by Peter Watson
An unfortunate comment. The real aim of romanticism, the underlying aim, had been set forth by Keats, who wrote poetry, he said, to ease ‘the burden of the mystery’. Romanticism was always, in part, a reaction to the decline in religious conviction, so evident in the eighteenth century, and then throughout the nineteenth. Whereas the scientists tried–or hoped–to explain the mystery, the romantics relished it, made the most of it, used it in ways that many scientists could not, or would not, understand. This is why poetry and music were the chief romantic responses–they were better at easing the burden.
This dichotomy, what Isaiah Berlin calls this incompatibility or incoherence, between the scientific world-view and the poetic, could not continue. The world of the romantics, the inner world of shadows and mystery, of passion and interiority, might produce a redeeming beauty, might even produce wisdom, but in a practical Victorian, nineteenth-century world of new technologies, new scientific breakthroughs, when the external world was expanding as never before, being conquered and controlled as never before, a new accommodation was needed, or at least was bound to be attempted. This accommodation led to two developments, which will close this book. In literature and the arts, in music, poetry and painting, it led to the movement we know as ‘Modernism’. And on the other side of the divide it led to what is still perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon of modern times. This was the attempt to make a science of the unconscious.
31
The Rise of History, Pre-history and Deep Time
To Chapter 31 Notes and References
In May 1798 one of the most extraordinary expeditions in the history of ideas set out from Toulon, in France. No fewer than 167 chemists, engineers, biologists, geologists, architects, painters, poets, musicians and doctors were gathered together, referred to as savants by the 38,000 troops also collected in the southern French port. Like the troops, the savants didn’t know where they were headed, for their young commanding officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, had kept the destination secret. The average age of the savants was twenty-five, the youngest fourteen, but there were also well-known figures among the group which included: Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the flower painter, Gratet de Dolomieu, the geologist after whom the Dolomite mountains are named, and Nicholas Conté, a prominent chemist and naturalist.1
In fact, they were bound for Egypt, where Napoleon, hailed by Victor Hugo as ‘the Muhammad of the West’, landed at Alexandria on a ship called L’Orient. The venture was a mixture of colonialism and cultural/intellectual adventure. Bonaparte’s avowed aim was not merely conquest, he said, but to synthesise the wisdom of the pharaohs with the pieties of Islam and to that end everything the Armée did in Egypt ‘was explained and justified in precise Koranic Arabic’. Alongside the Armée, the savants were let loose to study the Middle Eastern world. The results of their endeavours were in many ways astounding. Conditions were harsh and they were forced to improvise. Conté invented a new kind of pump, and a new kind of pencil, without graphite. Larrey, a surgeon, turned himself into an anthropologist and made notes on the relations between the mixed population of Jews, Turks, Greeks and Bedouin. Every ten days or so they published a periodical, partly to keep the troops amused, partly to record their own activities and discoveries. Debates were organised by Napoleon himself, as a form of sophisticated entertainment for the savants, where questions of government, religion and ethics were aired.2 Most important, in the long run, the savants collected material for what would become The Description of Egypt, twenty-three large volumes, each page of which was one metre square (the metre, remember, being a new measure) and published over the following twenty-five years. Many things were explored in the Description. It began with a one-hundred-plus-page introduction by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, secretary of the Institut de l’Égypte, which Napoleon had set up in some secrecy. Fourier made it clear that the French saw Egypt as ‘a centre of great memories’, a focal point between Asia, Africa and Europe (as Alexandria had been in earlier ages) and as such was‘saturated with meaning for the arts, sciences and government’, and of which great things were expected in the future. The Description went on to outline new fauna and flora, new chemical substances, which existed naturally in Egypt, new geological features. But what most caught the imagination of many of the savants–turning them into the world’s first Egyptologists–and then proved especially popular among the public back home, were the archaeological treasures, of such size and in such abundance that everyone who came into contact with them was entranced. Doubly so when a big block of granite was found at Rosetta, where a contingent of soldiers was clearing a piece of land which they intended to turn into fortifications. This stone bore three texts, one in hieroglyphics, one in a demotic, cursive form of Egyptian, and one in Greek. It promised the possibility that hieroglyphics would soon be deciphered. (See Chapter 29 above.)3
One could say that archaeology in the West began with this expedition and that we have Napoleon to thank for it. In fact, in the realm of ideas, we have Napoleon to thank for rather more than this. After his return from Egypt, he went on to mount a campaign against Germany and this too was, indirectly, no less beneficial. By the turn of the nineteenth century, some two thousand self-governing German-speaking units that had survived the Thirty Years War had been reduced to around three hundred. This was still a lot by the standards of elsewhere but, in 1813, and led by Prussia, the Germans managed at last to defeat Napoleon, in the process learning the virtues of order and respect for rules that was to pay so handsomely thereafter.4 This was an important step on the road to unification, which finally was to arrive in 1871.
Thought in the eighteenth century in the fragmented kaleidoscope of small German-speaking states had lagged well behind other countries–behind Holland, Belgium, Britain and France–both in terms of political freedom, trading success, scientific advance and industrial innovation. This had been brought home by Napoleon’s rapid advances before his final defeat. The nineteenth century would see the rise of Germany, not just politically but also intellectually. Until Napoleon cut his swathe through Europe, roughly speaking in the second decade of the century, the German universities had been notable by their absence. In the 1700s, only Göttingen could lay claim to any academic distinction. However, stung into action by Napoleon’s campaigns, and example, which humiliated many Germans, the Francophile Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who had spent time in Paris prior to the rise of Napoleon, took it upon himself to push through a number of administrative reforms that had a profound effect on German intellectual life. In particular, Humboldt conceived the idea of the modern university, not merely as colleges which trained the clergy, doctors and lawyers–the traditional format–but as places where research was a primary activity. In parallel with this, Humboldt introduced the practice whereby high school teachers in Germany must have a degree in order to teach. This linked the universities to schools much more directly than hitherto and helped spread the ideal of scholarship, based on original research, throughout German-speaking society. The PhD, a higher degree based on original research, was introduced. German intellectual life was transformed and before long the effects were felt across Europe and in north America.5
This was the start of the golden age of German intellectual influence, which was only brought to an end by the ravages of Adolf Hitler following 1933. These developments were felt first at the University of Berlin (later the Humboldt University). Among the notable thinkers there were Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in philosophy, Bartold Georg Niebuhr in history and Friedrich Karl Savigny in jurisprudence. But it was more than just names. New disciplines were invented, which went beyond the traditional breakdown into law, medicine and theology. For example, specialisations such as philosophy, history, chemistry and physiology all came into being at that time and deepened and proliferated.6 The idea of specialisation itself took on a new force as a new literature–history for historians, chemistry for chemists–evolved. As Roger Smith has pointed out, this was
when the difference first emerged between specialist literature and a general readership. As Smith also says, these new academic disciplines did not yet include sociology or psychology, which began in a far more practical way, as a result of observations away from the universities, in prisons, asylums or workhouses.7
Hegel was partly responsible for the rise of history. In his book The Philosophy of History, he advanced the view that the ‘divine will’ unfolds over time, as the universe reveals itself, and so history is in effect a description of this divine will. For him, this meant that theology was to be replaced by history as the way to apprehend the ultimate truths. On his account, man was not a passive creature, an observer of history, but in all senses a participant, a creator, or co-creator of it, in co-operation with the divinity. Hegel’s famous theory as to how history moves forward–thesis, antithesis, synthesis–and his concept that, at certain critical times, ‘world historical figures’ (like Napoleon) emerge, to distil and personify the central arguments of an age, was for many the most satisfying concept about the past, and how it leads to the present.8
But it wasn’t only Hegel. We have already encountered the discipline that also helped to spark the revival in historical studies in Germany–philology, the comparative science of languages. Even in the nineteenth century, the classical languages maintained a certain position, even though language studies had been transformed by Sir William Jones’ observations about the links between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek (covered in Chapter29). Jones’ insights had had the impact they did because, in those days, far more people had an acquaintance with the classics, not least because doctoral theses–even in the ‘hard’ sciences–had to be written in Latin. In schools, there was an emphasis on Greek and Latin because of the part the classical authors had played in the development of logic, rhetoric and moral philosophy. The initiative of William Jones, and the subsequent discovery and translations of the ancient Indian scriptures, transformed not only philology, but the study of all texts. The most important effort in this regard took place first at Göttingen in the late eighteenth century, when the text of the Bible itself came under critical scrutiny. In time this had a profound effect on theology and meant that, in the early part of the nineteenth century, philology became the central discipline in the new universities, at least so far as the humanities were concerned.9
Humboldt himself was particularly interested in philology. He had formed a friendship with Condillac in Paris, and the Frenchman had helped overturn the standard idea that language had originated in a single God-given tongue, from which all other languages were descended. With Condillac, Humboldt shared the view that languages had evolved, reflecting the different experiences of different tribes and nations.10 Language, Humboldt concluded, was ‘mental activity’, and as such it reflected the evolutionary experience of mankind.11 So this is how philology and history came to form a central part of university scholarship, which would grow in importance throughout the nineteenth century. Combined with the Oriental renaissance, philology made India a fashionable area of study for a while and the analyses of language changes seemed to indicate that four waves of people had migrated from the original homeland, via the Middle East, to Europe. This is no longer the accepted view, but it proved important because it was in the context of this debate that Friedrich Schlegel, in 1819, first used the word ‘Aryan’ to describe the original Indo-European peoples. This idea was badly mangled by later ideologues.12
In Humboldt’s reformed German university system, by far the most controversial and yet influential form of historical/philological scholarship was textual criticism of the Bible and associated documents.13 As the world had opened up, thanks to the Oriental renaissance and Napoleon’s travels, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, more and more early manuscripts had been discovered (in Alexandria, and in Syria, for example), manuscripts that varied in interesting and instructive ways, which not only taught scholars howearly ideas had varied, but proved helpful in perfecting dating techniques. Philologists-turned-historians, like Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), were pioneers in the critical inspection and dating of primary sources.
