by Peter Watson
PART III
THE RISE OF THE EDUCATED MIDDLE CLASS: THE ENGINES AND ENGINEERS OF MODERN PROSPERITY
10.
Humboldt’s Gift: The Invention of Research and the Prussian (Protestant) Concept of Learning
The decades between 1790 and 1840 constitute the critical, formative period in the evolution of modern scholarship. By 1840 the natural and physical sciences, history and linguistics had forged the disciplinary divisions and had generated the central problems which would dominate academic learning into the twentieth century.” This is R. Steven Turner, in his 1972 Princeton PhD thesis, “The Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848.” He continues: “Scholars of most European nations contributed to this heroic age of organised learning, but German scholars played the pre-eminent role.”1
An ideological change took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, so that by 1850 German universities had almost entirely been converted into research institutes, “geared to the expansion of learning in many esoteric fields.”2 This “research imperative,” as Turner calls it, involved four innovations: (1) Publication of new results based upon original research became an accepted responsibility of a professor and the sine qua non for even a minor university appointment; (2) the universities began to build the infrastructure—libraries, seminars, and laboratories—that would support research; (3) teaching was redirected and attempted to initiate students into the methods of research; (4) the Prussian professoriate embraced a university ideology that glorified original research. It was in the German universities of the early nineteenth century that the “institutionalization of discovery” was integrated with teaching for the first time.3 After 1860 this ideology extended to England and the United States.
In some ways, as we have seen, the universities were the last place where this should have happened. Other institutions, such as the academies of science, had been quicker to respond to new intellectual trends (in Britain, for example). Eighteenth-century universities, as was discussed in Chapter 1, existed to “preserve and transmit” learning. The professoriate in the nineteenth century, however, felt that a creative function must be added to their teaching obligations. This new approach was outlined in a series of treatises by Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, all published in the course of the reforms carried through by Wilhelm von Humboldt. As the historian Friedrich Paulsen wrote: “[W]hoever wishes to enter upon a scholarly career, upon him is the demand to be placed that he not merely have learned the knowledge at hand, but rather that he also be capable of producing knowledge out of his own independent activity…”4
The modern professor is a member of two communities: the institution where he teaches and the fellow scholars in his discipline. The first disciplinary community, says Turner, may be traced to Professors Johann Friedrich Pfaff at Helmstedt and Carl Friedrich Hindenburg at Leipzig, who founded Germany’s first specialized mathematics journal, the Archiv der reinen und angewandten Mathematik. In chemistry Karl Hufbauer identified Lorenz Crell at Helmstedt and his Chemisches Journal as the center of the newly emerging chemists’ community. In these fields, as among the classical philologists identified in Chapter 1, an inner circle was emerging.5
The significant point about these self-conscious communities was that they began to acquire authority. In the eighteenth century such authority had been limited because the state had a monopoly over hiring and firing and often simply did not consult either the faculty or the discipline.6 (Göttingen was an exception, which accounts in part for its pre-eminence.) Attempts were made to encourage professors to publish, but not works of original scholarship: textbooks were what counted, not specialized monographs.
That our modern concept of research had still to emerge is evident from the language of academics who, before 1790, spoke of “discoveries” (Entdeckungen) and “emendations” (Verbesserungen) in the sciences without ever using the word “research” (Forschung). Discoveries arose, it was assumed, from sheer force of intellect, from minds which fastened on a previously unrecognized relationship or that could order a mass of learning and so extract a higher generalization. It was, in other words, the prerogative of genius. On top of that, it was understood that some areas of the sciences were, essentially, static. J. D. Michaelis was just one who did not expect new truths to emerge in certain sciences: philosophy, law, theology, and much of history.7
Probably, nothing would have happened without Napoleon and the crushing defeats he imposed on Prussia. (Thomas Nipperdey opens his magisterial history of nineteenth-century Germany with the words, “In the beginning there was Napoleon.”) Reformers were swept into power. The country’s collapse, they believed, had stemmed from the “rotten core” of the Frederician garrison-state with its emphasis on “mechanical obedience and iron discipline.” A moral renewal was needed and that included education.
This was carried through on three fronts: organizational, administrative, and ideological.8 Old, weaker institutions were abolished, others amalgamated, and, most exciting of all, new universities founded at Berlin and Bonn.
