Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

[KALKI]

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) German philosopher, poet and critic, clergyman, born in East Prussia. Herder was an enormously influential literary critic and a leader in the Sturn und Drang movement. He saw in India the:

"lost paradise of all religions and philosophies," 'the cradle of humanity,' and also its 'eternal home,' the great Orient 'waiting to be discovered within ourselves.'

According to him, "mankind's origins can be traced to India, where the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue with a simplicity, strength and sublimity which has - frankly spoken - nothing, nothing at all equivalent in our philosophical, cold European world."

Herder regarded the Hindus, because of their ethical teachings, as the most gentle and peaceful people on earth. Herder's "Thoughts of Some Brahmins "(1792) which contains a selection of gnomic stanzas in free translations, gathered from Bhartrihari, the Hitopdesa and the Bhagavad Gita, expressed these ideals.

Herder pointed out to the spiritual treasures of India in search of which later German Sansritists and Indologists had devoted their lives.

(source: Johann Gottfried Herder's Image of India (1900) - By Pranebendranath Ghosh p-334).

Herder admired India, as did Novalis and Heine, for its simplicity, and denounced the Europeans for their greed, corruption, and economic exploitation of India.

When George Forster sent him his German translation of the English version of the Sakuntala in 1791, Herder responded:

"I cannot easily find a product of human mind more pleasant than this...a real blossom of the Orient, and the first, most beautiful of its kind! ....Something like that, of course appears once every two thousand years."

He published a detailed study and analysis of Sakuntala, claiming that this work disproved the popular belief that drama was the exclusive invention of the ancient Greeks.

(source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal Part II p.229 - 231).

"O holy land (India), I salute thee, thou source of all music, thou voice of the heart' and "Behold the East - cradle of the human race, of human emotion, of all religion."

Like Sir William Jones, Herder, a Lutheran pastor, was also attracted by the Hindu ideas of pantheism and of world-soul (atman), both of which came to be viewed by the German Romantics as providing support for their own views about the transcendent wholeness and the fundamentally spiritual essence of the natural world.

(source: Oriental Enlightenment: The encounter between Asian and Western thought - By J. J. Clarke p. 61-63).

He characterized Indian art as "a monument of a philosophical system in the history of mankind."

He doubted therefore "whether any other people on earth have treated symbolism in art as thoroughly as Indians."

(source: Treasures of Indian Art: Germany's Tribute to India's Cultural Heritage - National Museum p. foreword by Dr. Georg Lechner, Director Goethe – Institut Muechen).