Table of Contents

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

About the Author

Chad Wellmon is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

“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