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Herder's Conception of “Kraft”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
Extract
It has long been recognized that the fundamental ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder's thought are few and consistent, in spite of the fact that their author frequently expressed his deep-seated aversion to metaphysical systematics. Herder's principle of regarding the individual experience as primordial and the abstract statement as derivative has been labeled by his biographers and commentators as “irrationalism,” when, as a matter of fact, his aversion to systematics was merely the result of a sincere concern with the discoveries of empirical science. Though Herder very often gave voice to his belief that all philosophical systems are “fictions” or “poems,” he was unwilling to go as far as do the radical positivists of our own day—Wittgenstein, Carnap, et al., who deny validity to all metaphysics. In fact, certain conceptions frequently used by Herder are admitted by him to be genuinely metaphysical. At the same time, in his use of the conception of “Kraft,” which definitely belongs among these, Herder will be seen to stand in much the same position as the Kant of the first Kritik, i.e., in that of having to reconcile inherited metaphysics and the results of the scientific experimentation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An examination of Herder's attempted reconciliation has long been overdue; it has been neglected in the past because of the outspokenly pro-Kantian attitude of Herder's biographers, among whom Rudolf Haym and Eugen Kühnemann stand unquestionably preëminent. It is the purpose of the following to sketch the conception of “Kraft” inherited by Herder and to indicate the synthesis he attained between the older idea and the scientific conceptions of his age. In addition, the rôle played by the final development of the idea in the break between Herder and Weimar classicism will be brought forward as a better explanation than the purely personal (and hence unfairly derogatory) motives hitherto adduced to explain it.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942
References
Notes
1 Martin Schütze, “The Fundamental Ideas of Herder's Thought.” MP, xviii (1920-21), 65-78, 289-302; xix (1921-22), 113-130, 361-382; xxi (1923-24), 29-48, 113-132.
2 J. G. Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Suphan, v, 461.—Hereinafter referred to simply by volume and page.
3 Cf. Gertrud Bäumer, Goethes Satyros, eine Studie zur Entstehungsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1905), pp. 47-54. Cf. also Max Morris, ed., Der junge Goethe (Leipzig, 1912), vi, 309-313.
4 Morris, op. cit., iii, 296.
5 Ibid., 297.
6 Aristotle, Metaphysics, tr. H. Tredennick (London, 1933), p. 251.
7 Quintilian, ii, 14, 3: “Quod ego vim appello, plerique potestatem nonnuli facultatem vocant; quae res ne quid adferat ambiguitatis, vim dico 
” Also, Quintilian agrees with Aristotle and the grammarians in assigning this vis to the verb: “Veteres enim, quorum fuerunt Aristoteles quoque atque Theodectes, verba modo et nomina et convinctiones tradidierunt; videlicet quod in verbis vim sermonis, in nominibus materiam (quia alterum est quod loquimur), in convinctionibus autem complexus eorum esse indicaverunt. . . .” (i, 4, 18-21) Herder has somewhat similar views in the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache.
8 Ludwig Schütz, Thomas-Lexikon —Paderborn, 1895), p. 865,
9 Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, sub “Kraft.”
10 Cf. Martin Schütze, op. cit., passim.
11 Florian Cajori, A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches, 2nd ed. (New York, 1929), p. 59.
12 Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York, 1928), p. 124 ff.
13 viii, 169.
14 Albrecht von Haller, Elementa physiologiæ corporis humani (Lausanne, 1766), iv, 467-468. I use the second edition, not having access to the first (1757).
15 Ibid., 440 ff.
16 Ibid., 446 ff.
17 Ibid., 467 ff.
18 vii, 11, et passim.
19 Schütze, op. cit., xix, 113.
20 iii, 137 ff.
21 Rudolf Unger, Hamann und die Aufklärung (Halle, 1925), i, 104.
22 F. Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin and Leipzig, 1934), article Energie.
23 James Harris, Philosophical Arrangements, in his Works (London, 1775), iii, 423.
24 Ibid., 283.
25 Ibid., 288 n.
26 v, 32.
27 Ibid., 29.
28 vii, 262.
29 ibid., 11 n.
30 ibid., 17 n.
31 viii, 195.
32 Ibid., 196.
33 Haller, op. cit., iv, 464.
34 viii, 216.
35 Cf. Wolfgang Nufer, Herders Ideen zur Verbindung von Poesie, Musik und Tanz (Berlin, 1929); cf. also my article, “The Union of the Arts in Die Braut von Messina, PMLA, lii (1937), 1135-46.
36 For the question of whether Herder was an evolutionist see F. von Bärenbach, Herder als Vorgänger Darwins und der modernen Naturphilosophie (Berlin, 1877), and its refutation by A. O. Lovejoy, “Herder, Eighteenth Century Evolutionist,” Popular Science, lxv (1904), 327-336.
37 For Herder's debt to Du Bos, cf. Armin H. Koller, The Abbé Du Bos—His Advocacy of the Theory of Climate. A Predecessor of Johann Gottfried Herder (Champaign, Ill., 1937).
38 F. W. Strothmann, “Das scholastische Erbe im Herderschen ‘Pantheismus’.” Dichtung und Volkstum, xxxvii (1936), 174-187.
39 Eugene Kühnemann, Herder, 2. Aufl. (München, 1927), 431 ff.
40 xvi, 452.
41 Ibid., 451-452.
42 xxi, 67.
43 viii, 193.
44 xxi, 109-112.
45 Ibid., 68.
46 Kühnemann, op. cit., 429 ff.
47 Ibid., 594.
48 Cf. H. Cysarz, Schiller (Halle, 1934), passim.
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