The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism

The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of RomanticismAuthor(s): Hans EichnerSource: PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 8-30Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462237 .

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HANS EICHNER

The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism

I

M O ORE THAN six hundred books and articles published during the first half of this century attempt to define Romanti-

cism. Culminating this immense effort, Rene Wellek's famous paper of 1949, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," identifies the most significant features of the Romantic

period as the emphasis on symbol and myth in literature and the replacement of the "mechanical philosophy" by an organic view of the cosmos.1 In 1951, an important paper by Morse Peckham slightly modified Wellek's view;2 but since then, although there is anything but full

agreement on the meaning of this elusive term, the number and importance of the proposed defi- nitions have greatly decreased. At long last, it

appears, scholars have realized-as Wellek and Peckham knew all along-that "Romanticism" is not a technical term like "propanol" or "cosine," invented to name a precise concept, but a word with a long, complicated, and confused history and that any definition capable of

encompassing Keats's sonnet "To Sleep," Nov- alis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Hugo's Her- nani must be so broad as to be meaningless. The question to ask if we are to understand the Ro- mantic phenomenon is not, What is Romanti- cism? but, What happened in the intellectual life of Europe in the period that we now call Ro- mantic?

The general recognition that something fundamental did happen is supported by at least two books, Arthur O. Lovejoy's magnificent study The Great Chain of Being (1936) and Michel Foucault's more recent and more obscure Les Mots et les choses (1966).3 Accord- ing to Lovejoy, one of the central concepts of Western thought-the concept of the great chain of being, which had decisively influenced theology, science, and philosophy ever since Plato -was radically and irrevocably transformed by

Romantic thought. And while Foucault seems to dislike the term "Romantic," he too describes the decades from 1770 to 1830 in terms of a monumental change, the change from what he calls the "classical episteme," which prevailed in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, to an entirely different heuristic model, which, though it may now be falling apart, he still considers the dominant mode of thought in our own

day. In view of the vast perspectives Lovejoy and

Foucault present, and particularly in view of the extensive space and impressive learning they de- vote to the three centuries preceding the age of Romanticism, it is surprising that neither of them pays more than fleeting attention to what was surely the most significant achievement of European thought between 1500 and 1800 and

probably the most significant achievement since the glories of ancient Greece: the creation of modern science.4 Yet it seems to me that the

history of Western thought from 1500 to the present day must be written with this achievement constantly in mind and that the grandeur and the futility, the wisdom and the folly, of the Romantic age can only be assessed and understood if the period is seen in relation to this achievement; for Romanticism is, perhaps pre- dominantly, a desperate rearguard action against the spirit and the implications of modern science -a rearguard action that, to anticipate the substance of this paper, liberated the arts from the constraints of a pseudoscientific aesthetics but that was bound to fail in the proper domain of science.

To a certain extent, this thesis is implied by the theories of Wellek and Peckham-but it is only implied. To tell the full story would be the task, not of an article, but of a long book. All I can hope to do here is to provide the bare outline of the course such a book might conceivably take.

The great breakthrough of modern science

8



petuum mobile, planets that are not the seats of great gods-Mars, Venus, Jupiter-but lumps of dead matter; we behold, not the divine heavens, but, to use that term again, celestial mechanics.

The tenacious resistance to this new view shows how hard it was to accept. Newton could never quite rid himself of the notion that God must exist to keep the planets in motion, and even that arch-materialist the Baron d'Holbach, as late as 1770, ascribes to dead matter an in- nate "nisus," or striving, which, rather than gravitation, accounts for the fall of bodies.6 To grasp the full implications of the new science, however, we must consider the new technology as well. In the Middle Ages, there were thou- sands of water mills throughout Europe, at first used mainly for grinding wheat but increasingly also, from the thirteenth century on, for power- ing the machines used in making cloth and saw- ing wood. At about the same time, pumps began to be widely used in ships and mines. The thirteenth century saw the first, very inaccurate mechanical timepieces, and some eighty years after Galileo had discovered the isochronic property of pendulums, the first pendulum clocks were constructed. Meanwhile, Peter Hen- lein had invented the mainspring, and by 1550 anyone wealthy enough could buy a portable watch. These developments had important implications.

As Galileo had shown, the motions of bodies are governed by laws of nature, and as the new astronomy showed, these laws apply not only to pebbles dropped from a tower or projectiles hurled from a cannon but to the planets and the earth itself. But what holds true for planets and pebbles must hold for the smallest particles that matter comprises-whether conceived of as Lucretian atoms or in some other way. The physical universe consists therefore of bodies in motion governed by natural laws, that is, by an inexorable causality. But these countless bodies in motion do not, of course, move chaotically, like dust motes in a whirlwind; the causally determined cosmos is orderly, harmonious, and re- liable. The sun rises every morning with-may I use the word?-clockwork regularity. In fact, the reason we can tell the time at all is that the heavens are like a clock: we could tell time by the sun and the stars long before we constructed

came in two closely related fields, astronomy and dynamics. In 1543, Copernicus proposed the hypotheses of the diurnal rotation of the earth and the rotation of the earth around the sun. Some seventy years later, Kepler announced his famous three laws of planetary motion. Be- tween them, they did away with some of the most hallowed conceptions of ancient and me- dieval cosmology, establishing, counter to the dictates of common sense and theology, that the earth is not the center of the universe and that the planets do not move in the perfect circles deduced by Aristotle and held evident ever since. The achievements of Copernicus and Kep- ler, however, were in the field of applied mathematics. It was Galileo, the greatest of the founders of modern science, who made the decisive breakthrough in mathematical physics: in the early decades of the seventeenth century he created the concept of acceleration, discovered the law of inertia, and thus put himself in a position to formulate the laws of motion of falling bodies.5 Finally, Newton, drawing on Kepler and Galileo, produced that mathematicophysical theory of planetary motion which was known in the seventeenth century as-the name is fraught with significance-"celestial mechanics."

Galileo's laws of motion can nowadays be explained to intelligent teenagers in the course of an hour, but it has become difficult to realize what his discovery meant in the seventeenth century. Common sense seems to tell us, or at least seemed to tell us before the ubiquity of machines totally refurbished our minds, that moving things live and that dead matter is at rest unless it is pushed. A dog can run up a hill, a stone has to be dragged. Hence the animistic, or vitalistic, conceptions that have dominated our view of the world since time immemorial: the winds are propelled by wind gods, the rivers are moved by river gods; the planets are steered by resident spirits or set in crystal spheres turned by the Supreme Being, the Unmoved Mover. Thus the ancients explained the world of dead matter in terms of the living. With Galileo and Newton, all this began to change. The law of inertia lays down not only that bodies resist being set in motion but that, once moving, they will continue to move. When we add the concepts of gravitation and centrifugal force, we have Newton's system of the planets circling the sun like a per-

Hans Eichner 9




our own clocks, and we can understand the sun and the stars in their motions because we can construct clocks. But, to repeat, what holds true for planets and pebbles must hold for all particles of matter, however small; and consequently, the whole physical universe is like a huge clock or like an immensely complicated machine. As Nehemiah Grew, the botanist, put it in 1682, "All Nature is as one Great Engine, made by, and held in [God's] hand."7

Nowadays, the concept of the physical universe as a vast engine or mechanical clock sounds a little simplistic. We have added chemis-

try and biology to mathematical physics, and some prominent scientists of the early twentieth

century have argued that the organic realm is

fundamentally different from the inorganic.8 In the last few decades, however, biology has been reduced almost entirely to a subbranch of physics and chemistry, and chemistry, where it is more than a craft or a collection of rules of thumb, is mathematical physics.9 With some re- finements, the heuristic principles of seventeenth-

century science still hold, and their triumphant results are with us from the moment we get up in the morning and switch on the light to the moment we retire between our synthetic sheets. Unless, bloated with power and starved for wisdom, we blow ourselves to pieces, the development that began with Copernicus, Galileo, and their fellow scientists must seem the greatest success story of human history. And yet there was something wrong with it from the beginning.

To show this flaw, I should like to begin by quoting Robert Boyle's splendid definition of the new science:

God, indeed, gave motion to matter; he ... established those rules of motion, and that order amongst things corporial, which we call the laws of nature. Thus, the universe being once fram'd by God, and the laws of motion settled, and all upheld by his perpetual concourse, and general providence; the [mechanical] philosophy teaches, that the phenomena of the world are physically produced by the mechanical properties of the parts of matter, and that they operate upon one another according to mechanical laws.10

This magnificent statement, if it holds true, has a number of startling and unpleasant consequences. I limit myself to five of them:

1. If the world is like a gigantic clock, it seems reasonable to assume a supreme clock- maker. The mechanical philosophy thus provided theologians with a splendid proof of the existence of God, the famous "argument from

design." But their victory was hollow. Once set in motion, a clock has no further need of its maker. Admittedly, a man-made timepiece has to be rewound from time to time, but the cosmic machine was seen, at least until the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, as a per- petuum mobile. Thus, "the universe being once fram'd by God" runs its course according to the fixed laws of motion, leaving no room for divine action unless God chooses to interfere with his own laws of nature. Besides, if the great cosmic

engine functions perfectly, as it must do, given the omnipotence and the perfection of its maker, such interference will be quite unnecessary. In this perfect mechanism, as Leibniz points out, even "sins carry their punishment with them by the order of nature, and by virtue of the mechanical structure of things itself; and in the same way noble actions will attract their awards by ways which are mechanical .. ."n Thus the chain of reasoning that began by proving the existence of God as the supreme maker and prime mover ended by rendering him unemployed. As French

philosophes like Holbach and Diderot showed in the eighteenth century, the mechanical philosophy inevitably drifted toward atheism.

