The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Where did his central insight originate? Did the idea of what a culture is, and what it is to understand it in its unity and variety, and its likeness, but, above all, its unlikeness, to other cultures, which undermines the doctrine of the identity of civilisation and scientific progress conceived as the cumulative growth of knowledge – did this spring fully armed like Pallas Athene out of his head? Who, before 1725, had had such thoughts? How did they percolate – if, indeed, they ever did – to Hamann and Herder in Germany, some of whose ideas are strikingly similar? These are problems on which, even now, not enough research has been done by historians of ideas. Yet, fascinating as they are, their solution seems to me to be less important than the central discoveries themselves; most of all, the notion that the only way of achieving any degree of self-understanding is by systematically retracing our steps, historically, psychologically and, above all, anthropologically, through the stages of social growth that follow empirically discoverable patterns, or, if that is too absolute a term, trends or tendencies with whose workings we are acquainted in our own mental life, but moving to no single, universal goal; each a world on its own, yet having enough in common with its successors, with whom it forms a continuous line of recognisably human experience, not to be unintelligible to their inhabitants. Only in this fashion, if Vico is right, can we hope to understand the unity of human history – the links that connect our own ‘magnificent times’ to our squalid beginnings in ‘the great forest of the earth’.32

  1 Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2. 3.

  2 Novum organum 1. 39.

  3 M. H. Fisch has correctly pointed out that the dissolution of monasteries had released a mass of documentary evidence which had not hitherto been available, and this contributed to the fact that the Church, in repelling attacks on her historical claims, had recourse to weapons of historical research.

  4 Phrases like ‘les saisons et mutations de moeurs d’un peuple’, or ‘la complexion et humour’ of a nation, or ‘façons de vivre’, or ‘forme de vivre’, ‘la police’ or ‘les motifs, les opinions et les pensées des hommes’, ‘le génie du siècle, des opinions, des moeurs, des idées dominantes’, ‘les passions qui conduisaient les hommes’ were very common throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  5 ‘Histoire’ in Dictionnaire philosophique: p. 365 in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, [ed. Louis Moland] (Paris, 1877–85) (hereafter M), vol. 19. Subsequent references to Voltaire, unless otherwise stated, are to this edition, by volume and page, thus: M xix 365.

  6 Preface to Essai sur l’histoire universelle, vol. 3 (1754): M xxiv 41.

  7 Essai sur les moeurs, ‘Avant-propos’: M xi 157.

  8 ibid., chapter 81: M xii 53.

  9 Siècle de Louis XIV, Introduction: M xiv 155.

  10 Letter to Maurice Pilavoine, 23 April 1760.

  11 op. cit. (p. 335 above, note 1), p. 367.

  12 Essai sur les moeurs, chapter 195: M xiii 162.

  13 So Fontenelle, whose influence was inferior only to Voltaire’s, identifies progress in the arts (as in everything else) with increase in order, clarity, precision, netteté, whose purest expression is geometry – the Cartesian method which cannot but improve whatever it touches, in every province of knowledge and creation. Mythology for him, as for Voltaire, is the product of savagery and ignorance. He is suspicious of all metaphor, but especially of images fabuleuses, which spring from a ‘totally false and ridiculous’ conception of things – their use can only help to disseminate error. Poets in primitive times employed mythological language ornamentally, but also as a stratagem to represent themselves as directly inspired by the gods; modern writers should at least use images spirituelles – personified abstractions – about, say, time, space, deity, images which speak to reason, not to irrational feeling. The intellectual power, courage, humanity and unswerving pursuit of truth with which the lumières of the age fought against nonsense and obscurantism in theory and barbarous cruelties in practice need not blind us to the vices of their virtues, delusions which have exacted their own terrible price. (See Fontenelle’s ‘Sur la poésie en général’: the quoted phrase is on p. 560 in his Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1989– ), vol. 5.)

  14 Vergil, Eclogues 3. 60; cf. Aratus, Phainomena 2–4; quoted in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, revised ed. (New York, 1968), paragraph 379. Subsequent reference to the New Science are to this edition, thus: NS 379.

  15 NS 401, 434.

  16 The passage in Vico’s New Science describing the end of a decadent civilisation is worth quoting: ‘no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, [men] live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice’. (NS 1106).

  17 For instance, the story of Theseus and Ariadne is concerned with early seafaring life: the Minotaur represents the pirates who abduct Athenians in ships, for the bull is a characteristic ancient emblem on a ship’s prow, and piracy was held in high honour by both the Greeks and the ancient Germans. Ariadne is the art of seafaring, the thread is a symbol of navigation, and the labyrinth is the Aegean Sea. Alternatively, the Minotaur is a half-caste child, a foreigner come to Crete – an early emblem of racial conflict. Cadmus is primitive man, and his slaying of the serpent is the clearing of the vast forest. He sows the serpent’s teeth in the ground – the teeth are the teeth of a plough, the stones he casts about him are the clods of earth which the oligarchy of heroes retain against the land-hungry serfs; the furrows are the orders of feudal society; the armed men who spring up from the teeth are heroes, but they fight, not each other, as the myth relates (here Vico decides to ‘correct’ the evidence), but the robbers and vagabonds who threaten the lives of the settled farmers. The wounding of Mars by Minerva is the defeat of the plebeians by the patricians. In the case of Pegasus, wings represent the sky, the sky represents the birds, flight yields the all-important auspices. Wings plus a horse is equivalent to horse-riding nobles with the right of taking auspices, and therefore authority over the people, and soon such myths represent powers, institutions, and often embody radical changes in the social order; mythological creatures like Draco – a serpent found in China and Egypt too – or Heracles, or Aeneas (whose descent to Avernus is, of course, a symbol of sowing), are not for Vico historical persons, but, like Pythagoras and Solon, are viewed by him as mere symbols of political structures, and not to be fitted into any chronological framework.

  18 NS 209, 381, 933.

  19 NS 354.

  20 NS passim, e.g. 13, 195, 301, 369, 736, 1097.

  21 NS 239–40. This is a good example of Vico’s freely roaming historical imagination: he groups together ‘lex’ (acorn), ‘ilex’, ‘aquilex’, ‘legumen’ and ‘legere’ as typical ‘sylvan’ words, plainly drawn from life in the forest, which then came to mean quite different activities and objects. At first, ‘lex’ ‘must have meant a collection of acorns’. ‘Ilex’ is ‘oak’, ‘for the oak produces the acorns by which the swine are drawn together’ (so, too, ‘aquilex’ means ‘collector of waters’). ‘Lex was next a collection of vegetables, from which the latter were called legumina. Later on, at a time when vulgar letters had not yet been invented for writing down the laws, lex by a necessity of civil nature must have meant a collection of citizens, or the public parliament; so that the presence of the people was the lex, or “law”, that solemnised the wills that were made calatis comitiis, in the presence of the assembled comitia. Finally, collecting letters, and making, as it were, a sheaf of them for each word, was called legere, reading.’ This is a characteristically fanciful piece of genetic sociological philology; yet in due course this socio-linguistic approach led to rich and important branches of the humanities in the form of historical jurisprudence, social anthropology, comparative religion and the like, particularly in their relations with the genetic and historical aspects of linguistic theory.

  22 NS 374.

  2
3 loc. cit. (p. 347 above, note 1).

  24 NS 225–30, 461.

  25 This is in fact based on a misreading of Polybius’ text, but it furnished Vico with an occasion for his historicist thesis: and even though Polybius did not commit this fallacy, it forms a strand in the tradition of the Enlightenment against which Vico rebelled.

  26 The difference of the earlier and later attitudes is brought out by the interest in myths and fables on the part of, say, Bodin and Bacon and even Montesquieu on the one hand, and Vico on the other. The former thinkers do not think of myths and fables as inventions of lying priests or merely results of ‘human weakness’ (to use Voltaire’s phrase), but they look to antiquities of this kind for information about the moeurs and façons de vivre in early or remote societies for the express purpose of discovering whether there are historical lessons to be learned with relevance to their own times and circumstances. Even though temperamentally they may have been intensely curious about other societies, and collected these facts for their own sakes, the ostensible motive was certainly ultilitarian – they wished to improve human life. Vico looks at myths as evidence of the different categories in which experience was organised – spectacles, unfamiliar to us, through which early man and remote peoples looked at the world in which they lived: the purpose is to understand whence we come, how we came to be where we are, how much or how little of the past we still carry with us. His approach is genetic, for it is only through its genesis, reconstructed by fantasia, guided by rules which he thinks he has discovered, that anything can be truly understood: not by some intuition of timeless essences, or empirical description or analysis of an object’s present state. This marks a genuine turning-point in the conception of history and society.

  27 op. cit. (p. 317 above, note 1), vol.11, p. 44.

  28 NS 331.

  29 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), passim, esp. chapter 5.

  30 loc. cit. (p. 20 above, note 1).

  31 Erich Auerbach seems to me to have put this with eloquence and precision: ‘When people realise that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premisses; when people reckon among such premisses not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena … so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid …’. Mimesis (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), p. 391. I know of no better formulation of the difference between history as science and history as a form of self-knowledge incapable of ever becoming fully organised, and to be achieved – as Vico warned us – only ‘with great effort’ (NS 338).

