The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Herder disagrees with Diderot’s justly celebrated theory of the actor who is inwardly detached from a role when he plays it.120 The true interpreter must seek to penetrate – lose himself in – the original which he, as it were, recreates, even if he can never wholly achieve this. Genuine translation from one language – that is, way of life – into another is, of course, impossible; no real idiom is literally translatable: the olives sacred to Minerva that grew round the Academy cannot be taken beyond the frontiers of Athens. ‘Even when Sparta ravaged Athens, the goddess protected her grove. So no one can take the beauties of our language from us: beauties woven into its texture, glimmering like Phryne’s bosom beneath her silken veil.’121 To translate is – for better or for worse – to create; the translation must be an Originalarbeit by a schöpferisches Genie;122 and, of course, because the creator is what he is, and not someone or somewhere else, a great deal is, and must be, lost. Egypt must not be judged by Greek criteria, or by Shaftesbury’s modern ones; the schoolboy is not joyless because he takes no pleasure in the avocations of a grown man, nor were the Middle Ages worthless because they do not please Voltaire: there is more in the great ferment of the Dark Ages than the absurdities of Ripuarian or Salic laws. The medieval culture of the West must be seen as a great revolt against the suffocating centralisation of Rome, a ‘rewinding of the gigantic, run-down clock’.123 To denounce or idealise it is equally absurd: ‘I am by no means disposed to defend the constant migrations and devastations, the feudal wars, the hordes of monks, the pilgrimages, the crusades. I want only to explain them: to show the spirit that breathed through it all, the ferment of human forces.’124 This was original enough in 1774. The Middle Ages are not a corridor to the Renaissance, nor is paganism an ante-room of Christianity. One culture is never a mere means to another; even if there is a sense in which mankind as a whole is advancing,125 each of the stages is an end in itself: men are never means to ends beyond themselves. No less than his opponent Kant, he fervently preaches the doctrine that only persons and societies, and almost all of these, are good in themselves – indeed they are all that is good, wholly good, in the world that we know. These maxims, which now (at least in the West) seem so platitudinous, were antinomian heresies in the middle of the eighteenth century in Paris and its intellectual dependencies.

  So much for the myth of the Dominant Model. Still bolder was Herder’s rejection of the historical myths of the century;126 of the French myth of classical culture created by the Gallo-Romans, in which lay the true soul of France, and which the barbarians destroyed, and equally of the counter-myth of the superiority of the Frankish conquerors, to which support had been given by Montesquieu, Mallet and Boulainvilliers. Similarly Herder has no truck with the Renaissance myth of the sunlit pagan world killed by the gloomy, pleasure-destroying Christian religion: he uses harsh words about the monks who suppressed the old German songs; but this does not mean that the Middle Ages are the dark haunt of the demons, slaves, diabolical priests and tyrants127 painted by Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume and, later still, Heine and all the neo-pagans. But neither does he uphold the growing German-Protestant legend of the uncorrupted, fearless, Cheruscan warrior Hermann canonised by Klopstock as Arminius, and then, in the shape of the young Siegfried, placed by Wagner in the German nationalist pantheon. These fantasies offer no avenue of escape. All attempts to flee, whether to modern Paris or to the dark German woods, are condemned by Herder as being equally deluded. Those who, for whatever reason, will not face reality are doomed.

  The third great myth of the eighteenth century was that of steady progress, if not inevitable, at least virtually certain; with consequent disparagement of the benighted past, which entailed the view of all earlier centuries as so many steps toward the superior life of the present and the still more wonderful life of the future. Herder rejects this completely. Each culture is a harmonious lyre – one must merely have the ear to hear its melodies. Those who seek to understand must learn to grasp the respects in which Abraham or Leonidas or Caesar are not men of our time – to see change as it occurs, not in juxtaposed segments which can be detached, compared and awarded marks for merit, for the degree to which they approach our standards of enlightenment. Is there, then, no progress? Are all cultures equally valuable? This is not Herder’s view. There is Fortgang, but this is not the same as the notion of progress enunciated by, say, Turgot or Condorcet, or, in particular, by Voltaire (for example, in La Philosophie d’histoire par feu l’abbé Bazin), against whom, together with the Swiss philosopher of history Iselin, Herder’s thunderbolts are specifically directed. Theirs is a shallow, unhistorical delusion. Diversity is everything. This is the central thesis of, to give it its full title, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, as of almost all Herder’s early writings:

  The general, philosophical, philanthropic temper of our age seeks to extend ‘our own ideal’ of virtue and happiness to each distant nation, even to the remotest ages in history … Those who have thus far taken it upon themselves to explain the centuries of progress have mostly cherished the notion that it must lead to greater virtue and happiness. In support of this they have embroidered or invented facts, played down or suppressed facts that belie it … taken words for works, enlightenment for happiness, greater intellectual sophistication for virtue, and so invented the figment of ‘the general progressive improvement of the world’.128

  Others realised that this was a dangerous delusion, and fell into hopeless scepticism like Montaigne, Bayle, Hume, and ultimately even Voltaire and Diderot.

  This rests on a misconception of what progress is. It lies in a variety of cultures, incommensurable with each other and incapable of being arranged on some single scale of progress or retrogression. Each society, each culture, develops in its own way. Each age is different, and ‘each has the centre of its happiness within itself. The youth is not happier than the innocent, contented child; nor is the peaceful old man less happy than the vigorous man in the prime of life.’129 The Middle Ages are full of ‘abominations, errors, absurdities’,130 but also possess ‘something solid, cohesive, noble and majestic’131 which our age, with its ‘enervated coldness … and human misery’,132 can scarcely understand. ‘Light does not nourish men’,133 order and affluence are not enough; still less technical accomplishment ‘in the hands of one person, or of a few, who do the thinking’ for everyone.134 There are many ways of life and many truths – to believe that everything is either true or false is a wretched general illusion of our progressive age. True Fortgang (‘advance’) is the development of human beings as integrated wholes and, more particularly, their development as groups – tribes, cultures and communities determined by language and custom, creating out of the totality of their collective experience, and expressing themselves in works of art that are consequently intelligible to common men, and in sciences and crafts and forms of social and political and cultural life that fulfil the cravings (conscious and unconscious) and develop the faculties of a given society, in its interplay with its alterable, but not greatly alterable, natural environment.

  To bind and interrogate this Proteus, which is usually called national character and which shows itself certainly not less in the writings than in the usages and actions of a nation – that is a high and beautiful philosophy. It is practised most surely in poetry; for in the works of … imagination and feeling the entire soul of the nation reveals itself most freely.135

  This is what the classical Greeks succeeded in doing so marvellously. Despite all Hamann’s anathemas, Herder cannot refrain from expressing his passionate admiration for the culture of Athens – a feeling that he shared with Goethe and Hegel, Hölderlin and Schiller, and, indeed, with the majority of the civilised Germans of his time, romantic and anti-romantic alike. Herder thinks the Greek achievement is in part due to the beauty of nature in Greece, a beauty which inspired principles that those fortunate inhabitants (mistakenly but excusably) regarded as objective and universally valid. But there must be no
Favoritvolk; he hastens to add to the list Kashmiris and Persians, Bokharans and Circassians, who also lived in beautiful natural surroundings, grew handsome themselves and produced beautiful cultures (unlike the Hebrews, whose merits are not aesthetic). The Greeks advanced; they developed their own faculties harmoniously and triumphantly, because nature was propitious and because no great natural accidents arrested this development. But they are not a hallway to the Romans, whose civilisation must be judged in terms of its own internal criteria, its own ‘centre of gravity’.

