Herder: From Cognition to Cultural Science ed. by Beate Allert (review)

One of the central focuses of the new investigations conducted from the beginning of the eighteenth century in Germany is the redefinition of the human being understood both as a bodily and as a social living creature situated into a specific culture. In the anthropological discourse of the time, a new concept is sketched and highlighted: That of the human being as "a whole person" (ein ganzer Mensch). This concept refers to the human body, its functions, instincts, needs, emotions studied from a scientific point of view and to the human, intended as a cultural being, observed from a historical perspective. "Der ganze Mensch" was considered as an indivisible unit of nature and culture, cognition and perception, sexuality and reason, and, above all, mind/soul and body.

One of the most important texts of eighteenth-century German anthropology was Anthropologie für Ärtze und Weltweise (1772) by Ernst Platner, a professor of medicine in Göttingen. Platner writes that while anatomy and physiology consider the human being as a machine working independently from the soul, and while psychology regards the characteristics of the soul as detached from the body, anthropology studies the body and the soul in their reciprocal interactions, because "the human being is neither body nor soul alone: it is the harmony between both of them" (Platner vi). The anthropological inquiry into the complex interaction between mind/soul and body (commercium mentis et corporis) became one of the main issues at that time. It was investigated not only experimentally in works of scholars like Albrecht von Haller (Primae lineae physiologiae, 1747) and De partibus corporis humani sensibilibus et irritabilus, 1752) and Johann Gottlob Krüger (Versuch einer Experimental-Seelenlehre, 1756), but also philosophically, for example in Friedrich Schiller's dissertation (Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen, 1780). Therefore, in the eighteenth century, anthropology was conceived not as a science merely based on observation, but also on a self-reflexive approach—i.e., it was understood as the result of experimental and philosophical interpretations made by philosophers and scientists, sharing the aim of trying to understand and define human nature.

With Kant's Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), literature became a useful tool for comprehending human nature, since it was considered to be an act of self-understanding of the human being who expresses natural human conditions through literary creations. In this sense, literature was thought as a useful tool for answering the question: "What is the human being?" As Kant wrote, history, biography, theatrical plays, and novels can all help develop anthropology, because artistic inventions are based on authors' actual observations of other humans. Artistic observations reproduce qualities that are coherent with human nature. In this sense, literary texts played important roles in anthropological discourse, since they have the capacity to represent both the reality of the human being—with the reciprocal interrelation between mind and body—as well as the modalities of interaction within the social world.

Johann Gottfried Herder played a crucial role in defining these paradigms, initiating new theories about anthropology, history, ethnography and philosophy of language. His anti-Kantian philosophical, anthropological and "cognitive" approach, which has long been marginalized and put in the shadow of leading Kantian positions, has recently been rediscovered, thanks to innovative theories about cognition related to the cultural sciences. The conference Herder: From Cognition to Cultural Science / Vom Erkenntnis zur Kulturwissenschaft at Purdue University in September 2014 was devoted to this aspect of Herder's work, and the volume under review here edited by Beate Allert is the result.

This inspiring volume sheds new light not only on the polyphony of Herder's innovative approaches to the philosophy of history and of language, to ethnography and to the studies of poetry, but particularly on the new definition of cognition as related to the mind's processes, self-awareness, and sense perception—all understood as inseparable from the body. These are central issues in the actual "neurocognitive venture" that links the cognitive sciences to...