Herder has often and quite wrongly been associated with the emergence of an intensely irrational, religiously tinged form of patriotism, although critics of this portrait of Herder’s relationship to the rise of German nationalism have again and again asserted that Herder’s “nationalism” must be understood exclusively with regard to the importance of the vernacular and the attempt to call for a renewed attention to German language–based cultural productions. In this chapter I shall not be primarily focused on Herder’s concept of the nation, but rather his concept of the public, which has received far less attention. I shall do so by studying the two versions of his essay addressing the question “Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?” from 1765 and 1796. In the first version of Herder’s essay on the public we may note marked differences vis-à-vis Abbt’s concept of the public; we see how Herder removes the constitution of an imagined community from its martial context and makes it instead an issue of the public sector, of those institutions that are to serve all members of a society equally. It is in this context that Herder focuses on the role of live audiences and the importance of common space. However, in the second, much expanded version, Herder, chastened by the aftermath of the French Revolution, rethinks when real live audiences gathering in public spaces are productive for the development of a modern public, and when not. In that second version the issue becomes whether public gatherings foster conformism or critical thinking. He shows that the answer depends on the pragmatics of the speech situation, on whether the audience members are to be hailed as obedient participants or whether the audience can maintain a mental reservation and individual members can decide on their own what message they hear. And it is in this context, when Herder conceives of the public in contrast to crowds manipulated by politicians or by religious leaders, that Herder turns to the importance of the arts: the secularizing achievement of theater, and the critical potential of fictional literature disseminated by way of the print medium.
Herder’s essay from 1764 comparing “our” modern public and fatherland to that of the ancients should be considered his response to Abbt’s question as to what kind of venue among the moderns could take up the role of the ancient forum and voice the call of the fatherland to public service, to create a public and a community that would transcend social hierarchies and self-interest. Although the young Herder who wrote this essay had just arrived in Riga as the assistant preacher and teacher for the German-speaking Lutheran community of that Baltic city, he does not issue his call for a means to transcend particular interests from the pulpit. Instead, he makes it the occasion of calling attention to the public space and institution of Riga’s new courthouse. And although Herder mentions Abbt’s essay and points out that even today one may occasionally find this kind of patriotic zeal, he does not at all make the willingness to die for one’s fatherland the central uniting force. In fact, in 1764, the then just twenty-year-old Herder had moved from Königsberg to Riga in order to evade the possibility of military service in his native Prussia.1
Whereas for Abbt the different estates of society are brought together under one common cause, the ultimate sacrifice, the willingness to die for the fatherland as in ancient Greece, for Herder the situation in modern times is utterly different. In a relatively autonomous city like Riga, which was a seaport that formed part of the Hanseatic League, and belonged to the Russian Empire since the victory of Peter the Great over Sweden, patriotic freedom means, according to Herder, something very different from what it meant for the ancient Greeks. It means the freedom to pursue one’s happiness in private life and to be successful in one’s trade. Moreover, patriotic zeal means less the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s fatherland than an altruistic engagement in the common good. Herder particularly observes this kind of altruism in the civic spirit of judges and other officials but also in the enlightened monarch Catherine. To a certain extent the young Herder seems to want to project and include himself among the ranks of those civic-minded officials who serve the common good and appeal to the audience of these public institutions. In that respect he resembles a functionary of the colonial administration, exactly that kind of figure who, according to Benedict Anderson, was crucial in defining the kind of imaginary community that was formative for the first phase of nationalism, the Latin American independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.2
Though Herder’s essay appeared in print in a small publication celebrating the new building, Herder writes as if his text were the written record of a speech delivered at the ceremonial opening of the new courthouse in Riga. Through the invocation of this festive speech act he turns his readers into witnesses of the inauguration of a whole new understanding of what it means to be a modern public:
This temple will be consecrated as the home of what is most sacred, the refuge for the distressed, the sanctuary for prayers and services. This school will be a nursery for wisdom, virtue, and religion, the workshop for the wise and the philanthropists, the armory for the state. Under this roof of charity meritorious old men will breathe calmly: here even misery shall find joy; here poor and rich shall smile. This court of law shall provide asylum for the oppressed, a refuge for weeping innocence, a seat of justice and an image of the supreme judge.—In view of the importance of such a mission one wonders who would not be overcome with a holy shudder!3
Herder enumerates an entire series of public institutions, the courthouse just one of them, that care for the poor, the weak, for youth and old age, i.e., institutions that dispense pastoral care. Through this move the young preacher and teacher can fit into the ranks of those who are relevant and active for the public. Historically, the actual courthouse in Riga, apart from its function as courthouse, however, also served as town or guildhall, a function Herder does not mention. Thus the German-speaking aldermen, key actors in the self-governance of this Hanseatic city, who were recruited primarily from the local patricians, are not considered. A focus on the patricians charged with the governance of the city would have led Herder to invoke an altogether different concept of the public, the ancient one of those wealthy and free to conduct the affairs of the community.4
Moreover, just as this ancient concept of the public is not taken into consideration, so also a more modern, more familiar one, the one associated with the nation-state, is not addressed. For in this first version of Herder’s essay we are not dealing with an imagined community based on a shared language. Instead of history, language, culture, or religion, what Herder considers a modern Publikum consists of a population that has the right to make use of institutions of public welfare and institutions ensuring the preservation of the common good.
