The German Genius

rather junior member of the movement but all of them—Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Heinrich Merck, and Johann Michael Reinhold Lenz, in addition to Klinger—were characterized by extreme youth (Lenz was nineteen in 1770, Klinger eighteen) and by, in general, temperamental instability, the defiance of accepted modes of thought and norms of behavior, restlessness, discontent, even maladjustment. Their works, essentially middle class (they were all university men), disparaged the modern state and all mercantile enterprises, and they delighted in physical exercise and nature (the wilder the better). They attacked “polite” society and followed their intuition, believing life to be both tragic and exhilarating.
    It is possible to see the Sturm und Drang movement as very young and very tiresome but, as we shall see, in their more mature years, most of them went on to create great works. As we shall also see with the Nazarenes, the existence of an early group identity gave them a self-confidence they might otherwise have lacked.
    The final and distinctive achievement of the historicist Aufklärer approach was the conception of a Bildungsstaat —a state whose main ideal was to enrich the inner life of man. 27
    T HE O RIGINS OF M ODERN B IOLOGY
     
    This new idea of nature had another important set of ramifications which made a basic contribution to the revolution in European thought in the eighteenth century, and here too German writers helped lead the way. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Sulzer, and Thomas Abbt all criticized—and criticized bitterly—the shortcomings of the mechanistic approach and pointed instead to the biological world where, they felt, the timeless nature of Newtonian-type laws was completely inappropriate and inadequate. The study of living forms, they insisted, offered the opportunity for what they called “immediate” or “experiential” understanding. The experience of other people, animals, and plants was direct, unlike the experience of, for example, mathematics. This mode of understanding, Resewitz’s anschauende Erkenntnis , became the major approach to knowledge in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Aestheticians abandoned the study of the eternal rules of composition to examine instead the process of artistic creation; jurists turned away from their attempts to discover the eternal laws of civil association, preferring instead to focus on the development of law within society; perhaps most important of all, natural scientists turned to the study of growth and development. 28 This underlines just what a great intellectual revolution historicism was in helping to create the modern age.
    “The word ‘biology’ is a child of the nineteenth century.” Until the seventeenth century, biological science as we understand it now comprised two fields: natural history and medicine. As the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, natural history began to break up into zoology and botany, although many people as late as Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck moved freely between the two. At much the same time, anatomy, physiology, surgery, and clinical medicine also diverged. To begin with, both anatomy and botany were practiced primarily by physicians (they dissected the human body and collected medicinal herbs), and animals were studied mainly as an aspect of natural theology. 29 The underlying reality is that the so-called scientific revolution of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries actually occurred only in the physical sciences, leaving the biological sciences largely unaffected. 30
    Long before the eighteenth century, the ancient Greeks had conceived the idea that there is a purpose—a predetermined end—in nature and its processes. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this ideal had coalesced around the notion of the scala naturae , the Great Chain of Being, culminating in man. The manifold adaptations of organisms to their environment—everywhere apparent—fostered the idea of a “harmony” in the natural world that could only have been produced by God. The apparent goal-directed processes in the development of individuals were just too conspicuous to be discounted. Final causes must be involved, as Immanuel Kant, among others, acknowledged (see Chapter 2).
    Overall, the concept was known as cosmic teleology—the universe is proceeding toward some particular end, predetermined by God. Until the