The Romantic Conception of Life

Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe

Robert J. Richards

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780226712185
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science.Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory.Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

Part One

THE EARLY ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE

Chapter 2

THE EARLY ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

Perhaps a whole new epoch of science and art would be inaugurated were symphilosophy and sympoetry to become so common and deeply felt that there would be nothing odd were several people of mutually complementary natures to create works in communion with each other.

—Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragmente, no. 125

The romantic mentality that ramified through Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was nurtured in the friendships and passions that held together the group that became known as “the early Romantics” (die Frühromantiker).¹ These individuals slipped away from the simpler rationalisms that dominated their native philosophical environment, especially as exemplified in the works of Christian Wolff, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the Immanuel Kant of the first Critique. They came to disdain, with the sanguine intolerance of young revolutionaries, conventional and encrusted thought wherever they found it. The poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), then a student ready for the intellectual barricades, recalled in later years how they were regarded and what they strove against:

The common attitude, or rather enfeebled judgment, had been prosaic for so long that the Romantic approach was taken for a sacrilege against a debased human understanding and would be tolerated, at best, as a bizarre, youthful prank. The heavy wagon carrying the provisions of the meat and potatoes science moved slowly into the customary dock of a wooden schematism; religion had to assume reason and move with the rationalism of the schools; nature was dissected atomistically like a dead corpse; philology enjoyed itself like a childish old man slicing syllables and proposing endless variations on a theme that it had long forgotten; and visual art prided itself on a slavish imitation of so-called nature.²

The early Romantics were poets and painters, philosophers and historians, theologians and scientists, and mostly they were young. We usually think of this group as forming a coherent movement, and readers have certainly been seduced into adopting this view by critics and historians referring to the “Romantic school.”³ The Romantics, however, often appreciably diverged from one another in their conceptions of the operations of sensation, imagination, and reason; and, indeed, they frequently assessed the functions of these faculties differently at different stages of their own intellectual developments. The powerful passions that held them together refracted their philosophical commitments, but then eventually repelled them from one another—passions that transmogrified from lingering fascination, to erotic love, and finally to destructive hate. The Romantic “movement” or “school,” then, is best conceived as constituted not by a group displaying a unanimity of ideas but by sympathetically minded individuals, by thinkers whose mutually supportive considerations of philosophy, literature, and science became enmeshed in the tangle of their personal and professional relationships. Within their social and intellectual environments, particular experiences thus shaped their conceptual growth in diverging directions. Radical disjunction, however, was prevented by the similarity of their intellectual heritages and by the co-adaptation of their developing ideas to the views of one another and to those of their teachers, friends, and, oppositionally, to their enemies. The implicit evolutionary model that encourages my suggestion about how to understand the Romantic movement preserves the usual story—commonality of ideas, enough to satisfy philosophers, but with an appreciation of particular differences, which historians are anxious to retain.⁴

In conformity to our usual understanding of Romanticism, some of the members of this early group turned decisively toward the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, under which beauty revealed a more intuitive, emotionally marked, and even mystical path to reality’s inner core. With the poet Novalis, they desired a time

When no more numbers and figures feature

As the keys to unlock every creature,

When those who join to sing and woo

Know more than the deeply learned do.⁵

Two deeply learned brothers, the literary historians and critics August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) and Karl Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), nonetheless attempted to lower the consciousness of their friends, like Novalis, to a less ethereal plane, to the historical justification and philosophical explanation of the role of poetic literature in achieving this new kind of cognition. Their searching analyses and aesthetic criticisms, exemplifying scholarship of an exceptionally high order, also served as newly fashioned keys to unlock the secrets of man and nature. Their journal, the Athenaeum, which published the poetry and prose of their circle during the three years of the magazine’s existence (1798–1800), created an institutional body that displayed this new perception of the Romantic.⁶ Yet their intellectual accomplishments would not have had the purchase on the minds of their generation had they not also the ability to rekey and play out in their literary works those emotional chords that first resonated through their most intimate friendships, consuming loves, and despoiling enmities.

Karl Friedrich Schlegel, known simply as Friedrich to his friends, was the intellectual architect of the movement. In early essays he established the meaning romantisch would initially bear. He used the term to signify imaginative literature of a distinctively modern form, to be contrasted with the writings of ancient authors, especially Homer and the Greek lyric poets and dramatists. The word derives from the French roman, which referred to a story, usually a military tale of awful creatures, heroic knights, and chivalric love. When the word entered the German language, toward the end of the seventeenth century, it carried the meaning of romanhaft, novel-like, specifically the kind of story or attitude typical of the genre. It quickly came to indicate an action-filled and passionate adventure, as well as the wild, natural scenery that might be the setting for such a fanciful story.⁷ By the end of the eighteenth century, the term in common use bore many of the connotations with which we are familiar. Goethe captured several of those meanings in his early writing. His antihero, Werther, despairing over his beloved’s rejection of him, tells her: “It is decided, Lotte, I want to die, and I write you that calmly, without Romantic expostulation” [ohne romantische Überspannung gelassen]. When Goethe returned from his journey to Italy in the late 1780s, he observed: “The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation.”⁸ Schlegel had in mind these various usages, but he wished to employ the term more specifically to describe a form of poetic literature developed in the modern period that expressed the subjective interests of the artist, that allowed conflicting elements to remain unresolved, that refused to restrain a freely playing and ironic imagination, that described the reactions and portrayed the sensibilities of individuals of common clay, usually the poet himself, and that focused on manners and times characteristic of a definite period in history. Ancient literature, by contrast, conformed to objective and formal principles of beauty, unified its various elements into a harmonious synthesis, described the activities of heroes and gods, transcended historically fixed times and places, and thus, indirectly, represented universal features of humanity.⁹

