Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803; the “von” prefix was added to his name when he was ennobled in 1802) was born near Königsberg in the East Prussian town of Mohrungen (present-day Morąg), into a Pietistic family of modest means in the employ of the Church. He studied theology at Königsberg. Here he underwent the influence of Kant and Hamann, and read Rousseau. Following Hamann, Herder developed a critique of Kant for having neglected language as a matrix for the shaping of cognition and knowledge. In Königsberg and Riga (where he was called to a teaching and pastoral position in 1764) he commenced occasional publications, in which he developed his idea that linguistic differences generated cultural and moral diversity between their respective groups of speakers, thus determining fundamental characterological and temperamental differences between nations, each of which have their own language-rooted mentalities and characters.

This fundamental diversion from Enlightenment universalism, which privileged cultural differentiation over general principles, would be the cornerstone of his cultural philosophy, which gradually won him fame across the German-speaking lands: from the Kritische Wälder of 1769 to his reflections on Ossian and Shakespeare in the collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773) and the major works Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774) and Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91). Foregroundedly, these writings provided a counterblow against the dominance of French taste and classicist standards in German cultural life. Literati who, following Herder’s precursor Lessing, were trying to develop a non-classicist, non-French programme for German literature (most importantly Goethe, but also the post-Goethe generation of Romantics) would see in Herder a maître à penser. More generally, Herder’s philosophical anti-Enlightenment stance gave an intellectual underpinning for the nascent sentimentalism which after Rousseau was abandoning worn-out classicist standards of taste and civility in favour of the naive, the rustic or the untaught. In Herder’s scheme, the vernaculars of humankind no longer needed to be measured against a universal, classicist benchmark, but could each be appreciated as a manifestation of the creative human power to adjust and diversify. This view he propounded not only in his discursive writings on history, literature or language (Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772), but also in his collection of popular ballads (for which he coined the neologism Volkslied): Alte Volkslieder appeared in 1775, 2 volumes of Volkslieder in 1778-79 – now known under the title of its posthumous 1807 edition: Stimmen der Völker in Liedern. These collections triggered a vogue for folkloristic anthologizing that was to inspire Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the prose-tale collections of the Grimm brothers; in addition, it inspired the new fashion for naive ballad form (Lied) as a Romantic poetic genre, largely through Herder’s formative influence on the young Goethe.

Herder met Goethe, then a law student, in Strasbourg in 1770-71, where he was staying at the time (he had left his position in Riga in 1769, had led a wandering existence as private chaplain to a travelling nobleman, and was soon to take up a pastoral position in the petty residence of Bückeburg). Goethe’s deep internalization of Herder’s ideas on cultural authenticity were reflected in his fervent celebration of the Gothic cathedral of Strasbourg (“Von deutscher Baukunst” appeared in the pamphlet series Von deutscher Art und Kunst) and in his literary production: quasi-naive balladry and quasi-Shakespearean historical tragedies such as an early version of Götz von Berlichingen. All this gave an extra cultural boost to the transmission of Herder’s ideas to the next, Romantic generation.

For his part, Goethe procured for Herder a call to Weimar’s city church  in 1776. Here he contributed to the Teutscher Merkur (1773-89), published the long-prepared Volkslieder and wrote the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit as a summation of his philosophy of culture and of cultural history – later theorized more fundamentally in his critique of Kant (Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1799). The relationship with Goethe worsened over the years; as Goethe developed an intense collaborative friendship with Schiller, Herder became friendly with some younger writers of the Romantic generation: Novalis, Jean Paul. He died in Weimar in 1803. In 1850, a statue in his honour, funded by public subscription, was placed before the church where he had been pastor.

The Romantic generation of Arnim, Brentano and the Grimms, with their celebration of the creative collectivity of the nation and their mixed feelings about Goethe, saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of Herder. As a result, their Romantic nationalism has been frequently projected back onto Herder himself, and Herder’s writings have generally been read in the light of the nationalism that would invoke him in subsequent decades. This, however, is an anachronistic distortion. While Herder celebrates the nation’s individuality as a categorical principle of humanity, and vindicated the German nation’s right to esteem its culture as being in no way inferior to that of classical antiquity of classicist France, he did so in the name of a common, diverse and inclusive humanity, which embraced all other nations as well as Germany. In addition, Herder’s evolutionary view of human culture was anthropological rather than historicist in nature; the phylogenetic-genealogical “family tree” paradigm that dominated the historical view of languages and cultures after Schlegel, Bopp and Grimm was alien to Herder’s thought.