German Studies Review

On the occasion of his appointment to a professorship at the University of Jena in 1789, the playwright and historian Friedrich Schiller delivered a lecture on universal history and the purpose of its study. In this oration, he drew his listeners’ attention to the edifying and entertaining “spectacle” (Schauspiel) that the recent discoveries of European travelers in foreign lands had provided to European onlookers at home on the continent.¹ Schiller described the results of these discoveries as follows:

They show us peoples at the most diverse stages of education gathered around us like children of various ages standing around an adult, who through their example remind him of what he once was and the place from which he came. A wise hand appears to have preserved these crude tribes for us up to the present time, where we have progressed far enough in our own culture to be able to find a useful application for this discovery and to restore the lost beginnings of our species in the mirror they hold up to us. But how shaming and sad is the image these people give us of our childhood! And yet the stage at which we glimpse them is not even the first. Man began even more contemptibly.² [End Page 23]

The idea that non-European peoples remained in a state of historical childhood, which Schiller here espouses, was an outgrowth of Enlightenment reflections on the order of history. In the eighteenth century, it found its most elaborate expression in the historical and anthropological writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. In Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, published in 1774, Herder fashioned a narrative comparing the maturation of the human species to the maturation of the individual. Later thinkers deployed this narrative, in which both ancient peoples and contemporary non-Europeans were likened to children, as a justification of the civilizing mission; Herder, however, mobilized it to subvert European pretentions of superiority and to call the colonialist project into question. Far from endorsing Schiller’s view that providence had “preserved these crude tribes for us,” he censured his contemporaries for imagining that prior peoples and history existed for the sake of eighteenth-century Europe. His theory that non-Europeans occupied earlier stages of growth was thus much more ambiguous in its implications than its subsequent iterations would suggest. But while malleable in the ends to which it was put, the idea of historical childhood also contributed to the temporalization of cultures, in which different peoples were represented as participating in different temporal moments. The notion of a temporal disjunction between cultures invalidated the application of a single timeless standard to all of them; at the same time, it facilitated invidious judgments about specific cultures’ relative belatedness and advancement.

In both his philosophy of history and his theorization of temporality, Herder described different peoples as inhabiting different times. According to Johannes Fabian, this “allochronic” assessment of cultures has exercised a pervasive and pernicious influence on modern anthropological discourse from the Enlightenment to the present. Fabian maintains that “talk about the childlike nature of the primitive has never been just a neutral classificatory act, but a powerful rhetorical figure and motive, informing colonial practice in every aspect”; in fact, “aside from the evolutionist figure of the savage there has been no conception more obviously implicated in political and cultural oppression than that of the childlike native.”³ With the intensification of colonialism in the nineteenth century, comparisons of non-European peoples to children proliferated. They also took on increasingly negative connotations, as in Rudyard Kipling’s infamous description of the nonwhite as “Half-devil and half-child” in “The White Man’s Burden.” But while Fabian’s claim that the figure of the childlike native has been utilized to justify colonial practice is beyond dispute, this fact should not obscure the ambiguities of the trope’s diverse historical inflections and the contrary uses to which it has been put. In the case of Herder, the idea of historical childhood functions not as a means to legitimate European colonialism, but to undermine it. And given Herder’s importance in the formulation and dissemination of this idea, the seemingly anomalous ends to which he put it must give us pause.

An exploration of the place of the idea of historical childhood in Herder’s thought [End Page 24] illuminates its emergence and the complexities of its function in modern historical and anthropological discourse. At the age of twenty-two, Herder composed “Von der Verschiedenheit des Geschmacks und der Denkart unter den Menschen,” an essayistic piece that brought together an inquiry into cultural diversity with a philosophical meditation on the universality of taste. Although this work foregrounded issues pertaining to aesthetic judgment, it touched on problems that went beyond the question of artistic standards. Herder explained that his principal interest was “to gather historical examples of how far the diversity of human beings can extend, to bring it into categories, and then to try to explain it.”⁴ This plan, which Herder conceived in his youth, came to be one of the guiding intellectual projects of his life, the foundation of his diverse historical and anthropological writings. An interest in anthropological questions was kindled early on under the tutelage of Immanuel Kant, who first encountered Herder in Königsberg in the early 1760s. But whereas Kant ultimately subordinated anthropology and history to critical philosophy, Herder remained committed to the formulation of a robust philosophy of history.⁵ In his attempt to categorize and explain human diversity, he devised a model of historical maturation in which phylogeny paralleled ontogeny. This narrative and the idea of historical childhood integral to it were formative for subsequent conceptions of the primitive.

Already in antiquity, we find comparisons of peoples and nations to different stages of human development. Perhaps most famously, in the Timaeus, Plato provided an account of Solon’s visit to Egypt, in which an elderly Egyptian priest refers to the Greeks as children. After Solon recounts the story of Deucalion and the flood, the priest says,

“Ah Solon, Solon, you Greeks are ever children. There isn’t an old man among you.” On hearing this, Solon said, “What? What do you mean?” “You are young,” the old priest replied, “young in soul, every one of you. Your souls are devoid of beliefs about antiquity handed down by ancient tradition. Your souls lack any learning made hoary by time.”⁶

The priest’s description of the Greeks does not so much draw a parallel between their character and the character of children as it emplots the Greeks’ historical position. Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks are not in possession of an ancient tradition and do not have a recollection of the most ancient times, something which distinguishes the historical consciousness of the Egyptians, particularly its priests. Herder makes use of the same analogy, but with a significant modification; in Herder’s version, it is the Egyptians who are represented as younger than the Greeks, because they stand closer to the origins of human history, while the Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans stand for subsequent periods of maturation. A similar reversal is at work in Francis Bacon’s pronouncement that “Antiquitas seculi Iuuentus Mundi” (antiquity [End Page 25] is the youth of the world).⁷ Bacon maintained that it was more accurate to describe the moderns as older than “the ancients” since the latter were, in relation to the former, like children, who lacked the knowledge acquired through prolonged study and accumulated experience.

Following European exploration and conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century, the likening of both ancient peoples and contemporary non-Europeans to children gained currency. But more widespread than portrayals of non-European peoples—particularly Amerindian peoples—as children were those comparing them to animals. We find instances of this comparison in some of the earliest accounts of the New World, including Amerigo Vespucci’s letter to Piero Soderini.⁸ Indeed, within theological circles there was a debate about whether the natives were even in possession of souls and thus fit to receive the Catholic faith. Although the papal bull Sublimis Deus, promulgated in 1537, explicitly asserted that they had souls and were thus candidates for salvation, the dehumanizing language of native animality persisted. Dehumanizing depictions legitimated the subjugation and exploitation of peoples deemed to be little more than beasts of burden; and for those who were judged too wild to submit to domestication, these depictions justified not only the dispossession of their lands, but even their extermination. In contrast to the trope of the native as animal, the trope of the native as child was equivocal. In its paternalistic form, it was sometimes invoked in favor of a more humane colonialism that sought to bring native peoples to the Christian faith without violent coercion. And in its more subversive manifestations, it served to call the colonial enterprise itself into question.

In his essay “Of Coaches,” Michel de Montaigne described the New World as “so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its ABC; not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat nor vines. It was still quite naked at the breast, and lived only on what its nursing mother provided.”⁹ Images like this one, in which native peoples appear as infants and children, were vital to the formulation of modern theories of uneven development. In light of these later theories, first articulated systematically in the eighteenth century, there are two features of Montaigne’s image and assessment that are particularly noteworthy. First, Montaigne did not present the peoples of the Americas as static and unchanging. Since he maintained that they were “not at all behind us in natural brightness of mind and pertinence,” their lack of knowledge in mathematics and agriculture was attributed to matters of circumstance, not to innate deficiency.¹⁰ Indeed, their infantile state, far removed from a condition of perpetual stagnation, promised future strength and vigor. In referring to the teaching of “its ABC,” Montaigne indicated that in their movement away from infancy, the Amerindians’ development was comparable to the education of the young, who have the potential to acquire new skills and knowledge. Second, Montaigne’s assessment was coupled with a critique of the practices and morals of his European contemporaries. Notwithstanding the employment of the [End Page 26] language of education, Montaigne did not argue that Europeans were destined to be the educators of savages; on the contrary, he expressed the fear that “we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of this new world by our contagion.”¹¹ His image of the Amerindians as vigorous and youthful, accompanied by the opposing image of the Europeans as a corrupting influence, undermined the purported moral superiority of the latter and challenged the elevation of the civilized over the savage. These representations were expanded upon and further disseminated with the Baron de Lahontan’s account of his travels in North America, published in 1703, and with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, published in 1755. With Herder, the association between non-Europeans and children continued, but it was stated more explicitly in his work than in Lahontan’s travel writings or Rousseau’s second discourse. It was also incorporated into a systematic philosophy of history; unlike the brief and sporadic comparisons between non-Europeans and children which occur in earlier reflections on history, Herder’s comparisons were integral to an elaborate historical narrative.

