Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Ice Doré

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Ice Doré

Johann Gottfried Herder held an aesthetic view that was totally different and reconcillably opposed to the view of Immanuel Kant and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Herder's views were those encountered in modern cultural anthropology.

"...the imponderables of empirical life [are] among the essential engines of artistic creation. Accordingly, he [Herder] rejects universalistic constructs of the self as well as binding paradigms of the beautiful. Because both cases have to do only with arbitrarily created ideals, it is, as a countermove to art, incumbent upon the aesthetic and 'interessegeleiteten' (interest-directed) self to discover new areas of experience. Aesthetic individuality is measured accordingly for Herder, according to willingness not to appeal to specific points of view and exclusive moral concepts." 1

"... according to Herder, '[was] wir wissen, wissen wir nur aus Analogie'; (what we know, we know only through analogy), and because this also holds true in the final analysis for scholarly principles and anthropological universals, these truths cannot be proved. Truths then become matters of faith. Formulaic proclamations about nature can be successively traced back to humans, who think and perceive in terms of analogies, who learn to think, as it were, under certain climatic and geographic conditions. Due to this radical questioning of discursive thinking, Herder is not able to accept the supposition that the human being discovers, without conceptions, a transcendental and non-temporal world order ..." 2

"The explosive power of such ideas cannot be measured by the reservations that Herder has against the self-image of Enlightenment rationalists. In their circle any conclusion that was responsible, due to its crude faith in science, for the age of light gradually losing its perspective, was viewed as scandalous. Applied to Herder's reading of the works of Baumgarten it becomes clear why he had to reject the putative revaluation of the senses within the context of scientific theories of the beautiful: because enlightened philosophers such as Baumgarten merely exploit the senses as tools of reason, they punish the human being to a certain extent with abiding blindness. Instead of making the senses and with them the undisciplined presence of everyday life a starting point for their aesthetic ideas, they begin with the notion of a heretofore Christian transfigured hereafter, which is now associated with eternal truths ..." 3


The etching above by Doré may be received with shock and disgust! Rejected as "art": Art is to be beautiful. Horror is not art! It cannot be displayed in a living room. This is precisely what Herder has in mind! Art is NOT to be judged by preconceived views of "beauty" nor by preconceived standards of morality. Why must we reject paintings by Otto Dix of the horrible battlefields of World War 1 as non-art? Why must we reject the art of horror or disgust in "Los Desastres de la Guerra" by Goya? Why must we close our eyes to the art in Dante's "Inferno" by Doré? Why must what the artist experiences be censored? Must beauty or art be limited to the abilities and imagination of those without a creative mind? Hitler rejected art he considered "degenerate" (a parallel judgement here to censoring, but now using "disgust" as the aesthetic filter). Herder asks: Is this what we are to mean by the term "Enlightenment"?

1 "A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder", Editors: Hans Adler, Wulf Koepke; p. 146
2 ibid., p. 147 The transcendental, non-temporal world is a world never experienced: consistent with prejudices.
3 ibid., pp. 147, 148

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