Johann Gottfried von Herder (/ˈhɜːrdər/ HUR-dər; German: [ˈjoːhan ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈhɛʁdɐ];[15][16][17] 25 August 1744 – 18 December 1803) was a Prussian philosopher, theologian, pastor, poet, and literary critic.

He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people (das Volk).

He is credited with establishing or advancing a number of important disciplines: hermeneutics, linguistics, anthropology, and "a secular philosophy of history.

At the same time, Herder became an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, a Königsberg philosopher who disputed the claims of pure secular reason.

This event proved to be a key juncture in the history of German literature, as Goethe was inspired by Herder's literary criticism to develop his own style.

Herder wrote an important essay on Shakespeare and Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) published in 1773 in a manifesto along with contributions by Goethe and Justus Möser.

[26][27] After becoming General Superintendent in 1776, Herder's philosophy shifted again towards classicism, and he produced works such as his unfinished Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity, which largely originated the school of historical thought.

[citation needed] He remarked that he would have wished to be born in the Middle Ages and mused whether "the times of the Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?".

Herder was one of the first to argue that language contributes to shaping the frameworks and the patterns with which each linguistic community thinks and feels.

In response to criticism of these contentions, Herder resisted descriptions of his findings as "conjectural" pasts, casting his arguments for a dearth of cognition in humans and "the problem of the origin of language as a synchronic issue rather than a diachronic one.

Herder additionally advanced select notions of myriad "authentic" conceptions of Völk and the unity of the individual and natural law, which became fodder for his self-proclaimed twentieth-century disciples.

Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a "nation"[30] extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales.

Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters".

Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity".

Following a trip to Ukraine, Herder wrote a prediction in his diary (Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769) that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity and rot away, while the eastern European nations would retain their religion and their idealism, and would this way become the power in Europe.

More specifically, he praised Ukraine's "beautiful skies, blithe temperament, musical talent, bountiful soil, etc.… someday will awaken there a cultured nation whose influence will spread… throughout the world."

One of his related predictions was that the Hungarian nation would disappear and become assimilated by surrounding Slavic peoples; this prophecy caused considerable uproar in Hungary and is widely cited to this day.

Herder, who hated absolutism and Prussian nationalism, but who was imbued with the spirit of the whole German Volk, yet as a historical theorist turned away from the ideas of the eighteenth century.

Seeking to reconcile his thought with this earlier age, Herder sought to harmonize his conception of sentiment with reasoning, whereby all knowledge is implicit in the soul; the most elementary stage is the sensuous and intuitive perception which by development can become self-conscious and rational.

This search is itself the key to the understanding of many German theories of the time; however Herder understood and feared the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings.

[32] Herder refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that "notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth".

... My long allegory has succeeded if it achieves the representation of the mind of a human being as an individual phenomenon, as a rarity which deserves to occupy our eyes.

[35][36][37] Concerning the history of life on earth, Herder proposed naturalistic and metaphysical (religious) ideas that are difficult to distinguish and interpret.

"[38] However, biographer Wulf Köpke disagreed, noting that "biological evolution from animals to the human species was outside of his thinking, which was still influenced by the idea of divine creation.