Herder was a rare European philosopher who engaged non-European national traditions

Evidence

Interestingly enough, Johann Gottfried von Herder, the eighteenth-century German thinker whose work Hegel knew well (we are told that Hegel never acknowledged Herder’s influence), was one of the rare European philosophers who attempted to come to terms with national traditions beyond that of Europe: “[H]ow seldom does an European hear from the native of any country the praise, ‘he is a rational man like us!’” And further: “The European has no idea of the boiling passions and imaginations, that glow in the Negro’s breast; and the Hindoo has no conception of the restless desires, that chase the European from one end of the World to the other.” Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1968 (orig. 1784–91), pp. 32 and 75 respectively. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1699

Categorization

• XREF: Herder’s sympathetic turn to non-European national traditions prefigures Robinson’s own recovery of the Black radical tradition against Hegelian racism—an intellectual-ancestry parallel.