연계전공 유럽지역학 [East Asian Intellectual History Network]

– 강연제목: Listening to Difference: Race, Culture & Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment

– 강연자: Tanvi Solanki (Assistant Professor/Underwood International College, Yonsei University)

– 의장: Paul Tonks (Associate Professor/Underwood International College, Yonsei University)

– 토론자: Dr. Yoko loku (Tokyo University of the Arts)

            Dr. Hideo Kotani (Gunma University)

– 일시: 2020.11.25 (수) 저녁 7시-9시

– 장소: ZOOM ID 879 0507 6085

<발표자료 논문 초록>

In this paper, I show how the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his former student Johann Gottfried Herder's differing views of aesthetics were integral to their concepts of (respectively) race and culture. While Kant’s aesthetics were based on formalist, ocularcentric categories, the ear and the act of listening had potency absent from sight for Herder.The contrast between the two served to establish two separate lines of thinking about human diversity during the Enlightenment: what scholars have termed Kant’s “race-thinking” and, on the other hand, Herder’s cultural difference, which grapples with human diversity not primarily through the lens of visual perception, of differences in skin color or physical appearance, but those apprehended by listening. Herder established spoken language and the articulation of voice as the key to human diversity, which he conceived of as continually in formation rather than unchangeable. 

I first outline the distinction between “race thinking,” and the thrust of Herder’s opposition to it, particularly in his Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind. I then conduct a reading of the sources Herder critiqued in his“Treatise on the Origin of Language” to outline his theory of linguistic and cultural difference, those of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French Jesuit missionaries, scientists, mathematicians, and diplomats,  who described the inadequacy of their own orthography to accurately transcribe the “sounds” and pronunciations of the indigenous peoples they encountered throughout the Americas, Thailand, China, and Brazil. I compare them to the travel writings constituting Kant’s sources in his writings on race. I end by positioning Herder within contemporary critiques of race and language ideologies.Studying Herder’s writings on language, in regards to what I call “listening to difference,” may offer alternate possibilities to Kant’s color line theory of race, still taken for self-evident in twenty-first century’s discourse on race.