The Mighty Germans
The ideas in the air at the end of the Eighteenth and beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries were both inspired and taken up quickly by the German thinkers and artists. The natural starting place to trace this is the work of Immanuel Kant. While his epistemology is very reminiscent of John Locke’s, Kant leaves room for those things that one cannot experience. To paraphrase him, while we can be fairly sure of the things we can experience, we have no way of knowing those things that are beyond our experience. They may exist, but we can never know.
From Kant we can trace a line of thought and thinkers, each one adding, expanding, altering, and changing these ideas in reaction to the “perfect” ideology of the Enlightenment and Leibnitz. The great Rules of the Age of Reason proved inadequate and broke apart with the French Revolution. But even before the collapse fostered by the French Revolution, Kant’s first work, The Critique of Pure Reason, sets the stage for a reaction to the perfection of the Enlightenment and is the launching pad for the valuing and appreciation of imaginative and unconscious explanations. We can see how, following Kant, Johann Fichte challenges revelation (a construct to protect religion from the logical rules of the Enlightenment) and introduces the importance of Nature. Schelling then picks up the importance of Nature and builds a philosophy centered on it. Hegel seems to react to these philosophies; yet, as we will see, accepting history as a process is the axe that cuts down the old static, perfect world of the Enlightenment. Adding Strauss and Feuerbach to this mix of thinkers opens the trend to myth and ceremony and frees many artists from the religious dogma that had inhibited the thinkers of the Renaissance and even men like Newton. While Schopenhauer ultimately provides a dark, gloomy outlook, he also is the voice that calls for compassion as the cushion for the rigors of existence, and it is this concept that ultimately describes the sacrifice of the ego through caritas.
For individuals unwilling or unable to read the original sources and texts of these thinkers, I would recommend Bryan Magee’s straightforward Story of Philosophy as an excellent reference and path to grasping these various ideas. Keep in mind that we must not assume that what follows traces the development of a single idea or series of ideas to some ultimate all-encompassing philosophy. Rather, what follows is a brief summary of the ideas that were in the air and breathable by writers, thinkers, and artists at the time. And always we must keep in mind Morse Peckham’s dictum that it was at this time that humankind began to think about the world in a different way. We are looking for the concepts of diversity, organicism, and dynamism. We are looking for the concepts of compassion, selfless love, and sacrifice. As we take this journey, we will look for the sources of the metaphors that served the artists (many, until the present time).
Immanual Kant stands at the open door to this new way of thinking. He points out that all we can know are the things we perceive, that come to us through our five senses. Other things may and probably do exist, but they are outside our apprehension and, therefore, our comprehension, so they are unknowable. Kant talks of the world of phenomena or those things we can experience and the world of noumena, those things beyond our experience, a transcendental world beyond our experience. He holds Chaos in check by describing how we supply our own order through the sensible dimensions and time. Remember that the first time Gurnemanz takes Parsifal to the Grail Castle, he tells him they are going beyond time and space. Kant, in short, opens the door to the string theorists of our time by allowing for things (unknowable) outside our experience and by using dimensions as the key to understanding everything else. The string theorists tell us that by mathematically describing a total of 10 or maybe 11 dimensions, we can account for the phenomena and the noumena and have a single concept that explains everything. George Eliot’s old Casaubon would have loved them.
The German ideas filtered into England through Coleridge, who passed them on to Wordsworth, and later through Carlyle (and later still through Mary Ann Evans). However, at no time was this flow of ideas a flood; rather, the ideas were in the air. Now as we pick up the thread we will see what these ideas are and how they appear in many of the Romantics’ works and later Victorian works. First, Johann Fichte shows the difficult birth pains of this new way of looking at the world, but by standing with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, he becomes a major transitional figure. Fichte was convinced, as were most from the time of Newton that the basic laws of physics were timeless and true; this is the traditional Enlightenment view, and in fairness, on the grand scale of the universe, Newton’s Laws are mathematically correct, even if they do not work in the microscopic world of quantum mechanics. But Fichte also says that these laws are apparently an innate part of us and that we, through our ordered concept of the universe define that universe. We see here one of the opening points for the concept of the inner eye of the Romantics and the idea of defining or redefining existence through our own perceptions. Remember what the Gnostics believed, knowledge of the universe was open to all of us directly. Fichte also adds a moral element to this. Kant said that only a rational creature (one knowing right from wrong) could have a morality. Fichte goes further and says that one’s morality determines the nature of reality. The moral will is the defining factor of existence. Here is the beginning of the concept which leads to the moral idea of personal sacrifice.
