INTRODUCTION
The title of this article may appear contentious in at least two respects. Both the implied idea that Johann Gottfried Herder was a substantive political thinker and that his thought should be discussed in relation, rather than opposition, to Enlightenment thought challenge a long tradition of scholarship. The image of Herder as a non-political, counter-Enlightenment figure has a long pedigree and has proved remarkably persistent.
Indeed, the characterization of Herder by his nineteenth-century biographer, Rudolf Haym, as a “dilettante” who only ever managed to “scratch the surface” with regard to politics has found many weighty followers,Footnote 1 most notably Friedrich Meinecke and Isaiah Berlin.Footnote 2 Moreover, Herder's “superficial” political views have predominately been interpreted in the context of his alleged opposition to the prevailing patterns of thought operating at the time he was writing. It was, above all, his uncompromising hostility towards the modern state, and particularly the championing of the state as a means to rationally advance human development and happiness by his contemporaries, that negatively defined his politics and aligned it with his struggle against Enlightenment rationalism and universalism.Footnote 3 Unable to fill the vacuum left by the negation of the state, Herder, so the argument goes, ended up with a fuzzy idea of cultural nationalism that is surprisingly close to anarchism: free and independent individuals, bound together by a shared culture, will organically grow as a community through spontaneous endeavours neither rationally directed nor policed by any actor residing outside itself.Footnote 4
And yet, the sharp increase in interest in Herder over the last two decades has led to considerable debate about his place within the Enlightenment,Footnote 5 and has resulted in several attempts to study his political ideas.Footnote 6 In particular, by employing a pluralized notion of Enlightenment, recent scholarship has sought to find relationships between Herder's work and various fault lines running through eighteenth-century thought. Concurrently there have been attempts to tease out the extent to which Herder's writings may have been implicated in political debates.
In this essay, I contribute to both lines of enquiry by tracing the emergence and subsequent development of a vital concept of Herder's philosophy: the idea of Bildung or formation/education/cultivation. It begins with a reconstruction of one salient point of origin of this idea in Herder's oeuvre, which is located in a highly political context. It was in a series of hitherto underexplored texts written in the late 1760s concerned with the civilization of Russia,Footnote 7 and above all with the grand reform projects of Peter I and Catherine II, that Herder first prominently elaborated on Bildung. Crucially, these writings not only are profoundly political, but also highlight Herder's active participation in Enlightenment controversies. We will see that when reflecting on the civilization of Russia, Herder employed Bildung as a means to mediate between conflicting models of reform prevalent at the time he was writing. In particular, it enabled him to steer a middle course between Voltaire's championing of socio-economic and cultural progress through willed, top-down reform and through the soaking up of outside influences, and its alternative, most prominently advocated by Denis Diderot, namely that civilization occurs naturally from the bottom up and must be advanced through the marshalling of existing internal forces.
While it is true that Herder soon abandoned the project of participating in the reform of Russia, he further refined the idea of Bildung in his subsequent works on anthropology of the 1770s and 1780s. A sketch of the development of Bildung during this period highlights the continuity between the early Russian writings and the later anthropological works, thereby substantiating my initial account of Herder as a political thinker deeply involved in Enlightenment debates. Indeed, whereas Herder's analysis of Russia is grounded upon a careful negotiation between differing models of political reform, Herder's anthropology of Bildung revises existing conceptualizations of human nature and sociability. This revision culminates in a distinct conception of the state that is developed through close engagement with the arguments of thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes.
Bildung is the glue that connects these two bodies of work, and questions of a political nature accompany the subsequent development of this concept. In particular, the problems Herder grappled with in his Russian writings are taken up again in his anthropological works, but are now discussed in a widened theoretical framework. Thus the question of the extent to which wilful political actions can influence the development of a given society is transformed into a consideration of the nature of human freedom within a generally deterministic account of nature tout court. Likewise, the contrast between a top-down, cosmopolitan model of reform and a bottom-up, indigenous one that stands at the heart of Herder's analysis of Russia is echoed in his later discussion about the extent to which any culture must be rooted in distinctly national traditions, and finds a resolution in his analysis about the respective roles of state, nation and individual in the process of Bildung.
Reading two important parts of Herder's oeuvre through the conceptual prism provided by Bildung throws some deep-seated misconceptions about his thought into sharp relief. The Herder emerging from such a reading is neither a “political dilettante” nor a rebel against a putatively monolithic tradition of Enlightenment. Instead we encounter a thinker who delves into some of the most complex political problems of his times, and who seeks to resolve these by mediating between conflicting strands of contemporary thought.
HERDER AND THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEBATE ABOUT THE CIVILIZATION OF RUSSIA
Herder engaged with Russia throughout his career, and reflections about the Bildung of the empire are scattered across his oeuvre. The most intense preoccupation with Russia occurred early in his life though, and found written, if not published, expression just when he was leaving the country. Herder had lived and worked in Riga since 1764 and left this town under Russian dominion in 1769 for Nantes. It is the Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 Footnote 8—conceived as a philosophical travel diary, but never completed—and a trio of smaller texts, written in France alongside the diary,Footnote 9 that contain the fullest picture of his conception of Russia.
The main topics Herder addressed in those writings – an appraisal of the reign of Peter I, and a sketch of a reform programme for the current czarina Catherine II – were causes célèbres in the second half of the eighteenth century, often used to illustrate conflicting arguments about the direction and the drivers of socio-economic and cultural development.Footnote 10 The usual starting point of such arguments was that Peter had inherited a country in a decidedly primitive condition, and that his reign, as well as that of his most illustrious successor, Catherine, must be regarded as attempts to kick-start a period of rapid progress. What particularly caught the eye of many thinkers was Peter's project of Europeanization; that is to say, his conscious effort to bridge a perceived developmental gap between Europe and Russia by means of emulating his neighbours. Russia and its reforming czars thus provided the occasion for a debate about the process of civilization, and the relative importance of the role of sovereigns and of cross-cultural exchange within this process.
