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The epochal Battle of Jena was fought on Oct. 14, 1806. A large French military below Napoleon reduce off Prussian and Saxon troops from entry to the Elbe River and from attainable Russian reinforcements. The French demolished the Germans and inside six weeks had conquered all of Prussia. The next Treaty of Tilsit made allies of France and Russia, pitilessly decreased Prussia and Austria, and planted French shopper states all through central Europe. The 1,000-year-old Holy Roman Empire, dominated for hundreds of years by the Austrian Habsburgs, got here to its finish. In every single place Bonaparte was acknowledged because the “new Charlemagne.”
Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pages
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A notable witness to those occasions was the thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then residing within the city of Jena. Extremely, Hegel had accomplished his masterwork, “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” on the eve of the battle. In “Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits,” Peter Neumann recounts the scene. After Hegel’s condominium had been ransacked by French troopers, he fled in his slippers, clutching the ultimate pages of his manuscript. Within the streets he encountered Napoleon: “I noticed the Emperor—this world-soul—driving out of town on reconnaissance. It’s certainly a beautiful sensation to see such a person, who, concentrated right here at a single level, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
Napoleon would change into the mannequin of Hegel’s “world-historic particular person”: excellent figures whose triumphs advance the Geist, Spirit or Splendid of their period, bringing humanity ever better consciousness of its personal freedom. Germans with a much less Olympian principle of historical past not often shared Hegel’s admiration for his or her conqueror. However, the fleeting encounter of the emperor and the thinker was the stuff of windfall—as if the arc of historical past had intersected with the designs of historical past’s philosopher-architect.
Briefly the positioning of battle, Jena was in any other case often called the house of Germany’s most outstanding college. On the flip of the Nineteenth century, on this modest city below the shadow of conflict, have been born two outstanding mental actions: German Idealism and German Romanticism. It’s the goal of “Jena 1800” to repair these actions in time and place, observing them as they emerged within the entwined lives of their main figures. A bunch biography, the e-book presents scenes and episodes illustrative of a interval of extraordinary mental ferment. Alongside concepts, it narrates conflict, romance, college politics, skilled rivalries and home tragedies.
The e-book is novelistic and eccentric. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch, it assumes extra background information than anglophone readers will typically possess and is just too transient and sporadic to supply a complete mental historical past. However, it succeeds at conveying the personalities, the environment, and the exhilaration of Jena’s philosophical and aesthetic revolution.
German Idealism and Romanticism emerged below two shadows: that of Napoleon, the superior victor of revolutionary France who, to many progressive Germans, betrayed the revolution’s emancipatory promise; and that of Immanuel Kant, the pre-eminent German thinker who introduced the Enlightenment to its end result but additionally revealed its limits.
In 1804 (the yr of Napoleon’s imperial coronation), Kant died within the Prussian metropolis of Königsberg. By then he was decrepit and secluded, however his main works had already reset European philosophical life. Searching for to transcend the battle between rationalism and empiricism, Kant posited that the world of issues—whereas it actually existed—couldn’t be recognized to us instantly. “Issues in themselves” existed for people solely via the prism of a priori classes of notion, notably house and time. In opposition to skepticism Kant vindicated motive however narrowed its scope. Motive couldn’t entry metaphysical truths; nor may the scientific methodology disclose the secrets and techniques of nature empirically. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” restricted our theoretical (or “transcendent”) information; it allowed us to systematize the looks of issues however to not apprehend their internal actuality.
“The brand new important pondering,” writes Mr. Neumann, referring to Kant’s transcendental Idealism, “seized the European continent like a shockwave.” To the religiously orthodox, Kantianism destroyed our information of God. To the “Enlightened,” it diminished the glories of the scientific methodology. “There have been now not oases of everlasting truths,” concludes Mr. Neumann. This new world was to some terrifying and to others liberating.
Jena hosted a collection of philosophers who promoted, and radicalized, the achievements of the grasp. These figures presided over Mr. Neumann’s “republic of free spirits.” Essentially the most well-known have been Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom would blaze via Jena as philosophical superstars. Fichte’s model of Idealism disbursed fully with “issues in themselves.” His issues have been mind-dependent, current solely in our consciousness. The consequence was a form of radical subjectivism. Writes Mr. Neumann: “Man has no authority above himself, Fichte insisted, and should adhere solely to legal guidelines that he, as a rational being, has enacted for himself.”
Schelling would pursue Idealism down a unique path, rejecting the privileging of the thoughts over issues. He exalted the “world as a totality,” wherein thoughts and nature have been totally different features of the identical “Absolute.” “Nature,” writes Mr. Neumann of Schelling’s system, “functioned as a medium for the thoughts to acknowledge itself and take form.”
Schelling’s Idealism was extra naturalistic and intuitive than Fichte’s icy abstractions, and it fed into the parallel motion of Romanticism, as Mr. Neumann exhibits. Goethe thought-about Schelling a “poet of the thinkers,” whose concepts paralleled his personal understanding of thoughts and nature as a totality. The Jena Romantics included the poet and thinker Friedrich Schlegel; his brother Wilhelm, the main German translator of Shakespeare; the novelist Dorothea Schlegel (married to Friedrich); the author Caroline Schlegel (married to Wilhelm and later to Schelling); the poet Ludwig Tieck; and the mystic author Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (who wrote below the identify “Novalis”). The brothers Schlegel and their wives arrange home in Jena, and this turned the salon-headquarters of the Jena Romantics.