The door opens wider with the teachings of Friedrich Schelling. Schelling taught that all life was creation of Nature, which was continually changing (maybe the correct word should be evolving). Here is the introduction of the organic, dynamic, and diverse world. Compare his ideas to the old Chain of Being, which stretches from slime to God and was thought to be static and unchanging. Schelling described Nature as a unity, but one made up of diverse parts with humankind as an integral part of the process—in fact, we have no existence outside of Nature. To paraphrase Schelling, Nature creates Nature and within Nature, the highest creation is humankind (not seraphims, angels or God). The creative artists are that portion of Humankind that can explain reality and represent the summit of existence. Here indeed is the source of the long-held adoration of the artistic genius, the individual in touch with his or her creative imagination, the inner eye. Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils” gives free expression to this concept:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
In reaction Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel felt that he was restoring rationality to philosophy, but when we look closely we see a philosophy of change, in fact a glorification of change as expressed in the dialectic. He viewed reality as a historical process. He defines the stuff of existence as Geist (spirit and mind) and describes the historical process as the development of Geist to self-awareness and self-knowledge. The dynamic nature of the universe is evident in his philosophy. Yet, for someone who says that each synthesis automatically creates a new thesis to be reacted to with a new antithesis, the idea that the process stops when we reach a conflict-free society seems to me to be a contradiction. However, Hegel then adds an explanation that takes us to Peckham’s thesis: Hegel conceives of an organic society in which every individual is a harmoniously functioning part of the whole freely serving the interest of a totality very much greater than himself. This is the leap of faith from the me to the not-me that leads a person in the everlasting yea of Sartor Resartus. We must recognize that this puts us on the proverbial knife’s edge, if we choose to serve the wrong totality, a social order or the state rather than a natural order for instance, we end up in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
One concept of Hegel’s must be emphasized because it speaks directly to the main idea of this text. Hegel explains that history is a process; that change comes from itself. However, when change occurs, the past must inevitably be different from the present. Hegel describes the geist of any point in time as the Zeitgeist or the spirit and ideas of that particular time. If we are to understand something, we need to examine it in terms of the zeitgeist. In other words, what ideas were in the air at that time. Essentially in this book we are exploring the zeitgeist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
An equally important side of this thought chain that takes its start from the freedom of thought offered by Kant is represented by David Friedrich Strauss and Emmanual Feuerbach. In his work Das Leben Jesu Strauss analyzed the miraculous elements in the gospels as being of mythic character. After Strauss’ work, the old expression, “take that as gospel” had a different meaning. In light of the rediscovery of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hamadi and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in more recent times as well as the historians looking for the historical Jesus, Strauss’s work seems a straightforward presentation. That was not the case in its day. As the humanist movement grew from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, to question the literal truth of the BIBLE was still to risk a variety of tortures and other punishment from the Inquisition as well as orthodox society. Before the Renaissance, the effort to stamp out such ideas resulted in such atrocities as the Albigensian Crusade. In the Renaissance we need only remember what happened to Galileo. But after Strauss, the door was now opened. Emmanuel Fuerbach could now state that God did not create man; rather, man created God. Humankind took all of the traits it valued, and bestowed them on a mythic figure up to which it could look. In his chapter entitled “Wagner, Feuerbach and the Future” Bryan Magee paraphrases Feuerbach’s ideas, “When we say something like ‘God came down to earth, and took on himself the sufferings of mankind, and died for us all,’ what we are really saying is that to suffer and die for others is the highest (i.e. the most godlike) activity of which human beings are capable.” (The Tristan Chord, p53). It is interesting that Magee chose this particular idea because it does lead to the very premise that culminates in the leap of faith and the subjugation of the ego, the premise that becomes a dominate theme in the art of this period. Karl Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels was influenced by Feuerbach, but later complained that the philosopher had two weaknesses. They are of course the two important points that we are looking for: first, the breakdown of scientific rationality and second, the concept of unselfish love and sacrifice. Engels complained that Feuerbach elevated literary phrases above scientific knowledge and advocated the concept of the liberation of mankind through love. Das Wesen des Christentums holds the beginning and end of Peckham’s 1951 argument. Even though we are tracing these concepts though the German philosophers, we must add a Frenchman at this point. In 1863 Ernest Renan published The Life of Jesus, in which, much as Strauss had done earlier, he removed the extra-worldly attributes from Jesus and presented him as a “great man.” Renan’s book reinforced the ideas put forth earlier by Strauss, but this time in a language more accessible to many more Europeans than Strauss’s German; remember, the vast majority of Russian nobility spoke and read French probably with as much ability as they did their native Russian, and although the Russian censors would have prevented the circulation of Renan’s book, the ideas would have been in a language accessible to them and the ideas would be in the air.
