Johann Gottfried von Herder ( ; ; 25 August 174418 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."Jacob, Margaret C. The Secular Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019, 192
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",Columbia studies in the social sciences, Issue 341, 1966, p. 74. 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.
Towards the end of his career, Herder endorsed the French Revolution, thereby earning the enmity of many of his colleagues. At the same time, he and Goethe experienced a personal split. His unpopular attacks on Kantian philosophy were another reason for his isolation in later years.Copleston, Frederick Charles. The Enlightenment: Voltaire to Kant. 2003. p. 146.
In 1802 Herder was ennobled by the Elector-Prince of Bavaria, which added the prefix "von" to his last name. He died in Weimar in 1803 at age 59.
Philosophy Herder was influenced by his academic advisor Immanuel Kant, as well as seventeenth-century philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz.Jacob, Margaret C. The Secular Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019, 193 In turn, he influenced Hegel, Nietzsche, Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt,Forster 2010, p. 9.Jürgen Georg Backhaus (ed.), The University According to Humboldt: History, Policy, and Future Possibilities, Springer, 2015, p. 58. 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."Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. M. N. Forster. Treatise on the Origin of Language Cambridge: 2002, p. 97
Even earlier, in 1768's Fragments on Recent German Literature, Herder explained that thought is fundamentally dependent on and delineated by language.
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,
Herder clearly saw language as positive expression of the human faculties, where new words and new combinations of words could give rise to new ideas. In staking out the relationship between thought and language, Herder launched a new and important tradition in the philosophy of language, presaging what would later become known as Linguistic relativity.
Herder did not adhere to the prevailing Enlightenment view that tied meanings with referent objects or ideas, but rather like Wittgenstein he tied meanings to word-usages in practice. In his conjectural narrative of human origins, Herder characterized language as the appropriation of the outer world experienced by the senses within the human mind by means of distinguishing marks (merkmale). In his arguments, Herder reformulated an example from works by Moses Mendelssohn and Thomas Abbt. He argued that, although linguistic morphemes and logographs did not determine thought, the first humans perceived sheep and their bleating, or subjects and corresponding Merkmale, as one and the same. Humans abstract such characteristic marks from sensations to form words. Herder moved beyond his narrative of human origins to contend that if active reflection (besonnenheit) and language persisted in human consciousness, then human impulses to signify were immanent in the pasts, presents, and futures of humanity. Avi Lifschitz subsequently reframed Herder's "the organ of thought" quotation: "Herder's equation of word and idea, of language and cognition, prompted a further attack on any attribution of the first words to the imitation of natural sounds, to the physiology of the vocal organs, or to social convention… [Herder argued] for the linguistic character of our cognition but also for the cognitive nature of human language. One could not think without language, as various Enlightenment thinkers argued, but at the same time one could not properly speak without perceiving the world in a uniquely human way… man would not be himself without language and active reflection, while language deserved its name only as a cognitive aspect of the entire human being." In response to criticism of these contentions, Herder resisted descriptions of his findings as "conjectural" pasts, casting his arguments for a dearth of cognition in humans and "the problem of the origin of language as a synchronic issue rather than a diachronic one."
And in this sense, when Humboldt argues that all thinking is thinking in language, he is perpetuating the Herderian tradition. 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. Arguably, the greatest inheritor of Herder's linguistic philosophy was Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose great contribution lay in developing Herder's idea that language is "the organ of thought" into his own belief that languages were specific worldviews (Weltansichten), as Jürgen Trabant argues in the Wilhelm von Humboldt lectures on the Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project website.
In 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. Herder – most pronouncedly after Georg Forster's 1791 translation of the Sanskrit play Shakuntala – was influenced by the religious imagery of Hinduism and Indian literature, which he saw in a positive light, writing several essays on the topic and the preface to the 1803 edition of Shakuntala.Willson, A. Leslie. "Herder and India: The Genesis of a Mythical Image." PMLA 70, no. 5 (1955): 1049–058. Accessed 3 October 2020. .
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."Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, The seminal 15th book. Translated by Bastian Terhorst. Berlin: Epubli, 2025. . p. 39. This optimistic view of historical development placed Herder firmly within the Enlightenment tradition while anticipating later German idealist philosophy.