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Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder
Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin's essays on these celebrated and captivating intellectual portraits: Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin's most important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences--both positive and (often) tragic.
Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism.
Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements.
The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title "The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism." The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as "Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas." Both are out of print.
This new edition includes a number of previously uncollected pieces on Vico and Herder, two interesting passages excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful responses to two reviewers of that same edition.
Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism.
Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements.
The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title "The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism." The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as "Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas." Both are out of print.
This new edition includes a number of previously uncollected pieces on Vico and Herder, two interesting passages excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful responses to two reviewers of that same edition.
541 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 2000
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About the author
Isaiah Berlin
207 books798 followersSir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.
Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.
Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.
Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.
Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.
This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.
Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.
Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.
Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.
Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.
Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.
This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.
Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.
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February 19, 2026
5*+ A 600 page book that could easily be 600 pages longer and still a continual delight.
In need of something (anything) after being stymied by Vico’s book proper (as indeed is only proper, this book informs me—‘Vico is a rich, suggestive and original, but scarcely a clear or coherent, thinker. One is tempted once again to quote Bizet’s celebrated comment on Berlioz that he ‘had genius without any talent’.
Be that as it may, I came here after the Oxford VSI bored somewhat, and was not disappointed—not by a long shot! And after a good month+ with I.B. as my personal Oxford tutor—or so it felt while reading this—I now feel fairly well-equipped to dive back into Vico!
Actually, you could say that I came for the Vico, stayed for the Herder, and will come back for more Hamann (needs must go get the latter two’s Works in the Cambridge Philosophical Texts series, I mean—they were just so damn interesting—not to mention, somehow consanguinious with the V-man, though there is no evidence that either of the Hs read him before developing their own thought...)
I shall endeavour to give you just the teeniest taste of each of these three in three quotations, limiting each to the realm of art and aesthetics. In the case of Vico,
As for Herder, he is largely responsible for the concept of
Very highly recommended!
In need of something (anything) after being stymied by Vico’s book proper (as indeed is only proper, this book informs me—‘Vico is a rich, suggestive and original, but scarcely a clear or coherent, thinker. One is tempted once again to quote Bizet’s celebrated comment on Berlioz that he ‘had genius without any talent’.
Be that as it may, I came here after the Oxford VSI bored somewhat, and was not disappointed—not by a long shot! And after a good month+ with I.B. as my personal Oxford tutor—or so it felt while reading this—I now feel fairly well-equipped to dive back into Vico!
Actually, you could say that I came for the Vico, stayed for the Herder, and will come back for more Hamann (needs must go get the latter two’s Works in the Cambridge Philosophical Texts series, I mean—they were just so damn interesting—not to mention, somehow consanguinious with the V-man, though there is no evidence that either of the Hs read him before developing their own thought...)
I shall endeavour to give you just the teeniest taste of each of these three in three quotations, limiting each to the realm of art and aesthetics. In the case of Vico,
works of art must be understood, interpreted, evaluated, not in terms of timeless principles and standards valid for all men everywhere, but by a correct grasp of the purpose and therefore the peculiar use of symbols, especially of language, which belong uniquely to their own time and place, their own stage of social growth; that this alone can unravel the mysteries of cultures entirely different from one’s own and hitherto dismissed either as barbarous confusions or as being too remote and exotic to deserve serious attention […] He conceived of aesthetics, which he called ‘poetics’, as being concerned with a basic activity of men seeking not to give pleasure or embellish truths, but to express a vision of the world, an activity that could be studied on a level with law or politics. He saw language and mythology as a free creation of the human spirit, and one providing more dependable data for human history than conscious records
As for Herder, he is largely responsible for the concept of
Expressionism: the doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so. Still more specifically, expressionism claims that all the works of men are above all voices speaking, are not objects detached from their makers, are part of a living process of communication between persons and not independently existing entities, beautiful or ugly, interesting or boring, upon which external observers may direct the cool and dispassionate gaze with which scientists – or anyone not given to pantheism or mysticism – look on objects in nature. This is connected with the further notions that every form of human self-expression is in some sense artistic, and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as such; which in turn entail such distinctions as those between integral and divided, or committed and uncommitted (that is, unfulfilled), lives; and thence lead to the concept of various hindrances, human and non-human, to the self-realisation which is the richest and most harmonious form of self-expression that all creatures, whether or not they are aware of it, live for.Herder’s mentor, Hamann, (who also wrote something called A New Apology for the Letter H, something I now absolutely have to read—not only because, well, we, or the Right would have us, think we’ve got Cancel Culture problems! Imagine the first letter of your surname in danger!) taught him to go to war with abstraction for the sake of the particular. To denounce dry-as-dust, cold reason and embrace the passions as the well-spring of all that is humane. Artists must not forget this, above all.
