Heidegger on Herder: Between "Herderism" and the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry

Michael Fagenblat (Open University of Israel)

In the summer of 1939, Heidegger delivered a seminar devoted to Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, treating it as emblematic of modern metaphysics and its reduction of language to human agency. Against this, Heidegger develops an alternative in which language is not a tool humans invent and master but the way being itself grounds human existence. Herder, adopting naturalistic assumptions, accounts for the origins of language through the faculties of hearing and reflection. But this, Heidegger argues, launches the metaphysics of subjectivity on its course toward "machination". Herder's theory of the origins of language thus marks a decisive point in the destiny of German metaphysics, steering it off course. Heidegger's positive program consists in steering that history back on course, where it is a matter of a language that hearkens (Horchen) to being, not one that takes language as a property of the reflecting animal.   Several striking comments in the Black Notebooks from this very time confirm that the 1939 seminar on Herder is not only an intervention into "the metaphysics of language," as it purports to be, but also into "meta-politics," as Heidegger called it. The Notebooks rally against a degenerate "Herderism," the monstrous overgrowth of Herder's theory of language, people (Volk), and place, while the seminar takes up the problem from its root, as Heidegger diagnoses it in the theory of the origins of language defended by the young Herder in the Treatise. On the one hand, I argue that Heidegger's reading of Herder is precise, reasonable, and illuminating, which helps account for how the political malaise Heidegger calls "Herderism" degenerated from Herder. On the other hand, I argue that the positive program Heidegger seeks as an alternative was already grasped by Herder himself, notably in On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (two vols., 1782-83). This work is especially significant because of the influence it likely exerted on the poet Friedrich Holderlin, whom Heidegger takes as the paragon for his alternative proposed, the "crossing-over" from "the metaphysics of language" to "the essencing of language". I argue that Heidegger's critique of Herder conceals the alternative Herder himself describes in his account of "the spirit of Hebrew poetry". This raises questions about what Marlène Zarader referred to as Heidegger's "unthought debt" to the ""Hebraic heritage," which the paper address in conclusion.