The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Winckelmann’s scientific pretentions notwithstanding, there was a healthy quantity of imaginative design in his reconstruction of Greece. But in the end, it was his vivid image of the freedom of the Greek spirit—and not only the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” he took to be captured in the Laocoön sculpture group—that left the enduring impression on his most famous followers. What really breathed life into the Hellenic ideal that dominated nineteenth-century intellectual life in Germany was the part of his theory that came to be universally and unequivocally accepted; namely, Winckelmann’s fantastical but detailed portrait of the vigorous, passionate, fully free, and uninhibited Greek whose physical beauty was so manifest that Greek sculpture could not but be aesthetically superior to modern. They had superior models, so that their representations were not idealizations, but were true to life. Winckelmann’s History had made a compelling case that the greater beauty of Greek art was due to the greater freedom of its people. But in the process, Winckelmann had, perhaps inadvertently, suggested a much stronger conclusion: without freedom, no beauty.39 It was the burden of vindicating or refuting that thesis—that freedom is the necessary condition of both aesthetic and spiritual (and, as we will see in Schiller’s case especially, even moral) beauty—that Winckelmann’s philosophical successors inherited. It was certainly no help that the conditions of freedom he had identified were the singular achievement of a bygone and perhaps irretrievable era: “Such were the advantages which Greece had over other nations in art,” Winckelmann had concluded, “and only such a soil could produce fruits so splendid.”40

  Winckelmann’s History acquired an immediately international reputation that sustained for decades, and earned him a diverse and devoted following as the father of a new archaeology and a veritable cult of personality.41 But two of his earliest supporters merit special mention for the way in which their reception of his work highlights the more burdensome aspects of his legacy. Meditating on Winckelmann’s programmatic preface, Herder, for one, wondered aloud in his Älteres Kritisches Wäldchen what it could really mean to legitimate history as a “science,” and indeed whether such an ambition was realizable at all.42 Naturally, he acknowledged Winckelmann’s many contributions, but by the late 1760s he nevertheless joined with a number of thinkers who took up the emerging methods of philology as a skeptical instrument with which to question the possibility, or the desirability or the wisdom, of imitating the Greeks.43 Prior to his 1770 encounter with Herder, and for many years after, Goethe, too, drew inspiration from Winckelmann’s work. He was immediately and deeply struck by the contrast Winckelmann’s ideas occasioned between the warmth and sensual paganism of Greece and the cold, austere moralizing of Christianity, between the physical and intellectual freedom, beauty and harmony of Greek life and the constraints imposed by the society in which Goethe actually lived. In his 1805 essay eulogizing Winckelmann, “the archaeologist appears as a Greek reborn, as a pagan, above all as a fulfilled and triumphant figure.”44 At the same time, however, Goethe’s attitude toward the Greeks maintained as Herder’s did a degree of realism, even wariness: “In theory,” he observed in an 1813 letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer (1774–1845), “the Greeks strongly believed in freedom; but the freedom which each believed in was his own, for inside each Greek there was a tyrant who needed only the opportunity to emerge, and the true despotism arose from the desire for freedom.”45

  38.3 FREEDOM AFTER WINCKELMANN

  With his “Copernican revolution” Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) set the agenda for much of the philosophical work of the nineteenth century and after; the centrality of the concept of “freedom” to his influential critical system (and his practical philosophy in particular) makes him particularly important here. In his first Critique, Kant poses the question whether the invariability in our experience of causal laws must exclude the possibility of freedom altogether, a worry he answers by dismissing it as the consequence of a “common but deceptive presupposition,” namely that the objects of our empirical experience are absolutely real. “For if appearances are things in themselves,” he writes, “then freedom cannot be saved. […] it necessarily would have to bring down all freedom if one were stubbornly to insist on the reality of appearances.”46 It is only the transcendental philosophy, Kant argues, that can resolve the tension between determinism and freedom, limiting the one and allowing for the other, by distinguishing between the natural causality of merely empirical phenomena and free (or noumenal) causality. Kant’s solution opens up an entirely new space, one that will allow for the exercise of moral freedom.47 It reveals his stalwart opposition to mechanism and his determination to vindicate human freedom, as well as the closeness of the relationship between his study of speculative reason and his theory of morality. The preface to the second Critique underscores this connection, as Kant says that the concept of freedom

  constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason; and all other concepts (those of God and immortality) […] now attach themselves to this concept and with it and by means of it get stability and objective reality, that is, their possibility is proved by this: that freedom is real, for this idea reveals itself through the moral law.48

  But, as we will see, the matter was far from settled.

  Kant’s transcendental distinction held out the promise of a solution to some of the most persistent and vexing philosophical problems. But in the end, the Kantian dignity that depended on the separation between the purely rational and the “pathological”49 would come at a price that many of his successors were unwilling to bear—namely, a tenacious dualism that would condemn man perpetually to be at war with himself, and a stubborn condemnation of everything “creaturely” about human beings and the natural world they inhabit. The greatness of the moral law, for Kant, is due to its opposition to our inclinations; it is an object of the highest respect precisely to the extent that it “humbles” our sensuous nature. Thus freedom as Kant construed it, as respect for the moral law, seemed to require that reason assume the role of dictator to keep the agent safe from the forces of natural necessity and, indeed, from himself. Kant did his best to resist this appearance of dictatorship, intending his account of the faculty of practical reason as its own legislator to be a positive conception of freedom, and a move away from the purely negative conception of freedom as independence from natural necessity and the degradation of nature as such.50 Whether that intention had been realized successfully, however, would be a further issue. The dawn of a new century revealed a wide variety of responses to the critical philosophy, which suggested that the balance between freedom and the law on Kant’s account could be tenuous at best: because our practical reason produces the laws that oblige us, we are free; but insofar as we are inescapably natural as well as rational creatures, whose psychological lives are characterized by inclination as well as ratiocination, we can only experience that obligation as unfreedom.51

  38.3.1 Grace and Dignity: Schiller

  Many of his successors found Kantian dualism unpalatable, but perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated reaction against it is advanced by Friedrich Schiller. His idea that an individual could be “free” only when the inner conflict that was the inevitable result of Kant’s practical philosophy could be mediated is the cornerstone of his critique of Kant’s ethics and constitutes a development interesting in its own right and also influential, foreshadowing as it does the mature Hegel’s concept of freedom as reconciliation (Vereinigung). It is important to clarify that Schiller’s conversion to Kantian philosophy in the early 1790s was complete; his own view of freedom and its connection to the good was in no way a rejection of Kantian ethics or an attempt to replace ethical principles with aesthetic ones. Rather, Schiller, who accepted his account of the basic duality of human nature (and indeed, took the disparity between the two worlds to be the proper theme of tragedy),52 sought to develop Kant’s concept of freedom in a way that would make it possible to negotiate a genuine peac
e between the faculties of reason and inclination, and thereby restore the integrity of the person as a whole. “In Kant’s moral philosophy,” Schiller says in “On Grace and Dignity” (1793),

  the idea of duty is presented with a severity that repels all graces and might tempt a weak intellect to seek moral perfection by taking the path of a somber and monkish asceticism. However much this great philosopher tried to defend himself against this misinterpretation, which, to his serene and free spirit has to be the most outrageous one, he himself, it seems to me, has provided strong grounds for it […] in his strict and harsh opposition of the two principles that have an effect on the human will.53

  Schiller’s own solution would be to distinguish the will from the faculty of reason, identifying the essence of the human being with the former and making the latter subordinate;54 in this way, the will should become capable of being utterly free and of mediating between reason and the instincts, between morality and nature.

  In his own account of moral praiseworthiness, then, Schiller in fact went beyond the demand that an agent act from respect for the moral law and introduced the idea of moral beauty. Human beings acting only rationally “cannot here act with their whole nature in harmony […]. In such cases, then, they also do not act with moral beauty, because inclination necessarily has to participate in the beauty of action as well.”55 The triumph of reason over the inclinations and emotions—the expressions of nature—could produce austere greatness, Schiller thought, but not beauty. The strenuous effort to recover the wholeness of the human being reveals Schiller’s steadfast commitment to the Winckelmannian ideal of Greek freedom, holism and harmony, which he believed to be the only palliative for the divisiveness of Kantian subjectivity. Kant, Schiller realized, had forcefully severed modernity from antiquity, but in cutting off that ancient past, he had condemned mankind to an intractable fragmentation that Schiller identified as the chief obstacle not just to happiness, but to the realization of genuine beauty—both aesthetic and moral. The task of culture, he later argued, is to “secure for each of these two drives [the formal and the sensuous] its proper frontiers” and, he continued, “to do justice to both drives equally: not simply to maintain the rational against the sensuous, but the sensuous against the rational too. Hence its business is twofold: first, to preserve the life of Sense against the encroachments of Freedom; and second, to secure the Personality against the forces of Sensation.”56 The very idea that anything need be secured against the “encroachments” of freedom as Kant understood it (i.e. as the exercise of rational autonomy) is a striking one, and goes a long way toward showing how compelling, how seductive, and how natural Winckelmann’s more sensuous opposite ideal still was. Just as Goethe saw in Christian morality a harsh asceticism and cold rationality and embraced the warm paganism of Greece in the belief that the Greeks lived a fuller life and conceived rightly of the end and aim of human life as an achievement of true harmony, Schiller quickly became wary of Kant’s conception of freedom as requiring that we abandon the very sensitivity that makes us complete—and completely human.

