The Oldest Documents of the Human Race by Johann Gottfried Herder

If you asked me what I thought the greatest law in human history was, I’d probably default to a boringly tame answer: the first amendment, the first line of Germany’s Grundgesetz. Maybe if I’m trying to impress a niche crowd I’m going for the Edict of Nantes. Or maybe I say “the Five Second Rule”, and ridicule my over-earnest questioner for asking such an annoying question in the first place.

A policy/econ geek could likely get more specific. I can see someone making a case for something like the UK’s Joint Stock Companies Act 1856.

But maybe that’s wrong, too. If you’re Francis Fukuyama, you will no doubt insist it was Pope Gregory’s reinstatement of priestly celibacy, or perhaps the devşirme system that built a bureaucracy out of abducted Balkan children.

If you’re a left-of-centre economist in early post-2008, on the other hand, you’re spending every available breath insisting that, no - you fools! - it’s clearly 1933’s Glass-Steagall legislation (which we all ought to bring back).

True contrarians will claim it’s Singapore’s chewing gum ban. Truer contrarians still back the 18th amendment.

But if you’re Johann Gottfried Herder writing in Riga at the twilight of the 18th century, you disagree with all the above. All laws pale in comparison to one, ancient law, humanity’s first.

This law is, of course, the Sabbath.

Herder’s not just a random Christian square. He’s an Enlightenment thinker, formidable exegete, erstwhile student of Kant’s, and a soon-to-be favourite of the soon-to-be-important German romantics. If you’re Herder, the Sabbath is not just a day to appreciate God’s creation. It’s not just an inconvenient obstacle for the logic of economics to overcome, a reason to bore children on Sundays, or something for bloggers to make half-baked jokes about.

For Herder, the Sabbath is the literal lynchpin of human progress. The Sabbath summarises humanity’s vocation on earth and in the heavens, and is the essential cornerstone of civilisation. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s the paradigmatic example of a just law, a law freely imposed. If you’re Herder, the Sabbath is everything despotism is not. It is, in short, the blueprint of utopian government.

This is the argument of Herder’s 1774 monograph, The Oldest Document of the Human Race, in which he discovers in the book of Genesis the proof that humans learn and legislate through religion and poetry rather than reason and rationality. Remarkably, this is an argument of serious historical and political interest, and I’m here to tell you that this quixotic work plays an illustrative role in the history of German nationalism.

The Oldest Documents is also an interesting attempt to answer the once-unnecessary question, “what actually is religion, and why does it exist?” Lots of people will find this question resolutely uninteresting. Popular responses range from “elite psyop” or “braindead delusion” to “the truth and the way” or “huh?”.

Herder’s got his own flavour of answer. I’ll spoil it at the outset: for Herder, religion is basically a kind of supervised learning, a fruitful primordial collaboration of God and man. The world is hieroglyphic, and revelation is the metaphysical Rosetta stone we co-create with the big man upstairs.

I’m also here on a side-quest to convince you that, no, not all German philosophers write with the esoteric technicalities of Kant or Hegel. Some of them, it turns out, write with a fiery Teutonic style worthy of Goethe’s mothertongue (who, it turns out, was a great friend of Herder’s).

And as a final welcome side-effect, this book also doubles up as a great performancing-enhancing drug for the popular hobby of Observing Sunrise (rivalling even that other great sunrise supplement, Movies By Richard Linklater).

II.

Open up The Oldest Documents of the Human Race, and within a single paragraph you’ll encounter more exclamation marks than you’d see in an email from a panicked (and statistically female) mid-20s new hiree trying their best to avoid the spectral threat of accidentally passive aggressive prose. Herder writes with the spirit and vigour of the Sturm und Drang, excoriating his opponents, mass-producing paeans to the ancients, and decrying the corruption of modern man.

We recognise this voice - it is the voice of a preacher. And like any good preacher, Herder has a good feel for balancing the dramatic and earnest with the light-hearted and wry. Take, for example, his swift discussion of the phrase: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. Once’s he done ridiculing the trite Platonist dualisms that foolish sophists have discovered in these words, Herder offers a plainer explanation. Imagine you are Adam. What do you see if you look around? There you go. Had Adam been a Merman, says Herder, he would’ve spoken of the Lord as the God of “Heaven and Sea!”

Such snide remarks have an overarching strategic and apologetic purpose. Herder had a long and interesting career, which included stints as a priest in Weimar and Riga, poetry, translation, several biblical commentaries and an excellent essay on Shakespeare. He believed in human progress, a free press, popular participation in government; he read and corresponded widely - in short, he was an Enlightenment man. But his intellectual mission can be summarised simply:

Everything you’re all thanking reason for, you should instead thank revelation for.

It was in this exegesis of Genesis that Herder first made this philosophical programme explicit. It is his attempt to couch Christian apologetics in Enlightenment terms acceptable to his progressive philosophically-minded peers.

To do so, The Oldest Documents of the Human Race has to challenge a number of popular Enlightenment ideas:

Humans can use reason to learn the essential content of the divine law through the observation of nature via a process termed “natural theology”.
Because religious knowledge is available to all, the claims of the priesthood to arcane wisdom are false.
Because man originally possessed this natural reason (which decrees the correct order of things), the continued existence of tyranny is in an important sense a historical accident.
This historical accident is in fact the result of a betrayal, an act of priestcraft, wherein a powerful class of priestly deceivers usurped the epistemic claim to spiritual knowledge, and used it to oppress the people.

Though Herder thinks tyranny unnatural, and is heavily in favour of liberal reforms and popular participation in government, he regards this story as a load of misleading rubbish.

More than anything, he says, it directly contradicts the best available source on humanity’s own origins: Genesis. This first book of the Bible, says Herder, is quite literally the oldest document of the human race. It is testament to man’s first hours on earth, and we should read Genesis for an idea of what natural man looked like, not the speculations of philandering Frenchmen.

Importantly, Herder does not mean any of this in some naive creationist sense. He is not straightforwardly claiming that the opening chapters of Genesis tells us what happened as it happened. For Herder, the truth of Genesis 1-3 is essentially anthropological. If you had been in the same situation, he tells us, you would probably have ended up creating a similar story. It shows us the world as Adam saw it, no more, no less. The early chapters of Genesis are therefore best read simply, as a document of the exact kind of tale primordial man told himself to make sense of the universe. It’s the story man recounts after his first sunrise. Attempts to discover more “advanced” philosophy in it are pointless - the infancy of its imagination is the precise source of its worth.

Read Genesis like this, says Herder, and you will find not the careful and calculated inference of a reasoning man, but the sensual immediacy of a child. He does his very best to translate this immediacy into his own writing, and I for one am continually impressed by the urgency with which he attempts, beyond all reason, to empathise with primordial man and the semiotic nuke he endured.

This makes reading the Oldest Documents a peculiarly moving exercise - one gets the repeated impression that Herder is interrupting himself, resorting again and again to the exclamation mark and increasingly to italics, capital letters or s p a c i n g (rendered uniformly as italics in modern editions) in an attempt to convey the all-important urgency and significance of his messages. It reads, at times, like the ramblings of a particularly literary psychosis. Like a psychotic, Herder feels himself in unique possession of an urgent truth. His mission: to “explain and salvage a revelation from God that has been obscured and disfigured for millenia”.

III.

Let’s turn to the text. The book is several hundred pages long, and Herder covers most of Genesis, unsurprisingly spending a lot of time on Moses in particular. But it’s the early chapters, on Genesis 1-3, where he really shines.

He opens with a semi-ironic rendition of the thesis of natural theology:

There has long been an outcry that God should, and must, reveal Himself through nature alone. What a magnificent book it is! Such profound, universally comprehensible language - and oh, how compelling! What integrity and what power upon the human heart!

The idea that man does this through reason and deliberation, however, is laughable.

God should reveal Himself to you through creation - but what is creation? A teeming throng of individual, separate, whole creatures; each a world unto itself: none connected to the other, none resembling the other… and what will you now clearly decipher from this clamorous rhapsody of all creatures?

