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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2017
Johann Gottfried Herder was both a philosopher and an active Lutheran minister, who constantly faced the difficult task of negotiating in his own work and life, in his public speeches and activities, the relationship to be established between reason and religion, both their limits and the promises they carry for each other. This article examines Herder's writings on language and reason, religion, myth, and history with the intention of putting together an account of religion and reason along lines that emphasize their continuity with each other. I argue that, in Herder's view, religion and religious education can play an active role in forming the disposition of individuals to humanity, in cultivating both their freedom and their capacity to empathize with others and love them, thus helping to materialize the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment.
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3 Edward Robert Norton has shown that Berlin's notion of the Counter-Enlightenment is the result of a sweeping and historically misplaced generalization, as well as of a rather superficial reading of Herder. This was imported into the Anglo-Saxon culture from nationalistic German writers such as Rudolf Unger, who were active at the beginning of the twentieth century ( Norton, Robert Edward, “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 [2007]: 635–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar). While Norton may give an exaggerated account of Berlin's understanding of Herder (see, for example, Lestition, Steven, “Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment? A Response to Robert Norton,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 [2007]: 659–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar), his argument makes us aware that ideas can be present in ways that radically diverge from the arguments and intentions of their authors.
4 Wolin, Richard, introduction to The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism—from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. As Sonia Sikka contends, it is true that, despite the lack of an explicit use of the idea of race, there are some aspects of Herder's thought that might make possible the association of his view of culture with racist thinking (Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference, 146). However, even under these circumstances, as both Spencer and Sikka are willing to admit, there are many valuable ideas in Herder that could enrich liberal and democratic political theory. To ignore them because of the presence of one strain of thought would be like saying that we should ignore Kant because of his racist views (Spencer, Herder's Political Thought, 16).
5 The criticism of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution, with the aim of correcting their excesses without giving up their ideals, reflects a larger characteristic of the German Enlightenment. Hegel, for example, in his Philosophy of History, while commending the French Revolution for first trying to give institutional expression to the ideals of freedom and equality, also thinks that its endeavor was incomplete (and as a result ended in violence) since it did not manage to situate its institutional reforms in a larger spiritual and cultural context.
6 Herder, Johann Gottfried, This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Forster, Michael N. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 321Google Scholar.
7 Herder, Johann Gottfried, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. Churchill, T. (London, 1800), 237Google Scholar, available online at archive.org.
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17 Christopher Bultmann, “Herder's Biblical Studies,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, 237.
18 Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 103.
19 Ulrich Gaier, “Myth, Mythology, New Mythology,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, 173, 178.
20 Herder, Johann Gottfried, Ideas toward a Philosophy of History, in Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, ed. Bunge, Marcia (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1993), 50, 54Google Scholar.
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23 F. M. Barnard, “The Hebrews and Herder's Political Creed,” 542.
24 As James Schmidt has argued (introduction to What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996]Google Scholar), the debate around the meaning of the Enlightenment was not exclusively a French affair. German thinkers and philosophers also engaged themselves in the debate on this topic. Regrettably, Schmidt does not include Herder in his account of the German discussion about the meaning and role of the Enlightenment.
25 Herder, Johann Gottfried, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, in Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. Barnard, F. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 228Google Scholar.
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27 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 100.
28 Ibid., 80.
29 Johann Gottfried Herder, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal, in Philosophical Writings, 9.
30 Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, 256.
31 Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, in Herder on Social and Political Thought, 128.
32 Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, 265.
33 Michael Morton argues that, for Herder, the “linguistic construction of reality, and thus also of human nature, occurs preeminently as a process of construction of metaphors” ( Morton, Michael, “Herder and the Reorientation of Philosophy,” in Herder Today: Contributions from the International Herder Conference, ed. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990], 162Google Scholar).
34 Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, 264–65.
35 Ibid., 264.
36 Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Diversity, 213.
37 Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 157.
38 Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, 270.
39 Ibid., 270, 304–5.
40 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Love and Selfhood,” in Against Pure Reason, 114.
41 Herder, Ideas towards a Philosophy of History, in Against Pure Reason, 83.
42 Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, in Herder on Social and Political Thought, 272.
