Johann Gottfried von Herder (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeJohann Gottfried von HerderFirst published Tue Oct 23, 2001; substantive revision Thu Sep 27, 2007Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) is a philosopher of thefirst importance. This claim depends largely on the intrinsic qualityof his ideas (of which this article will try to give an impression).But another aspect of it is his intellectual influence. This has beenimmense both within philosophy and beyond it (much greater than isusually realized). For example, Hegel's philosophy turns out to beessentially an elaborate systematic development of Herderian ideas(especially concerning the mind, history, and God); so too doesSchleiermacher's (concerning language, interpretation, translation, themind, art, and God); Nietzsche is deeply influenced by Herder as well(concerning the mind, history, and values); so too is Dilthey(concerning history); even J.S. Mill has important debts to Herder (inpolitical philosophy); and beyond philosophy, Goethe was transformedfrom being merely a clever but rather conventional poet into a greatartist largely through the early impact on him of Herder's ideas. Indeed, Herder can claim to have virtuallyestablished whole disciplines which we now take for granted.For example, it was mainly Herder (not, as is often claimed, Hamann)who established fundamental ideas concerning an intimate dependence ofthought on language which underpin modern philosophy of language. Itwas Herder who, through the same ideas, through his recognition of deepvariations in language and thought across historical periods andcultures, through his broad empirical approach to languages, and inother ways, inspired W. von Humboldt to found modern linguistics. Itwas Herder who developed modern interpretation-theory, or hermeneutics,in ways that would subsequently be taken over by Schleiermacher andthen more systematically formulated by Schleiermacher's pupilBöckh. It was Herder who, by doing so, also contributed toestablishing the methodological foundations of nineteenth-centuryGerman classical scholarship (which rested on theSchleiermacher-Böckh methodology), and hence of modern classicalscholarship generally. It was Herder who did more than anyone else toestablish the general conception and the interpretive methodology ofour modern discipline of anthropology. Finally, Herder also made vitalcontributions to the progress of modern biblical scholarship.1. Life and Works2. Philosophical Style3. General Program in Philosophy4. Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation5. Role in the Birth of Linguistics and Anthropology6. Philosophy of Mind7. Aesthetics8. Philosophy of History9. Political Philosophy10. Philosophy of ReligionBibliography Primary Texts Translations Secondary literature in German Secondary literature in English Other Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. Life and WorksJohann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) was born in Mohrungen inEast Prussia. His father was a school teacher and he grew up in humblecircumstances. In 1762 he enrolled at the University ofKönigsberg, where he studied with Kant, who accorded him specialprivileges because of his unusual intellectual abilities. At thisperiod he also began a lifelong friendship with the irrationalistphilosopher Hamann. In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up aschool-teaching position in Riga. There he wrote the programmatic essayHow Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefitof the People (1765); published his first major work, on thephilosophy of language and literature, the Fragments on RecentGerman Literature (1767-8); and also published an important workin aesthetics, the Critical Forests (1769). In 1769 heresigned his position and travelled — first to France, and thento Strasbourg, where he met, and had a powerful impact on, the youngGoethe. In 1771 he won a prize from the Berlin Academy for hisbest-known work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on theOrigin of Language (published 1772). From 1771-6 he served ascourt preacher to the ruling house in Bückeburg. The mostimportant work from this period is his first major essay on thephilosophy of history, This Too a Philosophy of History for theFormation of Humanity (1774). In 1776, partly thanks to Goethe'sinfluence, he was appointed General Superintendant of the Lutheranclergy in Weimar, a post he kept for the rest of his life. During thisperiod he published an important essay in the philosophy of mind,On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778); aseminal work concerning the Old Testament, On the Spirit of HebrewPoetry (1782-3); his well-known longer work on the philosophy ofhistory, the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity(1784-91); an influential essay in the philosophy of religion, God.Some Conversations (1787); a work largely on political philosophy,written in response to the French Revolution, the Letters for theAdvancement of Humanity (1793-7); a series of ChristianWritings (1794-8) concerned with the New Testament; and two worksopposing Kant's critical philosophy, the Metacritique (1799)(directed against the theoretical philosophy of the Critique ofPure Reason) and the Calligone (1800) (directed againstthe aesthetics of the Critique of Judgment). In addition tothe works just mentioned, Herder also wrote many others during hiscareer.2. Philosophical StyleIn certain ways Herder's philosophical texts are easier to read thanothers from the period. For example, he avoids technical jargon, writesin a manner that is lively and rich in examples rather than dry andabstract, and has no large, complex system for the reader to keep trackof. But his texts also have certain peculiarities which can impede aproper understanding and appreciation of his thought, and it isimportant to be alerted to these. To begin with, Herder's writing often seems emotionaland grammatically undisciplined in ways that might perhaps be expectedin casual speech but not in philosophical texts. This is intentional.Indeed, Herder sometimes deliberately “roughed up” material in thisdirection between drafts. When writing in this way he is in fact oftenusing grammatical-rhetorical figures which can easily look like merecarelessness to an untutored eye but which receive high literarysanction from classical sources and are employed by him artfully (e.g.anacoluthon). Moreover, he has serious philosophical reasons forwriting in this way rather than in the manner of conventional academicprose, including the following: (1) This promises to make his writingmore broadly accessible and interesting to people — a decidedlynon-trivial goal for him, since he believes it to be an essential partof philosophy's vocation to have a broad social impact. (2) One of hiscentral theses in the philosophy of mind holds that thought is not andshould not be separate from volition, or affect, that types of thinkingwhich aspire to exclude affect are inherently distorting and inferior.Standard academic writing has this vice, whereas spontaneous speech,and writing which imitates it, do not. (3) Herder is opposed to anygrammatical or lexical straightjacketing of language, any slavishobedience to grammar books and dictionaries. In Herder's view, suchstraightjacketing is inimical, not only to linguistic creativity andinventiveness, but also (and much worse), because thought isessentially dependent on and confined in its scope by language, therebyto creativity and inventiveness in thought itself. Another peculiarity of Herder's philosophy is itsunsystematic nature. This is again deliberate. For Herder islargely hostile towards systematicity in philosophy (a fact reflectedboth in explicit remarks and in many of his titles: Fragments… , Ideas … , etc.). He is in particular hostileto the ambitious sort of systematicity aspired to in the tradition ofSpinoza, Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: the ideal of acomprehensive theory whose parts display some sort of strict overallpattern of derivation. He has compelling reasons for this hostility:(1) He is very skeptical that such systematic designs can be made towork (as opposed to creating, through illicit means, anillusion that they do so). (2) He believes that suchsystem-building leads to a premature closure of inquiry, and inparticular to the disregarding or distorting of new empirical evidence.Scrutiny of such systems amply bears out these concerns. Herder'swell-grounded hostility to this type of systematicity established animportant countertradition in German philosophy (which subsequentlyincluded e.g. F. Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein). On the other hand, unlike his friend Hamann,Herder is in favor of “systematicity” in a more modest sense:the ideal of a theory which is self-consistent and maximally supportedby argument. He by no means always achieves this ideal (interpretinghim therefore calls for more selectivity and reconstruction than is thecase with some philosophers). However, his failures to do so arefrequently more apparent than real: First, in many cases where he mayseem to be guilty of inconsistency he really is not. For he is oftendeveloping philosophical dialogues between two or more opposingviewpoints, in which cases it would clearly be a mistake to accuse himof inconsistency in any usual or pejorative sense. And (less obviously)in many other cases he is in effect still working in thisdialogue-mode, only without bothering to distribute the positions amongdifferent interlocutors explicitly, and so is again really innocent ofinconsistency (examples of this occur in How Philosophy andThis Too). Moreover, he has serious motives for using thismethod of (implicit) dialogue: (1) Sometimes his motive is simply thatwhen dealing with religiously or politically delicate matters itpermits him to state his views but without quite stating them as hisown and therefore without inviting trouble. But there are alsophilosophically deeper motives: (2) He takes over from the precriticalKant an idea (inspired by ancient skepticism) that the best way for thephilosopher to pursue the truth is by setting contrary views on asubject into opposition with one another in order to advance towards,and hopefully attain, the truth through their mutual testing andmodification. (3) Also, he develops a more original variant of thatidea on the socio-historical plane: analogously, the way for humankindas a whole to attain the elusive goal of truth is through an ongoingcontest between opposing positions, in the course of which the bestones will eventually win out (this idea anticipates, and inspired, acentral thesis of J.S. Mill's On Liberty). This yields afurther motive for the dialogue-method (even where it does not leadHerder himself to any definite conclusion), in effect warranting therhetorical question, And what does it matter to the cause of humankindand its discovery of truth whether those various opposing positions areadvanced by different people or by the same person? Second,Herder's appearance of neglecting to give arguments is often, rather, aprincipled rejection of arguments of certain sorts. Forexample, he has a general commitment to empiricism and againstapriorism in philosophy which leads him to avoid familiar sorts ofapriorist arguments in philosophy; and a commitment to non-cognitivismin ethics which leads him to refrain from familiar sorts of cognitivistarguments in ethics.3. General Program in PhilosophyHamann's influence on Herder's best thought has been greatlyexaggerated by some of the secondary literature (e.g. Berlin). ButKant's was early, fundamental, and enduring. However, the Kant whoinfluenced Herder in this way was the precritical Kant of theearly and middle 1760's, not the critical Kant (against whom Herderlater engaged in the — rather distracting and ineffective —public polemics of the Metacritique and theCalligone). Some of Kant's key positions in the 1760's,sharply contrasting with ones which he would later adopt in thecritical period, were: a (Pyrrhonist-influenced) skepticism aboutmetaphysics; a form of empiricism; and a (Hume-influenced)non-cognitivism in ethics. Herder took over these positions in the1760's and retained them throughout his career. It should by no meansbe assumed that this debt to the early Kant is a debt to aphilosophically inferior Kant, though; a good case could bemade for the very opposite. Herder's 1765 essay How Philosophy is akey text for understanding both his debt to Kant and the broadorientation of his philosophy. The essay was written under stronginfluence from Kant, especially, it seems, Kant's 1766 essay Dreamsof a Spirit Seer, which Kant sent Herder prior to itspublication. Herder's essay answers a prize question set by asociety in Bern: “How can the truths of philosophy become moreuniversal and useful for the benefit of the people?” This question wasconceived in the spirit of the Popularphilosophie that wascompeting with school-philosophy in the German-speaking world at thetime. Kant himself tended to identify with Popularphilosophieat this period, and Herder's selection of this question shows him doingso as well, though in his case the identification would last alifetime. Philosophy should become relevant and useful for the peopleas a whole — this is a basic ideal of Herder's philosophy. Largely in the service of this ideal, Herder'sessay argues in favor of two sharp turns in philosophy, turns whichwould again remain fundamental throughout the rest of his career. Thefirst involves a rejection of traditional metaphysics, and closelyfollows an argument of Kant's in Dreams of a Spirit Seer.Herder's case is roughly this: (1) Traditional metaphysics, byundertaking to transcend experience (or strictly speaking, and a littlemore broadly, “healthy understanding,” which includes, in addition toempirical knowledge, also ordinary morality, intuitive logic, andmathematics), succumbs to unresolvable contradictions between claims,and hence to the Pyrrhonian skeptical problem of an equal plausibilityon both sides requiring a suspension of judgment. Moreover (Herder goeson to add in the Fragments), given the truth of a broadlyempiricist theory of concepts, much of the terminology of traditionalmetaphysics turns out to lack the basis in experience that is requiredin order even to be meaningful, and hence is meaningless (the illusionof meaningfulness arising through the role of language, whichspins on, creating illusions of meaning, even after the empiricalconditions of meaning have been left behind). (2) Traditionalmetaphysics is not only, for these reasons, useless; it is alsoharmful, because it distracts its adherents from the matterswhich should be their focus: empirical nature and human society. (3) Bycontrast, empirical knowledge (or strictly speaking, and a bit morebroadly, “healthy understanding”) is free of these problems. Philosophyshould therefore be based on and continuous with this. Herder's second sharp turn concerns ethics. Herehe is again indebted to the precritical Kant, but he also goes somewhatfurther beyond him. Herder's basic claims are these: (1) Morality isfundamentally more a matter of sentiments than of cognitions. (Herder'ssentimentalism is not crude, however; in subsequent works such as theCritical Forests he emphasizes that cognition plays animportant role in morality as well.) (2) Cognitivist theories ofmorality — of the sort espoused in this period by Rationalistssuch as Wolff, but also by many other philosophers before and since(e.g. Plato and the critical Kant) — are therefore based on amistake, and so useless as means of moral enlightenment or improvement.