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Articles

Herder & Human Identity

Brian King says that to understand the herd, you need a Herder.

One question about human nature is whether it is the same for all people at all times, or whether it is fundamentally different in different cultures or historical periods. The argument that it is everywhere the same is implicit in the evolutionary view, since we all share common ancestors; but it has a longer pedigree than that. Plato’s account of the soul assumes that it applies to all men; Hume believed that “mankind is so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange”; and the philosophers of the Enlightenment tended to see human truths in universal terms because they felt that the most significant aspect of human nature was rationality, which they observed to be evenly distributed throughout the world. However other thinkers, such as German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) thought that peoples from different historical periods and cultures vary so much in their concepts and beliefs that human nature is radically different in different cultures.

This idea originates from two basic observations.

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