7.

Aesthetics In the Critical Forests (1769, though the important fourth part was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century) Herder initially set out to argue for the following aesthetic theory: whereas music is a mere succession of objects in time, and sculpture and painting are merely spatial, poetry has a sense, a soul, a force; whereas music, sculpture, and painting belong solely to the senses (to hearing, feeling, and vision, respectively), poetry not only depends on the senses but also relates to the imagination; whereas music, sculpture, and painting employ only natural signs, poetry uses voluntary and conventional signs. This theory was subsequently taken over (with only minor modifications) by Schleiermacher in his aesthetics lectures, and it has sometimes been touted as Herder's main achievement in aesthetics (e.g. by Norton). But it is a naive theory, and Herder's real achievements in aesthetics are other than and contrary to it. As discussed earlier, Herder's philosophy of language is committed to the two doctrines that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language, and that meaning is word-usage. This invites certain questions: These doctrines plausibly break with an Enlightenment assumption that thought and meaning are in principle autonomous of whatever material, perceptible expressions they may happen to receive. Following Charles Taylor, we might call such a move one to expressivism. But what form should expressivism take exactly? Is the dependence of thought and meaning on external symbols strictly one on language (in the usual sense of language)? Or is it not rather a dependence on a broader range of symbolic media including, besides language, also such things as painting, sculpture, and music so that a person might be able to entertain thoughts which he was not able to express in language but only in some other symbolic medium? Let us call the former position narrow expressivism and the latter broad expressivism. Also, is Herder's own position narrow expressivism or broad expressivism? It might seem at first sight that his two doctrines themselves already answer this question in favor of narrow expressivism because of their reference to language and words. However, matters are not quite so simple. For one thing, such terms easily lend themselves to broadened uses which might include media beyond language in the usual sense. For another thing, precisely such a broadening actually occurs in a philosopher closely connected with Herder: Hamann. In his Metacritique (1784), Hamann is no less verbally committed to the two doctrines in question than Herder. But he embraces broad expressivism. And he does so quite consistently, because he understands the terms language and word as they occur in the doctrines in unusually broad senses for example, he explicitly includes as forms of the language on which he says

thought depends not only language in the usual sense but also painting, drawing, and music. Nonetheless, Herder's considered position is in fact the narrow expressivism that his two doctrines initially seem to suggest (so that his verbal sharing of them with Hamann in fact masks a significant difference of philosophical position between the two men). Moreover, after much wrestling with the subject, Herder eventually developed a particularly compelling version of narrow expressivism. The key work in this connection is again the Critical Forests. By the time of writing this work, Herder was already committed to the two doctrines in question, and, as this would suggest, from the start in the Critical Forests he is committed to narrow expressivism. However, his commitment to it is initially unsatisfactory and even inconsistent. For one thing, it initially takes the extreme and implausible form of denying to the non-linguistic arts any capacity to express thoughts autonomously of language by denying that they can express thoughts at all. This is the force of the naive theory recently described which the work initially set out to develop. Adding outright inconsistency to this unsatisfactoriness, Herder is from the start in the work also committed to saying (far more plausibly) that visual art often does express thoughts e.g. he intervenes in a quarrel between Lessing and Winckelmann on the question of whether linguistic art (especially poetry) or visual art (especially sculpture) is expressively superior in ways which tend to support Winckelmann's case for visual art. This unsatisfactoriness and inconsistency mainly result from Herder's oversight of a single fact: that it is perfectly possible to reconcile narrow expressivism with the attribution of thoughts to non-linguistic art, namely by insisting that the thoughts expressed by non-linguistic art must be derivative from and bounded by the artist's capacity for linguistic expression. However, by the time Herder writes the later parts of the Critical Forests, he has found this solution. Thus in the third part, focusing on a particularly instructive example, he notes that the pictorial representations on Greek coins are typically allegorical in nature. And by the time of writing the fourth part he is prepared to say something similar about much painting as well, writing there, for example, of the sense, the allegory, the story/history which is put into the whole of a painting. By 1778 he extends this account to sculpture as well. Thus in the Plastic of 1778 he abandons the merely sensualistic conception of sculpture that had predominated in the Critical Forests and instead argues that sculpture is essentially expressive of, and therefore needs to be interpreted by, a soul, but this no longer forces him into unfaithfulness to his principle that thought is dependent on, and bounded by, language, for he now conceives the thoughts expressed by sculpture to have a linguistic source: The sculptor stands in the dark of night and gropes towards the forms of gods. The stories of the poets are

before and in him. Subsequently, in the Theological Letters (1780-1) and the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, Herder extends the same solution to music as well. In the considered position at which he eventually arrives Herder also implies that non-linguistic art is dependent on thought and language in another way: In the fourth part of the Critical Forests he develops the point (already alluded to earlier) that human perception is of its nature infused with concepts and beliefs, and consequently with language which of course implies that the same is true of the perception of non-linguistic artworks in particular. So non-linguistic art is really doubly dependent on thought and language: not only for the thoughts which it expresses but also for those which it presupposes in perception. With Herder's achievement of this refined form of narrow expressivism and Hamann's articulation of his broad expressivism, there were now two plausible but competing theories available. Nineteenth-century theorists (e.g. Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey) would subsequently be deeply torn between them, and the dispute remains an important one today. While the philosophical issues involved are difficult, I believe that Herder's position is the correct one. Since for Herder thought and language play important roles not only in linguistic but also in non-linguistic art, both for him present similar interpretive challenges, requiring similar interpretive solutions. One aspect of this which deserves special emphasis is genre. Herder believes, plausibly, that a work of art is always written or made to exemplify a certain genre, and that it is vitally important for the interpreter to identify its genre in order to understand it. Herder's basic conception of genre is that it consists in an overall purpose together with certain rules of composition dictated thereby. For Herder, genres are in large measure socially pregiven, but they always play their role in a work via the intention of the artist (not autonomously thereof), and are not something that he is inexorably locked into but rather something that he can and often does modify. Why does Herder believe that it is vitally important to identify a work's genre correctly in order to understand the work properly? He has three main reasons (all good ones): First, grasping a work's genre is itself an essential constituent of understanding the work and its contents (in much the same way as grasping a sentence's illocutionary force is itself an essential constituent of understanding the sentence and its contents). Second, because an author intends his work to exemplify a certain genre, there will normally be aspects of the work's meaning which are expressed, not explicitly in any of its parts, but rather through its intended exemplification of the genre. For instance, Lessing had argued that the purpose of Aesop's fables as a genre was to illustrate through a concrete

example a universal moral principle, whereas Herder argues that it was instead to illustrate general rules of life, experience, or prudence so the full interpretation of any particular fable must include either the idea of a universal moral principle (if Lessing is right) or the idea of a general rule of life, experience, or prudence (if Herder is right). Or to cite a non-linguistic example, Herder argues that Egyptian sculpture (unlike Greek) had the purpose as a genre of expressing certain ideas about death and eternity so that the full interpretation of a piece of Egyptian sculpture must include this aspect of its meaning deriving from the general genre. Third, correctly identifying the genre is also vitally important for accurately interpreting things that are expressed explicitly in parts of a work. Hence, for example, in the Critical Forests Herder argues that in order to achieve a proper understanding of ridiculous passages in Homer (such as the Thersites episode in Iliad, book 2) it is essential to understand them in light of the nature of the whole text and their contribution thereto. Just as Herder insists on a scrupulous methodological empiricism in interpretation generally, so he insists on it in determining genres in particular. He therefore sharply rejects apriorism here not only the absolute apriorism of refusing in one's definition of a genre to be guided by the observation of examples at all, but also the more seductive relative apriorism of allowing oneself to be guided by the observation of examples but excluding from these particular cases, or even whole classes of cases, to which the resulting genre-conception is to be applied in interpretation. The latter procedure is still disastrous, in Herder's view, because the superficial appearance of a similar genre shared by different historical periods or cultures, or even by different authors within one period and culture, or indeed even by a single author in one work and the same author in another commonly in fact masks vitally important differences. Herder identifies this sort of misguided apriorism in the definition of genres in many areas of interpretation. For example, in the essay Shakespeare (1773) he detects it in the French critics' approach to tragedy, an approach which assumes the universal validity of Aristotelian genre-rules that were originally derived exclusively from ancient tragedies (sometimes even overlooking this empirical derivation), and consequently assumes that they provide an appropriate yardstick for interpreting Shakespearean tragedy as well, whereas the latter's genre-conception is in fact quite different. And in This Too and other pieces he detects it in Winckelmann's treatment of Egyptian sculpture: Winckelmann implicitly assumes the universal validity of a genre-conception for sculpture which he has derived from the Greeks, namely one dominated by the genre-purpose of a this-worldly portrayal of life and beauty, and he then applies this in the interpretation of Egyptian sculpture, where the genre-conception is in fact quite different, in particular involving a contrary

