Herder On The Relation Between Language and World

North American Philosophical Publications
Herder on the Relation between Language and World

Author(s): Sonia Sikka
Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), pp. 183-200
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical
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History of Philosophy Quarterly
Volume 21, Number 2, April 2004
HERDER ON THE RELATION BETWEEN

LANGUAGE AND WORLD
Sonia Sikka
Herdernihilo,
is often
a theorycredited with having
of language sometimes invented,
referred to as "lin albeit not ex
guistic constitutivism."1 Against older conceptions of language that
construed it as external to thought, a sort of clothing placed on
ideas for the purpose of communication, this theory holds that
thought is essentially dependent upon language, and that language
is creative rather than merely descriptive. Language is "more than
a tool," Herder writes, for "words and ideas are intimately con
nected."2 And of the human inventor of language he says: "In
naming everything, and ordering it in relation to himself and his
sensitivity, he becomes the imitator of divinity, the second cre
ator, thus also poiesis, a poet."3 On the basis of remarks like these,
commentators have made strong claims about the constitutive role
of language in Herder's view of both the human subject and the
objects it apprehends. Michael Morton, for instance, maintains
that, for Herder, "there is no such thing as prelinguistic conscious
ness, and in the absence of consciousness it plainly makes no sense
to speak of human beings . . . similarly, there can be no such thing
as an extra-linguistic reality external to us."4 Somewhat less radi
cally, Vicki Spencer suggests that, according to Herder's
"expressivist" theory, "language is the form in which human
thoughts are moulded and shaped, and it is thereby credited with
constituting the very contents of our consciousness."5
The description of Herder's theory of language as "expressivist"
rather than "designative" was first proposed by Charles Taylor.
Taylor argues that expressivist theories in general conceive of
linguistic activity as a process whereby we do not merely attach
labels to our experiences and feelings, but "formulate" or "articu
late" them. "Through language," that is, "we bring to explicit
183
184 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY
awareness what we formerly only had an implicit sense of."6

Herder's revolutionary insight, moreover, was that "in being able
to express our feelings, we give them a reflective dimension that
transforms them," where many of our specifically human feel
ings are actually enabled by this process of articulation.7
Interpretations like the above might leave the impression that
Herder embraced a kind of linguistic idealism. If language is held
to be constitutive in the interrelated senses that, (1) our con
sciousness of ourselves and the world around us is dependent upon
it, and (2) linguistic formulation transforms its subject, the conse
quence would seem to be that language determines the reality
we encounter, rather than the other way around. This was cer
tainly the direction in which Nietzsche developed the idea that
language is fundamentally "poetic."8 It is not, however, Herder's
view. Significantly, Taylor's analysis avoids terms likening the
process of articulation to construction or fictionalization9 in fa
vor of ones suggesting illumination, a getting clearer about
things.10 Furthermore, as Michael Forster has recently pointed
out, Herder actually holds "a quasi-empiricist theory of mean
ings or concepts according to which all our meanings or concepts
are of their nature based in (perceptual or affective) sensation."11
This is a gz/as/-empiricist theory because, as Forster notes, "the
sensations which ground concepts inevitably undergo a transfor
mation as the concepts are acquired, their final required nature
being one that they can only have along with their concepts."12
But it is an empiricist theory because concepts are shaped by,
and therefore ultimately refer to, sensations, with "the implica
tion for interpretation that in order to understand another
person's concepts an interpreter must not only master the person's
word-usage in an external way but must also in some manner
recapture the person's relevant sensations."13
My primary purpose in this essay is to examine the character
of these "sensations." Without wanting to deny or downplay the
constitutive and transformative dimensions of language within
Herder's thought, I focus instead on the ways in which it remains
a kind of mimesis, but one that reflects the "world" as encoun
tered by a given people. One respect in which Herder's reflections
on language are valuable, I believe, has to do with their sensitiv
ity to the intimate relation between the specific environment in
which people are embedded, and their affective and intellectual
lives. Language, for Herder, is a kind of space between these, I
argue, articulating the "sensations" of groups of individuals whose
existence unfolds in this place, through these activities?sensations
THE RELATION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND WORLD 185
in which subject and object, body, emotion, and understanding

are profoundly intertwined. Herder's insights into the connec
tions between these elements, moreover, while problematic in
certain respects, help to highlight some important features of
language as a constituent of cultural identity.
My analysis begins with a discussion of three concepts that
are central to Herder's understanding of language: Besonnenheit
or "reflection"; Empfindung, "sensation" or "feeling"; and Klima,
"climate" in a broad sense that includes the humanly constructed
environment along with the natural one. Herder's development
of these concepts in relation to his theory of language builds
upon themes already broached by Condillac, in spite of Herder's
harsh criticisms of the latter in his own essay, "On the Origin
of Language." The first section of this paper therefore situates
Herder in relation to Condillac, while the second section draws
out some implications of the theory of meaning that emerges
from Herder's account.
I. Three Central Concepts:

