The German Genius
Page 18
Before Kant, it was assumed that the Great Chain of Being was a true reflection of God’s purpose for nature. For Kant, even the purpose of nature, indeed the very concept of purpose itself, is built into our nature, so we can never know whether “purpose” exists outside ourselves. Our instinctive notion of purpose will determine the way we understand nature; nature’s laws do not exist “out there” we impose those laws on nature.
This led Kant to his reflections on art. If the order of nature, as shown by its particular laws, reflects no more than our constitutional ability to impose a unity on nature, this comes about because the attainment of such unity is always coupled with a feeling of pleasure and “the feeling of pleasure also is determined by a ground which is a priori and valid for all men.”31
The phrase “valid for all men” is crucial. Art, for Kant, was a realm of “pure” forms, each complete in itself. “The work of art…has its own basis and has its goal purely within itself, and yet at the same time in it we are presented with a new whole, a new image of reality.” Science concerns itself with superordination and subordination in a causal capacity, leading from premise to conclusion. In aesthetics we grasp the whole immediately and its parts and their relation to the whole is immediate, not causal; we surrender ourselves to pure contemplation. The aesthetic consciousness “grasps in this very fleeting passivity a factor of purely timeless meaning.” For Kant, the aim of art is to evoke “disinterested pleasure.” The fact that many people find the same things beautiful, that beauty is “valid” for all men, aroused in Kant the notion of “subjective universality.” The fact that everyone attributes a similar pleasure to a work of art is, for him, a vital aspect of the experience. It was evidence—important evidence—of a universal voice not mediated by concepts.32 Ideas in art are a more immediate kind of experience than other experiences.
The importance of this distinction led Kant to consider geniuses, building on Lessing. “The creation of genius receives no rule from outside, but it is the rule itself. In it is shrouded an inner lawfulness and purposiveness. Genius is the talent (natural gift) which gives rule[s] to art…fine art is only possible as a product of genius.” The existence of genius differentiated artistic productivity from scientific productivity. Kant argued that “there can be no genius in the sciences.” For him, the decisive difference lies in the fact that any scientific insight, as soon as it has been identified, possesses no form over and above the insight itself. The personality of the scientist doesn’t matter. In art, however, “the form of the product is integral to the insight conveyed.”33
Kant’s theory of genius became a rallying point for the Romantic movement and its view that the aesthetic imagination is the “begetter of the world and reality.”34 We shall come to the Romantic movement in Chapter 8, but what distinguishes Kant’s own view, in purely philosophical terms, is that it went against the concept of “reason,” as it had been evolved by the Enlightenment. Kant had, he felt, identified a “deeper” concept, the “spontaneity of consciousness,” which was reflected in art, which went beyond reason but was just as real. This new “determinant” of consciousness was, for Kant, an important—perhaps the most important—ingredient of freedom. “Only artistic insight discloses a new path to us. In art, in the free play of the powers of the mind, nature appears to us as if it were a work of freedom, as if it were shaped in accordance with an indwelling finality…”35
This difference between art and sciences, between the geniuses and scientists, was for Kant a glimpse into the purpose of life. The very idea of purpose comes from within, and the unity that we are driven to impose on art by our inner nature, and the universal subjectivity that exists, allows us to inflict purpose. In doing this, we enlarge ourselves and are able to share that enlargement with others. For Kant, this is what freedom meant, an inner enlargement, a profoundly influential idea in the German-speaking lands.
Kant’s range and ambition were shown in his project, in 1795, to explore the—to us—ambitious notion of perpetual peace. This side of the cataclysms of the twentieth century, such an idea verges on the preposterous, but it was not so very different when Kant made his attempt. Europe still had its share of absolute states and the blood spilled in the French Revolution and its aftermath was still wet. Kant had recently (in 1793 and 1794) evolved his idea about an ethical commonwealth, a moral community, an invisible church, by means of which the highest good, “the autonomous will of men,” would be achieved. In his plan for perpetual peace he set down various conditions—standing armies shall be governed by conditions of universal hospitality—many, if not all, of which sound to us (as no doubt to his colleagues and neighbors) as impossibly idealistic. But there was one that, as it turned out, was not impossibly idealistic and, in time, was at least half realized. This was his proposal that “The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican.” This, he thought, was the original basis of every form of civil constitution and it was, in its time, radical. But it lives on now, not just in the spread of democracies, or republics, but in the notion (which feels modern but dates back to Kant) that democracies are reluctant to declare war on each other.
