The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  From this we see what reason is: a name which in recent publications is often used like an inborn automat and which as such leads to nothing but misinterpretation. Theoretically and practically reason is nothing but something that is heard (Vernehmen); an acquired proportion and direction of ideas and forces to which humanity has been formed according to its organization and way of life. (Herder 2002: 133–4)

  This notion of reason as a type of listening is not only hermeneutic (for an illuminating discussion of Herder as inventor of both modern hermeneutics and cultural anthropology see Forster 2010)—focused on understanding the Other—but it also runs parallel to the natural running together of human differences—an argument with which Herder dismisses the immutable difference proclaimed by Kant’s science of race. In a way similar to that in which the different colors of the skin run into each other, cultural differences are part of a common human denominator. Reason recognizes difference but does not make it absolute. It bridges over what is different while not equating what differs from each other.

  37.4 HERDER’S IMPACT ON THE PERCEPTION OF THE OTHER IN GEORG FORSTER, SCHLEIERMACHER, VON HUMBOLDT, FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL, AND HEGEL

  Herder’s peculiar combination of difference and universalism inspired F. D. E. Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel’s cosmopolitan approach towards the Other. Contrasting with a Kantian construction of moral rationality in terms of a secularized understanding of Christ’s death to embodied interests. “For Schleiermacher religion can no more be based on morality than on metaphysics or science” (Forster 2010: 357). According to Schlegel, romantic art does justice to a pluralist cosmopolitanism by opening up different genres to diverse cross-overs. In this way the novel (Roman) is the romantic genre par excellence because it allows for the inclusion of the heterogeneous: “the novel is a romantic book” (Schlegel 1980, vol. 2: 179). Herder sensitized various nineteenth-century German philosophers to the diversity and infinite individuality of humanity. In this way the young Friedrich Schlegel takes issue with Kant’s moral approach, which does away with human plurality and individuality: “I think that [Kantian] moral education is foolish and that is should not be practiced. These hubristic experiments accomplish nothing except that they create an artificial human being who has been robbed of the most valuable element: individuality” (Schlegel 1980, vol. 2: 107).

  Schlegel’s friend Georg Forster also critiques the predominance of a Kantian homogenous universalism from the perspective of Herder’s pluralist as well as individualist cosmopolitanism. He first attacks the mechanical character of the Kantian approach to universal humanity. He then bemoans the substitution of maxims and laws for the motivating factors of ethical conduct: “Through the mere form of the law one hopes to be able to do away with all traditional motivations of morality and thus one hopes to enforce bourgeois virtue via withered and withering verbiage” (Forster 1967, vol. III: 281). However, it is not only the romantics who took to heart Herder’s pleas for diversity and individuality.

  The most significant and influential reception of Herder’s version of a pluralist cosmopolitanism may be found in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s political writings as well as in Hegel’s philosophy of spirit. Michael N. Forster has shown how Herder’s pluralist approach to the perception of the Other gave rise—via its permutation in W. von Humboldt’s and J. S. Mill’s thought—to the foundation of modern liberalism: “Now not only had Humboldt, inspired by Herder, already developed the ideal of individuality to which Mill is appealing here, and Mill’s primary application of it to argue for freedom of action, but he had already developed this Millian application of it to argue for freedom of thought and action” (Forster 2010: 254). W. von Humboldt restricts the power and reach of the state in order to safeguard both the individuality and the diversity of its members: “The highest good which society proffers it precisely the diversity (Mannigfaltigkeit) which develops from the coming together of the diverse; and this diversity is certainly lost whenever the state interferes” (W. von Humboldt 1960: 71). In order to protect human diversity W. von Humboldt advocates the separation between state and religion.

  Hegel too advocated the separation of state and religion. He was a strong supporter of equal rights for the Jewish and other non-Christian citizen of the modern state. Even though Hegel’s account of the history and the religion of the Jews is prejudiced—it casts the Jews as the embodiment of the unhappy conscience of the Orient—all his prejudicial writings highlight their own limitations. They do so by emphasizing the historical and thus changing and non-immutable nature of all cultural manifestations.

