First years at Weimar of Johann Gottfried von Herder

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).