Johann Gottfried Herder

Cet article se propose de reprendre, à travers le cas de Herder, la question de la « philosophie protestante ». On mesure aujourd'hui tout ce que la pratique philosophique de Herder dut à son appartenance institutionnelle à l'Eglise luthérienne. C'est ce projet d'une philosophie de pasteur qu'on voudrait présenter ici. On se penche en premier lieu sur les difficultés posées par la « théologie » de Herder, en prenant pour fil conducteur son traitement de la question de la dogmatique chrétienne. (...) En second lieu, on tente de reconstituer le Luther de Herder, ce qui pose particulièrement la question de l'évolution de ce dernier. Il apparaît alors un étonnant contraste entre d'une part le projet théologique de Herder, dont la cohérence peut au moins être mise en question, et d'autre part sa vision de Luther, sans doute plus constante qu'on ne l'a dit jusqu'à présent. On tente de résoudre ce paradoxe par l'examen des prises de position apparemment contradictoires de Herder sur la question luthérienne du serf-arbitre, en montrant que son interprétation ne se comprend qu'à l'intérieur d'une histoire plus vaste des lectures du De servo arbitrio par les philosophes. Par là, on accède aux diverses stratégies qui président à la lecture de Luther par les philosophes de langue allemande, et qui constituent à proprement parler la « philosophie du protestantisme », pour peu qu'on veuille prendre cette expression en un sens non confessionnel. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, die Frage nach der « protestantischen Philosophie » am Beispiel Herder wiederzugewinnen. Neuere Untersuchungen haben deutlich gemacht, wie eng Herders Tätigkeit als Philosoph mit seinem Predigtamt verknüpft ist. Man dürfte also von einem « Predigerphilosophen » sprechen, dessen Projekt hier dargestellt wird. Es wird zunächst eine Darstellung der Probleme versucht, die von der sog. « Theologie » Herders gestellt werden: Als Leitfaden wurde hier die Frage nach Wesen und Nutzen einer christlichen Dogmatik nach Herder gewählt. Alsdann wird Herders Lutherbild behandelt: hier wird insbesondere der Frage nach Herders Entwicklung nachgegangen. Es erweist sich ein merkwürdiger Kontrast zwischen Herders theologischem Projekt einerseits, dessen Kohärenz mindestens als fraglich erscheint, und Herders Lutherdeutung andererseits, die eben einheitlicher ist, als sie bisher gewertet wurde. Dieses Paradox wird durch eine nähere Untersuchung der sich anscheinend widersprechenden Äußerungen Herders über die lutherische Frage nach dem unfreien Willen gelöst. Es wird hier versucht zu beweisen, daß Herders Interpretation von De servo arbitrio nur im Rahmen einer umfassenden Geschichte der Rezeption dieser Lutherschrift verstanden werden kann. Dadurch erhält man einen Einblick in die verschiedenen Strategien, die in der Lutherlektüre der Philosophen auftauchen und die die sog. « Philosophie des Protestantismus » gleichwohl ausmachen, will man diesen Ausdruck in einem nicht-confessionnellen Sinn verstehen. (shrink)

In 1786 Georg Forster published a widely read critique of Immanuel Kant’s theory of race. Since then, the dispute between Forster and Kant on the unity of mankind has been widely discussed in light of both Forster’s essay and Kant’s decision to write a lengthy response to Forster in 1788. In this discussion I widen the frame for considering the two positions by focusing on Kant’s lectures on Physical Geography. In these notes Kant emerges as an ethnographer asking many of (...) the same questions posed by Forster himself, a man who had become famous since his time spent onboard James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific (1772-1775). Placing Kant’s ethnography in closer conversation with Forster reveals the many similarities (and some well-known differences) between the two. By including some of Forster’s other writings from the 1780s in an assessment of their debate, a much fuller picture can be had regarding natural historical investigations into the unity and difference of mankind at the time. (shrink)

