The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  93 Nietzsche, “Wir Philologen.” “We Classicists,” trans. William Arrowsmith in Unmodern Observations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 360. Arrowsmith’s translation comprises plans and sketches from Nietzsche’s notebooks throughout 1875; Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 8, 9–96.

  94 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams and trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Preface §4.

  95 It is perhaps unsurprising, in light of the rivalry between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and their mentors and allies, Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn (respectively), that Nietzsche’s name appears nowhere in Wilamowitz’s History of Classical Scholarship, which, second only to Sandys’ study, can probably lay claim to being the best and most thorough twentieth-century history of Altertumswissenschaft. More difficult to explain is Nietzsche’s absence from Sandys’ work: Nietzsche merits no mention at all in the Short History, and in the unabridged version he has the dubious honor of appearing precisely once, in connection with Erwin Rohde (1845–98) who merits a few paragraphs. “At Leipzig,” reports Sandys, “[Rohde] and his friend, Nietzsche, combined an enthusiasm for riding with an intense interest in classical learning, and they scandalized the more normal students by coming in riding-costume to the classical lectures. Both alike were sworn foes of every form of pedantry” (History of Classical Scholarship [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908], vol. III, p. 186). This, in spite of the fact that Sandys makes use of Nietzsche’s Laertiana in the first volume of his History, where he even appears to support Nietzsche’s conjecture about the primary sources of Diogenes’ doxography (History, vol. I, p. 340 n. 4)! Sandys’ flip dismissal of Nietzsche lends credibility to the received view that Nietzsche’s career as a classicist was cut short by the poor reception of The Birth of Tragedy, but the issue is a complicated one. For some doubts about the degree to which Wilamowitz should get the credit for Nietzsche’s departure from philology, see Jessica N. Berry, “Nietzsche and the Greeks,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 83–107, and James I. Porter, “‘Don’t Quote Me on That!’: Wilamowitz Contra Nietzsche in 1872 and 1873,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42 (2011): 73–99. For a recent and more balanced assessment of Nietzsche’s work on Diogenes Laertius by a classicist, see Jonathan Barnes, “Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius,” Nietzsche-Studien 15 (1986): 16–40.

  96 See, for example, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962).

  97 Nietzsche, “We Classicists,” 329.

  98 Nietzsche, “We Classicists,” 359.

  99 On Nietzsche’s complicated and ambivalent relationship to the classics and to classicism, and for a thoughtful and thorough discussion of the powerfully skeptical effects of nineteenth-century German philology, see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

  100 Winckelmann, History, IV i §§10, 19.

  101 If it is not too crude a gloss, we might borrow a term from Nietzsche’s later published works and say that the Greeks’ superior morality was for Nietzsche their immorality: “When I say the Greeks were generally more moral than modern man, what does this mean? The utter visibility of the soul in behavior shows that they were without shame; that they lacked bad conscience. They were more open, more passionate, like artists. There’s a sort of childlike naïveté about them, which gives a touch of purity, something close to holiness, to everything they do. Their individuality, very marked; isn’t there a higher morality in that?” (“We Classicists,” 337)

  102 Nietzsche, “We Classicists,” 328. For a discussion of the distinction between the concepts “human” and “humane” and its significance for the development of Nietzsche’s critique of morality, see Berry, “Nietzsche and the Greeks.”

  103 Letter of June 8, 1787, cited by Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts, 57.

  104 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, III 14.

  105 Nietzsche, “We Classicists,” 382.

  106 Nietzsche’s lecture “Über die Persönlichkeit Homers” was delivered May 28, 1869, and subsequently published as Homer und die klassische Philologie (Basel: Bonfantini, 1869); Frühe Schriften, vol. 5: Schriften der letzten Leipziger und ersten Basler Zeit 1868–1869, ed. Carl Koch and Karl Schlechta (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 283–305. Cited here as “Homer and Classical Philology,” trans. J. M. Kennedy, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1910).

  107 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 147.

  108 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 148.

  109 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 149.

  110 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 150.

  111 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 147 (emphasis added).

  112 Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 103–4.

  113 I am deeply grateful to my colleagues Eric Wilson and Gregory Moore for many helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.

  CHAPTER 39

  HISTORICISM

  JOHN H. ZAMMITO

  39.1 INTRODUCTION

  FOR English readers, the term “historicism” is irretrievably ambiguous.1 Two highly distinct, even contradictory conceptions have entrenched themselves in Anglophone consciousness. The first takes “historicism” as a predictive conception of history determined by “laws” that not only construe the past but constrain the future. This sense of “historicism” was attacked by Karl Popper in a work that shaped Anglophone sensibilities in the era of the Cold War. A more recent postcolonialist classic, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, has reasserted this sense of “historicism” as a grand narrative into which all local histories “ought” to be aligned.2 Ironically, the alternative sense of “historicism”—or “historism” as the first English translators unsuccessfully sought to render the original German Historismus—identified its agenda precisely in repudiating such speculative philosophy of history and insisting upon a much more diverse and nonlinear conception of the historical past.3 It is this latter sense of the German conception of Historismus that we must reconstruct. Still, that notion defined itself polemically over against the other, so that the first sense cannot really be absent from the discussion. It was personified in one name, Hegel, but, as Popper and Chakrabarty both emphasize, the more pressing antipode was Karl Marx.4

