Herder originally published this massive tome in four volumes, between 1784 and 1791. One could think of this book as a selective history of the span of human history, delving into civilizations as diverse as the Chinese, Indians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Tatars, Goths, Normans, Gauls, and much more. He was a cultural pluralist and his main theme is that geography, culture, and genetics all interact together to make every peoples unique from one another. First, Herder gives nature its do, “All outer form in Nature is the index of her inner workings; and so, great Mother, we step before your most hallowed earthly creation, the laboratory of the human understanding…. Nature fashioned man for language…. It is in language that his reason and culture have their beginning…. Only with his organization for speech did man receive the breath of divinity, the seed of reason and of eternal perfection, an echo of that creative voice that he should have dominion over the earth, the divine art of ideas, the mother of all arts…. Thus, man has not so much been deprived of his instincts as these have been suppressed and subordinated to the governance of the nerves and finer senses.”
Common in the milieux of German Pietists of Herder’s era, he discusses the concept of idealism that floated in the air since the speculations of Kant. “Indeed, to one convinced of this inner life of the self all external states in which the body, like all matter, is subject to constant change will in time seem as mere transitions that do not affect his essential being: he passes as insensibly from this world into the next as he passes from night into day and from one stage of life into another…. The purpose of our present existence is the formation of humanity: all the baser wants of this earth shall be subservient and conducive to this end. Our capacity for reason shall be formed to reason, our finer senses to art, our instincts to genuine freedom and beauty, our motive powers [Bewegungskrafte] to love of mankind…. And how seldom is this eternal, this infinite purpose realized in this world! In whole nations reason lies trapped beneath layers of brutishness…. Few men take godlike humanity, in both the strict and extended sense of the term, as the proper study of life.”
Herder returns again and again to the theme that it is humanity’s ability to reason, through the knowledge of languages, that makes us superior to the beasts of the earth. Reason also gives each civilization, when combined with their own geography, history, and culture, their own specialness. “Reason is the aggregate of the observations and exercises of the mind, the sum of the education of our species…. Born almost without instinct, we are raised to manhood only by lifelong practice, on which both the perfectibility as well as the corruptibility of our species rests, so it is precisely thereby that the history of mankind is made a whole: that is, a chain of sociability and formative tradition from the first link to the last…. Hence there is an education of the human species: precisely because every man becomes a man only through education and the whole species lives solely in this chain of individuals…. Hence the education of our species is in a twofold sense genetic and organic: genetic by the communication, organic by the reception and application of that which is communicated. Call this second, lifelong genesis of man what we will: whether culture [Cultur], by analogy with the tillage of the land, or enlightenment, after the operation of light; it matters not, for the chain of culture and enlightenment reaches to the ends of the earth.”
Later, Herder returns to one of his biggest preoccupations, language. “Language alone has made man human, by damming the vast torrent of his emotions and with words erecting rational monuments to them…. Through language, men extended a welcome to one another, entered into society, and sealed the bonds of love. Language framed laws and united the generations; only through language, in inherited forms of the heart and mind, did a history of mankind become possible…. Whatever the mind of man has devised, what the sages of old had contemplated, reaches me, if it pleases Providence, by way of language. Through language my thinking mind is linked to the mind of the first man who thought and possibly the last; in short, language is the character of our reason, by which alone it is given shape and propagated.”
Herder next directly addresses the history of humanity. “Everywhere on our earth whatever can, will come into being; partly according to the situation and the requirements of the locality, partly according to the circumstances and opportunities of the age, and partly according to the native or acquired character of nations…. Time, place, and national character alone—in short: the cooperation as a whole of living forces in their most distinctive individuality—determine, as all productions of Nature, so all events in the human realm…. The ancient character of peoples derived from the tribal features, climate, way of life and education, early activities and occupations that were peculiar to them. Ancestral customs penetrated deeply and became the intrinsic pattern of the tribe…. Tradition in itself is an excellent ordination of Nature and indispensable to our species; but as soon as it shackles all power of thought, both in the institutions of state and in education; as soon as it inhibits all progress of human reason and improvement according to new circumstances and times; then it is the true opium of the mind, for states as well as for sects and individuals.”
Finally, Herder stresses, again, what makes humans the only species capable of history, while discrediting a Whig theory of historical progress. “Everything in history is therefore transitory; the inscription on her temple reads: vanity and decay. We kick the dust of our forefathers and walk on the crumbled ruins of human states and kingdoms…. The cause of the impermanence of all terrestrial things lies in their essence, in the place that they inhabit, in the whole law that binds our nature…. We fancy ourselves self-sufficient and yet are dependent on all in Nature: woven into the web of things mutable, we too must follow the laws governing their repeated course…. Everywhere we observe destruction in history without perceiving that what is renovated is better than what was destroyed. Nations flourish and then fade; but a faded nation does not bloom again, let alone more beautifully than before. Culture continues on its path; but it does not become more perfect.”
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