Forthcoming in Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches, ed.

John Noyes, (Camden House, 2017)

Herder’s Kantian critique of Kant on the concept of Being

Nigel DeSouza, University of Ottawa

Herder’s originally unpublished Versuch über das Sein or Essay on Being

(1763), as readers of this volume will know, was only made widely available in the
twentieth century.1 It was the young Herder’s first philosophical treatise, composed
while he was attending the University of Königsberg (1762-1764) and attending Kant’s
lectures on logic, mathematics, physical geography, moral philosophy, physics, and,
most important here, metaphysics. 2 Indeed, the Essay on Being engages with Kant’s
ideas on the proof of the existence of God as presented both in his metaphysics lectures,
as evidenced by Herder’s copious lecture notes,3 and in his 1762 treatise, The only
possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence of God (AA 2, 63-
163). In this essay Herder steers a clear path with respect to what he collectively treats
as logical arguments for the necessity of Being or Sein that he finds in Baumgarten,
Wolff, and Kant, and presents an original conception not of the logical necessity, but
rather of the sensory certainty, of Being. In the process, Herder works out some core
epistemological, and metaphysical, ideas that lay the groundwork for the philosophical
anthropology that will orient his life’s work. It is for this reason, and not simply because
it is his very first philosophical treatise, that this work occupies such an important place
in Herder’s œuvre. While the writings that make up that œuvre will range widely, far
beyond ‘school philosophy’ (Schulphilosophie)—into studies of language, literature,
culture, history—the conception of human nature that underlies them all was first
worked out in the language of that particular philosophical tradition that he studied
under Kant. More specifically, as I will try to show in this chapter, the approach to
epistemology that Herder develops both here, in his critique of Kant—whom I will
focus on—as well as of Wolff and Baumgarten, and in several subsequent pieces from
the 1760s, has its origin in ideas he learned from Kant himself. Herder’s central thesis in
his Essay on Being is that the concept of Being is not susceptible of objective, logical
proof and is rather known only with a subjective, sensory certainty. The passion with
which Herder expresses and defends this thesis reflects what appear to be deep-seated
convictions about human nature and human knowledge, and yet, the philosophical ideas
that he employs in its defence are in fact not entirely original to him. Rather, Herder is
drawing here on the cutting edge of philosophy of the time, as represented by Kant and
Crusius and as he was first exposed to it in Kant’s metaphysics lectures, in order to give
philosophical expression to these convictions.4 The objective of this paper, in short, is to
trace this first, philosophical, expression of these convictions to their original ideas and
to show how Herder then uses these same ideas to critique the very teacher who taught
them to him.

I. Kant and Crusius on given, unanalyzable concepts and on logical vs. real
grounds
Specifically, underlying Herder’s central thesis in his Essay on Being—namely,
that the concept of Being is known with a subjective, sensory certainty—are two key
ideas that he learned from Kant and Crusius: 1) the given and unanalyzable nature of the
most fundamental philosophical concepts, and 2) the distinction between logical and
real grounds. Both of these ideas can be found in Herder’s notes from Kant’s lectures on
logic and metaphysics and in Kant’s contemporaneous writings. They form the core of
the pre-critical Kant’s criticisms of the so-called Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, one of
the most recent versions of which was to be found in Baumgarten’s influential textbook,
Metaphysica, upon which Kant based his lectures.
Starting with the first idea, the very opening of Herder’s lecture notes begins
with the observation that “all familiar, human concepts are based on others,” which it is
the task of philosophers to analyze. These concepts, however, are not “infinite[ly]
divisible; thus must there be basic concepts [Grundbegriffe], which [are] themselves
unanalyzed [and] have no basic concept as support” (AA 28, 5).5 This idea of
unanalyzable concepts is one that Kant himself found in Crusius, whom he
acknowledges in his lectures, but whom he also criticizes for having sometimes taken as
unanalyzable concepts or principles that were in fact susceptible of further analysis (AA
28, 5, 10, 157).6 Crusius distinguishes between unanalyzable concepts at which “distinct
knowledge of the human understanding ends below,” such as colour, and at which it
ends “above,” where one analyzes compound concepts coming from the senses into
their simple component concepts.7 Crusius distinguishes two limits of analyzable
concepts by identifying two limits of distinct human understanding: “The lower limits
of the human understanding’s distinct knowledge is necessarily common distinctness,
and the upper limit is logical distinctness.” An example of the former is colour, while an
example of the latter is the simple component concepts into which the compound
concepts coming from the senses can be analyzed. The most important examples of the
latter are the simple concepts of space and time, arrived at by an analysis of the concept
of existence, which we in turn obtain by a process of abstraction from the thoughts of
existing things that we originally acquire through sensation.8 Both Kant and Crusius, in