Modern writers have turned the savage violence of the Beasts of the Apocalypse into Lessing’s harmless moral imagery, and Aesop’s fierce vision into smooth Horatian elegance. To understand truly one must descend to the depths of the orgies, to Bacchus and Ceres. Nieuwentyt’s and Newton’s and Buffon’s discoveries cannot inspire poetry as mythology has done. For this there must be a reason. Nature has been killed by the rationalists because they deny the senses and the passions. ‘Passion alone gives to abstractions and hypotheses hands, feet, wings; images it endows with spirit, life, language. Where are swifter arguments to be found? Where the rolling thunder of eloquence, and its companion, the monosyllabic brevity of lightning?’ For this we must go to the artist, not to the modern philosopher […] What is it to understand? If you wish to understand [e.g.] the Bible you must comprehend […] with the passion of ‘a friend, an intimate, a lover’ [...] above all, not by rules. […] for sense and words are one, and all translation distorts. Some sentences may resemble one another, or carry similar meanings, but no sentence can literally be substituted for any other, for the connection of words and sense is organic, indissoluble, unique. Words are the living carriers of feeling – only pedants and scholars dilute them by analysis or kill them with devitalising formulae. A word is the stamp of life – the richer the better.
Very highly recommended!
November 29, 2024
Three Critics of the Enlightenment, the title Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s indefatigable editor and organizer, chose for this collection, is incredibly provocative. Who could possibly be critical of the Enlightenment? Stand up for irrationalism? Berlin convincingly argues that many ideas of the Counter Enlightenment, although usually associated with some of the darkest ideas in human history, actually form the basis for many essential liberal values, perhaps never more convincingly as in his studies of Vico and Herder. Irrationalism, in the sense that rational methods are not necessarily adequate to explain things, is at the core of arguments made by these three critics of the Enlightenment.
Giambattista Vico, (1668-1744) a Neapolitan academic and civil bureaucrat, had difficulty in organizing his cluttered, but brilliant mind and ideas (it is amusing to read Berlin’s thoughts on this since the same could be said of him; it was Hardy who organized much of Berlin’s writing into readable, thematic books). Some of Vico’s ideas became important footnotes in the later writings of Marx, Goethe and Nietzsche, but it took Berlin to pull his legacy out of obscurity to explain his significance to posterity: he “virtually invented a new field of social knowledge, which embraces social anthropology, the comparative and historical studies of philology, linguistics, ethnology, jurisprudence, literature, mythology, in effect the history of civilisation in the broadest sense.” Berlin summed this up as “the study of the human past as a form of collective self-understanding”, i.e., the conceptualization of the idea of culture, the bundle of experiences that make people who they are, as individuals and social beings.
For Vico, man’s existence was a mess of influences and experiences that could not be explained with mathematical precision. Vico rejected the conventional wisdom of thinkers like Descartes—that men (they didn’t take much stock of women back then) could be explained deductively with the application of universal, logical methods—or Locke—that a natural, pure state of man existed to whom immutable laws could be applied. Descartes’ conception of man, for example, failed to take into account psychology, which Vico "call[ed] the ‘poetical’ cast of mind." It failed to recognize “that mathematics is rigorous only because it is arbitrary, that is, consists in the use of conventions freely adopted as in the playing of a game; and is not, as had hitherto been generally supposed, a set of innate and objective rules, or a discovery about the structure of the world.” Nor could history be blithely dismissed by as an interesting, amateurish diversion or, as Locke and other political theorists did with classical Rome and ancient Greece, selectively cited as authoritative examples to explain man’s natural state. Culture and its expressions, like literature and art, could not be distilled into neat, logical and reproducible bundles.
Herder’s idea of expressionism can also be thought of a respect and valuing of authenticity. Much like Vico, but in a more ordered way, Herder felt that men could not be fairly judged by those in different cultures or of other historical eras. What was judged to be valid by an American in the 20th century could not be applied to those how lived during in Italy in the Middle Ages, or in a different culture in another part of the world, for that matter. There was no ultimate standard which could subject them to one or a collection of eternal truths. It would be wrong to dismiss this as cultural relativism, that no standards applied anywhere, however. That was our continuous duty, to balance, to make decisions, to account for differences in place, time and culture. This was essence of pluralism. It would be easy to use trite slogans like, “there is strength in diversity.” Instead, Herder might instead say “there is complexity in diversity and we, each of us, have to deal with it.” This is almost taken for granted today in modern societies, a fact which led Berlin to give Herder the ultimate compliment: “His vision of society has dominated Western thought; the extent of its influence has not always been recognised, because it has entered too deeply into the texture of ordinary thinking.”
Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was Herder’s teacher and mentor. Berlin’s focuses on Hamann’s foundational ideas to demonstrate both linkages to and departure’s from Herder’s thinking. He was both a friend and an intellectual antagonist to Immanuel Kant, rejecting his universalism. Hamann believed that universal doctrines, those that “appeared to be moving forward with the irresistible power of liberated human reason”, were destructive mirages. This notion of reason was built on “Belief [which] is not the product of the intellect, and can therefore also suffer no causality by it: since belief has as little grounds as taste or sight.” The same could be said about “wisdom”, which “is a feeling, the feeling of a father and child”. These could not be distilled, as Berlin summed up, into “logical deduction, guarantees given by infallible intuition”, instead “things are as they are”. Reason, as understood in the Enlightenment, suffered from the same fallacies as mathematics, it is made up of symbols and constructs created by man, they do not exist in nature.
This reverence for belief, which Berlin ascribes in part to Hamann’s “piety” also created a visceral hate for the natural sciences, a idea that has survived in most reactionary political ideologies to this day (consider the American conservative disdain for the science of climate change for a contemporary example). The Bible was his North Star, it was what it was and could not be deconstructed logically to fit some notion of human reason. From this standpoint, he conceived of a counterpoint to Kant, that “the task of true philosophy is to explain life in all its contradictions, with all its peculiarities, not to smooth it out or substitute it for ‘castles in the air’—harmonious, tidy, beautiful, and false.” Herder developed Hamann’s ideas into a framework that fit into liberal, revolutionary thought in subsequent generations. On the other hand, “Hamann hated authorities, autocrats, self-appointed leaders—he was democratic and anti-liberal—and embodies one of the earliest combinations of populism and obscurantism, a genuine feeling for ordinary men and their values and the texture of their lives, joined with an acute dislike for those who presume to tell them how to live. This [was] reactionary democracy, the union of anti-intellectualism and self-identification with the popular masses.” This strand of thinking formed the foundation of the fascist ideas of Maistre, fed the darkest ideologies of the 20th century, and now occupies the most powerful position in the world.
Berlin means so much to me because his questions, far from being locked in the times he was writing about, seem to resonate for every age. For example, as I was reading, I could not help but think of an ongoing debate between those in the U.S. who fetishize the eternal wisdom of the Framers of the Constitution and the more liberal notion of a living Constitution. Berlin noted that Vico was a stern critic of “natural law” and any static view of human affairs, writing, “They had a love to speak of ‘the matchless wisdom of the ancients’, as if early men could conceivably have known more than their descendants, who have inherited all the discoveries and inventions of the past and improved upon them; or, more absurdly still, as if these early men were fully rational beings, or lived (or could have lived) in a world similar to our own, or faced the kind of problems that necessarily belong to our our own unique phase of historical growth. If we do not study origins, we shall never know to what problems the thought or behavior of our ancestors was a continuous response; and since their response shaped ultimately not only them but us, too, we shall not understand ourselves unless we trace our own growth to its roots.”
This is an important collection of essays that anyone who cares about human relations and history should consider reading.
Giambattista Vico, (1668-1744) a Neapolitan academic and civil bureaucrat, had difficulty in organizing his cluttered, but brilliant mind and ideas (it is amusing to read Berlin’s thoughts on this since the same could be said of him; it was Hardy who organized much of Berlin’s writing into readable, thematic books). Some of Vico’s ideas became important footnotes in the later writings of Marx, Goethe and Nietzsche, but it took Berlin to pull his legacy out of obscurity to explain his significance to posterity: he “virtually invented a new field of social knowledge, which embraces social anthropology, the comparative and historical studies of philology, linguistics, ethnology, jurisprudence, literature, mythology, in effect the history of civilisation in the broadest sense.” Berlin summed this up as “the study of the human past as a form of collective self-understanding”, i.e., the conceptualization of the idea of culture, the bundle of experiences that make people who they are, as individuals and social beings.
