Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Volume 36, Number 2, 2015

Adaptive Naturalism in Herder’s

Aesthetics:
An Interpretation of “Shakespeare”

Rachel Zuckert

1. Introduction

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is well known for his appre-

ciative attention to historical and cultural diversity. He is often consid-
ered an originator both of historicism and multiculturalism in thought.1
Though this aspect of his work has drawn most attention (particularly
in Anglo-American discussions) in the context of political theory,2 it is
present in, and indeed arguably arises partly from, his philosophical
and critical discussions of art. For Herder is not only deeply interested
in artworks from many different cultures and historical periods, but
also argues—from his early, unfinished “Fragments of a Treatise on
the Ode” (1764–1765) onward—that they should be understood and val-
ued as reflecting the diverse ways of life, values, worldviews, and so
forth of the societies in which they were produced.3 Herder also, how-
ever, invokes nature as an explanatory and normative category, both
generally and with respect to artistic value in particular. He thus also
appears to be an aesthetic naturalist, holding that art is to be explained
as arising out of human natural tendencies and evaluated according to
natural norms.
These two aspects of Herder’s aesthetic theory—the emphases on
art’s cultural embeddedness and historical variation and on natural
norms of artistic value—appear to be in some tension. If nature is the
ground of artistic value, then one might argue, as Enlightenment aes-
theticians of Herder’s time and philosophical naturalists now do argue,
that there are universally shared, trans-historical and trans-cultural
norms of artistic value.4 On the other hand, if one emphasizes the his-
torical and cultural variation of artworks, a position I shall call “cultur-
alist” (in order to avoid the many confusing connotations of “historicism”),

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then one would seem inclined to resist “mere” naturalistic explanation

for either the production or the value of such works.5 On such a view,
one cannot explain where artworks “come from” without referring to
varied and historically changing cultural institutions and beliefs (such
as religion, to choose a central example for Herder and for his better-
known successor in this line of thought, Hegel), nor can one articulate
their value without reference to social purposes (such as social self-
understanding). In short, if artistic value is to be based on nature,
would not social-historical variations constitute mere prejudice, or even
perversion of some universal artistic value? Or, if the cultural and his-
torical formation of art is crucial to its nature and value, how can artis-
tic value be understood in terms of nature, which is so basic or general
that it would underdetermine, or even be entirely irrelevant to, what-
ever might determine such value?
In this paper, I explore this tension in Herder’s thought, and its
potential resolution, by attending to one of his most influential, sophis-
ticated, and focused treatments of cultural and historical diversity in
the arts, namely his essay “Shakespeare.”6 This essay, a central text in
the German literary tradition, deserves in any case to be better known
within philosophical aesthetics, especially in the Anglo-American dis-
cussion.7 As I shall argue, it may also be understood as presenting a
Herderian resolution to his naturalist/culturalist tension, which I shall
call “adaptive naturalism.” Herder argues that artistic value is to be
found in works that best express their own societies in their distinctive
and particular characters, a view obviously foregrounding historical
and cultural variation. But this view is also naturalistic, I shall contend,
in that it takes valuable art to promote natural human flourishing: the
exercise of human natural capacities in harmonious engagement with
their environment, including their social environment. Such a view is,
therefore, adaptive naturalism, both in emphasizing adaptation to one’s
circumstances (harmony with the environment) as a natural good, and
as a result, in taking the natural good itself to be adaptive (i.e., to take
on different forms as circumstances differ).
I begin by presenting the two sides of the tension. Section two is a
brief statement of Herder’s aesthetic naturalism. Section three presents
the culturalist position of “Shakespeare.” In both cases, I attempt to
render the tension just sketched more precise by suggesting that
Herder’s central concern and the locus of apparent conflict between the
two views is normative. In section four, I consider two ways that one
might try to reconcile this position with his naturalism by attending to
Herder’s references to “nature” in “Shakespeare.” Both interpretations
correctly capture some part of Herder’s view, I shall suggest, but nei-

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ther is quite satisfactory. In section five, I suggest that adaptive natu-

ralism combines the strengths of those interpretations. I conclude by
briefly considering a question raised by Herder’s view.

2. Herder’s Naturalism: An Overview

Since I have discussed Herder’s naturalism elsewhere,8 and in order to

be able to focus here on its relation to his culturalism, I shall simply
present my view of his naturalist position and its application to philo-
sophical aesthetics briefly and with little argument, despite its some-
what controversial character (both interpretively and philosophically).
Herder’s philosophical naturalism has three components, the last of
which is of chief importance here: methodological, explanatory, and
normative.
First, regarding Herder’s methodological naturalist commitments: to
some degree, like contemporary naturalists, Herder endorses a rather
humble conception of philosophy. He takes himself to follow a long tra-
dition in holding that philosophy comprises both the critical and argu-
mentative use of reason directed toward developing a comprehensive
understanding of human beings and our place in the world, to help us
lead good lives. But, on Herder’s view, there is no a priori knowledge,
nor, more broadly, any special philosophical knowledge. Rather, philos-
ophy is and must always be informed by and answerable to knowledge
acquired in empirical disciplines, including not just the natural sci-
ences, but also (indeed emphatically for Herder, as he is primarily
interested in human beings) what we would now call the social sci-
ences—empirical psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics—as
well as historical and other (e.g., artistic) presentations of the human
condition, and the study thereof (e.g., philology and art history).9
Second, and correspondingly, Herder has a naturalist view concern-
ing philosophical explanation: human behavior is to be explained in
terms of both natural, organic capabilities and processes—drawing on
biological knowledge of human beings as one sort of animal—and of
historical and social contexts and causes, since these are also found
empirically to influence human behavior. And it is not to be explained
in terms of special, non- or anti-natural causes like free will or direct
intervention by God.10
Third, and most importantly, Herder also takes nature to set norma-
tive goals or standards. The good for human beings is natural: it com-
prises the flourishing—harmonious full activity or vital expression of
the capacities or forces—of human nature. Thus Herder characterizes
distinctively human nature as involving the “use of the forces of the

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soul,” which (if things go well) develops into an “easier, stronger, more
diverse use” (OL 84–5; US 719–20). This natural orientation toward full
or “perfect” flourishing and integration is, Herder contends, shown even
by cases of “degeneration into savagery,” such as the wild children pur-
portedly raised by bears or wolves that were so interesting to eigh-
teenth-century thinkers. Such cases constitute “unnatural” failures to
realize the normatively good functioning of human nature proper, just
as a plant that grows crookedly crushed under a stone is “in its nature
an upwards-growing plant” (OL 93–4; US 729–30).
Herder’s conceptions of artistic value are similarly grounded in
reflections concerning human flourishing as the full and harmonious
exercise of human natural capacities. The arts of painting, sculpture,
and music have value and please because they express and allow the
spectator or auditor to have full—both intense and refined—operation
of the capacities of sight, touch, and hearing, respectively.11 Other arts
less directed toward a particular sense (literature, rhetoric, or architec-
ture, for example) express and allow in their audience vital and harmo-
nious activity of other (combinations of) cognitive, sensuous, and affective
natural capacities. Thus, to take our most central example here, Herder
suggests that poetry (i.e., literature) is “speech . . . the music of the
soul,” comprising a “train of thoughts, of images, of words, of tones”
that, at its best, allows for “[t]he most vital expression of passion . . . [and]
whatever is called life and charm and action,” and correspondingly
“affects the soul . . . deeply” (FG 286–7; VW 411). The full force of this
naturalistic normative commitment comes out in Herder’s polemical
invocations of “nature” against artworks that are “artificial,” “frigid,”
imitative, rigidly classicist, and so forth.12 For example, at the height of
Athenian “taste,” Herder contends that art was the “flower of the nation
and living Greek nature”; but later, when art became imitative, “the
beautiful flower lacked soil, sap, nourishment, and ether, and . . . it
died” (ST 318–9; GG 126–7). In these passages, the vitalist tenor of
Herder’s normative naturalism—its association of nature with force,
life, vitality—is clear, as well as the dominance of organic metaphors in
his normatively oriented discussions. Herder’s polemics against artifice
and imitation play a central role in “Shakespeare” as well, to which I
now turn to present the other side of the Herderian tension: cultural-
ism.

