The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Of course, that only intensified the question of the validity (timeless or otherwise) of such a historical claim—it seemed caught up in a vicious regress. Philosophy, as Beiser’s own inquiry instantiates, could never allow that history should make such authoritative claims about philosophical warrant, and it has submitted history continuously to philosophical inquisition. A wicked dialectic between philosophy and history has ensued from which, one can clearly discern, we have by no means extricated ourselves.33 I will return to this in my final discussion of the epistemological issue of historicism and Beiser’s assessment of it.

  To reconstruct historicism in all its dimensions, Christian Emden conceives, first, of a “highly specialized and professional kind of historical studies” that “accepts the objectivity of facts and sources.” He regards this as “positivist,” which I believe is a bit overstated. Second, he identifies “a form of historical study that emphasizes individuality and contingency of historical epochs and events.” This is the form emphasized by Meinecke and most historians of historiography, like Iggers, but also by historians of philosophy, like Beiser. Finally, Emden discerns “historicizing virtually every aspect of cultural life” as a third sense of historicism.34 I will construe Emden’s first sense in terms of a historical “school,” his second, in terms of a historical “sense,” and his third, in terms of historical “Angst.”

  39.2 HISTORICAL SCHOOL

  In a powerful and persuasive book, Theodore Ziolkowski has offered us a frame for this emergent moment: Clio, the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (2004). And, in another, John Toews has carried that story into its maturation: Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2004). Three figures appear central—and all in apparent opposition to a fourth. The three key figures of the emergence of German Historismus were Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779–1861), Barthold Niebuhr (1776–1831), and Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), and their common nemesis was, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). All four of them found themselves, not coincidentally, in the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, Berlin, in the crucial era after 1813. Moreover, they found themselves in the same institution within that political context: the new University of Berlin. Hegel was for two decades the most powerful intellectual force in that university, but he was contested (perhaps even before he was present) by a powerful opposition led by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Barthold Niebuhr, to whom Savigny early on and Ranke later attached themselves. One of the many strengths of Ziolkowski’s monograph is its focus on the faculties and politics of the University of Berlin as embodying larger currents of the age. That is the concrete setting from which the discourse of Historismus emerged.35

  To emphasize my historical-contextual reconstruction of the discourse of Historismus, I propose to begin with Karl von Savigny, rather than with Ranke, as has been far more conventional.36 It is with Savigny that we can see most clearly the political-cultural matrix out of which historicism as a distinctly nineteenth-century German discourse emerged. The fashioning of the “Historical School of Law,” in other words, is the best initial concretization of the mindset that would constitute nineteenth-century German historicism. In the aftermath of 1813, Savigny proclaimed, “the historical sense has awakened everywhere.”37 Savigny crystallized his ideological and professional agenda already by 1815, in and through his formative experiences of Romanticism and the Wars of Liberation. They constituted the animating vision behind his multivolume masterwork, History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, which he began publishing in 1815.38 Savigny, in short, arrived at most of the key standpoints of the historicist way of thinking before Ranke articulated his theoretical views. Setting his program first enables us to highlight the genealogical reconstruction over the teleological one.39

  Savigny was steeped in Frühromantik from his university studies onward.40 He made “pilgrimages to Jena” in summer of 1799 and spring of 1800.41 By the time he accepted Wilhelm von Humboldt’s invitation to chair the faculty of law at the new University of Berlin in 1810 he was already the most distinguished authority on Roman law in Germany. Coming to Berlin was, as Toews observes, “a political and cultural statement as well as a career move,” for in Savigny’s view, “Prussia had become the vanguard of a general German awakening and liberation.” For three decades Savigny dominated the law faculty at Berlin and thus “played a pivotal role in the institutionalization of historicist attitudes in the early nineteenth century.”42 Upon his arrival at Berlin he audited the lectures on the early history of Rome that Barthold Niebuhr was presenting there for the first time, and they became close friends and allies.43 Another key ally was one of the founders of Frühromantik, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who had a seminal role in conceiving the mission of the University of Berlin and then went on in his work on religion and especially hermeneutic interpretation to lay the foundations for historicist thinking.44 His courses both in the history of Christian theology and in hermeneutics at Berlin in 1811 represented a major consolidation of the methodological framework that Niebuhr was entrenching in his critical study of the origins of Rome and Savigny was developing in the history of Roman law. They had established a strong historicist orientation well before G. W. F. Hegel even arrived at the University of Berlin in 1818, and well before his crucial lecture courses in philosophy of right and philosophy of history.45

  Hegel did become their institutional and intellectual rival, but it is important to recognize that they had formed their orientation before engaging Hegel. It was the rationalism of the Enlightenment, embodied in the ideas first of natural law and then of Kantian transcendental philosophy, that formed the counterpoint against which they proposed to articulate their views.46 Thus, Beiser is right to observe: “Kant’s rationalism was the antithesis of, and chief alternative to, Savigny’s historicism.”47 But equally prominent, and politically more incendiary, was the radical rationalism associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Code. Savigny developed his idea for a historical school of law precisely out of his disenchantment with natural law and with Kantian rationalism, but his experiences as Rector of the University of Berlin in the critical year 1813 also galvanized his political and cultural reaction against the French imperium in Central Europe.48

