounds of poetry is not the same as the coexistence of parts in painting. The succession of its signs is nothing more than its ‘conditio, sine qua non,’ and it is thus merely a certain restriction: but the coexistence of the signs in painting is the nature of that art, the basis of painterly beauty” (SW III, 135). Since the successive arrangement of the signs, or of the “articulated tones," of poetry did not exhaustively account for its effect. Herder thought that painting and music could be compared with one another much more fruitfully than painting and poetrv. For, as he wrote, “painting achieves its effect entirely through space, just as music does through the succession of time . . . both are the natural means of their effect" (SW III, 136). Everything in these two arts depended on the particular distribution of their respective natural signs in time or in space. Here the relationship between the material sign and the mode of its organization completely described the sphere of the art form’s effect. Painting, Herder thought, produced its effect entirely through its me¬ dium of visual signs arranged in a spatial configuration; music produced its effect entirely through a coordination of audible signs along a tem¬ poral axis. Thus both were wholly composed of natural signs; only the manner of their distribution was different. Poetrv, however, has to achieve its effect by some other means, one that was not adequately circumscribed by these two concepts: “With poetrv, however, the scene is different. Here the naturalness of its signs, for instance letters, sounds, succession of harmony, has little or nothing to do with its effect: its meaning [Sinn], wTich resides in the words by an arbitrary7 convention, the soul which inhabits die articulated sounds, is everything” (SW III, 136). As opposed to Mendelssohn and Lessing, Herder maintained that the effective quality of poetry resided not in the sensate material of its signs, but rather in the meaning (“der Sinn”) that was invested in the arbitrary signs of language. The question of the “meaning” of music or 30. See Nivelle, Kunst- und Dichtunpfstheonen, p. 159.

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of the visual and plastic arts did not arise for Herder because the natural signs appropriate to these arts stood in a virtually identical relationship with the things they signified. That is, they “meant” in a sufficiently literal way what they represented. Furthermore, the concepts of time and space, and their attendant qualities of successivity and contiguity, fully encompassed the representative possibilities of these arts and des¬ ignated the modes in which they achieved their end. These concepts did not apply with the same exclusivity to the arbitrary signs of poetry, however, and Herder required an additional concept that would explain both how these arbitrary signs acquired their meaning and how this meaning was then transmitted to the mind of the recipient. As it happened, Herder had already established the theoretical princi¬ ple that would allow him to solve this problem. We recall from the Versuch fiber das Sein that Herder had insisted that there were three “primary concepts” that served as the organizing principles for the entirety of the world of experience, namely those of time, space, and force. That these categories distinguished the most basic elements of reality gave Herder occasion to assume that they must also necessarily constitute the most fundamental components of each art work’s mode of being. He had already associated the concepts of space and time, along with their qualities of contiguity and successivity, to the other art forms. The third concept, force or “Kraft,” which is characterized by the quality of “motivity,” enabled him to suggest a tripartite system of the arts, in place of the traditional bipartite division, with a special category reserved for poetry: Would it not be possible to reduce the essence of poetry as well to such a primary concept, since it achieves its effect on the soul through arbitrary signs, through the meaning of words? We shall call the means of this effect force [Kraft]: and thus, as space, time and force are the three primary concepts of metaphysics ... we shall also say in the theory of‘belles lettres5: those arts which deliver works are effected in space; those arts that are effected through energy, in succession; the ‘belles lettres,5 or rather the only ‘belle lettre5, namely poetry, is effected through force.—Through force, which inhabits words, which, though it goes through the ear, has its effect directly upon the soul. This force is the essence of poetry, not coexistence or succession (SW III, 137).

The concept of “force” (Kraft), which Herder used here to describe the means of poetry’s effect, has been widely discussed within the

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scholarly literature.31 Most often, however, it is portrayed as a part of Herder’s supposed demand for vitality, youthful vigor, and dynamic expression in poetry. “After all,” one critic writes, “the young enthusiast of the Storm and Stress years saw poetry as a means of infusing emo¬ tional content into an effete and over-rationalised society.”32 But the concept actually has nothing to do with the antirational or subjective impulses implied by this reference to the “Storm and Stress.”33 Instead, Herder borrowed the term force, or power, from contemporary philoso¬ phy and used it in a very precise, if complex manner in order to explain how the abstract meaning of a poem passed from the arbitrary material signs of language into a receptive mind. It is, admittedly, a difficult concept to define, and, even though “force” was an essential component of most ontological and psycholog¬ ical theories of the Enlightenment, most of the philosophers who used it also struggled to find an adequate determination of its meaning.34 With reliance on Leibniz’s definition of the inherent activity of the monadic substance, Christian Wolff, for example, claimed in his Verniinftijfe Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen (Ra¬ tional Reflections on God, the World and the Human Soul) that the most basic capacity of the human soul, the ability to create representa¬ tions in the mind, was dependent on a variety of “force”: Since the soul has but a single force [Kraft] out of which all of its changes [Veranderunffen] arise; then from this force, through which the soul represents 31. Salmony, Die Philosophic des junyyen Herder, p. 140, admits, that “Herder’s concept of power is obscure,” although he does make the attempt to associate the term generally with the “Sturm und Drang.” In his book. Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, Nisbet identifies (pp. 10-15) eight different spheres of application of the term in Her¬ der’s writings: “The Philosophical Usage”; “Animalistic and Related Usages”; “"Kraft’ and the Occult”; “Religious and Mystical Usages”; “The Aesthetic Usage”; ‘The Histor¬ ical Usage”; ‘The Physical Usage”; ‘The Biological Usage”; “The Physiological Usage.” See also Robert T. Clark, Jr., “Herder’s Conception of‘Kraft’,” PMLA, vol. LVII, pt. 1 (1942), pp. 737-52. 32. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, p. 14. He also writes that “the poetic application of this concept is the most overtly subjective of all the uses Herder makes of it.” 33. This is the interpretation given by Salmonv, Die Philosophic ties juntjen Herder, p. 133, and also by V. M. Schirmunski, Johann Gottfried Herder. Hauptlinicn seines Schajfens (Berlin: Aufbau, 1963), p. 30. 34. For general information on the history of “force,” see the highly readable Max Jammer, Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Mechanics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957); and for the eighteenth century in particular, Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisprohlem, vol. II, pp. 425—26, et passim.

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the world to itself, must also come everything else which we perceive to change in the soul. . . Since this force is accordingly the basis of the changes that occur in the soul, then its essence must consist in this force, and it is thus the first thing in the soul which can be thought. Indeed, whoever distinctly perceives force is in a position to indicate the basis of everything that relates to the soul.35

The evidence suggesting the existence of “force,” though not force itself, thus resided in the changes that otherwise inexplicably took place in the mind. Wolff thought that force must in some essential way be aligned with the cause of the movements that are brought about in the soul. The desire to know the origins and ultimate causes of every mental phenomenon extended even to the wish to discover the obscure mecha¬ nism that was responsible for the changes that occur in the mind as our attention is focused on successive representations. And while Wolff concentrated here only on the subjective aspect of force, the implication was that, by extension, we might thereby also be able to comprehend the nature of all change in general. But Wolff—and this proves to be a leitmotif in all of the philosophical considerations of the term as well— was at a loss to provide a distinct concept of force itself, although he intimated that whoever “distinctly perceived1' it would be capable of indicating the very nature of the operations of our soul. Yet Wolff’s association of force with activity and change already signals an important aspect of the Enlightenment understanding of the concept. For the concept of “force,” or “power,” as being associated with the agency of change also played a considerable role in the philoso¬ phy of Locke. In the second book of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, he explained that since his “present Business being not to search into the original of Power, but how we come by the Idea of it,” he first inquired into the reasons this concept, or idea, arose in the first place: The Mind, being every day informed, by the Senses, of the alteration of those simple Ideas, it observes in things without; and taking notice how one comes to 35. Christian Wolff, Verniinfiige Gedancken von Gott, dcr Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch alien Dingen uberhaupt: Den Liebhabern der Wahrheit mitgethedet. . . (Halle: 1720) “Deutsche Metaphysik,” § 754-55. Quoted from Silvio Vietta, Literarische Phantasie: Theorie und Geschichte, Barock und Aufkldrung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 103. Wolff’s remark that the soul basically has only “a single force” necessarily calls into question the claims that are still made about Herder’s having overcome the so-called faculty psychology of the Enlightenment.

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an end, and ceases to be, and another begins to exist, which was not before; reflecting also on what passes within it self, and observing a constant change of its Ideas, sometimes by the impression of outward Objects on the Senses, and sometimes by the Determination of its own choice; and concluding from what it has so constantly observed to have been, that the like Changes will for the future be made, in the same things, by like Agents, and by like ways, considers in one thing the possibility of having any of its simple Ideas changed, and in another the possibility of making that change; and so comes by the Idea of what we call Power.

Although Locke was, as he stated, not principally concerned with telling us what power actually is, but rather how we acquire the idea of its existence, he nevertheless offered a few suggestions about what was involved when we speak of power. “Whenever Change is observed,” he thus went on to write, “the Mind must collect a Power somewhere, able to make that Change, as well as a possibility in the thing in itself to receive it.”36 In this way, “power” is really a heuristic device, a means to explain a phenomenon that otherwise remains obscure to the mind. And the phenomenon fundamentally at issue here is the agent responsi¬ ble for the interactions of causal relationships.37 The example Locke used to illustrate concretely such causal interaction was the transference of motion in the impulse or impact that occurred when one billiard ball struck another, calling this the “power of communication.” But “power” also designated the ability of the ball being struck to receive motion. “Power thus considered is twofold,” Locke wrote, “viz. as able to make, or able to receive any change: The one may be called Active, and the other Passive Power f Active and passive power were therefore the integral, though still unclearly understood, part of even7 causal connection between two dissimilar entities. Yet, while both active and passive power enabled, in Locke’s example, the transference of motion from one billiard ball to another, he found it impossible to describe its nature even if its effects were readily observable: “If here again we 36. Locke, Essay, II, xxi, § 2,1, 4. 37. Gibson, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge, p. 106, states that “for Locke, as for Descartes, the innermost significance of the idea of causalitv is that of the active initiation of change.” Sec also John W. Yolton, Locke: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 112: “Cause is closely linked with power. It is by observing change and alteration, coming into existence and ceasing to exist, as well as our reflection on the change and flow of ideas and thoughts in our mind, that we come to the dual notion of the possibility of being changed and of receiving change.”

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enquire how this is done, we are equally in the dark A38 It is somewhat less difficult to observe the beginning of motion when we consciously move a part of our bodies, such as raising an arm or turning the head. In fact, it was not only much easier to identify rite production of move¬ ment when it thus issues from our own will, rather than from the motions of external objects, Locke maintained that rite observation of the effects of our own volition is the only instance in which we have ait experience of its active initiation: “The Idea of the beginning of motion, we have only front reflection on what passes in our selves, where we find by Experience, that barely by willing it, barely by a thought of the Mind, we can move the parts of our Bodies, which were before at rest.”39 Used to describe changes outside of our mind, then, power therefore takes on something of rite nature of a metaphor that must be employed with a good deal of caution. It was, in this way, a general term that conveniently expressed the manner in which relations were established in any network of causes and effects, but we could not say what any further property of its own it might possess. And it is this last point that is especially important. Both active and passive power together may be seen to allow, or in some obscure way be the cause for, the communica¬ tion of something (for example, of motion) between two bodies. But it cannot with certainty be said to have any other characteristic than that of being the vehicle of this communication. In his Traite des sensations (Treatise on the Sensations) of 1754, Condillac also took up Locke's distinction between active and passive power (rite French word he used was force). And even though he too made what was by then the almost ritual gesture of denying that one could actually define the term itself, he ventured to explain more specifically rite origin of its use: There is in us a principle of our actions, which we feel but cannot define. We call it force. We are equally active with regard to what this force produces either within us, or outside us. For example, we are active either when we are reflecting or when we are making our body move. By analogy, in all objects which produce some change, we suppose a force which we know even less about than the objects which produce it, and are passive to the impressions

38. Locke, Essay, II, xxi, § 4, 2—3, and 28. 39. Ibid., II, xxi, § 4. See Gibson, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge, p. 108.

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make on us. Thus a being is active or passive, according as the cause of the effect produced is inside it or outside.40

Condillac had thus gone a decisive step further than Locke. He too claimed that, in analogy to our own actions on things, we presuppose an agency of “force” in those external objects which cause some sort of change or produce some kind of effect. But whereas Locke was unwill¬ ing to impute active power to external bodies, Condillac claimed that such an imputation was indispensible to our comprehension of the changes that we observe. Thus, for example, when we passively receive impressions from a body in space we must of necessity assume that some active force in that object underlies the communication of these impres¬ sions. Although Locke had also traced our idea of power to a subjective origin—namely to the effects we observe as the successful result of our willing them to occur—he had not gone so far as to attribute active power to matter.41 In Condillac’s portrayal of force, in contrast, it seems that any object is capable of possessing active or passive power, depending solely on whether the cause or the effect is to be located in that object. With that, then, Condillac implied that even inanimate matter could be thought to possess some active power to act on other objects without an immediate external influence, even though such a notion had been inadmissible to his mentors, Newton and Locke.42 Despite its inherent conceptual difficulties, the undisputed usefulness of the concept of force or power for explaining the establishment of a causal connection between two entities was so appealing that the term enjoyed widespread popularity throughout the eighteenth century. It quickly found its way into contemporary aesthetic philosophy, figuring prominendy (if not very helpfully) in an essay published in 1765 by / 40. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1930), footnote to I, ii, § 11. In the important book by Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), vol. I, p. 585, we find the comment that: “The concept of force, though introduced by Condillac in the footnote in rather haphaz¬ ard fashion seems to me more central to his thinking than the association of ideas, because he obviously attached to it a spiritual quality which equaled in importance the energy which Leibniz stressed in the monad.” See also Condillac’s Lojfic, I, v, § 1-2, in which he discusses the concept of force at greater length and, interestingly enough, specifically in relation to the concepts of space and time. 41. Sec Gibson, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge, p. 109. 42. Sec Yolton, Locke \ An Introduction, p. 112. See also J. E. McGuire, “Force, Active Principles, and Newton’s Invisible Realm,” Ambix, XV (1968), pp. 154—208.

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Sulzer titled Von der Kraft (Energie) in den Werken der schonen Kiinste (On Force (Energy) in the Beaux Arts).43 Yet, when less circumspect writers enlisted its services, the convenient obscurity surrounding the notion of force was the main reason for its frequent, and often crit¬ icized, abuse.44 When David Hume, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, undertook his critique of causality, he began by remark¬ ing: “There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure and uncertain, than those of power, force, energy or necessary connexion, of which it is every moment necessary for us to treat in all our disquisi¬ tions. We shall, therefore, endeavour, ... to fix, if possible, the precise meaning of these terms, and thereby remove some part of the obscurity, which is so much complained of in this species of philosophy.”45 Herder’s own use of the concept of force (Kraft) fits squarely within this tradition. Condillac’s suggestion that one automatically presup¬ posed an inherent “force” in external bodies to account for various causes and effects found fertile soil in Herder, who assumed that the three basic concepts of space, time, and force were not simply subjective categories of understanding but actually described the fundamental structuring principles of the empirical world. As early as in the Versuch 43- Johann Georg Sulzer, Vermischtephilosophische Schriften (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974), pp- 122-45.

44. In Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, p. 10, N isbet cites the erstwhile president of the Berlin academy, Maupertuis, who complained about the abuse of the term “force” in contemporary philosophy: “Other [philosophers] believed to have made great progress by adopting a word that will not serve to hide our ignorance: they have attributed to bodies a certain force which communicates their movement to others. In modern philosophy there is no word repeated more often than this, while no one has defined it at all precisely. Its obscurity makes it so convenient that its use has not been restricted to the bodies we know; today, an entire school of philosophy attributes to beings, which one never sees, a force that is not manifested by any phenomenon.” In the Encyclopedic, we find under the article “Force” the following similar comment: “Philoso¬ phers have pretended that force is an inherent quality of matter; that every invisible particle, or rather monad, is endowed with active force: but it is also difficult to demon¬ strate this assertion. . . .” In the later article by Nisbet, “Zur Revision des Herder-Bildes im Lichte der neueren Forschung,” pp. 109-10, he also claims that Flerder’s use of the concept is responsible for what he sees as the inconsistencies of his thought. 45. In Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, pp. 61—62, Hume attacked precisely the notion that we gain an accurate idea of force or power through analogy to the actions we initiate by willing, concluding on p. 67: “that our idea of power is not copied from any sentiment or consciousness of power within ourselves, when we give rise to animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use and office. That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable.”

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uberdas Sein, Herder had also examined the “origin of this concept” (W 15) of force in its connection with the concept of causality in his on¬ tological definition. But he rejected the Wolffian implication that, if one could only acquire a distinct idea of force, it might conceivably lead one to an adequate definition of the essence of “Being” itself: Since force is the connection between real causes and effects; and possibility is a connection between the effects \Folgen]: then, if the existence of the effect is explained by possibility, then this explanation would have to come from the concept of force: but the origin of this concept shows that existence is com¬ pletely a concept of experience; that of possibility, however, is merely an arbitrarv logical subordination of concepts and hence in no way capable of explaining the essence of existence (W 15).

Instead of making the attempt here to determine what force might “reallv” be—an undertaking that had defeated many of the best minds of the eighteenth centurv—it is perhaps more important to recognize how Herder conceived of the function that force undeniably, if opaquely, performed. For in his work on psychology, VomErkennen undEmpfinden der menschlichen Seele (On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul) of 1778, Herder himself admitted—as had done every other phi¬ losopher before him—that he could not satisfactorily demonstrate what force actually is, although one always imputed its existence to the objects under consideration: “I am not saying that I am explaining something by this term; I have yet to know a philosophy that explains what force is, whether force is active in one or two beings. What philosophy does, is observe, classify things among themselves, elucidate, after it has always already presupposed force, impulse, and effect” (SW VIII, 177). Like both Locke’s “power” and Condillac’s “force,” Herder’s notion of “Kraft” contains within it at once an active and a passive element.46 Because of its intimate association with the ideas of communication and transference, the implications of the notion of force for a theory ot poetry and language in general were, as Herder realized, very alluring. Through its function of establishing a causal relation in which some¬ thing is communicated from one body to another, Herder essentially saw force as providing the logical solution to the question of the means by which poetry achieved its effect. In its dual aspect, force not only is 46. See, however, Schiitze, Modem Philology, XVIII (October, 1940), p. 64, who

thinks that the term has a more or less exclusive origin in the philosophy ot Leibniz. See also Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science, p. 8.

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responsible for ensuring the association between the two disparate elements of the sensate linguistic sign and the abstract intention with which it is invested, but it also provides the means to explain the much more complex relationship that allows authors to use these signs to transmit an emotional or conceptual content to their audience in a direct and immediate way. In other words, in the aesthetic usage, force designated for Herder the investment of meaning {Sinn) in the arbitrary signs of language, in which case the signs “passively” receive their particular meaning within the total constellation of a poem, and force also represented the medium whereby the signs actively communicate this meaning to the reader or listener. Force, when applied to the “objects” of language, is meant to explain the “activity” involved in signification.47 It is, therefore, a purely functional term and not a description of poetry’s content. It was intended merely as a designation of the ontological efficiency by which poetry activated its meaning as set apart from music and the visual arts. Herder never made the demand that poetry should embody or exude force in some vague subjectivistic sense. He was trying, instead, to explain how the arbitrary signs of poetry, as opposed to the natural signs of the other arts, communicated their meaning to the reader. Once this notion of force had been established, Herder believed that he had improved on the explanation of the means by which poetry achieved its effect, which had been offered by either Mendelssohn or Lessing. Herder’s solution not only was more specific, but it also addressed a problem that had been insufficiently treated in the predomi¬ nantly formalistic theories of his predecessors: the problem of the meaning or content of poetry that had no necessary relationship to its means of representation. Lessing and Mendelssohn had tried to solve this problem by arguing, as David Wellbery has shown, that the “poet conveys an intuitive cognition to the reader not only by transforming arbitrary signs into natural signs through the use of metaphor but also by employing those natural signs which language as such contains.”48 47- In Archaeology of the Frivolous, pp. 72-76 and pp. 93-95, Derrida has very interest¬ ing remarks on the problem of “force” in Condillac’s Essay, and he explicitly notes (p. 97) the connection between “force” and the “activity” of signification: “Signs classify and enlighten. Are they, for all that, without force? There is also a force, a quantity of the analogy of signs. ... By signification, we must understand activity, activation itself, activation by putting into an articulatable chain, signification as concatentation, con¬ catenation as distinction.” 48. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon, p. 197.