genre-purpose of conveying ideas of death and eternity. Furthermore, Herder emphasizes that getting questions of genre right is vitally important not only for the correct interpretation of artworks, but also for their correct critical evaluation. The French critics not only make an interpretive mistake when they go to Shakespeare with a genre dogmatically in mind that was not his, but they also, on this basis, make an evaluative one: because they falsely assume that he somehow must be aspiring to realize the genre-purpose and -rules which Aristotle found in ancient tragedy, they fault him for failing to realize them, while at the same time they overlook the quite different genre-purpose and -rules which he really aspires to realize and his success in realizing these. Similarly, Winckelmann not only makes an interpretive mistake when he implicitly imputes to the Egyptians a Greek genre-conception for sculpture that was not theirs, but also, on this basis, an evaluative one: because he falsely assumes that the Egyptians somehow must be aspiring to realize the Greek genre-purpose and -rules, he faults them for failing to realize these, and at the same time he overlooks their success in realizing the very different genre-purpose and -rules which they really do aspire to realize. Nothing has yet been said about beauty, the concept that is often thought to be the central concern of aesthetics. Herder has several interesting ideas on this subject too. A first, which he develops in the Critical Forests, concerns the very concept of beauty. He argues, plausibly, that this concept's origin lies in visual experience, but that it has been extended from that domain to cover virtually everything that has a pleasurable effect on the soul, that in this sense sight allegorizes the images, the representations, the conceits of the soul, and beauty becomes our most general term of approval for whatever we find pleasing in relation to any of the senses and indeed to mental life more generally. A second interesting idea of Herder's concerning beauty (prima facie somewhat at odds with the first one, but potentially reconcilable with it, and perhaps even encouraged by it) is developed in his later work the Calligone. There he suggests, in opposition to the great emphasis traditionally placed on beauty in the philosophy of art, that beauty is not in fact nearly as essential to art as it is often taken to be. In particular, he argues that art is much more essentially a matter of Bildung cultural formation or education (especially in moral respects). A third important idea of Herder's concerning beauty (both as it relates to art and more generally) is that standards of beauty vary greatly from one historical period and culture to another. This at least is his usual position, from early works such as On the Change of Taste to late ones such as the Calligone (where he invokes it against Kant's Critique of Judgment). There is also occasionally a

counterstrand in Herder's works in which he argues for a deeper unity in standards of beauty across historical periods and cultures (e.g. in the Critical Forests). However, the former, usual position seems to be his considered one, and is much the more plausible one. Finally, a position closely connected with the point recently mentioned that the fundamental role of the arts is one of Bildung: In On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Ethics of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times (1778) and again later in the Calligone Herder argues more specifically that the fundamental role of the arts both has been historically and moreover should be one of moral character formation. He has a nuanced account of how the arts do and should perform this function. For example, in On the Influence of the Beautiful Sciences on the Higher Sciences (1781) he specifies three ways in which poetry and literature promote moral character formation: First, they do so through light rules, in other words through subtly conveying ethical principles directly in explicit or implicit ways. Second, and more important, they do so by presenting in an attractive light good moral exemplars for people to emulate: still better, through good examples. Third, they also convey a broad range of practical experience relevant to the formation of moral character which would otherwise have to be acquired, if at all, by the more arduous route of first-hand experience. In the Calligone Herder also notes concerning non-linguistic art that music has a power to affect moral character for good or ill depending on the principles with which it is associated, and that visual art has a power to make moral ideals attractive by presenting them blended with physical beauty. Herder's conception that it is and should be the primary function of art to form moral character serves him as a criterion for evaluating artworks. Thus when he observes in On the Effect that in contrast to earlier poetry modern poetry has typically lost this function, he means this as a serious criticism of modern poetry. And he even applies this criterion as a ground for criticizing certain works by his friends Goethe and Schiller which he considers immoral or amoral in content.