3. “Shakespeare” and Culturalism

“Shakespeare,”13 like many of Herder’s works focused on cultural and

historical diversity in the arts, is part of his literary-critical project of
attempting to promote modern German literature.14 Here, Herder fre-

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quently aims specifically to counteract modern European classicism,

which, on his understanding, took the form of elaborating rules pur-
portedly governing classical (ancient Greek and Roman) works, and
then demanding that modern works follow them. Against this view,
Herder urges that German literature should follow its own rules or, as
we might say, find its own voice.15 In “Shakespeare,” Herder argues cor-
respondingly that prior discussion about Shakespeare is wrong-headed
in criticizing or excusing Shakespeare for breaking the formal rules of
Greek drama, specifically the three unities (action, time, space), taken
to be elaborated by Aristotle in his Poetics and best exemplified in
Sophocles’ plays.16 Shakespeare aims, he argues, to present a new, com-
plex subject matter (an “event” or “world” [S 305; SH 518]) that cannot
be represented in plays following the Aristotelian formal rules, and so
should not be judged—whether criticized, praised, or excused—in
accord with those rules. (One could, then, identify another major claim
of philosophical aesthetics defended in Herder’s essay, namely that
form must reflect content, though it will be of subordinate importance
here.)
Herder thus emphasizes the differences between Sophocles and
Shakespeare: “Sophocles’ drama and Shakespeare’s drama are two
things that in a certain respect have scarcely their name in common” (S
292; SH 499–500). (I briefly return to Herder’s qualifications, “in a cer-
tain respect,” and “scarcely,” below.) Shakespeare is thus different from
Sophocles, Herder argues, because he belongs to a different society: “In
Greece [drama] was what it can never be in the north. In the north it is
not and cannot be what it was in Greece” (ibid.). Or, he writes more
expansively,
The Greek worldview, manners, the state of the republics, the tradi-
tion of the heroic age, religion, even music, expression, and the
degrees of illusion changed. And so naturally enough the material
for plots disappeared, too, as well as the opportunity to adapt it and
the motive for doing so. (S 294; SH 503)

Shakespeare lived in a culture with different “history, tradition, and

domestic, political, and religious relations,” and different “spirit of the
age, manners, opinions, language, national prejudices, traditions, and
pastimes” from the Athenian ones (S 297; SH 507). Thus, Herder con-
cludes, his plays must be different as well.
Herder does use the language of “nature” in this essay: Shakespeare
portrays “nature,” and creates “naturally”—the expressions to which I
will return below—but his discussion emphasizes cultural and historical
differences as formative for art (e.g., beliefs, political structures, social
practices, language, traditions, and so forth). “Shakespeare” is, then, a

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central statement of Herder’s culturalism, which I shall now try to spell

out a bit, suggesting that, like his naturalism, it combines explanatory
and normative elements.
In the passages above, Herder appears at first glance to be making
an explanatory argument, even to be proposing a form of historical-cul-
tural determinism. Cultural factors such as religion or tradition are so
determinative for an artist’s production that they are inescapable ele-
ments of any artwork produced in a particular culture, at a particular
time. The artist will and must draw upon the “materials” she has at
hand and from the cultural context in which she lives. Thus, if the cul-
tures are different, so too will the art be.
Something like this view arguably underpins much literary, critical,
and art-historical enquiry today, where works are understood in terms
of period and culture classifications taken to reflect essential, perhaps
inescapable, characters of those artworks. And Herder would certainly
not be opposed to such study, as he argues vehemently that works
should be understood “on [their] own terms,” and against the thought-
less importation of one’s own cultural prejudices, expectations of mean-
ing, or moral standards into one’s interpretation of works from other
cultures (ST 315; GG 121).17
But again, Herder’s chief interest here is normative rather than
explanatory, as we can see by considering two possible objections to the
preceding argument. First, Herder’s argument turns on claiming that
the “material for plots,” the subject matter or content of works, changes
across different cultures. But, one might object, could one not change
subject matter while retaining the same forms? Then artworks might
in one sense remain the same (structurally or compositionally, or as
members of the same genre), though their contents might change. For
example, romantic comedies might always require obstacles to stand in
the way of the ultimate happy union of the two protagonists, but the
character of those obstacles might change in accord with the standing
social arrangements. Second, one might object that artists have more
freedom than Herder allows. Artists can follow models from other cul-
tures, and thus are not so inescapably marked by their cultural context,
as he appears to claim.18
For Herder, these two objections are closely related. Both are exem-
plified in French classicism, against which he here, as elsewhere,
polemicizes.19 For the French classical dramatists use the forms of
ancient Greek drama, adhering rigorously to the three unities, while
supplying to some degree different content. They thereby follow models
from another culture, and so appear to be free from complete determi-
nation by their own culture.20 Herder of course recognizes this; for pre-
cisely these reasons, the French dramatists are the model for the

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German classicists both of what should and, for Herder, of what should
not be done in modern German literature. I suggest therefore that, for
Herder, it is not quite that artists inescapably reflect their own culture
in their works, but that they should do so. His culturalism is, thus, also
and more centrally normative.
This normative emphasis qualifies the explanatory/determinist tenor
of Herder’s position, described above. It is true that artists can try to
imitate another culture, and can use its forms separate from the origi-
nal “materials.” But if they do so, they will produce unsuccessful works.
So, Herder objects that in focusing upon formal rules derived from
Greek drama, the French are “superficial” and produce the mere
beauty of versification or intellectual satisfaction at having fulfilled for-
mal requirements. By contrast, Sophocles’ and Shakespeare’s plays
achieve the “real effect” of drama, namely powerful emotional response.
They succeed because each employs the materials of his own time and
culture, as noted above, whereas the French produce merely superficial
works because they engage in “a half-truthful copying of foreign ages,
manners, and actions” (S 296; SH 506).
This normative qualification does not, however, amount to a com-
plete rejection of explanatory culturalism. For the artistic failure is
itself to be traced to a version of explanatory culturalism: the imitating
artist’s work fails precisely because he cannot reproduce the form’s (or
other imitated element’s) placement within its original cultural context,
since he does not live in it or write for it. To expect Greek drama to
arise in modern contexts, Herder writes, is like expecting “a sheep to
give birth to lion cubs” (S 297; SH 507). Correspondingly, the modern
artist will in fact import some elements of his own culture that lie in
tension with the imitated elements. The result will be a sort of mish-
mash of competing elements, or as Herder himself tends to argue, a
work of emptiness or deadness. This combination of explanatory and
normative claims is, I suggest, encapsulated in Herder’s criticism of the
French as “half-truthful” copiers.
The “half-truthful copying” is half-truthful, first, because it uses a
form that no longer has its meaning, or connection to its surrounding
culture, and so is “superficial.” The three unities are the form of Greek
drama, both because they are inherited from the practices that precede
the drama there (such as religious rituals), and because they are appro-
priate to representing the sort of content Greek dramatists, particularly
Sophocles, aim to present: a single, heroic—political or religious—
action revealed in a single scene, “an allegorical, mythological, semi-
epic painting” (S 293; SH 501). In the hands of the French, this form is,
therefore, not a “truthful” copying because it takes only the “husk” and
not the “kernel” (S 292; SH 499), to use one of Herder’s favorite

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metaphors. Though “outwardly resembling,” it no longer is the same

form or has the same meaning as in Greek drama (S 296; SH 505).21
Such copying is also “half-truthful” because it both does and does not
reflect the actual French cultural context: precisely because French his-
tory, tradition, and culture are different, this form does not mean for
them what it did for the Greeks. In this sense it is, even if indirectly,
“truthful” to the French—but only half-truthful, as such form does not
have any cultural meaning for the French. (Perhaps it means, rather
emptily, something like “aspiration to high culture,” as some of
Herder’s criticisms of German classicism in the Fragments on Recent
German Literature suggest.) The content of French classical drama is
likewise artificial: “adventurous, brave, magnanimous, love-struck,
cruel heroes . . . dramatic fictions who outside the theater would be
branded fools and who even in those days, at least in France, were
almost as outlandish as they are in most modern plays” (S 295; SH
504). Herder’s point here, I suggest, is both that the form is trans-
formed by having another content—not Greek, but “Spanish-Senecan
heroes” (ibid.)—and that because the French aim at a (“foreign”) form
above all, they then manufacture subject matters equally distant from
their way of life.22 (A more recent, if somewhat extreme example of
Herder’s point might be the van Meegeren forgeries: they fail to copy a
prior style [Vermeer’s], because they in fact, unawares, have the style
contemporary to van Meegeren, i.e., they reflect their own age. Yet the
paintings also reflect their own time emptily and unsatisfactorily pre-
cisely because they aim to be something entirely different, something
from another age.)
Successful literary production correspondingly seems to require a
focus first and most emphatically on content—broadly, on what matters
to one’s society—followed by a demand to find a way to present that
content, that is, to find the appropriate form, probably drawing upon
one’s own society’s practices, historical connotations, and cultural
meanings. This is what Shakespeare did, on Herder’s view: he not only
used his own materials (history, tradition, and so forth), but also drew
upon the British tradition of carnivals and puppet plays to fashion
appropriate and culturally meaningful forms for those materials (just
as the practice and form of Greek drama grew out of their religious
practices). More broadly, the messiness of Shakespeare’s dramatic form
is appropriate to the messiness (i.e., the complexity and heterogeneity)
of the modern Northern world, just as, Herder believes, the simplicity
of Greek drama reflects the relative homogeneity and simplicity of
Greek social structure (S 298–9; SH 508–9). Thus works become, as
Herder writes about Greek drama, a “national institution whose every
little particular produces an effect and betokens the highest, richest

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culture [Bildung]” (S 296; SH 506).23

In sum, Herder’s culturalism includes both explanatory, and, more
importantly, normative elements. Artworks cannot be understood or
explained without reference to the specific cultural contexts in which
they were made (given that artists are formed by those contexts), and
their value lies, at least in part, in the way that they express—reflect,
clarify, and present in a unified way, or render vivid (“living” or felt)—
the traditions, worldviews, and practices of their societies. I hope to
have indicated, through discussing his treatment of the French drama-
tists, that Herder can consistently claim both that artists do automati-
cally and always reflect their cultures, and that they are not thereby
always successful in expressing those cultures, perhaps because they
aspire to do something else.24 Henceforth I will call the positive relation
of the successful work to the surrounding culture—the core of Herder’s
culturalism—its cultural “expression,” and will use “formation” or
“influence” to refer, in a more normatively neutral way, to determina-
tion by the artist’s context. Herder’s culturalism can, in other words, be
seen as an endorsement of authenticity as a significant artistic value,
understood as the comprehension and manifestation of who one is,
including embeddedness in one’s cultural context.
Herder takes these cultural contexts to vary dramatically, both his-
torically and geographically.25 Thus, as we have seen, in contrast to the
prima facie universalism of normative naturalism, in “Shakespeare”
Herder argues that the nature and value of artworks must vary across
cultural contexts. I have suggested, more broadly, that Herder makes
two normative claims: that art should follow natural norms (section
two) and that art should reflect its particular, time-bound culture (as
just discussed). It is not clear how they may be combined, and I turn
now to discuss that question.26

4. “Nature” in “Shakespeare”: Two Proposed Reconciliations

Given the impassioned culturalism of “Shakespeare,” one may wonder

how Herder could be considered a naturalist—or, perhaps better, what
sort of naturalism, if any, he can be understood to espouse. I begin
responding to that question by returning, as promised above, to
Herder’s references to nature in the essay, and to the commonalities
between Shakespeare and Sophocles (i.e., to his reservations concern-
ing his differentiation between the two dramatists). For Herder uses
“nature” to characterize their artistic success: nature functions for
Herder here too, it would seem, as a normative standard.
Herder claims, as we have seen, that though they have “scarcely”
anything in common, Sophocles and Shakespeare were able to achieve

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the “same effect” of drama (S 298; SH 508). Shakespeare “reached the

same goal by very different paths,” for he “created dramatic works from
[his] raw material as naturally, sublimely, and originally as the Greeks
did from theirs” (S 297; SH 507). Or more extensively, in a passage
that includes some description of those “different paths”:
Shakespeare is Sophocles’ brother precisely where he seems so dis-
similar, only to be inwardly wholly like him. Since all illusion is
accomplished by means of this authenticity, truth, and creativity of
history, then were they absent, not only would illusion be impossi-
ble but not a single element of Shakespeare’s drama and dramatic
spirit would remain. . . . Sophocles remained true to Nature when
he adapted a single action in a single time and place; Shakespeare
could remain true to Nature only if he tossed his world events and
human destinies through all the times and places in which—well,
in which they occurred. (S 303; SH 515)

These passages clearly refer to Herder’s culturalist position—i.e., what

Sophocles and Shakespeare have in common is that they draw upon
their own “raw materials,” from their own cultures, and are properly
different from one another as a result—but also make direct reference
to “nature.” They therefore suggest a confluence between these two ele-
ments of Herder’s account, and I now consider two initial proposals con-
cerning how to interpret “Shakespeare” so as to understand Herder’s
culturalism as also a naturalism. I shall suggest that each proposal is
partly correct, yet also unsatisfying in ways that point us toward the
interpretation (in section five) of Herder as an adaptive naturalist.
One might propose, first, that the two elements are confluent in
being basically identical, namely that by “nature,” Herder in fact
means “second nature” of a neo-Aristotelian sort: human beings are
naturally malleable (i.e., not determinately fixed to a particular way of
life), and also naturally habituable/habituated (i.e., naturally partici-
pants in and so formed by social practices).27 Moreover, these habitual,
cultural formations are not merely superficial tendencies added onto
one’s natural capacities, but are as immediately and fully one’s own;
they just as directly define who one is and what one values, as do one’s
first-natural tendencies (should one have any such tendencies that
remain unmodified by one’s second-nature formation). On this view,
then, the “raw materials” of one’s own society are “natural” to one inso-
far as they are formative of one’s behavior, attitudes, and relation to
others, central to one’s self-definition, and perhaps, taken as “given,”
immediate, requiring no reflection or choice, simply what one is, or who
we are. Herder’s aesthetic-normative recommendations to be “natural”
and to be faithful to one’s own culture would then come to the same
thing.