  Only in the twentieth century, after a period in which it was largely used pejoratively, did the German term Historismus come to signify a whole movement of thought, and then under a problematic rubric: the “crisis of historicism.”5 Ironically, given its anti-teleological thrust, “historicism” thus came to be read in terms of this teleology of culminating “crisis.” Indeed, it was in the writings of a key set of authors of the 1920s—Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Mannheim, and Karl Heussi—that the term became canonized in a topos of meaning which has carried forward to our own day.6 Most historiographical and philosophical discussions of the term in English and in German set out from this crystallization of the term and its particular setting in the context of “crisis.”7

  In his recent monograph, Frederick Beiser sets out from Troeltsch’s diagnosis of a “fundamental historicization of all our thinking about man, his culture and his values,” in his classic Der Historismus und seine Probleme of 1922.8 Troeltsch, a theologian by discipline, characterized this “crisis” in three aspects: first, a reflexive quandary in historicist epistemology; second, the social fragmentation of value-orientations; and third, the shattering of received wisdoms, especially moral and religious order
s.9 It had become a philosophical obsession already for the generation after Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874), from Wilhelm Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883) through Georg Simmel’s Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (1892), to the writings of the neo-Kantians Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert from the 1880s through the era of World War I.10 That is, the essence of historicism was the notion of radical historical contingency (“historicity”).

  Beiser associates this with the older philosophical doctrine of nominalism, but also with “relativism” and the more recent notion of “incommensurability.” That lifts it from its specific historical situatedness and renders it a general philosophical issue, and Beiser is quite clear about it: “the historicist program is, by its very nature, more philosophical than historical…Hence historicism was an essentially philosophical tradition.” That is, it was always about the warrant of claims. It was “epistemological,” not “metaphysical,” and thus Beiser can distinguish it from (speculative) philosophy of history (usually associated with Hegel).11 But what Beiser’s account moves too swiftly past is the sense of radical rupture associated with historicism: its epochal situatedness.

  It is said that the nineteenth century was, for all Europe, a distinctively “historical age.” How was this so? And why? Perhaps the most telling connection is with the sense of profound rupture induced by the great French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath in the Napoleonic Wars. Both the sense that this mammoth event represented a cesura of unprecedented scale, and that it was precipitated by a seemingly hubristic confidence in the human capacity to rebuild the world from scratch, informed the aftermath in Europe with a deep sense of anxiety about the relation of the present to the past, and above all about the prospect of historical continuity into a far more inscrutable future.12 Figures of the stature—and also of the philosophical contrast—of Edmund Burke in England and G. W. F. Hegel in Germany found the outbreak of the French Revolution a conundrum demanding the most acute historical and philosophical reflection, whose purport extended far beyond even its own immensity to the very nature of world history and human possibility. To make sense of the past seemed a precarious prerequisite for mastering the present and preparing for the future. But the very resources with which to pursue this undertaking—most prominently “reason” itself—seemed, in the wake of the cesura, themselves caught up in the problem they were presumably to resolve. Thus, the historical concern was simultaneously a philosophical concern, the philosophical resources demanded historical appraisal, and all of this elicited a starkly reflexive challenge to human capacities for comprehension. If, as Hegel had it, philosophy was its age comprehended in thought, this was an age which queried the very prospect of philosophical comprehension. And yet it had no alternative.13

  In Germany—more precisely in the Germanies—this epochal crisis was concretized in another: the struggle for national liberation from the Napoleonic occupation. In the desire to affirm the German nation, it was convenient to demonize not only Napoleon but France and all it stood for. What it stood for, however, was in no small measure modernity itself, and a fateful contestation between tradition and modernity became embroiled in the very idea of a German nation. That found its most intense articulation in the year 1813. Thus, the “spirit of 1813,” with its energies for national liberation and indeed national formation, captured and concentrated the wider concerns of the age. Nations became the privileged bearers of historical meaning and the vehicles through which to master the present and orchestrate the future, for these seemed uniquely capable of bearing the enormous weight of carrying the past forward into the future, of rendering coherent the unwieldy mass of historical events and impulses.14 But for Germans, the very multiplicity of nations implied the indispensable particularity of each and, a fortiori, of theirs. If “cultural” nationalism was a project that eighteenth-century Germans—most prominently Johann Gottfried Herder—could already conceptualize, in the wake of the Napoleonic dissolution of that superannuated vestige called the Holy Roman Empire, the question of a political nationalism began to preponderate in the political-cultural consciousness in Germany.15 To be sure, powerful forces resisted these impulses, from the Congress of Vienna to the Carlsbad Decrees and beyond, but other, equally powerful forces began to invoke them for purposes of their own, most notably the Kingdom of Prussia.16 The conception of the nation as the ideal object of historical conceptualization forms an essential backdrop to the more methodological or epistemological—and, indeed, metaphysical—considerations that manifested themselves in the discourse of Historismus. These are the “configurations,”—the Zusammenhänge, to use a decisive term from within the German historicist discourse—within which that very discourse emerged.17

  My strategy will be to consider Historismus as a political-cultural aspect of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century—that is, not initially or essentially as a disciplinary or philosophical topic. That, in turn, will drive the periodization of the nineteenth century that I will employ here: the epoch 1813 to 1914—that is, from the German wars of liberation to the plunge of the German Empire into World War I, from the “spirit of 1813” to the “idea of 1914.”18 But it is just here that we must resist a teleological reading, i.e., to presume that all this must be understood in light of the terrible course of twentieth-century German history, and thus to castigate nineteenth-century Historismus for aiding and abetting this “catastrophe.”19 My questions will be what and whence, not whither; and this for two reasons: first, only in this way can we reconstruct what the nineteenth-century historicists understood themselves to be undertaking; and, second, only then can we judge whether anything they conjectured can be of present significance and use. As a practitioner and a philosopher of history this latter consideration is for me not unimportant.20 Even for such an approach there remains a fundamental blur that has haunted the consideration of German historicism from the outset, both in itself and for its interpreters, namely between the story of the self-constitution of the academic discipline of history and the story of a general cultural crisis over historicity, the realization that virtually everything—in particular every cultural institution and value—turns out to be historically contingent. For Otto Oexle, Troeltsch, in conceiving of a “crisis of historicism,” blurred the disciplinary and the existential dimensions thoroughly together. Oexle has gone so far as to urge that we differentiate these as “Historicism I” and “Historicism II.”21

  Friedrich Meinecke’s monumental Historism of 1936 occupies a prominent but recently highly contested place in the twentieth-century reception of the German tradition.22 For one thing, he systematically conflated the disciplinary formation associated with historicism with its larger sense of hermeneutic meaning, but at the same time downplayed the sense of a crisis of relativism (he wrote a full decade after Troeltsch), and with a striking complacency about the validity of the basic historicist premises of individuality and development. At the same time, he demonstrated a problematic nationalist disdain for “Western” and Enlightenment approaches to history (he was writing in the heyday of the Third Reich). Recent disciplinary revisionism has sharply deflated Meinecke’s prominence in light of these complacencies.23 Of equal relevance, here, is that Meinecke’s study stressed the eighteenth-century origins of German historicism, situating it in the context of a critique of Enlightenment historiography in Western Europe and climaxing in detailed discussions of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, with only a brief epilogue on Ranke, the epitome of nineteenth-century historicism. It is with the nineteenth century phenomenon and its internal complexities that we must wrestle here.

  Beiser takes up these complexities in his reconstruction of historicist discourse. First, he notes that it was from the outset embroiled in the particular undertaking of elevating history (as an academic discipline) into a science: “to justify the scientific status of history.”24 To be sure, historicism has been (retrospectively) identif
ied with the disciplinary consolidation of history, and, to be sure, that disciplinary formation was conducted under the rubric of “science.”25 But we must be extremely careful about what “science” means, here, and above all not presume the positivistic conception of natural science. There is, in our post-positivist age of the “disunity of science,” no justification for the presumption of an authoritative, unique “scientific method.”26 In the actual historical context in which the disciplinary self-formation of history took place, the German sense of Wissenschaft was quite distinct from this positivist notion based on the “exact natural sciences.” It was a more open sense of methodical investigation, though one which insisted upon starting from empirical evidence, not abstract a priori principles. Oexle suggests that the development of methodology—for history and the human sciences more widely—was part of a wider reconstruction of “science” as “research” across all the disciplines of human knowledge, and that it was a separate, though connected phenomenon in relation to the wider cultural experience of historical contingency as an epochal feature of European modernity.27

  This problematization of the notion of “science” in the disciplinary self-construction of history connects to a second dimension Beiser recognizes, namely the conventional sense of historicism as a dispute with the Enlightenment. Beiser discriminates three principles of Enlightenment thought that historicism repudiated: atomistic individualism in the construction of social and historical forms; natural law as a universal foundation for positive political orders; and identification with a long-term trend of “political centralization” based on “rationalization.”28 In all these dimensions, historicism represented a break with the universalistic ambitions of Enlightenment social thought. But there was another, deeper insurrection, namely against the longstanding disparagement of historical knowledge—cognitio historica—as merely particular, contingent, and conjectural, relative to philosophical knowledge from first, universal principles.29 From Aristotle in antiquity to Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant in eighteenth-century Germany, history had been deemed inferior knowledge. The issue that asserted itself with the rise of historicism, was, as Beiser puts it aptly, “how did [the historicists] attempt to vindicate the scientific status of history in the face of Kant, the Enlightenment and the rationalist legacy?”30 Part of the answer was an accentuation of empirical research methodology, of “source-criticism” and “hermeneutical” interpretation. But the other was a fierce counter-attack on the very idea that such an a priori vantage was even possible for humans, suggesting that it was what we might call, anachronistically but in their spirit, a “view from nowhere.”31 Thus, this historical rupture had an epistemological turn of its own: its claim to historicize philosophy, that is, to discredit its presumed authority to levy timeless judgments of validity.32