Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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234 CHAPTER SIX

while a full understanding of another’s situation is impossible, humans’

extensive ability to commiserate with each other across various lines of

difference reveals the depth of this sensibility in the social and moral

character of humankind. He even argues that sound and language as such

are capable of engendering human sympathy, rather than only a language

with which one is familiar.

But sympathy, Herder insists, is not sufﬁcient for the purpose of orga-

nizing formal social relations and distributing justice. Thus, despite sym-

pathy’s powerful hold upon humankind in certain circumstances, on the

whole, it tends to become weak when humans interact with those who

are presumed to be different. He argues that

as the sympathy of man is incapable of being universally extended, and could

be but an obscure and frequently impotent conductor to him, a limited and

complex being, in everything remote; his guiding mother [Nature] has sub-

jected its numerous and lightly interwoven branches to her more unerring stan-

dard: this is the rule of truth and justice. (102)

Herder develops this idea further when he investigates his more norma-

tive understanding of humanity in Book XV of the Ideas. For now, he

conﬁnes himself to stating that some form of the Golden Rule approxi-

mates the sense of reciprocity, equity, and respect that can be found at

work in a variety of social circumstances. In some sense, the “rule of

truth and justice” derives from a similar disposition toward being treated

fairly and from the norms that develop from increasing interactions among

those with distinct approaches toward social life. Herder implies that the

content of various social rules and norms will vary, but that they have a

broadly similar character, one that underlies many of them and that indi-

cates a deep universal truth behind the diversity of social relationships

and practices. In this sense, his idea of a “rule of truth and justice” is

similar to Diderot’s partly sociological and partly philosophical concept of

the “general will of humanity”. Herder contends that

the laws of humankind, of nations, and of animals, are founded on similarity of

sentiment, unity of design among different persons, and equal truth in an alli-

ance: for even animals that live in society obey the laws of justice; and humans,

who avoid their ties by force and fraud, are the most inhuman of all creatures,

even if they are kings and monarchs of the Earth. (102)

European monarchs and the centralized political power that they repre-

sent pose, for Herder, one of the greatest threats to fostering and main-

taining the delicate equilibrium that justice requires. Since “[n]o reason,

no humanity, is conceivable without strict justice and truth” (102), the

oppressive political powers of Europe in both their domestic and imperial

guises conﬁrm their own brutal inhumanity, a point that Diderot had also

argued forcefully in the Histoire des deux Indes.

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 235

Indicating a theme that runs throughout the Ideas, Herder asserts that

there exists a universal impulse to religion, not to any speciﬁc religion or

theological doctrine, but to a sense of the mystery of our existence and

the limits of our own understanding. He criticizes those who reduce reli-

gion to fear, yet he also gives a speculative account of the origins of

religion by arguing that human curiosity about ultimate causes and the

deep connections among beings and actions leads to spiritual reﬂection.

In this respect, he asserts, “the ﬁrst and last philosophy has ever been

religion.” (103) Herder emphasizes the universality of such contempla-

tion, and of investing a variety of symbols or invisible realms with mean-

ing, by reiterating the constitutive features of humankind.

As he writes,

Even the most savage nations have practised it [religion]: for no people upon

Earth have been found entirely destitute of it, any more than of a capacity for

reason and the human form, language and the connubial union, or some of the

manners and customs that are characteristic of human beings. (103)

All peoples, therefore, strive to ﬁnd meaning in their lives and exercise

artful and creative capacities, though their languages, customs, intimate

relationships, and spiritual pursuits, all of which take on an almost inﬁnite

variety. Hence, “we know no creature above the human being [who is]

organized with more diversity and art.” (107) In part, this is the case

because humans are fundamentally cultural and plural beings: “Education

[or self-development, upbringing, Erziehung], art, culture were all indis-

pensable to him [i.e., to man] from the ﬁrst moment of his existence”.

Thus, they comprise the “speciﬁc character of humankind itself” (286).

