Herder is also very important as a philosopher of history.1 His philosophy of history appears mainly in two works: first in This Too (1774), then later in the Ideas (1784–91). Some of his principles in this area are important mainly for their influence, others both for their influence and for their intrinsic value.
Herder’s philosophy of history is perhaps most famous for its development of a teleological conception of history as the progressive realization of “humanity” and “reason.” This Too already prepares the ground for such a position by arguing, in light of the cumulative way in which cultures have built on each other over the course of time, that history is fulfilling a divine purpose of some sort, though the work does not yet presume to identify the purpose in question. The Ideas then fills in the picture by identifying this purpose as the progressive realization of “humanity” and “reason,” and using this as a key for interpreting the main phases of history.
This conception of history has certainly been important for its influence—in particular, it anticipated and strongly influenced Hegel’s philosophy of history. However, as later nineteenth-century thinkers such as Dilthey came to see, it is a dubious conception that ultimately rests more on the questionable habit of traditional Christian eschatology than on empirical evidence. And while the relative peace and prosperity of Europe in the eighteenth century (especially in comparison with the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth) may have lent it a certain temporary plausibility, the horrors of the twentieth century have put an end to that.2 This is probably not therefore one of Herder’s intrinsically important achievements in the philosophy of history.
Have you not found … that in the changeable everything is change, that on the wings of time everything is progression, haste, migration?
God: Some Conversations (1787)3
Herder’s most intrinsically important achievement in the philosophy of history arguably instead lies in what might be called his historicization of phenomena: roughly, his recognition that even phenomena that had previously been believed to be either eternal or else the products of divine acts of creation are in fact the naturally generated results of historical transformations. The main phenomena in question are: the solar system (or the universe); organic nature; and human mental life.
Concerning the solar system (or the universe), Herder, in sharp contrast to many of his contemporaries who still believed that God had created the universe about six thousand years ago, writes in the Ideas:
Nothing affords such a sublime sight as this image of the great structure of the world; and the human understanding has perhaps never dared, and in part also happily concluded, a longer flight than when it in Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Huygens, and Kant discovered and determined the simple, eternal, and perfect laws of the formation and motion of the planets.4
And he then adds in a footnote:
(Kant’s) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Königsberg and Leipzig 1755. A work that has remained less well known than its content deserves.5
In other words, Herder here endorses Kant’s thesis in the work cited that the origin of the solar system, rather than requiring explanation in terms of a divine act of creation, as Newton had still supposed, can be fully explained as the result of a gradual emergence of its present structure out of a sort of primordial plasma in accordance with the laws of Newtonian physics (the so-called “Kant–Laplace Nebular Hypothesis”).6 Changes in details aside (e.g. the “Big Bang”), this is basically still the sort of conception that is offered by the best cosmogony we have today. It constitutes one important form of historicization to which Herder is committed.
A second form concerns the development of organic nature, including humankind.7 In place of a divine creation of organic nature, in the manner of the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis for example, Herder in the Ideas offers a naturalistic account of a gradual sequential development of first plants, then animals, and finally human beings. Thus in a section of the Ideas titled “Our earth has gone through many sorts of revolutions before becoming what it now is,” he writes:
The mass of effective forces and elements from which the earth came to be probably contained as chaos everything that was due to, and could, come to be on it. In periodic stretches of time the air, the fire, the water, and the earth developed from mental and physical seeds. Many sorts of combinations of water, air, and light had to have preceded before the germ of the first plant organism, for example moss, could emerge. Many plants had to have emerged and died before an animal organism came to be; here too insects, birds, aquatic and nocturnal animals preceded the more fully formed animals of earth and daytime; until finally after all of them the crown of the organic on our earth, the human being, appeared.8
In addition, Herder emphasizes that there is a qualitative continuity between each of these realms and the next, including between animals and humans. For example, he writes that “human beings’ older brothers are the animals; before the former existed, the latter did,”9 and that certain apes achieve “a mode of thought right on the border of reason,” “half human-reason.”10
Moreover, while Herder does not officially hold that species change into each other, as Darwin’s theory of evolution maintains—for example, at one point in the Ideas he writes in a rather emphatic dismissal of such a position, “Truly, ape and human being were never one and the same species”11—the passages just quoted, together with several others in the Ideas, do at least strongly suggest such a possibility. And a number of Herder’s closest acquaintances and friends immediately recognized this implication. One of them was Kant in his reviews of the Ideas (who rejected the notion with horror). Another was Goethe’s intimate friend Charlotte von Stein, who already saw that this was the direction in which Herder’s theory was tending in 1784, when she remarked in a letter following the publication of the first part of the Ideas that the work “makes it likely that we were initially plants and animals; what more Nature will now make of us will probably remain unknown to us.”12 A third was Goethe himself, who developed Herder’s theory further in this direction—as his excitement at discovering the intermaxillary bone (which had previously been thought to distinguish animals from human beings) in human beings in 1784 and his development of the concepts of the Urpflanze and the Urtier (which involve an ambiguity between mere ideal-type and real historical source) during the 1790s show.
Given that recent work has established that Goethe and the Romantics who followed his lead were important influences on the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution,13 it is reasonable to infer from this situation that Herder ultimately made a significant contribution to the emergence of Darwin’s theory.
The third form of historicization that Herder develops is historicism: his thesis, in opposition to such Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire,14 that radical mental differences occur between different historical periods (as well as between cultures and even individuals), i.e. that people’s concepts, beliefs, sensations, values, and so on differ deeply from one period (or culture or individual) to another. This thesis is already prominent in On the Change of Taste (1766), finds its fullest expression in This Too (1774), and (despite vacillations) persists throughout Herder’s career, for example reappearing as one strand of the Letters (1793–7).15
Like the other two forms of historicization just mentioned, historicism is arguably correct. Moreover, it exercised an enormous influence on major successors such as the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey.
