HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON German poet and philosopher, was born at Mohrungen, East Prussia, on Aug. of poor parents. The hardships of his early years drove him to introspection and to communion with nature, and thus favoured a more than proportionate development of the sentimental and poetic side of his mind. In 1762 he went to Konigsberg to study medicine, but soon, with the help of friends, he abandoned it for theology and philosophy. At Konigsberg he came under the influence of Kant and was stimulated to fresh critical enquiry by his revolutionary ideas in philosophy. To Kant's lectures and conversations he also owed something of his large interest in cosmological and anthropological problems. He was still more influenced by J. G. Hamann, "the northern Mage," a vague, incoherent, yet gifted writer from whom Herder acquired some of his strong feeling for the naïve element in poetry, and for the earliest developments of national literature. Even before he went to Konigsberg he had begun to write verse; his first published writings were occasional poems and reviews for the Konigsbergische Zeitung.
On leaving the university Herder became assistant master at the cathedral school of Riga, and a few years later, assistant pastor. In 1767 he published his first considerable work, Fragmente uber die neuere deutsche Literatur, which secured the interest of Less ing. From this time he continued to pour forth a number of critical writings on literature, art, etc. His bold ideas, which were a great advance even on Lessing's doctrines, excited hostile criticism, which took the form of aspersions on his religious orthodoxy, and he resolved to leave Riga. He contemplated at this time a radical reform of social life in Livonia, which (after the example of Rous seau) he thought to effect by better educational methods, and he visited France, England, Holland, etc., to study their systems of education. During his voyage to France he first shaped his idea of the genesis of primitive poetry, and of the gradual evolution of humanity. But he was turned aside from these plans of prac tical social reform by an offer of a post as travelling tutor and chaplain to the young prince of Eutin-Holstein. His new duties led him to Strasbourg, where he met the young Goethe, on whose poetical development he exercised so potent an influence. (See GOETHE.) At Darmstadt he made the acquaintance of Caroline Flachsland, his future wife. He soon (17 71) threw up his tutor ship for an appointment as court preacher and member of the consistory at Biickeburg where he encountered opposition from the orthodox clergy and their followers. His health continued poor, and he suffered from a fistula in the eye. Pecuniary difficulties delayed his marriage and added to his depression.
He was attracted by the poetry of the north, more particularly Percy's Reliques, the poems of "Ossian" (the genuineness of which he did not doubt) and the works of Shakespeare. Under these influences he broke with classicism, and became the pioneer of the new Sturm and Drang movement. He inspired a band of young writers at Darmstadt and Frankfort, including Goethe, who in a journal of their own sought to diffuse the new ideas, and finally brought about the release of German literature from the imitation of French classicism.
Herder had married in 1773. Three years later he obtained through Goethe's influence the post of general superintendent and court preacher at Weimar, where he passed the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the society of Goethe, Wieland, Jean Paul (who came to Weimar in order to be near Herder), and the patronage of the court. Yet the social atmosphere of the place did not suit him ; his personal relations with Goethe again and again became embittered. This, added to ill-health, intensified his natural irri tability, and the history of his later Weimar days is a rather dreary chronicle. At Weimar he made his collection of popular poetry, Stimmen der Volker in Liedern (1778-79) ; his translation of the Spanish romances of the Cid (1805) ; and wrote his important but unfinished work on Hebrew poetry, Vom Geist der hebraischen Poesie (1782-83) ; and his opus magnum, the Ideen zur Phi losophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (4 vols., 1784-91). To wards the close of his life he occupied himself, like Lessing, with philosophy and theology. The boldness of some of his ideas cost him some valuable friendships, as that of Jacobi, Lavater and even of his early teacher Hamann. He died on Dec. 18, 1803.
I. In the region of poetry Herder sought to persuade his coun trymen, both by example and precept, to return to a natural and spontaneous form of utterance. His own poetry has but little value ; Herder was a skilful verse-maker but hardly a creative poet: He was most successful in his translation of popular song, in which he shows a rare sympathetic insight into the feelings and ideas of peoples as unlike as Greenlanders and Spaniards, Indians and Scots. In the Fragmente fiber die neuere deutsche Literatur (1 767) he aims at nationalizing German poetry and freeing it from ex traneous 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 kind of "proteus among the people, which changes its form according to language, manners, habits, according to temperament and climate, nay, even according to the accent of different nations." This fact of the idiosyncrasy of national poetry he illustrated with great fulness in the case of Homer, the nature of whose works he was one of the first to elucidate, the Hebrew poets, and the poetry of the north as typi fied in "Ossian." This same idea of necessary relation to national character and circumstance is also applied to dramatic poetry, and more especially to Shakespeare, whose essentially modern and Teutonic character Herder brings out.
2. The views on art in Herder's Kritische Walder (1769), Plastik (1778), etc., are valuable as a correction of the excesses into which reverence for Greek art had betrayed Winckelmann and Lessing, by help of his fundamental idea of national idiosyncrasy. He argued against the setting up of classic art as an unchanging type, universally valid, and emphasized the excellences of Gothic art. Beyond this, he pleaded the cause of painting as a distinct art, which Lessing in his desire to mark off the formative arts from poetry and music had confounded with sculpture. He re garded painting as less real than sculpture, because lacking the third dimension of space, and admitting of much greater freedom of treatment. Herder appreciated the early German painters, and helped to awaken the modern interest in Durer.
3. By his (iber den Ursprung der Sprache (I772), Herder laid the rude foundations of the science of comparative philology and of the ultimate nature and origin of language. Directed against the supposition of a divine communication of language to man, it argues that speech is a necessary outcome of that special arrange ment of mental forces which distinguishes man, and more particu larly of his habits of reflection. "If," Herder says, "it is incom prehensible 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." 4. Herder also laid the foundations of a comparative science of religion and mythology. He rejected Hume's notion that re ligion sprang out of the fears of primitive men, in favour of the theory that it represents man's first attempts to explain phenomena. He thus associated religion with mythology and primitive poetry. Later forms of religion owed their vitality to their embodiment of the deep-seated moral feelings of our common humanity. His ap preciation of Christianity rested on a belief in its essential human ity. In later life he found his way to a speculative basis for his religious beliefs.
5. Herder's masterpiece, the Ideen zur Philosophie der Ge schichte, aims at explaining human development in connection with the nature of man's physical environment. Man is viewed as a part of nature, and his widely differing forms of development as strictly natural processes. Herder's philosophy thus stands in contrast to the anthropology of Kant, which regards human development as the gradual manifestation of a growing faculty of rational free will. The Ideen shows Herder as an evolutionist after the manner of Leibnitz, and not after that of more modern evolutionists. The lower forms of life prefigure mar, in unequal degrees of imperfec tion ; they exist for his sake, but do not represent necessary ante cedent conditions of human existence. The genetic method is ap plied to varieties of man, not to man as a whole. Herder in his provokingly tentative way of thinking comes near to ideas pro pounded by Spencer and Darwin. His account of the first dawn ings of culture, and of the ruder oriental civilizations, is marked by genuine insight, but his account of the development of classic culture is less skilful.
6. Of Herder's properly metaphysical speculations little needs to be said. He had no accurate knowledge either of Spinoza, whose monism he advocated, or of Kant, whose critical philosophy he fiercely attacked. Herder's Spinozism, set forth in Vom Erken nen and Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778), is much less logically conceived than Lessing's. It is the religious aspect which attracts him, the presentation in God of an object which at once satisfies the feelings and the intellect. With respect to his attacks on the critical philosophy in the Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799), it is easy to understand how his concrete ever alive to the unity of things, instinctively rebelled against that analytic separation of the mental processes which Kant at tempted. However crude this critical investigation, it helped to direct philosophic reflection to the unity of mind, and so to develop post-Kantian speculation. Herder was much attracted by Schell ing's early writings, but appears to have disliked Hegelianism be cause of the atheism it seemed to involve. In the Kalligone (I 800), a work directed against Kant's Kritik der Urteilskra f t, Herder argues for the close connection of the beautiful and the good. To his mind the content of art, which he conceived as human feeling and human life in its completeness, was much more valu able than the form, and so he naturally emphasized the moral ele ment in art. Thus his theoretic opposition to the Kantian aes thetics is but the reflection of his practical opposition to the f orm idolatry of the Weimar poets.