Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 25 August 2024 is the 280th anniversary of the birth of Johann Gottfried von Herder (25 August 1744–18 December 1803), who was born at Mohrungen, then part of Prussia and now part of Poland, just south of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad (where Kant was a professor), on this day in 1744.
The historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy wrote an essay on Herder and the philosophy of history that begins with this:
“A series of eminent German writers between 1780 and 1796 published what may be called progressivist philosophies of history; and these were, of course, intrinsically adverse to most forms of primitivism, and implied the rejection of the assumption of the superiority of ‘nature’ to ‘art.’ The most important of these writings are Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race 1780 (Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts); Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind 1784–91 (Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), and some parts of the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity 1794 (Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanitat, 3te Sammlung), especially Bk. VI; Kant’s Ideas for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent 1784 (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht) and Speculative Beginning of Human History 1786 (Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte); Schiller’s What is, and to what end do we study universal history? 1789 (Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universal geschichte) and Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man 1795 (Briefe uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen).”
That’s a lot going on at the same time, and Lovejoy doesn’t even mention Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit, written in safe houses while Condorcet was on the run from the revolutionary gendarme, and which was posthumously published 1795. In my episode on Fernand Braudel I quoted Kenneth Clark as saying:
“Great movements in the arts, like revolutions, don’t last for more than about fifteen years. After that the flame dies down, and people prefer a cosy glow.”
I cited this as an example of what Braudel called a conjuncture. It seems the same is true of intellectual movements, and that sometimes form historical conjunctures. The years from 1780 to 1796 were unusually intellectually productive of philosophies of history, and we could call them a conjuncture of philosophies of history.
There are commonalities among these philosophies of history, all appearing within the same philosophical conjuncture. All of the philosophers who contributed to this philosophy of history conjuncture that Lovejoy identified influenced each other, but there are also differences among them. Lovejoy calls them all Enlightenment philosophies of history, and he says that they were progressive. Lovejoy gives an account of Herder’s progressivism that features his favorite hobby horse, that is to say, the principle of plenitude, which Lovejoy named, and which is the idea that no possibility remains forever unrealized. Lovejoy says that Herder exemplifies what he calls the temporalized form of the principle of plenitude, according to which the totality of possibilities are realized over time. He quotes Herder as saying,
“All that can be, is. All that can come to be, will be, if not today, then tomorrow.”
This does clearly sound like Lovejoy’s principle of plenitude. Lovejoy also says that progressivism is inimical to both primitivism and classicism. This is the source of conflict and contradiction in Herder, according to Lovejoy, since Herder is particularly associated with a kind of primitivism. This is the kind of primitive that we also find in Rousseau, another counter-Enlightenment philosopher, but Herder ultimately resolves this contradiction, Lovejoy says, by abandoning the primitivism.
While the static conception of the principle of plentitude holds that one must keep to one’s natural place in the world, which is a profoundly conservative idea, the temporalized principle of plenitude holds that one must never go back, only forward. From this forward movement of history, we get progress. Of course, there are many forms of progress, and we find them variously exemplified in the Enlightenment philosophies of history. There is the progress of the human mind that Condorcet wrote about. There is the progress that Lessing thought was to be secured through education. And there is the progress embodied in Kant’s idea of a convergence on a perfect civil constitution.
Herder was a student of Kant, but Herder’s metaphysics are quite different from that of Kant, as revealed by Herder’s Essay on Being, which was only published in English translation in 2018. In his Essay on Being Herder is critical of Descartes, so that takes us to the very root of modern philosophy, saying that Descartes, “…drew conclusions for existential being from ideal being.” Herder wrote that, “The skeptical idea occurred to the excessively studious philosophers.” He doesn’t name Kant here, but Kant’s philosophy was in large measure a response to Hume’s skepticism, and we might reasonably identify Kant as an excessively studious philosopher. Herder thought this skepticism was misplaced. He wrote of being that, “It is the first sensory concept, whose certainty lies at the ground of all else. We are born with this certainty.”
