Becoming Human

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: On the Possibility of Critique and the Failure of Anthropology

Part One: The Historical Problem

1. Proto-anthropology and the Discovery of Reflexivity

Part Two: A Provisional (Kantian) Solution

2. Cultivating Freedom: Kant’s Affective Ethics

3. Freedom, Between Nature and Reason: Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology

4. Testing the Human: Kant and Forster on the Differences of Race and the Possibilities of Culture

Part Three: Three Responses to Kant

5. Poesie as Anthropology: Schleiermacher, Colonial History, and the Ethics of Ethnography

6. Lyrical Feeling: Novalis’s Anthropology of the Senses

7. The Body of Language: Goethe, Humboldt and the “Lively Gaze”

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

“In Becoming Human, Chad Wellmon accomplishes three significant feats: he provides a genealogy of the conceptual crisis that still haunts cultural anthropology, demonstrates the complexities of the ‘Enlightenment project’ that developed a richer notion of humanity than post-Enlightenment caricatures of the autonomous cogito suggest, and puts those complexities to work in a redefinition of modernity with a critical potential that can address contemporary issues.”

—John H. Smith, University of California, Irvine