The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  this historical-scientific cognitive approach established itself in all domains of culture: politics, law, economic, morals and religion—indeed, even music and art came to be studied with the aid of these methods of knowing. Historical science became the leading science of the century.77

  As Emden puts it, “the historicization of reason and culture over the nineteenth century…rendered it possible for history to become the dominant explanatory paradigm within the humanities in Germany.”78 Many “schools” of historicist practice emerged, but their disciplinary consolidation is less pertinent to our recovery of the meaning of historicist discourse than the conception of insight that they shared and that came, over the course of the nineteenth century, to be termed the “historical sense [historische Sinn].”79

  39.3 HISTORICAL SENSE

  Some time after Savigny had established his position and his “school” at Berlin, but before Ranke had arrived to found his, the figure who founded that university, Wilhelm von Humboldt, brought his circuitous intellectual itinerary to a crucial turning point in a landmark essay, “The Task of the Historian,” delivered to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1821.80 As Peter Hanns Reill has noted, Humboldt’s essay was “probably the most important short article on historical understanding and writing composed in the nineteenth century,” serving, for many interpreters, “as the theoretical foundation for the development of modern German historicism.”81 The thrust of Humboldt’s essay was to underscore the creative role of the historical interpreter, drawing the latter closer to the artist than to the philosopher, but at the same time to argue that the historian was different from the artist in his devotion to reality and his subordination of imagination to evidence. Behind these overarching considerations we can discern in Humboldt both an attunement to the ancient Aristotelian denigration of history, in comparison with both philosophy and art (poetry), for its failure to express the universal, as well as to the early-modern rationalist disparagement of cognitio historica as contingently empirical. For Humboldt it was essential to underscore the historian’s obligation to undertake a rigorous examination of the material evidence at his disposal but also to synthesize these details into a meaningful order which they did not possess in their fragmentary particularity. Even more importantly, this synthesis was not simply an artificial imposition but a discernment of an immanent principle of order: it was found, not simply made, as constituting actuality. Thus Humboldt insisted both that there was an immanent necessity in history and that the historian was capable of discriminating it.

  These commitments have struck later interpreters as “metaphysical” or “unscientific,” but that is, first, an anachronistic judgment (based on standards of a later epoch, positivism), and, second, it is philosophically questionable, since positivism no longer has the authority to pronounce on what is metaphysical or scientific. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have demonstrated, there was a dramatically different sense of scientific objectivity operative in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one which drew scientific insight and artistic imagination into a far more intimate connection.82 Humboldt belongs in that historical moment of the conceptualization of scientific objectivity, and it is pointless (indeed, it was self-serving) to disparage it from the vantage of later positivistic notions of objectivity and science, with their concomitant horror of metaphysics. Instead of distaste or condescension, it behooves us to understand why Humboldt thought his approach made sense.

  “An event…is only partially visible in the world of the senses; the rest has to be added by intuition, inference, and guesswork.”83 Two points need to be made in interpreting this statement. First, “event” can stand for any object of empirical inquiry, natural or cultural. That sense data only ever get construed as integral objects by the action of the mind is a common ground of all post-Kantian thought. Second, “intuition, inference, and guesswork” need not be repugnantly “irrational,” but instead invoke the inevitably tentative practice of actual human construal of the unknown (“science in the making”)—again as commonplace in the natural as in the cultural sciences.84 My point is: historicism has languished long enough under a retrospective positivist misreading; we need to see it both as a historically situated sense of scientific inquiry and as a philosophically far less objectionable one than the intervening epoch of positivism urged us to believe. To be sure, “guesswork” can be wrong, and Humboldt was attentive to this from the start to the finish of his essay, warning that the historian—I would add, every empirical inquirer—risked imposing upon his materials an order that was only his own conjecture. That is certainly true. The risk is also unavoidable. This raises two questions: how can the historian proceed? And why should others credit his product? Humboldt had a quite healthy sense of the actual accreditation of historical claims: history is “little more than the results of tradition and scholarship which one has agreed to accept as true.”85 For foundationalists, this is scandalously “relativist.” For anti-foundationalists, it is just what it means to practice empirical inquiry in any field.

  The interesting thing about Humboldt, though, is that he thought the historian was decidedly on the track of a higher reality. Thus it is crucial to grasp his notion of “historical ideas.”86 “The historian is searching for reality alone and has to plunge deeply into it…proceed to the center of things from which their true nexus can be understood,” Humboldt wrote.87 He must “show every event as part of a whole,” that is, “uncover its inner structure, and make visible the truly acting forces,” which constitute “the form of history in itself.” Humboldt believed there were “truly acting forces” informing historical actuality and that it was the task of the historian to penetrate to them. “The creative forces of world history…the ideas…are not being projected into history, but are the essence of history itself. For every force, living or dead, acts according to the laws of its nature, and all occurrences are inseparably linked.” Humboldt deliberately termed these forces “ideas” because he meant them to be “by their very nature…outside the compass of the finite, and yet [to] pervade and dominate every part of world history.” There was a transcendent (providential) governance, Humboldt believed, though the historian “has no special faculty for inquiring directly into the plans of world governance.” Instead, “it is, of course, self-evident that these ideas emerge from the mass of events themselves, or, to be more precise, originate in the mind through contemplation of these events undertaken in a truly historical spirit.”

  It was precisely in insisting on the inferential, inductive discrimination of these immanent principles of historical reality that Humboldt wished to distinguish the historian from the philosopher. The latter attached historical events to a prior conception of what history should be, where it was headed: a teleological conception which, as Humboldt saw it, killed the authentically emergent process of history and substituted for it some artificial principle of order or purpose. “This search for final causes, even though it may be deduced from the essence of man or nature itself, distorts and falsifies every independent judgment of the characteristic working of forces…” Here, Humboldt was repudiating “so-called philosophical history” without naming names. We can supply the usual suspects of “Enlightenment history,” but it is important to suggest that among these Immanuel Kant was clearly a prominent instance. This is because of the strong propensity among interpreters—German and Anglophone—to seek to rescue what they construe as sound in Humboldt by wrapping him up in Kant. In fact, Humboldt’s program has far more in common with that of Johann Gottfried Herder, though he found the latter little to his taste. Similarly, there is much in Humboldt that parallels another figure he disliked, G. W. F. Hegel, who had not yet offered his lectures on the philosophy of history when Humboldt presented this essay, but whose vision of the immanent emergence of spirit in actuality nevertheless bespoke elements in Humboldt (though, to be sure, with far too much confidence in accessing the principle of world governance than Humboldt believed mortal
s could attain).

  Humboldt believed both in the reality of “ideas” as forces informing world history and in their mysterious, indeed transcendent origin. But he also believed that historians could infer them from the careful study of events. There were two components to his confidence, first a conception of the inquiring subject, and second a conception of the intelligible order in the historical object. Humboldt believed in “an original, antecedent congruity between subject and object” at the foundation of historical understanding. That is, “everything which is active in world history is also moving within the human heart.” Thus, “eternal ideas [are] rooted deeply in the soul of man,” and there emerges in the inquiry into historical objects a self-discovery of the presence of these same ideas, as forces of subjectivity, in the historical inquirer himself. What, in the object of inquiry, stimulated this sense of kinship and concomitant understanding? First, Humboldt argued, the historian could discern “trends,” that is, recurrent patterns of organization in the course of events. But he was always led beyond these to something deeper and more problematic: “a creation of energies which cannot be deduced in all their scope and majesty from their attendant circumstances.” There was something ultimately mysterious about this spontanous generativity, “the miraculous element…the first flashing of the spark.” Its talisman was the concrete individual: “the secret of all existence lies in individuality,” in an “individual spiritual force.” To make sense of any individuality one had to see it as the actualization of an immanent entelechy, easiest to see in the organism in nature. Thus, “every human individuality is an idea rooted in actuality…something original…an incessant active drive to give outward shape to its inner, unique nature.” This insight construed the form of history in itself: “the actualization of the idea which is to be realized by mankind in every way and in all shapes in which the finite form may enter into a union with the idea.” And that defined the “task of the historian”—“the presentation of the struggle of an idea to realize itself in actuality.”

