The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  III

  Let me begin with Herder’s populism, or his idea of what it is to belong to a group. Everyone seems agreed that Herder began as a typical, almost routine, defender of the great ideas of eighteenth-century enlightenment, that is, as a humanitarian, a cosmopolitan and a pacifist. Later, so it seems to be assumed, he moved towards a more reactionary position, the subordination of reason and intellect to nationalism, Gallophobia, intuition, uncritical faith and belief in tradition. Was this not, after all, the evolution in some degree of other thinkers of his and the succeeding generation in Germany? Almost without exception, they began by welcoming the French Revolution rapturously, planting trees of liberty, and denouncing as obsolete and brutally oppressive the rule of the three hundred German princes, until, horrified by the Terror and wounded by the military humiliation of Germany by the armies of Revolutionary France and, still more, those of Napoleon, they turned into patriots, reactionaries and romantic irrationalists. Was not this the path pursued by Fichte (above all Fichte), Görres, Novalis and the Schlegels, Schleiermacher and Tieck, Gentz and Schelling, and to some degree even by the great libertarian Schiller? Were not Goethe and Humboldt (and Georg Forster, though he died before the reaction set in) almost alone in their unswerving fidelity to reason, toleration and the unity of mankind, in their freedom from nationalism, and, in common with Kant and Hegel, in their loathing for all forms of collective emotional afflatus? Is it not reasonable to assume that this process of retreat from reason took place in Herder too? True, he died before the most crushing defeats had been inflicted by Napoleon on the German armies and princes; yet was it not the case that Herder began as a cosmopolitan and ended as a nationalist? Here too, then, so it would seem, wounded national pride, and perhaps age and the cooling of youthful Utopianism, had had their inescapable effect. Yet this view seems to me untenable. Whatever may have been the evolution of Fichte or Friedrich Schlegel, Herder’s form of nationalism remained unaltered throughout his life. His national feeling was not political and never became so, nor did he abandon or modify the peculiar brand of universalism with which he had begun, whether or not the two tendencies were consistent (the least of his concerns), throughout his long and voluminous intellectual activity.

  As early as 1765, in an address composed in Riga (where at the age of twenty-one he occupied the post of a Lutheran preacher in that officially Russian city) in answer to the question ‘Have we still a republic and a fatherland like the Ancients?’,10 Herder declared that this was no longer the case. In Greece the strength and the glory of the polis were the supreme goals of all free men. Religion, morals, tradition – every aspect of human activity stemmed from, and was directed to, maintaining the city, and any danger to it was a danger to all that these men were and lived by; if it fell, everything fell with it. But then, he went on to say, Christianity came and the horizons of mankind became immeasurably wider. Christianity, he explained, is a universal religion: it embraces all men and all peoples; it transcends all local and temporary loyalties in the worship of what is universal and eternal.

  This thesis was highly characteristic of the Christian humanism of the German Aufklärung, and, despite all that has been said to the contrary, Herder never abandoned this point of view. His central belief was expressed towards the end of his life in words similar to those of his early writings: ‘To brag of one’s country is the stupidest form of boastfulness … What is a nation? A great wild garden full of bad plants and good; vices and follies mingle with virtues and merit. What Don Quixote will break a lance for this Dulcinea?11 Patriotism was one thing, nationalism another: an innocent attachment to family, language, one’s own city, one’s own country, its traditions, is not to be condemned. But he goes on to say that aggressive nationalism is detestable in all its manifestations, and wars are mere crimes.12 This is so because all large wars are essentially civil wars, since men are brothers, and wars are a form of abominable fratricide. ‘One fatherland ranged against another in bloody battle is the worst barbarism in the human vocabulary.’13 A year later he adds: ‘We can be nobler heroes than Achilles, loftier patriots than Horatius Cocles.’14 These views can scarcely be due merely to the fact, by which they are sometimes explained, that political nationalism would have been too unrealistic an outlook in a feeble and divided country governed by several hundred hereditary despots; so that even to look for it there demonstrates a lack of historical sense. Yet the Italians, who were no less divided and politically impotent, had developed a distinct craving for political unification which dated back at least to Machiavelli, even though the prevailing social and political conditions in Italy were not so very unlike those of eighteenth-century Germany.

