Herder is thus no straightforward historicist or cultural relativist. Rather, his convictions that the best art reveals the truth about its world and that there are deep commonalities in human emotional responses to such truths allow him to defend the ideal of a standard of or paradigm for taste after all. It will be noted, however, that throughout Herder’s aesthetics the notion of play has hardly figured at all; it has been mentioned only in connection with the superficial art of painting rathe