J.G. herder on language and the metaphysics of national community

Review of Politics

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 237-262

  Fox, Russell Arben ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 30444453369     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500049950     Document Type: Article

References (117)

1. Isaiah Berlin's studies of Herder were very influential here; in publications like "Herder and the Enlightenment" (in Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas [New York: Viking Press, 1976], pp. 145-216), he explained the role Herder's romantic appreciation of diverse histories and folkways played in the rise of cultural pluralism as a challenge to Enlightenment doctrines.
2. Since then, Herder's contributions to political and social matters have been examined by Frederick Beiser (in Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992], pp. 189-221)
3. Charles Taylor (in "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed, Amy Gutmann [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], pp. 25-73)
4. and many others. The study of Herder's political ideas in English-language scholarship has gone beyond Berlin's original work, which is appropriate; for all his insights, Berlin never examined the ontological roots of Herder's appreciation of history and the Volk, and hence left many of Herder's religious and philosophical writings unexplored. Berlin's pluralist reading of Herder has been productively criticized of late (see Damon Linker, "The Reluctant Pluralism of J.G. Herder," Review of Politics 62 [Spring 2000]: 268 n.2 and passim), but much work remains to be done
5. See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 165
6. and passim; "From Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism to Liberal Nationalism," in Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 210.
7. See Kymlicka, "Liberal Culturalism: An Emerging Consensus?" in Politics in the Vernacular, pp. 39-42 and passim.
8. Some theorists who are basically sympathetic to Kymlicka's project include Avishai Margalit, David Miller, Joseph Raz, Jeff Spinner and Yael Tamir. See Margalit and Raz, "National Self-Determination," Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 439-61;
9. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
10. but also see Miller, "Communitarianism: Left, Right and Centre," in Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 97-109;
11. Raz, "Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective," Dissent, Winter 1994, pp. 67-79;
12. Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4;
13. and Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
14. See Renan, "What Is a Nation?" in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 52-53 and passim;
15. Margaret Moore, The Ethics ofNationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 7.
16. Taylor, "Can Liberalism be Communitarian?" Critical Review 8 (1994): 259-260
17. Taylor, "Can Liberalism be Communitarian?" Critical Review 8 (1994): Ibid., pp. 260, 262
18. See Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 10. White is discussing here what he calls "weak ontological reflection," not anything associated with human attachments per se. But his exploration of this topic is helpful in understanding the aesthetic-affective dimension; and moreover, as White notes, the issues raised by certain varieties of communitarianism (in particular Taylor's) have been an important source for recent challenges to traditional ontological assumptions regarding the p-motivated self. See ibid., p. 5, and chap. 3.
19. I acknowledge that I am dismissing here without argument the claim that the post-September 11th patriotism expressed by the great majority of Americans, far from revealing a spontaneous sense of awareness and attachment, in fact reflected nothing more than media-induced (and politically manipulated) groupthink. I find such claims completely unpersuasive, not to mention condescending.
20. For example, see Stanley Hauerwas, "What Could It Mean for the Church to Be Christ's Body?" in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 19-31;
21. Alasdair Maclntyre, "A Partial Response to My Critics," in After Maclntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair Maclntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 283-303;
22. and Sheldon Wolin,"EPluribus Unum: The Representation of Difference and the Reconstitution of Collectivity," in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 120-36.
23. See George Kateb, "Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility," Political Theory 28 (2000): 6,16 and passim.
24. See George Kateb, "Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility," Political Theory 28 (2000): Ibid., p. 6;
25. Jeffrey Friedman, "Nationalism in Theory and Practice," Critical Review 10 (Spring 1996), pp. 158,160.
26. Friedman is making particular to the work of David Miller in this passage; see On Nationality, p. 70.
27. This is how Anthony D. Smith presents the "modernist" claim about nationality; see Smith, "The Origins of Nations," in Becoming National, pp. 106,109 and passim.
28. Influential defenses of the modernist position include Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991)
29. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
30. and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
31. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ed. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), "Preface," pp. 10-11, and §75 n.47, §268-270 n.162.
32. See, for example, chap. 2 of the standard sociolinguistic text, John Edwards's Language, Society and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1985).
33. It is almost impossible to avoid reports on nationalist movements and their focus on language; when I was writing the first draft of this essay, two examples appeared on the same day on the front pages of major American newspapers: Suzanne Daley, "In Europe, Some Fear National Languages are Endangered," The New York Times, Al
34. and Susan B. Glasser, "In Russian Republic, ABCs Are Test of Power," The Washington Post, Al, both on 16 April 2001.
35. Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship, p. 152;
36. Spinner is here criticizing the claims of Charles Taylor; see Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," p. 59.
37. Fletcher, "The Case for Linguistic Self-Defense," in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 333.
38. See, for example, Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 44-73 and passim.
39. Taylor, "Reply and Re-articulation," in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism;
40. The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 239;
41. Michael N. Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles," Review of Metaphysics 56 (2002): 324, 333-34, and passim.
42. Taylor discusses this issue in a philosophical vein in "Reply and Rearticulation," pp. 236-240
43. which is a response to Vincent Descombes's discussion of language in "Is There an Objective Spirit?" in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, pp. 96-118;
44. Taylor considers the matter further in "Language and Society," in Communicative Action: Essays on Jiirgen Habermas's "The Theory of Communicative Action," ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
45. For support from cognitive linguistics for this position, see Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
46. I think here in particular of Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
47. On the former, see the aforementioned work of Isaiah Berlin; on the latter, consider John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. chaps. 4 and 8.
48. Ernest A. Menze, "Gang Gottes iiber die Nationen": The Religious Roots of Herder's Auch eine Philosophie Revisited," Monatshefte: fur deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 92 (2000): 17;
49. Menze is citing Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit [Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humankind], in Werke in zehn Bdnden, vol. 4, Jiirgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, eds. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), p. 41
50. hereafter cited as "Auch eine Philosophie" I Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 299, hereafter cited as "Forster." In this paper, citations from Herder will be followed, after a slash, by the primary source for the given English translation. I have often slightly altered translations when my reading appeared to support such changes. When there is no slash, the translation is mainly my own.
51. Michael Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unity and Diversity in "On Diligence in Several Learned Languages" (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 16-17.
52. Uber den Fleifi in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen [On Diligence in Several Learned Languages], in Sdmtliche Werke, vol.1, ed. Bernard Suphan (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967), pp. 1-2
53. hereafter cited as "Uber den Fleifi" / Selected Early Works, 1764-1767, ed. Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges and trans. Menze and Michael Palma (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 29-30, hereafter cited as "Menze and Palma."
54. Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought, pp. 36, 42.
55. Briefzu Beforderung der Humanitat [Letters for the Advancement of Humanity], in Werke in zehn Btinden, vol.7, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), p. 304, hereafter cited as "Brief zu Beforderung."
56. Herder described his concept of Besonnenheit as "the whole disposition of human nature" and "the accommodation of all human forces in this central, fated direction" (Abhandlung itber den Ursprung der Sprache [Treatise on the Origin of Language], in Werke in zehn Ba'nden, vol.1, ed. Ulrich Gaier [Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985], pp. 719, 720
57. hereafter cited as "Abhandlung" / Forster, pp. 84, 85).
58. Brief zu Beforderung, pp. 577-578 /
59. Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, ed. and trans. Marcia Bunge (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 146, hereafter cited as "Bunge."
60. Abhandlung, p. 722 / Forster, p. 87.
61. Abhandlung, p. 723 / Forster, p. 88.
62. Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language," p. 340.
63. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind], in Werke in zehn Bdnden, vol.6, ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), p. 348, hereafter cited as "Ideen zur Philosophie."
