Schiller’s Romantic Rational Reconstruction of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 10 November 2024 is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (10 November 1759–09 May 1805), who was born in Marbach am Neckar, in the Duchy of Württemberg, on this date in 1759.
In several episodes I have quoted a paragraph from Arthur O. Lovejoy that counts Schiller with Kant, Herder, and Lessing as progressivist German philosophers of history of the Enlightenment, but he was not only a philosopher. Schiller was also the author of classic dramas such as The Robbers, Wallenstein, and William Tell. Schiller was a friend of Goethe, and between the two of them they are taken to define the style that has come to be known as “Weimar Classicism.” In this, and like Herder, his work transcends the Enlightenment and also represents romanticism, but his philosophy of history is quite different from that of Herder. Kant, Lessing, Schiller, and Herder do all share a progressive vision of history, but Kant and Lessing exemplify the Enlightenment, while Schiller and Herder exemplify romanticism.
Schiller is, in fact, one of the greatest of the writers of the romantic era. His play The Robbers was a sensation when it premiered in 1782, and it made Schiller famous. Verdi wrote an opera that was an adaptation of The Robbers. And Schiller wrote a treatise on poetry that has been translated as “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry” and as “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” Before he wrote this poetical treatise, he had put this poetical theory into practice. In 1788 he wrote a poem titled “The Gods of Greece” were Schiller conceives the ancient gods as they appeared to the Romantic imagination:
Ye in the age gone by,
Who ruled the world — a world how lovely then! —
And guided still the steps of happy men
In the light leading-strings of careless joy!
Ah, flourished then your service of delight!
How different, oh, how different, in the day
When thy sweet fanes with many a wreath were bright,
O Venus Amathusia!
Then, through a veil of dreams
Woven by song, truth’s youthful beauty glowed,
And life’s redundant and rejoicing streams
Gave to the soulless, soul — where’r they flowed
Man gifted nature with divinity
To lift and link her to the breast of love;
All things betrayed to the initiate eye
The track of gods above!
This is a depiction of Greek religion that’s filled with sentiment, longing, and loss, and these romantic attitudes to religion resonated in intellectual life throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. In the nineteenth century, the young Hegel wrote several essays on religion in which he imagined the Greeks had a more intimate relationship to the divinities, which had since come to be drained of this authentic feeling for a connection to the divine. In the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber echoed many of Schiller’s themes in his thesis on the disenchantment of the world. Weber said in his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” (“Wissenschaft als Beruf”):
“…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather… one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.” (Weber, 1946)
The romantics weren’t the first to intuit this changed human relationship to the world, though they seem to have been the first to mourn this recognition. Earlier figures of the scientific revolution had a much more combative attitude, seeing nature as a force to be mastered and subdued. I could argue that the triumph of the scientific revolution only became evident by the time of the romantic era, and, once this triumph of science was evident, the earlier pre-scientific relationship to the natural world then had the appearance of the lost innocence of childhood.
The romantic attitude is a comprehensive vision of the world, and therefore at the same time a comprehensive vision of history. We could even call it a metaphysical conception that leaves nothing untouched. In John Neubauer’s 1972 paper, “The idea of history in Schiller’s Wallenstein,” Neubauer wrote:
“Can it be that human history is merely a chaos & random events where each subsequent deed cancels the effect of the previous one, or is there a yet uncoded ‘natural’ law that gives to events a hidden order and coherence? This is Wallenstein’s metaphysical question which is ignored by all interpreters who see him only as a ‘realist.’ Among the characters of the play only Wallenstein and Max seek an order that would give to the fragmented world of the Thirty Years War an encompassing meaning. True, Wallenstein’s search is guided by ulterior motives as well: to know the rhythm of history means being lord of it. Yet even if coupled with megalomania, the drive is metaphysical.”
