Johann Gottfried von Herder
(1744 - 1803) Germany
Poet, critic, theologian and philosopher
Born at Mohrungen, in East Prussia, he studied at Könisberg where he was influenced by Kant, became pastor at Riga, and in 1776 was called to Weimaras court preacher. Herder's critical writings indicate his intuitive rather than reasoning trend of thought. A friend of Goethe, he gave considerable impulse to the Sturm un Drang (Storm and Stress) movement in German literature. He collected folk songs of all nations (1778) and in the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1784-91) he outlined the stages of human cultural development.
The following extract is from Philosophy of the History of Man:
"Never has a branch born finer fruit than that little branch of Olive, Ivy, and Pine, which was the victor's crown among the Greeks. It gave to the young men good looks, good health, and good spirits; it made their limbs nimble, graceful and well-formed; in their souls it lighted the first sparks of the desire for good name, the love of fame even, and stamped on them the inviolable temper of men who live for their city and their country. Finally, what was most precious, it laid the foundation in their characters of that predilection for male society and friendship which so markedly dlstinguishes the Greeks.
"In Greece, woman was not the one prize of life for which the young man fought and strove; the loveliest Helen could only mould the spirit of one Paris, even though her beauty might be the coveted object of manly valor. The feminine sex, despite the splendid examples of every virtue that it exhibited in Greece, as elsewhere, remained there only a secondary object of the manly life. The thoughts of aspiring youths reached towards something higher.
"The bond of friendship which they knitted among themselves or with grown men, compelled them into a school which Aspasia herself could hardly have introduced them to; so that in many of the states of Greece manly love became surrounded and accompanied by those intelligent and educational influences, that permanence of character and devotion, whose sentiment and meaning we read of in Plato almost as if in a romance from some far planet."
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