The German Genius

explanation. Instead, Kant said, the process of birth is a better metaphor, implying that human reason creates knowledge. To find out what I should do in a given situation, I must listen to “an inner voice.” According to the sciences, reason was essentially logical and applied across nature equally. But the inner voice does not conform to this scenario. Its commands are not necessarily factual statements at all and, moreover, are not necessarily true or false. The purpose of the inner voice, often enough, is to set someone a goal or a value, and these have nothing to do with science, but are created by the individual. It was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and totally new.
    In the first instance (and for the first time), it was realized that morality was a creative process but, in the second place, and no less important, it laid a new emphasis on creation, and elevated the artist alongside the scientist. It is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values. The artist does not discover, calculate, deduce, as the scientist (or philosopher) does. The artist invents his goal and then realizes his own path toward that goal. “Where, asked Herzen, is the song before the composer has conceived it?” * Creation in this sense is the only fully autonomous activity of man and for that reason takes pre-eminence. At a stroke, art was transformed and enlarged, no longer mere imitation, or representation, but expression , a far more important, more significant and ambitious activity. “A man is most truly himself when he creates. That, and not the capacity for reasoning, is the divine spark within me; that is the sense in which I am made in God’s image.” 7
    We are still living with the consequences of this revolution. The rival ways of looking at the world—the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist—constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible. As Berlin has put it, we shift uneasily from foot to foot as we recognize this incompatibility.
    The dichotomy was shown first and most clearly in Germany. 8 The turn of the nineteenth century saw Napoleon’s great series of victories, over Austria, Prussia, and several smaller German states, and these failures created a desire for renewal in the German lands. In response, many German-speakers turned inward to intellectual and aesthetic ideas as a way to unite and inspire their people. “Romanticism is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the eighteenth century, the German-speaking countries were the most tormented in Europe.” 9
    The route from Kant to the Romantics was not a straight line, but it was clear. For Herder, it was the “expressive power” of human nature that had produced some very different cultures across the world. Fichte portrayed the self as “activity, effort, self-direction. It wills, alters, carves up the world both in thought and in action, in accordance with its own concepts and categories.” Kant conceived this as an unconscious, intuitive process but for Fichte it was instead “a conscious creative activity…I do not accept anything because I must,” Fichte insists, “I believe it because I will.” There are two worlds, and man belongs to both. There is the material world, “out there,” governed by cause and effect, and there is the inner spiritual world, “Where I am wholly my own creation.” “Contemplative knowledge,” the ideal of the Middle Ages, is the wrong model, says Fichte. “What matters is action…Knowledge is not to be looked upon passively but is to be used, used to help us create, for creation is freedom.” 10
    This was a provocative idea, says Berlin, because through Fichte it became applied to nations, and nations could only become nations by creating, acting, doing . Nationalism, active nationalism, therefore became the natural stance. “So Fichte ends as a rabid German patriot and nationalist, who thought that Germany had not been corrupted as the Latin nations had.” 11 Fichte beefed up this view in his famous address to the German nation, written after Napoleon had conquered Prussia. The speeches themselves had little impact but later, when they were read, they contributed to a huge upsurge of nationalist feeling “and went on being read by Germans throughout the nineteenth century, and became their bible