Herder's Naturalist Aesthetics

- Blurb -

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder' s complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder' s texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder' s time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder' s theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder' s significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought.