The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  In his charge of inconsistency in his review of Kant’s Anthropology, Schleiermacher probably cannot be credited with a full appreciation of the subtleties of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Whether we view his understanding of Kant’s fundamental distinction as uncharitable or unsophisticated, however, Schleiermacher was not alone in developing these criticisms. On the whole, the Kantian moral philosophy might have met with less resistance had it not entered a world stage already crowded with Greek choruses and statuary and the shadows of Olympic gods. The pages of the Athenäum, which paid tribute to all of these, were also a laboratory for Schleiermacher’s collaborator Friedrich Schlegel’s exploration of the fragment as a new literary device and an important new vehicle for the Romantic conception of systematic thought. Though he never articulates a theory of the fragment as such, Schlegel deploys them, explicitly and consciously, not as a rejection of the systematicity of the Kantian critical philosophy (or indeed of systematicity as such)63 but as its further, necessary if not inevitable, development. Nevertheless, Schlegel’s intentions are deeply critical, and the motivation behind them is one we can now readily identify: on Schlegel’s Romantic conception of things, the Kantian agent, as a representative of modernity, faces a devastating and ultimately impossible choice between an existence characterized by the isolation of particularity, as a merely phenomenal being, and an existence made meaningful by the holism of a system of pure practical reason, but at the cost of everything individual. The answer, which Schlegel attempted to realize in the form as well as in the content of his philosophical reflections, was to seek unity without sacrificing plurality.

  In this sense, Schlegel’s critical philosophical efforts, like those of Friedrich Schiller, were attempts to realize the promise and optimism of Winckelmann’s prediction: “The concepts of unity and completeness in the nature of antiquity will purify and make more meaningful the concepts of those things that are divided in our [modern] nature.”64 Their attempts to understand freedom as an aesthetic as well as a moral achievement demonstrate their veneration for Winckelmann’s Greeks, whose “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” was the visible, outward aspect of the freedom they enjoyed. Their freedom had depended on a kind of inner harmony unavailable to fragmented modern subjects, and, as we have seen, thinkers like Schiller and Schlegel committed themselves to the restoration of that inner harmony. The presentation of Schlegel’s ideas in hundreds of eminently quotable fragments,65 in the Athenäum and elsewhere, is intended graphically to convey the paradoxical Romantic notion that the universal is always and inevitably singular, and that what is fragmentary, particular or individual is not, therefore, deficient or lacking in completeness but is in fact already universal. Properly conceived, every fragment contains, as if in embryo, a system. All individuals are systems; and conversely, every system is an individual. The absolute or totality is consequently an individual characterized by plurality. One fragment in particular is worth quoting in its entirety, both for its presentation of this position and for its illustrative use of “classical poetry” as an ideal representative of “an individual”:

  If someone attempts a characterization of the ancients en masse, then no one considers that paradoxical; and yet so little do these people usually know their own minds that they would be surprised at the suggestion that classical poetry is an individual in the strictest and most literal sense of the word: more clearly defined in its physiognomy, more original in its manners, and more consistent in its maxims than whole masses of the phenomena whom we consider and should consider, in our legal and social relations, to be people and, yes, even individuals. Is it possible to characterize anything but individuals? Isn’t whatever can’t be multiplied after a certain given point just as much a historical entity as something that can no longer be divided? Aren’t all systems individuals just as all individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency? Isn’t every real entity historical? Aren’t there individuals who contain within themselves whole systems of individuals?66

  For the Germans of the nineteenth century, as for the Greek philosophers before Plato, the problem of the one and the many, the search for unity in plurality, was the central philosophical problem. To reconcile the universal and the particular, without sacrifice; to resolve the tension of Kantian dualism, without dissolving its components; to find a meaningful place within the whole, without losing oneself in the process; to be a free human being at home in the world: as a new century began, many thinkers adopted these as the proper goals of philosophy, and to that extent reestablished another Greek idea, that the activity of the philosopher is justified first and foremost by its service to realizing the best kind of life for human beings.

  38.3.3 “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism”: Hölderlin and Hegel

  This insistence on the indispensability of aesthetic sensitivity for the development of a proper conception of freedom—one that achieves what Kant’s conception could not, that is, widespread impact beyond the walls of the university—may be nowhere more evident than in the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (1797), a brief and cryptic fragment variously attributed to Hegel, in whose young hand it is written, to Schelling and to Hölderlin (it can be found in any sufficiently thorough collection of the work of any one of them).67 The “System Program” is a manifesto of sorts; the project it outlines is essentially that of creating a new practical philosophy that will reconcile both the human subject in his various internal aspects and also the individual with his world. The first full sentences of the extant portion of the fragment68 announce its central theme:

  Since the whole of metaphysics will in the future fall under moral [theory]—of which Kant, with his two practical postulates, has given merely an example, but not exhausted anything—this ethics will be nothing other than a complete system of all ideas (Ideen), or what comes to the same, of all practical postulates. The first idea is naturally the representation of myself as an absolutely free being (Wesen).69

  Even for scholars who take Hegel to have authored (rather than merely transcribed) the brief and bombastic text, no one denies the extent to which conception of freedom presented in it is indebted to Hölderlin.70 The insistence that freedom is realized only in an aesthetic act (and, indeed, that the activity of reason must be seen as fundamentally aesthetic) and only through works of genuine poetry echoes themes in Hölderlin’s own thought and, more distantly, Winckelmann’s picture of the poets of Greece who could be “lawgivers” and “commanders.” The “System Program” declares that “idea of beauty, taking the word in the higher Platonic sense” is “the idea that unites all the others.”71 In fact, its author states:

  I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, the one in which it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are sisters only in beauty—the philosophers must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet; our literalist philosophers are men with no aesthetic sense. The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.72

  The “System Program” gives poetry “a higher dignity,” elevating her to the status of “the teacher of humanity”; the poet will be the herald of a “sensuous religion” and a new “mythology of reason,” both of which are needed for liberation and the cultivation of the many, now merely latent if not thoroughly degraded, powers of the human being.73 For the realization of this full potential and for the project of liberation, a system is required and the pure concepts of philosophy will not be adequate to its construction.

  The importance of beauty and its dependence on the realization of truth and the pure expression of moral goodness that are possible only for truly free human beings in a thriving polis is the thread that ties Winckelmann’s brief Reflections to his far more systematic History of Art. In addition to his assertions of the importance of the poet to his society, Hölderlin also takes away from his engagement with Winckelmann the idea that the poet is able to achieve what he does in virtue of a peculiar aesthetic sensitivity and ability to balance
the factual and the ideal, both of which are required, in appropriate measure, for great art. Recalling the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” captured by Greek artists at the height of their achievement, Hölderlin attempts to illuminate the special contribution of art and beauty to freedom.74

  If Hölderlin’s influence is discernible in the development of the young Hegel’s idea of freedom and his admiration for the Greeks, however, it is an influence that clearly diminished over time. Certainly by the time Hegel published Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821),75 his conception of freedom begins to include the impulse to get free of the Greek ideal.76 This was a valuable insight, but one that seems to have required Hegel to treat the ancients as rooted in a past that was not simply difficult to recover but was in fact unfit for revival in a modern era, and their ideals as unsuited to moderns. As far as Hegel is concerned, the inner life of the Greek is unstable and unreflective, unworthy of sustained admiration: “Of the Greeks in the first and genuine form of their Freedom,” he says, “we may assert that they had no conscience.”77 Indeed, he held that Greeks, like those in Asian civilizations, developed little or no individual personalities.78 In Hegel’s portrait, the Greeks appear as children, incapable even of entertaining distinctions until the Sophists “first introduced subjective reflection, and the new doctrine that each man should act according to his own conviction.”79

  Such judgments accompanied Hegel’s fairly decisive rejection of, among other things, the current of paganism running through Weimar classicism and early nineteenth-century philhellenism. In his study of “freedom” in Hegel’s thought, in which he claims that freedom “is the value that Hegel most greatly admires” and that it is “the central organizing concept” and “the key to understanding Hegel’s social philosophy,”80 Alan Patten reminds us that on Hegel’s view, “It is only with the advent of Christianity—with its principle of ‘infinite subjectivity’—that ‘absolute’ or ‘concrete’ freedom becomes fully possible.”81 On balance, we must concede that Hegel was not alone in insisting on differences between ancients and moderns that required seeing the former as naïve or primitive, yet in Hegel’s thought they often appear in caricature. In short, his was a far less flattering cartoon than Winckelmann’s. The very idea, however, that the Greeks pursued the same basic ends as moderns, but that they did it only fumblingly or badly, would turn out to be unsustainable in the light that made the picture of Greece ever clearer to those in the late nineteenth century.82

  38.4 THE RISE OF CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY

  Interestingly, that very light had already dawned by the time Winckelmann popularized the idea of hitching Germany’s intellectual and cultural future to the imitation of the ancients. The Enlightenment had been destabilizing in many ways; decline in commitment to Christianity, at least to the literal truth of its myths, awakened interest in the pre-Christian past. Antiquity might well furnish models helpful for the reconstruction of a harmonious society—one less prone to producing the fragmentation and alienation that had, by Goethe’s time, already become a widely acknowledged and widely lamented condition. Thus it came to be that some of the original pioneers in the study of antiquity were not academics in the strict sense, but schoolmasters and self-taught upstarts who, like Winckelmann himself, discovered this window into an ancient past and the uses to which it might be put in modern times.83 Nevertheless, Winckelmann’s work was indispensably facilitated by the rise of a new scholarly movement to which he would be an important contributor—a movement that reached its height in the nineteenth century but in fact got underway much earlier.

