The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  V

  Is this nationalism? In an obvious sense it is. It is anti-French – the voyage to Nantes and Paris (like the later journey to Rome) depressed Herder acutely. He met some of the most distinguished of the philosophes, but evidently failed to achieve any degree of communication with them. He suffered that mixture of envy, humiliation, admiration, resentment and defiant pride which backward peoples feel towards advanced ones, members of one social class towards those who belong to a higher rung in the hierarchy. Wounded national feeling – this scarcely needs saying – breeds nationalism, but it is important to realise that Herder’s nationalism was never political. If he denounces individualism, he equally detests the State, which coerces and mutilates the free human personality. His social vision is antagonistic to government, power, domination. Louis XIV and Frederick the Great (like Caesar and Charlemagne before them) represent a detestable ideal. Herder does not ask for power and does not wish to assert the superiority of his own class or culture or nation. He wishes to create a society in which men, whoever they are, can live full lives, attain to free self-expression, ‘be someone’; and he thinks that the less government they have the better. We cannot return to the Greek polis. This may, indeed, have been the first stage of a development destined in its later stages to become nationalistic and chauvinistic in the full, aggressive sense. Whether or not this is historically and sociologically true, it is clear that Herder did not himself harbour these sentiments. Even though he seems to have coined the word Nationalisms, his conception of a good society is closer to the anarchism of Thoreau or Proudhon or Kropotkin, and to the conception of a culture (Bildung) of which such liberals as Goethe and Humboldt were proponents, than to the ideals of Fichte or Hegel or political socialists. For him die Nation is not a political entity. He is repelled by the claims of contemporary Celtomaniacs and Teutomaniacs who rhapsodised over the ancient Gaels or Northmen. He celebrates German beginnings because they are part of, and illuminate, his own civilisation, not because German civilisation ranks higher than that of others on some cosmic scale. ‘In the works of imagination and feeling the entire soul of the nation reveals itself most freely.’93 This was developed by Sismondi, Michelet and Mazzini into a full-scale political-cultural doctrine; but Herder stands even closer to the outlook of Ruskin or Lamennais or William Morris, to populists and Christian socialists, and to all of those who, in the present day, are opposed to hierarchies of status or power, or to the influence of manipulators of any kind. He stands with those who protest against mechanisation and vulgarisation rather than with the nationalists of the last hundred years, whether moderate or violent. He favours autarky, but only in personal life; that is, in artistic creation and the rights of natural self-expression. All his invocations of the Nationalgeist (an expression probably coined by Freidrich Karl von Moser), and of its many aliases – the Geist des Volkes, Seele des Volkes, Geist der Nation, Genius des Volkes and the more empirical Nationalcharakter94 – are intended to stress what is ours, not theirs, even though theirs may intrinsically be more valuable, viewed on some vaster scale.