2
acknowledging the existence of such concepts, are thereby criticizing the pretensions of
Christian Wolff, who, Kant claims, sought to demonstrate everything and who, indeed,
“thought he was capable of everything” (AA 28, 5).9 His error, we further read in
Herder’s lecture notes, is “that he recognizes no unanalyzable concepts and defines
everything” (AA 28, 156).
Kant’s lectures on this issue closely match his articulation of his position on it in
a contemporaneous piece which Herder knew, namely, the Inquiry concerning the
distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morality, published in 1764, but
composed in 1762. There Kant draws a distinction between mathematics and philosophy
in the first section, entitled, “Mathematics arrives at all its definitions synthetically,
whereas philosophy arrives at its definitions analytically” (AA 2, 276; TP 248).10 That
is, while mathematics arrives at its general concepts through “the arbitrary combination
of concepts,” through which it constructs or defines its concepts which were not
previously given, “in philosophy, the concept of a thing is always given, albeit
confusedly or in an insufficiently determinate fashion” (AA 2, 276; TP 248). The work
of philosophy, which must thus begin from the concepts that are given to it, is clear:
“The concept has to be analysed; the characteristic marks which have been separated
out and the concept which has been given have to be compared with each other in all
kinds of contexts: and this abstract thought must be rendered complete and determinate”
(AA 2, 276; TP 248-9). A corollary of this is that the analysis of given concepts by
which philosophy proceeds necessarily leads to unanalyzable concepts, of which there
are innumerably many, such as “being next to each other and being after each other,”
“the concepts of space, time, and many different feelings of the human soul, such as the
feeling of the sublime, the beautiful, the disgusting, and so forth” (AA 2, 280; TP 252).
Kant likewise mentions the error “committed by some” who believed that they could
completely analyze these concepts “into a few simple concepts” (AA 2, 280; TP 253).
The second idea, mentioned above, that Herder drew from Kant is the distinction
between logical and real grounds, and this distinction permeates Herder’s metaphysics
lecture notes, serving as a second basis for the critique of Wolff.11 The notion of a
ground was already present in Wolff and Baumgarten who both define it similarly as
“that through which one can understand why something is” (Wolff) or “that from which
it is knowable why something is” (Baumgarten). 12 In the lecture notes, Kant criticizes
this definition for its use of the word “why,” claiming that because this simply means
“from which ground,” Baumgarten is arguing in a circle (AA 28, 11). 13 But Kant’s
deeper issue with their understanding of ground is that it is limited to only one type of

3
ground, i.e., a logical ground. “The author [i.e., Baumgarten], Wolff, and almost no
philosophers have paid attention here to logical and real ground and conflict; and [they]
viewed everything as logical” (AA 28, 912).14 Kant explains that all grounds are either
logical, following from the principle of identity, or real, in which case they do not
follow from the principle of identity (AA 28, 11). As with the notion of unanalyzable
concepts, Kant explores this correction to Wolff and Baumgarten in his
contemporaneous writings, including Negative magnitudes (written in 1762, published
in 1763) and The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence
of God, to which we shall turn in the next section. Kant’s idea here, as explained in the
former treatise, derives from the distinction he draws between logical opposition and
real opposition. “Two things,” he writes, “are opposed to each other if one thing cancels
that which is posited by the other. This opposition is two-fold: it is either logical
through contradiction, or it is real, that is to say, without contradiction (AA 2, 171; TP
211). In the case of the first, which Kant says has hitherto been the exclusive focus in
philosophy, the opposition arises from affirming and denying something of the same
thing, such as saying that A is both B and not B. According to the law of contradiction,
this is impossible (AA 2, 171). When it comes to real opposition, however, two things
may be opposed to each other, and yet not in violation of the law of contradiction. For
example, two equal motive forces (or magnitudes) that oppose each other will cancel
each other out and the result is rest, or, just as in the first case, nothing, although in a
different sense since here it is not a question of predicates of the same thing standing in
opposition and thus yielding a logical impossibility (AA 2, 171-2). Kant’s point is that
this “real repugnancy” that occurs between “positive grounds” is a genuine kind of
opposition that is not covered by the concept of logical opposition or the law of
contradiction (AA 2, 175-6; TP 211).
Kant ends Negative magnitudes with a “General Remark” in which he turns to
the question of logical and real grounds. There he writes, “I fully understand how a
consequence is posited by a ground in accordance with the rule of identity: analysis of
the concepts shows that the consequence is contained in the ground” (AA 2, 202; TP
239). As he makes clear in his lectures on metaphysics too, philosophy had until then
only concentrated on the logical or “formal” principles of contradiction and identity,
which have to do only with the impossible and the false and with how predicates are to
be compared with subjects (AA 28, 8). What is needed in addition, however, are
“material” principles which, first, take into account that “all our knowledge consists in
concepts and judgements, of which the former [consist] in unanalyzable basic concepts;