Herder’s commitment to the thesis of historicism also led to important consequences for his conception of the discipline of historiography. In particular, it led him to make the empirical exploration of the realm of mental diversity posited by this thesis the very core of the discipline of historiography. For, as has often been noted, he takes relatively little interest in the so-called “great” political and military deeds and events of history, instead focusing on the “innerness” of history’s participants.16 This choice was perfectly deliberate and self-conscious. For example, Herder already writes in his Travel Journal from 1769:
Here nothing of our [conventional] history remains: no series of kings, battles, laws, or miserable characters, everything directed at the totality of humanity and its conditions, of migrations and institutions, religions and laws and ways of thought, languages and art.17
Because of this choice, psychology and interpretation inevitably take center-stage as methods in the discipline of historiography for Herder.
Beyond his espousal of the thesis of historicism, Herder also has further deep philosophical reasons for making this choice concerning how to approach history, and hence for assigning psychology and interpretation central roles as methods in historiography.
To begin with, he has a set of negative reasons, ones directed against the competing approach of traditional political-military historiography. Why should history focus on the supposedly “great” political and military deeds and events of the past, after all? There are several possible answers: (1) A first would be that they are fascinating or morally edifying. But Herder will not accept this. For one thing, he denies that mere fascination or curiosity is a sufficiently serious motive for engaging in historiography.18 For another thing, his antiauthoritarianism, antimilitarism, and borderless humanitarianism cause him to find the acts of political domination, war, and empire that make up the vast bulk of these supposedly “great” deeds and events not morally edifying but morally repugnant.19 Thus he contrasts the sort of investigation of nations’ cultural lives of which he approves with “the deceptive, consolationless path of their political- and war-history,” and notes that the latter sort of history is “rarely an edifying image for youth.”20
This still leaves two other types of motive that might be appealed to for undertaking the sort of historiography in question: (2) because examining the course of the sorts of deeds and events in question reveals some form of overall meaning in history, or (3) because it leads to efficient causal insights that enable us to explain the past and perhaps also predict or control the future. However, Herder is again skeptical about these rationales.
He articulates this skepticism most clearly in his early Older Critical Forestlet (1767–8). There, in criticism of rationale (2), he consigns the task of “the whole ordering together of many occurrences into a plan” not to the historian but instead to the “creator, … painter, and artist,”21 and in criticism of rationale (3), he goes as far as to assert (on the basis of a Hume- and Kant-influenced general skepticism about causal knowledge that he espoused at the time) that with the search for efficient causes in history “historical seeing stops and prophecy begins.”22
His later writings depart from this early position in some obvious and important ways, but they also in some important ways remain faithful to it: They by no means officially stay loyal to the view that history has no discernible meaning; as was recently mentioned, This Too insists that history does have an overall purpose, and that this fact (though not the nature of the purpose) is discernible from the cumulative way in which cultures have built upon one another, and the Ideas then goes on to tell a long story to the effect that history’s purpose has consisted in its steady realization of “humanity” and “reason.” However, Herder clearly still harbors grave doubts just below the surface. This is visible in This Too from the work’s ironically self-deprecating title; its Pyrrhonian-spirited motto “It is not things that disquiet human beings but dogmas concerning things”;23 its vacillation between several incompatible models of history’s direction (progressive?, progressive and cyclical (an upward spiral)?, merely cyclical?, even regressive?); and its morbid dwelling on, and unpersuasive attempt to rebut, the “skeptical” view of history as meaningless “Penelope-work.” It is also visible from the fact that a few years later, in his Theological Letters of 1780–1, Herder would write that history is “a textbook of the nullity of all human things.”24 Moreover, it can be seen from the fact that in the Ideas Herder starts out by reflecting on just this sort of negative position,25 and that although he officially answers it with an account according to which history is purposive, this answer is then contradicted by other passages in which he insists on the inappropriateness of teleological (as contrasted with efficient-causal) explanations in history.26 Herder’s official position in favor of an overall meaning in history certainly exercised a powerful influence on some of his successors (especially Hegel, as was mentioned earlier), but it is arguably this quieter counter-strand of skepticism that represents his better philosophical judgment.
Concerning efficient-causal insights, Herder’s later works again in a way stay faithful to his skeptical position in the Older Critical Forestlet—but they also modify it, and this time decidedly for the better philosophically speaking. The mature Herder does not, like the Herder of that early work, rest his case on a general skepticism about the role, or the discernibility, of efficient causation in history. On the contrary, he insists, much more plausibly, that history is governed by efficient causation and that moreover we should try to discover as far as possible the specific ways in which it is so. But he remains highly skeptical about the extent to which such an undertaking can be successful, and hence about how far it can take us towards real explanations of the past, or towards predicting or controlling the future. His main reason for this skepticism is that major historical deeds and events are not the products of some one or few readily identifiable causal factors (as political and military historians often tend to assume), but are instead the results of chance confluences of huge numbers of different causal factors.27 Moreover, he holds that many of these factors are inevitably unknown to, and even unknowable by, the historian—for example, because they were in themselves too trivial to have been recorded,28 or, in the case of psychological factors, because the historical agent failed to make them public, deliberately misrepresented them, or was himself unaware of them due to their submersion in the unconscious depths of his mind.29
In short, Herder believes that all three of the main rationales for doing traditional political-military history turn out to be deeply flawed.30
Complementing this negative case against the claims of traditional political-military history to be of overriding importance, Herder also has positive reasons for instead focusing on the “innerness” of human life in history:
(1) A first reason is certainly just the sheer interest of this subject-matter (though, as was mentioned previously, this would not be a sufficient reason in his eyes).
