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

In his helpful introduction, John K. Noyes gives an astute account of cultural history during Herder's time in order to document a growing awareness of the various dimensions of globalization and the development of an anti-imperialist aesthetics. He argues that "although Herder does not use the word imperialism, it is clear that he talks about what Christopher Bayly calls the 'first age of global imperialism,' beginning around 1760—that is, around the time Herder started to write." Noyes also draws from theoretical works by Dimas Figueroa on the three structural conditions that make globalization possible, from Immanuel Wallerstein's description of "the second era of the great expansion of the capitalist world economy," and from Reinhard Koselleck's 1959 Kritik und Krise with the observation that "in the eighteenth century, the modern subject became increasingly defined as encompassing all of humanity," and that its "field of action was the unitary world of the globe." Noyes emphasizes that Herder followed the latest discoveries by James Cook and Georg Forster, and explains how "the changing picture of the world and its inhabitants," due to many scientific advances in geography, biology, ethnography, and anthropology, made the world then more imaginable as a whole, but also less imaginable, considering its infinite complexity, arguing that Herder considered "the threats which unchecked commercialism posed to the global environment—whether we take this as an environment of cultural and linguistic diversity, or that of biodiversity." Noyes maintains that Herder's writings can be interpreted as "an ongoing exercise in crisis management related directly to globalization." While Herder's writings are replete with many interesting and sometimes conflicting observations, Noyes has a talent for making even Herder's most speculative ideas appear to be logical, philosophically stringent, and grounded on materiality and cultural study.

Noyes discusses how contemporaneous developments, in terms of globalization, made Herder aware of "the Atlantic slave trade and the decimation of the indigenous population throughout the New World," which he clearly condemned. As Noyes clarifies, Herder also opposed such "ideas as the superiority of European civilization, the primacy of reason, and the progress of humankind," while drawing attention to more complex notions that defy any simplistic interpretation. According to Noyes, Herder also rejected the idea that "artistic expression can be universalized, reduced to a set of a priori rules" as was implicit in the philosophical rationalism of his time and especially in "the academic school that dominated German philosophy at mid-century." As Noyes explicitly states, Herder had "a deep-seated aversion to any form of exploitation or domination of one culture by another," a contention that Noyes, however, then begins to unravel by elaborating on what he calls "several dimensions to his anti-imperialism." Especially striking is Noyes's exploration of aspects of Herder's biography in the context of his philosophical work—in particular, his important sea travels that led to a new methodological approach connecting the movement of the mind with that of the body. Noyes attributes a concept of "embodied thought" to Herder, which I find fascinating, stating, for example, that "Herder speculates on the migration of fish, and he uses the resulting figures of motion to think about the long history of migrating humanity that gave rise to Europe as he knows it."

One of Noyes's primary achievements is to show how Herder's approach to aesthetics is extremely relevant to recent debates in postcolonial studies. Noyes explicitly engages with theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, 1999), A. G. Hopkins (Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, 2006), and Dipesh Chakravabarty (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2008), among others, and also addresses the important book by Vicki A. Spencer, Herder's Political Thought: A Study on Language, Culture and Community (2012), adding important nuances to its interpretation of Herder. In his treatment of Sonia Sikka's Herder and Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (2011...