The German Genius

views spanned the Atlantic but it was especially strong in Germany. Goethe learned Persian and wrote in the preface to the West-östlicher Divan : “Here I want to penetrate to the first origin of human races, when they still received celestial mandates from god in terrestrial languages.” Heinrich Heine studied Sanskrit under Wilhelm Schlegel at Bonn and under Bopp in Berlin. As he wrote: “Our lyrics are aimed at singing the Orient.” Both Wilhelm Schlegel and Ferdinand Eckstein, another German Orientalist, believed that the Indic, Persian, and Hellenic epics rested on the same fables that formed the basis of the Nibelungenlied , the great medieval German epic of revenge, which Richard Wagner was to rely on for Der Ring des Nibelungen . For Schleiermacher, as for the entire circle around Novalis, the source of all religion “can be found,” according to Ricarda Huch, “in the unconscious or in the Orient, from whence all religions came.” 3
    A C HANGE IN THE M EANING OF I NDIVIDUALITY
     
    In the history of Western political thought, says Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford historian of ideas, “there have occurred three major turning-points.” The first of these took place in the short interval at the end of the fourth century B.C. between the death of Aristotle (384–322) and the rise of Stoicism, when the philosophical schools of Athens “ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life…and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation.” A second turning point was inaugurated by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and involved his recognition that political values “not merely are different from, but may in principle be incompatible with, Christian ethics.” 4 This produced a utilitarian view of religion, discrediting any theological justification for any set of political arrangements.
    The third great turning point—which Berlin argues is the greatest yet—was conceived toward the end of the eighteenth century, with Germany in the vanguard. “At its simplest the idea of romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also—truth and validity as such.” This, says Berlin, has produced incalculable effects. In the past, it had always been taken as read that moral and political questions, such as “What is the best way of life for men?” “What is freedom?” were in principle answerable in exactly the same way as questions like “What is water composed of?” and “When did Julius Caesar die?” It was assumed that the answers were discoverable, because, says Berlin, despite the various religious differences that have existed over time, one fundamental idea united men, though it had three aspects. “The first is that there is such an entity as a human nature, natural or supernatural, which can be understood by the relevant experts; the second is that to have a specific nature is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by God or an impersonal nature of things… the third is that these goals, and the corresponding interests and values (which it is the business of theology or philosophy or science to discover and formulate), cannot possibly conflict with one another—indeed they must form a harmonious whole.”
    It was this idea that gave rise to the notion of natural law and the search for harmony. The rival contention of the Romantics, stemming from Kant, was to cast doubt on the very idea that values, the answers to questions of action and choice, could be discovered at all . This is an important moment in the history of the European consciousness. 5 The Romantics argued that some of these questions simply had no answer. No less originally, they argued that there was no guarantee that values could not, in principle, conflict with one another. Finally, the Romantics produced a new set of values, a new way of looking at values, that was radically different from the old way.
    Kant’s great contribution, as we have seen, was to grasp that it is the mind that shapes knowledge, that there is such a process as intuition, which is instinctive, and that the phenomenon in the world that we can be most certain of is the difference between “I” and “not-I.” 6 On this account, he said, reason “as a light that illuminates nature’s secrets” is inadequate and misplaced as an