One thing that really helps you get through a book like this, written in a different era in a different language with a very different prose style (although I seem to have inherited it somehow--my friend went through my thesis today marking all the sentences that were more than four lines or so. There were many) on esoteric topics, is if you feel like you'd really like the guy writing it. And Herder seems like a rad companion. "Once again, all I can do amid this richness"--the richness of human language--"is gather flowers," he says, and you are left with no pressure on you to wander with him and perhaps espy a four-leaf clover. This was a prize-essay, and Herder writes with the polemical zip of one who wishes to take the crown, but also the genial wonder of one who sees no need to make your time together unpleasant just because he has to put the boots into Süssmilch, Leibniz, Rousseau, Condillac.

Ironic, with that last, because Herder and Condillac don't disagree nearly as much as Herder thinks (pretends?) they do. Their epistemology, and in particular their account of the development of languages (not the origin of language), are virtually identical (difference is, C sees two children externalizing their internal words in order to cooperate together; Herder sees us sitting around the fire and the natural Word hitting us with a thunderbolt--the sheep is the thing that goes baaa!--and then, because that's the most exciting thing to have happened in many thousands of moons, we get together and invent more. Their main split is on the matter of the origin of language--the putative topic of the essay, which Herder seems to want to settle and move beyond as soon as possible. "Already as a beast, man has language," he says, and with that radical beginning (in 1772, very radical indeed!) he pushes back not only Condillac's constructivism but also the divine origin of language people, and Kant with his innate ideas (to Herder, language is innate, and ideas rise out of it, the reverse situation), and Lockean designativism. We may howl our fear and desire when alone, he say, evoking the Greek hero Philoctetes abandoned on his island with his reeking wound, but as soon as we enter human company, these unilateral blasts give rise to the infinitely complex and beautiful process of connecting with our neighbour, instantiating a Volksgeist, exploring the mind of the Other. Herder loves all cultures and all peoples, but not in a gross neoliberal way: cherish yourself, cherish what you come from, and then go out and slurp down down everything else on the human buffet table, he says. He's the antifascist polyphile, and we may yet find he's our best way forward. ( )