Ma Jianqing: Herder's Significance for the Formation of Marx's Thought

The influence of the German intellectual and cultural tradition on Marx was immense. To a large extent, this tradition shaped the very profile of Marx’s thought. However, we must never narrowly understand this tradition simply as the German speculative philosophy represented by Hegel; rather, we should define and comprehend it within the broader intellectual movements of 17th- and 18th-century Germany and Europe. Consequently, it is particularly necessary to conduct a concrete and in-depth analysis of the intellectual connections between Marx and those theorists who led these movements and provided the spiritual elements for the synthesis of this tradition at a higher level. In this regard, one cannot fail to mention Johann Gottfried Herder. He was a famous German historian, literary theorist, philosopher, and leader of the Sturm und Drang ^[1] movement. He was deeply involved in the shaping of 19th-century German intellectual culture. Although evaluations of Herder himself and his thought often vary, he "did indeed exert a profound and revolutionary influence on subsequent thought and practice." The question is whether Herder influenced Marx. If so, which element or elements of Herder's thought influenced Marx? To what extent did this influence reach? Was it negligible, or does it demand serious consideration? Did it affect only a certain stage of Marx’s thought, or did it exert a continuous influence across multiple stages? If there was an influence, and if that influence was significant, through what channels did Herder affect Marx? And how did Marx transform these influences into a driving force for theoretical construction?

Isaiah Berlin, who held Herder's status in the history of ideas in extremely high regard, believed that Herder’s influence on Marx was direct and obvious. In Vico and Herder, he states that the concept that "man lives in a world which he himself creates" constitutes "the source of Marx's most profound sociological insight and of the revolution in his view of history." F.M. Barnard argued that Herder's practice of defining the "mob" (Pöbel) as a group lacking common consciousness and self-orientation "clearly foreshadowed Marx's thought." Allen Wood, from the perspective of the evolution of historical theory, pointed out: "Along with Kant, Herder was a major source of the theory of history in the great nineteenth-century tradition of German Idealism: the historical theories of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx." E.M. Dale’s Hegel, the End of History, and the Future notes that Herder’s conception of history, which grants immense autonomy to the human will, played an important role for Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. From an anthropological perspective, T.C. Patterson pointed out that the "view advocating for the historical reality of nature and human society... was passed down through Buffon in the mid-18th century and the group of writers who ultimately exerted a significant influence on the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Adam Smith (1723–1790) and the German critics of Enlightenment liberalism, Herder and Hegel." While these works—which only occasionally mention the relationship between Marx and Herder—identify Herder's influence on Marx from different aspects, they do not elaborate in detail on the specific content involved in this intellectual influence. Indeed, rather than answering the questions posed above, these works deepen them. Although J.K. Noyes has analyzed the internal intellectual links between Herder and Marx in detail from both genealogical and theoretical-thematic perspectives, such essential exploratory work is extremely limited and remains far from clarifying the problem.

It is worth thinking further along the directions indicated by these results. On the one hand, from the perspective of the history of ideas, we should clarify through which spiritual channels Herder truly provided inspiration and resources for Marx's observations and reflections. On the other hand, from a textual perspective, we should clarify that traces of Herder's thought do indeed exist within Marx's own works. This exploratory task intends only to prove that Herder did indeed influence Marx in certain aspects; it does not intend to elucidate the full breadth and depth of this influence. Even so, this task still entails great risk—not only because the intellectual connection between Marx and Herder is extremely fragile, but also because the textual evidence supporting this fragile connection is extremely scarce.

I. The Channels of Dialogue Between Marx and Herder

Herder was born in 1744 and died in 1803. Marx, born in 1818, could not have had direct contact with Herder. However, Marx clearly knew of Herder and had read some of his works. During his time at the University of Bonn, Marx was deeply influenced by Romanticism; he fell in love with poetry and used it to express his feelings for Jenny ^[2]. However, by the end of 1837, he abandoned poetry and turned toward folk songs. He followed the widespread interest in folk poetry of that era, believing it to be the expression of an original and authentic national spirit ^[3]. In 1839, while in Berlin, Marx even compiled a collection of folk songs for Jenny, who shared this interest. A major source for this collection was Herder’s collection of European folk songs, Voices of the Peoples in Songs (Stimmen der Völker in Liedern). Marx not only extracted several titles from it, but his principles for the classification and arrangement of folk songs in the collection were also deeply influenced by Herder. In "The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law" (1842), while criticizing Hugo, a representative of the Historical School of Law, Marx cited Herder’s view that "natural men are all poets, and the sacred books of primitive nations are all collections of poems," pointing out that every era has its own distinct nature, and that the unique character of the 18th century was "fiction." This literary view of Herder’s is scattered throughout works such as Fragments on Recent German Literature, On German-Oriental Poets, and The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. This indicates that Marx very likely read one or more of these works and was familiar with their viewpoints. When Marx turned to the study of political economy after 1844, Herder did not depart from Marx's intellectual stage. In order to conduct a comprehensive and realistic investigation into the history of the formation and development of the European economy, Marx read extensively in philosophy, economics, politics, history, and culture during the period from 1844 to 1847. According to the book list recorded in Marx’s Notebooks (1844–1847), the books he intended to read included Herder's work on the philosophy of history, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), and the Romantic narrative work The Cid (Der Cid). Evidence suggests that Marx not only read these two books but was also quite familiar with their contents. In a letter to Engels dated February 29, 1856, while discussing Dobrovský’s Slavic Studies, Marx noted quite naturally that the descriptions of various Slavic peoples therein were extracted from Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. In a letter to Marx dated August 25, 1877, Engels fluently and effortlessly quoted an expression from Chapter 28 of Herder’s The Cid—"the proud Cid"—without citing the source. This indicates that Engels was very familiar with some of Herder’s works and knew the extent of Marx's familiarity with them, thus trusting that he would understand the significance of the citation. In fact, Herder’s writings had become part of Marx's private library, which he consulted and studied seriously at any time. In a letter to Engels on February 27, 1861, regarding the looting of his library left in Cologne, Marx complained: "All the works of Fourier, as well as those of Goethe, Herder, and Voltaire, were stolen. But the worst for me is that the Economistes du dix-huitième siècle (the latest edition, which cost me about five hundred francs), many volumes of Greek classics, and many single volumes of other collections were stolen."