One pivotal event in the development of these interlocking debates was the publication of Voltaire's two-volume Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand in 1760–63.Footnote 11 Voltaire, drawing on, but significantly radicalizing, earlier assessments of Peter, crafted an argument that framed the debate about the civilization of Russia until the end of the century. According to Voltaire, the question of Russia's civilization could be largely reduced to the reign of the great czar and his reforming successors. When Peter ascended to the throne, Russia was, Voltaire argued, a vast tabula rasa: an empire of enormous extent, languishing in a state of isolation, ignorance, poverty and weakness.Footnote 12 As such, pre-Petrine Russia constituted a stark counterpoint to the state of contemporary Europe, which Voltaire had depicted in his earlier Siècle de Louis XIV. During the long reign of the Sun King, Europe had achieved a decisive break with its own dark past and entered a state of relative civilization. Through an acceleration of civilizing processes in operation since the Renaissance, Europe had reached a state marked by flourishing economic activity, booming arts and sciences, polite manners and rapid cycles of cultural and economic exchanges, providing the engine for continuous further development.Footnote 13
In Voltaire's eyes, Peter's crowning achievement was to have set in motion forces that enabled his country to rapidly catch up with Europe. While it had taken the continent several centuries to leave its barbaric past, Peter had condensed this long process into a reign of a mere twenty-nine years.Footnote 14 To explain this prodigious development, Voltaire pointed to Peter's character and his willingness to learn from the outside world. He was particularly struck by the strength and determination of the czar's will. Endowed with an active mind, courageous and determined to push himself and others forward, Peter had all the attributes needed to inflexibly impose reforms calibrated to provide his country with a source of dynamism previously lacking.Footnote 15 And yet, despite his single-mindedness, he was open to external guidance. One key theme running through Voltaire's history is that of the czar profiting from his more advanced neighbours by endeavouring to learn about European legislation, manners, arts and sciences and by importing European artists, artisans and men of letters into Russia.Footnote 16
The distinctive elements of Voltaire's portrayal of Russia's rapid transformation under Peter are etatism, or the top-down imposition of the reforming sovereign's will, and cosmopolitanism, or the soaking up of foreign influences to guide the reforming will. Given that Herder is often portrayed both as an inveterate enemy of the modern state, and as a passionate advocate for local, national cultures, we would expect him to mount a frontal assault on such a story, and to stress bottom-up action and autarkic modes of development instead. However, this is far from being the case.
Already the very first, fleeting reference to Peter in Herder's works shows his indebtedness to Voltaire. It occurs in an essay of 1764, entitled Über den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen, which deals with the advantages and disadvantages of learning foreign languages. Peter is cited as an example of the benefits that foreign influences can have. The czar is included in a long tradition of literary and political geniuses who were only able to fully develop their innate talents by emulating a foreign model. In the same way that Cicero's feats of oratory were dependent on the influence of Demosthenes, and Caesar required the inspiration of Alexander to become a military hero, Peter needed to learn from Richelieu in order to succeed in his political projects.Footnote 17
The key image Herder invoked to illustrate his point—Peter admiring the tomb of Richelieu in Paris—is a direct reference to the czar's second journey to Europe. Voltaire had made much of this episode to underline his argument that Peter had single-handedly created a new Russia by means of Europeanization,Footnote 18 and Herder stuck closely to this account throughout his life. In the Journal, for instance, he credited Peter with having pulled his country out of stasis and isolation by inducing a passion for imitation in his subjects:
No nation is more eager to imitate, to adopt the ways of others than [Russia] . . . It is not only as seafarers that they try to copy others. They show the same facile tendency when they pretend to assume French manners and the French language . . . but . . . they never get beyond a certain point. All the same, I see in this desire to imitate, in this childlike passion for innovation, nothing but the healthy disposition of a developing nation [eine Nation die sich bildet] . . .Footnote 19
However, Herder did not simply repeat Voltaire's account of the czar. While consistently arguing that Peter had been singularly successful in his quest to improve Russia, he equally stressed that there are important limitations to such a project. In Über den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen, he urged caution against the soaking up of non-native languages, arts and sciences in an unreflecting manner: even though a reaching out beyond one's own borders is beneficial, sustainable benefits from such influences can only be gained if they are approached from the fixed starting point of one's own cultural background. When entering into a foreign world, we have to carefully compare the foreign with the indigenous, and be conscious to import only influences that can enrich our own traditions.Footnote 20 Similarly, in the passage quoted from the Journal, he claimed that the “childlike passion for innovation” that characterizes the post-Petrine Russians is only a necessary step in the development of Russia, and not the whole story as Voltaire had intimated.
By suggesting that there may be limitations to the Petrine project of enforced Europeanization, Herder did not lend his voice to a “counter-Enlightenment”, but merely contributed to the generally critical reception of the Histoire de l'empire de Russie during the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 21 Indeed, Herder's account of Russia resembles closely, and develops in parallel with, the most significant contemporary reply to Voltaire's history of the czar: that of Denis Diderot.