Only after the long panegyric on the institutions of public welfare does Herder come around to address the question about the difference between a modern and an ancient public and their respective types of patriotism. He notes that whereas the ancient public was actively involved in governance, a public of a democracy that met to decide and debate all matters of common relevance in the open, modern monarchies are being governed and administrated by specialists. Herder does not appear nostalgic for the public of antiquity but points out that, for the ancients, there were plenty of occasions for abuse, swaying the people with the force of rhetoric and instrumentalizing the power of religion.
It is only in the later essay that Herder pays attention to how language provides an important element in the creation of an imagined community, exactly as Benedict Anderson has claimed to be the case for the second phase of nationalisms. But—and this is what makes the second version of Herder’s essay so interesting—the focus on a common spoken language alone does not suffice. Whereas the ancient/modern distinction in the early essay is the one between ancient, more simply administered and governed democracies and modern, more complex monarchies, the ancient/modern distinction for the essay from 1795 becomes a media-technological one. According to Herder, the introduction of print technology means the creation of an altogether new kind of public, a public that will ultimately have free access to information, an end to the powers of censorship, but also a public that will not be manipulated by the force of rhetoric and the power of assembled crowds. It is thanks to print that the individual reader can withdraw and make up her or his own mind. Print culture provides the means to escape the pressure of assembled crowds and the power of rhetoric.
This is how Herder characterizes the revolutionary benefits of print technology ushering in a point of no return:
We cannot take back what has happened; print technology exists; it is not only a great economic resource for trade and labor, but it also is a trumpet for language, as far as its products can reach. All monarchs of this world, if they unite their forces and step in front of each print shop, would not be able to destroy this poor family of the letter box, this asylum and telegraph of human thoughts. And besides, who would want to destroy it? For it has produced next to some evil also so much good. Moreover, due to its innocent but strong nature, it still will be the cause of more good in the future. The orator drowns me out; the writer speaks quietly and gently; I can read him thoughtfully, and it is my fault if I am deceived by his pompous words or if I waste my time with his babble; it is my task to examine him, and it is my prerogative to throw him away.5
Print, according to Herder, is an economically and politically important instrument that trumps the powers of the monarchies of this world; it empowers critical thinking against any kind of censorship. It frees the individual from being overwhelmed by the powers of rhetoric and it challenges the reader’s critical, responsible judgment. And, indeed, Herder ultimately concludes his essay with an argument for imaginative print literature as the most effective and desirable resource for shaping the modern public in view of a common commitment to humanist values. And yet this does not sufficiently capture where the intellectual labor and the theoretical benefits of the essay lie.
Although Herder conceives of the solitary, private reader in opposition to a gathered crowd, and he highlights the contrast between the reflective reader and revolutionary crowds or manipulated mobs on the side of the moderns and the public of antiquity, settling public affairs under the Greek sky in the forum, we must not reduce the essay to a pre/post print culture opposition. Nor does the essay oppose a culture of writing/reading to one of oral/aural communication. Instead, the essay deals with different ways in which live audiences matter in the production of an imagined and projected collectivity. Indeed, it is most interesting how Herder elaborates for the second version of the essay his discussion of preprint culture. He differentiates between the culture of the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans, all of them ancient cultures that are still relevant for “us” the Barbarians, i.e., Christians today.