  Herder’s attitude is clearly the normal enlightened attitude of his time; the point, however, is that he did not abandon it. He believed in kinship, social solidarity, Volkstum, nationhood, but to the end of his life he detested and denounced every form of centralisation, coercion and conquest, which were embodied and symbolised both for him, and for his teacher Hamann, in the accursed State. Nature creates nations, not States.15 The State is an instrument of happiness for a group, not for men as such.16 There is nothing against which he thunders more eloquently than imperialism – the crushing of one community by another, the elimination of local cultures trampled under the jackboot of some conqueror. He vies with Justus Möser in his tenderness towards long-lived traditions and institutions embodied in particular forms of life that have created unity and continuity in a human community. He cares nothing for virtù in the Renaissance sense of the term. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne are not heroes for him. The basis of the State is conquest, the history of States is the history of violence, a bloodstained story of aggression. The state is Ixion’s wheel and calls for meaningless self-immolation. Why should hundreds suffer hunger and cold to satisfy the whim of a crowned madman, or the dreams bred by the fancy of a philosophe?17

  This may be directed specifically at Frederick the Great and his French advisers, but the import of it is universal. All rule of men over fellow men is unnatural. True human relations are those of father and son, husband and wife, sons, brothers, friends, men; these terms express natural relations which make people happy. All that the State has given us is contradictions and conquests, and, perhaps worst of all, dehumanisation.18 What pleasure is there in being ‘a blind cog in a machine’?19 God has divided the world by mountains and oceans in order to prevent some fearful Nimrod from conquering the whole. The Ideen anticipate socialist historians in representing the history of conquerors as the history of man-hunters. Despite his vow to look with a sympathetic, or at least impartial, eye upon all cultures and all nations, he cannot bring himself to forgive Rome for crushing the cultures of the peoples it had conquered, not even that of Carthage. There may be merit in efficiency and unity, but it is for him more than offset by the tragedy of the destruction; that is, by the evil of the barbarous disregard of so many spontaneous, natural forms of human self-expression: ‘Whom nature separated by language, customs, character, let no man artificially join together by chemistry.’20 This is what the Romans tried to do and how the whole Roman Empire was held together. And its ‘Holy’ successor was no better – it was an unnatural monster, an absurd clamping together of disparate cultures, ‘a lion’s head with a dragon’s tail, an eagle’s wing, a bear’s paw, [“glued together”] in one unpatriotic structure of a State’.21 The Jews, ‘parasitic’ money-lenders now,22 were at least not self-worshippers; they are praised for not having made Palestine the source and centre of the world, for not having idealised their ancestors, and for not deriving their genealogy from gods and demigods (it is this last that has enabled them to survive the Diaspora).23 Empires, especially multi-national ones (a ‘wild mingling of various tribes and peoples under one sceptre’),24 rest on force; they have feet of clay and must collapse. Theocracies that are founded upon some non-political principle, a spiritual or religious force – China or Egypt, for example, to take only non-Christia
n faiths – have proved correspondingly more durable. The sword of the spirit is better than mere brute force: not even the acutest poverty, the deepest squalor, still less ambition and love of power, entitle men to have recourse to violence. Like Möser, Herder laments the fact that the Germans are poor, hungry and despised; that Luther’s widow had to beg for help from the King of Denmark; that Kepler died of hunger; that men of German speech have been scattered and exiled to England, America, Russia, Transylvania; that gifted artists and inventors are compelled to leave their country and lavish their gifts upon foreigners; that Hessians are sold and bought like Negro slaves while their families starve and perish. Nevertheless, conquest is not the answer. He dwelt on the folly and cruelties of imperialism all his life.

  In his first essay on the philosophy of history (Auch eine Philosophie, of 1774) he speaks of Roman conquerors as a compound of blood, lust and sinister vices.25 For the next two decades, and, indeed, in the last years of his life, he continues to denounce the inhumanity of colonial rule, ancient and modern: ‘Foreign peoples were judged [by Rome] in terms of customs unknown to them’;26 imposed by violence, this distorted the character of the conquered until ‘the Roman eagle … pecked out their eyes, devoured their innards, and covered [their] wretched corpses with its feeble wings’.27 It was not a happy day when the bloody tyranny of Rome became united with Christianity.28 Rome ruined Greece, and the Teutonic Knights and recently converted Poles exterminated the Prussians and enslaved the poor Balts and peaceful Slavs.

