The German Genius

Caroline Böhmer, the daughter of the Orientalist Johann D. Michaelis. She was a “fiery and omni-talented woman” who seems to have been the lover of just about everyone in the Romantic circle and had three husbands, including Friedrich’s brother Wilhelm, and Friedrich Schelling. (Another aspect of the closeness was the fact that Schelling shared a room with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).) 24
    Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), another in the group, was a theologian who, while most of the others were trying to align the arts and sciences, was concerned to establish the role that poets and artists played in religion. “They convey the heavenly and the eternal as an object of pleasure and unity…They strive to awaken the slumbering kernel of a better humanity, to inflame a love for higher things, to transform a common life into a higher one…They are the higher priesthood who transmit the most inner spiritual secrets, and speak from the kingdom of God.” 25
    Novalis (1772–1801) stressed the dark side of human nature, the superiority of night to day, of death to life, and Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) likewise highlighted the fragility of human existence, of doubt and despair, and that, as he tried to show in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg ( Prince Frederick of Homburg ), man is not the master of his own destiny. These were motifs taken up later by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), E. T. A. Hoffmann, Richard Wagner, and Thomas Mann who, in his “Rede vor Arbeitern in Wien” (Speeches to the Workers in Vienna) in 1932, spelled out for his audience the importance of German Romanticism as the ultimate German art form. (In fact, as we shall see, it alternated regularly with social realist works.)
    Several among the Romantics had an interest in science, and here the paradigmatic discipline was biology. The main idea, stemming from Kant but shared by Schelling and Goethe, was that living nature was organized into fundamental types, “archetypes” ( archetypi , Urtypen , Haupttypen , Urbilden , etc). On this understanding there were four basic animal structures: radiata (starfish and medusa), articulata (insects and crabs), mollusca (clams and octopuses), and vertebrata (fish and human beings). 26 It was Kant’s view that the archetypal structure of organisms reflected the very ideal they embodied. For him there was, in effect, a divine mind that imagined these archetypal ideas.
    The Naturphilosophen who came after Kant believed that there were special causal factors that accounted for the “instantiation” of archetypes and their progressive variations. These causal factors were understood as special applications of the physical powers that had emerged in the eighteenth century: animal electricity, for example. They were given names such as Lebenskraft and Bildungstrieb . For them, matter and Geist (understood as both spirit and/or mind) were conceived as two aspects of the same underlying Urstoff . The natural world had an underlying unity, which remained to be discovered. This approach gave rise to several theories about the higher-order patterns in nature. Beginning with the Kantian notion of ideal reality , they explained variations in organisms as a result of the gradual development—the evolution—which “instantiated” progressive variations of the ideal forms. This was not Darwinian evolution, but rather dynamische Evolution , as Schelling termed it. 27
    The Naturphilosophen also accepted that nature was teleologically ordered. From Herder, Goethe, and Schelling on, they opposed the mechanical ideal as developed by Descartes and Newton. Instead, they believed that nature was steadily transformed from a simpler, less organized, earlier state to a higher, more developed, later state. They also accepted Kant’s argument about the similarity between teleological judgment and aesthetic judgment, which he set out in the Kritik der Urteilskraft ( Critique of Judgment ). The most important effect of this was that the Romantics equated these two kinds of judgment, meaning that “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.” 28 Romantic biologists believed that the aesthetic comprehension of an entire organism came first, before science analyzed its respective parts.
    Friedrich