This is how Herder defines the public:
What is a public? This is a very vague concept, which, if one brackets all of its idiosyncratic uses and abuses, means a common judgment, at least a plurality of voices in the circle in which one speaks, writes or acts. There is a real and an ideal public; the former is the one that surrounds us in the present, which even if it doesn’t let us hear its voice at least would be able to do so; the ideal public is sometimes so dispersed, so far away, that no air wave from that distance or from the proximity can bring us the sound of its thoughts. Yet one imagines both kinds of public as a reasonable, moral being, which participates in our thoughts, in our presentation, our actions, which can appreciate their worth and worthlessness, which can approve or disapprove, which we may in turn teach and correct, whose taste we may form and transform. We encourage, we warn; it is our friend and child, but also our teacher, critic, witness, plaintiff and judge.
(302)
Herder’s model of a judging public, which can be entrusted with an important power to decide, is obviously influenced by the institution of the court of law. It furthermore becomes clear that he envisages a public that decides by voting, when in the first part of the essay he describes the voice of the public and uses the word Stimme both in the sense of the Latin vox (voice) but also in the sense of votum (vote). For Herder, this kind of public represents a concrete example of a reales Publikum, a real public capable of speaking and acting. By contrast, Herder imagines the ideales Publikum (the ideal public) as those whom the speaker or writer anticipates or invokes. With the term ideal Herder seems to designate less “the best hypothetical” and more something like “virtual,” relating to ideas rather than ideals.
The main difference between these two kinds of publics consists in the fact that a real public can actively react or respond, although it is always subject to the physical limitations of time and space, whereas an ideal public in principle is unlimited and infinitely large. It is the sum total of all possible addressees, readers, or listeners of an utterance. Each utterance hails a potential group of addressees both in the actual formulation (encouragement, warning, prohibition, etc.) and in its actual context-specific effect upon the audience (which then reacts with obedience, criticism, intimidation, etc.).
Herder commences his discussion with a focus on the public of the Hebrews, which allows him to introduce the concept of an imagined community, prior and anterior to an actual public gathering, and to address the question of how language can become the unifying force of a nation. The Hebrew of the laws, psalms, and prayers hails what Herder calls “a genetic individual” beyond all existing borders, even in the diaspora. This is a public that is being admonished, commanded, encouraged, that is the subject of injunctions and promises beyond generational boundaries. For this kind of public the individual is always also the representative of the whole, and vice versa. But this unity of individual and whole is achieved at a great cost. As Herder points out, the religious rites, laws, commands, and promises are all endowed with divine authority and the status of sacred scripture. They do not allow for the addressee to distinguish between hearing the message, the command, the promise and applying, following, or believing the message, command, or promise. In other words, there is no way to separate the hearing from the obeying of the command and to say with Goethe’s Faust: “Die Botschaft hör ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube” (“The message well I hear, my faith alone is weak”).
The contemporaneous German-speaking public, according to Herder, represents the diametrical opposite to the public of the Hebrews. For those speakers use their language very differently. Those from a higher social standing often prefer to speak to each other in Italian or French and would use the vernacular only when addressing their servants. Though Herder introduces the Hebrews in order to criticize the fragmented nature of contemporary German culture, he does so not to suggest they adopt that contrasting model. Instead he introduces in the same paragraph quite another model, one of a living language in which all actively participate: “My voice, as weak as it may be, still moves the waves of the ethereal ocean. Among the millions speaking and reading German, there will be some who can hear and understand me, were it only as many as Persius claims for his audience, aut duo aut nemo; even those two, whether praising or criticizing, will propagate those waves. In the public of language even the nobody has ears; he learns from or through me, and continues to speak. And this public continues to expand as long as the language lasts, even with all its changes, until it ceases to be understandable” (304). In contrast to the fixed language of Holy Scripture, the living, constantly changing vernacular is compared to an ocean that can integrate every individual speaker who can modify this entity and who is modified by this entity. Each speaker does not only find an audience or listeners but also leaves traces in the medium, traces that will be picked up and continue to be transformed by others. The contrast between the interactive plasticity of this medium and the mosaic stone tablets could not be stronger. The political thrust of this image is clearly one directed toward the participation of each and everyone in the formation of the unit. However, there is also a problem that becomes obvious with this image for the spoken vernacular as the grounds for a national unity. For, if it is such a fluid medium, it lacks contours. And this is exactly what is addressed when he turns to the public of the Greeks.
