In the past fifteen years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in why the young Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) made and then abandoned plans to become a philosophe. Too often stale debates about his role in a so-called “Counter-Enlightenment” have framed the historiography, where it is the later Herder who takes center stage.Footnote 1 Yet with their focus on his mature work, scholars have overlooked a preoccupation of Herder's datable to the 1760s, namely his ambition to articulate a form of community befitting German-speaking Europe. That early aporia helps to explain his inability to realize a more concrete notion of “human socialization,” to quote one interpreter, but it also permits us to explore Herder's complex engagement with his age.Footnote 2 This essay traces the period between Herder's entry into a debate on the status of German community in 1765 and his visit to France four years later. I argue that what most exercised the youthful Herder was a conflicted “feeling” of modern publicity as a phenomenon capable of enactment not only in print, but also sociably, in the world outside the text. Herder attempted to circumvent what he viewed as the insufficiently sociable character of German publicity through a dual appeal to the print domain as an “affective” space and to man as an aesthetic being with access to it. France, revealing to Herder the possibility of a significance to modern sociability that he had relegated to classical antiquity, confronted him with an unexpectedly tangible alternative to this vision.
Though attunement to the sociocultural practices of Enlightenment publicity remains unusual in the study of the Aufklärung, specialists of France and Britain have made strides in this direction.Footnote 3 They have uncovered connections between print and the sociability of men and women in theaters, salons, and coffee houses. Each of these “sites and social spaces,” as Charles Withers has demonstrated, lent texture to the textual side of modern publicity.Footnote 4 As for the German states, certainly one cannot dispute the existence there of that critical–rational exchange of letters identified by Habermas as a constitutive element of the eighteenth-century public sphere.Footnote 5 It is no longer plausible to portray the German print domain as derivative, whether with regard to liveliness or to thematic richness and originality.Footnote 6 A profusion of newspapers and journals, for example the new “moral weeklies,” drew together a critically conversant audience and counterweight to ancien régime authority.Footnote 7
As we shall see, however, Herder complained of the absence of a complement to this vibrant literary life in the world outside the text. How was this possible? It is not news, most obviously, that eighteenth-century German intellectuals lacked an urban center of gravity where print culture and oral culture might directly reinforce each other.Footnote 8 Yet the landscape was hardly barren, for the Aufklärung witnessed the rise in German cities of a bourgeois associational life with lasting political implications.Footnote 9 From Leipzig to Berlin to Hamburg, from reading societies to table societies to patriotic societies and other “clubs,” whether in an active coffee house culture or within the context of a freemasonry whose politicizing function, here as elsewhere in Europe, has been disputed, German society possessed an undeniable sociability.Footnote 10 How these sociable forms could be experienced, on the other hand, has yet to be determined systematically.
Within the confines of this article I am concerned with Herder's experience of the situation in Germany, the conceptual resources he mustered to grapple with it, and the repercussions for him as a thinker. Modern publicity disclosed itself to Herder as a phantom of the printed word, but not inherently, and the fashion in which the young preacher and publicist from East Prussia sought to lend flesh to this phantom deserves attention.Footnote 11 Here not a few have paved the way. Several works, seeking to bring the Habermas thesis into deeper dialogue with German intellectual history, have returned to writers other than Kant in order to show the diversity of reactions to the eighteenth-century literary public sphere. Benjamin Redekop describes the rise of a new personality in German letters, the “public writer.” This “transcendent” archetype heralded the stirrings of “common political culture” in pre-1789 Germany, a community concentrated in print but difficult to locate. The later Herder in particular is characterized as desirous of an “organic” public synthesis.Footnote 12 Yet, as Anthony La Vopa has pointed out, the written encounter could be ambivalent for the public writer, since the modern print domain not only offered level terrain for ideas but threatened to level ideas outright.Footnote 13 La Vopa and Harold Mah have pursued this line of thought with emphasis on Herder and his attitude towards modern print culture. Mah describes Herder's reservations about “the abstract and phantasmatic space of the modern public sphere” and its power to homogenize language. For La Vopa it was Herder's occasional skepticism vis-à-vis print publicity, compounded by his refusal to accept the French “linguistic regime,” or what Herder viewed as a despotic collusion of language with courtly sociability, which proved decisive.Footnote 14
La Vopa's analysis focuses on the relationship between print, orality, and power. What it does not address, however, is the crucial aesthetic–affective dimension of Herder's misgivings. This forms the focus of my discussion here. I disagree that Herder truly longed for “the vital oral culture of a purified nation,” since it was the vital oral culture of Paris that so challenged him.Footnote 15 Herder's actually quite deep faith in the potential power of print as a tool for cultural reform, pitfalls aside, was almost a blinding one; he longed for the “purity” of an aesthetic construct, his ideal print-based public of affective belonging. This fact emerges only against the backdrop of his intellectual pursuits in the mid- to late 1760s.
