Herder's Conception of “Kraft”

Abstract

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.