Herder’s implicit question when turning from the public of the Hebrews to the public of the Greeks can be made explicit: What are the conditions for the possibility of the imaginary unity, if this unity is not to be achieved through religious commitment to a sacred text? According to Herder, the most important contribution of the Greek model of a public lies in its invention of art as a radical secularizing intervention. However, the Greek public of art needs to be understood not only in contrast to the public of religion, as in the case of the Hebrews, but also in contrast to the public of politics and philosophy. For Herder’s remarks about politics and philosophy make the normative assumptions of his model of the public especially clear. Thus he points out that the political public of the Greeks does not even deserve to be mentioned, for this public is entirely dominated by the power of rhetoric and incapable of critical judgment. Just as detrimental would be a public of philosophy. This would be a philosophical school, an imaginary community, marked by adherence to a common ideology, which would amount to the perversion of the entire philosophical enterprise. Herder reminds his readers that “still today we more or less agree with the Greek position towards a philosophical public; for whoever wants to be and become a philosopher has to do so on his own. The teacher confronts the student with the truth that he has to acquire on his own terms; for wisdom, like virtue and genius, cannot be obtained from others. … As long as there is human reason and will, there will be a hidden, quiet public of philosophy; but one should not expect to see this on the marketplace or in a school” (314).
The decisive formulation of this passage lies in the thought that the public of philosophy must not become visible; it must be found neither in a marketplace nor in a school. On the one hand, Herder means by this that philosophy must not depend on the demands and tastes of its public. Moreover, through the distinction between a visible and an invisible public of philosophy, Herder makes the point that the practice of philosophy should not become a spectacle or group enterprise. Apparently he fears that, once the practitioners of philosophy identify themselves as part of a common enterprise, independent critical thought gives way to the pressures of the group and the desire for conformity.
Herder’s objection to the formation of philosophical schools provides a helpful foil for understanding his approach to the public of Greek art. For it is against this background that art becomes the only domain that allows for a visible public, a public physically present to itself. The audience of a religious event has the status of participants and in that sense is entirely different from the audience of a spectacle, of those who listen to a concert or observe the performance of a play. Only in the case of art—and this seems to be the great achievement of art—do we have, on the one hand, the depragmatization of a live event and, on the other hand, and as a result of the former, the possibility of an imaginative, playful self-reflexivity, i.e., of an imagined community that is conscious of its imaginary component. As we have seen in the section on the public of the Hebrews, the power of religion is grounded in the identity of locution and perlocution as it is transmitted and practiced in the words of Holy Scripture. These two aspects of the speech act can be decoupled if the speech takes place in a situation that is free of any pressures to act and decide. For then the audience has the opportunity to hear a commandment without obeying, a promise without believing, an admonition without heeding the advice. This is the case when the attention of the public is shifted from the content to the form, from the “what” to the “how” of the speech or representation.
But how should we imagine that this shift of attention was introduced? How should a speech not only be perceived in view of its immediate impact but also criticized and enjoyed in view of its artistic, rhetorical, technical choices? This is how Herder characterizes the inauguration of the domain of art:
Poetry accompanied by music created and formed a Greek public in a more refined language and a more refined manner of thinking. The mythical names of Orpheus, Linus, and Musäus are with regard to their actual impact not mythical names: the form of their divine and human shapes, the melody of their verses and words of wisdom, the rhythmical progression of their sensations and images left an impression in the ear, the memory of the listeners, and went from mouth to mouth, finally even into the writings and habits of a later posterity. … The Homeric hymns, songs and choral performances of all kinds, music and poetry competitions graced and enhanced each gathering of the people, each public game, each festive transaction of religion or the state. This is how a Greek public for poetry, soon also for prose emerged. … This is how Greek theater came into being. For the latter with all of its diverse components presupposed the existence of a public, and this is how a Greek public was entertained.
