Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology

Abstract

Zammito, John H. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 576 pp. $68.00 hardcover; $29.00 paperback. In this prequel to his The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Zammito offers a compelling account of one of the most significant divergences in eighteenth century German thought: the breach between Kant and his student Herder over the relation of philosophy to anthropology, or the study of human nature. He presents the intellectual biographies of Kant and Herder as two trajectories which converged from roughly 1762-1767 and then diverged, sharply dividing the intellectual world then and subsequently. Zammito argues that the personal acquaintance between Kant and Herder coincided with a distinctive and underappreciated phase in Kant's career. In the early 1760s, Kant rejected the rationalist philosophy of the Wolffian tradition, in favor of the empiricism of the British philosophers and Rousseau. At the same time, he developed misgivings about the established role of a university professor as too isolated from the needs of an emerging German cultured class. He accordingly refashioned himself for a brief time as a Popularphilosophe. In this persona, Kant offered his students, including Herder, new intellectual vistas arising from empirical philosophy, including an anthropological study of the human mind and of history and culture. However, by 1768 Kant had begun to see new possibilities for a rigorous philosophy founded on rationalist principles, and to react against any signs of facile dilettantism in philosophy. During this new dogmatic turn, he offered a lukewarm response to Herder's early writings, thereby initiating a lifelong intellectual and personal breach between them. By the early 1770s, when Herder was reconceiving philosophy as an anthropological discipline, Kant was pursuing his own interest in anthropology as an empirical and pragmatic sideline, especially by developing a new course in anthropology at the University of Konigsberg: a survival of his ambitions as a popular philosopher, but rigorously separated from his philosophical work. In spite of its considerable strengths as a work of biography and intellectual history, Zammito's study deals only superficially with the main philosophical issue in the later divergence between Kant and Herder: the relationship of anthropology to philosophy, or more precisely of Herder's hermeneutic historicism to Kant's critical philosophy. …