  Herder admits no such scale: cultures are comparable but not commensurable; each is what it is, of literally inestimable value in its own society, and consequently to humanity as a whole. Socrates is for him neither the timeless cosmopolitan sage of the Enlightenment, nor Hamann’s destroyer of pretentious claims to knowledge whose irony and self-confessed ignorance opened the path to faith and salvation. Socrates is, above all, an Athenian of the fifth century; and that age is over. Aristotle may be more gifted than Leibniz, but Leibniz is ours, Aristotle is not; Shakespeare is ours, other great geniuses, Homer or Moses, are not. Individuality is all; artificial combinations of old and new, native and foreign, lead to false ideas and ruinous practice.95 Let us follow our own path; let men speak well or ill of our nation, our literature, our language: they are ours, they are ourselves, and let that be enough.96 Better Germans, whatever they are, than sham Greeks, Frenchmen, Englishmen.97 But when he says, ‘Awake, German nation! Do not let them ravish your Palladium!’,98 declares that fearful storms are coming and warns men not to lie asleep like Jonah in the tempest, and when he tells me to take warning from the terrible example of partitioned Poland,99 and says, ‘Poor, torn, crushed Germany, be hopeful!’100 and ‘Germans, speak German! Spew out the Seine’s ugly slime!’,101 it is difficult to avoid the thought that this may indeed have fed the sinister nationalism of Görres and Jahn, Arndt and Treitschke, and their monstrous modern successors. Yet Herder’s own sentences refer to purely cultural self-determination; he hates policirte Nationen.102 Nationality for him is purely and strictly a cultural attribute; he believes that people can and should defend their cultural heritage: they need never give in. He almost blames the Jews, despite his passionate addiction to their antiquities, for not preserving a sufficient sense of collective honour and making no effort to return to their home in Palestine, which is the sole place where they can blossom again into a Nation. He is interested, not in nationality but in cultures, in worlds, in the total experience of peoples; and the aspects of this experience that he celebrates are personal relationships, friendship and enmity, attitudes to nature, war and peace, art and science, ways in which truth, freedom and happiness are pursued, and in particular the relations of the great civilising leaders to the ungrateful mob. He fears organisation as such, and, like the early English romantics, like Young or Thomas and Joseph Warton, he wants to preserve what is irregular and unique in life and in art, that which no system can wholly contain.

  His attack on political centralisation and intellectual polarisation springs from the same source. When he imagines the world as a garden which can contain many flowers, and when he speaks of the possible and desirable harmony between all the national cultures, he is not simply ignoring the aggressive potentialities of nation States or blandly assuming that there is no reason for conflict between various nationalisms. Rather, he is deeply hostile to the growth of political, economic, military centralisation, but sees no reason why culturally autonomous communities need clash. It may, of course, be unrealistic and unhistorical to suppose that one kind of autarky need not lead to other and more dangerous kinds. But it is not the same kind of unrealism as that with which he, and the Enlightenment generally, are usually charged. His faith is not in nationalism, collectivism, Teutomania or romantic State-worship, but in something that is, if anything, incompatible with these ideals. He is the champion of those mysterious Kräfte which are ‘living and organic’.103 For him, as for Shaftesbury (one of those English thinkers who, like Young and Carlyle, influenced the Germans far more than his own compatriots), there is, in the end, only one great creative Kraft: ‘What is alive in creation is, in all forms, shapes, channels, one spirit, one single flame.’104 This is scarcely an empirical or scientific notion. He sings paeans to the Seele des Volkes which is the social incarnation of the Leibnizian vis viva, ‘wonderful, unique … inexplicable, inextinguishable, and as old as the Nation’.105 Its most vivid expression is, of course, not the State, but ‘the physiognomy of its speech’.106

  The point that I wish to stress is that the true heir of this doctrine is not power politics but what came to be called populism. It is this that acquired such momentum among the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, and later spread in Asia and Africa. It inspired not étatistes but believers in ‘grass roots’ – Russian Slavophils and Narodniks, Christian Socialists and all those admirers of folk art and of popular traditions whose enthusiasm assumed both serious and ridiculous shapes, still not unfamiliar today. Populism may often have taken reactionary forms and fed the stream of aggressive nationalism; but the form in which Herder held it was democratic and peaceful, not only anti-dynastic and anti-élitist, but deeply anti-political, directed against organised power, whether of nations, classes, races or parties. I have called it populism because this movement, whether in Europe or outside it, seems to me the nearest approximation to Herder’s ideal. It is, as a rule, pluralistic, looks on
government as an evil, tends, following Rousseau, to identify ‘the people’ with the poor, the peasants, the common folk, the plebeian masses,107 uncorrupted by wealth or city life; and, to this day, animates folk enthusiasts and cultural fanatics, egalitarians and agitators for local autonomy, champions of arts and crafts and of simple life, and innocent Utopians of all brands. It is based on belief in loose textures, voluntary associations, natural ties, and is bitterly opposed to armies, bureaucracies, ‘closed’ societies of any sort.

