http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/johann_gottfried_herder_revisited/

It is said that Herder deserves even more credit than Edmund Burke for the conservative war against Enlightenment liberalism.

Quotes of interest:

Herder, as nearly all anti-Enlightenment thinkers, rejected the intellectually vapid notion of a “social contract.” If such contracting individuals were to exist to enter into some contractual obligations, then the contract would have already been settled. In other words, the civilizational apparatus that would allow a scholar to even conceive of a “contract” is already in existence as the contracting parties are coming together. “Social contract” theory is an intellectually dishonest slight of hand: its primary purpose is to reject all aspects of history, civilization and nationhood in order to rebuild the society on the demands of the contracting parties. These, as always, mean the wealthy and powerful who demand the institutionalization of their own interests and call them “universal human rights.”

Communities derive primarily from the fact that men are born radically helpless and dependent, not free and equal. Only the existence of the community ensures that human beings exist at all. Therefore, all arts and sciences derive from this natural, communal union, and exist as a product of the communal mind, rather than specifically the minds of great men. In other words, that the man of genius, undoubtedly a reality in human history, should be demystified in that his genius has been nurtured by the community around him. The books he has read, lectures attended, apprenticeships, language, education, in short, everything necessary to develop the talents of genius are communally created, not individually created. Therefore, the proper study of human society is not the “great man” but rather the community, the nation, the ethnos. This is the proper unit of history, and it is it that works through the great men, economic institutions, armies and books that a historian might study. Genius exists, as do classes or great ideas, but they do not come into existence in isolation.

…Epistemology is intensely social, and to divorce it from social life and the development of national consciousness (and therefore language) is to divorce knowledge from reality.

…For the Enlightenment, the notion of “progress” has been an allegedly continuous move from “myth” to “fact”… For Herder, this is a regress… The older idea of myth was not falsehood in any sense, but is a key to the heart and mind of a specific people and civilization. To aestheticize nature is to imprint the “general will” upon it, to provide it with cultural reality by integrating it into the vortex of the nation. The nation, then, seeks to unify all things to itself: nature, technics and economics. These are provided with the imprint of the historical memory of a people.

[There follows some unappetizing talk of anarchy. No man has ever lived without a "state," in the sense of law and authority, and this is the whole basis of rejecting the social contract theory. And then...]

…The most natural state is one naturally with one national character. This it retains for ages and this is most naturally formed when it is the object of its native genius for a nationality is as much a plant with nature as a family, only with more branches. Nothing appears so indirectly opposite to the end of government as the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of all kinds of people and nationalities under one scepter… Glued together indeed they may be into a fragile machine, termed a machine of state, but it will be destitute of inner life and mutual sympathy of the parts.

…The self is not sui generis—to put this more simply—but rather the product of the cultural milieu in which it was created: the language, customs, hopes, memories and fears which nurture the self from infancy into adulthood. Only when the culture breaks down through alien peoples and ideas (including the state) does this connection become severed, and the most horrid of situations, alienation, becomes a social reality, leading to social pathology and ultimately, social death.

Man is shaped by his association with others. This association is governed, indeed made possible at all, though similarity—language, concepts, morality and historical experience. When this memory become clouded—as in the present day—though outside intervention of self-interested self-deception then the basic nature of the association is destroyed. The abstractions of liberalism or neo-conservatism cannot rescue it, but are the very products of this decay.

…His battle was primarily against the notion of cosmopolitanism, or the idea that man’s faculties are sui generis, and therefore owing no loyalty to any specific community. Such a person is barely human, living accordingly only to his desires and impulses: he is inherently sociopathic. The proof of Herder’s ideas here is evident in the present day. Herder writes, mocking the pretensions of the modern cosmopolitan spirit:

‘All national characters, thank God, have become extinct; we all love one another, or, rather no one feels the need of loving anyone else. We all associate with one another, all are completely equal—cultured, polite, very happy; we have, it is true no fatherland, no one for whom we live; but we are philanthropists and citizens of the world. Most of the rulers already speak French, and soon we all shall do so. And then—bliss! The golden era is dawning again when all the world has one tongue and one language; there shall be one flock and one shepherd!’

[I've also heard Sam Dickson say that the individualist who praises cosmopolitanism is a sociopath. This is the exact word he has used.]

In other words, Yehoshua is saying that even the small number of Israeli deaths attributed to ALL the above-mentioned rockets — thousands of them — are either outright concoctions or were actually caused by Israeli friendly fire, etc. Of course, we have no way of being certain about that, although one thing seems sure because Olmert’s own spokesman, Mark Regev, admitted as much on camera — Hamas did not fire a single rocket at Israel during the entire period of last year’s ceasefire. No doubt those things have the potential to be lethal, but I suspect that any Israeli deaths from those rockets may have resulted from disturbance of their sleep at night.

