What History Feels Like

In every cultural practice that wields orientational force, explaining the normative power of canons is a hard nut to crack. It requires understanding not simply the core texts of a tradition but also ways of thinking that those texts normatively cast into obscurity. As Erwin Panofsky argued, making monuments historically intelligible by analyzing the documents that surround them presumes the distinction between what is canonical and what provides context (Panofsky 1955, 10). Documents make monuments intelligible, but monuments make documents matter—or more often, not matter. Canons shape our inquiries prehistorically, so to speak. Because the normative force of canons is expressed in their disestablishment of alternatives, historians of canonicity must listen for the knell of silenced voices.Rachel Zuckert’s study of Johann Gottfried Herder’s aesthetics marches straightaway into the teeth of this problem. “Despite the richness of Herder’s work in aesthetics, however, it has not been much considered either as part of the history of philosophical aesthetics or as a resource in ongoing discussion in aesthetics … Herder’s aesthetic theory comprises a largely neglected alternative in philosophical aesthetics” (2019, 2, 5). Now, Zuckert may with justice deny that displacing the canon of philosophical aesthetics is essential to her enterprise, countering that she aims only to supplement it. In this perspective, were we to judge that Zuckert’s Herder cannot dislodge the significance of Kant’s efforts to make the subjectivity of taste compatible with enlightened cosmopolitanism or Hegel’s restriction of the significance of cultural variety in the arts only to historical reflection, we could still appreciate how Zuckert makes a neglected strain of aesthetic thinking available to us. Nonetheless, Zuckert sees that the ways in which Herder is an outlier makes him interesting, as she says, as a neglected alternative to the canon. And the reason for this neglect is plain. “Unlike most of his predecessors, contemporaries, or successors, Herder is a naturalist in aesthetics” (5). In reconstructing Herder’s naturalism, Zuckert invites us to value what the canon cannot absorb, and to value it because the canon cannot absorb it. To paraphrase Herder: This Too a Philosophy of Aesthetics (Herder 2002).