Johann gottfried von herder biography of christopher

This, then, is the sense in which the objection is correct; Herder does indeed lack a "political theory" of these sorts. Following a trip to Ukraine , Herder wrote a prediction in his diary Journal meiner Reise im Jahre that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity and rot away, while the eastern European nations would retain their religion and their idealism, and would this way become the power in Europe.

He talked of the "national animal" and of the " physiology of the whole national group," which organism was topped by the "national spirit," the "soul of the volk. But that is emphatically not Herder's idea -- for that would amount to exactly the sort of assimilation of the thought in a text to one's own which he is above all concerned to avoid.

This process was dependent on language. Although himself an unsociable person, Herder influenced his contemporaries greatly. At the same time, he and Goethe experienced a personal split.

Johann gottfried von herder biography of christopher: Johann Gottfried von Herder was a

But that is again quite deliberate, given his non-cognitivism in ethics, and his rejection of such theories as both false and harmful. Moreover, after much wrestling with the subject, Herder eventually developed a particularly compelling version of narrow expressivism. Herder bases this further claim largely on empirical grounds e.

This, strictly speaking, frees the theory from some common characterizations and objections e. Herder's patriotism bordered at times upon national pantheism , demanding of territorial unity as, "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions" and sounding an even deeper call:.

The theory is important in its own right.

Johann Gottfried von Herder | German Philosopher, Poet

For example, he has a general commitment to empiricism and against apriorism in philosophy which leads him to avoid familiar sorts of apriorist arguments in philosophy; and a commitment to non-cognitivism in ethics which leads him to refrain from familiar sorts of cognitivist arguments in ethics. Second, and more important, they do so by presenting in an attractive light good moral examples for people to emulate: "still better, through good examples.

Let us call the former position narrow expressivism and the latter broad expressivism. Consequently, interpretation will essentially involve pinning down word-usages. His father was a school teacher and he grew up in humble circumstances. But whereas Spinoza characterized it as substance , Herder prefers to characterize it as force , or primal force.

Biography [ edit ]. At this period he also began a lifelong friendship with the irrationalist philosopher Hamann. Germans did not have a nation-state until the nineteenth century. Why does any special need arise here? It might seem at first sight that his two doctrines themselves already answer this question in favor of narrow expressivism because of their reference to "language" and "words.

Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity".

On the contrary, he insists that history is governed by efficient causation and that we should try to discover as far as possible the specific ways in which it is so. JSTOR There is also an occasional counterstrand in which he argues for a deeper unity in standards of beauty across historical periods and cultures e. This theory is scattered through a large number of works.

This line of thought might seem at odds with his first one forces. Herder was ennobled by the Elector-Prince of Bavaria late in life, which added the prefix "von" to his last name. Herder presented formal defiance of the age of reason and Enlightenment.