Diderot's interest in Russia was kindled just at the time Herder formulated his own thoughts about the country. Prompted by Catherine's decision to buy his library in 1765, Diderot joined the debate about Russia in the 1770s, most notably through a series of contributions to Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes,Footnote 22 and two unpublished works closely related to his visit to St Petersburg in 1773 and 1774.Footnote 23 Across these texts, Diderot squarely situated his own thought in opposition to Voltaire's. In the first edition of the Histoire des deux Indes, for instance, he implied that Voltaire had considerably overestimated the efficacy of Peter's reforms. Diderot claimed that the czar had attempted to command his Russians to resemble civilized “Germans, English and French”, but in actual fact had merely managed to render them “strangers in their own land”, thereby hindering rather than furthering Russia's development.Footnote 24 His analysis thus identified the two attributes of Peter's reign that Voltaire had commended—the top-down approach to reform and his cosmopolitan outlook—as reasons for the czar's failure. The overall aim of this analysis was to alert Catherine to those mistakes so that she might succeed where her predecessor had failed.
However, Diderot's advice to Catherine was itself based on a theory of historical causation very different from Voltaire’s. Whereas Voltaire had placed a premium on human agency to account for historical change, history was, for Diderot, not an autonomous process susceptible to being freely directed by human beings, but part of the more general process of nature.Footnote 25 The faulting of Peter and of Voltaire's portrayal of his reign only becomes intelligible when considered within the context of Diderot's wider project of outlining the contours of such a naturalized history.Footnote 26
Diderot's conception of nature is informed by a monistic materialism according to which any organism is a temporary configuration of endless atoms in random movement, and, as such, inevitably subject to dissolution. Nature is a scene of constant renewal through destruction, where all organisms pass through uniform cycles of birth, growth, decline and death, to give rise again to new life forms. Significantly, just as all organisms pass through such cycles, so do human associations. History thus reveals above all the process by which societies are born, develop and reach a climax, before they decline and, ultimately, die.Footnote 27 The ascending slope of such a cycle describes a process from simplicity to complexity, whereby complexity is achieved by marshalling the energy produced through human cooperation. Economically, for instance, a natural trajectory leads from a hunter-gatherer stage, in which every individual is self-sufficient, to more complex modes of subsistence, marked by ever increasing reciprocity: first, husbandry, then agriculture, to finally reach a climax in a stage based on commerce. Economic development, in turn, brings about progress in other spheres. Culturally, the higher sciences and the arts of luxury develop out of the more basic useful arts and sciences, or, politically, simple forms of patriarchal governance give way to complex democracies, aristocracies and monarchies.Footnote 28
Diderot was convinced that Russia and Europe stood at opposite ends of the historical cycle. Europe had already reached its climax and was on a course of inevitable descent, but Russia was a young, simple country, ready to embark on its ascending journey.Footnote 29 It is this basic difference between the two entities that Peter had failed to recognize. Wilful political actions can never substantially alter the natural course of history. They can merely nudge a society's development into a desirable direction if it assists, rather than contradicts, the process of nature. Civilization grows slowly, and it passes through mandatory stages that cannot be skipped at will. Given the vast gulf in development between Russia and Europe, civilization by means of Europeanization was a project doomed to fail.
The direction of such gradual development, Diderot believed, is bottom-up in two respects. On the one hand, it always leads from the simple to the complex, thus the higher arts and sciences, for instance, can only flourish once their more basic precursors have established themselves. On the other hand, the process of civilization is principally dependent on the activities of the lower social strata, and not on the impetus provided from the top. Historical progress is always driven through an increase in the density and strength of reciprocal relations among all members of a given society. It is the health and vigour of the social relationships among the nation as a whole, and not the quality of the sovereign's will, that determine a society's fate.Footnote 30
The lesson Diderot wanted to teach Catherine was clear: if she harboured any hope of success, she had to dismiss Peter's legacy and devise a programme of reform informed by an understanding of Russia's present state and the natural progression of history.Footnote 31 The ill-informed Petrine obsession with rapid development through emulation of Europe had to be abandoned. Instead, Catherine had to focus on establishing the basic infrastructure that allows for gradual bottom-up development. Rather than relying on imposition of her enlightened will, Catherine was advised to devolve power to the nation via representative institutions. Likewise, Diderot urged her to promote agricultural development rather than vie with Europe in the pursuit of the higher arts and sciences. Instituting a system of universal education, finally, was prescribed as the best means to strengthen the social ties among her subjects.Footnote 32
There exist clear parallels between Herder's and Diderot's positions regarding the reform of Russia. Most importantly, the former joined the latter in urging Catherine to move away from the Petrine model of reform that Voltaire had celebrated. And yet, Herder stuck to his initial Voltairean assessment of Peter throughout his life, and the reform programme he suggested to Catherine was never coupled with criticism of her predecessor.
In fact, when Herder wrote his late Adrastea (1801–3), he countered Diderot's argument that Peter, by only following his own will and not the laws of nature, had confused the natural order by which civilization develops. In a short dialogue Herder tackled the fundamental question posed by Diderot, namely whether forced, rapid development can ever succeed, or whether such methods necessarily collide with nature. One of the protagonists makes Diderot's point that nature imposes both an order and a rhythm on the process of civilization that cannot be overridden by man:
Just as nature follows for every plant a particular and precisely therefore its own timetable . . . shouldn't human beings when undertaking their most refined work [i.e. the civilization of their country] . . . also follow the particular timetable of every plant, that is to say should they ever demand the fruit before the bloom, and a blossoming in the bud?
Yet it is his opponent who wins the argument through a reference to Peter: “However, what if the nature of the plant demands that the bloom sprouts through a fertilizing thunderstorm? I just thought about Peter the Great who rendered his nation flourishing in all arts at once and through violence.”Footnote 33 By indicating that Russia was in a situation that demanded that the process of civilization be forcefully speeded up, Herder, of course, needed to give an account of this situation. In his early writings he was ambivalent on this question. He generally concurred with both Voltaire and Diderot that pre-Petrine Russia was in a youthful, savage state close to nature. Nonetheless, he also dropped strong hints that Peter had inherited a complex country comprising civilized, semi-civilized and savage provinces.Footnote 34 In the Adrastea, however, Herder unequivocally stressed the historical nature of Russia: far from having been confronted by natural savages, Peter had inherited an empire influenced by what he described as Asiatic and late Greek, read Byzantine, culture, and whose main characteristic was not ahistoricity but stasis.Footnote 35
Herder's precise conception of the role of a ruler faced with an inert country will be explored in more detail in the next section. Here it suffices to note that his defence of Peter against Diderot was based on a conviction that static seventeenth-century Russia needed the imposition of Peter's will, expressing itself through the importation of European culture, in order to provide it with a new source of dynamism.
