In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "So steh' ich denn hier wehrlos gegen dich?"—Figures of Armament and Disarmament in German Drama before and after the French Revolution
  • Susanne Fuchs

Within the history of European philosophy and literature, the discourse of the human has been closely tied to discourses on forms of governance. The constitution of the city, the republic, the nation, the military apparatus has been linked to that of the human by means of analogies that greatly impact how both the political and the individual are thought of. In Plato's Republic, for example, a group of discussants agrees that the soul is a tripartite entity composed of an appetitive, a spirited, and a rational part. The same structure, Socrates adds, comprises the city.1 In Book Four, the constituents of the city and the human soul are set side by side in pairs: the city's craftsmen and the appetites; the guardians of the city and the forcefulness of the spirit; the philosophers ruling the city and the rational capacities thought ideally to govern within a person.

Plato describes a harmonious relationship between the three parts of both city and individual as justice. The definition of such harmonious co-existence or justice comprises the main pursuit of the dialogues in the Republic (see 368d-e, 434d). Two explicitly stated prerequisites for its emergence are: that each part exclusively minds its own business and, secondly, that a top-down order of command is accepted, that is, the philosopher queens and kings' position on top of the hierarchy must remain uncontested.

During the eighteenth century, the human-state analogy reappears in a variety of forms. The events leading up to and following the French Revolution necessitate new, secular societal founding narratives. Both political philosophies and anthropologies—two genres frequently amalgamated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—meet this demand in alternately explanatory, descriptive, and prescriptive pamphlets that consider the nature of a just society and the "humanity" of the individual intricately intertwined.2

Structural analogies between the political and the human entail significant consequences. Segregated into distinct elements and reliant on voluntary obedience, both the city and the human perform a precarious balance, one where harmonious co-existence easily drifts into conflict, and war appears as an integral component of the conceptual framework. Indeed, the text of the Republic implicitly acknowledges "civil war" as the norm in both [End Page 239] city and individual. Only the unlikely sovereignty of the philosophical part over the soul can keep civil war at bay (442c-d, 586e).

In the following, I focus on the martial implications of a complex array of state-human analogies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As I will show, late eighteenth-century German philosophy and literature, including texts by Immanuel Kant, Jakob Michael Lenz, Friedrich Schiller, and Carl von Clausewitz, yield concepts that are structurally similar to Plato's and, notably, underscore the specific armament of diverse faculties in much greater detail than the Republic. Simultaneously, dramatic literature employs and critiques the human-state analogy and, in doing so, directly addresses, problematizes, and even seeks to annul its propensity to warfare. Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris (1779/87), analyzed at length in this article, stands out for its emphasis on expressly non-militaristic subjectivities. My reading of the play underlines its conversation with Enlightenment discourses of perpetual peace and reveals how the play's preference for figures of disarmament and surrender is related to decisive dramatic acts appeasing both the portrayed concepts of subjectivity and society. Emerging in the sustained political upheaval following the French Revolution, whose impact still shapes present-day imaginations of democratic systems, the literary development of similar figures of appeasement in Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea remains relevant today. Goethe's and his successors' figurative and concrete disarmaments conceive of surrender as a necessary predecessor for anti-hierarchal and anti-martial orders; at the same time, they unveil the pitfalls and paradoxes of this gesture, drawing upon and challenging the notion of a utopian zone beyond reason, conflict, and violence.

To underline the theoretical resistance that disarmament and surrender pose to Enlightenment rhetorics, this article will first analyze Immanuel Kant's anthropological and political writings...

pdf

Share