  The explosive context through which all of this came to articulation was the so-called Kodifikationsstreit of 1814. The issue was how to reorganize German legal practice in the wake of the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon in 1806 and the abolition of the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine in 1814. What should the Germanies now have as their common basis in law? The Kantian Anton Friedrich Thibaut (1772–1840) proposed that the Germans create a whole new systematic legal code which would carry forward the efforts of the Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht (1794) and surpass the alien Code Napoleon.49 For Savigny this smacked all-too-much of the “radical mentality of the Enlightenment.”50 He was roused to compose his “polemical historicist manifesto,” Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft” (1814, with three editions through 1840).51 In 1815, with his colleague in the legal faculty at Berlin, Karl Friedrich Eichhorn (1781–1854), Savigny launched a new journal, Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft, whose editorial program statement proclaimed the historicist premises of their school.52 Thus, as Beiser writes, “after the publication of the Zeitschrift, the historical school became a self-conscious, organized and recognized force in German intellectual life.” While, to be sure, one thrust of the school was to establish a science of jurisprudence based on a historical-critical reconstruction of positive law, another was quite clearly to capture and enable the stirring energies of German nationalism and channel them along the lines of what they understood as the ideal of the Prussian Reform Movement.53

  Savigny’s Romantic ideas of organicism and development, articulated already in 1814 and 1815, formed cornerstones of the emergent conceptual discourse of historicism. As
Toews has contended, Savigny’s mission remained consistent over his three decades of leading the law faculty at Berlin, animated, as he formulated it in his culminating System des heutigen Römischen Rechts (1840), by “the ‘inner necessity’ of the ‘cultural drive’ [Bildungstrieb] that impelled the collective national subject toward full self-determination and self-expression.”54 By 1840, this historicist vision had already been theorized by another figure close to his position at Berlin: Leopold von Ranke.

  Ranke was a full generation younger than the other three figures here under consideration. He arrived at the University of Berlin only in 1825, but he was already shaped in his political-cultural orientation and he swiftly found himself affiliated with the anti-Hegelian camp founded by Schleiermacher and led by Niebuhr and Savigny.55 Their alliance—and the untimely death of Hegel in the cholera epidemic of 1831—consolidated the intellectual ascendancy of the historicist viewpoint by the late 1830s. Institutionally, this was affirmed by the succession of Frederick William IV in 1840 and the official turn to suppression of the Hegelian legacy. Ranke was caught up in the national liberation spirit of 1813, but his allegiances were to the traditional ideals of the Holy Roman Empire, and his attitudes hardened after he experienced the tumult of the Revolutions of 1830. As he wrote to his political ally in the Prussian administration, Graf von Bernsdorff, in November 1831, his goal was “to defend the actuality of our native development against the flood of alien demands stemming from…presumptuous theories.”56 While John Toews, following Leonard Krieger, urges that “the philosophical dimension in Ranke’s historiography cannot be adequately grasped in terms of continuity with the Idealist-Romantic tradition from which it emerged,” because Ranke introduced significant revisions into that tradition, it remains that Ranke was formed initially and profoundly by his Romantic affiliations, and these were central to the alliances he formed at the University of Berlin with Niebuhr, Schleiermacher and Savigny.57 Opposition to the dominant Hegelianism at the University in the 1820s found in him a powerful new voice.

  This came through clearly in the debate over his first book, and especially its important historiographical appendix, with the Hegelian Heinrich Leo in 1828, in which Ranke made clear his distaste for what he took to be the a priori prescription of philosophy for the course of history.58 By the 1840s, 1840 as Toews shows, Ranke moved from a nostalgic Romantic affirmation of the pre-modern to a stronger identification with the Prussian state.59 Thus, he served as the patriarchal figure for what emerged as the “Prussian School” of German history, all of the key figures of which were his students.60 Indeed, almost every major German historian of the nineteenth century passed through Ranke’s seminar. He taught this seminar until 1870, creating a professional cadre of historians who conceived of him as the “father of scientific history,” but who perpetuated only a partial legacy of his complex practice and theory. Thus, for many professional historians, Ranke emerged as a “positivist.” This was above all the case in the reception of two of his most famous phrases: the claim that the task of history was “to show how it really happened [zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen]” and the desire to “erase myself and just let the things speak for themselves, allow the powerful forces to appear…”61 His call for historical impartiality [Unparteilichkeit] was captured in yet a third famous phrase, that “every epoch is immediate to God.”62 But this last suggested the vast distance between Ranke and a positivist notion of science. As Beiser sums the matter in three succinct points, Ranke believed that history had an inescapably artistic component; he believed that metaphysics (and theology) formed a necessary backdrop to historical insight; and he had no interest in formulating general laws.63 Rudolf Vierhaus has demonstrated that the famous phrases were far more nuanced and plausible when taken in their full context.64

  Central for an understanding of Ranke is the persistence and power of his theological and metaphysical commitments. As Iggers puts it, “Ranke regarded it as ‘certain’ that behind the outward appearance of the historical events, persons, and institutions studied, there is always a totality (Totalität, Totales), an integrated, spiritual reality.”65 For Iggers, Ranke thus appears “not very far removed from Hegel,” but he insists that Ranke always set out from the individual historical actualities, whereas he believed Hegel approached history from an a priori vantage. Ranke saw as his mission establishing the autonomy of historical research and insight from the hegemonic claims of philosophy. Hegel was convinced that the principle of the coherence of history was rationally accessible and could be discursively articulated. Empirical history confirmed, but it did not occasion, that rational insight. For Ranke, it was the concatenation of individual events—their textured, integral individuality, but also their immersion in synchronic and diachronic patterns of order—that elicited in the historian a sense for totality that needed to be imaginatively constructed and yet pointed to and affirmed a grounding in the actuality itself—or, indeed, behind it, in the will of God.66

  Ranke’s sublime metaphysical confidence in a divinely ordered world did not signify that he believed he had access to this divine plan. “Only God knows world history,” he wrote. “We can approach it intuitively and from a distance…Nevertheless, we can perceive unity, continuity [Fortgang] and development.”67 That is, beyond the metaphysical guarantee, “Ranke was explicit…about the empirically ascertainable character of the historical universal.”68 Thus, Ranke asserted, “our task is to present the characteristic, the essential in the individual, and the coherence, the connection in the whole.”69 Historical insight was a combination of an intuitive attunement [Anschauung] to individualities in history—persons, peoples, institutions, or states—and intense research [Forschung] into their connections. Without research, Ranke believed there could be no “science,” but without intuition or imagination there could be no synthesis. Thus historical practice was always as much art as science.70 The grand sense of order and meaning in history that Ranke drew from his Lutheran religiosity and his “Fichtean Neo-Platonism,” as Krieger phrases it, simply reinforced the historian in his empirical pursuit.71 As Beiser points out, “what justifies the principle is not its metaphysical truth but its fruitfulness as a method of inquiry.”72

  In his theory of “ideas,” Ranke professed that actual entities of world history showed the formative hand of God, thus had always to be understood as “real-spiritual [real-geistig].”73 Already in the 1830s, 1830 Ranke began to lecture on universal history, seeking a grand scheme within which to situate his concrete historical studies. Not only did he demand attunement to the “infinite” in the individual, but he demanded as well the situation of these “real-spiritual” individualities in the course of holistic development. Thus Ranke concentrated on the nation-state as the core bearer of these larger historical ideas: each such state was a unique individuality, an organic whole, but it was also in constant interaction with others in a grander, unified trajectory of development. As Toews puts it, “as the medium in which the living substance of the people became a community of law informed by a common consciousness, the state itself appeared in history as an individualized ‘spiritual substance,’ an embodied divine ‘idea,’ and ‘individual, unique self.’”74 This vision—as much political as historical—informed Ranke’s crucial essays for the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift from 1832 to 1836.

  Iggers claims that “Ranke developed the most systematic and coherent exposition of historicist principles in nineteenth-century historiography.”75 In fact, that is not true. Wilhelm von Humboldt before him and Johann Gustav Droysen after him were far more systematic and penetrating in their conception of the “historical sense” and of historical method. There was always a significant naivety in Ranke’s confidence in access to primary source materials and in the efficacy of critical methods. That was transmitted to his disciples and to a routinized historical profession which came to think that archival access and source criticism resolved all problems of historical interpretation. Ranke knew better; his artistic sk
ills in narration and his historical knack for imaginative synthesis were, however, his individual talent. They did not transmit to his “school.” The best of his students found good grounds to distance themselves from his ideals for history, as from his conservative hopes. Burckhardt and Droysen, however drastically their values and practices diverged, understood the theoretical and philosophical limitations of their great teacher.

  Still, hermeneutic historicism was the “very center of Geisteswissenschaft in nineteenth-century Germany,” as Christian Emden has put it.76 Thus German historicism in the nineteenth century was characteristic not of the singular discipline of history, or even the sub-specialty of the philosophy of history, but of all the disciplines of the human sciences. While, to be sure, historicism was the explicit concern of the discipline of history in its self-constitution over the nineteenth century, it was equally the concern of theology, especially Biblical criticism and history of the Christian Church, of classical philology, political economy, jurisprudence, art and art history, and, of course, philosophy. In her rich study of the multidisciplinarity at the core of nineteenth-century historicism in Germany, Annette Wittkau writes: