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).