The German Genius

“totally alien to the Germans, who were morally but not politically inclined. Interested in metaphysics, poetry and music but not in voting rights or the proper procedures of the parliamentary system, for them Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a more radical act than the proclamation of the rights of man.”

In the 1950s the German historian Carl Hinrichs advanced the thesis that the source of the Prussian state-service ideology can best be understood as the fruit of the Pietist movement,

The very concept of honor (Ehre) was itself transformed. Honor was no longer only a reflection of distinction in purely military matters: it now became necessary for an officer to fulfill his duty to others more widely—as a quartermaster, say, as a drillmaster, even as an accountant. What mattered was how much an officer had helped his neighbors, albeit subordinates. The

An important observation comes out of all this: the German intelligentsia differed sharply from its counterparts in other countries. In France, the intelligentsia became estranged from the royal regime, so much so that it eventually attacked the traditional authorities. In Russia the intelligentsia consisted almost entirely of nobles, and in Britain neither the term nor the concept existed until the twentieth century. In Germany, because a university education was needed for a government position, the intelligentsia was drawn from all social levels. Not irrelevant either was the fact that Germany at that time lacked a metropolitan capital to rival London or Paris. This left the German intelligentsia dispersed yet far more intimately involved in practical state administration than anywhere else. Whereas British and American sociologists have characterized “remoteness from the practical world of government and administration” as one of the identifying features of the intelligentsia, this is manifestly not true of Germany.52

The period between 1687, when Isaac Newton’s discoveries in Principia Mathematica confirmed and systematized the earlier observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, and 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, comprises a unique time span in the history of Western thought, though it is not always seen as such. It was a time when a purely religious purpose to life (salvation in a future state) was called into question while there was as yet no other model to replace it, when Darwin’s biological understanding of man had yet to appear. The fact that so much of Germany’s golden age came between these two dates—1687 and 1859—was to have profound consequences, consequences that affected Germany more than anywhere else. Intellectually speaking, the country was shaped during this crucial—unique—transitional period. In particular, and most important, this transitional period saw the development of historicism and the rise of biology.

was the idea that if the rest of the universe was governed by (relatively) simple laws—accessible to figures like René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Antoine Lavoisier, and Carl Linnaeus—then surely human nature itself should be governed by equally simple and accessible general laws.

was the idea that if the rest of the universe was governed by (relatively) simple laws—accessible to figures like René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Antoine Lavoisier, and Carl Linnaeus—then surely human nature itself should be governed by equally simple and accessible general laws.

With this went a further profound change—the reconceptualization of the soul as the mind, the mind increasingly understood by reference to consciousness, language, and its relationship with this world, in contrast to the soul, with its immortality and preeminent role in the next world. This was, in other words, the replacement of theology by biology (a word not introduced until 1802).

Locke himself used the word “mind,” not “soul,” and referred to experience and observation, rather than some “innate” or religious (revelatory) origin, as the source of ideas. Locke further argued that motivation was based on experience—nature—which helped form the mind, rather than derived from some transcendent force operating on the soul.

“I,” was not some mystical entity relating to the soul, but an “assemblage of sensations and passions that constitutes experience.”

According to Leibniz, both the physical and spiritual realms were characterized by change.

Natural Law was understood in this way “as the force that arranged things.”

but it is the beginning of an explanation of the formation of civil society in developmental terms.

Isaak Iselin, in Über die Geschichte der Menschheit (History of Mankind), published in revised form in 1768, characterized history as man’s spiritual struggle to overcome nature. Conceived in this way, he was led to consider three ideal types of human behavior: man ruled by his senses, man ruled by his imagination, and man ruled by his reason, producing a threefold periodization of history: the state of savagery (senses), of cultivation (imagination), of human maturity/harmony among the three faculties (reason).

Isaak Iselin, in Über die Geschichte der Menschheit (History of Mankind), published in revised form in 1768, characterized history as man’s spiritual struggle to overcome nature. Conceived in this way, he was led to consider three ideal types of human behavior: man ruled by his senses, man ruled by his imagination, and man ruled by his reason, producing a threefold periodization of history: the state of savagery (senses), of cultivation (imagination), of human maturity/harmony among the three faculties (reason).

The study of living forms, they insisted, offered the opportunity for what they called “immediate” or “experiential” understanding. The experience of other people, animals, and plants was direct, unlike the experience of, for example, mathematics. This mode of understanding, Resewitz’s anschauende Erkenntnis, became the major approach to knowledge in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Blumenbach observed that the repaired area was never quite as good as new but always retained a depression. He was led to conclude “First that in all living organisms, a special inborn Trieb [drive, or motivating force] exists which is active throughout the entire lifespan of the organism, by means of which they receive a determinate shape originally, then maintain it, and when it is destroyed repair it where possible. Second, that all organized bodies have a Trieb which is to be distinguished from the general properties of the body as a whole as well as from the particular forces characteristic of that body. This Trieb appears to be the cause of all generation, reproduction, and nutrition. I call it the Bildungstrieb.”

Blumenbach believed that the Bildungstrieb was teleological in character and “immanent” in the material constitution of the organism. In a way, of course, the Bildungstrieb doesn’t explain anything—it is merely a name for a mysterious process. But that is what appealed to Kant.

In the organic realm, on the other hand, “cause and effect are so mutually interdependent that it is impossible to think of one without the other…This is a teleological mode of explanation, for it involves the notion of a ‘final cause.’”

They were originally development stages and only later achieved the rank of independent species;

Yet evolutionism was far more popular in Germany than anywhere else.

And so, in the late eighteenth century, in Germany, doubt, deism, Pietism, and the drive toward perfection—in history, in art, in biology—all came together to create a way of looking at the world, looking within, looking back, and looking forward all at the same time.