Johann Gottfried Herder Revisited: The Revolution in Scholarship

in the Last Quarter Century

John H. Zammito
Karl Menges
Ernest A. Menze
Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 71, Number 4, October
2010, pp. 661-684 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Universitaetsbibliothek Mainz at 01/21/11 6:52PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/summary/v071/71.4.zammito.html
Johann Gottfried Herder Revisited:
The Revolution in Scholarship
in the Last Quarter Century
John H. Zammito, Karl Menges, and Ernest A. Menze
IN MEMORIAM
REGINE OTTO
A veritable tidal shift in Herder scholarship has taken place over the last
quarter century, primarily but not exclusively in German.
1
This review
essay seeks to evoke the richness and vitality of this revival with the hope
of persuading American academics that some ill-founded opinions still cir-
culating concerning Herders irrationalism and chauvinistic, even racist
1
Two new and thoroughly annotated editions of Herders works have appeared, updating
the great edition of Bernard Suphan from the late nineteenth century: Werke in zehn
Ba nden (Frankfurt: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985ff; hereafter cited as DKV); and
Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed., Wolfgang Pross: 3 vols: Vol. I, Herder und der
Sturm und Drang, 17641774; Vol. II, Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufkla rung;
Vol. III/1, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Text; Vol. III/2, Kom-
mentar. (Munich, Vienna: Hanser 1984, 1987, 2002). Still, Suphans edition Herders
Sa mtliche Werke (Berlin: Weidmann), 33 vols. (18771913), remains indispensable. In
addition, attention should be directed to the publications sponsored by the International
Herder Societynot only the Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook, the ofcial publication
of the society, but also the many conference volumes publishing the proceedings of rich
meetings that have explored an extraordinary variety of issues in Herder and his context,
many of which will be referenced in this essay. And see most recently: A Companion to
the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Rochester:
Camden House, 2009).
Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 71, Number 4 (October 2010)
661
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
nationalism, and his philosophical naivety and literary effrontery, might at
last be put to rest. The rationalist reconstruction of German Enlighten-
ment, with Kant as its overweening hero, now appears to have cast into
unwarranted shadow many other endeavors towards Enlightenment
including Herdersthat current historiography is recovering.
2
True
Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Germany was emphatically not
just Kants critical philosophy.
3
We must pluralize our notion of Enlighten-
ment.
4
The recent revival has brought sharply to the fore two crucial aspects
of Herder. First, there is the contribution of Herders thought to the emer-
gent cultural and social sciences. The recognition extended Herder in the
histories of various disciplines in the human sciences has not been mis-
guided;
5
the problem is that it has not been synthesized effectively enough
across these disciplines to demonstrate his truly seminal importance. Sec-
ond, for Herder the science of man was also a natural science: the divi-
sion between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been such a
hallmark of the age from Kant until very recently did not exist for him. As
Hans Adler puts it, Nature, the anthropological, and the history of
humanity belong together for Herder.
6
Accordingly, there has been a sec-
ond and even more striking recognition of Herders involvement with the
emergent natural sciences of his day.
It is routinely acknowledged that Herder played a major role in the
gestation of many of the interpretive cultural and social sciencesmost
prominently, cultural anthropology, history, and literary-philosophical her-
meneutics. At a conference devoted to Herder and anthropology in 2006,
2
See Ernst Cassirers classic, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1951), for this conception. For one striking alternative, consider Pana-
jotis Kondylis, Die Aufkla rung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1981).
3
See Werner Schneiders, Die wahre Aufkla rung: Zum Selbstversta ndnis der deutschen
Aufkla rung (Freiburg: Alber, 1974). Rainer Godel, VorurteilAnthropologieLiteratur:
Der Vorurteilsdiskurs als Modus der Selbstaufkla rung im 18. Jahrhundert (Tu bingen:
Niemeyer, 2007).
4
See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
16501750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and
Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
5
Michael Carhart has discussed some of these in The Science of Culture in Enlightenment
Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a wider conspectus,
see Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni, eds., The Anthropology of the Enlightenment
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
6
Hans Adler, Johann Gottfried Herders Concept of Humanity, Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Culture 23 (1994): 5574, cited from 63.
662
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
Michael Forster brilliantly sketched the lines of Herders impact on the
emergence of cultural anthropology.
7
Others have discerned this Herderian
inuence, as well, most notably the dean of historians of anthropology,
George Stocking.
8
With regard to history, the historicist invocation of
Herder is well-trodden ground, though the notion of historicism devel-
oped by Rudolf Stadelmann and Friedrich Meinecke was deeply awed by
a German nationalism, an irrationalism, and a radical relativism that
must not be uncritically projected back onto Herder.
9
Yet one need not go
all the way with Claus Tra ger and claim that Herders role was merely a
legend.
10
Hans Dietrich Irmscher has written persuasively of Herders
signicance in the emergence of modern historical practice.
11
With regard
to literary-philosophical hermeneutics, some recent commentators have
acclaimed Herder as a pioneering voice for the linguistic turn and post-
modernism. This will be the specic concern of part two of this essay.
Herders tendency to take up questions of natural science with a poets
sensibility has drawn scorn, from Kants blistering reviews of the 1780s to
the most extensive recent work in English on Herders relationship to the
natural sciences, H. B. Nisbets Herder and the Philosophy and History of
Science (1970).
12
To be sure, Herder was not a natural scientist, but he
7
Michael Forster, paper delivered at Conference on Herder and Anthropology, Center
for Cultural Complexity in the New Norway, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, May,
2006.
8
George Stocking, Volksgeist as method and ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and
the German anthropological tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
See also Gerald Broce, Herder and Ethnography, Journal of the History of the Behav-
ioral Sciences 22 (1986): 15070.
9
Rudolf Stadelmann, Der historische Sinn bei Herder (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928); Friedrich
Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, tr. J.E. Anderson, ed. H.D.
Schmidt (orig. German ed., 1936; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
10
Claus Tra ger, Die Herder-Legende des deutschen Historismus (Frankfurt: Verlag Marx-
istische Bla tter, 1979). See George Iggers, The German Conception of History: The
National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (rev. ed.; Wesleyan
University Press, 1983).
11
Hans Dietrich Irmscher, Grundfragen der Geschichtsphilosophie Herders bis 1774,
in: Brigitte Porschman, ed., Bu ckeburger Gespra che u ber Johann Gottfried Herder 1783
(Bo sendahl: Rinteln, 1984) 1032; Die geschichtsphilosophische Kontroverse zwischen
Kant und Herder, in HamannKantHerder: Acta des 4. Internationalen Hamann-
Kolloqiums im Herder-Institut zu Marburg/Lahn 1985, ed. Bernhard Gajek (Frankfurt:
Peter Lang, 1987), 11192. See Zammito, Herder and Historical Metanarrative: Whats
Philosophical About History? in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried
Herder, 6592.
12
Immanuel Kant, Recensionen von J.G. Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit, Theil 1.2 (Berlin: Akademie Ausgabe, 1903ff), 8: 4366; H. B. Nisbet,
Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge: Modern Humanities
Research Association, 1970).
663
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
keyed the viability of his philosophical history of mankind to the advance-
ment of the natural sciences of his day. As Elas Palti has noted: the study
of the natural sciences of his time claries fundamental aspects of Herders
historical view, and, conversely, the analysis of Herders philosophy allows
us to better understand [the developments in natural science].
