The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe

By Robert J. Richards

"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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780226712185

Book preview

Science and Its Conceptual Foundations

Edited by David L. Hull

ROBERT J. RICHARDS is a professor of history, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (1987) and The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (1992).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2002 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2002

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-71210-9 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-226-71218-5 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richards, Robert J.

The romantic conception of life : science and philosophy in the age of Goethe / Robert J. Richards.

p.   cm.—(Science and its conceptual foundations)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-71210-9 (alk. paper)

1. Romanticism—Germany. 2. German literature—18th century—History and criticism. 3. German literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Literature and science—Germany. 5. Philosophy—German. I. Title. II. Series.

PT361 .R53 2002

830.9'145—dc21

2002001769

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

The Romantic Conception of Life

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE AGE OF GOETHE

Robert J. Richards

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Flora, goddess of spring and flowers, oil painting (1790) by Angelika Kauffmann, friend of Goethe. (Private collection.)

For Barbara

All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, 115

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. Introduction: A Most Happy Encounter

The Historical Meaning of Naturphilosophie and Romantic Biology

PART ONE: THE EARLY ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE

2. The Early Romantic Movement

Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel

Novalis: The Romantic Personality

Caroline Böhmer and the Mainz Revolution

The Schlegels in Jena: The Break with Schiller and the Politics of Romanticism

Fichte, the Philosopher of Freedom

The Salons of Berlin

Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Poetics and Erotics of Religion

Friedrich Schlegel’s Aesthetic Theory

3. Schelling: The Poetry of Nature

Schelling’s Early Life

Naturphilosophie

Schelling in Jena

Transcendental Idealism and Poetic Construction

Schelling’s Affair with Caroline and the Tragedy of Auguste

Schelling’s Identity Philosophy

4. Denouement: Farewell to Jena

The Meaning of Romanticism

PART TWO: SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE ROMANTIC CONCEPTION OF LIFE

5. Early Theories of Development: Blumenbach and Kant

Embryology and Theories of Descent in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Blumenbach’s Theory of the Bildungstrieb

Kant’s Theory of Biological Explanation

6. Kielmeyer and the Organic Powers of Nature

Lecture on Organic Forces

Theory of Species Origin and Transformation

Critique of Kant and the Idealists

7. Johann Christian Reil’s Romantic Theories of Life and Mind, or Rhapsodies on a Cat-Piano

Early Training and Practice

Lebenskraft

Studies of Mental Illness

The Romantic Movement in Halle

The Romantic Naturphilosoph

Final Years: War and Romance

8. Schelling’s Dynamic Evolutionism

Biological Treatises

Critical Analysis of the Biological Theories of Contemporaries

Nature as a Dynamically Shifting Balance of Forces

Theory of Dynamic Evolution

9. Conclusion: Mechanism, Teleology, and Evolution

Appendix: Theories of Irritability, Sensibility, and Vital Force from Haller to Humboldt

PART THREE: GOETHE, A GENIUS FOR POETRY, MORPHOLOGY, AND WOMEN

10. The Erotic Authority of Nature

Growing Up in Frankfurt

University Education

The Law, Herder, and Lotte

The Weimar Councillor and the Frustrated Lover

The Science of Goethe’s First Weimar Period

The Unity of Biological Nature: Goethe’s Discovery of the Zwischenkiefer in Human Beings

The Impact of Spinoza

Goethe’s Italian Journey: Art, Nature, and the Female

Conclusion

11. Goethe’s Scientific Revolution

Homecoming

The Foundations of Morphology

Friendship with Schiller and Induction into the Kantian Philosophy

The Science of Morphology

The Romantic Circle and Schelling

Zur Morphologie

The Vertebral Theory of the Skull: Goethe’s Dispute with Oken and the Truth of Memory

12. Conclusion: The History of a Life in Art and Science

PART FOUR: EPILOGUE

13. The Romantic Conception of Life

14. Darwin’s Romantic Biology

The Romantic Movement

Darwin’s Romantic Conception of Nature

Romantic Nature in the Origin of Species

Darwin’s Theory of Morals

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Frontispiece, Flora, goddess of flowers

1.1. The vertebrate archetype, from Carl Gustav Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen und Schalengerustes

2.1. Friedrich Schlegel

2.2. Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)

2.3. Sophie von Kühn

2.4. The freedom tree

2.5. Caroline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel Schelling

2.6. August Wilhelm Schlegel

2.7 Johann Gottlieb Fichte

2.8. Friedrich Schlegel

2.9. Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher

3.1. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

3.2. Friedrich Hölderlin

3.3. Auguste Böhmer

4.1. Friedrich Schelling

5.1. Frontispiece to the publication of Goethe’s Faust, Ein Fragment

5.2. Albrecht von Haller

5.3. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

5.4. Johann Gottfried Herder

5.5. Immanuel Kant

7.1. Johann Christian Reil

7.2. Katzenclavier, or cat-piano

7.3. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland

8.1. Erasmus Darwin

A.1. Plate from Luigi Galvani, De viribus electricitatis

A.2. Plate from Alexander von Humboldt, Versuche über die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser

10.1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10.2. Carl August, duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

10.3. Charlotte von Stein

10.4. Apartments of Charlotte von Stein

10.5. The river Ilm

10.6. Justus Christian Loder

10.7. Anatomieturm in Jena

10.8. Illustration of the human intermaxillary bone

10.9. Goethe in apartment in Rome

10.10. Emma Lyon

10.11. Anatomy sketch by Goethe

11.1. Christiane Vulpius

11.2. Goethe’s house on Der Frauenplan

11.3. Gardens at the rear of Goethe’s house on Der Frauenplan

11.4. Megatherium drawn by D’Alton

11.5. Lorenz Oken

11.6. Bust of Oken in Jena

12.1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

12.2. Dedication page to Goethe by Alexander von Humboldt

14.1. Charles Darwin

14.2. Richard Owen

14.3. Richard Owen’s illustration of the vertebrate archetype

14.4. Charles Darwin

14.5. Charles Darwin

Plates

PLATE 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the Roman Campagna

PLATE 2. Henriette Herz

PLATE 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

PLATE 4. Friedrich Schiller

PLATE 5. Alexander von Humboldt

Acknowledgments

No book springs whole from the mind of a single author, a simple fact of which I am acutely aware. References to the large scholarship on the subjects I treat accumulate on my pages like stars against a dark sky, where they reveal a considerable debt. Without the generous aid of several institutions that provided access to this scholarship and the resources to pursue it, this book would still be in embryo. My gratitude goes, first of all, to my own university, the University of Chicago. The university used to enjoy the pungent atmosphere of the steel mills on the south side of the city. I have often thought that gritty, demanding, and dangerous environment served as a metaphor for the scholarship practiced in Hyde Park; the monuments of this scholarship stand like the marvels of the city’s architecture and have been for me comparably inspiring. The Dibner Institute for the History of Science granted me a research fellowship for the academic year 1995–96, and that allowed me to begin my project. The Dibner’s directors, Evelyn Simha and Jed Buchwald, showed gracious hospitality and furnished a stimulating forum for collegial discussion. The Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, through a research fellowship for the year 2000, enabled me substantially to complete the work. The director, Lorraine Daston, and many friends there provided a critical and sufficiently skeptical environment that compelled me often to rethink arguments, if not always to change them. The following institutions made both printed material and manuscripts available: the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschungsstelle, Berlin; the Manuscript Room, Cambridge University Library; Haeckel-Haus, Jena; the Manuscript Room, London Natural History Museum; Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; the Stadtbibliothek, Berlin; and Widner Library, Harvard University.

Preliminary versions of sections of several chapters have previously appeared in the journals Critical Inquiry and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Science, and in the collections Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, ed. Jane Maienschein and Michael Ruse (Cambridge University Press), and The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (University of Chicago Press). These essays were initially composed, however, with this present volume in view. All of the translations in the text—except in a few noted instances—are my own.

Several individuals have read large portions of my manuscript. I gave them enough rough pages on which to sharpen their critical faculties, and none failed to employ their judgment to my great advantage. I am supremely in the debt of Karl Ameriks, Frederick Beiser, Thomas Broman, Frederick Gregory, Michael Hagner, David Hull, Nicholas Jardine, the late Lily Kay, Cheryce Kramer, Wolfgang Lefevre, Peter McLaughlin, Robert Proctor, Michael Ruse, and Joan Steigerwald. It is often a reflexive cliché for academics to say how much they’ve learned from their students. My own students will recognize ideas formed commonly in seminars that now have been appropriated in this book. Kristin Casady scrutinized the entire manuscript with an eye sensitive to infelicities of English and ragged translations from German. She made numerous suggestions for improvement, and I am deeply grateful for her efforts. Erin DeWitt’s meticulous eye and steady hand rendered my textual references deceptively consistent; I could not have hoped for better. Susan Abrams, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, has served not only as a patient critic but also as a good friend. Her intelligent guidance has allowed my book to appear amid a glittering array of others under her purview. My wife, Barbara, never ceased to urge me on, and my dedication is but small recompense for what she continues to provide.

Prologue

My title, The Romantic Conception of Life, refers to two related aspects of this study of early German Romanticism. First of all, I mean life as experienced by the individuals whom I discuss. Theirs were romantic lives: the young poet whose inamorata dies at age fifteen and he himself before thirty; the German beauty who quickly becomes infatuated with a French soldier during the Revolution and then is thrown into prison while pregnant with his child; the philosopher-scientist who falls in love with the wife of a friend and the woman’s daughter as well; the famous writer who escapes to Rome, where he celebrates sexual liberation in exquisite poetry. These poets, philosophers, and scientists defied bourgeois moral conventions, advanced the ideals of freedom, and left memorable portraits of their extraordinary careers in autobiographies and letters, and indirectly in poems, novels, and even in theological and scientific texts. They were individuals who self-consciously appropriated the name Romantic, and their lives came to define the term.