  32 NS 123; and see p. 349 above, note 3.

  HERDER AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  We live in a world we ourselves create.1

  I

  HERDER’S FAME RESTS on the fact that he is the father of the related notions of nationalism, historicism and the Volksgeist, one of the leaders of the romantic revolt against classicism, rationalism and faith in the omnipotence of scientific method – in short, the most formidable of the adversaries of the French philosophes and their German disciples. Whereas they – or at least the best known among them, d’Alembert, Helvétius, Holbach and, with qualifications, Voltaire and Diderot, Wolff and Reimarus – believed that reality was ordered in terms of universal, timeless, objective, unalterable laws which rational investigation could discover, Herder maintained that every activity, situation, historical period or civilisation possessed a unique character of its own; so that the attempt to reduce such phenomena to combinations of uniform elements, and to describe or analyse them in terms of universal rules, tended to obliterate precisely those crucial differences which constituted the specific quality of the object under study, whether in nature or in history. To the notions of universal laws, absolute principles, final truths, eternal models and standards in ethics or aesthetics, physics or mathematics, he opposed a radical distinction between the method appropriate to the study of physical nature and that called for by the changing and developing spirit of man. He is credited with having put new life into the notion of social patterns, social growth, the vital importance of considering qualitative as well as quantitative factors – the impalpable and the imponderable, which the concepts of natural science ignore or deny. Preoccupied with the mysteries of the creative process, whether in individuals or groups, he launched (so we are told) a general attack on rationalism with its tendency to generalise, abstract, assimilate the dissimilar, unify the disparate; and, above all, on its avowed purpose, to create a corpus of systematic knowledge which in principle would be capable of answering all intelligible questions – the idea of a unified science of all there is. In the course of this propaganda against rationalism, scientific method and the universal authority of intelligible laws, he is held to have stimulated the growth of particularism, nationalism and literary, religious and political irrationalism, and thereby to have played a major role in transforming human thought and action in the generation that followed.

  This account, which is to be found in some of the best-known monographs on Herder’s thought, is broadly true, but oversimplified. His views did have a profound and revolutionary effect upon later thought and practice. He has been praised by some as the champion of faith against reason, poetical and historical imagination against the mechanical application of rules, insight against logic, life against death; by others he has been classed with confused, or retrograde, or irrationalist thinkers who misunderstood what they had learned from the Enlightenment, and fed the stream of German chauvinism and obscurantism; still others have sought to find common ground between him and Comte, or Darwin, or Wagner, or modern sociologists.

  It is not my purpose in this study to pronounce directly upon these questions, although I am inclined to think that the extent of his acquaintance with, and fidelity to, the natural sciences of his day has often been seriously underestimated. He was fascinated and influenced by the findings of the sciences no less than Goethe, and, like him, thought that false general inferences were often drawn from them. Herder, was, all his life, a sharp and remorseless critic of the Encyclopaedists, but he accepted, indeed he acclaimed, the scientific theories on which they based their social and ethical doctrines; he merely thought that these conclusions could not follow from the newly established laws of physics or biology, since they plainly contradicted what any sensitive observer, since the beginning of social self-consciousness, knew to be true of human experience and activity.2 But it is not Herder’s attitude to the natural science of his day that I propose to discuss. I wish to confine myself, so far as possible (and at times it is not), to what is truly original in Herder’s views, and by no means to all of this: in particular I shall try to examine three cardinal ideas in the rich welter of his thought, ideas which have had great influence for two centuries and are novel, important and interesting in themselves. These ideas, which go against the main stream of the thought of his time, I have called populism, expressionism and pluralism.3

  Let me begin by conceding the most obvious of Herder’s debts to other thinkers.4 Herder’s thesis that the proper subject of the historical sciences is the life of communities and not the exploits of individuals – statesmen, soldiers, kings, dynasties, adventurers and other famous men – had been stated by Voltai
re and Hume and Montesquieu, by Schlözer and Gatterer, and before them by French writers on history in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and with incomparable imagination and originality by Vico. There is, so far as I know, no conclusive evidence that Herder had read Vico’s Scienza nuova until at least twenty years after his own theory of history had been formed; but if he had not read Vico he had heard of him, and probably read Wegelin, and Cesarotti’s Homeric commentaries. Moreover, the idea that great poets expressed the mind and experience of their societies, and were their truest spokesmen, was widespread during Herder’s formative years. Shaftesbury celebrated artists as the inspired voices of their times, von Muralt, Bodmer and Breitinger in Switzerland placed Shakespeare and Milton and the old German Minnesingers far above the idols of the French Enlightenment. Bodmer corresponded on these topics with Vico’s devoted admirer, Count Pietro Calepio;5 the battle between literary historicism and the neo-classicism of Paris and its German followers was in full swing in Herder’s youth. This may perhaps be sufficient to account for the striking resemblance between the views of Vico and Herder, and obviate the long and desperate search for more direct lines. In any case the notion of cultural patterns was far from new in his day, as the ironical title of his early Yet Another Philosophy of History was meant to emphasise. The case for it had been presented effectively, if in somewhat general terms, by his arch-enemy Voltaire in the celebrated Essai sur les moeurs and elsewhere.