(2) Another reason is that his discovery of radical difference in human mentality has shown there to be a much broader, less explored, and more intellectually challenging field for investigation here than previous generations of historians had realized. For example, he writes concerning medieval history:
Our whole medieval history is pathology, and for the most part only pathology of the head, i.e. of the emperor and a few classes in the Holy Roman Empire. Physiology of the whole national body—what a different thing that would be! And how mode of thought, formation, ethical custom, mode of expression, and language related to it—what a sea yet to be sailed lies there, and what beautiful isles and unknown spots yet to be found here and there!31
Two further reasons are moral in nature:
(3) Herder believes, plausibly, that studying people’s minds through their literature, visual art, and so on generally shows them at their moral best (in sharp contrast to studying their political-military history, which generally shows them at their moral worst), so that there are benefits of moral edification to be gleaned here.32
(4) He also has cosmopolitan and egalitarian moral motives for studying people’s minds through their literature, visual art, and so on: unlike studying unedifying and elite-focused political-military history, this promises to enhance our sympathies for peoples, and moreover for peoples at all social levels, including lower ones.33
Finally, doing “inner” history is also valuable as an instrument for our non-moral self-improvement:
(5) It serves to enhance our self-understanding. One reason for this is that it is by, and only by, contrasting one’s own outlook with the outlooks of other peoples that one can come to recognize what is universal and invariant in it and what by contrast distinctive and variable. Another reason is that in order fully to understand one’s own outlook one needs to identify its historical origins and how they have developed into it. (This is Herder’s justly famous “genetic method”—first presented in the Attempt at a History of Lyric Poetry [1764] and the Fragments [1767–8] in connection with literature and language, respectively, but subsequently in This Too and elsewhere also applied to culture more broadly.)
(6) Herder also believes that an accurate investigation of the (non-moral) ideals of past ages can serve to enrich our own ideals and happiness.34 This motive emerges at many points in his work. One good example of it is his exploration of past literatures in the Fragments with a view to drawing from them lessons about how to improve modern German literature (especially in the direction of a poetry of nature and feeling).
Like Herder’s fundamental insight into historicism (or radical mental difference across historical time) itself, the approach to historiography that he built on it, namely his decision to focus on the “innerness” of history’s participants and his consequent emphasis on psychology and interpretation as historical methods, anticipated and strongly influenced subsequent nineteenth-century theorists of historiography such as Droysen and Dilthey. Furthermore, Dilthey was strongly influenced by Herder’s more detailed rationale for this decision, as it has just been described—in particular, virtually reproducing its negative side in his Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883) and elsewhere. In fact, though, Herder’s original version of the rationale was superior to Dilthey’s version in important respects, especially on its positive side. For whereas Dilthey’s positive reasons are alarmingly thin and unsatisfactory—mainly consisting merely in the observations that our interest in narrative is more fundamental than our interest in explanation, and that we can enrich our drab lives by encountering the different experiences of historical Others—Herder’s, as we have just seen, were already rich and compelling.
Another of Herder’s major contributions to the philosophy of history, again founded on his fundamental insight into historicism, or the radical mental differences that occur across historical time, is the genetic method that was recently mentioned. This was a revolutionary invention that exercised a huge influence on the philosophies of important successors such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault, and which has proved to be of enormous intrinsic value.
Herder’s genetic method is first and foremost conceived as a means towards better understanding, or explaining, psychological outlooks and psychologically laden practices—especially a means towards better understanding one’s own, towards better self-understanding. (By contrast, its significance for evaluating such outlooks and practices is secondary and ambiguous.) The method achieves its distinctive contribution to better understanding such outlooks and practices, saliently including our own, by showing, in a naturalistic (i.e. non-religious, non-mythical, non-transcendent) way, that and how they have developed historically out of earlier origins prior to which they did not yet really exist at all and from which they have emerged via a series of transformations.
Herder was probably inspired to develop this method in part by attempts to explain present social, political, and religious institutions in light of the past that had already been undertaken by seventeenth-century theorists of the social contract, Hume, Rousseau, and others. And as Frederick Beiser has argued, he was probably also inspired in part by Kant’s approach in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens to explaining the present condition of the solar system naturalistically in terms of its gradual crystallization, or self-articulation, over time out of a sort of primordial plasma (in accordance with the laws of Newtonian physics).35
As has already been mentioned, Herder initially developed his genetic method in the 1760s mainly in relation to poetry and language, but he then went on to apply it more broadly, for example to moral (and other) values.
His unpublished essay Attempt at a History of Lyric Poetry (1764) is his earliest theoretical discussion and deployment of the method. The essay opens with the following methodological remarks:
One of the pleasantest fields into which human curiosity likes to wander is this: to know the origin of that which is … In particular, we are keen to know the origin of human works and inventions … However, it is not only delightful to track down the origin of the objects that we want to understand with some measure of completeness but also necessary. Obviously, we lose with it a large part of the history, and how greatly does the history not serve towards explaining the whole? And moreover, the most important part of the history, from which afterwards everything is derived; for just as the tree can be traced back to its root, so likewise the bloom of an art to its origin. The origin contains within itself the entire nature of its product, just as the whole plant with all its parts lies hidden in the seed; and I will not be able to derive from the later condition the degree of illumination that makes my explanation genetic.36
The essay then turns to an extensive discussion of the following epistemological themes: the difficulty of discovering a psychological phenomenon’s real origin; various illusions to which this difficulty tends to give rise, especially the connected illusions that the phenomenon initially emerged in a state of perfection and that it had a divine source; and the investigative means that it is appropriate to use in order to overcome the difficulty and the illusions just mentioned, namely tentative inference from the various sorts of empirical evidence that are available to the most plausible hypothesis.
