The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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The final word on early German romantic sociability in the context of feminist theory belongs to Friedrich Schleiermacher in his Essay on a Theory of Sociable Conduct, where an ideal of sociability is presented in a sustained analysis. Schleiermacher’s Essay30 paints a picture of a society of equals: a group of individuals of diverse professions, religious commitments, and gender who come together in an attempt to develop the natural human tendency to sociability to a higher level. The rationale for this is not mere entertainment or even aesthetic, but rather that fundamentally human beings require sociable diversity in order to transcend their contingent situatedness and become more essentially themselves:
Free sociability, neither fettered nor determined by any external end, is demanded vociferously by all educated people as one of their primary and most cherished needs. Whoever is merely thrown back and forth between the burdens of domestic life and the enterprises of civil life merely has the pace increasingly slowed at which one approaches this higher goal of humanity, the more faithfully the pattern is repeated.31
Human beings naturally strive for their own betterment—to become who they essentially are—but the strict division of labor between public and private life makes those on both sides narrow-minded and one-sided in their individual development. Professional life “confines the activity of the spirit to a limited sphere,” and domestic life is even worse. It “brings us into contact with very little and always with the same.” The solution is to bring together a group of people all longing for enlarged horizons but from very different backgrounds in a situation that:
enables an individual’s sphere to be intersected as variously as possible so that each of one’s own points of limitation will afford a view into a different and strange world. In such a manner, all manifestations of humanity will become known, one after the other, and the most alien temperaments and relationships can also become familiar and similarly intimate to that individual.32
For Schleiermacher it is essential that this discursive space be constituted consensually and in the complete absence of civil authority, in accordance with the fundamental principle that “everyone must be their own legislator and must look to it that the common good sustains no damage.”33 Schleiermacher’s ideal of sociability thus is fundamentally an ethical rather than political notion, but also prefigures something like a Rawlsian original position to be constituted empirically: one’s profession, class, and gender are known, of course, but knowledge of one sphere should not be allowed to dominate and is not sufficient for developing a sociable conversation, since it leaves out individuals who do not belong to that sphere. His substantive principle of reciprocity fleshes out the procedural account: “Everyone is to be inspired to a free play of thought by means of communicating what is mine.”34
In analyzing the details and complexities of this project, he points out that it is important that members not limit their contributions only to generalities that all might have in common, since this soon becomes tedious, causing the society to “crystallize” out into smaller special interest groups. “This crystallization,” Schleiermacher warns, “is certainly to the great detriment of sociability, and will certainly never enable it to attain its goal of lifting a person out of the viewpoint of his or her profession for a time.” He then continues:
Here I cannot help but make a comment; is it not true that better sociability comes about under the eyes of and upon the direction of women, and that this is, like so many other excellent matters in the affairs of humans, a consequence of exigency? Women namely, are much worse off than men if they follow the maxim criticized here [i.e. to limit my conversation with others to what I know we have in common]…Now if a man talks of his profession, he nonetheless feels free of one aspect, namely the domestic. Women, on the other hand, for whom [profession and domesticity] coincide, feel all their fetters in such a conversation…For the very reason that they have no status in common with the men other than that of an educated person, women thus become the founders of the better society.
He then gives a nuanced, complex account of the challenges of founding and sustaining this society that he believes women (at that particular time and place in history) are best qualified to run. He concludes that it will require a practice of conversational equilibriation, “oscillating” between sharing the details of my personal background on the one hand and on the other remaining watchful that “the final goal of free sociability” is not compromised thereby: “Reciprocity thus reflects upon and completes itself” and determines the entire nature of society.”35 This discursive equilibriation is an art, and indeed, an art of sensitivity to others:
[conversing] in such a way that if receptiveness is there, it will not fail to have an effect and that, if that [receptivity] is missing, no one will find themselves in an embarrassing situation; [it requires] noticing from the slightest intimations what is too demanding for one or the other. This is the art that really constitutes refinement in conversation.
In the Essay Schleiermacher captures the very essence of the early romantic ideal of philosophical discourse that is truly inclusive, respectful of difference and of the importance of the individual. His ideal society sees all participants as ends in themselves who are free agents who choose to enlarge their own and each others’ horizons through free sociability. Schleiermacher’s model of free sociability can be viewed as a romantic revisionist portrait of real life possibilities in contrast to what he and other early romantics took to be Kant’s overly rationalistic account of human ethical relations. Becker-Cantorino rightly insists that Schleiermacher’s Essay is meant to portray an ethical ideal and is not intended as a snapshot of the Berlin salons themselves.36 At the same time, there can be no question that his friendship with Henriette Herz and his involvement with her salon in Berlin deeply affected his view that women were best situated to found and run the ideally sociable society.37 His longtime acquaintance and friendship with Dorothea Veit/Schlegel and Caroline Schlegel/Schelling were also crucial to his account of women’s centrality to the ideal sociable group. Schleiermacher had no intention of reproducing the “republic of despots” that Dorothea, in her letter to him, described the Jena Circle as having become, and as we saw, the discursive atmosphere of the salons was progressive for the time in allowing women to take part, but far from ideal in terms of numbers of women involved and active participation of the few who were there in the intellectual dialogue.38 Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s genuinely close friendships with these women, especially Henriette Herz, and the impact of their conversations with him, both in person and through letters, had a profound effect on him.
Further evidence of this influence can be seen in the Athenäum fragment 364, in which Schlegel inserted Schleiermacher’s “Idea for a catechism of reason for noble women.”
Although the format and language are a tongue-in-cheek nod to the ten commandments and the apostle’s creed in the Lutheran catechism, the content is pure early German romanticism in its “teachings” to women. It includes commandments such as “Thou shalt not bear false witness for men, thou shalt not extenuate their barbarity in word or deed,” and “Covet the education, art, wisdom, and honor of men,” as well as credos such as “I believe that I do not live to obey commands or to seek distractions, but rather to be and to become; and I believe in the power of the will and of education to make me draw near once more to the infinite, to deliver me from the chains of miseducation, and to make me independent of the barriers of sex”; and in keeping with Schlegel’s comments in Lucinde on friendship, Schleiermacher includes the “friendship of men” in a list of other values women should hold.
Perhaps most interesting, philosophically and from a feminist perspective, however, is the first “credo”: “I believe in immortal humanity, which was there before it assumed the garment of masculinity and femininity.” Schleiermacher’s view that women and men together form a whole, or in his view, can re-form in the flesh the unity of the original human, has been seen by some as a feminist mo
ment in his work, even as it served to underwrite his decidedly inegalitarian view that women belong in the realm of the private, men in that realm of the public.39
27.4 BECOMING ONESELF AS A WOMAN AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Nearly a century later, Hedwig Dohm published a novella titled, Werde, die du bist! (“Become who you are!”) (1894), about a middle-aged woman’s doomed attraction to a younger man. Dohm was a prominent novelist, playwright, and essayist, and a pioneering radical feminist in Berlin during the 1870s and until her death in 1919. Although her literary work reflected the reality of women’s second class status in German society at the time, in her political writing and activism she vehemently denied that women were “by nature” unequipped for intellectual and artistic greatness:
Surely most thinking people will agree with me that [women’s inferior] achievements prove nothing without a thorough consideration of social, political and historical circumstances under which they were produced…it would really be even more of a wonder if women’s achievements had not lagged behind those of men.40
These views were of course not new to socialists of the era and were very much in step with Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill’s socialist utilitarian feminism. In fact, however, the title of Dohm’s novel pays homage to one of Nietzsche’s favorite phrases and the subtitle of his last work: Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Dohm’s title reflects the strong influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy upon her work. It is a noteworthy turn in the history of German feminism that at the end of the nineteenth century the philosophy of Nietzsche, an outspoken anti-feminist, proved to be fertile ground for the emergence of a new radical feminism and anti-feminism alike. Dohm and other radical feminists embraced Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values and elevation of the power of the individual will and self-assertion. Feminists saw these views as powerful conceptual tools for transforming women’s self-conception, and as holding out the possibility of women finally “becoming who they were”: beings with desires and capacities to create art, pursue a profession, and express themselves sexually without repression and castigation. On the anti-feminist side, however, many women accepted or even embraced women’s political and social inequality on essentialist grounds: women’s nature, they argued, was biologically determined for motherhood, and they disparaged women who attempted to have careers or to avoid motherhood.41 In Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Carol Diethe lays out the situation succinctly, pointing to the reactionary changes of the closing decades of the nineteenth century and their effect on feminism in Germany:
the new Civil Code contained little to relieve the repression of women; in addition, the banning of socialism from 1878 until 1890 meant that socialist feminists such as Clara Zetkin and Lily Braun were taboo to the moderates, who in their turn opposed the efforts of the radicals, such as Hedwig Dohm and Helene Stöcker. [Dohm and Stöcker]…drew much from arch anti-feminist Nietzsche. Such paradoxes, and the factional splits in the feminist movement in Germany, would continue to hamper progress…The right-wing nature of the German feminist movement after Gertrud Bäumer became its president in 1910 placed it on a path which would lead it very close to collaboration with the National Socialists.42
One of the most outspoken and well-known among German anti-feminists was Lou Salomé. In Der Mensch als Weib she urged that women embrace their biological difference as mothers and sexual beings, but inveighed against women who aim at “masculine” pursuits. As Diethe points out, Salomé’s anti-feminism “is impossible not to view as hypocritical, since she took herself seriously as a writer” and because in her personal life, in addition to her ambitious career as a writer, she had multiple affairs with well-known intellectuals, and avoided having children. The “paradox,” as Diethe calls it, of radical feminists drawing on Nietzsche’s views can be unraveled to a certain extent by pointing out that useful theoretical alternatives for feminism at the end of the nineteenth century were limited: the banning of socialism meant that turning to Marxist accounts was politically inexpedient if not downright dangerous politically. Moreover, in the eyes of many radical feminists socialism failed adequately to theorize the individual woman and women’s subjectivity. Nietzsche’s exuberant focus on the possibilities of making a full life for oneself by force of will was empowering for women whose entire existence was defined by and, with precious few exceptions, completely limited to, domesticity. What the radical feminists had to overlook, of course, was Nietzsche’s “formula for greatness in a human being,” namely “amor fati”—love of fate, including one’s own fate.43 In that respect Lou Salomé’s anti-feminism was a perfect examplar of Nietzsche’s view: she believed most women, indeed women in general, were fated by their biology, but saw herself as an exceptional case. Her position from her own perspective (the only one that mattered, philosophically, on this view) was not hypocritical so much as it was an expression of the fundamental egoism of the position. This aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy—its disdain for and rejection of an underlying, universal sociability that binds all human beings, weak and strong, young and old, religious or atheist, and so on—was the fly in the ointment for feminists attracted to it. What was needed was a new, self-affirming, self-empowering feminism that defined itself in terms of solidarity among creative, self-confident women working for social change. At its root, radical feminism needed to recognize the value of sisterhood not merely as a means but rather as an end: not as a tool for attaining one’s selfhood, but as constitutive of it. If nineteenth-century German feminism took as its first principle the command that women as individuals become “who they are” in a republic of equals, then the ideal of a social, woman-identified self had to be its primary goal. It would take decades before a new wave of feminism devoted to the raising of women’s consciousness and the principle of a sisterhood of women would put into practice many of the insights that, as we have seen, had already been theorized by the early romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
27.5 CONCLUSION: EARLY GERMAN ROMANTICISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL FEMINISM
It is a standard feminist criticism of philosophy, and until the last few decades a truism, that “the philosopher” (gendered masculine of course) works alone, in the absence of spouse and family, or if he has a family, he relies upon “the wife” to ensure that his life is relatively free of most of the physical and psychological cares and clutter of family living. In the case of early German romantic philosophy, such detachment was not assumed, nor was it the case. It is clear that women were major players in the construction of the perspectivist individualism and the role of sociability in philosophy that are the hallmark of early German romanticism. For that reason alone it deserves a place in the history of feminist theory. What matters more, however, is that these women’s contributions shaped a philosophical theory that, not surprisingly, can and indeed must theorize the absence of women from all areas of public and private discourse, philosophy included. Given the philosophical commitment of early romanticism to perspectivism and to the centrality of multiple, diverse individual human interactions as the source of these perspectives, women’s invisibility in philosophy is a fundamental theoretical problem for romanticism. Moreover, it is a problem that early German romanticism explicitly addressed, if not always in ways that were consistent with its own ethical commitments to reciprocity and mutual aid.
For these philosophers—and among them we must include Dorothea Schlegel and Caroline Schlegel/Schelling—philosophy is a social process, not an isolated product; a collaboration, not a proprietary enterprise. Friedrich Schlegel insisted that writing involves a kind of “invention” of a reader that is not the actual reader but rather one that is “as he ought to be,” namely “lively and responsive,” like a partner in conversation:
[the author] does not try to make any particular impression on [the reader], but enters with him into the sacred relationship of the most intimate Symphilosophie or Sympoesie.44
The effect of this p
rocess is the transformation of the very “self” that is philosophizing, or in the idiom of the Jena Circle, the self that is romanticizing. This process is the role reversal and fusion, as it were, of writer and reader. This collaborative, constructive process does not eliminate but rather transforms the individual, gets him or her outside him or herself and perhaps even allows the individual to become something more like the other, more like him or her. Dorothea Veit and Friedrich Schlegel were a case in point: they practiced and theorized these role reversals, and, however traditional their later life became, there can be no doubt that neither would have progressed as far as they did without these early commitments to experiment with and move beyond traditional gender constraints.
In his early (1795) essay “On Diotima” Friedrich Schlegel criticized the prejudice that women’s virtues lie only in “absolute devotion and totally clinging” to men on the grounds that such views perpetuate “characterlessness” in women:
Femininity as well as masculinity should be refined into a higher personality…the power-hungry tempestuousness [Ungestüm] of the man and the selfless deference [Hingegebenheit] of the woman are exaggerated and mean. Only independent femininity and mild masculinity is good and beautiful.45
This version of individual human development, like Schleiermacher’s view of a progressive return to an “immortal humanity before it assumed the garment of masculinity and femininity,” is a far cry from the Nietzschean Übermensch. Indeed, the early German romantics would balk at the idea that any one type is determined by the process of romanticizing, or that there is ever a genuinely final outcome to any single process of self-development. For early German romanticism, becoming who one is is a creative process undertaken together with others in the midst of our lives, and is never fully determined and always open-ended. To be sure, the free creativity and mutual respect and support that this philosophy ascribes to human subjectivity at it best is not without problems: the early German romantic experiment’s success was fragile and short lived and did not have the influence on the remainder of the nineteenth century that feminists in 1800 might have hoped it would have. Twenty-first-century feminism is, however, in a far better position to rescue the very best of this theory. I hope to have shown that it is worth the effort.