For Vico, man’s existence was a mess of influences and experiences that could not be explained with mathematical precision. Vico rejected the conventional wisdom of thinkers like Descartes—that men (they didn’t take much stock of women back then) could be explained deductively with the application of universal, logical methods—or Locke—that a natural, pure state of man existed to whom immutable laws could be applied. Descartes’ conception of man, for example, failed to take into account psychology, which Vico "call[ed] the ‘poetical’ cast of mind." It failed to recognize “that mathematics is rigorous only because it is arbitrary, that is, consists in the use of conventions freely adopted as in the playing of a game; and is not, as had hitherto been generally supposed, a set of innate and objective rules, or a discovery about the structure of the world.” Nor could history be blithely dismissed by as an interesting, amateurish diversion or, as Locke and other political theorists did with classical Rome and ancient Greece, selectively cited as authoritative examples to explain man’s natural state. Culture and its expressions, like literature and art, could not be distilled into neat, logical and reproducible bundles.
Above all he had a sense of how various elements blended in social existence…a capacity for perceiving the way in which the ‘senseless factor’ in history interacts with conscious motives and purposes to produce unintended consequences—a quasi-aesthetic capacity for discrimination, integration and association, needed by historians, critics, novelists more than the capacity for abstraction, generalisation and dissociation of ideas indispensable to original discoveries in the natural sciences.There is no evidence that Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) ever read Vico, but he gave shape and voice to many of Vico’s most fundamental ideas. Berlin credits Herder with three great innovations, the conception of populism, expressionism and pluralism—none of which fit neatly into the prevailing tenor of the Enlightenment. Herder’s populism should not be confused with contemporary uses of the term. While it does rest on “the belief in the value of belonging to a group or a culture,” it “is not political [and] to some degree, anti-political, different from, even opposed to, nationalism.” His conception equated populism with ideas of the nation, of the Volksseele, not with the narrowness of the political State, which “has given us…contradictions and conquests, and, perhaps worst of all, dehumanisation.” In authentic populism, consent of the people is not based on rules of the State, but “upon respect, affection, kinship, equality, not fear or prudence and utilitarian calculation.” The latter could be subjected to functional, quantifiable analysis, the former could not.
Herder’s idea of expressionism can also be thought of a respect and valuing of authenticity. Much like Vico, but in a more ordered way, Herder felt that men could not be fairly judged by those in different cultures or of other historical eras. What was judged to be valid by an American in the 20th century could not be applied to those how lived during in Italy in the Middle Ages, or in a different culture in another part of the world, for that matter. There was no ultimate standard which could subject them to one or a collection of eternal truths. It would be wrong to dismiss this as cultural relativism, that no standards applied anywhere, however. That was our continuous duty, to balance, to make decisions, to account for differences in place, time and culture. This was essence of pluralism. It would be easy to use trite slogans like, “there is strength in diversity.” Instead, Herder might instead say “there is complexity in diversity and we, each of us, have to deal with it.” This is almost taken for granted today in modern societies, a fact which led Berlin to give Herder the ultimate compliment: “His vision of society has dominated Western thought; the extent of its influence has not always been recognised, because it has entered too deeply into the texture of ordinary thinking.”
Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was Herder’s teacher and mentor. Berlin’s focuses on Hamann’s foundational ideas to demonstrate both linkages to and departure’s from Herder’s thinking. He was both a friend and an intellectual antagonist to Immanuel Kant, rejecting his universalism. Hamann believed that universal doctrines, those that “appeared to be moving forward with the irresistible power of liberated human reason”, were destructive mirages. This notion of reason was built on “Belief [which] is not the product of the intellect, and can therefore also suffer no causality by it: since belief has as little grounds as taste or sight.” The same could be said about “wisdom”, which “is a feeling, the feeling of a father and child”. These could not be distilled, as Berlin summed up, into “logical deduction, guarantees given by infallible intuition”, instead “things are as they are”. Reason, as understood in the Enlightenment, suffered from the same fallacies as mathematics, it is made up of symbols and constructs created by man, they do not exist in nature.
This reverence for belief, which Berlin ascribes in part to Hamann’s “piety” also created a visceral hate for the natural sciences, a idea that has survived in most reactionary political ideologies to this day (consider the American conservative disdain for the science of climate change for a contemporary example). The Bible was his North Star, it was what it was and could not be deconstructed logically to fit some notion of human reason. From this standpoint, he conceived of a counterpoint to Kant, that “the task of true philosophy is to explain life in all its contradictions, with all its peculiarities, not to smooth it out or substitute it for ‘castles in the air’—harmonious, tidy, beautiful, and false.” Herder developed Hamann’s ideas into a framework that fit into liberal, revolutionary thought in subsequent generations. On the other hand, “Hamann hated authorities, autocrats, self-appointed leaders—he was democratic and anti-liberal—and embodies one of the earliest combinations of populism and obscurantism, a genuine feeling for ordinary men and their values and the texture of their lives, joined with an acute dislike for those who presume to tell them how to live. This [was] reactionary democracy, the union of anti-intellectualism and self-identification with the popular masses.” This strand of thinking formed the foundation of the fascist ideas of Maistre, fed the darkest ideologies of the 20th century, and now occupies the most powerful position in the world.
