280 DESTINY DISRUPTED
themselves be guided solely by reason must eventually progress toward a
single universal set oflaws and value judgments.
Herder, however, argued that there was no such thing as universal val-
ues, either moral or aesthetic: rather, he said, the world was composed of
various cultural entities, which he called volks: or "people." Each of these
entities had a volksgeist, a spiritual essence possessed in common by the
given people. Shared language, traditions, customs, history-ties like these
bound a group of people together as a volk. Although a true volk was a
purely social entity, its "groupness" wasn't just a social contract or some
sort of agreement among its members to team up, any more than a multi-
tude of cells agree to come together and be an organism. Nations had a
unified singleness that made them as real as butterflies or mountains: that's
the sort of thing Herder meant by volk. And when Herder spoke of volks-
geist, he meant something like what religious people mean by soul or what
psychologists mean when they speak of"the self." Every nation, to Herder,
had some such unified spiritual essence.
Herder's argument implied that no moral or aesthetic judgment was
universally valid or objectively true. If humanity was not reducible to a ca-
pacity for reason, then values were not the same at all times for all people.
In aesthetics, for example, an Indian and a German might disagree about
what was beautiful, but this didn't mean one side was right and the other
wrong. Each judgment reflected a volksgeist and was true only insofar as it
truly expressed the volksgeist. A value judgment could rise no higher than
the level of the nation.
Herder wasn't saying one nation was better than another, just that
they were different, and that one nation couldn't be judged by the values
of another. But a slightly younger philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
took Herder's ideas a step further and shifted their import. Fichte agreed
that humanity clumped together as discrete nations, each one bound to-
gether by a common spirit; but he suggested that some volks might ac-
tually be superior to others. Specifically, he suggested that Germans had
a great inherant capacity for liberty, theirs being a vigorous living lan-
guage as contrasted to the French language, which was dead. (The
French no doubt disagreed.)
Fichte died in 1814: his career, therefore, peaked in the period when
Napoleon was conquering Europe and dominating the Germans, which is