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Philosophical Writings
Herder is a figure of considerable importance in the history of philosophy and the history of ideas. His far-reaching influence encompasses philosophy--Hegel, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, literature--Goethe, Schiller and linguistics--von Humboldt. This volume presents a comprehensive selection of his writings in a new translation, with an introduction that sets them in their philosophical and historical context.
436 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 1998
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About the author
Johann Gottfried Herder
1,605 books80 followersTheory of culture and advocacy of intuition over rationality of German philosopher and writer Johann Gottfried von Herder greatly influenced Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and formed the basis of German romanticism.
The periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar classicism associate this theologian, poet, and literary critic.
In 1772, Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, oh you German." Herder then established the foundations of comparative philology within the new currents of political outlook.
The periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar classicism associate this theologian, poet, and literary critic.
In 1772, Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, oh you German." Herder then established the foundations of comparative philology within the new currents of political outlook.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 10, 2020
Herder came as a big surprise to me. His substantial contributions to philosophy tend to be disregarded or minimized - I was aware of him, but he was most often referenced in broad strokes as a defender of feeling and faith against the Kantian systematic exposition of reason, and as one of the primary figures responsible for the Romantic belief that the matrix of creativity is the people or das Volk. (Before Arnim and Brentano, and before the Brothers Grimm, Herder collected and published a collection of folk songs in one influential volume.)
These statements are more or less true, but they hardly scratch the surface of Herder's significance or influence. One of the biggest surprises for me is that Herder was an enormous influence on Nietzsche - I've been reading Nietzsche since I was 16, and I don't believe I have ever seen this relationship noted by any commentator, but it is obvious and pervasive. In Fragments on Recent German Literature, for example, Herder traces the evolution of the Greek term kaloi k’agathoi, which roughly means "the beautiful and the good", and demonstrates that over the centuries, the reference changed as Greek values changed. In warrior times, the "good" pertained to the warrior virtues, while in the latter days of Greek high civilization, it referred to more subtle virtues. This argument clearly anticipates Nietzsche's analysis of good/bad versus good/evil in his On the Genealogy of Morals in key respects.
Or consider this passage from This Too a Philosophy of History; it would be perfectly at home in Nietzsche's The Gay Science:
'Generally, the philosopher is most an animal when he would wish to be most reliably a God – thus also in the confident calculation of the perfection of the world. Of course, if only it were true that everything proceeded prettily in a straight line and that every succeeding human being and every succeeding race got perfected according to his ideal in a beautiful progression for which he alone knew to give the exponent of virtue and happiness! Then in that case it always came to him last of all – he the last, highest member with which everything concludes. “Behold, the world has risen to such enlightenment, virtue, happiness! I, high on the swing-bar!, the golden pointer of the world-scales – behold me!”'
Like Nietzsche, Herder repudiated the attempt to systematically develop philosophical arguments, and for similar reasons. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche warned that "The will to a system lacks integrity." Similarly, Herder believed that to artificially exclude passion, care, concern, and feeling from philosophical discourse would not truly remove their influences, but would merely leave their impact unacknowledged and unexamined. Further, he regarded the attempt to isolate philosophical concerns as misguided, as one cannot simply separate out the role of language, art, history, literature, music, and so on, from philosophy, without doing violence to one's object of inquiry. In actual history, these things all work themselves out in constant dialog, and deeply inform one another.
So, like Nietzsche, Herder wrote in a highly rhetorical and fragmentary style, with his arguments on any given topic distributed widely across multiple composite works, and with each individual work being difficult to pigeonhole into any specific genre or topic. This was deliberate, and reflected his core philosophical commitments.
As with Nietzsche, Herder is very easy to caricature and to misunderstand. Herder is often interested both sides of any argument, and indeed, he often finds that what is generally considered good is actually bad, and vice versa. It is easy to take his pronouncements out of context and to give a highly misleading sense of his overall assessment of, say, the role of reason in philosophy, or of the notion of progress in history.
To be sure, there are core differences between Nietzsche and Herder, the primary one being that Herder had a much more conventional religious sensibility. Where Nietzsche saw contingency and the contest of unbridled natural forces at play, Herder saw providence, and intuited an overall redemptive pattern that ultimately reconciles apparently-antithetical forces. Both philosophers arrived at a stance of universal affirmation and amor fati, but for Herder, it was more of a question of affirming the concord which may be felt but not perceived or understood, while for Nietzsche, affirmation of things as they are is to be done in spite of, or even because of the lack of any such possibility of ultimate redemption. For Nietzsche, the redemption comes from the affirmation itself, and depends on nothing. In this, Nietzsche was close to Goethe's Prometheus, and far distant from any conventional theodicy.