Sure, Herder concedes, modern man might well be able to classify the natural world around him with ease. But division, abstraction and representation are the privileges of late-stage humanity equipped with the user-interface of language. In this vein does Herder address the reader:

But of course you can in time find the means to do this: separating, individuating, dissecting - Lightning! Plant! Tree! Animal! Stone!... but consider that this was not the circumstance of all, and of the earliest world? To demarcate in this way, to slowly dissect… They had not time for that, no means and tools, no gift for abstraction, no desire and no courage.

To think of natural man as capable of such abstraction is to bestow foreign modes of thinking upon him. I’m on board with some of this. I’d happily concede to Herder that most of the sophisticated system of representation with which we interface with the world is not hard-coded into the human brain. But there’s plenty that is - faces, basic shapes, in and out, above and below - all things we know now our brains have innate circruity for.

Herder doesn’t care about these modern objections, of course. He is at great pains to stress that the first men learn differently to us (I guess training is distinct from inference, after all). He considers it decidedly impossible that happenstance, random learning could lead humans into the wisdom they came to possess. Some guiding force must have been holding their hand. And so he goes on:

God, the teacher of these people, shall teach them… not through conclusions and abstractions, of which they, like all adolescents, have no idea! Which exhaust, hinder and blind us! No, only through presence and power! So that they are gradually guided and directed to everything around them, upon which they feelas if poured out onto!

Such that the entire world of images, that bombarded or would bombard their eyes, could proceed in gentle order - such that each could be grasped in its entire presence with sense and power - Heavens! For this adolescent, for the blind man learning to see, what wiser, more paternal order in heaven and earth [1]

When humans learn in this way, only one conclusion is possible: to the infant eyes of the first homo sapiens, the experience of sunrise is, inescapably, an encounter with God. Herder is bullish on this, claiming it’s an experiment you can replicate with any kid:

Take a child into the hymn of dawn: you will see success. The oldest, strongest children of the human race! - finally even the firstborn of God, to whom their Father revealed Himself so lovingly! Who can empathize with this primordial epoch of the religion of Creation, when Adam came into being, stood, saw - God everywhere - and felt himself in Him, himself as His image - holy moments of the first revelation!

If and when I have children, you bet I’ll be introducing them to the Hymn of Dawn (provided that referent remains uncaptured by an as-yet-uncreated Scandinavian metal band). In the meantime, I’d be grateful if any of my readers could do the same and report their results asap (ideally having kept your offspring’s YouTube-exposure to an implausible minimum).

Now there’s an obvious ambiguity in all this: is Herder saying natural theology is indeed possible, or that positive revelation from God is needed?

What he seems to be attempting here is a half-way house between the “everyone can discover God in nature” faction and the “revelation is arcane knowledge of God and imparted by him to chosen messengers” faction. Herder readily concedes that revelation’s expression in human language necessitates some degree of human participation. But he’s keen to maintain that this can only occur in select circumstances - like childhood or primordial civilisation - in which man is close enough to nature, where his experience of it is unmuddied by layers of abstraction and representation.

This matters because Herder has with this analysis provided a wholesale alternate history to counter the familiar Enlightenment one.

Yes, natural man knew God. Undoubtedly. But they were not acquainted through reason, but through natural and unrestrained awe, through sensuality and presence. Not careful deliberation, but primordial passionate and mythologising (dare I say Malickian) encounters with creation bring man into communion with God. It is on this communion which the social order depends:

He who taught men what they know appeared under the purple of the dawn; there he opened the gaze and soul of his favorite creature, loosened its language and tongue, beckoned it to his goodness, splendor and order; descending gradually from heaven to earth, gave it his counsel, his image, his example; gave it first custom, order, institution, vocation and rest...

The element of instruction was, in every respect, composed into creation! Great, articulate, mighty, eternal, like the system of the heavens and the earth! This is how God teaches!

God as Adam saw Him

I likened this to supervised learning earlier, but maybe a better analogy is that of a seeded run. In the rogue-like videogame genre, players makes repeated attempts to beat the game in one go, with any number of small randomisations affecting outcomes throughout the entire “run”. The essence of skill in a rogue-like is a player’s ability to make use of the hand they’ve been dealt. Each run is denoted with a specific “seed” which denotes a given game path by determining the randomisation of all the outcomes a player experiences over the course of the run.

In most rogue-likes, players have the option to set a specific seed in advance to get a particular (and typically favourable) experience of the game. Streamers of rogue-like games blessed with implausible luck will frequently be accused of surreptiously playing a “seeded run”. Real life parallels abound: nepo babies are all on gatekept runs; Basil I of Byzantine clearly enjoyed some outrageous RNG; the Kennedy seed… … is a mixed bag. (For veteran gamers only).

Forrest Gump: modern cinema’s quintessential seeded run

Adam is playing a seeded run. He’s still playing his own game, he’s still making all his own decisions, and he’s still completing the run (obtaining Revelation) by his own legitimate efforts. But I know a seeded run when I see one. This one’s just been curated by God Himself, maximising Adam’s chances of ending the run successfully with a pristine copy of Genesis 1-3 in his hands.

This allows Herder to appease the proponents of natural theology whilst preserving a more active role for God. Even more importantly, it means he can switch up the blame game. The loss of the true divine law is no longer the fault of a deceptive, usurping priesthood. How could it be? The clergy originates with Adam (“Firstborn Favourite Priest… how he taught God in nature!”), patient zero of Revelation.

Herder presents a very different corruption origins story. Instead, the loss of the Law is cast as the inevitable result of the erosion of man’s original sensuality. The very process of abstraction, representation and division by which Spinoza and his rationalist cronies claim to know God are, so it turns out, exactly what pull us away from faith.

Modern man, born into a ready-made, borrowed language and system of thought, is an agonising arm’s length from creation. He is thus uniquely vulnerable to missing the wondrous unity of creation and the deity behind it:

The more we now weaken ourselves through abstraction, separate and distribute the senses, dissolve our entire feeling into small threads with memory and ratiocination, which no longer feel anything wholly and purely - naturally, with this, this great sense of ‘God, the Omnipresent in the world’ must be weakened and dulled.

You can literally see this happening, says Herder, as early as the second chapter of Genesis, which Herder regarded to be a retelling of the original creation story from a later time-period.

In the first chapter - a document produced in an age of “innocence, as yet untainted by misapprehension”- God is referred simply as “Elohim” (God). Cut to Genesis 2, however, and you’ll find “Adonai Elohim” (God of the Gods) in the original Hebrew. The very need to clarify God’s status as superior deity, argues Herder in an early manuscript, is proof that “idolatry, if not already rampant, was to be feared”.

Good representations spring only from immanent interaction with the real world. The more we learn through the symbols and abstractions of others, the further we get from real understanding. “All those who use a learned language walk as if in a dream of reason,” writes Herder in a later work, “they think in the reason of others and are wise only in imitation.” The obvious analogy is that of LLMs trained on synthetic data. “This won’t work,” says Herder. Worth noting also that there’s some useless life advice here - if you want to be really smart, make up your own language. You’ll not only understand the world better, but you’ll be closer to God. I’d love to see a moonshot ACX grant funding a trial on this.

In any case, the discovery that 1) Adam was in some sense a priest; 2) idolatry is a outcome of civilisation progressing; 3) priests are there to help us preserve the fruits of Adam’s realisations, means that priests are absolved. “Do you really believe,” asks Herder, “that those first benefactors of mankind, founders of laws, order and common happiness were the deceivers, especially the deceivers of God, that your time imagines them to be?”

Not a chance.

IV.

Ok, I hear you say. But what does this have to do with putting the Sabbath on a political pedestal? And how is this a part of the long shadow-history of German nationalism?

On Herder’s account, Genesis is not just the usual cute story of Boy meets World. It also contains an account of our first law, a law authored by the story of creation itself. That law is the Sabbath, and Herder is at great pains to stress its epicness to us as the “first timid and laborious step of the human race towards wisdom, towards order and organisation of society, towards culture!”

Perhaps most curiously of all, Herder stresses time and again that the Sabbath is, strictly speaking, not an “order”: “No word, no command, no advice - only a quiet example, deed”. It is in this vein that Herder, in a later commentary on Hebrew poetry, describes Moses’ government as history’s one and only nomocracy, in which Laws, not individuals, rule. What’s going on here?

Some background info will help. There are a bunch of ways to tell the story of the Enlightenment. The most common (and possibly still the best) way is to summarise it with one simple slogan: “Let’s ground everything in reason!”

