Chapter Three

An Age of Tendencies

In contrast to the Buddha, the early Romantics intentionally focused on creating a body of thought that, instead of being timeless, was in step with—and a few steps ahead of—their times. So, to understand them, it’s necessary to gain a sense of the times to which they were speaking.

Friedrich Schlegel once listed the three great “tendencies” of the age in which he and his fellow Romantics received their education, and to which their thought was a response: the French Revolution; Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophical treatise, the Wissenschaftslehre; and Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The list was meant to be provocative in at least two ways. First, by placing two German books on a par with one of the defining social and political upheavals of the modern world, it insinuated that books and the ideas they contain can be as important as the actions of crowds overthrowing whole social systems, and that German ideas were on the forefront of European progress.

Second, as Schlegel explained in a later essay, he used the word “tendencies” to indicate that his entire age was an Age of Tendencies. Further, he referred to these tendencies as things to be “corrected or resolved.” In other words, the previous generation had moved the world in a certain direction, but had left it in an imperfect and unresolved state.

Schlegel questioned whether these imperfections would be resolved by his generation—or any generation—but his list of tendencies is useful in indicating three main dimensions of the background from which the early Romantics consciously drew and on which they hoped to improve: political, philosophical, and literary. We will use these three dimensions as the categories to frame the discussion in this chapter.

However, the list leaves out the component that most strongly influenced the contours of early Romantic thought: the sciences of the late 18th century. There are two possible reasons for why Schlegel neglected to mention this influence: either he was focusing on provocative tendencies—and being provocative himself—or else the scientific influence was so pervasive in the educated circles in which he traveled that he took it for granted. But trends in the sciences of the time provide the key to understanding how the early Romantics framed their thoughts about politics, philosophy, and literature.

All of the Romantics, in their various ways, showed not only a knowledge of contemporary science but also a conviction that scientific knowledge was crucial for understanding themselves and the world in which they lived. Novalis, in his novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, stated explicitly that the education of every good poet should be solidly based on a study of the latest advances in the sciences. Schelling, when he switched his studies from theology to philosophy, spent several years reading up on the sciences, and continued to stay abreast of scientific developments throughout the early part of his career. Schlegel, on meeting Fichte for the first time, expressed surprise that such a preeminent philosopher would express no interest in science or history at all. Schleiermacher sprinkled his book, Talks on Religion, with frequent allusions to astronomy, chemistry, and biology. Even Hölderlin, the most poetically inclined of the Romantics, planned at one point to publish a journal whose mission was to unite the sciences with the humanities.

So it’s completely in line with the Romantic worldview that we preface our discussion of Romantic views on politics, philosophy, and literature with a brief sketch of the scientific trends that exerted the strongest pull on the Romantic imagination.

There’s a common belief that the early Romantics were anti-scientific, that they rejected the rationalist scientific approach promoted by the 18th century Enlightenment in favor of a more introspective, poetic approach, privileging the importance of their own emotions and imagination over the hard, dry facts of the material world. And although it is true that the early Romantics gave great importance to the life of their emotions and imagination, they felt that they had scientific reasons for doing so. As children of the Enlightenment, they may have rebelled in some ways against their parents, but in other ways they inherited many of the Enlightenment’s tendencies.

One of those tendencies was that, in exploring their emotions and imagination, they saw themselves as pioneers in the science of the mind. Furthermore, they saw each human body and mind as a microcosm of human society in general, and of the universe at large. This meant that in exploring themselves from within, they believed they were gaining objective knowledge that put them more in touch not only with themselves, but also with their fellow human beings and with nature as a whole.

The image of a microcosm draws directly from the currents in late 18th century science that distinguished it from the science of the earlier part of the century. The huge gulf created by these shifting currents can be illustrated by a simple image. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1789 and resisting most of the new currents in scientific theory, spoke of looking up at the nighttime sky and being inspired by the sublime sense of order he saw there in the stars. Friedrich Schleiermacher, writing ten years later, spoke of looking up at the same stars and seeing chaos.

Science

Isaac Newton, in the 17th century, had set forth his laws of motion with such rigor and clarity that they influenced European thought far beyond the realm of pure science. They promoted a view of the universe as a vast machine, operating in line with strict, invariable laws. The invariable nature of these laws promoted the idea that the universe was essentially static. The stars were fixed in their places, the planets in their orbits, and the coordinates of space had not been altered since the beginning of time. Matter was inherently inert, as it could not move unless something else moved it. God’s role in the universe was reduced to that of a watchmaker who assembled the cosmic watch, wound it up, and left it to run on its own while he apparently turned his attention elsewhere.

The mechanical and universal nature of these laws promoted the idea that causality in every area of life was also mechanistic. This idea then led to a controversy in philosophy as to whether there was such a thing as free will and, if so, how it could have an impact on a material world whose motions were already determined by fixed causal laws. Either the human mind was nothing more than matter itself, in which case free will was a total illusion inasmuch as matter was totally passive and inert; or it was radically different from matter, in which case it was, in a famous phrase, a ghost trapped in a machine. And if it was a ghost in a machine, there remained the question of how it could have any influence on the controls.

Toward the end of the 18th century, however, scientific thinkers began to question the mechanical worldview of Newtonian physics, and the strict division between mind and matter. This new line of questioning derived from new discoveries in the fields of biology, geology, paleontology, and astronomy.

In biology, the study of organisms had revealed two major discoveries: one, that causality within an organism, and between the organism and its environment, was reciprocal; and two, that electric currents were at work in the transmission of impulses along the nerves and in the movements of the muscles.

The first discovery resulted in a new view of causality that was not strictly deterministic. An animal responded to stimuli in its environment not in simply passive or mechanical ways, but through an active faculty called sensibility: its ability to organize its intake of and response to stimuli.

This ability had two implications. The first was that life was not simply passive. In constant interaction with its environment, it was alternately passive and active, adapting to its environment and appropriating its environment as sustenance. The same reciprocal passive/active interaction also took place within the organism, among the individual organs of which it was composed. The more advanced the form of life, the more complex the sensibility it displayed.

The second implication of sensibility was that life interacted with its environment with a purpose: survival.

The resulting view of biological causality thus differed from mechanical causality in two respects. It was both reciprocal and teleological, i.e., acting for an end.

The second discovery—of the role of electricity in moving living tissues—showed that matter was not inert, a fact that helped to erase the line between matter and mind. Instead of simply being dead “stuff,” matter was now seen to have a force or potency similar to that of the mind. This led some thinkers to speculate that mind and matter differed not radically in kind, but simply in the degree of their sensibility. Perhaps the physical universe was actually a less advanced form of life. Other thinkers removed the “perhaps” and treated it as a proven fact: Mind and matter were nothing but different aspects of a larger unified pattern of energy.

Although these currents of thought were not universally embraced, they were echoed in new theories appearing in German geology and paleontology. Geologists, when exploring caves or far-distant locations, had found fossils and old bones of animals—such as mammoths and giant lizards—that had never been seen alive. The question was, were these animals still living in unexplored regions of the Earth, or had they become extinct? And when the fossils bore a familial relationship to known animals, what was the relationship between them? One prominent German paleontologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), proposed that life evolved. In his eyes, the Bildungstrieb—drive to develop—forced plant and animal life to generate new forms and new species in line with the evolution of its physical environment, and had gone through three major epochs, paralleling those of human society: the mythic, the heroic, and the historical. In other words, the general trend was from larger and stronger organisms—the giant lizards of mythic times, the mammoths of heroic times—to the smaller, weaker, and more sensitive human beings of historic times.

This theory went hand-in-hand with a new geological conception of the Earth, as fossils were used to date the rock strata in which they were found, revealing a picture of the Earth as immensely old and changing radically with time. Two major German geologists, Johann Heinrich Merck (1741–91), and Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817)—Novalis’ geology professor—proposed that the Earth had grown organically and was continuing to do so.

Many of these theories were hotly debated, both from the side of religion and from the side of religious skepticism. Fervent Christians were offended by the huge time spans that the geologists were proposing, and by the idea that current forms of life didn’t come directly from the hand of God. Religious skeptics objected to the idea of a life force imbuing all matter, in that it allowed God, as a living force, to play a continuing role in the affairs of the world.

The most decisive event in strengthening the organic view of the universe was the publication, in 1789, of a paper by the renowned astronomer, William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus. Herschel, a native of Germany living in England, had curried favor with George III by originally naming his new planet “the Georgian star”—a name that fortunately did not stand the test of time. It persisted long enough, however, for his friends in the Royal Academy of Sciences successfully to lobby the king to provide Herschel with the funds to build an immense telescope outside of London, by far the largest telescope to that date in the world. Herschel’s reputation—he was one of the early superstars of science—together with the size of his telescope, gave added authority to his subsequent discoveries.

In 1789, Herschel published some of his findings in a paper modestly titled “Catalogue of Second Thousand Nebulae with Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens.” However, the observations he reported in the paper, and the conclusions he drew from them, were anything but modest.

Herschel noted that, with the improved power of his telescope, he had discovered that many of the “nebulae” in his catalogue were not really nebulae, but actually separate galaxies, and that our solar system was located in only one of the many galaxies within his newly-expanded field of view.

