Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on citation style
- Abbreviations and works cited by title
- Introduction
- 1 The question of moral relativism
- 2 Happiness and the moral life
- 3 History and human destiny
- 4 The concept of race
- 5 Language and world
- 6 The place of reason
- 7 Religious diversity
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The place of reason
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on citation style
- Abbreviations and works cited by title
- Introduction
- 1 The question of moral relativism
- 2 Happiness and the moral life
- 3 History and human destiny
- 4 The concept of race
- 5 Language and world
- 6 The place of reason
- 7 Religious diversity
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Herder holds an empiricist theory of language, according to which all of its semantic content is derived from experience, understood as including sensations and emotions. Given his insistence that thought depends upon language, it follows that Herder's position on concepts and patterns of reasoning will also be an empiricist one. Herder's critique of Kant in the Metacritique rests on this empiricism, complaining, among other things, that “to make oneself independent of oneself, i.e. to place oneself beyond all original, inner and outer experience, to think beyond oneself, entirely free of the empirical: this no one can do” (Metacritique, 324–5). Such a claim might at first seem odd as an objection to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, since the latter expressly denies that concepts can function independently of sensuous content. Herder's Metacritique has been criticized for overlooking this essential point, as well as for failing to understand that Kant's treatment of the a priori in the first Critique constitutes an attempt to isolate the necessary conditions for experience in general, conditions that – being conditions – cannot themselves be derived from experience or reduced to it. In light of points like these, Rudolf Haym accused Herder of not comprehending the most basic elements of the transcendental philosophy (Haym 1954, 709–26). The suspicion arises here that Herder's Metacritique actually represents a naively pre-critical stance, especially since it appeals to empiricists like Bacon, Locke, and Hume in articulating its opposition to Kant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Herder on Humanity and Cultural DifferenceEnlightened Relativism, pp. 192 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011