The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  the Germans are predestined slaves. Greece has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilization, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly, they have been obsessed by them more utterly, and they have assimilated them less than any other race.1

  Butler’s narrative style is prone to a kind of excess that gives her account a melodramatic character, and this claim is no exception. Nevertheless, her suggestion of “predestination” seems apt in light of the almost totally accidental way in which German thinkers had come, by the end of the eighteenth century, to look to Greece for a model of the spiritual harmony and freedom that modern life seemed, in one way or another, to render impossible. Once it caught on, this ideal so dominated German thought by the turn of the nineteenth century that even some who rejected it paid their homage by setting out their systems in opposition to it. Thus Butler rightly thought that we could not offer an adequate account of the intellectual development of this century without devoting sustained attention to the all-consuming phenomenon of German philhellenism and its systematic impact on philosophical thought in Germany.2

  It would of course be impossible to answer the question as to what form philosophy might have taken in Germany if its most powerful intellects had not been so thoroughly enamored of Hellenic thought and culture; but it is equally impossible, without a full reckoning of their debt to antiquity, to understand the most pervasive themes and persistent problems of the most fruitful intellectual climate of the modern era. As Hugh Lloyd-Jones observes, “Much of what has been written about the influence of Greek literature in modern times has been concerned with the detection of direct echoes, or with modern works that make use of Greek décor but have little intrinsic relationship with Greek models.”3 In this chapter, I take for granted that such “influence studies” are of limited interest if our objectives are to say something about the era as a whole, to understand the trajectory of the development of its thought, and to understand not only how this or that thinker put Greek ideas and ideals to use, but why the Greeks became an apparently bottomless well of inspiration in the first place. So, here I will cast the net more widely and more thematically, and in the account that unfolds we will discover several ironies that make it interesting both dramatically and philosophically.

  The first of these ironies is (i) that the Hellenic ideal that held such powerful sway in Germany for over a century turned out to be irremediably idiosyncratic and almost wholly illusory. This aspect of the relationship, which I will touch on briefly,4 has been widely acknowledged since Butler’s study chronicled “the invasion of Germany by the mythical inhabitants of a Greece that never was on sea or land.”5 Less often discussed, however, is that the “freedom” they were alleged to have enjoyed was perhaps the most important dimension of the attraction of the Greeks for the Germans. The struggle to articulate the nature of human freedom and the conditions of its realization is one of the most dramatic and most visible struggles in German philosophy of the nineteenth century. To establish autonomy as a source of genuine agency and ground for the authority of moral norms was the ambitious undertaking that so thoroughly absorbed Kant’s Idealist followers; even his critics largely agreed with the priority of freedom in his system of practical reason. And, of course, the goal of liberation remained a preoccupation of many thinkers long after the collapse of Idealism; notably, for instance, in the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–83) and in his critique of Hegelianism. But the focus on “freedom” that has served as an organizing principle for so many accounts of the development of German philosophy in this tremendously energetic century,6 although its importance must not be overlooked, nevertheless obscures a second crucial irony in the thought of that period: namely, (ii) that the dogged pursuit of freedom and even the ways in which it could be conceived were indelibly, and fatefully, shaped by an oddly self-imposed, utterly foreign, and almost wholly illusory ideal, from which the embattled German philosophical imagination spent over a century working to free itself.

  But the final twist in our account will be the recognition of how the Greek ideal was ultimately overcome. In the end, (iii) the monument to the Greek ideal erected in the mid-eighteenth century had trouble withstanding (and ultimately fell to) the very scrutiny and devotion to which its admirers subjected it. The rise of classical philology in the German university during the nineteenth century had been fueled in no small part by the very same idealization of Hellenic culture that held so many great minds in thrall (and was owed to the very same intellectual progenitors), but the skeptical spirit that animated philological inquiry, not to mention the scientific turn that discipline would take by the middle of the nineteenth century, had a dramatically deflationary effect on that ideal, until the philosophical projects that had depended on an idealized conception of the Greeks—or, rather, on a variety of misconceptions about them—ultimately had to yield.

  38.2 WINCKELMANN AND THE DREAM OF FREEDOM

  Construction began on the Hellenic ideal in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the excavations at Herculaneum in 1738 and at Pompeii in 1748, which launched classical philology as an independent discipline, stirred the popular imagination in Europe, and, among other things, inspired a young art historian named Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) to publish his groundbreaking pamphlet, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755). The explosive popularity of this modest essay is hard to overstate. It made Winckelmann—the son of a provincial cobbler and an unlikely scholar—a legend in his own time and became one of the forces that would turn the intellectual tide in Europe toward Greece. Of his contemporary Germans Winckelmann declared that, “The only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.”7 Winckelmann’s clarion call inspired some of the greatest literary efforts of the modern age: the poets Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), and others waxed painfully nostalgic about the lost beauty of Greece and longed to revive it.8 Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832), Germany’s national poet and a committed Winckelmannite, determined that “everyone should be a Greek, but in his own way.”9 And Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who mentored Goethe, influenced Kant, and ultimately inspired the emergence and development of German Idealism, was an important successor to Winckelmann, though not an uncritical one; he pointedly questioned the wisdom of such imitation.

