The German Genius
Page 24
It had a deep effect in Germany because, according to this mode of understanding, the function of the artist now involved an ability to dive deep into the unconscious forces “which move within him,” and bring them to consciousness, however difficult the struggle. For Schelling, in order for art to have value, it must tap into “the pulsations of a not wholly conscious life.” Otherwise art is a mere “photograph,” a piece of knowledge that, like science, is no more than careful observation. These two doctrines, Fichte’s understanding of the will and Schelling’s of the unconscious, formed the essential backbone of the aesthetics of the Romantic movement. The truth of art, says Thomas Nipperdey, became the great question of the nineteenth century. 16
Friedrich Schlegel had yet another view.17 For him, there were three elements that shaped Romanticism. He agreed that Fichte’s theory of knowledge was one, but he added, for good measure, the French Revolution and Goethe’s famous novel Wilhelm Meister. The French Revolution exerted its effect on the Germans because, as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, there was sparked, in Prussia in particular, “a vast burst of wounded national feeling.” The events of the Reign of Terror during the Revolution were crucial, those events switching back and forth as they did in such unpredictable ways as to suggest to the Romantics that not enough was known about human behavior and that what was known was only the tip of a vast hidden iceberg, some unknown and uncontrollable and even undiscoverable impersonal force, the strength of which could not be deflected.18 Schlegel’s third great influence, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, was admired because it showed how, “by the free exercise of his noble and unrestrained will,” a man can work on himself to improve himself, increase his self-consciousness.*19
A CHANGE IN THE MEANING OF WORK
The effects were momentous. For one thing, the Romantic revolution reinforced the Protestant understanding of work. Instead of being regarded as an ugly necessity, it was transformed into “the sacred task of man,” because only by work—an expression of the unfolding of the will—could man bring his distinctive, creative personality to bear upon “the dead stuff” of nature. Man now moved ever further from the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages, in that his real essence was understood not as contemplation but activity. What mattered now was the individual’s search for his freedom, in particular “the creative end which fulfils his individual purpose.” What matters for the artist now is “motive, integrity, sincerity…purity of heart, spontaneity.” Intention, not wisdom or success, is what counts. The traditional model—the sage, the man who knows, who achieves “happiness or virtue or wisdom, by means of understanding”—is replaced by the tragic hero “who seeks to realise himself at whatever cost, against whatever odds.” Worldly success is immaterial.20
This reversal of values cannot be overstated. Since man’s values are not discovered but created, there is no way they can ever be described or systematized, “for they are not facts, not entities of the world.” They are simply outside the realm of science, ethics, or politics. Harmony cannot be guaranteed, even within one individual whose own values may shift over time. For the Romantics, martyrs, tragic heroes who fought for their beliefs against overwhelming odds, became the ideal. The artist or hero as outsider was born in this way.
THE SECOND SELF
It is an idea and ideal that leads to a form of literature, painting, and (most vividly) music that we instantly recognize—the martyred hero, the outcast genius, the suffering wild man, rebelling against a tame and philistine society. As Arnold Hauser rightly says, there is no aspect of modern art that does not owe something important to Romanticism. “The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art…its unrestrained, un-sparing exhibitionism, is derived from it.”21
Associated with all this at the time was the notion of the “second self,” the belief that inside every Romantic figure, in the dark recesses of the soul, was a completely different person, and that once access to this second self had been found, an alternative—and deeper—reality would be uncovered. This is, in effect, the discovery of the unconscious, interpreted here to mean a secret, ecstatic something, which is above all mysterious, nocturnal, ghostlike, and often macabre. (Goethe once described Romanticism as “hospital-poetry” and Novalis pictured life as “a disease of the mind.”) The second self, the unconscious, was seen as a way to spiritual enlargement. The early nineteenth century was the point at which the very concept of the avant-garde could arise, with the artist viewed as someone who was ahead of his time and apart from the bourgeoisie. The concept of genius played up the instinctive spark in new talent at the expense of painfully acquired learning over a lifetime of effort.
THE MARRIAGE OF POETRY AND BIOLOGY: ROMANTIC SCIENCE
The Romantic mentality that coalesced in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emerged in the first instance through the close friendship and intense passions that welded together a group that became famous as the die Frühromantiker or “early Romantics.” They were poets and painters, philosophers and historians, theologians and scientists, and they were young.22 As with other young revolutionaries, both before and since, they came to disdain conventional thought. Their movement was widely held to be one of resistance to or rebellion against the Enlightenment, asserting the primacy of the “poetry of the heart” above the prosaic nature of the modern world. In particular they scorned the Terror in Paris in 1793, and the optimism of that same Enlightenment, so eloquently expressed by Kant in “Zum ewigen Frieden” (Of Eternal Peace; 1784), which they believed had proved so illusory.
The “intellectual architect” of the movement, in the words of Robert J. Richard, was Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). A poet, a literary critic, and historian, he provided the initial meaning of romantisch. The French word roman (novel) had entered the German language toward the end of the seventeenth century, when, as romanhaft, it carried the meaning of an action-packed adventure. In the late 1790s, however, Schlegel argued that literature that is romantisch is characterized by a “continual striving after the perfect realisation of beauty” and is always trying to attain a higher state for man, even though one can never be sure what that higher state is.23
The close and closed nature of the early Romantics is epitomized by Schlegel and his brother, Wilhelm. Friedrich fell in love with Caroline Böhmer, the daughter of the Orientalist Johann D. Michaelis. She was a “fiery and omni-talented woman” who seems to have been the lover of just about everyone in the Romantic circle and had three husbands, including Friedrich’s brother Wilhelm, and Friedrich Schelling. (Another aspect of the closeness was the fact that Schelling shared a room with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).)24
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), another in the group, was a theologian who, while most of the others were trying to align the arts and sciences, was concerned to establish the role that poets and artists played in religion. “They convey the heavenly and the eternal as an object of pleasure and unity…They strive to awaken the slumbering kernel of a better humanity, to inflame a love for higher things, to transform a common life into a higher one…They are the higher priesthood who transmit the most inner spiritual secrets, and speak from the kingdom of God.”25
Novalis (1772–1801) stressed the dark side of human nature, the superiority of night to day, of death to life, and Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) likewise highlighted the fragility of human existence, of doubt and despair, and that, as he tried to show in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (Prince Frederick of Homburg), man is not the master of his own destiny. These were motifs taken up later by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), E. T. A. Hoffmann, Richard Wagner, and Thomas Mann who, in his “Rede vor Arbeitern in Wien” (Speeches to the Workers in Vienna) in 1932, spelled out for his audience the importance of German Romanticism as the ultimate German art form. (In fact, as we shall see, it alternated regularly with social realist works.)
Several among the Romantics had an interest in science, an
d here the paradigmatic discipline was biology. The main idea, stemming from Kant but shared by Schelling and Goethe, was that living nature was organized into fundamental types, “archetypes” (archetypi, Urtypen, Haupttypen, Urbilden, etc). On this understanding there were four basic animal structures: radiata (starfish and medusa), articulata (insects and crabs), mollusca (clams and octopuses), and vertebrata (fish and human beings).26 It was Kant’s view that the archetypal structure of organisms reflected the very ideal they embodied. For him there was, in effect, a divine mind that imagined these archetypal ideas.
The Naturphilosophen who came after Kant believed that there were special causal factors that accounted for the “instantiation” of archetypes and their progressive variations. These causal factors were understood as special applications of the physical powers that had emerged in the eighteenth century: animal electricity, for example. They were given names such as Lebenskraft and Bildungstrieb. For them, matter and Geist (understood as both spirit and/or mind) were conceived as two aspects of the same underlying Urstoff. The natural world had an underlying unity, which remained to be discovered. This approach gave rise to several theories about the higher-order patterns in nature. Beginning with the Kantian notion of ideal reality, they explained variations in organisms as a result of the gradual development—the evolution—which “instantiated” progressive variations of the ideal forms. This was not Darwinian evolution, but rather dynamische Evolution, as Schelling termed it.27
The Naturphilosophen also accepted that nature was teleologically ordered. From Herder, Goethe, and Schelling on, they opposed the mechanical ideal as developed by Descartes and Newton. Instead, they believed that nature was steadily transformed from a simpler, less organized, earlier state to a higher, more developed, later state. They also accepted Kant’s argument about the similarity between teleological judgment and aesthetic judgment, which he set out in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment). The most important effect of this was that the Romantics equated these two kinds of judgment, meaning that “the basic structures of nature might thus be apprehended and represented by the artist’s sketch and the poet’s metaphor, as well as by the scientist’s experiment and the naturalist’s observation.”28 Romantic biologists believed that the aesthetic comprehension of an entire organism came first, before science analyzed its respective parts.
Friedrich Schelling was the great advocate of the marriage of biology and poetry, though Friedrich Schlegel agreed.29 In the treatise Von der Weltseele (On the World Soul; 1798), Schelling explored the latest scientific research, concluding that “teleological structures characterised all living creatures.” He thought that nature was infinitely productive (he had no idea of genetics) and that it took the forms it did as a result of being continuously inhibited or limited by opposing forces. These forces—magnetism, electricity, chemical processes—brought about changes in the powers of organization (sensibility, irritability, and Bildungstrieb). “Schelling conceived the infinite productivity of nature as an unending evolution (unendliche Evolution), with its products as momentary resting places, a slowing of the evolutionary process but not a cessation of it.”30 In its way, this was a pre-Darwinian notion of adaptation.