This chapter first gives a rough outline of the reasoning behind the division of this collection of essays, one part focused on particular issues and the second on more universal ones. It then works out that reasoning in more detail through an examination of the historical development of the relationship between storytelling, as represented by myth and poetry, and history in the Western tradition from Hesiod through Hegel. The thesis is that Aristotle’s philosophical preference for poetry over history is overturned (...) in modernity, an overturning that culminates in Hegel in such a way that the pre-Aristotelian difficulties of determining the differences between stories and histories return. With that in mind, the introduction then summarizes and links the two parts of the collection and the essays collected. Finally, it defends the range of topics in and the multidisciplinary nature of the collection by thinking through the meaning of juxtaposition in relation to Aristotle’s differentiation of luck and chance, concluding with an attempt to show the connections between the topics covered made possible by their respective positions within the collection. (shrink)

Anglophone attention to issues of race and racism, with particular attention to Kant and other members of the German Enlightenment, has long been hampered by a lack of critical editions in English. While this is no longer significantly true for Kant studies, it continues to be the case for many of the most relevant works by Georg Forster and Christoph Meiners. This is a problem for philosophers working exclusively in English, and it is one that is only exacerbated by the (...) field’s general lack of interest in not just the intellectual history of philosophy and its figures, but in analyses published in languages other than English today. Ahistorical, monolinguistic approaches become especially problematic, however, when it comes to the philosophical analysis of race and racism, given the need to approach such topics from multiple angles at once—historical, political, cultural, economic, and legal—a fact that is no less true for scholarship on the figures of the eighteenth century than it is for the study of the present one. My aim in what follows therefore is to fill in a bit of the bigger picture, the specific context within which a writer like Georg Forster and his cohort were working, in order to better frame the kinds of specialised discussions of Kant’s philosophy of race that we find today. (shrink)

This introductory article outlines how this special issue contributes to existing scholarship that calls for a rethinking and re-evaluation of common assumptions about early modern philosophy. One way of challenging existing narratives is by questioning what role systems or systematicity play during this period. Another way of rethinking early modern philosophy is by considering assumptions about the role of philosophy itself and how philosophy can effect change in those who form philosophical beliefs or engage in philosophical argumentation. A further way (...) of advancing early modern scholarship is by examining the tight links between early modern views on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other hand. Moreover, there are ongoing debates whether and how the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism, which has been questioned for several reasons, should be replaced. It has been proposed to replace it with a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy, but this distinction cannot easily accommodate early modern debates concerning moral, social, and political philosophy. In addition to highlighting several ways how early modern philosophy has and can be rethought, we summarize how the papers in this special issue contribute to these ongoing efforts. (shrink)

The origin of languages was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. This paper reconstructs a distinctively Kantian account according to which the origination, progression, and diversification of languages is at bottom reason’s self-development under certain a priori constraints and external environments. The reconstruction builds on three sets of materials. The first is Herder’s famous prize essay on the origin of languages. The second includes Kant’s explicit remarks about language – especially his notion of “transcendental grammar,” his argument that (...) language cannot be innate, his contrast of “Oriental” symbolic (intuitive) and “Occidental” discursive languages, and his treatment of the latter as a sine qua non of humanity’s cultural and moral progress. The third includes the concepts that we need to make sense of those remarks, such as Kant’s epigenetic theory of biological formation and his account of categories as originally acquired. (shrink)

The fifth chapter of _Experience Embodied_ is devoted to Herder’s theory of cognition and the epistemic merits of the capacity for ‘sympathy’, or ‘empathy’ – what Herder calls _Einfühlung_, and which Waldow renders more accurately as ‘affective immersion’. I situate Waldow’s reading of Herder as a member of the epistemological tradition within the debate on Herder’s relationship to the Enlightenment. Waldow’s reading, I contend, is congruent with the view of Herder as an Enlightenment, rather than anti-Enlightenment, figure. I focus on (...) what Waldow calls ‘the problem of the conceivability of difference’ (Waldow 2020, 185) and how she charts Herder’s proposed method of Einfühlung and the need for ‘affective immersion’ to address this problem. However, I also identify three potential problems, which Waldow does not address, that can arise when _Einfühlung_is taken too far: the first is that it may lead to relativism, and thus to incoherence; the second is reductionism, which can eliminate, rather than draw attention to, difference – thereby achieving the opposite goal; while the third is that relying solely on _Einfühlung_as a method can lead us into error, as it is speculative and lacks an external truth criterion. (shrink)

Issue number 4 of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" is devoted to the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis and 250th anniversary of the birth of the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. This fourth issue of the journal contains nearly 600 pages of new research articles, translations, review-essays, and book reviews. The main section on Hemsterhuis among the German Romantics was guest edited by Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London).

This article focuses on debates on philosophical knowledge, mathematics, and the empirical sciences by analyzing the positions on cosmological and astronomical knowledge, around 1800, of three German authors: Herder, Schelling, and Hegel. I show the mutual interdependence of Schelling’s and Hegel’s Naturphilosophie and Herder’s Ideen, and I then demonstrate that the latter’s position during the last years of his life was a reaction to Schelling’s and Hegel’s speculative philosophy. While Herder seems to ignore the works of the Naturphilosophen in his (...) journal Adrastea, in fact he participated in a very lively debate that included Schelling’s Weltseele and Hegel’s Dissertatio de Orbitis Planetarum. (shrink)

This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of whether animals possess reason. In Germany, the (...) debate concerning animal reason was influenced by Christian Wolff and was taken up by diverse thinkers such as Winkler, Meier, and Reimarus. I argue that in the second half of the eighteenth century the study of animal language became more loosely related to the question of whether animals possess reason: animal language was studied not only in light of the debate on animal reason but also because it sheds light on the nature of animals, on the differences and similarities between animals and humans, and on the origin and development of language. This systematic study of animal language coincided with the rise of linguistics, anthropology, and biology as independent sciences. (shrink)

It was commonly accepted in Goethe’s time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God’s beneficent and providential design. Goethe’s identification of sexual propagation as the “summit of nature” in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff’s science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself (...) improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe’s plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity—not merely a passive product—freed Goethe of the need to tie plants’ forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology. (shrink)

The study of the “first wave” of reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason in Germany from the second half of the 1780s until the beginning of the nineteenth century reveals the paradoxical status of the Kantian transcendental subject. While the existence of the transcendental subject, whatever the term means, is not open to question since it arises from the very essence of critical philosophy, the fundamental status of the subject is sometimes questioned in this period. Although the meaning of (...) the concept of transcendental subject seems obvious today it lends itself to various interpretations in the late eighteenth century. To achieve my goal I have undertaken a textological analysis of the works of the earliest opponents and followers of the Kantian critique and a reconstruction of the conceptual field in the midst of which the transcendental subject has been planted. Among others I draw on the works of J. S. Beck, J. A. Eberhard, J. G. Hamann, F. H. Jacobi, S. Maimon, K. L. Reinhold, G. E. Schulze and A. Weishaupt. The authors of the period are grouped depending on the common themes and questions that prompted them to turn to the concept of the transcendental subject, even though the results of their reflections did not always coincide. These authors think of the transcendental subject in its relationship to the transcendental object, or as “something = х”, and in terms of the relationship of representation to the object. It is characterised sometimes as something absolutely hollow, and sometimes as the fullness of true reality. The status ascribed to the transcendental subject is sometimes that of a thing-in-itself and sometimes that of a “mere” idea. Finally, Kant’s transcendental subject was sometimes seen as something to be overcome and sometimes as an infinite challenge to understanding. (shrink)

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally varying (...) forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought. (shrink)

In this paper I trace the manner in which Herder’s philosophy of language grounds his approach to hermeneutical issues regarding history, interpretation, and translation. Herder’s approach to the question of language has been repeatedly lauded for its important influence on the later work done by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer, but in this discussion I am going to put him more directly in conversation with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Although recent critics have derided Humboldt’s theory as both derivative and wrong, I will (...) argue that we should instead recognize that Humboldt’s philosophy of language represents a significant development of Herder’s thesis. This development is accomplished by way of Humboldt’s application of Kant’s mature theory of reason to a program for comparative linguistics. In Humboldt’s hands, this amounts to a new strain of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the on-going research into the ways in which the humanities transformed the natural sciences in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. By investigating the relationship between hermeneutics -- as developed by Herder -- and natural history, it shows how the methods used for the study of literary and artistic works played a crucial role in the emergence of key natural-scientific fields, including geography and ecology.

In seinen frühen Arbeiten setzt Herder regelmäßig die Proteusfigur ein, um die geschichtlichen Verwandlungen des Menschen und der Produkte des menschlichen Geistes zu schildern. Die Figur scheint zunächst in eine skeptische oder auch relativistische Richtung zu weisen (und wurde in Interpretationen von Herders Frühwerk oft so gedeutet). Eine textnahe Lektüre der Herderschen Verwendung der Figur und eine Analyse seiner Anknüpfungen an die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Proteus-Mythos ergeben aber ein anderes Bild. Sich auf Nebenbedeutungen der Proteusfigur wie die ‚Urmaterie‘ und die ‚Divination‘ (...) stützend, verweist Herder gerade mit dieser Figur auf die Einheit in der Vielheit. In dieser Arbeit werden, nach einer kurzen historischen Darstellung der verschiedenen Deutungen der Proteusfigur, drei Methoden identifiziert und analysiert, die Herder anwendet, um anhand von Proteus die Einheit in der Vielheit einsichtig zu machen. Erstens geht es um den Versuch, anhand von Analogien die Verbindung aller historischen Gestalten der Menschheit aufzudecken. Zweitens wird erklärt, wie Herder durch die genetische Erklärung der Ursachen der historischen Verwandlung von menschlichen Sprachen und Kulturformen sich ihrer gegenwärtigen Form verstehend annähert. Drittens spielt Proteus eine wichtige Rolle in Herders Verständnis der Endlichkeit und Plastizität der menschlichen Natur sowie ihrer providentiellen Bildung durch die ganze Weltgeschichte hindurch. Gemeinsam ist den drei Strategien, dass Herder stets eine doppelte Polemik, sowohl gegen den Pyrrhonismus als auch gegen den Ethnozentrismus, führt. Die Hauptthese dieser Arbeit lautet, dass Proteus für Herder eine geeignete Denkfigur darstellt, um die Fehler beider Positionen zu vermeiden. Dabei ist es wichtig festzuhalten, dass nicht nur die Einheit und die Vielheit, sondern auch die anthropologischen und theologischen Aspekte von Herders Frühwerk auf diese Weise zusammengedacht werden können. (shrink)

Through a detailed study of Herder's Enlightenment thought, especially his philosophy of literature, Kristin Gjesdal offers a new and sometimes provocative reading of the historical origins and contemporary challenges of modern hermeneutics. She shows that hermeneutic philosophy grew out of a historical, anthropological, and poetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that, as such, it represents a rich, stimulating, and relevant engagement with the potentials and limits of human meaning and understanding. Gjesdal's study broadens our conception of hermeneutic philosophy (...) - the issues it raises and the answers it offers - and underlines the importance of Herder's contribution to the development of this discipline. Her book will be highly valuable for students and scholars of eighteenth-century thought, especially those working in the fields of hermeneutics, aesthetics, and European philosophy. (shrink)

This essay lays out the historical case for a broader assessment of Kant’s relationship to Blumenbach by focusing first on Kant’s review of Herder in 1785 as the best lens through which to understand not only their respective theories of generation but indeed the specific motivation leading to Kant’s support for Blumenbach at all. The results of this inquiry will suggest that while Kant might have been interested in gaining the support of the rising star of the Göttingen medical faculty, (...) Blumenbach’s own theories did little to influence Kant’s approach to either generation-theory or race. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to demonstrate that the contact between European philosophy and Chinese culture in the 17 th and 18 th centuries had an influence on the emergence and development of secularism, which became a distinctive feature of the Western Enlightenment. In the first part, I examine in what way knowledge of the history of China and the Confucian ethics contested the Biblical chronology and undermined faith as a prerequisite for morality. Subsequently, I analyze the attempts to (...) refute these allegations, reinterpreting Confucianism as crypto-monotheism. In the third part, I will show how the debate on Chinese culture has contributed to the birth of the secular philosophy of history, which put an end to the Enlightenment Sinophilia. In conclusion, I will present the main limitations of the thesis about the influence of Chinese thought on the birth of secularism. (shrink)

In Another Philosophy of History, J.G. Herder claims that his aim is not to compare and judge different cultures, but merely to describe and explain how each came into being and thus to adopt the standpoint of an impartial observer. I argue, however, that there is a tension between Herder's understanding of his own project—his stated doctrine of historicism and cultural relativism—and the way in which it is actually put into practice. That is, despite Herder's stated aims, he is nevertheless (...) unable to avoid justifying premodern forms of life and making context-transcending evaluative judgments in the process of trying to understand cultures on their own terms and holding them up as exemplars vis à vis the Enlightenment. This tension presents the challenge of accounting for it in the most charitable and illuminating way. I argue that this goal can be achieved by appealing to the resources of the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which enables us to disclose two enabling conditions for Herder's project of which he was not explicitly aware, viz., the internal connection between understanding and justification and the enabling character of prejudice as the condition for the possibility of understanding as such. (shrink)

This article focuses on the apparently paradoxical remarks of Novalis on landscape, which followed the famous “Romantikertreffen” of August 1798: that decisive meeting of the “early German romantics” on the occasion of a communal visit to the painting and sculpture galleries in Dresden. We analyze how Novalis surpasses the phenomenological conception of landscape painting proposed by August Wilhelm Schlegel by resorting to the "incorrect" categories of sculpture and haptic sense to talk about the feeling for nature that governs landscape painting. (...) This is the aesthetics of Herder – his reflections in the treatise “Sculpture” (1778) on the actual concrete and tangible force of the beautiful and the central importance it accords to the experience of one’s own body (a highly modern conception) – which is diverted here in a typical Novalisian gesture that we will show is consistent with his philosophy. The reception of Herder has contributed to the development in Novalis of a Pygmalionic aesthetics of contact with things that casts a different light on early romanticism: it is not only the exclusive exercise of a critical reflexivity that assumes distance, but also of a sensibility that seeks a tactile meeting point as it were between what is separated. (shrink)

Book Reviews Jordan Pascoe, Kantian Review, FirstView Article.

In this essay I will argue that although Rousseau often invokes the concept of nature as a fixed point of reference in the evaluation of personal traits, and individual and collective practices, a closer look at the dynamics of the educational programme laid out in his Emile shows that for him human nature has to emerge in a process that combines the influence of nature and artifice. This process is essentially enabled by Emile's sensibility that, as I will claim, can (...) be conceived as a natural property geared towards development and change in relation to a specific social environment. By confronting him with artfully orchestrated stimuli, this environment ensures that he “naturally” develops in line with a normatively laden conception of society. (shrink)

I discuss an apparent tension between two aspects of Johann Gottfried Herder’s aesthetic theory: his emphasis on and endorsement of art’s cultural embeddedness and historical variation, and his reliance on natural norms of artistic value. I propose that Herder’s essay, “Shakespeare,” suggests a possible resolution to this tension, a position I call “adaptive naturalism.” On this view, aesthetic value comprises a work’s capacity to promote the exercise of human natural capacities in harmony with the (natural or social) environment. Thus such (...) naturalistically grounded value does and must vary in form, in line with differences among social environments – and yet also may succeed or fail according to natural norms: some artworks are and promote better adaptation to their circumstances, than others. (shrink)

John Zammito, among others, argues that in his review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas, Kant criticizes Herder as a dogmatic metaphysician hypocritically: these criticisms themselves rest on dogmatic metaphysical grounds, viz. an insistence of the distinction of human beings (as souls or rational free agents) from the rest of nature, a commitment to “dead” matter and the like. Against this interpretation, I argue that Kant’s criticism of Herder is grounded not in metaphysical commitments, but in epistemological concerns articulated in the Critique (...) of Pure Reason, i.e., in Kant’s predominant critical treatment of metaphysics. As I shall also suggest, Kant’s arguments in the review are perhaps not quite representative of his position in the CPJ either, but rather represent a transitional position in his thinking concerning the explanation of organisms. (shrink)

This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which they (...) relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. (shrink)

According to a tradition reaching back at least as far as Aristotle, human beings are set apart from other terrestrial creatures by their rationality. Other animals, according to this tradition, are capable of sensation and appetite, but they are not capable of thought, the kind of activity characteristic of the rational part of the soul. Human beings, by contrast, are rational animals, and an understanding of our minds must begin from a recognition of this distinctiveness. For, the tradition holds, the (...) presence of rationality does not just add one more power to the human mind, or increase the scope and efficacy of mental powers already present in nonrational creatures. Rather, rationality transforms all of our principal mental powers, making our minds different in kind from the minds of nonrational animals. (shrink)

While the last several decades have seen a renaissance of scholarship on J. G. Herder (1744?1804), his moral philosophy has not been carefully examined. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap, and to point the way for further research, by reconstructing his original and systematically articulated views on morality. Three interrelated elements of his position are explored in detail: (1) his perfectionism, or theory of the human good; (2) his sentimentalism, which includes moral epistemology and a theory (...) of moral education; and (3) his theism, which deepens and justifies these other elements. (shrink)

The subject of this article is Herder’s unique conception of the soul-body relationship and its divergence from and dependence on Leibniz. Herder’s theory is premised on a rejection of the windowlessness of monads in two important respects: interaction between material bodies (as gleaned from Crusius and Kant) and interaction between the soul and body. Herder’s theory depends on Leibniz insofar as it agrees with the intimate connection Leibniz posits between the soul and the body, as his epistemology demonstrates, with, however, (...) the significant modification that the connection is real. Herder transforms the Leibnizian rehabilitation and use of substantial forms to develop a double-conception of the human soul as both thinking substance and substantial form: the soul, qua thinking substance, needs a body through whose senses it can interact with, and acquire knowledge of, the external world; the soul, qua substantial form, constructs itself this material body by harnessing the forces of attraction and repulsion. Herder’s theory provides an alternative to other contemporary accounts of the soul-body relationship, especially Kant’s, which start from the problem of relating two distinct substances. His unique and original reconciliation of the modern dichotomy of spirit and matter, via his connecting of Leibniz’s realms of final and efficient causes, is of great significance for the rise of German Idealism. (shrink)

"What is whole on earth? … [D]oesn't this building of the times upon each other make the whole of our species into a formless monstrous structure [zum unförmlichen Riesengebäude], where one carries away what another began to build, where what never should have been built remains standing and in centuries finally everything becomes One Ruin [Ein Schutt], amongst which, the more broken and crumbling it is, the more confidently the hesitating people live?" "Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte (...) der Menschheit1"With the subordination of Church to State introduced by the principle of “cuius…. (shrink)

Some of Herder's most striking ideas stemmed from his early evaluation of German literary publicity, which to his mind stood in stark contrast to conditions in the sociable world. Such a predicament bespeaks the importance of considering the relationship between printed text and lived sociability in the Enlightenment. By charting the heady twists and turns in his intellectual development from 1765 to 1769, this essay treats the young Herder in what for him became an aesthetically charged field between the two. (...) The public which he came to envision would be manifest to the senses, at least to the extent that it might be by the reader of print, but it also amounted to a surrogate for the more tangibly sensual experience of face-to-face community. (shrink)

This article analyses how Rousseau's First Discourse and the questions it posed about human progress and the reform of society were debated in the institutional context of the Berlin Academy by Formey and Herder. Despite some important disagreements, Formey and Herder fundamentally shared Rousseau's assumption that erudition could be detrimental both to society and to the individual. In order to limit the socially corrosive effects of the arts and the sciences, and in an attempt to realize their full beneficent potential, (...) they called for their reform through institutional regulation and management by a meritocracy of scholarly experts. Drawing on Hume, Herder in particular developed a positive role for the modern state as an active agent of enlightenment, provided it not only promoted the arts and sciences but also guaranteed freedom and the rule of law to ensure their flourishing. (shrink)