The figure whose ideas seem to crystallize the new world and humankind’s place in it is Arthur Schopenhauer. Unread and unappreciated until the latter half of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer identifies the egotistical strivings of the individual as vanity, the very words Wagner would put into the mouth of his shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs. Wagner’s early works took the concept of sacrifice for the benefit of others as the vehicle for plot; when he discovered the writings of Schopenhauer, as Bryan Magee points out, he was startled to find such a kindred spirit: “I was alarmed, as will everyone in my frame of mind, by the moral principles with which he caps his work, for here the annihilation of the will and the complete self-abnegation are represented as the only true means of redemption from the constricting bonds of individuality in its dealings with the world” (135). Wagner could not believe that the ideas of his operas were so clearly enunciated by another. He should have realized the ideas were in the air.
Schopenhauer takes his start, as did most of the Germans, from the writings of Kant. This is so much the case that he does not even explain his starting points, since they had already been read by anyone familiar with the writings of Kant. The older philosopher had said that the only thing we could know were the things available to our senses. This is the phenomenal world. Many other things may exist, but we could never be aware of the things in the noumenal realm because these did not impinge upon our senses. Schopenhauer agrees, but points out that if we cannot sense the noumenal world, then it is all one; the term “many things” in this context is meaningless. Schopenhauer goes on to say that Kant had made it clear that the phenomenal world was given order by our imposition of time and dimension. Therefore the noumenal realm exists outside the realm of time and space, and here there can be no differentiation: all must be one and undifferentiated. Two ideas should occur to us here. First is the dictum of Einstein which unites time, space and matter, and the second is the realm of the Grail, to which Gurnemanz leads Parsifal and which exists beyond time and space. Schopenhauer allows the Holy Grail to coexist with the Theory of Relativity.
Schopenhauer goes on to further clarify the split between the phenomenal and the noumenal. In the world of the phenomenal and the world of science, we speak of force. In the noumenal world, the equivalent of force is will. In the phenomenal world, we exist or appear to be separate individuals, but in the “ultimate ground of our being,” that is, in the noumenal realm we are one and undifferentiated, which is the source of compassion and shared joy. It is compassion that is the root of both ethics and unselfish love. The phenomenal world is one of ego and vanity in which we strive against our unified existence. Only one relief beyond compassion is available—art. Art puts us in touch with something outside the empirical realm, something out of space and time. The “Wahn” monologue of Wagner’s Hans Sachs puts this in words that anyone who has seen the opera can understand. “Wahn! Wahn!/ Uberall Wahn!/Wherever I look searchingly/ in city and world chronicles,/ to seek out the reason/ why, till they draw blood,/ people torment and flay each other/ in useless, foolish anger!/ No one has reward/ or thanks for it: driven to flight,/ he thinks he is hunting;/ hears not his own/ cry of pain;/ when he digs into his own flesh/ he thinks he is giving himself pleasure!” (act III, scene 1). All our earthly struggles are only vanity and cause us to injure ourselves and others. Only art, which the meisters, seek to preserve and foster rises above this struggling. It is so very unfortunate that meisters must be translated as masters, with the connotations that accompany it. Sachs was telling us to follow the German artists and thinkers to escape the ravages of vanity, not to follow those who would seek to pursue vanity through power and cause those ravages.
As we can see the German philosophers provide us with the philosophical bridge from the strangling reason and rules of the Enlightenment to the world of change and diversity: an organic world of which humankind is a part and which ultimately unites us all. We co-exist in a world of mind-imposed time and dimension and in a world beyond time and space. To find our place in the universe, we must take the leap of faith, destroy the ego, and journey into the realm of the everlasting yea. Whether we follow the journey of Sydney Carton, Parsifal, or Raskolnikov, this is the path we must tread.
