Johann Gottfried Herder Quotes on Knowledge
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) gave the late Enlightenment its most influential statement of the case that human knowledge is constitutively historical, linguistic, and cultural rather than the achievement of an abstract universal reason exercising itself outside any particular tradition. The Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), the four-part Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), and the long polemic against the more rationalist tendencies of Kant and the Berlin Aufklärung articulate the doctrine that each people (Volk) thinks within the conceptual resources of its own language and historical formation, and that the comparative study of these formations is the proper philosophical successor to the abstract anthropology of the earlier century.
Quotes
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Attributed to Johann Gottfried Herder:
“Without language we have no reason, no reason without language.”
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Attributed to Johann Gottfried Herder:
“A poet is the creator of the nation around him.”
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Attributed to Johann Gottfried Herder:
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to listen to them can learn the truth.”
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“We live in a world we ourselves create.”
Wir leben immer in einer Welt, die wir uns selbst bilden. -
“Übers Erkennen und Empfinden in der menschlichen Seele (1774); cited from Bernhard Suphan (ed.) Herders sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913) vol. 8, p. 252. Translation from Roy Pascal The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959) p. 136”
Wir leben immer in einer Welt, die wir uns selbst bilden. -
“For every ancient nation likes to consider itself the firstborn and to take its territory for humanity’s birthplace.”
quoted in Maurice Olender - Languages of Paradise -
“Briefe, das Studium der Theologie betressend (1780-81), Vierundzwanzigster Brief; cited from Bernhard Suphan (ed.) Herders sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913) vol. 10, p. 260. Translation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817) vol. 1, ch. 11, pp. 233-34”
Am sorgfältigsten, mein Freund, meiden Sie die Autorschaft darüber. Zu früh oder unmäßig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wüste und das Herz leer, wenn sie auch sonst keine üblen Folgen gäbe. Ein Mensch, der die Bibel nur lieset, um sie zu erläutern, lieset sie wahrscheinlich übel, und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstößt, durch Feder und Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wi -
“"Tell me, O wise man, how hast thou come to know so astonishingly much?" By never being ashamed to ask of those that knew!”
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