by Peter Watson
A French translation of On War appeared in 1849–50 and an English version in 1873. Military colleges on both sides of the Atlantic began to adopt On War as a major text. After its failure to contain the irregular forces in the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), the British army began to take an interest in Clausewitz. The main message the British found was the need for popular militarism. And this view spread. At the beginning of the twentieth century, all the nations of continental Europe began building powerful armies and fleets, and Clausewitz was regarded as one of those responsible for these developments. Writing the introduction to an English edition of On War in 1908, Colonel F. N. Maude said: “It is to the spread of Clausewitz’s ideas that the present state of more or less readiness for war of all European armies is due.”63
8.
The Mother Tongue, the Inner Voice, and the Romantic Song
In France in the late 1680s King Louis XIV added six young Jesuits—all scientists as well as prelates—to a mission he was sending to Siam. The men were put ashore in the south of India, the first of the French (as opposed to Portuguese) “Indian Missions” that were to gain fame for their Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, which gave detailed accounts of their experiences. Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon, the French king’s librarian, requested that the missionaries be alert for “Indic” manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes, the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of the first “big game” of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost. (It was in fact a complete Rig-Veda in Sanskrit.) Subsequently, a whole raft of Hindu manuscripts was brought to Europe in the eighteenth century, and that movement, together with the deciphering, at much the same time, of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform, prompted Edgar Quinet, the French anticlerical historian, to describe it in 1841 as an event “more or less comparable” with the arrival of the ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts, many in Arabic translation, that had transformed European life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Raymond Schwab, in The Oriental Renaissance, argued that the discovery of the Sanskrit language and its literature was “one of the great events of the mind.”
THE ORIENTAL RENAISSANCE
The so-called Oriental renaissance properly began with the arrival in Calcutta of William Jones, a British poet, linguist (he spoke thirteen languages), and judge, and with the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in January 1784. This was established by a group of talented English civil servants who were employed by the East India Company and who, besides their official duties helping to administer the subcontinent, also pursued broader interests, which included language studies, the recovery and translation of the Indian classics, astronomy, and the natural sciences.
Jones was president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and it was in his Third Anniversary Discourse that he announced his great discovery which was to transform scholarship, namely the relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin. In “On the Hindus,” his address delivered on February 2, 1786, he said: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”
In linking Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and in arguing that the Eastern tongue was, if anything, older than and superior to the Western languages, Jones was striking a blow against the very foundations of Western culture and the assumption that it was more advanced than cultures elsewhere. The history of the East was at last on a par with that of the West, no longer subordinate to it, no longer necessarily a part of that history.
Although it was an Englishman who had discovered the all-important link between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, and although the French carried out some of the earliest translations of the Hindu scriptures and classics, the Oriental renaissance found its fullest expression in Germany.1
The dimensions of this renaissance need underlining. In 1832 Wilhelm Schlegel said that his own century had produced more knowledge of India than “the twenty-one centuries since Alexander the Great.” (Schlegel was, like Jones, a linguistic prodigy. He knew Arabic and Hebrew by the time he was fifteen and, at seventeen, when he was still a pupil of Herder’s, he lectured on mythology.) The German translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Gita Govinda, published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a tremendous influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Schiller, Novalis, Goethe, and, eventually, Arthur Schopenhauer.
The poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, its wisdom, and its complexity and richness brought about a major change in attitudes toward the culture of India and the East. In Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, Friedrich Schlegel discussed the metaphysical traditions of India on an equal footing with Greek and Latin ideas. This was more important than we may understand now, because, against a background of deism and doubt, such an approach allowed that the Indians—the inhabitants of the far-off East—had as thorough a knowledge and belief in the true God as did Europeans. This was quite at variance with the teachings of the church. The sheer richness of Sanskrit also went against the Enlightenment belief that languages had begun in poverty and grown more elaborate. This helped to launch—in Germany first, and then elsewhere, as we have seen—the great age of philology. Many religious souls at the time remained convinced that the earliest (and most perfect) language had to be Hebrew, or something like it, because it was the language of the chosen people. Franz Bopp (1791–1867), who had studied Sanskrit manuscripts in Paris and London, turned his back on these preconceptions and showed how complex Sanskrit was even thousands of years ago, throwing doubt on the very idea that Hebrew was the original tongue. Friedrich Schelling took the ideas of Jones one step further. In his 1799 lecture, Philosophie der Mythologie, he proposed that, just as there must have been a “mother tongue,” so there must have been one mythology in the world shared by all peoples.
