3

The Metaphysical and

Epistemological Foundations
of Herder’s Philosophical
Anthropology
Nigel DeSouza

Herder’s thought as a whole is best seen through the lens of the term “anthro-
pology”: all of his writings on literature, the arts, history, language, religion,
and education have at their center the aim of understanding human beings.
The original, and enduring, motivation for this anthropology, beyond his own
profound curiosity and desire to understand, is Herder’s closely related practical
vocation of being a shaper of peoples, an agent of Bildung, his passion for which is
so vividly expressed in his Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Diary of my voyage
in the year 1769).1 While all this is perhaps evident to people in the English-
speaking world who are familiar with Herder’s celebrated philosophical ideas
on culture and history,2 what is perhaps less well known is that Herder early on
sought to work out the metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings of these
ideas. It is these underpinnings that form the basis of the philosophical anthro-
pology that will orient Herder’s multifaceted thought for his whole life.3
My objective in this paper is well defined: I wish to present a synthetic account
of the young Herder’s metaphysics and epistemology. This will involve drawing
on a range of short pieces, sketches, and commentaries that Herder wrote in the

1 2
See FHA 9/2, 9–126. See, e.g., most recently, Sikka 2011, Spencer 2013.
3
Marion Heinz’s contribution in the present volume shows how Herder came to the under-
standing of the relationship between metaphysics and anthropology that forms the background of
the ideas explored in this chapter. See Zammito 2002 and Pross 1987 for detailed studies of Herder’s
role in the rise of anthropology and in the anthropology of the Aufklärung.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

1760s, and presenting the views contained therein as a whole, rather than
individually and chronologically,4 with the intention of bringing into relief the
strikingly systematic and coherent nature of the young Herder’s metaphysics and
epistemology. The ultimate objective, of course, is to give the reader a greater
sense of the philosophical depth of Herder’s more familiar philosophical ideas on
culture and history. In the first section, we will look at God’s relationship to the
world he creates. In the second, we turn to the analogous relationship, based on
interaction, between the soul and the body it builds for itself. And in the third, we
bring this all together in order to understand how the embodied soul, through
engagement with the world, obtains knowledge, and acquires its identity as a
historical-cultural being.

1 God and World

As with Leibniz, Wolff, and other philosophers in the German Aufklärung, God
plays an important role in Herder’s metaphysics. The world has its origin in the
divine understanding: “the whole world [is] a thought in God’s being,” as Herder
writes in a short piece from 1766 or 1768, entitled Plato sagte, daß unser Lernen
bloß Erinnerung sei (Plato said that all our learning is merely recollection).5 Unlike
Leibniz and Wolff, however, Herder does not maintain that God chooses to
create the best from among many possible worlds; rather, in line with Spinoza’s
necessitarianism, Herder believes that there is only one divine thought, which
contains all that is possible within it, as he outlines in another short piece,
Grundsätze der Philosophie (Principles of Philosophy), from 1769. But differently
from Spinoza, who believed that “everything exists in God” (HWP 2, 52), Herder
maintains that, in order to fully realize himself, God must create the world: God
requires the external manifestation of his thought in the form of the physical
universe and the finite human beings that inhabit it and who share in the divine
thought in a limited fashion and through whose own thought, in the broadest
sense of the word, in part acquired via the senses, the world returns to God via a
form of spiritualized materialism.6 Spinoza thus erred in not seeing that “besides
the perfect being, which itself is a thought, others are necessary, which thus think
of others, just as they think of themselves” and that “no God is therefore possible

4
In this chapter, I am in part drawing on several articles where the objective was just that kind of
more focussed analysis: DeSouza 2012b, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, and forthcoming.
5
The manuscript of Plato sagte was edited and published for the first time by Marion Heinz in
Heinz 1994, 175–82, here 175; see Heinz 1994, 43 for the dating of this manuscript. All translations
in this chapter are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
6
See Heinz 1994, xxv–xxvi; Kondylis 2002, 625ff.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

without world: just as no world without God” (HWP 2, 52–3).7 And correcting
Leibniz, Herder asserts, “the one thought of God cannot but contain all possible
things which are at the same time actual ” (HWP 2, 53).
In conceiving of this necessary divine creation as the creation of the physical
universe and of finite human beings, Herder is reflecting the idea, common since
Descartes, of there being two kinds of created substance: material/bodily and
immaterial/spiritual. However, Herder does not subscribe to this ontology of
substance, replacing it instead with an ontology of forces (Kräfte).8 Bodies and
souls are known by their respective phenomena of movement and resistance, and
thought, whose common underlying cause Herder posits to be not a substance
but a force: “all I know is that once the force of thinking is posited in my soul,
thus do I think forth, just like a pushed body always goes forward in a straight
line” (HWP 2, 52). But these forces of thought and of movement cannot
themselves be further explained. “As little as I can there explain the force of
movement: as little here the force of thought: as little impact there: as little the
creation of thoughts here. Both are nevertheless phenomena” (HWP 2, 52).9
Herder is echoing here a lesson he learned from Kant in his lectures on meta-
physics in the early 1760s and in his pre-critical writings according to which
philosophy must begin from given concepts and phenomena and restrict itself to
analyzing them into their constituent parts/representations and their relations,
but not try to posit explanations that transcend experience.10 However, as we
shall see, Herder develops his ontology of forces in a way that fails to respect this
Kantian limit, but for the purpose not only of securing a certain theological
metaphysics, but also in order to do justice to the phenomenology of human
experience in a way that is impossible within Kant’s strictures.
The divine creation of the universe thus involves the creation of two kinds of
forces: the external forces of attraction and repulsion and the internal force of
thought. Herder does not attempt to provide any kind of explanation of the
nature of matter as res extensa (Descartes) or as a well-founded phenomenon
reducible to the derivative active and passive forces of an underlying aggregate of

