Herder's Nationalism

Some light reading for your summer weekend

Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of their living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man--as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection to the sacred cosmos. Those few who have managed to maintain connection to a truly living tradition see themselves as people who understand the deeper interrelatedness of things, an interrelatedness that is celebrated in the rituals that the modernists judge to be irrational and meaningless. The living traditionalists see the modernists as having shriveled souls, as people who have been rendered incapable of responding to a mystery in things that is to them self-evident, beyond proving or disproving.

But living traditionalists are hard to find these days; the zombie traditionalists are more common, and they are as incapable or responding to the mystery in things as the modernists are. I'm not saying that there is no one who is a genuine living traditionalist today, even in America. But there is no future in this kind of traditionalism. It's drying up wherever in the world it might still live. We have to find another way to the sacred; it's no longer something that is just given by the culture as a gift. It's gone into hiding, and we have to search it out. The mystery in things is still there, but it's something we all as individuals have to discover for ourselves. It's not something that can be found in the traditional forms. But that isn't to say that the traditional forms have to be swept away; they have to be resurrected from the dead. But first we have to recognize that they are dead.

Excerpt from “Zombie Traditionalism II”

This essay from which this was excerpted was written a few days before “Dying Traditions”, which I posted a few days ago. It is very Herderian in spirit written before I knew anything about Herder. These posts were written twenty years ago¹ when I was feeling with some intensity the flatness of the modern world. Perhaps it was just mundane mid-life crisis. Whatever. What matters is how you deal with it.

I think that this was a time in my life when I embraced the idea that we were going through a culture-wide Dark Night of the Soul (I still think so), or alternatively, that we were like the ancient Israelites wandering in a bleak wilderness. Unlike them, though, we didn’t choose to go out into the wilderness; the wilderness came instead to us. Or to put in Deleuze and Guatarri’’s language, we were de-territorialized in place. And in that bleakness it is understandable that the fleshpots of Egypt would look very attractive by comparison. To go back, I believe, is the reactionary choice. Many people have made it. But while I understand it, I can’t say that was ever attractive to me. To go back is to choose a kind of death in life that shouldn’t be attractive to anybody.

But what does it mean to go forward? Well in the short run it just means putting one foot in front of the other, living in hope that we will eventually find a homeland, but the most important thing to understand is that there is no going back.

The reactionaries, of course, don’t think they’re choosing death, but aren’t they? When I looked to the actual lives of these people trying to live reactionary lives, I did not see a living tradition, but a zombie version of it—dead forms animated by some creepy energy that parodies life. Kevin Roberts is a zombie. Russell Vought is a zombie. We have seen J.D. Vance transform into one over the last ten years. Somewhere along the line, some zombie got to him and ate his brains.

In any event, it became clear to me back then that we were not missing the traditional forms, but the creative energies that our ancestors were in touch with that gave those forms—the music, ritual, the dance, their clothing, cuisine, architecture, their poetry and legends and fairy tales—their shape. But the forms are useless if they don’t connect you to the originary energies that gave them their shape. I came to understand this then, and in doing so I became a Herderian.

Herder was a student of both Hamann and Kant, but more a Hamannian that a Kantian. He was, like Hamann, a great defender of the particular and concrete, and an enemy of the abstract and systematic. And so for this reason he was a celebrator of populism and the inventor of the word Nationalismus to give his brand of populism a name.

These ‘nationalist’ energies are what Herder sometimes called Volkgeist, but perhaps better understood by the German word Krafte. These are the originary source of the energies that give every culture its uniqueness and authenticity. The word in German means ‘forces’ or ‘powers’, and I think it could be argued that it’s a predecessor of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ if you understood correctly what he meant by the phrase. Isaiah Berlin, on whom I am relying here, says this about Herder’s Krafte—

… in general [Herder] conceived of nature as a unity in which the Krafte—the mysterious, dynamic purpose-seeking forces, the interplay of which constitutes all movement and growth—flow into each other, clash, combine, coalesce. … His notion of them owes more to neo-Platonic and Renaissance mysticism, and , perhaps to Erigena’s Natura naturans [Nature naturing] than to the science of his time.

For Herder reality is a kind of symbiosis of these Krafte with an environment that is conceived in somewhat static terms; if the environment is altered too abruptly, the result is some kind of collapse. Herder found more and more evidence for this. Transplanted flowers decay in unsympathetic climates; so do human beings. Greenlanders do not thrive in Denmark. Africans are miserable and decay in Europe. Europeans become debilitated in America. Conquest crushes, and emigration sometimes leads to enfeeblement—lack of vital force, the flattening out of human beings, and a sad uniformity. Vico and Herder, pp. 176-77

What are the American Krafte? Are there any anymore—at least in the sense that Herder understood them? Were there ever any? I think that’s a very good question, and I think there are two books that address it in interesting ways: Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer and American Nations by Colin Woodward, and taking a look at them through a Herderian lens is something to do in the future—especially to contrast it with Yoram Hazony’s ideas about what constitutes the American nation. But not yet.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether these Krafte are alive anywhere that capitalism has disrupted or destroyed traditional societies. Herder is living at a time in Europe where he’s seeing the old thing dying around him, and he was among the first to sound the alarm. Berlin quotes him—

“I cry to my German brothers…the remnants of all genuine folk songs are rolling into the abyss of oblivion…the night of so-called culture is devouring all about it like a cancer.”

After Herder, folklorism became a thing. He was the great inspirer of people like the Grimm Brothers in Germany or later Yeats and Lady Gregory in Ireland who went around collecting all the old tales and songs living in these living traditions mostly orally. He had enough sense of the old to know the value of what was being lost, but enough consciousness of how things were changing in such a way as to seal off the German people from the sources of their unique cultural vitality.

Berlin says of Herder—,

All regionalists, all defenders of the local against the universal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life, both reactionary and progressive, both genuine humanists and obscurantist opponents of scientific advance, owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrines which Herder … introduced into European thought. Vico and Herder, p. 176

If you’re familiar with the Southern Agrarians literary movement (John Crowe Ransom, William Penn Warren, et al.) or more recently the work poetry and essays of Wendell Berry, then you get a taste of where Herder is coming from. They were/are trying to protect something they still experienced as living, precious, particular,—their homeland—while all the homgenizing ‘forces’ around them seek to obliterate it.

[Herder identified] ‘the people’ with the poor, the peasants, the common folk, the plebeian masses, uncorrupted by wealth or city life; and to this day, animate folk enthusiasts and cultural fanatics egalitarianism and agitators of local autonomy, champions of arts and crafts and of simple life, and innocent utopians of all brands. It is based on belief in loose textures, voluntary associations, natural ties, and is bitterly opposed to armies, bureaucracies, ‘closed’ societies of any sort. Vico and Herder, p. 184

He was kind of a hippy before there was such a thing. Or more accurately, hippies are simply the an incarnation of this older Romantic worldview. The first hippies were young German Romantics. But Herder was no primitivist and no nostalgist. He—

welcomed invention—the arts and science are fruits of the creative powers of man, and through them he rises to the full height of his purposive nature. Inventions as such do not corrupt … ’”only if one lives on the inventions of others does one become mechanical and devitalized.” Vico and Herder, p. 178

He was the enthusiastic celebrator of all forms of expressive creativity; he despised imitation, mimicry, the reverse engineering of the technique of others. He was against cultural appropriation not because it was stealing, but because it’s stupid and phony and it doesn’t work. It’s like white suburban boys trying to act ghetto black. The Krafte can’t be mimicked; one’s relationship to them has to be organic, from the origins.

But what about us poor souls who have no sense of these Krafte? Is there any hope for us?

Herder has his optimistic moments, when he supposes that a renewal is possible: that if man can only ‘cease to be in contradiction with himself’ and ‘return to himself, and if peoples cannot find themselves’ and ‘learn not to think in other people’s thoughts’ they can recover and revive and recreate new works of art, in modern terms, as noble an expressive of their true nature as anything that men have created in the past. There is only on course against which Herder sets his face absolutely: that is any attempt to return to the past. Here there is no salvation. Vico and Herder 179

So it should be clear: Herder was no reactionary—quite the opposite. A reactionary’s return the past was a form of mimicry, of thinking other people’s thoughts—or animated by something perversely worse. Herder was all about creative energy, and his politics, to the degree that he had any, were anarchic.

Herder stands even closer to the outlook of Ruskin or Lamennais or William Morris, to populists and Christian socialists, and to all of those who, in the present day, are opposed to hierarchies of status or power, or to the influence of manipulators of any kind. He stands with those who protest against mechanization and vulgarization rather that with the nationalists of the last hundred years, whether moderate or violent. … All his invocations fo the Nationalgeist, and of its many aliases—the Geist des Volkes, Seele des Volkes, Geist der Nation, Genius des Volkes and the more empirical Nationalcharakter—are intended to stress what is ours, not theirs, even though theirs may intricinsically be more valuable, viewed on some vaster scale. Herder admits no such scale: cultures are comparable but not commensurable; each is wha it is, of literally inestimable value in its own society, and consequently to humanity as a whole…Socrates is, above all, an Athenian of the fifth century; and that age is over. Aristotle may be more gifted than Leibniz, but Liebniz is ours, Aristotle is not; Shakespeae is ours, other great geniuses, Homer or Moses, are not. Individuality is all artificial combinations of old and new, native and foreign, lead to false ideas and ruinous practice. … Nationality for him is purely and strictly a cultural attribute; he believes that people can and should defend their cultural heritage: they need never give in. Vico and Herder, pp. 181-82

You can see how these ideas are reflected in some of the attitudes of the cultural Right who argue that their culture is being crowded out or ‘replaced’, and that they are fighting for their cultural survival. There’s something there that has to be taken seriously. But are they defending a living homeland or a zombie version of it? There’s no easy answer to that, and I don’t know. But Herder is also in the multiculturalism celebrated on the Left and its taboos about cultural appropriation. But would Herder recognize his ideas in the way they have been appropriated by the contemporary Right and Left? Perhaps a discussion for another day.

Herder was against alienation, against all of the ways being too civilized strangled the life out of people. The goal was to reconnect with the creative, originary energies—the Krafte. He thought that every culture had a unique schwerpunkt, a vital creative center of gravity. Your vitality as a culture lies in remaining in contact with its energies, and this is why he was the great hater of military adventurism because of the way the conqueror almost always snuffed out a local culture’s schwerpunkt. We Americans need look no further than its treatment of the Native Americans in the way we obliterated their native cultures and forced them to choose either assimilation or life in gulags² He was no fan of Alexander, or Caesar, or in his own day Frederick the Great. They were all killers of the local folk souls, homogenizers, destroyers of precious particularity.

Herder maintained that every activity, situation, historical period, or civilization possessed a unique character of its own; so the attempt to reduce such phenomena to combinations of uniform elements, and to describe or analyse them in terms of universal rules, tended to obliterate precisely those crucial differences with constituted the specific quality of the object under study, whether in nature or in history. To the notions of universal laws, absolute principles, final truths, eternal models and standards in ethics or aesthetic, physics or mathematics, he opposed a radical distinction between the method appropriate to the study of physical nature and that called for by the changing and developing spirit of man. He is credited with having put new life into the notion of social patterns social growth, the vital importance of considering qualitative as well as quantitative factors—the impalpable and the imponderable, which the concepts of natural science ignore or deny. Vico and Herder, p. 145

In other words, it’s not what science affirms, but what it leaves out that’s the problem, because what it leaves out is the most important for human thriving. It’s not what makes something statistically or abstractly the same as other things that’s interesting, but what makes it unique, what is unquantifiable about it.

He was a radical pluralist who insisted that every culture was incomensurate with every other one, that people in one culture could never pass judgment on another for being morally superior, more progressed, or better in any way. A particular culture was what it was, the way a tiger is a tiger or a camel is a camel. One is not better than the other, they have to be appreciated for what they are without comparison.

The stupidest, silliest thing for Herder was to envy another culture, to want to be a Greek or an Indian or a Tibetan. That is no cure for alienation. You must find and connect with your own culture’s schwerpunkt. But while all cultures are incommensurable with one another, that doesn’t mean you can’t admire other cultures:

Herder is one of those not very many thinkers in the world who really do absolutely adore things for being what they are, and do not condemn them for not being something else. For Herder everything is delightful. He is delighted by Babylon and he is delighted by Assyria, he is delighted by India and he is delighted by Egypt. He thinks well of the Greeks, he thinks well of the Middle Ages, he thinks well of the eighteenth century, he thinks well of almost everything except the immediate environment of his own time and place. The Roots of Romanticism, pp. 74-75.

So he wasn’t saying it was impossible to understand anything of a different culture or society from one’s own, but that one could never really truly understand it, what most important is always lost in translation. If you are German, you can learn ancient Greek, and you can make the empathic attempt in imagination to enter the ancient Greek world, you can admire it, appreciate it, but you can never truly understand what the particular, concrete lived experience from which Greek temples and religion, and politics, and poetry, and philosophy arose, because you cannot experience its schwerpunkt, the creative energies and forces that were unique for that people in that time.

We hear echoes of his pluralism and multiculturalism in identitarian politics today, in ideas about how the experience of different identity groups are completely incomprehensible to people outside of it, and how their claims about that experience must be accepted without question or judgment, and the more severe their historical marginalization, the more we need to accede to legitimacy their account.

There’s a problem there. And there is also a problem of moral relativism that goes with it, which, so far as I know, is left undiscussed by Herder. What did he think about Aztec human sacrifice? Was he delighted by that too? And it leads to the Heidegger problem discussed in an earlier post: Heidegger was clearly in the Herderian stream when he embraced early Nazism as the living expression of the German volkgeist. It’s clear to me that Herder would not have made the same mistake because Nazi thuggishness would have repelled him in a way that apparently it did not Heidegger—

Populism may have been in part responsible for isolationism, provincialism, suspicion of everything smooth, metropolitan, elegant and socially superior, hatred of the beau monde in all its forms; but with this went hostility to centralization, dogmatism, militarism, and self assertiveness, or, in other words, all that is commonly associated iwth the full-grown nationalism of the nineteenth century, as well as with a deep antipathy to mobs—Herder carefully distinguishes the Pobe auf die Gassen (“the rabble’) from Das Volk (i.e. ‘the body of the nation’) however this is done—and with a hatred of violence and conquest as strong as any to be found among the other Weimar humanists. The faithful followers of Herder may often have been—and can still can be—confused, sentimental, impractical, ineffective, and sometimes ridiculous, but not managerial, calculating or brutal. Vico and Herder, p. 186

But it’s not hard to see how Herder can be appropriated for purposes he would never approve. But does his cultural relativism allow him to approve or disapprove? You see how his can’t be the complete story. It was a corrective needed for his time and place, and it has has been adopted by subsequent generations in ways that now force us to make a corrective in our own. (Hence ‘Rescuing Aristotle’. But trying not to get sidetracked here.)

So while much of what Herder meant by populism and nationalism is continuous with what it meant for subsequent generations and for us now, there are important differences. First and foremost, there was no political dimension for Herder associated with his nationalism. It was exclusively cultural, and his politics were borderline anarchist. He hated the state, particularly the Prussian state of Frederick the Great, and saw it and the militarism that was associated with it as the great crusher and homgenizer of the human spirit. And like Hamann, he was a great despiser of the ‘cosmopolitan’ because of its rootlessness, it’s no-where-ness, its suspension of the human being in a timeless, spaceless limbo. Berlin stresses that for Hamann the most important thing for a human being is to belong somewhere, to have a homeland.

This is also the root of the notion of belonging. This notion is really elucidated for the first time by Herder, and that is why the whole idea of cosmopolitan man, a man who is equally at home in Paris, or Copenhagen, or Iceland, or India, is, to him, repellent.

A man belongs to where he is, people have roots, they can create only in terms of those symbols in which they were brought up, and they were brought up in terms of some kind of closed society which spoke to them in a uniquely intelligible fashion. Any man who has not had the good fortune to suffer this, any man who was brought up without roots, on a desert island, by himself, in exile, an émigré, is to that extent weakened, and his creative powers are automatically made the smaller. This was not a doctrine which could have been understood, and certainly not one which could have been approved of, by the rationalist, universalist, objectivist cosmopolitan thinkers of the French eighteenth century. The Roots of Romanticism, pp. 72-73.

Or understood or approved by the Neoliberal globalists of our own day. This, btw, is where Hazony needs to be taken seriously. He gets this.

So what would Herder think of the populist Right in Germany or the U.S. today? Hazony positively namechecks Herder, but what would Herder think of Hazony? That’s a discussion for another day, but I’ve already hinted where I’m going. I think that Herder would agree with my diagnosis of the disease on the cultural Right as zombie traditionalism. It was the perverse animating spirit of Nazism a hundred years ago and is now in its early stages again in Europe and America. It’s a phony, sick form of traditionalism, and Herder would have seen through it right away. Am I saying that Hazony is a proto-fascist. I don’t believe he is, but he’s fraternizing with them, and it’s not clear to me at all that he sees that as problematic. But we’ll come back to that theme later.

Postscript on Cultural Appropriation

I am not a scholar. I haven’t the patience for scholarship, and my mind doesn’t work in scholarly patterns. I am interested in ideas, particularly the history of ideas, perhaps more in how ideas influence cultures and societies rather than in the thinkers themselves. I am not particularly interested in giving credit, but I do try to acknowledge my sources with a sense of deeply felt gratitude. Nevertheless, I do not believe than any of us owns our ideas. Anybody who is truly original recognizes that his originality isn’t his but originates in something that we all participate in. Some people have better, deeper access to it than others.

For someone like Herder creativity is unselfconscious and spontaneous. There are no worries about whether someone else did something similar. What matters is not the product but the expressive act, one’s working with and shaping the Krafte. Who invented folk songs and dances? Who built the great cathedrals, sculpted their gargoyles, and made their stained-glass windows? Why should anybody care? What? You want to give them credit? Those people didn’t care about credit; it was enough for them to work together in a communal effort to create something deeply felt and beautiful. All truly creative people understand that they are working with ‘forces’ bigger than they are.

Perhaps that’s also why I don’t see any important individual thinker, say Plato, Aquinas, Kant, or Nietzsche as important for his being an individual intellectual prodigy so much as he, better than any of his contemporaries, articulated the ‘spirit’ of his time and place. In that I am a Herderian, but Herder, too, needs to be understood as a man of his time and place. He too is constrained by his historical context, and I’ve spent so much time here trying to explain what he was affirming and what he was rejecting because, while we are not inhabitants of 18th-Century Germany, we are very much heirs of what happened then and there and what the most interesting people then and there thought about it and how they acted on it. And that continues to have a profound influence on how we think and act today.

Herder’s ideas about the incommensurability of cultures isn’t completely wrong, but it isn’t completely right either. Take for example English Romanticism. Is that incommensurate with German Romanticism? To some extent, yes, of course. Does it have its own unique schwerpunkt? Yes and no. No in that it was profoundly influenced and inspired by German Romanticism, mainly through Coleridge. And it was profoundly inspired and influenced by Plato, mainly through the new English Plato translations of Thomas Taylor. Both were reacting to a transcultural phenomenon in early industrial capitalism. But what matters to English Romantics is not whether they got Plato right or the German philosophers and poets right, but rather how they appropriated them for their own purposes, and how they developed those purposes in their unique time and place. And so should we now read them, be inspired by them, and appropriate them for our own purposes in our own unique time and place. (This is what I see Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections seeking to do.)

So clearly creative people in one culture can be and often are inspired by and influenced by the Krafte of other cultures. Picasso said “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” I think that Herder would say “Mediocre artists imitate; great artists steal, and then make what they steal their own.” But stealing from whom and for what purposes? That’s the important question. The problem isn’t with the sources of that which has been stolen, but with the sources of the creative energies that the artist is working with here and now. That’s why a lot of the ideology on the left about cultural appropriation is kind of silly. Wearing blackface isn’t the same as writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Was Keats stealing? Yes, in the best possible way.

But the critical question becomes—what is the source of the Krafte for us? Do we have access to these forces now in the same way that our ancestors did? Or are our lives within the TCM gradually being sealed off from them? Herder and the other Romantics were among the first to sound the alarm to resist getting sealed off from these sources of creative life, the nineteenth century avant-garde continued this tradition of resistance, and the high modernists in the pre-WWII decades were the last to resist. The Postmodernists have completely capitulated, or so I argue. To what have they capitulated? To the ever expanding, co-opting appetites of of late capitalism.

Late capitalism, more specifically techno-capitalism, defines our society’s schwerpunkt. If you don’t think so, what then is the alternative, healthy schwerpunkt of late-capitalist societies? Where is there any competing, vital center of gravity? What isn’t coopted? What isn’t vulnerable to be eventually sucked into the all-consuming maw of techno-capitalism?

Something to explore in future posts. The goal for now is to lay a foundation and establish a vocabulary.

1. Just sayin’—I was talking about zombies before they became a thing. (Well, they were a thing, but not yet the thing they became.) Why do zombies eat brains? Because zombies symbolize how brains and appetite are the exclusive drivers of life at the cutting edge of the soulless, spiritless Techno-Capitalist Matrix. What is AI training all about except these brainless creatures mindlessly consuming the product of human brains, craving to be human when all they can be is an undead parody of the human.

2. At the end of the third of the Cathedral Lectures, I use the film Whale Rider to pull together the basic argument I was trying to make. I think it’s a beautiful parable of a Maori society devastated by having lost its schwerpunkt, but holding on to its lifeless forms, long enough to be reanimated by the girl in whom both the forms and the life are integrated. If you’ve never seen this movie, I strongly recommend it. Very Herderian. Then read what I have to say about it at the end of those lectures.