Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism

David Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351568111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace, progress and wealth as the foundation of future debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it analyses examples of counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including 21st-century debates in sociology, politics and legal theory.

PART I

(Trans) National Perspectives

CHAPTER 1

Germany: The Straggler as Leader

T. J. Reed
The Queen’s College, Oxford

Can Germany of all countries really be considered under the rubric ‘cosmopolitanism’? The associations that come sooner to mind are nationalism, expansionism, militarism, aggression. That is because an alternative German tradition failed to be translated into, or sustained in, political practice. But for the historian, and perhaps also the ever-hopeful ‘Weltbürger’, the tradition exists because it existed. Ideas do not die. The literary and philosophical products of eighteenth-century German thinking survive and have ample life in them. The Enlightenment in particular never loses its relevance, since the problems it was responding to are obstinately part of our social and political existence, and it constitutes Europe’s most concerted attempt to make life on earth happier for as many human beings as possible.

I use the German term ‘Weltbürger’ — citizen of the world, as against ‘cosmopolitan’ — for its altogether different effect. It borrows a welcome solidity from the constituent ‘Bürger’ and makes the world feel local. In contrast, a cosmopolitan in common usage sounds like a person too sophisticated to be at home anywhere, and commensurately too lightweight to affect any local reality. To be a ‘Weltbürger’, on the other hand, means that you carry your ‘Bürgerlichkeit’, your citizenly qualities and a corresponding commitment, with you everywhere you go. It constitutes a friendly claim on — and at the same time an offer of allegiance to — the whole world.

The German commitment to ‘Weltbürgertum’ originates with men of the calibre of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Lichtenberg, Forster, and — in a rather different and somewhat problematic way — Herder. Classic examples are Kant’s essays Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht [‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intention’] of 1784,¹ Schiller’s practice as a historian in that spirit, or Goethe’s statements on the live interactive processes of ‘Weltliteratur’. All these writers were working from the mid-eighteenth into the early nineteenth century. For much of that time, down to 1806, Germany was divided into some three hundred states, large (Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg) via medium (city-states like Frankfurt-am-Main) right down to minute (individual bishoprics). After 1806, when the long since shaky Holy Roman Empire that held them all loosely together was finally abolished by Napoleon, that number was reduced by a factor of ten. For the rest of the nineteenth century until the first unification of Germany as a nation state in 1871, there were variously thirty-six to thirty-nine separate states, in different ways (but only ever loosely) joined.

The main sense of all this is that in the eighteenth century Germany did not exist as a polity. Indeed, from the time of Charlemagne around AD 800 until the reunification of the two post-war states in 1990, it had only ever been a single political entity for a total of seventy-four years. The full title ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ was almost a mockery of this national non-existence, meaning little more than ethnic origin. So the point of the title of this essay is that until the most recent times Germany trailed a long way behind the established nations of Europe, with the exception of Italy, in coherence, constitution and institutions. Yet, as in long-distance track events, the isolated straggler can appear to be out in front, though in reality about to be lapped by the group of runners who have covered a whole circuit of the track that he has yet to start on.

Unlike the hapless athlete, Germans could feel they were really in the lead, because being pre-national meant they were effectively post-national, safely beyond the problematic impulses, ambitions and rivalries of the nation states all round them. In 1789 the poet and dramatist Schiller, who was also a productive and eloquent historian, commented on the perspective from which history should be written:

Wir Neueren haben ein Interesse in unserer Gewalt, das kein Römer und kein Grieche gekannt hat, und dem das vaterländische Interesse bei weitem nicht beikommt. Das letzte ist überhaupt nur für unreife Nationen wichtig, für die Jugend der Welt. Ein ganz andres Interesse ist es, jede merkwürdige Begebenheit, die mit Menschen vorging, dem Menschen wichtig darzustellen. Es ist ein armseliges, kleines Ideal, für eine Nation zu schreiben; einem philosophischen Geiste ist diese Grenze durchaus unerträglich. Dieser kann bei einer so wandelbaren, zufälligen und willkürlichen Form der Menschheit, bei einem Fragment (und was ist die wichtigste Nation anders?) nicht stillestehen. Er kann sich nicht weiter dafür erwärmen, als soweit ihm diese Nation oder Nationalbegebenheit als Bedingung für den Fortschritt der Gattung wichtig ist. Ist eine Geschichte (von welcher Nation und Zeit sie auch sei) dieser Anwendung fähig, kann sie an die Gattung angeschlossen werden, so hat sie alle Requisite, unter der Hand des Philosophen interessant zu werden, und dieses Interesse kann jeder Verzierung entbehren.²

[We moderns have an interest in our grasp that no Roman and no Greek knew, and which the patriotic interest is quite unable to come up to. The latter only matters to immature nations, in the youth of the world. Of a different order is the interest in presenting any remarkable event in the lives of men as important for mankind. It is a miserable small-minded ideal to write for one nation; to the philosophical mind this limitation is intolerable. He cannot stop at such a changeable, chance and arbitrary form of humanity, such a fragment (for what is even the most important nation but a fragment?). It cannot rouse his enthusiasm except insofar as a nation or a national event is significant as a condition of the progress of humanity. If an episode (from whatever nation and period) can be applied in this way, if it can be linked with the whole human race, then it has everything it needs to be made interesting under the philosopher’s hand and this is an interest that needs no embellishing.]

On this scale, Germany was not yet even such a fragment, just a disjointed set of fragments. Yet it was possible to be supra-national if you had not yet matured to national status, easy to think of patriotic sentiment as, paradoxically, a phenomenon of immaturity. True, you were being virtuous because there was as yet little temptation to vice; Germans had still to come to know the emotions and temptations of nationhood. But virtue it surely still was.

Eighteenth-century German cosmopolitanism is also often stated in the more fundamental concept of ‘humanity’ — ‘Menschlichkeit’, ‘Humanität’. It is fundamental in the literal sense that deep down all human beings were surely, it was argued, of a common substance. The most celebrated statement is the rhetorical question posed by the Jewish central figure in Lessing’s drama Nathan der Weise [Nathan the Wise] (1779), Act II, scene 5: ‘Sind Christ und Jude eher Christ und Jude / Als Mensch?’ [‘Are Jew and Christian sooner Jew and Christian / Than men?’] The implication is that, if only they would recognize that common substance, there need be no conflict. The play is set in the time of the crusades. When — so Lessing asks in his foreword — would the disadvantages of revealed religion for mankind be clearer to a rational man than at precisely this point in history?³ In the text, this is most explicit in the Templar’s speech at II, 5:

Wenn hat, und wo die fromme Raserei,

Den bessern Gott zu haben, diesen bessern

Der ganzen Welt als besten aufzudringen,

In ihrer schwärzesten Gestalt sich mehr

Gezeigt, als hier, als itzt? Wem hier, wem itzt

Die Schuppen nicht vom Auge fallen...

[Where and when has the pious crazed belief

That your god is better, and you must impose

This better god on everybody else,

Shown up in blackest form but here and now?

If the scales do not fall from your eyes, now, here...]

Lessing/Nathan’s famous question must warm the cockles of every enlightened heart. But is the answer the one the rhetoric invites? It is true in some scientific senses that all human beings are alike. There is apparently less genetic variation in the whole human race than there is among chimpanzees in one small area of Africa.⁴ We know about the universality of our DNA and about the worldwide commonalty of blood groups. But these things do not impinge on the consciousness that feeds action, especially extremist action. How many people even know about them? More to the point, when it comes to racial or religious conflict, who cares? The same applies to any humanistic sense of a common fate, of the limited span between birth and death, the same cycles of the generations, the identical human needs and vulnerability, the same sequence of growth and decline.

The overriding fact — overriding, precisely, those undoubted elements of physical community — is that all human beings are born into and shaped from the very first by distinctive communities. Even in their mother’s womb they begin to hear and feel the sounds and rhythms of a specific culture. They grow up acquiring all the features of their surroundings, practical, religious and moral; knowledge and everyday skills; beliefs and prejudices; ideas of who is an ally and who an enemy. It does not matter whether you take Lessing/Nathan’s ‘sooner’ in a temporal or an essential sense (i.e. whether ‘sooner’ means a human being before becoming a Jew or Christian, or whether it means a human being rather than a Jew or Christian). Either way, the answer is still not what the question invites. The realities of communal — family, tribal, national, racial — life make human beings profoundly different from one another. There is no more a ‘pure’ human being than there is a human face without features.

Germans certainly had, by the late eighteenth century, their own distinctive cultural identity, and they had it in ample measure. With good reason they could conceive the compound ‘Kulturnation’ [cultural nation] as distinct from the concept of ‘Staatsnation’ [political nation]. It was precisely their belief in a ‘Kulturnation’ that compensated them for not being a political nation — and they needed some form of compensation other than just the awareness of their own supranational high-mindedness, which may indeed not have been widely shared outside the intellectual élite, any more than a pride in their culture will have been. Politics has a cruder reach than culture, in a way deeper, in a way more superficial.

That is why more concrete consolation came to be needed. It is this psychological need that means German leadership in an age beyond nationality, if not as illusory as the leadership of the athletic straggler, is certainly fragile, and temporary. Even within cultural circles, there came to be a specifically national pride in having at last come out from under the dominance of France, a dominance that had been maintained — by what can only be called an act of cultural treachery — by the many princely courts. That was true even and especially of the Berlin of Frederick the Great, whose European status as a German military leader coexisted with a total subservience to an alien culture.

This mixture of cultural self-assertion and political backwardness is the situation out of which Herder develops his ideas on the irreducible distinctness of cultures, as spread out through historical time and across geographical space. It is virtually an answer to Lessing’s heroically high-minded question about the underlying common humanity. For Herder, every nation had — and needed to have — ‘its midpoint of happiness in itself as every sphere has its centre of gravity’; and for the purposes of that happiness it further needed, at least temporarily, ‘the prejudice of a limited nationalism’⁵ — a surprisingly positive use of the word ‘prejudice’ for a child, albeit a somewhat difficult child, of the Enlightenment. Although Herder’s thesis is meant to be universal, it was surely inspired by the situation and development specifically of German culture, its earlier humiliation before the culture of the dominant political nation, France, and its new self-assertion in literature, thought, and music. However universal it may be, particularism must in each individual case allow that element of ‘prejudice’, which must mean at least a powerful national commitment, to show through even the most high-minded cultural utterances.

Tellingly, that happens even with Schiller, despite his idea of a universal humanity which was our starting-point. In 1797, Schiller sketches a poem with the title ‘Deutsche Größe’ [German Greatness].⁶ Germany — that is to say, some of the German states — have come off badly in a peace agreement that provided a lull in the Napoleonic Wars (we shall come on to ‘Eternal Peace’ later). As a defensive reaction, the draft argues that Germany, whi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• PART I: (TRANS) NATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
• PART II: AGENTS OF COSMOPOLITANISM
• PART III: AFTERLIVES
• Index