(3) But (and here Herder's theory moves beyond Kant's), worse thanthat, they are actually harmful to morality, because theyweaken the moral sentiments on which morality really rests. In ThisToo and On the Cognition Herder suggests several reasonswhy: (a) Abstract theorizing weakens sentiments generally, andhence moral sentiments in particular (this is perhaps Herder's leastinteresting reason). (b) The cognitivists' theories turn out to be sostrikingly implausible that they bring morality itself intodisrepute, people reacting to them roughly along the lines: If this isthe best that even the experts can say in explanation andjustification of morality, then morality must certainly be a sham, andI may as well ignore it and do as I please. (c) Such theories distractpeople from recognizing, and working to reinforce, the realfoundations of morality: not an imaginary theoretical insight of somesort, but a set of causal mechanisms for inculcating and sustaining themoral sentiments. (4) More positively, Herder accordingly turns insteadto discovering theoretically and promoting in practice just such a setof causal mechanisms. In How Philosophy he mainly emphasizesforms of education and an emotive type of preaching in this connection.But elsewhere he identifies and promotes a much broader set ofmechanisms as well, including: the influence of morally exemplaryindividuals; morally relevant laws; and literature (along with otherart forms). Literature is a special focus of Herder's theory andpractice here. He sees literature as exerting a moral influence inseveral ways — e.g. not only through fairly direct moralinstruction, but also through the literary perpetuation (or creation)of morally exemplary individuals (e.g. Jesus in the New Testament), andthe exposure of readers to other people's inner lives and a consequentenhancement of their sympathies for them (a motive which lies behindHerder's epoch-making publication of the Volkslieder (1774), acollection of translations of popular songs from peoples around theworld). Herder's development of this theory and practice of moralpedagogy was lifelong and tireless.4. Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and TranslationOn the Origin from 1772 is Herder's best known work in thephilosophy of language. However, it is in certain respectsunrepresentative and inferior in comparison with other works, such asthe Fragments and On the Cognition, and should notmonopolize attention. On the Origin is primarily concernedwith the question whether the origin of language can be explained inpurely natural, human terms or (as Süßmilch had recentlyargued) only in terms of a divine source. Herder argues in support ofthe former position and against the latter. His argument is quitepersuasive (especially when supplemented on its positive side from theFragments). But this argument is unlikely to constitute amodern philosopher's main reason for interest in Herder's views aboutlanguage — deriving its zest, as it does, from a religiousbackground that is, or should be, no longer ours. Of far greater modern relevance are three relatedtheories which Herder develops: a philosophy of language concerning thevery nature of language, thought, and meaning; a theory ofinterpretation; and a theory of translation. These theories are foundscattered through a large number of Herder's works. The following aretheir main features: Philosophy of language: language,thought, meaning. Already in the mid-1760s — forexample, in On Diligence in Several Learned Languages (1764)and the Fragments (1767-8) — Herder began advancingthree fundamental theses in this area: (1) Thought is essentially dependent on, andbounded in scope by, language — i.e. one can only think if onehas a language, and one can only think what one can expresslinguistically. (To his considerable credit, Herder normally refrainsfrom a more extreme, but philosophically untenable, version of thisthesis, favored by some of his successors, which simplyidentifies thought with language, or with inner language.) (2) Meanings or concepts are to be equated— not with the sorts of items, in principle autonomous oflanguage, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equatedthem, e.g. the referents involved, Platonic forms, or empiricist ideas,but instead — with usages of words. (3) Conceptualization is intimately bound up with(perceptual and affective) sensation. More precisely, according to whatmight be called Herder's quasi-empiricist theory of concepts, sensationis the source and basis of all our concepts, but we are able to achievenon-empirical concepts by means of a sort of metaphorical extensionfrom the empirical ones — so that all of our concepts ultimatelydepend in one way or another on sensation. (On the Cognitioncontains one of Herder's clearer statements of this position.) The first two of these theses dramaticallyoverturned the sort of dualistic picture of the relation betweenlanguage and thought/meaning that had predominated during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and thereby essentially foundedthe philosophy of language as we still know it today. Hamann has oftenbeen credited with introducing something like these two revolutionarytheses and then passing them on to Herder (e.g. by Berlin). But that isa mistake; Herder was already committed to them in the mid-1760's,Hamann only much later and under Herder's influence. The third thesis,quasi-empiricism, would be far less widely accepted by philosopherstoday. However, it may very well be correct too (contrary to firstappearances, it need not conflict with thesis (2), the equation ofmeanings with word-usages; and the most likely modern ground forskepticism about it, a Fregean-Wittgensteinian anti-psychologismconcerning meaning that is popular today, may well be mistaken). Inaddition to making a fundamental contribution to the philosophy oflanguage, these three theses also underpin Herder's theories ofinterpretation and translation (as we are about to see). Theory of interpretation.Herder's theory of interpretation rests on (and also in a way supports)a certain epoch-making insight: (1) Whereas such eminent Enlightenmentphilosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire had still believed that, asHume put it, “mankind are so much the same in all times and places thathistory informs us of nothing new or strange,” Herder discovered, or atleast saw more clearly than anyone before him, that this was false,that peoples from different historical periods and cultures often varytremendously in their concepts, beliefs, (perceptual andaffective) sensations, and so forth. He also noted that similar, albeitusually less dramatic, variations occur even between individuals withina single period and culture. (These two positions are prominent in manyof Herder's works, including e.g. On the Change of Taste(1766) and On the Cognition.) Let us call this twofoldprinciple the principle of radical difference. (2) Given this principle of radical difference,and the gulf that consequently often initially divides an interpreter'sown thought from that of the person he wants to interpret,interpretation is often an extremely difficult task, requiringextraordinary efforts on the part of the interpreter. (Note that, tohis credit, Herder does not draw the more extreme — and misguided— conclusion to which some recent philosophers have been temptedthat it would be impossible.) (3) In particular, theinterpreter often faces, and needs to resist, a temptation falsely toassimilate the thought which he is interpreting to someoneelse's, especially his own. (This theme is prominent in ThisToo, for example.) How, given these challenges, is the interpretersupposed to achieve accurate interpretation? Herder makes severalpoints in this connection: (4) His three above-mentioned theses in thephilosophy of language undergird his whole theory of interpretation andentail certain aspects of the answer to the question just posed. It isan implication of his thesis that all thought is essentially dependenton and bounded by language that an interpreted subject's language is ina certain sense bound to be a reliable indicator of the nature of histhought, so that the interpreter need not have worries about theinterpreted subject entertaining ineffable thoughts or thoughts whosecharacter is systematically distorted by his expression of them inlanguage. It is an implication of Herder's thesis that meaning consistsin word-usage that interpretation essentially and fundamentallyrequires pinning down an interpreted subject's word-usages, and therebyhis meanings. Finally, it is an implication of Herder'squasi-empiricist thesis concerning concepts that an interpreter'sunderstanding of an interpreted subject's concepts must involve somehowrecapturing their basis in the interpreted subject's sensation. Herder also espouses three further basicprinciples in interpretation-theory which contribute to answering thequestion posed above: (5) A principle of secularism ininterpretation: Contrary to a practice that was still common inHerder's day in relation to the Bible, the interpretation of texts mustnever rely on religious assumptions or means, even when the texts aresacred ones, but must instead rely only on secular ones. (Herderalready advances this principle forcefully in works from the1760's.) (6) A principle of genericinterpretation. In addition to the nature of a work's meanings,interpretation must also pay close attention to the nature of itsgenre (i.e. roughly, a set of general purposes and rules whichit aims to realize). As in the case of meanings, genres vary from ageto age, culture to culture, and even individual to individual, and theinterpreter therefore faces, and needs to resist, constant temptationsfalsely to assimilate a work's genre to other ones with which he ismore familiar (e.g. Shakespearean “tragedy” to Sophoclean “tragedy,” orvice versa). (This principle is already prominent in works from the1760's, but finds its classic statement in the essayShakespeare from 1773.) (7) A principle of methodologicalempiricism in interpretation: interpretation must always be basedon, and kept strictly faithful to, exact observations of relevantlinguistic (and other) evidence. (This principle is again alreadyprominent in the 1760's, e.g. in the Fragments and OnThomas Abbt's Writings (1768).) Beyond this, though, Herder also advances afurther set of interpretive principles which are liable to sound muchmore “touchy-feely” at first hearing (the first of them ratherliterally so!), but which are in fact on the contrary quite“hard-nosed”: (8) Herder proposes (e.g. prominently in ThisToo) that the way to bridge radical difference when interpretingis through Einfühlung, “feeling one's way in.” Thisproposal has often been thought (e.g. by Meinecke) to mean that theinterpreter should perform some sort of psychological self-projectiononto texts. However, that is emphatically not Herder's idea— for that would amount to just the sort of distortingassimilation of the thought in a text to one's own which he is aboveall concerned to avoid. As can be seen from This Too,what he has in mind is instead an arduous process ofhistorical-philological inquiry. What, though, more specifically, isthe cash value of his metaphor of Einfühlung? It has atleast five components, and they are quite various in nature: (a) Note,first, that the metaphor implies (once again) that the interpretertypically faces radical difference, a gulf, between his own mentalityand that of the interpreted subject, making interpretation a difficult,laborious task (it implies that there is an “in” there that theinterpreter must carefully and laboriously “feel his way into”). (b) Italso implies more specifically (This Too shows) that the“feeling one's way in” should include thorough research not only into atext's use of language but also into its historical, geographical, andsocial context. (c) It also implies a claim — based on Herder'squasi-empiricist theory of concepts — that in order to understandan interpreted subject's language the interpreter must achieve animaginative reproduction of his (perceptual and affective) sensations.