I also mean to convey by my title that the individuals who led such lives attempted to understand animate nature in a Romantic mode through poetry, philosophy, and science. They were not uniformly opposed, as is usually assumed, to the Enlightenment emphasis on reason. Many of the Romantics might, rather, be classified as hyperbolically rational in that they believed the scientific mind could penetrate into all of the dark corners of the universe. They did argue, though, that aesthetic judgment offered another, complementary path into the deep structures of reality, a path overlooked by most Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, they altered fundamental assumptions about the very character of philosophy and science, arguing that a poetical transformation of these disciplines might reveal features of nature not contemplated by their predecessors. Emboldened by this new understanding, the Romantics attacked a significant bulwark of earlier thought, one that advanced mechanism as the engine of progress in science. From Descartes and Newton to Hume and Kant, mechanism had been employed as the basic concept by which to understand not only the inanimate universe but the living world as well. The Romantics replaced the concept of mechanism with that of the organic, elevating it to the chief principle for interpreting nature.

During the couple of decades on either side of 1800, the age of Goethe, these individuals came together in various venues to symphilosophize and to sympoetize, as they put it. Even the scientific members of this loose confederation brought the conceptual concerns of the philosopher and the refined sensibilities of the poet to the experimental investigation of life. The Romantics formulated powerful ideas about the relationship between artistic modes of representation and scientific modes. Their conceptions, however, flowed not simply in abstract numbers from dispossessed minds but from embodied personalities, from individuals whose particular relationships, fired in love and in hate, shaped those conceptions as much as did the formal aspects of their inquiries. I have followed the philosophic and scientific ideas of these early Romantic thinkers as their ideas emerged from the intellectual legacy to which they were heir, from their immediate scientific experiences, and especially from their more intimate personal relationships.

Though the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s attempted to coax the authorial genie out of the well-wrought urn—and the postmodernists of our day simply refuse to believe in him—I think it impossible to exorcise the daemon. Can it be seriously entertained that poets who dramatized the extremes of life or philosophers who attempted explicitly to reconstruct it—that they formulated conceptions unmarked by their own lived experience? That the mind of such individuals could create a work that would float free, detached from the imperfect life that produced it?¹ This book will offer a long argument against such presumption. My effort, though, will be not only to show how their lives affected their work, but also to show how their work affected their lives. They composed Romantic poetry and then became the passionate, ironic, and adventuresome individuals their verse described—thus did life imitate art. In these pages, then, more of the biographical will appear than might otherwise be expected in a volume devoted to the history of philosophy and science.

I have tried to sustain several themes across the four parts of this book. My intention has been to show how concepts of self, along with aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—gave complementary shape to biological representations of nature. These themes of German Romanticism, however, have been developed in the several parts of this volume in respect to different individuals and events. This means that each of the parts can be read as a coherent whole, and so the burden of the book need not be hoisted all at once.

The various themes of this book and the arguments on which they ride flow to a conclusion that will be most perspicuously realized in the epilogue, which describes the fundamental ways in which Romantic thought gave shape to Darwin’s conceptions of nature and evolution. Most often anything called Romantic science has been thought at best a minor tributary of nineteenth-century scientific thought—really nothing but a backwater. My general conclusion is quite different. On the basis of the history recounted in the main part of this volume, I have become convinced that the central currents of nineteenth-century biology had their origins in the Romantic movement.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: A MOST HAPPY ENCOUNTER

When sleep overcomes her, I lie by her side and think over many things. Often I have composed poetry while in her arms and have softly beat out the measure of hexameters, fingering along her spine.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Römische Elegien

On 20 July 1794, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) happened to attend the same meeting of the Jena Natural Research Society. They knew each other, having met six years before, but their relationship remained distant and distrustful. Goethe had been instrumental in securing Schiller’s appointment to the history faculty at Jena; initially, though, the position carried only a small stipend and provided neither the financial security the younger poet sought nor the freedom to continue his literary work. Goethe’s aloof genius, which seemed so effortlessly to sail over the flood of poetry spilling from his pen, evoked in Schiller feelings, he confessed, not unlike those Brutus and Cassius must have had for Caesar. I could murder his spirit, he wrote a friend, and then love him with all my heart.¹ For his part, Goethe disliked Schiller’s sensational Sturm und Drang play Die Räuber (The robbers, 1781), which seemed to endorse the kind of anarchic attitudes that inspired talk of revolution; and he was vexed over what he believed Schiller had implied about him in the essay Über Anmut und Würde (On grace and dignity, 1793), namely, that his aesthetic talent lacked a deeper moral character. What particularly disconcerted Goethe was Schiller’s Kantian subjectivism, which he thought dropped a veil between the artist and nature. So when they left the Jena meeting and could not avoid interchange, they began to discuss, with mutual wariness, the fragmented character of the lecture they had just heard. Contrary to the approach of the speaker, the botanist August Johann Georg Carl Batsch (1761–1802), Goethe suggested that the study of nature had to move from the whole to the parts rather than the reverse. Intrigued, Schiller invited this benign nemesis back to his house to continue the conversation. There Goethe turned to his botanical theories, and he sketched for Schiller the ideal plant, the morphological model for understanding all plants. Seven years earlier Goethe had roamed through southern Italy and Sicily attempting to discover this Urpflanze. But when Schiller looked at the sketch, he exclaimed: Das ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee—That’s no observation, that’s an idea. Goethe, quite provoked, responded: Well, I’m rather fortunate that I have ideas without knowing it and can even see them with my own eyes.²

