Born into a religious family in East Prussia, Johann Gottfried von Herder became an innovator in the philosophy of history and culture and a leading figure of the Sturm and Drang literary movement. His father was a schoolmaster in the town of Mohrongen, where he was born on August 25, 1744. He was able to obtain a university education, in the capital city of Konigsberg, through a surgeon in the then occupying Russian army who offered to be the young man's patron. Herder decided on a medical career but changed his mind when he fainted at every operation he attended. Changing to theology, during this period, Herder came into contact with Immanuel Kant, founder of critical philosophy, and Johann Georg Hamann, a prominent critic of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In 1764, Herder went to Riga to teach and preach. He remained there until 1769, during which time he wrote many essays and reviews. His first published work was Fragments concerning Recent German Literature (1767), followed by Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Science and Art of the Beautiful (1769). After Riga, Herder embarked upon a sea voyage to Nantes and during this time, he seems to have undergone a profound change. He saw himself as a groundless person without a safe haven, and it became his aim to uncover the future from insights he had gained from the past.
Herder traveled throughout Europe during the following years, settling for a time in Paris, where he met writers Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, and in Strasbourg, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Goethe. With Goethe's intervention in 1776, Herder was permanently appointed to the post of superintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar, where he died on December 18, 1803.
Herder wrote prolifically during his years at Weimar, including collections of folk literature, translations, and poetry. In his later works, he tried to demonstrate that nature and history obey a uniform set of laws. Herder's works incorporate elements of historicism, the view that there are no general patterns in human progress and that each historical epoch holds its own place and has its particular character and culture. Herder was pessimistic about the perfectibility of human nature. He felt that humans play out their destiny in proportion to the power that results from interaction among persons, institutions, and environment. Progress can be found in the species rather than in the individual. In this way, humanity does progress despite the individuals who compose it.
Also at Weimer, Herder completed a transition within himself to classicism, with a special interest in poetry. He saw poetry as a way of coming to terms with reality. "A poet is the creator of the nation around him," he said. Herder felt that poetry appeared in its greatest purity in the uncivilized periods of every nation. Therefore, he was greatly interested in retrieving ancient German folk songs.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Herder enjoyed a reputation as a philosopher of history. His reputation in the field of socio-politics was less lasting, partly due to his negative feelings about such concepts as "state" and "sovereignty" and partly because Germany in the eighteenth century was not a rich source of political fervor. There were no political parties, few poltical clubs, and a barely existing free press. Herder concluded at one point that "political reform has to come from below," since he came to believe it would never come from German leadership. In the end, Herder decided that if battles were to be waged, they would be waged with his pen.
The Sturm and Drang (Storm and Stress) literary movement in the late eighteenth century, in which Herder was a leading player, exalted nature and feeling and sought to overthrow rationalism. This movement is closely associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was inspired by Herder's ideas and, through him, became interested in Gothic architecture, Shakespeare, and German folk songs. Although Goethe went on to produce great works in classical literature, the movement soon exhausted itself. In later years, disagreements led to an estrangement between Herder and Goethe, which resulted in Herder's bitterness toward the whole German classical movement in poetry and philosophy.
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