Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (review)

Goethe Yearbook 307 the early Kant actuaUy unfolded Ui Herder instead) is fascinating. But since the result is a Kant-heavy book Ui which Herder is nonetheless the hero (hut he is the hero for talcing up Kant's early impulses), one might have wished for more discussion of Herder's texts—even tf this would have resulted Ui another hundred pages. This reviewer would have read them eagerly. University of Miami Anthony Krupp David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca: CorneU UP, 2002 (first pubUshed by Reaktion Books, London, 2002). 264 pp. The great virtue of David Bindman's Ape to Apollo is that it opens a number of different paths of inquiry into the same question: why did aesthetics and race theory, two major yet seemingly incompatible achievements of the European— and especiaUy German—eighteenth century, intersect so frequently? How to explain the recurring reUance of race theories on aesthetic criteria and, perhaps odder stiU, of aesthetics on racial categories? Bindman's book is an admirably lucid , wide-ranging, and instructive introduction to the main issues informing these questions (besides being beauttfuUy designed and richly Ulustrated). It is also frustratingly shy about making conceptual claims and advancing strong readings of texts and images. Its strength lies not in putting forward a thesis guiding the whole book, but in its parts, each of which assesses an aspect of the topic carefuUy and knowledgeably. The book's opening chapter provides us with a summary of how inteUectuals manage the evidence of external human differences before the powerful concept of race takes hold Ui the later eighteentii century. Bindman assembles a gaUery of (mainly British) exhibits from the early part of the century to show how the representation of non-Europeans oscUlates, as one might expect, between ideaUzing and demonizing diem. By drawing on noveUsts (Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe), painters (WUUam Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds), and philosophers Gohn Locke, David Hume), he suggests that there is a certain logic to this osculation , for where the Noble Savage makes an appearance, his counterpart, the Savage Savage, is never far behind. (This would have been a good place to explain why, in some detaU.) Bindman also provides a review of the two main theories that at the time were taken to be scientific accounts of human variety. The more consequential of the two, put forth by the Comte de Buffon, anchors differences among humans Ui differences in climate; the other, argued by Hume, reUes on a four-stage model of human development corresponding to four modes of subsistence. But this useful summary of theories and representational practices is, for Bindman, not an end itsetf but the launching pad for what wiU be his main preoccupation throughout the book, namely an investigation of the ways in which judgments of human variety and judgments of beauty— racial theory and aesdietics —come to be inextricably bound up with one another. How does this happen ? More important, why do these two systems of arranging the world overlap so frequently and insistently? It is not merely a question of Buffon praising the whiteness of skin, or of the widespread distaste in eighteenth-century Europe for the physiognomy of Africans. Rather, it is a question of whether racial and aesthetic theories grapple with simUar issues at their deepest levels of operation. Here Bindman suggests—alas, merely suggests—a fascinating and important Une of inquiry according to which racial and aesthetic judgments embody a paradox 308 Book Reviews lodged in the heart of the EnUghtenment project: how is one to reconcUe the powerful idea of the universaüty of human endowments with what strikes eighteenth-century observers as a flagrant unevenness in the distribution of those endowments? Though Bindman does not explain why aesthetics and racial theory (as opposed to any number of other discourses) come to embody this paradox, the remaining three chapters of the book can be understood as an attempt at gathering evidence towards answering this crucial question. Next, Bindman tackles three very different sorts of texts: the art historical writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the physiognomic studies of Johann Caspar Lavater, and the travel accounts of Reinhold and...