American Behavioral Scientist

Volume 49 Number 5
American
10.1177/0002764205282220
Fox / On Metaphysics
Behavioral Scientist
and Nationality

January 2006 716-732

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The Rival Enlightenments of Kant and
Herder
Russell Arben Fox
Western Illinois University

The enlightenment ideal has long been under fire, but perhaps by nothing so much as the
continuing appeal of national belonging. The nation’s affective hold on how people think
about the world connects with metaphysical complaints with modernity, thereby making
a rational response to nationalism especially difficult. This was an issue known to both
Kant and Herder, who addressed themselves to the related metaphysical complications of
nationality in very different ways. Although Herder’s rejection of many of Kant’s cosmo-
politan claims is well known, the centrality of national affectivity to his religious
approach to the problem of enlightenment is not as well understood, despite its equal
importance to his overall critique of Kant. This article considers certain aspects of Kant’s
and Herder’s rival enlightenment philosophies and suggests the superiority of Herderian
arguments to understanding the way in which nations continue to play a normative role in
a post-Enlightenment world.

Keywords: Kant; Herder; enlightenment; modernity; nationality

T he Enlightenment was, and remains, a particular vision of modernity, an interpre-

tation of human being and potential in an intellectual world characterized by the
rise of instrumentalism, individualism, and skepticism. It posited the universal possi-
bility of a certain kind of progress—namely, that through education, secularization,
political reform (or revolution), and public debate, human beings everywhere can and
should enjoy the benefits of personal liberty, representative government, and civil
rights. Today, one may plausibly read the events of recent decades as a series of ever
greater tests and triumphs for this 18th-century ideal. The establishment of the United
Nations, the liberation of former European colonies, the slow but steady inclusion of
human rights in international law, civil rights movements throughout Europe and
America, the extension of free market economies, and perhaps especially the growth
of the European Union all seem to support the faith that old borders and prejudices
would melt away before the rational interests of an enlightened population. Globaliza-
tion itself may be understood as part of the enlightenment dream: that all peoples,
through the freedom to engagement in both argument and commerce, will liberate

716
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 717

themselves from those limitations and obligations that until now have prevented a
truly representative global politics from emerging (Soros, 2002).
But in fact, only willfully blinkered advocates of the Enlightenment hold to such an
interpretation of recent history. On the contrary, partisans of enlightenment liberalism
often feel themselves to be on the defensive, with public confidence in the authority of
science, democracy, and education on the decline throughout the West (Taverne,
2005). Attacks on modern philosophy have become so frequent that discussions of
“postmodernity” have almost become cliche. The future of the European Union has
become ever more contested, with complaints about its constitutional structure often
serving as a cover for more difficult issues of demography and sovereignty. And in
particular, the (often violent) role that religious fundamentalism and different forms of
nationalism have played in world affairs in recent decades does not at all conform to
the gradual secularization and eclipse of national attachments that the Enlightenment
predicted. Given how closely entwined the secularization thesis was with the confi-
dent expectation that reasoned forms of political attachment would supercede ethnic
or cultural allegiance, it is to be expected that these two phenomena have frequently
been studied together (Asad, 1999; Berger et al., 1999; Casanova, 1994). But what has
not been studied enough—and which needs more consideration, if the fate of the
Enlightenment is to be more widely appreciated and addressed—is the degree to
which the relationship between nationality and religion challenged enlightenment
thought from the very beginning.
In terms of political theory, a “nation” is an entity of affect: It refers to a people that
are moved by a story—usually one having to do with their origin, identity, and tradi-
tions—that they tell themselves and concurrently tell to others and through that tell-
ing, bond to one another in a strong and wide way. Nationality, therefore, marks a
self-conscious “people”; it may be distinguished from other assumptions of
boundedness in that its mutually felt existence both trumps many or most other claims
of belonging and enlists many or most aspects of human behavior into that belonging
(R. Smith, 2003). This is a very simple definition, to which much more must be added;
for the moment, however, it serves to emphasize the centrality of feeling to nationality.
However one accounts for the origin of nations, and whatever normative force or real-
ity one attributes to them, their existence involves a certain degree of subjectivity. In
this they are presumably unlike the state, an entity whose existence involves objective
considerations of legitimate force, public contract, or demonstrable right.1 Moreover,
in this nations are also like religions: forms of life premised for the most part on cus-
toms, stories, and experiences whose binding power over human behavior lies not in
matters of publicly reasoned law and right but in affective and subjective conviction.
So it is not surprising that nationality and religiosity were often treated similarly by
many enlightenment thinkers: To whatever degree they could not be rendered relevant
solely to the individual subject (i.e., to whatever degree they seemed to continue to
demand a politics based on feeling), they were an enemy to the liberal order.
As broad a category as this may at first appear, it is not implausible to connect West-
ern liberalism’s long-standing (if always only partial) exclusion of matters of feeling
718 American Behavioral Scientist

