Johann Gottfried Herder

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(b Mohrungen, 25 Aug 1744; d Weimar, 18 Dec 1803). German man of letters. He served at the Bückeburg court, 1771-6, and then at Weimar, where he came into contact with Goethe. A central figure in the development of several disciplines (history, language, theology, philosophy, sociology), he considered music fundamental to culture and education. He wrote essays on music and texts for stage and other works (some set by J. C. F. Bach) besides publishing folksong collections. His poems, some dealing with music, were set by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and others.

The German philosopher, theologian, and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) is best known for his contribution to the philosophy of history.

Johann Gottfried von Herder was born into a religious middle-class family in East Prussia on Aug. 25, 1744, and was raised in the town of Mohrongen, where his father was the schoolmaster. A surgeon in the occupying Russian army offered to be young Herder's patron and finance his university education in the capital city of Königsberg. In 1762 Herder enrolled as a medical student only to discover that he was unable to attend dissections or operations without fainting. He transferred to theology, and during this period he met Immanuel Kant and Johann George Hamann. Despite their later disagreements, Herder wrote a moving description of Kant, then a young teacher, and Kant, equally impressed, remitted his usual lecture fees. In Hamann, Herder discovered a kindred spirit who wished to preserve the integrity of faith by exposing the limitations of "enlightened" rationalism. Their lifelong friendship and correspondence reinforced the interests of both philosophers in literature, language, translation, and esthetics.

Between 1764 and 1769 Herder lived in Riga, where he worked as a teacher and minister and wrote a number of reviews and essays. His first important works - Fragments concerning Recent German Literature (1767) and Critical Forests (1769) - display an early tendency to treat problems of esthetics and language historically.

In the following years Herder traveled throughout Europe and held a minor pastorate. In Paris he met the encyclopédistes Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, and in Strasbourg he began his lifelong association with the poet J. W. von Goethe. Through Goethe's intervention, Herder eventually secured a permanent appointment as superintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar in 1776. Herder worked conscientiously at his considerable administrative and clerical career in order to provide for his family of four children. Nonetheless, his prolific writings run to 33 volumes and include Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, Christian Writings, two works criticizing Kant (Metakritik and Kalligone), as well as collections of folk literature, translations, and poetry. He died in Weimar on Dec. 18, 1803.

His Thought

The speculative dimension of history is concerned with the search for philosophic intelligibility or meaning in the study of human events. Ancient historians saw the repetitive pattern of history, and in this cyclical perspective the justification for studying the past was to anticipate the future. Christianity introduced a linear conception of time and the notion of Providence by dating history from a specific event and envisioning a definite end. Beginning with the late 17th century, philosophers secularized Providence: God's story was replaced by a belief in human progress and man's future perfectibility. By and large, professional historians and philosophers have discarded such theories in favor of a position known as historicism. In this view there are no general patterns, and each historical epoch is unique in its individual character and culture.

Herder's work is the first to incorporate elements of historicism. In an early work, ironically entitled Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774), and his later four-volume Idea for a Philosophy of History for Mankind (1784-1791), he displays an ambivalence toward the goals of rationalism and the Enlightenment. In the Idea Herder's Protestant pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature is reinforced by physical-cultural relativism: on a star among stars, man, as a creature among creatures, plays out his unique destiny in proportion to the "force" or "power" resulting from the interaction between individual, institution, and environment. Like Kant, Herder was among the first to strike upon the ingenious solution, later favored by G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx, of locating progress in the species rather than in the individual. Thus humanity progresses, through God's mysterious ways, in spite of the individuals who compose it. History offers a synthesis of Providence, progress, and individuality since "whatever could be has been, according to the situation and wants of the place, the circumstances and occasions of the times, and the native or generated character of the people."

Further Reading

Robert T. Clark's biography Herder: His Life and Thought (1955) is excellent and contains the fullest analysis in English of Herder's work. G. A. Wells, Herder and After (1959), discusses Herder's conception of both man and history and its critical reception from the 19th century to current times. Other brief studies include Alexander Gillies, Herder (1945), and portions of Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays on the History of Ideas (1948).