Herder's early work was fueled by German patriotic yearnings with which he sympathized, but he espied at their core the lack of a tangible community, a “true” public. This suggested to Herder a need of a different order, which he attempted to redress with recourse not to a praxis of sociability but to aesthetic theory. When I refer in this essay to sensation, therefore, I knowingly adduce something with an ambiguous provenance: sensuous experience can arise sociably, indeed can even derive from particularly visceral reading, but it can also be theorized in the language of aesthetics, with all of the ideality and abstract seamlessness such a move entails. Rarely does this ambiguity pose a dilemma of great magnitude, but it did for Herder, whose early ambitions depended upon it. His “imagined community” was unusually imaginative, and the frustrations which he thereby incurred were that much more intense.Footnote 16 Nothing short of an aesthetic plan for cultural reform accompanied Herder on his journey to France in 1769. It also set him up for disappointment. Like any intellectual, Herder thought and wrote within a set of personal motivations and expectations. In France these gave way to a crisis of expectations and a reorientation of priorities that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
THE LIMITS OF PATRIOTISM
The Seven Years War (1756–63) incited a flurry of patriotic tracts in the German states, above all in Prussia, marking a watershed both for the political self-awareness of a bourgeois reading public and for the vigor of German intellectual debate.Footnote 17 For publicists a “war of the pen,” the conflict “contributed to an astounding boom in collective models of identity within the early patriotic discourse,” as Hans-Martin Blitz has noted.Footnote 18 Since on the Continent it pitted Prussia not only against Russia and Sweden but also against Austria, the war and the burgeoning particularistic patriotism bound up with it threatened both the already fragile Holy Roman Empire and an older Reichspatriotismus, or Holy Roman patriotism, which was forced into a defensive position.Footnote 19 As a whole, however, this enlightened, frequently cosmopolitan movement—inflected in the Protestant lands by the ecumenicism and emotionalism of Lutheran Pietism—was notable less for any consistent political referent than for its common goal of testing the boundaries of German community in a rapidly changing Europe.Footnote 20 Herder tailored his initial remarks on the issue to this patriotic discourse. A vogue for war-tinged, sentimental patriotism spurred on the young publicist, who found before him a consciousness-building exercise of the spirit whose core he would attempt to preserve as he challenged its premises.
Especially influential for Herder was Thomas Abbt (1738–66), also something of a transient and lonesome Wunderkind, whose treatise “Vom Tode für das Vaterland” appeared in 1761.Footnote 21 Abbt concluded that a modified neoclassical patriotism could address a major question posed by the Seven Years War: what sort of stance was required of the literate citizen and spectator, and how involved should that stance be? Abbt looked to the human heart for a potential answer, devising a patriotically minded program with a strong emotional impress. His brand of affective patriotism subsisted in the encounter between a classically stylized fatherland and the enthusiastic commitment of the patriotic subject. “Vom Tode,” with its innovative employment of sentimentalism, recalled Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois (1748), which had met with instantaneous acclaim in the German states. Montesquieu's praise of patriotism as the affectionate, subjective counterpart to a legalistic construct of national spirit had broken with a Baroque tendency to conceive of patriotism in conventionally classical terms.Footnote 22
“Vom Tode” saw Abbt give pride of place to such subjectivity, which induced him to draw most prominently upon the idea of sensus communis in Shaftesbury as well as the motif of vita activa in Ciceronian oratory.Footnote 23 Abbt developed a war patriotism superficially modeled on the patria of Roman republicanism. Self-sacrifice is the patriot's tie to his native land, whether by birth or by choice; the bond of blood is externally expressed, which is to say, shed.Footnote 24 Such fondness for classical-republican tropes might make Abbt's fervent support for Prussia seem puzzling, and moreover it set him at odds with Montesquieu, who had tightly linked patriotic attachment to the republican form of government.Footnote 25 Abbt preferred monarchy for what he saw as its power to bring the Stände (estates) closer together.Footnote 26 Paramount, however, were his concerns for the spatial coherence of the polity, and it was in this respect that he found the crown most salutary. Abbt linked space with power, claiming that “in republics, zeal for the fatherland lessens accordingly as its territory grows. Monarchies, however, are generally of great scope.” Far from causing the patriotism of its subjects to sleep, one of Rousseau's concerns, this would promote the communicability of that patriotism: “All glory accruing to the prince, all resplendence which circulates around him, constitutes as it were a light ether around the entire nation.”Footnote 27 Civic virtue could not thrive within a decentralized territory like the Holy Roman Empire, asserted Abbt, whereas a monarchy like Prussia might sustain such virtue indefinitely. Abbt favored the framework he considered most capable of fostering an affective bond that an entire people could share.
Abbt preached the glory of obeying a spirited call to die for the fatherland, reasoning that the pathos of mass immolation would invoke the community of common sentiment allegedly known to the Greeks and Romans.Footnote 28 He also wondered, however, whether there existed any forum in Germany where such a call could resonate and be heard. This difficulty struck him as sensory in nature. The call of ancient patriotism, the call to death, was for Abbt always oral, the “voice of the fatherland.” Yet while antiquity had its ancient orators to mediate that voice, in Germany there existed “no public places where we congregate for deliberations,” where the “sleepy citizen” might hear the clarion call to “die joyfully for the fatherland.” Abbt's halting suggestion that the German clerisy adopt a patriotic evangel pointed up the severity of the problem.Footnote 29 Here an image of ancient sociability, the frictive and fructive coming together of engaged citizens, had been translated into strongly sensuous terms, and the present was found wanting. The voice of patriotism could reverberate as a command intuitable to the senses, but without a proper forum in which it might be heard, no ignition of Abbt's affective flame could be possible and thus no emergence of a genuine community. “Vom Tode” posited, indeed “felt,” a collective aesthetic dilemma, but it promised no solution.
