Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism

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H e r de r on H u m a n i t y a n d C u lt u r a l Di ffe r e nc e

Herder is often criticized for having embraced cultural relativ­ ism, but there has been little philosophical discussion of what he actually wrote about the nature of the human species and its dif­ ferentiation through culture. This book focuses on Herder’s idea of culture, seeking to situate his social and political theses within the context of his anthropology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, Â�theory of language, and philosophy of history. It argues for a view of Herder as a qualified relativist, who combined the conception of a common human nature with a belief in the importance of Â�culture in developing and shaping that nature. Especially highlighted are Herder’s understanding of the relativity of virtue and happiness, and his belief in the impossibility of constructing a single best soci­ ety. The book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested both in Herder and in Enlightenment culture more generally. s on i a s i k k a is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa.

H e r de r on H u m a n i t y a n d C u lt u r a l Di ffe r e nce Enlightened Relativism Son i a Si k k a University of Ottawa

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge c b 2 8r u, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

© Sonia Sikka 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Sikka, Sonia, 1963– Herder on humanity and cultural difference : enlightened relativism / Sonia Sikka. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00410-8 (hardback) 1.╇ Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744–1803.â•… 2.╇ Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744–1803.â•… 3.╇ Culture – Philosophy.â•… 4.╇ Humanity.â•… 5.╇Ethics.â•…I.╇Title. b3051.z7s55â•… 2011 193–dc22 2011002702 i s b n 978-1-107-00410-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To the beautiful, terrible land of my birth. I love you still, in spite of everything.

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on citation style Abbreviations and works cited by title Introduction

page viii ix x 1

1 The question of moral relativism

12

2 Happiness and the moral life

44

3 History and human destiny

84

4 The concept of race

126

5 Language and world

160

6 The place of reason

192

7 Religious diversity

219

Conclusion

248

Bibliography Index

261 273

vii

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for two research grants that were invaluable in completing the research towards this book. Portions of the book incorporate and adapt material previously published as “Enlightened Relativism:€ The Case of Herder,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 31 (2005). I am also grateful for permission to use revised versions of the following articles:€“On the Value of Happiness:€ Herder contra Kant,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 37/4 (December 2007); “Herder’s Critique of Pure Reason,” Review of Metaphysics, 61 (2007); and “Herder and the Concept of Race,” Herder Yearbook, 8 (2006).

viii

Note on citation style

Whenever I have cited directly from an English translation of a work by Herder or another author, reference is given to the translation, with, in most cases, a cross-reference to an edition of the original text. Thus, “FW 4, 839/PW, 270” refers to p. 839 of volume 4 of Herder’s Werke in zehn Bänden, and p. 270 of the English translation in Philosophical Writings, both of which are listed in the bibliography. Likewise, “CPrR, 23/AA 5, 25” refers to p. 23 of the English translation of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and p. 25 of volume 5 of the Akademie Ausgabe of the original German text. When no reference to an English translation is given, the translation is mine, though I have frequently consulted existing transla­ tions in producing my own. In the case of references to major works by Herder and Kant, and a few other primary sources, I have preferred to use abbreviated titles in my text, rather than dates and volume numbers. This is because I wish the reader to know, or to be able to ascertain very easily, which work I am cit­ ing or to which I am referring.

ix

Abbreviations and works cited by title

Wor k s b y H e r de r APH – Yet Another Philosophy of History (FW 4) Briefe – Briefe:€Gesamtausgabe (Herder 1977) Cognition – “On the Human Soul’s Cognition and Sensation” (FW 4) Fragments – Fragments on Recent German Literature (FW 1) FW – Werke in zehn Bänden (Herder 1985–) God – God:€Some Conversations (Herder 1940) Hebrew Poetry – On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (FW 5) Ideas – Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (FW 6) LAH – Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (FW 7) Language – On the Origin of Language (FW 1) Metacritique – Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason (FW 8) PW – Philosophical Writings (Herder 2002a) Sculpture – Sculpture:€Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (Herder 2002b) Suphan – Herders Sämtliche Werke (Herder 1893) SWA – Selected Writings on Aesthetics (Herder 2006) Wor k s b y K a n t AA – Werke, Akademie Ausgabe (Kant 1902–) APPV – Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant 1978) CJ – Critique of the Power of Judgement (Kant 2000) CPrR – Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 1997a) Gr – Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (Kant 1997b) MM – Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1996) PP – Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Kant 1983) Religion – Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant 1960) x

Abbreviations and works cited by title

xi

TPP – “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” (Kant 2001) Wor k s b y o t h e r au t hor s BT – Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) Mémoires – Mémoires concernant les Chinois par les missionaires de Pékin, 17 vols. (1776–1814) Œuvres complètes – Œuvres complètes de Buffon (Buffon 1853) PH – The Philosophy of History (Hegel 1991) PT – Philosophy and Truth (Nietzsche 1979) Sämmtliche Schriften – Georg Forsters Werke (Forster 1958–)

Introduction

Johann Gottfried Herder is commonly regarded as a founding father of the view that each of the world’s many nations has a specific and uniquely valuable character, expressed in the various facets of its collective life:€its language and literature; its religion, traditions, and customary practices; its values, institutions, and laws. He is therefore frequently mentioned in works dealing with culture or ethnicity, and it is rare to find any extended work on the subject of cultural nationalism that does not allude to the influence of his ideas. Unfortunately, at the same time, he has become one of those authors, not uncommon in history, whose writings are seldom studied in depth or detail, when they are read at all, in spite of the fact that his name is regularly used as a placeholder for a certain roughly defined position. Bhikhu Parekh labels this position “culturalism” (Parekh 2006, 10), a suitably vague term for a host of loosely connected ideas. As a culturalist, Herder is thought to have held the relativistic thesis that the value systems of different societies are incommensurable and equally valid, because there is no common human nature and therefore no basis for postulating universal ethical principles. He is also thought to have believed that peoples form homogeneous organic units, intimately connected to a native geography and bound together by a shared language. The normative implications of these ideas for ethics and politics include the claim that nations should be true to their own way of being, rejecting foreign importations, and that the boundaries between them are natural ones, with which the artificial borders of states should be brought into alignment.1 There is a measure of truth in these representations of Herder, but on the whole they paint a superficial and one-sided picture of his understanding of the character of cultural difference, which is significantly more For example:€Anderson (1991, 60, 68); Wolin (2004, 6, 17, 288); Barry (2001, 260, 265); Benhabib (2002, 2–3); Appiah (2005, 106, 244).

1

1

2

Introduction

nuanced than the “culturalist” label suggests. The problem is that, because he is more often presented as an example than studied, most accounts attributing to Herder the beliefs associated with culturalism are based on a highly cursory acquaintance with his thought. Rarely do they make an attempt to understand what precisely is involved in Herder’s claims about the constitutive components of a culture and the relation between them. Even more rarely do they engage with the underlying grounds for these claims, which would require a sophisticated grasp of Herder’s anthropology, aesthetics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Thus, Herder is regularly assigned a position on the map of contrasting views about culture, which is then targeted for criticism, but without much investigation of whether he actually belongs in that location, or, to the extent that he does, of why he would have chosen to stand there. I hope, in this book, to help to remedy this situation, by offering close examinations of a number of central issues pertaining to Herder’s understanding of the characteristics and capacities of humanity, and their development through culture. My analysis of these issues is guided by a concern with two overarching themes. The first is Herder’s theory of cultural identity, including the questions of how a culture is formed, what its essential constituents are, and what makes it a unified whole for which the metaphor “organic” is felt to be descriptively appropriate. The second is the nature, scope, and basis of Herder’s positive attitude towards cultural diversity, his belief that cultural differences are significant, and that they should, in some measure, be respected and preserved. While I would like to correct some common misconceptions about Herder’s position in relation to these themes, my purpose in doing so is not merely to improve his reputation. Instead, engaging with Herder’s writings over the last several years has also led me to conclude that, in spite of some flaws and limitations, his thought contains valuable resources for thinking through significant problems concerning cultural identity and pluralism that remain relevant today. These resources remain insufficiently appreciated, excavated and utilized, even though several sympathetic studies in English have made an effort to highlight the historical importance of Herder, as well as his continuing relevance. Isaiah Berlin’s well-known essay, “Vico and Herder,” for instance, first published in 1960, drew attention to three novel theses originated by Herder:€“populism:€the belief in the value of belonging to a group or culture”; “expressionism:€ the doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do

Introduction

3

so”; and “pluralism:€the belief not merely in the multiplicity, but in the incommensurability, of the values of different cultures and societies, and, in addition, in the incompatibility of equally valid ideas” (Berlin 2000, 176). Elaborating upon these three claims, Berlin mentions, among other points, Herder’s opposition to imperialism, his focus on language and literature, his sense that there is a common element running through the activities of a given people, and his belief that each culture should be appreciated for what it is, rather than being judged by the standards of another. In Herder’s Social and Political Thought (1965), F. M. Barnard discusses some of these same points, situating them within a richer analysis of central concepts like “force” and “organism.” Barnard also dedicates greater space to a consideration of the specifically political dimensions of Herder’s thought, including his relation to nationalism and internationalism, as well as to the concept of race. Barnard’s more recent work, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (2003) reiterates Herder’s belief in the “uniqueness and incommensurability of national cultures” (6), while noting the element of universalism conveyed by Herder’s notion of “humanity” (77). Although the universalist side of Herder’s thought tends to be overlooked in the literature connecting him with culturalism, it is by now generally recognized among scholars more closely engaged with Herder’s writings. Frederick Beiser even argues, in Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (1992), that Herder always remained fully committed to the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, to which he was won over in his youth by Kant, and that he only criticized his contemporaries for their hypocrisy and partiality in implementing these ideals (192f.). As the reader will quickly discover, I am more inclined to see Herder as a genuine, and often harsh, critic of at least some of Kant’s fundamental principles, along with those of the “Enlightenment” generally, depending upon how this term is defined. That is also the way Herder saw himself. Yet it is true that he did not entirely reject Enlightenment ideals and the universalism they entailed. Rather, in his accounts of language, climate, and religion, of the variability of human happiness, the nature of reason and the unfolding of history, Herder charts a complex course navigating between the poles of cultural particularism and universalism. I have nonetheless opted to describe Herder as a kind of “relativist,” knowing that most sympathetic commentators now tend to shy away from that word, preferring the less offensive term “pluralism.”2 This is because the ╇ Berlin (2000); Spencer (1998, 2007); see also Berlin (1991b) on the issue of relativism.

2

4

Introduction

idea of “relativism,” as I will demonstrate, captures facets of Herder’s position that the term “pluralism” does not. It is then genuinely apt, as long as one takes care to define it appropriately, and in a manner that avoids attributing to Herder anachronistic notions developed later in the context of specifically modern varieties of anthropology, or in the context of arguments based on distorted interpretations of the kind of cultural relativism these anthropological theories actually maintained. Herder does not, for example, interpret cultural practices entirely in terms of social function, nor does he analyze cultures as analogous to language. He sees language as a crucial aspect of culture, but he does not use the model of linguistic codes to conceptualize the character of culture, or the relation of cultures to one another. Furthermore, although language is, for Herder, determinative of thought, and shapes people’s view of the world, it is also shaped by the world, and it is possible to “feel one’s way into” the world of another people. But the word “relativism” is still appropriate for Herder’s thought insofar as it suggests that one needs to suspend the habit of evaluation when approaching the study of a culture, and to try to understand the culture in its own terms, in relation to its own values and beliefs. Herder can also be appropriately described as a relativist, I will argue, because he maintains that the goodness of individual lives is relative, within certain limits, to their achievement of the goals and ideals presented to them as desirable and worthy in the society of which they are members. This claim is contentious, no less so now than in the eighteenth century, but one should not round off the sharper edges of Herder’s challenge to the Enlightenment thinkers he confronts. On the issue of diversity, Herder asserts more than the somewhat anodyne thesis that the ideals of freedom and reason allow for a measure of variation in the way they are realized across different societies. It would be difficult to argue with that statement today, whereas one might still oppose Herder’s brand of qualified relativism, which is more provocative and also more interesting. While insisting on the appropriateness of the term “relativism” for Herder, I also want to challenge the common notion that the potentially objectionable elements in his thought all stem from this relativism, and need to be balanced and corrected through the obvious virtues of his universalist principles. Accounts espousing this view (Beiser’s is a prime example) fail to engage seriously enough with the critique of universalism launched in many of Herder’s works, where he takes his contemporaries to task for the cultural partisanship and prejudice that underlie their unthinking Eurocentrism, and their ignorant condescension towards

Introduction

5

non-European peoples. In my view, the most serious flaws in Herder’s writings result from his failure to live up to this insight, in that he often commits the sins of which he accused his contemporaries. In practice, the problem is that Herder is sometimes not enough of a relativist, and falls short of the principles he articulates. Since the lessons communicated by these principles are still worth heeding, one should not ignore€– and I will emphasize€ – the questionably ethnocentric opinions and attitudes that Herder shared with his fellow modern Europeans, in his view of other peoples as childlike, for instance, or in his relation to the idea of race, which is more ambivalent than might be apparent from his explicit rejection of the term. There are, then, a number of points on which I disagree with one or another of the few extended studies that have been published to date on Herder’s social and political ideas. More significantly, in relation to these studies, the style of my engagement with Herder is motivated by a sense that he deserves more attention from the perspective of philosophy than he has so far received. For whatever reasons, Herder’s thought has tended to evoke more interest among political scientists, historians, and anthropologists than among philosophers. As a result, the epistemological and metaphysical foundations for his claims about culture and politics have received less thorough investigation than one might expect, and certainly less than parallel themes in the writings of other European philosophers of similar sophistication and historical importance. Correspondingly, the relation between Herder’s ideas and those of his philosophical predecessors, contemporaries, and successors has also not received adequate attention within the scholarly literature:€his criticisms of Kant, for example, or his positive debt to the British empiricists, or his role in shaping the thought of later German philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger. Herder’s oppositional relation to Kant, in fact, will form a central topic of consideration in this book. Because Herder’s stance on a number of points developed through an explicit rejection of central Kantian theses, an exploration of Herder’s confrontation with Kant helps to highlight what is unique in his own position. Kant’s preeminence, moreover, has in my opinion too often led to a hasty dismissal of Herder’s contrasting philosophical views, which have more going for them than is generally appreciated. In sum, my aim in this book is to provide a philosophically informed analysis of Herder’s reflections on the nature of humanity, and on the intricate weaving together of language, religion, place, and history in

6

Introduction

the formation of the kinds of social unities which we now describe as “Â�cultures.” I will not proceed, however, by offering a broad outline of Herder’s position. That is precisely what has already been given in studies such as those by Berlin and Barnard. Instead, each of the following chapters addresses in depth a specific aspect of the question about humanity and culture. Their treatment of Herder on that question is shaped by an orientation towards philosophical concerns that remain relevant today, although it certainly also seeks to situate Herder within his historical context. While some of Herder’s ideas on the constituents of cultural identity, and especially on language (Taylor 1985, 1995), have been taken up in recent philosophical discussions, others, such as his understanding of happiness, or of the character of religion, have largely been ignored. In truth, dimensions even of Herder’s understanding of the role of language in constructing identity, I maintain in Chapter 5, remain inadequately thematized. I should acknowledge from the outset that one currently popular position on cultural identity which is ruled out by the basic nature of my inquiry is the one that rejects the very idea of its existence. Any defense of the continuing relevance of Herder’s reflections on the character of a “culture” naturally must be premised on the supposition that there exists some significant social entity for which this label is appropriate. I think that is a reasonable supposition. It is contested, however, in some of the recent critical literature on the subject, which seems to have two primary targets. One is cultural “essentialism”:€ the view that each culture has a definable core that makes it what it is, and that distinguishes it from any other. Against this thesis, critics stress the internal diversity and temporal fluidity of cultural groupings, the historical and present overlaps between these groupings, the porousness of their borders, and the condition of hybridity.3 The other target is more difficult to describe with precision, but involves the idea, in the minds of its opponents, that cultures are natural entities of some sort, where their alleged reality and genuineness are founded upon a belief in their naturalness. Debunking such beliefs, constructivist views of identity emphasize the extent to which identities are artificial groupings, manufactured by social and political pressures, often deliberately manipulated by vested interests, and involving a great deal of falsification and forgetting.4 See, for example, Benhabib (2002, esp. 1–23); Bhabha (1994); Appiah (2005, esp. 114–54); Hall (1992); and Bhatti (2005). 4 The most strongly constructivist accounts of this sort focus on national, rather than cultural, identity (see Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991). But Benhabib’s (2002) analysis of cultural identity is also constructivist. 3

Introduction

7

Herder is actually not as strong a cultural essentialist as is sometimes thought. He explicitly acknowledges that cultures are not internally uniform, that they fuse to form new combinations, and that their evolution is shaped by interaction with one another. On the latter point, far from holding the view that cultures should shun foreign influence, Herder largely sees cultural interaction as a good thing, as long as it is not the result either of violence or of imitation arising purely from a sense of cultural inferiority.5 In addition, Herder denies that there are clear borders between types of things anywhere in nature, and it would be bizarre to attribute to him the belief that human cultures have “essences” which are more definite and stable than those he assigns to natural kinds. He nevertheless does think that cultures have distinct characters in a weaker sense, resulting from identifiably real differences among histories, languages, geographies, forms of life, and beliefs. I believe this position is defensible, even if Herder’s own version of it is in places still too strong, and in need of modification. Anti-essentialism, however well-founded in some respects, does not establish either the non-existence or the worthlessness of cultural identity.6 Cultures may be internally diverse, shifting, hybrid, and porous, but the fact is that individuals are shaped by, and feel a special affinity for, this configuration of cultural elements rather than that one, and this fact still needs to be appreciated, thematized, and examined. As to the thesis that cultural identities are artificial constructs rather than natural forms, it is not altogether clear what view such a thesis means to refute, or what consequences are supposed to follow from the refutation. No one with any knowledge of history believes that cultures are wholly static, with respect either to their content or to the borders between them, nor does anyone suppose that they are anything other than human constructions. For Herder, cultures are the product of Bildung, of processes of education and cultivation involving the active exercise of specifically human, reflective faculties. Individuals become members of cultures by participating in these processes, which they begin to do as soon as they are born into a human society. Presumably, constructivist theories of culture do not mean to deny that the theories of cultural identity they criticize affirm the constructed character of cultures in these senses; otherwise, they would too obviously be attacking a straw man. In many cases, constructivist critiques focus, rather, on falsification and invention, on the extent to which national and cultural identities consist of manufactured 5

See Spencer (2007, 83–6, 100–1).╇╅

╇ Cf. Modood (2000, 175–80).

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Introduction

allegiances that reconfigure and recompose an allegedly common past, suppressing certain historical memories€ – for instance, of hostility and difference among groups now asserted as forming a unity€– while inventing fictive narratives and imagining sentiments of solidarity. Critiques of this sort perform a valuable function in helping to expose dangerous popular myths about identity€– myths that are mobilized in order to mask internal oppression and inequality, as well as to promote exclusion, xenophobia, and other forms of group-based conflict. But one should not draw from them the lesson that the sense of possessing a common cultural identity is entirely an illusion, or that these types of Â�identity are always and only fictions. For one thing, a sense of solidarity has to be distinguished from the existence of the kinds of common features that are generally associated with the idea of culture. The latter features may or may not be sufficient to constitute a basis for social or political solidarity, and they may (in reality, they always do) coexist with divergent economic interests, and with inequalities of class, caste, gender, and color. Moreover, people can share a common culture without being reflectively aware of doing so, or without this awareness being a significant aspect of the way in which they define themselves. Herder’s focus is not on soliÂ� darity, or on the sense of belonging to a particular cultural group, but on the features that cultural groups do as a matter of fact have in common. That the members of a cultural group may not pay attention to these common features until presented with a pressure that causes them to do so, or that they may not feel solidarity with one another until they face a common threat, or are mobilized against an imagined enemy, is a separate point. If, on the other hand, the constructivist claim is that a society never possesses any common cultural features beyond the false mythologies invented by nationalist discourses, that is a claim Herder would indeed deny. Again, though, I think Herder’s position on this point is defensible. It will not seem so if one insists that a culture must be definable through a set of necessary and sufficient conditions in order to be a category of real things, but that is an unreasonable standard to apply. Even biological species will not meet it, let alone social groups. Furthermore, as Nicholas Kompridis argues, “when we allow our talk of ‘construction’ to distort its object, we come uncomfortably close to a position which fictionalizes culture and identity” (Kompridis 2005, 324), and which treats “cultural identifications and attachments as imaginary constructs that can be as easily constructed as deconstructed” (325), in which membership is a matter of choice (329). On Herder’s analysis, by contrast, enculturation, the

Introduction

9

process of being formed within the context of a given culture or number of cultures, yields a kind of belonging that is nothing like membership in a voluntary organization. An individual may dislike something, or many things, or even almost everything about the society in which she is raised; she is nonetheless deeply affected by the character of that society simply in virtue of the fact that she took shape as a human being within it. There can be no question of “deconstructing” this shape. One would have to be reborn as a different person. Herder does tend to attribute to native cultures too great a determining force upon individuals, leaving insufficient room for cultural mobility and the renegotiation of identity. He had not witnessed the kinds of voluntary large-scale global migrations to which we are now accustomed, and much of the cultural dislocation and rupture that he did see was the result of conquest. His view of cultural migration, as opposed to interaction, is generally negative, and his thought contains inadequate resources for analyzing complex, hybrid, and hyphenated identities. Acknowledging these shortcomings, the strength of Herder’s account consists in its recognition of the significance of the specific cultural environment within which individuals realize the various aspects of their humanity:€ their emotions, reason, and habits of thought; their values and modes of social interaction; their practical, aesthetic, and spiritual responses to the world. And while it is important to be critical of relations to identity that engender violence, one should be equally wary these days of what Linda Alcoff has described as the “pathologizing of identity” (Alcoff 2006, 11) within discourses that represent group identities exclusively as constricting and dangerous, to be dismantled or surpassed wherever possible. With respect to cultural identity, Herder’s analyses help to show why the goal of transcending the shaping forces of culture is incoherent, and why cultural attachments are profoundly meaningful and important to individuals, needing to be appropriately qualified and balanced, not eliminated. A final question I would like to broach in this Introduction is that of why Herder is not more widely read and studied, if he is, as I am implying, an important thinker whose works merit serious consideration. Part of the answer lies, I think, in the rather diffuse character of much of his writing. Herder’s works lack the degree of systematic organization and focus that one expects to find in philosophical analyses on a particular subject. Consequently, as Michael Morton points out, it is difficult to locate a definitive text within the Herder corpus that could serve as a good point of entry into his thought (Morton 1989, 3). On several occasions, I have myself encountered this problem when faced with a request for a

10

Introduction

reference to exactly such a text, evoked by my enthusiastic praise of one or another Herderian idea in conversations with colleagues. The difficulty has been that passages dealing with the idea in question are scattered here and there among a number of Herder’s works, sometimes expressed in an effusive literary style, and frequently mingled with highly contemporary references, as well as with hypotheses or empirical observations that have not stood the test of time. One will not find in Herder’s writings the kind of extended, principled argumentation and cool analysis typical of a philosopher like Spinoza or Kant. Temperamentally, Herder seems to have lacked the levels of patience and detachment required for the production of that genre of philosophical disquisition. This does not mean, however, that his views on given subjects are either rash or incomplete, or inconsistent with one another. On the contrary, I will show that a careful examination of Herder’s works reveals a clear, coherent, and well-developed philosophical position€ – one of whose elements is that, given the relation between language, knowledge, and thought, abstract reasoning is of limited value, and is prone to self-bewitchment. Another, more pedestrian, reason why Herder is not more widely read in the English-speaking world, and why it is difficult to refer potential readers to a single text, is the lack of translations. Only a few of Herder’s writings have been fully translated into English. Among these, the one complete translation of his major work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, dates from about 1800. Readers of Herder in English, therefore, have to rely exclusively on the selected extracts from his works available in a number of anthologies.7 This restriction reinforces the partial and skewed image of Herder to which I alluded earlier. Serious Herder scholars study his works in German, of course, but many English accounts of his thought, even relatively long ones, are based only on the very limited portion of his writings that is available in translation.8 The German reader does not face this problem of accessibility, and yet, although there is more scholarship on Herder published in German than in English, as one would expect, little of it deals with the subject central to this book. That is not surprising. Sympathetic analyses of strong theories of cultural identity within the German tradition are exceedingly The most recent of these is Michael Forster’s volume, Philosophical Writings. See Herder (2002) for details about this anthology and others. Parekh’s account in Rethinking Multiculturalism, for instance, is based entirely on Barnard’s anthology, along with two translations, one badly outdated and one abridged, of the Ideas (Parekh 2006). The same is true of many English-language articles on Herder, such as Whitton (1988) and Wilson (1998).

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Introduction

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rare in Germany itself, for obvious historical reasons. Articles have been Â�published on Herder’s understanding of Volk,9 and on his relation to Nazism,10 but there is no comprehensive philosophical work in German that presents the various facets of Herder’s theory of culture in a positive light. I readily admit the dangers and limitations of some of Herder’s ideas about the kind of unity that is supposed to constitute a Volk, a Â�people or nation, and I will discuss the use of these ideas by Nazi authors at several points. At the same time, I would insist that Herder’s view of culture is by no means intrinsically connected with fascism. Not only did he stress ideals of freedom and fairness which he took to be universal, but his understanding of cultural identity does not necessarily entail the conclusion that states should be monocultural.11 Even if Herder was himself disposed toward the latter view, his belief that it is important to respect the different cultures within which people’s identities are formed, and that there is no single best culture, can just as easily lead to multiculturalist conclusions. The units of group identity analyzed and defended by Herder are, after all, cultural rather than political ones. And his own pluralistic defense of the intrinsic value of different cultures is directed against claims to cultural and racial superiority of precisely the sort that have been, and continue to be, deployed in the service of denigration, vioÂ� lence, and subjugation. Examples include Fink (1987); Koepke (1987a); and Irmscher (1994). See, for instance, Schneider (1994). 11 For a recent analysis of this theme, see Eggel et al. (2007). ╇ 9 10

Ch apter 1

The question of moral relativism

In line with the view of him as a “culturalist,” Herder has often been thought to espouse a thoroughgoing moral relativism, maintaining that different societies and ages hold distinct systems of belief regarding what is good and bad, right and wrong, and that there are no objective, transhistorical, and transcultural criteria for judging between these systems. In the majority of cases, the ascription of moral relativism to Herder is intended as a criticism and refutation, and at times also as a warning of the dangers of Herder’s thought. Consider, for example, the following remark by Max Rouché, in his introduction to the 1943 French translation of Yet Another Philosophy of History: With Yet Another Philosophy of History, according to which our conception of life is a function of our nation and our age, German thought sets out on the path of relativity; our vision of the world will be presented as a function of our race by H. S. Chamberlain and then Rosenberg, and our type of civilisation by Spengler. Modern Germany is the country par excellence of relativity. (Rouché 1943, 74)

The implication here is that Herder was the starting-point for an idea that ended in Nazism, for he asserted, as did Nazis and their racist predecessors, that peoples are divided into types whose members inescapably see the world in different ways. The deep ethical worry about such a view lies in its presumption that there is no common nature by which all human beings are bound together, and also no common principles by which their ideas about the good might be either guided or assessed. The door is then open for Nazis to claim that Jews are an alien race, one whose way of thinking has no place in Europe, or that their own views and policies are appropriate to the character of their nation, and cannot legitimately be criticized by the standards of a system of values foreign to the German race. In accounts wanting to connect Herder with the pattern of ideas in Germany that culminated in the Nazi disaster, these two themes€– the 12

The question of moral relativism

13

division of peoples into distinct varieties and a correlative incommensurability of values€ – are repeatedly emphasized. At the same time, it has become commonplace to refer to Nazism as a prime example of the unpalatable consequences of ethical relativism. If one believes that there are no objective criteria for ethical judgement, the lesson goes, then one cannot claim that the Nazis were absolutely wrong in what they did, as long as they acted in conformity with their own ideas about right and wrong, coherently embedded in their particular worldview, however deranged and malignant that worldview might seem to us. Most people will not accept this consequence, and so will want to reject any philosophical position that entails it. But it is hard to see how Herder’s position could avoid such a consequence, if it is true, as Brian Whitton claims, that Herder held a “pluralist, culture-relative conception of human Â�values” (Whitton 1988, 154), so that, in the words of another commentator, “generally speaking, it was impossible to judge the products of human choice or invention from a position that transcended the limits imposed by historical and cultural conditions” (Gardiner 1981, 144).1 Kai Nielson therefore rejects Herder’s “relativistic claims about … forms of life being equally valid and all being incommensurable,” arguing that, “if Herder is right, we can have no grounds for the assertion of the superiority of one way of living over another.” Nielson’s own ideal, which he contrasts with Herder’s, involves combining the latter’s “recognition of the central significance of local attachments” while keeping “the universalistic ideals of the Enlightenment” (Nielson 1987, 383–4). Nielson’s understanding of Herder, like that of many others, is heavÂ� ily indebted to Isaiah Berlin’s account in “Vico and Herder.” Although Berlin does describe Herder as a relativist in this 1960 essay, however, a clarificatory footnote added to a later version of it maintains that the “relaÂ� tivism” Berlin originally had in mind should not be equated with “episÂ� temological subjectivism,” but is better described as “objective pluralism” (Berlin 2000, 198, n. 1).2 In other words, Herder is actually a realist about values; he believes that some things are absolutely good or bad, right or wrong. But he is a “pluralist” insofar as he believes that not all good things can be realized in the same society, that some goods actually conflict, and that one cannot evaluate societies against one another, so that cultures are “incommensurable” (Berlin 2000, 233). Likewise, as mentioned Gardiner acknowledges, however, that there are also universalistic elements in Herder’s thought. He concludes that, in expressing relativistic views, “Herder was endorsing an approach to which he did not in fact remain faithful over the whole range of his writings” (Gardiner 1981, 144). 2 Cf. Berlin (1991a). For a description of Berlin’s struggles with this issue, see Lukes (1998). 1

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in the Introduction, more recent scholarship on Herder has questioned the perception of him as a “Counter-Enlightenment” figure who refused entirely the universalistic ideals of his contemporaries.3 Kurt MuellerVollmer notes that “Herder’s relation to the Enlightenment is much more differentiated than we have traditionally assumed”:€and that “many would argue that Herder actually continued leading Enlightenment tendenÂ� cies rather than breaking with them altogether” (Mueller-Vollmer 1990a, viii).4 Frederick Beiser goes so far as to claim that “Herder’s critique is essentially internal:€it criticizes the Aufklärung strictly in the light of its own ideals” (Beiser 1992, 204). In a similar vein, and taking into account Herder’s varying, and sometimes even seemingly contradictory, claims about the values of different cultures, Vicki Spencer proposes that Herder offers “a pluralist alternative to the traditional opposition between relativism and absolutism” (Spencer 1998, 53). She appeals, in making this case, to the following definition of relativism provided by Bernard Williams, as a position which holds that: “right” means (can only be coherently understood as meaning) “right for a given society”; that “right for a given society” is to be understood in a functionalist sense; and that therefore it is wrong for people in one society to condemn, interfere with, etc., the values of another society. (Williams 1972, 20; cited in Spencer 1998, 55)

This, Spencer argues, is not Herder’s position. Herder does maintain that there is no single best way of life, and no single set of absolutely correct moral principles. He also thinks that some values and ways of life are non-comparable (Spencer 1998, 57). But he does not claim that the latter are all equally valid or good; nor does he exclude the possibility of crosscultural understanding and judgement. Rather, “the plurality of values to which Herder adheres is nevertheless derived from a minimal moral framework” (57), so that his thought is most appropriately understood as a form of “weak pluralism” combining an “appreciation for diversity with certain core universal values” (55).5 “For the cultural relativist,” on the other hand, “there is no context-free rationality and no universal See, for example, Gaier and Brummack in Schmidt (1989). In spite of such arguments, a contributor to the very volume for which Mueller-Vollmer writes these words in his preface still describes Herder as “a violent opponent of the Aufklärung” (Craig 1990, 22). 5 Spencer is drawing her conception of weak, as opposed to strong, pluralism from Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom (1986). She reaffirms this point in her more recent essay, “In Defense of Herder on Cultural Diversity and Interaction,” maintaining that “in accepting the existence of certain minimal universal values while recognizing many valuable ways of life, [Herder] was a value-pluralist in the sense coined by Joseph Raz” (Spencer 2007, 96). 3

4

Herder’s universalism

15

standards or principles which are somehow external to and above the historical and cultural framework in which they are held” (55). In this first chapter, I begin my analysis by examining a number of Herder’s central works in relation to the above-described scholarly debate on whether or not his position is a relativist one. A close and comprehensive study of these works reveals, I maintain:€(1) that Herder endorses a weak and fallibilistic form of universalism, resting on a minimal, empirically derived conception of human nature and a few related core values; (2) that this universalism is combined with several forms of weak relativism revolving around issues of methodology, including the need for sensitivity to cultural context, the difficulty of surmounting cultural partiality, and a recognition of the inevitable imperfection of every human culture; and (3) that Herder’s reflections on individual happiness and virtue express a deeper form of relativism, one which genuinely challenges the evolutionary assumptions of many of his contemporaries and cannot easily be squared with typical Enlightenment tenets. Understanding these various dimensions of Herder’s thought is necessary in deciding whether he is best described as a universalist, relativist, or pluralist, as an Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment thinker, and whether, or to what extent, he believed in the “incommensurability” of the cultural perspectives of the world’s various peoples and societies. I address these questions during the course of my argument, and return to them explicitly at the end of the chapter. H e r de r’s u n i v e r s a l i s m If the strongest, and perhaps crudest, form of relativism asserts that in the sphere of morality cultural conventions fully determine truth, then Herder is certainly not a relativist. This is abundantly evident from the fact that he persistently passes ethical judgements, often negative ones, on many aspects of the societies he describes, foreign societies no less than his own. While some commentators have maintained there is a shift in Herder’s position over the course of his writings, from relativism to increasing universalism,6 the presence of ethical evaluation remains a constant. It is there in all of Herder’s major works dealing with the theme 6

This shift has not always been seen as a positive one. Robert T. Clark, for instance, claims that the “laudable objectivity” of the Ideas “is unfortunately invaded by considerations of ‘humanity’” in a way that Yet Another Philosophy of History is not, and that this criterion of judgement becomes more “rigid” in the Letters (Clark 1955, 326, 385).

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of cultural diversity, including the early work often held to be his most relativistic one, Yet Another Philosophy of History. Ethical judgements are equally present, moreover, within Herder’s accounts of historically earlier societies and his accounts of contemporary non-European ones. He approaches temporally and geographically distant societies in the same way, in fact, exhibiting a tendency, typical of the ethnography of his day, to suppose that non-European nations have largely been as they are now, or at least that their histories have not involved as much variation and change as took place within the development of European cultures. In short, far from suspending judgement altogether, Herder both praises and criticizes virtually every society that he considers. The view that emerges from these assessments is, as Spencer notes, that “all Völker and eras possess positive and negative features” (Spencer 1998, 63). They all possess characteristic virtues and vices, with the vices often being the flip-side of the virtues. For example, in Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder describes ancient Greece as the place where mankind reached its most beautiful youthful flowering (APH, 26), and he is appreciative of the ambition, courage, and pride that functioned as virtues in Roman society (APH, 30–1). On the other hand, he notes that “among the noble Spartans live inhumanely treated Helots,” and that “the Roman victor [Triumphator] dyed in the red of the gods is also invisibly stained with blood” (APH, 37). Likewise, when complaining about the exclusively negative depiction of medieval society by his contemporaries in the same work, he nonetheless adds:€“I do not by any means want to defend the perpetual migrations and devastations, feudal wars and attacks, battalions of monks, pilgrimages, crusades:€I only want to explain them; to explain how spirit nonetheless breathes through them all!” (APH, 53). These mixed reviews of ancient Greece, Rome, and the European Middle Ages are reiterated in the later work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Here, Herder has high praise for the accomplishments of the Greeks, and especially for their language, poetry and art (Ideas, 522–37). Regarding their political constitution, though, he says:€“The severity with which Athenians suppressed those whom they conquered, even their own colonies, the robberies and wars, in which the Greek states were incessantly embroiled, the hard service which their own citizens had to perform for the state, and many other things, make Greek states not the most desirable ones” (Ideas, 535). On Rome and the Middle Ages, Herder is more profoundly critical in the Ideas than he had been in Yet Another History, but he still tries to mention their virtues along with their vices (Ideas 611, 829f.).

Herder’s universalism

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Herder’s reviews of non-European societies in the Ideas are similarly mixed. Although he associates China with despotism and insularity, and, as a result, paints a highly unflattering and distorted picture of almost every facet of its culture and history (Ideas, 434f.), he also says that in China “no subject is forced to adopt a religion, and no one is persecuted unless he attacks the state” (Ideas, 432), and he means to draw a favorable contrast between this tolerance and the situation in Europe. His depiction of Indian society contains both negative and positive judgements as well, although in different proportions. He is full of praise for the Brahminic idea of God, and for Hindu tolerance and respect for other religions (Ideas, 454–5). On the whole he is far more sympathetic to the language, art, and mythology of Indian culture than to those of China. But he does not hesitate to condemn certain practices, such as the treatment of pariahs and the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres (Ideas, 455–6; cf. Spencer 2007, 96). Also apposite in this context is the analysis Herder gives, in the Ideas, of the treatment of women generally. “No fact shows more decisively the true character of a man or a nation than their treatment of women,” he claims, and among “uncultivated nations,” those whose material conditions are hard, “woman is reduced to being a domestic animal” (Ideas, 318). In truth, according to Herder, “the women of most nations are slaves” (Ideas, 320), a state of affairs he laments. He points out the poor excuses men give for their brutal treatment of women, especially in warm climes where people are allegedly given to an excess of libidinous desire, offering the case of widow immolation in India as an example (Ideas, 319). The falseness of such excuses is shown, Herder argues, not only by the history of culture, in which proper education has made women equal to men, but also by the example of certain reasonable Â�peoples without a refined culture, such as the ancient Germans, who recognized what was noble in woman and appreciated the fine properties of her sex (Ideas, 320). The list Herder presents of these properties€ – “cleverness, faithfulness, courage and chastity” (Ideas, 320)€ – is not exactly revolutionary, and it is accompanied by a belief that the natures of men and women are essentially and profoundly different (Ideas, 316). Herder seems largely blind to the subordination of women within European societies, and he might have displayed a little more skepticism about the connection between hot climates and hot passions made by overwrought European travelers fascinated by the perceived lasciviousness of various others. My point here, however, is not that Herder was free of cultural prejudice, or that he was a modern-day feminist. It is that he

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The question of moral relativism

shows no hesitation in using cross-cultural criteria to assess the treatment of women among different peoples. Neither in Yet Another Philosophy of History nor in the Ideas does Herder provide any explicit and systematic statement of the values upon which his ethical judgements about the practices and social arrangements within different societies are based. These values have to be reconstructed from the particular judgements themselves, and the ones described above will do very well for this purpose. Herder clearly and consistently condemns enslavement, conquest, inequality, violence, and intolerance, whether these are directed against a group that is internal to a given society, like pariahs or women, or against an external group, as in the case of Roman imperialism or the Christian crusades. In effect, he always condemns practices that lead to or result from a severe inequality of power between individuals and groups, where the well-being of those who are oppressed by this inequality is harmed, as Herder supposes it inevitably is. One finds this supposition reflected in Herder’s complaints against authoritarian religious institutions as well:€ for example, in his harsh criticisms of the church in the Middle Ages and the extremely negative account of Tibetan religion provided in the Ideas. Herder draws parallels between these two types of religion, describing the Tibetan Lama as a religious despot heading “a form of popish religion,” like the one Europe had in its own dark ages, although the latter, he adds by way of qualification, actually lacked the order and morality (Sittlichkeit) for which Tibetans and Mongols are praised (Ideas, 449). Putting aside, for the moment, the possible inaccuracies and biases in Herder’s account of Tibetan Buddhism, one can see in it the concern with oppressive power that underlies many of his cultural criticisms. In Tibet, he writes, “spiritual and worldly power were sometimes separated within small revolutions, but in the end they were always united again, so that here as nowhere else the whole constitution of the country rests on an imperial high priesthood” (Ideas, 445). The ills of Tibetan society, within Herder’s account, largely stem from this uniting of political and religious authority, and its concentration in a single person who is taken to be descended, through reincarnation, from a god (Ideas, 445). Herder does not fault the whole of Buddhism for the case of Tibet. He states, towards the end of his account, that “everything in nature, including the philosophy of Buddha, is good or bad, depending on how it is used,” and that this philosophy “has its high and beautiful ideas, although, on the other side, it can awaken and nourish deception and inertia” (Ideas, 450). What he faults in the case of Tibet, as in the case of medieval Christianity, is the

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employment of priestly power to suppress people’s wishes, and to promote superstition and blind obedience. From these points, it becomes clear that freedom, understood in some sense, can be identified as one of Herder’s basic values. This does not mean, though, that his criticisms of oppressive practices and social arrangements amount to a defense of the principle of individual choice, interpreted as an intrinsic right. Rather, what emerges from Herder’s portrait of Tibet is an assumption that there is some fixity to the nature of the human species, and that this nature gives rise to certain wants, the satisfaction of which constitutes human flourishing. The problem with the imposition of the brand of Buddhism Herder thinks exists in Tibet is that it, like the “popish” religion of the dark ages, works against such flourishing. Tibetan Buddhism’s version of “holiness,” Herder claims, strives for a highly unnatural condition, consisting of “disembodied stillness, superstitious thoughtlessness and monkish celibacy” (Ideas, 446). “If every Tibetan followed the laws of the Lama,” he continues, “and struggled to achieve its highest virtues, there would no longer be any Tibet.” “But fortunately, the nature of human beings is stronger than any adopted delusion. The Tibetan marries, even though he thereby sins; and the busy Tibetan woman, who takes more than one husband and works more diligently than the men themselves, willingly renounces the highest level of Paradise, in order to keep this world” (Ideas, 447). Two points are particularly worth highlighting here regarding Herder’s understanding of power and freedom and the relation between these. First, Herder firmly acknowledges the reality of power inequalities within cultural communities, whereas a problem with some concepts of “culture” has been that these have tended to ignore the functioning of power in the historical and present constitution of societies. While Herder does not explicitly thematize the relation between culture and power, he is well aware that the established practices and values of a given culture may reflect the interests of a dominant group, rather than the perspectives and wishes of all of the culture’s members. The second point has to do with the role of Herder’s concept of human nature within his understanding of what is good, and of the value of freedom. Herder repeatedly speaks against extremes of asceticism, unworldliness, and self-mortification in all religions, including Christianity, and he is particularly adamant about this point in relation to sexuality, a recurring theme in his writings. Thus, Herder’s evaluative reflections on different societies are guided by a particular conception of human nature, according to which its plasticity, while considerable, has definite limits. The variability of human desires

20

The question of moral relativism

must be understood against the background of human nature, but the latter cannot be understood a priori, or through inspection only of oneself. Tibetans give evidence of the shapes into which human inclinations can and cannot be molded among the majority of people. They marry, and have children, and concern themselves with their households, even at the cost of losing the paradise that their religious authorities offer them in exchange for a life of asceticism and celibacy. Here, the implicit value of freedom (the word is not used in the section), of both thought and action, is an instrumental one. The attempt to suppress people’s natural needs in this nation is effected through various myths€– about paradise, about the Lama, about terrible punishments and atonements for sins (Ideas, 446), although these myths are, fortunately in Herder’s view, for the most part merely believed rather than followed (Ideas, 448). If a better political constitution would be one in which people were free to question such myths, and free to determine their own way of life, that is because such a constitution would be more conducive to human fulfillment. Within it, quite simply, people would be more easily able to satisfy their various desires. Only because Herder posits human flourishing as a goal, and thinks that some things genuinely contribute to this goal while others do not, can he pass critical judgement on the societies he considers. The idea of Humanität, which plays a central role in the Ideas, captures various dimensions of this issue, naming both human nature and the excellence of which it is capable. Hans Irmscher provides a helpful statement of the multiple meanings of this concept as it functions within Herder’s thought: (1) the general nature of man as a being that determines itself; (2) the particular realization of the possibilities of this general nature in a specific historical situation; and, (3) the historical task of the co-evolution of nations, involving the sublation of individuality in a world community characterized by solidarity.7 (Irmscher 1994, 205) Irmscher’s definitions nicely pick out and distinguish the main senses of Humanität in Herder’s writings, where these senses are interrelated and I would point out, however, that the phrasing of this last point in Irmscher’s list is slightly problematic. The Hegelian term “sublation” usually indicates a kind of incorporation in which the individual is preserved. While this definition does formally fit his position, Herder emphasizes the importance of preserving difference and particularity, among nations as well as individual human beings, to a much greater extent than Hegel does. Herder does not call for anything resembling a “sublation of individuality,” and that is significant.

7

Herder’s universalism

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mutually dependent. It is because Herder believes that human beings possess Humanität as a common nature that he can posit for them Humanität as a common goal:€“Our capacity for reason should be cultivated (gebildet) towards reason, our finer senses towards art, our drives towards true freedom and beauty, our inclinations towards love of humanity” (Ideas, 187). It is on the basis of belief in this common goal that Herder sees a certain progress in Humanität over history, a decrease in violence (Ideas, 639) and an increase in true understanding and justice (Ideas, 671). While Herder is usually seen as championing the variability of human nature, and as a radical opponent of Voltaire’s claim that “in general, man has always been what he is now” (Voltaire 1963, 25), the contrast between his position and that of Voltaire in this respect should not be overstated. After all, the second part of the Ideas takes as its motto a line from Terence suggesting that no person is wholly foreign to any other:€“I am a human being, and consider nothing human to be alien to me” (Ideas, 203). There must then be some shared properties that enable understanding between human beings, where such understanding is a prerequisite for any critical assessment of a practice or institution in a foreign society. Herder actually argues emphatically in favor of the existence of common properties among all human beings, regardless of the nation to which they belong (Ideas, 377). All possess reason, language, and the drive towards Humanität. In this context, Humanität signifies benevolence and respect, consideration for the humanity of others, as opposed to the inhumanity of oppressors and assassins (Ideas, 372). Herder maintains that all human beings possess the same basic aptitudes and predispositions (Anlagen) (Ideas, 379), but, in line with the principle of unity in multiplicity that is so pervasive in his thought, these broad common capacities and tendencies are, he thinks, realized in diverse forms, at varying levels of advancement, across different societies. Although he often describes these distinct realizations in terms suggestive of Leibnizian monads, Herder does not think that human cultures are, or should be, self-contained. As Barnard observes, “the Herderian ‘monad’ has ‘windows’” (Barnard 1965, 37).8 Herder speaks strongly against the invasion of one nation by another in the Ideas, but he supports forms of interaction that do not involve violence or assimilation, such as trade, travel, and study. “A noble expansion takes place in the soul,” he writes, “when it dares to venture outside the circle that climate and Yet Another Philosophy of History is more ambivalent on this point, though, sometimes favouring a level of cultural monadism (see APH, 39–40).

8

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The question of moral relativism

education have drawn around it” (Ideas, 304). A central reason for what Herder sees as the faults of China is its self-isolation, as a result of which, he claims, “it compares itself only with itself and neither knows nor loves anything foreign” (Ideas, 439). Homann and Albrecht rightly point out that, for Herder, “to the extent that nations compare themselves with one another and exert influence upon one another, they come to know themselves, in that they see what they are not” (Homann and Albrecht 1993, 80). Additionally, the China example shows that, in Herder’s view, the benefit of cultural interaction resides not only in its being a prerequisite for self-knowledge, but also in its capacity to effect salutary change. Interaction with the other is one of the elements that encourages cultural development and progress.9 In Herder’s late work, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, the discourse surrounding the notion of Humanität, with its repeated appeal to the importance of cultivating reason, goodness, and fairness (Vernunft, Güte, Billigkeit) among all people (LAH, e.g. 128), seems to accord more fully with typical Enlightenment formulations than do many statements in the Ideas, and certainly in Yet Another Philosophy of History. The same point can be made for the thesis of a common nature, which Herder, at one point in the Letters, expresses in a line highly reminiscent of Voltaire:€“Man has been the same in all ages; only, he expressed himself in each case according to the conditions in which he lived” (LAH, 577). As I have been arguing, however, the thesis of a minimally common human nature underlies Herder’s judgments even in Yet Another Philosophy of History, and is further developed in the Ideas. It forms the basis for Herder’s condemnation, in both of these works, of practices, behaviors, and social arrangements that appear to damage the well-being of individuals or to frustrate their wishes, and Herder particularly targets practices involving abusive asymmetries of power. These views are entirely consistent with Herder’s universalistic claims, in the Letters, that in the end all human beings are “common citizens of the great city of God on earth” (LAH, 154), that no nation should be viewed and treated as if its members were animals (LAH, 739), and that we cannot consider ourselves as happy Cf. Bernasconi on the application of this point in Herder’s view of Europeans:

9

Because Berlin’s concern was to secure the pluralism of discrete cultural units against the idea of conflicting values or incompatible outlooks, he ignored the possibility that the confrontation between the values of different cultures might be productive. But Herder not only sometimes criticized the behavior of missionaries and colonizers of what he recognized as objective values, he also seems to have thought that one of the objective values Europeans allegedly transgressed was that of opening oneself to challenge from outside. (Bernasconi 1995, 73)

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or morally good as long as there exists a single slave (LAH, 750). They are also consistent with Herder’s recommendations for realizing Humanität as a goal, which include abolishing war, the heroic ethos, imperialistic statecraft, and overweening patriotism, while developing the feeling (not merely the idea) of a sympathy through which each person can put himself in the place of the other (LAH, 720–3). Such sentiments are part and parcel of Herder’s picture of the human race as “an infinite diversity” struggling towards a common moral ideal (LAH, 750).10 Recognizing these points can help to resolve a puzzle which Berlin illustrates by saying, at one point in “Vico and Herder,” that Herder “can hardly condemn anything that displays colour or uniqueness” (Berlin 2000, 178), and, at another point, that Herder is not always consistent with respect to his doctrine of the “incommensurability” of cultures, “since he condemns and praises entire civilizations” (Berlin 2000, 223). These remarks are themselves inconsistent, and they are both inaccurate. Herder rarely praises or condemns “entire civilizations,” but he condemns something or other about practically every phase of every civilization. If, then, he does maintain that cultures are “incommensurable” in some sense, it cannot be one that would rule out all critical judgement, which implies that there is some common measure after all in terms of which such judgements can be made. Herder has no qualms whatsoever about speaking against war, conquest, subjugation, inequality, material want, and superstition, wherever he finds them. He thereby exhibits adherence to standards of judgement similar to those usually associated with the Enlightenment standpoint. That is the primary consideration behind Robert Bernasconi’s claim that “Berlin emphasized Herder’s pluralism at the expense of those aspects of his thought that showed him to be a more typical representative of the Enlightenment” (Bernasconi 1995, 70). According to Bernasconi: If Herder surpassed the narrow Eurocentrism exhibited by the philosophies of history of his time, it was not by renouncing the judgments that one people might issue against another. Herder allowed for one people to challenge another and put it in question. His point was that this was not the exclusive preserve of Europeans. (Bernasconi 1995, 78) 10

Irmscher writes in his commentary on the Letters:

Herder always understands the infinite individualization of the human within history also as the loss of an original unity which is always presupposed, and which has to be recovered. The task of human beings, therefore, their realization of Humanität, involves not only the self-determination of their individuality, but also the simultaneous sublation (Aufhebung) of this individuality and a return to unity. (“Herders Verständnis von ‘Humanität’,” LAH, 829)

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The question of moral relativism

Indeed, many of Herder’s criticisms of his allegedly “enlightened” European contemporaries, target the assumption not that there is some measure for assessing the advancement of Humanität, but that their own society or civilization constitutes the measure for making such an assessment. In Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder takes aim at the French philosophes for their national prejudice, which operates on the assumption that this one single culture, with its particular language and mores, is the epitome of civilization. “On commençoit à penser comme nous pensons aujourd’hui:€ on n’étoit plus barbare,” he writes, with obvious irony, “et nous pensons tous en français” (APH, 56),11 since that is what it means to no longer be a barbarian. There is undoubtedly some very German resentment against the predominance of French culture in this remark, but the fundamental point affirms Herder’s belief that goodness is scattered across the earth, and not realized without remainder in the form of a single society. This belief also underlies his hostility towards any form of cosmopolitanism that would extinguish national cultures (APH, 74), and especially towards one that, under the guise of restoring a golden age prior to the babel of diversity, actually aims to universalize a particular culture with a particular language€– that of France (APH, 75). The most frequently occurring theme in Herder’s negative assessment of his own age concerns precisely this universalizing of particularity, this failure, on the part of his contemporaries, to acknowledge the possibility that their society has its limitations.12 Yet Another Philosophy of History draws attention to these limitations in no uncertain terms, criticizing eighteenth-century Europe for its arrogance and assimilationism, its imperialism and hypocrisy, and its sterile, mechanistic intellectualism. These themes are repeated in the Ideas, where they comprise a general critique of a worldview aptly labeled by John Zammito as “Eurocentric presentism” (Zammito 2002, 334). In principle, the nature of Herder’s evaluation of European society is not fundamentally different from his evaluation of other societies:€Europe has its virtues and concomitant vices, both of which become visible through comparison. The problem with historians of his age is that they have not acknowledged the vices along with the virtues. As pointed out earlier, one respect in which Herder often contrasts European society unfavorably with some others, like China and India, is on the issue of “He begins to think as we think today; he is no longer a barbarian … and we all think in French.” 12 Cf. Beiser (1992, 206–7). 11

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tolerance. Europeans will not let be anyone who is different. They persecute internal minorities, and they seek to convert everyone else. If one gathers together Herder’s scattered remarks about Europe in the Ideas, one finds that, in his mind, the defining characteristic of the European spirit, in comparison with other nations, is a kind of restless assertiveness. In its positive aspect, this characteristic generates industry and progress. Herder claims that while China knew many crafts before Europe did, it did not progress because it lacked the drive to do so (Ideas, 441). But the negative side of this drive consists in aggression and imperialistic expansion, fueled by an all-consuming and indiscriminate appetite. “The European eats everything,” Herder has the Indian say, where the latter, by contrast, sets his happiness in a cheerful calm (Ideas, 291). There is, however, one kind of centrality and expansionism that Herder supports for Europe. When discussing the development of European states through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, he sees European culture as the historical origin of an ideal that should become global:€“Europe was to be educated … in a Humanität and reason that, with time, would encompass the earth” (Ideas, 891). Herder’s complaints about his own society do not, then, involve an objection to its basic moral principles, or even to its belief that these principles are universally applicable in some fashion. In the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, Herder writes that European culture cannot be the exclusive measure of all human goodness and value, but that is because, in addition to being itself quite heterogeneous, this culture is mixed with many shortcomings and vices (LAH, 700). Using an analogy I will discuss further in a later chapter, Herder takes Europe to task for failing, in its gray old age, to respect societies that are at different stages of development, while contributing to their premature aging through alcohol, illness, and slavery (LAH, 739). He urges Europe to make amends for what it has destroyed (LAH, 741). From remarks like the ones I have been citing, it would seem that Herder always believed cross-cultural evaluation to be possible, using broad criteria he took to be universally appropriate. Moreover, although the precise character and range of these values remain vague, they appear to include not only a basic condemnation of violence and material want, but also a typically Enlightenment commitment to strong ideals of freedom and equality. And yet, I want to argue in the next two sections, these universalistic elements coexist, in Herder’s writings, with both weak and strong forms of relativism.

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The question of moral relativism M e t hod ol o g ic a l r e l at i v i s m a n d t h e i de a l of i m pa r t i a l i t y

We have seen that Herder actually engages in a great deal of evaluative commentary on the societies he examines. The picture of Herder as someone who believes in the total incommensurability of distinct cultures therefore cannot be accurate, as it ignores this critical dimension of his thought. Nonetheless, Herder does repeatedly insist that different cultures should be interpreted from their own perspectives, in light of their own values and ideals, rather than being viewed through an alien lens. In part, this hermeneutic principle arises simply from his commitment to a strong ideal of impartiality, requiring a suspension of one’s own culturally conditioned values. Herder asks that the historian be aware of his own prejudices, that he approach his subject-matter with due care and objectivity, and with a vision that is non-partisan (unparteiisch) (Ideas, 509). By now, this last point may seem to be an obvious one, familiar as we are with the problems of cultural bias in anthropological and ethnographical investigations, but one should not underestimate its importance at the historical juncture at which Herder is writing. Sergio Moravia points out that, with respect to the development of comparative anthropology, what was most significant during this period was not merely the collection of information regarding far-flung and little-known cultures, but “a real philosophical-epistemological break” which abandoned the idea that Europe was the center of the world and that its Western Christian values were absolute (Moravia 1989, 121). The need for cultural impartiality is constantly iterated in contemporary travel accounts. Georg Forster, whose writings both influenced and were influenced by Herder, writes, in his preface to A Voyage round the World (1777): Accustomed to look on all the various tribes of men, as entitled to an equal share of my good will, and conscious, at the same time, of the rights which I possess in common with every individual among them, I have endeavoured to make my remarks with a retrospect to our general improvement and welfare; and neither attachment nor aversion to particular nations have influenced my praise or censure. (Sämmtliche Schriften 1, 405)13 A Voyage round the World is Forster’s account of his observations during the second voyage of James Cook, in which he participated along with his father Johann Reinhold Forster. The text originally appeared in 1777. A German translation, prepared by the author, was published in 1784 under the title Reise um die Welt.

13

Methodological relativism and impartiality

27

The German translation of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (1782), emphasizes the need to be unparteyisch in making judgements about what is civilized or savage, and complains about the partisan views (partheyischen Vorstellungen) of Europeans, who think that all non-European nations are barbarian (Macintosh 1785 1, 229). These examples help to show that, while Herder occasionally expresses some concern about the possibility of an evaluative “skepticism” that “would almost confuse us into not trusting our own tastes and sensibilities,”14 the real danger in his society is not such skepticism, but ethnocentrism. It is against this danger that his remarks are most often directed, including his complaints against the hasty, pejorative generalizations about past societies, and non-European ones, made by many of his contemporaries, as well as his various statements suggesting that, in order to understand the values of a foreign society, one must transcend the naivety of one’s own culturally conditioned perspective. In this respect, as Spencer notes, “the concerns which Herder expresses over the historical methods employed by many of his contemporaries clearly have much in common with those expressed in more recent times by anthropologists who adopt a relativist methodology” (Spencer 1998, 59). Herder shares with these more recent anthropologists a number of goals. Like them, he wants to promote the production of objective accounts of foreign societies, as free as possible from the intrusion of cultural biases. He is also deeply concerned about the legitimation of European violence against others in the name of an alleged cultural superiority. Surveying the situation in his age, Herder is frankly appalled at the immoral behavior of Europeans abroad:€their treatment of “savages” in the Americas, their enslavement of Africans, and their exploitation of peoples in nations on the verge of becoming colonies, like India. His criticisms of European pretensions to supremacy, and his insistence on the value of all cultures, are in large measure a response to an idea of civilization that was 14

“On the Difference of Taste and Manner of Thought among Men” (“Von der Verschiedenheit des Geschmacks und der Denkart unter den Menschen”) (FW 1, 160). The entire passage runs:

Can that which one nation in one age holds for true be held, in another age, for bad, for ugly, for useless, for repellent, for false? And yet this happens! Are truth, beauty, and moral goodness not the same for all ages? Yes, and yet one sees that principles for which in certain ages any person would have sacrificed his last drop of blood are in other ages condemned to the fire by the same nation … This skepticism would almost confuse us into not trusting our own tastes and sensibilities. This work was probably composed in 1766 but was not published during Herder’s lifetime (cf. APH, 40–1).

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being deployed to justify the denigration and exploitation of peoples who were branded as less civilized, or as uncivilized. Herder also thinks that suspending one’s cultural values so as to approach the study of others in a non-partisan spirit has moral benefits for oneself, as such an approach more easily permits one’s own cultural prejudices to be put in question and facilitates learning something genuinely new. Spencer observes that “objectivity,” understood as involving at least the aim of suspending cultural prejudgements, is by now an accepted methodological principle among most historians and social scientists, whether they adopt a “relativistic” methodology or not. “For this reason,” she suggests, “Herder’s claim that in order to understand the plurality of human actions and beliefs we need to attempt to study cultures on their own terms strikes us today as an obvious truism” (Spencer 1998, 59). One should be attentive, though, to Herder’s warnings about the distance between being able to articulate an ideal, and actually being reformed in such a manner as to follow it. Not only is Eurocentrism still alive and well, but even in Herder’s age, when much less reliable knowledge about non-European civilizations was available to Europeans, the latter were nonetheless capable of performing cross-cultural comparisons not wholly flattering to themselves. The majority just preferred not to do so. Herder does make these kinds of comparisons at many junctures, pointing out the superiority€– never wholesale, but in this or that respect€– of past as well as of non-European societies. There are other authors in the eighteenth century who employ the (imagined) perspective of the cultural other as a critical tool, although the projection of this other perspective is not always very accurate. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), for instance, in which his France is judged through the eyes of two Persian travelers, ends up being largely about the mores of eighteenth-century French society, and one cannot reliably glean from it any information about the Persia of his day. Still, Montesquieu does make an attempt at self-criticism by looking at the reflection of his society in the eyes of another. While doing so, he exhibits a thesis, similar to Herder’s, which combines universalism and particularism, supposing that, although human beings vary considerably according to time and place, some inclinations are inherent to the species.15 In spite of the imposed conventions of their society, the women in Montesquieu’s fictional Persian harem eventually rebel, and they present their own view of heaven as a place in which numerous slavishly devoted men serve their 15

╇ See Baghramian (2004, 61).

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every wish (Montesquieu 2004, 248–50). It is fair to say, I think, that Montesquieu fails to imagine the perspective of women as surely as he does the perspective of Persians, but at least he tries, asserting these perspectives against Eurocentrism as well as androcentrism. Herder’s Letters for the Advancement of Humanity explicitly integrates a belief in a common humanity with a characteristic commitment to the defining role of cultural particularity, and the issue of impartiality remains central. In the 26th Letter, largely written in the form of a dialogue, it is proposed that human beings are identified in terms of their culture, and that “when a German encounters a Frenchman, a Frenchman an Englishman, this is not a mere man encountering a mere man, but such a man encountering such a man” (LAH, 134). Taken alone, and read with the knowledge of a later history, this sentence has ominous overtones, seeming to anticipate Joseph de Maistre’s brand of extreme particularism.16 But Herder’s point in the dialogue is actually to resist the onesidedness of this view, to acknowledge its force while insisting that there is nonetheless an “invisible church” consisting of those who are capable of transcending the prejudices of their nation and native religion, and “who know well enough, when patriotism ceases to be a virtue” (LAH, 137). Later in the Letters he repeats this central message:€“above all one must be impartial like the genius of humanity itself; one must have no preferred race, no Favoritvolk on the earth” (LAH, 698). Recognizing the culturally embedded character of identity and struggling to achieve such impartiality are not, for Herder, mutually exclusive. The first has to do with acknowledging that individuals do not evolve within a vacuum, and that who they come to be is profoundly shaped by the complex of ideas within which they are educated, and by the very concrete elements of their social and natural environment, their Klima. As Georg Forster wrote in “O-Taheiti” (1780):€ “Everyone has his own way of seeing … the character and public knowledge of a nation, education, environment€ – and who knows what else?€ – are so many membranes in the eye, each of which refracts light differently, even if the dissecting knife cannot locate them” (Sämmtliche Schriften 5, 35). The struggle for impartiality, on the other hand, involves what one might, for lack of a better term, call will. It is significant that much of the language Herder uses when speaking of transcending particularity€– being unparteiisch, having no Lieblingsstamm and no Favoritvolk€– has For an account of Maistre’s position, see Berlin’s “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism” (Berlin 1991c) esp. pp. 99–100.

16

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The question of moral relativism

to do not with intellect but with attachment and preference. The same can be said of Herder’s remarks against national pride, against the sort of partisanship that leads one to praise one’s own nation above all others for no reason except that it is one’s own, and to take its side in all matters, regardless of justice (LAH, 255). In Herder’s view, justice requires not that particularist loyalties and affections be renounced, but that they be limited through a sympathy that is increasingly expansive:€“‘I love my family,’ says the noble man, ‘more than myself; more than my family I love my fatherland; more than my fatherland I love humanity’” (LAH, 692). Thus, Herder’s universalism rests essentially in the belief that everyone in every culture is of equal moral worth, which is different from saying that all of their moral beliefs are equally worthy, combined with this imperative to develop and exercise a sympathy through which the content of such a belief can be genuinely understood and taken to heart. Herder does not reject the critical spirit of the Enlightenment; in the Letters, he argues explicitly in favor of subjecting opinions to the trial of impartial consideration, and he associates the willingness to do this with the spirit of true tolerance (LAH, 244). Unlike Kant, however, when Herder promotes these Enlightenment values, he places the emphasis not on a cognitive faculty which is supposed to intuit, or generate, universal principles of judgement (and it is certainly true that his analysis of the relation between language, thought, and culture casts doubt on the existence of such a faculty), but on achieving the spirit of impartiality. Herder sees the greatest enemy of universal justice not as ignorance, whether of fact or principles, but as partisanship, and of this he holds Europeans more guilty than the allegedly backward peoples whom they condemn. It has to be said that Herder does not always manage to avoid the danger of Eurocentrism himself. At many points, his observations fail to live up to his own standards of objectivity, and to his insistence on the rigorous and empathetic study required for a proper understanding of any foreign society. This failure takes its most extreme form in Herder’s remarks on the physical appearance of different human types. One might think that, if there were any point on which total relativism were amply justified, it would be this one, and that, if anyone were able to transcend the prejudices of his age in this respect, it would be Herder. Yet it is precisely on this point, regarding physical beauty, that Herder has the greatest trouble attaining in practice the impartiality that he commends in principle. He asserts, for instance, that the proportions of the ancient Greek head were the finest possible (Ideas, 129) and that East Asians are

Methodological relativism and impartiality

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misshapen (Ideas, 216f.), while Kashmiris€– Asians who, not coincidentally, resemble Europeans€ – are very beautiful (Ideas, 222). These aesthetic judgements, which Herder adopts uncritically from his sources of information, contradict his own admonition against taking the common European ideal as “the model of all health and beauty” (Ideas, 277) when “reading” physical forms (a dubious enterprise in any case, but that is another matter). Nor do his claims about ancient Greek language, mythology, and poetry being the best on earth (Ideas, 522) accord well with his insistence that understanding the history of peoples requires a spirit that does not take one people as its favorite, despising all others, a spirit capable of an impartial and dispassionate gaze (Ideas, 509). And various items in Herder’s presentation of China and India fall far short of the standard set by his historiographical strictures against making hasty and/or partisan generalizations:€his assertion that the Chinese have not produced any significant scientific inventions (Ideas, 438), for example, or that Indians have been repeatedly conquered because of their peaceable character (Ideas, 417).17 The section on Africa in the Ideas illustrates quite precisely the character both of Herder’s ideals and of his failure fully to realize them in practice. It begins with the advice: “When we pass to the land of the blacks, we should reject our proud prejudices and consider this region of the earth as impartially as if it were the only one in the world” (Ideas, 228). We should understand that if “we” see the Negro as the son of Cain and as the very picture of a fiend, he can with equal justice see us as cruel predators, albinos, and white satans, and we can well Â�imagine that he might think of his land as the best one, given its riches and fruitfulness (Ideas, 228). But when discussing the physical appearance of “Negroes,” Herder does not quite manage to think€– as he very well might have, given the principles he has just articulated€ – that their noses are no more justly characterized as squashed and flat than his as protruding and pointy, or their lips as thick and swollen than his thin and deflated (Ideas, 230). And his remarks on the character of African peoples affirm ideas with a long and depressing history in the West. Africans are described as sensual and natural, closer therefore to animals than are most other human types (which is nonetheless different Merely recalling ancient descriptions of Alexander’s campaigns in India should have been sufficient to make Herder question the latter conclusion. As to China, Clark’s contention that there was little reliable information on China at this time (Clark 1955, 325) is surprising. There was actually a great deal of first-hand literature, some of which Herder himself mentions (Ideas, 432–3). I will examine this subject in detail in Chapter 3.

17

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The question of moral relativism

from saying that they are closer to animals than they are to humans, an idea Herder emphatically denies).18 In various respects, then, Herder’s Eurocentric assessments do not meet the standards of the ideally impartial anthropology he advocates. The ideal itself, on the other hand, is articulated in a consistent manner. One consequence of this ideal is that judgements about the values held by different peoples should indeed be made in relation to those peoples’ social and historical context. They should, then, be relativistic, but not in the sense of assuming that the rightness or wrongness of people’s values is wholly determined by that context. It cannot be that Herder holds the latter view, since he assesses the vices and virtues of various societies, and in doing so supposes that some inclinations are common to all human beings. His relativism about judging others, rather, is oriented towards the question of whether people are deserving of censure or contempt, whether they are blameworthy for being as they are and holding the values they do, given their historical and environmental conditions. In a similar spirit, Forster writes, in “O-Taheiti”: Virtue and vice are relative concepts, which, when applied to national character, should only be used in a comparative manner; and even then one must not judge any nation without taking into account the ethical system (Sittenlehre) that guided it. In this way we avoid the objection that we are attributing our thoughts to foreign peoples, and therefore assuming the right to punish or acquit them according to unfair presuppositions. (Sämmtliche Schriften 5, 64)

Herder pleads for a non-judgemental understanding of others on the same grounds, arguing that we need to take into account the cultural horizon that determines peoples’ values before we condemn them for holding those values, even if we want, finally, to criticize the values themselves. The concept of culture, of Bildung, as education and formation, is central to this argument. Herder wants to emphasize the fact that human beings are cultivated. They are not wild shoots of nature, but the products of society, and their character is profoundly shaped by their having been raised within a particular climate and environment, with a set of inherited traditions. In addition, Herder’s epistemology is deeply empiricist. People learn and know only what is given to them, and they have no access to any other form of understanding. It follows that, in the sphere of morality, there are, for Herder, no intuited principles and no pure See Ideas, 255:€ “Neither the pongo nor the gibbon is your brother, but the American and the Negro are. Therefore, you must not oppress or kill or rob them:€for they are human beings, as you are; with the ape you can enter into no brotherhood.”

