German Philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism

Terry Pinkard (Cambridge UP: 2002)

INTRODUCTION: THE DIVIDED SELF:

PRECIS: Pinkard introduces us to the key theme of 19^th-Century philosophy – namely, freedom – from a historical, socio-cultural perspective. He focuses upon the key question confronting the 18^th-century inhabitants of present-day Germany: namely, what is Enlightenment, and how does it define modernity. Pinkard underscores the crucial role of the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th Century to the “Storm and Pressure” (Sturm und Drang) period of the latter half of the 18^th Century: namely, the emphatic and uncompromising focus upon the individual as supreme locus of (universal) freedom and (individual) responsibility. While the Protestant Reformation focused upon the religious vocation of personal responsibility, the Enlightenment focused upon secular, rational vocation of personal responsibility. In both cases, however, the individual self as the locus of personal responsibility was a divided self: the religiously self was torn between Rome (earthly law & power) and Jerusalem (divine law and power), while the Enlightenment self was torn between factual circumstances (economic, social, and political) and ideals of self-authentification, whether through reason or emotion. The calling to personal responsibility is the vocation of freedom, the freedom to sever one’s self-imposed reliance upon the authority of others – the immaturity of childhood – to attain self-reliance upon one’s own ability to reason and to feel – the maturity of self-enlightenment. In this Introduction, Pinkard is setting the stage for the reception of Kant’s radical conceptualization of human freedom, his self-proclaimed “Copernican Turn” in philosophy to the truly enlightened self.

NB: Key terms are in Bold or CAPITALS; indented entries are my own clarifications and commentary.

1) GERMANY FRACTURED INTO PRINCIPALITIES:… Thirty Years War (1618-1648), “Germany” found itself divided by the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 into a series of principalities – some relatively large, some as small as a village – that were held together only by the more-or-less fiction of belonging to and being protected by the laws and powers of the Holy Roman Empire [1]

2) DIVIDED RELIGIOUSLY: if any, its major feature was its intense religious division into Protestant and Catholic areas, with all the wars and rivalries that followed from that division [1]

3) ‘GERMANY WAS NOT”: “Germany” during that period must thus be put into quotation marks, since for all practical purposes there simply was no such thing as “Germany” at the time. “Germany” became Germany only in hindsight. Yet, Starting in 1781, “German” philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy and to change the shape of how not only Europeans but practically the whole world conceived itself, of nature, of religion, of human history, of the nature of knowledge, of politics, and of the structure of the human mind in general. From its inception, it was controversial, always hard to understand, and almost always described as German [2]

4) MADAME DE STAAL STEREOTYPE: In 1810, Madame de Stael, in her book “On Germany,” coined the idea of Germany as a land of poets and philosophers, living out in thought what they could not achieve in political reality. Thus the picture of the “apolitical” German fleeing into the ethereal world of poetry and philosophy became a staple of foreign perceptions of Germany, so much so that since that time even many Germans themselves have adopted that account of their culture … That view is, however seriously misleading, if not downright false. The Germans were by no means “apolitical” during this period, nor were they practically or politically apathetic. In fact, they were experiencing a wrenching transition into modern life, and it affected how they conceived of everything [3]

5) PHILOSOPHY NOT GEO-ETHNIC: To understand German philosophy is to understand, at least partially, this “whole” and why the contingent forms it took ended up having a universal significance for us [3]

6) ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM: Those pressures, in turn, helped to pave the way for the gradual introduction of Enlightenment thought into Germany, as princes became more and more convinced by their officials that only with the most modern, up-to-date ideas about society and government was it possible for them to pursue their new ends of absolutist, courtly rule [4]

a) Frederick der Grosse: “Ich bin der erster Diener des Staates” (“I am the first servant of the state”).”

b) Compare Louis XV1’s “Le etat, se moi” (“The state; it’s me”).

7) Thus, the economy simply could not offer sufficient employment opportunities to all the young men who were going to university or seminary to train in those Enlightenment ideas, with the hopes of finding a suitable career afterwards for themselves [5]

8) The period of the middle to the end of the eighteenth century in “Germany” was thus beset with some very fundamental tensions, if not outright contradictions, within itself [6]

9) LESEZIRKELN (READING GROUPS): For the burgeoning class of administrators and those who hoped to join their ranks, “reading club” sprang up everywhere, even provoking some conservative observers to bemoan what they saw as a new illness, the “reading addiction,” Lesesucht, to which certain types of people were supposedly especially vulnerable (typically, servants lacking the proper awe of their masters, women whose mores did not fit the morals of the time, and, of course, impressionable young students) [7]

10) [Novels] … attached arbitrary princely authority and extolled the virtues of the learned professions in general. Travel literature – with its capacity to exercise the imagination about different ways of life – became a cult of its own [7]

11) STUKTURWANDEL DER OEFFENTLICHKEIT (THE STRUCTURAL CHANGE OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN) FROM FEUDAL AND REGAL PATRONAGE TO THE “THIRD ESTATE”/ THE CUTLURE OF BILDUNG (EDUCATION): The emerging culture of the reading clubs was not “court” culture, but it was also not “popular” culture. It was the culture of an emerging group that did not conceive of itself as bourgeois so much as it thought of itself as cultivated, learned, and, most importantly, self-directing. Its ideal was crystallized in the German term Bildung, denoting a kind of educated, cultivated, cultured grasp of things; a man or woman of Bildung was not merely learned, but was also a person of good taste, who had an overall educated grasp of the world around him or her and was thus capable of a “self-direction” that was at odds with the prevailing pressures of conformity [7]

a) Goethe’s adage: Wo Sie stehen ist eine Frage der Ausbildung (Where you stand is a question of education):

i) One’s “standing” is here understood as one understanding of the world and one’s withstanding its demands, so that who one is becomes a matter of standing apart from one’s past – that is, one’s upbringing, training, and indoctrination, habits, and routines – to hold open one’s future. One “stand out” from one’s past and one’s surroundings as the unique ability to respond to such inheritance – that is, one is condemned to the activity of assessing, accepting, rejecting, retaining, relinquishing, revising elements of one’s condition and, in this very activity, becoming “un-conditioned.”

12) The man or woman of Bildung was the ideal member of a reading club, and together they came to conceive of themselves as forming a “public,” an Oeffenlichkeit, a group of people collectively and free arriving at judgments of goodness and badness about cultural, political, and social matters. In his prize-winning essay of 1784, Moses Mendelssohn (a key figure in the German Enlightenment) even identified Enlightenment itself with Bildung [8]

13) SHIFTING LOCATION OF AUTHORITY IN GERMAN SOCIETY: The resulting settlement in Germany after the wars, which allowed local princes to determine what would count as the established church in their domain, had then itself paradoxically both further undermined the kind of claim to absolute authority that the church had previously assumed for itself, and written that kind of authority even more firmly in the social fabric [8]

14) THE PRIVITIZATION OF RELIGION & INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE: The obvious conclusion was that determining what Christianity really “meant” required further reflection, and, in light of that, many Christians took Augustine’s advice and turned it inward to find the “true” voice of Christianity that had been overlaid, if not silenced, by the fragmentation of the church. Many Protestant thinkers advised people that they would better find God’s presence and his will by looking into their hearts, not into their theology books [8]

a) NB: The Inward Turn in Narrative.

15) PIETISM AS METICULUS DISCIPLINARY CARE-OF-SELF: In many areas of Protestant Germany, this took the form of what came to be know as pietism, which extolled group readings of the Bible, personal and group reflection on the deliverances of one’s “heart” as a means of self-transformation, and a focus on reforming society now that the reformation had been (partially) carried out within the church itself. Pietism also taught people to perform a kind of self-reflection that focused on keeping diaries, discussing one’s experiences of faith with others, holding oneself to a principle, and, in short, learning to see whether one was directing one’s life in accordance with God’s wishes [8]

16) FINDING GOD IN CONCEIVING OF HUMANS AS AGENTS OF GOD’S LOVE HERE AND NOW: Seeking God’s perfection in the world meant reflecting on God’s love for the world, which, in turn, gradually began to undermine the gloomy picture of human nature presented by some Christian thinkers (particularly, the Calvinists) in favor of a view that held that the world’s imperfections were capable of a sort of redemption in the here and now, not in some afterlife [9]

17) The secular Enlightenment emphases on sympathy and empathy thus fused well with the religious sense of enacting on our own God’s love for the world by Pietist reflection, and both, although uncomfortably, into the notion that one should be directing one’s life by becoming cultivated and by holding oneself to a moral principle. The educated young men and women of the “reading clubs” and the universities thus married the ideas of Bildung as self-direction and subjectivity as self-reflection into religious feeling as self-direction. The mixture resulted in a slightly confused but still assertive mode of self-understanding that fit at best only precariously with the fragmented, authoritarian, conformist world in which they were seemingly destined to live [9].

a) In offering a sociological-historical account of the “spirit of the time” (Zeitgeist), Pinkard identifies four important elements of the German reception of Enlightenment ideals.

i) BILDUNG AS SELF-DIRECTION: THE PARADOX OF SUBJECTIVITY AS “IN THE WORLD” (the self as “conditioned” [bedingt] or treated as a “thing” [Ding]) AND “VIEWPOINT UPON THE WORLD” (unconditioned [unbedingt] or ). First and foremost, the concept of Bildung is an existential ideal that combines the activity of learning with the formation of self: that is, on becoming oneself. Diametrically opposed to our contemporary understanding of knowledge as information – a commodity that can be acquired, stored, exchanged, and “processed” (worked through) leaving its owner unaffected – knowledge for German Enlightenment thinkers was a matter of transforming the self. As both English and German terms attest, the root very-meaning of “education” is “to build” or “to form,” and what is shaped is the self. The self is understood not so much as a thing in the world than as a understanding of, perspective upon, or, better, openness to the world. The predominant influence of Judeo-Christian theological assumptions are evident here in the conception of a human being as in but not entirely of this world. The most essential feature of Jewish monotheism and its reinterpretation with Christianity is that humans must take a stand on the significance of worldly things, with the promise of salvation arising from seeing all worldly things as reflections of God, as creations. The secularization of this model of human beings retains the basic idea that humans “stand” inside the world as one thing among others and yet, at the same time, “stand” outside the totality of things, as did Yaweh after the creation, as the power and force to whom the world is personally there. This dual status of human beings as both inside and outside of nature – as one among many and as the one to whom the many appear – became the focal point of self-understanding. From the Judeo-Christian theology, German Enlightenment thinkers inherited the model of human beings having to take a stand on the world as the totality of things. Education, then, transforms one’s understanding of the world, where this “stance” or “orientation” to the world is the most basic thing one can say about “the self.” Goethe proclaims that “Where you stand is a question of education” (Wo sie stehen ist eine Frage der Ausbildung). This saying captures the idea that the self is a locus within the world that is most essentially a viewpoint upon the world as the totality of one’s involvements – that is, the ability to take in the measure of the world expanse -- making education a matter of what one can grasp or take in.

ii) SUBJECTIVITY AS SELF-REFLECTION: The theological conception of the self is fundamentally dualistic: it demands that humans take themselves as both inside and outside the world. This dualism, however, is not the Cartesain one of two types of things – mental and physical – but, instead, between two ways of considering or taking oneself: as a thing subject to worldly forces, on the one hand, and as an agent or actor capable of shaping herself, on the other. On the one hand, a human being stands within the world as one thing among many, and, on the other, stand “outside” the world in the sense of being individually responsible for understanding that unique placement in the right way. In Pauline Christianity, this dualism takes the form of dual citizenship, so to speak, in two different kingdoms: to wit, the Roman kingdom of earthly power and political intrigue, on the one hand, and the kingdom of God, on the other, wherein justice and love reign. Awareness of belonging to both “the city of god” and Rome as symbol of earthly power – i.e. of dual citizenship in realms of power and justice – is the basic structure of monotheistic theological reflection. One is born into a world from which one must emigrate to attain one’s true accommodation. There are many different though interrelated notions of self-reflection besides this theological one. Within the tradition of Modern philosophy that Kant is responding to, self-reflection is understood as consciousness turning back upon itself as the object of consciousness.

iii) RELIGIOUS FEELINGS AS SELF-DIRECTION: Religious feelings are uniquely paradoxical. On the one hand, one feels absolute isolation as a unique individual sorted out from all others, standing alone and naked before god. On the other, being called out from all others by God connects one most essentially to all others and everything, since one feels communion with the creator. This paradoxical communal isolation, of being with all only by responding alone is thoroughly exacerbated and pitched in Reformation theology. This paradox structures, as Pinkard points out, the “religious sense of enacting on our own God’s love for the world.”

18) Rather, young men and women in Germany in this period found themselves living in a practical, existential dilemma: many of them simply could no longer be the people that fit comfortably into the kind of social milieu, and thus for them the issue of what is meant for them to be any kind of person at all came more obviously to the fore. As the normative force of the old order slowly eroded away beneath them, those younger generations (roughly those coming of age in the 1770s and those born in the early 1770s) came to believe that they were leading unprecedented lives, and they went in search of a new set of meanings that would anchor their lives in that not yet so brave new world [10]

19) MODERNITY AS AWARENESS OF HISTORICAL JUNCTURE: For completely contingent reasons, the Germans of this period thus squarely face what we can now call “modern” problems [10]

20) … instead, they found that holding on to those things required some other evidence than those things themselves, that the authority of tradition and established religion was no longer self-evident or self-certifying [10]

21) … it was that their social world itself had changed, and that they had changed, such that appeals to matters that in the past had settled things for the ancestors … were no longer viable. What had seemed fixed had come to seem either a matter of changeable convention or at best something that humans had “placed” in the world, not part of the eternal structure of things. What they were left with was their “own lives,” and what they found themselves “called” to do was lead their own lives. This however raised the further issue for them: what kind of life counted as “one’s own”? [10]

22) CORRESPONDENCE OF ALIENATION AND AGENCY/GOETHE’S BEGRIFF DER GESCHICHTE: Trying to interpret their world, they found that the institutions and practices surrounding them gave them little help, since they could not “find” themselves or “see” themselves reflected in those practices. They became thereby metaphorically “homeless”; the consolations of locality, which had structured life for so many of their ancestors, were not immediately there for them [10]

23) THE DIVIDED SELF: They thus took on a kind of duality in their own lives, an awareness (sometimes suffocating) of what they were supposed to do, a sense that their life’s path had already been laid out for them, and an equally compelling awareness that they were not “determined” by these pre-determined social paths, that it was “their own” lives they had to lead, all of which presented them with what can be properly called a pressing moral as well as political question: how to live, how to keep faith with their families, their friends, their social context, sometimes even their religion, while maintaining this alienated, “dual” stance toward their own selves [11]

24) “Germany” thus found itself in a revolutionary situation [11]

25) ROUSSEAU’S RETURN TO NATURE AS GUIDING ONESELF OUT OF SOCIAL CORRUPTION: It is small wonder that Rousseau was so attractive for those generations. His notions resonated with everything they were experiencing: (1) first, that we are “corrupted” by civilization …; (2) and, second, that we should instead seek a kind of independence from such social entanglements, be “natural,” find some kind of authenticity in our lives, be self-directing, and attend to our emotions as more “natural” guides to life [11]

26) THE CULT OF SENSIBILITY AS A RECOIL FROM SOCIALIZATION: … the cult of feeling and sensibility … – what the German idealists would later call a “splitting in two,” and Entzweiung – was the cultivation of an authentic sensibility, an attending to what was their “own” that was independent of the conformist, artificial world of the courts and the bureaucracy that either already surrounded them or inevitably awaited them. Their own “self-relation” – their sense of how their life was to go, their awareness of how they fit into the plan for them and the larger scheme of things [11]

27) They were burdened with the crushing thought that they simply could not look forward to living their “own” lives in their allotted social realm, but only taking over “inherited” lives of sorts; what was their own had to be “natural” and to be within the realm of the “feelings” they alone could cultivate and to which they could authentically respond [11]

28) To be “natural” and be in touch with their “sensibility” was thus to be independent of the social expectations from which they felt so alientated [12]

29) … an immutable order … Could that world be changed? … That world was shaken by the great incendiary jolt that marked the publication of the twenty-three year old Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s epistolary novel in 1774, The Passions of Young Werther (rendered misleadingly in English ever since as the “Sorrows” of Young Werther) [12]

30) What genuinely electrified the audience at the time … was the way it perfectly expressed the mood of the time while at the same time commenting on it, as it were, from within. Werther is presented as a person living out the cult of feeling and sensibility, experiencing the alienation from the social world around him, and drawing the conclusion that, without satisfaction for that sensibility, life was simply not worth living (or, rather, drawing the conclusion that either he or Lotte’s husband had to go) [13]

31) Werther thus played the almost unprecedented role of actually inducing or at least bringing to a full awareness a duality of consciousness on the part of its readership, an awareness that they were this character and yet, by virtue of reading about him, were also not this character [13]

32) [Werther] simply brought home to its audience who they were and what that meant [14]

33) [Werther] did, however, capture and solidify a sense, a mood, already at large and gave it a concrete shape. For its readers, however, it raised in a shocking and thoroughly gripping way the central issue of the time for them: what was it to live one’s “own” life? What was it to be a “modern” person, or, even more pointedly, a modern German? [14]

34) Werther, however, suggested that there was nonetheless a sense brewing in all of “Germany,” maybe even in all of Europe, that things, in the broadest sense of the term, had to change. The official Wolffian philosophy of the day, however, apparently proved that “things” were the way they had to be according to the nature of things-in-themselves. A split consciousness, a duality lived in one’s own life, seemed to be the necessary consequence, not of any contingent setup, but of the way things necessarily were in themselves [15]

35) In 1781, things did change. In Koenigsberg, a far outpost of Prussia, outside even the domains of the Holy Roman Empire, a center of Scottish and English Enlightenment had established itself as an offshoot of the great merchant trade going on there [15]

36) The large British settlement in Koenigsberg provided the impetus by which Scottish Enlightenment thought gradually mixed with German thought at a point just beyond the established edges of the old Holy Roman Empire. Out of that mixture came the next lightning bold, which in one blow effectively demolished the entire grand metaphysical system supposedly holding the whole “German” scheme in place. Overthrowing the old metaphysics, it inserted a new idea into the vocabulary in terms of which modern Germans and Europeans spoke about their lives: self-determination. After Kant, nothing would be the same again [15]