The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  He dreams of a visit to the Northern seas reading ‘the story of Utal and Ninetuma in sight of the very island where it all took place’. His voyage to France, which took him past the shores of Scandinavia and England, transported him: ‘This was a living and creative Nature, between the deeps of sea and sky’,63 very different from the world in which he was living, where ‘we scarcely see or feel, only reflect and reason’,64 in which poets invent imaginary passions and qualities of soul unknown to them or anyone, and compare verses about objects about which one cannot think or feel or imagine anything at all. He feels a kindred spirit in the English scholar Robert Wood, who gazed upon the ruins of Troy, a volume of Homer in hand.65 He must go to the Scottish Highlands, to see the places described by the great Ossian himself and ‘hear the living songs of a living people’.66 After all, ‘The Greeks, too, were once … savages, and in the best period of their flowering far more of nature remained in them than can be descried by the narrow gaze of a scholiast or a classical scholar.’ Homer goes back to ancient sagas, Tyrtaeus to ballads, Arion and Orpheus are ‘noble Greek shamans’, Sappho’s songs are like nothing so much as the songs of a Livonian girl of our own time.67 Our scholars and translators have no inkling of this. Consider the translation of a Lapp song by the minor poet Christian Ewald Kleist:

  I would willingly give up for this song a dozen of Kleist’s imitations. Do not be surprised [he writes to his fiancée Caroline], that a Laplandic youth who knew neither school nor writing, and scarcely knows God, sings better than Major Kleist. After all, the Lapp improvised his song while he was gliding with his reindeer over the snow, and time dragged so slowly on the way to Lake Orra where his beloved lived.68

  Swiss and English scholars had celebrated Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. Hurd, Young, Percy, Lowth and Blackwell revived the study of ancient poetry. Enthusiasm for the achievements of the collective genius of primitive societies, under the impulsion of Rousseau, was transformed into a European movement by Herder’s passionate advocacy.

  All genuine expressions of experience are valid. They differ because lives differ: perhaps because the earth’s axis is inclined by twenty-four degrees. This generates different geophysical ‘climates’, different experiences, different societies. Anything that seems to Herder authentic delights him. He has his preferences: he prefers the Greeks, the Germans and the Hebrews to the Romans, the ancient Egyptians or the Frenchmen of his own time or of the previous century. But, at least in theory, he is prepared to defend them all; he wishes and thinks he is able to penetrate – ‘feel himself’69 (Einfühlen is his invention, a hundred years before Lipps or Dilthey or Croce) – into their essence, grasp what it must be like to live, contemplate goals, act and react, think, imagine in the unique ways dictated by their circumstances, and so grasp the patterns of life in terms of which alone such groups are to be defined. The central concept here is that of natural growth, biological, emotional, intellectual. Nature is growth – what Bodmer and Breitinger had spoken of, perhaps echoing Vico’s nascimento, as Naturwüchsigkeit – spontaneous natural growth, not the static ‘true nature’ of Boileau’s aesthetics, or Batteux’s la belle nature, which the artist must learn to discern and reveal from the welter of mere experience.

  Everything that is natural is valuable. The notion (for example, the Marquis de Sade’s) that vices or decadence or aggression are not less natural than the rich and harmonious development of all human potentialities is not allowed for. In this respect Herder is a true child of the Enlightenment at its most naïve as well as at its most imaginative and penetrating. Arthur Lovejoy was surely right when he included Herder among the thinkers (perhaps the majority in the West) who identified the ‘must’ of natural laws that caused things to be as they are, and governed the world inexorably, with the ‘ought’ of the normative rules, derived, apparently, from the selfsame nature, obedience to which alone conducts men towards happiness and virtue and wisdom. But this consensus has its limits. Herder sharply differs from the central thought of the French Enlightenment, and that not only in the respects that all his commentators have noted.

  What is usually stressed is, in the first place, his relativism,70 his admiration of every authentic culture for being what it is, his insistence that outlooks and civilisations must be understood from within, in terms of their own stages of development, purposes and outlooks; and in the second place his sharp repudiation of that central strain in Cartesian rationalism which regards only what is universal, eternal, unalterable, governed by rigorously logical relationships – only the subject-matter of mathematics, logic, physics and the other natural sciences – as true knowledge.

  But Herder rebelled against the Aufklärung in an even profounder way, by rejecting the very notion of impassable barriers in nature or experience – barriers between types of consciousness or faculties or ideas or natural objects. What repels him equally in such deeply disparate thinkers as Descartes and Kant and the French philosophes is their common insistence on rigid divisions between ‘faculties’ and types of experience, which they seem to him to have introduced merely to make it possible to classify and generalise. He admires Leibniz more than Kant: he recognises the logical gulf between mathematical truths and those of fact, but he regards the former (probably following Hume) as tautologies, statements unconcerned with nature.71 He is a thoroughgoing empiricist in matters of epistemology. Kant’s transcendental categories, which claim to determine experience a priori, seem to him a monstrous conflation of analytic and synthetic: he rejects the ‘synthetic a priori’ as a hideous confusion.72 Reality for him admits of no a priori laws; Kant’s attempt to distinguish contingent from necessary judgements about experience seems to him to be far more misleading than the distinction between intuited necessities and observed contingencies out of which Spinoza and Leibniz built their systems. Categories, rigorous distinctions of kinds of truth about the nature of reality – like the similar distinctions drawn between words and concepts – distort judgement not only in epistemology and logic, but in politics and ethics and the arts, and indeed all regions of experience. All activities, he insists, express the whole and undivided man whom Descartes and Kant, in their several ways, have done their best to carve up into compartments with their faculty psychology of ‘reason’, ‘imagination’, ‘intuition’, ‘feeling’, ‘will’.73 He declares that he knows of no criteria for distinguishing such Kantian faculties as Erkennen, Empfinden, Wollen – they are indissolubly united in the organic personality of living men.

  The attack on Kant in the Metakritik of 1799 merely summarises a lifelong attitude. The black-and-white terms these neo-scholastics use to describe man – an inexhaustibly complex organisation – seem to Herder wilfully absolute and arbitrary. Instead, for example, of asking themselves how free men are, free from or for what, and where and when, and in what respects, or what renders them more or less free, these thinkers dogmatically pronounce man to be free, wholly free in some absolute sense, as against animals who are wholly mechanical, or at least wholly lack freedom. They speak of man as distinguished by his possession of reason (not as being less or more rational), and define him in terms of selected properties that one must either possess wholly or not possess at all; they describe him in terms of sharp, artificial dichotomies that arbitrarily break up the interwoven, continuous, at times irregular, fluid, shapeless, often unanalysable, but always perceptible, dynamic, teeming, boundless, eternal multiplicity of nature,74 and so provide distorting lenses both to philosophers and historians. Attempts to bring manifestations so complex and so various under some general law, whether by philosophers seeking knowledge, or by statesmen seeking to organise and govern, seemed to Herder no better than a search for the lowest common denominator – for what may be least characteristic and important in the lives of men – and, therefore, as making for shallowness in theory and a tendency to impose a crippling uniformity in practice. Herder is one of the earliest opponents of uniformity as the enemy of life and freedom.

  On
e of the central doctrines of the Western tradition, at any rate since Plato, has maintained that the good is one, while evil has many faces; there is one true answer to every real question, but many false ones. Even Aristotle, for whom Plato’s ideal of an unchanging, wholly unified society is too rigid, since it does not allow for the variety of human characters and wishes, merely reports this as a fact, not as something desirable in itself. The central current in ethics and politics, as well as metaphysics and theology and the sciences, is cast in a monist mould: it seeks to bring the many into a coherent, systematic unity. Herder is an early and passionate champion of variety: uniformity maims and kills. The ‘ferment’ of the Middle Ages did at least, he wrote in 1774, ‘hold at bay the devouring jaws of despotism’ whose tendency is

  to crush everything into deadly uniformity. Now is it better, is it healthier and more beneficent for mankind to produce only the lifeless cogs of a huge, wooden, thoughtless machine, or to rouse and activate lively energies? Even if institutions are not perfect, even if men are not always honest, even if there is some disorder and a good deal of disagreement, it is still preferable to a state of affairs in which men are forced to rot and decay during their own lifetime.75

  Even Montesquieu, so widely praised for his novel sense of the differences between societies and of the ‘spirit’ that animates their laws and institutions, has tried to press these teeming varieties of human life and culture into the strait-jacket of three basic types: ‘three wretched generalisations! … the history of all times and peoples, whose succession forms the great, living work of God, reduced to ruins, divided neatly into three heaps … Oh, Montesquieu!’76

  All regionalists, all defenders of the local against the universal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life, both reactionary and progressive, both genuine humanists and obscurantist opponents of scientific advance, owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrines which Herder (with a far wider and more magnificent sweep than Möser or Burke or Ferguson) introduced into European thought. Vico might have achieved something of this. But he was (and is) not read; as Savigny remarked, he came into his own too late to have a decisive influence.

  However much lip-service Herder may have paid to ‘natural kinds’, in general he conceived of nature as a unity in which the Kräfte – the mysterious, dynamic, purpose-seeking forces the interplay of which constitutes all movement and growth – flow into each other, clash, combine, coalesce. These forces are not causal and mechanical as in Descartes; nor insulated from each other as in the Monadology of Leibniz; his notion of them owes more to Neoplatonic and Renaissance mysticism, and, perhaps, to Erigena’s natura naturans than to the sciences of his time. For Herder reality is a kind of symbiosis of these Kräfte (whose character remains obscure) with an environment that is conceived in somewhat static terms; if the environment is altered too abruptly, the result is some kind of collapse.

  Herder found more and more evidence for this. Transplanted flowers decay in unsympathetic climates; so do human beings. Greenlanders do not thrive in Denmark. Africans are miserable and decay in Europe. Europeans become debilitated in America. Conquest crushes, and emigration sometimes leads to enfeeblement – lack of vital force, the flattening out of human beings, and a sad uniformity. The Ideen is full of such examples. Like Fourier after him, Herder believed in the complete realisability of all potentialities (‘All that can be, is; all that can come into being, will come into being; if not today, then tomorrow’),77 since everything fits somewhere. Only artificiality is destructive, in life as in art. Marriages of convenience, coldly entered into, ruin children, and are worse for them than pure animality. The patriarchs at times exercised severe and cruel authority: but at least this is more ‘natural’ – and therefore less harmful – than the artificial reasonings of philosophers. Herder harbours a Rousseau-like suspicion of ‘reasoning’. He does not think that Voltaire’s desiccated maxims or Wolff’s syllogisms are better for children than the stern but natural behaviour of primitive men. Anything is preferable to a system which imposes the ideal of one culture on another and arranges, adjusts, makes for uniform ‘physiognomies’, as opposed to a condition which is ‘natural’, in a state of creative disorder, where alone individuality and freedom live and grow. Hence his condemnation of all theories which over-categorise men – into racial types, for example, or social orders – and thereby divide them from each other. Centralisation and dirigisme are the enemies: even some degree of inefficiency is preferable to ‘a state of affairs in which men are made to rot and decay during their own lifetime’. In the same spirit ‘political reform must come from below’,78 since ‘even when man abuses his freedom most despicably he is still king; for he can still choose, even if he chooses the worst; he can rule over himself, even if he legislates himself into a beast’.79 His differences from his fellow opponents of the French lumières – Möser, Kant, Rousseau, Burke – are obvious enough.

  He condemns the anthropologies which treat men in general and leave the individual drained of too many differentiating characteristics. Even tradition, which otherwise acts as a preservative of the most vital characteristics of human groups, can be a danger when it becomes too mechanical and acts as a narcotic, as it seems to him to have done in Asia, which it put to sleep by eliminating too many of the other ingredients of a healthy life, too many other Kräfte that are indispensable to life and activity. This thought is incapable of precise formulation; but, as always with Herder, it is suggestive and has a clear general direction. ‘The savage who loves himself, his wife and his child … and works for the good of his tribe as for his own … is in my view more genuine than that cultivated ghost, the … citizen of the world, who, burning with love for all his fellow ghosts, loves a chimera. The savage in his hut has room for any stranger … the saturated heart of the superfluous cosmopolitan is a home for no one.’80 He repeats throughout the Ideen that originality – freedom of choice and creation – is the divine element in man. When a savage speaks with vigour and precision he is superior to the civilised man who stands on a pedestal built by others.81 There is much talk in the Ideen (this is later echoed by Fichte) about men who live on other men’s accounts: they are viewed as ‘superfluous cosmopolitans’, men whose feelings have been drained away, dehumanised creatures, victims of nature or history, moral or physical cripples, parasites, fettered slaves.

  How do men come to lose their humanity? By living on others and by the labour and ideas of others. Herder, in opposition to the primitivists, welcomed invention – the arts and sciences are fruits of the creative powers of man, and through them he rises to the full height of his purposive nature. Inventions as such do not corrupt (in this Herder differs from the Rousseau of the first and second Discourses); only if one lives on the inventions of others does one become mechanical and devitalised.82 Here, too, as in the writings of Mably, Rousseau and Friedrich Karl von Moser,83 begins that lament, still more characteristic of the following century, and perhaps even more often heard in our own, for the youth that is gone for ever – for the lost virtues of an earlier, more vigorous epoch in the life of mankind. Herder, no less than Mill or Carlyle or Ruskin, speaks with gloom about the triviality and lifelessness of modern men and modern art, in contrast with the full-blooded, doughty, independent human beings of the morning hours of humanity – the creators of the great epics and songs, of an anonymous but more robust age. Before Henri de Saint-Simon he draws a contrast between the creative and the relatively sterile epochs in the history of culture. Herder has his optimistic moments, when he supposes that a renewal is possible: that if man can only ‘cease to be in contradiction with himself’ and ‘return to himself’, and if peoples can only ‘find themselves’ and learn not to ‘think in other people’s thoughts’,84 they can recover and revive and create new works of art, in modern terms, as noble and expressive of their true nature as anything that men have created in the past. There is only one course against which Herder sets his face absolutely: that is, any attempt to r
eturn to the past. Here there is no salvation. To sigh after the Greeks and wish to return to them, of which he suspects Winckelmann, is absurd and impossible: Winckelmann’s idealisation of the Greeks as the originators of art, which among them attained to a sublime height never reached by, say, the Egyptians, is wholly unhistorical and nothing but a terrible delusion.85

  The dangers to free development are many. In the first place, there is the centralised State; it can rob us of something essential: it can rob us of ourselves. There are foreign cultures that devour German folk-song ‘like a cancer’86 – folk-song that is a response to the deepest human cravings, to collective desires that seek to embody common experiences in symbolic forms not dreamed of in Voltaire’s philosophy. There is the more specific danger of foreign languages: I am able to stammer with immense effort in the words of a foreign language; its spirit will evade me. Yet to this we devote the best years of our life!87 But we are not Greeks; we are not Romans; and we cannot become such. To wish to return is to be dominated by a false vision, a crippling illusion as fatal as any for which it attempts to be the cure. Imitation is a terrible curse: human nature is not identical in different parts of the world; the worlds of things and sounds are different. What then must we do? We must seek to be ourselves. ‘Let us be characteristic of our nation, language, scene, and let posterity decide whether or not we are classical!’88 Perhaps Klopstock’s Messias was less successful than it might have been because it was not ‘national’ enough.89 It is here that Herder utters his most ardently nationalist sentiments: ‘But now! I cry yet again, my German brothers! But now! The remnants of all living folk-life [Volksdenkart] are rolling into the abyss of oblivion … the light of so-called culture is devouring all about it like a cancer.’90 ‘We speak the words of strangers and they wean us from our own thoughts.’91 He sees no merit in peasants in wigs, much as Hamann talks of ‘false noses’.92 He appeals to the Germans to know themselves, to understand their place and respect their role in the cosmos, in time and in space.