Additional Sources

Barnard, F. M. (Frederick M.), Self-direction and political legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder, Oxford, England: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University, 1988.

Berlin, Isaiah, Sir., Vico and Herder: two studies in the history of ideas, New York: Viking Press, 1976.

Berlin, Isaiah, Sir., Vico and Herder: two studies in the history of ideas, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, 1976.

Berlin, Isaiah, Sir., Vico and Herder: two studies in the history of ideas, London: Hogarth, 1976.

Bluestein, Gene, Poplore: folk and pop in American culture, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Ergang, Robert Reinhold, Herder and the foundations of German nationalis, New York, Octagon Books, 1966 c1931.

Fugate, Joe K., The psychological basis of Herder's aesthetic, The Hague, Mouton, 1966.

Johann Gottfried Herder: language, history, and the enlightenment, Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990.

Johann Gottfried Herder, innovator through the ages, Bonn: Bouvier, 1982.

Herder, Johann Gottfried (Mohrungen, East Prussia, 1744-1803, Weimar), the son of a parish clerk, grew up in humble circumstances, but received a grammar school education, enabling him to study theology at Königsberg University where Kant taught. There Herder became friendly with J. G. Hamann. In 1764 he was appointed as teacher at the cathedral school at Riga, becoming also a popular preacher in the cathedral. In 1767 he published anonymously Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, a brilliant review of the current literary situation in Germany, interspersed with original and fertile ideas. This work is often referred to as Herder's Fragmente because its three parts are so described. Kritische Wälder (3 vols., 1769) includes discussions on J. J. Winckelmann and on G. E. Lessing's Laokoon, and foreshadows Herder's concept of the totality of the human personality.

In 1769 Herder, an enthusiast for the ideas of J. J. Rousseau, resigned his appointments and set out for France, travelling by ship to Nantes. His views and feelings on this journey are recorded in the Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769, a diary first published posthumously in 1846. While in France he was offered an appointment as travelling tutor to a prince of Holstein-Eutin. On the way to his new post he met Lessing and M. Claudius. He soon set out with his charge on what was intended as a three-year tour. In Darmstadt he met Caroline Flachsland, whom he married in 1773, and in Strasburg in Sept. 1770 he encountered the young Goethe. Herder stayed there to receive medical treatment for his eyes, and the contract with the prince was dissolved. In 1771 he became court preacher to the petty court of Schaumburg-Lippe at Bückeburg. In the year following the appearance of his philological tract Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) Herder published a notable series of essays, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, to which he and Goethe were the principal contributors. His early historical essay Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit and the theological work Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts appeared in 1774 In 1776 Herder, whose restless temperament made him easily dissatisfied with any situation, was glad to accept an invitation to Weimar, where Goethe had secured him a post as Moderator (Generalsuperintendent). For the next twelve years Herder lived in harmony with his environment, and entered a new phase of productivity. It began with the publication of a collection of folk-songs, Volkslieder (2 vols., 1778-9), which is better known under the title Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1807). This collection marks the climax and the end of Herder's association with the Sturm und Drang, to which he had made two major contributions: firstly, the idea of perception by the total personality (replacing the belief in the primacy of reason); and secondly, the high estimation of those poets and literary works which are closest to nature (notably the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian, and folk-song). Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie (1782-3), arising out of Briefe, das Studium der Theologie betreffend, applies aesthetics to theology. The great achievement of Herder's first decade in Weimar is his most systematic and complete historical work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91), which combined his cyclical, organic conception (the birth, growth, and death of civilizations and their manifestations) with an idea of progress, which he was one of the first not to perceive in terms of a linear development.

