Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era

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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 263-273
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BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Although my book focuses mostly on forms of theory in the Romantic period, it’s perhaps only natural for any study of this kind to be construed (to some extent) as an attempt to propose a new paradigm for Romantic studies. With that in mind, I begin with some earlier efforts to define the field conceptually.

In his well-known position piece “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (rpt. in Lovejoy, Essays on the History of Ideas [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1948], pp. 228–53), A. O. Lovejoy questioned the feasibility of such a project. His challenge produced an equally well-known rejoinder by René Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History” (rpt. in Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen Nichols [New Haven: Yale UP, 1963], pp. 128–98). Unlike Geoffrey Hartman, I don’t see the debate as a standoff (see The Fate of Reading [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975], p. 277). Instead, I would argue that what Wellek demonstrated was the possibility of a conceptual link between different national literatures in the Romantic period. He also showed that if you viewed some of the internal conflicts within the period (e.g., between Weimar Classicism and Jena Romanticism) at a higher level of generality, you could achieve conceptual definition in a meaningful way.

Before deconstruction began to have an impact on Romantic studies, the most influential attempt at a conceptual synthesis was clearly that of M. H. Abrams, in his Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971). Once considered the standard account of the period, it has in recent years been criticized for a variety of weaknesses: (1) that it wasn’t sufficiently open to Romantic indeterminacy or irony and its capacity to destabilize or undermine any sort of Romantic ideal; (2) that it failed to recognize the importance of noncanonical authors, and especially of gender as an issue in Romantic literature; and (3) that its exclusively literary perspective blocked any perception of how Romantic literature might be determined by economic and/or other material forces. Yet these claims, even if true, didn’t suffice to justify the negative assessment of the critique. Nor did they entirely invalidate his considerable achievement. After all, the kind of Romantic idealism Abrams described had the capacity to absorb Romantic irony, and the omissions his work displayed didn’t necessarily nullify the value of what he discussed but only limited it. Other problems, however, seem more significant, because more internal. First, Abrams deliberately restricted the scope of his study to Romantic literature and philosophy. And because he didn’t look at any other forms of cultural activity, he couldn’t really make the larger claims necessary for a conceptual synthesis of the entire period. Thus his attempt at a synthesis ultimately rested on an insufficient base. Second, and perhaps more important, his analysis of Romantic concepts wasn’t sufficiently theoretical. By that I mean he didn’t take them to a higher level of generality, which would have allowed them to range over any given field. As a result, they were deprived of explanatory force. Instead, his treatment of German philosophy reduced it to a purely thematic level (e.g., Hegel’s Phenomenology as a narrative of the circuitous journey). To some extent, moreover, these two problems reinforced each other: because he didn’t consider other forms of cultural activity, he lacked the incentive for a higher level of generality. And because he opted to avoid that higher level, he lacked the appropriate framework for a broader cultural assessment.

At roughly the same time, two important position papers pointed to a felt need for more emphasis on reflexivity within Romantic texts. In “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness” (rpt. in Beyond Formalism [New Haven: Yale UP, 1970], pp. 298–310), Geoffrey Hartman approached the issue from a perspective largely shaped by phenomenological criticism and especially the Geneva critique de conscience of Georges Poulet and others. Meanwhile, Harold Bloom in “The Internalization of Quest Romance” (rpt. in The Ringers in the Tower [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971], pp. 12–35) came at reflexivity from a background of myth criticism, derived from Northrop Frye, and psychoanalysis. Inevitably, both papers now seem slightly dated as the perspectives they rested on have passed into the history of criticism in the later twentieth century. Moreover, neither mythos nor consciousness could quite explain why the reflexive turn occurred: why self-consciousness led to anti-self-consciousness, or why the quest romance had to be internalized. As theoretical constructs, in other words, mythos and consciousness weren’t sufficiently analytical. And that placed a limit on their critical usefulness. Nonetheless, the emphasis on reflexivity in these papers helped highlight a crucial aspect of Romantic literature, and especially Romantic theory.

A similar lack of explanation could be said to characterize The Literary Absolute of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, which appeared a few years later (1974, English translation by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester [Albany: SUNY P, 1988]). But here we seem to get closer to one: the notion of a Romantic literary absolute as defined by autoproduction (pp. 11–12) at least gives us a generative principle for Romantic art. And the idea of criticism as necessary to the formation of a work of art, of the formation of Form as the essence of Romantic art, linked the generative principle to a mode of self-consciousness or reflexivity (pp. 104–6, 110–12). What Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy didn’t explain, however, was how reflexivity or criticism could act as a generative principle for art.

