At the first and most basic level this work is a close reading
of Herder's early essay "Uber den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten
Sprachen" (On Diligence in Several Learned Languages) of 1764.
Morton offers the first extended examination of Herder's
distinctive philosophical and rhetorical idiom. He argues that
Herder's often difficult style is not the mere hindrance to
understanding it has often been taken to be, but rather that the
substance of his thought is in fact integrally bound up with
precisely how he constructs the texts intended to express it. The
meaning of a Herderian text, Morton maintains, is conveyed both
through the overt content of its propositions and, at the same
time, through the various poetic techniques by which they are woven
together. Interpretation of Herder's work thus depends on looking
not only at what the words say (or appear to) but also, as with any
literary text, at what they actually do--or, in the terms of the
dialectic to which Morton refers throughout the book, at the
gestural no less than the discursive dimension of the text.
Morton argues that the essay represents the essential key to the
shape and direction of Herder's thought at large. In so doing, he
provides a basis for a reassessment of Herder's position in
intellectual and literary history generally, with particular
reference to his role in the development of German Idealism, his
key contribution to the foundations of Romanticism, and the impetus
provided by his work to the rise of both linguistic and historicist
paradigms of thought.
This work is of importance to scholars both in German studies
and in other fields working with the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, as well as to all those concerned with modern
intellectual history, philosophy of language, and philosophy of
history.
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