Philosophy & Social Criticism

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Enlightened relativism: The case of Herder Sonia Sikka Philosophy Social Criticism 2005; 31; 309 DOI: 10.1177/0191453705051708

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Sonia Sikka

Enlightened relativism The case of Herder

Abstract Johann Gottfried Herder has been described as the founder of cultural relativism within the German philosophical tradition, which would make him the starting-point for one thread in the pattern of ideas leading to the Nazi disaster. More recently, some scholars have rejected this interpretation, arguing that Herder actually supported the universalist values of the Enlightenment. I argue that Herder’s position is actually a complex, and laudable, blend of universalism and relativism. It includes: (1) the presumption of a set of basic human goods, upon which some universal criteria for ethical judgements may be founded: and, (2) the view that human practices, values and beliefs must be interpreted within their social context, and that the happiness and virtue of individuals can only be measured in relation to their speciﬁc values, being a function of their capacity to satisfy their desires and to live up to their ideals. Key words Counter-Enlightenment · cultural relativism · ethical relativism · Eurocentrism · Johann Gottfried Herder

There are probably few debates within moral and political philosophy that evoke more anxiety, on all sides, than that surrounding value- relativism. The contemporary landscape of this debate is familiar. All parties see themselves as defending justice against the dangers rep- resented by their opponents, dangers to which, they think, present events should alert us and to which history bears witness. Anti- relativists worry that the position they oppose would disallow condemnation of many violent, oppressive, and manifestly unfair social practices across the world, and they often point out the appeal to relativist tenets by Nazi ideologues. Anti-universalists worry that the position they oppose inclines people to ignore the partiality of their own perspective while passing negative judgements on others, and they often point out the appeal to universalist principles by colonialists and imperialists.

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It is against the backdrop of this debate that I wish to re-examine the position expressed in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder is commonly thought of as belonging ﬁrmly to the relativist camp. Indeed, he has been described as the founder of relativism within the German philosophical tradition,1 which would make him the starting-point for one thread in the pattern of ideas leading to the Nazi disaster. Consider, for example, the following remark by Max Rouché, in his introduction to the 1943 French translation of Yet Another Philosophy of History:

With Yet Another Philosophy of History, according to which our conception of life is a function of our nation and our age, German thought sets out on the path of relativity; our vision of the world will be presented as a function of our race by H. S. Chamberlain and then Rosenberg, and our type of civilisation by Spengler. Modern Germany is the country par excellence of relativity . . .2

The perception that the core of Herder’s thought places him on the relativist side of the debate has by now passed into common philosophical currency. Kai Nielson, for instance, refers in a 1987 article to Herder’s ‘relativistic claims about . . . forms of life being equally valid and all being incommensurable’, and says that ‘if Herder is right, we can have no grounds for the assertion of the superiority of one way of living over another’.3 His own ideal, which he contrasts with that of Herder, involves combining the latter’s ‘recognition of the central signiﬁ- cance of local attachments’ while keeping ‘the universalistic ideals of the Enlightenment’.4 Nielson’s understanding of Herder as a ‘Counter- Enlightenment’ thinker here is indebted to Isaiah Berlin’s highly inﬂu- ential essay, ‘Vico and Herder’.5 On the other hand, much scholarship over the last decade or so has questioned this characterization of Herder.6 Kurt Mueller-Vollmer rightly notes that ‘Herder’s relation to the Enlightenment is much more differentiated than we have tradition- ally assumed’ and that ‘many would argue that Herder actually con- tinued leading Enlightenment tendencies rather than breaking with them altogether’.7 Frederick Beiser, whose analysis rejects the view of Herder as a relativist, goes so far as to claim that ‘Herder’s critique is essentially internal: it criticizes the Aufklärung strictly in the light of its own ideals’.8 This claim, in my view, goes too far.9 I will argue, in this article, that while Herder does indeed accept or only modify a number of key theses usually associated with the standpoint of Enlightenment universalism, he nonetheless can legitimately be described as a kind of relativist, in a sense I will clarify. A careful reading of Herder’s texts actually demonstrates that he espouses something more like the ideal that Nielson proposes, blending Enlightenment universalism with a species

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of relativism that challenges his society’s conception of itself as the sum of all perfections. I will limit my analysis mainly to some of Herder’s major works: Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774),10 Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91),11 Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1800), and Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–7).12 These works belong to different stages in Herder’s thought, and one can see over their course signiﬁcant shifts in emphasis and tone. I will argue, though, against some previous interpre- tations, that such shifts do not mark a substantial change in Herder’s principles,13 and that his position can consistently be described as a kind of ‘enlightened relativism’, although at ﬁrst this might seem to be a contradiction in terms.

I Herder’s universalism

Although, in ‘Vico and Herder’, Berlin sometimes describes Herder as a relativist, in a footnote added to a later version he points out that the ‘relativism’ he originally had in mind should not be equated with ‘epistemological subjectivism’ but is better described as ‘objective pluralism’.14 According to Berlin, that is, Herder is a realist about values; he believes that some things are genuinely good or bad, right or wrong. But he is a ‘pluralist’ insofar as he believes that not all good things can be realized in the same society, that some goods actually conﬂict, and that one cannot evaluate societies against one another, so that cultures are ‘incommensurable’.15 Berlin is certainly right that Herder is a pluralist of some sort. However, his account also raises serious puzzles, given that Herder does evaluate, persistently and often negatively, many aspects of the societies he writes about, foreign societies no less than his own, and he seems to appeal to some general principles of justice in doing so. When complaining about the negative depiction of medieval society by his contemporaries in Yet Another Philosophy of History, for instance, he nonetheless adds: ‘I do not by any means want to defend the perpetual migrations and devastations, feudal wars and attacks, battalions of monks, pilgrimages, crusades: I only want to explain them; to explain how spirit nonetheless breathes through them all!’ (APG, p. 53). He is appreciative of the ambition, courage, and pride that functioned as virtues in Roman society (APG, pp. 30–1), but notes that the Roman conqueror is also stained with blood (APG, p. 37). His point is that every society has its virtues and vices, that the vices are often the ﬂip- side of the virtues, and that to understand the values of a foreign society one must transcend the naivety of one’s own culturally conditioned

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perspective. This position implies the incommensurability of cultures only in a highly attenuated sense. It does not rule out passing critical judgements, which suggests that there is a common measure after all in terms of which such judgements can be made. Herder has no qualms about speaking against war, conquest, subjugation, inequality, material want, and superstition, wherever he ﬁnds them. He thereby exhibits adherence to some standards of judgement that are similar to those usually associated with the Enlightenment standpoint. This is the primary consideration behind Robert Bernasconi’s claim that ‘Berlin emphasized Herder’s pluralism at the expense of those aspects of his thought that showed him to be a more typical representative of the Enlightenment’.16 It is important not to overlook or downplay a central analogy employed by Herder in Yet Another Philosophy of History, that between cultures and stages of individual life. In tracing the development of occidental cultures, he describes the time of the patriarchs as the ‘golden age of mankind’s childhood’ (APG, p. 15), Greece as the age of youth (APG, pp. 19–20), and Roman society as the age of manhood (APG, pp. 30–1). When speaking of his own century, he tends to employ the metaphor of old age. The metaphor suggests, among other things, that societies in earlier phases of western history had an energy and fresh- ness that have now been lost. It also points, obliquely, towards the hope of rebirth and renewal, in line with another recurring trope in Herder’s philosophy of history. However, the metaphor of old age, as Herder develops it, is ambivalent.17 It connotes not only desiccation but also maturity, and the stages-of-life analogy implies, among other things, development and growth. Herder insists only that an earlier stage should not be measured by the standards of a later one (APG, p. 22), just as a child should not be judged as one would judge an adult. Beiser therefore claims that, through the use of this organic analogy, Herder manages to ‘avoid the danger of relativism’, as the metaphor of stages of growth allows him to say ‘that cultures are incommensurable with each other and that they all conform to a single standard or goal’.18 Isaiah Berlin’s analysis, in that case, does not recognize the degree to which Herder’s thesis of ‘incommensurability’ is integrated with a version of universalism, one that is sometimes even questionably con- descending, as the childhood metaphor illustrates (Herder says that ‘the greater part of the nations of the earth remain in childhood’ [APG, p. 89]). This universalism posits some core values, which Herder equates with the essence of Christianity. For Herder, Christianity, according to the intention of its founder, is supposed to be ‘the religion of mankind, the instinct of love, and the bond that ties all nations into a brotherhood’ (APG, pp. 46–7). It is supposedly the ﬁrst religion to be free of

