The Rise of Modern Science and The Genesis of Romanticism

The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism
Author(s): Hans Eichner

Source: PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 8-30
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/462237
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HANS EICHNER
The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism
I
Romantic thought. And while Foucault seems to
dislike the term "Romantic," he too describes
M O ORE THAN six hundred books and the decades from 1770 to 1830 in terms of a
articles published during the first half of
monumental change, the change from what he
this century attempt to define Romanti-
calls the "classical episteme," which prevailed in
cism. Culminating this immense effort, Rene
the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, to
Wellek's famous paper of 1949, "The Concept
an entirely different heuristic model, which,
of Romanticism in Literary History,"though
identifies
it may now be falling apart, he still con-
the most significant features of the siders
Romantic
the dominant mode of thought in our own
period as the emphasis on symbol and day. myth in
literature and the replacement of the "mechani-
In view of the vast perspectives Lovejoy and
cal philosophy" by an organic view of thepresent,
Foucault cos- and particularly in view of the
mos.1 In 1951, an important paper extensive
by Morse space and impressive learning they de-
Peckham slightly modified Wellek's vote
view;2 but centuries preceding the age of
to the three
since then, although there is anything but full
Romanticism, it is surprising that neither of
agreement on the meaning of this elusive term,
them pays more than fleeting attention to what
the number and importance of the proposed defi-
was surely the most significant achievement of
nitions have greatly decreased. At long last,
European it between 1500 and 1800 and
thought
appears, scholars have realized-as Wellek and
probably the most significant achievement since
Peckham knew all along-that "Romanticism"
the glories of ancient Greece: the creation of
is not a technical term like "propanol" or
modern science.4 Yet it seems to me that the
"cosine," invented to name a precise concept,
history of Western thought from 1500 to the
but a word with a long, complicated,present
and con-
day must be written with this achieve-
fused history and that any definitionment
capable of
constantly in mind and that the grandeur
encompassing Keats's sonnet "To Sleep,"
and theNov-
futility, the wisdom and the folly, of the
alis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Hugo's Her-
Romantic age can only be assessed and under-
nani must be so broad as to be meaningless.
stood ifThe
the period is seen in relation to this
question to ask if we are to understand the Ro- for Romanticism is, perhaps pre-
achievement;
mantic phenomenon is not, What is dominantly,
Romanti- a desperate rearguard action against
cism? but, What happened in the intellectual lifeand the implications of modern science
the spirit
of Europe in the period that we now call Ro- action that, to anticipate the sub-
-a rearguard
mantic?
stance of this paper, liberated the arts from the
The general recognition that something fun- constraints of a pseudoscientific aesthetics but
damental did happen is supported by at least that was bound to fail in the proper domain of
two books, Arthur O. Lovejoy's magnificent science.
study The Great Chain of Being (1936) and To a certain extent, this thesis is implied by
Michel Foucault's more recent and more ob- the theories of Wellek and Peckham-but it is
scure Les Mots et les choses (1966).3 Accord-
only implied. To tell the full story would be the
ing to Lovejoy, one of the central concepts task,
of not of an article, but of a long book. All I
Western thought-the concept of the great chain
can hope to do here is to provide the bare out-
of being, which had decisively influenced theol-
line of the course such a book might conceivably
take.
ogy, science, and philosophy ever since Plato
-was radically and irrevocably transformed byThe great breakthrough of modern science
8
Hans Eichner 9
came in two closely related fields, astronomy petuum mobile, planets that are not the seats of
and dynamics. In 1543, Copernicus proposed great gods-Mars, Venus, Jupiter-but lumps
the hypotheses of the diurnal rotation of the of dead matter; we behold, not the divine heav-
earth and the rotation of the earth around the ens, but, to use that term again, celestial me-
sun. Some seventy years later, Kepler announced chanics.
his famous three laws of planetary motion. Be- The tenacious resistance to this new view
tween them, they did away with some of the shows how hard it was to accept. Newton could
most hallowed conceptions of ancient and me-never quite rid himself of the notion that God
dieval cosmology, establishing, counter to the must exist to keep the planets in motion, and
dictates of common sense and theology, that the even that arch-materialist the Baron d'Holbach,
earth is not the center of the universe and that as late as 1770, ascribes to dead matter an in-
the planets do not move in the perfect circlesnate "nisus," or striving, which, rather than
deduced by Aristotle and held evident evergravitation, accounts for the fall of bodies.6 To
since. The achievements of Copernicus and Kep-grasp the full implications of the new science,
ler, however, were in the field of applied mathe- however, we must consider the new technology
matics. It was Galileo, the greatest of the found- as well. In the Middle Ages, there were thou-
ers of modern science, who made the decisive sands of water mills throughout Europe, at first
breakthrough in mathematical physics: in theused mainly for grinding wheat but increasingly
early decades of the seventeenth century he cre- also, from the thirteenth century on, for power-
ated the concept of acceleration, discovered theing the machines used in making cloth and saw-
law of inertia, and thus put himself in a position ing wood. At about the same time, pumps began
to formulate the laws of motion of falling bod-to be widely used in ships and mines. The thir-
ies.5 Finally, Newton, drawing on Kepler and teenth century saw the first, very inaccurate
Galileo, produced that mathematicophysical the-mechanical timepieces, and some eighty years
ory of planetary motion which was known in the after Galileo had discovered the isochronic
seventeenth century as-the name is fraughtproperty of pendulums, the first pendulum
with significance-"celestial mechanics." clocks were constructed. Meanwhile, Peter Hen-
Galileo's laws of motion can nowadays belein had invented the mainspring, and by 1550
explained to intelligent teenagers in the course of anyone wealthy enough could buy a portable
an hour, but it has become difficult to realize watch. These developments had important im-
what his discovery meant in the seventeenth cen- plications.
tury. Common sense seems to tell us, or at least As Galileo had shown, the motions of bodies
seemed to tell us before the ubiquity of machines are governed by laws of nature, and as the new
astronomy showed, these laws apply not only to
totally refurbished our minds, that moving things
live and that dead matter is at rest unless it is pebbles dropped from a tower or projectiles
pushed. A dog can run up a hill, a stone has tohurled from a cannon but to the planets and
be dragged. Hence the animistic, or vitalistic, the earth itself. But what holds true for planets
conceptions that have dominated our view of the and pebbles must hold for the smallest particles
world since time immemorial: the winds are that matter comprises-whether conceived of as
propelled by wind gods, the rivers are moved by Lucretian atoms or in some other way. The
river gods; the planets are steered by residentphysical universe consists therefore of bodies in
spirits or set in crystal spheres turned by themotion governed by natural laws, that is, by an
Supreme Being, the Unmoved Mover. Thus theinexorable causality. But these countless bodies
ancients explained the world of dead matter inin motion do not, of course, move chaotically,
terms of the living. With Galileo and Newton, all like dust motes in a whirlwind; the causally de-
this began to change. The law of inertia lays
termined cosmos is orderly, harmonious, and re-
down not only that bodies resist being set in liable. The sun rises every morning with-may I
motion but that, once moving, they will continue use the word?-clockwork regularity. In fact,
to move. When we add the concepts of gravita-the reason we can tell the time at all is that the
tion and centrifugal force, we have Newton's heavens are like a clock: we could tell time by
system of the planets circling the sun like a per- the sun and the stars long before we constructed
10 The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism
our own clocks, and we can understand the sun 1. If the world is like a gigantic clock, it
and the stars in their motions because we can seems reasonable to assume a supreme clock-
maker. The mechanical philosophy thus pro-
construct clocks. But, to repeat, what holds true
vided theologians with a splendid proof of the
for planets and pebbles must hold for all parti-
existence of God, the famous "argument from
cles of matter, however small; and consequently,
design."
the whole physical universe is like a huge clock But their victory was hollow. Once set
or like an immensely complicated machine. As in motion, a clock has no further need of its
Nehemiah Grew, the botanist, put it in 1682, maker. Admittedly, a man-made timepiece has
to be rewound from time to time, but the cosmic
"All Nature is as one Great Engine, made by,
and held in [God's] hand."7 machine was seen, at least until the discovery of
Nowadays, the concept of the physical uni-the second law of thermodynamics, as a per-
verse as a vast engine or mechanical clockpetuum mobile. Thus, "the universe being once
fram'd by God" runs its course according to the
sounds a little simplistic. We have added chemis-
try and biology to mathematical physics, and fixed laws of motion, leaving no room for divine
some prominent scientists of the early twentiethaction unless God chooses to interfere with his
century have argued that the organic realm own
is laws of nature. Besides, if the great cosmic
fundamentally different from the inorganic.8 Inengine functions perfectly, as it must do, given
the last few decades, however, biology has beenthe omnipotence and the perfection of its maker,
such interference will be quite unnecessary. In
reduced almost entirely to a subbranch of phys-
ics and chemistry, and chemistry, where it isthis perfect mechanism, as Leibniz points out,
more than a craft or a collection of rules of even "sins carry their punishment with them by
thumb, is mathematical physics.9 With some the
re- order of nature, and by virtue of the mechan-
ical structure of things itself; and in the same way
finements, the heuristic principles of seventeenth-
noble actions will attract their awards by ways
century science still hold, and their triumphant
which are mechanical .. ."n Thus the chain
results are with us from the moment we get up in
of reasoning that began by proving the existence
the morning and switch on the light to the mo-
ment we retire between our synthetic sheets. of God as the supreme maker and prime mov
Unless, bloated with power and starved for wis-ended by rendering him unemployed. As Fren
dom, we blow ourselves to pieces, the develop- philosophes like Holbach and Diderot showed i
ment that began with Copernicus, Galileo, and the eighteenth century, the mechanical philos
their fellow scientists must seem the greatest phy inevitably drifted toward atheism.
success story of human history. And yet there2. It is a commonplace that the eighteent
was something wrong with it from the beginning.century fervently believed in progress. It is le
To show this flaw, I should like to begin well
by known that this belief is incompatible wi
the metaphysical assumptions of cosmic chang
quoting Robert Boyle's splendid definition of the
new science: lessness that the eighteenth century had inherit
from earlier ages. The product of a suprem
God, indeed, gave motion to matter; he ... estab-being (the argument goes), the world must ha
lished those rules of motion, and that order amongstbeen created perfect. Improvement is thus u
things corporial, which we call the laws of nature.thinkable; the evil the universe contains must be
Thus, the universe being once fram'd by God, and
necessary to it.12 According to Leibniz, for in
the laws of motion settled, and all upheld by his
stance, God created the best of all possib
perpetual concourse, and general providence; the
worlds, that is, either the world with the greate
[mechanical] philosophy teaches, that the phe-
nomena of the world are physically produced bynumber of "compossibles" (including all th
the mechanical properties of the parts of matter, evils that were "compossible") or the world wi
and that they operate upon one another according the highest possible ratio of good to evil. O
to mechanical laws.10 either assumption, the total amount of evil ca
not be reduced: if a better world were possib
This magnificent statement, if it holds true, hasGod
a would have created it in the first pla
number of startling and unpleasant conse-
Thus all hope for progress is illusory. Paradox
quences. I limit myself to five of them: cally, this notion of a static universe seemed
Hans Eichner 11
perfect agreement with the mechanistic founda- Lenkte damals seinen goldnen Wagen
tions of modern science. The great cosmic "en- Helios in stiller Majestat.
Diese H6hen fiillten Oreaden,
gine" that is "held in God's hand" is of course an
Eine Dryas starb mit jenem Baum,
engine in motion, but engines neither grow nor
Aus den Urnen lieblicher Najaden
develop. The cosmic engine thus inevitably re-
Sprang der Strome Silberschaum.
sembles one of those machines devised by mod-
ern pop art that rattle and shake, squeak and Unbewult der Freuden, die sie schenket,
blow whistles, merely to return to the status quo. Nie entziickt von ihrer Trefflichkeit,
But if all the evil that exists is essential to the Nie gewahr des Armes, der sie lenket,
universe, then progress is an illusion harboredReicher nie durch meine Dankbarkeit,
by superficial minds, history has no meaning,Fiihllos selbst fur ihres Kiinstlers Ehre,
and the story of the world is a tale told by anGleich dem toten Schlag der Pendeluhr
Dient sie knechtisch dem Gesetz der Schwere,
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Die entg6tterte Natur!
3. Aristotle saw the purposiveness of the or-
ganism as the basic paradigm that explains
events; a scientific explanation, for him, identi- Morgen wieder neu sich zu entbinden,
Wuhlt sie heute sich ihr eignes Grab,
fied a purpose or final cause that reveals a divine
Und an ewig leicher Spindel winden
intelligence at work. His science thus projects aSich von selbst die Monde auf und ab.
nature not only alive but meaningful in human,MuiBig kehrten zu dem Dichterlande
and indeed ethical, terms: the uniform and cir-Heim die Gotter, unniitz einer Welt,
cular motion of the planets is "perfect," and aDie, entwachsen ihrem Gangelbande,
stone falls to reach its proper place. When mod-Sich durch eignes Schweben halt.13
ern science banished final causes-Galileo and
Descartes were equally caustic about them-a 4. "The [mechanical] philosophy teaches that
rift seemed to open between humanity and na-
the phenomena of the world are physically pro-
ture, physics and ethics; and the more duced mathe- by the mechanical properties of the parts
matical science became, the more the "language of matter," and the human body is one of the
of will and purpose and hope" in which the phe-
phenomena of the world. If the universe is "as
nomena of the world used to be talked about
one Great Engine," the body is like a smaller,
was replaced by an abstract language of quanti-though still immensely complicated, engine.
tative relations, in which "no terms exist for Early modern science assumed that the phenom-
good or bad, kind or cruel" (Gillispie, p. 43) ena of life can only be understood by applying
and which either ignored entirely the "secondary the laws of mechanics and using the heuristic
qualities" of objects or reduced them to mere model of the machine. It was on this assumption
abstractions. Some, of course, particularly the that Harvey, as early as 1628, achieved his great
most competent scientists, thrilled to the beauty breakthrough in physiology, his discovery of the
of the new world view. Kepler, to quote a ran- function of the heart. The terminology he used
dom example, contemplated the "harmonies" of to announce this discovery in his famous trea-
Copernican astronomy "with incredible ravish- tise on the motion of the heart of 1628 is note-
ment" (quoted from Gillispie, p. 27). Others worthy. The heart, he declares, is a "piece of
were horrified by what they saw as a fatal es- machinery in which one wheel gives motion to
trangement between man and nature, and this another"; the blood is pumped by the heart "as
sentiment became widespread in the second half by two clacks of a water bellows to raise
of the eighteenth century. Diderot's and water."14 But if living bodies are like machines
Goethe's distrust of mathematics and Blake's, and if their movements are "physically produced
Goethe's, Hegel's, and Schelling's hatred of by the mechanical properties of the parts of mat-
Newton were straws in the wind, while Schiller ter" of which they and their environment con-
responded to the new world view with a devas- sist, then they are causally determined by the
tating sense of loss: laws of nature, so that they would be exactly the
Wo jetzt nur, wie unsre Weisen sagen same if they were without consciousness. On the
Seelenlos ein Feuerball sich dreht, basis of this analysis consciousness, or the mind,
is merely-to use Gilbert Ryle's famous term- that the soul cannot initiate motions, it can
a ghost in the machine. How awareness of phys- change the direction of existing motions, and
ical events can enter the mind is unimaginable,this ability is enough to account for free will.'1
and that the mind should be able to alter the Unfortunately, this attempt to escape deter-
minism is both bad philosophy and bad science.
course of physical events is contrary to the laws
of nature. It is bad philosophy because the soul, being
immaterial, cannot conceivably affect motion.
5. Since the laws of nature totally control the
And it is bad science because the laws of dy-
parts of matter that make up the body, there can
be no freedom of the will. namics specify that both the quantity and the
direction of momentum are constants. Appar-
The mechanical philosophy, then, which is in-
extricably linked with the genesis of modern sci-ently Descartes became aware of this difficulty
ence and all its subsequent triumphs, projects whena he tried (unsuccessfully) to formulate the
world view that has no room for God, no hope laws of impact, and he therefore dropped from
his mature philosophy the theory that the soul
for a better world, and no possibility of free will.
Such was the heuristic assumption that scientistscan influence the direction of motion, thus leav-
had to make if they were to achieve any progress,ing unsolved-and, he assumed, unsolvable-
but its implications seemed both horrible andthe problem of how the soul can affect bodily
absurd. movements without annulling the laws of dy-
Descartes, the best philosophical mind at namics.l7 To circumvent this problem, Geulinx
work at the beginning of the scientific revolu- and Malebranche subsequently devised the "oc-
tion, must have at least glimpsed these implica- casionalist" doctrine, which asserts that there is
tions. He does not state the antinomy of free no causal connection between physical and men-
will and determinism in the terms I use, but he tal events but that they run a parallel course
does state it, and he confesses that he cannot re- preestablished by God, just as two clocks that
solve it. While he insists that "the chief perfection are working perfectly will show the same time
of man is his being able to act freely or by will," although there is no causal connection between
that it is free will that "renders him worthy of them. Unfortunately, this doctrine solves at best
praise or blame," and that "the liberty of our only a part of Descartes's problem, and it is
will is self-evident," he also holds it "certain that wholly implausible. The main drift of the me-
God has foreordained all things"; and when he chanical philosophy seemed irreversible.
attempts a conciliation of free will and "Divine Roughly a century after Descartes's death La
pre-ordination," he lamely concludes that we do Mettrie, in L'Homme machine, abandoned Des-
not "possess sufficient intelligence to know" how cartes's precarious distinction between human
God "leaves the free actions of man indetermi- beings and animals and proposed-once again
nate" despite having preordained them.15 Simi- drawing on the heuristic model of the timepiece
larly, Descartes recognized the problem of the -that the human body is a "machine that winds
ghost in the machine and failed to cope with it up its own springs, a living image of perpetual
satisfactorily. Animals, he admits, are automata motion," or "an assemblage of springs that mu-
-that is, "machine[s] made by the hands of tually wind up one another."18 The puzzle is
God, which [are] incomparably better arranged, not how the mind influences this machine but,
and adequate to movements more admirable inversely, how the machine produces the phe-
than is any machine of human invention" (Dis- nomenon we call mind. Baron d'Holbach drew
course on Method, p. 44). The assumption that the ultimate consequences in 1770 in his System
animals have consciousness is gratuitous, but of Nature, where he concludes from the "invari-
even if they do have consciousness, it does not in able laws of motion" that the phenomena we call
any way influence their actions. In contrast, we mental and the phenomena we call physical are
know by introspection that we are conscious all wholly determined and that just as "a heavy
beings gifted with free will. Consequently the body must necessarily fall, if it meets with no
soul must be able to affect physical motion, obstacle sufficient to arrest its descent," so "a
though we do not know how. Although we know sensible body must necessarily seek pleasure,
from the law of the conservation of momentum and avoid pain":
Hans Eichner 13
... in no one moment of existence is a man a free