Four years later, a twenty-one-year-old Herder affirmed the desirability of Abbt's ideal while calling into question the power of affective patriotism to realize it. At that moment Herder, who had just finished his studies at Königsberg, was teaching in the cathedral school in Riga, then home to a sizable German merchant elite.Footnote 30 “Haben wir noch jetzt das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?” was completed in 1765 as a ceremonial speech, one perhaps never delivered, for the council of elders at Riga as well as Catherine II. It was published the following year. Herder interpreted in the civic spirit of classical antiquity a division between public and fatherland, weighing the adaptability of each to the nominally Russian respublica Rigensis, but also with advertence to his German-language readership.Footnote 31 He recast Abbt's patriotic “voice of the fatherland” as the “voice of the people” or the “voice of the state,” linking them to the ancient polities of a bygone era. But Herder's purpose was not merely to historicize. In his piece he confirmed Abbt's doubts and explained why the flame of patriotism, in the eighteenth century, would not spring up at the sound of a voice. Herder emphasized what he claimed was the different quality of modern orality, arguing that the passing of Greco-Roman democracy and republicanism had put an end to ancient orality's former importance. Public oratory was no longer charged with meting out punishment or deciding affairs of state. Who could doubt that its classical role was irrevocable?Footnote 32 Accordingly—and in a text commemorating the dedication of a municipal building, no less—Herder went so far as to allege that the present-day orator had no place from which to deliver a speech.Footnote 33
Herder's sharp distinction between the oralities of antiquity and those of modernity typified the later eighteenth-century aftermath of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, for he emphasized an unbridgeable historical gulf between the two epochs, rather than continue, as generations of humanists had done, to pursue polemical comparisons between them.Footnote 34 With the older Herder the wish to analyze rather than emulate the ancients would become a “program,” signifying his rejection of a Winckelmannian philhellenism directed against the present.Footnote 35 However, the younger Herder appears also to have generalized his analysis of German orality to the dispensation of modernity as such; this speaks volumes about his shock four years later in Paris, where modern orality in fact did command considerable cultural capital, if not exactly within the surroundings of the agorá.Footnote 36
Having dismissed the oral plank of “Vom Tode” as an anachronism, at any rate, Herder extended his critique of German publicity to the theater and letters, implicitly calling into question Lessing's attempts to erect a public on such foundations.Footnote 37 Thus in his reading of Abbt's aural dead end, Herder construed a more fundamental problem of public circulation in the German-language context. Yet he had drawn an important distinction: if the German public appeared little responsive to Lessing's harnessing of drama and literature, it was positively insensate to the primal summons of Abbt. For though his censure of the literary situation was severe, Herder's rejection of the “voice of the fatherland” as a spur to a dynamic German public was absolute. An exasperated Herder asked his readers, “But the great multitude of this many-headed creature: where does it have its seat and voice? Where should one stand in order to address this public, on the marketplace or in private homes?”Footnote 38 The problem of orality as formulated by Abbt was for Herder, in other words, a sociable one. Germans possessed no robust public in the classical mode because they had no site where a bygone sociability might gather and sustain itself. Their voices could not carry, as Abbt had feared, and Herder's backward glance to a distant Greco-Roman past indicated his inability to imagine how they ever might.
In the patriotic turn of “Publikum und Vaterland” from the ancient public to the ancient fatherland and the question of its modern relevance, one might interpret a reversal. Herder pursued this course with gusto, slandering Helvetius, Mandeville, Hobbes, and Machiavelli along the way as “base and cold misanthropes,” despoilers of “the sweet sensation of patriotism.” Peter the Great, conversely, he called a savior of patriotism, the father of a Russia reborn. But there was a problem even with this partial rehabilitation of Abbt's model, for besides depriving it of its classical–oral fulcrum, Herder downplayed its sentimental core: “Admittedly, we no longer sacrifice ourselves blindly. The warlike cavalcades are gone . . . but has the fire that is love of country gone out with them?”Footnote 39 Herder provided ample grounds for doubt, for in the text he continually undercut any sentimentally affective basis for the fatherland, and with marked skepticism towards the notion of a self-sacrificial author–patriot, which he would again evince three years later in his obituary for Abbt.Footnote 40 Instead, Herder adopted a moderate position, proposing to refine affective patriotism by valorizing mercantilism. Thus both Mah and Frederick Beiser situate “Publikum und Vaterland” within an eighteenth-century discourse of enlightened commercial republicanism.Footnote 41 Herder did contemplate a suitably Rigan revision of the patriotism so dear to Abbt, namely by extolling the temperate self-sufficiency of the commercial republic. In doing so, however, Herder projected only a tepid alternative to Abbt's exciting schema, and one inapplicable to most German states.
It is clear that, for Herder, affective patriotism could not realistically hope for a German public realized along classical lines, and outdated invocations of Hanseatic pride offered but a poor substitute. Any attempt to resolve this dilemma would require that Abbt's notion of “felt” community be regrounded. Herein lay a major intellectual impetus for Herder in the 1760s. Mere patriotism, with its martial overtones and need of an energetic public orality—which presupposed a locatable public sociability, as Herder had recognized—simply would not do. The forum for a palpable public needed a more hospitable site, which Herder would locate within the literary realm so familiar to him. The print domain might unite Germans in a way that their orality could not, but its letters would first somehow have to be made living and vital. Like the sound of a voice or bustle of a crowd, their content—conveyed by the right form—would have to stimulate the sensuous powers of the reader. Here Herder, inspired by “popular” intellectual currents, seized upon a potential homology with the work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62), which blurred the lines between cognition, sensation, and bodily experience. If Abbt had inspired Herder with a “feeling” of what a fully fledged public could be, Baumgarten seemed to offer a set of conceptual tools with which to call it into being.
POPULAR PHILOSOPHY, PRODUCTIVE ANTHROPOLOGY
Herder had reached an impasse, but he had at his disposal other resources. One was the German Popularphilosophie movement, born at early eighteenth-century Halle in connection with the teachings of Christian Thomasius. “Popular philosophy” was both doctrine and ethic, spanning the divide between learned works and the more accessible writings of the publicists.Footnote 42 It stressed cognitive autonomy and common sense, influencing the moral weeklies with its emphasis on practical experience and everyday know-how.Footnote 43 Herder encountered popular philosophy at Königsberg under Kant between 1762 and 1764.Footnote 44 He seems to have taken this primer and run with it, seizing upon popular philosophy's epistemological message despite the warnings of Kant. Herder was drawn to the mantra of the teachable human subject, one whose awareness of the world depends on the encouragement of a discriminating aesthetic capacity.Footnote 45
Here Herder also saw applications for his study of Baumgarten, the founder of aesthetics as a discrete area of inquiry. The attraction made sense, for despite the loftiness of the rationalist Leibnizian–Wolffian lineage to which he belonged, Baumgarten held the purpose of aesthetics to be not the “perfection” of metaphysics but a comprehensive theory of sensation and cognition. This “advocacy of sensibility” is what Herder appropriated.Footnote 46 And he was a man of his time to do so: whether in the sentimental novel, philosophical treatise, or neurological tract, eighteenth-century European discourse was aflame with sensibility, “a language of feeling for the purposes of representing necessary social bonds,” in the words of John Mullan.Footnote 47 The fluidity with which such concepts coursed through the writings of Abbt and Herder testifies to how steeped in aesthetics was the age, as well as how liberally these concepts could be appropriated for the contemplation of humankind. The Aufklärung was distinguished by an “aesthetic idea of humanity,” one heralded by Baumgarten's reconciliation of sense impressions with human reason and then elaborated by Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Christian Garve, and Herder. Only with Kant was this pervasive association between “feeling” and the human condition challenged in Germany.Footnote 48 The “almost anxious regression to phenomena of art” characteristic of later aesthetics represented a curtailment of the discipline named and developed by Baumgarten.Footnote 49
From this side of the critical Kant, it can be easy to lose sight of the appeal that a figure like Baumgarten might hold for a generation of thinkers, regardless of whether or not they had read his work in any detail. They constituted a “Baumgartian school,” which besides Herder included Abbt, Mendelssohn, Johann Georg Sulzer, Georg Friedrich Meier, and Johann Jacob Engel, all of whom took away from Baumgarten an appreciation for the flexibility of aesthetics, its potential closeness to art but also feeling, as well as its ability to “protect the affective life from philosophy” itself.Footnote 50 They recognized in Baumgartian aesthetics not just an art-oriented branch of philosophy or solely a theory of the beautiful and sublime, but rather an expansive doctrine of the relationship between mind and body.Footnote 51
This was broad terrain, and like Popularphilosophie, with which it often overlapped, Baumgartianism belonged to a still broader area of eighteenth-century European ideas, namely that of Enlightenment “anthropology.”Footnote 52 Beyond the numerous meanings then attached to this term, as Wolfgang Proß has illustrated, the overriding concern of anthropological discourse was to “place” the seemingly enhanced yet murky significance of the human being within a cosmology radically altered since the Middle Ages. In a world whose religious foundations had been shaken, the language of feeling and thinking won newfound analytical significance.Footnote 53 Viewed from this angle, the theoretical pillars of Herder's project cease to appear so eclectic, for their reliance on aesthetics, as with other “utopian” enlightened visions of human perfectibility, was by eighteenth-century association also “anthropological”—oriented to the study of man as a sentient and sensuous creature.Footnote 54 Baumgartian aesthetics helped prepare Herder for the specific anthropological journey ahead of him.Footnote 55 And that journey, reconstructable only with the aid of a fragmentary textual basis, was arduous.
EN ROUTE TO A PUBLIC-BUILDING AESTHETICS?
