The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Herder, therefore, did not expect the people at the top of the tree ever to do anything to jeopardize their position. Instead, he published his argument in the hope that he might inspire the emergence of popular leaders, “men of the people,” who would spread the message of education (Bildung). It was the job of the state, he felt, to help each individual to develop and fulfill his or her propensities. “To fail to make use of man’s divine and noble gifts, to allow these to rust and thus to give rise to bitterness and frustration, is not only an act of treason against humanity, but also the greatest harm which a state can inflict upon itself.” This shows Herder’s very modern grasp of the links between economics, politics, and education or, more particularly, Bildung. For Herder (as for Humboldt), the development of the self, the humanization of the self, will not only make people better individuals but also better—and more willing—members of the community. Reciprocity is for Herder the whole point of human association.52

  This fit Herder’s overall aim, to give culture—as well as nation—a new meaning. With his deeply historical view of human affairs, and his Leibnizian inheritance—that change was of the essence—he formed the view that whatever the “collective consciousness” of a Volk was at any particular time, was its culture.53 This was wholly at odds with the prevailing Enlightenment tradition where culture was aligned with civilization and understood as a reflection of intellectual sophistication. It was thus Herder who was responsible for our modern usage of such phrases and concepts as “political culture,” “peasant culture,” and so on. At root, Herder suspected that culture was not simply the result of experience alone but owed something to a genetic component (though of course the modern understanding of genetics did not then exist).54 This combination of genetics and experience helped in turn to generate the main ideas that shape history, he said, and, at any particular stage, a Zeitgeist, a “spirit of the time,” can emerge. Herder is credited with coining this term.55

  Herder’s view was essentially an updated and secularized version of Francke’s Pietist theology: the Creation could be improved upon. It could be developed, evolved, helped to become more than it had been, all via the process of Bildung, which elevated knowledge as the highest good, the all-important foundation for human association. A belief in the perfectibility of man was a sine qua non, he insisted, if we are to accept a role for the human will in the shaping of history.56 For Herder, recognizing that there is an inborn drive to perfection is part of man’s developing self-consciousness, part of his evolution, in a doubt-ridden, pre-Darwinian world.

  As Aristotle—and Leibniz—had before him, Herder sought to integrate the inner development of man with his outer, social arrangements.57 In his lifetime (he died in 1803) the advent of the industrial revolution was not yet well enough advanced to have an impact in Germany (or anywhere for that matter), but the disjunction between the inner world and the outer, social world, would come to dominate nineteenth-century thought above everything else, as the concept of “alienation,” preoccupying everyone from Hegel to Karl Marx to Freud. Herder was the first to outline these lineaments in a language we recognize today.

  NEW FORMS OF NOBILITY

  Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was born in Marbach am Neckar. His father was a military surgeon, and Friedrich was given a medical training in addition to a good general education. The medical faculty at the military academy at Marbach was excellent, and Schiller proved to be an exceptional pupil: his thesis—on physiology—was approved for publication by none other than the duke himself. (In small states dukes and princes sometimes took a personal interest in their clever charges.) Schiller’s thesis was accepted only on the third attempt—but even so he broke new ground, first bursting on the world as a scientist. In his 1780 thesis, titled On the Connection between the Animal and Spiritual Nature of Man, Schiller not only advanced the view that the mind regulates the body, and vice versa, but he also argued that “harmony” between the two was not the “default” position, as we would say today, but rather that human physiology “is a tension-filled process,” a precarious balance that needs to be nurtured and maintained. Within this view is the implication that such things as diet, physical circumstances, and personal relationships have an effect on “mental health” and not just one’s relationship with God.