His most important observation, however, was that some galaxies showed signs of being more evolved than others, a fact that he explained by detailing how a galaxy might grow, develop, and die in line with the laws of gravity, an organic process that involved immense spans of time. In other words, the more evolved galaxies were far older than the less evolved, which in turn meant that the galaxies were not all created at the same time.

Herschel’s paper accomplished several things at once. It turned astronomy from a science concerned primarily with navigation to one focused on issues of cosmology: the origins of the stars and the evolution of the universe. In terms of the content of the science, it effected a revolution even more radical than the Copernican. Copernicus had simply moved the center of the universe from the Earth to the Sun, whereas Herschel argued that there was no center at all. Moreover—because galaxies were of different ages even though obeying the same laws of physics—it suggested that there was no single beginning point in creation or time.

These two propositions were a radical challenge to received religion in the West. They confirmed the large spans of time needed to explain geological and biological evolution, and questioned the centrality of human life in the general scheme of the universe.

Above all—at least in terms of what the Romantics did with this new discovery—Herschel’s paper reinforced the organic view of the universe. As one modern writer has observed, the paper turned astronomy into a life science, concerned with the evolution of stars and galaxies over time. To emphasize this point, Herschel throughout his paper drew his analogies and imagery from the realm of plant life.

The universe revealed by his telescope, he said, was like a garden. “Youth and age are comparative expressions; and an oak of a certain age may be called young, while a contemporary shrub is already on the verge of its decay.… To continue the simile I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom… the heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds… and we can extend the range of our experience [of them] to an immense duration.” Just as a person in a garden is able “successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant,” in the same way, a human observer looking through a telescope was able to see, in a single moment and from a single place, “a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence.”1

This vision of our galaxy as a giant organism within a vast garden of other giant organisms was quickly popularized in the work of poets, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. As it spread through Europe, it provoked many questions: What is our place, as organisms, in the life of the larger organism of which we are part? And what meaning does life have in a vast universe in which organisms are taking birth and dying, over and over again? Is there a single, larger organism of which the galaxies themselves are part, or is the garden random and chaotic? And what powers do we have to answer questions about such vast stretches of space and time?

The many analogies from astronomy that the Romantics used in their writings—such as Hölderlin’s reference in his novel Hyperion to the nighttime sky as a “garden of life”—show that they were familiar with Herschel’s work and took seriously the questions it raised. The answers at which they arrived drew on the other three areas of European culture that most influenced their worldview: politics, philosophy, and literature.

Politics

Friedrich Schlegel, in citing the impact of the French Revolution on his age, was simply pointing to the most dramatic political event that occurred during his lifetime. But other political events predating the Revolution had an even more pervasive influence in shaping the questions he and his fellow Romantics addressed and how they addressed them.

Germany during his time was still recovering from the devastation caused more than a century earlier by the Thirty Years War (1618–48). That war had pitted Catholic against Protestant countries all over Europe, but most of the bloodshed and destruction had occurred on German soil. Some principalities, such as Württemberg, had lost more than three quarters of their population. What was left of Germany after the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was a patchwork of principalities—some, like Prussia, relatively extensive, others no larger than a village—each with its own laws, customs, and forms of government. In fact, some historians insist that the word “Germany” during this period should always be put in quotation marks, to act as a reminder that there was nothing—not even a fully common language—to bind together what we now know of Germany into a single political or cultural unit.

In most cases, these principalities were ruled by councils of nobles or petty monarchs, who—in each case—had been given the right to choose the established church in the land under their jurisdiction: Protestant or Catholic. Because they were independent of one another, some of the more powerful monarchs developed royal pretensions, seeking to turn their courts into small versions of the model that the French were creating at Versailles.

This required money. The solution, in some cases, was to adopt another model exported from France: the ideal, promoted by the French philosophes, of the enlightened despot, i.e., a monarch who ran his country on rational principles with an efficient bureaucracy. The philosophes had espoused efficiency and rationality with an eye to fairness, but the petty princes of Germany had their eyes more on another goal: efficient tax collection. This combination of efficient administration coupled with autocratic rule, as it developed on German soil, combined the worst of both the medieval and the modern world: arbitrary rule efficiently enforced. In fact, some of the complaints about rationalist government that we associate with modernists and postmodernists were first expressed by writers such as Novalis in late 18th century Germany.

To train the bureaucrats needed to staff their bureaucracies, the various principalities supported their local universities, or created new ones where they did not yet exist. The universities, however, found themselves split by dual requirements. To attract good students, they had to provide an up-to-date curriculum, which often meant keeping up with the latest liberal trends from England and France; but to maintain the support of their sponsors, they had to ensure that what they taught would not be so liberal as to upset the status quo. Thus the students at these universities found themselves in a schizophrenic environment of ever-changing standards for what could and could not be taught.

The schizophrenia did not end with their graduation. If they were lucky enough to secure jobs in the German bureaucracies, they found themselves dealing with the vagaries of the local monarchs or legislative councils, who often required their officials to act in direct contradiction to the principles learned at school. This, of course, has been a recurring problem in human history, but in late 18th century Germany it was felt especially acutely, as German political realities lagged so far behind those of its neighbors to the west.

Historians writing about this period describe the prevailing mood among educated Germans as one of alienation and separation: feeling divided within themselves because of the disconnect between the liberal principles in which they had been educated and the conservative principles that still governed the society where they lived and worked; and divided from a larger sense of communion with like-minded people by the fragmented social and political landscape. In terms later popularized by the French Revolution, there was a felt lack of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

With little practical hope of attaining the first two of these three ideals, many educated Germans focused their energies on the third. Here, leadership came first from another consequence of the Thirty Years War: the growth of Pietism.

Although modern historians have suggested that the real causes of the war were economic, those in the midst of the war saw it as a life-and-death battle over the future of the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church had been eager to see the Reformation suppressed by military means, as had happened to earlier heterodox movements throughout the Middle Ages. The Protestant denominations, in response, recognized the need to become more organized and to seek military support of their own. In exchange for this support, however, they found themselves forced to become more and more subservient to the rulers allied to their cause. The altar, to use the terms of the time, became subject to the throne. To make this fact more palatable, participants in the war justified it in terms of the very minor differences of doctrine separating the Protestants from the Catholics. After thirty years of killing one another over questions of how to understand the oneness of the Trinity, or God’s presence—or lack thereof—in consecrated bread and wine, people began to wonder if this was really what Christianity was all about. The jaded response was Yes, which led to the growth of the anti-Christian secular movements of the 18th century, especially in Scotland and France.

The unjaded response was the growing belief that the Christian message was one not of the head, but of the heart. As a true Christian, one should be measured not by one’s understanding of the Trinity but by one’s right feeling of love for God, however one conceived Him. This, in turn, was to be measured in daily life by one’s right loving relationship to one’s fellow human beings. Various religious movements grew out of these convictions. One that developed in England from a parallel disillusionment with the organized church was Methodism. The prime movement in Germany was Pietism.

Pietism appealed largely to anti-intellectuals, but it also attracted people of a more scholarly bent, who used their philosophical training to show that, contrary to the school theologians, no human being could form an adequate concept of God, and so no self-styled authorities had the right to say that their concept was right and anyone else’s wrong. Because the founding principle of the universe could not be adequately conceptualized, the best use of one’s energies was to develop a provisional concept that worked in fostering the love that the Christian message clearly called for. In other words, religious truths should be judged by pragmatic standards: their ability, not to represent reality fully, but to inspire a correct relationship to one’s God and one’s fellow human beings.

Pietism was originally a movement within the Lutheran Church, but it soon sparked similar movements in Catholic parts of Germany as well. However, because the administration of churches in Germany was often subject to political interference from local authorities, the movement developed a loose relationship to existing church organizations. In fact, it fostered a perception that the Romantics adopted and has since grown common throughout the West: that organized religion is inimical to the genuine religious life of the heart—or what we currently call the split between religion and spirituality.

Large voluntary brotherhoods developed, crossing state boundaries, in which like-minded men and women could live and work together in their quest to develop the right qualities of heart. One of the prime activities of these brotherhoods was to hold Bible-reading circles in which members were encouraged to keep diaries of the state of their souls, to be shared in the (ideally) safe environment of the circle so that they could learn from one another how to develop the right attitudes of spiritual love. Other activities, designed to bring this love into the world, included the founding of orphanages and hospitals for the care of the poor.

The Bible-reading circles of the Pietists soon inspired secular counterparts among the educated administrative classes of Germany: book-reading clubs in which people pursued their own further education and cultural improvement, beyond the rote-learning they had received in university. The German word for this ideal—a self-directed improvement of not only one’s knowledge but also one’s good taste, character, maturity, and overall culture—is Bildung. Because there is no English word adequate to translate this concept, we will keep the German word throughout this book. Bildung was central to the sense of a German cultural identity that, during this period, began to transcend state boundaries. In some ways, it was the secular equivalent of piety, in that it was a matter of the maturity and quality of the entire character, shaped by philosophy and literary sensibility, consciously cultivated in a self-directed way, and going far beyond the education organized by the state.