Besonnenheit, Empfindung, Klima
Herder locates the "origin" of language, at least in the sense of
that which makes language possible, in the human capacity for
Besonnenheit or "Reflection." This is the capacity to stand back
from the "ocean of sensation" that rushes over one and to recog
nize a single, distinctive property, "one wave," within that ocean.14
Through such recognition, human beings are able to distinguish
between things on the basis of their proper characteristics, and to
assign marks signifying the thing that has been identified in this
manner. The capacity for language within this theory is then closely
connected with freedom, for, as Irmscher notes, its source lies in
"the human ability to distance oneself from impressions of reality
and to make them and oneself the object of a free determination."15
The fundamental idea here is not original to Herder. Condillac
had already, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge,
described r?fl?chir as a process in which, our minds having been
freed from the objects pressing upon them, "we are able to turn
our attention successively to various objects or to different parts
of a single object," and he had linked this process to the employ
ment of signs.16 Thus, while Herder complains, in the language
essay, that Condillac's account begs the question about the ori
gin of language, presupposing the very capacity (reflection) that
makes it possible to attach signs to impressions in the first place,
this is not true.17 Nor is it entirely true, as Kurt M?ller-Vollmer

claims, that Condillac thinks reflection is produced by signs, while
Herder thinks signs are produced by reflection.18 Actually,
Condillac's analysis suggests that reflection and the use of signs
work together, and are mutually productive.19 Moreover, Condillac
had even anticipated the objection that his account of this pro
cess appears to be circular:
It seems that we would not be able to employ institutional
signs, if we were not already capable of reflecting sufficiently
to choose these signs and to attach them to ideas: how then,
someone might object, can the exercise of reflection be acquired
by the use of signs?
I respond that I will resolve this difficulty when I present the
history of language. Here it suffices for me to note that it has
not escaped my attention. (Essai, 461)
This response, however, points to a genuine difference between
Herder and Condillac. For one thing, Herder's criticisms demon
strate that Condillac's account of the history of language does
not resolve the difficulty noted in these lines. Not only does it set
up a highly artificial situation that could not correspond to any
actual history?two children alone without speech?but it reaf
firms the problem of circularity. The children could not learn to
connect the cries they utter with meanings unless they were al
ready capable of reflection, but, in that case, Condillac has not
explained how the capacity for language evolves (Sprache, 708
9). Now, Herder's "solution," which seems to consist simply in
saying that the process of isolating distinguishing characteris
tics is already language,20 does not answer this question, either,
and perhaps it never intended to. What it does show, though, is
that while Condillac grounds the development of language in the
need for communication, Herder sees it as arising from an "in
ner" need to discern the outlines of things within the chaos of
impressions received through the senses. The relevant contrast
in this case is not between expression and designation, but be
tween expression and communication. For Herder, the idea that
the human inventor of language is fundamentally a poet means
not only that he is creative, but also that he is impelled to find
the right expressions for his experiences quite independently of
any practical need for communication.
This difference is subtly reflected in Condillac's and Herder's
otherwise very similar statements about the rootedness of all ideas
in experience, and the fundamentally "interested" character of
this experience. Condillac, discussing the latter point, says that

"things do not attract our attention except through the relation
they have to our temperament, to our passions, to our state, or,
in short, to our wants," and that the connections between our
ideas reflect this fact (Essai, 29). Accordingly, words were prob
ably first invented to communicate fears and wants to one another
(Essai, 154-57). Herder also notes that human beings relate ev
erything to themselves (Sprache, 738). Ideas, he claims in a later
work, are produced by "that which attracts, the interesting, id
quod interest" (Metakritik, 385; cf. Sprache, 739).
The word Herder most commonly uses when insisting upon the
rootedness of thought in experience, moreover, is Empfindung, a
word meaning "sensation," but of a form that cannot be separated
from feeling and sensitivity, from affect. Thus, Herder and
Condillac both ground thought in "sensations," where these in
clude perceptions of the external world through the physical
sense-organs, and "inner" emotional states. To speak more pre
cisely, "sensations" are, for both Condillac and Herder, produced
by a complex interplay of perception and emotion, through which
the world is related to the sensing person. Herder does not, how
ever, situate the affective character of language within a
utilitarian account of its invention, as Condillac does. He sug
gests, rather, that language has its source in a human need simply
to give expression to impressions; that is why the first language
was song (Sprache, 740). In "On Cognition and Sensation in the
Human Soul," Herder says that "the person who senses (der
empfindende Mensch) feels himself in everything, feels everything
out of himself, and presses upon it his own image, his impres
sion."21 Language arose because this sensing person "had to, he
wanted to, express (?u?ern) what he saw and felt in himself; thus,
supported by voice and gesture, there came into being, in the in
ner impressions of his soul, an utterable sign, a word" (Metakritik,
p. 420). Language therefore reflects the world as encountered by
a particular feeling, sensing, willing creature, and it reflects at
the same time the nature of this creature as fundamentally "po
etic." Its construction reveals the essential property that
separates human beings from other animals: their capacity and
need to take in the world from a particular perspective, and to
express that perspective in concrete forms. Naturally, it is po
etry itself that reveals this best. With reference to Hebrew poetry,
Herder writes: "Images stream into the soul from outside: sensa
tion stamps its seal upon them and seeks to express them through
gestures, sounds and signs" (Ebr?ischen Poesie, 962).
The "sensations" in which words are ultimately rooted, then,