4
the latter [consist] in unproveable basic judgements,” and which, second, have to do
with the “true” and with which predicates should be compared with subjects (AA 28, 8).
“For the material principle should indicate not the type of connection, but rather the
ground for which a predicate should be connected to the subject” (AA 28, 9). Here Kant
cites Crusius who had laid the groundwork for his own distinction between logical and
real grounds through his distinction between ideal and real grounds, according to which
an ideal ground (Idealgrund) or ground of knowledge (Erkenntnisgrund) is that “which
produces the knowledge of a thing with conviction” and a real ground (Realgrund) is
that “which produces or makes possible, entirely or in part, the thing itself outside of
thoughts” (AA 28, 11).15 In both the lectures and Negative magnitudes, although he
clearly owes his conception of real ground in part to Crusius, Kant explicitly
distinguishes Crusius’s distinction from his own on the basis that Crusius’ ideal grounds
have only do with our knowledge of things or of real grounds and thus the two are
identical, whereas for Kant, logical grounds and real grounds do not have to do with the
same thing (AA 2, 203; 28, 12, 37).16 Thus, whereas “necessity is a ground of
immutability” or “composition is a ground of divisibility”—where “the relation of the
ground to its consequence can be understood logically,” Kant opens the space for his
concept of real ground in Negative magnitudes by asking, “[b]ut what I should dearly
like to have distinctly explained to me, however, is how one thing issues from another
thing, though not by the means of the law of identity” or, equivalently, “How am I to
understand the fact that, because something is, something else is?” (AA 2, 202; TP
239).17 One example that Kant provides, both in Negative magnitudes and in his
metaphysics lectures, is that “the will of God contains the real ground of the existence
of the world.” He explains, “[t]he will of God is something. The world which exists is
something completely different. Nonetheless, the one is posited by the other” (AA 2,
202; TP 241; AA 28, 12).18 However thoroughly the concept of God’s willing is
analyzed, Kant explains, the concept of an existent world will not be found in it. Further
examples include how the motion of B, currently at rest, is posited by the motion of A,
currently moving directly towards B (AA 2, 202). Kant precludes all recourse to
explanations involving words like “cause,” “effect,” “force,” “action,” insisting that to
do so is merely to already regard the relation of the consequence to its ground as
contained in the “cause,” in which case the relation is just a logical one (AA 2, 203).
The tentative conclusion he makes, at the very end of the treatise, is the following:
the relation of a real ground to something, which is either posited or
cancelled by it, cannot be expressed by a judgement; it can only be

5
 expressed by a concept. That concept can probably be reduced by means
of analysis to simple concepts of real grounds, albeit in such a fashion
that in the end all our cognitions of this relation reduce to simple,
unanalysable concepts of real grounds, the relation of which to their
consequences cannot be rendered distinct at all. (AA 2, 204; TP 241)

Although it is clear that what he says here foreshadows what he will argue in the
Critique of Pure Reason (he even gestures towards this, saying, “one day I shall present
a detailed account of the fruits of my reflections,” AA 2, 203-4; TP 241),19 it is also
important, for our purposes in this paper in particular, to bear in mind the genesis of
these ideas in his critical reflections on Wolff, Baumgarten, and especially Crusius. For
Herder, via the lectures in which Kant presented these reflections, was exposed to this
cutting edge of metaphysics and assimilated these new ideas in his own way, as we shall
see below.

II. Kant’s argument for the existence of God

Now in The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the
existence of God, which brings us closer to Herder’s Essay on Being, Kant’s argument
relies on a similar distinction between what he calls the “material” or “real” element in
possibility and the “formal” or “logical” element in possibility (AA 2, 77-8). In section
I.2, Kant distinguishes between whether or not the elements of a thing, the predicates of
a subject, are contradictory or not, on the one hand, this constituting their logical
possibility or impossibility, and the very existence of those elements or predicates, on
the other, this constituting the material for the possibility. For example, “[a]
quadrangular triangle is absolutely impossible. Nonetheless, a triangle is something, and
so is a quadrangle” (AA 2, 77; TP 123). The important question here is: what is the
precise nature of this so-called real or material element that is something? Kant explains
that possibility disappears when there is a logical contradiction, “but also when there
exists no material element, no datum, to be thought” (AA 2, 78; TP 123). The link, then,
is evidently between possibility and thought. Kant goes on to assert that there would be
no possibility whatsoever—let alone logical possibility—if there were no such material
element: “if all existence is cancelled, then nothing is posited absolutely, nothing at all
is given, there is no material element for anything which can be thought; all possibility
completely disappears” (AA 2, 78; TP 123). Finally, Kant argues on this basis that
because “when all existence is denied [aufgehoben], then all possibility is cancelled as
well[, a]s a consequence, it is absolutely impossible that nothing at all should exist”
(AA 2, 79; TP 124). This, of course, is the linchpin in his ontological argument for the

6
existence of God, whose actuality is that through which “all that can be thought is
given,” and who is thus the “ultimate real ground of all other possibilities” (AA 2, 83;
TP 127, 128). The language of logical and real ground is used to express this
relationship:
the actuality, by means of which, as by means of a ground, the internal
possibility of all other realities is given, I shall call the first real ground
of this absolute possibility, the law of contradiction being in like manner
its first logical ground, for the formal element of possibility consists in
agreement with it. In the same way, that which is real furnishes the data
or material element of that which can be thought. (AA 2, 79-80; TP 124-
5)

This argument is precisely what Herder takes issue with in his Essay on Being, so it is
worth examining a little more closely.
The central question that has been raised by commentators about this argument
ever since it was presented is the following: why is it absolutely impossible that nothing
at all should exist?20 Kant had in fact made roughly the same argument in 1755, in his
New elucidation of the first principles of metaphysical cognition, but its presentation
there was considerably briefer, with no explanation of the impossibility that nothing at
all should exist (AA 1, 395ff ). As Lothar Kreimendahl puts it: “If it is thinkable, as
Kant concedes, that there is nothing real, why is it then ruled out that this cancellation of
all reality also extends to the possible, so that there is absolutely nothing, neither real
nor possible? What is the reason, therefore, that there must at least be possibilities?”21
While Kreimendahl poses this question with respect to the argument in the New
elucidation, he, as well as the commentators he cites, come to the same conclusion with
respect to the later, more detailed, formulation of the argument in The only possible
argument, namely, that Kant gives no satisfactory answer to this question.22 In the latter,
he simply asserts at the beginning of his treatment of this question (in section I.2.iii,
entitled, “It is absolutely impossible that nothing at all should exist”): “That, by means
of which all possibility whatever is cancelled, is absolutely impossible, for the two
expressions are synonymous” (AA 2, 79; TP 124). This claim, however, already
implicitly contains the assumption that not all possibilities can be cancelled. 23
A closely related problem is the validity of Kant’s argument from the
(suppressed) premise that there must be possibilities to the conclusion that something,
without which there would be no material for possibility and hence no possibility
whatsoever, must exist. Kant appears to be arguing, through purely conceptual analysis,
from the concept of possibility to the existence of something. 24 Martin Schönfeld poses

