I. Style as a Problem

IT IS NOT EASY TO READ HERDER'S TEXTS, and many scholars past and present have complained about this aspect of Herder's work. The same, however, is true for texts by, say, Kant, Fichte, or Schelling. One important and hitherto neglected difference between Herder's way of thinking and writing on the one hand and Kant's and Fichte's on the other seems to lie less on the level of content but more on the level of how the ideas and reflections are presented. There is a crucial difference of thinking and expression between Herder and many other philosophers. This difference is a difference of style, style of thinking and style of writing. Metaphors and tropes have their legitimate argumentative function within the semantic universe of Herder's texts, so that we should take care to scrutinize these features fair-mindedly before dismissing them as idiosyncratic quirks, as Rudolf Haym did in criticizing Herder's “ruffled figures” and Immanuel Kant did in damning his philosophy as border-crossing “poetic philosophy.” For Herder, there was no such thing as “naked truth,” just as there was for him no (immaterial) soul without a (material) body. Human truth is “leibhafte Wahrheit,” 1 embodied truth: it is always bound up with the body and the senses, otherwise it would not be “menschliche Wahrheit.” Herder's theoretical reflections on aesthetics, literary theory, translation, philosophy — in particular, philosophy of language and history — pedagogy, theology, and so on are all oriented toward aisthesis — sensate cognition — as the fundamental part of human cognition in general. Even insights into the most abstract ideas are grounded in corporeal experience — which, for Herder, shaped human understanding and its organs — or they are “Nebelträume” (foggy dreams). In Herder's work and thinking, this grounding is extended to the material appearance of the text.

Being confronted for the first time with texts by Johann Gottfried Herder, university students commonly follow either one of the following two patterns of reaction. Some of them display bewilderment without being able to give reasons for that type of response. Some of them react with an almost rapturous welcome, without, however, being capable of providing a plausible explanation for their enthusiasm. Both reactions parallel patterns that have developed during the reception of Herder's works over the past 250 years.