Herder, the Famous Nobody

THE PRESENT VOLUME TRIES TO CONVEY a comprehensive picture of the life and works of Johann Gottfried Herder. The nineteen authors of the following seventeen articles provide an overview of the diverse aspects of Herder's contributions to eighteenth-century culture and beyond. It is no coincidence that this volume is the first collaborative attempt ever to compile a Companion to Herder's works. Today it is possible and timely to do justice to Herder's work and ideas as an achievement in their own right, to view his work as an independent historical-philosophical approach to almost all important problems of the Enlightenment and beyond. Today, we can read this author in a different, more open way and, indeed, he “speaks” to us in a way that lets us discover a partner in discourse bridging more than two centuries. This Companion is, furthermore, the result of a collaborative effort because the diversity of Herder's work defies a single-authored approach. The only attempt to provide a presentation of the “whole” Herder was that of Rudolf Haym in his Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken. Emil Adler’s Herder und die deutsche Aufklärungand Robert T. Clark's Herder: His Life and Thoughthave merits of their own but do not match Haym's monumental work. One of the hallmarks of Haym's still dominating, all-encompassing biography is the impressive figure of four complete reprints of the two volumes with their more than 1500 pages in the original edition. Haym’s work constitutes, however, a liability as well as a legacy, because his book determined posterity's reception of Herder in a decisive but unfortunately misleading way. He depicted Herder as a thinker of the second order, one who, already at the age of twenty-one, had lost contact with the avant-garde of the early 1770s, Kant above all. Herder as the pre-critical Kantian, the “poetic” philosopher, as Kant claimed in a malicious review of the first two volumes of Herder's opus maximum, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind, 1784– 91), Herder as a discursive chimera, merging poetry and philosophy in — as Kant saw it — an illegitimate way.