Imagination in Politics by Czobor-Lupp Mihaela;

Author:Czobor-Lupp, Mihaela;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Herder on Culture and Imagination

Like Edmund Burke, Herder claims that constitutions and institutions need to be supported by an aesthetic culture, if moral and political freedom is to have any reality. They need to be grounded in people’s feelings and imaginations. However, in a different way than Burke and rather in tune with the ideals of the Enlightenment, Herder also claims that feelings and imagination can connect individuals across national cultures, thus enlarging their rational capacity to understand what it means to be human across particular contexts, as well as forming their dispositions to humanity. Herder sees humanity as a regulative ideal to be cultivated in individuals in ways that engage history, culture, and language.[19] In this enterprise, imagination and literature play a central role. Placing imagination in such a fundamental role allows Herder to recognize the role that the anthropological diversity of mankind plays in the gradual embedment in reality of reason’s ideals (i.e., of humanity as a community of equal, free, tolerant, and peaceful groups[20] ). It also allows him to argue for the positive virtues of narratives and literature in forming the individuals’ dispositions to reason and humanity.

Herder’s conception of culture[21] and his plea for cultural diversity have been predominantly interpreted as an argument for nationalism. The interpretation finds support in Herder’s view of culture as the expression of a people’s specific needs and circumstances. As a result, Charles Taylor sees Herder as the early major articulator of the romantic notion of authenticity, namely, “the idea that each of us has an original way of being human.”[22] Taylor connects this idea to what he calls the expressive turn in the modern culture. According to this, an individual or a culture realizes her nature when she or it brings it to expression, in the double sense, of formulating it and of shaping it.[23]

As it can be easily guessed, the expressive turn stresses the important role that creative imagination plays in articulating individual and cultural identity. Unfortunately, Taylor’s reading overlooks the power imagination also has, in Herder’s view, to grasp other cultures and to transplant an external observer inside the symbolic fabric of a society. As a result, it fails to convincingly communicate the idea that Herder’s conception of culture can also oppose an isolationist and exclusionary claim that might accompany the attempt to express the unique national character of a group.

The trouble is that Herder does not make things easier when he provides definitions of culture as a living and organic fabric, a “great garden in which people grew up like plants.”[24] In this sense, critics, such as Sonia Sikka, for example, are right to argue that this definition could make the extent to which anyone can penetrate the (‘original’) fabric of another people’s culture somehow questionable. Thus, the definition seems to endorse Habermas’ argument that Herder embraces a purist understanding of culture and national identity. Furthermore, the tendency in Herder’s conception of culture not only to overstress the differences between cultures, but also to present them as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.