to modern philosophy itself and its resistance to ontology. Of course, we have always
had ontologies—logically entailed “range[s] of possible entities . . . without which we
could not state our beliefs” (MacIntyre, 1967, p. 543). For centuries, Christendom’s
basic ontological claim—the idea of a “Great Chain of Being” which linked every-
thing from the “meagerest of existents” to “the highest possible kind of creature”
(Lovejoy, 1964, p. 59) together beneath God’s absolute being—was defended in the
West as the basis for all political legitimacy and moral reasoning. But with the
Protestant Reformation came a change in the terminology of that claim, and eventu-
ally an eclipse of it, especially in conjunction with the scientific and philosophical rev-
olutions—and the catastrophic religious wars—of the 16th and 17th centuries. The
reactions to these events were numerous and often conflicting, but most involved a
retreat from articulating politics or morality in terms that involved metaphysical
accounts of the nature of humanity and the world. Ontology, thus, receded in impor-
tance and was replaced by epistemological inquiries concerning the grounds and con-
ditions of what were taken to be subjectively held axioms. Human reason, at least for
most educated persons, became the sole source of human meaning. As Martin
Heidegger (1962, pp. 21-24, 86) argued, this transformation—which achieved its full-
est expression in various theories of enlightenment—resulted in modernity’s focus on
the “metaphysics of knowledge”: that is, an emphasis on categorical presumptions
that allowed an elision of ontological questions about the nature of human beings and
that saw the pursuit of truth as an inquiry that would only be muddled by taking into
account the conditions of the world within which we conceive of “truth” in the first
place—conditions that are mostly matters of feeling, not fact.
My point with this excursus is not to situate religion and nationality solely within
“ontological” or “metaphysical” categories. I use these terms merely to make a point:
that several dominant streams of thought in the modern Western world have reified
ways of thinking about political problems that discourage the sort of intuitive, holistic
claims about the meaningful contours of reality that often characterize both religious
experiences and communal—including national—attachments. This is hardly a new
point; indeed, the criticism of this aspect of modern philosophy may by now be noth-
ing less than “the fundamental intellectual issue of our time” (Gutting, 1999, p. 1).
Although many postmodern manifestoes are overwrought, there is a clear sense in
which one might conclude that the story of the Enlightenment, or at least the political
aspect of it, is drawing to a close and that requires us to engage in some Minerva’s
owl–like surveys of the path the Western world has aspired to travel down. I would
suggest that there is no better place to inquire into the persistence of feeling, whether
religious or communal or both, in the midst of (and often in spite of) the Enlighten-
ment and its emphasis on a rational political ideal than in the writings of two thinkers,
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a teacher and
his student who—unlike many other enlightenment figures—always kept these cate-
gories central to their own, very different political conclusions. But first, a review of
the numerous ways in which nationality intersects with modernity is in order.
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 719

National Affectivity and Modernity

In premodern Europe, “political forms neither demarcated clear boundaries nor

fostered internal integration and homogenization” (Calhoun, 1997, p. 68); conse-
quently, for centuries, issues of cultural allegiance or community attachment barely
made any impact at all on political matters. Anciently, as Bernard Yack (1996) has
argued, the Greeks’ sense of ethnicity was transportable across civic boundaries and
thus irrelevant to identifying the site of their political activities or membership. And
throughout the Middle Ages, the reigning sense of attachment felt by the members of
Christendom was (nominally, at least) to the Kingdom of God; even the secular and
temporal spaces of the feudal order were theological creations—the individual soul
was situated within a particular moment of the saeculum and, thus, attached to the eter-
nities by way of the Great Chain of Being (Asad, 1999; Markus, 1970). Although it is
obvious that the church was a political power in premodern Europe, it was not an insti-
tution whose involvement in matters of state in any significant way referenced the alle-
giance of those whom it “represented.” Hence, until the beginnings of state building in
early modern Europe, the collective self-identification of peoples with and as nations
was politically irrelevant. The problem for modern political thought is that long after
the rise and subsequent transformation of such national states, the relevance of nation-
ality to political theory, as well as politics itself, unaccountably remains.
Of course, many theorists have held that acts of national identifying were not
merely irrelevant but quite absent before the modern era anyway. Under the influence
of such scholars as Elie Kedourie (1961), and later John Breuilly (1982) and Ernest
Gellner (1983), the “constructivist” theory of nation building and nationalism has
come to dominate most scholarship; “construction and choice,” in the words of one
scholar, “rather than blood and inheritance, is now the standard story line about identi-
ties” (Laitin, 1998, p. 12). The basics of this theory are that “nationality” is a specific
kind of modern consciousness that has been constructed in response to relatively
recent institutional and economic pressures. Although this theory allows that there
may have been self-conscious and self-identifying ethnic communities in the world
prior to the advent of modern political life (meaning a technologically and administra-
tively enabled and extended public sphere), the idea of nationality itself is held to be an
intangible “abstraction, something that nationalists, and elites in general, have ‘con-
structed’ to serve their partisan [state-oriented] ends” (A. Smith, 1996, p. 106).
According to this theory, it is through the top-down promotion and maintenance of a
homogeneous language and culture via education and centralized social measure-
ments (often imposed by force) that disparate peoples came to tell and share common
stories and experiences, thereby increasing public trust sufficient to sustain and reflect
the imperatives of a market economy and an urbanized bureaucracy. By so doing, of
course, people came to define themselves by reference to some fixed criteria that allow
them to exclude others, either marginalizing them or treating them as outright ene-
mies. Thus does the modernist theory depict nationalism as an essential component of
not just economic growth but also the imperialism concomitant to it.
720 American Behavioral Scientist