(d) It also implies (This Too again shows) that hostility inan interpreter towards the people he interprets will generally distorthis interpretation, and must therefore be avoided (note, though, thatHerder is equally opposed to excessive identification withthem for the same reason). (e) Finally, it also implies that theinterpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage,contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where itachieves something like the same immediacy and automaticness that ithad for a text's original author and audience when theyunderstood the text in light of such things (so that it acquires forhim, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feelingthan a cognition). (9) In addition, Herder insists (e.g. in theCritical Forests) on a principle of holism ininterpretation. This principle rests on several motives, including thefollowing: (a) Pieces of text taken in isolation are typicallyambiguous in various ways (in relation to background linguisticpossibilities). In order to resolve such ambiguities, one needs theguidance provided by surrounding text. (b) That problem arisesonce a range of possible linguistic meanings, etc. isestablished for a piece of text. But in the case of a text separatedfrom the interpreter by radical difference, knowledge of such a rangeitself presents a problem. How, for example, is he to pin down therange of possible meanings, i.e. possible usages, for a word? Thisrequires a collation of the word's actual uses and an inference fromthese to the rules that govern them, i.e. to their usages, a collationwhich in turn requires looking to remoter contexts in which the sameword occurs (other parts of the text, other works in the author'scorpus, works by other contemporaries, etc.), or in short: holism. (c)Authors typically write a work as a whole, conveying ideas notonly in its particular parts but also through the way in which thesefit together to make up a whole (whether in instantiation of a generalgenre or in a manner more specific to the particular work).Consequently, readings which fail to interpret the work as a whole willmiss essential aspects of its meaning — both the ideas inquestion themselves and meanings of the particular parts on which theyshed important light. (10) In On Thomas Abbt's Writings,On the Cognition, and elsewhere Herder makes one of his mostimportant innovations: interpretation must supplement its focus onword-usage with attention to authorial psychology. Herderimplies several reasons for this: (a) As already mentioned, he embracesa quasi-empiricist theory of concepts which implies that in order tounderstand an author's concepts an interpreter must imaginativelyrecapture his relevant sensations. (b) As Quentin Skinner has recentlyemphasized, understanding the linguistic meaning of an utterance ortext is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for understandingit tout court — one needs, in addition, to establish theauthor's illocutionary intentions. For example, I meet astranger by a frozen lake who tells me, “The ice is thin over there”; Iunderstand his linguistic meaning perfectly; but is he simply informingme?, warning me?, threatening me?, joking? … (c) Skinner tendsto imply that one can determine linguistic meanings prior toestablishing authorial intentions. That may sometimes be so(e.g. in the example just given). But is it generally? Herderimplies not. And this seems right, because commonly the linguisticmeaning of a formula is ambiguous (in terms of background linguisticpossibilities), and in order to identify the relevant meaning one mustturn, not only (as already mentioned) to larger bodies of text, butalso to hypotheses, largely derived therefrom, concerning the author'sintentions (e.g. concerning the subject-matter he intends to treat).This is a further reason why interpreters must invoke psychology. (d)Herder also (as already mentioned) implies that an author often conveysideas in his work, not explicitly in its verbal expressions, but rathervia these and the way in which they are put together to form a textualwhole (whether in instantiation of a general genre or in a manner morespecific to the particular text). It is necessary for the interpreterto capture these ideas, both for their own sakes and because doing sois frequently essential for resolving ambiguities at the level ofparticular verbal expressions. (e) Herder also refers to the secondlimb of his doctrine of radical difference — individualvariations in mode of thought even within a single period and culture— as a source of the need for psychological interpretation. Whydoes any special need arise here? Part of the answer seems to be thatwhen one is dealing, for example, with a concept that is distinctive ofa particular author rather than common to a whole culture, onetypically faces a problem of relative paucity and lack ofcontextual variety in the actual uses of the word available asempirical evidence from which to infer the rule for use, or usage,constitutive of its meaning. Hence one needs extra help — and theauthor's general psychology may provide this. (11) In On Thomas Abbt's Writings,On the Cognition, and elsewhere Herder also indicates thatinterpretation, especially in its psychological aspect, requires theuse of divination. This is another principle which is liableto sound disturbingly “touchy-feely” at first hearing — inparticular, it can sound as though Herder means some sort of propheticprocess that has a religious basis and is perhaps even infallible.However, what he really has in mind here is (far more sensibly) aprocess of hypothesis, based on meager empirical evidence, but alsogoing well beyond it, and therefore vulnerable to subsequentfalsification, and abandonment or revision if falsified. Finally, Herder also makes an importantadditional point concerning the general nature of interpretation: (12) After Herder, the question was raisedwhether interpretation was a science or an art. Herder does notexplicitly address this question. But his strong inclination wouldclearly be to say that it is like rather than unlike naturalscience (pace a popular reading in the German secondary literature,developed especially by Irmischer, which sees him as a sort ofproto-Gadamer). He has several reasons for this inclination: (a) Heassumes (as did virtually everyone at this period) that the meaning ofan author's text is as much an objective matter as thesubjects addressed by the natural scientist. (b) Thedifficulty of interpretation which results from radicaldifference, and the consequent need for a methodologicallysubtle and laborious approach to interpretation in manycases, make for further points of similarity between interpretation andnatural science. (c) The essential role of “divination,” quahypothesis, in interpretation constitutes a further point ofsimilarity between interpretation and natural science. Moreover, (d)even the subject-matter of interpretation is not, in Herder's view,sharply different from that dealt with by natural science: the latterinvestigates physical processes in nature in order to determine theforces that underlie them, but similarly interpretation investigateshuman verbal (and non-verbal) physical behavior in order to determinethe forces that underlie it (Herder explicitly identifyingmental conditions, including conceptual understanding, as“forces”). Herder's theory of interpretation had an enormousbeneficial impact on subsequent hermeneutics. His theory was taken overalmost in its entirety by Schleiermacher in the latter's much morefamous hermeneutics lectures, delivered during the first third of thenineteenth century. Admittedly, Schleiermacher's theory is alsodirectly influenced by sources which he shares with Herder, especiallyErnesti. However, such fundamental and famous positions in it as hissupplementing of “linguistic” with “psychological” interpretation andhis identification of “divination” as the method pertaining especiallyto the latter are due entirely to Herder. Moreover, where Herder andSchleiermacher do occasionally disagree on issues concerninginterpretation, Herder's position almost always turns out to bephilosophically superior on close inspection. By decisively influencingSchleiermacher's hermeneutic theory Herder also exercised an indirectdecisive influence on the hermeneutic theory of Schleiermacher'sgreatest pupil Böckh, whose Encyclopedia and Methodology ofthe Philological Sciences (1877) essentially reproducedSchleiermacher's theory with only modest elaborations, and became thestandard methodological work for classical scholars. Moreover,Böckh's most significant departure from Schleiermacher's theory,his supplementing of the aspects of interpretation which Schleiermacherhad already distinguished with generic interpretation, ineffect simply takes up and incorporates the strong emphasis that Herderhad already placed on this. Theory of translation. Thefollowing are some key theses concerning translation which Herderalready developed in the Fragments of 1767-8, and which wouldsubsequently have an enormous beneficial impact on both the theory andpractice of translation in Germany: (1) Translation faces a deep challenge due to thefact that there exist radical mental differences — including inparticular, conceptual differences — between different historicalperiods and cultures, and even to some extent between individualswithin a single period and culture. (2) Consequently, translation is in many cases anextremely difficult undertaking. (3) Consequently again, translation commonlyconfronts a choice between two possible approaches: what Herder calls a“lax” approach (i.e. one in which the language and thought of thetarget text are allowed to diverge rather freely from those of thesource text) and an “accommodating” approach (i.e. one in which thelanguage and thought of the target text are made to accommodate tothose of the source text). (4) Herder firmly rejects the former approach,largely because it entails sacrificing semantic faithfulness (arguablythe most fundamental and commonly accepted goal of translation). (5) He in particular rejects a certain rationalefor it which Dryden and others had advocated, namely that a translationshould provide the work that the author would have written had hisnative language not been the one he actually had but instead the targetlanguage. Herder objects to this that in such a case as that oftranslating Homer, for example, the author could not havewritten his work in the modern target language. (6) So Herder urges that the translator shouldinstead err in the other direction, towards “accommodating.” But how is this to be achieved? (7) One necessary means to achieving it whichHerder identifies is interpretive expertise in the translator.So Herder requires this. (8) Another, and much less obvious, means is acertain vitally important technique which Herder develops forovercoming conceptual discrepancies between the source language and thetarget language. That might seem simply impossible (indeed, some recentphilosophers, such as Donald Davidson, have mistakenly assumed that itwould be). But Herder, drawing on his novel philosophy of language,finds a solution: Since meanings or concepts are word-usages, in orderto reproduce (or at least optimally approximate) in the target languagea concept from the source language which the target language currentlylacks, the translator should take the most closely corresponding wordin the target language and “bend” its usage for the course of thetranslation in such a way as to make it mimic the usage of the sourceword. This technique essentially requires that the source word betranslated uniformly throughout its multiple occurrences in a work (andthat the single target word chosen not be used to translate any othersource words). Such an approach is far from being a commonplace intranslation practice, so far indeed that it is rarely actually found intranslations. However, Herder scrupulously uses it in his owntranslations, as does an important subsequent tradition which hasfollowed him in espousing it (including Schleiermacher, Rosenzweig, andBuber). (9) Herder is well aware that using this“bending” approach will inevitably make for translations which are moredifficult to read than those that can be produced by a more “lax”method (e.g. by using multiple words in the target language totranslate a single word in the source language). However, he considersthis price worth paying in order to achieve maximal semanticaccuracy. (10) Another key means which Herder espouses isto complement the goal of semantic faithfulness with that offaithfulness to the musical form of a literary work (e.g.meter and rhyme). His motives for doing this are partly extra-semantic:in particular, aesthetic fidelity, and fidelity to the exact expressionof feelings which is effected by means of a literary work's musicalfeatures. But they are also in part semantic: in his view, musical formand semantic content are strictly inseparable, so that fully realizingeven the goal of semantic faithfulness in fact requires that atranslation also be faithful to the work's musical form. Why doesHerder believe that form and content are inseparable in this way? Hehas two main reasons: First, musical forms often carry their ownmeanings (think, for example, of the humorous and bawdy connotations ofthe meter/rhyme-scheme of a limerick). Second, as was recentlymentioned, Herder believes that musical form is essential to an exactexpression of feelings; but, as we saw earlier, he also thinks thatfeelings are internal to meanings (this is the force of hisquasi-empiricism in the philosophy of language); so that reproducing awork's musical form in translation turns out to be essential even foraccurately conveying the meanings of its words and statements intranslation. (11) In addition to being necessary in order toachieve as fully as possible translation's traditional fundamental goalof exactly reproducing meaning (as well as aesthetic fidelity andfidelity in the expression of feelings), the sort of “accommodating”translation that has just been explained is also necessary, in Herder'sview, in order to achieve certain further important goals. One of theselies in a potential that translation has for enriching the targetlanguage (both conceptually and in musical forms). Herder arguesconvincingly that, in contrast to “accommodating” translation, “lax”translation forgoes this opportunity. (12) Another of these further goals lies inexpressing, and cultivating in the translation's readership, acosmopolitan respect for the Other — something which requiresthat the translation reproduce the Other's meanings (and musical forms)as accurately as possible. (13) Herder holds that the preferred“accommodating” sort of translation requires the translator to be in asense a “creative