Thinking with Kant's Critique of Judgment by Michel Chaouli (review)

examination of these minor yet widely circulated local publications that displayed knowledge of China just as effectively as Goethe’s better-known late adaptations of Chinese poems. Tautz also addresses the crucial role of Chinese language texts in Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, something that is surprisingly overlooked in scholarship on the topic. In contrast, John K. Noyes focuses entirely on a canonical authorial figure as he conducts an original close reading of Goethe’s cycle of poems in the 1829 Chinesisch­deutsche Jahres­ und Tageszeiten. He argues that Goethe uses China as a cipher to critique Kantian aesthetics, thus innovatively showing Goethe’s complex philosophical investments at play in the lyric cycle. By exploring the influence of Herder’s thought on foreign literatures in the context of Goethe’s poems, Noyes concludes that Goethe performs an encounter with foreignness in his poetry, while, in contrast to the Orientalists, presenting universal limits of understanding. Robert Bernasconi then returns our focus back to Hegel, presenting research that shows how he manipulated sources for his later lectures on world history in order to develop a racist bias against Africans and Asians, including the Chinese. Based on the results of his investigation, Bernasconi argues that Hegel had no philosophical grounds for presenting them as lacking spirit, as static and outside history, and even as less than human. The volume concludes with Jeffrey S. Librett’s study of Martin Buber’s employment of Daoism to critique the hermeneutic logic of the Pauline Christian tradition, notably the division between faith and law, letter and spirit, and supercession. Librett places Buber in conversation with the Enlightenment figure Moses Mendelssohn and makes intriguing connections between Jewish theology and Daoism, arguing that Buber undermines the “Pauline split between matter (or letter) and Orientalism at once.” Brandt and Purdy’s well-researched volume is impressive in terms of the methodological diversity of its contributors, all of whom are engaged with Enlightenment intellectuals’ fascination with and, for some (notably Hegel), repulsion toward China. While ordered chronologically, the contributions speak to each other in a variety of ways, depending on the reader’s own agenda and interests. However, I would have liked to see contributions in the collection that made use of Chinese-language sources as well. This could have opened up new questions about their translations, reception, and transmission in Germany—for example, regarding Goethe’s late lyric cycle addressed by Noyes. Brandt and Purdy have produced an impressive volume with consistently high-quality contributions, resulting in an enjoyable read even for nonspecialists. The book will undoubtedly have an impact on a number of fields of inquiry beyond China and the German Enlightenment. It exposes intellectual historians, philosophers, and literary scholars to methodologies they may otherwise neglect in their usual research on the same shared primary sources, thereby enriching future research on related topics. They have achieved the clearly articulated aims they outlined in their introduction admirably.