Goethe’s irritating confrontation with Schiller actually marked the beginning of their intimate friendship, which terminated only with Schiller’s death a decade later. Goethe described this happy encounter in the first number of his zoological writings Zur Morphologie (1817–24). He meant the tale to be emblematic of the several features of the morphological doctrine that he formed before and after his encounter with Schiller. But this literary Denkmal also suggests, I believe, the way in which Goethe’s theory, and the tradition it spawned, arose out of a decidedly Romantic sensibility: his ideal plant did stem from empirical observations, which, however, had been transformed by a creative imagination to reveal a deeper core of reality.

Goethe as a Romantic—a rather anomalous idea, perhaps. Certainly his Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The sorrows of young Werther) is easily read as a Romantic novel; and much of Goethe’s lyric poetry expresses that delicacy of feeling for nature with which the English Romantic poets resonated. But his dramas, such as Iphigenie auf Tauris or Torquato Tasso, are normally understood as classical in character. And his several other novels, such as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship), are usually thought to occupy the genre of Bildungsroman, rather than that of the Romantic portrait. Even his very living quarters exhibited his classical taste. The floors of his well-preserved (and postwar reconstructed) house on Der Frauenplan in Weimar sag with the weight of Greek and Roman statuary that he accumulated on his travels. Goethe might be more easily classifiable had he become reasonable, for then he would have been, as Lessing remarked, an ordinary man.³ But his genius and energies far outstripped those of his contemporaries. He appeared at the time (and now) a figure immensely larger than any small category that might capture individuals of more common clay. And particularly in this instance, he disdainfully discarded the very label that might allow his work to be easily tagged as Romantic. Late in his life, in conversations with a young writer on the make, Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe mentioned that he had very simple definitions of classical and Romantic. I call the classical healthy, he explained, and the Romantic sick.⁴ Yet a year later, on 21 March 1830, he acknowledged to his young friend that Schiller had convinced him that I myself, contrary to my own will, was a Romantic.⁵

Goethe’s acknowledgment of the Romantic character of his own thought will serve as a leitmotiv for this book. Historians of nineteenth-century science, the really serious historians, usually dismiss anything sounding like Romantic science as an aberration and suspect that anyone following such a red thread will be traveling down a path that terminates in the higher nonsense. Historical investigations of Romanticism may be amusing enough for the moment but certainly not instructive about the authentic science of the period, the science that grounds our contemporary understanding. The biologist E. O. Wilson, for instance, indicts the Romantics precisely as those responsible for advancing irrational fantasy over scientific reason—the latter, fortunately, having escaped the specter that still haunts present culture.⁶ Even a sophisticated historian like Timothy Lenoir, who has focused on German life sciences of the early nineteenth century, wishes to shield the real biologists of the period—such as Johann Christian Reil, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Ignaz Döllinger, Karl Friedrich Burdach, and Karl Ernst von Baer—from this taint. Lenoir argues the certainly interesting thesis that these aforementioned scientists have to be regarded as materialists and mechanists and that their construction of living organisms as teleological can only be modeled after Kant’s teleology als ob—a model that supposedly allowed good scientists to believe organisms were mere mechanisms while heuristically describing them as if they exhibited an intrinsically purposive structure.⁷ I believe these historiographic attitudes have excised the heart of nineteenth-century biology, which pulsed to more fascinating rhythms than can be imagined when dissecting the dried corpus of the discipline. When that biology has its lifelines secured by reattaching them to the thought and culture that animated it, I believe we will discover that many of its main themes have been played out in a Romantic mode, or so is the central argument of this book.⁸

In the next three chapters, forming part 1 of this volume, I portray the life and thought of the individuals who created the Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century—Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), the brothers Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schelling, Goethe, and the incomparable Caroline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel Schelling, whose surname plots only part of her romantic trajectory. I also consider associated figures who, while not members of the charmed circle, nevertheless provided some of the ingredients necessary for the magic to work. In this latter category, I focus on Kant and Fichte in particular. My effort is first to observe the leading ideas of these individuals as they emerged from the interstices of personal interactions and then more carefully to explore those conceptions in order to reveal their inner logic and external relations. It is impossible, I believe, to understand either the more overt or the very subtle ways Romanticism shaped biology in the nineteenth century without coming to understand the Romantic mode of being and thought, and to feel its very complex and often heterogeneous constitution. In part 2 I consider philosophical and scientific formulations of the nature of life, especially in the works of Kant, Herder, Blumenbach, Kielmeyer, and Humboldt. These formulations merged with and were transformed by writers like Schelling and Reil. During this period the basic categories of investigation changed from mechanism to organicism, and with that change arose a consideration that would assume huge proportions later in the nineteenth century, namely, the theory of evolution. In part 3 I return to Goethe and his apparently contradictory evaluations of Romantic literature. In order to understand his attitude, it will be necessary, first, to assess the various ways nature exerted an erotic command over his thought and life. I then concentrate on what the Schiller-induced acknowledgment of Romanticism reveals about the structure of Goethe’s aesthetics and his science, their relationship, and the sources of their construction. Goethe dominated scientific and even philosophical thought in the Romantic circle, and his fundamental ideas about biological structures would reverberate throughout the nineteenth century, becoming united with the evolutionary thought of Darwin and Haeckel. I will limn the impact of German Romanticism on Darwin’s biology in the epilogue and undertake a more thorough analysis of its consequence for the science of the late nineteenth century in a subsequent volume.⁹