  This is a breathtaking characterization of the historian’s calling. It is not for nothing that Humboldt’s conception of historical understanding has been labeled “idealistic.” The challenge is to stop thinking that this disqualifies it from serious consideration—either as philosophy or as historical ambition. These issues remain at the core of contemporary philosophy of history, which pivots around the question whether “historical ideas” (or, in more modern parlance, “colligatory concepts”) are merely made as imaginative representations of the past, or rather evoke, however imperfectly, intersubjectively warrantable patterns of order and meaning found in aspects or elements of the past.88

  39.4 HISTORICAL ANGST—THE “EXISTENTIAL” AND THE “EPISTEMOLOGICAL” STRAINS

  Whatever the ubiquity of historicism as a hermeneutic-critical method, historicism became embroiled in a far more radical sense of historicity: the relativization of values. Historicism could not be construed strictly as an internal intellectual problem, whether of disciplinary history or of formal philosophy, but rather it betokened a dramatic historical change itself, the rise of modernity. Karl Mannheim phrased this succinctly in 1924: “It was not historical writing that brought us to historicism, but the historical process that made us into historicists.”89 Thus, Otto Oexle has it right: “historicism is a foundational, constitutive phenomenon of modernity, comparable with Enlightenment, Revolution, Industrialization and Technification, as well as the universal submission of all domains of life to scientific organization [Verwissenschaftlichung].”90 Emden is of the same view: “The crisis of historicism was…triggered to a considerable extent by the modernization of the public sphere in Western and Central Europe during the early 1800s…”91

  In a compelling essay, Allan Megill, drawing upon the dissertation of Thomas Howard, has contended that “the crisis of historicism had its roots in theology and religion, not in historiography or philosophy.” That is, it was “a religious-theological crisis first of all,” because, as Wolfgang Hardtwig established in his path-breaking essay, “Geschichtsreligion,” “the historical discipline was subordinated to religion and theology, and not the reverse.” Thus, “the crisis of historicism really amounted to a crisis for Christian belief in an age of Wissenschaft.”92 This was the impetus that brought Ernst Troeltsch, a theologian, to conceive of a crisis of historicism in the opening years of the twentieth century.93 Its real historical locus, however, as Megill reconstructs it, was the 1830s. He finds a crucial continuity between the enormous controversy initiated by D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835/36) and its echo in Martin Kähler’s Der sogenannte historische Jesus (1892) and Albert Schweitzer’s Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906). As Troeltsch received this long dispute, he drew the conclusion that such a historical approach threatened the Christian faith.

  The key point, here, is that the “crisis” that Christian faith experienced in the course of the nineteenth century, a crisis indeed associated with Wissenschaft, was not a crisis of historicism, that is, the discernment of any intrinsic failure in its research program, but rather a crisis caused by historicism, that is, the amassing of such a body of historical knowledge as to undermine confidence in the absolute validity of Christian dogmas. Just because of its inescapable commitment to such absolutes, theology fell vulnerable first and foremost to the historicization of knowledge and culture under the new aegis of science. Wolfgang Hardtwig’s essay offers us a firmer grasp of this. What he contends is that nineteenth-century historical practice was conducted under the auspices—often explicitly acknowledged—of an absolute metaphysical order governing the world. Hardtwig demonstrates the explicit commitment to such a backdrop in Humboldt, Ranke, Droysen, Burckhardt, and even the twentieth-century historicist Meinecke. It was this metaphysical backdrop that warranted their confidence in “objective” knowledge of the changing historical world. The ontological, not simply the methodological or metaphorical, core of the “historical idea” organized their theories of historical meaning. This notion of a separate and higher reality guaranteeing order and meaning in the empirical world was formulated in most overtly Christian terms in Ranke (and more or less in the others). Thus, Hardtwig concludes, “the claim to objectivity in scientific history was secured ultimately by metaphysics, not logic.”94 Yet their simultaneous pursuit of a historical-critical (hermeneutic) method of research, which they shared with (and in some measure derived from) Biblical criticism, classical philology, and jurisprudence, amassed enormous historical detail which simply discredited the metaphysical confidence from which they set out, gradually hollowing out the “persistence of idealism.” That would be the argument of Troeltsch.95

  Importantly, Hardtwig connects this internalist crisis to social and political developments in the nineteenth century, demonstrating that this metaphysically-inspired historicism also acted as a socio-political ideology whose efficacy deteriorated in parallel with, but independently of, the proliferation of historical knowledge and its consequent pluralization and disenchantment of values. In this sense, Hardtwig recognizes that historicism was the creation and self-fashioning of a narrow academic elite as the core of a somewhat wider Bildungsbürgertum which asserted, and for a time enjoyed, a high-profile role in German society and politics. The complacent mandarin claim that historical-metaphysical insight warranted political leadership came clearly to be discerned as the self-promoting posture of a privileged elite, especially after the failure of the German Revolution of 1848 and then of middle-class resistance to Bismarck’s power politics in 1862. The “crisis of historicism,” then, was part of what Fritz Ringer baptized The Decline of the German Mandarins.96

  What haunted Christian theology already in the 1830s turned gradually into a general disenchantment with received wisdom over the balance of the century, diagnosed most scathingly in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his formulation, its victims might well ask whether “science” was worth the pain, if it undermined all the values whereby humans made se
nse of their lives. He suspected that for many modern Europeans the answer might well become negative, though this was not his personal choice.97 That led him to pose the famous question in his second untimely meditation, On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874). Starting with Nietzsche in the 1870s, 1870 this “malady of history” became the philosophical core of the “crisis of historicism.”

  Emden contextualizes Nietzsche’s untimely meditation about history quite specifically as “The Formation of Imperial Germany seen from Basel.” That is, Nietzsche was heavily influenced by “the deep-seated anti-modernism of Basel’s intellectual culture,” and above all by Jacob Burckhardt, who viewed the entire development of the nineteenth century, the “age of revolution,” as “the great crisis of modern culture.”98 Burckhardt’s sense of history was tinged with an aristocratic pessimism which estranged him utterly from the optimism of the “Prussian School” of history led by his mentor, Ranke.99 As Emden puts it, “‘Prussianism’…stood in sharp opposition to the intellectual culture of Basel.”100 From his patrician vantage in Basel, Burckhardt articulated a far more guarded sense of history’s mission and message in a lecture series, “Über das Studium der Geschichte,” which he gave several times from the 1850s to the 1870s, 1870 and which Nietzsche audited in 1870–1.101 Burckhardt modeled a historical skepticism that Nietzsche would find salutary in his increasing disillusionment after 1871 with German nationalism and with the German historical-philological community that had hitched its identity and self-worth to that cause. His untimely meditation was a direct challenge to this smug accommodation, vehemently denouncing the extravagant myth-making that aligned the new German Empire with the greatness of the Greeks. Exemplary of this conflation was Johann Gustav Droysen’s best-selling Geschichte des Hellenismus (1833–43), which Emden notes “would be found on the bookshelves of virtually every educated German middle-class household.” In Nietzsche’s notions of the monumental use of history the central myth-making of the German mandarins and of the German Empire served as prime target. The targets of Nietzsche’s notion of the antiquarian were the ranks of increasingly specialized and also increasingly “industrialized” classical philology, with its great archaeological digs and its massive collections of inscriptions from antiquity, which came to be called Prussian “big science [Großwissenschaft].” The last, most controversial notion of history, Nietzsche’s “critical history,” Emden both labels “impossible” and seeks to characterize as stressing “the heterogeneity and contingency of historical events that resist their idealization,” revealing that “the present is, above all, haunted by the errors, illusions and even crimes of previous epochs.”102 By my lights, that is to read Nietzsche all too much in the light of Michel Foucault’s grand essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”103 But it certainly rescues Nietzsche from any allegation of aestheticist escapism, which is the view Emden mainly seeks to debunk.