Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

According to Herder, one cannot make such judgments. Judgments of good and bad are defined culturally and internally, in terms of each culture’s own goals and aspirations. Each culture’s standards originate and develop from its particular needs and circumstances, not from a universal set of principles; so, Herder concluded, “let us have no more generalizations about improvement.”[178] Herder thus insisted “on a strictly relativist interpretation of progress and human perfectibility.”[179] Accordingly, each culture can be judged only by its own standards. One cannot judge one culture from the perspective of another; one can only sympathetically immerse oneself in the other’s cultural manifestations and judge them on their own terms.