Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)

Rousseau. Ygh. The Thoreau of "people whose names end in -eau who aren't Thoreau." And if you read these reviews or hang out with me regularly you'll know what I think of Thoreau.

Although it is fun to think of Rousseau meeting Thoreau. "Ptui! He had the soul of a bourgeois" vs. "What a sucker! I bet his rake cost waaaaay more than seventeen cents."

With regard to this specific essay, of course presentism in evaluating these things is stupid. They were in a different place than us. Sometimes show more they knew less and made the best of it, sometimes they were digging into the same mountain from a separate-but-equal place, sometimes they may have even known more (our theory of aesthetics, for instance is as a joke compared to). But where they are coming to conclusions reasonable or fascinatingly strange based on their assumptions and lifeworld and the evidence at hand, who can fault them?

Rousseau's MO, on the other hand, is to reach banally absurd conclusions as a way of stirring the pot, a simpleminded form of self-promotion--at best, unoriginal thoughts expressed in an original way. And at worst: gesture is more powerful at conveying propositions and verbal language at conveying emotion? Go ahead and express that in a gesture, cochon. The evidence that language divided and did not unite us is that otherwise we'd all be crammed into the same corner of the globe? (Besides being doofy, that one is contradicted by his whole subsequent argument that language was only invented when solitary noble savages began to try to come together to form societies--which itself is a stupid argument.) Figurative language was born before literal language? How exactly? Worthy of Derrida or Zizek, that. All delivered with that smooth certitude--even where his ideas aren't self-evidently beef-headed, they're unsupported. Language has to be established by convention (why?), proceed from passion to reason (who says?), to be sung before it is spoken (probe it!!).

Sometimes he does talk sense--unlike many of his contemporaries, he doesn't conflate language with writing, recognizing that you can't tell the antiquity of a people from the antiquity of its alphabet. Sometimes he even says cool intriguing things--the idea that writing makes language more literal by stripping it of its prosody is plausible. And sometimes he's just a man of his time, as when he talks about that aforementioned evolution from passion to reason, though compared to the many other writers who assert that eighteenth-century commonplace Rousseau gives much more attention to the social consequences--as he sees it, an ossification of the early, free, musical spirit and the advent of tyrannies, as seen politically in the ancient Mediterranean world and artistically in what he takes to be a move from a focus on melody in Greek music to a focus on harmony in his contemporary euroclassical. It's bad musicology, but interesting social myth--though he ruins it when he says that societies have reached their final form and no longer will anything be changed except by arms and cash. (I'm willing to give him a partial pass on this one because I know he sees society in terms of a progression from hunting (savagery, the best state) to herding (barbarism) to agriculture (civilization, the shits). But to dismiss as meaningless any social change short of a move away from an agricultural society seems a bit much. In any case, this is where he wants to get us in the end--language is really about music, and music is really about an etiology of the human condition, and for such a puportedly deep-but-wide thinker Rousseau really seems to have a bit of an idée fixe--the association of people starts in competition and ends in tyranny--society is the necessary precondition to war.

No, okay: on paper Rousseau's argument is basically that the obligatory Adamic common tongue failed as we were scattered across the world after the Flood, then as we came together again we invented language once more--in the South at the well, flirting with the hot sons and daughters of the next herders over (solitary savages only talked to their families, and they only did so with gestures and grunts), and in the North so that we could cooperate and collaborate in the face of inclement conditions. Thus, the putpose of southern languages is to make us feel and that of northern languages to make us understand: their key characteristics respectively vigour and clarity.

And okay, so Rousseau does have a few diverting things to say. He is almost certainly right that Homer sang not wrote. It's cute when he gets in digs at the English.

But he's a charlatan through and through, a cocktail-party philosophe--war is peace, we work to be lazy, tired paradoxa. And you see that he is an intellectual parasite, on Diderot, on Condillac, as well as a contrarian. And! One who helped kill the laudable Enlightenment spirit and replace it with the sometimes laudable but alway problematic Romanticism, especially problematic in Rousseau's case because he remains committed to a stealthy Christian mysticism that is fine in its place but not when it starts inspiring you to claw back against civil society and the spirit of secular inquiry. Rousseau was what they call an "indifferentist," from what I understand, basically an advocate of freedom of religion and tolerance generally, and would have disowned his vicious Jacobin children, but he spawned them nevertheless. (Ironically, he left all five of his real children at the orphanarium.)

But then you think, well, Diderot and d'Holbach and all those guys were tax farmers and sybarites ("Ah, the superfluous! The most necessary thing" -Voltaire, yuck) and probably bad tippers, champagne progressives, and Rousseau advocated a life of free and equal peasanthood for all, and turned down the king's pension and walked the talk and probably earned a certain bounder-and-chancer's self-righteousness. And he was persecuted for bullshit and deserves a break.

And like the Brotsgelehrte who knows he depends on his wits to eat, the guy really is funny. From the subtle--"the mountains of Switzerland pour into our bountiful regions a perpetual colony," says this Genevan--to the sublimely ridiculous--"Girls would come to seek water for the household, young men would come to water their herds. There eyes, accustomed to the same sights since infancy, began to see with increased pleasure. The heart is moved by these novel objects; an unknown attraction renders it less savage; it feels pleasure at not being alone. Imperceptibly, water becomes more necessary. The livestock become thirsty more often. [...] Under old oaks, conquerors of the years, an ardent youth will gradually lose his ferocity. Little by little they become less shy wth each other. In trying to make oneself understood, one learns to explain oneself." Before we invented language to convince girls to bang us, if you're wondering, we married our sisters. But we weren't really into them.

One more example, because this one is amazing--it is on the different effects of the different arts of the different nations on the people of those nations, a weird kind of cultural relativism. Only French people have French feelings when they hear French music, etc. Then:

"Suppose a man has his hand placed and his eyes fixed upon the same object, while he alternately believes it to be alive and not alive: the effect on his senses would be the same, but what a different impression! Roundness, whiteness, firmness, pleasant warmth, springy resistance, and successive rising, would give him only a pleasant but insipid feeling if he did not believe he felt a heart full of life beating underneath it all."

Note how the original point was lost as soon as he started to talk about boobies. Elsewhere he says we need to keep women subjugated because if they are allowd to participate in the public sphere they will overwhelm us with their wiles and take over the place. I find his account of gender relations endlessly comical, and his account of social relations invogorating but wrong, and his account of the arts insipid, speaking of insipid, since it makes us only into Aeolian harps for sense-perceptions. And his account of language I find baffling. show less

One thing that really helps you get through a book like this, written in a different era in a different language with a very different prose style (although I seem to have inherited it somehow--my friend went through my thesis today marking all the sentences that were more than four lines or so. There were many) on esoteric topics, is if you feel like you'd really like the guy writing it. And Herder seems like a rad companion. "Once again, all I can do amid this richness"--the richness of show more human language--"is gather flowers," he says, and you are left with no pressure on you to wander with him and perhaps espy a four-leaf clover. This was a prize-essay, and Herder writes with the polemical zip of one who wishes to take the crown, but also the genial wonder of one who sees no need to make your time together unpleasant just because he has to put the boots into Süssmilch, Leibniz, Rousseau, Condillac.

Ironic, with that last, because Herder and Condillac don't disagree nearly as much as Herder thinks (pretends?) they do. Their epistemology, and in particular their account of the development of languages (not the origin of language), are virtually identical (difference is, C sees two children externalizing their internal words in order to cooperate together; Herder sees us sitting around the fire and the natural Word hitting us with a thunderbolt--the sheep is the thing that goes baaa!--and then, because that's the most exciting thing to have happened in many thousands of moons, we get together and invent more. Their main split is on the matter of the origin of language--the putative topic of the essay, which Herder seems to want to settle and move beyond as soon as possible. "Already as a beast, man has language," he says, and with that radical beginning (in 1772, very radical indeed!) he pushes back not only Condillac's constructivism but also the divine origin of language people, and Kant with his innate ideas (to Herder, language is innate, and ideas rise out of it, the reverse situation), and Lockean designativism. We may howl our fear and desire when alone, he say, evoking the Greek hero Philoctetes abandoned on his island with his reeking wound, but as soon as we enter human company, these unilateral blasts give rise to the infinitely complex and beautiful process of connecting with our neighbour, instantiating a Volksgeist, exploring the mind of the Other. Herder loves all cultures and all peoples, but not in a gross neoliberal way: cherish yourself, cherish what you come from, and then go out and slurp down down everything else on the human buffet table, he says. He's the antifascist polyphile, and we may yet find he's our best way forward. show less

Decent book. As to Herder's merits in broad scope, I would have to read more of him; that, however, will not be any time soon. Some of his notions regarding the Bible were fairly pioneering at the time. He was one of the early promoters of Biblical criticism, and supported the earliness of Mark and the dependence of Matthew and Luke on common sources. Since this has become rather old hat, that, in and of itself, doesn't make his writings that relevant and novel today.
His opposition to show more Kantianism and pure rationalism is a little more of what I was interested in. He had some good things to say in regards to that set of topics, but as I am writing this, nothing springs to mind that was that memorable for me. As it stands, I am glad I read the book (skipping one section that didn't interest me). I was mainly interested in Herder because of his role in the Sturm Und Drang German romantic movement. I think Hamann is probably more noteworthy as the true visionary in regards to German romanticism, but Herder, Jacobi and Lavater, all played a substantial role early on. show less

Despite having some interesting bits, i found this book very boring overall.