Nobody was a greater master of the Olympian put-down than the aging Goethe. On November 9, 1824, he remarked to Johann Peter Eckermann, the obsequious shadow who noted his every sneeze, that without such “mighty predecessors” as the philosopher Herder, “our literature would not have become what it now is.” By “our literature” he meant himself. The forerunners were important because they had helped Goethe become Goethe. Herder, he went on to say, had once been ahead of the times but time had now passed him by. Having helped to launch Goethe’s career, he implied, Herder had been not merely superseded by his protégé but swallowed up whole. Goethe was wrong. Herder may be little read today, but his ideas have enjoyed — and still enjoy — a surprisingly stubborn afterlife.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was an unusually original thinker with a consuming curiosity in everything human, from the pre-history of mankind to the origin and growth of language to the intricacies of national identity. Unlike Immanuel Kant, with whom he once studied, Herder was not systematic. He was a strange exuberant philosopher, whose insights tumbled from his pen. Against the philosophes of the 18th century, who exalted universality and objectivity, Herder prized the local, the specific, and the emotional. He wielded abstractions with the best of them but clung to the tangible at every turn. His emphasis on the primacy of the senses inspired the young Goethe; he taught him not only to see but to touch. Poetry for Herder was “sensuous discourse.” That lesson inspired Goethe to compose his first great lyrics. Some have even seen Herder, with his intense passion for knowledge as the hidden model for “Faust” (a suggestion Goethe gruffly rejected).

Now, in “Selected Writings on Aesthetics” (Princeton University Press, 468 pages, $65), Gregory Moore has translated and edited an extensive selection of Herder’s writings on art, and especially on the art of poetry, for Herder the highest form of human expression. After his death, Herder’s widow published his works in 45 thick volumes; a dozen or so volumes of his correspondence appeared later. It can’t have been easy to choose what to include, but Mr. Moore has succeeded brilliantly. Better still, he has translated Herder’s vivid and convoluted prose with elegance and lucidity.

He includes two important sections from Herder’s “Critical Groves,” first published in Riga (then a part of Russia) in 1769. These demonstrate Herder’s gusto in polemic — he dismisses rival critics as “a swarm of mice” — but also his delight in the palpable and the individual. In discussing the Homeric gods, he reminds us that they are never “abstract concepts” but persons “with a quite definite way of thinking, with strengths and weaknesses, with faults and virtues, with everything that appertains to a living being.” Against the “baptizers of machines” who turned Homer’s gods into allegorical ghosts, Herder argues that their “thoughts, words, actions … flow from the innermost depths of an individual.”

In his “Fourth Grove,” Herder carried this notion further in his treatment of the senses. After giving sight and hearing their due, he goes on, rather surprisingly, to praise the sense of touch. Touch has been neglected, he argues, and yet it is the foundation of aesthetics. Touch “is properly the organ of all sensation of other bodies, and hence has a world of fine, rich concepts subject to it.” We cannot see something without instantaneously conceptualizing it. But touch embodies a different, more immediate form of perception. Touch is knowledge in its most persuasive intimacy. Sculpture, therefore, is a tangible art; a statue demands touch more than sight. And thus “the beauty of a form, of a body, is not a visual but a tactile concept” must be “sought in the sense of touch.”

Herder carried this perception further in his beautiful late essay “On Image, Poetry, and Fable.” Though the genre isn’t much practiced nowadays, fable posed vexing questions to 18th-century thinkers. Herder’s reflections could inspire a whole new generation of fabulists for our environmentally conscious times. Why, he asks, do animals always appear in fables? And he notes that we don’t actually see animals as “lifeless Cartesian machines.” They have desires and emotions like ours. At the same time, they possess constancy as characters: a fox is always a fox, a stork a stork. We are bound to animals by a powerful intuition; we know them as we know ourselves. A fable misfires only if its shaggy or scaly protagonists step out of immemorial character. The analogy on which fables rest is moral as well as poetic.

The 175th anniversary of Goethe’s death falls tomorrow. The occasion will be widely celebrated, and rightly so. But behind the genius other figures stand, and Herder is one of them. To read him in this superb compilation is to encounter a vivid presence, one whose fingertips still seem fresh from the touch of truth.

eormsby@nysun.com