In general terms, then, we may say that one significant achievement of Romantic science in Germany was a pre-Darwinian idea of evolution. A second was a pre-Freudian notion of insanity. Johann Christian Reil was one of the most famous medical theorists of his time. Born in the far north, the grandson of a Lutheran pastor, he worked on several studies of mental illness before his seminal work, Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Rhapsodies on the Application of Psychiatric Methods of Cure to the Mentally Disturbed).31 This became perhaps the most influential work in shaping German psychiatry before Freud. Reil’s view was that insanity arose from the “fragmentation of the self, from an incomplete or misformed personality and from the inability of the self to construct a coherent world of the non-ego—all of which resulted from a malfunction of self-consciousness, that fundamentally creative activity of the mind.” A marked element in Reil’s system was that civilization had its dark side. Self-consciousness, he maintained, “synthesises the mental man, with his different qualities, into the unity of a person.” This is clearly very modern.32
Reil also had an evolutionary view. He believed that new species would go on occurring and that higher, more-developed forms would evolve in the wake of less-developed species. The force behind this process, he claimed (as did Kielmeyer), was the same as that which drove the development of the fetus. He believed that, over time, more fully evolved individuals would emerge that would come to epitomize more completely the potential of the species. It was not as if species were pushed from behind toward a predetermined future; instead they developed closer and closer to “the realisation of the ideal of absolute organism.”33 This was a form of biological Idealism.
GOETHE’S URPHENOMENA
Goethe had always had an interest in science; this is evident from the fact that, after he matriculated at the University of Strasbourg in 1770, he chose a liberal arts course which included political science, history, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry.34 But his interest didn’t begin to mature until he returned from his extended visit to Italy in 1786–88. For the next two decades, more or less, he spent a great deal of time studying the history of science and investigating two interests, plant morphology and color theory, even as he wrote some of his best poetry. When he died, on March 22, 1832, besides his letters and other writings and his 5,000 books, he left a museum of scientific instruments and cabinets of flora, fauna, and countless minerals that Werner would have coveted—50,000 artifacts in all. The Leopoldina edition of Goethe’s scientific writings was published from 1947 on.35
Goethe’s contributions to science fell into five main categories—geology, anatomy, botany, optics, and the nature of the experiment. Karl Fink underlines Goethe’s very modern view of science: he was aware that scientific “facts” are, as often as not, interpretations that owe as much to the scientist himself as to what is “out there.” Goethe was never in thrall to the experiment as others were, seeing it as less about “proof” and more about the way science “presented” itself. In his science Goethe also inhabited that world between doubt and Darwin. He thought that the nature of reality could best be glimpsed “at the borders” of objects, that change was where nature revealed herself. Famously, he thought that there were Urphänomene, primordial forms in nature that gave rise to other, later forms. Granite, for example, was for him the archetypal rock, “the basis of all geological formation.” He thought that basalt (now known to be volcanic rock) was a “transitional” form of granite, in the same way that the whale was (for him) a transitional animal between fish and mammal and the polyp a transition between animal and plant forms.36
It was Goethe’s view that crystallized granite was “the first individualisation of nature,” the first step away from the Urstoff, and that “second-level” transitions produced the simpler organic forms, such as corals and ferns. As Karl Fink has put it, this is “becoming” as applied to nature.
Goethe became almost obsessed by the intermaxillary bone because he thought it might reveal the transition from one species of skull to another. He had familiarized himself with the theories of Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) suggesting that facial bones were the distinguishing characteristic of zoological types, and it was Goethe’s argument that the intermaxillary bone appears between the two main bones of the upper jaw, containing the four incisor teeth. He identified the bone to his own satisfaction in such domestic and wild animals as the walrus, lion, oxen, and the apes, but, most important of all, he considered it the “distinguishing mark” between apes and humans, “playing no part in the facial structure of the former but important in the latter.” This was another of those ideas that was more radical then than it appears now—on this system of understanding, animals were seen as on the same continuum as man, a pre-Darwini
an notion that conflicted with biblical dogma.37 Goethe believed it was self-evident that fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals were all derived from one “primeval form” (“nach einem Urbilde”). There had, he said, been a series of “successive changes” that had produced the variety we see about us, and he thought there were two crucial differences between organic matter and inorganic matter, namely the “indifference” of the latter and the “purpose” and organization of the former, plus the fact that organic matter has “borders” and consists of individuals, botanical or zoological. Here too, Goethe is groping to understand his world in a pre-Darwinian, nonbiblical fashion.
Goethe’s researches on optics and color theory were also predicated on another set of borders, the juncture where darkness and lightness meet.38 This produced in him the notion that there are three forms of color—one originating in the physiology of the eye, a second originating outside the eye (observed through optical mediums), and a third located in the substance observed. More than this, though, all forms of color—physiological, physical, and chemical—are for Goethe derived from a primal phenomenon, the polarity of light and darkness. For him, this polarity was equivalent to the attraction and repulsion in magnetism, plus and minus charges in electricity, even major and minor keys in music. It was analogy run wild, a perfect example of Romantic science and out of date even when it was published.39