The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

The crux of Herder’s disagreement is contained in the following claim,
The more spiritual the pleasure, the more it endures and the more its object also
endures outside of us… [the more] an object exists and continues to exist outside
of us and can only really become one with us metaphorically, that is, hardly or not
at all. (1994, 4:409; 1993, p. 113)
Hemsterhuis asserted that desire for union (and so the possibility of union) increased
the more spiritual the desire became; Herder here—under the pretext of summarising
Hemsterhuis’ thought—gives a diametrically opposed analysis. The more spiritual a
desire, the less explaining it by means of fusion makes sense, for such fusion is, in
fact, less possible here. Moreover, in a complete disregard for Hemsterhuis’ actual
position, Herder suggests this is a good thing: pious desire for union is not something
to be positively valued, but is rather merely the model for ‘crude’ desires. Desire for
union is a ‘brief, deceptive illusion’ (ibid, 4:416; p. 116). Spiritual desires are to be
valued more highly precisely because they obey a very different model and are not
determined by the figure of the One.
The reason for this is the self-destructiveness of neoplatonic piety. As Aristophanes
already noted in the Symposium, when one unites with the object, all pleasure is at an
end, for the subject/object relation is annulled. The same problem holds for
Hemsterhuis who follows the Symposium closely: desire for the One destroys desire.
‘It is impossible for man to flow together with everything like mud’—and stay man,
Herder writes (ibid, 4:422; p. 119). Hence, Herder argues that spiritual pleasures are