HERDER'S CONCEPTION OF "BILD"

HERDER,

BY MARTIN SCHÜTZE

ERDER, more than any one of the great minds of the modern age, has been charged with lack of unity and with vagueness and uncertainty of the fundamental terms and assumptions of his philosophy. Even his best interpreter, Haym, in his monumental work, leaves the reader with a distracting impression of Herder's mind as a vast, uneasy composite of heterogeneous ideas borrowed chiefly from Leibniz, Lessing, and Kant; a mind not truly fundamental, not primarily actuated by an authentic creative power; but rather secondclass, alert and acquisitive, stimulated, now by a polemic passion to correct minor errors, now by a disciple's zeal to amplify original ideas, of greater minds. The unparalleled scope and richness of Herder's work and the synthetic and imaginative manner of his statement make the task of penetrating to the few primary ideas which, if his philosophy be fundamental and original, must be the nucleus of his characteristic conclusions, more difficult than does the work of any modern thinker. The treasure lies deep within an immense and varied tract of mental experience.

It is clear that only by reducing that multiplicity of ideas to its simplest terms, and by ascertaining whether these terms are constant throughout the development of his thought, an answer can be found to the question: Is the philosophy of Herder fundamental and original? An affirmative answer, since it would have to include the principal characteristic elements, would involve also a re-classification of Herder's philosophy among the primary types of philosophy during his age.

Two classes of elements determine the character of any fundamental conception of mind: the active constituents of that which thinks, or feels, or is aware; and the primary units of the universe of discourse. These two classes cannot be assumed as independent of one another. They must be essen

tially and characteristically inter-related. The latter must pertain typically to the former, and the former must consummate its essential functions in the latter. Further, all the specific functions of the former and all the essential qualities of the latter must, throughout the details of their operations, developments, and uses, amid their combinations, amplifications, modifications and adaptations to particular conditions, each preserve its character.

In Herder's philosophy, which is a philosophy of the mind, the first class of elements is represented by his conception of specific genetic personality, the second by his conception of image.

The first has been discussed elsewhere.1 The second is the subject of the following pages.

ÜBER BILD, DICHTUNG UND FABEL

In his essay on Image, Poetry, and the Fable, which appeared 17872 in the third part of Zerstreute Blätter, Herder undertook to sum up his conception of "image" and to apply it fundamentally to his conception of poetry generally and of the Aesopian fable particularly. That his principal ideas upon this subject had guided him, however, from the beginning of his theoretic work, dating back to the Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur, would, even without his assertion in his preface to this essay, be evident from the Fragmente. Imagery is there throughout his primary unit of language and poetry, and the specific total index of individual and collective, racial and cultural personality and its poetic environment.

He integrates his conception of image at the outset of the essay with his conception of the organic unity of the mind, to which he had given his final expression in the preceding decade, in "Mind and Sensibility" (Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele).

In my "The Fundamental Ideas in Herder's Thought," Modern Philology, June 1920, pp. 65-78; October 1920, pp. 289-302; November 1920, pp. 113-130; May 1922, pp. 361-382; August 1923, pp. 29-48; November 1923, pp. 113-132. "The Cultural Environment of the Philosophy of Kant"in Immanuel Kant (Memorial Lectures delivered at Northwestern University, December 4-5, 1924), 1925. The Open Court Publishing Co., pp. 45-68. "Herder's Psychology," The Monist, October 1925, pp. 505-555.

2 The text of S.S.W., Vol. XV, pp. 523-568, is that of the second edition, 1798.

He says:

Man is a composite-artificial being to such an extent that he is incapable of a wholly simple condition. At the moment that he sees, he also hears, and otherwise unconsciously receives from without, through all the organs of his complex machine, influences, which indeed result in largely obscure sensations, yet incessantly take part in secretly shaping the sum of his mental condition. He floats in a sea of impressions, in which each wave, touching him now more, now less perceptibly, represents a modification of his inner condition through stimulation by his total environment.

Among his senses, eye and ear, drawing upon the sea of obscure sensations, bring before his soul the clearest and most intimate objects; and as he has the gift of words to designate and retain these objects, he finds in his language an orderly world of perceptions and ideas, which have sprung from the activities of eye and ear and reveal their origin even in their most remote developments. Even the most abstract activities of the soul have been traced to eye and ear, as is shown by the terms, "intuition," "idea," "fancy," "image," representation," and "Gegenstände.'

After eye and ear, touch, especially the tactile function of the hand, has furnished his soul with ideas. Taste and smell have contributed less, especially in northern countries.3

Language, as Herder had concluded in The Origin of Language,* has, by means of reflection (Besonnenheit), the faculty of the "third term" of discourse, the function of coördinating all the primary data of consciousness.