Berlin means so much to me because his questions, far from being locked in the times he was writing about, seem to resonate for every age. For example, as I was reading, I could not help but think of an ongoing debate between those in the U.S. who fetishize the eternal wisdom of the Framers of the Constitution and the more liberal notion of a living Constitution. Berlin noted that Vico was a stern critic of “natural law” and any static view of human affairs, writing, “They had a love to speak of ‘the matchless wisdom of the ancients’, as if early men could conceivably have known more than their descendants, who have inherited all the discoveries and inventions of the past and improved upon them; or, more absurdly still, as if these early men were fully rational beings, or lived (or could have lived) in a world similar to our own, or faced the kind of problems that necessarily belong to our our own unique phase of historical growth. If we do not study origins, we shall never know to what problems the thought or behavior of our ancestors was a continuous response; and since their response shaped ultimately not only them but us, too, we shall not understand ourselves unless we trace our own growth to its roots.”
This is an important collection of essays that anyone who cares about human relations and history should consider reading.
September 2, 2009
The benefits to modern thinking with which the Enlightenment has endowed later centuries are now so obvious that it seems almost impertinent to criticize that period of human development. Yet that is just what three contemporaries of the Enlightenment did at the time. Isaiah Berlin has brought their criticisms to light for modern readers in three remarkably researched long essays.
The gist of the Enlightenment centers around what the good for human beings amounts to. The direction the epoch had taken by the 1700's gave the movement’s greatest thinkers a tendency toward rationalism and, sure enough, toward system building. These critics weren't trying to refute the general humanist orientation, but they insisted that we distinguish the welfare of people in general from that of particular humans. Working separately from one another, these forceful writers were the first to call into question the rationalist trajectory of modern thinking. I like what each had to say.
Vico, for instance, writing early in the eighteenth century, attacks the idea of absolute truth. This doesn’t seem radical today because scientific knowledge is now considered contingent. But it was rather unheard-of when he first suggested it. Vico attacks systems built on a priori knowledge, Descartes' for example, explaining that the propositions of mathematics and other such constructs are absolutely true simply because the human mind can have privileged awareness of what it itself creates.
Vico calls this per caussas knowledge. The implications here go way beyond geometry. For example, does per caussas reasoning mean that conclusions about one’s own or another person's thoughts, impulses and motives might be described in terms of truth or knowing ("I know he's right to think ...")? Can reasoning by analogy from our thoughts to those of another person be justified by per caussas knowing? Isaiah Berlin develops Vico’s epistemology enticingly.
Herder and Harmann attack rationalism from many other angles. Herder emphasizes the role of belonging in contrast to the individualist atomization of the Enlightenment. Hamann, among many questions, asks whether the drive toward uniformity and standardization amounts to an outright denial of human reality. In all cases, these thinkers argue that the human individual cannot reasonably be factored out of human affairs.
As he develops their often disjointed rhetoric and reasoning, Isaiah Berlin brings to this book an enthusiasm for the world of ideas that makes it unusually satisfying to read. As the author points out, these thinkers, whose ideas have developed in so many directions over the past two centuries, do not have any real predecessors, so their critiques are original works. Berlin’s effort here to give these ideas modern expression while locating them in their proper perspective make this an excellent book for anyone interested in early modern philosophy or the history of ideas.
The gist of the Enlightenment centers around what the good for human beings amounts to. The direction the epoch had taken by the 1700's gave the movement’s greatest thinkers a tendency toward rationalism and, sure enough, toward system building. These critics weren't trying to refute the general humanist orientation, but they insisted that we distinguish the welfare of people in general from that of particular humans. Working separately from one another, these forceful writers were the first to call into question the rationalist trajectory of modern thinking. I like what each had to say.
Vico, for instance, writing early in the eighteenth century, attacks the idea of absolute truth. This doesn’t seem radical today because scientific knowledge is now considered contingent. But it was rather unheard-of when he first suggested it. Vico attacks systems built on a priori knowledge, Descartes' for example, explaining that the propositions of mathematics and other such constructs are absolutely true simply because the human mind can have privileged awareness of what it itself creates.