  Historically, populism has, of course, become closely interwoven with real nationalism, and it has, indeed, often provided the soil in which blind xenophobia and irrationalism grew to dangerous heights; and this is no more accidental than the alliances of nationalism with democracy or romanticism or liberalism at various points in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is a historical and moral error to identify the ideology of one period with its consequences at some other, or with its transformation in another context and in combination with other factors. The progeny of Herder in, let us say, England or America are to be found principally among those amateurs who became absorbed in the antiquities and forms of life (ancient and modern) of cultures other than their own, in Asia and Africa or the ‘backward’ provinces of Europe or America, among professional amateurs and collectors of ancient song and poetry, among enthusiastic and sometimes sentimental devotees of more primitive forms of life in the Balkans or among the Arabs; nostalgic travellers and exiles like Richard Burton, Doughty, Lafcadio Hearn, the English companions of Gandhi or Ibn Saud, cultural autonomists and unpolitical youth movements, as well as serious students and philosophers of language and society.

  Perhaps Herder’s most characteristic descendants were to be found in Russia, in which he took so abiding an interest. In that country his ideas entered the thought of those critics and creative artists who not merely developed national and pseudo-national forms of their own native art but became passionate champions of all ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’, traditional forms of art and self-expression wherever they manifested themselves. These admirers of ethnic colour and variety as such, Mussorgsky, Stassov, and some of the musicians and painters whom they inspired, so far from supporting authority and repression, stood politically on the left, and felt sympathy for all forms of cultural self-expression, especially on the part of persecuted minorities – Georgians, Poles, Jews, Finns, but also Spaniards, Hungarians and other ‘unreconstructed’ nations. They denounced, however unjustly and intemperately, such ‘organ-grinders’ as Rossini and Verdi, or neo-classical schools of painting, for alleged cosmopolitanism, for commercialism, for a tendency to destroy regional or national differences in favour of flat and mechanical forms of life – in short, for rootlessness (a term which afterwards became so sinister and ominous in the mouths of obscurantists and chauvinists), heartlessness, oppression and dehumanisation. All this is typically Herderian.

  Something of this kind, too, may have entered Mazzini’s ideal of the Young Italy which was to live in harmony and mutual understanding with Young Germany – and the ‘Youth’ of all nations – once they had thrown away the shackles of oppressive imperialism, of dynastic autocracies, of the denial of the rights of all ‘natural’ human units, and attained to free self-determination. Such views may have been thoroughly Utopian. But if they were nationalistic, they were so in a sense very different from the later – and pejorative – sense of the word. Populism may have been in part responsible for isolationism, provincialism, suspicion of everything smooth, metropolitan, elegant and socially superior, hatred of the beau monde in all its forms; but with this went hostility to centralisation, dogmatism, militarism and self-assertiveness, or, in other words, all that is commonly associated with the full-grown nationalism of the nineteenth century, as well as with deep antipathy to mobs – Herder carefully distinguishes the Pöbel auf den Gassen (‘the rabble’) from the Volk (that is, the body of the nation), however this is done108 – and with a hatred of violence and conquest as strong as any to be found among the other Weimar humanists, Goethe, Wieland and Schiller. The faithful followers of Herder may often have been – and can still be – confused, sentimental, impractical, ineffective and sometimes ridiculous, but not managerial, calculating or brutal. No one made more of this profound contrast than Herder himself.

