Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Romanticism was a massive revolution in ideas. Very different from the French, industrial and American revolutions, it was no less fundamental. In the history of Western political thought, says Isaiah Berlin, though he is using ‘political’ in its widest sense, ‘there have occurred three major turning-points, when by turning point we mean a radical change in the entire conceptual framework with which questions have been posed: new ideas, new words, new relationships in terms of which the old problems are not so much solved as made to look remote, obsolete and, at times, unintelligible, so that the agonising problems and doubts of the past seem queer ways of thought, or confusions that belong to a world which has gone.’8

  The first of these turning-points, he says, occurred in the short interval at the end of the fourth century BC between the death of Aristotle (384–322) and the rise of Stoicism, when the philosophical schools of Athens ‘ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life, ceased to discuss the questions connected with public and political life that had preoccupied the Academy and the Lyceum, as if these questions were no longer central, or even significant, and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation’.9 This great transformation in values–‘from the public to the private, the outer to the inner, the political to the ethical, the city to the individual, from social order to unpolitical anarchism’–was so profound that nothing was the same afterward.10 The transformation was discussed in Chapter 6.

  A second turning-point was inaugurated by Machiavelli (1469–1527). This involved his recognition that there is a division ‘between the natural and the moral virtues, the assumption that political values not merely are different from, but may in principle be incompatible with, Christian ethics’.11 This produced a utilitarian view of religion, in the process discrediting any theological justification for any set of political arrangements. It too was new and startling. ‘Men had not previously been openly called upon to choose between irreconcilable sets of values, private and public, in a world without purpose, and told in advance that there could in principle exist no ultimate, objective criterion for this choice.’12 Machiavelli’s political ideas were outlined in Chapter 24.

  The third great turning-point–which Berlin argues is the greatest yet–was conceived toward the end of the eighteenth century, with Germany in the vanguard.13 ‘At its simplest the idea of romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also–truth and validity as such.’ This, says Berlin, has produced vast and incalculable effects. The most important change, he says, has come in the very assumptions underlying Western thought. In the past, it had always been taken for granted that all general questions were of the same logical type: they were questions of fact. It followed from this that the important questions in life could be eventually answered, once all the relevant information had been collected. In other words, it was taken as read that moral and political questions, such as ‘What is the best way of life for men?’, ‘What are rights?’, ‘What is freedom?’ were in principle answerable in exactly the same way as questions like ‘What is water composed of?’, ‘How many stars are there?’, ‘When did Julius Caesar die?’14 Wars have been fought over the answers to these questions, says Berlin, but ‘it was always assumed that the answers were discoverable’. This was because, despite the various religious differences that have existed over time, one fundamental idea united men, though it had three aspects.15 ‘The first is that there is such an entity as a human nature, natural or supernatural, which can be understood by the relevant experts; the second is that to have a specific nature is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by God or an impersonal nature of things, and that to pursue these goals is what makes men human; the third is that these goals, and the corresponding interests and values (which it is the business of theology or philosophy or science to discover and formulate), cannot possibly conflict with one another–indeed they must form a harmonious whole.’16

  It was this basic idea that gave rise to the notion of natural law and the search for harmony. People had been aware of certain inconsistencies–Aristotle, for example, observed that fire burned in the same way in Athens and Persia whereas moral and social rules varied. Nonetheless, down to the eighteenth century people still assumed that all experience in the world was capable of harmonisation once enough data had been collected.17 The example Berlin gave to underline this point were the questions ‘Should I pursue justice?’ and ‘Should I practise mercy?’ As any thoughtful person could see, situations could arise when to answer ‘Yes’ to both these questions (which most people would go along with) would be incompatible. Under the traditional view, it was assumed that one true proposition could not logically contradict another. The rival contention of the romantics was to cast doubt on the very idea that values, the answers to questions of action and choice, could be discovered at all. The romantics argued that some of these questions had no answer, full stop, period. No less originally, they argued further that there was no guarantee that values could not, in principle, conflict with one another. To argue the contrary, they insisted, was ‘a form of self-deception’ and would lead to trouble. Finally, the romantics produced a new set of values, in fact a new way of looking at values, radically different from the old way.18

  The first man to glimpse this new approach was Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the Neapolitan student of jurisprudence we first met in Chapter 24 and who, with stunning simplicity, sabotaged Enlightenment ideas about the centrality of science. In 1725, it will be recalled, he published Scienza Nuova, in which he claimed that knowledge about human culture ‘is truer than knowledge about physical nature, since humans can know with certainty, and hence establish a science about, what they themselves have created.’ The internal life of mankind, he said, can be known in a way that simply does not–cannot–apply to the world man has not made, the world ‘out there’, the physical world, which is the object of study by traditional science. On this basis, Vico said, language, poetry and myth, all devised by man, are truths with a better claim to validity than the then central triumphs of mathematical philosophy. ‘There shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects upon this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows: and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or the civil world, which, since men made it, men could come to know.’19