If The Literary Absolute, based on Friedrich Schlegel and Jena Romanticism, tried to characterize the Romantic period solely by means of theory, other studies such as Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981) are by contrast purely historical. The advantage of a purely historical perspective is greater width or scope: Butler manages to incorporate women writers of the 1790s like Ann Radcliffe and Maria Edgeworth (pp. 94–97), conservatives like Austen and Scott (pp. 97–109, 109–12), James Gillray and caricature (pp. 53–57), and the professional intellectual as a type in both England and Germany (pp. 69–77). The disadvantage of such a perspective is that it becomes hard to discern any differences that aren’t merely local. To put it another way: without larger differences, we miss a sense of structure.

Even before, the impact of deconstruction had already begun to make itself felt. In English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980) Anne Mellor taxed Natural Supernaturalism for its failure to discuss Romantic texts that were “open-ended and inconclusive” (p. 6). As an alternative model, she proposed Romantic irony, with explicit acknowledgment of its link to Paul de Man and deconstruction (pp. 4–5). Unfortunately, Friedrich Schlegel (from whom she derived her notion of irony) is too narrow a base: if irony is to be our point of departure, we need a larger rapprochement between English and German Romanticism (Tieck, Hoffmann, et al.). Nor does Mellor mention how close Schlegelian irony is to Hegelian negativity, which perpetually undoes itself. And that would make Romantic irony closer to the “circuitous journey” motif of Natural Supernaturalism than she allows for. A later example of the same ironic perspective is L. J. Swingle, The Obstinate Questionings of English Romanticism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987). Unlike Mellor, Swingle doesn’t think it’s a good idea to start with either eighteenth- or nineteenth-century philosophical tradition. Instead, he opts for a “somewhat less formal, more literary model of the intellectual situation that induces Romantic questioning” (pp. 11–12). As a result, he surrenders the possibility of a link to German or European Romanticism. At the same time, by this loss of historicity, his book risks the repetitiveness of a deconstructive exercise: if the aim of Romantic questioning is just to free up an “open space of creative opportunity” (p. 77), what isn’t clear is why we need to go through the process repeatedly.

The introduction of previously neglected women writers into the Romantic canon marked a major change in Romantic studies. Although the work was begun by Marlon Ross in The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), I want to focus on Anne Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) because it discusses other genres besides poetry and so widens the field considerably. The addition of so many new authors across a broad range of genres proved immensely beneficial. And because of the tendency of women’s writing in the Romantic period to reflect one or another tradition, any recovery project concerned with this material naturally had inherent historical value. Several significant issues, however, remain to be addressed: (1) Confusion at the terminological and even at the conceptual level. Gender is always tricky to talk about. But when both male and female writers display traits of the other gender (Emily Brontë and John Keats in part III, for example, or the male poets’ “takeover” of female traits described on pp. 23–24), the usefulness of any characterization in terms of gender must obviously come into question. (2) Ideological ambivalence. If Mary Wollstonecraft and a number of other women writers are progressive, many (Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, et al.) clearly aren’t. The imbalance makes for an awkward situation. Ideally you don’t want to back a lot of conservative authors. Yet in her conclusion Mellor has to admit: “the ideological investments of most of the women writing between 1780 and 1830 in England have more in common both with their eighteenth-century forebears … and with their Victorian descendants” (p. 210). Still, Mellor obviously wants to try to make a case for the entire group. Subsequently she says: “Indeed, from a late twentieth-century perspective, we might see Victorian literature as a regression from the more liberated stance of feminine Romanticism” (p. 212). But if most women writers in the Romantic period are in fact conservative, how do we justify her characterization of the “liberated stance of feminine Romanticism”? (3) Lack of relation to Romantic theory. While many women writers have now begun to be explored, we still lack a way to connect their work to theory in the period. Without that, we can’t quite arrive at an overall picture of the Romantic scene.