7
Herder’s early criticism of Spinoza here stands in contrast to his later interpretation, most
notably in Gott: einige Gespräche.
8
Cf. Heinz 1994, xiii, 102.
9
Herder elaborates on this more fully in the 1778 version of Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der
menschlichen Seele. With reference to his use of the term “force” he writes: “I do not say that I hereby
explain anything; I have not yet known any philosophy that explained what force is . . . What
philosophy does is to observe, order together, elucidate after it always already presupposes force,
irritation, efficacy” (FHA 4, 337–8; Forster 2002, 194).
10
See Kant, Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der
Moral, AA 2, 276; Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik, AA 2, 370.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

monads (Leibniz), although he does reference this latter definition in some

places.11 His understanding of matter is mainly based on ideas he took from
Kant according to which matter’s outer properties of resistance or impenetrabil-
ity and movement can be understood in terms of its forces of attraction and
repulsion.12 Not only does God as the originary, infinite force thus create these
forces, but the very spatiotemporal structure of the physical universe itself
also corresponds to the necessary nature of God’s thought qua externalized.
The process, according to Herder, is as follows: “God fills space through his
force . . . he fills time through his force . . . [h]is force thinks all possible things
actual . . . The world is an infinite continuum through space: an infinite succession
through time: for space and time are the consequences of the infinite thought of
God, since he thinks every possible thing next to and after each other” (HWP 2, 53).
And within this spatiotemporal universe—Herder drawing heavily here on
Kant’s cosmological account in his Universal Natural History and Theory of
the Heavens (1755)—“planetary bodies in the universe are formed through the
forces of attraction and repulsion.”13
Now what is important to note in this account of the metaphysical origins of
the universe is a basic feature which permitted Herder to construe the universe
both as divinely created and as unfolding according to its own laws, naturalis-
tically.14 This feature combines ideas from both Shaftesbury and Kant, both of
whom explicitly sought to refute Epicureanism (AA 1, 222; Shaftesbury 1999,
304). From Kant, the subtitle of whose above-named treatise reads “An essay on
the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire structure of the universe
based on Newtonian principles,” Herder derives an understanding of the
mechanism by which the universe arose. The necessity through which this
mechanism operates does not extend only to the laws of motion that result
from the material forces of attraction and repulsion; rather, it extends to the
origin of the very laws themselves. Whereas Leibniz saw these laws as the product
of a divine act of will, according to the Principle of the Best,15 Kant construed
them in The Only Possible Proof-Ground of the Existence of God (1763) as
“non-morally dependent” on God, i.e., not as chosen by God but as necessarily
contained in the very concept of matter (but still demonstrative of divine

11
See e.g. FHA 4, 338.
12
Kant presents this view of matter in Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels
(1755) and Monadologia physica (1756).
13
HWP 2, 53; see e.g. AA 1, 225f.
14
Johannes Schmidt discusses the relationship between the religious/theological and naturalistic
aspects of Herder’s anthropology in his chapter in the present volume.
15
Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, §19, Leibniz 1965, vol. IV, 444f.; Principes de la nature et de
la grace, §11; Leibniz 1965, vol. VI, 603.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

providence, who chose to create matter, given the order to which the laws of
motion give rise) (AA 2, 100, 99). Thus, once the decision to create matter is
taken, Kant claims, “the laws of the motion of matter are absolutely necessary”
(AA 2, 100). Herder’s only modification to this story is to add necessity to the
divine act of creation itself. From Shaftesbury, Herder derives an idea that was
foundational for his whole metaphysics (as we shall see in the next section also)
and which in fact underlies this very assertion as to the necessary nature of
creation.16 That necessity derives from a fundamental analogical conclusion that
Shaftesbury makes in The Moralists from our own experience of our body as
being governed by our mind to the existence of a mind that governs the body of
the world as a whole and is responsible for its undeniable order (Shaftesbury
1999, 302–4). On this view, just as no soul is complete without a body, so too is
God incomplete without his own “body,” i.e., the world. Now Herder combines
these ideas he takes from Kant and Shaftesbury to produce his own cosmology,
which is both divine and naturalistic. He writes: “just as planetary bodies in the
universe are formed through the forces of attraction and repulsion . . . so God the
world” (HWP 2, 53).17 Although Herder uses here the analogy of the formation
of a planetary system and refers to God as the “centre of the universe” that
generates “an infinite circle of creation,” he is not thereby making God’s rela-
tionship to the universe that of a physical body to others that orbit it and to which
it has given rise (HWP 2, 52). Rather, God is the Shaftesburian universal mind
who creates the universe, but who physically governs it according to the
Newtonian-Kantian mechanism of the forces of attraction and repulsion and
their resulting laws of motion, which in fact operate independently of God’s
intervention once created.