Beyond a set of capacities or powers, however, Herder emphasizes re-

peatedly that it is the incessant striving and ﬂux of human life that best

characterizes humanity; in part, this follows from the characteristics he

emphasizes, for they all imply a degree of activity, reﬂection, and cre-

ativity. In this sense, he notes, all humans move toward what might be

considered an ideal humanity by cultivating and exercising their powers

in manifold ways. Humanity is not a deﬁnable goal and it clearly does not

represent a singular purpose or end. For Herder, it represents the sum

total, and the ever changing uses, of our active powers in different ages

and places. He notes that the traditions that one inherits are often restric-

tive (the “chains” of “prejudices and evil manners”) and that the claims

of necessity and the inﬂuence of environmental factors (such as climate)

can impose limits upon human activity and striving, but that everywhere

this striving toward humanity occurs in its own distinctive manner. Hence,

he argues that

[t]he design of plastic Providence must have taken in all these steps, these

zones, these varieties, at one view, and known how to advance human beings in

all of them.... (123)

236 CHAPTER SIX

Although Herder uses the language of providence, humans themselves

create, sustain, and transform their diverse cultural beliefs, practices, and

ideas. Like Kant, Herder calls upon all humans to continue to work to-

ward their self-cultivation by this perpetual and diverse striving, in order

for each individual “to become a nobler, freer creature, by his own exer-

tions” (124). Thus, humans possess freedom both as a constitutive char-

acteristic and as an open-ended capacity that is exercised in diverse ways

in order to become actual.

It is important to note that Herder himself presents his view of the

shared features of humanity to indicate that there is, indeed, something

that is identiﬁably human within the immense diversity of human life.

Thus, after having surveyed a number of ethnographic accounts of non-

European peoples, Herder writes the following:

Weary and tired of all these changes of climates, times, and nations, can we ﬁnd

on the globe no standard of the common property and excellence of our frater-

nity? Yes: the disposition to reason, humanity, and religion, the three graces of

human life.... Languages vary with every people, in every climate; but in all

languages one and the same type of searching human reason is conspicuous.

(251)

Underlying the manifold variety of languages, practices, institutions, and

beliefs, therefore, there exists a set of capacities that makes such diversity

possible and that suggests a common character which animates our var-

ious pursuits.

Herder argues explicitly (partly, perhaps, against Rous-

seau, who had suggested that orangutans might be purely natural hu-

mans, free of the artiﬁce of society and conventional mores) that humans

as such use language, reason, and strive for spiritual meaning. The eth-

nography of the non-European world, for Herder, conﬁrms what should

also be clear simply from a proper self-understanding. As he argues,

Had humans been dispersed over the Earth like brutes to invent the internal

form of humanity for themselves, we would then ﬁnd nations without lan-

guage, without reason, without religion, and without morals: for as humans

have been, so humans are still. But no history, no experience, informs us of any

place where human orangutans dwell; and the fables, which the late Diodorus,

or still later Pliny, relates of men without feeling and other inhuman men have

the marks of falsehood on the very face of them; or at least are not to be

credited on the testimony of such writers. (255)

Again, Herder relates two of his favourite examples, the New Zealanders

and the Pesherays, as humans who live in such extreme climates that they

appear to lead the most “savage” lives possible; yet even they “possess

humanity, reason, and language.” (255)

Herder moves, however, from a more anthropological and descriptive

sense of humanity to a normative conception of humanity in Book IX of

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 237

the Ideas. As we will see in the ﬁnal section of this chapter, it is the

synthesis of the two that eventually forms his considered view of the

concept of humanity. In Book IX, we see already this move toward relat-

ing what might be termed human nature with the natural tendency to-

ward respect and reciprocity. Herder begins to discuss the disposition to

humanity, which consists of the tendency to judge others and oneself by

standards of fairness and justice. He argues that New World peoples,

despite some practices that might offend Europeans, when considered

more carefully, also display this distinctive disposition toward ethical life;

moreover, he notes repeatedly (much as Montaigne had) that Europeans

themselves have at least as strong a tendency to weaken and subvert this

disposition as non-Europeans. Commenting on reports of cannibalism

(and, unlike Kant, assuming that to some extent such reports are cred-

ible), Herder argues forcefully that

[n]o cannibals devour their children or brothers: their inhuman practice is a

savage right of war to nourish their valour, and terrify their enemies. It is,

therefore, nothing more or less than the work of a gross political reason, which

in those nations has overpowered [the disposition to] humanity with regard to

these few sacriﬁces to their country, as it is overpowered by us Europeans, even

in the present day, in some other respects. Before strangers they are ashamed of

this barbarous practice, although we Europeans do not blush at killing men;

indeed, they behave nobly and like brothers to every prisoner of war, on whom

the fatal lot does not fall. (255)

Following this line of argument, Herder also notes that other practices

that are often described to support the claim that many New World peo-

ples lack the capacity to be moral beings—“when the Hottentot buries

his child alive” or when “the Eskimo abridges the days of his aged par-

ent”—are the “consequences of lamentable necessity, which at the same

time are not inconsistent with the original feeling of humanity.” Indeed,

he argues that “misguided reason or unbridled luxury has engendered

many more singular abominations among us [Europeans].” (255) The

upshot of Herder’s arguments is to demonstrate not only the hypocrisy

of Europeans’ pejorative judgements about New World peoples, but also

the universality of a moral disposition that takes on many forms. Despite

their great variety, Herder believes that they can all be described, in for-

mal terms, as including dispositions of “affection toward children”, “grat-

itude toward friends”, the “rule of justice”, and “principles of social

rights”; thus, the various forms of sociability and the balance achieved in

humans’ social relations through norms and institutions all point to the

constitutive features of humankind.

In a crucial passage, Herder blends his descriptive and normative un-

derstandings of humanity and contends that this disposition to humanity

is itself human nature:

238 CHAPTER SIX

permit me, after all I have read and examined concerning the nations of the

Earth, to consider this internal disposition to humanity to be as universal as

human nature, or rather to be properly speaking human nature itself. (255)

Herder ends Book IX with a metaphorical description of the relationship

between human unity and human diversity, one that is best to keep in

mind as we move toward his ideas about how one ought to conceptualize

human diversity. Speaking of the internal disposition to humanity and

how it lies within humans simply because of their humanity, he contends

that “benevolent God” gave instincts to animals, but impressed upon

humans his “image, religion and humanity”. He argues that “the outline

of the statue lies there, deep in the block, but it cannot hew itself out, it

cannot fashion itself. Tradition and learning, reason and experience, must

do this....” (256) Herder’s own understanding of humanity as the an-

thropological core of what it means fundamentally to be human is itself

“deep in the block” of the Ideas. The shared characteristics of humanity,

which also include an impulse toward just relations of respect and reci-

procity, are not enough to constitute any living human. Like the material

from which a statue is made, “humanity” is the essential and important,

but ultimately also the somewhat amorphous, material that is shaped and

moulded diversely by free and active human powers. Hence, for Herder,

respecting humanity necessarily entails respecting human diversity.

Conceptualizing Human Diversity:

Sedentary versus Nomadic Societies

Herder makes clear, at the beginning of Book VI, that his study of hu-

manity will attempt to integrate an account of humans as such with a

theory of human diversity; thus, as he explains, having formed an idea of

humans’ “general nature”, one should then proceed “to contemplate the

various appearances” that humans assume on the “global stage.” (132)

In the Ideas, of course, Herder switches back and forth quite rapidly

between anthropological statements about the nature of humanity to ar-

guments about what differentiates humanity and how far these differ-

ences run. Hence, there is not a clear textual division between his theor-

ization of human nature and cultural difference. In this section, I weave

together his various contentions about diversity to elucidate the key con-

cepts and categories that he draws upon and those that he rejects. More-

over, I show how his philosophical anthropology informs, and is informed

by, his conceptualization of the multiplicity that permeates human life.