The biographical emphasis of this book stems from my conviction, which can only be partly acted upon in a work such as this, that we catch ideas in the making only when we understand rather intimately the character—the attitudes, the intellectual beliefs, the emotional reactions—of the thinkers in question. Without an initial plunge into personality, logical analysis of the connections of their ideas will be blind and social construction of their theories empty.

The Historical Meaning of Naturphilosophie and Romantic Biology

To demonstrate the accuracy of Goethe’s own avowal of Romanticism requires a rather thick description of the Romantic movement at the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. I undertake that description in the next three chapters. But no matter how rounded this narrative, it will seem hardly sufficient to prepare for the argument that Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel were Romantic scientists. The historian of science David Knight expresses a perfectly common view when he takes for granted that "the Origin of Species was not rooted in Romanticism. The Romantics, he conventionally presumes, were not in the business of genealogy, constructing family trees, but searching for natural kinds."¹⁰ So a scientist like Haeckel, who planted more genealogical trees in the hard ground of his empirical studies than any of his English friends, likewise should not, upon this representation, be counted among the Romantics.

Part of the difficulty of seeing all those evolutionary trees but not their Romantic roots stems, I think, from the unstudied vagueness with which the terms Romanticism and Naturphilosophie have been used. Cultural historians have been studiously reluctant to venture a definition of Romanticism, regarding such effort a trap, as Isaiah Berlin put it.¹¹ In one of the best recent books devoted to the topic of Romanticism and the sciences, none of the contributing authors attempts a definition of the subject of the volume; rather, they rely on cultural assumptions and unanchored intuitions—a caricature of the Romantic approach itself.¹² Most of these authors undoubtedly assume, with decent precedent, that any attempted definitions of Romantic science or nature philosophy must be flat, stale, and unprofitable; that limp generalizations must fail to capture the rich diversity of a movement that involved so many extraordinary individuals, the luxury of their art, and the prodigality of their ideas.¹³

I do not think, however, that the effort at general characterization is as hopeless as it appears. I will attempt two methodologically different approaches to definition. The first utilizes an evolutionary construction, and it constitutes the principal task of this book: namely, to uncover the historical roots of the ideas captured by the terms Romantic biology and Naturphilosophie, and then to follow their evolution, as they develop and bend to the causal interactions radiating from their intellectual, psychological, and social environments. Thus at any one time in their evolution, the meanings constituting Romantic biology will be fixed by their particular causal interactions; and their entire development will constitute the meaning of Romantic biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Definitions of the more usual sort also have their uses. After all, just as in the case of biological systematics—when one attempts to trace the genealogy of, say, a species of Galapagos mockingbird—so in the genealogy of ideas: general notions must initially be used to discriminate the lineages of interest. We must, therefore, form some broad but definite conceptions about the composition of Naturphilosophie and Romantic biology, which will constitute their provisional definitions, in order to recognize their sources and trace their consequent developments. If such preliminary characterizations are to be strategically useful, though, they must be induced, partly at least, from the actual history of their constituent ideas. Definitions so constructed can then be employed to illuminate the further course of the participant ideas as they extend beyond their preliminary inductive foundations. On the basis of these extending historical analyses, we will be able to refine our understanding of the principal subjects of interest and, accordingly, readjust the definitions. From induction to definition to deductive inference and around again, in historical constructions we raise our understanding by our own semantic bootstraps. Let me then, as propaedeutic to my study, discriminate those ideas that have traveled together for a good part of their history; these will constitute, in a preliminary fashion, the meanings of Romantic biology and of Naturphilosophie. No system of thought in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries will likely include all of these marks; but we will understand a system to be more or less Romantic or naturphilosophisch depending on how many of these notes they do incorporate.

Initially, I think, we must distinguish Naturphilosophie from Romantic science—or rather, Romantic biology as that discipline of science with which I am concerned. The terms Naturphilosophie and romantisch are not the historian’s confections; introduced in the early eighteenth century, they were reoriented by authors at the end of the century for specific semantic purposes. They have different though closely related histories; so I think clarity demands that we define them differently, even if in recent historical literature they are often used interchangeably. Based on their respective histories and the constituent ideas with which they were associated, I wish to suggest that Romantic biology be taken as a species of the wider genus of German nature philosophy. Thus all Romantic biologists were Naturphilosophen, but not all Naturphilosophen were Romantics, at least in the way I propose to use the terms. Romantic thinkers added aesthetic and moral elements to the content of ideas traveling under the rubric of Naturphilosophie. Friedrich Schlegel, as will be discussed in the next chapter, employed the term romantisch precisely to indicate a specific kind of poetic and morally valued literature. I will use the term to distinguish a type of science that retains this aesthetic and moral heritage.