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This suggestion captures significant elements of Herder’s view. As

noted above, Herder’s general conception of human nature does not
exclude social factors. He insists (against Rousseau, for example) that
human beings are naturally social, sympathetic, and even, naturally
use language.28 On Herder’s view, that human beings find themselves
in some culture or other in which they learn from one another and from
past members of that society through linguistic communication is,
therefore, not an artificial, somehow unnatural fact about human life,
but itself natural. And Herder emphasizes (often in his polemics
against classicism) that one’s own culture, especially one’s “mother
tongue,” directs one’s responses and forms one’s interpretation of the
world in ways that are completely “natural” (i.e., immediate, unques-
tioned, and definitive of oneself).29 In the context of “Shakespeare,” this
proposal accommodates well what one might call Herder’s adverbial
usage of “nature”: Shakespeare, like the Greeks (and unlike the
French), draws “naturally” upon the raw materials of his own culture;
the form of Greek drama was, for the Greeks, “not artifice at all! It was
Nature!” (S 293; SH 501). The Greeks (and Shakespeare) did not, and
did not need to, follow explicit rules. They just did what came to them
directly, what followed from or expressed who they were.30
However, Herder also uses “nature” otherwise in “Shakespeare,” to
assert a more substantive similarity between the two dramatists: they
achieve the “same effect” by being true to nature, or (apparently equiv-
alently) via illusion (Täuschung). These claims will, I suggest, be better
accounted for by a different, second interpretation that identifies a
more complicated relationship between nature and culture, or natural-
ism and culturalism: adequacy to one’s own cultural context serves as a
means of accomplishing universal, naturally good ends.
According to this second interpretation, Herder’s argument, particu-
larly in the passage on Shakespeare and Sophocles (S 303; SH 515)
quoted above, may be reconstructed, I suggest, as follows:
(1) Success for a dramatic work—“its purpose, effect, kind, and
essence [Wesen]” (S 295; SH 504, trans. mod.)—consists in arous-
ing powerful emotions, perhaps specifically pity and fear (S 296;
SH 505).
(2) This effect is brought about through “illusion.”
(3) Illusion is brought about through “remaining true” to one’s
own culture.
(4) Therefore, to succeed with a drama, one must express one’s
own culture.
This argument can also be seen as neo-Aristotelian, albeit in a some-
what different way: like Aristotle in the Poetics, Herder here engages in

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genre-analysis, wherein the genre is defined by its purpose—here, its

generation of powerful emotions—and is analyzed to discern the best
means for accomplishing that purpose. Herder departs from Aristotle,
at least on the classicist interpretation, in denying that the three uni-
ties are always the best means: they were the best way to bring about
“illusion” for the Greeks because they expressed the character of Greek
society. The correct generalization is, then, not the three unities, but
rather that artists should generate similar illusion by expressing their
own societies.
Herder seems here to propose a view like that in Kames’ Elements of
Criticism (1762)—a work Herder admired, referring to its author as
“the Aristotle of this British Sophocles” (S 306; SH 519). Kames also
argues that Aristotle was correct concerning the end of drama (i.e., its
emotional effect), but that he had over narrowly identified the means
thereto. For Kames, the crucial means is to generate “ideal presence,”
the sense in the audience that they are witnessing real, gripping
events, and the three unities are not necessarily the best way to do
that.31 Quite explicitly in Kames, and I suggest also for Herder, nature
functions here as the source of extra- or supra-cultural norms for art.
Generating powerful emotional effects is, universally, a naturally good
end since exercising one’s emotional capacities is both part of human
flourishing and is naturally pleasing.
Nature, in another sense, appears also to be part of the means to
that end: “remaining true to nature” means, it would appear, having
representational content (and consonant form) that is accurate to the
world as it is, so as to generate the “ideal presence” (Kames) or “illu-
sion” (Herder) that is, in turn, necessary to generate emotional
response. Herder adds to Kames’ view the variability of that to-be-rep-
resented “nature” as including historically changing and diverse cul-
tural phenomena. Thus for Herder, contra Kames, Sophocles and
Shakespeare can have the “same effect” only by employing radically
different means, because their worlds, which they respectively aim to
form into an “illusion,” are radically different—“everything in the world
changes” (S 294; SH 503). Thus, Herder suggests, Kames does not see
the largest question concerning Shakespeare, namely how he trans-
formed the “worthless” cultural materials of his time into a drama of
new and distinctively appropriate form (ibid.).32 Broadly, however,
Herder’s view could be seen as similar to Kames’: nature provides a
norm or an end for artistic success, as well as the appropriate means to
accomplish that end.33 The culturalist recommendation is for him, if not
for Kames, part of those means: in order to arouse emotions, one must
“remain true to” how things are, which includes the character, prac-
tices, history, etc., of one’s society.

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This view can, then, incorporate much of the second-nature view.

Precisely because human beings are malleable and culturally formed,
one must represent the specifics of the particular cultural context to
“remain true” to how things are. But unlike the second-nature view, it
reconciles the two positions not by equating them, but by taking cultur-
alism to be a subordinate part of a dominantly naturalist aesthetics in
which natural human flourishing sets the ultimate artistic norms, val-
ues, or purposes.
As I have suggested, this interpretation also captures a good deal of
Herder’s position. It recognizes his adherence to emotional power as a
universal (i.e., cross-cultural) norm of artistic value grounded in human
natural flourishing. Unlike the second-nature position, it therefore
allows nature to function as a normative standard for the evaluation of
cultures themselves: some cultures stunt individual flourishing, for
example, by an overly complex division of labor and a corresponding
narrowness of individual way of life. Not all second natures allow the
flourishing of some or other aspect of first nature. Similarly, art—itself
a cultural phenomenon—may succeed or fail at promoting human flour-
ishing, here specifically by succeeding or failing at arousing emotional
responses. So Herder wishes to argue: the badness of “artificial” works
of art is not only that they are too intentional, too self-conscious, or
even “half-truthful,” but also that thereby they render themselves dead,
empty, unable to arouse feeling (OL 134; US 776–7).
The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it renders cul-
tural expression merely instrumental to the independent, natural aim
of art: it is mere means to “illusion” that is, in turn, a means to evoke
emotional response. There is arguably something right about such
instrumentalism. For example, advice to aspiring writers that they
“write what they know” is not, I think, meant to convey that what they
know is itself crucial to convey. Rather, it means that only so, as a nec-
essary, but not sufficient condition of artistic success, can they write
sharply, richly, evocatively, powerfully, etc., and move their audience.
Still, this view would seem to diminish the achievement of Sophocles or
Shakespeare that Herder celebrates: their ability to express and give
form to the values, worldview, way of life, and tradition of their society.
To put this point another way, Herder’s language of “illusion” might
suggest that he privileges representational realism (or “naturalism,” in
a different, art-historical meaning) as the best mode of representation.
Only if the actions on stage are credible to the audience, only if they
appear as if real, will the audience have the requisite emotional
engagement—and cultural accuracy is merely part of that credibility.
Herder seems to suggest as much when he says that “theater, actors,
and scenery disappear” in the experience of Shakespearean drama (S