Some constructivist thinkers have placed the first steps of this process rather early
in the history of modernity and attached significant normative consequences to the
variety of nationalist strategies that the emergent nation-states of Europe adopted from
the 16th through the 19th century (Greenfeld, 1992). Others are doubtful of the evi-
dence for such conscious “nationalizing” projects so early and have tended to restrict
the origin of nationalism to the late–18th-century era of revolutions, and especially the
industrial revolution that followed (Hobsbawm, 1990). But one thing all these theories
agree on is the “projected” nature of the nation: It is, to quote Benedict Anderson
(1991), an “imagined political community” (p. 6). And a community that is “imagined”
is presumably a community that can be reimagined and woken up from if need be.
To believe that nationality is a concept with an origin other than our own or some
elite’s conscious constructive intent—that is, to believe that one’s membership in a
nation is not only not chosen but in fact is a component of our consciousness—is a dif-
ficult conviction to maintain today. Some scholars (A. Smith, 1986; Stack, 1986, pp.
1-11), employing what is often called a “primordialist” theory of nations, have empha-
sized the ethnic roots of existing nations and, therefore, posited the national project as
a kind of popular iteration of something much more fundamental to the people’s exis-
tence. But these theories of national belonging do not pose much normative challenge
to the implications of the modernist theory (see R. Smith, 2003, pp. 37-38, Note 22):
Even if ethnicity—the myths, customs, religion, language, and territorial associations
of a people—is accepted as the essential raw material for the historical construction of
national narratives and feelings, there is no reason to assume that such feelings should
survive the transcending of ethnic traditions and stereotypes that modern communica-
tion, education, and social practices make possible. In other words, whatever the ori-
gin of nationality, so long as it is something self-imposed, it is something that can pre-
sumably be shucked off—from the traditional enlightenment point of view, it is, very
simply, a prejudice. And, thus, the question is, Why do so many people continue to
defend the wholly affective elements of nationality, when by all accounts they should
have long since arisen from this “self-incurred immaturity” (Kant, 1991, p. 54)?
There are, of course, numerous defenses of nationalism. It is common for the inher-
itors of enlightenment liberalism to attempt to distinguish between civic and ethnic
nationalism or between patriotism and nationalism (Ignatieff, 1993; Viroli, 1995),
seeking in the former the creation of an affective bond to laws and constitutions that
can, presumably, be subject to rational judgment and, thus, making the felt entities that
give shape to human attachments dependent on public reason (Habermas, 1995). For
some, this liberal reading of nationalism or “culturalism” seems the best possible com-
promise that can be made in the face of human subjectivity and feeling (Kymlicka,
2001, pp. 39-48; see also Miller, 1995; Tamir, 1993). But it is a compromise more
hoped for than sustainable; the argument for the existence of thoroughly liberal commu-
nities, wherein ethnic and cultural affectivity is firmly subordinated to matters of ratio-
nal choice, has not had much success (Markell, 2000; Scruton, 1990; Yack, 1996).
There is another definition of nationality, however, one that when connected with a
study of the aforementioned rival enlightenment arguments, suggests a yet different
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 721

approach to this puzzle. This definition looks to the religious experiences of medieval
Europe, linking the emergence of vernacular languages to the development of Chris-
tianity and the particular heritage that forms of religious life took during the course of
the centuries (Hastings, 1997). This might appear to be yet another version of the
constructivist theory (nationality arising from the people’s conscious belief in a partic-
ular religious body), but it suggests much more than that. One finds in this argument
the possibility that identity formation is concomitant with the reception of a kind of
revelation, by which a people, through the appropriation of a religious story in their
own tongue and, thus, as part of their own telling, recognize their particular place in an
active “Christian history . . . a history of faith and divine providence” (Hastings, 1997,
p. 196). Under this reading, the persistence of national affection, even as Christianity
has been profoundly changed by its encounter with modernity, can be seen as a form of
partial resistance to what Walter Benjamin (1973, pp. 263-265) called the “homoge-
neous, empty time” that places all events—including especially those that historically,
would have been understood as being “simultaneous” with a fated, holy story—in an
open-ended context.2 This is, to be sure, an idiosyncratic reading of the history of
nationality, one which mixes the “horizontality” of language with a “teleological
evolutionism” in which the development of particular languages makes made mani-
fest throughout Europe distinct, religiously embedded potential nationalities (A.
Smith, 2003). Given its focus on Christian history, it might seem to have little
connection to enlightenment disputes—but in light of the metaphysical disputes
between Kant and Herder, this is anything but the case.