  The star of Winckelmann’s Reflections was Laocoön, whose sculptural representation he said “was for the artist of ancient Rome just what he is for us—the demonstration of Polyclitus’ rules, the perfect rules of art.”10 In the depiction of the tragic end of the Trojan priest who had attempted in vain to warn his fellow citizens against the suspicious gift sent by the Greeks, and who, for his trouble, is violently strangled along with his two sons by monstrous sea serpents sent by the gods, Winckelmann found his perfect emblem of the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur [eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Größe]” that he famously said were “the general and most distinctive characteristics of the Greek masterpieces.”11 Winckelmann’s bizarrely inappropriate choice of the Laocoön group as the illustration of “quiet grandeur” has never been overlooked.12 Richard Jenkyns has credited it to “a perversity so astounding that it amounts almost to genius,”13 and it surely reflects something of the desperation in Winckelmann’s era for harmony, serenity, and wholeness that he should have found it in so unlikely a representative.14 In spite of it all, however, “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” became Winckelmann’s enduring slogan. But we should not let the fact that it remains for most people the primary, or even the only, association with his name obscure two important facts. First, it was never an uncritically accepted or uncontroversial view of the Greeks or their art. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), for instance, had
assailed it in his own Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766),15 which drew an almost immediate response on Winckelmann’s behalf from Herder in the “First Grove” of his Critical Forests (1769)16 and launched a vigorous debate. Second, we should recognize that this little monograph, which put the infamous phrase in so many mouths in that era, was not his most significant or lasting contribution.

  The more solid foundation for Winckelmann’s abiding influence, and the more important work for the purposes of our consideration of nineteenth-century Germany’s preoccupation with “freedom,” is his magnum opus, the two quarto volumes that comprise his History of Ancient Art (1764),17 which became Goethe’s constant companions on his travels through Italy and drew Herder’s heartfelt praise (as well as some skepticism, to which I will return) in his work on Winckelmann. Its reputation is deserved. The History is no mere catalog of antique relics; in fact, it is no mere history. Its comprehensive treatment of the subject and its explicitly systematic method of inquiry made it an important contribution to historiography and a model for scientific approaches to history and the study of antiquity. In many ways, it heralded the turn toward historicism and Altertumswissenschaft in Germany. A few words about the novelty of Winckelmann’s approach will help to illuminate the impact of his work and its importance to the future of German intellectual history. As we will see, many of the signal contributions of the era were made by those who, like Winckelmann, were not necessarily academics by training or by profession. But it would be a mistake to think that the philosophical developments that comprise what is now the standard curriculum in philosophy, as represented by those inside the academy, were uninfluenced by him and by his nineteenth-century followers.

  The opening lines of the treatise are as indicative of Winckelmann’s affinity for the Greeks as of his careful reflection on method: “The History of Ancient Art which I have undertaken to write is not a mere chronicle of epochs, and of the changes which occurred within them. I use the term History in the more extended signification which it has in the Greek language; and it is my intention to present such a system.”18 Several of its features, he argued in the preface, gave his History the right to such a claim and set it apart from its competitors. First, Winckelmann grounded the authoritative nature of his treatise in his own thorough and first-hand observational evidence of the relevant art objects. Other histories of art existed, but he charged that their authors “could communicate nothing more than what they had learned from books or hearsay.”19 Direct observation, he reasoned, is indispensible for avoiding error. Second, his inquiry was an inquiry into causes: “In the large and valuable works descriptive of ancient statues which have hitherto been published, we seek in vain for research and knowledge in regard to art. The description of a statue ought to show the cause of its beauty, and the peculiarity of its style.”20 Winckelmann’s commitment to knowledge of causes as a criterion for genuine understanding took him, necessarily, beyond the physical details (which he nevertheless captured exhaustively) of this or that sculptural object. Of course one must look to the fine details of a statue, down to the hair on the head of Marcus Aurelius’ horse, to conjecture about its provenance, or to the peculiar drape of the garment to determine whether the sculptor had realized successfully the most important principles of artistic beauty. But a genuine understanding of the greatness of an art form, Winckelmann suggested, requires knowledge beyond those facts; it requires an investigation into the causes—the conditions for the appearance—of great artists themselves. And finally, as if anticipating later critics’ occasional derision of his conclusions as too hasty, Winckelmann said:

  I have ventured to present a few speculations of which the proofs may not appear sufficiently strong; but they may, perhaps, help others onward who wish to penetrate into the art of the ancients; and how often it happens that a conjecture is, by a later discovery, converted into a truth! Conjectures—those, I mean, which are attached, at least by a thread, to something firm—are no more to be banished from a treatise of this kind, than hypotheses from natural philosophy. They resemble the frame of a building; they are indispensable indeed, if […] we do not wish to make great leaps across many vacant spots.21

  Charles Darwin writing a century later would deliver a hardly more eloquent statement of the indispensability of hypotheses for the progress of knowledge.22 In his defense of the conjecture and of the value of going right—or wrong—in the pursuit of knowledge, Winckelmann emphasized the importance of a healthy fallibilism for the scientific spirit.

