Review refers to M&D

[jbor]

_Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology_ by John H. Zammito
reviewed by Riccardo Pozzo. _The Review of Metaphysics_. Washington: Sep
2004. Vol.58, Iss. 1;  pg. 205, 2 pgs

Full Text (615 words)
Copyright Review of Metaphysics Sep 2004

ZAMMITO, John H. _Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology_. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2002. 576 pp. Cloth, $68.00; paper,
$29.00-Rather than as a philosopher, Zammito writes as a historian dedicated
to contextual intellectual history. The book has nonetheless a conspicuous
literary value, and it reminds one not incidentally of Thomas Pynchon's
historical novel Mason and Dixon (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997), first
and foremost because both focus on the friendship of scholars who were at
their peak in the 176Os (Immanuel Kant [1724-1804], Johann Gottfried Herder
[1744-1803], Charles Mason [1728-86], and Jeremiah Dixon [1733-79]). In
fact, just as Pynchon sets off his narrative account by reconstructing the
Mason-Dixon expedition to the Cape of Good Hope for the transit of Venus
from 1761 to 1762, Zammito sets off with the notes Herder took in Kant's
classes at Königsberg between 1762 and 1764. Of course, those were
astronomers and these were philosophers; those were Britons and these
Germans; and I would rather stop looking for analogies here. According to
Zammito, Kant and Herder "shared in a remarkable moment of intellectual
discovery and growth associated with the penetration into Germany of the
thought of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and especially Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and in the endeavor to use these exciting new insights to revise
the established philosophical views codified in the works of Christian
Wolffand Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten" (p. 1). The method of contextual
history, remarks Zammito, "is not causally unidirectional." Kant and Herder
were influenced by what was in the air at their time, and at the same time
they were instrumental in shaping it. Eventually, they were to contribute to
the "calving away" of anthropology from philosophy around the year 1772,
when Ernst Platner published his Anthropologie für Ärtzte und Weltweise,
Kant gave his first course in anthropology at Königsberg, and Herder
published his prize-winning essay "Versuch über den Ursprung der Sprache"
(p. 3). Oddly, this book does not go into any aspects of Kant's critical
philosophy. It contains analysis of Kant's Bemerkungen zu den Beobachtungen
of 1764 and the Träume eines Geistersehers of 1766, and it stops with the
already mentioned course of the year 1772, which is perfectly legitimate,
given that in 1772 Kant and Herder parted and stopped working toward the
same goal, namely, the constitution of philosophical anthropology. Besides,
and this is also one of its great merits, Zammito's book provides the reader
with a faithful reconstruction of what Kant looked like between 1762 and
1772, that is, as a thoroughly representative figure of German Enlightenment
thought who had not made the "critical turn," and who, as Lewis W. Beck has
argued, would have been worthy of perhaps a paragraph in the history of
philosophy. Zammito suggests that the Kant of 1772 would not have been so
insignificant after all, and he asks rather "whether he does not deserve a
larger stature in the history of the German Aufklärung, not simply as a
representative but as a dissident and even a transformer" (p. 5). Zammito's
analysis is well documented in primary literature (one thinks of Platner's
text, of which hardly an account had been given so far, not even in German)
and in secondary literature (one thinks of the works by Reinard Brandt,
Norbert Hinske, Marita Linden, Peter Hanns Reill, Giorgio Tonelli, and
Richard Velkley). His main thesis about the mutual influence of Kant and
Herder in getting their facts straight in the 1770s by pushing "the whole
cultural shift toward 'epistemological liberalization' that constituted the
emergence of anthropological discourse" is brilliant (p. 309).-Riccardo
Pozzo, The University of Verona.