Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unity and Diversity in on Diligence in Several Learned Languages
At the first and most basic level this work is a close reading of
Herder's early essay "Uber den Fleiss in mehreren
gelehrten Sprachen" (On Diligence in Several Learned
Languages) of 1764. Morton offers the first extended examination of
Herder's distinctive philosophical and rhetorical idiom. He
argues that Herder's often difficult style is not the mere
hindrance to understanding it has often been taken to be, but
rather that the substance of his thought is in fact integrally
bound up with precisely how he constructs the texts intended to
express it. The meaning of a Herrderian text, Morton maintains, is
conveyed both through the overt content of its propositions and, at
the same time, through the various poetic techniques by which they
are woven together. Interpretation of Herder's work thus
depends on looking not only at what the words say(or appear to) but
also, as with any literary text, at what they actually do-- or, in
the terms of the dialectic to which Morton refers throughout the
book, at the gestural no less than the discursive dimension of the
text. Morton argues that the essay represents the essential key to
the shape and direction of Herder's thought at large.In so
doing, he provides a basis for a reassessment of Herder's
position in intellectual and literary history generally, with
particular reference to his role in the development of German
Idealism, his key contribution to the foundations of Romanticism,
and the impetus provided by his work to the rise of both linguistic
and historicist paradigms of thought. This work is of importance to
scholars both in German studies and in other fields working with
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as to all
those concerned with modern intellectual history, philosophy of
language, and philosophy of history. Michael M. Morton is in the
German Literature Department at Duke University.