Herder defines image as any datum of perception which has attained to some degree of consciousness."

6

This consciousness or awareness is not a passive process of receiving impressions, but an active, characteristic function of the individual mind, by which the latter transforms sensations in its own image, or, in Herder's metaphor, stamps them with its

3 Op. cit., 523-4.

"See "Herder's Psychology."

"Bild nenne ich jede Vorstellung eines Gegenstandes mit einigem Bewußtsein der Wahrnehmung verbunden," op. cit., p. 525.

'As was assumed by the "empiricists" of the school of Locke, and the "sense-ists" of the eighteenth century.

character." "All our mental life is therefore in a sense poetics: we do not merely see, we create our images." 8

The essential primary constituent of our experience, of our universe of discourse, is not any external object, it is not the image reflected on our retina; but it is the image created by our inward sense, the work of the creative artist, which is our "soul" or integral individual self."

It follows that our soul, and likewise our language, cannot but create "allegories." Both together must "transmute" and "translate":

The original object (as, for instance, the physical image reflected on the retina) has so little in common with the mental image, the latter with the abstract idea, the idea with the expression, the visual perception with the name, that we can explain the bond of identity between them only as a unifying function essential to our complex organization, by which we are able to combine our different sense impressions into one image. We must assume a synthetic function, pertaining to our total mind, by which are produced the harmonious contact and communication between our senses. Without such an active integrating function, mental development ("Perfectibilität des Menschen") would be impossible. If we had only one sense, there would be no possibility of transmuting objects into images, images into words or other signs; and with that would cease all possibility of mind itself.10

In this central faculty of mental coördination all types of images reach immediate contact and assimilation. This contact is not intellectual but organic. Abstract ideas are not primary units of mind but derived from images.

This idea of primary powers of synthetic association, not ratiocinative but organically inherent in all the functions of mind, had played an essential part in Herder's argument, in the first Wäldchen, against Lessing's sense-istic confusion, in Laokoon, of the succession of sounds with the order of association of the 7 "Alle Gegenstände unserer Sinne werden nur dadurch unser, daß wir sie . . . mit dem Gepräge unsres Bewußtseins mehr oder minder hell und lebhaft bezeichnen" (p. 525).

8 P. 525.

'P. 526.

10 These ideas, the foundation of Herder's identification of mind and language in "Besonnenheit," the central faculty of mental coördination, form the basic argument of his essay on The Origin of Language. See my "Herder's Psychology," pp. 527-529.

ideas derived from the sounds of language, and belongs to the beginning of his theoretic work. It accounts for the term, first used in the first Wäldchen, "intrinsic coherence of related images."

" 11

All types of images and their expressions are ultimately amenable to the same standards: "Wahrheit, Lebendigkeit und Klarheit.' 12

"Truth, force and clarity" should be interpreted, not universally as in rationalism, but specifically, with individual reference. Otherwise they would be empty of meaning.

The "innere Sinn," i.e., not ratiocination, but the active integral function of creating images, being the primary function of mind and "giving rules to understanding and consciousness," 13 must be the sole standard of the manner in which an image must be applied, adapted, elaborated to fit each work, each system of art or discourse, in short, the "sole standard of the degree of truth, vividness, and clarity required for each particular one of its traits." 13

We encounter here one of Herder's fundamental principles, which, beginning with the first Wäldchen, is one of his most fruitful criteria. It is the principle of constructive specificity in the determination and control of generalization and synthesis, and of analysis of detail. It is, in his logic, the technical equivalent of his conception of personality.

In examining the rules of technique of discourse, he opposes the principle of constructive specificity to that of formal universalism, characteristic particularly of rationalism, and generally of any absolutism. His method, first thoroughly developed in his criticism of Lessing's Laokoon, in the first Wäldchen, is

11 "zusammenhängende Bilderbegriffe."

12 P. 527: In the philosophy of Leibniz, and of Rationalism generally, "distinctness" and "clarity," the specific attributes of (ratiocinative) truth, were opposed to vividness or force, the characteristic attributes of the higher among the ranks of the monads, below those of the "Reason." Baumgarten, in his Aesthetica, identified these vivid monads with the imagination and assigned them to poetry and the arts. Herder rejects the formalistic dualism of Rationalism.

13 P. 528: . . . "die Regel des Verstandes und Bewußtseins . . . der einzige Maßstab, wie in jedem Werk, in jedem System der Kunst oder des Vortrages ein Bild gestellt, gewandt, ausgemalt, kurz, zu welchem Grade der Wahrheit, Lebhaftigkeit und Klarheit es in jedem Zuge gebracht werden dürfte."