Impatient to move, Herder travelled to Italy in 1788, but abandoned the tour within a year, preparing his Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793-7), ten collections originating from his response to the ideals of the French Revolution. In the following decade his publications were mainly theological, and included Von der Auferstehung als Glauben, Geschichte und Lehre (1794) and Sammlung christlicher Schriften (1794-8). His later years in Weimar were marked by increasing dissatisfaction and disharmony with Duke Karl August and Goethe. He also embarked on a campaign to discredit the philosophy of Kant, publishing Verstand und Erfahrung. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2 vols.) in 1799, and Die Metakritik der Urteils-kraft, known as Kalligone, in 1800, both of which encountered severe criticism. His selection of his later writings resuming the themes of his early works, Adrastea (6 vols., 1801-4), made his supporters in Weimar alert to the weaker aspects of his intellect and personality. It included the cycle Der Cid, his translation (largely based on a French version) of the Spanish poem El Cid. His renderings of foreign folk-songs and of the Greek Anthology were also in Herder's own eyes far more noteworthy than the original poetry and the few plays he wrote.

By the turn of the century Herder's influence had declined, but his contribution to German literary and historical thought remains outstanding. His stature depends less on comprehensiveness than on fertility of ideas and suggestive originality. He was noted for an uneven temper emanating from his hypersensitive personality; but he also possessed great charm and a persuasive eloquence.

Sämtliche Werke (45 vols.) appeared 1805-20, the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (33 vols.), ed. B. Suphan, 1877-1913, 3rd reprint 1994-5, Herders Briefwechsel mit Nicolai (1 vol.) in 1975, and Aus dem Nachlaß (1 vol.) in 1976; a comprehensive edition of correspondence, Briefe 1763-1803 (8 vols.), in 1977-84 (Weimar).

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744-1803) German philosopher and historian, and an important influence on German Romanticism. Herder was originally destined for medicine, but at the university of Königsberg he changed his subject to theology, and made the acquaintance of Kant and Hamann. After various travels he took up the post of Generalsuperintendent of the clergy at Weimar.

Herder published continuously, his most important works being Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772, trs. as Treatise upon the Origin of Language, 1827) and Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (four parts, 1784-91, trs. as Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1800). His work, like that of Vico, is marked by a historical depth that led to dissent from the Enlightenment assumptions of a uniform, if progressing, human nature, and to a stress on the pervasive influence of history in the shaping of human language and art. Herder also attacked the prevailing faculty psychology of the time, holding that only nonsense arose from the standard distinctions between reason, will, desire, affection, and so forth. Rather, the person is a single unity (infused by a spirit or vital force, Kraft) that reasons, wills, and desires. Herder was also one of the first philosophers to identify the ability to reason with the ability to use language, and to equate thinking with inner speaking.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von (1744–1803), German philosopher and theologian. Born in Mohrungen, East Prussia (now Morag, Poland), the son of a schoolteacher, Herder studied at the university of Königsberg for two years, where he began a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1787) and heard lectures by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), then a private lecturer, not yet famous or even a professor. In 1764 Herder began a career as a Lutheran pastor, first at Riga (1764–1769), then at the court of Schaumberg-Lippe in Bückeburg (1771–1776), and finally at the court of Sachsen-Weimar in Weimar (1776–1803). Twice he nearly joined the theological faculty at the University of Göttingen, but in 1776 when the Hanoverian court in London required that he submit to a test of religious orthodoxy, he opted to follow Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), whom he had met in Strasbourg in 1770, to Weimar. In 1789 the Weimar court promoted him as an inducement to decline Göttingen's offer.

During his travels in France and western Germany between his positions at Riga and Bückeburg, Herder learned of the annual essay competition sponsored by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on the topic of the origin of language. The Academy had been debating the question for nearly twenty-five years, and in December of 1770 as he convalesced from unsuccessful eye surgery in Strasbourg, Herder dashed off an entry in advance of a 1 January 1771 deadline. He won the competition, and the academy published the essay, which inaugurated a prolific literary career.

Herder's thesis, that the difference between humans and animals was language and that language was the vehicle of cognition, was not distinctly original. Others had pointed out that, since the orangutan possessed speech organs similar to those of humans but could not freely manipulate abstract concepts in the mind apart from what they represented in space and time, the seat of language had to be not in the mouth, but in the soul. The difference, argued Herder in Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Essay on the origin of language), was in the purposes of man. "The bee was a bee as soon as it built its first cell," he wrote, "but a person was not human until he had achieved completeness. People continued to grow as long as they lived. . . . We are always in process, unsettled, unsatiated. The essence of our life is never satisfaction, rather always progression, and we have never been human until we have lived to the end."

Unlike animals, children were uniquely vulnerable, but that weakness was by design. Children must learn to speak, and the family was the social unit charged with educating children in that most basic and essential of all human capacities—language. More than teaching a child language, the family also imparted the individual's sense of identity and made him or her part of a group. Herder took it as a natural law that "man is by destiny a creature of the herd, of society." Where Jean-Jacques Rousseau had said in Émile that the child had more to say to the mother than the mother to the child, Herder countered that by teaching children language, the family's manner of thinking and set of values were developed and preserved. The education of the human race occurred in the bosom of the family. "Why does the mute child so weakly and unwittingly depend on his mother's breasts and his father's knee? So that he might be hungry for learning and learn language. He is weak so that his race may be strong." The treasury of the family heritage was preserved through the family language. As the clan expanded into a tribe, it celebrated the deeds of its forefathers. All heroic poetry—Germanic, Ossianic, Homeric—was tribal, that is, familial, in origin.

Through the 1770s and 1780s Herder explored the formation of national character in the primitive state. Die ältesten Urkunden des Menschengeschlechts (1774; The oldest documents of the human race) and Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774; Yet another philosophy of history for the education of humanity) were comparative studies of the primitive mind in society, while Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773; On the German type and art) and Vom Geist der hebräischen Poesie (1782–1783; The spirit of Hebrew poetry) celebrated the unique spirit of primitive Germanic and Hebrew literature. Although his prose essays drew together much of the leading scholarship of the day, Herder reflected the innovations of other scholars more than he advanced his own. His real genius was as a translator of poetry, and here he influenced Goethe and secured his reputation as an author of national import in the Romantic period. He collected two volumes of Volkslieder (Folksongs; 1778–1779, reissued posthumously with a third volume as Stimmen der Völker in Liedern [Voices of the peoples in song]), and his version of the Spanish heroic epic El Cid went through literally dozens of editions and reprintings in the nineteenth century. In what is now his most famous work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791; Ideas for the philosophy of the history of humanity, 4 vols.), he insisted that the education of the human race was tantamount to the education of individuals. The goal of the individual was to develop his or her personhood or humanity, and as individuals developed their faculties, so did the family, the community, the nation, and humanity as a whole. There was such a thing as what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing called "the education of the human race" but not in the Neoplatonic sense of individuals participating in some unified World Soul. Instead each individual, community, and nation developed according to its own internal logic, which was unique and valuable in its own right. Herder hated all forms of centralization and imperialism, whether ancient Roman or modern European, as these suppressed the unique genius of both the conquerors and the vanquished.

His notion of the uniqueness of cultural groups and the particular manifestations of mind in human history brought him into conflict with Kant's critical philosophy. Toward the end of his life Herder offered a Metacritique (1799) of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) arguing that there was no such thing as pure reason, only human reason. If language was the vehicle of reason, and if languages differed between nations, then so must reason also differ. Reason existed only in particular historical circumstances as it was exercised by particular peoples, nations, and communities. Just as he wrote in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit that each society must find its own unique form of happiness, and within a society each generation must do the same, so in the Metacritique he said that each nation defines reason and rationality in its own terms, terms that do not necessarily correspond to those of eighteenth-century Europe.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Essay on the Origin of Language. Translated by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. New York, 1967. Together with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages.

——. J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture. Edited and translated by F. M. Barnard. Cambridge, U.K., 1969. This most widely available English edition of Herder contains loose and misleading translations and should be carefully verified with the German.

——. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Translated by T. O. Churchill. London, 1800. Abridged as Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Edited by Frank E. Manuel. Chicago, 1968.

——. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Michael N. Forster. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.

——. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Bernhard Suphan et al. 33 vols. Tübingen, 1877–1913.

——. The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. Translated by James Marsh. Burlington, Vt., 1833.

——. Werke in zehn Bänden. Edited by Martin Bollacher et al. 10 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1985–2000.

Secondary Sources

Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Berlin, Isaiah. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London, 1976.

Clark, Robert T. Herder: His Life and Thoughts. Berkeley, 1955.

Ergang, Robert Reinhold. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism. New York, 1931.

Koepke, Wulf. Johann Gottfried Herder. Boston, 1987.

Zammito, John. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology Chicago, 2001.

—MICHAEL CARHART

Quotes:

"Brave is the lion tamer, brave is the world subduer, but braver is the one who has subdued himself."

"What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self."

"Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant, they is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks."

"Say oh wise man how you have come to such knowledge? Because I was never ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others."

"Those that embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part love nothing, but their narrow selves."

"Touch not the flute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent."

See more famous quotes by Johann Gottfried Von Herder

Johann Gottfried Herder

German philosophy Enlightenment philosophy
Full name	Johann Gottfried von Herder
Born	25 August 1744
Died	18 December 1803 (aged 59)
School/tradition	Romantic nationalism
Main interests	Sturm und Drang, philology, cultural anthropology
Notable ideas	Volksgeist
Influenced by Johann Georg Hamann Immanuel Kant
Influenced Ľudovít Štúr

Johann Gottfried von Herder (25 August 1744 – 18 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works and ideas 2.1 Germany and The Enlightenment 3 Bibliography 4 See also 5 Footnotes 6 References 7 External links

Biography

The Johann Gottfried Herder statue in Weimar in front of the Peter and Paul church

Born in Mohrungen (Morąg) in the Kingdom of Prussia, Herder grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, an introspective youth of seventeen, he enrolled at the local University of Königsberg, where he became a student of Immanuel Kant. At the same time, Herder became an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, a patriotic Francophobe and intensely subjective thinker who championed the emotions against reason. His choice of Hamann over such luminaries as Immanuel Kant was significant, as this odd figure, a needy hypochondriac, delved back into the German mysticism of Jacob Böhme and others, pronouncing obscure and oracular dicta that brought him fame as the "Magus of the North". Hamann's disjointed effusions generally carried subtitles such as Hierophantic Letters or A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose.

Hamann's influence led Herder to confess to his wife later in life that "I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy", yet Herder can justly claim to have founded a new school of German political thought. Although himself an unsociable person, Herder influenced his contemporaries greatly. One friend wrote to him in 1785, hailing his works as "inspired by God." A varied field of theorists were later to find inspiration in Herder's tantalisingly incomplete ideas.

In 1764, now a clergyman, Herder went to Riga to teach. It was during this period that he produced his first major works, which were literary criticism.

In 1769 Herder traveled to the French port of Nantes and continued on to Paris. This resulted in both an account of his travels as well as a shift of his own self-conception as an author.

By 1770 Herder went to Strasbourg, where he met the young Goethe. This event proved to be a key juncture in the history of German literature, as Goethe was inspired by Herder's literary criticism to develop his own style. This can be seen as the beginning of the "Sturm und Drang" movement. In 1771 Herder took a position as head pastor and court preacher at Bückeburg under Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe.

By the mid-1770s, Goethe was a well-known author, and used his influence at the court of Weimar to secure Herder a position as General Superintendent. Herder moved there in 1776, where his outlook shifted again towards classicism.

Towards the end of his career, Herder endorsed the French Revolution, which earned him the enmity of many of his colleagues. At the same time, he and Goethe experienced a personal split. Herder died in Weimar in 1803.