The role played by other contemporary theorists—who loosely gathered Herder’s important ideas—in the indirect intellectual dialogue between Marx and Herder should not be underestimated. Berlin once remarked that Herder influenced authors such as "Schlegel, Jacob Grimm (especially in their philological miscellany), Savigny (who applied Herder's organic concept of state growth to law), Görres (whose nationalism was rooted in Herder's vision, albeit with some distortion), and Hegel (whose concept of the formation, growth, and characteristics of institutions of impersonal relations was born in Herder's pages), as well as 19th- and 20th-century historical geographers, social anthropologists, philosophers of language, philosophers of history, and historical writers." Given the breadth of this influence, it is realistic to speak in a typical sense of which theorists unconsciously served as intermediaries for the spiritual interaction between Herder and Marx. First, one must mention Hegel, who had a major impact on the formation and development of Marx's thought. Undoubtedly, Hegel had direct intellectual links with his great predecessor, Herder. Hegel had read Herder's works as early as his school days in Stuttgart; he affirmed Herder’s then-popular view that modern society was split into class oppositions and thus unable to integrate common interests, and he hoped to overcome this split by applying Kant's moral religion. Hegel's views on Jewish and Greek cultural-religious history were based on Herder’s creative understanding of national identity and cultural difference. Hegel also inherited from Herder the views that "man is by nature social," "man is a product of history," and "the development of the individual recapitulates the history of mankind in summary." It could even be said that the formation of Hegel's dialectical thought stemmed to a considerable extent from the transformation and synthesis of intellectual elements inherited from Herder. From this perspective, the intellectual legacy Hegel left to Marx was by no means limited to the dialectic that seemingly belonged to Hegel alone; it also included certain contents of Herder’s thought wrapped in the form of dialectics, although these contents are difficult to peel away completely. It was precisely the rich intellectual content provided by a host of pre-Hegelian thinkers, including Herder, that provided the theoretical preparation for Marx to discard the false mantle of "German Ideology" and come into contact with real history. Second, it is necessary to mention Feuerbach, who was equally significant to the formation of Marx's thought. Herder’s influence on Feuerbach was immense. In his youth, Feuerbach read Herder’s Letters on the Study of Theology while preparing to enter the Faculty of Theology at Heidelberg. Feuerbach was attracted by Herder’s sensuous, humanistic philosophy and benefited greatly from Herder’s view that religious problems are, in the final analysis, anthropological problems. He believed that this kind of philosophy truly represented the future of philosophy. He regarded Herder as his teacher, praising him as a "priest and prophet of humanity," and invited speculative philosophers to receive his baptism. It is therefore not entirely a coincidence that Herder's son became one of Feuerbach's closest correspondents, nor is it accidental to find a certain strong intellectual kinship between Feuerbach and Herder. When Marx turned to Feuerbach and engaged in dialogue with him, was he not also engaging in a dialogue with Herder through Feuerbach? Finally, one cannot ignore the implicit mediating role played by other contemporary thinkers who had dealings with Marx directly or indirectly but are often overlooked. For example, Savigny, the founder of the Historical School of Law. During his university years, Marx majored in law. While at the University of Berlin, he systematically "studied Savigny's work on the right of possession" and other related writings. The realistic content in Savigny's doctrine played an important role in stimulating and pushing the young Marx to break away from the preoccupations of idealism. Savigny believed that the secret of law lies within the history of each nation. This view undoubtedly came from Herder, who played a foundational role in the establishment of the German Historical School and the growth of German nationalism. Another example is Goethe, a leading figure of the German Sturm und Drang movement, and Eduard Gans, the intellectual leader of the Young Hegelians. The former was Herder's student, deeply influenced by him, and was also an author Marx liked and knew well. The latter was a reader of Herder who lectured on jurisprudence to Marx at the University of Berlin and exerted a profound influence on the early development of Marx's thought.

In fact, Herder, who had long been integrated into the "spirit of the age" ^[4], could not have failed to influence Marx, even if such influence is difficult to articulate in purely theoretical terms. Herder was not only the first thinker to use the concept of Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) in its German form; he was also one of the first great thinkers to stand at the forefront of his era and participate in shaping that spirit. Goethe remarked that when Herder appeared, he "walked ahead of the age... as if he had to drag the age" along with him. Although Nietzsche accused Herder of not being a truly great thinker, he had to admit that Herder was an "ambitious priest" who "wanted to be the spiritual Pope of his age," possessing "the keenest scent for discovering and picking the first-ripening fruits of a season before anyone else." Herder could not endure the fragmentation of the world, the mechanistic explanations of life, or the loss of meaning. He transformed speculative studies into anthropology, proposed nationalism and historicism, and restored humanistic values. His thought typically expressed the spirit of that era. Simultaneously, his ideas had long been assimilated by the age, becoming an indispensable part of the Zeitgeist. This explains why Herder’s "influence on 19th and 20th-century literature and philosophy is ubiquitous."

II. Herder’s Influence on Marx

Herder delved extensively into various fields such as philosophy, language, literature, art, religion, politics, and history, achieving distinction in many of them. Obviously, it is not only impossible but also problematic to speak vaguely of these disparate views and link them to Marx’s thought. Therefore, it is necessary to enter Herder’s intellectual world, extract and refine those core views that run through different fields and possess revolutionary significance in intellectual history, and conduct a comparison and analysis with Marx’s thought to objectively present the intellectual connection between the two. This effort, which remains a preliminary attempt, is based on the consideration that if Herder was the first to propose a view that proved paradigmatic and revolutionary for subsequent research, then regardless of the way this view reached Marx or the form it took in his work, it can be counted as Herder’s intellectual legacy, even if Marx did not explicitly acknowledge it.

