“Herder's Deconstruction of Race” International Herder Society Madison, Wisconsin September 19, 1998 Karl J. Fink One Year B
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“Herder's Deconstruction of Race” International Herder Society Madison, Wisconsin September 19, 1998 Karl J. Fink One year before she fled Germany (1933), Hannah Arendt-Stern published an essay on the "Enlightenment and the Question of the Jews" (Aufklärung und Judenfrage), where she set forth her thesis that the question dates from the Enlightenment period and was framed by the non-Jewish world.1 Here she argued that the "formulations" (Formulierungen) and answers set the standard of "behavior" (Verhalten) for the "Assimilation" of the Jews (Assimilation, p. 65) into her time.2 In her view, Moses Mendelssohn (1728-86) had refined Gotthold E. Lessing's (1729-81) concepts of "humanity" (Menschlichkeit) and "tolerance" (Toleranz) and with Lessing's separation of "rational" and "historical truth" (Vernunft- und Geschichtswahrheiten, p. 65) Mendelssohn had established for the Jewish community a "true assimilation" (wirklicher Assimiliertheit) into the Christian world. This Enlightenment concept of assimilation, she argues, along with Christian W. Dohm's (1751-1820) concept of Jewish emancipation by means of education in values of European middle class society, levelled Jewish culture to the ideals of Enlightenment progress toward humanity. Both Lessing's concept of tolerance, Mendelssohn's rathional truth, and Dohm's requirement of progress toward humanity set a new standard for Jewish equality in Europe. Johann G. Herder (1744-1893), she contends, corrected this 1Hannah Arendt-Stern, "Aufklärung und Judenfrage," Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 4 (1932): 65-77, p. 65. 2In writings from after World War II, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: World Publishing Company, 1958 [1st ed., 1951), essentially maintains her view that the writers of the Enlightenment set the question of Jewish integration into European society, focusing less on philosophical and more on the formal and legal origins of anti-semitism, beginning after the French Revolution with a "series of emancipation edicts which slowly and hesitantly followed the French edict of 1792," p. 11. Fink-Herder on Race 2 normalized view of Jewish culture with a new definition of history that judged a culture on its own terms.3 Herder, she wrote, "understands the history of the jews, as they themselves interpret this history, as the history of the chosen people of God."4 In Hannah Arendt-Stern's view, Enlightenment writers had set the stage for Jewish equality by emphasizing "development" (Bildung) through the autonomy of independent thinking (das Selbst-denken-können, p. 68), which Herder replaced with the concept of history, that in his words "form the head and shape the limbs" (formt seinen Kopf und bildet seine Glieder, p. 72). "Reason" (Vernunft) according to Herder, she points out, is not the means, rather is the result of human history. And from this perspective, she contends, Herder introduced a change in the question of the Jews, which put their position as "the chosen people" back into the center of their identity, and at the same time removed it, when he argued that secularization came with the continuity of historical change. Herder, she concludes, polemicized against "the autonomy of thought" (das Selbstdenken, p. 74), which had negated the special status of the Jewish tradition, and instead he argued for "formation through understanding of models" (das Bildende im Verstehen der Vorbilder, p. 75). Thus Herder in one stroke gave the Jews back their tradition, but by placing it in the course of time, dispersed and secularized it, so that it was "no 3Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), under much tighter definitions that followed the atrocities of the Nazi era, maintains Herder's unique position as a defender of Jewish emancipation by their own terms: "Jews were exhorted to become educated enough not to behave like ordinary Jews, but they were, on the other hand, accepted only because they were Jews, because of their foreign, exotic appeal. In the eighteenth century, this had its source in the new humanism which expressly wanted `new specimens of humanity' (Herder)," p. 57, which, she points out later in her book, distinguishes Herder from others in a period of "race-thinking before racism," pp. 162, 177. 4Arendt-Stern, "Aufklärung und Judenfrage" (1932), "Herder versteht die Geschichte der Juden so, wie sie selbst diese Geschichte deuteten, als die Geschichte des auserwählten Volkes Gottes" (p. 73), which she grounds in Part III, Book 12 of Herder's Ideen, where he writes: "Ich shäme mich also nicht, die Geschichte der Ebräer, wie sie solche selbst erzählen, zugrunde zu legen" (p. 73). Fink-Herder on Race 3 longer under the power of God" (nicht mehr unter die Macht Gottes, 75).5 Written before the Nazis came to power, Hannah Arendt-Stern concluded from her study of Herder, that the Jewish nation did not live by "mercantile advantages" (merkantilischer Vorteile, p. 76), rather it lived in the citizens of science and humanity: "Their Palestine is therefore, where they live and nobly work everywhere" (Ihr Palästina ist sodann, wo sie leben und edel wirken allenthalben, p. 76).6 In hindsight her vision for the Jewish people may be debated, but her scholarship on Herder, it seems to me, is accurate,7 for by contrasting him to Lessing and Mendelssohn she did capture the essential difference that locates Herder in opposition to the Enlightenment at those points where minority cultures are sacrificed to the values of general cultures. For this reason I have predicated my essay on Herder's deconstruction of race on Hannah Arendt's thesis that Herder wrote in counterpoint to writers, who measured other cultures by foreign rather than indigenous standards.8 Beyond her thesis my essay relies on 5Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropologie in theologischer Perspektive (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983, also argues that Herder takes the lions share of credit, or responsibility, for introducing a secularized historiography into the study of culture, p. 457. 6Compare Arendt-Stern's conclusions with those of Wilhelm Müller, Studien über die rassischen Grundlagen des "Sturm und Drang" (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1938), who in stark contrast attempts to limit the intellectual community to a genealogy of blood lines, in the firm belief "daß eine Entwicklung der Ideengeschichte auch einen biologischen Unterbau und somit richtung-angelegten Fortgang habe und die systematische Darstellung einer ausgereiften Ideenwelt darum zugleich ein rassisches Bild der Träger gebe, die sie hervorgebracht," p. 13-14. 7Paul L. Rose, German Question/Jewish Question. Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), in an afterword to his book, notes Hannah Arendt's book on Totalitarianism (1958) as one of the "Earlier titles that should have been cited," p. 387, apparently even in this postscript unaware of her study of Herder from 1932, when she came to views of Herder based on quotations from his Ideen, which were also used by Rose, who argues in his conclusion that "the recent tendency to see his general outlook as liberal and humanitarian is misconceived," p. 98, that "he held to the essentially illiberal German conviction that the Jews were far too alien and distinct a nation ever to become `Germans,'" p. 107, and that he "loved humanity, but he was no humanitarian," p. 108. 8Jürgen Brummack, "Herder's Polemik gegen die `Aufklärung,'" in: Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der Europäischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Ed. Jochen Schmidt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), pp. 277-293, reviews the changing status of Herder's position in German literary and philosophical history from Heine to Suphan, Kindermann, and current arguments that waffle between his humanistic alternative to Berlin nationalism. He argues that all of these perspectives are too narrowly defined, Fink-Herder on Race 4 Herder scholarship that has shown how past claims to his writings for the cause of nationalism and anti-semitism were ideological distortions coopted from statements out of context,9 and so it is with this background that the way has been laid clear to move ahead with a close study of texts by Herder that examine his strategy for reconstructing a science of the human being that had not yet become humane. Introduction Let it be assumed then, that long before anyone was inspired to reject "modernism" for "postmodernism,"10 Herder was shaping a voice of dissent that seriously questioned the Enlightenment conception of liberty and justice for all. It is remarkable, but not surprising, that between the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789 Herder would write an agenda that anticipates a crisis in cultural values in other periods of history, including one that began at the turn of this century and has surfaced again at the end of the century in the that the younger Herder differs greatly from the older one, that his critical tone captured by the Storm and Stress movement is not in opposition to the Enlightenment, rather "daß Herder vielmehr eine Form der Aufklärung gegen eine andere setzt, ja, daß seine Polemik geradezu eine bedingte Form der Bejahung derjenigen Kulturentfaltung im modernen Europa ist, mit der sich der Name Aufklärung für ihn verbindet, " p. 279. 9Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism (1958), observes the abuse of Herder scholarship in her claim that "It was Herder, an outspoken friend of the Jews, who first used the