Works and ideas

Herder

In 1772 Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O You German". Herder now had established the foundations of comparative philology within the new currents of political outlook.

Throughout this period, he continued to elaborate his own unique theory of aesthetics in works such as the above, while Goethe produced works like The Sorrows of Young Werther – the Sturm und Drang movement was born.

Herder wrote an important essay on Shakespeare and Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) published in 1773 in a manifesto along with contributions by Goethe and Justus Möser. Herder wrote that "A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world." To him such poetry had its greatest purity and power in nations before they became civilised, as shown in the Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer, and he tried to find such virtues in ancient German folk songs and Norse poetry and mythology.

After becoming General Superintendent in 1776, Herder's philosophy shifted again towards classicism. Herder was at his best during this period, and produced works such as his unfinished Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity which largely originated the school of historical thought. Herder's philosophy was of a deeply subjective turn, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, stressing that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything". The historian should be the "regenerated contemporary" of the past, and history a science as "instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit".

Herder gave Germans new pride in their origins, modifying that dominance of regard allotted to Greek art (Greek revival) extolled among others by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He remarked that he would have wished to be born in the Middle Ages and mused whether "the times of the Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?". Herder equated the German with the Gothic and favoured Dürer and everything Gothic. As with the sphere of art, equally he proclaimed a national message within the sphere of language. He topped the line of German authors emanating from Martin Opitz, who had written his Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae in Latin in 1617, urging Germans to glory in their hitherto despised language. Herder's extensive collections of folk-poetry began a great craze in Germany for that neglected topic.

Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a "nation" extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales.

Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism – "he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself", whilst teaching that "in a certain sense every human perfection is national". Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that "there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant". Explanation that the Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of "the people" as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.

The nation, however, was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters". Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity". With no need for comparison since "every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others" for "do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?"

He also predicted that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity, and thus rot away, and saying that the eastern European nations would stick to their religion and their idealism; and would this way become the power in Europe. One of his related predictions was that the Hungarian nation would disappear and become assimilated by surrounding Slavic peoples; this prophecy caused considerable uproar in Hungary and is widely cited to this day.^[1]

Germany and The Enlightenment

This question was further developed by Herder's lament that Martin Luther did not establish a national church, and his doubt whether Germany did not buy Christianity at too high a price, that of true nationality. Herder's patriotism bordered at times upon national pantheism, demanding of territorial unity as "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions" and sounding an even deeper call:

"But now! Again I cry, my German brethren! But now! The remains of all genuine folk-thought is rolling into the abyss of oblivion with a last and accelerated impetus. For the last century we have been ashamed of everything that concerns the fatherland."

Herder presented formal defiance of the age of reason and Enlightenment. In his, Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind he even wrote, "Compare England with Germany: the English are Germans, and even in the latest times the Germans have led the way for the English in the greatest things."

Herder, who hated absolutism and Prussian nationalism, but who was imbued with the spirit of the whole German Volk, yet as historical theorist turned away from the light of the eighteenth century. Seeking to reconcile his thought with this earlier age, Herder sought to harmonize his conception of sentiment with reason, whereby all knowledge is implicit in the soul; the most elementary stage is sensuous and intuitive perception which by development can become self-conscious and rational. To Herder, this development is the harmonizing of primitive and derivative truth, of experience and intelligence, feeling and reason.

Herder is the first in a long line of Germans preoccupied with this harmony. This search is itself the key to much in German theory. And Herder was too penetrating a thinker not to understand and fear the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. Herder's attitude toward Jews is complex. He argued that Jews in Germany should enjoy the full rights and obligations of Germans, and that the non-Jews of the world owed a debt to Jews for centuries of abuse, and that this debt could be discharged only by actively assisting those Jews who wished to do so to regain political sovereignty in their ancient homeland of Israel.^[2] Herder refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that "notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth".

He also announced that "national glory is a deceiving seducer. When it reaches a certain height, it clasps the head with an iron band. The enclosed sees nothing in the mist but his own picture; he is susceptible to no foreign impressions." And:

"It is the apparent plan of nature that as one human being, so also one generation, and also one nationality learn, learn incessantly, from and with the others, until all have comprehended the difficult lesson: No nationality has been solely designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good. Hence no nationality of Europe may separate itself sharply, and foolishly say, "With us alone, with us dwells all wisdom."

The passage of time was to demonstrate that while many Germans were to find influence in Herder's convictions and influence, fewer were to note his qualificatory stipulations.

Herder had emphasised that his conception of the nation encouraged democracy and the free self-expression of a people's identity. He proclaimed support for the French Revolution, a position which did not endear him to royalty. He also differed with Kant's philosophy and turned away from the Sturm und Drang movement to go back to the poems of Shakespeare and Homer.

To promote his concept of the Volk, he published letters and collected folk songs. These latter were published in 1773 as Voices of the People in Their Songs (Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern). The poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano later used Stimmen der Võlker as samples for The Boy's Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn).

Bibliography

• To Cyrus, the grandson of Astyages (1762)
• Essay on Being (1763-64)
• On Diligence in Several Learned Languages (1764)
• Treatise on the Ode (1764)
• How Philosophy can become more Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765)
• Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767-68)
• On Thomas Abbt's writings (1768)
• Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Science and Art of the Beautiful (1769-)
• Journal of my Voyage in the Year 1769 (first published 1846)
• Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772)
• Selection from correspondence on Ossian and the songs of ancient peoples (1773) See also: James Macpherson (1736–1796).
• Of German Character and Art (with Goethe, manifesto of the Sturm und Drang) (1773)
• This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774)
• Oldest Document of the Human Race (1774-76)
• Essay on Ulrich von Hutten (1776)
• On the Resemblance of Middle English and Germany Poetry (1777)
• Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream (1778)
• On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778)
• On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Ethics of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times (1778)
• Folk Songs (1778-79; second ed. of 1807 titled The Voices of Peoples in Songs)
• On the Influence of the Government on the Sciences and the Sciences on the Government (1780)
• Letters Concerning the Study of Theology (1780-81)
• On the Influence of the Beautiful in the Higher Sciences (1781)
• On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. An Instruction for Lovers of the Same and the Oldest History of the Human Spirit (1782-83)
• God. Some Conversations (1787)
• Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784-91)
• Scattered Leaves (1785-97)
• Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1791-97 or 1793-97?)
• Christian Writings (1794-8)
• Terpsichore (1795-6) (translations & commentary of the Latin poet, Jakob Balde)
• Persepolisian Letters (1798) (fragments on Persian architecture, history & religion)
• Luther’s Catechism, with a catechetical instruction for the use of schools (1798)
• Understanding and Experience. A Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason. Part I. (Part II, Reason and Language.) (1799)
• Calligone (1800)
• Adrastea: Events and Characters of the 18th century (6 vols.)
• The Cid (1805; a free translation of the Spanish epic El Cid)

See also

• Herder Prize
• Translation

Footnotes

1. ^ Transylvania - Title
2. ^ Barnard, F. M., “The Hebrews and Herder’s Political Creed,” Modern Language Review,” vol. 54, no. 4, October 1959, pp. 533-546.

References

• Barnard, Frederick Mechner (1965). Herder's Social and Political Thought. Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198271514. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Johann Gottfried Herder

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Johann Gottfried Herder

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Herder, Johann Gottfried.

• "Johann Gottfried Herder" article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Herder Bibliography and more
• www.johann-gottfried-herder.de (German)
• International Herder Society
• Selected works from Project Gutenberg (in German)

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Persondata
NAME	Herder, Johann Gottfried von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German Romantic nationalist philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	August 25, 1744
PLACE OF BIRTH	Mohrungen
DATE OF DEATH	December 18, 1803
PLACE OF DEATH	Weimar, Germany

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