BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

national character in reaction to centuries of French domination culminating in the Napoleonic
Wars and invasion of German territory.
65.
The significance of Berlin’s Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment dialectic for
understanding modern nationalism and national identity arises from efforts to gain perspective on
the relative forces of universal reason and cultural tradition. The three major figures in Berlin’s
schema—Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann and Herder—countered (or complemented)
Enlightenment monism and what they considered reductionist social theory based on natural law
with a more holistic and empirical acknowledgment of cultural pluralism. 23 In contrast to a
mechanistic view of human reason gradually emerging triumphant through trial and error from
the tumult of instinct and passions, labeled “springs of human action” by Scottish philosopher
David Hume, Vico contended that mythic traditions and customs of “principled” behavior
governed both reason and instinct in ways discernable through a “common mental language”
underlying cultural diversity. 24 Vico and Herder, pioneers of anthropological historicism,
devised methodologies analogous to Newtonian mechanics yet appropriate to their relativist
orientation: Vico in his intuitive search for “principles of humanity” and Herder in his evaluation
of cultures through their own criteria. Herder’s Counter-Enlightenment critique must be
distinguished from anti-Enlightenment concerns as much as from the Romantic movement. His
protest against the “tyranny of reason” and the “brutally efficient state” really comprised part of
23 Joseph Mali, “Berlin, Vico, and the Principles of Humanity,” in Mali and Wokler, 62,
24 Ibid., 65-66. Mali quotes from Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
ed. L. A. Selby Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 84., and Vico’s The New
Science, tr. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), par. 161-
2.
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