The German Genius

the same period. In fact, between 1820 and 1840 the number of professors increased by a bigger proportion than did the number of students (187 percent and 50 percent in philosophy, 113 percent and 22 percent in medicine). At Berlin, financial support for scientific institutions was increased—from 15.5 percent in 1820 to 34 percent in 1850. “The intellectual cannot be too highly valued. It is the basis of all that on which the strength of the state can eternally rest.” 41
    The ministry frequently imposed its intellectual viewpoint. The most well-known example is Hegelianism, which before 1830 became a virtual state-philosophy in Prussia, where the ministry ensured its dominance by granting Hegel’s students a near monopoly over chairs of philosophy. Altenstein, Eichhorn, and Schulze all saw to it that no one could become a professor until he had published a “solid” book. 42 The dual nature of the professoriate—teaching and research—had become a fact of academic life. Younger scholars, bloodied in the emerging “research imperative,” saw specialized research as the only road to a professorship. These new values were the basis for the great new institutes and laboratories that proved to be a jewel of the Bismarckian era. 43

The Evolution of Alienation
     
    I ntellectual tastes and fashions are curious entities. In 1808, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were premiered at exactly the same moment as Caspar David Friedrich’s The Cross on the Mountain . In 1839, as Peter von Cornelius was completing his vast fresco of the Creation, Redemption, and the Last Judgment in the Ludwigskirche in Munich, Felix Mendelssohn was conducting the first performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony in C Major (The Great Symphony). German music remains as popular as ever, but German painting of the period 1750–1850 (and in fact somewhat later), has sunk into—if not oblivion—marked neglect. A related paradox concerns German speculative philosophy. It too was regarded at the time as a bright star in the firmament—the names of Schelling, Feuerbach, and, above all, Hegel were on everybody’s, not just German, lips in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the cold light of the twenty-first century, however, these names—and the very act of speculative philosophy itself—seem very distant.
    Speculative philosophy had a special status just then because, once again, Europe was in that intellectual time frame between doubt and Darwin. Religion, Christianity in particular, was in retreat and with it the concept of revelation. Philosophy naturally filled this intellectual gap but was speculative in the sense that such thoughts and insights of the philosophers, wherever they came from, had to convince others by force of reason and internal consistency rather than by ecclesiastical authority. At the same time (and this is the paradox) this speculative philosophy, especially that of Hegel, gave rise to one of the most powerfully influential—perhaps the most influential—philosophy the world has ever seen: Marxism. If Marxism is fading now as a political force, it is still seen in many quarters as a useful analytic form of understanding. And in the concept of “alienation” we find one of the most powerful ideas shaping the phenomenon of modernism. It has affected painting, the novel, theater, and film, not to mention psychology.
    We begin, not with Hegel or Marx but with Friedrich Schelling. A member of that small closed circle of German Romantics, he included among his most intimate friends such figures as Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and the Schlegels. In his own thought he was chiefly concerned with what he saw as “deep and pervasive affinities” between man and nature. 1 Nature, for him and others like him, was the product of an active “organizing principle” or “world soul” ( Weltseele ). This principle “externalized” itself as objective phenomena, which together reflected a unity that was ultimately to be understood in teleological terms; in other words, and put simply, there is a continual process of creation, and its various levels are related to one another in a purposive manner. 2 These stages of creation could be investigated by the different branches of science—physics or biology—but they could not be truly understood in isolation; some overarching system was needed for a complete perspective. For Schelling there were three obvious and all-important levels. There was the