  VI

  In this connection it is worth considering Herder’s attitude to three great eighteenth-century myths which fed the stream of nineteenth-century nationalism. The first is that of the superiority of a particular tribal culture. His denunciation of patriotic boastfulness – the Favoritvolk doctrine – has already been referred to. One of the most quoted sentences from Yet Another Philosophy of History tells us that ‘Every nation has its own inner centre of happiness, as every sphere its own centre of gravity.’109 This is what the historian, the critic, the philosopher must grasp, and nothing is more fatal than the attempted assimilation of the Mittelpunkt of one culture with those of others. One must ‘enter the time, the place, the entire history’110 of a people; one must ‘feel oneself [sich hineinfühlen] into everything’.111 This is what contemporary historians (he is referring specifically to Schlözer) conspicuously fail to do.112 To understand Hebrew scripture it is not enough, he tells us, to see it as a sublime work of art, and compare its beauties with those of Homer, as the Oxford scholar Robert Lowth had done; we must transport ourselves into a distant land and an earlier age, and read it as the national poem of the Jews, a pastoral and agricultural people, written in ancient, simple, rustic, poetic, not philosophical or abstract, language. ‘Be a shepherd among shepherds, a peasant in the midst of an agricultural people, an oriental among the primitive dwellers of the East, if you wish to enjoy these creations in the atmosphere of their birth.’113 Germans are not ancient Hebrews; biblical images are drawn from a world alien to them. When the poet of the Bible speaks of the snows of Lebanon or the pleasant vineyards of Carmel, these are empty words to a German poet.114 ‘The dreadful storms from the sea passing over their land to Arabia were for them thundering steeds bearing the chariot of Jehovah through the clouds.’115 He says that it would be better for a contemporary poet to sing of electric sparks than copy these Judaean images; for the Bible the rainbow is the footstool of the Lord’s house; for the Skalds it is a fiery bridge over which the giants sought to storm heaven.116 All this is at best only half intelligible to us. The Germans are not biblical Jews, nor are they classical Greeks or Romans either.117 Every experience is what it is. To understand it is to grasp what it meant to those who expressed it in the monuments through which we try to read it. All understanding is necessarily historical. The Aufklärer – Gottsched, Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn – not only lack all historical perspective, they tend to grade, to give marks for moral excellence. Herder, in this (what he would regard as a Spinozan) mood, warns, at any rate in 1774 in Auch eine Philosophie, against moral evaluation (prone though he was to it himself, then and later), and urges the critic to understand above all that if one must condemn and praise, this should be done only after an exercise of sympathetic insight – of one’s capacity for Einfüblen (‘empathy’).

  Auch eine Philosophie contains the most eloquent description of the newly discovered sense of history, with its uncanny resemblance to that of Vico, whom, so far as we can tell, Herder did not read until twenty years later:

  How unspeakably difficult it is to convey the particular quality [Eigenheit] of an individual human being and how impossible it is to say precisely what distinguishes an individual, his way of feeling and living; how different and how individual [anders und eigen] everything becomes once his eyes see it, once his soul grasps it, his heart feels it. How much depth there is in the character of a single people, which, no matter how often observed, and gazed at with curiosity and wonder, nevertheless escapes the word which attempts to capture it, and, even with the word to catch it, is seldom so recognisable as to be universally understood and felt. If this is so, what happens when one tries to master an entir
e ocean of peoples, times, cultures, countries with one glance, one sentiment, by means of one single word! Words, pale shadow-play! An entire living picture of ways of life, or habits, wants, characteristics of land and sky, must be added, or provided in advance; one must start by feeling sympathy with a nation if one is to feel a single one of its inclinations or acts, or all of them together.118

  Greece, he continues, was not Athens. It was inhabited and ruled by Athenians, Boeotians, Spartans, Corinthians. Egyptians were traders no less than Phoenicians. Macedon was a conqueror like Rome. The great Greek thinkers had speculative minds as sharp as those of moderns. Yet (Herder repeats in and out of context) they were Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Macedonians, and not inhabitants of our world. Leibniz is ours; Plato is not. Similarity is not identity; one must see both the wood and the trees, although only God can do this completely. All history is an unending conflict between the general idea and the particular; all general ideas are abstractions, dangerous, misleading, and unavoidable. One must seek to see the whole, however unattainable this goal may be. Exceptions and deviations will amaze only those who insist upon forcing an idealised image on the manifold of reality. Hume and Voltaire, Robertson and Schlözer are denounced for using the measuring-rod of their own time. All civilisations are incommensurable.119 The critic must, so far as he is able, surrender to his author and seek to see with the author’s eyes.