(307)
According to Herder the audience of art was formed when music and poetry became part of religious or state ceremonies. The use of music signals, decisively, a live performance in front of a gathered crowd. Furthermore, in the decisive formulation “poetry accompanied by music” Herder harks back to the typical eighteenth-century account of the development of language and the arts and sciences, such as Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. According to this account, the deployment of music, dance, and pantomime during religious or state ceremonies—meant to make the event more persuasive and more memorable—had the unintended side effect of opening up through this media-specific division of labor a new space for the imagination of the audience, one that allowed for the focus on the means and techniques of representation and performance and alerted the audience to a realm of a linguistically or artistically produced reality, a fabricated reality that might be counterfactual or merely made up.6 In other words, the use of artistic media during a religious ceremony allowed the gathered audience to imagine themselves also as observers of a virtual reality parallel to their actual reality. A critical public of art is created that knows how to appreciate and enjoy the success of the selection and performance of the spectacle, with its different sensuous components. The possibility of distinguishing form from content introduces a certain depragmatization of the speech and performance situation and thus creates the condition for the emergence of the domain of art.
Herder argues that the arts only come to blossom once there is an audience for them, and this he sees happening in Greece. Moreover, he sees the Greek arts, whether epic poetry, lyrical poetry, or, of course, Greek theater, as always part of live performance, part of the active public life of Greek culture. Yet Herder does not recommend a return to this. Instead he trusts in the possibility of the literary arts to create an ideal, i.e., virtual, audience that has both a self-reflexive and a unifying dimension to it. And this possibility exists as soon as the domain of art has been created and has given rise to imaginative literature. For different literary genres, according to Herder, have the inherent ability to hail an imagined community. This is how Herder puts it:
A hymn according to its genre requires a gathered crowd. The poet who does not see his audience will take heaven and earth, forests and rocks for listeners and witnesses. The voice of a lyrical poet hails and creates an audience. The singer, even the historian of great events, demands to gather a circle of men, women, youths and children around him, in whose ears and soul his accounts are to resound. They do not only open up to him a stage where he can earn their applause and his glory, but their minds are his arena, the stage, the goal and measure of his effect and reach. Only that scene that the epic poet describes such that it comes to life for the eyes of his listeners, such that even in the soul of the acting characters everything is made visible to their focused interest, is a true epic scene.
(309)
In this description of how different poetic genres, according to their respective imagined speech situations, create an imagined audience, more than the rhetorical figure of energeia is at stake. First of all Herder points out the ability of poetic speech to create an audience where there is no real, actually gathered, public. Then he turns to the epic poet who manages to let a verbal representation come to life in the imagination of his audience. It is important that this scenario of an audience created and hailed by the speech of the poet does not invoke an individual listener or audience member, but an entire circle of listeners. This audience is not united as a group of connoisseurs; rather they are a unified people/Volk, not in the sense of an ethnic group but in the sense of a transgenerational group that is not divided by occupation, estate, or class barriers, for what unites them is their common humanity, and this humanity becomes graspable in the joint understanding of the power of human language that consists in actively constructing and shaping reality. (“They do not only open up to him a stage where he can earn their applause and his glory, but their minds are his arena, the stage, the goal and measure of his effect and reach.”)7 In that sense the public of art and literature is a public that never merely stands for just one nation, but instead metonymically for humanity at large.
We have seen how Herder makes a live performance, the public ceremony accompanied by music, the necessary condition for creating a public of art, for creating and separating off the domain of the different arts. But then, once the arts have come into existence, he argues, they can also survive without an actual, real, live audience. Then the literary arts, the arts of imaginative literature, live on for an ideal or virtual audience, which only becomes larger once there is print technology. In contrast to the public of the stage, the public of literature is an “ideal public,” the community of thinking human beings. The public of literature is transnational—it is capable of providing a critical counterweight to all possible state constitutions. In contrast to the secret societies of the Enlightenment, it is a public that is in general open to all (and sundry). For Herder the public of literature is a public that is exclusively committed to the ideals of humanity. It is decidedly not tied to one language or one nation.
