The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  The “science” of the relationship between experience and creation was called “aesthetics,” a word coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1739. The link between aesthetics and history was that both disciplines, for the Aufklärer, “assumed the possibility of a leap on to a higher plane of understanding…Perfectibility, genius and the phenomenology of the spirit were the main elements in formulating a more comprehensive theory of historical development.”17

  Baumgarten, Christian Wolff’s “most brilliant disciple,” was the first to investigate the field he himself identified. What, he asked, was “the type of knowledge conveyed by art?” Baumgarten conceived the view that the senses must be capable of perfection, just as reason was. But he did not think that this perfection corresponded to the way mathematics was perfectible. A picture or a poem was for Baumgarten “a sensuous representation of an image of perfection.” Perfection could be achieved through the act of creation—the perfection of a work of art lying in its unique ability “to weld diverse impressions and confused apperceptions into an individual whole that conjured up a pure image.”18 Baumgarten was joined by Johann Jakob Bodmer, who argued that poetry (and by implication other forms of art) was a form of truth equal, if not superior, to philosophy (to include what we call science), the more so because it was more closely related to history. This was an important insight because it suggested that the unique and distinctive essence of a nation is best found in its poetic and mythic traditions.19

  For Bodmer the artist became a Promethean figure, a “wise creator,” whose vision “forces his contemporaries to think and act in a new mould,” someone who epitomizes his own times while attempting to change and improve them. Bodmer also introduced a teleological element: each creation of genius results in an expansion of consciousness, opening the path to the apprehension of a better—more perfect—world, enabling us to transcend the present.20

  In fact, says Reill, by the 1760s this Leibnizian idea of perfectibility had become one of the central concepts of German aesthetics. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) was just one figure who was specific in his claims along these lines. In 1755 he had applied the idea of perfectibility to artistic understanding, claiming that “the healthful, the tasteful, the beautiful, the practical, all pleasures stem from the idea of perfection.” He made a distinction between the perfection of man’s physical nature, which he regarded as more or less complete, and the perfection of his inner nature, which had not yet been achieved: “Alone the inner man is incomplete…men have to work, to work tirelessly for improvement.” Mendelssohn, referred to as the “Jewish Socrates,” argued that there is a special faculty in the soul that functions solely in regard to beauty, enabling man to respond to beauty, to “know” it and recognize it in a way that analysis can never achieve. On this view, it was the soul that predisposed man to higher culture.

  For the aestheticians of the Aufklärung, then, all artistic creation, and by extension all historical creation, is the result of the inborn drive toward perfection, referred to by the German deist philosopher Hermann Reimarus as the notion diretrix. Furthermore, the idea of perfectibility linked all individual creations together. Perfection was defined as “the achievement of a harmony between inner life and outer life,” and that is what a masterpiece was, a harmony between spirit and nature.

  This vision of the creative genius of the Aufklärer was developed still further. It was in the genius that the two realms of the individual and the general came together. More and more, the genius was considered to have the qualities of a prophet. By 1760, the Aufklärer across a wide range of disciplines were involved in trying to understand the exact nature of genius. In his 1760 book, Versuch über das Genie (Truth about Genius), Friedrich Gabriel Resewitz argued that genius was characterized by “intuitive knowledge” (anschauende Erkenntnis), defined as the ability to grasp the general and the individual simultaneously. Resewitz was saying, in effect, that the product of genius is itself a form of perfect knowledge. In asserting this he implied that genius “samples” divine knowledge.21

  The evolving concept of genius had a number of ramifications. First, the new understanding implied that historical change resulted from spiritual change, but it also carried the implication that change was not automatic, for genius was notoriously unpredictable. And since by definition (to the devout at any rate) every image of perfection could only be ultimately incomplete, direction was implied but the destination could never be reached. “Art as well as history had an infinite realm of future possibility.”22

  Isaak Iselin, in Über die Geschichte der Menschheit (History of Mankind), published in revised form in 1768, characterized history as man’s spiritual struggle to overcome nature. Conceived in this way, he was led to consider three ideal types of human behavior: man ruled by his senses, man ruled by his imagination, and man ruled by his reason, producing a threefold periodization of history: the state of savagery (senses), of cultivation (imagination), of human maturity/harmony among the three faculties (reason). In arriving at this organization, Iselin contributed to the German (as opposed, say, to the British or American) idea of freedom. For him, freedom was to be acquired through knowledge; it was an internal freedom that concerned him, in contrast to an outward—political—freedom.* Furthermore, the realization of the future was for him, as for other Aufklärer, possible only through a conscious act. The future didn’t just happen; it was fashioned, fostered, crafted, and geniuses were to be the primary agents of this advance.23 Here were two ideas that were to have powerful ramifications in German intellectual history.