But there are other ways to tell that story. As a political project, one would better characterise the Enlightenment (particularly in its French and German instantiations) with a different rallying-call: “Let’s find a basis for just rule!” Phrased another way, this question soon becomes: “what in the actual frick is it that makes law law, rather than just force?”

Crucially, “reason” was but one of a myriad plausible answers to this question. Herder’s own answer, of course, is “revelation”, and the Oldest Document is his attempt to make that argument in the fashion of his own times, and in a way that concedes important ground to the populist project of the Enlightenment and is unignorant of the challenge of the philosophers.

This most important challenge of all - what makes law law rather than force? - is issued by the most famous Genevan since Calvin, a Francophone by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Before Rousseau, people did of course discuss why laws held qua law. But the question of whether the law depended, ultimately, on force, didn’t bother anyone all that much. Laws held because they were, ultimately, the decree of God, the basis of peace, or the inheritance of the great civilisation of Rome. Over the course of his own prolific life, this particular Francophone made such intellectual stances increasingly untenable and unpopular.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is famous for having lots of sex, dumping the resulting bastards on orphanages, and writing best-sellers about raising kids, was also a political philosopher. He’s most famous for his Discourse on Inequality, but it’s the Social Contract which we will touch on here. The book is great and worth reading in its entirety, but you can learn its most important lesson from just one paragraph.

I’m gonna quote it in full here, because 1) he’s a great writer; and 2) there’s only a handful of other paragraphs in the entire history of political thought which you could accord greater importance. This helped set the political agenda that defined modern liberalism for a (decisive) half-century, particularly in erstwhile Erbfeinde Germany and France. Here he is criticising the idea of a “right of the strongest”:

Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will -- at the most, an act of prudence.

Suppose for a moment that this so-called ‘right of the strongest’ exists. I maintain that we’ll get out of this nothing but a mass of inexplicable nonsense.

If force makes right, then if you change the force you change the right (effects change when causes change!), so that when one force overcomes another, there’s a corresponding change in what is right. The moment it becomes possible to disobey with impunity it becomes possible to disobey legitimately. And because the strongest are always in the right, the only thing that matters is to work to become the strongest.

Now, what sort of right is it that perishes when force fails? If force makes us obey, we can’t be morally obliged to obey; and if force doesn’t make us obey, then on the theory we are examining, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word ‘right’ adds nothing to force: in this context it doesn’t stand for anything.

‘Obey the powers that be.’ If this means submit to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I guarantee that it will never be violated! All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness—are we then forbidden to send for the doctor? A robber confronts me at the edge of a wood: I am compelled to hand over my money, but is it the case that even if I could hold onto it I am morally obliged to hand it over? After all, the pistol he holds is also a power.

Then let us agree that force doesn’t create right, and that legitimate powers are the only ones we are obliged to obey.

Rousseau here is forwarding an exceptionally important and near-tautological fact: force prevails. If you accept his framing, it’s pretty difficult to disagree.

The situation he describes is pretty simple: we live in a world in which force prevails. Duh. So far, that doesn’t look much like a world in which right can prevail, since the only thing with any space for prevailing is force.

Suddenly, everyone is obsessed with the idea that, damn, it sure does look like everything that happens is just the result of Force Prevailing. The follow-up is obvious: “But wait - are we stuck in the predicament? Will everything always just be force all the way down? How and when will right prevail?”

The equity of these outcomes may be debatable, but they’re all undeniably the result of Force Prevailing.

Rousseau makes the answer seem painfully obvious. A man who obeys the commands of his own will is - clearly - not subject to force. (I decide to buy the good sourdough from the expensive deli because my will decrees it, and surely not out of compulsion.)

In a flash, the answer to the Enlightenment Question is solved: any rule authored by one’s own self is a just one. Self-legislation is the obvious basis of non-despotic government. That was easy.

Much of this will be familiar to you all, as will the immediate problem it throws up: “what kind of government could possibly be said to author rules with the stamp of each and every one of it’s citizens own wills?”

This question becomes the next Golden freaking Fleece of 18th century philosophy.

Rousseau himself is devilishly and catastrophically coy about how this is all supposed to happen. It’s going to involve a Contract (obviously) between free and reasonable agents. And this contract should institute a government which will be designed so as to represent the mythical sum total of their wills.

Bad news. Rousseau admits that the only way you’re actually gonna get people to create such a contract is through a remarkably talented, quasi-religious Lawgiver figure who can give voice and unity to the previously disparate bunch of wills kicking about, usually through an appeal to “divine intervention”. Divine intervention sounds like an unfortunate thing to have to depend on for good government.

Even worse, it’s not like just any group of people can even be plausibly be united in this way to begin with. Having spent most of his life fathering and abandoning bastards, Rousseau came to the sound empirical conclusion that Europeans were too morally corrupted to have even a trace of a general will in them at all any more. An irrevocably lawless continent, doomed to let Force Prevail.

(Note that Rousseau singled out exactly one European nation - which he predicted would “some day astonish Europe” - as an exception. This was the only remaining country “capable of being given laws”.

I encourage you to guess which one - the answer will be posted at the bottom of this review. If you want to hold yourself accountable you can even log your guess here).

IV.

The Germans end up taking this to the weirdest possible places.

Immanuel Kant, who was famous for never having sex, adored Rousseau. A portrait of the Frenchman was the only painting Kant ever hung in his Königsberg home. He read the Social Contract, became obsessed with the logic of its core argument, and applied it beyond right and law into the sphere of morality itself.

Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals basically just applies the logic of the above quoted Rousseau paragraph to morality itself. I refuse to quote Kant out of principle, so I’ll treat you to my own summary instead.

Duty to a moral law must arise out of duty to morality itself, and something cannot be moral just because it is imposed through force (“force cannot create right”).
Anything which is not the product of an own individual’s will is, strictly speaking, the product of force.
Morality too, therefore, must be self-legislated. Any purportedly “moral” precept believed on the basis of outside authority is Positive Law, and is therefore just another example of Force.

This is how Kant ends up with the categorical imperative, history’s most dunked-on principle. Aside from telling you to point the Gestapo in the direction of your hiding Jewish neighbours, however, the categorical imperative does contain an important and compelling argument: real morality is self-legislated. Morality cannot be compelled, and thus strictly speaking can never be the result of positive instruction nor the consequence of natural inclination.

Kant is best understood as the final boss of Protestantism: a neckbearded, bottom-of-the-iceberg Lutheran. After centuries of Prussian paranoia that the faith of believers stemmed not from inner conviction but papal authority, the Prots have managed to end up popeifying God. “You only believe in the divine law because of God’s authority, not because you recognize its inherent righteousness! Blasphemer!”

It’s this same conception of true morality as self-legislated which goes on to define the entire programme of German Idealism. Are you subject only to your own will? No, obviously not, because your actions are constrained, variously, by Nature, Necessity, and Capitalism. Natural law is just another instantiation of positive law (in short, another Pope).

With this, German Idealism recasts entire course of history as a mission to realise a world in which human agency is no longer enslaved to laws legislated by an alien Other, named Necessity, Nature, Capitalism or Moloch. There is thus an only slightly silly sense in which the law of supply and demand is to Marxists what Leo X is to Luther. Homo sapiens is born at the mercy of an unaligned computation, and and we can beat it only with Kultur, Bildung and Geist.

Herder - a proud, scholarly and sensitive OG Lutheran - wants to put an early stop to this nonsense (he obviously failed). His is a (fruitless) mission to show us that morality and law are, somewhat miraculously, simultaneously self- and divinely-lesiglated.

The Oldest Documents are his weapon of choice.

Now we can see Herder’s elevation of the Sabbath in proper light: the only real Lawgiver is God, and he communicates his Laws to us through creation. His method of instruction is example: he creates and then rests, and so we should do the same.

To rest and to have accomplished - can one conceive of a more pure and noble conception of that end which mankind pursues here below…? To rest and to have accomplished, as God accomplished! It is the eternal mantra of the human race under a hundred forms, deviations and errors. ‘I strive that I might enjoy!’

With this law, man’s vocation on earth is clarified and instituted.

