Abstract
This essay looks at the reception of the new discipline of anthropology, which since the 1770s had gradually gained in popularity throughout Europe, among German Romantic philosophers and authors. An analysis of texts by Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Achim von Arnim, Friedrich Schlegel, and Alexander von Humboldt demonstrates an interest in understanding other, non-European cultures among these romantic philosophers and their immediate predecessors. However, the essay also shows that this interest is a highly contradictory one. Romantic anthropology connects culture to territory and, on the basis of this, privileges sedentary over non-sedentary and nomadic cultures, leading to a rejection of cultural mobility. This explains why Romanticism is associated with an interest in other cultures and simultaneously also fostered nationalism and anti-Semitism.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011):648–83. Regarding the pan-European popularity of the term “anthropology” in the late eighteenth century, see Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln, NE / London, UK: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 362, who points out that between 1770 and 1800 forty-three books were printed using a form of “anthropology” in their titles.
- 2.
Anon., Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Amsterdam, 1770), no author or publisher listed. A bibliography of the forty-nine editions of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes published between 1770 and 1843 can be found at http://www.abbe-raynal.org/histoire-des-deux-indes.html.
- 3.
Mr. de P***, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir l’Histoire de l’Espèce humaine, 2 vols. (Berlin: George Jacques Decker, 1768, 1769); a third volume, including a defense of the previous volumes by the author, appeared in 1770.
- 4.
[Georges-Louis Leclerc de] Buffon / [Louis Jean-Marie] Daubenton, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1749), 530. The methodological importance of Buffon for the natural sciences, and in particular of the first three volumes of his Histoire naturelle, is often overlooked today, but is emphasized by older scholar like Ernst Cassirer in his Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998), 102–07. See also Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Muenich/Vienna: Hanser, 1976), 58–62, 71–72, and 75.
- 5.
See Simón Gallegos Gabilondo, Les mondes du voyageur. Une épistémologie de l’exploration (XVIe—XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018), 232; the author discusses Buffon as the model for this type of philosophical approach. The Encyclopédie’s article “PHILOSOPHE” from 1765, authored by César Chesneau Dumarsais, speaks of the need to break the obstacles that religion has put in the way of reason (“ils ont brisé les entraves où la foi mettoit leur raison”) to instead look for causes and live according to the insights gained; in: Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 12 (Neufchatel: Samuel Fauche, 1765), 509–11, here 509.
- 6.
This distinction can be traced back to Melchior Grimm who reported on this division in his Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 2nd. ed., vol. 1 (Paris: F. Buisson, 1812), 490 (dated May 1771); see also Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 67–68, and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parti_philosophique.
- 7.
Herrn von Buffons allgemeine Naturgeschichte. Eine freije mit einigen Zusätzen vermehrte Übersetzung nach der neuesten französ: Außgabe von 1769. 7 vols. (Berlin: Joachim Pauli Buchhändler, 1771–1774).
- 8.
John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 292–93.
- 9.
See Zammito, for instance, op. cit., 178–220, 278.
- 10.
Kant, Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen zur Ankündigung der Vorlesungen der physischen Geographie im Sommerhalbenjahre 1775 (Königsberg: Hartung, 1775), 2–3; Kant refers to Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 4 (1753), 385–86.
- 11.
Kant, 8.
- 12.
See my essay “Buffon, Blumenbach, Lichtenberg, and the Origins of Modern Anthropology,” in: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Race and Natural History, 1750–1850, edited by Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer (Oxon, UK / New York: Routledge, 2019): 27–52, here, 37 and 39.
- 13.
See Steffen Martus, Aufklärung. Das deutsche Jahrhundert—ein Epochenbild (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2014), 13 and 844.
- 14.