  Can you name a land [he asks in his Letters on the Advancement of Mankind (1793–7)] where Europeans have entered without defiling themselves for ever before defenceless, trusting mankind, by the unjust word, greedy deceit, crushing oppression, diseases, fatal gifts they have brought? Our part of the earth should be called not the wisest, but the most arrogant, aggressive, money-minded: what it has given these people is not civilisation but the destruction of the rudiments of their own cultures wherever they could achieve this.29

  This is what the English have done in Ireland, in the Scottish Highlands, and Europeans have done in their colonies, the natives of which have ‘developed a passion for fire-water’, whereby they were considered ‘ripe for conversion to our faith’.30 In 1802, in his periodical Adrastea, he imagines a conversation between an Asian and a European; in the course of it the Asian (an Indian) says:

  ‘Tell me, have you still not lost the habit of trying to convert to your faith peoples whose property you steal, whom you rob, enslave, murder, deprive of their land and their State, to whom your customs seem revolting? Supposing that one of them came to your country, and with an insolent air pronounced absurd all that is most sacred to you – your laws, your religion, your wisdom, your institutions, and so on, what would you do to such a man?’ ‘Oh, but that is quite a different matter,’ replied the European, ‘we have power, ships, money, cannon, culture.’31

  On this topic Herder remained uncompromising and passionate: ‘“Why are you pouring water over my head?” asked a dying slave of a Christian missionary. “So that you can go to Heaven.” “I do not want to go to a heaven where there are white men,” he replied, and turned on his side and died.’32 By this means Europeans are engaged in forging the chains with which other peoples will bind them.33 Herder is as certain as Karl Marx that those who oppress and exploit others and force their own institutions on others are acting as their own grave-diggers – that one day their victims will rise against them and use their catchwords, their methods and ideals to crush them.

  The German mission is not to conquer; it is to be a nation of thinkers and educators. This is their true glory.34 Sacrifice – self-sacrifice – not the domination of one man over another, is the proper end of man. Herder sets his face against everything that is predatory, against the use of force in any cause but that of self-defence. The Crusades, no matter how Christian in inspiration, are hateful to him, since they conquered and crushed other human communities. Yet consent for him is a false basis of society, for consent is ultimately a form of yielding, however rational or voluntary, to strength, whereas human relations must rest upon respect, affection, kinship, equality, not fear or prudence and utilitarian calculation. It is when religions forget the ends of man and turn into empty, mechanical cults that they develop into a source of unintelligible mystification and their ceremonies decay into a recital of dead formulae, while the priests, who no longer understand their own faith, become instruments of other forces – in particular of the State and the men who control it. For him, as for Nietzsche, the State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Nothing in the whole of human history is more hateful to him than Churches and priests who are instruments of political power; of these he speaks with the same voice as Voltaire or Holbach; as for the State (he says in words that could have been Rousseau’s), it robs men of themselves.35 The State becomes a drug with the help of which men seek to forget themselves, a self-generated method of escaping from the need to live, create and choose. Furthermore, the sheer exercise of bureaucratic activity is a form of self-intoxication, and he speaks of it as a kind of opium by which men are metamorphosed into mechanical functionaries. Profound differences, both personal and literary, came to divide Herder from Goethe and Schiller, but when, in their jointly written Xenien, they say

  Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß das Land nicht zu finden

  Wo das Gelehrte beginnt, hört das Politische auf.

  and

  Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hoffet es, Deutsche, vergebens,

  Bildet, ihr könnt es, dafür freyer zu Menschen euch aus.

  they speak for Herder too.36 The State is the substitution of machinery for life, a prospect, and a reality, that frightened him no less than it did Rousseau.

