Due to Goethe’s affect, Herder was appointed normal superintendent and consistory councillor at Weimar in 1776. There, anticipating Goethe, he developed the foundations of a normal morphology, which enabled him to grasp how a Shakespearean play, as an example, or the Gospel According to John, within the historic context of every, was certain to imagine the person kind that it did as a substitute of one other. Herder’s technique achieves its outcomes by recognizing contradictions and by resorting to a better unity—a way by which Herder earns a spot within the historical past of dialectical logic.
It was at the moment additionally that Herder accomplished his transition to Classicism. Among the many works of this era are Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778; “Of the Realizing and Sensing of the Human Soul”), Briefe, das Studium der Theologie betreffend (1780–81; “Letters In regards to the Research of Theology”), Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie (1782–83; The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry), and his assortment of Volkslieder (1778–79; “People songs”). Herder regarded poetry as a mode of coming to phrases with actuality. Whereas most of his contemporaries noticed it both as a product of studying or as a method of amusement, he thought of poetry to spring from the pure and historic environment skilled by feeling, moderately as an involuntary response to the stimulus of occasions than as a deliberate act. Such feeling is the organ of a dynamic relationship between man and the world, which is expressed much more readily within the sounds, stresses, and rhythms of speech than in a picture. This “voice of feeling” achieves the standing of artwork solely when it’s indifferent from the person and from the historic setting that created it and turns into rounded off to constitute a world by itself.
Summit and later years of his profession
Herder’s work at Weimar reached its peak in Zerstreute Blätter (1785–97; “Sporadic Papers”) and within the unfinished Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man). Within the latter work, the results of his intercourse with Goethe, Herder tried to display that nature and historical past obey a uniform system of legal guidelines. Already within the growth from earth to mankind, a striving of forces was at work, aiming to steadiness each other by producing determinate types or particular person existences. This identical phenomenon might be noticed as a legislation of “humanity” in man’s communal life, during which contending forces are reconciled. At any passing second the measure is particular person, however the precept of the event towards kind is normal. Too usually, nevertheless, man in his freedom works towards nature, for his sense of the measure of issues and his reason are immature. Regardless of these shortcomings, one should belief that rising perception and goodwill will lead males to behave in response to the reality that they acknowledge and, by way of the battle of countries, will attain the equilibrium of a construction embracing all mankind.
The essential premises underlying the Ideen are resumed within the dialogues Gott: einige Gespräche (1787; 2nd ed., Einige Gespräche über Spinozas System, 1800; “A number of Discourses on Spinoza’s System”), during which Herder combines the views of the rationalists Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Benedict de Spinoza, and Anthony, Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury.
Monetary difficulties, variations of opinion over the French Revolution, and, above all, his self-assertive nature, which couldn’t bear the proximity of a better man, led to an estrangement of Herder from Goethe. On Herder’s aspect this resulted in a bitter enmity towards the entire Classical motion in German poetry and philosophy. His Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1793–97; “Letters for the Development of Humanity”) and his Adrastea (1801–03), containing treatises on historical past, philosophy, and aesthetics, emphasised the didactic objective of all poetry, thus contradicting that very concept of the autonomy of the murals that he himself had helped to determine. With the Christliche Schriften (1794–98; “Christian Writings”), the Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799; “Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Purpose”), and the Kalligone (1800), a metacritique of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Herder started his assault on Kant, whose philosophy he noticed as a risk to his personal historic view of the world. On this assault he had the help of Christoph Martin Wieland, an influential poet and novelist, and of Jean Paul.
Herder died in 1803. The primary collected version of Herder’s works was produced by his widow, 45 vol. (1805–20). There’s additionally a important version by B. Suphan, 33 vol. (1877–1913; reprinted 1967–68).