Crucially, however, the emulation of Europe was in Herder's view only one important step for Russia's development, and he consistently stressed that a second, equally important, one still had to be taken. In the Journal, he insisted that if Peter had induced in Russians an appetite for imitation and a passion for innovation, his successors now needed to nationalize recent innovations in order to raise Russia's culture to a state of perfection.Footnote 36 Similarly, he claimed in the Adrastea that the czar had merely commenced the civilization of Russia by ordering the importation of aspects of European culture. The task of providing these imports with strong roots was still outstanding.Footnote 37
We can see that Herder took a mediating stance in the Voltaire–Diderot debate about Russia. Rather than presenting external, top-down civilization (Voltaire) and internal, bottom-up development (Diderot) as mutually exclusive models, Herder sought to combine both by conceiving them in a temporal sequence. What Peter had started Catherine needed to bring to fruition, not, however, by following in the great czar's footsteps, as Voltaire had suggested, but through a change of direction.Footnote 38
When Herder wrote his Journal, he harboured hopes that he himself could inspire this necessary change by finding the ear of Catherine. Written at an important crossroad in his life after his sudden departure from Riga, it contains various plans for possible future career moves.Footnote 39 The idea of participating in Catherine's efforts to improve Russia figures prominently in these plans. On the one hand, Herder contemplated an eventual return to Riga to continue his previous career as a clergyman and educator.Footnote 40 Alternatively, he envisaged writing a book entitled Über die wahre Kultur eines Volks und insonderheit Rußlands, which he hoped to send to the czarina in order to directly influence her reforms.Footnote 41
Underlying both these options is one unifying idea: Catherine needs to nationalize Peter's imposed cultural imports. Thereby the new civilization, which had so far been an external, European veneer artificially imposed on the country's static and Asiatic core, could be internalized. The concept Herder employed to denote this idea is Bildung. For instance, working as a clergyman, Herder hoped to improve the souls of Riga's population “not through writing, not through literary quarrels, but in a lively manner through Bildung”,Footnote 42 and the aim of his theoretical work dedicated to Catherine was to investigate “[t]imes of Bildung, pathways of Bildung, methods [and] results”.Footnote 43
Bildung, which emerged as a central concept in German discourse at the time Herder was writing, and to whose emergence he contributed significantly, is, notoriously, virtually untranslatable.Footnote 44 Used as a noun it is in Herder's usage almost indistinguishable from both Kultur (culture) and Zivilisation (civilization), which are themselves used interchangeably. All three terms denote the result of a historical process during which human beings increasingly learn to master nature through the cooperative development of their inherent faculties. As we shall see in the next section, Herder thought that Bildung would progressively lead to the highest possible actualization of human faculties; a telos he increasingly came to term Humanität (humanity).
For our present concern, however, Herder's employment of Bildung as a verb (bilden)—that is, as a means to reach the goals of Kultur, Zivilisation and Humanität—is more important. In its active sense, Herder generally distinguished Bildung from yet another semantically close term, namely Erziehung or “education”. Even though Bildung, like Erziehung, has in Herder's usage strong pedagogic elements, it is nevertheless used to denote a distinct kind of pedagogy. Whereas erziehen has connotations of an active teacher imposing knowledge on a passive pupil, bilden, according to Herder, signifies an iterative process between teacher and pupil, emphasizing the active absorption of knowledge by the latter by means of reappraisal and adaptation.Footnote 45Bildung thus signifies a process which can negotiate between external importation and internal assimilation as well as between top-down imposition and bottom-up development.
By exhorting Catherine to start a programme of Bildung, Herder reiterated his conviction that Russia was in need of a second, distinct phase of reform: if Peter had imposed his will on a static nation, and had altered its external behavioural patterns, Catherine's task was to change the nation's core from within. Even though Herder never wrote the Über die wahre Kultur eines Volks, which would no doubt have provided us with more detail about what such a programme of Bildung might look like in practice, his various drafts written in preparation of the work still offer us some clues about its modus operandi.