Schlegel’s conception of the Romantic underwent an evolution during the late 1790s. In his early volume on Greek and Roman poetry (1795–97), he deemed modern literature to be inferior to classical literature, which latter, he believed, had achieved the most complete expression of beauty possible. But he quickly came to argue—after reading a monograph by Schiller—that a literature he would call romantisch, with its continual striving after the perfect realization of beauty, more conformed to the nature of man as a progressive being.¹⁰ Ancient literature, the apotheosis of universal, formal beauty, thus belied human nature, the very essence of which melted away into that of an incomplete becoming, but with longings that drove the individual desperately toward the infinite. “Romantic poetry,” Schlegel insisted in the famous fragment 116 of the Athenaeum Fragmente, “is progressive universal-poetry.” “The Romantic mode of poetry,” he proclaimed, “is still in the process of becoming; indeed, that is its very essence, that it eternally becomes and can never be completed.” “Romantic poetry,” he concluded, “is the only mode of poetry that is more than a mode, it is the poetic art itself; thus, in a certain sense, all poetry is or should be Romantic.”¹¹ But Romantic poetry had a goal, an end point that literature of the time began to realize. This was the union of the distinctively modern mode of poetizing with the ancient, the merging of the greatest beauty possible consistent with human nature. Already in 1794, Friedrich wrote his brother: “The problem of our poetry seems to me to be the union of the essentially modern with the essentially ancient; if I indicate that Goethe, the first to have made a beginning for a wholly new period of art, has approached this goal, you will certainly understand what I mean.”¹² Goethe’s accomplishment thus became the model for the aspirations of Romantic literature.

The subtle shifts in Schlegel’s attitude and the set of additional meanings romantisch would carry must be understood as the result not simply of more abstract definitions proffered by members of the Romantic circle, but of additional strands of personal feelings, political attitudes, aesthetic perceptions, philosophical considerations, and scientific ideas that bound together the cognitive and emotional experiences of the individuals whose lives intersected at the end of the eighteenth century. Only by examining the development of their intellectual and passional lives—the ways in which individual experiences electrified their cognitive connections—can one understand the multifaceted meaning of the Romantic and how its elements became interlaced through early-nineteenth-century biology, giving it the particular structure it had. The intellectual development and fluctuating friendships of the Schlegel brothers offer entrance into the charmed sphere of the early Romantics.

Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel

The brothers were the youngest sons of Johann Adolf Schlegel (1721–1793) and Johanna Christiane Schlegel (née Hübsch, daughter of a mathematics professor).¹³ Their father served as Lutheran pastor at the Marktkirche in Hannover and the Court Church of Neustadt (northwest of Hannover) and interested himself in matters literary and philosophical, as did several of his seven children. August Wilhelm—known to his family as Wilhelm—excelled as a gymnasium student and did brilliantly in literary studies at the university in Göttingen, where he matriculated in 1786. Friedrich, however, initially displayed little academic ability. He was sickly, somewhat recalcitrant, and aimlessly melancholic. He had the soul, we would say, of a Romantic, but a mind, his father rather hoped, that might be bent to business. In 1788 the young Friedrich was apprenticed to a banker in Leipzig, but within six months no one could doubt the failure of the effort. Friedrich was saved by his brother Wilhelm, who introduced him to Greek language and literature; and this seems to have completely altered his attitudes and kindled his ambitions. Under his brother’s tutelage, Friedrich unveiled a considerable gift for tongues, quickly mastering Greek and Latin (as well as, later, Spanish, English, French—their modern and medieval versions—Sanskrit, and Persian). But Friedrich’s desires pushed him beyond the goal of simple technical proficiency. He wanted to understand the minds that originally used these languages and the historical contexts that shaped their perceptions. In 1790 he joined his brother at Göttingen, where he ostensibly followed the curriculum in jurisprudence, the shadow of his father’s hopes. He was usually discovered, however, in lectures on literature and language, especially those of his brother’s mentor, the distinguished philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812). In summer of 1791, Wilhelm finished at university and became a tutor to a rich banking family in Amsterdam, while Friedrich entered the university at Leipzig, further to pursue, from a distance, his legal studies. He was initially earnest in his efforts, writing to his brother: “I regard the study of law much more seriously than you—it seems to me to accord more with middle-class [bürgerliche] destiny.”¹⁴ He quickly, however, fell into the arms of literature, philosophy, history, and fascinating women.

Figure 2.1 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) at age twenty-two, sketched by his love at the time, Caroline Rehberg. (Courtesy the Staatliche Museem zu Berlin.)

During their year together at Göttingen, both brothers suffered the pangs of slightly requited love. Friedrich pursued Caroline Rehberg, who drove him into a melancholic depression¹⁵ and would later make an appearance as a sweet innocent in his “dissolutely Romantic” [liederlich romantischen] novel Lucinde (1799).¹⁶ Wilhelm attempted to encourage the affections of a young widow, the most remarkable Caroline Michaelis Böhmer, who would play a dramatic role in the lives of both brothers. At Leipzig Friedrich continued the passionate pursuit of literature and love, detailing in letters to his brother h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One: The Early Romantic Movement in Literature, Philosophy, and Science
• Part Two: Scientific Foundations of the Romantic Conception of Life
• Part Three: Goethe, a Genius for Poetry, Morphology, and Women
• Part Four: Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index