The German Genius

did not exist at the time Kant was alive. Theology, as we have seen, was no longer the queen of the sciences.
    This context helps explain the emergence of so-called German Idealism in the late eighteenth century. Insofar as these things can be understood at all, Idealism probably emerged in Germany rather than anywhere else because it was—or had been—the most fiercely Protestant country, with a virile tradition of looking inward to search for the truth, a strong, uncompromising semi-mystical form of self-examination. 2 In Königsberg, there was in addition particular awareness of the ideas of the English and Scottish Enlightenments. This had a lot to do with the British navy’s need for a certain kind of timber for its ships’ masts—flexible and sturdy at the same time. Baltic timber, the trade centered on Königsberg, was just right. This made for a strong British presence in the port and, as is often the case, ideas followed commerce.
    We have seen that among the new sciences taught in the reorganized philosophical faculty at Göttingen was what we would now call “empirical psychology,” though that term did not exist then. The shift to psychology in Germany—in all Europe—was to culminate in Kant, but three other Germans led the way: Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff, and Moses Mendelssohn. 3
    Thomasius, one of the founders of the University of Halle, who daringly lectured in German, not Latin, famously argued that Nature, the source of law, exists independently of God’s will, and that ethics stem from a “special physics”—the empirical science of (human) nature. 4 He devised what he called a “calculus of the passions” as a result of which rational judgments about conduct are (should be) made possible. He went so far as to assign numerical grades to the various passions on a scale from five to sixty. The precision of this system seems absurd now but its importance lies in the fact that Thomasius conceived human nature as a psychological entity, not a theological one. 5
    Christian Wolff, the son of a tanner, is sometimes called the prelector or teacher of Germany. Notoriously ordered out of Halle in 1723, because he argued, unwisely, that “reason does not allow itself to be ordered about,” he was much taken with mathematics because it comprised connected knowledge, connected logically. He tried to apply a similar reasoning to psychology; he thought the soul’s nature could be understood empirically, scientifically, so he too was replacing theological with psychological understanding.
    Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau in 1729 and in 1743 went to Berlin, where he met Lessing, who published his first philosophical tract, the Philosophische Gespräche , in which he argued that genius creates what nature cannot, in the process bringing about new perfections. 6 “A beautiful object enhances the perfection of our bodily state,” and this perfection impacts on the soul. For Mendelssohn, too, individual psychology replaces universal theology. 7
    These were important innovations, radical for their time and, with hindsight, all of a piece. Set beside Kant, however, they are simply confused.
    T HE L IMITS TO R EASON
     
    The sheer intellectual difficulty of the task, to discover what man is and should become, in the absence of a traditional creator or a clear biological understanding—the historical novelty of the predicament—is hard for us to grasp 200 years later. But this difficulty is very evident in the work of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, for example. Many aspects of their thought are hard to grasp, and this is only partly to do with the fact that they were, admittedly, hardly the most elegant of writers. What they were seeking to uncover and describe was difficult; they tried to isolate phenomena that they themselves only glimpsed in moments of lucidity. Nonetheless, “The period of German Idealism constitutes a cultural phenomenon whose stature and influence has been frequently compared to nothing less than the golden age of Athens.” This is Karl Americks, the well-known Kantian scholar, writing in the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. 8 Americks is referring to the overall transformation in thinking achieved by the Idealist philosophers lasting from the 1770s into the 1840s rather than to any particular style. “The texts of German Idealism continue to be an enormous influence on other fields such as religious studies, literary theory, politics, art, and the