Herder's Naturalist Aesthetics
Cambridge University Press, 4/25/2019
EAN 9781108483070, ISBN10: 1108483070
Hardcover, 276 pages, 23.1 x 21.3 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought.
Introduction
Part I. Herder's Aesthetics
1. Herder's philosophical naturalism
2. Synthesis and critique of eighteenth-century aesthetics
3. Aesthetics of the senses
4. Aesthetics of expression
coda cultural variation and taste
Part II. Explorations
5. The problem of the sublime
6. Sculpture and touch
7. Aesthetics and (in)authenticity
Herder's reputation of Ossian
Conclusion.