are sensations of the world as selected, and inflected, by a given
form of seeing and feeling. This view clearly has much in com
mon with the empiricism of Locke and Condillac, but it is also
influenced by Leibniz. Like Locke, Herder rejects the existence
of innate ideas, claiming instead that all of our ideas can be traced
to sensations.22 Like Condillac, he weds ideas to language, and
stresses the role of interest in determining what catches our at
tention. But Herder's Leibnizian view that "every creature has
its own, a new, world" (Ideen, 89) and that the human soul is "a
mirror of the world" (Ideen, 198) means that one cannot genu
inely separate the "inner" and "outer" with respect to sensation.
Sensation is "of the world that communicates itself to a given
sentient creature, in accord with the disclosive powers of that
creature, which in turn are guided by needs and drives. Human
beings are unique in their ability to achieve a certain distance
from these needs and drives so as to reflect with greater clarity
the world that is given to them. Words refer to elements within
this world. Thus, while Herder is famous for the view, a staple of
linguistic constitutivism, that "thought sticks to the expression"
(Fragmente, 557), it is no less true for him that expressions stick
to sensations, and that sensations stick to the world.
This means that the content of words and ideas, of language
and thought, has its primal source in the experience of the body
within a particular setting. "We only sense what our nerves give
to us," Herder writes in the language essay; "only on the basis of
this, and in accordance with it, can we think" (Sprache, 351).
Because "our thought depends upon sensation" (Sprache, 351),
"we have no concept of anything that lies outside the circle of our
sensations" (Ideen, 294), which in turn occur within the context
of a specific Klima. The term Klima, in Herder's usage, covers
not only "climate," and not only natural environment, but all of
the very concrete elements that shape an individual's existence:
The elevation or depression of a region, its constitution and
products, the food and drink a person consumes, the manner
of life he follows, the work he performs, clothing, even cus
tomary positions, pleasures and arts, along with a host of other
circumstances, which operate powerfully in connection with
one's life; all these belong to the portrait of this greatly chang
ing Klima. (Ideen, 266)
Marion Heinz, in a monograph on Herder's theory of knowledge,
aptly titled Sensual Idealism, provides a helpful summary of the
connection between thought, sensation, and Klima:
The confined human soul needs sensations that present to it an

image of the universe. . . . Sensations deliver raw materials to
the soul, which are processed in understanding. . . . The hu
man soul is not only reliant upon the givenness of representa
tions, it is also dependent upon which particular sensations are
granted to it through its physical constitution and its position
in a determinate spatial and temporal situation. For Herder,
the soul itself takes on a different shape in accordance with the
specific natural and artificial, i.e., humanly produced, circum
stances in which its activity unfolds. Arts, manual trades, and
forms of thought show, for Herder, that human beings only
understand on the basis of their sensations.23
Indeed, reason, Vernunft, is not, for Herder, a separate faculty of

the soul, entirely distinct from perception (Sprache, 717-718). It
is, rather, a manner of perceiving or hearing, a Vernehmen, which
takes note of what is one and the same in the things it encoun
ters and classes them together on this basis (Metakritik, 385, 499).
It is, therefore, a putting together, & Zusammennehmen, of many
into one (Metakritik, 499), where this categorization is guided
not by any "pure reason," but by the attentive listening of an
embodied, interested, situated being.24 Herder's critique of Kant
rests upon this view of the relation between reason and experi
ence,25 as does his call for a kind of deconstruction of concepts,
particularly the very abstract concepts of philosophy, which would
trace their genealogy back to its point of origin in sensation.26
Thus, words, for Herder, are ultimately derived from sensa
tions, which in turn belong to a an embodied life moving and
feeling within a specific Klima. The acts of reflection that lead to
the invention of words involve a marking of patterns among these
sensations. Language is consequently strongly bound to specific
forms of life, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase. Alternatively, draw
ing on Heidegger, one might say that it articulates the
intelligibility of a particular world. The "meaning" of words is
then constituted by their reference-relation to items whose ap
pearance is determined by their place within the interested life
of the human beings who grasp them. Signification and signifi
cance cannot be separated here, because the thing that is named
has entered awareness, and been marked, precisely through this
interested grasp. The name indicates the thing as sensed, where
this sensing, as I have pointed out but want to emphasize, is tied
to an affected body and, through this body, to a physical place.
Accordingly, the name resonates with the significance of the thing
named within the context of the life led in this place. These names
are not, of course, invented anew by every generation; tradition
plays a profound role in shaping and transmitting a language