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Thus, it was implied, the effect of the arbitrary signs of poetry should finally approximate that of natural signs, suggesting “the possibility of a formal naturalness in signification.”49 The most severe limitation of this theory, it becomes quickly clear, is that the effect of poetry could not be described except with constant reference and an ultimate equation to that of the visual and plastic arts. By claiming that poetry possessed the autonomous quality of force through which it achieved its effect, Her¬ der was able to suggest a theoretical category that was independent of those defining the other arts. In so doing, he created the framework with which he could account for what he thought to be the essential difference between literature and the other arts: that literature transmits abstract ideas whereas every other art does not and cannot. Although, like Mendelssohn, Herder thought that poetry offered us a direct intui¬ tive representation of the signified object or thought, he insisted that this occurred not through the avenue of sensate stimulation by material signs but through the immediate apprehension of their meaning by virtue of the activity of force. Since the significance of arbitrary signs is not determined by their material aspect, as in the case of natural signs, there is a greater representational freedom inherent in their very nature. Whereas natural signs can appeal only to particular senses, the meaning of arbitrary signs—for the very reason that it is not restricted by the physical substance of the signs by which it is conveyed—has a wider range of representational possibilities open to it. Only after Herder had fixed this distinct quality of poetry did he then compare it with the other arts, and he found that Baumgarten’s definition of poetry was in fact acceptable: It achieves its effect in space: namely by making its entire discourse sensate. The sign itself must not be perceived in any sign, but rather the meaning [Sinn] of the sign must be perceived; the soul must not perceive the vehicle of force, the words, but the force itself, the meaning. This is the first sort of intuitive or vivid cognition [anschauende Erkdnntnif ]. But poetry presents every object, as it were, visibly before the soul; that is, it gathers together as many characteristics as it needs to make the impression all at once, to lead the object before the eyes of the imagination, to deceive it with the spectacle: this is the second sort of intuitive cognition, and the essence of poetry. The former can be achieved by any lively discourse that is not a splitting of words or philosophy: the latter can be achieved by poetry alone and is its essence, namely that which is sensately 49.

Ibid., p. 202.

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perfect in discourse. One can thus say that the first essential aspect of poetry is really a kind of painting, sensate representation (SW III, 137-38).50

Because of its capacity to exploit various tropes in order to elicit visual images or representations in the mind, Herder thought that the way in which poetry transmits its meaning can be justly compared with that of the visual arts, whose signs are effective only in the dimension of space. Yet poetry is of course different from these in that it is not a static art form, it is not in the strict sense a “work,” and thus poetry is also related in its ontological structure to those arts, primarily music, for which the effective medium is kinetic or “energetic.” Again, however, he stressed that the occasional “naturalness” of the signs employed in poetry was in itself insignificant, but rather what was important was what these signs, as mere means of representation, signify: It is effected in time because it is discourse. This is not merely primarily the case, in that discourse is a natural expression, for example, of the passions and emotions, for this is external to poetry; rather, it is most particularly the case in that it produces its effect on the soul through the rapidity, the going and coming of its representations, the energetic effect which it achieves partly through variety and partly through the whole it constructs in succession. . . . this makes it a music of the soul, as the Greeks called it (SW III, 138).

Thus Herder could argue that Lessing had seen poetry much too narrowly when he had claimed that poetry properly represented only actions and that the way in which actions are depicted was merely through the successivity of its signs. Herder maintained, on the con¬ trary, that successivity contributed only one part to the efficiency of poetry: “The concept of succession is only half of the idea of action: it must be a succession through force: thus action takes place. I imagine a being active in the succession of time, I imagine changes that follow one upon the other through the force of a substance: thus arises the force of an action. And if actions are the subject of poetry, then I wager that this subject can never be defined with the dry concept of succession: force is the center of its sphere” (SW III, 139).51 Just as we attribute a motivat50. For a more detailed account of Herder’s estimation of Baumgarten, see the essay titled Von Baumgartens Denkart in seinen Schriften (SW XXXII, 185). 51. Given the centrality of the concept of motion as it is involved in “force,” it is interesting that in the first draft of the Laocoon, Mendelssohn had suggested that Lessing

152

Herder’s Aesthetics

ing power or force to the actions and changes we perceive in the objects of the external world, so too must there be some additional efficiency in the signs of poetry that allows them to transmit a content as they successively pass by our imagination. Succession alone cannot explain how this occurs, whereas force provides a way to show how the “ac¬ tions” (Handlungen) of poetry assume and communicate a specific meaning that is distinct from the material nature of its signs, which are strung together along the temporal axis. Yet Herder also perceived in the concept of force the means to compare poetry with painting and at the same time to distinguish the ways in which they produced their effect. That is, while both painting and poetry do occasion images in the mind, the former accomplishes this through entirely different channels: “painting is effected through colors and figures for the eye: poetry is effected through the meaning of the words for the lower powers of the soul, especiallv the imagination. Since an action of the imagination can always be called an intuition [Anschauen]; then poetry, in so far as it renders a concept, an image visible [anschauend] to the imagination, may appropriately be called a painter for the imagination” (SW III, 158). Herder fully realized, more deeply perhaps than Lessing himself, that poetry possesses an exceedingly complex, multitiered structure that cannot be analyzed by relying on the single concept of succession. Although its signs are deployed successively, they also conjure up im¬ ages before the imagination in a manner that Herder equated with the concept of the coexistence or simultaneity of elements, which Lessing exclusively applied to the plastic arts. But Lessing had overlooked the crucial difference between “painting” in its widest sense and poetrv: that specific mechanism of communicative efficiency called force that accounted for poetry’s ability to embody and deliver a content unrelated to its means of representation.52 substitute the word “motions” (Bewegungen) for “actions” (Handlungen), which would have come closer to satisfying Herder’s criteria for a definition of poetry’s sphere. See the commentary bv Blumner, cited in Lessings Laokoon, p. 602. Elsewhere, in hisAbhandlnng iiber die Fabel, Lessing had defined “action” as “a sequence of changes that together constitute a whole. This unity of the whole depends upon the agreement of all of the parts witli the final purpose”; Blumner, p. 605. Blumner notes: “Here we have the concept of force which Herder demanded.” 52. I would therefore not agree with the judgment of Karlheinz Stierle, “Das bequeme Verhaltnis: Lessings Laokoon und die Entdeckung des asthetischen Moments,” in Das

A n Ontology of the Arts

Ontological sphere Means of representation Effective medium* Art form

153

Energy (kinesis)

Work (stasis) Natural signs

Arbitrary signs

Space

Time

Force

Sculpture/Painting

Music

Poetry

^Principles or categories that order the means of representation.

Now, whatever the merits or demerits may ultimately be of Herder’s application of the concept of force to aesthetic theory—whether, above all, as a “qualitas occulta,” force can really explain anything at all53—it is essential that we first see how the concept functioned in Herder’s portrayal of poetry and how it found its place within a larger theoretical context. With the foregoing in mind, then, we can schematically outline the results of Herder’s attempt to construct a basic ontology of the arts. The diagram above should be read from top to bottom as representing increasing degrees of analytic specificity, even diough the upper terms still remain constitutive. The first Kritisches Waldchen represents, as it were, the cornerstone of Herder’s philosophy of aesthetics. In it, as we have seen, he analytically elaborated a tripartite classification of the arts based on their specific ontological nature that he described with the concepts—long familiar from his studies with Kant—of space, time, and force. The system of the arts that Herder developed in the first Kritisches Waldchen therefore not only is methodologically consistent but also conforms with the general development of his thought preceding its composition. The problems of history, language, and philosophical procedure all find at least thematic relevance throughout the entire work. Yet, up to this point, Herder has said virtually nothing about the way in which we actually understand works of art, nothing about the psychological and even physiological processes that he believed take place during the act of their perception. In the fourth Kritisches Waldchen, Herder began to Laokoon-Projekt, ed. Gebauer, p. 48, in which he claims that Herder had a no more clear notion than Lessing of the multilayered structure of language and of the complex dialectic of succession and simultaneity with which the dialectic of work and speech act is constructed. 53. See the critique of Herder’s use of “force” in Knodt, pp. 105—7.

154

Herder’s Aesthetics

develop the consequences of his analysis of the individual works of art for a theory of aesthetic perception. Following the logical implications of having assigned a separate ontological sphere to each of the arts— with a unique status reserved for poetry—Herder attempted to formu¬ late a theory resting on the assumption that each of the major art forms originally appealed to a particular sense. Herder envisioned a psychol¬ ogy of the perception of art based on the three main faculties of sight, touch, and hearing in relation to those arts which he thought most immediately affected these senses.

5

The Psychology of Aesthetic Perception: The Fourth Kritisches Waldchen Every rule of beauty is at the same time J J a discovery in psychology. —Mendelssohn

I

n the previous chapters of this book, I have occasionally emphasized die enormous, indeed central importance of die fourth Kritisches WUldchen within the sum of Herder’s writings either direcdy or implicidy relating to questions of aesdietics. As previously indicated, the paramount significance of this work is pervaded by a rather bitter irony, for it was precisely the fourth WUldchen, in contrast to the first diree, that never reached publication in Herder’s lifetime. Herder’s most important treatise from the first decade of his career was dius denied die role in the development of German aesdietic philosophy diat it surely would have otherwise played. And adding to the peculiar status of diis work is the circumstance that, after the composition of the fourth WUldchen, Herder’s interest in comprehensive aesthetic dieories seems to have lost its sustaining momentum and he began to concentrate more exclusively on properly historical studies.1 It has been surmised that die one reason for Herder’s sudden decision to relinquish die study of aesthetics was the painful disclosure of his audiorship of the first three Walder, which he had previously publicly denied.2 Yet there is reason to believe that the apparent motives for the abandonment of his project 1. The one exception being, of course, Kallipfone, which was written thirty years later. I do not mean to imply that this treatise is insignificant or does not warrant careful study in relation to the formation of German idealist aesthetic philosophy. But Kallujone is an anomaly in that it falls outside of what I am portraying as a closed and unified segment of the development of Herder’s own thought. 2. See Haym, Herder nach seineni Leben, vol. I, pp. 301—4.

156

Herder’s A esthetics

may have merely been a rather convenient pretext for quitting what increasingly seemed in itself an insurmountable task. For, in spite of all his later scruples, in the fourth Kritisches Waldchen Herder made his most broadly conceived case for an aesthetics that would be, as he stressed repeatedly, “philosophy, strict, precise philosophy itself” (SW IV, 26). No one can doubt the sincerity or seriousness of his claim, but it appears that he was only then beginning to perceive the enormity of the goal he had set for himself. It was certainly an ambitious undertaking, and, contrary to what one might initially expect. Herder had a very specific notion of the form this “strict philosophy” should take. In its general conception and execu¬ tion, the fourth Kritisches Waldchen in fact adheres to the ideas he had been developing within the many essays and “fragments” that he had written earlier. As we have already seen, within the relatively short time of five or six years. Herder had assimilated an astonishing amount of complex thought that represents the European Enlightenment, for he appeared to move with equal ease and familiarity within each of the national traditions. But with Herder, the passive process of assimilation was intimately combined with the will to synthesize this thought into new constellations and to provide answers to the problems it explicitly posed. And although his interests freely ranged over the many perspec¬ tives of history, philosophy, and language, the primary attraction and stimulus for Herder quite obviously resided in the problems of art. Indeed, it seems as if Herder cultivated these adjacent interests primarilv in order to supply himself with the fullness of factual knowledge that he felt was indispensable to addressing the myriad questions of aesthetics. Art, which he thought to be the most condensed and pregnant expres¬ sion of the innumerable patterns of human existence, demanded a mode of understanding that was fully equal in subtletv to its nature. Aes¬ thetics, then, assumed in Herder’s mind not only the significance of an exact and independent philosophical discipline but appeared as die focus of all other fields of scientific endeavor and as the place where their content and method converged. Yet, after he had completed the fourth Kritisches Waldchen, Herder’s optimistic faith in the ability of the mind to encompass the seemingly infinite varieties of artistic expression exhibited by every culture and historical epoch began to relax in the face of his growing suspicion that he might never be able to collect enough data for the task he had

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

15 7

envisioned. As already suggested, the seeds of this eventual dissatisfac¬ tion were probably inherent in Herder’s methodological premise itself. The analytic method, as he and his contemporaries understood it, stipulated the exhaustive isolation of each distinctive feature within any given field of phenomena before one attempted to reconstitute the whole by advancing to more general explanatory principles and laws. Taken to its logical extreme, such a practice would have necessarily entailed an extensive survey of every facet of the context in which a given phenomenon arose, including those influences which were ef¬ fective on the individual or subjective level as well as those which determined the general historical and cultural character of the time in which an object was created. The sheer effort of mind implied in this ideal combination of universal erudition and philosophical precision would seem to place an enormous, if indeed not impossible, strain on the resources of an individual life. There are, in fact, several indications throughout the fourth Waldchen, as when Herder discusses the concept of the beautiful, that he was beginning to realize how long and arduous the path was that he had chosen: “It is a difficult, slow concept; it has to be abstracted from many individual ‘datis’ and names: all of these cannot be collected, ordered and refined enough if we are to produce an analysis of beauty in general; and yet it is precisely this that is the final product of all phenomena” (SW IV, 55). Today, when much more of the material that Herder sought is avail¬ able, we may smile at his seemingly naive belief in the certainty that such a final conceptual synthesis, in which the essence of beauty in general would be fully revealed, would have been possible at all. But a refusal to yield to obstacles has its own significant rewards, which we should not be too hasty to discount. For it may well be that the work for which Herder is perhaps best remembered, the Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity), emerged from the belief, which crystallized into an unshak¬ able conviction during his work on aesthetics, that methodological rigor coupled with a scrupulous fidelity to the particulars of historical circumstances could alone provide the foundation for a legitimate his¬ torical anthropology. The fourth Kritisches Waldchen is thus a pivotal text in a number of ways. It was still obviously fueled by his full confidence in the Enlight¬ enment analytic practice of first descending to the original, basic com-

158

Herder’s Aesthetics

ponents of the objects under study as the essential prerequisite to comprehensive and reliable knowledge. As a treatise on the perception of art in particular, it further carried the stamp of his age in that it conformed to the intimate association of aesthetics with theories of cognition and psychology that formed a prodigious part of eighteenthcentury reflections on the problems of art. In the fourth Wdldchen we therefore find Herder concentrating his powers of analysis on that part of the aesthetic experience which followed as a natural extension of his previous investigations. After he had determined the fundamental modes of each art form’s existence in the first Wdldchen, he then pro¬ ceeded to examine the psychological and even physiological processes that informed the act of understanding these works. The investigation of the basic conditions that govern our perception of art is, then, what Herder set out to carrv out in the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen. With that general purpose poised at the center, the last Wdldchen is logically divided into three main sections. In the first segment, Herder deals with fundamental questions of psychology and perception in order to provide a clear conceptual basis from the vantage point of which he will treat one of the most widely debated and important issues of eighteenth-century aesthetics: the problem of taste.3 In addition, and related to this discussion of taste, the first part contains Herder’s pro¬ grammatic definition of the nature and goals of all aesthetic philosophy in opposition to the concerns of criticism and practical poetics. The second section then introduces Herder’s discussion of the major art forms relative to the individual senses that govern our perception of these forms. Unfortunately, as in the case of the rather sterile second and third volumes devoted to the writings of Klotz, Herder’s ideas in the last part of the fourth Wdldchen falter under the weight of his polemical fury and they thus offer little that is of intrinsic value or independent interest. Yet, despite the lucidity and coherence of Herder’s argument in the first and second sections, the fourth Wdldchen still awaits an ade¬ quate and detailed explication.4 In a way that obviously bespoke the j

3. See Walter John Hippie, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, & the Picturesque in

Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), P- 306, in which he points out the centrality of the notion of taste in eighteenth-century English aesthetics, although his remarks pertain generally to France and Germany as well. 4. In the last book-length study on Herder’s aesthetic theory, by Fugate, Psychologi¬ cal Basis of Herder’s Aesthetics, this first section is, inexplicably, ignored altogether. The only mention of it is on p. 134, where he says, “We can restrict ourselves to an examina¬ tion of part two.”

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confident optimism of his age in the philosopher’s capacity to unlock the secrets of nature and the mind, Herder’s explicit intention issued in the establishment of a secure theoretical foundation upon which all subsequent aesthetic inquiry could be based. Yet, for whatever assorted and complex reasons, the fourth Kritisches Waldchen came to constitute a kind of prolegomenon for a future aesthetics that Herder never fully realized in its intended form. As he had done in the previous volumes, Herder formulated the main ideas of the fourth Waldchen in opposition to a precursor text while subjecting it to intense critical scrutiny. This time, however, the work he chose as the focal point for his discussion had not been written by someone with the acumen and learning of Lessing, but by a man who seemed to personify the sort of bad thinking that was anathema to Herder. Friedrich Justus Riedel, much like his mentor and benefactor Klotz, was a scholarly opportunist who more or less fatuously pursued the literary and philosophical fashions of his day in the calculated attempt to appeal to the widest popular audience.5 Herder’s critique is centered on Riedel’s Theorie der schonen Kiinste und Wissenschaften (Theory of Beaux Arts and Belles Lettres) of 1767, a compendium of opinions, quotations, and excerpts gleaned from the most incongruous sources and held together according to some inscrutable plan, and his collection of fictional “letters” titled Ueber das Publicum: Briefe an einige Glieder desselben (On the Public: Letters to Several Members of the Same), which Riedel published in the following year. Very early in the fourth Waldchen, Herder favorably compared the simplicity and precision that he felt distinguished the works of such thinkers as Mendelssohn and Sulzer, who in the main belonged to the Leibniz—Wolffian school of philosophy, to the intolerable irregularities of Riedel’s epigonic work. With more than mock indignation, Herder gave vent to the intellectual repugnance he felt toward what he called the “Crusian—Riedelian labyrinth”: The mind takes on, as it were, a dark expression when, after having seen psychology in the simplicity and exactitude and fine precision in which it was 5. See Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, p. 250, and Clark, Herder, pp. 88-89, for more tactual information on Riedel’s life. See as well the “Biographische Skizze” in the “Nachwort” by Eckart Feldmeier to the reprint of Friedrich Justus Riedel, Ueber das Publicum: Briefe an einige Glieder desselben (Vienna: Osterreichischer Bundesverlag fur Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1973), PP- 142—50. For an attempt at a positive reevaluation of Riedel, see Rita Terras, “Friedrich Justus Riedel: The Aesthetic Theory of a German Sensualist,” Lessing Yearbook, IV (1972), pp. 157-82.

i6o

Herder’s Aesthetics

placed by Leibniz’s students and in which Mendelssohn and Sulzer have cleared up so many paradoxes, especially in the area of dark and confused ideas;—after viewing the noble simplicity of this great edifice, the mind clouds over when it suddenly goes into the Crusian-Riedelian labyrinth [Irrgarten], where basic forces have become overgrown, wildlv intertwined with other basic forces, where the most complex and intricate capacities of the soul become basic sensations from which everything follows which one wants and does not want, where the human soul becomes a chaotic abvss of immediate inner feelings, and philosophy becomes a sensitive, obfuscating gas-bag (SW IV, 12).

Here we are thrown at once into the very heart of Herder’s contro¬ versy with Riedel. Departing from the teachings of his professor Darjes in Jena, Riedel advocated a theory of cognition that rested on a notion of "immediate’" perception, in which ideas were communicated to the mind unmitigated by the act of reflection, as the basis of philosophical, moral and aesthetic certainty.6 We are, Riedel argued, immediately and unreflectively “convinced” of that which is true or false, good or bad, and beautiful or ugly bv virtue of certain “inner feelings” that are innate in every one of us. Riedel thus maintained that the three basic “feel¬ ings,” which he labeled the “sensus communis,” “conscience,” and “taste,” were themselves directlv responsible for our apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful. These separate sensate faculties, then, that operated independently of one another and functioned de¬ void of any reflective activity, were the fundamental categories of which the human soul consisted and the basis on which we judged the world. To anyone as familiar as Herder was with the dominant traditions of Enlightenment philosophy since Locke, the very notion that an “imme¬ diate” sensation could enter conscious awareness without any participa¬ tion of reflection had to seem the absurdity it was. Whether one read the “Lockians” or “Leibnizians,” one invariably encountered the assump¬ tion that all cognitive activity rested on a constant interaction between the two basic operations of sensation and reflection. We remember that, as early as in Herder’s first essay, the Versuch iiber das Sein, he had also shared the opinion that while sensate impressions may provide to our minds essential materials of our understanding, these impressions could 6. Sec Feldmeier’s “Biographische Skizze,” in LJcbcr das Publicum, pp. 142-43, in which Riedel’s activities as a professor in Jena are described. See also the study by Wundt, Die deutsche Schulplnlosophic im Zeitalter dev Aufklarunq, p. 205, for information on Darjes.

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

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only assume the shape and order of knowledge when they were acted on and transformed by reflective reason. And while Kant, in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft of 1781, delivered the most compelling logical explana¬ tion of the precise nature of this relationship between sensation and the a priori contribution of the intellect in the formation of knowledge, the recognition of this necessary relationship, however it may be con¬ stituted, had been a central tenet of virtually every major school of Enlightenment epistemology. Thus it was with some amazement that Herder asked: To be convinced immediately? If these words have any meaning, they intend to say that we are convinced without conclusions, without judgments, merely through a simple sensation. And of what could a simple sensation convince us? Of nothing more than a particularity, an isolated concept [Inselbegriff]. Either to combine or to separate two concepts would already be judging; to combine two judgments in order to recognize the third thing in them would already be making a conclusion: and we are not supposed to conclude, or judge here, but rather to feel immediately. Thus, what a simple sensation, an immediate feeling, gives me can be nothing other than that: a simple sensation, a single feeling (SW IV, 5-6).7

Here, Herder first objected to RiedePs use of the term uto convince” to characterize immediate perception, for to be “convinced” of some¬ thing inherendy implies some application of judgment. Yet it was the involvement of such judgment at the most basic cognitive level that Riedel has so vigorously disclaimed; all impressions first entered the mind, he insisted, as immediate and individual feelings. But, Herder countered, a single, simple impression or idea, without the activity of reflection to give it significant clarity and context, remains just that: an isolated, disjunctive idea, or what Herder called an “Inselbegriff” If we 7. In the short essay titled Ueber Bild, Dichtung und Babel, which appeared in the third collection of the Zerstreute Blatter of 1787, but which was written, as Herder himself indicated, for “the second part of the Fragmente iiber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur, that is in 1767,” Herder made the following statement, which is very appropriate to the present argument: “All of the objects of our senses only become ours in that we become aware of them, that is we designate them, in a more or less clear and lively fashion, with the stamp of our consciousness. In the forest of sensible objects that surround me, I only find my way and become master of the chaos of the sensations that press upon me by separating objects from others, by giving them outline, measure and form, in short by creating unity in diversity, and animatedly and confidently designating them with the stamp of my inner sense, as if this were a stamp of truth” (SW XV, 525—26).

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Herder’s A esthetics

followed Riedel’s conception of the operations of the mind, Herder argued, each sensate idea would then exist in a sphere by itself, unrelated to our other countless and necessarily separate ideas, which would produce not “conviction” or certainty but an intolerable state of total confusion. Obviously this is not the way we think. Herder continued, and because we are aware of having perceptions at all is evidence of some basic reflective activity of reason.8 Herder used the vocabulary of Wolffian psychology to illustrate his point more clearly: “To recognize a thing clearly, even in the slightest degree, means that one has already distinguished it; and no distinction ever occurs without judgment, and a judgment is no longer an immediate feeling. And to recognize some¬ thing distinctly: that requires a clear cognition of its subordinate con¬ cepts as such, as the distinguishing marks [Merkmcde] of the whole, and thus involves an act of the inner workings of reason” (SW IV, 6). This argument introduces one of the most important ideas of the entire essay and it will prove to be the theoretical justification for Herder’s subsequent analysis of the aesthetic experience. We note that Herder has explicitly stated that from the moment a sensate impression, a feeling or simple idea, is raised to the level of conscious clarity and grasped by reflective awareness, this impression simultaneously ceases to be merely an immediate sensation. To “judge” (urteilen), which in the philosophy of both Locke and Wolff designated the cognitive act of distinguishing between two or more ideas, necessarily obtrudes into perception whenever we recognize a particular feature as being distinct within an otherwise undifferentiated perceptual field. Only two years 8. It is interesting, in this connection, to read how Sulzer defined the activity of reason, for Herder often uses Sulzer in the fourth Waldchen as a foil against which Riedel’s faults are supposed to be more plainly evident. Herder writes enthusiastically of Sulzer at one point, claiming: “The learned Rfiedel] did not even know the main work (not to mention his individual treatises in the Academy) by the main author of aesthetics among the Germans (not to mention the English, French and Italians)—Sulzer’s Theory of Sensations” (SW IV, 43). In the essay bv Sulzer that Herder mentions, “Untersuchung fiber den Ursprung der angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen,” in Vcrmischte philosophische Schriften, p. 10, Sulzer offers the following definition of reason, which, although it was one that was basically shared bv the majorin’ of contemporary thinkers, bears a more than superficial resemblance to that of Herder: “But it is not enough that the soul produces ideas. Like good soil that nourishes and sprouts the seed it received, by considering and comparing its ideas [the soul] brings forth new ones and forms judg¬ ments, conclusions and entire rows of thoughts. This activity of the soul is manifested everywhere, and even the most mediocre head makes its conclusions as well as the philosopher. One calls this power of comparing ideas and drawing conclusions REA¬ SON r

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

16 3

later, in xhcAbhandlung iiberden Ursprung der Spmche, Herder used this same argument, as we saw, to define the origin of language, namely as the moment when a mental sign, or a “distinguishing mark” (Merkmal) instituted by reflection, was associated with a particular sensate impres¬ sion. And just as he insisted in the Abhandlung that reflection, or “Besonnenheit,” which he understood to be the essential characteristic of humanity, was by definition always active, here too he maintains that we “judge” or think, and never simply passively perceive, from the moment we come into being: From the beginnings of childhood we have grown accustomed to all the different ways of thinking and to all of these types working in unison, so that, just as in the case of all habits, in this one too, it becomes difficult to observe and distinguish between the subordinate actions which we perform habitually. From the first moment of our lives we have thought, judged, and formed conclusions; and we do all of this alternately, successively and simultane¬ ously .... We judge and form conclusions rapidly and habitually, and we still believe we are receiving immediate sensations: we leave out intermediary steps, and the conclusion seems to be a simple judgment: we obscure the connection between the concepts, and the judgment seems to be an immediate sensation (SW IV, 9-10).

It is only because we habitually and unconsciously perform the complex operations of reason that we believe we directly perceive an object or a single idea without the interference of reflection. In reality, Herder reiterated, we cannot even be aware of the simplest phenomenon with¬ out executing, in however swift or abbreviated a fashion, the cognitive operations of comparing, combining, and distinguishing ideas, which first give our perceptions an intelligible form. By learning through habit to coordinate this confluence and constant interplay of our sensible and reflective faculties, the actually highly complex procedure of percep¬ tion—which involves dozens of individual and intermediary steps— becomes so “natural” that it seems to us to consist of a single unmedi¬ ated act. Although the distinct operations of the mind may be obscured by the swift collation of habit, they are nevertheless always present in the most basic act of the understanding. There is, Herder therefore concluded, no such thing as a “pure” or immediate sensate impression. What appears to us to be a mere “sensation” is in actuality always already the product of judgment. Thus thought, or active reflection, accompanies and determines in Herder’s view even those apparently

164

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most fundamental “feelings” of perception that Riedel had facilely posited as the very basis of our soul. The general psychological premises that Herder elaborated here, which bear more than a fleeting resemblance to those of Locke, Berke¬ ley, Condillac, and Hume, are crucial for an understanding of his treatment of the specific issue of how we perceive works of art in particular.9 By insisting that reflective judgment always plays an active role in ordering the materials of perception, even though this activity might be unconsciously and habitually performed, Herder was in es¬ sence making a plea for the ability and, more important, for the respon¬ sibility of the philosopher to analyze fully even the most basic psycho¬ logical or cognitive processes. For if one were to accept Riedel’s premise that certain innate faculties of “feeling” were directly responsible for our ideas of morality, truth, and beauty, then this would be tantamount to relinquishing the essential task of philosophy. Two years before, in the first version of the Fmgmente in 1767, Herder had already vehemently criticized this “modern” direction of thought. He felt that it threatened to transform the concepts of philosophy into “inexplicable words” through an appeal to an arbitrary and relativistic “je ne sais quoi” of feeling or individual preference. Significantly, Herder equated this “newer philosophy” with the species of metaphysical obscurantism from which Bacon, Locke, and Leibniz had already attempted to re¬ deem thought: If a certain modern philosophy continues to view truth as a color and takes this to be the highest first principle of thought; if what I can think of as being either true or false is, hence, true or false—if one changes the first principle of all of aesthetics, namely beauty, into a ‘I know not what?’ of taste; and the foundation of morals into a feeling or sensation of conscience, or, worse, into ait innate instinct of obedience, to determine what is jjood:—I repeat, when this path is to become the philosophical method, then we are once again cast into the labvrinth of inexplicable words, in which thought is fixed on expression and from which Bacon, Locke and Leibniz sought to liberate us

(SW

I, 415).

9. The importance of Herder’s argument here lias been neglected in the literature on the fourth Waldchen. We do find an exception contained in a brief remark in the essay bv Nisbet, “Zur Revision des Herder-Bildes im Lichte der neueren Forschung,” pp. 106—7, who mentions that the aesthetic ideas that Herder presented in 1^69 are closer to the spirit of Locke and Berkeley than to that of Hamann.

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In die kind of knowledge propagated within this “modem philosophy," by which Herder primarily meant Klotz and his disciples, no one would be able to give an objective account of our ideas and concepts. For these would be reduced to die level of subjective feelings equivalent to in¬ stincts diat mav or not be shared or “felt" by anyone else.10 In the fourth Waldchen, Herder argued diat if diis conception were true, we w ould in practice never be able to find a common basis ot communication or understanding: “The true, die beautiful, and die good are a ‘qualitas occulta': w hoever feels it may do so;—where diis is not die case—who can help, w ho can convince?... You teel diis w ay, I feel differently—we go our separate wavs'’ (SW IV, 14). Yet everyday experience—or die frequendv invoked touchstone ot “common sense —shows diat at least some agreement is struck among people concerning the meaning ot diese ideas, even though Herder admitted diat we mav at first have onlv an unclear notion of dieir actual significance. But die goal ot philosophy is not to reinforce diis lack of clarity by arbitrarily multiplying “feelings" or separate faculties of die mind as explanatory principles. Radier, it is die task of philosophv to lav bare precisely diose layers ot habitual experience and diought w hich otherwise obscure the original nature of our ideas: “The essence of philosophy is, as it were, to elicit ideas diat lie within us, to illuminate into distinctness truths which we only darkly knew, to unravel proofs w hich we did not clearly understand in all of dieir intemiediarv steps. All of diis requires judgments and conclusions: judgments diat begin wadi die comparison of two ideas and which retrace dieir formation until dieir relationship to one another becomes evident” (SW IV, 12). This was a powerful, persuasive argument, and it was one diat clearly gadiered its conceptual support and critical authorin' from die psycho¬ logical theories of die “philosophies," and perhaps most direedy from his former teacher, Kant.11 .After he had oudined diis basic premise. 10. See the book by Heinrich von Stein, Die Entstckung da• neucrcn Asthctik (Stutt¬ gart: J. G. Cotta sche Buchhandiung, i886h p. 9+. in which he writes that die idea of taste as being very like an “instinct* was not an uncommon one in die literature on the concept of taste. 11. I emphasize diis point, w hich seems ob\ious on reading Herder, because of die tendency in die research to see Herder as a so-called philosopher ot feeling (Gcfihlsphilosoph) who bodi advocated and practiced a subjectivistic or irrational approach to art based alone on intuition and “empathy."

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Herder could then turn to the more specific examination of the ideas that are garnered in the realm of aesthetic experience. What, he asked, was the fundamental nature of that “feeling” called taste, which Riedel had posited as the faculty that governed our perception of beauty? Herder thought that Riedel, who had identified taste as the immediate “cause” of our knowledge of beauty, had actually forestalled his inquiry where it should have begun. If, as Herder maintained, the reflective activity of the understanding—which possesses the quantifiable charac¬ teristics of comparison, association, distinction, and combination— encroaches upon what would seem to be even the most simple sensa¬ tions, then taste too must be a particular application of reason to particular sensate perceptions that as such is susceptible to further analysis. So, if it is not simply an ineffable feeling, a purely individual sympathetic response, what then is this thing called taste? In traditional scholarship on the development of aesthetic philosophy during the eighteenth century, the problem of taste has generally been associated with the gradual rise of subjectivism and hence with the final dethronement of normative poetics and rationalist thought in gen¬ eral.12 In this view, taste came to be considered the foremost, if not singular, standard by which artistic beauty was judged. But its associa¬ tion with the variability or relativity of opinion was also one of the decisive factors in replacing the canon of rigid rules, which neoclassicist writers established as the only valid measure in both the creation and judgment of art. Herder, then, is portrayed as the thinker who, by advocating the absolute individuality and relativity of taste, in addition to the creative singularity of the original genius, is credited with having definitively brought the rationalist epoch to its close. But a closer look at the history of the concept of taste reveals that this schema is both somewhat misleading and, as it applies to Herder, manifestly false. Although various metaphorical usages of the term had been familiar ever since antiquity, the modern concept of taste first emerged during the middle of the seventeenth century through the writings of Baltasar Gracian.13 Following the lead of Gracian, virtually every thinker who wrote a treatise on taste through the first quarter of the next century 12. In his chapter on aesthetics in Philosophy of the Enlightenment^ Cassirer thus began a section with the characteristic heading, ‘The Problem of Taste and the Trend toward Subjectivism,” p. 297. 13. In the following I rely heavily on the thorough essay by Friedrich Schiimmcr, “Die Entwicklung des Geschmacksbegriffs in der Philosophic des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv fur Begriffsgeschichte, I (1955), pp. 120-41.

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used the term “taste” not so much as an exclusively aesthetic category but rather to designate the more general means by which one may learn to lead a graceful and exemplary life.14 To acquire and to have “good taste” therefore meant to Boileau, Bouhours, La Bruyere, Dryden, and Addison that through the study of the “beaux arts” and “belles letters” one cultivated ease and eloquence in polite conversation, that one comported oneself in a courteous but confident manner, and that one strove to embody the moral precepts that gave direction to one’s private life. This was, for example, precisely the sense in which Christian Thomasius used the term “Geschmack” when he introduced it to Ger¬ many in 1687 in an essay titled Welcher Gestalt man denen Frantzosen in gemeinemLeben and Wandel nachahmen solle (How One Should Imitate the French in One’s Everyday Life and Conduct). In a fashion that was in accord with the rest of his pragmatically oriented philosophy, Thom¬ asius went to great lengths in this essay to explain especially how one could conduct a reasonable, well-mannered and honorable life through learning the exercise of “good taste.” And, indeed, for most writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the acquisition and perfection of taste represented a pedagogical and ethical concern rather than solely, or even primarily, an aesthetic one. By relegating the cultivation of taste to the realm of experience and quotidian affairs, these writers seemed to be setting “gout,” or “Gesch¬ mack,” in direct opposition to the abstract sphere of theoretical reason. Taste, it was thought, could at best give us guidance in organizing and refining the predicates of practical life. But it was precisely the conse¬ quent susceptibility of taste to fashion or change that made it unaccept¬ able in the rigorous pursuit of accurate and stable knowledge.15 By virtue of this very juxtaposition, however, both taste and reason came to be considered, especially in France, as complementary and indispensable elements of which the “whole man” was composed. In his Caracteres of 1688, La Bruyere, for instance, perceived the two as necessary correlates, and he even placed them in a direct relationship of cause and effect: “Talent, taste, mind, common sense are different things, but not incom¬ patible ones. Between common sense [bon sens] and good taste [bon gout] there is the difference between cause and effect.”16 Reason, one 14. Ibid., p. 121; see also Baeumler, DasIrrationalitatsproblem, p. 18, in which he points out that a new ideal of education arose with the concept of taste. 15. See von Stein, Entstehung der neueren Asthetik, p. 93. 16. Cited in Schiimmer, “Entwicklung des Geschmacksbegriffs,” p. 130.

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was led to understand, tempered the vicissitudes and vagaries of taste, and taste breathed life into the brittle and arid structures of reason. And in light of this apparent causal relationship between taste and rational thought, Dominique Bouhours also suggested that the “bon sens” of his fellow men might be improved through the careful studv of the “pieces cfeloquence” he cited in his book La maniere de bien penser dans les outrages de Vesprit of 1687.17 In a very immediate way, then, the refine¬ ment of taste was seen to go in tandem with the perfection of abstract knowledge toward the completion and fulfillment of an individual’s social, intellectual, and emotional capacities. Taste thus occupied a place of special importance in earlv eighteenthcentury thought primarily because of its perceived complementary function vis-a-vis reason in the conduct of a well-proportioned exis¬ tence. As it began to be used more exclusively as a categorv referring to the evaluation of art works in particular, the alreadv traditional codeter¬ mination ol taste and reason led thinkers such as Du Bos to grant to taste, or “sentiment,” an independent power of judgment that was related to, but separate from, other forms of intellectual judgment. For this reason we find in Du Bos’s Reflexions critiques the simple assertion that “sentiment judges the merit of a poem.”18 In Montesquieu’s article “Sur le gout” (On Taste), which appeared more than thirty years later for the Encyclopedic in 1757, this alignment of taste with “sentiment” had already become paradigmatic: “The most general definition of taste, without considering whether it is good or bad, just or not, is that which attaches us to a thing through sentiment.”19 It seems, therefore, that the participation of reason in the judgment of beauty had been entirely assimilated or incorporated within the notion of taste as a faculty of “sentiment.” This being the case, the mere mention of taste as respond17. In the foreword of his book La maniere de bien penser dans les ouvracjes d’esprit: Dialogues, New Edition (Paris: Miehel Brunet, 1715), Bouhours takes care to distinguish his work from a treatise on formal logic, calling it rather a “Logic without thorns.” 18. Cited from Baeumler, Das Irrationalitdtsproblcm, p. 8;. One should keep in mind, however, von Stein’s remark in Entstehmuj der ncucrcn Asthetik, p. 9;, that the word “sentiment” used by the older aestheticians did not contain the pow er and inwardness of the modern notion of feeling. “Sentiments” are also views or opinions. 19. Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu, “Essai sur le gout dans les choses de la nature et de Part,” in Oeuwes completes, ed. Andre Masson, vol. Ill (Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1950), p. 615. It is indicative of the universality of this view that d’Alembert, in the Preliminary Discourse, p. 45, should also write: “It is to this kind of feeling that we owe taste and genius, which are distinguished from one another in that genius is the feeling that creates and taste the feeling that judges.”

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ing to particular objects of sense was still accompanied by the tacit assumption that some form of reflective awareness always shaped its application. A similar development was taking place in England, even though Gracian’s filtered influence was at first still predominant in Addison's discussion of taste in the Spectator, where he never used it as an aesthetic categorv.20 Francis Hutcheson, for example, who wrote “the first for¬ mal treatise on aesthetics in English,”21 the Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of 1725, isolated a specific operation of the mind that was allegedly responsible for apprehending the ideas of beautv. Although he did not use the term taste itself to designate this mental act, it is nevertheless clear that Hutcheson was working with the same conceptual categories, for he called this “Power of perceiving the Beautv of Regularity Order, Harmony, an INTERNAL SENSE.”22 He went on to specify this “internal sense,” which has all of the qualities of reflective activity as “a natural Power of Perception, or Sense of Beauty in Objects, antecedent to all Custom Education or Example."23 Thus here, too, reason was thought to play an implicit regulative role in the judgment of beautv through the avenue of this “internal sense.” Because of the avowed uniformin' of the basic structures of the human mind— that, as Hutcheson maintained, the “sense of beauty” existed prior “to all custom, education and example”—one could therefore safely assume that evenT rational and educated person within a particular culture entertained similar notions of what is beautiful. But Hutcheson's theory necessitated both the division of the powers of the mind into discrete, unrelated categories and the multiplication of various faculties to ac¬

,

count for their operation. Edmund Burke also confronted the problem of taste—understood as a facultv subject to the irregularities of sense experience and still har¬ nessed and shaped bv the strictures of reason—in his essay on taste of 20. See Schiimmer, “Entwicklung des Geschmacksbegriffs.” p. 133. 21. Rene Wellek, A History of Modem Criticism: 1750-1950, vol. I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p- 107. 22. Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofBeauU' and Virtue, pp. v—vi. Cited from the editor’s introduction to Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame. Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), p. xxxii. See also the informative discussion of Hutcheson’s views in the survev bv Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 185—88. 23. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. box.

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1758, which was added to his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of the previous year. Burke attempted to provide a stable foundation for the concept of taste by illustrating that while taste was indeed composed of not one but a combination of the elements stemming from the three sources of the senses, the imagi¬ nation, and rational judgment, this psychological argument itself pre¬ supposes the existence of the universal laws governing perception that underlie all the workings of the mind: Taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but is pardy made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning facultv, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners and actions. ... the ground-work for all these is the same in the human mind; for as the senses are the great originals of all our ideas, and consequently of all our pleasures, if they are not uncertain and arbitrary, the whole ground-work of Taste is common to all.24

In Germany, this complicated relationship between sentiment and reason in connection with the concept of taste was systematized and arranged within the existing psychological framework described by the “lower'’ and “upper" faculties of cognition. The result was that the concept of taste was increasingly codified within intellectual categories, precipitating what Alfred Baeumler has called a “rationalizing of the problem of taste.”25 In Gottsched’s Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst taste or “Geschmack” is portrayed as that specific facultv of the mind with which we determine the beauty of an object, whereby Gottsched also attended to the important distinction between “sensation” and “understanding” that characterized the French and English definitions of the term. Following the hierarchical epistemology of Leibniz and Wolff, however, Gottsched posited taste as the activity of the mind by which we comprehend the perfection of those “clear” and “indistinct” sense perceptions, which we call beauty, whereas die logical perfection of the abstract concepts that comprise certain knowledge or truth re¬ sults when perceptions are made “distinct.” Thus taste, he wrote, is “understanding that correctly judges the beauty of a thing according to

,

24. Ibid., p. 23. 25. Baeumler, Das Irrationalitatsproblem, p. 94.

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the mere sensation of it, with respect to matters of which one can have no distinct and thorough cognition/’26 Baumgarten, finally, attempted to formalize this identification of a particular form of judgment that was peculiar to sensate cognition by replacing die term "taste11 with die more general notion of a “faculty of distinguishing.11 As he defined it in the Philosophic Generalise Baumgarten wished to establish a formal “art of distinguishing, or a CBJTICAL AESTHETICS.112^ Widi diat, he accorded to die judgment of sensate perceptions, which were the proper objects of aesthetic inquiry, an analogous, yet qualitatively different, status to diat of die judgment of logical concepts. There w as dierefore a well-established historical precedent not only for RiedeFs assumption diat there existed a separate faculty of die mind called taste, but also for his insistence diat diis faculty was restricted solely to the level of immediate sensation, or “sensate cognition.11 But Riedel discarded die implicit regulative role of reason in die exercise of taste and he wrent on to draw die conclusion that, since our perception of beauty wras founded only on this purely individual, subjective feeling, die notion of “objective beauty” was an idle illusion. Except for diat which “immediately” pleases us or not, diere could be no general laws or rules of taste diat wrould sene as abstract criteria of judgment. In the first letter from die collection Ueber das Publicum, Riedel thus advocated a notion of taste that not only admitted an absolute plurality of opinion with regard to works of art but also categorically denied the possibility of a dieoretical explanation for diis diversity: Beauty is really an “arriton” which is felt more than it is taught. Since it is to be judged merely from die impression which an object makes upon our senses and our imagination, and since diis impression will be different according to the receptivity of the perceiving being; who would define for me what is objective in beauty? . . . One dung often pleases diis person and displeases another. Is the second wrong? Or the first? Or could they not bodi be right? In the realm of beauty it is not the same as in the realm of truth, where among two opposing 26. Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, p. 123. In Das Irrationalitatsproblem, p. 72, Baeumler points out the novelty of this formulation by explaining that at the time of Gottsched the understanding was die faculty of distinct representations, but in no way a faculty of judging. The expression “understanding that judges” sounded new then, while today it seems tautological. 27. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Theoretische Asthetik, p. 73. See Baeumler, Das Irrationalttatsproblem, p. 88, for a description of Baumgarten’s definition of judgment.

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judgments only one is true and the other has to be false. What is beautiful to me is what causes me pleasure. If it causes someone else displeasure, then it will always be ugly to him. I tolerate his sensation; he should tolerate mine.28

Beyond the differences of individual judgment, Riedel also underscored the absolute historical and cultural variability of taste in such a manner as to imply that finding the common ground or underlying psychologi¬ cal principles governing taste was a hopeless venture. He maintained that “entire nations contradict one another in their judgments of taste and in their sensation of the good and the beautiful,” and he empha¬ sized that such unbridgeable contradictions were natural and inevita¬ ble.29 Riedel thus portrayed the inconstancy and variability of taste as its most essential determining aspect.30 In an odd twist of irony to which interpretations of the past are so often subject, it would appear that Riedel, whom Herder so energetically opposed, was just the sort of historical relativist that so many commentators have imagined Herder himself to have been. Far from endorsing notions that would absolve the philosopher from the labors of evaluation and judgment. Herder in fact countenanced a concept of taste that was at once more abstract and more general than the one Riedel upheld. Herder rejected Riedel’s superficial relativism on both the psychological and historical levels. He did this first bv appeal¬ ing to Baumgarten’s theoretical definition of taste as mirroring the cognitive activity of judgment. Herder clearly recognized the logical impasse necessitated by Riedel’s division of the mind into an arbitrarv number of individual faculties. But he also strongly objected to Riedel’s portrayal of taste as an isolated, independent feeling or “Gefiihl” that as such involved no participation of rational paradigms. Taste, which Riedel had defined as a separate category of perception through which we are immediately convinced of the beauty of an object, is according to Herder merely a modification of the unitary, general form of judgment that is habitually applied to a particular field of objects: “If taste is 28. Riedel, Ueber das Publicum, pp. 23 and 25. The Greek word Riedel uses in the first sentence, “arriton,” is difficult to translate and means roughly “that which cannot be expressed, explained or known.” 29. Ibid., p. 27. On Riedel’s notion of history, see Terras, “Friedrich Justus Riedel: The Aesthetic Theory of a German Sensualist,” pp. 173—75. 30. In F.ntstehunpf der neueren Asthctik, von Stein, p. 93, also points out that this was one of the common features of the concept of taste generally.

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

17 3

nothing more than a judgment concerning certain classes of objects, then it is formed as judgment... It is therefore not a basic power, not a general basic power of the soul; it is the habitual application of our judgment to objects of beauty” (SW IV, 36). Taste, like every other rational capacity, is thus formed through the habit of applying our judgment to a certain realm of objects, in this case specifically to the objects of beauty.31 With that, Herder succeeded in reducing the complex operation of taste to a single, recognized cogni¬ tive principle. It is true, Herder admitted, that because the external objects that shape an individual’s taste will vary according to his or her environment the manifestation of taste itself will always take on a different countenance. And it will be duller or livelier, stronger or weaker, more distinct or more confused according to the development of the individual’s faculties. Yet, since the origin of taste is rooted in the most basic structure and operations of the mind, Herder stressed that the principle that causes it to arise in the first place must underlie each unique permutation of individual taste. This uniformity of cause allows us to state that there is indeed a “standard” of taste based on our universally shared psychological constitution.32 31. In the essay Herder wrote for the prize competition announced by the Berlin academy for 1773 (and which, incidentally, Herder won), he set out to answer the question: “What are the causes of the decadence and the corruption of taste?” Herder’s contribution, which is titled Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmachs bei den verschiedenen Volkern, da ergebliiht (Causes of Corrupted Taste among the Different Peoples in whom It Blossomed) contains a definition of taste that is in close accord with these earlier formulations: “If taste is nothing more than the order and practice of the powers of beauty; then, no matter how quickly it has an effect and is felt, it can only have an effect through reason, judgment, reflection, which alone create order. . . . and the nobler a genius is, the more worthy the sphere is toward which he strives, and the more worthily he perfects his striving, the more he has to show accurate, comprehensive reason in the most rapid fire storm of activity and sensation” (SW V, 606-7). 32. In the prize-winning essay of 1773, Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmacks bei den verschiedenen Volkern, da ergebliiht, Herder stressed the same point, claiming: “Thus, as different as the times are, so must the sphere of taste be, although the same rules are always in effect. The materials and the ends are different” (SW V, 645). In this context, the work by Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, intro. Walter J. Hippie, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963), is interesting because Gerard, whose “argument on the standard of taste is the best in the century” according to Hippie in the introduc¬ tion, p. xxii, produced a very similar argument. However, although the Essay was originally published in 1759, the section titled “Of the Standard of Taste” was not added to the book until the third edition of 1780, thus appearing too late to have had an effect on Herder’s thinking. In the “Standard of Taste,” Gerard also distinguished between senti¬ ment and judgment, albeit in different words, and claimed that the “standard” of taste

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By thus realigning taste within the more general conceptual appara¬ tus he had already defined at the outset of the essay, Herder wanted above all to make provision for the philosopher’s ability to acknowledge particular expressions of taste. But at the same time, he wanted to ensure the possibility of analyzing them according to certain general concepts. Herder wanted to admit the individual and historical com¬ plexity of the aesthetic response and of human nature as a whole. At the same time, he wanted to do so without viewing the mind as a collection of autonomous faculties, each reacting individually to a particular facet of experience. Herder therefore recognized that “human nature, as a feeling being, is not completely the same under all climates” (SW IV, 38). Yet as Herder had argued in the essay Von der Verschiedenheit des Geschmacks und der Denkart unter den Menschen (On the Variation in the Taste and Mentality among Peoples) of 1766, while the “spirit of change” (Geist der Vemnderung) is indeed the hub of all history, it was precisely the manifestations of this “spirit of change” that the historian had to eliminate in order to reach the submerged forces that lent the phenomena their perceptible guise.33 The obvious evidence of manifest discontinuities throughout the history of art did not mean, as Riedel implied, that the theoretical concept of beauty was completely meaning¬ less. Herder stated this explicitly: “Despite all deviations and idio¬ syncrasies, the natural rules of the beautiful thus still remain constant, even if they are applied in the poorest manner: beauty and grace are thus still not vague, empty names” (SW IV, 39). By this maneuver Herder reversed the drift of Riedel’s argument back could only be located in the latter while still allowing the legitimacy of the former. Gerard thus discussed (pp. 214-15) the problem of taste “either as a species of sensation, or as a species of discernment. In the former light, it is mere feeling and perception; it is touched and affected by certain objects, and attaches us to them immediately and without reflection; it is simply the faculty by which we receive pleasure from the beauties and pain from the faults and imperfections of the things about which we are conversant. In the other light, it is a faculty by which we distinguish the true causes of our pleasure or of our dislike; by a reflex act, it discerns the several qualities which are fit to excite pleasure or displeasure; it estimates the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction which every object ought to produce. Taste considered in the former of these lights, in respect of what we may call its direct exercise, cannot properly admit any standard.” 33- The passage to which I am referring reads: “The spirit of change is the kernel of history; and whoever does not take this as his main consideration: to distill, as it were, this spirit, to combine the taste and character of every epoch into ideas and to travel through the various periods of world events with the penetrating gaze of a wanderer hungry for knowledge, he sees, like every blind man, people as trees and dines on history as on a meal consisting of husks without grain and ruins his stomach” (SW XXXII, 27).

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onto itself. That some standard of taste is evident in every time and culture—however much this standard may seem to be at variance with the one we recognize—Herder claimed to be proof that a single princi¬ ple is operative in the formation of a body of artistic works that can be characterized as belonging to a particular time and place. The problem, Herder explained, was not that this principle did not exist, but rather that it had not yet been fully understood: And is it [i.e., “taste”] not to be explained by the times, customs and people? and does it not thus always have a first principle which has just not been understood well enough, just not felt with the same intensity, just not applied in the correct proportion? and does not even this Proteus of Taste, which changes anew under every stretch of the heavens, in every breath it draws in foreign climes; does it not itself prove by the causes of its transformation that there is only One beauty [daf die Schonheit nurEinssey], just like perfection, just like truth (SW IV, 40—41).

Just as this “Proteus of Taste,” or the result of our habitual exercise of judgment on beautiful objects, has its origin in the universally shared capacities of the human mind, so too must beauty, as a quality of the objects to which taste is applied, in each case be the product of a certain unitary causal principle, yielding the “Eins” that Herder mentions. As we have discovered, Herder conceived of the “Eins”—the general prin¬ ciple that must inform all expressions of art and nature—in a very abstract manner so as not to mistake the external, fungible attributes of a thing with the forces and laws that gave it its form. In one of the more remarkable passages of the entire fourth Waldchen, Herder raised the possibility that a thinker may well arise who, equipped with both universal knowledge and critical impartiality, would be able to penetrate the polymorphous surface of individual appearance and to fathom the hidden, abstract principles that he thought must underlie all the arts created throughout the history ot humanity: There is therefore an ideal of beauty for every art, for every branch of letters, for good taste in general, and one can find it in all peoples and times and subjects and products. To be sure, it is difficult to find.... There are indeed peoples who project their national character into their representation of it and imagine it with the traits of their individuality. But it is also possible to disaccustom oneself of this idiosyncracy that is both innate and acquired, to break free of the irregularities of a situation that is too particular and, with a taste that is not determined by national, temporal or personal considerations, finally to enjoy

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works where one finds them, in all times and peoples, in all arts and in all varieties of taste. To taste and feel it in its purity, separated from all foreign elements. Happy is he who has such taste! He has been initiated into the secrets of all the Muses and of all times and of all memories and of all works: the sphere of his taste is boundless, like the history of humanity (SW IV, 41).

Herder therefore imagined the ideal aesthetic philosopher as someone who would be able to assume the objective stance of an observer without bias or partisan prejudice and who would be able to judge the artistic endeavors of every nation and time on the basis of uniform criteria that were not fundamentally at odds with the final products of these endeavors themselves. At this juncture we are once again compelled to focus our view on a wider field, for Herder’s campaign against the individual views of Riedel represented only one of the fronts on which he was fighting simultaneously in the fourth Kritisches Wcildchen. His task was made more complicated by the other, nonaesthetic or pedagogical aspect of the concept of taste—whereby it was seen to provide refinement in one’s practical affairs—that had also remained viable until Herder’s day.34 Here, however, Herder’s treatment of the concept of taste pro¬ vided the backdrop for the much larger and important issue of the very fate of the new discipline of aesthetics as a whole that Baumgarten had only recendy introduced as an independent theoretical science. It is perhaps difficult to reconstruct for ourselves the intense urgency and excitement that Herder must have felt at the thought that he was standing on the threshold of the developing science of aesthetics and that he might help to mold its future course. Throughout the fourth Kritisches Wcildchen we sense that there was much more at stake for Herder than merely correcting the views of a misguided colleague. He was obviously straining toward a more profound vision of the nature and scope of aesthetics itself, and his exertions were undoubtedly fos¬ tered by the hopeful prospect of winning lasting philosophical fame. As a result of this highly ambitious and personal involvement that Herder 34- This is even true of the early work on aesthetics by Kant, “Beobachtungen iiber

das Gefiihl des Schonen und Erhabcnen” (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime), in Wcrkausyabe, vol. II, pp. 825-84, which was first published in 1764. Kant made, for example, the distinction between the differences of feeling for the beautiful and the sublime determinate on sex, much in the way Cicero had distinguished between a masculine and a feminine style.

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felt with regard to aesthetics, he strenuously, even jealously, attempted to protect the purity of its rigorous philosophical stature. To under¬ stand his apprehension, we only have to recall that the second volume of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica had appeared in 1758, less than a decade before Herder set down to his own Kritische Walder, and that Baumgarten had died in 1762, before he could finish the third and final volume. This obvious state of incompletion gave an already complicated venture the uncomfortable appearance of a provisional vulnerability, which only seemed to invite the transgressions of someone like Riedel. Herder felt uneasy that the future integrity of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline would be endangered by intellectual lassitude on the part of Baum¬ garten’s less scrupulous or unwarranted followers. And indeed, adding to the threat of conceptual uncertainty potentially engendered by Rie¬ del’s meandering work, there were two other issues, still revolving around the notion of taste, that occupied Herder’s attention in this first part of the Kritisches Waldchen. In the years 1748-50, Baumgarten’s student and popularizer, Georg Friedrich Meier, had published a German translation of Baumgarten’s demanding Latin prose, titled Anfangsgriinde alter schonen Wissenschaften (The First Principles of All Belles Lettres), which was based on notes he had assembled from his teacher’s lectures. Meier’s primary intention in translating Baumgarten’s Aesthetica into German was cer¬ tainly laudable, for he wished to have his ideas disseminated among an audience that may not have been equal to the task of deciphering his mentor’s work. Yet immediately after its publication, Meier’s Anfangsgriinde earned the scorn of several thinkers who thought he had marred or “watered down” Baumgarten’s theoretical model.35 For beyond of¬ fering simply a translation (which in itself served of course a didactic purpose), Meier had attempted to lend Baumgarten’s theory a more pronounced pedagogical cast by claiming that, just as logic trains and refines our rational capacities, so can aesthetics “improve” sensate cogni¬ tion, or taste, in general. In this way, Meier sought to incorporate the older tradition of thought concerning the concept of taste within Baum¬ garten’s logical and systematic framework. In xhcAnfangsgriinde, Meier 35. See one of the few studies on Meier, by Ernst Bergmann, Die Begriindung der deutschen Asthetik durch Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten und Georg Friedrich Meier (Leip¬ zig: Roder & Schunke, 1911), p. 173. See also Nivelle’s critical assessment of Meier in Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien, pp. 39-46.

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thus offered a definition of taste similar to the one that had been propagated by Gracian and his followers: Taste is one of the most indispensible faculties of the soul. The greatest majority of our actions and words, in everyday life as well, have to be determined by taste. ... A person who possesses a silly or decadent taste is a fool through and through. All of his actions, all of his words, gestures, expressions, manners, and clothing are forced, unnatural, tasteless and ridiculous. . . . Now, since aes¬ thetics improves taste, then its fifth use consists in being able to make the person who understands and practices this science a perfecdy polite human being.36 With this, Meier’s reworking of Baumgarten’s premise did in fact threaten to remove aesthetics from the sphere of purely objective sci¬ ence. It would have placed aesthetics once again in the service of practical education and (worse in Herder’s eyes) of prescriptive poetics. Realizing this, Herder roundly repudiated Meier’s justification of aes¬ thetics as a parallel to logic by questioning whether either discipline actually “improves” any of our faculties. What aesthetics does do, Her¬ der claimed, is help us to reveal and to understand those aspects of the human mind bracketed in traditional logic: “One should not want to claim of [aesthetics] That it affords an improvement in cognition be¬ yond the boundaries of the sphere of distinctness,’ since it is still rather uncertain whether logic improves the so-called higher faculties, and it is at least not the first aim of aesthetics to provide a new beautiful nature, or a feeling which one did not have before. It acquaints us with powers of the soul with which logic did not acquaint us” (SW IV, 26).37 Regrettably, and this was Herder’s other major concern in the first section of the fourth Waldchen, Baumgarten himself seemed to have provided the opportunity for such confusion to arise. In the first para¬ graph of the Aesthetica, Baumgarten had listed several apparendy syn¬ onymous designations of the new science he proposed, explaining: “AESTHETICS (as a theory of the liberal arts, as an epistemology of 36. Georg Friedrich Meier,Anfawjsfjrunde oiler schonen Wissenschafteti, vol. I, Second Edition (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1754), pp. 28-29. 37. Herder was not the only one to feel anxious about the future of Baumgarten’s philosophy. See the review of Meier’s book by Mendelssohn, “G. F. Meier: Auszug aus den Anfangsgriinden aller schonen Kiinste und Wissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften: Jubildumsaus^abe, vol. IV (Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 1977), p. 197.

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lower cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking, as the art of thinking that is analogous to reason) is the science of sensate cognition.”38 With the exception of the term “art of beautiful thinking,” each of these appositives could be considered as more narrowly defining only the philosophical discipline itself. But by stating that aesthetics also encom¬ passed the “art of beautiful thinking,” Baumgarten appeared to be implying that aesthetics could be employed to instruct actual artistic activity, which would then adversely affect its status as a rigorously abstract and theoretical enterprise.39 But this slight confusion appeared in reality to be based merely in terminology, for it seemed that Baum¬ garten simply wished to define aesthetics in strict analogy to logic, which Wolff had also called an “art of thinking.”40 And this was in itself of course by no means an unusual expression. We need only to remind ourselves, for example, that one of the most influential philosophical works of the previous century, the Port-Royal logic by Antoine Arnauld of 1662, was titled La logique ou Part depenser, and this way of referring to logic remained common throughout the eighteenth century.41 Nevertheless, in view of the evident weakening of the boundaries between aesthetics, pedagogy, and practical poetics, which Meier’s book again introduced, and for which Baumgarten himself may have been originally responsible. Herder thought it was still necessary to redefine these boundaries in the strictest possible manner: He calls it aesthetics, the science concerning the feeling of the beautiful, or, in Wolffian language, concerning sensate cognition; this is still appropriate! Accord¬ ing to this definition, it is a philosophy that has to have all of the attributes of science and investigation, analysis [Zergliederung], proofs and method. But he also calls his aesthetics the art of thinking beautifully; and that is an entirely different matter; it is an 1 know not what’ of skill and practical instruction in how to apply the powers of genius and taste, or, in the language of art, in how to employ the faculty of sensate cognition beautifully, and that is what aes¬ thetics, in its primary sense, is not (SW IV, 22). 38. Baumgarten, Theoretische Asthetik, § 1. 39. In Die Entdeckung der Phanomene: Dokumente einer Philosophic der sinnlichen Erkenntnis (Basel: Schwabe, 1981), Hans Rudolf Schweizer and Armin Wildermuth argue that this was indeed one of the possible implications of Baumgarten’s work. 40. For an examination of the various meanings and implications of this term, see Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis, p. 83. 41. In the Preliminary Discourse, p. 40, d’Alembert also mentioned that “it is still disputed in the schools, for example, whether Logic is an art or a science.”

i8o

Herder’s Aesthetics

Now this was a fine distinction, and Herder was probably the first to perceive it so acutely. In the first instance he mentioned, aesthetics exhibits all the traits of scientific or philosophical investigation. It represents a philosophy that possesses the qualities of analysis, proofs, and “method” in the strictest sense. But in the second case it becomes a confused catalog of ways in which the powers of creation, in addition to the delicacy of what we would now call “artistic appreciation,” could be employed and enhanced. In the hands of eager dilettantes, this latter brand of “aesthetics,” and philosophy in general, would be reduced, as Herder had accused Riedel of doing, to “a sensitive, obfuscating gas¬ bag” (SW IV, 12). Yet it is certainly not the case that Herder was here attacking Baumgarten himself and that he therefore misunderstood Baumgarten’s actual intentions, as some commentators have claimed on the basis of this passage.42 Herder’s admiration for Baumgarten was actually very great indeed, and he had written of him only a few pages before these lines: “I know of no other philosopher who possesses the gift of defining in briefer, more concise perfection other than Aristode and him” (SW IV, 16). Herder was anxious, rather, to prevent Baum¬ garten’s recondite ideas from being misconstrued or muddled in their reception—a legitimate fear, as the examples of Meier and Riedel had already sufficiently demonstrated. The problem that Herder was actually addressing here went in fact far beyond his quibbles with either Meier or Riedel and had a history as ancient as the practice of theorizing about poetry itself. Ever since the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics during the Renaissance, the practice of commenting on poetic texts had been intimately associated with the establishment of the rules that writers ought to observe when they composed their own verse. As we saw in the first Kritisches Waldchen, even Lessing himself was still essentially engaged in the gesture of prescriptive poetics. He aimed not only toward an understanding of the rules by which poetry is composed but also toward a codification of these rules as guidelines in the composition or production of poetry. Herder, on the other hand, thought that, like a logician or a natural scientist, the philosopher of aesthetics may only describe and explain what actually and demonstrably already exists. The formation of rules that poets “ought” to obey thus had, in Herder’s view, no place in the 42. See Baeumlcr, Das Irrationalitatsproblem, p. 213, and Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis^ p. 84.

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science of aesthetics. Newton, the great model for eighteenth-century notions of scientific and philosophical procedure, had not dictated that nature will henceforth operate according to an arbitrary principle he had prescribed. Instead, he was seen to have simply perceived the natural law of gravity that until then had merely lain undiscovered but that had nevertheless always ordered the workings ol the universe. Herder similarly thought that it was above all necessary to separate what he saw as two distinct activities. One was the philosophical enterprise of inquiring objectively into the nature of existing works of art and the conditions under which we understand them. The other, and far dif¬ ferent activity involved the practically oriented work of criticism, in which one assumed the more pedagogical role of acting as an arbiter of poetic propriety.43 At the beginning of the second part of the Frag¬ mented Herder largely concurred in this latter traditional definition ol criticism when he delineated his notion of the function that the literary critic performed: “Now the true critic appears—in what sense? Toward the reader, toward the writer and toward the entire realm of literature in general. To the reader he is first a servant, then a confidant, then a physician. To the writer, first a servant, then friend, then judge; and to the whole of literature either as foundry worker, or as hod carrier or as the architect himself. ... In short, to educate [hilden] people of correct feeling, of insight and taste—that is your great purpose” (SW I, 247).44 But, as Herder made clear in the fourth Wctldchen, whereas this “educa¬ tion” of the taste of the general reading public and of creative writers themselves is the appropriate—in fact essential—purpose of literary criticism, aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, must address itself to issues (and an audience) that are completely removed from this practical sphere: “Our aesthetics is a science, and wants in no way to educate people of genius and taste; all it wants to do is educate philosophers, if 43. Ronald S. Crane, “English Neoclassical Criticism: An Outline Sketch,” in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modem (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952); the author points out that this tendency appeared generally around the middle of the century. Cited in Hippie, Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque, p. 307. 44. The older research on Herder’s concept of criticism, especially in regard to Herder’s insistence on its separation from aesthetic philosophy, is not very helpful. Max Wedel, Herder als Kritiker (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1928), p. 44, for example, asserts that Herder was influenced by Hamann to write “experiential criticism.” See also the more recent study by Anton Kathan, Herders Literaturkritik: Untersuchunjqen zuMethodik und Struktur am Beispiel der friihen Werke (Goppingen: Alfred Kiimmerle, 1969), particularly pp. 81-97, in which the passage quoted in the text is discussed.

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aesthetics is taken in the correct sense and is not, as Meier has it, a science that—God help us!—writes beautifully and confusedly what others have said distinctly: for, of course, in this sense it loses its purpose, dignity and accuracy” (SW IV, 25-26). As a form of philoso¬ phy, aesthetics must not and cannot be used as a means to better the taste of one’s fellow countrymen, nor can it teach anyone to think artistically or “beautifully.” If aesthetics is to have any pedagogical function at all, then it would consist, according to Herder, merely in the education of philosophers. The true goal of aesthetics, then, if it is truly to be an objective science, can lie solely in the philosophical understand¬ ing and explanation of the given and observable nature of artistic phenomena. Assembling all the terms of his argument up to this point, Herder then applied his discussion of taste to the determination of the proper sphere of aesthetic inquiry as a whole. In the spirit of the logical precision exemplified by Baumgarten himself, Herder took great pains to distinguish sharply between artistic creativity, or what he called the “art of tastef and the intellectual activity of analyzing the products of this creativity, or “philosophy about taste.” And while the latter naturally presupposed the first as the object of inquiry, the attitude of mind necessary for a “philosophy concerning taste” was the very antithesis to the kind of thinking required to produce “tasteful art”: One takes the powers of our soul to feel the beautiful and the products of beauty which they have brought forth as the objects of investigation: Behold a great philosophy, a theory of the feeling of the senses, a logic of imagination and poetry, an explorer of wit and discernment, of sensate judgment and of memory; it is the means to analyze the beautiful wherever it is found, in arts and letters, in bodies and souls: this is aesthetics, and, if you will, philosophy about taste. The art of taste has as its purpose beauty itself, and is poorly matched with aesthetics if it wants to think beautifully, judge beautifully, make conclusions beautifully, instead of making correct conclusions, sharp distinctions and think¬ ing truthfully .... Mixing both concepts together thus naturally results in a monstrosity of aesthetics, and if Meier then adds to his explanation that it also “improves” sensate cognition, then we know even less (SW IV, 22—23).

Herder was very much aware that his definition of the purpose of aesthetic philosophy exacted the sacrifice of the immediate, pleasurable experience of beauty. But it was a sacrifice he willingly accepted in the interests of obtaining the clear concepts of knowledge and truth. Her-

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

18 3

der of course recognized, in Wolffian terms, the affective importance of the “confused” or “indistinct” cognitive moment in the aesthetic experi¬ ence. But it was precisely this habit of mind which the philosopher had to unravel and effectively to “destroy” in order to resolve it into the distinct concepts of rigorous discourse: [Aesthetics] decompounds, as far as it is able to do so, precisely that which was habitual, what was beautiful nature, and, as it were, destroys it in the same moment. It is precisely that beautiful confusion—which, if it is not the Mother, is at least the inseparable companion of all pleasure—it is this which aesthetics decompounds and seeks to illuminate with distinct ideas: truth takes the place of beauty. It is no longer the body, the thought, the work of art that is supposed to have an effect in confused intuition; decompounded into the elements of beauty, it should now appear as truth: that which had previously effected me confusedly should now be said distinctly—(SW IV, 23-24).45

Yet it is implied, though not directly stated, that there is a deeper satisfaction that compensates for this loss of the pleasurable moment of immediate experience, a satisfaction that arises from the acquisition of true knowledge. Hume, while speaking specifically about metaphysics, had also recognized and endorsed this type of intellectual pleasure when he wrote that “obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needs be delightful and rejoicing.”46 In the first chapter of this book, and subsequently throughout, I have stressed the crucial role that the method of analysis plays in Herder’s thought and in that of Locke, Condillac, d’Alembert, Maupertuis, and the precritical Kant. These thinkers believed, as we have seen, that if one wished to secure the kind of accurate and reliable knowledge that they equated with the results of the natural sciences, it could only be acquired through a resolute adherence to the analytic method. Herder was con45. Herder may have been unconsciously reproducing Lessing’s words from the Laocoon, p. 14: “Unquestionably, laws must not exercise any constraint on the sciences,

for the ultimate goal of knowledge is truth. Truth is a necessity to the soul, and it is tyranny to impose the slightest constraint on the satisfaction of this essential need. But the ultimate goal of the arts is pleasure, and this pleasure is not indispensable.” 46. Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, p. 11. This was quite clearly a topos of the time, as one also finds in Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, p. 156, the following similar sentiment: “The spirit of reasonably thinking beings has an innate inclination and need to raise itself above matter into the intellectual sphere ol concepts, and its true satisfaction is the production of new and refined ideas.”

18 4

Herder’s A esthetics

vinced that, if aesthetics was to achieve the independence and dignity of a truly scientific discipline, then it also had to be brought into conform¬ ity with this generally recognized procedure. Herder therefore could not disagree more strongly with Riedel’s claim that our judgment of a work of art ended in the immediate experience of it and that our unreflected subjective impression of pleasure or displeasure was the sole standard of its worth. Although the experience of such subjective sensa¬ tions may mark the final goal of a connoisseur’s perception of beauty, it certainly could not be that of the philosopher. Herder reiterated that these impressions themselves were merely the precondition, the source of the psychological data or ideas that one must reveal and dissect in relation to the perceiving subject as well as with regard to the individual art work in question. Finally, after the evaluation of all available data is complete, the philosopher may be able to subsume these individual elements under ever more general concepts. Ultimately, as in the exam¬ ple of Herder’s ideal conception of the aesthetician who would be able to transcend individual taste, one might then be able to demonstrate how the universal laws of all artistic expression are reflected in each particular work. In this connection Herder gave his most detailed definition of analysis to date: It [i.e., aesthetics] chooses the method of philosophy, strict analysis: it exam¬ ines as many products of beauty of every sort as it can, attends to the whole, undivided impression; it returns from the depth of this impression to the object; it observes its parts both individually and working in harmony; it does not compromise on a merely beautiful half-understood idea; it brings the sum of the ideas rendered distinct under general concepts, and then these under their own; finally, perhaps, there is a general concept in which the universe of all beauty in both arts and letters is reflected (SW IV, 21).47

Given the tendency to neglect this aspect of Herder’s endeavors, it is probably worth emphasizing that he quite expressly conceived of him¬ self as pursuing verifiable truth as it was manifested in the phenomena of the aesthetic experience and that he was doing so by following the 47-

I his passage has frequently been cited as evidence of Herder’s advocacy of induction. It is usually accompanied with some reference to Bacon, at most to Locke, but it has not been linked with the contemporary conception of the method of analysis. Beginning with Haym, Herder’s methodological statement was gradually seen as the point at which Herder abandoned and implicitlv criticized “the Enlightenment” as a whole; see Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, pp. 253—54.

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rigors of rational investigation. One still finds, despite all obvious evidence to the contrary, those who believe that Herder “proceeds intuitively, he reacts immediately to die respective individual problem vvidiout expresslv formulating a method, a principle ol judgment. 4:> Paradoxically, while diis evaluation of Herder's approach to art coin¬ cides vvidi the accepted traditional image of Herder, it more nearly characterizes die attitude ol Herder's adversary, Riedel. For it w as Riedel, not Herder, who claimed diat “in matters relating to beauty, sensation is not onlv die judge, but it is also itsell diat w hich causes something to please us and hence to be beautiful."49 Herder, in con¬ trast, passionatelv and repeatedly argued lor die high dieoretical se¬ riousness of aesdietics and lor die necessity’ ol abiding by the rational strictures and methodological exactitude diat guided philosophical inquiry into everv odier realm ol experience and thought. It would be difficult to exaggerate the newness and radicalitv ol die demand Herder made here. He explicitly called out, for die first tune so clearly in die history of die philosophy of art, for a theory diat is striedy and solely goyerned by die method of rational analysis and diat has die knowledge acquired through such an investigation as its only significant goal and reward. Besides framing it in analogy to die ideal ot Newm> nian natural philosophy. Herder paved die way for such a dieory—as we have discovered—bv striedv dissociating it from poetics. Through this insistence, he effectively abolished die venerable tradition diat linked die investigation of die law's inherent in art vvidi die formation of guidelines diat were to be followed in its actual production. It is true diat Bamngaiten had laid die cornerstones for building a philosophy of aesdietics; however, he had not mixed his mortar well. As his successors modified its structure, aesdietics came to be presented not just as a theory about die beautiful but in addition as an aid in die realization of beauty in practice. Herder readily allowed diat, for die artist and die

+8. Nivelle, Kunst- undDichtnngsthcorien, pp. 15"—38. Nivelle seems to be echoing the opinion of the study bv Paul Chrobok, Die cisthetischen Grundgedanken von Herders “Plastik” in ihrem Entirlcklungsgangc (Naumburg a. S.: H. Sieling, 1906'), p. 15. For a corrective to this view, see Mann, “Wandlungen des Herder-Bildes," p. +5, and die early and very useful book bv Malcolm Howard Dewey, “Herder's Reladon to die Aesthetic Theory of His Time: A Contribution Based on the Fourth Critical Weil dehen" (Univer¬ sity of Chicago: Dissertation, 1920), p. +9. Riedel, “Dntter Brief an den Herm Moses Mendelssohn," in Ueber das Publicum. pp. 36-37.

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passive percipient, one’s “knowledge” of beauty was identical to one’s experience of it. The philosopher, on the other hand, had to resolve this experience into the elemental conditions of its being in order to achieve an understanding of the true and original nature of that experience in each individual case. Through his resolute insistence on the absolute separation of these two spheres, Herder sought to overcome the confu¬ sion ol what he considered to be totallv irreconcilable activities. In so doing, he sought to free aesdietic philosophy from both practical crit¬ icism and unabashed, subjectivistic emotional response.50 Only in this way, Herder thought, could aesthetics ever aspire to produce the sort of knowledge diat constituted the highest aim of the other sciences. There is eloquent corroboration of Herder’s intention to carrv out this rigorously analytic approach to art, and to works of literature in particular, in Goethe’s autobiographv, Dichtung und Wahrheit (.Poetry and Truth). Herder’s relationship to Goethe, at least during the first years following their encounter in Strasburg in 1770, is typically por¬ trayed as one in which Herder awakened the younger poet from his tired imitations of anacreontic verse by arousing his interest in the expression of “original,” living passions in “folk poetrv.”51 Yet in a rarely quoted passage from Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe vividly described the sobering effect that Herder’s distanced and reflective treatment of literature had on him in the days when he, Goethe, was still a young and naive enthusiast. With a slightly uncharitable intent, Goe¬ the emphasized the didactic manner in which Herder chided him and his friends for responding too emotionally—that is, too unphilosophically—to works ofliterature: He criticized the excessive emotion that surged up more strongly in me with every step. I had the feelings of a human being, a young human being; to me it all seemed living, true, present. He, of course, who only considered form and substance, plainly saw that I was being overwhelmed bv the subject matter, and this he would not permit .... He was particularly irritated by our lack of perspicacity, the fact that we did not foresee the contrasts often used bv the author, but let ourselves be moved and enraptured without noticing how 50. See Baeumler, Das Irrationalitcitsproblem, pp. 92-93, in which he acknowledges this fact and rightly observes that Herder was the first to see that aesthetics was not the work of the person who feels, hut of the philosopher who reflects on feeling. 51. See Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. I, p. 391, and Clark, Herder, pp. 122-24, for an account of the significance of the meeting between 1 lerder and Goethe.

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

18 7

frequently the same technique was being repeated .... It can be seen from this that he viewed the work only as an artistic product and required us to do the same, although we were still at the stage of development where works of art may surely be permitted to affect one as though they were the products of nature.52

Herder certainly did not completely disallow the sort of aesthetic re¬ sponse that Goethe here somewhat petulantly wished to preserve for a sensitive young reader. Indeed, as we have seen, Herder knew it to be absolutely necessary. But Herder also knew that during the later, rumi¬ native process of determining how and why an art work gives rise to such a response, the philosopher had to leave behind the overpowering immediacy of a poem or a painting in order to divulge the inner secrets of its effect. The two activities did not necessarily exclude one another entirely, but they existed on different cognitive planes and pursued a different goal. As Herder had previously declared with the trenchant neatness of a well-turned phrase, in aesthetic philosophy worthy of the name, “truth takes the place of beauty” (SW IV, 23). The second section of the fourth Kritisches Wiildchen represents Her¬ der’s attempt to approach this truth by applying the principles he had theoretically defined in the first part of the treatise. And it was here that Herder introduced one of the more interesting experiments in aesthetic philosophy undertaken during the Enlightenment. After he had deter¬ mined the fundamental psychological premises that should motivate an investigation of the aesthetic experience, Herder then advanced, using these premises as his guide, to an analysis of the means by which we perceive particular art works themselves. Herder was dissatisfied with the sort of psychological theories that were characteristic of the works produced by the German theorists. For here the emphasis rested almost exclusively on the elaboration of cognitive processes that had been directly analogized to the operations of abstract logic. The result had been a broad codex of thought that described the internal, subjective response to beauty in the most general terms. But it had left the question largely unanswered whether “the beautiful” might possess 52. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, trans. Robert R. Heitner, intro, and notes Thomas P. Saine, in Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. IV (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 317—18. Interestingly enough, the work to which Goethe is referring here is Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield.

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essentially different traits in the individual forms of art and, hence, whether each art might not function and affect us according to laws that were specific to itself It was this Gordian knot, the philosophical determination of the distinct ways in which we perceive each art form, which Herder set out to unravel in the middle section of the fourth Waldchen. In the first Waldchen, we remember, Herder had sought to develop a general ontology of the arts. He had isolated and described the various basic modes of existence exhibited by the major art forms and the means bv which these forms were organized. He had insisted there that each of the arts achieved its effect through a medium peculiar to it alone. He demonstrated how the three fundamental concepts of time, space, and force, as they were manifested through the qualities of successivity, contiguity, and motivity, were responsible for the respective order of the signs in music, painting, sculpture, and poetry (the latter representing a focal point at which all of these categories were simultaneously ef¬ fective). Now, in the effort to preserve a continuity of purpose and design, Herder wished to demonstrate in the fourth Waldchen that, prior to their svnthetic integration into the larger constructs of knowl¬ edge, the ideas that each order of signs delivered to our mind were originally perceived onlv bv specific senses. Herder thus made the appeal for a complete analysis of each particular faculty of sense and of the ideas they were individually responsible for delivering to our minds before these ideas were abstracted and combined to form the complex structure characteristic of the concept of beauty. Herder felt that this avenue of inquiry furnished a greater objectivity with regard to the materials of investigation—that is, with respect to the arts themselves—, and that it also provided the means to define more precisely the relationship be¬ tween each art form and our apprehension of it: “As much as aesthetics as been considered from the perspective of psychology, and hence subjectively, it has still been little considered from the perspective of objects and of their beautiful sensateness; and yet without this, a fruitful 'theory of the beautiful in all arts’ can never appear. Every art has its original concepts, and every concept has, as it were, its Fatherland in one sense” (SW IV, 127). The notion that each of the senses is intrinsically able to convey only certain ideas to the mind—that, as Herder put it, “every concept has its Fatherland in one sense”—and that it was the reflective power of reason

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that compounded these individual sense impressions into ever more complex concepts, was of course not original with Herder. It was, in fact, a theme that had already been prevalent in various philosophical writings of antiquity, and it became one of the distinctive tenets of English and French Enlightenment epistemology.53 In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke had developed more fully the notion familiar from Aristotle that there are special objects peculiar to the separate senses, claiming that “Our Senses, conversant about particular sensible Objects, do convey into the Mind, several distinct Perceptions of things, according to the various ways, wherein those Objects do affect them.”54 Philosophers who received and adjusted the legacy of Locke—first among them being Berkeley, Condillac, and Hume—also commonly held that every sense possesses its proper objects, or ideas, and that each sense thus originally allowed us to perceive wholly unique aspects of reality.55 Where they disagreed was in the determination of what the proper ideas of each sense were. Berkeley, for instance, devoted his Essay toward a New Theory of Vision of 1709 to proving the assertion “that the objects of sight and touch are two distinct things,” and to fixing wherein these wholly hetero¬ geneous “objects” consisted.56 Several years before Herder wrote the Kritische Walder, a number of thinkers had already begun to explore the broader implications of this division of the senses according to the objects they were ostensibly able to register. Burke was, to my knowledge, the first to incorporate this perspective in an examination of the specific idea of the beautiful in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757. He based his investigation on the already familiar conclusion that “there is a chain in all our sensations; they are all but different sorts of feeling, calculated to be affected by various sorts of 53. See, however, the very interesting essay by Mendelssohn, Die Bildsaule: Ein psychologisch-allegorisches Traumgesicht, in Schriften zur Philosophic, vol. II, pp. 231-46, in which Mendelssohn sets forth his critique of what he calls “mechanistic philosophizing” by arguing that, although it may be able to analyze the objects perceived by the senses of sight and touch, the objects of the other senses will resist this sort of investigation because they cannot be explained by reference to matter or motion. 54. Locke, Essay, II, i, § 3. 55. For a discussion of this issue, see Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century 1929), p. 182, and Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception, p. 104 and pp. no—12. 56. George Berkeley, Philosophical Works including the Works on Vision, intro, and notes M. R. Ayers (Totowa, NJ.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), § 46.

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objects.” Accordingly, Burke described what he called “Beauty in Col¬ our,” “the beautiful in Feeling,” “the beautiful in Sounds,” and even the beauty found in “Taste and Smell.”57 But Burke did not, as these section headings indicate, align the different ideas apprehended by each indi¬ vidual sense with particular art forms. In fact, Burke was not primarily interested in the arts per se, but rather in the beautiful and the sublime as they existed and were experienced in the manifold objects of nature.58 Yet the idea alone of locating the beautiful in the various objects of sense was a new and exciting departure in Burke’s time and it led subsequent writers to inquire into the suggestion more folly. Herder’s immediate predecessor in this regard was probably Johann Georg Sulzer, whom, as we know, Herder much admired and who expounded at some length on the qualities and function of the separate senses in his Untersuchung fiber den Ur sprung der angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen (Investigation of the Origin of Pleasant and Unpleasant Sensations) of 1762.59 Sulzer’s theory of sensate percep¬ tion, as it appears in the Untersuchung, relied essentially on the assump¬ tion that “the essence of the senses in general, as it is commonly assumed, exists in the nerves. The senses are essentially different in no other way than in the sensitivity and location of the nerves.”60 By thus equating sense impressions with the vibrations that were channeled to the mind through the various nerves of the body (an idea Sulzer himself obligingly attributed to Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz), Sulzer was able to account for the dissimilar impressions received by each class of “nerve,” or organ of sense: “The vibrations of air which cause sound strike the eye as much as they do the ear; but the eye does not give the soul anything to perceive from them: and if one holds the tongue against light, not the least sensation will arise from this, although its 57. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 120, 116-18. 58. Later in the fourth Kritisches Waldchcn, Herder also noted this fact with regret,

expressing his disappointment that Burke did not venture further into the less secure area of the “prepared imitations of the arts” (SW IV, 104) and that Burke limited his investigation on the whole to nature alone. 59. As we read toward the end of the second section of the fourth Kritisches Waldchcn, Herder was full of strong and perhaps ideologically motivated praise for Sulzer: “Sulzer’s Theory of Sensations is, excluding some ornamentation and the too facile pace of the academic lecture, a small monument in Germany that stands among so much aesthetic rubble and worthy of the hand of a Leibniz and Wolff” (SW IV, 144)60. Sulzer, “Untersuchung fiber den Ursprung der angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen,” in Vcrmischte philosophische Schriftcn, p. 54-

of A esrljcric Peru prion

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must inevitably be touched bv it. Everv tvpe of nerve thus requires a particular impression, and it requires a kind of matter that is suited to producing this impression."01 Sulzer, like such contemporary philosophers as David Hartley and Albrecht von Haller, therefore gav e a physiological explanation of the causal relation between sensate stim¬ ulation and die ideas this creates in our minds.6- He thought that each sense organ, or type of nerve, was responsible for perceiving only certain kinds of “matter" of the phenomenal world and that tiiis matter imparted a distinct kind of vibration to our nervous system. It followed, he reasoned, that each group of nerves was so constituted as to corre¬ spond to die nature of the material to which they alone were sensitive. Sulzer therefore went on to suggest die following hierarchical division of die nerves of sense, which included a characteristic valuative element: nerves

The kinds of matter suited for every type of nerve gives me the basis for a categorization of die senses. I call a nerve fine or coanr according to die matter suited to it, although I do not wish to maintain that the nerv e in and of itself is of this quality. The nerves of sight are, bv this understanding, the finest because light, die matter diat affects them, is the finest of all those that noticeably touch our instruments of sense. The nerves of hearing occupy the second station, for, after light, air is die finest kind of matter; dien smell and taste follow, and finally die sense of touch, w hose nerv es, taken in this meaning, are the coarsest.03

The hierarchical value Sulzer assigned to each of the senses or nerves— diat die sense of sight was die “finest" and the nerves of touch were the “coarsest"—was important not only because it induced him to exclude die “baser" sensations from serious study, but also because Herder would later invert die same valuative scale in his own aesthetic writings. As the tide of the Untcniuhiuiii clearly states, however, since Sulzer was mainly concerned widi showing how “pleasant" or “unpleasant" sensa¬ tions were brought about in general, he, like Burke, also did not expiicitiv state diat specific arts were basically governed bv certain proper¬ ties or “kinds of matter" diat originally or fundamentally appealed to particular senses and to no others. Although this was certainly an Cl

61. Ibid., p. 55. 02. For a discussion of the influence exerted on Herder bv the phvsiologic.il theories ot perception bv these and other philosopher's, see Xisbet. Herder akA tec IT:. Two \ .ir.A History of Science. pp. 201—02. 0;. Sulzer. “Untersuchung liber den Ursprung der angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen," in Vcmustvre reiiosoreiscee Sceritiets. pp. 55—50.

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inherent implication of these ideas, it was a decisive step that Herder had to take in order to fulfill their inner potential by applying them directly to the philosophy of art. Toward the end of the Journal meinerReise, which was written in 1769, the same year as the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen, Herder mentioned his unpublished work on aesthetics in an uncharacteristically subdued, even self-effacing fashion. He noted that while the ideas it contained were not necessarily of his own invention, he could at least claim the modest distinction of being the first to apply them fruitfully to the study of art: “I have . . . worked on something concerning aesthetics and believe to be genuinely new; but in how little? In the principle that sight sees only surfaces, feeling touches only forms: but the principle is already familiar from optics and geometry, and it would be a misfortune if it not already been proven. Thus merely the application was mine: painting is only for the eye, sculpture for touch” (SW IV, 443). Herder clothed his assertion in such restrained terms that we almost overlook that, in the space of a single clause, he had proposed a solution to one of the persistent problems of Lessing’s Laocoon.64 In Lessing’s reliance on the traditional bipartite division of the arts into “beautiful letters and arts” as referring, respectively, to poetry and the pictorial arts, he had not, as we know, obviously distinguished between painting and sculpture. Rather, in order to retain this dualism as a theoretical support for his semiotic scheme, he had grouped them both under the general classification of “painting.” He justified this division by claiming that both sculptors and painters manipulated natural signs, whereas writers employed the arbitrary signs that were proper to “poetry.” In the first Kritisches Wdldchen, Herder seems to have tacitly accepted, or not given special consideration to, this equation of sculpture with painting, since he was at that point not yet concerned with the cognitive processes by which we apprehend the various arts. But in die fourth Kritisches Wdldchen, in which the emphasis lies decidedly on the analysis of die psychological conditions enabling the perception of artistic signs, or the ideas they impart to us, Herder felt that a separation of painting and sculpture according to the different ways we perceive them was crucial. As he was to write in the treatise Vom Erkennen und Empfinden dcr

64. See Lee, Ut Pictura Pocsis, p. 21, in which he claims that Lessing “unconsciously confused painting with sculpture.”

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

19 3

menschlichen Seele (On Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul) of 1778: “In my humble opinion no psychology is possible that is not at every step precise physiology” (SW VIII, 180). And it was in his application of this principle that Herder rightly believed, as earlier indicated, that he had offered something that was “genuinely new ” Herder accordingly began his investigation of the senses in relation to their proper and original objects by making this imperative distinction: Objects of sight are the clearest, the most distinct: they are in front of us; they are external and next to one another: they remain objects as long as we like. They are thus the easiest and clearest, or however you want to describe it, to recognize. Since its parts are more susceptible to being decompounded than any other impression, their unity and diversity, which causes pleasure, is the most visible and apparent, and hence arises the concept of “beautiful, beauty!” \Schon, Schdnheit\. This is according to its derivation: for seeing, appearance, the beautiful, beauty [schauen, Schein, Schon, Schonheit] are the related offspring of language . . . According to this first meaning, the concept of beauty is a “phenomenon” ... It is actually a concept of surfaces, since we properly recognize bodies, pleasing forms and solid shapes only with the aid of touch, and with sight we can only see planes, figures and colors; but we cannot immediately see physical spaces, angles and forms (SW IV, 44).

Through the sense of sight alone, Herder claimed, we are able to perceive only the one-dimensional qualities of planes and surfaces; that is, sight by itself gives us colors, outlines, and varieties of light and shadow. The tactile sense is responsible, in contrast, for enabling us to perceive objects in three-dimensional space. Of course Herder did not mean by this that a fully developed or mature mind cannot perceive such spatial qualities as extension, distance, or three-dimensional form by means of vision alone. Rather, he wished to point out that this latter ability was a late result, the final product of a cognitive process that begins at birth. During this process, we must learn to coordinate and to combine the various senses and the individual ideas they communicate to the brain. Originally, in its fundamental aspect, the sense of sight only affords us with ideas of flat surface qualities, whereas the sense of touch imparts to us ideas of solidity and space. Through their constant interac¬ tion, and through the habitually performed synthesizing activity of the mind, we thus gradually acquire the facility of “seeing” what we orig¬ inally could only have felt. In a way that links this second section of the Waldchen with the one preceding, Herder implied, then, that the first

194

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task of the philosopher is to expose the elementary properties of the several ideas appropriate to each of the senses. For only in this way can we ascertain the relations between the individual sense data that have been buried by layers of unconscious habit. Yet there was an additional, related difficulty to which Herder alluded in the passage just cited. Beyond the obscurity in which our cognitive processes are enveloped by the elisions of habit, he felt that aesthetic inquiry was further hampered by basic linguistic confusions, by an inattentiveness to the very words that philosophers employed to charac¬ terize their abstractions.65 Words, or the complex concepts they signify, have their own internal "history.” The origins underlying this history are to be found, he insisted, in the organization of sensory data by the mind. To grasp the significance of a particular concept, we must there¬ fore lay bare not only the cognitive but also the linguistic conditions of its arising. As an example of this necessity, Herder asserted that the German word for beauty was etymologically, and hence intrinsically, related to the words "to see” and "appearance” (schauen and Schein). The concept of “Schonheit” thus referred, in its original meaning, to a “phenomenon” (from the Greek phainesthai, "to appear”) in the sense of an appearance or observed feature of something as distinguished from its full, tangible reality. Declaring that this association had been forgotten and suppressed, Herder commented critically that beauty, or “Schonheit,” was not understood to apply only to objects that appealed to the visual sense but was used as a general designation of artistic perfection: “In almost all languages, beauty has become die primary expression and the most general concept of all fine arts of delight and pleasure. Beauty is [due to the poverty of language] the primary word of all aesthetics. A theory of vision, an aesthetic optics and phenomenology 65. A few pages later. Herder makes this point explicit and, addressing himself to

burgeoning philosophical adepts, he writes of the dangers of learning mere words in isolation from, or in ignorance of, what they signify: “Apprentices of science! thus you put your souls to sleep: All of its parts become crippled when they grow accustomed to resting on the words and inventions of others. The man who invented the word that you learn so abstractly had an entirely different notion of it from yours: he saw the concept; he wanted to express it: he fought with language; necessity drove him to express what he saw. How different it is with you who know the concept merely by the word and believe to have the former when you grasp the latter and employ it with a partial idea. At that moment you do not have the same inner light as he: you have merely an arbitrary coin that you have adopted by convention and that others adopt from you by convention, instead of knowing it by its inner worth as did he who invented it” (SW IV, 58).

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is thus the main entrance to a future edifice of the philosophy of the beautiful” (SW IV, 45—46).66 Even though this piece of etymological bravura is, of course, only truly applicable to the German language (and is, even then, historically incorrect), Herder’s real point goes much deeper. We have seen how Herder thought that, because of the total interdependence of language and thought, a philosophical analysis could only proceed as far as the inherent resources of language would allow. In the words from the second edition of the Fragmente: “A thing can be analyzed as long as its subordinate concepts are present—and an idea can be explained as long as new combinations of words place it in a brighter light” (SW II, 18). A complete analysis of the concept of beauty in relation to all of the arts would have to begin by distinguishing between those sensate impres¬ sions that are originally acquired through each of the various senses. It would also, or simultaneously, necessitate a greater differentiation and precision in our use of language. The word “beauty” means different things when it is applied to different objects. And it is these differences, Herder argued, that must occupy our attention. The advancement of philosophical knowledge essentially depended, in other words, on the refinement of language itself. The failure of previous philosophers of art to distinguish, even on the linguistic level, between the different impressions we receive through the individual senses becomes strikingly apparent, Herder went on to write, when one attempts to characterize the objects of hearing. And 66. In a footnote to his edition of the fourth Kritisches Waldchen, Suphan informs us that the words I have included in brackets within the quotation were crossed out by Herder in a later draft. I have left them in because they clearly illustrate that Herder did not always use the term “Schonheit” as, for example, Winckelmann, Lessing, Hagedorn, Mengs, or other contemporary German writers did, as an all-encompassing ideal or, for that matter, in an unreservedly positive sense. In another quotation from a later section of the Waldchen, Herder exhibits his interest in and even predicts the inevitability of the future scientific exploration of the phenomena of visual beauty: “There lies a truly great ‘science of the beautiful appearance’ in the womb of the unexplored future, a science that will be just as much substantiated by mathematics and physics as the doctrine of the beauty of ideas is founded on logic and language. I am not randomly predicting its existence because Baumgarten and Boden have written about aesthetic and poetic ‘light’ and ‘shadow’: for anyone who is familiar with the writings of these authors know that they merely treat a borrowed metaphorical concept. I am not speaking of such a concept, but since, in a very literal sense, visible beauty is nothing other than appearance: there is thus a great science of this appearance, an aesthetic phenomenology that is waiting for a second Lambert” (SW IV, 89).

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here Herder made his linguistic critique more incisive. Because of the absence of a well-defined philosophical terminology referring specifi¬ cally to die sensible data received through the ear, we are forced to speak indistinctly about the objects of hearing with the aid of metaphors borrowed from totally unrelated spheres: Our language is poorer in proper expressions for the delight we take in the objects of hearing-. it must take refuge in borrowed, foreign words, such as beautiful or sweet sounds, and we thus speak in metaphors. The causes of this poverty are evident. The effects of that which pleasantly enters our ear, lie, as it were, deeper in our soul, whereas the objects of the eve lie calmly before us. The former are effected, so to speak, in one another, through vibrations that turn into vibrations: they are therefore not as separate from one another, not as distinct (SW IV, 47). '

This problem becomes even more pronounced when one turns to the third major sense: the sense of touch. In explicit opposition to Sulzer’s disqualification of the tactile nerves as “coarse,7' Herder remarked that, on the contrary, “touch” possessed the high distinction of having first lent aesthetics its name. Here too, however, as in the case of “Schonheit,” the term had gradually lost its original meaning (having been again derived from the Greek aisthanesthai, “to perceive through the senses”), and it now merely supplied us with a misconstrued and stale metaphor: “The third sense is the least examined and should perhaps be the first to be investigated: touch. We have disowned it under the name of the unrefined senses: . . . we have excluded it from the beautiful arts and damned it for delivering us nothing but misunderstood metaphors; but, aesthetics, after all, according to its name, is supposed to be pre¬ cisely the philosophy of feeling or touch” (SW IV, 48). Herder was correct in observing that the sense of touch had received less attention than it deserved, especially in contrast with the extensive research that had been devoted to the sense of sight in the hundred years or so preceding his birth. As a corrective to this one-sided emphasis on optical phenomena and on vision in general that was so prevalent during the Enlightenment, Herder suggested the necessity of a philo¬ sophical reevaluation of the contribution performed by the ideas trans¬ mitted by the sense of touch to the mind in the formation of our knowledge of the world. It is therefore essential to keep in mind that throughout the fourth Kritisches Wcildchcn Herder used the term “Ge-

Psychology of A esthetic Perception

19 7

ftihl,” which can mean both feeling and touch, in its purely technical or philosophical meaning. That is, it contains less of the subjectivistic connotations that it would accrue in the intervening years, particularly during the period of romanticism and thereafter. Rather, it designated for the most part the tactile sense as opposed to that of sight, hearing, smell, and taste. This becomes clear when Herder once again specified the nature of the ideas that “touch,” as distinct from the sense of sight, originally conveys to the mind: I thus presuppose as an undeniable experience that it is not sight that gives us concepts of forms and bodies, as one assumes by common opinion. ... I presuppose that sight cannot show us anything but surfaces, colors and images, and that we can receive concepts of everything diat concerns physical space, spheric shapes and solid form in no other way than through touch, and through long, repeated touching. All those born blind and those who have been blind demonstrate diis (SW IV, 49).