13
Central to
Herders thought was the conviction that there could be no categorical
divide between nature and (human) history. Hans Dietrich Irmscher notes,
It is striking that Herder makes absolutely no effort to bridge [the] gaps
[between nature and culture] with reference to the freedom of God and
those made in his image. Instead, he calls for a continuous, purely imma-
nent historical transition and coherence.
14
Man was, to be sure, a unique
being for Herder, but within nature. This is a decisive new vantage on
Herder.
15
No scholar has done more to advance this fundamental reap-
praisal than Wolfgang Pross, to whose monumental edition with commen-
tary of Herders masterpiece, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (178491), we will dedicate the last segment of this essay.
I. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN
AND HERDERS ENLIGHTENMENT
Perhaps the most programmatic call Herder ever made came in an early
fragment from 1765: What fruitful new developments would not arise if
only our whole philosophy would become anthropology.
16
Indeed, one of
the most important features of recent German eighteenth-century studies
has been the recovery of the turn to anthropology in the last half of that
century.
17
13
Elas Palti, The metaphor of life: Herders Philosophy of History and Uneven Devel-
opments in Late Eighteenth-century Natural Science, History and Theory 38 (1999):
32247, citing 323n.
14
Hans Dietrich Irmscher, Grundfragen der Geschichtsphilosophie, 27.
15
See John H. Zammito, Method versus Manner? Kants Critique of Herders Ideen
in the Light of the Epoch of Science, 17901820, Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook,
1998, ed. Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 125.
16
Herder, Problem: wie die Philosophie zum Besten des Volkes allgemeiner und nu t-
zlicher werden kann. DKV: 1, 132.
17
The theme of anthropology has been a major focus of research for the past two
decades. For a comprehensive bibliographical essay, see: Wolfgang Riedel, Anthropolo-
gie und Literatur in der deutschen Spa taufkla rung. Skizze einer Forschungslandschaft, in
Internationales Archiv fu r Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Tu bingen: Niemeyer,
1994), 93157. On the rise of anthropology in Germany see, e.g., Monika Linden, Unter-
suchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bern/Frankfurt: Lang, 1976);
Andreas Ka user, Anthropologie und A

sthetik im 18. Jahrhundert, Das achtzehnte Jahr-

hundert 14 (1990): 196206; Ju rgen Barkhoff & Eda Sagarra, eds., Anthropologie und
664
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
Prominent evidence is provided in the anthology, Der ganze Mensch,
edited by Hans-Ju rgen Schings.
18
Schings and his co-planners designated
four large areas: a new discourse on body-soul, a new experience of
human nature, new ideas in aesthetic sensibility, and, nally, specically
literary anthropology.
19
The rst rubric spanned metaphysical and empiri-
cal considerations of mind-body interaction (empirical psychology). The
second referred to the various new domains of eighteenth-century medi-
cinephysiognomy, dietetics, temperament analysis, ideas about mental ill-
ness, animal magnetism, etc.; the third topic included such foci as genius
and imagination, feelings of the sublime and the beautiful, and enthusiasm
(Schwa rmerei). Under the last, travel literature and the new psychological
novel merited special attention. Notably, the editor, Schings, and many of
his contributors saw Herder as the undeclared, but omnipresent leading
gure of our undertaking.
20
In Herder und die Anthropologie seiner Zeit, Wolfgang Pross makes
a magisterial case for the centrality of anthropology in the work of Herder,
and implicitly of Herder in the emergence of anthropology.
21
For Herder,
man is a unity of feelings, imagination and understanding and in all his
powersand this is the decisive thinga creature of historicity.
22
Thus
Herder saw a complete homology between his project of empirical psychol-
ogy at the level of the individual and his project of conjectural history at
the level of the species: A human race and a human child are very like one
another.
23
Herder sought to explainalbeit empiricallythe totality of
human experience, and he set about to do so from the evidence in mans
sensuousness. He offered a theory of developmental psychology grounded
Literatur um 1800 (Munich: Iudicium Vlg, 1992); Katherine Faull, ed., Anthropology
and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell
University Press, 1995); Karl J. Fink, Storm and Stress Anthropology, History of the
Human Sciences 6 (1993): 5171; Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
18
Hans-Ju rgen Schings, ed., Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahr-
hundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994).
19
Schings, Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers, in Schings, ed., Der ganze Mensch, 24.
20
Ibid., 8.
21
Wolfgang Pross, Nachwort to Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, Bd. II: Herder und
die Anthropologie der Aufkla rung (Munich: Hanser, 1987), 11281216.
22
Rainer Wisbert, Commentary on Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, DKV: 9/2,
877.
23
Herder, Viertes Kritisches Wa ldchen, DKV: 2, 325. Marion Heinz observes: mankind
individualizes itself in the same way that a single person does (Heinz, Historismus
oder Metaphysik? Zu Herders Bu ckeburger Geschichtsphilosophie, in Johann Gottfried
Herder; Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Martin Bollacher (Wu rzburg: Ko nigshausen & Neu-
mann, 1994), 7586, citing 83).
665
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
in the specicity of each of the senses, which he found conrmed in the
characteristics of the particular forms of ne art which appealed to these
specic senses.
24
As Pross claims, this is the core of H[erder]s anthropo-
logical proposition: external and internal are related to one another
reciprocally. . . . There is no expression of the physical which does not
immediately appear as spiritual, as the symbol of some psychic process of
reworking.
25
After many years of dismissing Herder as a philosophical dilettante,
a series of works has nally emerged that try seriously to reconstruct Herd-
ers philosophical efforts in their own right. Here the recent works of Ulrich
Gaier, Hans Adler, and Marion Heinz stand as major milestones.
26
Herder
developed a different conception of philosophy, a philosophy in the frame
of the humanly possible.
27
As Marion Heinz puts it, since Herder sepa-
rated Humes insight into the limits of human knowledge from its skeptical
consequences, he assigned to philosophy a new eld of endeavor: the illumi-
nation without prejudice of the organization of the nite-human subject
and the boundaries and possibilities that this would determine.
28
The main
point was that Herder insisted that philosophy was not the ground upon
which empirical study should be built, but rather the culmination of all
the empirical sciences.
29
In light of the anthropological turn, this can
now clearly be seen as a central project of the German Enlightenment, and
not in opposition to it.
The relation of Herder to the Enlightenment has always been an essen-
tially contested issue.
30
Coming to terms with it requires a nuanced grasp
24
Thus, from the reworking of the impressions of sight arise the ideas of distance, space
and substance, from the reworking of those of hearing arise the representations of succes-
sion and thus of time, and nally from the feeling of touch, the representation of unity
and multiplicity and also of cause and effect (Pross, Commentary on Kritische Wa lder:
Viertes Wa ldchen in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, Bd. II, 876).
25
Pross, Commentary on Fragmente u ber Wolff, Baumgarten und Leibniz, ibid., 852.
26
Ulrich Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik (Stuttgart/Bad Canns-
tatt: Frommann & Holzboog, 1988); Hans Adler, Die Pra gnanz des Dunklen: Gnoseolo-
gie, A

sthetik, Geschichtsphilosophie bei J.G. Herder (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990); Marion

Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnistheorie des jungen
Herder (17631778) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994).
27
Adler, Pra gnanz des Dunklen, 84.
28
Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 14.
29
Ibid.
30
As we can see from Berlins original essay title: Isaiah Berlin, Herder and the Enlight-
enment (originally in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl Wasserman; reprinted
in The Proper Study of Mankind [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997], 359
434). But for Herder scholarship on a more cosmopolitan footing, the path-breaking
intervention on that theme was Emil Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufkla rung (Vienna:
Europa, 1968).
666
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
of Enlightenment itself. The Enlightenment in National Context, which
appeared in 1981, suggested there were substantive differences in the
national trajectories of Enlightenment and much could be learned by disag-
gregating it into its richly individual national manifestations.
31
This ap-
proach also took up transnational connections within the epoch in a more
discriminating manner.
32
The upshot left Enlightenment historiography far
more acutely aware of developmental change and internal contestation
within the Enlightenment, both in singular national contexts and across
them. That has resulted in a far more nuanced understanding of the histori-
cal Enlightenment.
It has also made the case that Herder belongs to the Counter-Enlight-
enment, in Isaiah Berlins widely-received terminology, less than self-
evident. Berlins Counter Enlightenment was a conception of proto-
Romanticism.
33
It was not simply a matter of traditionalist foes, as would
appear to be the case in treatments of French Counter-Enlightenment (e.g.,
the Jesuits or the Parlements ).
34
Rather, these were foes who were innova-
tive, but pursuing a different (expressionist) direction.
35
To justify his
notion of Counter Enlightenment, Berlin resorted to a simplistic caricature
of Enlightenment, one which he certainly knew to be insufcient.
36
Above
31
Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
32
For example, see: Uwe Steiner, Brunhilde Wehinger, Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp,
eds., Europa ischer Kulturtransfer im 18. Jahrhundert. Literaturen in Europa
europa ische Literatur? (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2003). Indeed, some his-
torians have come to the view that the Germans of the eighteenth century self-
consciously emulated the Scots. See Michael Maurer, Aufkla rung und Anglophilie in
Deutschland (Go ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987); Norbert Waszek, The Scot-
tish Enlightenment and Hegels Account of Civil Society (Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer,
1988); Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in
Eighteenth-century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
33
Berlin, Counter-Enlightenment (1973; reprinted in Against the Current [Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1979], 125). Berlin proposed his concept almost a decade after individ-
ual essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann, and just as he began to take up the
consideration of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. It was by weaving these four gures
togetherand sketching out a formidable reception-history in their wakethat he con-
ceptualized Counter-Enlightenment. This synthesis was elaborated and defended in
Vico and Herder (Berlin, Vico and Herder [New York: Viking, 1976]). In 1977 a crucial
piece was added: Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism (1977; reprinted
in Against the Current, 16287), elaborating the role of Jacobi in his narrative.
34
Darren McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment
and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
35
For a more detailed discussion of Berlins Counter-Enlightenment concept, see John H.
Zammito, Herder, Sturm und Drang, and Expressivism: Problems in Reception-
History, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27 (November, 2006): 5174.
36
As his sympathetic critic, Robert Wokler, writes, For those of us who work in diverse
667
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
all, he pitted the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang
against the rest of the Enlightenment.
Sturm und Drang has had a curious reception-history. Conventionally,
the termrefers to a movement in literature and theater of the 1770s, extend-
ing at most to the early 1780s. For something so short-lived, its prominence
in historiography lies in its connections with European Romanticism and
German nationalism. Historical reception turned Sturm und Drang all too
simplistically into the scandalous other of true Enlightenment. A century
later, in response, the vo lkisch German nationalism of the late nineteenth
and especially the early twentieth centuries, in overt opposition to banal
Western Enlightenment, lionized as the source of authentic German charac-
ter the very irrationalism blasted by admirers of a Kantian Enlighten-
ment.
37
Yet we must not read German Second Reich chauvinism into
eighteenth-century cultural-national self-assertion. Sadly, English-language
scholarship has done precisely that in its reconstructions of eighteenth-
century Germany, of Sturm und Drang, of Romanticism, and of Herder.
38
Since Herder was the leading light of Sturm und Drang, this made Herder
over into an enemy of the Enlightenment.
39
Nothing has been so important
for the Herder-scholarship of the last thirty years, especially that under the
auspices of the International Herder Society, as to dispel this misconcep-
tion.
40
Berlin overstates the estrangement of Sturm und Drang from Aufkla r-
elds of eighteenth-century studies and also greatly admire his achievement, Berlins
invention of a monolithic Enlightenment with just three legs is more than a trie embar-
rassing, particularly since it was only assembled so that it might be deconstructed in the
manner of Procrustes and thereby point the way to a richer understanding of the diverse
threads that constitute its opposite. Robert Wokler, Isaiah Berlins Enlightenment and
Counter-Enlightenment, in Isaiah Berlins Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph Mali and
Robert Wokler, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 93 (2003): 1333,
citing 18.
37
See Bernhard Becker, Herder-Rezeption in Deutschland: Eine ideologiekritische Unter-
suchung (St. Ingbert: Ro hrig, 1987).
38
For a seminal instance, see Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1953). For the wider context, see Katherine Arens, Geister der
Zeit: The Allies Enlightenment and German Literary History, Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 102 (2003): 33661.
39
For a very different view, see Wulf Koepke, Herder and the Sturm und Drang, in
David Hill, ed., Literature of the Sturm und Drang (Rochester: Camden House, a Divi-
sion of Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 74.
40
Hence the concern among members of that Society, leading to this review essay, over
many misconceptions resurrected in the pages of this journal, in the recent controversy
between Steven Lestition and Robert Norton, current President of the Society. See Robert
Norton, The Myth of Counter-Enlightenment, JHI 68 (2007): 63558; Steven Lesti-
tion, Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment: A Response to Robert
668
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
ung, and this renders problematic his particular reconstruction of Herder.
Recent scholarship insists that Sturm und Drang be seen as a development
within the Enlightenment, and not its abandonment.
41
Gerhard Sauder has
formulated this continuity thesis elegantly, conceiving Sturm und Drang as
the dynamization and internal critique of Enlightenment.
42
Dynamiza-
tion entailed enlightening the wider public, empowering its capacity to
think for itself. In other words, Sturm und Drang was an element in the
Popularphilosophie which dominated the German Aufkla rung in the 1770s.
But it was also internal critique: it challenged the ways in which Enlight-
enmentnot only in France but also and perhaps especially in Germany
was falling short of, or even betraying its own ideals and aspirations,
especially from the social vantage of young men of talent.
43
Goethe cap-
tured that in the melodramatic ction of Sorrows of Young Werther, but it
is documented more soberly in the reviews he and his colleagues wrote for
the Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen in 1772.
44
Finally, it is reductionist to regard Sturm und Drang simply as anti-
French nationalism. French Enlightenment thought was central to German
Sturm und Drang. It is quite unimaginable without the constructive input
of Rousseau and Diderot.
45
To be sure, the project was to establish a Ger-
man literary culture, and to do so would require getting out from under the
Francophile regimen emanating from Frederick IIs Berlin and the high
priest of Neoclassicism in Leipzig, Gottsched. But it is not true that this
German cultural movement wanted nothing to do with the French (and
the British). Herder was emphatically cosmopolitan in his establishment of
resources for this German cultural self-assertion, and he explicitly drew on
Norton, ibid., 65981; Norton, Isaiah Berlins Expressionism, or: Ha du bist das
Blo ckende! JHI 69 (2008): 33947.
