Translating the Pacific: Georg Forster and the Order of Nature in Meiners, Kant, and Herder

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Seminar. Jennifer Mensch (Western Sydney University) and Michael Olson (Marquette University) are running a three-day seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, 5–8 October 2023, Montréal, Canada.

Summary. As even a quick glance at the list of “Neue Literatur zu Georg Forster” included at the end of each installment of the Georg-Forster-Studien will attest, scholarly work on Georg and his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, is being produced at a steady clip. The enduring fame of the Forsters begins with their time spent as naturalists on James Cook’s second major expedition to the Pacific in search of a southern continent (1772-75). The Forsters each published important accounts of the voyage, and continued for decades afterward as key disseminators—via translations, commentaries, articles, and books—of travel literature for German readers. For today’s historians of philosophy, however, Georg Forster is best-known for his dispute with Kant on race. But the Forsters’ ethnographic observations and natural historical writings were more broadly influential than this one exchange suggests, and their philosophical reception history remains significantly understudied overall. This seminar aims to begin recovering some of their impact on the philosophical anthropologies produced by Herder, Kant, and Meiners.

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Format. Participants will receive advance copies of whole texts by Georg and Johann Forster, Herder, Kant, and Meiners for the seminar—roughly 100 pages—with shorter sections identified for each day’s discussion. Participants will be asked to choose a text and write a brief account—about 1000 words—highlighting themes and questions for the seminar to address.

• Richard Apgar (Sewanee)
• Peter Gilgen (Cornell)
• Sally Gray (Mississippi State)
• Jeffrey Jarzomb (Washington)
• Madhuvanti Karyekar (Indiana University)
• William Marsolek (Ohio State)
• Heather Morrison (SUNY New Paltz)
• Joseph O’Neil (Miami University)
• Daniel Purdy (Penn State)

Provisional Schedule

Friday, 6 October

• Immanuel Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen” (1775/1777)
• Christoph Meiners, “Einige Bemerkungen aus der Geschichte der Insel-Bewohner der Südsee” (1775)
• Georg Forster, “O-Tahiti” (1780)
• Georg Forster, Der Brodbaum (1784)
• Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Books 6 and 7 (1785)

Saturday, 7 October

• Kant, Review of Herder (1785)
• Kant, “Bestimmung des Begrifs einer Menschenrace” (1785)
• Forster, “Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen” (1786)
• Forster, “Cook, der Entdecker” (1787)
• Kant, “Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie” (1788)

Sunday, 8 October

• Meiners, “Historische Nachrichten über die Wahre Beschaffenheit des Sclaven-Handels, und der Knechtschaft der Neger in West-Indien” (1790)
• Meiners, “Von den Varietäten und Abarten der Neger” (1790)
• Forster, Review of Meiners’ anthropological writings (1791)