The German Genius Page 9

  Even by the end of the seventeenth century, fifty years before our starting point, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited. Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, for holding opinions that no one could prove one way or the other. The observations of Kepler and Galileo transformed man’s view of the heavens, and the flood of discoveries from the New World promoted an interest in the diversity of customs and beliefs found on the other side of the Atlantic. It was obvious to many that God favored diversity over uniformity and that Christianity and Christian concepts—like the soul and a concentration on the afterlife—were not necessarily crucial elements since so many lived without them. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the invention of printing matured, that vernacular translations of the Bible brought the book before a lay audience who now discovered that many traditions were actually nowhere to be found in the scriptures. The Bible also came under more systematic criticism when it was shown that the original Old Testament had been written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, meaning the scriptures could not have been dictated to Moses by God: the Old Testament was not “inspired.”

  As more and more people began to lose faith in the Bible, the calculations of the earth’s age based on the scriptures lost support also. The new science of geology suggested that the earth must be a great deal older than the 6,000 or so years it said in the Old Testament, and Robert Hooke, at the Royal Society in London, observed that fossils, now recognized for what they were, showed animals that no longer existed. This too suggested that the earth was much older than the Bible said: these species had come and gone before the scriptures were written. This had implications for the significance of the Creation.

  The effect of all this was to produce a world where the very nature of doubt (or the reasons for it) was itself always changing. In fact, the growth of doubt went through four distinct stages: rationalistic supernaturalism, deism, skepticism, and, finally, full-blown atheism.

  Deistic thought was the most important stage. It came into existence first in England, from where it spread to both the Continent and America. The actual word “deist” was coined by the Genevois Pierre Viret (1511–71) to describe someone who believed in God but not in Jesus Christ. The anthropological discoveries in America, Africa, and elsewhere only underlined that all men had a religious sense but that on the other continents there was no awareness of Jesus. The deists were also influenced by new discoveries in the physical sciences, which suggested that God was not an arbitrary figure, as in ancient Judaism for example, but the maker of the laws that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and the others had uncovered. The deists in fact achieved a major transformation in the concept of God, arguably the greatest change in understanding since the development of ethical monotheism in the sixth century B.C. God lost his “divine arbitrariness” and was now regarded as a lawmaking and law-abiding deity.

  The atheists were predominantly French and were known as mechanists (as the intellectual heirs of Newton they were inspired by the idea of a mechanical universe). Voltaire was just one who thought that science had shown that the universe was governed by “natural laws,” which applied to all men and that countries—kingdoms, states—should be governed in the same way. Voltaire convinced himself that, through work, religious ideas would eventually be replaced by scientific ones. Man, he insisted, need no longer lead his life on the basis of atoning for his original sin; instead he should work to improve his existence here on earth, reforming the institutions of government, church, and education. “Work and projects were to take the place of ascetic resignation.”

  These new attitudes, grounded in the recent advances of science, together with the fact that more and more people could read of these discoveries, meant that the optimistic idea of progress was suddenly on everyone’s mind, and this too was both a cause and symptom of changes in religious belief. Until the likes of Michel de Montaigne and Voltaire, the Christian life had been a sort of intellectual limbo: people on earth tried to be good in the manner laid down by the church but, in effect, they accepted the notion of perfection at Creation, followed by the Fall and decline ever since. The faithful expected fulfillment only in “a future state.”

  Pietism was of course a response to this, a religious response. It stressed the (moral) rewards available in this life. A quite different response, however, which matured as the century wore on, 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). As we shall see—and if an ugly neologism be allowed—the “biologification” of the world took place preeminently in Germany.

  The individual mainly responsible for this approach, at first, was the Englishman John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690. In this book, prepared in draft in 1671, 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. One unsettling effect of this was to further remove God from morality. Morality has to be taught, said Locke; it is not innate. Arguably most important of all, he said that the sense of self, the “I,” was not some mystical entity relating to the soul, but an “assemblage of sensations and passions that constitutes experience.” This was a key ingredient in the birth of psychology, even if that term was not much used yet.

  Alongside the rise of psychology, in Locke’s hands, and the (gradual) replacement of the concept of the soul with that of the mind, went a closer study of the brain. Thomas Willis had carried out numerous dissections of brains, helping to show that the ventricles (the central spaces where the cortex was folded in on itself) had no blood supply and was therefore unlikely to be the location of the soul, as some believed. Madness was increasingly being explained as a Gemütskrankheit, “failure of the mind,” understood as housed in a bodily organ, the brain. Yet more biologification.