2 Soul and Body

The divine creation does not only involve the spatiotemporal physical universe.
God also creates finite human beings qua souls, whose fundamental nature
Herder often equates with a “thought-force” (Gedankenkraft or Gedenkkraft)
or power of representation (Vorstellungskraft) as its “central force” (Centralkraft)
in line with Wolffian school philosophy (Schulphilosophie) (Heinz 1994, 175;
HWP 2, 52, 54). Analogously to God, however, these souls realize themselves
through their bodies. There are several related strands to Herder’s theory of the

16
Herder’s high opinion of Shaftesbury is evident from the praise he lavishes on him in letters to
Hamann and Kant. See DA I, 119, 217.
17
See also Herder, Gesetze der Welt: Gesetze der Körper, FHA 9/2, 222; Zum Sinn des Gefühls,
HWP 2, 244, 245f.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

soul-body relationship, each of which needs to be unpacked. First and foremost,

Herder consistently and resolutely rejects Cartesian dualism, in line with his
rejection of an ontology of substance, as seen above. At the same time, however,
Herder is committed to interaction, partly on the grounds of its phenomeno-
logical self-evidence. On his view, this interaction occurs not between two
distinct substances, but rather between two entities that are ultimately reducible
to the same thing, namely, force. A further strand to this view is Herder’s
interpretation of interaction within the framework of life. Drawing on, but also
very much modifying, Leibniz, Herder construes the soul not only as a thought-
force, but also in Aristotelian fashion as the principle of life.
The human soul’s primordial existence is that of a thought (Gedanke) or power
of thought bound up in itself. “The soul steps into the world: the power of
representation is its essence: but it is itself entirely its thought—the obscure, but
lively concept of its being (Seyn) fills it entirely” (Heinz 1994, 175). Herder is here
rejecting the idea that the soul immediately begins to have representations upon
entry into the world.18 Rather, the soul’s thought initially fills it entirely as an
obscure, but lively feeling (Gefühl) which contains within it all the sensuous and
abstract concepts it will eventually unfold (ibid.). This continuity between feeling,
sensation, and cognition is central to Herder’s thought and forms the subject of
(three versions of) his treatise Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen
Seele (On the cognition and sensation of the human soul), from the 1770s. In order
for this obscure feeling to unfold itself, and for sensation and cognition to become
possible, a body is required. Just as God creates himself a world from what Herder
calls his “thought,” “thought of being,” or “the concept of himself,” so too does
the human soul prepare or construct itself a body (Heinz 1994, 175; HWP 2, 53;
HWP 2, 245). Although originally inspired by Shaftesbury, Herder greatly
extends this analogy between God and world, and soul and body, both meta-
physically and epistemologically. We saw in the previous section how God
realizes himself through the external manifestation of his thought or concept of
being in a physical world characterized by relations of space, time, and force.
Now the human soul, as divinely created thought-force, similarly realizes itself
through the external manifestation of its own thought or concept of being in its
own physical world, namely, its body. There is thus a fundamental double
structural similarity or correspondence between this body and the external
world. First, just as the physical world is governed by the forces of attraction
and repulsion, so too, qua physical entity, is the human body. The world and the

18
He is disagreeing here with Mendelssohn, Abhandlung über die Evidenz in Metaphysischen
Wissenschaften, Mendelssohn 2008, 30.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

body represent the external limits or spheres of activity of God and the soul,
respectively, and are thus dependent on the latter—indeed, as we shall see in the
next section, the forces of attraction and repulsion are ultimately to be seen as
dependent on, as modifications of, the force of thought (Gedankenkraft or
Vorstellungskraft). Second, just as the physical world is characterized by relations
of space, time, and force, so too is the body, but, what is more, its very senses
correspond to these relations. The sense of sight corresponds to the next-to-each-
other (Nebeneinander) of space, the sense of hearing to the after-each-other
(Nacheinander) of time, and the sense of touch to the in-each-other (Ineinander)
of force (HWP 2, 53; Heinz 1994, 177). Both God and the human soul thus share
the thought of being or Seyn, with the key difference that for God the whole world is
“the one distinct thought of himself ” whereas for human beings, who must
“construct obscurely,” our only mode of access to our soul’s thought and its
fundamental concepts is via the body and its senses (Heinz 1994, 176).
Herder combines this epistemological account of the soul’s self-realization
through the body (to which we shall return in the next section) with a physio-
logical/biological account that seeks to show how the soul, qua principle of life, is
responsible for the body.19 The premise of Herder’s theory of the soul-body
relationship is a commitment to interaction, but not an interaction conceived of
as occurring between two distinct substances. This is clear from his 1768 review
of Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer, in which Herder explicitly rejects Kant’s albeit
hypothetical musings on the existence of two worlds operating according to two
sets of causal laws. According to Kant’s hypothesis, there is a material world, full
of dead matter possessing solidity, extension, and shape and operating according
to laws of contact and impact, and there is an immaterial world, inhabited by
immaterial beings or spirits that are spontaneously active principles, which
operate according to what Kant calls pneumatic laws (AA 2, 329). Kant makes
it clear in subsequent chapters of his work that his “own pretentious theory of the
community of spirits” is meant to be taken tongue in cheek (AA 2, 350). For Kant
had, of course, been attempting in part to ridicule Emanuel Swedenborg and his
reports of his visions and supposed paranormal powers as detailed in Arcana
cœlestia, and to show just how far one could go with hypotheses, in this case
about spirits (Geister), that were not grounded in experience. While we have
internal experience of our own thinking and willing, which we can attribute to an
immaterial substance, Kant claimed that, as well as external experience of