Although Bildung was acquired through one’s entire life experience, it was influenced by ideas picked up from books and discussed in the book-reading clubs. Book-publishing during this period expanded at a faster rate in German-speaking parts of Europe than anywhere else—a sign not only that more Germans were becoming literate, but also that they were looking more and more to books for their emotional and intellectual sustenance. The Leipzig catalog of new books, for instance, listed approximately 1,200 titles in 1764, but 5,000 by 1800. Favorite genres included plays, travel writing, essays, popular philosophy, and novels. Travel books allowed people to imagine and discuss alternate ways of life in a manner that the authorities did not find threatening. Annual essay contests provoked responses from all the German lands, and sparked widespread discussion of such topics as the meaning of Enlightenment, the relationship between reason and feelings, and the future of German literature. Popular philosophy books addressed the Big Questions of life, but without requiring technical rigor from their readers. Even Kant wrote a layperson’s guide to aesthetics that went through more printings during his lifetime than any of his other works.

Novels in particular, with their ability to explore subtleties of their characters’ psychological and emotional development in a way that other genres could not, encouraged readers to see the importance of exploring their own inner emotional growth—a theme we will explore further below.

This was the environment into which news of the French Revolution burst in 1789. As might be expected, young German university students were originally among the most ardent supporters of the Revolution. Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, on learning of an important victory in the Revolution, planted a “tree of liberty” and danced around it, in hopes that the good influence of the Revolution would take root in German lands. But even some older portions of the educated German public responded positively to the Revolution as well. Immanuel Kant, for one, maintained to his last coherent day that it had been a Good Thing in advancing the cause of human liberty.

But as the Revolution progressed into its darker phases—the Terror and the Empire—attitudes in Germany, even among the enthusiasts for freedom, began to change: What had gone wrong? Conservatives, of course, gloated over the failure of the Revolution, claiming it as proof that liberty and equality had to be stamped out wherever they reared their head.

More liberal thinkers, however, began to look for another answer, one that might show a safer route to a German society in which liberty, equality, and fraternity could ultimately prevail. One of the answers they ultimately proposed was peculiarly German in the sense that it grew from German conditions fostered by the Thirty Years War: The Revolution had failed because the French lacked the kind of Bildung needed to handle liberty. The follow-up questions then became: What kind of Bildung might that be? And how could it be fostered to take root in German soil?

These questions were the legacy that the French Revolution left to the early Romantics. To answer them, the Romantics turned to look at the state of contemporary German Bildung. Philosophy—at that time the queen of the sciences in German universities—was one of the first places they looked.

Philosophy

Four philosophers—three living and one dead—proved most influential in shaping early Romantic thought. The dead philosopher was Plato, whom we will discuss at the end of this section, because his influence was filtered through what the living philosophers were teaching.

Among the living philosophers, only one—Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)—was a philosopher by profession. The other two—Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)—were known primarily for their literary accomplishments, but their philosophical writings proved, in the long run, more influential than Fichte’s in shaping the way the early Romantics thought about art and its relationship to freedom and life in general.

All three of these living philosophers had, at one point or another, been students or followers of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and all had broken with him for various reasons. The Romantics, in turn, ended up breaking in various ways from all three—in some instances returning to themes the three had discarded from Kant; in others, going even further away. So to understand the Romantics, we have to start with a sketch of what it was in Kant that they found most useful and most in need of correction.

Kant

The main theme of modern European philosophy was one that the Buddha would have classed as a question ultimately not worth answering, in that it was framed in terms of becoming: What is a human being’s place in the world? In ethical terms, do we have free will to act in the world, or are we simply automatons who cannot know or control the reasons for their actions? As these questions were pursued, they sparked further self-reflective questions: Is there a self? Is there a world outside of one’s own mind? How could one know these things for sure?

Some typical answers were these:

• The world is just as we perceive it, and it can be understood by working down to first principles—about what things are in their essence, both in the world and in the mind—and then deriving our experience from those principles.

• The world exists only in the mind, which is the only essential substance there is.

• There is no way that we can know the essences of things, for all we know are representations derived through the senses. We can’t even know if causality is really at work behind our sense data, because causality can never be seen in action. Even our self is unknowable. It’s simply an assumption that lies outside the range of our senses.

Kant gained his reputation as a major philosopher because of the novel and provocative way he addressed these questions. Instead of focusing on a quest to confirm or deny essences outside or inside, he looked at the way consciousness interacted with the input of the senses, showing that the basic raw material of knowledge is composed not of sense data, but of judgments about sense data. In other words, what we perceive directly is not things-in-themselves in the world outside or the self inside, but the workings of reason in shaping experience in the middle ground. We make our experience, and—as Kant often said—we know best, not what is, but what we make.

However, this fact does not prevent us from coming to objective conclusions about our place in the world, for if we examine, through introspection, the workings of reason in action, we can penetrate beyond the subjective content of our experiences to their objective structure or form, which has to be the same for all conscious, rational beings. In other words, we learn objective facts about the world of experience by observing the ways our reason has to shape it. Kant called this approach critical, in that it took a critical view of the powers and limitations of reason, and transcendental, in that it sought to discover necessary, objective forms of conscious activity that transcended the purely subjective level; i.e., all subjective experience had to presuppose and follow these forms. (Kant’s meaning of the term transcendental here differs from the meanings that other thinkers will be using throughout this book, so take note of how these meanings change.)

One of the consequences of this critical, transcendental approach is that Kant developed a novel criterion for truth. Because things-in-themselves cannot be known, there is no way to measure the truth of a judgment by seeing how well it represents reality “out there.” Instead, its truth has to be measured by its coherence with one’s other judgments “in here.” Because coherence has objective, rational standards, one’s assessment of truth is not entirely subjective, but it nevertheless, by Kant’s reasoning, becomes an internal quality within consciousness.

In his search for coherence, Kant began by dividing reason into two sorts: theoretical and practical. Theoretical reason dealt with beliefs concerning such questions as the reality of causality, the existence of an immortal self, and the existence of God. Kant felt that, on the grounds of theoretical reason alone, causality—the mechanical causality of the Newtonian universe—had to be accepted as an objective, transcendental form of sensory experience, whereas the existence of God and an immortal self could neither be proven nor disproven.

Practical reason dealt with the area of action, and it, too, had an objective form that was universal for all rational beings: respect for one’s duty as dictated by reason in the form of what Kant called the categorical imperative, i.e., an imperative that was the duty of all rational beings. His primary formulation of this imperative was that one should act only on maxims that one would will for all other beings to act on as well. For this imperative to have power in practice, it required—and so justified—assuming two principles that theoretical reason could not prove: the existence of God to provide a purpose for moral actions (by having a purpose for the universe), and the immortality of the soul (to receive the rewards from helping to fulfill that purpose).

The imperative also gave practical justification for the assumption that human beings were free in two senses. The higher of the two senses was autonomy: the freedom from one’s passions that resulted from taking the duty of reason as the sole motivation for one’s actions. The lesser sense of freedom was spontaneity: freedom to act in ways not determined by the laws of strict causality so that one could choose to follow those imperatives or not. The assumption of these two forms of freedom, however, flew in the face of one of the necessary forms of theoretical reason: that experience follow strict, mechanical causal laws. When this is the case, how can a person have free will to act in a way that influences experience?

Other thinkers might have concluded that freedom of will was thus an impossibility, but not Kant. For him, everything worthy of respect in each human being came from freedom in both his senses of the term. Anyone who believes that governments should not oppress people—that people deserve to be treated as ends in themselves and not as a means to one’s ends—has to respect the principle that people have the dignity of freedom. If you have any respect for human thought at all—either your own or that of others—you have to respect the principle that people are free.

However, Kant did not propose that the principles of theoretical reason should be discarded to make way for the principle of practical reason. He expressed the conflict here as a genuine dilemma.

Still, he did propose two approaches for dealing with this dilemma, neither of which satisfied the Romantics—or many others, for that matter. The first approach was to state that there were two levels of self: the phenomenal self, or the self as experienced in the realm of nature, which meant that it was subject to the causal laws of nature; and the noumenal self—the self in-and-of-itself—which lay outside the world of nature and so was not subject to those laws. This distinction, however, created a divided self, with the relationship between the two selves left unexplained. It also meant that the self in-and-of-itself was unknowable—just as things-in-themselves, outside our experience, were also unknowable—and it further left hanging the question of how such a self could actually influence the world of experience.

Kant’s second approach was to call in another area of philosophy: the field of aesthetics, or the study of beauty. The experience of beauty, he claimed, did not prove that there was a resolution of the dilemma, but it did intimate that freedom of will might, on a supersensible level, be compatible with causality on the sensible level. His argument here centered on two concepts.

The first was the beautiful. Beautiful things express freedom in that they excite the free play of our imaginative faculties as we contemplate them. In fact, Kant insisted that there were no objective standards of beauty, probably with the purpose of maintaining that the experience of beauty was one of freedom. At the same time, though, beautiful objects express necessity in that they suggest that all their parts are meant to serve a single aim. In this way, they are like biological organisms. The word suggest here is important, because we can have no proof that the creator of a beautiful object had any purpose for it. Still, the beauty of the object excites a strong intimation that this is so. And thus, Kant argued, the same can be said for biological creation: The purposiveness of animal and plant life suggests that there is a purpose for the universe as a whole. In this sense, beauty is a symbol of the reality of the moral law. It is also a symbol of the fitness of the parts of the universe to one another, suggesting that the transcendental patterns of reason fit well with the way things actually are in and of themselves.

Kant’s second concept—which had a long past history, stretching back to the Epicureans—was that of the sublime. Sublime objects go beyond being beautiful because they are so immense that they give rise to a sense of terror and awe. Typical examples include mountains, canyons, waterfalls, and sunsets. (As one wilderness writer has noted, the theory of the sublime provided the impetus for the American experiment in setting aside land for national parks. Only in the 1930’s was a non-sublime piece of wilderness, a swamp, set aside.)

During the 18th century, when the concept of the sublime took on new life, thinkers were divided as to whether the sublime dimensions of nature were truly terrifying, in the sense that they called into question the possibility of any larger, benevolent force behind them, or if they were ultimately reassuring in demonstrating that, no matter how great they were, the benevolent God who created them had to be even greater. Kant fell into the second camp. The overwhelming immensity of sublime experiences, together with a sense of their orderliness in following causal laws, he said, excites within the mind a feeling that there must be a supersensible faculty at work in the universe. In fact, Kant felt that the sheer possibility of thinking such a thought without contradiction could be seen as a sign of a supersensible faculty, outside of time and place, at work within the mind itself. Thus, for him, the experience and thought of the sublime suggested—even though they did not prove—both a benevolent God and an immortal self—and a connection between the two.

Kant’s discussion of beauty is where he most clearly shows his Pietist roots. In fact, there is some justice in the view, occasionally expressed, that his philosophy can be read as a sustained attempt to provide Pietism with a rigorous, philosophically respectable form. Certainly, many of the inconsistencies and dilemmas he left unresolved can be explained by an underlying Pietist agenda, conscious or not.

As already noted, Kant’s proposed ways out of the dilemma he posed between theoretical and practical reason did not satisfy the Romantics—or any of the three philosophers who had a more direct impact on the Romantics. But it was a tribute to the power and originality of Kant’s reasoning that his philosophy, even though imperfect, excited so much thought throughout Europe and beyond in response. In particular, six aspects of his philosophy proved especially attractive to the Romantics:

• his approach of looking at the workings of the mind, as an active principle, to explain experience as a whole,

• his standard of truth as an internal quality,

• his insistence that many metaphysical issues could not be resolved by theoretical reason,

• his insistence on the centrality of freedom in any respectable philosophy,

• his proposal that aesthetics might hold the key for solving problems beyond the realm of the purely aesthetic, and

• his doctrine of the experience of the sublime as an intimation of the divine.

All of these themes provided the Romantics and their teachers with ample food for thought.

Fichte

One of the major flaws in Kant’s philosophy was his insistence, on the one hand, that reason requires a complete, coherent explanation for all of experience, and, on the other, that reason has to recognize its inability to provide such an explanation. Many of his followers tried to resolve this inconsistency, one of the most creative attempts being that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in turn taught philosophy directly to many of the early Romantics. Fichte felt that, in smoothing out many of the twists and turns in Kant’s reasoning, he was being true to the critical spirit of Kant’s philosophy even as he changed many of its basic outlines.

Fichte followed Kant in giving primacy to the need for philosophy to respect the principle of freedom, and he defined freedom in the same two senses that Kant did: autonomy and spontaneity.

In fact, in the areas where he departed from Kant, Fichte gave even more primacy to these principles of freedom than had his master. To begin with, he dropped the division between theoretical and practical reason, saying that in reality there was only one form of reason: practical. Following Kant’s maxim that we know only what we do, Fichte argued that genuine knowledge can come only by doing, and not by pure thinking. Because practical reason has to assume freedom, the arguments of theoretical reason for deterministic, mechanical laws at work in nature have no validity.

This means that there is no need to say that freedom is in any way paradoxical or that the self is unknowable. Fichte argued that, in fact, the self is directly known through an act of “intellectual intuition,” which meant that this knowledge was not mediated through the senses and their attendant concepts, but through a direct experience of the self’s activity. This activity could be directly experienced as the self strived to impose its reason on whatever parts of nature were “not-self.” Because this knowledge is direct, the self has no essence lying behind its activity of striving; in fact, the self is pure striving. It is what it makes itself, and its knowledge of itself is no different from what it makes itself.

This principle takes Kant’s maxim that we know only what we make to an audacious extreme. Given that, in many Christian theological systems—such as that of Thomas Aquinas, whose theology became the official doctrine of the Catholic Church during the Counter-reformation—the status of being pure activity identical with pure self-knowledge was reserved only for God, it’s easy to see why Fichte eventually ran afoul of the authorities.

Although Fichte saw the self as free in the spontaneous sense—that it was able to strive to make itself anything at all—he did not believe that true freedom was totally arbitrary, for the only way the self could know that it was not a slave to its passions would be for it to exercise autonomy as well. In other words, it was truly free only when it took on Kant’s categorical imperative as the principle guiding its actions.

Because what is not-self will never fully succumb to the striving of the self, the experience of the self is one of endless striving. This certainly was true of Fichte’s own life, in that he lost two professorships—first in Jena, then in Berlin—as a result of standing up for his moral principles when university officials had asked him to compromise them.

Fichte admitted that there was a circularity to his reasoning: Because he denied the validity of theoretical reason, he could not provide a purely rational justification for the principle of freedom. So he simply asserted that there was a moral duty to believe in freedom. But for there to be such a thing as a moral duty, the principle of freedom has to be true. In other words, belief in moral duty requires a belief in freedom, but belief in freedom requires a belief in moral duty. Fichte offered no way out of this circle.

In the early years of the French Revolution, students were willing to overlook this circularity because Fichte’s teachings on freedom provided an attractive rallying point for their revolutionary aspirations. His teachings on the self as being directly knowable in its spontaneous self-creation remained attractive to the early Romantics even as they eventually rejected other aspects of his philosophy. However, as the French Revolution entered its dark stages, the idea of the single-minded pursuit of freedom began to lose some of its luster.

As the early Romantics began to articulate their disenchantment with Fichte’s philosophy, two issues stood out. First, his account of the self as nothing but striving—acting on the world while resisting being acted on by the world—struck them as narrow and one-sided. From their point of view, developed partly from their lessons in biology, a full account of the self would also have to account for how the world acted on the self.

Second, in abolishing the dilemma between theoretical and practical reason, Fichte had also removed the need for aesthetics to play a role in his philosophy. And it was in pursuit of a serviceable understanding of the role of aesthetics in developing Bildung that the early Romantics returned to Kant for his doctrine of the experience of the sublime. But they found his concept of the beautiful too lifeless in that it ignored the role of desire. For a more adequate concept of beauty, they thus turned to two of Kant’s other former followers—Schiller and Herder—and eventually to Plato.

Schiller

Friedrich Schiller was a playwright and poet, not a professional philosopher. In fact, he is best known to posterity for his Ode, “To Joy,” which Beethoven set extravagantly to music in the Ninth Symphony. Still, Schiller had a philosophical and medical education under autocratic conditions that inspired a life-long interest in the issue of freedom. In seeking to deepen his understanding of this issue, he undertook a thorough study of Kant’s philosophy, at first agreeing with Kant’s conclusions, and then finally arriving at a position of his own.

The main outline of Schiller’s position paralleled Kant’s: that the aesthetic is what mediates the split in human nature, allowing for the possibility of freedom. But because Schiller’s view of what a human being is differed radically from Kant’s, he came to a radically different conclusion about what freedom means and how it is found.

Kant had stated in his treatise, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, that each human being had three dispositions: animality, humanity, and personhood. Animality is the disposition to physical self-love, expressed in the drive to survive, to propagate the species, and to engage in social activity. Humanity is the disposition to self-love that compares oneself to other human beings and competes with them, first to attain equality, then to gain mastery over them. Personhood is the innate disposition to respect one’s duty for its own sake as a sufficient incentive to behave morally.

For Kant, only the third aspect of human nature was genuinely worthy of respect, as it was the only aspect truly free in an autonomous sense. Thus it had to be developed so that it could override the other two dispositions. In fact, Kant insisted that actions were authentically moral only when motivated by pure respect for duty. Actions in line with one’s duty that also happened to be motivated by considerations that served one’s animality and humanity—say, to survive or to be sociable—did not, strictly speaking, qualify as moral.

This was the point that eventually stuck in Schiller’s craw. The short version of his response was a witty little verse whose “verdict” satirized Kant’s position:

The long version of Schiller’s response came in two books on moral issues: Grace and Dignity and Letters on the Aesthetic Education [Bildung] of Man. The basic position of these books, taken together, can be summarized as follows:

Schiller agreed with Kant that there is a strict dichotomy within each human being between animal drives (Treib) and the drives of reason. However, he came to the conclusion that Kant’s picture of how these drives function within the human being—and how the moral drives are even known in the first place—was both unhealthy and untrue to the facts. This conclusion is what led him to develop a doctrine of freedom that differed sharply from Kant’s.