2. It is a commonplace that the eighteenth century fervently believed in progress. It is less well known that this belief is incompatible with the metaphysical assumptions of cosmic change- lessness that the eighteenth century had inherited from earlier ages. The product of a supreme being (the argument goes), the world must have been created perfect. Improvement is thus un- thinkable; the evil the universe contains must be

necessary to it.12 According to Leibniz, for in-

stance, God created the best of all possible worlds, that is, either the world with the greatest number of "compossibles" (including all the evils that were "compossible") or the world with the highest possible ratio of good to evil. On either assumption, the total amount of evil cannot be reduced: if a better world were possible, God would have created it in the first place. Thus all hope for progress is illusory. Paradoxi-

cally, this notion of a static universe seemed in

10



Hans Eichner

perfect agreement with the mechanistic foundations of modern science. The great cosmic "en-

gine" that is "held in God's hand" is of course an

engine in motion, but engines neither grow nor

develop. The cosmic engine thus inevitably re- sembles one of those machines devised by modern pop art that rattle and shake, squeak and blow whistles, merely to return to the status quo. But if all the evil that exists is essential to the universe, then progress is an illusion harbored

by superficial minds, history has no meaning, and the story of the world is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

3. Aristotle saw the purposiveness of the or-

ganism as the basic paradigm that explains events; a scientific explanation, for him, identified a purpose or final cause that reveals a divine

intelligence at work. His science thus projects a nature not only alive but meaningful in human, and indeed ethical, terms: the uniform and cir- cular motion of the planets is "perfect," and a stone falls to reach its proper place. When modern science banished final causes-Galileo and Descartes were equally caustic about them-a rift seemed to open between humanity and nature, physics and ethics; and the more mathematical science became, the more the "language of will and purpose and hope" in which the phenomena of the world used to be talked about was replaced by an abstract language of quanti- tative relations, in which "no terms exist for good or bad, kind or cruel" (Gillispie, p. 43) and which either ignored entirely the "secondary qualities" of objects or reduced them to mere abstractions. Some, of course, particularly the most competent scientists, thrilled to the beauty of the new world view. Kepler, to quote a random example, contemplated the "harmonies" of

Copernican astronomy "with incredible ravish- ment" (quoted from Gillispie, p. 27). Others were horrified by what they saw as a fatal es- trangement between man and nature, and this sentiment became widespread in the second half of the eighteenth century. Diderot's and Goethe's distrust of mathematics and Blake's, Goethe's, Hegel's, and Schelling's hatred of Newton were straws in the wind, while Schiller responded to the new world view with a devastating sense of loss:

Wo jetzt nur, wie unsre Weisen sagen Seelenlos ein Feuerball sich dreht,

Lenkte damals seinen goldnen Wagen Helios in stiller Majestat. Diese H6hen fiillten Oreaden, Eine Dryas starb mit jenem Baum, Aus den Urnen lieblicher Najaden Sprang der Strome Silberschaum.

Unbewult der Freuden, die sie schenket, Nie entziickt von ihrer Trefflichkeit, Nie gewahr des Armes, der sie lenket, Reicher nie durch meine Dankbarkeit, Fiihllos selbst fur ihres Kiinstlers Ehre, Gleich dem toten Schlag der Pendeluhr Dient sie knechtisch dem Gesetz der Schwere, Die entg6tterte Natur!

Morgen wieder neu sich zu entbinden, Wuhlt sie heute sich ihr eignes Grab, Und an ewig leicher Spindel winden Sich von selbst die Monde auf und ab. MuiBig kehrten zu dem Dichterlande Heim die Gotter, unniitz einer Welt, Die, entwachsen ihrem Gangelbande, Sich durch eignes Schweben halt.13

4. "The [mechanical] philosophy teaches that the phenomena of the world are physically produced by the mechanical properties of the parts of matter," and the human body is one of the

phenomena of the world. If the universe is "as one Great Engine," the body is like a smaller, though still immensely complicated, engine. Early modern science assumed that the phenomena of life can only be understood by applying the laws of mechanics and using the heuristic model of the machine. It was on this assumption that Harvey, as early as 1628, achieved his great breakthrough in physiology, his discovery of the function of the heart. The terminology he used to announce this discovery in his famous treatise on the motion of the heart of 1628 is note-

worthy. The heart, he declares, is a "piece of

machinery in which one wheel gives motion to another"; the blood is pumped by the heart "as

by two clacks of a water bellows to raise water."14 But if living bodies are like machines and if their movements are "physically produced by the mechanical properties of the parts of matter" of which they and their environment consist, then they are causally determined by the laws of nature, so that they would be exactly the same if they were without consciousness. On the basis of this analysis consciousness, or the mind,

11




is merely-to use Gilbert Ryle's famous term- a ghost in the machine. How awareness of physical events can enter the mind is unimaginable, and that the mind should be able to alter the course of physical events is contrary to the laws of nature.

5. Since the laws of nature totally control the parts of matter that make up the body, there can be no freedom of the will.

The mechanical philosophy, then, which is in- extricably linked with the genesis of modern science and all its subsequent triumphs, projects a world view that has no room for God, no hope for a better world, and no possibility of free will. Such was the heuristic assumption that scientists had to make if they were to achieve any progress, but its implications seemed both horrible and absurd.

Descartes, the best philosophical mind at work at the beginning of the scientific revolution, must have at least glimpsed these implications. He does not state the antinomy of free will and determinism in the terms I use, but he does state it, and he confesses that he cannot re- solve it. While he insists that "the chief perfection of man is his being able to act freely or by will," that it is free will that "renders him worthy of praise or blame," and that "the liberty of our will is self-evident," he also holds it "certain that God has foreordained all things"; and when he attempts a conciliation of free will and "Divine pre-ordination," he lamely concludes that we do not "possess sufficient intelligence to know" how God "leaves the free actions of man indetermi- nate" despite having preordained them.15 Simi- larly, Descartes recognized the problem of the ghost in the machine and failed to cope with it satisfactorily. Animals, he admits, are automata -that is, "machine[s] made by the hands of God, which [are] incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable than is any machine of human invention" (Dis- course on Method, p. 44). The assumption that animals have consciousness is gratuitous, but even if they do have consciousness, it does not in any way influence their actions. In contrast, we know by introspection that we are conscious beings gifted with free will. Consequently the soul must be able to affect physical motion, though we do not know how. Although we know from the law of the conservation of momentum

that the soul cannot initiate motions, it can change the direction of existing motions, and this ability is enough to account for free will.'1

Unfortunately, this attempt to escape determinism is both bad philosophy and bad science. It is bad philosophy because the soul, being immaterial, cannot conceivably affect motion. And it is bad science because the laws of dynamics specify that both the quantity and the direction of momentum are constants. Appar- ently Descartes became aware of this difficulty when he tried (unsuccessfully) to formulate the laws of impact, and he therefore dropped from his mature philosophy the theory that the soul can influence the direction of motion, thus leaving unsolved-and, he assumed, unsolvable- the problem of how the soul can affect bodily movements without annulling the laws of dynamics.l7 To circumvent this problem, Geulinx and Malebranche subsequently devised the "oc- casionalist" doctrine, which asserts that there is no causal connection between physical and mental events but that they run a parallel course preestablished by God, just as two clocks that are working perfectly will show the same time although there is no causal connection between them. Unfortunately, this doctrine solves at best only a part of Descartes's problem, and it is wholly implausible. The main drift of the mechanical philosophy seemed irreversible. Roughly a century after Descartes's death La Mettrie, in L'Homme machine, abandoned Des- cartes's precarious distinction between human beings and animals and proposed-once again drawing on the heuristic model of the timepiece -that the human body is a "machine that winds up its own springs, a living image of perpetual motion," or "an assemblage of springs that mutually wind up one another."18 The puzzle is not how the mind influences this machine but, inversely, how the machine produces the phenomenon we call mind. Baron d'Holbach drew the ultimate consequences in 1770 in his System of Nature, where he concludes from the "invari- able laws of motion" that the phenomena we call mental and the phenomena we call physical are all wholly determined and that just as "a heavy body must necessarily fall, if it meets with no obstacle sufficient to arrest its descent," so "a sensible body must necessarily seek pleasure, and avoid pain":

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Hans Eichner

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

agent. He is not the architect of his own confirma- tion, which he holds from nature, he has no control over his own ideas, or over the modification of his own brain; these are due to causes, that, in spite of him, and without his knowledge, unceasingly act upon him. . . . The same necessity which regulates the physical, also regulates the moral world, in which everything is in consequence submitted to fatality. (pp. 101-02)

Now perhaps Holbach should not be mentioned in the same breath as La Mettrie and Malebranche, not to speak of Descartes. He was neither a competent scientist nor a competent philosopher, and he constantly, in the most an-

noying manner, confused the physical determination of the movement of the body with the

psychological determination of volition. The crass materialism he proclaimed with better ora-

tory than logic is not a necessary consequence of Newtonian physics. But the assumptions of modern science really did pose problems of great severity, and the bulk of Continental philosophy from Descartes to Hegel consists of more or less

desperate attempts to solve these problems without being driven to such unacceptable conclusions as the denial of free will.19 Although this

extremely important matter hardly ever receives

enough emphasis in histories of philosophy, it needs no detailed illustration here, and I can limit myself to some brief remarks on Leibniz and Kant.

As I have said, the doctrine of the occasional- ists is implausible; but Geulinx and Malebranche were men of great intellect, and if they formulated so fantastic a philosophy, they must have been compelled to do so by the need to escape the Cartesian impasse. Leibniz borrowed from them and devised a philosophy that not only al- lowed for free will but also got rid of some logical difficulties inherent in the Cartesian concept of substance (see Russell, p. 606). Geulinx assumed two chains of events, one mental and one

physical, each a closed system but each synchronized, through the will of God, with the other. Leibniz assumed a vast plurality of such

systems, his famous monads. Each monad is both mental and physical, and each, from its own unique point of view, dreams the world. These dreams are all synchronized; though the monads are "windowless," they are in a har-

mony preestablished by God. This philosophy seemed to provide everything one could ask for: a splendid proof of the existence of God, a logical solution to the problem of the ghost in the machine, and, because the monad is windowless, the release of the mind from its bondage to the causal chains of the material world. Leibniz'

theory, however, is even less plausible than occasionalism, and anyone who really believed in it would be driven insane by a sense of complete isolation.

With the next great philosophic system that must be mentioned, that of Kant, we seem to move into a different world and encounter an

entirely different method, but the problem Kant set out to solve was still one of the basic Car- tesian dilemmas: the conciliation of causality, needed for science, with free will, needed for ethics. Kant achieved this conciliation by distin-

guishing between the noumenal world of the

things-in-themselves, which are "outside" space and time and are unknowable, and the phenomenal world of our sense experience, which the mind constructs from the data supplied by the noumena. The relation of cause and effect is one of the "categories" through which the mind or- ders these data, and nothing in the noumenal world corresponds to this relation. Insofar as we

belong to this noumenal world, which is not sub-

ject to causation, we are endowed with free will; when we deal with the phenomenal world, we can be sure that the law of causality will hold, because this is a condition our own mind im-

poses on all experience. Since Kant's philosophy seemed to provide a place for everything that his readers wished to believe in-a secure founda- tion for science, free will, God, and the immor-

tality of the soul-it caught on very rapidly, and we would be foolish to dispute either its intellectual brilliance or its historical importance. Kant's ablest contemporaries saw very quickly, however, that his system promised more than it could deliver.20 If causation only holds sway within the phenomenal world, the noumena cannot account for the spatiotemporal configuration better than Descartes at explaining how "matter" enters the "mind." Similarly, if the noumena are neither spatial nor temporal, they cannot cause the phenomena, so that Kant is no of the phenomena we observe. Now of course Kant nowhere asserts, in so many words, that

13




the noumena do cause the phenomena; he ex- presses himself on this subject with extreme cau- tion and with great ambiguity; but if the noumena do not cause the phenomena, what do they do? Is it not entirely gratuitous to assume that there are things-in-themselves that exist independent of our experience? In the decisive years when Romantic thought began to take organized shape, there seemed to be no satisfactory answer to these questions. However much one could learn from Kant, it seemed inevitable to con- clude that he had failed. Thus the time was ripe, at long last, for radical-or, rather, for even more radical-solutions. Within twenty years of the publication of Kant's last Critique, the major Romantic systems were devised, proclaimed, and began to fall apart again. For our purposes they can be characterized in a single sentence: they attempted to escape the dilemmas of the mechanical philosophy by replacing all its basic assumptions by the exact opposites.

It was Fichte who took the decisive steps in the new direction in his Wissenschaftslehre of 1794. The basic concept of the mechanistic philosophy is that of material particles, whose motion it studies. With Kant, all that remains of these particles outside the mind are the unknowable things-in-themselves. Fichte does away with this residue. Every philosophy that assumes the existence of matter, he asserts, will inevitably lead to a rigidly causal system and deny free will. A philosophy that upholds human dignity must therefore deny the existence of matter and posit a universe that is purely mental. Its basic assumption must be precisely what all forms of "dogmatism" end up by denying, that is, free will; and its first proposition, the "thesis" from which all its other propositions are to be dialec- tically deduced, must therefore be an assertion of free will. Descartes's basic proposition is purely intellectual and static: "I think, therefore I am." Fichte's first proposition states a free action: "The ego posits itself."

With Fichte, two of the most worrying problems of the earlier, dualistic philosophies have suddenly disappeared (though at a price few philosophers are now willing to pay): not only is free will unchallenged, it is the very soul of the new system; and the rift between mind and matter no longer exists, because there is no matter. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, however, is still a

decisive step away from any philosophy that can be called Romantic. It has two essential characteristics that his most enthusiastic disciples, the young German Romantics, found unacceptable. The first is a further degradation of nature, which the mechanical philosophy had already reduced to lumps of dead matter. In the Wissen- schaftslehre, nature is merely the ego's field of moral activity, merely the "nonego." As such it has no existence independent of the mind and no value other than that of presenting the ego with a barrier to be overcome by free moral action. The other characteristic of Fichte's thought that the Romantics found unacceptable is more complicated and more controversial.

In its "practical" aspects, Fichte's philosophy is nothing if not dynamic. It sets us the task of realizing in practice the freedom it guarantees through its theoretical starting point, and it en- visages human history as the story of infinite progress toward this end. But in its theoretical foundations, the Wissenschaftslehre is, paradox- ically, no less static than the mechanical philosophy. According to Fichte, all knowledge can, and ultimately must, be derived from its first proposition by a series of purely logical, dialectic deductions. The thesis "The ego posits itself" harbors, Fichte maintains, a contradiction that can only be resolved by its antithesis, "The ego posits the nonego." The thesis and its antithesis form a new contradiction, which must be resolved by a synthesis that is again contradictory, thus giving rise to a new antithesis, and so on. The mind can only pass from one proposition to the next in a temporal sequence, but since each proposition is in itself a logical contradiction, it is untenable except in conjunction with all the others, so that the whole system of propositions must be thought of as simultaneous. The Wis- senschaftslehre thus does not tell the story of the gradual creation of the universe. The ego does not first posit itself, then the nonego, and so on; on the contrary, the free actions that can be deduced logically from the first must, all of them, take place at the same time. In fact, the final proposition with which the whole system of deductions completes itself is also the first, "The ego posits itself." But if this reasoning is valid, the universe projected by this philosophy is as "complete" at the (unimaginable) moment of its

beginning as the universe created, according to

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Hans Eichner

more traditional beliefs, by God, and its constituents form as rigid a series as the changeless constituents of the great chain of being.

Of course, as we have seen, when Fichte devised the Wissenschaftslehre as a logical system, he did not mean to imply that the world had no

history; he was simply caught on the horns of an ancient dilemma. But if there was any room for

history left in his world, his dialectics, so to

speak, took the steam out of it. Just as the mechanical philosophy envisaged a world of perpetual motion whose entire history follows by causal determination from its beginning, which

preordains it, so Fichte envisaged a world of eternal striving whose entire history follows from its logical constitution. Characteristically, he told Friedrich Schlegel that he would rather waste time counting peas than study history. "Philosophy," he says elsewhere, "anticipates the whole of experience."21

With all his innovations, Fichte thus still be-

longs to the classical episteme (to use Foucault's term again). It is uncertain which of his follow- ers first thought of modifying Fichte's philosophy by assigning nature a more significant role and by changing the logical order of Fichte's

propositions into a historical one. As early as the summer or fall of 1797, Friedrich Schlegel complained that Fichte's philosophy was "not

yet" a historical system,22 and at about the same time Novalis noted that the Wissenschaftslehre was "nothing but applied logic."23 There is no doubt, however, that it was Schelling who, in his System der Naturphilosophie (1798/99), produced the first coherent philosophical system that can, without qualification, be called Roman- tic. He did so by turning Fichte's dialectic, the "ideal development of reason," into a dialectic that is the "real development of nature" (Hart- mann, p. 117)-the historical, temporal unfold- ing of the universe. Fichte's logical deductions thus became an evolutionary cosmogony.

The step Schelling took was monumental. By "temporalizing" Fichte's dialectic, Schelling broke with an assumption that had prevailed at least since the days of Plato, thus paving the way for the whole series of Romantic, evolutionary philosophies that stretch through Hegel and

Bergson all the way to Teilhard de Chardin. For more than two thousand years, as Lovejoy has shown (p. 316), Western thinkers had taken for

granted that whatever is "lower" or further from

perfection must have been created by, or have emanated from, something "higher" or more

nearly perfect-all the way up to Plato's "Su-

preme Good" or the Creator in the Hebrew- Christian tradition. According to the new vision, the reverse is true: the "higher" developed from the "lower," the more perfect from the less; the world was not created once and for all by a

perfect, supreme being but has grown or devel-

oped-and growing, "becoming," Werden is its

very essence. Even its God is not "something completed and present" from the beginning but one who "makes himself" (Schelling). He must be "thought of as changing and imperfect, as is the case in all mythologies" (Schlegel).24

With this new vision of an imperfect, evolving universe, the problem of evil, which had driven earlier philosophers to such desperate strata-

gems, lost its sting. If the world is imperfect and

striving toward perfection and if the perfect su-

preme being is not its creator but its telos, the existence of evil presents no puzzle, and such evil as there is can be vanquished. In the "best

possible" world, there is no room for hope; in an evolving world, there is. But this implication is

only one of several introduced by the vision of an evolving world, and some of the others are far more obviously related to my main theme.

Machines do not grow, organisms do. Schell- ing and other Romantics not only replaced the "static" world of earlier thought by an evolving one but exchanged the mechanistic assumptions associated with modern science for an equally sweeping organicism. Nature, according to this view, is not a mere "nonego" but unconscious, visible spirit striving toward consciousness. The world is not a "Great Engine" resting in God's hand but a great organism, a "cosmic animal" or "All-Tier," as the Romantic physicist Ritter calls it,25 not external to God, but in some un- fathomable way identical with him. If the mechanical philosophy had sought to explain all phenomena, including those of life, by causal determination, by the motion of particles, and

by the heuristic model of the machine, Romantic

philosophy sought to explain all phenomena, in-

cluding so-called dead matter, by freedom, by conscious or unconscious mental processes, and

by the analogy of organisms. "Our philosophy of the world," F. Schlegel explains, "refutes the

15




core of dogmatism, i.e., the principle of causality. Every motion is individual and dynamic. Every motion is instinct" (xII, 32). "Rivers do not fall into the sea mechanically, but organically strive towards it" (xviiI, 188, No. 739).26 That this view of nature had a far greater appeal to poets than Fichte's-that it completely reversed the alienation of nature that Schiller had so

eloquently deplored-goes without saying. That it is incompatible not merely with the mechanical

philosophy but with all science is a matter to which we must return later.

Another immediate consequence of the con-

cept of an evolving universe was Romantic historicism. The eighteenth century had by no means lacked interest in history; it produced such major historians as Montesquieu, Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, and it witnessed great advances in the methodology of historical research. But the thought of the age had remained

fundamentally ahistorical.27 The new science that began with Copernicus and Galileo sought to explain the world rationally in terms of the laws of nature, and these laws, like reason itself, were thought to hold uniformly at all times and places. It seemed natural that human beings, the most rational of creatures, should be equally timeless in their essence. Thus even such an excellent historian as Voltaire conceived of moral-

ity as being the same at all times and places ("la morale uniforme en tout temps, en tout lieu"), and he speaks of a natural law that must hold equally in Europe and Japan and that inspired Solon and Zoroaster as it inspires us (Lovejoy, p. 290). In fact, change seemed something almost unnatural. Some eighteenth-century phil- ologists found it so unreasonable to suppose that languages change that they denied, in the face of all evidence, that the Romance languages had developed from Latin (Foucault, pp. 89, 121). The Romantics, who had done away with the notion of an unchanging universe, also abandoned the concept of unchanging human nature. As they did so, not only the preoccupation with but also the admiration for the timeless, the universal, and the general made way for a decided preference for the temporal, the local, and the individual; and the most obvious, indeed the only, explanation for the temporal, local, and individual seemed to them history. Here, Fried- rich Schlegel was their most eloquent spokes-

man. "The explanation of an organic product, of an organic being," he declares, "must be historical, not mechanical" (xvIIi, 21, No. 36). "The world is not a system, but a history" (XII, 418). "The best theory of art is its history" (iv, 230). History is "the only science," and hence "scientific physics . . . must be natural history" (XII, 420). "All science is genetic," and history is therefore "the most universal, the most general, and the highest of all sciences" (xi, xxiv, n. 1).

The Romantic fascination with history led to modern, historical philology, which replaced the quest for a universal grammar; to a historical theory of genres, which replaced timeless laws of

poetry; and to a biology of evolution, which replaced one preoccupied with classifying suppos- edly static, unchangeable species. Under its influence, too, the quest for a timeless, universal "natural law" made room for historicism in legal thought and, in the wake of Burke, provided countless arguments against "man-made," "artifi- cial" constitutions such as those of the United States and revolutionary France. But even historicism was not the most radical development that followed from the belief in an organic, evolving universe.

In the thought of such men as Descartes, Boyle, and Christian Wolff, there was an inti- mate connection between mechanistic assumptions and faith in reason and observation. If nature worked like a "great Engine," human beings, who built engines, could unriddle its se- crets, using the same thought processes that they used in building engines. There might be truths to be deduced a priori, there were the revealed truths of Christianity, and there might even be a few facts-such as the coexistence of free will and divine predetermination in Descartes-that were forever denied to human comprehension. On the whole, however, it could be assumed that nature and the human intelligence were "made for each other" and that whatever could be known at all could be known by reason and experience (of which revelation formed a part). When organicism replaced the mechanical philosophy, all this changed. The Romantics saw that the way in which we know what it is like to be a living being is fundamentally different from the way in which we know how a clock works, that we know about our own existence by intro-

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spection. Besides, the phenomena of life were

precisely those for which the mechanistic, Car- tesian, or Newtonian methods of investigation failed; and if everything was alive and organic, these methods no longer applied anywhere.

This conclusion does not mean, of course, that the Romantics rejected the findings of modern science or that they repudiated science as such: they were convinced that, in denying the axioms of what is now called "classical," New- tonian physics, they were turning against a tem-

porary aberration, and they appropriated some of the most recent findings of science-particularly such dubious ones as animal electricity, animal magnetism, and Brownian medicine-with almost indecent haste, in the conviction that these phenomena demonstrated the superiority of their own speculative organicism over New- tonian physics. Similarly, the Romantics never

wholly rejected reason, but they dethroned it, assigning it only the more menial services; to at- tain those truths that really matter they relied on the irrational faculties of the mind-unmediated

insight, "enthusiasm," "intellectual intuition," and the imagination, concepts the Romantics did not always clearly differentiate.28 The claims made by the Romantics on behalf of the imagination, in particular, are as ubiquitous as they are, to the modern ear, excessive. According to Schleier- macher, the imagination is the highest and most

indispensable faculty ("das hochste und

urspriinglichste im Menschen"); without it, there would be "neither a world, nor God." Ac-

cording to Jean Paul, it is the "elementary spirit" of all the faculties ("der Elementargeist der

iibrigen Krafte"). According to Friedrich

Schlegel, it is the basic faculty of the mind ("die Grundfahigkeit im menschlichen BewuBtsein") and the organon of religion ("das Organ fur die

Religion"). According to Wordsworth, it is "but another name for absolute power and clearest

insight." In short, while Western philosophers, for more than two thousand years, had thought of truth as something to be discovered in the world outside them, through reason or faith, through tradition, revelation, or the evidence of their senses, the Romantics, as Isaiah Berlin put it, sought not to discover truth but to invent it. In Keats's famous phrase, "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth-whether it existed before or not... ."29

With this quotation, we have at long last come to the field that the Romantics most successfully claimed as their own, the field most unquestion- ably ruled by beauty and the imagination- poetry.30 But before we can discuss the view of

poetry that resulted from the Romantic revolt

against mechanicism and its attendant phenomena, we have to look briefly at the view that

preceded it. Modern science would never have developed

beyond its infancy if its early practitioners had not had the courage to break with the past and to speak up where they found the ancient au- thorities in error. The founders of French classicism, which was to dominate the theory and

practice of European poetry for more than a

century, took their cue from this past. It was from Aristotle (or, to be precise, from Aristotle mistranslated and misunderstood) that they derived the three unities and the principle of imitation. But their ability to turn to Aristotle as their

lawgiver and to Greek tragedy as their prescrip- tive model is not unconnected with the spirit of the scientific revolution, nor is it surprising that Corneille (1606-84), Descartes (1596- 1650), and Boyle (1627-91) were contem-

poraries. The faith in reason that the scientific revolution so splendidly justified is as evident in the poetics of the period as in the science and

philosophy. "The arts have this in common with the sciences," Le Bossu wrote in 1675, "that like the latter they are founded on reason."31 And since reason is the same in all places and at all times, the laws for the arts must be as universal as the laws of nature: what held good in ancient Greece must hold just as good in modern France. Like science, art must be objective and

impersonal, and all artists must strive to realize one and the same ideal. The uniformity that Voltaire claimed for ethics-"There is only one

morality . . . just as there is only one geometry" -equally held in the arts: "There is only one

beauty, just as there is only one goodness" (Winckelmann); "There is only one poetry, just as there is only one reason" (Fichte).32

Unfortunately, the quest for universal laws that achieved such success in the sciences worked poorly in the arts. The doctrine of imitation fitted in very well with the temper of an

age that had learned the virtues of faithful and

patient observation of nature, but it was bla-

17




tantly incompatible with what great painters and poets really did. Instead of abandoning it, writ- ers on the arts took refuge in outrageous cheat- ing. To mention just one, by no means untypical, example, the Swiss critics Bodmer and Breitin- ger squared their admiration of Milton with their enslavement to Aristotle by suggesting that poets are not restricted by the actual world but are free to "imitate" possible worlds that God might have created had he not chosen otherwise. The doctrine of idealization, which assumed particular importance in eighteenth-century Germany, is of course also incompatible with that of the imitation of real, or even beautiful, nature, and it led to an absurdity of its own: if there is really only one bon gout, or only one ideal of beauty, all successfully idealized paintings of, say, a beautiful woman should look exactly alike.33

Fortunately, since painters had no access to the ideal of beauty, their paintings continued to differ. Poetry, which was saved from uniformity by the infinite variety of possible subjects, faced a worse danger. Should not Descartes's "clear and distinct ideas," which worked such wonders in the sciences, work equally well in the arts? Boileau, who believed that a theory of poetic genres should be as timeless and universal as the theory of conic sections, certainly thought so, and hence preached an ideal of poetic diction that had all the virtues of prose:

Whate'er you write of, pleasant or sublime, Always let sense accompany your rime.

Love reason then; and let whate'er you write Borrow from her its beauty, force, and light.

As your idea is clear, or else obscure, The expression follows, perfect or impure; What we conceive with ease we can express; Words to the notion fly with readiness.34

But if the language of poetry prides itself primarily on its clarity and good sense, it can hardly hope to achieve anything that prose cannot do as well. This conclusion (which was not often drawn explicitly)35 was unlikely to dis- turb an age convinced of the "reciprocal kinship between knowledge and language" (Foucault, p. 89), a kinship that seemed to guarantee (like the kinship between reason and nature, of which

it was a consequence) that whatever has to be said can be said clearly in ordinary prose. But then why write poetry at all-except as an idle pastime? Inevitably, as French classicism increasingly spread its influence throughout Eu- rope during the first half of the eighteenth century, poetry went into a decline. If, in the second half of the century, it recovered, the explanation is that the best poets simply ignored, or even

deliberately defied, classicistic poetics-not, in-

cidentally, because they had clearly envisaged theoretical reasons but because they followed different models, such as Pindar or Shakespeare, or because they chose to vent their impatience with a restrictive society by systematically break- ing rules in all fields. The best critics rebelled against isolated aspects of classicistic poetics, but their attacks, however brilliant, were too piecemeal to be really effective.36 As long as the basic epistemological convictions and mental habits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained dominant, the aesthetics that followed from them could be patched up indefi- nitely. But when these basic convictions were overthrown, the system collapsed, and the radically new and coherent attitude toward poetry that is the most enduring achievement of the Romantics followed almost of necessity. This attitude is so well known and has been so fully documented that there is no need to describe it in any detail, and the remarks that follow are merely intended to show its coherence and its internal logic.

When organicism replaced the mechanical philosophy, the imagination, rather than reason, became the accepted way to the higher truths; and the imagination reveals its powers nowhere so fully as in poetry. It must be poetry, therefore, the Romantics argued, that is the supreme tool of cognition. As early as 1796/97, in the

fascinating document known as "Das ilteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus" and variously ascribed to Schelling, Hegel, and even Holderlin, it was claimed that the "highest act of reason" is an "aesthetic act," that poetry would soon regain its role as the "teacher of mankind," that philosophy and history would disappear, and that "poetry alone" would "sur- vive all the other sciences and arts."37 According to Friedrich Schlegel, we must be "initiated into the mysteries of poetry" if we are to "penetrate

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into the heart of physics" (II, 266, No. 99), for "poetry is the sun in which all the planets of the arts and sciences will dissolve" (xviii, 569, No. 84). According to Novalis, poetry is the "One and All," and according to Wordsworth, it is "the first and last of all knowledge." In the words of Shelley, it is "at once the centre and the cir- cumference of knowledge; it is that which com- prehends all science, and to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought."38

The Romantic view of poetry as the fountain- head of all higher truths is intimately connected with the dramatic reversal in the attitude toward poetic language that now took place. As the mechanistic interpretation of the world gave way to organicism, the belief in the kinship between reason and nature, between knowledge and the

ordinary language of discursive prose, broke down. The higher truths that are revealed through the irrational or suprarational powers of the imagination cannot, the Romantics held, be expressed directly: such revelations can only be communicated symbolically, and hence the

higher poetry, which is concerned with these higher truths, must be symbolic. Great poetry has always been symbolic. As F. Schlegel argues, the polytheistic mythologies of Greece and India, and indeed the monotheistic mythology of the Hebrew-Christian tradition, are symbolic poetry. The great task for the poetry of the future is to revive all these mythologies and to create a still vaster and more nearly perfect mythology to express the new vision granted to us (II, 311-22; xi, 9).

Evidently, this view of poetry has no use for the concept of imitation, which the Romantic critics took pains to ridicule. It is equally in-

compatible with the all-important classicistic doctrine of the single ideal of beauty. Science concerns objective, impersonal truths. If Robert Boyle had not discovered "Boyle's law," pv = c, someone else would have discovered exactly the same law.3" The higher truths of Romantic poetry are not of this kind. Knowledge of God and of the Infinite is obtained not through reason, which is the same in everyone, but through the imagination, which is different: individuals can only grasp and reveal that knowledge in the light of their own personalities, from their own individual and unique perspectives. Religion,

Schleiermacher declared, is an individual view of the universe (passim; but see esp. pp. 40, 46, 84, 95, 122, 132, 159). The godhead can only emerge in its full splendor through the mutually supportive multiplicity of such individual views, and individuality is therefore not a defect but a virtue. Romantic historicism, of course, led to the same conclusion, which the Romantics voiced in conscious opposition to the classicistic normative aesthetics. "Art is like nature," writes

Ludwig Tieck. "It has more than one beauty."40 And F. Schlegel makes this point repeatedly. "Everything that is beautiful, is beautiful here and now, in this place or that" (LN, p. 118, No. 1113). "There is only one reason, and it is the same in all men; but just as every man has his own nature and his own love, every man has his own poetry" (II, 284). "Every poem is its own genre" (LN, p. 116, No. 1090). "There is a greatness and a beauty for every climate, even for the north pole."41 "The real value, and indeed the virtue of man [is] his originality" (in, 320).

The realization that poetry is individual and local rather than universal necessarily went hand in hand with a radical change in literary criticism: history and interpretation, the approaches that still dominate our discipline, replaced rhe- toric and poetics. Just as inevitably, the beliefs in the primary role of the imagination and in poetry as the highest form of knowledge determined most of the other characteristics of Ro- mantic poetry-the fascination with dreams and visions and the predilection for such genres as fairy tales, romances, philosophical poems, and verse tales with "fantastic," supernatural in- gredients. But instead of pursuing these developments, which would involve much tedious repetition of well-known facts, I should like to draw some more general conclusions.

Lovejoy, Peckham, and Foucault argue- using entirely different methods and drawing on different kinds of evidence-that the decades around 1800 mark a turning point in Western thought, the beginning of an era that has continued into the present (or at any rate until the time when they wrote their books). In other words, they claim that the Romantics achieved a lasting victory over the world view, the "classi-

19




cal episteme," that preceded them; that we have not returned to this earlier view; and that the twentieth century is therefore still, in essential ways, part of the Romantic era. This claim is partly correct and partly quite wrong. Although few today would agree that poetry is the beginning and the end of all science, it can hardly be doubted that the Romantics were-in Rene Wel- lek's phrase-the fathers of modern literary criticism; that their insistence on individuality and on historical explanations in the arts was, on the whole, justified; and that classicistic, normative aesthetics with its quest for universal rules is a matter of the past. The contemporary art lover who, on a visit to a gallery, delights in being able to tell at a glance a Monet from a Van Gogh or a Matisse and sees a part of the greatness of these artists in the uniqueness of their paintings is a direct descendant of the Romantics: even Goethe would still have insisted that works dis- playing such individual styles and visions are not so much "original" as eccentric and that they commit the cardinal sin of "mannerism."42

But when the Romantics rejected classicistic aesthetics, they did not see precisely why its proponents had gone wrong. The creators of modern science had developed methods of in- quiry vastly superior to any previously known and had used these methods to show that under- lying the infinite variety of nature there is a kind of uniformity that can be described in terms of, and perhaps even explained by, universal laws. The creators of classicistic aesthetics misapplied the notion of the uniformity of nature and strove to rival the sciences by formulating universal laws of art. Not content with rectifying this error, the Romantics-not out of frivolity but for the profound reasons we have attempted to explain-poured out the babe with the bath- water. Lovejoy, in his long and erudite book, shows that the Romantics replaced the static concept of the great chain of being with a dynamic, evolutionary concept. Peckham, in his brilliant and succinct paper, argues that the replacement of the mechanical philosophy with organicism was the Romantics' decisive theoretical achievement. They both, however, create the impression (unintentionally, no doubt) that the ideas Romanticism rejected were quaint and ex- pendable, and though this implication does not

lessen the achievement of these authors, it is false. The Romantics rejected not merely the foundations of the science of Descartes, Harvey, and Boyle but the foundations of science itself. Such statements as "the world is like a clock," "the universe is as a great engine," or "the human body is a machine" may sound naive, but they are not. They are not meant to imply that a living body, or the world as a whole, really consists of springs, levers, and cogged wheels. The terms used in these statements merely reflect certain facts about the period: that modern science began by accounting for such relatively simple phenomena as planetary motion and the flight of projectiles and that the machines then in existence-unlike, for example, a digital watch with its electronic circuits-really consisted of such simple parts as springs, wheels, and levers. The proponents of the mechanical philosophy never tired of emphasizing that the machine built by the supreme artificer is vastly more complicated than any machine ever built, or ever likely to be built, by human beings. What their statements assert is that motion can be explained in principle with the machine as the heuristic model (i.e., without recourse to mysterious and unaccount- able "vital forces"), that it is determined, and that it is thus subject to laws of nature. The force of these assertions was not affected by the addition of chemistry and electronics to the ar- senal of science. Admittedly, we have acquired a subtler view of the "parts of matter" than that assumed by Newtonian physics; but the basic heuristic assumption of science is still that the phenomena of the world are causally determined in conformity with the laws of nature.43 The road that leads from Copernicus via Newton and Laplace to Einstein and Planck has its twists and turns, but it is one road. In the words of Werner Heisenberg, "Modern physics is just one link in a long chain of events that started from the work of Bacon, Galileo and Kepler and from the practical application of natural science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."44 If Boyle were alive today, he might feel uneasy about some of the terms he used in defining the mechanical philosophy, but he would feel that modem science had vindicated his basic convictions-the convictions that the Romantics rejected.

20



then, that Schelling's Naturphilosophie turned out to be just as much of a dead end in science as Romantic irrationalism had.

The second point cannot be dealt with so briefly. Throughout this paper I have assumed that "good science" can be distinguished from bad and that it progressively increases our knowledge of the real world. I have also assumed that "good science" operates, roughly speaking, in the manner first formulated by the Alexandrians and subsequently adopted by Kep- ler and Galileo, that is, that it rests on the observation of facts, the formulation of hypotheses to account for those facts, and the subsequent testing of the hypotheses by suitably designed experiments (procedures not characteristic of Romantic science).40 It was on the basis of these assumptions that I could adopt Heisen- berg's saying that "modern physics is just one link in the long chain of events that started from the work of Bacon, Galileo and Kepler" and assert that the road of science, despite its twists and turns, is one single road. As recently as thirty years ago these assumptions could have been made tacitly, with little likelihood of their being challenged. Their acceptance is no longer so assured.

In the early decades of the present century, the scientific method just outlined hardened into the doctrine of logical positivism. According to this doctrine-if the immensely complex and by no means uniform views of the Viennese Circle can be summarized in a few bald sentences- "good" science is entirely free of metaphysical assertions, terms, or assumptions. It should consist of nothing but pure statements of fact (i.e., of observation statements, "sense-data" statements, or "protocol sentences") and of (prefer- ably mathematical) generalizations of these facts; these generalizations (i.e., theories) should have predictive value and should be subject to verification by experiments leading to new observations that agree with the predictions. No statement is to be admitted as part of science that cannot thus be objectively and empirically verified, for "the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification," or even, "a genuine statement must be capable of conclusive verification."50 The verification theory of meaning en- joyed only brief popularity, and the conviction

II

Obviously, the preceding pages somewhat oversimplify and idealize both the Romantic re- bellion and the system of thought it attempted to overthrow. Most of the oversimplifications in my presentation must be left to the reader to correct, but two of them require, at this point, a brief excursion. Romanticism was not the mono- lithic block that I have suggested, and the history of science is open to interpretations very different from mine.

As for the first of these matters, it must suffice here to note that Romantic irrationalism went hand in hand-for long stretches of time, apparently, without any sense of contradiction-with a peculiarly arrogant speculative rationalism. For Fichte the identity of object and subject that he regards as "given" in intellectual intuition is a sufficient premise for the deduction of all knowledge; in announcing his Berlin lectures of 1804, for instance, he promised nothing less than a "complete solution of the riddle of the universe and of consciousness with mathematical cer- tainty,"45 that is, by a deduction a priori. Schelling distinguishes between history, which is empirical, and science, which is genuine knowledge only to the extent that it is deduced from a first principle; hence, while admitting that the speculative philosopher can, or perhaps even has to, make use of the empirical findings provided by lesser minds, he tends to treat the empirical study of nature with contempt.4 In spite of its grandiose claims and the novelty of its deductive procedures, his Naturphilosophie is, in decisive ways, a throwback to earlier, prescientific modes of thought. His concept of the Weltseele refur- bishes the stoic notion of pneuma, and while he vacillates on the subject of causality, he prefers, on the whole, to think in terms of a kind of Aristotelian teleology, of preestablished har- mony, or of his (particularly obscure) notion of Wechselwirkung.47 It is typical of his whole approach that, following Hegel, he considers New- ton's astronomy a mechanistic and empiricist distortion (Verunstaltung) of Kepler's laws of motion and claims that Newton and Boyle ruined physics just as Bacon (according to him) had ruined philosophy.48 It is hardly surprising,

Hans Eichner 21




that a genuine statement must be completely veri- fiable quickly gave way to the more reasonable notion that the predictive successes of a theory could never do more than make it increasingly probable. Given such limitations, however, and in spite of Karl Popper's grave objections to some of the Viennese Circle's fundamental assumptions, the views of this group, particularly as formulated by Carnap, became the dominant philosophy of science in the three decades from, roughly, 1930 to 1960. Clearly, if this article had been written thirty years ago, the present excursion would be unnecessary. From the early fifties on, however, the "received view," as it came to be called, was subject to a series of devastating attacks. It was argued, for instance, that all so-called observation statements necessarily involve theoretical assumptions and that therefore one cannot draw the sharp distinction between observational and theoretical statements that the received view requires. It was further argued that the positivists' emphasis on the predictive successes of theories is unwar- ranted (Darwin's theory of evolution, for instance, has great explanatory power and very little predictive value). And it was argued above all that the Viennese Circle's exclusive attention to fully developed theories had led to an idealized concept of science that bears little resem- blance to what scientists really do and that science-this would have delighted the Roman- tics!-must be studied in its historical development. As a result of these and similar criticisms, logical positivism lost its hold on the philosophy of science in the course of the 1960s, and there is little prospect of its being revived.

Some critics of logical positivism-most important, perhaps, Stephen Toulmin, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend-developed rival theories, whose popularity, particularly in the sixties, has made the present excursion inevitable.51 These philosophies share the convictions that science must be studied in terms of its history, that it cannot be cleansed of metaphysical assumptions, and that its findings depend on these assumptions, which cannot be proved. Toulmin, the most conservative of the three, holds that scientific theories are neither true nor false and are best regarded as rules for drawing inferences about phenomena.52 Feyerabend, the most radical, presents an anarchic view of sci-

ence, arguing that "the knowledge of today may become the fairy-tale of tomorrow," that "the most laughable myth may eventually turn into the most solid piece of science," and that "there is no idea, however ancient and absurd that is not capable of improving our knowledge."53

Kuhn occupies a middle ground between Toulmin and Feyerabend, and his views must be summarized at slightly greater length. Starting with the conviction that observations are necessarily "theory-laden," he argues that communi- ties of scholars share ontological and methodological assumptions, or "paradigms," that they absorb unconsciously when learning scientific procedure and that determine what questions they ask and what answers they receive. At most times-the times of what Kuhn calls "normal science"-there is a generally accepted paradigm, and normal science proceeds by adding to the set of established theories new ones that re- move anomalies or "solve puzzles" within the framework determined by this paradigm. From time to time, however, normal science encoun- ters so many puzzles it cannot solve that scientists begin to question the dominant paradigm, and a period of "revolutionary science" begins that finally leads to the adoption of a new paradigm. This changeover, however, is not a rational process. One tradition of normal science is not replaced by another because the new paradigm "fits the facts" better;54 there are really no "facts." The paradigms that determine how research is done are not only "constitutive of science," Kuhn says, but "constitutive of nature" (p. 109); "the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds" (p. 149). Thus, when paradigms change, we may have the illusion of progress, but it is only an illusion: "We may . .. have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists . . . closer and closer to the truth" (p. 169). "As in politi- cal revolutions, so in paradigm choice-there is no standard higher than the assent of the rele- vant community" (p. 93).

Toulmin still adheres to the traditional view that science has led to a cumulative growth of real knowledge about the world; and since his "enquiry into the aims of science" ends with his approvingly quoting Copernicus' famous statement of method, he provides welcome confirma-

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tion of the continuity in scientific thought that I claim has existed over the last four centuries or so.55 But if Kuhn and Feyerabend are right, science and its history are very different from what I have assumed them to be, there is no reason to prefer Newton's or Einstein's science to Schelling's or Schlegel's, and science, far from being a steady progression, is simply a succes- sion of "sciences" reflecting different sets of metaphysical prejudices. Feyerabend has not, however, met the objections of his critics, and I can see no reason for regarding his writings as anything but a deliberate provocation, which may have been useful in the sixties but can now be ignored. Kuhn's views, which commit him to a subjective idealism that is very difficult to accept, have been severely criticized, above all on the grounds that his central notion, the paradigm, is intolerably vague and that his sharp distinction between "normal" and "revolutionary" science is untenable;56 and it seems evident that his influence is on the wane. It may be useful, however, to say a few words about Larry Laudan's attempt, in Progress and Its Problems (1977), to rescue some of Kuhn's findings.

Laudan replaces Kuhn's paradigm by "research traditions" but, contrary to Kuhn, claims that such traditions constantly compete with, are modified by, and replace one another. Thus for Laudan the growth of science is once again a continuous process. He insists, moreover, that the replacement of one tradition by another- Kuhn's change of paradigms-is a rational process, at least whenever the "chosen tradition is a better problem solver than its rivals" (p. 109), as it normally seems to be. But he nonetheless concludes that "science does not, as far as we know, produce theories which are true or even highly probable" (p. 224). Now it should be said at once that Laudan provides no convincing arguments for this skeptical conclusion and that a basic contradiction runs through his whole discussion. He does assert the "cognitive progress" of science (p. 7), which surely implies a growth of at least highly probable knowledge, and he does claim that "scientific theories are usually attempts to solve specific empirical problems about the natural world"; that their function is, among other things, "to show that what happens is somehow intelligible and predictable"; and that they "provide satisfactory solutions to im-

portant problems" (p. 13). It is difficult to conceive that a system capable of all this should consist of statements that can stake no claim to even probable truth. Moreover, if science were really an enterprise a la Miinchhausen that keeps itself floating in midair by holding onto its own pigtails, it would be difficult to see (if so vulgar an argument is permissible in the rarefied atmosphere in which Laudan operates) how it could ever have led to a technology that really works-to the technology that, for example, en- ables us to dial a ten-digit number and ten sec- onds later talk to a friend on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead of indulging in a polemic against Laudan, however, I should like to con- clude this excursion by pointing out that I could quite easily rewrite this paper in Laudan's terms, or even in Kuhn's, and that doing so would lead to some interesting considerations. I would have to say, then, that when turning against New- tonian science, the Romantics adopted a new paradigm or research tradition and that they did so on the reasonable grounds-reasonable at least according to Laudan's model-that the old tradition had led to serious, and from its point of view unsolvable, puzzles, such as the antinomy of free will and causality. This new tradition brought about substantial progress in the humanities and-though this matter cannot be followed up here-in such "human" studies as psy- chology. In the hard sciences, however, the Romantic tradition turned out to be a dead end, while the tradition the Romantics rejected continued to flourish.

Of course it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. There were researchers in the Roman- tic tradition who did make important discoveries. Thus J. W. Ritter, one of the great pioneers of electrochemistry and the first experimenter to succeed in separately collecting the hydrogen and oxygen produced by electrolysis, owed his discovery of ultraviolet light directly to Schel- ling's supposed "law of polarity," from which he concluded, after hearing of Herschel's discovery of infrared light, that there must be a similar phenomenon at the other end of the spectrum.57 Similarly, H. C. Oersted succeeded in demon-

strating the connection between electricity and

magnetism, after many years of experimenta- tion, because he was convinced by Schellingian speculations that such a connection must

23



The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism exist.58 But Ritter and Oersted, both trained as pharmacists, could make the step from wild speculations to concrete discoveries only because they had absorbed the "causal," empirical paradigms of what was then "normal science" long before they drifted into Schelling's orbit. At worst, then, their successes, to which discoveries by other "Romantic" researchers could of course be added, might lend support to Feyerabend's dic- tum that "there is no idea, however . . . absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge." A more likely conclusion is that any attempt to divide scientists neatly into "good guys" and "bad guys" must necessarily fail.59 Such a conclusion would leave untouched the facts that the Romantic "research tradition" radically de- parted from the high road of modern science; that it attempted to undo, in essential ways, the methodological progress made since Galileo and Descartes; and that it proved unproductive in the sciences except where it compromised with the established methods it had set out to refute.

III

In the first section of this paper, I isolate some of the implications of the mechanical

philosophy that made it unacceptable to the Romantics and that prompted them to branch out on new paths. I must now briefly return to three of them: the intractability of evil in a world assumed to be basically unchangeable, the impossibility of accounting for the interaction of mind and matter, and the problem of free will. The first of these may have seemed an ines- capable consequence of the mechanical philosophy: machines, we have said, do not grow. But this is a specious argument. If human and animal bodies are machines, in the mechanical philosophy's sense of the word, then machines do grow, and there is no reason why the "cosmic engine" should be static. Schelling's evolutionary hypothesis derives of course from pure speculation and involves unverifiable teleological assumptions, while Darwin's theory of evolution rests on empirical facts and involves a mechanism of natural selection that would have delighted scientists like Harvey and Boyle; in the temper of their minds, Schelling and Darwin

were so far apart that it is difficult to imagine them carrying on an intelligent conversation; but Schelling's intuition pointed in the right direction, and though the problem of evil continues to agitate theologians, the notion of an unchanging universe that made this problem so oppressive in the eighteenth century is unlikely ever to be revived. The Romantics' attempts at solving the other two problems were, however, less success- ful. A solution of the mind-matter problem that involves denying the existence of matter has always seemed, to most of us, just as implausible as Malebranche's occasionalism or Leibniz' monadology; and even among professional philosophers the idealist, who has been rare throughout the twentieth century, now seems as extinct as the Dodo bird. The dominant attitude to this problem in our own times is exactly that of La Mettrie: to worry about it seems "a foolish waste of time" (p. 23).60 The Romantics' attempt at solving the third problem, the antinomy of free will and causality, has fared no better. In rejecting causality, the Romantics did not, of course, consciously and deliberately deny the possibility of science. On the contrary, they attempted to replace the old, mechanistic science by a new and, in their view, superior set of assumptions and methods. But with the exceptions of the evolutionary hypothesis (which Schelling was not the first to propose) and of the discoveries of men like Ritter and Oersted, who ploughed on both sides of the fence, Schelling's philosophy of nature produced what can only be described as a farrago of nonsense. The assumption that whatever the imagination seizes as beauty is truth or that rivers flow into the sea because they want to may inspire poets, but such notions are of no use to scientists. Thus, as far as our knowledge of nature is concerned, the Romantic epistemology was at best a brief epi- sode in the history of Western thought.61 The real scientists of the last two hundred years- those who, with their helpmates the engineers, created the world we now live in-took no no- tice of Romantic theory and carried on in the spirit of Copernicus, Harvey, Newton, and even La Mettrie. This statement may be a truism, but if it is, then we must have serious reservations about Lovejoy's, Peckham's, and Foucault's thesis that the Romantic age, marking a turning point in Western thought, ushered in a way of

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Hans Eichner

looking at the world that still dominates our own times. If Galileo could be hijacked by a time machine, taught English, and dropped in con-

temporary Boston, he would, after a three- month crash course in modern physics and mathematics and a few sleepless nights caused

by the uncertainty principle, feel completely at home at M.I.T. Schelling would have to be brainwashed.

What all this amounts to I can perhaps now summarize in a brief statement, which admit-

tedly is an oversimplification. A century ago, Wilhelm Dilthey, an enthusiastic but not an un- critical student of the Romantics, proposed that one must distinguish more rigorously than had been done in the past between Naturwissen- schaft and Geisteswissenschaft. The former studies nature, assumes determinacy, reasons ahis- torically, and aims to establish timeless universal laws. The latter studies human creations, assumes free will, takes a basically historicist

approach, and focuses on the individual, unique, time-bound, and unrepeatable. If it was the cardinal sin of the classicist episteme to apply the

assumptions and methods of Naturwissenschaft to all fields of knowledge, including the arts, it was the cardinal sin of Romanticism to apply the assumptions and methods of Geisteswissen- schaft to all fields, including science. Today, we are unlikely to repeat the Romantic error. To make the opposite error is a constant tempta- tion. It is difficult at times not to envy the cer- tainties and the power of generalization of the mathematical sciences, and our students ar-

dently long for a method of interpreting poems that is as "scientific," foolproof, and teachable as the method of analyzing ore samples. If our tale has a moral, it is perhaps that this longing must remain unfulfilled.

University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario

Notes

1 Wellek, in Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), 1-23, 147-72; rpt. in Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 128-98.

2 Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," PMLA, 66 (1951), 5-23. The present paper is largely an elaboration of Peckham's theory. In fact, if Peckham had written at greater length in 1951, and if he had not subsequently changed his mind, this paper would probably be unnecessary.

3 References to Lovejoy's book are to the third edition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966); references to Foucault's are to the English translation, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci- ences (New York: Vintage-Random, 1973).

4 In Lovejoy, this omission is justified, since it follows directly from his concern with the history of a single idea, that is, the great chain of being. Foucault devotes a whole chapter to biology but takes no account of those fields in which modern science achieved its decisive breakthrough. "The interest shown by the Classical age in science," he maintains, "the publicity accorded to its controversies, its extremely exoteric char- acter, its opening up to the uninitiated, Fontenelle's popularization of astronomy, Voltaire reading Newton, all this is doubtless nothing more than a sociological phenomenon. It did not provoke the slightest altera- tion in the history of thought, or modify the development of knowledge one jot" (p. 89).

5 For my assessment of Galileo, see, for example, Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton

Univ. Press, 1960), p. 8: "[Galileo,] whose claim is higher than any other's to the honor of having founded modem science .. ." The recent controversies about his precise achievement do not, as far as I can see, seriously affect this judgment; in fact, now that Stillman Drake has produced documentary evidence that Galileo really did perform the experiments he claims to have performed (Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978]), Galileo's traditional status as "the greatest of the founders of modern science" (Bertrand Russell) seems more secure than ever.

6 Paul-Henri d'Holbach, The System of Nature, trans. H. D. Robinson (1868; photomechanical rpt. New York: Franklin, 1970), pp. 18-19. In the rest of this paper, so as not to obscure the main issues, I ignore the residual vitalism evident in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mainstream scientists.

7 Grew, The Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682), p. 80; quoted from A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolu-

tion, 1500-1800 (London: Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 289.

8 An interesting case in point is J. S. Haldane, who owes his fame less to the substantial contributions he made to science than to his popular lectures against materialism, which he attempted to refute by arguing that mechanistic or physicochemical hypotheses could not account for such phenomena as reproduction, self- healing, and the adjustment of living organisms to their environments. These arguments seemed plausible in the 1920s because modern genetics was still in its infancy,

25




cybernetics had not yet developed such concepts as negative feedback, and computer technology was not even dreamed of. (For a collection of the lectures, see J. S. Haldane, Materialism [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932].)

9 Needless to say, this statement implies no disrespect. The skill and ingenuity that go into, for example, the synthesis of a complicated organic molecule are equal to those displayed in any other field.

10Boyle, "The Excellence and Grounds of the Mechanical Philosophy," in Boyle, Philosophical Works (London, 1725), I, 187; quoted from Hall, p. 212.

11 Leibniz, Monadology; quoted from Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith (London: Inter- Varsity Press, 1969), p. 57.

12 Thus Joseph Clarke, writing in 1734, held it certain "that God cannot hereafter create any new Species of Beings; because, whatever it is good for him to create in time, it was equally good from all Eternity" (Lovejoy, p. 242). Similarly, the existing beings can move neither up nor down in the great chain of being, since any such change would push another being from its proper place and leave a gap. The argument ultimately derives from Plato. Evidence for its ubiquity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is scat- tered throughout Lovejoy's monograph, but see esp. pp. 242-44.

William King, in his influential treatise De Origine Mali (1702), argues that the evil in the world is "not only consistent with infinite wisdom, goodness and power, but necessarily resulting from them" (Lovejoy, p. 213). Eighteenth-century optimism thus consisted, as Lovejoy (pp. 208-26) has shown, primarily in re- cognizing that the world is as it must be. Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists were, however, inconsistent enough to combine their dour metaphysical deductions with much more cheerful religious and commonsense beliefs. Leibniz, for example, asserts both that the universe is unchanging and that monads can progressively develop to higher states of consciousness, though only the first of these assertions is compatible with his metaphysics. Perhaps Leibniz, like Descartes, simply wanted to avoid martyrdom and thus made conscious concessions to orthodox beliefs in his published writings; but it is just as likely that he occasionally made unconscious concessions to commonsense convictions and established habits of mind. Rare, indeed, are the thinkers for whom a metaphysical deduction is as real as the bacon and eggs they have for breakfast.

13 "Where now, as our wise men say, only a soulless ball of fire revolves, then [in antiquity] Helios drove his golden chariot in quiet majesty. These heights oreads crowded, with every tree a dryad died, and the rivers' silver foam sprang from the urns of lovely naiads. . . . Unaware of the joys it gives, never delighted by its own perfection, never conscious of the arm that guides it, never enriched by my gratitude, insensitive even to its maker's honor, nature, bereft of its gods, [now] slavishly serves the law of gravity like a lifeless pendulum clock. Nature digs its own grave

today to be reborn tomorrow, and on a weightless distaff the moons eternally spin up and down of their own accord. Useless to a world that has outgrown its leading-strings and now hovers aloft unaided, the gods, rendered idle, have returned to the world of poetry." Friedrich Schiller, "Die G6tter Griechenlands" (version of March 1788), Sdmmtliche Werke, Horen ed. (Munich: Georg Muller Verlag, [1910]), v, 3-10. (All translations from German and French are my own, except where otherwise noted.) There is, of course, a vast difference between Newton's beliefs and the implications of "Newtonian science" as interpreted by Continental thinkers sixty or seventy years after New- ton's death.

14 See H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 62.

15 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae (1644); quoted from Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (London: Dutton, n.d.), pp. 166, 179, 180.

16 For this paragraph and the next, compare Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), pp. 583-84. Russell's and my remarks concerning the identification of the constants in the collision of elastic bodies oversimplify what was actually quite a slow process of clarification, but a detailed account of the vis viva controversy would be irrelevant both to Russell's argument and to mine.

17 Christian Wolff, who decisively influenced German eighteenth-century thought, accepted Descartes's conviction of the mechanical determination of bodily movements in its entirety, stating "that all bodily movements would be the same as they are now even if there were no soul, since the soul does not contribute to them by its power; we would, however, not be conscious of what happens in our bodies." Aware of the problem he had thus created for himself, he sacri- ficed logical consistency to the requirements of his ethics, decked out his Cartesian assumptions with bits and pieces of Leibniz' monadology, and blithely declared that the mechanistic determination of the body "does not restrict the freedom of the soul." See Hans M. Wolff, Die Weltanschauung der deutschen Aufklrung, 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1963), p. 108.

18 Julien La Mettrie, L'Homme machine, ed. and introd. Aram Vartanian (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 154, 186; see also Introd., p. 20.

19 The great exception is Spinoza, who denied both free will and a personal god, but the problem of evil drove even this fearless and honest thinker to what seems to me a purely verbal solution. It is difficult to see, for example, that the genocide practiced by the Nazis is not really evil sub specie aeternitatis but only an appearance of evil due to our limited understanding.

20 For an account of the objections of Kant's contemporaries, see Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), Ch. i (esp. pp. 15-26); for a succinct modem restatement of these objections, see Russell, pp. 734- 35, 741-44.

21 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Gesamtausgabe der Baye-

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Hans Eichner

rischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1961- ), Pt. I, Vol. iv, p. 206. For his comment to F. Schlegel, see Briefe von und an Fried- rich und Dorothea Schlegel, ed. Josef K6rner (Berlin: Kindle, 1926), p. 9.

22 "[Fichte] nur Kp [Kritiker], (noch) nicht Hist- [orischer] ovo-rT [Systematiker]," Kritische Friedrich- Schegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler with the assistance of Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1958- ), xviim, 33, No. 148. For the date of this entry see Ernst Behler's commentary in xix, 386, No. 126. Henceforth volume and page numbers cited for F. Schlegel in the text and notes refer to this edition.

23 Novalis, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Carl Seelig (Zurich: Biihl, 1945-46), IV, 213, No. 2642.

24 F. W. J. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen; quoted from Armand Nivelle, Friihromantische Dich- tungstheorie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), p. 35. Schegel, xvIII, 421, No. 1222.

2 "Wo ist eine Sonne, wo ist ein Atom, die nicht Teil ware, der [sic] nicht geh6rte zu diesem Organischen All, lebend in keiner Zeit, jede Zeit fassend in sich?- Wo bleibt denn der Unterschied zwischen den Teilen des Tieres, der Pflanze, dem Metall und dem Steine?- Sind nicht samtlich Teile des groBen All-Tiers, der Natur?" 'Where is a sun, where is an atom that is not part of, that does not belong to this organic universe, living in no time, encompassing all time in itself?- Where, then, remains the difference between the parts of the animal, the plant, the metal, and the stone?- Are they not all parts of the great universal animal, Nature?' (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Beweis, daf ein bestindiger Galvanismnus den Lebensprozef3 in dem Thierreich begleite [Weimar, 1798], p. 171.) The pass- age is quoted from the excellent monograph by W. D. Wetzels, J. W. Ritter: Physik im Wirkungsfeld der Romantik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973), p. 23.

26 By calling motion "dynamic," Schlegel means the exact opposite of what modern science teaches under the heading of "dynamics," that is, that the motion originates with the moving object itself.

27 See, e.g., Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1936), and Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklirung (Tibingen: Mohr, 1932).

2s There is, of course, no confusion in this respect with Fichte. In his system, every person who is capable of intellectual intuition understands that the ego is free and active; the unconscious productive imagination creates the nonego. The importance the early Romantics attached to intellectual intuition and the imagination is undoubtedly connected with the key roles these qualities play in the Wissenschaftslehre. But Fichte himself was a rationalist, and Romantic irrationalism, in spite of its dependence on Fichte's concepts, resulted from

organicism. Nicolai Hartmann shows the connection for F. Schlegel (pp. 172-73); for Schelling, see Georg Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973), I, 114-38.

29 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Uber die Religion: Reden

an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verdchtern (Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1969), p. 86. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Asthetik, in Simtliche Werke, Historisch- kritische Ausgabe der PreuBischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Weimar: B6hlau, 1927-64), Pt. I, Vol. xI, p. 37. Schlegel, xn, 421; xvII, 329, No. 57; see also ii, 257, No. 8. Wordsworth, The Prelude xiv.190- 91. Berlin, Pref., in H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (London: Constable, 1966). Keats, Letters, ed. M. B. Forman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 67.

30 Of course, beauty and the imagination manifest themselves equally in the other arts, and the Romantic contribution to art and art history, music and musicol- ogy cannot be overlooked. If I limit myself to poetry, I do so partly for reasons of space. But since Romanticism arose largely in response to philosophical problems, its earliest practitioners (with the notable exception of Wackenroder) were inevitably preoccupied with verbal art. That the man now widely regarded as the most seminal mind of European Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel, was primarily a literary critic and theorist hardly seems coincidental. The German Ro- mantics, we must also remember, used the word "poetry" (Poesie) in at least two different senses, that of belles lettres (Schlegel's "Poesie der Worte," i, 285) and that of the creative human spirit that manifests itself in all the arts. Occasionally, the Romantics identified "poetry," in this second sense, with Fichte's unconscious productive imagination; hence Schlegel's refer- ence to the "bewuBtlose Poesie" 'unconscious poetry' that pervades all nature (II, 285) and his notorious identification of the "poetic ideal" with God (Literary Notebooks, ed. Hans Eichner [London: Athlone, 1957], p. 87, No. 735; this edition is hereafter cited as LN).

31 Ren6 P. Le Bossu, Traite du pomee epique (Paris: Michel le Petit, 1675), p. 1.

32 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris: Garn- ier, 1935), II, 161. Winckelmann's statement, "Es gibt nur Ein Sch6nes, wie es nur Ein Gutes gibt," is quoted from Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1932), III, 203, and Fichte's, "So wie es nur Eine Vernunft giebt, giebt es auch nur Eine wahre Poesie," is from a letter to F. Schlegel (16 Aug. 1800, Briefe von und an F. und D. Schlegel, p. 31). While the neat parallelism of these three assertions does, I believe, illustrate a common attitude toward humanity and the world-an attitude that is the direct opposite of Romantic individualism-they are of course logically independent of one another, and Voltaire's conviction that there is only one morality did not prevent his being a relativist in aesthetics.

'33 Winckelmann comes remarkably close to drawing this absurd conclusion: in discussing an antique statue of Niobe and her daughters, he claims that the faces of the girls resemble one another because they all approximate the one and only ideal of beauty (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. Wilhelm Senff [Weimar: Bohlau, 1964], pp. 192-93). Goethe was so greatly taken with the single ideal of beauty in

27



The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism his classicistic period that he was pleased when readers could not distinguish between his and Schiller's anonymous publications in Die Horen. That his and Schiller's works had begun to resemble each other seemed evidence to him that they were both on the (one and only) right road. (See Goethe's letter to Schiller, 26 Dec. 1795, Goethe-Schiller Briefwechsel [Frankfurt: Fisher, 19611, p. 91.)

34 Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, L'Art poetique, quoted from Sir William Soame's translation in The Art of Poetry: The Poetical Treatises of Horace, Vida and Boileau, ed. Albert S. Cook (Boston: G. E. Stechert, 1892), pp. 160, 161, 167.

35 The closely related view, however, that poetry can have an important function only in relatively primitive societies and must decline in more advanced civilizations was quite widespread. Its most famous proponents were Vico, Herder, and, in the nineteenth century, Hegel. Thomas Love Peacock's version of it provoked Shelley's Defence of Poetry.

36 This deficiency in pre-Romantic critical literature explains why I concentrate to such an extent on early German Romanticism. Most of the characteristic ideas and preoccupations of European Romanticism can be traced back for decades, if not for centuries. Thus the view that the divine and the infinite can only be expressed symbolically already appears in Origenes and Clement of Alexandria, and it was never entirely lost sight of (at least not among theologians); Goethe and his friends made the earliest lucid and comprehensive statements of the symbolic nature of art, formulating them as part of a classicistic aesthetics. The Romantic concern with irrational sources of knowledge revived Plato's doctrine of enthusiasm, to which at least lip service had been paid for more than two thousand years and which was defended at length and in full seriousness, long before the Romantics, by Shaftesbury. Young pleaded brilliantly for "originality," and Herder's historicism was as sweeping, in some of its conclusions, as Schlegel's. The overriding lesson to be learned from studying pre-Romanticism is that none of the ideas that characterize Romanticism succeeded on its own in seriously challenging the main thrust of European thought. They did so only when they came together under the leading concept of organicism and thus coalesced into a coherent whole. This happened in Germany, and hence any account of the genesis (as distinct from the poetic achievement) of European Romanticism must focus on that country.

37 In this document, the argument that leads up to the apotheosis of poetry is derived from the position among the faculties of the mind that Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft assigns to judgment, but this link with Kant was soon dissolved. The supremacy of the imagination, and hence that of poetry, was assumed to follow directly from the organicist assumption and spread rapidly even among poets whose knowledge of German philosophy was slight. For a discussion of the author- ship of the "Systemprogramm," see Otto Poggeler, "Hegel, der Verfasser des iltesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus," Hegel-Tage Urbino 1965

(Hegel-Studien, Supp. 4 [Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969]), pp. 17-32, and P6ggeler, "Holderlin, Hegel und das ilteste Systemprogramm," Hegel-Tage Villigst 1969 (Hegel-Studien, Supp. 9 [Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1973]), pp. 211-59; for a critical edition of this document, see pp. 263-65.

38 Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Rich- ard Samuel (Darmstadt: Kohlhammer, 1965) Ii, 591, No. 280; Wordsworth, Preface, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed.; Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. B. Forman (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), vii, 136.

39 In fact, somebody else did. The law was formulated in 1662 by Richard Townley, on the basis of Boyle's measurements, but it apparently did not become widely known, so that Edme Mariotte had to discover it all over again in 1679.

40 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. Alfred Anger (Stuttgart: Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1966), p. 342.

41 Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. O. Walzel (Berlin: Speyer and Peters, 1890), p. 70.

42 See, e.g., Goethe's attack on Manier in "Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil" (1789), in Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, Pt. i, Vol. XLVII, pp. 77-83.

43 "When we make an experiment," Werner Heisen- berg states, "we have to assume a causal chain of events that leads from the atomic event through the apparatus finally to the eye of the observer; if this causal chain was not assumed, nothing could be known about the atomic event" (Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 2nd ed. [London: Allen and Unwin, 1963], p. 82). Karl R. Popper, who would prefer not to assume the principle of causality, which he regards as metaphysical and therefore undesirable, substitutes for it a "methodological rule" that "corresponds so closely to the 'principle of causality' that the latter might be regarded as its metaphysical version. It is the simple rule that we are not to abandon the search for universal laws and for a coherent theoretical system, nor ever give up our attempts to explain causally any kind of event we can describe" (Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, rev. ed. [London: Hutchinson, 1972], p. 61). The difference between Popper's view of causality and that prevailing in classical (Newtonian) physics is of great interest, but it has no bearing on the arguments of the present paper.

44 Heisenberg, p. 162. I am of course deliberately quoting the discoverer of the uncertainty principle rather than any of the dozens of historians of science I might have quoted instead. Quantum physics has not done away with causation. While the uncertainty principle states that there is a limit to the accuracy with which the velocity and the position of a particle can be measured simultaneously, so that the future of an individual particle cannot be predicted, quantum mechanics can make statistical predictions; and it thus assumes causation (though, in the parlance of quantum theorists, only the "weaker type" of causation, where the concept of probability may be used to define the

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Hans Eichner

state of the system). Where causation is not assumed, no predictions can be made, and there is no science.

45 "Der Unterzeichnete erbietet sich zu einem fort- gesetzten miindlichen Vortrage der Wissenschaftslehre, d.h. der vollstandigen Losung des Ratsels der Welt und des BewuBtseins mit mathematischer Evidenz" (Ber- liner Zeitung, 1804; quoted from Bernhard Casper, "Der historische Besen . . .," in Romantik in Deutsch- land: Ein Interdisziplinares Symposium, ed. Richard Brinckmann [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978], p. 493).

46 See, e.g., "Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Sys- tems der Naturphilosophie," Schellings simmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-61; hereafter cited as Werke), Pt. I, iII, 275-77, and "Einige allgemeine Betrachtungen," Werke, Pt. I, iv, 527-33. See also the excellent summary in Robert C. Stauffer, "Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Dis- covery of Electromagnetism," Isis, 48 (1957), 33-70.

47 See, e.g., "System des transzendentalen Idealismus," Werke, Pt. I, III, 475-77.

48 See Hegel, Dissertatio Philosophica de Orbitis Planetarum (1801; rpt. in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. Verein von Freunden des Verewigten [Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1832-44], xvi, 1-29); Schelling, "Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philoso- phie," Werke, Pt. I, iv, 432, and Schelling's 1803 addition (Zusatz) to the introduction to his "Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur," Werke, Pt. I, II, 70.

49 See Stillman Drake, "Ptolemy, Galileo and Scien- tific Method," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 9 (1978), 99-115. Kepler still held that the hypothesis had to be validated not only by prediction or retrodiction but by its being, in one way or another, metaphysically significant. Thus he asssociated the center of planetary motions with God the Father, the encircling spheres with the Son, and the relations between them with the Holy Ghost. Galileo-and most scientists after him-dropped the requirement for an explanation of this kind, and the Romantics revived it. For Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, there were no con- tingent facts in science, and the Romantics quite generally looked for a "human" or cosmological significance in whatever facts they had to deal with. For them, just as for Plato and Aristotle, a scientific "explanation" was the identification of a purpose or a final cause that revealed a divine intelligence at work. Both Novalis and Schlegel kept notebooks on "Physik und Moral," and although these notebooks are lost, we can gain an impression of what they might have contained from other notes that have been preserved. Thus Schlegel suggested that the inner planets must be "more religious," the outer planets "very romantic," and the comets "probably completely irreligious, merely poetic and philosophic" (xvIII, 154, Nos. 372 and 375), and Novalis wrote to Schlegel in July 1798: "In meiner Philosophie des taglichen Lebens bin ich auf die Idee einer moralischen . . . Astronomie gekom- men und habe die interessante Entdeckung der Religion des sichtbaren Weltalls gemacht. . . . Was denkst Du, ob das nicht der rechte Weg ist, die Physik im all- gemeinsten Sinn, schlechterdings Symbolisch zu be-

handeln? Auf diesem Wege denke ich tiefer als je, einzudringen und aller Campanen und Oefen entiibrigt zu seyn" 'In my philosophy of everyday life I had the idea of a moral ... astronomy and made the interesting discovery of the religion of the visible universe .... Don't you think this might be the right way of treating physics, in the widest sense of this word, absolutely symbolically? In this way I hope to penetrate more deeply than ever and be rid of all retorts and furnaces' (Schriften, IV, 255).

50 These two statements are quoted by Popper, p. 40. The first is from F. Waisman, in Erkenntnis, 1 (1930), 229; and the second is from M. Schlick, in Naturwis- senschaften, 19 (1931), 150.

51 Although Popper seems to me more important than Toulmin, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, his profound belief in the rationality of science makes it unnecessary to discuss him in the present connection.

)2 See Frederick Suppe's account of Toulmin's early views in Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theor- ies, 2nd ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 127-35. My debt to this excellent book is greater than my few references to it suggest.

53 Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge," Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 4 (1960), 17-130; quoted from the paperback rpt. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975), pp. 47, 52.

54 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolu- tions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 146.

5r) His final answer to the question, What gives scientific ideas merit, and how do they score over their rivals? is that they must be "(in Copernicus' words) 'consistent with the numerical records'" and "accept- able-for the time being, at any rate-as 'absolute' and 'pleasing to the mind.'" (Stephen E. Toulmin, Fore- sight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science [New York: Harper, 1963], pp. 111, 115.) Toulmin's more recent writings are beyond the scope of this paper.

56 See, e.g., Suppe, pp. 135-51, 643-49; D. Shapere, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Philosophical Revue, 73 (1964), 383-94; Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth

(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 73-76. 57 See, e.g., Die Begriindung der Elektrochemie und

Entdeckung der ultravioletten Strahlungen von Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Eine Auswahl aus den Schriften des romantischen Physikers, ed. A. Hermann (Frankfurt/ Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1968; Ostwalds Klassiker der exakten Naturwissenschaften, NS, No. 2), and H. Schipperges' postscript to the photomechanical rpt. of Ritter's Fragmente aus dem Nachla]f eines

jungen Physikers (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1969). 58 See R. C. Stauffer, "Speculation and Experiment in

the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electro- magnetism," Isis, 48 (1957), 33-50.

59 Trevor Levere comes to this conclusion in "Cole- ridge, Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Nature," Studies in Romanticism, 16 (1977), 349-79.

60 The twentieth-century philosophers who do con-

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cer themselves with this problem have approached it in a way entirely different from that of either the Cartesians or the idealists-by conceptual analysis. See, e.g., Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949). I doubt, however, that the problem can be "explained away" in this manner.

61 See Heinrich Henel, "Erlebnisdichtung und Sym- bolismus," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literatur- wissenschaft und Geistesgesschichte, 32 (1958), 71-98, where a similar conclusion is reached by a different road.

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The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism

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