7
the problem in the following way: “a conceptual analysis of “possibility” reveals the
possibility of a conceptual whole and the possibility of its conceptual elements—its
does not reveal the possibility of a conceptual whole and an independent and prior
existence of its conceptual elements.”25 What is more, in the previous section (I.1) of
The only possible argument, where Kant famously argues that existence is not a
predicate, he also argues that existence is identical with the concept of Being insofar as
it amounts to the positing of something in and for itself and that “this concept is so
simple that it is not possible to say anything further by way of elaboration” (AA 2, 73;
TP 119). Indeed, Kant goes on to claim that existence is one of the unanalyzable or
almost unanalyzable concepts into which the whole of our cognition ultimately resolves
itself (AA 2, 74, 73; TP 119).26 It would seem then that in arguing for the absolutely
necessary existence of some being that contains the ultimate real ground of all other
possibilities, Kant is defying one of his very own strictures according to which the
existence of something, qua synthetic, can only be known empirically and not
analytically.27 After all, Kant himself maintained that “[o]nly through experiences, not
logically, can we see the nexus of real grounds,” as we read in Herder’s metaphysics
lectures notes, and, in Reflection 3972 a few years later, “all real grounds and also even
the possibility of these are only knowable a posteriori’ Kant, AA 28, 24; Kant, AA 17,
R 3972 [1769], 370).
In section I.2, entitled, “Of internal possibility, in so far as it presupposes
existence,” however, Kant explicitly draws attention to the fact that his exclusive
concern is just this: “internal or so-called absolute and unconditional possibility and
impossibility” (AA 2, 77, 78; TP 122, 123). Kant is thus not arguing about the
possibility of actually existing things, but rather of their very conceptual possibility.
Later, at the very end of his presentation of the ontological argument, Kant characterizes
this argument as “entirely a priori” and as “derived from the internal characteristic mark
of absolute necessity,” presupposing the existence neither of himself, of other minds,
nor of the physical world (AA 2, 91; TP 135). Several commentators have highlighted
the degree to which Kant’s proof echoes Leibniz, for whom essences, as possibilities,
precede existence. 28 As Leibniz explains in On the ultimate origination of things,
“[N]either those essences nor the so-called eternal truths pertaining to them are
fictitious. Rather, they exist in a certain realm of ideas, so to speak, namely in God
himself, the very source of every essence and of the existence of the rest.”29 In a similar
fashion, at the end of his ontological argument, Kant writes: “Now, it is further apparent
from the argument we have recommended that all the essences of other things and the

8
real element of all possibility are grounded in this unique being” (AA 2, 91; TP 135).
Kant is thus arguing here, in line with the rationalist tradition, for the reality of the
essences purely insofar as they can be represented by a mind, or can be thought, namely
by God, independently of their external existence.30 Without God, Leibniz writes in the
Monadology, “there would be nothing real in possibles, and not only would nothing
exist, but also nothing would be possible.”31

IV. Herder’s critique of Kant’s argument

In the Essay on Being, both Herder’s articulation of his own position with
respect to the concept of Being and his criticism of Kant’s argument in The only
possible argument draw, in part, on ideas he learned from Kant as well as from Crusius
(partly via Kant) as we shall see below. The starting point for Herder’s entire approach
to the question of the concept of Being or Sein—which is the term he uses instead of
God or God’s existence (Dasein)—is a characterization of the nature of human thought
and consciousness as finite (FHA 1, 11; EB xx).32 Herder draws on Kant and Crusius in
his further characterization of finite human consciousness as possessing both inner and
outer sense and thus as beginning from sensation. Crusius explains: “for sensation
[Empfindung] is just that state of our understanding where we are immediately
compelled to think of something as existing […] External sensations give us concepts of
things that are outside our soul. Through inner sensation, however, we are conscious of
what occurs in our soul.”33 A similar distinction can be found in Kant, who, like
Crusius, associates the inner sense with consciousness (AA 2, 60; AA 28, 901).34 Now
it is on the basis of this characterization of human consciousness that Herder claims,
throughout his Essay, that all our basic concepts are sensory and given—the “given”
nature of our basic concepts being, of course, an idea that Herder learned from Kant, as
we saw above. The contrast Herder draws is with infinite and divine consciousness
which, “free of all sensory impressions, without any given concepts, without the
remotest a posteriori premises, perhaps alone can say I to itself” (FHA 1, 11; EB xx).
This fundamental difference between human and divine consciousness lies at the basis
of Herder’s account of how we humans arrive at our basic concepts. We are not
endowed with a capacity for immediately grasping distinct concepts; rather, starting
from our representations deriving from outer sense, all of which are subjective, given,
sensory, and obscure, Herder claims that through abstraction, reflection, and analysis in
inner sense, we proceed as far as we are able, but what is left over are sensory concepts
(FHA 1, 11, 10; EB xx). “But I extract them, refine them out of the sensory until it