In this whole methodological and epistemological spirit, Herder then argues in the essay more specifically against theories of poetry that, because they only go as far back in history as the relatively advanced phases of poetry in which it had already attained a certain perfection, ignoring the long process of trial and error that had preceded them, attribute poetry’s origins to a divine source. And he argues that poetry’s original source instead lay in strong human sentiments, especially ones associated with primitive religion, and that these sentiments were negative ones such as fear rather than positive ones such as gratitude.
Herder’s slightly later published work, the Fragments (1767–8), contains similar methodological and epistemological reflections, but this time in connection with an application of the method to language. The work also refines his initial picture of the method by eliminating the implication that the eventual phenomenon is always fully preformed in a single origin and instead allowing for the possibility that it emerged from accidentally coinciding multiple origins.37 Since this slightly later work not only gives an improved statement of the method but is also its first public appearance, it is worth quoting its methodological part at some length:
With the origin of a thing we lose a part of its history, which, though, inevitably explains so much in the thing, and usually the most important part. Like the tree from its root, art, language, and science grow up out of their origin. In the seed lies the plant with its parts, in the animal foetus the creature with all its limbs—and in the origin of a phenomenon the whole treasure of illumination through which its explanation becomes genetic. Whence have so many confusions arisen but from the fact that people have taken the later condition of a thing, a language, an art for the first, and forgotten the origin? Whence so many errors than because a single condition in which people saw everything inevitably yielded nothing more than one-sided observations, divided and incomplete judgments? Whence so much argument than because each person regarded these his concepts and rules, however one-sided they were, as the only ones, made them into pet thoughts, decided everything according to them, and declared everything outside them to be nothing, to be deviation? Finally, whence so much self-confusion than because one in the end could make nothing of a thing that did not always remain the same, always appeared changed.—Whence all this, than because one lacked the first point from which the fabric of the confusion spun itself, lacked the beginning from which the whole confused mass can be so easily unwound afterwards, and did not know the origin on which the whole history and explanation rests as on a basic foundation … Most things in the world are produced, developed, raised, and torn down by a chance, and not by purposeful efforts, and where now do I mean to get to with my conjectures in a magical land of accident where nothing happens according to fundamental principles, where everything exempts itself most abruptly from the laws of intention and purposefulness, where everything, most and the most valuable things, falls to the hands of the god of chance. If we had a history of human inventions, how we would find products that arose in accordance with Epicurus’s cosmogony through a coincidence of atoms! Series of causes cooperated, against and after one another: cog gripped cog, one motive against another, one thing suppressed another without plan or rule, the throws changed fierily and quickly, chance had almost exhausted its bad lots before better ones fell.—Now if one sketches according to a philosophical heuristics plans concerning how a thing could have arisen, should have arisen, one makes a fool of oneself with all one’s a priori fundamental principles! Not how language should have arisen, could have arisen, but how it arose—that is the question!38
Like the earlier essay, the Fragments then proceeds to an extensive discussion of some related epistemological issues, a discussion similar in content to the earlier essay’s, though this time focusing on language rather than poetry. Accordingly, Herder goes on to emphasize the difficulty of discovering the origin of language; various illusions to which this difficulty gives rise, especially the connected illusions of language’s initial perfection and of its divine origin; and the investigative means that it is appropriate to use in order to overcome the difficulty and the illusions in question, namely tentative inference from the various sorts of empirical evidence that are available to the best hypothesis.
In this whole methodological and epistemological spirit, he then argues against Süßmilch’s theory, which had held that the impressive complexity and purposiveness of our languages could only have arisen from a divine origin, on the grounds that this position rests on overlooking language’s probable earlier development from cruder beginnings. And he instead champions the contrary thesis that language did indeed emerge from such cruder beginnings, and that it only reached its later highly developed forms via a long and thoroughly human process of development.
In addition, Herder already in the 1760s began to apply such a method to moral (and other) values. For example, in the Fragments of 1767–8—inaugurating an intimate association of the genetic method, or genealogy, with philology, etymology, and exact interpretation that would remain one of its central features henceforth39—he calls for someone to “trace exactly the metamorphoses which in Greek the words anêr, anthrôpos, agathos, kalos, philokalos, kalok’agathos, kakos, epicheirêtês, and in Latin vir, homo, bonus and melior and optimus, honestus, pulcher and liberalis, strenuus and such national words have undergone, which were the honor of their age, and changed with it.”40 Similarly, in This Too (1774), where he largely focuses on moral, aesthetic, and prudential values, he develops the large-scale genetic thesis that history has consisted of a great chain of cultures (Hebrew patriarchal culture, then Egyptian, then Phoenician, then Greek, then Roman, and so on) which have built on each other cumulatively and thereby eventually produced modern European culture (towards which he is very ambivalent). To mention one specific example of how he envisages this process in the case of moral values: he claims that Greek culture combined the obedience of antecedent Hebrew and Egyptian culture with the freedom of antecedent Phoenician culture in a new synthesis, and then passed this synthesis on to subsequent European cultures.41 He subsequently continued championing this sort of application of the genetic method to values and culture. Moreover, in the Letters he re-describes the method at points as one of genealogy [Genealogie].42
How exactly is the method supposed to advance (self-)understanding, though? It aspires to do so in two distinguishable ways, which together constitute what one might call the essential model of genetic or genealogical explanation.
