Herder's conception of "das Volk"

by Georgiana Rose Simpson

Herder as philosopher was concerned more with practical and concrete applications of his principles than with dogmas and abstract theories. The following brief investigation of purely philosophical discussions is made with a view of determining how he applies his philosophy to this definite anthropological conception.

In his Gespräche über Spinozas System Herder sets forth much of his own religious philosophy. A passage in the second dialogue substitutes for the word “attributes” the word “forces” in expounding one of Spinoza’s postulates. The passage then reads: “The Godhead reveals itself in an infinite number of forces and in an infinite number of ways.” It is with the word for forces that we are concerned at this point—Kraft, Kräfte.

This same word Herder uses in discussing the fundamental life-principle in the world at large, which is the theme of his first few sections in the essay entitled: Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in ihrem menschlichen Ursprunge und den Gesetzen ihrer Würkung. These Kräfte, these “modifications of God,” find their impulse to operate in a stimulus, beyond the material form of which Herder cannot go.

Herder’s philosophy plants itself from the beginning quite firmly on material foundations. He says that in the qualities which are constantly designated by such words as heavy, thrust, fall, movement, rest, strength, even power of inertia, is implied a life-principle, a soul. Any close observation of nature must show that the great working power of nature is everywhere the same, and it is the analogy between the processes of the material world in general and the phenomena in the human organism in particular which can give the clearest insight into the great life-principle. This study by analogous reasoning is not artificial, Man cannot avoid feeling the similarity between himself and external nature. Human beings must of necessity, he continues, vitalize everything about them with their own feelings.

The feelings then are strongly instrumental in man’s interpretation of the world about him.

I. STIMULUS

The first phase of feeling which Herder considers is Reiz or stimulus. The peculiar phenomenon of stimulus says he, which may be seen in the smallest, most delicate filaments of plants, causing them to contract and expand, and bespeaking a sort of feeling is due to the same law which controls the most complicated feelings and passions of the human being. This all-pervading law of stimulus Herder finds in the action of physical heat and cold, which he makes parallel in its working with pleasure and pain respectively. Pain, disturbance by something foreign, contracts; the strength collects, increases for resistance, and takes its stand again. Well-being and pleasure—warmth—expands, makes for calmness, placidity, enjoyment, and release.

That which is expansion and contraction in dead nature, the result of warmth and cold, seems to be here the obscure seed of stimulus and feeling in man. The “world-all,” the entire feeling, nature of human beings and animals moves in this ebb and flood of warmth and cold. The power to expand and contract which is the effect of this heat and cold, pleasure and pain, Herder makes the fundamental principle of the power for self-nutriment.

This power is nothing external or mechanical, in which case it would not be life. The plant structure of organic fibers which takes in life from the surrounding elements does so through its own activities. The power to escape its enemies and to make over all its nourishment into differentiated parts lies within the plant. The complicated body of the animal likewise has this stimulus to seek the nutrition essential for life within: hunger and thirst are powerful exciting forces. When he applies his theories to man, he calls love the most powerful stimulus to life.