Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom by Chad Wellmon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 157 The opposite is true for Byron, whose involvement in the founding of The Liberal, and whose late orientalist poem “The Island” form the subjects of Fang’s last chapter. While both The Liberal and “The Island” have re­ ceived their share of critical notice (although, in the case of “The Island,” that notice has often been dismissive), Fang calls attention to the fact that “The Island” was originally intended for publication in The Liberal, arguing that this fact helps to explain its alleged aesthetic deficiencies. She begins her chapter by rehearsing the history of The Liberal’s short run and “its deeply loaded emphasis upon southern geography” (154), the context in which, she argues, “The Island”’s fictional account ofthe 1789 Bounty mu­ tiny needs to be understood. The poem’s Tahitian setting becomes, in her account, an emblem both of “undisturbed nature” and “the inescapable power of contemporary imperialism,” while its tonal unevenness similarly suggests the disruption of a pre-modern sentimental idyll (157, 162). The poem thus registers Byron’s political hopes for The Liberal and his ultimate disenchantment with the capabilities of the periodical form, to the extent that his subversive aims were shrunken to that of “preserv[ing] ... a space outside of contemporary history altogether” (175). Even so, Fang con­ cludes, “The Island” represents “Romanticism’s strongest and most in­ triguing application of orientalism for imperial critique” (177). As this synopsis implies, one of the great strengths of Fang’s book is the diversity of material it encompasses, despite the apparent limitations of her focus on a mere two-year span of textual production in one language. Es­ pecially impressive is the way her primary case studies lead Fang to consider how these mostly “minor” authors (with the obvious exception of Byron) engage—in intricate, sinuous, and sometimes richly conflicted ways—with the major issues and major writers oftheir day. The result is an illuminating and informative history, not only of periodical writing per se, but also of British Romanticism as a geopolitical phenomenon. Margaret Russett University of Southern California Chad Wellmon. Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodi­ ment of Freedom. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 336. $84.95. Chad Wellmon’s title phrase appears in two notable instances in his text. One, in the first chapter setting out the “historical problem” of anthropol­ ogy, is from Herder on Kultur. “We are not actually human beings yet, but we are becoming human daily.” The second appears in his concluding lines, before a final quotation, on the endless suffering of human life, from SiR, 52 (Spring 2013) 158 BOOK REVIEWS Holderlin’s “Hyperions Schicksalslied.” Wellmon writes, “The human be­ ing is always becoming. The cost ofbecoming human is that we cannot be human.” There is a gap between these two ideas of “becoming human”: the first, optimistic, guided by an Enlightened ideal of progressive culture or Aufklarung; the second, pessimistic, guided by the tragic metaphor ofhu­ man life as a waterfall, “From cliff to cliff / Downward for years into the unknown.” Although Wellmon concludes that Humboldt and Goethe “acknowledge” this pathos, one that was “intimated” earlier in Kant, I would say that the first, more optimistic usage is more important to this book. Wellmon’s thoughtful engagement with the philosophical under­ pinnings of the anthropological turn in late eighteenth-century German thought ultimately offers a “nice” Kant and colleagues, amenable to a mod­ ern liberal ethics of cultural difference. The reflexivity which Wellmon finds at the heart of Enlightenment philosophy is not, throughout most of his account, a source of deathly relativism or nihilism, but instead a kind of productive openness, intellectual modesty, and pragmatism. Understanding this overall slant is necessary to grasp the nature of the book’s scholarly contribution. For, it must be said that intellectual and lit­ erary historians have known for some time that philosophers, writers, and scientists in Europe around 1800 were deeply preoccupied with the prob­ lem of the human and how one might study it, and that these two im­ portant questions themselves shaped “modernity” and the “disciplines.” Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Hitman Sciences is now...