The method’s first contribution to (self-)understanding is roughly as follows. Someone who possesses his or her own distinctive concepts, beliefs, values, modes of feeling, forms of art, customs, and so on but who does not compare them with perspectives that have lacked them altogether or possessed only variant alternatives runs a grave risk of taking them to be universal and indispensable, and also of overlooking what is distinctive in their character. The genetic method counteracts both of these types of (self-)misunderstanding by making one familiar with earlier historical periods that have lacked the relevant concepts etc. altogether and with intervening historical periods in which they were indeed anticipated but only in forms that were significantly different from the form in which one possesses them oneself, thereby making it possible for one both to perceive the non-universality and dispensability of the concepts etc. in question and to compare them with others in order to reveal their distinctive character.
Herder often emphasizes this first contribution that the method makes to (self-)understanding. For example, as we saw in Chapter 4, he writes in the Ideas:
The soul experiences a noble expansion when it dares to place itself outside the narrow circle that clime and education have drawn around us and at least learns amid other nations what one can dispense with. How much one there finds dispensed with and dispensable that one long considered essential! Notions that we often took to be the most universal axioms of human reason disappear here and there with the clime of a place, as dry land disappears like a cloud for someone sailing out to sea.43
And in an essay from 1783 he writes similarly concerning morality in particular:
When we have turned grey in certain ethical customs and modes of representation, and are consequently so grown-together with them that we believe them essential to humanity and so quite inseparable from it, how often have I been quite beneficially amazed and ashamed to find that a few levels further up or down [on the scale of peoples] whole peoples know nothing of these modes of representation and ethical customs, have never known anything of them, often cherish the very opposite ones just as dearly, and yet despite this are in a tolerably good condition and as comfortable as the fragile clay from which humanity is formed, together with the necessary expenses which each person incurs from without, could allow.44
This first contribution that the method makes to (self-)understanding is very important. However, while it is essential to the method, the method is not essential to it. This is because it could in principle be achieved by means of a comparison of the concepts etc. in question with historically unrelated alternative perspectives instead (as often happens in the discipline of cultural anthropology, for example). Herder already recognized this possibility, and consequently recommended that such non-genealogical comparisons be undertaken in addition to genealogical ones (for example, already in the loose pages for his Travel Journal [1769] and then later in the 10th Collection of the Letters [1793–7]).
By contrast, the method’s second main contribution to (self-)understanding cannot be achieved in any other way. What does this consist in? At the most basic level it consists in showing two things: First, it consists in showing that the concepts etc. in question, rather than, say, either having been innate and therefore present in human minds all along or else having emerged ex nihilo fully formed at some point in history, are the products of historical developments before which they did not yet really exist at all and in the course of which they only existed in variant forms. Second, it consists in showing what exactly these historical developments that produced them have been. At a less basic level, it normally also includes providing some further sort of explanation that is more specific in character. For example, the method shows that lyric poetry began as, and has continued throughout its transformations to be, an expression of deep emotions, that languages developed gradually from more primitive beginnings to achieve their striking later complexity, or that modern culture and its values arose through a series of accumulations and transformations of earlier cultures and their values.
Hegel subsequently took over this method from Herder. Hegel already employs it in his unpublished early theological writings from the 1790s (which are also heavily influenced by Herder in many other ways). It then also constitutes an important strand in the complex weave of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which, as a published work, is a more important link in the method’s historical transmission (Hegel discusses the method most explicitly in the work’s preface). Later, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel repeats his commitment to using the method and explicitly mentions Herder as a forerunner in its development.
Nietzsche subsequently took over the method from Herder and Hegel, deploying it most famously in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Accordingly, in posthumous fragments he praises both Herder and Hegel for their historical sense, especially concerning morals. He probably had direct familiarity with Herder’s employment of the method from works such as This Too and the Letters.45 He was also familiar with Hegel’s reuse of it in the Phenomenology (as can be seen from his appropriation in On the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere of a piece of wordplay on the terms bekannt [familiar] vs. erkannt [known, recognized] that Hegel had used when discussing the method in the preface of the Phenomenology).
Hegel and Nietzsche not only took over the method from Herder, though, but also developed it in some very distinctive ways. This is especially true concerning the more specific and variable component of its mode of explanation that was mentioned above. For example, Hegel’s application of the method in the Phenomenology purports to show that modern concepts etc. have emerged from a series of earlier antecedents that turn out to have been increasingly entangled in self-contradictions the further back in time one goes, so that their emergence can be seen to have been a rational process of gradual liberation from self-contradictions. And according to a sharply opposed version of the method in Nietzsche certain modern moral values (in particular, love and forgiveness) turn out to have originally emerged from quite contrary psychological motives (hatred and revenge), which still underlie them, so that they originally were, and still remain, deeply inconsistent and hence irrational.