Naturphilosophie

The principal figures of this study adopted a conception, given currency by Kant, Schelling, and Goethe, that regarded living nature as exhibiting fundamental organic types, often called archetypes (archetypi, Urtypen, Haupttypen, Urbilden, and the like); the four most basic animal structures usually discriminated were the radiata (for instance, starfish and medusae), articulata (insects and crabs), mollusca (clams and octopuses), and vertebrata (fish and human beings). These archetypes themselves could be nested within more fundamental types—that of the general animal or the general plant—with the most basic of all being the archetype of the organic per se. Looking in the other direction, more proximate archetypes, as realized in particular organisms, were seen to exfoliate extraordinary subtype variations. Thus the articulata bulged with numerous classes of insects and species of beetles beyond reckoning. These types also exhibited a progressive hierarchy—so, for instance, within the vertebrata, horses were thought more progressively developed organisms than fish.

Kant had maintained that the archetypal structure of organisms suggested that they had been produced by the very ideal they embodied. Such an ideal might reside only in an intellectus archetypus, a mind whose conceptions would be productive—the Divine mind. Yet Kant also held that the proper scientific analysis of nature required the investigator to employ only the categories of Newtonian science. The necessary and universal laws of nature, including living nature, had to be parsed mechanistically—that is, so that an organism and its activities be understood as the determinate consequence of the operations of its parts. The Kantian biologist, then, should only deploy archetypal notions heuristically, as if organisms had been the products of an ideal plan, while yet searching for proper mechanistic causes. Schelling and Goethe—and those biologists following their lead—countered that if archetypes proved a necessary methodological assumption for the biologist, then there was no reason—especially on Kantian grounds—to argue that nature was not intrinsically archetypal, that is, essentially organic rather than mechanistic.

Figure 1.1   Illustrations of the vertebrate archetype (fig. 1) and of an ideal vertebra (fig. 3), from Carl Gustav Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen und Schalengerustes (1828).

The Naturphilosophen usually invoked special causal forces to explain the instantiation of archetypes and their progressive variations. These scientists and philosophers, however, did not consider such forces incompatible with more mundane physical powers; rather, the forces were often conceived as special applications of physical powers (animal electricity and animal magnetism, for instance), emergent from them (Lebenskraft, Bildungstrieb, or natural selection) or even constituting them (e.g., Schelling’s polar forces). Since the Naturphilosophen adopted the metaphysical position of monism, in which matter and Geist (understood indifferently as mind or spirit) were regarded as two features of the same underlying Urstoff, the causal activities of either had ultimately to express a unified force. The natural world—with its various organic types and their vertiginous varieties, its underlying substantial unity, and its particular forces—displayed, it was thought, higher-ordered patterns. Thus, for example, particular types of vegetation might be found at comparable latitudes and altitudes on the different continents; and similar animal forms might be associated with similar plant forms in the New and Old Worlds. Nature, to use Alexander von Humboldt’s term, was a cosmos—a harmoniously unified network of integrally related parts.

The naturphilosophisch theory of archetypes spawned three different theories of their instantiation in nature. Initially, such theorists as Schelling characterized archetypes transcendentally, as features of ideal reality (not an oxymoronic phrase within this tradition). They then explained the appearance of archetypal variations in nature as a consequence of gradual development, or evolution, which instantiated the ideal forms. Theirs was not exactly Darwin’s theory of evolution, rather a theory of dynamische Evolution, as Schelling termed it and Goethe adopted it. To the British mind of the early nineteenth century, the metaphysical position of Schelling and Goethe, grounded as it was in Spinoza’s conception, exuded pantheism—a hardly less noxious form of atheism. Those in England who toed too closely the Naturphilosophie line, thinkers like Joseph Henry Green and Richard Owen, thus risked charges of irreligion. They consequently relocated archetypes in the Divine mind and regarded their appearance in nature as the result of God’s creative activity. The final transformation of archetypal theory was undertaken by that superb English gardener Charles Darwin, whose conception of nature owed much to German Romantic sources. Utilizing his theory of evolution by natural selection, he rooted archetypal structures back in nature, not as abstract entities but as historical creatures. Darwin’s evolutionary theory of archetypes was then replanted by Haeckel in native soil, where it flourished.

The Naturphilosophen commonly thought individual organisms and nature as a whole to be teleologically ordered. In the German context, this did not mean what it was taken to mean in the British context. Kant argued that we had to understand biological organisms as if they had been designed so that disparate parts functioned reciprocally as means and ends, and together contributed to the well-being of the entire individual. For example, the heart contracts for the purpose of circulating the blood, and the blood circulates for the purpose of supplying vital elements to the parts, including the heart, so that they might properly function to maintain the entire organism. After Kant, and especially because of the influence of Goethe and Schelling, biologists came to hold the teleological structure of nature not simply as if but as intrinsic: nature, whether in the individual or at large, really was purposively organized. But the Naturphilosophen, unlike the British natural theologians, did not appeal to a separate Creator who imposed final order on recalcitrant matter. Rather, they conceived nature in Spinozistic fashion—it was Deus sive natura: God and nature were one. This meant that the teleological structuring of biological organisms modeled the conceptual structuring of the ideas in terms of which nature was understood.

