Johann Gottfried von Herder
born August 25, 1744, Mohrungen, East
Prussia [now Morag, Poland]
died December 18, 1803, Weimar,
Saxe-Weimar [Germany]
German critic, theologian, and
philosopher, who was the leading figure
of the Sturm und Drang literary movement
and an innovator in the philosophy of
history and culture. His influence,
augmented by his contacts with the young
J.W. von Goethe, made him a harbinger of
the Romantic movement. He was ennobled
(with the addition of von) in 1802.
Early life and travels
Herder was the son of poor parents and
attended local schools. Beginning in the
summer of 1762 he studied theology,
philosophy, and literature at
Königsberg, coming into close contact
with Immanuel Kant, the founder of
critical philosophy, as well as with
Johann Georg Hamann, one of the
Enlightenment’s prominent critics.
In November 1764 Herder went to teach
and preach in Riga (then part of the
Russian Empire). There he published his
first works, which included two
collections of fragments, entitled Über
die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente
(1767; “On Recent German Literature:
Fragments”) and Kritische Wälder, oder
Betrachtungen die Wissenschaft und Kunst
des Schönen betreffend (1769 and 1846;
“Critical Forests, or Reflections on the
Science and Art of the Beautiful”).
In the summer of 1769 he set out on
an ocean voyage from Riga to Nantes,
which brought him a deeper understanding
of his destiny. His Journal meiner Reise
im Jahr 1769 (1769; “Journal of My
Voyage in the Year 1769”), completed in
Paris in December, bears witness to the
change that it effected in him. Herder
saw himself as a groundless being who
had left the safe shore and was
journeying into an unknown future. It
became his vocation to unveil that
future through insights gained from the
past, so that its character might be
felt by his contemporaries. Herder’s
prophetic criticisms of his own time
anticipated the possibilities of
intellectual developments generations
ahead, including the ideas of Goethe,
the brothers August Wilhelm and
Friedrich von Schlegel, and Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm in poetical and aesthetic
theory; Wilhelm von Humboldt in the
philosophy of language; G.W.F. Hegel in
the philosophy of history; Wilhelm
Dilthey and his followers in
epistemology; Arnold Gehlen in
anthropology; and the Slav nationalists
in political thought.
During a visit to Strasbourg, where
he arrived in September 1770 as the
companion of Prince Peter Frederick
William of Holstein, Herder experienced
a momentous meeting with the young
Goethe, who was stirred to recognize his
own artistic faculties through Herder’s
observations on Homer, Pindar, William
Shakespeare, and on literature and folk
songs.
Career at Bückeburg
In April 1771 Herder went to Bückeburg
as court preacher. The works that he
produced there were fundamental to the
Sturm und Drang, a literary movement
with Promethean and irrationalist
motifs, without which German Classical
and Romantic literature could not have
arisen. In the Romanticism Herder
espoused, the medium of thought is
feeling (Gefühl), which he compared to
the sense of touch. Whereas sight
apprehends things at a distance, feeling
enjoys an immediate experience of
reality, which it apprehends as a power
reacting against an individual’s own
vital energy. At the same time, however,
the individual experiences his own body,
in which a vital power asserts itself
against the world. At the moment when a
person recognizes the limits imposed by
the environment without becoming
dependent on it, a balance of forces is
achieved between the two in which the
individual body is converted into the
aesthetic gestalt (or integral
structure) and the identification of the
individual with reality is consummated.
Among his works of this period are
Plastik (1778), which outlines his
metaphysics, and Abhandlung über den
Ursprung der Sprache (1772; “Essay on
the Origin of Language”), which finds
the origin of language in human nature.
For Herder, knowledge is possible only
through the medium of language. Although
the individual and the world are united
in feeling, they separate themselves in
consciousness in order to link
themselves anew in the “intentional,” or
object-directed, act in which the
objective meaning of a word is rooted.
Thus, what earlier had been apprehended
dimly but not specifically recognized in
feeling is expressly designated. Feeling
and reflection thus interpenetrate each
other; and the word, being at once sound
and significance, is the cause of this
union. Every signification of something
therefore includes an emotional attitude
toward it that reflects the
particularity and the outlook of its
users. Thus, the structure of language
is a true image of human nature.
Whereas the psychologists of the time
were carefully distinguishing various
human faculties (conation, feeling,
knowledge), Herder stressed the unity
and indivisible wholeness of human
nature. Consciousness and Besonnenheit
(“reflective discernment”) are not
simply “higher” faculties added to an
animal foundation; instead, they
designate the structure of the
individual as a whole with qualitatively
unique human desires and human
sensitivities. Since human instincts and
sensitivities are subject to reflection,
or “broken off” (gebrochen), however,
the human individual is “the first
liberated member of creation.”
Herder’s philosophy of history also
began to take form at this time,
springing from his attempt to use the
past in order to assess the present
situation and future probabilities. He
had already outlined in the Fragmente
the scheme of a typical historical
development on the analogy of the ages
of a man’s life. By this means he tried
to determine the situation of German
poetry that was then current. The essay
on Shakespeare and Auch eine Philosophie
der Geschichte zur Bildung der
Menschheit (1774; “Another Philosophy of
History Concerning the Development of
Mankind”), opposing Rationalism in
historiography, were the first writings
to show a deeper understanding of
historical existence as the product of
the contradiction between individuation
and the whole of history; this
contradiction itself forms the logical
basis of historical development. If two
forces are in conflict, one can be seen
as striving to persevere and to emerge
from the whole as an individual
structure. Yet the whole is not
satisfied with any single form: in
historical catastrophes it frees itself
to shape a new form of things, which is
shattered again in turn when its time is
past. The individual is not only an end
but also a blind, unfree instrument
taken or rejected by God. Even the
philosopher can see the future only by
tracing its conditions from patterns of
past development in order to counteract
it.