  It was by such a method, Winckelmann said, that he had exerted himself in his History of Art for the sake of discovering “the truth”:23 its central argument aimed not only to demonstrate the superiority of ancient to modern art but also to ground that superiority in the conditions of life in Greece—chiefly, in the superior freedom the Greeks are alleged to have enjoyed. “The independence of Greece is to be regarded as the most prominent of the causes, originating in its constitution and government, of its superiority in art.”24 Winckelmann dwelt on the political freedom of classical democracies, of course, especially in Athens:

  where, after the expulsion of the tyrants, a democratic form of government was adopted, in which the entire people had a share, the spirit of each citizen became loftier than that of the other Greeks, and the city itself surpassed all other cities. As good taste was now generally diffused, […] everything flowed into this city, in consequence of its power and greatness, even as rivers flow toward the sea. Here the arts and sciences established themselves […].25

  Their unparalleled political liberty contributed to “habits of thinking” in Greece that made its great artistic achievements possible.26 Winckelmann lauded them for “their kindly natures, their gentle hearts, and joyous dispositions.”27 In essence, he said, “The thoughts of the whole people rose higher with freedom, just as a noble branch rises from a sound stock. […] Herodotus shows that freedom alone was the basis of the power and superiority to which Athens attained […].”28 Scholars have long been tempted to present Winckelmann’s ideas as an anticipation of the revolutionary republican spirit that animated the late eighteenth century in Europe and so dramatically changed the landscape of the nineteenth century, but politics would be insufficient to establish the freedom he thought responsible for the aesthetic achievement of the Greeks. That his emphasis was on the experience of freedom—freedom as a state of consciousness—makes him a clearer forerunner of German philosophical movements than a European political theorist.29

  Winckelmann did, however, make a great deal of concurrent cultural developments in Greece, including dramatic festivals, the birth of oratory and philosophy, and state sponsorship of the visual arts.30 The artists’ work was a generously supported and widely appreciated part of the fabric of life in the Greece of Winckelmann’s fantasy, and it afforded them, on his account, a unique opportunity to play a formative role in the development of their culture: “The artist could become a lawgiver […]. He could command an army.”31 If he did not draw them out explicitly, the implications of Winckelmann’s conjectures about the great station of the artist in antiquity were nevertheless clear enough, and they inspired the ambitious pedagogical objectives sketched out by thinkers like Friedrich Schiller, in his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who championed the vision of education as Bildung that was embraced by Romantic thinkers. His elevation of the artist inspired, in addition, the insistence on poetic talent as the only appropriate vehicle for the realization of genuine cultural and individual freedom as we find it expressed in some of the earliest documents that express the ambitions of post-Kantian German Idealism.32 But Winckelmann also explored what he took to be the freedom of Greek citizens from the stifling moral and religious conventions of modern Europe, and even from the burdens that moderns felt imposed by the very pace of commerce and social life, and by scholarship itself: “In the best days of Greece,” he observed, “it was easy to be learned, in
the signification of the word at that time; and every one could be wise. For there was one vanity less in the world at that time than at present, namely, that of being conversant with many books […].”33

  Equally as important as, if not more important than their political and social circumstances and the joie de vivre to which those gave rise, however, Winckelmann credited the climate of Greece with the greater freedom of its citizens: “The influence of climate must vivify the seed from which art is to be produced; and for this seed Greece was the chosen soil.”34 Mediterranean warmth encouraged the “joyousness of disposition” that fostered games and festivals. Free from the unhealthy chill of northern latitudes (which lent itself to the inactivity that produced the less robust physique of the modern man), the Greeks were more physical, more sensual. Even their intellectual powers were employed “at the period when they are brightest and strongest and are sustained by the sprightliness of the body, which, among us, is ignobly nourished until it decays.”35 To fit the style of life, their dress allowed for greater freedom of movement—and greater exposure. In his earlier Reflections, Winckelmann had observed, “all clothing of the Greeks was so designed that it put not the slightest constraint upon formative nature. The development of beautiful form would not have permitted the different types and shapes of our present-day clothing, which binds and confines, especially at the neck, hips, and the thighs.”36 Modern concerns for modesty were unknown, in Winckelmann’s picture of Greek life; because “beauty was thus desired and prized by the Greeks, nothing was concealed which could enhance it.”37 In short, artists had greater opportunity to be presented with beautiful bodies and were given greater encouragement to represent them; and the people and bodies with which they were more intimately acquainted were in fact simply more beautiful than modern ones.38