  Classical scholarship and pedagogy in the modern era was characterized by the turn from an earlier to a later “humanist” phase. The Old Humanism had aimed merely at the verbal imitation of the style of the classics in Latin—a laborious endeavor that had largely exhausted its usefulness by the middle of the seventeenth century. The New Humanist phase began in Göttingen in the early 1730s, 1730 under Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), who had introduced Greek classics into the German schools and promoted the study of Greek language and texts at a time when antiquity was still viewed primarily through Roman lenses. According to classical historian J. E. Sandys, Gesner is to be reckoned “one of the greatest scholars of the eighteenth century”; he became the “prophet and precursor” of the age of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Goethe. Set against the Old Humanism, the aim of the new approach he championed was “not to imitate the style, but to assimilate the substance, to form the mind and to cultivate the taste, and to lead up to the production of a modern literature that was not to be a mere echo of a bygone age, but was to have a voice of its own whether in philosophy, or in learning, or in art and poetry.”84 Gesner’s pedagogical philosophy was shared and enthusiastically disseminated by lexicographer Christian Tobias Damm (1699–1778), a mentor to Winckelmann who had already decided that “the imitation of Greek models was necessary to raise the level of German culture,” and by Leipzig professor of history and poetry and pioneer of classical archaeology, Johann Friedrich Christ (1700–56), who conveyed his enthusiasm for the literature and art of antiquity to a generation of students including Lessing and the scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812).

  Though Heyne was the leading classical scholar in Germany when he met Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Göttingen,85 his reputation has been overshadowed by his rebellious pupil Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), whose name has belonged to posterity since he inaugurated a new era in scholarship by designating his intended area of study in the matriculation book of the University of Göttingen in 1777 by the unheard of title ‘studiosus philologiae’. By the final decade of the eighteenth century, when Herder wrote in his monumental Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–91) that, “With Greece the morning breaks, and we joyfully sail to meet it,”86 German philhellenism was at its height and the New Humanism, represented prominently by Wolf, had decisively triumphed. For Wolf, whose Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) would introduce new arguments that raised disturbing challenges to the authorship of the epics attributed to Homer and would occupy generations of scholars to come, the final goal of the modern study of antiquity was a thorough knowledge of and even intimacy with the rich and multi-faceted life of the Greeks. Wilhelm von Humboldt brought Goethe and Schiller into contact with this work, and for many years, the pursuit of the aims adopted by F. A. Wolf and his followers coexisted reasonably well with the romantic, soft-focus distortion that encouraged so much sublime nostalgia in poetic representations of Hellenic life—such as in Schiller’s own poems and Hölderlin’s odes. But by the early mid-nineteenth century, the turn toward historicism in Germany profoundly affected the methods and aims of classical scholars.

  Humboldt, having spent the first years of the new century in Rome (1803–8), where many of his linguistic interests were enlivened by intense study of Greek, and where he both translated and wrote about Greek poetry and drama, returned to Germany in 1808 to assume a position with the Ministry of the Interior. There, while overseeing educational affairs, he instituted a sweeping and radical reform of the educational system in Prussia that made study of the classics a centerpiece of education and that aimed to make university education accessible to all citizens. Humboldt was a visionary, whose commitment to universal education and self-improvement through culture was inspired in no small part by his study of Greek antiquity. It was under him that the German university would become a model of institutions of higher learning for much of the rest of the Western world.

  The enthusiasm for classical philology created by the German classicism of the age of Goethe led directly to the intensive study of antiquity that marked the nineteenth century. This development inaugurated an unprecedentedly great age of scholarship in Germany, the very task of which, according to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), was “to bring that dead world to life by the power of science.”87 The early decades of the 1800s brought a new insistence on seeing the classics in their correct context,
and philologists, seduced by the promise and glamour of scientific exactitude, began to use the methodology and data of epigraphy, archaeology, art history, and the newly developed science of comparative linguistics to analyze their texts. But when scholars turned their backs on the classicism of the Weimar era, rejecting it as an unrealistic idealization, they also risked losing its humanistic purposes. A generation or two of progress in this direction allowed Wilamowitz to declare as the twentieth century began:

  That antiquity which was supposed to be an absolutely compulsory model for art and life was a serious danger to both, if only because it was a hallucination. A century of historical research has rid us of it. […] historical science had to destroy the belief in such an abstract ideal, because a golden age lies as little behind us as before us.88

  Almost in spite of itself, therefore, as quixotic devotion gave way to close and critical scrutiny, Germany began to free itself from the tyranny of the Hellenic ideal. But as Wilamowitz’s sobering reflections suggest, a second problem had already set in—how to be realists (about both antiquity and modernity) without becoming pessimists.

  38.5 THE OVERCOMING OF GREECE

  This problem is in fact the one that Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) dedicated his career-long efforts to solving. Nietzsche is best remembered for his critique of morality, especially Christian morality; but the threat of what he called the “ascetic” moral ideal and universal commitment to it was, at bottom, the threat of intractable, incurable pessimism and worse—nihilism.89 The ascetic ideal, embodied as concretely in Kantian morality as in Christianity, on Nietzsche’s view, is most readily recognizable by its “three great pomp words […]: poverty, humility, chastity”90 and by its devaluation of everything that is worldly and “human, all too human” in comparison with a metaphysical, otherworldly existence in preparation for which our lives are a mere trial run. For Nietzsche’s contemporaries, the ascetic ideal had secular guises, too, in the equality and liberty championed by proponents of humanism and in the objectivity pursued as an epistemic ideal in the natural sciences. In his clearest and most concise polemic against the ascetic ideal, The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche warns: