Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism by John K. Noyes (review)

John K. Noyes has given us a game-changing book on Johann Gottfried Herder, a volume well deserving of the Modern Language Association's 2016 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. Noyes provides a comprehensive map to Herder's work, overlaying a germanophone intellectual cultural network centred around Herder over the familiar map of Europe's eighteenth century with its messy political and social evolutions.

In chronologically ordered chapters, Noyes presents nuanced analyses of Herder's responses to local circumstances and challenges from his day and age, informed by, but never colonized by, the mythical "Enlightenment" of new intellectual and geopolitical interests. His Herder assesses what geo-politics and colonial networks mean for human knowledge, which Noyes characterizes as "problems that continue to haunt postcolonialism" (17)—an intellectual project that evolves within the age of imperial colonialism but is not constrained by it.

The volume's goal is to counter the prevailing germanophone and anglo-phone intellectual history narratives that have colonized Western thought since the nationalist nineteenth-century moment that codified them as the geopolitical correlate of the fictive "Germany" of Hegelian accounts that had arisen in the Prussian-led German Reich after 1870, as the "Land der Dichter und Denker" declared itself the German Empire. Through his rereading of Herder, Noyes lays the groundwork for a deep revision of German studies' most favourite and damaging clichés. Akin to a T-O map (which represents the medieval world as centring on Jerusalem), Noyes's new chart revises the Weimar-centric map most often used for Herder's Europe and instead starts mapping its universe around Immanuel Kant's Königsberg, following Herder's travels through Europe and charting how Europe came to him (through wars, intellectual exchange, books).

Noyes starts his reconstruction philosophically, with Herder's "Versuch über das Seyn" ("Essay on Being," 1764) read as a response to Kant and as introducing a different reading of Kant's work. Herder understands the interface between mind and world as thinking through the body, not just transforming empirical experience or evidence into knowledge by means of the understanding that grasps and forms it into concepts (Begriffe, a word that shares a root with grip and grasp). Herder stresses instead how aesthetics and individual experience are never divorced from understanding, and that the creation encompassing the data to be experienced may be whole, but our understanding of it is not. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's 1735 Aesthetics outlined how knowledge production proceeds as thinking through the body, in a usage closer to the Greek αἰσθησις (aisthēsis, sensation) and αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos, aesthetic, sensitive, pertaining to sense perception), not "beauty" or "taste" alone. For Herder, the study of humanity and knowledge production requires considering aesthetics alongside of mind as being in the world, which implicates being in community and being in a particular environment, as reflected in his "Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache" ("Treatise on the Origins of Language," 1772). Thus, not only scientific knowledge but also folk songs, literature, and other cultural inheritance become part of material experience on the local level, as part of the language that brings the individual mind into the time and space of a living community of experience and its historical legacies.

Kant described how cognition and knowledge depend on sensory experience (an aesthetic process), but Herder valorizes material creation as the space where humans accrue embodied, historicized knowledge (20), not only ideas. Moreover, that knowledge is constantly challenged by creation's material and geographical diversity and by individuals' acculturation through history and community. Language remains central to Herder's evolving project as the medium of socialization and the myth-making that appeals to the sensus communis, the community of sense- or meaning-making through which universal processes based in the mind and body create local knowledge.

This is the fundament of a new interdisciplinary and transnational Herder studies: Noyes traces various permutations of Herder's evolving project...