Vico calls this per caussas knowledge. The implications here go way beyond geometry. For example, does per caussas reasoning mean that conclusions about one’s own or another person's thoughts, impulses and motives might be described in terms of truth or knowing ("I know he's right to think ...")? Can reasoning by analogy from our thoughts to those of another person be justified by per caussas knowing? Isaiah Berlin develops Vico’s epistemology enticingly.
Herder and Harmann attack rationalism from many other angles. Herder emphasizes the role of belonging in contrast to the individualist atomization of the Enlightenment. Hamann, among many questions, asks whether the drive toward uniformity and standardization amounts to an outright denial of human reality. In all cases, these thinkers argue that the human individual cannot reasonably be factored out of human affairs.
As he develops their often disjointed rhetoric and reasoning, Isaiah Berlin brings to this book an enthusiasm for the world of ideas that makes it unusually satisfying to read. As the author points out, these thinkers, whose ideas have developed in so many directions over the past two centuries, do not have any real predecessors, so their critiques are original works. Berlin’s effort here to give these ideas modern expression while locating them in their proper perspective make this an excellent book for anyone interested in early modern philosophy or the history of ideas.
September 16, 2010
A word of warning must be sounded about Isaiah Berlin's books. I like this one when I first read it, as well as "Crooked Timber of Humanity", but since getting into the authors he talks about more deeply I've found that the way that he often characterizes them is at variance with how they're looked at by scholars in their own countries and in their own languages, with at times an almost willful distortion of the actual ideas that the people espoused. Two general examples of this are his treatment of de Maistre as being a kind of bloodthirsty pseudo-fascist and of Fichte as being purely an authoritarian nationalist. De Maistre was an ultra-conservative writing against the French Revolution, but Berlin distorts a quote from his "St. Petersberg Dialogues" to make it sound like he supports murder as a necessary thing for society. Fichte, who became a conservative later in life, is looked at as a proto-type for fascist nationalism because of his "Addresses to the German Nation", without a mention that Fichte was previously one of the most radical liberal of the Idealist philosophers and that his philosophical positions were established during this time.
The fact is that his playing somewhat fast and loose with the facts has most probably gone unnoticed because the authors he talks about are virtually unknown in the United States. But they aren't unknown elsewhere.
The fact is that his playing somewhat fast and loose with the facts has most probably gone unnoticed because the authors he talks about are virtually unknown in the United States. But they aren't unknown elsewhere.
June 20, 2023
Isaiah Berlin's "Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder" presents a captivating exploration of the intellectual contributions of three prominent figures—Vico, Hamann, and Herder—who challenged the prevailing ideals of the Enlightenment. Berlin meticulously analyzes their philosophical, cultural, and historical critiques, shedding light on their profound influence on subsequent thought. This review aims to provide an academic evaluation of Berlin's arguments, discussing the book's strengths, weaknesses, and its significance within the fields of intellectual history and philosophy.
"Three Critics of the Enlightenment" by Isaiah Berlin delves into the writings and ideas of Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, and Johann Gottfried Herder, who questioned the underlying assumptions and principles of the Enlightenment project. Berlin examines their distinct critiques, highlighting the diverse perspectives they brought to bear on issues of human nature, history, language, and culture. He traces their intellectual genealogies, contextualizing their works within the broader Enlightenment movement.
Berlin's work stands out for its rigorous scholarship and its ability to elucidate complex philosophical ideas. He engages with primary sources and secondary literature, carefully reconstructing the arguments and intellectual contexts of Vico, Hamann, and Herder. By unpacking their critiques of reason, universalism, and abstract concepts, Berlin illuminates their contributions to shaping alternative visions of human nature, society, and culture.
One of the notable strengths of "Three Critics of the Enlightenment" lies in Berlin's erudition and his skillful interpretation of complex philosophical texts. He demonstrates a deep understanding of the thinkers he discusses, allowing readers to grasp the nuances and originality of their ideas. Berlin's analysis provides a comprehensive account of the intellectual journeys of Vico, Hamann, and Herder, shedding light on their relevance and significance within the broader intellectual landscape.
Moreover, Berlin's exploration of the diverse critiques presented by these three thinkers enables readers to appreciate the multifaceted challenges posed to Enlightenment ideals. He reveals the richness and complexity of their thought, transcending simplistic characterizations of the Enlightenment as a monolithic movement. Berlin's work encourages readers to reevaluate the dichotomy between reason and tradition, universality and particularity, and objective knowledge and subjective experience.
While "Three Critics of the Enlightenment" offers a compelling analysis, it is not without its limitations. Some critics argue that Berlin's selection of thinkers and their works may not provide a fully comprehensive representation of all the critiques directed at the Enlightenment during that period. A broader engagement with other thinkers who offered critical perspectives on the Enlightenment could enhance the book's inclusivity and breadth of analysis.