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superstition and ceremony, and to transcend national boundaries (APG, p. 47). This privileging of a particular religion may seem to be inconsistent with Herder’s cultural and religious pluralism, and with his critique of Enlightenment attitudes. But the Christianity Herder privileges is really a moral code, stripped of ritual, ceremony, symbol, arguably of all that makes it a particular religion. Herder’s claim that this abstracted moral code represents the true intentions of Christian- ity’s founder is doubtful, and one could probably make a similar, and equally doubtful, claim about any religion, after isolating – or fabricat- ing – its allegedly universal moral content. Be that as it may, the endorsement of a rarefied Christianity, far from being inconsistent with Herder’s position, actually exemplifies it.19 Herder is deeply committed to certain values that, in his view, transcend cultural specificity. These are values in which love of one’s fellow man plays a foundational role, and they lead, among other things, to the principle of respect and concern for all nations. Moreover, although he rejects the thesis of simple linear progress popular among many of his contemporaries, Herder nonetheless affirms that history displays progress (Fortgang) and development (Entwicke- lung) in a ‘higher sense’ (APG, p. 41). Scholars have struggled to understand what this ‘higher sense’ amounts to. Wolfgang Förster suggests that ‘the central line in the historical progress of mankind realizes itself, according to Herder, in the fullness of specific shapes, in multiple forms of appearance, and in a contradictory, interrupted manner’.20 Wulf Koepke claims that, for Herder: ‘History is development, evolution; but that should not be seen as the perfection of plants. Rather, history has to be compared to the life stages of plants. Every stage reaches its own perfection but must give way to the next.’21 These points are sound, but it is important also to ask about the measure of progress Herder employs in formulating his position, and this is a question Berlin ignores when he says that, for Herder, progress ‘lies in a variety of cultures, incommensurable with each other and incapable of being arranged on some single scale of progress or retrogression’.22 Certainly, Herder does not think progress can be measured on a ‘single scale’, since his pluralism has the implication that there is more than one measure of progress, and that an increase in some goods is inevitably accompanied by a decline in others. But if, for Herder, cultures were totally incommensurable, it would make no sense to speak of progress at all, as there would be no common unit in terms of which it could be assessed. In fact, there are such units; Herder acknowledges increases in the realization of key social values which he takes to be basic. Beiser is right to point out that Herder’s relation to the philosophies of history he criticizes rarely, if ever, involves outright rejection.23 Often, Herder is only critical of the simultaneously naive and arrogant manner

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in which Enlightenment philosophes have developed ideas of which he himself accepts a version. For instance, he endorses the thesis that societies build upon previous ones, yielding a significant form of progress, but he is sarcastic about the view of history that accompanies this thesis among some of his contemporaries: ‘how many edges first had to be forcibly rubbed away, before the round, smooth, pretty thing that we are could appear!’ (APG, p. 54). The critical thrust of this remark is addressed to a prevalent view of the past as purely a means, with no intrinsic value, and the present as purely an end, the flawless culmination of all human development. Herder insists, against this view, that everything in the kingdom of God is both means and end, including his own century (APG, p. 54). For Herder, history is a meaningful narrative, and one that is moving towards something, but it has to be read as a complex drama, or an epic (APG, p. 82), not as a morality tale. Another central criticism in Yet Another Philosophy of History concerns the idea that one single culture, with its particular language, is the epitome of civilization. ‘On commençoit à penser comme nous pensons aujourd’hui: on n’étoit plus barbare,’ he writes, with obvious irony, ‘et nous pensons tous en français’ (APG, p. 56) since that is what it means to be no longer a barbarian. There is, of course, some very German resentment against the predominance of French culture in this remark, but the central point affirms Herder’s cultural pluralism, his belief that goodness is scattered across the earth, and not realized without remainder in the form of a single society. This belief also underlies his hostility towards any form of cosmopolitanism that would extinguish national cultures (APG, p. 74), and especially towards one that, under the guise of restoring a golden age prior to the babel of diversity, actually aims to universalize a particular culture with a particular language – that of France (APG, p. 75). The most frequently recurring theme in Herder’s negative assessment of his own age concerns precisely this universalizing of particularity, this failure, on the part of his contemporaries, to acknowledge the possibility that their society has its limitations.24 Herder also complains about the overly broad and simplistic generalizations about societies in the philosophies of history typical of his century, singling out Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748) as an example (APG, pp. 62–3). In doing so, he is not implying that it is impossible to comprehend or judge a culture other than one’s own; he is only saying that the task is a difficult one, requiring more careful study and greater attention to complexity than Montesquieu, for one, understands. His criticisms of the place of reason within Enlighten- ment philosophy are similarly nuanced. They are not directed against the ideals that may be discerned by reason, but against the lack of

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understanding, among those who emphasize intellect to the exclusion of every other aspect of being human, of how these ideals are to be achieved, of what individual and social reform truly requires. It requires more, Herder points out, than paying lip-service to notions of freedom, honour and virtue, more than just possessing the idea of a universal humanity (APG, p. 64). It requires a change in people’s hearts rather than merely their heads, through an education that takes into account the roles of affection, imagination and custom in the formation of human beings. Without such a change, Herder writes, ‘humanity’ (Menschheit) is just a pretty word (APG, p. 66), and he condemns the emptiness and hypocrisy of the rhetoric of universal brotherhood that he hears around him. Underneath this rhetoric, he suggests, lies imperialism – economic, political and cultural.25 What ‘we’ really want is for everyone to be like us, or, better, to serve us. Finally, Herder takes issue with another phenomenon he associates with Enlightenment rationalism, the increasing tendency to view society as a ‘machine’, an organized, as opposed to organic, system within which every individual has its assigned place and function. He points to the loss of individual freedom and responsibility in a society where everyone is steered into ‘that marvelous thing, the machine’, and where ‘no one knows anymore about self-justiﬁcation, self-worth and self- determination’ (APG, p. 73). He objects also to the corresponding tendency to formulate large-scale engineering plans for this social machine. The progress of humanity is, for Herder, the work of ‘destiny’, where every reformation begins with small things that gradually shape themselves into something greater. ‘Whenever, on the other hand, some big plan was deliberately designed beforehand,’ he notes, ‘it failed’ (APG, p. 58). In sum, Herder criticizes his society for its arrogance and assimilationism, its imperialism and hypocrisy, its hasty pejorative generalizations about others, and its sterile, mechanistic intellectualism. These criticisms make Herder an opponent of the Enlightenment in a sense that does not rule out belief in objective and universal standards for a certain type of moral judgement and in the reality of historical progress. Recognizing these points can help to resolve a puzzle which Berlin illustrates by saying, at one point in ‘Vico and Herder’, that Herder ‘can hardly condemn anything that displays colour or uniqueness’,26 and, at another point, that Herder is not always consistent with respect to his doctrine of the incommensurability of cultures, ‘since he condemns and praises entire civilizations’.27 These remarks are themselves inconsistent, and they are both inaccurate. In truth, Herder rarely praises or condemns ‘entire civilizations’, but he condemns something or other about practically every phase of every civilization, including his own. To quote Bernasconi again:

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If Herder surpassed the narrow Eurocentrism exhibited by the philosophies of history of his time, it was not by renouncing the judgments that one people might issue against another. Herder allowed for one people to challenge another and put it in question. His point was that this was not the exclusive preserve of Europeans.28 Turning to the Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Herder’s attitudes towards ancient Rome and towards the European Middle Ages again provide examples of his typically mixed reviews of all societies. In the Ideas, he is more profoundly critical of these ones than he had been in Yet Another Philosophy of History, but he still tries to mention their virtues along with their vices (Ideen, pp. 611, 829f.). Herder’s approach to non-European societies, moreover, is similar. Although he associates China with despotism and insularity, and, as a result, paints a highly unﬂattering, and distorted, picture of almost every facet of its culture and history (Ideen, pp. 434f.), he also says that in China ‘no subject is forced to adopt a religion, and no one is persecuted unless he attacks the state’ (Ideen, p. 432), and he means to draw a favourable contrast between this tolerance and the state of affairs in Europe. Herder’s depiction of Indian society contains both negative and positive judgements as well, although in a different proportion. He is full of praise for the Brahminic idea of God (Ideen, p. 454), and for Hindu tolerance and respect for other religions (Ideen, p. 455). On the whole, he is far more sympathetic to the language, art, and mythology of Indian culture than to those of China. But he does not hesitate to condemn the aspects of Indian society which offend his fundamental ethical principles, such as the treatment of pariahs (Ideen, p. 455) and the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres (Ideen, p. 456). As in Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder frequently employs the analogy of stages of life in the Ideas, claiming, for instance, that China, like many other nations, remains as if at the level of youth, and that most nations remain children for the whole of their lives (Ideen, p. 450). When speaking of the caste system in India, particularly the power of the Brahmin caste, he says this arrangement is understandable ‘at this level of culture’ (Ideen, p. 451), and he associates the existence of such a priestly caste with the political youth of a nation (Ideen, p. 457). For Herder, these are necessary stages in the development of a culture. They should not be judged by the standards of more advanced stages. In judging that there are more and less advanced stages, however, Herder assumes universal criteria. It is on the basis of these criteria that he afﬁrms the superiority of Christianity over other religions, present- ing a portrait of it that is in essential respects the same as the one in Yet Another Philosophy of History. He deplores many elements in the history of Christianity – monastic life, ritualism, theological sophistry,

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superstition, blind faith, other-worldliness – but claims that its essence consists in a moral content, allegedly expressed in the original teachings of Jesus, and described by Herder as ‘the truest humanity’ (Ideen, p. 708). By contrast, he has virtually nothing positive to say about Tibetan Buddhism (Ideen, pp. 446f.). He condemns in it much the same elements he rejects in Christendom, but without making any of the redeeming distinctions that he does for Christianity. In light of such considerations, it is hard to see how one author’s claim that ‘Herder’s approach to religion, as to any other facet of human endeavour, is strictly relativist’29 could be sustained. In fact, the universalist notion of Humanität, which plays a central role in the Ideas, underlies Herder’s understanding of religion along with every other aspect of culture. Hans Irmscher nicely summarizes the multiple meanings of this concept as it functions within Herder’s thought: (1) the general nature of man as a being that determines itself; (2) the particular realization of the possibilities of this general nature in a speciﬁc historical situation; and, (3) the historical task of the co-evolution of nations, involving the sublation of individuality in a world community characterized by solidarity.30 These meanings are interrelated and mutually dependent. It is because Herder believes that human beings possess Humanität as a common nature that he can posit for them Humanität as a common goal: ‘Our capacity for reason should be cultivated [gebildet] towards reason, our ﬁner senses towards art, our drives towards true freedom and beauty, our inclinations towards love of humanity’ (Ideen, p. 187). It is on the basis of belief in this common goal that Herder sees a progress in Humanität over history, a decrease in violence (Ideen, p. 639) and an increase in true understanding and justice (Ideen, p. 671). While Herder is usually seen as championing the variability of human nature, a radical opponent of Voltaire’s claim that ‘in general, man has always been what he is now’,31 the contrast between his position and that of Voltaire on this point, although legitimate, should not be overstated. After all, the second part of the Ideas takes as its motto a line from Terence suggesting that no person is wholly foreign to any other: ‘I am a human being, and consider nothing human to be alien to me’ (Ideen, p. 203). There must then be some shared properties that enable understanding between human beings. For Herder, all human beings possess reason (Ideen, p. 372); all possess the same basic aptitudes and predispositions (Anlagen) (Ideen, p. 379). In line with the principle of unity in multiplicity which is so pervasive in Herder’s thought, these broad common capacities and tendencies are realized in

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diverse forms, at varying levels of advancement, across different societies. Although Herder describes these distinct realizations in terms sug- gestive of Leibnizian monads, this does not entail the view that human cultures are, or should be, self-contained, for, as Barnard notes, ‘the Herderian “monad” has “windows” ’.32 Herder speaks against the invasion of one nation by another in the Ideas, but he supports forms of interaction that do not involve violence or assimilation, such as trade, travel and study. ‘A noble expansion takes place in the soul’, he writes, ‘when it dares to venture outside the circle that climate and education have drawn around it’ (Ideen, p. 304). A central reason for what Herder sees as the faults of China is its self-isolation, as a result of which ‘it compares itself only with itself and neither knows nor loves anything foreign’ (Ideen, p. 439). Homann and Albrecht rightly point out that, for Herder, ‘to the extent that nations compare themselves with one another and exert influence upon one another, they come to know themselves, in that they see what they are not’.33 The China example shows, however, that in Herder’s view the benefit of cultural interaction resides not only in its being a prerequisite for self-knowledge, but also in its capacity to effect salutary change. Interaction with the other is one of the elements that encourage cultural development and progress.34 Like Yet Another Philosophy of History, the Ideas only rejects a simple, linear model of historical progress; it does not reject the idea of progress altogether. Herder frames this idea in terms of a pantheistic theology belonging to that line of thought, inaugurated by Spinoza, which occupies, within the history of European ideas, a peculiar space between theism and naturalism.35 History, he claims, in a phrase that sounds paradoxical, is governed by ‘divine natural laws’ (Ideen, p. 571). For Herder, history is a kind of divine drama, but human advancement is, at the same time, a natural process of learning through trial and error (Ideen, p. 646), where ‘every idleness, folly, evil, unreason, and unfair- ness’ intrinsically leads to an undesirable result (Ideen, pp. 667–8). Herder’s criticisms of his own age in the Ideas also address themes familiar from Yet Another Philosophy of History, and are not inconsistent with his upholding of Enlightenment ideals. He describes as absurdly arrogant the presumption ‘that, in order to live happily, the inhabitants of all parts of the world must be Europeans’ (Ideen, p. 327), affirming that all people everywhere are, and have been, ends in themselves: ‘you people in all parts of the world, who have passed away over the ages, you did not live only to fertilize the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your descendants could become happy through European culture’ (Ideen, p. 335). Although Herder does not maintain that all peoples in all cultures are equally advanced, he nonetheless rails against colonialism and slavery, as nothing about

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any of the characteristics of any people justifies their subjugation or exploitation.36 The general nature of Herder’s evaluation of European society is not fundamentally different from his evaluation of other societies: Europe has its virtues and concomitant vices, both of which become visible through comparison. The problem with historians of his age is that they have not acknowledged the vices along with the virtues. As I have already pointed out, one respect in which Herder often contrasts European society unfavourably with some others, notably China and India, is on the issue of tolerance. Europeans will not let be anyone who is different. They persecute internal minorities, and they seek to convert everyone else. If one gathers together Herder’s scattered remarks about Europe in the Ideas, one finds that, in his mind, the defining characteristic of the European spirit, in comparison with other nations, is a kind of restless assertiveness. In its positive aspect, this characteristic generates industry and progress. Herder claims that while China knew many crafts before Europe did, it did not progress because it lacked the drive to do so (Ideen, p. 441). But the negative side of this drive consists in aggression and imperialistic expansion, fuelled by an all-consuming and indiscriminate appetite: ‘the European eats everything’, says the Indian, who, by contrast, sets his happiness in a cheerful calm (Ideen, p. 291). There is, however, one kind of centrality and expansionism that Herder supports for Europe. When discussing the development of European states through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he sees European culture as the historical origin of an ideal that should become global: ‘Europe was to be educated . . . in a Humanität and reason that, with time, would encompass the earth’ (Ideen, p. 891). In the Letters on the Advancement of Humanity, the discourse surrounding the notion of Humanität, with its repeated appeal to common standards of reason, goodness and fairness (Billigkeit) (e.g. BBH, p. 128), seems to accord more fully with typical Enlightenment formulations than do most statements in the Ideas, and certainly in Yet Another Philosophy of History. The same point can be made for the thesis of a common nature, which Herder, at one point in this work, expresses in a line highly reminiscent of Voltaire: ‘Man has been the same in all ages; only, he expressed himself in each case according to the conditions in which he lived’ (BBH, p. 577). But as I have demon- strated, the belief in universal standards for moral judgement and in a minimally common human nature underlies Herder’s judgements even in Yet Another Philosophy of History, and is further developed in the Ideas. The application of these beliefs in the preceding works is, moreover, entirely in accord with Herder’s claims, in the Letters, that in the end all human beings are ‘common citizens of the great city of God on earth’ (BBH, p. 154), that no nation should be viewed and

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treated as if its members were animals (BBH, p. 739), and that we cannot consider ourselves as happy or morally good as long as there exists a single slave (BBH, p. 750). This is also true of Herder’s recommendations for realizing Humanität as a goal, which include abolishing war, the heroic ethos, imperialistic statecraft and overween- ing patriotism, while developing the feeling (not merely the idea) of a sympathy through which each person can put himself in the place of the other (BBH, pp. 720–3). Such sentiments are all part and parcel of Herder’s picture of the human race as ‘an infinite diversity’ struggling towards a common moral ideal (BBH, p. 750).37 As in Yet Another Philosophy of History and the Ideas, Christian- ity represents, in the Letters, the finest expression of this moral ideal. It offers ‘the purest humanity in the purest manner’, the evils associated with it having arisen only from its misuse (BBH, p. 752). This is again a highly rarefied Christianity, a ‘moral institute’ (BBH, p. 318) whose founder is supposed to have announced a kingdom embracing all nations, consisting not of external ceremonies but of inner perfection combined with the practice of justice and love (BBH, p. 317).38 Herder’s view of progress in the Letters similarly develops ideas presented in earlier works. He proposes a non-linear (BBH, p. 126), quasi- dialectical model of development in which errors ultimately lead to betterment (BBH, p. 129) through the natural functioning of ‘nemesis’, where every injustice carries within it its own revenge (BBH, p. 735, cf. 115). Interaction plays an important role in this process. Herder says that peoples and ages, like individuals, should learn from one another unceasingly until they understand that ‘no people on earth is the exclusively chosen people of God; truth must be sought by all; the garden of the common good must be built by all’ (BBH, p. 226). Once more, Herder’s complaints about his own society do not involve a rejection of its universal moral principles. He criticizes Europe for taking its culture to be the exclusive measure of worth (BBH, p. 700), and for failing, in its grey old age, to respect societies that are at different stages of development, while contributing to their prema- ture ageing through alcohol, illness, and slavery (BBH, p. 739). He urges it to make amends for what it has destroyed (BBH, p. 741), and says that, if Europe could unite its reason with goodness – and Herder is hopeful that it can, although it has not done so to date – this would be a great boon for the entire human race (BBH, pp. 740–1). What Herder objects to in his enlightened age is not the ideal of reason but its deploy- ment in separation from kindness, as well as its deterioration into a kind of productive technique, a tool for straightening the crooked timber of humanity: ‘It is a terrible thing to regard mankind as just a line which one can bend, cut, extend, and shrink for some purpose quite as one pleases, in order to execute a plan, to accomplish a task’ (BBH, p. 733).

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It would seem, then, that Herder always believes that cross-cultural evaluation is possible, on the basis of values he takes to be universal. Moreover, although the precise character and range of these values remains vague, they seem to include not only a basic condemnation of violence and material want, but also a typically Enlightenment commitment to strong ideals of freedom and equality. There are, however, many passages in the three texts I have been considering which seem to speak against the universalist principles I have so far outlined. In the next section of this article, I turn to an analysis of such passages, focussing in particular on the issues of happiness, virtue, impartiality, and moral censure.