As Robert Bernasconi has pointed out, the section of the 1797 edition of Blumenbach’sHandbuch der Naturgeschichte that introduces the concept of “race” contains a footnote that can be read as endorsement by Blumenbach of Kant’s thoughts on the matter: “This difference between races and varieties was first determined precisely by Prof. Kant in the Teutscher Merkur 1788, 1 B, 48” [“Diesen Unterschied zwischen Rassen und Spielarten hat zuerst Hr. Prof. Kant genau bestimmt, im teutschen Mercur 1788. 1. B. S. 48”] (Blumenbach, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, 5th ed. [Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1797]: 23; see Bernasconi, “Kant and Blumenbach’s Polyps: A Neglected Chapter in the History of the Concept of Race,” in: The German Invention of Race, ed., Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore [Albany: SUNY Press, 2006): 73–90, here 84]. In his corrections to the same edition of his Handbuch, Blumenbach adds to his note the following comment (overlooked by Bernasconi): “see regarding this matter in detail Mr. Privy Council Girtanner on the Kantian Principle and Natural History 1796. 8” [“s. hiervon ausführlich Hrn. Geh. Hoft. Girtanner über das Kantische Princip für die Naturgeschichte. Göttingen, 1796. 8”] (24); Blumenbach refers here to Christoph G. Girtanner, Über das Kantische Prinzip für Naturgeschichte. Ein Versuch diese Wissenschaft philosophisch zu behandeln (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1796). This example shows that Kant’s anthropological thinking only gradually gained in acceptance by the scientific community, and only after his three critiques had established his reputation.
- 15.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 4, ed, Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994):10–107, here, 38–39. Chunjie Zhang points to the central role of this statement in literature arguing for Herder’s cultural relativism (Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017], 119–20), but, quite correctly, also points to the many inconsistencies in Herder’s thinking about relativism 120; see also endnotes 5 and 6, at 213).
- 16.
Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher, vol. 6 (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 251, 256. Parenthetical page references in the following refer to this text.
- 17.
See in this context John K. Noyes’s argument that Herder’s thought accepts reason as universal (something that makes humans human) that however can only exist as a plurality and manifests itself in many different ways (Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism [Toronto Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 2015], 301–02).
- 18.
See Sankar Muthu who points to the juxtaposition of sedentary and nomadic cultures in Herder’s work in Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 238–39, 243–44. See my essay “The Romantics and other Cultures,” in: The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 147–62, in particular the section on Jews and Gypsies as outsiders in Romantic culture (152–56), for a further elaboration of this point.
- 19.
I take this title from the translation by Alan Brown (London, UK: Atlas Press, 1990). All translations from Arnim’s text in the following are my own.
- 20.
Achim von Arnim, “Die Majorats-Herren,” Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. 4, ed. Renate Moering (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992):107–47, here 107. Parenthetical references in the text in the following refer to this edition.
- 21.
See “The Romantics and other Cultures” 155; Heinz Härtl, “Romantischer Antisemitismus. Arnim und die ‘Tischgesellschaft,’” in Weimarer Beiträge 33 (1987):1159–73, and Stefan Nienhaus, Geschichte der deutschen Tischgesellschaft (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003). A concise summary of the development of Romantic anti-Semitism can be found in Detlef Kremer, Romantik, 3rd. ed. (Stuttgart / Weimar, J.B. Metzler, 2007), 14–15.
- 22.
Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte. In achtzehn Vorlesungen gehalten zu Wien im Jahre 1828. Edited by Jean-Jacques Anstett (Muenich / Paderborn / Vienna / Zuerich: Ferdinand Schöningh / Thomas-Verlag, 1971), 3. Parenthetical page references in the following refer to this text.
- 23.
Elizabeth Millán distinguishes between Schlegel’s “classical” phase characterized by his “Objektivitätswut” (1793–96), a romantic phase (Fall 1796–1808), and a “conservative” phase (1808–1829) in Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 10–11.
- 24.
Note that Schlegel here uses the term “entarten”—a term that would have a long political reception well into the Third Reich—while Blumenbach, for instance, uses the terms “verarten” and “ausarten”; see “Buffon, Blumenbach, Lichtenberg, and the Origins of Modern Anthropology” (see endnote 12), 38, 41.
- 25.
“Poetry” [“Poesie”] plays a central role in Schlegel’s early thinking; poetry allows for an intuition of the infinite in a finite form, and in fact it makes art central to society (see Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989], 291–92); it creates a social community, and the term is linked to humans’ purposeful acting (as in the Greek term poiesis) (see Matthias Löwe, “Universalpoesie,” in Friedrich Schlegel Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung, edited by Johannes Endres [Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2017], 331–33, here 331 and 333.
- 26.