After Nietzsche, the most celebrated recent exponent of the method of genealogy, Foucault, avowedly took it over from Nietzsche. He too therefore stands on the shoulders of a whole German tradition that ultimately leads back to Herder.46
We have already encountered two distinctive Herderian uses of the word Bildung: as one of his several words for articulating an anthropological concept of culture (Chapter 4), and as a certain ideal of individual self-development (Chapter 7). But he also gives the word a third distinctive use, namely in relation to history.47
Until Herder came along, the word Bildung in its mentalistic (as opposed to its physical) meaning was used almost exclusively of individuals, connoting an individual’s development and education. However, in 1774 Herder published This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation [zur Bildung] of Humanity, in which (as its title already shows) he also applied the term to humankind as a whole in its historical development.48
This broadening of the term’s use was facilitated by a central metaphor that Herder developed in the work: the comparison of the phases of human history with the ages of a single individual. But (like that metaphor itself) it is more substantively underpinned by Herder’s conception in the work that the development of humankind has been more or less linear and cumulative: in particular, that after the Hebrew patriarchs had established their authoritarian culture, the Egyptians took it over and enriched it with new values such as industriousness and civic duty, then the Phoenicians did the same with Egyptian culture by adding an element of worldliness and freedom to it, then the Greeks inherited traits of both Egyptian and Phoenician culture to form their own distinctive culture, then the Romans took over Greek culture and transformed it by placing a new emphasis on such values as courage and endurance, and so on, until finally we modern Europeans indirectly or directly owe the core of our culture to this whole preceding series of cultures.
It is an implication of this model that the Bildung of a modern European individual (the second of the three senses or applications of the word distinguished above) largely consists of a sort of appropriation of this Bildung of humankind as a whole (the third of those senses), as this has developed so far.
But Herder also has a further important idea in this connection. In the title of This Too the expression “zur Bildung” means not only “on the Formation” but also “for the purpose of the Formation” (hence my deliberately ambiguous translation “for the Formation”). So one of the things that the title implies is that the sort of depiction of the history of past cultures in their development out of each other all the way up to our modern European culture that the book offers makes it possible for its readers to become more gebildet, more fully developed/educated.
How is this supposed to be achieved? Reading a work of history of course usually contributes to an individual’s development/education in a perfectly everyday sense, so this will be part of what Herder has in mind. But he also has some less obvious contributions to individual development/education in mind. One of these lies in the work’s application of the genetic method, which in the ways that were explained in the previous section of this chapter promises to enhance our self-understanding. Another lies in a sort of moral enlightenment: We modern Europeans are to be shown by the book that we are far from possessing the only or the highest culture, as we often narcissistically suppose, that there are also other cultures every bit as valuable as our own; and we are also to be brought to the humble realization that God is nonetheless pursuing some sort of overall plan in history which, even though we cannot know its specific content, shows itself in the linear, cumulative way in which the history of cultures has been unfolding.
This whole project also implies two additional features that Herder does not himself emphasize, but which are worth noting. First, it implies that because the development of cultures has been more or less linear and cumulative, our “genetic” recovery of the past is going to be somewhat easier than it would otherwise have been, since the cultures of the past are in a certain sense already preserved within us and hence familiar to us.
Second, it also implies that the process of “genetic” enlightenment will involve an aspect of alienation from our own concepts, beliefs, values, etc. as we come to realize that these are not in fact the only possible ones and begin to see in which respects they differ from and in which respects they resemble other ones that compete with them.
With certain qualifications (for example, that beginning the account of historical Bildung with the Hebrew patriarchs can now be seen to be chronologically untenable, and that the leap from a linear, cumulative development to a divine plan seems a stretch), this Herderian theory of historical Bildung seems largely defensible.
Moreover, it has been quite influential. Hegel later took over this whole theory of historical Bildung in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In that work he too understands Bildung not only as individual development/education but also as a collective accomplishment of humankind over the course of history. Accordingly, in the introduction (which he wrote first) he says that the work will give “the detailed history of the Bildung of consciousness itself up to science [i.e. up to the modern standpoint of his own philosophy—M.N.F.],”49 and in the preface (which he wrote later) he says similarly that “the task of leading the individual from his unformed [ungebildeten] standpoint to knowledge had to be understood in its universal sense and the universal individual, self-conscious spirit, had to be observed in its Bildung.”50 Moreover, like Herder, Hegel holds that this Bildung of humankind as a whole has been linear and cumulative (as can be seen from each of the Phenomenology’s three treatments of the whole course of history: that focused on forms of individual consciousness in the chapters “Consciousness” to “Reason”; that focused on social contexts in the “Spirit” chapter; and that focused on conceptions of God or the Absolute in the chapters “Religion” and “Absolute Knowing”). Furthermore, like Herder, Hegel holds that his account in the work of the development of past cultures up to the standpoint of modernity contributes to the Bildung of individual readers; that this contribution largely consists in providing a genetic explanation of modern psychological outlooks and practices by showing that and how they have arisen out of earlier origins that underwent continuous transformations until those outlooks and practices resulted; that the genetic recovery of this history is made easier than it would otherwise be by the fact that the development has been linear and cumulative, which entails that the past standpoints involved are in a certain sense already preserved within us and hence familiar to us;51 and that such individual Bildung inevitably involves an aspect of alienation from our own concepts, beliefs, values, etc. as we come to realize that these are not in fact the only possible ones and recognize the respects in which they differ from, and those in which they resemble, their competitors.52
Herder also develops a number of further noteworthy principles based on his fundamental historicism which should be mentioned here briefly.
One of these concerns the way in which the sort of formative influence of one culture on another that we have just been considering occurs. Herder thinks of this as normally involving significant modification of what is taken over.53 For example, he writes in This Too: “Greek sciences which the Romans drew to themselves became Roman; Aristotle became an Arab and a scholastic.”54 An especially interesting example of this process of which Herder was aware is the way in which ancient Egyptian portrait sculpture and temple architecture influenced the earliest Greek portrait sculpture and temple architecture of the seventh to sixth centuries bc, which at first strikingly resembled their Egyptian models but then became increasingly different from them by the classical period. That cultural influence usually takes this form is for Herder one of the things that distinguishes normal sorts of such influence from mere imitation. This whole principle would later be taken over by Nietzsche, who in particular argued that the Greeks had borrowed much from Asia but that they had also subjected it to radical transformation in the process.
A second principle that Herder sometimes implies is that the various aspects of a culture normally exhibit a certain similarity or affinity with each other.55 In a passage from This Too that we considered earlier he cites this as one of the reasons why the interpretation of any given aspect of a culture should be approached holistically:
The whole nature of the soul, which rules through everything, which models all other inclinations and forces of the soul in accordance with itself, and in addition colors even the most indifferent actions—in order to share in feeling this, do not answer on the basis of the word but go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel your way into everything.56
This principle is very plausible. Think, for example, of the uncanny structural similarity between political individualism, metaphysical individualism (e.g. the Cartesian ego), and physical atomism in seventeenth-century Europe. Hegel would later take over this principle from Herder and make it even more central to his philosophy of history.
A third principle concerns the relation between collective and individual determinants of historical development. Rudolf Stadelmann in his thoughtful book on Herder’s philosophy of history well observes that Herder usually emphasizes the role of social determinants of historical developments but that he sometimes emphasizes the role of individuals as determinants instead.57 Stadelmann complains that this is inconsistent. However, I would suggest that it is actually consistent and grounded in Herder’s recognition that human language and mentality are not only deeply dependent on society but also capable of individualistic development (as this was discussed in Chapter 5). Moreover, I would suggest that it is correct.
Finally, Herder develops a fourth principle in the philosophy of history towards the end of This Too according to which we are not in a position to predict the historical future: “It is not my office to prophesy … Let us … work with courageous, happy hearts even right in the middle of the cloud.”58 This principle rests in part on Herder’s considered skepticism about both teleological and efficient-causal explanations of the course of history (as discussed earlier in this chapter). But it also rests in part on his historicist recognition that since human beings’ mental lives and practices have often changed radically in the past, they are likely to continue to do so in the future as well. This principle of epistemic humility concerning knowledge of the historical future seems well grounded. Largely under Herder’s influence, versions or variants of it went on to play important roles in some of the most important philosophies of history of the nineteenth century, in particular those of Hegel (see especially his famous discussion of this subject in the preface of the Philosophy of Right) and Marx (who for this reason keeps his characterizations of future communist society extremely vague).
A final important contribution that Herder makes to the philosophy of history lies in the fact that he recognized, and at least grappled with, even if he did not finally solve, a certain problem that emerges from his conception of history (and of intercultural comparison) as an arena of radical differences in human mentality. This is the problem of skepticism. Thus he both begins and ends On the Change of Taste (1766) discussing this problem, and he wrestles with it in This Too as well.
Herder tends to run two distinguishable problems together in this connection: (1) the problem of whether there is any overall meaning to the seemingly anarchic and endless series of changes that occur from one period to another in history; and (2) the problem that the multiplication of conflicting viewpoints on virtually all subjects that is found in history (and in intercultural comparison) results in, or at least significantly exacerbates, the ancient skeptic’s difficulty of unresolvable disputes forcing one to suspend belief.
Problem (1) has already been discussed earlier in this chapter. Here it is problem (2) that concerns us. This is a problem that Ernst Troeltsch would make much of in the twentieth century. But Herder had already clearly seen it.
Herder is determined to avoid this sort of skepticism. Over the course of his career he develops two main strategies for doing so, but they are inconsistent with each other, and neither of them works in the end. His first strategy is to acknowledge the problem in an unmitigated form and to respond to it with a sort of relativism. Especially in This Too he argues that—at least where questions of moral, aesthetic, and prudential value are concerned—the different positions that have been held by different periods and cultures are equally valid, namely for the periods and cultures to which they belong, and that there can be no question of any preferential ranking between them. For example, as we have seen, he writes there:
At bottom, all comparison proves to be problematic. As soon as the inner sense of happiness, the inclination, has changed, as soon as the external occasion and needs form and fix the new sense—who can compare the different satisfaction of different senses in different worlds? … Each nation has its center of happiness in itself, like every sphere its center of gravity!59
His second strategy is to try to forestall the problem at its source by arguing that, on closer inspection, there turns out to be much more common ground between different periods and cultures than the problem allows. This strategy can already be found at points in the Critical Forests, where Herder in particular argues that different standards of beauty have an underlying unity. It then comes to play a central role in the Ideas, where he especially represents “humanity” as a shared moral value (and even represents certain religious conceptions as common to all humankind).60
Later, in the Letters, Herder tends to vacillate between these two opposed strategies, sometimes opting for relativism, at other times arguing, in continuity with the Ideas, that there are deep commonalities, in particular a shared commitment to the ideal of “humanity.”
Neither of these strategies is satisfactory in the end. The second, that of asserting deep commonalities, is ultimately hopeless (notwithstanding its seemingly eternal appeal to empirically under-informed Anglophone philosophers). For one thing, it flies in the face of the empirical evidence. For example, as we have seen, when writing in this mode Herder praises Homer for his “humanity,”61 but thereby lays himself open to Nietzsche’s powerful retort in Homer’s Contest that what is most striking about Homer and his culture is rather their cruelty. For another thing, it flies in the face of Herder’s own better interpretive judgments about the empirical evidence—for example, his observation in On the Change of Taste and elsewhere that basic values have not only changed over the course of history but in some cases actually become inverted (an observation that strikingly anticipates Nietzsche’s brilliant insight into a systematic inversion of Homeric moral values that occurred in later antiquity with Socrates/Plato and then especially Christianity).
Herder’s alternative, relativist, strategy is more interesting and promising, but not in the end satisfactory either—even concerning values, where its prospects seem best. As we have seen, the main problems with it, which Nietzsche again recognized, are that we cannot as a psychological matter sustain such a relativist indifference vis-à-vis other people’s values, and that moreover it would not be good if we could. As Nietzsche puts it, “Is life not passing judgment, preferring, being unfair … ?” Do we, for example, really think that a moral rule requiring the forcible burning of dead men’s wives is no better and no worse than one forbidding it? And would it be good if we did?
It was largely an intuition that Herder had left this skeptical problem unsolved that motivated Hegel and Nietzsche to introduce some of their most striking innovations into their versions of his genetic method, namely in an attempt to solve it. Hegel in the Phenomenology noticed that one might accept Herder’s basic insight that there are fundamental differences in values (and other outlooks) but nonetheless avoid skepticism and relativism by subjecting other people’s values (and other outlooks) to an internal critique, a demonstration that they are internally inconsistent. Accordingly, in the introduction to the Phenomenology he explicitly outlines such a strategy, arguing that despite the (conceded) absence of common criteria for deciding the disagreements between the various “shapes of consciousness” that have arisen over the course of history, these disagreements do not generate skepticism or relativism because the perspectives in question all turn out to be implicitly self-contradictory (only his own perspective remaining standing as self-consistent).
Under Hegel’s influence, Nietzsche then pursued a strikingly similar strategy in reaction to Herder’s problem. For example, in The Gay Science he writes concerning a specific moral value that he wishes to discredit:
The “neighbor” praises selflessness because it is to his advantage. If the neighbor himself thought “selflessly,” he would reject that diminution of power, that harm for his benefit, work against such inclinations, and above all show his selflessness by not calling it good!—This indicates the fundamental contradiction in the morality that is currently held in honor: the motives of this morality contradict its principle!62
And Nietzsche’s most famous genealogy of all, his tracing of Christian and modern secular values such as love and forgiveness back to original motives of hatred and resentment [Ressentiment] in On the Genealogy of Morals, similarly purports to identify a self-contradiction within those values.63
However, Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s putative solutions both run into problems of their own, albeit somewhat different ones in each case: Hegel’s claim to have identified a fundamental self-contradiction within each historical “shape of consciousness” turns out to be implausible when examined in detail. And while Nietzsche’s tracing of Christian values back to original underlying motives that are contrary to them turns out to be much more historically plausible,64 in order really to solve Herder’s problem it would need to show that the inconsistency involved was in each case essential to the value in question, not merely a contingent one that could (and perhaps also did) disappear at some later point in history leaving the value consistently held—but this it probably cannot do.65
It may therefore well in the end be a more straightforward Nietzschean response which I have mentioned before that constitutes the most satisfactory solution to Herder’s problem, at least for values: namely, conceding that the phenomenon of fundamental value variations shows that there are no universal or objective values, but continuing to hold one’s values, and to judge others’ values in light of them, only now in a self-consciously non-universal, non-objective way. As Nietzsche put it, “My judgment is my judgment.” Or if one finds Nietzsche’s extreme individualism there unacceptable, then: “Our judgment is our judgment,” for some less-than-universal us.
This still leaves the problem of skepticism in the theoretical domain, though. Herder’s commitment to historicism, or radical mental difference, applies to this domain as much as it does to that of value, exacerbating the sorts of skeptical problems concerning the availability of deeply opposed positions/arguments on each subject and also concerning the possibility that our concepts may lack instantiation (e.g. that the concept of a “god” may correspond to nothing in reality) that had already been powerfully developed by the Pyrrhonists. As we saw earlier, Herder himself—following his teacher, the pre-critical Kant—applied this type of skepticism to the specific theoretical area of metaphysics. But, especially when boosted by historicism, or radical mental difference, its potential for undermining theoretical beliefs seems to extend far beyond that.
Moreover, there are several additional features of Herder’s philosophical position that promise to add further fuel to the fire of skepticism in the theoretical domain. One of these features is his conception that the perceptual sensations of a mature human being are always infused with concepts, beliefs, and theories, and that these are highly variable; for this seems to undermine the hope of finding any sort of secure basis for theoretical beliefs in experience. Another such feature is his recognition of the profound role that metaphors (including what he calls “metaschematization”) play in all language and thereby in all thought, together with his recognition of the deep role that analogy plays in scientific inquiry—for the role of these processes again seems to call into question the possibility of objective knowledge.
Herder does occasionally make attempts to forestall such skeptical challenges to theoretical knowledge. For example, in the Essay on Being (1763–4) he champions the thesis that such a fundamental concept as Being affords us a sort of epistemic certainty, and in various places he implies that God must have set our cognitive equipment in basic harmony with the world. But these attempts are not very developed or very convincing. It therefore becomes tempting to respond to the Herderian skeptical considerations just mentioned with something more like the sort of radical skepticism or relativism concerning theoretical knowledge that one later encounters in Nietzsche.
Whether such an extreme and disturbing response is inevitable or can in the end be avoided is a large and important question that cannot be addressed here. But one thing that can, I think, be said with some confidence is that the Herderian considerations that lead to this question are unlikely to be reversible with any plausibility. Rather, they constitute a lasting achievement that requires us to think in continuity with them but beyond the point that Herder himself reached.
These, then, are some of Herder’s main achievements in the philosophy of history. As the above discussion has tried to make clear, certain of his ideas in this area were influential but probably not of much intrinsic value—in particular, his teleological conception of history. However, others were not only influential but also of great intrinsic value—especially, his historicism and the rich set of further ideas that rests upon it.