Herausforderung Herder/Herder as Challenge (review)

This collection brings together nineteen papers originally delivered at the International Herder Society conference of 2006, with an introduction by the editor, Sabine Groß. The essays, by an interdisciplinary, international group of scholars, are arranged into seven groups on particular topics, each (except the last) comprising three essays: “Challenges of Herder’s Legacy,” on Herder’s reception; “(Re-)situating Herder,” on Herder’s relationship to other philosophers; “Imagining the Other,” on Herder’s treatments of non-European cultures; “Caroline Flachsland—Gottfried Herder: Gender, Society, Politics, Language,” on both Herders’ political engagements; “Herder on Language, Herder as Editor: Positions, Transitions, Subversion,” on Herder’s philosophy of language, and on his work as an editor of folk songs; “Herder and Current Challenges,” on Herder’s relationship to late modern philosophy, as well as his pacifism; and “Reading Textual Form,” comprising one (very long) essay by Staffan Bengtsson providing a detailed analysis of the printed form of Herder’s Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts.

As is frequently the case with volumes arising from conferences, and despite Groß’s efforts to tie them together in her very helpful, meticulously researched introduction, the essays do not seem really to cohere into one larger project, here “Herder as Challenge.” As Groß indicates, this title suggests that the volume will concern ways in which Herder’s thought challenges his contemporaries’ or our current ways of thinking. It seemed to this reader at least, however, that few of the essays in this volume were especially to be so characterized. Several essays—notably Gerhard Sauder’s discussion of the Herders’ stance towards the French Revolution, and Stefan Greif’s rather jargon-ridden essay interpreting Herder as a member of “radical” modernity—do concern Herder’s opposition to some aspects of his historical context. But Herder’s often antagonistic relationship to the Enlightenment has long been the subject of intense scholarly attention, and is not particularly emphatically discussed here. Indeed, a larger number of the pieces are straightforward scholarly attempts to understand Herder’s doctrines and works, for example the fine, and nicely paired, essays by Angelica Nuzzo and Marion Heinz concerning, respectively, Herder’s early and late positions in the philosophy of language. Others, for example David Simmons’s essay on Herder reception in religious studies, and Ulrike Zeuch’s essay on Herder’s conception of imagination (particularly in the Treatise on the Ode), relate Herder to twenty-first-century debates (concerning, in these two cases, the proper direction for religious studies and the possibility of veracious mental representations of the world, respectively), but they do not seem to suggest that Herder’s positions contest current (or eighteenth-century) understandings on these topics, but rather simply fit Herder into those debates.

The volume does, however, do what one generally expects from such a collection (or from gatherings of an international society) in the sense that it provides a cross-section of a rather wide range of current approaches in Herder scholarship. It includes essays by both established and new scholars from various disciplines—philosophy, history, and religious studies, as well as German studies—who take various approaches, from philosophical exposition and analysis (as in the above-mentioned essays by Nuzzo and Heinz), to primarily historical or biographical approaches, as in Michael Maurer’s presentation of Caroline Herder’s activities in the Herder household, to Anke Gillier’s poststructuralist-influenced analysis of Herder’s use of gender metaphors. Thus the volume can both introduce readers to some central questions in current Herder scholarship, and, precisely because it is eclectic, offer at least something of interest or something unusual to almost any scholar working on Herder.

Indeed several essays in this volume are challenging—not to current views in general, but to common scholarly approaches to Herder. In “Goethes Schatten über Herders Bild,” the late Wulf Koepke argues that the long-standing scholarly focus on Herder’s early works, and the common understanding of Herder’s importance in German literature as lying in his prompting the Sturm und Drang...