The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  So, too, the notion that the variety of civilisations is, to a large degree, determined by differences of physical and geographical factors – referred to by the general name of ‘climate’ – had become, since Montesquieu, a commonplace. It occurs, before Montesquieu, in the thought of Bodin, Saint-Evremond, the abbé Dubos and their followers.

  As for the dangers of cultural arrogance – the tendency to judge ancient societies in terms of modern values – this had been made a central issue by Herder’s older contemporary Lessing (even though Lessing may well have been influenced by him). Nor had anyone written more pungently than Voltaire against the European habit of dismissing as inferior remote civilisations, such as that of China, which he had extolled in order to expose the ridiculous vanity, exclusiveness and fanaticism of the ‘barbarous’ Judaeo-Christian outlook that recognised no values besides its own. The fact that Herder turned this weapon against Voltaire himself, and accused him of a narrowly dix-huitième and Parisian point of view, does not alter the fact that the head and source of all opposition to Europocentrism was the Patriarch himself. Voltaire had praised ancient Egypt, and Winckelmann the Greeks; Boulainvilliers had spoken of the superiority of the Northern nations, and so had Mallet in his celebrated history of Denmark; Beat Ludwig von Muralt in his Letters on the English and the French, had, as early as 1725, drawn a contrast between the independent spirit of the Swiss and English, particularly English writers, and the conventional mannerisms of the French; Hurd, Millar and, after them, Justus Möser sang the praises of medieval Europe at the very height of the contemptuous dismissal of the Dark Ages by Voltaire and the Encyclopédie. They were, it is true, a minority, and, while Justus Möser’s paeans to the free life of the ancient Saxons before they were so brutally civilised by Charlemagne may have been influenced by Herder, they were not created by him.

  There was new emphasis on cultural differences, and protest against the authority of timeless general laws and rules. The notorious lack of historical sense that made Racine and Corneille represent classical or exotic oriental personages in the clothes and with the manners of the courtiers of Louis XIV was adversely commented on by Dubos and successfully satirised by Saint-Evremond. At the other end of the scale, some German pietists, Arnold and Zinzendorf among others, laid great stress on the proposition that every religion had a unique insight peculiar to itself, and Arnold based on this belief a bold and passionate plea for toleration of deviations from Lutheran orthodoxy, and even of heresies and unbelief.

  The notion of the spirit of a nation or a culture had been central not only to Vico and Montesquieu, but to the famous publicist Friedrich Karl von Moser, whom Herder read and knew, to Bodmer and Breitinger, to Hamann and to Zimmermann. Boling-broke had spoken of the division of men into nationalities as being deeply rooted in Nature herself. By the middle of the century there were plenty of Celtomaniacs and Gothomaniacs – notably Irishmen and Scotsmen who, even without the aid of Ossian, praised the virtues of Gaelic or Germanic tribes and represented them as being morally and socially superior not only to ancient Greeks or Romans, but still more to the decadent civilisation of modern Latin and Mediterranean peoples. Rousseau’s celebrated letter to the Poles, advising them to resist forcible assimilation by Russia by stubbornly clinging to their national customs and characteristics, unacceptable as this was to the cosmopolitanism of his time, exhibits the same spirit.

  As for the notion of society as an organism, with which Burke and Herder made such play, it was by this time very old indeed. The use of organic metaphors is at least as old as Aristotle; nobody had used them more lavishly than medieval writers; they are the heart and centre of John of Salisbury’s political tracts, and are a weapon consciously used by Hooker and Pascal against the new scientific-mechanical conceptions. There was certainly nothing novel in this notion; it represents, on the contrary, if anything, a deliberate return to older views of social life. This is no less true of Burke, who was equally prone to the use of analogies drawn from the new biological sciences; I know of no evidence that Burke had read or heard of Justus Möser’s or Herder’s ideas.

