The son of the woods, the huntsman, understands the voice of the stag, and the Laplander that of the Reindeer. All is in accordance with this principle, excepting in cases of peculiar exception.
— Johann Gottfried von Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772; trans. 1827)
Herder’s Treatise argues against Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s contention that language had a divine origin, which Herder regarded as an affront against the dignity of the human race. For Herder language was not something given, but was something always in a process of being made; not by any external power, but by the boisterous activity of the ‘human soul’. Herder doesn’t only describe his position, he embodies it in adventurous rhetoric, straining to articulate his arguments with force and freshness. It’s not only to begin from the beginning, therefore, but to impress his reader with his boldness, that in the opening movement of his Inquiry Herder peremptorily announces that far from being a divine gift, human language shares an origin with the noises made by beasts. Men and animals are, for Herder, together subject to a natural law that binds all living things to articulate their needs in sound. A being in pain must cry out, and its cries must be understood, because every being must be capable of arousing sympathy in the hearts of others if it is to live.
At this point the Laplander and his reindeer make their entrance. Their appearance might be read as a further demonstration of Herder’s interest in making a bold impression, that he is bringing these primitive figures from the borderlands of Europe into the picture to surprise his reader with an exhibition of exotic specimens. But that’s not Herder’s intention. On the contrary, Herder is expecting that these figures would already be familiar to his readers in connection with the kind of claim he was making. It’s precisely because everyone already knew that the Laplander and his reindeer could understand each other that Herder introduces them into his argument, because by this means Herder is able to reconcile his claims about language and feeling with common sense, performing a rhetorical and logical feat which — for reasons I’ll return to shortly — is of fundamental importance to the kind of argument he wants to make.
Kulnasatz my Rain-deer
We have a long journey to go;
The Moor’s are vast,
And we must hast,
Our strength I fear
Will fail if we are slow,
And so
Our Songs will do.
Kaigè the watery Moor
Is pleasant unto me,
Though long it be;
Since it doth to my Mistriss lead,
Whom I adore;
The Kilwa Moor
I nere again will tread.
Thoughts fill’d my mind
Whilst I thro Kaigè past
Swift as the wind,
And my desire,
Winged with impatient fire,
My Rain-deer let us haste.
So shall we quickly end our pleasing pain:
Behold my Mistresse there,
With decent motion walking ore the Plain.
Kulnasatz my Rain-deer,
Look yonder, where
She washes in the Lake.
See while she swims,
The waters from her purer limbs
New cleerness take.
-- Anon., ‘Kulnasatz My Rain-Deer’, in Johannes Scheffer, Lapponia (1673; trans. The History of Lappland, 1674)
The notion that Laplanders and their reindeer could understand one another entered enlightenment common sense through the work of the Swedish humanist and ethnographer Johannes Scheffer. Scheffer’s Lapponia was first published in 1673, and soon translated into European vernaculars; an English version was printed by Oxford University Press as the History of Lapland in 1674. Among its descriptions of the Lapps and their customs are two transcriptions of Saami folk songs, the collection of which Scheffer attributed to ‘Olaus Matthias, a Laplander.’ In the Oxford edition of the book these are printed both in the original language and in English. The translations are set in the form of English Pindarick odes, a kind of literary lyric pioneered by the courtier-poet Abraham Cowley in the 1650s that defined the later seventeenth century’s sense of how an authentically archaic lyric should look and sound.
In April and June 1712, polite à-la-mode imitations of these two poems appeared in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s era-defining periodical The Spectator, which ensured their wide circulation throughought Europe until the end of the century. The Lapland lyrics and their implications soon became objects of common knowledge: everyone who knew anything about poetry knew that the Laplanders could both converse with their reindeer, and articulate elevated feeling in beautiful lyric poems. The Lapland lyrics would be reproduced by Henry Home, Lord Kames in the first edition of his Sketches of the History of Man (1774) as defining examples of a primitive northern lyric tradition; Kames used them there as comparative texts in an argument for the authenticity of the works of Ossian, prose pseudo-translations of ancient Celtic poems really composed by the antiquarian James Macpherson (1761), the publication of which agitated one of the most vibrant literary controversies of the later eighteenth century. Herder himself would make use of the Ossian poems in his 1772 Treatise, and published a long essay on them in a series of critical letters the following year.
