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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
By Robert E. Norton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 257. $35.95.
Focusing on the early phase of Herder's creative activity between 1763 and 1778, the study offers an account of Herder's aesthetic philosophy that pursues two related goals: (1) to rehabilitate Herder as a "serious" philosopher concerned with a methodologically rigorous, "scientific," search for truth, and (2) to demonstrate in detail Herder's indebtedness to the empiricist and sensualist tradition of the British and French Enlightenment, especially Locke and Condillac. By situating Herder's thought within a broad historical perspective, the study seeks to correct both the "traditional view of Herder as an irrational iconoclast" and the corresponding notion of an Enlightenment supposedly characterized by "rational optimism and facile secularism" (p. 1).
Herder's aesthetic writings, often neglected in favor of his historical and linguistic studies, do in fact provide strong evidence in support of Norton's argument. The very notion of an aesthetics, a "science of sensate cognition" (Baumgarten), was a child of the Enlightenment, emerging in response to the increasing challenge presented by the empiricist tradition to the rationalism of the Wolffian School. And with his ambition to complete Baumgarten's unfinished project, the young Herder explicitly situated himself within a contemporary problematic defined by the opposition between these two competing paradigms. Norton traces the genesis of Herder's aesthetics from the early Versuch uber das Seyn (1763) through his polemic against Lessing and Riedel...
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