  These changing beliefs were embodied, perhaps inevitably, in a work that took them to extremes. L’homme machine (Man a Machine) by the French surgeon Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, published in 1747, argued that thought is a property of matter “on a par with electricity,” coming down on the side of determinism, materialism, and atheism, all of which were to land the author in hot water. His nonetheless influential view was that human nature and animal nature were part of the same continuum, that human nature equated with physical nature; and he insisted that there were no “immaterial substances,” thus casting further doubt on the existence of the soul. Matter, he said, was animated by natural forces and had its own organizational powers. This, he said, left no room for God.

  La Mettrie’s book was as controversial as it was extreme, and it provoked a mighty backlash. That backlash was led from Germany.

  THE RISE OF HISTORICISM

  In Germany there were two important areas of particular interest that would have a long-term effect on the country’s intellectual life. These areas were history and biology, though aesthetics and the concept of genius also formed part of the picture.

  Just as Richard Gawthrop has recently recovered a number of Pietistic writers and writings from obscurity and given them a new prominence, Peter Hanns Reill has done the same with seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century German historians. In doing this, he makes clear that the Aufklärung—to distinguish it from the French, English, and Scottish Enlightenments—had a number of achievements to its credit by the time of Bach’s death, and certainly by the time of Friedrich the Great’s.

  The Aufklärung, he points out, came later than the “Western” Enlightenment (i.e., in France, England, and Scotland), “and so it could and did borrow from its neighbours.” Though they borrowed from Voltaire and Hume, the Aufklärer (as Reill calls them), did so selectively, to address problems of specific concern in German intellectual life. Mostly, these stemmed from the impact of Leibnizian philosophy.2 According to Leibniz, both the physical and spiritual realms were characterized by change. This is an unexceptional thing to say in the twenty-first century, but it was very different then: the Christian worldview implied not exactly a static state of affairs, as the Greeks had viewed their environment, but a world in limbo—Christians, even Pietists, were waiting for perfection in the next world. Moreover, and this is a point we shall return to time and again, the change envisioned by Leibniz was teleological: it was understood as development toward a specific goal, a goal that was vaguely inherent in the nature of the entity undergoing change.

  Here then is the crucial point: change was accepted in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe, and Germany in particular, but it was expected to have a direction, though no one knew what that direction was or what it entailed. Moreover, the discovery of that direction now lay in activities outside the church.

  Once the principle of change had been accepted, the concept of history also changed (and so too did the understanding of politics, considered later). Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, the normal stance for German historians was similar to that of Sigmund Baumgarten, who argued that history’s main purpose was to confirm man’s impotence in the face of God’s will—in other words to show that history underlined the veracity of Christianity.3 In 1726, the Halle-trained historian and jurist Johann David Köhler announced that “the best chronologists date the beginning of the world on the 26th of October in the year 1657 before the Flood and 3,947 years before Christ’s birth. To be sure,” he continued, “the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans, as well as the modern Chinese, make the world many thousands of years older, but Holy Scripture is more believable than all other books of heathen fables founded on the ancients’ search for fame.”4

  By 1760, however, a definite shift was discernible. Instead of using history to confirm specific Christian episodes, these thinkers (known in Germany as Neologists) attempted to steer a path between orthodox, deist, and Pietist beliefs. The Neologists did not deny the importance of dogma, but nor did they accept that it was universally valid. For example, they felt able to surrender Christian chronology without rejecting the rest of Christianity, and this was an important milestone in the development of doubt.5 The German Neologists argued that the Bible should be understood as a collection of books written at different times and in response to different circumstances. They took what we might regard as an anthropological approach: they accepted that God’s commands were transmitted in these books, but they also conceded that the transmission was carried out by human agents who were responding to specific circumstances. The importance of the books lay in the fact that they always expressed a moral law, but the message was dressed in what Johann Salomo Semler called a “local” or “provincial” dialect. On this reckoning, it would have been inappropriate “for God to have his message transmitted in Newtonian language at a time when that language would have been totally incomprehensible.” Similarly, it would be equally anachronistic for someone living in the eighteenth century to accept that the world was created in six days just because “this was the way a primitive nomadic people grasped and expressed God’s majesty.”6

  Johann David Michaelis expanded this view. He argued that the way in which the ancient Israelites had transmitted their sacred knowledge was very different from that of eighteenth-century Europeans. Chronology, he insisted, was relatively unimportant to the Israelites of the Mosaic era. Instead, Moses provided his people with a selective genealogy, recording “only those events that had meaning in the memory of his people and revealed God’s message.” The rest was unimportant.7 Moreover, given that the Bible was a collection of books compiled by single individuals, who lived at different times and places, it was only natural that contradictions would occur. With this bold move, the Neologists overturned the assault on Holy Scripture by asserting that the contradictions in the text actually confirmed its validity.

  This new view enabled imaginative scholars to suggest a fresh understanding of chronology. Johann Christoph Gatterer, for example, related the age of the people in the Bible to the Fall of man. Man’s life span during the biblical chronology, he observed, was divided into six levels, in the course of which life span declined from an average of 900–969 years (until the Flood), to 600 years, 450 years, 239 years (building the Tower of Babel), 120 years (the Mosaic era), to 70–80 years (since David’s time). Gatterer explained the change in life spans against the background of a hypothetical natural history. According to this, the earth—created perfect by God—took some time after Adam’s original sin to arrive at its present stage of imperfection. “The immediate post-Adamite air had been cleaner and healthier, the earth richer and more fertile, the fruits and vegetables bigger, better and more nourishing.” That is why people lived longer and why, he said, the earth had more people in it before the Flood than at any time since.8

  In this way, then, as Peter Hanns Reill has noted, the chronology of the Christian creation myth became “hermetically sealed off” from the remainder of historical analysis.9 This allowed people to keep their faith, but it also allowed the development of historical understanding outside the biblical chronology. Although scholars might have disagreements about the actual course of history since biblical times, it was now accepted that, in the interim, there had been development, evolution (though not yet in a Darwinian sense), and that development was accessible to the diligent historian. “The rise of historicism is one of the great intellectual revolutions of the modern age.”10

  Another intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century, with important implications for historians, was the triumph of Natural Law. This came about partly through the astronomical/physical/mathematical discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, and partly through the biological and anthropological discoveries in the New World, Africa, and elsewhere. Given the laws discovered by Newton and others, and the fact that “primitive” tribes in the newly discovered parts of the world lacked Christianity but still had religion and lived in civil societies, these patterns fostered the idea that there must be in human affairs fundamental regularities—laws—that existed much as gravity existed, only needing a Newton to uncover them. Natural Law was understood in this way “as the force that arranged things.”11

  The meaning of the words “nature” and “natural” were not always obvious. For classical thinkers, unaware for the most part of “primitive peoples,” the natural state was life in a healthy civil society. Christians, on the other hand, always made a distinction between the state of nature (itself divided into the “pure state” of nature and the “state of fallen nature”) and the state of grace. Men such as Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius, however, attempted to redefine the idea of nature so as to arrive at a new explanation for the origin of things. Thomas Hobbes in particular concerned himself with the state of nature that existed before civil society. This too implies change, development, evolution.12

  Reill identifies three German scholars in particular who all taught at Göttingen and all built on Hobbes and embraced Natural Law to explain the evolution of society. Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) conceived of primitive society as a collection of states so small they “resembled families.”13 Ruled by elected judges, these small states were so uncorrupted that authority could be exercised in a simple “parental” manner. The experience of s
uch peoples was expressed in their sacred poetry. Gottfried Achenwall (1719–72) said that ever-larger states were created “by contract” between smaller ones; the aim was to ensure maximum and mutual happiness. The agreements that made up the contract formed the basic constitution which shaped the character of the state. Achenwall’s colleague Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807) thought there were other types of social organization that came between the family and the state. He called these Gemeinde (a loose grouping of people) and Volk (a collection of families and/or Gemeinde), which bodies he thought lacked sovereignty. None of this is totally satisfactory but it is the beginning of an explanation of the formation of civil society in developmental terms. August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) summed up the new thinking: “Since the beginning of the human race, a beginning we do not know and cannot rationally reconstruct, three basic types of social organisation have developed in succession: familial [häusliche] organisation, civil [bürgerliche] groups, and state-society [Staatsgesellschaften].” For him, the moment of state formation was the point separating history from prehistory. Here too the scriptural account of the Creation was sealed off. The biblical account was now held to apply solely to the Israelites, which allowed the Aufklärer to argue that the basic principle governing mankind as a whole was Natural Law.14

  And so, in this way, history gradually acquired a new function—it was to discover how society in the past had developed so that future evolution might be understood.15

  WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS CONVEYED BY ART?

  If societies developed over time, what force or forces propelled that change? Natural Law might be operating at some level but the Aufklärer were attracted by the notion that perfection was not a static quality inherent in the nature of things. Instead, they understood that perfection was to be achieved by “the forces of the spirit.” To them, the mind (itself a relatively new concept) was not a merely passive reflector of sensations but “possessed an inherent creative energy…Increasingly, they located the motor element of history in the actions of man’s spirit.”16