The Tension Between "Unity"and "Diversity"

Herder, thinker of the age of enlightenment, is considered as the rebel of the enlightenment thought and the leader of the romantic movement. This could be mainly due to his introspection on enlightenment rationalism so as the purpose to open up an era of diversity. He insisted that real unity possessed diversity. Herder’s works and thoughts are so widely, that this paper could tries to chose his diverse unity as the breakthrough point, in order to analyzes the connotation in the field of philosophy of history, culture and literary theory, and cast light on the important role and guide significance of the thought of "unity" and "diversity" in his works. In his thought of historical of philosophy, we tries to points out that, the diversity of human nature and the "humanitarian" development is the dialectical unification, methods the retrospective study on his diversification in human nature and on the "humanity". The diversity of ethnic culture is decided by the diversity of nation, language is not only the way to express themselves and to describe the world supporting body, therefore it also has the characteristics of concreteness and diversity. But at the same time, the diversity of national culture should be provided with the relativity. And only in the full development of each national culture the continuous progress of the world as a whole is possible. In addition, Herder paid tribute to the way of Shakespeare’s characterization with richness and vitality, and has considered that, Shakespeare has really obeyed the law of unification of tupos. Finally, we have discussed the advancement and the perspectiveness in Herder’s thought as well as the its influence on some other famous scholars respectively, and we hope today’s cultural crisis, which produced by the "globalization", will be solved with the help of Herder’s diversity of unity.