Schiller’s views on human nature came from the theory of medicine—called philosophical medicine—in which he had been trained. This approach treated the body and mind not as radically separate, but as two different but interactive parts of a single organism, in which the health of one part is necessary for the health of the other. For a doctor, this meant that diseases in the body did not necessarily stem only from physical causes. Their cure often required that diseases of the mind be treated as well. Ideal health, even though it could never be fully accomplished, was to be pursued by trying to bring these two sides of the organism to wholeness and harmonious balance.

From this perspective, Schiller developed both a psychology of morals and a genealogy of morals—i.e., a theory of how people come to know the moral law and develop a feeling for it in their lives.

The psychology is based on the principle of the health of a human being as a whole organism. If, as Kant claimed, moral actions had to serve one part of the organism—one’s personhood—at the expense of one’s animality and humanity, they couldn’t be truly healthy. Thus Schiller concluded that freedom was not a matter of one part of the human mind legislating at the expense of the rest of the human being. Instead, freedom was the ability to find harmony among the various drives—both physical and mental—that made up the human being as a whole.

This is a concept of freedom radically different from anything advocated by Kant or Fichte—and different from anything they would have recognized as genuine freedom. It leaves no room for freedom as autonomy, and places severe restrictions on the freedom of spontaneity. Freedom is now subject to the various competing drives that have to be brought into balance, with no way to liberate itself from those drives. By making freedom the pursuit of internal wholeness and balance, Schiller made it less an ethical category than an aesthetic one. In fact, in one of his earlier writings, he had cemented the concept of freedom to aesthetics by tweaking Kant’s formula for the relationship between freedom and beauty: Instead of being a symbol of freedom, beauty in Schiller’s eyes was the appearance of freedom—the way harmony looks, both by inference to the observer and directly by the person who is able to act in harmonious ways.

Because freedom, for Schiller, is the pursuit of harmonious wholeness, it parallels the pursuit of the health of the individual in that it is an unending pursuit rather than a goal to be attained. This definition of freedom also affects Schiller’s definition of the underlying motivation for the moral life. Instead of being inspired by an innate respect for duty, the moral life is now inspired by the desire for wholeness.

Schiller’s genealogy of morals attempted to explain how this desire is cultivated in the first place. In doing so, he showed that beauty is more than just the appearance of freedom. An aesthetic sense, in his eyes, is actually what makes an ethical sense possible.

A human being, he said, does not start with an innate respect for the moral law. Instead, one starts with a jumble of predispositions that fall into three major categories: the sense drive, the drive to satisfy basic physical needs; the play drive, the aesthetic drive for pleasures that are freely creative; and the form drive, the drive for reason and morality. The play drive is the only drive free from compulsion, and it is what brings the sense drive and the form drive into harmony: i.e., the play drive is where freedom is found. In fact, the exercise of the play drive is what makes people aware of the form drive to begin with.

When life is nothing but a struggle to survive, people have no time or energy to be even aware of their form drive, much less to follow it. Instead, they are devoted only to the needs of their sense drive, which often brings them into conflict with one another. However, when their basic needs are met, they turn to play: singing, dancing, telling stories. As they do so, they find enjoyment in one another’s company.

If done carelessly, the exercise of the play drive can lead to dissolute harm and further conflict. But if done with reflection, it can eventually lead people to think in moral terms: how best to live together with one another in fairness and harmony—fraternity, in the sense of the Revolution, or wholeness writ large—so as to find more enjoyment together over the long run.

What this means is that one’s sense of morality does not develop in contradiction to one’s feelings and social drives, as it does in Kant’s theory. Instead, the moral sense comes about as a result of one’s feelings and social drives—when these are trained through a reflection on how one’s long-term wellbeing depends on pursuing wholeness both within and without.

This is where aesthetic education comes in: training the play drive so that it leads in a moral direction. Schiller’s own experience with state-sponsored education convinced him that governments were ill-equipped to provide the sort of education that people needed in order to become free. Ideally, governments would direct the economic order so that people were not alienated from their labor—as when they had no control over the objects they made—or from one another through unfair exploitation. At the very least, governments should provide the economic conditions whereby all members of society had their needs well enough met so that they had time and leisure to enjoy the arts, such as the theater and books.

Once people were ready for the arts, though, it was the artist’s duty to provide their aesthetic education. The purpose of this type of education was to lead them to the “aesthetic condition”—a state of mind where they could step back from the immediate concerns of their sense drives and contemplate (1) the fact that they also had form drives, and (2) that they were in a position to choose whether to bring their form drives and sense drives into harmony. In other words, a true work of art should not preach morality, for that would be tedious and self-defeating. Instead, it should raise moral questions and get its audience to see their own lives as involving moral issues. Then it was up to them to exercise their freedom of choice to pursue the goal of harmonizing their various drives.

Schiller delineated two types of moral actions that can result when the moral sense is developed: those performed with grace and those performed with dignity. Actions performed with grace are the moral ideal: those in which one’s feelings and preferences are in harmony with one’s knowledge of what the moral law requires. You want to do what you know you ought to do. When inner harmony is achieved through self-training, the grace that characterizes the resulting actions is the appearance of freedom. This is one of the ways in which morality parallels art: A work of art is beautiful when there is no sense that the author had to strain to force its various parts into a harmonious whole. In fact, in Schiller’s eyes, the ultimate work of art is the beautiful soul, as displayed in the actions it freely performs.

Actions performed with dignity are those where one’s feelings are at odds with what the moral law requires—you don’t want to do what you ought to do—and yet one is able to overcome those feelings to do what is right. These actions lack the beauty of graceful actions, for they are obviously done under duress, but they are nevertheless inspiring to others who are also struggling with their own resistance to the moral law. As a playwright, Schiller knew that the depiction of these kinds of actions made for better drama than graceful actions—and for a more educational drama as well, in that they highlighted moral issues without shrinking from the difficulties that the pursuit of wholeness might bring.

Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man was written to address a question provoked by the failure of the French Revolution: how Bildung could prepare people for a society in which they could be genuinely free. Thus these letters spoke directly to an issue that fascinated the Romantics. In particular, they contained two maxims that had a huge impact not only on the early Romantics but also on many later generations of artists and psychologists: (1) “Human beings play only when they are, in the full sense of the word, human; and they are fully human only when they play.” (2) “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”2 Taken together, these maxims outline the program the Romantics pursued: how to train the play drive so as to bring about freedom.

As noted above, Beethoven, too, was inspired by Schiller’s dream of using art as a means to freedom. In fact, when he set the Ode “To Joy” to music, he chose the version that Schiller had revised in 1803 to better reflect his mature thoughts on how the joy of play leads to wholeness within the human race:

Schiller knew that, because of the innate dichotomy in every human being, this brotherhood was a goal to be pursued even though it could never be fully achieved. This view too—that freedom and harmony were to be found in process, and not in any final attainment—had an enormous influence on the Romantics, even though they ultimately rejected the psychology on which it was based. For the basic premise of their own psychology, they turned instead to Herder.

Herder

One of the ironies of the Romantic movement is that one of its prime fathers—Johann Gottfried Herder—received so little explicit acknowledgement from the early Romantics themselves. Perhaps this was because his influence was structural: He provided them with the basic outlines for their worldview, for their understanding of art, and for their sense of their own place in the world and in history. Because structure lies under the surface, it often goes unnoticed by people standing right next to it.

Another reason was that Herder was actively disliked by Kant and people loyal to Kant, such as Fichte. Of the various students who broke away from Kant, Herder excited within Kant the strongest feelings of betrayal, for Herder—in Kant’s eyes—had gone over to the enemy.

Herder had come from a poor background. Kant—seeing his talent—had arranged for him to attend his lectures gratis, and devoted a great deal of time to Herder’s growth as a student. However, Herder came under the influence of a mystical thinker living in Königsberg, Johann Georg Hamann, and eventually decided that Kant’s belief in pure, universal rational principles governing the entire life of the mind was far too narrow. In his eyes, the reasons of the human heart and mind—as exemplified in the vast range of human culture over the long course of history—were much too wonderfully variegated to be adequately judged and understood by universal rules. He also rejected Kant’s idea that aesthetic appreciation was to be treated simply as a subjective issue, for that would deny the possibility that important lessons could be learned by consciously developing one’s aesthetic tastes.

Herder’s life purpose thus became the quest for principles that would allow one to appreciate all products of human culture on their own terms—what he called the development of an “infinite sphere of taste,” not the narrow tastes of 18th century rationalism. As he wrote in his Four Critical Groves:

Through his writings and researches, Herder laid the groundwork for many modern and postmodern disciplines: cultural anthropology, folk studies, and intellectual history among them. He also revived, almost single-handedly, appreciation for the works of Shakespeare—who in the 18th century was at the nadir of his critical reputation—and he was among the first European philosophers to express admiration for the religions of India. He also devoted his spare time to collecting folk songs, first in Latvia, where he was briefly posted as a Lutheran minister, and then later, together with Goethe, in Germany. If diversity studies could have a dead white male as its patron saint, Herder would be the one.

