The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  XI

  Herder is in some sense a premonitory symptom, the albatross before the coming storm. The French Revolution was founded on the notion of timeless truths given to the faculty of reason with which all men are endowed. It was dedicated to the creation or restoration of a static and harmonious society, founded on unaltering principles, a dream of classical perfection, or, at least, the closest approximation to it feasible on earth. It preached a peaceful universalism and a rational humanitarianism. But its consequences threw into relief the precariousness of human institutions; the disturbing phenomenon of apparently irresistible change; the clash of irreconcilable values and ideas; the insufficiency of simple formulae; the complexity of men and societies; the poetry of action, destruction, heroism, war; the effectiveness of mobs and of great men; the crucial role played by chance; the feebleness of reason before the power of fanatically believed doctrines; the unpredictability of events; the part played in history by unintended consequences; the ignorance of the workings of the sunken two-thirds of the great human iceberg, of which only the visible portion had been studied by scientists and taken into account by the ideologists of the great Revolution.

  This, too, could be said of the Russian Revolution. Its ideals are too familiar to rehearse; and its results, too, threw doubts, whether justified or not, on the effectiveness of the kind of democracy for Which liberals and radicals in the nineteenth century had pleaded; on the ability of rational men to allow for and control the forces of unreason; on revolution as an instrument for the promotion of freedom, a wider culture and social justice. It awakened men forcibly to the effectiveness of resolute conspiracies by disciplined parties; the irrationality of the masses; the weakness of liberal and democratic institutions in the West; the force of nationalist passions. As Durkheim, Pareto and Freud stand to the Russian Revolution – with their views on the uncritical use of such general terms as democracy and liberty, and their theories of the interplay of rational and irrational factors in making for social cohesion and disintegration, ideas which have deeply influenced thought and action in our day – so Herder stands to the events of 1789. The craving for fraternity and for self-expression, and disbelief in the capacity of reason to determine values, dominated the nineteenth century, and even more our own. Herder lived until 1803. He did not attempt to draw the moral of his own doctrines in relation to the fate of Germany or Europe, as Saint-Simon and Hegel and Maistre, in their very different fashions, had attempted to do. Perhaps he died too early in the century. Nevertheless, he, more than any of his contemporaries, sensed the insecurity of the foundations of faith in the Enlightenment held by so many in his time, even while he half accepted it. In this sense, those who thought of him as endowed with special powers – we are told that he was sometimes called a magician and was a model for Goethe’s Faust183 – did him no injustice.

  1 References for quotations from Herder are to Herder’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1877–1913), by volume and page, thus: viii 252, the reference for this quotation. My thanks are due to Professors Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, Roy Pascal, and F. M. Barnard for the use of their renderings of texts by Herder quoted in this essay. My debt to Professor Barnard’s Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1969) is particularly great: some of his renderings are reproduced verbatim, others in a form somewhat altered by me. To Professor Barnard I also owe a number of other quotations and references.

  2 On this see the excellent studies by H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge, 1970), and by G. A. Wells, Herder and After: A Study of the Development of Sociology (The Hague, 1959).

  3 I shall necessarily have to omit much else that is relevant and interesting: for example, Herder’s dominant influence on romanticism, vitalism and existentialism, and, above all, on social psychology, which he all but founded; as well as the use made of his imprecise, often inconsistent, but always many-faceted and stimulating thought by such writers as the Schlegels and Jakob Grimm (especially in their philological excursions), Savigny (who applied to law Herder’s notion of organic national growth), Görres (whose nationalism is rooted in, even if it distorts, Herder’s vision), Hegel (whose concepts of becoming and of the growth and personality of impersonal institutions begin their lives in Herder’s pages), as well as historical geographers, social anthropologists, philosophers of language and of history, and historical writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My principal reason for choosing the three ideas on which I intend to concentrate is that they are conceptions of the first order of originality and historical importance, the origins and properties of which have not received sufficient notice. My purpose is to do justice to Herder’s originality rather than his influence.

  4 The best discussion of this topic known to me occurs in Max Rouché’s excellent introduction to his edition and French translation of Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (Paris, n.d.), pp. 92–105.

  5 There is an illuminating discussion of this in Carlo Antoni’s Lo storicismo (Turin, 1957).

  6 Harold Laski’s description of Ferguson as a ‘pinchbeck Montesquieu’ throws light only on the quality of Laski’s critical judgement, in this instance probably a mere echo of Leslie Stephen. Harold J. Laski, Political Thought in England: From Locke to Bentham (New York and London, 1920), p. 174.

  7 Diderot in the Encyclopédie, s.v. ‘Grecs (philosophie des)’, p. 908, col. 1. Diderot does at least protest that the view he quotes ‘shows a lack of philosophy and taste’.

  8 I use this term in its widest, most generic sense, with no specific reference to the expressionist painters, writers and composers of the early decades of the twentieth century.

  9 xiii 13.

  10 i 13–28.

  11 xvii 211.

  12 See xvii 230 ff.

  13 xvii 319.

  14 xviii 86.

  15 xiii 339–41, 375.

  16 xiii 340.

  17 ibid.

  18 e.g. xiii 341: ‘Millions of people on the globe live without States … Father and mother, man and wife, child and brother, friend and man – these are natural relationships through which we become happy; what the State can give us is an artificial contrivance; unfortunately it can also deprive us of something far more essential – rob us of ourselves.’

  19 xiii 340.

  20 xviii 206.

  21 xiii 385.

  22 xiv 67; cf. xiv 283–4.

  23 Herder was fascinated by the survival of the Jews; he looked upon them as a most excellent example of a Volk with its own distinct character (x 139). ‘Moses bound the heart of his people to their native soil’ (xii 115). Land, common language, tradition, sense of kinship, common law as a freely accepted ‘covenant’ – all these interwoven factors, together with the bond created by their sacred literature, enabled the Jews to retain their identity in dispersion – but especially the fact that their eyes remained focused upon their original geographical home (xii 115, viii 355, xvii 312) – historical continuity, not race, is what counts (xii 107). This is what creates historical individuality (xii 123, xxxii 207). On this entire subject, and especially the view of the ‘Jewish problem’, not as religious, but national and political, needing what later came to be known as the Zionist solution, see the interesting article by F. M. Barnard, ‘Herder and Israel’, Jewish Social Studies 28 (1966), 25–33. See also the same author’s ‘The Hebrews and Herder’s Political Creed’, Modern Language Review 54 (1959), 533–46.

  24 xiii 384.

  25 v 508; cf. v 515.

  26 xiv 201.

  27 ibid.

  28 xiv 202.

  29 xviii 222–3; cf. xiv 410.

  30 v 546.

  31 xxiii 498.

  32 xviii 224.

  33 v 579.

  34 The most eloquent statement of Herder’s conception of the German’s earthly miseries and spiritual task is to be found in his epistle in verse, German National Glory, written in the 1790s, but effectively first publishe
d, posthumously, in 1812 (xviii 208–16), when the mood of many of his countrymen, whipped into a frenzy of nationalism by Jahn, Arndt, Körner and Görres, was wholly different.

  35 see p. 373 above, note 4.

  36 Xenien 95–6, ‘Das deutsche Reich’ and ‘Deutscher Nationalcharakter’: pp. 320–1 in Schillers Werke (op. cit., p. 260 above, note 3), vol. 1.

  37 xvii 212.

  38 xviii 247; cf. xviii 248, where Herder says there must be ‘no order of rank … 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.’

  39 See iv 204–5, xiii 265–73.

  40 op. cit. (p. 16 above, note 1), vol. 8, p. 23, line 5. But see also Kant’s ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ (ibid., pp. 33–42) and Herder’s letter to Hamann of 14 February 1785.

  41 xiii 383.

  42 viii 315.

  43 ibid.

  44 viii 193.

  45 See, e.g., De l’esprit des lois, book 24, chapter 18: p. 290 in op. cit. (p. 219 above, note 1), vol. 1 B. The phrase ‘grand simplificateur’ and the word ‘simplificateur’ itself were coined by Sainte-Beuve to describe Benjamin Franklin in ‘Franklin à Passy’ (29 November 1852): p. 181 in C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (Paris, [1926–42]), vol. 7. (The equally familiar ‘terribles simplificateurs’ was coined by Jacob Burckhardt in a letter of 24 July 1889 to Friedrich von Preen.) H.H.

  46 xvii 58.

  47 The sources of this view in Christian mysticism and Neoplatonism, and its form in other philosophical systems – for instance, that of Berkeley – have not as yet been sufficiently investigated.

  48 xiii 357.

  49 See esp. xiii 362.

  50 See, e.g., xi 225, xvii 59, xviii 346, xxx 8.

  51 xviii 137.

  52 xiii 363.

  53 op. cit. (p. 250 above, note 2), vol. 2, p. 176, line 13.

  54 G. A. Wells, op. cit. (p. 361 above, note 1), p. 43, advances this view, which seems to me very illuminating.

  55 See below, pp. 403–4.

  56 v 164.

  57 ibid.

  58 ix 532. This quotation, and those earlier in this paragraph, are based on the translations in Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson (eds), The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680–1860 (Bloomington/London, 1972), pp. 229–30.

  59 viii 412.

  60 See viii 390.

  61 v 538.

  62 viii 96.

  63 v 169.

  64 v 183.

  65 v 169.

  66 v 167.

  67 ix 534.

  68 Letter to Caroline Flachsland, 2 January 1771.

  69 v 503.

  70 At various points in this essay I describe Herder as a relativist. Although the general tenor of my remarks makes it clear, I hope, in what sense I use this term, what I say has led to some misunderstanding of my views (see, for example, Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘On the Pioneer Trail’, New York Review of Books, 11 November 1976, 33–8). I have attempted to clarify my position in an article entitled ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, reprinted in one of my collections of essays, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London, 1990; New York, 1991). Essentially, in the present study of Herder I sometimes use ‘relativism’ to mean not a species of ethical or epistemological subjectivism, as the term has very often been understood, but to refer to what I have elsewhere identified, I hope more perspicuously, as objective pluralism, free from any taint of subjectivism. I.B. 1996.

  71 xxi 36.

  72 xxi 38.

  73 According to Herder the soul evolves a pattern from the chaos of things by which it is surrounded, and so ‘creates by its own inner power a one out of the many, which belongs to it alone’ (xiii 182); cf. xv 532 and H. B. Nisbet, op. cit. (p. 361 above, note 1), p. 63. That the creation of integrated wholes out of discrete data is the fundamental organising activity of human nature is a belief that is central to Herder’s entire social and moral outlook: for him all creative activity, conscious and unconscious, generates and is, in turn, determined by its own unique Gestalt, whereby every individual and group strives to perceive, understand, act, create, live. This is the idea which dominates his conception of social structure and development, of the nature of an identifiable civilisation, and, indeed, of what men live by (see v 103–5). Nisbet seems to me entirely justified in describing Herder as a forerunner of gestalt psychology. On this see also Martin Schütze’s articles, ‘Herder’s Psychology’, Monist 35 (1925), 507–54, and ‘The Fundamental Ideas in Herder’s Thought’, Modern Philology 18 (1920–1), 65–78, 289–302; 19 (1921–2), 113–30, 361–82; 21 (1923–4), 29–48, 113–32.

  74 See xiii 194.

  75 v 516.

  76 v 566.

  77 xiv 86.

  78 xxxii 56.

  79 xiii 147.

  80 xiii 339.

  81 xiii 371–2.

  82 In his essay on Ossian, Herder speaks of this as the source of the fatal division of labour which creates destructive barriers among men, classes and hierarchies, and the division of spiritual from manual labour which robs men of their humanity. Material progress may march hand in hand with cultural decline; this theme is taken up by Goethe and Schiller and developed by Marx and Marxists. (I owe this point to Professor Roy Pascal.)

  83 Especially in Moser’s Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist, published in 1765–6, which speaks of the Germans as despised, disregarded, mocked, and preyed upon by everyone.

  84 xiii 160–1. Such phrases are almost verbally exact echoes of sentences in which Hamann deals with what much later came to be called the problem of ‘alienation’.

  85 viii 476–7; compare the following (v 565) from Auch eine Philosophie: ‘There is no country the civilisation of which has been able to take a backward step, and become for the second time what it has once been. The path of destiny is as inflexible as iron … can today become yesterday? … You Ptolemies could never again create an Egypt, nor you Hadrians a Greece, nor Julian a Jerusalem.’ These cultures have had their day. ‘The sword is worn out, the empty scabbard lies in pieces.’