The tetractys in J. G. Herder's Metacritique

Herder set a fourfold formula of categories against Kant's forms of intuition and explicitly called it a tetractys.

Painting: portrait of a man in a dark coat with a white neckcloth — Johann Gottfried Herder, portrait by Anton Graff, 1785.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) wrote the Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1799, a polemic against Kant. The basis here is the study Heilige Tetraktys. Herders metakritische Hermetik (Sacred tetractys: Herder’s metacritical Hermeticism) by Florian Mayr (Novalis Verlag, 2006).

The fourfold of the soul

In the Metacritique Herder explicitly calls his central formula a tetractys. In essence he writes: this fourfold is an act of the soul. Whoever divides this tetractys destroys the nature of human understanding. For Herder, following the Pythagoreans, this fourness is the ground plan of all knowing: this is how the human mind is built, and this is how it relates to the world.

Its four members are an origin, two opposites and their union, drawn as a cross with arms of equal length. It can be filled with various corresponding concepts.

Applied to the four start figures, as a deliberately speculative assumption:

Start figure	Herder’s scheme	Interpretation
Triangle	cause (axiom)	God
Pentagram	thesis	time
Hexagram	antithesis	space
Double pentagram	synthesis	matter

Polygon3the number itself, no divisor

Compound polygon6 : 2 = 3n is divisible by k

Star polygon5 : 2 = 2.5n and k are coprime

Compound star10 : 4 = 2.5n is not divisible by k, but they share a factor > 1

The four start figures as cause, thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Kant, Paracelsus and the Kabbalah

Kant, too, following Plato, separated space and time in his transcendental aesthetic: space is the condition of outer perception, time that of inner perception. This resembles Paracelsus’ microcosm and macrocosm: microcosm = pentagram = time, macrocosm = hexagram = space.

Herder sets the sephirot scheme of the Kabbalistic tree of life against his own scheme, counting it among the symbolic-philosophical tools of the Pythagorean tradition. As already described under The Kabbalah: the Sefer Yetzirah and the tetractys are two sides of one coin, and as early as 1494 Reuchlin compared the Tetragrammaton YHWH with the tetractys. Whether the Kabbalah is a philosophical edifice or esoteric nonsense is open to debate. What matters is what its true contents are and how they are interpreted or distorted.

Herder was a Freemason and, together with Goethe, a member of the Order of the Illuminati.

The full comparison of the fournesses is in the tetractys analogy table.