  POETRY VS. MATHEMATICS

  At the center of the historicist approach is the conviction that a fundamental difference exists between the phenomena of nature and the phenomena of history, from which it follows that the social and cultural sciences are inherently different from the natural sciences.24 The Aufklärer also made a further distinction—between rational or abstract understanding on the one hand, and moral or “immediate” understanding on the other. Rational thought, they believed, is best suited to exploring the world external to man, while immediate understanding lends itself to the exploration of the human world. On this view, mathematics represents the ideal form of rational understanding, whereas poetry is the ideal manifestation of intuitive understanding. History, which is concerned with both the external world and the spiritual world, must draw from both. For the Aufklärer, the genius is not so much the great speculative philosopher but more likely a great poet. “Poetry both preceded and was superior to reflection…The great poet provides his people with an intuitive representation of the truths of their times at a level approaching divine understanding.”25 The historian’s task, then, becomes an investigation of a people’s national character according to its sacred and creative writings. For the Aufklärer, historical understanding came to be regarded as on a par with the achievements of poets and artists because it enabled people “to understand their own humanity by apprehending the humanity of others.”26

  The importance of the poetic approach was central to the Romantic movement, and the difference between the cultural and natural sciences has been an important concern in Germany right up until the present day. In the late eighteenth century, the significance of poetry was highlighted early by the short-lived but intense flourishing of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement. The title was taken from a play by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, actually a rather junior member of the movement but all of them—Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Heinrich Merck, and Johann Michael Reinhold Lenz, in addition to Klinger—were characterized by extreme youth (Lenz was nineteen in 1770, Klinger eighteen) and by, in general, temperamental instability, the defiance of accepted modes of thought and norms of behavior, restlessness, discontent, even maladjustment. Their works, essentially middle class (they were all university men), disparaged the modern state and all mercantile enterprises, and they delighted in physical exercise and nature (the wilder the better). They attacked “polite” society and
followed their intuition, believing life to be both tragic and exhilarating.

  It is possible to see the Sturm und Drang movement as very young and very tiresome but, as we shall see, in their more mature years, most of them went on to create great works. As we shall also see with the Nazarenes, the existence of an early group identity gave them a self-confidence they might otherwise have lacked.

  The final and distinctive achievement of the historicist Aufklärer approach was the conception of a Bildungsstaat—a state whose main ideal was to enrich the inner life of man.27

  THE ORIGINS OF MODERN BIOLOGY

  This new idea of nature had another important set of ramifications which made a basic contribution to the revolution in European thought in the eighteenth century, and here too German writers helped lead the way. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Sulzer, and Thomas Abbt all criticized—and criticized bitterly—the shortcomings of the mechanistic approach and pointed instead to the biological world where, they felt, the timeless nature of Newtonian-type laws was completely inappropriate and inadequate. The study of living forms, they insisted, offered the opportunity for what they called “immediate” or “experiential” understanding. The experience of other people, animals, and plants was direct, unlike the experience of, for example, mathematics. This mode of understanding, Resewitz’s anschauende Erkenntnis, became the major approach to knowledge in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Aestheticians abandoned the study of the eternal rules of composition to examine instead the process of artistic creation; jurists turned away from their attempts to discover the eternal laws of civil association, preferring instead to focus on the development of law within society; perhaps most important of all, natural scientists turned to the study of growth and development.28 This underlines just what a great intellectual revolution historicism was in helping to create the modern age.

  “The word ‘biology’ is a child of the nineteenth century.” Until the seventeenth century, biological science as we understand it now comprised two fields: natural history and medicine. As the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, natural history began to break up into zoology and botany, although many people as late as Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck moved freely between the two. At much the same time, anatomy, physiology, surgery, and clinical medicine also diverged. To begin with, both anatomy and botany were practiced primarily by physicians (they dissected the human body and collected medicinal herbs), and animals were studied mainly as an aspect of natural theology.29 The underlying reality is that the so-called scientific revolution of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries actually occurred only in the physical sciences, leaving the biological sciences largely unaffected.30

  Long before the eighteenth century, the ancient Greeks had conceived the idea that there is a purpose—a predetermined end—in nature and its processes. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this ideal had coalesced around the notion of the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being, culminating in man. The manifold adaptations of organisms to their environment—everywhere apparent—fostered the idea of a “harmony” in the natural world that could only have been produced by God. The apparent goal-directed processes in the development of individuals were just too conspicuous to be discounted. Final causes must be involved, as Immanuel Kant, among others, acknowledged (see Chapter 2).

  Overall, the concept was known as cosmic teleology—the universe is proceeding toward some particular end, predetermined by God. Until the mechanism of natural selection was identified, many biologists (Lamarck was one) argued for the existence of nonphysical (even nonmaterial) forces that drive the living world “upward toward ever greater perfection.”31 This was known as orthogenesis. Leibniz, Linnaeus, Herder, and almost all British scientists shared this view, some of them as late as the middle of the nineteenth century.

  So, from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, two schools of thought coexisted: the physical scientists believed that God, at the time of the Creation, had instituted eternal laws governing the processes of this world (essentially the deist view). Against that, devout naturalists—familiar with living nature—concluded that, so far as the diversity and myriad adaptations of living creatures are concerned, the mathematically based laws of Galileo and Newton were meaningless.32 Germany was one of the main centers of this latter group.

  Within biology (to use the modern term), a new era of observation had begun with the work of the so-called German fathers of botany—Otto Brunfels (1488–1534), Hieronymus Bock (1489–1554), and Leonhart Fuchs (1501–66). The study of medicinal plants was popular throughout the later Middle Ages and was reflected in the publication of a number of herbals. Then, as a result of the great voyages in the age of exploration and the discovery of the New World, the immense variety of plant and animal life across the globe was realized.33 These German botanists provided a break from medieval works, which were endlessly copied myths and allegories. Instead, their descriptions were based on real plants observed in their natural habitat, with the result that their realistic drawings played much the same role in botany as those of Vesalius did in anatomy. Hieronymus Bock’s descriptions—in meticulous if colloquial German—were vividly drawn from his own observations. Importantly, he also broke with the alphabetical arrangements of earlier herbals, describing instead his own method “to place together, yet to keep distinct, all plants which are related and connected, or otherwise resemble one another.”34 The German herbals are worth singling out because of the new classificatory principles they introduced. This early tradition of classification reached its climax in 1623 with the release of Caspar Bauhin’s Pinax, in which 6,000 kinds of plants were arranged in twelve books and seventy-two sections.35 Related plants were often put together because of their common properties, and each plant assigned to a genus and a species, though genera were not defined. In addition, there was in Pinax an implicit separation of the monocotyledons, and some nine or ten families of dicotyledons were brought together also. Already, reproduction was recognized as crucial.

  Botanists from Conrad Gesner (1567) and Andrea Cesalpino (1583) to Linnaeus all recognized the importance of fructification for classification, but this still left great scope for argument owing to the multitude of characteristics available, all bearing on fructification.36 Debate was and was not helped by the fact that the number of known plants increased at an astonishing rate during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1542, Leonhart Fuchs identified some 500 species, Bauhin in 1623 referred to 6,000 species, while John Ray in 1682 listed no fewer than 18,000.37 The need for order and classification was greater than ever, but the welter of new material was overwhelming. At much the same time, while all others around him were fixated on the concept of essentialism (according to which each species is characterized by its unchanging essence—eidos—and separated from all other species by a sharp discontinuity), Leibniz stressed the opposite: continuity. Ernst Mayr, the German-born Harvard historian of biology, argues that Leibniz’s interest in the scala naturae, and the links between various life forms (as revealed in the earliest attempts at plant classification), helped prepare the ground for Linnaeus and, ultimately, for evolutionary thinking.

  A key figure here was Albrecht von Haller (1707–77) who began a number of wide-ranging animal experiments, examining the operation of various internal organs. Haller found no evidence for a “soul” governing physiological functions, but his studies did convince him that bodily organs have certain properties (irritability, for example) which are absent in inanimate nature.38 Though it may sound primitive to us, Haller’s irritability concept was important because he was not a vitalist: for him organic matter was different from inorganic matter but the difference, however mysterious, was a natural and not a supernatural process. This helped form a climate of opinion whereby it was in Germany, toward the end of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, that the strongest resistance developed against the purely mechanistic understand
ing of the followers of Newton (though this is not to dismiss the role played in eighteenth-century biology by the Frenchman George Buffon, 1707–88, and the French-Swiss Charles Bonnet, 1720–93).39 Three biologists in particular may be mentioned, not forgetting the important role played by Immanuel Kant in Königsberg.

  Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) led the way. The influence of his experiments and observations was immense—roughly half the important German biologists during the early nineteenth century studied under him or were inspired by him: Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Georg Reinhold Treviranus, Heinrich Friedrich Link, Johann Friedrich Meckel, Johannes Illiger, and Rudolph Wagner, several of whom we shall meet again. Friedrich Schelling and Kant agreed that Blumenbach was “one of the most profound biological theorists of the modern era.”40

  His foundational theories were set out in a short work, Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (On the Formative Drive and the History of Generation). In this book, Blumenbach considered how the sperm, “by the subtle odour of its parts which are particularly adapted to causing irritation,” awakens the germ “from its eternal slumber.”41 And he identified a crucial question: “Why is it that progeny always differs from its original progenitor?” while observing too that offspring often display a blend of parental traits. He was homing in on the idea of both genetics and evolution, except that he had parts of the theory upside down: in his view all the various peoples around the world were a degeneration from the Caucasian race.

  Blumenbach’s central idea, the one that influenced Kant and Schelling so much, was that there is a kind of “Newtonian force” in the biological realm, which is the agent for organic structure and which he called the Bildungstrieb.42 He had conceived this model after several experiments with the humble polyp. What struck Blumenbach about this organism was, first, that it could regenerate amputated parts “without noticeable modification of structure” and second, that the regenerated parts were always smaller than the originals. Furthermore, this seemed to be true more generally. Where humans had suffered serious flesh wounds, Blumenbach observed that the repaired area was never quite as good as new but always retained a depression. He was led to conclude “First that in all living organisms, a special inborn Trieb [drive, or motivating force] exists which is active throughout the entire lifespan of the organism, by means of which they receive a determinate shape originally, then maintain it, and when it is destroyed repair it where possible. Second, that all organized bodies have a Trieb which is to be distinguished from the general properties of the body as a whole as well as from the particular forces characteristic of that body. This Trieb appears to be the cause of all generation, reproduction, and nutrition. I call it the Bildungstrieb.”43