First of all, the Bildung of a nation needs to be guided by the sovereign. Indeed, Herder explicitly denied that completely spontaneous bottom-up development could achieve desired results. In a draft for the Über die wahre Kultur eines Volks, he noted,
The flow of time and the succession of government lead to progress [bilden weiter], but can also lead to regress [zurückbilden] . . . Against the objections of those who claim everything progresses [bilde] by itself. Yes, but also backwards. The flow must be guided by the monarch here.Footnote 46
Despite such guidance, Herder was adamant that the direction of Bildung must never be based on the sovereign's will alone. Rather, its aim must be to foster what Herder called a Nationalgefühl (national sentiment) or Nationalgeist (national spirit), which will itself, as the expression of the will of the nation, influence the direction of Bildung.Footnote 47
Bildung, driven by the nation but guided by the sovereign, was termed by Herder “Bildung of a nation through itself”. But such an ideal of development does not preclude imitations of others. Without such imitation, Herder argued, a nation will never fully actualize its potential. Therefore, indigenous development must be supplemented through outside influences, or through “Bildung of a nation after others”.Footnote 48 But as with guidance through the sovereign, such imitations must be undertaken with utmost care. All nations are different in mores and character and such differences must be respected. The maxim Herder wanted to put to Catherine was that no other nation could be taken as a ready-made model for the reform of Russia; instead he urged her to assimilate Peter's cultural imports, thereby synthesizing external and internal Bildung.Footnote 49
Herder illustrated the need to negotiate between external and internal as well as between bottom-up and top-down Bildung most succinctly with reference to the St Petersburg Academy. The Academy, founded by Peter between 1724 and 1725, was invariably invoked to underline the relative virtues and weaknesses of the czar's project of civilization through Europeanization. According to Voltaire, its establishment and the related ability to join the other European nations in the emulative pursuit of the higher arts and sciences stood as proof that Russia had caught up with Europe.Footnote 50 For Diderot, by contrast, the Academy highlighted all that was wrong with Peter's project: mainly staffed by foreigners, and serving the glory of Russian sovereigns rather than the needs of the nation at large, its existence symbolized the need for radically different indigenous educational institutions exclusively focusing on the basic arts and sciences.Footnote 51 Herder, characteristically, combined these diverging views:
Peter's Academy has yet no national spirit: it does not yet live for, through and in the nation. It lowly serves the court and is asleep. [The aim must be] to create one out of, and for, the nation; [to create one] out of its spirit [in order] to further guide this spirit.Footnote 52
A reformed Academy that would henceforward operate for, through and in the nation is only one of several concrete institutions Herder planned to suggest to Catherine. The aim behind such reformed institutions was to awaken and foster a civic culture that could revitalize the nation and guide its future development. When discussing civic reform, Herder turned sharply against a central pillar of Catherine's policy, namely to use legislation as the primary tool for the advancement of Russia.
This policy was first formally announced in Catherine's Nakaz of 1767, written as a guideline for a completely new code of Russian law. Herder's criticism of the Nakaz was primarily caused by the influence that Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois exerted on Catherine's legislative programme. For Herder, this influence was pernicious for at least two reasons. First, he denied that honour—the principle that regulates monarchical government in Montesquieu's system—could ever be the mainspring of Russian society.Footnote 53 Second, he alleged that Montesquieu, despite his intention to study the spirit behind the laws, had solely investigated the legalistic aspects of governments and the sociocultural mechanics of courts and capitals, without ever getting to the manners, mores and spirit of a nation at large. De l'esprit des lois, Herder warned Catherine, is only a “a metaphysics for a dead code of law . . . it is not a metaphysics for the formation [Bildung] of peoples”.Footnote 54
The underlying problem with Montesquieu's “metaphysics for a dead code of law” is that it was based on the idea that development should radiate out from the court to the provinces, and descend from the higher social strata to the lower. Montesquieu had arrived at this idea by his analysis of the French monarchy, but France was not an appropriate model for Russia, or indeed any other society.Footnote 55 Herder consistently criticized the slavish imitation of polite French culture by German courts,Footnote 56 and was equally adamant that the overbearing influence of the court on the nation that characterized French society had to be avoided in Russia. Rather than effecting a diffusion of court culture, Catherine had to plant the seeds for the development of a truly civic culture that could bind the nation together and give it a new sense of purpose. By stressing the importance of honing mores and habits that can buttress civil life, Herder urged Catherine to look beyond centrally imposed laws and the court, and start her reforms by an investigation into the concrete milieu in which ordinary Russians lived:
In what does true culture consist? Not merely in providing laws but in cultivating [bilden] morals and customs . . . The excellence of good institutions counts for more than the best of laws and certainly as much as any example set by the court . . . The example of the court . . . is only valid at the court, though even there its prestigious advantages are not without disadvantages. Many individual examples taken from the diverse provinces, or better still, from individual households should prove more relevant and effective.Footnote 57
The argument that Catherine should start the formation of mores through many decentralized institutions that are firmly rooted in her subjects’ actual manner of life is of course entirely consonant with the wider point continuously repeated across Herder's Russian writings: Peter's cosmopolitan imports have to be nationalized, and the Bildung of Russia must now proceed from the bottom up after the initial top-down impetus provided by the czar.
Taken as a whole, these writings succinctly highlight the young Herder's keen interest in questions regarding political reform, and they demonstrate that his grappling with such questions must be considered within rather than outside the wider Enlightenment context. Indeed, the Russian reflections are a part of a much wider late eighteenth-century debate about the empire, framed by the thought of, inter alia, Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu. Herder's intervention in this debate does not alter its established framework. On the contrary, he sought to negotiate a number of dichotomies that were thrown up by the question of Russia's civilization: internal versus external development, civilizing through bottom-up versus top-down processes, the inevitability of the historical process versus the role of conscious human actions. Far from emerging as a rebel against an ostensibly monolithic Enlightenment, the Russian writings reveal Herder as a mediator of conflicting strands contained within late eighteenth-century discourse.
A refusal to consider such dichotomies as exclusive categories not only characterizes Herder's thought on Russia, but is a distinct feature of his philosophy more generally. In particular, Herder employed the concept of Bildung to connect opposing categories. Even though he never returned to his early project to write a metaphysics of Bildung geared toward the reform of Russia, the question of Bildung remained at the forefront of his thought. Indeed, he increasingly turned his attention toward establishing the outlines of an anthropology that was, again, built around the idea of Bildung. In the anthropological writings Herder also returned to many of the political problems he first broached when contemplating the reform of Russia.
HERDER'S ANTHROPOLOGY: MAN AS AN ANIMAL STRIVING FOR BILDUNG
Recent scholarship suggests that an anthropological approach lies at the very heart of Herder's philosophy.Footnote 58 Indeed, current reconsiderations of Herder's place within the Enlightenment have frequently focused on his conception of human nature as outlined in his Abhandlung vom Ursprung der Sprache (1772), Übers Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele (1774) and the first two parts of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–5), and have related these writings to the wider anthropological turn in late eighteenth-century thought.
For our present concern of delineating Herder's concept of Bildung, and its capacity to mediate between apparently opposing tendencies in the domain of politics, we have to be alert to two problems addressed in these texts. The first such problem is to give an account of human freedom and a related capacity for progress (or Fortbildung), while at the same time integrating human beings into a deterministic conception of nature. The second is to derive an account of human sociability and to tease out its political implications.
Herder resolved the first problem through a move we have already encountered in Diderot: to collapse the domains of nature and human endeavours. Thereby, man is fully integrated within the order of nature and subject to its deterministic laws.Footnote 59 Unlike Diderot, however, Herder did not believe that nature consists of atoms in random movement. In his view, its elementary building blocks are not atoms, but forces (Kräfte), whose operations are determined by a plan, which ultimately is of a godly and teleological nature.Footnote 60 Herder's God, or the source and result of all operating forces, was inspired by Baruch Spinoza's pantheism and conceived as being itself part of nature. By equating God with nature, thus moving Him from transcendence to immanence, Herder's pantheism was calibrated to safeguard a purposeful universe against the atheistical and decidedly non-teleological implications of an atomist position such as the one espoused by Diderot.Footnote 61
Even though Herder did not believe that God's purpose could ever be fully grasped by human beings, he did contend that through a combination of observing the natural world and drawing analogies, aspects of this plan could be divined.Footnote 62 The analogy he employed to establish human beings’ place and purpose within nature is based on the observation of an ascending chain of ever-higher forms within nature. Lurking behind visible forms are invisible forces which through their various configurations give rise to organized forms, gradually moving from the most simple—minerals and metals—to the more complex—plants, animals and, finally, human beings.Footnote 63
According to Herder, the heightened artificiality in the combination of the forces that constitute higher organisms manifests itself predominantly in decreased specialization, which, by the same token, increases indeterminability and therefore freedom. Or, to put it differently, the higher we travel up the chain, the bigger an organism's potential sphere of activity and existence, the less concentrated its sensuality toward this particular sphere, and the less instinctive its responses to external stimuli.Footnote 64 Although there exist no sharp breaks in nature, man, standing at its apex, has an organization quite distinct from any animal. In particular, human beings’ nature is indeterminate, because of their weak instincts. In contrast to an animal that can never fail to act in a certain way and fulfil its predeterminate purpose, human beings, if left to their weak lower animal instincts, would, in Herder's view, literally be without a raison d’être and quite possibly be unable to survive, simply because they would hardly be compelled to act at all.Footnote 65 However, we can compensate for our weak instincts by means of a capacity Herder termed Besonnenheit—“conscious reflection”—that allows us to discover and model the scope and nature of our purpose ourselves. The vital medium by which Besonnenheit can be put to use is language, which in itself is the necessary condition for the development of reason.Footnote 66
So far Herder's account is by no means original. The notion of man's instinctual weakness and of the existence of a compensating capacity for reflection had been frequently invoked in the eighteenth-century debate about the origins of language, notably by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Hermann Samuel Reimarus and Jean Henry Samuel Formey.Footnote 67 However, the consequences Herder derives from this account arguably are original.
Most importantly, Herder's concept of Bildung is intimately related to this account of the emergence of language. According to Herder, Besonnenheit, language and reason enable human beings to form (bilden) a complete image of the universe and their own place therein within themselves. Bildung, in this sense, is the creation of a cultural, as opposed to a natural, whole, which is a free, conscious and creative exercise. Or, as Herder put it, “we always live in a world which we form [bilden] ourselves”.Footnote 68
Rather than just reacting to sense impressions instinctively, human beings can assimilate them internally by integrating them into their own view of the world before embarking on a reaction.Footnote 69 The ultimate end behind this process is happiness, which is the sense of satisfaction human beings experience when they succeed in assuring themselves about the purpose of their existence through the creative use of their own forces.Footnote 70 And yet, even though such a self-fashioning of happiness is ultimately a free activity, it is nonetheless bounded by four factors: climate, society, history and providence.
First, Bildung is influenced by climate, encompassing the sum total of the physical circumstances of a given locality. The cultural whole human beings construct will always be dependent on the kind of sense impressions they receive, which are themselves shaped by climate.Footnote 71
Second, Bildung is an inherently social process. Although all human beings construct their own distinct views of the world, they will by means of communication coalesce. Such a socially constructed cultural whole secures the individual through organic integration into an entity greater than itself: a community bound together by a common set of norms and beliefs, that are expressed in a shared language. Herder termed this phenomenon the Bildung of a Nationaldenkart (national mode of thinking), itself standing at the basis of a distinct Nationalgeist (national spirit).Footnote 72
Third, Bildung is shaped by history as it is subject to intergenerational transmission of culture. Every new generation does not start their cultural constructions from scratch but will be influenced by tradition. The transmission of tradition is in itself a form of Bildung: the old generation does not simply impose its world view onto its children, nor does the new generation unconsciously imitate the old world view. On the contrary, it is a complex process of active learning involving both passive reception and creative production in which the old and the new are constantly merged by means of organic assimilation of traditions to changing circumstances.Footnote 73
Fourth, Bildung is a directional historical process, and the direction of its development is determined by human beings’ place in nature. Intergenerational transmission of culture opens up the possibility of progress, and Herder posited an end towards which progress inevitably moves. Again, it is man's position at the top of the chain of organisms that serves as the analogy from which Herder derived this end. If human beings’ exalted position is determined by their potential to use all their capabilities freely, it follows that the end towards which they must strive is to fully and freely develop all their capabilities. This is the essence of Herder's ideal of Humanität, positing the full actualization of all inherent human possibilities as the end of the historical process.Footnote 74
According to Herder, the actualization of Humanität moves in two distinct directions: towards the establishment of distinct local cultures through intergenerational transmission of tradition, and towards the gradual spreading of culture across the globe by means of emigration, colonization and intercommunal communication.Footnote 75 To the extent that both these processes are driven by the inner nature of human beings—that is, by the distinct configuration of human forces and impulses, which does not restrict man to one particular place or to one particular mode of existence, but which equally necessitates cultural development as a means to survival—it happens inevitably.
However, given human beings’ freedom to fashion their own progress, there is no guarantee that every individual or every community will advance without interruption. Freedom to act equally implies freedom to make mistakes.Footnote 76 Mistakes, Herder showed, usually manifest themselves in a dissonance between the intensity or the rootedness of a given culture, and its extent, leading to a situation which prevents individuals or communities realizing their potential.Footnote 77 Or, to put it differently, both aspects of cultural development must be harmoniously combined; if not, stasis or alienation will rear their heads and prevent the progressive actualization of Humanität.Footnote 78
Stasis typically happens, according to Herder, in a culture that has developed in autarky, and, therefore, possesses well-rooted traditions. In such a situation, the traditional heritage can become an end in itself, rather than a means to continuous growth by negotiating between the past and the present and the culture's internal core and the outside world. Such a culture will provide its members with a strong sense of belonging, but it will prevent them from contributing to its further development. Inward- and backward-looking receptivity, in other words, endangers outward- and forward-looking spontaneity.Footnote 79
Alienation is the opposite of stasis, but its results are similar. It occurs if a culture extends too far from its traditional, inner core, thereby reaching a level of complexity that prevents the organic assimilation of old and new, and foreign and indigenous. The cultural whole, which enables individuals to find a sense of belonging and purpose, becomes fragmented, and individuals lose their mooring to a firm centre from which they can meaningfully reach out to the outside world.Footnote 80 If a static culture is threatened by death through inward ossification, an alienated one risks the same fate through outward disintegration.Footnote 81
According to Herder, it is the key responsibility of government to establish institutions that enable the required balancing of the two aspects of cultural development, thereby preventing stasis and alienation. In order to understand this conception of government, we have to look at Herder's solution to the second problem of his anthropology: to establish a firm basis of human sociability.
The premise of Herder's account of sociability is again provided by man's instinctual weakness. This account is, in the first instance, directed against Rousseau, and particularly against the distinction between natural man motivated by a benign concern for self-preservation, or amour de soi, and social man with his characteristic destructive concern for social recognition, or amour-propre.Footnote 82 Herder's anthropology, by contrast, does not allow for any sharp opposition between nature, on the one hand, and society and culture, on the other. In his view, man simply could never have been a completely isolated animal, capable of finding a fulfilled existence autonomously. Entering the world with weak instincts, survival would be impossible in such a situation, and parental love and integration into a wider community are needed to compensate for this weakness. From the moment an individual is born, it is a social animal in need of culture, and its sociability and its natural need for culture both express themselves in Bildung; that is, the transmission of culture from parents to children, without which no survival, let alone a fulfilled existence, is possible.Footnote 83
By thus conceiving society as being both necessary and natural to man, Herder equally turned against any description of sociability as being not really sociable at all, but driven by self-interest. Here the target is not solely Rousseau, but a whole tradition of anthropological theorizing, which for Herder most prominently includes Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Claude Adrien Helvétius and Immanuel Kant. According to Herder, weak man's primordial instinct for self-preservation simply does not collide with the social requirement of cooperation and peaceful coexistence. On the contrary, since man's self-preservation is by necessity collective, the two drives are intimately entwined.Footnote 84 Hence, a perceived existential conflict within man that underlies much eighteenth-century anthropological thinking—as for instance expressed in Rousseau's opposing principles of amour de soi and amour-propre or in Kant's notion of man's ungesellige Geselligkeit Footnote 85—is a non-issue for Herder.Footnote 86
The most important consequence of this account of sociability is political. If Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant believed that the question how to institute a sovereign power that is able to impose limits on human beings’ asocial drives is the fundamental problem of politics, Herder disagreed. Indeed, he claims that Kant's principle to this effect, namely that man is an animal that requires a master—i.e. the law-governed stateFootnote 87—is an unnatural, evil one. In Herder's view, the most pressing issue a state faces vis-à-vis its citizens is exactly the same as the one parents have to confront with regard to their offspring:
An easy but evil fundamental principle of the philosophy of history would be: “man is an animal that requires a master, and must derive the happiness of his destination from this master or from an association of these” . . . Nature has not signified a master for our species . . . As it is a bad father who educates in such a manner that his child remains in lifelong immaturity and has a lifelong need for a tutor . . . apply the same reasoning to the teachers of the human species, to the fathers of countries and their pupils.Footnote 88
Man is a weak animal in need of a tutor, and parents and states are charged with ensuring the education of their children/citizens. But the reference to the bad father, who educates in a way that ensures indefinite immaturity, indicates that Herder conceived education not as Erziehung but as Bildung: imposition is to be kept to a bare minimum and the aim of education is to put the educated into a position where Bildung can happen autonomously. Governmental responsibility therefore only extends to create opportunities that allow Bildung to take place, its goal, ultimately the realization of Humanität, can only be reached by individuals through the unhindered use of all their faculties.
This is also the upshot of Herder's most overtly political work, the essay Vom Einfluß der Regierung auf die Wissenschaften. Herder therein argued that a sovereign's reign can only be considered glorious if it had a beneficial influence on the development of culture.Footnote 89 But he equally argued that such an influence best happens indirectly: by preparing the ground for culture to flourish through the granting of extensive freedom of thought and expression, by establishing institutions that offer opportunities for learning, and by promoting emulative behaviour.Footnote 90 Any direct cultural imposition on a passive people is thereby in principle rejected. However, there are circumstances where development has to be guided more forcefully. Especially the importation of foreign cultural goods needs supervision, Herder argued, and in case they should prove disruptive, a temporary suspension of free expression may have to be considered.Footnote 91
CONCLUSION
One of the principal reasons for the prevalent assessment of Herder's thought either as non-political tout court, or as dangerously veering in the direction of anarchism, is his rejection of a conception of the state along the lines suggested by Hobbes. By refusing to conceive the state as ontologically different from the family, or, by extension, from a nation defined by a shared language, Herder can, of course, be read as arguing that the state, understood as a coercive mechanism charged with imposing laws, is not merely superfluous, but diametrically opposed to the attainment of happiness. After all, Herder suggested that human socialization and pacification, and the promotion of cultural development, cannot, or in any case should not, be imposed by a political actor residing above a given nation. Instead, they should flow spontaneously from the nation itself through the complex process of Bildung, comprising both the organic integration of individuals and the gradual development of culture through the meshing of tradition and innovation. It is, of course, only a small step from such a portrayal of Herder's politics to Berlin's claim that his thought should be principally considered as a rejection of the Enlightenment, involving the pitting of cultural nationalism, pluralism and populism against his contemporaries’ values of cosmopolitanism, universalism and etatism.Footnote 92
There is, of course, some truth in such a portrayal. Most importantly, Herder had undoubtedly a different understanding of human sociability and the state from, for instance, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and Kant. And yet, to conclude from such differences that Herder opposed his own ideals to a monolithic Enlightenment tradition involves a significant misrepresentation of Herder's position as well as an oversimplified reading of Enlightenment thought.Footnote 93
The reading of Herder's Russian writings in the context of his anthropology provided here demonstrates that, far from attempting to reject certain fixed ideals, he endeavoured to mediate between conflicting notions put forward by his contemporaries. In particular, in the context of Russia, his concept of Bildung enables Herder to carefully negotiate between Voltaire's championing of Peter as the prime example demonstrating the efficacy of rapid, willed, top-down civilization by means of cultural importation, on the one hand, and Diderot's attempt to convince Catherine of the virtues of slow, natural, bottom-up and indigenous development, on the other. Bildung combines determinate natural forces and contingent, willed human actions, internal and external influences, top-down imposition and bottom-up spontaneity, and the Bildung of an empire such as Russia, Herder consistently stressed, requires both Voltaire's Peter and Diderot's Catherine.
Moreover, and despite Herder's unquestionable uneasiness about the modern state, his is far from an anarchical theory based on a notion of spontaneous growth from the grass roots. It is again in his Russian writings that he most succinctly makes the practical case for state intervention. As man is an animal in need of a tutor, the state has an important educating role to play as soon as a community has extended beyond the primordial family. Even though this role is not qualitatively different from the one played by parents or a patriarch, and even though states should generally only act indirectly by creating opportunities for Bildung, especially in times when normal development has been blown off course, much more positive and active guidance needs to flow from the top.
Indeed, stasis and alienation—the two prime obstacles to continuous development—both figure large in Herder's understanding of Russian history. Peter, having inherited a country in stasis, provided it with a new source of dynamism through his cultural imports. The reform programme proposed to Catherine was conceived to prevent Russia from falling into a state of alienation, hence the concern with nationalizing the imports. Catherine's job was to start the process of reconstructing a cultural whole, to reconnect tradition with recent innovations, and to revitalize Russia's civic life, thereby enabling Russians to develop a new sense of belonging and purpose. To put it differently, Herder, the alleged quasi-anarchist and counter-Enlightenment figure, can in certain circumstances advocate modes of political action that are surprisingly close to a doctrine of enlightened despotism without violating his own principle that man is an animal in need of a tutor. When stasis or alienation occur, figures able to see beyond a country's current predicament are needed to impose reforms in order to create conditions that allow for natural development, driven by the Nationalgeist rather than the will of the sovereign, to resume.Footnote 94
Of course, this does not mean that we can reduce Herder's political thought to a defence of an ideal of enlightened despotism. Indeed, Herder consistently refrains from drawing up political ideals. Instead, he subsumes the domain of politics under the domain of culture, or, more specifically, under the dynamic and ever-changing process of cultural advancement that is encapsulated in the idea of Bildung. Political structures and forms of political action can, therefore, never be of a fixed kind, but need to be of a flexible disposition, in order to deliver constant ends in changing historical circumstances. Bildung and, ultimately, Humanität are the ends; politics is a means.
By firmly reducing politics to a means, and by treating the basic stuff of political debate—forms of governance, laws, institutions—in very general and, at least after his initial enthusiasm for the reform of Russia, in unspecified ways, Herder has laid the groundwork for the interpretation of his thought as non-political per se. Accepting such an interpretation, however, would leave us with an impoverished reading of eighteenth-century political debate as it is based on a very narrow definition of “political” that Herder, as well as many of his contemporaries, would have rejected.
According to Herder, politics is an integral component of the study of humanity. Once human beings have developed beyond the basic forms of familial and tribal allegiance and structures, questions of political organization emerge. Herder implied that answers to such questions will influence the further course of cultural development. And yet, he also constantly reminds us that we can only fully understand the questions posed, and the appropriateness of the answers given, if we contextualize both within a larger framework of anthropological concerns: we first need to know what it means to be human, and what our human aspirations and needs are within specific historical and local configurations, before we can settle problems of politics. Regarding this reminder as a valuable political intervention not only sharpens our understanding of Herder, but can also enrich our understanding of the history of political thought.
