H ERDER'S IMPORTANCE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT of thinking in the field of aesthetics and poetics has always been recognized, but it has been difficult to define the nature and extent of his contributions. They came during a crucial time of evolution leading into what is generally termed as European Romanticism. It seems to be necessary to define more precisely where exactly to locate Herder in this momentous shift of worldviews. In the second half of the eighteenth century, aesthetics established itself as a discipline of philosophy. In contrast to earlier rule-based poetics, the question of the nature of art now came into the foreground of scientific interest. In general terms, philosophers now granted a wider-reaching meaning to the senses and their influence on the rational perception of truth. Although the early humanists had understood the human being as purely rational, the senses were now no longer suspected of undermining the logical or discursive perception of the world through a diversity of perspectives. This epistemological revaluation was, however, not without contradictions. To be sure, philosophers now recognized sensory perception, on the one hand, for its contributions to the discovery of eternal truths; but, on the other hand, this contribution amounted to no more than furnishing the higher cognitive powers with rationally pre-selected information. In Enlightenment discourse the senses were equated in this respect with a rational interface between a causal explanation of nature and empirical reality. The fact that the human being experiences his surrounding reality in more than a merely reflective manner was not taken into consideration in the aesthetic and anthropological discourse of the Enlightenment. This also includes the “trivial” fact that everyday life abounds in unforeseen and irrational occurrences. It is significant that in order to exclude these potential irregularities of existence, the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century based itself only on the “hellsichtige” (clairvoyant) eye. In contrast to the “dumpferen” (duller) powers of sensation, the eye was given the task of providing reason with preobjective images of reality. The human being, who is constantly threatened by other sensations, is accordingly obligated to mistrust his lower organs of perception.

At the end of the eighteenth century, anyone who expressed serious doubts about this aesthetics — based as it was on epistemology and a theory of perception — found himself outside the boundaries of Enlightenment philosophy.