Herder and the Emergence of Philosophy of Culture

Though thinking about culture returns to ancient Greece, "culture" as understood today is a modern concept influenced more by the speculations of the German thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries than ancient Greek thinkers. Despite the ideas of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Vico, Leibniz, and others, it can be shown that Johann Gottfried von Herder (1764-1803) was the first thinker that provided a metaphysical and philosophical grounding for culture. He portrayed the human being as essentially a cultural being. However, Herder does not have an independent book or treatise specifically about the "philosophy of culture" or even the meaning of culture. Consequently, the present paper tries to analyze how Herder's "philosophy of culture" implicitly emerges from his vast oeuvre by extracting his diverse and diffuse discussions about language, man, history, politics and culture; and, finally, its impact on the subsequent thinkers of this field, especially Hegel. Accordingly, this paper, regardless of its short introduction, has three main parts: First, the theoretical foundations of Herder's thoughts and his sources of inspiration; Second, Herder’s philosophy of culture, extracted from a variety of his works and focusing on his critiques of Enlightenment; and third, examining Herder's influence on subsequent thinkers, focusing on the evolution of the concept of culture.