Along with
Johann Fichte and others, Herder replaced the traditional concept of a juridico-political state with that of the "folk-nation" as organic in its historical growth, thus creating the
Romantic nationalist school. Every nation was in this manner organic and whole, nationality a plant of nurture. He talked of the "national animal" and of the "
physiology of the whole national group" , which organism was topped by the "national spirit", the "soul of the people" (
Volksgeist).
Herder gave Germans new pride in their origins, modifying that dominance of regard allotted to
Greek art (
Greek revival) extolled among others by
Johann Joachim Winckelmann and
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He remarked that he would have wished to be born in the
Middle Ages and mused whether "the times of the
Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?". Herder equated the German with the
Gothic and favoured
Dürer and everything
Gothic. As with the sphere of art, equally he proclaimed a national message within the sphere of
language. He topped the line of German authors emanating from Martin Opitz, who had written his
Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae in
Latin in
1617. This urged Germans to glory in their hitherto despised language, and Herder's extensive collections of folk-poetry began a great craze in Germany for that neglected topic.
Along with
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a "
nation" extended to include
folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales.
Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of
patriotism — "he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself", whilst teaching that "in a certain sense every human perfection is national". Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that "there is only one class in the state, the
Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant". Explanation that the
Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of "the people" as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.
The nation, however was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters". Herder praised the
tribal outlook writing that "the
savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity". With no need for comparison since" every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others" for "do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?"
He also predicted that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity, and thus rot away, and saying that the eastern European nations would stick to their religion and their idealism; and would this way become the power in Europe.