THE RISE OF JENA
Jena was and was not like Weimar. It had always been a small town, like countless others, populated mainly by artisans, and with a second-rate university: nothing exceptional. Then, all at once, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, it suddenly blossomed as the center of a new revolution in German intellectual life.36
Goethe himself was partly responsible. By his position, his character, by his very presence, he made Weimar and Jena rise in profile, and the university at Jena became the very model of a reformed, even what has been called a “Kantian” university. This was still an age when many universities were considered irrelevant and unruly nuisances, but Jena adopted the more successful and more modern Halle/Göttingen model—the union of teaching and research where students were brought into contact with leading minds working on the latest ideas. Also following the Göttingen model, the philosophical faculty, rather than the theological faculty, was the main focus of activity. A new periodical, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, was founded there and it soon became the most widely read intellectual journal in Germany.37 According to Terry Pinkard, in his study of the legacy of Idealism, the public that subscribed to journals like the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung read and discussed Kant “with the same intensity as novels and more popular literature.”
One of the first post-Kantians there was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), who, in 1785, turned Kant’s critical approach on the master himself. He developed the view that, fundamentally, reason “takes its first principles” from the heart and not from the head and that, contrary to what Kant said, “all knowledge must rest on some kind of faith.” What he meant was that, underlying all thought, whatever it is, there must be something, a first principle, that cannot itself be proved by reference to something else, that exhibits what he called “immediate certainty.”38 For example, he said that we have immediate certainty of our own bodies. Therefore, Jacobi said, if this is so, why should we not trust the “immediate certainty” we have of God? He became convinced that Idealism was a form of nihilism, a term he coined.39
In 1786, and again in 1790, Karl Leonhard Reinhold released a series of letters, later brought together as a book, Briefe über die kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian Philosophy). These letters supported Kant’s viewpoint and did so with such panache that Reinhold was briefly—but only briefly—regarded as an even brighter star in the philosophical firmament than Kant himself. A Jesuit novitiate who had converted to Protestantism, he was appointed a professor at Jena in 1787, and one of his self-appointed tasks there was to systematize Kantian thought into a formal science.40 This is perhaps the origin of the tendency in German thinking at that time to attempt to construct elaborate interlocking systems, exploring as much as possible from first principles, and in an internally consistent way, an approach that would culminate in Ficht
e, Hegel, and Marx. Reinhold added to what had gone before by asserting that consciousness had the quality of immediate certainty, and this moved it center stage as the entity to be explained, over and above Kant’s emphasis on experience and intuition. 41
GOD REPLACED BY THE SELF
There was another side to all this. As we have seen, Königsberg had good links with Britain, and many shared the views of Scotland’s down-to-earth school of common sense. To such people, the entire paraphernalia of “transcendental Idealism” seemed far-fetched, and there was in Germany no shortage of critics and skeptics.42 More fruitfully, perhaps, there was a whole generation of people who, while not accepting all that Kant had to say, found enough in his philosophy to try to take it further. Among these, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were the most interesting. Schelling will be considered in the section on Romanticism, Hegel in the chapter on alienation. Fichte is another matter.
Bertrand Russell thought that Fichte’s system “seems almost to involve a kind of insanity.”43 Certainly, Fichte represents above all the example of the speculative philosopher trying to build a whole system on the basis of one central idea or construct. He is also an important stage in the emergence of what we now call psychology.44
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was the poor son of a ribbon weaver in Saxony, and, like Herder, was given an unexpected chance for an education when, as an eight-year-old, he showed total recall of that day’s sermon in church, a feat witnessed by a local noble who was so impressed that he decided to give the boy a proper schooling.45 This was not a complete success but did help in that Fichte eventually made his way to Königsberg to meet Kant. At first the master was not overly impressed and so, in order to improve his standing, Fichte composed a short piece, “Ein Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung” (An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation). Kant liked what Fichte had written and helped to get it published. However, the publisher—deliberately or otherwise—left Fichte’s name off the finished product and, since the text showed such a command of Kantian theory, everyone assumed the author was the master himself. After the truth came out, Fichte’s fame was assured and when Reinhold was offered a better-paying job at Kiel in 1794, Fichte was seen as his natural successor, a meteoric rise from nowhere. He was thirty-two.
In Jena he threw himself into the fray, taking on a work that had itself created a commotion. This was the Aenesidemus, by G. E. L. Schulze, professor of philosophy at Helmstedt. Schulze’s argument, refuting Reinhold, and therefore Kant, was that we cannot know with certainty anything of things-in-themselves. Instead, he insisted, all we can be certain of is our own mental states. Fichte argued against this but in doing so he constructed, or tried to construct, a whole system of thought with interlocking parts.46 The subsequent book, Die Grundlage der gesamten Wis senschaftslehre (The Foundations of the Whole Doctrine of Science), was that which Schelling included with Goethe and the French Revolution as one of the three great “tendencies” of the age—see Chapter 4.*47
Fichte’s key insight, which he thought deepened Kantianism, was that the distinction we make between subject and object is itself subjectively established.48 Fichte accepted Jacobi’s idea of immediate certainty, Reinhold’s immediate certainty of consciousness, and Kant’s subjective universality, but added what was for him the most important element, the immediate certainty of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, he insisted, is a basic ingredient of consciousness and together they are the irreducible elements by which we grasp reality. Moreover, a basic ingredient of self-consciousness and consciousness is the “not-self.” “The self is not a static entity—it develops through time as its awareness of itself grows and changes, through encounters with the ‘not-self’” (i.e., other selves and objects “out there”). Reason is in effect a by-product of consciousness and self-consciousness—we infer the world around us, its interconnections and dependencies.49
Now at one level, to us in the twenty-first century, these arguments of Fichte’s seem like a very confused and overelaborate way of stating the obvious, even repeating much of what Locke had said far earlier, and that is the way some people have construed him, with many others viewing Hegel as by far the more important post-Kantian. But, thinking our way back into late eighteenth-century forms of understanding the world, Fichte’s theories, as set out in his lectures and books, were significant in two ways that are not immediately obvious to us. First, his was the ultimate “psychologizing” of human nature (to return to the anachronistic term). His emphasis on the self, the “I,” and the “not-self,” without any reference to religion in general or Christianity in particular, was an important stage in the revision of our understanding, from the theological to the psychological, which would lead in time to the Freudian and post-Freudian world. At the same time, his understanding of the centrality of the self, and its understanding of—and interactions with—the “not-self,” had important implications for ideas about freedom. In Germany, and in Kantianism in particular, as was mentioned above, freedom had been seen as an “inner” phenomenon, a psychological freedom to be achieved by learning, by education, by a journey inward. Fichte realized that (a quite different idea of) freedom depended on the relation between the self and the “not-self,” that the self could be free only to the extent that its freedom did not impinge on, or curtail, the freedom of other selves. In a land of small absolute states, this was far more controversial—revolutionary even—than it seems to us now.
Likewise, Fichte’s theories threw a fresh light on the state and its responsibilities. “The state functions as the ‘objective’ viewpoint that precipitates out of the various subjective viewpoints of the citizenry as they each keep score on each other.”50 This begins to sound like Jeremy Bentham’s “felicific calculus,” with the state’s virtue judged by the contentedness of the greatest number. Insofar as one self is the equal of another, this also took on the color of a democratic, even republican, viewpoint.
Fichte was a charismatic teacher whose lectures often overflowed, with students standing on ladders at the windows to hear him. But his career at Jena came to a sudden end when he reacted to criticism in a high-handed way and his threatened resignation was accepted.51 He transferred to Berlin where he taught privately for a while, before being chosen as the first philosophy professor at the newly formed University of Berlin in 1810 (see Chapter 10).
It is worth pointing out that the Wissenschaftslehre went through sixteen different editions.52 This had something to do with his charisma but also owed something to the fact that a new form of understanding of man was being born. That new understanding was a psychological approach to mankind. Locke and Francke played their part in this new understanding, and Pietism, too. But Kant had introduced one other change that should not go unnoticed. Though Idealism is sometimes referred to as a form of speculative philosophy, that isn’t wholly fair. Kant had introduced a rigorous new way of observing, of observing ourselves. This sometimes got out of hand—it may well have got out of hand with Fichte—but this observation of ourselves, the concentration on subjective universality, consciousness and self-consciousness, was the real beginning of modern psychology, one of the beginnings certainly. The problem with this new approach was that it emerged before Darwinian understanding had been evolved. This had major consequences for psychology, which for many has always been seen more as a form of philosophy rather than a form of biology. It is one reason why the unconscious, and with it the therapeutic approach to life, was at root a German idea.
6.
The High Renaissance in Music: The Symphony as Philosophy
In Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, vocal music was more popular than instrumental music well into the sixteenth century. (Martin Luther had a lusty singing voice.)1 But then arose, in Italy, the first great European organ school. As artists like Dürer visited Venice to learn from the masters there, so many Germans now visited La Serenissima to study the organ and return with new techniques of polyphonic writing.2 This development would lead in ti
me to Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), one of many musicians who traveled to Venice to study under Giovanni Gabrieli, and to Johann Jacob Froberger (c. 1617–67), Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), and Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707). Like Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), Buxtehude was in his lifetime far more famous than Bach (who traveled sixty miles on foot to hear him). But their reputations have not lasted quite as Bach’s has, and German music’s first culmination is in fact found in the works of the Leipzig master and one other composer with whose name he is inseparably linked: Georg Friedrich Handel.
Born in the same year, in towns barely eighty miles apart, they never met but they shared the highest peaks of technical perfection, which their predecessors had been struggling toward but had not yet achieved. Beyond that, they could not have been more different. Handel was a worldly figure, cosmopolitan, at ease with success, whereas Bach was above all devout and a “thoroughgoing provincial.”3