mony preestablished by God. This philosophy
agent. He is not the architect of his own confirma-
seemed to provide everything one could ask for:
tion, which he holds from nature, he has no control
a splendid proof of the existence of God, a logi-
over his own ideas, or over the modification of
cal solution to the problem of the ghost in the
his own brain; these are due to causes, that, in
machine, and, because the monad is windowless,
spite of him, and without his knowledge, unceasingly
the release of the mind from its bondage to the
act upon him. . . . The same necessity which regu-
causal chains of the material world. Leibniz'
lates the physical, also regulates the moral world, in
which everything is in consequence submitted to theory, however, is even less plausible than oc-
fatality. (pp. 101-02) casionalism, and anyone who really believed in
it would be driven insane by a sense of complete
isolation.
Now perhaps Holbach should not be men-
tioned in the same breath as La Mettrie and With the next great philosophic system that
Malebranche, not to speak of Descartes. He must
wasbe mentioned, that of Kant, we seem to
move into a different world and encounter an
neither a competent scientist nor a competent
philosopher, and he constantly, in the most an- different method, but the problem Kant
entirely
set out to solve was still one of the basic Car-
noying manner, confused the physical determi-
nation of the movement of the body with tesian
the dilemmas: the conciliation of causality,
psychological determination of volition. needed
The for science, with free will, needed for
crass materialism he proclaimed with better ethics.
ora- Kant achieved this conciliation by distin-
guishing
tory than logic is not a necessary consequence of between the noumenal world of the
Newtonian physics. But the assumptions of
things-in-themselves, which are "outside" space
and time and are unknowable, and the phenom-
modern science really did pose problems of great
enal world of our sense experience, which the
severity, and the bulk of Continental philosophy
from Descartes to Hegel consists of more or lessconstructs from the data supplied by the
mind
noumena. The relation of cause and effect is one
desperate attempts to solve these problems with-
out being driven to such unacceptable conclu- of the "categories" through which the mind or-
sions as the denial of free will.19 Although ders these data, and nothing in the noumenal
this
extremely important matter hardly ever receives world corresponds to this relation. Insofar as we
enough emphasis in histories of philosophy, it to this noumenal world, which is not sub-
belong
needs no detailed illustration here, and I can ject to causation, we are endowed with free will;
limit myself to some brief remarks on Leibniz when we deal with the phenomenal world, we
and Kant. can be sure that the law of causality will hold,
As I have said, the doctrine of the occasional-
because this is a condition our own mind im-
ists is implausible; but Geulinx and Malebranche poses on all experience. Since Kant's philosophy
were men of great intellect, and if they formu- seemed to provide a place for everything that his
lated so fantastic a philosophy, they must have readers wished to believe in-a secure founda-
been compelled to do so by the need to escape tion for science, free will, God, and the immor-
the Cartesian impasse. Leibniz borrowed from tality of the soul-it caught on very rapidly, and
them and devised a philosophy that not only al- we would be foolish to dispute either its intel-
lowed for free will but also got rid of some logi-lectual brilliance or its historical importance.
cal difficulties inherent in the Cartesian conceptKant's ablest contemporaries saw very quickly,
of substance (see Russell, p. 606). Geulinx as- however, that his system promised more than it
sumed two chains of events, one mental and one could deliver.20 If causation only holds sway
physical, each a closed system but each syn-
within the phenomenal world, the noumena can-
chronized, through the will of God, with thenot account for the spatiotemporal configuration
better than Descartes at explaining how "mat-
other. Leibniz assumed a vast plurality of such
systems, his famous monads. Each monad ter" is enters the "mind." Similarly, if the nou-
both mental and physical, and each, from its mena are neither spatial nor temporal, they can-
own unique point of view, dreams the world.not cause the phenomena, so that Kant is no
These dreams are all synchronized; though theof the phenomena we observe. Now of course
monads are "windowless," they are in a har- Kant nowhere asserts, in so many words, that
the noumena do cause the phenomena; he ex- decisive step away from any philosophy that can
presses himself on this subject with extreme cau- be called Romantic. It has two essential charac-
tion and with great ambiguity; but if the nou- teristics that his most enthusiastic disciples, the
mena do not cause the phenomena, what do they young German Romantics, found unacceptable.
do? Is it not entirely gratuitous to assume that The first is a further degradation of nature,
there are things-in-themselves that exist inde- which the mechanical philosophy had already
pendent of our experience? In the decisive years reduced to lumps of dead matter. In the Wissen-
when Romantic thought began to take organized schaftslehre, nature is merely the ego's field of
shape, there seemed to be no satisfactory answer moral activity, merely the "nonego." As such it
to these questions. However much one could has no existence independent of the mind and no
learn from Kant, it seemed inevitable to con- value other than that of presenting the ego with
clude that he had failed. Thus the time was ripe, a barrier to be overcome by free moral action.
at long last, for radical-or, rather, for even The other characteristic of Fichte's thought that
more radical-solutions. Within twenty years of the Romantics found unacceptable is more com-
the publication of Kant's last Critique, the major plicated and more controversial.
Romantic systems were devised, proclaimed, In its "practical" aspects, Fichte's philosophy
and began to fall apart again. For our purposes is nothing if not dynamic. It sets us the task of
they can be characterized in a single sentence: realizing in practice the freedom it guarantees
they attempted to escape the dilemmas of the through its theoretical starting point, and it en-
mechanical philosophy by replacing all its basic visages human history as the story of infinite
assumptions by the exact opposites. progress toward this end. But in its theoretical
It was Fichte who took the decisive steps in foundations, the Wissenschaftslehre is, paradox-
the new direction in his Wissenschaftslehre of ically, no less static than the mechanical philos-
1794. The basic concept of the mechanistic ophy. According to Fichte, all knowledge can,
philosophy is that of material particles, whose and ultimately must, be derived from its first
motion it studies. With Kant, all that remains of proposition by a series of purely logical, dialec-
these particles outside the mind are the unknow- tic deductions. The thesis "The ego posits itself"
able things-in-themselves. Fichte does away with harbors, Fichte maintains, a contradiction that
this residue. Every philosophy that assumes the can only be resolved by its antithesis, "The ego
existence of matter, he asserts, will inevitably posits the nonego." The thesis and its antithesis
lead to a rigidly causal system and deny free form a new contradiction, which must be re-
will. A philosophy that upholds human dignity solved by a synthesis that is again contradictory,
must therefore deny the existence of matter and thus giving rise to a new antithesis, and so on.
posit a universe that is purely mental. Its basic The mind can only pass from one proposition to
assumption must be precisely what all forms of the next in a temporal sequence, but since each
"dogmatism" end up by denying, that is, free proposition is in itself a logical contradiction, it
will; and its first proposition, the "thesis" from is untenable except in conjunction with all the
which all its other propositions are to be dialec- others, so that the whole system of propositions
tically deduced, must therefore be an assertion must be thought of as simultaneous. The Wis-
of free will. Descartes's basic proposition is senschaftslehre thus does not tell the story of the
purely intellectual and static: "I think, therefore gradual creation of the universe. The ego does
I am." Fichte's first proposition states a free ac- not first posit itself, then the nonego, and so on;
tion: "The ego posits itself." on the contrary, the free actions that can be de-
With Fichte, two of the most worrying prob- duced logically from the first must, all of them,
lems of the earlier, dualistic philosophies have take place at the same time. In fact, the final
suddenly disappeared (though at a price few proposition with which the whole system of de-
philosophers are now willing to pay): not only ductions completes itself is also the first, "The
is free will unchallenged, it is the very soul of the ego posits itself." But if this reasoning is valid,
new system; and the rift between mind and mat- the universe projected by this philosophy is as
ter no longer exists, because there is no matter. "complete" at the (unimaginable) moment of its
Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, however, is still a beginning as the universe created, according to
Hans Eichner 15
more traditional beliefs, by God, and its con-granted that whatever is "lower" or further from
perfection must have been created by, or have
stituents form as rigid a series as the changeless
constituents of the great chain of being. emanated from, something "higher" or more
Of course, as we have seen, when Fichte de- nearly perfect-all the way up to Plato's "Su-
preme Good" or the Creator in the Hebrew-
vised the Wissenschaftslehre as a logical system,
he did not mean to imply that the world hadChristian
no tradition. According to the new vision,
the reverse is true: the "higher" developed from
history; he was simply caught on the horns of an
ancient dilemma. But if there was any room thefor "lower," the more perfect from the less; the
world was not created once and for all by a
history left in his world, his dialectics, so to
perfect, supreme being but has grown or devel-
speak, took the steam out of it. Just as the me-
chanical philosophy envisaged a world of per- oped-and growing, "becoming," Werden is its
petual motion whose entire history follows veryby essence. Even its God is not "something
causal determination from its beginning, which completed and present" from the beginning but
preordains it, so Fichte envisaged a worldone of who "makes himself" (Schelling). He must
eternal striving whose entire history follows "thought of as changing and imperfect, as is
be
the case in all mythologies" (Schlegel).24
from its logical constitution. Characteristically,
he told Friedrich Schlegel that he would ratherWith this new vision of an imperfect, evolving
waste time counting peas than study history. universe, the problem of evil, which had driven
earlier philosophers to such desperate strata-
"Philosophy," he says elsewhere, "anticipates
the whole of experience."21 gems, lost its sting. If the world is imperfect and
With all his innovations, Fichte thus still be-
striving toward perfection and if the perfect su-
preme being is not its creator but its telos, the
longs to the classical episteme (to use Foucault's
existence of evil presents no puzzle, and such
term again). It is uncertain which of his follow-
evil as there is can be vanquished. In the "best
ers first thought of modifying Fichte's philoso-
possible" world, there is no room for hope; in an
phy by assigning nature a more significant role
evolving world, there is. But this implication is
and by changing the logical order of Fichte's
propositions into a historical one. As earlyonly
as one of several introduced by the vision of
an evolving world, and some of the others are
the summer or fall of 1797, Friedrich Schlegel
complained that Fichte's philosophy was "not far more obviously related to my main theme.
yet" a historical system,22 and at about the same Machines do not grow, organisms do. Schell-
time Novalis noted that the Wissenschaftslehre ing and other Romantics not only replaced the
was "nothing but applied logic."23 There is no "static" world of earlier thought by an evolving
one but exchanged the mechanistic assumptions
doubt, however, that it was Schelling who, in his
System der Naturphilosophie (1798/99), pro- associated with modern science for an equally
duced the first coherent philosophical system sweeping organicism. Nature, according to this
view,
that can, without qualification, be called Roman- is not a mere "nonego" but unconscious,
visible
tic. He did so by turning Fichte's dialectic, the spirit striving toward consciousness. The
"ideal development of reason," into a dialecticworld is not a "Great Engine" resting in God's
that is the "real development of nature" (Hart-hand but a great organism, a "cosmic animal" or
mann, p. 117)-the historical, temporal unfold-"All-Tier," as the Romantic physicist Ritter
calls it,25 not external to God, but in some un-
ing of the universe. Fichte's logical deductions
thus became an evolutionary cosmogony. fathomable way identical with him. If the me-
The step Schelling took was monumental. chanical
By philosophy had sought to explain all
"temporalizing" Fichte's dialectic, Schelling phenomena, including those of life, by causal
broke with an assumption that had prevailed determination,
at by the motion of particles, and
by the heuristic model of the machine, Romantic
least since the days of Plato, thus paving the way
philosophy sought to explain all phenomena, in-
for the whole series of Romantic, evolutionary
philosophies that stretch through Hegel and cluding so-called dead matter, by freedom, by
conscious or unconscious mental processes, and
Bergson all the way to Teilhard de Chardin. For
more than two thousand years, as Lovejoy has
by the analogy of organisms. "Our philosophy of
the world," F. Schlegel explains, "refutes the
shown (p. 316), Western thinkers had taken for
core of dogmatism, i.e., the principle of causal- man. "The explanation of an organic product, of
ity. Every motion is individual and dynamic. an organic being," he declares, "must be histori-
Every motion is instinct" (xII, 32). "Rivers do cal, not mechanical" (xvIIi, 21, No. 36). "The
not fall into the sea mechanically, but organically world is not a system, but a history" (XII, 418).
strive towards it" (xviiI, 188, No. 739).26 That "The best theory of art is its history" (iv, 230).
this view of nature had a far greater appeal to History is "the only science," and hence "scien-
poets than Fichte's-that it completely reversed tific physics . . . must be natural history" (XII,
the alienation of nature that Schiller had so 420). "All science is genetic," and history is
eloquently deplored-goes without saying. therefore
That "the most universal, the most general,
and the highest of all sciences" (xi, xxiv, n.
it is incompatible not merely with the mechanical
philosophy but with all science is a matter 1). to
which we must return later.
The Romantic fascination with history led to
Another immediate consequence of the modern,
con- historical philology, which replaced the
cept of an evolving universe was Romanticquest
his-for a universal grammar; to a historical
toricism. The eighteenth century had by no of genres, which replaced timeless laws of
theory
means lacked interest in history; it produced poetry; and to a biology of evolution, which re-
such major historians as Montesquieu, Gibbon, placed one preoccupied with classifying suppos-
Hume, and Robertson, and it witnessed edly greatstatic, unchangeable species. Under its in-
advances in the methodology of historicalfluence,re- too, the quest for a timeless, universal
search. But the thought of the age had remained"natural law" made room for historicism in legal
fundamentally ahistorical.27 The new science thought and, in the wake of Burke, provided
that began with Copernicus and Galileo sought countless arguments against "man-made," "artifi-
to explain the world rationally in terms of cial"
theconstitutions such as those of the United
laws of nature, and these laws, like reason itself,
States and revolutionary France. But even his-
were thought to hold uniformly at all times and
toricism was not the most radical development
places. It seemed natural that human beings, thatthefollowed from the belief in an organic,
most rational of creatures, should be equally
evolving universe.
timeless in their essence. Thus even such an ex-
In the thought of such men as Descartes,
cellent historian as Voltaire conceived of moral-
Boyle, and Christian Wolff, there was an inti-
ity as being the same at all times and places ("la
mate connection between mechanistic assump-
morale uniforme en tout temps, en tout lieu"),tions and faith in reason and observation. If
and he speaks of a natural law that must holdnature worked like a "great Engine," human
equally in Europe and Japan and that inspiredbeings, who built engines, could unriddle its se-
Solon and Zoroaster as it inspires us (Lovejoy,crets, using the same thought processes that they
p. 290). In fact, change seemed something al- used in building engines. There might be truths
most unnatural. Some eighteenth-century phil- to be deduced a priori, there were the revealed
ologists found it so unreasonable to suppose that
truths of Christianity, and there might even be a
languages change that they denied, in the face offew facts-such as the coexistence of free will
all evidence, that the Romance languages had
and divine predetermination in Descartes-that
developed from Latin (Foucault, pp. 89, 121).
were forever denied to human comprehension.
The Romantics, who had done away with the On the whole, however, it could be assumed that
notion of an unchanging universe, also aban-
nature and the human intelligence were "made
doned the concept of unchanging human nature. for each other" and that whatever could be
As they did so, not only the preoccupation with known at all could be known by reason and ex-
but also the admiration for the timeless, the uni-perience (of which revelation formed a part).
versal, and the general made way for a decidedWhen organicism replaced the mechanical phi-
preference for the temporal, the local, and the losophy, all this changed. The Romantics saw
individual; and the most obvious, indeed the
that the way in which we know what it is like to
only, explanation for the temporal, local, andbe a living being is fundamentally different from
individual seemed to them history. Here, Fried-
the way in which we know how a clock works,
rich Schlegel was their most eloquent spokes-that we know about our own existence by intro-
Hans Eichner 17
spection. Besides, the phenomena of life were With this quotation, we have at long last come
precisely those for which the mechanistic, toCar-
the field that the Romantics most successfully
tesian, or Newtonian methods of investigation claimed as their own, the field most unquestion-
failed; and if everything was alive and organic, ably ruled by beauty and the imagination-
these methods no longer applied anywhere. poetry.30 But before we can discuss the view of
This conclusion does not mean, of course, poetry that resulted from the Romantic revolt
that the Romantics rejected the findings of mod- against mechanicism and its attendant phenom-
ern science or that they repudiated science as ena, we have to look briefly at the view that
such: they were convinced that, in denying the preceded it.
axioms of what is now called "classical," New- Modern science would never have developed
tonian physics, they were turning against a tem- beyond its infancy if its early practitioners had
porary aberration, and they appropriated some not had the courage to break with the past and
of the most recent findings of science-particu- to speak up where they found the ancient au-
larly such dubious ones as animal electricity, an- thorities in error. The founders of French clas-
imal magnetism, and Brownian medicine-with sicism, which was to dominate the theory and
almost indecent haste, in the conviction that practice of European poetry for more than a
these phenomena demonstrated the superiority century, took their cue from this past. It was
of their own speculative organicism over New- from Aristotle (or, to be precise, from Aristotle
tonian physics. Similarly, the Romantics never mistranslated and misunderstood) that they de-
wholly rejected reason, but they dethroned it, rived the three unities and the principle of imita-
assigning it only the more menial services; to at- tion. But their ability to turn to Aristotle as their
tain those truths that really matter they relied on lawgiver and to Greek tragedy as their prescrip-
the irrational faculties of the mind-unmediated tive model is not unconnected with the spirit
insight, "enthusiasm," "intellectual intuition," of the scientific revolution, nor is it surprising
and the imagination, concepts the Romantics did that Corneille (1606-84), Descartes (1596-
not always clearly differentiate.28 The claims1650), and Boyle (1627-91) were contem-
made by the Romantics on behalf of the imagina-poraries. The faith in reason that the scientific
tion, in particular, are as ubiquitous as they are, to
revolution so splendidly justified is as evident in
the modern ear, excessive. According to Schleier- the poetics of the period as in the science and
macher, the imagination is the highest and most
philosophy. "The arts have this in common with
indispensable faculty ("das hochste und the sciences," Le Bossu wrote in 1675, "that
urspriinglichste im Menschen"); without it, like the latter they are founded on reason."31
there would be "neither a world, nor God." Ac- And since reason is the same in all places and at
cording to Jean Paul, it is the "elementary spirit"all times, the laws for the arts must be as uni-
of all the faculties ("der Elementargeist der
versal as the laws of nature: what held good in
iibrigen Krafte"). According to Friedrich ancient Greece must hold just as good in modern
France. Like science, art must be objective and
Schlegel, it is the basic faculty of the mind ("die
Grundfahigkeit im menschlichen BewuBtsein") impersonal, and all artists must strive to realize
and the organon of religion ("das Organ fur die one and the same ideal. The uniformity that
Religion"). According to Wordsworth, it is "but Voltaire claimed for ethics-"There is only one
another name for absolute power and clearestmorality . . . just as there is only one geometry"
insight." In short, while Western philosophers, -equally held in the arts: "There is only one
for more than two thousand years, had thought beauty, just as there is only one goodness"
of truth as something to be discovered in the(Winckelmann); "There is only one poetry, just
world outside them, through reason or faith,as there is only one reason" (Fichte).32
through tradition, revelation, or the evidence of Unfortunately, the quest for universal laws
their senses, the Romantics, as Isaiah Berlin putthat achieved such success in the sciences
it, sought not to discover truth but to invent it.
worked poorly in the arts. The doctrine of imit
In Keats's famous phrase, "What the imagina-tion fitted in very well with the temper of
tion seizes as Beauty must be Truth-whether it age that had learned the virtues of faithful a
existed before or not... ."29 patient observation of nature, but it was bl
tantly incompatible with what great painters and it was a consequence) that whatever has to be
poets really did. Instead of abandoning it, writ- said can be said clearly in ordinary prose. But
ers on the arts took refuge in outrageous cheat- then why write poetry at all-except as an idle
ing. To mention just one, by no means untypical, pastime? Inevitably, as French classicism in-
example, the Swiss critics Bodmer and Breitin- creasingly spread its influence throughout Eu-
ger squared their admiration of Milton with their rope during the first half of the eighteenth cen-
enslavement to Aristotle by suggesting that poets tury, poetry went into a decline. If, in the second
are not restricted by the actual world but are half of the century, it recovered, the explanation
free to "imitate" possible worlds that God mightis that the best poets simply ignored, or even
have created had he not chosen otherwise. The deliberately defied, classicistic poetics-not, in-
doctrine of idealization, which assumed partic- cidentally, because they had clearly envisaged
ular importance in eighteenth-century Germany, theoretical reasons but because they followed
is of course also incompatible with that of the different models, such as Pindar or Shakespeare,
imitation of real, or even beautiful, nature, and
or because they chose to vent their impatience
it led to an absurdity of its own: if there is really
with a restrictive society by systematically break-
ing rules in all fields. The best critics rebelled
only one bon gout, or only one ideal of beauty,
all successfully idealized paintings of, say, against
a isolated aspects of classicistic poetics,
beautiful woman should look exactly alike.33 but their attacks, however brilliant, were too
Fortunately, since painters had no access topiecemeal to be really effective.36 As long as the
basic epistemological convictions and mental
the ideal of beauty, their paintings continued to
differ. Poetry, which was saved from uniformityhabits of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
by the infinite variety of possible subjects, faced turies remained dominant, the aesthetics that fol-
a worse danger. Should not Descartes's "clear lowed from them could be patched up indefi-
and distinct ideas," which worked such wonders nitely. But when these basic convictions were
in the sciences, work equally well in the arts?overthrown, the system collapsed, and the radi-
Boileau, who believed that a theory of poetic cally new and coherent attitude toward poetry
genres should be as timeless and universal as the
that is the most enduring achievement of the
theory of conic sections, certainly thought so, Romantics followed almost of necessity. This at-
and hence preached an ideal of poetic diction titude is so well known and has been so fully
that had all the virtues of prose: documented that there is no need to describe it
in any detail, and the remarks that follow are
Whate'er you write of, pleasant or sublime, merely intended to show its coherence and its
Always let sense accompany your rime. internal logic.
When organicism replaced the mechanical
Love reason then; and let whate'er you write philosophy, the imagination, rather than reason,
Borrow from her its beauty, force, and light. became the accepted way to the higher truths;
and the imagination reveals its powers nowhere
As your idea is clear, or else obscure, so fully as in poetry. It must be poetry, there-
The expression follows, perfect or impure; fore, the Romantics argued, that is the supreme
What we conceive with ease we can express; tool of cognition. As early as 1796/97, in the
Words to the notion fly with readiness.34
fascinating document known as "Das ilteste
Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus"
But if the language of poetry prides itself pri-and variously ascribed to Schelling, Hegel, and
marily on its clarity and good sense, it can
even Holderlin, it was claimed that the "highest
hardly hope to achieve anything that prose can-
act of reason" is an "aesthetic act," that poetry
not do as well. This conclusion (which was notwould soon regain its role as the "teacher of
often drawn explicitly)35 was unlikely to dis-mankind," that philosophy and history would
turb an age convinced of the "reciprocal kinshipdisappear, and that "poetry alone" would "sur-
between knowledge and language" (Foucault, p. vive all the other sciences and arts."37 According
89), a kinship that seemed to guarantee (like to Friedrich Schlegel, we must be "initiated into
the kinship between reason and nature, of which the mysteries of poetry" if we are to "penetrate
Hans Eichner 19
into the heart of physics" (II, 266, No. 99), Schleiermacher

