  Herder came from East Prussia, and from 1762 to 1764 was a student in Königsberg, where he studied with Kant. He later turned away from Kant, whom he saw as having himself turned away from an empirical approach to philosophy to one that is excessively abstract and a priori. From 1762 to 1769, he taught school in Riga, and then left for a tour of France and Western Germany, during which he met the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, shortly to become famous for The Sorrows of Young Werther. Indeed, after Herder served as preacher in the small court of Bückeburg from 1771 to 1776, Goethe had him appointed as the General Superintendent of Lutheran clergy in the Duchy of Weimar, where Goethe himself was the chief minister. This position, which Herder occupied for the rest of his life, gave him ample time to write and put him into contact with the many other leading figures of late eighteenth-century German literary and intellectual life whom Goethe brought to Weimar.