Herder

Abstract

A distinctive feature of Herder’s attempt to develop an anthropology is the crucial role played by aesthetics. Anthropology is a naturalized form of understanding human motivations and behaviour, replacing traditional religious and humanist forms of understanding. It is naturalist in the sense of opening up human motivations and behaviour to empirical evidence, and deciding questions on this basis. Naturalism here is not a reduction to the physical sciences, but rather to sources of evidence that can be gleaned from comparative areas such as history, geography, and, more problematically, anatomy. That aesthetics could play a role in such an exercise may seem somewhat puzzling at first, but for Herder and his German contemporaries, an aesthetic sensibility was central to what it was to be a human being, just as, for his predecessors, a religious sensibility was crucial to what it was to be a human being.

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