The principle philosophical contribution I see in Herder is his surprisingly-modern insistence that reason, history, language, and ideas form an indissoluble matrix that must be analyzed in terms of one another. There is no overarching reference point available to human beings in Herder's analysis, no "view from nowhere," and as such, we must recognize that ideas are always mediated through language, and that language is conditioned by the actual situation in which language users live and operate.
In terms that strongly influenced Hegel, Herder argued that philosophy itself is a historical process which can only shed particular light on the world from the reference point available to any individual philosopher. We can only know what we can know, and he castigates philosophers who evidence confidence in the sufficiency of their ideas and beliefs, as though they are somehow certain that they are adequate to account for everything. How can we be sure of this, Herder asks, when we cannot even know the historical consequences that may come of our current beliefs? Yet, just as the medieval astronomer was perfectly convinced that no advance in fundamental concepts was necessary to account for light, or the stars, or the age of the universe, so, too, do many of our contemporaries feel equal certainty that in principle our current set of concepts is adequate to account for anything we might encounter.
Herder's core ideas are influential and worthwhile, even if his individual arguments are at times way off base, or at times difficult to follow. His rhetorical style is flamboyant, and as a non-native speaker I find Herder excruciating to read in German. Unfortunately, his work is not well represented in English translation, so I enthusiastically welcome Michael N. Forster's excellent, painstaking work. His felicity and precision deserve top marks, and his interpretation and supporting commentary is indispensable. For the English speaker, this is an excellent place to begin when taking a serious look at Herder.
These statements are more or less true, but they hardly scratch the surface of Herder's significance or influence. One of the biggest surprises for me is that Herder was an enormous influence on Nietzsche - I've been reading Nietzsche since I was 16, and I don't believe I have ever seen this relationship noted by any commentator, but it is obvious and pervasive. In Fragments on Recent German Literature, for example, Herder traces the evolution of the Greek term kaloi k’agathoi, which roughly means "the beautiful and the good", and demonstrates that over the centuries, the reference changed as Greek values changed. In warrior times, the "good" pertained to the warrior virtues, while in the latter days of Greek high civilization, it referred to more subtle virtues. This argument clearly anticipates Nietzsche's analysis of good/bad versus good/evil in his On the Genealogy of Morals in key respects.
Or consider this passage from This Too a Philosophy of History; it would be perfectly at home in Nietzsche's The Gay Science:
'Generally, the philosopher is most an animal when he would wish to be most reliably a God – thus also in the confident calculation of the perfection of the world. Of course, if only it were true that everything proceeded prettily in a straight line and that every succeeding human being and every succeeding race got perfected according to his ideal in a beautiful progression for which he alone knew to give the exponent of virtue and happiness! Then in that case it always came to him last of all – he the last, highest member with which everything concludes. “Behold, the world has risen to such enlightenment, virtue, happiness! I, high on the swing-bar!, the golden pointer of the world-scales – behold me!”'
Like Nietzsche, Herder repudiated the attempt to systematically develop philosophical arguments, and for similar reasons. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche warned that "The will to a system lacks integrity." Similarly, Herder believed that to artificially exclude passion, care, concern, and feeling from philosophical discourse would not truly remove their influences, but would merely leave their impact unacknowledged and unexamined. Further, he regarded the attempt to isolate philosophical concerns as misguided, as one cannot simply separate out the role of language, art, history, literature, music, and so on, from philosophy, without doing violence to one's object of inquiry. In actual history, these things all work themselves out in constant dialog, and deeply inform one another.
So, like Nietzsche, Herder wrote in a highly rhetorical and fragmentary style, with his arguments on any given topic distributed widely across multiple composite works, and with each individual work being difficult to pigeonhole into any specific genre or topic. This was deliberate, and reflected his core philosophical commitments.
As with Nietzsche, Herder is very easy to caricature and to misunderstand. Herder is often interested both sides of any argument, and indeed, he often finds that what is generally considered good is actually bad, and vice versa. It is easy to take his pronouncements out of context and to give a highly misleading sense of his overall assessment of, say, the role of reason in philosophy, or of the notion of progress in history.