  Undoubtedly Hegel’s philosophy of spirit was deeply shaped by Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism. However, Hegel was also unsatisfied with the dualism that goes with Kant’s and Fichte’s purity of reason: the dualism between autonomy and heteronomy, between mind and body, between substance and subject. In order to avoid such dualisms Hegel cast his philosophy as a phenomenology. This means that Hegel’s phenomenological method “is a part of the philosophy of spirit, that part which corresponds to the moment in which consciousness of spirit manifests itself to itself as object” (Hyppolite 1974: 61). It is common philosophical knowledge that Hegel is a Kantian idealist. As I have tried to intimate elsewhere (Mack 2010), we may come to understand the difference between Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism and Hegel’s phenomenological avoidance of various dualisms by uncovering Hegel’s reliance on Herder’s notion of reason as a form of understanding, of listening (Vernunft in terms of Vernehmen). Hegel embarks on the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to understand human diversity as the complementarity of the heterogeneous. He does so by listening (Herder’s Vernehmen), by attending to the history of various cultural manifestations. Significantly, the Phenomenology of Spirit closes with a revealing play on the German word for memory: Erinnerung. Reiterating Herder’s admonition not to ridicule or otherwise demote past and other peoples and cultures, Hegel argues that “memory (Er-innerung) preserves the Other and in doing so instantiates inner subjectivity (das Innere) which is indeed the higher form of substance” (Hegel 1973: 591). Here we witness how human diversity consists not only of substance but also of subjectivity. We cannot understand one without the other.

  Developing not Kant’s but Herder’s anthropology, Hegel’s notion of the concrete universal describes the reliance of the self on the Other: the Other (the contingent, the particular that deviates from the necessity of an homogenous understanding of reason) does not call into question the universal. Instead the particularity or individuality of the Other is the site, the phenomenological uncovering of the universal. Though concerned with understanding different cultures, Hegel has not been singled out as the founder of modern hermeneutics.

  Schleiermacher has been acclaimed as the “inventor” of hermeneutics. As Michael N. Forster has recently shown, all of Schleiermacher’s innovations derive from Herder. This is not surprising given, as we have seen, the emphasis Herder places on understanding (Vernehmen) rather than explaining or judging the Other. Where Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics deviate from Herder’s is in the former’s mistaken attempt to separate the humanities from the sciences:

  Again, unlike Herder, Schleiermacher regards the central role of “divination,” or hypothesis, in interpretation as a ground for sharply distinguishing interpretation from natural science, and hence for classifying it as an art rather than a science. However, he should arguably instead have regarded it as a ground for considering interpretation and natural science similar. (Forster 2010: 335)

  Developing Herder’s critique of Kant’s monolithic and pseudo-scientific notion of race, German philosophers in the nineteenth century contributed to the foundation of disciplines—such as hermeneutics, translations studies, and cultural anthropology—which paved the way for a pluralist perception of the other.

  37.5 MARX’S AND NIETZSCHE’S PERCEPTION OF THE OTHER

  Herder’s pluralist understanding of reason in terms of Vernehmen prepared nineteenth-century philosophy for a more
open-minded approach towards the Other. As Markus Gabriel has recently argued, “contingency is the possibility-to-be other of a certain arrangement of elements” (Gabriel 2009: 51). The emphasis on change and creativity in the contrasting social thought of Marx and Nietzsche has a common ground in their combined attempt to transform traditional philosophy’s denigration of contingency and otherness. The change in question here is indeed connected with Feuerbach’s Kantian perception of the Other, as Marx makes clear in his first thesis: “Hence, in Das Wesen des Christentums, he [i.e. Feuerbach] regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty—Judaic manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of practical-critical, activity” (Tucker 1978: 143). The revolution Marx has in mind is one which would abolish all forms of rendering the Other dirty and inferior. The way to do so would be to overturn the current practice of praxis, of labor—where the menial and embodied demands of the practical are in sharp opposition to the cerebral sphere of theory. Labor would no longer be associated with contingency and the otherness of the Judaic. Rather it would form the fulfillment of a cosmopolitan humanity that has abolished labor as a form of exploitation and done away with the Kantian dualism between mind and body.