  The most ready association with Schiller will probably be with his aesthetic theory, or perhaps his views on tragedy and culture, or pedagogy and self-development. Of Schiller’s philosophical thought, however, R. D. Miller has argued that “the idea of freedom is so fundamental in Schiller that all other ideas must be related to it, if they are to be properly understood.” Moreover, he continues, “critics who play down the ideal of freedom in Schiller, in favor of what they consider to be the more mature ideal of harmony, do not understand that the ideal of harmony is itself based on that of freedom.”57 The importance of freedom in his thought, Miller claims, even explains Schiller’s appreciation of the ancient Greeks. But this claim points the arrow of causality in the wrong direction, since it sits uneasily with the facts: Miller’s suggestion that Schiller discovered in the Greeks an embodiment of his own highest ideal and came to appreciate them as a result would seem to require, first, that the concept of aesthetic freedom we find in Schiller’s mature works was more fully fledged than it could have been when his devotion to the Greeks was at its peak—in the late 1780s, 1780 for instance, before his turn to Kantian philosophy, when his poem, “The Gods of Greece,” already lamented the loss of an irretrievable ideal. And secondly, it would seem to require that the concept of freedom as Schiller develops it in his mature works was really there to be found in Greece. But as we have seen, that ideal was part and parcel of the fantastic bequest of Winckelmann, the primary source of Schiller’s familiarity with Hellenism. In fact, as we will see, a more unvarnished view of the Greeks and their thought could not by itself have generated, much less sustained, the account of freedom as spiritual harmony that emerges in Schiller, any more than it could have sustained the starry-eyed philhellenism of Winckelmann or any of his devotees. Thus, rather than explaining Schiller’s philhellenism, his commitment to freedom (and consequently his mature aesthetic theory and contribution to the progress of German idealism and romanticism) must be explained by it.

  38.3.2 The New Athenians: Schleiermacher and Schlegel

  The notion of freedom as aesthetic harmony as Schiller develops it in his mature works is worth studying in its own right as well as for its lasting influence on thinkers who succeeded him. Recent work by Frederick Beiser has made a compelling case for this claim, and indeed for a stronger claim: namely, that “it was Schiller’s conception of freedom, and not Kant’s, which had the most pervasive and lasting influence upon his idealist and romantic successors. The young Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Schlegel endorsed Schiller’s holistic ethics, and they developed some of his implicit criticisms of Kant’s concept of moral autonomy, which they found too narrow and moralistic.”58 One of the most immediate critical responses along these lines was delivered, at least at first, anonymously. Just before the turn of the century, Friedrich Scheiermacher (1768–1834) arrived in Berlin, where he would soon forge an intense and fruitful relationship with the literary critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), who was throughout the 1790s intensely engaged in the study of Greek literature and poetry. The two collaborated on many projects, including a translation of the Platonic dialogues that was ultimately left to Schleiermacher and the publication of the journal Das Athenäum, which, though short-lived (begun in 1798, it flourished only until 1800), became an important vehicle for the philosophical and literary writings of the early Romantic thinkers, many of whom came to be associated with the “Jena circle” (the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis [1772–1801], for instance, and Friedrich Schlegel’s brother August Wilhelm [1767–1845], also a celebrated literary critic).

  In 1799, a short review of Kant’s recently published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)59 appeared in the journal’s second volume. Under cover of anonymity, Schleiermacher takes a decidedly sarcastic tone: “the book appears to be excellent,” he writes, “not as anthropology, but rather as the negation of all anthropology. […] The antithesis between physiological and pragmatic anthropology, grounded in Kant’s way of thinking and quite originally set up here, makes both impossible.”60 The trouble, according to Schleiermacher, is that the work contains a fundamental contradiction; namely, that the psychological questions Kant raises about what affects the mind cannot be asked without our being forced to contemplate the mind as an appearance, which must put an end to freedom, on Kant’s own account. But neither could that account of freedom succeed with respect to beings whose agency is in fact constrained by the possibilities of the human body and by our capacity for being affected by natural phenomena at all. Schleiermacher, who understands this as Kant’s unwitting concession to the irreducibility of the human being to the purely transcendental, proceeds to accuse him of a kind of crypto-materialism: “one sees here more than before how that which appears to be but a pure deification of free choice is at bottom quite closely related to a hidden realism, to which Kant pays secret and idolatrous homa
ge after he himself had overturned and demolished it.”61 Behind the palpable glee with which Schleiermacher assails what he takes to be this telling consequence of Kant’s argument and of his many examples (which are derided in the opening sentence of the review as a “collection of trivia”) is a note of triumph: Kant has attempted to elevate the free human being to a transcendental realm, completely at the expense of man’s natural constitution, and Schleiermacher takes no small pleasure in what he regards as the failure of the attempt.

  Schleiermacher agreed with Kant, in broad strokes, that a supreme principle of morality could not be grounded merely empirically. But he rejected Kant’s solution to the grounding problem as too expensive. In this respect, the complaints voiced in his review echo his even earlier reactions to the Kantian system, especially its moral theory. His notes on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, for instance, likely written while Schleiermacher was preparing his own “Dialogues on Freedom” (1789), reflect a genuine perplexity over the question of how a moral law such as Kant’s can motivate sensuously conditioned beings like ourselves at all. He writes, “The concept of freedom (transcendental) of speculative reason is indispensable only for an otherworldly subject.”62 But these early writings reflect something besides perplexity, too; namely, the Romantic attachment to the very possibility of giving an account of freedom that does full justice to our embodied natures and, perhaps more importantly, a steadfast refusal to be embarrassed about the sensuous nature of human beings. The Greeks, as Winckelmann represented them, had celebrated the body and the beauty of the natural world, and they achieved freedom not in spite of it, but in so doing. Schleiermacher, like most committed Winckelmannites, refused to relinquish that ambition.