On German Intellectual Ideas During the Aufklärung and Beyond

Lately, I’ve been reading “The German Genius” by Peter Watson, which reads well, although it’s a brick of a tome by itself.

It’s an account of the cultural, intellectual, and scientific achievements of eminent German scientists, thinkers, artists, and others.

What first struck me was how it mentioned the origin of Idealism in Germany as stemming from the intensely inward-looking philosophical tradition of Protestant Germany, which was a kind of uncompromising self-examination to find the truth.

Not unlike it, there is also the hermeneutic tradition in Germany focused on textual interpretation, which can also be ascribed to the rise of private interpretation following the Reformation.

It allowed for private and independent judgement among thinkers who were now more liberated from the constraints of obscurantist dogma and traditional clerical authority.

It wasn’t entirely that smooth, though, as the Pietist movement of purified inwardness and piety rose up against the perceived corruption of the Lutheran church, which hadn’t completely tossed off the shackles of Catholic vestiges.

The Pietist emphasis on duty, discipline, and conscientiousness and to do good works for others made it a useful religious framework for Enlightenment rulers who wished to enforce greater control and obedience in their lands.

If you haven’t heard of Pietism before, it is comparable to Puritanism, which it was strongly influenced by.

From Denmark to Prussia, Pietism was adopted as the official statist ideology, particularly at court and in the state apparatuses to make their civil servants and magistrates more compliant and conscientious.

It was even so successful as to lead to greater censorship in Denmark-Norway of the plays of the national playwright Ludvig Holberg, which were viewed as morally subversive.

One also had the Kantian Revolution leading to a shift towards psychology in Europe alway from theology, which had an interesting geopolitical component to it.

The British navy in the 18th century had a need for a particular kind of timber for its ship masts, which had to be both flexible and sturdy. The “ideal type” was Baltic timber, of which Königsberg was the center.

A strong British presence subsequently grew in the town, and the ideas of the English and Scottish Enlightenments consequently were very much in vogue in the town at the time.

No wonder that Kant used to visit an English friend of his, Joseph Green, every afternoon during a phase in his life to discuss philosophy.

The aesthetic and intellectual convention of Bildung is also treated as pivotal in German cultural history.

It’s a tradition which emphasises the inner self-realisation and cultivation of the individual through education which ennobles the self through education in the arts and the humanities.

Schiller, for instance, developed this tradition further when he advocated for aesthetic education as the key ti improving one’s noble character.

Indeed, Bildung has been such a strong cultural concept in German educational history that it influenced Humboldt when he established the organisation of the philosophical faculty, which included philosophy, philology, and the natural sciences (natural philosophy).

He made sure to give the humanities pride of place as the overarching disciplinary heading, lest the natural sciences should make the universities go into overdrive on empirical reductionism.

This explains the long-standing bias in German universities towards the humanities, which in some form has persisted to this day.

Suffice to say, the humanities have a strong particular tradition in Germany, and so do the universities.

The Prussian university model and the University of Göttingen in particular were central in the emergence of the modern university system, for instance through the development of the seminar, which encouraged critical reflection and rigorous academic discussion.

Later came the advent of PhDs and research papers, not to mention the Humboldtian university model, which stresses the binary mission of universities focused on teaching and research, which is the foundation of modern university practice to this day.