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

Herder has long been associated with nationalist feeling; Kant has not. The reasons
for this are fairly obvious—Herder made innumerable references to “national tastes,”
“national languages,” “national traditions,” and “national spirit” in his writings
(Koepke, 1996), whereas Kant by contrast almost never spoke of nationality. Instead,
Kant (1991) wrote about the emergence of cosmopolitanism and a “cosmopolitan so-
ciety” (p. 41; see also Caygill, 1995, pp. 137-138), a concept that Herder (1969)
viewed with immense distaste: “The saturated heart of the idle cosmopolitan offers
shelter to nobody” (p. 309). For Herder (2002, pp. 297, 384-385), the nation and its
prejudices play an important and beneficial role in our development as human beings;
for Kant (p. 55), prejudices of any sort are a “leash” that slows and distracts humanity
in our exercise of our natural capacities for reason and education. Thus is Kant seen as
representing the argument for enlightenment in its highest form, defending “a politics
based upon reason rather than patriotism or group sentiment, a politics that was truly
universal rather than communitarian” (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 27), a politics wherein
restrictive national provincialisms would be replaced by liberating universal duties.
Herder, on the other hand, is seen as representing the opposite model: a strong propo-
nent of affective and parochial cultural allegiances, primarily based on language and
history.
722 American Behavioral Scientist

There are problems with this interpretation of Kant and Herder. First, it ignores the
complexity of their respective arguments. The applicability of Herder’s ideas to
state-centered nationalist politics as they developed during the 19th century is limited
(Beiser, 1992, pp. 189-221; Spencer, 1997); his insistence on the reality and necessity
of national attachments was extended to all persons and allowed for the development
of universalist principles, if not bodies and bureaucracies, that would encourage a con-
structive pluralism, not an antagonistic relativism (Barnard, 2003, pp. 131-160;
Spencer, 1998). At the same time, Kant’s commitment to cosmopolitanism did not
oblige him to ignore local realities—his vision of “perpetual peace” was balanced by
his realization that a love for local things, “despite its potentially parochial and preju-
dicial character, is nevertheless indispensable for a moral life” (Muthu, 2003, pp.
152-153; see also McCarthy, 2002). But perhaps even more important than these qual-
ifications is the fact that their political differences are secondary to their thinking;
the Kantian and Herderian interpretations of modern politics have their roots in
rival understandings of the Enlightenment world they were both a part of. The real
significance of Herder’s disagreements with Kant emerged with time as part of an
“aesthetic-metaphysical tradition [that] has variously been called Romanticism,
expressivism, or . . . the ‘counter-Enlightenment’” (Hinchman, 1996, p. 497).
The Counter-Enlightenment was never in any significant way a communitarian,
nationalist, or even merely anticosmopolitan movement, although such were compo-
nents of it from the beginning. Primarily it was an argument about forms of knowledge
and meaning. The Counter-Enlightenment was premised on, in the words of one
scholar, the denial of “the core assumptions of the Enlightenment: the possibility and
goodness of rational discourse dispelling darkness and mystery from human life”
(Linker, 2000, p. 338). This requires some qualification: Most counter-enlightenment
thinkers embraced “mystery” only so far as they thought that the canonical methods of
reason, by eschewing the particularities of religion, tradition, and intuition in its study
of the human condition, invariably addressed false problems rather than actual ones;
in the terms introduced in the foregoing section, it sought to preserve humanity’s focus
on knowing fully those entities and allegiances we can feel but cannot necessarily
(especially after the rise of modern science and collapse of the authority of the medi-
eval church) describe in publicly accessible, nonsubjective ways. This effort took
numerous forms; the Counter-Enlightenment has been variously described as an inter-
nal development of enlightenment ideals, a radicalization of them, or a revival of
medieval mysticism in an “enlightened” context, and the work of Vico, Rousseau,
Hamman, Jacobi, and Schelling, in addition to Herder, has all been considered in the
context of this tradition (Beck, 1969, pp. 382-392; Berlin, 1980; Lilla, 1993; Linker,
1999, 2000; Melzer, 1996). What they held in common was a belief that the methods
of enlightenment needed to be supplemented by a kind of aesthetic appreciation of the
world; in their view, rationality ought not be separated from a concern with ontologi-
cal holism, a concern that—being moderns themselves—they no longer believed was
reflected in straightforward religious orthodoxy but instead, in religious sublimity
available in nature and art. Indeed, it is by looking at Herder’s early aesthetic and reli-
gious writings that the uniqueness of his understanding of enlightenment, and his real
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 723

but limited connection to later, more radical Romantic critics of Kant, can best be
3
appreciated (Dahlstrom, 2000; Norton, 1991).

The Metaphysics of Reason and Affect

Simon Critchley (1997), in a study of Romanticism, presented the contradictions of