41
That is the position of Matthias Luserke, Sturm und Drang: AutorenTexteThemen
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977) and of David Hill, ed., Literature of the Sturm und Drang
(Rochester: Camden House, a Division of Boydell & Brewer, 2003).
42
Gerhard Sauder, The Sturm und Drang and the Periodization of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, in Literature of the Sturm und Drang, ed. David Hill, 30932.
43
Alan Leidner, The Impatient Muse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1994).
44
Hans-Dietrich Dahnke, Intentionen und Resultate des Jahrgangs 1772 der Frankfurter
Gelehrten Anzeigen, in Sturm und Drang: Geistiger Aufbruch 17701790 im Spiegel der
Literatur, ed. Bodo Plachta and Winfried Woesler (Tu bingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 23348.
45
Anne Saada, Diderot und der Sturm und Drang, in Sturm und Drang: Geistiger
Aufbruch 17701790 im Spiegel der Literatur, 2340; Ralph-Reiner Wuthenow, Rous-
seau im Sturm und Drang, in Sturm und Drang, ed. Walter Hinck (Kronberg: Athe-
na um, 1978), 1454. And see Wolfgang Pross, ed., Herders Werke, Vol. II.: Herder und
der Sturm und Drang.
669
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
French and British resources. He proposed to join the thorough English
temperament, the wit of the French, and the resplendence of Italy with Ger-
man diligence.
46
Thus, he endeavored to add to our Leibnizes the Shaft-
esburys and Lockes, to our Spaldings the Sternes, Fosters, and Richardsons,
to our Moses [Mendelssohn] the Browns and Montesquieus.
47
Frederick Beiser offers a balanced view: Herder was won over to the
cause of the Aufkla rung by the young Kant. All his life, though, Herder
was a deeply self-critical Aufkla rer, and he was so largely due to the inu-
ence of Hamann.
48
The relation of Herder to Hamann turns out to be far
more equivocal, since in the end it was the inuence of Kant that proved
victorious.
49
That is, If we were to describe in a word how Herder
assimilated Hamanns thought, then we would have to say that he secular-
ized it. In other words, he explained it in naturalistic terms and justied it
in the light of reason.
50
That gets the relationships just right, and it drives
a considerable wedge between Herder and Counter-Enlightenment.
Robert Wokler comments: Although the tone of [Hans] Aarsleffs objec-
tions to Berlins account of Herder strikes me as excessively severe, I feel
more than a little inclined to agree with his contention that the intellectual
gulf between Herder and Hamann is vast. . . .
51
Indeed, it is; and
Counter-Enlightenment a` la Berlin cannot bridge the gulf.
II. HERDERS METACRITICAL TURN AND THE
HERMENEUTICAL SITUATION
Following the notion that Herders relation to the Enlightenment has
always been a contested issue, we can see the historical coordinates that
would enable us to realign rationalist discourse historically, placing a criti-
cal focus on philosophical system building.
52
One of the main targets in this
46
Herder, On diligence in the study of several learned languages, in Johann Gottfried
Herder, Selected early works, 17641767, ed. Ernest Menze and Karl Menges (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), 32.
47
Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, DKV, 9:33.
48
Frederick Beiser, The Political Theory of J. G. Herder, in Beiser, Enlightenment, Rev-
olution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790
1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 195.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 192.
51
Wokler, Isaiah Berlins Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, 20. See Hans
Aarsleff, Vico and Berlin, London Review of Books 518 November 1981, 67.
52
See the polemical take on Voltaires deistic Philosophie de lhistoire (1765) in Auch eine
Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774) in which Herder argues
670
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
constellation, which has greatly contributed to Herders alleged ambassa-
dorship of the Sturm und Drang movement, are the Philosophers of Paris
(DKV 4:66)Montaigne, Bayle, Diderot, Voltaire, and, by implication,
Descartesall of whom Herder considers the ma tre penseurs of an era
denable as the great century of doubting and making waves. Doubt is
the latest fad of the leading French philosophers whom Herder dismisses
as radical skeptics, all doubters, pursuing universalist constructions in a
logocentric and appropriating approach to the history of the world
(DKV 4: 41, fn.10).
What Herder attacks here is the inherent dogmatism of radical skepti-
cism. By questioning everything that is doubtable, the skeptic tries to make
the opposite emerge: something indubitable that might serve as the secure
foundation for all theoretical inquiries. Hoping for the elimination of all
uncertainties in sensory perception, it is, of course, Descartes who suggests
in his Discourse on Method (1637) that there is good reason to doubt all
sense-dependent empirical knowledge in favor of analytical propositions
which, as mental processes, appear indubitable and thus universal. Inherent
in this famous argument, which anticipates Kants transcendental turn, are
two essentials, the doctrine of the constancy of human nature, which
extends to the discrediting of history as the realm of a contingent and
unscientic empirical world, and the corresponding liberation of man
from those very contingencies through an enlightened transition from
superstition to progress and social perfection. Clearly, Voltaires philosophy
of history is informed by this program and its optimistic prediction of the
inexorable progress of human knowledge and perfection.
53
Herder rails all his life against such constructivism and the associated
goal of philosophy towards system building and closure. Which brings up
the rhetorical question whether we can ever hope to arrive at certainty
through speculative processes, or whether all constitutivism, cut off from
validating experience (Erfahrung) does not amount, rather, to gments of
the imagination (Figmenta ex nullis ad nulla DKV 8: 343), given its
lack of empirical support.
54
for a pragmatic historiographical approach, repeating the earlier call for a transfor-
mation of philosophy into anthropology (DKV 1, 132).
53
For a comparison of Herders early philosophy of history with its Voltairian counter-
part see Michael Maurer, Die Geschichtsphilosophie des jungen Herder in ihremVerha lt-
nis zur Aufkla rung, in Johann Gottfried Herder 17441803, ed. Gerhard Sauder
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), 14155.
54
See Adler who emphasizes haptic perception over visual impression in Die Pra gnanz
des Dunklen, 11720.
671
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
It is here that Herders revolutionary contribution to modern language
philosophy comes into play. His thought has been explicated by Ju rgen
Trabant in a number of brilliant essays that focus on the specically human
dimension of language as an instrument of cognition and not just communi-
cation. Briey: while man communicates through sounds just like the ani-
mals,
55
it is the cognitive disposition to listen and respond, rather than act
without thinking to any stimulus that sets humans apart. Man is able and
is, in fact, called upon, to engage in a communicative discourse grounded
in an interpersonal disposition which Herder calls Besonnenheit, reexivity.
Thought, in other words, has a decisive auditory component as hearing
becomes the privileged sense.
56
It is in this context that Herders anthropological turn unfolds, as he
privileges sensual, particularly auditory perception, over intellectual intu-
ition in a reversal of mind over body. Being as the center of all certainty
(DKV 1:19) appears as the core proposition that has been rightly associated
with a transcendental philosophy of sensual perception.
57
As such it
informs Herders philosophy of language, which has had a decisive impact
on the linguistic turn of the late eighteenth century.
58
To gain a more
nuanced perspective on these liations and their impact on contemporary
thought, hermeneutics and sociological system theory, in particular, it
might be helpful to retrace briey Herders ambivalent relationship to tran-
scendentalism and his transformation of critical philosophy.
The central question in Kants critical enterprise is the famous
notion of synthetic propositions a priori.
59
While human knowledge is
always a function of ordering the variety of sense impressions, they can
only be ordered when principles are given that have been gained not from
experience but rationally and a priori. Herder vehemently disagrees with
this proposition by declaring it an extra-mundane fallacy. If there is any
given a priori, it is, in his view, not consciousness but Being which
appearssince his Essay on Being (1763/64)as the mantle into which we
55
Hence the opening sentence of Herders prize essay on language origin: Already as an
animal, the human being has language (DKV 1:697).
56
Ju rgen Trabant, Herders Discovery of the Ear, in: Herder Today: Contributions
from the International Herder Conference, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (Berlin: de Gruyter
1990), 34566. Also Herder and Language, in A Companion to the Works of Johann
Gottfried Herder, 117- 39.
57
Ulrich Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntnistheorie, 35.
58
See Ju rgen Trabant, Mithridates im Paradies. Kleine Geschichte des Sprachdenkens
(Munich: Beck, 2003), 21829.
59
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. G. Hateld (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 28, 31.
672
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
are literally wrapped (DKV 1:14). Yet it is not pure Being (Sein) that
Herder thematizes in its encompassing vastness and related emptiness. It is
Dasein, existence (or being-in-the-world in the Heideggerian sense)
60
that
attracts his attention. Dasein as the articulated form of Being (Seiendes)
becomes the focal point, centered on an ongoing interplay between individ-
ual and social spheres. To the extent that we exist with others (DKV
8:350), we compete on the basis of what appears sensible and meaningful
at any given moment. The fact that it changes constantly in reaction to
the ever shifting complexity of the world, only underscores the sequential
creation of meaning (Sinn). Such creation is not a stable, one-time affair,
but an ongoing self-referential process in that the construction of meaning
always refers to prior meaning. Put differently: to the extent that Dasein
appears as a function of competing individual and social forces, the tradi-
tional logocentric model in Western thought yields to the notion of an
emerging order, as meaning always changes in interaction with highly selec-
tive and complex sets of circumstances. It is not a given, much less an a
priori construct but a result.
61
Herder inverts here that highest point in Kants synthetic unity of
perception,
62
i.e., self-consciousness, by grounding it in a multitude of lan-
guage games within the horizon of an established community of speakers:
We are people, he asserts, before we become philosophers: hence we
already possess thought and language before we approach philosophy
(DKV 1:638). Language, in other words, is always already there as Witt-
genstein later suggests,
63
building implicitly on Herder who rst assumes
this position with reference to the circularity of any non-linguistic attempt
at foundational knowledge.
64
From this vantage point, Kants transcenden-
tal subject understandably appears as a hysteron proteron, a phantasm
or work of ction, conjured up through misuse of language whose
senselessness is documented by the very abstractions it claims to avoid.
60
Herder anticipates central tenets of Heideggers Fundamentalontologie with his con-
cept of facticity and the related analysis of forfeiture and forgetfulness of Being. See
Karl Menges, Seyn und Dasein, Sein und Zeit. Zu Herders Theorie des Subjekts, in
Herder Today, 13857.
61
See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 62f.
62
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2007), B 134.
63
See Michael Morton, Changing the Subject: Herder and the Reorientation of Philoso-
phy, in Herder Today, 161, 162. Despite numerous references, a detailed study on the
liations between Herder and Wittgenstein is still a desideratum.
64
See Herders critique of Su ssmilchs language theory: Without language man has no
reason, and without reason no language, etc. (DKV 1: 727).
673
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
Again, doing philosophy does not involve the synthetic creation of events.
All it can attempt to do is to clarify them. Hence its fundamentally analyti-
cal disposition: the only true method of philosophy is therefore the analyt-
ical one (DKV 1:424) which amounts to no more and no less than the
analysis of an already given within the multitude of creation (Scho pfungs-
vielfalt).
In this context Herders own reclamation of the Copernican metaphor
comes into focus as an inversion of philosophical priorities, specically as
a transformation of philosophy into anthropology (DKV 1:132). There
are two essential aspects in this reassignment: It is Being (Sein) that gives
human knowledge its boundaries and denes it as Seiendes; and it is the
task of analytic philosophy to determine these boundaries, thus preventing
speculation from becoming nonsensical (DKV 8:343). Hence the selective
dimension of analytic philosophy. It can be dened as a negative philoso-
phy, as the ultimate Socratic science, in recognition of the limits of
human knowledge (DKV 1:557) and its incorporation into the process of
knowing. As such it is, nally, a late-comer among philosophical schools.
In contrast to Kants prima philosophia, it is literally a last philosophy
in that it follows the empirical sciences with the goal of shedding light on
their inherently unclear predispositions (DKV 8:340).
What does that entail specically? It means, rst and foremost, that
such alternative thinking is interpretive rather than foundational. Specula-
tion, according to this model, does not create and ground things; rather,
things are given to us and are structured by our own experience. Such struc-
turing, furthermore, involves choices as experience is not only imbued with
sensual receptiveness; it also represents the capacity to create meaning
(Sinn) within a spatio-temporal continuum (DKV 8:361f). Dependent upon
being, it assures, recursively, the order of things (DKV 8:360) in terms of
a ceaseless re-interpretation within an ever shifting sea of contingencies.
Herder pursues this notion by adapting Leibniz concept of a moving
force (Kraft)
65
which propels Being to its human specicity as Dasein or
being-in-the-world (DKV 8:364). The important point here is the genera-
tive aspect: Humans are thrown into Being (Heideggers Geworfenheit), yet
it is up to each and everyone of us, literally, to generate our Dasein by
constantly reinterpreting it, lling it with meaning, thereby establishing
65
On the conceptual history cf. Robert E. Norton, Herders Concept of Kraft and the
Psychology of Semiotic Functions, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Academic Disciplines
and the Pursuit of Knowledge, ed. Wulf Koepke (Columbia: Camden House, 1996),
2231.
674
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
ourselves as individuals in a process of risky selectivity. Dasein, then,
requires an ongoing differentiating effort within an empirical community
of competitors: We are with others (DKV 8:350) in order to be, or rather,
become human. The central underlying activity in all of this is not some
foundational performance. What is at work, rather, is the creation of mean-
ing through enforced selectivity. We cannot help but choose as we are liter-
ally ooded by impressions from our surroundingswe stand in a
stream, ooded by the impressions of a rich and forceful communicative
world (DKV 8:385)and it is incumbent upon us to make sense of all the
variables of this innitely complex environment. Furthermore, complexity
is an open-ended experience that combines with contingency, that is,the
realization that there are always other possibilities to choose from. To that
extent, meaningful actions are always interactions based on critical analysis
and choice. The innite possibilities within the communicative context
remain vital.
Two interrelated aspects are important here: communication is not just
a linguistic process, but, more broadly, part of the semiotic structure of our
life world and the related reproduction of the social system. Furthermore,
in view of the innite recombinatory possibilities of the world, enforced
selection is part of the creation of meaning, which we can never escape, as
it is impossible not to choose within the ever self-replicating horizon of our
world.
The notion of an essential autoproductivity in this process has been
noted as one of the constants in Herders thinking.
66
It is stated para-
digmatically in this passage from the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of
Humankind: Man is the rst liberated one in creation; he stands upright.
The scale of good and evil, of falsehood and truth is suspended within him:
he can search and must choose (DKV 6:145f). Choice, then, involves inter-
pretive freedom in the creation of meaning which in turn can be dened as
the selective representation of complexity. This implies (a) that any mental
operation constitutes a selection that, as Luhmann argues, cannot avoid
bypassing other possibilities,
67
and (b) that the selection is self-referential
as its resultant meaning generates new meaning in an ongoing process of
choice. In doing so, man constitutes himself (DKV 7:153), Herder
asserts, because he does not follow some prior design, but acts freely, from
moment to moment, by choice. His constituting himself, therefore, is not
the result of some a priori mental activity; rather, it is the realization,
66
Hans Dietrich Irmscher, Commentary (DKV 7:818).
67
Luhmann, Social Systems, 60.
675
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
through enforced selectivity, of possibilities among others, based on the fact
that man has no choice but to choose.
It is revealing to see how Herder manages this point. As with his re-
jection of rational a priorism, here too he questions a bastion of Western
rationalism, namely the stigmatization of prejudicial ideas and actions.
Prejudices, of course, represent the antonym to enlightened propositions.
Yet Herder comes to their rescue by pointing not only to their hermeneuti-
cal unavoidability, but to their benets, which he sees in the everyday
establishment and stabilization of a healthy identity. Take, for example,
the Fragments On Recent German Literature (1767) where national
prejudices (Nationalvorurteile) appear as national assets (Nationalvor-
teile) that are instrumental in the evolution of a national spirit (National-
geist, SEW:178ff).
68
In making this point, Herder advances an argument
that will accompany all of his later writings aimed at the resurrection of a
national literature.
69
As he states in his early tract Another Philosophy of
History (1774), according to which the past is not simply to be imitated
but emulated in an effort at re-creating meaning in the image of the
Ancients, he notes: Prejudice is good in its time: it makes men happy. It
pushes peoples together at their center; making them stand rmer upon
their roots, more ourishing in their way, more virile, and also happier in
their inclinations and purposes. From which Herder concludes: The most
ignorant, prejudiced nation is in this sense often the rst: the age of dreamy
wanderings and hopeful journeys abroad is already sickness, atulence,
bloatedness, premonition of death.
70
The impact of this assessment on the development of modern thought
can hardly be overstated. It has had a direct bearing not only on Nietzsches
critique of Western metaphysics from Plato to Schopenhauer, but especially
on the hermeneutical debate, which took an important directional change
with Gadamers likeminded emphasis of the basic prejudicial structure of
cognition. Against the typical rejection of prejudices by the Enlightenment,
Gadamer emphasizes their unavoidability, as they open up the link to the
past which rationalism consistently has either overlooked or tried to
obscure. At issue is the question of understanding, which cannot occur on
68
Johann Gottfried Herder, Selected Early Works 17641767, 178f.
69
See Karl Menges, Particular Universals: Herder on National Literature, Popular Liter-
ature, and World Literature, in: A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder,
189213.
70
Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writ-
ings, trans. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
2004), 29f.
676
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
the assumption of interpretive neutrality because we are always involved in
what Gadamer calls an ongoing process of effective history (Wirkungsge-
schichte). It inuences the dialogue between the interpreter and the text or
past event he seeks to comprehend. Predispositions and prejudices thus
mark the hermeneutical situation into which we are embedded. Yet where
traditional historicism adheres to the Cartesian notion that the reader is
able to assume neutrality in interpretation, Gadamer posits a culturally
mediated, preexisting structure of perception that is in play in each process
of understanding. Its inescapability, which has been missed by the whole of
Western tradition, restricts the interpreter to a given that renders the notion
of objective knowledge obsolete. Echoing the Herderian claim that
knowledge can never be separated from its constituting components,
Gadamer asserts that interpretation must not be thought of so much as an
action of subjectivity, but as the entering into an event of transmission in
which past and present are constantly mediated.
71
As we are trying to
understand a text or occurrence, our efforts are not determined by conven-
tional concepts of scientic knowledge; rather we are always already
engaged in a process that Gadamer calls presencing (Vergegenwa rtigung)
in a constant merging of horizons, as here too the issue of meaning and
its adequate interpretation is in play. Prior readings always affect our most
recent one, which is to say that it is not so much our judgments as it is our
prejudgments that constitute our being.
72
Self-reference, then, and an interest-driven, prejudicial stabilization of
identity appear as mutually reinforcing faculties. And Sinn created through
the individual force of selective reexivity (Besonnenheit) denotes an
evolutionary process that reacts to our life world no longer with a prescrip-
tive but with a dialogical, hermeneutical disposition. Sinn and Besonnen-
heit not only dene man existentially and morally, they are foundational to
all ancillary activities as they precede thought and its articulation in lan-
guage. Herder states that man, put in the state of reexivity which denes
his identity, . . . has invented language. Or, more precisely, as reexivity
involves the selection of meaning as a specically human activity, that
reexivity characterizes man and his species just as his invention of lan-
guage (DKV 1:722). It is Besonnenheit, i.e., the ability to create Sinn, that
selects and engages recursively the other in an ongoing dialogical fusion
of horizons. Hence Herders maxim: Whatever remains beyond compre-
hension for you, leave it; but do not believe that what is comprehensible in
71
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tu bingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1975), 274f.
72
Ibid., 261.
677
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
things can be created and carried into them through your opining
and thinking (DKV 8:390). Against the dogmatism of the latter, Herder
envisions the communicative paradigm of recognition (Anerkennung) and
individual choice which denotes a process of endless selection and interpre-
tation. To the extent that it denes mans social disposition, it also implies
self-determination as a specically human capacity. As he transcends mere
biological constraints, man gains a greater view imbued with more
light, which, while pointing to an alternative form of Enlightenment,
means: No longer an infallible machine within the mechanics of nature,
he becomes for himself the purpose and end of the process (DKV 1, 717).
Therein rests the ultimate meaning of humanity, with Besonnenheit as its
hermeneutical, self-referential tool.
III. HERDER AND THE NATURAL
HISTORY OF MANKIND
Despite the monumental biographical and editorial contributions by Haym
and Suphan
73
in the late nineteenth century, the history of Herder scholar-
ship is full of appropriations that range from early nationalist (Wilhelmin-
ian) to Fascist, Marxist, and anti-Semitic readings. All of these converge in
creating selective interpretations in which the textual evidence is reduced to
the afrmation of preconceived ideological positions. Such appropriations,
however, are a dying breed, as the new interest in Herder is complemented
by new editorial insights, resulting in the DKV and the Pross editions men-
tioned above. Both editions will serve as markers for future scholarship,
not only in regard to Herders intellectual positioning in the eighteenth cen-
tury, but to his anticipatory potential for the contemporary critical debate.
While the 10-volume Frankfurt edition represents an impressive, more lexi-
cographic team effort, Prosss selective editions follow a painstaking arche-
ological approach, resulting in the excavation of sources to whom Herder
as the prototypical omnivorous reader is directly or, more frequently,
implicitly indebted.
74
73
Rudolf Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken, 2 vols. (Berlin: Gaertner,
1877, 1885). Bernhard Suphan, ed., Herders Sa mmtliche Werke (Berlin: Weidmannsche
Buchhandlung, 188793).
74
See e.g., the impressive author index in Arnolds review and his characterization of
Prosss methology: His commentary derives not from the explication of particular pas-
sages but rather from the fundamental texts that Herder used almost like documentation
[Unterlagen] from whose current of writing and thought he adopted his own contrasting
678
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
Some of the best recent treatment of Herders engagement with natural
science can be found in the essays of Wolfgang Pross and in the annotations
and commentary to his monumental edition of Herders Ideen. Pross has
been able to state his case in English in a contribution to an authoritative
series on political thought, but the truly notable edition of Herders selected
works, published over the course of the past quarter century, has been vir-
tually ignored in the English-speaking world.
75
The texts selected by Pross
for his Herder edition, their studied arrangement within the volumes, the
matchless commentaries, and the extensive postscripts to the volumes, are
ideally suited to convey to readers unfamiliar with the larger scope of Herd-
ers life and letters a deeply informed account of the mans rise to the peak
of his powers.
While to focus on an edition of selected works brings with it the perils
of bias and omission, the comprehensiveness of Prosss commentaries
enables discerning readers to navigate the inevitable pitfalls. The editor is
to be commended for making himself available to critical analysis by shar-
ing every signicant shred of evidence dug up in decades of painstaking
research. The singularity and sharpness of his focus, not to speak of his
audacity in challenging two centuries of scholarship, initially set him apart
from the mainstream. To be sure, Pross by now has long and widely been
recognized as having provided a major thrust and new direction to the
ongoing rehabilitation of Herder. Of course, the decision to focus in this
section of a joint Herder assessment on the issues stressed by Pross must
not obscure the abundance of Herder scholarship published in Germany
and elsewhere over the same time span.
76
Taken as a whole, however, the
Pross edition of selected works by Herder, leading up to the Ideen as the
quintessential expression of his thought, must be reckoned with by anyone
wishing to determine Herders place with respect to the European Enlight-
enment and Romanticism. Needless to say that in that determination, Herd-
ers later writings as well as those earlier ones not included by Pross but
available in other editions must be considered.
rendition [U

berschreibung] (Pross, III /2, 11). Gu nter Arnold, Herders Geschichtsphi-

losophie und ihre Quellen, review of Pross Vol. III/1&2, 2002, IASLonline, 22.04.2003,
2.
75
Wolfgang Pross, Naturalism, Anthropology, and Culture, in The Cambridge History
of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21847.
76
For regularly updated bibliographical information and most recent scholarly assess-
ments see the biennial Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook (1992 ff.) and the just pub-
lished Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder.
679
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
Testimony to the magnitude of the Pross accomplishment came in the
insightful review of Volume III by Gu nter Arnold, the editor of Herders
letters and a scholar widely recognized as a foremost authority in the eld.
77
Arnolds understanding of Volume III as by far exceeding, in terms of
extent and scholarly yield, all editions of the Ideen heretofore published
(2), his explication of the editors mastery of Herders documented as well
as unacknowledged sources, many of them not mentioned previously any-
where in the Herder literature (23), his highlighting of Herders deep inter-
est in natural science as featured throughout the Pross edition (34), and
his recognition of the Pross Postscriptthe grand essay, Natur und
Geschichte in Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Mensch-
heit (III/1, 8391041)as comprehensively demonstrating the anthropo-
logical premises of Herders philosophy of history as well as outlining his
inuence during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arnold makes up
for some of the supercial comments that greeted Vol. III upon its appear-
ance in 2002.
78
Arnolds stated awareness that further thought needs to be
given to the religious dimensions of Herders conceptualizations and to the
appropriate positioning of the great Enlightenment gure in the history of
philosophy (5), is well taken, as are his repeated references to Volumes I
and II of the Pross edition.
If there is one theme that runs through both volumes as selected,
arranged, and elucidated by Pross, it is that of Herders sustained commit-
ment to a world view emancipated from the outset from metaphysical fet-
ters and all manner of mystical impediments. Herders vision of the human
condition, Pross argues, was shaped by his early and lasting awareness of
the inextricable connectedness of body and soul, expressed strikingly in the
Plastik commentary of Volume II regarding Herders debate with Moses
Mendelssohn in 1769: that the concept of the soul as such becomes think-
able only on the basis of the physical form of appearance (Vol. II, 985).
Pross nds here an initial anthropological approach that progresses from
the earlier, brief excursion of the young Herder into the realm of taste,
entitled Is the Beauty of the Body a Messenger of the Beauty of the
Soul?
79
The selections of Vol. I, the Essay on the History of Lyrical Poetry
77
Arnold, 15.
78
See Alexander Kosenina, Niemals, niemals nur Tinte sein! in Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung Nr. 59 (March 11, 2003), 38.
79
DKV 1, 13548, 9951000; published rst in 1766 in a Riga journal, the text is now
available in English in Gregory Moore, Selected Writings on Aesthetics: Johann Gottfried
Herder (Princeton : Princeton University Press 2006), 3140.
680
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
(1766), the incomplete second edition of the famous Fragmente (1768), the
Travel Journal of the Year 1769, the Ossian Correspondence (1773) and
the Shakespeare Essay (1773) included in Von deutscher Art und Kunst,
the Essay on Being (1763/64), and the notorious Pamphlet entitled
This, too, a History of the Formation of Humankind (1774), gathered
together under the title Herder und der Sturm und Drang go, in their
origins and effects, far beyond this very limited, often overestimated move-
ment, as Arnold observed. The fact that Pross decided to include the
revised but incomplete second edition of the Fragmente, written in 1768
but withheld from publication during Herders lifetime, is highly symptom-
atic. For Pross the revisions must almost be regarded as Anti-Hamann
as they constitute an early manifestation of a theme that runs through the
entire edition (Vol. I, 730). Not only by his selections but also by repeatedly
breaking at critical points the strict chronological arrangement, Pross pur-
sues his objective of presenting the Herder who, in his view, is least known
and who urgently merits to be more widely appreciated. So, for example in
Volume I, by placing the very early Essay on Being after the 1773 selec-
tions from Von deutscher Art und Kunst, in order to set up his presentation
of the much debated rst Herder text on the philosophy of history of 1774,
Pross is able to state the theme that dominates all the texts of this volume
(Vol. I, 846).
While the richly documented Postscript to Volume I (coauthored
with Pierre Penisson) ruled out religious reconstructions of the oeuvre (Vol.
I, 87882) and forcefully repudiated the bending as far back as 1927 of
Herder and Goethe in the direction of a Counter-Enlightenment,
80
the
Postscript to Volume II (11281229) guides the reader through the next
essential stages, which in turn facilitates an appreciation of the culminating
presentation of Herders Ideen in Volume III 1&2. The carefully structured
Postscript to Volume II must be regarded as an essential formulation of
the editors objective in the entire edition. It highlights the themes of the
selections and explicates the reasons for their inclusion and arrangement in
the volume. Pross describes the psycho-physiological double-constitution
of the human being as the center of the discourse, present in the entire
oeuvre from the earliest writings to those left unnished at the time of
Herders death. Suspended between cosmocentrism and anthropocen-
trism, the Herder of Volume II comes to terms with the objective auton-
80
See Pross, Vol. I, 896, n. 91: Some interpreters, so exemplarily Franz Koch 1927,
have bent Herders and Goethes oeuvre in the direction of a radical Counter-Enlighten-
ment.
681
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
omy of mechanics in a closed scientic system and the subjectivity of
experience, both having in common the momentous twin elements eman-
cipation from God and enhanced valuation of nature (Vol. II, 1130
31). Again, the arrangement of the selections drives the thesis of Herders
anthropological turn in terms of his innovative aesthetics linked to a phi-
losophy of history that aims at the ultimate symbiosis of the cultural and
the natural sciences.
Given the enormous range of writings to choose from (as evidenced by
the 33-volume Suphan edition, with the Nachlass not yet exhausted), the
selections of Volume II, as far as Pross is concerned, present the core com-
ponents of the essential Herder. The centerpiece of Volume II is Herders
famous 1772 prize essay On the Origins of Language, a text which also
played a central role in Prosss early scholarly career.
81
Richly informed by
that scholarship, Pross assigns the Origins of Language a crucial role in
tying the components of Volume II together. Prefaced by the brief selections
of the late 1760s about three authors (Wolff, Baumgarten, and Leibniz),
which show Herder as an author in the eld of the ne arts, who has
already outgrown the school of philosophy, the unfortunately withheld
Fourth Grove of his Critical Forests, and the explosive sketch On the
Sense of Touch, the language essay sets up the four grand pieces docu-
menting Herders anthropological turn.
82
Each entirely suited to stand on
its own, the essays Sculpture (1770, 1778), On Cognition and Sensibility
(1774, 1775, 1778), On the Lie attached to Man at Birth (1777), and
God: Some Conversations (1787) bring light to the less-explored dimen-
sions of Herder that have intrigued the newer Herder scholarship of the
past quarter century.
83
Entitled Nature and History in Herders Reections on the Philos-
ophy of the History of Humankind, the Pross monograph appended to
the text of the Ideen as a Nachwort merits detailed attention. The extensive
and meticulous documentation of all the claims made in its two-hundred
pages makes this the culminating formulation of Prosss construal of
Herder (Pross III/1, 8391041). Calling for familiarity with the texts, anno-
tation, and explication of Volumes I and II, the Postscript presents, to begin
with, the themes of the eight chapters that will justify his radical new read-
81
See Wolfgang Pross, ed., Johann Gottfried Herder. Abhandlung u ber den Ursprung der
Sprache. Text, Materialien, Kommentar (Munich: Hanser 1978).
82
For English translations of the Monument to Baumgarten and the rst and fourth
Groves of the Critical Forests see Moore 2006, 4150 and 51290.
83
See Adler, Die Pra gnanz des Dunklen and Ju rgen Brummack, ed., DKV 4, Commentary
97889.
682
Zammito, Menges, and Menze Herder
ing and lead to a fuller understanding of Herders incomplete magnumopus
(83944).
The rst three of these chapters then review the prerequisites in the
young Herders day for a philosophy of history rooted in anthropology and
historical methodology (84556), the signicance of his rst publication in
the eld (the radical pamphlet of 1774) and the resulting paradox of an
ephemeral humanity as the ultimate goal of nature (86481). In the fourth
chapter of his guidance of the reader towards a fresh appreciation of Herd-
ers signicance Pross presents Herders New Approach. This encom-
passesnotwithstanding all lip service to a faith in Providencea vision
of the world and history that runs diametrically counter to the established
dogmatic faith in a divine guidance of the universe extending into the life
of the individual who prots from this divinity (881). Chapter ve (The
Formation of Criteria: Herder and the Aporias of Tradition, 90584) pres-
ents the traditional barriers in the way of Herders grand undertaking of
an ideally new vision of nature. Determined to challenge them head-on,
Herder nds himself engaged in a difcult process of formulating criteria
that will substantiate his reections. Chapters six and seven, briey summa-
rizing and discussing the high points of the twenty books comprising the
Ideen, must be read in the context of their thorough introduction, annota-
tion, and interpretation in the remarkable Commentary volume (Pross III/
2, 7908). The commentaries of the rst four books of Part I bring together
and analyze the vast range of sources in natural science and history that
informed Herders account of Planet Earths emergence as the dwelling,
shaping him and being shaped in turn. Whereas Pross nds these Books
clearly in line with his basic thesis, Book 5 is characterized as problemati-
cal as its purely philosophical and speculative character, [is] running
counter to the empirical approach as it almost entirely foregoes a precise
presentation of material fact (Pross III/2, 309). The extensive page by page
commentary leaves no doubt that Herders overall purpose would have
been better served had Book 5 not been included in the volume at all (Pross
III/2, 30922). Hence, Book 6, with its survey of human expansion across
various climate zones could follow directly upon Book 4, avoiding the
exposure to the criticisms of lacking philosophical competence (Kant) and
theological absurdity in the confession to Spinoza (Jacobi) brought about
by the speculative glances into the hereafter (309). Though Pross nds
that the book [. . .] in the light of the contemporary discussion is signi-
cantly more rational than it appears to be [. . .], he concludes that for the
time being [. . .] it retarded in part a convincing impact of the entire Part
683
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS OCTOBER 2010
I and predisposed the reception of the subsequent Parts of the Ideen
(320). The concentrated effort by Pross to bring out in his commentary the
natural history component of the Ideen, which would soon be central; to
Kants devastating assault on Herders philosophical competence, sets the
tone for the entire commentary volume. With the appearance of Kants
damaging reviews of the Ideen in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in
1785,
84
Herder recognized the critical Kant as his opponent and his
writing becomes increasingly polemical.
85
The Otto/Zammito Conference volume (of the Weimar Conference on
Herders Ideen) appeared just before the publication of Volume III 1 & 2
in 2002. It anticipates many of the issues addressed by Pross and one can
only speculate howthe contributors might have reacted had the rich harvest
of his research been available to them before the conference. Nevertheless,
the religious dimensions of Herders oeuvre as exemplied in the Ideen
remain essential to his legacy.
86
The discussion of Parts III and IV of the
Ideen in Prosss Postscript, Chapter 7, entitled The Historical Evolution
of Humankind in the Third and Fourth Volume of the Ideen: Spinoza versus
Kant guides the reader through one of the earliest and most encompassing
texts of world history and communicates the incompleteness of the entire
project, by pointing to the outline of the projected fth Part contained in
the Appendix (100621, 115758). In his discussion of Part III Pross
alerts the reader to the vital importance of Book 15 in mitigating the dam-
age done by the, in his view, awed Book 5 (Pross III/I, 101011).
Chapter 8 of the Postscript discussing The Continued Life of the
Ideen: A Retrospect provides invaluable insights and references for anyone
interested in Herders reception and inuence (102141). The fact that
there are other readings of Herders works, and more yet to come, does not
diminish Prosss achievement. Rather, it conrms Herders rank among the
very few for whom there is no last word.
Rice University, the University of California at Davis, and Iona Col-
lege.
84
See n. 12: Kant, Recensionen von J.G. Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit, 1903ff.
85
See Ralf Simon, Das kurze Kapitel zur Sprachphilosophie in Herders Ideen, in Vom
Selbstdenken. Aufkla rung und Aufkla rungskritik in Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Regine Otto and John H. Zammito (Heidelberg: Syn-
chron 2001), 14556.
86
See Arnold, Wisbert, and Wolfes in Johann Gottfried Herder. Aspekte seines Lebensw-
erkes, ed. Martin Kessler and Volker Leppin (Berlin: de Gruyter 2005), 38793, 39799;
35662; 296307. In the end the Otto/Zammito and Kessler/Leppin volumes must be
seen as necessary complements to the Pross effort.
684