Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 143 Flage says, a concept of self which involves both identity over time and "simplicity" at a given moment in time. Hume's association psychology can explain our capacity to ignore interruption and variation and hence arrive at a belief in the identity of the mind as a system of perceptions. But, not only is such a system complex, it will be perceived as such by a mind which "never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences." So Hume cannot explain this fiction of mental simplicity. But, one might ask, "What belief in simplicity?" Whereas it is very plausible to say that the beliefs in "body," causal necessity, and personal identity are inescapable, this is not obviously true of a belief in the simplicity of our minds. Discussions of simplicity in the text can be taken to refer to a (Cartesian) philosophic theory, rather than one of our natural beliefs. As such it.would not be necessary for Hume to show that human minds naturally gravitate toward this belief. Like other parts of this book, Flage's Appendix theory is subtle and carefully worked out. But I was not persuaded to drop the view that what Hume saw was a conflict between his causal theory of the mind and his mental theory of causation. NATHAN BRETT Dalhousie University Robert E. Norton. Herder's Aestheticsand theEuropean Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 257. Cloth, $35.95. There seem to be two Herders emerging in recent scholarship on this most protean of German "classical" authors: one heavily influenced by, if not wholly dependent on, English and French Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Condillac and Diderot, the other steeped in German pietist culture and entirely absorbed by problems of Kantian philosophy, Hamannian religiosity and Goethean aesthetics. This schism had already marked scholarship on other German authors of the epoch, most notably on W. von Humboldt whose "German" insistence on transcendental universality is denounced as "racist," while the positive elements of his linguistic thought are said to derive from French traditions entirely. This astonishing claim, raised by the head of the "French" school, Hans Aarsleff, reads like this: "Not even by the wildest stretch of speculation can Humboldt's linguistic thought be derived from Kant or constitute a reversal of what he had read in Condillac, Garat, Deg(~rando, and Diderot. ''~ The vehemence with which the "German" side repudiates this "unbearable conspiracy-story"' demonstrates that quite a lot (at least a lot of emotions) seems to be at stake in this dispute and that any exposition of Herder's thought--a thought in clear if complicated precursorship to Humboldt's--is likely to get between enemy lines. All the more so if, as is the case with the present book, it is written as a dissertation under the tutelage of the aforementioned Hans Aarsleff. 1H. Aarsleff, Introduction,in Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language, trans. P. Heath (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, ,988), lxiii and Ix. 9J. Trabant, TraditionenHumboldla(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 199o), ~a ,. 144 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31 : 1 JANUARY 1993 Considering this difficult predicament, Norton has produced a solid book, as good and useful as any introduction to Herder's earlier work available in English. Understandably , given his academic provenance, Norton tries to show that Herder's thought of the 176os and 7us fits squarely with mainstream English, French, and German Enlightenment thought, rather than being the radical break which stylistically it purports to constitute. In showing traces of hitherto-neglected influences on Herder's writing the book is never polemical, and the author's translations are correct and very helpful. But Norton has a tendency to fall back into the vice of the "French" school of solving philosophical questions by purely philological or biographical arguments. One such instance is his discussion of Herder's famous Treatise on the Origin of Language 077o), on which I will concentrate my remarks. There are some serious omissions here in the bibliography, most notably U. Gaier's Herders Sprachphilosophie,3 clearly the best book written on the topic in the last two decades, but also the huge anthology Theorien yore Ursprung der SpracheA an excellent summary of contemporary research on...