for declared, is an individual view of
the universe (passim; but see esp. pp. 40, 46,
"poetry is the sun in which all the planets of the
arts and sciences will dissolve" (xviii, 569, No.
84, 95, 122, 132, 159). The godhead can only
84). According to Novalis, poetry is the "One emerge in its full splendor through the mutually
and All," and according to Wordsworth, it is
supportive multiplicity of such individual views,
and individuality is therefore not a defect but a
"the first and last of all knowledge." In the words
virtue. Romantic historicism, of course, led to
of Shelley, it is "at once the centre and the cir-
cumference of knowledge; it is that which com-the same conclusion, which the Romantics
prehends all science, and to which all science voiced in conscious opposition to the classicistic
must be referred. It is at the same time the root normative aesthetics. "Art is like nature," writes
and blossom of all other systems of thought."38 Ludwig Tieck. "It has more than one beauty."40
The Romantic view of poetry as the fountain-And F. Schlegel makes this point repeatedly.
head of all higher truths is intimately connected "Everything that is beautiful, is beautiful here
with the dramatic reversal in the attitude toward and now, in this place or that" (LN, p. 118, No.
poetic language that now took place. As the 1113). "There is only one reason, and it is the
mechanistic interpretation of the world gave way same in all men; but just as every man has his
to organicism, the belief in the kinship between own nature and his own love, every man has his
reason and nature, between knowledge and the own poetry" (II, 284). "Every poem is its own
ordinary language of discursive prose, broke genre" (LN, p. 116, No. 1090). "There is a
down. The higher truths that are revealed greatness and a beauty for every climate, even
through the irrational or suprarational powers of for the north pole."41 "The real value, and in-
the imagination cannot, the Romantics held, be deed the virtue of man [is] his originality" (in,
expressed directly: such revelations can only be 320).
communicated symbolically, and hence the The realization that poetry is individual and
higher poetry, which is concerned with these local rather than universal necessarily went hand
higher truths, must be symbolic. Great poetry in hand with a radical change in literary criti-
has always been symbolic. As F. Schlegel ar- cism: history and interpretation, the approaches
gues, the polytheistic mythologies of Greece and that still dominate our discipline, replaced rhe-
India, and indeed the monotheistic mythology of toric and poetics. Just as inevitably, the beliefs
the Hebrew-Christian tradition, are symbolic in the primary role of the imagination and in
poetry. The great task for the poetry of the fu- poetry as the highest form of knowledge deter-
ture is to revive all these mythologies and to mined most of the other characteristics of Ro-
create a still vaster and more nearly perfectmantic poetry-the fascination with dreams and
mythology to express the new vision granted to visions and the predilection for such genres as
us (II, 311-22; xi, 9). fairy tales, romances, philosophical poems, and
Evidently, this view of poetry has no use for verse tales with "fantastic," supernatural in-
the concept of imitation, which the Romantic gredients. But instead of pursuing these devel-
critics took pains to ridicule. It is equally in- opments, which would involve much tedious
compatible with the all-important classicistic repetition of well-known facts, I should like to
doctrine of the single ideal of beauty. Science draw some more general conclusions.
concerns objective, impersonal truths. If Robert
Boyle had not discovered "Boyle's law," pv = c,
someone else would have discovered exactly the Lovejoy, Peckham, and Foucault argue-
same law.3" The higher truths of Romantic using entirely different methods and drawing on
poetry are not of this kind. Knowledge of God different kinds of evidence-that the decades
and of the Infinite is obtained not through rea- around 1800 mark a turning point in Western
son, which is the same in everyone, but through thought, the beginning of an era that has contin-
the imagination, which is different: individuals ued into the present (or at any rate until the
can only grasp and reveal that knowledge in the time when they wrote their books). In other
light of their own personalities, from their own words, they claim that the Romantics achieved a
individual and unique perspectives. Religion, lasting victory over the world view, the "classi-
cal episteme," that preceded them; that we have lessen the achievement of these authors, it is
not returned to this earlier view; and that the false. The Romantics rejected not merely the
twentieth century is therefore still, in essential foundations of the science of Descartes, Harvey,
ways, part of the Romantic era. This claim is and Boyle but the foundations of science itself.
partly correct and partly quite wrong. Although Such statements as "the world is like a clock,"
few today would agree that poetry is the begin- "the universe is as a great engine," or "the
ning and the end of all science, it can hardly be human body is a machine" may sound naive, but
doubted that the Romantics were-in Rene Wel- they are not. They are not meant to imply that a
lek's phrase-the fathers of modern literary crit- living body, or the world as a whole, really con-
icism; that their insistence on individuality and sists of springs, levers, and cogged wheels. The
on historical explanations in the arts was, on the terms used in these statements merely reflect cer-
whole, justified; and that classicistic, normative tain facts about the period: that modern science
aesthetics with its quest for universal rules is began
a by accounting for such relatively simple
matter of the past. The contemporary art lover phenomena as planetary motion and the flight of
who, on a visit to a gallery, delights in being ableprojectiles and that the machines then in exis-
to tell at a glance a Monet from a Van Gogh tence-unlike, for example, a digital watch with
or a Matisse and sees a part of the greatness ofits electronic circuits-really consisted of such
these artists in the uniqueness of their paintings simple parts as springs, wheels, and levers. The
is a direct descendant of the Romantics: even proponents of the mechanical philosophy never
Goethe would still have insisted that works dis- tired of emphasizing that the machine built by
playing such individual styles and visions are not the supreme artificer is vastly more complicated
so much "original" as eccentric and that they than any machine ever built, or ever likely to be
commit the cardinal sin of "mannerism."42 built, by human beings. What their statements
But when the Romantics rejected classicistic assert is that motion can be explained in princi-
aesthetics, they did not see precisely why its ple with the machine as the heuristic model (i.e.,
proponents had gone wrong. The creators of without recourse to mysterious and unaccount-
modern science had developed methods of in- able "vital forces"), that it is determined, and
quiry vastly superior to any previously known that it is thus subject to laws of nature. The
and had used these methods to show that under- force of these assertions was not affected by the
lying the infinite variety of nature there is a kind addition of chemistry and electronics to the ar-
of uniformity that can be described in terms of, senal of science. Admittedly, we have acquired a
and perhaps even explained by, universal laws. subtler view of the "parts of matter" than that
The creators of classicistic aesthetics misapplied assumed by Newtonian physics; but the basic
the notion of the uniformity of nature and heuristic assumption of science is still that the
strove to rival the sciences by formulating uni- phenomena of the world are causally determined
versal laws of art. Not content with rectifying in conformity with the laws of nature.43 The
this error, the Romantics-not out of frivolity road that leads from Copernicus via Newton and
but for the profound reasons we have attempted Laplace to Einstein and Planck has its twists
to explain-poured out the babe with the bath- and turns, but it is one road. In the words of
water. Lovejoy, in his long and erudite book, Werner Heisenberg, "Modern physics is just one
shows that the Romantics replaced the static link in a long chain of events that started from
concept of the great chain of being with a dy- the work of Bacon, Galileo and Kepler and from
namic, evolutionary concept. Peckham, in his the practical application of natural science in the
brilliant and succinct paper, argues that the re- seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."44 If
placement of the mechanical philosophy with Boyle were alive today, he might feel uneasy
organicism was the Romantics' decisive theoret- about some of the terms he used in defining the
ical achievement. They both, however, create the mechanical philosophy, but he would feel that
impression (unintentionally, no doubt) that the modem science had vindicated his basic convic-
ideas Romanticism rejected were quaint and ex- tions-the convictions that the Romantics re-
pendable, and though this implication does not jected.
Hans Eichner 21
then, that Schelling's Naturphilosophie turned