  Medicine, important as it was for Schiller, was not his first love. At school, the Karlsschule, he was introduced to Kant, particularly his writings on aesthetics, and to Shakespeare (Schiller became known, later in life, as “the German Shakespeare”). Together with Goethe, Schiller’s works comprise the main elements in the “canon” now known as “Weimar classicism.”58

  As with Herder, Schiller’s early adult life was unsettled—he moved around, from Mannheim to Dresden to Leipzig. His first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers), was written in 1781, printed at his own expense, and performed the following year in Mannheim. The central character is the leader in a band of robbers, but the chief theme is that leader’s rejection of the values of his father. The play is essentially about the nature of liberty—to what extent is it inner freedom, and to what extent outer social/political freedom?—such a focus being new and daring (at least in Germany with its many absolutist states).59

  Among all Schiller’s plays, Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784), has always been the most popular, surviving everywhere as Luisa Miller in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of that name. The play is an attack on the cruelty and oppressiveness of absolutism. Ferdinand and Luise, the two main characters, try to escape their class and the bourgeois and aristocratic conventions that imprison them. They fail. Ferdinand is prepared to risk all but not Luise, who (correctly) anticipates there will be reprisals against her father. Schiller’s point is that, under absolutism, characters are unable to become autonomous.60

  Schiller’s first “overwhelming” masterpiece came next, Don Carlos being welcomed by a critic as “one of the world’s greatest pieces of literature.”61 Here the theme of conflict between father and son is continued. Set in sixteenth-century Spain during the reign of Phillip II, Don Carlos, heir to the throne, is in love with his childhood friend, Elisabeth of Valois, to whom he was once betrothed but who is now his stepmother following her marriage to Phillip. Carlos is determined to resolve his passion for Elisabeth, and to do so enlists the aid of his friend, Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, whose task is to engineer a meeting between the two would-be lovers. But Posa, charged with arguing the case of the oppressed people of Flanders, sees in this an opportunity for Carlos to foment a full-scale rebellion against his father’s tyrannical regime, which extends not just to his political subordinates but to his family as well. More than this, Schiller’s deeper design is to show that weakness is as much the basis of tyranny as is strength. Phillip may have raw political power but he is lonely, jealous, and miserable.62

  In 1787, the year Don Carlos was performed, Schiller visited Weimar, hoping to meet Goethe. At the time, Goethe was in Italy, but Schiller did succeed in meeting both Herder and Wieland and spent time in the company of Duchess Anna Amalia. Two years later, on Goethe’s recommendation, he was invited to become professor of history at the University of Jena.

  Although Goethe was responsible for Schiller’s presence in Jena, and in Weimar, we now know that, to begin with, each kept his distance. Rivalry, or respect, probably played their part though Schiller certainly thought that Goethe was too self-important. But, early in 1794, Schiller began looking for people to contribute to his periodical, Die Horen (The Horae, 1795–97), and Goethe was, not unnaturally, among those asked.* This got them talking, so that it was natural for them to leave together after a meeting of the Society for Natural Science in Jena. During that conversation, Schiller attacked—but politely, respectfully—Goethe’s notion of a primal plant, the Urpflanze, from which all others are derived. Schiller followed this up with a letter in which he contrasted his own critical-analytical (“sentimental”) approach to reality, with Goethe’s more organic (“naïve”) belief
in the simplicity of nature and in natural genius (whose intuitions were implicitly above criticism). Schiller’s argument owed something to his medical training, something to Kant, and something to the German intellectual traditions introduced in Chapter 2, and it won Goethe’s respect: from then on they were firm friends. Although very different, their letters confirm that they subsequently each had a hand in the writing of the other’s works, notably Faust and Wallenstein.63

  Schiller, probably more than Goethe, was much affected by news of the Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror in France (1793–94). The execution of well over a hundred members of the ancien régime sickened him, as it sickened many other Germans, but he did not follow the path of many fellow intellectuals in Germany, who turned away from the massacres to the inner life. Schiller was not given to Pietistic inwardness or, for that matter, political nihilism.64 For him, the main threat facing the world was barbarism, which he thought had always been with us, as common in the ancient world as it was in his own time. These reflections led to one of his major theoretical works, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), in which Schiller offered an alternative to the predicament he saw around him. For Schiller, education was the best—the only—way forward, but it was to be education of a special kind: it was aesthetic culture that produced the “healthiest” relationship between reason and emotion. For him, art and literature, images and words, offered the best hope of showing how the imagination and the understanding can work collaboratively together, one limiting the other to help us avoid extremes, which Schiller saw as the main problem underpinning barbarity. For Schiller, Bildung of the individual through knowledge of aesthetic culture had an ennobling effect on character.65

