In Defense of Herder on Cultural Diversity and Interaction

Review of Politics

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 79-105

  Spencer, Vicki ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249142842     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670507000320     Document Type: Article

References (209)

1. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980).
2. Charles Taylor, “From Philosophical Anthropology to the Politics of Recognition: An Interview with Philippe de Lara,” Thesis Eleven 52 (February 1998), 105
3. Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Teddington: Acumen, 2000), 7.
4. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutmann (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30–32.
5. Fred Dallymayr, Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
6. This is in large part due to the highly influential interpretation by Elie Kedourie in his Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), which was originally published by Hutchinson in 1960. For more recent examples, see Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 99-101; Paul Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), 48-50, 53-56; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), c. 4.
7. See Bikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 67–79
8. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 260
9. Damon Linker, “Herder's Reluctant Pluralism,” The Review of Politics 62 (Spring 2000): 289–292
10. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 70
11. Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 113–124.
12. See Berlin, Vico and Herder, 153, 156–163, 180-85; Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges, “Introduction” in J. G. Herder, Selected Early Works: 1764-1767 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 1; Vicki Spencer, “Herder and Nationalism: Reclaiming the Principle of Cultural Respect,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, 43, no. 1 (1997): 1-13. Further critical of Berlin for nevertheless claiming in his Against the Current that Herder sowed the “seeds of nationalism” is Christoph Bultmann, “Die Urgeschichte in Herders Geschichtsphilosophie. Anmerkungen zur Suche nach den Ursprüngen des Nationalismus” in Regine Otto, ed. Nationen und Kulturen Zum 250. Geburtstag Johann Gottfried Herders (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1996), 387-94. While F. M. Barnard, the foremost commentator on Herder's political thought, has consistently pointed out that Herder's nationalism is without any aggressive or racist tendencies (see Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 71, 172), only recently has he noted that Herder is not a nationalist in the way this term is used today. Yet he continues to employ this problematic categorization. See F. M. Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), esp. 19-26, 37-49, 64, 74, 178.
13. While Herder rejected systems theory, the claim that he was an unsystematic thinker is consistently challenged. See John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 318; Michael Forster, “Introduction” in Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ix-x; Marian Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnistheorie des jungen Herder (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), xiv; Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 128, 140.
14. For discussions of his holism see Elias Palti, “The ‘Metaphor of Life’: Herder's Philosophy of History and Uneven Developments in Late Eighteenth-Century Natural Sciences,” History and Theory 38, no. 3 (1999): 322–347
15. Ernst Behler, “Historismus und Modernitatsbewusstsein in Herders Schrift Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit,” Etudes Germaniques (July-September 1994): 267–284
16. Menze and Menges, “Introduction,” 1–19
17. Robert Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1–2
18. Hans Adler, “Johann Gottfried Herder's Concept of Humanity,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 55–74
19. Hans Adler, “Herders Holismus” in Herder Today: Contributions from the International Herder Conference (November 5-8 1987) (Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 1990), 31–45
20. Michael Maurer, “Die Geschichtsphilosophie des jungen Herder in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Aufklarung,” Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert, 9 (1987): 141–145
21. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 16 -18, 21–24.
22. For example: F. Meinecke, Historism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 309–310
23. R. T. Clark, Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), 56, 251
24. F. MacEachern, The Life and Philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 33
25. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 90, 97, 149. Linker's recent critique of Herder's pluralism in “Herder's Reluctant Pluralism” is based on a false dichotomy between monism and pluralism that he attributes incorrectly to Berlin. In his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), lii-liii, Berlin acknowledges the existence of certain universal values, albeit in a minimalist form.
26. See, for example, Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History, who first refers to “Herder's pluralist approach” followed in the next sentence by “his cultural relativism” (103), his “relativist, pluralist, and process-centered approach” (134), and his “relativist and pluralist conception of culture” (145); Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (335), who attributes a radical “relativism” to Herder's thought and then later refers to his “pluralism” (345); Fink's reference to Herder's “theory of cultural pluralism” (55) followed by his reference to Herder's “cultural relativism” in “Storm and Stress Anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 1 (1993): 65; and Gerald Broce's observation that “Herder had a relativistic and pluralistic conception of culture,” “Herder and Ethnography,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1986): 22, 150. This confusion is also evident in B. J. Whitton, who refers to “Herder's relativistic conception of cultural community”, but says he intends to outline the basic contradictions in “such radical arguments for cultural pluralism,” “Herder's Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural Community versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism,” History and Theory 27, no. 2 (1988): 147. Problems also exist due to Isaiah Berlin's interpretation. Although he later came to reject his categorization of Herder in Vico and Herder as a relativist (208 -9), it remains the most influential of his essays on Herder. See The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1990), 74–90.
27. See Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, xlix–lvi
28. Berlin, Crooked Timber, 74–89
29. Taylor, Multiculturalism, 63–73
30. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4
31. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 395–399, where he distinguishes between a weak pluralism that accepts minimal universals and a strong pluralism that accepts no transcultural values and is in this respect the same as relativism; Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 11-12.
32. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 171–172, 196, 206
33. Dallymayr, Alternative Visions, 271–272
34. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 143, 148, 152
35. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, “Introduction” in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21
36. Taylor, Multiculturalism, 63
37. James Tully, “Cultural Demands for Constitutional Recognition,” The Journal of Applied Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1995): 114–115
38. William Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 105, no. 3 (April 1995): 518.
39. J. G. Herder, Sämmtliche Werke (henceforth cited as SW), ed. B. Suphan 33 vols. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877-1913), 14: 228.
40. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (Glasgow: Fontana, 1983), 87–89.
41. As this remains the only full translation of Herder's text, it was a particularly unfortunate error. See J. G. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London: J. Johnson, 1800).
42. SW 4: 524; Turgot and Condorcet were the main developers of this theory of progress in the Enlightenment, although the histories written by Voltaire in, for example, La Philosophie d'histoire par l’ Abbé Bazin and Iselin, who Herder attacks directly, were informed by the same world view. See Berlin, Vico and Herder, 190
43. F. E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 103
44. Meinecke, Historism, 57–80
45. A. N. de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. J. Barraclough (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955).
46. J. G. Herder, J. G. Herder On Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 214; SW, 5: 557.
47. SW, 18: 290; my translation.
48. Herder, J. G. Herder, 186; SW, 5: 509.
49. SW, 13: 4; my translation.
50. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 118–119.
51. SW, 14: 35.
52. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 148–149.
53. SW, 14: 66–67.
54. SW, 8: 209–210.
55. Herder, J. G. Herder, 184
56. SW, 5: 505–506.
57. SW, 5: 508; 14: 121.
58. SW, 14: 145.
59. SW, 14: 227–228.
60. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 75.
61. C. Montesquieu, The Spirit of The Laws, trans. and ed. A. Cohler, B. C. Miller, and H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 310.
62. Translation in G. A. Wells, Herder and After: A Study in the Development of Sociology (Gravenhage: Mouton, 1959), 135; SW, 16: 556.
63. SW, 16: 570.
64. SW, 14: 213–217, 227, 233.
65. SW, 8: 188–189.
66. Also see Forster, “Introduction”, xiv, xxiv.
67. SW, 14: 210; 18: 147.
68. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 99–102.
69. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 148–149.
70. SW, 4: 465–466; 13: 386; 18: 318.
71. SW, 5: 511–513.
72. For a similar argument stating every culture is to a degree multicultural, see Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 163.
73. SW, 5: 527, 554, 564.
74. Herder, Outlines, 226
75. SW, 13: 346.
76. SW, 14: 247.
77. Wells, Herder and After, 268–269.
78. Linker, “Herder's Reluctant Pluralism,” 289–290.
79. Wells, Herder and After, 268–269.
80. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 216-17, 221.
81. Adapted from translation in Wells, Herder and After, 268–269;
82. SW, 15: 270.
83. Zamitto, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 164.
84. Linker, “Herder's Reluctant Pluralism,” 291. Though Barnard (Herder's Social and Political Thought, 147) agrees that Herder was essentially a “soft” historical determinist, who saw human beings as having the capacity for self-direction, he also argues that Herder possessed a providential conception of history that saw human actions as part of the working out of a grand design and thus presupposed a doctrine of historical fatalism. For Barnard (112), Herder's acceptance of these two potentially irreconcilable ideas was one of the most perplexing problems in his philosophy of history, and it is this view that largely influenced Linker. In his most recent work, Barnard claims that this is not a “fatal contradiction” in Herder's work, but his own confusion remains highly evident. See Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History, 114-18, 129.
85. J. R. Milton, “The Origin and Development of the Concept of the ‘Laws of Nature,'” Archives europennes de sociologie [European Journal of Sociology] 22 (1981): 191–195.
86. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Dent, Everyman's Library, 1976), 3, 1, 1-3, 205.
87. It is often pointed out that Herder later came to doubt the validity of this argument in his prize-winning Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. In 1774 in the first book of his Ideen, for example, he openly declares that speech is a divine gift from God. Yet in advancing the view in the preface that nature is God personified, when he asserts that language is a gift from God, he is at the same time saying it is a natural phenomenon. Following his declaration of language as a divine gift, he claims that “nature has formed the human being for language” (SW, 13:141, my translation). Throughout the Ideen, he continues to portray the human species as creatures predisposed to see, hear, and reason while indicating that it is necessary for people to learn how to use these innate facilities. Thus, his position on the nature versus nurture controversy remained unchanged. Finally, while God is depicted as the creator of the laws of nature, in the Abhandlung, he also conceded that Providence is ultimately responsible for humanity's creation. He questions, however, whether it is the task of philosophy to explain humanity's creation just as later in the Ideen he ponders whether it is necessary for humanity to know fully the divine plan. SW, 13: ix, 9-10, 344-45; 5: 95. Also see J. H. Stam, Inquiries into the Origin of Language: The Fate of a Question (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 172–174
88. E. Sapir, “Herder's ‘Ursprung der Sprache,'” Modern Philology 5, no. 1 (July 1907): 137–148.
89. SW, 5: 513, 586; 13: 67-71.
90. SW, 5: 527.
91. SW, 13: 138.
92. Mackie, Ethics, 220–221.
93. Mackie, 223.
94. SW, 13: 146–147.
95. SW, 5: 21–26, 28-31, 47. He was also conscious of appealing to the followers of both Leibniz and Locke in distinguishing humans “as possessing the active and free power of reason.” Norton, Herder's Aesthetics, 111-12.
96. SW, 13: 117–118; 14: 235-38.
97. SW, 14: 227.
98. SW, 14: 210; my translation.
99. SW, 14: 209–210.
100. SW, 21: 152–153.
101. Adler, “Johann Gottfried Herder's Concept of Humanity,” 62–63.
102. SW, 17: 113–115.
103. Aristotle, Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson, revised ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 91, 2, i, 1103 a14–b25.
104. Jean Jacque Rousseau, “A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, revised ed. (London: Dent AND Sons, 1973), 53–53
105. R. Wokler, “Rousseau's Perfectibilian Libertarianism” in A. Ryan, ed. The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 236–238.
106. SW, 17: 138.
107. SW, 14: 207–208.
108. SW, 17: 138.
109. SW, 13: 160.
110. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 134.
111. SW, 17: 122.
112. Walzer, Thick and Thin, 11–12.
113. SW, 17: 354; 18: 238-44.
114. SW, 13: 320–322; 14: 235, 250; 18: 262-74.
115. SW, 17: 115, 122.
116. SW, 17: 138.
117. SW 21: 178 – 81 Taylor also notes that his linguistic holism has been one of the most influential, albeit generally unacknowledged, insights. See Charles Taylor, “The Importance of Herder” in E. Margalit and A. Margalit, eds. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 58.
118. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 68
119. Linker “Herder's Reluctant Pluralism,” 280, n. 36. For a highly useful discussion of the differences between Herder's and Leibniz's theories of monads, see Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 37. Also see Beate Dreike, Herders Naturauffassung in ihrer Beeinflussung durch Leibniz’ Philosophie (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1973); Zamitto, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 171, 316.
120. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 31–32.
121. Berlin, Crooked Timber, 79–80.
122. For a discussion of Herder's analysis of Shakespeare that argues that he is “Sophocles' brother” because they are inwardly alike, despite being so dissimilar, see Zamitto, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 343.
123. SW, 13: 393.
124. Adapted from Herder, Outlines, 255
125. SW, 13: 393.
126. Herder argues that certain cultural phenomenon are almost incomparable when they have each attained their own perfection and thus Humanität (SW, 14: 227-28). This is not the same, however, as the relativist claim that different cultures are equally valid. See Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 322, 343–344.
127. Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York, Harper and Row, 1972), 20.
128. Herder, Outlines, 255;
129. SW, 13: 394.
130. SW, 13: 393.
131. SW, 14: 30–31.
132. Dallymayr, Alternative Visions, 39–40.
133. I. Kant, Kant's Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 46.
134. Herder, Outlines, 249
135. SW, 13: 383.
136. Berlin, Crooked Timber, 71.
137. Joseph Raz, “Liberalism, Skepticism and Democracy,” Iowa Law Review 74 (1989): 780.
138. SW, 4: 469.
139. SW, 17: 122.
140. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 73.
141. F. M. Barnard, Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 244.
142. SW, 17: 122; my translation.
143. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 10, 81
144. Menzes and Menges, “Introduction,” 3.
145. Herder, J. G. Herder, 191
146. SW, 5: 516.
147. SW, 14: 118.
148. SW, 9: 325–329, 365, 375-76.
149. SW, 14: 99–100, 236-36; 17: 127; 18: 318.
150. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 81. The kind of inclusive representation Young calls for in her politics of difference would satisfy this requirement. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, esp. c. 4.
151. SW, 13: 26, 255; 14: 213-15.
152. SW, 13: 341.
153. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought, 65–66
154. Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 211–214.
155. SW, 12: 117–120.
156. SW, 16: 606–616.
157. SW, 16: 600; my translation.
158. SW, 4: 467; 18: 283.
159. R. Aris, History of Political Thought in Germany: 1789 to 1815 (London: Frank Cass, 1965), 235
160. H. S. Reiss, The Political Thought of the German Romantics: 1793-1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 2.
161. This approach has been gaining increasing acceptance in recent years as contemporary political philosophers have turned their attention to the reality of cultural pluralism. See, for example, John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 4–6, 126; Tully, Strange Multiplicity.
162. SW, 4: 465–466; 13: 386; 18: 318.
163. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 206, emphasis added.
164. SW, 17: 288–289; 16: 600-601.
165. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 73.
166. SW, 17: 58.
167. Herder, Selected Early Works, 128
168. SW, 1: 186.
169. P. Juliard, Philosophies of Language in Eighteenth Century France (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1970), 84.
170. Herder, Selected Early Works, 165
171. SW, 1: 240.
172. Taylor, Multiculturalism, 25–26.
173. SW, 18: 157–158; my translation.
174. SW 8: 210; my translation.
175. SW 17: 58–61; For similar attention to cultural difference in contemporary political philosophy, see Taylor, Multiculturalism; James Tully, Strange Multiplicity; Dallymayr, Alternative Visions, esp. 263.
176. Viroli, For Love of Country, 124.
177. SW 17: 212; my translation.
178. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 73.
179. SW, 4: 335–356.
180. SW, 17: 212.
181. SW, 17: 58–59; 18: 204-8, 248 -50.
182. Dallymayr, Alternative Visions, 271–272.
183. According to Michael Forster, the current slogan “Think globally, act locally” aptly captures his position. See “Introduction,” xxxii, n. 34.
184. SW, 1: 2–3.
185. Ellie Kedourie asserted, for example, that “Herder argued that for a man to speak a foreign language was to live an artificial life.” See Nationalism, 3rd ed. (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1966), 64.
186. Herder, Selected Early Works, 31
187. SW, 1: 3–4.
188. Viroli, For Love of Country, 120.
189. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 73–74.
190. SW, 5: 164–165 8: 406-15.
191. SW, 5: 564–565; 11: 292; 14: 99-100, 113, 237; 17: 314.
192. SW 14: 113; my translation.
193. For a fuller discussion of Herder's expressivism see Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” 40–63
194. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1: 227–247, 255-92.
195. SW, 5: 134–135; 18: 147; 4: 422; 1: 194; 12: 7.
196. SW, 13: 357; 21: 180-84.
197. SW, 4: 422.
198. SW, 32: 27.
199. The long-standing myth that Herder was a conservative has been recently repeated. See, for example, Aris, History of Political Thought in Germany, 234–239
200. Michael Freeden, “Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology,” Political Studies 56 (1998): 762
201. Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism, 53–55.
202. Parekh, Rethinking Muliticulturalism, 78.
203. SW, 13: 375–381.
204. SW, 13: 332–333.
205. SW, 13: 385–386.
206. SW, 4: 466–468.
207. SW, 14: 89; my translation.
208. SW, 13: 381–383; 14: 212.
209. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 150.