The reforms started in Königsberg, where King Friedrich Wilhelm III was impressed by the patriotism of the university faculty when his court moved there during Napoleon’s invasion. Friedrich Wilhelm turned down a delegation of Halle professors who wanted him to transfer the University of Halle in its entirety to Berlin, but he did agree to found an entirely new university in the city, and this proved crucial. Fichte, Schleiermacher, and F. A. Wolf had all migrated to Berlin, and the king’s decision provoked a great explosion of theorizing about universities. The critical move took place, however, when Hardenberg, one of the reform-minded ministers, brought Wilhelm von Humboldt back from a diplomatic sinecure in Rome to head up the newly created Department of Religious and Educational Affairs. Humboldt, having himself written on philology, was closer to Wolf than to anyone else, and they set out to recruit individual scholars themselves. The university opened its doors for the winter semester of 1810 with Fichte as the first (elected) rector. This began what Nipperdey calls “the religion of education” in nineteenth-century Germany.9
Humboldt succeeded in attracting a number of eminent scholars—the jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the anatomist Karl Asmund Rudolphi, plus Schleiermacher, Wolf himself, of course, J. C. Reil, and J. G. Bernstein. He also poached a raft of scientists from the Berlin Academy. In the early days, the faculty was strongest in philology and law, and here Berlin soon outshone Göttingen. In the sciences, however, it was not until the late 1820s that the new institute really began to shine. By then a second new university had been created at Bonn, and Humboldt had been succeeded by Kaspar Friedrich von Schuckmann.10
No less important than the organizational and institutional reforms of the university were the theoretical innovations, the spiritual and philosophical rejuvenation, as Turner puts it. “Their common tenets may be grouped under one name, Wissenschaftsideologie. This new concept went on to unprecedented success during the years following the founding of Berlin University. It became the official ideology of the German universities during the nineteenth century, endowed with an awesome, almost religious status, an ideology that has defined the ‘idea’ of the German university, with its emphasis on the unity of research and teaching.”11
Besides Humboldt, five other individuals carved out the fundamentals of this Wissenschaftsideologie. Fichte was the best known, writing On the Vocation of the Scholar, given as a series of lectures and published as pamphlets at Jena and Berlin between 1794 and 1807. Schelling, Henrik Steffens, Schleiermacher, and Wolf all added their thoughts to his. Through them two intellectual traditions came together in Wissenschaftsideologie.12 First, the new tradition owed a great deal to Idealist philosophy, by then centered at Jena. Following Lorenz Oken and Schelling himself, Steffens became the chief advocate of Naturphilosophie, regarded as the scientific branch of Idealism (covered in Chapter 8, on Romanticism). But Wissenschaftsideologie was rooted, secondly, in the tradition of aca
demic neohumanism associated with the University of Göttingen. Wolf and Humboldt had both studied under Heyne, while Schleiermacher had become known as a philologist through his editions of Plato. “The glories of Greece and Rome, they argued, could best enhance the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of German students. Hence their study should precede all later, professional study, not only in their gymnasiums but also in the university. Broader and deeper immersion in the classics, the neohumanists believed, would go far to eliminate both the crass utilitarianism of the eighteenth century universities and the corruption of student life.”13
There was also the fact that these advocates of Wissenschaftsideologie believed in an important difference between school and university. At school the pupil gained information; at university he learned judgment and independence. Schleiermacher in particular thought the universities—between the schools and the academies—“were suited to ‘the German genius’…the university is thus concerned with the initiation of a process…nothing less than a whole new intellectual life process, to awake the idea of learning (Wissenschaft) in youth…so that it becomes second nature for them to consider everything from the point of view of learning.”14 Schleiermacher and others believed that universities were more than just higher schools. Thus was born the concept of Brotstudium, “bread studies.” Bread studies provided the student with enough information for a job, but not to advance learning.
All this, a new understanding of what it meant to be educated, was being created in Wissenschaftsideologie. The Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical systems identified two modes of Being, the Real and the Ideal. According to Schelling, Wissenschaft “is knowledge of the absolute unity existing between the Ideal and the Real. Wissenschaft is the philosophical insight that there is unity between the Real and the Ideal. Wissenschaft is innate in all men but it is a growing thing, evolving and dynamic and so central to this was the concept of Bildung, also drawn from idealist philosophy—the process of becoming in an educative sense. Under this system, discovery—research—was a moral act as much as anything.”15
It wasn’t far from this to Fichte’s argument that the scholar, the professor, is the natural leader and teacher of mankind. “The scholar should be morally the best man of his age; he should exhibit in himself the highest grade of moral culture then possible.”16 There were doubters, who thought that neohumanism was atheistic and subversive but, curiously enough, in a Romantic age, scholars personified the Romantic individual. By 1817 Berlin had replaced Jena as the focal point of the new university ideology.
But the new universities coincided with a patriotic revival in Prussia and in Germany generally, and the contribution of the university students in the war of liberation also played a part in changing attitudes, making the universities more popular than they had ever been.17
Between 1818, when a measure of political stability returned to Prussia (as to the rest of Europe), and 1848, the year of revolution, the pursuit of scientific and scholarly research became the defining characteristic of the German university. “Wissenschaftsideologie glorified discovery and creativity within the universities; and…It assumed that one obtains academic knowledge through the rigorous application of well-defined methods of investigation which moreover means that the tools of discovery can be made available to large numbers of students.”18 This was the new Prussian concept of learning.
