affirmative historicist traditions with which we are presently concerned. German historians in this century have tended to stress that historicism involved the negation of the idea of progress. This was true only to the extent that the historicist position denied that there was any unilinear advance in history or that history developed according to a scheme. In another sense, however, German historicism was much more optimistic about the meaningfulness of history than were even adherents of the classical idea of progress. Theories of progress may assume either that human advancement is inevitable and that the process of history is determined in an upward direction (Hegel, Saint-Simon, Marx, Comte), or that man can be perfected, that progress is possible if man applies rationality to human institutions. Either position, particularly the second (the two positions do not necessarily exclude each other) implies that there is irrationality in the existing world; that there is a conflict between the world as it should be, and one day may be, and the world as it is. In this sense, the idea of progress still adheres to the tradition of natural law. German historicism on the other hand, assumes that all that has grown naturally or historically is good. “Every nation has its center of happiness within it.”26 History is the source of real value.
To be sure, there are the seeds of relativism in this concept, for it assumes that all knowledge and all values are related to concrete cultural and historical settings. Such a supposition could lead to the anarchy of values.27 The historicism of Herder rests upon the firm belief that there is a divine purpose in history, that “Providence guides the path of development onward.”28 All of Nature and of history reflect God. Herder compares history to a stream rushing to the ocean or to a growing tree. History is indeed meaningful, the “scene of a guiding intention on earth, although we do not perceive this ultimate purpose at once.29 Basically, mankind is still one, according to Herder. However, the meaning of history is not found in the direction of events toward a rational end, but in the multiplicity of ways in which the human mind expresses itself in the diversity of nations.
Truth, value, and beauty are not one, but many. They are found only in history and manifest themselves only in the national spirit. True poetry and true art for Herder are thus always national and historical. He set to work to compile and translate his great anthologies of folk poetry. For him, as for much of nineteenth-century Germany, history became the cornerstone of true culture. Implied in this concept is the assumption that all meaningful philosophy must become history of philosophy, and all theology the history of theology.
In Also a Philosophy of History, Herder had laid the foundations for a historicism which spread far beyond the German boundaries. Herder’s theory directly contributed to the reawakening of historical interest. His writings were translated into the Slavic languages, as well as into French and English. His ideas merged with the broad stream of Romantic philosophy to challenge Enlightenment doctrines throughout Europe; yet historicist doctrine by no means had been fully developed. Herder had presented the most coherent theory of historicism, but several important concepts that later played a significant role in the German historical tradition of the nineteenth century were still missing in his writings or had not been fully developed by him.
Moreover, historicism was by no means the dominant intellectual attitude in Germany in the late eighteenth century; nor was it the sole challenger of the Enlightenment faith in human rationality. We have already cited the strong currents of pietism and traditionalism. Important in the transition from natural law doctrine to historicism were two trends of thought which in many ways were still committed to Enlightenment ideals, but nevertheless contributed to the modification and completion of historicist doctrine. These were the Humanitätsideal which further defined the idea of the individual, and German idealistic philosophy which elaborated upon the idea of identity, a central element in historicist faith. The Humanitätsideal is difficult to define because it is so intimately interwoven with the personalities of the small group of eminent, creative thinkers who gave it expression: Goethe, Herder, Winckelmann, Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, each of whom left a different and personal imprint.30 It derives a good deal of its original inspiration from Winckelmann’s studies of classical Greek art and from Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, written in his more mature years.
These writers agree with the Enlightenment that there is a common humanity, a certain nobility and dignity present in seed form in all men. “The purpose of our existence,” Herder comments, “is to develop this incipient element of humanity (Humanität) fully within us.… Our ability to reason is to be developed to reason; our finer senses are to be cultivated for art; our instincts are to achieve genuine freedom and beauty; our energies are to be turned to the love of man.”31 Still, if the Enlightenment stresses the common characteristics of man and his rationality, the Humanitätsideal stresses the diversity of man and the interrelation of all aspects of his personality, of rationality and irrationality, into a harmonious whole. Every individual is different, and the task incumbent upon each one is to develop his own unique personality to the fullest.32 Hence the idealization of the Greeks. “Mankind as a whole,” writes Wilhelm von Humboldt, “exists only in the never attainable totality of all individualities that come into existence one after another.”33 Peculiarly absent from the group’s admiration of the Greeks, however, is an appreciation of the great value which the Greeks had placed on politics. Freedom for these German thinkers was, first of all, an inner, spiritual matter rather than a political concept, as it was for much of Enlightenment thought. For Goethe and Humboldt the individual person constitutes the prime unit of which humanity is composed; for Herder the nations, too, possess the characteristics of individuality to a greater extent than individual persons. Nevertheless, Herder’s concept of nationality assumes a basic equality of worth among all nations as contributors to the richness of the human spirit. In this sense, he is cosmopolitan in spirit no less than Goethe.
The concept of individuality contained within the Humanitätsideal differs from Enlightenment theories of the individual in still another important way, particularly from those ideas which had been developed by associationist psychology (e.g., Locke, Condillac, Hume, and others) or utilitarianism (Bentham, James Mill). For Wilhelm von Humboldt the individual is not found in the empirical person we perceive, but in the higher idea he represents. The purpose of man’s life is thus emphatically not “happiness,” but rather the fulfillment of this idea. Wilhelm von Humboldt argues against state action in behalf of the welfare of the citizens since such action misunderstands the “dignity of man.”34 Kant similarly had written in his Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint that Nature is not concerned with man’s “living well,” but only with his “living in dignity.”35 The rejection of “happiness” as an end of life was common to the whole tradition of historicist thought from Humboldt and Ranke to Meinecke. “Eudaemonism” became a pejorative term by which German historians tried to dissociate their own idealistic position from most of English and French historical thought.36 In the concept of the individual as the expression of an idea lies the link between the theory that every individual possesses “individuality” and that each collective group, too, is an “individuality.” Groups and individuals share in the expression of ideas. It was therefore not very difficult for Humboldt, who at first had recognized that only individual persons possess the characteristics of individuality, to admit this applies to states and nations as well.
The Enlightenment concept of natural law underwent further revision in German philosophic discussion after Kant. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all accepted the theory of the basic uniqueness of individuals and nations in history. At the same time, they also accepted the Enlightenment faith in a rational universe. They attempted to solve this dilemma by seeing in reason not an abstract norm divorced from abstract reality, but rather something immanent within reality. Kant had already suggested in the Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint that reason was operative in history. He had assumed that “all the natural potentialities of any creature are destined to develop once fully and to the end for which they are intended,”37 and that the history of the world similarly saw the steady growth of rationality. Hegel had described history as the development by which the rational idea