and corresponding mode of representation (Vorstellungsart)
(Ideen, 298). But what tradition hands down from one generation
to the next is the reflection, in concrete forms of expression, pre
cisely of the life led in a given place, whose course then forms the
history of a specific community. "The mode of representation of
each nation is the more deeply imprinted upon it because it is
their own, bound to their sky and their earth, sprung from their
form of life (Lebensart), inherited from their fathers and forefa
thers" (Ideen, 298).
There is then something problematic about a common percep
tion that the identity of a nation or people (Nation, Volk) rests,
in Herder's view, primarily upon its language. F. M. Barnard,
for instance, claims that "even when Herder did recognize that
factors other than language partook in fashioning national char
acter, he never ceased to regard the linguistic element as the
decisive determinant."27 It follows that "the nation remains in
tact provided it maintains its distinctive linguistic traditions."28
In a sense, this is true, but language, for Herder, is entangled
with life and world, and its meaningfulness is oriented towards
these. Language, after all, refers, so that if the reality to which it
refers changes significantly, or disappears altogether, the lan
guage that once expressed this reality becomes hollow, empty of
any genuine sense. Symbols lose their meaning, Herder suggests,
"when they are not often connected with their objects through
active use, so as to remain in meaningful remembrance" (Ideen,
373). Certainly, imagination is powerfully involved in the con
struction of the stories and mythologies of a given people, which
contribute to forming their identities, but the elements with which
the imagination works in producing these stories are still drawn
from the experiences of life within a given Klima.29 Even these
stories, therefore, in a way "refer" to the actual world of a people:
their habits and customary activities, their place of dwelling, their
food and drink, the character of their relations with one another.
Language preserves the identity of a people only to the extent
that it preserves this world.
I alluded earlier to Michael Forster's claim that meaning, for
Herder, is based in sensation. Forster also claims, though, that
Herder's position combines this doctrine with another one,
namely, the doctrine that meaning just consists in word-usage,
and he claims that these two doctrines are not incompatible.30 In
light of my analysis so far, I would develop these claims in the
following way. Meaning is indeed based in sensation, for Herder,
as all words ultimately refer to experienced "things," in the broad

est sense of anything that can be experienced, including thoughts,
feelings, and events. Words only remain meaningful, moreover,
if they continue to be connected with these things. On the other
hand, the things in question are not objects that could be de
scribed just as well in any language, and certainly not in a
language from which the first-person perspective is absent. They
are, rather, elements whose character is determined by their place
within collective patterns of significance. They are pieces of a
shared human world, a life-world, to use Husserl's term. Thus,
meaning is use, because the web of a specific language maps the
world of sensations from which it is spun, and one cannot refer
the words ofthat language to their corresponding sensations with
out knowing how the words are used?in which kinds of discourse,
in which contexts and circumstances, associated with which ac
tivities and feelings. An external observer will not be able to
understand the sensations, to imagine them, without this knowl
edge. In other words, I would maintain that there is a respect in
which Herder has a correspondence theory of meaning. But his
position is distinguished from older versions of this theory by his
conception of what words correspond to: not "neutral" objects,
intelligible to any intellect and therefore expressible in any lan
guage, but things with qualities that present themselves only in
relation to the concrete life of a definite "we." This position has
important implications for interpretation and translation, for the
role of Klima in forming a language, and for the role of language
in forming a cultural identity.
II. Language and Culture

There is no doubt that language occupies a central place in
Herder's understanding of the constituents of cultural identity.
"Whoever is raised in the same language," he writes, "whoever
learns to pour his heart, to express his soul, in it belongs to the
people (Volk) of this language" (Briefe, 304). As this sentence re
veals, Herder tends to stress the affective rather than the
cognitive dimension of language's effect on the "soul." He focuses,
that is, less on the way that language formulates the beliefs of
people belonging to a particular linguistic community than on
how it expresses their feelings. More precisely, Herder challenges
what he sees as the artificially strict distinctions often drawn
between such aspects of being human (Metakritik, 319). A lan
guage speaks of the world in which people dwell, and that world
is grasped not with one faculty and then another, but with the
whole being of persons: their bodies, their emotions, their under

standing, where these interpenetrate one another so profoundly
that the distinction between them is virtual rather than real.
Herder maintains that, because our first grasp of the world, as
children, has an especially profound effect on making us who we
are, a first language occupies a special position in the construc
tion of our identities:
Our mother language was at the same time the first world
that we saw, the first sensations that we felt, the first activ
ity and happiness that we enjoyed! The accompanying ideas
of place and time, of love and hate, of happiness and action,
and whatever the fiery, swelling soul of youth first thought in
connection with these, is all jointly immortalized?now lan
guage is already a lineage (Stamm). (Sprache, 787)
When recalled, therefore, the words of a first language actually
represent not objects, not beliefs, and not even emotions, but the
interwovenness of these with one another in the fabric of a holis
tically experienced world. This is the world to which, I have
suggested, language ultimately "sticks" on Herder's account, so
that a word evokes not one idea but the whole host of impres
sions connected with the context in which one learned to use it.
Herder never loses sight of this attachment of language to an
experienced world in his discussions of the subject. It is signifi
cant that, with all of his interest in language, Herder is not inclined
to engage in investigations of syntax or semantics that treat lan
guage as an object in itself, capable of being regarded independently
of its sources and referents. Thus, when Charles Taylor, drawing
a parallel between Herder and Wittgenstein, says that, for Herder,
"a word has meaning only within a lexicon and a context of lan
guage practices, which are ultimately embedded in a form of life,"31
the accent needs to fall on this last aspect. In fact, "form of life,"
Lebensart, is a term Herder himself uses, but generally in combi
nation with other factors that are said to affect the character of a
nation, which language, in turn, reflects. In a passage in the Ideas,
discussing the elements that shaped the original character of an
cient peoples, Lebensart is mentioned along with family traits,
regional climate, upbringing, employments, and activities (Ideen,
508). Herder's account highlights the way in which language re
flects and reproduces the texture of such elements.
At this point, I would like to adduce an example to illustrate
this feature of Herder's analysis of language. It is taken from the
kind of language with which Herder was most concerned: "use
less" language, motivated not by any practical end but by the

need for expression that Herder saw as fundamental to the hu
man spirit. A line in a Hindi song runs: "Wherever the sun may
go, let its dh?p not fall upon you."32 The Oxford Hindi-English
Dictionary renders the meaning of the word dh?p into English
as: "light or heat of the sun; sunshine."33 The problem is, if, in
the above sentence, one translates dh?p as "light," the sentence
sounds like a curse, whereas it is actually intended as a blessing,
in a context expressing love. "Heat" might be more appropriate,
but the lines that follow make better sense if one imagines dh?p
as light: "The shades of these tresses are calling you,/Come let
me make for you a canopy of eyelashes." The word is difficult to
translate simply because the climate, in the most literal sense,
in which these two languages, Hindi and English, evolved is strik
ingly different. The light of the sun is frequently very hot in South
Asia, and much of the time there is more of it than one might
like. This is not true of England. Consequently, the word dh?p
can have negative connotations that are quite alien to the term
"sunshine." Conventions of poetic diction within a particular tra
dition of love poetry also affect the choice of words, and the
resonances they carry, in the above-cited lines. However, Herder
always locates genuine understanding not in an external mas
tery of such conventions, but in an imaginative "feeling one's way
into" (Einf?hlung)34 the life that supports them. In this case, one
has to imagine the place that sun and shade might occupy in the
lives of people who dwell?sense, feel, fall in love?in a hot re
gion of the world (the song also refers to black clouds and rain,
typical of savan, the rainy season associated with lovers). The
difficulty of translation here rests not in any deep conceptual
incommensurability that would in principle rule out mutual un
derstanding, but just in the fact that the realities reflected in, and
expressed by, the words of the two languages are not the same.
These "realities," moreover, exist in a space constituted by the
interaction of human beings with their environments. Language
articulates this space, where the "internal" cannot be separated
from the "external." Vicki Spencer, discussing the variations be
tween languages, claims that "Herder identifies two main factors
which contribute to these variations: external environmental fac
tors such as climate and geography, and internal circumstances
including dispositions and attitudes arising from a community's
collective experiences and from relations between families and
individuals within communities."35 This is true, but Herder also
draws attention to the way these two factors are interlaced within
the spirit of a people, which is revealed in "the physiognomy of

its speech" (Ideen, 353). Barnard expresses this point by suggest
ing that "the word Weltanschauung, in its most literal sense,
captures perhaps best the compass of divergent ways of encoun
tering the outside from the inside."36 I would add that the
divergence, for Herder, is due partly to the fact that the "out
side" is physically different for different nations, a circumstance
that shapes the character of the "inside."
The deep connection Herder posits between people and place,
between Volk and Klima, forms one facet of his "organic" concep
tion of cultural identity. It seems to imply that a people is only
"whole," and its language only properly meaningful, when both
remain attached to the geographical region in which their origi
nal character took shape. Herder is well aware, though, that
people have migrated, and taken their languages and cultures
with them. He therefore recognizes the limitations of the botani
cal metaphors he likes to use in describing the relation between
peoples and places. With respect to the nations of the world, he
writes: "If each of these nations had remained in its place, one
could regard the earth as a garden, where here this human na
tional plant, there that one, blooms in its own shape and nature"
(Ideen, 508-9). "But since people are not firmly rooted plants,"
he continues, "over time they could, and had to, change their place
and cultivate themselves more or less differently in another re
gion, often driven by the harsh accidents of hunger, earthquake,
war etc." (Ideen, 509). In these cases, the transplanted peoples
make new homes for themselves, homes whose structure is a com
pound of ideas from the old and the new country (Ideen, 509).
And the period of this construction, Herder remarks, is commonly
called "the youthful bloom of nations" (Ideen, 509).
Nonetheless, in spite of such observations, Herder does seem
to favor identities that are unitary rather than complex, and he
tends to see development in a single place as essential to main
taining the integrity of a culture. That is why, while he
enthusiastically admires the culture and language of the ancient
Hebrews, he is much less enthusiastic about the condition of Jew
ish identity in the diaspora. According to Herder, once the Jewish
people were no longer gathered together in a particular place,
their culture deteriorated and their language became "a sad mix
ture" (Ebr?ischen Poesie, 678). The remedies ultimately proposed
by Herder are a return to of Jews to their homeland in Palestine
and/or their full assimilation to the cultures upon which they
have been, as he sees it, grafted.37 As Jeffrey Grossman points
out, Herder's insistence on the connection between place and iden