Another significant trend of the past decade has been toward the study of nationalism and nation-formation. In Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), David Simpson brought it to bear in a fruitful way on the Romantic period. His argument that an attitude toward theory marked a national tendency made it possible to see the cultural work of the entire period as a product of the interplay between different national forces. Its only weakness was that it didn’t sufficiently sort out different pro-theory stances that are ideologically fairly close but that differ on the proper direction for theory (German idealism, for example, or versions of rationalism in England). By contrast, Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), is much less interested in theory. Nor do we get the international perspective of Simpson. Moreover, the focus has narrowed to a single genre (the Romantic novel). The advantage is that we now get to observe the process of nation-formation much more closely. For Trumpener, nationalism is intimately linked to the work of cultural recovery. The implication is that a way of life that characterizes a particular region can itself be a repository of value. So we find Scottish or Irish nationalism set against British imperialism. But one might ask whether such a perspective doesn’t tacitly subscribe to a form of cultural essentialism (the region, with its way of life, intrinsically has value: all we have to do is affirm it). Nor is it proof against the kind of national relativism espoused by E. J. Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) (see esp. pp. 180–92).

Perhaps the most sophisticated example of New Historicist work on the Romantic period to date is James Chandler’s England in 1819 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998). Unlike Trumpener, Chandler offers a lot of theoretical framework for his analysis of the period. In fact, you might even say his point has as much to do with historiographical self-consciousness as it does with historical consciousness: that the first is our only means of access to the second. The deftest move of Chandler’s work was to embed the historical moment of 1819 within a framework formed by our own historiographical perspective (see esp. pp. xiii–xvi, 3–7, 31–39, 105–14, 135–51, 169–85). But its silence on most of the theoretical work produced by the Romantic period itself meant that the kind of analysis it advanced would have to be theoretical rather than metatheoretical. And that left it open to the possibility of an end-around move, a counter-analysis by theoretical forces within the period. In other words, its refusal to subsume Romantic theory into its own story left open the possibility that Romantic theory might tell a different story. On some level, we can see such an omission as dictated by the Marxist assumption that a period can’t possess a full theoretical awareness of its own activity, that it’s the privilege of historical hindsight to have a monopoly on theory. Yet the limit of any theoretical monopoly must inevitably lie in those forms of theory that remain beyond its control.

A number of recent developments show promise. In his Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000), Jerome Christensen has suggestively proposed 1798/ 1802/1815 as a way to think about the structure of the Romantic period (pp. 3–8). But perhaps the most noteworthy new development is to be found in Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003). Unlike Chandler, Hamilton sees the Romantic project as inclusive of self-critique (pp. 1–4). Specifically, it produces its self-critique by creative discourse in another sphere, and so acts as Romanticism and metaromanticism simultaneously (pp. 17–18). In this fashion, Romantic theory looks toward the development of metatheory.

Any attempt to think about Romantic theory in its historical context has to think about its relation to what’s clearly the most important event of the period: the French Revolution. Here I draw first of all on the works of Georges Lefebvre, particularly some of his late surveys: The French Revolution from Its Origins to 1793, tr. Elizabeth Moss Evanson (New York: Columbia UP, 1962); and The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799, tr. John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti (New York: Columbia UP, 1964). Although the revisionist critique first advanced by Alfred Cobban in The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964) and later more fully developed by François Furet in Interpreting the French Revolution, tr. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981) and elsewhere did much to erode the Marxist explanation established by Lefebvre and his predecessors, it didn’t affect his analysis of the radical reformist tendency of the Terror. What Lefebvre discovered was a particular kind of logic in the legislative work of the Terror, one that might help to explain what Simon Schama characterized in Citizens as its almost unnatural efficiency. I see the same extremist rigor at the base of French clinical reform in the hospital and hence as the background to my discussion of Bichat and the French medical scene.

In the wake of revisionist work on the Revolution, it’s become increasingly clear that any attempt to grasp the processes involved will have to survey these at the micro-level. Of exemplary value here are the works of Richard Cobb, especially The People’s Armies, tr. Marianne Elliott (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987); The Police and the People (London: Oxford UP, 1970); and Death in Paris (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978). Equally important, in other ways, are George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959); and Colin Lucas, The Structure of the Terror (London: Oxford UP, 1973). Nor should I fail to mention their model predecessor: Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789, tr. Joan White (New York: Pantheon, 1973). What Cobb, Rudé, and Lucas showed in impressive detail was how the Revolutionary impulse managed to make itself felt in everyday life, in both Paris and the provinces: the creation of a gendarmerie as a popular force, the formation and role played by the crowd in Paris, and the structure and transmission of provincial Revolutionary authority. In their work we get a sense not only of which forms the Revolutionary impulse took, but also of those subtler ways in which the Revolutionary fervor of the menu peuple transformed the emotional life and above all the outlook of a nation. From studies like these, we become aware of how causality in the French Revolution typically takes the form of a stage-by-stage progression: from spontaneous mass movements that initially express an impulse we move to institutional arrangements that embody it, and finally to their activity and its consequences for a wider sphere. Hence in my study of Bichat and the French hospital scene I move from the physical circumstances of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris to the institutional circumstances of Revolutionary medicine and finally to its ideological circumstances, as a prelude to vitalist theory.

