TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) had been Kant's student in Königsberg between 1762 and 1765, but was well known during the 1770s as a critic of the Enlightenment. In 1784 he produced the first volume of his greatest work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity. Kant reviewed the first two volumes, containing books 1 through 10, for the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung in the January and November issues of 1785.

Book 10 of Herder's Ideas contained an account of the earliest ages of human history. It was based on a creative interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, and was designed to drive home some central points in Herder's critique of the Enlightenment. Herder sees human beings as destined by God for a life of innocent contentment, and originally as standing in natural harmony with the divine, whose spirit is expressed through all folk cultures, poetry and religion. He views the Fall as the self-assertion of human reason, which corrupts human life and brings misery on human beings when it claims an authority over human life that is detached from our larger humanity and made independent of these supernatural resources of revealed knowledge.

Herder's first expression of these ideas had come in his Oldest Document of Humankind (1774), to which Kant had reacted quite negatively, and expressed in letters to J. G. Hamann (who had also been Herder's mentor).