The Self-Government of Genius

Man is the last and highest link in nature; his task is to understand what she aims at in him and then to fulfil her intentions.

Continuing Goethe and the Intellectual Revolt of Germany,
our selection from German Thought During the Last Two Hundred Years by Karl Hillebrand published in 1880. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Goethe and the Intellectual Revolt of Germany.

Time: 1775
Place: Germany

For it was Herder who discovered the true spirit of history, and in this sense it is that Goethe was justified in saying of him:

A noble mind, desirous of fathoming man’s soul in whatever direction it may shoot forth, searcheth throughout the universe for sound and word which flow through the lands in a thousand sources and brooks; wanders through the oldest as the newest regions and listens in every zone.” “He knew how to find this soul wherever it lay hid, whether robed in grave disguise, or lightly clothed in the garb of play, in order to found for the future this lofty rule: Humanity be our eternal aim!”

Among the young literary rebels who, under Herder’s guidance, attempted, toward and after 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all authority, even all law and rule, in order to put in their stead the absolute self-government of genius, freed from all tutorship — the foremost were the two greatest German poets, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe’s Goetz and Werther, Schiller’s Brigands and Cabal and Love, were greeted as the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their subjects were German and modern, not French or classic; in their plan they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once familiar, strong, and original; in their inspiration they were protests against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement outbursts of individuality against convention.

Not twenty years had passed away, when both the revolutionists had become calm and resigned liberal conservatives, who understood and taught that liberty is possible only under the empire of law; that the real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world, which knows no frontiers; that to be completely free man must fly into the ideal sphere of art, science, or formless religion. Not that they abjured “the dreams of their youth.” The nucleus of their new creed was contained in their first belief; but it had been developed into a system of social views more in harmony with society and its exigencies, of aesthetic opinions more independent of reality and its accidents, of philosophical ideas more speculative and methodical. In other words, Goethe and Schiller never ceased to believe, as they had done at twenty, that all vital creations in nature as in society are the result of growth and organic development, not of intentional, self-conscious planning, and that individuals on their part act powerfully only through their nature in its entirety, not through one faculty alone, such as reason or will, separated from instinct, imagination, temperament, passion, etc. Only they came to the conviction that here existed general laws which presided over organic development, and that there was a means of furthering in the individual the harmony between temperament, character, understanding, and imagination, without sacrificing one to the others. Hence they shaped for themselves a general view of nature and mankind, society and history, which may not have become the permanent view of the whole nation; but which for a time was predominant, which even now is still held by many, and which in some respects will always be the ideal of the best men in Germany, even when circumstances have wrought a change in the intellectual and social conditions of their country, so as to necessitate a total transformation and accommodation of those views.

We cannot regard it merely as the natural effect of advancing years if Goethe and Schiller modified and cleared their views; if Kant, whose great emancipating act, the Critique of Pure Reason, falls chronologically in the same period (1781), corrected what seemed to him too absolute in his system, and reconstructed from the basis of the conscience that metaphysical world which he had destroyed by his analysis of the intellect. The world just then was undergoing profound changes. The great “Philosopher-king” had descended to the tomb (1786), and with him the absolute liberty of thought which had reigned for forty-six years. The French Revolution, after having exalted all generous souls, and seemingly confirmed the triumph of liberty and justice which the generation had witnessed in America, took a direction and drifted into excesses which undeceived, sobered, and saddened even the most hopeful believers. As regards personal circumstances, the Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788) and his scientific investigations into nature, the study of Kant’s new philosophy to which Schiller submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791), were the high-schools out of which their genius came strengthened and purified, although their aesthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite unimpaired by them. I shall endeavor to give an idea of this double process and its results at the risk of being still more abstract and dry than before.

Man is the last and highest link in nature; his task is to understand what she aims at in him and then to fulfil her intentions. This view of Herder’s was Goethe’s starting-point in the formation of his Weltanschauung (or general view of things).

“All the world,” says one of the characters in Wilhelm Meister, “lies before us, like a vast quarry before the architect. He does not deserve the name if he does not compose with these accidental natural materials an image whose source is in his mind, and if he does not do it with the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All that we find outside of us, nay, within us, is object-matter; but deep within us lives also a power capable of giving an ideal form to this matter. This creative power allows us no rest till we have produced that ideal form in one or the other way, either without us in finished works or in our own life.”

Here we already have in germ Schiller’s idea that life ought to be a work of art. But how do we achieve this task, continually impeded as we are by circumstances and by our fellow-creatures, who will not always leave us in peace to develop our individual characters in perfect conformity with nature? In our relations with our neighbor, Goethe — like Lessing and Wieland, Kant and Herder, and all the great men of his and the preceding age, in England and France as well as in Germany — recommended absolute toleration, not only of opinions, but also of individualities, particularly those in which Nature manifests herself “undefiled.”

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