Additionally, Berlin's writing style can be dense and intricate, making it challenging for some readers to navigate his arguments. A more accessible presentation of ideas and clearer signposting of key concepts could facilitate a broader readership's engagement with the book's content.
"Three Critics of the Enlightenment" holds significant importance within the fields of intellectual history and philosophy as a seminal work that unveils alternative voices within the Enlightenment era. Berlin's analysis broadens our understanding of the diverse intellectual currents at play during that period and their lasting impact on subsequent thought. The book's contribution lies in its ability to foster critical reflections on the limitations and blind spots of Enlightenment ideals, challenging us to reassess our assumptions about reason, progress, and human nature.
GPT
"Three Critics of the Enlightenment" by Isaiah Berlin delves into the writings and ideas of Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, and Johann Gottfried Herder, who questioned the underlying assumptions and principles of the Enlightenment project. Berlin examines their distinct critiques, highlighting the diverse perspectives they brought to bear on issues of human nature, history, language, and culture. He traces their intellectual genealogies, contextualizing their works within the broader Enlightenment movement.
Berlin's work stands out for its rigorous scholarship and its ability to elucidate complex philosophical ideas. He engages with primary sources and secondary literature, carefully reconstructing the arguments and intellectual contexts of Vico, Hamann, and Herder. By unpacking their critiques of reason, universalism, and abstract concepts, Berlin illuminates their contributions to shaping alternative visions of human nature, society, and culture.
One of the notable strengths of "Three Critics of the Enlightenment" lies in Berlin's erudition and his skillful interpretation of complex philosophical texts. He demonstrates a deep understanding of the thinkers he discusses, allowing readers to grasp the nuances and originality of their ideas. Berlin's analysis provides a comprehensive account of the intellectual journeys of Vico, Hamann, and Herder, shedding light on their relevance and significance within the broader intellectual landscape.
Moreover, Berlin's exploration of the diverse critiques presented by these three thinkers enables readers to appreciate the multifaceted challenges posed to Enlightenment ideals. He reveals the richness and complexity of their thought, transcending simplistic characterizations of the Enlightenment as a monolithic movement. Berlin's work encourages readers to reevaluate the dichotomy between reason and tradition, universality and particularity, and objective knowledge and subjective experience.
While "Three Critics of the Enlightenment" offers a compelling analysis, it is not without its limitations. Some critics argue that Berlin's selection of thinkers and their works may not provide a fully comprehensive representation of all the critiques directed at the Enlightenment during that period. A broader engagement with other thinkers who offered critical perspectives on the Enlightenment could enhance the book's inclusivity and breadth of analysis.
Additionally, Berlin's writing style can be dense and intricate, making it challenging for some readers to navigate his arguments. A more accessible presentation of ideas and clearer signposting of key concepts could facilitate a broader readership's engagement with the book's content.
"Three Critics of the Enlightenment" holds significant importance within the fields of intellectual history and philosophy as a seminal work that unveils alternative voices within the Enlightenment era. Berlin's analysis broadens our understanding of the diverse intellectual currents at play during that period and their lasting impact on subsequent thought. The book's contribution lies in its ability to foster critical reflections on the limitations and blind spots of Enlightenment ideals, challenging us to reassess our assumptions about reason, progress, and human nature.
GPT
May 26, 2014
There are good books. There are great books. And there are books I’d devour with cheese and chips if it meant having their content stored in my body fat, just so I could keep having flashbacks whenever I burned this intellectual cholesterol inside me. How happy would I be if I could run behind the bus in a hopeless effort to catch it and suddenly my memory suddenly retrieved something – anything, really – about Hamann’s philosophy of language? I’d probably just stop there and seize my very own moment of enlightenment, jotting down a few personal notes and blocking traffic. Unfortunately, I reckon this is not what they mean by “cellular memory”. Or “devouring books”. Or by “enlightenment”. I wish it worked like this though.
The first critic of the enlightenment in this book is Gianbattista Vico. His claim to fame is an interesting attack on Descartes, by pointing out maths is so precise because we bloody invented the thing, and building up a whole system of thought from there. He also seems to have outsmarted Marx long before Marx though about class struggle, and for this he remains as popular as ever. And by that I mean no one knows him. Seriously, I looked up his name on Google and my computer offered me some mentholated ointment for my throat. That’s how famous he is.