genius,” i.e. skilled and creative enough to satisfythe heavy demands which this sort of translation imposes on him, inparticular creative enough to invent the needed novel conceptual andmusical forms in the target language. (14) Despite his commitment to the centralimportance of this sort of translation (largely, as we have seen, dueto its necessity for achieving translation's traditional fundamentalgoal of faithfully reproducing meaning), Herder is also in the endquite liberal about the forms that translation (or interlinguistictransfer more generally, including for example what he distinguishesfrom “translation [Übersetzung]” proper as “imitation[Nachbildung]”) can legitimately take, allowing that itspossible forms are quite various, and that which is most appropriate ina particular case will depend largely on the author or genre inquestion and on the translator's purposes. Herder's theory of translation (as justsummarized), and his demonstration of its viability in practice, forexample in his sample translations of Shakespeare in theVolkslieder, had an enormous beneficial impact on a wholegeneration of German translation theorists and practitioners —including Voss (the great translator of Homer), A.W. Schlegel (thetranslation theorist, and great translator of Shakespeare), Goethe (animportant theorist of translation), W. von Humboldt (a significanttranslator and theorist of translation), and Schleiermacher (animportant theorist of translation, and Germany's great translator ofthe Platonic dialogues). Herder's principle of complementing semanticfaithfulness with faithfulness in the reproduction of musical form hadan especially powerful impact on these successors. His principle of“bending” word-usages in order to cope with conceptualincommensurabilities was less widely followed, but was adopted bySchleiermacher among others. Herder's philosophies of language,interpretation, and translation certainly owe significant debts topredecessors — for example, his philosophy of language isindebted to Leibniz and Wolff, his theory of interpretation to Ernesti,and his theory of translation to Abbt. However, even his borrowingsincorporate important refinements, and his overall contribution isenormous.5. Role in the Birth of Linguistics and AnthropologyHerder's philosophies of language and interpretation made animportant contribution to the birth of two whole academic disciplineswhich we today take for granted. Through emphasizing thought'sessential dependence on and bounding by language, the radicallydifferent forms of thought supported by different languages, the needfor a rigorously empirical approach to the investigation of suchdifferences, and in other ways, Herder made a fundamental contributionto the birth of modern linguistics. That birth occurred above all intwo thinkers who were both profoundly influenced by Herder: F.Schlegel, whose main work in this connection is his On the Languageand Wisdom of the Indians (1808), and W. von Humboldt, whose mainwork in this connection is his The Diversity of Human LanguageStructures and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind(1836). Schlegel and von Humboldt were in particular both fundamentallymotivated by the Herder-inspired insight that because of thought'sessential dependence on and bounding by language and the radicallydifferent ways of thinking supported by different languages, theempirical study of languages can afford a sort of window onto theradically different ways of thinking in question. Less obviously, but no less importantly, Herder'stheories about language and interpretation (together with hisdistinctive values, especially the pluralistic cosmopolitanismdiscussed later in this article) also played a fundamental role in thebirth of modern anthropology. Several of Herder's writings, especiallythe 10th Collection of the Letters, contain a virtualblueprint for that future discipline. His specific contributions weremany and deep; but they include, for example, his principle of radicaldifference, his principle of thought's essential dependence on andbounding by language, and his principle of holistic interpretation. Thechannels through which his contributions influenced the development ofthe discipline include the following. Franz Boas, the father ofAmerican anthropology, was German by birth and education, and had hisintellectual roots in the German tradition, including not only Herderhimself (whom he sometimes mentions by name) but also other Germans whowere either directly or indirectly influenced by Herder in profoundways, such as W. von Humboldt, Steinthal, Bastian, Dilthey, and W.Wundt. Through Boas, this intellectual inheritance was passed on to hisstudents in American anthropology (including Sapir, Lowie, Kroeber,Benedict, and Mead), and then to their students. On the other side ofthe Atlantic, Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of modern Britishanthropology as a discipline grounded in intensive fieldwork, had deepGerman intellectual roots that lead back to Herder as well. Malinowskisometimes explicitly mentions Herder and Herder's follower W. vonHumboldt in a positive way. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.Malinowski's father, who held the chair in Slavonic philology at thesame university Malinowski attended in Poland, was a German-trainedexpert in philology and comparative grammar with a special interest incollecting folksongs and folklore — an intellectual profile whichimmediately places him under Herder's sphere of influence. Also,Malinowski himself studied in Leipzig with W. Wundt, the author of themassive work Völkerpsychologie (1900-9), and even beganwriting a dissertation there on Völkerpsychologie. NowWundt's work has deep Herderian roots. The discipline ofVölkerpsychologie had originally been founded by Lazarusand Steinthal under the influence of Herder and W. von Humboldt. And itwould hardly be an exaggeration to say that Wundt's work is essentiallyjust a sort of grand re-writing of Herder's Ideas. In short,Malinowski was deeply steeped in Herder's influence. He subsequentlypassed on his Herderian intellectual legacy to his students in Britishanthropology (including Evans-Pritchard, Firth, and Leach).6. Philosophy of MindIn On the Cognition of 1778 and elsewhere Herder alsodevelops an extremely interesting and influential position in thephilosophy of mind. The following are some of its central features. Herder's position is uncompromisinglynaturalistic and anti-dualistic in intent. In Onthe Cognition he tries to erase the traditional sharp divisionbetween the mental and the physical in two specific ways: First, headvances a theory that minds consist in forces[Kräfte] which manifest themselves in people's bodilybehavior — just as physical nature contains forces which manifestthemselves in the behavior of bodies. (The general notion of mental“forces” was not entirely new with Herder, but can already be foundbefore him in Rationalists such as Wolff and Süßmilch.) Heis officially agnostic on the question of what force is, except forconceiving it as something apt to produce a type of bodily behavior,and as a real source thereof (not merely something reducible thereto).This, strictly speaking, frees his theory from some commoncharacterizations and objections (e.g. vitalism). But it also leaves itwith enough content to have great virtues over rival theories: (1) Thetheory ties mental states conceptually to corresponding types of bodilybehavior — which seems correct, and therefore marks a point ofsuperiority over dualistic theories, and indeed over mind-brainidentity theories as well. (2) On the other hand, the theory alsoavoids reducing mental states to bodily behavior — whichagain seems correct, in view of such obvious facts as that we can be,and indeed often are, in particular mental states that happen toreceive no behavioral manifestation, and which hence marks a point ofsuperiority over outright behaviorist theories. Second, Herder also tries to explain the mind interms of the phenomenon of irritation [Reiz], aphenomenon which had recently been identified by Haller, and which isparadigmatically exemplified by muscle fibers contracting in responseto direct physical stimuli and relaxing upon their removal — inother words, a phenomenon which, while basically physiological, alsoseems to exhibit a transition to mental characteristics. There is anambiguity in Herder's position here: Usually, he wants to resistphysicalist reductionism, and so would resist saying that irritation ispurely physiological and fully constitutes mental states. However, inthe 1775 draft of On the Cognition and even in some parts ofthe published version this is his position. And from a modernstandpoint, this is arguably a further virtue of his account (though wewould certainly today want to recast it in terms of different, and morecomplex, physiological processes than irritation). This second line of thought might seem at oddswith the first one (forces). But it need not be. For, given Herder'sofficial agnosticism about what forces are, it could, so to speak, fillin the “black box” of the hypothesized real forces, namely inphysicalist terms. In other words, it turns out (not as a conceptualmatter, but as a contingent one) that the real forces in questionconsist in physiological processes. Herder's philosophy of mind also advances athesis that the mind is a unity, that there is no sharpdivision between its faculties. This thesis contradicts theorists suchas Sulzer and Kant. However, it was not in itself new with Herder,having already been central to Rationalism, especially Wolff. WhereHerder (together with Hamann) is more original is in rejecting theRationalists' reduction of sensation and volition to cognition;establishing the unity thesis in an empirical rather than aprioristway; and adding a normative dimension to it — this is not onlyhow the mind is but also how it ought to be. Thislast feature can sound incoherent, since if the mind is this way by itsvery nature, what sense can there be in prescribing to people that itshould be so rather than otherwise? However, Herder's idea is in factthe coherent one that, while the mind is indeed this way by its verynature, people sometimes behave as though one faculty could beabstracted from another, and try to effect that, and this then leads tovarious malfunctions, and should therefore be avoided. Herder's overall thesis of the mind's unity restson three more specific doctrines concerning intimate mutualinvolvements between mental faculties, and malfunctions that arise fromstriving against these, doctrines which are in large part empiricallymotivated and hence lend the overall thesis a sort of empiricalbasis: A first concerns the relation between thought andlanguage: Not only does language of its very nature express thought(this is an uncontroversial point), but also (as noted earlier) forHerder thought is dependent on and bounded by language. Herder basesthis further claim largely on empirical grounds (e.g. concerning howchildren's thought develops in step with language acquisition). Thenormative aspect of his position here is that attempts (in the mannerof some metaphysics, for example) to cut language free from theconstraints of thought or vice versa lead to nonsense. A second area of intimate mutual involvementconcerns cognition and volition, or affects. The claim that volition isand should be based on cognition is not particularly controversial. ButHerder also argues the converse, that all cognition is and should bebased on volition, on affects — and not only on such relativelyanemic ones as the impulse to know the truth, but also on much lessanemic ones. He is especially concerned to combat the idea thattheoretical work in philosophy or the sciences is or should bedetached from volition, from affects. In his view, it never really iseven when it purports to be, and attempts to make it so merelyimpoverish and weaken it. His grounds for this whole position are againmainly empirical in nature. A third area of intimate mutual involvementconcerns thought and sensation. Conceptualization and belief, on theone hand, and sensation, on the other, are intimately connectedaccording to Herder. Thus, he advances the quasi-empiricist theory ofconcepts mentioned earlier, which entails that all our concepts (andhence also all our beliefs) ultimately depend in one way or another onsensation. But conversely, he also argues (anticipating much importanttwentieth-century work in philosophy) that there is a dependence in theother direction as well, that the character of our sensations dependson our concepts and beliefs. Normatively, he sees attempts to violatethis interdependence as inevitably leading to intellectual malfunction— e.g., as has already been mentioned, he thinks thatmetaphysicians' attempts to cut entirely free from the empirical originof our concepts lead to meaninglessness. His grounds for this wholeposition are again largely empirical in character. In a further seminal move which Herder makes inthe philosophy of mind he argues that (linguistic) meaning isfundamentally social — so that thought and other aspects of humanmental life (since these are essentially articulated in terms ofmeanings), and therefore also the very self (since this is essentiallydependent on thought and other aspects of human mental life, andmoreover defined in its specific identity by theirs), are so too.Herder's version of this position seems to be intended only as anempirically-based causal claim. It has since fathered a long traditionof attempts to generate more ambitious arguments for stronger versionsof the claim that meaning — and hence also thought and the veryself — is at bottom socially constituted (e.g. by Hegel,Wittgenstein, Kripke, Burge, and Brandom). However, it may well be thatthese more ambitious arguments and versions do not work, and thatHerder's version is exactly what should be accepted. Herder also, in tension though not contradictionwith this principle of sociality, holds that (even within a singleperiod and culture) human minds are as a rule deeplyindividual, deeply different from each other — so thatin addition to a generalizing psychology we also need a psychologyoriented to individuality. This is an important idea which has stronglyinfluenced many subsequent continental thinkers (e.g. Schleiermacher,Nietzsche, Proust, Sartre, and Manfred Frank). Herder advances it onlyas an empirical rule of thumb. By contrast, a prominent strand inSchleiermacher and Frank purports to establish it as an a prioriuniversal truth. However, Herder's version is again arguably the moreplausible one. Finally, like predecessors in the Rationalisttradition and Kant, Herder sharply rejects the Cartesian idea of themind's self-transparency — instead insisting that much of whatoccurs in the mind is unconscious, so that self-knowledge is oftendeeply problematic. This is another compelling position which has had astrong influence on subsequent thinkers. This whole Herderian philosophy of mind certainlyowes much to predecessors, especially ones in the Rationalisttradition. But it is in many ways original. The theory is important inits own right. And it exercised an enormous influence on successors(e.g. on Hegel in connection with anti-dualism, the role of physicalbehavior in mental conditions, faculty-unity, and the sociality ofmeaning, thought, and self; on Schleiermacher in connection withanti-dualism and faculty-unity; and on Nietzsche in connection with theinterdependence of cognition and volition, or affects, theindividuality of the mind and the consequent need for anindividualistic psychology, and the mind's lack ofself-transparency).7. AestheticsIn the Critical Forests (1769, though the important fourthpart was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century)Herder initially set out to argue for the following aesthetic theory:whereas music is a mere succession of objects in time, and sculptureand painting are merely spatial, poetry has a sense, a soul, a force;whereas music, sculpture, and painting belong solely to the senses (tohearing, feeling, and vision, respectively), poetry not only depends onthe senses but also relates to the imagination; whereas music,sculpture, and painting employ only natural signs, poetry usesvoluntary and conventional signs. This theory wassubsequently taken over (with only minor modifications) bySchleiermacher in his aesthetics lectures, and it has sometimes beentouted as Herder's main achievement in aesthetics (e.g. by Norton). Butit is a naive theory, and Herder's real achievements in aesthetics areother than and contrary to it. As discussed earlier, Herder's philosophy of languageis committed to the two doctrines that thought is essentially dependenton and bounded by language, and that meaning is word-usage. Thisinvites certain questions: These doctrines plausibly break with anEnlightenment assumption that thought and meaning are in principleautonomous of whatever material, perceptible expressions they mayhappen to receive. Following Charles Taylor, we might call such a moveone to “expressivism.” But what form should expressivism takeexactly? Is the dependence of thought and meaning on externalsymbols strictly one on language (in the usual sense of“language”)? Or is it not rather a dependence on a broader range ofsymbolic media including, besides language, also such things aspainting, sculpture, and music — so that a person might be ableto entertain thoughts which he was not able to express in language butonly in some other symbolic medium? Let us call the former positionnarrow expressivism and the latter broadexpressivism. Also, is Herder's own position narrow expressivism or broadexpressivism? It might seem at first sight that his two doctrinesthemselves already answer this question in favor of narrowexpressivism because of their reference to “language” and“words.” However, matters are not quite so simple. For onething, such terms easily lend themselves to broadened uses which mightinclude media beyond language in the usual sense. For another thing,precisely such a broadening actually occurs in a philosopher closelyconnected with Herder: Hamann. In his Metacritique (1784),Hamann is no less verbally committed to the two doctrines inquestion than Herder. But he embraces broad expressivism. And he doesso quite consistently, because he understands the terms“language” and “word” as they occur in thedoctrines in unusually broad senses — for example, he explicitlyincludes as forms of the “language” on which he saysthought depends not only language in the usual sense but alsopainting, drawing, and music. Nonetheless, Herder's considered positionis in fact the narrow expressivism that his two doctrinesinitially seem to suggest (so that his verbal sharing of them withHamann in fact masks a significant difference of philosophical positionbetween the tthestate of nature, the social contract, natural rights, the general will,and utopias for the future. But again, he has good specific reasons forskepticism about these things. This, then, is the sense in which theobjection is correct; Herder does indeed lack a “political theory” ofthese sorts. But he lacks it on principle, and isarguably quite right to do so. On the other hand, he does have a“political theory” of another, and arguably more valuable, sort. First,consistently with his general empiricism, his position in politicalphilosophy is deeply empirically informed. For instance, as can be seenfrom the Dissertation on the Reciprocal Influence of Government andthe Sciences (1780), his thesis concerning the importance offreedom of thought and expression, and the competition between viewswhich it makes possible, for producing intellectual progress is largelybased on the historical example of ancient Greece and in particularAthens (as contrasted with later societies which lacked the freedom andcompetition in question). And in the 1792 draft of the Lettershe even describes the French Revolution and its attempts to establish amodern democracy as a sort of “experiment” from which we can learn(e.g. whether democracy can be successfully extended to nations thatare much larger than ancient Athens). Second, in conformity with hisgeneral non-cognitivism about morals, he is acutely aware that hispolitical position ultimately rests on moral sentiments — his ownand, for its success, other people's as well. For example, in the 10thCollection of the Letters he emphasizes that people's moral“dispositions” or “feelings” play a fundamental role as requiredsupports for his political position's realization. As has beenmentioned, this standpoint absolves him of the need to do certain sortsof theorizing. However, it also leads him to engage in theorizing ofanother sort, namely theorizing about how, and by which causal means,people's moral sentiments should be molded in order to realize theideals of his political position. His discuy 1778 he extends thisaccount to sculpture as well. Thus in the Plastic of 1778 heabandons the merely sensualistic conception of sculpture that hadpredominated in the Critical Forests and instead argues thatsculpture is essentially expressive of, and therefore needs to beinterpreted by, a soul, but this no longer forces him intounfaithfulness to his principle that thought is dependent on, andbounded by, language, for he now conceives the thoughts expressed bysculpture to have a linguistic source: “The sculptor stands in the darkof night and gropes towards the forms of gods. The stories of thepoets are before and in him.” Subsequently, in the TheologicalLetters (1780-1) and the Letters for the Advancement ofHumanity, Herder extends the same solution to music as well. In the considered position at which he eventuallyarrives Herder also implies that “non-linguistic” art is dependent onthought and language in another way: In the fourth part of theCritical Forests he develops the point (already alluded toearlier) that human perception is of its nature infused with conceptsand beliefs, and consequently with language — which of courseimplies that the same is true of the perception of “non-linguistic”artworks in particular. So “non-linguistic” art is really doublydependent on thought and language: not only for the thoughts which itexpresses but also for those which it presupposes inperception. With Herder's achievement of this refined form ofnarrow expressivism and Hamann's articulation of his broadexpressivism, there were now two plausible but competing theoriesavailable. Nineteenth-century theorists (e.g. Hegel, Schleiermacher,and Dilthey) would subsequently be deeply torn between them, and thedispute remains an important one today. While the philosophical issuesinvolved are difficult, I believe that Herder's position is the correctone. Since for Herder thought and language playimportant roles not only in linguistic but also in “non-linguistic”art, both for him present similar interpretive challenges, requiringsimilar interpretive solutions. One aspect of this which deservesspecial emphasis is genre. Herder believes, plausibly, that a work of art isalways written or made to exemplify a certain genre, and that it isvitally important for the interpreter to identify its genre in order tounderstand it. Herder's basic conception of genre is that it consistsin an overall purpose together with certain rules of compositiondictated thereby. For Herder, genres are in large measure sociallypregiven, but they always play their role in a work via the intentionof the artist (not autonomously thereof), and are not something that heis inexorably locked into but rather something that he can and oftendoes modify. Why does Herder believe that it is vitallyimportant to identify a work's genre correctly in order to understandthe work properly? He has three main reasons (all good ones): First,grasping a work's genre is itself an essential constituent ofunderstanding the work and its contents (in much the same way asgrasping a sentence's illocutionary force is itself an essentialconstituent of understanding the sentence and its contents). Second,because an author intends his work to exemplify a certain genre, therewill normally be aspects of the work's meaning which are expressed, notexplicitly in any of its parts, but rather through its intendedexemplification of the genre. For instance, Lessing had argued that thepurpose of Aesop's fables as a genre was to illustrate through aconcrete example a universal moral principle, whereas Herder arguesthat it was instead to illustrate general rules of life, experience, orprudence — so the full interpretation of any particular fablemust include either the idea of a universal moral principle (if Lessingis right) or the idea of a general rule of life, experience, orprudence (if Herder is right). Or to cite a “non-linguistic” example,Herder argues that Egyptian sculpture (unlike Greek) had the purpose asa genre of expressing certain ideas about death and eternity — sothat the full interpretation of a piece of Egyptian sculpture mustinclude this aspect of its meaning deriving from the general genre. Third,correctly identifying the genre is also vitally important foraccurately interpreting things that are expressed explicitlyin parts of a work. Hence, for example, in the CriticalForests Herder argues that in order to achieve a properunderstanding of “ridiculous” passages in Homer (such as the Thersitesepisode in Iliad, book 2) it is essential to understand themin light of the nature of the whole text and their contributionthereto. Just as Herder insists on a scrupulousmethodological empiricism in interpretation generally, so he insists onit in determining genres in particular. He therefore sharply rejectsapriorism here — not only the absolute apriorism of refusing inone's definition of a genre to be guided by the observation of examplesat all, but also the more seductive relative apriorism of allowingoneself to be guided by the observation of examples but excluding fromthese particular cases, or even whole classes of cases, to which theresulting genre-conception is to be applied in interpretation. Thelatter procedure is still disastrous, in Herder's view, because thesuperficial appearance of a similar genre shared by differenthistorical periods or cultures, or even by different authors within oneperiod and culture, or indeed even by a single author in one work andthe same author in another commonly in fact masks vitally importantdifferences. Herder identifies this sort of misguided apriorism in thedefinition of genres in many areas of interpretation. For example, inthe essay Shakespeare (1773) he detects it in the Frenchcritics' approach to tragedy, an approach which assumes the universalvalidity of Aristotelian genre-rules that were originally derivedexclusively from ancient tragedies (sometimes even overlooking thisempirical derivation), and consequently assumes that they provide anappropriate yardstick for interpreting Shakespearean tragedy as well,whereas the latter's genre-conception is in fact quite different. Andin This Too and other pieces he detects it in Winckelmann'streatment of Egyptian sculpture: Winckelmann implicitly assumes theuniversal validity of a genre-conception for sculpture which he hasderived from the Greeks, namely one dominated by the genre-purpose of athis-worldly portrayal of life and beauty, and he then applies this inthe interpretation of Egyptian sculpture, where the genre-conception isin fact quite different, in particular involving a contrarygenre-purpose of conveying ideas of death and eternity. Furthermore, Herder emphasizes that gettingquestions of genre right is vitally important not only for the correctinterpretation of artworks, but also for their correctcritical evaluation. The French critics not only make aninterpretive mistake when they go to Shakespeare with a genredogmatically in mind that was not his, but they also, on this basis,make an evaluative one: because they falsely assume that hesomehow must be aspiring to realize the genre-purpose and -rules whichAristotle found in ancient tragedy, they fault him for failing torealize them, while at the same time they overlook the quite differentgenre-purpose and -rules which he really aspires to realize and hissuccess in realizing these. Similarly, Winckelmann not only makes aninterpretive mistake when he implicitly imputes to theEgyptians a Greek genre-conception for sculpture that was not theirs,but also, on this basis, an evaluative