Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches, edited by John K. Noyes, is a landmark publication that makes accessible for the first time in English Johann Gottfried Herder’s Versuch über das Sein (Essay on Being), a youthful but philosophically decisive text from 1763–64. Long overshadowed by the commanding figure of Kant, Herder has in recent decades re-emerged as a vital interlocutor for understanding the limits of Enlightenment rationalism and the transition toward a modern conception of philosophy that grounds truth in history, sensibility, and human finitude. This volume not only offers an annotated English translation and facsimile of Herder’s fragile manuscript, but also gathers leading international scholars to situate the essay within the broader constellation of eighteenth-century metaphysics, epistemology, and anthropology, and to demonstrate its enduring significance for figures as diverse as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
The Essay on Being occupies an unusual place in Herder’s corpus. Written during his student years in Königsberg under the direct tutelage of Kant, it takes the form of a respectful dedication to his teacher, while at the same time carving out a position fundamentally different from Kant’s metaphysical premises. Responding to Kant’s The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763) and to lectures on Baumgarten’s Metaphysics, Herder begins by questioning whether Being can be demonstrated at all. Instead, he roots Being in the givenness of sensibility, in the primordial structures of space, time, and force, and in the lived finitude of human cognition. This shift away from proof to experience, from abstraction to embodiment, is what later commentators recognize as the first articulation of Herder’s lifelong epistemological orientation. As John Noyes argues in his introduction, the essay must be understood as a faint star in philosophy’s sky—less luminous than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation—but one which nonetheless provides essential orientation for understanding the trajectory of German thought.
Herder’s youthful text is notoriously difficult: written in haste, heavily abbreviated, sprinkled with symbols and unfinished sentences, its meaning hovers between fragments and flashes of insight. Yet it is precisely this unfinished quality that renders it pivotal, for it collects into a single point the multitude of influences shaping Herder’s formation—Neoplatonism, Parmenides, Leibniz, Rousseau, Hume, Crusius, and of course Kant—and refracts them into the beginnings of an original metaphysical vision. The central conviction, already evident here, is that Being cannot be captured by logical deduction or ontological proofs but must be grasped as the irreducible condition of experience itself. In denying the possibility of an ontological proof of God, Herder relocates certainty in the immediate reality of lived existence, inaugurating what later critics call his “sensualist idealism.”
The scholarly essays included in this volume trace the many dimensions of this move. Manfred Baum reconstructs the argumentative structure of the Essay on Being, situating Herder’s refusal of both dogmatic rationalism and radical empiricism as an early anticipation of the anthropological turn in philosophy. Wolfgang Pross contextualizes the text within contemporary debates on metaphysical evidence, connecting it to Hume’s fact–value distinction and to the French moral philosophers, showing how Herder reformulates the question of Being through sensibility. Alexander J. B. Hampton explores Herder’s notion of Being as “indivisible and inexplicable,” the hidden ground of all certainty, and links it to Herder’s later philosophy of history, science, and language. Marion Heinz offers a powerful reading of Herder’s radicalization of Kant’s pre-critical doubts about metaphysics, showing how Herder’s epistemology turns the sensory condition of thought into the sole foundation of philosophy.
Nigel DeSouza highlights the paradox of Herder’s “Kantian critique of Kant,” a tension between Herder’s debt to Kant’s lectures and his decisive break with Kant’s reliance on abstract categories. Arnd Bohm reopens the genealogy of Herder’s reflections by returning to Parmenides and the problem of Being’s irreducibility to non-Being, demonstrating how Herder’s text belongs to the most ancient strata of metaphysical thought. Ulrich Gaier reconstructs Herder’s engagement with Neoplatonism, showing how Plotinian themes of emanation and return shape the structure of Herder’s early ontology. Finally, Sonia Sikka stages a dialogue between Herder and Heidegger, arguing that Herder’s insistence on rooting even the highest concepts in sensibility anticipates Heidegger’s grounding of ontology in concrete existence, while also raising profound questions about the relation between Being, possibility, and God.
Together these contributions demonstrate that Herder’s early metaphysical reflections, far from being derivative lecture notes, articulate a profound shift that resonates through subsequent philosophy. His conception of Being as inseparable from lived finitude, his refusal of purely logical demonstrations, and his emphasis on the primacy of sensibility mark him as a critical alternative to Kant and as a precursor to later phenomenological and existential currents. The translation and critical apparatus provided here open this neglected but foundational text to an English-speaking audience, allowing readers to witness the germination of ideas that would later animate Herder’s aesthetics, philosophy of history, and anthropology, and that would echo in the works of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches is therefore not only a philological achievement, rescuing an obscure manuscript from the margins of intellectual history, but also a philosophical provocation. It compels us to rethink the Enlightenment and its alternatives, to see in Herder a thinker who, from the very outset of his career, challenged the abstraction of rationalist metaphysics and redirected philosophy toward the concreteness of lived human existence. In making Herder’s Essay on Being available in English for the first time, this volume restores to the history of ideas a text whose faint light continues to orient the modern philosophical constellation.
Simon Gros 
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