  Differences of ideals – of what made men and societies happy – had been illustrated vividly by Adam Ferguson in his highly original Essay on the History of Civil Society, which Herder had read.6

  In his general explanation of events in naturalistic terms, whether geophysical or biological, Herder adopted the normal approach of the followers of Locke, Helvétius and the Encyclopaedists, and indeed of the entire Enlightenment. Unlike his teacher Hamann, Herder was decisively influenced by the findings of natural science; he gave them a vitalistic interpretation, though not the mystical or theosophical one favoured by Hemsterhuis, Lavater and other ‘intuitivists’.

  The ancient notion of a single great cosmic force of nature, embodied in finite, dynamic centres, had been given new life by Leibniz and was common to all his disciples.

  So, too, the idea of a divine plan realised in human history had passed in uninterrupted succession from the Old Testament and its Jewish interpreters to the Christian Fathers, and then to the classical formulation of Bossuet.

  Parallels between primitive peoples remote from one another in time and space – Homeric Greeks and early Romans on the one hand, and Red Indians or Germanic tribes on the other – had been put forward by Fontenelle and by the French Jesuit, Père Lafitau; the protagonists of this approach in the early years of the century, especially English writers such as Blackwell and the Wartons, owed much to these speculations. It had become part and parcel of Homeric scholarship, which flourished both in England and, under the impulsion of Vico, in Italy. Certainly Cesarotti had perceived the wider implications of this kind of approach to literature for comparative philology and anthropology; and when Diderot in the Encyclopédie, in the course of a general article devoted to Greek philosophy, dismissed Homer as ‘a theologian, philosopher and poet’, quoting the view of a ‘well-known man’ that he was unlikely to be read much in the future,7 this was a characteristically partisan boutade, in the spirit of Descartes and Pierre Bayle, against reverence for the past and dreary erudition, a belated echo of the battle of the ancients and the moderns. Nor was the Bible itself, which Vico had not dared to touch, left unmolested. Philosophical and historical criticism of the text, which had begun with Spinoza and Père Simon in the previous century, had been carried on cautiously – despite some opposition from Christian orthodoxy, both Catholic and Protestant – with strict regard to the rules of secular scholarship. Astruc in France, Lowth in England, and after them Michaelis in Germany (and Denmark), treated the Bible as a monument of oriental literature composed at various dates. Everyone knows of Gibbon’s debt to Mosheim’s coldly secular treatment of early Christian ecclesiastical history. Herder, who was not a trained researcher, had plenty to lean upon.

  The same is true of Herder’s linguistic patriotism. The defence of the German language had been vigorously taken up by Martin Opitz in the early years of the seventeenth century, and had since then formed part of the conscious programme of theologians, men of letters, and philosophers. Mencke, Horneck, Moscherosch, Logau and Gryphius are names that may not mean a great deal to English readers today; but in the two centuries that followed the Reformation they fought with stubbornness and success under Luther’s banner against both Latin and French; and more famous men, Pufendorf and Leibniz, Thomasius and Wolff, Hamann and Lessing, were also engaged in this campaign that had begun long before. Once again, Herder began with something that had by that time become established as a traditional German attitude.

  As for the famous reversal of values – the triumph of the concrete over the abstract; the sharp turn towards the immediate, the given, the experienced, and, above all, away from abstractions, theories, generalisations and stylised patterns; and the restoration of quality to its old status above quantity, and of the immediate data of the senses to their primacy over the primary qualities of physics – it is in this cause that Hamann made his name. It formed th
e basis of Lavater’s ‘physiognomical’ researches; it was at least as old as Shaftesbury; it is pertinent to the works of the young Burke.

  The reaction against the reorganisation of knowledge and society by the application of rationalist and scientific principles was in full swing by the time Herder came upon the scene. Rousseau had struck against it in 1750 with his first Discourse. Seven years later his moralising and reactionary letter to d’Alembert denouncing the stage had marked a total break with the party of the philosophes, as both sides swiftly recognised. In Germany this mood was strongly reinforced by the inward-looking tradition of the pietist movement. The human solidarity and mutual respect of these small groups, inspired by their burning Protestant faith; their belief in the unadorned truth, in the power of goodness, in the inner light; their contempt for outward forms; their rigid sense of duty and discipline; their perpetual self-examination; their obsession with the presence of evil, which at times took hysterical or sadistic forms and generated a good deal of unctuous hypocrisy; and above all their preoccupation with the life of the spirit, which alone liberated men from the bonds of the flesh and of nature – all these strains are very strong in those who were brought up in this stern atmosphere, and particularly in the East Prussians, Knutzen, Hamann, Herder, Kant. Although a great intellectual gulf divides Kant from Herder, they share a common element: a craving for spiritual self-determination as against half-conscious drifting along the streams of uncriticised dogma (whether theological or scientific), for moral independence (whether of individuals or groups), and above all for moral salvation.

  If Herder had done no more than create a genuine synthesis out of these attitudes and doctrines, and built with them, if not a system, at any rate a coherent Weltanschauung destined to have a decisive influence on the literature and thought of his country, this alone would have been a high enough achievement to earn for him a unique place in the history of civilisation. Invention is not everything. If one were called upon to show what is strictly original in the individual doctrines of Locke or Rousseau, Bentham or Marx, Aquinas, or even Hegel, one could, without much difficulty, trace virtually all their doctrines to antecedent ‘sources’. Yet this does not derogate from the originality and genius of these thinkers. ‘Small change for a napoleon is not a napoleon.’ It is not, however, my purpose to evaluate the work of Herder as a whole, but only to consider certain authentically sui generis doctrines which he originated; to discuss them not only for the sake of historical justice, but also as views that are peculiarly relevant and interesting in our own time. Herder’s final claim need not rest upon what was, if I am right, most original in his thought. For his vast general influence has sometimes, paradoxically, served to overshadow that which he, virtually alone, launched upon the world.

  II

  Let me return to the three topics of this study, namely:

  1 Populism: the belief in the value of belonging to a group or a culture, which, for Herder at least, is not political, and is indeed, to some degree, anti-political, different from, and even opposed to, nationalism.

  2 Expressionism:8 the doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so. Still more specifically, expressionism claims that all the works of men are above all voices speaking, are not objects detached from their makers, are part of a living process of communication between persons and not independently existing entities, beautiful or ugly, interesting or boring, upon which external observers may direct the cool and dispassionate gaze with which scientists – or anyone not given to pantheism or mysticism – look on objects in nature. This is connected with the further notions that every form of human self-expression is in some sense artistic, and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as such; which in turn entail such distinctions as those between integral and divided, or committed and uncommitted (that is, unfulfilled), lives; and thence lead to the concept of various hindrances, human and non-human, to the self-realisation which is the richest and most harmonious form of self-expression that all creatures, whether or not they are aware of it, live for.

  3 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 ideals, together with the implied revolutionary corollary that the classical notions of an ideal man and of an ideal society are intrinsically incoherent and meaningless.

  Each of these three theses is relatively novel; all are incompatible with the central moral, historical and aesthetic doctrines of the Enlightenment. They are not independent of each other. Everything in the illimitable, varied and exceedingly rich panorama which Herder’s works present is interwoven. Indeed, the notion of unity in difference, still more that of differences in unity, the tension of the one and the many, is his obsessive idée maîtresse. Hence the recurrence through all his discussions of a constant theme: the ‘organic’ oneness of personality with the form of life that it leads, the empirical and metaphysical unity of the physical and the mental, of intellect, will, feeling, imagination, language, action – distinctions and classifications that he regarded as at best superficial, at worst profoundly misleading. Hence the stress on the unity of thought and feeling, of theory and practice, of the public and the private, and his single-minded, life-long and heroic effort to see the universe as a single process.

  The celebrated words with which he opens his most famous and ambitious work, Ideas about the Philosophy of History of Mankind – ‘Our earth is a star among stars’9 – are very characteristic. There follow chapters on geology, climate, mineral, vegetable and animal life, and lessons in physical geography, until, at last, man is reached. There is a corresponding attempt to link all the arts and all the sciences, to represent religious, artistic, social, political, economic, biological, philosophical experience as facets of one activity; and since the pattern is one, fact and value are not divided (pace Hume and Kant, with whose works Herder was only too familiar). To understand a thing was, for him, to see how it could be viewed as it was viewed, assessed as it was assessed, valued as it was valued, in a given context, by a particular culture or tradition. To grasp what a belief, a piece of ritual, a myth, a poem or a linguistic usage meant to a Homeric Greek, a Livonian peasant, an ancient Hebrew, an American Indian, what part it played in his life, was for Herder to be able not merely to give a scientific or common-sense explanation, but to give a reason for or justification of the activity in question, or at least to go a long way towards this. For to explain human experiences or attitudes is to be able to transpose oneself by sympathetic imagination into the situation of the human beings who are to be ‘explained’; and this amounts to understanding and communicating the coherence of a particular way of life, feeling, action; and thereby the validity of the given act or action, the part it plays in the life and outlook which are ‘natural’ in the situation. Explanation and justification, reference to causes and to purposes, to the visible and the invisible, statements of fact and their assessment in terms of the historical standards of value relevant to them, melt into one another, and seem to Herder to belong to a single type, and not several types, of thinking. Herder is one of the originators of the secular doctrine of the unity of fact and value, theory and practice, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, intellectual judgement and emotional commitment, thought and action.

  The sharpest critics of Herder have always conceded the power and breadth of his imagination. He did have an astonishing capacity for conceiving a great variety of actual and possible societies in the past and the present, and an unexampled warmth of sympathy for them all. He was inspired by the possibility of reconstructing forms of life as such, and he delighted in bringing out their individual shape, the fullness of human experience embodied in them: the odder, the more extraordinary a culture or an individual, the better pleased he was. He can hardly condemn anything that displays colo
ur or uniqueness: Indians, Americans and Persians, Greece and Palestine, Arminius and Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Savonarola seem to him equally fascinating. He deeply hates the forces that make for uniformity, for the assimilation, whether in life or in the books of historians, of one culture or way of life to another. He conscientiously looks for uniformities, but what fascinates him is the exception. He condemns the erection of walls between one genus and another; but he seeks for the greatest possible number of distinctions of species within a genus, and of individuals within the species. Hamann had preached to him the need to preserve sensitiveness to specific historical and cultural phenomena, to avoid becoming deadened by the passion for classification and generalisation demanded by networks of tidy concepts, a fatal tendency which he attributed to the natural sciences and their slaves, the Frenchmen who wished to transform everything by the application of scientific method. Like Hamann, Herder preserved his childlike impressionability – his capacity to react spontaneously to the jagged, irregular, not always describable data provided by the senses, by imagination, by religious revelation, by history, by art. He did not hasten to refer them to their appropriate cases in the museum of concepts; he was penetrated through and through by the new spirit of empiricism, of the sacredness of facts. Not so much as Hamann, but more than even Lessing and Diderot, and incomparably more than such official materialists and ‘sensualists’ as Condillac or Helvétius, Herder avoided the temptation to reduce the heterogeneous flow of experience to homogeneous units, to label them and fit them into theoretical frameworks in order to be able to predict and control them. The notorious luxuriance and formlessness of his ideas is due at least as much to his sense of the complexity of the facts themselves as to a naturally rhapsodical and turbid mind. As a writer he is exuberant and disordered, but not obscure or vague. Even at his most rapt he is not somnambulistic or self-intoxicated; he does not, even in his most lyrical moments, fly from the facts to an ideal heaven, like the German metaphysical poets of his time, Gleim or Uz or Klopstock or even Goethe on occasions. Great scientists and philosophers have often made their impact by violently exaggerating their original insights. But Herder cannot let go of what he sees, feels, hears, learns. His sense of the texture of reality is concrete, while his analytical powers are feeble. The three original theses which form the subject of this study display this again and again, and have consequently often been a source of irritation to tidier, clearer, logically more gifted thinkers.