HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON (1744–1803)

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.

HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON (1744–1803)

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