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299; SH 509), or in his criticism of the French for bringing “fictions” to

the stage (S 295; SH 504). But this impression is complicated by
Herder’s praise of Shakespeare for having “transported” one to “his
world,” to a “dream,” i.e., to a world of his own making, and precisely
not the one that the audience somehow mistakes for part of this, ordi-
nary reality (S 305; SH 517–8). Likewise, Herder takes it as given that
Shakespeare’s plays are more moving than most real experiences, and
so must have something more “to them” than simple verisimilitude in
the sense of being “as if” real, direct experience.
What is required, then, is an interpretation that incorporates the
strengths of both proposals: the second-nature emphasis upon human
malleability and the centrality of culture to identity or authenticity—
and so a view of cultural expression as a distinct, non-instrumental
source of artistic value—as well as the Kamesian employment of nature
as a normative standard for evaluating cultural forms, including art.
This view, I shall argue now, is adaptive naturalism, according to
which artistic variability in response to cultural diversity and speci-
ficity or, more precisely, cultural expression, is itself a component of
natural flourishing.

5. Adaptive Naturalism in “Shakespeare”

I begin with a few comments concerning Herder’s philosophical anthro-

pology, as articulated in his prize essay, the “Treatise on the Origin of
Language.” In the essay, Herder argues that humans are distinct from
other animals in not being fitted to any particular Kreis (environment,
sphere of activity), or in other words, in being able to adapt to many
different spheres.34 As a result, Herder argues, human beings are not
directed by instinct to fit their spheres determinately (e.g., to seek out
this foodstuff, to avoid that predator), and so require self-awareness
(“reflection” or Besonnenheit) and language for self- and species-preser-
vation. Humans must be able to identify their own needs, desires, and
possibilities, to sort the overwhelming masses of information provided
by the senses, to select what to notice, and to determine what to do
(specifically, here and now) (OL 78–80; US 712–4). As the second-
nature position has it, human beings are indeed naturally undeter-
mined, and so they are naturally determinable by differing cultural
conditions. But humans are also naturally outfitted with particular
capabilities—i.e., self-consciousness and language—to negotiate that
situation, so as to survive and flourish.35
Herder aims here to provide a naturalist explanation for human pos-
session of language, against Süssmilch’s argument that language must
have a divine origin: linguistically structured thought is necessary for

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the survival of this animal, and constitutes a development of one of its

characteristic natural powers (OL 85–6, 91–2; US 719–20, 726–7). But
it also introduces, I suggest, an important aspect of Herder’s normative
naturalism: if a human being is doing well when she fully exercises her
human capacities, she must, on this view, be exercising her abilities to
adapt to differing contexts, or rather, to her own actual context. Again,
this is not merely an explanatory claim that context affects the individ-
ual; it is a normative one. For an individual can be influenced by an
environment without successfully adapting to it.36 In more recognizably
normative terms (in Herder and elsewhere), the human being is doing
well when she is harmonious with or fits her environment, including
having cognitive fit with—i.e., knowledge of and accuracy in recogniz-
ing what is important in—that environment.
With two further premises, both of which Herder holds, we can see
that on this view there will be variation in forms of the human natural
good or flourishing. First, if environments vary massively, as Herder
believes they do (even in the strictly extra-human natural world),
human natural flourishing must correspondingly take radically differ-
ent forms as a result of adaptation to these varying contexts. And so
differing cultures themselves can be understood as different collective
adaptations to their environment, perhaps with differing degrees of
success. Second, since on Herder’s view human beings are naturally
social and historical beings, such contexts—with which individuals
should harmonize, if they are to flourish—will include not only natural,
but also cultural environments.
Given this general account of Herderian adaptive naturalism, we
can now see schematically how cultural expression in art promotes,
indeed partially constitutes, natural flourishing. First, cultural expres-
sion in art allows audiences to become culturally or communally self-
conscious and thus to exercise their most central, most distinctively
human natural capacity (OL 84; US 719). Through cultural expression,
we recognize who we are, what we do and what is important to us. It
thereby also allows the individual to harmonize with her cultural envi-
ronment: to see what it is, how it works, what values organize or direct
it, and perhaps thereby to connect emotionally or otherwise more
strongly to it. Cultural expression in an artwork is then both an
instance of human natural flourishing and promotes natural flourish-
ing as adaptive and self-conscious. Culturalism is part of Herderian
naturalism.
This reading, I suggest, can be applied to Herder’s comments in
“Shakespeare” that in virtue of his successful cultural expression
Shakespeare “teaches, moves, and cultivates” (S 299; SH 509).
Shakespeare shows his audience who they are by giving form to their

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messy world; he moves them in part through providing that self-recog-

nition and thereby he promotes their abilities to harmonize with their
cultural context. According to Herderian naturalist norms, then,
Shakespeare’s drama appropriately or rightly takes on a specific char-
acter, different from other drama, in virtue of adapting and speaking to
and for its own social, historical, and natural context.37 Or, in terms
Herder uses in his “Sunken Taste” essay, Shakespeare sings within his
element, sings what he is fitted to sing (ST 317; GG 124).38
Adaptive naturalism thus combines the strengths of the previous
two proposals. As on the second-nature view, according to adaptive nat-
uralism human nature (and so also artistic production) is malleable,
adaptable to different contexts and social practices. Correspondingly,
one of art’s values—the value of cultural expression—is authenticity,
here understood emphatically as the expression and recognition of who
and where one is in all cultural specificity. Against the second-nature
view, and with the Kamesian view, however, such an achievement is
not understood as simply reflecting whatever is most immediate, famil-
iar, or habitual, but contributes to the satisfaction of, as it were, “first-
natural” desiderata for human flourishing, namely self-consciousness
and fit with the environment.
Unlike the Kamesian view, however, cultural expression on the
adaptive naturalist view is not merely instrumental to emotional effect
understood as the true natural good, but rather is itself constitutive of
artistic value and directly contributes to human flourishing.39 It can,
correspondingly, ground a more appealing reading of the passage con-
cerning “illusion” discussed above. On the Kamesian view, “illusion”
looks like a relatively flat, instrumental thing: some sort of verisimili-
tude credible enough to arouse emotions. (On the second-nature view,
perhaps one could say something similar: “illusion” amounts to famil-
iarity.) As noted above, Herder seems to understand “illusion” other-
wise, namely as the creation of the work’s own world, a world with com-
pelling, absorbing power that deeply, emotionally engages its audi-
ence.40 Herder’s line of argument in the essay suggests that such illu-
sion relies on the two sorts of artistic achievement already discussed:
aesthetic unity of form and content, and cultural expression. Successful
“illusion” means a holistic or coherent work, that is, a form/content
union that is emotionally moving, at least in part, because it has cul-
tural meaning, and because it encapsulates—expresses, clarifies, uni-
fies into a “living world,” i.e., appropriately forms—the practices,
beliefs, institutions, and so forth, of the culture in which and for which
it is made. Such illusion therefore requires “creativity of history” (S
303; SH 515): a discernment of who we are and have been, and a grasp
of appropriate historically-rooted forms for its clarifying expression.

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And it is emotionally moving and absorbing, because it thus distills and

forms what is important to us. It therefore is “true to Nature” (ibid.), I
suggest, not in the sense of being “realistic” or familiar, but in the sense
of promoting human natural flourishing fitted to its environment.
Correspondingly, insofar as Shakespeare encapsulates his cultural con-
text in appropriate unified forms—as, in Herder’s terms, an “inter-
preter of Nature in all her tongues”—he is indeed a genius who trans-
forms “worthless materials” into comprehensible, moving expression.
That expression does not merely reflect its context (as all art produc-
tion in some way will), but actively harmonizes with it—an innovative
and impressive achievement (S 299; SH 509).41 It is deeply and thor-
oughly culturally specific—because only so can it achieve its naturally
normative ends.

6. Conclusion

I have argued that Herder’s normative naturalist and culturalist claims

are reconciled in adaptive naturalism: it is universally and normatively
part of human natural flourishing to adapt to—i.e., harmonize, fit, be
emotionally attuned to, or be self-conscious of one’s place within—one’s
specific natural and cultural environment. Art is valuable—according,
again, to natural norms—in part because it is cultural expression:
thereby it can present and bring about such adaptation, harmony, and
self-consciousness.
This view, and Herder’s argument for it, raises more questions than
I can address here.42 I conclude, however, by noting just one obvious
concern, to which Herder himself alludes at the end of his essay, when
he laments that
even this great creator of history and the world soul grows older
every day, that the words and customs and categories of the age
wither and fall like autumnal leaves, that we are already so far
removed from these great ruins of the age of chivalry. . . . [S]oon
perhaps, as everything is obliterated and tends in different direc-
tions, even his drama will become quite incapable of living perfor-
mance, will become the dilapidated remains of a colossus, of a pyra-
mid, which all gaze upon with wonder, and none understands. I
count myself lucky that I still live in the last days of an age when I
can understand him. (S 307; SH 520)

Herder’s adaptive naturalist aesthetics is not cultural relativism. He

does not hold that a culture may stipulate, or habituate its members to
hold, that any artwork of whatever arbitrarily settled-upon kind is of
value. Nor does he claim (on this interpretation) that artistic value
claims are true only for members of the artwork’s culture. But his

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adaptive naturalist view does perhaps suggest that a significant artistic

value—its cultural expression—may be appreciable only by members of
the artist’s culture. Because “everything changes,” the work promotes
adaptation to their circumstances and self-consciousness for them
alone. For them alone, the work creates absorbing, emotionally charged
“illusion.” But this implication seems to violate our sense of the endur-
ing, cross-cultural value of artworks and of the appreciators’ cross-con-
textual ability to appreciate them—as Herder appreciates Shakespeare,
in a way that he fears (falsely, it would seem) will soon pass away.
Though this concern warrants more discussion than I can provide
here, I shall suggest a few responses to it, as they elucidate aspects of
the adaptive naturalist interpretation I have been developing. One
might respond to this worry, first, by noting that prior to this passage,
Herder’s most restrictive (cultural-determinist) claims concern artistic
production, not appreciation: Greek drama could not “grow” in modern
cultural contexts, Shakespeare’s dramas “must” be different, and so
forth. And this restriction may seem closer to the facts: artists are, it
seems, significantly more constrained as to whether they can success-
fully adopt styles or subject matters from other cultures than are
appreciators.
Concerning appreciation specifically, one ought to recognize first
that on an adaptive naturalist view, the “fit” of artwork to culture—its
genial, transformative formation of inchoate cultural materials into
expression—may be recognized objectively and from the outside, even if
one is not oneself moved by it. The artwork may have value, and be rec-
ognized to have it, even if it does not promote the evaluator’s own flour-
ishing (e.g., her adaptation or exercise of emotional capacities). This is
perhaps the position in which Herder places himself with respect to
Sophocles in “Shakespeare”: Sophocles is, he emphasizes, farther from
him than Shakespeare (S 298; SH 509), but he appears nevertheless
able to discern the play’s achievement from afar.
Yet this too seems overly to restrict appreciation of artworks to
members of their own societies, as Herder’s own very lively and sympa-
thetic appreciation of Greek works attests.43 Herder’s interpretations
and his explicit arguments suggest, however, that one needs to “accul-
turate” oneself in order to fully appreciate those works: to learn the
language, to familiarize oneself with their cultural context, including
religious practices, political institutions, and ways of life. (Perhaps
through extended sympathetic study of the works themselves, under-
stood as the necessary condition for aesthetic appreciation of them.)
Through such learning, one forms oneself appropriately to the work, to
be “as if” a member of that society, or at least able to feel the work’s fit
with it, to appreciate the work as speaking to that society.

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Herder’s interpretations also suggest that the appreciation thereby

achieved will be somewhat different from that of a member of the
work’s society. Rather than a direct recognition (“this is who we are,”
“this is my world”), one here achieves a more complicated, ambiguous
self-recognition. On the one hand, such appreciation recognizes some
sort of commonality between “us” and “them” through one’s ability
(however limited) to “feel oneself into” the ways of life, emotions, rela-
tionships in those vastly different societies,44 through being (able to be)
led to feel so by the artistic genius.45 On the other hand, this apprecia-
tion also contains a fascination with the specific diversity of the other
culture, a pleasurable, imaginative encounter with something explic-
itly different from one’s own cultural context. Cultural expression is,
then, crucial to such appreciation, though not as providing immediate,
adaptive self-consciousness. It furnishes, perhaps, a broader sort of self-
consciousness, of oneself as member of an immensely varying species.
This broader self-consciousness is achieved neither through removing
artworks from their contexts, leaping to a “higher level” of universality,
nor through treating cultural differentiation as superficial or merely
instrumental. Rather, it is achieved through the appreciator’s immer-
sion of herself in those diverse and vividly rendered contexts, in her
attempt to understand others as such. It is also, arguably, the core of
Herder’s moral, political, and aesthetic ideal, Humanität—but that dif-
ficult concept is the subject matter for another discussion.

NOTES

I am grateful to Andrew Cutrofello, Anne Eaton, Hannah Ginsborg, Les Harris,

and Katalin Makkai for helpful discussion of the issues in this paper.

1. See Frederick Charles Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 98–100.
2. This approach was pioneered by Isaiah Berlin. See his Vico and Herder, in
Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry
Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 1–300. For a
recent, nuanced version of this approach, see Vicki A. Spencer, Herder’s
Political Thought: A Study on Language, Culture, and Community
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
3. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Fragments of a Treatise on the Ode,” in
Selected Early Works, 1764–1767: Addresses, Essays, and Drafts;
Fragments on Recent German Literature, trans. Ernst A. Menze and
Michael Palma, ed. Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 35–51.