To make the very idea, the very image, the very remembrance of God into the primordial pillar of human order, and particularly of human industry!... This was virtually the first faltering and arduous stride of mankind towards civic wisdom, towards the ordering and organization of society, towards civilization itself!

For what does civilization consist of, if not in the prudent allocation and purposeful application of our energies, our labors and our respites, in the enumeration and ordering of the days of our lives - in short, an unending toil, punctuated by brief moments of repose!

Remember how Herder was keen to stress that Adam comes up with the story of creation on his own? Adam wakes up, sees sunrise, comes up with the early chapters of Genesis, and follows the rule the story naturally invites (the Sabbath). Civilisation ensues. Not self-legislating reason, but self-legislating revelation is the bedrock of just rule! Herder’s defending not just God’s role in revelation, but revelation’s own quality as self-authored and, therefore, not a despotic imposition of an external law.

What does this mean in practice, given that we’re screwed by the fact that our tenuous link to creation is itself eroded by the march of civilisation? What we need, it turns out, is a priesthood. “The ridiculed priesthood,” so Herder writes, “is the origin of the world’s edification”. Moses is of course the number one exemplar of a lawgiver who resurrected revelation for legislation.

I’m impressed by the longwinded ingenuity of Herder’s uno reverse card. In one prolonged, strained cry, he’s transformed priests from enfants terribles of human history into the bona fide shepherds of progress and liberty. Priests are not papist tyrants imposing positive laws on our hapless wills - they recover the original, true self-legislation of human order. The fallibility of man, the corruptibility of his language - these indisputable facts necessitate constant efforts to recall God’s message. This is the vocation of the priesthood, and it is thus upon chaps like Herder or Moses that human present and future depend.

Collectively, this gives us all a very different idea of how to avoid despotism. It is not some impossible Social Contract through which we get the sine qua non of government, the ideal of a non-coercive law, but through a revival of God’s original revelation to man. Only then can men be socialised into harmonious and free life.

The Sabbath - the rule emanating from this revelation - is the origin of man’s “custom, structure, institution, vocation, and respite”. (To this day. I await the creation of a Sabbath Party which takes the political ramifications of Herder’s portrayal of the Sabbath - “I strive that I might enjoy” - seriously).

Start taking your Sundays seriously my G’s.

VI.

“18th century priest reads Bible and discovers the truth of religion” is hardly a good hook for a book review. So why bother with Herder? Even if his claim about the origins of human learning and order were believable to begin with, it certainly don’t seem it now. In any case, the Epic of Gilgamesh seems a likelier candidate for humanity’s oldest document. Cave paintings don’t bear much metaphysical fruit either.

Well to begin with I think it’s always good to remind ourselves that the Enlightenment was a contested project, and “reason is the answer” was far from its predetermined (or even final) conclusion. This is the kind of banal point history grad students farm out in return for good grades and mediocre publications the world over, but it bears repeating with examples often, perhaps particularly to the readership of this blog.

But I’d also recommend Herder’s Oldest Documents of the Human Race if you share my own terrible habit of reading every book as a self-help manual.

I’m a comprehensively red-teamed atheist. I’ve spent successive self-selected Sundays in Church, been on Buddhist retreats, dabbled in spiritualising substances, and have remained mundanely materialist throughout. And even I felt moved by the power of God in Herder’s work. In the growing arsenal of personal soteriologies with which I tackle the struggles of my own life, Herder’s has proved a useful and distinctive contribution. His take, that sin, sedition and evil originate in a distance from creation, is a helpful one. Read Herder alongside Malick’s Tree of Life. Go Midas-mode, and resanctify the world around you piece by piece. It might just make you feel good.

With this framing, The Oldest Documents of the Human Race can gift you a helpful personal theodicy to have at your disposal.

Epilogue I. Nationalism

Oh yes, German nationalism. I’ll regrettably be providing Catholics with more fodder here. The nationalist implications of all this can be summarised quickly: by successively eroding all apostolic and institutional guarantees of the legitimacy of scripture and faith, German Protestants are forced to turn to increasingly ethnic anchors of spiritual truth.