One final, fundamental way in which the discovery deeply affected people was in the notion of “becoming.” If religions were at different stages of development, and yet were all linked in some mysterious way—only glimpsed at so far—did this mean that God, instead of just being, could himself be said to be becoming, undergoing a process of Bildung? God came to be seen, not in an anthropomorphic sense, but as an abstract metaphysical entity.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO CLASSICISM AND THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF EDEN
The Oriental renaissance played a vital role in the origins of the Romantic movement. The strongest link was between Indic studies and the German form of Romanticism. Indic studies proved popular in Germany for broadly nationalistic reasons. It seemed to German scholars of the time that the Aryan/Indian/Persian tradition linked with the original barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire from the East and, together with the myths of the Scandinavians, provided an alternative (more northerly) tradition to the Greek and Latin Mediterranean classicism that had dominated European life and thought for the previous 2,500 years. Furthermore, the discovery of similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, together with the Hindu ideas of a world soul, seemed to the Germans to indicate a primitive form of revelation, the original form, out of which Judaism and Christianity might have grown, but which meant that God’s real purpose was hidden somewhere in the Eastern religions. Such a view implies that there was a single God for all mankind, that there was a world mythology, the understanding of which would be fundamental. In Herder’s terms, this ancestral mythology was “the childhood dreams of our species.”
A further factor that influenced Romanticism was that the original Indian scriptures were written in poetry. The idea became popular, therefore, that poetry was “the mother tongue,”
that verse was the original way in which wisdom was transmitted from God to mankind (“Man is an animal that sings”). Poetry, it was thought, was the original language of Eden.2
The range of poets, writers, and philosophers who came under the influence of these views spanned the Atlantic but it was especially strong in Germany. Goethe learned Persian and wrote in the preface to the West-östlicher Divan: “Here I want to penetrate to the first origin of human races, when they still received celestial mandates from god in terrestrial languages.” Heinrich Heine studied Sanskrit under Wilhelm Schlegel at Bonn and under Bopp in Berlin. As he wrote: “Our lyrics are aimed at singing the Orient.” Both Wilhelm Schlegel and Ferdinand Eckstein, another German Orientalist, believed that the Indic, Persian, and Hellenic epics rested on the same fables that formed the basis of the Nibelungenlied, the great medieval German epic of revenge, which Richard Wagner was to rely on for Der Ring des Nibelungen. For Schleiermacher, as for the entire circle around Novalis, the source of all religion “can be found,” according to Ricarda Huch, “in the unconscious or in the Orient, from whence all religions came.”3
A CHANGE IN THE MEANING OF INDIVIDUALITY
In the history of Western political thought, says Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford historian of ideas, “there have occurred three major turning-points.” The first of these took place in the short interval at the end of the fourth century B.C. between the death of Aristotle (384–322) and the rise of Stoicism, when the philosophical schools of Athens “ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life…and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation.” A second turning point was inaugurated by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and involved his recognition that political values “not merely are different from, but may in principle be incompatible with, Christian ethics.”4 This produced a utilitarian view of religion, discrediting any theological justification for any set of political arrangements.
The third great turning point—which Berlin argues is the greatest yet—was conceived toward the end of the eighteenth century, with Germany in the vanguard. “At its simplest the idea of romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also—truth and validity as such.” This, says Berlin, has produced incalculable effects. In the past, it had always been taken as read that moral and political questions, such as “What is the best way of life for men?” “What is freedom?” were in principle answerable in exactly the same way as questions like “What is water composed of?” and “When did Julius Caesar die?” It was assumed that the answers were discoverable, because, says Berlin, despite the various religious differences that have existed over time, one fundamental idea united men, though it had three aspects. “The first is that there is such an entity as a human nature, natural or supernatural, which can be understood by the relevant experts; the second is that to have a specific nature is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by God or an impersonal nature of things… the third is that these goals, and the corresponding interests and values (which it is the business of theology or philosophy or science to discover and formulate), cannot possibly conflict with one another—indeed they must form a harmonious whole.”
It was this idea that gave rise to the notion of natural law and the search for harmony. The rival contention of the Romantics, stemming from Kant, was to cast doubt on the very idea that values, the answers to questions of action and choice, could be discovered at all. This is an important moment in the history of the European consciousness.5 The Romantics argued that some of these questions simply had no answer. No less originally, they argued that there was no guarantee that values could not, in principle, conflict with one another. Finally, the Romantics produced a new set of values, a new way of looking at values, that was radically different from the old way.
Kant’s great contribution, as we have seen, was to grasp that it is the mind that shapes knowledge, that there is such a process as intuition, which is instinctive, and that the phenomenon in the world that we can be most certain of is the difference between “I” and “not-I.”6 On this account, he said, reason “as a light that illuminates nature’s secrets” is inadequate and misplaced as an explanation. Instead, Kant said, the process of birth is a better metaphor, implying that human reason creates knowledge. To find out what I should do in a given situation, I must listen to “an inner voice.” According to the sciences, reason was essentially logical and applied across nature equally. But the inner voice does not conform to this scenario. Its commands are not necessarily factual statements at all and, moreover, are not necessarily true or false. The purpose of the inner voice, often enough, is to set someone a goal or a value, and these have nothing to do with science, but are created by the individual. It was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and totally new.
In the first instance (and for the first time), it was realized that morality was a creative process but, in the second place, and no less important, it laid a new emphasis on creation, and elevated the artist alongside the scientist. It is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values. The artist does not discover, calculate, deduce, as the scientist (or philosopher) does. The artist invents his goal and then realizes his own path toward that goal. “Where, asked Herzen, is the song before the composer has conceived it?”* Creation in this sense is the only fully autonomous activity of man and for that reason takes pre-eminence. At a stroke, art was transformed and enlarged, no longer mere imitation, or representation, but expression, a far more important, more significant and ambitious activity. “A man is most truly himself when he creates. That, and not the capacity for reasoning, is the divine spark within me; that is the sense in which I am made in God’s image.”7
We are still living with the consequences of this revolution. The rival ways of looking at the world—the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist—constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible. As Berlin has put it, we shift uneasily from foot to foot as we recognize this incompatibility.
The dichotomy was shown first and most clearly in Germany.8 The turn of the nineteenth century saw Napoleon’s great series of victories, over Austria, Prussia, and several smaller German states, and these failures created a desire for renewal in the German lands. In response, many German-speakers turned inward to intellectual and aesthetic ideas as a way to unite and inspire their people. “Romanticism is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the eighteenth century, the German-speaking countries were the most tormented in Europe.”9
The route from Kant to the Romantics was not a straight line, but it was clear. For Herder, it was the “expressive power” of human nature that had produced some very different cultures across the world. Fichte portrayed the self as “activity, effort, self-direction. It wills, alters, carves up the world both in thought and in action, in accordance with its own concepts and categories.” Kant conceived this as an unconscious, intuitive process but for Fichte it was instead “a conscious creative activity…I do not accept anything because I must,” Fichte insists, “I believe it because I will.” There are two worlds, and man belongs to both. There is the material world, “out there,” governed by cause and effect, and there is the inner spiritual world, “Where I am wholly my own creation.” “Contemplative knowledge,” the ideal of the Middle Ages, is the wrong model, says Fichte. “What matters is action…Knowledge is not to be looked upon passively but is to be used, used to help us create, for creation is freedom.”10
This was a provocative idea, says Berlin, because through Fichte it became applied to nations, and nations could only become nations by creating, acting, doing. Nationalism, active nationalism, therefore became the natural stance. “So Fichte ends as a rabid German patriot and nati
onalist, who thought that Germany had not been corrupted as the Latin nations had.”11 Fichte beefed up this view in his famous address to the German nation, written after Napoleon had conquered Prussia. The speeches themselves had little impact but later, when they were read, they contributed to a huge upsurge of nationalist feeling “and went on being read by Germans throughout the nineteenth century, and became their bible after 1918.”
“All those who have within them the creative quickening of life, or else, assuming that such a gift has been withheld from them, at least await the moment when they are caught up in the magnificent torrent of flowing and original life, or perhaps have some confused presentiment of such freedom, and have towards this phenomenon not hatred, nor fear, but a feeling of love, these are part of primal humanity. These may be considered as true people, these constitute the Urvolk, the primal people—I mean the Germans. All those, on the other hand, who have resigned themselves to represent only the derivative, the second-hand product…and shall pay the price of their belief. They are but an annexe to life…They are excluded from the Urvolk…The nation which bears the name ‘Germans’ to this day has not ceased to give evidence of a creative and original activity in the most diverse fields.”12
THE RISE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), who succeeded Hegel in his professorial chair, had a more organic, less aggressive view of spiritual self-development than Fichte. For Schelling the world consisted of phenomena which varied in their degree of self-consciousness, from total unconsciousness, gradually coming to full consciousness of themselves. At its most fundamental, there are the brute rocks that form the earth, which represent the “will” in a condition of total unconsciousness.13 Gradually life infuses them, producing the first biological species. Plants and animals follow, self-consciousness growing, leading toward the realization of some kind of purpose. Nature represents progressive stages of the will and is striving toward something “but is not aware what it strives for.”14 Man, as well as striving, becomes aware of what he is striving for. This is an event important for the whole universe, which, in Schelling’s account, is brought in this way to a higher consciousness of itself. This was God for Schelling, a self-developing consciousness, a progressive phenomenon evolving.15