Educated in philosophy, Herder tried to find philosophical underpinnings to justify his interests. The philosophy he eventually developed grew from three principles: vitalism, the theory that the universe is animated by an organic living force; historicism, the belief that something can be understood only through its own history and its place in the larger history of the universe; and monism, the theory that the universe is all One. He derived these three principles from three disparate sources. The vitalism came from the organic views of science that were developing at the time (Herder was a friend of the geologist, Johann Heinrich Merck, and cited Albrecht von Haller’s researches into the role of magnetism and electricity in biological tissues). The historicism came from the founder of art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768); and the monism, from Kant’s nemesis, Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677).

On a general level, there is a logic connecting all three sources. Haller’s vitalistic theories fit well with monism in that they claimed to erase any clear line dividing mind and matter; Winckelmann’s aesthetic theory fit well with vitalism through his theory that styles of art developed historically in organic ways. However, when we look at the details, we find that Herder had to make major adjustments in Spinoza’s philosophy for it to fit with the other two sources. Spinoza, had he been alive, would have been no more pleased than Kant was with the result.

Herder had been attracted to Spinoza’s monism for its vision of a universe not only One, but also One within God. This justified Herder’s interest in all things human, as they could be explained as expressions of the divine acting in and through human nature. However, Spinoza’s monism had entailed some less attractive conclusions. He taught that the universe could have only one substance, which was God, and that everything else was just an accident of that substance. The physical world and mental world were simply two aspects of one underlying substance. Each aspect, observed on its own terms, could be seen to obey its own laws, but because the physical was not essentially different from the mental, those laws were actually parallel.

Now, physical laws, in Spinoza’s account, were purely logical and mechanical, predetermined by necessity from the reason innate in God’s nature, and acting without apparent will or purpose. This meant that everything happening in the mind was predetermined by necessity as well. Spinoza even wrote his major philosophical work, the Ethica, along the lines of Euclid’s Geometry, to show how the behavior of things, in both the world of objects and the world of the mind, was derived necessarily from a single first cause.

Because God was the only substance, only God had freedom, which Spinoza defined as the power to follow one’s own nature. Human beings, as “finite modes” of God’s substance, had no freedom of choice because they acted, of necessity, in line with God’s reasons. Freedom for them—for their minds—consisted solely in the power to form a conception of the universe that was adequate for helping them to recognize and assent to the necessity of the way things were. This would then free them from their passions and allow them to live in equanimous acceptance. Similarly, only God was immortal; a human being could taste immortality only by accepting the way things were—although how one had the freedom to choose to accept or not accept these things, Spinoza never explained.

Spinoza’s philosophy is often seen as a reaction to the religious intolerance of his time. He argued that, as finite modes, human beings could never fully comprehend God or his purpose—if he had any—and so it was unreasonable to kill others whose conceptions of God and God’s purpose were different from one’s own. However, by identifying God with pure, necessary reasons, Spinoza had to explain away much of the Talmud and Bible, inasmuch as the God of those books was hardly the embodiment of reason. So he insisted that religious writings that defied reason had to be understood as nothing more than allegories, and their poetic effusions discarded.

Even though Kant had a similar view of the Bible, it’s easy to see why he felt such animus for Spinoza’s view of man’s place in the universe: It was antithetical to everything Kant found inspiring in the human heart and mind. Freedom, in Kant’s double sense of the word, was impossible in Spinoza’s philosophy.

Herder’s concern for freedom differed from Kant’s. He was interested in freedom less as a moral issue than as an aesthetic one—the freedom to develop an infinite sphere of taste—but there was no room for even this sort of freedom in Spinoza’s mechanistic view of the universe. So Herder simply updated that universe, replacing it with what he saw as the new scientific orthodoxy: the universe as organism, developing and evolving all the time. The laws of this universe were necessary, but they were also reciprocal, in constant interaction and interconnectedness, so that not everything was predetermined. And they acted teleologically, like all of life, for the purpose of achieving ends. As the universe evolved, its laws evolved as well, for higher and higher purposes.

Because the universe, in Herder’s view, was a manifestation of God’s substance, this meant that changing the universe required changing God as well. God was no longer timeless and immutable. He, too, evolved over time. In fact, he was the force that, through the necessity of his organic inner laws, drove evolution, and had a will and purpose. As a force, his operations were to be found in everything, from matter on up through all the activities of the mineral, plant, and animal world. These levels differed from one another not in kind, but only in complexity. But because these forces formed an organic whole, everything was unified in leading to the best possible goal. As Herder looked upon this universe, he saw that it—and everything within it—was good:

As the overarching force reached higher and higher levels of evolution in the human heart, Herder felt that it showed its most advanced forms not only in principles of theoretical reason, but also in the emotions—which, as with everything else, differed from reason not in kind but in levels of complexity. In its highest form, this force became the desire to be expressive. Its purpose was to communicate through its creative activity.

This point connected with Herder’s view of art—and all human creative expression. Because God is ever-evolving, his expression through human creativity must evolve as well. Thus there is no single standard for judging human creations as right or wrong, beautiful or not. Everything is to be judged by how suitably it expresses God’s force for the particular time and place when the work of art was created.

Here Herder borrowed a principle from the work of Johann Winckelmann, who had almost single-handedly invented the field of art history. Winckelmann, an ardent admirer and student of Greek art, had developed the theory—a commonplace today—that art should be appreciated, not in terms of eternal rules, but in line with its cultural and historical situation. This meant appreciating how, on the one hand, a work of art fit into the culture at the moment it was created, in relation to the philosophy, institutions, and mores of the time. On the other hand, it meant seeing how the work of art related to other works of art of a similar style that preceded and inspired it—or that it, in turn, inspired—to show where it fit into the organic laws of the birth, growth, flowering, or decline of that particular style.

To this theory of art, Herder added two elements. One, all human creative endeavors—this included not only the arts, but also science, philosophy, and religion as well—should be approached as art: i.e., not for their truth value, but for what they expressed of the heart motivated to bring them into being. Two, because God was the force shaping not only the artist’s inspiration but also the context in which the artist worked, the study of the history of human creative endeavors was not simply a pastime for the idle, but a way of developing a broader appreciation of the divine will at work in the universe.

The vast distance separating Herder from Spinoza can be illustrated by how each treated the Bible. As noted above, Spinoza found nothing worthwhile in the Bible aside from universal, rational principles on how to behave morally. For Herder, the most interesting parts of the Bible were the poems, especially the Psalms, because they were the most accessibly characteristic expressions of the culture in which they were composed. He wrote a revolutionary book, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, showing how the imagery of the Psalms perfectly expressed the distinctive strengths of early Hebrew culture and gave an insight into God that was missing in later cultures.

This approach, now called cultural relativism, succeeded both in elevating and demoting the Bible—and everything else to which Herder applied it. It elevated aspects of ancient literature that his contemporaries found rough and barbaric, showing that they, too, had their inner logic and charm. However, it demoted them by denying that they might have universal validity or authority.

The idea that no human thought could have universal validity would have been repugnant to Spinoza, inasmuch as he identified God with universal principles of reason. Nevertheless, Herder was so persuasive in the way he presented his appreciation of Spinoza that for the many succeeding generations, “Spinoza” meant Herder’s recasting of the latter’s doctrine. When the early Romantics spoke of combining what they saw as the two opposite poles of philosophy—Fichte and Spinoza—into a new synthesis, they were actually trying to unite Fichte and Herder.

For all his differences with Spinoza on the issue of causality, it’s hard to say that Herder fully avoided the difficulties of Spinoza’s doctrine of freedom. Herder, too, saw freedom as nothing more than the power to act in line with one’s nature. Even though he broadened “one’s nature” to include far more than one’s ability to form adequate concepts of reason, this doctrine still placed limits on how free a human being could be. The chief limit was that one was not free to change one’s nature or the forces acting within one. As an artist, one had some freedom in expressing those forces, but no freedom to step outside of the bounds of one’s time and place, or to defy the laws of the organic evolution of human culture—which, for Herder, were as necessary as the eternal laws of logic had been for Spinoza. Herder did grant a greater measure of freedom to the interpreter of art, for the latter, through conscious Bildung, could comprehend the laws of cultural evolution and so rise above some of the limitations imposed on the artist. But this was an ideal more to be pursued than fully attained. And in expressing one’s appreciation, one was bound by the same restrictions imposed on the artist.

Herder was a more enthusiastic than a systematic thinker, so he failed to address many of the weaknesses and inconsistencies in his thought. The major weakness, from Kant’s point of view, was that there was no empirical basis for erasing the line between mind and matter. As Kant argued in a review of Herder’s work, the fact that matter possesses energy, in the form of electricity and magnetism, is no proof that it acts purposefully for any specific end. We know purposeful activity only within our own minds, in observing ourselves act for the sake of ideas and principles, but there is no way we can get inside matter to know if it acts for the sake of ideas and principles as well. This means that Herder’s main principle for explaining the universe as One—a universal force acting for purposeful ends—explains things that are directly experienced by means of something that cannot be experienced at all.