Herder argues that one should be wary of relying uncritically upon the

standard division among hunters, pastoralists, and agriculturalists, which

was so often used to categorize peoples into distinctive groups (and which

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 239

was employed, as we have seen, by Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant, among

many others). Accordingly, he contends,

It has been customary to divide the nations of the Earth into hunters, ﬁsher-

men, shepherds, and agriculturalists; and not only to determine their rank in

civilization from this division, but even to consider civilization itself as a neces-

sary consequence of this or that way of life. This would be very excellent if

these modes of life were determined themselves in the ﬁrst place, but they vary

with almost every region, and for the most part run into each other in such a

manner that this mode of classiﬁcation is very difﬁcult to apply with accuracy.

(202)

Thus, throughout the Ideas, Herder makes an effort to distinguish, for

example, the speciﬁc mores, customs, arts, and traditions of one pastoral

people from another; as he notes, the “Bedouin and the Mongol, the

Laplander and the Peruvian, are shepherds, but how greatly do they differ

from each other....” (202, cf. 199) Nonetheless, despite the im-

portance of such local differences, Herder makes a number of cautious

generalizations about the primary differences between nomadic and sed-

entary peoples, differences that (as we will see) are crucial for his under-

standing of human development and imperialism.

Herder’s discussion of nonagriculturalists centres on the causes of their

nomadic lifestyle, the unlikelihood that they will change their lifestyle,

and an explanation of the kinds of arts and traditions that this way of life

tends to create and nurture. The climate within which a people live,

Herder argues, affects its level of artful activity. Those who can live pri-

marily on roots, herbs, and fruits (as Tahitians, for example, were often

understood to do) tend to foster “arts and inventions” that attend only

to their “daily wants.” Not all peoples, however, are fortunate enough to

enjoy such naturally bountiful environments; thus, where the climate is

“less temperate”, the pressures of necessity make humans live “more

hardily and with less simplicity.” (203) The arts, practices, and customs

that are required simply to maintain the sustenance of a people is itself

signiﬁcant, in Herder’s view, for it involves the “active powers of the

mind”. With regard to aboriginal Australians, he explains that the combi-

nation of activities that are required to sustain a people’s very existence

forms a distinctive way of life with its own standards of pleasure and

satisfaction (203).

Moving to other regions, he argues that the kinds of

understanding that are employed by a people are always suited to its

speciﬁc, local needs. Herder contends, for instance, that the

[indigenous] Californian displays as much understanding as his country and

way of life afford or require. So does the native of Labrador, and of every

country on the most barren verge of the earth. Everywhere humans have recon-

240 CHAPTER SIX

ciled themselves to necessity, and from hereditary habit live happily in the la-

bours to which they are compelled. (203, cf. 135)

The mode of transmission from one generation to the next, Herder im-

plies, indicates the cultural knowledge, social narratives, and artful prac-

tices that are required for what might erroneously appear to be a ‘natural’

life. Accordingly, he hypothesizes the kind of education that a young boy

might receive from the elders of a nomadic people.

The [Amerindian] boy is educated to aspire to the fame of a hunter; [or] as the

son of a Greenlander, to seek renown by catching seals: this forms the subject

of discourse, the songs, the tales of famous deeds that meet his ears; this is

represented to his eyes in expressive actions, and animating dances. (203)

Songs, Herder later argues, convey much of the essence of a people, for it

is through such artistic modes of expression that the key symbolic mean-

ings, traditions, and propensities of a people are bequeathed to younger

generations (216). The very fact that a people continues to lead its hunt-

ing or pastoral life indicates that it has accepted and is willing to continue

and to transform a set of social practices and norms; the members of such

a people show a “rooted esteem for that way of life which they have

received as an inheritance.” In contrast to common imperialist argu-

ments, Herder portrays such lifestyles as well-ordered and maintained by

the active powers of the human mind, rather than by instinct or by wild

irrationality.

In all of these respects, therefore, non-Europeans are similar to Euro-

pean peoples—while customs, languages, practices and so forth differ

signiﬁcantly, each people is artful, creative, and adjusts to the speciﬁc

qualities of its geography and climate. Still, as Herder notes, European

societies were considerably more complex and technologically more so-

phisticated than many of the societies that they encountered in the Amer-

icas—what, he asks, can explain this? Herder’s query is in part an attempt

to answer the related question of how one can explain the ability of Eu-

ropeans to conquer the Americas so rapidly, in a manner such that “Eu-

ropeans could treat . . . [Amerindians] like a ﬂock of defenceless sheep?”

(205) He asserts that differences in physical strength and in “understand-

ing” cannot account for the relative ease of European imperialists’ suc-

cesses. He mentions as obvious contributing factors Europeans’ arts and

weapons, but “principally”, he argues, the crucial element that guaran-

teed such swift victories consists of Amerindians’ lack of domesticated

animals. Herder explains this curious judgement at ﬁrst by indicating the

military prowess that Europeans possessed because of their use of horses

and dogs. In addition, he writes that since horses have been introduced

among some Amerindian nations, the “[t]he horse, which the [Euro-

pean] oppressors of their brethren employed as an unconscious instru-

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 241

ment of fate, may perhaps at some future period be the deliverer of the

whole land” (205). But the ultimate reason that the domestication of

animals is of paramount importance, in his view, concerns the consequent

psychological and social transformations, which often lead to the estab-

lishment of more powerful, and more destructive and imperializing,

societies.

As long as humans are kind toward animals, Herder argues, they tend

to improve one another. Thus, animals develop “capacities and inclina-

tions” that cannot be found “in the wild animal”. Moreover, the domes-

tication of animals and the activities that it enables promote “the active

mind of humans”; “the practical understanding on the part of humans”,

he writes, “has been strengthened and extended by the [domesticated]

beast”. (206) Herder argues that the lack of many domesticated animals

in the New World did not result from a lack of creativity or understand-

ing on the part of New World peoples. Rather, there were simply fewer

domesticable animals in the Americas. As he argues,

[The Americas] had fewer kinds of quadrupeds.... The alpaca and llama, the

camel-sheep of Mexico, Peru, and Chile, were the only tameable and domesti-

cated beasts: for even the Europeans, with all their understanding [of domes-

tication], have been unable to add any to these, or to render the . . . puma, the

sloth or tapir, an animal of domestic utility. (206)

Through this quirk of fate, he argues, much of the global differentiation

of lifestyles, institutions, and social practices followed.

Herder argues

that an inclination toward liberty is linked with the domestication of ani-

mals because the use of animals increases humans’ ability to fashion

themselves and their surrounding environments. In addition, most cru-

cially, it increases humans’ inclinations toward “acquisition and perma-

nent property” (135–36).

Hence, in many cases, he suggests, agriculturalism tends to follow

from the domestication of animals. Like Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant,

Herder argues that “generally speaking, no mode of life has effected so

much alteration in the minds of humans as agriculture, combined with

the enclosure of land.” (207) The sedentary, agricultural life, he con-

tends, lays the foundation for government and laws, although in other

passages he also suggests that a form of political rule (if not “civil” rule,

the political rule of a town or city) exists among nonsedentary peoples.

The establishment of civil life, however, comes at a steep cost, in particu-

lar a loss of human freedom because of the paternalism of governmental

power. As Herder argues, agriculture

necessarily paved the way for that frightful despotism, which, from conﬁning

each human to his ﬁeld, gradually proceeded to prescribe to him what alone he

should do on it, what alone he should be. (207)

242 CHAPTER SIX

Herder makes a number of impassioned attacks against the social evils

that are propagated by cities and towns, and argues that the restraints

placed upon citizens by states are a result of the problems that sedentary

living itself has caused. Following Rousseau, he contends that social op-

pression does not result from human nature, but rather from humanly

constructed and maintained institutions and practices. Political rule, at

least in the manner in which it existed in Europe in his day, was for

Herder an artiﬁcial and unnecessary burden; the quasi-anarchistic mo-

ments of his political theory becomes clearest in such passages.

Herder writes,

He who maintains that laws are necessary because otherwise humans would live

lawlessly takes for granted what is incumbent upon them to prove. If humans

were not thronged together in [the] close prisons [of cities], they would need

no ventilators to purify the air; were their minds not inﬂamed by artiﬁcial mad-

ness, they would not require the restraining hand of correlative [of the corre-

sponding political] art. (210)

In addition to the variety of domestic problems that agriculture unleashes,

it also leads to an imperializing and crusading mentality, whereby the

supposed beneﬁts of such life are spread coercively throughout the globe.

Herder often stops short of criticizing arts and sciences per se; moreover,

he often celebrates their contribution to human knowledge and even to

human prosperity and comfort. Herder even argues that Europe is in-

debted to Asia, for it was because of the “beneﬁcent” spread of cultivated

ideas and practices from Asia that Europe was able to develop beyond a

relatively simple life. (145)

But Europeans, in Herder’s view, cannot claim any superiority simply

because their settled lifestyles have over time produced artistic, scientiﬁc,

and technological achievements. He attacks the vanity of “so many Euro-

peans, when they set themselves above the people of all the other quar-

ters of the globe with respect to what they call arts, sciences, and cultiva-

tion” (241). Those who claim greatness are almost always the individuals

who had nothing themselves to do with the invention and improvement

of such arts and sciences. In an attempt to undercut some of the standard

arguments in favour of European superiority, Herder writes sarcastically

that simply learning to use inventions and traditions that one has inher-

ited “is the work of a machine” and that those who merely imbibe “the

waters of science”, without contributing to it themselves, possess all the

merit of “a sponge that has grown on humid soil” (241).

On the whole,

he argues that one cannot simply be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the development

of advanced arts and sciences: “I do not think the question is to be

answered with a simple afﬁrmative or negative, since here, as in every-

thing else, all depends on what use is made of that which has been in-

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 243

vented.” (242) Still, Herder ﬁnds it difﬁcult to contemplate such reﬁne-

ments without acknowledging that the inequalities upon which they have

been developed have “converted many towns and countries into poor-

houses” (243).

In a similar vein, Herder argues that the mere possession of books

signiﬁes nothing about the value of a people as such; the merits of writ-

ten documents consist in how well they are understood and appropriated

by thoughtful individuals. The practice of writing, in Herder’s view, is a

mixed blessing, for it tends to homogenize human thought and experi-

ence and to stiﬂe creativity. Local variations become erased as the written

word makes uniform the diverse understandings of a people so as to re-

cord them. As he contends,

although this way of perpetuating our thoughts ﬁxes both the spirit and the

letter, it in various ways fetters and restrains them [as well]. Not only are the

living accents and gestures, which formerly gave language such power to pene-

trate the heart, gradually extinguished by writing; not only are dialects, and

consequently the characteristic idioms of particular tribes and nations, rendered

less numerous; but humans’ memories and the spirit of their mental powers are

enfeebled by this artiﬁcial assistance of prescribed forms of thought. (239)

At the same time, he notes, writing can promote fraternity and may one

day become a universal feature of human societies, in which case fertile

cross-national exchanges of ideas and perspectives could check the inter-

nal homogenization of expressions, dialects, and perspectives that tends

to occur within any written culture. It is perhaps this ambivalent view of

writing that leads Herder to reject implicitly the imperial logic of mis-

sionaries and others who justify colonization on the grounds of spreading

the Gospel. For Herder argues that peoples who do not read and write

can win eternal salvation simply by believing in a higher power and im-

mortality, beliefs that, as we have seen, he takes to be nearly universal.

Thus, not only for Diderot and Kant, but also for the more religious

(though in many respects highly unorthodox) Herder, the religious di-

mension of imperialist politics is empty and uncompelling.

Given all of this, it comes as no surprise, then, that Herder is unwilling

to recommend the sedentary, agricultural lifestyle as a universal end to-

ward which all peoples should either voluntarily progress or coercively be

pushed. He protects himself from the charge of hypocrisy—“imagine not

that I wish to derogate from the mode of life which Providence has em-

ployed as a principal instrument for leading humans to civil society: for I

myself eat the bread it has produced.” (207–8) But, while admitting that

there are numerous beneﬁts to an agriculturally based, sedentary society,

he also calls upon his fellow Europeans to give equal respect to different

forms of social organization. As Herder exhorts,