  Though Schiller was not conspicuously Pietist, like Herder he shared Francke’s view that the Creation can be improved upon. Schiller seems to have thought that our minds are divided into two: the instrument of understanding and the imagination. The purpose of imagination, creativity, is to expand understanding and self-awareness. That being so, he distinguished three epochs in the evolution of civilization—the natural state, when the individual is subject to the forces of nature; the moral state, when man has identified the rules of nature and uses those rules as the basis of living together; and the aesthetic state, when he is free of these forces. In the first epoch, raw force prevails; the “ethical” state is governed by law; and in the “aesthetic” state individuals are free to treat each other as in a play—that is, people can choose their own roles.66 In aesthetic society, beauty “acquaints us with our full potential.”

  This sounds impossibly idealistic, but in Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) Schiller carried his argument still further and produced a thesis that some, at least, have seen as “one of the founding documents of literary modernity.” His argument here is that the naïve poet is preoccupied with nature, whereas the sentimental poet is preoccupied with art and that something is lost in the latter process.67 For Schiller, human beings in antiquity were closer to nature, and therefore were “more human” than they are now, primarily because they were less corrupted by culture (here is one origin of the German distinction between culture and civilization). For him the Greeks were more noble than we are, precisely because they disclaim “any desire to be more than human.”68 Poetry therefore ennobles us only insofar as it keeps us close to our true nature. This aspiration to nobility, to self-improvement, to Bildung, on the part of the middle classes was for him (as it was for others in the eighteenth century, such as Edward Gibbon, Hume, and Adam Smith), “the most important element in modern history.”69

  Having made his mark as a medical scientist, a playwright, a theorist about poetry, and a philosopher of aesthetics, in 1792 Schiller turned historian and published his Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years War), in which he painted some unforgettable pictures of the main protagonists, most notably Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein.70 Work on this book seems to have given him new ideas about the dramatic realm because, four years later, he began his three great late dramas, which were to join the canon of the Weimar classics. These were Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, and Wilhelm Tell.

  Wallenstein, completed in 1799, when Schiller was forty, shows him gathering strength as a tragedian. Lessing, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, had argued in favor of bourgeois tragedy, on the grounds that “the concept of the state is far too abstract to appeal to our senses.” Schiller, in complete contrast, took a leaf out of the Greek book, realizing that the stage is essentially an aesthetic public space, making it perhaps the only location where we can overcome the alienation between the state and the individual.

  Count Albrecht Wallenstein, a (real) Bohemian Protestant who has become a Catholic, serves Emperor Ferdinand, becoming the Thirty Years’ War’s most famous commander. Wallenstein is as ferocious as any of those who have committed atrocities during the conflict but, in 1643, he sees a chance of concluding a peace with the (Protestant) Swedes, despite the fact that such a peace is against the will of the emperor. Wallenstein’s initiative is not carried out only from the highest motives, of course—he has been as corrupted as the next man—and he himself is accused of treason and murdered on the emperor’s orders, and the peace negotiations founder. But Schiller is asking here whether motives need to be pure for peace, suggesting that war is so corrupting that even a peace achieved for less than pure motives is still a noble aim.

  Every hand is raised

  Against the other. Each one has his side.

  No one can judge. When will it end and who

  Untie the knot that endlessly adds to

  Itself.