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4. Examples among Herder’s contemporaries include Francis Hutcheson, An

Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two
Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Liedhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004) and
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. Peter Jones
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), both of which Herder knew. For a
recent version of universalist naturalism in aesthetics, see Denis Dutton,
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2009).
5. The term often used in Herder’s work is “nation” but this—and its corre-
sponding “ism,” “nationalism”—has even more complicated connotations.
On this tricky topic in Herder, see “Nationalism,” chap. 5 of Spencer,
Herder’s Political Thought, pp. 129–57. A somewhat equivalent term,
Bildung (understood broadly as “formation”), is important to Herder’s
work since it describes biological development as well as education, histor-
ical change, and so forth. By “culturalism,” I do not mean to refer to all of
these meanings either, but only to the historically and geographically
varying complexes of political and social institutions broadly understood
(to include language, tradition, economic practices, and social customs, as
well as formal institutions) that are Herder’s foci in his historical writings,
and that we often designate as “culture.” His major writings in the philos-
ophy of history include “This Too a Philosophy of History for the
Formation of Humanity (1774),” in Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed.
Michael Neil Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.
272–358; and Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans.
Thomas Churchill (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966); Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Martin Bollacher, vol. 6 of
Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher
Klassiker, 1989).
6. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Selected Writings on
Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006), pp. 291–307; henceforth S, followed by page number;
“Shakespear,” pt. 2 of Von deutscher Art und Kunst, in Schriften zur
Ästhetik und Literatur, 1767–1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm, vol. 2 of Werke
in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher
Klassiker, 1993), pp. 498–521; henceforth SH, followed by page number.
7. On this essay in relation to other philosophical areas (e.g., hermeneutics,
the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history, respectively), see
Kristin Gjesdal, “Literature, Prejudice, Historicity: The Philosophical
Importance of Herder’s Shakespeare Studies,” in Die Aktualität der
Romantik, ed. Michael Forster and Klaus Vieweg (Berlin: Lit, 2012), pp.
137–60; Andrew Cutrofello, “Kant’s Debate with Herder about the
Philosophical Significance of the Genius of Shakespeare,” Philosophy
Compass 3:1 (2008), pp. 66–82; Eva Knodt, “Dramatic Illusion in the
Making of the Past: Shakespeare’s Impact on Herder’s Philosophy of
History,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, History, and the
Enlightenment, ed. Wulf Koepke (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990),
pp. 209–23.
8. See my “Herder and Philosophical Naturalism,” Herder Jahrbuch 12:1
(2014), pp. 125–44.

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9. For similar views about historicism in general, and Herder in particular,

as consistent with, or even a part or a form of naturalism, see “Herder’s
Historicism, its Genesis and Development,” chap. 3 of Beiser, The German
Historicist Tradition, pp. 98–166.
10. See, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of
Language (1772),” in Philosophical Writings, p. 163; henceforth OL, fol-
lowed by page number; “Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache
(1772),” in Frühe Schriften, 1764–1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier, vol. 1 of Werke in
zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker,
1985), pp. 809–10; henceforth US, followed by page number. Herder’s
(broadly Christian) religious commitments complicate this claim, as I dis-
cuss briefly in my “Herder and Philosophical Naturalism,” pp. 140–2. I
believe that Herder adheres to a roughly Spinozist position on this issue
(naturalist explanations are in some sense “also” religious explanations, or
can be restated as such), which might also explain why, for him, natural-
ism is both an explanatory and normative position: what exists (nature) is
good, as equivalent to (or chosen by) God. As usual for this not always
systematic thinker, however, not all of his comments may be fully
accounted for by such a move.
11. This is the central line of argument in Herder’s Fourth Critical Forest (see
Johann Gottfried Herder, Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedel’s
Theory of the Beaux Arts, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, pp. 177–290;
henceforth FG, followed by page number; Kritische Wälder: Viertes
Wäldchen, über Riedels Theorie der schönen Künste, in Schriften zur
Ästhetik und Literatur, 1767–1781, pp. 247–442; henceforce VW, followed
by page number). As may be clear, Herder therefore has a pluralist con-
ception of artistic value. In what follows, the term “artistic value” is not
meant to refer to one univocal value of all art, but rather to one or some of
those artistic values that I leave unspecified here; some of them are the
subject of chapter three of my Herder’s Naturalized Aesthetics (unpub-
lished manuscript).
12. Johann Gottfried Herder, “The Causes of Sunken Taste Among the
Different Peoples in Whom it Once Blossomed,” in Selected Writings on
Aesthetics, p. 317; henceforth ST, followed by page number; “Ursachen des
gesunknen Geschmacks bei den verschiednen Völkern, da er geblühet,” in
Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–1787, ed.
Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, vol. 4 of Werke in zehn Bänden,
ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 1994), p. 124;
henceforth GG, followed by page number.
13. “Shakespeare” was originally published in 1773 together with another
essay by Herder and two essays by Goethe, in a volume entitled Von
Deutscher Art und Kunst: Einiege fliegende Blätter, ed. Heinz Kindermann
(Hamburg: Bode, 1773), pp. 71–118.
14. See particularly Johann Gottfried Herder, “Fragments on Recent German
Literature (1767–8),” in Philosophical Writings, pp. 33–64, which was a
commentary on the Letters on Modern German Literature (Moses
Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Nicolai, Briefe, die
neueste Literatur betreffend [Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974]), a collection

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of works by various authors concerning the direction modern German lit-

erature ought to take.
15. On this project, see Karl Menges, “Particular Universals: Herder on
National Literature, Popular Literature, and World Literature,” in A
Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Hans Adler and
Wulf Koepke (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), pp. 189–213; see also
Wulf Koepke, “Herder’s Views on the Germans and Their Future
Literature,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, pp.
215–32.
16. See Kristin Gjesdal, “Reading Shakespeare—Reading Modernity,”
Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9:3 (2004), pp. 17–31; for
a description of some of this prior discussion, see pp. 22–3.
17. See also Herder’s more extensive animadversions against anachronistic
interpretation and evaluation of ancient Greek works that occupy most of
the first two Critical Forests (Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Art
and Science of the Beautiful: First Grove, Dedicated to Mr. Lessing’s
Laocoön, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, pp. 51–176; Kritische Wälder:
Erstes Wäldchen, Herrn Leßings Laokoon gewidmet, in Schriften zur
Ästhetik und Literatur, 1767–1781, pp. 57–245; and Zweites Wäldchen,
über einiger Klotzische Schriften, in vol. 3 of Sämtliche Werke, ed.
Bernhard Suphan [Berlin: Weidmann, 1878], pp. 189–372). Cultural vari-
ation and context-dependence is especially apparent in literary works, to
which Herder also devotes most of his attention, as their medium (lan-
guage) obviously varies across cultures. He takes such cultural variation
to hold for other art forms as well, but consideration of how or to what
degree lies beyond the scope of the present discussion.
18. One might object, too, that artists could invent their “materials” entirely,
or draw them from nature rather than any culture—possibilities that, I
think, are not considered by Herder.
19. In this polemic, Herder builds upon Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy
(1795) (see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy [New York:
Dover, 1962]), as he notes in S 295; SH 504.
20. This claim is complicated: modern French culture is arguably in part con-
stituted by its inheritance from (i.e., its particular interpretation and
appropriation of) the Greek and Roman heritage (as Herder recognizes,
somewhat, in S 292; SH 499). Herder’s separation of the two cultures from
one another is, then, perhaps too strong. As Peter Burgard argues in
“Literary History and Historical Truth: Herder, ‘Shakespeare’, Goethe,”
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte 65:1 (1991), pp. 636–52, Herder has an overly non-con-
tinuous conception of cultural history. This criticism is not entirely fair, as
Herder does emphasize cultural inheritances elsewhere (e.g., Greek adop-
tion of artistic and scientific knowledge from the Egyptians). However, he
does tend to speak of cultures as confined historical-geographical entities
that are born, flourish, and die off.