Contrary to Sulzer’s opinion, then. Herder believed that touch per¬ formed an important, even vital function. Herder was so certain that we originally gain the concepts of space and diree-dimensional or “solid" form only through tactile experience that he claimed this to be an “undeniable experience.” Yet his reference, in the final sentence, to those “born blind” reveals that this “undeniable experience” was most proba¬ bly gleaned from his reading of Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles of 1749. And Diderot’s work itself stands widiin a complex and rich tradition of eighteenth-century philosophical reflection on the problem of visual and tactile sensation. But this tradition, and Herder’s own position within it, will be explored in greater detail in relation to his essay Plastik. It is enough to realize here that, in making one of die most interesting proposals of the fourdi Kritisches Waldchen, Herder quite obviously conceived of himself as working not in opposition to, but in fundamen¬ tal agreement with, die researches of his contemporaries. Yet, as we saw in the quotation mentioned earlier from the Journal meiner Reise, even though Herder was conscious of and readily acknowledged his reliance on the ideas of others, he was no less aware of the novelty he brought to the application of diese ideas, in particular to the study of artistic beauty. This is the point at which we approach the innovation that Herder could honesdy claim as his own and that forms die conceptual apex of

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the entire essay. After his review of the various senses and their prop¬ erties—Herder methodically excluded the senses of taste and smell: uthere are thus three primary senses” (SW IV, 54)—he reiterated his belief in the necessity of isolating the various uses of the abstract concepts of aesthetic inquiry relative to the objects from which they were first derived as a precondition of serious inquiry: “One thus obviously sees that it is impossible to begin at the end and speak of the most abstract concepts of the imagination, beauty, greatness, sublimity, etc., without first investigating even the slightest impressions from which these so abstract, so all-encompassing ideas first arose” (SW IV, 54). Without mentioning this fact directly, Herder was in effect arguing yet again for the necessity of descending to the sensible and linguistic origins of the concepts that were, so he thought, all too often un¬ critically employed in the philosophy of art. With this caveat in place, Herder then turned to the arts in particular, specifying that there are “three arts of the beautiful” with respect to the senses for which their fundamental qualities are the proper objects: One whose principal object is beauty insofar as space contains it, insofar as it is reflected on surfaces: this is painting, the beautiful art for sight. One whose object is agreeableness, in which the succession of tones affects us, as it were, in simple lines; this is music, the beautiful art for hearing. Finally one which beautifully represents entire bodies, insofar as they consist of forms and dimen¬ sions: this is sculpture, the beautiful art for touch (SW IV, 62).

It is remarkable that the simple elegance of Herder’s division of the arts according to the objective nature of the impressions that their primary constituents deliver to our mind in the act of perception has been met with so little understanding or sympathy in the scholarship devoted to his aesthetic theory. For, given the prepossessions contained within Herder’s general notions of psychological processes, it was a perfectly plausible and internally consistent method of inquiring into the ways we understand individual art forms. But it also supplied Herder with a powerful means to embrace the widest possible range of artistic phe¬ nomena within the smallest number of fundamental principles. By dividing the arts into discrete categories determined by their different availabilities for perception, Herder could account for the varying qual¬ ities of “beauty”—or the successful organization exhibited by their components—in the particular arts. And he could simultaneously pro-

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vide an explanation of die reasons why art works diat were created by cultures and ages different from our own were yet considered “beauti¬ ful” by die people who produced them. Planar or surface elements of lines, color, light, and shadow, and die ways in which we see diem, always determine the fundamental characteristics of painting. How diey are deployed, the combinations in which these elements are cast and die specific uses to which they are put to achieve a particular end, will, conversely, always be determined by the individual artist and historical “climate” that are responsible for a work’s coming into being. Thus, as an example, Herder claimed diat while perspective may be an invention of Brunelleschi and of die early Renaissance generally, it is also merely a transposition and manipulation of die inherent laws diat govern visual and tactile perception in order to create the illusion of space on a flat surface. The same analvsis could be made, by analogy, with reference to sculpture and painting. The advantage of Herder’s approach, and die promise it held out for infinitely extended investigation, is diat he had isolated only a few distinct laws diat, aldiough universal in their validitv, could be easily applied to a virtually endless number of phenomena. And these laws not only allowed for but actually revealed die motivating; conditions of dieir appearance, of their distinct individuality. To be sure, Herder did not now engage in the soil: of detailed analyses of painting, music, and sculpture that his insights would have allowed. While he ventured to make several penetrating observations about the basic constituents of, among other diings, music and its historical transformation, these remained on die level of suggestions needful of further development.6” The Wdldchen represented, after all, only an oudine of the principles that must inform a strictlv philosophical pro¬ gram of inquiry. But we notice the conspicuous absence of poetrv in Herder’s list of the arts. Not until a full one hundred pages after die initial division of die “beautiful arts’" into diree classes did he even broach the subject of poetry as an art. This absence of any dieoretical discussion of poetry at the very heart of Herder’s treatise has caused some commentators to conclude that, owning to die lack of an obvious 67. The best essay on Herder’s philosophy of music is by Walter Wiora, “Herders Ideen zur Geschichte der Musik,” in bn GeisteHerders, ed. Erich Kevser (Kitzingen a/M: Holzner, 1953), pp- 73—128. See also die discussion of Herder in John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language-. Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 159—63.

200

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particular sense to which the elements of poetry could be said to appeal, it simply did not fit into his scheme and he therefore somewhat disin¬ genuously left it out.68 And yet Herder did have very interesting things to say about poetry, and his comments, though admittedly brief and somewhat cryptic, are substantially in accord with the rest of his theory. In the first Kritisches Waldchen Herder had shown that poetry was essentially different from the other arts because its signs did not directly correspond to the things they signified. Instead, through the specific agency of “force,” the arbi¬ trary signs of poetry communicated a meaning, or “Sinn,” to the imagi¬ nation that was not restricted by the material facticity of its representa¬ tional means. He had also maintained that, precisely because of the heightened semiotic freedom inherent in arbitrary signs, the poet could exploit the properties of all those objects that were the sole domain of the other arts. Although Herder did not again explicitly refer to this classi¬ fication of signs in the fourth Waldchen, its attendant assumptions were still operative when he finally wrote that “the sensations of the beautiful flow into the imagination from all of the senses, and thus from all of the beautiful arts into poetry. Just as the imagination knows nothing with¬ out the senses, so too does poetry know nothing without the beautiful arts: it has most of its basic ideas of the beautiful from them, and it is an ocean teeming with shapes and images and sounds and motions of agree¬ ableness” (SW IV, 163). Because of the flexibility of its representational means, poetry can incorporate and combine the fundamental sensate elements—the basic ideas (Grundideen)—of the other art forms. Fur¬ thermore, since our perception of poetry, unlike that of other arts, is not limited to only one particular sense, it more generally appeals to the intellectual sphere of the imagination. As a result of this universality of its representational means, poetry mines the semiotic resources of sculp¬ ture, painting, and music while its greater expressive possibilities tran¬ scend the comparatively narrow limits of their specificity: Poetry is more than silent painting and sculpture; and in fact, it is something entirely different from both: it is discourse, it is music of the soul. The sequence of ideas, images, words, and sounds is the essence of its expression; in this it is similar to music .... In the end, however, it should make those lively motions and sensations sensate which all of these dead arts merely expressed lifelessly 68. Thus Markwardt, Herders Kritische Wcildc)\ pp. 198-99.

Psychology of Aesthetic Perception

Work (stasis)

Ontological sphere

Energy (kinesis)

Natural signs

Means of representation Effective medium*

Sculpture

Faculties of perception t

Touch

Arbitrary signs

Time

Force

Painting

Music

Poetry

Sight

Hearing

Imagination

Space

Art form

201

^Principles or categories that order the means of representation fTo which the individual orders of representational means originally appeal

and music alone expressed darkly; . . . poetry absorbed whatever is called life and impulse and action and transplanted it intellectually in its essence, in its expression and in the delivery of its expression, high recitation—Divine poetry! intellectual art of the beautiful! Queen of all of the ideas from all of the senses! meeting place of all of the magic in all of the arts! (SW IV, 166).

Even though the terms are at best implicit, we can readily arrange the categories of perception that Herder elaborated in the fourth Kritisches Wiildchen into the existing theoretical framework he had developed in the first Wiildchen. One of the most important differences between the diagram above and the one displayed in relation to the first Wiildchen is the division of sculpture and painting into separate spheres, which was necessitated by the dissimilar ways we apprehend them. And again, the diagram is to be read from the top to the bottom, vertically tracing the increased degrees of analytic resolution. In the simple division of the arts according to the senses to which their elementary qualities originally appeal, Herder had schematically defined die broadest limits of his aesthetic psychology and, to a large degree, he had already fulfilled the inherent theoretical potential of his entire philosophy of aesthetics. Everydiing that would follow from these programmatic distinctions could only represent an elaboration and refinement of their internal implications. While he could describe in ever greater detail the essential characteristics of each art form, show how they functioned in combination with or in opposition to one another, and demonstrate more fully in what ways the unique constitu¬ ents of these arts determined our perception of them, the absolute boundaries of inquiry had already been set. Ail that truly remained to be done was to accumulate data within the confines already prescribed by

202

Herder’s Aesthetics

the theory. At the moment in which Herder’s aesthetic philosophy came into being, it already carried the source of its stagnation within itself But beyond this systematic barrier, there was another, subjective obsta¬ cle that, in any case, probably prevented its full development. Herder was possessed by too much of a resdessly active mind to have spent the measure of his days filling out the empty spaces of a theorv, like a child scribbling in the white areas of a coloring book, and so he impulsively abandoned his own edifice even while it was still in the first stages of its construction. There was an important exception, however, in Herder’s Plastik, which, although it did not appear until 1778, was conceived and largely written during the time he was working on the fourth Kritisches Waldchen. It is to this work, then, and the context in which it emerged, that we must now turn our attention.

6 Herder’s Theory of Sculpture: Vision and Touch and the Outline of a Philosophical “Anaglyphies” Only thus I appreciate marble; I reflect and compare, See with an eye that can feel, feel with a hand that can see. —Goethe

I

n the atrium of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, there is a notice that hangs next to a copy of a statue by Antonio Canova and reads: “You may touch this statue of Aphrodite. Most people wish

to touch the statues. They want to feel the sculptor’s work, the volumes and surfaces, the nuances that escape the eye. You may touch this modern statue.” Herder’s essay on sculpture, the Plastik, represents the first extended attempt to provide a theoretical explanation of this seemingly instinc¬ tual need—both the desire and necessity—to feel, to experience first¬ hand, as it were, the tactile sensations of plastic art. But it is unlikely that the curators of the Getty museum were fully aware of the philosophical issues implied in their acknowledgment of what seems to be an almost universal human urge to touch sculptural forms. For, by giving institu¬ tional sanction to what they saw as a natural impulse, they lent tacit credence to an idea whose implications have by no means always gone uncontested. If the fourth Kritisches Waldchen was denied a place in the history of aesthetics simply because of its long-delayed publication, Herder’s Plas¬ tik has suffered the comparatively worse fate of having been disparaged and finally ignored as a rather queer aberration of the author’s sup¬ posedly untutored imagination. Both the premise and conclusion of Herder’s Plastik—that the sense of touch alone originally provides us with the concept of space and form and that it was therefore the first and

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true judge of sculptural beauty—seemed so contrary even to common sense that critics have hardly discussed the work, somehow hoping that its embarrassing existence would be forgotten.1 In one of the first monographs devoted to Herder’s aesthetics, Gunther Jacoby expressed this critical sentiment in his deferential, but still firm, refusal to consider seriously “that profound, but fantastic notion of using the sense of touch to grasp physical beauty,” and he was happy to confirm that Herder abandoned this “fantastic” idea in the late Kallijjone of 1800.2 In his biography of Herder, Robert T. Clark, Jr., devoted no more than a paragraph to the work with the justification that it “is less interesting as a novel introduction to the aesthetics of plastic art than as an attempt to get at the psychology of touch perception.”3 And Roy Pascal let the indifference to the essay stand as a valid justification for his own deci¬ sion not to treat it at all, saying rather damningly that the Plastik “contains interesting psychological observations, but is of no signifi¬ cance in the history of taste.”4 Yet Herder’s essay has not always been so willfullv disregarded. During his lifetime it was not only read but quite genuinelv, and even enthusiastically, admired. In a letter to his brother on June 4, 1791, Friedrich Schlegel, for example, wrote: “Just this morning I read one of your favorite books, Herder’s Plastik ... I enjoyed transposing mvself into his soul—and, to be sure, it is the most individual of his works, to use one of his expressions.”5 The Swiss historian Johannes von Muller 1. Very few contributions have been devoted solelv to this thesis, the most important being a dissertation by Chrobok, Die dsthetischen Grundp\edanken\ a short monograph bv Bernhard Schweitzer, J. G. Herders “Plastik” und die Entstehung der neueren Kunstwissenschaft: Eine Einfiihrung und Wurdigung (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1948); and a short notice by Karl Lehmke, “Bemerkungen zu Herders ‘Plastik’,” Bildende Kunst, II, Dresden (1963), pp. 100—101. 2. Jacoby, Herders und Kants Astbetik, pp. 79-80. 3. Clark, Herder, p. 224. Yet Clark did not explain what Herder meant bv a “psychology of touch perception,” for, as he savs, “his naive dependence upon physiology as the foundation stone for psychology—particularly of the psychology of art appreciation and art production—shows only too well that he had taken only the first step out of the Scholastic-Rationalistic morass.” 4. Pascal, German Sturm and Dranjf, p. 235. 5. Friedrich Schlegel, Briefe an semen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. Oskar F. VValzel (Berlin: Speyer und Peters, 1890), p. 3. Schlegel was referring to a passage in the Plastik in

which Herder writes, “Formative nature hates ‘abstracta’: she never gave any one thing everything and gave each thing its individuality [das Seinige] in its most individual [seineste \ wav. Visual art, which emulates her, has to do it as well, or it is not worthv of its name” (SW VIII, 80).

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also praised it as “a marvelous little book, full of intuition and circum¬ spection—one of his best works.”6 Herder himself also thought that Plastik was not one of his worst creations, and in a letter he wrote to his wife, Karoline, in 1788 from Rome, he indicated that, of all his books, the Plastik was the first he would wish to revise.7 One thus begins to suspect that one of the main reasons for the present misunderstanding and neglect of the Plastik might lie not so much in the abstruseness of the treatise itself as in the failure of its commentators to inquire about the context in which it was written.8 As I will demonstrate, the premise of Herder’s Plastik is deeply rooted in an eighteenth-century epistemological debate concerning the function and relative importance of the two primary senses of sight and touch. As an aesthetic treatise, it attempted to address the significance of this debate for the theoretical investigation of the arts. But Herder’s Plastik does not merely occupy a legitimate and logical place in this context of Enlightenment philosophy. Written, as the verso side of the title page tells us, “for the most part in the years 1768-70,” it also represents the most fully developed expression of that fragmentary philosophy of aesthetics which Herder had begun to sketch out in the Kritische Walder. And in the fourth Kritisches Waldchen in particular he even alluded to his current interest in writing a fully developed theory of tactile perception with reference to sculpture: “I have collected a num6. Cited in Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben, vol. II, p. 957. Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Dobbek and Gunter Arnold, vol. VI (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1981), p. 59, Herder writes from Rome, on October 8,1788: “My Plastik is coming back to me again; it will probably be the first thing I will extend and revise.” Unfortunately, this plan never materialized. 8. Clark, Herder, merely appears to be an exception to this rule. He writes on p. 224: “In both the forth Grove and Plastic Art Herder proceeds from the Lettre sur les aveugles of Diderot and the surgical report of the English Dr. Cheselden, whose cure of the onceblind boy Saunderson aroused attention on the Continent.” But, from this account, one might justifiably doubt whether Clark really knew the contents of Diderot’s Lettre. The Cheselden case actually plays a very minor role in Diderot’s work, and Nicholas Saun¬ derson, who was never cured of his blindness, was not just any “boy,” but a famous professor of mathematics at Cambridge and the author of a book titled Elements of Algebra. It was also Diderot’s fictitious account of Saunderson’s dying speech, which seems to call into question the existence of God, that earned Diderot his prison sentence on July 24,1749. For, despite his clever attempt to pass off Saunderson’s heretical words as being taken from the equally fictitious biography of Saunderson’s life by a certain William Inchlif, Diderot was jailed for his ostensibly atheistic tendencies. See Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot-. The Testing Tears, 1713-1759 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 103-16.

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ber of other reflections on this theory of touch, and I found in it such great enlightenment concerning this art, indeed I have found, as it were, a new logic for the connoisseur, and a new way for the artist to become similar to the ancients in the perfection of such works, that it would afford me the most pleasant hours to be able to collect these observa¬ tions under the eyes of an artist and to bring them to philosophical perfection” (SW IV, 73). But just as Herder never released the fourth Kritisches Wdldchen to the press, he withheld these “observations” on the theory of touch from immediate publication as well. He did, however, continue to write sketches and plans for what, in a short fragment of 1769, he called “the first ontology of touch: of being, of things external to us, space, time, force, bodies, etc.” (SW VIII, 104). And in 1770 he finished a first draft of the Plastik, which served as a quarry from which he took much of the material for the later essay. It was not until 1778, then, that he thought these ideas had fully matured to his own satisfaction. Yet, as the same side of the title page of the Plastik also announces, this “partial com¬ mencement of similar essays on anaglyphies, optics, acoustics, and so forth,” was the one piece of a larger design that he actually completed. There is something to be said for August Langen’s thesis that “the eighteenth century is to a high degree a visual culture.”9 The age that included the last years of the reign of the “Sun King” and was later given the name of “Enlightenment” did indeed exhibit a profoundly visual orientation toward the world, which we find pervasively expressed in both the sciences and the arts. But this eighteenth-century “visual culture” was only the culmination of a development that had its imme¬ diate origins in the philosophy and culture of the previous century. It was surely no coincidence that at the beginning of the seventeenth century two instruments were invented, the telescope and the micro¬ scope, which almost miraculously extended the natural powers of the eye.10 These new optical tools revealed worlds never before imagined, 9. August Langen, Anschauungsformen in der deutschcn Dichtunjj des 18. Jahrhnndcrts: Rahmenschau undRationalismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968),

P- II-

10. In the first paragraph of Descartes’s Optics, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, p. 152, we find evidence of the keen contemporary interest in these new develop¬

ments: “The conduct of our life depends entirely on our senses, and since sight is the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses, inventions which serve to increase its

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207

and they essentially enabled scientists such as Kepler, Newton, Leeu¬ wenhoek, and Swammerdam to make their greatest discoveries in as¬ tronomy, physics, and medicine. In the so-called metaphysical sciences, too, philosophers were thought to be guided through the dark paths of error toward the illumination of truth by the inner “natural light” of reason. The predominance of visual or optical qualities was no less apparent in the arts of the seventeenth century. In both the Mediterranean countries and in the Protestant north, the architecture of the Baroque partially arose out of a vigorous exploitation of the effects produced by light on recessed and irregular shapes, and architects sought to create the visual illusion of motion by manipulating these effects to produce seemingly undulating forms. Painters of the seventeenth century— Caravaggio and, following his lead, Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, and many others—incorporated this new visual sensibility into their own medium and increasingly made light and its shadowy antithesis one of the predominant subjects of their works.* 11 And this preoccupation with optical phenomena was not limited to the visual arts. Classicist poetics, citing the authority of Horace’s well-worn maxim “ut pictura poesis,” demanded that above all a poem should excite vivid images or “pic¬ tures” in the mind of its reader.12 Similarly, Newton’s Opticks, itself a symptom as well as an inspiration of his era’s fascination with vision and light, had a direct influence on a number of eighteenth-century poets. In power are undoubtedly among the most useful there can be. And it is difficult to find any such inventions which do more to increase the power of sight than those wonderful telescopes which, though in use for only a short time, have already revealed a greater number of stars and other new objects above the earth than we had seen there before. Carrying our vision much further than our forebears could normally extend their imagi¬ nation, these telescopes seem to have opened the way for us to attain a knowledge of nature much greater and more perfect than they possessed.” 11. See the fundamental study by Wolfgang Schone, Uber das Licht in dev Malerei, (Berlin: Gebriider Mann, 1954), p- 148. 12. Alfred Baeumler, Das Irvationalitatspvoblem, p. 145, refers in this connection to the “Discourse der Mahlern” of 1721-23 by Bodmer and Breitinger and writes: “The word 'painter’ is synonymous with poet for the two Swiss writers since the primary faculty of the poet, the imagination, is derived from sight.” In the explanatory footnote to this remark, Baeumler offers this revealing historical explanation: “The word ‘imagination’ is from Addison who declared sight to be the most noble sense (The Spectator, No. 411 ‘Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses’), and most literally to be understood as the faculty of images (imagines). The ‘pleasures of imagination’ come from ‘visible objects.’ The word ‘picture’ thus suggests itself quite naturally (‘all the varieties of picture and vision that are agreeable to imagination.’ No. 411).”

