Hear The Language of The Light: Herder and The Imagination

Abstract

The philosophical principles of J. G. Herder (1744-1803), as the recent Herder-Forschung point out, are in the philosophy of Leibniz and Spinoza. The main ideas of the rationalist philosophers play a fundamental role in his essay On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778). In addition, this work is considered his philosophical chef d’Œuvre. With Herder’s creative reinterpretation of the Monadology, he turned the ontology of substance into an ontology of force (Kraft), where the corporeality is integrated into a (neo-Spinozist) monism. The implications of this ontological turn are identified in his theory of mind (Seleenlehre), which is a vitalistic and organicist perspective that promotes a psychology against the reductionist vision of the rationalist tradition. In this article, I will show that the imagination is the concept key in the explanation of the relationship between the soul and corps in Herder’s account. The imagination furthermore plays an important role in his cognitive psychology. Which are the consequences of the Herder’s position on imagination, i. e., the argument on the historic-genetic development of the imagination from the hearing? The German philosopher, I suggest, thereby proposes an epistemic turn: from the visual imagination to the acroamatic ―auditory― imagination.