Herder, Fichte

and
Romantic Nationalism

http://books.google.be/books?id=DeLJxf_SYrIC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq=Herder+and+Prussia&source=bl&ots=snp-
sz6dUb&sig=p68y6Tdp-c6Om4fY4K4HbGvU34w&hl=fr&ei=4BDVTN68Hs-
TjAfAxvi2CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CEoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=Herder%20and
%20Prussia&f=false

http://books.google.be/books?
id=5ihJn9EKCl4C&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=Popularphilosophen&source=bl&ots=6c6gkvCygV&sig=MJ1XveleN
5OMgS6XW9UtQQjRkVY&hl=fr&ei=1FzVTKywCY-
RjAeH6YjcCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Popularphilosop
hen&f=false

Introduction

Romantic and Literary Conceptions of the Nation

Scotland, as we know it, was invented somewhere between 1770 and 1780 by a handful of romantically
inclined Germans. As such Scotland is not the only nation (rather than state) to have been invented in this manner. The
phenomenon spreads across Europe and contributes to the emergence of a national consciousness. What is found on
closer examination of tartanry and Highlandism is not so much the genius of the Scottish people as a conscious
construction, one that owes a considerable debt to Herder.
For Herder, originally writing from the elliptical European position of today's Kalingrad and then from Riga in
Latvia (on the frontier of what was to become greater Germany as it ran up against the frontiers of a greater Russia)
much of what he has to say about the genius of the people inevitably fell on receptive ears in the an equally peripheral,
largely economically backwards and essentially Protestant Scotland. Much of the German contribution was then
elaborated upon by the Tory Edmund Burke (in explicit opposition to the French Revolution) on a basis that begins
from aesthetic theory in the wake of Kant.
Herder belongs to the rise of romanticism in Europe – and with it the “life sciences” – as this entails a shift
from mechanical metaphors (the universe as a piece of clock work) to organic and natural metaphors (social relations in
terms of growth and adaptation to the environment). He is an empiricist (in a post-Humean or pre-critical Kantian
mode), a philosopher of art (whose aesthetics – as was the case with late eighteenth century German aesthetics in
general – is also fundamentally empiricist) and a theorist of cultural, historical relativity (the aspect of his writing that
he is best known for today). At the same time, he is interested in language as its shapes thought (without thought being
reduced to language, something prevented by the philosopher's empiricism). Finally, he is a sentimentalist, in the sense
in which emotions are understood as shaping human action and belief by contrast with or in opposition to reason.
 That he appears here, however, is mainly due to his contribution to the development of what is called – in
France at least – the “German” conception of nationality. This concept of the nation involves a sense of cultural and
historical relativity, thematised in relation to botanical differences in which certain botanical characteristics flourish in
certain areas, for example. This gives rise, by analogy, to a sense of culture being related to the environment and arising
from the local conditions that adhere to particular geographical contexts.
There is manifestly a strongly empiricist aspect to this culture. For the empiricist, we are what we are on
account of the influence of external factors as these leave an imprint on the tabula rasa that is our original being. Given
that the nature of this influence changes historically and geographically or geo-culturally, it is not surprising that
individuals from different times and different places are quite different to one another.

The political philosopher who most clearly lays the groundwork for this development is manifestly Rousseau
with his elevation of the natural world (in line with pastoralism) and the modern world. It is here that the complex
relations between the social contract tradition of politics, on the one hand, and the nationalist tradition, on the other,
begin to find their roots. The “state of nature” in the social contract tradition is further fleshed out, as it were, in
relation to pastoralism. The Romantic taste for the primitive and the pastoral comes to furnish the “state of nature” but
one that is now the point of departure for a specifically national development. .
The rise of the nation-state, however, means that the state requires a sense of national culture (or has a sense of
national culture foisted upon it) and this is something that must be created through cultural and linguistic
homogenisation and the strengthening of the relations between culture, language and religion. This requires bolstering
the national tradition and in particular the corpus of national history (in an epic mode) alongside a sentimental
attachment to the native language and customs of the people. The nation becomes the guarantor of ancient liberties and
traditions, the locus of simple, ancestral and rural pieties now defined in terms of their naturally established dignity.

Lorsque les guerres napoléoniennes ravagèrent l’Europe au tournant du XIXe siècle,

nombre de savants, écrivains et poètes allemands sentirent le besoin de trouver ce qui faisait
du peuple allemand un peuple original et unique. Rompant avec la tradition classique et avec
les références françaises qui avaient marqué la vie savante et culturelle allemande jusque là,
les premiers romantiques opérèrent une véritable révolution dont Herder fut l’un des principaux
artisans.
Alors que des juristes romantiques tels qu’Adam Müller avaient

substitué au concept de Nation celui de Volk,

défini comme une communauté populaire façonnée par les instincts essentiels,
les coutumes et les rites religieux,

la pensée romantique commença à valoriser le local plutôt que l’universel,

la foi plutôt que la raison et la tradition du passé plutôt que les progrès du futur.

Amoureux de l’unique et de l’exotique, le courant romantique épousa tout naturellement le

savoir orientaliste dans sa recherche de l’unicité du peuple allemand.
 The nation serves as a means of extending political influence beyond the land-owning elites and the wealthy
bourgeoisie – in a period during which access to literacy let alone further education was severely curtailed – and in so
doing prepares the way for the wider democratisation of society. In parallel with this, the Herderian phase of romantic
nationalism – with its positive representation of simple, pastoral values and of the cultural wealth of the common people
– is a logical extension of Protestantism's elevation of literacy as a necessary pre-requisite for access to the individual
reading of the Bible. This then serves to found the principles of morality and education that will be necessary for
universal suffrage and the development of a professional middle class.

Herder has been especially neglected by philosophers (with two notable exceptions in the Anglophone world:
Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor). The Herder who emerges is

a remarkably modern-thinking, sensible, and republican-minded theorist,

an author whose reputation suffered as much from the limitations imposed on him by censors
(who would not allow Herder to reveal fully his republican colours in print)

and propagated by Herder's own penchant for rhetorical excess. In apologizing for Herder, however, Barnard spends
remarkably little time discussing the state of the question. But for a footnote on page 27, which cites books published in
1938, 1946, 1952, and 1955 (Benno von Wiese, Collingwood, Popper, and H. S. Reiss respectively), Barnard omits
mention of any current scholarship that takes Herder to task.

Who are the thinkers who have been misreading Herder?

Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor are sympathetic,
as are Anthony LaVopa, Frederick Beiser and John Zammito.

Somewhere there is a cadre of critics, but, if Barnard knows them, he has politely decided not to name names (or
reference their articles). Then again, the greatest challenge facing Herder enthusiasm is not the critics, per se, but the
overstuffed canon of European Intellectual History. Herder is eminently worth reading, yet his work seldom makes it
onto syllabi outside German departments. Barnard provides a great service in this further contribution to the promotion
of Herder's work, yet two major stumbling blocks remain: historically embedding Herder in his eighteenth-century
German world, and identifying (or promoting) a representative teaching text or texts that might enable students to
recognize the nuanced concepts Barnard so rightly identifies.

If there is a potentially threatening aspect to this “rise of the nation” for conservatives, at the same time, the
manner in which this is understood has a certain appeal for the same body of opinion. By contrast with a
Republicanism and militant syndicalism, the modesty of traditional rural and agricultural subsistence suggests that the
prime quality of the people is that they do not expect either an overthrow of the ideological superstructure (above all as
is this entails a relation to the Church) or substantial material improvement in their lot (something that has a necessarily
corrupting influence). Instead, they are happy with the primitive and pastoral existence – and the values of honest
labour – that they have inherited from the past.
 Already we have described much of what was to become “kailyard” in Scottish literature. Kailyard at the end
of the nineteenth century – like the philosophy that emerges in Germany at the end of the eighteenth – involves the
tension that exists between the educated lower middle classes – as this involved graduates returning from university to
jobs as doctors, lawyers, ministers and schoolmasters – in essentially rural environments. The education that they had
received at university clashes with the lack of education in the environments in which they find themselves. This is
resolved in terms of a sentimental if condescending relation to the ordinary people, “salt of the earth” to which these
individuals are related in terms of their biographical origin but from which they are now separated.
In this respect, the nation becomes the expression of the links between the elites and the people, the mediation
between the classes in terms of a common culture. It is the intermediary class of those that came from a modest
background but who had gained access to education that seeks to promote a wider sense of national unity. Indeed, the
philosophers associated with the German Aufklarung were almost exclusively sons of the lower middle, urbanised
middle classes: Herder's father eked out a living as a non-university educated schoolmaster and as singer in the local
choir, Fichte's father was a ribbon weaver and Kant's father was a harness maker (and so on). They also exhibit an all
but universal adherence to pietistic forms of Lutheranism (as this descends down to the biographies of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche),whilst their access to philosophy came through a training for the ministry as this often mutated into posts
as private tutors to wealthy families and eventually, access to university teaching.
Upwards social mobility, in this respect, is directly associated with the values of self-determination and
education as this will extend to demands – not realised until the last quarter of the nineteenth century – for universal,
secondary education as a necessary correlate for universal suffrage.

The nation, in this respect, is not necessarily the nation of “blood and soil” (although, as will later be argued, it
contains an element of a more martial culture). It is to be understood in the sense of the expression of the values of the
people taken as a whole and as a body capable of ensuring not only equality before the law but also equality of
opportunity. It is not necessarily to be understood in terms of jingoism and a penchant for xenophobic elevation of the
self-same in which national and “racial” hierarchies are substituted for class hierarchies.
The result is a sense of the legitimate political body being one defined in terms of the nation-state with the
nation supplying the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious networks on which social existence is understood to
depend at the ordinary level of experience. In Sociological terms, this is the “organic” and functionalist conception of
the political body in which class difference is understood in terms of different functions within the “body” of the nation,
something that can be compared (following the biological metaphors already mentioned) to the different, inter-
dependent functions of, say, the lungs, the kidneys and the heart.
This sense of the “political body” takes on full meaning, however, only once the former divisions between
town and country, bourgeois and aristocrat are seen as fusing in a common opposition to the rise of revolutionary
Republicanism and, then, with industrialisation, the rise of the “working class”. This bring with it, not only urban
squalor and the breaking up of traditional communities (following enclosures) but also organised bodies responsible for
the defence of working class interests. From Herder and Wordsworth to kailyard and even certain foms of naturalism,
the valorisation of rural existence is contrasted with the denigration of urban life.

What is to be found here is the origins of modern conservative ideology (as this will give rise, for instance, to
one nation toryism). It is a relative complex formation. On the one hand, it is required to integrate the values of the
formerly dominant class (which were those of honour and martial virtue). On the other hand, it seeks to provide a
pietistic, reverential morality but one grounded in individual self-determination in a characteristically Protestant mode.
Finally, it also seeks to represent the nation as an all but biological organisation that grows from an origin – in the
Medieval past – and which gains is consistency and internal principles from this origin (as a tree grows from an acorn).
As such, it tends to be orientated towards the past and towards a narrative of origins and growth, of a past
rooted in a natural environment and spontaneous bonds of community (between warrior and farmer) as this extends to
include a national community. Identity, in this respect, also requires an external threat, one that galvanises an otherwise
peaceful and pastoral existence into self-consciousness (which is to say its awareness of its intrinsic goodness in
opposition to a corrupting, external influence identified with foreign corruption).
The racketeering aristocratic warrior becomes, in the process, the guarantor not of feudal but of pietistic,
pastoral values. The military function is now identified with the defence of characteristically national values extending
to and including “the people”. These are peaceful until they are outraged by the purposeful breach of the values that
knit the community together (often a rape or sadistic the murder of a child, for instance) and which justify revolt. The
tradition that will stretch from Herder to Walter Scott is born. It at once unites the ordinary people, the demand for
education and the violently expressed defence of the nation (in the face of foreign tyranny).
Defined in terms of the elevation of an ethnically defined same in opposition to foreign tyranny, it can
descend, on the one hand, via a liberal and sentimental attachment to the people towards “chapel socialism” but it can
also develop, via an elevation of the ethnic-cultural component of the nation, this time, towards Bismark and the
ideology of “blood and soil” or towards the value system of the Klu Klux Klan. Some would argue that Zionism is
situated somewhere between these two poles. As Hannah Arendt saw, the association of the ethnic group – the race –
with the aggressive expression of their interests involves the return of a certain aristocratic ethos of conquest and the
subordination of subject peoples.

Herder: Youth and Education

Youth

Herder's life is divided, without too much difficulty, into three main periods. There is first the period of his
education during which time he famously undergoes the influence of the pre-critical Kant and Hamman. This phase
exhibits a strongly Protestant influence. This is followed by the period of his association with Goethe and the Sturm
und Drang movement in Germany (in which the emphasis is placed on hyperbolically expressed emotions). During this
time and after he worked as a philosopher, literary critic, Bible scholar, and translator. Finally, there is the period spent,
at the end of his life in Weimar (during which time he expressed a degree of enthusiasm for the French Revolution).
Herder (1745-1803) was born in a small town in the eastern Prussia (not far from the present day Lithuanian
border). Mohrungen had been founded by the Teutonic Knights at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It was on a
trading route linking the Baltic with Venice but remained a predominantly agricultural region known as a market for
cattle and grain. It had been assimilated into Prussia in 1525 and became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701.
His childhood was spent in relative poverty, his father making his living from work as sexton, singing in the
choir and work as a petty schoolmaster. As was the case in the Britain of the time, the educational resources were
typically the Bible coupled to other, mainly devotional literature such as songbooks. He went on to the local school
after receiving some rudimentary education from his father and by 1762 was able to enrol at the local, German
university of Koningsberg. His initial intention had been to study Medecine but, apparently finding dissection too
difficult to stomach, he turned instead to education for the Ministry.
Koningsburg is now the dismal, post-Stalinist Kalingrad, a part of the Russian enclave of the same name.
However, it had known greater glory in the past. Koninsburg had also been founded by the Teutonic Knights and was
granted city rights in 1285, becoming a member of the Hanseatic League in 1285. During the 14 th and 15th centuries it
thrived and was on the borders of the Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth and a university was founded there in
1544. Trade between Germany and Russia (which then had control of the regions of present day Baltic States) and the
towns status as a port (serving the whole region) lay at the basis of its prosperity. Having been under the ultimate
authority of Poland (from the beginning of the fifteen century), Prussia – Protesant since 1525 – gained control of
Koningsberg in 1660. Frederick I of Prussia was crowned there in 1701 and was now the capital of Prussia, until that
role was taken over by Berlin.

Education