J.G. Herder: From Cognition to Cultural Science / Von der Erkenntnis zur Kulturwissenschaft ed. by Beate Allert (review)

In 2010, John H. Zammito, Karl Menges, and Ernest A. Menze aptly described the developments in Herder scholarship over the recent twenty-five years as a "veritable tidal shift" (Zammito et al., "Herder revisited," 661). Among a number of exciting new lines of inquiry that this shift involved, two have been particularly visible and influential. As Hans Adler's and Marion Heinz's detailed philosophical reconstructions showed, already in his earliest writings Herder came up with a sophisticated sensualist epistemology (called "gnoseology" by him) that grounded his approach to philosophy, while he later developed a philosophy of life in which epistemology and ontology were combined in a distinctive way (for a recent overview, see Heinz and Clairmont, "Epistemology," 2010). Second, and starting even earlier, Wolfgang Pross's commentaries in his edition of Herder's selected works (Werke, 1984–2002) opened up the path for a broader recognition of the central place of anthropology in Herder's thinking. Pointing out a number of relevant contexts for understanding Herder's ideas, Pross particularly highlighted the extent to which Herder's conception of the human being as involving an inseparable body-mind constitution was informed by the latest developments in natural science. This provided a new impetus for reassessing Herder's approach to the sciences, and for adopting a cautious attitude to the nineteenth-century distinction between "human" and "natural" science as in many ways a misleading guide to this author.

The volume J.G. Herder: From Cognition to Cultural Science, edited by Beate Allert and based on the revised and edited papers from the 2014 International Herder Conference, engages more with the first than the second line of inquiry. However, even so it focuses on a broad range of issues, since cognition or noesis for Herder cannot be separated from sensations or aisthesis. Herder also considers both inseparable from language. Thus, as the editor specifies, the focus on cognition in fact involves "knowledge formation, interpreted as processes of sense perceptions (seeing, hearing, touching) and their relations to thinking (naming, reasoning, drawing conclusions, ethical judgements)" (11). Herder's approach is particularly interesting because it highlights the bodily as well as cultural grounding of cognition. This has important consequences for the way in which the relationship among the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences should be understood. Currently often pitched against each other, these different kinds of sciences should instead all recognise their common foundation in the way in which cognition operates. "Cultural science," Allert suggests, offers us precisely this kind of knowledge.

The 25 contributions of the volume are organised into three thematic clusters. The first section focuses on Herder's theory of cognition. In the opening article Hans Adler powerfully sets the stage by reconstructing Herder's understanding of the gnoseological foundations of the method of comparison that shapes Herder's thinking. Instead of being simple heuristic tools without independent cognitive value, or involving the (impossible) comparisons between things in themselves and perceptions, comparisons should be understood as operating between the various fictions that we create in order to give Gestalt to our sense perceptions. The latter, however, we receive only as far as there exists a certain homology between the distinctive marks of external things and our perceptive organs. The next contributions focus on the ways in which Herder understood cognition and its constitutive aspects in specific contexts—such as homiletics and sermons (Christan W. Hallstein and Tina Belmann) or historiography (Johannes Schmidt)—or zoom in on the role of one distinctive sense in Herder's understanding of cognition (Mattias Pirholt discussing the tactile sense and Clémence Couturier-Heinrich addressing hearing). Christina Weiler explores the metaphors of synesthetic perception in one of Herder's little-known poems, while Beate Allert investigates Herder's notion of Gestalt formation in the process of cognition, elaborating on the ways in which this notion is relevant for contemporary debates about the...