It is important to say what it was not as well as what it was. In Germany the revolution in scholarship began with the Kantian critiques but owed just as much to classical philology, history, and the discovery of the Indo-European languages, covered in Chapter 8. Intellectually, this was all as innovative as the discoveries in the natural sciences that were occurring simultaneously in France through Lavoisier, Laplace, and Georges Cuvier. In Germany, though, the sciences did not play this role. Creativity in science did not begin there until after about 1830.19
Speculative philosophy apart, classical philology epitomized the German Wissenschaft from the time of Heyne and Wolf on—it was its new techniques and standards of rigor that were later transferred into law, history, and other branches of scholarship. Moreover, the fierce intellectual rigor that Heyne and Wolf brought to classical philology, and the accomplishments of this approach, stimulated new specialities. Germanic culture itself was one. Romantics such as Friedrich von der Hagen, Achim von Arnim, and Clemens Brentano had rescued from oblivion large amounts of otherwise forgotten old Teutonic literature. The brothers Grimm—Jacob and Wilhelm—produced jointly Kinder-und Hausmärchen, a work on which their fame was based, while Jacob alone published his no less famous Deutsche Grammatik of 1819–37. This, together with their etymological dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, known as “der Grimm,” and of which they completed only four of the eventual thirty-plus volumes, helped establish a rigorous basis for the advance of Germanic philology.20
Likewise, in historiography, the critical tradition that began in classical philology was espoused by Barthold Niebuhr. Born in Copenhagen, Niebuhr was briefly a civil servant before taking up a position at the new University of Berlin, where he gave a famous series of lectures in 1811–12 which he then turned into a book, Römische Geschichte (History of Rome; 1811–32), a no-less-impressive multivolume work. It was here that Niebuhr employed critical analysis to the sources of Roman history so as to identify a sound narrative among the myths and oral traditions that had come down from antiquity. Niebuhr’s account was overtaken and improved by the writings of Theodor Mommsen later on, but even so his Rome was a sensation, widely regarded as history of a new kind, and proved to be a model for Leopold von Ranke.21 The disciplines of philology and history were, importantly, centered in the philosophical faculty, and this contributed further to the rise in importance of that faculty, a changeover in priorities that, as we saw, began in the eighteenth century at Halle and Göttingen.
“THE MOST EXACT AND EXALTED OF GERMAN SCIENCES”
Their common romantic roots gave the different branches of the new scholarship in Germany a striking unity of theme and outlook.22 Over and above that, however, there was also a transformation in critical method.
Together with “Wissenschaft” and “Bildung,” the term “Kritik” was emerging as a basic category of the academic approach. It had first been encountered, of course, as a more or less technical term in Kantian philosophy in the 1780s, where it exemplified a turning away from the existing content of knowledge toward a critical assessment of the sources of knowledge and the validity of existing learning. By the time the University of Berlin was fully established in the 1820s, scholars still used “Kritik” in this sense (the method is called quellenkritisch). The term implied a constant, skeptical evaluation of sources. It implied too that the critical scrutiny of evidence should precede the more constructive aspects of scholarship. More technically, it referred to the “scrupulous precision” with which sources—archives, manuscripts—were to be treated.23
The “recension” of a text epitomized the new approach. In this process, scholars compared different versions of a source, each of which had to be accurately dated, and all errors eliminated. F. A. Wolf did this most famously in Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795, concluding (see Chapter 3) that, in effect, there was no such person as Homer. In fact, many of Wolf’s specific arguments were exploded by his own students—and fairly quickly at that. But, in a sense, that was not the point. The book—at a stroke—demonstrated the sheer power of the critical method to unearth real historical knowledge. It aroused passionate debate, debate in which Wolf played his part, but during the next two decades his methods were extended into new areas—for example, the German epics, and the biblical texts. “The Prolegomena established philology as the most exact and exalted of German sciences.”24
The new Prussian learning was a highly self-conscious entity and, says Nipperdey, somewhat solitary. Turner says that a feeling of intense excitement and accelerating intellectual progress permeates the letters and papers of scholars during the early nineteenth centu
ry. “Boeckh wrote repeatedly of the ‘new learning,’ Wolf of Altertumswissenschaft as ‘a new science at its birth’ and Leopold von Ranke reported with awe the ‘still unknown history of Europe’ lying before him in the Vienna archives.”25
In line with these changes, the “disciplinary community” began to emerge and with it the associated furniture—libraries and manuscript collections, prestigious journals and their editorships, reviews and critiques, which now became very important, as part of a scholar’s output, not least because they helped maintain rigorous methods and standards.
Not everyone had the time or inclination for such an approach and so, before too long, and gradually, philologists began to write for each other in their journals. Thus was born the first instance of a professional literature. It was a development that did not go unnoticed by the public; philologists, for example, became known for their egotism and sheer arrogance. Some, like Karl Konrad Lachmann, were notorious for their acid reviews.26
That arrogance apart, however, the critical method had helped to produce a new attitude toward scholarly creativity and the process of discovery. There developed a dissatisfaction with mere erudition, so valued in the eighteenth century: there was now a growing emphasis on originality as the criterion of the value of a scholarly enterprise. One effect of this was to undermine the eighteenth-century belief that discovery “was available only to geniuses,” and instead allowed that a greater number of individuals, “with lesser gifts,” could achieve something worthwhile. This encouraged a prevailing sense of movement, an expectation of infinite advance, and marked a major transition from the eighteenth-to the nineteenth-century understanding of learning.27 Out of all this came an idealizing of creativity and an ideology of original research.