Performs, novels and poems adopted, and criticism within the organ Athenaeum, edited by the Schlegel brothers. The hallmarks of German Romanticism have been a important deference to “inventive genius” and a want to harmonize artwork, science and philosophy into an built-in entire. Unusually, they appreciated the Center Ages as an period of natural tradition and socially embedded artwork. This medieval or Gothic aesthetic may make the Romantics, in flip, hostile to the airless rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment. “The political revolution in Paris might have failed,” writes Mr. Neumann, “however right here, a unique one—an aesthetic revolution—was drawing close to.” Central was a much less formal and extra naturalistic account of the creativeness. Summary ideas have been blind to feeling, however creativeness flickered “between idea and notion, rationality and sensuality, thoughts and nature, thought and expertise.” Artwork may, on this sense, bridge the Kantian chasm between topic and object.
The creations of the Romantics included Friedrich Schlegel’s experimental novel “Lucinde,” wherein erotic love letters, fictional diary entries, aphorisms and demanding reflections appeared with nearly Joycean abandon. Extra accessible and equally emblematic of the rising Romantic fashion have been the poems composed by Novalis earlier than his untimely loss of life on the age of 28, “Hymns to the Night time”: “Oh draw at my coronary heart, love / Draw until I’m gone, / That, fallen asleep, I / Nonetheless might love on. / I really feel the move of / Demise’s youth-giving flood / To balsam and ether / Remodel my blood— / I stay all of the daytime / In religion and in may / And in holy hearth / I die each evening.”
Idealism and Romanticism have been distinct actions, however in these early years they ran collectively in a heady combine. Each have been individualistic, subjectivist, inward-obsessed. They liberated people from conventional authorities and dogmas however not essentially from historical past or nature, which may embody “spirit” and “genius.” These concepts would culminate with Hegel’s dialectic of historical past, via which people progressively notice the Geist of their age, driving towards an ever extra excellent human freedom.
The success of “Jena 1800” depends on its kaleidoscopic narrative fashion. The doctrines of the Idealists and the effusions of the Romantics aren’t neatly summarized as if looking back. As a substitute they spill out in actual time, amid the private triumphs and tragedies of their authors. We journey with them to view, by torchlight, antiquity collections in Dresden. We attend their Christmas events on the Schlegel home, watching them learn poetry to at least one one other by the fireplace. We study of their writing habits, their tastes in meals, their cash worries, their romantic pursuits (notably between Caroline Schlegel and her eventual second husband Schelling, below the nostril of her first husband).
The mental drama of the e-book performs out much less in main philosophical and literary works and extra in now-obscure essays and opinions (which enraged conservative opinion in Berlin) and much more within the college lectures provided by the boys of the Jena cohort. These lectures have been must-attend occasions, packed by college students anticipating to be dazzled by the oracular insights of professorial sages.
Equally charming are the lives of Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel. Formidable intellects and writers, they served because the social middle of Jena’s literary “republic.” Publicly derided for his or her politics and unconventional existence, they weren’t afforded the deference loved by their husbands. They emerge, nonetheless, because the e-book’s most indominable characters.
Mr. Neumann has offered an evocative account of a wealthy episode in Europe’s cultural historical past. How related readers will discover his topics is one other query. To make sure, Romanticism since its inception has by no means totally misplaced its grip on fashionable inventive style. The Romantic aesthetic—emotive, sensory, heroically subjective—endures.
Idealism, in contrast, has much less of a maintain. Our present philosophical temper is naively materialistic and deterministic, dazzled by the supposed capability of pure science to disclose all fact. This angle higher recollects late-Nineteenth-century positivism or the extra dogmatic materialists of the Enlightenment.
Even much less interesting right now would be the social and political considered the Jena cohort. Kant insisted on the intrinsic worth of autonomous people, and his ethics have been readily accommodated by fashionable liberalism. However each Fichte and Hegel seen summary particular person rights as inadequate. Moral freedom was achieved in interactive neighborhood, customized and custom, nation and state. Within the ashes of his nation’s Napoleonic humiliations, Fichte promoted German language, tradition and nationhood because the pillars of a non secular empire. For Hegel, the logic of historical past was collective, and people may solely notice true freedom in allegiance to a state.
Distinguished later commentators, together with Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, scorned the Idealists’ communalism as inherently nationalistic and even totalitarian, getting ready Germany for its militaristic, authoritarian future. These critiques are extremely exaggerated, and positively Mr. Neumann has no time for them. His e-book is far hotter towards the Jena free spirits, whom he presents as progressive visionaries. One suspects, nonetheless, that they’d have discovered our late liberal world naively empirical in philosophy and unattractively solipsistic in tradition. “Jena 1800” is, on this respect, the devoted account of a misplaced trigger.
—Mr. Collins is a professor of historical past at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario.
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