  Wallenstein seizes the moment, but the moment backfires. The experience of revolution, Schiller is saying, teaches us that any attempt to destroy an existing state based on pure reason (i.e., ignoring other political realities and the existing power structure and the emotions they engender) produces only catastrophe and chaos.71 The plot, and indeed the character of Wallenstein, are much closer to Schiller’s own time than to the Thirty Years’ War, which is the setting. Wallenstein himself is closer to Napoleon than to any personages in the earlier conflict, and contemporary audiences recognized this. Wallenstein is important because it is an early sighting of that (predominantly German) view that reason is not the be-all and end-all of forces shaping the human condition, a tradition that was to consume Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Richard Wagner, and culminate in Nietzsche, Freud, and Martin Heidegger.

  Schiller has given us some of the most magnificent women of the stage. In Intrigue and Love, the skirmishes between Luise and Lady Milford, who occupies a much higher social standing, are a remarkable rhetorical duel. In Maria Stuart the rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary is, if anything, an even higher level of combat. The play dramatizes an encounter between Queen Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots in her last days, when she was held captive in the Castle of Fotheringhay. In real life Elizabeth and Mary never met, but the play imagines the meeting and, at the outset, the two queens are “sisters”—they are not, to begin with, complete opposites. As the play develops, however, Elizabeth’s behavior is increasingly governed by her senses, the physical here-and-now, whereas Mary moves to the spiritual/intellectual plane. Although both women are equally formidable, equally noble, equally isolated, Mary’s “state of sublimity” creates a growing—ultimately unbridgeable—gap between the two. Despite her political pre-eminence, Elizabeth, Schiller is saying, is essentially a prisoner of her office, which prevents her from being herself. Mary, though politically emaciated and physically shackled, is still morally free. These two female monarchs, so similar in so many outward ways, have very different inner natures—and that is what counts.72 Do Elizabeth’s actions against Mary stem entirely from the exigencies of the political situation, or is it more personal and, if so, in what way? Can Elizabeth ever know? Can we ever know? Is such self-knowledge possible?

  For
many people, the characters and predicaments of Don Carlos, Wallenstein, and Maria Stuart are even more overwhelming than those of Goethe’s Faust or Werther. Giuseppe Verdi drew on Schiller for four operas (Luisa Miller, Joan of Arc, I Masnadieri, and Don Carlos), Beethoven used “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy) in his choral symphony, and Schiller’s poems inspired Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. More Schiller has been set to music than has Shakespeare.

  5.

  New Light on the Structure of the Mind

  At one stage in his life, the philosopher Immanuel Kant formed a firm friendship with a certain Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg (the city was a port, with many foreigners). According to Reinhold Jachmann, another friend of the philosopher and one of his earliest biographers, Kant would go to Green’s house almost every afternoon. There, he would “find Green asleep in an easy chair, sit down beside him and, lost in meditation fall asleep himself. Then Bank Director Ruffmann usually came in and followed suit, till finally, at a certain time, Motherby [Green’s partner] entered the room and woke the sleeping company, who then engaged in the most interesting conversation till seven o’clock. They used to part so punctually at seven that people living in the street were in the habit of saying it could not be seven o’clock yet, because Professor Kant had not gone past.”1

  This story, like so many others about Kant, has been dismissed as fanciful nonsense by his modern biographers. Which means that we now need to doubt all the other colorful details credited to him over the years, such as whether he really was an adept at both billiards and cards but gave up the latter because no one he knew could keep up with him. Did he really move house because the crowing of his neighbor’s cock disturbed him—only to occupy a mansion too near the prison, where the singing of the prisoners’ choir was likewise distracting? And no doubt he didn’t always match his waistcoats to the colors of the flowers in season, as some “observers” have said. No matter. Kant was still an original genius in all manner of ways. Ernst Cassirer said that the fundamental “spiritual forces” in Prussia in the eighteenth century were Winckelmann, Herder, and Kant. Paintings and portrait busts (which, presumably, we can trust) inevitably depict him as though his features are about to break out in a smile. He was the first great philosopher who was a university professor and who has had a great impact—on philosophy and on academic life.