Journal of the History of Philosophy

Broadly speaking, naturalism can be described as a philosophical position or set of positions stating that nature is all there is and/or that philosophy, instead of relying on supernatural entities like God, can borrow all its explanatory tools from the sciences. It may seem surprising to search for its early representatives in a Protestant Enlightenment theologian such as Johann Gottfried Herder. But Rachel Zuckert deploys an impressive set of arguments to state her case and explain the premises of Herder's naturalism and its philosophical fruitfulness for his aesthetics.

The book, in two parts, contains seven chapters. Part 1 is a systematic reconstruction of the theoretical claims of Herder's aesthetics. Part 2 explores more specific aesthetic phenomena: the sublime, sculpture, and Herder's enthusiastic yet problematic interpretation of the ancient Scottish poet Ossian. The opening chapter presents the main tenets of Herder's "explanatory" naturalism, with its consequent restriction of "proper … explanations to causes found in the sensibly accessible, natural world" but compatible with a certain "theism," admiration, and awe of divine nature. More specifically, such naturalism is grounded on a conception of human beings (authors and aesthetic appreciators) as biological organisms, conditioned by and "flourishing" in the context of an empirically given environment. According to Zuckert, Herder implements such naturalism in his aesthetics (chapter 2) by combining elements from German rationalist aesthetics (Baumgarten) with empirical observations borrowed from the Scottish tradition (Kames). Such aesthetics is both a theory of art and (empirical) psychology, approaching art as the locus where we best experience the soul's vitality and acquire natural, empirical knowledge of human sensibility. As Zuckert explains in chapters 3 and 6 (on sculpture), "the value of each art … is its felt fit with the relevant sense or capacity" (13). But the very attempt to rethink art as an "expression" of the human soul (chapter 4) requires an extension from psychology toward the material and sociohistorical contexts of the soul's formation. This explains Herder's great relevance for debates on expression and aesthetic pluralism in later nineteenth-century aesthetics, but it also complicates the naturalism issue. Actually, Herder endorses a very broad concept of nature that includes culture, as revealed when Herder and Kant are compared on the sublime (chapter 5).

The book is highly original, thoughtful, and clearly structured. Offering a new key to Herder's embodied aesthetics, it also raises many genuine questions, such as the two following. To describe Herder's approach to aesthetics, Zuckert deliberately prefers the term 'naturalism' to Herder's own (perhaps more ambiguous) 'anthropology,' and she more [End Page 823] generally refrains from engaging with naturalism and anthropology in historical terms. Her philosophical aim is neither to explore Herder's novel notions of force, organism, life, and sensibility within eighteenth-century anthropology, nor to reconstruct the genesis and deeper unity of Herder's philosophy, however interesting such inquiry might be. This also explains her selective bibliography, more thorough on aesthetics than on Enlightenment anthropology. Zuckert's intention is to spell out Herder's methodological affinities with twenty-first-century naturalism and the fruitfulness of such naturalism for aesthetics. This is a legitimate restriction of her viewpoint, which gives her book a clear focus.

However, it also leads to certain ambiguities and imprecisions. Zuckert could have provided a more complete account of Herder's double perspective, which is both naturalist and theist, as presented in his treatise on the Origin of Language. This would have allowed her to take a more nuanced view on humans who are never fully part of the natural world, as she claims (11), but also, constitutively, remain "divine" animals or "wanderers" between two worlds, the natural and the supernatural. Does the aesthetic experience not involve some elevation toward the "divine"? Does it not offer some empirical "self-knowledge" and experience of humanity and of the very sensate, cognitive, and aesthetic faculties human beings possess, different from the biological growth and flourishing characteristic of plants and nonhuman animals?

Zuckert's position would have been strengthened by a clearer...