Schlegel builds these theories on earlier linguistic work in his (influential) book On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians [Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier] from 1808, where he argues for Sanskrit as the root of old Persian, Greek, Latin, and ultimately also the Germanic languages, thus excluding large parts of the Orient from his Germanic genealogy (see “The Romantics and other Cultures,” 151).
- 27.
The term “new mythology” [“neue Mythologie”] first appears in the so-called Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism [Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus] (1796/1797?), a text that seeks an aesthetic legitimation of life out of a critique of the “Machinenstaat” (see Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott. Vorlesungen über die neue Mythologie [Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982], 153ff, esp. 162 and 194). Long before the Ältestes Systemprogramm Herder had already been arguing for a rehabilitation of “myth” in his Vom neueren Gebrauch der Mythologie from 1767 (ibid. 124); Schlegel contributed to the debate through his Rede über die Mythologie from 1800 (205–09). While Schlegel envisions a universal mythology beyond national borders, he simultaneously, according to Frank, considers suspect what is “esoteric, not generally communicable” [“das Esoterische, das nicht allgemein Mitteilbare”], which he associates with the Enlightenment which has fragmented [“zersplittert”] humankind (ibid. 209).
- 28.
Also late in life, after his turn to Catholicism, in a series of articles from 1815 and 1816 Friedrich Schlegel defended the freedom to practice Judaism and civil rights for Jews, understanding Jews as a religiously defined community, in the expectation however that eventually Judaism and Protestantism would merge into Catholicism; see Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 219–20, 350–51.
- 29.
Alexander von Humboldt, “Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse,” in Ansichten der Natur, mit wissenschaftlichen Erläuterungen, vol. 2 (Stuttgart / Tübingen: J.G. Cotta, 1826): 1–47, here 19 (see also 9–10). Parenthetical references in the text in the following refer to this edition. An earlier version of this text was published in volume 1 of the first edition of Ansichten der Natur (Tübingen: J.G. Cotta, 1808): 157–204. A bibliography of Alexander von Humboldt’s writings, including digital copies of the different editions of Ansichten der Natur, can be found at http://www.avhumboldt.de/?page_id=5.
- 30.
Concerning the Ansichten der Natur, Mary Louise Pratt writes of an “interweaving of visual and emotive language with classificatory and technical language”; see Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London / New York: Routledge, 1992), 121.
- 31.
“Die Lebenskraft oder der Rhodische Genius. Eine Erzählung,” in Ansichten der Natur, vol. 2 [1826]:187–200. Parenthetical references in the text in the following refer to this edition. The text was originally published in Die Horen, vol. 1, no. 5, 1795:90–96. In the third edition of Ansichten der Natur Humboldt added comments meant to clarify the scientific issues raised by the story; cf. Ansichten der Natur, mit wissenschaftlichen Erläuterungen, vol. 2 (Stuttgart / Augsburg: J.G. Cotta, 1860): 222–25.
- 32.
See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Knopf, 2016), 53, 106–08.
- 33.
See “The Romantics and other Cultures,” op. cit., 149.
- 34.
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, op. cit., 197.
- 35.
See Wulf, The Invention of Nature, op. cit., 102–03.
- 36.
See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, op. cit., 137–38, 140; on Humboldt and Romantic ideology see also 115, 121, and 124.
- 37.
See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, op. cit., 182, 188, and 197.
- 38.
While I welcome attempts to come to a pluralistic understanding of German Romanticism such as Rüdiger Görner’s “pluralectic” view of Romanticism, it would be wrong, in my view, to see Alexander von Humboldt’sKosmos (1845–1862) as a kind of culmination point of a Romantic interest in a pluralist view of other cultures (for which the Romantic interest in India and Novalis are supposed to serve as examples). Görner simultaneously argues that in KosmosHumboldt is interested in these worlds in their interplay with the German world (cf. Die Pluralektik der Romantik. Studien zu einer epochalen Denk- und Darstellungsform [Vienna / Cologne / Weimar: Böhlau, 2010], 44). Precisely the trend to think of “other” cultures in relation to German culture explains some of the problems with German Romanticism, as I hope to have shown above.
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Niekerk, C. (2020). Romantic Philosophy as Anthropology. In: Millán Brusslan, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53567-4_22
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