The analogy between peoples and life stages formed an essential part of Herder’s interpretation of the logic, meaning, and movement of history. In Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, Herder brought together a polemic against rival philosophers of history, such as Voltaire, with a constructive vision grounded in this analogy. In his narrative of historical development, in which the movement of history paralleled the maturation of the human individual, the ancient Orient was depicted as the age of childhood; Egypt, the boyhood of the species; Greece, its youth; and Rome, its manhood. The Orient to which Herder referred in this work was primarily the Biblical Orient, the Near Eastern lands of patriarchs and shepherds described in the Old Testament. Notwithstanding a passing reference to India, in which the Ganges is listed alongside the Oxus and the Euphrates as a river of the Orient, Herder’s description of the Oriental as pastoral suggests that the designation does not encompass the agrarian civilizations of the East (Writings, 280). Herder even asserted that the principal difference between the ancient Oriental and the ancient Egyptian resided in the fact that the former was nomadic and pastoral whereas the latter was sedentary and agricultural. The transition from the Orient to Egypt in socioeconomic organization corresponded to a transformation in social consciousness and the emergence of a novel notion of civic responsibility; this notion was lacking among the Orientals since their fundamental unit of organization was not the city, but the family (Writings, 281). In his description of the ancient Orient, Herder emphasized the patriarchal dimension of its social organization and the power of the fathers over their families. His assertion that the commands of these fathers were foundational for subsequent history also made this era a source of authority for later ones. Yet Herder described this period not as an age of paternity, but as an age of childhood. The reason for this characterization derived, in large part, from his organic model [End Page 27] of historical development, but it also owed much to his impression that the people of the Orient were themselves childlike in character. The attributes which Herder ascribed to the Oriental, and which he also considered natural to children, included submissiveness towards authority, imaginativeness, enthusiasm, a sense of wonder, and a close proximity to God and nature.

Herder expressed an admiration for the vitality and inspired passion of the ancient Orient, which he contrasted unfavorably with the coldness of his own era. In his depiction of the Orient, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, he sought to show that past cultures were not simply benighted and ignorant of modern truths, but were in possession of admirable qualities, some of which his own age sorely lacked. The point, though, was not to return to some idealized bygone era; Herder insisted on the unrepeatability of history, the uniqueness of each culture and moment, and the folly of trying to mimic what was natural only in times past. In waxing poetic about the particular virtues of each age, he attempted to undo the notion that all times and places could be judged by a uniform standard. Although an adult cannot return to the state of childhood, this existential fact does not preclude an appreciation for the merits of childhood or a recognition of what is lost in the transition from one age to another.

Even in presenting the deficiencies of prior ages, Herder aimed to mitigate them through contextualization. Error, which assumed in Herder’s work a less malignant aspect than it did with the philosophes, was shown to be an integral part of the growth and education of humanity, not merely an unfortunate impediment or obstruction. This recuperation of error, as opposed to the exposure of folly, distinguishes Herder’s brand of historical optimism from that of Voltaire, which was predicated on the destruction of pernicious beliefs and institutions as much as on the establishment of sound and prudent ones. For Herder, there were ideas and sentiments that were more appropriate to one age rather than another, and their subjection to an external standard or the “criterion of another time” led to a partial and distorted judgment (Writings, 282). Herder explicitly employed the comparison of the childhood of the individual to the childhood of the species in arguing this point. He asserted that “what is unavoidably necessary for each individual human being in his childhood is certainly not less so for the whole human species in its childhood” (Writings, 277). On the basis of this assertion, Herder sought to show that unfavorable European judgments about non-European forms of government had failed to understand what was required at different stages of spiritual development. Although the childlike obedience of the Oriental might strike the eighteenth-century European as undignified, Herder insisted that this obedience had been the condition for social order and the necessary foundation for the education of humanity. He further intimated that the Oriental sense of wonder was preferable to the uninspired philosophical sentiment of the present age. He wrote that before long “we will learn to see the value of ages that we now despise—the feeling of universal humanity and bliss will stir” (Writings, 342). [End Page 28]

And yet it may be objected that Herder’s narrative betrays a condescension, in spite of his avowed intention, towards those cultures and peoples whom he compared to children; this includes the majority of the human population since, according to Herder, “the greatest part of the nations of the earth is still in childhood” (Writings, 341). There is no denying that, for Herder, Europe’s position of adulthood permitted a privileged philosophical perspective on history, one which granted him and his contemporaries more insight into the past than permitted to non-Europeans. At the same time, Herder did not take Europe’s historical position of dominance for granted. After acknowledging that “we Europeans invent means and tools to subjugate, to deceive, and to plunder you other parts of the world,” he opined that “perhaps it will one day be precisely your time to triumph!” (Writings, 352). His judgments about the deficiencies of ages past were offset, to some extent, by an incisive critique of eighteenth-century Europe. He mounted a polemic against the contemporary division between heart and intellect, an unnatural condition of fragmentation foreign to peoples in the more holistic and well-integrated state of childhood. In the fashion of the romantics who followed him, Herder celebrated childhood as a more pure and holy state of being in which the child was closer to God than was the adult.¹² After describing the Oriental as possessing a childlike sensibility, he added that in the Orient “the human spirit received the first forms of wisdom and virtue with a simplicity, strength, and loftiness that now—speaking frankly—in our philosophical, cold, European world surely has nothing, nothing at all, like it” (Writings, 278).