And now there are more reports of Israelis using DIME (dense inert metal explosive) weapons in Gaza. These produce virtually no shrapnel beyond a radius of four meters and thus are “safer” for use in densely populated civilian centers like Gaza — except for the fact that the powdered tungsten used in these explosives is EXTREMELY carcinogenic. So Palestinians exposed to these weapons can expect to develop deadly cancers over the next few months or years . . .

So to allow him to speak with his own voice, here’s an online net-book that contains excerpts from some of Hamann’s writings:

http://www.archive.org/details/jghamann17301788013654mbp

“In Hamann’s railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries’ irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers–in appreciation and dissent–is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements.”

http://www.amazon.ca/Three-Critics-Enlightenment-Hamann-Herder/dp/0691057265

These both books should be quite easy to find from academic libraries.

A review of Berlin’s Hamann book (in full only for subscribers):

“The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and, in particular, of all forms of rationalism of his time (he lived and died in the eighteenth century) was Johann Georg Hamann, who came to be known as the Magus of the North. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the Romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method in any guise was considerable and perhaps crucial.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=2421

…followed by some scholarly exchange:

“To call Hamann an anti-rationalist is to say that he attacked the methods by which the great rationalists of the seventeenth century, and their descendants and critics in the French Enlightenment (and after them such rational thinkers as Bentham, Mill, William James, Moore, Russell, and the great majority of English-speaking philosophers of our time), stated, analyzed, and sought to justify their views, and by which they criticized those of their opponents. It is this that makes the fact that Hamann is the first and most vehement opponent of the French Enlightenment and its descendants a phenomenon of historical importance.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2403

His student, Johann Gottfried von Herder, is also worth studying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder

I’m fascinated by the similarities between these Volkish men (German to the marrow) and Kinism in our own time. Truly, all that we hold dear in life was given to us by “racists” in ages long forgotten.

“Herder’s focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a ‘nation’ extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales…

Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism – ‘he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself’, whilst teaching that ‘in a certain sense every human perfection is national’. Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that ‘there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant’. Explanation that the Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of ‘the people’ as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.

The nation, however was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having ‘wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters’. Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that ‘the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species‘, isolated since ‘each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity‘. With no need for comparison since ‘every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others’ for ‘do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?’…

While regarding the Jews as aliens in Europe, he refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that ‘notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth’…

‘It is the apparent plan of nature that as one human being, so also one generation, and also one nationality learn, learn incessantly, from and with the others, until all have comprehended the difficult lesson: No nationality has been solely designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good. Hence no nationality of Europe may separate itself sharply, and foolishly say, With us alone, with us dwells all wisdom.”

This is outstanding! While I would quibble with his definition of species, not to mention his support for the French Revolution, and the idea that romanticism is an adequate response to modernism, I see an unbroken chain of thought from before his time to ours, rooted in Christ and Folk, that has helped a remnant to stay alive in the wilderness, so to speak. There is no way to absorb such brilliance without a love for Christ and a consequent desire to obey His command to care for our own. Since so many Christians in our day have gnosticized their faith, I fear that they will read these quotes and be as perplexed as were the Pharisees after hearing parables. But I hope not.

Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788),
Preacher of Christ in the Wilderness of the Enlightenment

” He anticipated the work of such modern “pre-suppositionalists” as Cornelius Van Til and Rousas John Rushdoony and, yes, the creationist movement since the 1960′s. ”

http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v07n3p19.htm

Hamann was largely responsible for the original launching of that first great anti-modernist, counter-revolutionary phenomenon in the Western world, the “Romantic movement”.

Völkisch romantic racialism was thus an indirect product of the initiative of this anti-Enlightenment Christian polemicist. A famous Jewish historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin, wrote a whole book about him:

” Sir Isaiah Berlin here explores the world and the ideas of a man he calls the Enlightenment’s “most passionate, consistent, extreme, and implacable enemy”, a philosopher whom he considers perhaps the only “wholly original critic of modern times”. J.G. Hamann was an eccentric Prussian thinker of the eighteenth century whose peculiar and difficult work was cherished by Kant, Goethe, and other luminaries, yet to the twentieth century this self-styled Magus of the North is all but unknown. ”

http://www.ecampus.com/bk_detail.asp?isbn=0374196575

http://defamer.com/5129900/ann-coulter-botches-view-audition