Herder as philosopher was concerned more with practical and concrete applications of his principles than with dogmas and abstract theories. The following brief investigation of purely philosophical discussions is made with a view of determining how he applies his philosophy to this definite anthropological conception.
In his Gespräche über Spinozas System Herder sets forth much of his own religious philosophy. A passage in the second dialogue substitutes for the word “attributes” the word “forces” in expounding one of Spinoza’s postulates. The passage then reads: “The Godhead reveals itself in an infinite number of forces and in an infinite number of ways.” It is with the word for forces that we are concerned at this point—Kraft, Kräfte.
This same word Herder uses in discussing the fundamental life-principle in the world at large, which is the theme of his first few sections in the essay entitled: Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in ihrem menschlichen Ursprunge und den Gesetzen ihrer Würkung. These Kräfte, these “modifications of God,” find their impulse to operate in a stimulus, beyond the material form of which Herder cannot go.
Herder’s philosophy plants itself from the beginning quite firmly on material foundations. He says that in the qualities which are constantly designated by such words as heavy, thrust, fall, movement, rest, strength, even power of inertia, is implied a life-principle, a soul. Any close observation of nature must show that the great working power of nature is everywhere the same, and it is the analogy between the processes of the material world in general and the phenomena in the human organism in particular which can give the clearest insight into the great life-principle. This study by analogous reasoning is not artificial, Man cannot avoid feeling the similarity between himself and external nature. Human beings must of necessity, he continues, vitalize everything about them with their own feelings.
The feelings then are strongly instrumental in man’s interpretation of the world about him.
I. STIMULUS
The first phase of feeling which Herder considers is Reiz or stimulus. The peculiar phenomenon of stimulus says he, which may be seen in the smallest, most delicate filaments of plants, causing them to contract and expand, and bespeaking a sort of feeling is due to the same law which controls the most complicated feelings and passions of the human being. This all-pervading law of stimulus Herder finds in the action of physical heat and cold, which he makes parallel in its working with pleasure and pain respectively. Pain, disturbance by something foreign, contracts; the strength collects, increases for resistance, and takes its stand again. Well-being and pleasure—warmth—expands, makes for calmness, placidity, enjoyment, and release.
That which is expansion and contraction in dead nature, the result of warmth and cold, seems to be here the obscure seed of stimulus and feeling in man. The “world-all,” the entire feeling, nature of human beings and animals moves in this ebb and flood of warmth and cold. The power to expand and contract which is the effect of this heat and cold, pleasure and pain, Herder makes the fundamental principle of the power for self-nutriment.
This power is nothing external or mechanical, in which case it would not be life. The plant structure of organic fibers which takes in life from the surrounding elements does so through its own activities. The power to escape its enemies and to make over all its nourishment into differentiated parts lies within the plant. The complicated body of the animal likewise has this stimulus to seek the nutrition essential for life within: hunger and thirst are powerful exciting forces. When he applies his theories to man, he calls love the most powerful stimulus to life.
Herder ascribes to the plant something in addition to the stimulus to seek nutrition when he recognizes that intelligence in plant structures which selects only such elements as fit the peculiar needs for its development after its kind. He does not succeed in getting rid entirely of the external in operating the organism; he sees in breathing a kind of time-beating by which nature swings the machine, and here nature is without, for she breathes upon the machine, in this harmonious way, the spirit of life.
Thus far Herder has recognized the existence of a stimulus in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, which is in reality a life-principle. This life-principle is not only the monitor over the feelings, but merges into them and becomes the stuff of which feelings are made.
What is the relation of these indefinable and unanalyzed stimuli to the feelings? Since the passions which surround the heart find their roots in the finest fibers of the physical structure, the degree to which these fibers are stimulated determines the degree to which the feelings will be excited and will express themselves. Love, courage, anger, and bravery are in proportion to the stimulus of the heart and the collaborating parts: “Die Innigkeit, Tiefe und Ausbreitung mit der wir Leidenschaften empfangen, verarbeiten und fortpflanzen macht uns zu den flachen oder tiefen Gefässen die wir sind.”
The forcefulness of thought is likewise dependent upon the vigor of this obscure stimulus, for no thought, says he, can reach the brain unless feeling in its proper physical connection has preceded it.
And just here our philosopher lays the very roots of individuality. The degree to which the fibers are stimulated is the beginning of the operations which will end in producing an aggregate of properties peculiar to an individual.
II. SENSES
By this inductive method, which develops fundamentally a philosophy of evolution, Herder finds that the senses are a nerve-structure developed to meet the waves of stimulus from without and feeling from within and to differentiate them more finely than did the fibers which worked only in a general way. But the law is the same. The nerves of every sense operate according to the same law by which the fibers contract and expand. The nerves advance to meet pleasant agreeable things, but recede from and resist unpleasant things.
Now Herder observes that something other than the organ of sense and the external objects must operate to produce sensation in at least two of the senses. He sees a certain mental bond without which sight and hearing could not go to the object nor the object to the senses; this common substance, he says, is light, a substance which has the peculiarity of taking just so much from creation as the two end organs can receive. But this light as a medium is a requisite for the finer senses only. There are coarser senses, fibers, and stimuli which cannot be brought into action thus. They can feel only in themselves, for the object must come to them, touch them, and, to a certain extent, be one with them.
Herder is explicit in connecting individual character with the senses. The contribution which each sense makes to the soul cannot with any two human beings be the same in kind, strength, depth, and breadth. There are many proofs of this. Seeing and hearing, which furnish most of the material for thinking, are seldom in one individual with the same degree of training or of natural force. This will not only account for inequalities of the senses evinced in all forms of expression in a single individual, but for such inequalities among groups and races. For, he continues, imaginative power in which thoughts and feelings disport themselves is made of the flowing together of sense impressions.
This is Plato’s thought also when he objects to making knowledge mere sense-perception because it would make a different standard of knowledge for each man. Socrates in Theaetetus quotes Protagoras on the same point: “Sensations are relative and individual.” One scarcely needs to be reminded here of Herder’s thorough acquaintance with Greek philosophy.
The way from a sensation to thought is through the nerve-structure of sense organs, these nerve-structures furnishing just such a medium between the object of sensation on the one hand and thinking and willing on the other, as does light between the object of sense and the visual and auditory organs.
Never losing sight of the physiological element in his psychology, Herder tells us that the soul has grown out of the body, and has so outgrown the body that soul has become the monarch over that, without which soul could not exist. All its thinking grows out of feeling, and this feeling out of a body having in its command manifold obscure forces administered to by variously endowed “servants” and “messengers.”
III. KNOWING AND WILLING
Herder denies that anything in the way of knowledge comes back to the soul out of the platonic fore-world, and abstract egoism, he says, is opposed to truth and the open course of nature. Just as all of the soul’s knowing depends upon obscure stimuli and forces having their foundations in the body and leading to sensations and then to reasoning, so her willing comes from these as a natural sequence of her knowing. Any knowing without willing would be false and incomplete. If knowing is only a deep feeling of truth, who is going to see truth and at the same time be blind to it—know goodness and not will to do it? Every single passion or feeling thus knowing the good would at the same time will the good. Herder is emphatic about the interdependence of these two. Just as no knowing is without willing, no willing is without knowing; they are only one energy of the soul.
This suggests Socrates in the Protagoras, as he argues that men would always do good if they knew the good. “No man voluntarily pursues evil or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature.”
Briefly summarizing: Herder finds his stimulus the same everywhere in the material world. It is the principle of life since it impels to self-nutriment and reproduction. It works by the same law in both body and soul. Variations of it in degree are the foundations for individuality and personality. All that is true of feeling for essentially stimulus becomes feeling. Out of all this Herder arrives at the conclusion: “Der tiefste Grund unseres Daseyns ist individuell, sowohl in Empfindungen als Gedanken.”
The distinctive personal and individual character whose foundations have just been traced, according to our author, can not come to its fullest development except as a component part in a larger self-conscious and self-directing entity which he calls “humanity.”
This humanity as a whole, and the relation of the individual to it, is discussed in the collections Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. An emphatic tone regarding personality and individuality as characteristics of the group pervades these letters.
Existence as a self-conscious being which develops into group consciousness Herder finds rooted in human frailty.
Primitive man, to himself and enigma, he observes, when comparing his visible condition, his natural capacities, his will-power with enduring nature, was forced to a feeling of weakness, to a sense of mortal existence; he finds himself of the earth, a fragile house of clay. Sympathy then and the realization of one’s duty to one’s fellow-men began here.
But the consciousness of frailty led also to a knowledge of our powers and abilities, to a sense of our calling and our duties, and brought us to a deep consideration of human nature.
The group is always striving toward an ideal pattern which is “the character of the race,” and, again, this character is in the individual; for, says Herder, he who does not make the best of himself cannot assist the sum total of the race.
The author states the idea when he says that it is according to the sacred laws of nature that man is a complete unit in himself, and at the same time an important element of groups each a consistent part of larger groups which make the sum total of humanity. Man is friend, citizen, husband, father; fellow-citizen, finally, in the great city of God on earth.