Immanuel Kant wrote that his infamously academic, arid
philosophy posed three questions: What can I know? What can I do?
What can I be permitted to hope for? He then added a fourth that he
claimed would subsume them all: What is the human? This last
question, he suggested, could be answered by a new science of man
called anthropology. In Becoming Human, Chad Wellmon recounts the
emergence of anthropology around a question that had become too
capacious for a single discipline and too unstable for the
distinctions that had come to ground Enlightenment
modernity--distinctions between nature and culture, body and mind,
human and animal, European and non-European.
If, as Friedrich Schlegel wrote, we don't even know "what the
human is," then what would a science of the human base itself on?
How would it be possible and why would it even be necessary? This
book is an intellectual and literary history of how these questions
took form in late eighteenth-century Germany. By examining this
period of anthropological discourse through the works of thinkers
such as Kant, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and
Goethe, Wellmon argues that the crisis of a late eighteenth-century
anthropology marks the emergence of a modernity that sees itself as
condemned to draw its norms and very self-understanding from
itself. Modernity became fully modern when it became fully
reflexive--that is, sensitive to the paradoxical and possibly
futile nature of the modern project.
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