Hamann and Herder, master and pupil respectively, are a bit more well-known, and that’s not saying much. Although they kick-started German romanticism by cranking up their pietistic roots up to eleven, Goethe stole their thunder with the Sturm Und Drang movement, and romantic thinkers – from Jacobi to Hegel – hijacked and developed some of their ideas so that they entered mainstream philosophy and no one knew for sure how exactly that happened.
Isaiah Berlin did know. And that’s about as much as I can tell you without spoiling the book. Just go read it. There are enough Enlightenment fanboys these days to give you the impression it’s all fun and games, whereas these lads will make you think a bit about the whole project.
The first critic of the enlightenment in this book is Gianbattista Vico. His claim to fame is an interesting attack on Descartes, by pointing out maths is so precise because we bloody invented the thing, and building up a whole system of thought from there. He also seems to have outsmarted Marx long before Marx though about class struggle, and for this he remains as popular as ever. And by that I mean no one knows him. Seriously, I looked up his name on Google and my computer offered me some mentholated ointment for my throat. That’s how famous he is.
Hamann and Herder, master and pupil respectively, are a bit more well-known, and that’s not saying much. Although they kick-started German romanticism by cranking up their pietistic roots up to eleven, Goethe stole their thunder with the Sturm Und Drang movement, and romantic thinkers – from Jacobi to Hegel – hijacked and developed some of their ideas so that they entered mainstream philosophy and no one knew for sure how exactly that happened.
Isaiah Berlin did know. And that’s about as much as I can tell you without spoiling the book. Just go read it. There are enough Enlightenment fanboys these days to give you the impression it’s all fun and games, whereas these lads will make you think a bit about the whole project.
July 5, 2013
Ik ben aan mijn "read"-lijst de meest interessante boeken aan het toevoegen die ik voor mijn thesis heb (moeten) (ge)lezen. No shame. I read the goddamn books.
May 25, 2023
Excellent introduction to figures who are not well known to the public, but were important to the development of what in the long run was the historicist background behind the rise of postmodern and work ways of thinking. The author, though, was in the Milner group (see Quigley's The Anglo-American Establishment).
September 3, 2025
Belin tem um estilo relativamente caótico e repetitivo. Ainda sim é um prazer ouvir o que ele tem a falar sobre cada filósofo. O ensaio sobre Vico é maravilhoso. Hamann e Herder são menos interessantes que o italiano.
January 20, 2024
I hate Berlin's lectures. His written studies are alot better.
July 18, 2024
Berlin is a very clever and original thinker; I awe at how he computes his ideas. The first Jew I believe ever to be taken up at All Souls? The ‘proper study of mankind be next’, having ever so feebly gleamed his ‘Russian Thinkers’. That books sits omen like on my window, whispering to me during the next in a dim slavic accent ‘Read me Mr James’.
August 11, 2020
Not recommended as an introduction to any of these three authors, especially not Hamann, about whom I am probably the least unqualified to speak. Berlins characterizations are too general too often, and in many cases they say more about Berlin than about the person in question. He also seems to rely heavily on secondary sources, most visibly in the chapter on Hamann, where Unger's book on Hamann is used as standard reference-work. An apologist for Berlin might say the book is interesting as a general overview of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', but the most extraordinary gaffes occur when Berlin attempts to paint with broad strokes. For clear examples, take page 354, 417, 424. Connecting Hamann to Nietzsche, Husserl or D.H. Lawrence - or to all at once - might take another book or two. Apart from all this, the attempt to judge Hamann by his opinions on the Jews appears particularly wrong-headed, both as general approach and in Hamann's specific case. Luckily, recent scholarship has made this book mostly superfluous - except perhaps for the article on Herder.
September 26, 2012
Some books require undivided attention and I wasn't fully able to give it in this case. I certainly found it interesting--I hadn't known much, if anything, about Vico, Hamann or Herder before I read it. Now that I've read it, I'd like to go back to the introduction to see if I can step back and get a better perspective. But his focus in these essays, as often elsewhere, is on counter-Enlightenment thinkers and to "recover" neglected writers of the group and to give them credit for their ideas where credit has previously been misplaced on more well-known thinkers.
September 5, 2016
Where Berlin does an excellent job of summing up the primary ideas of Vico and Herder, he tends to repeat them over and over in ways that add very little to his observations. He also tends to wax intellectually in ways that mostly obscure what he is trying to say.
Skipped portion on Hamann as I haven't read him yet.
Skipped portion on Hamann as I haven't read him yet.
August 2, 2008
He called it the counter-enlightenment. I've been trying to get someone to translate Hamann into english ever since I read this book. It's been over two hundred years and still no one's up to the task. Where's the sense of adventure in our young german translators?
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