Because they open up the possibility of eighteenth-century cultural influences on theory, works on the origin of the Revolution are also useful: for example, Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, tr. R. R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947); and its revisionist counterpart, William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford UP, 1980/1988). A considerable amount has also been done on the cultural sources of the Revolution itself (e.g., Robert Darnton, Lynn Hunt, Roger Chartier). Nonetheless, what isn’t clear is whether any of the pre-Revolutionary cultural sources can actually be said to exert any kind of direct effect on the Revolution. And this is a problem that goes all the way back to the work done by Daniel Mornet. For that reason, I haven’t tried to impose Rousseau or any of the other pre-Revolutionary sources on actual Revolutionary circumstances, but have instead treated these separately (chap. 1).

For any study of the Romantic period as a whole, a crucial question has to be how to define the exact relationship between the Revolution and the Empire. On that issue, the best treatment to date is probably D.M.G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (New York: Oxford UP, 1986). Here the continuity between Revolution and Empire is to some extent one of necessary sequence: any action produces an equal and opposite reaction = revolution by a well-placed urban population produces a counter-revolution by disaffected agrarian masses. The counter-revolution alone is the subject of Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action 1789–1804, tr. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971). We get a slightly different perspective from Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon, tr. R. R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981). For Bergeron, Napoleon is both the preserver of the Revolution and an Enlightenment sovereign. I see this combination of development + rationality as a key to how the Napoleonic regime could affect Romantic theory, which is largely a product of the Empire period. In Wolf, Friedrich Schlegel, and Hegel we find the same mix of development + rationality. Nor should the decisive effect of Napoleon on Germany come as a surprise: in Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, tr. Daniel Nolan (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996) Thomas Nipperdey asserts that even German resistance and reform are determined by Napoleon’s conquest and administration of Germany. The same point was already borne out by Friedrich Meinecke in The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815, tr. Peter Paret (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977).

Besides the French Revolution, I’ve also found it necessary to think about several sources of theory from a historical perspective: (1) preromanticism, (2) the sciences, and (3) German idealism.

For the first, my point of departure (as my use of the iconography of Rousseau’s tomb will have made evident) is that a turn to the visual is crucial for preromanticism. Here I draw on John Barrell, whose argument in The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980) has to do with the unrepresentability of the rural poor as they actually are within the English landscape tradition from Gainsborough to Constable. Since the period Barrell covers (1730–1840) encompasses the transition from preromantic eighteenth century to Romanticism, his analysis can help to uncover what preromanticism was all about.

But if we take the primacy of the visual as constitutive for preromanticism, it tacitly sets up the possibility of a link between the visual and the verbal that can be read in at least two ways. One way would be to see the visual as a substitute for the verbal: the language of the picture says what we can’t say verbally. Thus Ronald Paulson in Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982). For Paulson, the literary landscape involves the use of landscape as a backdrop for human activity. Under these circumstances, the landscape offers a commentary on the human condition and so acts as a substitute for what we might say about it verbally. But Turner and Constable, as Paulson sees it, go beyond any verbal formulation. In the process, they perfect and ultimately transcend the literary landscape genre. Another way to see the visual-verbal link would be to trace a tendency toward the visual within the verbal medium itself. This was the route Paul van Tieghem took, in Le Sentiment de la Nature dans le Préromantisme Européen (Paris: Nizet, 1960). For van Tieghem, the dominant mode of much preromantic literature was essentially descriptive. By various means, literature worked to paint or render nature mimetically. Its efforts focused on particular aspects of nature (the countryside, mountains, the sea). And that led to the expression of sentiment or emotion, especially in the form of reverie.

In one respect, however, the two ways of looking at the visual-verbal link that I’ve described share a basic similarity: both posit a split between the visual image and what can be expressed verbally. And that, to my mind, is precisely what made preromanticism possible: the absence of an exact verbal equivalent to the visual image engenders emotion around the visual, which produces the kind of sensibility we associate with preromanticism.

Two recent explorations of preromanticism treat the subject somewhat differently. In his Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), Marshall Brown stresses such topoi as self-consciousness, space, time, articulation, and form, while Isaiah Berlin, in lectures issued as The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), considers preromanticism a kind of outlook that doesn’t believe in either rationality or solvability or compatibility but that does believe in self-affirmation and creativity. Neither, then, lays any particular stress on the visual or its link to the verbal.