Herder’s interest in the earliest manifestations of the human spirit was bolstered by a conviction that an inquiry into origins was indispensable for understanding a range of philosophical, anthropological, and historical problems. The problem of origins plays a prominent role in his reflections on language, his interpretation of the Bible, his view of ancient history, and his theory of aesthetics. For Herder, in apprehending the origin of a thing we achieve a deeper understanding of the thing itself; indeed, there is even a sense in which the origin of a phenomenon reveals its essence.¹³ Moreover, the origin often partakes of a purity, an innocence, and even a certain unpolishedness that appeals to his poetic sensibility. His celebration of the natural and spontaneous, as opposed to the artificial and derivative, leads him to an appreciation for the folk songs of different peoples and a devaluation of artworks shaped according to rigid rules, as in the case of French classical drama. According to Herder, authenticity and originality, rather than an adherence to an abstract set of rules, were the distinguishing marks of great art; he thus derided the imitation of unchanging models as spiritless pseudo-art. In his Aesthetica in Nuce, Herder’s friend and teacher Johann Georg Hamann declared that “poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”¹⁴ This idea was an organizing principle of Herder’s reflections on language and history. And while Herder soon departed from the theology that underwrote Hamann’s idea, the idea itself remained crucial to his understanding of [End Page 29] history and his conception of its poetic beginnings. It was also central to his view of children, with their natural aptitude for language, as intrinsically poetic and creative.

Prior to the publication of Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, Herder composed his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, for which he received a prize from the Berlin Academy in 1771. In this work, he put forward a naturalistic account of language that combined historical inquiry with philosophical reflection. Although Herder was a Lutheran pastor, he repudiated supernatural accounts of the origin of language, including those of Hamann and Johann Peter Süßmilch. For Herder, language was not divine in origin, but was natural to human beings. At the same time, he objected to naturalistic theories of language that emphasized language’s descriptive function and treated its earliest users as incipient philosophers. According to Herder, language’s principal function was not designative, but expressive—the cries of a child are not intended to name an object, but are rather an expression of an internal state. Pressing this interpretation into the service of historical inquiry, Herder asserted that “the human species in its childhood formed for itself precisely the language which a child-without-any-say stammers; it is the babbling vocabulary of the wet-nurse’s quarters” (Writings, 103). The analogy between the childhood of the individual and the early history of humanity appears here as a way to account for the creation of language. Through this comparison, Herder sought to explain the sound system and syllabic structure of Eastern languages. More generally, he used it to persuade the reader that something so seemingly miraculous as the origin of language could occur naturally. The ease with which children acquire language, notwithstanding their lack of acquaintance with books on grammar, led Herder to exclaim that, far from being an impediment, “the childhood and inexperience of the human species made language easier!” (Writings, 107). Only later was language subjected to conceptual analysis and this development itself came at the cost of language’s expressive power, a power that Herder discerned in the poetry of peoples still in a state of childhood.

Herder imagined the formation of humanity to be purposeful, but he also keenly felt the fact that gains were not possible without losses, and the decline of poetic expression was one to which he was especially sensitive. While Herder’s analogy between the life stages of the human individual and the ages of history forms a crucial part of his world-historical narrative, it is thus important to remember that he did not endorse a straightforward view of historical supersession. His understanding of the maturation of the species also differentiated itself from prior and subsequent models in the peculiar form that its teleology assumed. Far from endorsing mechanism, Herder saw teleology at work in both the natural world and historical processes. At the same time, his understanding of the maturation of the individual broke from the classical Aristotelian view. For Aristotle, the child stood for an incomplete stage of development on the way towards the actualization of its potentiality, attained in adulthood. Within Aristotle’s teleological framework, the adult was superior to the child; the latter, on [End Page 30] account of its lack of reason and virtue, could be schooled to attain subsequent happiness, but was incapable of knowing true happiness in the state of childhood itself.¹⁵ Herder, however, objected to the notion that one age or life stage was intrinsically superior to another, and he insisted on the incommensurability of the different forms of happiness unique to each. He thus famously asserted that “each nation has its center of happiness in itself, like every sphere its center of gravity!” (Writings, 297). This position can be attributed, in part, to Herder’s cultural pluralism, but it also owed much to his attempt to formulate a historically sensitive theodicy. Since, according to Herder, every moment expressed the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, it was justified in itself and did not need to be redeemed through some future event.¹⁶ Part of Herder’s animus towards Voltaire and the philosophes was due to what he perceived to be their arrogance in condemning the work of the creator; he thus chidingly asked his contemporaries who belittled the Orient and Egypt, “Philosopher in the northern valley of the earth, holding the child’s scales of your century in your hand, do you know better than Providence?” (Writings, 295). Patricia Rehm identifies Voltaire’s assessment of scripture, in which religion was “reduced to a story that one tells to children,” as being particularly offensive to Herder; she also points out that Herder attempted to rebut this judgment by demonstrating that scripture deserved the respect of thoughtful adults.¹⁷ It should be added, however, that he also subverted Voltaire’s judgment in a more oblique and creative fashion, namely by embracing the comparison of certain peoples to children and then overturning the prejudice that the position of the child was necessarily inferior to that of the adult.

The correlation between cultures and the ages of the human life cycle permeates Herder’s early and later thought, but he did not adhere to this analogy so rigidly that all other metaphors were excluded. In Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, in the midst of comparisons drawn from the metaphorics of life stages, Herder employs the metaphorics of building; he even describes the Orient as constituting the unshakeable foundations upon which all later history has been constructed (Writings, 277). He also makes abundant use of botanical tropes, in which peoples are compared to plants and their growth is described as a form of blossoming.¹⁸ This very profusion of metaphors in Herder’s writings points to his freedom from the dogmatic adherence to any one of them too strictly. In the 1780s, Kant publicly objected to this mode of discourse as indicative of Herder’s conceptual sloppiness. For Kant, Herder’s anthropology consisted of a body of vague generalities and imaginative analogies, which provided “food for thought,” but did not lead to a “philosophy” of history as Kant understood the term. Instead of a coherent philosophy, Herder offered “a cursory and comprehensive vision” that paid little attention to “consistency in the use of principles.”¹⁹ In his critical assessment, Kant expressed an anxiety that his former pupil was substituting rhetoric for rigor. But while Herder’s mode of discourse sometimes bears the marks of a too fertile imagination, at its foundation lies a well-considered judgment about [End Page 31] the limitations of concepts in apprehending the nature of things and a recognition of the indispensability of metaphors for interpreting the world around us. As Hans Dietrich Irmscher has shown, the employment of metaphor also forms an integral part of Herder’s comparative method, in which the world is made intelligible through analogy and the recognition of resemblances.²⁰ This appreciation for metaphor contributed to Herder’s receptivity to the literature of the Orient and its use of literary tropes; since his own writing made such ample use of figurative language, he did not consider it to be indicative of a superseded stage of intellectual development.

Although Herder’s employment of metaphor was often idiosyncratic, the metaphor of historical childhood, which he did so much to popularize, became a familiar trope in historical discourse by the end of the eighteenth century. In 1797, Herder gave a sympathetic review of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s Antient Metaphysics, or the Science of Universals; in this work, Monboddo offered an account of human history, in which he maintained that “the ages that the human being passes through as an individual” correspond to “the course taken by the whole species” (Writings, 416). Monboddo’s work was published in 1784, a decade after Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, but he independently arrived at an interpretation of history in which phylogeny mirrored ontogeny. The similarity of their interpretations points to their participation in a common intellectual milieu with a set of shared questions and problems. Moreover, both Herder’s and Monboddo’s narratives were themselves part of a larger constellation of theories of uneven development in eighteenth-century thought, in which peoples were described as occupying different levels of civilization or participating in different stages of historical development. While quite distinct from Herder’s historical model and the model of his historicist descendants in the German-speaking world, the stadial theories of history proposed by leading Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, were also variations on the theme of uneven development.²¹ In a time of rapid influx of knowledge about the non-European world into Europe, these theories offered a way to make sense of the diversity of cultures on the planet and their various forms of social and political organization. They also made sense of the movement of history and the place of contemporary Europe within it.

Herder employed the idea of historical childhood to explain and assess different peoples’ historical positions, but the result was not a flattening of various cultures or their reduction to a lowest common denominator. In his anti-Kantian Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, published in 1799, he asserted that “in actuality, every mutable thing has the measure of its time within itself”; according to Herder, “there are therefore (one can state it properly and boldly) at one time in the universe innumerably many times.”²² This plurality of temporal moments and rhythms, existing concurrently, disrupts the reduction of history to a single, linear time. Furthermore, Herder maintained that even those individuals and collectives which might be [End Page 32] identified as participating in a similar, if not identical, temporal moment could be radically unalike in other respects. After enumerating the stark differences between the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in their modes of thinking, their customs, and their ways of life, he describes them as “twins from one mother” (Writings, 284–285). Although Herder compared different peoples to children, the descriptions which he offered thus diverged sharply from one another. This is evident in his most systematic presentation of human history, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, which he worked on from 1784 until 1791.

In this work, Herder argued that human beings were not originally warlike and did not emerge out of a violent state of nature into society; on the contrary, the tendency towards cooperation has always been natural to the species. Herder consequently interpreted instances of savagery and wildness among certain peoples as a “degeneration” (Entartung) from the natural state, not a return to it. He blamed external factors for the distortion of humans’ healthy natural tendencies and speculated that wildness first began when human beings shed the blood of animals. For Herder, the Hindus, whom he described as “the most gentle tribe among men” (der sanftmüthigste Stamm der Menschen), embodied many of the virtues of this early childlike condition (Werke, 13:222).²³ According to Herder, the native inhabitants of India did not seek to harm any living thing, and they derived their sustenance from milk, rice, and the nourishing fruits and vegetables that the land provided. Establishing a parallelism between the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul, he repeated and endorsed William Macintosh’s description of them as slender, well-proportioned, and graceful in their movements (Werke, 13:222). He also lauded the lofty conception of God, which the Brahmins promulgated, and the gentle comportment of the Indians, which he juxtaposed with European aggressiveness and violence. He did, however, express indignation at the practice of sati, the burning of Indian widows on funeral pyres, and the poor treatment of the untouchable class of pariahs (Werke, 14:30–31). These instances of lack of consideration for others struck him as inconsonant with the gentle spirit of the people, and he attributed their emergence and persistence to the prevalence of certain oppressive forms of social organization and false beliefs, such as the doctrine of reincarnation. In presenting the more blameworthy aspects of Indian society as later corruptions or consequences of class divisions, Herder was able to preserve an ideal of the people’s originary goodness. Likewise, in his description of the Amerindians, he identified “goodness of heart and childlike innocence” (Gutherzigkeit und kindliche Unschuld) as their defining attributes and ascribed later corruptions to the influence of Europeans (Werke, 13:250).

Following his acquaintance with Indian literary compositions in the 1790s, Herder’s esteem for the spirit of the Indians was raised further. In 1791, Georg Forster translated Kalidasa’s Sakuntala into German and sent it to Weimar, where Herder was then residing. Forster had already achieved prominence in the 1770s with [End Page 33] the publication of his Reise um die Welt, a classic of modern travel literature, which offered a firsthand account of Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. Based on Sir William Jones’ translation of the Sanskrit original, Forster’s version of Sakuntala received widespread acclaim.²⁴ In a collection of letters, entitled Über ein morgenländisches Drama, Herder provided a brief synopsis and assessment of the play. In these letters, which first appeared in the Zerstreute Blätter in 1792, he effusively praised the play for its poetic language, its character development, and its narrative structure. The same expression of high esteem reappears in the 1803 preface to the second edition of Forster’s translation. Herder here described Sakuntala, the play’s eponymous protagonist, as a “child of nature” (Kind der Natur), and he interpreted her close communion with animals and her love for flowers as an expression of the spirit of the Indian people (Werke, 24:578). Herder alerted the reader that, in order to understand the drama, “one must thus read the Sakuntala in an Indian, not in a European spirit” (Werke, 24:577). In the Zerstreute Blätter, Herder also demonstrated the inapplicability of Aristotle’s categories to Sakuntala and thereby called into question the universal validity of the philosopher’s poetics (Werke, 16:92–104). He insisted that a proper appreciation of Sakuntala required a sensitivity to Indian culture and an acquaintance with the religion and mythology of the people; the appeal to alien aesthetic standards must give way to historical contextualization and empathetic understanding.

This favorable and at times even idealized treatment of India finds its foil in Herder’s description of China, in which the comparison of its people to children assumes much less flattering connotations. Herder remarked that “according to the Mongol nomad custom, childlike obedience should be made the foundation of all virtues, not only in the family but also in the state” (Werke, 14:10). In Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, Herder discerned and defended the same tendency to submit to authority in the pastoral peoples of the Near East; however, his assessment of this quality in the context of China was much less sympathetic. While Herder believed that such obedience was vital to social cohesion among nomadic tribes, he also thought that it was inappropriate to a large empire organized around agriculture. According to Herder, the respect that even adult Chinese men were expected to pay to their fathers impeded their autonomy and infantilized them; the virtue of filial piety, taken to an unhealthy extreme, contributed to political despotism and the stifling of spiritual progress. The perceived lack of development in China led Herder to claim that “ancient China, at the edge of the world, with its half-Mongolian constitution, remains standing like a ruin of prehistory” (Werke, 14:15). At times, Herder’s portrayal suggests that the Chinese suffer from a sort of dotage or senescence, but he concluded not that they had passed into protracted old age but that they had failed to emerge from childhood. Moreover, this condition exhibited few of the virtues that Herder ascribed to the peoples of the Near East and India. Whereas these peoples [End Page 34] are portrayed as possessing childlike qualities, the Chinese are described as suffering from childish ones. Herder expressed a strong distaste for what he regarded as the Chinese people’s excessive respect for the state and their inability to free themselves from constrictive customs inherited from the past. He also disparaged their childish busyness in which there was a failure to differentiate between the necessary and the trivial (Werke, 14:12). This unfavorable depiction sits so uneasily with Herder’s own recommended approach to foreign cultures, which enshrines empathetic understanding, that some scholars have suggested he intended it ironically. Rolf J. Goebel thus reads Herder’s depiction as a highly self-reflective intervention, in which irony serves to destabilize the derogatory judgments that Herder ostensibly sanctions.²⁵ But while self-reflexivity informs Herder’s philosophical reflections on the interpretation of culture, in the case of China, his pronouncements do less to unsettle existing prejudices and stereotypes than to perpetuate them. Indeed, as Sonia Sikka argues, Herder’s pronouncements on China reveal a failure to maintain his professed commitment to cultural pluralism.²⁶ They also reveal the extent to which his understanding of history was bound to his ideas on education. Herder’s perception that the Chinese had stalled in their educational development, due in part to a mismatch between their antiquated customs and their more advanced form of social organization, was one of the principal sources of his unfavorable assessment.

A consideration of the role of education in Herder’s thought sheds light on his views of particular peoples and his idea of historical childhood more generally. From 1776 until his death in 1803, Herder served as the general superintendent of the Lutheran clergy for the duchy of Weimar, and this role demanded an engagement with pedagogical matters, including the organization of the Weimar school system. Although he often felt the administrative duties of the position to be a burden, issues pertaining to the education of youth always remained close to his heart. As general superintendent, he sought to reform the existing school system in accordance with his understanding of the purpose of education.²⁷ For Herder, education extended beyond the acquisition of knowledge or the accumulation of skill sets to include the cultivation of the whole person and the healthy integration of the faculties. Since this procedure necessitated space for students to shape themselves, even as they studied under the guidance of their teachers, Herder objected to rote learning and scholasticism as impediments to the formation of a complete personality. The same animus towards contemporary pedagogical practices, which he deemed to be mechanical and authoritarian, was at work in his criticism of the Chinese political system, which prevented the Chinese people’s emergence from childhood and their attainment of autonomy.

The idea of historical childhood held together, in uneasy tension, two principles to which Herder was dedicated. The first was that history was a story of humankind’s education, in which human beings came to more fully realize their own humanity over [End Page 35] time. The second was that different peoples should not be subjected to the standards of any one preferred time or culture. Although he sometimes failed to uphold these principles, as in his assessment of China, Herder attempted to formulate a coherent philosophy of history where both would find a secure place. There was an ever-present danger, however, that one of these principles would triumph over the other. On the one hand, the representation of history as an ongoing educational process ran the risk of elevating the present moment, which might be construed as history’s apogee, at the expense of all prior ones, thereby diminishing the worth of the historical existence of past peoples. On the other hand, the questioning of the universal validity of the particular judgments of any single people or era threatened to lapse into a cultural and historical relativism, in which all moral standards were reduced to the same level. While Herder’s idea of historical childhood might be reproached for inviting both of these (for him) unpalatable results, he actually intended for it to overcome them, to show how an educational vision of humankind and a commitment to cultural diversity were reconcilable.

The title of Herder’s pioneering work on history, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, indicates that the problem of education was closely tied to his historical and anthropological interests. The word Bildung, which draws together ideas of formation, culture, and education, was crucial to eighteenth-century German intellectual discourse on aesthetics and politics. Bildung was also a guiding principle of Prussia’s educational reforms, which Wilhelm von Humboldt initiated as the Prussian minister of education in the early nineteenth century. Herder’s reliance on the concept helps to explain the appeal of the idea of historical childhood for him and its place in the wider context of his thought. Conceiving culture itself as an educational process, he reasoned that different cultures were at different stages of education. Within this schema, those at an earlier stage of education were imagined to be more like children than those at a later one. The analogy seems to suggest a hierarchy of grades, but Herder actually deployed it in favor of a cultural and historical pluralism that undermined hierarchical evaluations. Since not all peoples participate in the same temporal moment, the application of a timeless standard to all of them leads to misrepresentation and misunderstanding. And just as there are peoples at different stages of education, there are also different forms of education and these cannot be judged according to uniform criteria. Not only is it inappropriate to teach young children things that are only suitable for older students, it is also the case that there are incompatible forms which education can assume. The cultivation of the human spirit in some aspects leads to the neglect and atrophy of others.

Even so, children require some form of instruction, and Herder harbored no doubt that adults had a moral obligation to educate them. Applied to the realm of cultural interaction, his idea of historical childhood could be seen then as implying that people who are like children are in need of receiving instruction from more adult [End Page 36] peoples. This notion was important to later justifications of the civilizing mission, in which Europeans were portrayed as dutifully taking upon themselves the burden of educating their unenlightened brethren. Given Herder’s abiding interest in Bildung, pedagogy, and the general education of humanity, it might seem that such an idea would find a place in his political thought. Yet Herder expressed serious reservations about the pretensions of one people to enlighten another. In his Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, Herder made explicit the correlation between his theory of pedagogy and his views on cultural interaction on this score. He asserted that “just as every duty of humaneness commands us not to disturb for a child, for a youth, his age in life, the system of his forces and pleasures, likewise it also commands nations such a thing vis-à-vis nations” (Writings, 417). This position was informed by Herder’s belief in a people’s right to self-determination and his opposition to authoritarian rule. Vicki A. Spencer points out that Herder opposed forced conformance to an ideal of freedom; his preferred alternative was “to plant in the minds of people the seeds of values or goals, such as freedom, and watch those seeds grow.”²⁸ Herder was more than open to the possibility that one people might learn from another; in fact, he entertained the idea that “culture was brought only by a few to others” (Writings, 416). But he was also skeptical of European colonizers’ motivations and doubted the beneficial effects of their activities abroad. In fact, he presented Europeans themselves as suffering from a senescence that made them less than ideal educators. In regard to the condition of the planet, he writes that “there exist there peoples in childhood, youth, manhood, and will probably do so for a long time to come before the seafaring old men of Europe succeed in advancing them to old age through brandy, diseases, and slaves’ arts” (Writings, 416–417).

In his “Gespräche über die Bekehrung der Indier durch unsre Europäische Christen,” which appeared in 1802 as part of the third volume of Herder’s Adrastea, a deflation of European pretensions of superiority was coupled with a condemnation of European violence perpetrated against other peoples and a skepticism towards missions to civilize them. Although the dialogic form of the “Gespräche” prevents us from treating Herder’s voice as identical with either of the two interlocutors, who are identified only as “the European” and “the Asian,” his own judgments are more closely aligned with those of the latter. It is instructive, then, that even in questioning the virtues of Christian proselytizing and imperial commerce, the Asian expresses an openness to the possibility that the future unification of peoples may indeed be brought about by Europeans. But this state of affairs derives less from the moral superiority of Europeans than from their power, which may be used for either good or ill. The Asian further suggests that it is the destiny of European Christians that they will have to make amends for the misuse of this power (Werke, 23:504–505). Such a pronouncement is especially noteworthy given that it appears in a work entitled Adrastea, an epithet of Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution.²⁹ The idea, though, is not so [End Page 37] much that Europeans will be punished for their misdeeds as that they will be set right by the consequences of them and will recompense those whom they have harmed. Near the conclusion of the Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, Herder stated that “Europe must give compensation for the debts that it has incurred, make good the crimes it has committed—not from choice but according to the very nature of things” (Writings, 418). At the same time, Herder retained hope that Europe would learn from its past mistakes and pursue loftier spiritual goals in the interest of humanity; the chastisement it experienced might even facilitate a spiritual regeneration.

Notwithstanding such hopes, Herder’s criticisms of contemporary Europe and his sense of uncertainty about its prospects have led some to characterize him as a pessimist.³⁰ But while Herder had reservations about Europe’s future, and was hardly immune to bouts of melancholy in his personal life, his historical optimism and belief in humanity were not shaken by the failings of Europe since he did not conflate the continent with humankind as a whole. Herder even warned his readers against such an overestimation of Europe’s importance: “So let no one augur from the greying of Europe the decline and death of our whole species! What harm would it do to the latter if a degenerated part of it perished?, if a few withered twigs and leaves of the sap-rich tree fell off? Others take the place of the withered ones and bloom up more freshly” (Writings, 419). In entertaining the possibility of Europe’s decline, Herder showed his willingness to affirm the sometimes disconcerting implications of his organic model of historical development. And his presentation of Europe’s senescence as having less than catastrophic consequences for the species expressed a profound faith in the vitality of humankind as a whole.

Like his idea of historical childhood, Herder’s idea of historical senescence was indebted to the metaphorics of organicism and a relativistic theorization of temporality. The two ideas were necessary correlates, but it was the former, rather than the latter, that was integral to his interpretation of history. This idea was intimately bound to his pedagogical philosophy, his reflections on the origin of language, his theory of aesthetics, and his critical stance towards the state of contemporary European culture. At its foundation lay the attempt to understand humankind’s cultural diversity. But while the idea of historical childhood served to undermine the notion of a transhistorical standard, according to which all cultures could be uniformly judged, it was also easily mobilized in the service of Europe’s civilizing mission and gave fodder to the very ethnocentrism that Herder sought to subvert.