one: because he falselyassumes that the Egyptians somehow must be aspiring to realize theGreek genre-purpose and -rules, he faults them for failing to realizethese, and at the same time he overlooks their success in realizing thevery different genre-purpose and -rules which they really do aspire torealize. Nothing has yet been said about beauty,the concept that is often thought to be the central concern ofaesthetics. Herder has several interesting ideas on this subject too. Afirst, which he develops in the Critical Forests, concerns thevery concept of beauty. He argues, plausibly, that this concept'sorigin lies in visual experience, but that it has beenextended from that domain to cover virtually “everything that has apleasurable effect on the soul,” that in this sense “sight …allegorizes the images, the representations, the conceits of the soul,”and beauty becomes our most general term of approval forwhatever we find pleasing in relation to any of the senses and indeedto mental life more generally. A second interesting idea of Herder's concerningbeauty (prima facie somewhat at odds with the first one, butpotentially reconcilable with it, and perhaps even encouraged by it) isdeveloped in his later work the Calligone. There he suggests,in opposition to the great emphasis traditionally placed on beauty inthe philosophy of art, that beauty is not in fact nearly as essentialto art as it is often taken to be. In particular, he argues that art ismuch more essentially a matter of Bildung — culturalformation or education (especially in moral respects). A third important idea of Herder's concerningbeauty (both as it relates to art and more generally) is that standardsof beauty vary greatly from one historical period and culture toanother. This at least is his usual position, from early works such asOn the Change of Taste to late ones such as theCalligone (where he invokes it against Kant's Critique ofJudgment). There is also occasionally a counterstrand in Herder'sworks in which he argues for a deeper unity in standards of beautyacross historical periods and cultures (e.g. in the CriticalForests). However, the former, usual position seems to be hisconsidered one, and is much the more plausible one. Finally, a position closely connected with thepoint recently mentioned that the fundamental role of the arts is oneof Bildung: In On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Ethicsof Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times (1778) and again later inthe Calligone Herder argues more specifically that thefundamental role of the arts both has been historically and moreovershould be one of moral character formation. He has a nuanced account of how the arts do andshould perform this function. For example, in On the Influence ofthe Beautiful Sciences on the Higher Sciences (1781) he specifiesthree ways in which poetry and literature promote moral characterformation: First, they do so “through light rules,” in other wordsthrough subtly conveying ethical principles directly in explicit orimplicit ways. Second, and more important, they do so by presenting inan attractive light good moral exemplars for people to emulate: “stillbetter, through good examples.” Third, they also convey a broad rangeof practical experience relevant to the formation of moral characterwhich would otherwise have to be acquired, if at all, by the morearduous route of first-hand experience. In the CalligoneHerder also notes concerning non-linguistic art that music has a powerto affect moral character for good or ill depending on the principleswith which it is associated, and that visual art has a power to makemoral ideals attractive by presenting them blended with physicalbeauty. Herder's conception that it is and should be theprimary function of art to form moral character serves him as acriterion for evaluating artworks. Thus when he observes in On theEffect that in contrast to earlier poetry modern poetry hastypically lost this function, he means this as a serious criticism ofmodern poetry. And he even applies this criterion as a ground forcriticizing certain works by his friends Goethe and Schiller which heconsiders immoral or amoral in content.8. Philosophy of HistoryHerder's philosophy of history appears mainly in two works: ThisToo and the later Ideas. His philosophy of history isinitially likely to seem striking and interesting mainly for itsdevelopment of a teleological conception of history as the progressiverealization of “reason” and “humanity” — a conception whichanticipated and strongly influenced Hegel, among others. However, thisconception is highly dubious on reflection, and is arguablynot one of Herder's main achievements in this area. His most intrinsically important achievement inthis area arguably rather lies in his development of the thesismentioned earlier — contradicting such Enlightenmentphilosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire — that there existradical mental differences between different historical periods (andcultures), that people's concepts, beliefs, sensations, etc. differ indeep ways from one period (or culture) to another. This thesis isalready prominent in On the Change of Taste (1766) andpersists throughout Herder's career. It had an enormous influence onsuccessors such as the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, andDilthey. Herder makes the empirical exploration of therealm of mental diversity posited by this thesis the very core of thediscipline of history. For, as has often been noted, he takesrelatively little interest in the so-called “great” political andmilitary deeds and events of history, focusing instead on the“innerness” of history's participants. This choice is deliberate andself-conscious. Because of it, psychology and interpretationinevitably take center-stage in the discipline of history forHerder. Herder has deep philosophical reasons forthis choice, and hence for assigning psychology and interpretation acentral role in history. To begin with, he has negativereasons directed against traditional political-military history. Whyshould history focus on the “great” political and militarydeeds and events of the past, after all? There are several possibleanswers: (1) A first would be that they are fascinating or morallyedifying. But Herder will not accept this. For one thing, he deniesthat mere fascination or curiosity is a sufficiently serious motive fordoing history. For another thing, his antiauthoritarianism,antimilitarism, and borderless humanitarianism cause him to find theacts of political domination, war, and empire which make up the vastbulk of these “great” deeds and events not morally edifying but morallyrepugnant. This leaves two other types of motivationthat might be appealed to for doing the sort of history in question:(2) because examining the course of such deeds and events reveals somesort of overall meaning in history, or (3) because it leads toefficient causal insights which enable us to explain the past andperhaps also predict or control the future. Herder is againskeptical about these rationales, however. This skepticism is perhapsclearest in the Older Critical Forestlet (1767-8) where, incriticism of rationale (2), he consigns the task of “the whole orderingtogether of many occurrences into a plan” not to the historian but tothe “creator, … painter, and artist,” and in criticism ofrationale (3), he goes as far as to assert (on the basis of a Hume- andKant-influenced general skepticism about causal knowledge) that withthe search for efficient causes in history “historical seeing stops andprophecy begins.” His later writings depart from this early position insome obvious ways, but they also in less obvious ways remain faithfulto it. They by no means officially stay loyal to the view thathistory has no discernible meaning; famously, This Too insiststhat history does have an overall purpose, and that this fact (thoughnot the nature of the purpose) is discernible from thecumulative way in which cultures have built upon one another, and theIdeas then goes on to tell a long story to the effect thathistory's purpose consists in its steady realization of “reason” and“humanity.” However, Herder clearly still harbors grave doubts justbelow the surface. This is visible in This Too from the work'sironically self-deprecating title; Pyrrhonian-spirited motto;vacillation between several incompatible models of history's direction(progressive?, progressive and cyclical?, merely cyclical?, evenregressive?); and morbid dwelling on, and unpersuasive attempt torebut, the “skeptical” view of history as meaningless “Penelope-work.”(A few years later in his Theological Letters (1780-1) Herderwould write that history is “a textbook of the nullity of all humanthings.”) It is also visible in the Ideas from the fact thatHerder's official account there of the purposiveness of history getscontradicted by other passages which insist on theinappropriateness of teleological (as contrasted withefficient causal) explanations in history. Herder's official positioncertainly had a powerful influence on some successors (especiallyHegel), but it is this quieter counterstrand of skepticism thatrepresents his better philosophical judgment. Concerning efficientcausal insights, Herder's later works again in a sense stay faithful tohis skeptical position in the Older Critical Forestlet —but they also modify it, and this time for the better philosophicallyspeaking. The mature Herder does not, like the Herder of that earlywork, rest his case on a general skepticism about the role ordiscernibility of efficient causation in history. On the contrary, heinsists that history is governed by efficient causation andthat we should try to discover as far as possible the specific ways inwhich it is so. But he remains highly skeptical about theextent to which such an undertaking can be successful, andhence about how far it can take us towards real explanations of thepast, and towards predicting or controlling the future. His main reasonfor this skepticism is that major historical deeds and events are notthe products of some one or few readily identifiable causal factors (aspolitical and military historians tend to assume), but rather of chanceconfluences of huge numbers of different causal factors, many of which,moreover, are individually unknown and unknowable by the historian(e.g. because in themselves too trivial to have been recorded, or, inthe case of psychological factors, because the historical agent failedto make them public, deliberately misrepresented them, or was himselfunaware of them due to the hidden depths of his mind). Complementing this negative case againstthe claims of traditional political-military history to be ofoverriding importance, Herder also has positive reasons forfocusing instead on the “innerness” of human life in history. (1) Onereason is certainly just the sheer interest of this subject-matter— though, as was mentioned previously, that would not be asufficient reason in his eyes. (2) Another reason is that his discoveryof radical diversity in human mentality has shown there to be a muchbroader, less explored, and more intellectually challenging field forinvestigation here than previous generations of historians haverealized. Two further reasons are moral in nature: (3) He believes, andplausibly so, that studying people's minds through their literature,visual art, etc. generally exposes one to them at their moral best (insharp contrast to studying their political-military history), so thatthere are benefits of moral edification to be gleaned here. (4) He hascosmopolitan and egalitarian moral motives for studying people's mindsthrough their literature, visual art, etc.: (in sharp contrast tostudying unedifying and elite-focused political-military history) thispromises to enhance our sympathies for peoples, and moreover forpeoples at all social levels, including lower ones. Finally, doing“inner” history is also important as an instrument for ournon-moral self-improvement: (5) It serves to enhance ourself-understanding. One important reason for this is that it is by, andonly by, contrasting one's own outlook with the outlooks of otherpeoples that one recognizes what is universal and invariant in it andwhat by contrast distinctive and variable. Another important reason isthat in order fully to understand one's own outlook one needs toidentify its historical origins and how they developed into it (this isHerder's justly famous “genetic method” — first discussed by himin the Fragments in connection with language, but also appliedby him much more broadly — which subsequently became fundamentalto the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault). (6) Herder believesthat an accurate investigation of the (non-moral) ideals of past agescan serve to enrich our own ideals and happiness. This motive findsbroad application in his work. One example is his exploration of pastliteratures in the Fragments largely with a view to drawingfrom them lessons about how better to develop modern Germanliterature. Herder's decision to focus on the “innerness” ofhistory's participants, and his consequent emphasis on psychology andinterpretation as historical methods, strikingly anticipated andstrongly influenced Dilthey. So too did his rationale for thisdecision, as described above, which is indeed arguably superior toDilthey's, especially on its positive side. (Dilthey's positive reasonsare alarmingly thin — mainly that our interest in narrative ismore fundamental than our interest in explanation; and that we canenrich our drab lives by encountering the different experiences ofhistorical Others — whereas, as we have just seen, Herder's areby contrast rich and compelling.) Finally, Herder is also impressive for havingrecognized, and, though not solved, at least grappled with, a problemthat flows from his picture of history (and intercultural comparison)as an arena of deep variations in human mentality. This is the problemof skepticism. He tends to run together two problemsin this connection: (1) the problem of whether there is anymeaning to the seemingly anarchic and endless series ofchanges from epoch to epoch (or culture to culture); (2) the problemthat the multiplication