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A deeper relativism

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reason. The sources of moral knowledge are environment and tradition, as well as the instruction, or at least pressure, of nature in the form of one’s own inclinations. Consequently, there are no transcendent norms to which individuals in every culture could have access, such that we would then be justified in holding them accountable for their shared conclusions. If Herder’s qualified brand of relativism permits cross-cultural criticism, it is not by postulating the existence of such norms. People are, he maintains, only what they could have been at that time in those circumstances, and they ought not to be blamed or ridiculed for having failed to be otherwise. Some might not consider the kinds of “relativism” I have been describing so far as genuine cultural relativism at all. Neither the thesis that we ought to try to understand other cultures from their own perspectives, nor that this process can lead to a salutary revision of our own views, nor that we need to make allowances for cultural and historical context in assigning moral blame amounts to strong “relativism,” as the majority of philosophers understand the term. These claims are, after all, easily compatible with universalism, a form of which Herder himself seems to have espoused in his view that human beings have a set of common inclinations that limit the shaping force of culture. It is then understandable that many scholars conclude that Herder is most appropriately seen as a pluralist. That is the conclusion Spencer reaches, arguing that, while Herder affirmed the possibility of diverse and incomparable sets of good ends among the peoples of the world, expressed in their systems of value, these ends, unlike the inhumane practices he clearly condemns, “do not violate the universal principles embodied in the minimal moral framework provided by his concept of Humanität” (Spencer 1998, 69). Spencer is right that Herder is not a relativist, if that label is reserved for the view that “all cultural practices are equally valid” (Spencer 1998, 67), or that there is no possibility of understanding a foreign culture well enough to be able to make judgements about it. But Herder also makes some claims that are too radical to be easily incorporated within most universalist positions, and for which “relativism” does appear to be the only appropriate term. A De e pe r r e l at i v i s m Of Herder’s major works, the one that seems to endorse relativism most emphatically and unambiguously is Yet Another Philosophy of History, and the single line that most clearly exemplifies this endorsement runs:€“every

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The question of moral relativism

nation has its center of happiness (Glückseligkeit) within itself, as every sphere its center of gravity” (APH, 39). This line is often cited in support of the claim that Herder believed the values of different societies to be incommensurable (Berlin 2000, 233), or that he had a “pluralistic, culture-relative conception of human values” (Whitton 1988, 154). Herder does indeed speak against cultural comparison in Yet Another Philosophy of History (APH, 26), and he is harshly critical of the evaluative comparisons drawn by authors in his own century. To yield an adequate picture of the type of relativism for which Herder is arguing when he makes such comments, however, they must be understood within their context. The passage in which Herder claims that “every nation has its center of happiness within itself” begins by addressing a rather questionable question, one posed, Herder says, by “a learned society of our age”:€namely, “which people (Volk) in history was the happiest?” Herder reasonably finds the question odd, and he implies that it may lie outside the horizon of a possible human response altogether (APH, 38). It is, after all, not a question about the virtue of this or that social practice in light of a specific good, nor is it even a question about the justice of particular social arrangements. It does not ask whether slavery or serfdom or violent conquest or religious persecution serve the interest of freedom, or promote human well-being, questions Herder finds far less problematic. It is a question about the moment in history when the greatest quantity of happiness was realized in a given society. In response to this question, Herder says, “I know not what to answer except that either, at a certain time and under certain circumstances, such a moment befell every people, or it never occurred at all” (APH, 38). When it comes to measuring quanta of happiness, Herder is a relativist, in a strong sense. He is also a relativist, in the same sense, about individual virtue. Both happiness and virtue are, for Herder, associated with human “inclinations” (Neigungen). Happiness consists in the satisfaction of inclinations, and virtue in their government. In an early draft for Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder had begun with the question:€“Have human beings’ inclinations changed from time to time, and what are the virtues and vices that have governed them here and there more or less?” (PW, 268). Later in this draft, considering whether or not there is a development of human inclinations over the cycles of history, Herder writes: let there also be permitted right at the start the separation of two side concepts which could confuse everything, namely that “of moral virtue and of human beings’ happiness in this sequence or in this cycle of their inclinations.” For both of these we not only still lack a correct criterion, but it could even perhaps be

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that human nature had such a flexibility and mutability as to be able to form out for itself in the most diverse situations of its efficacy also the most diverse ideals of its actions into what is called virtue and the most diverse ideals of its sensations into what is called happiness, and to be able to maintain itself therein until circumstances change and further formation occurs. (FW 4, 839/PW, 270)

Herder’s conclusion in the published version of Yet Another Philosophy of History is that human nature is indeed plastic enough to manufacture for itself diverse ideals of action and satisfaction. The generation of these Â�ideals, as well as the formation of the inclinations associated with them, is a function of land, time, and place. In that case, both happiness and virtue are “relative” concepts because they can only be defined in relation to the sentiments and values of particular societies, and can only be measured in terms of the ideals of those societies. On the issue of happiness, Herder believes that degree of happiness is dependent upon the achievement of whatever makes people happy, and different things make different people (and peoples) happy. There are distinct kinds of satisfaction, which it makes no sense to compare: Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and climate. For what is it besides the sum of “satisfaction of wishes, attainment of goals and gentle overcoming of needs,” which, however, shape themselves according to land, time, and place. Thus, all comparison fundamentally misses the mark. (APH, 38)

The idea here is that people’s wants are formed within a certain historical context, and that happiness consists in the satisfaction of those wants. Happiness is therefore relative, because it consists in the satisfaction of desires evoked, shaped, and held to be worthy of satisfaction in a given society. Although Herder does believe that some inclinations are basic to all human beings, he also believes that other inclinations vary across the species, in their presence, degree, and precise form. Since happiness consists in the satisfaction of inclinations, it will vary accordingly, and comparing the happiness of individuals in one society with that of individuals in a very different one will be impossible. This view does not entail any proscription against condemning practices clearly causing unhappiness, wherever they might occur. It is not equivalent to the sort of relativism which says that a person from culture a cannot pass judgement on any social institution or practice in culture b. It is, moreover, limited to a judgement about distinct forms of happiness among individuals who are happy, those who would be considered as happy within their society and those who would consider themselves to be

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The question of moral relativism

so. Greek slaves and Indian widows do not fit this criterion. The examples Herder gives to illustrate the incomparability of happiness in different “worlds” are not examples of the unfortunate members of a society, but of those who, if they are successful, would meet their own societies’ Â�ideals of happiness. “Who can compare the different satisfaction of different senses in different worlds?” he asks. “The shepherd and Oriental patriarch, the farmer and the artist, the sailor, runner, world-conqueror€– who can compare them?” (APH, 38). These are examples of different ways of life, involving different desires and pleasures. They are not cases pointing to conflicts of values that require us to refuse judgement about manifestly unjust practices:€for instance, those in which the interests of a dominant group are served at the expense of great harm to others. To illustrate the distinction, consider the difference between the following types of “relativist” statements: (1) a is harming b, and b is in distress, but I cannot judge that to be wrong, because the harm issues from a longstanding practice in their society; and, (2) I cannot claim that a is deprived as a result of not having/being x, because he neither wants nor values x, and it is wrong for me to assume that everyone does or should. He actually wants and values y, and he has/is y, so he is happy, after his own fashion, which is different from mine. Herder often makes statement like (2), but never like (1). One might argue that this is then not a very robust form of relativism, since it is (1) that most commonly raises principled objections from opponents of relativism. Modern Western liberalism, after all, acknowledges the validity of a range of possible good lives, limited only by certain principles of justice which Herder himself seems to acknowledge because of his belief in a set of basic human inclinations, and his sensitivity to the issue of power. Perhaps, then, one could derive from Herder’s account a set of basic human goods like those posited by Rawls€– goods people will want no matter what else they want€– while acknowledging that, beyond these goods and the framework of justice necessitated by them, individuals should be free to choose a variety of goals. But Herder’s claims are stronger than that. The forms of happiness he describes as specific to various ages and cultures are only possible within the kinds of social arrangements, as well as material conditions, that characterize these ages and cultures. While they might be possible, or might have been possible, without some of the very cruel practices Herder

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condemns, they would not all be possible under liberal principles, or under the kinds of social conditions that modern liberalism tends to generate. Some of them, for instance, are the product of societies organized along religious lines. This is true of the “Oriental patriarch,” the Indian living within a Brahminical society, and the Tibetan, who has her specific joys, even if some aspects of her society are also oppressive. Some forms of happiness, moreover, like that of the nomadic shepherd, the small-scale farmer, or the tribal fisherman and hunter, require conditions that liberalism might not be able to preserve without violating its principles, or that might simply have passed away in the course of time as a result of economic processes (which is not to grant that such processes are necessary or irreversible). Herder’s relativism about happiness implies a deep form of evaluative incommensurability entailing that the forms of happiness possible among these different societies, including ones that are not liberal and not modern, cannot be ranked. Thus, in claiming that every people has its center of happiness within itself, Herder is affirming that there is no scale on which all societies can be weighed as wholes against one another, taking happiness as the unit of measure. Herder makes a similar point about virtue. It emerges, for example, in his description of Roman virtue in Yet Another Philosophy of History: The great-hearted disposition of the soul to overlook pleasures, weakness and even more refined enjoyment, and to work for the fatherland. The composed heroic courage, never to be rash and to plunge into danger, but to persevere, to consider, to prepare and to act. It was the unflinching stride that never allows itself to shrink before anything seen as an obstacle, that seeks to be greatest precisely in misfortune, and never to despair. It was, finally, the great perpetually pursued plan, to be satisfied with nothing less than their eagle’s dominion over the entire world. (APG, 30)

Herder condemns Roman cruelty later in the same work. He is also harshly critical of the Roman empire in the Ideas, where he speaks of “the Roman eagle who, after pecking out their eyes and devouring their entrails, covered the sad corpses of the provinces with its feeble wings” (Ideas, 624). In part, these opposing attitudes are explained by Herder’s claim, to which I have already alluded, that “shortcoming and virtue always dwell together in one human hut” (APG, 37). Not only does Herder believe, as Berlin has pointed out, that some virtues are incompatible with one another, and therefore incapable of being realized simultaneously in a single society, he also thinks that virtues are necessarily accompanied by concomitant vices. The “manly” Roman virtues simply could not be realized without the aggression and violence that are their

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The question of moral relativism

essential counterpart, and yet they are genuinely virtues. What makes this conception of virtue distinctly relativistic, as opposed to pluralistic, is that Herder also accepts the thesis that, for individuals in a given society, being virtuous consists in living up to their society’s determinate, historically specific ideals of action and self-governance, assuming that the individuals in question themselves accept those ideals. Nothing in Herder’s account remotely suggests that individuals are wrong to challenge their society’s ideals, or to demand change. But if the Roman warrior accepts his society’s standards of virtue and struggles to achieve them€– if he is courageous, strong, persevering, and indifferent to pleasure, while believing that this is how he should be€– then he is virtuous, even if he would not be considered as such in a Christian society valuing gentleness, compassion, and humility. It is this kind of relativism that grounds Herder’s assertion that the protean transformations of mankind over the centuries do not reach towards “greater virtue or happiness of the individual” (APG, 40). This is a strong claim. It means that Christians are not, in principle, more virtuous than Romans. It means that eighteenth-century Europeans living in large cities governed by complex systems of law are not, in principle, either more virtuous or happier than nomadic shepherds following a set of customs. Individuals may, in either of these cases, be fortunate or unfortunate, vicious or virtuous. But their degree of virtue is constituted by their meeting the ideals which their society educates them to hold, and their degree of happiness is a function of their ability to satisfy the limited range of human inclinations generated by the natural and social milieu in which they are raised. Here, there is a genuinely Counter-Enlightenment force in Herder’s position, and a connection with the spirit of Sturm und Drang, for it is a consequence of Herder’s views that the “Oriental patriarch” who lives sincerely by the beliefs and values of his time and place may be both happier and more virtuous than the enlightened thinkers of Herder’s own age. There is, for Herder, no sensible answer to the question of whose life is “better.” This position is best characterized as a form of deep relativism, because Herder is not only claiming that cultures need to be understood from their own perspectives, or that people should not be blamed for not being more enlightened than their times and circumstances allow. He is also asserting that happiness and virtue, as properties belonging to individual human beings, are constituted in relation to those perspectives. The latter claim does contradict the universalist principles of much eighteenthÂ�century thought. Herder also complains, in Yet Another Philosophy of

Relativism or pluralism?

39

History, about the temptation, among his contemporaries, to mistake “enlightenment for happiness” (APG, 40), and he rejects the idea that an increase in enlightenment necessarily leads to an increase in either happiness or virtue. The opposite may be true, Herder asserts, as happiness and virtue are not equivalent to knowledge, not even to knowledge of what constitutes an equitable social arrangement, and neither is exclusive to, let alone guaranteed by, some one type of society. The way in which Herder develops this distinction between happiness and virtue, on the one hand, and knowledge as an affair of reason, on the other, anticipates a central current within Romanticism, and amounts to more than an “internal” critique of universalistic Enlightenment ideals, as Beiser claims.19 Rather, Herder’s position is best understood as one in which a degree of universalism coexists with various forms of relativism, including a deep relativism about virtue and happiness. I would therefore also dispute Isaiah Berlin’s statement that in Herder’s works “there are the separate strands of Humanität as a general human ideal … and, on the other side, his more frequent and characteristic pluralism and relativism” (Berlin 2000, 240). These strands are in fact equally “frequent and characteristic,” and they are not “separate” but profoundly interrelated. R e l at i v i s m or plu r a l i s m ? In the following chapters, more evidence will be provided, from a range of Herder’s writings, to support the reconstruction of his position presented so far, and centrally relevant issues like happiness, morality, reason, and the idea of human advancement will be examined in greater detail. But I hope to have made an initially plausible case for this reconstruction, and one that helps to justify my choice of defining Herder as a kind of relativist. Admittedly, he could not be described as such according to the definitions that Vicki Spencer, for one, employs, which are taken from some standard twentieth-century philosophical discussions of the subject. Herder does not think that the validity of judgements about “right” and “wrong” can only be determined by reference to the conventional definÂ� itions of a particular society, nor does he ever look at societies in purely The full text of the remark by Beiser I am alluding to here runs:

19

Herder’s critique is essentially internal:€it criticizes the Aufklärung strictly in the light of its own ideals. So rather than viewing Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte as an attack on the ideals of the Aufklärung by a Sturmer und Dränger, we would be more accurate interpreting it as an attack on the practice of the Aufklärung by a radical Aufklärer who had lost patience with his more conservative brethren. (Beiser 1992, 204)

40

The question of moral relativism

functional terms, as some modern anthropologists have done, assessing only the role that moral principles play in the survival and reproduction of the community. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine Herder assenting to the denial of some of the assertions that philosophers, at least, commonly attribute to relativists. He would surely not have agreed that there does exist a “context-free rationality,” for example, or moral “standards” and “principles” that could properly be described as “external” to history and culture (Spencer 1998, 55). One problem with trying to situate Herder in relation to current philosophical debates about relativism, the majority of which refute or reject the position, is a level of anachronism that inevitably creeps into the analysis as a consequence of the terms in which these debates are usually framed. In reflecting on the cultural relativity of what is good, Herder does not formulate the question in terms of the validity of axiological or ethical propositions, nor does he think of cultures as akin to linguistic codes, nor does he look at social practices through a functionalist lens. When one or more of these conceptions implicitly or explicitly provides the basis for defining options like “pluralism,” “relativism,” and “universalism,” attempts to determine Herder’s place among such options can be misleading. To illustrate my point, compare Herder’s approach to cultural variation among values with James Rachels’ candidate for a “culture-neutral standard of right and wrong” in his popular textbook, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (Rachels 1999, 32). Rachels proposes that, in the case of a given cultural practice, we might ask “whether the practice promotes or hinders the welfare of the people whose lives are affected by it,” and whether an alternative set of social arrangements might do a better job (32). Assuming we agree that practices can be judged in this Â�manner across different cultures, we have found, Rachels suggests, “just the sort of independent moral standard that Cultural Relativism says cannot exist” (33). But in relation to the question of relativism as it arises within Herder’s writings, Rachels’ argument seems decidedly odd, for Herder fully accepts the idea that social and cultural practices should be assessed in terms of their impact on human welfare. I doubt he would have been able to imagine any alternative to such a procedure. For Herder, it is precisely in making judgements about human welfare across different societies and ages that the issue of relativism becomes pertinent. First we have to decide what will be measured in the judgement. It might be happiness, or virtue, or accomplishment, or freedom, or knowledge, or some other category of human good. We also have to ask what constitutes these goods, where there may be more than one answer to this question, and whether an

Relativism or pluralism?

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increase in one is necessarily accompanied by an increase in another. In answering these questions, we have to face the problem of being a particular “we” among the many peoples of the world, past and present. We have to consider whether, to what degree, and how the distances between us and others can be bridged, given that the ways of life of some of these others will surely begin by appearing highly strange to us, as our ways would to them. In connection with Herder’s analysis, the question concerning the “relativity,” in various senses, of the multiple components of human flourishing, as well as the difficulty of cross-cultural understanding, arises in these contexts, where what is being asked about is precisely human welfare, and human nature. In contrast with Kant, moreover, Herder believes that morality, as well as politics, is about nothing other than the promotion of human welfare. If the character of this welfare, including the existence and extent of common capacities and needs among the species, can only be determined empirically, then moral and political questions cannot be decided by the “reason” of a human being in a given culture. They can be decided only through knowledge of the various types of human societies that have existed on the planet. They can be decided only, that is, through anthropology. As Zammito points out in Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, “Herder was among the earliest and most radical advocates of supplanting philosophy with anthropology, and he devoted his life’s work to that endeavor, with all its promise and Â�perils” (Zammito 2002, 3). This naturally set Herder against the post-critical Kant. Zammito oversimplifies the opposition between Herder and Kant on this issue, I think, in claiming that the latter “did not propose to discover human nature through a consideration of human variety,” but was, rather, “totally committed to a preemptive, metaphysical prescription of human nature grounded in his conception of reason and the categorical imperative” (Zammito 2002, 299). It is true, however, that Herder makes the precise requirements of morality rest on empirically revealed facts about human nature in a way that Kant does not. Given Herder’s stand on the relation between philosophy and anthropology, and given his historical role in helping to found the latter as a separate discipline,20 it may be, in some respects, more illuminating to approach the question of relativism in his writings through the concerns of anthropology, rather than through the framework of an abstractly 20

Zammito notes that “the parting of ways between Kant and Herder came at exactly the moment when anthropology in Germany ‘calved’ away from philosophy” (Zammito 2002, 3).

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The question of moral relativism

defined philosophical position. Herder did not look at morality exclusively in functionalist terms, but that is a minority position within anthropology, and not definitive of the discipline. Interestingly, some recent anthropologists have also taken issue with the interpretation of “relativism” on which philosophical discussions of the topic are usually premised, and I would suggest that the difficulty of relating Herder to that interpretation is a result not only of anachronism, but also of a reductive oversimplification of the concept of relativism among philosophers, as well as a general disconnect between anthropological and philosophical discourses on the subject.21 There are various species of “relativism” in Herder’s writings, oriented around some of the same insights and critical concerns that grounded theses about “cultural relativity” among anthropologists in the early and mid twentieth century. Viewed from the perspective of these insights and concerns, the term “relativism” remains a useful and appropriate descriptor. Instead of rejecting it, one might question the narrowing of its definition to the single crude position that most commonly forms the target of philosophical attack:€ namely, the one alleging that “right” and “good” are only what the dominant norms of a given society say they are, and cannot legitimately be judged from any other perspective. There are indeed many flaws and points of incoherence in the latter view, and it is worth opposing, especially in contexts where its assertion within political discourses serves to undermine efforts at criticism and reform of unjust practices. But “relativism” can, and has, meant many different things, and one should be equally attentive to the legitimate concerns about ethnocentrism that are often tacitly put aside along with refutations of relativism. These concerns were absolutely fundamental to the articulation of Herder’s views.22 There are also elements of Herder’s position, and especially his theses about individual happiness and virtue, that are much better captured by the term “relativism,” since they assert that judgements can only be made “relative to” the beliefs and practices of a given community. I will be arguing that, although the accent varies, the basic blend of universalism and relativism outlined in this chapter actually remains constant A collection of articles published in a 2007 issue of Anthropological Quarterly addresses precisely the issue of this disconnect. Significantly, the collection originated from the dismay of one of its contributors, Thomas H. Johnson, over Rachels’ misunderstanding of the concept of relativism as used by anthropologists (Johnson 2007, 791–2). 22 As David Wong points out, moreover, in the context of his own defense of a qualified form of relativism, “pluralism” is itself hardly an unproblematic or perspicuous concept, and in this situation retaining the term “relativism” may be the more honest choice (Wong 2006, 97–8). 21

Relativism or pluralism?

43

over the course of Herder’s reflections. It includes:€(1) the anthropological presumption of a set of basic human inclinations, upon which some criteria for cross-cultural judgement may be legitimately founded; (2) the view that human practices, values, and beliefs must be understood within their social context; and (3) the claim that the happiness and virtue of individuals can only be measured in relation to their specific values, being a function of their capacity to satisfy their desires and to live up to their ideals. At times, however, there does seem to be a certain tension between Herder’s respect for the distinct possibilities of human flourishing that were realized in different ages and culture, on the one hand, and his ranking of these possibilities as more or less advanced, on the other. The next two chapters explore more fully two issues central to this tension:€the status of human happiness, and the question of historical progress.

Ch apter 2

Happiness and the moral life

At one time, during the 1760s, Herder had been a student of Kant’s, and had greatly admired the views communicated in his lectures of that period. Kant’s highly unsympathetic review of the second part of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, published in 1785, however, shows how profound the philosophical differences between these two had become by this point. The nature of happiness, and its place within the “destiny” or “vocation” (Bestimmung) of the human race, forms a central area of dispute emerging from the review. Kant is responding, in particular, to a section of the Ideas entitled:€“The happiness (Glückseligkeit) of human beings is everywhere an individual good; consequently, it is everywhere climatic and organic, a child of practice, tradition, and custom” (Ideas, 327). Although he is not mentioned by name, this section clearly contains critical rejoinders, often quite harsh in tone, to aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy and philosophy of history, as Herder understands them. Against the idea that happiness requires extrinsic justification, for example, Herder insists that “every living creature takes delight in its life; it does not brood and ask, why is it there? Its existence is to it an end and its end is existence” (Ideas, 330). Against the view that true happiness lies only at the end of a history whose completion belongs to European states, he writes:€ “it would be ridiculously presumptuous to think that the inhabitants of all continents must be Europeans in order to live happily” (Ideas, 327), and he strongly opposes those who would see the destiny of the human race in the achievement of some final political condition. What, he asks, could it mean to say that man is “made for the state, as the end of his race and all of its generations, made in fact only for the last generation, which sits enthroned on the decayed frame of the happiness of all previous ones?” (Ideas, 332). Herder claims, by contrast, that happiness is an “inner condition” whose measure must be sought “in the breast of every individual being” (Ideas, 327). 44

Happiness and the moral life

45

These remarks are specifically directed at Kant’s essay, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” which had appeared the previous year, in 1784. Kant’s defensive response to Herder, in his review, emphatically reaffirms the position he had developed in that essay. In the first place, objecting to the worth Herder places on an individualistic and relativistic notion of happiness, Kant counters Herder’s question about the state with a question of his own. “What if the genuine goal of history were not this phantom of happiness, which everyone creates for himself,” he asks, “but the continually progressing and increasing activity and culture that is thereby set into motion, whose maximum possible degree can only be the product of a state organized according to concepts of human rights, and thus the work of human beings themselves?” (AA 8, 63). Kant also objects to Herder’s suggestion that a happy existence is self-justifying, arguing that Herder needs to address the issue, not merely of the worth of a given condition among existing beings, but of the worth of their existence itself. At this juncture, Kant poses to Herder the following questions about the life of “Tahitians,” as he supposed it to be: Does the author mean to say that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti were never visited by more civilized nations, and were destined to live for thousands of years in their quiet indolence, one would receive a satisfactory answer to the question of why they exist at all, and whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been inhabited by happy sheep and pigs as with these people happy in mere enjoyment? (AA 8, 65)

In light of this exchange, some commentators have tended to assimilate Herder’s position to that of the earlier Rousseau, judging that while Kant places ultimate value upon the struggle to achieve a just moral and political order, a struggle motivated by various forms of discontent, Herder prizes most highly the simple pleasures of life in (imagined) primitive societies. Allen Wood, for instance, claims that “human beings for Herder were destined by God for a life of harmony and innocent contentment” (Wood 1999, 228). Catherine Wilson thinks Herder echoes Rousseau in believing that “man was not made for citizenry and the civil state … but for family and tribal life” and that “sensitivity of the heart is more important than the depths of ratiocination” (Wilson 1998, 319). She finds support for this view in Herder’s identification of happiness with “the simple, deep, irreplaceable feeling of existence” common to all living beings (Ideas, 331), as well as in his proposal that happiness is “more a quiet feeling than a glittering thought,” so that “a head overfull of knowledge, be it even golden knowledge, oppresses the body, narrows

46

Happiness and the moral life

the breast, darkens the eye, and becomes to him, who has to bear it, a sickly burden upon life” (Ideas, 330). Herder’s anthropology and philosophy of history are, however, significantly more nuanced than such remarks suggest, and he is not straightforwardly a proponent of the ideals that Wood and Wilson identify with Rousseau.1 Herder is, as demonstrated in the last chapter, a relativist about happiness. He does not champion a single form of it, nor does he think that it can only be found in “primitive” societies. At times, moreover, Herder even makes hierarchical judgements about the inclinations and aptitudes of different peoples in which he, too, judges sensual enjoyment and ability to be in some sense “lower” on the scale of human goods. These judgements often express ethnocentric biases, both with respect to their interpretation, division, and ranking of the inclinations and aptitudes themselves, and with respect to the assumptions being made about how these are distributed among particular peoples. For instance, as we have seen, Herder’s portrait of African peoples in Chapter 7 of the Ideas presents them as less advanced than others, and as more sensual and childlike. This portrait is open to a host of objections concerning the accuracy of its representation of Africans, its suppositions about the character of allegedly simple societies in general, and its way of categorizing human abilities and activities. At the same time, when Herder argues that Africans do not deserve contempt, he is a consistent relativist in precisely the same senses that I identified as operative within Yet Another Philosophy of History, with happiness being a central measure. He argues that “Negroes” are not less happy than others, since nature has compensated its withholding of “nobler gifts” from their nature by granting them a richer measure of sensual enjoyment (Ideas, 235). This happiness should be appreciated for what it is, Herder wants to say, and not judged by criÂ� teria that are alien to it. He is again maintaining that happiness is a relative concept, both in the sense that people never possess it perfectly, but only in limited degrees and aspects, and in the sense that it consists in the satisfaction of desires that are context-specific and variable. Georg Forster makes a similar claim in A Voyage round the World: The ideas of happiness are infinitely various in different nations, according to their manners, principles and degrees of civilization. As the productions and apparent good qualities of our globe, are either profusely or sparingly distributed, In the case of Wilson, I am referring here only to her portrait of Herder. My analysis supports a number of the points she raises in relation to Kant, on the other hand, while building a better appreciation of Herder’s critique.

1

Happiness and the moral life

47

on its different parts, the diversity of human opinions is a convincing proof of that paternal love, and unerring wisdom, which, in the plan of this world, has provided for the good of mankind, alike in the torrid and the frigid zone. (Sämtliche Schriften 1, 405)

Forster concludes this passage with a citation from the English poet, Alexander Pope:€“Fix’d to no spot is happiness sincere, / ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where,” lines reminiscent of Herder’s answer to the question of which people in history was the happiest. In their respective views on happiness, Herder and Forster were formulating positions within a debate spawned by Rousseau, but they were not simply taking the latter’s side. While they challenge contemporary denigrations of so-called “savages,” they also both affirm, against primitivism, the (relative) happiness of what they considered to be more advanced cultures. Forster addresses this point explicitly in “New Holland and the British Colony in Botany Bay” (1789), where he writes: To wax indignant about the shortcomings of civil (bürgerliche) society, and to prefer the condition of savagery (Wildheit), is to forget that the refined person, as much as the savage, lives in enjoyment of his own existence, and that the difference between these consists only in type of enjoyment. The enjoyment of the refined person resides in accomplishments for which the capacity lies dormant in the savage. (Sämtliche Schriften 5, 161)

The vocabulary of refinement and savagery reveals that Forster’s belief in the relativity of happiness is not of such a sort as to exclude all hierÂ�archical judgements even about types of happiness. In Reise um die Welt (1784), the German version of A Voyage round the World, he says that Glückseligkeit immer nur ein relativer Begriff ist (Sämtliche Schriften 2, 298), that happiness is always only a “relative” concept, but he means by this that it is never perfectly achieved and can only be measured comparatively, not that no distinctions between more and less refined forms of it can be made. The point is unambiguous in the English text, which speaks of “the imperfect state of sublunary happiness,” describing it as “comparative at best” (Sämtliche Schriften 1, 215). Likewise, Herder only says that “Negroes” are equally happy, and that they should not be despised for lacking capacities nature did not give them, or enjoyments for which they feel no need. His account nonetheless affirms that those capacities and enjoyments are “more noble.” Still, it is in an important respect true, as one scholar says with explicit reference to the passages on Africa, that for Herder “all [peoples], in the specific form that corresponds to their nature, are of equal worth” (Jäger

48

Happiness and the moral life

1986, 186), and Herder’s belief in an equality, or rather incommensurability, of happiness among different peoples is a key component of this judgement. To see this, one might contrast Herder’s position with that of Georg Forster’s father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who says of the “savage” (Wilde): His satisfaction is illusion; his happiness (Glück) is ephemeral and deceptive, for it rests merely on sensual pleasure. The whole sum of his pleasant feelings is insignificant, poor, in a word, of little worth. He is happy (glücklich) who lives among civilized (gesitteten) people, who is educated by the wisest, and whose peace and fortune are due to the benevolent protection of laws, a well-chosen form of state, and religious and political tolerance. (Forster 1981, 268)2

Given the evaluative language he uses in his description of Africans, Herder would not, I think, disagree that a person who is fortunate enough to live in such civilized conditions (should they ever genuinely come to prevail) is capable of more refined forms of development than the person who lives in the so-called “savage” culture. But he would reject the proposition that the happiness of the latter is “of little worth.” It has its own worth, its own unique variety of goodness, which should, he thinks, be sympathetically appreciated, not despised. This Rousseau-inspired debate about “savage” vs. “civilized” societies also involves the question of virtue. Georg Forster ends an account of one his journeys with the words:€“Thus we left an amiable nation, who, with all their imperfections, are perhaps more innocent and pure of heart, than those who are more refined and better instructed” (A Voyage round the World, Sämtliche Schriften 1, 429). Forster does not accept the myth of the noble savage, but neither does he accept the thesis that “civilized” peoples are necessarily more virtuous. His position is similar to that of anther eighteenth-century traveler and ethnographer, William Macintosh, who argues, in his Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, that progress in the arts and sciences is not necessarily accompanied by moral improvement (Macintosh 1782, 230f.). Approaching the matter differently, Macintosh also claims that if the term “savage” is rightly applied to people who have no scruples about perpetrating oppression, cruelty, and injustice, then his observations over the course of his travels lead him to the conclusion that European peoples are more savage than those to whom they apply this label (229–30).3 Herder does not idealize simple societies or ways of life, but like Forster and Macintosh, neither does he believe that The Ideas contains several references to this text, the first on p. 48. Herder refers to this text repeatedly in the Ideas; see pp. 150, 222, 259, 453.

2 3

Happiness and the moral life

49

“civilization”€– even when it includes a progress in moral ideas€– necessarily leads to an improvement in moral character. At stake in the debate between Kant and Herder that surfaces in Kant’s review of Part II of the Ideas are precisely these kinds of judgements about happiness and virtue, in relation to the ultimate point of human existence, which in turn affect their contrasting judgements about the worth of the world’s different cultures and peoples. Kant takes issue with the conclusions Herder draws from his relativistic conception of happiness, arguing that the goal of history, and therefore the purpose of human existence, lies not in happiness at all, but in progressive self-betterment employing reason, where moral and political betterment is a crucial aspect of this process. Yet Herder actually accepts that history involves salutary forms of struggle to improve the lot of humanity, and that it manifests a kind of progress. He also does not simply reject reason. Accordingly, the opposition between Kant and Herder on the subject of happiness is more complex than one might think, touching upon a host of questions in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Kant and Herder hold sharply contrasting views of the relation between mind and body, between reason and perception, and between means and ends within various spheres of teleological understanding. They also differ on the nature and role of the emotions, and on the status of the “natural” as a category applying both to an aspect of human subjectivity and to the objective world. All of these differences are implicated in the dispute between them on the character and value of happiness, in relation to morality, a dispute which has serÂ� ious consequences for social and political practice. My analysis in the rest of this chapter rests on the premise that a close examination of the differences between Kant and Herder on this topic helps to build an appropriately sophisticated picture of Herder’s mature position – a reasonable premise, I think, since critical engagement with Kant was crucial to the development of that position. I also argue that Herder’s criticisms of Kant are more sophisticated than they are taken to be in accounts presenting Herder merely as a champion of primitive simplicity, of simple happiness and untutored virtue. Herder offers a challenge to Kant that not only anticipates important later objections, but that calls into question the entire framework of Kant’s practical philosophy, its most basic categories, distinctions, and value judgements. In spite of some recent attempts to defend and rehabilitate Kant’s ethical thought, these criticisms remain valid. At least, I hope to show, Herder’s proposed alternatives merit closer consideration than they have received to date.

50

Happiness and the moral life T h e i de a of h a ppi n e s s

Kant defines happiness in a number of ways:€ as pleasure (Lust) (CprR, 19/AA 5, 22), as the satisfaction of inclinations (Neigungen),4 and, generally, as “the state of a rational being in the world in the whole of whose existence everything goes according to his wish and will” (CPrR, 104/AA 5, 124). On earth, the concept applies exclusively to human beings, the only beings in this world who are “rational but finite” (CPrR, 23/AA 5, 25). In his Lectures on Anthropology, Kant claims that only a being who can say “I” is capable of happiness or unhappiness; animals can only be said to feel pleasure and pain.5 Happiness, then, belongs only to beings who can represent their condition, with its needs and desires, to themselves, and work to achieve a more agreeable one. It belongs only, in other words, to beings who are capable of prudential reasoning. It is, moreover, an essentially “indeterminate” (Gr, 28/AA 4, 418) and “unstable” concept (CJ, 297/AA 5, 430). Kant actually shares Herder’s relativistic conception of happiness, according to which it is an end whose content varies among individuals, and whose achievement can only be measured in relation to this variable content. From this common feature of their conception, however, Kant draws much more pessimistic conclusions than Herder does. For one thing, he argues that individuals can only know what will make them happy through experience, yet “for the idea of happiness there is required an absolute whole, a maximum of wellbeing in my present condition and in every future condition” (Gr, 28/AA 4, 418). The result is that all human beings want happiness, but, in doing so, they do not really know what they want. Additionally, given that the idea of happiness is vague, shifting, and variable, no principles can be formulated for how society, or nature, could possibly be organized in order to meet this general human demand.6 The concept cannot serve as a basis, therefore, for any ethics or politics. Kant also doubts, on anthropological grounds, that man is capable of ever achieving happiness, because “his nature is not of the sort to call a halt Kant sometimes describes happiness as the satisfaction of all inclinations, and sometimes as the satisfaction of a system of inclinations. In the Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, he speaks of happiness as “the sum of satisfaction of all inclinations” (Gr, 12/AA 4, 399), while, in the Critique of Practical Reason, he defines it as the satisfaction of “all the inclinations together … which can be brought into a tolerable system” (CPrR, 63/AA 5, 73). For a discussion of this distinction, see Wikes (1994, 6–7). 5 Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, first half (AA 25.1, 11–12, 422). 6 See MM, 9–10/AA 6, 215–17; “On the Proverb:€That May be True in Theory, but is of no Practical Use” (PP, 72/AA 8, 290; CJ, 297/AA 5, 430). 4

The idea of happiness

51

anywhere in possession and enjoyment and to be satisfied” (CJ, 298/AA 5, 430). As this statement indicates, Kant’s pessimism about the possibility of achieving happiness is connected with his way of defining it. Because he considers happiness to be a state of complete rest, in which all desires are fulfilled, he cannot see how a finite being in the world could ever, even in principle, achieve such a condition. This judgement is buttressed by Kant’s equation of all desire and need with a form of pain. “Pain must precede every gratification,” he writes later, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and it is “the incentive to activity,” where only in activity do we feel our life (APPV, 131–2/AA 7, 231). “To feel one’s life, to enjoy oneself, is then nothing else but to feel constantly impelled to pass beyond the present state (which, consequently, has to be a frequently recurring grief)” (APPV, 133/AA 7, 233). Given this way of perceiving the relation between desire and satisfaction, the latter can only be, at best, a brief interlude between bouts of pain, and Kant tends to conceive of satisfaction negatively, as the cessation or diminution of pain. This conception is especially prominent in his 1781–2 Lectures on Anthropology, where he explicitly defines happiness as “that which frees us from pain” (AA 25.2, 1075).7 Commenting on these lectures, Susan Meld Shell observes that Kant has now firmly reached the conclusion, in agreement with Count Verri, that life is primarily pain, both in the sense that enjoyment is experienced exclusively as the absence of pain, and in the sense that “the total sum of pain always outweighs the total sum of enjoyments” (Shell 2003, 215). Similar sentiments are expressed in Kant’s published writings. In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, he suggests that the value of life is “less than zero” if assessed “merely by what one enjoys (the natural end of the sum of all inclinations, happiness).” “For who would start life anew under the same conditions,” he asks, “or even according to a new and self-designed plan (but one still in accord with the course of nature), which would, however, still be aimed merely at enjoyment?” (CJ, 301/AA 5, 434). Kant makes a similar point in “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” claiming that “one must have a poor understanding of life’s true value if one can still wish that it should be longer than it actually is, for that would only prolong a permanent game of struggling with toil and trouble” (PP, 58/AA 8, 122). His advice is that one should focus on goaldirected tasks instead, “filling one’s time with harmoniously progressive 7

But see also the following remark, from lectures given in 1772–3:€“When we enjoy satisfaction, do we increase happiness? A little, but even that only in the beginning. Satisfaction uses itself up, it has no means of renewing itself … the happiness of human beings consists in the absence of pain and dissatisfaction” (AA 25.1, 171).

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activities, which have an important and intended purpose in view” (APPV, 135/AA 7, 234), while cultivating a measure of indifference towards the fulfillment of inclinations. The latter, in any case, only “change, grow with the indulgence one allows them, and always leave behind a still greater void than one had thought to fill.” Consequently, they are always “burdensome to a rational being” who would rather be free of them altogether (CPrR, 99/AA 5, 118). For Kant, then, the best strategy for achieving inner peace is to aim, not at the hopeless end of satisfying one’s ever-increasing desires, but at a form of “contentment with oneself” (Selbstzufriedenheit) consisting in the consciousness of virtuous activity and freedom (CPrR, 98/AA 5, 117). Within the terms of Kant’s analysis, this state cannot itself be defined as a form of happiness, “because it does not depend upon the positive concurrence of a feeling.” It arises from the awareness of independence from, and mastery over, one’s inclinations, and is therefore only “a negative satisfaction with one’s state” (CPrR, 99/AA 5, 118). In truth, as we have seen, for Kant all satisfactions are primarily negative. He even writes that “the greatest sensuous pleasure, which is not accompanied by any loathing at all, is found under healthy conditions in resting after work” (APPV, 184/ AA 7, 276).8 Kant’s judgements here rest partly upon his discomfort with forms of enjoyment that involve being moved too much, as he perceives it€– those that disturb the mind’s equilibrium by subjecting it to powerful affects. According to Kant’s model of the self, only acts of the will are truly one’s own, so only their exercise is considered to be self-generated, and therefore autonomous. The rest of the human psyche€– emotions, needs, wishes, and so forth€– are outside the will, the essence of the rational self under its practical aspect. Being subjected to their influence, in that case, means being moved by something external, the definition of heteronomy. Consequently, the sensation of feeling a powerful pleasure is experienced as a kind of disempowering self-alienation. In the Anthropology lectures, for example, Kant contrasts enthusiastic enjoyment, Lustigkeit, unfavourably with the calmer Zufriedenheit, describing the first as “a form of convulsive movement” (AA 25.1, 372). Since this distaste for strong feelings is often combined with the sense that, as Kai Haucke puts it, “human life, precisely because it seeks happiness, is an endless series of disappointments, At one point in the Anthropology lectures, Kant says that “our best happiness lies here in work” (AA 25.2, 1319). Such remarks support Max Weber’s claim, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that “many of [Kant’s] formulations are closely related to ideas of ascetic Protestantism” (Weber 1958, 270).

8

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interrupted only by death” (Haucke 2002, 190), it is unsurprising if Kant’s solution to the problem of life turns out to be a form of Stoic detachment. “Everything and particularly the brevity of life invites us not to consider life as important,” he remarks. To find contentment, one must keep this in mind:€ “that a human being is really not something important, and that only good conduct makes up the true worth of men” (AA 25.1, 370). Again, Kant does not describe this kind of contentment as itself a form of happiness. States of mind involving the exercise of virtue do not belong to the sphere of happiness, as Kant conceives of it. This feature of Kant’s idea of happiness, where it is entirely distinct from morality, along with his understanding of it as a subjective phenomenon, distinguish Kant’s position from that Aristotle. For the latter, it is often pointed out, eudaimonea, “happiness” in the broader sense of living well, necessarily includes virtue, and is measured objectively, as a sum of human flourishing over the course of a lifetime. James Murphy, among many others, points out the opposition between Kant and Aristotle on these two issues. Unlike Aristotle, he notes, Kant sees “the prudential quest for happiness as compatible with profound immorality” (Murphy 2001, 266). “When Aristotle says that no child could be described as happy,” moreover, “we sense the distance between his objective conception of happiness and Kant’s€– and our€– more subjective understanding” (Murphy 2001, 274).9 In certain respects, Herder agrees with Kant on the subjective character of happiness. Like Kant and unlike Aristotle, Herder does not conceive of happiness as measurable by an objective and universal standard, nor does he think of it as a property attributable only to the whole of a life. On the contrary, Herder often insists that different kinds of happiness are proper to different stages of an individual’s life, and that no one of these amounts to a greater overall quantity of happiness than another. He also argues that each form of society and culture has its own ideal of happiness, and approximation to this variable ideal constitutes the happiness of individuals living in a particular country, time, and place (APH, 38). When drawing attention to variability among representations of happiness, Kant places the emphasis on individual differences, whereas Herder, in accordance with his understanding of the embeddedness of individuals within historical communities, stresses variations 9

Although attempts have recently been made to develop a closer rapprochement between Kant and Aristotle, these focus mainly on the contrast between an ethics of virtue and one of duty, arguing that this contrast has been too sharply drawn in the case of Aristotle vs. Kant (see, for example, Engstrom and Whiting, 1996). Whether or not these arguments are ultimately successful, they do not serve to diminish the differences I am outlining on the idea of happiness.

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from one people to another. Both, however, see happiness as relative to shifting needs and desires. Yet while Kant concludes, from this fact of relativity, that people have no clear idea of what they really want when they want happiness, a conclusion that plays a role in his pessimistic assessment of its achievability, Herder finds in the same fact an occasion for celebration. One reason for this divergence is Herder’s belief that, although the human heart contains an indefinite number of propensities (Anlagen), only a certain number of these are awakened within a given natural and social environment. A limited, culture-specific horizon of wishes is thereby constructed, within which definite forms of happiness are indeed possible. This thesis forms the basis for the claim that “every nation has its center of happiness within itself, as every sphere its center of gravity,” as well as for Herder’s assertion, also in Yet Another Philosophy of History, that the nationalistic prejudice which attaches a people to this center is good, because it increases happiness (APH, 39) (although this is an opinion he revises in later works).10 The needs of individuals are not as infinite as are the needs of humanity as such, for “the European has no concept of the boiling passions and phantoms that glow in the breast of a Negro, and the Indian has no concept of the restless longings that drive the European from one end of the world to another” (Ideas, 331). Since happiness is measured subjectively, as the fulfillment of desired ends, the satisfaction of this limited sphere of wishes constitutes its achievement. It does not follow that individuals ever achieve a condition of complete and constant inner peace. As the reference to boiling passions and restless drives in the above-cited sentence suggests, Herder shares Kant’s view, which one would be hard-pressed to dispute, that the human heart is not inclined to be perfectly still for very long. Only Herder’s definition of happiness does not require it to meet this standard. “Nowhere on earth does the rose of happiness bloom without thorns,” he writes, “but what rises from these thorns is everywhere and in all sorts of shapes the admittedly fleeting, yet beautiful rose of joy in human life” (Ideas, 332). Herder sees happiness as a condition arising, under favorable circumstances, in the course of human life and history, which are nonetheless in perpetual motion. All happiness is therefore temporary, but that does not make it any less genuine or valuable. In maintaining that happiness consists in the subjective satisfaction of culturally relative needs and desires, Herder assumes a concept of ╇ See, for instance, LAH, 699.

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happiness that is no less distant from Aristotle’s than is Kant’s. However, other aspects of Herder’s understanding of happiness bring him closer to the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia. First, there is a kind of historicized analogue to Aristotelian teleology in Herder’s conception of happiness. Herder believes that human nature is too plastic, and its potentiality too vast, for one to be able to specify in any detail what is required for human flourishing, even though there are some basic needs common to human beings which provide a partial foundation for cross-cultural ethical and political judgements. On this, again, Herder agrees with Kant. But he would not accept the latter’s judgement that happiness is therefore, as Kant put it in his review of the Ideas, a “phantom … which everyone creates for himself” (AA 8, 63). While it is true that individuals have different ideas of happiness, the general shapes of these are constructed by the combination of natural and social factors that make up a specific culture. That is why the section on happiness in the Ideas which Kant criticizes claims, in its title, that happiness is “climatic and organic, a child of practice, tradition and custom” (Ideas, 327). Human flourishing, of which happiness, subjectively defined, is a component, takes multiple forms, but only a very definite form of it is possible at a given time and place. The struggle to achieve the (relatively) best form of flourishing within a particular set of historical and geographical conditions constitutes the realization of the human essence, and this necessarily limited realization is perfection, as Herder conceives it. In the Letters on the Advancement of Humanity, he writes that “the perfection of a thing can only mean that the thing becomes that which it should and can be” (LAH, 123). In relation to happiness, this thesis has the implication that varieties of it are possible in historically earlier forms of social and economic organization€ – for instance, in a nomadic culture€ – that are not possible in later ones€– for instance, in a life of settled agriculture (Ideas, 312–13). In making this point, Herder’s claim is not that the nomadic culture was better, in an overall sense. It is that the prior form of life had its own satisfactions, which the later one, with its own quite different satisfactions, by its very nature excludes. If happiness consisted in the sum of satisfaction of a potentially infinite set of inclinations, it would indeed be fair to say that no one is ever happy. But the wants of particular individuals in Â�particular societies take shape against a limited horizon, and to be happy, Herder believes, is to experience the joys envisioned as possible within this horizon. These joys include the pleasure accompanying the exercise of human capacities. In the “Universal History” essay, Kant had suggested that, in

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the case of human beings, nature appears to have aimed not at happiness but at the development of these capacities. The frugality of nature in depriving man of instinct, he argues, while granting him reason and freedom, provides evidence of nature’s intent that man “should produce everything from himself,” “as if she aimed more at his rational self-esteem than at his well-being” (PP, 31/AA 8, 19–20). Herder argues, on the other hand, that health, for one thing, is a necessary foundation for happiness, and if nature wished to provide human beings with this good, she had to impose upon them the necessity for labor (Ideas, 328). More significantly, he claims that the sensation of activity in its various forms€ – physical effort, the use of senses, the exercise of understanding, attention, memory, and decision€ – makes up what we call “the presence of spirit, our inner life-force (Lebenskraft),” and that such activities are “rewarded of themselves with happiness and joy” (Ideas, 329). Thus, when Herder equates happiness with the “simple, deep, irreplaceable feeling of existence,” he conceives of this feeling as including the sensation of force and activity proper to each kind of living being. In the case of human beings, that includes the healthy exercise of reason, but whereas Kant draws a sharp distinction between the rational and the natural, and, correspondingly, between the human and the animal, Herder does not see these as belonging to separate spheres of existence. This difference touches the very heart of the opposition between the two. Herder is fundamentally a monist. His metaphysics involves an attempted synthesis of Spinoza and Leibniz, combining the former’s thesis that nature (or God) is a single substance with the latter’s conception of reality as composed of dynamic centers of self-organizing activity. The resulting position imagÂ�Â� ines reality as a single system of “forces” (Kräfte)€– the “finger of divinity,” Herder calls them at one point (Ideas, 173)€– which build themselves into ever more complex forms, from the grossest matter to the most refined intellect. An important corollary of this view is that mind and matter are not separate substances. They are expressions of a single principle, in terms of which they can be explained. Exactly how such an explanation would proceed is not altogether clear, to say the least, and, in his review of the first part of the Ideas, Kant takes Herder to task on the obscurity of the concept of Kraft (AA 8, 53–4). But Herder had always admitted this obscurity. In “On the Human Soul’s Cognition and Sensation” (1775), he had written:€ “I do not here claim to explain anything; I have not yet encountered any philosophy which explains what Kraft is” (Cognition, 337). As the innermost nature of the real, force is manifest, and knowable, only in its effects. Herder does not

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claim to be able to define its essence, or to explain how the various aspects of reality derive from this essence. He does repeatedly insist, though, by appeal to the concept of force, that reality is a single fabric, manifesting gradual differences and varieties, not sudden, radical changes of substance (Cognition, 338). There is no iron wall, therefore, between the material and the non-material, or mental (Cognition, 354). There also seems to be, in Herder’s mind, no iron wall between the divine and the natural; life is itself an expression of the “divine forces” (Ideas, 636) giving rise to all that exists. These metaphysical and theological theses lead to€ – or, perhaps, are themselves the result of€ – a sense that desire and enjoyment, in their proper forms, are not only acceptable and good, but profoundly valuable, even sacred. Herder’s description of happiness as the “simple, deep, irreplaceable feeling of existence” continues:€“a little drop from that infinite sea of blessedness, which is in everything, and which rejoices and feels itself in everything” (Ideas, 331). Likewise, in his dialogue, God:€Some Conversations, Herder has one of the personae say:€“through the enjoyment of life, we enjoy [God] as a real existence full of force and life,” though another adds that thought is equally necessary to this apprehension (God, 163/FW 4, 765). The term “pantheism” does not quite fit Herder’s position, if this term is supposed to signify a complete identification of nature and God. But Herder does feel that the forces of nature, which in life achieve varying degrees of awareness, are an aspect of the holy rather than an opponent of it. Because of this perception, Herder’s attitude towards natural desire is strikingly different from that of Kant. To give an example, at one point in God:€Some Conversations, the discussion broaches the topic of “how beings assimilate one to another and form a continuous series in the€reproduction of their kind.” Theano, the one female participant in the dialogue, asks, at this juncture, if she should leave, and is told:€“In the name of all the graces, no, Theano! For we are discussing the most hallowed and certainly divine law. All things that love one another, become assimilated the one to the other” (God,183/FW 4, 785). Kant, by contrast, sees sexuality as a form of animal pleasure in which an individual is used by another purely as a tool, a relation that poses a problem for human beings, whose inherent dignity demands both that they never be treated merely as means and that they never allow the sensual part of their nature to dominate.11 Another contrast consists in the fact that Herder does not find powerful 11

The solution to this problem lies, according to Kant, in confining sex to marriage, and subjecting it to the “natural end” of procreation. See MM, 61–4/AA 6, 277–80 (The Doctrine of Right) and

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passions to be troubling in the same way Kant does. On the contrary, he often grants to them a positive worth.12 On the issue of the “animality” of desire, the basis for the disagreement between Herder and Kant includes Herder’s being more generously disposed towards the natural world, and his view that the differences between living beings are gradual. At the same time, Herder does posit a clear separation between the human species and all others, even the apes that resemble it most closely.13 In On the Origin of Language (1772), he suggests that the distinctiveness of human beings, as language-users, resides in their capacity to step back from the sea of drives and sensations that flood all living beings so as to distinguish, order, and judge (Language, 722). This capacity is the condition for the possibility of language, which in turn, Herder always insists, is essential to reason (e.g. Ideas, 347–52). Herder terms it Besonnenheit, a word denoting, in his usage, both self- reflection and self-restraint. On earth, only human beings possess Besonnenheit, and only in virtue of possessing it are they properly human. Thus, one would misunderstand the dispute between Herder and Kant on the subject of happiness if one were to conclude that Kant values the specifically human property of reason, while Herder encourages the indulgence of all manner of natural drives. Herder also thinks that the fulfillment of the human essence requires the exercise of something like reason, but he does not see this faculty as isolated€ – or isolable€ – from perception and feeling. He also does not conceive of it as the sole thing in the world that has intrinsic worth, in part because he does not conceive of it as a “sole” thing at all. H a ppi n e s s a n d t h e g o od Kant asserts, in the Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals, that only a “good will” is good “without limitation” and “good in itself” (Gr, 7–8/ AA 4, 393–4), such that this will must be “the highest good and the MM, 178–80/AA 6, 424–6 (The Doctrine of Virtue). Cf. APPV, 20/AA 7, 136:€“How much cleverness has been wasted in throwing a delicate veil over man’s desires, but revealing still enough of man’s close relation to the animal kingdom so that bashfulness results.” 12 This is reflected in his life as well as in his philosophical writings, as one can surmise from his letters to Caroline Flachsland, the woman with whom he fell in love and married. Herder wrote a large number of these between 1770 and 1771. See the first volume of Herder’s Briefe; for instance, nos. 83–5, pp. 188–94. 13 Herder argues, in the Ideas, that, while all human varieties are brothers, “with the ape you can enter into no brotherhood” (Ideas, 255). Dagmar Barnouw notes the contrast between this aspect of Herder’s position and that of his friend and contemporary, Georg Forster; see Barnouw (1993, 336).

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condition of every other, even of all demands for happiness” (Gr, 10/AA 4, 397). Statements like these may leave the impression that Kant attributes no worth to happiness considered as an end. Attempting to counter this impression, Christine Korsgaard argues, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends, that in fact Kant views happiness as “objectively” good, but he thinks it is good only under certain conditions, being repugnant, for instance, when not accompanied by a good will (Korsgaard 1996a, 118). The Groundwork specifically alludes to the example of someone who prospers without having any feature of a good will to support its claim that happiness is not unconditionally good (Gr, 7/AA 4, 393). However, Kant’s thesis that only a good will has absolute or intrinsic worth and, concomitantly, that happiness is no more than a conditional good, involves more than the claim that happiness accompanied by wickedness is not good. If this were all Kant meant, then he would not suggest, in his question to Herder, that the existence of happy Tahitians is not self-justifying€– a point he repeats in the Critique of the Power of Judgement when he says that the question of “why it is necessary that human beings exist” might not be so easy to answer “if one thinks about the New Hollanders or the Fuegians” (CJ, 250/AA 5, 378). Kant does not think these people are all wicked, in the sense that they do not care for one another, or that their societies are exceptionally violent or cruel. The common image of Tahitians, formed on the basis of travel reports like those of Georg Forster, was of a good-natured and peaceful people, kind to one another and to strangers.14 In Kant’s mind, though, while such people possess capacities sufficient for inclusion in the category of human beings, their imagined manner of existence (prior to visitation by “more civilized nations”) is not sufficient to qualify as an end in itself. That is because they do not exercise “good will” in the Kantian sense. Living merely for enjoyment, their needs amply met by the richness of their natural environment, they do not exercise “will” at all. Reason can therefore find no ultimate purpose to their existence. As Kant says in the third Critique:€“But that the existence of a human being who lives merely for enjoyment (however busy he might be this respect) should have a value in itself, even if as a means to this he was as helpful as possible to others who were likewise concerned only with enjoyment, because he Â�participated 14

In A Voyage round the World, Forster concludes of “O-Taheiti” that “this island is indeed one of the happiest spots on the globe” (Sämmtliche Schriften 1, 187). Louis de Bougainville provides a similar account in his own A Voyage around the World, translated from French into English in 1772 by Georg Forster’s father, Johann Reinhold Forster (Bougainville 1967, 198–249).

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in all gratification through sympathy:€of this reason could never be persuaded” (CJ, 94/AA 5, 208). It is not, after all, the biological species “human being” that possesses, for Kant, the status of being an end in itself. This status belongs to “rational natures,” and happy Tahitians, as Kant imagines them, do not realize this nature until they meet other human beings who do€ – namely, Europeans. Until then, Kant thinks, these people only do what they want to do, and doing what one wants makes a person no better than a sheep. Kant’s judgements on this point rest in part on his belief that sympathetic actions have no moral worth because they are motivated by natural incentives, and therefore do not express freedom. In the final analysis, such actions are self-interested, for sympathetic souls are actually motivated, according to Kant, by the “inner satisfaction” they find in “spreading joy around them” (Gr, 11/AA 4, 398).15 They aim, therefore, at the satisfaction of inclinations, which is one of Kant’s definitions of happiness. What gives a form of existence absolute or intrinsic worth, on the other hand, is the capacity to act independently of inclinations, and that means without aiming at happiness. Thus, the existence of a human being is not an end in itself if he merely enjoys his existence and wants others to do so as well. Rather, “only through that which he does without regard to enjoyment, in full freedom and independently of that which nature could passively provide for him, does he give his being as the existence of a person absolute value” (CJ, 94/AA 5, 208). The claim that “happiness, in all the fullness of its agreeableness is far from being an unconditional good” (CJ, 94/AA 5, 209) does mean, then, that happiness has no worth, taken by itself. It gains worth only when it is the natural end of a being who also engages in self-legislation not motivated by the aim of happiness, where merely kind or loving actions do not fit this criterion. A number of commentators have disputed the claim that Kant considered all “inclinations,” including sympathetic ones, to be egoistic, but I find their arguments unconvincing. Korsgaard, for instance, argues that, for Kant, both the man of duty and the man of sympathetic temperament genuinely aim at the welfare of others (Korsgaard 1996a, 107), appealing, in support of her claim, to the same sentence of the Groundwork that I have cited here. On my interpretation, however, the sentence actually says that sympathetic persons have no motive other than the satisfaction they find in spreading joy around them, where such a motive is still ultimately self-interested. On similar grounds, I would take issue with Andrews Reath’s claim, that “Kant recognizes that we can have inclinations that are straightforwardly other-regarding” (my italics) so that “it seems somewhat misleading to term [the principle of happiness] the ‘principle of selflove’, as Kant does” (Reath 1989, 60). In fact, Kant’s description of his own position is accurate, since he believes that the true aim of sympathetic action is the happiness of the agent, not benefit to others.

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One must not overlook the significance of Kant’s assertion, in the Groundwork, that “the inclinations themselves, as sources of needs, are so far from having an absolute worth, so as to make one wish to have them, that it must instead be the universal wish of every rational being to be altogether free of them” (Gr, 37/AA 4, 428). Sympathetic commentators have tended to water down the force of this statement, thereby setting aside its radical implications. Korsgaard glosses the sentence as follows:€“Now even without fully endorsing what Kant says here, we can easily agree that there are some inclinations of which we want to be free” (Korsgaard 1996a, 121). Allen Wood deals with the issue in substantially the same way, saying “it is surely true of some inclinations … that they are a nuisance,” and that Kant’s stronger claim about the complete worthlessness of inclinations is “besides the point” (Wood 1999, 123). That depends, though, on which point one is addressing. Given that happiness, according to Kant’s own conception of it, involves the satisfaction of inclinations in some manner, the wish to be rid of inclinations altogether would require an indifference to happiness. This sentiment accords well with Kant’s assertion, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, that “life itself and all the enjoyment of it, so far as it depends upon circumstances, has no value of its own; what alone has value is the use to which life is put and the end to which it is directed” (APPV, 141/ AA 7, 239). On the other hand, Kant also states, in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone: Natural inclinations, considered in themselves, are good, that is, not a matter of reproach, and it is not only futile to want to extirpate them but to do so would also be harmful and blameworthy. Rather, let them be tamed and instead of clashing with one another they can be brought into harmony in a wholeness which is called happiness. (Religion, 51/AA 6, 58)

Here, considering the difference between these several remarks, Rae Langton’s distinction between a “sane” and a “severe” Kant€– the latter being described as “very far from the sane” (Langton 1992, 485, 495)€– seems apposite. The severe Kant is a moral ascetic. Desires enter his consciousness only as a painful hindrance, and he would rather be free of them. He considers happiness to be impossible, and an unworthy goal in any case. The sane Kant, on the other hand, thinks that natural inclinations should be limited and reconciled with one another, for only then can happiness be achieved. He also thinks that such happiness is an “objective good,” as Korsgaard suggests, as long as it does not require abrogating moral principles. Doubtless, many aspects of the severe

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Kant’s position on happiness and morality could be reconstructed in this saner fashion. Yet there is also a continuity in the fundamental values Kant espouses in all of his post-critical writings. It is true that, at various points, he is more or less generously disposed towards the natural end of happiness. Unregulated, inclinations can obstruct that end, as well as being a counter-force to the demands of duty, so they tend to emerge into consciousness as a burden, though they are not in themselves evil. What remains constant is that Kant never grants to a happy existence the status of being an end in itself, and inclinations, concomitantly, are never granted an intrinsic worth. That status belongs purely to the will, and only its activity properly justifies the existence of a happy being. Paul Guyer is therefore right to suggest that Kantian morality, in its mature version, is based on the intrinsic, rather than merely instrumental, value of freedom (Guyer 2000, 11).16 The satisfaction an agent takes in the awareness of exercising a free will€– an awareness emerging only in the face of resistance€– is the one thing that, for Kant, does not provoke the question, “why?” It is the one end requiring no further justification,17 a view that does give an ascetic slant to some of Kant’s intuitions about morality. Max Scheler astutely observed that Kant “makes the moral value of an action dependent on its cost, on the sacrifices made by the one who acts,” even if he “does not imply that virtuous conduct as such is conduct against an inclination” (Scheler 1973, 227–8). Herder does not grant moral worth primarily to acts that are costly, nor does he feel that reason remains dissatisfied in the face of a happy life. To some extent, it might be that one hits the bedrock of basic values at this juncture. But Herder’s assessment of this issue is also connected to his understanding of the nature of reason. While a full examination of this topic is reserved for a later chapter, some preliminary remarks will Andrews Reath writes, in a review, that “Guyer challenges, or at least revises, Kant’s understanding of his own method.” For while

16

Kant holds that the moral law cannot be based on any conception of the good because of his belief that conceptions of the good can only be determined empirically in relation to agents’ interests and thus cannot ground principles with the requisite necessity and universality … Guyer claims that Kant in fact derives the moral law from an antecedent conception of the value of freedom. (Reath 2003, 134) Robert Pippin draws attention to the peculiarity of this aspect of Kant’s conception, where freedom, understood as “end setting determined by reason,” is identified as a substantive value, “but then its intrinsic value is not defended teleologically or by any appeal to natural purposes or any kind of contentment,” so that “somehow the value-conferring capacity itself has its value conferred” (Pippin 2000, 255).

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be necessary here, as the question of reason is implicated in the dispute between Kant and Herder on the status of happiness, and on the relation between happiness and morality. Kant tends to thinks of reason, in both its theoretical and practical functions, as sharply distinct from other faculties, and particularly from sensation€– so distinct, in fact, that it links human beings, the sole possessors of reason on earth, to a realm of existence entirely separate from nature. Herder frequently objects to this view of reason. His essay on language contends that reason is only the “arrangement” (Einrichtung) or “management” (Haushaltung) of the whole of human nature, and that the idea of it as a “new, wholly separated power” distinguishing humans from animals is “philosophical nonsense, however great may be the philosophers who utter it” (Language, 717–18). In the Ideas, Herder describes reason, Vernunft, as something learned, vernommenes (Ideas, 144), a point he repeats in his Metacritique, designed as a critique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Metacritique, 499). In the first place, the material of reason is derived entirely from the senses; there are no a priori categories. To cite Marion Heinz:€“the fundamental principle of Herder’s argument is the idea that limited beings possess the content of their representations not through or from themselves, but mediated by the body,” so that “the power (Kraft) of the soul is bound to the Â�powers of the body,” and can work only on “what flows to it from the body” (Heinz 1994, 139). In addition, Herder considers freedom and self-Â�determination to be themselves “natural” forces. “Freedom,” he maintains, “is a force of nature; when it opposes laws, these take their revenge, and the highest force that we know of in our nature, namely, self-determination (Selbstbestimmung), is only free when it obeys the highest laws of nature through its own power” (Metacritique, 529). As I noted earlier, however, Herder does not think human beings are much the same as other species. He agrees with Kant that they have a power distinguishing them from animals, but he understands the character of this power, and the resulting distinction, differently. While Kant rejects the intrinsic value of the life of Tahitians, he also says, in his Lectures on Anthropology (and here there is an ambiguity in his position), that “any being that can say ‘I,’ and therefore make itself into an object of its consideration, has an unmediated worth” (AA 25.1, 10). Herder thinks, though, that having this ability alters every dimension of our being, with the result that, within human desire, experience, and activity, a clear line cannot be drawn separating the sensual and the rational. It is true, in Shell’s words, that “the cycles of nature do not strike Herder with the repellant force that they evoke in Kant” (Shell 1996, 186). But the sharp contrast between

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Herder’s and Kant’s reactions to the “natural” within the human also reflects their opposed conceptions of the constitution of the human psyche. For Herder, “the whole of nature knows itself in [man] as in a living mirror; she sees through his eye, thinks behind his brow, feels in his breast, and works and makes with his hands” (LAH, 363). Thus, Besonnenheit, “reflectivity,” the capacity that allows human beings to relate to themselves so as to be able to say “I,” arises as a self-reflexive moment within nature. Through it, human beings are granted a unique form of awareness, as well as a capacity for self-regulation. Infused with this awareness, and appropriately regulated by the exercise of self-Â�determination€– which, it must be remembered, is itself a natural force€– sense, thought, feeling, and activity are equally and fully human. When accompanied by an added awareness that the nature working within them is the same as the nature working within all things, they also take on the character of the sacred. This view accounts, in some measure, for “the striking absence in Herder of the complex sexual pessimism so marked in the anthropologies of Rousseau and Kant alike,” remarked upon by Shell (1996, 186). In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant describes the “predisposition to animality in mankind” as threefold:€ “first for self-preservation, second, for the propagation of the species, through the sexual impulse, and for the care of offspring so begotten; and third, for community with other men, i.e., the social impulse.” He states that this predisposition is good, because it does not per se contradict the moral law, but it remains, for him, an animal aspect of our nature, in contrast with “humanity” and “personality” (Religion, 22/AA 6, 26). As Herder sees it, on the other hand, the will to live, sexual love, care for children, sociability€– these are indeed natural drives, with analogues in the animal world, but they are expressed in a special way among human beings (Ideas, 109). Consequently, it is not a matter of regulating the “animal” in ourselves through the use of reason, conceived as a distinct and non-natural capacity. Rather, Herder’s ideal involves a harmonious ordering of desire, so that, through humanity, natural forces may achieve their clearest and most beautiful form. The antithesis between Herder’s and Kant’s attitude towards emotion is a corollary of this difference. Kant sees emotions as merely natural, which means that they belong to the realm of sensibility, are ultimately selfseeking, and are determined by causal laws. Actions motivated by emotions have no moral worth, for they are not the result of free self-legislation according to the autonomous laws of pure practical reason. Herder does not divide the natural and the moral, the sensible and the rational, in this fashion. Accordingly, he does not think of emotions as drives occasioned

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by the needs of the sensible part of the self, nor does he separate them from understanding. In “On the Worth of Emotions,” he insists on the unity of the soul, against philosophers who want to divide it into a hierarchy of powers, and claims that the so-called “lower” powers of the soul, to which emotion is often relegated, are actually the basis of the so-called “higher” ones (FW 9.1, 100). Theodor Litt suggests that, on this issue, “what divides Kant and Herder is not merely a divergence in psychological theories of emotion,” but “different interpretations of the fundamental relationship between human beings and the world.” Whereas Kant sees human beings as standing over against the world, Herder sees them as “woven into the whole of the world with all the threads of their existence.” Ultimately, that is why emotions are, for Kant, “blind followers,” whereas, for Herder, they are “discoverers leading our interpretations of the world” (Litt 1930, 66). Locating this metaphysical difference permits a further clarification to Kant’s and Herder’s respective understanding of the status of desire, which in turn has implications for the status of happiness, as a condition in which desire is fulfilled. Herder could never entertain the thought, even for a moment, that a rational being would prefer to be rid of what Kant calls “inclinations,” as he considers these to be links between human beings and reality, both in the sense that they are themselves expressions of nature, and in the sense that they connect us with the environing world. Now, the “sane” Kant also does not think we should try to elimÂ�inate inclinations. Moreover, apart from a few moments of severe Stoicism, Kant generally believes that, while inclinations are often a burden, it is better that they be satisfied than not, given that they exist. That is to say, he mainly holds the (sane) view that happiness is preferable to unhappiness, as long as there is no conflict with morality. But he does not ever think, as Herder does, that emotions and desires€– indeed, even physical drives and hungers€ – connect us with the real in such a way that their fulfillment could constitute an end in itself. Furthermore, in contrast with Herder, he always draws a sharp division between “natural inclinations” and the faculties proper to morality. Herder’s belief that love and sympathy are essential to morality has to be interpreted against the background of his general understanding of the status of emotions. In this context, Herder does not simply privilege spontaneity of feeling over self-regulation. He praises the moral heroism, for instance, through which unsteady, selfish drives are freely bound by law and readiness for sacrifice. However, he describes this self-binding as motivated by care for the good of others, rather than by any pure thought of duty (Ideas, 148–9). And because Herder does not divide emotion and

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sense from reason and freedom in the way Kant does, he can affirm that such motivation, far from involving heteronomy, is the product of the most powerful self-determination (Ideas, 149). The story Herder tells about the development of principles of justice is revealing here. The first community, he claims, is the family. Combining maternal love and paternal guidance, it is held together by bonds of mutual sympathy and trust (Ideas, 158). Rules become necessary because this sympathy does not extend widely enough, and so, beyond a limited circle, can be a dim and often ineffective leader (Ideas, 159). Thus, while Herder agrees with Kant that sympathy is an unsure guide to moral conduct and principles are needed, his view does not implicate its exclusion from the realm of morality. Sympathy is itself a faculty of moral discernment, Herder thinks, issuing in moral concerns. The problem is that, in a limited creature, it tends to be confined to the sphere of those who are familiar. Nature therefore provides human beings with rules of conduct that mimic sympathy, the highest of which is that you should behave towards others only as you would wish them to behave towards you (Ideas, 159). Attaining mutual sympathy remains the ideal of human interaction, and approaching this ideal is the moral task of humanity. Among nations, therefore, “a common feeling must gradually awaken, so that each can feel itself to be in the place of the other” (LAH, 725). Herder’s critique of some contemporary trends in the sphere of morality is based on this ideal. He complains that, in his age, the principles of freedom, honor, and virtue are on everyone’s lips, while warm feeling for those who are closest is infinitely weakened (APH, 64). In reality, he says, the savage (Wilde) who loves his family and is passionate about his tribe is a “truer being” than the “cultivated shadow” enraptured by a mere word (Ideas, 333). Even the beautiful term “love of man” (Menschenliebe), he writes in the Letters, has become so trivial that mostly one loves “men” but no one among them (LAH, 148). These remarks affirm the intrinsic value of love. For Herder, to whom happiness is an end in itself, the feeling that wants others to be happy has the highest moral worth, since it is motivated by a wish for the general good. While Herder would certainly agree with Kant that happiness combined with wickedness (supposing such a condition to be possible)18 is not good, he would strongly In fact, while Herder unequivocally condemns viciousness, he does not explicitly analyze the case of a happy but vicious person. Perhaps he agreed with Plato “that the inescapable penalty of wickedness is simply to be the sort of person one is,” as Iris Murdoch puts it in her reading of the Theaetetus (Murdoch 1977, 39). I am speculating, but such a view would accord with Herder’s understanding of virtue.

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disagree that actions motivated “only” by a desire for the happiness of others cannot be described as moral. Herder is also criticizing the hypocrisy of his allegedly enlightened times, in which Europeans enthuse about their superior principles of justice while impoverishing and enslaving other nations. These assertions are grounded in a belief that, without sympathy, moral principles are empty abstractions. They are needed to manage feeling, and may substitute for it when feeling is too limited, but they will not, on their own, ensure that people either see or respect the happiness of others. Consequently, Herder thinks, people ought to enlarge their sympathies, which they can do through attempts to imagine being in the place of others. Kant also claims that people have a duty to cultivate sympathetic feeling (MM, 205/AA 6, 457), but, in line with his way of distinguishing the spheres of sensibility and freedom, only the “will to share in others’ feelings,” is moral, not the receptivity to these feelings, and it is so because sympathy helps us “to do what the representation of duty alone might not accomplish” (MM, 205/AA 6, 457). Affection for others cannot be described as morally motivated, as it can for Herder, nor does it possess any cognitive value.19 The difference is subtle, but important. For Kant, what has moral value is the activity of cultivating compassionate feelings, in the belief that they can be useful aids to achieving that which reason discerns to be right, and this activity is itself motivated by a respect for duty. For Herder, people should be sympathetic because love for Â�others, resulting in a desire for their happiness, incarnates the very goal of morality. Herder does not think this desire is at bottom self-interested, and he rejects the metaphysical and psychological distinctions upon which Kant bases his view that all desires are determined, while moral action must be free. As a result, Kant and Herder come to very different conclusions about what defines the character of the morally good person. Kant states that the person of cold temperament who acts from duty thereby gives himself a “higher worth” than the person who acts from sympathetic inclinÂ� ation (Gr, 11–12/AA 4, 398–9). Herder claims that “merely following rules, without possessing virtue, means wanting to follow cold reason alone, and not enjoying the whole feeling part of humanity.”20 It is not that Kant thinks the best kind of person is cold-hearted, but, for him, virtue resides Korsgaard claims that, for Kant, “being sympathetic helps us to be aware of those cases when our assistance or support will be called for,” but I can see no basis for this claim in the section of The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue to which she is appealing (Korsgaard 1996b, 221). 20 “Thoughts Upon Reading Montesquieu” (1769), FW 9.2, 207. 19

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in choosing to do one’s duty, and this choice is never more visible than when it is made in opposition to inclinations. Herder’s idea of the virtuous person, by contrast, closely resembles Schiller’s model of the “beautiful soul,” in whom sense and reason, duty and inclination, harmonize (Schiller 1966, 408–9). The truly virtuous person, Schiller thinks, should have “an inclination to duty”; “he should obey his reason with joy,” rather than being perpetually divided against himself (405–6). Schiller therefore ridiculed what he saw as an implication of Kant’s position, namely that actions done with pleasure cannot be virtuous.21 It has been pointed out, in Kant’s defense, that he is not proposing that actions must be performed with aversion in order to be considered moral. As Allison observes:€“Kant never claims that an otherwise morally praiseworthy act loses its moral significance if an agent has an inclination to perform it. His claim is rather that such an act lacks moral significance if the agent performs it only because of the inclination” (Allison 1990, 111). This defense, though, requires accepting a Kantian view of the nature of “inclinations” as inherently selfish, which Schiller€– and Herder€– do not. On Herder’s moral psychology, we can gladly do our duty, because we can act out of a desire for the happiness of others. In so doing, we do not aim to gratify the desire; we aim to further the ends of others, and that is virtuous. Within the constitution of the human soul, moreover, the divisions Kant wants to draw in isolating inclination, as an affair entirely of sense, from selfdetermination, as a function of pure practical reason, are untenable. On this issue, I would suggest that the difference between Herder and Kant is not only based on divergent observations and inferences, but reflects opposed psychological predilections. Herder always favors the perception of continuities and gradations, within the human psyche as well as in nature, whereas there is something in Kant that loves a wall€– between mind and body, reason and sense, human and animal, freedom and inclination. In accordance with judgements expressing these predilections, Kant attributes the highest achievable moral excellence to the following of duty against desire, while Herder’s ideal requires the attainment of unity. Litt draws attention here to the contrast between the two authors’ conceptions of virtue. For Kant, he notes, “virtuous” names a value-tendency directed towards the supersensuous, and obligated only to law. For Herder, it names a “harmonious integration of all the aspects and propensities of human nature” (Litt 1930, 133). Because happiness, as Herder understands it, would require such an integration, virtue is 21

╇ See Paton (1958, 48).

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actually a necessary condition for it, although not a sufficient one. The state of the world, as it presently stands, is such that behaving virtuously often demands sacrifice, but Herder does not see virtue and happiness as in principle alien to one another. Virtue may, after all, be motivated by a wish for the happiness of others, and one can be happy to do what one ought to do. Therefore, a condition on earth which is both happy and virtuous is certainly conceivable. It does not seem, on the other hand, that Herder ever conceived of a condition in which an individual could be happy without being virtuous. This is the point on which Herder’s position most closely resembles Aristotle’s, in contrast with Kant’s. Recall, for example, Herder’s portrait of the virtuous Roman in Yet Another Philosophy of History. The figure Herder paints in this portrait is of someone actively virtuous, in accord with the ideals of his society, who also finds satisfaction in the exercise of the virtues he takes to be excellent.22 While the virtuous Roman disregards “pleasures, weakness and even more refined enjoyment,” in line with his “great-hearted disposition of the soul,” he finds a nobler satisfaction in overcoming all obstacles, in the exercise of “heroic courage,” in maintaining his “unflinching stride” in the service of his fatherland (APH, 30). The exercise of these virtues does not constitute, for Herder, an acting against inclinations. It involves satisfying precisely those inclinations or propensities that are awakened in this society, and expressed within its ideals. To be sure, the highest good, for Kant, is also one in which happiness is commensurate with virtue, rather than in conflict with it (CPrR, 93/AA 5, 110–11), but, within this ideal, the connection between the two remains an extrinsic one. Given Kant’s understanding of these phenomena, moreover, it is hard to imagine what either virtue or happiness would be like in such a state. Since Kant conceives of desire and emotion as forms of inclination, and defines inclination negatively, as the alleviation of pain, it seems reasonable to conclude that, in an ideal state, we would have no inclinations. What would virtue be, though, if it never overcame inclinations? And what would happiness be in their absence, when it has been defined as their fulfillment? Langton’s presentation of the correspondence between Kant and Maria von Herbert raises precisely these questions. Von Herbert’s second letter to Kant suggests that becoming a perfect Kantian moral agent leads to an elimination of the very desires and joys that make life worthwhile. Far from feeling that these require ╇ Cf. Annas (1993, 369–72).

22

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further justification, von Herbert finds that a purely moral life has no meaning (Langton 1992, 493–4). Suppose, however, that Kant’s ideal is reconstructed in line with his less severe views. Then the perfect moral condition does not require eliminating inclinations, but following moral imperatives regardless of them. The problem is that, in the case of any individual, either there is a conflict between duty and desire, such that a moral action has some cost, as Scheler puts it, or there is not. In the first situation, the person cannot be described as happy. In the second, it is hard to see how moral and natural motivations could be distinguished. It still seems as if actually attaining the highest good would abolish the tension that is the very basis of virtue on earth, and this is a peculiar goal to set up as the telos of history. Within Herder’s, ultimately Christian, vision of the ideal condition, by contrast, desire and duty coincide not incidentally but essentially, because in this condition a person behaves out of a sympathetic concern for the happiness of others. It is a mistake to think, as some commentators have done, that the opposition between Kant and Herder on this point hinges on the question of whether or not the “beautiful soul,” in whom “want” and “should” are harmonized, is perfectly achievable. The issue is not about the realizability of these different models, both of which are only meant to be ideal forms, but about their nature as ideals. For Herder, the ideal form of humanity is a person who is happy and who wants all others to be so. Neither is there any conflict in this condition, nor does it raise any worries about motivation. Given that human beings are not God, they will never fully achieve such a state, since it would require both perfect inner harmony and an equal love for all human beings. Still, we can strive for it, and the moral agent need never worry that she is acting merely out of love rather than duty, though she may indeed have to worry that her partiality for those who are close to her is leading her to ignore, or even act against, the welfare of more distant people. This is the point at which she will have to consider principles of justice. It remains the case, though, that the production of happy forms of life, in which people act for the benefit of others out of inclination rather than obligation, is, for Herder, the most sublime goal of human endeavor, and, consequently, of history. H a ppi n e s s a n d t h e pu r p o s e of e x i s t e nc e Happiness is decidedly not the goal of history for Kant, who claims that “the end of the existence of nature itself must be sought beyond nature”

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(CJ, 250/AA 5, 379). No being within nature can be the final end of creation, Kant believes, because its existence cannot, by itself, answer the question, what is it good for? (CJ, 294/AA 5, 426). The existence of plants and animals can be seen as good for the existence of human beings, but the existence of the latter still poses a question (CJ, 294/AA 5, 426). What lifts human beings beyond an ultimately pointless existence is the capaÂ� city to set voluntary ends for themselves (CJ, 298/AA 5, 431). The final purpose for the existence of nature, therefore, lies in the human capacity to transcend it, to bring both the nature outside and the nature within under the domination of reason and will. Only the realization of this capacity can answer the question, “why are there human beings?” thereby, in fact, providing a full answer to the question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” where the question wants an answer in terms of a final rather than an efficient cause. Happiness, on the other hand, “is … not even an end of nature with regard to human beings in preference to other creatures, let alone a final end of creation” (CJ, 303/AA 5, 436). It is not a final end of creation because “the fact that if the human being exists he makes this itself his final aim does not yield any concept of why he should exist at all, and what value he himself has in order to make his existence agreeable” (CPJ, 309/AA 5, 442). It is not even an end of nature because nature does not seem designed to make people happy. In the essay on universal history, Kant suggests that nature certainly does not aim at the happiness of individuals, which it is prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of a higher end: But it appears that nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well, only that he bring himself to the point where his conduct makes him worthy of life and well-being. What will always seem strange about this is that earlier generations appear to carry out their laborious tasks only for the sake of later ones, to prepare for later generations a step from which they in turn can raise still higher the building that nature had in view. (PP, 31/AA 8, 20)

Nature wills that man “partake in no other happiness or perfection than what he himself, independently of instinct, can secure through his own reason” (PP, 31/AA 8, 20). The development of reason, then, through which human beings gain greater and greater autonomy from nature, is the true goal of history. The struggle for happiness, on the part of individuals, is the means through which this goal is achieved; reason is not merely a means for achieving happiness. Fichte was only a good student of Kant when he wrote, in The Vocation of Man (1800), that “reason

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is not there for the sake of existence; but existence for the sake of reason” (Fichte 1987, 91). Kant maintains that, while people develop their rational capacities with the intention of securing their own well-being, nature uses this effort to secure the development of those capacities, an objective achieved only in the species, not in the individual (PP, 30/AA 8, 19). Nature thereby uses the vicious inclinations it has given to human beings€ – their self-centeredness, unsociability, propensity for war€ – to bring about, at the end of history, the just and moral constitution which is its final aim (CJ, 299–300/AA 5, 432; PP, 32–5/AA 8, 21–5). In The Metaphysic of Morals, Kant makes it clear that the ultimate purpose of such a constitution, embodied in the state, is not the “the welfare of its citizens and their happiness,” which might be more easily achieved in a state of nature, as Rousseau asserts. Instead, the condition of the ideal state is one whose “constitution conforms most fully to principles of right; it is that condition which reason, by a categorical imperative, makes it obligatory for us to strive after” (MM, 94–5/AA 6, 318). Such a healthy condition defines the well-being of the state, as distinct from the welfare of its citizens. This is precisely the position that Herder found so repellant. After reading Kant’s essay, he wrote, in a letter to his friend Hamann:€“Good that I now know what I have from the Herr Magister of the 7th order; and fortunate, that I have no use for his childish plan according to which the human being is created for the species and the most perfect statemachine at the end of time.” “I would be sincerely pleased,” he adds, “if I made [Kant’s] idol of reason shrink back or destroyed it.”23 In opposition to all such ideas of the state, Herder will insist, in the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, that “all state constitutions are nothing but means for human happiness” and that “the sum of the individual happiness of all members is the happiness of the state” (LAH, 132–3). To be fair, Herder’s criticism of Kant in the letter to Hamann is wrong insofar as it is directed towards Kant’s understanding of the nature of the state, and the means that human beings should employ to bring it about. Kant is not saying we exist for the sake of the state, for whose well-being individuals should be sacrificed, claims that would contradict the very essence of his moral and political philosophy. His point is that the just state respects people’s rights rather than promoting their happiness, and that such a state is the goal of history. But Herder is not alone among Kant’s critics in noticing a contradiction between the categorical imperative and Kant’s ╇ Herder’s Briefe 5, p. 106. The letter is dated February 14, 1785.

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teleological view of history,24 according to which individuals are sacrificed for others. Both authors’ conceptions of history are, after all, providential ones, positing (or at least hoping for) a moral author of the world. Herder’s conception of how such an author would order history is consistent with his own moral principles, whereas Kant’s does not seem to be. Herder finds it disturbing that Kant could affirm the view of history he proposes while retaining a belief in its fundamental goodness, and he worries about the political implications of this view, in spite of Kant’s injunction against treating rational natures merely as means. This worry seems justified in light of Wood’s suggestion that the issue here “is really about whether we can understand history in terms of an end seen first as implicitly and unconsciously animating the progressive efforts of the entire human species and later as something grasped by reason and pursued consciously and collectively as a common purpose” (Wood 1999, 233). If unconscious reason within history treats individuals as mere means to a higher end, might there not be a temptation for conscious reason to do so as well, once it recognizes this fact? As to the nature of the state, Herder fully accepts Kant’s principles of natural rights and of the rights of nations, which he wishes would be generally recognized and implemented (LAH, 800). Indeed, he even accepts the idea that human history manifests progress in this regard, and that evil contributes to good. “Individual generations pass away,” he writes, in lines that strongly foreshadow Hegel, “but the immortal whole survives the wounds of the vanished members, and learns good from evil itself” (Ideas, 645). Within Herder’s position, however, the goodness of principles of right depends upon their contribution to human happiness, not the other way around, and freedom, whose value Herder always affirms, is a condition and component of happiness rather than an ultimate moral basis. Furthermore, while past individuals and generations have contributed to forms of scientific, social, and political progress, they also lived for themselves, enjoying forms of life whose pleasures and achievements were unique and unrepeatable. This belief accords with Herder’s general view that “nothing in the entire kingdom of God … is only a means€ – everything is simultaneously a means and an end” (APH, 54). For “all the works of God have this as their own, that although they all belong to one incalculable whole, 24

Whether Kant is entitled to such a view is another question; see Wilson (1998, 324):€ “Kant’s optimism about the cunning of nature appears to be in painful contradiction with his intricately elaborated claim that we are ignorant of the properties of totalities, knowledge of which transcends the bounds of experience.”

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each nonetheless is also for itself a whole and carries the divine character of its destiny (Bestimmung) within itself” (Ideas, 341). Herder thinks this is true even of plants and animals (Ideas, 342). In relation to the “destiny” of non-human species, he would then have to reject Kant’s claim, in “The Speculative Beginning of Human History,” that man assumed his appropriate place within nature “the first time he said to a sheep:€‘the pelt that you bear was given to you by nature not for yourself but for me’” (PP, 52/AA 8, 114). The destiny of human individuals, nations, and generations definitely does not lie in merely being a means for a state that only appears at the end of history€– a state allegedly brought about, to make matters worse, by a single culture. Rejection of this teleological position is very much at play in Herder’s proclamation, in the Ideas, that the peoples of all continents and ages did not live just to fertilize the earth with their ashes, so that their descendants might become happy, at the end of time, through European culture (Ideas, 335). Because Herder affirms the intrinsic worth of happy, flourishing, peaceful human lives, of which he thinks there are many varieties, his philosophy of history never reduces any culture, or any individuals within that culture, to the status of being only a vehicle for the accomplishment of a purpose lying outside its own particular existence. As to the final purpose (Endzweck) of creation€ – “the end of all things”€– there is none. “For what is a final purpose in the world?” Herder asks in the Letters, “Where is there finality?” (LAH, 625). This is a point he makes repeatedly. Much earlier, in Yet Another Philosophy of History, he had written:€“Examine the whole world from heaven to earth€– what is a means? What is an end? Isn’t everything a means to a million ends? Isn’t everything the end of a million means?” (APH, 82). The world, including nature and history, cannot be organized into a total system in which the functioning of the parts is subordinated to the production of a good that is not their own. The world, that is to say, is not a machine. Herder’s repeated assertion to this effect has a cognitive as well as an ethical dimension. He wants to claim, first, that the world cannot be comprehended as a functionally organized total system (Ideas, 625). He also wants to say that it ought not to be forcibly made into one. “Nature is everywhere a living whole and wants to be gently followed and improved, not violently mastered” (Ideas, 284). Herder thinks that attempts to order nature, including humanity, in accordance with the idea of a purpose generally lead to bad results and he cautions against such approaches. He therefore strongly opposes “the social engineering of enlightened absolutism,” in Koepke’s words (Koepke 1996, 192). At the same time, Herder does posit an ideal of

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humanity towards which all nations should strive. On these points, he is not at odds with Kant (though he is concerned that the latter’s philosophy of history seems to point in a contrary direction), except that Herder’s ideal, which he spells out most fully in the Letters, is both highly pluralistic and open-ended. The French and the English will paint their “humanité and humanity” differently (LAH, 736), and we do not know where the human race may end up, since “every newly achieved ability is the root of an innumerable series of new ones” (LAH, 749). Thus, it lies in the very nature of the case that Humanität, the ideal essence of the species, cannot be given a single, determinate formulation. Its realization involves fairness (Billigkeit) and kindness (Güte) (LAH, 128), but cannot be further defined into a set of universal and transhistorical principles. Kant’s appeal to a priori and purely formal principles of right shows both the proximity and the distance between Herder’s ideal and his own. The happiness of citizens, Kant argues, cannot serve as the highest prinÂ� ciple of a political constitution, because “such well-being, which each individual envisions for himself according to his own personal inclination in this way or that, is worthless for any objective principles such as universality requires” (APPV, 249/AA 7, 331). Herder, on the other hand, believes that the goal of a just state is the happiness of its citizens. He accepts that this happiness is highly varied, although individuals in a given society also share some common aspirations. It follows that laws and norms can be nothing more than imperfect generalizations, admitting of exceptions. They may also legitimately differ from one society to another, within limits respecting the basic wants that human beings do as a matter of anthropological fact have in common. Human destiny does not quite lie, therefore, in achieving a “kingdom of ends”€ – a metaphor suggesting a political administrative unit, with a single best form, whose fundamental principle is respect for the human will. Herder’s preferred metaphor is that of a “garden of the common good” (LAH, 227). The ideal world, according to Herder, is a place in which nature is cultivated rather than opposed, containing a diversity of national plants, and founded on a concern for human happiness. S u m m a r y:€t h e m e r i t s of H e r de r’s p o s i t ion Herder’s ethical philosophy is nowhere presented as clearly and systemÂ� atically as Kant’s. I have attempted to reconstruct it in this chapter by gathering together and reordering some of Herder’s scattered reflections on happiness and virtue, as constituents of the good life, and by

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contrasting these with views expressed by Kant. I would like to end by highlighting and discussing a little further the differences isolated in this chapter, while making more explicit the reasons for my belief in the comparative merits of Herder’s position. One issue centrally at stake in this debate is the value of happiness. For Herder, the production of happy lives is an end in itself, while for Kant it is not. This is admittedly a difficult dispute to adjudicate from a fully neutral standpoint. It is not obvious what such a standpoint would look like, and so the search for a completely “objective” answer to the question of the worth of happiness would be misguided. But there nonetheless are legitimate criticisms one might offer against some of the claims Kant makes in devaluing happiness as ultimately worthy of pursuit. At times, these claims articulate a variety of pessimism, common in philosophical and spiritual writings, about the achievability of happiness, suggesting that human beings are never truly satisfied, though they keep thinking they will be, and that life is primarily toil and trouble, though we do not realize it. These ideas are linked to Kant’s definition of happiness as a state of permanent settled contentment. Herder’s much more positive assessment of happiness, including his more optimistic understanding of its achievability, is in turn partly a function of the fact that he does not employ such a definition. Rather, he conceives of happiness as a temporary condition, which can result from the satisfaction of some previously unfulfilled wish or desire, but which may also reflect the pleasure of being, where that includes the active exercise of one’s capacities. Granting that pessimism about happiness involves existential questions which are not easily resolved (as well as differences of temperament it would make no sense to speak of “resolving”), it is significant that Herder’s views more accurately reflect the intuitions and experiences of a majority of people. Most of us do believe in the possibility of happiness under fortunate circumstances (no one denies that lives may be unhappy under unfortunate circumstances, of course), and we attribute value to happiness in spite of its temporary nature. The objection that this is because we are profoundly deluded is unsustainable if it supposes that the alleged delusion consists in the vain expectation of achieving a permanent state of bliss. People are not so foolish. We know that happiness is transient, and that our futures will not be free of hardship and sorrow. We simply think that the trials and tribulations of life are amply rewarded by its joys and satisfactions, or at least that this can be the case if certain conditions are met, so that the task is to achieve those conditions. This is a perfectly reasonable view. I, for one, would want to live longer, as most people do,

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and I doubt that I am any poorer a judge of life’s character than Kant was. Kant’s pessimism on this score is simply unconvincing. It is also rather an easy target, and arguably not crucial to the debate between Kant and Herder on the value of happiness. More important is the difference between them on the concept of happiness, with Kant’s definition of the concept being narrower than Herder’s. For Kant, happiness consists in the satisfaction of inclinations. The exercise of virtue, as well as contentment with oneself upon achieving certain kinds of aims, is excluded from the idea of happiness because such activities and states are not connected with “inclinations.” It is not only because the task of satisfying inclinations is judged to be hopeless that Kant suggests it is better to aim for progressive self-development, and for the self-contentment one achieves through virtuous activity and the exercise of freedom. It is also because he thinks the latter have more worth, since they involve the employment of will, ideally in accord with reason, and lead to the development of human talents. Herder’s definition of happiness includes all states and forms of activity that are satisfying, although he does not maintain that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and he admires self-sacrifice for the sake of others. The point in dispute here is not whether the pursuit of self-interest has the highest value€ – Herder and Kant are entirely in agreement that it does not€– but whether all forms of satisfaction should be included in the definition of happiness. There are two related questions one might ask in assessing the options presented by Kant and Herder. One concerns the plausibility of the epistemological and metaphysical claims grounding the distinction Kant draws between inclinations and other forms of motivÂ� ation. The other concerns the phenomenological basis for this distinction. Regarding the first question, accepting the strong distinction Kant wants to draw between inclinations and other kinds of motivation would require accepting something like his distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms, so that the realm of the “natural” could be clearly distinguished from the realm of freedom. Herder, by contrast, Â�posits a continuity between these, with “freedom” being an expression of the same forces that are at work in the rest of nature, and not something radÂ� ically other. He does not manage to provide an explanation of how this could be so, how a nature whose operations seem, in many aspects, to be Â�governed by cause and effect could also allow for freedom. The force metaÂ� physics he proposes as an alternative to mechanism, moreover, is hardly unproblematic itself. Yet if the choice lies between two forms of obscurity, in response to a metaphysical question that we (still) do not know how

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to answer, Herder’s assumption of a natural continuity we cannot quite understand, at least so far, seems to me preferable to Kant’s positing of a noumenal realm left utterly unknowable. At least it does not require rejecting a priori every possible version of naturalism. The second question concerns the phenomenological basis, the basis in experience, for the distinction between the fulfillment of “natural” inclinations and the exercise of freedom directed by reason, as well as the satisfaction which may be derived from the latter. Kant’s moral philosophy, in which happiness and morality are radically distinct from one another, although not in principle incompatible with each other, is oriented towards the tension between self-interested desire and the obligation of duty. That we experience this tension at times, and that engagement with it forms a considerable part of moral life, is an undeniable fact. Accordingly, there are important insights contained in those of Kant’s formulations about morality which rest on a recognition of this tension. But in light of Herder’s criticisms, one might ask whether the experience of the tension between duty and desire can truly bear the weight of some of the implications Kant draws from it, and especially the construction of the wall that is supposed to separate inclinations from freedom, autonomy from heteronomy, the natural from the moral. I do not think it can. At a phenomenological level, it is not possible to separate “happiness,” as the fulfillment of inclinations and wishes, so sharply from forms of satisfaction that allegedly do not involve “inclinations.” Value judgements and normative prescriptions based on such a sharp separation are therefore unsustainable. For instance, there is no reason to exclude from the concept of happiness the satisfaction that may be derived from the disciplined exercise of virtue, as well as of other capacities. Nor are there good grounds for supposing that acts motivated by sympathy cannot be described as properly moral, a highly counter-intuitive claim. It is then perfectly reasonable to believe that the existence of people who live for happiness, their own and that of others, is self-justifying, and also to suppose that enabling such an existence is a worthwhile social and historÂ�ical goal. In that case, there is no reason to suppose that the life of those fabled Tahitians, even had it actually been the way overstressed Europeans dreamed it to be, was of no more value than the life of happy sheep (not that one should necessarily attribute no value at all to the lives of happy sheep, but that is another matter). One might well wish to reject the ultimate value of a life dedicated to unrestrained “sensuous” indulgence, but that point is not contested between Herder and Kant. Herder is no more a fan of such a life than Kant is, and he emphatically affirms

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the need to limit and regulate desires. Indeed, he criticizes his own society, with its expansionist aims and its ever-multiplying wants, on precisely this point. Herder is not an ascetic, but neither is he a hedonist. Yet we could also pause here and ask some questions even about “sensuous enjoyment.” In what exactly does it consist? Should it be ranked as low on the scale of valuable activities, as it often is? And can it be distinguished so neatly from so-called “higher” pursuits? Herder speaks against greed and luxury, but at the same time he attributes a great deal of worth to forms of “enjoyment” that could be described as having a sensuous component, as well as ones that are quite clearly a matter of sensation. He tends to celebrate the embodied enjoyment of a surrounding nature, for instance, as well as of one’s own being, and he has a very different attitude towards sexuality than Kant. It is doubtful that such activities and experiences, mixed as they are, for human beings, with a reflective sense of appreciation and perhaps gratitude, with sensitivity to beauty, with awareness and passion for another, are quite as simply “sensual,” or sensual in the same way, as the pleasures of the wallowing pig from which we are so concerned to differentiate ourselves. Suppose further that one now adds to this picture the human emotions Herder valued so highly, in particular those constituting some variety of love, and consider also enjoying the company of those whom one loves. A judgement that a life containing these elements, even exclusively, is merely “natural,” or that reason could not be convinced of the ultimate value of such a life is, to say the least, debatable. It is hard not to suspect that this judgement rests on a rather crude and reductive understanding of sensation, emotion, and enjoyment. It also rests on the sense of a strong separation between human beings, as rational creatures, and the rest of nature. This sense is quite alien to Herder, who here, too, posits continuity and gradation rather than a sharp break, and whose monism reflects a view of human beings as included within nature rather than standing outside it. The difference is again partly one of temperament, arising from, or resulting in, markedly different experiences of being in the world. And one has to grant that there is no properly “neutral” position from which to make a judgement on this point. There is no truth of the matter, that is, about whether non-human nature “should” be experienced as alien by human beings or not, whether we should feel deeply a part of nature or not. To some extent, the theological vocabulary of sacredness which Herder sometimes applies to experiences that Kant sees as entirely natural, and therefore as not having any ultimate worth, is a function of this conflict

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of personality and basic experience. Herder’s quasi-pantheism articulates a sense of the embeddedness of human beings within nature, and it ascribes a high value to awareness of this embeddedness, which occurs in multiple forms. I will not pretend that the sympathetic portrayal I have given of this position is entirely “objective,” as if that were possible. Herder’s views better reflect my own experience, and I may as well own up to that in siding with him. The opposition between Kant and Herder on such issues is not, however, entirely a matter of temperament. Monism is not merely an existential mood; it is a metaphysical position, for which arguments may be given. In fact, as I have tried to show, the dispute between Kant and Herder on the subject of happiness involves a number of epistemological and metaphysical disagreements. Herder’s views on emotion and Â�sensation, which are linked to his understanding of the nature and value of happiness, as well as of the relation between happiness and morality, are intimately connected with a variety of epistemological realism, and a variety of naturalism. The latter rejects both mechanism and substance ontology, in favor of an idea of nature as a system of dynamic, shape-building forces. The former rejects idealism, claiming that human faculties connect with and express the same real world that produces them. Herder’s arguments for realism, and, to a lesser extent, for his conception of nature as force, will be presented in greater detail in later chapters. These will not convince everyone€– philosophical arguments on such matters never do€– but they are genuine contenders in the arenas of philosophical controversy within which they are presented. It is also worth observing that Herder’s conception of the place of humanity within nature has some practical ethical advantages at the present time. The view of the appropriate stance human beings should adopt towards nature which this conception entails fits well with current critiques, motivated by environmental concerns, of a purely instrumental relation to nature, and of the consequences of seeing ourselves as potential masters of nature. It does not seem these days as if mastery over nature is the destiny of humanity, or that this goal is the right one to pursue. Many also draw attention to the mistreatment of non-human animals that has been legitimated by the notion that they, like the rest of nature, are only there to serve us, and have no other value. More broadly, one might challenge the idea that perpetual progress, in the sense of increase, is what truly has value, and seek instead to envision a possible state of affairs that would be good in itself, sustainable, and worth repeating. Herder does believe in the possibility of a certain kind of progress, but at

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the same time he finds intrinsic value in the unfolding of happy human lives, of many sorts. This position avoids instrumentalizing either nature or human life. It avoids, especially, the sort of extreme teleology that can tempt people to the view that the end is what really matters, and is worth the sacrifice of individual life and happiness along the way. Contempt for happiness can be ethically dangerous, even when (perhaps especially when) it is motivated by high moral principles. In addition, Herder’s relativism about both happiness and virtue, which grounds his belief in the intrinsic worth of different cultures over history and across the world, is plausible, as is his belief that a concern for happiness can, and should, form the basis for ethics and politics. On the relativity of happiness and virtue, it makes sense to think, as Herder does, that different species of these goods are possible at different times and places, and that no one mode of human organization€– no one social, economic, or political form€– could contain the conditions that would allow the flourishing of all kinds of happiness and virtue, not least because some of these are not compossible. Also sensible is Herder’s belief that, while there are limits to the plasticity of human nature, and therefore some basic needs and wants whose frustration inevitably leads to unhappiness, different cultures give rise to different sets of desires, whose satisfaction constitutes happiness within the cultural horizon of a given society. This variability, at an individual and social level, is one reason why Kant rejects the idea of founding ethical or political prescriptions on the goal of furthering human happiness. And he is right that no single and certain set of principles for right conduct or political justice could be founded on such a goal. But that could lead one to the conclusion that no such principles should be sought, rather than to a rejection of happiness as the aim of ethics and politics. That is precisely Herder’s position, and he is fully willing to accept the consequences that follow from it:€namely, that there is a plurality of possible forms of good government, that ethical judgements have to be guided by a combination of reason and sympathy inevitably leaving much room for error, and that what constitutes human flourishing cannot be known a priori but can only be determined empirically, through an open-ended process of discovering what humanity may be. Apart from the issue of certainty, worries about paternalism might also lead one to reject happiness as the goal of politics in particular, and this is an important aspect of the appeal of Kant’s focus on respecting autonomy instead. Respect for freedom at the political level, however, is no less important to Herder than to Kant. Only, for one thing, Herder sees political freedom as an instrumental rather than an intrinsic good. It is

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simply the best means for advancing human happiness, helping to ensure that the interests of some are not sacrificed to those of others, and that people are able to pursue the satisfaction of their desires. Also, and perhaps more importantly, since the human wants whose satisfaction constitutes happiness are, for Herder, shaped by a social context, it follows that the idea of pure autonomy is incoherent. There will then be no way of setting up a society in which individuals can be considered to exercise such autonomy, nor does this aim make any sense. The choices of individuals are historÂ�ically and culturally conditioned, and while Herder encourages the expansion of cultural horizons through knowledge and dialogue, he does not believe that this process ever places human faculties€– reason, imagination, will€– beyond the shaping forces of the traditions individuals inherit and the societies in which they find themselves. Finally, in relation to ethics in particular, Kant excludes happiness as a possible foundation because he sees ethical action as a determination of the will, a following of duty rather than of desire, so that the fulfillment of the desire for another’s happiness€– for instance, in the case of sympathetic action€– does not in itself count as moral. One problem with this account, I have suggested, is its implicit psychological egoism about the motivation of sympathy, as if sympathetic actions really aimed at one’s own pleasure, rather than this pleasure following from a fulfillment of the aim of making someone else happy. Herder is right not to make this supposition. Herder does not, moreover, deny that morality sometimes demands the following of duty against self-interested desire. The question, rather, is about what makes the duty a duty. For Herder, it is a concern for the happiness of the other person, not respect for a principle, and sympathy can lead one to this concern as well as€ – usually better than€– reason, though it will not necessarily tell a person what precisely she should do in a given situation. Herder never claims that sympathy alone will safely guide a person through the thickets of moral choice so as to make deliberation unnecessary, and that is not where one should locate the difference between him and Kant. The difference lies in Herder’s claim that sympathy, which is fundamentally oriented to the other’s happiness, is an essential component of morality, and that actions motivated by sympathy are not non-moral simply in virtue of their resulting from an emotion rather than an act of will. The above considerations have been implicit throughout my analysis in this chapter, and have guided my view that Herder’s position on happiness is in many respects superior to that of Kant. The topic is a rich one, raising complex issues about moral psychology, among other matters, and I have

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only been able to present some preliminary arguments in Herder’s favor. I will be satisfied, however, if I have laid the groundwork for further study and philosophical analysis, and if I have convincingly demonstrated, as I set out to do, that the differences between Kant and Herder on this issue are more subtle and interesting than is often thought to be the case. That is also true of their contrasting philosophies of history, which I examine more closely in the next chapter.

Ch apter 3

History and human destiny

In the last chapter, we saw that, while Herder accepts the idea that history is advancing towards a goal, for him the “aim” (Zweck) of this providential history includes the various forms along the way, and as ends in themselves, not merely as means towards the production of a later stage. Herder’s theology on this issue reflects the sentiment that the worth of human beings in different societies, past and present, is not determined exclusively by their contribution to some scheme of world-historical progress. His assessment of the forms of life of allegedly simple peoples is linked to this point, and would allow him to answer Kant’s question about “Tahitians.” The goodness of people cannot, in Herder’s view, be measured entirely through their capacity for “reason,” as Kant understood it, nor is their happiness ever like that of sheep or pigs. Herder is therefore not inclined to ask why these people exist. Such a question suggests that their existence, even if it is happy and virtuous, needs to be justified by something outside of itself, that its value remains instrumental rather than intrinsic, a view Herder categorically refuses. Consequently, he also refuses a straightforwardly progressivist view of history, and especially when coupled with the idea that his enlightened Europe is the end and summum bonum of the process. In the Ideas, he describes as absurdly arrogant the presumption “that, in order to live happily, the inhabitants of all parts of the world must be Europeans” (Ideas, 327), affirming that all people everywhere are, and have been, ends in themselves:€ “you people in all parts of the world, who have passed away over the ages, you did not live only to fertilize the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your descendants could become happy through European culture” (Ideas, 335). He does not maintain that all peoples in all cultures are equally advanced in every respect, but he nonetheless rails against colonialism and slavery, 84

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as nothing about any of the characteristics of any people justifies such subjugation or exploitation.1 Furthermore, while the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity is firmly oriented towards an ideal of moral and political progress, and as a result has been considered to be more universalistic than Herder’s earlÂ� ier works, its universalism actually coexists with the same kinds of relativism about different societies that one finds in Yet Another Philosophy of History. In the Letters, too, Herder speaks against any wholesale comparison of peoples, arguing that nature has distributed different gifts to different nations (LAH, 255). He claims that “the Negro, the American, the Mongol has gifts, facilities, preformed aptitudes, which the European does not have” and that “perhaps the sum is the same, only in different relations and with different compensations” (LAH, 699). This remark even shows that Herder is in some ways less inclined to make hierarchical judgements about peoples in this late work than he was in the Ideas, where he described precisely these groups as less advanced. It suggests that he is perhaps less certain now about which gifts are higher than others, or who is more advanced, on the whole. “Letter 116,” in which this sentence appears, maintains that the researcher presupposes no order of rank when approaching the creatures he investigates (LAH, 699), and that European culture cannot function as a measure for all human goods and all human worth (LAH, 700). At no point in this letter does Herder imply a hierarchical ordering of the characteristics of the various peoples he mentions. In any case, Herder’s central point is that all peoples are human, expressing distinct ways of being human (LAH, 701), that none are deserving of calumny or contempt (LAH, 698), and that no people has the right to dominate or enslave another (LAH, 699). His complaints against the horrific treatment of Africans by Europeans in the Letters, moreover, and his insistence on the greater virtue of the former in comparison with the barbaric behavior of the latter (see Neger-Idyllen, LAH, 674–85), is actually compatible with his portrait of Africans as somewhat sensual and childlike in the Ideas. I would therefore dispute Uta Sadji’s claim that “the difference between the depiction of Negroes in these two of Herder’s major works€– the Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind and the Letters Of the African slave trade, Herder says:€“What right did you have, you brutes, even to approach the land of these unfortunates, let alone to take them from their land and their people through robbery, cunning and cruelty?” (Ideas, 261).

1

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for the Advancement of Humanity€– is so striking that one must ask oneself how and why the author changed his view of the inhabitants of black Africa, and, indeed, whether it is even possible for someone to arrive at such a fundamentally new position” (Sadji 1979, 201). In truth, neither in the Ideas nor in the Letters is Herder entirely free of condescending biases himself, nor is he ever fully committed to the thesis that no judgements whatsoever of higher and lower, better and worse, can be made about specific human aptitudes, inclinations, values, or forms of life.2 He just claims that individual virtue and happiness are found in every society, and that cultures cannot be ranked against one another, using these two goods as measures. He also claims, most basically, that every people should be appreciated for what it is, given that “every nation, in its time and place, was only that which it could be” (LAH, 587), while calling for awareness of one’s own limitations as well as those of others. For Herder, the truly impartial vision regards every nation not with indifference to its merits and demerits, but with an equality of love, and this love does lead, within Herder’s thought, to a kind of deep ecology about human cultures, past and present:€“The humblest genius hates comparison and ordering according to rank … lichen, moss, ferns, and the richest flowering herb; each blooms in its place in God’s order” (LAH, 576). Thus, even in the Letters, which embraces a broadly progressivist ideal, Herder’s position is still best described as a form of relativism€ – rather than, say, pluralism, although Herder is a pluralist as well€– because it continues to maintain that historical cultures should be considered for what they are, employing a measure intrinsic to them. And yet such relativism does not rule out judgements based on some cross-Â�culturally applicable ethical principles, or even on strong ideas about human perfection. The claim is that one should not blame a piece of moss for not being a lily, as if it had a choice, and as if moss possessed no virtues of its own. But one can still judge that the lily has a more sophisticated structure than the moss. One can even judge that, in certain respects, it stands “higher” on the botanical scale than the moss, while insisting, without self-contradiction, that it is not therefore simply better, and that the bit of moss should be loved no less than the lily. This is not to say that Herder imagines one single form at the top of the scale of human development towards which history is inexorably moving. He is, as I have said, a pluralist as well. The goal is Humanität, but while It is therefore wrong to accuse Herder of falling into “a basic relativist paradox” as Whitton does (1988, 162). Whitton can offer this objection only by falsely, and anachronistically, conflating Herder’s position with that of Lyotard.

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there are many ways of failing to reach this goal, there are also many ways of accomplishing it. Humanität is the common ideal to which each nation contributes by unfolding the potentialities that are proper to it, by tending its own plot in the garden of humanity (LAH, 164) (although this does not mean that an individual must remain in his native land, as if he actually were a tree or a plant rather than a human being [LAH, 329–30]). The political ideal corresponding to this cultural one is summarized by Barnard: Herder did not recommend the abolition of states in favour of some international organization or “world government”; indeed he opposed the latter, arguing that international tension was likely to increase rather than abate in the wake of its creation. The existence of independent nation states was for him as natural and necessary as the alternation of day and night; it was something people had to accept and to which they had to adjust themselves as best as they could. They had to learn to live together as men and as members of national communities. “Cosmopolitanism” was at best a blithe illusion and at worst an invitation to international chaos or enforced uniformity. (Barnard 1965, xix)

Herder sees human history as a progressive struggle towards a regime of peaceful diversity (LAH, 227), free of the religious persecution he particularly despises (LAH, 291–2), expressing in manifold ways the ideal of Humanität, and he combines this ideal, but still plural, vision of humanity with a relativistic appreciation of the diverse cultures and peoples that the good earth has supported. T h e pro g r e s s of w h at ? The various dimensions of Herder’s understanding of humanity, however, combined with his relativistic appreciation of difference, do generate a puzzle. I argued in Chapter 1 that, while Herder believes in a certain form of progress over history, he also maintains that this progress does not aim at greater happiness or virtue among individuals. Rather, every stage of history, and every established culture, gives rise to its own unique forms of these individual goods. In Chapter 2, I then suggested that Herder’s opposition to Kant regarding the goal and progress of history revolves around two key elements: (1) the implication that some generations might be only a means for the production of an end they will not enjoy; and, (2) the idea that the final goal of history is the production of a just state, whose constitution is oriented towards something other than the happiness of its individual members.

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Added together, these points appear to yield an incoherence. It would seem that Herder promotes the spread of reasonable principles of justice, as does Kant, but sees these as oriented towards happiness, understood in a sense that includes activity and virtue. If that is so, and if Herder believes the advancement of humanity is slowly accomplishing the spread of justice, then should this not mean that the happiness, along with the virtue, of individuals is increasing after all, or at least that it can do so once the principles of justice are genuinely and thoroughly realized? It is true that Herder’s ideal insists on a measure of possible pluralism with respect to what constitutes human flourishing, and he does not imagine, as the purpose of history, the production of a single best culture. Still, supposing that the expansion of justice across the globe would include, for instance, the abolition of slavery, along with a diminution of other kinds of oppression, why should this not lead to an increase in individual happiness, as many people would then no longer suffer the sad fate of being dominated by others? Why would it not also lead to an increase in virtue, if individÂ� uals born into more advanced ages were to recognize human equality, as Herder asks and hopes, feeling a genuine common solidarity with people all over the world? On the other hand, if the happiness of individuals is not increased over history in any sense at all, how can Herder sustain a belief in historical progress? What value, or set of values, could he use to measure this progress, given his explicit rejection of Kant’s thesis that the goal of history is not the happiness of individuals but something else? The latter problem is exacerbated by Herder’s repeated claim that the various cultures human history has produced should not be compared with one another, a point he still emphasizes as late as in the Letters: Nature has distributed her gifts differently; on different stalks, under different climates and types of care grow different fruits. Who can compare these with one another? Who can award the prize to the crab apple over the grape? (LAH, 225)

It is statements like these that led Isaiah Berlin to the conclusion that, for Herder, progress “lies in a variety of cultures, incommensurable with each other and incapable of being arranged on some single scale of progress or retrogression” (Berlin 2000, 216). Berlin is right that Herder does not think progress can be measured on a “single scale,” since his pluralism about human goods has the implication that there are multiple measures of human advancement. In addition, Herder thinks an increase in some goods must inevitably be accompanied by a decline in others, so that, as Barnard puts it, “historical progress involves the cost of excluded

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alternatives” (Barnard 2003, 15). But if, for Herder, cultures were totally incommensurable, he could not speak of progress at all, as there would be no common units of value in terms of which it could be assessed. Since Herder criticizes past and present cultures on many counts, in particular for their mistreatment and subjugation of various groups, he clearly does appeal to some common value, or values, which he takes to be basic, and which qualify the thesis of incommensurability. Moreover, although Herder rejects the “dream” of simple linear progress popular among some of his contemporaries, and criticizes the biased perspectives inevitably accompanying this dream, he equally rejects the antithetical position of total skepticism about progress: Others who saw the objectionableness of this dream, and knew nothing better, saw vices and virtues change like climates, perfections arise and perish like a springtime of leaves, human ethics and inclinations fly and turn, like leaves of fate€– No plan! No progress! Eternal revolution€– weaving and undoing!€– Penelope-work!€– They fell into a whirlpool, skepticism about all virtue, happiness, and vocation of mankind, into which they wove all history, religion and ethical doctrines. (APH, 41)

Against such thoroughgoing skepticism, Herder affirms that history displays progress (Fortgang) and development (Entwickelung) in a “higher sense” (APH, 41). A number of scholars have struggled to understand what this “higher sense” is supposed to consist in. Wolfgang Förster suggests that “the central line in the historical progress of mankind realizes itself, according to Herder, in the fullness of specific shapes, in multiple forms of appearance, and in a contradictory, interrupted manner” (Förster 1986, 380). Wulf Koepke claims that, for Herder:€“History is development, evolution; but that should not be seen as the perfection of plants. Rather, history has to be compared to the life stages of plants. Every stage reaches its own perfection but must give way to the next” (Koepke 1987b,€13). These points are sound, but they still do not address the question of what measures of value Herder is assuming in affirming any form of progress. Nor do they resolve the puzzle regarding the relation between historical progress and individual happiness. Remarking on the way later civilizations build upon the achievements of previous ones, Herder claims to see in this movement “truly progress, progressive development, even if no individual won in the process” (APH, 42). But, again, if no individual won in the process, and if Herder is at the same time critical of the idea that the goal of humanity should be anything other than the happiness of individuals, what kind of “progress” could this be?

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Frederick Beiser suggests that the tension, in Herder’s writings, between the thesis that cultures are incommensurable, on the one hand, and that there is progress, on the other, is resolved through Herder’s use of the analogy between the stages of human civilization and the stages of an individual life. This analogy does play a central role within Herder’s philosophy of history. For instance, in Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder describes the culture of “Oriental patriarchs” as the “golden age of mankind’s childhood” (APH, 15), ancient Greece as the age of youth (APH, 19–20), and Roman society as the age of manhood (APH, 30–1). When speaking of his own century, he tends to employ the metaphor of old age. This metaphor can imply a kind of decline, suggesting that sociÂ� eties at earlier stages of human development have an energy and freshness that have been lost in his own time. It can also point, obliquely, towards the hope of rebirth and renewal, in line with another recurring trope in Herder’s philosophy of history. As Herder develops it, however, the metaphor of old age is deeply ambivalent (see Brummack 1989, 281). It connotes not only desiccation but also maturity, and the stages of life analogy in general implies, among other things, development and growth. Often, Herder insists only that an earlier stage should not be measured by the standards of a later one (APG, 22), just as a child should not be judged as one would judge an adult. Beiser therefore claims that, through the use of this organic analogy, Herder manages to “avoid the danger of relativism,” as the metaphor of stages of growth allows him to say “that cultures are incommensurable with each other and that they all conform to a single standard or goal” (Beiser 1992, 208–9). This interpretation is helpful, but still leaves unclarified the nature of the “single standard or goal.” The latter cannot be virtue or happiness, since Herder complains that to date those who have undertaken to chart historical progress have usually adopted as their favorite idea precisely a notion of progress that involves an increase in virtue and happiness among individual human beings (APH, 40). In formulating his counterposition, Herder uses the analogies of a stream of water that flows into many shapes while remaining what it is, a tree that passes through various phases in its upward growth, and, once more, the analogy of stages of an individual life. Developing this last analogy, he says, “the youth is not happier than the innocent, contented child nor is the peaceful old greyhair unhappier than the violently striving man” (APH, 40). He seems to be claiming, then, that there are different forms of happiness, along with different types of virtue, that belong to these different stages. One can, and should, appreciate these for what they are; it is absurd to blame

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a child for not being a man, and one ought not to lament the loss of vigor in old age if it is replaced by peacefulness. In that case, the analogy would be affirming an increase in knowledge and maturity over history, while rejecting the idea that there has been a corresponding increase in individual virtue and happiness. Yet Herder hopes for a future in which equitable social arrangements will be realized in fact, rather than just in theory, across the world, a hope that continues to pose a difficulty for the strongest of his claims about the historical relativity of happiness, given that ensuring happiness is supposed to be the goal of such arrangements. If we temporarily bracket this problem, Herder’s position on the logic of history appears, in its basic structure and values, to have much in common with that of Hegel, as developed in the latter’s lectures on The Philosophy of History. Adopting freedom as his guiding concept, Hegel posits in these lectures a dialectical progress towards the (subjective and objective) realization of freedom over the course of human civilization. The progressive realization of this idea, according to Hegel, is evident in the evolution of cultural wholes expressing different grades of advancement, with the interest of history being focused on the systems of government that are an integral aspect of these wholes. Some nations remain at the level of lesser maturity, but they are capable of further development through the assimilation of the more advanced ideas of freedom arrived at elsewhere. Hegel claims, for example, that “the Orientals have not attained the knowledge that spirit€– man as such€– is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free” (PH, 18). Orientals know only that one man, the ruler, is free. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, knew that some are free, while “the German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free” (PH, 18). This consciousness has now spread across Europe, and will be spread to the rest of the world by means of European political domination. In spite of Herder’s complaints against accounts of world history that are biased in favour of Europe’s present, and his complaints against European domination over other continents, many elements in his philosoÂ�phy of history do anticipate Hegel’s position. In Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder castigates his contemporaries for their contemptuous and condescending attitudes towards past societies, but he does so without denying that these societies represent the early stages of man’s development. Oriental patriarchy is for him, too, a very early stage, “the Golden Age of humanity in its childhood” (APH, 15), when religion, fear, authority, and despotism are the necessary vehicle of formation

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(APH, 22). This culture has not vanished from the earth, moreover, and Herder claims that “no Oriental as such is yet able to possess any deep concept of a humane, better constitution” (APH, 17). Thus, Herder does not say that “Orientals” were, or are, as mature as modern Europeans. He just wants his readers to see that the “oriental” stage of development was indispensable for the development of mankind, for “there foundation stones were laid which could not be laid in another way” (APH, 16). He also wants them to appreciate the happiness and virtue that belong, specifically and exclusively, to this stage. “Was not precisely the Oriental with his sensitive child’s sense the happiest and most obedient student?” (APH, 17), he asks, adding that in this phase of history “the human spirit received the first forms of wisdom and virtue with a simplicity, strength and loftiness that now€– speaking frankly€– in our philosophical, cold, European world surely has nothing, nothing at all, like it” (APH, 17). Herder’s claims about the relativity of happiness and virtue are, therefore, combined with a theory of Â�progressive maturation according to which present European societies are the eldest. Herder even maintains that “the greater part of the nations of the earth remain in childhood” (APH, 89), and the nations he has in mind are non-European ones. These views are reiterated in the Ideas, where the analogy of stages of life is once again prominent. Herder claims here that China, like many other nations, remains as if at the level of youth, and that most nations remain children for the whole of their lives (Ideas, 450). His defense of such cultures against denigrating views often appeals, again, for an understanding of their immature stage of development. When speaking of the caste system in India, particularly the power of the Brahmin caste, he says this arrangement is understandable “at this level of culture” (Ideas, 451), and he associates the existence of a priestly caste in general with the political youth of a nation (Ideas, 457). “A form of Brahmins, Mandarins Talapoins, Lamas etc. was … necessary for every nation in its political youth,” Herder argues, adding that “this stage of a yet very imperfect culture” should not be judged by the standards of a more advanced one (Ideas, 459). But he does not eschew the judgement that there are more and less advanced stages of political development, and he relegates virtually all non-European nations to the level of childhood, in this respect. Given the forms of social organization Herder associates with childhood, freedom is again visible as his guiding concept, at least in relation to political progress and the variety of moral progress connected with it. Vicki Spencer notes that “Herder is not only a narrator of history but also a social commentator and critic” (Spencer 1998, 64). I pointed out

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in Chapter 1 that most of the time what Herder criticizes are actions and practices involving the subjugation of some social groups or nations by others. Examples include Herder’s criticisms of slavery, both ancient and modern, the caste system in India, women being treated like domestic animals or slaves, priestly and monarchical rule, the state-machine, imperialism and colonialism. These are all situations in which certain Â�people€ – slaves, women, citizens€ – are made to serve others to whom their own interests are sacrificed, and are denied the opportunity for selfdetermination. Herder’s objections to Kant, moreover, never take issue with the categorical imperative forbidding the treatment of human beings merely as means. On the contrary, he criticizes Kant’s model of history for failing adequately to respect this imperative, which he extends, in his own historical analysis, to social and cultural groups. His critical judgements about exploitative relations between these groups do rest, then, on a fundamental moral principle grounded in the value of human freedom. That principle would also appear to be the yardstick by which Herder, like Hegel, measures political progress. Even the course of this progress is quasi-dialectical, anticipating a crucial element of Hegel’s philosophy of history:€“Just as our gait is a constant falling to the right and left and yet we come further with each step:€so is the progress of culture among human generations and whole peoples. We often try both extremes separately, until we reach the still middle, as the pendulum strikes out to both sides” (Ideas, 655). It seems, therefore, that Herder’s position strongly anticipates Hegel’s idea that history reveals the manifold shapes of the human spirit in its quest for perfection. One might argue further that, if Herder’s philosophy of history is nonetheless more relativistic, or at least more deeply pluralistic, than Hegel’s, that is simply because its focus is broader. Hegel, for instance, excludes the question of individual happiness as unsuitable for the topic of world history: He is happy who finds his condition suited to his special character, will, and fancy, and so enjoys himself in that condition. The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony. (PH, 26)

Herder, by contrast, is profoundly interested in these allegedly “blank pages,” in those periods of harmony during which a culture, at its best, enables its members to flourish in the unique way proper to that historical moment. A history of such flourishing, the enjoyment of which constitutes happiness, is still, for Herder, a history of nations because, while

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happiness is “an individual good,” the individual’s wants are shaped by a cultural context. It is then, for Herder, not entirely relative to an individual’s “special character, will, and fancy,” as Hegel supposes, but is also relative to the complex system of wants evoked within a given culture at a given point in history. In his own philosophy of history, Herder wants to provide sympathetic descriptions of these systems, rather than exclusively to chart, as Hegel does, the political development of humanity, with its points of tension, conflict, and transition. The latter development is nonetheless well represented in Herder’s thought. Also represented is the idea that history has some kind of teleological structure, and that the efforts of individuals contribute to the achievement of history’s telos without their being aware of it. At times, Herder himself describes individuals as tools in the hands of a providential destiny. In Yet Another Philosophy of History, he writes:€ “Man, you were always, almost against your will, just a small, blind tool (Werkzeug)” (APH, 58–59), whose pride and timidity were themselves both “individuals tools in the plans of an unsurveyable providence” (APH 107). Herder maintains, against Kant, just that individuals, nations, and epochs do not figure only as tools within the designs of a benevolent providence. A view of history as ultimately governed by a moral end cannot be reconciled, he feels, with the idea that any human beings are mere means for the realization of that end. But this view is perfectly compatible with the thesis that every human being is both a means and an end. Because the philosophers of history to whom he objects have a tendency to think of the past exclusively as a means to the present, and to regard with disdain any beliefs and forms of life that are significantly different from their own, Herder’s writings on the subject often emphasize what was worthy of respect in past societies, insisting on the dignity and intrinsic value of the individual lives that were led within them. There are nevertheless strongly teleological elements in his account of history, and Herder does want to justify the course of history. He frames the latter idea in terms of that species of pantheistic theology, inaugurated by Spinoza, which occupies, within the history of European ideas, a peculiar space between theism and naturalism. History, he claims, is governed by “divine natural laws” (Ideas, 571). It is a kind of divine drama, the story of “God’s course among the nations” (APH, 87), yet Herder opposes any appeal to a hidden providential plan to explain its events, or to excuse its violent episodes as necessary (Ideas, 623). On this last point, there is sharp difference between Herder and Hegel, illustrated in their respective attitudes towards the famous figures of history. Herder insists, for instance, that questions like, “Why did

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Alexander go to India?” should be answered entirely through an analysis of the circumstances and character of the actor, for: If we attribute to his rash resolution the hidden intentions of a higher power, and to his brave deeds an individual goddess of fortune:€we then run the danger on the one hand of making his blackest impetuosities into divine purposes, and on the other of diminishing his personal courage and cleverness in war, but on the whole of robbing the entire event of its natural form … History is the science of that which is, not of that which perhaps could be, in accordance with the secret intentions of fate. (Ideas, 569)

We could compare these remarks with Hegel’s understanding of “worldhistorical persons” as “agents of the world-spirit” (PH, 31) who unconsciously unfold “the general idea” of history (PH, 30). Hegel is in no danger of diminishing the personal virtue of such figures; in fact, he attributes any attempt to do so to envy (PH, 32). But his account does run the opposite risk of excusing what they do in pursuit of their great passion as necessary to the progress of spirit: A world-historical individual … is devoted to the one aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower€– crush to pieces many an object in its path. (PH, 32)

Herder’s approach is designed specifically to rule out analyses of historical figures in which their trampling of innocent flowers is seen as justified by the needs of history. Given his stated position on how the science of history should proceed, moreover, and the dangers of positing hidden purposes, he would also have to take issue with the general framework of Hegel’s analysis of figures like Alexander and Napoleon, including the latter’s rejection of a “psychological” view of their actions (HP, 31). According to Herder, the historian should deal not with ultimate purposes, but with evident causes and consequences (Ideas, 625), and Herder never has recourse to divine intentions himself when identifying the motors of historical progress. Human advancement is, on his description, a natural process of learning through trial and error (Ideas, 646). Providence can be said to employ a kind of punishment, but this punishment is itself part of the natural process, ensuring that “every idleness, folly, evil, unreason, and unfairness” intrinsically leads to an undesirable result (Ideas, 667–8). In the Letters, Herder adopts the Greek term “nemesis” to define this process, claiming that bad actions are revenged of themselves:€“all imbalances and injustices, every proud presumption,

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every hostile incitement, every betrayal carries its punishment with it or behind it” (LAH, 735). On occasion, Herder even suggests that oppressive social relations are partly the result of flaws in the character of those who suffer them. “One can accept as a cardinal principle of history,” he writes at one juncture, “that no people is oppressed unless it wants to allow itself to be oppressed, and is therefore deserving of slavery.” As examples of vices in a ruling class that permit and deserve conquest by others, he lists decadence, foolishness, cowardice and stupidity (Ideas, 367). These remarks are strikingly untypical, though, of the sentiments Herder usually expresses on the subject of oppression. Most commonly, in relation to cases involving the subjugation of one people by another, Herder’s attitude is one of sympathy and indignation. He also does not usually ascribe moral fault to nations or individuals who are enslaved by others. He does, on the other hand, frequently suggest that there is some fault of a non-moral sort, some form of weakness or imperfection, that allows conquest to occur. Reflecting on what he imagines to be the case of India, for instance, he suggests that “sooner or later, every Brahmin-rule readies a people (Volk) for subjugation,” because, under such rule, “the line of warriors must soon become unwarlike, as its vocation is contrary to religion and is subordinated to a more noble line that hates all spilling of blood” (Ideas 457). A people in this condition is lucky if it is geographically isolated from potential conquerors, “but at the foot of those mountains on which live human predators, Mongols, near those luxuriant coasts where Europeans bent on mischief land; poor Hindus, sooner or later you, with your peaceful constitution, would be lost” (Ideas, 457). This loss, while sad, is inevitable:€“The hard course of the destiny of peoples! And yet it is nothing but the natural order” (Ideas, 457). Herder disapproves, morally, of spilling blood, but in a world of predators, you must be able to defend yourself, he thinks, or you go under. That is the lesson of history, which nations that suffer the yoke must learn before they can free themselves. Within Herder’s account of history, then, humanity progresses as a result of what it learns through the bitter consequences of its own character and actions. Consequently, to discern the moral sense of history, “we need only to accept that corruptions precede so that improvement and order may be produced” (APH, 54). We need to understand that “the course of providence goes to its goal (Ziel), even over millions of corpses!” (APH, 98). Only this course does not follow a nice straight line, as the philosopher wishes it would, with every following individual and generation perfecting itself according to the ideal of virtue and happiness of

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which he alone is the exponent (APH, 81). The goal is also not a final end in a sense that would make the course purely a means:€“the philosophy of final ends (Endzwecke) has brought no advantage to natural history,” for it has been satisfied with illusions, unable to grasp how much more human history is, with its thousand intertwined goals (Ideas, 625). Each of the particular moments at which human beings strive for these goals is also an end in itself. Expressing the point theologically, Herder writes that the father of all things regards each of his children as if it were the only creature in the world: All of his means are ends; all of his ends are means to greater ends, in which the all fulfilling infinite reveals himself. What every man is and can be, therefore, that must be the end (Zweck) of the human race; and what is this? Humanity and happiness in this place, in this grade, as this and no other member in the chain of creation that reaches through the whole race. (Ideas, 342)

Slightly later in the Ideas, in passages criticizing despotism, Herder adds:€“But even in the worst degeneration the tirelessly good mother does not abandon her children, and knows how at least to ease the bitter drink of oppression, through forgetting and habituation” (Ideas, 368). Herder also suggests, in this context, that inner happiness and freedom are not inescapably tied to a person’s social standing as master or slave: In general the lot of man and his destiny (Bestimmung) for earthly happiness is bound neither to ruling nor to serving. The poor man can be happy, the slave can be free:€the despot and his instruments are usually, and often through whole generations, the unhappiest and most unworthy slaves. (Ideas, 368)

In light of these points, one might reasonably conclude that Herder posits a progressive view of history, taking freedom as the measure of this progress, with individual virtue and happiness being a function of the stage of development at which different societies emerge. Such an interpretation would support Beiser’s suggestion that the analogy between stages of life and stages of history allows Herder to “avoid the danger of relativism,” although I believe it is more appropriate to say that the use of this analogy allows Herder to combine a theory of historical progress with a form of relativism. Herder could then be arguing that, while the aim of political freedom is the promotion of happiness, human beings are adaptable, and individuals are able to find happiness within lesser degrees of freedom, in accordance with the horizon of expectations constructed by their circumstances and culture. Furthermore, the political lens is not the only one through which “freedom,” let alone all human excellence and well-being, should be viewed. When measured in relation to personal virtue, and to

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the happiness for which such virtue is a precondition, the political slave may be a master, and the master a slave. There remain certain elements in Herder’s position on history which complicate this picture, though, and attenuate the idea of history as progressive even in a non-linear manner. One of these we have encountered before:€Herder’s belief that not everything good in one age can be retained in subsequent ones, and that all progress is therefore inevitably accompanied by loss. “The human container is capable of no full perfection all at once,” he writes in Yet Another Philosophy of History; “it must always leave behind in moving further on” (APH, 29). The political and military weaknesses that make a society vulnerable to conquest, moreover, may well be accompanied by forms of excellence that disappear along with its demise. Herder’s defenses of past societies against present contempt do not only ask that these societies be measured in relation to what was possible at the time, and that they be appreciated as necessary stages in the development of humanity. They also draw attention to the forms of human excellence these stages contained, which were lost at stages judged to be, in other respects, more advanced. In his comments on “Oriental patriarchs,” for example, Herder appeals for an understanding of what is necessary and useful in the childhood of mankind, but he also draws some unfavorable contrasts between this age and his own: It may be that only respect, exemplary model, authority ruled in the patriarch’s tent, and that hence, in the artificially contrived language of our politics, fear was the driving motive of this constitution … Is there not in every human life an age in which we learn nothing through dry and cold reason, but everything through inclination, education, in obedience to authority? (APH 15)

The reference to “dry and cold reason” here reflects a prominent theme in Yet Another Philosophy of History:€the overemphasis, within the intellecÂ� tual milieu of eighteenth-century Europe, on the instruction of reason, isolated from the education and cultivation of other aspects of the individual. Influenced by the model of education proposed by Rousseau in Émile (1762), Herder adapts to an analysis of historical development the thesis that human formation, and particularly moral formation, requires more than the knowledge of correct ideas. Since “all ethics are based on inclinations” (PW, 270), the advancement of humanity, and the task of history, includes an education of human inclinations effected by the character of cultures at different stages. The restrictions and shortcomings of those cultures are therefore necessary as means of formation, and to think

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they could be dispensed with is to suppose that the human species could be educated by the light of reason alone. Herder claims, instead, that if the means of enlightenment upheld by his own age were imposed upon the progress of an earlier one€– on ancient Egypt, for example€– a deformation would result: do you not see, if you know a bit of the Egyptian spirit, how your citizen’s cleverness, philosophical deism, easy trifling, travel to all parts of the world, tolerance, propriety, international law, and however this stuff’s names may go on, would have in turn made the boy into a miserable old man of a boy? He had to be shut in; there had to be a certain privation of cognitions, inclinations, and virtues, in order to develop what lay within him and could now in the sequence of world events be developed only by that land, that place! (APH, 22)

Ostensibly, Herder’s point in this passage is that his contemporaries need to understand the past necessity of forms of education that were a precondition for the achievement of their own cultural maturity. But the subtext is that this supposedly mature culture is itself lacking in some respects, and is not superior to the past in every way. One of its flaws is that it does not recognize the ongoing necessity for an education reaching deeper than the intellect€– one that can form, and reform, the whole person. Herder often uses the term “reason” (Vernunft) positively himself, upholding its value as an aspect of human development. But genuine progress in morality and politics requires more, he insists, than paying lip-service to notions of freedom, honor and virtue (APH, 64). Without a change in people’s dispositions, through an education that takes into account the roles of affection, imagination and custom in the formation of human beings, “humanity” (Menschheit) is just a pretty word (APH, 66). Herder often gives examples of the hypocrisy of his age in this respect: Savages everywhere will become ripe for conversion as they grow fonder of our spirits and our luxury. As they approach our culture, through spirits and luxury, they will all become, so help me God, men like we are! good, strong, happy men! (APH, 71) In Europe slavery has been abolished, because we calculated that these slaves cost far more and produced far less than free people. We have allowed ourselves just one thing, to treat three continents as slaves, to trade their people, to banish them to silver mines and sugar plantations€– but those are not Europeans, not Christians. (APH, 74)

Herder promotes the achievement of a true concern for humanity in all of its forms, but he condemns the emptiness and hypocrisy of the rhetoric of universal brotherhood that he hears around him. Underneath

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this rhetoric, he suggests, lies imperialism€ – economic, political, and cultural.3 What “we” really want is for everyone to be like us, or, better, to serve us. His barb that “the whole earth is practically illumined already by Voltaire’s clear light!” (APH, 71) is directed towards the fact and consequences of this manifestation of will to power, to use a Nietzschean term. Herder takes issue with another phenomenon he associates with rationalism, the increasing tendency to view society as a “machine,” an organized, as opposed to an organic, system within which every individual has its assigned place and function. He points to the loss of individual freedom and responsibility in a society where everyone is steered into “that marvelous thing, the machine,” and where “no one knows anymore about self-justification, self-worth and self-determination” (APH, 73). He objects also to the corresponding tendency to formulate large-scale engineering plans for this social machine. The progress of humanity, Herder believes, is the work of “destiny,” where every reformation begins with small things that gradually shape themselves into something greater. “Whenever, on the other hand, some big plan was deliberately designed beforehand,” he claims, “it failed” (APH, 58). What Herder deplores in his enlightened age, then, is the deployment of reason in separation from kindness, as well as the deterioration of this faculty into a kind of productive technique, a tool for straightening the crooked timber of humanity:€“It is a terrible thing to regard mankind as just a line which one can bend, cut, extend, and shrink for some purpose quite as one pleases, in order to execute a plan, to accomplish a task” (LAH, 733). If Europe could unite its reason with goodness, on the other hand€– and Herder is hopeful that it can, although it has not done so to date€– this would be a great boon for the entire human race (LAH, 740–1). “Progress” in reason, therefore, is not an unmitigated good. While Herder cannot be described as an anti-rationalist, his critique of various aspects of the ideal of reason in his age seeks to highlight ways in which the development of this ideal does not simply constitute an advance. He contrasts his society unfavorably with past ones to make this point. Thus, to Vicki Spencer’s observation that Herder’s philosophy of history includes critical commentary, one must add the point that this critical commentary extends in both directions:€from the past to the present as well as the other way around. Herder accepts a qualified theory of historical progress ╇ Cf. Beiser (1992, 202–3).

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aiming at the ideal of freedom from domination, and he condemns many practices and forms of social organization in the past, as well as in the present, in light of this ideal. But the past is not, for Herder, merely a record of flaws and imperfections that have been overcome, or a record of the process of this overcoming. Herder could not agree with Kant’s hypothesis, near the end of the latter’s essay on universal history, that future generations will treasure the history of ancient times “only from the standpoint of what interests them, namely, what peoples and governments have done to contribute to or to impair the objective of cosmopolitanism” (Kant 1983, 39). Nor does Herder only want to stress, against such a hypothesis, the intrinsic interest of past excellences that could not help but be lost in the course of historical progress, being incompatible with more advanced forms of social and political culture. That is part of his point, but he also assumes that the present can be instructed by these excellences, that it can not only judge the past, but also learn from it. The motivation of learning from the past in order to correct the present is not always advanced directly in Herder’s appreciative appraisals of ancient societies. Its presence is unmistakable, however, as in the following description of the “inclinations” predominant among “Oriental patriarchs”: What were these inclinations? What should they have been? The most natural, the strongest, the simplest! The eternal foundation for the education (Bildung) of mankind:€wisdom instead of science, piety instead of wisdom, love of parents, spouse, and children instead of pleasantry and debauchery. Life well-ordered, divine rule and regency over a house as the original model of all civil order and its institutions€– in all this humanity’s simplest enjoyment but also its deepest. (APH, 12)

This passage underlines the virtues that ancient peoples possessed “instead of” the qualities of the present, presupposed (under a different description) as the best of all possible excellences by the French philosophers with whom Herder takes such strong issue in Yet Another Philosophy of History. It needs to be read in connection with his directly critical statements, in the same work, about the elite culture of the European Enlightenment, and with his prescriptions for education. Herder’s complaint that modern Europe focuses entirely on the head rather than the heart is relevant in this regard, as he thinks the result is that Europe’s progress in moral ideas has been accompanied by a diminution in virtuous inclinations and concrete affection for others (APH,€64). This is due to a failure to understand that the education of humanity

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requires “the awakening or strengthening of the inclinations by which mankind is made blessed,” and that, on their own, “ideas yield nothing but ideas, greater clarity, correctness, and order in thinking” (APH, 65). They do not yield the reform in inclinations that is the mark of genuine moral progress. It is then no wonder if Europe behaves hypocritically, combining its high ideas with low behavior, especially towards non-European nations. One function of the history Herder tells, then, is to offer instructive examples from the past. These are intended to highlight the faults of the present by contrast, and to serve as a source of inspiration for change, so that Herder’s relativization of the virtues of his age has a practical didactic purpose as well as a purely descriptive one. Herder asks those of his contemporaries who triumphantly celebrate the age of reason to recognize that the ideals of this age have limitations. He attempts, at the same time, to build an appreciation for certain goods€– naturalness, passion, concreteness€– that have been lost in the achievements of the Enlightenment, and that need to be restored in some manner. This is not a matter of simply going back, but of drawing inspiration from the past. Never, for Herder, can any historical moment be repeated, for each is unique, the product of a very particular set of interconnected traditions and circumstances: into no land has education (Bildung) ever been able to take a step back, so that it might, for a second time, become what it was. The path of destiny is iron and strict:€the scene of that time, that world, was already over; the purposes for which they existed were past€– can today become yesterday? (APH, 87)

Nor can a single factor, including any one virtue or excellence, be isolated from the cultural context within which it is situated, and which gives it its precise shape and meaning. Herder therefore always speaks against mere imitation of the past as well as of other nations. In his essay on sculpture, published in 1778, he writes of the Greeks: We should treat them as friends, not idols. Instead of subjugating ourselves to them, we should treat them, as the name itself suggests, as exemplars that present to us in bodily form the truth of ancient times, making us aware of the proximity and distance between their form of life and our own. (Sculpture, 61)

Whereas Herder is rejecting simple imitation in these lines, opposing a variety of neoclassicism in art, the relation to the Greeks promoted in Sculpture involves more than a mere appreciation of what once was, and cannot be any longer. Herder laments the overemphasis on the sense of sight within the aesthetics of his century, a fault he associates with a lack of attention to embodied experience, to the sense of touch in particular,

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and with abstraction and artificiality. Greek sculpture reveals a concrete sensibility and genuineness that Herder thinks his age has lost, but the imitation of the Greeks, far from constituting a solution, is a symptom of precisely that loss. It is, for Herder, a symptom of over-learned sophistication, of looking too much, and too superficially, at the letters of texts recording the lives of others, rather than truly living the life that is one’s own: How far we stand behind [the Greeks] may be judged by a later age … We see so much that we in fact see nothing, and we know so much that we no longer possess anything that is our own, that is to say, something we could not have learned, something that arises out of the virtues and errors of our own self. (Sculpture, 81–2)

Charles Taylor has drawn attention to the “ideal of authenticity,” of being true to oneself, articulated by Herder in application both to individuals and to peoples (Taylor 1994, 30–2). That ideal is powerfully present in Sculpture, as it is in Yet Another Philosophy of History, but in both works Herder also relates his culture to ancient ones with the goal of being educated by the latter. This move does not contradict his strictures against imitation, in life or in art, as one of his points is that the ancients were true to their own experiences in a way that overly learned modern Europeans are not, and that the literary and artistic expressions of the ancients were therefore more genuine than modern ones. Herder also finds in ancient societies a sensuous embeddedness in the world, a naturalness and a depth of feeling that he thinks need to be reintroduced into a European high culture which has become excessively formal and bloodless. His admiring study of Hebrew poetry, published a few years after Sculpture, engages the same theme in relation to the freshness and vigor of the language of the Old Testament. This was a language spoken in the childhood of the race, by those to whom “everything appears … in the blinding radiance of newness” (Hebrew Poetry, 965). The age of this language has passed, but the passing is by no means in every respect a surpassing, for it involves decline as well as progress. Thus, these are actually children from whose freshness of vision those born into the tired old age of Europe may learn something. This aspect of Herder’s relation to history adds a qualifying dimension to Beiser’s otherwise fair observation that Herder’s relation to the progressivist philosophies of history he criticizes rarely, if ever, involves outright rejection (Beiser 1992, 206–7). It is true that often Herder is only critical of the simultaneously naive and arrogant manner in which

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Enlightenment philosophes have developed ideas of which he himself accepts a version, including the idea that societies build upon previous ones, yielding a significant form of progress. He endorses the thesis that history is a meaningful narrative, for instance, and one that is moving towards something, but argues that it has to be read as a complex drama, or an epic, whose labyrinthine ways and thousand doors do not all lead to you (APH, 83). It needs to be recognized, however, that within the weave of this drama, as Herder presents it, ascendance forms only one motif, and is combined with a depiction of various forms of decline. Many of Herder’s caustic remarks against Enlightenment theories of progress in Yet Another Philosophy of History reflect this sense of historical decline. When Herder exclaims, ironically, “how many edges first had to be forcibly rubbed away, before the round, smooth, well-mannered thing that we are could appear!” (APH, 54), he is not only targeting the hypocrisy of his age, or its view of the past as exclusively a means to the present. The remark is also meant to suggest that round, smooth, well-mannered things are not the apex of all beauty and perfection. And precisely because there is decline as well as improvement over history, the past holds treasures that, if appropriately viewed, may reveal to a present generation what it lacks, thereby contributing to a new beginning after an age, nation, or civilization has run the course of its natural life cycle, and exhausted the possibilities contained within the limited network of inclinations and ideas that defines its identity. There are actually, as Max Rouché observed in his 1940 study of the subject, a number of different philosophies of history within Herder’s writings, variously emphasizing, in relation to human cultures, the themes of progress, decline, and flourishing without any ulterior purpose (Rouché 1940, 80–131, 325–37).4 Rouché notes, in this context, that Herder’s descriptions of presently existing cultures attribute declining old age only to Europe:€“Each civilization, considered in isolation is an organism passing through the phases of life:€childhood, youth, maturity and old age. The rationalist eighteenth century represents the senility of European culture; that is, a purely local decline” (Rouché 1940, 95). In the Letters, Herder says, in relation to this local decline: From the greying of Europe no one should augur the decline and death of our whole species! What does it hurt the latter if a degenerate piece of it goes under? Cf. Förster (1986, 364):€“Herder combines a belief in the independent significance of different cultures in human history with the idea of a progressive social development, which, however, does not follow a straight line.”

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If a few withered twigs and leaves fall off from the tree rich in sap? Others will step into the place of the withered ones and bloom upwards more freshly. Why should the little western corner of our northern hemisphere alone possess culture? And does it possess it alone? (LAH, 741)

This organic analogy applies only to specific cultures; people continue in some version, and Europeans will as well. Herder is not expecting them to die out, any more than ancient Greeks or Romans did when their cultures were transformed by new historical forces. He also holds out the possibility of renewal and rejuvenation for civilizations, which may come from contact with other peoples, or from a rediscovery of old sources. The history of Europe Herder traces in the Ideas contains many such moments of renewal, through the incursion of Germanic tribes from the north, or the renaissance of a Greek heritage that had fortunately been preserved in the Arab world. At such moments, an exhausted culture rises again, but its identity is so transfigured in the process that, viewed from another vantage point, one might see the death of one culture and the birth of another. Thus, Herder’s philosophy of history is even more internally varied than Rouché’s analysis proposes. It maintains that humanity progresses, that all progress is accompanied by decline, and that every culture is unique and unrepeatable. But it also maintains that the seeds of the past remain, and that peoples who have gone under may rise up again:€ “Everything has flourished on the earth that could flourish; each thing at its time and in its circle; it has faded and will bloom again, when its time comes” (Ideas, 625). At one juncture, speaking of the Roman conquests, Herder complicates this botanical analogy still further, claiming that some of the countries conquered by Rome were spent plants, while others were buds damaged in their first growth (Ideas, 622). The result is a very shaggy philosophy of history indeed, and intentionally so. That is the way history is, as Herder sees it; dramas and epics are not like morality tales. That said, one highly prominent theme in the story Herder tells concerns the advanced age of European civilization, in an ambivalent sense connoting both maturity and senility. And, as I have noted, Herder does frequently depict the other nations of the world as remaining at the stage of childhood. In Yet Another Philosophy of History, he claims that “the greatest part of the earth’s nations is still in childhood ” (APH, 89), and in the Ideas that “most of the earth’s nations act and imagine, love and hate, hope and fear, laugh and cry like children” (Ideas, 330). Both texts suggest that there is something valuable in this youthful condition, which has been lost in the aged state at which Europe currently

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stands:€namely, the same energy and freshness, the same concrete sensibility, simple virtue, and genuineness of emotion that Herder admires in the remnants of cultures belonging to Europe’s past. An implication may be that the breezes needed to refresh a tired Europe will come from outside its borders, as well as from its own past. There is another side to Herder’s portrayal of non-European nations as childlike, however€– one that is simply superioristic and patronizing, and that reveals the limits of Herder’s ability to transcend Eurocentrism. Nowhere is this shortcoming better illustrated than in Herder’s portrait of China in Book 11 of the Ideas. I m m at u r i t y a n d t h e c a s e of C h i n a Although Herder praises China for its religious toleration in the Ideas, his portrait of the character of this society is otherwise unremittingly negative. One can locate in this portrait a number of interrelated tropes. The nation is defined, for Herder, by obedience to authority and rule, by artificiality as opposed to naturalness, and by a lack of inventiveness and resistance to change. It is also worth noting that some version of the terms “child” and “childish” is repeated nine times in this brief section of the Ideas. The adjective “childish” modifies the other characteristics, suggesting that these are in general a reflection of China’s cultural immaturity. Herder’s criticisms of specific features of Chinese society illustrate these general cultural traits. He sees a lack of naturalness in the complexity of the Chinese language, a “lack of inventive capacity in large things,” combined with an “unwholesome refinement in trivialities” (Ideas, 434). This aspect of the Chinese character is also reflected, according to Herder, in the creation of dragons and monsters, in the “formless confusion of their gardens,” in their clothing, their fireworks, their long nails and bound feet, their ceremonies, distinctions, and forms of politeness. “There reigns in all of these,” he writes, “so little taste for the true relations of nature” (Ideas, 435). Observations like these do not touch only superficial aspects of Chinese society, given Herder’s view of the intimate relation between inner character and cultural expression, and his thesis that the various facets of a culture form a kind of organic unity bound together by a distinctive spirit or principle:€“Just as the Chinese love beyond measure their gold paper and varnish, the cleanly drawn strokes of their crinkled letters and the tinkling of their pretty sentences:€so the constitution of their spirit thoroughly resembles this gold paper and varnish, the letters and the ringing of their syllables” (Ideas, 435).

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This artificiality of spirit is also non-superficially connected with a spirit of obedience to authority and rule. For the Chinese, Herder claims, “childish obedience”€ – towards elders, towards mandarins, towards the state and its rules€– is the ground of all virtue (Ideas, 436). He describes that obedience, and the statutes it unthinkingly respects, as contrary to nature (Ideas, 437). The result is a thoroughly despotic culture, whose political despotism mirrors its national character. It is no surprise, Herder maintains, that a nation of this sort has not invented much, as measured by European standards of science, and remains in the same place as it always was. Because it is a slave to its unchanging rules and conventions, its laws and morality, its astronomy and music, its literature and military craft, its painting and architecture have remained the same for centuries. In sum:€ “the Reich is an embalmed mummy, painted with hieroglyphs and wrapped in silk; its inner rhythm is like the life of an animal hibernating in winter” (Ideas, 439). In Herder’s portrait, then, the Chinese character, manifested in its cultural expressions and its history, is obedient, unnatural, and static where these traits interpenetrate one another. This one-sidedly negative judgement about China seems, prima facie, to be out of keeping with Herder’s usual approach to cultures and Â�peoples in the Ideas. The description of India which follows it, for instance, is much more balanced and positive. And Herder’s portrait of China decidedly contradicts principles he articulates and repeats concerning the importance of not taking Europe as the measure of all goodness and trying to suspend inherited prejudices in one’s approach to other cultures. At the same time, it also reflects tropes present throughout the Ideas, and elsewhere in Herder’s works, especially the notion that non-European cultures stand at a less mature stage of development than European ones, and Herder’s application of this notion to China excludes the positive evaluations it sometimes implies. The explanation for this harshness towards China does not lie simply in the limitations of the sources of information that were available to Herder, as his choice and use of these sources reveals a clear bias. At the beginning of his account, Herder alludes to the contemporary literature, drawing attention to the opposition between admiring portraits, on the one hand, particularly those sent to Europe by the Jesuit missionaries in China, and descriptions produced in reaction to these, which do not, he says, grant to China either its high culture or its uniqueness (Ideas, 432). He Â�suggests that the truth lies in a middle way between these two extremes of excessive praise and criticism (Ideas, 433). The problem is, first, that the account he goes on to give does not follow a “middle way.” It has also

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been pointed out, rightly, that Herder’s description is quite selective in its use of the sources at his disposal, relying more on the pejorative accounts than on the complimentary ones (see Grundmann 1900, 47). All of these sources are by no means equally credible, as should have been apparent to Herder if he were approaching Chinese culture in a genuinely impartial spirit, in accordance with his own repeatedly stated ideal. Cornelius de Pauw and Pierre Sonnerat, upon whose accounts Herder relies heavily, offer especially egregious examples. They are so obviously ill-willed and culturally biased, and their accounts are based on such brief first-hand acquaintance with their subject matter, that it is hard to believe any objective eighteenth-century reader could fail to be suspicious of them. Sonnerat’s account is presented in his Voyages aux Indes Orientales et la Chine, first published in 1782, and translated into German the following year. Describing Chinese gardens, he complains that they do not have plants from all over the world, as European gardens do, nor does one find in them, for instance, a little bridge or a belvedere; rather for decoration they only have a few labyrinths (Sonnerat 1783, 279). Their much-praised agriculture only consists in planting rice, which is done by some poor wretch standing knee-deep in water. They do not really have any painting or drawing; well, just some colors on glass, but putting nice colors together hardly counts as fine painting. They barely have any knowledge of architecture; one does not find in their buildings any marble pillars or other stone constructions; one finds only, on their pagodas, a few monstrous images made out of wood and cardboard (280). Their music is just as bad as Indian music; the best musician is the one who makes the most noise (284). Their silk cannot be compared with what is manufactured in Lyon, and their porcelain is not better than the best European stuff (284). And they have such childish customs about the way in which they greet one another (286). De Pauw’s account is similarly extreme. He denigrates Asiatic cultures in general, stressing the superiority of Greece and the cultures descended from it. With respect to China, he also criticizes its gardens, painting, architecture, varnish, and so on (de Pauw 1773 1, 305–6; 2.2, 5–6), not to mention its religion, and his analysis of Chinese religion is a fine Â�example of the ignorant and arrogant comprehension, or incomprehension, of nonEuropean religions that is so common in Western writings (2.2, 1f.). It is then surprising, and significant, that Herder should have drawn on these obviously very parteiisch accounts, especially given the lucid manner in which they are criticized by some of the Jesuit missionaries who had a lengthy and first-hand acquaintance with China. Père de Mailla, in

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his introduction to a translation of a work on Chinese history published in 1777, speaks of “the audacious assertions which M. Paw, sitting tranquilly in his office, pronounces about a people that he has never seen, who live six thousand leagues from him” (de Mailla 1777, xxxvii). Père Amiot echoes this criticism in Volume 6 (1780) of the well-known Jesuit work, Mémoires concernant les Chinois. Pauw, he writes, having wanted to prove too much, ends up proving nothing. Amiot points out that Pauw “has spoken of the Chinese without knowing them, he has spoken of them only according to the least well-grounded and most unjust prejudices.” He also notes, reasonably, that the Jesuit missionaries are much better placed to assess China’s vices and virtues, having spent of lot of time there getting to know the culture (Mémoires 6, 275). Volume 9 of the Mémoires, published in 1783, contains a similar appraisal of Sonnerat (Mémoires 9, ix–x). In Volume 11, published in 1786 (a year before Part III of the Ideas, which contains the section on China), Amiot grants that Sonnerat went to China, but adds:€“China is vast; what did he see of this vast country? The city of Canton, or rather, to speak more accurately, a single street of Canton, the only place Europeans were permitted to go to satisfy their curiosity” (Mémoires 11, 544). One cannot know whether Herder read these remarks, but he very well might have, and he was certainly familiar with the Jesuit Mémoires, to which he refers in the Ideas. The more important point is that the criticisms offered by Mailla and Amiot draw attention to flaws in de Pauw’s and Sonnerat’s account that should have been apparent to Herder. They are directed, after all, to the reprehensibly flawed character of de Pauw’s and Sonnerat’s approach to China, in which biased judgements are made from a Eurocentric perspective anxious to maintain its own superiority, and decidedly uninterested in gaining accurate and detailed knowÂ� ledge of other cultures. These are the kinds of criticisms Herder himself often makes about the approach to other cultures adopted by many of his European contemporaries, and yet his account of China seems oblivious to their force. To make matters worse, there is an unmistakably racial component in Herder’s description, which repeatedly links supposedly flawed aspects of the Chinese character to their so-called “Mongolian” ancestry and constitution. I use the term “racial” deliberately here, with full awareness of Herder’s explicit rejection of this term. In spite of that rejection, Herder does have a kind of racial theory, as I will argue in the next chapter. This theory emerges in an especially unsavory fashion in Herder’s description of the “genetic character” of the Chinese nation, which, Herder claims,

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expresses and maintains itself over many centuries in spite of geographÂ� ical variation (Ideas, 434). Johannes Grundmann, in his study of Herder’s geographical and ethnographical sources, published in 1900, writes that he did not find this thesis about racial effect in any of Herder’s sources (Grundmann 1900, 51). It may well be an original contribution on Herder’s part. “Only a Mongolian ear,” says Herder, “could have managed to make a language out of 300 syllables” (Ideas, 434), and he is not using the term “Mongolian” in a purely cultural sense. Contrast this judgement with Amiot’s learned account of Chinese music in Volume 6 of the Mémoires (1780), in which he also relates the response he received when he asked some of his Chinese hosts what they thought of “our,” i.e. European, music: They answered me as politely as was possible for them, that as our melodies are not at all made for their ears, nor their ears for our melodies, it was not surprising that they could not perceive their beauties as they could those of their own. The melodies of our music, added a learned doctor … pass through the ear to the heart, and from the heart to the soul. We feel them, we understand them:€ those which you have just played do not have the same effect upon us. (Mémoires 6, 2–3)

It was, then, possible for Europeans, at this historical juncture, to consider that there might be cultural differences between ears, and that therefore the harmonious phrases of one people might sound like confused noise to another. That Herder, of all people, does not consider this is distinctly odd. I have wanted to cite sources like Amiot at some length here partly because there is a tendency in some quarters to excuse the culturally biased, and in some cases racist, statements of European philosophers in the past by saying that they could not help being products of their age. In principle, this could be a perfectly fair point, but in practice such claims are often made without much knowledge of the variety of things that were being said in that age, to which contemporary philosophers had access. Possibly, scholars sometimes want to preserve an image of certain figures in the history of Western philosophy as being essentially in the business of formulating high ethical and political principles, but unable to free themselves entirely from the universally held prejudices of their times. The result is that there is an underappreciation of the extent to which European philosophers participated in constructing, with effort and thought and against opposing voices, colonialist and racist forms of discourse. In many ways, Herder was one of the opposing voices€– but not always, and not unambiguously.

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There are, in the scholarly literature on Herder, a number of hypotheses about why he chose to adopt such a severe position on China in the Ideas, some of which are more plausible than others. The least plausible perhaps is the claim, advanced by Rolf S. Goebel in a 1995 article, “China as Embalmed Mummy,” that Herder is being ironic. “Herder’s figurative language,” Goebel maintains, “by virtue of its sheer quantity and repetitiveness, draws attention self-parodistically to itself, mixing ethnological arrogance with a considerable amount of self-ridicule” (Goebel 1995, 122). It is understandable why one might be tempted by such a thesis, given how extreme Herder’s account is, and given also that, just a little later in the Ideas, Herder makes some remarks about Asian cultures which explain more sympathetically a number of the characteristics he derides in his description of China (and also of Tibet, in fact).5 Still, there simply is no warrant in the text for supposing that Herder is being ironic. It has also been suggested that in criticizing China, whose ethical, religious, and political fabric had been highly praised in Voltaire’s Philosophy of History, Herder is really concerned not so much with China itself, but with the appeal to it as a model for a good society by European thinkers. Eun-Jung Lee argues, in this vein, that Herder’s harshness towards what he depicts as the despotic character of Chinese culture is motivated by his own promotion of political reform (Lee 2003, 260). There is also a critique of various kinds of formalism embedded in Herder’s complaints about, for instance, Chinese aesthetic achievements and social relations.6 In these respects, China is functioning, in the text, as a kind of other onto which are projected a number of the vices Herder thinks Europeans should avoid, and as a proxy for his hostility towards the French philosophes, Voltaire in particular. For his part, Voltaire had seen in (or read into) China his own ideal of a well-ordered society, free of superstition and organized according to reasonable moral principles. The Chinese may not be as advanced as Europeans in some sciences, Voltaire writes in his Philosophy of History, “but they brought morality to perfection, which is the first of the sciences” (Voltaire 1965, 85). Herder may have reacted especially unfavorably to the implications of Voltaire’s claims that, in China, religion has only been concerned with virtue, and law and morality have never needed the help of a religion that contained anything more than this. Chinese laws, Voltaire notes with approval, have never been controlled by a college of 5

See the section entitled “General Reflections on the History of these States” (Ideas, 458–64). Cf. Martin Bollacher’s commentary on the Ideas (FW 6, 999).

6

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priests (83), nor do these laws mention rewards and punishments after death (87). Chinese religion, moreover, “was simple, wise, august, free from all superstition and all barbarity” (85), and Confucianism is not really a religion at all:€“We sometimes say, very improperly, ‘the religion of Confucius’; he had no other than that of the first sages, he recommends nothing but virtue, preaches no mysteries” (86). If Voltaire intends, with these comments, to contrast China favorÂ� ably with his own society, as he surely does, then the suggestion is that Chinese religion, in its fundamental character, its historical development, and its relation to morality and law, is superior to Christianity. Herder might have found this suggestion objectionable, especially given that Voltaire is saying, at the same time, that Chinese “religion” is nothing but a system of virtue. Voltaire’s description of China is then a vehicle for his criticisms of religion in general, and a rejoinder to the view that it is necessary for morality. Conversely, Herder’s negative portrait of China, formulated partly in opposition to Voltaire, reflects his positive stance towards religion, at least in its better forms, and his belief in the excellence of Christianity. To be sure, Herder always promotes religious toleraÂ� tion; indeed, he praises China on this point, and in contrast with Europe (Ideas, 432). Furthermore, although his account of Chinese religion is biased, usually Herder is entirely capable of granting that the theology of other religions may also contain elevated ideas of God and morality. He says precisely this of Brahminical religion in India (Ideas, 454). But Herder does not seem prepared to accept that another religion might contain an excellence that Christianity lacks. His pluralism does not extend quite that far, at least not on the subject of religion. Herder’s assessment of the Jesuit reports on China is connected with this fact as well. Adrian Hsia points out that Herder was probably reacting to Jesuit claims about the antiquity of Chinese culture, and especially to claims that this culture had a sophisticated idea of God very early in its history, one that even prefigured Christianity (Hsia 1998, 120). It seems likely that Herder’s near-total rejection of the positive elements in Voltaire’s assessment of China and that of the Jesuits arises from a general antipathy towards the position these authors represent at this historical juncture, and from the threat to his own religious views posed by some of their specific assertions about China. Lee and Hsia also draw attention to the change of heart towards China, and towards the Jesuit mission, manifest in Herder’s, “On the Christianisation of the Chinese Kingdom,” published in 1802 in his own

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journal Adrastea (FW 10, 577–87). While this very late work, whose tone is much more positive towards China, does represent a significant shift in Herder’s attitude, however, there are significant continuities between the content of its claims and those advanced in the Ideas. For instance, opposing attempts to Christianize China, Herder asks, “Can you change the linguistic organ of a nation?” and adds: Just as little can you change its manner of thinking (Vorstellungsart), which is bound to customs and ceremonies:€for this is also language, and it is in China intimately woven together with the state as well as with morality. Everything there is based on childish obedience. (FW 10, 579)

The portrait of China given here is still that of a culture at a lower stage of development, the stage of youth or childhood, as Herder had said in the Ideas. We should remember that the attribution of cultural immaturity occurs in Herder’s account of India in the Ideas as well, where he maintains that a priestly caste is to be expected “at this stage of culture” (Ideas, 451). At the conclusion of his remarks on Tibet, moreover, in Â�reference to East Asian cultures as a whole, Herder asks, “are not most of€these cultures, in their gentle sleep of the soul, children for the whole of their lives?” (Ideas, 450). And in his remarks on the political structure of all Asian nations, with their reliance on a priestly class, he says:€“granted this is the stage of a culture which is as yet very imperfect; it is nonetheless necessary for the childhood of the human race” (Ideas, 459). Herder’s judgement is that the political structure of Asiatic societies is fixed at a stage of development through which Europe has already passed. Given that he sees cultures as organic wholes, the political organization of a society is, for him, continuous with other aspects of its culture, a view clearly reflected in his portrait of China. While Herder is usually either championed as a pluralist or condemned as a relativist, in this case the problematic elements in his account are expressed in terms of the universalist dimension of his political ideals and the progressivist trope within his philosophy of history. The fact that the distorted picture of China produced by Herder is not consonant with the best empirical evidence available to him, and that the methodology behind its production falls far short of his ideal of impartiality in historical scholarship, raises the suspicion that there remains a powerful Eurocentric bias in Herder’s thought, in spite of his many criticisms of exactly such a bias in others. The idea that non-European cultures stand at an “earlier” stage of human development can allow a European observer to appreciate the

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achievements of non-European cultures from a superior distance, without having to grant the unsettling possibility that a study of these other cultures might challenge, or at least significantly enlarge, any of his basic convictions in any important sphere€– whether aesthetic, religious, political, or ethical. It is easy to see how Voltaire’s claim that China had never needed a priestly class would be objectionable for someone with an interest in maintaining this distance and the view of historical development that supports it. Herder’s vision of history is not entirely guided by such an interest, of course, as we have seen. But the idea that most nations in the world are in a state of infancy is expressed in many of his works, and it does not quite allow for a relation between nations that is one of equal partners in an ongoing dialogue. This conception of non-European nations as childlike is wholly compatible with Herder’s injunctions against their exploitation and mistreatment, and with his call for understanding. That a culture is like a child suggests that one should not harm it, and that one should make allowances for its stage of development when passing judgements upon it. Herder also does, as I have stressed, often attribute much value to childhood, personal and historical, and his attribution of old age to Europe is certainly not entirely complimentary. In his account of China, though, the childhood analogy carries none of the positive significations€ – of freshness, wonder, originality€ – that Herder associates elsewhere with this trope. China is a strange child€– one who has grown old without growing up. Along with its alleged obedience and attraction to shiny ornaments, it loves rules and formalities, and is artificially polite and thoroughly unadventurous, not features one would normally associate with a child. Herder could just as feasibly have imagined China as having become old and gray in a different manner than overly learned Europe has. That metaphor would suggest equal maturity and wisdom, along with senescence, rather than indicating a stage of development that has already been traversed and surpassed in Herder’s own more advanced culture. The implications for how Europe should relate to China would be very different. These considerations cast a different light on Beiser’s claim that Herder’s use of the stages of life analogy enables him to reconcile the tension between a belief in some form of historical progress and a pluralistic appreciation for the historical diversity of cultures. If it does so by manufacturing a scale of excellence whose measures are European, which it then uses to weigh all other cultures, Herder’s philosophy of history€– in addition to being hypocritical€– is not fundamentally different from that

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of Hegel, and is open to the same charges of cultural partiality.7 Hegel’s descriptions of the “oriental world” also define the Chinese character as fixed and despotic (Hegel 1991, 116, 120), the Indian as “spirit in a state of dream” (140), and both as fundamentally immature (139). In raising this criticism, I am not implying that Herder should not have criticized other cultures at all. My point, rather, is that Herder’s repeated use of the childhood analogy for non-Western cultures at times exhibits a kind of intellectual imperialism, which foreshadows Hegel in its assumption of a position from which the character of foreign nations can be mastered in thought and assigned an inferior place within the scheme of history. This assumption is not the only alternative to full-blown relativism in approaches to cross-cultural analysis. But these observations are meant only to qualify the idea of Herder as a cultural pluralist who overcomes Eurocentrism€– an idea which much of my own analysis supports€– and not to contradict it. One should also consider the contrasts between Herder’s and Hegel’s philosophies of history, including their reflections on Asian societies, which are no less striking than the similarities. For instance, compare Herder’s judgement about the elevated conception of God within Brahminical religion with Hegel’s claim that the idea of the divine in India is “bizarre, confused and ridiculous,” or with the latter’s concern to distinguish Indian pantheism from anything resembling his own version (PH, 141). In general, Hegel’s descriptions of non-European societies are not tempered by an appreciation of their virtues, as Herder’s often are. Hegel also shows precious little awareness of the specific vices of Europeans in comparison with others, or of the moral hypocrisy and sheer brutality of their treatment of those others, themes on which Herder speaks repeatedly, with no small amount of passion and outrage. Whatever his judgements about particular nations and peoples might be, Herder never provides justifications for political subjection, and always expresses moral condemnation of such subjection. Although he does argue that societies contain weaknesses which allow them to be conquered (a statement that is virtually tautological), one cannot imagine Herder saying, as Hegel does, that in India “the English, or rather the East India Company, are the lords of the land; for it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans; and China will, some day or other, be obliged to submit to 7

Perhaps this point does not worry Beiser. His own presentation of Hegel’s philosophy of history in his survey of Hegel’s thought (Beiser 2005) emphasizes the merit of overcoming historicism, but is untroubled by any concerns about Eurocentric bigotry, or Hegel’s denigration of nonEuropean cultures. See Beiser (2005, 261–81).

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this fate” (Hegel 1991, 142–3). On the contrary, Herder’s anti-Â�colonialism involves a deep sensitivity to the injustices committed by Europeans against other nations, and even a belief that the latter may be the instruments by which the scales of justice are rebalanced: The more means and tools we Europeans invent to enslave, cheat and plunder you other continents, the more it may be left to you to triumph in the end! We forge the chains by which you will pull us [one day], and the inverted pyramids of our constitutions will be righted on your soil€– you with us. (APH 100)

Herder is also keenly aware, in principle, of the difficulties involved in trying to understand a foreign culture, of the need to be sufficiently attentive to that culture’s complexity and variety of levels and to suspend one’s own cultural prejudices and simple preference for what is one’s own. Perhaps most significantly, Herder simply does not believe in historical progress unaccompanied by irredeemable loss, or, correspondingly, in the possibility of a best of all possible cultures in even the most distant of distant futures. A plu r a l f u t u r e What, then, does this future hold, in Herder’s view, at least as a hope that could function as a regulative principle? That he does hold out hope of moral and political progress in the future is evident from Herder’s writings on the subject of history, even when these express skepticism that very much progress of that kind is evident in his own age. Yet Another Philosophy of History rejects the idea that the lot of humanity as a whole has greatly improved in the eighteenth century, and that Europeans have been the means of this improvement. But Herder certainly continues to hope that the seeds of the moral ideals of his age will one day be combined with genuine virtue, and will come to fruition:€“What if, one day, all the light that we are sowing in the world, with which we blind so many eyes, cause so much misery and darkness, were everywhere to become gentle life-light and life-warmth?” (APH, 96). Although the accent in Yet Another Philosophy of History falls on Herder’s criticisms of his age, rather than on his hopes for the future, these are closely connected, in that his appeals for an appreciation of the past also point to what is needed, in the future, to ameliorate the ills of the present. Later works increasingly emphasize the progressive aspect of Herder’s philosophy of history, and articulate more and more clearly the goal that Herder thinks needs to be achieved. In the Ideas, Herder claims that “the course of history shows that with the growth in true humanity

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the destructive demons of the human race have actually become fewer; in accordance with the inner natural laws of a self-enlightening reason and statecraft” (Ideas, 639). In spite of the differences between Herder and Kant discussed in the previous chapter, then, Herder’s conception of history does accept a number of Kant’s most fundamental theses. Herder accepts, for instance, that history involves a process of learning that inevitably leads to better understanding and greater justice:€“In universal history, as in the life of unprotected individual human beings, all the stupidities and vices of our race exhaust themselves, until it is finally compelled by necessity to learn reason and fairness” (Ideas 668). European states, moreover, for all their sins and failings, are the site of three things of which Herder strongly approves:€“social security, competitive industry and a progressive striving” (Ideas, 891), even if Herder also emphasizes the greed and aggression that too often accompany the latter tendencies. And the concept of freedom provides the measure by which Herder judges the political and social organization of societies. These Kantian themes find their most forceful and clearest expression in the Letters, where Herder explicitly says of Kant:€“His Critique of Practical Reason and the moral philosophy built upon it lays the foundation for natural rights and the rights of peoples, which€– if it were universally recognized? If it were universally applied?” (LAH, 800). The hope is that these rights will be universally recognized and applied; the complaint is that they have not been, and that Europe itself has much to atone for in this respect (LAH, 741). While Herder takes issue with many elements of Kant’s moral philosophy, he wholeheartedly agrees with the basic principle that all humanity deserves respect, and that the recognition of this principle in practice entails political freedom. In this sense, Herder does promote the global realization of a single ideal. We need to become “Â�citizens, finally, of the great city of God on earth, governed, ordered and led by only one law, one daemon, the spirit of a universal reason and humanity” (LAH, 154). For Herder, it is the proper realization of precisely this one ideal that leads to a respect for cultural plurality, including a measure of political plurality. Respecting the freedom of all people in the pursuit of their own happiness requires that they be allowed to develop the mode of selfgovernance that is most appropriate for them, and that may differ from nation to nation: The happiness of one people (Volk) does not allow itself to be imposed, dictated, loaded onto another and every other. The roses of the crown of freedom must be plucked by one’s own hands, and must grow out of one’s own needs,

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one’s own joys and pleasures. The so-called best form of government, which unfortunately has not yet been found, certainly does not suit all peoples, all at once, in the same manner; the yoke of an external (ausländisch) freedom, introduced in an evil way, would burden a foreign people most terribly. (LAH, 734)

Justice demands that nations, understood in a cultural sense, be selfÂ�determining. Because no one is in a position to know what they will decide, what forms of life and governance they will develop in response to their own needs and desires, no one can say definitely what a happy future for the nations of the earth would look like, if it were achieved. This is the ground for the “open teleology” to which Vicki Spencer refers (Spencer 1998, 65), and which is a function of Herder’s commitment to freedom. One way of stating the point is to say that Herder’s universalism and relativism mutually limit one another, but these should not be interpreted as conceptually distinct principles that somehow need to be balanced. What Herder prescribes is that people be allowed to pursue their own happiness, where that happiness is also the goal of both morality and politics. Because individuals are culturally embedded, and because culture builds the horizon of one’s wishes and values, allowing people to pursue happiness in their own way also means allowing peoples to do so. As Whitton says, “Herder’s theory of cultural nationality is, first and foremost, a theory of freedom€– the freedom of all national groups to express their cultural identities to the fullest extent” (Whitton 1988, 156). At the same time, Herder is well aware that cultures contain, and are the product of, internal inequalities and forms of domination:€ between men and women, freemen and slaves, kings and subjects, priests and uneducated laypersons. While he argues for a future in which nations be allowed to determine the shape of their own society, he rejects all such forms of inequality. It does not occur to Herder (nor indeed does it make any moral sense) that a commitment to the ideal of freedom, even combined with a belief in the relativity of happiness and virtue, should include validation of social hierarchies in which the interests of one group are given precedence over the interests of another. In the case of such hierarchies, Herder’s relativism involves only the view that cultures need to be understood in relation to their stage of development. He never justifies the continuation of internal forms of inequality, nor does he ever present in a positive light the myths and mores by which these are supported in a given society. The ideally plural future Herder imagines excludes the subjugation of one group by another, with respect both to relations between nations and to relations between groups within nations.

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The ideal of cultural “authenticity” promoted by Herder needs to be understood in this light. It is an ideal of development; it does not encourage societies to remain as they are, but suggests that their evolution needs to consist in the unfolding of their own potentialities, and that this is the best way for them to assume their proper role in the development of humanity. That is a principle Herder applies to individuals as well as to cultures: To the good of mankind as a whole can no one contribute who does not make of himself what he can and should become; each should therefore cultivate and tend the garden of humanity first on that bed, where he turns green as a tree, or blossoms as a flower. We all carry in and with ourselves an ideal of what we should be, and are not … (LAH, 164)

This ideal of cultivating one’s own garden is also connected with a vision of appropriate separation:€ “Nature has separated peoples through language, morals (Sitten), customs, often through mountains, seas, rivers and deserts; she did all this so that they might, for a long time, remain isolated from each other, and attached to themselves” (LAH, 687). But, as I have pointed out before, Herder’s remarks about the need for nations to leave each other alone almost always pertain to relations of domination of some form, whether overt or subtle. Of the moral justifications adduced in favour of conquests in the course of history, he asks:€“And when the scraping of peoples against each other spread this art here, or that comfort there, does this make up for the evils that the imposition of nations upon one another delivered to the victor and the vanquished?” (LAH, 687). This promotion of cultural individualism does not exclude learning from other nations, past or present, through forms of interaction that are genuinely friendly, and that confer mutual benefit. The problem is that the assimilation of foreign elements into a culture often occurs, Herder thinks, as a result of either violent conquest or imitation under the misguided belief that a single culture is the best in the world. This can happen in relation to a past culture, like that of ancient Greece, or a present nation, like France, or a whole continent, like Europe. Europeans are not ancient Greeks, Herder wants to say, and while their artistic productions may be fruitfully inspired by the example of Greece, they should grow naturally out of their own experiences and their own traditions. Germans are not French, he also wants to say, but France is not the epitome of all civilization, whose superior model every other European nation ought to copy. And the other nations of the world should not blindly imitate Europe, as if they possessed no valuable culture of their own.

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These pluralistic cultural and political ideals are closely connected to Herder’s historiographical ideals. That is no coincidence, since Herder’s account of history is guided by a faith that the design of history is, ultimately, a good one. In that case, discerning this design would naturally require that history be approached in a spirit guided by the same values believed to be progressively realized within it. Accordingly, while Herder’s advice for those wishing to write a “natural history of humanity” ostensibly focuses on the need for objectivity, it also reflects his understanding of the true goal of humanity: 1. You must above all be impartial like the genius of humanity itself; you must have no preferred generation, no favorite people on the earth … 2. Even less may one contemptuously insult a group of people, who have never insulted us … one must not hand the scepter to one people over others due to “innate pre-eminence”; much less the sword or the slavewhip. 3. The natural scientist presupposes no order of rank among the creatures that he considers; he loves and values all equally. So also the natÂ�ural scientist of humanity. The negro has as much right to consider the white man as a deviation, a congenital cockroach, as the white man has to consider him as a beast, a black animal … 4. Every nation must therefore be regarded exclusively in its context, with all that it is and has; arbitrary divisions, throwing isolated traits and customs together in confusion, does not yield a history … 5. Least of all then can our European culture be the measure of the universal human good and human value; it is no such measure, or a false one. (LAH, 698–700) The ideal political condition of Humanität is also one in which no people is favored, insulted, or given the right to rule over others, and in which cultures are allowed to flourish as integral wholes distinct from one another. Herder encourages egalitarian forms of cross-cultural interaction as an important component in the ongoing development of peoples, but he also favors a degree of distance, which he sees as a condition for the preservation of cultural diversity. His ideal is not, in this respect, a cosmopolitan one. It is also not quite, as I have suggested, a modern liberal one, insofar as liberalism is grounded in a specific interpretation of individual freedom. Herder is committed to freedom in that he opposes the subordination of the interests of some individuals to others, and accepts the Kantian thesis that no human being should be used as merely a means for the happiness

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of another. The ideally plural future he envisages therefore excludes many past and existing forms of governance and social organization. Moreover, the collective entities to whom Herder wants to grant the right to decide their own future are peoples, Völker, not governments or elite groups that may well represent the interests of only a portion of their society. But Herder’s political ideal nonetheless cannot properly be described as liberal because it is premised on the belief that individual wants, in relation to which choices are made, are profoundly shaped by historical and cultural context. It follows that a given society cannot help but shape those wants, producing one set of inclinations rather than another. It also follows that no one system of laws or institutional arrangements can in fact accommodate the satisfaction of every possible set of wants, or provide the necessary conditions for every possible form of a good and happy life. The settled calm of the Brahmin is not possible among a people which eats everything, an example to which Herder appeals in criticizing a kind of society (his own) that encourages the multiplication of desires and the pursuit of luxury. Because Herder’s understanding of freedom has these implications, its vision of a happy future for humanity is one in which peoples will develop in a manner that cannot be anticipated by others. This future therefore cannot, in principle, be given a definitive theoretical shape. What Herder’s concept of freedom provides is an ideal form of self-realization; the content must, given the very nature of the form, be decided by individual nations in a future that remains open. Nonetheless, it is not quite true, as one might conclude, that Herder’s ideal for the future is compatible with any and all cultural values as long as they are the product of the collective will of the culture’s members. For some values, including ones Herder has admired in past ages, are to be not only rejected but positively discouraged as not serving to promote and stabilize the ideal of Humanität. Herder’s list of recommendations in this regard includes making “war” a hated word, and something as unwanted as plague or famine, as well as diminishing the prestige of the conquering heroic spirit extolled among Greeks and Romans (LAH, 720–2). These prescriptions do not aim merely at restricting people’s behavior. They concern the social formation of desires and values, and they would exclude characteristics proclaimed as virtues in many human societies€ – ones Herder himself acknowledges as worthy of admiration. The line between form and content within Herder’s ideal of freedom is, on closer inspection, a blurry one, and perhaps inevitably so. Not all of the virtues that are or have been valued in different cultures are compatible with an ideal that wants to grant the freedom to shape its own happiness to all peoples.

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In that case, Herder’s ideal of human advancement, reflected in his recommendations for the future, involves some necessary sacrifice of what are real goods. It requires a relinquishing of traits that are genuinely admirable in certain respects, but that are not compatible with goods judged to be, on the whole, more desirable. One should not pretend, though, that nothing is thereby lost, that the progress is simply progress. Herder’s wistful appreciation of the virtues of past societies does not reflect a nostalgic longing for return, or an idealizing of those societies which ignores their flaws and injustices. It is, rather, realistic in its recognition that, when dispensing with characteristics which do not serve to promote the states of affairs we now judge to be better, we nonetheless give up something, often something of great value, and should not suppose otherwise. The story of progress that Herder tells is therefore not a triumphalist one. It is mixed with sadness, and with a genuine appreciation of the value of past civilizations, including even an appreciation for qualities Herder thinks humanity ought, on the whole, to abandon. At the same time, Herder also proposes remaining open to the possibility that something can be retrieved from the past, that the latter can provide inspiration to the present for the future. It can offer models, not for simple imitation, but for a transformed adaptation to the needs of a present time and place. Herder’s position on historical “progress” in relation to happiness involves some parallel points regarding the inevitably mixed character of historical change, the consequent validity of appreciation for past forms of happiness that are no longer real options, and the hope of retrieving some options that are still possible but were lost in the course of time. At this juncture, we can return to the puzzle posed near the beginning of this chapter, about how Herder’s belief in even a mixed form of moral and political progress could be compatible with his belief in the relativity of happiness. The question is this:€since Herder does believe in the possibility of global historical advancement in justice and freedom (although he questions whether this actually occurred), ideals intimately connected to the goal of human happiness, should he not acknowledge that progress in human happiness could occur as well? The answer to this question depends upon how one interprets Herder’s claim, in Yet Another Philosophy of History, that history does not aim at a greater happiness for the individual. If it is interpreted as applying to the sum of human happiness, then, in the final analysis, there remains a measure of conflict between Herder’s political ideal and his strongest claims for the cultural relativity of happiness. Arguably, many of the points Herder makes in support of the claim that there is no progress in individual happiness do

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not support this claim, in its strongest version. One might be able to agree with Herder that the happiness of happy individuals in different ages and cultures is incommensurable, that the very concept of a single happiest culture is misguided, and that it is possible for human beings to find happiness within social and political conditions that are far from ideal. One might also agree that as a matter of fact human happiness, measured on a global scale, may not have increased in Herder’s century (or in ours) in comparison with previous ages, given the new evils by which forms of progress have been accompanied. But it does not follow that no increase in the sum of human happiness is possible, or that such an increase is not a goal of history, or that we should not make it our goal. It remains difficult to understand how Herder could consistently deny that the future ideal he posits still involves the hope that a greater number of people will be able to lead happy lives, if hearts are truly reformed, and if the rights of all humanity are recognized. Herder insists that happiness is the goal of politics and morality, after all, and he does not hold the absurd posÂ� ition that it is equally possible under any conditions whatsoever. He did not believe that enslaved Africans in America were just as well off as they would have been if they were freed, or that women were happy enough to be treated as domestic animals, and his vehement denunciations of slavery and other forms of subjugation emphasize the misery of those who suffer these conditions. So even if there cannot be, in principle, a very best human culture, and even if every improvement is accompanied by loss, one might still hope, as Herder himself seems to, for a future world order in which the worst forms of human suffering will at least be reduced. This hope cannot be fully reconciled with the most extreme implications of Herder’s statements on the relation€– or lack of relation€– between historical progress and individual happiness, supposing that what he means is that the sum of human happiness cannot possibly increase over history, or that the very idea of calculating whether or not a greater number of individuals have their basic needs met is incoherent. It seems unlikely, however, that this is what Herder means, given the examples and considerations he presents in Yet Another Philosophy of History and elsewhere. He is perfectly aware that there are conditions of want and oppression under which human beings cannot be happy, and that these can be both diagnosed and ameliorated. What one cannot do, he suggests, is to compare and rank the happiness of happy individuals across different cultures and ages. And that happiness is not merely idiosyncratic; it is the product of a given society. There is then a very real sense in which one cannot assess whether there is “progress” in individual

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happiness over history, as the forms of happiness which different societies enable are incommensurable. This view is not inconsistent with allowing the possibility of some increase in the overall sum of human happiness as a result of the progressive realization of the moral and political ideals Herder supported. Herder’s hope for such progress requires some modification to at least the phrasing of a few of his most extreme claims. It must be possible for some individuals to “win” through the progress of history, for instance, or it cannot be described as “progress” at all, since advancement in moral and political goals is, for Herder, essential to any such description, and the ultimate worth of these goals is grounded in human happiness. But this critical qualification leaves intact the majority of what Herder says about individual happiness across cultures and ages, and it does not diminish the force of his criticisms about the allegedly universalist, but actually Eurocentric (and presentist), judgements of his contemporaries about the issues involved. On this last point, the implications of Herder’s relativism and plurÂ� alism should not be understated. Herder offers a serious challenge to Enlightenment philosophies of history through his suggestion that “progress” can be measured in many ways, that the criteria his contemporaries use to measure it are culturally partial, and that to a very large extent happiness can only be measured using internal criteria. Granting that human beings have some basic needs which cannot be thwarted without creating misery, and taking into account the fact that many of the values and norms of a culture only reflect the interests of a dominant group, there remain deep disagreements, and some genuine incommensurability, in ideas of happiness across different cultures. This will make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to find a single measure for happiness so that we could determine whether or not “it” has increased, though we might be able to measure reductions in obvious harms€– ones that people largely agree are harms€– as well as increases in basic goods. Furthermore, even in those cases where we can understand the different kinds of happiness that different cultures have enabled, through study and sympathetic imagination, we will have to acknowledge that with respect to happiness, as with virtue, happy individuals in different societies have been equally happy, or, speaking more precisely, that we cannot judge the relative degree of their happiness, since the goods they desired are incomparable. Regarding the role of non-European societies within history, Herder sometimes displays overtly condescending biases, representing the majority of the world’s nations as immature in comparison with Europe, especially in their political structures. These judgements are, however, always

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tempered by an appreciation for the virtues and forms of happiness that belong to the contemporary cultures of other continents, as to societies connected with Europe’s past. Here, too, Herder calls for a just appreciation of the positive traits of other cultures. He also finds in these cultures, as he understands them, sources of exemplary instruction and correction for his own society. Thus he makes the point, first, that difference from Europe does not necessarily signify inferiority, that forms of human excellence and well-being may be possible and present in other societies that are not there in his contemporary Europe. Second, he wants to say not only that there may be something to admire in these societies, as there is in past societies, but also from which his contemporaries could learn, through exchanges based on equality and friendship rather than domination and self-interest. These points pertain not only to the contemporary status of non-European societies, but also their potential contribution to the future. It is not, for Herder, the destiny of the world to be subjugated by Europe, either politically or culturally. While he upholds certain broad political values, roughly grounded in the ideal of freedom, the expression of these values is too variable to make them the province of one culture. In fact, the realization of the ideal of freedom requires, for Herder, that all of the world’s peoples be able to define their happiness as they choose, with their political arrangements reflecting their own priorities. This plural ideal is constrained by Herder’s assumptions, reflected in his judgements about various societies, that political structures must respect the basic needs of human beings, and work to limit inequalities of power (constraints hardly well respected in the Europe of his day, he wants to insist). It is not clear within Herder’s writings what the realization of this plural ideal, subject to such constraints, would look like, concretely, in a possible ideal future. Nor is it supposed to be; the ideal future cannot be determined by someone standing within a particular culture, and there is, for Herder, no one who does not stand within a particular culture. What is clear, though, is Herder’s rejection of the belief that Europe, however grand its role may have been and may continue to be, is destined for permanent global predominance, and that the whole point of history was to produce this predominance.

Ch apter 4

The concept of race

The second part of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1785) contains a chapter with the heading:€“In all the different forms in which the human race (Menschengeschlecht) appears on earth, it is nonetheless everywhere one and the same human species” (Menschengattung) (Ideas, 251). In this chapter of the Ideas, Herder takes issue with the concept of race being developed by some of his contemporaries. The special target of his remarks is again Kant, whose “On the Different Races of Man” (Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen), appearing in 1775, had divided the human species into four fixed and sharply distinct races. Against such accounts, Herder says: A few have thus ventured to term as races four or five divisions of the human species, originally drawn according to region or colour; I see no reason for this designation. Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist, or which covers the most distinct races in each of these regions of the world and among each of these colours. For every people (Volk) is a people:€it has its own national formation (Bildung), as well as language. (Ideas, 255)

Herder’s polemical remarks on the concept of race in the Ideas have a practical, as well as an epistemological, intent. The debate about race has significant ethical and political implications, and Herder’s position within this debate is meant to support his admonition, directed towards his fellow Europeans, that, unlike the higher apes, “the American and the Negro” are your brothers, and that “therefore, you must not oppress or kill or rob them:€for they are human beings, as you are” (Ideas, 255). Leading scholars of Herder’s thought, defending him against distortions by Nazi writers, have often appealed to passages like these, and have stressed the extent to which Herder’s conception of national identity is cultural rather than racial. Barnard, for instance, acknowledges that some of Herder’s remarks can be turned to racist purposes, especially if quoted out of context, but adds: 126

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it must be remembered that it was not blood but language which Herder regarded as the essential criterion of a Volk. Volk was conceived as an ethnic and not as a racial community. Herder did not recognize any intermediate collective units between Volk and mankind, and he thought of mankind as being biologically undifferentiated. Whilst he believed that mental habits may differ considerably between national groups, he nevertheless denied that these differences were attributable to differences of race. (Barnard 1965, 70–1)

In “Vico and Herder,” Isaiah Berlin insists that, in Herder’s view, “a nation is made what it is by ‘climate’, education, relations with its neighbours, and other changeable and empirical factors, and not by an impalpable inner essence or an unalterable factor such as race or colour” (Berlin 2000, 186). And Wulf Koepke glosses the fact that Herder sometimes speaks in terms suggesting descent groups in the following way: Herder sees something like Volk as determined by a common way of thinking, thus by tradition and culture, and above all, by language, but the biological aspect of “common descent” does not concern him much. He does not use the metaphor of “blood” in connection with Volk or nation, and he finds the concept of “race,” which Kant had employed, vague and unmanageable. (Koepke 1987a, 214–15)

Given his expressed views on the category of race, and his stress on Â�language, environment, and tradition as the central determinants of Â�cultural identity, readings of Herder even during the Nazi period could not, and did not, claim that he had an explicitly formulated racial Â�theory, or that he was a key historical player in the development of such theories. In addition, however, to fusing their own concepts of race with Herder’s idea of Volk, some Nazi authors did maintain that one could find in his writings a sort of implicit and embryonic concept of race. Friedrich Berger says precisely this in 1933, arguing that “[Herder’s] research contains the seeds of an anthropology from a zoological and racial-biological standpoint, as well as a geography and ethnography of peoples” (Berger 1933, 605). A year later, Martin Redeker, in Humanität, Volkstum, Christentum in der Erziehung (Humanity, Nationality, Christianity in Education), admits that “Herder … still stands outside the modern problems of blood, race, and heredity,” but claims that, in his understanding of how the individuality of peoples is constructed, Herder had already seen “the elemental facts of connectedness with soil and blood” (Redeker 1934, 97). In “Der Gedanke des Volkes in Herders Weltbild” (“The Idea of Volk in Herder’s Worldview”) Benno von Wiese largely concentrates, as one would expect, on Herder’s understanding of Volk, but he also notes that “from time to time Herder also speaks

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of stock (Stamm) or lineage (Geblüt), thereby occasionally approaching today’s concept of ‘race’” (Wiese 1939, 137).1 How these remarks are interpreted by scholars specifically attempting to assess Herder’s relation to Nazi ideology has depended, to a large extent, on which segments of Herder’s texts they choose to emphasize. Bernhard Becker, pointing to passages opposing the concept of race in the Ideas, concludes that the Nazi use of Herder, at least on this point, was a complete distortion (Becker 1987, 159–60). Jost Schneider, on the other hand, says that “the racial–biological interpretation of Herder profited from an ambivalence that is embedded in Herder’s writings themselves” (Schneider 1994, 65), but does not elaborate any further. I want to explore the character of this “ambivalence” in the present chapter, before proceeding, in the remainder of this book, to a more detailed examination of some of the key cultural constituents in Herder’s understanding of the character of peoples. The latter are by far the more important determinants in Herder’s understanding of Volk, but there are passages in Herder’s writings which demonstrate that he often does divide the human species into types that could legitimately be described as “racial” as well, thereby providing a basis for appropriation by Nazi racialists. I will also attempt to situate Herder in relation to Kant on the subject of race, in order to clarify the nature of the debate between them, and to provide a fuller account of Herder’s position within its own historical context. The final part of my analysis in this chapter addresses the practical and political side of Herder’s views on human variety, asking whether his ethical prescriptions, which always insist upon equal treatment for all peoples as a matter of justice, are consistent with his theories about the origin and nature of different human types. I should state that it is not my purpose here either to accuse or to defend Herder in relation to the concept of race. I merely wish to offer what I believe is a more nuanced, and historically accurate, account of his relation to this concept than the one presented to date. Because of Herder’s stated rejection of the concept of race and his insistence on the fraternity of all human beings, as well as the unique value of every Volk, recent scholars of his thought have argued, or simply assumed, that there is no sense in which he could be said to support any idea of race, and that he attributes the differences between human types entirely to what we now term “culture.” This line of argument has also been motivated by an understandable attempt to distance Herder’s writings 1

╇ Von Wiese also makes this claim in Herder:€Grundzüge seines Weltbildes (Wiese 1939b, 33–4).

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from Nazi misuses of them, and from Nazi racial ideology in general. But Herder’s position is actually more complex than this. He accepts a view about the identity of peoples that contains a racial component, in a sense I will explain, but that does not commit him to support forms of violence and oppression based on racial distinctions, which he always opposes. One ought not to suppose, anachronistically, that ideas we now see as inextricably linked must always have been so. It is possible to believe, as Herder did, that there are biologically distinct human types about which some limited judgements of higher and lower can be made, and, at the same time, that the individuals belonging to these types are all fully human, and deserving of the moral consideration due to every member of this species. H e r de r’s t y p ol o g y of t h e h u m a n s pe c i e s The most patently racialist remark in the Herder corpus, by which I mean the one that most clearly supports a hierarchical, biologically based typÂ� ology of the human species, occurs in an early essay, “Is Beauty of the Body a Sign of Beauty of the Soul?” (1766).2 Although Herder’s answer to the question posed by the title of this work is not an unqualified yes, he does say, at one point:€“Where nature cannot produce beautiful bodies, there beautiful souls are also unknown. Among Negroes, people are the brothers of apes not only in their lips, but also in their whole bodies; and they are even more so in spirit” (FW 1, 140). The same, Herder alleges, is true for the cold zones; thus, the purported ugliness of Greenlanders corresponds to a spirit that is “limited, superstitious, stupid and small” (FW 1, 141). With these judgements, Herder supports a theory according to which only “moderate” climates produce peoples who are well formed in body and mind. This theory has sometimes been used to argue for the innate superiority of Europeans (see Fink 1987). In the first of his Critical Forests on Aesthetics, moreover, written a year or so later, Herder informs his readers that he has come to believe, on the basis of travel descriptions, that the beauty of nations (Nationalschönheit) is due to “not merely climate, but above all the form and structure of the race (Geschlecht)” (FW 2, 48). As a consequence, he claims, “nothing is so strongly detrimental to the genealogy and national character of the beauty or uniqueness of a people as migration or foreign admixture; this is precisely what robbed the Nordic nations, who, according to the ╇ “Ist die Schönheit des Körpers ein Bote von der Schönheit der Seele?” (FW 1, 135–48).

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testimony of some ancients themselves, were beautiful, of their form” (FW 2, 48). Such lines could easily be enlisted in support of Nazi racial ideology. They are quoted by Redeker, with the comment:€ “These sentences were written in 1767 and yet sound modern. There is no Volksgeist isolated from Volksblut” (Redeker 1934, 99). Herder does not use the disputed term Rasse in this work, but he does speaks of Menschengattungen and Menschengeschlechter, “human races” in a looser sense, each with its own form or Gestalt, and he says that “nothing makes the original form (Originalbildung) weaker and more indistinct, as when peoples depart from their land and their nature” (FW 2, 50). Based on the above citations, the following conclusions appear warranted:€that Herder divides the human species into distinct types, whose form is in part hereditary, the result not only of climate and external forces, but of something “inner”; that he evaluates the physical beauty of these types according to implicitly Eurocentric standards, while believing that it corresponds to mental perfection; and that he warns against migration and mixture as leading to a degeneration of type. Berger then does not seem to be stretching Herder’s thought very far when he claims that, for Herder, “racial–national types do not manifest themselves first of all in concrete spiritual forms like folk poetry, language etc., but already find shape in anatomy, physiology and racial soul” (Berger 1933, 604). Nor does von Wiese in drawing the inference that “a people which does not keep its blood pure falls into the danger of destroying its ‘original form’” (Wiese 1939a, 137). Of course, too much should not be made of a few isolated remarks in early works. It could be argued that these are not typical of Herder’s thought, and that they represent an immature position he eventually outgrows. However, the authors I have mentioned who try to connect Herder with Nazi race theory€– Redeker, von Wiese, and Berger€– do not appeal exclusively to early works but also, and centrally, to the Ideas, which represents Herder’s most sustained and systematic attempt at a descriptive geography of peoples. Some of these appeals are admittedly rather dubious. Arguing against such racialist readings of the Ideas, Barnard points out that Herder’s frequent use of the term “genetic” in this text should not be interpreted “in the terminology of modern biology,” and that when he opposes the “wild mixing of entire nations,” Herder is “concerned not with ‘racial purity’, but with the forcible inter-mixing of nationalities as a result of military subjugation” (Barnard 1965, 71). Berger and von Wiese specifically refer to these elements in the Ideas to support their readings (Berger 1933, 605, 607; Wiese 1939a, 136–7).

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Nonetheless, there are passages in the Ideas which genuinely cast doubt on Barnard’s claim that, within Herder’s thought, the human species is “biologically undifferentiated” (Barnard 1965, 71). For one thing, Herder continues to draw some sharp distinctions between the physical appearances of various peoples, and his judgements about these appearances are still highly Eurocentric, in spite of his proscription against taking the European ideal as “the model of all health and beauty” (Ideas, 277). He claims, for example, that the ancient Greek head indicates “the most beautiful proportion in the sensitive powers of the brain,” adding that “every deviation therefrom is animalistic” (Ideas, 129). Herder has not, then, abandoned his belief that beauty of outer form is a sign of inner perfection. At other points in the Ideas, he describes “physiognomy” as “the interpreter of the living nature of a person” (Ideas, 277), and refers positively to Camper’s head measurements. The latter supposedly discover a natural scale ascending by degrees (Stufenweise) from animals to “the most beautiful of beautiful people” (Ideas, 277). These are, once again, ancient Greeks. At the bottom of the scale are “Negroes” (Ideas, 277). Such observations cannot simply be dismissed as anomalous, as out of tune with Herder’s usual approach to peoples in the Ideas. The weight of Herder’s analyses certainly does fall on the cultural determinants of the character of peoples, their environment and traditions. At the same time, though, he quite systematically divides the human species into physiological types, which he assesses by definite standards. While he never employs the term Rasse when making these divisions, except to criticize it, he does on occasion use similar terms. Herder’s insistence that all human beings belong to the same Menschengattung or “human race” (Ideas, 251), for instance, does not prevent him from using exactly this term in reference to a specific human type in his description of East Asian peoples. Given that Asia is the birthplace of the human species, Herder writes, “one is inclined to look there for the most beautiful Menschengattung as well; but how greatly are we deceived in this expectation!” (Ideas, 216).3 Since Herder never provides a precise definition for Menschengattung, it would be uncharitable to conclude that apparently conflicting statements containing this expression are instances of self-contradiction, rather than cases in which an identical term is used in somewhat different senses. But the expression does always indicate a physiologically differentiated type of some sort. The above remark is followed by highly unflattering Cf. Herder’s description of “Pescherays” (the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego) as “perhaps the lowest Gattung of human beings” (Ideas, 247).

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descriptions of the faces and bodies of “Mongolian” peoples, including the Chinese and the Japanese (Ideas, 219), interwoven with equally unflattering comments about their characters and societies: Chinese taste seems to be as much a consequence of ill-formed organs, as despotism is of their form of government, and barbarism of their form of wisdom. The Japanese … are almost all ill-shaped, with thick heads, small eyes, stump noses, flat cheeks, almost no beard and mostly bandy-legged; their form of government and wisdom is full of violent constraints, suitable only for their land. (Ideas, 219).

Although Herder does not explicitly say here that there is some real link between the physiologies and the national characters of these Â�peoples, except for the alleged connection between Chinese taste and sense organs, one gets the impression that, in his mind, the body and spirit of a people form two aspects of a typological unity. This impression is strongly reinforced when, in the ensuing account of Kashmiris€– whom, employing the same Eurocentric standards, Herder judges to be beautiful€– he says:€“And as is the form of their body (Leibesgestalt), so is the original form of their spirit (Gestalt ihres Geistes); indeed, so is their way of life, when considered apart from the pressure of superstition or slavery” (Ideas, 223). The section on China in the third part of the Ideas, moreover, which I discussed at length in the last chapter, reaffirms Herder’s thesis that there is a causal link between the nature of Chinese sense organs and aspects of the Chinese Geist. Herder extends this thesis to cover many facets of Chinese culture, including the structure of their language (Ideas, 434). As we have seen, his harshest criticisms are reserved for China’s systems of government, but he does not see these as contingent historical developments. They are, for him, symptomatic of an innate character expressed in every feature of Chinese society. He asks, does not China’s history of despotism reveal “of what sort and what genetic character this nation is? A stamp that one can hardly fail to see in contemplating the whole and its parts, extending even to clothing, food, customs, domestic manners, the nature of their art and their pleasures” (Ideas, 434). The term “genetic” must not be interpreted anachronistically, but, read in context, it still suggests a character that is inherited and fixed. Various other remarks in this chapter make it clear that Herder does indeed think of the Chinese character in this manner. “The nation is of Mongolian origin (Abkunft),” he writes, “as is demonstrated by their form, their coarse or eccentric taste, indeed even their clever ingenuity and the first seat of their culture” (Ideas,

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433). He repeatedly uses the term “stock” (Stamm), saying, at one point, that “from this human stock (Menschenstamm) Greeks and Romans could never be made” (Ideas, 434), and, at another, that this is “a Mongolian stock, degenerated into Chinese slave-culture” (Ideas, 436). He does not maintain that Chinese culture and society have been entirely determined by an innate character, but his claim that “the form of Chinese education contributed, along with their national character, to their being as they are and not having become more” (Ideas, 436) assumes that this “national character” has played some determining role, and it is in turn shaped by being “Mongolian.” The position that emerges is one where the Chinese Volk is conceived of as possessing a form, expressed in both the character and physical structure of Chinese people, which is in part a function of its belonging to the type called “Mongolian.” This casts some doubt on Zammito’s claim that Herder’s treatment of the Chinese involves only “cultural contempt,” in contrast with Kant’s biological racism against non-Western peoples (Zammito 2002, 345). The fact that, within Herder’s thought, the character of peoples has a hereditary aspect may sometimes be obscured by his emphasis on the close relation between a people’s culture and its physical environment or Klima. Herder’s descriptions tend, that is, to suggest that by and large the physical and characterological constitution of peoples can be traced back to the concrete elements of their environment. For example, he claims that the facial features and physiology of Greenlanders are a result of, and are suited to, the cold temperatures in which they dwell (Ideas, 211). Such effects are not produced anew in every generation, however, as if “from scratch.” At some point, the typological characteristics developed through adaptation to a particular environment become hereditary. If that were not the case, Herder could not describe the “Somojede” as “the Negro among northern peoples,” and attribute to him physical characteristics distinct from those of other peoples living in the far north (Ideas, 214–15). Interestingly, Herder concludes that, on the whole, the form of the Samoiede is nonetheless that of a northerner, “in spite of his delicate and hot (hitzig) nature, which he probably brought with him as a national character, and which could not be overcome even by Klima” (Ideas, 215). This conclusion shows that Herder thinks further adaptation from an original type is possible, and that this original type, which includes characteristics pertaining to personality, resists such adaptation. He makes a similar point about “Americans,” meaning the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas. Since they all originated from the same region, he argues, their ancestors probably having traveled from Asia over a Western

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land pass, it is understandable that “in spite of all climates, the form and character of [Americans] will exhibit a uniformity, suffering only a few exceptions” (Ideas, 240). Herder understands that native Americans are divided into different peoples, which he sets out to describe, but he also says that these descriptions will show “how the uniformity of their original character shades into a multiplicity and yet is never lost” (Ideas, 243). While, for Herder, physical environment plays a profoundly important role in determining the mental and physical nature of peoples, then, some€ – though by no means all€ – of the characteristics for which it is originally responsible also eventually become hereditary, and in that sense innate. Herder’s account of African peoples crystallizes the various elements of his position. It also illustrates his view that “the region of the most wellconstituted peoples is the middle region of the earth, which, like beauty itself, lies between two extremes” (Ideas, 226). He accordingly judges the features of the typical so-called “Negergestalt”€– nose, lips, hair€– as ugly (Ideas, 230). The dark color of Africans he attributes to the great heat of their climate (Ideas, 233). His hypothesis is that this heat “cooks” an oil contained in a membrane which everyone has under their skin (this is why white people also get darker under the sun), and that when people have lived in a very hot climate for thousands of years, so that they have “incorporated” (einverleibet) themselves to it, it is to be expected that, over the course of time, they will end up being colored (Ideas, 233–4). The precise mechanism by which this happens is unknown to Herder, but the basic theory is clear enough:€ the color of colored peoples, or at least of very dark ones, is the product of historical adaptation to a hot climate, the results of which slowly become innate, typical, and hereditary. On Herder’s account, mental and personality traits are included within this process of adaptation. In Africa, the result is a general type, the “Negro,” placed very low on the human developmental scale. Adaptation to climate has in this case produced a face bearing a certain resemblance to that of apes, Herder claims, and a body designed for sensual animal pleasure (Ideas, 235). This is supposed to be the compensation nature gave to this type for her withholding of higher gifts: The more refined intelligence, which had to be denied to the creature under this burning sun, in this breast boiling with passions, was compensated through a nervous constitution that did not permit him to think of those senses … He spends his life free of care, in a land that provides him his food with overflowing generosity. His agile body splashes in the water, as if it were made for the water; he climbs and runs, as if each of these were his delight:€and he is as healthy and

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strong as he is cheerful and easy, bearing through his different constitution all the accidents and illnesses of his Klima, to which so many Europeans succumb. Of what use to him the painful sense of higher joys, for which he was not made? The material (Stoff ) for them was in him; but nature turned her hand, and made from that material what he more greatly needed for his land and for the happiness of his life. (Ideas, 236)

This passage suggests that, for Herder, the human species was once biologically undifferentiated, and so it can be said that the “stuff” for allegedly higher development was there in Africans, too, but that since then processes of adaptation, affecting both mental and physical characteristics, have taken place in various regions. The species is no longer uniform; it is divided into unified psycho-physical types, whose characters reveal the shaping power of evolution, understood in a preDarwinian sense. Indeed, at times, Herder explicitly, if somewhat tentatively, proposes evolutionary theses with radical implications. When talking about the life and habits of Mongolian tribes, he asks:€ “would it not be probable that, thousands of years ago, perhaps a few of these causes operated still more strongly, and that the form of these people developed from them and passed over into an inherited nature?” (Ideas, 217–18). The “causes” of which he is speaking include riding horses, not bathing frequently, and drinking a good deal of tea; they include everything involving a Â�person’s body. When Herder affirms the likelihood that some of these are “incorporated (eingepfropft) and inherited into the bodily structure of a people” (Ideas, 218), he is claiming that acquired characteristics may, over the course of time, become hereditary. The relationship between body, soul and Klima in Herder’s thought means that the consequences of such a claim are profound. “We are a malleable clay in the hands of Klima” (Ideas, 265), where Klima has a much broader meaning in Herder’s use than the English term “climate” (which is why I have generally chosen to leave the term untranslated). It covers not only temperature and the character of the air, but also:€“The elevation or depression of a region, its constitution and products, the food and drink a person consumes, the manner of life he follows, the work he performs, clothing, even customary positions, pleasures and arts, along with a host of other circumstances, which operate powerfully in connection with one’s life; all these belong to the portrait of this greatly changing Klima” (Ideas, 266). Herder is not suggesting that all of these elements can become hereditary, but he does think some of them produce effects on the body that can be transmitted across generations.

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Yet the ultimate creator of any living form, including a people, is not, for Herder, the external influence of Klima, but an “internal” power. In the Ideas, the chapter following the one on Klima from which I have just been citing, is called:€“The Genetic Force is the Mother of all Forms on the Earth, which Klima Only Works with in Friendly or Hostile Manner” (Ideas, 270). Berger, who cites this line (1933, 604), interprets the relation between “internal” and “external” factors in Herder’s thought as follows:€“To the internal formational (gestaltende) directing forces of blood and race are added the external influences of the natural and human–historical environment” (Berger 1933, 624). Herder does not speak in terms of “blood” or “race,” and he actually says that he does not know the origin or inner nature of the genetic force (Ideas, 271). As Nisbet notes, the concept of “genetic force” in the Ideas is “illdefined” (Nisbet 1970, 228). Herder does, however, describe it as innate and organic (Ideas, 273). It is an active, shape-producing power, revealing itself in the forms to which it gives rise. Again, the term “genetic” must not be read anachronistically, but it frequently is associated, in the Ideas, with the hereditary characteristics that distinguish different types of organisms. Distinct animal species are said to be “genetically separated” (Ideas, 278). The lowly overall Gestalt of the “Negro” can now only be changed “genetically,” for the functioning of this inner power explains why the character of the geographical region in which a people dwells only changes their form gradually, while the typical features of that people disappear in a few generations through “mixing with foreign nations” (Ideas, 276). Herder’s position on the constitution of “Negroes” here is indebted to Samuel Thomas Soemmerring’s Über die Â�körperliche Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europäer (1784), to which Herder refers explicitly (Ideas, 275). Significantly, a revised edition of this work was published in 1785, in which Soemmerring now refers to Herder’s account, agreeing with it that “Negroes” are closer to apes than other human beings are, although they are still definitely human beings, and not apes (Soemmerring 1990, 161–2). This claim is meant to apply to their characters as well as to their bodies, as Soemmerring, like Herder, sees a causal connection between these. Claiming that Negroes have stronger nerves and smaller brains, he adds:€“Maybe this explains some historical facts about their wildness, lack of restraint, and somewhat lesser capacity for more refined culture” (237). (Soemmerring also says, however, that the type admits of exceptions, as there are a few blacks who are more like their white brothers, even surpassing them in beauty and understanding [248]).

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While “organic forces” are in general highly plastic for Herder, in the context of his discussion of “Negroes,” he uses the term “genetic force” to indicate a subspecies of these forces:€ namely, the powers that produce hereditary features which resist being reshaped through the influence of Klima. Nisbet points out that, for Herder, “the deterministic influence of environment is never total, but is always modified by other factors,” and that, “with the exception of a few rare cases … his theory of determinism is usually tempered by a vitalistic ‘genetische Kraft’ which resists and modifies climatic and environmental influences” (Nisbet 1970, 225–6). This “‘genetische Kraft’ … denotes some internal characteristic of the organism which, if altered, can produce inherited changes, while other, more superficial changes are not passed on” (Nisbet 1970, 228). In this respect, Herder draws a distinction between customary deformities people inflict on their bodies, such as nose-piercing and foot-binding, which have no permanent effect no matter how long the practice continues in a nation, and those deformities which are genetisch and therefore “inherited” (Ideas, 275). Hereditary properties can also change, but only slowly and over generations, so that the character of a race, and therefore of individuals belonging to that race, is determined by heredity, although it is not fixed for all eternity. Moreover, taking into account Herder’s claim that “mental thought is also dependent upon the organisation and health of the body” (Ideas, 273), the “genetic” power must, to some extent, affect the former in as much as it shapes the latter. In fact, a little later in the Ideas, Herder proposes a hypothesis according to which heredity would have a very significant and definite effect upon thought. The hypothesis is presented in a chapter dealing with the faculty of imagination (Einbildungskraft). This faculty is, for Herder, the mediator between body and mind. “Fantasy” is connected with “the whole structure of the body, especially with the brain and nerves” (Ideas, 302), so that the images and ideas it produces are embedded in the body, and are made out of the stuff of bodily experience. For instance, imagination produces the mythology of a people, which is constructed out of their experience of the physical nature surrounding them (Ideas, 301). Mythology is then a result of Klima. It is passed on mainly by tradition. However, in raising the question of whether there are innate ideas, Herder answers that there are not, given the usual understanding of this expression, but adds: if one understands it as the immediate predisposition towards receiving, connecting, and expanding certain ideas and images:€then nothing speaks against it and everything for it. If a son can inherit six fingers, if the family of the porcupine-man in England can inherit his monstrous deformity, if the external form

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of the body and face are often visibly transmitted, would it not be surprising if the brain were not transmitted as well, and inherited perhaps in its most refined organic folds? (Ideas, 303)

Herder believes it to be highly likely, then, that images and ideas, together with ways of connecting them, which are originally acquired by a people within a certain Klima, may be passed on to descendants in the form of predispositions. Ergang was therefore right to claim, in Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (1931), that while, for Herder, environmental factors are mainly responsible for differences of culture (89): heredity also plays a part. As a result of the action or influence of the different forces upon the national soul a national character is developed. This generated character, or sum of acquired tendencies, is in turn passed on to the next generation, as it were, in the blood and becomes a generating influence. (Ergang 1931, 94)

With this hypothesis, Herder approaches an idea similar to that of a “racial soul.” In addition, because, for Herder, each type of living thing is adapted for its environment, where a portion of this adaptation has been incorporated and become innate, transplantation is fraught with hazards. “Every human being, every animal, every plant has its own Klima” (Ideas, 273–4), so that, when transported, it preserves the impress of the original Klima for which it was, in a sense, made. Herder gives botanical and zoological examples to support this supposition, claiming that, in greenhouses, imported plants maintain the seasonal rhythms of their native lands even after having been in Europe for sixty years (Ideas, 64), and that the American bear preserves American time-zones in its behavior when brought to Europe (Ideas, 72). Human beings, at least those of a “sensual” variety, are likewise attached to their native lands: It is evident why all sensual peoples who are built for their land are so faithful to their soil and feel themselves to be inseparable from it. The constitution of their bodies and their manner of life, all the joys and activities to which they have been accustomed from their childhood, the whole circle of vision of their soul is klimatisch. If one robs them of their land, one has robbed them of everything. (Ideas, 259)4

To illustrate this point, Herder draws attention to the misery of Greenlanders and African slaves removed from their homeland, and their Cf. Ideas, 151:€“The more animalistic (tierisch) a nation is, the more it is attached to its land and Klima with the bonds of love and of its soul.”

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longing to return to the place of their birth (Ideas, 260). The main part of this longing has to do with the sort of deep connections between identity and place that are formed after a person’s birth. But Herder’s reference to “the constitution of their bodies” shows that a physiological component is thought to be at work here as well. If a predisposition to think in certain ways belongs to that physiological component, then the line between the innate and the acquired in the composition of a people’s collective “soul” is unclear€– as it usually is in Herder’s mind. Herder affirms, on the other hand, that “human beings are not firmly rooted plants” (Ideas, 509); he recognizes that they do migrate, changing and adapting to new climes. The result, for Herder, is an integration of the old with the new (Ideas, 509). Again, the most important part of such integration has to do with culture, with adapting old traditions to a new place, but I think I have said enough to establish that, in Herder’s thought, the original type maintains a certain fixity not only because of traditions, not only as a second nature, but also because elements of that type have become a first nature. Furthermore, on the whole, Herder does tend to think that peoples flourish most fully when they remain unified wholes, planted in their native soil and distinct from one another. Barnard is right that Herder’s remark, in the Ideas, against “wild mixing,” frequently quoted in literature on Herder published during the Nazi era, has to do, primarily, with ethnic rather than racial communities. And it is particularly directed against oppressive empires, like that of ancient Rome. Barnard slants the issue, though, by citing this remark as “wild mixing of entire nations” (Barnard 1965, 71). The text actually reads:€ “the wild mixing of Menschen-Gattungen and nations” (Ideas, 369). T. Churchill’s 1800 translation into English renders Menschen-Gattungen here as “races” (Herder 1800, 249). This rendering is problematic, given Herder’s opposition to the term “race,” but it is not entirely unfair, since this is not the only time Herder uses the term Menschen-Gattung in the Ideas, and since he always intends it to signify biological types of some sort. H e r de r, K a n t, a n d N a z i i de ol o g y In spite of Herder’s denial of the concept of race, then, and in spite of his opposition to Kant on this issue, it turns out that, in some important respects, Herder’s understanding of human types and of the process through which they developed agrees with Kant’s racial theory, as presented in the 1775 essay, “On the Different Races of Man.” Kant had argued that the human species originally contained within itself all the

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potentialities, all the “seeds” (Keime) and “natural aptitudes” (Anlagen), that would enable it to adapt to the many different geographical and climatic conditions in which it had been destined to live. Under these different conditions, varying potentialities were developed or held back, resulting in distinct races, each suited to the character of the region in which it had taken shape, and each having typical characteristics that are now hereditary (AA 2, 435–41).5 The position Herder presents in the Ideas is, on these points, similar. He is at pains to stress that there are some basic capacities universal to the species, insisting that no people is wholly lacking in “humanity, reason and language” (Ideas, 377), but these capacities are not realized in the same way, and to the same degree, by all the peoples on earth. Jürgen Jacobs says Herder presupposes “that human souls are identical in their ‘fundamental substance’ (Grundstoff ), that the difference between them, therefore, is first produced through the self-Â�realization of this substance in a determinate place” (Jacobs 1994, 83). This is true, in a sense, but in that sense it is true of Kant’s view as well. The question is whether the differentiation of this fundamental substance only takes place now, after birth, in the case of every individual, or whether some part of it took place historically to yield what are now significantly distinct human types. Kant believes the latter; so does Herder. Kant addresses Herder’s criticisms of the concept of race himself, in his review of the second part of the Ideas (November, 1785). He states that Herder does not favor the division of the human species into races, particularly when it is grounded on inherited color, “presumably because for him the concept of a race is not as yet clearly determined” (AA 8, 62). Immediately after making this comment, Kant takes up the issue of Keime, or “seeds.” Herder had criticized the notion of “seeds” in the first part of the Ideas, claiming that no one has ever seen such entities, and that in any case the postulation of them explains nothing, since “the seed is already a constructed thing (Gebilde) and where there is such a thing, there must be an organic force which constructs it” (Ideas, 89). In making these points, Herder places himself on one side of a contemporary debate within the life sciences, favoring epigenesis, which Zammito broadly defines as “the idea of emergent order as an inherent potentiality in nature itself” (Zammito 2002, 232). For Herder, the natures of living beings, including human beings, are ultimately constructed by the formproducing action of Kräfte. Kant, on the other hand, favors a modified For detailed discussions of Kant’s position over the course of his several essays on race, see Bernasconi (2001; 2002).

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preformationism, with Keime being, in Phillip Sloan’s words, “Â�pre-existent ‘germs’ lying within the human stock that underlie the display of distinct physical properties of an organism when brought to their unfolding by external causes” (Sloan 2002, 239). In his review of the first part of the Ideas (February, 1785), Kant had responded to Herder’s complaint about the obscurity of the notion of Keime by pointing out, not unreasonably, that the notion of invisible organizing forces is not very helpful either, as it purports to explain something that one does not understand by appeal to something that one understands even less (AA 8, 53–4). In fact, as I have noted before, Herder entirely grants the obscurity of the notion of Kraft. In the Ideas, he states that he does not know where this “living, organic force” comes from, nor what its inner nature is (Ideas, 271). While this statement is already a reaction to Kant’s critical review, Herder had made the same point much earlier as well, in On the Human Soul’s Cognition and Sensation (1775), where he says, with respect to his use of the idea of Kraft:€“I do not here claim to explain anything; I have not yet encountered any philosophy which explains what Kraft is” (Cognition, 337). For his part, Kant grants the obscurity of the notion of Keime in his review of the second part of the Ideas (AA 8, 62–3). He then notes that Herder attributes the “climatic difference between people” to the working of an inner genetische Kraft rather than to seeds, but that if this inner force gives rise to a limited number of forms, which subsequently do not change into other types even under altered circumstances, one might call the potential to develop into these forms Keime oder ursprüngliche Anlagen, “seeds or original predispositions” (AA 8, 62). These would just be names for the limits of the inner organizing power, limits that cannot be clarified any further (AA 8, 62). Sloan argues that “in this claim, Kant can be seen to be loosening a strong preformationist sense of Keime and Anlagen, while not abandoning his commitment to these theoretical entities,” which “have assumed the role of limiting structures on the Lebensprincip, rather than that of self-enclosed essential characters that unfold on the occasion of experience” (Sloan 2002, 244). At the same time, Kant rightly assumes here that Herder, too, accepts that there is a measure of fixity in the human types produced by the “genetic” force, a character that remains constant in the face of climatic variation. One might wonder, at this juncture:€whether the inner principle is described as a dynamic life force or as self-unfolding seeds, if, at the end of the day, it results in biologically distinct human types fitted to various climes, does one not have something like races? If yes, then why did Herder reject the concept in such strong terms?

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Nisbet offers the following answer: [Herder’s] belief in the unitary origin of all people convinced him, like the majority of his contemporaries, that the present races had first developed their differentiating characteristics in the course of time, so that these were not to be regarded as inextinguishable differences. Nonetheless, many ethnologists of the 18th century€– like, for example, Linné, Blumenbach and Kant€– sought to work out an exact typology of the different races. Herder, however, rightly held that the knowledge then available was inadequate and he went so far as to reject the expression “race” as a falsification of the complex genetic reality. (Nisbet 1992, 11)

There is actually no necessary link between the belief that racial characteristics developed over the course of time and the belief that they are not now immutable. Herder and Kant both defended monogenesis; they both maintained a single origin for the human species, with type-specific differences developing later. However, Kant held in “On the Different Races of Man,” that the present races could not now change into others, because “only the base form (Stammbildung) can develop into a race” (AA€2, 442), while Herder maintained that development is ongoing. This difference was implicated in the Keim/Kraft dispute between them, and it remains constant. In the 1785 essay, “Determination of the Concept of a Human Race,” Kant reaffirms that “the races which now exist could no longer be extinguished, if all mixing of them among one another were prevented” (AA 8, 105). Even if, in Kant’s thought, the notions of Keime and Anlagen have by 1785 become, as Sloan says, “‘limitations on a selfstructuring capacity’ rather than … a preformation of specific properties” (Sloan 2002, 245), the difference with Herder, as it affects the idea of race, remains significant. Kant’s thesis is that the original human race contained all human seeds and dispositions, but that, over the course of time, a process of environmental adaptation occurred in which some of these were suppressed while others developed. This process produced the present distinct human races. The suppressed seeds cannot now be reactivated by any change of circumstance, the result being that the character of the current races is ineradicable. For Herder, by contrast, the genetic forces which produce the present human types are quite capable, through interaction with Klima, of being altered over generations. But Herder nonetheless believes that individual members of these present types are psycho-physically distinct from those belonging to other types, and that these distinctions are based on hereditary characteristics. He does not, however, believe that the biological distinctions between human types are exact. The passage in the Ideas where Herder argues against the application of the term “race” concludes:

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In short, neither four or five races, nor exclusive varieties exist on earth. Colours run into one another:€forms serve genetic character; and, considered as a whole, everything becomes, in the end, only a shading of one and the same great picture, spread through all the places and ages of the earth. This picture does not belong, therefore, to systematic natural history, but to the physico-geographical history of mankind. (Ideas, 256)

The varieties of man, that is, are not natural kinds. They are much too fluid, and their borders are much too fuzzy, for them to be designated by terms that would constitute them as objects of scientific investigation, rather than of a historical hermeneutic, albeit one in which a certain study of bodies is involved. At this point in time, the term “race,” in Herder’s view, threatens precisely to name human varieties in such a way as to turn them into natural kinds. There are in nature, he wants to insist, no such human kinds. Bernasconi offers a helpful summary of the differences between Kant and Herder with respect to human variety: Whereas Kant was among those who advocated division into only four or five kinds, Herder advocated recognition of the diversity of human peoples; whereas Kant focused on color divisions, Herder saw continuity … Like Blumenbach, Herder believed that if we only knew more about the different peoples, we could perhaps complete the shadings of the portraits of these peoples without finding a single break … Whereas Kant regarded the division of races as permanent, according to Herder, “the characters of peoples are gradually extinguished in the general run of things”. (Bernasconi 2001, 28)

In that case, Herder’s position on race is in some respects quite close to that of his contemporary Georg Forster, who also argued against Kant on this subject (although Forster, unlike both Kant and Herder, was a polygeneticist, believing that the human species had multiple origins). In his “Yet More on the Human Races” (Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen) (1785), Forster asks what sort of sort the idea of race is supposed to name, and compares it with terms like Gattung, Varietät, and Art, and with the Latin terms employed by the Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus:€ classes, ordines, genera, species, varietates (Sämmtliche Schriften, 8, 142–3). Like Herder, Forster rejects the term “race” as a name for a scientific kind, but he says that if it is used merely in the sense of “variety,” to designate “a people of distinct character and unknown descent,” then he has no objection (Sämmtliche Schriften, 8, 152). This was not the sense for which Kant had been arguing. Thus, unlike Kant, Herder did not think human beings were sharply divided into distinct and permanent racial types. Still, given the vague

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and shifting meaning of the term “race,” then and now, anyone proposing that there are psycho-physically distinct human types, could count as having a racial theory. A 1939 article in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehung includes a variety of views in its sketch of the early history of the concept of race: Cuvier, Blumenbach and Kant were the spokesmen for a static conception:€R aces are special forms that remain self-identical, whose characteristic differences maintain themselves through all generations, whatever may be the chanÂ� ging conditions of life to which they are exposed. “Once race has taken root,” explains Kant, “it resists all transformation, because the character of the race has now become predominant in the productive power.” Buffon, Hunter and Lamarck represent a dynamic racial principle. The separation of races is indeed a fundamental element of human life, but it effects only changeable differences. (Brake 1939, 262)

Herder is not mentioned here, as is to be expected, given his explicit opposition to the idea of race, but the content of his theory of human types actually places him in the “dynamic” camp, with Buffon and Lamarck. The physical differences between human varieties are as determinate within Herder’s account as they are in that of Buffon, to whom Herder frequently refers. In the 1766 essay, “De la dégénération des animaux,” Buffon attributes the differences between human varieties largely to the influence of climate and diet in the history of their development. He claims that these influences have led, over centuries, to the production of the “constant and general characters by which one recognizes the races and even the different nations which compose the human genus” (Buffon 1853, 4, 112–13). These varieties are not at all permanent, according to Buffon’s theory. They are capable of further “degeneration,” as Herder also believes. But while, for both, human types are capable of an indefinite quantity and quality of change over numerous generations, individuals born into the presently existing types do have distinct and innate racial characters, which will remain fixed during their lifetimes.6 Herder’s theory that acquired characteristics can eventually become hereditary, moreover, anticipates Lamarck, whose “Second Law” (1809) states: Whatever nature causes individuals to acquire or lose through the influence of the circumstances to which their race has long been exposed, and, consequently, through the influence of predominant use of a certain organ, or through the constant disuse of a given part; nature preserves through generation for the new Cf. the section, “Variétés dans l’espèce humaine,” in Buffon’s “Histoire naturelle de l’homme” (1749) (Buffon 1853, 2, pp. 137–221).

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individuals that issue from them, provided that the acquired changes are common to both sexes, or to those that produced these new individuals. (Lamarck 1960, 235)

By “race,” Lamarck means not only a human race, but also, and primarily, a breed or subspecies of animal. As Nisbet observes, Herder “frequently suggests, after the manner of Lamarck, that the organism can be physically changed by environmental influences, and that such changes are inherited” (Nisbet 1970, 224). For Herder, the temporal fluidity among human types is combined with synchronic vagueness, as he thinks all the varieties run into one another and no clear borders exist between them. On these points, Herder’s views, while contrasting with Kant’s, agree with those expressed by Blumenbach, in his “Contributions to Natural History,” Part 1 (1806): as all the differences in mankind, however surprising they may be at the first glance, seem, upon a nearer inspection, to run into one another by unnoticed passages and intermediate shades; no other very definite boundaries can be drawn between these varieties, especially if, as is but fair, respect is had not only to one or the other, but also to the peculiarities of a natural system, dependent upon all bodily indications alike. (Blumenbach 1973, 303) I am acquainted with no single distinctive bodily character which is at once peculiar to the Negro, and which cannot be found to exist in many other and distant nations; none which is in like way common to the Negro, and in which they do not again come into contact with other nations through imperceptible passages, just as every other variety of man runs into the neighbouring population. (Blumenbach 1973, 305)

These are exactly the kinds of points that Herder makes in opposing the concept of race in the Ideas. Thus, what he opposes is only the idea that the human varieties named by the emerging term “race” are fixed types with clear borders between them. Within Herder’s position, the criteria for distinguishing these varieties are multiple and shifting, and nowhere near as clear as those for distinguishing species€ – but this is still a racial theory of a significant sort, given Herder’s view that the Â�differences between the types extend beyond physical features to cognitive and characteroÂ�logical traits. It would not be if Herder were only concerned with superficial physical characteristics. As a 1934 item in the Nazi daily, Völkischer Beobachter, succinctly puts it:€“If there were only physical differences between races, the whole racial question would be without any essential significance; there would then be no serious racial question at all. That is precisely why

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research into the hereditary differences of soul among racial differences is of such decisive importance” (Lenz 1934). No one disputes, nor does it matter much, that human beings can be divided into rough nominal categories, admitting of many exceptions and degrees, based on clusters of phenomenal physical features. But Herder goes much further than this; he claims that those features are intrinsically connected with cognitive and characterological traits. In the history of race and racism, this idea has mattered very much, especially when combined with the assumption, which Herder seems to share, that some distinctions of higher and lower can be made between human types. To be sure, belief in the perdurance of race has been central to racist practice. The point was certainly emphasized in Nazi treatises and propaganda. Another item in the Völkischer Beobachter, also from 1934 and reporting a speech in Karlsruhe by the Rector of the University of Berlin, says:€“What is race and what is nationality (Volkstum)? Although in life they belong together, conceptually they represent two different things. Race is a concept in natural science; nationality belongs to the humanities. Race is heredity. Racial properties are hereditary properties, unchangeable and inalienable, given by nature” (Fischer 1934). A 1933 article in the Â�racist magazine, Volk und Rasse, repeats the slogan, Völker vergehen, Rassen bestehen, “Peoples pass away; races endure” (Viergutz 1933, 89, 90). Herder did not think that any properties typical of a human variety were wholly inalienable, but, as I have shown, he did believe that properties originally evolved through the action of organic forces within a particular Klima are eventually reproduced through genetic forces, which are resistant to change. This is clear in his descriptions of “Negroes” and “Mongols.” At one point, he even speaks of “the nearly eternal national character which so completely distinguishes all North Asian stocks (Stämme) from southern peoples” (Ideas, 429). Keeping in mind the physical dimension of the connection between Klima and national character within Herder’s thought, his position could be compared with that expressed by Ewald Banse, Professor at the Technischer Hochschule in Hannover, in an essay, also published in Volk und Rasse, called “On the Connection Between Man and Landscape” (“Über den Zusammenhang von Landschaft und Mensch”): All life sprang, at some time, from soil and air, and from the beginning it developed differently in different climatic areas; but however far it might have reached, through migration, into other climatic zones, it still carries within itself the impress of the original native climate (Heimatklima), outwardly altered, but nonetheless inextinguishable and unmistakable …

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â•… It is important to understand that these developments and developmental differences lie infinitely far back in the past and could only occur at the stage when the soul was still exposed. The results, however, once achieved in this way, must persist as fairly unalterable and, if one could utter this word cautiously, eternal … â•… For wherever it may stray in its migrations, a race carries about with itself, in the pictures of its soul, imperishable and unerasable, the projection of its original landscape. (Banse 1932, 9–10)

This article was published in 1932. Banse repeats these points in “Does Landscape Affect Race?” (“Wirkt die Landschaft auf die Rasse ein?”) (Banse 1935), which indicates that his theory fit well with Nazi ideology and helped to support it. It is also strongly reminiscent of Herder’s hypothesis that the predisposition to form and connect ideas in a particular way is probably passed down through hereditary brain structures, where this is supposed to explain an aspect of national character. I therefore suggested earlier that Herder’s theory at times approaches the idea of what would later be called a “racial soul” by, for instance, Rosenberg (see Rosenberg 1930, e.g. pp. 113–14). Determining the precise nature and extent of Herder’s influence upon the development of this idea is a difficult task, especially since, as Goethe observed, Herder’s ideas were quickly absorbed in Germany, and their source forgotten.7 But the case for Herder’s being one original source for the idea of a racial soul has a prima facie plausibility, considering the similarities between the content of this idea and aspects of Herder’s position, as well as elements in the literature on Herder during the Nazi period. I have wanted to establish, in addition, that the “racial” reading of Herder is not simply a distortion of his thought. Commenting on Herder’s conception of a national soul, Ergang writes: Each nationality has something peculiarly characteristic about it which to Herder was “inexpressible”. This gives a peculiar stamp to its character which in turn is impressed upon all the phenomena of its history, upon its science, its art, its language, its literature, its religion and upon all the other manifestations of the group. (Ergang 1931, 87).

This description is indisputable. If one adds that this “inexpressible” element is in part produced by the activity of an inner “genetic force,” and that heredity therefore plays a role in determining its character, which then resists modification by environmental factors, then surely there is ╇ See Goethe (1887–, 41.2, 345 and 42.1, 189).

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some warrant for identifying it as a racial essence or Gestalt, even though Herder himself refused to do so.8 It is not that Herder thinks physiology is responsible for the character of peoples in any straightforwardly reductionist sense. Herder is a monist, not a materialist. The shape of a Geist is not determined by biology; rather, the same underlying force gives rise to a Gestalt of which mind and body are aspects. Because of Herder’s emphasis on language, however, it is easy to overlook this metaphysical element, together with the biological aspect of it, when considering his understanding of national identity. One can see why Hans Dietrich Irmscher would conclude that, for Herder, “the genuine force through which a nation constitutes itself is neither a biological factor, for instance ‘race,’ which Herder rather disregarded, as against Kant … nor a metaphysical principle (Hegel’s Volksgeist), but language, in its respective national particularity” (Irmscher 1994, 198). Language plays an absolutely central role in Herder’s understanding of cultural identity, but it is, for Herder, the medium in which a shape of spirit, the Geist of a specific Volk, is articulated. If something about that shape€– like a predisposition to form certain ideas and to connect them in a particular fashion€– is inherited not culturally but biologically, and if the ultimate driving force behind the formation of this shape is a metaphysical principle, then Irmscher’s conclusion is debatable. Theories of race within Nazi ideology were themselves not always simply reductionistic. Berger, in “Herder und die Gegenwart,” says that “an anthropology of ethnic forms is far from every racial materialism,” and describes a “racial soul” as “the inner interweaving of a physical, mental and spiritual typification (Artung)” (Berger 1933, 629). A racial soul is then not the passive product of biological factors, but an active metaphysical essence determining the overall character of a people: The basic type of the racial soul (der rassenseelische Grundtypus) determines, on its side, expressive life, the rhythm of the soul, and also reveals itself in a person’s spiritual products (geistige Gestaltungen). At the level of “pure reason,” all people display the same structure; but things stand otherwise in the realm of concrete, plastic forms of expression and concrete spiritual creations like language, style of life, customs, music and dance. (Berger 1933, 603)

These remarks by Berger in turn resemble descriptions of the racial in items published in Nazi journals like Volk und Rasse. The author of Herder did not, however, think of Jews in this way; they were, for him, a cultural, religious and historical unit, a Volk rather than a biological type. I have therefore not included any discussion of his position on Jews or Judaism here, but will take up this issue in later chapters.

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“‘Race’ and ‘People’ as Higher Life-Units” (“‘Rasse’ und ‘Volk’ als höhere Lebenseinheiten”) (1934), for instance, writes:€ “we can say of race, that it is not only the sum of certain hereditary factors, but that over these hereditary factors there stands a higher lawfulness, which determines the combined action of these factors, and which comes to expression in a style of life and soul” (Graf 1934, 46). Viergutz claims, in “‘Rasse’ und ‘Volk’,” that the racial does not consist wholly either in the appearance or the thoughts of people; rather, “this individuality, what is common to a human group€ … lies deeper than the spiritual (Geistige), deeper than acquired form (Bildung) … deeper also than moulding through a common fate, through the ‘spirit of the times.’” According to Viergutz, the racial is actually “a living activity, which encounters us in everything a person does and thinks, which is woven through all his conduct, his struggle and rest, his searching and celebration” (Viergutz 1933, 91). It is an active, indwelling Gestalt, and, as such, a metaphysical force rather than a biological thing. R ac i a l a n d mor a l e qua l i t y There are, then, pronounced parallels between Herder’s understanding of human variety and some themes within Nazi race theory. On its own, however, the picture presented so far in this chapter would be misleading, because it is not yet balanced against the textual evidence that appears to contradict it. In spite of his denigration of some non-European nations€– most strikingly, China€ – there are elements in Herder’s position which would lead one to believe that he thought all peoples were fundamentally equal, and so could not have drawn racial distinctions between them, especially not ones suggesting a hierarchical order with white Europeans at the top. One relevant motif in this regard is Herder’s explicit opposition to Eurocentric judgements. His aesthetic judgements about the outward appearance of different peoples are based on implicit Eurocentric criteria, of which Herder seems to be unaware. He certainly does not say, moreover, that northern Europeans represent the apex of human beauty, either in figure or culture. He claims that the region giving rise to well-formed peoples extends from Greece to India, but that, luckily, his own Europe lies near enough to this region to have intermingled with its peoples (Ideas, 225). “We northern Europeans would still be barbarians,” Herder writes, “if a gracious breath of fate had not blown over to us at least a few blossoms from the spirit of these peoples, so that ours could over time be ennobled through the grafting of this beautiful branch onto savage stocks” (Ideas, 228). In suggesting that Europeans are lucky that “Eskimos” and

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“Negroes,” by contrast, had no interest in leaving their lands (Ideas, 227), he expresses judgements that certainly are Eurocentric, in that his negative assessments of these people, and particularly of their physical form, apply specifically to those respects in which their features deviate from typical European ones. But Herder does not realize that this is the case, and that he is thereby violating his own injunction against taking the European ideal as the model of all health and beauty (Ideas, 27). Second, Herder does not merely grant, but is at pains to stress, that all human beings belong to the same species, and that this establishes a fraternity among them that should always be respected. Although races are not species, and one can certainly divide the human species into races without denying the unity of the former (as Kant himself did) (AA 2, 429), Herder’s insistence upon that unity is connected with his rejection of the term “race,” which he at one point describes as an “ignoble word” (Ideas, 150). Herder fears that sharp categorial divisions are likely to support the differential, and oppressive, treatment of peoples. Yet Nisbet’s statement that Herder “concludes … from the genetic unity of the human species that no people is superior to any other, so that, for example, colonialism and slavery are not only morally, but anthropologically, unjustified” (Nisbet 1992, 12), cannot be quite right. Herder believes that all human beings are human, and therefore have certain capacities and characteristics in common. These are sufficient for the ethical demand that they be treated like, well, human beings, in which case colonialism and slavery are indeed “anthropologically unjustified.” From this one cannot infer, though, that Herder thinks no people is superior to any other in any respect, nor that all peoples are “genetically” identical in every respect. Herder thinks nature has ensured that no people is wholly lacking in the faculties defining humanity, but he also thinks that these are granted differently to different peoples. “Near to the ape she placed the Negro,” for example; “she offered for solution the grand problem of humanity to all peoples of all times, from the reason of the Negro to the brain of the most refined human form” (Ideas, 633). Everyone has reason (Vernunft) and a sense of justice (Billigkeit), and, “endowed with these gifts and using them faithfully, the Negro can establish his society as well as the Greek, the Troglodyte as well as the Chinese” (Ideas, 654), which does not mean that all of these groups of people€– Negro, Greek, Troglodyte,9 and In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758), Carl von Linné included “Troglodytes,” of whom he had heard reports, among his classes of the species “Homo Sapiens” (Linné 1956, 24).

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Chinese€– are naturally endowed with an equal measure and proportion of these aptitudes. It only means that “the kingdom of these aptitudes and their realization is the genuine city of God on the earth, in which all people are citizens, only according to very different classes and stages” (Ideas, 379). The belief that peoples are genuinely varied in the degree and proportion of their human capacities, and even that they can be hierarchically ordered as a result, is not logically incompatible with the belief that they should all be treated decently, and certainly not within the terms of moral debate predominant in European intellectual circles during the Enlightenment. It is not, after all, written in the principles of nature, let alone within the principles of any moral system, that the human species could not be divided into races with distinct capacities. This just happens to be true, as a matter of contingent fact. It turns out that natural talents are not distributed differently according to anything like race. They are, however, distributed; individuals do not all possess an equal measure of all of them. If this fact could not, within the moral framework that Herder and his contemporaries took for granted, be considered a legitimate reason to accord individuals different measures of compassion and rights, then why should the case be different for whole groups of people? The fact of difference alone does not justify inhumane treatment, as was obvious to a number of eighteenth-century figures who reflected on the issue of race. Buffon, for one, strongly condemns the African slave trade, even though his account suggests that “Negroes” are naturally less intelligent than other human varieties (Œuvres complètes, 2, 189). Georg Forster does not think African peoples are innately inferior, but he argues that they are descended from a different stock than whites. Against the objection that this belief might sever the last connection between them and Europeans, and so further their mistreatment, Forster asks whether belief in a common origin has ever caused the slave-driver to lower his whip, and comments: No, my friend, when moralists proceed from false concepts, it is in truth their own fault if their construction sways, and falls like a house of cards. Practical instruction, which elucidates every fundamental principle through examples that are comprehensible, that make a deep impression, and that allow one to abstract from experience, can perhaps bring it about that in future people will feel what they owe to human beings€– what each animal species, in fact, which they treat so autocratically, may demand of them. Articles of faith have never been able to accomplish this, and never will. (Sämmtliche Schriften, 8, 155)

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For my purposes, the important thing about this remark is not its place within the debate on monogenesis vs. polygenesis, but its implication that moral reasoning about how living beings ought to be treated should proceed from grounds that are genuinely relevant, and should remain oriented towards concrete examples. Given the broad moral principles accepted by Herder (largely following his teacher Kant), neither a difference in origin, nor in appearance, nor in degree of human intelligence, could possibly justify the enslavement and physical abuse of any human being by any other, as careful and imaginative attention to a few real cases would make clear. Therefore, Herder’s belief in the lesser intellectual capacity of some African peoples is not at odds with the accusatory question he poses to Europeans:€ “What right did you have, you monsters, even to approach the land of these unfortunates, let alone to tear them from it through robbery, cunning, and cruelty?” (Ideas, 261). Perhaps, though, the moral character of the people about whom one is reasoning is relevant to the question of how they ought to be treated. It is striking that so many participants in the debate about race at this time comment on the natural disposition of peoples that Europeans have regarded as inferior. When considering the fate of the native inhabitants of Peru, Herder says:€ “Gentle and harmless were they, when you came to them; the uneducated wildness in this good-natured creature should have been raised by you to that of which it was capable” (Ideas, 246). Herder does not think that the less advanced “races” are lacking in goodness or virtue in such a way as to be deserving of moral contempt or censure. This may explain why he only expresses compassion for them, never blame, even where he is describing their supposed shortcomings, as when he concludes, in the section on African peoples:€“Let us therefore pity, but not despise the Negro, since no nobler gift could be conferred upon him, given the organization of his Klima” (Ideas, 236). Similarly, Buffon’s complaints against the slave trade include a reference to the natural goodness of “les Nègres”: But they have, as one can see, an excellent heart, they have the seed of all the virtues. I cannot write their history without feeling pity for their condition; are they not unhappy enough at being reduced to servitude, at being forced always to work without ever having the power to acquire anything? Is it necessary to go even further, to beat them, to treat them like animals? Humanity rebels against these odious forms of treatment which have been put into practice by greed for profit. (Œuvres complètes, 2, 189)

Blumenbach writes that direct experience has convinced him of the “good disposition and faculties of these our black brethren,” and that

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“in those respects as well as in natural tenderness of heart, they can scarcely be considered inferior to any other race of mankind taken altogether” (“Contributions to Natural History,” Part 1, in Blumenbach 1973, 308). Kant, by contrast, does attribute specific failings of moral character to members of what he judges to be lower races. For instance, Buffon, Kant, Herder, Forster, and Blumenbach all think that the character of “Negroes” is a result of their adaptation to the African climate. But only Kant’s account includes a list of innate vices, without any compensating virtues; the “Negro” is, he says, “strong, fleshy, agile, but under the rich care of his motherland lazy, weak and dallying” (“On the Different Races of Man,” AA 2, 438). Significantly, the negative characteristics in this list have moral overtones, while the positive ones do not. To give another example, Buffon, Forster, and Herder, unlike Kant, all reject the view that currently existing human varieties are fixed. However, because these three do believe that the nature of these varieties is a function of climatic adaptation, they are nonetheless in accord with Kant in thinking that transplantation into a very different climate results in unfitness. In “Yet More on the Human Races,” Forster, speaking specifically about “Negroes,” writes:€ “Each particular creature of nature is what it should be only in that place for which nature allowed it to be produced; a truth which one sees confirmed on a daily basis in menageries and botanical gardens” (Sämmtliche Schriften, 8, 138–9). Buffon affirms the same point in “Histoire naturelle de l’homme”: One therefore does not find Negroes except in those climates of the earth where all circumstances are united to produce a heat that is constant and always extreme; this heat is so necessary, not only to the production but even to the preservation of Negroes, that it has been observed in our islands, where the heat, although very high, is not comparable to that of Senegal, that newly-born Negro infants are so susceptible to the impression of the air that for the first nine days after their birth they have to be kept in rooms which are tightly closed and very warm. (Œuvres complètes, 2, 216)

But, again, among these authors only Kant describes this unfitness in terms suggesting a lack of virtue. “Nature has prevented human beings from mistakenly exchanging one climate for another,” he claims in “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” (TPP, 47/AA, 8, 174), adding, in a note, that “Negroes” and “gypsies” are disinclined to work because of the climates in which they originally developed:€ “the much smaller needs in those lands and the little trouble required to satisfy only them requires no great predisposition for keeping oneself busy” (TPP,

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54–5/AA 8, 174). Kant makes a comparable remark on native Americans in the same work: But the fact that their natural disposition has not yet reached a complete fitness for any one climate provides a test that can hardly offer another explanation why this race is too weak for hard labor, too indifferent for diligence, and unfit for any culture still stands€– despite the proximity of example and ample encouragement€ – far below the Negro himself, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races. (TPP, 48/ AA, 8, 175–6)

Given the fundamental elements of Kant’s moral theory, combined with his belief that all the human races belong to the same species, it is peculiar, as Bernasconi has pointed out, that Kant never explicitly condemns the enslavement of Africans, although he does sharply attack certain colonial practices in his late essay, “Perpetual Peace” (1795) (Bernasconi 2002, 150–4). Because of the remarks in “Perpetual Peace”, complaining of the brutally “inhospitable” conduct of Europeans towards foreign lands and peoples€– including Americans, blacks, and Indians (PP 119/AA 8, 359), Pauline Kleingeld argues that Kant underwent a change of heart on the issue of race later in his life (Kleingeld 2007, 586–92). His position does seem to soften, although I do not think the evidence warrants the strongest of Kleingeld’s claims:€that by the 1790s Kant grants “full juridical status to non-whites” (586), or that he drops the idea of racial hierarchy altogether (590). We should also not assume that Kant’s earlier hierarchical view of the natural abilities of the races ever necessitated the conclusion that no moral concern was due to non-white peoples. He never directly argued that “Negroes” could legitimately be treated however their slave-owners wished, or that Africa and the Americas should be regarded as if they belong to no one, or that India could justifiably be brought under colonial rule. None of this follows directly from a hierarchical racial theory, even one that sees one race as inherently capable of a greater advancement in morality than others. Still, on the whole, Kant does seem usually to display less moral concern for non-white peoples than Herder does. This cannot be attributed simply to a belief that there are distinct races, for reasons I have outlined. It is more likely that Herder’s rejection of race, in spite of a belief in relatively distinct human types, can be explained by his holding an attitude towards these types which is already different from that of Kant. Probably, the issue of moral character plays a role here, so that this difference reflects, in part, their divergent views on the capacity for virtue among the varieties of people they consider.

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Within the framework of Kant’s practical philosophy, it is importÂ� ant that the natural failings he attributes to certain groups of non-white peoples concern an incapacity for, or at least a disinclination towards, effort and industry. Felicitas Munzel claims, in Kant’s Concept of Moral Character, that, for Kant, “virtue is in effect self-control characterizing the human processes of thinking, specifically of choice making or the subjectively practical use of reason in human moral life” (Munzel 1999, 165). Its development, and the development of good moral character in general, requires resolve, a steadfast commitment to principles against the vagaries of natural inclinations (31).10 Supposing, then, that Kant were even to accept that “Negroes,” for example, have a natural kindness of heart, he would be unlikely to grant such a quality much moral worth if it were not accompanied by a desire to cultivate this disposition as a matter of duty, and to place it under the discipline of moral law. Munzel notes that “in his mature conception Kant does not accord the designation ‘good character’ or even ‘character,’ to kindheartedness taken by itself (as Â�simply characteristic of our inclinations)” (124). Rather, “Kant repeats this point a number of times in his Reflections on Anthropology and very explicitly:€‘Morality in no way consists in the kindliness of the heart, but rather in a good character [that morality] is to cultivate’” (125, n. 62).11 Without the commitment to such cultivation, kindness is, for Kant, merely a natural sentiment, a feeling, and emotions on their own do not evoke a great deal of respect from Kant.12 It is possible, then, that people who possess kind emotions, but are naturally disinclined towards the effort required for the cultivation of virtue, are not, in Kant’s mind, full moral agents. If this is the case, they also may not be, in his mind, persons in all the relevant senses, even though they are certainly members of the human species. As evidence supporting this hypothesis, consider the following remark from Reflexionen zur Anthropologie:€“A person can have a good heart, and still have no character, because he depends upon impulses and does not act according to maxims. To character belongs Munzel’s source for these observations is Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Citing this text, she refers to “Kant’s conception of this singular resolve that is the hallmark of good moral character, ‘this steadfastness and perseverance in principles in general’ that can never be ‘gradually achieved by education, example, or instruction, but rather is effected, as it were, through an explosion that ensues all at once upon a surfeit of the vacillating state of instinctual’ life.” The citations are from Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798) (AA 7, 294). 11 The citation is from Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß (AA 15, no. 1179, 515). 12 For a discussion of this issue, see Hinman (1983). Sally Sedgewick offers a feminist perspective on this aspect of Kant’s moral philosophy in “Can Kant’s Ethics Survive the Feminist Critique?” (Sedgewick 1997). 10

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steadiness and unity of principles. One can call such a man neither good nor bad, for he has no character; he has no manly understanding, but is like a child” (AA 15, no. 1113, 498). Elsewhere in this work, Kant makes a similar point and connects it with women:€“All people have a disposition, but some have no character (except a bad one), for example, women” (AA 15, no. 1219, 534). If rationality defines being human, and moral autonomy is an aspect of that rationality, then those who cannot realize that autonomy because of the human type to which they belong (women, along with “Negroes,” gypsies and Americans) occupy a somewhat ambiguous position. Herder is more sympathetically disposed towards the “natural” in general. Also, although he does not subscribe to the myth of the noble savage, Herder does tend to value what he sees as genuineness over artifice. In the area of morality, we have seen, he often makes the point, in criticism of his own society, that natural sentiments of love are worthier than the hypocritical affirmation of moral principles upon which one does not act because they correspond to no real affections. Kant would surely agree that the latter is reprehensible, and he does complain about the appalling injustices committed by European nations against the inhabitants of the lands they have colonized. But there is nonetheless a difference between Kant’s and Herder’s view of “savages,” arising in part, I believe, from contrasting attitudes towards the emotional and the natural. One consequence of this difference is that, even if Herder believed certain peoples were not inclined to the sort of resolve Kant values (and it may be that his descriptions of “Negroes” makes this likely), such a belief would not affect his assessment of their humanity or their worth. Herder’s pluralism also plays a role in shaping the difference between him and Kant in their respective stances towards various types of peoples. We know that Herder thinks different goods are realized in different forms of human existence, and that all possible human goods cannot be realized in one such form. This view influences the tone of his judgements about peoples he believes to be less advanced, or less developed, than others, which is sometimes condescending but never wholly superior. Because it is a fundamental principle of Herder’s thought that “wherever nature withholds, she compensates” (Ideas, 127), he believes that all peoples possess forms of goodness, of happiness and virtue, that are uniquely theirs, even where they lack some more refined human gifts. Something valuable, therefore, and distinctly human, would be lost from the world if any of these peoples were to disappear.

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This does not seem to be the case for Kant. In fact, as Mark Larrimore points out, Kant’s understanding of the purpose of human existence gives rise to a problem when combined with his race theory. In “Sublime Waste:€ Kant on the Destiny of the ‘Races’,” Larrimore observes that, within Kant’s philosophy of history, “nature’s highest purpose is not the mere spread of human beings throughout the world … but the freedom which (may) arise from human civilization” (Larrimore 1999, 117). But this thesis about human destiny in general, Larrimore notes, is hard to square with Kant’s theory of race, according to which “the (non-white) races seem disqualified from playing any part in that destiny in its mature formulation” (116). Given that Kant himself speculates, in an unpublished note, that all races, excepting only the white, will die out, Larrimore asks:€“Could Kant have conceived of the (non-white) races as an unsalvageable waste, a mistake, meaningless in the grand teleological scheme of things?” (116). The issue here is the same as the one that emerges from Kant’s exchange with Herder on the purpose of the existence of Tahitians. Kant finds it hard to see how the imagined life of these simple people could have any purpose, unless it were eventually “improved” by contact with nations whose inhabitants are simultaneously more disciplined and more energetic, since he does not consider happiness to be an end in itself. What matters to Kant, in the final analysis, is the industrious unfolding of practical reason within the world. But if some races are actually not capable of such industry, they will not be able to participate in bringing about the final goal of mankind. Then one might indeed wonder what was the point in their having existed at all. Herder does not face this problem, even though he also sometimes attributes lesser capacities for certain human accomplishments to certain human varieties. That is partly because he thinks happy lives are ends in themselves, and partly because he thinks the existence of a wide variety of human types, with differing excellences in differing degrees, is self-justifying. In this respect, Herder’s attitude towards human groups is continuous with his attitude towards living things in general. Every species of creature is good, after its kind, he feels, and ought not to be reviled. Herder’s description of sloths provides an excellent example of his sentiments on this score. At first, Herder portrays this odd creature in negative terms. It is the most formless of the quadrupeds, a lump of mud organized into an animal, with a little round head and fat limbs, hair growing in contrary directions, and blood so cold it approaches the amphibian (Ideas, 98–9). But, says Herder, nature has provided it with compensations, so that this “noble animal” is not as unfortunate as it

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seems. It loves warmth and sleep; “it hangs itself from a tree with one paw, feeds itself with the other, and enjoys its caterpillarish existence like a hanging sack in the warm sunshine” (Ideas, 99). There are actually some structural and tonal similarities between this passage on sloths and the one on “Negroes” in Herder’s account of African peoples (Ideas, 235–6). I am not suggesting that Herder thinks any African peoples are like sloths. He does not; he very clearly insists that they are human beings. My point is that he thinks their existence is good, in its own fashion, even if some of them supposedly lack certain “nobler” capacities. By the time Herder composes his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–7), he seems less inclined to make any evaluative judgements about the natural capacities of human types. He has not, however, abandoned a belief in such types. Consider again this claim against hierarchical ranking, which I cited in a previous chapter:€ “The Negro, the American, the Mongol have gifts, abilities, preformed aptitudes, that the European does not have. Perhaps the sum is even the same; only in different relations and with different compensations” (LAH, 699). These are the same groups that, in the Ideas, had been described in a manner consistent with racial, rather than merely cultural, types. In the section of the Letters called “Neger-Idyllen,” moreover, which forcefully criticizes the terrible treatment of enslaved blacks at the hands of their white oppressors, Herder does not depict the former as capable of the same intellectual achievements as Europeans (although he does not deny this, either). He focuses only on their misery in the conditions to which they are subject, their longing for freedom and for return to their native lands, and their vastly greater virtue in comparison with those who abuse them in such a vile manner (LAH, 674–85). None of this is incompatible with a belief that human beings, while belonging to the same species and having the same basic capacities€ – reason and a sense for justice€ – are nonetheless naturally varied in their possession of more specific aptitudes, especially since Herder does not see intellectual agility as continuous with virtue. Herder’s indignation at the way Europeans have excluded whole groups of people from moral concern under the pretext of race has led some commentators to believe, understandably, that he must have thought all peoples were by nature “equal,” in the sense of having the same innate abilities. But Herder’s brand of humanitarianism does not require such equality as a condition for being a full citizen of the moral realm. In this respect, his relation to the concept of race could not be more distant from that of the National Socialists. Herder’s own refusal of the term shows that he understood what was at stake, ethically and politically, in the

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anthropological debate surrounding the concept. He was certainly well aware of the danger of words: The characters of different nations, sects, classes and people push against one another; each attaches itself ever more firmly to its centre. Mania becomes a national coat of arms, the heraldry of a class, the banner of a profession. â•… It is terrible, how firmly this mania is attached to words, as soon as it once invests them with power. A learned jurist has observed what a series of harmful delusions hangs upon the word Blut, Blutschande, Blutsfreunde, Blutgericht;13 with the words inheritance, property, possession etc., it is often the same. In our day we have seen what a frenzy the word-sounds rights, humanity, freedom, equality can excite in a lively nation; inside and outside its borders the syllables aristocrat, democrat have brought about quarrels and suspicion, hatred and dissension.14 (LAH, 248)

With these lessons in mind, it is no wonder that Herder chose to avoid the word “blood”€– as he did the word “race.” “Blood, blood shame (i.e. incest), blood friend, blood verdict.” The reference in this sentence is clearly to the French Revolution.

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Language and world

Although there is at times a racial component in Herder’s understanding of the character of peoples, by far the greater part of that character is, for Herder, acquired through culture rather than inherited through biology. Language, as many scholars have noted, appears to be the most crucial determinant of cultural identity within Herder’s analysis. It both expresses and shapes the perspective of a people, articulating a specific form of human consciousness, passed on from one generation to the next. Because Herder proposes that there is an intimate relation between language and thought, moreover, he is often credited with having invented, albeit not ex nihilo, a theory of language sometimes referred to as “linguistic constitutivism.”1 Against older conceptions of language that construed it as external to thought, a sort of clothing placed on ideas for the purpose of communication, this theory holds that thought is essentially dependent upon language, and that language is creative rather than merely descriptive. In his Fragments on Recent German Literature, Herder writes that language is “more than a tool,” for “words and ideas are intimately connected” (Fragments, 177). And in On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, he says of the human inventor of language:€“In naming everything, and ordering it in relation to himself and his sensitivity, he becomes the imitator of divinity, the second creator, thus also poiesis, a poet” (Hebrew Poetry, 963). On the basis of such statements, commentators have drawn strong conclusions about the constitutive role of language in Herder’s view of both the human subject and the objects it apprehends. Michael Morton maintains that, for Herder, “there is no such thing as prelinguistic consciousness, and in the absence of consciousness it plainly makes no sense to speak of human beings … similarly, there can be no such thing as an extra-linguistic reality external to us” (Morton 1993, 159). A little less 1

╇ For use of this precise term in relation to Herder, see Menges (1998, 158) and Morton (1990, 159).

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radically, Vicki Spencer suggests that, according to Herder’s “expressivist” theory, “language is the form in which human thoughts are moulded and shaped, and it is thereby credited with constituting the very contents of our consciousness” (Spencer 1996, 249). The description of Herder’s theory of language as “expressivist” rather than “designative” was first proposed by Charles Taylor. Taylor argues that expressivist theories in general conceive of linguistic activity as a process whereby we do not merely attach labels to our experiences and feelings, but “formulate” or “articulate” them. “Through language,” that is, “we bring to explicit awareness what we formerly only had an implicit sense of” (Taylor 1985, 257). Herder’s revolutionary insight was that “in being able to express our feelings, we give them a reflective dimension that transforms them,” where many of our specifically human feelings are actually enabled by this process of articulation (Taylor 1995, 98). Interpretations like these might leave the impression that Herder embraced a kind of linguistic idealism. If language is held to be constitutive in the interrelated senses that (1) our consciousness of ourselves and the world around us is dependent upon it, and (2) linguistic formulation transforms its subject, the consequence would seem to be that language determines the reality we encounter, rather than the other way around. In that case, the perspectives of different linguistic groups, on themselves as well as on the objects around them, would be created by the language they inherit. This is not exactly Herder’s view, however. For one thing, he is not an idealist, about language or anything else. Significantly, Taylor’s description of the “expressivist” view of language, which he attributes to Herder, avoids terms likening the process of articulation to construction or fictionalization, in favor of ones suggesting illumination, a getting clearer about things. He says, for instance, that through language “we become conscious of things, in one very common sense of this term, that is we come to have explicit awareness of things” (Taylor 1985, 258), and that “expressions manifest things” (Taylor 1995, 221). These descriptions suggest that the tradition in which Herder stands sees language as revealing what is true, in some sense, rather than as a refracting lens that alters truth. Furthermore, as Michael Forster has pointed out, Herder actually holds “a quasi-empiricist theory of meanings or concepts according to which all our meanings or concepts are of their nature based in (perceptual or affective) sensation” (Forster 2002, 351). This is a quasi-empiricist theory because “the sensations which ground concepts inevitably undergo a transformation as the concepts are acquired, their final required nature being one that they can only have along with their concepts” (Forster

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2002, 352). It is an empiricist theory because concepts are shaped by, and therefore ultimately refer to, sensations, with “the implication for interpretation that in order to understand another person’s concepts an interpreter must not only master the person’s word-usage in an external way but must also in some manner recapture the person’s relevant sensations” (Forster 2002, 353). In fact, Herder’s understanding of language is both “constitutive” and “empiricist,” in senses I hope to clarify in this chapter. Language does, within Herder’s thought, play a profound role in creating the shared world of a given linguistic community, and it does have transformative dimensions. Yet it also remains a kind of mimesis, an imitation of reality that can equally well be said to reflect the world, where the reflection is, as Taylor says, a bringing to consciousness. To understand how Herder can simultaneously see language in these two ways, as both constructing and revealing, we need to look more closely at the character of the “sensations,” or experiences, that it captures, and that, as Forster notes, have to be recaptured in cases of successful interpretation. These sensations do not consist in anything like a mere reception of purportedly neutral sense data, for they involve emotion, and intelligence as well as sense perception, but central to them is the perception of concrete elements in the environing physical world. Indeed, an important virtue of Herder’s analysis of language is its sensitivity to the intimate relation between the specific environment in which people are embedded and their affective and intellectual lives. Language, for Herder, is a kind of space between these, articulating the experiences of groups of individuals whose existence unfolds in this place, through these activities€– experiences in which subject and object, body, emotion, and understanding are profoundly intertwined. Herder’s insights into the connections between these elements help to highlight some important features of language as an aspect of cultural identity. I begin with a discussion of three concepts that are central to Herder’s understanding of language generally:€ Besonnenheit or “reflection”; Empfindung, “sensation” or “feeling”; and Klima, which in Herder’s usage includes the humanly constructed environment along with the natural one. T h r e e c e n t r a l c onc e p t s:€ B e s o n n e n h e i t, E m p f i n du n g , K l i m a

Herder locates the “origin” of language, in the sense of that which makes language possible, in the human capacity for Besonnenheit or “reflection.”

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This is the capacity to stand back from the “ocean of sensation” that rushes over one and to recognize a single, distinctive property, “one wave,” within that ocean (Language, 722). Through such recognition, human beings are able to distinguish between things on the basis of their proper characteristics, and to assign marks signifying the thing that has been identified in this manner. Peculiarly, the capacity for language within this theory is then closely connected with freedom, for, as Irmscher explains, its source lies in “the human ability to distance oneself from impressions of reality and to make them and oneself the object of a free determination” (Irmscher 1991, 818). In his Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason, Herder describes this ability, in relation to the self, as in turn the distinctive property of human beings, saying that “in me there is a double ‘I’; conscious of myself, I can and must become an object to myself,” and that “this advantage raises us above animals; it is the characteristic of our species” (Metacritique, 592). The fundamental idea that the capacity for self-collected reflection is the basis of language is not original to Herder. Condillac had already, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), described réfléchir as a process in which, our minds having been freed from the objects pressing upon them, “we are able to turn our attention successively to various objects or to different parts of a single object,” and he had linked this process to the employment of signs (Condillac 1924, 460). Thus Herder is wrong to complain, in the language essay, that Condillac’s account begs the question about the origin of language, presupposing the very capacity (reflection) that makes it possible to attach signs to Â�impressions in the first place.2 It is also not quite fair to say, as Kurt Mueller-Vollmer does, that Condillac thinks reflection is produced by signs, while Herder thinks signs are produced by reflection (Mueller-Vollmer 1990a, 12). Condillac’s analysis actually suggests that reflection and the use of signs work together, and are mutually productive. Robert Norton makes this point, claiming, against Mueller-Vollmer, that “it is simply not the case that Condillac thought that reflection was ‘semiotically induced’ … rather, Condillac thought that reflection and signification worked in constant tandem to produce the intricate systems of interwoven signs we call knowledge” Hans Aarsleff notes that Herder only refers to Part II of Condillac’s Essai, which contains his account of the history of language, and never to Part I, in which Condillac develops his theory of reflection. Aarsleff concludes that, “if Herder had not read Part One of the Essai, it becomes understandable that he could criticize the adequacy of the argument he found in Part Two at the very same time as he unwittingly reconstructed the missing part in Condillac’s manner” (Aarsleff 1982, 198).

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(Norton 1993, 182). At the same time, Herder sometimes makes statements suggesting that human consciousness was made possible by language. He explicitly states in the Ideas, for instance, that “Perception, recognition, recall, possession, a chain of thoughts became possible through [language] and through it alone” (Ideas, 356–7). This issue does not, therefore, constitute a fundamental point of difference between the two, nor does it reveal a new insight on Herder’s part. In addition, Condillac had even anticipated the objection that his account of the process of language production, involving reflection and sign usage, appears to be circular: It seems that we would not be able to employ institutional signs, if we were not already capable of reflecting sufficiently to choose these signs and to attach them to ideas:€how then, someone might object, can the exercise of reflection be acquired by the use of signs? â•… I respond that I will resolve this difficulty when I present the history of language. Here it suffices for me to note that it has not escaped my attention. (Condillac 1924, 461)

This response points to a genuine difference between Herder and Condillac, for Herder’s criticisms demonstrate that Condillac’s account of the history of language does not resolve the difficulty noted in these lines. Not only does it set up a highly artificial situation that could not correspond to any actual history€– two children alone without speech€– but it reaffirms the problem of circularity. The children could not learn to connect the cries they utter with meanings unless they were already capable of reflection, but, in that case, Condillac has not explained how the capacity for language evolves (Language, 708–9). Herder’s “solution,” if it can be called that, seems to consist simply in saying that the process of isolating distinguishing characteristics is already language. Norton remarks that Herder’s treatise cleared away an uncertainty in Condillac’s account “by insisting that the interior, silent cognitive activity of fixing an individual perception with a sign must be understood as already constituting language” (Norton 1991, 115). Spencer makes the same observation, that “for Herder … the internal and silent cognitive act of fixing an arbitrary symbol to an individual perception is already seen as human language” (Spencer 1996, 247). This redefinition of language does not answer the question about the initial source of the capacity for language, and perhaps it was never intended to. What it does show is that while Condillac grounds the development of language in the need for communication, Herder tends to see it as arising from an “inner” need to discern the outlines of

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things within the chaos of impressions received through the senses. The relevant contrast in this case is not between expression and designation, but between expression and communication. Admittedly Herder does say at one point, in his Fragments on Recent German Literature, that “the beginning of language was in a simple shape, as a tool for the sake of use; the nature of the use dictated the form of the tool” (FW 1, 609/PW, 59). But when he speaks of the invention and evolution of languages among different peoples, he does not focus on communication for the purpose of achieving practical ends. He emphasizes, rather, the poetic character of language, as a “living expression” that gives voice to nature in song and speech (FW 1, 611–12/PW, 61). For Herder, the idea that language is fundamentally poetic means not only that it involves creativity, but also that this creativity arises from a deep impulse to find the right expressions for experiences and to share these with others. It is not motivated exclusively, or basically, by the need for practical communication. This difference is subtly reflected in Condillac’s and Herder’s otherwise very similar statements about the rootedness of all ideas in experience, and the fundamentally “interested” character of this experience. Condillac, discussing the latter point, says that “things do not attract our attention except through the relation they have to our temperament, to our passions, to our state, or, in short, to our wants,” and that the connections between our ideas reflect this fact (Condillac 1924, 29). Accordingly, words were probably first invented to communicate fears and wants to one another (Condillac 1924, 154–7). Herder also notes that human beings relate everything to themselves (Language, 738). Ideas, he observes in the Metacritique, are produced by “that which attracts, the interesting, id quod interest” (Metacritique, 385). Significantly, the word he most commonly uses when insisting upon the rootedness of thought in experience, is Empfindung, a word meaning “sensation” or “experience,” but of a form that cannot be separated from feeling and sensitivity, from affect. Herder does not, however, generally situate the affective character of language within a utilitarian account of its invention, as Condillac does. He suggests that language has its source in a human need simply to give expression to impressions. That is why the first language was song (Language, 740). In “On the Human Soul’s Cognition and Sensation,” Herder says that “the person who senses (der empfindende Mensch) feels himself in everything, feels everything out of himself, and presses upon it his own image, his impression” (Cognition, 330). Language arose because this sensing person “had to, he wanted to, express (äußern) what he saw and felt in himself; thus, supported by voice and gesture, there came into being, in

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the inner impressions of his soul, an utterable sign, a word” (Metacritique, 420). Language reflects the world as encountered by a particular feeling, sensing, willing creature, and simultaneously reflects the nature of this creature as fundamentally “poetic.” Its construction reveals the essential property that separates human beings from other animals:€their capacity and need to take in the world from a particular perspective, and to express that perspective in concrete forms. Naturally, it is poetry itself that reveals this best. With reference to Hebrew poetry, Herder writes:€ “Images stream into the soul from outside:€ sensation stamps its seal upon them and seeks to express them through gestures, sounds and signs” (Hebrew Poetry, 962). The “sensations” in which words are ultimately rooted, then, are sensations of the world as selected, and inflected, by a given form of seeing and feeling. This view clearly has much in common with the empiricism of Locke and Condillac, but it is also influenced by Leibniz. Like Locke, Herder rejects the existence of innate ideas, claiming instead that all of our ideas can be traced to sensations.3 Like Condillac, he weds ideas to language, and stresses the role of interest in determining what catches our attention. But Herder’s Leibnizian view that “every creature has its own, a new, world” (Ideas, 89) and that the human soul is “a mirror of the world” (Ideas, 198) means that one cannot genuinely separate the “inner” and “outer” with respect to sensation. Sensation is “of” the world that communicates itself to a given sentient creature, in accord with the disclosive powers of that creature, which in turn are guided by needs and drives. Human beings are unique in their ability to achieve a certain distance from these needs and drives so as to reflect with greater clarity the world that is given to them. Words refer to elements within this world. Thus, while Herder is famous for the view, a staple of linguistic constitutivism, that “thought sticks to the expression” (Fragments, 557), it is no less true for him that expressions stick to sensations, and that sensations stick to the world. This means that the content of words and ideas, of language and thought, has its primal source in the experience of the body within a particular setting. “We only sense what our nerves give to us,” Herder writes in the language essay; “only on the basis of this, and in accordance with it, can we think” (Language, 351). Because “our thought depends upon sensation” (Language, 351), “we have no concept of anything that lies outside the circle of our sensations” (Ideas, 294). The latter, in turn, occur 3

╇ For an analysis of the relation between Herder, Condillac, and Locke, see Chase (1997).

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within the context of a specific Klima. Marion Heinz summarizes the connection between thought, sensation, and Klima in the following way: The confined human soul needs sensations that present to it an image of the universe … Sensations deliver raw materials to the soul, which are processed in understanding … The human soul is not only reliant upon the givenness of representations, it is also dependent upon which particular sensations are granted to it through its physical constitution and its position in a determinate spatial and temporal situation. For Herder, the soul itself takes on a different shape in accordance with the specific natural and artificial, i.e. humanly produced, circumstances in which its activity unfolds. Arts, manual trades, and forms of thought show, for Herder, that human beings only understand on the basis of their sensations. (Heinz 1994, 135)

Words, for Herder, are ultimately derived from sensations, which in turn belong to an embodied life moving and feeling within a specific Klima. The acts of reflection that lead to the invention of words involve a marking of patterns among these sensations. Language is consequently intimÂ� ately bound to specific forms of life, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase. Alternatively, drawing on Heidegger, one might say that it articulates the intelligibility of a particular world. The “meaning” of words is then constituted by their reference relation to items whose appearance is determined by their place within the interested life of the human beings who grasp them. Signification and significance cannot be separated here, because the thing that is named has entered awareness, and been marked, precisely through this interested grasp. The name indicates the thing as sensed, where this sensing, it must be emphasized, is tied to an affected body and, through this body, to a physical place. Accordingly, the name resonates with the significance of the thing named within the context of the life led in this place. These names are not invented anew by every generation, of course; tradition plays a profound role in shaping and transmitting a language and corresponding mode of representation (Vorstellungsart) (Ideas, 298). What tradition hands down from one generation to the next, though, is the reflection, in concrete forms of expression, precisely of the life led in a given place, whose course then forms the history of a specific community. “The mode of representation of each nation is the more deeply imprinted upon it because it is their own, bound to their sky and their earth, sprung from their form of life (Lebensart), inherited from their fathers and forefathers” (Ideas, 298). There is then something problematic about the common perception that the identity of a nation or people (Nation, Volk) rests, in Herder’s view, primarily upon its language. Barnard claims that “even when Herder did

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recognize that factors other than language partook in fashioning national character, he never ceased to regard the linguistic element as the decisive determinant” (Barnard 1965, 62). It follows that “the nation remains intact provided it maintains its distinctive linguistic traditions” (Barnard 1965, 58). But language, for Herder, is entangled with life and world, and its meaningfulness is oriented towards these. Language refers, so that if the reality to which it refers changes significantly, or disappears altogether, the language that once expressed this reality becomes hollow, empty of any genuine sense. Symbols lose their meaning, Herder suggests, “when they are not often connected with their objects through active use, so as to remain in meaningful remembrance” (Ideas, 373). Certainly, imagination is powerfully involved in the construction of the stories and mythologies of a given people, which contribute to forming their identities, but the elements with which the imagination works in producing these stories are still drawn from the experiences of life within a given Klima.4 Even these stories refer, in a way, to the actual world of a people:€their habits and customary activities, their place of dwelling, their food and drink, the character of their relations with one another. Language preserves the identity of a people only to the extent that it preserves this world. I alluded earlier to Michael Forster’s claim that meaning, for Herder, is based in sensation. Forster also claims that Herder’s position combines this doctrine with another one, namely, the doctrine that meaning just consists in word-usage, and he claims that these two doctrines are not incompatible (Forster 2002, 346, 354). In light of my analysis so far, I would develop these claims in the following way. Meaning is indeed based in sensation for Herder, as all words ultimately refer to experienced “things,” in the broadest sense of anything that can be experienced, including thoughts, feelings, and events. Words only remain meaningful, moreover, if they continue to be connected with these things. On the other hand, the things in question are not objects that could be described just as well in any language, and certainly not in a language from which the first-person perspective is absent. Instead, they are elements whose character is determined by their place within collective patterns of significance. They are pieces of a shared human world, a life-world (now using Husserl’s term). Meaning, then, is use, because the web of a specific language maps the world of sensations from which it is spun, and one cannot refer the words of that language to their corresponding sensations without knowing how See, for example, Herder’s hypothetical account of how the mythology of Greenlanders is constructed (Ideas, 295f.).

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the words are used€– in which kinds of discourse, in which contexts and circumstances, associated with which activities and feelings. An external observer will not be able to understand the sensations, to imagine them, without this knowledge. To put the matter differently, there is a respect in which Herder has a correspondence theory of meaning, but his position is distinguished from older versions of this theory by his conception of what words correspond to:€not “neutral” objects, intelligible to any intellect and expressible in any language, but things with qualities that present themselves only in relation to the concrete life of a definite “we.” This position has important implications for interpretation and translation, and for the role of language in the formation of a cultural identity. I now explore some of these implications in more detail. L a nguag e , pl ac e , a n d s e ns at ion Language does occupy a central place in Herder’s understanding of cultural identity. “Whoever is raised in the same language,” he writes, “whoever learns to pour his heart, to express his soul, in it belongs to the people (Volk) of this language” (LAH, 304). As this sentence reveals, Herder stresses the affective as much as the cognitive dimension of language’s effect on the “soul.” He focuses not only on the way language formulates the beliefs of people belonging to a particular linguistic community but also on how it expresses their feelings. More precisely, he challenges what he sees as the artificially strict distinctions often drawn between such aspects of being human (Metacritique, 319). A language speaks of the world in which people dwell, and that world is grasped not with one faculty and then another, but with the whole being of persons:€ their bodies, their emotions, and their understanding, where these interpenetrate one another so profoundly that the distinction between them is virtual rather than real. Herder maintains that, because our first grasp of the world as children has an especially profound effect on making us who we are, a first language occupies a special position in the construction of our identities: Our mother language was at the same time the first world that we saw, the first sensations that we felt, the first activity and happiness that we enjoyed! The accompanying ideas of place and time, of love and hate, of happiness and action, and whatever the fiery, swelling soul of youth first thought in connection with these, is all jointly immortalized€– now language is already a lineage (Stamm). (Language, 787)

When recalled, the words of a first language represent not objects, not beliefs, and not even emotions, but the interwovenness of these with one

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another in the fabric of a holistically experienced world. This is the world to which language ultimately “sticks” on Herder’s account, so that a word evokes not one idea but the whole host of impressions connected with the context in which an individual learned to use it. Herder never loses sight of this attachment of language to an experienced world in his discussions of the subject. It is striking that, with all of his interest in language, Herder is not inclined to engage in investigations of syntax or semantics that treat language as an object capable of being analyzed independently of its sources and referents.5 When Charles Taylor, drawing a parallel between Herder and Wittgenstein, says that, for Herder, “a word has meaning only within a lexicon and a context of language practices, which are ultimately embedded in a form of life” (Taylor 1995, 93), the emphasis needs to fall on this last aspect. “Form of life,” Lebensart, is a term Herder himself uses, but generally in combination with other factors that are said to affect the character of a nation, which language expresses. In a passage in the Ideas, discussing the elements that shaped the original character and way of thinking (Denkart) of ancient peoples, Lebensart is mentioned along with family traits, regional climate, upbringing, employments, activities, and moral customs (Sitten) (Ideas, 508). Herder’s account highlights the way in which language, along with other forms of expression, reflects and reproduces the texture of these elements. The elements are themselves bound together, and interpenetrate one another, simply in virtue of the fact that they belong to a concrete form of life. That life is lived in a particular region and climate, for example, which will of course affect people’s employments and activities. The latter could hardly develop, or be considered, in isolation from moral customs, nor could the structure of family life, including the upbringing of children. This is the basis of Herder’s use of organic analogies in relation to peoples. Peoples form organic unities because the aspects of a human life are not like mechanical parts that could be separated from one another, and understood independently of one another. Furthermore, literature and art When Herder does discuss matters of grammar and syntax, he relates these features to the characters and forms of life of different peoples as well, placing the emphasis on variability and change. He does not directly address the issue of whether there is a logical form which all languages have in common, and which makes it possible for human beings to learn different languages. At times, he suggests that all languages do share some common grammatical structure, but it is not clear what that would be, given the extent of variability which is always Herder’s focus. Thus Herder’s position in relation to modern questions about the possibility of a “universal grammar” of the sort proposed by Chomsky is unclear. See, on this issue, Adler and Koepke (2009, 133); Norton (1991, 84); den Ouden (1975, 26–7).

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originally give expression to the interwoven fabric of a form of life, and themselves become part of that fabric. Neither they, nor any element of the life they express€– including its politics, ethics, religion, and mythÂ� ology, along with its material and economic conditions€ – can be interÂ� preted apart from the context of which they are constituents, let alone be resurrected without substantial transformation within a different social and historical context. The implications for translation are profound. I would like at this point to adduce an example of my own to illustrate the features of Herder’s analysis of language I have been describing, and the problems they pose for translation. The example is taken from a song in a classic, and famous, Hindi/Urdu-language film, Pakeezah, meaning “pure” or “chaste.” It is therefore an example of the kind of language in which Herder was most interested:€“useless” language, motivated not by a practical end but by the need for creative expression and communication of sentiments that Herder saw as fundamental to the human spirit. The song is entitled Mausam hai āshiqānā, a sentence that is itself difficult to translate into English, but that could be rendered, not very literally, as “The season speaks of love.” A line from the song runs:€ “Wherever the sun may go, let its dhūp not fall upon you.” The Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary gives the meaning of the word dhūp in English as:€“light or heat of the sun; sunshine.” The problem is if, in the above sentence, one translates dhūp as “light,” the sentence sounds like a curse, whereas it is actually intended as a blessing, in a context expressing love. “Heat” might be more appropriate, but the lines that follow make better sense if one imagines dhūp as light:€“The shades of these tresses are calling you, / Come, let me make for you a canopy of eyelashes.” Philosophers are accustomed to considering problems of translation having to do with the nuances of concepts, or with deep differences in worldview. But the word dhūp is difficult to translate here not because of some such complexity, but simply because the climate€– in the most literal sense of the term€– in which these two languages, Hindi/Urdu (originally one language, Hindustani, written in two scripts) and English, evolved is strikingly different. The light of the sun is frequently very hot in South Asia, and much of the time there is more of it than one might like. This is not true of England. Consequently, the word dhūp can have negative connotations that are quite alien to the term “sunshine.” Conventions of poetic diction within a particular tradition of love poetry also affect the choice of words, and the resonances they carry, in the above-cited lines, which deepens the problem of translation. Dhūp invariably carries negative connotations in the poetic traditions to which

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this song is indebted, while the positive resonances of “sunlight” common in English song and poetry are conveyed by other terms with contrasting significations. Certainly, such conventions are profoundly important. “Tresses” is a pretty awful translation of a word in the next line, because of its association with cheesy romance fiction, although it is literally exact and appropriately formal (being a philosopher rather than a poet myself, I could think of nothing better to translate gesū, a perfectly respectable term in Indian poetry for the long, wavy locks of a woman’s hair). Herder always locates genuine understanding not in an external mastery of such conventions, however, but in an imaginative “feeling one’s way into” (Einfühlung)6 the life that supports them. In this case, one has to imagine the place that sun and shade might occupy in the lives of people who dwell€ – act, sense, feel, fall in love€ – in a hot region of the world. The song also refers to black clouds and rain, typical of sāvan, the earlier part of the rainy season associated with lovers, and also a conventional reference in the Urdu/Hindi forms of poetry that shaped the music and song of many Bollywood films in India. The difficulty of translation in this instance rests not in any deep conceptual incommensurability that would in principle rule out mutual understanding, but in the fact that the realities reflected in, and expressed by, the words of the two languages are not the same. These “realities” exist in a space constituted by the interaction of human beings with their environments. Language articulates this space, where the “internal” cannot be separated from the “external”. Spencer, discussing the variations between languages, points out that “Herder identifies two main factors which contribute to these variations:€external environmental factors such as climate and geography, and internal circumstances including dispositions and attitudes arising from a community’s collective experiences and from relations between families and individuals within communities” (Spencer 1996, 250). He also draws attention to the way these two factors are interlaced within the spirit of a people, which is revealed in “the physiognomy of its speech” (Ideas, 353). Barnard expresses this point by suggesting that “the word Weltanschauung, in its most literal sense, captures perhaps best the compass of divergent ways of encountering the outside from the inside” (Barnard 2003, 6). I would add that the divergence, for Herder, is due partly to the fact that the “outside” is physically different for different nations, a circumstance that shapes the character of the “inside.” Or perhaps it would be better to say that the ╇ For a discussion of this concept, see Barnard (2003, 5–8).

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outside/inside distinction is not entirely apt in describing either the character of human experience, or the character of the language that captures this experience, and that Herder’s understanding of the connection between people and place, reflected in a nation’s language, recognizes this fact. In the lines from the Hindi/Urdu song I have been using as an example, the reference is not merely to the external fact of weather as encountered from the inside by a human subject, but to human activities, as well as the sentiments associated with them, in the life lived in the place with that climate. The entirety of this context, physical and social in ways that cannot be disentangled, is evoked by the references to heat and shade, clouds, canopies, and lovers. The connection Herder posits between people and place, between Volk and Klima, forms one facet of his “organic” conception of cultural identity. It seems to imply that a people is only “whole,” and its language only properly meaningful, when both remain attached to the geographical region in which their original character took shape. How, then, does Herder deal with the historical fact of migration, where people took their languages and cultures with them? He does acknowledge it, and in doing so he recognizes the limitations of the botanical metaphors he likes to use in describing the relation between peoples and places. With respect to the nations of the world, he writes:€“If each of these nations had remained in its place, one could regard the earth as a garden, where here this human national plant, there that one, blooms in its own shape and nature” (Ideas, 508–9). “But since people are not firmly rooted plants,” he continues, “over time they could, and had to, change their place and cultivate themselves more or less differently in another region, often driven by the harsh accidents of hunger, earthquake, war etc.” (Ideas, 509). The transplanted peoples make new homes for themselves, ones whose structure is a compound of ideas from the old and the new country (Ideas, 509). The period of this construction is commonly called “the youthful bloom of nations,” Herder remarks, adding that almost every nation of the earth has wandered from its original place at least once (Ideas, 509). Herder recognizes, then, that people migrate, for one reason or another, and that new cultural identities are born from fusions. He also recognizes that the majority of peoples at advanced stages of history are the product of many such fusions. Within his account, only ancient peoples, those among whom the earliest human cultures developed, can be described as culturally simple, in the sense of not being the result of mixtures and interactions between many different peoples. European nations, on the

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other hand, have multiple cultural origins:€ the ancient Orient, Greece, Rome, Nordic and Germanic peoples, and so on. The cultures of Europe cannot be understood except by tracing the genesis, interaction, and combination of these multiple sources. Herder does not think that this fact conflicts with a conception of Germany, or France, or Italy as having a national character that is uniquely its own, and that is expressed, above all, in its language. He is not so positive about every form of cultural composition, though. Herder undeniably favors identities that end up as unified rather than hybrid, and he tends to see development over a long period in a single place as essential to maintaining the integrity of a culture. Nor is it the case that Herder’s criticisms of cultural mixing pertain exclusively to relations involving violence or subjugation (although these relations are in most cases his target). An example is Herder’s attitude towards Jewish identity, which he discusses in the Ideas, as well as in a late piece called “On the Conversion of Jews” (1802; FW 10, 628–42). While Herder enthusiastically admires the ancient Hebrews, he is much less enthusiastic, to say the least, about the condition of Jewish identity in the diaspora. The issue of language is central to both of these attitudes. Herder’s On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry approaches the Old Testament as a work of literature, whose rhythms, sounds, images, symbols, and figures of speech reflect the experiences and emotions of a people encountering the world for the first time. The literature of this people is therefore “a poetry (Poesie) of the childhood of our race” (Hebrew Poetry, 690), and Herder’s view of it is representative of his view of the language and literature of ancient peoples generally. “The oldest languages,” he writes in Fragments on Recent German Literature, “have a sort of sensuous formation”; in them we see “the morning of the world, when a nation formed its language for itself according to tongue, ear, and eye, and spoke for ear and eye” (Fragments, 611/PW, 60). Herder’s appreciation for these languages, and the unfavorable contrasts he draws between them and modern ones, is connected with his sense that they possess a naturalness, an immediacy of contact with the world and a genuineness of feeling, that gets lost as languages evolve, moving away from experience and building on inherited concepts. Ancient languages are “formed immediately according to living nature, and not like the more modern languages according to arbitrary, dead ideas” (Fragments, 66/PW, 61). They are original expressions, attempts to give voice to what is seen and heard, before these expressions are abstracted into ideas devoid of sensuous force and transmitted through the medium of written signs:€“And in that age, when people had

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not yet thought of books, what was language then? Nothing but singing and speaking nature” (Fragments, 612/PW, 62). In line with these ideas, Herder describes the origin of Hebrew poetry in the following words: It is, as I showed in relation to the pregnant roots of its speech, image and sensation (Bild und Empfindung). Images stream into the soul from outside; sensation impresses its seal upon them, and tries to express them through gestures, sounds and signs. The whole of the world with its movements and forms is, for the man who looks, a great table of images upon which all figures live. He stands in an ocean of living waves, and the source of life in him streams and works against these. That which streams against him, how he senses it and describes it with sensation, that makes up the genius of poetry in its origin. (Hebrew Poetry, 962)

According to Herder, this freshness of experience and expression, which finds creative voice in the poetry of ancient peoples, tends to decline in later ages, with the result that language becomes increasingly impoverished, dry and artificial. But there is an additional, and different, component in Herder’s comments on what he sees as the corruption of Jewish culture within the diaspora, reflected in the loss of Hebrew. He claims of the Jews that once “the poor nation was dispersed into the world,” most of its people constructed their expression according to the languages among which they lived. The result was that the culture of the Jews deteriorated, and their language became “a sad mixture” (Hebrew Poetry, 678). In “On the Conversion of Jews,” the remedies ultimately proposed by Herder are a return of Jews to their homeland in Palestine and/or their full assimilation to the cultures upon which they have been, as he sees it, grafted (FW 10, 630–3, 639–40). Jeffrey Grossman acknowledges that Herder’s insistence on the connection between place and identity is generally deployed in opposition to imperialism and slavery (Grossman 1994, 69). He argues, however, that it also reveals “the limits of his tolerance,” which “appear when he discusses peoples who are, in his view not ‘organically’ rooted in a specific region of the world and whose language lacks the proper level of organic development with its own orderly history” (Grossman 1994, 74). What differentiates these peoples€– e.g. Jews in the diaspora€– from those whose migrations led to a new youth (and that includes Israelites in an earlier period of their history [Ideen, 509]) is the question of whether the resulting identity is best described as a genuine fusion of elements, giving rise to a new substance, or a mixture of elements that remain disparate. Herder interprets diasporic Jewish identity as belonging to the latter category. Presumably, he would have passed a similar judgement on the hybrid and

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hyphenated identities of immigrants in a later age, even if he would also have been sensitive to the circumstances motivating these relocations. One might want to question Herder’s view that singleness of identity is always to be preferred over what Salman Rushdie has called “monÂ� grelization.”7 In Herder’s thought, this preference appears to have multiple grounds. It may involve, in part, an aesthetic judgement. It is certainly affected by Herder’s view of the relation between language and place, which suggests that a condition in which an individual is dislocated from the world reflected in his or her first language will be experienced as containing an element of alienation. This is not an aesthetic point but a psychological one, and it is plausible. Many of the constituents of a “world” can themselves be relocated€ – customs, activities, food, clothing€ – but what cannot be reproduced elsewhere is the intimate interconnection of these with an original place, and that is what a first language expresses and evokes. It does not follow that people should not migrate. They have some pretty good reasons for doing so, as Herder understood. But he is right to suggest that such transplantation results in a certain lack of organic “fit” between a first language and a new world. A consequence for identity is that the speakers€– or, more accurately, the “hearers”€– of this language remain partly oriented towards the old world of which it speaks, and therefore not fully at home in their new location (whether being fully at home in this respect is always desirable is a separate question). More generally, Herder’s reflections on this issue draw attention to one reason why a first language might occupy an important place in the lives and identities of people, whether they move very far or not. Michael Forster claims, as I have mentioned, that on Herder’s theory of language, understanding another person’s concepts requires the interpreter to recapture that person’s relevant sensations (Forster 2002, 343). I have been explicating a dimension of the character of these “sensations,” which Herder sees as the original sources of language, arguing that they are shaped by a complex web of perception, emotion, and activity, occurring in a specific place within a particular society. There is nothing novel these days in the claim that distinct languages present diverse, and perhaps incommensurable, conceptual schemes (although not everyone agrees with this claim), or that the semantic range of particular concepts in a given language will not match that of concepts in another language, See “In Good Faith,” commenting on The Satanic Verses:€“The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (Rushdie 1991, 394).

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or that things named in one language are not named in another. These factors make translation difficult, and never perfect. Herder’s analysis, I have suggested, also brings into view another kind of difficulty, and one that can affect even the simplest of words. Returning to my Hindi/Urdu example, the problem with translating the lines cited, and particularly the word dhūp, is not that English speakers cannot grasp the idea of hot sunlight, nor is it that there is no single English word for this idea. One can always construct a phrase instead (though preferably something a little more elegant than “hot sunlight”). The problem is also not that the phenomenon named in the Indian language is never named in English, perhaps because it does not exist in countries where English is spoken, or that it is never named in poetic discourse. “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,” writes Shakespeare in Sonnet 18,8 demonstrating that such an event is known and referred to by English speakers, even those who have spent their whole lives in England. But it does not have the same significance for those speakers, so it is difficult to produce an English translation which will be literally faithful while carrying the same resonances as the Indian word, resonances essential to the meaning of the line in which the word occurs. Herder sees these resonances as essential to the meanings of words in general, so that this is a feature of meaning that poetry reveals rather than invents. Because of the origination of language in the world experienced by its speakers, words actually represent bits of that world. And because the latter is something particular, even words with direct counterparts in different languages will not “sound” in quite the same way in all of those languages. Therefore, the meaning of such words, whether the words name natural objects (“sun,” “moon,” “sky”) or artifacts (“door,” “lamp”) or feelings (“thirst,” “pain,” “joy”), is not precisely the same from one language to the next. (If any Hindi speakers are reading this, I would ask them to compare:€sūraj, chānd, ākāsh; dvār, dīpak; pyās, dard, ānand.) Strictly speaking, translation is impossible, because one would have to translate a world, and that is just not the sort of thing that can be translated. Less strictly, translation attempts to evoke the sensations of people dwelling in one world in words belonging to another, helping the reader to imagine, to feel his way into, a human life different from his own. It could be objected that such an analysis construes the meaning of “meaning” too broadly, that while words may be attached, in the imagination of the members of a given linguistic community, to particular 8

╇ Sonnet 18, line 5 (Shakespeare 1997, 1929).

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contexts, “meaning” should refer to a general content that could be defined independently of those contexts. But the definition of “meaning” itself should rest not on purportedly universal criteria, but on pragmatic ones. It matters whether the question about the meaning of words is raised with a view to resolving puzzles about color vocabulary, or evolving precise descriptions of scientific objects, or producing translation manuals for travelers, or deciding what political accommodations should be made for a minority language. A theory of meaning that is sufficient for one task, because it picks out the features of language relevant to that task, may not suffice for another. Herder’s theory of meaning is oriented towards the tasks of interpretation and translation as they relate to understanding the varied shapes human life has assumed in different places at different times. His own belief in the value of such cultural diversity leads him to focus on the characteristics of language that make each one unique, and uniquely important to those for whom it is their native tongue, while binding the human race together through its general capacity for language.9 It is this focus that determines the necessary breadth of his theory of meaning. L a nguag e a n d c o g n i t ion While I have so far been emphasizing the place of sensation within that theory, and thus highlighting the empiricist aspect of Herder’s view of language, the constitutive aspect is no less important. Languages are transmitted across generations, and what is transmitted along with them is a way of thinking:€a set of beliefs, values, and judgements, a particular, bounded perspective on the world. This perspective is passed on not only through the language we learn as children, but through all education, since “in education we learn thoughts through words” (Fragments, 556/ PW, 49). Because “we cannot think without thoughts, and we learn to think through words,” “language sets limits and outline for the whole of human cognition” (Fragments, 557/PW, 49). Originally, languages are formed on the basis of sensations, but the works of a language name a thing from a specific point of view, which then shapes the perspective of those who are educated in that language. The result is that nations develop a characteristic worldview, inherited from their ancestors. It enables their understanding of the world, but also restricts its scope. Herder outlines this theory in a passage worth citing in full for the light it sheds Cf. Ideas, 372:€“languages change with every Volk in every Klima; in all languages, however, the same sign-seeking human reason is discernible.”

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on his conception of the development of language, and its inescapably national character: Hence each nation speaks in accordance with its thought and thinks in accordance with its speech. However different was the viewpoint from which the nation took cognizance of a matter, the nation named the matter. And since this was never the viewpoint of the Creator€– who not only saw the becoming of this matter in its inner nature but also commanded it€– but was instead an external, one-sided viewpoint, this viewpoint got imported into the language at the same time too. Precisely thanks to this, it was therefore possible for the eyes of all later people to be, so to speak, accustomed, tied, limited, or at least brought close, to this viewpoint. In this way truths and errors were preserved and passed on, as advantageous or disadvantageous prejudices; advantageously or disadvantageously, side ideas attached themselves which often have a stronger effect than the main concept; advantageously or disadvantageously, contingent ideas were confused with essential ones; areas filled or left empty; fields cultivated or turned into wastelands. The three goddesses of human cognition€– truth, beauty, and virtue€– became as national as language was. (Fragments, 558/PW, 50)

A nation’s literature, Herder adds, having formed itself in accordance with a language, must run together with that language (Fragments, 558/PW, 50). In it, then, too, ideas of truth, beauty, and virtue will be national, expressions of the world of a given people at a given place and time. Herder’s own analyses of literary works stress the need to interpret them within their historical and cultural context, and suggest at the same time that they reveal the spirit of a people in an especially profound way. That spirit, after all, is held within language, and “the genius of language is also the genius of the literature of a nation” (Fragments, 181). Herder’s analysis, in the Fragments, of the Greek phrase kalos k’agathos illustrates his belief in the necessity for appropriately contextualized interpretation. It also reveals his sensitivity to variations among ethical concepts in particular, and to the way these variations are reflected in the precise sense of words. Herder objects to Shaftesbury’s reading of the kalos k’agathos as a kind of gentlemanly virtuoso, which, he argues, assimilates a number of crucial Greek evaluative concepts to the judgements and tastes of Shaftesbury’s own age (Fragments, 319–22/PW, 45–7). Against Shaftesbury’s interpretation, he points out that the term agathos did not mean moral goodness for Homer, and that its sense has to be understood in connection with aretê, virtue, which in turn, at this time “still meant only braveness of body and spirit” (Fragments, 319/PW, 45). He notes the subtle shifts that the words aretê, agathos, and kalos undergo in later Greek thought, where they acquire ethical significations having to do with being an effective citizen of the state, as understood within

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the political culture of the Athenians (Fragments, 320/PW, 45–6). To the question of why someone should spend so much time analyzing a word, Herder responds that one can never say too much about a word like agathos, which was, among the ancient Greeks, “the expression of their character and the summit of their praises,” and that: The explanation of such words unlocks for us manner of thought and police, character and ethics, in short, the secret of the nation€– without which we always make distorted judgments about a people, learn distortedly from it, and imitate it intolerably. I would recommend it to a man of philology, historical knowledge, and taste, as a contribution to the history of Greek and Roman literature, that he track precisely the metamorphosis which in Greek the words anêr, anthrôpos, agathos, kalos, philokalos, kalok’agathos, kakos, epicheirêtês, and in Latin the words vir, homo, bonus and melior and optimus, honestus, pulcher, and liberalis, strenuus, and such national names have undergone, names which were the honor or shame of their age and which changed with it. That is how one becomes acquainted with peoples and learns to profit from them. (Fragments, 322/FW 1, 322)

As revealed by his analysis of kalos k’agathos, Herder’s interpretation of such words€– and of ancient and foreign texts in general€– does not focus only on the formal relations between words, but on the concrete context in which they are used. That Homer’s conception of goodness, beauty, and virtue, in relation to a person’s character, is strongly connected with bravery cannot be understood without reference to the kinds of situations and actions that Homer depicts, in the context of which he uses evaluative terms like agathos, kalos, and aretê. The shifts in the meaning of these terms in the writings of, for instance, Plato cannot be understood without reference to the political context of ancient Athens. Thus, the Volk whose Geist€– spirit or mind€– is revealed in these words is not constituted by its language, considered in isolation from the other facets of its culture. Spencer rightly observes that, in Herder’s writings, “a common environment, history, laws, customs, morality, tradition and religion are all identified as contributing factors in the unity of a Volk” (Spencer 1996, 251). What gives language a special preeminence is the fact that it is the primary medium of education, in the broadest sense, through which the other aspects of a culture are expressed and transmitted. Language needs to be appreciated “as the organ of our reason and social activity, as the tool of every culture and instruction, as the bond of sociality and good morals, as the true vehicle for the advancement of humanity in every class of human beings.”10 ╇ “On the Capacity to Speak and Hear” (FW 9.2, 707).

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As Taylor’s analysis suggests, moreover, in this case the idea that language is “expression” does not simply mean that it puts into words meanings present beforehand. Originally language is, for Herder, creative. It does not only mirror an experience, a sensation, a feeling, or a thought; it also invents a form for these. In so doing it gives them a form, which then not only reflects but also shapes what they are. Creative expression (“poetry,” in a broad sense) therefore occupies a special place within Herder’s reflections on language, and particularly on the role of language in both expressing and constituting a national character. The first language of a people is poetic, and it can be said to establish the identity of that people. It is the language whose words, patterns, sayings, and stories originally articulate, and weave together, what interests and matters to these people, their common sensations and feelings, their actions and judgements, the things and events that catch their attention in the time and place where they live. What attracts Herder to ancient languages especially, in comparison with modern ones, is that they are, he thinks, more “natural,” more immediately rooted in people’s genuine experiences of themselves and the world. They imitate€– give form and voice to€– what people directly feel and perceive, rather than being indebted to records of the feelings and perceptions of others. These languages, drawing more from direct experience than tradition, echo the sounds people hear, copy the rhythms they sense around them, and embody things, movements, and actions in powerfully evocative images and symbols. Herder also admires the liveliness, strength, and richness of ancient languages, in which verbs predominate, images and sounds strike a person with vivid force, and words naming things from many angles prolifÂ� erate in wild tangles (Fragments, 614). An ancient language was “a poetic language,” “a language of sensuous people,” “full of images and passions, idioms and pleonasms, word transformations and stubborn idiosyncrasy, which sang, gestured, painted for eye and ear” (Fragments, 615/PW, 64). The poetry of these languages is diminished when they become more exact, and more “civilized”:€ “the more civic (bürgerlich) and abstract words are introduced, the more rules a language contains:€the more perfect it certainly becomes, but also the more it loses true poetry” (FW 1, 183). This view of the fate of language over the course of human history is continuous with the broader motif of historical decline discussed in the last chapter. There is, for Herder, a certain loss of vitality, sensuousness and affect that accompanies the progress in rationality and orderliness characterizing modern European civilization. This is, for him, a true loss, one not sublimated into a form of accomplishment that is simply higher.

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Herder’s complaint is not only about a loss of charm and aesthetic appeal in language. It also asserts a decline in “authenticity” of a sort, but not one implying that a nation should remain as it always has been, or resist cultural interchange. Herder thinks that, to be genuinely meaningful, language needs to be “original,” in the sense of arising out of the actual experiences of the people who speak it. This is an ongoing process. Language is inherited, but it also continues to evolve, ideally through the influx of new sensations and the thoughts that these occasion. It can also become disconnected from experience, however, in a number of ways. It can become overly abstract, full of empty and confused concepts whose place of birth within experience has long since been obscured (a subject about which I will have more to say in the next chapter). Language can also lose touch with experience when it is the product of a mere imitation of others, where that is something different from cross-cultural dialogue and learning. When the moderns imitate the ancients in their literature, or the Germans the French, under the misguided assumption that they thereby copy a model that is better than themselves and in doing so rise higher, they actually fall lower. The greatness of languages and literatures lies in their capacity to express the soul of a community, “to act as a mirror of the history, actions, joys and suffering of the people who speak them,” as Spencer puts it (Spencer 1996, 250). But when they are merely copied by other nations, they lose their capacity to do precisely that. One problem here is that the world articulated in one language simply is not like the world of another. Herder therefore maintains that one should not judge the poetry of one nation by the standards of another (Hebrew Poetry, 965), looking to find a Homer or Ossian in every culture, and concluding that it has no great poetry otherwise (Hebrew Poetry, 674). Literary works are, in addition, wholes, reflecting the whole of a culture, a Klima, and a form of life. Interpretation should never, therefore, proceed by tearing a single element of poetry out of its context, let alone comparing it with a different element in the poetry of another nation (Hebrew Poetry, 965–6). It follows that one also cannot just transpose an element of the literature of one nation into that of another, as if the diction and imagery that expressed the life of ancient Greeks could just be grafted onto the cultural expressions of modern Europeans while retaining its relevance. Herder’s reflections on ancient literatures and languages, like his reflections on their forms of education in Yet Another Philosophy of History, also serve a critical purpose. Here, too, the ancients are meant to provide a source of inspiration for Herder’s own age, and an antidote to its sterile

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intellectualism, but in a manner that points away from imitation. What is admirable about ancient languages is that they spoke from the immediacy and fullness of experience, which they tried to put into words. This idea, combined with the thesis that the life of every people possesses its own unique forms of virtue, contributes to Herder’s promotion of vernacular literature, and of literature that is less artificial and more natural, more in touch with emotions and inclinations. Ancient language and literatures do provide an example of how people should speak and write, he believes, but by suggesting that they should do so as themselves, out of their own sensations and feelings. Tradition, including the writings that enable us to learn from the past and to build upon it, is a great educator, but it can also be stultifying if not refreshed by experience, leading to the desiccation of language and other forms of creative expression. It remains to be added that, sometimes, Herder also sees language as more than the creative expression of the experiences of human beings. He claims that the creation of language mirrors the activity of nature, or even divinity. I cited before the following sentence from The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, regarding the inventor of language:€“In that he names everything, and arranges it for himself in line with his feeling, he becomes the imitator of divinity, the second creator, thus also poiesis, a poet (Dichter).” Herder adds that, “the essence of the poetic art has been put in an imitation of nature, but should actually, in consequence of this origin, be put more boldly in an imitation of the creating, naming divinity” (Hebrew Poetry, 963). This description of the poet as an imitator of divinity could be interpreted as a poetic metaphor itself, but Herder’s understanding of the relation between humanity, nature, and divinity gives good grounds to suppose that he is being quite literal here. While a fuller analysis of Herder’s idea of divinity, and of the place of this idea within cultural identity, is reserved for Chapter 7, one cannot do justice to Herder’s conception of language as a central constituent of cultural identity without examining the metaphysical, rather than exclusively anthropological, Â�dimensions of this idea. Russell Arden Fox raises this point in noting that, for Herder, what is taking place in the formation of language “is not a purely subjective ordering, but an alignment of our thinking with truths that are there to be understood,” and that “if finding forms of expression is, therefore, a way of relating to reality, then the national self-realization of a Volk takes on a very different light” (Fox 2003, 247). Fox goes on to relate Herder to Heidegger on the metaphysics of national community, while acknowledging that there seems to be a great distance between Herder’s philosophy of language and Heidegger’s insistence on “‘overcoming’ the

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sensate, and therefore natural and historical, metaphysical possibilities of a Volk” (Fox 2002, 261). Heidegger himself, in a seminar he taught on Herder’s essay on language, criticized Herder for remaining within the tradition of metaÂ�physics, characterized by subjectivism and a reification of the human, that Heidegger’s own thought seeks to transcend.11 There are nonetheless strong parallels between Herder’s and Heidegger’s understanding of the relation between language and the identity of a Volk, and these connect with their shared view of language as revelatory rather than fictionalizing. Neither thinker understands language as merely the product of a human subject who transfigures the true character of reality by imposing upon it the forms of his human, all too human consciousness. In Herder’s case, the creative activity of the poet, in giving rise to new forms, essentially mimics, and is itself a product of, the creative activity of nature. Because the latter is in turn the work of “divine natural forces,” the poet’s activity is at the same time a kind of second creator, a reflection of divinity. It is not only the active creative power of the poetic art that reflects nature and divinity, but also the content of the languages that this power invents, because the creation of language is the result of a reflective relation to what there really is in the world. The substance of a language, which in turn expresses the life of a community, is then a piece of the substance of reality itself. I believe this thesis can fruitfully be compared with Heidegger’s philosophy of language, early and late, in a way that sheds light on both of these thinkers. H e r de r, H e i de g g e r, a n d t h e on t ol o g y of l a nguag e I have already suggested, without analysis, a parallel between Herder and Heidegger on the relation between the language and the “world” of a people. I had in mind, in part, Heidegger’s analysis of “worldhood” in Being and Time, according to which the “things” we primarily encounter within the world are not neutral objects, or physical substances, but items of use, what is “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger puts it, tools or equipment (BT, ¶15). We do not understand these items in isolation from “On the Essence of Language” (Vom Wesen der Sprache) (Heidegger 1999). On the whole, this very sketchy set of lecture notes does not, in my view, add much to our understanding of the positive relation between Herder and Heidegger on language. As is often the case in Heidegger’s explicit treatments of philosophers by whom he was influenced (Aristotle and Hegel provide other examples), one suspects that the actual debt is much deeper than is suggested by his attempt to situate his subject within the “history of being” that he wants to tell.

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one another. They are intelligible only within a “relational totality,” the whole of the Â�meaningful context of activities and projects that constitutes “significance” (BT, 120). Significance is therefore ultimately rooted in the shared purposes of Dasein, the being that I myself am. (Because Heidegger wants to suspend presuppositions about the character of this being, he avoids using terms like “subject,” or even “man”.) Revising Kant, Heidegger suggests that, in the case of our everyday experience of things, and particularly when we are engaged in practical activity, what is projected in advance as a Â�necessary condition of intelligibility is not a set of categories delimiting the being of physical objects€– categories such as “cause” or “substance.” It is, rather, our own ends, the possibilities we project for our existence. These build the “horizon” within which what is Â�encountered within the world appears, for it is in terms of the possiÂ� bilities of our own existence, what we might be or do, that things gain the meaning they have within the context of our lives. Since these lives are, moreover, always lived in common with others€ – Dasein (literally, “being-there”) is always, Heidegger says, a “being-with” (BT, 157)€– what we encounter has a designated place within the shared patterns of meaning that make up the life of a Â�community. The “worldhood of the world” can therefore be said to rest in this common horizon of meaning. In comparison with his later works, where language becomes a central theme, Heidegger does not say much about language in Being and Time, describing it only as the expression of discourse (Rede), which is itself the “articulation of intelligibility” (BT, 203–4). But in that language expresses the intelligibility of the world, and the world is the totality of what matters to an always collective form of human existence, it can be said that language articulates the shared concerns of that existence. Also, as I have argued elsewhere, while the later Heidegger is at pains to reject the conception of language as subjective expression, Being and Time does claim that Dasein’s reflective care for its own existence€– the fact that being is an issue for it (BT, 67)€– grounds the meaningfulness of what it encounters within the world, and therefore of what is articulated in language. This idea is not far from Herder’s notion of Besonnenheit as founding the interested and articulate grasp of things.12 There are, at the same time, some equally significant differences between Herder and the early Heidegger in their respective descriptions of the relation between human beings and the environing world. One misses in Being and Time the profound emphasis that Herder places ╇ See Sikka (1994, 109–10).

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on materiality€– on the body, the senses, and the physical environment within which people eat and drink, work and play, tell tales, and marvel at what they perceive around them. I recognize that Heidegger, in keeping with the method of phenomenology, wants to suspend assent to the presuppositions of the natural sciences. He therefore deliberately avoids terms and descriptions which covertly assume that the nature of human existence can be appropriately captured in a physical vocabulary derived, ultimately, from the consideration of objects. I recognize also that the body is present in Being and Time, for instance in Heidegger’s example of seizing and handling a hammer (BT, 98f.). This presence is, however, decidedly marginal; the account of Dasein in Being and Time acknowledges the physicality of existence only obliquely, and does not assign it much weight.13 Another, and related, difference is that Being and Time is still quite deeply Kantian in its view of how the reality we encounter is constituted and becomes intelligible.14 Although Heidegger shifts the focus from the objects of scientific investigation to the “reality”€– what he prefers to call, more neutrally, the “being”€ – of the things we understand and use in pragmatic activity, the “world” to which these things belong, and against the background of which they appear as meaningful, is constructed by human projection. Heidegger is nonetheless not an idealist, as he rejects the assumption of an initial divide between subjects and objects, as two kinds of substances, upon which he thinks idealism is based. But the “world” is nonetheless constituted by the ends of Dasein, whose primary orientation is towards the future. “Nature” is encountered in terms of these ends, as what enters into the making of things that are of use to Dasein. “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’” (BT, 100). Heidegger also refers, in Being and Time, to the nature “which assails us and enthralls us as landscape” (BT, 100), but this perception of nature does not fit well into any of the categories of being that Heidegger delineates in the work. Nature encountered in this way is constituted as neither an object of science nor as a resource for use. Here, too, largely absent in Being and Time is an appropriately extended and rich description of the independent materiality of nature, as encountered by an embodied and sensing being. The world becomes a field for the self-realization of Dasein, This point has been made by a number of scholars, and I take it up in “Kantian Ethics in Being and Time” (Sikka 2006, 322–3). 14 See Sikka (2006). 13

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where that self-realization is itself interpreted as a matter of accomplishing projected ends. This is the world whose intelligibility is articulated in language. Herder also stresses the role of human interests in shaping what we experience and what we put into language, but his analyses and reflections give due weight to the givenness of nature as well, and to the fact that nature is not encountered entirely in terms of our practical purposes. The latter point is reflected in Herder’s understanding of poetic language as “singing and speaking nature,” which echoes and paints what is registered by the senses and affects. In some respects, this view is much closer to the later Heidegger’s reflections on language, poetry, and Volk than to his earlier analysis of existence and world in Being and Time. In Heidegger’s later writings, language, and particularly poetry, becomes a central theme, as do the experiences of the beautiful and the sacred, elements one does not find at all in Being and Time. In addition, many of Heidegger’s later works focus on the intersection between what he sometimes distinguishes as “earth” and “world,” emphasizing the critical place of the elements of a natural landscape€– for instance, the Rhine in Germany€– within the life of a Volk (Sikka 1994, 111–12). While Heidegger’s later descriptions have a very different tone than Herder’s, and are couched in a language that is self-consciously trying not to adopt the standpoint of anthropology, the two do have in common, as Taylor suggests, a “constitutive-expressive” conception of language as both bringing to awareness and shaping our grasp of ourselves and of the world. Words and language are not wrappings for things, Heidegger claims in An Introduction to Metaphysics, “it is in words and language that things first come into being and are” (Heidegger 1959, 13). Words incarnate what is; they tell us how a matter that is an issue for people is to be conceived and interpreted. Many of Heidegger’s textual and etymological analyses of the shifts in language within Western philosophy reflect the importance he attaches to the precise connotations of words, and his belief, with which Herder would strongly agree, that translation always involves a change in meaning. Because both see language as a highly particularized bringing to light of the shared concerns of a historical community, Herder and Heidegger also share the view that language is an essential determinant of the identity of a people. It might seem, on the other hand, that Heidegger’s anti-subjectivism, and even anti-humanism, about language in his later works points to a profound distance from Herder, who is considered to be an important figure in the development of anthropology, and especially in what Zammito

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describes as the “calving” of this discipline from philosophy (Zammito 2002). If Herder sees language as a matter of human expression, and if he understands human beings as one biological species among others, then his conception of language would appear to be fully in line with the subjectivistic tradition Heidegger is opposing when he claims that language is the “house of being,”15 or that “in its essence language is neither expression nor an activity of man”; rather “language speaks” and “man speaks only as he responds to language” (“Language”; Heidegger 1971b, 197, 210). The claim that “language is the house of being” is repeated by Heidegger in his essay, “The Nature of Language,” in connection with his reading of a line from a poem by Stefan Georg:€“Where word breaks off no thing may be” (Heidegger 1971b, 63). “The word alone gives being to the thing” (Heidegger 1971b, 62), Heidegger proposes as a gloss, not in the sense that physical objects do not exist unless they are called something by us, but in the sense that nothing comes into definite appearance for us without an appropriate word, and we cannot think of that which we cannot name. These kinds of statements point to a position on language that can be called “anti-subjective” in a number of senses. First, they assert that we are not the masters of language. We are not autonomous “subjects,” established prior to language, who can then choose to speak in one way or another. In a way, language is prior to us, and it tells us what we can think and say. It thereby determines the character of our being, and not the other way around. Second, language is not the deed of a subject who expresses€ – literally, “presses out”€ – what is inside of him, where what is inside of him is an individual take on things. Not only is language the “expression” of a shared world, but it is, speaking more precisely, not a pressing out of something inner at all. Taylor claims, rightly in my view, that Heidegger is actually a complex kind of realist, and that this is evident in his account of language as manifestation (Taylor 1992, 263). Heidegger’s most basic objection to the characterization of human beings as “subjects,” and thus of their fundamental activities and works, including the speaking of language, as “subjective,” is that this characterization does not sufficiently investigate the nature of the entity that it describes as a “subject.” Heidegger takes this entity€– Dasein in Being and Time, “man” in later works€– to be not an enclosed sphere substantially cut off from the real, but a site for the “unconcealment of being.” Language thereby becomes a response to “the silent voice of being,”16 to “Letter on ‘Humanism’,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (Heidegger 1998, 254). “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’,” trans. William McNeill (Heidegger 1998, 236).

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what being gives man to say, where that “giving” is always historical and finite, and always ongoing. The consequence for national communities is that the languages that define them are no merely human doing. They are “destined” revelations, finite disclosures of what is, as presented to a people who are bound together within the world-historical unfolding of the potentiality of being. If these ideas are compared with Herder’s understanding of the relation between human beings, reality, and language, Heidegger’s anti-subjectivistic formulations and Herder’s anthropological ones turn out to be not so far apart after all. Herder certainly does not think that human beings are the masters of language. Language is expressive, but it is the expression of impressions, of what is given to human reflection by an immanent “nature” with which human beings are continuous. Herder’s affirmation of this continuity does not deny a special status to human beings, conferred by their capacity for language. What is special about human beings, what makes them human in the first place, is their ability to reflect on what presses upon them and to bring it to the explicitness of the word, where that bringing to word is a form of revelation. And language is, for Herder, too, profoundly historical, enabling and delimiting what can be thought by the speakers to whom it is passed on. At the same time, it is never closed, but is constantly being reshaped by the historical concerns of its speakers, who are involved in various kinds of interaction with others. In the notes for his seminar on Herder, Heidegger criticizes Herder’s philosophy of language on a number of counts. He claims that Herder sees language as a human construct, while failing to ask “what is a human being?”; that Herder understands human language as analogous to, and arising from an imitation of, the cries of animals; that he traces the origin of language back to natural forces; and that he connects it with reason, logos, thereby assuming a traditional conception of man as a rational animal (Heidegger 1999, 85, 46–51). His conclusion is that Herder fails to reach to the essence of language, and that he is part of a Western metaphysical tradition that:€(a) objectifies language into a kind of thing lying before us, and (b) thinks of it as a product of man conceived in turn as “homo faber” (Heidegger 1999, 85, 52).17 But Herder does not see human beings as the inventors of language, either in the sense that they brought it into being through a capacity they possessed which was prior to language itself, or in the sense that they continue to invent it as a tool of ╇ For a more detailed summary of these points, see Kovacs (2001, 57–8).

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communication, for purposes they project which are themselves free of its shaping force. Nor does his rooting of language in the “natural” imply that there is no essential difference between the articulation of meaning within human language and the inarticulate cries of animals (assuming, for the sake of this argument, that the cries of animals are inarticulate), or that language is a thing among other things. As to the question of “reason,” this forms the subject of my next chapter. Here, I will only say that Herder’s understanding of human beings as possessing the reflective capacity (which they did not themselves produce) to notice patterns and distinguishing characteristics among the things that touch them and to mark these with signs, combined with his interpretation of this process as a form of clarification, does not add up to a view of man as a calculating animal, nor does it see the concepts of reason as having an exclusive and privileged grasp on the real and the true. It is essential to add that Herder’s own view of language as manifestation, as an expression, ultimately, of those forces whose own essential nature remains unknown and ineffable, is combined with considerable skepticism about the actual content of language, which he sees as containing a host of human errors, and with the view that this content reflects the finite perspectives of human beings. Each national language does have a unique value, because it mirrors the intersection of the human and the natural (both elements of “nature,” understood more broadly) in a given place. It cannot be true, however, as Fox asserts, that “Herder believed that when we mark off and hermeneutically open up, through language, an understanding of the given historical and natural context which informs all our thinking, we are situating ourselves into communities which share a grasp of things that is fundamentally right” (Fox 2003, 251). Herder explicitly refers to errors and confusions within language, and I have demonstrated in previous chapters that he most definitely does not affirm the rightness of every nation’s beliefs, practices, and values. If these elements of a culture are articulated in its language, how can Herder think that every language opens up “a grasp of things that is fundamentally right”? Fox explains this claim by saying that “the discovery of words both commits and privileges a people, revealing a meaningful way of understanding and being which affects their ethics, politics, and all other aspects of life” (Fox 2003, 251). But “meaning” is not truth. Given that Herder is critical of one aspect or another of virtually every society upon which he comments, he cannot be committed to the thesis that the meaningfulness of particular languages to their speakers is a guarantee of the rightness of what they say. Also, while I have been concentrating

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on what we might call Herder’s realism about language€– his sense that it is the expression of a nature that gives itself to human beings, and so speaks through them in their words€– some of Herder’s remarks on language, including ones I have cited, seem to have more in common with a Nietzschean view of language as thoroughly anthropomorphic than with Heidegger’s notion of language as the “speaking of being.” This apparent ambivalence can only be resolved through a closer study of Herder’s position within the opposing categories of realism and idealism, his analysis of concept-formation, and his view of the relationship between concepts and the realities from which they are derived. I take up these subjects in the next chapter.

Ch apter 6

The place of reason

Herder holds an empiricist theory of language, according to which all of its semantic content is derived from experience, understood as including sensations and emotions. Given his insistence that thought depends upon language, it follows that Herder’s position on concepts and patterns of reasoning will also be an empiricist one. Herder’s critique of Kant in the Metacritique rests on this empiricism, complaining, among other things, that “to make oneself independent of oneself, i.e. to place oneself beyond all original, inner and outer experience, to think beyond oneself, entirely free of the empirical:€this no one can do” (Metacritique, 324–5). Such a claim might at first seem odd as an objection to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, since the latter expressly denies that concepts can function independently of sensuous content. Herder’s Metacritique has been criticized for overlooking this essential point, as well as for failing to understand that Kant’s treatment of the a priori in the first Critique constitutes an attempt to isolate the necessary conditions for experience in general, conditions that€– being conditions€– cannot themselves be derived from experience or reduced to it. In light of points like these, Rudolf Haym accused Herder of not comprehending the most basic elements of the transcendental philosophy (Haym 1954, 709–26). The suspicion arises here that Herder’s Metacritique actually represents a naively pre-critical stance, especially since it appeals to empiricists like Bacon, Locke, and Hume in articulating its opposition to Kant.1 One cannot, however, so easily dismiss as “pre-critical” Herder’s insistence on the dependence of thought upon language. With respect to the nature and status of reason, Herder’s view that “from childhood onwards we receive and expand our thought through language” (Metacritique, 520–1), and that “the human soul thinks with words” (Metacritique, 320) Thomas M. Seebohm, for instance, raises this criticism, though without endorsing it (Seebohm 1972, 61).

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means:€ (1) that we can never separate ourselves from the particularity of our received ideas to inspect the functioning of a “pure” reason, and, (2) that no ideas exist in the mind prior to their acquisition through a language. Thus, whereas Kant’s rejection of metaphysics is directed only at the possibility of gaining knowledge of things beyond the perceptible world, Herder also rules out the possibility of achieving a position from which one could speak, as Kant does, of the universal structure of our experience and its objects. As Ulrich Gaier observes, one of Herder’s primary metacritical arguments concerns “the principal linguisticality of reason, and consequently its ties to experience, interest and history; any idea of a ‘pure’ reason is thereby excluded” (Gaier 1988, 207; cf. Menges 1998, 171). It remains nonetheless true that Herder’s own theory of knowledge, formulated against Kant’s transcendental idealism, involves some sort of empiricism, combined with some sort of realism. It therefore does have some affinities with the “pre-critical” epistemologies that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason sought to transcend. I believe that the most fruitful way of understanding Herder’s theory is actually to see it as offering a variant critique of pure reason, a critique that has some parallels with Kant’s version (and perhaps stronger ones than Herder himself recognized), but that reaches different conclusions. I want to explicate this thesis further, developing an idea introduced in the last chapter:€ namely, that Herder espouses a brand of empiricism for which the “given” consists not of immediate and neutral sense data, but of experiences shaped by specifically human powers and interests, and already conditioned by the complex and shifting a priori of language. In relation to this point, I will also explore the striking similarity between several features of Herder’s analysis of language and claims later made by Nietzsche, especially as presented in the latter’s early essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Most interesting, for my purposes, is that, in spite of this parallel with Nietzsche, Herder’s epistemology eschews both skepticism and subjectivism. It manages to do this because his empiricism is accompanied by a rather peculiar brand of realism. Herder does not suggest that human faculties deliver knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, nor does he think our representations correspond to things as they are independently of all observation. Knowledge, for Herder, is decidedly perspectival, yet he remains a realist because of the relation he posits between the human subject and being. In this respect, I will argue, Herder’s account again anticipates that of Heidegger, and one can see in Heidegger’s critical revision of Husserl a certain repetition of Herder’s position vis-à-vis Kant.

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Looking at Herder’s reflections on knowledge and reality in juxtaposition with those of Nietzsche and Heidegger helps to reveal that Herder does not endorse either a naive realism or a skeptical subjectivism, but threads a sophisticated route between these alternatives. H e r de r’s e m pi r ic i s m In his early work, “An Inquiry into Being,” Herder states, in explicit agreement with Locke, that “all our concepts are sensuous” (FW 1, 10). As I demonstrated in my examination of Herder on language, he describes concepts as formed through a process whereby selected characteristics of perceived objects are brought into relief, and marked with words. Like both Locke and Condillac, Herder stresses that the selection of these characteristics€ – and, consequently, the meaning of the words expressing them€– is not, in the case of natural languages, the result of neutral observation. Sensation, upon which thought always depends, includes emotional response, and it is shaped by the depth and nature of our participation in our surroundings, a fact reflected in language. It is within this basic epistemological framework that Herder’s analysis of reason, along with his critique of pure reason, proceeds. Herder’s empiricist position entails that there are no innate ideas. The soul derives no knowledge from itself, nor does it recall anything from prior acquaintance with a Platonic realm (Cognition, 351). All thought depends upon sensation (Cognition, 365), and so we have no concept of anything lying entirely outside the circle of our sensations (Ideas, 294). Herder therefore proposes that “reason” (Vernunft), which operates through concepts, “is only something acquired (Vernommenes), a learned proportion and direction of ideas and forces, in which people have been educated according to their organization and way of life” (Ideas, 144). Reason, in other words, is born from experience and led by tradition, although “this ‘birth of our reason’,” Herder remarks, “mostly seems so indecent to the wise of our world that they entirely deny it, and worship their reason as an infallible oracle, self-established, eternal, and independent of everything” (Cognition, 361). In truth, because ideas, the medium and substance of reason, are nothing other than interpretations of the experiences of a particular community of people over the course of a given history, they are limited and variable. On this point, as on others, Herder’s position is powerfully affected by his reading of the burgeoning travel and ethnographical literature of his day, with its descriptions, often surprising and unsettling,

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of the widely divergent customs, beliefs, mythologies, and values among the nations of the world. The information he gleaned from this literature forms the basis for his observation that “representations which we often saw as the most universal principles of human reason disappear there and here with the climate of a place” (Ideas, 304) (where the term “climate” again refers to physical environment, in the broadest sense). Too often, Herder thinks, we mistake our cultural prejudices for self-evident truths, with the consequence that “universal human reason, as we readily want to understand the word, is a cloak for our favorite little notions, for superstition, blindness and inertia” (Cognition, 372). To say that reason arises from, and is continuously shaped by, ideas rooted in experience is to also say that it depends upon language. Herder believes, crucially, that the ideas with which reason operates cannot be distinguished from words, so that a people has no idea for which it has no word (Ideas, 347). Reason then functions only through language, where language is in turn ultimately derived from sensation. Any analysis of reason, therefore, has to involve an analysis of words, and Herder repeatedly postulates the need, in this context, for a kind of genealogy of language. In Plastik, his essay on sculpture, Herder asks:€“Will a practical doctrine of reason ever be written, a philosophical lexicon of language, the senses, and the fine arts that traces each word and each concept back to its origin and uncovers the processes whereby a word or concept is carried over from one sense to another, and from the senses to the mind?” (Sculpture, 90/FW 4, 310). The need for such a genealogy of words and concepts is also iterated in Journal of my Voyage in the Year 1769, where Herder writes:€“It is a difficult thing to trace every science in all its concepts and every language in all its words back to the senses, in which and out of which they arise, and yet that is necessary for every science and language” (FW 9.2, 119). In stressing this necessity, a particular worry for Herder is that language is prone to ever-increasing levels of abstraction, and that, over time, words tend to get divorced from the experiences out of which they evolved. In late societies, they then risk becoming mere empty containers (Language,€754). Worse, they are used and put together in such a way as to represent, hazily, non-existent things. They cast shadow pictures, but these very shadows come to be mistaken for existing realities, Herder suggests, in a reversal of Plato’s allegory of the cave (Journal of my Voyage, FW 9.2, 15). The worst offenders are the abstractions of philosophy, and Herder echoes Locke’s complaints about the misuse of words in metaphysical discourse. “All our metaphysics is metaphysics,” he argues in the Ideas, “i.e. an abstracted, ordered list of names after observations

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of experience” (Ideas, 349). No knowledge of real things can be derived by combining such phantoms. In a sense, the meaning of a word is, for Herder, fixed by reference, but the “referent” is not an extramental object; it is a thing or state of affairs as encountered within experience. Consequently, the “meaning” of metaphysical terms can be determined only by tracing the process through which they were constructed on the basis of some original sensations, in a psychology accompanied, at every step, by physiology (Cognition, 340). At best, such terms may be schematizations of experience, or analogies. At worst, they are simply nonsense. Herder might have acknowledged, in the Metacritique, that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason also rejects the possibility of acquiring knowledge of reality from concepts alone, and is no friend to speculative Â�metaphysics. Unfortunately, Herder ignores this point. He also does not engage explicitly with the reasons behind Kant’s rejection of empiricism. These shortcomings seriously weaken the quality of the Metacritique’s overall confrontation with Kant. One can, however, take a more measured approach than Herder himself, in showing why, for him, Kant’s critique of pure reason does not go far enough, and why he believes that an empiricist account of our most basic concepts is in fact possible. At first, Herder’s diatribes against the emptiness of the concepts Kant associates with pure reason do seem entirely to miss the point. For instance, when he has the Kantian “sorceress” say, at the beginning of the Metacritique, “take this little reed; out of it you can blow forms; forms of sensuousness and every possible thinking before all thinking” (Metacritique, 307), he seems not to recognize the force of the claim that some forms of organization need to be projected in advance, in order for a coherent world of phenomena to appear and to be intelligible. In fact, though, there are organizing forms which anticipate experience within Herder’s epistemology as well; only these are not universal categories, existing a priori in the mind, but words, naming and distinguishing things in diverse ways across different languages. Since Herder’s empiricist account of the origin of these words wants to trace them back to sensations, his account might seem to be circular, positing the need for language in order to make sense of impressions, while at the same time claiming that language arises from impressions. The key to understanding this apparent circularity is once more Herder’s notion of Besonnenheit or reflectivity, a capacity he sees as definitive of being human. In his essay on language, Herder describes reflectivity as the ability to step back from a flood of sensations so as to become reflectively aware of significant patterns within that flood (Language, 722).

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These patterns, whose shape is very much determined by human interests, are what language articulates, and language in turn furnishes the concepts of reason. Two features of this analysis are particularly important for understanding Herder’s critique of Kant on the nature of reason. First, Herder does not provide any account of how this capacity for reflection comes about among human beings, nor does he wish to. Strictly speaking, reflectivity cannot be appropriately described as coming about among human beings at all, since it is what makes them human to begin with. It is basic to human understanding, and it is the capacity that makes language, as the institution of representative signs, possible. Second, existing human beings are never actually in a position where they experience the “origin” of their language. While Herder argues that all language is ultimately derived from sensations, existing thinkers€ – which is to say, language-users€– inherit the words through which they think, and their experience is shaped in advance by these. Taking up the first point, only reflectivity needs to be posited as truly a priori, Herder believes, as its existence suffices to explain the development of our most general ideas. Herder’s description of the construction of our concepts of time and space, intended to be a critical alternative to Kant’s understanding of these as a priori, provides an example. Of the concept of space, he says: As sensuous awareness, space (Raum) is first making room (räumen)€– i.e. a privative concept. Our limits, that is to say, have led understanding to note the there, where we are and are not, and to determine, to measure, to describe it in a thousand fine distinctions, until it finally wanted to be elevated to a pure, i.e. entirely non-sensuous, concept of reason. It is, however, not such a pure concept. (Metacritique, 352)

“Space” is first encountered through the self-reflexive, interested awareness of being able to be here or there, an awareness grounded in the experience of limits defined by embodiment, which is essential to the sense of being in this place or that. Thus space is, in a sense, “subjective”; “it is posited and given with our limited existence (Dasein) in the universe” (Metacritique, 353). We brought space into the world “with our selves,” bringing at the same time a soul that could become aware (inne werden) and make note (bemerken) of it as a multiplicity of possible places (Metacritique, 353). Herder’s analysis of the concept of time is similar: For a long time, it seems, man was inattentive to the sequence of changes within and around him; he enjoyed the duration of his existence, without placing a

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measure upon it. Only when the moment came that something needed to happen did he say:€ “now it is time!” The commanding moment (Augenblick) simultaneously shook him from his sleep. He let the fruits grow; then he plucked them and said:€ “now they are ripe (zeitig).” When something arrived inconveniently, i.e. too late or too early; then he said:€“that is inopportune (unzeitig).” (Metacritique, 357)

Strictly speaking, the form of awareness the beginning of this story describes is not yet distinctly human. Animals are also aware of themselves and their environment, and have some relation to time, but here Herder is characterizing the explicit grasp enabled by reflectivity, which permits the highlighting of significant moments that can subsequently be abstracted into a concept of empty time. There is an unmistakable similarity between these genealogies of the concepts of space and time, and the phenomenological descriptions of temporality and spatiality provided by Heidegger in Being and Time (BT, ¶22–4, ¶78–81). Both accounts underline the primacy of practical and interested engagement, as opposed to the theoretical inquiry characteristic of science, in the origination of these basic forms of understanding. Concomitantly, both locate their source, and the source of fundamental concepts generally, in everyday familiarity with the world rather than in abstract reason. In his own analysis of space, Heidegger does not speak of “sensuous awareness,” nor of the basic sense of myself being here rather than there. Rather, he grounds the notion of space in what he calls “circumspective concern,” an interested, practical looking around that finds a needed thing to be in a certain spot, or an intended destination to be at a certain distance. This is in line with Heidegger’s greater emphasis on the organization of the life-world through purposive activity, and his lesser emphasis on the feeling of the body and sensuous perception. Herder, focusing on the latter, highlights the awareness being placed here, while others may be there, where I am not. This sensation of having a place, he claims, is already present in the unborn child, through its subjection to pressures and pushes (Metacritique, 350). In spite of this difference, Herder does, like Heidegger, describe the organization of space€ – meaning, our active organizing of space€ – as resulting from a fundamentally pragmatic orientation. Furthermore, in this description Herder also draws on, and appeals to, the meaning of everyday spatial vocabulary: Our being is bounded (umgrenzt), and where we are not, another can be; this negating “where” we call space (Raum). There is space for others there; they can have their place (Ort) there. If they take it, then the space is occupied, filled;

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to make place for others, they must vacate (räumen) it. An area, where there are many spots (Plätze), i.e. places of or for existing (Orte des Daseins oder zum Dasein), is called spacious (geräumig). (Metacritique, 350)

The fact that so many terms in this passage are difficult to translate precisely is itself revealing, as Herder’s point is that the concept of pure space is not basic, but derived. It is derived from a practical familiarity with spots and places, and ways of negotiating these, which is in turn reflected in ordinary language. The latter is particular; it is the language of a given community. Its terms may point to some universal features of existence, and Herder’s analysis of German spatial terms certainly intends to demonstrate something about the way in which human beings generally arrive at the idea of space. But such terms, carving and interpreting the world on the basis of experiences that themselves belong to a given place and time, will never translate perfectly from one language into another. Herder notes further that expressions having to do with space are woven through discourse, and that “they order and explain (erörtern), as it were, the perceptions of the universe” (Metacritique, 351). All of our senses, along with understanding and reason, participate in the formation of such expressions, which attempt to organize the world in line with our perceptions and judgements of measure and movement. To illustrate his claim that spatial expressions primarily have to do with organization, Herder gives the examples, in German, of basic words like vor, nach, zu, in, bei, über, unter, as well as prefixes such as er-, gen- ab-, and zu- (Metacritique, 351, n.€12). The deeper point here is that all of these terms spring not from a preexisting concept of pure space, but from a complex set of sensations and interpretations, involving the activity and interaction of all of our sensory and cognitive faculties. While Heidegger does not, as I have noted, emphasize sensory perception or embodiment, he also grounds his analysis of the awareness of space in everyday expressions and experiences. “In concerning itself circumspectively with the world,” he writes in Being and Time, “Dasein can move things around or out of the way or ‘make room’ for them (um-, weg-, und ‘einräumen’)” (BT, 146). The “space” that Dasein posits beforehand in such everyday dealings with things is a significant “region” of the world, in which things have an appropriate place. Heidegger rejects both subjectivism and transcendentalism as well, for reasons very similar to those presented by Herder. Against subjectivism, he claims:€“Space is not to be found in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world ‘as if’ that world were in a space, but the ‘subject’ (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial” (BT, 146). Against transcendentalism, Heidegger

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argues that the concept of a neutral, empty space is actually derived from a flattening out of the everyday understanding of space as constituted by a set of significant places for things:€“When space is discovered non-circumspectively by just looking at it, the environmental regions get neutralized to pure dimensions. Places€– and indeed the whole circumspectively oriented totality of places belonging to equipment Â�ready-to-hand€ – get reduced to a multiplicity of positions for random things.” Finally, we arrive at “the homogeneous space of nature” (BT, 147). Herder and Heidegger share the view, then, that the idea of a “pure” space, which Kant took to be an a priori generation of the subject, is actually grounded in a more basic encounter with locations and places in a world where we move around and make room for things. For both authors, the idea of empty time, a pure sequence of nowpoints, is likewise derived from a more primitive experience of time, in spite of some pronounced differences between their accounts. Heidegger’s discussion of time employs a dialectic between “authentic” and “inauthentic” existence which has no parallel in Herder’s discussion. Because Heidegger is engaging in phenomenology rather than anthropology, moreover, he confines himself to descriptions of what human existence is like, and avoids telling stories about what we may have been like before we were human. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s descriptions agree with Herder in the fundamental point that “time” is, first, time for something, so that the “now” is understood as “either appropriate or inappropriate” (BT, 467), in which case “significance” belongs to its very structure (BT, 474). This observation is reflected in Heidegger’s use of the verb zeitigen (BT, 278, 377) to describe how time goes (so to speak), a verb that ordinarily means bringing about or leading to, and therefore suggests direction towards an end. When “authentic,” Heidegger claims, Dasein is resolved to take action within the context of a meaningful situation. Its present then has the character of a “moment” (Augenblick) (BT, 463) in which it grasps what genuinely needs to be done, at the time in which it stands. Thus Heidegger’s analysis of the understanding of time, like Herder’s, stresses the derivative character of the kind of concept of time that Kant, for one, posited as a priori, while again rejecting both subjectivism and transcendentalism. Heidegger is not setting out to describe “time-Â�consciousness,” as Husserl did. Our sense of time is not “subjective”; it is oriented towards what is within the world, and while there is a kind of a priori that grounds the perception of the being in time of things, this is not a pure concept, but the temporality of Dasein itself, which projects itself towards its future while recalling its past and

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confronting its present. The pure concept of time, on the other hand, is constructed through reflection, requiring abstraction€– in all the senses of that term€– from Dasein’s initial practical engagement with the world, which already has a temporal structure. Herder’s analyses suggest that the universality of all general concepts, to the extent that it exists, is explained by the presence of common features of human experience, the most common of which is the capacity for reflectivity itself. He also repeatedly argues for an appreciation of cultural variation in the construction and evolution of concepts, and he stresses the difficulty this variation poses for any attempt to determine the principles of an allegedly “pure” reason (Metacritique, 326, 568). What emerges is a largely nominalist position on concept construction, stressing the foundational role of embodied experience, combined with an insistence on the unity between thought and language. “We only experience what our nerves give us,” Herder says; “only subsequently and on that basis can we also think” (Cognition, 351). We think only in words, moreover, and words name a thing with respect to the characteristic that has been noted as significant about it. They do not give the “thing in itself”; on this, Herder fully agrees with Kant. But he rejects as an illusion the view that the content of some of our concepts is such that it could not have been derived from experience and must precede it. Concepts arise through a remarking of the one in the many. They are precipitates of a process of abstraction whereby a feature displayed repeatedly within a flux of impressions is identified and represented in a word, which in turn is supposed to stand for a thing. The concepts that result from isolating such features at a primary sensuous level, Herder argues, form the basis for further acts of abstraction, generating concepts that are increasingly general: the more abstract a concept is, the more the pictorial content of its expression is reduced, until finally it seems entirely to disappear. The higher ordering of concepts, that is, demanded that by and by the characteristics of the lower orderings were isolated, so that one distinguishing characteristic out of many was brought into relief; at the same time the expression was divested of the multiple and the sensuous. (Metacritique, 422)

That is how we eventually arrive at the highly abstract concepts of metaÂ� physics, given, for instance, in words like “substance,” “subject” and “quality” (Metacritique, 406). Such words express the being of a thing in general, answering the question, “how does a thing exist?” (wie Â�bestehet ein Ding?). They do not explain anything. They only recognize, and characterÂ� ize in a particular manner, a broad feature of our experience (Metacritique,

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406). Concepts like these are then neither a priori nor necessary. They are constructed. The act of positing a self-subsisting power supposed to be an underlying ground of properties, for instance, does not spontaneously precede perception, but reflects upon it, noting what is constant within it (Metacritique, 406). In so doing, it constitutes the extreme end of a process of naming whose remarking of the one in the many seeks to stabilize and fix in categories the flux of particulars given in perception. Original naming fixes this flux from an interested perspective, identifying things on the basis of striking occurrences: So the snake (Schlange) [gets its name] from its twisting (schlingenden), winding movement, the river (Fluß ) from flowing (Fließen), the stream from streaming, the lightning (Blitz) from its quick flash (Blick), the thunder from its crash, and so forth€– It is instructive to compare the languages of different peoples in this naming, i.e. substantivizing. Such a comparison shows not only the different characters of the inventors, but also the different aspects of things that can be noted and the moment of characterization itself. (Metacritique, 403–4)

Since names denote how things appear to people in their interaction with the world, they do not give the “essence” of a thing apart from a definite, living perspective. If this is true of names responding directly to sensuous observations, how much more so of abstract terms, constructed on the basis of these observations and standing at a still further remove from the things they observe. Metaphysics, therefore, as the rational science which works with such terms, is useful as an order and register of concepts, but in no way corresponds to the things themselves:€“All our science calculates with abstracted individual external marks, which do not touch the inner existence of any single thing,” and “our poor reason is thus only a marking calculator” (bezeichnende Rechnerin), as its name says in many languages (Ideas, 349). When engaging in abstract reasoning, the soul calculates “with counting coins (Rechenpfennigen), with sounds and figures,” with external symbols torn away from things and cloaked in other arbitrary symbols, resulting sometimes in empty nutshells” (Ideas, 350). Eventually, among philosophical sects and religions, “only empty sounds echo around the ears of men” (Ideas, 350). While Herder’s description of the development of the concepts of space and time anticipates Heidegger, these remarks on language, science, and reason are reminiscent of Nietzsche’s similarly nominalist account of concept construction in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (PT, 79–100). Nietzsche proposes, in this unfinished essay, that concepts

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are formed through a series of “metaphorical” transferences. The subject first receives a nerve stimulus which is transferred into an image. The image is then imitated in the sound of a word. Finally, these wordsounds become concepts through the equation of unlike things (PT, 81–3). Like Herder, Nietzsche stresses the close relation between names and subjective interest, even giving the same example of the German word for “snake” as indicating a twisting motion (PT, 82). The existence of various languages, he adds, demonstrates that the creator of language does not name things in themselves; he “only designates the relations of things to men” (PT, 82). This view of concepts provides the foundation for Nietzsche’s skeptical claim that “truth” is only “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” (PT, 84). The concept, after all, in which the truth of things is supposed to be conveyed, is “merely the residue of a metaphor” (PT, 84), distilled by transference from sense perception. But this fact gets forgotten. “Truths” are therefore “metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (PT, 84). In later ages, the labor of concept construction, originally the task of language, is taken over by science, which then “works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions” (PT, 88). Nietzsche’s analysis implies, as Herder’s does, that the senses are closest to things, and they communicate a constantly changing world of particulars. This world is steadied and made comprehensible, but also falsified, by being translated into words standing for kinds of things. Herder writes, at one point, that “the creator of all things does not see as man sees … He knows no classes; each thing resembles only itself.”2 Nietzsche deliberately refrains from making such statements about how things are independently of human perception. In his claim that “every concept arises from the equation of unequal things,” the “thing” in question is not a transcendent object, but “the unique and entirely individual original experience” to which a concept owes its origin (PT, 83). Yet he does also assert that “nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species” (PT, 83), betraying a sense that original experiences, while still not delivering things in themselves, are at least more closely in touch with the real than are the abstractions derived from these experiences. Likewise, in Nietzsche’s statement that the edifice of concepts is constructed “as it were, on running water” (PT, 85), the ╇ “On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Principal Powers of the Human Soul” (Suphan 8, 315).

