The German Genius

Bonn, and Humboldt had been succeeded by Kaspar Friedrich von Schuckmann. 10
    No less important than the organizational and institutional reforms of the university were the theoretical innovations, the spiritual and philosophical rejuvenation, as Turner puts it. “Their common tenets may be grouped under one name, Wissenschaftsideologie . This new concept went on to unprecedented success during the years following the founding of Berlin University. It became the official ideology of the German universities during the nineteenth century, endowed with an awesome, almost religious status, an ideology that has defined the ‘idea’ of the German university, with its emphasis on the unity of research and teaching.” 11
    Besides Humboldt, five other individuals carved out the fundamentals of this Wissenschaftsideologie. Fichte was the best known, writing On the Vocation of the Scholar , given as a series of lectures and published as pamphlets at Jena and Berlin between 1794 and 1807. Schelling, Henrik Steffens, Schleiermacher, and Wolf all added their thoughts to his. Through them two intellectual traditions came together in Wissenschaftsideologie. 12 First, the new tradition owed a great deal to Idealist philosophy, by then centered at Jena. Following Lorenz Oken and Schelling himself, Steffens became the chief advocate of Naturphilosophie , regarded as the scientific branch of Idealism (covered in Chapter 8, on Romanticism). But Wissenschaftsideologie was rooted, secondly, in the tradition of academic neohumanism associated with the University of Göttingen. Wolf and Humboldt had both studied under Heyne, while Schleiermacher had become known as a philologist through his editions of Plato. “The glories of Greece and Rome, they argued, could best enhance the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of German students. Hence their study should precede all later, professional study, not only in their gymnasiums but also in the university. Broader and deeper immersion in the classics, the neohumanists believed, would go far to eliminate both the crass utilitarianism of the eighteenth century universities and the corruption of student life.” 13
    There was also the fact that these advocates of Wissenschaftsideologie believed in an important difference between school and university. At school the pupil gained information; at university he learned judgment and independence. Schleiermacher in particular thought the universities—between the schools and the academies—“were suited to ‘the German genius’…the university is thus concerned with the initiation of a process…nothing less than a whole new intellectual life process, to awake the idea of learning (Wissenschaft) in youth…so that it becomes second nature for them to consider everything from the point of view of learning.” 14 Schleiermacher and others believed that universities were more than just higher schools. Thus was born the concept of Brotstudium , “bread studies.” Bread studies provided the student with enough information for a job, but not to advance learning.
    All this, a new understanding of what it meant to be educated, was being created in Wissenschaftsideologie. The Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical systems identified two modes of Being, the Real and the Ideal. According to Schelling, Wissenschaft “is knowledge of the absolute unity existing between the Ideal and the Real. Wissenschaft is the philosophical insight that there is unity between the Real and the Ideal. Wissenschaft is innate in all men but it is a growing thing, evolving and dynamic and so central to this was the concept of Bildung , also drawn from idealist philosophy—the process of becoming in an educative sense. Under this system, discovery—research—was a moral act as much as anything.” 15
    It wasn’t far from this to Fichte’s argument that the scholar, the professor, is the natural leader and teacher of mankind. “The scholar should be morally the best man of his age; he should exhibit in himself the highest grade of moral culture then possible.” 16 There were doubters, who thought that neohumanism was atheistic and subversive but, curiously enough, in a Romantic age, scholars personified the Romantic individual. By 1817 Berlin had replaced Jena as the focal point of the new university ideology.
    But the new universities coincided with a patriotic revival in Prussia and in Germany generally, and the contribution of the university students in the war of