Johann Gottfried von Herder ( HUR-dər; German: [ˈjoːhan ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈhɛʁdɐ]; 25 August 1744 – 18 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."
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", 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. 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. In turn, he influenced Hegel, Nietzsche, Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 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." Even earlier, in 1768's Fragments on Recent German Literature, Herder explained that thought is fundamentally dependent on and delineated by language.
If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts, and learn to think through words, then language sets limits and outline for the whole of human cognition. 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,
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