tity is generally deployed in opposition to imperialism and
slavery.38 But it also reveals, Grossman argues, "the limits of his
tolerance," which "appear when he discusses peoples who are, in
his view not 'organically' rooted in a specific region of the world
and whose language lacks the proper level of organic develop
ment with its own orderly history."39 What differentiates these
peoples?for instance, Jews in the diaspora?from those whose
migrations led to a new youth (and that includes Israelites in an
earlier period of their history [Ideen, 509]) is the question of
whether the resulting identity is best described as a compound,
where a genuine fusion of the old and the new has occurred, or a
mixture of elements that remain disparate. Herder interprets
diasporic Jewish identity as belonging to the latter category. Pre
sumably, he would have passed a similar judgement on the hybrid
and hyphenated identities of immigrants in a later age, although
he would also have been sensitive to the circumstances motivat
ing these relocations.
One might want to question Herder's view that singleness of
identity is always to be preferred over what Salman Rushdie has
called "mongrelization."40 The basis for this preference is not ob
vious; perhaps it involves an aesthetic judgement. On the other
hand, if Herder's view of the relation between language and place
contains at least a measure of truth, as I believe it does, it fol
lows that a condition in which an individual is dislocated from
the world reflected in his or her first language will be experi
enced as containing an element of alienation, and this is not an
aesthetic point but a psychological one. Of course, many of the
constituents of a "world" can themselves be relocated?customs,
activities, food, clothing?but what cannot be reproduced else
where is the intimate interconnection of these with an original
place, and that is what a first language expresses and evokes. I
am not trying to imply here that people should not emigrate; they
have some pretty good reasons for doing so. My point is, rather,
that although Herder's preference for unitary cultural identities
can be challenged, he is nonetheless right to suggest that trans
plantation results in a certain lack of organic "fit" between a first
language and a new world. A consequence for identity is that the
speakers?or, more accurately, the "hearers"?of this language
remain partly oriented towards the old world of which it speaks,
and therefore not fully at home in their new location (whether
being fully at home in this respect is always desirable is a sepa
rate question). More generally, Herder's reflections on this issue
draw attention to one reason why a first language might occupy

an important place in the lives and identities of people, whether
they move very far or not.
Conclusion
I alluded earlier to Michael Forster's claim that, on Herder's
theory of language, understanding another person's concepts re
quires the interpreter to recapture that person's relevant sensa
tions.41 I have attempted, in this paper, to explicate a dimension
of the character of these "sensations," which Herder sees as the
original sources of language, arguing that they are shaped by a
complex web of perception, emotion, and activity, occurring in a
specific place within a particular society. It follows that the sen
sations of different peoples in different worlds are different, and
this is reflected in the differences between their languages. By
now, there is nothing novel in the claim that distinct languages
present diverse, and perhaps incommensurable, conceptual
schemes, or that the semantic range of particular concepts in a
given language will not match that of concepts in another lan
guage, or that things named in one language are not named in
another. These factors make translation difficult, and never per
fect. But Herder's analysis brings into view another kind of diffi
culty as well, and one that can affect even the simplest of words.
Returning to my Hindi example, the problem with translating
the lines cited, and particularly the word dh?p, is not that En
glish speakers cannot grasp the idea of hot sunlight, nor is it
that there is no single English word for this idea. One can al
ways construct a phrase instead (though preferably something a
little more elegant than "hot sunlight"). The problem is also not
that the phenomenon named by the Hindi term is never named
in English, perhaps because it does not exist in countries where
English is spoken, or that it is never named in poetic discourse.
"Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines," writes Shakespeare
in Sonnet 18,42 demonstrating that such an event is known and
referred to by English speakers, even those who have spent their
whole lives in England. But it does not have the same signifi
cance for those speakers, so it is difficult to produce an English
translation which will be literally faithful while carrying the same
resonances as the Hindi word, resonances that are essential to
the meaning of the line in which the word occurs.
Herder sees these resonances as essential to the meanings of
words in general, a feature of meaning that poetry reveals rather
than invents. Because of the origination of language in the world
experienced by its speakers, words actually represent bits ofthat

world. And because the latter is something particular, even words
with direct counterparts in different languages will not "sound"
in quite the same way in all of those languages. Therefore, the
meaning of such words, whether the words name natural objects
("sun," "moon," "sky") or artifacts ("ring," "lamp") or feelings
("thirst," "pain," "joy"), is, in a sense, not the same from one lan
guage to the next. Strictly speaking, translation is impossible,
because one would have to translate a world, and that is just not
the sort ofthing that can be translated. Less strictly, translation
attempts to evoke the sensations of people dwelling in one world
in words belonging to another, helping the reader to imagine, to
feel his way into, a human life different from his own.
As a final point, I want to address the possible objection that
such an analysis construes the meaning of "meaning" too broadly.
One might argue that, while words may be attached, in the imagi
nation of the members of a given linguistic community, to
particular contexts, "meaning" refers to a general content that
can be defined independently of those contexts. I would respond
that the definition of "meaning" itself should rest not on purport
edly universal criteria, but on pragmatic ones. If, for instance, it
were claimed that the theory of meaning sketched in this article
defines "meaning" more broadly than is necessary, I would ask,
"necessary for what?" It matters whether the question about the
meaning of words is raised with a view to resolving puzzles about
color vocabulary, or evolving precise descriptions of scientific
objects, or producing translation manuals for travelers, or decid
ing what political accommodations should be made for a minority
language. A theory of meaning that is sufficient for one task, be
cause it picks out the features of language that are relevant to
that task, may not suffice for another. Herder's theory of mean
ing is oriented towards the tasks of interpretation and translation
as they relate to understanding the varied shapes human life has
assumed in different places at different times. His own belief in
the value of such cultural diversity leads him to focus on the char
acteristics of language that make each one unique, and uniquely
important to those for whom it is their native tongue, while bind
ing the human race together through its general capacity for
language.43 It is this focus that determines the necessary breadth
of his theory of meaning.
University of Ottawa
NOTES
1. For uses of this precise term in relation to Herder, see Karl Menges,
"'Sinn' and 'Besonnenheit': The Meaning of 'Meaning' in Herder," Herder
Yearbook, vol. 4 (1998), pp. 157-175, p. 158; and Michael Morton, "Chang
ing the Subject: Herder and the Reorientation of Philosophy," in Herder
Today, ed. Kurt M?ller-Vollmer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), p. 159.
2. ?ber die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente, Werke, ed. Ulrich Gaier
et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-), vol. 1, ed. Ulrich
Gaier, p. 177. All references to Herder's works in this essay are to this
edition. All translations into English are my own.
3. Vom Geist der Ebr?ischen Poesie (1781-1782), Werke, vol. 5, ed. Rudolf
Smend, p. 963.
4. Michael Morton, The Critical Turn: Studies in Kant, Herder, Wittgen
stein, and Contemporary Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1993), p. 159.
5. Vicki Spencer, "Towards an Ontology of Holistic Individualism:
Herder's Theory of Identity, Culture and Community," History Of Euro
pean Ideas, vol. 22 (1996), pp. 245-260; p. 249.
6. Charles Taylor, "Theories of Meaning," in Human Agency and Lan
guage: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 257.
7. Charles Taylor, "The Importance of Herder," in Philosophical Argu
ments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 98.
8. See especially "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in Philoso
phy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's,
trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979).
9. One might note that Nietzsche's account, by contrast, is full of such
language. For an extended analysis of this point, see Sarah Kofman's
Nietzsche et la m?taphore (Paris: Payot, 1972).
10. Taylor states, for instance, that through language "we become con
scious of things, in one very common sense of this term, that is we come to
have explicit awareness of things" ("Theories of Meaning," p. 258), and that
"expressions manifest things" ("Language and Human Nature," in Human
Agency and Language, p. 221).
11. Michael N. Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language, Interpreta
tion, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles," Review of
Metaphysics, vol. 56 (2002), pp. 323-356; p. 351.
12. Ibid., p. 352.
13. Ibid., p. 353.
14. Abhandlung ?ber den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) ("Essay on the
Origin of Language"), Werke, vol. 1, p. 722. Henceforth, Sprache.
15. Hans Dietrich Irmscher, "Herders Verst?ndnis von 'Humanit?t,'" in
J. G. Herder, Briefe zu Bef?rderung der Humanit?t ("Letters on the Ad
vancement of Humanity"), Werke, vol. 7, ed. H. D. Irmscher, p. 818.
Henceforth, Briefe. Cf. Herder's Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen
Vernunft ("A Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason"): "In me there is
a double T; conscious of myself, I can and must become an object to myself.

