Shakespeare

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was born in Mohrungen in East Prussia. His father was a schoolteacher and he grew up in humble circumstances. In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he studied with Kant, who accorded him special privileges because of his unusual intellectual abilities. At this period he also began a lifelong friendship with the irrationalist philosopher Hamann. In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up a school-teaching position in Riga. There he wrote the programmatic essay How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765); published his first major work, concerning the philosophy of language and literature, the Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–8); and also published an important work on aesthetics, the Critical Forests (1769). In 1769 he resigned his position and travelled—first to France, and then to Strasbourg, where in 1770 he met, and had a powerful impact on, the young Goethe. In 1771 he won a prize from the Berlin Academy for his best-known work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on the Origin of Language (published in 1772). From 1771–6 he served as court preacher to the ruling house in Bückeburg. The most important works from this period are the essay Shakespeare (1773) and his first major essay on the philosophy of history, This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774). In 1776, partly thanks to Goethe’s influence, he was appointed General Superintendent of the Lutheran clergy in Weimar, a post he would keep for the rest of his life. During this period he published an important essay in the philosophy of mind, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778); a seminal work on the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3); his well-known longer work on the philosophy of history, the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784–91); an influential essay on the philosophy of religion, God: Some Conversations (1787); a work largely on political philosophy, written in response to the French Revolution, the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–7); a series of Christian Writings (1794–8) concerned with the New Testament; and two works opposing Kant’s critical philosophy, A Metacritique on the Critique of Pure Reason (1799) (directed against the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason [Kant 1781/7]) and the Calligone (1800) (directed against the aesthetics of the Critique of the Power of Judgment [Kant 1790]). In addition to the works just mentioned, Herder also wrote many others in the course of his career.