First, the influence of Herder’s philosophy of man on Marx. Herder’s philosophy is closely related to his unique understanding of the human being. Although Herder did not provide a definitive boundary or explanation of the essence of man, the following view was foundational to his anthropological construction: unlike other species, humans possess "humanity" (Humanität), but this "humanity" is not an abstract essence constructed by reason and detached from the empirical world; rather, it encompasses all the powers people bestow upon themselves, manifested specifically as the "total range of the utility" of these powers. Herder’s classic formulation is that the difference between humans and beasts lies in their "ability to represent the invisible as visible, and to represent power as result, which raises them to be higher rational creatures." One could also say that Herder does not recognize a fixed essence in man; nature gives man only certain potentials or tendencies, and man must manifest and shape himself through his own actions. Herder vividly likened human nature to "a lump of soft clay that is molded into different shapes by different conditions, needs, and pressures." This contains what Charles Taylor identifies as the "expressionist" view—one "adopted not only by Romantic authors but also, in another direction, by Goethe and Hegel, becoming a continuous stream of modern culture": man’s nature requires him to express himself, to confirm himself through expression, and to gradually realize himself. In short, man's nature is expression; if what man’s nature expresses is history, then it can be said that man’s nature is history. The revolutionary nature of this view lies in the fact that it partially affirms the active power originating from the depths of human nature while also partially affirming the objective world in which this power is externalized. It reveals the dialectic of human existence, thereby making it possible to integrate human freedom, the objectified world, and the dialectical relationship between the two into the scope of self-cognition.

This philosophical anthropological view profoundly influenced Hegel and Feuerbach. The Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s writing must confirm and realize itself through constant externalization. In Feuerbach’s eyes, "the object with which a subject essentially relates is nothing other than the subject's own inherent but objective essence." Marx accepted the basic views or modes of thinking of this expressionism primarily through Hegel and Feuerbach. As early as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx elaborated on his theory of objectification, which is similar to expressionism. In his view, humans possess a species-essence ^[5] distinct from animals, and this essence is not a dead determinacy given by some Absolute, but rather free, conscious activity—that is, the activity of continuously objectifying one’s powers and confirming and expressing these powers in the objectified world. Without this objectifying activity intended for expression, nature would be a "nothingness of existence" to man, and man himself would be but an abstract being. Marx’s phrasing is: "To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigor is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the objects of his being or of his life-expression; or, that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects." Since man must produce his own life in a certain way, he possesses a history, and man and history are a dialectical unity. What a person is like depends on the objects he deals with and the history he produces. "As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce." This view constitutes one of the basic principles of historical materialism, used to explain the dialectical interaction and common trajectory of man and his conditions of life. Sometimes, Marx even understood objectification more broadly as the expressive relationship between things. In his view, there also exists a relationship of mutual expression and confirmation between the "sun" and the "plant." In Capital, Marx partially reveals the secrets and fate of capitalism by analyzing the mutual expressive relations of categories such as commodities, money, and capital.

Second, the influence of Herder’s philosophy of language on Marx. Herder’s contribution to the philosophy of language was pioneering. It can be said that he "founded the modern philosophy of language." Two revolutionary tasks are relevant here. The first is his proposal and theoretical demonstration of the identity of thought and language—that is, that thought depends essentially on and is constrained by language. In other words, without language, humans would be unable to think, and they can only think about things that can be expressed in language. In his 1772 prize-winning essay, Treatise on the Origin of Language, Herder argued from a naturalistic perspective that humans generated language through their own means, and as long as they generated language, they had to actually exercise reason. From the moment of human existence, reason and language have been fused together as the "natural essence of man." The moment the first act of thought occurred was also the moment language was generated. Herder said: "Without language, man has no reason, and without reason, no language." Once Herder combined the origin of language with its cognitive function, the problem of language was transformed into an anthropological one.