II out to be just as much of a dead end in science
as Romantic irrationalism had.
Obviously, the preceding pages somewhat The second point cannot be dealt with so
oversimplify and idealize both the Romantic re- briefly. Throughout this paper I have assumed
bellion and the system of thought it attempted to that "good science" can be distinguished from
overthrow. Most of the oversimplifications in my bad and that it progressively increases our
presentation must be left to the reader to cor- knowledge of the real world. I have also as-
rect, but two of them require, at this point, a sumed that "good science" operates, roughly
brief excursion. Romanticism was not the mono- speaking, in the manner first formulated by the
lithic block that I have suggested, and the his- Alexandrians and subsequently adopted by Kep-
tory of science is open to interpretations very ler and Galileo, that is, that it rests on the ob-
different from mine.
servation of facts, the formulation of hypotheses
As for the first of these matters, it must suffice to account for those facts, and the subsequent
here to note that Romantic irrationalism went testing of the hypotheses by suitably designed
hand in hand-for long stretches of time, appar- experiments (procedures not characteristic of
ently, without any sense of contradiction-with Romantic science).40 It was on the basis of
a peculiarly arrogant speculative rationalism. these assumptions that I could adopt Heisen-
For Fichte the identity of object and subject that berg's saying that "modern physics is just one
he regards as "given" in intellectual intuition is a link in the long chain of events that started from
sufficient premise for the deduction of all knowl- the work of Bacon, Galileo and Kepler" and as-
edge; in announcing his Berlin lectures of 1804, sert that the road of science, despite its twists
for instance, he promised nothing less than a and turns, is one single road. As recently as
"complete solution of the riddle of the universe
thirty years ago these assumptions could have
and of consciousness with mathematical cer- been made tacitly, with little likelihood of their
tainty,"45 that is, by a deduction a priori. being challenged. Their acceptance is no longer
Schelling distinguishes between history, which is so assured.
empirical, and science, which is genuine knowl- In the early decades of the present century,
edge only to the extent that it is deduced from a the scientific method just outlined hardened into
first principle; hence, while admitting that the the doctrine of logical positivism. According to
speculative philosopher can, or perhaps even has this doctrine-if the immensely complex and by
to, make use of the empirical findings provided no means uniform views of the Viennese Circle
by lesser minds, he tends to treat the empirical can be summarized in a few bald sentences-
study of nature with contempt.4 In spite of its "good" science is entirely free of metaphysical
grandiose claims and the novelty of its deductive assertions, terms, or assumptions. It should con-
procedures, his Naturphilosophie is, in decisive sist of nothing but pure statements of fact (i.e.,
ways, a throwback to earlier, prescientific modes of observation statements, "sense-data" state-
of thought. His concept of the Weltseele refur- ments, or "protocol sentences") and of (prefer-
bishes the stoic notion of pneuma, and while he ably mathematical) generalizations of these
vacillates on the subject of causality, he prefers, facts; these generalizations (i.e., theories)
on the whole, to think in terms of a kind of should have predictive value and should be sub-
Aristotelian teleology, of preestablished har- ject to verification by experiments leading to
mony, or of his (particularly obscure) notion of new observations that agree with the predictions.
Wechselwirkung.47 It is typical of his whole ap- No statement is to be admitted as part of science
proach that, following Hegel, he considers New- that cannot thus be objectively and empirically
ton's astronomy a mechanistic and empiricist verified, for "the meaning of a statement is the
distortion (Verunstaltung) of Kepler's laws of method of its verification," or even, "a genuine
motion and claims that Newton and Boyle statement must be capable of conclusive verifica-
ruined physics just as Bacon (according to him) tion."50 The verification theory of meaning en-
had ruined philosophy.48 It is hardly surprising, joyed only brief popularity, and the conviction
that a genuine statement must be completely veri- ence, arguing that "the knowledge of today may
fiable quickly gave way to the more reasonable become the fairy-tale of tomorrow," that "the
notion that the predictive successes of a theory most laughable myth may eventually turn into
could never do more than make it increasingly the most solid piece of science," and that "there
probable. Given such limitations, however, and is no idea, however ancient and absurd that is
in spite of Karl Popper's grave objections to not capable of improving our knowledge."53
some of the Viennese Circle's fundamental as- Kuhn occupies a middle ground between
sumptions, the views of this group, particularlyToulmin and Feyerabend, and his views must be
as formulated by Carnap, became the dominant summarized at slightly greater length. Starting
philosophy of science in the three decades from,with the conviction that observations are neces-
roughly, 1930 to 1960. Clearly, if this article sarily "theory-laden," he argues that communi-
had been written thirty years ago, the present ties of scholars share ontological and methodo-
excursion would be unnecessary. From the earlylogical assumptions, or "paradigms," that they
fifties on, however, the "received view," as it absorb unconsciously when learning scientific
came to be called, was subject to a series ofprocedure and that determine what questions
devastating attacks. It was argued, for instance,they ask and what answers they receive. At most
that all so-called observation statements neces- times-the times of what Kuhn calls "normal
sarily involve theoretical assumptions and that science"-there is a generally accepted para-
therefore one cannot draw the sharp distinction digm, and normal science proceeds by adding to
between observational and theoretical state- the set of established theories new ones that re-
ments that the received view requires. It was move anomalies or "solve puzzles" within the
further argued that the positivists' emphasis framework
on determined by this paradigm. From
the predictive successes of theories is unwar- time to time, however, normal science encoun-
ranted (Darwin's theory of evolution, for in-ters so many puzzles it cannot solve that sci-
stance, has great explanatory power and very entists begin to question the dominant paradigm,
little predictive value). And it was argued aboveand a period of "revolutionary science" begins
all that the Viennese Circle's exclusive attention
that finally leads to the adoption of a new para-
to fully developed theories had led to an ideal-
digm. This changeover, however, is not a ra-
ized concept of science that bears little resem-
tional process. One tradition of normal science
blance to what scientists really do and that
is not replaced by another because the new
science-this would have delighted the Roman- paradigm "fits the facts" better;54 there are re-
tics!-must be studied in its historical develop- ally no "facts." The paradigms that determine
ment. As a result of these and similar criticisms,how research is done are not only "constitutive
logical positivism lost its hold on the philosophy
of science," Kuhn says, but "constitutive of na-
of science in the course of the 1960s, and there ture" (p. 109); "the proponents of competing
is little prospect of its being revived. paradigms practice their trades in different
Some critics of logical positivism-most im-worlds" (p. 149). Thus, when paradigms
portant, perhaps, Stephen Toulmin, Thomas change, we may have the illusion of progress,
Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend-developed rival but it is only an illusion: "We may . .. have to
theories, whose popularity, particularly in the
relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that
sixties, has made the present excursion inevita-
changes of paradigm carry scientists . . . closer
ble.51 These philosophies share the convictions
and closer to the truth" (p. 169). "As in politi-
that science must be studied in terms of its his-
cal revolutions, so in paradigm choice-there is
tory, that it cannot be cleansed of metaphysical
no standard higher than the assent of the rele-
assumptions, and that its findings depend onvant community" (p. 93).
these assumptions, which cannot be proved.Toulmin still adheres to the traditional view
Toulmin, the most conservative of the three,
that science has led to a cumulative growth of
holds that scientific theories are neither true nor
real knowledge about the world; and since his
false and are best regarded as rules for drawing
"enquiry into the aims of science" ends with his
inferences about phenomena.52 Feyerabend, the approvingly quoting Copernicus' famous state-
most radical, presents an anarchic view of sci-
ment of method, he provides welcome confirma-
Hans Eichner 23
tion of the continuity in scientific thought that portant