Literary critics have found metaphysics in Shakespeare, so we shouldn’t be surprised to also find metaphysics in Schiller’s plays. In a paper by Beatrix Langner that hasn’t been translated into English, “The Name of the Flower: Schiller’s tragedy The Bride of Messina as a dramaturgy of historical reason” (“Der Name der Blume: Schillers Trauerspiel Die Braut von Messina als Dramaturgie der geschichtlichen Vernunft”), she says that:
“Several research projects over the last thirty years suggest the view that Schiller, due to ‘his religious-moral disposition,’ was increasingly guided in his later dramas by ‘metaphysical principles’ of an eschatological interpretation of history.”
In this connection I should note that the title of this paper in German calls Schiller’s work “Trauerspiel,” which was the topic of Walter Banjamin’s thesis that so shocked his advisors that they asked him to withdraw it from consideration. I discussed this in my episode on Walter Benjamin.
The temper of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment was to see reason everywhere and in everything. It stands to reason that Schiller would find it in Wallenstein as well, but as a post-Enlightenment thinker, Schiller not only found reason in everything, but Schiller’s reason comes as part and parcel of a metaphysical vision of history that earlier Enlightenment thinkers didn’t have. The Enlightenment was, in part, a reaction against the brutality of the Thirty Years War, and insofar as the Enlightenment continues to shape our world today (and I argue that it does), a reaction to the Thirty Years War continues to shape our world today. Today we tend not to see this, as we live in the aftermath of the world wars of the twentieth century, which have shaped our world in visible ways, but we are also shaped by older wars, and the reaction against older wars.
Schiller seems to have been profoundly influenced by the Thirty Years’ War. In addition to a drama set during the Thirty Years’ War, Wallenstein, Schiller was also an historian who wrote a history of the Thirty Years’ War. In this history he has a particularly dramatic and moving account of the Sack of Magdeburg, which occurred on 20 May 1631 — more than 150 years before Schiller’s time, but still apparently a powerful memory in his time. Schiller’s The History of the Thirty Years War emphasized the horrors of what came to be called “Magdeburgization” (“Magdeburgisieren”), which was coined after the sack and used to describe the total devastation suffered by the city, then one of the largest cities in Germany. The idea of Magdeburgization is familiar in our own time, although by different names; this has a contemporary sound to our ears, since we are all too familiar with place names being transformed into symbols of war and destruction. This kind of systematic destruction of civilian centers as tactic of war only fully came into its own in the twentieth century, as I described in my episodes on the bombing of Dresden, the Advent of the Nuclear Age, and the Beginning of the Second World War.
Schiller’s claim to being a philosopher of history was a lecture delivered on 26–27 May 1789, “What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History?” This was Schiller’s inaugural lecture after his appointment as professor of history at Jena — a position that Goethe had helped him to secure. Jena was where, a generation later, Hegel would write his Phenomenology of Mind, the manuscript of which he had in hand when he fled Jena because of the Battle of Jena-Aauerstadt, seeing Napoleon and famously describing him later in a letter as the worldspirit on horseback.
Many have invoked universal history, but what does Schiller mean by it? Schiller begins by imagining an ideal history, but “Only the infinite understanding can survey these events wholly and completely; for man, narrower limitations are set.” Schiller then sets out four limitations the kind of non-ideal history to which human beings can reasonably aspire, which four limitations are:
- Events that had had no human observer: “The entire epoch prior to speech, however momentous it may have been for the world, is lost to world history.”
- Events handed down by tradition are unreliable: “all events prior to the use of the written word, therefore, are as good as lost to world history.”
- Written sources are subject to the vicissitudes of time, accident and loss: “Most of them, by and large, are lost to world history, together with the information they should have provided us.”
- Surviving accounts are disfigured by passion and failures of judgment: “Our mistrust awakens at the oldest of historic monuments, and it does not leave us even at the chronicles of the present day.”
Having stipulated these four limitations on non-ideal history, “The small sum of events remaining after all these deductions have been made is the substance of history in its broadest understanding.” After these preliminaries, he presents universal history as a selection principle:
“Out of the entire sum of these events, the universal historian selects those which have had an essential, irrefutable, and easily ascertainable influence upon the contemporary form of the world, and on the conditions of the generations now living. It is the relationship of an historical fact to the present constitution of the world, therefore, which must be seen in order to assemble material for world history. World history thus proceeds from a principle, which is exactly contrary to the beginning of the world. The real succession of events descends from the origin of objects down to their most recent ordering; the universal historian ascends from the most recent world situation, upwards toward the origin of things. ”
In a chapter titled “Schiller’s Philosophy of History” in the 2023 Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, Andree Hahmann says that this is a constructivist philosophy of history:
“…this philosophy of history is essentially constructivist insofar as the historian has to establish a systematic whole that rightly deserves to be called universal history.”
And Hahmann goes on to say:
“…the current state of affairs provides the starting point of the universal historian to look for past events that had the highest impact on the development of world history and finally brought about or fundamentally contributed to the determination of the current world state. This is a highly remarkable claim, not only because it nicely depicts Schiller’s above-mentioned constructivist approach to universal history. We can also see more clearly how the teleological principle helps to establish a system from isolated facts by the application of causal laws that are effective in history. It is precisely in the way Schiller applies these causal principles that it becomes most evident how his universal history departs from world history, understood as the sum or collection of all historical facts.”
What Hahmann is describing is what Kant called a transcendental argument, but Kant employed transcendental arguments in his epistemology, where they take the form of arguing what must be the case in order for our knowledge of the world to be what it is. Hahmann is effectively crediting Schiller with a transcendental argument in history, where we give an historical account, based on the present, that demonstrates that which was necessary for the present to be what it is and as it is. We can understand this in a trivial way, since a great deal of history is a simple function of how the present came to be what it is, but I think that Schiller managed to wring more out of the idea than this trivial sense implies.
Schiller finds reason in history through a teleological understanding rooted in the present, rather than being a telos rooted in the future, as we find in most forms of teleology, which guides the universal or philosophical historian to select those events from the past that proved to be important in the constitution of the present. We could see this as a form of Whiggish history, such as Herbert Butterfield warned us about, but we can also see it as a form of rationalism seeking to reconstruct the origins of the present.
As both an Enlightenment and a romantic figure, Schiller had no great love for conventional scholarship, which he calls “Scholasticism.” In his inaugural lecture, Schiller erects a distinction between what he calls the “bread-and-butter scholar” and the philosopher, as a way to illustrate the search for a more rational and coherent whole in the teeth of hidebound complacency:
“As carefully as the bread-and-butter scholar keeps his discipline clear of everything extraneous, so the philosopher endeavors to expand his, and to restore its connections with the others. I say ‘restore,’ because one discipline has been distinguished from another only by boundaries created by the analytic understanding. Where the bread-and-butter scholar puts asunder, the philosopher joins together. He has early reached the conviction that in the realm of understanding, as in the domain of sensation, everything is interconnected, and his active drive for coherence cannot remain satisfied with fragments. All his efforts are directed toward perfecting his knowledge; in divine discontent he cannot rest until he has ordered all his ideas into a coherent whole, until he locates himself in the exact center of his art, of his science, and from this vantage point surveys with satisfaction its territory. New discoveries in the field of his activity, which are disheartening to the bread-and-butter scholar, delight the philosophical mind. Perhaps they fill a gap which had disfigured the developing totality of his ideas, or fit the last, still missing stone into the edifice of his ideas and complete it.”
This is the Enlightenment par excellence — a dramatic re-phrasing of Kant’s Sapere aude! (Dare to know!) History must be taken apart in order to be put back together again more perfectly, and this because of the inner necessity as reason converges on perfection and forces us, in obedience to reason, to revise all that we have done, or even to discard what we have done and start over again. We could call this a rational reconstruction of history. Ideally, this is how science has functioned since the scientific revolution, and this is how Schiller believed that historical reason should also function.
