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Selected Writings on Aesthetics This Page Intentionally Left Blank Selected Writings on Aesthetics Selected Writings on Aesthetics This page intentionally left blank Selected Writings on Aesthetics Johann Gottfried Herder Translated and edited by Gregory Moore princeton university press princeton and oxford Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744–1803. [Selections. English. 2006] Selected writings on aesthetics / Johann Gottfried Herder ; translated and edited by Gregory Moore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11595-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-11595-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics. I. Moore, Gregory, 1972– . II. Title. BH39.H456213 2006 111Ј.85—dc22 2005029475 All Rights Reserved British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ϱ pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgments vii Note on the Texts ix Introduction 1 Is the Beauty of the Body a Herald of the Beauty of the Soul? 31 A Monument to Baumgarten 41 Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Art and Science of the Beautiful: First Grove, Dedicated to Mr. Lessing’s Laocoön 51 Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedel’s Theory of the Beaux Arts 177 Shakespeare 291 The Causes of Sunken Taste among the Different Peoples in Whom It Once Blossomed 308 On the Influence of the Belles Lettres on the Higher Sciences 335 Does Painting or Music Have a Greater Effect? A Divine Colloquy 347 On Image, Poetry, and Fable 357 Editor’s Notes 383 Bibliography 445 Index 449 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I thank Barry Nisbet for suggesting me for this project and for his willing and valuable advice throughout; Ian Malcolm at Princeton University Press for his help and patience; Martyn Powell, who commented on an early draft of the introduction; and Dalia Geffen for preparing and im- proving the manuscript. Most of all I am grateful to Bettina Bildhauer, not only for her encouragement and assistance in rendering some of Herder’s occasional stylistic obscurities but for much else besides: I’m sorry. This page intentionally left blank Note on the Texts Because Herder wrote widely on aesthetics—and on art and literature more generally—no single volume can pretend to be a comprehensive col- lection of his work in this area. At most this collection aims to introduce the English-speaking reader to what are, by common scholarly consensus, some of Herder’s most important relevant writings, as well as several lesser known but no less interesting texts, and to cover as wide a range of themes as possible. Perhaps the most significant omissions here are the Fragmente and Plastik (both are already available in translation) and Kalligone (Herder’s interesting, misguided, and unfortunately very long polemic directed against Kant’s Critique of Judgment). The texts are based on two German editions: Sämtliche Werke, edited by Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), and Werke, edited by Günter Arnold et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000). In compiling my explanatory notes, I drew from the com- mentaries included in these editions, as well as in two other editions of Herder’s writings: Werke, edited by Wolfgang Pross, vol. 2 (Munich: Han- ser, 1987), and Kritische Wälder, edited by Regine Otto, 2 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1990). With the exception of the essay “Shakespeare,” all texts included in this volume are translated into English for the first time. Several other trans- lations of Herder’s writings contain works that bear directly or indirectly on the theme of aesthetics: Selected Early Works, 1764–1767, translated by Ernest A. Menze, with Michael Palma (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), includes Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur and several shorter writings; the long essay Plastik has been trans- lated by Jason Geiger as Sculpture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Michael N. Forster’s collection Philosophical Writings (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) includes a fragment on taste and Essay on the Origin of Language; F. M. Barnard’s J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) contains partial translations of Journal of My Journey in the Year 1769; there is also the rather antiquated translation by James Marsh of The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (Burlington, VT: Edward Smith, 1833). H. B. Nisbet’s German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1985) includes not only Herder’s Correspondence on Os- sian but also translations of important texts by various contemporaries x • Note on the Texts who profoundly influenced his thought on art and literature. Winckel- mann’s major writings (including his History of Ancient Art) have been collected as Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, edited by Curtis Bowmann, 3 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001). Another important contemporary influence was Moses Mendelssohn. His Philosophische Schriften (including his Briefe über die Empfindungen and Hauptgrund- sätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften) has been translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Recommendations for further reading can also be found in the bibliography. Selected Writings on Aesthetics This page intentionally left blank Introduction In notes written in 1765 bemoaning the wretched state of German lit- erature, Johann Gottfried Herder took some comfort from the thought that though his country was devoid of “original geniuses in the realm of the ode, the drama, and the epic,” he was at least living in “the philo- sophical century.” Those nations lacking poetic inspiration and the polit- ical unity necessary for a mature literary tradition ought instead to devote themselves to developing a fuller understanding of the nature of art and the historical and cultural conditions under which it flourishes. Perhaps such a theory would enable writers to discover and mine new seams of poetic creativity. “Not poetry,” he concluded, “but aesthetics should be the field of the Germans.”1 In some ways this was already true. Despite—or perhaps because of— the painfully felt absence of a native literary culture, German critics were intensely preoccupied with new theoretical approaches to art and litera- ture, and the mid-eighteenth century saw a number of important devel- opments that helped shape an emergent public sphere in the German- speaking world: Johann Christoph Gottsched’s attempt to impose a local version of French neoclassicism; the long-running controversy between Gottsched and the Swiss critics Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, who championed English literature and criticism, and, com- bining Addison with Leibniz, opened poetry to the unlimited worlds of the imagination; the birth of modern art history in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s hugely influential interpretations of Greek sculpture; the critical writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, and Friedrich Nicolai. And perhaps most significant of all, the very term aes- thetics was coined in 1735 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (from the Greek aisthanesthai, “to perceive”) in his dissertation Meditationes philo- sophicae. Fifteen years later, in the first two volumes of his major work Aesthetica (1750–58), he went further and established aesthetics as an in- dependent sphere of philosophical inquiry, cognate with, but separate from, the truths of logic and morality. By the 1760s this newly minted word had already become common currency, and treatises on the subject 1 Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), 32:82 (hereafter SWS). 2 • Introduction were growing so numerous that by 1804 Jean Paul Richter could observe: “There is nothing more abundant in our time than aestheticians.”2 Herder was certain that although this new discipline could be decisive for the development of German literary politics in the mid-eighteenth century, and for all that he hailed Baumgarten as a new Aristotle, Baum- garten’s premature death in 1762 had left his philosophical project in- complete. “O Aesthetics!” Herder exclaims with characteristic exuber- ance in the Critical Forests, his most comprehensive contribution to the subject, “in which cavern of the Muses is sleeping the young man of my philosophical nation destined to raise you to perfection!” Then in his early twenties and an ambitious though obscure clergyman in Riga awakening to the novelty of his own insights, Herder was beginning to think he might be that slumbering youth. Yet those hopes were never realized. Not only were some of his most important and original writings in this area not published during his lifetime, they were in any case soon overshadowed by Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), that work which more than any other shaped the development of modern philosophical aesthetics and took it in a direction never envisaged by either Baumgarten or Herder. In later life, Herder would expend a great deal of energy in his Metacritique and Kalligone vainly seeking to refute Kant’s ideas, but his early work, which shows him assimilating a great deal of contemporary thought and synthesizing it into new constellations, sheds important light on aesthet- ics at a crucial stage in its evolution. The writings included in this volume, although by no means exhaustive, have been chosen to reflect the extent and diversity of his writings on art and aesthetics, covering as they do such contemporary debates as the nature of aesthetics itself, the debate over classification of the arts, genius, taste and the classical tradition, the rela- tionship between art and morality, and the fable. Sense and Sensibility Herder never accepted the critical turn in Kant’s philosophy.
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