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Articles

Trying Herder

Dale DeBakcsy listens to the lost voice of the Eighteenth Century’s greatest Twenty-First-Century thinker.

Of all the crimes a late eighteenth century German cultural thinker could commit, none carried a stiffer sentence than Not Being Goethe. Klopstock, Möser, Süssmilch, Reimarus, Herder… all names blasted out of our common cultural memory by their proximity to the towering poet of Weimar. Yet while there probably isn’t anybody weeping torrents over the loss of Süssmilch, the obscurity of Johannes Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is actually rather tragic. Consistently two centuries ahead of his time, his ideas about linguistics and comparative history had to wait until the twentieth century for a rebirth, while his reflections on cognition are shockingly prescient of developments in modern neuroscience. How was it that such an original and deep thinker became so utterly lost to us?

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