43 Ibid., 268–69.
44 Herder, Ideas for a Philosophy of History, 269.
45 See Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Diversity, 181 and Spencer, Herder's Political Thought, 53.
46 As Bakhtin explains, a person participates in the dialogue “wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium” ( Bakhtin, M. M., Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
47 Herder, Ideas toward a Philosophy of History, 50–53.
48 Ibid., 51, 53.
49 Ibid.
50 Johann Gottfried Herder, On Human Immortality, in Against Pure Reason, 60–61.
51 Czobor-Lupp, Imagination in Politics, 152.
52 Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 143.
53 Herder, This Too a Philosophy of History, 342–44.
54 Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 263.
55 Ibid., 255.
56 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 83; This Too a Philosophy of History, 335.
57 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 65. He uses a similar contrast to describe the human condition in his Essay on the Origin of Language, 128–33.
58 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 65–66.
59 Ibid., 72.
60 Ibid., 67.
61 Ibid., 71.
62 Ibid.
63 Herder, This Too a Philosophy of History, 319–21.
64 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 71.
65 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 72–73.
66 Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 253–56.
67 Ibid., 103–4.
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69 Herder, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul, in Philosophical Writings, 188.
70 Ibid., 196.
71 Johann Gottfried Herder, “On the Influence of the Belles Lettres on the Higher Sciences,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, 336.
72 Johann Gottfried Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, in Against Pure Reason, 165.
73 Gerrish, B. A., “The Secret Religion of Germany: Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 4 (1987): 437–55Google Scholar.
74 That is, the idea that religion is rational only if it conforms to a geometrical-type deductive reasoning ( Crowe, Benjamin D., “Beyond Theological Rationalism: The Contemporary Relevance of Herder's Psychology of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 21 [2009]: 258CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
75 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Letters to Jacobi,” in Against Pure Reason, 122–23; and Herder, God, Some Conversations, in Against Pure Reason, 129.
76 Johann Gottfried Herder, Concerning Religion, Doctrines, and Practices, in Against Pure Reason, 92, 95, 97.
77 Quoted in German in Koepke, “Truth and Revelation in Herder's Theological Writings,” 145.
78 Koepke, “Truth and Revelation in Herder's Theological Writings,” 145–46.
79 Herder, Johann Gottfried, “On the Term and the Concept ‘Humanity,’” in On World History: An Anthology, ed. Adler, Hans and Menze, Ernest A. (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997), 106Google Scholar.
80 Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 494–99, 585.
81 Arnd Bohm, “Herder on Politics,” in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, 286–87.
82 Herder, Journal of My Voyage, 92–93.
83 F. M. Barnard, “The Hebrews and Herder's Political Creed,” 545–46; Dallmayr, Fred, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 149Google Scholar, with Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 583–85.
84 Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 104.
85 Johann Gottfried Herder, “On the Gospels,” in Against Pure Reason, 183.
86 Johann Gottfried Herder, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, in Philosophical Writings, 414.
87 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Concerning the Divinity and Use of the Bible,” in Against Pure Reason, 208.
88 Ibid.
89 Johann Gottfried Herder, Letters concerning the Study of Theology, in Against Pure Reason, 248.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 226.
92 Spencer, Herder's Political Thought, 197.
93 Herder, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 163; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 584 (“Qu'ran, that wonderful mixture of poetry, eloquence, ignorance, sagacity, and arrogance”).
94 Almond, Ian, “Terrible Turks, Bedouin Poets, and Prussian Prophets: The Shifting Place of Islam in Herder's Thought,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 62, 65Google Scholar.
95 Herder, “On Recent German Literature,” 106–7.
96 Johann Gottfried Herder, “A Monument to Baumgarten,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, 44.
97 Herder, This Too a Philosophy of History, 321.
98 Herder, “On Recent German Literature,” 106–7.
99 Herder, “On the Term and the Concept ‘Humanity,’” 106.
100 Calhoun, Craig, Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Parekh, Bhikhu, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar; Delanty, Gerard, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warner, Michael, VanAntwerpen, Johnathan, and Calhoun, Craig, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.