Herder S Contribution To The Acceptance Of Spinoza In Germany

An extensive examination of the profound impact of Spinoza's philosophy on the German Idealists.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is a towering figure in modern thought, but one who has hitherto been severely underappreciated. Michael Forster seeks to rectify that situation He considers Herder's philosophy in the round and argues that it is both far more impressive in quality and far more influential in modern thought than has previously been realized. After an introduction on Herder's intellectual biography, philosophical style, and general program in philosophy, there are chapters on his philosophy of language, his hermeneutics, his theory of translation, his contribution of the philosophical foundations for both linguistics and cultural anthropology, his philosophy of mind, his aesthetics, his moral philosophy, his philosophy of history, his political philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and his intellectual influence. Forster argues that Herder contributed vitally important ideas in all of these areas; that in many of them his ideas were seminal for major subsequent philosophers, including Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel, and Nietzsche; that they indeed founded whole new disciplines, such as linguistics, anthropology, and comparative literature; and that moreover they were in many cases even better than what these subsequent thinkers and disciplines went on to make of them.

Spinoza in Germany presents fifteen newly commissioned essays by a distinguished set of international experts examining the legacy and influence of Spinoza on German thought in the long nineteenth century. The focus on Spinoza's influence illuminates both the nature of his philosophical contribution, as well as novel aspects of the philosophical lineage from idealism to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and beyond. The chapters are at the cutting edge of research on modern German thought, not only concerning canonical figures like Herder, Kant, and Marx, but also thinkers whose importance has since been neglected such as Salomon Maimon and Lou Salom?.

One hundred years before Freud’s striking psychoanalytic case-histories, the narrative psychological case-history emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany as an epistemic genre (Gianna Pomata) that cut across the disciplines of medicine, philosophy, law, psychology, anthropology and literature. It differed significantly from its predecessors in theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. Rather than subsuming the individual under an established classification, moral precept, category, or type, the narrative psychological case-history endeavored to articulate the individual in its very individuality, thereby constructing a ‘self’ in its irreducible singularity. The presentation and analysis of several significant psychological case-histories, their theory and practice, as well as the controversies surrounding their utility, validity, and function for an envisioned ‘science of the soul’ constitutes the core of the book. Close and ‘distant’ (F. Moretti) readings of key texts and figures in the discussion regarding ‘empirical psychology’ (psychologia empirica), experiential psychology (Erfahrungsseelenkunde) and ‘medical psychology’ (medizinische Psychologie) such as Christian Wolff, J.C. Krüger, J.C. Bolton, Ernst Nicolai, J.A. Unzer, J.G. Sulzer, J.G. Herder, Friedrich Schiller, Jacob Friedrich Abel, Marcus Herz, Karl Philipp Moritz, J.C. Reil, Ernst Platner and Immanuel Kant provide the disciplinary, historical-scientific context within which this genre comes to the fore. As the first systematic argument concerning the early history of this genre, my thesis is that the psychological case-history evolved as part of a pastoral apparatus of care, concern, guidance and direction for what it fashioned as the ‘unique’ individual, as the discursive medium in a process by which the soul became a ‘self’. The narrative psychological case-history was in fact a meta-genre that transcended traditional boundaries of history and fiction, medicine and philosophy, psychology and anthropology, and sought, for the first time, to explicitly link the experience, history, memory, fantasy, previous trauma or suffering of a unique individual to illness, deviance, aberration and crime. In a word, it demonstrated, as Freud later said of his own case-histories in Studies on Hysteria, “the intimate relation between the history of suffering and the symptoms of illness” (“die innige Beziehung zwischen Leidensgeschichte und Krankheitssymptome”). This genre not only had a profound and far-reaching effect on the evolution of German and European literature – one thinks of the rich traditions of the Novella and the Fallgeschichte from Goethe, Büchner, R. L Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe and Chekhov to Kafka and beyond – but in shaping modern literature, the clinical sciences, and even popular culture. The book should therefore be of interest not merely to Germanists, modern European cultural historians, historians of science, and literary historians, but also those interested in the history of medicine and psychology, the origins of psychoanalysis, the history of anthropology, cultural studies, and, more generally, the history of ideas.

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology.