Michael N. Forster

As we (finally? Hopefully?) reach the end of this master’s thesis that’s been ruining my life for so long, I find myself left with a lot of personal affection for JG Herder that I don’t have for the other d.w. men I wrote on. Locke’s very optimistic and intent on getting the fundamentals straight so we can have a modern era, and that’s great, but he also doesn’t trust words and wants signification to make sense, and so it’s fair to blame him for positivism as well as neoliberalism, you know? Leibniz seems like he’d’ve been an interesting guy to talk to in a foggy way, but he rejects common sense for God. Condillac has a lot of love for the arts and passion and human culture and his conjectural method shows some imagination and pluck, but there is something slightly colourless about his produce—neither fish nor flesh, neither rationalist nor romantic. Like, either go to the boring stuff about the operations of the mind and get it straight like Locke didn’t (like you couldn’t either, not without MRI), or let it remain originary myth and get on to talking about music theory and the solemn eloquence of the Iroquois like we know you wanna.

But Herder, man, I trust the guy. I like his heart and I think if he woke up today he’d be on the right side (when he was done screaming). He exhorts us to “expel the filth of the Seine” and it is a counterhegemonic riposte, not the ethnonationalism certain latter-day unsavouries have taken it to be; and I admire him for doing it, for speaking out. He wrote piles, and changed over time, and in ways that always saw him engaging and developing and never getting crazy conservative. But I think it’s the young Sturm-und-Drang Herder that I like best, not the older (I imagine the whole 19th century in Germany as a kind of dusty Prussian military academy schoolroom) and the one where all the best ideas came out: not only the famous “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” where he ballsily cuts the Gordian knot of language origin theory by saying we speak because we’re human, FULL FUCKING STOP, and then uses the airspace freed up to say many interesting things about the ways different languages express and shape the Geister of peoples, different strokes for different Volks, not only not only that, but also the larger body of his work, which Forster shows quite conclusively (I’d say) involves a much more radical, progressive, cosmopolitan sense of difference than the treatise does. And like, if you haven’t noticed we need a cosmopolitan theory of difference—one, that is, that falls neither into hypocritical leftish neurosis about respecting-difference-while-promoting-Western-values, nor rightish psychosis, of either the everyone’s-a-yankees-fan-at-heart or the Nazi tribal horror variety—then you haven’t been reading much.

Herder gives us radical alienness and a way of valuing it—both unalloyed positives in my book (as in, we only need to focus so hard on finding common ground if we’re too shitty to live with difference, which is much more interesting). His basis is threefold: 1) he does not admit the existence of transcendent meaning; 2) language in his vision does not evolve toward and cannot be wrangled into a single state, that is, it is irreducibly multiple; and 3) languages, to him, are therefore incommensurable. Each of these points in turn depends on what Forster argues carefully and compellingly is the unifying thesis of all Herder’s work: that thought is bounded by meanings, which are at once constituted by word-usages (with no external reference such as “ideas”) and reliant on sense-perceptions, and are thus radically different between cultures, historical eras, and also individuals, as expressed most richly in works of artistic (especially literary) genius. Herder’s linguistics is thus best seen as a special case of his investigation of differences in worldviews, of which his anthropology, hermeneutics, philosophy of history, and translation theory each make up a part and through which they inform each other. This makes him, in himself, a virtual secret history of our best attempts to theorize cultural difference in a respectful way. Then to top it off he does things like translate folksongs of the world so we can learn all about and love each other. He’s ace.

Almost forgot to mention that this book—“after” Herder—also considers Hamann (who has often been seen as Herder’s irrationalist mentor but who Forster considers a cranky poseur—it’s plausible, but I won’t accept it till I’ve checked out his whole book written from the perspective of the letter H myself—and Schleiermacher, who’s a historical doyen of sorts in translation theory but who Forster shows is in major debt to Herder too. That is all fine (the essay on Herder, Schleiermacher and “foreignizing” translation, bending words to try to convey the language world of the original author and expanding your reader’s own language world at the same time, is maybe the best one here), but it does make for a deal of repetition (all the same points about Herder get made in the other guys’ sections); also Forster plays favourites too baldly for a guy whose favourite philosopher’s buzzword was “empathy,” and maybe should have left Hamann alone rather than be so grudging. But small criticisms; strong effort.… (altro)

You almost think he just got taken by the rhyme in the title, because the dominant figure here is neither Schlegel nor Hegel (nor Humboldt, who also has a section devoted to him), but Herder; Forster's companion volume to this one was already called After Herder, but if I could rename this volume it'd be something like The Herderian Legacy: The Nexus of Hermeneutics and Language Philosophy. There is a wealth of factual information and generalist observation on Schlegel, Humboldt, and Hegel, focusing on their philosophy of language but also getting into interpretation, metaphysics, translation theory, etc. But the seemingly unrecognized or at least implicit thesis that comes up again and again throughout, popping up its head in the most unlikely places, is this: Herder created the philosophy of language. He gave us linguistic relativity. He gave us language determining thought. He gave us the radical variation of language (and hence thought) with culture. He gave us language as a way to understand the human (in contrast to linguistics, which Schlegel and Humboldt gave us and which means the investigation of language for its own sake). Finally, he gave us the imperative to connect with the linguacultural Other not by a "principle of charity," interpreting the O's words in a way we can get down with, but by stretching ourselves till we can get down with him. It's not quite the final word on this matter, but if you had to pick one dude to be Father of this particular area of philosophical investigation (which would be stupid), Herder would be it.… (altro)