The German Genius

so that the “distinguishing mark of the German spirit” is a supreme regard for inner truth and the inner meaning of things, “as against, say, the externality of the Latin spirit or the utilitarianism of Angla-Saxondom.” 30 Dewey conceded: “It does seem to be true that the Germans, more readily than other peoples, can withdraw themselves from the exigencies and contingencies of life into a region of Innerlichkeit , which at least seems boundless; and which can rarely be successfully uttered save through music, and a frail and tender poetry, sometimes domestic, sometimes lyric, but always full of mysterious charm.” 31
    A second achievement of Kant, said Dewey, after the separation of the realms, came in “the gospel of duty,” Kant’s idea of self-imposed duty as stern but noble, as a phenomenon that separates us from the animals. Equally important, however, Dewey felt that Kant had told us to do our duty without specifying what those duties were, or are. 32
    He also thought the distinction made in Germany between society and state was important, as was that between civilization and culture. “Civilisation is a natural and largely unconscious or involuntary growth. It is, so to speak, a by-product of the needs engendered when people live close together…Culture, on the other hand, is deliberate and conscious. It is a fruit not of man’s natural motives, but of natural motives that have been transformed by the inner spirit…And the real significance of the term ‘culture’ becomes more obvious when [Kant] adds that it involves the slow toil of education of the Inner Life, and that the attainment of culture on the part of an individual depends upon long effort by the community to which he belongs.” 33
    Dewey went on to examine the ideas of society and the state. In American and British usage, he said, “the state” generally refers to society “in its more organised aspects,” one government agency or another. But in Germany, “the State, if not avowedly something mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral entity, the creation of self-consciousness operating in behalf of the spiritual and ideal interests of its members. Its function is cultural, educative…its purpose is the furtherance of an ideal community…Hence the peculiar destiny of the German scholar and the German State. It was the duty and mission of German science and philosophy to contribute to the…spiritual emancipation of humanity…The scholar…is, in a peculiar sense, the direct manifestation of God in the world—the true priest…” 34
    This was, one can now see, a perceptive analysis of the achievements of nineteenth-century Germany and a delicate and eloquent exploration of how Germany differed from, say, France, Britain, and the United States. Dewey’s final point was that there had been an unfolding of a great sequence in that same nineteenth-century Germany—1815, 1864, 1866, 1870–71—which he put alongside the fact that Germans had accepted the idea of evolution long before Darwin came up with natural selection. Added to this, “The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance…” 35
    In contrast, a parallel and simultaneous work by George Santayana, while not devoid of numerous perceptive comments, was written with such sarcasm and bile that the author’s attitude repeatedly got in the way of what he was trying to say. Santayana (1863–1952), born in Madrid, studied in Germany under Paulsen, and then became one of the best teachers Harvard ever had (his pupils included Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, and Samuel Eliot Morison). He retired back to Europe, from where he published Egotism in German Philosophy in 1916, covering much the same ground as Dewey—Kant, Fichte, Hegel—but adding Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for good measure.
    Santayana didn’t think much of any of them. He thought transcendental theory was a set of “desperate delusions,” even that there was “something sinister” at work beneath it all, close to a (false) religion. 36 He admitted there was “an obvious animus pervading these pages, which it was a pleasure for me to vent.” 37 He conceded that the direction in which German philosophy was profound was its inwardness, its consciousness of “inward light and of absolute duties” but he thought this was egotistical, and