In particular, attention turned to the New Testament. Exegesis, the interpretation of the meaning of the text, was nothing new, as we saw in Chapter 25. However, the new German philologists were much more ambitious: with the new techniques at their disposal, their first achievement was to accurately date the gospels, the effect of which was to throw a new light on the inconsistencies in the different accounts, so that their overall reliability began to be questioned. It is important to say that this did not occur overnight, nor was it deliberate. Originally, scholars such as F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) had merely wished to distil a reasonable trajectory for the biblical narrative, one that could be accepted by any rational person. In the process, however, so much doubt was cast on the texts themselves that Jesus’ very existence as a historical figure began to be undermined and this risked sabotaging the very meaning of Christianity.14 The most controversial of all the Germanic textual bombshells was The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in 1835 by David Strauss (1808–1874). Strauss was much influenced by German romanticism–he wrote a romantic tragedy that was performed, and took a great interest in magnetic and hypnotic cures. In this way he acquired an understanding of God as immanent in nature, but not as someone who would intervene in the course of history.15 Strauss thus used history against religion, arguing that its details were insufficient, by a long way, to support Christianity as it existed in the nineteenth century. So incendiary were his findings–that Jesus was not a divine figure, that the miracles never took place, that the church as we know it has little connection with Jesus–that Strauss’s appointment to a professorship in Zurich in 1839 sparked a local riot so worrying to the local authorities that he had to be ‘retired’ before he even had chance to take up his chair. His conclusions could not be retired so easily, however. In England, Marian Evans, better known as George Eliot, ‘nearly drove herself to despair with the soul-stupefying labour involved in the translation of Strauss into English, but she thought it her duty to humanity’.16 As we shall see in Chapter 35, Strauss’s work was just one element in the nineteenth century’s struggle with religion, and what some were beginning to call ‘the death of God’.
‘Once the Parisians see me three or four times,’ said Napoleon Bonaparte, then twenty-eight, after his victorious campaign in Italy, ‘not a soul will turn his head to look at me. They want to see deeds.’17 His next campaign, as we have seen, was in Egypt, where he took those 167 savants or scholars, who discovered and brought back to Europe the highlights of a fascinating early civilisation. These discoveries were soon built on by others, to make the early nineteenth century both the birth and the heroic age (in the West at least) of yet another new historical discipline, archaeology.
Archaeology, a term first used in the 1860s, amplified and deepened the work of philology, going beyond the texts and confirming that there was a more distant past for men, pre-history, from before writing. In 1802, the schoolmaster Georg Friedrich Grote-fend (1775–1853) delivered three papers to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, in which he revealed that he had deciphered the Persepolis cuneiform script, which he achieved mainly by rearranging the groups of wedges (‘like birds’ feet in soft sand’) and putting spaces between groups of letters, and then relating their form to Sanskrit, as a (geographically) nearby language. He guessed that some of the inscriptions were king-lists, and the names of some kings were known.18 The other forms of cuneiform, including the Babylonian, were deciphered some years later. In the 1820s, Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphics, as we saw in Chapter 29, and in 1847 Sir Austen Layard excavated Nineveh and Nimrud, in what is now Iraq. There, he uncovered the wonderful palaces of Assurnasirpal II, king of Assyria (885–859 BC) and Sennacherib (704–681 BC). The great guardians of the gates that were uncovered, some half-bulls, some lions, far larger than life-size, created a sensation in Europe and did much
to make archaeology popular. These excavations eventually led to the discovery of a cuneiform tablet on which was written the epic of Gilgamesh, notable for two reasons: that it was much older than either Homer or the Bible, and because several episodes in the narrative–such as a great flood–were reminiscent of the Old Testament.