I problems" (p. 13). It is difficult to con-
claim has existed over the last four centuries or ceive that a system capable of all this should
so.55 But if Kuhn and Feyerabend are right, consist of statements that can stake no claim to
science and its history are very different from even probable truth. Moreover, if science were
what I have assumed them to be, there is no really an enterprise a la Miinchhausen that
reason to prefer Newton's or Einstein's science keeps itself floating in midair by holding onto its
to Schelling's or Schlegel's, and science, far from own pigtails, it would be difficult to see (if so
being a steady progression, is simply a succes- vulgar an argument is permissible in the rarefied
sion of "sciences" reflecting different sets of atmosphere in which Laudan operates) how it
metaphysical prejudices. Feyerabend has not, could ever have led to a technology that really
however, met the objections of his critics, and I works-to the technology that, for example, en-
can see no reason for regarding his writings as ables us to dial a ten-digit number and ten sec-
anything but a deliberate provocation, which onds later talk to a friend on the other side of
may have been useful in the sixties but can now the Atlantic. Instead of indulging in a polemic
be ignored. Kuhn's views, which commit him to against Laudan, however, I should like to con-
a subjective idealism that is very difficult to ac- clude this excursion by pointing out that I could
cept, have been severely criticized, above all on quite easily rewrite this paper in Laudan's terms,
the grounds that his central notion, the para- or even in Kuhn's, and that doing so would lead
digm, is intolerably vague and that his sharp dis-to some interesting considerations. I would have
tinction between "normal" and "revolutionary" to say, then, that when turning against New-
science is untenable;56 and it seems evident that tonian science, the Romantics adopted a new
his influence is on the wane. It may be useful, paradigm or research tradition and that they did
however, to say a few words about Larry so on the reasonable grounds-reasonable at
Laudan's attempt, in Progress and Its Problems least according to Laudan's model-that the old
(1977), to rescue some of Kuhn's findings. tradition had led to serious, and from its point of
Laudan replaces Kuhn's paradigm by "re- view unsolvable, puzzles, such as the antinomy
search traditions" but, contrary to Kuhn, claims of free will and causality. This new tradition
that such traditions constantly compete with, are brought about substantial progress in the hu-
modified by, and replace one another. Thus for manities and-though this matter cannot be fol-
Laudan the growth of science is once again a lowed up here-in such "human" studies as psy-
continuous process. He insists, moreover, that chology. In the hard sciences, however, the
the replacement of one tradition by another- Romantic tradition turned out to be a dead end,
Kuhn's change of paradigms-is a rational pro- while the tradition the Romantics rejected con-
cess, at least whenever the "chosen tradition is a tinued to flourish.
better problem solver than its rivals" (p. 109), Of course it's an ill wind that blows nobody
as it normally seems to be. But he nonetheless any good. There were researchers in the Roman-
concludes that "science does not, as far as we tic tradition who did make important discover-
know, produce theories which are true or even ies. Thus J. W. Ritter, one of the great pioneers
highly probable" (p. 224). Now it should be of electrochemistry and the first experimenter to
said at once that Laudan provides no convincing succeed in separately collecting the hydrogen
arguments for this skeptical conclusion and that and oxygen produced by electrolysis, owed his
a basic contradiction runs through his whole dis- discovery of ultraviolet light directly to Schel-
cussion. He does assert the "cognitive progress" ling's supposed "law of polarity," from which he
of science (p. 7), which surely implies a growth concluded, after hearing of Herschel's discovery
of at least highly probable knowledge, and he of infrared light, that there must be a similar
does claim that "scientific theories are usually phenomenon at the other end of the spectrum.57
attempts to solve specific empirical problems Similarly, H. C. Oersted succeeded in demon-
about the natural world"; that their function is, strating the connection between electricity and
among other things, "to show that what happens magnetism, after many years of experimenta-
is somehow intelligible and predictable"; and tion, because he was convinced by Schellingian
that they "provide satisfactory solutions to im- speculations that such a connection must
exist.58 But Ritter and Oersted, both trained as were so far apart that it is difficult to imagine
pharmacists, could make the step from wild them carrying on an intelligent conversation; but
speculations to concrete discoveries only be- Schelling's intuition pointed in the right direc-
cause they had absorbed the "causal," empirical tion, and though the problem of evil continues to
paradigms of what was then "normal science" agitate theologians, the notion of an unchanging
long before they drifted into Schelling's orbit. At universe that made this problem so oppressive in
worst, then, their successes, to which discoveries the eighteenth century is unlikely ever to be re-
by other "Romantic" researchers could of course vived. The Romantics' attempts at solving the
be added, might lend support to Feyerabend's dic- other two problems were, however, less success-
tum that "there is no idea, however . . . absurd, ful. A solution of the mind-matter problem that
that is not capable of improving our knowledge." involves denying the existence of matter has al-
A more likely conclusion is that any attempt to ways seemed, to most of us, just as implausible
divide scientists neatly into "good guys" and as Malebranche's occasionalism or Leibniz'
"bad guys" must necessarily fail.59 Such a con- monadology; and even among professional phi-
clusion would leave untouched the facts that the losophers the idealist, who has been rare
Romantic "research tradition" radically de- throughout the twentieth century, now seems as
parted from the high road of modern science; extinct as the Dodo bird. The dominant attitude
that it attempted to undo, in essential ways, the to this problem in our own times is exactly that
methodological progress made since Galileo and of La Mettrie: to worry about it seems "a fool-
Descartes; and that it proved unproductive in ish waste of time" (p. 23).60 The Romantics'
the sciences except where it compromised with attempt at solving the third problem, the antin-
the established methods it had set out to refute. omy of free will and causality, has fared no bet-
ter. In rejecting causality, the Romantics did
not, of course, consciously and deliberately deny
the possibility of science. On the contrary, they
III
attempted to replace the old, mechanistic science
by a new and, in their view, superior set of as-
In the first section of this paper, I isolate
sumptions and methods. But with the exceptions
some of the implications of the mechanical of the evolutionary hypothesis (which Schelling
philosophy that made it unacceptable to the was not the first to propose) and of the discov-
Romantics and that prompted them to branch eries of men like Ritter and Oersted, who
out on new paths. I must now briefly return to
ploughed on both sides of the fence, Schelling's
three of them: the intractability of evil inphilosophy
a of nature produced what can only be
world assumed to be basically unchangeable, the
described as a farrago of nonsense. The assump-
impossibility of accounting for the interaction oftion that whatever the imagination seizes as
mind and matter, and the problem of free will.
beauty is truth or that rivers flow into the sea
The first of these may have seemed an ines-
because they want to may inspire poets, but such
capable consequence of the mechanical philoso- notions are of no use to scientists. Thus, as far
phy: machines, we have said, do not grow. But as our knowledge of nature is concerned, the
this is a specious argument. If human and ani- Romantic epistemology was at best a brief epi-
mal bodies are machines, in the mechanicalsode in the history of Western thought.61 The
philosophy's sense of the word, then machines real scientists of the last two hundred years-
do grow, and there is no reason why the "cosmic those who, with their helpmates the engineers,
created the world we now live in-took no no-
engine" should be static. Schelling's evolutionary
hypothesis derives of course from pure specula- tice of Romantic theory and carried on in the
tion and involves unverifiable teleological as- spirit of Copernicus, Harvey, Newton, and even
sumptions, while Darwin's theory of evolution La Mettrie. This statement may be a truism, but
rests on empirical facts and involves a mechan- if it is, then we must have serious reservations
ism of natural selection that would have de- about Lovejoy's, Peckham's, and Foucault's the-
lighted scientists like Harvey and Boyle; in thesis that the Romantic age, marking a turning
temper of their minds, Schelling and Darwinpoint in Western thought, ushered in a way of
Hans Eichner 25
looking at the world that still dominates our approach,

