Johann Gottfried Herder

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, pastor and literary critic, born in Mohrungen in the Kingdom of Prussia (today Morąg, Poland). He is associated with the Enlightenment, the Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism, and he is one of the thinkers who prepared the ground for German Romanticism. He is credited with founding or advancing hermeneutics, linguistics, anthropology and a secular philosophy of history.

The son of a poor schoolteacher with Pietist leanings, he educated himself largely from his father's Bible and songbook. At seventeen he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he studied under Immanuel Kant and became an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, who challenged the claims of pure secular reason. In 1764 he became a Lutheran pastor and taught in Riga. In 1769 he sailed toward Nantes and went on to Paris, and the travel notes he wrote changed how he saw himself as an author. In September 1770, in Strasbourg, he met the young Goethe, a meeting often taken as the start of Sturm und Drang. In 1771 he became head pastor and court preacher at Bückeburg, and in 1776 Goethe helped secure him a post in Weimar as General Superintendent. Late in life he welcomed the French Revolution, which cost him the goodwill of many colleagues, and he and Goethe drifted apart. He died in Weimar in 1803.

Against the Enlightenment faith in abstract reason, Herder saw human beings as whole organisms that could not be split into separate faculties. For him, the life of peoples, their language and their traditions shaped the consciousness of individuals, and poetry sprang from the Volksgeist, the spirit of a nation. This led him to prize folk songs, ballads and ancient poetry, and to question Greek tragedy as a universal model: each culture had to be understood from within. Yet he still believed in a deep unity of humankind expressed through its diversity. In his Treatise on the Origin of Language he argued that speech is a natural achievement of the human species, born of its reason and its need to communicate, rather than a divine gift or a mere convention, and that thought and language are closely bound together. His most ambitious work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, appeared in four volumes between 1784 and 1791. It sought to show that nature and human history follow the same laws and that opposing human forces would eventually be reconciled. It was left unfinished.

Herder broke with Goethe and with Weimar Classicism in his late Letters on the Progress of Humanity (1793–1797), and his later attacks on Kant were poorly received. His influence waned during his lifetime, but his ideas reached Hegel, Humboldt, Coleridge, John Stuart Mill and Nietzsche, and his interest in popular poetry inspired the Grimm brothers' collection of German folk tales. His contribution to literary studies and German historical thought remains very important.