Around Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit”

Abstract

Johann Gottfried Herder in his early work, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774), thus far translated into Polish only in fragments (E. Namowicz 1973, T. Namowicz 2001), deals with the problem of constructing historical syntheses and cross-sections that do not take into account the dynamic variability of cultures over time. He is also interested in the critique of the Enlightenment idea of progress. At the same time, he draws attention to the role of general concepts in the description of things, phenomena, and processes, as well as ideas related to them, culturally conditioned, but also individually processed and modified. The author of the article puts forward a thesis that the pamphlet and polemical form of Auch eine Philosophie… enables the German philosopher to formulate in a radical manner questions that are important also for modern researchers of culture. These questions concern not only the problems related to the description of cultural reality, but also the multitude of definitions of concepts, and sometimes the excess of specialised terms, difficult to translate.