II Herder’s relativism

Of Herder’s major works, the one that appears to endorses relativism most emphatically and unambiguously is Yet Another Philosophy of History, and the single line that most clearly exemplifies this apparent endorsement runs: ‘every nation has its center of happiness [Glück- seligkeit] within itself, as every sphere its center of gravity’ (APG, p. 39). This line is often cited in support of the claim that Herder believed the values of different societies to be incommensurable, or, as one author puts it, that he had a ‘pluralistic, culture-relative conception of human values’.39 To yield an adequate picture of the type of relativism for which Herder is arguing, however, such claims must be understood within their context. The passage in which Herder states that ‘every nation has its center of happiness within itself’ begins by addressing a rather question- able question, one posed, Herder says, by ‘a learned society of our age’: namely, ‘which people [Volk] in history was the happiest?’ Herder quite reasonably finds the question odd, and he implies that it may lie outside the horizon of a possible human response altogether (APG, p. 38). It is, after all, not a question about the virtue of this or that social practice in light of a specific good, nor is it even a question about the justice of particular social arrangements. It does not ask whether slavery or serfdom or violent conquest or religious persecution serve the interest of freedom, or whether they are right or fair, questions which Herder finds far less problematic. It is a question about the moment in history when the greatest quantity of happiness was realized in a given society. In response to this question, Herder says, ‘I know not what to answer except that either, at a certain time and under certain circumstances, such a moment befell every people, or it never occurred at all’ (APG, p. 38). When it comes to measuring quanta of happiness, Herder is indeed a kind of relativist. He believes that degree of happiness is dependent

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upon the achievement of whatever makes people happy, and that different things make different people (and peoples) happy. There are distinct kinds of satisfaction, which it makes no sense to compare: Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and climate. For what is it besides the sum of ‘satisfaction of wishes, attainment of goals and gentle overcoming of needs,’ which, however, shape themselves according to land, time, and place. Thus, all comparison fundamentally misses the mark. (APG, p. 38) This view does not entail any proscription against condemning practices that cause unhappiness, wherever they might occur. It is not equivalent to the sort of relativism which says that a person from culture a cannot pass judgement on any social institution or practice in culture b. The precise examples Herder gives of incomparability are instructive: ‘who can compare the different satisfaction of different senses in different worlds? The shepherd and Oriental patriarch, the farmer and the artist, the sailor, runner, world-conqueror – who can compare them?’ (APG, p. 38). These are examples of different ways of life, involving different desires and pleasures. They are not cases pointing to conflicts of values that cannot be reconciled within a broad theory of justice. To illustrate the distinction, consider the difference between the following types of ‘relativist’ statements: (1) a is harming b, and b is in distress, but I cannot judge that to be wrong, because the harm issues from a long-standing practice in their society; and, (2) I cannot claim that a is deprived as a result of not having/being x, because he neither wants nor values x, and it is wrong for me to assume that everyone does or should. He actually wants and values y, and he has/is y, so he is happy, after his own fashion, which is different from mine. Herder often makes statements like (2), but never like (1). Thus, this is a sort of relativism, but a different sort than the one that commonly raises principled objections from opponents of relativism. Arguably, modern western liberalism is itself characterized by this kind of relativism. There are, of course, difficulties in understanding what constitutes distress and well-being for individuals within a given culture, but these are interpretive difficulties of which Herder is keenly aware, and it is precisely here that he insists upon the necessity for careful, thorough, and imaginative investigation. His relativism about happiness, though, does imply a form of evaluative incommensurability, at least in some cases. In claiming that every people has its center of happiness within itself, Herder is affirming that there is no scale on which all societies can be weighed wholesale, taking

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happiness as the unit of measure, and he often makes a similar point about virtue. These issues have consequences for Herder’s view of progress. When he says, for instance, that goodness is scattered across the earth, Herder adds that its protean transformations over the centuries do not reach towards a greater ‘virtue or happiness of the individual’, since ‘mankind remains mankind – and yet a progressive pattern becomes visible – my great theme!’ (APG, p. 40). He complains that to date those who have undertaken to chart historical progress have usually adopted as their favourite idea precisely a notion of progress where it involves an increase in virtue and happiness among individual human beings (APG, p. 40). Such a procedure, he claims, mistakes ‘enlightenment for happiness’ (ibid.). In formulating his counter- position, Herder again employs the analogy of stages of an individual life, saying ‘the youth is not happier than the innocent, contented child nor is the peaceful old grey-hair unhappier than the violently striving man’ (APG, p. 40). He is claiming that there are different forms of happiness, along with different types of virtue, that belong to these different stages. One can, and should, appreciate these for what they are; it is absurd to blame a child for not being a man, and one ought not to lament the loss of vigour in old age if it is replaced by peaceful- ness. While the analogy demonstrates, as I argued in the first part of this article, that Herder affirms an increase in knowledge and maturity over history, it also demonstrates that he does not affirm a corresponding increase in individual virtue and happiness. These are not, after all, equivalent to knowledge of what constitutes an equitable social arrangement, and neither is exclusive to, let alone guaranteed by, some one type of society. Here, there is a genuinely Counter-Enlightenment force in Herder’s position, and a connection with the spirit of Sturm und Drang, for it is a consequence of Herder’s views that the ‘Oriental patriarch’ who lives sincerely by the beliefs and values of his time and place may be both happier and more virtuous than the enlightened thinkers of Herder’s own age. There is, for Herder, no sensible answer to the question of whose life is ‘better’. Therefore, while I agreed earlier with a number of Beiser’s points about the consonance of Herder’s thought with Enlightenment universalism, I take issue, in the end, with his claim that Herder’s use of the Lebensalter analogy avoids relativism. I would say, rather, that the position Herder develops supports a form of relativism. Herder is claiming not only that cultures need to be understood and judged according to their own perspectives, a point Beiser acknowledges,40 but also that happiness and virtue, as properties belonging to individual human beings, are relative to those perspectives. The latter claim genuinely runs counter to the universalist principles of much 18th- century thought. The way in which Herder develops his distinction

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between happiness and virtue, on the one hand, and knowledge as an affair of reason, on the other, anticipates a central current within Romanticism, and certainly amounts to more than an ‘internal’ critique of Enlightenment ideals.41 The resulting position is one in which a degree of universalism coexists with a specific form of relativism, perhaps not always in a fully and systematically integrated manner, but not in one that is self-contradictory, either. This combination of universalism and relativism continues to inform Herder’s approach to societies and cultures in the works belonging to his Weimar period, including the Ideas. For instance, Herder’s portrait of African peoples in chapter 7 of the Ideas presents them as less advanced than others, and this judgement has to be made according to some cross-cultural standards. When he argues that Africans nonetheless do not deserve contempt, however, Herder is a consistent relativist, in precisely the same senses as in Yet Another Philosophy of History. He argues, for one thing, that ‘Negroes’ are not less happy than others, for nature has compensated its withhold- ing of ‘nobler gifts’ from their nature by granting them a richer measure of sensual enjoyment (Ideen, p. 235). This happiness should be appreciated for what it is, not judged by criteria that are alien to it. As in Yet Another Philosophy of History, then, Herder is maintaining that happiness is a ‘relative’ concept, both in the sense that people never possess it perfectly, but only in limited degrees and aspects, and in the sense that it consists in the satisfaction of desires that are context- specific and variable.42 Georg Forster, whose writings both influenced and were influenced by Herder, makes a similar claim in his well-known work, A Voyage round the World (1777):

The ideas of happiness are inﬁnitely various in different nations, according to their manners, principles and degrees of civilization. As the produc- tions and apparent good qualities of our globe, are either profusely or sparingly distributed, on its different parts, the diversity of human opinions is a convincing proof of that paternal love, and unerring wisdom, which, in the plan of this world, has provided for the good of mankind, alike in the torrid and the frigid zone.43

In their respective views on happiness, Herder and Forster were formulating positions within a debate spawned by Rousseau. Against the latter’s primitivism, they both afﬁrm in principle the (relative) happiness of what they considered to be advanced cultures.44 Their belief in the relativity of happiness is not of such a sort as to exclude the very concept of advancement.45 For his part, Herder only says that ‘Negroes’ are equally happy, and that they should not be despised for lacking capacities nature did not give them, or enjoyments for which they feel

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no need. His account nonetheless affirms that those capacities and enjoyments are higher, ‘more noble’. Still, it is in an important sense true that, as one scholar says with explicit reference to the passages on Africa, for Herder ‘all [peoples], in the specific form that corresponds to their nature, are of equal worth’.46 To see this, one can contrast Herder’s position with that of Georg Forster’s father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who says of the ‘savage’ (Wilde): His satisfaction is illusion; his happiness [Glück] is ephemeral and decep- tive, for it rests merely on sensual pleasure. The whole sum of his pleasant feelings is insignificant, poor, in a word, of little worth. He is happy [glücklich] who lives among civilized [gesitteten] people, who is educated by the wisest, and whose peace and fortune are due to the benevolent pro- tection of laws, a well-chosen form of state, and religious and political tolerance.47 Herder would not disagree that a person who is fortunate enough to live in such civilized conditions (should they ever genuinely come to prevail) is capable of higher forms of development than the person who lives in a simpler society. But he would reject the proposition that the happiness of the latter is ‘of little worth’. It has its own worth, its own unique variety of goodness, which should be sympathetically appreciated, not despised. It is on precisely this point that Kant took issue with Herder’s relativistic conception of happiness in his review of Part II of the Ideen, where he says that the aim of providence lies not in this ‘phantom [Schattenbild], which each person creates for himself’, but in constant progress towards a state organized according to concepts of human rights.48 Herder accepts this idea of progress, but for him the ‘aim’ (Zweck) of providence includes the various forms along the way, and as ends in themselves, not merely as means towards the production of a later stage. Herder’s theology on this issue reflects the sentiment that the worth of human beings in different societies, past and present, is not determined by their contribution to some scheme of world-historical progress. Kant’s question about Tahitians is instructive here: Does the author mean to say that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti were never visited by more civilized nations, and were destined to live for thou- sands of years in their quiet indolence, one would receive a satisfactory answer to the question of why they exist at all, and whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been inhabited by happy sheep and pigs as with these people happy in mere enjoyment?49 Not only does Herder have quite a different assessment of such forms of life than Kant does (the goodness of people cannot, for Herder, be measured entirely through their capacity for ‘reason’, as Kant

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understood it, nor is their happiness ever like that of sheep or pigs), he is also not inclined to ask why certain people exist. Such a question suggests that their existence can only be justified by something outside of itself, that its value is instrumental rather than intrinsic, a view Herder categorically refuses.50 This Rousseau-inspired debate about ‘savage’ vs. ‘civilized’ societies has to do not only with the question of happiness, but also that of virtue. Georg Forster ends an account of one of his journeys with the words: ‘Thus we left an amiable nation, who, with all their imperfections, are perhaps more innocent and pure of heart, than those who are more refined and better instructed.’51 Forster does not by any means accept the myth of the noble savage, but neither does he accept the thesis that ‘civilized’ peoples are necessarily more virtuous. In a similar spirit, William Macintosh argues, in his Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (1782), that progress in the arts and sciences is not necessarily accompanied by moral improvement.52 Herder does not idealize simple societies or ways of life, but, like Forster and Macintosh, and unlike Kant, he also does not believe that ‘civilization’ – even when it includes a progress in moral ideas – necessarily leads to an improvement in moral character. In addition, Herder is profoundly concerned with the ideal of impartiality, and, while this ideal does not entail relativism, it does require a suspension of values that can seem like a form of relativism. Herder specifically asks that the historian be aware of his own cultural prejudices, and that he approach his subject-matter with due care and objectivity, with a vision that is unparteiisch (Ideen, p. 509). By now, this last point may hardly seem to be worth making, familiar as we are with the problems of cultural bias in anthropological and ethno- graphical investigations. But one should not underestimate its import- ance at the historical juncture at which Herder is writing. Sergio Moravia points out that, with respect to the development of comparative anthropology, what was most significant during this period was not merely the collection of information regarding far-flung and little-known cultures, but ‘a real philosophical-epistemological break [coupure]’, which abandoned the idea that Europe was the center of the world and that its western Christian values were absolute.53 The need for cultural impartiality is constantly iterated in contemporary travel accounts. Georg Forster writes, in his preface to A Voyage round the World: Accustomed to look on all the various tribes of men, as entitled to an equal share of my good will, and conscious, at the same time, of the rights which I possess in common with every individual among them, I have endeavoured to make my remarks with a retrospect to our general improvement and welfare; and neither attachment nor aversion to particular nations have influenced my praise or censure.54

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The German translation of William Macintosh’s Travels emphasizes the need to be unparteyisch in making judgements about what is civilized or savage, and complains about the parteyischen Vorstellungen of Europeans, who think that all non-European nations are barbarian.55 The point I want to make in mentioning these examples is that while Herder occasionally expresses some concern about the possibility of cultural relativism – or, rather, less anachronistically, of ‘scepticism’56 – the present danger in his society is not relativism but ethnocentrism, and it is against this danger that his remarks are most often directed. It is a danger he does not always manage to avoid himself. In practice the relativist side of Herder’s thought is not the problematic one, since his is a limited sort of relativism that never prevents him from making ethical judgements when these are called for. If one looks at the actual judgements Herder makes, one finds that, when he errs grossly, it is usually on the universalist side. He tends towards a Eurocentrism that often fails to live up to his own standards of objectivity, and to his insistence on the rigorous and empathetic study required for a proper understanding of any foreign society. This lack of objectivity takes its most extreme form in Herder’s remarks on the physical appearance of different human types. One might think that, if there were any point on which total relativism were amply justified, it would be this one, and that, if anyone were able to transcend the prejudices of his age in this respect, it would be Herder. It is then disappointing to find him assert- ing that the proportions of the ancient Greek head were the finest possible (Ideen, p. 129) and that East Asians are misshapen (Ideen, pp. 216f.), while Kashmiris – Asians who, not coincidentally, resemble Europeans – are very beautiful (Ideen, p. 222). These aesthetic judgements, which Herder adopts uncritically from some of his sources of information, do not live up to his own admonition against taking the common European ideal as ‘the model of all health and beauty’ (Ideen, p. 277) when ‘reading’ physical forms (a dubious enterprise in any case, but this is another matter). Nor do his claims about ancient Greek language, mythology and poetry being the best on earth (Ideen, p. 522) accord well with his insistence that understanding the history of peoples requires a spirit that does not take some one people as its favourite, despising all others, a spirit capable of an impartial and dispassionate gaze (Ideen, p. 509). And various items in Herder’s presentation of China and India fall short of the standard set by his historiographical strictures against making hasty and partisan generalizations: his assertion that the Chinese have not produced any significant scientific inventions (Ideen, p. 438), for example, and that Indians have been repeatedly conquered because of their peaceable character (Ideen, p. 417).57

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The section on Africa in the Ideas, a portion of which I have already discussed, illustrates quite precisely the character both of Herder’s ideals and of his failure to realize them in practice. It starts with some laudable advice. ‘When we pass to the land of the blacks,’ Herder says, ‘we should reject our proud prejudices and consider this region of the earth as impartially [unparteiisch] as if it were the only one in the world’ (Ideen, p. 228). We should understand that if ‘we’ see the Negro as the son of Cain and as the very picture of a fiend, he can with equal justice see us as cruel predators, albinos and white satans, and we can well imagine that he might think of his land as the best one, given its riches and fruitfulness (ibid.). Herder is pleading here for an awareness of different perspectives and the biases inherent in them, with the ultimate goal of achieving a regard that is fair. Unfortunately, in practice his own regard is not so fair. When discussing the physical appearance of ‘Negroes’, he repeats the usual stupidities, showing no trace of the relativism that would actually be appropriate here, no trace of understanding that their noses are no more justly characterized as squashed and flat than his as protruding and pointy, or their lips as thick and swollen than his as skinny and deflated (Ideen, p. 230). And his remarks on the character of African peoples affirm ideas with a depressing history: they are described as sensual and natural, closer therefore to animals than are most other human types (which is nonetheless different from saying that they are closer to animals than they are to humans, an idea Herder emphatically denies).58 Thus, in various respects, Herder’s Eurocentric assessments fail to meet the standards of the ideally impartial anthropology he advocates. The ideal itself, however, is a laudable one. For Herder, one consequence of this ideal is that moral judgements about people should be made in relation to their social and historical context, but Herder does not mean by this that the truth of all value-judgements is determined by that context. Not only does Herder believe in something like a limited range of moral facts, grounded in the goods that he thinks all human beings value, given their common constitution, he even thinks that some human goods are more ‘noble’ than others. His relativism about judging others is oriented towards the question of whether people are deserving of censure or contempt, whether they are blameworthy, for being as they are and holding the values that they do, given their historical and environmental conditions.59 The universalist themes in Herder’s Letters on the Advancement of Humanity are similarly integrated with a characteristic commitment to the defining role of cultural particularity, and the issue of impartiality is again central. In the 26th letter, largely written in the form of a dialogue, it is proposed that human beings are identified in terms of their culture, that ‘when a German encounters a Frenchman, a Frenchman

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an Englishman, this is not a mere man encountering a mere man, but such a man encountering such a man’ (BBH, p. 134). Taken alone, this sentence has ominous overtones, seeming to anticipate Joseph de Maistre’s brand of extreme particularism.60 But Herder’s point in the dialogue is actually to resist the one-sidedness of this view, to acknowledge its force while insisting that there is nonetheless an ‘invisible church’ consisting of those who are capable of transcending the prejudices of their nation and native religion, and ‘who know well enough, when patriotism ceases to be a virtue’ (BBH, p. 137). Herder has always upheld the value of overcoming one’s cultural prejudices. Later in the Letters he repeats one of his central messages: ‘above all one must be impartial like the genius of humanity itself; one must have no preferred race, no Favoritvolk on the earth’ (BBH, p. 698). For Herder, recognizing the culturally embedded character of identity and struggling to achieve such impartiality are not mutually exclusive. The ﬁrst has to do with acknowledging that individuals do not evolve within a vacuum, that who they come to be is profoundly shaped by the complex of ideas within which they are educated, and by the very concrete elements of their social and natural environment, their Klima. As Georg Forster wrote in ‘O-Taheiti’ (1780): ‘Everyone has his own way of seeing . . . the character and public knowledge of a nation, education, environment – and who knows what else? – are so many membranes in the eye, each of which refracts light differently, even if the anatomical knife cannot locate them.’61 The struggle for impartiality, on the other hand, concerns what one might, for lack of a better term, call will. It is signiﬁcant that the language Herder uses when speaking of transcending particularity – being unparteiisch, having no Lieblingsstamm and no Favoritvolk – has to do not with intellect but with attachment and preference. The same can be said of Herder’s remarks against national pride, against the sort of partisanship that leads one to praise one’s own nation above all others for no reason except that it is one’s own, and to take its side in all matters, regardless of justice (BBH, p. 255). Justice requires, for Herder, not that particularist loyalties and affections be renounced, but that they be limited through a sympathy that is increasingly expansive: ‘ “I love my family,” says the noble man, “more than myself; more than my family I love my fatherland; more than my fatherland I love humanity” ’ (BBH, p. 692). Herder’s universalism rests essentially in the belief that everyone in every culture is of equal moral worth, which is quite different from saying that all of their moral beliefs are equally worthy, combined with this imperative to develop and exercise a sympathy through which the content of this belief can be genuinely understood, taken to heart. Contrary to a widespread popular impression, Herder never rejects the critical spirit of the Enlightenment; in the Letters, he argues explicitly

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in favour of subjecting opinions to the trial of impartial consideration, and he associates the willingness to do this with the spirit of true tolerance (BBH, p. 244). Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, when Herder promotes these Enlightenment values, he places the emphasis not on a cognitive faculty which is supposed to intuit, or generate, universal principles of judgement (and it is certainly true that his analysis of the relation between language, thought and culture casts doubt on the existence of such a faculty), but on achieving this spirit of impartiality. In Herder’s mind, the greatest enemy of universal justice is not ignorance, whether of fact or principles, but partisanship, and of this he holds Europeans more guilty than the allegedly backward peoples whom they condemn. Moreover, the spirit of impartiality that Herder upholds in the Letters not only coexists with, but actually leads to, the same species of limited relativism that one finds in earlier works. Herder again speaks against wholesale comparison, arguing that nature has distributed different gifts to different nations (BBH, p. 255). He claims that ‘the Negro, the American, the Mongol has gifts, facilities, preformed aptitudes, which the European does not have’ and that ‘perhaps the sum is the same, only in different relations and with different compensations’ (BBH, p. 699). This remark does not entirely repudiate Herder’s own evaluative judgements about precisely these groups in the Ideas, although it does suggest, in context, that he is perhaps less certain now about which gifts are higher than others, or who is more advanced, on the whole.62 In any case, Herder’s central point is that all peoples are human, expressing distinct ways of being human (BBH, p. 701), that none is deserving of calumny or contempt (BBH, p. 698), and that no people has the right to dominate or enslave another (BBH, p. 699). He had made these points in the Ideas as well. His complaints against the horrific treatment of Africans by Europeans in the Letters, and his insistence on the greater virtue of the former in comparison with the barbaric behaviour of the latter, is not incompatible with his portrait of Africans as somewhat sensual and childlike in the Ideas.63 As I have demon- strated, Herder’s relativism never commits him to the thesis that no judgements of higher and lower, better and worse, can be made in principle about specific human aptitudes, inclinations, values or forms of life.64 It only claims, most basically, that every people should be appreciated for what it is, given that it could not have been otherwise, a point Herder reaffirms in the Letters,65 and that one should be aware of one’s own limitations as well as those of others. The truly impartial vision regards every nation not with indifference to its merits and demerits, but with an equality of love, and this love leads, within Herder’s thought, to a kind of deep ecology about human cultures: ‘The humblest genius hates comparison and ordering according to rank . . .

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lichen, moss, ferns, and the richest flowering spice; each blooms in its place in God’s order’ (BBH, p. 576). This position is, I think, best described as a form of relativism – rather than, say, pluralism, although Herder is a pluralist as well – since it does maintain, in a way, that cultures should be considered for what they are, employing a measure intrinsic to them. And yet such relativism does not rule out judgements based on universal ethical principles, or even on strong ideas about human perfection. The claim is that one should not blame a piece of moss for not being a lily, as if it had a choice, and as if moss possessed no virtues of its own. But one can still judge that the lily has a more sophisticated structure than the moss. One can even judge that, in certain respects, it stands ‘higher’ on the botanical scale than the moss, while insisting, without self-contradiction, that it is not therefore simply better, and that the bit of moss should be loved no less than the lily. This is not to say that Herder imagines one single form at the top of the scale of human development. He is, as I have said, a pluralist as well. The goal is Humanität, but while there are many ways of failing this goal, there are also many ways of accomplishing it. Consequently, ‘it is quite right for the French and the English to paint their humanité and humanity in an English and a French manner’ (BBH, p. 736). There is a common ideal to which each nation contributes by unfolding the potentialities that are proper to it, by tending its own plot in the garden of humanity (BBH, p. 164),66 although this does not mean that an individual must remain in his native land, as if he actually were a tree or a plant rather than a human being (BBH, pp. 329–30). Herder sees human history as a progressive struggle towards a regime of peaceful diversity (BBH, p. 227), free of the religious persecution he particularly despises (BBH, pp. 291–2), expressing in manifold ways the ideal of Humanität, and he combines this ideal, but still plural, vision of humanity with a relativistic appreciation of the diverse cultures and peoples that the good earth has supported. I would take issue, therefore, with Isaiah Berlin’s statement that in Herder’s works ‘there are the separate strands of Humanität as a general human ideal . . . and, on the other side, his more frequent and characteristic pluralism and relativism’.67 These strands are in fact equally ‘frequent and characteristic’, and they are not ‘separate’ but profoundly interrelated. Although the accent varies, the blend of universalism and relativism is actually consistent over the course of Herder’s reflections. It includes: (1) the presumption of a set of basic human needs, and corresponding goods, upon which some universal criteria for social judgement may be legitimately founded; and, (2) the view that human practices, values and beliefs must be understood within their social context, and that the happiness and virtue of individuals can only be measured in relation to their specific values, being a function of their capacity to satisfy their

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desires and to live up to their ideals. Therefore, no internal contradiction is presented by the fact that, while Herder is appreciative of vastly different societies, insisting that each should be understood in terms of its own goals and aspirations, its own particular world-view, he nonetheless seems to have no qualms about making certain kinds of critical judgements himself. In doing so, he posits a human nature whose common properties ensure that mutual understanding is in principle always possible, while subjugation and exploitation are always ethically ruled out. He is also committed to a very broad, and therefore inevitably vague, ideal of freedom and well-being, which functions as a standard for cross-cultural judgements. He demands, on the other hand, that such judgements not be made without comprehensive and sympathetic investigation, a task requiring impartiality, as well as imaginative understanding of the values and world-view of the culture in question. He also insists that historical context be taken into account when assessing a culture, with the consequence that contempt is never justiﬁed, and that no society should be regarded merely as a stepping-stone to another; each is an end in itself, possessing its own forms of happiness and virtue, whatever might be its limitations. Finally, Herder wants to point out that every society has its vices along with its virtues, which it can come to recognize by comparing itself with others, and it is unlikely that your society is an exception to this rule. These principles do not contradict one another, and they have much to commend them as regulative ideals, even if Herder’s Eurocentric judgements, in practice, often fall short of them.

Conclusion

I alluded near the beginning of this article to Kai Nielson’s ideal, formulated explicitly against Herder, of combining Enlightenment universalism with a recognition of particularity. On the issue of ‘local attachments’, Nielson says: ‘Perhaps we – or at least some of us – will give many of them up and become universal men and women. And perhaps that is a good thing? More likely we will become universal men and women who will also have our local attachments which will not stand in the way of our commitment to the ideals of the Enlighten- ment.’68 I hope to have shown that in fact Herder himself develops precisely the synthesis of universalism and particularism Nielson is recommending here, and that he does so through a series of reﬂections that are insightfully textured and subtle. Herder is committed to universal principles of justice, but he wants to apply these principles in a manner that gives due consideration to both the tenacity and the value of particularist affections. He also helps to expose the incoherence of

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any model of universality which assumes that there are, or could be, persons with no particular identity. What Herder promotes is an expansive sympathy willing to embrace the other’s otherness as well as the other’s sameness, a respect extending not only to the general humanity of people, but also to the speciﬁc form this humanity assumes in them. At the same time, he delivers a timely (I believe, still timely) critique of the vices to which self-avowedly enlightened Europeans are particularly prone: biased cultural partisanship, leading to manifold varieties of imperialism in thought and action, hypocrisy resulting from empty reform of the intellect with no corresponding change of heart. The use of Herder by later nationalist thinkers in Germany tended either to reject or to downplay the universalist dimension of his thought.69 As one would expect, this is even more markedly the case with writings on Herder during the Nazi era. Benno von Wiese, for instance, in an article published in 1939, applauds Herder’s analyses of cultural identity, but complains that during his Weimar period Herder increasingly posits Humanität as a moral standard to which all peoples are subject.70 In fact, Herder always assumes such a standard, and it is scarcely possible to appropriate his ideas without noticing, at the very least, that respect and tolerance for other peoples is a necessary consequence of them. Wiese avoids discussing this issue, but a 1933 article relating Herder’s thought to key aspects of the Nazi conception of nation and state claims that ‘nothing is more abhorrent to the völkisch idea of the state than the desire for conquest and the subjugation of foreign peoples’.71 It is easy to forget that a good deal of the völkisch literature during the earlier part of the Nazi period, ranging from texts based on a mistaken view of the regime’s intended policies to thoroughly dishonest propaganda, employed a rhetoric quite close to today’s discourse on multiculturalism.72 Surely, discourse of this sort is not invali- dated by the fact that it can be a mask for its opposite, for total disregard of the other? Among Nazi ideologues, such disregard was justiﬁed by appeal to doctrines of racial superiority and the right to domination that would have been anathema to Herder. If it is nonetheless true that the emphasis on cultural particularity, along with other Counter-Enlightenment themes, among Herder and his intellectual descendants played a role in the development of fascist ideas in Germany, it is also true that aspects of the latter development can be plausibly connected with the targets of Herder’s complaints against his enlightened fellow Europeans: their sense of superiority and entitlement, their lack of a genuinely sympathetic understanding of others, their tendency towards mechanistic social engineering, their egocentric assumption that their nation and their culture is the standard and sum of all perfection. Herder’s thought, standing as it does on the cusp between Enlightenment and Romanticism, should

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not be seen exclusively either as a continuation of the former or as a precursor of the latter, but as an instructive example of a position that manages to avoid some of the characteristic errors on both sides of this historical antithesis.

University of Ottawa, Canada

PSC

Notes

1 See Patrick Gardiner, ‘German Philosophy and the Rise of Relativism’, Monist 64 (1981): 138–54. 2 Max Rouché, introduction to J. G. Herder, Une autre philosophie de l’histoire, bilingual edn, trans. Max Rouché (Aubier: Éditions Montaigne, 1943), p. 74. 3 Kai Nielson, ‘Cultural Identity and Self-Definition’, Human Studies 10 (1987): 383–90 (383–4). 4 ibid., p. 383. 5 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth Press, 1976). 6 See, for example, Ulrich Gaier, ‘Gegenaufklärung im Namen des Logos: Hamann und Herder’ and Jürgen Brummack, ‘Herders Polemik gegen die “Aufklärung” ’, in Aufklärung und Gengenaufklärung, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgessellschaft, 1989). 7 Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, Editor’s preface to Herder Today: Contributions from the International Herder Conference (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), p. viii. In spite of such arguments, though, a contribution to this same volume still describes Herder as ‘a violent opponent of the Aufk- lärung’ (Gordon A. Craig, ‘Herder: The Legacy’, p. 22). 8 Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 204. 9 John Zammito astutely points out, with specific reference to Beiser’s interpretation, that while it was once necessary to refute the one-sided impression of Herder as an anti-Enlightenment thinker, ‘now there is the risk of an excess of rectification, such that the Sturm und Drang threatens to vanish as a force in German cultural history, or at least in Herder’. See his Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 145–6 and p. 408, n. 64. This point is worth emphasizing in the context of recent scholarly literature, although the impression of Herder precisely as a thoroughly anti-Enlightenment thinker persists in spite of, and alongside, this literature. See note 7 for an example. 10 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit: Beitrag zu vielen Beiträgen des Jahrhunderts, in Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–1787, in Werke, vol. 4, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). Henceforth cited as APG.

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11 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Martin Bollacher, in Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), pp. 255–6. Henceforth cited as Ideen. Although most of the scholarly literature on Herder in the past has referred to the Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vols 1–33 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), I have opted for the now complete 10-volume critical edition published by Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, largely because of its greater user-friendliness. The translations into English are ultimately my own, but I have at times consulted published translations in the following for help: J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and with an intro. by F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1800). 12 Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, ed. Dietrich Irmscher, in Werke, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991). Henceforth cited as BBH. 13 I disagree, for instance, with Clark’s claim that the ‘laudable objectivity’ of the Ideas ‘is unfortunately invaded by considerations of “humanity” ’ in a way that Yet Another Philosophy of History is not, and that this criterion of judgement becomes more ‘rigid’ in the Letters. Robert T. Clark, Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), pp. 326, 385. 14 ‘Vico and Herder’, in Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 198, n. 1. Cf. ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 70–90. For a description of Berlin’s struggles with this issue, see Steven Lukes, ‘Berlin’s Dilemma’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1998, pp. 8–9. 15 ‘Vico and Herder’, in Three Critics, p. 233. 16 Robert Bernasconi, ‘ “Ich mag in keinen Himmel, wo Weisse sind”: Herder’s Critique of Eurocentrism’, Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae 13 (1995): 69–82 (70). 17 Jürgen Brummack makes this point in ‘Herders Polemik gegen die Auf- klärung’ (see note 6), p. 281. 18 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, pp. 208–9. 19 Although Herder expresses hostility towards deism elsewhere in Yet Another Philosophy of History, in this passage he is taking issue with Voltaire’s negative assessment of Christianity in Philosophie de l’histoire, implying that, if deism is equivalent to a universal moral code and a set of metaphysical teachings, then it is equivalent to Christianity, and Christian- ity has played a central role in its development. On this point, see editors’ commentary, APG, p. 873. 20 Wolfgang Förster, ‘Johann Gottfried Herder: Weltgeschichte und Humanität’, in Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Georg G. Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen and Peter H. Reill (Göttingen: Vanden- hoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 380. 21 Wulf Koepke, Johann Gottfried Herder (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 13.

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22 Berlin, ‘Vico and Herder’, Three Critics, p. 216. 23 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, pp. 206–7. 24 ibid. 25 ibid., pp. 202–3. 26 Berlin, ‘Vico and Herder’, in Three Critics, p. 178. 27 ibid., p. 223. 28 Bernasconi, ‘ “Ich mag in keinen Himmel” ’, p. 78. 29 F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 96. 30 Hans Dietrich Irmscher, ‘Nationalität und Humanität im Denken Herders’, Orbis Litterarum 49 (1994): 189–215 (205). 31 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1963), p. 25. First complete edn published 1754. 32 Barnard, Herder’s Thought, p. 37. Yet Another Philosophy of History is more ambivalent on this point, sometimes favouring a kind of cultural monadism. See APG, pp. 39–40. 33 Harald Homann and Clemens Albrecht, ‘Die europäische Bedeutung des Herderschen Kulturbegriffs’, in Die Europaidee im deutschen Idealismus und in der deutschen Romantik, ed. Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg (Bad Homburg: Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg, 1993), p. 80. 34 Cf. Bernasconi on the application of this point in Herder’s view of Europeans: ‘Because Berlin’s concern was to secure the pluralism of discrete cultural units against the idea of conflicting values or incompatible outlooks, he ignored the possibility that the confrontation between the values of different cultures might be productive. But Herder not only sometimes criticized the behavior of missionaries and colonizers of what he recognized as objective values, he also seems to have thought that one of the objective values Europeans allegedly transgressed was that of opening oneself to challenge from outside’ (‘ “Ich mag in keinen Himmel” ’, p. 73). 35 Cf. Barnard, Herder’s Thought, p. 46. 36 Of the African slave trade, he says: ‘What right did you have, you brutes, even to approach the land of these unfortunates, let alone to take them from their land and their people through robbery, cunning and cruelty?’ (Ideen, p. 261). 37 As Irmscher says in his commentary in the Werke edition of the Briefe: ‘Herder always understands the infinite individualisation of the human within history also as the loss of an original unity which is always presup- posed, and which has to be recovered. The task of human beings, therefore, their realization of Humanität, involves not only the self-determination of their individuality, but also the simultaneous sublation [Aufhebung] of this individuality and a return to unity’ (‘Herders Verständnis von “Humanität” ’, in BBH, p. 829). 38 See Förster, ‘Johann Gottfried Herder’, in Aufklärung und Geschichte: ‘Christianity is for Herder originally a synonym for Humanität. It arose as the religion of the poor, the oppressed and suffering, of servants and slaves. Against the worldly hierarchy, Christianity aims for human equality and justice’ (p. 377). This does not mean that Herder advocated a worldwide conversion to Christianity as a specific religion. In a contribution to his

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journal, Adrastea (1801–4), he writes: ‘Every nation flourishes like a tree upon its own roots, and Christianity, that is, true conviction about God and human beings, is then nothing but the pure heavenly dew for all nations, one which, moreover, does not change the character or fruit of any tree.’ Werke, vol. 10, ed. Günter Arnold (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000), p. 614. Cf. the ‘Gespräche über die Bekehrung der Indier durch unser Europäische Christen’, also in Adrastea, in which the Asian says that if Europeans really could end some of the cruel forms of oppression in India, ‘the religion of Christians would be blessed, without, however, any Indian accepting it in a formal and historical fashion’ (pp. 473–4). 39 Brian J. Whitton, ‘Herder’s Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural Community versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism’, History & Theory 27 (1988): 146–68 (154). 40 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, p. 208. 41 The full text of the remark by Beiser to which I am alluding here runs: ‘Herder’s critique is essentially internal: it criticizes the Aufklärung strictly in the light of its own ideals. So rather than viewing Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte as an attack on the ideals of the Aufklärung by a Sturmer und Dränger, we would be more accurate interpreting it as an attack on the practice of the Aufklärung by a radical Aufklärer who had lost patience with his more conservative brethren’ (p. 204). 42 Herder addresses the general question of Glückseligkeit directly a little later in this part of the Ideen, in a section revealingly titled ‘Die Glückseligkeit der Menschen ist allenthalben ein individuelles Gut; folglich allenthalben klimatisch und organisch, ein Kind der Übung, der Tradition und Gewohn- heit’ (Ideen, p. 327). 43 This passage concludes with the following lines by Pope: ‘Fix’d to no spot is happiness sincere, / ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where.’ Georg Forsters Werke: Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag Berlin, 1986), p. 405. A Voyage round the World is Forster’s account of his observations during the second voyage of James Cook, in which he participated along with his father Johann Reinhold Forster. The text originally appeared in 1777. A German translation, prepared by the author, was published in 1784 under the title Reise um die Welt. 44 Cf. Forster’s precise formulation of this point in ‘Neuholland und die brittische Colonie in Botany Bay’ (1789): ‘To wax indignant about the shortcomings of civil [bürgerliche] society, and to prefer the condition of savagery [Wildheit], is to forget that the refined person, as much as the savage, lives in enjoyment of his own existence, and that the difference between these consists only in type of enjoyment. The enjoyment of the refined person resides in accomplishments for which the capacity lies dormant in the savage.’ Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde, in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 5 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag Berlin, 1985), p. 161. 45 In Reise um die Welt, Forster says that ‘Glückseligkeit immer nur ein relativer Begriff ist’ (Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 2 [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag

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Berlin, 1989], p. 298) but he means by this that it is never perfectly achieved and can only be measured comparatively, not that no distinctions between more and less reﬁned forms of it can be made. The point is unambiguous in the English text, which reads: ‘Allowing for the imperfect state of sublunary happiness, which is comparative at best . . .’ (A Voyage round the World, p. 215). 46 Hans-Wolf Jäger, ‘Herder als Leser von Reiseliteratur’, in Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert: Neue Untersuchungen, ed. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätslag, 1986), p. 186. 47 Johann Reinhold Forster, Beobachtungen während der Cookschen Weltum- segelung 1772–1775: Gedanken eines deutschen Teilnehmers; reprint of the 1783 edn, Bemerkungen über Gegenstände der physischen Erdbeschreib- ung, Naturgeschichte und sittlichen Philosophie auf einer Reise um die Welt gesammelt, trans. Georg Forster (Stuttgart: Brokhaus Antiquarium, 1981), p. 268. The Ideas contains several references to this text, the ﬁrst on p. 48. 48 In Immanuel Kant, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtspolitik und Pädagogik, vol. 2, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1964), p. 804. 49 ibid., p. 805. 50 Cf. the following remarks in Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’ (1784): ‘it appears that nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well, only that he bring himself to the point where his conduct makes him worthy of life and well-being. What will always seem strange about this is that earlier generations appear to carry out their laborious tasks only for the sake of later ones . . . Without those characteristics of unsociability . . . man would live as an Arcadian shepherd, in perfect concord, contentment, and mutual love, and all talents would lie eternally dormant in their seed; men docile as the sheep they tend would hardly invest their existence with any worth greater than that of cattle; and as to the purpose behind man’s creation, his rational nature, there would remain a void.’ In Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), pp. 31–2. The original text can be found in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtspolitik und Pädagogik, vol. 1, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1964), pp. 37–8. 51 Forster, A Voyage round the World, p. 429. 52 William Macintosh, Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (London: J. Murray, 1782), pp. 230f. Approaching the matter differently, Macintosh also claims that if the term ‘savage’ is rightly applied to people who have no scruples about perpetrating oppression, cruelty and injustice, then his observations over the course of his travels lead him to the conclusion that European peoples are more savage than those to whom they apply this label (pp. 229—30). Herder refers to this text repeatedly in the Ideas; see pp. 150, 222, 259, 453. 53 Sergio Moravia, Beobachtende Vernunft: Philosophie und Anthropologie in der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), p. 121. 54 Forster, A Voyage round the World, p. 14.

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55 C. A. A. Wichmann, Des herrn Mackintosh’s Reisen durch Europa, Asia und Africa, aus dem Englischen übersetzt, 2 vols (Leipzig: Friedrich Gotthold Jacobäer, 1785), vol. 1, p. 229. 56 Most notably in the essay ‘Von der Verschiedenheit des Geschmacks und der Denkart unter den Menschen’, where Herder says: ‘Can that which one nation in one age holds for true be held, in another age, for bad, for ugly, for useless, for repellent, for false? And yet this happens! Are truth, beauty, and moral goodness not the same for all ages? Yes, and yet one sees that principles for which in certain ages any person would have sacrificed his last drop of blood are in other ages condemned to the fire by the same nation. . . . This scepticism would almost confuse us into not trusting our own tastes and sensibilities.’ Werke, vol. I, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), p. 160. This work was probably composed in 1766 but was not published during Herder’s lifetime. 57 Merely recalling ancient descriptions of Alexander’s campaigns in India should have been sufficient to make Herder question the latter conclusion. As to China, Clark’s contention that there was little reliable information on China at this time (Herder, p. 325) is surprising. There was actually a great deal of first-hand literature, some of which Herder himself mentions (Ideen, pp. 432–3). And yet his own account agrees in most respects with the strik- ingly biased one in Pierre Sonerrat’s Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine (Paris: 1782), translated into German as Des Herrn Sonnerat Reise nach Ostindien, und China, in den Jahren 1774 bis 1781 (Leipzig: 1783). In spite of Sonnerat’s claim that he will speak ‘sehr unparteyisch’ about China (Des Herrn Sonnerat Reise, p. 262), unlike previous accounts of the country which have been (he thinks) overly positive, his hostility takes him to the other extreme. He does not merely condemn despotic government and the cruelty of certain practices, which would be understandable, but is utterly contemptuous of Chinese gardens, agriculture, painting, architec- ture, geometry, astronomy, ships, music, porcelain, silk, and forms of greeting (pp. 279–86). The extraordinary Eurocentrism of Sonnerat’s account, along with his resentment against defensive measures adopted by China against European incursion (pp. 265, 292), should have been evident to Herder. That many of Herder’s judgements are nonetheless so similar (see Ideen, pp. 435–46) as to indicate that he was positively influenced by this text betrays a species of blindness and partiality perfectly identical with the one he repeatedly criticizes. Herder refers to Sonnerat elsewhere in the Ideen; see pp. 254, 301, 400, 453. 58 See Ideen, p. 255: ‘Neither the pongo nor the gibbon is your brother, but the American and the Negro are. Therefore, you must not oppress or kill or rob them: for they are human beings, as you are; with the ape you can enter into no brotherhood.’ 59 Cf. Forster in ‘O-Taheiti’ (1780): ‘Virtue and vice are relative concepts, which, when applied to national character, should only be used in a comparative manner; and even then one must not judge any nation without taking into account the ethical system [Sittenlehre] that guided it. In this way we avoid the objection that we are attributing our thoughts to foreign peoples, and therefore assuming the right to punish or acquit

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them according to unfair presuppositions.’ Sämmtliche Schriften, vol. 5, p. 64. 60 For an account of Maistre’s position, see Berlin’s ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Hardy, pp. 91–174, especially pp. 99–100. 61 Forster, Sämmtliche Schriften, vol. 5, p. 35. 62 Letter 116, in which this sentence appears, insists that the researcher assumes no order of rank when approaching the creatures he investigates (BBH, p. 699) and that European culture cannot function as a measure for all human goods and all human worth (BBH, p. 700). At no point in this letter does Herder imply a hierarchical ordering of the characteristics of the various peoples he mentions. 63 See the Neger-Idyllen, BBH, pp. 674–85. I make this point against Uta Sadji’s claim that ‘the difference between the depiction of Negroes in these two of Herder’s major works – the Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind and the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity – is so striking that one must ask oneself how and why the author changed his view of the inhabitants of black Africa, and, indeed, whether it is even possible for someone to arrive at such a fundamentally new position.’ Der Negermythos am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland: Eine Analyse der Rezeption von Reiseliteratur über Schwarzafrika (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1979), p. 201. 64 It is therefore wrong to accuse Herder of falling into ‘a basic relativist paradox’ as Whitton does (‘Herder’s Critique’, p. 162). Whitton can offer this objection only by falsely, and anachronistically, conﬂating Herder’s position with that of Lyotard. 65 ‘Every nation, in its time and place, was only that which it could be’ (BBH, p. 587). 66 The political ideal corresponding to this cultural one is summarized by Barnard: ‘Herder did not recommend the abolition of states in favour of some international organization or “world government”; indeed he opposed the latter, arguing that international tension was likely to increase rather than abate in the wake of its creation. The existence of independent nation states was for him as natural and necessary as the alternation of day and night; it was something people had to accept and to which they had to adjust themselves as best as they could. They had to learn to live together as men and as members of national communities. “Cosmopolitanism” was at best a blithe illusion and at worst an invitation to international chaos or enforced uniformity’ (Herder’s Thought, p. xix). 67 ‘Vico and Herder’, in Three Critics, p. 240. 68 Nielson, ‘Cultural Identity’, p. 387. 69 As Jeffrey Grossman says: ‘Contrary to the misuse of Herder’s notions by later völkisch writers, Herder’s concept of Bildung did not merely apply to individual Völker, but assumed a universalist dimension embracing all humanity. Herder thus viewed the development of a Volk or Nation as part of and related to the development of humanity, a notion which leads to the advocacy of the free development of diverse cultures and peoples.’ Grossman, ‘Herder and the Language of Diaspora Jewry’, Monatshefte 86(1) (1994): 59–79 (62).

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70 Benno von Wiese, ‘Der Gedanke des Volkes in Herders Weltbild’, Die Erziehung. Monatschrift für den Zusammenhang von Kultur und Erziehung in Wissenschaft und Leben 14 (1939): 121–46 (139). 71 Friedrich Berger, ‘Herder und die Gegenwart. Zur Grundlegung einer völkischen Bildungslehre’, Württembergischen Landesanstalt für Erziehung und Unterricht 9 (1933): 607. 72 I deal with this theme in my paper ‘Heidegger and Race’, in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

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