Some philosophers with a big impact on human thinking are almost forgotten. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of them. I guess that most of my readers will not have heard of this Prussian Enlightenment philosopher. Happily, I knew a little bit about him, so when I saw an anthology from his work with an introduction in a bookshop, I didn’t hesitate to buy it. For, although I knew his name and although I knew that he had been an important thinker, and that he had something to do with the idea of history, I had never read anything written by Herder. So, this was a good opportunity to correct that omission.
In short, and maybe a bit exaggerated, Herder’s contribution to human thinking has been threefold:
- He invented the idea of history.
- He invented the idea of cultural relativism.
- He stressed the importance of language as the bearer of our thinking and world views.
There is more, but already this made Herder one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment.
As for the last point, which I’ll further ignore, Herder was one of the first to state that language shapes our framework of thinking, without saying that it determines thinking. Languages are the reflections of cultures.
But let me go to the other points. Until the 18th century the European world views were static. In fact, there was no past and no future, but only present. I mean, people thought that past and future were more or less copies of the present. Only the variables were filled in differently during the ages. The persons changed and institutions may have been replaced by other institutions, but it was, so to speak, old wine in new bottles, so people thought. However, Herder made clear that history involved development. The present is not a repetition of the past, but the past is substantially different from the present. Human institutions and ideas are continuously changing and becoming qualitatively different. There is progress, or maybe decline, or at least there is change. New wines are being developed, so to speak; not only the bottles become new. After some time, old wines are no longer considered tasty.
Herder introduced also the idea of cultural relativism. This involves that each culture has a value of its own. Therefore, each culture must be measured by its own standards. There are no inferior or superior cultures. This was a direct attack on the reigning European culture and its self-arrogance towards non-European cultures: “Every nation must ... only be viewed from its own situation with everything it is and has. ... Our European culture cannot act as a measure of general human values.”
That this was something new, can be illustrated by mediaeval paintings. Mediaeval painters often painted biblical scenes, so scenes in the holy land or otherwise in Egypt, Babylonia, and the like. However, these depicted scenes were clearly Mediaeval-European. They didn’t take into account that the biblical stories took place thousands of years ago in a different, Middle-Eastern culture. Only by and after the Renaissance, people began to realize that there have been different worlds that were not only inhabited by different people, but that these worlds were fundamentally different from theirs. So biblical scenes had to be filled with Middle-Eastern landscapes and with people in Middle-Eastern cloths. Johann Gottfried Herder was the first or at least the most influential philosopher who worded and expressed such views.
Does this mean that we must accept everything that is happening in other cultures, because it is happening in a culture that is not our own? Supposing that we accept Herder’s ideas, the answer is yes and no. It is “yes”, because we cannot or must not apply our own standards to cultures that are alien to these standards. Cultures must be judged from within. But this makes that the answer is also “no”. Actually, in each culture there are dissidents and critics. No culture is a unity. Moreover, cultures don’t exist isolated, anyway not in the present world. Carriers of a culture look across the borders of their own worlds, and there are always also a few who physically leave their own world and travel around and get new ideas and see other standards. This can be a starting point for criticism and cultural change.
Does this mean that in the end all values, norms and standards are relative, since culture-bound? I think that the answer is clearly “no”. Although values, norms and standards are culture-bound, this doesn’t involve that they are bound only to one culture. Some values, norms and standards are general and apply to everybody. We call them universal human values. They have been formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance. Thanks to the Enlightenment philosophers we know that general standards should be general and not be one-sided and culture-bound. Herder was one of these philosophers and certainly not the most unimportant one.
Sources: Johann Gottfried Herder, Hoe worden we humaan? (esp. pp. 106-124; quote on p. 118, my translation) and Wikipedia.
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