In biographical terms, Herder's life in Riga between 1764 and 1769 unfolded within stable bounds, including his work at the cathedral school, which extended to the pulpit; his productivity as a writer, which had gathered pace; and his 1766 induction, a rite expected of all prominent men in the city, into the lodge Zum Schwerdt, in which he soon rose to the rank of secretary.Footnote 56 This last facet of Herder's Rigan existence makes tempting an excursus on masonic sociability, for the nebulous brotherhood of the freemasons has been convincingly identified as a significant element of the “mobile” Enlightenment imagination.Footnote 57 I concede the possibility of a masonic tint to what follows, even if Herder almost never commented on his membership in any of his writings, private or published. Yet chronologically we deal here with an original momentum pre-dating Herder's freemasonry; the latter may then have served to reinforce his tendency to conceive of the public, indeed “humanity,” in the abstract.Footnote 58
It is at the conceptual level that the various strands of this story—how Herder attempted to articulate what I have described as his ideal print-based public of affective belonging—are to be isolated and tied back together. For the historian committed to neat chronology this can make for rough going, and here my argument is not simple, but I know of no more convincing frame in which to situate Herder's earliest work.Footnote 59 From the mid-1760s until the end of the decade, Herder struggled to transpose the sociable–oral logic of affective patriotism, which he had deemed unfeasible, into a written register, the realm of print, for him the most viable “aesthetic” space of communicable sentiments. Taking to heart the popular-philosophical notion that a sophisticated, public-fostering sensibility could be imparted to Germans, Herder resolved to reground that mission in an aesthetic anthropology. This was a blueprint for cultural reform, an “aesthetic state” pre-dating Weimar classicism.Footnote 60 To dismiss the fact because difficult concepts were involved, to apply distinctions between “high” and “applied” theory, would be anachronistic. Here lay for Herder the royal road to a lively German public, however airborne that road may look to us now. Along this road lay three waypoints for Herder: an anthropology derived from Baumgarten; a pedagogy à la popular philosophy; and, lastly, the study of language, which not only opened up vast intellectual frontiers for Herder but secured him an initial measure of fame.
As for the first of these waypoints, in his Königsberg essay “Versuch über das Sein,” from 1763, Herder had already proclaimed the proper role of philosophy to be “handmaiden of anthropology.”Footnote 61 Reading Baumgarten, Herder concluded that questions of ontology resolve themselves historically. Existence is a field of sensuous “obscurity” gradually penetrable by human consciousness, and this process of unconcealment is open to theoretical inquiry only after the fact, by “genetic” means.Footnote 62 Hence Herder's conviction that an anthropology in the mode of Baumgarten would, strictly speaking, concern itself with the disclosure of being to the receptive faculties of the human subject over time; after all, the human being possessed an “essential autoproductivity” as a creature endowed with sensuousness, the innate capacity to generate meaning.Footnote 63 This early formulation of an “anthropological and historical aesthetics” was heavily Baumgartian, without a doubt, but from the start Herder's borrowing was goal-driven.Footnote 64 Faithful to the spirit of popular philosophy, the young Herder channeled this abstruse impulse into an educational project, one inchoate, impetuous, and more suggestive than prescriptive.
For another interest of Herder's in these years, second, was a didactics of perfectibility, which he consistently conceptualized in the language of aesthetics.Footnote 65 We know that his docentship at the Collegium Friedericianum in Königsberg from 1762 to 1764 gave him an early taste for pedagogy.Footnote 66 Several pieces written following his 1764 appointment to the cathedral school in Riga outlined an educational program that dovetailed with his university studies.Footnote 67 In “Wie die Philosophie zum Besten des Volkes allgemeiner und nützlicher werden kann” (1765), foreshadowing his festival essay and invoking Abbt, Herder examined the concerns of the contemporary patriotic dialogue through the lens of popular philosophy: “If one educates [bildet] citizens as a patriot—this fire spreads, propagates itself, etc.” This was immediately followed by a section with the heading “A finer people from books.”Footnote 68 In such fragmentary remarks we find a confident writer absent in “Publikum und Vaterland.” There Herder had spotted in the affective patriotism of Abbt only the glimmer of a solution to the lack of a tangible German public, but he had withheld emendation. Now Herder intervened more aggressively. Patriotism, he reckoned, implied a specific sensuous–cognitive disposition, “a logic of intelligence which deserves general dissemination among our people; a logic still undiscovered.”Footnote 69 In his “Begründung einer Ästhetik in der Auseinandersetzung mit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten” (1766–7), a memorial fragment for the philosopher, we find utterances as to what this might require. If Baumgarten had attributed sensuous receptivity to the individual perceiving subject, so Herder, then one could extrapolate this to a collective perceiving subject, to the people. This insight might, figuratively speaking, help to “hellenize” them; “that would be aesthetics!” he exclaimed.Footnote 70
It is within this intellectual horizon, third, that one ought to view Herder's growing interest in language. Johann Georg Hamann's teachings on the divine immanence of primitive language had been pivotal to Herder's education in Königsberg, affording him an early example of the “holistic” possibilities of language as an aesthetic category. Yet it must be remembered that Hamann's meditations were only ever viable for the young Herder as part of a less ecstatic aesthetic anthropology.Footnote 71 “Über den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen” (1764), composed six years before the Berlin Academy prize essay “Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache,” shows Herder's indebtedness to Condillac and his theory of correspondence between national character and language, as well as to Montesquieu, for whom language constituted a mentality. Still more provocative was Herder's sensitivity—on display both in the finished version of “Über den Fleiß” and in an identically titled lecture manuscript—to the work done by language as an aesthetic “space” that can draw the nation together in a common bond of learned letters. “Über den Fleiß” features a slippage between comparatively concrete metaphors like “common chain of peoples” or “great bond of learning” and more recondite formulations, e.g. “narrow sphere of its language,” “reach of a language,” “field full of thoughts,” and a striking description of language as a “boundless sea.”Footnote 72
With language, the road widened and led to a signal work in the Herderian oeuvre. Herder's enthusiasm for language, his elevation of the same to a master concept capacious enough to accommodate both his interest in Baumgarten and his commitment to the German public, inspired a series of manuals for the advancement of literary publicity in Germany. These were the Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur (1766–8), Herder's rejoinder to the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759–65), the Berlin-based project of Lessing, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn. The story behind the publication of the Fragmente lends itself to thematization of Herder's fraught relationship with the condition of the modern author. Its various twists and turns, however—the reversals and reissuings of his publisher Friedrich Hartknoch, relentless criticism from the Berlin neoclassicist Christian Adolf Klotz, Herder's waffling over anonymity—likewise bespeak the anguished first steps into the literary limelight of a gifted young writer, one who had dared to subject the German literary establishment to wholesale scrutiny at the age of twenty-two.Footnote 73 Herder's letters from the late 1760s are full of trepidation over the spread, reception, and potential misunderstanding not just of the Fragmente but of all his writings, which had multiplied since his departure from Königsberg. These letters are also filled to the brim with mundane expressions of Herder's thirst for news from the world of German letters. This amounted to a stocktaking necessary for his rehabilitation of the print realm in Germany.
The Fragmente blossomed as the first fruits of these labors. In the text Herder stormed out of the gate with the charge that the Briefe furthered nothing but pedantry and narrowness, whereas a more authentic print venture would function as “the voice of patriotic wisdom and the improver of the people.” Literary self-sufficiency required self-awareness, not slavish imitation, he scolded. These considerations induced Herder to consider the “fit” between different ages or national contexts and manners of literary expression.Footnote 74 A unifying and indigenous German literature needed a timely style, something like the moderate tempo and lucidity of French prose.Footnote 75 But Herder's intent was practical and pedagogical. He had the edification of the reading public in his sights: “My Fragmente are written purely in order to be used,” Herder explained to his Königsberg acquaintance and fellow publicist Johann Georg Scheffner.Footnote 76
Herder's hasty revision of the Fragmente stemmed largely from anxieties over his reception and reputation, but these encouraged him to sharpen his arguments. Nor did he revise in a bubble. For just as Herder was not alone in his engagement with aesthetics, he was once again accompanied in his preoccupation with issues of German community. A certain radicalization of the Fragmente should be led back to the pull of the Nationalgeistdebatte in Germany between 1765 and 1767, the rediscovery of which we owe to Nicholas Vazsonyi. The “National Spirit Debate” involved reactions—printed mainly in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, to which Herder contributed—to the anonymous 1765 publication of Holy Roman patriot Friedrich Carl von Moser's Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist. The debate represented a “transitional moment,” with respect not only to an increasingly political German public dialogue but also to the reception of Montesquieu. Moser's book adhered faithfully to De l'esprit des lois, sounding out the possibility of realizing a German “national spirit” within the legal framework of the Holy Roman Empire, the moribund condition of which he decried. As Vazsonyi points out, the book's opening sentence, “We are a people of one name and language,” belied the fact that Moser actually considered these derivative qualities of the German states, less important than the national spirit obtainable only through a body of sound laws. Moser rejected nonstandard interpretation of Montesquieu, and he doubted the existence of national spirit in contemporary German affairs. But Moser's text, no model of clarity, inspired confusion alongside dissent and agreement, heightening the profile of the concept of national spirit in German discussion.Footnote 77
Herder's opinion of Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist was critical, and he wondered to Hamann, “who may be the author of these pages full of such wild excess and shapeless caprice?”Footnote 78 Yet having already cited Moser in the first edition of the Fragmente, Herder saw fit to incorporate some of this modish terminology into the second, and in regard to language, not laws. Whereas in the first edition of the Fragmente Herder could aver that the “genius of a language is therefore also the genius of a nation's literature,” in 1768 he posed a bolder question: “A language . . . that resembles an ancient temple, erected by the nation after the archetype of its spirit [Geist] . . . spacious enough to comprehend the nation and enduring enough to be its eternal monument—would such a language, even after all revolutions, not still be an original, particular national language?”Footnote 79 In one sense Herder was invoking an older “spherical” discourse tied to baroque theories of art, climate, and national character.Footnote 80 Most significant about these remarks, however, was their more forceful, “spiritual” formulation of a persistent tendency already mentioned, namely the association in Herder's thought between language as a spatial metaphor and its aesthetic power to unify and refine human beings.
And that is to say, written language. Print might afford the forum for a German public with substance, for the “patriotic” flame of community; this would be kindled textually, not sociably. Herder's remarks on literary style constituted a “practical” extension of his theoretical convictions. Print publicity remained a lodestar for Herder during these years, and he wrote the Fragmente because he had identified print as the best site for an energetic German public. Yet the Fragmente had primarily handled questions of form; there remained content to deal with. As Herder would muse in 1769, one must write “a book for the education [Bildung] of peoples,” animated by “lively examples, customs, edification [Erziehung]” rather than “the silhouette of dry laws” in the manner of Montesquieu.Footnote 81 Here was an opportunity for Herder to put into practice what he viewed as the essential aim of the affective patriotism propounded by Abbt. Print could furnish the site for an aesthetic public, a “felt” community.Footnote 82 But what would this mean in practice, what ought one to write? If the Fragmente had already taken up with language, Herder wanted guidance as to what should be expressed through it. Desirous of concrete knowledge as well as useful ideas, and not a little lonely, he took to the waves.