In my chapters on the sciences in the Revolutionary or Romantic era, I try to take account of several major shifts in historiography on the period.

Much of the best early work adopted an approach similar to the prosopography practiced by Ronald Syme and others on the Roman Empire: it looked at the careers of prominent men in French science during the Romantic era and their links to each other, especially through Napoleon. Thus Maurice Crosland, The Society of Arcueil (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967). Despite reservations voiced by recent scholarship, the approach worked to some extent: lines of filiation are useful in the sciences when it comes to influence or thought transmission, and I make use of a similar tactic in my presentation of Bichat via his mentor Desault.

Meanwhile, other scholarship employed a very different strategy, one that attempted to conceptualize the sciences. Not, however, by means of concepts produced by the period itself, but rather by larger theoretical constructs loosely based on the material. So we have Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965) and Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Vrin, 1968). This approach was subsequently historicized and given even wider scope by Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) (New York: Random House, 1970). Here Foucault traced the emergence of the human sciences back to what he called the Classical episteme, a seventeenth-/eighteenth-century moment defined by belief in a correspondence between things and their verbal representation. But while such an approach offered the advantages of an overview or higher perspective, it couldn’t explain either how exactly a theory arose, or why it was later abandoned. In other words, it couldn’t explain historically. Hence in my treatment of theory in the Romantic sciences I’ve largely preferred to stick to the concepts they produced, in the belief that these afford a better access to the formation and development of any given theory.

More recently, the trend has been toward institutional history: witness Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) with its sequel, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004); and Nicole and Jean Dhombres, Naissance d’un nouveau pouvoir: sciences et savants (1793–1824) (Paris: Payot, 1989). Both rely heavily on an institutional matrix: the Academy of Science, the Museum of Natural History, the Institute, the Egyptian expedition, the École Polytechnique. Since all of these tend to organize scientific activity, and since they play a particularly important role in the history of the sciences in France, the advantages of such a perspective are evident. Hence my use of the Revolutionary hospital as a framework for Bichat. It doesn’t always work, however: the radical or revolutionary makeover of higher algebra by Galois (which I discuss in chap. 6) is a case in point.

For scholarship on the history of German idealism, the main question in recent years has been whether to emphasize the exact process by which idealism emerged after Kant, or to focus instead on the link between idealism and early Romanticism. What’s at stake here is the payoff from idealism: those who emphasize the exact process by which it arose seem to believe it can contribute to current epistemology, while those who stress its link to early Romanticism feel its main value might be in its contribution to aesthetic theory.

Representative of the belief in idealism qua epistemology are Dieter Henrich, especially Between Kant and Hegel, ed. David Pacini (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003); and Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002). As Henrich sees it, the motive behind German idealism is the desire to arrive at a coherent theory of self-consciousness that can resolve the problems raised but not solved by Kant, problems that continue to be crucial for current epistemology. Here Fichte has primacy.

In support of the idealism/early Romanticism link, meanwhile, we have Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); and Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003) and From Romanticism to Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). From the standpoint of Frank and Bowie, the kind of foundational theory of self-consciousness envisioned by German idealism isn’t an achievable goal. As Bowie puts it, “What we can consciously know of ourselves does not exhaust what we are” (Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 63). Instead, they opt for aesthetics as the best way to link the theoretical to the sensuous world and so give our experiences value. Hence their emphasis on Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena circle. The notion of aesthetics as a replacement for a theory of self-consciousness is problematic, simply because it doesn’t have the same foundational quality. But so far a theory of self-consciousness via a modified form of Fichte hasn’t proved persuasive either.

My own take is that the move in German idealism from Fichte to Hegel involves a radical shift not recognized by either Henrich/Beiser or Frank/Bowie, from epistemology to metatheory. Likewise, I would argue, the move from Kant to Fichte required, in effect, an equally radical shift from classical epistemology to meta-level criteria (Reinhold’s programme) for epistemology. Unlike Henrich or Beiser, then, I don’t treat Hegel as the last attempt in German idealism to work out a foundational theory of consciousness but rather as the first full-fledged instance of pure philosophical metatheory. At the same time, I concur with Henrich when he asserts that we need to recover the total situation of an individual (life circumstances and all) in order to grasp the philosophy that is the result. Hence my attempt to evoke the circumstances associated with Napoleon and the battle of Jena.