At this point it is possible to summarize the key features of Herder’s concept of a public. First, it is striking that all his considerations of a public are gained in view of the real and imagined community created in different kinds of speech situations, whether they are bound to time and space or mediated by writing and print and hence possibly independent from the actual presence of the speakers and addressees. What Herder excludes from his discussion is a public that is engaged in an uncensored, potentially polemical deliberation over issues, exactly the kind of public that one would find in Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” essay or in Lessing’s carefully staged theological debates, which I shall consider in the following chapter. This kind of public, at least in the eighteenth century, is a public modeled on the practices of the republic of letters. For Herder a critical public is not the one modeled on conflict, debate, and deliberation, but one where each member is capable of taking a distance and reflecting on what is being said or shown, as it is also a public that does not use its own crowds to enforce any kind of conformism.
But in contrast to much that has been said about Herder’s influence on nineteenth-century nationalisms, Herder’s public is also ultimately—in view of what he envisages for Germany—not exclusively a linguistically based imagined community. One must keep apart his concept of different kinds of publics from his concept of the people or folk (Volk) and from his concept of nation (Nation).8 We have seen how Herder insists on the decoupling of religion from the state and from language. And there is nowhere the assumption of an ethnic identity at the base of the nation; if anything, he makes it clear in the passage on the fatherland that it is pride in the constitution of a nation and responsibility toward the future that should define this community.9 Although the imagined community of literature and art Herder envisages for Germany is one that needs a more thorough commitment to a unified common vernacular, it will have to trust and build on the shared values of humanity in the public of literature, which will always have to include literature from other times and cultures, i.e., literatures in translation.10
Finally it is important to note that the post–French Revolution Herder of the 1795 version of the essay does not advocate a vague universalism.11 He points out that, while we might think we can speak as representatives of humanity at large, all speakers are limited by how they can concretely imagine their audiences. An all-too-generalizing claim will reveal the very limited parochial knowledge of the speaker: “Based on the experiences of one’s own country and city one might be tempted to speak for all of Christianity, Europe, the World, posterity, imagining those entities always as a mystical person or gathering, an enlightened or to be enlightened collectivity. In order to escape from this confusion-producing misunderstanding it is necessary to determine exactly the horizon, and to distinguish in view of each public different times and different peoples” (303).
The reminder of how imagined communities are always also extrapolations of real communities brings us back to the earlier version of Herder’s essay. It is in the context of commemorating the inauguration of the new courthouse of Riga that Herder insists on the power of public institutions to bring together a very mixed group of people in one concrete physical public space. We would have the public of all the people entitled to the benefits of public institutions, a notion of the public that should not be forgotten, as Tony Judt makes clear when he spells out the consequences of the diminishing public sector in today’s Western democracies.12 In the second version of the essay the concern with a common, uniting interest is shifted to a focus on the contours and shape of different publics, the identity and self-understanding as publics are constituted differently, whether through total subjection to a divine authority, in the case of religion, or through ideological conformism, in the case of dominant philosophical schools, or, finally, the public of literature and art. Concrete space in which a live audience can gather matters for Herder’s second essay as far as what kind of stage it provides for the audience to generate an image of itself, be that one of a homogenized or heterogeneous group of people, one of mere unreflecting participants, or critical listeners and observers.
The way in which Herder draws attention to both the importance of real time and space and virtual reality when it comes to the political dimension of the construction of imagined communities is probably more relevant to a reader of the twenty-first century than to the reader of the mid-twentieth century when Habermas’s Public Sphere made its first appearance. The Arab Spring depended on the interrelationship of social media and the gathering of real people in real spaces. It offers an important recent example of why the political implications of modern media technologies—whether print or electronic in the age of the Internet—cannot be derived from the essentialist approach of a technological determinism. The pragmatics of distinct cultural domains such as religion or the arts must be considered as well, especially (if we agree with Herder’s analysis) because they provide a basis for analyzing different media and understanding the real and virtual dimensions of a public’s self-image.