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three major works from 1744, for instance (Thomson’s The Seasons, Young’s Night Thoughts, and Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagina¬ tion), Newton’s theory of colors plays a conspicuous and important role.13 But, alongside of, or running counter to, this predominant emphasis on light and the visual sense in our understanding of the world, there was a subversive strain of thought during the eighteenth century in which the prevailing conception of the superiority of vision was modified and eventually overturned bv a reevaluation of the ideas we receive through our tactile sense. This reevaluation occurred by degrees, but by the time Herder completed and published his Plastik, the sense of touch had obtained a level of philosophical importance that it had never before possessed. As with so much else, Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding also provided direction for the course that the “visual civilization” of the eighteenth century would take. Considering the new emphasis that Locke placed on sensation, one might expect that he would have given the subject of vision very careful and extensive consideration. Yet it seemed so self-evident to Locke, as it had to virtually everv philosopher before him from Aristotle to Descartes, that sight was “the most com¬ prehensive of all our Senses,” that he did not find it necessary to prove or even critically examine this assertion.14 There was simply no doubt in his mind that sight was, so to speak, the queen of all our senses, delivering to our understanding a more generous and varied notion of the world than any of the less regal members of her retinue. But beyond its reference to actual visual sense perceptions themselves, the concept of vision acquired an even greater significance in Locke’s philosophy through his ubiquitous use of metaphors derived from the sense of sight to describe the qualities of the understanding. It was no accident that in the very first paragraph of the Essay, Locke declared that the “Under¬ standing” was “like the Eye.”15 We only have to remind ourselves that the central pillars of Locke’s great edifice, the “Ideas” of which the mind is composed, received their name from the Greek verb idem, which means “to see.” And at one point Locke expressly sought to characterize j

j

13. See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Nnvton Demands the Muse: Newton's “Opticks" and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 5. 14. Locke, Essay, II, ix, § 9. The first sentence of Descartes’s Optics also reads: “sight is the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses.” 15. Ibid., I, i, § 1.

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the essentially specular nature of the understanding with this revealing metaphorical description: “The Understanding is not much unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things without; would the Pictures coming into such a dark Room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the Under¬ standing of a Man, in reference to all Objects of sight, and the Ideas of them.”16 Locke was thus not unaware of the central role that the metaphors of vision play in his description of the mind’s workings, and he pointed out himself that “the Perception of the Mind, being most aptly explained by Words relating to the Sight, we shall best understand what is meant by Clear, and Obscure in our Ideas, by reflecting on what we call Clear and Obscure in the Objects of Sight.”17 In the opinion of the philosopher who had rehabilitated sensation as a crucial source for our knowledge of the world, the particular sense of sight not only was the primary contributor of sensible ideas to the mind but was also the main conceptual point of reference on almost every level of his own discourse. Yet Locke’s reliance on visual metaphors to designate the phenomena of the mind really only gave perfect expression to a fundamental tend¬ ency of his time. The truly significant aspect of Locke’s particular contribution was that, although through no conscious intention of his own, he set the parameters within which the eighteenth century would discuss the technical questions of what the eye can and does perceive. Locke, as we have already noted, adhered to the ancient belief that, in its original and basic capacity, each faculty of sense was responsible for communicating specific simple ideas to the mind, which our reason then combines or synthesizes into increasingly complex concepts. In the second edition of his Essay of 1694, Locke included a short discussion of a problem related to this assumption that was suggested to him in a letter from his friend William Molyneux. Molyneux’s question essen¬ tially concerned the issue of whether a man who had been blind from birth and whose vision was suddenly restored would be able to dis¬ tinguish by means of sight alone a cube from a sphere, which he had previously known only by touch. The question was interesting to Locke 16. Ibid., II, xi, § 17. 17. Ibid., II, xxix, § 2.

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because it raised the issue of the particular “ideas” that the individual senses were intrinsically able to deliver to the mind. Even though sight was admittedly the superior sense, it was thought that the eye could not perceive ideas foreign to its nature until it had learned to recognize these ideas by working in concert with the other senses. Both Molyneux and Locke therefore agreed that a man born blind whose vision was restored would not be able to distinguish visually between the cube and the sphere until he had learned through experience to relate the tactile sensation of both objects to their corresponding visual perception.18 And that was all Locke felt was necessary to say about the matter. As it turned out, “Molyneux’s question,” as it came to be known, served as the catalyst for an intense debate that was carried out during the follow¬ ing century, inspiring a succession of works by some of the most prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Berkeley, Leibniz, Voltaire, Condillac, Diderot, and, not least of all, Herder himself.19 In 1709 George Berkeley published his first philosophical work under the title An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision. It soon became enor¬ mously influential and almost two hundred years later, in Hoffding’s history of philosophy of 1894, it was still thought to be “one of the most brilliant psychological works which has ever been written.”20 Berkeley’s 18. Ibid., II, ix, § 9. The letter and Locke’s reply read: “‘Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man be made to see. Quart, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube.’ To which the acute and judicious Proposer answers: ‘Not. For though he has obtain’d the experi¬ ence of, how a Globe, how a Cube affects his touch; yet he has not yet attained the Experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; Or that a protuberant angle in the Cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the Cube.’ I agree with this thinking Gent. ... in the answer to this his Problem; and am of opinion, that the Blind Man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say, which was the Globe, which the Cube, whilst he only saw them: though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the differences of their Figures felt.” 19. In the chapter of Philosophy ofthe Enlightenment titled “Psychology und Epistemol¬ ogy,” p. 108, Cassirer claims that Molyneux’s question was one of the focal points of thought in the entire century. See also John W. Davis, “The Molyneux Problem,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXI (i960), pp. 392-408, and Desiree Park, “Locke and Berkeley on the Molyneux Problem,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXX (1969), pp. 252-60; and Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Pcrccptum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 20. Cited in Nicholas Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 1650-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 71.

Herder’s Theory of Sculpture

m

earliest thought lacks the radical idealism that characterizes his later Essay on the Principles of Human Understanding, and in the Theory of Vision he clearly saw himself as following in the empirical tradition of Locke and merely adding greater precision to his predecessor’s argu¬ ments.21 In actuality, Berkeley’s sober analysis and strict separation of the relative ideas of sight and touch implicidy challenged Locke s tradi¬ tional assumption of the supremacy of sight in that Berkeley allotted neither one of the senses any sort of epistemological priority. Neverthe¬ less, when stating the purpose of his essay in the first paragraph, he disclosed an undeniable orientation toward Locke’s own approach to the problem: “My design is to shew the manner wherein we perceive by sight the distance, magnitude, and situation of objects. Also to consider the difference there is betwixt the ideas of sight and touch, and whether there be any idea common to both senses.”22 Like his mentor, Berkeley began his essay widi a critique of Des¬ cartes, and in particular of Descartes’s work on optics, La dioptrique of 1637. According to Berkeley’s account, Descartes thought that the mind judges the distance and size of objects through a kind of natural geome¬ try, whereby we quickly determine the angle created by the interval between the eyes and the intersection of the optical axes focused on the perceived object. This argument struck Berkeley as being absurd, and he wondered how, without the aid of an extensive education in geometry, a simple man would be able to see at all. No, he said, “the judgment we make of the distance of an object, viewed with both eyes, is entirely the result of experience.” Berkeley reasoned, more explicitly than Locke and Molyneux had done, that normal visual perception requires a process of learning to coordinate and habitually combine the ideas of sight with the ideas of touch: “having of a long time experienced certain ideas, perceivable by touch, as distance, tangible figure, and solidity, to have been connected with certain ideas of sight, I do upon perceiving these ideas of sight forthwith conclude what tangible ideas are, by the wonted ordinary course of Nature, like to follow.”23 But Berkeley advanced decisively further in his argument. In the paragraph of the Essay following the discussion of Molyneux’s question, 21. See Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception, p. 104. 22. Berkeley, “An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision,” in Philosophical Works including the Works on Vision, pp. 9—55- This edition is based on the fourth edition of the essay, which appeared in 1732. 23. Ibid., § 19, 20, 45-

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Locke had rather confusingly maintained that sight conveys “to our minds the Ideas of Light and Colours, which are peculiar only to that Sense; and also the far different Ideas of Space, Figure and Motion .”24 Through the addition of the second clause, Locke apparently did not mean that we could form an idea of space and figure by means of visual perceptions alone—completely unaided by the sense of touch—but simply assumed that the reader would understand that sight can com¬ municate these ideas to the mind after we have had the benefit of experience. Yet this slight hint of confusion alerted Berkeley’s attention, for his entire essay is devoted to proving that there is no resemblance whatsoever between the ideas of the two senses. By itself, the eye cannot see what the hand feels, and vice versa. In direct response to the passage just quoted from Locke’s Essay, Berkeley thus emphasized that “the extension, figures, and motions perceived by sight are specifically dis¬ tinct from the ideas of touch called by the same names, nor is there any such thing as one idea or kind of idea common to both senses.”25 Berkeley wanted to make absolutely certain that his reader understood that the ideas provided by the senses of sight and touch are in their original nature absolutely unrelated and independent of one another, even though by dint of experience we become accustomed to their close association. The purely visual impression in looking at a globe would be that of a “variously shadowed flat circle,” not of a convex sphere. Berkeley’s answer to Molyneux’s question was thus cast very emphat¬ ically in the negative: “That which I see is only a variety of light and colours. That which I feel is hard or soft, hot or cold, rough or smooth. What similitude, what connexion have those ideas with these? . . . The truth is, the things I see are so very different and heterogeneous from the things I feel that the perception of the one would never have suggested the other to my thoughts, or enabled me to pass the least judgment thereon, until I had experienced their connexion.”26 A strange thing occurs, however, in the course of Berkeley’s essay. Berkeley’s very efforts to hold the two senses apart serve to unite them in a more subtle way through the constant comparison of their juxtapo¬ sition. In order to define the unique and limited capacities of each sense, 24. Locke, Essay, II, ix, § 9. 25. Berkeley, Essay, § 127. 26. Ibid., § 103, 108.

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Berkeley required the example of its counterpart to demarcate the respective boundaries of their nature. To show what sight is not, Berke¬ ley tells us what positive functions touch performs. By so resolutely insisting that the eye can perceive nothing but light and color, Berkeley actually caused sight to forfeit its traditional sovereign status, and he raised the sense of touch to the important task of compensating for what must be understood as the natural deficiencies of vision.27 Berkeley no longer thought of touch merely as an auxiliary to the sense of sight, but he considered it to perform an independent and vital function of its own. The tactile sense therefore achieved the unprecedented dignity of being an indispensable component not just in the process of vision, but in the acquisition of some of the most fundamental ideas of our knowl¬ edge as well. Berkeley thus effectively replaced the absolute supremacy of vision with a binary system of sensate perception in which sight and touch coordinate in easy unison. Voltaire brought this discussion to France in 1738 when he published the Elements de la philosophic de Newton, in which he included the famous reports by the Englishman Dr. Cheselden.28 Cheselden had successfully operated on several cataract patients and upon questioning them after their surgery about what they then saw, he noted responses that seemed to confirm Berkeley’s thesis.29 Condillac was equally interested in the epistemological consequences of Molyneux’s question and when he included a consideration of it at the end of the first section in his Essai sur Voripfine des connoissances humaines, he referred extensively to Voltaire’s work. Yet Condillac’s position within the eighteenth-century develop¬ ment of thought concerning sight and touch is slightly ambiguous, since he offered two conflicting opinions of the relationship between the two senses. In the Essay, he categorically rejected the conclusions of Locke and Berkeley in their treatment of Molyneux’s question, insisting that “when I look upon a globe, I see something else besides a flat 27. See Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception, p. 79. 28. Not everyone in the eighteenth century was equally fascinated by the problem. In Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, p. 20, Hume seems to have been somewhat impatient with the whole discussion, and he simply wrote: “A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds. Restore either of them that sense in which he is deficient; by opening this new inlet for his sensations, you also open an inlet tor the ideas; and he finds no difficulty in conceiving these objects.” 29. Voltaire, “Elements de la philosophic de Newton,” in Oeuvres completes, vol. XXVIII, esp. the “Seconde partie,” chap. VII, pp. 131-41-

214

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circle.”30 Condillac dismissed the notion that one had to “learn” to see, claiming that the ideas we receive by means of vision alone were suffi¬ cient to allow us to frame a perfectly adequate concept of extension. Yet eight years later, in the Traite des sensations of 1754, he altered his opinion, but he did not simply adopt Berkeley’s theory without any significant contribution of his own.31 Rather, by successively endowing his statue with the five senses in the Traite des sensations, Condillac intensified the implicit critique of vision that had remained unarticu¬ lated in Berkeley’s treatise, and he further enlarged the relative philo¬ sophical and cognitive importance of the tactile sense. But because it is uncertain whether Herder actually knew the Traite when he wrote the Plastik, let us turn to the work of Condillac’s friend, Diderot, who had a direct and unquestionable influence on Herder’s later reworking of these ideas in his approach to art.32 Like most of his contemporaries, and under the immediate sway of Condillac, Diderot was attracted to the general problem of sensation as it related to the nature and development of human knowledge. But he approached sensation in a characteristically idiosyncratic fashion: through its absence. As their hill titles indicate, Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveu£fles a Pusatfe de ceux qui voyent (Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See) of 1749 and his Lettre sur les sourds et muets a Pusajqe de ceux qui entendent et quiparlent (Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak) of two years later were both motivated by his assumption that the manner in which people compen¬ sate for the lack of one or more of our basic faculties of sense perception may help to explain how those in possession of all their senses actually acquire and manipulate their ideas. In the Lettre sur les aveugles, Diderot was fully aware of the unusual approach he had adopted in his “nega30. Condillac, Essay, I, VI, § 3. 31. See Nicholas Pastore, “Condillac’s Phenomenological Rejection of Locke and Berkeley,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXVII (1966-67), p. 431. Evidence of Condillac s change of opinion can be found in the Treatise on Sensations, III, iii, § 2: The eye then needs the help of touch before it can form a habit of the movements which belong to vision, and before it can accustom itself to relate its sensations to one end of the rays, and thereby judge distances, sizes, situations and shapes.” 32. See Karl-Gustav Ceroid, Herder und Diderot'. Ihr Einblick in die Kunst, especially the sections under the headings “Das Verhaltnis der Kiinste zueinander und ihre Grundlagen, pp. 69—79, and Plastik, pp. 91—108. But Gerold does not mention the important role the Molyneux problem played in the eighteenth-century reevaluation of the sense of touch.

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tive” thought experiments, and he sought to justify his method by proposing that: “People try to give those born blind the gift of sight, but, rightly considered, science would be equally advanced by question¬ ing a sensible blind man. We should learn to understand his psychology and should compare it with ours, and perhaps we should thereby come to a solution of the difficulties which make the theory of vision and of the senses so intricate and so confused.”33 With the thoroughness one would expect from an editor of the Encyclopedic, in the Lettre Diderot made an exhaustive and critical survey of the literature already written on the subject of vision. Diderot’s documentary meticulousness is actu¬ ally invaluable for our purposes insofar as his text is one of the very few that Herder specifically mentioned in his own Plastik. Since Diderot discussed in detail—often quoting verbatim—Descartes, Locke, Molyneux, Berkeley, Voltaire, and Condillac, as well as several other lesser authors, we can readily assume that Herder possessed at the very least an indirect knowledge of the most important arguments made during the first half of the eighteenth century relating to the problems of sight and touch.34 On the whole, the substantive conclusions Diderot drew from his investigation of blindness are in fundamental accord with what Locke and Berkeley had already written on the matter. Addressed to his mistress, Mme. de Puisieux, the very form of Lettre casually mocks the pretensions of ponderously written metaphysical treatises, and Diderot led his addressee through a twisted path, taking attractive detours, digressing on related issues, only to end with a consideration of God’s existence.35 Yet the slightly ironical, irreverent style of the Lettre is punctuated with insights that drive beneath its sometimes chatty sur¬ face, and Diderot broached aspects of the central problem that had been untouched by any of his predecessors. His procedure of approaching his topic by way of a “via negationis,” as it were, inspired him to say that “the mutual aid our senses lend to one another stands in the way of their 33. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, pp. 116-17. 34. In uZur Asthetik des jungen Herder,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, p. 64, Irmscher speculates that Herder might have known Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveutjles by the 1760s, even though Herder did not mention it until the draft of the Plastik of 1770- But that Herder had already read Diderot’s letter on the blind in the 1760s is beyond doubt. Herder elaborated a plan for an aesthetics in the Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 and mentioned both of Diderot’s Lettres there (SW IV, 445). 35. See Wilson, Diderot, p. 97-

216

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perfection.” That is, Diderot created philosophical capital from the deficiency of blindness, because blind people develop a much finer sense of hearing and touch, and can often make more precise and acute judgments about their immediate environment, than people who have vision. The ostensibly disadvantaged person is thus able to raise certain sensate capacities to a state of perfection that otherwise remain an unused, latent potential in “those who see”: “The case of this famous blind man proves that the sense of touch, when trained, can become more delicate than sight, for he distinguished genuine from counterfeit coins by passing his hands over a number of these, although the coun¬ terfeits were sufficiently good imitations to deceive a clear-sighted con¬ noisseur.”36 With this in mind, Diderot’s interest in the arts led him to engage in a number of speculations, which would never have occurred to his more sober colleagues, about a blind person’s knowledge and judgment of beauty. Speaking generally, Diderot declared that it was self-evident of the blind man that “he judges of beauty by touch.” But there are obviously only certain art forms a blind person may so judge; painting, theater, and dance all mean, of course, very little to the blind. With the heightened sense of touch that the blind possess, however, Diderot mused that blind people would perhaps be the best judges of the particular art of sculpture. “In my opinion feeling such statues would give them a keener pleasure than we have in seeing them. What a delight to a passionate lover to draw his hand over beauties which he would know again, when illusion, which would act more potently on the blind man than on those who see, should come to reanimate them!”37 Yet all of these observations on the blind person’s superior faculty of determining the beauty of sculptural forms are scattered rather haphaz¬ ardly throughout the Lettre-, and it is no wonder that, considering the astonishing amount of diverse information the Lettre contains, Diderot could not linger over this particular question. Diderot was also not the sort of thinker to be inclined to force these asides into a comprehensive system, and his remarks concerning the relationship between feeling and sculpture never rose above their rather aphoristic form. In the Lettre sur les sourds et muets of 1751, Diderot nevertheless once 36. Diderot, Letter on the Blind, pp. 76, 106. 37- Ibid., pp. 79, 106.

Herder’s Theory of Sculpture

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more briefly mentioned the contingent role each of the senses plays in our understanding. Here he explicidy assigned certain hierarchical val¬ ues to the individual faculties of sense in a way that not only confirmed Berkeley’s success in reinstating the philosophical interest in the sense of touch, but also suggested that Diderot had already embraced the wider implications of that interest: “My idea would be to analyze, as it were, a man, and to examine what he derives from each of his senses. I have sometimes amused myself with this kind of metaphysical anatomy, and I consider that of all the senses the eye was the most superficial, the ear the proudest, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and the most inconstant, touch the profoundest and the most philosophi¬ cal.”38 Diderot’s assertion that touch was “the most profound and philo¬ sophical” of the senses, and that, conversely, sight was the most “super¬ ficial,” marks a significant, even startling, departure from that tradition of thought in which vision had been regarded as the most comprehen¬ sive, and certainly the most “philosophical,” faculty of perception. But, again, this was only a provocative aside, another of those tantalizingly brief, fragmentary insights which Diderot tossed off with the air of someone who was in the possession of more riches than he could possibly squander. For Herder, on the other hand, Diderot’s suggestive aper