Universal selves in the face of the other: Crosssections of aesthetics and anthropology in Germany (Immanuel Kant, Georg Forster).

摘要

This dissertation explores interconnections in eighteenth-century German aesthetics and anthropology in works by Georg Forster and Immanuel Kant, showing how these two thinkers come to define concepts of the human being as a whole in terms of their individual perspectives on difference. Their varying concepts of human nature turn out to be self-portraits painted over the faces of others. An analysis of these self-portraits points to a subtle, yet devastating effect in simple acts of knowledge that results, I argue, in the total annihilation of difference.; In 1777 Georg Forster published both Voyage around the World and a German translation of it, Reise um die Welt, documenting his experiences with Captain Cook's second circumnavigation. In Reise, Forster describes each group of people the explorers encountered on their journey. Despite his remarkable efforts towards objectivity, Forster's descriptions reveal an inadvertent aesthetics reflective of the neoclassical movement in Germany which started with Johann Joachim Winckelmann's treatise Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755). The first chapter of this dissertation compares Forster's aesthetics to Friedrich Schiller's 1795 epistolary work Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen, and shows how in both texts the aesthetics elide all other practical goals.; The second chapter then examines the ways Forster and Kant mix similar concepts of aesthetics with their widely varying work in anthropology to arrive at radically different concepts of scientific theory. In 1785, Immanuel Kant's essay, "Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrasse" published in the Berlinishe Monatschrift, ignited a public debate with Forster over a new anthropological classification for humans under "species" for "race." Georg Forster responded in 1786 to Kant's essay on race with "Noch etwas uber Menschenrassen," published in the Teutsche Merkur. Forster argued against Kant's new "race" classifications which were based essentially on skin color. This chapter places the debate between Kant and Forster in the context of Johann Gottfried Herder's differences with Kant over the origins of humanity and a philosophy of mind in Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1774). While Forster's strict empiricism, perspectivism, and rejection of "race" as a scientific classification reflect an underlying, distinctly modern concept of the natural world, Kant's nature reflects back in an alarming way to Plato.; A final chapter focuses on Kant's own oeuvre and examines texts which span Kant's career, including Beobachtungen uber das Gefuhl des Schonen and Erhabenen (1764), Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), and Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). This discussion reveals thematic, methodological, and formal consistencies between Kant's work in anthropology and aesthetics, presenting a reading of his aesthetics as the transcendental support for his scientific theory which forms in turn the groundwork for his anthropology. Together, Kant's aesthetics and anthropology allow him to project a global authority on difference which elides all self-determination on the part of those understood as "other."