The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Whether as an aesthetic critic, or as a philosopher of history, or as a creator of the notion of the non-alienated man, or as the most vehement critic of the classifiers and dividers, Herder (with Hamann) emerges as the originator of the doctrine of the unity of art and life, theory and practice. He is the most eloquent of all the preachers of the restoration of the unbroken human being by the growth of civilisation, Humanität, whether by an act of spiritual water-divining whereby the buried stream of the true humanist tradition may be found and continued, or, as Rousseau demanded, by some social transformation that will destroy the shackles that crib and confine men, and will allow them to enter or re-enter the Garden of Eden which they lost when they yielded to the temptation to organise and dominate one another. Once the walls that separate men are knocked down, walls of State or class or race or religion, they will return to themselves and be men and creative once again. The influence of this part of his teaching on the ideas of others, who spoke more articulately and acted with greater political effect, has been very great.163

  IX

  Finally, I come to what is perhaps the most revolutionary of the implications of Herder’s position, his famous rejection of absolute values, his pluralism.

  Men, according to Herder, truly flourish only in congenial circumstances, that is, where the group to which they belong has achieved a fruitful relationship with the environment by which it is shaped and which in turn it shapes. There the individual is happily integrated into the ‘natural community’,164 which grows spontaneously, like a plant, and is not held together by artificial clamps, or soldered together by sheer force, or regulated by laws and regulations invented, whether benevolently or not, by the despot or his bureaucrats. Each of these natural societies contains within itself (in the words of Yet Another Philosophy of History) the ‘ideal of its own perfection, wholly independent of all comparison with those of others’.165 If this is so, how must we answer the question, put by men throughout recorded history and settled with such clarity and authority by the great lumières of the eighteenth century, namely: What is the best life for men? And, more particularly: What is the most perfect society?

  There is, after all, no dearth of solutions. Every age has provided its own formulae. Some have looked for the solution in sacred books or in revelation or in the words of inspired prophets or the tradition of organised priesthoods; others found it in the rational insight of the skilled metaphysician, or in the combination of scientific observation and experiment, or in the ‘natural’ good sense of men not ‘scribbled over’ by philosophers or theologians or perverted by ‘interested error’. Still others have found it only in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man. Some thought that only trained experts could discover great and saving truths; others supposed that on questions of value all sane men were equally well qualified to judge. Some maintained that such truths could be discovered at any time, and that it was mere bad luck that it had taken so long to find the most important among them, or that they had been so easily forgotten. Others held that mankind was subject to the law of growth; and that the truth would not be seen in its fullness until mankind had reached maturity – the age of reason. Some doubted even this, and said men could never attain to such knowledge on earth; or if they did, were too weak to follow it in practice, since such perfection was attainable only by angels, or in the life hereafter. But one assumption was common to all these views: that it was, at any rate in principle, possible to draw some outline of the perfect society or the perfect man, if only to define how far a given society or a given individual fell short of the ideal. This was necessary if one was to be able to compare degrees of imperfection.

  But this belief in the final objective answer has not been absolutely universal. Relativists held that different circumstances and temperaments demanded different policies; but, for the most part, even they supposed that, though the routes might differ, the ultimate goal – human happiness, the satisfaction of human wishes – was one and the same. Some sceptical thinkers in the ancient world – Carneades, for example – went further and uttered the disquieting thought that some ultimate values might be incompatible with one another, so that no solution could logically incorporate them all. There was something of this doubt about the logic of the concept of the perfect society not only among the Greeks, but in the Renaissance too, in Pontano, in Montaigne, in Machiavelli, and after them in Leibniz and Rousseau, who thought that no gain could be made without a corresponding loss.166 Something of this, too, seemed to lie at the heart of the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the central stream of the Western tradition was little affected by this fundamental doubt. The central assumption was that problems of value were in principle soluble, and soluble with finality. Whether the solutions could be implemented by imperfect men was another question, a question which did not affect the rationality of the universe. This is the keystone of the classical arch which, after Herder, began to crumble.

  If Herder’s view of mankind was correct – if Germans in the eighteenth century cannot become Greeks or Romans or ancient Hebrews or simple shepherds, still less all of these together – and if each of the civilisations into which he infuses so much life by his sympathetic Einfühlen are widely different, and indeed uncombinable – then how could there exist, even in principle, one universal ideal, valid for all men, at all times, everywhere? The ‘physiognomies’ of cultures are unique: each presents a wonderful exfoliation of human potentialities in its own time and place and environment. We are forbidden to make judgements of comparative value, for that is measuring the incommensurable; and even though Herder himself may not always be consistent in this respect, since he condemns and praises entire civilisations, his doctrine, at least in his most original works, does not permit this. Nor can it be doubted that he himself made valiant efforts to live up to his earlier principles: for all his dislike of the rigidly centralised Egyptian establishment, or Roman imperialism, or the brutal chivalry of the Middle Ages, or the dogmatism and intolerance of the Catholic Church, he sought to be not merely fair to these civilisations, but to represent them as each realising an ideal of indefeasible validity which, as an expression of a particular manifestation of the human spirit, was valuable in itself, and not as a step to some higher order.

  It is this rejection of a central dogma of the Enlightenment, which saw in each civilisation either a stepping-stone to a higher one, or a sad relapse to an earlier and lower one, that gives force, a sense of reality, and persuasive power to his vast panoramic survey. It is true that in the Ideen he enunciates the general ideal of Humanität towards which man is slowly climbing, and some of Herder’s interpreters have faithfully attempted to represent his earlier relativism as a phase of his thought which he ‘outgrew’, or else to reconcile it with his hazy notion of a single progressive movement towards Humanität. Thus, Max Rouché thinks that Herder conceives of history as a drama, each act, perhaps each scene, of which can and should be understood and evaluated independently; which does not prevent us from perceiving that, taken together, these episodes constitute a single progressive ascent.167 Perhaps Herder did come to believe this, or to believe that he believed it. But it remains a vague conception; his skill and imagination, even in the Ideen, go into the evocation of the individual cultures and not of the alleged links between them. The whole thrust of the argument, both in such early works as the Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie, the Kritische Wälder, and in the late and mildly worded Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, and the Ideen itself, not to speak of his classical statement of historical relativism in Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, is to show and celebrate the uniqueness, the individuality and, above all, the incommensurability with one another of each of the civilisations which he so lovingly describes and defends.168

  But if all these forms of life are intelligible each in its own terms (the only terms there are), if each is an ‘organic’ whole, a pattern of
ends and means which cannot be resurrected, still less amalgamated, they can scarcely be graded as so many links in a cosmic, objectively knowable, progress, some stages of which are rendered automatically more valuable than others by their relationship – say, proximity to, or mirroring of – the final goal towards which humanity, however uncertainly, is marching. This places Herder’s Weltanschauung, so far as it is consistent at all, despite all the insights that it shares with them, outside the ‘perfectibilian’ philosophies of modern times, as remote from the divine tactic of Bossuet (or even Burke) as from the doctrine of progress determined by the growth of reason preached by Lessing or Condorcet, or of Voltaire’s bon sens, or from the ideal of progressive self-understanding and self-emancipation, spiritual or social, Hegelian or Marxist.

  If Herder’s notion of the equal validity of incommensurable cultures is accepted, the concepts of an ideal State or of an ideal man become incoherent. This is a far more radical denial of the foundations of traditional Western morality than any that Hume ever uttered. Herder’s ethical relativism is a doctrine different from that of the Greek sophists or Montesquieu or Burke. These thinkers were agreed, by and large, that what men sought was happiness; they merely pointed out that differences of circumstance and the interplay of environment – ‘climate’ – with men’s nature, conceived as fairly uniform, created different characters and outlooks and, above all, different needs which called for dissimilar institutional means of satisfaction. But they recognised a broad identity or similarity of purpose in all known forms of human activity, universal and timeless goals of men as such, which bound them in a single human species or Great Society. This would, at least in theory, enable a socially imaginative and well-informed universal despot, provided he was enlightened enough, to govern each society with a due regard to its individual needs; and to advance them all towards a final universal harmony, each moving by its own path toward the selfsame purpose – happiness and the rule of wisdom, virtue and justice. This is Lessing’s conception, embodied in the famous parable of the three rings in Nathan the Wise.169

  Herder had deep affinities with the Aufklärung, and he did write with optimism and eloquence about man’s ascent to ideal Humanität, and uttered sentiments to which Lessing could have subscribed, no less Goethe. Yet, despite the authority of some excellent scholars,170 I do not believe that anyone who reads Herder’s works with the Einfühlung for which he asks, and which he so well describes, will sustain the impression that it is this – the ideal of enlightened Weimar – that fills his mind. He is a rich, suggestive, prolix, marvellously imaginative writer, but seldom clear or rigorous or conclusive. His ideas are often confused, sometimes inconsistent, never wholly specific or precise, as, indeed, Kant pointedly complained. As a result, many interpretations can be (and have been) put upon his works. But what lies at the heart of the whole of his thought, what influenced later thinkers, particularly the German romantics and, through them, the entire history of populism, nationalism and individualism, is the theme to which he constantly returns: that one must not judge one culture by the criteria of another; that differing civilisations are different growths, pursue different goals, embody different ways of living, are dominated by different attitudes to life; so that to understand them one must perform an imaginative act of ‘empathy’ into their essence, understand them ‘from within’ as far as possible, and see the world through their eyes – be a ‘shepherd among shepherds’ with the ancient Hebrews,171 or sail the Northern seas in a tempest and read the Eddas again on board a ship struggling through the Skagerrak.172

  These widely differing societies and their ideals are not commensurable. Such questions as which of them is the best, or even which one should prefer, which one would judge to be nearer to the universal human ideal, Humanität, even subjectively conceived – the pattern most likely to produce man as he should be or as one thinks he should be – are, therefore, for a thinker of this type, in the end, meaningless. ‘Not a man, not a country, not a people, not a national history, not a State, is like another. Hence the True, the Beautiful, the Good in them are not similar either.’173 Herder wrote this in his journal in 1769. The cloven hoof of relativism, or rather pluralism, shows itself even in his most orthodox discussions of universal ideals; for he thinks each image of Humanität to be unique and sui generis.174 It is this strain in his thought, and not the language of commonplace universalism which he shares with his age, that struck, and perhaps shocked, the Aufklärer, the Kantians, the progressive thinkers of his time. For this goes directly against the notion of steady progress on the part of mankind as a whole, which, despite difficulties and relapses, must, or at least can and should, go on; a proposition to which the German no less than the French or Italian Enlightenment was fully committed.175

  Herder is not a subjectivist. He believes in objective standards of judgement that are derived from understanding the life and purposes of individual societies, and are themselves objective historical structures, and require, on the part of the student, wide and scrupulous scholarship as well as sympathetic imagination. What he rejects is the single overarching standard of values, in terms of which all cultures, characters and acts can be evaluated. Each phenomenon to be investigated presents its own measuring-rod, its own internal constellation of values in the light of which alone ‘the facts’ can be truly understood. This is much more thoroughgoing than the realisation that man is incapable of complete perfection, which, for instance, Winckelmann allowed,176 Rousseau lamented, and Kant accepted; or the doctrine that all gains entail some loss.177 For what is here entailed is that the highest ends for which men have rightly striven and sometimes died are strictly incompatible with one another. Even if it were possible to revive the glories of the past, as those pre-historicist thinkers (Machiavelli or Mably, for instance) thought who called for a return to the heroic virtues of Greece or Rome, we could not revive and unite them all. If we choose to emulate the Greeks, we cannot also emulate the Hebrews; if we model ourselves on the Chinese, whether as they are in reality, or in Voltaire’s opéra bouffe version, we cannot also be the Florentines of the Renaissance, or the innocent, serene, hospitable savages of eighteenth-century imagination. Even if, per impossibile, we could choose among these ideals, which should we select? Since there is no common standard in terms of which to grade them, there can be no final solution to the problem of what men as such should aim at. The proposition that this question can, at least in principle, be answered correctly and finally, which few had seriously doubted since Plato had taken it for granted, is undermined.

  Herder, of course, condemns the very wish to resurrect ancient ideals: ideals belong to the form of life which generates them, and are mere historical memories without them: values – ends – live and die with the social wholes of which they form an intrinsic part. Each collective individuality is unique, and has its own aims and standards, which will themselves inevitably be superseded by other goals and values – ethical, social and aesthetic. Each of these systems is objectively valid in its own day, in the course of ‘Nature’s long year’ which brings all things to pass. All cultures are equal in the sight of God, each in its time and place. Ranke said precisely this: his theodicy is a complacent version of Herder’s theses, directed equally against those of Hegel and moral scepticism. But if this is so, then the notion of the perfect civilisation in which the ideal human being realises his full potentialities is patently absurd: not merely difficult to formulate, or impossible to realise in practice, but incoherent and unintelligible. This is perhaps the sharpest blow ever delivered against the classical philosophy of the West, to which the notion of perfection – the possibility, at least in principle, of universal, timeless solutions of problems of value – is essential.

  The consequences of Herder’s doctrines did not make themselves felt immediately. He was thought to be a bold and original thinker, but not a subverter of common moral assumptions. Nor, of course, did he think so himself. The full effect was felt only when the romantic move
ment, at its most violent, attempted to overthrow the authority both of reason and of dogma on which the old order rested. The extent of its explosive potentialities was not fully realised until the rise of modern anti-rationalist movements – nationalism, Fascism, existentialism, emotivism, and the wars and revolutions made in the name of two among them; that is to say, not until our own time, and perhaps not altogether even today.

  X

  Herder’s works, as might be expected, bristle with contradictions: on the one hand, ‘The power which thinks and works in me is in its nature as eternal as that which holds together the sun and the stars … Wherever and whoever I shall be, I shall be what I am now, a force in a system of forces, a being in the immeasurable harmony of God’s world.’178 Whatever can be, will be. All potentialities will be realised. Herder believes in plenitude, in the great chain of being, in a nature with no barriers. Influenced by the naturalists, by Ritter, by von Haller, he sees man as an animal among animals: man is what he is because of slowly working natural causes, because he walks upright, or because of a cavity in his skull. Yet he also believes, with Aristotle and the Bible, in natural kinds, and in the special act of creation. He believes in a general human essence, a central human character: it is, as Leibniz taught in the Nouveaux Essais, like a vein in marble, to be brought out by reason and imagination; men are the Benjamins, the ‘darlings of Nature’s old age’, the peak of the creative process. Yet he also believes that this human essence takes conflicting forms; types differ and the differences are unbridgeable. He makes a curious effort to bring together the monistic notion of the logically rigorous interconnection of all real entities, as in Spinoza’s world (although in Herder’s case it takes the form of something more flexible and empirical), with the dynamic, self-developing individuated entities of Leibniz.179 There is a tension between Herder’s naturalism and his teleology, his Christianity and his enthusiastic acceptance of the findings of the natural sciences; between, on the one hand, his respect for some, at any rate, of the achievements of the French Encyclopaedists, who believed in quantitative methods and precision and a unified schema of knowledge; and, on the other, his preference for the qualitative approach of Goethe and Schelling and their vitalistic followers. Again, there is a contradiction between his naturalistic determinism, which at times is very strong, and the notion that one can and should resist natural impulses and natural forces;180 for people who do not resist are overwhelmed. The Jews were crushed by the Romans; their disastrous destiny is ascribed to natural factors; yet he holds that it could have been averted; so, too, the Romans are held to have succumbed to vices which they could have resisted successfully. Herder was not sensitive to the problem of free will as, say, Kant was; there are too many conflicting strains in him. He may have believed, like most self-determinists, that men were free when they did what they chose, but that it was, in some sense, idle to ask whether men were free to choose, since they obviously were not; yet his writings give little evidence that he sought escape in this time-honoured, but hardly satisfactory, ‘solution’.181 Again, there are the separate strands of Humanität as a general human ideal (to be realised fully, perhaps, only in the world to come) and the ‘Gang Gottes unter die Nationen’182 – a phrase and a concept which Hegel later appropriated – and, on the other side, his more frequent and characteristic pluralism and relativism. There is noticeable tension between his passion for ancient German tribal life, real or imaginary, as he conceived it – spontaneous, creative and free – and his reluctant admiration for Rome, and even more for the Church, with their universalism and order and capacity for rational organisation. More far-reaching still is the contrast between, on the one hand, his notion of the continuity of overflowing nature, natura naturans, the energy that is one in magnetism and electricity, in plants and animals and men, in language and in art – a universal, continuous life-force of which everything is a manifestation, of which laws can be discovered in the form both of the physical sciences of his time, and of biology, psychology and the particular brand of historical geography and anthropology that he favoured – and, on the other hand, the crucial role attributed to the unaccountable leaps of genius, miraculous events, sheer chance, the unanalysable process of true creation, and the consequent impossibility of achieving anything great or lasting solely by the application of techniques; and, what goes with this, the incommunicability of the central core of what individuates men or cultures and gives them all the colour and force and value they possess, something that is open only to the eye of imaginative intuition, incapable of being reduced to communicable, teachable scientific method. Finally, there is the ban on moralising, but at the same time the impassioned apostrophes to the great moments of human existence, the curses heaped on the enemies of human unity and creativity – the bloodstained conquerors, the ruthless centralisers, the shrivelling of the spirit by narrow and superficial systematisers, with, at the head of them all, the odious Voltaire, with his devitalising ironies and pettiness and lack of insight into what men truly are. All the confusions of his time seem richly reflected in his shapeless, sprawling, but continuously suggestive works.