  What then is the right life for men? They should live in natural units, that is, in societies united by a common culture. Nature, moreover, does not make some nations intrinsically superior to others. Whatever the qualities of the ancient Germans, to look on them, for this reason, as the European people chosen by God, to which he has, in virtue of its native ability, accorded the right to own the entire world and to be served by other peoples – that would be the ignoble vanity of barbarians.37 There is no Favorit-volk.38 A nation is made what it is by ‘climate’,39 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. All this, said late in his life, is the pure milk of the doctrine of the Enlightenment. Herder protests, not without a certain malicious satisfaction (as Hamann also did, with equally ironical pleasure), that the great liberal Kant in his Anthropologie emphasised race and colour too much. He is equally indignant about Kant’s proposition that ‘man is an animal who needs a master’;40 he replies, ‘Turn the sentence round: the man who needs a master is an animal; as soon as he becomes human, he no longer needs a master.’41 He also denounces Kant’s philosophy of history, according to which it is the vices of mankind – desire for power and mastery over the scarce resources of the earth – that stimulate competition, struggle, and thereby progress, with the corollary that the sufferings of the individual are indispensable to the improvement of the species (a doctrine that was destined to reach its richest development in Hegel, and in another form in Spencer’s evolutionary doctrine and the vagaries of social Darwinism). Herder repudiates these doctrines in the pure spirit of liberal, individualist, Weimar cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the perception that cruel and sinister implications are contained in any doctrine that preaches the sacrifice of individuals on the altar of vast abstractions – the human species, society, civilisation, progress (later thinkers were to say race, State, class and a chosen élite) – has its true beginnings here.

  Kant’s unconcealed lack of sympathy for Herder’s sweeping and imprecise generalisations, and his complaints that these were never supported by either adequate evidence or rigorous argument, may in part account for Herder’s deliberate choice of the famous champion
of the inexorable voice of duty, the moral equality of men, and the infinite value of the individual as the butt of his own passionate anti-racialism and anti-imperialism and of his defence of the right of all men and nations to develop along their own, self-chosen, lines. Variety does not, for Herder, entail conflict. He does not see why one community absorbed in the development of its own native talent should not respect a similar activity on the part of others. The Kant of the Grundlegung or the Zum ewigen Frieden might have agreed; but the Kant of the Anthropologie and the other essays on universal history evidently did not. Kant drew a sharp line of division between, on the one hand, individual morality, universal, absolute, free from internal conflict, based on a transcendent rationality wholly unconnected with nature and history and empirical reality, and, on the other, the disharmonies of the processes of nature, the aim of which was the preservation of the species, and the promotion of progress by competition and strife. Herder would have none of this. He found such dualism totally unintelligible. The hard and fast distinctions between orders of experience, mental and corporeal faculties, reason and imagination, the world of sense and the worlds of understanding or the ethical will or a priori knowledge seemed to him so many artificial partitions, ‘wooden walls’,42 built by philosophers, to which nothing corresponded in reality. His world is organic, dynamic and unitary: every ingredient of it is at once unique and interwoven with every other by an infinite variety of relationships which, in the end, cannot be analysed or even fully described. ‘Similarities, classes, orders, stages’, he wrote in 1775, ‘are only … houses of cards in a game. The creator of all things does not see as a man sees. He knows no classes; each thing resembles only itself.’43 ‘I am not sure that I know what “material” and “immaterial” mean. I do not believe that nature erected iron walls between these terms … I cannot see them anywhere.’44 He is anxious not to lose any part of reality, not to obliterate or elide or smooth out irregularities in order to fit them into a system, get them neatly covered by a general formula. He inherits from his teacher Hamann the desire to seize the whole in its fullness, in all its peculiar, complex, historically changing manifestations (this is what fascinated and permanently influenced the young Goethe when they met in 1770), and goes a good deal further than Montesquieu, who raised the banner of revolt against the grands simplificateurs.45 The springs of life are mysterious, hidden from those who lack the sense of the inwardness of the spirit of a society, an age, a movement – a sensibility killed by the dissection practised by French lumières and their academic German imitators. Like Hamann he is convinced that clarity, rigour, acuteness of analysis, rational, orderly arrangement, whether in theory or practice, can be bought at too high a price. In this sense he is the profoundest critic of the Enlightenment, as formidable as Burke, or Maistre, but free from their reactionary prejudices and hatred of equality and fraternity.