This organic conception of nature—given currency by Herder, Goethe, and Schelling—opposed the mechanical ideal stemming from Descartes and Newton. Within the tradition of Naturphilosophie, nature ceased to be mere product of the Creator’s designs but itself became producer—of itself. Self-production and development revealed that nature moved from a simpler, less organized, earlier state to a more progressively developed later state. But this was only to say that nature became temporalized. Like a growing individual, it took on the form of a completely historical entity. The mechanistic conception of nature, by contrast, could not easily support intrinsic temporality: the clockwork mechanism that an intelligent Creator would produce was stable, coherent, and as perfect from the beginning as it would be at the end—save when it ran down a bit and needed a Divine rewinding.¹⁴ The clockwork mechanism itself was, paradoxically enough, fundamentally atemporal and thus ahistorical. But nature as self-productive, as organic, could have a history. In the work of the Naturphilosophen, that history would be understood as inscribed in nature’s very bones: they would argue, for instance, that individual organisms recapitulated the history of their species as they went through their own ontogenic development. The infusion of time into nature was not merely a necessary condition for the appearance of evolutionary theories; it constituted those very theories during the late eighteen and the nineteenth centuries.¹⁵

Romantic Biology

Those scientists to whom I refer as Romantic biologists generally accepted the metaphysical and epistemological propositions of Naturphilosophie. They took more to heart, however, Kant’s analysis of the logical similarity between teleological judgment and aesthetic judgment, which he developed in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of judgment). Romantic biologists came to regard these two kinds of judgment as complementary approaches to nature, approaches that penetrated to the same underlying object. This meant that artistic experience and expression might operate in harmony with scientific experience and expression: the basic structures of nature might thus be apprehended and represented by the artist’s sketch and the poet’s metaphor, as well as by the scientist’s experiment and the naturalist’s observation. Further, Romantic biologists maintained, sometimes explicitly, often implicitly, that the aesthetic comprehension of the entire organism or of the whole interacting natural environment would be a necessary preliminary stage in the scientific analysis of respective parts: both in art and science, comprehension of the whole had to precede that of the parts—the theme Goethe played out for Schiller. Initially, for the biologist, then, ineffable aesthetic experience had to open the way to articulate scientific understanding. And for the reader, this meant that the sketches, drawings, figures, and metaphors that graced biological monographs could not be relegated to the status of dispensable pedagogic aids: images carried a scientific content often impossible to render precisely in words. Art became thus employed in the logic of scientific demonstration.

Romantic thinkers considered the activities of the scientist comparable to that of the artist, for both employed creative imagination. And when addressing nature, both found in their object a source of similar creativity. Nature’s forms—various, unexpected, delightful, but exhibiting a deep unity—had to be regarded as creative expressions as well. Romantic biologists thus concluded that in nature from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.¹⁶

Kant also uncovered a deep logical similarity in the structures of aesthetic judgment and of moral judgment: in each we render a judgment on the basis of mere form (that of the structure of a beautiful object or of the structure of a moral maxim) and each such judgment produces a certain feeling claimed as valid for everyone. So, according to Kant, when evaluating a painting as beautiful or an act as moral, we simultaneously demand that others reach the same conclusion and experience the same regard toward the object or act. Because of these similarities, Schiller argued that the path to political freedom—a kind of moral freedom that respects the autonomy of a citizenry—had to be made through the fields of aesthetic experience. But for biology, given the aforementioned isomorphisms of judgment, this meant that the scientific and aesthetic comprehension of nature also involved a moral component. Romantic biologists thus understood nature to be the repository, not only of lawful regularities and aesthetic delights, but of moral values as well.

Along with nature, the individual self stood as a principal object of moral and aesthetic focus for the Romantics. Fichte’s metaphysics laid the foundation and Schelling’s transcendental philosophy constructed the framework for this concern. According to Fichte, the absolute self created and strove to develop, morally and aesthetically, both the empirical self and the nature that stood over against the individual. Schelling explored the various ways in which the empirical self and nature reflected each other and developed in intimate accord with each other. When a Goethe, a Humboldt, or a Darwin rambled along lovely littoral regions of the Mediterranean or ventured into the exotic jungles of South America, they discovered not only the sublime beauty of their surroundings but their own emerging selves as well. In this respect, nature became for Romantic adventurers the principal resource for the creation of the self—a self that ever hovered just on the horizon of their biological science. Given these preoccupations, the concept of development, of Bildung, helped channel biological research. As a result, most of the scientists I discuss showed an irresistible interest in theories of embryogenesis and species evolution, which they typically regarded as parallel and anchored in that deeper development of self and nature.

