The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  IV

  As for Herder’s doctrine of expression, it is for him profoundly connected with the ways in which and by which men live. What determines the units in which it is ‘natural’ for men to live? Despite his tendency to look upon the family and patriarchal institutions as the basic forms of human association, Herder does not explicitly affirm Aristotle’s (and Rousseau’s) doctrine that a ‘natural’ or satisfactory human society is constituted only by small human groups in which men can know each other face to face and where (in Aristotle’s phrase) one herald can be heard by all. Human groups, large and small, are products of climate, geography, physical and biological needs, and similar factors; they are made one by common traditions and common memories, of which the principal link and vehicle – indeed, more than vehicle, the very incarnation – is language. ‘Has a nation … anything more precious than the language of its fathers? In it dwells its entire world of tradition, history, religion, principles of existence; its whole heart and soul.’46 It is so because men necessarily think in words or other symbols, since to think is to use symbols; and their feelings and attitudes to life are, he maintains (as Vico did before him), incorporated in symbolic forms – worship, poetry, ritual. This is so whether what they seek are pleasures or necessities: the dance, the hunt – primitive forms of social solidarity expressed and preserved by myth and formalised representation – in fact, the entire network of belief and behaviour that binds men to one another can be explained only in terms of common, public symbolism, in particular by language.

  Herder had derived from Hamann his notion that words and ideas are one. Men do not think, as it were, in thoughts and ideas and then look for words in which to ‘clothe’ them, as one looks for a glove to fit a fully formed hand. Hamann taught that to think was to use symbols, and that to deny this was not so much false as unintelligible, because without symbolism one was led fallaciously to divide the aspects of a single experience into separate entities – the fatal doctrine of Descartes, who spoke of mind and body, thought and its object, matter and mind, as though they were independent existents. Such distinctions as we draw between thought and feeling (and their ‘objects’), physical sensation and intellectual or moral or aesthetic awareness are, according to Hamann (where one can understand him), an attempt to draw attention now to this, now to that facet of a single experience; a tendency which, pushed too far, tends to separate and abstract one facet from another, and, pushed further still, to lead to the invention of imaginary abstract objects, or idealised entities – to transform reality into a collection of artificial figments. This springs from a craving for tidy scientific classification, but it distorts the facts, congeals the continuous flow of the living sense of nature and of God into dead fragments, and kills the sources of the true sense of reality – the imagination, consciousness of divine revelation, direct acquaintance with reality, obtained through the senses, which men unspoiled by the logic and metaphysics of rationalism always have.

  Hamann was a Christian touched by mysticism: he looked upon the world, upon nature and history, as the speech of God to man; God’s words were hieroglyphs, often tormentingly dark, or they were allegories, or they were symbols which opened doors to the vision of the truth, which, if only men saw and heard aright, answered the questions of their heads and hearts.47 Hamann was not himself a visionary. He had had no special revelation; but when, in the midst of an acute spiritual crisis, he turned to the Bible, he was overwhelmed by the realisation that the history of the Jews embodied a universal, trans-historical truth: for it symbolised his own – and every man’s – painful quest for God. Men were made in God’s image, but as Hamann’s pietist ancestors had taught, man was sinful and weak, he stumbled and fell and rose again as he sought to hear the voice of his father and master, the Christ within him and without, who alone could make him whole. Man was healed only by surrendering himself to the unity of life, by allowing his entire being – spirit and flesh, mind, will, and above all senses – to take in that which God was saying to him directly in Holy Writ, and also signified by means of the working of nature and by the pattern of human history. Nature and history were symbols, cryptograms, of the Logos, to be read by those who were not perverted by metaphysical subtleties. Sin was denial of divine grace and of what God had given men: passions, desires, love, a sense of joy in every manifestation of life, of sensuous nature, of creation and procreation in all forms. The existence of this reality could not, indeed, be proved. Hume was right: no facts or events can be demonstrated to exist by reason. Yet we accept them because we cannot help it, because it is animal faith in the external world, given in sense perception, which alone makes it possible for us to think or act at all. God, the world of the senses, the meanings of words – all are directly given and intimately present to any man if only he will let himself see, hear, be.

  Herder remained free from mysticism. It was Hamann’s rejection of rationalist analyses, and his unabashed sensualism and empiricism, as well as his simple Christian faith, that influenced Herder, and not the peculiar mystical nominalism which led Hamann to seek to understand God’s hidden purposes in the occult significance of the individual Hebrew or Greek words of Holy Writ. Hamann’s doctrine of language – that language alone was the central organ of all understanding and all purposive action, that men’s fundamental activity was to speak to others (to men or God or themselves), and that only through language could individuals, or groups, and the meanings that they embodied in poetry or ritual, or in the network of human institutions and ways of life, be understood – this great revelation became an article of faith for Herder. To understand men was to understand what they meant, intended, or wished to communicate. Creation is communication. During the great debate in the eighteenth century about the origins of human speech he acquired a European reputation by saying that language was neither a sudden miraculous gift of God, as Süssmilch and other orthodox Christian writers maintained, nor a deliberate invention of particular men at a specific moment of time, a tool for the improvement of life, like the wheel or the compass, as the French scientists – Maupertuis and Condillac – came near to saying, and Monboddo explicitly maintained. Language was a natural growth, no more and no less mysterious than any other form of natural development, and one which, if one believed in a creative God, was divine, inasmuch as God had given man a nature capable of mental activity; the power of generating symbols, of communication, of intentionality, was intrinsic to its development.

  At other times, recalled, perhaps by Hamann, to his beliefs as a Lutheran clergyman – he was, after all, the clerical head of the Grand Duchy of Weimar – Herder recanted and conceded that language was indeed implanted in, or taught to, man by God, by a specific creative act. But he could not rest in his belief. How could creatures not spiritually developed enough to use language suddenly come to be capable of doing so? And what is it to be spiritually developed, if not to be capable of thought (that is, the use of symbols, whether images or gestures or words)? Defying the strict Lutherans, towards the end of his life Herder returned openly to the belief that language was an essential part of the natural process of the growth of consciousness, indeed, of human solidarity, which rests on communication between men; for to be fully human is to think, and to think is to communicate; society and man are equally inconceivable without one another. Hence ‘Reason pure and simple without language is on earth a Utopia.’48 Herder means that it is inconceivable rather than improbable. Words, by connecting passions with things, the present with the past, and by making possible memory and imagination, create family, society, literature, history. He declares that to speak and think in words is to swim in an inherited stream of images and words; we must accept these media on trust: we cannot create them.49 The notion of a wholly solitary – as opposed to an artificially self-isolated – man is to him as unintelligible as it is to Aristotle or to some linguistic philosophers of our own time. Mere contemplation yields no truth; it is only life, that is, action with or against others, that doe
s this. For Herder man is shaped by, and must be defined in terms of, his association with others.

  We can purify and reform a language, but we cannot create one out of nothing; for to create a language is to think, and to think is to use language. This circle cannot be broken. The relation of particular words or groups of words to specific things is not logically or metaphysically necessary, but causal or conventional. Particular words are used in communicating particular experiences as a result either of natural influences – environmental factors – collectively called ‘climate’, after Montesquieu; or of psychological ones; or of mere chance; or of the decisions of human beings, who, acquiring some terms by ‘natural’ means (in some pre-rational state), invent others as they please, arbitrarily. That is why the doctrine of real essences – the Wolffian plan of discovering the truth by the analysis of concepts – is a chimera. Locke was right: we have no insight into ‘essences’. Only experience can tell us if the expression x in a particular text means the same as the expression Y. The dogmatic certainty of fanatical sectarians about what this or that sacred text must mean is therefore irrational and groundless. Knowledge of philology – the historical development of languages – alone yields the story of changing uses and meanings. Herder is anti-mechanistic: but he is an empiricist, in direct descent from Occam and the English naturalists. Only assiduous historical research, sympathetic insight into the purpose of the speaker, a grasp of the machinery of communication whereby human beings understand each other, whether directly, or across the centuries, can bridge the chasms between different, yet never wholly divorced, civilisations. Language expresses the collective experience of the group.50

  Has a nation anything more precious? From a study of native literatures

  we learn to know ages and peoples more deeply than along the deceptive, desolate path of their political and military history. In the latter we seldom see more than the manner in which a people was ruled, how it let itself be slaughtered; in the former we learn how it thought, what it wished and craved for, how it took its pleasures, how it was led by its teachers or its inclinations.51

  Hence Herder’s stress on the importance of genetic studies and the history of language, and hence, too, the great impulsion that he gave to studies of comparative linguistics, comparative anthropology and ethnology, and above all to the great philological movement that became the pride of German scholarship towards the end of his life and in the century that followed. His own efforts in this direction were no less suggestive or speculative than those of Vico. After declaring, in language borrowed from Lavater, that the ‘physiognomy of languages’52 is all-important, he insisted, for example, that the languages which preserved genders (such as Russian, with which he came into contact during his Riga years) implied a vision of a world different from the world of those whose languages are sexless; so too did particular uses of pronouns. He insisted that verbs – connected with action – came before nouns, connected with contemplation of objects; that active nations employ different linguistic modes from passive ones; that nuances of language are pointers to differing forms of experience (Weltan-schauungen). Logic for him is only an abstraction from languages living or dead. There is no ‘deep’ logical structure presupposed by all forms of rational thought; in his Sprachphilosophie, logic is an approximation to what is common in isomorphic languages, which themselves point to a high degree of similarity in the experiences of their users. Anthropology, not metaphysics or logic, whether Aristotelian or Leibnizian or Kantian, is for Herder the key to the understanding of human beings and of their world. It is the history of language that most clearly and continuously reveals such phenomena as social growth – the cycles of infancy, youth, maturity, decay – that are common to individuals and nations.

  The relation of language to thought, although in a sense they are one, is an ambivalent one. At any rate, the art of writing, the incorporation of thought in permanent forms, while it creates the possibility of a continuity of social self-awareness, and makes accessible his own and other worlds to an individual, also arrests and kills. What has been put down in writing is incapable of that living process of constant adaptation and change, of the constant expression of the unanalysable and unseizable flow of actual experience, which language, if it is to communicate fully, must possess. Language alone makes experience possible, but it also freezes it. Hamann spoke of the valley of dry bones which only ‘a prophet’53 (such as Socrates, St Paul, Luther, and perhaps himself) could cover with flesh. Herder speaks of corpses – forms of linguistic petrifaction – against which, in due course, men revolt. The history of linguistic revolutions is the history of the succession of cultures, the true revolutions in the history of the human race. Was there once a language common to all men? He does not wish to assert this. On the one hand, he clings to the notion of one world, one basic human personality, the ‘organic’ interrelation of everything; he insists on the folly and danger of abstraction, of fragmentation, of splitting the human personality into separate faculties, as not only Wolff but Kant, too, had done in their psychologies and in their strict division of body from soul, nature from spirit, the empirical from the a priori, the historical from the eternal. Yet he is a Christian, too, and he is committed to the Aristotelian and biblical doctrine of natural kinds. Man is unique; Lord Monboddo and the naturalists must be mistaken. That, no doubt, is why language had to be a direct gift of God, and not the product of a gradual process of emergence of rational beings out of some pre-rational state of nature – from the animal kingdom and subhuman forms of sentience, or even from insentience.54 The contradiction is never reconciled.

  The only identification that Herder never abandons is that of thought and action, language and activity. Poetry, particularly early epic poetry, is for him pure activity. He was taken in by Ossian, like many of his contemporaries. It is probably from these poems rather than from Homer – although he speaks of the Homeric poems as improvisations, not a dead artefact – that he derives his notion of poetry as activity. Poetry, particularly among early peoples, is, he maintains, magical in character; it is not cool description of nature or of anything else: it is a spur to action for heroes, hunters, lovers; it stimulates and directs. It is not to be savoured by the scholar in his armchair, but is intelligible only to those who have placed themselves in situations similar to the conditions in which such words sprang into existence. During his voyage from Riga to Nantes, he observed the sailors during rough seas. These dour men under a savage discipline, who lived in terror of, and in constant intimate contact with, the elements which they sought to dominate, resurrected for him the dark world of Skalds and Vikings and the Eddas,55 a world scarcely intelligible to tranquil philologists in their studies or detached literary epicures who turn over the pages idly, without the power to re-create the world of which these works are the vision and the voice. Words, rhythms, actions are aspects of a single experience. These are commonplaces today, but (despite Vico) they were far from being such in Herder’s time.

  ‘The more savage, that is, the more alive and freedom-loving a people is (for that is the simple meaning of the word), the more savage, that is, alive, free, sensuous, lyrically active, its songs must be, if it has songs’, he wrote in 1773.56 He compares ‘the living presentness of the imagery’ of such songs with songs ‘written for paper’. ‘These arrows of a savage Apollo pierce hearts and carry souls and memories with them.’57 ‘All unpolished peoples sing and act; they sing about what they do and thus sing histories. Their songs are the archives of their people, the treasury of their science and religion … a picture of their domestic life in joy and in sorrow, by bridal bed and graveside … Here everyone portrays himself and appears as he is.’58 Language, content, tone tell us more about the outlook, beliefs, origins, history, mingling of nations than travellers’ tales. Then artifice begins. When the words were divorced from music, when the poet began to write ‘slowly, in order to be read’,59 art may have gained, but there was a loss of magic, of ‘miraculous power’.60
What do our modern critics, the ‘counters of syllables’, ‘specialists in scansion’, masters of dead learning, know of all this? ‘Heart! Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!’61 ‘I feel! I am!’62 These are Herder’s mottoes; no wonder that the poets of the Sturm und Drang recognised themselves in his writings.