Herder`s Deconstruction of Race

“Herder's Deconstruction of Race”
International Herder Society
Madison, Wisconsin
September 19, 1998
Karl J. Fink
One year before she fled Germany (1933), Hannah Arendt-Stern published an essay on
the "Enlightenment and the Question of the Jews" (Aufklärung und Judenfrage), where she set
forth her thesis that the question dates from the Enlightenment period and was framed by the
non-Jewish world.1 Here she argued that the "formulations" (Formulierungen) and answers set
the standard of "behavior" (Verhalten) for the "Assimilation" of the Jews (Assimilation, p. 65)
into her time.2 In her view, Moses Mendelssohn (1728-86) had refined Gotthold E. Lessing's
(1729-81) concepts of "humanity" (Menschlichkeit) and "tolerance" (Toleranz) and with
Lessing's separation of "rational" and "historical truth" (Vernunft- und Geschichtswahrheiten, p.
65) Mendelssohn had established for the Jewish community a "true assimilation" (wirklicher
Assimiliertheit) into the Christian world. This Enlightenment concept of assimilation, she
argues, along with Christian W. Dohm's (1751-1820) concept of Jewish emancipation by means
of education in values of European middle class society, levelled Jewish culture to the ideals of
Enlightenment progress toward humanity. Both Lessing's concept of tolerance, Mendelssohn's
rathional truth, and Dohm's requirement of progress toward humanity set a new standard for
Jewish equality in Europe. Johann G. Herder (1744-1893), she contends, corrected this
1
Hannah Arendt-Stern, "Aufklärung und Judenfrage," Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 4
(1932): 65-77, p. 65.
2
In writings from after World War II, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: World
Publishing Company, 1958 [1st ed., 1951), essentially maintains her view that the writers of the Enlightenment set
the question of Jewish integration into European society, focusing less on philosophical and more on the formal and
legal origins of anti-semitism, beginning after the French Revolution with a "series of emancipation edicts which
slowly and hesitantly followed the French edict of 1792," p. 11.
Fink-Herder on Race
2
normalized view of Jewish culture with a new definition of history that judged a culture on its
own terms.3 Herder, she wrote, "understands the history of the jews, as they themselves interpret
this history, as the history of the chosen people of God."4
In Hannah Arendt-Stern's view, Enlightenment writers had set the stage for Jewish
equality by emphasizing "development" (Bildung) through the autonomy of independent
thinking (das Selbst-denken-können, p. 68), which Herder replaced with the concept of history,
that in his words "form the head and shape the limbs" (formt seinen Kopf und bildet seine
Glieder, p. 72). "Reason" (Vernunft) according to Herder, she points out, is not the means, rather
is the result of human history. And from this perspective, she contends, Herder introduced a
change in the question of the Jews, which put their position as "the chosen people" back into the
center of their identity, and at the same time removed it, when he argued that secularization came
with the continuity of historical change. Herder, she concludes, polemicized against "the
autonomy of thought" (das Selbstdenken, p. 74), which had negated the special status of the
Jewish tradition, and instead he argued for "formation through understanding of models" (das
Bildende im Verstehen der Vorbilder, p. 75). Thus Herder in one stroke gave the Jews back their
tradition, but by placing it in the course of time, dispersed and secularized it, so that it was "no
3
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), under much tighter definitions that followed the atrocities of the
Nazi era, maintains Herder's unique position as a defender of Jewish emancipation by their own terms: "Jews were
exhorted to become educated enough not to behave like ordinary Jews, but they were, on the other hand, accepted
only because they were Jews, because of their foreign, exotic appeal. In the eighteenth century, this had its source in
the new humanism which expressly wanted `new specimens of humanity' (Herder)," p. 57, which, she points out
later in her book, distinguishes Herder from others in a period of "race-thinking before racism," pp. 162, 177.
4
Arendt-Stern, "Aufklärung und Judenfrage" (1932), "Herder versteht die Geschichte der Juden so, wie sie selbst
diese Geschichte deuteten, als die Geschichte des auserwählten Volkes Gottes" (p. 73), which she grounds in Part
III, Book 12 of Herder's Ideen, where he writes: "Ich shäme mich also nicht, die Geschichte der Ebräer, wie sie
solche selbst erzählen, zugrunde zu legen" (p. 73).
Fink-Herder on Race
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longer under the power of God" (nicht mehr unter die Macht Gottes, 75).5
Written before the Nazis came to power, Hannah Arendt-Stern concluded from her study
of Herder, that the Jewish nation did not live by "mercantile advantages" (merkantilischer
Vorteile, p. 76), rather it lived in the citizens of science and humanity: "Their Palestine is
therefore, where they live and nobly work everywhere" (Ihr Palästina ist sodann, wo sie leben
und edel wirken allenthalben, p. 76).6 In hindsight her vision for the Jewish people may be
debated, but her scholarship on Herder, it seems to me, is accurate,7 for by contrasting him to
Lessing and Mendelssohn she did capture the essential difference that locates Herder in
opposition to the Enlightenment at those points where minority cultures are sacrificed to the
values of general cultures. For this reason I have predicated my essay on Herder's deconstruction
of race on Hannah Arendt's thesis that Herder wrote in counterpoint to writers, who measured
other cultures by foreign rather than indigenous standards.8 Beyond her thesis my essay relies on
5
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropologie in theologischer Perspektive (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983,
also argues that Herder takes the lions share of credit, or responsibility, for introducing a secularized historiography
into the study of culture, p. 457.
6
Compare Arendt-Stern's conclusions with those of Wilhelm Müller, Studien über die rassischen Grundlagen des
"Sturm und Drang" (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1938), who in stark contrast attempts to limit the intellectual
community to a genealogy of blood lines, in the firm belief "daß eine Entwicklung der Ideengeschichte auch einen
biologischen Unterbau und somit richtung-angelegten Fortgang habe und die systematische Darstellung einer
ausgereiften Ideenwelt darum zugleich ein rassisches Bild der Träger gebe, die sie hervorgebracht," p. 13-14.
7
Paul L. Rose, German Question/Jewish Question. Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), in an afterword to his book, notes Hannah Arendt's book on Totalitarianism
(1958) as one of the "Earlier titles that should have been cited," p. 387, apparently even in this postscript unaware of
her study of Herder from 1932, when she came to views of Herder based on quotations from his Ideen, which were
also used by Rose, who argues in his conclusion that "the recent tendency to see his general outlook as liberal and
humanitarian is misconceived," p. 98, that "he held to the essentially illiberal German conviction that the Jews were
far too alien and distinct a nation ever to become `Germans,'" p. 107, and that he "loved humanity, but he was no
humanitarian," p. 108.
8
Jürgen Brummack, "Herder's Polemik gegen die `Aufklärung,'" in: Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der
Europäischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Ed. Jochen Schmidt (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), pp. 277-293, reviews the changing status of Herder's position in German
literary and philosophical history from Heine to Suphan, Kindermann, and current arguments that waffle between
his humanistic alternative to Berlin nationalism. He argues that all of these perspectives are too narrowly defined,
Fink-Herder on Race
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Herder scholarship that has shown how past claims to his writings for the cause of nationalism
and anti-semitism were ideological distortions coopted from statements out of context,9 and so it
is with this background that the way has been laid clear to move ahead with a close study of texts
by Herder that examine his strategy for reconstructing a science of the human being that had not
yet become humane.
Introduction
Let it be assumed then, that long before anyone was inspired to reject "modernism" for
"postmodernism,"10 Herder was shaping a voice of dissent that seriously questioned the
Enlightenment conception of liberty and justice for all. It is remarkable, but not surprising, that
between the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789 Herder would
write an agenda that anticipates a crisis in cultural values in other periods of history, including
one that began at the turn of this century and has surfaced again at the end of the century in the
that the younger Herder differs greatly from the older one, that his critical tone captured by the Storm and Stress
movement is not in opposition to the Enlightenment, rather "daß Herder vielmehr eine Form der Aufklärung gegen
eine andere setzt, ja, daß seine Polemik geradezu eine bedingte Form der Bejahung derjenigen Kulturentfaltung im
modernen Europa ist, mit der sich der Name Aufklärung für ihn verbindet, " p. 279.
9
Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism (1958), observes the abuse of Herder scholarship in her claim that "It was
Herder, an outspoken friend of the Jews, who first used the later misused and misquoted phrase, `strange people of
Asia driven into our regions,'" as she explained how Herder had with these words expressed the eighteenth-century
search for "`new specimens of humanity,'" p. 57. See also Emil Adler, "Johann Gottfried Herder und das
Judentum," in: Herder Today. Contributions from the International Herder Conference, Ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 382-401, who reviews this issue of philological abuse with the conclusion that
Herder dedicated much of his career to friendly and positive presentations of Jewish culture and that some of the
"stereotypical anti-Jewish statements" discovered by Herder's defender and detractors were "originally pro-Jewish,"
p. 383.
10
See Lawrence Cahoone, "Introduction," in: From Modernism to Postmodernism. An Anthology, Ed. Lawrence
Cahoone (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 1.28, for a review of important texts in the "History of
Postmodernism," pp. 3-10, a term which "seems first to have been used in 1917 by the German philosopher Rudolf
Pannwitz to describe the `nihilism' of twentieth-century Western culture, a theme he took from Friedrich Nietzsche,"
p. 3.
Fink-Herder on Race
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rejection of normative values defined by the European Enlightenment.11 Actually it is quite
normal that he would examine critically any cultural politics that favors a standard of success
and happiness driven by the dominance of one group of peoples over another. This anachronism
becomes especially poignant, when we separate the ideas of Herder, the writer, from Herder, the
person.12 Born, raised, and educated on the borders between German and Slavic cultures, he
lived in a so-called emergent culture, which was viewed in his time as a country that had only
"lately become literary."13 Beyond Herder, there are few classical European writers, who merit
closer study for personal experiences with the kind of cultural imperialism that many today
experience in the cross-cultural contact zones of a shrinking world.14
In his formative years, Herder lived and felt Prussian dominance over smaller Baltic
peoples squeezed between powerful states also under the influence of empires with foreign
11
See Rudolf Pannwitz, Die Krisis der Europäischen Kultur (Nuernberg: Hans Carl, 1917), p. 64, for reference to
"postmodernism," as well as for the sources of his philosophical perspectives on the crisis in cultural values.
12
Robert T. Clark, Herder. His Life and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), looks at
Herder's Prussian roots in "Herder and the Berlin Program," pp. 39-74, in this period pointing to his rejection of
Rousseau's view of the degeneration of culture, which "undoubtedly was brought about by a desire to increase the
effectiveness of his constructive criticism advanced in the Litteraturbriefe," p. 74, published in early works in
literary criticism.
13
Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Swords, 1803), vol. II, p. 111.
Miller also noted the scientific potential of the German language for "many new combinations of words," vol. II, p.
111.
14
For a collection of texts by European writers against the horrors of colonialism see the ethno-literary anthology
by Gerd Stein, Ed. Die edlen Wilden. Die Verklärung von Indianern, Negern und Südseeinsulanern auf dem
Hintergrund der kolonialen Greuel vom 16. bis zum 20 Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1984), particularly the
section on Afro-Americans, which includes Herder's idylls, pp. 171-78. Eduard Said, Culture and Imperialism (New
York: Knopf, 1993), has not looked for this voice of dissent in European writers, generally lumping Herder with
others in the "great Enlightenment insights:" "And underlying their work was the belief that mankind formed a
marvelous, almost symphonic whole whose progress and formations, again as a whole, could be studied exclusively
as a concerted and secular historical experience, not as an exemplification of the divine," p. 44. Karl J. Fink,
"Goethe's West Östlicher Divan: Orientalism Restructured," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 14
(1982): 315-28, argues that particularly Goethe had captured the divine world of Islamic culture, importing it into
the west, rather than, as other writers were doing, imposing Western values upon "the Orient."
Fink-Herder on Race
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rulers.15 Living at the margins of European culture he also felt and resented the way colonial
powers like England, France, Holland, and Spain repressed and often terminated the potential of
second and third world territories, including regions of his native German heritage.16 When we
add to this background his education at the University of Königsberg with Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804), who by then had moved beyond physics to research in human physical geography,
then it is not surprising that he devoted much of his writing to the conflicts that surround social
and racial hatred. In his formative years Herder had lived in cultures at the margins of political
and technical integration, and so with this perspective, it is not surprising that Herder, the writer
and first philosopher of history, would search for and shape concepts that mark a "new science"
of the human being.17 Herder's innovation here is not the discovery of a "new science," rather it
is the recognition that times were changing, radically, and that a new climate of opinion and set
of values about human behavior was emerging.18 It is in this context that it pays to go beyond
15
This image of Herder hardly conforms to that presented by Henri Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism
in Eighteenth-Century Prussia, Trans. Frank Jellinek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 [1st French ed.,
1947]), who rejects any marks of a revolutionary spirit in the German Storm and Stress writers, like Herder, who did
not suffer from dissent: "in point of fact, all the young men who revolt against rationalism and oppose foreign
influences manage to obtain decent jobs fairly easily. The leaders of the movement, at any rate, become false to it
one after another," p. 94.
16
Rose, German Question/Jewish Question (1992) misses this point when he writes from an anglocentric
perspective that Herder was neither a liberal nor a humanitarian "in the customary English meaning of the word," in
his conclusions rejecting Herder's humanism as "German," which "had nothing in common with the emotional
humanitarianism of the English reformers, which stemmed from compassion for the oppressed individual and for
oppressed peoples and classes," p. 108.
17
See James W. Marchand, "Introduction," The New Science, Ed. Karl J. Fink and James W. Marchand
(Carbondale,IL: Southern Illinois University Press), pp. 1-5, who argues that "the entire eighteenth century in
Germany can be looked at from Vico's point of view as a process of developing a language which was adequate to
the task of articulating the universe of science and philosophy," p. 2. Robert S. Leventhal, "Critique of Subjectivity:
Herder's Foundation of the Human Sciences," in: Herder Today. Contributions from the International Herder
Conference, Ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 173-89, resumes this discussion, arguing that
Herder tried to get beyond a metaphysics of locality to a phenomenological truth, "a rhetoric of knowledge, a
historical anthropology of the construction of truth in language," p. 174.
18
Herder, "Was ist der Geist der Zeit," letters 14-16 of the second collection of Briefe zu Beförderung der
Humanität, in: Sämtliche Werke, 33 vols., Ed. B. Suphan, Suphan-Ausgabe (SA), (Hildesheim: Olm, 1967), Vol. 17,
Fink-Herder on Race
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the search for racism in his writings and to ask how he put the deconstruction of race at the
center of his project for the advancement of humanity in the first period of "race-thinking" in
Western society.
Herder's Equal
Herder, positioned in the contact zone between two major cultures, employed by a
minority culture in Riga, a European outpost in Latvia, and educated from a global perspective in
human geography, seized the spirit of the revolution era. He did so perhaps more than any other
European writer, save George Forster ((1754-94), who by other means also rejected
Enlightenment conceptions of human equality.19 Forster, born and raised in the same contact
zone, had no formal education but had the advantage of home schooling with his father in field
work, first on the German communities along the Volga River and then at age eighteen on
Polynesian peoples of the South Sea Islands.20
pp. 77-81, examines and develops a concept of the "spirit of the times," asking first what it is, then where it comes
from, and then after distinguishing it from other terms like style, he defines it with the example of three changes in
the spirit of the times that Europe has witnessed: "Eine ist längst vorüber;" "Die zweite ist geschehen und geht in
ihren Wirkungen fort;" and "Über der dritten brütet der Weltgeist, und wir wollen ihm wünschen, daß er in sanfter
Stille ein glückliches Ei ausbrüten möge," vol. 17, p. 81. Clark, Herder (1955), opens his book on Herder with two
passages, the first one from Nietzsche and the second from George Bancroft, summed up in the latter's view that
"Without possessing great originality, he had that power which gives life to acquisitions:" "He knew how to enter
upon the study of a foreign work as if he had been of the country and time for which it was originally designed," p.
x.
19
Manfred Wenzel, "Die Anthropologie Johann Gottfried Herders und das klassische Humanitätsideal," in: Die
Natur des Menschen. Probleme der Physischen Anthropologie und Rassenkunde (1750-1850), Ed. Gunter Mann and
Franz Dumont (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1990), pp. 137-167, argues that Linneaus already in 1766, and Buffon shortly
after 1749, biologically integrated Homo sapiens with other primates, but while most of Herder's contemporaries
contributed essays on this fact, Herder accepted the fact and looked forward to establishing ideals for a new vision
of humanity among organically related human beings, p. 140.
20
See Karl J. Fink, "Storm and Stress Anthropology," History of the Human Sciences, 6 (1993): 51-71, on
"Forster's Defense of Ethnic Difference," pp. 57-60. See also Wolf Lepenies, "Germany: The search for a new
Fink-Herder on Race
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Forster's experiences, and his strategies for the deconstruction of race are instructive here,
for with Herder they converge at the same time and over the same issues against Kant's
anthropology. They met at that point when Kant reviewed Herder's "Ideas for a Philosophy of the
History of Humanity" (Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, SA, 13-14),
which Forster read while he was living in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he took his first position
after getting a degree in medicine at the University of Göttingen. Both Herder and Forster took
their first jobs at the margins of European culture, one in Riga and the other in Vilnius, and from
this perspective examined critically European cultural values, rejecting especially those
grounded in the concept of race.
Essentially Kant had said of Herder's first chapters on human origins that we cannot
know our descent in its organic sense and from our present knowledge we at best can classify the
peoples of the globe into the same system used to organize plants and animals.21 Forster
understood the problem, namely, of casting the human being in biological terms. He rejected
Kant's proposition as inadequate and declared any integration of physical and cultural
anthropology a "science for the gods" (Wissenschaft für die götter, 1785).22 He continued to
ancestor," in: Anthropology: Ancestors and Heirs, Ed. Stanley Diamond (The Hague: Mouton, 1980, pp. 395-430,
who examines "the limits of prejudice," arguing that Forster is among the few "ancestors," who "impress us even
today because of their lack of prejudice," p. 409, and even though he is not "entirely free of the characteristic and
distorting perspectives of his own cultural view," p. 411, we cannot consider him "a Europe-centered anthropologist
of the `classical epoch'," p. 416.
21
See Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), who confronts
the theory of evolution as a system of beliefs without scientific proofs, and Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), who writes that Darwin's theory of evolution "might explain many things,
however, I do not believe it explains molecular life," p. 5, and who views the history of biology as "a chain of black
boxes; as one is opened, another is revealed," p. 6.
22
Forster, "Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen," in: Werke, 18 vols., Ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften Berlin
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958-), Vol. 8, p. 143. Thomas Strack, "Philosophical Anthropology on the Eve of
Biological Determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the Moral Qualities and Biological Characteristics of
the Human Race," Central European History, 29 (1998): 285-308, examines the separation of science and
philosophy, following Forster's dilemma without looking at Herder's position in the gap: "Forster came to believe
Fink-Herder on Race
9
write ethnographies and died a political activists in Paris, while Kant proceeded to write a
landmark essay "On the Use of Teleological Principles in the Sciences" (Über den Gebrauch
Teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie, 1789).23 Here he followed his notion that humans
like plants and animals are organic and are open to modification and change at the same time that
they are subject to regulation and uniformity.
Herder took yet another direction to the question on the nexus of mind and body in
human nature, seeking in his "Letters for the Advancement of Humanity" (Briefe zu Beförderung
der Humanität, SA, 17-18) to close the gap between science and religion. This step taken in the
wake of the French Revolution from 1793-94, included a deconstruction of biological definitions
of the human being as a species of animals and the formation of new concepts of the human
being as an integration of mind and body set in the values of a historical tradition.24 Hoping to
capture the spirit of the times, the topic of the second collection, Herder hoped in the tenth and
final collection of letters to define a human being grounded in the autonomy of cultural
individualism and in the possibility of growth and development beyond the present to ideals of
the self.
that the empiricist approach would inevitably fail to supply an idea of humanity, which Forster insisted had to come
from outside the sciences. Forster came to the conclusion that the gap between the sciences and the philosophical
discourse on the potentials of humankind could not be closed but had to be endured," 308.
23
Kant, Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie, in: Kants gesammelte Schriften, 29
vols., Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer & de Gruyter, 1910), Vol. 8, pp. 157-84.
24
Walter Sieger, "Gedanken zum Verhältnis von Humanität und körperlicher Vervollkommnung bei Herder,"
Theorie und Praxis der Körperkultur, 27 (1978): 811-16, finds a new social humanism in Herder's recognition of
new claims of biology to the human animal and in his response that this same biology is what distinguishes human
beings from animals: "Das vierte Buch der Herderschen Arbeit [Ideen] beginnt mit einem Vergleich von OrangUtan und Mensch. In ihm lesen wir die stolzen Worte: `Der Mensch ist der erste Freigelassene der Schöpfung, er
stehet aufrecht'," p. 814.
Fink-Herder on Race
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Herder's Disclosures
Unlike Kant, the scientific philosopher, and Forster, the political activist, Herder stayed
the course in search of strategies that would deconstruct the concept of race for the advancement
of human beings across cultures. In his "Tenth Collection" (Zehnte Sammlung) of "Letters for
the Advancement of Humanity" (SA, 18, 219-302) he successfully, I argue, dismantles the
concept of race as a measure of the human being and sets forth a "new science" of the human
being inspired by the writings of Giambattisa Vico (1668-1774). His strategy for concept
formation is similar to the one he had developed in writing his collection of "Scattered Leaves"
(Zerstreute Blätter),25 which is to paint a scene rather than to analyze a issue, so that each essay,
or in this case each letter, stands alone as a picture of a problem and at the same time probes the
borders of related issues.26 The power of each letter lies in the balance of pithy statements and
radical disclosures. It is by this means that Herder confronts the concept of race, which had been
shaped by global expeditions of colonialism and by classification systems of science. That is,
with a literary approach he challenged the emerging institutions of science and business.
Herder's letters tell no secrets and the table of contents reads like a list of disputations set
forth a public debate. The "Tenth Collection," which includes ten letters, numbers 114-124,
25
Herder's "Zerstreute Blätter" are a collection of essays published in the chaotic years of the French Revolution
between 1785-97, also in the Suphan edition of Herder's writings (SA) scattered through volumes 16, 26, 27, 28, and
29. See Karl J. Fink, "Tithonism, Herder's Concept of Literary Revival," in: Johann Gottfried Herder: Language,
History, and the Enlightenment, Ed. Wulf Koepke (Columbia, SC: Camden, 1990), pp. 196-208, on the symmetry of
the essays with the one on "Tithonus und Aurora" located in the center of the collection, p. 198.
26
Johannes Saltzwedel, Das Gesicht der Welt. Physiognomisches Denken in der Goethezeit (Munich: Fink, 1993),
refers to this process as an "Analogisches Verstehen" that extends and enriches the thought process before it is
repressed with abstract definitions: "Er nähert sich neuen Fakten, indem er sie als Teile eines größeren
Zusammenhanges begreift; er gebraucht Analogien, die verfeinert oder durch weitere Analogien balanciert werden,
und gelangt damit von oft überschematisierten Ausgangsmodellen zum Reichtum komplizierter Bedeutungsgefüge,
ohne daß er sich den beschränkenden Vorgaben abstrakter Definitionen unterwerfen müßte," p. 146.
Fink-Herder on Race
11
begins with a statement "On the Reciprocity of Nations" (Vom Wirken der Völker aufeinander,
SA, 18: 221-34). He opens the letter with a question, asking "why folks have to affect folks," a
rhetorical question, which he answers with another question in a subordinate clause, "in order to
disturb their peace" (Aber warum müssen Völker auf Völker wirken, um einander die Ruhe zu
stören, 221). The deconstruction process continues in the second sentence, which this time is
coordinated, but separated with a caesura, so that in the first half Herder sets up the received
opinion on cultural behavior and in the second knocks it down: "They say it is for the sake of a
continually growing culture; how the book of history tells us otherwise!" (Man sagt, der
fortgehend-wachsenden Cultur wegen; wie gar anders sagt das Buch der Geschichte!, 221).
With a monument of Enlightenment ideology shattered on the floor, Herder kicks the pieces on
the floor around in the first half of the letter and in the second half examines the plight of the
African peoples in a series of songs and dialogues that read much like the book of Lamentations
from the Bible.27
In the first letter Herder dismantled a pillar of Enlightenment thought and replaced it with
the cultural nihilism of postmodern thought. The pieces that Herder knocked to the floor include
all forms of aggressive cross-cultural behavior, from the perpetrators of war in Asia, the
27
Ann Macy Roth, "Building Bridges to Afrocentrism, A Letter to my Egyptological Colleagues," in: The Flight
from Science and Reason, Ed. Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis (New York: New York
Academy of Sciences, 1996), pp. 313-26, attempts to close the gap between scholarship and myth in Afro-American
claims to Egyptian heritage, demythologizing the claims that "ancient Egyptians were black," "ancient Egypt was
superior to other ancient civilizations," "Egyptian culture had tremendous influence on the later cultures of Africa on
Europe," and that "there has been a vast racist conspiracy to prevent the dissemination of the evidence for these
assertions," p. 315. For a study of early Afro-American students of German culture see, Ingeborg Solbrig, "Herder
and the `Harlem Renaissance' of Black Culture in American: The Case of the `Neger-Idyllen'," in: Herder Today:
Contributions from the International Herder Conference, Ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), pp.
403-14, who surrounds a discussion of Herder's anti-slavery poems with the fact that the first Afro-Americans with a
PhD degree, Edward B. DuBois, as well as the first black Rhodes Scholar, Alain L. Locke, studied at the Humboldt
University in Berlin, where they heard lectures on Herder, although there is "no documentary evidence," that they
read his "Neger-Idyllen," p. 413.
Fink-Herder on Race
12
crusaders for religion from Europe, to the colorial settlers in ancient times. Indeed, he even
questions the "plant cities" (Pflanzstädte, 221) created by the Greeks, asking if any of these
dominant folks had "any intention" (je zur Absicht), or were "ever in a position" (je im Stande,
221) to spread culture? Even Christianity brought horror to contact zones as soon as it began to
function like a "state machine" (Staatsmaschiene, 222). He asks what good did the crusades bring
to the Orient, or what happiness did the Prussians bring to the peoples on the coast of the Baltic
Sea? Indeed: "In their hearts the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians, in the poorest of
conditions, still today curse their oppressors, the Germans" (Liwen, Ehsten und Letten im
ärmsten Zustande fluchen im Herzen noch jetzt ihren Unterjochern, den Deutschen, 222). In
particular he asks what can be said for the culture that the Spanish, Portugese, British, and Dutch
brought to the West Indies, Africa, and South Sea Islands: "Are not all of these countries more or
less screaming for revenge?" (Schreien nicht alle diese Länder, mehr oder weniger, um Rache?,
222).28
Herder's Strategy
Herder's second strategy for the deconstruction of race was the formation of a concept of
the "European Collective Spirit" (Europäischer Gesammtgeist, 222), which, he observes, seen
live rather than read in books should cause us to shame ourselves "before all nations of the earth"
(vor allen Völkern der Erde, 222) for our "crimes against humanity" (des Verbrechens beleidigter
Menschheit, 222). In his view, Europeans have "destroyed" (zerstört) rather than "cultivated"
28
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) points out that "it was the case nearly
everywhere in the non-European world that the coming of the white man brought forth some sort of resistance," and
that what he had left out of his earlier book on Orientalism (1979), "was that response to Western dominance which
culminated in the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World," p. xii.
Fink-Herder on Race
13
(cultivirt, 223) the values of other folks. This approach allowed Herder to open a new paragraph
with a definition of a new concept, not of "culture," but rather of "foreign culture" (fremde
Cultur, 223).
Most views of a "foreign culture," Herder argues, are not charged with a concept of
"development" (Bildung, 223) that is guided by the "predispositions" (Anlagen) and "needs"
(Bedürfnisse, 223) of individuals in the target culture. The "development" (Bildung) of "Foreign
Cultures," Herder asserted, are molded by general concepts of culture, values inspired by "the
collective spirit of Europe," values shaped to meet the eye of the beholder. Thus, the South Sea
Islanders brought back to England to be educated, for example, are "victims of battle"
(Schlachtopfer, 223), of culture wars that stunt growth. They are victims of a negative
development mis-shaped by a false conception of "Bildung."29
Herder closes this introduction to the lamentations of the Africans with the speculation
that Europeans, too, are tools of Divine Providence, indeed, maybe tools of their own
destruction. Europeans, he argues, have robbed, disturbed, instigated, and wasted the cultures of
the world, and who does not tremble at this "insolence towards humanity" (Menschenfeindliche
Frechheit, 223).
Herder's third strategy for the deconstruction of race was to paint a picture of Africans in
29
See also Friedrich M. Klinger, Betrachtungen und Gedanken über verschiedene Gegenstände der Welt und der
Litteratur, 3 vols. (Köln: Hammer, 1803-05), a contemporary of Herder, who commented on the war of cultures
between those who believed reason and those who believed feelings solve problems of the world: "Der Streit, der
gegenwärtig zwischen den kaltvernünftigen und den warmen, gefühlvollen Philosophen herrscht, gleicht dem
Kampfe zwischen der sogenannten, ganz neuen Souverainität des Volks, und der tausendjährigen Erfahrung
dagegen. . . . Wenn die Kämpfenden des Streits müde sind, so sieht sich jeder nach seinem wahren Standpunkt um
und tritt in seine Grenzen zurück. Nur ein Unterschied wird übrig bleiben, und er ist beträchtlich. Jener Kampf
bedeckte das Schlachtfeld mit Leichen, dieser bedeckt es mit Büchern," vol. 1, pp. 154-55. A modern version of the
same dialogue may be found in Peter Shaw, The War Against the Intellect. Episodes in the Decline of Discourse
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press: 1989), especially in the chapter on "The Politics of Deconstruction," pp. 5666.
Fink-Herder on Race
14
a contact zone with Americans and to show ideal types of mis-guided European influence on
these folks of foreign culture. He calls his collection "Negro Idylls" (Neger-Idyllen, 224), which
he introduced with a short summary of his critique of European values, "a sorry history of
humanity" (eine traurige Geschichte der Menschheit, 224).30 Here he follows the proverb that
says the human being is to his fellow human being "a wolf" (Wolf), "a God" (Gott), "an angel"
(Engel), and "a devil" (Teufel). From this he observes how the Africans paint their devils white,
the Latvian reject heaven as long as Germans are there, and the slaves ask the missionary why he
is pouring water on his head, which the missionary explains paves the road to heaven, to which
the slave says: "I do not want to go to any heaven where there are whites" (Ich mag in keinen
Himmel, wo Weiße sind, 224). The end of the sad story is that the slave turns his head and dies.
And with that Herder presents a collection of idylls about folks in oppression rather than in
romantic fields herding their flock of sheep.
Herder's Camera
With his brush, Herder painted five scenes that in verse form show the plight of Africans
in America, lamentations that at the same time rejoice in the human qualities of black culture and
wail and sob in the horror of crimes against their humanity. Set in classical verse of an Idyll,
30
Recent studies on Herder's idylls written from a socialist-marxist point of view include Ursula Wertheim,
"Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubarts Artikel zum Kolonial- und Skalverei-Problem und Herders `Neger-Idyllen',"
in: Herder-Kolloquium 1978, Ed. Walter Dietze (Weimar: Böhlau, 1980), pp. 376-92, who finds in Herder's poetry a
"Konzeption von den Brüdernationen," p. 386. Wilfried Feuser, "Slave to Proletarian: Images of the black in
German literature," German Life and Letters, 32 (1979): 122-34, examines Herder's call for "the emancipation of the
slaves" (126), and finding no "linear progression" of this view (126), concludes his survey from seventeenth century
writers to Bertolt Brecht with the view that even today "the age of solidarity invoked here has not yet arrived for the
Third World," p. 133. See also Hedwig Voegt, "Schwarze Brüder," in: Ansichten der deutschen Klassik, Ed. Helmut
Brandt and Manfred Beyer (Berlin: Aufbau, 1981), pp. 74-83.
Fink-Herder on Race
15
these five scenes are anything but the ideal life of a shepard watching over sheep in the meadows
of a wooded landscape. The ironic contrast only deepens the single theme of the first four songs,
which narrate hate crimes of the whites against blacks in America, leaving the fifth to show in
contrast how a white man of Quaker values frees a slave with compensation for the years of his
service in captivity. The horror of the first four scenes is lodged in the guilty conscience of the
Quaker, who had not mistreated his slave and yet frees him and compensates him for labor done
in slavery. The Quaker without personal guilt atones equally in collective guilt for the hate
crimes against African humanity described in the first four Idylls. The message is clear:
historical distance does not free us of collective guilt for crimes against humanity.
The Quaker is an ideal type who does penance in atonement for the first pastoral scene,
which Herder called "The Fruit on the Tree" (Die Frucht am Baume, SA, 224), in which he
describes a caged African, who is being punished for resisting the capture of his bride-to-be.
Herder cast this victim of white oppression as a Christ figure, who from his cage first called for
water and later for "poison" (Gift, 225), for the birds and bugs had drained him of his life blood,
and after two days he still could not die. The death wish runs through each of the four scenes as
does the affluence of the white master who uses his position of power to satisfy whims of the
moment.
The scenes of the other three idylls are not as grotesque but are equally harsh and equally
serve to introduce the model of atonement described in the last scene where the Quaker
celebrates the birth of freedom for the slaves. He calls the second scene "The Right Hand" (Die
rechte Hand, 226), first showing the comfort that fellow slaves found in a captured African
noble, who confronted "the white devil" (der Weisse Teufel, 226) for the death sentence of a
slave, and then was ordered to carry out the sentence himself for his insolence. In this scene the
Fink-Herder on Race
16
African noble hacked off his right hand in protest, dying of his wound. Here Herder the poet
becomes a scholar-theologian, interjecting a stanza of explanation on the value-system of the
African culture, where nothing is so dear to the individual as "the right hand" (die Rechte Hand,
226).
Joy in his bride, joy in his right hand, and joy in a friend shape the first three idylls. In
the third one a slave boy grew up a companion of the white boy who later became his master,
and in a whim, ordered his old boyhood friend dragged behind a cart in public. In an ensuing
struggle the African slave pulled a knife and stabbed himself, covering his boyhood friend "with
the warm blood of brotherhood" (mit warmen Bruderblut, 228). Each scene evokes both a
distaste for white culture and an empathy for the value system of the Afro-American.
The fourth lamentation called "Zimeo" (229-32) is more of a movie than a snapshot of
the life of an African in America. Here in dialogue form and cloaked in the foreign names of
Jamaican culture, Herder focuses on the brutality of the slave trade. His narration shows how
Portugese seamen arrive on the shores of Jamaica and lure the natives on board with a party and
suddenly depart with their booty on board. Here Zimeo rises above both cultures, admonishes his
fellow slaves against murder and in the course of time regains his beloved bride, Elavo, who had
in the meantime born a child whom he had fathered before their capture. In this narrative Herder
weaves a complex web of cultural values, including the death wish of captured slaves, the loyalty
of friends, the reunion of long lost lovers, and the bitter lessons of captivity. In conclusion
Herder lets the players speak the lesson of heartfelt gratitude expressed in tones Herder thought
foreign to "a white person" (ein Weisser, 232). This scene ends in the mountains of Jamaica,
where the players gain autonomy and shape a culture, which Herder explains in a footnote, was
recognized in 1738 by England as a free republic. Here Herder rejoices in the lamentations of
Fink-Herder on Race
17
African culture which, too, can rise above the brutality of hate, and shape a culture with
democratic values.
Herder's Europe
With the paint brush of the artist, Herder deconstructed race by shaping a concept of the
"European collective spirit" and by evoking an empathy for the value system of a "foreign
culture" languishing in the shadows of other dominant cultures. This is his concept of
"development" (Bildung), a formation by measures of the indigenous folk. With the exception of
a few footnotes to place names and historical facts, Herder's indigenous folk is fictive and the
values and players are ideal types. In the other nine letters of this collection, Herder follows both
of these strategies of concept formation in his quest for a new science of the human being.
In the second letter, number 115, he reviews literature that was "European" (Europäisch),
but not "humane" (menschlich, 236), criticizing the British slogan "Rule, Britannia, rule the
waves" (236), and asking "what good is a concept of general culture based on Europeans
anyhow?" (Was soll überhaupt eine Messung aller Völker nach uns Europäer?, 237). In this letter
he again answers his rhetorical question in the same sentence with another question: "Where is
the means for comparison?" (wo ist das Mittel der Vergleichung, 237), thus, like in the first letter
disassembling and assembling at the same time. In this letter he goes on to illustrate from
European writers the means by which a comparison of cultures might be made without the bias
of European standards, concluding that in Vico we have the first author "of a school of humane
science in the true sense of the word" (einer Schule menschlicher Wissenschaft im echten Sinne
des Wortes, 246). In his writings, Herder found an author in search of "the principle of
Fink-Herder on Race
18
humanity" (das Principium der Humanität, 246), and in the faculties of "recognition, want,
ability" (Kennen, Wollen, Vermögen [nosse, velle, posse], 246) Herder felt Vico set up a framed
a science from which we might develop "a philosophy of humanity" (eine Philosophie der
Menschheit, 246).
In letters three and four Herder follows the same strategy of concept formation used in
the first two, both disassembling and assembling concepts favorable to his criticism of the
European Enlightenment and to his view that folks should be judged by internal standards rather
than by standards of a general culture. In the third letter he responds to the call for a "Natural
History of Humanity" (Naturgeschichte der Menschheit, 240), pointing out that everyone agrees
on the need to include all folks now marked by "so-called races, variations, varieties, and all
manner of copulation" (sogenannten Racen, Varietäten, Spielarten, Begattungsweisen, 247). Yet
the task has not yet been accomplished, so in this letter he projects his "dream of such a history"
(Traum einer solchen Geschichte, 247). Here he begins to project a view of humanity written
with a deconstructed conception of race.
The first step in writing such a history is to become "impartial" (unpartheiisch, 247),
secondly such a history cannot show "contempt" (verachtend), and thirdly the author cannot
assume any "hierarchy" (Rangordnung, 248) among the folks: the black person has as much right
as a white to view the other person as a "variety" (Abart, 248). The same is true of the American
and the Mongolian. In this letter Herder completely deconstructs any notion of race, arguing that
not the genetic code (Keime), but rather the forces of development (Kräfte, 248) make the
difference. And in this sense all folks have the capacity for development: "The prototype of
humanity lies therefore not in a single nation of a single continent" (der Prototyp der Menschheit
liegt also nicht in Einer Nation Eines Erdstriches, 248).
Fink-Herder on Race
19
Herder's agenda for postmodernism is clear and is current. Beyond impartiality, the
absence of malice, and the rejection of hierarchy, Herder proposes for his "dream history" three
more conditions. In the fourth he proposes that a history of humanity must present a people "on
the spot" (auf der Stelle, 248) without "arbitrary distinctions" (willkührliche Sonderungen) and
without the "dismissal of certain tendencies and customs" (Verwerfungen einzelner Züge und
Gebräuche, 248). And the fifth condition repeats the theme of the entire tenth collection: "Our
European culture is the last possible measure for general human goodness and human values"
(Am wenigsten kann also unsre Europäische Cultur das Maas allgemeiner Menschengüte und
Menschenwerthes seyn, 249).
European culture is an abstracted concept, "a name" (ein Name), and besides, it includes
too many weaknesses and can hardly serve as a concept of the whole of humanity. In the sixth
and final pre-condition for "a dream history," Herder further deconstructs the abstractions of
science, arguing that biologically inspired definitions of race are arbitrary. Indeed, he observes
that all concepts that distinguish and separate are "irrational concepts" (Wahnbegriffe, 249).
They are pure speculations that require us to look beyond the subject at our self and ask of all
writers, "how pure their eyes were" (wiefern sie ein reines Auge hatten, 251).
Herder examines the affect of Europeans in the contact zone with other cultures,
including the "basic laws" (Grundsätze, 255) by which folks interact with each other in war and
peace. In the fourth letter he describes the rules by which we wage war, while in the fifth he
examines the Iroquois forum "for eternal peace" (zum ewigen Frieden, 262), which he found in
the image and concept of a man dressed as a woman. He studies the prospects of this tradition,
but despairs at the chances of success from the "efforts of the woman of peace" in the context of
Europe at war with itself. In this context, he argued, the Iroquois gender blend did not survive
Fink-Herder on Race
20
any better chances to promote peace across cultures than did any of the others images dressed up
in temples, statues, obelisks, and other monuments erected for the public.31
In despair Herder suggests that the best approach to peace might be to use a trade practice
common to some African folks, in which they bring their wares, leave them, and without seeing
each other, barter and exchange. From the deconstruction of race Herder moves to disassemble
war, which forums and monuments to the cause of peace do not seem to fix. Thus, he suggest
that we dismantle the glory of war, to replace it with an "abhorrence for war" (Abscheu gegen
den Krieg, 268). He argues that we need to reduce respect for the hero of war, to change views
of patriotism, to sensitize feelings toward other nations. These are all means that would
disassemble old habits of aggressive behavior toward our neighbors.
Herder's New Age
In the last three letters of the Tenth Collection, Herder approaches the deconstruction of
race from yet another angle, first by reviewing Monboddo's concept of "the animal life" (das
animalische Leben, 286), then by posing a thesis "of a radical, evil force in human nature" (von
einer radicalen bösen Grundkraft im menschlen Gemüth, 295), and finally by proposing that "the
tendency of Christianity" might serve to fix the problem of racial hatred. He concludes this
31
Karla Lydia Schultz, "Herders Indianische Friedensfrau," Monatshefte, 81 (1989): 413-24, advances Herder's
proposal, comparing the Greek goddess, Eirene and the Trojan Kassandra, with "Kants Garantin des Friedens, `die
große Künstlerin Natur'" and "Herders indianischen Transvestiten, `die große Friedensfrau' alias `tatige Vernunft',"
p. 413. She points out that Kant had criticized Herder for mixing poetic language with artistic images and blending
both into a "Bild, mit weiblicher Kleidung," p. 422, which traditionally makes Herder suspect, but in reality adds
strength to the concept: "Wenn aber, wie Kassandra es sah, die Frauen und Sklaven gezwungen werden zu
verstummen; wenn, wie aus der Kritik an Herders `femininen' Tendenzen hervorgeht, der Begriff zur Waffe
gemacht, das Bild zum Opfer erklärt wird, dann hat auch der Frieden zwischen den Geschlechtern und Rassen, d.h.
der Frieden des ganzen Menschengeschlechts, keine Chance," p. 423.
Fink-Herder on Race
21
collection with a cautious recourse to his religious heritage, focusing equally on the "abuse of
christianity" (Mißbrauch des Christenthums, 301) and on its potential source for "the purest
humanity" (die reinste Humanität, 301). While Herder finds solace in the very word "son of
man" (Menschensohn, 302), he does not begin with this message. Rather he begins with the
problem of racial relations and in the eighth letter deals directly with an emerging scientific and
biological view of the human being, Monboddo's concept of "animal life." Herder's eighth letter
on Monboddo is not harsh or emotional, it is a reasoned response to a secularized and scientific
view of the human being, one in his view preferable to those theories of culture written from an
economic and political point of view.
Herder concedes Monboddo's human animal without any trepidation, yet goes beyond
him and asks what one could conclude from this knowledge of a human animal integrated in
mind and body. This is significant for Herder's language is inclusive and his hopes are to close
the gap between science and religion with concepts that recognize both our organic and cultural
heritage. At the outset, he argues, we can conclude that on this earth there are still many folks
that live in a primitive state, but secondly must also concede that the distinctions between
primitive and advanced powers of knowledge are "only in the mind" (nur im Gedanke, 289).
With this caveat Herder warns of the danger in ranking people from primitive to advanced,
because it permits the notion of viewing intermediate folks as potential "beasts of burden"
(Lastthiers, 288).
Thirdly he concludes that if Europe does have an intellectual advantage, it can only prove
it by more intellectual arguments. And from this conclusion to Monboddo's thesis, he draws a
fourth, where he argues that it would be great if the European scientific mind could fuse itself
beyond mind and body with "human goodness" (Menschengüte, 289), from which he draws his
Fink-Herder on Race
22
fifth conclusion, where he speculates that it is conceivable that European intellectual powers
could be synthesized with "human goodness" (Menschengüte, 291. That is, the two are not
mutually exclusive. And finally, in the sixth conclusion drawn from Monboddo's thesis of "the
animal life," Herder finds it is amazing that no one has "eye balled" (augurire, 290) the death of
the human species "from Europe's horror" (aus dem Ergrauen Europa's, 290).
Monboddo's "animal life" is Herder's preferred legacy of culture theories from the
Enlightenment. But it remains inadequate and does not, in Herder's view, free the human being
from Europe's "horrors." A child of the revolution era, he observes that greatest changes of the
human species have come from technical discoveries "or from revolutions of the earth" (oder von
Revolutionen der Erde, 290). By revolution he means the turn of the earth's axis, for how can we
know what each turn will bring "through the consequence of the times" (zur Folge der Zeiten,
290). Climates will change and with them fertile lands become barren. Also, colonies will
become independent, but new discoveries will not preserve the old ones. Even the greatest
efforts of statesmen abate and fall, so who would want to suggest any measure of culture that
would predict such uncertainties. Here then is the crux of Herder's deconstruction of European
thought: He asks if we have to know the outcome of things for a history of humanity, to which
he says, no, for in the moment we say, yes, then we judge our fellow human beings by those
outcomes. This is the currency in Herder's deconstruction of race for it challenges the possibility
of all normative thinking, at least with respect to "how some folks affect other folks."
Others in Dissent
Herder was not alone in his attempt to deconstruct a definition of the human being
Fink-Herder on Race
23
increasingly guided by the science of biology. Forster had called the emerging science of the
human being "a science for the gods." But there were others from the scientific community who
did engage the question of science and race and actively sought to disengage the linkage of
biology and culture, among these Peter Camper (1722-89), Europe's leading comparative
anatomist.32 Following the parade of foreigners of color brought back to Europe from global
expeditions,33 he published a "Lecture on the origin and the color of blacks, held in Groeningen
on the anatomical stage (Schaubühne) on November 14, 1764).34
Staging the human body in a laboratory for dissection was not yet common practice and
here Camper's career becomes instructive because he was among the first to include the human
being in comparative anatomy, and also among the last to give due respect to the spiritual side of
the human being before taking the body apart in the laboratory. Indeed, in this essay on the
"origin of color among blacks," he begins with the view that human anatomy would be
insignificant were it not important "to sciences beyond medicine and health" (auf andere
Wissenschaften außer der Arzney-und Heilkunst, 24). The human body, he asserts, is the
pinnacle of God's creation, and, after "theology" (Gottesgelahrheit, 25) is nowhere better
32
Robert Visser, "Die Rezeption der Anthropologie Petrus Campers (1770-1850)," in: Die Natur des Menschen
(1990), pp. 325-335, follows Camper's primary contribution from 1770, when he went beyond skin color and other
superficial measures of human difference and claimed that "the angle of the face" was the unique mark of difference
among peoples of the globe. Among foreign writers Camper's thesis was noted first by Johann Casper Lavater for
his studies in physiognomy, p. 327, and among scientists it at first sparked accusations of racism, a view largely
following from Thomas Soemmerrings interpretation of Camper's thesis, p. 330: "In Campers Schriften findet man
nirgendwo auch nur den geringsten Hinweis, daß er moralische oder intellektuelle Unterschiede zwischen den
Rasssen voraussetzte, p. 333.
33
Renato G. Mazzolini, "Anatomische Untersuchungen über die Haut der Schwarzen (1700-1800)," in: Die Natur
des Menschen, (1990), pp. 169-187, counted over forty publication on the question of skin color between 1730-65,
most of them by French and later by German writers.
34
Peter Camper, "Rede über den Ursprung und die Farbe der Schwarzen, gehalten in Groeningen auf der
anatomischen Schaubühne den 14. November 1764," in: Kleinere Schriften die Arzneykunst und führnehmlich die
Naturgeschichte betreffend, Ed. and Trans. G. M. F. Herbell (Leipzig: Crusius, 1782), pp. 24-49.
Fink-Herder on Race
24
glorified than "on this stage" (auf dieser Bühne): "upon which we explore the beauty and
perfection of our artistic and splendid construction" (worauf man der Schönheit und
Vollkommenheit unsers künstlichen, und vortrefflichen Baues nachspürt, p. 25).35
Particularly Camper's lectures at the "Academy for Drawing in Amsterdam"
(Amsterdammer Zeichen Akademie), given in the 1770s and published in German in 1782, are
instructive, because here he examines the issue of racial prejudice from a scientific and aesthetic
point of view.36 In his third lecture from 1782, "On the Beauty of Form" (Über die Schönheit der
Formen), he argues that it runs against our "habits" (Gewohnheiten, 77) to see beauty in the
forms of other races.37 Beauty is not shaped by rules, rather is "rooted" (eingewurzelt,77) in the
habits of youth which cannot be expunged with age. Secondly Camper argues, beauty is
grounded in "authority" (Autorität, 78), and thirdly, it is in the "customs and tastes of a country"
(Sitte und Mode eines Landes, 78). He explains how the Europeans paint their gods white, just as
every other culture reproduces its gods in a sense of beauty that is grounded in forms familiar to
the self-same people. Beauty, and perfection, is the reproduction of images comfortable to the
habits of the senses.
35
Robert Visser, "Die Rezeption der Anthropologie Petrus Campers," in: Die Natur des Menschen (1990), pp.
325-335, explains that Camper was "ein überzeugter Monogenist und Unitarist," and from this perspective negated
any difference between "Negern und Europäer," closely following a biblical explanation of all people derived from a
single pair, p. 326.
36
Peter Camper, Vorlesungen, gehalten in der Amsterdammer Zeichen Akademie, Über den Ausdruck der
verschiedenen Leidenschaften durch die Gesichtszüge; Über die Bewundernswürdige Ähnlichkeit im Bau des
Menschen, der Vierfüßigen Thiere, der Vögel und Fische; und Über die Schönheit der Formen, Trans. G. Schaz
(Berlin: Voss, 1793), including lectures from 1774, 1778, and 1782 and plates with drawings showing how human
body parts overlay those of animals, including the rump of man and horse and the structure of a fish compared with
man sitting in a rowboat.
37
Mazzolini, "Die Haut der Schwarzen," (1990), examines the complaint expressed by Herder in 1785 that artists
did not give true paintings of foreigners of color, often painting them in the image of Europeans, which was a
correction first registered in the scientific community when Camper and Blumenbach began to seek true specimen
for physical differences among peoples of the globe, pp. 172-74.
Fink-Herder on Race
25
In his "Natural History of the Orang-Utang," published in 1791 after his death and about
the time Herder was writing his letters on humanity, Camper more directly deconstructs
differences between blacks and whites. In this essay he reviews the literature on the dissection of
the human body, giving evidence to the short history of the scientific study of human anatomy.
By comparing rib counts in the Orang-Utang to the human body, he concluded that since
antiquity the body parts of various animals had been used to determine those of humans, and that
the error in the difference gives evidence that human bodies until recently had not been observed
in the laboratory at all. Indeed, Camper's entire discussion of Galen's human body shows that it
was analogized from comparative animal bodies.
Camper's essay in comparative anatomy reads like a lesson on the deconstruction of race,
for in it he seems equally interested in demonstrating the linkage of folks around the globe and in
limiting human and animal analogies. In this goal Camper was fighting a losing battle, for
biologists had begun to specialize on the human body, a trend even among amateur scientists,
like Goethe, who dismissed the last bone of contention between humans and animal, when he
wrote his essay ascribing the intermaxillary bone "to the human being as well as to animals"
(dem Menschen wie den Tieren, LA,I,9:154-66).38
Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840), another voice from the scientific community, was of
Herder's generation and devoted his entire career to an objective and unbiased study of human
nature. More than any other scientist from early European anthropology, Blumenbach has been
recognized for discoveries in quantitative research, and for a program of research on human
38
Geoffrey Cantor, "The Rhetoric of the Experiment," in: The Uses of the Experiment, Ed. David Gooding, Trevor
Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 159-80, argues that there is considerable "distance"
between the events of a laboratory and the report that might appear in a scientific journal, "which is a highly
artificial product," p. 160.
Fink-Herder on Race
26
nature free of bias and prejudice. Among the first to appreciate Blumenbach's achievement was
Karl Marx (1818-83), who gave the "Memorial Lecture" (Ein Gedächtniss-Rede) for the Royal
Society of Sciences in Göttingen on his biography and accomplishments.39 Marx, a socialist and
critic of human oppression by raw forms of capitalism, listed specific experimental discoveries,
such as the ability of the seal to adjust the eyeball for underwater sight, and proof of milk in male
breasts. Yet, he focused more on the human qualities of Blumenbach as a scientist, teacher and
person, emphasizing the importance of his character in support of an anthropology free of
prejudice: "At the time when the negroes and savages were still considered as half animals, and
no one had yet conceived the idea of the emancipation of the slaves, Blumenbach raised his
voice, and showed that their psychical qualities were not inferior to those of the European"
(1978, p. 9).40
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), like Camper, took a moral lesson from aesthetics after
completing studies on the animal nature of the human being. In his dissertation from 1779 "On
the Connection of the Animal and Spiritual Nature of the Human Being" (Versuch Über den
Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner Geistigen, NA, 20, 37-75), he
39
Karl F. H. Marx, "Zum Andenken an Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Eine Gedächtniss-Rede Gehalten in der
Sitzung der Königlichen Societät der Wissenschaften den 8 Februar, 1840," in: The Anthropological Treatises of
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Ed. and Trans., Thomas Bendyshe (Boston: Longwood, 1978, rep. 1865), pp. 1-45.
40
Londa Schiebinger, "The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science," EighteenthCentury Studies, 23 (1990): 387-405, generally spares Blumenbach from her sharp criticism of the way "anatomists
(mostly male and European)" used their positions to build hierarchies by which physical features of human beings
were studied: "For them the question was how each of these subordinate groups measured up to the European male,"
p. 404. For a study on the broad cultural background image of the black African, see Uta Sadji, Der Negermythos
am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland. Eine Analyse der Rezeption von Reiseliteratur über Schwarzafrika
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1979), and for Blumenbach's polemics on scientific racism see Frank W. P. Dougherty, "Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach und Samuel Thomas Soemmerring: Eine Auseinandersetzung in anthropologischer
Hinsicht?" in: Samuel Thomas Soemmerring und die Gelehrten der Goethezeit, Ed. Gunter Mann, Jost Benedum and
Werner Kümmel (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1985), pp. 35-56, and again in "Christoph Meiners und Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach im Streit um den Begriff der Menschenrasse," in: Die Natur des Menschen (1990), pp. 89-111.
Fink-Herder on Race
27
argued the priority of human physiology in the development of human spirituality. Then after
writing a play on the hatred of two brothers of different racial characteristics, he wrote an essay
on the theatre, asking in his title "What impact can a good permanent stage have?" (Was kann
eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?, NA, 20:87-100).
The point that Schiller makes in the essay on the stage is that the theatre can expose the
prejudice of human beings in their animal state, and on a broad scale can bring moral instruction
to a nation. In his view the stage is a public sphere without the institutional restrictions of
religion and the law, and in this capacity it can mediates both by displaying the human being in
all its visceral faults and aesthetic potential. The impact of the stage is powerful, he argues,
because it elevates human beings from the "trials of physical life" (Dauer des physischen Lebens,
88): "the need of the animal-human is primal and more pressing--while the need of the spirit is
more preferable and inexhaustible" (Bedürfniß des Thiermenschen ist älter und drängender-Bedürfniß des Geistes vorzüglicher und unerschöpflicher, 88).
Conclusion
Camper tried to advance an aesthetic view of the human being based on the eye of the
beholder from relative cultures, while Blumenbach and Schiller of another generation each
played out a full career in respect for the dignity of the human being, one in objective
anthropology and another in aesthetic education. But no contemporary, not even Georg Forster,
anticipated as clearly as did Herder the problems of racial hatred in contact zones that would
increase as societies became increasingly mobile. The key here is his focus on the contact zone,
on his analysis of the problem where two cultures meet and where one is dominant and views the
other without the capacity for "Bildung." Herder did not invent the genre of victim literature, but
he did see the signs of culture wars long before there were world wars, international trade, and
Fink-Herder on Race
28
global warming. The earth is an "organic being" (organisches Wesen, 290), he argued, and is
under the influence of multiple conditions, including the changes in climate that come with each
revolution. And, he asks, "who is capable of calculating the consequences of these multiple
conditions?" (Wer vermag die Folgen hievon zu berechnen?, 290). He does prefer Monboddo's
system of an integrated human animal over rival theories of the global businessman and
politician of a pragmatic anthropology. But in the last letter of the "Tenth Collection" he returned
to the values of Christianity and ended his analysis with a slogan for Marxism: "no one for
himself, everyone for all" (niemand für sich allein, jeder für Alle!, 302).