The Philosophical Roots of Nationalism: Herder and Fichte

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), writing against the universalizing rationalism of the French Enlightenment, developed in works such as Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Humanity (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–1791) and the earlier essay This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774) an account of the Volk, the people, as the fundamental bearer of cultural and spiritual life. For Herder, each people possesses its own Volksgeist, or national spirit, expressed above all through language, which he considered not a neutral instrument for conveying pre-existing thoughts but the very medium in which a people's distinctive way of perceiving and organizing the world takes shape. This claim rested on his broader philosophy of language, articulated in the Treatise on the Origin of Language (Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772), which argued that human reason itself is inseparable from linguistic articulation, so that different languages embody genuinely different modes of thought rather than interchangeable labels for identical concepts. Herder's collection of folk songs, Voices of the Peoples in Songs (Stimmen der Völker in Liedern, 1778–1779), reflected a practical program of cultural recovery: he urged Germans, then politically fragmented among hundreds of principalities under the Holy Roman Empire, to cultivate their own vernacular literary and musical traditions rather than imitate French courtly culture, which he regarded as an artificial, cosmopolitan veneer detached from any living Volksgeist.