Johann Gottfried Herder was born in 1744 in Mohrungen in Prussia (today Morag in Poland), the son of a schoolteacher. He studied to become a clergyman at nearby Königsberg University, where he was a pupil of Immanuel Kant.
He taught first in Riga, then, in the late 1760s travelled through France. In 1770 he met the young Goethe, on whom he became a major influence, in Strasbourg. A few years later the now famous Goethe was able to secure him a position as superintendent of the (Lutheran) clergy.
Herder made a significant contribution to European thought in many areas, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, aesthetics, linguistics and political thought. At a time when the Enlightenment aspired to offer a universally applicable understanding of history and human development and when French was becoming the European language of culture, Herder asserted that each nation should delve deep inside itself and proudly proclaim its singularity, derived from its distinct geography and climate, language, customs and traditions. In particular he urged Germany’s educated classes to “spew out the ugly slime of the Seine” and speak their own language.
Far from endorsing the idea of progress in human affairs, the notion that history has been witness to a gradual but continuous increase in knowledge, culture, comfort and human happiness, Herder asserted that the greatest virtue was often to be found in ancient and less “civilised” societies, as evidenced for instance by the power of their epic poetry. But even aside from this consideration he was inclined to reject any understanding of history which judged particular periods in terms of the “direction” in which they were supposed to be developing (progressive or regressive). An epoch that is past, Herder argued, should be judged on its own terms, not on ours. This required the historian to develop considerable gifts of imaginative sympathy.
Nationalities, and national cultures, Herder believed, were part of a providential plan which had “wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates” but also by languages and [national] characters. It was time for Germans in particular to stop being ashamed of who they were, work towards unifying the national territory and understand the supreme value and virtue of the people, the German Volk.
If we think we know only too well where all this was heading we should think again: Herder was in tendency a democrat and republican, an opponent of class or caste hierarchies, of the concept of race, of military values and military aggression, imperialism or any attempt to dominate other nations on the basis that one was superior to the rest and could impose its will. He believed in nations certainly: but in all nations, a philosophy that has been called “pluralistic cosmopolitanism”.
Herder died in 1803. In the decades immediately afterwards, and in particular toward the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, many hitherto subject peoples discovered in themselves a very reasonable desire for self-government. The nationalist political movements which arose were often accompanied by an ardent quest for the national essence, that which makes us different from everyone else, which had sometimes been submerged or for other reasons was not wholly obvious.
Across Europe and beyond, new (or very old) peoples rediscovered lost national epics, symbols, anthems, flags, national costumes and national games and instituted national galleries, theatres, libraries and museums. Nationhood was all the rage and with it came a set of accoutrements which everyone had to have.
As some scholars have pointed out, difference was paradoxically asserted everywhere in strikingly similar ways; nothing, it seemed, was so international as nationalism.
