The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy Book

Herder, Kant's shining pupil, is deservedly forgotten. The only good thing one can say really is that he lived his philosophy: he was an irrationalist, and his writings, erratic and dangerously overblown with exclamation marks, are a testament to this. Two notable features of Herder are, first, his empiricist philosophy of language, where he expands on the thesis, looked at first by Rousseau in the Second Discourse, that language began from our guttural cries of pleasure and pain, and second, his philosophy of history, which was seriously ripped off by Hegel. In the former case, Herder maintains that the ear is much closer to our deepest feelings than is the eye, and consequently language touches us as human beings more profoundly than seeing things; he also puts forward the anti-Cartesian idea that thought is in some way dependent on language - that there is no introspective thought without words at the very least, though Herder would go further, I believe, and say there is no such thing as introspection altogether, since he was a neutral monist and an enthusiastic part of the Spinozist fad in the 1780's. In the latter, the stages of history are not developed in accordance with an inhuman reason, marking out the theses and antitheses upon and against our subjectivities, but are each a unique flowering of the human spirit, conceived emotionally. Since each historical stage is a manifestation of emotion, not reason, there is no hierarchy of stages, and therefore no real development or progress throughout history. Herder is basically unreadable, in English at least (learn German today!), but it is interesting to note that, standing before the two arch-rationalists, Kant and Hegel, are their respective irrationalist wells of inspiration, Rousseau and Herder.