9
cannot be refined any further, and a rough nugget remains. Behold, it was unanalyzable.
Thus sensory and unanalyzable are synonyms” (FHA 1, 11; EB xx). Here we arrive at
another idea encountered above, which is closely related to that of given concepts and
which Herder also takes from Kant and Crusius, namely, the idea of unanalyzable
concepts. These characteristics—subjective, given, sensory, unanalyzable—are true of
our most basic concepts, Herder maintains, but they are true in the highest degree of the
most basic concept of them all, the concept of Being or Sein:
If one were to pursue the most sensory of concepts, it would be
completely unanalyzable for us, with sensory certainty in the highest
degree, almost a theoretical instinct, the foundation of all other concepts
of experience, and completely undemonstrable. Beneath it, the other
unanalyzable concepts could be collected, and out of their confused
chaos an order would be found, if not objectively, then subjectively in
relation to us. (FHA 1, 12; EB xx)

Here we encounter the final, and most significant, characteristic of these concepts,
which is correspondingly truest of the concept of Being: certainty. This is the keystone
of Herder’s argument: the concept of Being is in need of no philosophical proof since it
has its own, natural, inherent power to convince or “power of conviction” (FHA 1, 11;
EB xx). This is what Herder means when he says, drawing on Hume,35 that it is like a
“theoretical instinct,” for as Herder explains, in order to prove it philosophers “denied
the Being of which Mother Nature had long since convinced them” (FHA 1, 13; EB
xx).36 Herder’s point is that the subjective, sensory certainty of the concept of Being is
perfectly sufficient for us.
This is not all, however, for Herder also emphatically claims that the concept of
Being is not even susceptible of philosophical proof. Like Kant, Herder rejects
Baumgarten’s proof, according to which Being or “something” (aliquid) qua “possible”
is logically derived from “that which is not nothing” (nonnihil), i.e., that which contains
no logical contradiction,37 as well as Wolff’s proof, according to which Being or
existence is the complement of possibility. 38 For Herder, both these proofs proceed from
purely logical concepts and thus can only have logical consequences—they cannot
prove the concept of Being we primordially possess (FHA 1, 13-4, 16; EB xx). This is
because that concept originates not from some innate, clear and distinct concept of the
understanding, but rather, qua “real Being” (Realsein), from an “impression of nature”
whose “copy” is “logical Being” (logisches Sein)—Hume’s influence is evident here
again in Herder’s terminology (FHA 1, 12; EB xx).39 This concept, being sensory in

10
origin and unanalyzable by nature, stands outside the reach of any logical proof, and
precedes all possibility.
The logically possible cannot explain any aspect of real Being, because
one can always have explained the logical essence completely without
having touched the real essence. [...] And this is indeed the only business
of the philosophers. – Indeed! and it must be. But let them not draw
conclusions regarding real Being from this logically possible, believing
they have explained real Being when they unpack in detail the
completely different concept of the logically possible and mix it up with
the former. (FHA 1, 16; EB xx)

Here again, Herder is drawing on an idea that he first encountered in Kant and Crusius,
as we saw above, namely, the distinction between the logical and the real. Beyond
Baumgarten and Wolff, however, Herder also employs this distinction to criticize
Kant’s own argument that he lays out in The only possible argument and which is also
reproduced in Herder’s metaphysics lecture notes (AA 28, 914ff).
Herder discusses Kant’s argument twice, in both chapters of his Essay on Being,
and our focus here will be on the central criticism that is common to both.40 As we saw
above, Kant claims that something, some being—i.e., God—must exist because
otherwise there would be no possibility whatsoever, not logical or real, since there
would be no material on which both these kinds of possibility depend. Now it was seen
that by real possibility Kant had in mind what it is possible to think—the material,
predicates, essences that a mind could represent. In section I.2.iv, Kant provides the
example of a “fiery body,” the internal possibility of which he seeks to have explained.
After proceeding to analyze it into its logically non-contradictory constituent concepts
of fire and body, and, further, of extension, impenetrability, and force, Kant insists that
this is not enough:
You must, however, give me an account of what entitles you so readily
to accept the concept of extension as a datum. For suppose that it
signified nothing: your alleged account of the possibility of the body
would then be an illusion. It would also be highly improper to appeal to
experience in connection with this datum, for what is at issue is precisely
whether an internal possibility of the fiery body would occur even if
nothing at all were to exist. […]
As long as you prove possibilities by means of the law of contradiction,
you are depending upon that which is thinkable in the thing and which is
given to you in it, and you are only regarding the relation in accordance
with this logical rule. But in the end, when you consider how this is then
given to you, the only thing to which you can appeal is an existence
[Dasein]. (AA 2, 80, 81; TP 125, 125-6)