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“running water” is actually the stream of perception, but the statement also implies a Heraclitean picture of the really real. Nietzsche often proposes that the human mind fixes in place the subjects of its knowledge, a process reflected in (or perhaps caused by) the structure of language. In On the Genealogy of Morals, for instance, he adduces the example of “lightning” to illustrate this point:€“the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning” (Nietzsche 1967, 45). Herder’s discussion of this example, among others, does not go so far as to deny the existence of real things, but it also wants to show, through an examination of language, how subjects are designated on the basis of perceived motions. Utterances about the world will then indeed consist of “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms,” as Nietzsche puts it in his essay on truth. Herder and Nietzsche seem to share, then, a nominalist and broadly empiricist view of concepts, according to which they are constructed from, and reflect, human perspectives on things. To this position is added the insight that ideas and ways of combining them are inherited with a language, which then shapes beforehand the way things are interpreted by the speakers of that language. These ideas affect Herder’s and Nietzsche’s respective views on evaluative terms as well as descriptive ones. The central thesis of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals is that there is a profound difference between ancient Greek ethics, on the one hand, and JudeoChristian morality, on the other. Nietzsche’s evidence for this thesis rests in large measure on an analysis of ancient Greek vocabulary expressing judgements of value, and here he analyzes the same Greek concepts of beauty and goodness that Herder had analyzed in objecting to “a moral reading of Homer” (Nietzsche 1967, 25–30). The broader lesson to be drawn concerns the variability of such concepts generally, and the need to understand them within their linguistic contexts, which also means in the context of the society whose manner of thinking is incarnated within its language. Both authors draw attention as well to the problem of abstraction, where language is progressively drained of content through its separation from the force of experience. Peculiarly, Herder is also inclined to use the imagery of coinage in describing language, and particularly in drawing contrasts between words that are more and less forceful. He compares modern social expressions with “small change,” and adds:€“The ancients, by contrast, exchanged gold pieces; they spoke through images, whereas we at most speak with images” (FW 1, 195/PW, 34). He also compares “the words for abstract ideas” with “gold and coins,” saying:€“Both

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are struck by voluntary decision, and enter circulation through a voluntarily assigned value; the most sound among both are preserved as treasures; the smaller become pocket change” (FW 1, 198). The imagery of coinage is employed differently in these passages than in the ones I have cited from Nietzsche’s essay, but in both cases the simile is meant to indicate the conventional character of meaning, and the difference between words that genuinely have some purchase on reality, and ones that do not. My purpose in drawing these comparisons is not merely to reveal the fact of similarities between Herder and Nietzsche. Rather, I want to highlight, first, the extent to which Herder’s analysis resembles Nietzsche’s skeptical and subjectivist position, which in turn exhibits a continuity with some of the most fundamental tenets put forward in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Nietzsche agrees with Kant’s thesis that the human subject introduces specific kinds of order into the world, in line with its own nature, and that its understanding is limited to the phenomena constituted by these. He also accepts that human experience is shaped by some necessary and universal forms, proper to the species as such. In “On Truth and Lies,” he identifies space and time as examples (PT, 87), while producing a naturalistic speculative account, influenced by Darwin, about how basic ordering principles like these might have evolved under pragmatic pressures.3 While this latter move is decidedly un-Kantian, the underlying position accords with transcendental idealism in its affirmation of subjective forms that structure all experience, and that are, in the case of human beings as we know them, a priori. Now, Herder’s position on, for instance, space and time also does not, in a sense, deny their subjectivity. His analysis of how we arrive at the notions of empty space and time within scientific discourse is presented in explicit opposition to Kant, but it nonetheless grants that these, beginning as forms of intuition locating objects here or there, are brought into the world “with us.” Similarly, Herder insists on the ultimately empirical derivation of all concepts, with serious consequences for the character of reason, but he does not reject the claim that some concepts are necessitated by the fundamental character of human experience. Otherwise, he could not offer alternative tables of categories himself in the Metacritique. Moreover, the process of abstraction does not, on Herder’s account, yield forms corresponding to the structure of real things. It produces only subjective idealizations, and these compose the lens through which science views its objects. Everyday understanding is in no better position with ╇ On this subject, see Clark (1990, e.g. 87, 121).

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respect to the possibility of grasping things in themselves, since it is shaped by languages that only record superficial characteristics and anthropomorphic relations. One is left with the impression, then, that Herder’s position is as skeptical and subjectivistic as Nietzsche’s, as so many of his remarks on language, concepts, and reason appear to indicate. Yet Herder is unarguably a realist; the target of his ire in the Metacritique is not only Kant’s transcendentalism but also, and equally, his idealism. We need then to ask what there is in Herder’s position, as distinct from Nietzsche’s, to support this realism, and how it accords with his skepticism about language. H e r de r’s r e a l i s m Karl Menges notes that, for Herder, “If there is any given a priori, it is, in his view, not consciousness but being which appears€– since the Versuch über das Sein (1764)€– as the mantle into which we are literally ‘wrapped’” (Menges 1998, 162). “An Inquiry into Being,” the early work to which Menges is alluding here, maintains that the world of things revealed through the senses is the primary datum of our experience, against those who would take the isolated ego as their starting point and foundation (FW 1, 10–11). “Being,” the most sensuous of all concepts, according to Herder, names the sheer givenness of the real. As such, he writes, it cannot be, but also does not need to be, proven: Being is indemonstrable … entirely uncertain€ – no not uncertain, also not uncertain within a demonstration:€but certain and yet not to be demonstrated. Being, as we have understood it, no one has denied:€the thought of doubt came only to over-learned philosophers, and they sought to prove it. (FW 1, 19)

In the Metacritique, Herder returns to this point, now asserting it in opposition to Kant’s critical philosophy. “Being is the ground of all knowledge” (Metacritique, 364), he insists, and he takes special issue with Kant’s reduction of all phenomena to the status of “appearance” (Erscheinung). “As a global concept for the objects of our sensuous perception,” he observes, “this word is unknown in our language, which leads rather, in the case of every sensuous given, not to seeming (Schein) but to being” (Metacritique, 346). The words with which we normally describe our experience, like “object” and “perception,” indicate things of which we become aware, whereas “with the word appearance … one thinks of something that is not an object, but a seeming (Schein), and makes the whole of experience (Erfahrung)€ – a significant word!€ – into a seeming,

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contrary to nature and language” (Metacritique, 346–7). Herder says further that if one pays attention to the original meaning of the Greek terms, “Phänomenon means, what appears; Noumenon, what understanding (nous) thinks.” Here, erscheinen clearly does not have the sense of a deceptive seeming, but only indicates, more neutrally, the appearing of a thing. Understanding then thinks “not behind and outside, but from (an) the phenomenon” (Metacritique, 469). A reader familiar with Being and Time is sure to be reminded, at this juncture, of Heidegger’s response to skepticism in that work, as well as of his explication of the term “phenomenon” (BT, ¶7a, ¶43a). Heidegger does not use the term “being” in the same way that Herder does, and he would not describe it as a “sensuous” concept. Nevertheless, he also claims that the existence of the “external world” cannot be, and does not need to be, proven, for it is presupposed along with our own being, which is always already wrapped up in the things with which we are concerned (BT, 249). Accordingly, in confrontation with both Kant and Husserl, Heidegger rejects the idea that we are ever confined to the sphere of consciousness and the objects constituted within it, to “phenomena” understood as how things seem to us as opposed to how they are in themselves. The “phenomena” appropriately studied by a phenomenology whose rallyÂ� ing cry is “back to the things themselves!” are not, as Husserl supposed, the intentional objects of consciousness. Rather, careful and free-sighted attention to the character of being in the world, Heidegger claims, reveals phenomena to be, as the Greek understanding of the term suggests, Â�entities. Appearing is then the shining forth or stepping into the light of what is, its becoming evident. “Seeming” is only a special mode of appearÂ�Â� ance, one in which something is taken to be what it is not; this concept cannot be applied to phenomena as a whole (BT, 49–55). A question that naturally arises, in response to both Herder and Heidegger on the issue of appearance, is whether their positions do not make an illegitimate assumption about the relation between our representations and things in themselves, the very assumption Kant undertook to challenge in The Critique of Pure Reason. Ulrike Zeuch criticizes Herder on this ground: Herder presupposes, without admitting it, that the world orients itself in accordance with our subjective representations. In fact, he goes so far as to conceal this presupposition. Kant, on the other hand, not only openly states that “we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them” but actually views this as a new idea consisting in the presupposition that “objects must conform to our knowledge.” (Zeuch 1998, 152)

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The contrast between Herder and Kant that Zeuch is highlighting here could be stated a little more precisely. Herder does not think we know much of anything a priori, and that is central to his dispute with Kant. He also frequently stresses the necessarily partial and anthropomorphic character of human representations. Still, he is emphatic in his rejection of idealism, and that is the main basis of Zeuch’s charge. Heidegger is more ambivalent, in Being and Time, about the issue of “idealism,” a point to which I will return, but he is equally emphatic in rejecting the view that sees appearances as representations of a subject which is itself represented as substantially cut off from the world. In part, Herder and Heidegger are simply challenging the idea that the sense of being in a world with things, reflected in our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking, involves a “presupposition.” Involvement with things within the world is too basic to be “presupposed,” they suggest, and to believe otherwise is to make a highly artificial move. But they also question, in various ways, the picture of the subject, in its relation to objects, that this move involves. In spite of his claim that “along with Dasein as Beingin-the-world, entities within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed” (BT, 251), Heidegger does not, in the end, endorse realism. That is primarily because he thinks “realism” leaves the notion of “reality” unanalyzed, and does not recognize the dependence of this notion upon a prior understanding of being (BT, 251). For Heidegger, it is only through such understanding, which€ involves projection of one sort or another, that things show up within the world. This sounds like idealism, because it makes the appearance of what we encounter within the world dependent upon our own existence, and upon projects and ideas that are sketched out in advance. Heidegger accepts “idealism,” defined in this way, but says that in that case Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant (BT, 251). He objects, on the other hand, to the position that grounds all being in a subject whose own being remains unanalyzed, claiming that “this idealism is no less naive in its methods than the most grossly militant realism” (BT, 252). In other words, Heidegger is complaining about theories that maintain the subjectÂ�relativity of what is perceived and understood, without investigating the nature of this “subject.” In Being and Time, Heidegger claims that Dasein, “the entity that I myself am,” is not a self-enclosed subject at all, but a “clearing” in which the truth of what is within the world is disclosed (BT, 171). It seems unlikely, though, that such a conclusion, based on phenomenological observations, would satisfy the idealist, who could surely object that Heidegger is either falsely reducing a metaphysical question about

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our relation to reality to a semantic one about what we mean by “being,” or simply begging the question. Herder’s argument against idealism has a further component, one based neither on the ordinary meaning of words nor on the intuitive force of experience. Is it not, he asks, the same nature in which I find myself and the object? (Metacritique, 389). If so, why should I imagine that I am inescapably separated from things? Kant’s transcendental idealism, Herder thinks, illegitimately posits precisely such a separation: We are there as parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself. (Metacritique, 508)

While Herder agrees with Locke and Condillac that words describe the relations of things to human beings, he does not reach the skeptical conclusions Nietzsche draws in his essay on truth. That is because Herder sees these relations as real ones. They are relations between two “pieces” of the same nature; they do not involve a transposition of elements from one sphere into a wholly foreign one. For Herder, the forces that build the things we apprehend are the same forces that build us, with all of our faculties. Besonnenheit is the reflective capacity that enables us to bring to word, and thus to the level of explicit awareness, the impressions of a living being embedded in a reality first registered through senses and affects. The latter are not vehicles of distortion, but, in Litt’s expression, the threads that bind us with the world (Litt 1930, 66). Through them, the world plays upon us, as it were; we are a Saitenspiel (Cognition, 339), a kind of stringed instrument that resounds in accordance with the way it is touched. The relationship between human cognition and reality is not intrinsically a relationship of falsification, because human beings do not project their character upon a world whose own constitution is alien to that character. They clarify a bit of the world, from a limited perspective, and they do so through language. The human drive for linguistic articulation, which is simultaneously a drive for understanding, seeks “from the vast whole of the universe to clear (entwölken) a part for oneself” (Metacritique, 509). People may be mistaken in their representations, of course. There are instances of seeming, as well as of embellishment, fantasy, and fiction. But there is no reason to think that what appears is all seeming, as there is no reason to think that human faculties of perception and understanding are by their very nature distorting media.

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The critical remarks Herder makes about the partial, culturally relative, and anthropocentric character of names do not arise, then, from a full-fledged subjectivism. They are directed against particular forms of fictionalization, and, more fundamentally, against the human tendency to mistake the limited perspective for the whole, and to fix in place what is constantly evolving. Herder’s limited skepticism about words actually has the same target as some of his complaints against Kant. Whether placed in the subject or the object, he thinks, categories claiming for themselves universal application and eternal validity are mistaken about the character of the human relation to reality. They attribute to the human power that invents these categories an autonomy from the shifting sands of embodied experience which it never truly possesses. One can then see how Herder would answer the following question, posed by Charles Taylor in “Theories of Meaning”: Is the expression which makes us human essentially a self-expression, in that we are mainly responding to our way of feeling/experiencing the world, and bringing this to expression? Or are we responding to the reality in which we are set, in which we are included of course, but which is not reducible to our experience of it? (Taylor 1985, 238)

For Herder, these alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Expression is indeed self-expression, but the “self” is intimately related to the world it experiences. Herder’s position might, in that case, be similar to the Romantic expressivist one which Taylor claims was grounded in pantheism (Taylor 1985, 238), but the term “pantheism” would then require some further analysis.4 To clarify the issue, it might be helpful to reflect on how Herder’s position would regard what Locke described as “secondary properties.” It would not reject the subject-dependence of a property such as color. It would accept that color emerges only through the medium of a particular organ, belonging to some living beings, organized in a particular way. It would argue, however, that this organ is a product of the same nature as the one it perceives. That same nature, after all, builds the organ and the things around it, and it is also present in the communication between them. Consequently, while the senses can be said to “translate” reality into the perspective of a given living being, there is no reason to describe this “carrying across” (the literal meaning of “translation”) as a process that falsifies or obscures the “real” properties of nature, rather than revealing them. 4

╇ I take up this point in the next chapter.

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It is because Herder sees the human subject as bound up with the reality it perceives and thinks that he can claim:€“the thing in itself means cognizable truth” which exists “in you, in me, as in all objects” (Metacritique, 599). The capacity to recognize and express this truth is, in turn, grounded in the human ability to establish a distance from the flood of instincts and impressions within which animals are wholly immersed. This separation from oneself and the world, which Herder describes as freedom, establishes a sphere within which human beings can mirror things, and mirror themselves to themselves (Language, 717). It might be that a position similar to this one lies behind Heidegger’s brand of anti-subjectivism as well. Heidegger also describes Dasein’s understanding of being as grounded in a self-relation, which he associates with freedom,5 and he defines Dasein as a clearing in which truth is unconcealed (BT, 171). The central theme of Heidegger’s later works, moreover, is the intrinsic relatedness of man and being. His understanding of this relatedness underlies his claim that language is a response to being€– “the house of being,” as he says in the Letter on Humanism€ – and it motivates his repeated engagement with Parmenides’ sentence, “knowing and being are the same.”6 I believe that these parallels point to a form of realism like that of Herder, one that even affirms a revised version of the idea that the mind is a mirror of nature. For his part, Herder, in drawing attention to the oddness of the view that human awareness is self-contained, and some kind of foreign element within reality, challenges the idealist assumption that realism is the position that makes the illegitimate presupposition. In addition, his emphasis on the dependence of all thought on the givenness of an experience which is, in practice, always limited and always already shaped by language, rejects the view that some one set of concepts provides the absolute measure of being, whether real or ideal. F r e e d om a n d or ig i n a l i t y What Herder fundamentally attacks, then, is the belief in a disembodied, eternally selfsame, and universal reason. It follows from his empiricist principles that reason cannot possess the kind of autonomy from the variable material circumstances of existence that would be required for it to fit the claims that some philosophers have made for it. Herder does, See BT, 32–3. Also On the Essence of Truth (Heidegger 1968a, 332–3); and The Essence of Human Freedom (Heidegger 2002, 205–6). 6 For one such discussion, see What is Called Thinking? (Heidegger 1968b, 249–52). 5

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on the other hand, accept a version of the idea that human beings possess a capacity for reason which distinguishes them from other animals, consisting, most basically, in the ability to step back from sensations and reflect upon them. In the sphere of concept-formation, this capacity allows human beings to identify striking or characteristic traits, and to mark these with signs. It is inseparable from the capacity for language, and Herder never discusses the faculty of reason without speaking of language. In relation to practical activity, the ability to step back and reflect manifests itself as a freedom from the determining force of instincts. It thereby enables human beings to subject their activity to a law, and that law is reason (LAH, 128, 153). As Marion Heinz says, “for Herder, man is distinguished from animals in that he does not react to the environment in a determined manner, but can reflect on the form and manner of his activity in relation to the world as a whole, and can therefore perform his activity freely, that is, autonomously (selbstbestimmt)” (Heinz 1996, 147). At the same time, Heinz adds:€“that human reason is set into the unity of the overall life of nature and its laws means … that it is essentially bound to the body and the senses, and shaped through this bond; this is the ground for the plurality and historicity of reason” (Heinz 1996, 148). The “freedom” of reason, therefore, does not rest upon the acknowledgement of any a priori universals, whether concepts or laws, to which reason subjects itself in either its practical or its theoretical deployment. If there are still some limited universals, roughly common concepts or ethical rules, these can only be the result of some shared patterns or structures among human beings in their engagement with the world. Reflection is the most fundamental shared capacity, the one that defines the species, and it is responsible for the fact that human beings are creatures of culture. It enables them to produce language and art, as well as bodies of scientific knowledge, to transmit these to future generations, and to rework what is inherited from past ones. In having this capacity, all human beings are rational, and all are cultured; Herder is at pains to reject the distinction between cultured and uncultured peoples drawn by some of his contemporaries (Ideas, 11–12, 340). The relativity of reason, on the other hand, is rooted in the relativity of language, which in turn is the product of experiences particular to a given history and geography. Because we come to reason only through language, and reason only within language (Ideas, 346), there can never be a reason that would be free of the variable and limiting conditions that apply to the formation of concepts. It might seem that this position rules out the capacity for independent reasoning altogether, since it suggests

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that human reason is limited by the concepts that are inherited through the acquisition of a given language, and so limited, largely, to what has been thought before by others. Herder does believe that the majority of people imitate the thoughts of others for precisely this reason, but with rare exceptions: It is with deep respect that I trace the inventions of the human spirit back to this simple principle of its recognizing and designating reason:€ for this is precisely the truly divine in man, his characteristic asset. All who use a learned language go about as if in a dream of reason; they think in the reason of others and are wise only by imitation:€for is someone who uses the art of a foreign artist himself an artist? But the one in whose soul his own thoughts are produced and shape a body for themselves, He, who does not see with the eyes alone but with the spirit and designates not with the tongue but with the soul, He, who is successful in eavesdropping on nature in her shrines of creation, who can spy out new signs of her activity and turn these to a human end through artfully contrived tools; he is the true man and, because he appears seldom, a God among men. He speaks and thousands echo him; he makes, and others play with what he has brought forth:€he was a man and perhaps centuries after him are children. How rare creators have been in the human species, how idly and easily one clings to that which one has, without being concerned with what we lack; the sight of the world and the history of peoples shows us in a hundred proofs; yes, the history of culture will itself show us this well enough. (Ideas, 357–8)

Original, genuinely autonomous, reasoning is partly associated, in this passage, with the capacity for finding new names for things. The suggestion is that while most people think entirely within the concepts they inherit, thereby imitating the thoughts of others, a few manage to listen and to see beyond the horizon of these concepts, and to give shape, in the language of new ideas, to what they have thought. Herder is not claiming that these “creators” simply transcend the determining force of language and enter into a perspectiveless beholding of things in themselves. He asserts, rather, that they introduce fresh perspectives into history, giving rise to new directions of thought and speech. On this point, too, it is worth comparing Herder with Nietzsche. The latter, in “Truth and Lies,” distinguishes between two types of intellect:€ (1) that which continues work on the “columbarium” of concepts, organizing and systematizing the residues of metaphors created in the past by others (PT, 85); and (2) the “free” intellect, which “with creative pleasure … throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstraction” (PT, 90). Nietzsche’s distinction in this case is not between imitative and free reason, as in the passage from Herder cited above. He is contrasting the “rational” and the “intuitive” man, where

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the former works with concepts and the latter with “intuitions.” “There exists no word for these intuitions,” Nietzsche says; “when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts … he does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition” (PT, 90). The intuitive man is an artist, and an ironist. Unconcerned with the regular patterns of pre-constituted “truths”€ – which are nothing other than worn-out metaphors, illusions whose source has been forgotten€– he playfully creates new combinations, “pairing the most alien things and separating the closest” (PT, 90). The partial parallel between Herder and Nietzsche here rests in their understanding of thought, freedom, and creativity. Language, for both, delivers to its speakers a set of pre-formed concepts, the remnants, hardened by tradition, of the creative activity of past thinkers, struggling to give form to their impressions. To think entirely within this set of concepts is to remain within the region of what has been thought€– except that the situation is worse than that, because, since one is not immediately confronted with the impressions that formed the basis for inherited concepts, there is the danger of lapsing into empty discourse. Freedom lies in the ability to experience the force of impressions with some measure, always limited, of independence from the conceptual cloaks through which they are delivered in language. These impressions are in themselves dark and dumb; they do not yet amount to thought. Creativity gives them form, which requires refashioning traditional concepts. The disanalogy between Herder and Nietzsche here is rooted, again, in the contrast between Nietzsche’s skepticism and Herder’s brand of perspectival realism. Nietzsche sees human beings as imposing themselves upon reality, and therefore sees the creative, intuitive man as an ironist, whereas Herder sees creative expression as revealing the real from a given perspective. One might note, though, that while most of Nietzsche’s mature works avoid making assertions about the character of reality, and need to do so in order to be consistent with his skepticism, earlier writings like The Birth of Tragedy suggest that human creative activity resembles the power of nature most closely, because it gives rise to novel combinations and beautiful illusions as nature herself does (Nietzsche 1967, 38, 44–5). For Herder, free reason imitates divinity, a concept intimately connected with, maybe even identical to, “nature” interpreted in a particular way, since it imitates those organic forces whose building activity organizes itself into the production of new forms of being.

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Nietzsche primarily has in mind literary and artistic creativity in his description of the “free intellect,” while Herder’s focus, in relation to creative genius, is broader. In the long passage cited above, he refers explicitly to the study of nature and to “artfully contrived tools.” The chapter of the Ideas in which the passage appears speaks generally of “sciences and arts” (Ideas, 356, 358), making a number of references to scientific and technological inventions. The language of the passage reveals that Herder thinks of scientific advancement quite differently than Nietzsche does. It attains, for Herder, true insight into the workings of nature, and does not consist in the production of useful fictions. Since human beings are products of nature, Herder thinks, there is no reason to suppose that their faculties of perception and cognition cannot in principle connect with the very same nature that is their origin, even if these faculties are prone, in practice, to partiality and error. Interestingly, in his notebooks from the early period in which “On Truth and Lies” is composed, Nietzsche experiments with a similar idea: Now man has evolved slowly, and knowledge is still evolving:€his picture of the world thus becomes ever more true and complete. Naturally it is only a clearer and clearer mirroring. But the mirror itself is nothing entirely foreign and apart from the nature of things. We observe an effort to make the mirror more and more adequate. The natural process is carried on by science. (PT, 37–8) The forms of the intellect have very gradually arisen out of the matter. It is plausible in itself that these forms are strictly adequate to the truth. For where is an apparatus which could invent something new supposed to have come from? (PT, 38–9)

We do not know why Nietzsche did not engage with this idea further in his later works, or why he rejected it as a possible answer to the question of the relation between human cognition and reality. No argument against it is given in Nietzsche’s writings, as far as I know, and it is no less compatible with Nietzsche’s preference for naturalism than is the skeptical position he eventually adopts, according to which the intellect’s anthropomorphic translations of reality are interpreted as fictions. In any case, this is precisely the position Herder endorses, with the result that he is neither an idealist nor a relativist about genuine science, which must be differentiated from the playing with empty signs that Herder sees as the hallmark of a good deal of metaphysics. Herder’s remarks on creativity in relation to science do not suggest that original ideas are only useful human constructs, or the products of a particular cultural perspective. His deeper form of cultural relativism applies to happiness

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and morality, not to scientific knowledge. He even grants that Europe is especially advanced in this respect (Ideas, 359), while emphasizing that its advancement is indebted to inventions and ideas that came to it from all over the world, so that Europeans are vain and foolish in believing that their enlightenment, art, and science sets them above all three continents (Ideas, 358). An extended analysis of Herder’s philosophy of natural science lies outside the scope of this book, and the topic has been in any case well covered by others (Nisbet 1970, Zammito 2002). But we can note here that Herder’s position on the knowledge of nature is continuous with his position on knowledge in general. No human power or procedure has direct and complete access to the heart of reality, and reason must work with external signs, not with the things themselves. What matters is that the signs be derived from, and constantly checked against, experience, and that they should not be the result of pure speculation, or of the application of principles alleged to be innately given. Herder’s position on literary and artistic invention is naturally somewhat different, as such invention deliberately produces fictions, engaging the faculty of imagination. This is not to say that imagination is wholly absent from science in Herder’s mind, and one must remember that he sees the distinctions between faculties as blurry at best. But questions of realism, and of truth, must take a different form in relation to art than they do in relation to science. Such questions are nonetheless still at play in Herder’s understanding of artistic genius. In this area as well, Herder’s position contrasts with Nietzsche’s in that Herder does not see art itself, even in the narrow sense, as the production of beautiful illusions, and he connects it with a kind of truth. Herder’s essay on Shakespeare (1773), whom he clearly regards as a paramount genius, offers a good example. Herder contrasts Shakespeare favorably with the theatrical productions of French classicism, which self-consciously model themselves on Greek drama. These productions, he suggests, although they may be beautifully executed, are ultimately unsatisfying because they have something false about them. They do not reflect the life and thought, the traditions and rhythms of their own society and age, nor can they genuinely repeat the Greeks. They may closely follow the rules of Greek drama, but “nothing in their inner essence is the same€– not action, manners, language, purpose, nothing” (SWA, 295/FW 2, 504). “So let us now suppose a nation,” Herder writes, that “did not care to ape the Greeks and settle for the mere walnut shell but preferred instead to invent its own drama” (SWA, 297/FW 2, 506). This nation would not develop its drama out of the chorus and the dithyramb, as the Greeks did, if it had no such poetic

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forms, and it would not impart the simplicity of these forms into its dramatic narrations. Instead: Where possible, it will create its drama out of its history, out of the spirit of the age, manners, opinions, language, national prejudices, traditions, and pastimes, even out of carnival plays and puppet plays (just as the noble Greeks did from the chorus). And what it creates will be drama if it achieves its dramatic purpose among this people. As the reader will see, we have arrived among the toto divisis ab orbe Britannis and their great Shakespeare. (SWA, 297/FW 2, 507)

The greatness of Shakespeare is due, then, to his having grown from the soil of his own age (FW 2, 508/SWA, 298), an age whose character he reveals through his poetic genius. “Truth” is still at issue here. French classicism, because it imitates the dramatic conventions of a past culture with which it has little in common, is not true to life. It does not properly reveal any real character, either that of France or that of the Greeks. Shakespeare, on the other hand, gives voice to the spirit of his age and his nation. He expresses the truth of their visions of history and humanity, adapting theatrical and literary forms that are meaningful to them. The case of philosophy is different from both science and art, and I conclude this chapter with a few words on the implications of Herder’s understanding of reason for the relation between philosophy and culture. This is not a subject on which Herder says much directly, but his reflections on philosophy, language, reason, and culture rule out the possibility that philosophical analysis could ever lift itself out of time and history so as to discover eternal and universal truths, either about ourselves or about the world around us. Philosophical reason must also proceed within language, which, we recall, is “the form of the sciences, not only in which, but also in accordance with which, thoughts take shape; where in all parts of literature thought sticks to the expression, and forms itself according to the latter” (FW 1, 556/PW, 48). The language that philosophers inherit, and in which they reason, is no less culturally and historically partial than is the language of everyday speech. Ideally, moreover, philosophy reflects on experience. Since these experiences are articulated variably in different languages, and in fact themselves vary from culture to culture, philosophers should not expect that an analysis of the vocabulary for a given subject in one language will produce universally valid results. The best they can hope to accomplish is some remarking of relatively common features or structures of human experience, a task that requires some empirical, and cross-cultural, knowledge.

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Much of the time, Herder suggests, philosophy does not follow this procedure. Rather, it abstracts away from experience altogether, inventing concepts increasingly empty of content, whose analysis and combination can only yield vanishingly thin results. What is required in relation to these concepts is not more construction, but dismantling, a “negative” rather than a positive philosophy: How much one would be able to sweep away here which we say, without in the process thinking anything, which we think falsely because we said it falsely, which we want to say without being able to think it! A man who thought this negative philosophy into existence would stand at the sphere of human cognition as though on a globe, and if he could not raise his head above these limits and look around into open air, at least he would dare to thrust forth his hand and would cry, “Here is emptiness and nothing!” … If I am not mistaken, in that case ideas would creep away out of our whole metaphysics, from ontology to natural theology, to which merely the words have given admission and a false citizenship€– and they are precisely the ideas about which there has been most conflict. Nothing is more prone to be quarreled about than what none of the parties understands, and unfortunately there is nothing that humanity is more inclined to than wanting to explain [to others] what it cannot explain to itself. (FW 1, 557–8/PW, 49)

Herder’s final judgement on a good deal of metaphysics, then, is that nonsense is nonsense€– in any language.

Ch apter 7

Religious diversity

Herder is a very strong proponent of religious toleration. The Letters for the Advancement of Humanity state his position on this point succinctly:€ “From childhood on nothing has been more abhorrent to me than the persecution or personal denigration of a person over his religion. Whom does this concern, but himself and God?” (LAH, 291). We might recall that Herder’s otherwise largely negative portrait of China in the Ideas nonetheless praises the nation for this one thing, religious toleration, claiming that, in China, “no subject is compelled to any religion, and no religion that does not attack the state is persecuted” (Ideas, 432). This is a virtue Herder attributes to Hindus as well, of whom he writes:€“Hindus do not persecute; they allow to each his religion, form of life, and Â�wisdom; why should one not allow the same to them and consider them to be, in the errors of their inherited tradition, at least good people who are deceived?” (Ideas, 455). As in the case of his position on morality, Herder’s reference to error in this context indicates that, whatever might be the basis for his advocacy of religious toleration, it cannot be such as to exclude the possibility of evaluative judgements, including cross-cultural ones, about the content of religious traditions. Barnard’s assertion that “Herder’s approach to religion, as to any other facet of human endeavour, is strictly relativist” (Barnard 1965, 96) would then at least need some clarification. I argued in the first chapter of this book that Herder’s brand of relativism is a subtle and nuanced one, which does not rule out in principle cross-cultural dialogue and criticism, and which accepts that there are facts about human beings as a species that can serve to ground some universal (but not a priori) prescriptions about how they should or should not be treated. In part, Herder’s evaluative judgements about religious traditions also concern ethics, and are oriented towards the same ideal of Humanität that regulates his criticisms of bad practices generally, across various societies. Herder privileges Christianity in this regard, because he 219

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understands its essential message as not particular to one society but as extending to all mankind, although he does not draw the conclusion that everyone in the world should therefore convert to this one religion. The Christianity he judges as being in some sense superior to all other religions is actually, as Wolfgang Förster notes, synonymous with Humanität:€“it arose as the religion of the poor, oppressed, and needy, of servants and slaves … against worldly hierarchy, it aims at human equality and justice” (Förster 1986, 377). Many of Herder’s writings articulate, in one fashion or another, this view of Christianity as equivalent to the ethical ideal of compassion and fraternity among all human beings. Yet Another Philosophy of History maintains that Christianity, according to the intention of its founder, is supposed to be “the religion of mankind, the instinct of love, and the bond that ties all nations into a brotherhood” (APH, 46–7). It is, Herder thinks, the first religion to be free of superstition and ceremony, and to transcend national boundaries: All previous religions of the best ages and peoples were still only narrow national religions, full of images and disguises, ceremonies and national customs, to which essential duties were always only attached and added€– in short, the religion of one people, one religion, one lawgiver, one age! [Christianity] is evidently the opposite:€the clearest philosophy of morals, the purest theory of truth and of duties, independent of all laws, all petty local constitutions; in short, if one likes, the most humanitarian (menschenliebendste) deism. (APH, 47)

Although Herder expresses hostility towards deism elsewhere in Yet Another Philosophy of History, in this passage he is taking issue with Voltaire’s negative assessment of Christianity in Philosophie de l’ histoire. The passage implies that, if deism is equivalent to a universal moral code and set of metaphysical teachings, then it is equivalent to Christianity, and Christianity has played a central role in its development.1 When making such claims, Herder is imagining Christianity as exclusively a moral code, stripped of ritual, ceremony, symbol, and arguably of all that makes it a particular religion. His claim that this abstracted moral code represents the true intentions of Christianity’s founder is doubtful, and one could probably make a similar, and equally doubtful, claim about any religion, after isolating (or fabricating) its allegedly universal moral content. Be that as it may, Herder’s endorsement of a rarefied Christianity exemplifies the universalist dimension of his vision, committed as it is to the principle of respect and concern for all human beings and all nations. ╇ On this point, see editors’ commentary, APH 873.

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The superiority of Christianity is reiterated in the Ideas, and is once again limited to a moral content that could be formulated and affirmed independently of commitment to this religion, or any other. In fact, Herder deplores many elements in the history of Christianity:€monastic life, ritualism, theological sophistry, superstition, blind faith, and otherworldliness. But he sees these elements as deviations from what he again claims to be the original teachings of Jesus, which he describes as “the truest Â�humanity” (Ideas, 708). By contrast, he has virtually nothing positive to say about Tibetan Buddhism (Ideas, 446f.), condemning in it much the same elements that he rejects in Christendom, but without making any of the redeeming distinctions he applies to Christianity. In the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, too, Christianity represents, for Herder, the finest expression of a moral ideal. It offers “the purest humanity in the purest manner,” the evils associated with it having arisen only from its misuse (LAH, 752). This is again a highly rarefied Christianity, explicitly described as a “moral institute” (LAH, 318), whose founder is supposed to have announced a kingdom embracing all nations, consisting not of external ceremonies but of inner perfection combined with the practice of justice and love (LAH, 317). Any ascription of relativism to Herder’s understanding of religion, therefore, would have to be compatible with his ideal of Humanität, and with his understanding of the relation between religion and Humanität. It is clear that Herder thinks many elements of religion, from superstitious beliefs to ascetic ways of life, are either false, or destructive to human flourishing, or both. He also thinks that some form of progress is possible within religion, as within morality and politics, and that such progress is visible in the transition from Judaism, which saw itself as the religion of one people, to Christianity, which seeks to deliver its message to all. Yet Herder does advocate religious toleration, and his position on this point appears to involve more than the pragmatic aim of avoiding unnecessary conflict. He seems to see religious plurality as a positive good to be preserved and respected, not as an unfortunate, and perhaps temporary, fact that must be accommodated in order to keep the peace. This pluralism about religion is not grounded primarily in an appeal to freedom of conscience, but is based on a particular theological position, as well as a substantive analysis of the relation between religion and culture. H e r de r’s c onc e p t of G od Herder’s mature views on the nature of God are presented in their most comprehensive and detailed form in God:€ Some Conversations, a work

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completed in 1787, between the second and the third part of the Ideas. Adopting the literary form of a dialogue, God undertakes to defend Spinoza against crude mischaracterizations of his position, particularly his alleged pantheism and fatalism, while acknowledging that Spinoza’s choice of terminology is sometimes questionable and misleading, and that his basic idea of substance is problematic. The positive position emerging from the dialogue is a broadly Spinozistic one,2 but modified through the influence of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. Given Herder’s criticisms of metaphysics, it might seem odd and inconsistent for him to engage in speculation to the extent that he does in God, where he seems to develop a complex metaphysical position himself. Herder’s critique of metaphysics does not reject the validity of any and all possible forms of metaphysical reasoning, however. It only raises specific objections to the procedures of reasoning that have been typical of metaphysical systems. Herder objects, first, to the fact that these are systems, aspiring to a completeness and finality which human thought can in truth never achieve. And he complains, second, that they work with confused abstractions whose source in experience has long since been lost. On the first point, regarding systems, Herder writes in Kalligone (1800) that his own “metacritique” of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “could only be pursued through contradictions, without binding these contradictions into a system:€for it wanted to free itself from the oppression of the categorical despotism, not, however, to replace this with another word-yoke” (FW 8, 646–7). His complaint against Kant’s transcendental philosophy is partly that this system pretends to bring philosophy to a close (FW 8, 645), attributing to its concepts a status they do not legitimately possess. Herder wants to challenge this status by presenting an alternative set of concepts, but without elevating these into a rival system making parallel pretensions to absoluteness. He also frequently complains about the muddled genesis of many metaphysical concepts. In Kalligone, he takes Kant to task on this point as well, complaining that the critical philosophy employs “substantivized images, thrown together from all sciences, metaphors coupled with one another, and, due to a complete poverty or a deliberate dissociation from all the data of experience, an eternal echo of the same word-sounds, the same foggy dreams” (FW 8, 644). A kind of Herder is intervening here in a famous controversy over Spinoza, and over the question of pantheism generally, which erupted in Germany in the 1780s. The controversy stemmed from Lessing’s having confessed to Jacobi that he agreed fully with Spinoza’s position. For summary descriptions of the history of the Pantheismusstreit, see Pätzold (2006, 159–60), and Burkhardt’s introduction to God:€Some Conversations, 28–30.

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metaphysics is possible, for Herder, but it must derive its content from the observation of nature, and it must be clear about the provenance of the concepts it employs. Consequently, metaphysics is no “pure” science proceeding through the operation of a putatively pure reason. When speculation attempts to operate through what it takes to be pure reason, Herder believes, it is in fact being naive about the language that actually guides and shapes its thought. It does not understand either that metaphysical concepts are originally derived from experience, or that they can be the products of a complex and tortuous history, resulting in phantasms corresponding to nothing real, not even to the general forms of our perceptions or of the things we perceive. Furthermore, because speculation can generate nothing of its own and needs to be grounded in observation, it should follow the natural sciences in their ongoing discoveries, instead of leading them through the projection of closed a priori principles or concepts:€“Physics and natural history are meanwhile progressing with mighty steps and, since speculative philosophy is only metaphysics, that is, an after-physics (Nachphysik), it will always be rewarding to the human mind if philosophy does not press on ahead of it as it has done for centuries and, unfortunately, was forced to” (God, 111/FW 4, 717). There is some debate about the adequacy of Herder’s understanding of scientific methodology itself, which has implications for the relation between science and metaphysics. Nisbet, exploring the strong influence of Francis Bacon on this facet of Herder’s thought, criticizes Herder’s philosophy of science for being too naively empirical, for espousing a rather unsophisticated form of induction, while failing to understand that scientific experiment does not furnish theories but only tests them (Nisbet 1967, 274). Zammito defends Herder on this score, arguing that the methodology of science “must in iterative process move from event to conjecture and back in a problematic inductive round€– a hermeneutic circle” (Zammito 2002, 322). Whatever may be the precise proper role of metaphysics within science, Herder’s view is that a speculative philosophy of nature must pay attention to the most recent findings of science, and that it goes astray if its concepts are not consonant with these findings. To the possible objection that since Descartes metaphysics has actually followed mathematics, the most precise and purest science, Herder responds that metaphysics has learned from mathematics precision, accuracy, and order, but that if its concepts are arbitrarily constructed or improperly abstracted, presentation in a mathematical form will not help, as all the proofs will be illusory. Indeed, he adds, the strict form can, in such a

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case, even be a hindrance to truth (God, 111–12/FW 4, 717). He gives the example of Spinoza’s concept of matter, claiming that it prompted “a host of other artificial definitions of attributes, modifications, space, body and so on, which the mathematical model could not remedy” (God, 112/FW 4, 717). Herder’s own debt to Spinoza, therefore, as well as to Leibniz, does not extend to their rationalist methodology, which he firmly rejects. If he enthusiastically accepts elements of their picture of reality nonetheless, it is because he thinks, rightly or wrongly, that these correspond best to what may be concluded from the latest and most convincing science of his day. These points are crucial to understanding God:€ Some Conversations, which is not intended as a work of physics, but of metaphysics. Given Herder’s understanding of the latter discipline, the speculative reflections he offers in God are not meant to dictate to natural scientists what their view of reality ought to be, and he is not trying to develop a set of concepts that will be useful or productive for science. Instead, he is presenting a hypothesis about the character of the really real€– the traditional subject matter of metaphysics€– abstracting from the observations of natural science, in accordance with his own empirical principles. God is also, of course, a work of natural theology. The ultimate ground and explanation of reality, which Herder defines as force or power, Kraft, is not merely, for him, an indication of God, but is God. Herder’s metaphysics is therefore coterminous with his theology; his theory of being and his theory of God are not merely intimately related, but identical. The question of pantheism, central to the dialogue in its qualified defense of Spinoza, naturally arises in relation to this equation of being and God. Frederick Burkhardt, in his introduction to the English translation of the dialogue, describes Herder’s position as a “dynamic panentheism” (God, 40), where God is seen as “immanent in the world, and manifesting Himself in a system of interacting organic forces” (God, 47). Herder is, it is true, careful not to identify the “world” with God, and if that is what “pantheism” means, then a term like “panentheism,” which pictures God as “in” the world but separate from it, might be more appropriate. However, the spatial metaphor on which the concept of panentheism relies is just that€– a metaphor. The relation Herder posits between the world and God is not one of spatial separation or nearness; it is not spatial at all, and cannot be literally described in spatial vocabulary. At the same time, it is fair to say that, if pantheism is supposed to indicate a position according to which God is the sum of visible objects, or a substance out of which

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they are composed, that is a position Herder refuses. But then it is not clear who, if anyone, represents it. Herder’s claim in God is that Spinoza, at least, does not. Since Herder develops his own theological views, in this dialogue, through a confrontation with what he claims are false charges against Spinoza, examining his apologetic, but also revisionary, engagement with these charges helps in understanding his positive theses. Paramount among the slanders directed at Spinoza, Herder proposes, are the accusations of pantheism and atheism. Theophron, the character in God whose voice most closely resembles Herder’s, asks how atheism and pantheism could be possible in one and the same system, since “the pantheist has always a God, although he is mistaken about His nature,” while “the atheist, who absolutely denies God, can be neither a pantheist nor a polytheist” (God, 80–1/FW 4, 686). At the beginning of the second conversation, Philolaus, another participant in the dialogue, confesses that after looking at the Ethics, he can see that the accusation of atheism against Spinoza is completely unfounded: It is plain on every page that he is no atheist. For him the idea of God is the first and last, yes, I might even say the only idea of all, for on it he bases knowledge of the world and of nature, consciousness of self and of all things around him, his ethics and his politics. (God, 95/FW 4, 702)

This might seem to be a rather disingenuous argument, as surely Herder knows that Spinoza’s widespread use of the term “God” in the Ethics is not in dispute. The question is whether Spinoza’s definition of this term, his equation of it with “nature” understood as substance, amounts to a denial of the existence of God. The question, that is, is whether what Spinoza calls “God” genuinely possesses the attributes that are essential to the concept, and that make the debate between atheists and believers a meaningful one. But Philolaus’ observation regarding the obviousness of Spinoza’s acceptance of the existence of God is only a starting point for Herder’s discussion, and the majority of the second conversation is devoted to an examination of Spinoza’s idea of God, the central point at issue in the debate over pantheism. Theophron maintains that it is important, in this regard, not to be misled by the terms “substance” and “modifications.” He explains to Philolaus that by “substance,” Spinoza means “a thing which is self-dependent, which has the cause of its existence in itself,” and that Spinoza meant only to say that God is “the highest and only substance” in the sense that all else depends upon God (God, 96/FW 4, 703). The word “modifications,” he grants, “offends us and will therefore never win

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a place in our philosophy” (God, 97/FW 4, 703). What Spinoza means by this “drastic expression,” though, is that everything in the world is maintained by divine power, and derives its existence from that power alone. Things as “modifications” are therefore “appearances of divine powers (Erscheinungen göttlicher Kräfte), each modified according to the place, the time and the organs in, and with which, they appear” (God, 97/FW 4, 703). Theophron argues further that Spinoza’s formulation is at least better than the notion of “occasional causes” used by “the Cartesians,” and that Leibniz’s hypothesis of the pre-established harmony of all things, while sounding more pleasant, also has its attendant difficulties (God, 97/ FW 4, 704). There is no heresy in any of these expressions, he concludes, adding: One is merely more awkward than another, and at bottom we understand equally little by any of them. We do not know what power (Kraft) is, or how power works. Still less do we know how the Divine Power has produced anything, and how it imparts itself to everything according to its nature. (God, 97/FW 4, 704)

These statements are ostensibly directed towards the varying metaphysical formulations used by post-Cartesian rationalist philosophers, but they also point towards Herder’s own interpretation of nature, and God, as Kraft, and therefore to his critical revision of Spinoza’s idea of substance. That revision takes its point of departure especially from another of the charges laid against Spinoza, and from the item of his philosophy which many of Herder’s contemporaries found most shocking of all:€namely, the assertion that “extension” is an attribute of God or nature. Such an assertion seems to ascribe corporeality to God, leaving the impression that God is a material substance out of which finite things are composed. Theophron claims that Spinoza’s identification of matter with substance was “the Cartesian error from which the philosopher could not free himself.” Spinoza rightly rejected Descartes’s dualism, his “sharp distinction between matter and spirit,” but he could not find a “unifying intermediate conception.” The reason is precisely that Spinoza took matter to be extension, and then, like Descartes before him, could not find any commonality between it and thought (God, 101/FW 4, 707). Theophron attributes this error to the immature stage of natural science at the time Spinoza was writing: Truth quietly marches on. Spinoza’s times were the childhood of natural science, without which metaphysics only builds castles in the air or gropes about in the dark. The more corporeal matter was physically investigated, the more active or interactive forces were discovered in it, and the empty concept of extension was abandoned. (God, 103/FW 4, 708–9)

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It is not at all clear what Herder himself means by Kraft or force, especially since he admits the concept is essentially indefinable. Nisbet suggests that “words such as animism, pananimism, panvitalism, panÂ� psychism, Â�panspiritualism, panlogism, hylozoism and the like “all conÂ� vey something of Herder’s use of the complex of ideas associated with Kraft” (Nisbet 1970,€11). Unfortunately, these terms are themselves rather vague and problematic, and some of their connotations may even obscure rather than clarify Herder’s intention. Herder is not maintaining that all of nature is somehow self-aware, as terms like “pananimism, panpsychism, and panspiritualism” imply. Nor is he claiming that all of nature has a will, or is rationally self-directed, as the word “panlogism” might suggest. He is not trying to reduce matter to mind, after all; he is looking for a third term that would be a common source for both, and that is what the concept of Kraft is supposed to represent. Although Herder insists that the intrinsic character of Kraft is unknowable, he does associate the term with a sense that all of nature is active rather than inert, and in this sense “alive.” “All that we call matter is thus more or less imbued with life,” Theophron says, for “it is a realm of active forces which form a whole” (God, 172/FW 4, 774). The position proposed here is a kind of “panvitalism,” in that case, but the concept of vita, life, being employed as a metaphysical principle here is synonymous with, and admittedly no more perspicuous than, the concepts of force and activity. The goal, for Herder, is to dissolve the problem, posed by dualism, of how interaction is possible between substances as radically unlike as mind and matter. Since God is supposed to have the properties of mind€– including activity and thought€– this problem is simultaneously a theological problem, and Theophron argues that the concept of matter as force puts the question to rest: there is an end to all the objectionable expressions of how God, according to this or that system, may work on and through dead matter. It is not dead, but lives. For in it and conforming to its outer and inner organs, a thousand living, manifold forces are at work. The more we learn about matter, the more forces we discover in it, so that the empty conception of a dead extension completely disappears. (God, 105/FW 4, 710–11)

The words “dead” and “living” in these sentences do not coincide with a distinction between the conscious and the non-conscious; nor does Herder mean to collapse every kind of distinction between the animate and the inanimate. His claim is that the whole of nature is describable in terms of dynamic forces, and that both mind and matter are expressions of these forces, so that there is no question about how mind can act on matter.

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Mind and matter are not separate substances with different properties; these categories correspond only to different degrees and types of organization of the forces that build themselves into various forms within the whole of reality. Herder evolves this metaphysics by combining Spinoza’s monism with Leibniz’s more dynamic understanding of the constituents of reality, under the influence of some contemporary developments in the biological sciences.3 As a solution to the mind–matter problem, Herder’s thesis may not seem to offer very much. It is subject to the same basic objection as is Spinoza’s monism:€ the character of the single underlying metaphysical principle remains obscure, with the result that the picture being proposed can do little explanatory work. As noted before, Herder himself acknowledges, in “On Cognition and Sensation,” that the concept of Kraft cannot be explicated (Cognition, 377). This is a point on which he expands in the dialogue on God: We do not know what force is, nor how it works. We only see its activity as spectators, and hence construct analogous judgments for ourselves. We can never demonstrate the general laws about it, not even those we find best confirmed. What should we know more intimately than the force which thinks and works within ourselves? However, we know it as little as we know every other force external to us. (God, 154/FW 4, 757)

“We have no senses that can look into the nature of things,” Theophron says a little later in the dialogue; “we stand outside and must observe” (God, 176/FW 4, 778). The idea that the inner character of the real consists in force is, therefore, a hypothesis, based on the observation of what are interpreted as the effects of force: namely, the motions and interÂ� actions that are perceptible, and measurable, in the natural world. Herder maintains that these motions and interactions, as observed within the natural sciences, legitimate the hypothesis that reality is Â�ultimately Â�single, and that it is better conceived as forces of different types and complexity than as extension and thought. This hypothesis is being presented as a Nachphysik, an “after-physics.” It offers no solution to any scientific question, and is not meant to do so. As a competitor within the discipline of metaphysics, it is asserted as being more consistent with the findings of natural science, but, within the framework of Herder’s empiricist epistemology, the idea of an invisible force can be nothing more than a vague idea, drawn by analogy and extension from what we can perceive in some fashion. 3

╇ For an account of some of these influences, see Zammito (2002, 232–4, 316–19).

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God, within this metaphysical picture, is conceived as the “primal force of all forces” (Urkraft aller Kräfte) (God, 710/FW 4, 710), who “reveals Himself in an infinite number of forces in an infinite number of ways” (God, 103/FW 4, 709). God is here being identified with “nature,” but only if nature is understood as force itself, not as the collection of things that are the “effects” of this force. On this picture, it can still be maintained that God is a kind of creator, and that individual things are his creatures, not identical to him in their definition or their properties. But God is not here a separate entity, making the world in his image according to a set of ideas. That description will have to be interpreted as an anthropomorphic one, useful enough as an analogy, but also potentially misleading if taken too literally. Theophron even rejects Lessing’s attempt to imagine God as a “higher force” responsible for all the other forces of nature, claiming instead that God is “existence” (Dasein), not a higher power, but the “ground and essence (Inbegriff ) of all forces” (God, 140/FW 4, 743). Since the inner character of force is itself unknown, the nature of God, as existence, also remains unknown. There can be no question of providing a “literally” true account of God, for any such account would have to be drawn from the properties of individual things, and would not properly apply to the primary force. Herder stresses this point by citing, in the dialogue, a number of poetic passages speaking of the indescribability of God (God, 113–14/FW 4, 719–20). Yet the concept of God as force is still meaningful; Herder uses it to criticize other conceptions, and particularly ones that he argues are anthropomorphic. Even if we do not understand the essential being of force, to say that God is not an entity separate from the world, but is the power underlying and informing the world, is still to say something that rules out a number of rival ideas. Theophron is similarly wary of the use of images, particularly anthropomorphic ones, to describe the relation between God and the world, but here, too, he suggests that some images are nonetheless better than others. For instance, he praises the expression “fulgurations,” once used by Leibniz, “which was based on the beautiful image of the sun’s rays,” though he goes on to complain that this image was taken up in an absurd manner by another author (God, 156/FW 4, 758–9). Regarding the image of God as the “world-soul,” he is likewise cautious:€ “It is a human image, and if it is used prudently a great deal concerning the inherently indwelling power of God can be illustrated clearly by means of it. Nevertheless, it remains an image, which, without the greatest care, immediately misleads one” (God, 157/FW 4, 759). The term Theophron himself favors for God’s activity in relation to the world is “expression”

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(Ausdruck). He claims that this was also Spinoza’s favorite term, and that the latter never speaks of “emanation,” but only very broadly of a form of production (Hervorbringung) whose character remains unclarified (God, 156/FW 4, 758). “Expression” is, according to Theophron, the best of the various symbols one might use to imagine the relation between God and individual things, and better than the misleading Spinozistic term “modification” (God, 108/FW 4, 713), but it still remains a symbol. In the end, he suggests, it is better not to use any images at all in speaking of God (God, 156/FW 4, 759). Thus the dialogue moves between a cautious appreciation of the value of symbolic theology, as necessary and helpful at times, while continually reverting to negative theology to define and limit the status of these symbols, to stress the importance of remembering that they are merely symbols, and may easily mislead. “The endless has no image, much less the absolutely infinite and eternal one,” Theophron says, citing part of a poem by Haller, “a philosophical poet,” and warning, further, that the infinity of God should not be pictured in terms of “an endless space and an endless time, not to mention images of the indivisible, eternal being” (God, 158–9/FW 4, 762). In that case, God cannot simply be identified with the world, which is itself spatio-temporal (God, 107/FW 4, 713). The world is not God and God is not the world, says Philolaus, remarking, though, that one comes no further with the notion of an extra- or supra-mundane God (God, 144/FW 4, 747). The idea of the world as an “expression” of God may suggest the image of God as a kind of artist, especially given Herder’s notion of the poet as an imitator of divinity. But Theophron comments that God “did not sit like a brooding artist, who wracked his brains, planned, compared, rejected and chose” (God, 125/FW 4, 729). This assertion is made in a context where Theophron is defending Spinoza’s idea that the world flows of necessity from the nature of the divine substance, which might seem to deny to God freedom and intelligence. Theophron claims that the attribution of choice and deliberation to God is actually incompatible with divine perfection. Spinoza rejected the ascription of purposes to the one substance because he saw these as “the wishes and arbitrary choices which the artist makes yet need not have made” (God, 124/FW 4, 728–9). In reality, “the Most Wise did not choose, for no choice was necessary where no antecedent, hesitating deliberation was needed” (God, 125/FW 4, 730). Leibniz understood this when he spoke€ – more prudently than Spinoza€ – of God acting from “moral necessity.” Only, in defending himself against charges of fatalism because of a misunderstanding of this kind of necessity, he had to employ “such

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anthropomorphisms as ‘plan,’ ‘choice,’ ‘fitness’ and so on” (God, 128/FW 4, 732). Reflecting Herder’s ideal of moral perfection, Theophron argues that the highest freedom consists not in making choices, but in acting out of a kind of “inner necessity … by means of perfect conceptions” (God, 138/FW 4, 742). That is what God does in producing the world, and it is the ideal to which we should aspire in our own activity. The equation of God with existence, interpreted, in turn, as force, does not constitute an a priori argument for the existence of God, nor is it a piece of semantic sophistry that simply says, whatever is the fundamental nature of existence, that is God. The equation depends, rather, on the veracity, which can only be established a posteriori, of certain theses about existence. “Nature,” that is, must be of a certain character in order for the term to be interchangeable with “God.” Herder’s conclusion about Spinoza’s understanding of “nature” is that it does possess this character. A Nietzschean conception of nature as consisting of multiple, chaotic, conflicting forces would not qualify; nor would the idea of nature posited by a reductive physicalist monism. If existence, or nature, turned out to be not rational, well-ordered, and harmonious, as Herder believes it to be (see God, 176–7/FW 4, 778), the underlying power “behind” the world could not be identified as divine. If history did not display some kind of justice and progress, giving grounds for a belief that the lives lived within it have not been wasted, and that the whole is tending somewhere, then in this domain, too, one could not identify the natural processes of learning and advancement within history as divine. In other words, Herder’s Spinozistic conception of God rests on some strong theses about the nature of nature, ones that have been the subject of ongoing debate within natural theology. On the basis of such theses, Herder presents variants of classical a posteriori arguments for the existence of God, ones that begin with empirical premises about the nature of the world, and move from these to conclusions about the necessity for supposing a self-subsistent, rational, and benevolent cause or author of the world. That is the shape of the argument Herder sketches in passages like the following: For even if one does not take into consideration the source of the forces which think, act and work, the tremendous number of which the transcendental philosopher, that is, one who overreaches himself, can never deny to be present in our world, yet the manner alone in which all these forces work according to their nature, is for me proof enough of God, that is, of an essential ground of inner truth, harmony, goodness and perfection which includes its existence in itself. (God, 149/FW 4, 752)

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Here Herder is offering, through Theophron, versions of a teleological and a cosmological argument, claiming, first, that the activity and order of the natural world point to a ground that is good and harmonious, and, second, that this ground must be self-caused, containing the explanation for its existence within itself. Theophron also argues that the processes of thought which produce knowledge, including geometrical and mathematical reasoning, operate according to a “divine” law, showing “that there is a mathematical reason in the world” (God, 150/FW 4, 753). None of these arguments are meant to establish the existence of hidden final causes€– particular divine purposes that would substitute for properly scientific explanations. Theophron explicitly denigrates that kind of teleological account, and the proofs of God derived from it: I hope that others will courageously follow on the road which Spinoza opened up … namely to develop exact, pure natural laws without becoming concerned in so doing with the particular purposes of God. He who could show me the natural laws by which the phenomena of our so-called dead and living creation, such as salts, plants, animals, and men arose according to inner necessity and union of active forces in such and no other organs, would have encouraged the most wonderful admiration, love and worship of God, far more than he who preaches to me from the chamber of divine council that we have feet in order to walk, the eye in order to see and so on, which secret discoveries no one ever doubted. (God, 133/FW 4, 737)

Herder postulates a kind of natural theology that will not in any way compete with science, but will instead be supported by the findings of science in its understanding of God. This supposes that science will discover a reality whose laws and processes are of a certain sort€ – well-ordered and rational€– producing harmonious systems in nature, and at least the possibility of moral progress for humanity. Given Herder’s monistic conception of God, the line of theological reasoning here does not proceed from theses about the character of the world to the hypothesis of an extramundane personal entity who created that world. It posits a power that is nature itself, while making claims about the character of this power that legitimate its being called “God.” Herder does not think, however, that a metaphysics grounded in the observation of nature can produce proofs for all of the beliefs central to religion, such as belief in an afterlife. In God, Theophron does argue that observation reveals a nature which perpetually renews and rejuvenates itself, and that “there is no death in creation, but metamorphosis” (God, 190/FW 4, 792). But this observed metamorphosis involves the perpetual reproduction of forms, and the creation of new ones, through the birth

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and death of individuals. The nature we see, far from preserving individual lives, demands the constant perishing of this life in the course of its own continuation. Temporal phenomena, Theophron says, are like waves of a river; their appearance reveals the eternal in a temporary form. Their disappearance, he advises, should therefore give no cause for fear (God, 186/ FW 4, 788). This statement supposes, rather doubtfully, that the fear one feels in the face of death is a fear of general annihilation, and so could be assuaged by the self-identification, at least in thought, with a nature which conserves every force and only “changes its organic garb” (God, 190/FW 4, 792). The argument Theophron presents in this instance is not for any kind of personal immortality, for the nature we see does not preserve individuals; it even requires their destruction. In the Ideas, on the other hand, Herder recognizes that belief in immortality has always been bound to religion, and is almost inseparable from the concept of God (Ideas, 163). He argues that the human sense of incompleteness, and our constant striving for a perfection not attained on earth, gives grounds for hope and faith (Glaube) in continuing progress after death, and that an analogy with the course of nature supports such a hope (Ideas, 164–5). Kant criticizes this argument in his review of the first part of the Ideas, objecting that nature only preserves the species while allowing individuals to be destroyed (AA 8, 53), and accusing Herder of being, in spite of his denials, a metaphysician, and a dogmatic one at that (AA 8, 54). But Kant’s criticism misunderstands Herder’s argument, which is not that nature gives evidence for the preservation of the individual. It is that from analogy with the course of nature, and through our natural striving for perfection, we may gather hopes for an afterlife. This argument relies on Herder’s sense that our relation to nature is such that we can legitimately believe that our profoundest drives and wishes, being expressions of the forces that build all things, may point to something true, and that visible nature gives us hints and indications of the aspects of reality that we cannot see. The notion of force at play in this view does indeed involve metaphysical speculation. Herder is formulating a hypothesis about the real on the basis of observation, thus engaging in “afterphysics.” He explicitly denies the possibility of any metaphysical proof of the immortality of the soul, however, and acknowledges that physics knows no such simple substance as the soul is supposed to be (Ideas, 164). Herder’s understanding of the relation between human beings and the nature of which they are expressions also underlies his view that God is not known exclusively through thought, but also through other dimensions of existence. While Herder does maintain that God, as the

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rationality of nature, reveals Himself in thought, he also has Theano, the female participant in the dialogue on God, say:€“through ideas we apprehend Him only as an idea, through words only as a word, but through observations of nature, through the use of our powers, through the enjoyment of life, we enjoy Him as a real Existence full of force and life” (God, 163/FW 4, 765). The dialogue is, moreover, punctuated by hymns and other poetic compositions, designed to “refresh” the participants who, in their rational discussions, “have often had to use the name of God as a mere symbol” (God, 147/FW 4, 750). The items of poetry are meant to stir the emotions, as opposed to merely exercising the intellect. Their employment also demonstrates that Herder is not averse to using images to evoke God, or to evoke the world that itself evokes God, offering glimpses of the divine through its forests and sky, its seashores, storms, and meadows (God, 149/FW 4, 751–2). For Herder, God is known, obscurely, through the world, and this is a knowledge to which one may be lifted by means of images and other poetic locutions, which have the capacity to reflect the reflections of God within the world in an especially powerful way. In order to be effective, such locutions have to be meaningful to their audience. This requires, Herder often suggests, that they be spoken in the vernacular, in a familiar language expressing lively local concerns. The dialogue on God shows that Herder is entirely willing to engage in argumentative speculations about God, and that he does not shrink from positing theses that stake out a definite position among various theological alternatives. At the same time, Herder’s views about how God reveals himself to human beings, and how they may best come to know him, entail an affirmation of at least some degree of religious pluralism. This affirmation is then not based entirely on a pragmatic concern for social stability, or a moral concern with reducing aggression and violence, but equally on a substantive theological position regarding the nature of religious discourse. H e r de r’s ph i l o s oph y of r e l ig ion The dialogue on God consists largely of constructive and critical metaphysical speculation about the nature of divinity. Metaphysics is not religion, however, and Herder does not see the latter as reducible to a set of beliefs that could be isolated and placed on the table for discussion in a universally accessible vocabulary. Religion is, for Herder, the medium through which human beings relate to the divine, and this relation is unlike the relation between scientific knowledge and its objects. Religions

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do not, that is to say, relate to God, or to the holy, as to an object to be known. Their approach to their subject is an indirect one, enacted in ritual practice and expressed in non-literal language, through the evocative power of metaphors, analogies, symbols, and myths. These expressions, like all poetry, will be rooted in, and derive their meaningfulness from, the specific forms of life of a given people. That is why Herder’s analysis of “the spirit of Hebrew poesy” stresses the fact that the language of this religion, the Hebrew religion, is the language of a people. The force of its symbolic expression is granted by the allusive reference it makes to the experiences of this people€– to, for instance, significant elements within the world of their concerns. “In the tents of shepherds,” Herder writes, “God is a shepherd, in the circle of a family, a Father” (Hebrew Poetry, 968). (In some cultures, also a mother, we might add.) The capacity of religious language to stir and move, to elevate the mind, the heart, the spirit towards that which cannot be literally described rests upon the derivation of its metaphors from things, persons, relations, and activities that hold a meaningful place in the lives of a community. Herder’s special praise for the language and stories of the Hebrew bible also rests on his appreciation of the poetry of ancient peoples in particular, because of its immediacy and simplicity, its closeness to life and corresponding capacity to evoke powerful sentiments and impressions: Why do the simple, moving poetic fables of ancient or unlearned peoples always stir us more than these mathematical-physical and metaphysical exactitudes? Is it not because those peoples poetized in lively scenes, because they thought of everything, God himself, as of the same form, narrowed the world to a house, and animated everything in it with hatred and love. (Hebrew Poetry, 749–50)

The warnings against anthropomorphic representations of God issued by Theophron in God have to be tempered, then, by this sense of the value of simple and homely images, ones that do represent God and the world in highly anthropomorphic terms. The latter should not be taken literally, Herder believes, and perhaps his own age has even outgrown them, but this development is accompanied by a loss and one should not be too quick to dismiss a poetic language that speaks not to the understanding but to the affects (Hebrew Poetry, 686). Furthermore, ancient religious texts, like all texts, must be read in context, as the products of a given culture where people lived and thought in a certain manner. In line with this view, Herder proposes that the Old Testament be read as a work of literature, with each image and element being interpreted in the context of the whole (Hebrew Poetry, 965–6), employing an imaginative sympathy

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that tries to feel its way into the life of shepherds dwelling in this region at this time (Hebrew Poetry, 682). It is a time at which history is still saga, and sagas€ – legends and myths€– are invented, and can only be invented, out of familiar features in the life and experience of a people. “Therefore the legends that we have of paradise, the fathers, the oldest stories of our race, are the legends of shepherds; they preserve as much as the shepherd could grasp and retain within his circle, as much as twined itself around his manner of thinking and way of life (Denkart und Lebensweise)” (Hebrew Poetry, 989). This is to be expected, given that these stories are the products of imagination, and imagination can only work with the elements that are given to people. Herder offers the example, in the Ideas, of the mythology of Greenlanders, constructing a dialogue between a European and a native inhabitant of Greenland (Ideas, 295–8). The dialogue is meant to demonstrate that, while the mythology of native Greenlanders may seem hopelessly naive and childish to Europeans, the latter need to understand that it is constructed from the elements of this people’s life and landscape, as is the mythology of all peoples. Because of this derivation, it is profoundly meaningful to them, in a way that an outsider may find it difficult to appreciate. “Every nation is most deeply impressed by its manner of representation because it is its own, bound up with its heaven and its earth, sprung from its manner of life, inherited from its fathers and forefathers. That by which a foreigner is astonished, they believe they conceive most clearly:€about that at which he laughs, they are the most highly serious” (Ideas 298). Herder draws attention to the way in which not only stories, but the whole range of religious customs and practices, in all their detail and color, shape from an early age those who grow up with them, producing a religious sensibility that is then not easily reshaped by exposure to foreign doctrines. Of Indians, he writes: That the Indian does not follow every foreigner in doctrines and customs is clearly due to the fact that the arrangements instituted by Brahmans have already so entirely captured his soul, his life, that there is no place left for others. Hence so many customs and festivals, so many gods and tales, so many holy places and virtuous works, engaging the whole faculty of imagination and reminding the Indian of what he is in almost every moment of his life. All European institutions have remained only superficial in comparison with this direction of the soul, which, I think, can last as long as there is an Indian. (Ideas, 453)

Herder also praises the refined idea of God among Brahmins, commends Indian society for its religious toleration, and criticizes its oppressive

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practices (Ideas, 454–5). These judgements reveal the various dimensions of Herder’s position on religion, which discriminates between higher and lower conceptions of God, as well as between morally better and worse social arrangements and beliefs, while respecting the culturally embedded symbols and stories that work upon the imagination and sentiments of individuals. Herder knows that forms of life change, that people are relocated and dislocated, that religions travel and spread, and that a state can be comprised of more than one religious community. He is a strong advocate of religious toleration within states, as well as between them. However, his support for political toleration of internal religious diversity is not only accompanied by, but actually grounded in, his belief that the proper language of religion is national, in a cultural rather than political sense. “The language in which we love, pray and dream,” he writes in “On National Religions,” “that is our ownmost, our language of religion,” and no other should be imposed upon people (Adrastea, FW 10, 609). Herder’s understanding of religion as culturally embedded would need to be supplemented by a more complex analysis of how religious traditions adapt themselves to various cultures. Religion is a part of culture, and because Herder’s reflections on both religion and culture tend to be guided by critical concerns about colonialism, imperialism, missionary excess, and the like, he always focuses much more on the integrity of existing communities than on their interactive evolution. As a result, one does not find in Herder’s writings an adequately developed account of the ways in which elements from varying religious traditions mix, hybridize, and fuse, forming new combinations and groupings. Having said this, Herder’s analysis of religious language and custom does locate an important substantive ground in favor of pluralism:€the recognition that all religions are rooted in stories and symbols, and that these reflect the attempts of different peoples to gesture, through the cultural expressions available to them, towards a divinity that cannot be literally represented. This view does not rule out every form of assessment and revision in principle, but it does entail that belief in a single “correct” religion is misplaced, amounting to something like a category mistake. There is also, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, a universalist dimension to Herder’s understanding of religion, as is revealed in his privileging of what he considers to be the essential message of Christianity. Herder is keenly aware of the evils committed in the name of Christianity, but he sees these as corruptions of the Christian ideal. They are totally opposed to the spirit of Christianity, he believes, and

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so are caused not by that spirit but by its enemies:€by bigotry, prejudice, hatred, greed, and the machinations of various elites, including priestly ones, with an interest in obfuscating the truth and maintaining their own power. Of the founder of Christianity, on the other hand, Herder says, in the Letters:€“He announced the coming of a kingdom to which all nations belong, which flourishes not in outward ceremonies, but in practice of spirit, in perfection of disposition, in purity of heart, in observation of the strictest justice and a forgiving love among human beings” (LAH,€317). Herder sees religion as a central vehicle in the moral education of mankind, and he sees the fundamental content of Christianity as consisting not in any set of ritual observances or doctrines, but in the promotion of an ethically perfect way of being. On this point, Herder is not a pluralist, for the aspect of religion he identifies with a basic ethical ideal is single and universal. This is the aspect he has in mind when he writes, in Of Religion, Doctrines, and Customs:€“Doctrines divide and embitter; religion unites:€for in the hearts of all people it is only one” (FW 9.1, 727). Religion, so understood, involves being true to one’s conscience in a spirit of self-sacrificing love. That is Herder’s definition of Christianity, but he adds:€“If the name ‘Christianity’ disappears, this faith must be called the ‘religion of man’ (Religion der Menschheit)” (FW 9.1, 785). The propositional content of this faith may seem rather slim. However, the subject here is religion, not philosophy or jurisprudence. Religion, in Herder’s conception of it, does not aim primarily to utter true statements; it seeks to accomplish a reformation of the whole person. The purpose of religion, Herder believes, is to actualize a way of being whose description is easy enough, but whose practice is the hardest thing in the world. The ideals of the “religion of man” are oriented not towards particular judgements, but towards the condition of the soul (so to speak), or the disposition, in which these judgements are reached. These ideals, Herder assumes, cannot and should not be excluded from politics, as a realm in which important decisions affecting the welfare of human beings are made, an assumption that is not incompatible with his belief in political toleration of multiple religions. Both the strengths and the limitations of Herder’s understanding of religion, with its blend of particularism and universalism, can be seen in two late essays dealing with conversion which Herder published in his journal Adrastea. One concerns the conversion of Indians by Europeans, the other the conversion of Jews within Europe. The former, published in 1802, is entitled, “Conversations on the Conversion of Indians through our European Christians.” It imagines a dialogue between an “Asian” and

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a “European,” in which the Asian points out the variety of ways in which the European’s views about Indian religion in particular are biased, false, hypocritical, and self-serving. He begins by asking: Tell me now, have you not yet left off trying to convert peoples whom you have subjugated, robbed, plundered and murdered, whose land and health you have taken away, and to whom you and your morals are a horror? If someone came to your land, described your most sacred things, your laws, religion, wisdom, political arrangements as being the most fatuous, how would you receive them? (FW 10, 468)

The Asian goes on to insist that Asian peoples have a highly refined culture, urging the European to examine their morals and education, to learn their language, and to read their poets and sages (FW 10, 468–9). He also asks the European to try to see how some of his own practices€– cursing, quarreling, drinking wine, eating pigs, greasing one’s hair with animal fat€– look from the perspective of Indians, though the latter might be too modestly polite to say anything (FW 10, 469). These remarks refer to many of the vices Herder thinks characterize European approaches to non-European cultures generally. His diagnosis of these vices presents some reasons for not passing too hasty a judgement on the religions of other peoples, or peoples who have been positioned as other, especially in situations of unequal power. Herder makes the point, for instance, that people do not readily accept moral lessons from those who behave in a despicable manner, and especially not when they have themselves been the victims of that behavior. He also complains about the ignorance behind European denigrations of Indian religion, suggesting that Europeans know little about Asian cultures generally. Since religion is not, for Herder, simply a set of beliefs that can be impartially selected, tested, and revised, like propositions within science, but is intricately bound up with the values and symbolic forms of a given society, knowledge of the culture in which a religion is embedded is crucial to arriving at a proper understanding of the religion itself. And Herder’s dialogue tries to decenter the European gaze, as well as to bring the cultural presuppositions of that gaze into question, by asking Europeans to imagine themselves as they appear from the point of view of a very different culture. The Asian says: Here you appear, wine drinkers and flesh eaters, animal hair on your head, unclean salve in your hair, in what is to us indecent clothing, of a black colour which we cannot abide. You place before us books bound in animal skins€– we may not and do not want to touch them. You refuse to adopt those forms of

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politeness, which, within our traditions, even a king does not refuse; for example, removing your unclean shoes (because, as you say, Moses took off his shoes only before the burning bush). You torment and exhaust us everywhere, on road and bridge, in resthouse and pagoda, with your importunate preaching, which enters into every little circumstance of our way of life. What else can we do but let you talk, as long as you want, until you€– go. (FW 10, 474–5)

Thus the dialogue accuses Europeans of moral hypocrisy, ignorance, and cultural egocentricity. On these points, Herder’s call for pluralistic respect does not rest on relativism, or on the principle of freedom, or even on the value of toleration for the sake of peace. It rests on a simple acknowledgement of the virtues that are the flip side of the vices he highlights:€the need for integrity, knowledge, and imagination in relations between communities. Herder is addressing an extreme case, that of European missionaries confronting non-European cultures through a position of intense ignorance combined with an equally intense degree of superioristic bigotry. But his advice also applies in less extreme situations, in the context of nations which are themselves composed of cultural groups that are more or less distinct, or that have defined themselves as contrasting and opposed to one another, whether on the basis of language, religion, region, or history, or some combination of these. The religious pluralism proposed in “On the Conversion of Indians” also involves more than the claim that people should take the time to understand religions before deciding their worth. The Asian says, “leave to everyone his religion, the one that belongs to him” (FW 10, 472), and the dialogue in which he figures is, in the end, opposed to conversion. This deep religious pluralism is nevertheless combined with a belief in the universal message of Christianity. The Asian proposes that the religion of Christians will be blessed by Indians if it brings them good things, but he adds:€“without any Indian accepting it formally and historically. All will enjoy the fruit of Christianity, true humanity of pure relations in a happy union of peoples” (FW 10, 474). The dialogue does not elaborate on what exactly is meant by accepting a religion “formally and historically.” In light of Herder’s identification of the essence of Christianity with the moral ideal of Humanität, though, it is likely that he thinks this ideal is combinable with being a member of a non-Christian religion, so that following it does not require religious conversion, although it may well require religious reform. One might well question the implication that such an ideal is found preeminently within Christianity, as opposed to other religions, but the fundamental normative point is that Herder’s approbation of religious diversity does not extend to being negotiable

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on the most basic principles of morality. Nor should one expect it to; in Herder’s understanding, religion and morality overlap in profound ways, both historically and conceptually, and he could no more endorse an “anything goes” variety of religious relativism than he could a moral one. As in his moral philosophy, then, Herder’s position on religious diversity blends a species of relativism€ – in this case, an appreciation of the cultural relativity of symbolic forms€ – with a universalism projecting a broad ideal of human flourishing, and holding open the possibility of cross-cultural reasoning about the subjects at issue. In the dialogue on the conversion of Indians, where it is suggested that Europeans should communicate their religious ideals from a respectful distance, this blend offers a much-needed counterpoint to colonial practices, and the cultural contempt that so often accompanied them. But it does have some considerably more problematic aspects. These emerge most clearly in the essay “On the Conversion of Jews,” which I discussed briefly in Chapter 5. This essay has inspired much debate, and a number of commentaries already exist exploring different facets of Herder’s stance towards Jews and Judaism. I do not want to take up the full range of issues related to this theme, but only to highlight the way in which Herder’s view of the intimate connection between religion and culture serves to ground his questioning of the possibility of Jews ever being fully integrated within Europe. Consider, for instance, the following passage in “On the Conversion of Jews,” where Herder draws out the political implications of the “foreignness” of the Jewish people among the peoples of Europe: Thus in Europe also this people is and remains, to our continent, a foreign Asiatic people, bound to that ancient law that was given to it under a distant sky, to which it is, by their own confession, indissolubly linked. To what extent now this law, and the way of thinking or living that arises from it, belongs in our states, this is no longer a dispute about religion, where one might discuss opinions and beliefs, but a simple question of state. How many, that is, of this foreign people€– who, under such a foreign national law, have this way of thinking and living, engage in these and not other occupations€– are dispensable, useful or harmful to this and no other state? How should one regard them and behave towards them? This is the problem. If the issue were that of Chinese, Indians, Persians, Gypsies or Mamlucks, who had migrated here, the question would remain the same … For since the Mosaic–Sinic law, and the people who adhere to it by consequence of their own confession, belong to Palestine and not to Europe; since in their prayers they respect Israel as a singular people distinct from all others; how could they be regarded otherwise by other nations? (FW 10, 630)

In relation to the Jews in particular, the “problem” located here concerns the fact that these people insist on their distinctness, and choose

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to separate themselves from others. The passage also suggests that their character and values, having been formed long ago on another continent, involve a way of thinking and living inescapably different from, and in conflict with, the spirit of Christian Europe, which would be the case for any “Asiatic” people who migrated to Europe. While the focus in the above-cited lines is on the “Mosaic–Sinic law” rather than on language, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry stresses the deep connection between language, morals, and religion in defining the spirit of the Jewish Volk. There is in Herder’s mind a link between the idea that Jewish and European ways of thinking and living are mutually distinct and incompatible, and the idea that the language of the Jews could only become, in Europe, a “sad mixture.” In both cases, the underlying assumption appears to be one for which Herder is often criticized:€ namely, that peoples form internally homogeneous and externally distinct cultural types, and that a nation should, ideally, be composed of only one such type. This assumption pays inadequate attention to the actual complexity of identities, and wrongly rules out the possibility that a state could accommodate a significant degree of cultural diversity within its borders. On the latter point, the response that Herder thinks of peoples as cultural rather than political units will not wholly suffice, since “On the Conversion of Jews,” in addressing the issue of the place of the Jewish Volk within European nations, explicitly says this is a “question of state.” One might well ask why Herder cannot imagine “German” as a way of being Jewish, and vice versa, or why he thinks a state cannot make room for a plurality of cultural outlooks, within some moral limits. Now, we also cannot help but be aware that this emphasis on the singularity of the Jews, their different behaviors and values, their foreignness to Europe will have a grotesque history within Germany, and the additional reference to “Gypsies” is hardly comforting in this regard. While Herder would no doubt have been appalled had he been able to foresee that history, some of his own views regard Jews in a way that probably contributed to it. His description of the Jews as a “parasitic plant on the trunks of other nations” in the Ideas (491–2) is the worst of these, although Herder never suggests that there is any biological determinant of the Jewish character, or that Jewish identity is conferred by anything other than language, religion, and way of life. In relation to the question of religion specifically, a major flaw in Herder’s account is his assumption that the religious identity of Jews is bound up with a set of values that is foreign to Europe, so that their wish to preserve this identity while being members of European states

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constitutes a “problem.” The idea that this foreignness is due to their having received their law “under a distant sky” is odd, since Christianity was born under that same sky, as Herder well knows, being a West Asian religion no more indigenous to Europe than Judaism or Islam. But Herder sees Christianity as having been the first religion with a content addressing all nations; this is the Christianity that forms a “moral institute” (LAH, 318) offering “the purest humanity in the purest way” (LAH, 752). Its moral content can be combined with any culture, in a way that is not true, Herder thinks, of other religions, which remain narrowly national. What is supposed to be specifically problematic about Jews within Europe is their insistence upon a separate law, which has the result of making them a persistently foreign element, a “parasitic plant” attached to, but not integrated within, the nations to which they have migrated. Herder does, it should be acknowledged, lay much of the blame for this separateness upon the unjust treatment of Jews at the hands of Christians. Alluding to this state of affairs, he writes that “political conversion starts from the wrong end, when it strikes at Jews rather than Christians” (FW 10, 637). While being warmly enthusiastic about the original culture of the Hebrews, Herder is not complimentary about the character of Jews within the diaspora, claiming in the Ideas that the “people of God” have become, almost across the whole earth, “a race of sly negotiators” (Ideas, 492). This is due to the restrictions and persecutions suffered by them: All laws that regard Jews more harshly than cattle, that do not trust them across the way and therefore rebuke them as dishonourable daily, hourly before the eyes of all, these exhibit the constant barbarism of the state, which tolerates these laws from barbaric ages. The more so must these laws breed revenge, hatred or at least an obstinate resentment, so that in many respects the Jew is a sharper judge of honour than the average Christian can be. (FW 10, 638)

What is needed to “better” the Jews is a “betterment” of Christians (FW 10, 637); the latter must make good the sins of their fathers by treating Jews as equals. Jews should be subject to the same laws as Christians, and should be allowed to enter the same professions. The state has both a right and a duty to educate Jewish and Christian children according to the same principles of morality and science (FW 10, 639). The ideal Herder postulates is certainly an assimilationist one, but it calls for a political and moral, rather than strictly religious, conversion. “Of religious customs is here not the issue,” Herder adds in brackets, when speaking of the need for a common education for Jews and Christians (FW 10, 639). As in “On the Conversion of Indians,” then, Herder is not proposing that

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these followers of another faith should formally convert to Christianity and give up their religious symbols and rituals. He is asking that they be given, and that they accept, a common legal and moral code, as well as a common education. The hoped-for outcome is stated in the Ideas:€“There will come a time when in Europe no one will ask, who is a Jew or a Christian:€for the Jew will also live according to European laws, and will contribute to the good of the state … only a barbaric constitution has obstructed him in this, or made his capacities harmful” (Ideas, 702). There is also another dimension to Herder’s proposals concerning European Jews, beyond the appeal for political conversion. He simultaneously favors the possibility of a return of Jews to Palestine, as a place in which they could found a proper state and restore their full identity. In the Ideas, Herder says of the Jews:€“in short, this is a people whose education was ruined, because they never achieved the ripeness of a political culture on their own soil, and thereby also never reached the full feeling of honour and freedom” (Ideas, 491). Here he does blame Jews themselves for never having longed for a fatherland, for their own honor and home, in spite of the oppression they suffered (Ideas 492). In “On the Conversion of Jews,” by contrast, Herder seems to accept that Jews do long for a homeland. He cites and supports a number of points presented by another author as reasons in favor of a return of Jews to Palestine, including their distinctness within all nations, their constant mistreatment at the hands of those nations, their preservation of a language and character that could make their return easier, and the fact that they themselves wish for this return in a spirit of hope and expectation (FW 10, 633). To these points, Herder adds that this wealthy and industrious nation could hardly be pleased with narrow Palestine, unless it were also offered trade by the old and new worlds (FW 10, 633). Putting these various points together, one can see that Herder’s reflections on Jews and Judaism paint a complex picture. It is therefore unsurprising that interpreters have reached radically different conclusions about his position, accusing him of being anti-Semitic (see Rose 1990, 103–9),4 or praising him as a proto-Zionist (Barnard 1959, 534). In general, Herder is profoundly positive about the ancient culture of the Hebrews, but largely negative about what Jews have become in the diaspora. The negative appraisal is based on two perceptions:€that Jews remain an unassimilated element in Europe, and that their character has been corrupted. I agree, though, with Ernest Menze’s appraisal of Rose’s analysis as simply inaccurate on a number of crucial points (Menze 1994).

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The former Herder blames both on Jews themselves, for asserting their separateness, and on Christians, who exclude them from full membership in European nations. The corruption of the Jewish character Herder believes to be the fault of Christians, who expose Jews to constant dishonor and bar them from worthy professions. Herder’s proposal is also twofold. He suggests that Jews be assimilated into Europe through an equalization of laws, the lifting of employment restrictions, and a common education. This would indeed largely eliminate, rather than restore, the cultural identity of Jews, although Herder does not call for religious conversion. Instead, he calls for a form of integration that would turn Jews into productive and virtuous citizens (which assumes they are not that presently), so that “their Palestine is then there where they live and nobly work, everywhere” (FW 10, 641). At the same time, Herder also proposes, tentatively, the reestablishment of the Jewish Volk in a literal Palestine. Describing the context in which Herder is writing, Karl Menges points out that, in the history, within Germany, of movements for freedom and equal rights for Jews, emancipation was always linked with assimilation, requiring the abandonment of Jewish identity (Menges 1996, 462). It is partly in this spirit that Kant, for instance, counsels the “euthanasia of Judaism (Judentum).”5 This is a most inauspicious choice of words in light of future events, but Kant is advocating the supercession of this historical religion, and not, of course, the elimination of individuals. Herder does not go quite as far, since he is not calling for the disappearance of the Jewish religion within Germany, nor for the disappearance of Jewish identity from the world. But he also sees no proper place for any strong version of this identity within Europe, and one should acknowledge the rejection of cultural hybridity within national borders that underlies his position on this topic. Herder explicitly says that the problem would be the same if Europe experienced an influx of “Chinese, Indians, Persians, Gypsies or Mamlucks.” The inclusion of “Gypsies” is particularly objectionable, not only in retrospect because of their persecution under the Nazis, but also because this is not a hypothetical case for Herder. He speaks of it directly in the Ideas, in a chapter entitled “Foreign Peoples in Europe,” the same chapter that describes Jews as parasitic plants. The last paragraph of the chapter reads: I pass over the Armenians, whom I regard only as travelers in our continent; and look, rather, at a numerous, foreign, heathen, subterranean people in almost all ╇ “The Contest of the Faculties” (GA 7, 53).

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countries in Europe:€the Gypsies. How did they get here? How did the seven to eight hundred thousand heads, that their newest historian counts, get here? A rejected Indian caste, separated by birth from everything that calls itself godly and civil, and remaining faithful for centuries to this debased destiny, for what are they suited in Europe, except for military training, which can discipline everything as quickly as possible? (Ideas, 703)

Earlier in this chapter, Herder makes a similar remark about Turks:€“For what should foreigners, who still after millennia want to be Asian barbarians, what should they be doing in Europe?” (Ideas, 702). Putting aside the cultural stereotypes, it would be too simple merely to accuse Herder of being insufficiently tolerant of internal diversity, as if modern states had no trouble in negotiating the level and type of difference that can be contained within their borders. Yet there is no denying that Herder is partial to the vision of cultural pluralism suggested by his favorite botanical metaphor:€the world as a garden in which plants grow in harmony with one another, forming a beautiful and peaceful whole, but remaining in their separate spots. While he champions religious toleration, this vision, combined with his understanding of religions as culturally rooted phenomena, has the consequence that he cannot quite make a full place for Jews qua Jews in Germany, or in any other European nation, and that he cannot imagine peoples of very different cultural origins living in the same nation. One can legitimately challenge the suppositions on which these conclusions are based, asking, in some cases, whether the differences are as profound as Herder believes, and, in others, whether a state really could not accommodate them within a single political system. In spite of these important limitations, I believe that Herder offers a rich and nuanced analysis of religious diversity, and develops a pluralist position that even has some advantages over both the modern liberal one with its emphasis on a purely formal respect for religious liberty, and the multicultural one with its call for “recognition” of religious identities regardless of their content. Being based on a substantive, and sympathetic, analysis of the character of religion, Herder’s position gives reasons for genuinely respecting the stories, symbols, and rituals in which the relation to the divine is articulated within various communities. While not excluding the possibility of critical discussion about these elements of religion, it demonstrates why, and how, such discussion must proceed with a due measure of erudition, imagination, and sensitivity. It is open, moreover, to critical reasoning about the nature of divinity, and recognizes the

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ethical power of religion.6 At the same time, it understands that, when dealing with religion, as with any aspect of culture, one must never forget to ask suspicious questions about domination and corruption. Some religious practices and doctrines simply reflect the self-regarding interests of dominant groups, and are informed by sentiments and attitudes that can be distinguished from, and thereby criticized through, the employment of religious principles. This is an old strategy within religious reasoning, and Herder uses it to good effect, especially against so-called “Christians” who want to convert others but are in need of some conversion themselves. 6

On this last issue, cf. Parekh’s suggestion that the secularist overlooks the positive role religion has played in many emancipatory movements, and is consequently wrong to bar religion from the political realm (Parekh 2006, 328).

Conclusion

A positive emphasis on political and cultural borders would seem to be, these days, rather intellectually unfashionable. Everywhere such borders are being placed in question as arbitrary, fictional, and pernicious, as serving to foster oppressively exclusivist modes of identity, as erecting boundaries between “us” and “them” that stand in the way of achieving mutual understanding and global justice. There are, to be sure, good reasons for this suspicion of borders, and much of value in the multiple forms of critique aimed at dismantling them:€ the political cosmopolitanism that thinks beyond the nation-state, seeking a decent life for all individuals; deconstructive accounts rightly drawing attention to the relational, dynamic, and overlapping character of group identities; universalist discourses emphasizing our common humanity, against xenophobia, racism and cultural bigotry. An aggressive insistence on borders of the sort that wants to keep out and keep in, or that limits moral concern to those who are supposedly my own as opposed to those who are not, does not serve the interests of justice, and is well worth criticizing. In this light, while one may applaud Herder’s attempts to counter racism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism, his focus on the distinctness of peoples and cultures might well be perceived as false and dangerous, especially given the terribly violent history of ethnic nationalism in the intervening years. Acknowledging that Herder’s understanding of cultural identity is sometimes overly essentialist, however, I have tried to show that his comprehensive position on humanity and cultural difference recognizes, and seeks to respect, both what all human beings have in common and what distinguishes the peoples of the world from one another. His stress on cultural variety does not deny, and in fact assumes, shared characteristics identifying the species€ – language, reason, politics, work, art, morality, religion€– which take shape in different ways. The difference is therefore perceived on the basis of a commonality, and it is never so radical that careful study and sympathetic imagination could not in principle achieve 248

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a substantial measure of understanding. The commonality includes some basic needs and desires forming the basis for Herder’s criticisms of many cultural practices, his outrage at the exploitation of African, Asian, and American peoples by European nations, as well as his ideals for the future of humanity. Indeed, for Herder, an appreciation of the cultural particularity of peoples is an element in the recognition of their humanity. Against assumptions of superiority that can serve as a pretext for domination, and perceptions of radical foreignness that may lead to indifference or hostility, he calls for the realization, first, that other peoples, all peoples, have cultures, in virtue of being human, and that, while these cultures may have their flaws, as everything human does, they are always, upon closer examination, richer and more intelligent than one’s own prejudices would initially lead one to believe. Herder’s actual sketches of various societies and civilizations are nonetheless lacking in many respects. They are based on highly limited information, are sometimes one-sided and agenda-driven, and are not free from the kinds of bias against which he explicitly warns. But they have as their motive an expansion of imagination that would allow the reader to see the humanity of these various peoples, precisely through an understanding of the culture in which that humanity is expressed. Building this Einfühlung for other cultures is necessary, Herder believes, to the pursuit of a genuinely just world order. It works against contempt and hatred, in favor of the concrete recognition of others that is a precondition, in practice, for including them within one’s sphere of moral concern. Herder’s emphasis on cultural particularity does not, then, mean to legitimate the confinement of sympathy to members of one’s own culture or nation. On the contrary, it hopes to enlarge sympathy, in the belief that the formulation of grand ideas about humanity and justice does not suffice to make people care about others, to recognize them as human in the manner required for just practice. At the same time, Herder accepts the basic content of the universalist moral principles we have come to associate with the Enlightenment. There exist, for Herder, no degrees or types of difference among human beings that could justify the theft of their freedom or the disregard of their interests, whether through violent conquest, enslavement, religious obfuscation, or economic subordination. Herder’s development of the ideal of freedom differs in important ways from that of both Kant and Hegel, but he is no less committed than either of these thinkers to the goal of liberating human beings from oppressive inequalities of power. He acknowledges, and criticizes, the operation of these inequalities between different societies, but also within societies, in

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the rule of aristocratic and clerical elites, the subordination of women to men, and the allocation of social privilege on the basis of birth. He therefore does not suppose that the social norms of a given culture reflect the common will of its members, or have always been arrived at by a concern for justice, and any form of relativism that does make this assumption would be ruled out. But Herder also, emphatically, views the specificity of culture as profoundly significant in the constitution of human beings. While he affirms that all humanity shares some broad capacities and wants, he simultaneously emphasizes the extent to which these are developed and shaped by a culture, with its very particular traditions and patterns of life. His rejection of the idea of a “pure” reason, whether practical, moral, or scientific, is bound up with this theme. For Herder, reason is itself situated, working only with what is given to it in a definite time and place. To believe that it could directly perceive, or derive on its own, an absolute knowledge, transcending altogether the location of the reasoning person, is to misunderstand the very nature of the faculty. These beliefs about reason lead Herder to underline a number of moral claims. One is that we should not disrespect people for failing to know more, or to know differently, than is possible for them in their cultural and historical moment. Another is that, while some broad prescriptions aimed at human flourishing can be derived from what we understand about the character of the species, beyond these the unfolding of human potentiality in its search for happiness and excellence is a highly variable and open-ended process, whose content and end cannot be dictated by the inhabitants of a single civilization. Herder’s philosophy of history is a consequence of these ideas about human nature and human development. The species is multiple and protean; what it wants and is capable of cannot be surveyed in advance, or from one location. There can be, and has been, progress along certain axes, but such progress is neither linear nor total, and it is always accompanied by forms of loss. There is as a result no single and final “end” of history. History has multiple ends, which are at the same time only means to other ends. Herder’s sense that happiness, defined broadly, is an end-in-itself, moreover, means that the process of history is in any case not justified merely by an end, but by the lives enabled along the way. It is clear, too, that Herder’s attention to cultural identity and variation includes a profound sense that these are not only facts to be recognized and accommodated, but are profoundly valuable phenomena. Herder attributes to cultural attachments, and to cultural diversity, several kinds of value. In part the value of cultural attachment is derived

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simply from the fact that people do value it. Everyone tends to love what is their own, Herder suggests, and we need to respect this natural tendency. But Herder also thinks, more radically, that particularistic local attachments are good, within certain limits. They should not lead one to disregard the interests of others, but the concrete relations and emotional ties which they involve are an important aspect of being human. Such ties are a deep source of happiness, and an essential element in human flourishing. In addition, they are necessary for producing and maintaining cultural variety, to which Herder also ascribes both derivative and intrinsic value. Cultural variety is valuable partly because it is potentially enriching for humanity as a whole. Since no one culture is a repository of all possible goods, people in different cultures can learn from one another, so as to be corrected and improved. The supposition that one’s own culture is the best of all poses an obstacle to cross-cultural learning, as does blind imitation arising from a sense of cultural inferiority. Herder therefore criticizes both of these tendencies, and any practice or ideal that would result in the imposition of one culture on the entire world. The value of cultural diversity does not, however, rest only in its contribution to global betterment. Herder also sees the uniqueness and variety of cultures as an intrinsic good, a manifestation of the multiple possibilities of the human spirit. Thus, although Herder embraces the ideal of a moral and political reasoning that would extend concern to all individuals and peoples, he does so while upholding the value and importance of cultural particularity. That is, he does not promote a weakening of the differences between peoples, or of their attachment to their own cultural identities as either necessary for the achievement of global concern, or a good in itself. He does not promote the erasure of borders that seems to characterize many current analyses of identity, and the ideals of some versions of cosmopolitanism. Strangely, these analyses and ideals coexist with celebrations of “diversity,” and their authors may even claim to be promoting diversity. One might well wonder, however, whether it is consistent to value difference while wanting to erase the lines that make it possible. At the present moment, what may be most challenging about Herder’s view of culture is precisely its validation of the lines of difference:€its conception of cultural identities as organic wholes, for instance, and its suggestion that following one’s own identity, which requires a measure of cultural exclusivism, is a positive good. I have tried to show that there is actually something right in Herder’s analysis of cultures as interconnected wholes. He may have

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underemphasized internal diversity and overlap, but there nonetheless are recognizably distinct cultures, and an intimate connection between the various elements which define them. Admittedly, with the changes brought about by recent technological innovations and globalization, these identities and distinctions may be breaking down. But they do still exist, and their disappearance is neither universally welcomed nor a foregone conclusion. Furthermore, the kind of exclusivist attachment to one’s own cultural self which Herder arguably does endorse is balanced by his rejection of bigotry, his affirmation of the need for self-criticism and cross-cultural interaction, and his call for expanding circles of sympathy:€in short, by the universalist dimensions of his thought mentioned above. The underlying ideal here is not self-contradictory, though it is existentially challenging. Herder calls for a stance in which people value and develop the culture they inherit, without being uncritical towards it or asserting it as the best in the world, while extending moral concern to all human beings, as well as wanting to know them and learn from them. He does not think it impossible to be strongly attached to a particular culture without denigrating others, or to feel a special love for those who are closer without being indifferent to people who stand further away, geographically and culturally. His blend of universalism and relativism seeks precisely to spell out a position from which the adoption of such a stance would be possible. The result, ideally, would involve neither a fetishization nor a demonization of “identity.” In the far-from-ideal world in which we live, of course, the kinds of ideas about culture that Herder, for one, articulates have helped to encourage ethnic chauvinism, searches for a mythical cultural authenticity and purity, and terrible violence towards individuals positioned as foreign to the group whose identity is being asserted. I do not want to absolve Herder from having contributed to these developments historically, nor do I want to claim that this contribution is entirely the result of a misinterpretation or misapplication of his ideas (an over-used defensive gesture among scholars of an author). I do want to note, though, that one may draw very different lessons from Herder, including ones that undermine the kind of cultural exclusivism that leads to, or is exploited to breed, violence. Amartya Sen speaks, in this regard, of the violence “fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror” (Sen 2006, 2). I would like to conclude this book by illustrating through a case study the complex relation between Herder’s analysis of culture and the kind of identity constructions Sen blames for such violence. The case is precisely

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the one uppermost in Sen’s mind:€the resurgent Hindu nationalism which has plagued Indian politics over the last few decades. A mode r n i l lus t r at ion:€H e r de r a n d H i n du t va In 2009, I spent four months on sabbatical leave in Delhi, India, researching the topic of identity. My stay coincided with campaigning for the 2009 national elections, during which there was considerable focus on the issue of “Hindutva,” the Hindu nationalist ideology that has for many years been a definitive plank in the party platform of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Although in the end the BJP sustained considerable losses during the elections, which returned Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party to power at the national level, the specter of Hindutva, along with other exclusivist constructions of identity, continues to haunt India, a nation containing within its political borders a stunningly diverse array of religious and philosophical traditions, languages, histories, customs, and patterns of life. Much of the anti-communalist intellectual discourse in India targets the idea of identity, holding attachment to religious, linguistic, regional, and caste identities responsible for violence against others. There are also many accounts challenging assumptions about the unity of particular groups and the questionable historical narratives that accompany these assumptions. In relation to the BJP and its affiliates, a loose coalition of Hindutva organizations commonly referred to as the “Sangh Parivar,” this kind of critical discourse is especially directed against a cultural nationalism whose articulation, during the course of its historical development, recalls some distinctly Herderian themes. V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966), for instance, the inventor of the term “Hindutva,” referred to Hindus as “an organic national being” with “common affinities, cultural, religious, historical, linguistic and racial” (see Dallmayr and Devy 1998, 116–17). Against the Congress Party’s more pluralistic conception of the Indian nation, Savarkar argues that territorial unity does not suffice to hold together a nation, if it is not “cemented by any cultural, racial or historical affinities” (Dallmayr and Devy 1998, 116). “Hindus” allegedly have these affinities with one another; Muslims and Christians are outsiders to the organic body of the nation, and will always remain so. Savarkar famously defines a “Hindu” as someone whose “fatherland” and “holyland” are the same (Dallmayr and Devy 1998, 115), thus making it possible for him to include within the cultural concept of “Hinduism” Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, who would not ordinarily call themselves Hindu, while excluding Muslims

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and Christians regardless of language, descent, or any other element of identity. According to Savarkar, in spite of their great internal differences, the common affinities of “Hindus” allow them to form a nation, whereas “the Indian Muslims are on the whole more inclined to identify themselves and their interests with Muslims outside India than Hindus who lived next door, like the Jews in Germany” (Dallmayr and Devy 1998, 117). There have been from the beginning strong ideological and historical connections between Hindu nationalism and German fascism. The text from which I am citing consists of speeches delivered in 1949. Given what had just happened in Europe, the comparison of Muslims in India with Jews in Germany is more than a little ominous. Savarkar at least qualifies his claims about the Hinduness of India with the statement that “the Hindu majority will not encroach on the legitimate rights of any non-Hindu minority” (Dallmayr and Devy 1998, 118). It is not clear what these “legitimate rights” will be in a majoritarian state based on Hindutva principles. But the stated qualification does make Savarkar’s text seem a little less objectionable than the following notorious statement about Muslims and Christians by M. S. Golwalkar, another seminal figure in the development of Hindu nationalism: All those … can have no place in the national life, unless they abandon their differences, adopt the religion, culture and language of the Nation and completely merge themselves in the National Race. So long, however, as they maintain their racial, religious and cultural differences, they cannot but be only foreigners … the strangers have to acknowledge the National religion as the State Religion and in every other respect inseparably merge in the National community. (cited in Cossman and Kapur 1999, 41)

This statement occurs in the 1939 text of We or our Nationhood Defined. It is made on the basis of a conception of the nation as a cultural rather than purely political unit, “the compound of five distinct factors fused into one indissoluble whole … the famous five ‘Unities’:€Geographical (country), Racial (race), Religious (religion), Cultural (culture) and Linguistic (language)” (Jaffrelot 2007, 100). Golwalkar elaborates on each of these factors, developing a theory of nationhood in which territory, customs, language, history, and tradition are bound together into something like an organic unity, although that is not a phrase he expressly employs. And on this point Golwalkar also thinks, in 1939, that there is something for India to learn from Germany, both from the latter’s reappropriation of all of its “hereditary territory” (Jaffrelot 2007, 111), and from its internal polÂ� icy towards Jews:

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To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races€– the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for use in Hindusthan to learn and profit by. (Jaffrelot 2007, 112)

Golwalkar defines “Race” as “a population with a common origin under one culture,” with the “one culture” being a function of “common customs, common language, common memories of glory or disaster” (Jaffrelot 2007, 102). Here, the term “race” defines a descent group with a common culture, and is not a strictly biological category, but it is deployed to exclude a specific group from membership in the nation, as it was in Germany. There is much in Herder’s position that speaks against the violence and lack of sympathetic imagination typical of narrow ethnic and cultural nationalisms like the one promoted by Hindutva ideology. Nonetheless, one cannot merely conclude that the moral and intellectual errors of these forms of nationalism in no way reflect errors in Herder’s thought, in spite of the fact that the latter did play a role in the development of the former. The historical fate of ideas often (though not always) reveals genuine shortcomings in their formulation, even when a careful and comprehensive examination of what their author actually said or wrote is not fully compatible with the way his or her ideas were appropriated. Herder’s focus on the integrity and value of distinct human cultures, as well as his championing of the rights of peoples to maintain their singular identities, raises questions about the status of minorities and migrants which Herder does not address in a satisfactory manner. Herder’s accounts of cultural identity also pay insufficient attention to internal diversity and dissent, and are unable to capture the complexity of many varieties of cultural identity, flaws that carry with them grave moral and political dangers. Such shortcomings are mirrored in the founding documents of Hindu nationalism cited above. The category of “Hindu,” as employed by Savarkar and Golwalkar, is an invented one, and the nation it pretends to describe has never possessed anything like the degree of unity the authors of Hindutva ascribe to it. India consists now, as it did when Savarkar and Golwalkar formulated their ideas, of many groups, culturally differentiated by a number of the very factors that these same authors allege to be necessary criteria for nationhood. There are many languages, for one thing, spoken in different regions. Golwalkar attempts to circumvent this problem, in We or our Nationhood Defined, by claiming that “there

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is but one language, Sanskrit of which these many ‘languages’ are mere offshoots” (Jaffrelot 2007, 116), but this assertion is simply false. Many major Indian languages are not derived from Sanskrit, and even the ones that are lie too far from that source to be described as “mere offshoots.” There have been and continue to be relations of conflict between groupings of various sorts€ – caste, class, and region, among others€ – so that these groups frequently feel precious little affinity for one another, and have radically different memories and evaluations of historical events. They then cannot be said to have “common memories of glory or disaster” (Jaffrelot 2007, 102). In fact, not all Indian communities even regard British colonial rule as a bad thing. For some Dalits (people formerly, and sometimes still, treated as “untouchables”), the advent of colonial rule represents the beginning of liberation from their true oppressors, the “Hindus,” with the religion of Christianity acting as a vehicle of this liberation.1 Many tribal peoples in India also do not see themselves as “Hindu,” and it has been argued that the latter category refers to nothing unitary in any case, being a product of colonial attempts to turn a diverse, loose, and regionally varied bunch of traditions into a “religion” on the model of Judaism and Christianity.2 In such a situation, Indian Muslims are as Indian as anyone else, in their own complicated way, like everyone else. The likes of Golwalkar and Savarkar (and Jinnah, for that matter, in postulating the two-nation theory that led to the partition of the subcontinent) were unable, or unwilling, to imagine “Muslim” as a way of being Indian, although it had been exactly that for generations€– just as Herder was unable to imagine Jewish as a way of being German. The cultural nationalism of Hindutva ideology ultimately has a political orientation, in that its fundamental premise is that the nation-state of India should be founded on an allegedly preexisting cultural unity. Scholars of Herder’s thought commonly stress, and I have largely agreed, that his idea of Volk, by contrast, is cultural rather than political. When Herder speaks of Völker, he is referring to peoples bound together by a common culture, and he does not directly claim that all and only such peoples should form nation-states, nor is he very trusting of the mechanisms and organization of state power in any case. Still, Herder did himself draw political implications from his notion of peoples as cultural units, and these render problematic the situation of groups regarded as “minorities.” As we have seen, “On the Conversion of Jews” postulates See Nigam (2006, 229–30); Nirula (2005, 90–7). For a detailed historical analysis of this question, see Pennington (2005).

1

2

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the existence of Jews within Europe as a “problem of state” (FW 10, 630). To speak, as Herder does, of the presence of Jews in “our states” (FW 10, 630) is already a highly questionable way of representing the identity of European Jews, and the implication is that a state cannot comfortably accommodate significant numbers of people who are culturally distinct from the majority in some respect. Herder’s own premise then does seem to be that political nations should largely correspond to cultural ones, with the latter being conceived as at least homogeneous enough to be identified, and differentiated from their neighbors. That is exactly the premise exploited by Hindu cultural nationalists in their attempts to represent Indian Muslims as outsiders to the nation.3 Moreover, while Herder’s defense of the rights of non-Western peoples to denigrate Eurocentric appraisals of their cultures was motivated by opposition to foreign subjugation, the conceptions of cultural identity that such defenses develop may also easily be employed to constitute certain groups as internal others, a problem exacerbated, in the case of India, by the historical fact that Islam originally came to it in part through patterns of conquest. Even radical Hindutva demands that Indian Muslims either go to Pakistan or assimilate to the majority “Hindu” culture echo Herder’s prescriptions for Jews, though without being balanced by anything corresponding to Herder’s respect and admiration for Hebrew culture, or his criticisms of discrimination against Jews. The objections to ethnic and cultural nationalism I am raising here are not new. They are often advanced against appeals to culture in general, and seek, legitimately, to challenge such appeals by noting the variety and disagreement that actually characterize the group in question, as well as the difficulty of drawing bright lines between it and other groups. These criticisms, like the pictures of identity they question, have a normative as well as a descriptive dimension. They seek to show both that such pictures of identity are false to the existing reality, and that they are employed to produce oppressively homogenizing effects:€to position people as foreign, for instance, or to force them to conform to an identity imagined as monolithic and static, or to choose between exclusivist constructions of some aspect of their identity.4 I have stressed that Herder’s ideas about Savarkar does not deny internal diversity altogether; he acknowledges the “thousand and one differences within our fold,” but says that “we Hindus … are bound by such religious, cultural, historical, racial, linguistic and other affinities in common as to stand out as a definitely homogeneous people as soon as we are placed in contrast with any other non-Hindu people€– say the English or Japanese or even the Indian Muslims” (Dallmayr and Devy 1998, 117). 4 For an Indian case study of such processes, see Mayaram (1997). 3

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culture, on the other hand, are accompanied by moral prescriptions insisting on consideration for all human beings, which would not permit violence, or any infringement of what we have come to define as basic human rights. Herder is also strongly in favor of religious toleration within states, and sensitive to the issue of internal hierarchies of power. These features of his thought help to mitigate the political and ethical risks attendant upon essentialist constructions of culture. Nonetheless, there are real flaws within Herder’s conception of what constitutes a people or a culture, flaws distinctly reflected in cultural nationalist ideologies like that of Hindutva. The solution to the errors of essentialist constructions of cultural identity, however, cannot lie in pretending that culture does not, or should not, matter very much in our sense of who we are, or that it should not matter for politics, or that allocations of human rights as applied to individuals suffice for justice. Herder is right that individuals are inescapably cultural products, and that cultures are significantly different, so that recognition of cultural identity is part and parcel of understanding who someone is. I would point out, in this regard, that some of the objectionable elements in Hindu nationalist claims about Indian identity, rather than paralleling shortcomings in Herder’s account of the organic unity of cultures, can actually be challenged in terms of that account. If I might be permitted a personal allusion, when I wrote the first version of Chapter 5 of this book, on the relation between language and world (in the form of a journal article published in 2004), I knew little about contests over cultural identity in India, and nothing about the history of the politically charged emergence of Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages from what had been a single language, Hindustani, written in two different scripts. In reflecting on the implications of Herder’s analysis of the connection between language and place, the example came to mind of some lines from a song in a film, Pakeezah, that was a part of Indian popular culture when I was a child, and that has remained wellknown, in no small measure because of the quality of its musical score. I doubt that Indians think of this film’s story or language or music primarily as “Muslim,” whatever that means (it certainly never occurred to me), and it would be impossible to make sense of the idea that there is something culturally foreign to India about such a film. It depicts Indian scenes in an Indian setting, Indian romantic as well as moral sentiments, Indian aesthetic traditions and a part of Indian history, expressed in an Indian language. I do not want to ascribe too much significance to an old Bollywood movie, but the example illustrates a deeper point about the meaningfulness and

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interwovenness of language, affect, and place, among other elements of cultural identity. The idea of cultures possessing an “organic” unity, in the sense in which Herder uses that term, is helpful in analyzing this interwovenness, and in understanding the strong sense of belonging to a place that is an important feature of identity for many people. While Hindu cultural nationalists try to position Muslims as forever foreign to India, a truly impartial analysis of the situation, using the kinds of criteria that Herder, for one, outlines and develops, would clearly reveal Indian Muslims to be an integral part of India, not only as political but as cultural citizens. They would not be who they are without India, nor would India be what it is without them. Herder’s analysis also helps to show why the significance of cultural membership cannot be made to disappear under the rubric of cosmopolitanism, even if versions of the latter are nonetheless well worth affirming. Cultures are deeply formative and allow no easy entry or exit, although neither are they ever entirely closed to the open mind and sympathetic imagination, let alone to the familiarity that comes from dwelling for a long time in a country other than the place of one’s birth. Herder’s picture is in some respects inadequate and incomplete, as it tends to assume too much internal integrity within cultures, and does not account for the possibility of individuals genuinely being products of more than one culture, a common reality in our age of mobility and migration. But it is also a useful corrective to facile notions of cultures as clubs that individuals join and leave at will, or of the world as a cultural smorgasbord from which one might choose the items one likes. The problem with such conceptions is that they misrepresent the “who” that is doing the choosing, supposing that she stands outside the shaping force of culture, and before it as an object. That is not the case, but there is nothing prescriptively limiting about this insight. It entails no injunction against learning or borrowing from others, or assimilating elements one finds to be good, whatever their cultural origin. It just rejects the naive supposition that a person stands nowhere when engaging in this process. In so doing, it helps one to become aware of one’s own cultural location, and of the fact that not everyone stands here. Last but not least, Herder’s profound anti-imperialism€ – intellectual and cultural as well as political€– contains lessons from which there is still much to be learned. While he strongly affirms the value of non-violent forms of cross-cultural interaction, Herder wants to encourage peoples whose cultures have been unfairly denigrated by others to resist interiorizing these demeaning portraits of themselves, and to celebrate and build

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on the set of traditions that gives them their unique character. This is a central element in Herder’s brand of cultural relativism, which is accompanied by a qualified and deliberately indeterminate notion of progress, and by a belief that there are some biological and psychological commonalities among human beings (though what precisely these are can only be learned, Herder thinks, through an empirical anthropology that remains continually revisable). One should remember that the sad legacy of Western imperialism also plays a role in traditionalist reactions like that of Hindutva. There remains here a certain inferiority complex, and a corresponding need to construct some “we” that would be as aggressively powerful as the “they” by which one feels humiliated (see Nandy 1983). In India, this lingering lack of cultural self-confidence is visible in the twin reactions of unthinking emulation and wholesale rejection. The storehouse of ideas about culture to which Herder contributed undoubtedly provides a toxic resource for constructions of identity arising from the second of these reactions, and thus for religious and cultural fundamentalisms that appeal to “our” traditions. But, at the same time, a sensitivity to the Eurocentric assumptions informing a great deal of the world’s ethical, political, and philosophical discourse can build space for healthier alternatives. That will require a much more thoughtful, complicated, and difficult negotiation of self and other, a critical engagement with the ideas delivered to “us” by multiple traditions, in light of the needs of the present moment. In this endeavor, drawing attention to the asymmetry of the conversation as a result of Western cultural dominance does not signal a fall into the variety of “relativism” that philosophers and others are prone to raise as an accusation. Such accusations should not be allowed to deflect attention from real issues about the challenges involved in genuine cross-cultural understanding, or about the persistence of a highly questionable sense of the manifest destiny of Western values that underlies modern historical consciousness. Herder was one of the very few who counseled another course, another possible way of seeing the relation between the world’s various cultures and civilizations. In the history of Western philosophy, this is a lonely position, and an admirable one.

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Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 163n2 Africans, 31–2, 46–8, 85–6, 134–5, 138–9, 151–2, 158, 249 See€also€Negroes Albrecht, Clemens, 22 Alcoff, Linda, 9 alcohol, 25 Alexander the Great, 31n17, 95 Allison, Henry, 68 Americans. See€Native Americans Amiot, Jean-Joseph-Marie, 109, 110 ancient Egypt, 99 ancient Greece classicist drama and, 216 ethics, 204 flowering society, 16, 31 freedom, 91 historical stage, 90 kalos k’agathos, 179–80 racial judgment, 30, 131 renaissance, 105 sculpture, 102–3 slavery, 36 terminology, 207 war, 121 ancient Rome historical stage, 90 violence, 16, 18, 37–8, 105, 121 virtue, 16, 37–8, 69 animals, 50, 74, 80, 189–90, 198, 211, 212, 232 animism, 227 anthropology comparative anthropology, 26 happiness and, 50–1 Herder’s contribution to, 187–8, 260 philosophy and, 41–3 Arab world, 105 Aristotle, 53, 55, 69, 208 Armenians, 245–6 Asians, 30–1

atheism, 225 authenticity, 103, 119, 182, 200, 252 Bacon, Francis, 192, 223 Banse, Ewald, 146–7 barbarians, 24, 27, 246 Barnard, F. M. Herder scholarship, 3 historical progress, 88–9 Jews, 244 language, 167–8, 172 monads, 21 political organization, 87 race, 126–7, 130–1, 139 religion, 219 Barnouw, Dagmar, 58n13 Becker, Bernhard, 128 Beiser, Frederick, 3, 4, 14, 39, 90, 97, 103, 114, 115n7 Berger, Friedrich, 127, 130, 148 Berlin, Isaiah, 2–3, 13, 22n9, 23, 37, 39, 88, 127 Bernasconi, Robert, 23, 143, 154 Besonnheit (reflectivity), 162–5, 185, 196–7, 198, 209 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 253 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 142, 144, 145, 152–3 Bollywood, 172, 258 borders, 1, 6–7, 143, 145, 248, 251 Botany Bay, 47 Bougainville, Louis de, 59n14 Brahmins, 17, 37, 92, 96, 112, 115, 236–7 brotherhood, 58n13, 99–100, 220 Buddhism, 18, 19, 221, 253–4 Buffon, Georges-Louis de, 144, 151, 152, 153 Burkhardt, Frederick, 224 Camper, Pieter, 131 castes, 8, 92, 93, 113, 246, 253, 256 Chamberlain, H. S., 12

273

274

Index

China immaturity, 92, 106–16 language, 106, 113 obedience, 106, 107 racial judgments, 109–10, 132–3, 149 religion, 17, 112–13, 219 science, 31 self-isolation, 22 tolerance, 17, 24–5 travellers’ accounts, 108–9, 110 Christianity China and, 112–13 conversions to, 238–9, 244, 247, 256–7 crusades, 16, 18 India, 253–4, 256 moral code, 220–1, 238 self-mortification, 19 superiority, 219–21, 237–8 universalism, 26, 219–20, 240–1 values, 38, 70, 91 Churchill, T., 139 civilization, morality and, 49 Clark, Robert T., 15n4, 31n17 colonialism. See€imperialism Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 163–5, 166, 194, 209 Confucianism, 112 Congress Party, 253 constructivism, 6, 7–9 conversions, 238–42, 244, 247, 256–7 Cook, James, 26n13 cosmopolitanism, 24, 87, 101, 248, 251, 259 crusades, 16, 18 ‘culturalism,’ 2, 12 Cuvier, Georges, 144 Dalits, 256 Dallmayr, Fred, 253–4 deism, 220 Descartes, René, 223, 226 despotism, 17, 91, 97, 107, 111, 115, 132 Devy, G. N., 253–4 divinity. See€God dualism, 226, 227 East India Company, 115 emotions, 64–6, 79–80, 106, 155–6, 162, 192, 234 empiricism, 5, 32–3, 161–2, 166, 192–206, 223, 228, 260 Enlightenment critical spirit, 30 downside, 102–3 Eurocentrism, 23 freedom and equality, 25 happiness and, 39

Herder’s challenge, 4, 14, 38 imperialism and, 100 moral debate, 151 Nietzsche and, 216 philosophes, 24, 104, 111 progress and, 84, 104 reason, 100 slavery and, 67 universalism, 3, 13–14, 38–9, 249 environment. See€Klima equality See€also€inequalities race and moral equality, 120, 128, 149–59 Ergang, Robert, 138, 147 Eskimos, 149–50 essentialism, 6, 7, 248, 258 ethics Christianity, 220–1, 238 civilization and, 49 equal moral worth, 30, 120, 128, 149–59 Herder’s deeper relativism, 33–9 Herder’s universalism, 15–25 Kant–Herder debate, 44–83 merits of Herder’s position, 75–83 methodology and impartiality, 26–33 moral good and happiness, 58–70 moral relativism, 12–43 moral relativism or pluralism, 33, 39–43, 86 Nietzsche, 204 religion and, 220–1, 238, 241, 247 sources of moral knowledge, 33 ethnocentricity, 5, 27, 42, 46, 148 See€also€Eurocentrism ethnography. See€travel literature Eurocentrism See€also€Europe global assumptions, 260 Herder’s critique of, 4–5, 23, 44, 115, 120, 124–5, 149 persistence, 28 progress and, 84–5 racial judgments, 30–2, 130, 131, 132, 149–50 religion, 239–40 Europe See€also€Eurocentrism colonialism, 25, 116, 154, 249 cultures, 173–4 historical stage, 25, 104–6 political domination, 91 positive and negative features, 117 progress and, 25, 101–2 rationality, 181 scientific advancement, 216 violence, 27–8, 48–9, 154 expressionism, 2–3

Index fascism. See€Nazis fatalism, 222, 230–1 Fichte, Johann Gottlob, 71–2 Fischer, Eugen, 146 Flachsland, Caroline, 58n12 formalism, 111 Forster, Georg, 26, 29, 32, 46–7, 48, 58n13, 59, 143, 151, 153 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 26n13, 48, 59n14 Forster, Michael, 161, 162, 168, 176 Förster, Wolfgang, 89, 104n4, 220 Fox, Russell Arden, 183–4, 190 France classicism, 216 philosophes, 24, 111 freedom concept, 63 happiness and, 97–8, 117–18 Herder’s concept of, 120–1 historical progress to, 91, 92, 101 natural force, 61, 63, 64, 77–8 political freedom, 81–2, 97–8, 117 reason and, 211–18 social machinery and, 100 Fuegians, 59 functionalism, 14, 40, 42 Gaier, Ulrich, 193 Gandhi, Sonia, 253 Gardiner, Patrick, 13 Georg, Stefan, 188 Germanic tribes, 105, 175 Germany. See€Jews; Nazis globalization, 252 God Herder’s concept of, 221–34 Kraft, 224, 226–9 nature and, 57, 225, 228, 231–3 Goebel, Rolf, 111 Goethe, Johann von, 147 Golwalkar, M. S., 254–6, 256 Graf, J., 149 grammar, 170n5 Greece. See€ancient Greece Greenlanders, 132, 138–9, 236 Grossman, Jeffrey, 175 Grundmann, Johannes, 110 Guyer, Paul, 62 Gypsies, 153, 156, 242, 245–6 Haller, Albrecht von, 230 Hamann, Johann Georg, 72 happiness deep relativism, 34–9 enlightenment and, 39 freedom and, 97–8

275

Hegel, 93 Herder’s concept, 45–6 hierarchical judgments, 46 inner condition, 44 Kant–Herder debate assessment, 75–83 concept of happiness, 49–58 moral good and, 58–70 purpose of existence and, 70–5, 89 value of happiness, 76–7 localism and, 251 meaning, 34 measuring, 34–5, 43 nationalism and, 54 political freedom and, 117–18 politics and, 81–2 progress and, 87–8, 122–4 relativity, 46–7 religion and, 37 savages, 47–8 self-justification, 44, 45 sources, 35 Haucke, Kai, 52–3 Haym, Rudolf, 192 health, happiness and, 56 Hebrew poetry, 103, 166, 174–5, 235–6, 242 Hegel, Georg concept of history, 91, 93, 94–5, 115 freedom, 249 Herder’s influence on, 5, 73 on non-European societies, 115–16 sublation, 20n7 Heidegger, Martin anti-subjectivism, 211 Herder’s influence on, 5, 193 idealism and, 208 language, 183–9 skepticism, 207–8 time and space, 198–200, 202 Heinz, Marion, 63, 167, 212 Heraclitus, 204 Herbert, Maria von, 69–70 Herder, Johann Gottfried See€also€specific concepts English language scholarship, 1–3, 5 German scholarship, 10–11 reputation, 9–10 translated works, 10 Hindi, 171–2, 173, 177, 258 Hinduism, 17, 96, 219 Hindustani, 258 Hindutva, 253–60 history divine natural laws, 94–5 goal, 72–3, 84, 87–8, 94–5, 96–7, 120, 250 Hegel, 91, 93, 94–5, 115

276 history (cont.) immature China, 92, 106–16 Kant, 93, 94, 101, 117, 157 nemesis, 95–6 oppression, 96 plural future, 116–25 progress. See€progress sagas, 236 stages, 90–2, 104–6, 114 Homann, Harald, 22 Homer, 179, 180, 182, 204 Hsia, Adrian, 112 Humanität, 20–5, 33, 39, 75, 86–7, 120, 121, 219–21, 240 Hume, David, 192 Hunter, John, 144 Husserl, Edmund, 168, 193, 207 hybridity, 6, 7, 174, 175–6, 245 idealism, 80, 186, 191, 193, 208–9 identity complexity of identities, 242 constructivism, 6, 7–9 Herder’s theory, 2 Hindutva, 253–60 naturalness. See€naturalness of cultures pathologizing, 9 violence and, 252–3 impartiality, 26–33, 86, 113, 120 imperialism British colonialism in India, 256 brotherhood rhetoric and, 100 Europe, 25, 116, 154, 249 Herder’s anti-imperialism, 3, 18, 84, 85, 116, 175, 259–60 race and, 150, 154 incommensurability of cultures, 3, 13, 23, 26, 34, 37, 48, 88–90, 123–4, 172 India Bollywood, 172, 258 British colonialism, 256 castes, 92, 93, 113, 246, 253, 256 conversions to Christianity, 238–40 culture, 107 Hegel on, 115–16 Herder’s judgments on, 31 Hindutva, 253–60 historical stage, 113 identity, 253–60 languages, 255–6 religion, 112, 236–7, 253–4, 256 subjugation, 27, 96 tolerance, 24–5 travellers’ accounts, 108 widow immolation, 17, 36

Index inequalities, 8, 18, 19, 23, 118, 125, 249–50 internationalism, Herder’s concept, 3 Irmscher, Hans Dietrich, 20–1, 23n10, 148, 163 Islam, 243, 257 Jacobi, Friedrich, 222n2 Jacobs, Jürgen, 140 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 254–6 Jäger, Hans-Wolf, 47–8 Jains, 253–4 Jesuits, 107, 108–9, 112 Jews, 12, 174–5, 238, 240–6, 254–7 Jinnah, Muhammad, 256 Judaism, 221, 243, 245, 256 See€also€Jews justice, 30, 36, 66–7, 70, 88, 116, 118, 122, 248, 250 kalos k’agathos, 179–80 Kant, Immanuel Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 51–2, 61, 155n10 categorical imperatives, 72–3, 93 Critique of Practical Reason, 52, 117 Critique of Pure Reason, 63, 192, 193, 196, 207, 222 Critique of the Power of Judgment, 51, 59, 71 Enlightenment values, 30 freedom, 120–1, 249 Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, 50n4, 58–9, 61 happiness comparative assessment, 75–83 concept, 49–58 moral good and, 58–70, 84 purpose of existence and, 70–5 value, 76–7 Heidegger and, 185, 186, 207 Herder–Kant debate, 5 assessment, 75–83 ethics, 44, 49–83 metaphysics, 222 reason, 192–3, 196–7 Herder’s teacher, 44 history, 93, 94, 101, 117, 157 ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,’ 45 idealism, 193, 206, 209 on Judaism, 245 Lectures on Anthropology, 50, 51, 52, 63 natural rights, 73–4, 75, 117 ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles of Philosophy,’ 153–4 Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 51, 56, 71–2, 74, 154

Index phenomenology, 206–8 philosophy and anthropology, 41 progress, 87–8 race, 126, 127, 128, 139–45, 150, 152–7 reason, 192–3, 196–7, 201, 205 Reflections on Anthropology, 155 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 61 review of Ideas, 44, 233 on sexuality, 57–8, 64 ‘Speculative Beginning of Human History,’ 51–2, 74 Tahitians, 45, 59, 60, 63, 78, 84 time, 200 transcendentalism, 206, 222 universalism, 3 on women, 156 Kleingeld, Pauline, 154 Klima language and, 167–9 race and, 133–4, 135–6, 137, 138, 142, 146, 153 reason and, 195 Koepke, Wulf, 74, 89, 127 Kompridis, Nicholas, 8 Korsgaard, Christine, 59, 60n15, 61, 67n19 Kraft, 56–7, 63, 141, 224, 226–9 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 144–5 Langton, Rae, 61, 69–70 language ancient languages, 179–82 anti-subjectivism, 187–9 authenticity, 182 Besonnheit (reflectivity), 162–5, 185, 196–7, 209 China, 106, 113 cognition and, 178–84 coinage imagery, 204–5 creative expression, 181–4, 187, 214–15 culture and, 4, 6 Empfindung (sensation), 165–7, 176–8 empiricism, 161–2, 166, 192 evolution, 182 expressivism, 161 first language, 169–70, 176 grammar, 170n5 Heidegger, 183–9 Herder scholarship, 160–2 Herder’s focus on, 3, 160–91 identity and, 148, 169, 183–4 India, 255–6 Klima, 167–9 linguistic constitutism, 160, 162, 166 metaphysics, 195–6 migration and, 173–4, 175–6

277

Nietzsche, 191, 193, 203 ontology, 184–91 origins, 162–9, 189–90, 197, 202 philosophy, 217–18 place and, 169–78 reason and, 58, 192–3, 195–6, 212–13 religion, 235–6, 242 translation, 171–2, 177–8 Volk and, 148, 169, 180, 183–4 Larrimore, Mark, 157 Lee, Eun-Jung, 111, 112 Leibniz, Gottfried, 21, 56, 166, 222, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230 Lenz, Fritz, 145–6 Lessing, Gotthold, 222n2, 229 liberalism, 36–7, 120–1, 246 life-force, 56, 141 Linnaeus, Carl, 142 literature See€also€poetry context, 171 Herder’s focus on, 3 language and, 179, 182–3 Old Testament, 174, 235 promotion of vernacular literature, 183 Litt, Theodor, 65, 68, 209 Locke, John, 166, 192, 194, 195, 209, 210 love poetry, 171–2 Macintosh, William, 27, 48–9 Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de, 108–9 Maistre, Joseph de, 29 mathematics, 223–4 Menges, Karl, 206, 245 Menze, Ernest, 244n4 Middle Ages, 16, 18, 25 migration, 9, 129–30, 139, 173–4, 175–6 Mongols, 18, 96, 109, 110, 132, 135, 146, 158 mongrelization, 176 monism, 56, 79, 80, 148, 228, 231, 232 Montesquieu, Charles de, 28–9 moral relativism. See€ethics Moravia, Sergio, 26 Morton, Michael, 9, 160 Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, 14, 163 Munzel, Felicitas, 155 Murdoch, Iris, 66n18 Murphy, James, 53 Muslims, 253–4, 256, 257, 259 myths, 8, 17, 20, 48, 137, 156, 168, 236 Napoleon I, 95 nation states, 87, 248, 256

278

Index

nationalism happiness and, 54 Herder’s concept, 3 Hindutva, 253–60 mythologies, 8, 236 national pride, 30 Native Americans, 133–4, 156, 158, 249 naturalness of cultures ancient world, 103, 181–2 China, 107 concept, 6, 7–8, 119 Herder–Kant debate, 49, 64 language, 174–5, 181–2 race, 156 nature emotions, 156 environment. See€Klima ethics and, 66, 70 freedom and, 61, 63, 64, 77–8 God and, 57, 225, 228, 231–3 happiness and, 50–1, 55–6, 60–2, 71–2, 79–81 Heidegger, 186–7 Herder’s preference for, 156 history and, 94–5 human beings and, 79–80 Kant–Herder debate, 49, 58, 64, 68 natural forces, 61, 64 natural rights, 73–5, 117 Negroes and, 46, 47 origins of language, 189–90, 191, 214 place of humanity within, 80–1 progress and, 88 sloths, 157–8 Nazis, 11, 12–13, 126, 127, 128–9, 130, 145–9, 158, 245, 254 Negroes, 31, 46–7, 54, 85–6, 126, 129, 131, 134–7, 145–6, 150–6, 158 nemesis, 95–6 New Holland, 47, 59 Nielson, Kai, 13 Nietzsche, Friedrich Herder’s influence on, 5 language, 191, 193, 203, 214 reason, 202–5, 209, 213–16 skepticism, 214, 215 will to power, 100 Nisbet, H. B., 136, 142, 145, 150, 223, 227 nominalism, 201, 202, 204 Norton, Robert, 163–4 Old Testament, 103, 174–5, 235–6 organisms, 2, 104, 136, 137, 141, 145 Oriental patriarchs, 36, 37, 38, 90, 91–2, 98, 101 Ossian, 182

Pakeezah (film), 171, 258–9 Pakistan, 257 panlogism, 227 pantheism, 57, 80, 94, 115, 210, 222, 224–5 Parekh, Bhikhu, 1, 10n6, 247n8 paternalism, 81–2 patriotism, 23, 29 Pauw, Cornelius de, 108, 109 Peru, 152 phenomenology, 186, 200, 207 philosophes, 24, 104, 111 philosophy, culture and, 217–18 physical environment. See€Klima Pippin, Robert, 62n17 Plato, 66n18, 180, 194, 195 pluralism garden metaphor, 246 meaning, 3–4 moral relativism or, 33, 39–43, 86 plural future, 116–25 politics, 11 progress and, 88 religion, 112, 221 terminology, 3–4 poetry Hebrew poetry, 103, 166, 174–5, 235–6, 242 language and, 181–4, 187 love poetry, 171–2 politics happiness and, 81–2 pluralism, 11 political freedom, 81–2, 97–8, 117 political ideal, 87, 121 Pope, Alexander, 47 populism, 2 power inequalities, 8, 18, 19, 23, 118, 125, 249–50 primitive societies, 45, 46, 49 progress China, 92 cultural interaction and, 22 dream of linear progress, 89 Enlightenment and, 84, 104 ethical progress, 48–9 Europe, 25, 101–2 European progressive striving, 117 forms, 73, 87–106 happiness and, 87–8, 122–4 Herder’s skepticism, 89 history and, 45, 49, 80–1 Kant, 87–8 maturity, 91 measuring, 88 non-triumphalism, 122 reason and, 21 relativism, 84–7, 250

Index struggle towards peaceful diversity, 87 to freedom, 91, 92, 101 universalism, 85 purpose of existence, 70–5, 84, 89 race See€also€specific races ambivalence, 5, 128 China, 109–10, 132–3, 149 definition, 255 happiness and, 46, 47 Herder and Nazis, 126, 127, 128–9, 130, 145–9, 158 Herder scholarship, 126–9 Herder’s racial theory, 3, 109–10, 126–59 Herder’s terminology, 130, 131–2, 136, 150, 158–9 Herder’s typology, 129–39 hierarchical judgments, 85–6 Kant, 126, 127, 128, 139–45, 150, 152–7 Klima and, 133–4, 135–6, 137, 138, 142, 146, 153 moral equality, 120, 128, 149–59 racism, 248 theorists, 12 Rachels, James, 40 Rawls, John, 36 Raz, Joseph, 14n5 realism, 13, 80, 188, 191, 193–4, 206–11, 214, 216 reason culture and, 250 Enlightenment, 100 European civilization, 181 freedom and originality, 211–18 Herder’s concept of, 63 Herder’s empiricism, 192–206 Herder’s realism, 193, 206–11, 214 Kant, 192–3, 196–7 language and, 58, 192–3, 195–6, 212–13 moral good and, 84 Nietzsche, 202–5, 209, 213–16 philosophy and culture, 217–18 place of, 98, 192–218 progress and, 21 purpose of existence and, 71–2 time and space, 197–201, 205 universalism, 195, 211–12 Reath, Andrew, 60n15, 62n16 Redeker, Martin, 127, 130 reflectivity. See€Besonnheit (reflectivity) relativism definition, 3–4, 14 moral relativism, 12–43 race. See€race

279

religion. See€religion terminology, 3–4 religion authoritarianism, 18–20, 247 China, 17, 112–13, 219 conversions, 238–42, 244, 247, 256–7 culture and, 237 elites, 250 ethics and, 220–1, 238, 241, 247 happiness and, 37 Herder’s concept of God, 221–34 Herder’s philosophy of, 234–47 Humanität and, 219–21 Jews, 238, 240–6 language, 235–6, 242 pluralism, 221, 240, 246–7 sexuality and, 19–20 tolerance, 112, 219, 237, 238, 240, 246, 258 universalism, 237–41 Romanticism, 39, 210 Rome. See€ancient Rome Rosenberg, Alfred, 12, 147 Rouché, Max, 12, 104, 105 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 45, 46, 47, 48, 64, 72, 98 Rushdie, Salman, 176 Sadji, Uta, 85–6 sagas, 236 Sangh Parivar, 253 Sanskrit, 256 savages, 27, 47–8, 66, 99, 149, 156 Savarkar, V. D., 253–4, 255, 256, 257n3 Scheler, Max, 62, 70 Schiller, Friedrich, 68 Schneider, Jost, 128 science, 215–16, 223–4, 226, 232 sculpture, 102–3 Sedgewick, Sally, 155n12 Sen, Amartya, 252–3 Senegal, 153 sexuality, 19–20, 57–8, 64, 79 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of, 179, 222 Shakespeare, William, 177, 216–17 Shell, Susan Meld, 51, 63 signs, 163, 164 Sikhs, 253–4 skepticism, 193, 203–8, 210, 214, 215 slavery, 18, 25, 27, 67, 84, 93, 96, 97–8, 99, 123, 150, 151, 152, 175 Sloan, Phillip, 141, 142 sloths, 157–8 social security, 117 Soemmerring, Samuel Thomas, 136

280

Index

solidarity, 8, 20, 88 song, 165, 171–3, 258–9 Sonnerat, Pierre, 108, 109 space, concept, 197–200, 202, 205 Spencer, Vicki Herder’s relativism, 14–15, 16, 33, 39 Herder’s social commentary, 92, 100 historical methodology, 27, 28 language, 161, 164, 172, 182 open teleology, 118 on Volk, 180 Spengler, Oswald, 12 Spinoza, Baruch, 10, 56, 94, 222, 224, 225–6, 228, 231 Stoicism, 53, 65 Sturm und Drang, 38 subjectivism, 193, 199, 205–7, 211 sympathy, 23, 30, 65–7, 78, 82, 249, 252 Tahitians, 45, 59, 60, 63, 78, 157 Taylor, Charles, 103, 161, 162, 170, 181, 187, 188, 210 Terence, 21 Tibet, 18–19, 20, 37, 111, 221 time, concept, 197–8, 200–1, 202, 205 tolerance, 17, 18, 25, 30, 48, 106, 112, 175, 219, 221, 236–8, 240, 246, 258 transcendentalism, 199–200, 206 translation, 171–2, 177–8 travel literature, 26–7, 48, 59, 108–10, 194–5 Turks, 246 universalism Christianity, 26, 219–20, 240–1 Enlightenment, 13–14, 38–9, 249 equal moral worth, 30 Herder’s concept of humanity, 3, 20–5, 33, 39

Herder’s critique, 4–5 Herder’s universalism, 15–25, 118, 252 progress and, 85 reason, 195, 211–12 religion and, 237–41 universal brotherhood rhetoric, 99–100 Urdu, 171–2, 173, 177, 258 Verri, Count, 51 Viergutz, R. F., 146, 149 Volk cultural concept, 256 language and, 127, 148, 169, 180, 183–4 natural landscape and, 187 Nazis and, 11 pluralism and, 121 race and, 11, 128 Voltaire, 21, 22, 100, 111–12, 114, 220 war, 23, 72, 95, 121 Weber, Max, 52n8 Whitton, Brian, 10n8, 13, 34, 86n2, 118 Wiese, Benno von, 127–8, 130 Williams, Bernard, 14 Wilson, Catherine, 10n8, 45, 46 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 167, 170 women Kant on, 156 Montesquieu, 28–9 subordination, 118, 123, 250 violence against, 17–18, 93 Wood, Allen, 45, 46, 61, 73 xenophobia, 8, 248 Zammito, John, 24, 41, 187–8, 223 Zeuch, Ulrike, 207–8 Zionism, 244