HERDER ADRIFT
The Journal of My Voyage in the Year 1769 recounts the twenty-five-year-old Herder's roundabout journey to France. Though fragmentary and loosely episodic, the text relates a crisis in Herder, a collision between his expectations of an avant-garde public and his reaction to the sociability integral to it.Footnote 83 The plan for such a trip, which Herder had probably hatched in Königsberg, originally foresaw a grand tour of Europe, with stopovers not just in Paris but also in London, Rome, and Amsterdam, as well as points east. Unswayed by the pleas of the Rigan city council, Herder set out for Denmark in June 1769, where he was convinced by his travel companion, Gustav Berens, to continue to France. There the two found lodging with a business acquaintance of Berens in Nantes. Herder spent nearly all of his time reading and writing, staying until early November. He then departed for a two-month visit to Paris, which despite a cursory introduction to le monde concluded on a bitter note. From here the trail led, via Amsterdam and Hamburg, to Strasbourg and Bückeburg.
Apart from his weariness over the quarrel with Klotz, Herder had grown restive in Riga, especially once his reform plans for the cathedral school met with stiff resistance. Despite his initially enthusiastic reception by the local merchant patriciate—which besides general recognition had brought him house visits and polite friendships in such profusion that he sometimes found it hard to attend to his work—Herder claimed to long for a different kind of Gesellschaft.Footnote 84 The sociability of the mercantile ethos and municipal self-government did not satisfy him. As he wrote to Scheffner in 1766, “I lack nothing so much as literary contact; personally almost completely, in writing also considerably. If only the mute reading of books had not to an extent replaced this company, and indeed so lopsidedly that for me your initiation of an exchange of letters is as enticing as the first embrace between friends.”Footnote 85
This sense of regret pervades the Journal. Herder bemoaned at the start his premature metamorphosis in Riga into “an inkwell of arts and sciences,” resolving to learn a different existence abroad, the “different structure of a different soul.” The model for this fleeting aspiration was the French-speaking philosophe, whose elan and “universal access to any cultural context,” to quote Mah, might offer a gratification which had been denied Herder in his pedagogical capacity in Riga.Footnote 86 Naturally, Herder sought new experiences, compensation for the infelicities of his youth, when he might have “enjoyed my years, acquainted myself with sound, real knowledge, and found out how to apply all that I had learned.”Footnote 87 These longings were hardly solipsistic; nor were they consistent. Herder envisioned returning to Riga as a patriot–reformer, securing for himself a Baltic laboratory for the ideas he had been cultivating since the middle of the decade.Footnote 88 He wanted from his European travels a conceptual socialization, perhaps even schooling in affability, but only to the extent that the reformer needed to possess such tools:
What to do, in order to eradicate the barbarism, to stamp out the ignorance, to spread culture and freedom, to become for this province a second Zwingli, Calvin, and Luther! Can I become that? . . . [T]ravel through France, England, Italy, and Germany with this in mind, take up the French language and well-being, the English spirit of reality and freedom, the Italian taste for fine inventions, German thoroughness and knowledge, and finally, where necessary, Dutch erudition, wake great concepts and great purposes in myself, accommodate myself to my epoch . . . consider and undertake everything practically, adapt myself, persuade the world, nobility and human beings, know how to bring them to my side—gallant lad! All that sleeps within you?Footnote 89
Herder's self-doubt was characteristic, but initially he did believe that his journey would disclose to him the secret of public effectiveness, which he imagined to emerge “not in writing, not through literary wars, but in a living manner, through education [Bildung].” Yet here it would be misleading to take Herder literally, for he had not thrown overboard his earlier judgments about the relationship between sociability and the modern public. In the same breath this aspiring “writer of humanity” fantasized about all of the useful data he might collect for his “living” project, the treasures he might put to public use. “Such a great undertaking, in its completion, what a work it would be for the world!” He would write a book about the human soul: “It shall teach and form!”Footnote 90 Nothing about the ambitions tentatively set forth in the Fragmente had fundamentally altered. Print, in the whirl of contradictory emotions and fantasies documented by the Journal, had become a fixation for Herder, but as an aesthetic force to be “felt” as much as read. Herder's tour of Europe would help him to transcend print and bring about its apotheosis, a “catechism of humanity” through the public's edifying exposure to knowledge.Footnote 91
Without a doubt, the pedagogical tables and outlines that dot the middle of the Journal, almost certainly drawn up in Nantes, prefigure much of Herder's later work, but they also reveal how he slid back, once abroad, into the role of the solitary author. This was not the routine of a sociable philosophe. His initial burst of euphoria long past, Herder gave himself over to the theoretical side of his project, resuming his anthropological meditations and setting a course for his subsequent intellectual career. The problem of actual application in Riga recedes over the length of the Journal, until finally the only passages that break up the torrent of ideas concern the supposed shortcomings of the French. This represents a shift in tone on Herder's part, arriving with the last third of the Journal, near the end of his stay in Nantes and deepening with the visit to Paris.
