Of Progress, before It all Started : Herder and the Natural History of the Human Being
This paper addresses an event which started to be perceived and conceived of a long time ago. A change emerged in the 18th century which resulted in the focus of attention being directed onto the interrelationship of past, present and future within...
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This paper addresses an event which started to be perceived and conceived of a long time ago. A change emerged in the 18th century which resulted in the focus of attention being directed onto the interrelationship of past, present and future within the history of European thinking. From this point on, the sciences were also provided with a past characterized by its inaccessibility, and a future characterized by its openness for things to come. From this time on, it was the present that served as a reference point for everything retrieved from the past and everything anticipated from the future - things in the present were thought to have originated in the past and were expected to point forward to the future. My presentation visits this experience as a dilemma in the decades that preceded and then witnessed its emergence, within the context of contemporary natural history and anthropology. In particular the paper will focus on those writings by Johann Gottfried Herder in which specific narratives mediate the problem of a creation which has fust come to its closure while at the same time still being in process; of a progress which is not developmental; of an event which is still suspended in its temporality. The anamnesis ofthe history of science is not for its own sake: the movements preceding the birth of the modern sciences provide important lessons for the process of their present day revision.
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