Some, such as Schiller and Friedrich Jacobi, were sceptical that the Revolution could ever reach a peaceful conclusion. Nevertheless, there was general consensus about its basic ideals, broad admiration for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and celebration of the end of aristocratic privilege. Hegel, who erected a liberty tree in Tübingen, proclaimed that ‘only now has humanity come to understand that spiritual reality should be ruled by Thought’. For Kant it was proof of mankind’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity, the process he had termed Enlightenment: a world-historical experiment in which man was finally self-determining and free.
For many Germans reading Kant after 1789, the ageing disciple of Rousseau appeared to have achieved in theory what the French had achieved in practice. German philosophy, in this narcissistic view, had been quietly heralding freedom all along. So passionate was this self-vindication in Germany that, as Nietzsche later quipped, the ‘text’ of the French Revolution ‘disappeared under the interpretation’.
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Disillusionment grew quickly after the Jacobins rose to power, terror was unleashed in the name of freedom by radical political forces, and, disturbingly for the literati, the urban lower classes seemed to gain influence. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), translated by Friedrich Gentz – later one of the closest advisors to the chancellor of Austria, Metternich – became a hit across Germany with its warnings against violent and hubristic political engineering.
Georg Forster, the writer and activist, who fled a failed mini-revolution in the German city of Mainz to Paris (to die there embittered in 1794), wrote to his wife that ‘the tyranny of reason, perhaps the most unyielding of all, lies yet in store for the world’. Goethe worried that the alliance of the masses with an intellectual elite had inaugurated a new era of deception. People incapable of self-awareness were now in charge of improving others. ‘What must I put up with? The crowd must strike, Then it becomes respectable. / In judgement, it is miserable.’
Others came to recoil from, in Nietzsche’s words, the ‘semi-insanity, histrionicism, bestial cruelty, voluptuousness, and especially sentimentality and self-intoxication, which taken together constitutes the actual substance of the Revolution’. Even Herder, a passionate defender of the Revolution (Goethe claimed to have spotted his inner Jacobin), finally confessed to being repelled by ‘a populace agitated to madness, and the rule of a mad populace’. He issued his own Burkean warning for the future: ‘What effects might, indeed must, this vertiginous spirit of freedom, and the bloody wars that will in likelihood arise from it, have upon peoples and rulers, but above all on the organs of humanity, the sciences and arts?’
Reports of atrocities from France seemed to demonstrate that inner freedom and morality were necessary before fundamental political change could take place. The liberal catchword of the 1790s accordingly became Bildung. Schiller set out a theory of drama that was an aesthetic preparation for political freedom. According to this pioneering German Romantic, the Enlightenment and science had given an ‘intellectual education’ to man but left undisturbed his ‘inner barbarian’, which only art and literature could redeem.
Diagnosing Alienation
Schiller also began to make the first of many critiques familiar to us from Marx, Weber, Adorno and Marcuse of modern commercial society, its gods of utility and instrumental reason, and its deformations of the inner life. Science, technology, division of labour and specialization, he wrote, had created a society of richer but spiritually impoverished individuals, reducing them to mere ‘fragments’: ‘nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge’.
In Schiller’s vision, the Enlightenment’s ideology had evolved into the terror of reason, destroying old institutions but also the spiritual integrity of human beings. It was now to be the task of the Romantic generation to shore up the ideal of Bildung against modern society, and its atomism, alienation and anomie. Against individual fragmentation and self-maiming, the Romantic ideal of Bildung reaffirmed the value of wholeness, with oneself, others and nature. It was aimed to make the individual feel at home again in his world, instead of seeing it as opposed to himself.
The Romantics developed further Rousseau’s notion of social hypocrisy in which the human self repressed its true desires and feelings within a culture of civilized manners. They also critiqued specialization, the development of the one at the expense of all the others. The sources of alienation, according to them, lay in the decline of the traditional community – the guilds, corporations and family – and the rise of the competitive marketplace and social-contractism, in which individuals pursued their self-interest at the expense of others.
Man was alienated from nature also because modern technology and mechanical physics made nature into an object of mere utility, a vast machine, depriving it of magic, mystery or beauty. ‘Spectres reign where no gods are,’ wrote Novalis. Modern man, according to him, was ‘tirelessly engaged in cleansing nature, the earth, human souls, and learning of poetry, rooting out every trace of the sacred, spoiling the memory of all uplifting incidents and people, and stripping the world of all bright ornament’.
Against these pathologies of modernity, the German Romantics counterpoised ideals of wholeness or unity. Self-division would be overcome by acting according to the principles of morality, by realizing an ideal of community, or what today’s autocrat Vladimir Putin calls the ‘organic life’; and healing the split from nature with immersion in it.
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On the face of it, this was a backward-looking programme. It seemed to bemoan the advent of bourgeois society and Enlightenment, and celebrate the unity and harmony found in classical Greece or the Middle Ages. But there was no going back for the Romantics. The challenge before them was how to achieve the harmony and unity of the past in the future, how to form a society and state that provide for community – a source of belonging, identity and security –while also securing rights and freedoms for individuals without them fragmenting into self-interested atoms.
As Novalis wrote, Germany may not be a coherent political nation like France, and in fact had fallen behind its Western neighbours in many respects. But it did not matter since Germany is ‘treading a slow but sure path ahead of the other European countries. While the latter are busy with war, speculation and partisan spirit, the German is educating himself with all due diligence to become an accomplice of a higher culture, and in the course of time this advance must give him much superiority over the others.’
In almost all cases the German Romantics in their provincial centres were reacting to what they perceived as the defects and excesses of both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. But Romanticism was not a mere reaction. It was also, in Ernst Troeltsch’s words,
a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal egalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal humanity.