Culture 13

The more the culture of countries increases, the narrower the desert becomes, the rarer its wild inhabitants.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1903 [1784]): Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Leipzig: Reclam. Darin: Alle zerstörenden Kräfte in der Natur müssen den erhaltenden Kräften mit der Zeitenfolge nicht nur unterliegen, sondern auch selbst zuletzt zur Ausbildung des Ganzen dienen. Fünfzehntes Buch, Kapitel II. p. 161.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was a German writer and philosopher. He was one of the most important minds in German-language Enlightenment philosophy.

Herder has had a strong influence on Western understandings of culture. It was from him that the idea of a linear development of human culture came. While before the Enlightenment, nature was understood within Christianity as something positive, and humankind’s original condition as "paradise", Herder found nature to be uncultured. In his view, culture was itself ethnic. Thus he linked it to the concept of the nation: people and nation were one and the same, both given by God (Patton 2010).

*Benedict Anderson (1984): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. *Alan Patton (2010): “The Most Natural State”: Herder and Nationalism.

1784