Herder's contribution to the Romantic philosophy of history, with special reference to the theological implications

Abstract

The present study is an enquiry into the philosophy of history and the implied and underlying theology of TTerderin its relationship to the philosophy of history and the theology of Romanticism. The con - cern of the work is not so much with the historical contacts of "erdEr with the pomantics - these are summarised briefly in an anrendix - but rather with the inter- relationship of thought which may be traced. The aim is to determine to what extent the leading concepts of Herder passed over into the Romantic mind, and to show how with the Romantics they were counterbalanced and transformed as a result of other influences.For the purpose of this enquiry the word Romanticism is used, not in the general sense of the whole European, or even the whole German Romantic movement, although many of the ideas discussed were common to the movement in this wider sense, but in the narrow and restricted sense of that German philosophical. ''romanticism usually known as the first German Romantic school, or the 'Berliner Romantik' . The main writers investigated are; of the leading members of the school, the literary critic Friedrich Schlegel, the poet Travails, the philosopher Schelling and the theologian Schleiermacher; of those standing in a looser relationship to the group, the philosopher Fichte, in close touch during the Jena years and exerter of a powerful influence, the philosopher Hegel, whose youthful development was closely akin to that of the Romantics, and the poet Holderlin, a fellow- student with Hegel and Schelling, whose thinking ran in many respects along parallel lines