Further works prepared during this
period were his Älteste Urkunde des
Menschengeschlechts (1774–76; “Oldest
Records of the Human Race”) on Hebrew
antiquities and his An Prediger:
Fünfzehn Provinzialblätter (1744; “To
Preachers: Fifteen Provincial Papers”).
Two especially important works were his
essay on Shakespeare and “Auszug aus
einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die
Lieder alter Völker” (1773; “Extract
from a Correspondence About Ossian and
the Songs of Ancient Peoples”),
published in a manifesto to which Goethe
and Justus Möser, a forerunner of Sturm
und Drang, also contributed. As Herder
showed in his exposition of Shakespeare
and Homer, in the genuine poetic
utterance, hitherto-hidden aspects of
man’s life are revealed by virtue of the
creative function of language. “A poet
is the creator of the nation around
him,” he wrote, “he gives them a world
to see and has their souls in his hand
to lead them to that world.” Poetic
ability is no special preserve of the
educated; as the true “mother tongue of
mankind” (Hamann), it appears in its
greatest purity and power in the
uncivilized periods of every nation. For
Herder, this ability was proved by the
Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer:
hence Herder’s concern to retrieve
ancient German folk songs and his
attention to Norse poetry and mythology,
to the work of the minnesinger, and to
the language of Martin Luther.
First years at Weimar
Thanks to Goethe’s influence, Herder was
appointed general superintendent and
consistory councillor at Weimar in 1776.
There, anticipating Goethe, he developed
the foundations of a general morphology,
which enabled him to understand how a
Shakespearean play, for instance, or the
Gospel According to John, in the
historical context of each, was bound to
assume the individual form that it did
instead of another. Herder’s method
achieves its results by recognizing
contradictions and by resorting to a
higher unity—a method by which Herder
earns a place in the history of
dialectical logic.
It was at this time also that Herder
completed his transition to Classicism.
Among the works of this period are Vom
Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen
Seele (1778; “Of the Knowing and Sensing
of the Human Soul”), Briefe, das Studium
der Theologie betreffend (1780–81;
“Letters Concerning the Study of
Theology”), Vom Geist der ebräischen
Poesie (1782–83; The Spirit of Hebrew
Poetry), and his collection of
Volkslieder (1778–79; “Folk songs”).
Herder regarded poetry as a mode of
coming to terms with reality. Whereas
most of his contemporaries saw it either
as a product of learning or as a means
of amusement, he considered poetry to
spring from the natural and historical
environment experienced by feeling,
rather as an involuntary reaction to the
stimulus of events than as a deliberate
act. Such feeling is the organ of a
dynamic relationship between man and the
world, which is expressed far more
readily in the sounds, stresses, and
rhythms of speech than in an image. This
“voice of feeling” achieves the status
of art only when it is detached from the
man and from the historical environment
that created it and becomes rounded off
to constitute a world by itself.
Summit and later years of his career
Herder’s work at Weimar reached its peak
in Zerstreute Blätter (1785–97;
“Sporadic Papers”) and in the unfinished
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a
Philosophy of the History of Man). In
the latter work, the result of his
intercourse with Goethe, Herder
attempted to demonstrate that nature and
history obey a uniform system of laws.
Already in the development from earth to
mankind, a striving of forces was at
work, aiming to balance one another by
generating determinate forms or
individual existences. This same
phenomenon could be observed as a law of
“humanity” in man’s communal life, in
which contending forces are reconciled.
At any passing moment the measure is
individual, but the principle of the
development toward form is general. Too
often, however, man in his freedom works
against nature, for his sense of the
measure of things and his reason are
immature. Despite these shortcomings,
one must trust that growing insight and
goodwill will lead men to act according
to the truth that they recognize and,
through the conflict of nations, will
reach the equilibrium of a structure
embracing all mankind.
The basic premises underlying the
Ideen are resumed in the dialogues Gott:
einige Gespräche (1787; 2nd ed., Einige
Gespräche über Spinozas System, 1800;
“Several Discourses on Spinoza’s
System”), in which Herder combines the
views of the rationalists Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, Benedict de Spinoza,
and Anthony, Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of
Shaftesbury.
Financial difficulties, differences
of opinion over the French Revolution,
and, above all, his self-assertive
nature, which could not bear the
proximity of a greater man, led to an
estrangement of Herder from Goethe. On
Herder’s side this resulted in a bitter
enmity toward the whole Classical
movement in German poetry and
philosophy. His Briefe zu Beförderung
der Humanität (1793–97; “Letters for the
Advancement of Humanity”) and his
Adrastea (1801–03), containing treatises
on history, philosophy, and aesthetics,
emphasized the didactic purpose of all
poetry, thus contradicting that very
theory of the autonomy of the work of
art that he himself had helped to
establish. With the Christliche
Schriften (1794–98; “Christian
Writings”), the Metakritik zur Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (1799; “Metacritique
of the Critique of Pure Reason”), and
the Kalligone (1800), a metacritique of
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Herder
began his attack on Kant, whose
philosophy he saw as a threat to his own
historical view of the world. In this
attack he had the support of Christoph
Martin Wieland, an influential poet and
novelist, and of Jean Paul.
Herder died in 1803. The first
collected edition of Herder’s works was
produced by his widow, 45 vol.
(1805–20). There is also a critical
edition by B. Suphan, 33 vol.
(1877–1913; reprinted 1967–68).
Hans Dietrich Irmscher