  In an entirely different but related way, Nietzsche attempts to change current societal structures which give rise to feelings of resentment and revenge. Nietzsche uncovers in seemingly innocuous notions such as “justice” or “equality” what could be called the psychology of the hatred of the Other. As Robert Pippin has recently pointed out, Nietzsche’s psychological anthropology brings to the fore the historical failure of Hegel’s teleological (necessity based) account of freedom:

  Somehow the “realization” of freedom that had counted so heavily for the preeminent bourgeois philosopher, Hegel, had within the space of sixty years come to count for a great deal less, “psychologically,” in the sense used here. It was Hegel who mounted the most ambitious case for the rationality of modern forms of ethical life and who insisted most emphatically that rationality was not an abstract ideal, imperfectly but ever more successfully achieved, but that such rationality had, to use the Nietzschean word, a “life” in the historically actual social practices of giving and demanding justifications from each other. (Pippin 2010 122)

  Could it be the case that Nietzsche attempts to outline an alternative to a concept of freedom which is based on teleology and necessity (such as Kant’s and Hegel’s)? Nietzsche argues for a type of freedom which embraces life’s plurality and contingency. In this way Gilles Deleuze has characterized Nietzsche’s philosophical project as an affirmation of the Other: “the sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy is multiplicity, becoming and chance are objects of pure affirmation. The affirmation of multiplicity is the speculative proposition, just as the joy of diversity is the practical proposition” (Deleuze 2012: 186). Nietzsche’s critique of the notion of equality is part of his attempt to undermine a homogenous understanding of freedom and rationality in terms of necessity and teleology. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra detects the most violent impulses behind rational demands for justice and equality. What, precisely, arouses such violence? Here again the shadow of Kant’s homogenous universalism looms large: “We want both to call bad names and take revenge on all those who are not like us” (Nietzsche 1980: 128).2

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beiser, Frederick, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005).

  Bernasconi, Robert, “Kant and Blumenbach’s Polyps: Neglected Chapter in the History of the Concept of Race,” in Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (eds.), The German Invention of Race (Albany: State University of New York, 2006): 73–90.

  Bernasconi, Robert, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Bernasconi (ed.), Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 11–30.

  Bernasconi, Robert, “Why do the happy inhabitants of Tahiti exist?” in John K. Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights. A Philosophical Guide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 139–51.

  Bernasconi, R. and Lott (ed.), The Idea of Race (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2000).

  Colerus, Johannes, Das Leben des Bened. von Spinoza (Leipzig: George Loewe, 1733).

  Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

  Feuerbach, Ludwig, Das Wesen des Christentums (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984).

  Fichte, J. G., The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, translated with an introduction by Walter E. Wright (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2005).

  Forster, Georg, Werke in vier Bänden, edited by Gerhard Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1967).

  Forster, Michael N., After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  Gabriel, Markus and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (New York: Continuum, 2009).

  Geuss, Raymond, Politics and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Phänomenologie des Geistes, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).

  Herder, Johann Gottfried, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  Herder, Johann Gottfried, Werke Vol. III/1: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, edited by Wolfgang Pross (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002).

  Hess, Jonathan M., Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

  Hyppolite, Jean, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

  Kant, Immanuel, On History, edited with an introduction by Lewis White Beck, translated by Robert E. Anchor and Emil L. Fackenheim (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963).

  Kant, Immanuel, Wilhelm Weischedel ed., Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964).

  Mack, Michael, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: the hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud (New York: Continuum, 2010).

  Mack, Michael, German Idealism and the Jew: the Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

  Nietzsche, Friedrich, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 4, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980).

  Pippin, Robert B., Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  Schlegel, Friedrich, Werke in zwei Bänden (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1980).

  Schopenhauer, Arthur, Urwille und Welterlösung: Ausgewählte Schriften (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1982).

  Tucker, Robert C., The Marx-Engels Reader. Second Edition (New York: Norton, 1978).

  von Humboldt, Wilhelm, Schriften zur Anthropologie und Geschichte, edited by Andreas Flintner and Klaus Giel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960).

  Wagner, Richard, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Julius Kapp (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1920).

  Wagner, Richard, Stories and Essays, edited by Charles Osborne (La Salle: Open Court, 1991).

  Wagner, Richard, Götterdämmerung, edited by Egon Voss (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997).

  * * *

  1 In a related way Jonathan M. Hess has brilliantly shown how Kant cast his notion of reason in Christian terms and opposed it to Judaism and the Jews (Hess 2002: 149).

  2 I am most grateful to the support of the Leverhulme Trust and to Anna Grundy in particular.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE BURDEN OF ANTIQUITY

  JESSICA N. BERRY

  38.1 THE TYRANNY OF GREECE OVER GERMANY

  IN her classic literary study of the Romantic period, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1
935), E. M. Butler dramatized the influence of the Hellenic ideal on the development of German thought and culture in the nineteenth century. “If the Greeks are tyrants,” she claimed,