19
Herder would eventually elaborate on the physiological dimension of his theory of how the
soul builds itself a body, in part by exploiting Albrecht von Haller’s concept of irritability. Stefanie
Buchenau’s chapter in the present volume takes up these themes.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

impenetrable bodies moving and interacting in space that we attribute to a

material substance (AA 2, 320ff.), we have experience only of the phenomenon
of our thinking and willing moving our body (AA 2, 370). That is, because our
only thinkable concept of external activity in space is that of impenetrable and
extended bodies interacting according to laws of impact, the idea of a spirit
moving a body would have to entail the hypothesis that it occupies space, as
demonstrated by its activity in moving a body, but without filling it through
extension (AA 2, 320ff.).20 The soul would thus be hypothesized to possess
impenetrability, but not extension—this, Kant believes, while not impossible, is
unthinkable for me (AA 2, 323). Kant thus ultimately concludes that even though
we experience the phenomenon of our thinking and willing moving our body,
we “can recognize the phenomenon but not understand it,” and thus all judge-
ments that try to explain how this occurs can only ever be “fictions” (AA 2, 371).
As mentioned above, Herder rejects Kant’s two-world hypothesis, but it is not
clear whether his having taken it seriously at all was ingenuous or disingenuous.
The reason for this is that although Kant had not meant for his musings to be
taken entirely seriously, it is clear that he did think that the problem is one of how
the soul as an immaterial substance can be understood to relate to material
substances like the body. It is this very starting point that Herder resolutely
rejects. In the review, Herder characterizes the definition of a spirit as a being
endowed with reason, from which Kant begins, as “arbitrary” and “indetermin-
ate” and construes Kant’s hypothesized spirit-world as a “construction of a
creative philosophical imagination” (AA 2, 319; SWS 1, 127, 129). As Herder
makes clear a few years later, he associates this modern concept of spirit with
Descartes, who “made thinking into his whole doubting I” and, after whom, one
more unnatural system after the other followed, each of which had the objective
of explaining the soul-body relationship for the sole reason that the interaction
between two such fully heterogeneous, immaterial, and material substances was
inconceivable (HWP 2, 583f.).
But if Herder rejects the very idea of the soul as a spirit or distinct, immaterial
substance, and yet believes in soul-body interaction, what is his conception of the
soul-body relationship? Interestingly, the seeds of that conception are to be found
in a possibility that Kant entertains in the very same treatise that Herder
otherwise subjects only to criticism. In the course of his analysis of the concept
of a spirit, Kant turns to the question of the human soul. Whereas it is hard, but

20
See Heinz 2001, 114f., esp. n. 33, for discussion. Heinz 2001 offers a penetrating analysis of
Herder’s review of Kant’s Träume. The interpretation proffered here and in DeSouza 2016a, 2016b is
somewhat different.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

not unintelligible, he says, to imagine a spirit-substance occupying a space, when it

comes to the soul, its location is easier to specify: “Where I feel, it is there that I am”
(AA 2, 324). Kant gives several examples of how one can feel oneself in different
parts of one’s body and concludes that the soul permeates the body (AA 2, 325). This
experience and that of the natural world, especially of animals, leads Kant to claim
that he is very inclined to assert the existence of immaterial natures, such as his soul,
which are principles of life. But Kant is also keenly aware of the problem, mentioned
above, that this poses with respect to conceiving the interaction between immaterial
and material substances. At this juncture, however, he proposes another hypothesis,
and this time it is one Herder will approve of. Kant writes:

It seems that a spirit-being is present in the matter, with which it is combined, in the most
intimate fashion; and it seems not to act on those forces which inhere in the elements and
in virtue of which they are related to each other; it seems rather to operate on the inner
principles of their state. For every substance, including even a simple element of matter,
must after all have some kind of inner activity as the ground of its producing an external
effect, and that in spite of the fact that I cannot specify in what that inner activity consists.
(AA 2, 328)

In a footnote, Kant provides a justification for this theory by referencing Leibniz

and his claim that the inner ground of all external relations and inner changes of
a substance is its power of representation (Vorstellungskraft). In his review of
Dreams, Herder repeats this Kantian hypothesis that “the soul can be most
inwardly present to the body that it can have an effect on [würkt] the inner
principle of its matter: and this inner state we can think of in nothing but
representations,” and then immediately adds: “these are the author’s new and
very attractive hypotheses” (SWS 1, 128). Herder had, in fact, been introduced to
these hypotheses in Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, to which his lecture notes
attest.21 In his approval here, Herder is also drawing a distinction between the
concepts of spirit and soul, as treated by Kant. With respect to the hypothesis of a
spirit-world, he writes in his review: “Just what is it based on? that spirits [Geister]
perhaps immediately have a community [with one another]; but might an
organic community not be enough, if there are no more than souls [Seelen],
and who knows about others?” (SWS 1, 129). Herder rejects the concept of the
soul as an independent substance or spirit in favour of an “organic” concept of
the soul, that is, of souls as always joined to bodies.
In this, Herder is in agreement with a philosopher whose conception of the
soul had a deep impact on him: Leibniz. Leibniz maintained that no soul existed