11
Kant’s employs the example of the fiery body in order to “attempt to bring the idea of
existence, which is always fundamental even to internal possibility, somewhat closer to
the more ordinary concepts of sound understanding” (AA 2, 80; TP 125). His objective,
it seems, is to show us how our appeal to the existence of the predicates that are given to
us in a logically possible thought ultimately derive from God, in whom are grounded
“all the essences of other things and the real element of all possibility” (AA 2, 91; TP
135).
Now Herder’s response to this is simply to reject it as transgressing the limits of
finite human consciousness, as taught to him by Kant himself. Far from it being “highly
improper to appeal to experience,” Herder, as we have seen, wants to insist that all our
concepts necessarily ultimately derive only from experience. The predicates in question
here can only have derived from our experience of actual fire and actual bodies or actual
fiery bodies, or of our having learned of these predicates from others. And our
knowledge of these predicates as ultimately given to us means that we cannot say
anything about their ultimate nature or their provenance from the divine intellect. Our
knowledge of Being derives from our primordial concept of real Being (Realsein) which
is a completely sensory concept, and from which our concept of logical Being is,
secondarily, derived. Kant’s argument, like the proofs of Baumgarten and Wolff, only
touches this logical concept, according to Herder. Rehearsing Kant’s proof, he writes:
To conclude: without something that can be thought, 41 there is no inner
possibility, without inner possibility nothing is possible. It follows that
without something thinkable nothing is possible. Where nothing is
possible there is no existence. But something exists – – therefore etc. etc.
something thinkable must have something material etc. This has been
demonstrated via a detour that can significantly refine and generalize that
of the Wolffians, but without demonstrative clarity.
[...]
In short: all logical possibility ends in a gap: nothing thinkable exists and
thus there is no inner possibility, no ground, no effects, nothing etc. etc.
(FHA 1, 18; EB xx)

Herder’s main point here is that in speaking of what it is possible to think, Kant is
speaking only about logical possibility and the material necessary for the thoughts that
are logically possible or not. As Herder summarizes, “Negate real Being logically, the
result is conceptual” (FHA 1, 14; EB xx).42 Thus to try, on this basis, to prove
something about real Being in and of itself is to make a grievous error, for it fails to
heed the gap (Kluft) between logical Being and real Being: you cannot prove something
about real Being on the basis of its entirely derivative copy, logical Being, nor, further,
is the nature of Being in and of itself even available to us since our only access to it is as

12
a sensory and given “impression of its nature.” Kant’s argument is thus simply a
refinement of Wolff’s proof insofar as he proceeds from existence to possibility rather
than from possibility to existence. Herder sees this as an improvement because, in his
eyes, all possibility does indeed proceed from existence, but just not from some kind of
a priori set of essences inhering in an absolutely necessary being (that is also unique,
simple, immutable, eternal, and containing supreme reality, AA 2, 83-5), as Kant
argues, but rather, more modestly, from the only kind of knowledge of this existence
that is open to us, that is, a sensory, a posteriori, and subjectively certain knowledge.
Summarizing the arguments of Baumgarten, Wolff, and Kant that he rejects, Herder
writes:
Being cannot be nonnihil, not complementum possibilitatis,43 not the
inclusive concept of logical predicates, because we have been able to
isolate these concepts so that Being could remain whole. [...] real Being
is the first absolute concept [...]When it comes to logical possibility, this
concept is always a complete remainder, and real possibility assumes it
and does not make the effort of explaining it. (FHA 1, 16; EB xx)

Conclusion
The concept of Being is in need of no explanation or philosophical proof
because our knowledge of it as given, sensory, unanalyzable, is endowed with its own
certainty—this means that this experiential knowledge of the concept of Being precedes
and is the inescapable basis of any philosophical understanding of it in terms of
possibility. “Subjectively, the concept of Being without a doubt preceded that of
possibility […] since there were human beings before there were philosophers” (FHA 1,
15; EB xx).44 And it is this very subjective quality of our certainty of this concept that
forms the central characteristic of the kind of philosophy that Herder calls for at the end
of his short essay. Herder emphatically reasserts, as he had earlier, that in the chaos of
our unanalyzable concepts an order and unity is to be found if we turn to “subjective
philosophy,” according to which all these “material principles” (echoing Kant’s use of
‘material’) have their point of connection in us (FHA 1, 20; EB xx). This is true of the
concept of Being, as the most sensory and completely unanalyzable concept, as well as
of are the concepts of “juxta, post, and per,” that is, space, time, and force, the next
most unanalyzable (FHA 1, 20; EB xx). It is this quartet of concepts, only briefly
mentioned in the Essay, that forms the metaphysical and epistemological heart of what
Herder calls here “subjective philosophy.”45
In several other pieces from the 1760s, Herder will develop this approach,
beginning with his 1765 pamphlet, How philosophy can become more universal and

13
useful for the benefit of the people, in which he makes his famous call for a Copernican
revolution through which philosophy will be transformed into anthropology (FHA 1,
134). There, Herder’s claims about the sensory and subjective certainty of our most
fundamental concepts is echoed, for example, in morality, in his Rousseauian conviction
that most people do not according to rationally worked out moral principles in the strict
sense but rather, thanks to nature, according to “sensations, and these are all good.” For
moral theory only renders distinct, for “my understanding,” that which “was already
certain for me beforehand,” and which “my heart, not the understanding, must feel”
(FHA 1, 115-6; PW 13). Around the same time, in a sketch from 1766 or 1768, Plato
said that our learning is only recollection, Herder develops what may be called a
“metaphysics of perception”46 according to which the starting point of all our
knowledge is not an external perception or representation, but rather a feeling of its own
existing that is the primordial manifestation of its thought of Being: “The soul enters the
world: the power of representation is its essence: but it is itself entirely its thought – the
obscure, but lively concept of its Being fills it entirely […] This thought is an obscure,
but singular vivid feeling.”47 This feeling, however, is only possible through the body
(whose equivalent, in the Essay, was “external sense”), as constructed by the soul and
whose existence in the relations of space, time, and force corresponds to the
fundamental concepts of space, time, and force in the soul’s concept of Being.48 Finally,
in On Christian Wolff’s writings (1768) and On Baumgarten’s way of thinking in his
writings (1767), Herder subjects to criticism the “objective philosophy” that he initially
criticized in the Essay on Being, here too associated with Wolff and Baumgarten, for its
fundamentally mistaken belief that the rational order of the world, the organization of
Being into species and kinds, originating in the divine intellect, is fully accessible to,
and demonstrable by, human beings via the instrumental science of logic. 49 Rather,
Herder proposes a new conception of philosophy which directs its attention to the
subjective and sensory origins of concepts in and through an embodied soul that
engages with the external world around it and obtains is historical-cultural identity
through its spatio-temporal situatedness. But all of these rich developments had their
first origins in the key ideas of Kant and Crusius through which Herder, in his Essay on
Being, gave philosophical expression for the first time to his most fundamental
convictions about human nature.

