by Will Durant
As Kant entered his last decade (1794) his early optimism suffered darkening, perhaps because of reaction in Prussia and the coalition of the powers against Revolutionary France. He retired into himself, and secretly wrote that gloomy Opus postumum which was to be his last testament to mankind.
VII. POSTHUMOUS
Physically he was one of the smallest men of his time—just a little above five feet in height, and made still shorter by a forward curvature of the spine. His lungs were weak, his stomach ailed; he survived only by a regular and abstemious regimen. It was characteristic of him that at seventy he wrote an essay “On the Power of the Mind to Master the Feeling of Illness by Force of Resolution.” He stressed the wisdom of breathing through the nose; one could avoid many colds, and other mishaps, by keeping his mouth shut.90 So, in his daily walks, he walked alone, shunning conversation. He went to bed punctually at ten, rose at five, and in thirty years (he assures us) never overslept.91 Twice he thought of marriage, twice he retreated. But he was not unsociable; usually he invited one or two guests, most often his pupils—never any woman—to share his dinner at 1 P.M. He was a professor of geography, but rarely moved outside Königsberg; he never saw a mountain, and probably—near though it was—never saw the sea.92 He was sustained through poverty and censorship by a pride that only outwardly yielded to any authority other than his own reason. He was generous, but he was severe in his judgments, and lacked that sense of humor which should save philosophy from taking itself too seriously. His moral sense rose at times to an ethical pedantry that held all pleasures suspect until they had proved themselves virtuous.
He cared so little for organized religion that he attended church only when his academic functions required it.93 He seems never to have prayed in his mature life.94 Herder reported that Kant’s students based their religious skepticism on Kant’s teaching.95 “It is indeed true,” Kant wrote to Mendelssohn, “that I think many things with the clearest conviction, and to my great satisfaction, which I never have the courage to say, but I never say anything that I do not think.”96
Till his last years he strove to improve his work. In 1798 he told a friend: “The task with which I now busy myself has to do with the transition from the metaphysical basis of the natural sciences to physics. This problem must be solved, or otherwise here is a gap in the system of critical philosophy.”97 But in that letter he described himself as “incapacitated for intellectual work.” He entered into a long period of physical decline, accumulating ailments, and the loneliness of unmarried old age. He died on February 12, 1804. He was buried in the Königsberg cathedral, in what is now known as the Stoa Kantiana; and over his grave were inscribed his words, “The starry heavens above me; the moral law within me.”
At his death he left a confused mass of writings which were published as his Opus postumum in 1882-84. In one of these he described the “thing-in-itself”—the unknowable substratum behind phenomena and ideas—as “not a real thing, … not an existing reality, but merely a principle … of the synthetic a priori knowledge of the manifold sense-intuition.”98 He named it a Gedankending, a thing existing only in our thought. And he applied the same skepticism to the idea of God:
God is not a substance existing outside me, but merely a moral relation within me. … The categorical imperative does not assume a substance issuing its commands from on high, conceived therefore as outside me, but is a commandment or a prohibition of my own reason. … The categorical imperative represents human duties as divine commandments not in the historical sense, as if [a divine being] had given commands to men, but in the sense that reason … has power to command with the authority and in the guise of a divine person. … The Idea of such a being, before whom all bend the knee, etc., arises out of the categorical imperative, and not vice versa. … The Ens Summum [Supreme Being] is an ens rationis [a creation of reason], … not a substance outside me.99
So the Kantian philosophy, to which Christianity clung so long, in Germany and later in England, as the last, best hope of theism, ended in a bleak conception of God as a useful fiction developed by the human mind to explain the apparent absoluteness of moral commands.
Kant’s successors, not knowing his Opus postumum, acclaimed him as the savior of Christianity, the German hero who had slain Voltaire; and they magnified his achievement until his influence exceeded that of any other modern philosopher. One disciple, Karl Reinhold, predicted that within a century Kant’s reputation would rival that of Christ.100 All Protestant Germans (except Goethe) accepted Kant’s claim that he had effected a “Co-pernical revolution” in psychology: that instead of having the mind (the sun) revolve around the object (the earth) he had made the object (things) revolve around—and depend upon—the mind. The human ego was flattered by being told that its intrinsic modes of perception were the determining constituents of the phenomenal world. Fichte concluded (even before Kant died) that the external world is a creation of the mind, and Schopenhauer, accepting Kant’s analysis, began his massive treatise The World as Will and Idea with the announcement “The world is my idea”—which rather surprised Mme. de Staël.
Idealists rejoiced that Kant had made materialism logically impossible by showing mind to be the only reality directly known to us. Mystics were happy that Kant had restricted science to phenomena, had barred it from the noumenal and really real world, and had left this shady realm (whose existence he secretly denied) as the private park of theologians and philosophers. Metaphysics, which the philosophes had banished from philosophy, was reinstated as the judge of all science; and Jean Paul Richter, conceding mastery of the sea to Britain, and of the land to France, assigned to Germany the mastery of the air. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel built metaphysical castles upon the transcendental idealism of Kant; and even Schopenhauer’s masterpiece took its start from Kant’s emphasis upon the primacy of the will. “See,” said Schiller, “how a single rich man has given a living to a number of beggars.”101
German literature, too, soon felt Kant’s influence, for the philosophy of one age is likely to be the literature of the next. Schiller buried himself for a while in Kant’s tomes, wrote a letter of homage to their author, and, in his prose essays, achieved an almost Kantian obscurity. Obscurity became a fashion in German writing, a coat of arms attesting membership in the ancient order of web weavers. “On the whole,” said Goethe, “philosophical speculation is an injury to the Germans, as it tends to make their style vague, difficalt, and obscure. The stronger their attachment to certain philosophical schools, the worse they write.”102
One would not readily think of Kant as romantic, but his learned-hazy passages on beauty and sublimity became one of the founts of the Romantic movement. Schiller’s lectures at Jena, and his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795)—milestones in that movement—grew out of studying Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The subjectivist interpretation of Kant’s theory of knowledge gave a philosophical basis to the romantic individualism that flaunted its flag in Sturm und Drang. The Kantian literary influence crossed to England, and affected Coleridge and Carlyle; it crossed to New England and gave a name to the Transcendentalist movement of Emerson and Thoreau.103 The bent little professor of geography shook the world as he trod the “Philosopher’s Walk” in Königsberg. Certainly he offered to philosophy and psychology the most painstaking analysis of the knowledge process that history has ever known.
CHAPTER XXII
Roads to Weimar
1733-87
I. THE ATHENS OF GERMANY
WHY did the supreme age of German literature make Weimar its home? Germany had no one capital to concentrate her culture, as France and England had, and no concentrated wealth to finance it. Berlin and Leipzig had been weakened—Dresden had been almost destroyed—by the Seven Years’ War; Hamburg gave its money first to opera, then to the theater. In 1774 Weimar, capital of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was a quiet little town of some 6,200 souls; even after it had become famous Goethe spoke of it as “this small
capital, which, as people jokingly say, has ten thousand poets and a few inhabitants.”1 Was its glory made by great individuals?
From 1758 to 1775 Weimar was governed by a niece of Frederick the Great, the vivacious Dowager Duchess Anna Amalie, who, at the age of nineteen, had been widowed by the death of Duke Konstantin, and had become regent for their one-year-old son Karl August. It was she who opened a door between government and literature by inviting Wieland to come and tutor her sons (1772). She was one of several cultivated women who, under her lead, and till her death in 1807, stimulated poets, dramatists, and historians with sex and praise. After 1776 she made her home a salon, and there—though all spoke French as well—she encouraged the use of German as a language of literature.
In 1775 the Weimar court included some twenty-two persons and their servitors. The poet Count Christian zu Stolberg found a pleasant informality there in that year of Goethe’s arrival. “The old Duchess [then thirty-six] is the very personification of good sense, and yet most agreeable and natural. The Duke is a wonderful lad and full of promise; so is his brother. And many excellent people.”2 In 1787 Schiller described “the Weimar ladies” as “very sensitive; there is scarcely one of them that has not had an affaire de coeur. They all strive to make conquests. … A quiet, scarcely perceptible government allows everyone to live, and to bask in the air and sunshine. If one is disposed to gaiety, every opportunity is offered.”3
Karl August assumed the government of the duchy on September 3, 1775, at the age of eighteen. Shortly thereafter, having pensioned his mistress,4 he took a wife, Princess Luise of Hesse-Darmstadt, and captured Goethe on the way. He hunted with fury, drove his carriage wildly through the quiet town, and passed hurriedly from woman to woman; but his impetuosity was checked by an intellect that slowly matured into good judgment. He studied and fostered agriculture and industry, cultivated the sciences, helped literature, and labored for the good of his principality and its people. Hear Mme. de Staël, who toured Germany in 1803:
Of all the German principalities there is none that makes us feel more than Weimar the advantages of a small state, when its sovereign is a man of strong understanding, and is capable of endeavoring to please all classes of his subjects without losing anything in their obedience. … The military talents of the Duke are universally respected, and his lively and reflective conversation continually brings to our recollection that he was formed by the great Frederick. It is by his own and his mother’s reputation that the most distinguished men of learning have been attracted to Weimar. Germany, for the first time, has a literary metropolis.5
II. WIELAND: 1733-75
Christoph Martin Wieland is the least known, but perhaps the most lovable, of the four men who made Weimar’s fame. Almost all the influences of the time played upon him and tuned his lyre in their turn. Son of a pastor in Oberholzheim (near Biberach in Württemberg), he was nurtured in piety and theology. When he discovered poetry, he made the virtuous Klopstock his ideal, and then turned to Voltaire for relief. At nearby Warthausen he found the extensive library of Count von Stadion; he plunged into French and English literature, and sloughed off so much theology that in a romance, Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764), he held up his boyhood faith to ridicule. He published prose translations of twenty plays by Shakespeare (1762-66), thereby giving Germany for the first time a view of Shakespeare as a whole, and providing German playwrights with an escape from the classic formula of French drama. Meanwhile Winckelmann and others were spreading the Hellenic gospel; Wieland made his own version of it, adopted a light epicurean tone in Komische Erzählungen (Comic Tales, 1765), and made a fictitious Greek the protagonist of his main prose work, Geschichte des Agathon (1766-67). Lessing called it “the only novel for thinking men.”6
In its wandering pages Wieland (aged thirty-three) proposed to expound his philosophy of life, exemplified in the physical and intellectual adventures of an Athenian of the Periclean age. “Our plan,” said the preface, “required that our hero should be represented in a variety of trials,” whose effect would be to educate a man in integrity and wisdom without the use of religious incentives or supports.7 Agathon (i.e., Good), young and handsome, resists the attempt of a Delphic priestess to seduce him; instead he develops for the simple maiden Psyche (Soul) a pure though passionate love. He enters politics, becomes disgusted by the factionalism of parties, denounces the voters for their lack of principle, and is banished from Athens. Wandering in the mountains of Greece, he comes upon a band of Thracian women who are celebrating the feast of Bacchus with wild and sensual dances. They mistake Agathon for Bacchus, and almost stifle him with their embraces; he is rescued by a pirate band, which sells him as a slave in Smyrna to Hippias, a Sophist of the fifth century B.C Wieland expounds the philosophy of the Sophists with indignation:
The wisdom of which the Sophists made a profession was in quality, as well as in effect, the exact opposite of that professed by Socrates. The Sophists taught the art of exciting other men’s passions [through oratory]; Socrates inculcated the art of controlling one’s own. The former showed how to appear wise and virtuous, the latter how to be so. The former encouraged the youth of Athens to assume control of the state; the latter pointed out to them that it would take half their lifetime to learn how to rule themselves. The Socratic philosophy took pride in going without riches; the philosophy of the Sophists knew how to acquire them. It was complaisant, prepossessing, versatile; it glorified the great, … dallied with women, and flattered everybody who paid for it. It was everywhere at home, a favorite at court, in the boudoir, with the aristocracy, even with the priesthood, while Socrates’ doctrines … would be pronounced unprofitable by the busy, insipid by the idle, and dangerous by the devout.8
Hippias, as Wieland pictures him, embodies all the ideas and vices of the Sophists. He is a philosopher, but he has seen to it that he is also a millionaire. He resolves to bring the upright Agathon to an epicurean way of thought and life. The wisest policy, he argues, is to pursue pleasant sensations, and “all pleasures are in reality sensual.”9 He laughs at those who deny themselves mundane joys to gain heavenly delights that may never materialize. “Who has ever seen those gods, and those spiritual beings, whose existence it [religion] asserts?” All that is a trick the priests play upon us.10 Agathon condemns this philosophy as ignoring the spiritual element in man and the needs of social order. Hippias introduces him to the rich and lovely Danae, encourages her to seduce him, and conceals from him Danae’s hetaera past. She dances, and the grace of her body, added to the charm of her conversation and the music of her voice, leads Agathon to offer her his full but virtuous love. Danae spoils Hippias’ plot by returning Agathon’s love in kind. She, who had passed through many arms, finds a new experience and happiness in Agathon’s devotion. Tired of soulless loves, she aspires to begin with Agathon a new and purer life. She buys him from Hippias, frees him, and invites him to share her wealth. Hippias, in revenge, reveals to Agathon Danae’s career as a courtesan. Agathon takes ship to Syracuse.
There he gains such repute for wisdom and integrity that he becomes chief minister to the dictator Dionysius. By this time he has surrendered some of his idealism:
He did not now have as highflown conceptions of human nature as before. Or, rather, he had come to know the infinite distance between the metaphysical man, of whom one thinks or dreams in speculative solitude, or the natural man as he proceeds in crude simplicity from the hands of the universal mother, and the artificial man whom society, laws, opinions, needs, dependence, and continual struggle of his desires with his circumstances, of his own advantage with the advantage of others, and the consequent necessity of continual dissimulation and masking of his true intentions, have falsified, degraded, distorted, and disguised, in a thousand unnatural and deceptive forms. He was no longer the youthful enthusiast who imagined that it would be as easy to carry out a great undertaking as to conceive it. He had learned how little one ought to expect from others, how little one ought to count on thei
r co-operation, and (what is most important) how little one ought to trust oneself. … He had learned that the most perfect plan is often the worst [and] that in the moral world, as in the material, nothing moves in a straight line; in short, that life is like a voyage, where the pilot must adapt his course to wind and weather, where he is never sure that he will not be delayed or drifted aside by contrary currents; and that everything depends upon this: amid a thousand deviations from one’s course, yet to hold one’s mind unbendingly fixed upon the port of destination.11
Agathon serves Syracuse well and accomplishes some reforms, but a court cabal deposes him, and he retires to Tarentum. There he is welcomed by his father’s old friend the Pythagorean philosopher and scientist Archytas (fl. 400-365 B.C.), who realizes Plato’s dream of a philosopher-king. There Agathon finds his youthful love Psyche, but, alas, she is married to Archytas’ son, and turns out to be Agathon’s sister. However (with the magic wand of a novelist) Danae is brought from Smyrna to Tarentum; she has abandoned her epicurean ways to live in a demure modesty. Agathon, realizing that he had sinned in deserting her, begs her forgiveness; she embraces him, but refuses marriage; she has resolved to atone for the meandering morals of her past by living her remaining years in continence. The story ends with Agathon incredibly content with sisters.
The book has a hundred faults. The structure is loose, the coincidences are lazy evasions of artistry; the style is agreeable but diffuse; in many paragraphs the subject avoids the predicate until it is forgotten; a critic greeted the author’s birthday by wishing him a life as long as his sentences. Even so, The History of Agathon is one of the major works of the Frederician age. Its conclusions indicated that Wieland had reconciled himself with the world, and could now be trusted to teach and tame stormy and stressful youths. In 1769 he was made professor of philosophy at Erfurt. Thence, three years later, he issued Der goldene Spiegel (The Golden Mirror), which expressed his ideas on education. Anna Amalie was charmed; she invited him to try his pedagogy on her sons. He came, and spent the rest of his life in Weimar. In 1773 he founded Der teutsche Merkur (The German Herald), which under his leadership was for a generation (1773-89) the most influential literary review in Germany. He was the intellectual star of Weimar till Goethe came; and when, in 1775, the dashing young author of Werther took the city by storm, Wieland welcomed him without jealousy, and was to remain his friend for thirty-six years.