To be sure, there are core differences between Nietzsche and Herder, the primary one being that Herder had a much more conventional religious sensibility. Where Nietzsche saw contingency and the contest of unbridled natural forces at play, Herder saw providence, and intuited an overall redemptive pattern that ultimately reconciles apparently-antithetical forces. Both philosophers arrived at a stance of universal affirmation and amor fati, but for Herder, it was more of a question of affirming the concord which may be felt but not perceived or understood, while for Nietzsche, affirmation of things as they are is to be done in spite of, or even because of the lack of any such possibility of ultimate redemption. For Nietzsche, the redemption comes from the affirmation itself, and depends on nothing. In this, Nietzsche was close to Goethe's Prometheus, and far distant from any conventional theodicy.
The principle philosophical contribution I see in Herder is his surprisingly-modern insistence that reason, history, language, and ideas form an indissoluble matrix that must be analyzed in terms of one another. There is no overarching reference point available to human beings in Herder's analysis, no "view from nowhere," and as such, we must recognize that ideas are always mediated through language, and that language is conditioned by the actual situation in which language users live and operate.
In terms that strongly influenced Hegel, Herder argued that philosophy itself is a historical process which can only shed particular light on the world from the reference point available to any individual philosopher. We can only know what we can know, and he castigates philosophers who evidence confidence in the sufficiency of their ideas and beliefs, as though they are somehow certain that they are adequate to account for everything. How can we be sure of this, Herder asks, when we cannot even know the historical consequences that may come of our current beliefs? Yet, just as the medieval astronomer was perfectly convinced that no advance in fundamental concepts was necessary to account for light, or the stars, or the age of the universe, so, too, do many of our contemporaries feel equal certainty that in principle our current set of concepts is adequate to account for anything we might encounter.
Herder's core ideas are influential and worthwhile, even if his individual arguments are at times way off base, or at times difficult to follow. His rhetorical style is flamboyant, and as a non-native speaker I find Herder excruciating to read in German. Unfortunately, his work is not well represented in English translation, so I enthusiastically welcome Michael N. Forster's excellent, painstaking work. His felicity and precision deserve top marks, and his interpretation and supporting commentary is indispensable. For the English speaker, this is an excellent place to begin when taking a serious look at Herder.
December 9, 2008
Johann Gottfried Herder is an excellent philosopher whose works have been largely neglected in the English-speaking world. This volume includes very good translations of several of Herder's most important works - notably the best available complete translation of "This Too a Philosophy of History" which has been credited with being the first and most influential work of 'historicism'. Also noteworthy is the tranlation of the "Treatise on the Origin of Language" and the "On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Main Forces of the Human Soul".
Herder played a significant role in the development of vitalism in the scientific thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, historicism as it was taken up by both Hegel and the neo-Kantians, and an important and compelling variety of nationalism. Herder's works on aesthetics and the nature of language deserve attention as well. There is much in Herder's thought that calls for reevaluation, as he often holds versions of theses that are superior to those that have been developed by those who he influenced.
Herder played a significant role in the development of vitalism in the scientific thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, historicism as it was taken up by both Hegel and the neo-Kantians, and an important and compelling variety of nationalism. Herder's works on aesthetics and the nature of language deserve attention as well. There is much in Herder's thought that calls for reevaluation, as he often holds versions of theses that are superior to those that have been developed by those who he influenced.
December 24, 2022
Philosophical Writings is a collection of works by Johann Gottfried Herder, an 18th-century philosopher and writer who is considered one of the key figures of the German Enlightenment. The collection includes a wide range of writings, including essays, letters, and other texts, on a variety of topics in philosophy, including history, language, culture, and human nature. In these writings, Herder discusses issues such as the nature of historical change, the role of language in shaping human thought and culture, and the relationship between the individual and society. He also critiques the ideas of other philosophers and intellectuals, including Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and suggests that their ideas are flawed and have dangerous implications for society. Philosophical Writings is considered an important resource for understanding the ideas and influence of Herder and is widely regarded as a classic work of philosophical thought.
GPT
GPT
August 19, 2008
I keep a file called "concept tree farm" inspired by Herder's Critical Groves, a title I initially misunderstood as Critical Grooves, apparently eager to take it as a proto-Nietzschean affirmation of one's critical impulses. Since Herder didn't in fact write that book I'd now like to. They translate it as Critical Forestlet, which really doesn't cut it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews