Hamann, Herder and the Counter-Enlightenment

Not everyone accepted the Enlightenment's claims for universal reason. In Königsberg, Johann Georg Hamann, a friend of Kant called the 'Magus of the North', argued that reason cannot be separated from language, faith and feeling, and that the philosophes' abstract reason was cold and arrogant.

His student Johann Gottfried Herder, who had attended Kant's lectures, argued in works such as This Too a Philosophy of History (1774) that each people has its own language, culture and way of life, which should be understood on its own terms rather than judged by a single standard of progress. Herder's ideas inspired the study of folk songs, languages and national cultures and influenced Romanticism and later nationalism. The historian Isaiah Berlin popularized the term 'Counter-Enlightenment' for such critics.

Yet many historians note that Herder shared Enlightenment values such as humanity and tolerance, suggesting that critics often came from within the Enlightenment rather than standing outside it.