This advantage raises us above animals; it is the characteristic of our spe
cies." Werke, vol. 8, ed. H. D. Irmscher, p. 592. Henceforth, Metakritik.
16. Condillac, Essai sur Vorigine des connaissances humaines (Paris:
Librairie Armand Colin 1924), p. 460.
17. Hans Aarsleff notes that Herder only refers to Part II of Condillac's
Essai, which contains his account of the history of language, and never to
Part I, in which Condillac develops his theory of reflection. Aarsleff con
cludes that, "if Herder had not read Part One of the Essai, it becomes
understandable that he could criticize the adequacy of the argument he
found in Part Two at the very same time as he unwittingly reconstructed
the missing part in Condillac's manner." From Locke to Saussure: Essays
on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: Univer
sity of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 198.
18. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, "From Sign to Signification: The Herder
Humboldt Controversy," in Johann Gottfried Herder: Language History,
and the Enlightenment, ed. Wulf Koepke, (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House,
1990), p. 12.
19. Cf. Robert E. Norton, in criticism of Mueller-Vollmer: "it is simply
not the case that Condillac thought that reflection was 'semiotically in
duced.' Rather, Condillac thought that reflection and signification worked
in constant tandem to produce the intricate systems of interwoven signs
we call knowledge." "Herder und kein Ende: Hans Aarsleff and the Histori
ography of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy of Language," in La Linguistique
entre mythe et histoire: Actes des journ?es d'?tude organis?es les 4 et 5 juin
1991 ? la Sorbonne en l'honneur de Hans Aarsleff, ed. Daniel Droixhe and
Chantal Grell (M?nster: Nodus Publikationen, 1993), p. 182. It is worth
noting that, on the other hand, Herder sometimes makes statements sug
gesting that human consciousness was made possible by language, like the
following: "Perception, recognition, recall, possession, a chain of thoughts
became possible through [language] and through it alone." Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Werke, vol. 6, ed. Martin
Bollacher, pp. 356-57. Henceforth, Ideen.
20. This point is made by Norton, who claims that Herder's treatise
cleared away an uncertainty in Condillac's account "by insisting that the
interior, silent cognitive activity of fixing an individual perception with a
sign must be understood as already constituting language." Herder's Aes
thetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1991), p. 115. Also Vicki Spencer, p. 247.
21. "Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele" (1774
1775), Werke, vol. 4, ed. J?rgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, p. 330.
22. For an analysis of the relation between Herder, Condillac, and Locke,
see Bob Chase, "John Locke and Cultural Relativism," Interpretation, vol.
25 (1997), pp. 59-90.
23. Marion Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur
Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik des jungen Herders (1763-1778) (Ham
burg: Meiner, 1994), p. 135.
24. Cf. Lia Formigari, "The Mind-Body Problem in Herder's Theory of

Language": "the architecture of language everywhere displays the history
of a creature 'intent on listening' and not of a pure spirit: the history in
other words of a creature receptive to experience and not already consti
tuted prior to experience." In La Lingusitique entre myth et histore (see
note 19), p. 169.
25. Much of the Metakritik is devoted to this issue.
26. See, for example, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769, Werke, vol. 9/
2, ed. Rainer Wisbert, p. 119; and Plastik, Werke, vol.4, ed. J?rgen
Brummack and Martin Bollacher, p. 310. This idea seems also to be de
rived from Condillac, who presents it in criticism of Descartes: "If this
philosopher had not been predisposed to favor innate ideas, he would have
seen that the one means of forming a new foundation for knowledge is to
destroy the ideas themselves in order to trace them back to their origin,
that is, to sensations." Essai, pp. 210-211.
27. F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlight
enment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 62.
28. Ibid., p. 58.
29. See, for example, Herder's hypothetical account of how the mythol
ogy of Greenlanders is constructed in the Ideen, p. 295f.
30. Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language," pp. 346, 354 .
31. "The Importance ofHerder," Philosophical Arguments, p. 93.
32. The song is "Mausam hai ?shiq?n?," from the film Pakeezah.
33. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, ed. R. S. McGregor (Oxford
and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
34. For a discussion of this concept, see F. M. Barnard, Herder on Na
tionality, Humanity, and History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2003), pp. 5-8.
35. Spencer, p. 250.
36. Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History, p. 6.
37. See Herder's essay, "Bekehrung der Juden" (1802), Werke, vol. 10, ed.
G?nter Arnold, pp. 630-633, 639-640. Also Ideen, pp. 491-492, where Herder
refers to the Jews as a "parasitic plant on the trunks of other nations."
38. Jeffrey Grossman, "Herder and the Language of Diaspora Jewry,"
Monatshefte, vol. 86, no. 1 (1994), pp. 59-79; p. 69.
39. Ibid., p. 74.
40. See "In Good Faith," commenting on The Satanic Verses: uThe Sa
tanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transforma
tion that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and
fears the absolutism of the Pure." In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981-1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991).
41. Forster, "Herder's Philosophy of Language," p. 343.
42. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen,
Jean Howard, and Katherine Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997)
p. 1929 (Sonnet 18, line 5).
43. Cf. Ideen, 372: "languages change with every Volk in every Klima; in
all languages, however, the same sign-seeking human reason is discernible."

Herder On The Relation Between Language and World

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Herder on the Relation between Language and World

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HERDER ON THE RELATION BETWEEN

awareness what we formerly only had an implicit sense of."6

in which subject and object, body, emotion, and understanding

I. Three Central Concepts:

this is not true.17 Nor is it entirely true, as Kurt M?ller-Vollmer

this experience. Condillac, discussing the latter point, says that

The "sensations" in which words are ultimately rooted, then,

The confined human soul needs sensations that present to it an

Indeed, reason, Vernunft, is not, for Herder, a separate faculty of

plays a profound role in shaping and transmitting a language

as all words ultimately refer to experienced "things," in the broad

II. Language and Culture

whole being of persons: their bodies, their emotions, their under

less" language, motivated not by any practical end but by the

the spirit of a people, which is revealed in "the physiognomy of

out, Herder's insistence on the connection between place and iden

draw attention to one reason why a first language might occupy

experienced by its speakers, words actually represent bits ofthat

a double T; conscious of myself, I can and must become an object to myself.

24. Cf. Lia Formigari, "The Mind-Body Problem in Herder's Theory of

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