WHY HERDER? Exposé

Abstract

Herder’s performance is incommensurable. To enunciate this is not only a moral duty but also an intellectual necessity. Such performance being summarized on a solid basis, this reconstruction canrewrite the history of the interpretation of the classical idealism, possibly, also, that of the entire modern culture. The underlying problem of any Enlightenment is that of how and to what extent the process of the Enlightenment needs considering being linear. The Enlightenment is a process, and to the extent that it reveals the modification of the contents of the consciousness to be linear, it has the potential to break with the hegemony of the hitherto prevailing multiple cyclic models of history. Herder’s incomparable performance helps interpret the concept of Inter-Enlightenment. The Inter-Enlightenment is a long historical moment, in which the linear dynamics comes to a halt, and it becomes possible for the philosopher to gaze into in the world of the politics and of the spirit on a European scale. The Enlightenment has already reached a high number of achievements, yet it promises more, but resistance to it becomes apparent, along with new fields of problematics. The Inter-Enlightenment grants a colossal-scale overview of the entire known present world. Herder’s ideology successfully brings together two moments that only in the rarest cases merge in an intellectual unit. His ideology is an immediate one; it however focusses on a holistic object (humankind throughout its history). Such duality can however only work because the objectivity of this philosophy is an objectivity of the human species’ values waiting for its deployment. Finally, Herder is about an expansion of the objectivity of the potentials also onto history and society.