Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics

This is not just an important work on Herder, on the history of aesthetics in the eighteenth-century, or on the “hinge” between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, as Rachel Zuckert puts it. Its sophisticated discussion of Herder's naturalistic method in aesthetics should be of interest to students of contemporary aesthetics and to philosophers interested in naturalism more generally.Part 1, “Herder's Aesthetics,” lays out Zuckert's interpretation of Herder's naturalism in general and in aesthetics in particular, and addresses the main issues that it raises, above all the tension between relativist and universalist tendencies in Herder's conception of aesthetic value and taste. Part 2, “Explorations,” explores several more specific topics in Herder's aesthetics, namely, his account of the sublime, his innovative account of our experience of sculpture, and his reception of the (in)famous “Ossian” poems of James Macpherson. Here I will focus on the first part of the book. This consists of an introduction and four chapters, “Herder's Naturalism,” “Synthesis and Critique of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” “Aesthetics of the Senses,” and “Aesthetics of Expression.”By Herder's naturalism in aesthetics, Zuckert means “most basically that Herder's accounts of beauty and sublimity, of art, and so forth are grounded in a conception of human beings—those who recognize aesthetic value and engage in artistic production—as biological organisms... furnished with a multiplicity of powers (capacities) that develop themselves and are fully active in harmony with one another in the flourishing organism... in the context of an empirically given, contingently formed environment, comprising geographical and climatic conditions, along with other organisms, to which it responds and adapts” (9). Chapter 1 distinguishes “methodological, explanatory, and normative” aspects of Herder's naturalism (12). The first of these means that “philosophy must be responsive to empirical claims from the natural sciences and elsewhere” (22), indeed that philosophy has no other method than an empirical one available to it—Herder studied with Kant from 1762 to 1764, during the period of Kant's closest flirtation with empiricism, above all in the form of moral sense philosophy, and never accepted Kant's turn to the (synthetic) a priori as the essence of philosophy. But a large part of Zuckert's argument is that Herder by no means confined his conception of scientific methodology to that of the physical sciences or even the natural sciences more generally, rather his empiricist methodology also drew on a wide range of history, nascent social sciences, philology, folklore and much else that we would now classify under the humanities. Second, Herder's “explanatory naturalism” is his conviction that “empirical explanations—natural-scientific, social-scientific, and other empirical explanations invoking sensibly accessible, empirically attested causes or patterns of behavior—are the best forms of explanation.” “Finally, and most importantly, Herder's normative naturalism is the view that the human good consists in human organic flourishing within an environment” (22). The source of aesthetic value in particular is the harmonious activation of the senses by works of nature or human art and through that the activation of our capacity for feeling or emotion.Chapter 3, titled “Aesthetics of the Senses,” continues the argument of chapter 1. The undeniably correct thesis of this chapter is that “Herder proposes, specifically, that different art forms—in the first instance, painting, sculpture, music—be understood as differentiated because each addresses a different sense—in the first instance, vision, touch, hearing—each of which has a distinct mode of functioning and characteristic objects, a distinctive form of flourishing,” and each is grounded “in the given character of the sense organs and their physical relations to material objects” (85–86). An “object is beautiful because it fits the sense, specifically because its order promotes the distinctive form of activity of that sense” (86). Beauty in painting lies in the relations among shapes and colors by which painting harmoniously activates our sense of vision; the beauty of music lies in the way in which its various forms of order—melody, harmony, rhythm, and so on—activate our sense of hearing; and the beauty of sculpture lies in its stimulation of our sense of touch.1 Zuckert also observes that Herder “elaborates characteristic subjective attitudes toward the object paired to each of these senses,” namely, “contemplation” in the case of painting and vision, “sympathy/communication” in the case of music and hearing, and “identification/contact” in the case of sculpture and touch (91). These are either states with their own feelings or emotional coloration or lead to such, in particular “visual beauty” lies in “intellectually pleasing order” and “musical value” lies in “powerful emotion” (94), so the different forms of beauty in nature and art activate our sensory, our cognitive, and our emotional faculties. Herder's “identification of multiple physiological bases for aesthetic appreciation” thus allows him to “account for... the diversity of aesthetic values and corresponding art forms” (94), what Zuckert calls his “aesthetic value pluralism” (93).The “cultural specificity of artworks and... how this Herderian theme may be combined with his aesthetic naturalism” is the topic of chapter 4, on the “Aesthetics of Expression” (114–15). The issue here is that Herder supposes the works of art produced in different cultures (at different places and times) express or reflect their “context” (115), or are particular “manifestation[s] of an inner (feeling, state, attitude, worldview) in an outer, sensibly perceivable form” (116), yet “aims, ideals, desires, feelings, worldviews, attitudes take new or different directions in different societies, at different times,” thus their “artistic expression” will also “vary culturally” (125). So the artworks of one culture might well be inaccessible or unintelligible to members of another culture. The works of Sophocles should be unintelligible to the denizens of Shakespeare's world, and the works of both playwrights unintelligible to the inhabitants of the world of the internet. Herder is famous for his recognition of “the empirical fact of massive cultural variation across human history” (131), but it looks as if that should make the art of one culture inaccessible to others. Herder's solution to this problem is to distinguish levels: at one level, the objects of the senses and emotions and the ways in which the senses and emotions will flourish in one culture are different, “but they are all objective values, all actual forms of human flourishing that in principle anyone can recognize.” The “objective good for human societies, as for the human individuals who live within them, is adaptation to their circumstances” (132), and individuals from one culture can recognize successful adaptation in another. This argument, however, not only makes a strong epistemological assumption; it also seems to need to be supplemented by something like the concept of sympathy developed by David Hume and Adam Smith to explain how those in one culture can actually share the pleasure of those from another. For what needs to be explained is not just how the denizens of Elizabethan England or the current internet world can recognize and understand successful expression of his culture in the work of Sophocles but also enjoy it. Here Herder's argument needs some further work.Returning to chapter 2, “Synthesis and Critique of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Zuckert's thesis is that Herder's aesthetics represents a “hinge point” between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics: he synthesizes central ideas of the “rationalist” and “empiricist” schools of eighteenth-century aesthetics while leaving behind the pretensions of both schools to the universality of taste and thereby anticipating the emphasis on historical differences in “art as human self-revealing and self-creating expression” (77) that Zuckert takes to be characteristic of nineteenth-century philosophies of art. She begins her exposition with a passage in the fourth of Herder's Kritische Wälder, unpublished in his lifetime, in which he argued that the methods of “Aristotle, Baumgarten, and Home” (i.e., Kames) (55–56) need to be combined. The method of Baumgarten is supposed to be the exposition of determinate rules for art; the method of Kames the empirical examination of various aesthetic responses including emotions; and the method of Aristotle, as illustrated in our fragment of his Poetics, analyzes our response to specific genres and specific works in those genres. Herder's synthesis is then to combine the empiricist method of Kames, although with greater attention to human physiology, with Aristotle's focus on particular works, although with greater attention to the diversity of human senses and the relations of artistic media to those different senses, while replacing Baumgarten's abstract conception of the “perfections” of different human “faculties,” which are supposed to give rise to determinate rules for art, with his own more concrete conception of the flourishing of different human senses. Herder's Aristotelianism in particular, that is, his focus on particular arts and works, combined with his recognition of cultural variation, is then what is supposed to constitute his anticipation of nineteenth-century philosophies of art.I think that Zuckert somewhat exaggerates Herder's advance over other eighteenth-century theories, and I also have some reservation about her account of his anticipation of nineteenth-century aesthetics. Herder does recognize the role of human physiology in aesthetic experience more fully than most of the British empiricists (except for Edmund Burke, as she acknowledges [72]). But I think that Zuckert underemphasizes the role of physiology in Moses Mendelssohn's aesthetics, which Herder knew and admired: Mendelssohn recognizes the effect of aesthetic experience on the nervous system as a whole, through its effect on individual senses, and also emphasizes the interaction between the more physiological and more intellectual aspects of aesthetic experience.2 More generally, it is easy to be misled by the language of the “rationalists,” such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's talk of the analogon rationis and Mendelssohn's language of “perfections,” and thereby to interpret their theories as more rule-driven and less psychological than they actually are. In spite of Kant's caricature of Baumgarten's aesthetics, his predecessor did not offer rules for making or judging art, but much like Kames although in different terminology, he enumerated aspects, qualities, or “elements” (Kames's word) about which we can say only that their presence tends to make works of art better, although in precisely what combinations and to precisely what degree can hardly be determined prior to the creation and experience of particular works. And in Mendelssohn, the “perfections” of the “soul” which are the source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience are just the activity of our cognitive and conative capacities, the former of which includes our senses and the latter of which includes our emotions—much as in Herder himself.3 Kant's notion of the “free play” of imagination and understanding is also an essentially psychological explanation of our pleasure in aesthetic experience. What can properly be said, and this indeed is Zuckert's main point, is that Herder places more emphasis on the specificity of sensory modalities and their relation to specific media of art than most of his contemporaries did, but this is not to say that his account of aesthetic experience is and theirs are not essentially psychological in character.Zuckert's suggestion that nineteenth-century aesthetic theories are more uniformly art-historical than those of the eighteenth century is also problematic. Zuckert seems to have in mind Hegel above all. To be sure, Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, as posthumously edited and expanded by H. G. Hotho, state that fine art expresses “the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit”—but this is immediately preceded by the statement that fine art “only fulfils its supreme task when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine” (Hegel 1975, 1:7). Hegel's aesthetics is part of his metaphysical and teleological vision of history as a whole, and can hardly be enlisted in the cause of cultural pluralism: Hegel's notorious “death of art” thesis is that the arts of different historical cultures must all, in turn, fall by the wayside in art's preliminary march toward the philosophy of absolute idealism. Further, it would certainly be implausible to think that Herder's aesthetics of the senses points the way toward Hegel's aesthetics: a philosopher who states that “art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality” (1:9) can hardly be considered an heir to Herder's emphasis on the flourishing of the senses as the essence of aesthetic experience.These historical reservations aside, Zuckert's book is rich and rewarding. She makes a good case for Herder's account of the specificity of different artistic media, and offers a sophisticated analysis of Herder's relativism. Her book should securely establish Herder's place in the history of modern aesthetics

Aestheticism · Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Epistemology · Everyday Aesthetics · Flourishing · Harmony (color) · Naturalism · Sublime · Value (mathematics) · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical Philosophy and Science · Philosophy · Psychology