this era as an inevitable response to the problem of “what might count as a meaningful
life, or as a meaning for life,” a problem that arose with Kant’s own parsimonious
effort to “reconcile the values of the Enlightenment . . . with the disenchantment of the
world that those values seem[ed] to bring about” (pp. 85-86). Kant’s role in the partic-
ular shape of enlightenment “disenchantment” was profound. Thinkers of the 16th
and 17th century, such as Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and G. W. Leibniz, had
helped to fashion a mechanical universe wherein the quest for ultimate meaning was
reduced to a sociological impulse called “religion,” which itself was ultimately
reduced to a simple question of “the dynamic relations among ‘passions’ or ‘affects’”
(Lilla, 1998, p. 398). They treated these affects as solely psychological and, thus, held
that the human mind was free, or at least potentially free, of all such ties to the oppres-
sive mythologies of the past. The longing for being was understood to be basically
resolvable; through rational inquiry and calculative reason, human beings could con-
sider their own natures and develop their own meanings for their lives, dismissing all
ideologies or aspirations that were not firmly in the control of their individual passions
and preferences. Kant’s pious reaction to this was to divide the world into distinct
realms of noumena and phenomena and posit human beings as fundamentally condi-
tioned by this division, leaving humanity “both freely subject to the moral law [but
also] determined by an objective world of nature . . . stripped of any value” (Critchley,
1998, p. 11) in itself. In making a “transcendental” and inward turn, Kant effectively
separated our moral and political concerns from any wider concerns about being itself,
thereby applying the power of reason to the limits of knowing, rather than its reach.
His goal in this narrowing of human reasoning was, in his words, to “make room for
faith” (Kant, 1965, p. 29).
The Kantian argument stipulates universal categories of intuition that provide a
contour to our consciousness, although we can never know the content of those cate-
gories directly; the closest we can come to an understanding of human progress in the
world of things is, therefore, through a consciousness of the general form of our own
practical thinking about those things. In protecting faith from skepticism, Kant, thus,
made questions of meaning into questions of knowing: Moral judgment had to be
“completely cleansed of everything that can only be empirical and appropriate to
anthropology” (Kant, 1964, p. 57); reasoning should reflect not the “starry heavens
above” but rather, the insensible “moral law within” (Kant, 1993, p. 169). With this
epistemological focus, the Kantian subject, in Critchley’s (1997) formulation, “is
de-substantialized or weakened, becoming something logically rather than ontologi-
cally entailed” (p. 88). And this is the religious heart of the Romantic complaint with
Kant: Although his enlightenment philosophy does provide a framework for respond-
724 American Behavioral Scientist

ing to the dilemmas of modernity, it gives human beings little situated, sensible ground
from which to assess those dilemmas in a holistic way. It leaves us without “meaning”:
without an ontological sense of place that is our own. Frederick Beiser (1998) was not
far off when he wrote, commenting on the debate concerning reason and meaning in
the wake of Kant’s first Critique, that “the so-called ‘postmodern predicament’ really
began, then, in 1786” (p. 23).
It was probably inevitable that the dividing and categorizing of the natural world
that followed the scientific discoveries of the 17th and 18th centuries would affect
moral and political thought. In turning away from the mechanism of the early Enlight-
enment, Kant introduced a new way of thinking about self and world that not only
enabled political and moral concerns to be addressed in a language distinct from the
positivistic treatment of human passions but also broke new ground in our conceptions
of knowledge, experience, and autonomy. Herder’s aesthetic analysis of community
would not have been possible without making a similar “critical” turn. But although
Herder’s turn also critiqued our ability to know the truth about things, it did not “tran-
scend” the substantial conditions of human being itself. Rather than seeing the field
(and limits) of knowledge as internal, Herder looked outward, to the given, natural,
and historical world (Herder’s metaphysics, thus, parallels Kant’s early “naturalism,”
before he completed his idealist revolution; Beiser, 1987, pp. 150-153, 350, Note 71).
Herder joined Kant in rejecting modern empiricism and concurred that the world of
things was both meaningful and would also always be in some fundamental sense
unfathomable to us, thus, demanding faith. But his faith did not take the form, as it did
for Kant (1993, p. 31), of a logically entailed bridge—“the fact of reason”—covering
the distance between human beings and the world. Rather, demonstrating the
aesthetic-affective orientation of his thought, Herder put his faith in that immanent
power that involves us in sensible, substantial connections—or, as manifest in lan-
guage, “analogies”—that reveal a meaning in nature to us over our experience of his-
tory. Through language, Herder posited a fundamental yet critical connection between
our experiences and the world. Kant’s critical philosophy, on the other hand, affirms
that human beings were disconnected from actual things and, thus, should build their
hopes for metaphysical “certainty” only on the basis of those conceptions implied in
the structure of human consciousness itself, rather than on what he considered a mis-
leading “hypostasis” of some sensible, constitutive, immanent order (Beiser, 1992,
pp. 27-32; Lilla, 1998, pp. 408-410). Kant (1965) feared that Romantic “enthusiasm”
(meaning, literally, being spiritually penetrated and affected by something external to
oneself) would only continue to misunderstand the “inward need” of reason, thus,
blinding humanity to the promise of autonomy and enticing a person “by the sirens of
his own curious desire into the unnavigable waters of metaphysics” (p. 56; see also
Lilla, 1998, pp. 403-407).
But Kant’s response to modernity did not elide metaphysics so much as transform
it, and the entities it presupposed, into categories that could be appreciated in a regula-
tive, but not a constitutive, way. Perhaps this is most clearly seen, again, by considering
Kant’s and Herder’s respective treatments of religion. Kant believed it necessary to
make an account of the divine in light of enlightenment rationality; consequently, he
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 725

developed a theology by reason alone, adhering to his noumena-phenomena scheme.

Herder, on the other hand, embraced a more hermeneutic understanding of reason that
posited God, and God’s presence in and through the world, as a component of our abil-
ity to reason at all. Thus did Herder feel his task in the struggle concerning enlighten-
ment to be one of engaging in—and defending and defining the force of—analogical
description. Herder assumed that certain concepts were critically “unanalyzable” and
had to be presumed on the basis of observation and (most important) felt experience.
Of course, Kant also held certain concepts—namely, the noumenal world—to be
beyond direct experience and, hence, unanalyzable; but he saw his division of the
knowable from the unknowable not as part of some wider whole of reason but as a nec-
essary restriction of it to prevent philosophical analysis from falling into insoluble
antinomies, thus, leading to skepticism. The cross-purposes of Herder and Kant made
for a perplexing debate, as Beiser (1987) explained,

[Herder and Kant] disagree with each other concerning the limits of naturalism, or where
to draw the boundary line between the natural and metaphysical. This line is “possible
experience,” to be sure. But what is that? Where does experience begin and where does it
end? . . . If we make the boundaries of experience too large, then we permit all kinds of
metaphysics; but if we make them too small, then we make the explicable inexplicable
and unduly restrict the frontiers of science. This problem [was the] sticking point in the
controversy between Kant and Herder. While Kant accuses Herder of going beyond the
limits of experience, Herder charges Kant with arbitrarily limiting this sphere and render-
ing the comprehensible incomprehensible. So who is guilty of metaphysics—Kant or
Herder? (pp. 150-151)

This debate came to a head in the late 1780s when Kant wrote several trenchant
pieces attacking Herder and Georg Forster, an anthropologist who sympathized with
Herder’s position. Kant’s criticisms, and Herder’s responses late in his life, sharpen
and clarify their different approaches to Enlightenment—but perhaps not any more
than does a provocative early essay by Herder (1985) with the simple title Essay on
Being. Herder’s basic argument in the Essay begins with the assumption that our con-
ceptions of the world are “sensate”—that is, the result of our sensory perception. But
this assumption is problematic or at least incomplete. How do we come to an under-
standing, even a consciousness, of those sensations in the first place? In other words,
what is their ground? His solution was to present being—“real being” (Realsein),
which one can easily recognize as a distant ancestor to contemporary notions of
authenticity and identity—as that “most fundamental, unanalyzable” concept, “the
one concept that is ineluctably presupposed in all the others” (Morton, 1990, p. 160).
There is, Herder wrote in his Essay, “something” that conditions our ability to perceive
things—“a ‘something’ . . . that can say to itself in godlike fashion, I think through
myself, and everything else through me” (Norton, 1991, p. 39). 4
At first glance this would simply suggest that Herder was a good student of Kant
and discerned in his teacher’s lectures an early, naturalist version doctrine of the
noumena. Herder’s (1985) comments in the Essay, however, suggest that the “some-
thing” which he alludes to is not truly transcendent; it is, rather, a substantial activity,
726 American Behavioral Scientist

coming “through” us with that force that Herder saw as characteristic of the whole nat-
ural and historical world. It is a force that “works” through us, producing an active
reflection of being—meaning both our own identity as well as our place in the
world—in our articulation of it. This lack of transcendent clarity in the source of our
subjective impressions seemed perfectly plain to Herder: “The more sensate a con-
cept,” he wrote, “the more unanalyzable.” He felt no need to transform the immediacy
and intuitiveness of sensate experiences into something which could be rationally cat-
egorized, much less subject to strict observational standards (Schneider, 1996); the
only analysis he considered legitimate was that which reflected on the “feeling” of
these fundamental concepts, their persuasive quality: “Do not sensate concepts pos-
sess just as much power of convincing us as analyzed concepts” (Herder, 1985, p. 11)?
The fact that human beings have an undeniable feel for distinguishing, expressing, and
analogically drawing meaning from brute sensations suggests that the persuasive
power of experience, manifest through our apprehension of the world, itself grants a
constitutive unity to all our authentic acts of reasoning about the world: Herder
concluded that “all these material principles have a locus of connection in us” (p. 20).
Thus, Herder (1985) argued that the force of being, its presence in our affective cer-
tainty about the fact of worldly beings (although not their meaning, that is to be real-
ized through our articulation of them), “is innate in us; nature relieved philosophers of
the burden of proving it since it has always already convinced us” (p. 19). As indebted
as Herder was to Kant, at this early stage he was already “deftly turn[ing] Kant’s line
of reasoning back on itself” (Norton, 1991, p. 41). Teacher and student agreed that we
cannot know the “first grounds” of being; the early modern challenge to older beliefs
made such claims to natural knowledge impossible for enlightenment philosophy to
sustain. But empiricism alone could not account for our affective character; intuition
remains. This led Kant to articulate certain categories of thought as themselves regula-
tive, a priori forms of intuition; but for Herder, there was no point to placing the obvi-
ous unity of the something that informs our grounding intuitions about the world in a
transcendent, critical realm. Being, for Herder and some other counter-enlightenment
thinkers who followed him, was equated with our own expressed, subjective feelings.
Our “grounding” intuitions are our sensate impressions of the world; what is a priori
for Herder is not a condition of consciousness but a condition of our immanent reflec-
tion of what we see, hear, and most important, feel. Herder was, thus, the real meta-
physician; but his metaphysics is strangely unphilosophical, at least in the Kantian
sense, and Herder happily accepted this judgment. In Herder’s (2002, p. 29) opinion, a
philosophy that does not misuse language (as he thought Kant’s critical philosophy
did) would be more “anthropology” than anything else (see also Zammito, 2002,
chaps. 4, 8).
So the question of meaning, and the preservation of affectivity in the context of
enlightenment, is for Herder a matter of taking our felt attachments and subjective
insights as themselves constitutive of that which enables us to know, judge, and draw
meaning from the world. Kant’s response, as Herder’s anthropological (and yet also
metaphysical) reinterpretation of the Enlightenment became clear, was forceful:
Such reasoning is more ascriptive than analytical, attributing to both material and
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 727

immaterial things (like nations) organic qualities that we observe only in ourselves.
How can we do that—especially if being is essentially unknowable—without making
a mockery of naturalism? For Kant, this was the central problem presented by
Herder’s counter-enlightenment: Discerning a telos of meaning in our particular loca-
tions and experiences runs roughshod over nature. There has to be, as Kant repeatedly
insisted, some criterion of reason that does not reduce to an anthropomorphic analogy
or some “qualitaes occultae that simply redescribe what they are to explain” (Beiser,
1987, p. 148).
How could Herder ever ascertain that those entities that subjectively impress them-
selves on us and whose affective meaning is realized through our own expression of
them are anything other than projections of human desires and longings? Herder’s
(2002) answer is in some ways a straightforwardly pragmatic one: He must employ
anthropological analogies because he could not imagine that there could be “any other
play for my thinking forces.” Rejecting any concept of an epistemologically mandated
a priori other than that which we simply experience in our time and place, Herder
answered the question, Is there truth to analogy? by responding “human truth, cer-
tainly; and as long as I am a human being, I have no information of any higher” (pp.
188-189). In other words, because Realsein is revealed and understood solely through
our own analogical and aesthetic thinking, a thinking that seeks to “feel out,” as it
were, the immanent shape or image of one’s natural and historical place, we as mortal
beings must accept that there can be no greater truth than that which analogies provide.
This is what has been called “Herder’s linguistic-epistemological constitutivism”
(Morton, 1990, p. 159) in its starkest form. Herder’s enlightenment, thus, preserves in
a somewhat new enlightened form the morally sensible priority of the “lived world”
over the “scientific one,” making our knowledge about that which we feel a matter not
of the proper “critique of reason” but rather, of a “‘critique of language,’ conceived as
a ‘clarification of concepts through recourse to the genesis of the words that cre-
ate them’” (p. 170). This might suggest that if anything, Herder was a kind of
proto-pragmatist, taking our sensate impressions to be the truth of being and simply
working with words thereafter. However, it must be kept in mind that Herder came to
this position for religious reasons. In Herder’s view, the fact that our sensible impres-
sions of meaning, discovered through religious revelation or cultural attachment, were
subjectively manifest and analogically constituted did not trouble him. Simply put,
Herder believed that God put the analogies there for us to find.

The Religious Recognition of Nations?

This final point, following on a close consideration of certain key differences

between the Kantian and Herderian approaches to enlightenment, suggests two con-
clusions, one potentially helpful to those concerned about the fate of the Enlighten-
ment, the other perhaps less so. First, Herder’s argument can plausibly provide strong
philosophical support for a religiously and linguistically constitutive theory of
nations, one that links the persistence of nationality to fundamental entities at the root
728 American Behavioral Scientist

of the aesthetic expression of our everyday, particular sensibilities and that by so

doing, at least partially explains the difficulty modernity has had in purifying affect
from our self-identifying. Second, whatever its suggestive insights, Herder’s ideas
must ultimately depend on a teleological reading that seemingly departs from the most
basic needs of the contemporary moment. How, in an age of pluralism and liberal tol-
erance, can a response to nationality possibly involve its redescription as part of a
theological argument?
Analyzing, much less mounting a defense, of Herder’s pluralistic and organic
Christian theology is beyond the scope of this article.5 As part of a conclusion, how-
ever, it is worth noting that the religiosity of national attachments as they are under-
stood in the West seem to invariably appear again and again even in the strictest
accounts of the Enlightenment. Kant himself could not avoid the logic of religious
belonging: Although he clearly argued against the power of churches grounded in par-
ticular histories and cultures, he still allowed that his hoped-for cosmopolitan world of
enlightened, federated nations would require an “ethical state of nature,” one in which
a reformed religion plays a “suprapolitical role” supported by an idealized “Church
Triumphant” that he clearly identified with a rationalized Christianity (Lilla, 1998, pp.
425-431). Of course, the instrumental usefulness of religion in general, and Christian-
ity in particular, has long been acknowledged (although sometimes only grudgingly)
by advocates of enlightenment. But would Kant’s regulative Christianity ultimately be
tolerant of rational, ethical determinations that arise from entirely different intuitions?
Certainly it would in terms of personal ethics, tolerance being a primary enlighten-
ment value; never does Kant suggest that enlightened churches will be anything other
than liberal in their teachings. Still, there is more to the story than that.
Consider how these two rival enlightenment thinkers addressed themselves to the
“problem” of Jews in Germany. It was Kant’s (1996) conclusion that the Jews ought to
convert to Christianity, going so far as to call for the “euthanasia of Judaism” (p. 53).
This is not because he thought Judaism a barbaric religion but simply because it was a
distinct religious body; Kant’s critical philosophy could not accommodate granting
any normative status to any affective expression that was not, ultimately, part of a sin-
gle regulative ethical whole. The constitutive possibilities of Judaism, however valu-
able, simply were not part of Kant’s calculus. By contrast, Herder (1994, pp. 253-262,
316) not only praised the integrity of the Jewish nation but also insisted that its fate was
far from clear even to a Lutheran minister such as himself, and he argued that the Jews
6
deserved the political space to enable their long-abused community to fully develop.
Given his belief in the cultivation of authentic and binding meanings and memories,
drawn from distinct natural and historical contexts, he did conclude that the Jews and
the Germans were distinct peoples, but that hardly meant that separation (or total
assimilation) was necessary (Hess, 2002; Menze, 1994, 1996). For Herder, preserving
the constitutive expressions that we articulate by way of national and religious attach-
ments was a theological mandate; even if he as a Christian had doubts about the ulti-
mate efficacy of a particular expression, he believed in according it full recognition.
This suggests that Herderian nationalism need not be less liberal than Kantian cosmo-
 Fox / On Metaphysics and Nationality 729

politanism, despite (or even perhaps because of) its embrace of metaphysical subjec-
tivity. Indeed, perhaps it is more so; Herder, after all, is concerned with acknowledging
and contributing to the religious and national homes that people realize for them-
selves, whereas the hospitality afforded by Kant’s (1991, pp. 105-106) enlightenment,
even with his allowances for the importance of locality, famously never extends
beyond that of a minimal “right of resort”—we cannot rightly look to be one another’s
“guests” under Kant’s regulative liberalism, because we are all, after all, “strangers,”
motivated by inward conviction rather than outward connection.
One can easily find parallels to this concern today, particularly in connection to
complaints about the moral “arrogance” of globalization (Steger, 2002). Not that all
nationalist or communitarian attacks on globalization are grounded in a Herderian cri-
tique of enlightenment; unfortunately, the Counter-Enlightenment claims most influen-
tial today are far more hostile to modernity than any of Herder’s ever were. But that is not
an argument for clinging that much more tightly to a single enlightenment narrative;
rather, it is a call to clarify what is useful and needed in the Counter-Enlightenment,
beginning with Herder’s contribution to such. Perhaps there is something to be said for
the idea that so long as expressions of affect cross over into metaphysical territory (and
according to Herder’s argument, they cannot avoid doing so), then the constitutive
attachments and the religious conclusions to which they lead people ought to be legiti-
mated by recognizing in them a close connection with actual historical and natural
experiences. This would make for a different kind of global public sphere, as it would
make room for a degree of “social populism,” rather than maintaining the presumption
that public reason will have ethical results in a purely “metasocial” environment (La
Vopa, 1995, p. 17). Such a Herderian project, however, might have successes in regard
to nationalist impulses where the Kantian enlightenment has not.

Notes
1. Some scholars have suggested that nationality is parasitic on the idea of sovereignty; see Vincent
(2002). This argument, however, fails to account for the existence of national expressions which are not at the
same time expressions of or demands for sovereign power (Taylor, 1997).
2. This reading goes directly against that of Benedict Anderson (1991, pp. 22-24), who saw the secular
perceptions of simultaneity necessary for national consciousness as precisely dependent on a rejection of a
marked, “vertical” sense of temporal significance.
3. Herder was an unwilling father to much of German Romanticism. His innovative defense of Spinoza,
his fascination with medieval history and folk culture, and his use of aesthetic categories to elucidate moral
and political truths plainly influenced Romantic thinkers such as Schlegel and Schleiermacher in their desire
to go beyond Kant and the idealist philosophy that followed in his wake. But by the end of his life, Herder was
frustrated by the direction in which German Romantic thought was being sent by Goethe and Schiller (on
Herder’s relation to the Romantic movement, see Barnard, 1965, pp. 153-167; Chytry, 1989, pp. 47-54;
Clark, 1955, pp. 417-421).
4. My translations from Herder’s Versuch über das Sein are based on those provided in Norton (1991, pp.
38-42).
5. I have attempted at least a partial explanation of how Herder believed language actually worked to
make immanent meanings known through the historical development of nations in Fox (2003).
730 American Behavioral Scientist

6. Herder suggested that this might involve the construction of a Jewish homeland, but he also wrote that,
because the Jewish people over the centuries had grown beyond the bounds of their original cultural space,
they should be helped to contribute to the “collective culture of humanity” by making a “Palestine” in what-
ever space they inhabit, including Germany (Herder, 1967, pp. 74-75).

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Russell Arben Fox is a professor in the Department of Political Science, Western Illinois University. His
current research involves an examination of the related philosophical problems of identity, nationality, and
sovereignty; he is presently completing a book manuscript on Johann Gottfried Herder’s contribution to
these debates, tentatively titled Herder and a Romantic Theory of Nations. He is also involved in studies
touching on non-Western political thought (particularly Confucianism), communitarianism and populism,
early American constitutional debates, and religion and education. His articles have appeared in The Review
of Politics, Polity, and The Responsive Community.