The German Genius

fortuitous turn. En route to his appointment, he stopped off in Hamburg, where he met Lessing and, soon afterward, in Strasbourg with the prince, he met Goethe (this was July 1770). Realizing at once that Herder was less than content with his position, Goethe prevailed upon Karl August to invite his friend to Weimar as head of the clergy in the state. Herder kept the position for the rest of his life and seems to have been content—his children used to go looking for painted eggs in Goethe’s garden. 43
    Herder is not nearly as famous as Goethe, but in many ways his ideas and influence were more immediate, more direct, and more widespread. 44 “Like Max Weber over a century later, Herder was preoccupied with the problem of social relations in a world that increasingly came to resemble for him a vast machine in which men were like cogs, whose lives were governed by the inexorable operations of mechanical bureaucracies.” He addressed this predicament in two books, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit ( Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind ; 1784–91; four volumes), and Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity), published in 1774. Here, his main concern was, as he put it, to discover the rules of the morals of association. What invisible hand is there that shapes spontaneous political association?
    Hume and Kant aside, the main influence on Herder was Leibniz. Herder looked upon Leibniz as “the greatest man Germany ever possessed” and saw himself as part of that tradition—Leibniz, Thomasius, Lessing, and Herder. These men had conceived the idea of “becoming,” when the universe was held to be an “organic” entity and in which Leibniz’s understanding of history as “a continuous process of development, energised by human striving,” profoundly affected Herder’s historical thinking. For Lessing, moral striving, “moral becoming,” as he put it, was the central concern of all education, of all cultivation. “Man could only be truly himself by consciously realising his individuality.” Herder refined this eloquently. He insisted that, for him, humanity was not a state into which man was born “but rather a task demanding fulfilment by conscious development.” This idea of Bildung as a task dominated the philosophy of the majority of subsequent German writers, from Goethe, as we have seen, to Humboldt and Fichte. 45 Again, one can imagine Henry Sidgwick snorting, as he turns in his grave, but there is a unity here in German thought: Bildung as a task comes from the recognizably Pietist lineage and looks forward to Weber’s concept of the Protestant work ethic. It was also subversive, because it placed a premium on the intrinsic worth of individual judgment, and accordingly rejected (external) authority as the fundamental source in religious and moral matters.
    Herder also thought that Rousseau had in effect put the cart before the horse. A “social contract” was a misnomer for him because, as he saw it, the state of society is man’s state of nature. Man is born into a family whether he likes it or not. But man isn’t just a social animal—he is also a political animal, for life in society needs order, organization. 46 This is where Herder joined forces with Bodmer, Gottsched, Wolf, and Humboldt: the underlying “sustaining force” of all this organization, he said, is language . As Locke had done, Herder dismissed the divine origin of language. There was, he said, no stage or epoch in prehistory when language had been invented, nor had it developed from animal sounds. We cannot think without words, he insisted, therefore language must have emerged when consciousness developed. 47 Which meant that, for Herder, language reflects the history and psychology of a distinctive social heritage, and this was by far his most influential argument—language identifies a Volk or nationality, and this , the historico-psychological entity of the common language, is for him “the most natural and organic basis for political organisation…Without its own language a Volk is an absurdity ( Unding ). For neither blood and soil, nor conquest and political fiat can engender that unique consciousness which alone sustains the existence and continuity of a social entity.” 48 Language, as well as unifying a community, also identifies that community’s consciousness of difference from