of conflicting viewpoints on virtually allsubjects that is found in history (or in intercultural comparison)causes, or at least exacerbates, the ancient skeptic's difficulty ofunresolvable disputes forcing one to suspend belief. Problem (1) hasalready been discussed. Here it is problem (2) that concerns us. Thisis a problem that Troeltsch would make much of in the twentiethcentury. But Herder had already clearly seen it. Herder is determined to avoid this sort ofskepticism. He has two main strategies for doing so, but they areinconsistent with each other, and neither in the end works: His firstis to try to defuse the problem at source by arguing that, on closerinspection, there is much more common ground between different periodsand cultures than it allows. This strategy already occurs in theCritical Forests, where (as was mentioned earlier) Herderargues that different standards of beauty have an underlying unity, andit plays a central role in the Ideas, where in particular“humanity” is presented as a shared ethical value. Herder's secondstrategy is instead to acknowledge the problem in an unmitigated formand to respond with relativism: especially in This Too heargues that — at least where questions of moral, aesthetic, andprudential value are concerned — the different positions taken bydifferent periods and cultures are equally valid, namely for theperiods and cultures to which they belong, and that there can be noquestion of any preferential ranking between them. The laterLetters vacillates between these two strategies. Neither of these strategies is satisfactory inthe end. The first, that of asserting deep commonalities, is hopeless(notwithstanding its seemingly eternal appeal to empiricallyunderinformed Anglophone philosophers). It flies in the face of theempirical evidence — for example, Herder in this modesentimentally praises Homer for his “humanity,” and thereby layshimself open to Nietzsche's more just retort in Homer'sContest that what is striking about Homer and his culture israther their cruelty. And indeed, it flies in the face ofHerder's own better interpretive judgments about the empirical evidence— for example, his observation in On the Change of Tastethat basic values have not only changed over the course of history butin some cases actually been inverted (an observation which strikinglyanticipates a brilliant insight of Nietzsche's concerning a systematicinversion of Homeric ethical values that occurred in later antiquitywith Socrates/Plato and especially Christianity). Herder's alternative, relativist, strategy ismore interesting, but is not in the end satisfactory either (evenconcerning values, where its prospects look best). There are severalpotential problems with it. One, which is of considerable historicalinterest but probably not in the end fatal, is this: Hegel in thePhenomenology of Spirit and then Nietzsche in his treatment ofChristian moral values saw the possibility that one might acceptHerder's insight that there were basic differences in values butnonetheless avoid his relativism by subjecting others' values to aninternal critique, a demonstration that they were internallyinconsistent. For example, Nietzsche (whose version of this idea is themore plausible) traced back such Christian values as love andforgiveness to a contrary underlying motive of resentment[Ressentiment]. However, in order to work, such a responsewould need to show that the inconsistency was essential to thevalues in question, not merely a contingent one that could disappearleaving the values consistently held — and this it probablycannot do. A more serious problem with this strategy is rather atwofold one, which Nietzsche again saw: First, we cannot in factsustain such a relativist indifference vis-à-vis others' values.Do we, for example, really think that a moral rule requiringthe forcible burning of dead men's wives is no better and no worse thanone forbidding it? (As Nietzsche memorably puts it, “Is life notpassing judgment, preferring, being unfair … ?”) Second, nordoes the phenomenon of fundamental value variations require usto adopt such an indifference. For, while it may indeed show that thereare no universal or objective values, it leaves us with a betteralternative to indifference: continuing to hold our values and to judgeothers' values in light of them only now in a self-consciouslynon-universal, non-objective way. (As Nietzsche puts it, “Myjudgment is my judgment.” Or if we reject Nietzsche's extremeindividualism, “Our judgment is our judgment,” for someless-than-universal us.)9. Political PhilosophyHerder is not usually thought of as a political philosopher. But hewas one, and moreover one whose political ideals are arguably moreadmirable, theoretical stances more defensible, and thematic emphasesof more enduring relevance than those of any other German philosopherof the period. His most developed treatment of political philosophyoccurs relatively late, in a work prompted by the French Revolution of1789: the Letters (including the early draft of 1792, which isimportant for its frank statement of his views about domesticpolitics). What are the main features of Herder's politicalphilosophy? Let us begin with his political ideals, first indomestic and then in international politics: In domestic politics, themature Herder is a liberal, a republican, a democrat, and anegalitarian (this, it should be noted, in historical circumstanceswhere such positions were by no means commonplace, and were embraced ata personal cost). His liberalism is especially radical inadvocating virtually unrestricted freedom of thought and expression(including freedom of worship). He has several reasons for thisposition: (1) He feels that such freedom belongs to people's moraldignity. (2) He believes that it is essential for individuals'self-realization. (3) As was mentioned earlier, he believes that humanbeings' capacities for discerning the truth are very limited and thatit is through, and only through, an ongoing contest between opposingviewpoints that the cause of truth gets advanced. (J.S. Mill wouldlater borrow from these considerations — partly viaintermediaries such as von Humboldt — to form the core of hiscase for freedom of thought and expression in On Liberty.) Herder is also committed to republicanism anddemocracy (advocating a much broader franchise than Kant did, forexample). He has several reasons for this position, ultimately derivingfrom an egalitarian concern for the interests of all members ofsociety: (1) He feels it to be intrinsically right that the mass ofpeople should share in their government, rather than having it imposedupon them. (2) He believes that this will better serve theirother interests as well, since government by alsotends to be government for. (3) He in particular believes thatit will diminish the warfare that is pervasive under the prevailingautocratic political régimes of Europe, where it benefits thefew rulers who decide on it but costs the mass of people dearly. Finally, Herder's egalitarianism alsoextends beyond this. He does not reject class differences, property, orinequalities of property outright. But he does oppose all hierarchicaloppression; argue that all people in society have capacities forself-realization, and must receive the opportunity to fulfill them; andinsist that government must intervene to ensure that they do receiveit, e.g. by guaranteeing education and a minimum standard of living forthe poor. Concerning international politics, Herder hasoften been classified as a “nationalist” or (perhaps even worse) a“German nationalist.” Some other philosophers from the period deservesuch a slur (e.g. Fichte). But where Herder is concerned it is deeplymisleading and unjust. On the contrary, his fundamental position ininternational politics is a committed cosmopolitanism, animpartial concern for all human beings. This is a large partof the force of his ideal of “humanity.” Hence, for example, in theLetters he approvingly quotes Fénelon's remark, “I lovemy family more than myself; more than my family my fatherland; morethan my fatherland humankind.” Moreover, unlike Kant's cosmopolitanism,Herder's is genuine. Kant's cosmopolitanism is vitiated by a set ofempirically ignorant and morally inexcusable prejudices that he harbors— in particular, racism, antisemitism, and misogyny. By contrast,Herder's is entirely free of these prejudices, which he indeed workstirelessly to combat. Herder does indeed also insist onrespecting, preserving, and advancing national groupings. However, thisis entirely unalarming, for the following reasons: (1) For Herder, thisis emphatically something that must be done for all nationalgroupings equally (not just or especially Germany!). (Hememorably insists that there must be no Favoritvolk.) (2) The“nation” in question is not racial but linguistic and cultural (in theIdeas and elsewhere Herder indeed rejects the very concept ofrace). (3) Herder does not seek to seal off nations from each other'sinfluence or to keep them static; he recognizes and welcomes the factsof normal interlinguistic and intercultural exchange, and oflinguistic-cultural development. (4) Nor does his commitment tonational groupings involve a centralized or militaristic state (in theIdeas and elsewhere he strongly advocates the disappearance ofsuch a state and its replacement by loosely federated local governmentswith minimal instruments of force). (5) In addition, Herder'sinsistence on respecting national groupings is accompanied by thestrongest denunciations of military conflict, colonial exploitation,and all other forms of harm between nations; a demand that nationsinstead peacefully cooperate and compete in trade and intellectualendeavors for their mutual benefit; and a plea that they should indeedactively work to help each other. Moreover, Herder has compelling reasons for thisinsistence on respecting national groupings: (1) The deep diversity ofvalues between nations entails that homogenization is ultimatelyimpracticable, only a fantasy. (2) Such diversity also entails that, tothe extent that it is practicable, it cannot occur voluntarilybut only through external coercion. (3) In practice, attempts toachieve it, e.g. by European colonialism, are moreover coercive from,and subserve, ulterior motives of domination and exploitation. (4)Furthermore, real national variety is positively valuable, both asaffording individuals a vital sense of local belonging and initself. Herder's pluralistic cosmopolitanism is animportant and attractive alternative to the homogenizing forms ofcosmopolitanism, based on delusions concerning either the fact or theprospect of universally shared values, which have predominated sincethe Enlightenment and still find much favor today, not only amongphilosophers (especially those in the Anglophone world) but also ininternational political organizations such as the United Nations. It might still be objected that all this does notyet really amount to a political theory — such as otherphilosophers have provided, including some of Herder's contemporariesin Germany. In a sense that is true, but philosophically defensible; inanother sense it is false. It is true in the following sense: There isindeed no grand metaphysical theory underpinning Herder's position— no Platonic theory of forms, no correlation of politicalinstitutions with “moments” in a Hegelian Logic, no “deduction” ofpolitical institutions from the nature of the self or the will àla Fichte and Hegel, etc. But that is quite deliberate, given Herder'sskepticism about such metaphysics. And is it not indeed philosophicallya good thing? Nor does Herder have any elaborate account purporting tojustify the moral intuitions at work in his political position as asort of theoretical insight (in the manner of Kant's theory of the“categorical imperative” or Rawls's theory of the “original position,”for example). But that is again quite deliberate, given hisnon-cognitivism in ethics, and his rejection of such theories as notonly false but also harmful. And is he not again right about this, andthe absence of such an account therefore again a good thing? Nor isHerder sympathetic with such tired staples of political theory as thestate of nature, the social contract, natural rights, the general will,and utopias for the future. But again, he has good specific reasons forskepticism about these things. This, then, is the sense in which theobjection is correct; Herder does indeed lack a “political theory” ofthese sorts. But he lacks it on principle, and isarguably quite right to do so. On the other hand, he does have a“political theory” of another, and arguably more valuable, sort. First,consistently with his general empiricism, his position in politicalphilosophy is deeply empirically informed. For instance, as can be seenfrom the Dissertation on the Reciprocal Influence of Government andthe Sciences (1780), his thesis concerning the importance offreedom of thought and expression, and the competition between viewswhich it makes possible, for producing intellectual progress is largelybased on the historical example of ancient Greece and in particularAthens (as contrasted with later societies which lacked the freedom andcompetition in question). And in the 1792 draft of the Lettershe even describes the French Revolution and its attempts to establish amodern democracy as a sort of “experiment” from which we can learn(e.g. whether democracy can be successfully extended to nations thatare much larger than ancient Athens). Second, in conformity with hisgeneral non-cognitivism about morals, he is acutely aware that hispolitical position ultimately rests on moral sentiments — his ownand, for its success, other people's as well. For example, in the 10thCollection of the Letters he emphasizes that people's moral“dispositions” or “feelings” play a fundamental role as requiredsupports for his political position's realization. As has beenmentioned, this standpoint absolves him of the need to do certain sortsof theorizing. However, it also leads him to engage in theorizing ofanother sort, namely theorizing about how, and by which causal means,people's moral sentiments should be molded in order to realize theideals of his political