Johann
Gottfried
Herder
CVSP 206
Professor Alireza Korangy
Eva Hassan
• Born in 25 august 1744 and died on 18
December 1803 in East Prussia
• German philosopher, theologian, poet and
literary critic , also called ‘’German Rosseau”
• His father was a schoolteacher, and he grew
up in humble conditions .
• He studied with Kant and was an influence on
many philosophers like Hegel , Nietzsche and
John Stewart Mill .
• He wrote a lot of important books like : The
Treaties On the Origin Of Language ,
Fragments, and On the Cognition of Sensation
that tackled many ideas such as philosophy of
language , history and other aspects.
Age Of Enlightenment
• was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated
Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences
and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas
centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of
knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of
the senses , and ideals such as liberty, progress , toleration ,
fraternity , constitutional government and separation of church
and state.
What Has The Enlightenment Thinkers say
about culture ?
• The Enlightenment thinkers had posited a universal human nature, and
they had held that human reason could develop equally in all cultures.
From this they inferred that all cultures eventually could achieve the
same degree of progress, and that when that happened humans would
eliminate all the irrational superstitions and prejudices that had driven
them apart, and that mankind would then achieve a cosmopolitan and
peaceful liberal social order.
Herder on Multicultural Relativism
• he claimed that true German culture was to be discovered
among the common people — das volks. it was through folk
songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the
nation was popularized
• each Volk is a unique “family writ large. "Each possesses a distinctive
culture and is itself an organic community stretching backward and
forward in time. Each has its own genius, its own special traits. And,
necessarily, these cultures are opposed to each other. As each fulfills its
own destiny, its unique developmental path will conflict with other
cultures’ developmental paths
• Judgments of good and bad are defined culturally and internally, in terms of each
culture’s own goals and aspirations. Each culture’s standards originate and develop
from its particular needs and circumstances, not from a universal set of principles.
• Each culture can be judged only by its own standards. One cannot judge one culture
from the perspective of another; one can only sympathetically immerse oneself in the
other’s cultural manifestations and judge them on their own terms.
• Attempting to understand other cultures is not really a good idea. And attempting to
incorporate other cultures’ elements into one’s own leads to the decay of one’s own
culture.
• One must avoid mixing one’s own culture with those of others, and instead steep
oneself in one’s own culture and absorb it into oneself.
.
• “The moment men start dwelling in wishful
dreams of foreign lands from whence they
seek hope and salvation they reveal the first
symptoms of disease, of flatulence, of
unhealthy opulence, of approaching death!”
Nationalism
• Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free
from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a
natural and ideal basis for a polity and that the nation is the only
rightful source of political power.
• Nationalism, seeks to preserve and foster a nation's traditional
culture
Herder As a Cultural Nationalist
• Cultural nationalism generally refers to ideas and practices that
relate to the intended revival of a purported national
community's culture.
• If political nationalism is focused on the achievement of political
autonomy, cultural nationalism is focused on the cultivation of a
nation.
• cultural nationalism sets out to provide a vision of the nation’s
identity, history and destiny.
• the vision of the nation is not a political organization, but a moral
community
• The history of cultural nationalism begins in late eighteenth-century
Europe.
• Herder presented the nation as the primordial scene from which the best
of human endeavor owed its provenance, and which therefore obliged its
cultivation through the recovery and celebration of its history and culture.
• Herder was as much practitioner as he was intellectual. In his search for
the true character of the nation among the rural peasantry of central
Europe, he played an influential role in the development of several
practices that became associated with the cultural nationalism of the
nineteenth century, such as philology, history and the collection of folk
songs, myths, and other practices.
• There is a fundamental divide
between the form of nationalism
espoused by Herder and the
nationalism embraced by later
thinkers and movements.
• Herder defended the rights of all
nations (and not just his own) and
condemned various forms of
nationalist aggression and
chauvinism, although these
certainly are distinctive features of
his position compared with some
later expressions of nationalism
• He saw no contradiction between the claims of
one’s own culture and those of other cultures.
Just as the “creator of all things knows no
classes; each only resembles itself,” so too
must we strive to see and value other peoples
not as they fail to resemble us, but as they
succeed to resemble themselves.
• No one nation can serve as a standard for
another nation—much less have that same
nation dismiss it as.
Take Home Messages
• One should focus on his culture and work to preserve it .
• Every nation has its unique characteristics, and no nation is superior
to other.
• Each culture has its own way of reasoning and there is no universality
of concepts.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ?
• Is Herder’s humane vision of humankind turns out to be as fantastic
and fictitious as the German folk tales he loved?
