The German Genius

it had been evolved by the Enlightenment. Kant had, he felt, identified a “deeper” concept, the “spontaneity of consciousness,” which was reflected in art, which went beyond reason but was just as real. This new “determinant” of consciousness was, for Kant, an important—perhaps the most important—ingredient of freedom. “Only artistic insight discloses a new path to us. In art, in the free play of the powers of the mind, nature appears to us as if it were a work of freedom, as if it were shaped in accordance with an indwelling finality…” 35
    This difference between art and sciences, between the geniuses and scientists, was for Kant a glimpse into the purpose of life. The very idea of purpose comes from within, and the unity that we are driven to impose on art by our inner nature, and the universal subjectivity that exists, allows us to inflict purpose. In doing this, we enlarge ourselves and are able to share that enlargement with others. For Kant, this is what freedom meant, an inner enlargement, a profoundly influential idea in the German-speaking lands.
    Kant’s range and ambition were shown in his project, in 1795, to explore the—to us—ambitious notion of perpetual peace. This side of the cataclysms of the twentieth century, such an idea verges on the preposterous, but it was not so very different when Kant made his attempt. Europe still had its share of absolute states and the blood spilled in the French Revolution and its aftermath was still wet. Kant had recently (in 1793 and 1794) evolved his idea about an ethical commonwealth, a moral community, an invisible church, by means of which the highest good, “the autonomous will of men,” would be achieved. In his plan for perpetual peace he set down various conditions—standing armies shall be governed by conditions of universal hospitality—many, if not all, of which sound to us (as no doubt to his colleagues and neighbors) as impossibly idealistic. But there was one that, as it turned out, was not impossibly idealistic and, in time, was at least half realized. This was his proposal that “The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican.” This, he thought, was the original basis of every form of civil constitution and it was, in its time, radical. But it lives on now, not just in the spread of democracies, or republics, but in the notion (which feels modern but dates back to Kant) that democracies are reluctant to declare war on each other.
    T HE R ISE OF J ENA
     
    Jena was and was not like Weimar. It had always been a small town, like countless others, populated mainly by artisans, and with a second-rate university: nothing exceptional. Then, all at once, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, it suddenly blossomed as the center of a new revolution in German intellectual life. 36
    Goethe himself was partly responsible. By his position, his character, by his very presence, he made Weimar and Jena rise in profile, and the university at Jena became the very model of a reformed, even what has been called a “Kantian” university. This was still an age when many universities were considered irrelevant and unruly nuisances, but Jena adopted the more successful and more modern Halle/Göttingen model—the union of teaching and research where students were brought into contact with leading minds working on the latest ideas. Also following the Göttingen model, the philosophical faculty, rather than the theological faculty, was the main focus of activity. A new periodical, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung , was founded there and it soon became the most widely read intellectual journal in Germany. 37 According to Terry Pinkard, in his study of the legacy of Idealism, the public that subscribed to journals like the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung read and discussed Kant “with the same intensity as novels and more popular literature.”
    One of the first post-Kantians there was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), who, in 1785, turned Kant’s critical approach on the master himself. He developed the view that, fundamentally, reason “takes its first principles” from the heart and not from the head and that, contrary to what Kant said, “ all knowledge must rest on some kind of faith.” What he meant was that, underlying all thought, whatever it is, there must be something, a first principle, that cannot itself be proved by reference to something else, that exhibits what he called “immediate certainty.” 38 For