ABSTRACT
For all its amusement, Herder’s image of Kant as the false, albeit charismatic Prophet, seducing a young generation of vulnerable souls with his critical revelations, carries with it a certain sadness. The picture it presents of the resentful, fi fty-six-year-old philosopher who, in his own lifetime at least, never managed to outdo his former teacher, strikes a melancholy note; Nietzsche’s “sore and unfree thinker”, who never felt he could “sit at the banquet of the actual creators”,2 springs most immediately to mind in reading Herder’s slightly self-righteous picture of Kant as a Prussian Mohammed, establishing a new creed of Vernunft with his Koran of Pure Reason.