21
See Kant, Metaphysik Herder, AA 28.1, 146.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

without a body and that the soul was the principle of organization and movement
of the body. Herder very much accepted this Aristotelian conception of the soul
but rejected Leibniz’s concomitant belief that the soul and the body, far from
interacting, existed in a pre-established harmony whereby their relations were
only ideal and expressive. This is clear both from Herder’s scrupulous omissions of
all those passages where Leibniz mentions pre-established harmony in his detailed
excerpts from Leibniz’s New Essays on the Human Understanding and, more
explicitly, in his critical reflections on Leibniz’s Principles of Nature and Grace in
a short piece from 1769 entitled Über Leibnitzens Grundsätze von der Natur und
Gnade (On Leibniz’s Principles of Nature and Grace) (HWP 2, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41,
49–51).22 In the latter, Herder begins by immediately throwing into question
Leibniz’s conception of substances or monads as beings capable of action, but
which are also windowless, or incommunicable, unities. Drawing in part again on
ideas from Kant’s metaphysics lectures, in this case the Principle of Co-existence,
Herder argues that even if substances or monads are unities, in virtue of their very
existence they have a relationship to each other such that they can mutually
influence each other (HWP 2, 49). Herder probably has in mind here Kant’s
conception of matter and the relations that emerge from the forces of attraction
and repulsion that the “physical monads” constituting matter possess.23 Leibniz’s
dynamics and his strenuous efforts to explain the purely phenomenal interaction
of bodies and the laws of motion by appeal to the underlying active and passive
derivative forces of metaphysical monads no longer resonated in a post-
Newtonian eighteenth-century philosophical world. However, Herder’s primary
concern was not the interaction between physical bodies, but rather that between
soul and body, and the rest of his reflections on Leibniz’s Principles turns to several
aspects of this issue. In response to Leibniz’s explanation that monads can only be
distinguished from each other in virtue of their perceptions that are representa-
tions of the external, Herder asks how it is possible that these external represen-
tations should derive from an inner force of the soul entirely independently of an
external world and asserts that if this were the case, “[t]hus would thought be
nothing real” (HWP 2, 49). Leibniz’s theory that substances communicate via
expressive relations was obviously felt by Herder to be inadequate. In the third
paragraph of Principles, Leibniz turns to living organisms, which consist of a
dominant soul-monad that is the principle of unity of the mass of an infinity of
monads surrounding it that make up its organic body, through whose properties
the soul represents the outside world and which is a “kind of automaton or natural

22
See DeSouza 2012b for an analysis of Über Leibnitzens Grundsätze von der Natur und Gnade.
23
See Kant, Monadologia physica, AA 1, 477–87.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

machine” (i.e., the body mechanically acts according to efficient causes as

determined by the predetermined laws of the entelechies governing the monads
of which the body is an aggregate) (Leibniz 1965, VI, 599). The soul’s represen-
tations, however, are not caused by the body in any way; rather, the appetitions
internal to the soul are the principle of change of its representations. Herder rejects
this view in the fourth reflection and argues as follows: “A monad is supposed to
be able to change its representations, and must change them according to its basic
force. Now if these representations are, however, nothing but external connections,
must not the ground of the perceptibility of the external and the ground of the ever
changeable perceptibility also lie in the basic force?” (HWP 2, 50). Paradoxically,
Herder seems here to be agreeing with Leibniz that the cause of the soul-monad’s
representations must be internal. In fact, however, his position is radically differ-
ent. He continues: “There must therefore also be an organic body, which becomes
its [i.e., the basic force’s] measure, and is actually no automaton in itself ” (ibid.).
Herder is arguing here that the soul is indeed the ground both of its own
perceptions and of their changes, but only insofar as it is the principle behind
the body. While Herder thus agrees with Leibniz that no soul is without a body, he
wants to insist that the interaction between the two that we phenomenologically
feel must point to more than a relationship of mere pre-established harmony
whereby the soul acts according to its own internal principle of appetition and the
body, qua automaton, to its own. Herder questions the sense of Leibniz’s position
according to which the soul and the body do not actually exist for the sake of each
other, or interact, but only appear to, for the sake of a third, i.e., God, for whom it
would only be “a game” (ibid.).
This of course means that Herder must have his own, more satisfying, account
of soul-body interaction. Indeed he does and its basis takes us back to that
hypothesis that he found so attractive in Kant’s Dreams whereby the soul is
able to act on the inner principle of matter. Central to this hypothesis is Kant’s
concept of the simple physical monad, which fills space and displays impenetra-
bility through the activity of its repulsive force (AA 1, 480–1). Now what Kant
seems to be envisioning here is that in the case of both souls or soul-monads and
physical monads, each has an inner state that consists of both representations of
varying degrees of obscurity/clarity and inner activity—analogous to both the
series of perceptions and the appetition that governs their change that Leibniz
attributes to the monad—and that the soul-monad’s inner principle should be
able to affect the inner principle of physical monads, whose external activity is
that defined by their attractive and repulsive forces, namely, impenetrability,
motion, etc. The problems with this account notwithstanding (for Leibniz it
fails to heed the autarky of monads and confuses the real metaphysical level of
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

the monad and its representations and the purely phenomenal level of bodies and
their interaction), it evidently greatly appealed to Herder as a potential explan-
ation of soul-body interaction. This explanation allowed for the kind of genuine,
intimate interaction that Herder was after. But for it to be fully satisfactory for
Herder, he first needed to make it his own. We saw above that Herder’s ontology
is grounded on a conception of force as thought-force or power of representation,
be it divine or human. We also saw that there is a fundamental structural
similarity between the world as the external manifestation of God’s divine
thought and the human body as the external manifestation of the human soul’s
one thought: both are physical and exist in relations of space, time, and force. But
since the physical world, consisting of matter that is in turn constituted by forces
of attraction and repulsion, ultimately derives from God’s thought or thought-
force, there is an underlying ontological identity between that thought-force and
the forces of attraction and repulsion. Herder unites the forces of representation/
thought and of attraction and repulsion into one Seiende—infinite or finite, that
is, God and world, or soul and body.24 The forces of attraction and repulsion can
thus be seen as modifications of the thought-force. And on this basis, a genuine
interaction between soul and body is possible because they fundamentally consist
of the same thing, force. On Herder’s account, the soul is able to harness the
forces of attraction and repulsion in matter and build itself a body through whose
senses it is able to engage and interact with the external world (HWP 2, 53; Heinz
1994, 176). The naturalness and self-evidence of this theory to Herder, as well as
its Kantian origin, is given vivid expression by Herder a few years later:

I think the system of preestablished harmony ought to have been alien to the great
inventor of the monad-poem, for, it seems to me, the two do not hold well together. No
one said it better than Leibniz that body as such is only an appearance of substance, as the
milky way is of stars, and the cloud of droplets. Indeed, Leibniz tried to explain even
motion as an appearance of an inner condition which we do not know but which could be
representation because no other inner condition is familiar to us. What? And the soul as
such could not have effect on this inner condition of the forces and substances of its
body?—this soul which after all shares their nature, and is itself innermost, most effective
force. So the soul would govern only in the domain of its sisters, of beings entirely similar
to itself; and it could not govern there?(FHA 4, 338; Forster 2002, 195)

3 Soul, Body, World, and Knowledge

Now this very process by which the soul as a thought-force (Gedenkkraft) or
power of representation (Vorstellungskraft) builds itself a body by harnessing the

24
Cf. Heinz 1994, 102.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

forces of attraction and repulsion in matter does not stand alone as a mere
metaphysical hypothesis. In the 1769 sketch Zum Sinn des Gefühls (On the
sense of touch), Herder buttresses it with a further, epistemological hypothesis,
which claims that this process was in fact, in principle, perceivable by each of us
through the sense of touch (HWP 2, 244). For the sense of touch is the sense
through which we may primordially perceive the thought-force that forms the
body; it is the sense that bridges the thought-force and the forces of attraction and
repulsion. As Herder writes, “I believe that it is possible for a blind person to
reduce the entire body in its structure to the forces of the soul. I believe that a
person born blind can, as it were, remember how the soul prepared itself its body,
how from each force each sense was formed” (HWP 2, 244). It is thus here that
the ontological identity of the two types of forces can be grasped most clearly, for
it is here that we see how Herder is construing the forces of attraction and
repulsion as modifications of the thought-force. The soul as a thought-force
feels its physical presence in the universe. The blind person could, as it were,
explain his very self by feeling “how his [soul’s] thought reveals itself in the
universe, i.e., how he became a body” (HWP 2, 244). In contrast, we sighted
human beings have become “too thrown outside ourselves” to be able to recollect
this process in the way that Herder hypothesizes is possible for a blind person
whose concepts are “strong, tangible, sensuous” (HWP 2, 243). In this same
discussion, Herder draws an important lesson for philosophy, which standardly
only concerns itself with appearances that we see (Herder associates these
“appearances” [Erscheinungen] with nominal definitions). True philosophy
should be interested, in particular, in the origin of one of these appearances:
“We see and study only appearances; how we have become appearances, we do
not study” (HWP 2, 244; emphasis added). However, Herder muses, this is
precisely what a blind person who became a metaphysician would do, for he
would return to everything in its origin and “remember everything Platonistically
[Platonisch]” (HWP 2, 244).
This invocation of Plato, repeated in another roughly contemporaneous
piece we encountered above, Plato sagte, daß unser Lernen bloß Erinnerung sei,
captures the sense in which the soul’s thought is originally an “obscure, pregnant
concept” that thus contains the seeds of its future unfolding.25 But in opposition
to Plato, and echoing Aristotle instead, Herder maintains that it is only through
the body that this concept can unfold. Although Herder even claims at one point
that “all . . . future, even sensuous, and still more abstract concepts lie in it,” that

25
Heinz 1994, 176. Hans Adler has analyzed the importance of the concept of “Prägnanz” for
Herder in Adler 1990.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

is, in the soul’s thought, our knowledge of these concepts necessarily proceeds
through our embodiment (Heinz 1994, 175). There is thus not only a tight
connection between the soul and the body metaphysically insofar as the soul
is the principle of life, there is also an equally tight connection between the soul
and the body epistemologically insofar as human knowledge is constitutively
dependent on the body and in a manner that is more profound than mere
empiricism might entail. This is most evident in the ontogenetic account Herder
provides of our most fundamental concepts and of the differentiation of the
senses that this in part depends on. We have seen above how the soul qua
thought-force is initially entirely its thought existing as an obscure but lively
feeling. This represents, as it were, the very bottom rung on the ladder of
knowledge, modelled on but modifying Leibniz, from obscure, to confused, to
clear and distinct ideas. Even at this most basic level of awareness, where the soul
only obscurely feels its thought, there exist the roots of our most basic concept,
namely, the concept of being (Sein). Herder explores this concept in his very
first philosophical treatise, the Versuch über das Sein (Essay on Being) (1763).
The central idea is that the concept of being is not susceptible to any kind of
abstract, rational, philosophical proof, for our fundamental mode of access to
this concept, and our conviction with respect to it, is sensuous in origin. The
concept of being is the first, most sensuous (allersinnlichste), most unanalyzable
(unzergliederlichste), but also most certain concept whose certainty is the
foundation of all other concepts (FHA 1, 20, 19). Our soul, like God, thus has
its own concept of being, which is also a concept of its own being. The key
difference is in the mode of access to this concept: whereas for God the entire
world is the one distinct thought of himself, our concept of being is initially
obscurely felt—our eventual, abstract, and philosophical understanding of this
concept has its origins here.
The unfolding of the concept of being in our soul continues with the acquisi-
tion of a set of concepts that are the next most basic: space, time, and force. This
of course lines up with the corresponding structures of the world (as discussed
above) as the external, physical manifestation of God’s divine thought and of the
human body as the external, physical realization of the soul’s thought—both of
which exist in relations of space, time, and force. We also saw above how these
relations correspond to the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Herder’s onto-
genetic account seeks to show how our very concepts of space, time, and force
originate in this differentiation of the senses that occurs in the body as it is
constructed by the soul in accordance with the latter’s unfolding of its concept
of being. As Herder puts it, if one thinks of the thought of the soul as a ray of
light, each sense is like a telescope (Fernglas) that captures it and breaks it up
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

(Heinz 1994, 175). The child, Herder says, thus first learns to distinguish herself
from the world and to distinguish her own thought of being through her sensing
of this world (Heinz 1994, 177). In a manner reminiscent of Condillac’s statue,
Herder writes: “With each sensation it [the child] emerges from sleep: strings
[Saite] of [its] being are touched . . . every sensation reminds it [i.e., the soul] of a
modification of its thought, thus does it collect concepts” (Heinz 1994, 177). As
with the concept of being, the child’s primordial awareness of the concepts
of space, time, and force will be pre-reflective, embodied, and experiential.
Judgements, however, gradually emerge from sensations: “With repeated identi-
cal sensations [Empfindungen] the first judgement is formed, that it is the same
sensation. The judgement is obscure and must be so; for it has to last a lifetime
and remain as a perpetual basis in the soul” (FHA 4, 274).26 This is the way our
basic concepts are acquired.
If one considers how many secret connections and separations, judgements and conclu-
sions a developing human being must make, in order to support in himself just the first
ideas of body, of figure, shape, magnitude, distance: one must be accordingly amazed.
In this the human soul has effected and developed, has missed and found, more than
the philosopher in his whole life of abstractions.(FHA 4, 275)

Through this genetic account, Herder is trying to give a naturalistic explanation

for the origin and acquisition of our first concepts. The soul may contain the
seeds of these concepts in its obscure, pregnant concept of being, but it can only
come to awareness of them through the body, which itself is an external realiza-
tion of the most basic set of them (space, time, and force).
This genetic epistemological theory has important ramifications for how we
should conceive of philosophy, Herder believed. Herder accepts the standard
starting point, however: he begins from a particular understanding of the soul
and its capacities that takes its cue from the school philosophy he was taught and
studied. The soul, on this view, has both an upper faculty of knowledge, possessing
intellect and reason and the capacity for distinct perception, and a lower faculty
of knowledge, possessing sensation and imagination and the capacity for sense
perception. But as we have seen, Herder believes a direct line can be traced
between our most abstract concepts of being, space, time, and force (as possessed
by the upper cognitive faculty) and their origin in our first, pre-reflective,
embodied, and experiential knowledge of them (as possessed by the lower
cognitive faculty). For Herder, genuine philosophy must accept this particular,

26
The text I am citing here is the Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen (1769), and, in particular, the
passages of it that cover the same philosophical ground as Plato sagte.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

human origin to these concepts and the correspondingly limited nature of human
philosophical knowledge and not arrogate to itself a capacity to understand the
world as God does. “A fully philosophical language,” Herder writes, “would have
to be the language of the Gods, which watched how the things of the world were
formed, which beheld beings in their conditions of becoming and arising, and
thus created the name of each thing genetically and materially” (FHA 1, 655).
We humans, in contrast, can only understand how things sensuously appear to us
and how our concepts emerge from our own soul—in both cases they are given to
us. It is the deep understanding of this Kantian insight, which we encountered in
the first section, that underlies Herder’s radical assertions that metaphysics and
ontology must be reconceived as a study of our own soul and that all philosophy
must become anthropology (Heinz 1994, 176; FHA 1, 134).27
Returning to our genetic account of human knowledge, there is an important
sense, however, in which the soul does not contain or account for all the
knowledge, in the broadest sense of this term, that the individual human being
will eventually acquire, and here the body qua spatiotemporal and worldly entity
assumes an even deeper importance. There are two dimensions to the unfolding
of the soul, according to Herder: “Our soul is metaphysically determined from
the inside, but the determinations from the outside give it form” (Heinz 1994,
178). Each soul unfolds its thought of being via the body and its senses, but
sensations do more than simply genetically explain the soul’s acquisition of its
basic concepts. Rather, they shape the very identity of the individual soul. Early
childhood impacts (Anstöße), for example, determine us for our whole lives
(Heinz 1994, 178). To this double-sided process correspond two sciences:
“An external [one], how our senses must be stimulated, our nerves tuned, our
power of determination [Bestimmungskraft] disposed in order to be perfect” and
“[a] science from the inside: to what extent thoughts are required in order to form
this or that sense, in this or that degree, e.g., so much inner striving to represent
the space of the world, or to develop the [soul’s] thought” (Heinz 1994, 178). Both
of these sciences can explain how the individuality of a human soul results, for
while souls and senses are “always the same in sum total”—i.e., ontologically,
every human being shares the same primordial thought of being, power of
representation, and senses—they are or become qualitatively different both
inwardly and outwardly. First, in every human being, all abilities and capacities
should be understood genetically through the unfolding of the embodied, sensu-
ous, human soul, which is unique in every case. But second, it is just as important