This involves his second task: revealing the quasi-materialist connotations of language from an anthropological perspective. Herder began his discussion of the origin of language with the difference between humans and animals. He pointed out a biological and ontological fact regarding human existence: that man is a fragile being. Animals have acute senses ("specialized and refined") and a narrow sphere of activity; they neither need nor are able to create language. Human senses are far less sensitive than those of animals; precisely because of this, humans gained freedom, and because their powers can be exercised freely, they created language. It should be noted that the free activity of man mentioned by Herder is essentially social activity. To say that man is a free being and therefore created language (what Herder called the "first law of nature" for the origin of language) and to say that man is a social being and therefore created language (the "second law of nature") are merely different expressions of the same issue. This actually affirms both the natural basis and, partially, the social basis for the origin of language. Herder concluded: "This origin is so far from being super-human that it is obviously animal. It is the law of nature for a machine capable of feeling." Herder also placed great importance on the role of the senses in the formation and development of language. "Any abstraction of the human spirit in the realm of the mind is formed through the stimulation of the senses, prompted by certain occasions; thus, any language is also an abstraction formed through sound and feeling." The strength of sensory capability is directly proportional to linguistic creativity. Primitive people, due to their rich sensations, possessed an outstanding capacity for linguistic creation and a beautiful, vivid language that is no longer seen today. Different "sensory circles" have different ways of life and thus different languages. Herder was primarily dedicated to revealing the fundamental differences that may exist in the conceptual structures of different regions and eras. This philosophy of language, based on an anthropological standpoint and fundamentally distinct from the "divine origin of language" theory, had a decisive influence on German Romanticism and German Classical Philosophy.

Marx discussed the issue of language in a fragmented yet quite powerful way. First, the question Marx needed to answer was: what is the essential determinacy of language? In his view, language presupposes the social intercourse ^[6] of people at both the factual and logical levels, and is thus essentially a social phenomenon. In The German Ideology, Marx pointed out that "Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men." Like consciousness, language is a social product from the very beginning. Because intercourse is always concrete and belongs to a certain community, "Language itself is the product of a community, just as in another respect it is the existence of that community." This view can be seen as an advanced development of Herder’s philosophy of language, except that in Marx, social intercourse is elevated to a more prominent position. Furthermore, as early as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx's view of language based on humanistic logic can also be seen as an extension of Herder’s naturalistic philosophy of language. In a Herder-like tone, Marx pointed out that language "has a sensuous nature"—that is, from a natural perspective, it is a real part of the process of the "humanization of nature," and from a human perspective, it is the expression and confirmation of man’s sensuous species-powers. Engels’ description of how language arose from labor seems to further prove the existence of this "extension."

Second, Marx clarified the dialectic between language and thought. In Marx's view, language and thought formed an indivisible unity from the beginning; language is the mode of existence of thought, and conversely, thought cannot exist without language. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, based on the theory of objectification, Marx argued that language is "the element of thought itself, the element of the life-expression of thought." That is to say, language is an internal element of thought itself and the way thought expresses itself. This view was further reaffirmed later. In The German Ideology, based on the standpoint of historical materialism, Marx pointed out that "The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life." In the Grundrisse ^[7], while criticizing the error of likening money to language, Marx emphasized again that "ideas do not exist severed from language." He illustrated this by noting that if the ideas of one nation are to circulate among others, they must first be translated into the other nations' languages. Although Marx did not limit himself to language alone but placed the issue of language on the broader stage of human history, this view can be regarded as the "direct continuation of the post-Kantian ‘philosophy of language’ and the tradition of German philosophy" created by Herder.

Third, there is the influence of Herder’s philosophy of history on Marx. In Meinecke’s view, Herder was one of the "most eminent and successful thinkers" among the "earliest pioneers of the new historical consciousness in the 18th century" ^[8]. Herder proposed his philosophy of history primarily in This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity and Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. In Herder’s view, although history is distinct from nature, they are fused together. History cannot break free from the chain of nature and must depend upon it, because the history that humans participate in and shape is, fundamentally, nothing more than the manifestation of human natural potential. Therefore, "the whole of human history is a pure natural history of human powers, activities, and habits." For the first time in the history of ideas, Herder recounted the story of the natural origins of humanity by drawing on knowledge from fields such as biology, geology, anthropology, ethnology, geography, and mythology. Just as nature has objective laws, history has its causal laws. Although Herder invoked God to discuss the historical totality that human perception cannot reach, he explicitly held that "history is the science of what is, not of what could be according to the designs of a hidden fate." One of his primary tasks was to investigate the causes of every historical event—just as one studies natural phenomena—and thereby reveal the causal chain of history as a whole. The materialist content inherent in this philosophy of history was only fully revealed in the work of Marx. At the same time, it should be noted that the historical causal chain Herder spoke of was not mechanistic, but organic. In his view, historical existences are interconnected through internal forces, constituting a whole—"an organic being"—and achieving progress along a rugged path toward the realization of that organic totality. Herder liked to use the growth of organisms as a metaphor for historical development. He said: "Just as a tree grows from its roots, so too do arts, languages, and sciences grow from their sources. Contained within the seed are the parts of the plant, in the sperm the limbs of the animal; and in the origin of a phenomenon lies the entire treasure of its explanation, through which the interpretation of phenomena becomes genetic." It can be said that prior to Hegel, Herder was already dedicated to describing the worlds of nature, history, and spirit as being in a process of constant motion, change, and development, and to revealing the inner connections therein.

Herder's naturalistic interpretation of history, his dialectical understanding of history, and his attempt to develop history into a causal science influenced Marx primarily through Hegel and Feuerbach. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx, based on Feuerbach’s sensualism ^[9], pointed out that history and nature are closely linked through human activity: all history is nothing but the dialectical process of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of man. "History is a real natural history of man." This viewpoint, which is extremely similar to Herder’s formulation and shares the same content, was retained by Marx and became one of the basic principles of historical materialism. During his mature period, Marx focused primarily on the study of human history, but he did not forget to understand the origin and direction of history by starting from "living individuals," from the natural conditions given to humans by the earth, and from the unique qualities of humans. Moreover, he did not forget to remind readers that "as long as humans exist, natural history and human history will mutually condition each other." Like Herder, Marx viewed human history as a "natural" process manifested through complex causal relationships and governed by certain laws. For Marx, "the question is these laws themselves, these tendencies acting and manifesting themselves with iron necessity." His primary task was to reveal the general laws of historical development and the specific laws of capitalism, thereby pronouncing the death sentence of capitalism. For Marx, who was familiar with Hegelian dialectics, this process was organic. Marx often compared a given social formation to an "organism." For example, when discussing capitalist society, he said: "Present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly in a process of change." The significance of this metaphor lies in its indication that society is a totality composed of interacting elements, and that history is a process of constant self-sublation ^[10] through contradictory movement. From this organicism, one can see that Marx's thought still retained a lasting legacy of the German Sturm und Drang movement led by Herder: a longing for unity and totality. This point is extremely evident in the young Marx. Even after founding the materialist conception of history, Marx seemingly never entirely abandoned the view that the "interests of the species always blaze their own trail by sacrificing the interests of the individual."

III. Anthropology and Historical Materialism

Although Herder did not initially develop his views to the extent required by Marx’s position, Marx nonetheless derived the necessary intellectual inspiration and theoretical resources from Herder, transforming and integrating them into his own problematic and theoretical language. These ideas, which in most cases cannot be directly identified but possess an elective affinity ^[11], often seem to produce a faint "resonance."

This "resonance" exists because they are on the "same frequency." The bond that truly links Marx and Herder is precisely the "historical" spirit that was about to occupy a dominant position in the 19th century. The trend of high rationalization in modern Western society and the resulting philosophical and cultural crises posed a common problem for both Marx and Herder: the reflection upon and repositioning of philosophy. After the legitimacy of rationalist philosophy was questioned, and amidst deep dissatisfaction with the socio-political conditions of the era, the answers they provided seemed to share a similar stance. Herder detested the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment because it forgot human emotions and qualities and the vivid, rich world they manifest; thus, it was morally harmful and did nothing to help people’s self-improvement and betterment in reality. For him, history was so rich and colorful that any abstract generalization appeared "lifeless, fragmentary, and pale." In his 1765 prize essay, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Beneficial to the People, Herder cried out: "All philosophy that is to belong to the people must make the people its center... If our entire philosophy were to become anthropology, what fruitful new developments would not arise?" This was a quasi-empirical anthropology based on "the people," which was not only a science conscious of its own conditions of possibility but also a philosophy that delved into the historical depths of human cultural life to unlock the mystery of human nature. Like Herder, Marx also felt a deep aversion to speculative philosophy because it forgot the secular world and was not only unhelpful to the cause of human liberation but harmful to it. He wanted philosophy to revolve around "man" and to make it the "revelation of man." As Marx gradually realized that the essential determination of man fundamentally stems from, and is ultimately consistent with, his material productive activities, he began to study the actual history of man's material productive activities, hoping to discover therein the path to human self-salvation. It can be seen that whether as a philosophy of anthropology or a philosophy of historical theory, they share a basic characteristic: "philosophical statements relate to the totality of human existence, rather than its fragments; simultaneously, philosophical statements express human life within the scope of human living." In other words, both Herder and Marx were committed to the unity of philosophy and life, of theory and practice. If it is said that "Herder was the initiator of the secular doctrine of the mutual unity of fact and value, theory and practice, 'is' and 'ought,' intellectual judgment and emotional activity, thought and action," then Marx was the true realizer of this "secular doctrine."

Herder’s quasi-realist stance produced much precious intellectual wealth. Anthropology was the Gesamtproblematik (total problem) of Herder’s philosophy; anthropological construction was the lifelong pursuit of his career. This anthropology, which "deliberately" appeared in a non-systematic form, largely eliminated the illusion of historical identity. For him, man is essentially familiar and cannot be conceptualized; the measure of man is not universal or trans-historical; the secret of man lies in his sensible image and in his temporality. Herder accorded a unique status and inalienable value to the different modes of existence man presents in the adventure of time. Herder suggested that if one truly wishes to know man, one must enter and truly "understand" (verstehen) the "spirit" or cultural life of every era and every nation. To understand different "spirits," he also sought answers from natural origins. One could say that throughout Herder’s anthropology, there runs a determination to break through all ideology and touch real existence. According to Althusser’s phrasing, Marx "retreated" to Herder precisely in order to "contact the things themselves and real history" through him.

However, Herder did not view man as "sensuous activity," nor did he examine man and his history entirely from man’s actual social relations and the surrounding material conditions that give man his reality. Consequently, he was unable to focus his descriptions and explanations of historical matters clearly under the light of history or explain the complex structures and processes of history from a scientific height. In details unreachable by the senses, Herder’s rich imagination often took the upper hand, mixed with speculation and confusion; in terms of the totality unreachable by the senses, he often resorted to God—sometimes in the sense of revelation, sometimes in the sense of deism. It is clear that Herder’s anthropology had not yet completely escaped the metaphysical shackles of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy and was forced to resort to metaphysics to participate in its own intellectual construction. In this regard, Meinecke pointed out with some justice: "Herder lacked the power of the senses to observe life and historical formations in their thoroughly concrete determinacy and naked natural-spiritual actuality. He lacked a sense of reality and empirical feeling." It is thus not difficult to understand why his anthropological system contained so many contradictory tensions. He opposed the abstraction of man’s rich living existence, yet he still consciously or unconsciously attempted to conquer the diversity of life through some unspeakable category of "humanity." Although his anthropology revealed the different motivations, rich cultural conditions, and unique modes of existence of humanity, it also displayed the universal, absolute will of God, making it seem as if human history "became a stage for God, even if we see only the opening and closing of individual scenes." Although his anthropology pointed out and analyzed the influence of certain objective conditions (geography, tradition, custom, emotion, language, etc.) on specific groups of people, he overestimated the role of the spirit, as if "intellect organized all states of human life into a continuous unity." One could go on with such examples.

According to Marx’s critique of the German ideology, Herder’s anthropology was inherently a form of idealism, despite representing a new way of thinking about the interpretation of humanity and its history. This was not because it denied the objective existence of history or the laws of its development, but rather resided in its metaphysical interpretation of man and history. It did not seek its basis in the secular foundation of history, but rather sought its standards in an imagined world; it did not examine history historically, but sought an ahistorical substance upon which to explain history. Regarding this issue, Marx and Engels provided a brilliant analysis in The German Ideology: "Hitherto the whole conception of history has either completely neglected this real basis of history, or has considered it a secondary factor that has no connection with the course of history. Thus history is always written according to a measure that lies outside it; the real production of life is looked upon as something ahistorical, while the historical is looked upon as something separated from ordinary life, something extra-world and supra-world." Historical materialism, established by Marx, drew a definitive line of demarcation from metaphysics. It not only adhered to materialism in the realm of nature but applied materialism to the realm of history. Because society is fundamentally practical, proceeding from life means proceeding from practice; and because material production is the most fundamental of all practices, proceeding from practice means primarily proceeding from material productive activities. For Marx, any social issue could be answered through concrete analysis and historical investigation of material productive activities and the complex social relations they constitute. Seen in this light, human nature is nothing more than the product created by people's own material productive activities; language is destined from the very beginning to be entangled with material intercourse; and history is nothing more than the generational unfolding of the activities of human beings pursuing certain goals. Through the analysis of the process of production and reproduction of human material productive activities, Marx discovered the objective laws of human historical development, just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of the organic world. In a world of necessity constituted by causal relationships, any ideas or concepts with a metaphysical hue—such as "purpose," "Providence," or "God"—will find no place to hide.

Practice always points to and expresses the reciprocal interaction and mutual constitution between humans and objects, as well as their continuous movement. In Marx’s work, this is the true reality and the only reality. "Reality without man is incomplete; likewise, man without the world is but a fragment." In the reality continuously created by practice, all seemingly opposite categories achieve reconciliation, because any category is a process of movement that subordinates all social elements to itself. This also means that the tension of contradictions existing in Herder—namely, the theoretical opposition between the generality manifested by humans at the level of the species and the particularity manifested at the level of the individual, and thus between cultural universalism and pluralism, and between historical continuity and diversity—melts away within the continuous sensuous activity of human beings.

Conclusion

The intellectual connection between Marx and Herder is traceable, though the process of exploration is more difficult than imagined. Marx read some of Herder’s works and maintained a latent dialogue with him through the works of other thinkers. Moreover, they shared striking similarities in their understandings of humanity, language, and history. This was not accidental. Standing at the turning point of the secularization of philosophy and culture, they shared a common theoretical mission: to reconcile the relationship between the ideal and the reality, the universal and the particular, and the abstract and the concrete. For Marx, approaching Herder meant accepting the materialist and dialectical content contained therein so that he could truly encounter the real world on a path of synthesis. However, Marx’s historical materialism went further and looked higher, forming an essential distinction from Herder’s anthropology, which still retained a metaphysical hue.

Clearly, it is questionable either to limitlessly amplify the intellectual connection between Herder and Marx or to strictly polarize the two. Terms such as "critique," "transformation," or "sublation" ^[12] are also unable to clearly elucidate the complex process by which Herder’s intellectual elements entered Marx’s thought. The intellectual connection between Marx and Herder is far from being that simple. Recognizing this theoretical fact will help us more objectively examine the relationship between the two. However, what remains to be further interrogated is what the commonalities and differences in what Marx and Herder spoke of actually mean for the Europe of that time and for society today.