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HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON (1744-1803)
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See also:HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON (1744-1803) , one of the most prolific and influential writers that See also:Germany has produced, was See also:born in Mohrungen, a small See also:town in See also:East See also:Prussia, on the 25th of See also:August 1744. Like his contemporary See also:Lessing, Herder had throughout his See also:life to struggle against adverse circumstances. His See also:father was poor, having to put together a subsistence by uniting the humble offices of See also:sexton, See also:choir-See also:singer and See also:petty schoolmaster. After receiving some rudimentary instruction from his father, the boy was sent to the See also:grammar school of his native town. The mode of discipline practised by the pedantic and irritable old See also:man who stood at the See also:head of this institution was not at all to the See also:young student's liking, and the impression made upon him stimulated him later on to See also:work out his projects of school reform. The hardships of his See also:early years drove him to See also:introspection and to solitary communion with nature, and thus favoured a more than proportionate development of the sentimental and poetic See also:side of his mind. When quite young he expressed a wish to become a See also:minister of the See also:gospel, but his aspirations were discouraged by the See also:local clergyman. In 1762, at the See also:age of eighteen, he went up to See also:Konigsberg with the intention of studying See also:medicine, but finding himself unequal to the operations of the dissecting-See also:room, he abandoned this See also:object, and, by the help of one or two See also:friends and his own self-supporting labours, followed out his earlier See also:idea of the clerical profession by joining the university. There he came under the See also:influence of See also:Kant, who was just then passing from See also:physical to metaphysical problems. Without becoming a See also:disciple of Kant, young Herder was deeply stimulated to fresh See also:critical inquiry by that thinker's revolutionary ideas in See also:philosophy. To Kant's lectures and conversations he further owed something of his large See also:interest in cosmological and anthropological problems. Among the writers whom he most carefully read were See also:Plato, See also:Hume, See also:Shaftesbury, See also:Leibnitz, See also:Diderot and See also: Another See also:personal influence under which he See also:fell at Konigsberg, and which was destined to be far more permanent, was that of J. G. See also:Hamann, " the See also:northern Mage." This writer had already won a name, and in young Herder he found a mind well fitted to be the receptacle and vehicle of his new ideas on literature. From this vague, incoherent, yet gifted writer our author acquired some of his strong feeling for the naive See also:element in See also:poetry, and for the earliest developments of See also:national literature. Even before he went to Konigsberg he had begun to compose verses, and at the age of twenty he took up the See also:pen as a See also:chief occupation. His first published writings were occasional poems and reviews contributed to the Konigsbergische Zeitung. Soon after this he got an See also:appointment at See also:Riga, as assistant See also:master at the See also:cathedral school, and a few years later, became assistant pastor. In this busy commercial town, in somewhat improved pecuniary and social circumstances, he See also:developed the See also:main ideas of his writings. In ,the See also:year 1767 he published his first considerable work Fragmente uber See also:die neuere deutsche Literatur, which at once made him widely known and secured for him the favourable interest of Lessing. From this See also:time he continued to pour forth a number of critical writings on literature, See also:art, &c. His bold ideas on these subjects, which were a See also:great advance even on Lessing's doctrines, naturally excited hostile See also:criticism, and in consequence of this opposition, which took the See also:form of aspersions on his religious orthodoxy, he resolved to leave Riga. He was much carried away at this time by the idea of a See also:radical reform of social life in See also:Livonia, which (after the example of Rousseau) he thought to effect by means of a better method of school-training. With this See also:plan in view he began (1769) a tour through See also:France, See also:England, See also: Under the influence of this See also:reading he now finally See also:broke with classicism and became one of the leaders of the new See also:Sturm and Drang See also:movement. He co-operated with a See also:band of young writers at Darmstadt and See also:Frankfort, including Goethe, who in a See also:journal of their own sought to diffuse the new ideas. His marriage took See also:place in 1773. In 1776 he obtained through Goethe's influence the See also:post of See also:general See also:superintendent and court preacher at See also:Weimar, where he passed the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the society of Goethe, See also:Wieland, See also:Jean See also:Paul (who came to Weimar in See also:order to be near Herder), and others, the patronage of the court, with whom as a preacher he was very popular, and an opportunity of carrying out some of his ideas of school reform. Yet the social See also:atmosphere of the place did not suit him. His personal relations with Goethe again and again became embittered. This, added to See also:ill-health, served to intensify a natural irritability of temperament, and the See also:history of his later Weimar days is a rather dreary See also:page in the See also:chronicles of literary life. He had valued more than anything else a teacher's influence over other minds, and as he began to feel that he was losing it he See also:grew jealous of the success of those who had outgrown this influence. Yet while presenting these unlovely traits, Herder's See also:character was on the whole a worthy and attractive one. This seems to be sufficiently attested by the fact that he was greatly liked and esteemed, not only in the See also:pulpit but in private intercourse, by cultivated See also:women like the countess of Buckeburg, the duchess of Weimar and Frau von See also:Stein, and, what perhaps is more, was exceedingly popular among the gymnasium pupils, in whose education he took so lively an interest. While much that Herder produced after settling in Weimar has little value, he wrote also some of his best works, among others his collection of popular poetry on which he had been engaged for many years, Stimmen der Volker in Liedern (1778–1779); his See also:translation of the See also:Spanish romances of the See also:Cid (18o5); his celebrated work on See also:Hebrew poetry, Vona Geist der hebrdischen Poesie (1782–1783); and his See also:opus magnum, the Ideen zur Philosophie der -Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791). Towards the See also:close of his life he occupied himself, like. Lessing, with speculative questions in philosophy and See also:theology. The boldness of some of his ideas cost him some valuable friendships, as that of See also:Jacobi, See also:Lavater and even of his early teacher Hamann. He died on the 18th of See also:December 1803, full of new literary plans up to the very last. Herder's writings were for a long time regarded as of temporary value only, and fell into neglect. See also:Recent criticism, however, has tended very much to raise their value by tracing out their wide and far-reaching influence. His works are very voluminous, and to a large ettent fragmentary and devoid of See also:artistic finish; nevertheless 'they are nearly always See also:worth investigating for the brilliant suggestions in which they abound. His place in Germanliterature has already been indicated in tracing his See also:mental development. Like Lessing, whose work he immediately continued, he was a See also:pioneer of the See also:golden age of this literature. Lessing had given the first impetus to the formation of a national literature by exposing the folly of the current See also:imitation of See also:French writers. But in doing this he did not so much See also:call his See also:fellow-countrymen to develop freely their own national sentiments and ideas as send them back to classical example and principle. Lessing was the exponent of See also:German classicism; Herder, on the contrary, was a pioneer of the romantic movement. He fought against all imitation as such, and bade German writers be true to themselves and their national antecedents. As a sort of theoretic basis for this See also:adhesion to national type in literature, he conceived the idea that literature and art, together with See also:language and national culture as a whole, are evolved by a natural See also:process, and that the intellectual and emotional life of each See also:people is correlated with peculiarities of physical temperament and of material environment. In this way he became the originator of that genetic or See also:historical method which has since been applied to all human ideas and institutions. Herder was thus an evolutionist, but an evolutionist still under the influence of Rousseau. That is to say, in tracing back the later acquisitions of See also:civilization to impulses which are as old as the See also:dawn of primitive culture, he did not, as the See also:modern evolutionist does, See also:lay stress on the superiority of the later to the earlier stages of human development, but rather became enamoured of the simplicity and spontaneity of those early impulses which, since they are the See also:oldest, easily come to look like the most real and See also:precious. Yet even in this way he helped to found the historical school in literature and See also:science, for it was only after an excessive and sentimental interest in primitive human culture had been awakened that this subject would receive the amount of See also:attention which was requisite for the genetic explanation of later developments. This historical idea was carried by Herder into the regions of poetry, art, See also:religion, language, and finally into human culture as a whole. It See also:colours all his writings, and is intimately connected with some of the most characteristic attributes of his mind, a See also:quick sympathetic See also:imagination, a See also:fine feeling for local See also:differences, and a scientific See also:instinct for seizing the sequences of cause and effect. Herder's works may be arranged in an ascending See also:series, corresponding to the way in which the genetic or historical idea was developed and extended. First come the works on poetic literature, art, language and religion as See also:special regions of development. Secondly, we have in the Ideen a general See also:account of the process of human evolution. Thirdly, there are a number of writings which, though inferior in interest to the others, may be said to See also:supply the philosophic basis of his leading ideas. 1. In the region of poetry Herder sought to persuade his See also:country-men, both by example and See also:precept, to return to a natural and spontaneous form of utterance. His own poetry has but little value; Herder was a skilful See also:verse-maker but hardly a creative poet. He was most successful in his translation of popular See also:song, in which he shows a rare sympathetic insight into the various feelings and ideas of peoples as unlike as Greenlanders and Spaniards, See also:Indians and Scots. In the Fragmente he aims at nationalizing German poetry and freeing it from all extraneous influence. He ridicules the ambition of German writers to be classic, as Lessing had ridiculed their eagerness to be French. He looked at poetry. as a See also:kind of " See also:proteus among the people, which changes its form according to language, See also:manners, habits, according to temperament and See also:climate, See also:nay, even according to the See also:accent of different nations." This fact of the See also:idiosyncrasy of national poetry he illustrated with great fulness and richness in the See also:case of See also:Homer, the nature of whose works he was one of the first to elucidate, the Hebrew poets, and the poetry of the north as typified in " Ossian." This same idea of necessary relation to national character and circumstance is also applied to dramatic - poetry, and more especially to Shakespeare. Lessing had done much to make Shakespeare known to Germany, but he had regarded him in contrast to the French dramatists with whom he also contrasted the See also:Greek dramatic poets, and accordingly did not bring out his essentially modern and See also:Teutonic character. Herder does this, and in doing so shows a far deeper understanding of Shakespeare's See also:genius than his predecessor had shown. 2. The views on art contained in Herder's Kritische Walder (1769), Plastik (1778), &c., are chiefly valuable as a correction of the excesses into which reverence for Greek art had betrayed See also:Winckelmann and Lessing, by help of his fundamental idea of national idiosyncrasy. He argues against the setting up of classic art as an unchanging type, valid for all peoples and all times. He was one of the first to bring to See also:light the characteristic excellences of See also:Gothic art. Beyond this, he eloquently pleaded the cause of See also:painting as a distinct art, which Lessing in his See also:desire to See also:mark off the formative arts from poetry and See also:music had confounded with See also:sculpture. He regarded this as the art of the eye, while sculpture was rather the art of the See also:organ of See also:touch. Painting being less real than sculpture, because lacking the third See also:dimension of space, and a kind of See also:dream, admitted of much greater freedom of treatment than this last. Herder had a genuine appreciation for early German painters, and helped to awaken the modern interest in Albrecht Diirer. 3. By his work on language Ober den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), Herder may be said to have laid the first See also:rude See also:foundations of the science of See also:comparative See also:philology and that deeper science of the ultimate nature and origin of language. It was specially directed against the supposition of a divine communication of language to man. Its main See also:argument is that speech is a necessary outcome of that special arrangement of mental forces which distinguishes man, and moil particularly from his habits of reflection. " If," Herder says, " it is incomprehensible to others how a human mind could invent language, it is as incomprehensible to me how a human mind could be what it is without discovering language for itself." The writer does not make that use of the fact of man's See also:superior organic endowments which one might expect from his general conception of the relation of the physical and the mental in human development. 4. Herder's services in laying the foundations of a comparative science of religion and See also:mythology are even of greater value than his somewhat crude philological speculations. In opposition to the general spirit of the 18th See also:century he. saw, by means of his historic sense, the naturalness of religion, its relation to man's wants and impulses. Thus with respect to early religious beliefs he rejected Hume's notion that religion sprang out of the fears of primitive men, in favour of the theory that it represents the first attempts of our See also:species to explain phenomena. He thus intimately associated religion with mythology and primitive poetry. As to later forms of religion, he appears to have held that they owe their vitality to their embodiment of the deep-seated moral feelings of our See also:common humanity. His high appreciation of See also:Christianity, which contrasts with the contemptuous estimate of the contemporary rationalists, rested on a See also:firm belief in its essential humanity, to which fact, and not to conscious deception, he attributes its success. His exposition of this religion in his sermons and writings was simply an unfolding of its moral side. In his later life, as we shall presently see, he found his way to a speculative basis for his religious beliefs. 5. Herder's masterpiece, the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte, has the ambitious aim of explaining the whole of human development in close connexion with the nature of man's physical environment. Man is viewed as a See also:part of nature, and all his widely differing forms of development as strictly natural processes. It thus stands in See also:sharp contrast to the See also:anthropology of Kant, which opposes human development conceived as the gradual manifestation of a growing See also:faculty of rational free will to the operations of physical nature. Herder defines human history as " a pure natural history of human See also:powers, actions and propensities, modified by time and place." The Ideen shows us that Herder is an evolutionist after the manner of Leibnitz, and not after that of more modern evolutionists. The See also:lower forms of life prefigure man in unequal degrees of imperfection; they exist for his See also:sake, but they are not regarded as representing necessary antecedent conditions of human existence. The genetic method is applied to varieties of man, not to man as a whole. It is worth noting, however, that Herder in his provokingly tentative way of thinking comes now and again very near ideas made See also:familiar to us by See also:Spencer and See also:Darwin. Thus in a passage in See also:book xv. chap. ii., which unmistakably foreshadows Darwin's idea of a struggle for existence, we read : " Among millions of creatures whatever could preserve itself abides, and still after the See also:lapse of thousands of years remains in the great harmonious order. See also:Wild animals and tame, carnivorous and graminivorous, See also:insects, birds, fishes and man are adapted to each other." With this may be compared a passage in the Ursprung der Sprache, where there is a curious adumbration of Spencer's idea that intelligence, as distinguished from instinct, arises from a growing complexity of See also:action, or, to use Herder's words, from the substitution of a more for a less contracted See also:sphere. Herder is more successful in tracing the early developments of particular peoples than in constructing a scientific theory of evolution. Here he maybe said to have laid the foundations of the science of primitive culture as a whole. His account of the first dawnings of culture, and of the ruder See also:Oriental civilizations, is marked by genuine insight. On the other See also:hand the development of classic culture is traced with a less skilful hand. Altogether this work is See also:rich in See also:suggestion to the philosophic historian and the anthropologist, though marked by much vagueness of conception and hastiness of generalization. 6. Of Herder's properly metaphysical speculations little needs to be said. He was too much under the sway of feeling and See also:concrete imagination to be capable of great things in abstract thought. It is generally admitted that he had no accurate knowledge either of See also:Spinoza, whose See also:monism he advocated, or of Kant, whose critical philosophy he so fiercely attacked. Herder's Spinozism, which is set forth in his little work, Vom Erkennen fund Ernpfunden der menschlichen Seele (1778), is much less logically conceived than Lessing's. It is the religious aspect of it which attracts him, the presentation in See also:God of an object which at once satisfies the feelings and the See also:intellect. With respect to his attacks on the critical philosophy in the Metakritik (1799), it is easy to understand how his concrete mind, ever alive to the unity of things, instinctively rebelled against that See also:analytic separation of the mental processes which Kant attempted. However crude and hasty this critical investigation, it helped to See also:direct philosophic reflection to the unity of mind, and so to develop the post-Kantian See also:line of See also:speculation. Herder was much attracted by See also:Schelling's early writings, but appears to have disliked Hegelianism because of the See also:atheism it seemed to him to involve. In the Kalligone (1800), work directed against Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, Herder argues for the close connexion of the beautiful and the See also:good. To his mind the content of art, which he conceived as human feeling and human life in its completeness, was much more valuable than the form, and so he was naturally led to emphasize the moral element in art. Thus his theoretic opposition to the Kantian See also:aesthetics is but the reflection of his See also:practical opposition to the form-See also:idolatry of the Weimar poets. (J. Additional information and CommentsThere are no comments yet for this article.
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