  What Herder calls Fortgang is the internal development of a culture in its own habitat, towards its own goals; but because there are some qualities that are universal in man, one culture can study, understand and admire another, even though it cannot return to it and will only make itself foolish if it tries. At times Herder speaks like Bossuet: as if history were not an episodic story but a vast drama; as if the finger of God guided the destinies of humanity in some teleological fashion, in a play of which each great cultural epoch was an act. He does not develop this notion, which led Bossuet to see each act as in some degree a link between its predecessor and its successor. More often he speaks as if history were indeed a drama, but one without a dénouement: as if it were like a cosmic symphony of which each movement is significant in itself, and of which, in any case, we cannot hear the whole, for God alone does so. The later movements are not necessarily closer to, or a prefiguring of, some ultimate goal, and, therefore, superior to the earlier movements. Life is not a jigsaw puzzle of which the fragments must fit into some single pattern in terms of which alone they are all intelligible, so that what seems, taken in isolation, irrational or ugly, is seen to be an indispensable ingredient in the great harmonious whole – the world spirit come to full self-consciousness of itself, in Hegel’s famous image. Herder believes in the development of each movement of the symphony (each act of the drama) in terms of its own ends, its own values, which are none the worse or less morally valuable because they will pass or be destroyed and be succeeded by others.

  There is a general purpose to be achieved by human life on earth, which he calls Humanität. This is a notoriously vague term, in Herder and the Aufklärung generally, connoting harmonious development of all immortal souls towards universally valid goals: reason, freedom, toleration, mutual love and respect between individuals and societies, as well as physical and spiritual health, finer perceptions, dominion over the earth, the harmonious realisation of all that God has implanted in his noblest work and made in his own image.136 This is a characteristically all-inclusive, general and optimistic formula of Weimar humanism, which Herder does, indeed, adopt, particularly in his later works, but which he does not seem to have used (for it has no precise connotation) as a universal criterion either of explanation or of value.

  He wants above all to be comprehensive and fair. He dislikes Gothic architecture, despite the eloquence on its behalf with which he made so deep an impression on Goethe in Strasbourg; he is repelled by chivalry, by medieval values in general, but he defends them against Voltaire, against caricatures. He placed no great value, particularly towards the end of his life, upon primitivism as such, and in this respect differed from its true admirers in the eighteenth century. Yet colonial subjugation of native populations, ancient and modern, in and outside Europe, is always represented as being morally odious and as a crime against humanity. If paganism requires to be defended against Christian attack, and Homer against Klotz and the Encyclopédie, so must Christianity be defended against Holbach, Voltaire and the Sinophiles, and the Chinese and Mongols in their turn against the arrogance of Europeans. The shamans of central Asia, he insists, are not just deceivers; nor are myths simply false statements about reality invented by wicked priests to bamboozle and acquire power over the masses, as Bayle and Voltaire had made the world believe; nor are the inventions of poets merely intended to give pleasure or to instruct. Here he stands with Vico, some time before he read him (one wonders whether he ever more than merely glanced at his work). Shamans express in the form of myth and superstition objects of men’s natural wishes – a vision of the world from which poetry naturally springs and which it expresses. Whole worlds are created by such poetry, worlds worthy of man and his creative powers, worlds not commensurable with other worlds, but all equally worthy of our interest and in need of our insight, because they are worlds made by men; by contemplating them we may succeed in grasping what we, in our turn, can be and create. We do this not by learning the lessons of the past (he sometimes says that the past repeats itself, but his central doctrine, in opposition to Hume or Voltaire, is that each page is unique), but rather because the vision of past creation inspires us to find our own centre of gravity, our own Mittelpunkt or Schwerpunkt or that of the group – nation, region, community – to which we belong.

  Without such belonging there is no true creation and no true realisation of human goals. Hence to foist a set of alien values on another Nation (as missionaries have done in the Baltic provinces, and are doing, for example, in India) is both ineffective and harmful.137 Worst of all are those who have no group, because they are exiled or self-exiled, physically or spiritually (for Herder the two are not very different), and are doomed to sterility. Such disintegration seemed to him to threaten the Germans in his own day. Indignantly some of his modern critics point out that he condemned France – the France of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries! – as being an exhausted society. But whatever his failings as a prophet (and he speaks with many voices, some of them far from distinct and often uttering contradictory sentiments), as a social psychologist he rose above his generation; more clearly than any other writer, he conceived and cast light upon the crucially important social function of ‘belonging’ – on what it is to belong to a group, a culture, a movement, a form of life. It was a most original achievement.

  VII

  It is the composer’s duty, as a member of society,

  to speak to and for his fellow human beings.

  I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds,

  in personal relationships … my music now has

  its roots in where I live and work.

  Benjamin Britten138

  The notion of belonging is at the heart of all Herder’s ideas. His doctrine of the unity of theory and practice, like that of his populism, is intelligible only in terms of it. To belong is not a passive condition, but active co-operation, social labour. ‘Complete truth is always only the deed.’139 Whether one reads the last books of his Ideas about the Philosophy of History of Mankind, the earlier treatise On Hebrew Poetry, the essays on Shakespeare, Ossian, Homer, the critical ‘Groves’, or the late Adrastea or Kalligone, one finds that what dominates them all is the notion that there are central patterns in terms of which each genuine culture – and the human beings who constitute it – can, and indeed must, be identified. For Herder, to be a member of a group is to think and act in a certain way, in the light of particular goals, values, pictures of the world: and to think and act so is to belong to a group. The notions are literally identical. To be a German is to be part of a unique stream of which language is the dominant element, but still only one element among others. He conveys the notion that the ways in which a people – say, the Germans – speak or move, eat or drink, their handwriting, their laws, their music, their social outlook, their dance forms, their theology, have patterns and qualities in common which they do not share, or share to a notably lesser degree, with the similar activities of some other group – the French, the Icelanders, the Arabs, the ancient Greeks. Each of these activities belongs to a cluster which must be grasped as a whole: they illuminate each other. Anyone who studies the speech rhythms, or the history or the architecture, or the physical characteristics of the Germans, will thereby achieve a deeper understanding of German legislation, music, dress. There is a property, not capable of being abstracted and articulated – that which is German in the Germans – which all these diverse activities uniquely evince. Activities
like hunting, painting, worship, common to many groups in widely differing times and places, will resemble each other because they belong to the same genus. But the specific quality which each type of activity will show forth will have more in common with generically different activities of the same culture140 than with specifically similar activities of another culture. Or, at the very least, that which the various activities of the same culture will have in common – the common pervasive pattern in virtue of which they are seen to be elements in one and the same culture – is more important, since it accounts for the characteristics of these activities at a deeper level, than their more superficial resemblances to the corresponding activities of other cultures and other human groups. In other words, what German epic poetry has in common with German family life, or German legislation, or German grammar, determines the patterns of these activities – runs through them more deeply – than that which German poetry has in common with Hindu or Hebrew poetry.

  This common property is not occult; no special non-empirical faculty is needed to detect it; it is a natural attribute and open to empirical investigation. Despite his theology, his belief in the primacy of religion, and his use of such metaphysical notions as the collective ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, despite the mysterious Kräfte, despite occasional lapses into acceptance of the dogma of natural kinds, Herder was far more of an empiricist from the beginning to the end of his life than Leibniz, Kant or even Helvétius. This was obscured by the fact that the following generation of German metaphysicians, whom he influenced, dealt freely in transcendent formulae. Yet in his own day he was at times suspected by the stricter among his fellow churchmen of inclining dangerously toward materialistic heresies. The heart of his empiricism lay in the importance that he attributed to the discovery of patterns in history and nature. It is this directly perceptible, but literally unanalysable, pattern quality, in virtue of which what Germans think or do or say is, as a rule, characteristically and unmistakably German – it is this Gestalt quality141 that, in his view, makes us attribute the doer and the deed, the thinker and the thought, to a specific German culture at a specific stage of its development.