Johann Gottfried von Herder ( HUR-dər; German: [ˈjoːhan ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈhɛʁdɐ]; 25 August 1744 – 18 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, pastor, poet, and literary critic. Herder is associated with the Age of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people (das Volk). He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation (der Volksgeist) was popularized. He is credited with establishing or advancing a number of important disciplines: hermeneutics, linguistics, anthropology, and "a secular philosophy of history."
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Biography
Herder was born in Mohrungen (now Morąg, Poland) in the Kingdom of Prussia. His parents were teacher Gottfried Herder (1706–1763) and his second wife Anna Elizabeth Herder, née Peltz (1717–1772). He grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, as a youth of 17, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, about 60 miles (100 km) north of Mohrungen, where he became a student of Immanuel Kant. At the same time, Herder became an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, a Königsberg philosopher who disputed the claims of pure secular reason.
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 tantalizingly incomplete ideas.
In 1764, now a Lutheran pastor, Herder went to Riga to teach at a Lutheran school. It was during this period that he produced his first major works, which were literary criticism. In 1769 Herder traveled by ship to the French port of Nantes and continued on to Paris. After the trip he produced an account of his travels and experienced a shift in his own self-conception as an author. In September 1770, Herder went to Strasbourg, where he met the young Goethe, an event that 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 William, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe.
By the mid-1770s, Goethe, now a well-known author, 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.
On 2 May 1773 Herder married Maria Karoline Flachsland (1750–1809) in Darmstadt. They had seven children: Wilhelm Gottfried (1774–1806), born in Bückeburg; Sigismund August (1776–1838), also born in Bückeburg; Wilhelm Ludwig Ernst (1778–1842); Karl Emil Adelbert (1779–1857), born in Weimar; Luise Thedore Emilie (1781–1860) also born in Weimar; Emil Ernst Gottfried (1783–1855); and Rinaldo Gottfried (b. 1790). All survived their childhood.
Philosophy
Herder was influenced by his academic advisor Immanuel Kant, as well as seventeenth-century philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz. In turn, he influenced Hegel, Nietzsche, Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Boas, and Walter Rauschenbusch among others.
Language and cultural theory
Herder was one of the first to argue that language contributes to shaping the frameworks and the patterns with which each linguistic community thinks and feels.
In 1772, Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language. In it he defines language as "the natural organ of the understanding."
Even earlier, in 1768's Fragments on Recent German Literature, Herder explained that thought is fundamentally dependent on and delineated by language.
If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts, and learn to think through words, then language sets limits and outline for the whole of human cognition.
Herder has often been misinterpreted, however. Neither Herder nor the philosopher of language Wilhelm von Humboldt argue that language (written or oral) is strictly deterministic of thought. Nor did Herder equate or identify thought with language. Such a stronger version of the relation, as occasionally expressed by Hamann and the earlier Schleiermacher, is more subject to counterexamples. One may think without using language to express it, such as when holding an opinion without expressing it. And it is surely possible to speak or write something without thought, such as by expressing gibberish.
For Herder, the emphasis is on the interdependence between thought and language,
We think in language, whether we are explaining what is present or seeking what is not yet present. In the first case we transform perceptible sounds into intelligible words and intelligible words into clear concepts. Hence a matter can be dissected for as long as there are words for its component concepts, and an idea can be explained for as long as new connections of words set it in a clearer light. In the second case, which concerns the discovery of new truths, the discovery is often as much an unexpected consequence of various word connections as can be the product of various combinations of signs in algebra. And so what remarkable impressions can language not bury even into the deepest ground of the abstract sciences.
Systematic approach to history
After he became General Superintendent in 1776, Herder's philosophy shifted again towards classicism, and he began developing his systematic approach to history and human development. This period culminated in his most ambitious work, the four-volume Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), published between 1784 and 1791.
The Ideas represented Herder's mature synthesis of his earlier insights about language, culture, and human development into a unified philosophy of history. In this comprehensive treatise, he attempted to trace the development of human culture from its origins through various stages of civilization, combining natural philosophy with cultural theory. The work largely originated the modern school of historical thought and established many foundational concepts in anthropology and cultural studies. Herder's philosophy was deeply subjective, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, and arguing 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".
In what scholars consider the most philosophically significant section of the work, the 15th book, Herder articulated his belief that human progress follows natural laws toward greater reason and justice. He argued that "by the very nature of law, reason and justice must inevitably gain influence among mankind, advancing a more enduring humanity." This optimistic view of historical development placed Herder firmly within the Enlightenment tradition while anticipating later German idealist philosophy.
German nationalism and cultural identity
Germans did not have a nation-state until the nineteenth century. Those who spoke Germanic languages lived in politically unconnected lands and groups. Herder was among the first German intellectuals to craft a foundation for German cultural unification and German national consciousness based mostly on German language and literature. While rationality was the prime value of Enlightenment philosophers, Herder's appeal to sentiment places him within German Romanticism. He 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 favored Dürer and everything Gothic. As with the sphere of art, he also 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.
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?"
Political philosophy and the Enlightenment
Herder further developed these ideas by lamenting that Martin Luther did not establish a national church, questioning whether Germany had paid too high a price for adopting Christianity at the expense of its true nationality. His patriotism at times bordered on national pantheism, as he advocated for German territorial unity, stating: "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions." He also warned against the loss of genuine folk traditions:
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.
In his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Herder observed: "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 opposed absolutism and Prussian nationalism, embodied the spirit of the German Volk. As a historical theorist, he distanced himself from the rationalist ideas of the eighteenth century, instead seeking a balance between sentiment and reasoning. He believed that knowledge is inherent in the soul, beginning with sensuous and intuitive perception that gradually develops into self-conscious rationality. To Herder, this evolution represented the harmonization of primitive and derivative truth, experience and intelligence, feeling and reasoning.
Herder is the first in a long line of Germans preoccupied with this harmony. This search is itself the key to the understanding of many German theories of the time; however Herder understood and feared the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. 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. 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".
Individual and cultural expression
Herder additionally advanced select notions of myriad "authentic" conceptions of Völk and the unity of the individual and natural law, which became fodder for his self-proclaimed twentieth-century disciples. Herderian ideas continue to influence thinkers, linguists and anthropologists, and they have often been considered central to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and Franz Boas' coalescence of comparative linguistics and historical particularism with a neo-Kantian/Herderian four-field approach to the study of all cultures, as well as, more recently, anthropological studies by Dell Hymes.
To promote his concept of the Volk, he published letters and collected folk songs. These latter were published in 1773 as Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs (Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern). The poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano later used Stimmen der Völker as samples for The Boy's Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn).
Herder also fostered the ideal of a person's individuality. Although he had from an early period championed the individuality of cultures – for example, in his This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774), he also championed the individuality of persons within a culture; for example, in his On Thomas Abbt's Writings (1768) and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778).
In On Thomas Abbt's Writings, Herder stated that "a human soul is an
individual in the realm of minds: it senses in accordance with an individual formation, and thinks in accordance with the strength of its mental organs. ... My long allegory has succeeded if it achieves the representation of the mind of a human being as an individual phenomenon, as a rarity which deserves to occupy our eyes."
Evolution
Herder has been described as a proto-evolutionary thinker by some science historians, although this has been disputed by others. Concerning the history of life on earth, Herder proposed naturalistic and metaphysical (religious) ideas that are difficult to distinguish and interpret. He was known for proposing a great chain of being.
In his book From the Greeks to Darwin, Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote that "in a general way he upholds the doctrine of the transformation of the lower and higher forms of life, of a continuous transformation from lower to higher types, and of the law of Perfectibility." However, biographer Wulf Köpke disagreed, noting that "biological evolution from animals to the human species was outside of his thinking, which was still influenced by the idea of divine creation."