If Herder had traveled abroad for public-building knowledge, what he gradually discovered in France, and what repulsed him, was that French ideas and sentiments complemented a heady sociability. For Herder this did involve a sore spot in regard to his command of spoken French. As he wrote to Hartknoch,
One cannot know a French author when one does not know the nation, and I gladly admit that I have not been able to hear, pronounce, understand, and appreciate French; at the moment I have to learn everything, and I do so with great difficulty, because it is a totally different language, the language of the ear and the living world, as opposed to the dead language of the eyes . . .
Herder recognized his tendency to “reduce” living language to dead, which only made his acquisition of the living article more necessary. And to this end he believed that he could learn French more easily in Nantes than in a Parisian salon.Footnote 92
Herder's attitude to the French language itself was one of anxiety, not scorn. Nor was it orality per se which so stymied Herder and threw his expectations of French public life into disarray, but the ways in which orality, as a linchpin of that public life, could be practiced. For this was a world of lively conversation, with all the trappings of stylized social interaction. From Paris Herder recalled his chat with a man in Nantes, which he dismissed as a vapid display of flitting insincerity:
And really in this character the French character was apparent, which is nothing but hypocrisy and weakness . . . His judgment [was] the assurance of former years about which he did no further thinking; his dissent often the simplest contradiction, without digression and reasons; in short, in all of his good points the most jaded, most somnolent human soul, with yawns enough to lull to sleep ten other people around him and set them to yawning.Footnote 93
Suddenly Herder began to perceive these qualities in the arts and letters of the French, now proclaiming them to be cold, triflingly mannered, devoid of any understanding of the “real substance of metaphysics,” which is what Herder had hoped to learn from them in the first place. The Frenchman, Herder grumbled, “has nothing but conventions of the social in his philosophy . . . we [Germans] love abstract truth, which on its own is worthy of regard.” Herder still acknowledged the flexibility of the French language and its amenability to a richly idiomatic philosophy, to be sure, but with a caveat: he now asked that the writing of French not be entrusted to the French themselves.Footnote 94
Though Parisian society seemed to Herder a subservient appendage of the court at Versailles, as La Vopa has shown, one finds it difficult to ignore the scent of sour grapes in a letter Herder sent to Hartknoch in November: “In Paris everything is very rambling and, due to the present time of year, particularly inconvenient; much it is better to read than seek out, and greater to read than see . . . I do not believe that I will acquire a taste for it.”Footnote 95 This tone of renunciation is never a stable one in the Journal. To an extent Herder, always self-aware retrospectively, knew that his moments of excessive vehemence were unwarranted. Near the end of his visit to Paris he vacillated between disparaging French culture and blaming himself for his inability to access it:
Where will you find a friend to accompany you across this land so foreign to you? To see the Louvre and Luxembourg, stroll through the Tuileries and gardens, unlock the libraries and nature cabinets, teach you to ponder artists and works of art? Where will you find him? And will he be a Frenchman or a German? . . . Good fortune, give me such a friend, teach me to know him! And give me flexibility to form [bilden] myself after his example! I am already in France, I must take advantage of it, for to come back without any French language, customs, anecdotes, and knowledge at all, what a scandal!Footnote 96
In France there lay before Herder, the dauntless Baumgartian, a “world of sensation” that he could only behold with a shudder. This was a problem of feeling that no aesthetics could ameliorate. “I see, I feel in the distance,” Herder lamented, “which is how I read, how I plan, how I work, how I travel, how I write, which is how I am entirely!”Footnote 97 It may be that Herder's crowning moment came at sea prior to his arrival in Nantes, when he exalted in “the wide, boundless circle of air” shaping the ocean's curve, as though grey water signified limitless potential.Footnote 98 As for Paris: “I have tried to study books and people, declamation and plays, dances and paintings, music and public. The seeds, however, are buried, until a springtime in the future.”Footnote 99
If La Vopa describes Herder's “profound ambivalence about the role of print in shaping modern public culture” and its “illusion of transcendent universality,” I would locate the greater transcendentalism on Herder's side.Footnote 100 The fraught quality of the figure “language” in his thought represented a sublimation of print. What gave Herder pause was print's tendency in practice to devolve into petty squabbles between authors. He wanted to refurbish the print domain and rouse it from its torpor, and his impatience with German letters derived from the opinion that they had not gone far enough to foster a mature publicness, one whose absence he “felt” but could articulate only with the aid of an aesthetics of feeling. Herder had looked to nothing but print as a basis for modern public culture, and so it should not astound us that he dismissed Parisian sociability as mere contamination.
While it would go too far to say that Herder's was a “reactive non-sensuousness,” he did suffer from a kind of dislocation, a metaphorical assimilation of the bodily to the nonbodily.Footnote 101 With his diagnosis of German-language publicity as a point of reference, and still more because of his associated philosophical undertakings, Herder's notion of community had displaced itself into an ethereal realm of ideal sensuous subjects, not sociable human beings. In his case, of course, this disaffection would prove stimulating; indeed, without the syncretism of his youthful ambitions, one can hardly imagine the later Herder's qualified pluralism or enthusiasm for folklore and traditional music, not to mention his aversion to imperialistic universalism.Footnote 102 But the young Herder had cultivated for himself a phantom public. If the abstract clarity of this vision put into words a more rarefied feeling of much that was new about modernity, it also came at a personal price.