64. Abhandlung, pp. 723-24 / Forster, p. 89 and passim
65. This does not mean that Herder was a straightforward empiricist in his understanding of language and thought, along the lines of Locke and other British thinkers. On the contrary, from very early on in his career Herder argued that material principles and sensations are not reflected by us, but rather have their "locus of connection in us" (see Versuch tiber das Sein [Essay on Being], in Werke in zehn Bdnden, 1: 20).
66. Forster, linking these two aspects of Herder's philosophy (that is, that meanings or concepts may be essentially equated with usages of words, and that those usages themselves have a sensate nature), writes that for Herder "the sensations which ground concepts inevitably undergo a transformation as the concepts are acquired [and hence spoken and further acquired and transformed], their final required nature being one that they can only have along with concepts" (see Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language," p. 352 and passim).
67. On the relevance of the sense of "irreducible rightness" to distinguishing human language and its unique "linguistic dimension" from other forms of intraspecies communication, see Charles Taylor, "The Importance of Herder," in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 85-86.
68. Abhandlung, p. 725 / Forster, p. 90;
69. see also Robert E. Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 115 and passim, for a fine consideration of Einverstandnis, an important concept which has unfortunately passed mostly uninvestigated in many other studies of Herder.
70. Abhandlung, p. 733 / Forster, p. 97.
71. Abhandlung, p. 740 / Forster, p. 103.
72. Ideen zur Philosophie, p. 339 /
73. J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 313, hereafter cited as "Barnard."
74. See Wie die Philosophie zum Besten des Volks allgemeiner und nutzlicher rverden kann [How Philosophy can become more General and Useful for the Good of the People], in : Werke in zehn Ba'nden, 1: 134 / Forster, p. 29;
75. Vom Erkennen Und Empfinden der ; Menschlichen Seek [On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul], in Werke in : zehn Banden, 4: 331, hereafter cited as "Vom Erkennen" I Forster, p. 189 and passim
76. See Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001), esp. pp. 253-76 and passim;
77. Fletcher, "The Case for Linguistic Self-Defense," pp. 331-32.
78. Ideen zur Philosophie, p. 369 / Barnard, p. 324.
79. Vom Erkennen, p. 358 / Forster, p. 212. It should be noted that this idea plays an important role in filling out Herder's whole philosophy of language, and that in presenting the bond of language as something which sustains and contributes to humanity's essential reflexivity or "inner plasticity," Herder to a degree partially supplants-or better, supplements, without necessarily changing any key arguments-the pure (perhaps almost too psychological) "marking" operation of Besonnenheit which he described in the Treatise. (Vom Erkennen, p. 357 / Forster, p. 211 and passim; see also Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language," p. 340.)
80. Brief zu der Abhandlung iiber Publikum und Vaterland [Letter for a Treatise on the Public and Fatherland], in Sdmtliche Werke, 18: 336.
81. Ideen zur Philosophie, p. 342 / Bunge, p. 53.
82. Auch eine Philosophie, pp. 39-40 / Forster, p. 297.
83. Ideen zur Philosophic, pp. 255-56 / Barnard, p. 284.
84. Vicki Spencer, "Difference and Unity: Herder's Concept of Volk and its Relevance for Contemporary Multicultural Societies," in Nationen und Kulturen, ed. Regine Otto (Wiizrburg: Konigstein, 1996), pp. 299-302.
85. Idee zum ersten patriotischen Institutfiir den Allgemeingeist Deutschlands [Idea for the First Patriotic Institute of the German Public Spirit], in Werke in zehn Banden, volume 9/2, ed. Rainer Wisbet and Klaus Pradel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), p. 565.
86. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 7 and passim;
87. Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 232.
88. Brief zu Befdrderung, p. 276.
89. Uber die Fahigkeit zu sprechen und zu hbren [On the Ability to Speak and Hear], in Werke in zehn Banden, 9/2: 707.
90. Vicki Spencer, "Herder and Nationalism: Reclaiming the Principle of Cultural Respect," Australian Journal of Politics and History 43 (1997): 6 and passim
91. "Difference and Unity," pp. 301-302.
92. See Rodriguez, "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood," The American Scholar 50 (Winter 1980/1981): 34 and passim.
93. For an example of this kind of traditionalist claim, see the preface of the facsimile publication of Noah Webster's First Edition of an American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828 (San Francisco: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1967), p. 10 and passim.
94. The dynamics (and limits) of a human rights approach to language policy are displayed in Kymlicka, "Human Rights and Enthnocultural Justice," in Politics in the Vernacular, pp. 78-79.
95. Is the multilingual Canadian federation, for instance, a success or not? Certainly Canada has a stable civil society and at least a certain degree of national affectivity. But has that been achieved because of a truly translingual, felt attachment, or because fortuitous historical circumstances have rendered Canada's "binational" federation palatable almost in spite of itself? This is a complex argument, one made more difficult by the (often buried but still very strong) animosities generated by the efforts of Pierre Trudeau to force Canada to embrace a single, multilingual identity: see Pierre A. Coulombe, "Citizenship and Official Bilingualism in Canada," in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 273-93;
96. Guy Laforest, "The True Nature of Sovereignty: Reply to my Critics Concerning Trudeau and the End of the Canadian Dream," in Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 298-310;
97. "Pierre Elliot Trudeau: Quebec's Best Friend," in Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, ed. Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999), pp. 367-92. Answering these questions also requires research into actual language practice, which is rarely as multilingual as the documents which give nations their legal embodiment seem to imply.
98. For example, it is interesting to note that in Switzerland, which is both multilingual and famously patriotic, communities are overwhelmingly monolingual: "there is no official bilingualism at the local level... living in Switzerland means living entirely in German, in French or in Italian" (Francois Grin, "Language Policy in Multilingual Switzerland," cited in Kymlicka, "From Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism," p. 213 n.7). 58.1 owe this important criticism to anonymous readers for The Review of Politics.
99. Idem zur Philosophie, p. 333 / Barnard, p. 309.
100. Brief zu Befdrderung, p. 698.
101. See Nettle and Romaine, Vanishing Voices, pp. 172-75 and passim.
102. Uber den Fleifi, pp. 3,7 / Menze and Palma, pp. 31, 33.
103. Brief zu Beforderung, pp. 65-66.
104. Martin Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview (1966)," in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan and trans. William J. Richardson (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 45-67.
105. Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, and J. Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, rev. ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 244-245
106. As Fred Dallmayr sees it, "populist nationalism ... had already suffered shipwreck in Heidegger's thought by 1934 ... a shipwreck that in large measure undergirded his celebrated Kehre seen as both a philosophical and a political turning" (Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993], p. 97).
107. See George Kovacs, "Heidegger in Dialogue with Herder: Crossing the Language of Metaphysics toward Be-ing-historical Language," Heidegger Studies 17 (2001): 45-63.
108. George Kovacs, "Heidegger in Dialogue with Herder: Crossing the Language of Metaphysics toward Be-ing-historical Language," Heidegger Studies 17 (2001) Ibid., pp. 57-61.
109. Heidegger, "Language," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 192
110. "Letter on Humanism," p. 262.
111. Kovacs, "Heidegger in Dialogue with Herder," p. 63.
112. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," pp. 241-242
113. See Christopher Rickey, Revolutionary Saints: Heidegger, National Socialism, and Antinomian Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 269 and passim.
114. Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, p. 103.
115. Von Baumgartens Denkart in seinen Schriften [Von the Thought ofBaumgarten in His Writings], in Werke in zehn Banden, 1: 655.
116. F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. xxi.
117. See Michael J. Perry, "Is the Idea of Human Rights Ineliminably Religious?" in The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 11-41.