Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates how Johann Gottfried Herder uses findings from science to overcome the dichotomy of body and soul that characterize the Enlightenment debate on aesthetics. Taking Herder's essay on being as a point of departure, this study shows that Herder locates within a pre-lingual sensuous experience of being the archetype of all particular perceptions. This understanding provides an ontological basis upon which Herder introduces empirical arguments into aesthetic debates. He argues that anthropology with its subdivision of physiology records basic laws of perception and therefore must be regarded as an integral part of any aesthetic theory. Furthermore this study finds that Herder uses a scientific textbook by Johann Gottlob Kruger to learn about the structure of human sense organs and the nervous system. Accepting Kruger's neurological oscillation theory to explain the transmission of impulses through the nerves, Herder is able to explain the predominance of sounds over visual data in the emotional life of human beings. Within Herder's analogical reasoning, body and soul form a unity that functions in analogy to a musical instrument. The soul is tuned according to geographic, climatic, and historical variables, and resonates to the sounds of its environment, as does a string instrument. On this anthropological basis, the young Herder refutes every theory concerning the aesthetics of sounds that does not incorporate the empirical findings that Kruger had laid out in his book on the sciences. Consequently, Herder rejects all aesthetic explanations that locate the mental, physical, or spiritual effect of music in harmonics. Herder insists on melody as the principle for composition of music and the writing of poetry because it corresponds best to the successive nature of human sound reception. Regarding the deficits of language use at his time, Herder then concludes that the multifaceted unity of the human being requires an idiom that appeals to more than reason or senses separately. Herder's aesthetic ideal of language integrates scientific, philosophical, and poetic discourses in order to engage all human capabilities including sound perception and processing for understanding the world