by Peter Watson
“Knowledge is itself a branch of human culture,” insisted Fichte. Humboldt agreed. The purpose of the universities is “to cultivate learning in the deepest and broadest sense of the word,” not for some practical or utilitarian end, but for its own sake as “preparatory material of spiritual and moral education (Bildung).”28
The fragmentation of scholarship into disparate, disconnected specialities also began in earnest in the 1830s. Scholarship was now seen as a process of accumulation, stone-by-stone.29 “Comprehension of the entire edifice remained an ideal, but only at one metaphysical remove.” This is still more or less the attitude we have today.
THE GROWTH OF THE SCIENCE SEMINAR
The other major change was that, during the Vormärz (the period between 1840 and the March revolution of 1848), the philosophical faculties of the Prussian universities—which had been the poor relations in the early eighteenth century—consolidated their advance and blossomed into a position of leadership. Between 1800 and 1854, again according to Turner, the number of students enrolled in philosophy grew from 2.4 percent to 21.3 percent, and the teaching staff showed a similar rise. Philosophy, philology, and history—“the three disciplines around which not only German scholarship but all of German intellectual life were being rapidly renewed”—all found their home in the lower faculty (i.e., they were not part of the theological, legal, or medical “higher” faculties).30
The philosophical faculty also owed its rise in pre-eminence to the fact that it prepared teachers for the new Gymnasien brought in by Humboldt’s reforms. Beforehand, most teachers had been trained in the theological faculty because the church had run the schools. Humboldt’s initiatives removed the schools from church control and provided an examination, the Abiturexamen, which a student had to pass to enter a university. In line with neohumanistic principles, the Abitur stressed Greek, Latin, and mathematics. These reforms produced a class of professional teachers in Prussia that spawned a rapid increase in the number of Gymnasien across the country between 1818 (91) and 1862 (144).31
In tandem, more and more students began to study the natural sciences—again pushing up numbers in the philosophical faculty. Science subjects expanded rapidly, especially after 1840, though to begin with the graduates mainly went into teaching because, even by 1860, Prussia did not possess sufficient industrial plants to absorb more than a fraction of the students. These changes occurred at the expense of applied subjects like Landwissenschaft and cameralism.32
By now the seminar was well established. It will be remembered from Chapter 1, that the essence of the seminar was that it was smaller and more intimate than the lecture; there was no place for rhetoric, and it was understood to be an advanced course of study, for those really committed to their subject. Normally, it worked in the following way. Every two weeks a research paper was presented by one member of the seminar and subjected to general criticism. The best papers would be published at the expense of the ministry and 500 thaler allotted for prizes. Admission to a seminar, therefore, promised substantial rewards and other disciplines, like history and theology, copied this model. New seminars spread across Germany and across the disciplines and were understood as being well tailored to transmitting the new critical methods. Gradually they became an elite “inner track” for the brightest students.
As was mentioned earlier, the 1830s were a critical decade in scholarship in that separate disciplines began to acquire their own journals and other specific infrastructure. It was in the 1830s that the sciences began to assimilate the concepts of philological and historical scholarship.33 Until then, the sciences had taken no part in Germany’s academic revolution and such science as was taught was elementary: chemistry stressed “recipes,” the life sciences were devoted mainly to classification. Frankly utilitarian, they epitomized the materialistic bread study which Wissenschaftsideologie saw as the main obstacle to spiritual and intellectual rejuvenation and to Bildung. The obsession with classification was, for neohumanists, particularly deadening.34
In the end, however, the sciences benefited from the attacks of the neohumanists. Precisely because these attacks were made in terms of Wissenschaftsideologie—that Wissenschaft was an unlimited, organically unfolding “cultural good”—younger scientists began to counterargue that the sciences, no less than the humanities, trained the intellect (Geist) and led to the refinement of the individual (Bildung). One important side effect of this argument was that “pure” science was seen as superior to applied science, which was dismissed as mere “bread study.”35
The post-1830 scientists became convinced that research not only added to the sum of learning but also that it helped the moral development of the individual doing the research. As a result, the number of frankly technological courses in science and mathematics dropped markedly, not least in Berlin and Halle. Technological education was relegated to other institutions, notably the forerunners of what were to become technische Hochschulen. Instead, the universities now began to teach science in a “purer” style, and chemistry and the life sciences became an integral part of the philosophical faculty. This was a major change in attitude that found institutional expression at the University of Bonn, where the first Seminarum für die gesammten Naturwissenschaften was established in 1825. “Bonn’s modest seminar can be properly considered Prussia’s first step toward the network of large research institutes which by 1880 had made the German organisation of science world famous.”36
That expansion began after 1830, and the following two decades witnessed the all-important flourishing of German science—with the work of Johannes Müller, Eilhardt Mitscherlich, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Evangelista Purkyne
A crucial role was played by C. G. J. Jacobi, whose own career epitomized wider changes. Educated first at the Gymnasium at Potsdam, Jacobi attended the University of Berlin in 1821, where he studied philology in August Boeckh’s seminar. He subsequently abandoned philology and turned instead to mathematical physics. Doing well, he was given a professorship at Königsberg, where he lectured about his research—on elliptical functions—and then, with Franz Neumann, founded in 1835 the Königsberg mathematics-physics seminar, modeled on Boeckh’s. In this seminar he insisted on original work from his students and every paper submitted received a stipend of twenty thaler, increased to thirty if the paper was published. The seminar also funded the cost of instruments used by the students. In this way, Jacobi’s Königsberg seminar became the focus of German mathematical physics and was widely imitated—at Halle (1839), Göttingen (1850), Berlin (1864), and elsewhere. Such science seminars as this one formed a logical transition, pointing forward to the great laboratories of the 1870s.38
THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE KULTURSTAAT
But there was an extra level to all this: government acceptance of the new ideology. During the 1830s, or thereabouts, professors were increasingly appointed because of their reputations among their peers, rather than as teachers. There was, in effect, says Turner, a new social contract between university intellectuals and the Prussian state: this was the theory of the Kulturstaat. The theory of the Kulturstaat maintained that society exists for the evolution of Kultur. “Culture attains its most highly conscious manifestation in the universities, where it is developed and preserved. The state, therefore, must serve and support its universities and depositories of culture and guarantee the academic freedom which makes the preservation and development of culture possible. A nation’s universities serve as national symbols of its intellectual greatness. As long as the state does this, the universities owe the state support, respect and service…
On this basis vast sums of money went into the universities and the theory of the Kulturstaat furnished the basis for the remarkable political symbiosis between Prussian intellectuals and the state which, despite many strains, lasted throughout the nineteenth century.”39
Germany was fortunate that its state bureaucrats mainly saw eye-to-eye with its leading scholars. In 1817, Karl von Hardenberg had appointed Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein as director of a newly created Kulturministerium. A Romantic botanist, a fervent follower of Fichte and Humboldt, Altenstein kept the universities free of religious or political interference and allowed the new scholarship and new attitudes to flourish. He was followed by Johannes Schulze, who had been a student at Halle, where he attended Wolf’s seminar, and had himself undertaken a new edition of Winckelmann’s work, at Goethe’s suggestion. Given carte blanche with Germany’s Gymnasien, he embraced Wissenschaftsideologie as the ideal basis of education. It was Schulze who made Greek compulsory for all Gymnasium students, and Schulze who determined that only Gymnasien could send their graduates to the university.40
The figures collected by R. Steven Turner, Charles McClelland, and William Clark (all Americans, as it happens), underline this picture. In 1805 Prussia allowed 100,000 thaler for its universities, a sum that rose to 580,000 by 1853. The teaching staff grew by 157 percent over the same period. In fact, between 1820 and 1840 the number of professors increased by a bigger proportion than did the number of students (187 percent and 50 percent in philosophy, 113 percent and 22 percent in medicine). At Berlin, financial support for scientific institutions was increased—from 15.5 percent in 1820 to 34 percent in 1850. “The intellectual cannot be too highly valued. It is the basis of all that on which the strength of the state can eternally rest.”41
The ministry frequently imposed its intellectual viewpoint. The most well-known example is Hegelianism, which before 1830 became a virtual state-philosophy in Prussia, where the ministry ensured its dominance by granting Hegel’s students a near monopoly over chairs of philosophy. Altenstein, Eichhorn, and Schulze all saw to it that no one could become a professor until he had published a “solid” book.42 The dual nature of the professoriate—teaching and research—had become a fact of academic life. Younger scholars, bloodied in the emerging “research imperative,” saw specialized research as the only road to a professorship. These new values were the basis for the great new institutes and laboratories that proved to be a jewel of the Bismarckian era.43
11.
The Evolution of Alienation
Intellectual tastes and fashions are curious entities. In 1808, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were premiered at exactly the same moment as Caspar David Friedrich’s The Cross on the Mountain. In 1839, as Peter von Cornelius was completing his vast fresco of the Creation, Redemption, and the Last Judgment in the Ludwigskirche in Munich, Felix Mendelssohn was conducting the first performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony in C Major (The Great Symphony). German music remains as popular as ever, but German painting of the period 1750–1850 (and in fact somewhat later), has sunk into—if not oblivion—marked neglect. A related paradox concerns German speculative philosophy. It too was regarded at the time as a bright star in the firmament—the names of Schelling, Feuerbach, and, above all, Hegel were on everybody’s, not just German, lips in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the cold light of the twenty-first century, however, these names—and the very act of speculative philosophy itself—seem very distant.
Speculative philosophy had a special status just then because, once again, Europe was in that intellectual time frame between doubt and Darwin. Religion, Christianity in particular, was in retreat and with it the concept of revelation. Philosophy naturally filled this intellectual gap but was speculative in the sense that such thoughts and insights of the philosophers, wherever they came from, had to convince others by force of reason and internal consistency rather than by ecclesiastical authority. At the same time (and this is the paradox) this speculative philosophy, especially that of Hegel, gave rise to one of the most powerfully influential—perhaps the most influential—philosophy the world has ever seen: Marxism. If Marxism is fading now as a political force, it is still seen in many quarters as a useful analytic form of understanding. And in the concept of “alienation” we find one of the most powerful ideas shaping the phenomenon of modernism. It has affected painting, the novel, theater, and film, not to mention psychology.
We begin, not with Hegel or Marx but with Friedrich Schelling. A member of that small closed circle of German Romantics, he included among his most intimate friends such figures as Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and the Schlegels. In his own thought he was chiefly concerned with what he saw as “deep and pervasive affinities” between man and nature.1 Nature, for him and others like him, was the product of an active “organizing principle” or “world soul” (Weltseele). This principle “externalized” itself as objective phenomena, which together reflected a unity that was ultimately to be understood in teleological terms; in other words, and put simply, there is a continual process of creation, and its various levels are related to one another in a purposive manner.2 These stages of creation could be investigated by the different branches of science—physics or biology—but they could not be truly understood in isolation; some overarching system was needed for a complete perspective. For Schelling there were three obvious and all-important levels. There was the inorganic level, governed by the laws of mechanics; there was the organic level, governed by the laws of biology; and there was the level of consciousness, only present among humans. The development of consciousness was looked upon by Schelling as the “culmination and goal” of the entire process.3 In saying this, he claimed to discern a cyclical movement in history. Spirit objectified itself in the natural world as phenomena, but it “returned to itself” as mind. Investigating the nature of “mind” now became the primary task of philosophical reflection; the spirit’s apprehension of itself was the “final task” of mankind.
In framing this approach, Schelling attached a profound importance to artistic creativity. The cumulative effects of creativity would lead to an ever-greater appreciation of what Schelling variously called “absolute identity,” “pure identity,” and “absolute reason.” There is a sense in which, to our ears, this sounds almost absurd but it was, again, a concept of an ultimate reality that had no grounding in religion and, as yet, showed no real biological understanding. With hindsight, it is possible to credit Schelling with some notion of “emergent evolution,” but his thoughts were really a halfway house and a dead-end.
Or not quite. Schelling is perhaps most pertinent as a forerunner of Hegel, who incorporated some of his notions, in particular his idea of the “absolute spirit,” or mind.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. From 1788 to 1793 he was a theology student at Tübingen, where his fellow students included both Schelling and the future great Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. After graduation Hegel first worked as a tutor to a number of families in Bern and Frankfurt and seems to have looked forward to a career as a reforming educator. But, possibly as a result of his contacts with Schelling and Hölderlin, he fell under the influence of Kant and then Fichte. He moved to the University of Jena to work more closely with Schelling, with whom he edited the Kritische Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy) and wrote about both Schelling’s and Fichte’s philosophy, exploring their differences. He gradually diverged from Schelling, his views becoming clear in his Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Spirit), published in 1806.4 Schelling interpreted certain passages in this book as an attack and their friendship ended. The occupation of Jena by Napoleon’s troops closed the university, and Hegel was forced to leave. He worked first as a journalist in Bamberg, and then as headmaster and teacher of philosophy at a Gymnasium in Nuremberg, where he married and started a family. In 1816 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg and then, in 1818, to the same chair at Berlin.
This estrangement was not yet called alienation but it already played a vital role in Hegel’s thinking. It was such estrangement that led him to propose his vast synoptic vision where every aspect of the world, every discipline of knowledge, was allotted its position and an explanation and rationale provided. Within this vast system, two oppositional ideas reappeared, but reclothed and in more imposing form.5
For Hegel, as for Schelling, the development of the world, of phenomena, was to be understood as the evolution of the spirit, described as “the process of its own becoming.” Hegel did not think, as Schelling appeared to, that there was any such thing as “pure undifferentiated identity,” or spirit, which was in some way “logically prior” to the reality of phenomena; instead, for Hegel spirit could only exist in the multitude of ways in which it revealed itself—there was no “other world” in his scheme. He did write as if there were an “inner” reality that, as it were, existed “behind” the world of ordinary experience and expressed the truth of things “without husk,” but this was a logical relationship revealed in pure thought rather than a separate existence. Explanation of these logical relations was for him the proper subject matter of philosophy.6