So despite being among Kant’s students, Herder wasn’t among those philosophers like Fichte who took up Kant’s critical philosophy and repurposed for their own ends. This isn’t an altered Kantianism, but no Kantianism at all. Herder’s philosophy was fundamentally different from Kant’s. Different metaphysics are going to entail different philosophies of history, and Kant and Herder produced different philosophies of history, with, of course, many commonlities, given their shared social milieu.
Kant saw that his former student had drifted some distance from his influence and he wrote no less than three reviews of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Herder had also come under the influence by Johann Georg Haman, an idiosyncratic thinker who was critical of Kant, and whom Isaiah Berlin included among his rogues’ gallery of counter-Enlightenment figures he sometimes identified as the “enemies of human liberty.” Both Lovejoy and Berlin saw pervasive contradictions in Herder’s thought, but whether Herder is more guilty on this score than a more purely Enlightenment figure like Kant or Lessing is not at all clear to me. Apologists of the Enlightenment, like Isaiah Berlin, would have us believe that the Enlightenment is uniquely coherent and consistent, and its advocates necessarily reflect this. Herder, like Rousseau was a counter-Enlightenment voice from within the Enlightenment. He shared many presuppositions of the Enlightenment worldview, but he also differed from those Enlightenment thinkers who stood unambiguously within the Enlightenment tradition.
When I read Herder, I am impressed by the naturalism of his work. Now, that could just be me projecting my own presuppositions onto Herder, but it would be too much to argue that naturalism burst onto the scene fully formed, with no development, later in the 19th century. This attribution of naturalism isn’t something that one hears in the focus on Herder as a counter-Enlightenment figure or as an early prophet of nationalism. He was both of these things, but the thrust of his contribution was not what he had in common with other Enlightenment thinkers.
Contemporary naturalism probably has its origins in the scientific revolution, prior to the Enlightenment, and was subjected to descent with modification during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment both accelerated and modified the nascent naturalism of the scientific revolution. If we survey the range of Enlightenment thinkers, we can find this naturalism variously exhibited, but it doesn’t appear in a pure form in any of them. One of the things that divides the Enlightenment philosophers of history among themselves are the traces of naturalism that each picks up and develops in their own way. So there are traces of naturalism in Condorcet, in Kant, and in Herder, but they are different traces, differently developed in these different contexts.
The traces of naturalism that Herder picked up on are themes that resonate with me personally, so much of Herder’s thought comes naturally to me. I should say, it makes more sense to me that other Enlightenment era philosophies. Your mileage may vary. Even today the content of naturalism is disputed, so it’s easy to find varying interpretations of naturalism today, not to mention the 18th century. I could also argue that the different kinds of naturalism picked up by the different Enlightenment philosophers was to some extent a function of their metaphysical views. Kant, with his distinctive idealism, was not going to work the same naturalistic themes into his philosophy that Herder with his rejection of Kantian metaphysics would work into his thought.
If you can find an unabridged edition of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind — this is the T. O. Churchill translation of 1800, so it was published while Herder was still alive — you will find that it begins with a naturalistic account as Earth as a part of the solar system, calling Earth a star among stars. Book III opens with, “Beasts are the elder brethren of man. Before he was, they were.” The more widely available abridgement doesn’t include this and instead begins with Book VII, after this naturalistic preliminaries. This is one of the reasons to always look for an unabridged edition of any book, since what it is edited out may furnish the context that alters the meaning of what follows. By starting out his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind with a naturalistic account of the Earth, plants, and animals, the later sections of humanity and the development of human history are placed in a naturalistic context.
There are several suggestions of evolution in Herder, and some commentators have rushed to assure us that Herder didn’t mean anything like what Darwin would propose later in the 19th century — Lovejoy was among these commentators — but Kant seems to have caught a whiff of it anyway, and in the supplement to his first review of Herder he wrote:
“…this would lead to ideas which are so monstrous that reason recoils from them: either one species would have emerged out of the other and all out of one single original species, or perhaps all would have emerged out of a single primordial womb.”
Kant, in short, was horrified by what Herder was suggesting, but Kant, in his usual perspicacity has put his finger directly on the fundamental problem. It is often said that Kant was ahead of his time in his cosmology, but he was also ahead of his time in envisioning the possibilities of the naturalistic origins of life, even if, so to say, negatively, since he rejected these ideas as monstrous. For Kant, Herder’s implicit evolutionism wasn’t merely unempirical, it was irrational. Here’s more from Kant’s review from Herder:
“This idea of organic force belongs solely to speculative philosophy; but if we were to gain entry even there, it would cause great havoc among accepted conceptions. To want to determine what arrangement of the head, externally with regard to its shape, and internally with respect to its brain, is necessarily connected with the propensity toward an upright posture; still more, to want to determine how a simple organization directed solely to this end could contain the ability to reason (a pursuit therefore in which the beast participates) — that patently exceeds all human reason. For reason, thus conceived, totters on the top rung of the physiological ladder and is on the point of taking metaphysical wing.”
The editor of Kant: On History, which includes Kant’s reviews of Herder, Lewis White Beck, reassures us in a footnote that Herder really wasn’t suggesting anything at all like evolution:
“Kant is… interpolating evolution into the thought, a notion that Herder expressly repudiated. There is nothing here of ‘transformations and revolutions, one into the next (des Einen in das Andere), of the multifarious species of the earth.’ In the very section which Kant is now criticizing, Herder writes: ‘No creature that we know has transcended its original organization and violated it by preparing itself for another .. .’ (XIII, 114). Elsewhere he repeats: ‘Man and the ape were definitely never one and the same species. . . . Nature has formed each species well enough and given it its own heritage’ (XIII, 257). Kant’s case against Herder rests partly on imputing to him a defiling evolutionism.”
I don’t think that this is an adequate response to the differences between Herder and Kant. Even though Herder did explicitly repudiate evolution in the passages quoted by Beck, it would not be misleading to call Herder’s work an evolutionary philosophy of history, and it is this pervasive evolutionism that led Kant to interpret Herder in the way that he did. Kant was horrified. His third critique was all about teleological reasoning, so it is almost as if Kant had intuited the body blow that natural selection was (or would be) for teleological conceptions of nature. The naturalism that Kant assimilated into his thought was such as could be reconciled with this teleological conception of nature.
Herder can be understood in this way: as an evolutionist before a mechanism for evolution was proposed. We can call this evolutionism if we like, or we can call it the temporalized principle of plenitude. There is, of course, much more to Herder’s philosophy of history than his evolutionism, but the evolutionism is important. For Kant, evolutionism was the mind taking to metaphysical wing, and Kant believed that he had given the lie to all metaphysics. Herder rightly intuited that an evolutionary treatment of history is not metaphysical, but rather naturalistic. At least, that’s how I read Herder. I suspect that Lovejoy would have insisted the temporalized principle of plenitude was a fundamentally metaphysical position. I think there is room to rationalize naturalistic evolutionism and the temporalized principle of plenitude, but that would be a project for another time.
Herder was no philosophical naturalist in the contemporary sense, but he was much closer to being so than Kant. As such, Herder constitutes an important intimation of contemporary thought. That being said, the later parts of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Man read more like Condorcet than Kant. While Kant was concerned to show the convergence of human history on a perfect civil constitution, Condorcet’s vision was more epistemological.
Recently I said that Husserl’s ideal vision of humanity was a vision of ideal knowledge, while Scheler’s ideal vision of humanity was more political and social and cultural. We also see this divergence between Kant, whose ideal is more political, and Condorcet, whose ideal was more epistemological. Herder is more like Condorcet and Husserl, and less like Kant, but there are hints of what Scheler was getting at also. In book XV of Ideas for a Philosophy of a History of Mankind, paints a picture of humanity as the end and aim of human nature, which is quite close to what Scheler would later write. Herder also develops the political and social implication of his views, especially in his letters on the advancement of humanity.
