Races in the Field: Encounters & Taxonomy in the grand Océan

Abstract

The German philosopher and Protestant divine Herder often provoked extreme responses. Kant (1785b:22, 154), his teacher, disparaged his lack of intellectual rigour, excessively ‘poetic language’, undisciplined empiricism, and reliance on ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herder’s own student and co-leader of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, recoiled from aspects of his thinking and from the sting of his ‘generally ugly disposition’ (Laan 1986:562).¹ Ever since, competing political, philosophical, or biological teleologies have drawn selectively on internal tensions in Herder’s texts to produce anachronistic present judgements on his meanings and influence. He has been serially feted or damned — as opponent of slavery, anti-imperialist, and champion of cultural plurality; as founder of the modern notions of history, cultural relativism, and cultural anthropology; as precursor of biological racism, ‘aggressive’ nationalism, and ultimately Nazism.² Eschewing teleology, I focus on Herder’s expressions of the theme of human difference in the second volume of Ideen zur Philosophie des Geschichte der Menschheit (1785).³