What particularly struck readers like Kames and Herder in these primitive northern poems was a quality that they, along with the anonymous imitator in the pages of The Spectator, would term tenderness. In part this simply meant that, by contemporary standards in men’s art and discourse about women, the ancient poets of the northern tradition represented women’s bodies with modesty and respect, and represented men’s feelings with sincerity and sensibility. But it was also intended to encapsulate certain yielding qualities of the language, particularly at the level of verse and tone. Whereas the ancient lyrics of the Greeks, like the odes of Pindar, were admirable for their obduracy and roughness, and the love lyrics of the Latin poets were valued for their explicit eroticism and polish, the primitive lyric traditions of the European north, exemplified in poems such as ‘Kulnasatz my reindeer’ showed a special power to arouse, to express, and to represent, sympathetic understanding.
Travelling is the only means by which the spell of verbal logic can be broken, and that of rational dialectic obtained; when the European meets the Indian and enters upon conversation, logic loses all its accuracy, for every word must have a definition, and every definition an explanation: the close construction of proposition must be broken down, and the wide range of things in their nature must be opened to inquiry, which I think may justly be denominated rational dialectic.
— John “Walking” Stewart, The Revolution of Reason: or the Establishment of the Constitution of Things in Nature, of Man, of Human Intellect, of Moral Truth, of Universal Good (c.1790)
John “Walking” Stewart, an adventurer and free-thinker who published a series of cultic philosophical works between 1790 and the end of his life in 1822, is among the most conspicuously neglected writers of British Romanticism. Eccentric and charismatic, he was befriended by William Wordsworth in Paris in 1792, in whose Prelude Stewart makes a cameo appearance, and was a friend of William Godwin during his time in London. Thomas de Quincey, who first met Stewart as a kid at Bath in 1799, when the philosopher was known to the local public as ‘The Child of Nature’, wrote a beautiful obituary on Stewart for The London Magazine in which he is presented as a ‘sublime visionary’, comparable in brilliance to the poet Shelley, who had also died that year. Stewart would not have disagreed: in an autobiography prefacing his Opus Maximum (1803), he esteemed his own works as ‘the most momentous discoveries in moral science at the most critical moment of human existence’ (xiii).
After starting a career in the service of the East India Company straight out of school, by twenty Stewart had quit the Company and entered the service of Indian rulers as a special advisor; clients included both the warlord Hyder Ali Khan in Mysore, and his mortal enemy Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, better known in Britain as the Nabob of Arcot. The situation proved to be as untenable as it sounds, and Stewart escaped noble service to commence upon a series of independent and ultimately ill-starred Asian adventures. During a period of captivity at the hands of Arab pirates, which he spent suspended from the main-yard of their vessel imprisoned in a hen-coop, he devised the basis of a system of philosophical ideas that — perhaps not surprisingly — enshrined at their heart a passionate devotion to freedom.
Though he aspired to be a practical philosopher, and attempted to propagate a great number of miscellaneous doctrines concerning diet, education, the organisation of military regiments, and so on, Stewart’s most important and passionately averred ideas were methodological. Stewart championed a way of thought which he called dialectic, for which term he developed an original meaning substantially anticipating that found in some more widely noted contributions to Romantic philosophy. Stewart’s dialectic perhaps owed something to the sixteenth-century protestant philosopher and martyr Pierre de la Ramée, perhaps owed something to the emergent discourse of the Critical Philosophy in Germany, certainly owed something to Rousseau’s account of philosophical vocation, and was heavily influenced by Buddhist and Brahmin teachings picked up during his years in India. The product of these influences was nonetheless uniquely his own. For Stewart, dialectical thinking was a special kind of cognition which, when allied to what he called ‘the offensive will’, which we might call something like revolutionary desire, was able to bring the thinking subject to leap immediately into relation with totality, to deal immediately with essentials, and into immediate contact with the other. It therefore promised, Stewart proclaimed in his Apocalypse of Nature (1790), when universally adopted, to advance the human race beyond the end of history, and into ‘a state of enlightened nature’; in which enlightened thinking — the thought of freedom finally free to be thunk within its own element — would be realised in its essential mode as the energetic embodiment of enlightened truth.
Different as are the significations in which the ancients used this term [dialectic] for a science or an art, we may safely infer, from their actual enjoyment of it, that with them it was nothing else than a logic of illution — a sophistical art for giving ignorance, nay, even intentional sophistries, the coloring of truth, in which the thoroughness of procedure which logic requires was imitated, and their topic employed to cloak empty pretensions.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (1781; trans. J.M.D. Meikelberg, 1900)
The Aristotelean tradition had stressed the primacy of common sense over dialectic outside the special domain of philosophical inquiry. In the Topics Aristotle taught that the apparent discoveries of any dialectical inquiry were to be tested against whatever was already generally accepted as true by what he called ‘reputable authorities’. If we want to know how to catch a fish or write a poem or worship the gods, we don’t go to a philosopher to reason it out by eliminating contradictions and coming up with a logical solution. We go to the best fishermen, or the best poets, or the best priests, and ask them to show us how it’s done. Dialectic can help us to refine our understanding of what those authorities teach us to think, but can’t supply our understanding with usable content. The inadvertent revolutionary Immanuel Kant, whilst emulating Aristotle by stamping ferociously down on the use of dialectical forms of doing philosophy to indulge in dangerous talk about freedom and the divine, also showed how dialectic could be used transcendentally — because the transcendental was in certain respects a real content that dialectic could therefore work with — once we made some special esoteric adaptations to its method, and within special definite parameters. The primary unintended consequence of his own argument, i.e. its compelling legitimation of dialectical speculation about the beyond, upset Kant so much that he effectively spent the rest of his life arguing against himself and anyone foolish enough to have agreed with him.
It’s for this reason that Herder refers his dialectic on the origin of language to his period’s common sense concerning the relation between the Laplander and his reindeer. It’s a way of establishing his academic credentials. As an attentive student of Aristotle and of Kant, whose university lectures on logic and metaphysics he had attended at Königsberg in the 1760s, Herder knows where the usefulness of dialectic begins and ends. He’s no crank. But such maneuvers are of little importance to Stewart. If anything he seems to court scholarly aversion as a kind of negative proof of the virtue of what he has to say. Academics didn’t get it. The era of European travel and discovery had revealed a global human experience of depth and extent in stunning excess of anything before known or imagined. The common sense on which academics depended now appeared utterly inadequate to serve the needs of truth and freedom in the real world, a world in which the thinking subject of civilised common sense — in curious contrast with the Laplander, Highlander or Indian — now stood revealed as an ignorant, aimlessly wandering stranger. Those who would serve freedom must therefore learn to think differently; they must learn to think with difference: not only negatively against common sense, but positively in the cause of an asymptotic activism toward a new ideal of freedom, the destination of the winding revolutionary progress of our history to come. ‘Think, speak all you think’, wrote Stewart; ‘violate not, but aid the offensive will; and should all mankind follow my example, the mutability of moral predicament would almost lose its nature, and become fixability; for when speaking of truth could produce no danger, falsehood would lose all its advantage and veniality’.
In the song, the Laplander sings to his reindeer of his longing for his beloved; he invites his reindeer to imagine with him her beautiful body bathing: a form so pure that it cleanses the water she washes in. But when reindeer become readers — that is, when the Laplander’s address to his reindeer becomes an address to literary readers on the other side of deep gulfs of cultural, social, and historical difference, mediated by a procession of folklorists and translators, editors and imitators, whose mediations can sometimes seem to extend and deepen rather than to reduce the gaps they work among — that song becomes involved in the complex dynamics of enlightenment arguments that staked the destinies of subjects and nations, even the salvation of the human race, on ancient northern lyric’s primordial power tenderly to mean and sympathetically to be understood across the thresholds of sex, of language, and of species. No image of art could ever be pure enough to get the water clean at this late stage. But in the murky pools of underground caverns, faintly echoing with the old song’s wrong and faltered music, Queen Christina of Sweden stirs.