There are, of course, those thinkers in the nineteenth century—and today—whose intellectual skeletons display nary a Romantic bone. Arresting scenes of nature that would have moved Goethe, Humboldt, or Darwin to tears of febrile delight evoke only cool calculations or warm impatience. Such souls would be immune to the metaphysics and certainly the aesthetics that characterized the deeper structures of the Romantics’ scientific thought. Fichte perceptively warned that the kind of philosophy adopted by individuals depended on their characters. Even highly ordered and rigorous systems of thought, he observed, were derivable from some first principle, which could not, of course, be demonstrated from within the systems themselves. The selection of a first principle, and thus the logical commitments it compelled, had to be a free choice of individuals.¹⁷ From the perspective of the other Jena philosophers and critics, such as Schelling, this would be expected. Thought, they believed, does not dance naked in the mind, in logically pure abstraction; rather, it must come imaginatively and emotionally dressed. This suggests, correctly I believe, that only certain individuals would have been receptive to the metaphysical and aesthetic doctrines of Romanticism, since those doctrines would have been suited only to a particular personal style. In its hyperbolic form, that style would be realized in the genius (a category given specific Romantic meaning by Kant and Schelling); in its more attenuated form, though, it would reside in other receptive individuals. After all, most intellectuals do, frequently enough, respond aesthetically to given modes of thought, often before logical analysis.

This fusion of thought and feeling, along with the admonition of Fichte, provides further reason for spending time on the biographies of the more important individuals whom this history will treat. For these considerations indicate vaguely, elusively, and, perhaps, maddeningly another criterion of the Romantic: that to which the Romantic personality resonates. What is a Romantic personality? One could answer by saying it is an individual who pursues adventure, follows instincts, seeks to penetrate into the secret depths of reality, responds to the beauties of nature, writes or reads poetry and literature of a certain sort, and is often thrall to love. But it would be better to say, it is Goethe in Rome, lying with his arms about his sleeping mistress and composing a poem, while counting out its measures softly on the vertebrae of her back.

These general definitions of Naturphilosophie and Romantic biology, of course, lack specificity and a context that makes them more intelligible and precise. They need to be rewoven within the mesh of the actual history that gave rise to them. And that history begins with the Romantic movement in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century.

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 his successes in the one and failures in the other. His movement along the trail of both undoubtedly intensified because of the new friend he made at the university, the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), later known as Novalis.

Novalis: the Romantic Personality

The Friendship of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg

Friedrich Schlegel met the nineteen-year-old Hardenberg, already a published poet, in January 1792, when they both were supposedly following the curriculum in law at Leipzig. Hardenberg had just come from a year at Jena, where he submitted to the spell of that greater master Friedrich Schiller—the reason his father pulled him back to Leipzig and serious study of law. The young poet, with dark golden hair flowing down to his shoulders and delicate features, left his imprint on the heart of his friend, as this description, which Friedrich supplied to his brother, attests:

Fate has delivered to my hands a young man who could have come from the absolute. He pleases me greatly and I him. He has opened wide the inner sanctum of his heart to me, and I’ve taken up my place therein and search. A still very young man—a nice slim figure, a fine face with dark eyes, a magnificent expression when he reads something beautiful with fire—an indescribable fire—he reads three times more and three times as fast as we others—the quickest mind and receptivity. The study of philosophy has given him a luxurious lightness with which to form beautiful philosophical thoughts. He doesn’t go after truth, but beauty—his favorite authors are Plato and Hemsterhuys.¹⁷ On one of our first evenings, he lectured me with wild fire in his eyes on the idea that there was nothing evil in the world and that we were again approaching the golden age. I’ve never seen such exuberance of youth. His sensitivity displays a certain chasteness but its foundation in his soul does not stem from inexperience. For he is very often to be found in society (he’ll soon be acquainted with everyone)—he had a year in Jena where he met the beautiful spirits and philosophers, especially Schiller. Yet he was entirely a student in Jena, and, as I hear, often in fights.¹⁸

The poet reciprocated these admiring sentiments. Hardenberg looked to the older student—the difference in their ages (two months!) could hardly be measured by the calendar—as a fount of deep learning in the classics and philosophy. He wrote Schlegel in summer of the next year: I won’t, I think, ever see another man like you. You have become for me the high priest of Eleusis. I have come to know heaven and hell through you—through you I have eaten of the tree of knowledge.¹⁹ Schlegel would discuss with him philosophical ideas from Kant to Schiller and the poetry of the Greeks, Shakespeare, and Goethe, usually with Schlegel taking the tutorial upper hand, except on questions of Schiller’s aesthetics and poetry.²⁰ In their letters they hardly ever mentioned the law, and that subject soon slipped entirely from Schlegel’s formal course of studies.

Schlegel and Hardenberg also abetted each other in love. Indeed, they had love affairs with two daughters of the same prominent Leipzig family, Hardenberg with the seventeen-year-old Julie Eisenstuck and Schlegel with her twenty-four-year-old sister Laura. Schlegel’s affair was complicated by the fact that the lively, beautiful, and vain Laura had a husband—a banker, dreary enough, however, not to be a great obstacle.²¹ For both friends their love relationships ended badly. The