As for the inconsistencies in Herder’s views, one stands out: If we assume that God acts in all human creations, why do some creations of a particular time and place better express his energy than others? And why are some cultures more receptive to his influence, and others less so? Herder was satisfied with the typical monistic answer to the problem of evil: that to see something as evil simply meant that one didn’t understand its role in the larger scheme of things. But he was bedeviled by the problem of the 18th century French: How could an entire culture be, from his point of view, so narrow and dismissive in its tastes? How could they fit into the larger scheme of things? What possible purpose could they serve? And what could a person bound in a narrow culture do to escape?

The difficulties in Herder’s concept of freedom, and the weaknesses and inconsistencies in his thought, carried over into Romantic views of the world and human psychology: What proof is there that everything is an expression of divine force? Even if one accepts the divine origin of forces within and without, how is one to decide which to follow and which ones not? Is one really free to choose?

As for the problem of narrow-minded cultures, the Romantics’ issue was not the narrowness of French culture. It was the narrowness of the German culture all around them. To gain insight into how to transcend those confines, they went outside that culture to the ancient philosopher most congenial to their project: Plato.

Plato

Plato, in his Socratic dialogues, had left a twofold legacy. On the one hand, there was Socrates the skeptic, who whittled away at the positions of his opponents until nothing was left, but then was coy about establishing a position of his own. On the other, there was Socrates the mystic, who spoke with great feeling on issues of friendship, love, beauty, and the eternal life of the soul.

The latter Socrates appealed to all the early Romantics, but the former had his Romantic admirers as well. In particular, Friedrich Schlegel extolled Socrates for his irony: his ability to take up a position, argue for it, then argue against it, and to keep moving on. This, Schlegel felt, exemplified philosophy as a living, dialectical process, rather than as a dead system, and provided him with the model for how he wanted to do philosophy, too.

But Socrates the mystic provided the Romantics with the positive goal for such a process: the search for inspiration in the creation of truly beautiful and expressive works of art. The two dialogues in which Socrates spoke most rhapsodically on these topics—the Phaedrus and the Symposium—were the ones the Romantics turned to most often.

Both dialogues taught that love of beauty was a conduit to the divine. In the Phaedrus, Socrates addressed the problem of love as madness, explaining it as a madness with a divine origin. He delineated several levels of divinely inspired madness, the next-to-highest being the madness that inspired poets to compose; the highest being love for a beautiful person. This love was divinely inspired, Socrates said, because the sight of a beautiful person stirred inchoate memories of the gods as seen in a previous lifetime, along with associations that those memories provoked. Once provoked, those associations drove one to pursue the beloved. This pursuit, however, could lead in either an exalting or a debasing direction.

Socrates illustrated this point with an analogy. The soul, he said, was like a chariot yoked with two horses: one noble, the other base. If the base horse overpowered the charioteer and the noble horse, the love would lead to nothing but the pursuit of carnal pleasure. However, if the charioteer and noble horse maintained control, the love would lead the lovers to abstain from such pleasures and to explore together the delights of philosophy instead. This would lead their souls on to a higher reincarnation after death.

In the Symposium, Socrates reported the lessons he had learned about love from Diotima, a mysterious woman from the East—and the only person, Schlegel noted, with whom Socrates never argued. Diotima taught that love was half-mortal, half-immortal: the medium through which human beings interacted with the divine. Love of beauty was driven by the purpose of finding immortality through procreation. On the lowest level, this meant creating babies. On the highest, though, it meant creating noble philosophical thoughts.

To achieve the highest level required training—Bildung, in the minds of the Romantics. It started with the love of a beautiful body, but then was to be trained to see the limitations of that particular beauty by detecting the same beauty also existing universally in other bodies, and on a higher level within many individual minds. Going beyond individuals, the soul was taught to appreciate higher and more refined levels of beauty—in customs, laws, and institutions—until it was able, in contemplation, to perceive the eternal form of beauty itself. From that contemplation one was able to give birth, “not to images of virtue—because one is in touch with no images—but to true virtue—because one is in touch with the true Beauty. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”5

In both dialogues, Socrates was quite insistent on the point that although appreciation of beauty may begin with erotic lust, it quickly has to outgrow sexual activity if it is to lead upward. This point, though, went right past the Romantics. They were more struck by the fact that Socrates—unlike Christianity and philosophers such as Kant—taught that lust was far from being antithetical to the divine and was instead a necessary part of the path leading there. Love for another person activated one’s appreciation for the divine forces at work in the world. That appreciation was then extended, through love of humanity, love of nature, and love of art, to a level where one’s expressive artistic creations absorbed more and more of the universe, and so were able to transcend—as much as humanly possible—the limitations of one’s culture. In so doing, they could inspire in others the sense of love and fellowship through which a truly free society could grow. As long as one’s love could stimulate these higher dimensions, the early Romantics thought, there was no need to abandon the beauties of carnal pleasures.

This was where the ideology of Romantic love, as both a personal and a political program, began.

Literature

With love such an important part of the growth of wisdom and a sense of one’s true place—vis à vis the world and its creator—it became obvious to the early Romantics that philosophy, as taught in the universities, was not the best medium for expressing and generating the whole of wisdom. There was no place for love in the academic classroom. At best, academic philosophy could offer rigor in exploring only part of human nature: reason. The whole of human nature, in all its emotional variety, required a different and vaster genre entirely: literature.

Herder had argued earlier that—because human language dealt primarily in analogies, and because literature was more sophisticated than philosophy in its handling of analogies—one could learn more about human nature through literature than through philosophy. But for Herder, literature primarily meant poetry: dramatic, epic, and lyrical—the works of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, and Shakespeare.

The Romantics, however, had grown up in a culture that was more profoundly shaped by a new genre of literature that was concerned less with analogies than with psychological development. That genre was the novel: der Roman in German, le roman in French.

In the late 18th century, the novel was still a new art form. Because ancient Greece and Rome had had no novels, there were no ancient standards for judging what a novel should or shouldn’t do. So novelists took almost everything as their subject matter, and experimented with a wide variety of styles, sometimes within an individual work. The experimental fiction of the present is no more experimental than what many novelists, such as Lawrence Sterne, were doing then. Officially—i.e., in the literary theory taught in the universities of the time—dramatic poetry was considered the highest form of art. But because novels, unlike drama, were primarily intended to be read by individuals, novelists were free to explore subjects that drama did poorly at best: revealing the organically developing inner life and thoughts of their characters.

The fact that novels were expressing something genuinely new was illustrated by the unprecedented sensation caused by two novels in the latter half of the century: Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Julie, in six volumes, told a story of doomed love in which the main characters described and analyzed the development of their feelings in extravagant detail. Werther, in the form of letters exchanged among the two main characters and their friends, told of a young man who, in love with a woman betrothed to another, ended up committing suicide. This latter novel struck such a raw nerve that a rash of suicides followed its publication—a fact that caused Goethe no end of regret. And both novels begat industries: Switzerland saw an uptick in the number of tourists wanting to visit locations where scenes in Julie had taken place; in Germany, it was possible to buy collectible plates illustrated with scenes from Werther. Because of the realism of both novels, many readers were convinced that they were not fictions, but portrayed actual events.

But what sort of realism was this? Julie had sparked a critical row in Germany when Moses Mendelssohn—one of the last great figures of the German Enlightenment, and Dorothea Schlegel’s father—had argued that Julie was unreadable, first because its long discussions of emotion were hard to stomach. “I believe,” he said, “that there is nothing more unbearable than when the pathetic becomes the loquacious.”6 Even worse, he said, the novel’s long declarations of love were totally unrealistic: Nobody in real life who was really in love would ever speak that way.

In response, Johann Georg Hamann, Herder’s mystical mentor, replied that Mendelssohn had no appreciation for the “true nature of the romantic.” Novels, he argued, exposed and explored a deep level of truth that the strictures of society usually kept hidden. It didn’t matter whether most people talked that way. There was a part of the human soul that wanted to—and novels provided the necessary outlet for its expression.

Mendelssohn was not silenced by this response. He took Hamann’s phrase and rearranged it, saying that the “romantic nature of truth” had to abide by the rules of all truth: to be cogent, coherent, and orderly. Hamann was demanding a leap of faith in allowing for a truth that had no order at all.

This exchange marked one of the first times “romantic” was used as an adjective to describe a type of truth. And although Mendelssohn had the last word in this particular skirmish, Hamann’s position eventually carried the day. The view that novels—even though their stories might be improbable and extreme—explored psychological development with a realism that no other genre could, became more and more influential until it was taken for granted.

Goethe, in his later novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96), tried to articulate what was distinctive about the genre by comparing it with drama. Drama, he said, is concerned with character and action; novels, with sentiment and events. In other words, novels focus less on the characters’ motivation for action, and more on how they feel about events. In fact, sentiments should propel the story. If the propulsion was slow and organic, that was to be expected and even enjoyed. No matter how long the characters took to sort out their feelings, there was plenty of room to take the reader through all the steps.

Fate should play a major role in dramas, Goethe went on to say, but not in novels. Novels, to be true to life, needed to make room for Chance. In fact, the driving force of the novel should not be external Fate but internal emotional development in response to chance occurrences.