  Very important, if very simple, things followed from this, said Vico, but man had been too busy looking outside himself to notice. For example, people share a nature and must therefore assemble their cultures in similar or analogous ways.20 This made it possible, even imperative, he said, for careful historians to reconstruct the thought processes of other ages and the phases they go through.21 He thought it was self-evident that in any civil society men should hold certain beliefs in common–this is what common sense was, he thought. And he found that there were three important beliefs that were shared everywhere. These were a belief in Providence throughout history and in all religions, in the immortal soul, and a recognition of the need to regulate the passions.22 Man, he said, has expressed his nature throughout history and so it must follow that the record of myth and poetry ‘is the record of human consciousness’.23 In saying all this, Vico transformed the human sciences, promoting them so that they were on a par with the natural sciences.

  Vico’s innovations were not picked up elsewhere for several decades, and it was not until Kant that the new approach began to catch on. Kant’s great contribution was to grasp that it is the mind which shapes knowledge, that there is such a process as intuition, which is instinctive, and that the phenomeno
n in the world that we can be most certain of is the difference between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’.24 On this account, he said, reason ‘as a light that illuminates nature’s secrets’ is inadequate and misplaced as an explanation.25 Instead, Kant said, the process of birth is a better metaphor, for it implies that human reason creates knowledge. In order to find out what I should do in a given situation, I must listen to ‘an inner voice’. And it was this which was so subversive. According to the sciences, reason was essentially logical and applied across nature equally.26 But the inner voice does not conform to this neat scenario. Its commands are not necessarily factual statements at all and, moreover, are not necessarily true or false. ‘Commands may be right or wrong, corrupt or disinterested, intelligible or obscure, trivial or important.’ The purpose of the inner voice, often enough, is to set someone a goal or a value, and these have nothing to do with science, but are created by the individual. This was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and was totally new.27 In the first instance (and for the first time), it was realised that morality was a creative process but, in the second place, and no less important, it laid a new emphasis on creation, and this too elevated the artist alongside the scientist.28 It is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values. The artist does not discover, calculate, deduce, as the scientist (or philosopher) does. In creating, the artist invents his goal and then realises his own path towards that goal. ‘Where, asked Herzen, is the song before the composer has conceived it?’ Creation in this sense is the only fully autonomous activity of man and for that reason takes pre-eminence. ‘If the essence of man is self-mastery–the conscious choice of his own ends and form of life–this constitutes a radical break with the older model that dominated the notion of man’s place in the cosmos.’29 At a stroke, Berlin insists, the romantic vision destroyed the very notion of natural laws, if by that was meant the idea of harmony, with man finding his place in accordance with laws that applied across the universe. By the same token, art was transformed and enlarged. It was no longer mere imitation, or representation, but expression, a far more important, far more significant and ambitious activity. A man is most truly himself when he creates. ‘That, and not the capacity for reasoning, is the divine spark within me; that is the sense in which I am made in God’s image.’ This new ethic invited a new relationship between man and Nature. ‘She is the matter upon which I work my will, that which I mould.’30

  We are still living with the consequences of this revolution. The rival ways of looking at the world–the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist–constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible. As Isaiah Berlin has described it, we shift uneasily from foot to foot as we recognise this incompatibility.

  The dichotomy was shown first and most clearly in Germany. The turn of the nineteenth century saw Napoleon’s great series of victories, over Austria, Prussia and several smaller German states, and this advertised the economic, social, and political backwardness of the German-speaking world. These failures created a desire for renewal in the German lands and, in response, many German-speakers turned inward, to intellectual and aesthetic ideas as a way to unite and inspire their people.31 ‘Romanticism is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the eighteenth century, the German-speaking countries were the most tormented in Europe.’32

  In the 1770s cultural and intellectual life centred on the many local courts scattered across greater Germany and it was in one of these that the tradition of Vico and Kant was built upon.33 Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar employed both Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder at his court. Goethe we shall come to shortly, but first Herder. He had studied theology and then under Kant at Königsberg, where he had been introduced to the works of Hume, Montesquieu and Rousseau.34 Under their influence he was moved to produce the four volumes of his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, between 1784 and 1791. In these books, Herder consciously expanded the ideas of Vico, arguing that the growth in human consciousness, as shown in literature and art, were part of a (generally rosy) historical process.35 ‘We live in a world we ourselves create.’36 For Herder, it was the ‘expressive power’ of human nature that had produced some very different cultures across the world, which were demonstrably shaped also by geography, climate, and history. It followed for him that human nature could only be understood by means of the comparative history of different peoples.37 Each Volk, Herder said, had its own history, producing a characteristic consciousness and a particular form of art and literature, not to mention its very language.38 ‘Has a nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers?’ Poetry and religion, he said, unite a Volk and these truths are therefore to be understood in a spiritual or symbolic way rather than as merely utilitarian. (Ancient poetry, he said, was a form of fossil.)39 After Herder, as Roger Smith says, the study of the humanities–notably history and literature–became central elements in the new way of understanding society.40

  An important factor in the creative act was the will. This was first and most vividly introduced as an idea by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.41 Taking up where Kant left off, Fichte argued that ‘I become aware of my own self, not as an element in some larger pattern but in the clash with the not-self, the Anstoss, the violent impact of collision with dead matter, which I resist and must subjugate to my free creative design.’ On this account, Fichte portrayed the self as ‘activity, effort, self-direction. It wills, alters, carves up the world both in thought and in action, in accordance with its own concepts and categories.’ Kant had conceived this as an unconscious, intuitive process but for Fichte it was instead ‘a conscious creative activity…I do not accept anything because I must,’ Fichte insists, ‘I believe it because I will.’42 There are two worlds, he says, and man belongs to both. There is the material world, ‘out there’, governed by cause and effect, and there is the inner spiritual world, ‘Where I am wholly my own creation.’43 This insight (itself a construct) brought about a radical change in the understanding of philosophy. ‘My philosophy depends on the kind of man I am, not vice versa.’ In this way the will assumed a larger and larger role in human psychology. All people reason in essentially the same way, says Fichte. Where they differ is in their will; and this can and does produce conflict whereas reason is unable to, because logic is logic.44

  The effects of this were momentous. For one thing, the understanding of work changed. Instead of being regarded as an ugly necessity, it was transformed into ‘the sacred task of man’, because only by work–an expression of the will–could man bring his distinctive, creative personality to bear upon ‘the dead stuff’ of nature.45 Man now moved ever further from the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages, in that his real essence was understood not as contemplation but as activity. In a sense, and among the German romantics in particular, the Lutheran concept of vocation was adapted to the romantic ideal but instead of God and worship being the object of activity, what mattered now was the individual’s search for his freedom, in particular ‘the creative end which fulfils his individual purpose’.46 What matters for the artist now is ‘motive, integrity, sincerity…purity of heart, spontaneity’. Intention, not wisdom or success, is what counts. The traditional model–the sage, the man who knows, who achieves ‘happiness or virtue or wisdom, by means of understanding’–is replaced by the tragic hero ‘who seeks to realise himself at whatever cost, against whatever odds’.47 Worldly success is immaterial.

  This reversal of values cannot be overstated. To begin with, man creates himself and therefore has no identifiable nature, which determines how he behaves, reacts and thinks. And unlike anything that has gone before, he is not answerable for the consequences. Second, and arguably more shocking, since man’s values are not discovered but created, there is no way they can ever be described or systematised, ‘for they are not facts, not entities of the world’. They are
simply outside the realm of science, ethics or politics. Third, the uncomfortable truth is that the values of different civilisations, or nations, or individuals, might well collide. Harmony cannot be guaranteed, even within one individual whose own values may shift over time.48

  Here too the importance of the change in thinking cannot be exaggerated. In the past, if a Christian killed a Muslim, say, in a crusade, he might regret that such a brave adversary had died for a faith that was false. But, and this is the central point, the very fact that the Muslim, say, held his false faith sincerely only made the situation worse. The more the enemy was attached to his false faith, the less he was admired.49 The romantics took a completely contrary view. For them, martyrs, tragic heroes, who fought gallantly for their beliefs against overwhelming odds, became the ideal.50 What they valued above all else was defeat and failure when it arose in defiance of compromise or worldly success.51 The artist or hero as outsider is born in this way.

  It is an idea that leads to a form of literature, painting and (most vividly) music that we instantly recognise–the martyred hero, the tragic hero, the outcast genius, the suffering wild man, rebelling against a tame and philistine society.52 As Arnold Hauser rightly says, there is no aspect of modern art which does not owe something important to romanticism. ‘The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art…its unrestrained, unsparing exhibitionism, is derived from it. And this subjective, egocentric attitude has become so much a matter of course for us, so absolutely inevitable, that we find it impossible to reproduce even an abstract train of thought without talking about our own feelings.’53