27
See DeSouza 2016a and 2016c for an analysis of Herder’s critiques of Wolffian and Baumgar-
tenian Schulphilosophie and of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica.
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

to grasp this unfolding as determined by both the inner characteristics and the
spatiotemporal situation of the soul. That is, the soul individualizes itself through
its outward, corporeally enabled activity in relations of space, time, and force
and it is in turn individualized by the effect of the external world on its senses
(Heinz 1994, 178–9).
This need to also understand the soul in its spatiotemporal situatedness in
order to grasp how it acquires its particular form means understanding how an
individual human being is a product of its historical and cultural circumstances.28
Herder’s genetic approach is no less important here too. We have seen how
Herder tries to provide an organic, ontogenetic account of both the formation of
the body by the soul and of the closely related origin and acquisition of our most
basic concepts. Herder applies this same approach to an understanding of history
and culture. In a word, all of the phenomena of history and culture in and
through which an individual soul in part receives its form or identity are in
turn products of historico-culturally situated human souls. The productivity or
Prägnanz of the lower cognitive faculty or region of the soul thus extends beyond
metaphysics and ontology. As the realm of sensation in a very broad sense,
including feelings, drives, affects, etc., it is here too that history and culture are
rooted and have their origin. One key example is that of morality.29 In opposition
to the idea that we can philosophically work out the norms or values of a
universal morality, Herder believes that these must be seen as particular products
of a specific historical and cultural period. This does not mean that moral
relativism is the necessary outcome, however, because those norms and values
are in turn rooted in moral feelings (moralische Gefühle) that are common to all
human souls and which in fact need to be refined upwards into mores, norms,
values, etc. in order to have any normative power. The moral feelings, however,
remain the originary, motivating anchor (SWS 8, 295–7). Now for Herder, like
morality, historico-cultural products in general have their origin in the lower
region of the soul qua fundus animae with its feelings, drives, affects, etc. and they
in turn can be acquired, learned, integrated by souls with the same capacities for
this very reason. But, as Herder made clear in a philosophically rich epistolary
exchange with Moses Mendelssohn, these “acquisitions” by the soul do not
continue with it on past death. Our soul’s vocation is to realize and develop itself
in this world and all the “learning, education, development” it acquires is “in and

28
See DeSouza 2012a and the contribution by Anik Waldow in this volume for an elaboration of
these ideas.
29
See DeSouza 2014 for a study of Herder’s views on morality and moral philosophy and for his
exchange with Mendelssohn.
 NIGEL DESOUZA 

for this state” (DA 1, 178). After death, the soul returns to its primordial form as a
“naked human soul, in the basic material of its forces and capacities” and builds
itself a new body all over again (DA 1, 179).

4 Conclusion
In arriving at this stage in our reflections, i.e., at the understanding of human
beings as historical and cultural creatures, I believe that we also obtain insight
into the raison d’être for Herder’s metaphysical and epistemological account of
human nature that we have outlined. This is none other than Herder’s passion for
Bildung, with which we began. In the Journal meiner Reise, Herder writes: “The
human soul, in itself and in its appearance on this earth, its sensuous tools and
weights and hopes and pleasures, and characters and duties, and everything that
can make human beings happy here, is my first prospect” (FHA 9/2, 30). By the
soul’s appearance on earth, Herder means the range of cultural products of
human beings throughout history, which in turn give shape and determination
to souls that are initiated into them. But Herder’s study of the soul extends
beyond this. A few pages later, he declares:

If I could be and were permitted to be a philosopher; a book on the human soul, full of
observations and experiences, that should be my book! I would write it as a human being
and for human beings! It should instruct and shape [bilden]! Contain the principles of
psychology, and according to the development of the soul also ontology, cosmology,
theology, physics! It should become a living logic, aesthetics, historical science and theory
of art! From every sense develop a fine art! And from every power [Kraft] of the soul
would emerge a science! (FHA 9/2, 33f.)

Herder is convinced that his wide-ranging practical interests, his desire to be an

agent of Bildung in the widest sense, must be rooted in a profound understanding
of the human soul. And because the wide range of historico-cultural products,
and human beings’ historical and cultural identities, are ultimately rooted in the
lower region of the soul, genuine Bildung must begin there. It must proceed in a
bottom-up, not a top-down fashion; that is, it must seek to understand human
beings as historico-cultural beings through an understanding of the whole
human soul, der ganze Mensch, and not through the upper cognitive faculty
alone in abstract or rationalistic terms.
Now underlying both this particular view of human beings as historico-
cultural beings and this conception of genuine Bildung is a conviction in soul-
body interaction. And it is this conviction, I would contend, that motivates much
of Herder’s metaphysics and epistemology and his particular theory of soul-body
 FOUNDATIONS OF HERDER ’ S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

interaction. Nowhere is this perhaps clearer than in his recounting of the

deleterious consequences of a theory of the soul in Cartesian terms as a separate,
spiritual substance that he rejects:
The cold, sensationlessly thinking science of the soul has perpetrated its deception as far
as into life and action. What romantic systems of freedom and perfection of the human
soul, which occur where else but in textbooks! The force of thinking, of acting according
to an ideal of perfection, is the essence of the soul; sensations and drives, in accordance
with which it in fact acts, have been considered only as additions, even as disorders in
accordance with which it should not act. Thus there arose a hypocritical figment of the
imagination which the metaphysician calls the human soul, clothed in the gloomy rays of
his abstractions, but which only appears in the presence of his magical lamp.
(SWS 8, 267; Forster 2002, 183)

The soul as mind, as thinking substance alone, leads to a fundamentally false

conception of the human being and its capacities, the representative example
here being that of Wolffian/Mendelssohnian moral philosophy and its principle
of the pursuit of the perfection of the—only contingently embodied—soul.
Herder was keenly aware that a proper understanding of the soul was funda-
mental to any project for Bildung. It comes as no surprise, then, when one realizes
that his metaphysical and epistemological ideas, as we have explored them in this
paper, almost all relate to this question of the soul-body relationship.

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