position. His discussion of moral“dispositions” in the 10th Collection is an example of such theorizing— concerning the how, rather than the causal means. Andsome of his extensive theorizing about causal means has already beensketched earlier in this article. These two sorts of politicaltheorizing (empirical theorizing and theorizing about moral sentiments)are deeply developed in Herder. And they are arguably muchmore pointful than the sorts which are not. In short, to the extent that Herder's politicalphilosophy really is theoretically superficial, it is, to borrow aphrase of Nietzsche's, “superficial — out of profundity”(whereas more familiar forms of political philosophy are profound— out of superficiality). And in another, more important, senseit is not theoretically superficial at all.10. Philosophy of ReligionIn Herder's day German philosophy was still deeply committed to agame of trying to reconcile the insights of the Enlightenment,especially those of modern natural science, with religion, and indeedmore specifically with Christianity. Leibniz, Kant, Hegel,Schleiermacher, and many others played this game — each proposingsome new reconciliation or other. Herder was part of this game as well.This was not a good game for philosophers to be playing. But it wasonly in the nineteenth century that German philosophy found the courageto cut the Gordian knot and turn from apologetics for religion andChristianity to thoroughgoing criticism of them (the prime examplesbeing Marx and Nietzsche). This situation imposes certain limits on theinterest of Herder's philosophy of religion, as on that of the otherreconciling philosophers mentioned. Also, while Herder's philosophy of religion wasgenerally very enlightened and progressive in both his early and hislate periods, there was a spell in the middle, the years 1771-6 inBückeburg, during which he fell into the sort of religiousirrationalism that is more characteristic of his friend Hamann. Thishappened as the result of what we would today classify as a mildnervous breakdown (documentable from his correspondence at the time),and should basically be discounted. Despite these qualifications, Herder did make important contributionsto the philosophy of religion — i.e. important in terms oftheir influence, their intrinsic value, or both. One of these(important mainly for its influence) lies in hisneo-Spinozism. Herder's serious and sympathetic engagement withSpinoza's work goes back at least as far as 1769. But its mainexpression is found in God. Some Conversations from1787. Herder published this work in the wake of Jacobi's Letterson the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785), a work in which Jacobi hadrevealed that the highly respected philosopher, critic, and dramatistLessing — who was much admired by Herder in particular —had confessed to him shortly before his death that he had abandonedorthodox religious conceptions in favor of Spinozism. Jacobi hadargued, sharply to the contrary, that Spinozism, and indeed allfundamental reliance on reason, implied atheism and fatalism, andshould therefore be rejected in favor of a leap of faith to aconventional Christian theism. Jacobi's work (along with a reply byMoses Mendelssohn) caused a public furor. In God. SomeConversations Herder intervened. In this work he supportsLessing's side of the debate by developing a version of“Spinozism” which modifies the original in somesignificant respects, largely with a view to defusing Jacobi'sobjections. Herder shares with Spinoza the basic thesis ofmonism, and like Spinoza equates the single, all-encompassingprinciple in question with God (which of course immediately calls intoquestion Jacobi's charge of atheism). But whereas Spinoza hadcharacterized this single, all-encompassing principle assubstance, Herder instead characterizes it as force,or primal force. This fundamental modification involvesseveral further ones which Herder also finds attractive, including thefollowing: (1) Whereas Spinoza had conceived the principle in questionas an inactive thing, Herder's revision effectively turns itinto an activity. (2) Spinoza's theory had attributedthought to the principle in question, but had rejectedconceptions that it had intentions or was a mind. Bycontrast, Herder claims that it does have intentions. Andgiven that his general philosophy of mind identifies the mind withforce, his identification of the principle in question with force alsoimports an implication that it is a mind (he does not yetquite say this in God. Some Conversations, but a few yearslater in On the Spirit of Christianity (1798) he explicitlydescribes God as a Geist, a mind). In these two ways, Herderin effect re-mentalizes Spinoza's God (thereby still furtherundermining Jacobi's charge of atheism). (3) Whereas Spinoza hadconceived nature mechanistically, in keeping with his Cartesianintellectual heritage (and had thereby invited Jacobi's charge offatalism), Herder (though officially still agnostic about what forceis) rather inclines to conceive the forces at work in nature asliving, or organic (a conception of them which he mainly owesto Leibniz). (4) Herder believes that Spinoza's original theorycontained an objectionable residue of dualism (again inherited fromDescartes), in its conception of the relation between God's two knownattributes, thought and extension (and similarly, in its conception ofthe relation between finite minds and bodies). By contrast,Herder's own conception of God as a force (and of finite minds aslikewise forces) is designed to overcome this alleged residualdualism. For forces are of their very nature expressed in thebehavior of extended bodies. (5) Herder also sketches a more detailedaccount of nature as a system of living forces based in the primalforce, God — an account which in particular ascribes animportant role in this system to the sort of opposition between forcesthat is exemplified by the magnet, and characterizes the system as aself-development towards higher and higher forms of articulation. During the last quarter or so of the eighteenthcentury and then well into the nineteenth century a wave ofneo-Spinozism swept through German philosophy and literature: inaddition to Lessing and Herder, further enthusiasts for Spinozismincluded Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin,Novalis, and F. Schlegel. This wave was largely a result of Herder'sembrace of neo-Spinozism in God. Some Conversations (and inGoethe's case, of Herder's sympathy with Spinozism even before thatwork), and it largely took over Herder's modifications of Spinoza'sposition. However, Herder's most intrinsicallyvaluable contribution to the philosophy of religion rather concerns theinterpretation of the Bible. In this connection, as was previouslymentioned, he champions a strict secularism. This was alreadyhis position in the 1760's. At that period he argued vigorously, in thespirit of Galileo, for disallowing revelation any jurisdiction overnatural science — though he did so not in an anti-religiousspirit but in the hope and expectation that an autonomous naturalscience would confirm religion. And he made a parallel case for theautonomy of interpretation: Religious assumptions and meanshave no business interfering in the interpretation of texts either,even when the texts are sacred ones. Instead, even biblical texts mustbe interpreted as the works of human beings, and by means of the samesorts of rigorous hermeneutical methods that are employed forinterpreting other ancient texts — any religious enlightenmentcoming as a result of such interpretation, not entering intothe process itself. This whole position remained Herder's consideredone in his later period as well. The general idea that the Bible should beinterpreted in the same way as other texts was by no means thecommonplace in Herder's day that it has become since, but nor was itnew with him. In adopting this principle he was self-consciouslyfollowing the lead of several recent Bible scholars — inparticular, Ernesti, Michaelis, and Semler. However, Herder'ssecularism is more consistent and radical than theirs. This can be illustrated by a comparison with Ernesti (the mostimportant of the Bible scholars just mentioned, and the one mostconsistently admired by Herder). Ernesti's great work, Institutiointerpretis Novi Testamenti (1761), which Herder singles out forspecial praise, is a key statement of the sort of secularism inquestion. Initially, this work seems to advocate a secularismidentical in spirit to Herder's, arguing that we must interpretbiblical books in the same way as profane texts, and therebylearn whatever religious truth they contain. However, as the workdevelops, matters become much cloudier. In this connection, it isimportant to distinguish two questions which can be asked concerningthe relation between divine inspiration and interpretation: (1) Mayreaders of sacred texts rely on a divine inspiration ofthemselves (e.g. by the Holy Spirit) bringing them to acorrect interpretation rather than on more usual interpretive means?(2) May they assume in interpretation that because the texts'authors are divinely inspired the texts must be completely trueand therefore also (a fortiori) completely self-consistent? WhenErnesti develops the details of his position it becomes clear that hehas really only advanced as far towards secularism as consistentlyanswering question (1) in the negative, not question (2). Hisfailure to give a consistently negative answer to question (2) landshim in flat contradiction with his official commitment to interpretingsacred texts in exactly the same way as profane texts (for, of course,as he indeed himself implies, in interpreting profane texts we maynot assume that the texts are throughout true and thereforealso self-consistent). It also seems intellectually indefensible initself — merely a rather transparent refusal to stop, so tospeak, “cooking the books” in favor of the Bible wheninterpreting it. By contrast, the young Herder advances in hissecularism beyond Ernesti because he consistently answersboth questions in the negative, and thereby, unlike Ernesti,achieves a position which is both self-consistent and otherwiseintellectually defensible. Moreover, Herder's actual interpretationsof the Bible admirably conform to this theoretical position, not onlyrefraining from any reliance on divine inspiration and insteademploying normal interpretive techniques, but also frequentlyattributing false and even inconsistent positions to the Bible (bothto the Old and to the New Testaments). Another noteworthy aspect of Herder's strictsecularism is his insistence that interpreters of the Bible must resistthe temptation to read the Bible as allegory (except in thosefew cases — e.g. the parables of the New Testament — wherethere is clear textual evidence of a biblical author's intention toconvey an allegorical meaning). In On God's Son, the World'sSavior (1797) Herder gives a perceptive general diagnosis of thetemptation to allegorical interpretation: over the course of historypeople's beliefs and values change, leading to discrepancies betweenthe claims made by their traditional texts and their own beliefs andvalues, but they expect and want to find their traditional textscorrect, and so they try to effect a reconciliation of them with theirown beliefs and values by means of allegorical readings. Herder's theoretical commitment to strictsecularism in biblical interpretation led him to interpretivediscoveries concerning the Bible which were themselves of epoch-makingimportance. For example, concerning the Old Testament, his commitmentto applying normal interpretive methods enabled him to distinguish anddefine the different genres of poetry in the Old Testament in a waythat was superior to anything that had been done before him. Also, thesame commitment, and in particular his consequent readiness to findfalsehood and even inconsistency in the Bible, allowed him to make suchimportant interpretive observations as that the ancient Jews'conceptions about death, the afterlife, the mind, and the body hadchanged dramatically over time. (For these two achievements, seeespecially On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.) Again, the samecommitment, and in particular Herder's consequent rejection ofunwarranted allegorical interpretations, allowed him to substitute forthe prevailing interpretation of the Song of Solomon asreligious allegory an interpretation of it as simple erotic love poetrywhich is today generally accepted as correct. Similarly concerning theNew Testament, Herder's commitment to applying normal interpretivemethods, including his consequent readiness to discover falsehood andinconsistency, enabled him to treat the authors of the four gospels asindividual human authors rather than as mere mouthpieces of the deity,to perceive inconsistencies between their accounts, to establish therelative dates of the gospels correctly for the first time (Mark first,Matthew and Luke in the middle, John last and late), and to give abroadly correct account of their genesis in oral sermon and of theirlikely relations to each other — achievements which he attainedabove all in two late works from 1796-7, On the Savior ofMankind and On God's Son, the World's Savior. Herder's strict secularism in interpretationwould shortly afterwards be adopted by Schleiermacher, who similarlyembraced the principle that the interpretation of sacred texts musttreat them as the works of human authors and by applying exactly thesame interpretive methods as are applied to profane texts, and whosimilarly followed through on this commitment, in particular findingnot only falsehoods but also inconsistencies in the Bible. Herder's great achievements in this area alsohave something of the character of the early acts of an inexorabletragedy, however. As has been mentioned, he did not by any means intendhis championing of the cause of intellectual conscience in insisting onthe autonomy of natural science and interpretation to underminereligion in general or Christianity in particular; on the contrary, hishope and expectation was that both sorts of autonomy would in the endsupport religion and Christianity. However, this hope has been so | |