own and focuses on the individual, unique,
times. If Galileo could be hijacked by atime-bound,
time and unrepeatable. If it was the car-
machine, taught English, and dropped in dinal
con- sin of the classicist episteme to apply the
temporary Boston, he would, after a three- assumptions and methods of Naturwissenschaft
month crash course in modern physics to and
all fields of knowledge, including the arts, it
mathematics and a few sleepless nights caused
was the cardinal sin of Romanticism to apply
by the uncertainty principle, feel completely
the atassumptions and methods of Geisteswissen-
home at M.I.T. Schelling would have toschaft be to all fields, including science. Today, we
brainwashed. are unlikely to repeat the Romantic error. To
What all this amounts to I can perhaps now
make the opposite error is a constant tempta-
summarize in a brief statement, which admit-tion. It is difficult at times not to envy the cer-
tedly is an oversimplification. A century ago, tainties and the power of generalization of the
Wilhelm Dilthey, an enthusiastic but not an un-mathematical sciences, and our students ar-
critical student of the Romantics, proposed that
dently long for a method of interpreting poems
one must distinguish more rigorously than had that is as "scientific," foolproof, and teachable
been done in the past between Naturwissen- as the method of analyzing ore samples. If our
schaft and Geisteswissenschaft. The former stud-
tale has a moral, it is perhaps that this longing
ies nature, assumes determinacy, reasons ahis- must remain unfulfilled.
torically, and aims to establish timeless uni-
versal laws. The latter studies human creations,
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
assumes free will, takes a basically historicist
Notes
1 Wellek, in Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), 1-23, Univ. Press, 1960), p. 8: "[Galileo,] whose claim is
147-72; rpt. in Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New higher than any other's to the honor of having founded
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 128-98. modem science .. ." The recent controversies about
2 Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," his precise achievement do not, as far as I can see,
PMLA, 66 (1951), 5-23. The present paper is largely seriously affect this judgment; in fact, now that Stillma
an elaboration of Peckham's theory. In fact, if Peckham Drake has produced documentary evidence that Galileo
had written at greater length in 1951, and if he had not really did perform the experiments he claims to have
subsequently changed his mind, this paper would prob- performed (Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography
ably be unnecessary. [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978]), Galileo's
3 References to Lovejoy's book are to the third edi- traditional status as "the greatest of the founders of
tion (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966); refer- modern science" (Bertrand Russell) seems more secure
ences to Foucault's are to the English translation, The than ever.
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci- 6 Paul-Henri d'Holbach, The System of Nature,
ences (New York: Vintage-Random, 1973). trans. H. D. Robinson (1868; photomechanical rpt.
4 In Lovejoy, this omission is justified, since it fol- New York: Franklin, 1970), pp. 18-19. In the rest of
lows directly from his concern with the history of a this paper, so as not to obscure the main issues, I
single idea, that is, the great chain of being. Foucault ignore the residual vitalism evident in many seventeenth-
devotes a whole chapter to biology but takes no and eighteenth-century mainstream scientists.
account of those fields in which modern science achieved 7 Grew, The Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682),
its decisive breakthrough. "The interest shown by thep. 80; quoted from A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolu-
Classical age in science," he maintains, "the publicity tion, 1500-1800 (London: Longmans, Green, 1954),
p. 289.
accorded to its controversies, its extremely exoteric char-
acter, its opening up to the uninitiated, Fontenelle's 8 An interesting case in point is J. S. Haldane, who
popularization of astronomy, Voltaire reading Newton, owes his fame less to the substantial contributions he
made to science than to his popular lectures against
all this is doubtless nothing more than a sociological
phenomenon. It did not provoke the slightest altera- materialism, which he attempted to refute by arguing
that mechanistic or physicochemical hypotheses could
tion in the history of thought, or modify the develop-
ment of knowledge one jot" (p. 89). not account for such phenomena as reproduction, self-
5 For my assessment of Galileo, see, for example, healing, and the adjustment of living organisms to their
Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay environments. These arguments seemed plausible in the
in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton 1920s because modern genetics was still in its infancy,
cybernetics had not yet developed such concepts as today to be reborn tomorrow, and on a weightless distaff
negative feedback, and computer technology was not the moons eternally spin up and down of their own
even dreamed of. (For a collection of the lectures, seeaccord. Useless to a world that has outgrown its lead-
J. S. Haldane, Materialism [London: Hodder and ing-strings and now hovers aloft unaided, the gods,
Stoughton, 1932].) rendered idle, have returned to the world of poetry."
Friedrich Schiller, "Die G6tter Griechenlands" (ver-
9 Needless to say, this statement implies no disrespect.
The skill and ingenuity that go into, for example, sionthe of March 1788), Sdmmtliche Werke, Horen ed.
synthesis of a complicated organic molecule are equal (Munich: Georg Muller Verlag, [1910]), v, 3-10. (All
to those displayed in any other field. translations from German and French are my own,
10Boyle, "The Excellence and Grounds of the except where otherwise noted.) There is, of course, a
Mechanical Philosophy," in Boyle, Philosophical Works vast difference between Newton's beliefs and the
(London, 1725), I, 187; quoted from Hall, p. 212. implications of "Newtonian science" as interpreted by
11 Leibniz, Monadology; quoted from Colin Brown, Continental thinkers sixty or seventy years after New-
Philosophy and the Christian Faith (London: Inter- ton's death.
Varsity Press, 1969), p. 57. 14 See H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science,
12 Thus Joseph Clarke, writing in 1734, held it cer- 1300-1800, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965),
tain "that God cannot hereafter create any new Species p. 62.
of Beings; because, whatever it is good for him to 15 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae (1644); quoted
create in time, it was equally good from all Eternity" from Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John
(Lovejoy, p. 242). Similarly, the existing beings can Veitch (London: Dutton, n.d.), pp. 166, 179, 180.
move neither up nor down in the great chain of being, 16 For this paragraph and the next, compare Bertrand
since any such change would push another being from Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London:
its proper place and leave a gap. The argument ulti- Allen and Unwin, 1946), pp. 583-84. Russell's and my
mately derives from Plato. Evidence for its ubiquity remarks concerning the identification of the constants
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is scat- in the collision of elastic bodies oversimplify what was
tered throughout Lovejoy's monograph, but see esp. actually quite a slow process of clarification, but a
pp. 242-44. detailed account of the vis viva controversy would be
William King, in his influential treatise De Origine irrelevant both to Russell's argument and to mine.
Mali (1702), argues that the evil in the world is "not 17 Christian Wolff, who decisively influenced German
only consistent with infinite wisdom, goodness and eighteenth-century thought, accepted Descartes's con-
power, but necessarily resulting from them" (Lovejoy, viction of the mechanical determination of bodily
p. 213). Eighteenth-century optimism thus consisted, movements in its entirety, stating "that all bodily
as Lovejoy (pp. 208-26) has shown, primarily in re- movements would be the same as they are now even if
cognizing that the world is as it must be. Most seven- there were no soul, since the soul does not contribute
teenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists were, how- to them by its power; we would, however, not be
ever, inconsistent enough to combine their dour conscious of what happens in our bodies." Aware of
metaphysical deductions with much more cheerful the problem he had thus created for himself, he sacri-
religious and commonsense beliefs. Leibniz, for exam- ficed logical consistency to the requirements of his
ple, asserts both that the universe is unchanging and ethics, decked out his Cartesian assumptions with bits
that monads can progressively develop to higher states and pieces of Leibniz' monadology, and blithely de-
of consciousness, though only the first of these asser-clared that the mechanistic determination of the body
tions is compatible with his metaphysics. Perhaps"does not restrict the freedom of the soul." See Hans M.
Leibniz, like Descartes, simply wanted to avoid Wolff, Die Weltanschauung der deutschen Aufklrung,
martyrdom and thus made conscious concessions to 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1963), p. 108.
orthodox beliefs in his published writings; but it is 18 Julien La Mettrie, L'Homme machine, ed. and
just as likely that he occasionally made unconsciousintrod. Aram Vartanian (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
concessions to commonsense convictions and established Press, 1960), pp. 154, 186; see also Introd., p. 20.
habits of mind. Rare, indeed, are the thinkers for whom 19 The great exception is Spinoza, who denied both
a metaphysical deduction is as real as the bacon and free will and a personal god, but the problem of evil
eggs they have for breakfast. drove even this fearless and honest thinker to what
13 "Where now, as our wise men say, only a soulless seems to me a purely verbal solution. It is difficult to
ball of fire revolves, then [in antiquity] Helios drove see, for example, that the genocide practiced by the
his golden chariot in quiet majesty. These heights Nazis is not really evil sub specie aeternitatis but only
oreads crowded, with every tree a dryad died, and the an appearance of evil due to our limited understanding.
rivers' silver foam sprang from the urns of lovely 20 For an account of the objections of Kant's con-
naiads. . . . Unaware of the joys it gives, never de- temporaries, see Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie
lighted by its own perfection, never conscious of the des deutschen Idealismus, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter,
arm that guides it, never enriched by my gratitude, 1974), Ch. i (esp. pp. 15-26); for a succinct modem
insensitive even to its maker's honor, nature, bereft of restatement of these objections, see Russell, pp. 734-
its gods, [now] slavishly serves the law of gravity like 35, 741-44.
a lifeless pendulum clock. Nature digs its own grave 21 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Gesamtausgabe der Baye-
Hans Eichner 27
rischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verdchtern (Stuttgart:
Frommann, 1961- ), Pt. I, Vol. iv, p. 206. For his Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1969), p. 86. Jean Paul,
comment to F. Schlegel, see Briefe von und an Fried- Vorschule der Asthetik, in Simtliche Werke, Historisch-
rich und Dorothea Schlegel, ed. Josef K6rner (Berlin: kritische Ausgabe der PreuBischen Akademie der
Kindle, 1926), p. 9. Wissenschaften (Weimar: B6hlau, 1927-64), Pt. I,
22 "[Fichte] nur Kp [Kritiker], (noch) nicht Hist- Vol. xI, p. 37. Schlegel, xn, 421; xvII, 329, No. 57; see
[orischer] ovo-rT [Systematiker]," Kritische Friedrich- also ii, 257, No. 8. Wordsworth, The Prelude xiv.190-
Schegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler with the assistance 91. Berlin, Pref., in H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the
of Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History
Schoningh, 1958- ), xviim, 33, No. 148. For the date (London: Constable, 1966). Keats, Letters, ed. M. B.
of this entry see Ernst Behler's commentary in xix, 386, Forman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947),
No. 126. Henceforth volume and page numbers cited p. 67.
for F. Schlegel in the text and notes refer to this edi- 30 Of course, beauty and the imagination manifest
tion. themselves equally in the other arts, and the Romantic
23 Novalis, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Carl Seelig contribution to art and art history, music and musicol-
(Zurich: Biihl, 1945-46), IV, 213, No. 2642. ogy cannot be overlooked. If I limit myself to poetry,
24 F. W. J. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen; I do so partly for reasons of space. But since
quoted from Armand Nivelle, Friihromantische Dich- Romanticism arose largely in response to philosophical
tungstheorie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), p. 35. Schegel, problems, its earliest practitioners (with the notable
xvIII, 421, No. 1222. exception of Wackenroder) were inevitably preoccupied
2 "Wo ist eine Sonne, wo ist ein Atom, die nicht with verbal art. That the man now widely regarded as
Teil ware, der [sic] nicht geh6rte zu diesem Organischenthe most seminal mind of European Romanticism,
All, lebend in keiner Zeit, jede Zeit fassend in sich?- Friedrich Schlegel, was primarily a literary critic and
Wo bleibt denn der Unterschied zwischen den Teilen theorist hardly seems coincidental. The German Ro-
des Tieres, der Pflanze, dem Metall und dem Steine?- mantics, we must also remember, used the word "po-
Sind nicht samtlich Teile des groBen All-Tiers, der etry" (Poesie) in at least two different senses, that of
Natur?" 'Where is a sun, where is an atom that is not belles lettres (Schlegel's "Poesie der Worte," i, 285) and
part of, that does not belong to this organic universe, that of the creative human spirit that manifests itself
living in no time, encompassing all time in itself?- in all the arts. Occasionally, the Romantics identified
Where, then, remains the difference between the parts "poetry," in this second sense, with Fichte's uncon-
of the animal, the plant, the metal, and the stone?- scious productive imagination; hence Schlegel's refer-
Are they not all parts of the great universal animal, ence to the "bewuBtlose Poesie" 'unconscious poetry'
Nature?' (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Beweis, daf ein that pervades all nature (II, 285) and his notorious
bestindiger Galvanismnus den Lebensprozef3 in dem identification of the "poetic ideal" with God (Literary
Thierreich begleite [Weimar, 1798], p. 171.) The pass- Notebooks, ed. Hans Eichner [London: Athlone, 1957],
age is quoted from the excellent monograph by W. D. p. 87, No. 735; this edition is hereafter cited as LN).
Wetzels, J. W. Ritter: Physik im Wirkungsfeld der 31 Ren6 P. Le Bossu, Traite du pomee epique (Paris:
Romantik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973), p. 23. Michel le Petit, 1675), p. 1.
26 By calling motion "dynamic," Schlegel means the 32 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris: Garn-
exact opposite of what modern science teaches under ier, 1935), II, 161. Winckelmann's statement, "Es gibt
the heading of "dynamics," that is, that the motion nur Ein Sch6nes, wie es nur Ein Gutes gibt," is quoted
originates with the moving object itself. from Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen,
27 See, e.g., Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1932), III, 203, and Fichte's, "So wie
Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1936), and Ernst es nur Eine Vernunft giebt, giebt es auch nur Eine
Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklirung (Tibingen: wahre Poesie," is from a letter to F. Schlegel (16 Aug.
Mohr, 1932). 1800, Briefe von und an F. und D. Schlegel, p. 31).
2s There is, of course, no confusion in this respect While the neat parallelism of these three assertions
with Fichte. In his system, every person who is capable does, I believe, illustrate a common attitude toward
of intellectual intuition understands that the ego is free humanity and the world-an attitude that is the direct
and active; the unconscious productive imagination opposite of Romantic individualism-they are of course
creates the nonego. The importance the early Romantics logically independent of one another, and Voltaire's
attached to intellectual intuition and the imagination is conviction that there is only one morality did not
undoubtedly connected with the key roles these quali- prevent his being a relativist in aesthetics.
ties play in the Wissenschaftslehre. But Fichte himself '33 Winckelmann comes remarkably close to drawing
was a rationalist, and Romantic irrationalism, in spite this absurd conclusion: in discussing an antique statue
of its dependence on Fichte's concepts, resulted from of Niobe and her daughters, he claims that the faces
organicism. Nicolai Hartmann shows the connection for of the girls resemble one another because they all
F. Schlegel (pp. 172-73); for Schelling, see Georg approximate the one and only ideal of beauty
Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft (Darmstadt: (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. Wilhelm
Luchterhand, 1973), I, 114-38. Senff [Weimar: Bohlau, 1964], pp. 192-93). Goethe
29 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Uber die Religion: Redenwas so greatly taken with the single ideal of beauty in
his classicistic period that he was pleased when readers (Hegel-Studien, Supp. 4 [Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969]),
could not distinguish between his and Schiller's pp. 17-32, and P6ggeler, "Holderlin, Hegel und das
anonymous publications in Die Horen. That his and ilteste Systemprogramm," Hegel-Tage Villigst 1969
Schiller's works had begun to resemble each other (Hegel-Studien, Supp. 9 [Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1973]),
seemed evidence to him that they were both on the pp. 211-59; for a critical edition of this document, see
(one and only) right road. (See Goethe's letter to pp. 263-65.
Schiller, 26 Dec. 1795, Goethe-Schiller Briefwechsel 38 Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Rich-
[Frankfurt: Fisher, 19611, p. 91.) ard Samuel (Darmstadt: Kohlhammer, 1965) Ii, 591,
34 Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, L'Art poetique, quotedNo. 280; Wordsworth, Preface, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd
from Sir William Soame's translation in The Art of ed.; Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," The Works of
Poetry: The Poetical Treatises of Horace, Vida and Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. B. Forman (London:
Boileau, ed. Albert S. Cook (Boston: G. E. Stechert, Reeves and Turner, 1880), vii, 136.
1892), pp. 160, 161, 167. 39 In fact, somebody else did. The law was formulated
35 The closely related view, however, that poetry in 1662 by Richard Townley, on the basis of Boyle's
can have an important function only in relatively measurements, but it apparently did not become widely
primitive societies and must decline in more advanced known, so that Edme Mariotte had to discover it all
civilizations was quite widespread. Its most famous over again in 1679.
proponents were Vico, Herder, and, in the nineteenth 40 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. Alfred
century, Hegel. Thomas Love Peacock's version of it Anger (Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1966),
provoked Shelley's Defence of Poetry. p. 342.
36 This deficiency in pre-Romantic critical literature 41 Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August
explains why I concentrate to such an extent on early Wilhelm, ed. O. Walzel (Berlin: Speyer and Peters,
German Romanticism. Most of the characteristic ideas 1890), p. 70.
and preoccupations of European Romanticism can be 42 See, e.g., Goethe's attack on Manier in "Einfache
traced back for decades, if not for centuries. Thus the Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil" (1789), in
view that the divine and the infinite can only be ex- Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, Pt. i, Vol. XLVII, pp. 77-83.
pressed symbolically already appears in Origenes and 43 "When we make an experiment," Werner Heisen-
Clement of Alexandria, and it was never entirely lost berg states, "we have to assume a causal chain of
sight of (at least not among theologians); Goethe and events that leads from the atomic event through the
his friends made the earliest lucid and comprehensive apparatus finally to the eye of the observer; if this
statements of the symbolic nature of art, formulating causal chain was not assumed, nothing could be known
them as part of a classicistic aesthetics. The Romantic about the atomic event" (Heisenberg, Physics and
concern with irrational sources of knowledge revived Philosophy, 2nd ed. [London: Allen and Unwin, 1963],
Plato's doctrine of enthusiasm, to which at least lip p. 82). Karl R. Popper, who would prefer not to assume
service had been paid for more than two thousand the principle of causality, which he regards as meta-
years and which was defended at length and in full physical and therefore undesirable, substitutes for it a
seriousness, long before the Romantics, by Shaftesbury. "methodological rule" that "corresponds so closely to
Young pleaded brilliantly for "originality," and Herder's the 'principle of causality' that the latter might be re-
historicism was as sweeping, in some of its conclusions, garded as its metaphysical version. It is the simple rule
as Schlegel's. The overriding lesson to be learned from that we are not to abandon the search for universal
studying pre-Romanticism is that none of the ideas that laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever
characterize Romanticism succeeded on its own in give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of
seriously challenging the main thrust of European event we can describe" (Popper, The Logic of Scientific
thought. They did so only when they came togetherDiscovery, rev. ed. [London: Hutchinson, 1972], p. 61).
under the leading concept of organicism and thus The difference between Popper's view of causality and
coalesced into a coherent whole. This happened in that prevailing in classical (Newtonian) physics is of
Germany, and hence any account of the genesis (asgreat interest, but it has no bearing on the arguments
distinct from the poetic achievement) of European of the present paper.
Romanticism must focus on that country. 44 Heisenberg, p. 162. I am of course deliberately
37 In this document, the argument that leads up toquoting the discoverer of the uncertainty principle
the apotheosis of poetry is derived from the positionrather than any of the dozens of historians of science
among the faculties of the mind that Kant's Kritik der I might have quoted instead. Quantum physics has not
Urteilskraft assigns to judgment, but this link with done away with causation. While the uncertainty
Kant was soon dissolved. The supremacy of the imagi- principle states that there is a limit to the accuracy
nation, and hence that of poetry, was assumed to follow with which the velocity and the position of a particle
directly from the organicist assumption and spread can be measured simultaneously, so that the future
rapidly even among poets whose knowledge of German of an individual particle cannot be predicted, quantum
philosophy was slight. For a discussion of the author- mechanics can make statistical predictions; and it thus
ship of the "Systemprogramm," see Otto Poggeler, assumes causation (though, in the parlance of quantum
"Hegel, der Verfasser des iltesten Systemprogramms theorists, only the "weaker type" of causation, where
des deutschen Idealismus," Hegel-Tage Urbino 1965 the concept of probability may be used to define the
Hans Eichner 29
state of the system). Where causation is not assumed, handeln? Auf diesem Wege denke ich tiefer als je,
no predictions can be made, and there is no science. einzudringen und aller Campanen und Oefen entiibrigt
45 "Der Unterzeichnete erbietet sich zu einem fort- zu seyn" 'In my philosophy of everyday life I had the
gesetzten miindlichen Vortrage der Wissenschaftslehre, idea of a moral ... astronomy and made the interesting
d.h. der vollstandigen Losung des Ratsels der Welt discovery
und of the religion of the visible universe ....
des BewuBtseins mit mathematischer Evidenz" (Ber- Don't you think this might be the right way of treating
liner Zeitung, 1804; quoted from Bernhard Casper, physics, in the widest sense of this word, absolutely
"Der historische Besen . . .," in Romantik in Deutsch- symbolically? In this way I hope to penetrate more
land: Ein Interdisziplinares Symposium, ed. Richard deeply than ever and be rid of all retorts and furnaces'
Brinckmann [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978], p. 493). (Schriften, IV, 255).
46 See, e.g., "Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Sys- 50 These two statements are quoted by Popper, p. 40.
tems der Naturphilosophie," Schellings simmtliche The first is from F. Waisman, in Erkenntnis, 1 (1930),
Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-61; hereafter cited as 229; and the second is from M. Schlick, in Naturwis-
Werke), Pt. I, iII, 275-77, and "Einige allgemeine senschaften, 19 (1931), 150.
Betrachtungen," Werke, Pt. I, iv, 527-33. See also the 51 Although Popper seems to me more important than
excellent summary in Robert C. Stauffer, "Speculation Toulmin, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, his profound belief
and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Dis- in the rationality of science makes it unnecessary to
covery of Electromagnetism," Isis, 48 (1957), 33-70. discuss him in the present connection.
47 See, e.g., "System des transzendentalen Idealismus," )2 See Frederick Suppe's account of Toulmin's early
Werke, Pt. I, III, 475-77. views in Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theor-
48 See Hegel, Dissertatio Philosophica de Orbitis ies, 2nd ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977),
Planetarum (1801; rpt. in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, pp. 127-35. My debt to this excellent book is greater
ed. Verein von Freunden des Verewigten [Berlin: than my few references to it suggest.
Duncker and Humblot, 1832-44], xvi, 1-29); Schelling, 53 Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of
"Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philoso- an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge," Minnesota
phie," Werke, Pt. I, iv, 432, and Schelling's 1803 addi- Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 4 (1960), 17-130;
tion (Zusatz) to the introduction to his "Ideen zu einer quoted from the paperback rpt. (Atlantic Highlands:
Philosophie der Natur," Werke, Pt. I, II, 70. Humanities Press, 1975), pp. 47, 52.
49 See Stillman Drake, "Ptolemy, Galileo and Scien- 54 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tific Method," Studies in the History and Philosophy of tions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 146.
Science, 9 (1978), 99-115. Kepler still held that the 5r) His final answer to the question, What gives scien-
hypothesis had to be validated not only by predictiontific ideas merit, and how do they score over their
or retrodiction but by its being, in one way or another, rivals? is that they must be "(in Copernicus' words)
metaphysically significant. Thus he asssociated the 'consistent with the numerical records'" and "accept-
center of planetary motions with God the Father, the able-for the time being, at any rate-as 'absolute' and
encircling spheres with the Son, and the relations be- 'pleasing to the mind.'" (Stephen E. Toulmin, Fore-
tween them with the Holy Ghost. Galileo-and most sight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of
scientists after him-dropped the requirement for an Science [New York: Harper, 1963], pp. 111, 115.)
explanation of this kind, and the Romantics revived it. Toulmin's more recent writings are beyond the scope
For Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, there were no con- of this paper.
tingent facts in science, and the Romantics quite 56 See, e.g., Suppe, pp. 135-51, 643-49; D. Shapere,
generally looked for a "human" or cosmological signifi-"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Philosophical
cance in whatever facts they had to deal with. For Revue, 73 (1964), 383-94; Larry Laudan, Progress and
them, just as for Plato and Aristotle, a scientific "ex- Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth
planation" was the identification of a purpose or a final (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 73-76.
cause that revealed a divine intelligence at work. Both 57 See, e.g., Die Begriindung der Elektrochemie und
Novalis and Schlegel kept notebooks on "Physik und Entdeckung der ultravioletten Strahlungen von Johann
Moral," and although these notebooks are lost, we can Wilhelm Ritter: Eine Auswahl aus den Schriften des
gain an impression of what they might have contained romantischen Physikers, ed. A. Hermann (Frankfurt/
from other notes that have been preserved. Thus Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1968; Ostwalds
Schlegel suggested that the inner planets must be Klassiker der exakten Naturwissenschaften, NS, No. 2),
"more religious," the outer planets "very romantic," and H. Schipperges' postscript to the photomechanical
and the comets "probably completely irreligious, rpt. of Ritter's Fragmente aus dem Nachla]f eines
merely poetic and philosophic" (xvIII, 154, Nos. 372 jungen Physikers (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1969).
and 375), and Novalis wrote to Schlegel in July 1798: 58 See R. C. Stauffer, "Speculation and Experiment in
"In meiner Philosophie des taglichen Lebens bin ich the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electro-
auf die Idee einer moralischen . . . Astronomie gekom- magnetism," Isis, 48 (1957), 33-50.
men und habe die interessante Entdeckung der Religion 59 Trevor Levere comes to this conclusion in "Cole-
des sichtbaren Weltalls gemacht. . . . Was denkst Du, ridge, Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Nature,"
ob das nicht der rechte Weg ist, die Physik im all- Studies in Romanticism, 16 (1977), 349-79.
gemeinsten Sinn, schlechterdings Symbolisch zu be- 60 The twentieth-century philosophers who do con-
cer themselves with this problem have approached it 61 See Heinrich Henel, "Erlebnisdichtung und Sym-
in a way entirely different from that of either the bolismus," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literatur-
Cartesians or the idealists-by conceptual analysis. See, wissenschaft und Geistesgesschichte, 32 (1958), 71-98,
e.g., Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: where a similar conclusion is reached by a different
Barnes and Noble, 1949). I doubt, however, that the road.
problem can be "explained away" in this manner.

The Rise of Modern Science and The Genesis of Romanticism

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The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism

Author(s): Hans Eichner

The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism

... in no one moment of existence is a man a free

into the heart of physics" (II, 266, No. 99), Schleiermacher

then, that Schelling's Naturphilosophie turned

tion of the continuity in scientific thought that portant

looking at the world that still dominates our approach,

problem can be "explained away" in this manner.

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