The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  To fit into such a pattern is to belong: it is for this and no other reason that a German exiled from the milieu of his fellow Germans, perhaps a Saxon or a Prussian forced to live elsewhere, will not feel at home there; and whoever does not feel at home cannot create naturally, freely, generously, unselfconsciously, in the manner that Schiller called ‘naïve’, and that Herder, whether he admits it or not, most admires and believes in. All his talk about the national character, the national genius, the Volksseele, the spirit of the people and so forth in the end comes to this alone. His notion of what it is to belong to a family, a sect, a place, a period, a style is the foundation of his populism, and of all the later conscious programmes for self-integration or re-integration among men who felt scattered, exiled or alienated. The language in which he speaks of his unfortunate fellow countrymen, driven by poverty or the despotic whims of their masters to Russia or Transylvania or America to become blacks and slaves, is not simply a lament for the material and moral miseries of exile, but is based on the view that to cut men off from their living centre – from the texture to which they naturally belong – or to force them to sit by the rivers of some remote Babylon, and to prostitute their creative faculties for the benefit of strangers, is to degrade, dehumanise, destroy them.142

  No writer has stressed more vividly the damage done to human beings by being torn from the only conditions in which their history has made it possible for them to live full lives. He insists over and over again that no one milieu or group or way of life is necessarily superior to any other; but it is what it is, and assimilation to a single universal pattern, of laws or language or social structure, as advocated by the French lumières, would destroy what is most living and valuable in life and art. Hence the fierce polemic against Voltaire, who, in his Essai sur les moeurs, declared that ‘Man, generally speaking, was always what he is now’,143 or that morality is the same in all civilised nations.144 Hence, by definition, it seemed to follow that the rest were barbarous or stupid: Gauls are ‘a disgrace to nature’.145 Hence, too, the attack on Sulzer for demanding a universal philosophical grammar, according to the rules of which one would be enabled to judge of the degree of the perfection of a people’s language, and, if need be, correct its rules in the light of the universal rules. Needless to say, this for Herder was both false in principle and the death of poetry and the springs of all creative power. Every group has a right to be happy in its own way. It is terrible arrogance to affirm that, to be happy, everyone should become European.146 This is so not because, as Voltaire maintained, other cultures may be superior to ours, but simply because they are not comparable. ‘No man can convey the character of his feeling, or transform my being into his.’147 ‘The Negro is as much entitled to think the white man degenerate … as the white man is to think of the Negro as a black beast … The civilisation of man is not that of the European; it manifests itself, according to time and place, in every people.’148 Again, there is no Favoritvolk. Herder assumes only that to be fully human, that is, fully creative, one must belong somewhere, to some group or some historical stream, which cannot be defined save in the genetic terms of a tradition, a milieu and a culture, themselves generated by natural forces – the Klima (that is, the external world) and physical structure and biological needs which, in interplay with every individual’s mind and will, create the dynamic, collective process called society.

  This theory entails no mythology. For Herder all groups are ultimately collections of individuals; his use of ‘organic’ and ‘organism’ is still wholly metaphorical and not, as in later, more metaphysical thinkers, only half metaphorical. There is no evidence that he conceived of groups as metaphysical ‘super-individual’ entities or values. For Herder this is no mystique of history, or of a species to which individuals were to be sacrificed, still less of the superior wisdom of the race, or of a particular nation, or even of humanity as a whole. Nevertheless, to understand men is to understand them genetically, in terms of their history, of the one complex of spiritual and physical ‘forces’ in which they feel free and at home. This notion of being at home, and the corresponding notion of homelessness (nostalgia, he once remarked, is the noblest of all pains) which lies at the heart of his reflections on the emptiness of cosmopolitanism, on the damage done to men by social barriers, oppression by strangers, division, specialisation – like the connected concepts of exploitation and of the alienation of men from each other, and, in the end, from their own true selves – derive from his one central conception. Those who have grasped the notion that men are made miserable not only by poverty, disease, stupidity or the effects of ignorance, but also because they are misfits or outsiders or not spoken to, that liberty and equality are nothing without fraternity; that only those societies are truly human which may follow a leader but obey no master,149 are in possession of one of Herder’s idées maîtresses. His writings radically transformed the notion of relations of men to each other. Hegel’s famous definition of freedom as Bei-sich-selbst-seyn,150 as well as his doctrine of Anerkennung – reciprocal recognition among men – seem to me to owe much to Herder’s teaching. The proposition that man is by nature sociable had been uttered by Aristotle and repeated by Cicero, Aquinas, Hooker, Grotius, Locke and innumerable others. The depth and breadth of Herder’s writings on human association and its vicissitudes, the wealth of concrete historical and psychological observation with which he developed the concept of what it is for men to belong to a community, made such formulae seem to be thin abstractions and drove them permanently out of circulation. No serious social theorist after Herder dared advance mechanical clichés of this type in lieu of thought. His vision of society has dominated Western thought; the extent of its influence has not always been recognised, because it has entered too deeply into the texture of ordinary thinking. His immense impact, of which Goethe spoke and to which J. S. Mill bore witness, is due principally to his central thesis – his account of what it is to live and act together – from which the rest of his thought flows, and to which it constantly returns. This idea is at the heart of all populism; and it has entered every subsequent attempt to arrive at truth about society.

  VIII

  So much for Herder’s specific contribution to the understanding of men and their history. There are two implications of his conception of men that have received little attention from his interpreters. These are, first, his doctrine of the indivisibility of the human personality and, as a corollary of this, his conception of the artist and his expressive role in society; and, secondly, his pluralism and the doctrine of the incompatibility of ultimate human ends.

  Herder was, as everyone knows, much occupied with aesthetic questions, and tried to seek out all manifestations of art in their richest and fullest forms. He tended to find them in the creations of the early ages of man. For Herder, art is the expression of men in society in their fullness. To say that art is expression is to say that it is a voice speaking rather than the production of an object – a poem, a painting, a golden bowl, a symphony, all of which possess their own properties, like objects in nature, independently of the purposes or character or milieu of the men who created them.151 By the very appropriately called Stimmen der Völker in Liedern, and by explicit argument, Herder seeks to demonstrate that all that a man does and says and creates must express, whether he intends it to do so or not, his whole personality; and, since a man is not conceivable outside a group to which, if he is reasonably fortunate, he continues to belong (he retains its characteristics in a mutilated state even if he has been torn from it), conveys also its collective individuality152 – a culture conceived as a constant flow of thought, feeling, action and expression. Hence he is bitterly opposed to the view, influential in his day as in ours, that the purpose of the artist is to create an object whose merits are independent of the creator’s personal qualities or his intentions, conscious or unconscious, or of his social situation.

  This is an aesthetic doctrine that reigned long before the doctrine of art for art’s
sake had been explicitly formulated. The craftsman who makes a golden bowl is entitled, according to this view, to say that it is no business of those who acquire or admire his creation to enquire whether he is himself sincere or calculating, pious or an atheist, a faithful husband, politically sound, a sympathetic boon companion or morally pure. Herder is the true father of the doctrine that it is the artist’s mission, above others, to testify in his works to the truth of his own inner experience;153 from which it follows that any conscious falsification of this experience, from whatever motive – indeed any attempt merely to satisfy the taste of his customers, to titillate their senses, or even to offer them instruction by means that have little to do with his own life or convictions, or to use techniques and skills as a detached exercise, to practise virtuosity for its own sake or for the sake of the pleasure it brings – is a betrayal of his calling.

  This was implicit in the artistic movement which came to be called Sturm und Drang, of which Herder was one of the leaders. To view oneself as a professional who in his works of art plays a role, or performs with a specialised part of himself, while the rest of him is left free to observe the performance; to maintain that one’s behaviour as a man – as a father, a Frenchman, a political terrorist – can be wholly detached from one’s professional function as a carpenter, doctor, artist – this view, to which Voltaire, if he had considered it, could scarcely have offered any objection, is, for all the writers of the Sturm und Drang, a fatal misapprehension and distortion of the nature of man and his relations with other men. Since man is in fact one and not many (and those who are genuinely divided personalities are literally no longer sane), it follows that whether a man be an artist, a politician, a lawyer, a soldier, anything that he does expresses all that he is.

  Some among the Stürmer remained individualistic – Heinse, for example, or Klinger. But Herder is uncompromisingly hostile to such egomania. The individual, for him, is inescapably a member of some group; consequently all that he does must express, consciously or unconsciously, the aspirations of his group. Hence, if he is conscious of his own acts (and all self-consciousness is embryonic assessment and therefore critical), such awareness, like all true criticism, is inevitably to a high degree social criticism, because it is the nature of human beings to be socially aware: expression is communication. Herder feels that all history shows this to be so. To divide (and not merely to distinguish as facets or aspects of one substance) body and soul, science and craft or art, the individual and society, description and evaluation, philosophical, scientific and historical judgement, empirical and metaphysical statements, as if any of these could be independent of one another, is for Herder false, superficial and misleading.

  The body is the image, the expression, of the soul, not its tomb or instrument or enemy. There are no ‘iron walls’ between body and soul;154 everything can pass into everything else by the insensible transitions of which Leibniz had spoken in his Nouveaux Essais. Once upon a time men ‘were all things: poets, philosophers, land surveyors, legislators, musicians, warriors’.155 In those days there was unity of theory and practice, of man and citizen, a unity that the division of labour destroyed; after that men became ‘half thinkers and half feelers’.156 There is, he remarks, something amiss about moralists who do not act, epic poets who are unheroic, orators who are not statesmen, and aestheticians who cannot create anything. Once doctrines are accepted uncritically – as dogmatic, unalterable, eternal truths – they become dead formulae, or else their meaning is fearfully distorted. Such ossification and decay lead to nonsense in thought and monstrous behaviour in practice.157

  This doctrine was destined to have a great flowering, not merely in the application of the concept of alienation in the writings of the young Marx and his friends in their Left-Hegelian phase, and among those who have used these ideas in our own time, but more particularly among pre-Marxist Russian radicals and revolutionaries. No body of men ever believed so devoutly and passionately in the unity of man as the Russian intelligentsia of the last century. These men – at first dissident members of the nobility and gentry, later members of many classes – were united by a burning faith in the right and duty of all men to realise their creative potentialities (physical and spiritual, intellectual and artistic) in the light of the reason and the moral insight with which all men are endowed. What the eighteenth-century French philosophes and the German romantics preached, these men sought to practise. Light to them came from the West. And since the number of literate – let alone well-educated – men in Russia was infinitesimal compared to the number who lived in ignorance, misery, hopeless starvation and poverty, it was plainly the first duty of any decent man to give all he could to the effort to lift his brothers to a level where they could lead a human existence.

  From this sprang the conception of the intelligentsia as a sacred order called upon by history to dedicate their lives to the discovery and use of all possible means – intellectual and moral, artistic and technological, scientific and educational – in a single-minded effort to discover the truth, realise it in their lives, and with its aid to rescue the hungry and the naked, and make it possible for them to live in freedom and be men once more. Man is one and undivided; whatever he is and does flows from a single centre; but at the same time he is as he is within a social web of which he is a constituent; to ignore it is to falsify the nature of man. The famous doctrine that the artist, and above all the writer, has a social obligation to express the nature of the milieu in which he lives, and that he has no right to isolate himself artificially, under the cover of some theory about the need for moral neutrality, or the need for specialisation, the purity of art, or of its specifically aesthetic function – a priestly task that is to be kept uncontaminated, especially by politics – this entire conception, over which such ferocious battles were fought in the following century, stems from Herder’s doctrine of the unity of man.

  ‘Everything that a man undertakes, whether it be produced in action or word or anything else, must spring from his whole united powers; all separation of powers is to be repudiated.’158 This principle of Hamann’s, so much admired by Goethe, formed Herder, and became (through Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel) the creed of the Russian radical critics. Whatever a man does, if he is as he should be, will express his entire nature. The worst sin is to mutilate oneself, to suppress this or that side of oneself, in the service of some false aesthetic or political or religious ideal. This is the heart of the revolt against the pruned French garden of the eighteenth century. Blake is a passionate spokesman of this faith no less than Hamann or Herder or Schleiermacher. To understand any creator – any poet or, for that matter, any human being who is not half dead – is to understand his age and nation, his way of life, the society which (like nature in Shaftesbury) ‘thinks in him’. Herder says over and over again that the true artist (in the widest sense) creates only out of the fullness of the experience of his whole society, especially out of its memories and antiquities, which shape its collective individuality; and he speaks of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser as being steeped in their national folklore. About this he may be mistaken, but the direction of his thought is clear enough. Poetry – and, indeed, all literature and all art – are the direct expression of uninhibited life. The expression of life may be disciplined, but life itself must not be so. As early poetry was magical, a spur to heroes, hunters, lovers, men of action, a continuation of experience, so, mutatis mutandis, it must be so now also. Society may have sadly disintegrated since those days, and Herder concedes that the rhapsodical Klopstock may now be able consciously to express only his own individual, rather than the communal, life; but express he must whatever is in him, and his words will communicate the experience of his society to his fellow men. ‘A poet is a creator of a people; he gives it a world to contemplate, he holds its soul in his hand.’159 He is, of course, to an equal extent created by it.160 A man lives in a world of which, together with others, he is in some sense the maker. ‘We live in a world we oursel
ves create.’161 These words of Herder’s were destined to be inflated into extravagant metaphysical shapes by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the Idealist movement in philosophy; but they are equally at the source of the profoundest sociological insights of Marx and the revolution in the historical outlook that he initiated.162

  Herder may be regarded as being among the originators of the doctrine of artistic commitment – perhaps with Hamann the earliest thinker consciously to speak (as one would expect of the founder of populism) in terms of the totally engagé writer, to see the artist as ipso facto committed and not permitted to divide himself into compartments, to separate body from spirit, the secular from the sacred, and, above all, life from art. He believed from the beginning to the end of his life that all men are in some degree artists, and that all artists are, first and last, men – fathers, sons, friends, citizens, fellow worshippers, men united by common action. Hence the purpose of art is not to exist for its own sake (the late Adrastea and Kalligone are the most ferocious attacks on this doctrine, which he suspected both Kant and Goethe of advancing) or to be utilitarian, or propagandist, or to purvey ‘social realism’; still less, of course, should it seek merely to embellish life or invent forms of pleasure or produce artefacts for the market. The artist is a sacred vessel who is shaped by, and the highest expression of, the spirit of his time and place and society; he is the man who conveys, as far as possible, a total human experience, an entire world. This is the doctrine that, under the impulsion of German romanticism and French socialism, profoundly affected the conception of the artist and his relation to society, and animated Russian critics and writers from the late 1830s until, at any rate, Doctor Zhivago. The theory of art as total expression and of the artist as a man who testifies to the truth – as opposed to the concept of him as a purveyor, however gifted and dedicated, or as a priest of an esoteric cult, entered the practice of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, even of such ‘pure’ writers as Turgenev and Chekhov. Through their works it has had a great, indeed a decisive, influence, not only on the literature and criticism, but on the moral and political ideas and behaviour, of the West, and indeed of the entire world. Consequently, Herder was perhaps not altogether mistaken when he so confidently proclaimed the part to be played by the artist in the world to come.