14
Notes

1 See John Noyes’ Introduction to this volume, pp. ??, for the relevant details.
2 See Steve Naragon, “Reading Kant in Herder’s Lecture Notes,” in Reading Kant’s
Lectures, ed. Robert R. Clewis, (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2015), 40ff., for a detailed
account of the lectures by Kant during Herder’s time in Königsberg.
3 Metaphysik Herder, in Kant, AA 28, 914ff.
4 The connections to Kant and Crusius in Herder’s Essay on Being were first evidenced

and analyzed by Ulrich Gaier, in his excellent commentary on the Essay in FHA 1, 844-
869, and then further elaborated upon by Marion Heinz in her in-depth analysis in
Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnistheorie und
Metaphysik des jungen Herder (1763-1778), (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), 1-25, and, more
recently, in Heinz, “Versuch über das Sein,” in Herder Handbuch, eds. Stefan Greif,
Marion Heinz, Heinrich Clairmont (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 47-58. My
analysis in this chapter builds on theirs.
5 Cf. also AA 28, 8: “[I]t is to be repeated that all our knowledge consists in concepts

and judgements, of which the former in unanalyzable basic concepts; the latter in
unproveable basic judgements.” All translations from the German are my own, unless
otherwise indicated.
6 Cf. e.g., Christian August Crusius, Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunft=Wahrheiten,

wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegen gesetzt werden, (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich
Gleditsch, 1745) in: Crusius, Die philosophischen Hauptwerke, ed. Giorgio Tonelli
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), §8, pp. 11-15.
7 Crusius, Entwurf, §8, pp. 12, 13. Crusius associates the former with what he calls

“common distinctness,” and the latter with what he calls “logical distinctness.”
8 Crusius, Entwurf, §48, pp. 76f., §45, p. 73.
9 Crusius speaks of those who are not satisfied with stopping at the two ends of common

and logical distinctness, which he calls the “two extremes of human knowledge,”
explicitly naming one group who “want to define and render distinct the simple
concepts likewise through a further analysis.” He continues, “Necessarily they must,
however, then turn around in a whirl and can go no further. […] Thus do they hit upon
[…] merely relative and negative concepts, which are not of the right kind, and just for
this reason also do not lead closer to true distinctness. From this emerge ontologies that
are exceedingly difficult and subtle, and yet not useful.” Crusius, Entwurf, §8, p. 14.
10 A discussion of the differences between mathematics and philosophy is also present

in the metaphysics lecture notes. See AA 28, 5-6.

11 Steve Naragon provides a detailed investigation of this distinction in Herder’s

metaphysics lecture notes on pp. 49-61 of “Reading Kant.” For a thorough discussion of
the background in Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, and Kant, see Eric Watkins, Kant and
the metaphysics of causality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chs 1-2,
esp. 81-89, 114ff.
12 Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des

Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, ed. Charles A. Corr (Hildesheim: Georg
Olms, 1983), §29, p. 15; Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysics, transl. Courtney D.
Fugate and John Hymers, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), §14, p. 102.
13 Herder will repeat this very criticism in his critical reflections on Baumgarten. Cf.

Herder, Von Baumgartens Denkart in seinen Schriften, in FHA 1, 656.

14 Translation: Naragon, “Reading Kant,” 55.
15 Crusius, Entwurf, §34, p. 53.
16 For discussion see Naragon, “Reading Kant,” 58-59.

15
17 Emphasis in original. The idea that the connection between two things need not
necessarily be conceived of as conceptual, logical, or ideal is already present in the
earlier pre-critical Kant as reflected in his espousal of physical influx and in his theory
of physical monads. For discussion, see Watkins, Kant and the metaphysics, ch. 1-2
and, for his influence in these two respects on Herder, see Nigel DeSouza, “Leibniz in
the eighteenth century: Herder’s critical reflections on the Principes de la nature de la
grace,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20, no. 4 (2012): 773-795.
18 Emphasis in original.
19 Eric Watkins maintains that Kant’s invocation here of real grounds betrays an

awareness of, and response to, Hume; see Watkins, Kant and the metaphysics, 166-70,
esp. f.n. 70, 167-8. For an interesting response to Watkins’ discussion see Andrew
Chignell and Derk Pereboom, “Kant’s Theory of Causation and Its Eighteenth-Century
German Background,” Philosophical Review, 119 (2010): 576-8.
20 See, for example, Martin Schönfeld, The philosophy of the young Kant, (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000), 204ff.; Lothar Kreimendahl, “Einleitung,” in Kant, Der
einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, eds. Lothar
Kreimendahl and Michael Oberhausen, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011), LXXff.,
CXIIff.
21 Kreimendahl, “Einleitung,” LXXIII.
22 Kreimendahl, “Einleitung,” CXIV-CXV.
23 Cf. Kreimendahl, “Einleitung,” CXIIf.
24 Cf. Kreimendahl, “Einleitung,” CXIIIf.; Schönfeld, The philosophy, 204f.
25 Schönfeld, The philosophy, 204. Emphasis added.
26 For Crusius, the concept of existence is analyzable into the concepts of somewhere

(irgendwo) and somewhen (zu irgend einer Zeit); see Crusius, Entwurf, §§46, 48, pp.
73-5, 76-7.
27 Cf. Kreimendahl, “Einleitung,” CXIII; Schönfeld, The philosophy, 205.
28 See, for example, Schönfeld, The philosophy, 205f. and Andrew Chignell, “Kant,

Real Possibility, and the Threat of Spinoza,” Mind, 121, no. 483 (2012): 642ff.
29 G. W. Leibniz, On the ultimate origination of things, in Philosophical essays, ed.

Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 151-2. Both Schönfeld
(2000) and Chignell (2012) adduce this same quote.
30 Cf. Chignell, “Kant,” 647.
31 Leibniz, Monadology, §43, in Philosophical essays, 218; quoted by Chignell in

“Kant,” f.n. 21, 647.

32 Cf. Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 3.
33 Crusius, Entwurf, §16, pp. 28, 29 (emphasis in original); cf. §426, pp. 824-5.
34 Crusius, Entwurf, §16, p. 29; §426, p. 824.
35 Hume, An enquiry concerning human understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), §5.22. Cf. Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus,
9; Heinz brings out the underlying influence of Hume throughout Herder’s Essay.
Manfred Baum also draws the connection in Baum, “Herder’s Essay on Being,” in
Herder Today, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), 133.
36 Cf. (FHA 1, 19; EB xx): “No-one has denied Being as I have been discussing it. The

skeptical idea occurred to the excessively studious philosophers and they attempted to
prove it. […] It is the 1st sensory concept, whose certainty lies at the ground of all else.
We are born with this certainty. Nature has spared the worldly wise the effort of proof,
since it has the power of conviction”
37 Baumgarten, Metaphysics, §§7, 8, pp. 100-1.
38 Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken, §14, p. 9. Cf. Kant, AA 2, 76.
39 Cf. Hume, An enquiry, §§2.1, 2.3, pp. 96, 97.

16
40 For discussion of other aspects of Herder’s critique of Kant, see Heinz,
Sensualistischer Idealismus, 20-3 and Heinz, “Versuch,” 55-58.
41 ein Denkliches
42 Emphasis added. In a similar vein, in response to Kant’s claim in I.1.ii (entitled

‘Existence is the absolute positing of a thing.’) mentioned above, that the concept of
positing (Position) is identical with the concept of Being (Sein) in general, Herder
critically responds by stating that we should leave the concept of Being “unexplained in
order to avoid confusion – – – but how will it be possible to determine it on the basis of
the absolute position, since this position is either completely identical with Being and
thus just a yet more obscure synonym, or rather a kind of Being which everyday
language unjustifiably says of God” (FHA 1, 16; EB xx). That is, Kant’s claim says
nothing substantive about Being, but is rather purely a linguistic matter.
43 Christan Wolff had declared, famously, that a real entity (ens) can be understood as

something possible, whose existence is to be grasped as the complement of this

possibility (complementum possibilitatis). “Existentam definio per complementum
possibilitatis,’ Philosophia prima sive ontologia (Frankfurt: Libraria Rengeriana 1736),
para 174.
44 Cf. Crusius, Entwurf, §56, p. 98: “Moreover, from the perspective of our knowledge,

the concept of the real [des wircklichen] is prior to the concept of the possible. For our
first concepts are existing things, namely sensations, through which we only afterwards
arrive at our concept of the possible.” Emphasis in original.
45 Cf. Nigel DeSouza, “The metaphysical and epistemological foundations of Herder’s

philosophical anthropology,” in Herder: philosophy and anthropology, eds. Anik

Waldow and Nigel DeSouza, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 52-71. For
discussion of the concepts of space, time, and force in the Essay on Being, see Heinz,
Sensualistischer Idealismus, 15-18.
46 Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 44. Heinz was the first to edit and publish this

piece. For analysis see Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, ch. 3 and Nigel DeSouza,
“Aufklärerische Selbstentwürfe,” in Herder Handbuch, eds. Stefan Greif, Marion
Heinz, Heinrich Clairmont, (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 114-117.
47 Herder, Plato sagte: daß unser Lernen bloß Erinnerung sei, in Heinz,

Sensualistischer Idealismus, 175.

48 Herder, Plato sagte, 175-6. For analysis of Herder’s theory of the soul-body

relationship, see Nigel DeSouza, “Leibniz in the eighteenth century.”

49
Herder, Über Christian Wolfs Schriften, in HWP 2, 9-13; Herder, Von Baumgartens
Denkart in seinen Schriften, in FHA 1, 653-658. For analysis see Nigel DeSouza, “Deux
périodes et métaphysiques de l’Aufklärung : Herder et sa critique de Wolff,” in: Les
Métaphysiques des Lumières, eds. Pierre Girard, Christian Leduc, Mitia Rioux-Beaulne,
(Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), 191-205, and DeSouza, “Aufklärerische
Selbstentwürfe,” 71-79.

17