Finally, Goethe noted that novelistic—i.e., romantic—traits were not limited to novels. In fact, this discussion of genres in Wilhelm Meister was a prelude to a discussion of Hamlet, in which the characters note that Hamlet was driven more by sentiment than by character, and so Shakespeare’s portrayal of him was actually an “expansion of a novel.” What made Hamlet a true drama in their eyes was the fact that Fate led to a necessary and tragic end.

This discussion is apparently what led Schlegel and his fellow Romantics to list Shakespeare as a “romantic” author, even though Shakespeare never wrote novels. Romanticism, as Schlegel defined it under Goethe’s influence, was less a genre of writing and more a general approach to literature as a whole.

Wilhelm Meister itself is a prime example of this approach: a novel impelled by sentiment and chance events. The story is primarily concerned with the emotional development of the title character—it was one of the first German Bildungsromane, or novels of how a young person grows and matures. Wilhelm starts out bright, inquisitive, and articulate, but emotionally immature. As the events unfold, he makes many decisions about what to do with his life, but in almost all cases, the more his decisions come from his head, the more disastrous they turn out to be. In the end, events—and the kindly intervention of people around him—teach him how to find happiness by listening to his heart and learning to appreciate the wisdom of those who genuinely love him. Although the apprenticeship of the title seems at first to refer to Wilhelm’s pursuit of a career in the theatre, he drops that interest toward the end of the book, after which there comes the revelation that his apprenticeship is really a series of lessons in how to master nothing less than the art of living itself.

As noted above, Schlegel cited Wilhelm Meister as one of the three major “tendencies of the age.” As with the other tendencies, he felt that the book had its imperfections, but by and large he and his friends thought very highly of it, and regarded it—together with its author—as one of the few bright lights of German literary culture. Novalis, although he later changed his mind on the book, had a very favorable first impression of it, calling it the “Absolute Novel.” Schlegel, in one of his critical fragments, added, “Whoever could manage to interpret Goethe’s Meister properly would have expressed what is now happening in literature. He could, so far as literary criticism is concerned, retire forever.”7 In both cases, the appeal seems to be that they saw it as an inspiring example of how a novel can contribute to the Bildung of a reader who wants to master the art of living as well.

For Novalis, one of the prime lessons in Wilhelm Meister lay in its element of magic. The Abbé—wise, kindly, and old—watches over Wilhelm’s apprenticeship from afar without Wilhelm’s knowledge, and occasionally interferes from behind the scenes to alert Wilhelm to the fact that there is more to the world than he conceives. The Abbé’s knowledge of Wilhelm’s mind-states and activities—which he copies into a manuscript that he shows to Wilhelm toward the end of the book—cannot be explained by normal human powers, and Goethe seems to imply that no explanation is required. The attractiveness of the idea—that there is a benevolent, omniscient being overseeing one’s spiritual progress—is offered as explanation enough. Novalis later employed a similar device toward the beginning of his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which young Heinrich finds an ancient illustrated but incomplete book, written in Provençal, which clearly contains the story of his life. Novalis, however, does offer an explanation for this bit of magic when he states that nature contains magical dimensions that are closed to those who don’t approach it with a sense of imagination, but are open to those who do. In other words, imagination adds nothing false to nature. It simply brings out the magic already potentially and authentically there.

This sense of magic was what Novalis had earlier recommended when he stated that, “Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.”8 As one saw the magical in the ordinary, one “romanticized” life—this was his term—and one thereby made oneself “authentic”—again, his term. The ability to turn the commonplace and ordinary into the mysterious and sublime was what confirmed one’s freedom and power to shape one’s experience, to taste one’s share of the infinite. Wilhelm Meister, even though Novalis later repudiated it for taking an ironic stance toward the arts, nevertheless had offered him lessons in what a romantic, authentic viewpoint could be.

For Schlegel, the appeal of Wilhelm Meister was more complex. In an extended review written for Athenäum, he stated that the novel’s lessons in Bildung operated on three levels.

The first level concerned the book’s content. The stages in Wilhelm’s Bildung illustrate many principles on how to educate one’s own sentiments. And these principles are not merely implicit in the events. Goethe fills the novel with discussions among the characters about art, love, philosophy—all aspects of life, even the most tasteful way to decorate a home and entertain guests. (The German fashion of having music in the background during meals, but with the musicians hidden from view, was apparently inspired by Goethe’s recommendations on the point.) As the characters reveal themselves in their words and actions, they offer the reader ample food for thought: both inspiring examples of lives well-lived, and affecting examples of lives gone astray, seeking redemption, and deserving compassion in unexpected ways. Simply to read the book on this level is to learn a great deal about life.

However, the second level of Bildung that Schlegel detected in the book went deeper. This was the challenge offered by the book’s form—or rather, its lack of any easily discernible form. In line with Goethe’s theory of Chance, the story is episodic and often causes the reader to wonder if it is going anywhere at all. Schlegel noted the randomness of the novel, but he called it a “cultivated randomness”: randomness with a higher purpose. He saw it not as a weakness but as part of the novel’s strength as an agent of Bildung. In his eyes, a reader gained Bildung not only by being exposed to the events of the story but also by being forced to reflect and contemplate the structure of the novel on a deeper level so as to make sense of the whole. This exercise in imaginative reflection, then, trained the reader to see not only the wholeness and coherence of the novel, but to detect wholeness and coherence in his or her own life. In this way, even after leaving the novel, one would be a changed person. As Schlegel said in one of his fragments extolling the “synthetic writer,” apparently referring to Goethe:

By entering into the “sacred relationship” of this dialogue with the author, one sharpens one’s critical powers and becomes co-author of the book. In so doing, one gains heightened appreciation of the processes of sensibility in all life that the Romantics learned from their biology professors: that one has to learn to be both receptive to outside stimuli and active in shaping them to participate fully in the ongoing, organic life of the universe.

This dialogue with the author leads to a third level in the novel’s lessons in Bildung: a deep exposure to what was, in Goethe’s case, a truly cultivated mind. Because the Romantics, through their scientific education, had come to see the human mind as a microcosm of the infinite, it’s easy to see why Schlegel viewed the opportunity for exposure to the great mind of a cultivated author as an opportunity to see the whole world anew. In one of his fragments, he stated:

In his review of Wilhelm Meister, he added:

Part of this indwelling genius, Schlegel felt, was Goethe’s stance as narrator of the novel. Although the narrator shows affection for all of his characters, he maintains a somewhat ironic distance toward them throughout, giving them room to demonstrate their foibles and weaknesses. This allows the reader to form his or her own judgments and, at the same time, to experience directly the heightened view of life that an ironic distance can afford. As we will see in the next chapter, the principle of ironic distance as a means of appreciating the wholeness of life was central to Schlegel’s own philosophy.

Schlegel was convinced that the organizing principle behind Wilhelm Meister was Goethe’s attempt to present a theory of art and its place in life. He also felt that, by presenting this theory in the form of a novel, Goethe had found a way to convey a philosophy that more than compensated for what it lacked in logical rigor by being alive and compelling.

In other words, Schlegel felt that Goethe had learned how to exploit the strengths of the novel as a genre not only to convey psychological insights but also to communicate a total philosophy, including history and science, in a living, evolving, progressive way. Wilhelm Meister had combined “poetry”—i.e., fine literature—and philosophy into one. This, for Schlegel, was the most important tendency exhibited by the book, for it suggested a way to rescue philosophy from the stuffiness of the academy and bring it to life. As he said in one of his fragments, “Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. And this free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry.”13

For this reason, the desire to unite poetry—i.e., any fine literature written in a novelistic style—with philosophy became one of the early Romantics’ major crusades. Schelling was a notable exception to this desire, but the other four major early Romantics all wrote novels and other “romantic,” “synthetic” pieces of literature as their primary vehicles for expressing their philosophic vision. And given the view of the universe they had adopted from Herder—as an infinite, organic unity, in which the parts evolve through continual interaction toward an unknowable goal—an open-ended genre that allows for philosophy to be expressed through dialogue, irony, intuition, love, and psychological development was an ideal medium for conducting the philosophical enterprise in the context of that universe.

The early Romantics did not call themselves “Romantics.” Even though they used the term freely to describe the literature they admired, the first person to apply it to them was their first great French admirer, Madame Germaine de Staël, in her book, On Germany (1813). She herself was a novelist, and in calling Schlegel and his cohorts “Romantics” she meant to underline the way in which their philosophy took a novelistic form. However, she also regarded them as apolitical, which was something of a mistake. As Schlegel’s comment about the tendencies of the age suggests, he and his friends saw their engagement with philosophy and literature as having a political dimension, too. However much they disagreed with Schiller on the details of his aesthetic theory, they agreed with him that, “It is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Toward this end, they wanted to combine philosophy and literature in a way that would provide Germans with the Bildung they needed to find liberty, equality, and fraternity while at the same time avoiding the mistakes of the French Revolution.

Madame de Staël may have dismissed the early Romantics’ political program because she was writing about them shortly after their group had disbanded without having produced any coherent political theory or tangible political results. There were several reasons for their failure on this part, and—as we will see in the next chapter—one of the main reasons was that the scientific worldview underlying their philosophy undermined the possibility of personal freedom. Their attempts to synthesize the tendencies of their age fell apart because some of those tendencies could not be reconciled with the lessons that William Herschel had seen in the stars.

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