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21. One might wonder, however, whether “empty” formalism might be the
appropriate expression of an “empty” modern culture—a Herderian
thought, though taken to a somewhat anti-Herderian conclusion.
22. In “Sunken Taste,” Herder suggests a similar understanding of
Apollonius, a later Greek imitator of Homer (ST 317; GG 124). Thus “for-
eign” need not mean from an entirely different culture, but can refer to a
different historical period of the same (i.e., historically and linguistically
continuous) culture.
23. See also ST 315–6; GG 122–3.
24. Contra Knodt, “Dramatic Illusion in the Making of the Past,” pp. 216–7.
Later expression theorists such as Dewey and Collingwood describe this
contrast in quasi-medical terminology: the artwork may always be a
symptom (effect) of who the artist is (or, for Herder, of what his society is
like), but it may fail to express that.
25. This is the purport not only of the comments about historical change in
“Shakespeare,” quoted above, but also of Herder’s philosophy of history
generally. It is an assumption of Herder’s arguments that I simply take on
board here.
26. I frame this question in normative terms because, as noted, Herder’s dom-
inant questions are normative. Herder’s naturalism is, too, less opposed
methodologically or explanatorily to culturalism than other forms of natu-
ralism. As noted above, it does not—unlike many contemporary forms of
naturalism—include a methodological privilege of natural science, and so
does not exclude social scientific or other culturalist descriptions or expla-
nations. (Such privilege is usually based on either epistemological concep-
tions of proper knowledge as rigorously lawful or mathematizable, or on
philosophical-metaphysical aspirations to reduction, about which Herder
is skeptical; his concern is broader, namely that knowledge be empirical.)
This is not to say that there are no possible methodological or explanatory
tensions for Herder concerning, for example, how to combine natural-sci-
entific with social-scientific descriptions, or how to determine whether a
naturalistic (e.g., neurological) or a historical explanation is appropriate
for understanding a particular case. But again, he tends not to discuss
such questions, focusing on the normative. I should also note that the res-
olutions of the naturalist/culturalist discussed here are not the only ones
present in Herder’s works: elsewhere, for example in “Sunken Taste,” he
seems instead to endorse various forms of aesthetic exceptionalism (cer-
tain cultures, because of their social arrangements, achieve natural artis-
tic norms). “Shakespeare” poses the tension more dramatically, and so
more interestingly, on my view; it also therefore requires a different, and
appealingly less exceptionalist, resolution than these other strands in
Herder’s thinking.
27. John McDowell is the most prominent defender of such a position in phi-
losophy today. See, for example John McDowell, “Two Sorts of
Naturalism,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998), pp. 167–97. I do not mean to characterize
McDowell’s view specifically here, however. Though she does not raise the

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question of the culturalist/naturalist tension, Gjesdal seems to endorse

this sort of resolution in her interpretation of “Shakespeare.” See Gjesdal,
“Literature, Prejudice, Historicity,” p. 153; see also Knodt, “Dramatic
Illusion in the Making of the Past,” p. 222n. 7.
28. See, for example, OL 65–8, 139–43; US 697–700, 783–7.
29. This is a major theme in Herder’s works starting with his early lecture,
“On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages (1764),” in
Selected Early Works, 1764–1767, pp. 29–34.
30. So one might also interpret the “sheep giving birth to lion cubs” passage
cited above as saying: one can “ape” other cultures, but not produce simi-
lar products “naturally” (i.e., immediately, or spontaneously).
31. See Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. 1, pp. 67–72; vol. 2, pp. 670–84.
32. Contra Gjesdal (“Reading Shakespeare—Reading Modernity,” p. 26), in
the penultimate draft of “Shakespeare” Herder claims that Kames “did
not quite become” the Aristotle for Shakespeare (“Shakespear: Zweiter
Entwurf,” pt. 4 of Von deutscher Art und Kunst, in Schriften zur Ästhetik
und Literatur, 1767–1781, p. 548) because, I am suggesting, Kames
adheres to an overly universalist conception of human nature, and so of
drama.
33. Kames probably views emotional arousal as the singular end of art, while
Herder takes different art forms to have different characteristic values. In
the case of other art forms, however, one could employ roughly the same
theoretical structure—cultural means to accomplish naturally normative
ends—though it might be complicated to work out how that goes in any
particular case.
34. Herder’s firm distinction of human beings from other animals here should
not mislead: this argument concerns human nature specifically, of course,
but it is an argument concerning what this nature is within the “general
economy of animal life” (OL 82; US 716).
35. In a way reminiscent of Kant’s view in the Critique of Pure Reason (which
first appeared nearly ten years later in 1781), Herder argues that the abil-
ity to conceptualize objects and self-consciousness originate together, per-
haps make one another possible.
36. Herder likewise describes learning from the environment as distinctively
human, with a very strongly positive normative tenor (OL 130–1; US
772–3).
37. Such adaptation is, I emphasize, only a component of Herder’s normative
naturalism: human flourishing comprises the full, harmonious exercise of
one’s faculties broadly. Thus adaptation to a society that suppressed feel-
ing (as Herder believed of the Enlightenment) or thought (as totalitarian
regimes perhaps aspire to do) would not satisfy Herder’s naturalist norms.
38. I have adjusted the grammar of these expressions, which are used nega-
tively by Herder to describe a failed imitator as singing outside his ele-
ment.

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39. I think in fact that the self-recognition offered by cultural expression in

art is itself an object of emotional response—an “aha,” one might say, of
self-understanding. This emotional response is only one source of artistic
value because, as noted above, Herder is an aesthetic pluralist. A more
straightforward (Kamesian) emotional response, e.g., sympathy with a
hero’s grief, can be another source of artistic value. As Katalin Makkai
pointed out in a private conversation, the self-recognitional emotional
response need not be explicit: it may be a cognitive achievement later, on
further reflection, to understand that the emotional response was one of
self-recognition.
40. Knodt suggests that Herder draws his conception of “illusion” from
Mendelssohn, who understands it as absorption in the events on stage,
while also retaining the consciousness that the events are not in fact real
(see Knodt, “Dramatic Illusion in the Making of the Past,” p. 223n. 12).
She also nicely glosses the way in which Herderian illusion transcends
mere verisimilitude (or, in terms of her own concerns, straightforward his-
torical presentation): Shakespeare’s plays “present history in the form of a
contrived totality which has no counterpart in the realm of fact” (ibid., p.
219).
41. For an interesting discussion of the concept of genius in Herder’s essay,
see Cutrofello, “Kant’s Debate with Herder.”
42. For example, given historical fictions and the artistic practices of rework-
ing plots, characters, and so forth, why assume that artistic content must
come from the artist’s own society? If not, does the work necessarily lack
artistic value? Or, what is one to make of artists who are “ahead of their
time,” recognized only retrospectively as expressions of their age (precisely
because they come, historically, to define it)?
43. See Herder’s discussions of Philoctetes in the First Critical Forest (see
Herder, Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Art and Science of the
Beautiful: First Grove, pp. 71–81), and of Homer in the Second Critical
Forest (see Herder, Zweites Wäldchen, pp. 197–214).
44. Herder’s famous “Einfühlung” is celebrated by Isaiah Berlin, among oth-
ers. See Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, pp. 292, 396.
45. Herder emphasizes the way in which genius can direct taste in “Sunken
Taste” (ST 329; GG 141). I owe this point to Andrew Cutrofello.

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