Herder was not the first to historicise revelation. Johann Georg Hamann, that great anti-Kant, got there first in his (enjoyably unreadable) essay Golgotha and Scheblimini:

Christianity therefore does not believe in the doctrines of philosophy, which is nothing but an alphabetical script of human speculation, subject to the variable changes of moon and vogue!... No, Christianity knows and recognises no other shackles of faith than the sure word of prophecy within the most ancient documents of the human race.

Once you historicise revelation like this, you are only a couple of algorithmically-recommended steps from seeing it as the unique purview of select cultures.

For example: it was on the basis of their superior culture, their proximity to the true and unsullied revelation of the divine, that Herder justified the Israelite conquest of Caanan. (I encourage my readers to exercise restraint in pursuing any contemporary implications of this).

Fast forward a couple of decades, past the French Revolution and the Terror, and German philosophy is converging on agreement that 1) reason without true religion is tyrannical, and 2) true religion depends on a pure, unsullied culture, still in immanent contact with a nature undivided by the sophistry of mechanical, arithmetical philosophy.

Unsurprisingly (and unconvincingly), the Germans see themselves as Europe’s last “unsullied” populace.

It is in this vein that you get ex-“atheist” Johann Gottlieb Fichte declaring, while Napoleon’s marched his troops into Jena, that the German language was “the last remaining thread still connecting” contemporary man “with nature and with life”, and that its destruction would entail a total and irreversible “spiritual death”. The loss of the German language, he declares, would mean that

[T]he hitherto constant flow of the culture of our race would indeed come to an end; a state of barbarism would return and, in the absence of salvation, advance until like wild beasts we all dwelt in caves once more and preyed on one another.

I’m not saying this predetermines what follows, but it certainly is a worrisome chain of thought.

Epilogue II. The Oldest Documents in the age of Deep Learning

We all know that 2001: A Space Odyssey was woefully wrong in its predictions of humanity’s future. An unexpected outcome of the deep learning revolution is to invalidate that film’s vision of our past, too.

There is no monolith. If AI can do it, we can do it too - human ingenuity is looking more and more like statistics and associative learning all the way down. There is no divine message to recover. Adam’s story has no special sauce. Anything and anyone can learn, anywhere.

If there is a hieroglyph-key of knowledge, it belongs not to ancient civilisations but is likely encoded in the high-dimensional space of a trillion-parameter model. Modern-day hermeticists should drop papyrology for classes in mechanistic interpretability. (I like to imagine a 21st century Casaubon neglecting young Dorothea in favour of interminable fruitless scrutiny of GPT’s model weights).

But if the success of deep learning has pooh-pooh’d the monolith story, it doesn’t vindicate the “reason is the origin of civilisation” story either. No one’s that hot on “reason” any more. “Reason” is not typically how we describe the capabilities of large language models. “Intelligence” is. Are these words just interchangeable? Or should we ascribe importance to this historical shift in the lode-bearer of progress?

Well, the clearest difference to me is that traditional Enlightenment narratives and above all the German Idealism story cast reason as the embodiment of human freedom over nature. Reason is both the substance and mechanism of moral progress. Alignment, in short, is built-in.

Intelligence is less about the discovery of basic laws, and more about the capacity to solve problems. It’s just engineering. And it’s own semantic status has a more tenuous link to ethical progress. German Idealism presented us with a world struggle between Nature, Force and Necessity vs Freedom-Instantiated-Through-Reason. But intelligence - particularly intelligence achieved through deep learning - just looks like yet another manifestation of Necessity. Intelligence is just more Force Prevailing.

Artificial General Reason would be Weltgeist incarnate - our surest route to conquering necessity and achieving Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. Artificial General Intelligence, however, looks quite a lot like More Nature, like Necessity Reloaded, like an upgrade from Virgin Moloch to Molochov cocktail.

Geist won’t save us anymore. Force prevails.

Epilogue III. The last free people in Europe [SPOILER]

The only free folks in Europe? Click here.

Herder’s Oldest Documents of the Human Race is actually not - to my knowledge - available in an English translation. I read it in the original German, in volume 5 of the collection of his complete works edited by Rudolf Smend. All unwieldy English translations are my own. If you’d like to read some Herder, however, I strongly recommend Another Philosophy of History, which is also a beautifully polemic read.