Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany

This elegant, erudite essay demonstrates "how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era" (ix). Concentrating on the first decades of the 19^th century and the four traditional "faculties" of the university, Ziolkowski explores the sudden conviction that, in Karl von Savigny's phrase, "the historical sense has awakened everywhere" (cited, 124). The French Revolution—together with the "epistemological revolution" associated specifically with Kant but culminating a longer and wider "disenchantment of the world"—triggered "an intensified awareness of time itself" (9). (Less convincingly, Ziolkowski throws in the "industrial revolution" as a third revolutionary rupture. It does not play much of a role in his detailed exposition.) This awakening historical sense was Romantic in "the shared view that human knowledge constitutes a vital whole [which could be] grasped in its totality only through a twofold approach employing both history and system" (173).

Ziolkowski's narrative touchstone is the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. His key exemplars from the four "faculties" of the traditional university all passed through the University of Berlin in its moment of crystalizing impact: Hegel in Philosophy, Schleiermacher in Theology, Savigny in Law, and Hufeland and Reil in Medicine. Moreover, the new University of Berlin embodied "a wholly Romantic theory of the university" (16) envisioned primarily by a group of brilliant thinkers who had gathered in Jena in the 1790s—Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Wilhelm von Humboldt—all of whom believed utterly in what Schelling called "the living unity of all sciences" (cited, 18). They believed further that this "unity of knowledge should be incorporated institutionally" (23). The university must be an "organic whole" where Wissenschaft could be conceived as a worthy end in itself, devoted to the "realm of hitherto unsolved problems" (25). The so-called "higher faculties"—theology, law, and medicine—were too career-oriented to fulfill this ideal. As Schleiermacher summarized this whole body of thought in his crucial Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense (1808), "the faculty of philosophy should constitute the center of the university" (23). Only under such a structure could the individual come to "understand how his particular discipline is related to the harmonious structure of the whole" (18).

This systematic holism could only be achieved—individually or culturally—through historical reconstruction. "For the individual, education or Bildung consists in acquiring for himself what the world spirit has already learned in the course of history" (55), in the exemplary formulation of Hegel. As he argued, "the consciousness of the individual in its development recapitulates the historical development of the world spirit" (43). This idea that "ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny" held sway across the Romantic moment from its literal exposition in von Baer's laws of embryological physiology to its extended sense as a philosophy of self-formation, or Bildung (139). More precisely, the key thinkers of the Romantic moment came to believe that historical understanding was the essential constituent of a systematic understanding; the task was simultaneously "to systematize history and to historicize reason" (53). This was not just Hegel's predilection. In field after field, Ziolkowski finds a key figure making the same argument. Hegel wrote: "[T]he study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself" (cited, 44). Friedrich Schlegel put it similarly: "[H]istory is a becoming philosophy and philosophy a completed history" (cited, 177). And Gustav Hugo, the founder of the "historical school of law," wrote: "[T]he whole science of law is nothing else than the history of law" (cited, 107). Savigny, Hugo's great successor, insisted the proper study of law was precisely to seek systematic understanding only through a painstakingly historical understanding. Ziolkowski points out that just these principles animated Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion (1799), which asserted that "[r]eligious men are wholly historical" (cited, 87). That is, religion is always a concrete worldview. One can never abstract away from "positive religion" but must, instead, historicize: find when "every positive religion appears most youthful and fresh [. . .] during its development and its blossoming" (cited, 86). For Schleiermacher, as for Savigny and Hegel, system could only be anchored in history: "any meaningful theology must be based on a historical understanding of religion" (97).

The case of medicine seals Ziolkowski's argument. He identifies as a decisive "paradigm shift" in the life sciences at the end of the 18^th century "the temporalization of science [. . .] synchronicity yielded to diachronicity, status to development, and mechanics to dynamics" (139). The autobiographical writings of Carl Gustav Carus attested to the driving impulse of the age: "the principle of a higher unity, emerging in the light of Naturphilosophie" (cited, 163). As the term Naturphilosophie suggests, the key figure here was Friedrich Schelling, who insisted that nature be understood as process, not product, as natura naturans, not natura naturata, and hence temporalized to discern its "productivity, genesis, and development" (144). "The process that Schelling calls Bildung 'occurs through epigenesis (through metamorphosis or dynamic evolution)'" (144). Ziolkowski endorses Robert Richards' positive assessment in The Romantic Conception of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) of the role of Schelling and Naturphilosophie for the history of science (xii, 146), affirming that "the majority of physicians and naturalists in Germany for the next few decades were profoundly, often passionately, committed to the notions of Naturphilosophie" (146).

In his conclusion, Ziolkowski justly claims to have demonstrated "the striking parallels between Hegel's Phenomenology and the works of his Romantic contemporaries, as well as their common source in Herder" (172). It is with this last point that I would like to conclude. Indeed, Ziolkowski does clearly point to Herder at every turn in his account. He begins with the observation that "it was Hegel's ambition, as it had been Herder's [. . .] to encompass in a single volume the entire knowledge of Western civilization" (53). Turning to Schleiermacher, Ziolkowski observes that in an early essay, "On Instruction in History," the theologian "sounds almost like Herder" (81). Similarly, Hugo's great Lehrbuch der Geschichte des römischen Rechts (1790) "displays a pronounced similarity to Herder's closely contemporaneous philosophy of history" (108). Savigny explicitly studied and incorporated Herder into his methodology, becoming in the process "as all-encompassing as Herder" (110). In the treatment of the life sciences Ziolkowski makes the most important case. "Young naturalists sought, in particular, to find in nature correspondences to the progressive idea of Herder" (139). "What has been called 'the peculiar relationship between the concepts of history and ontogeny in German Romanticism' can be traced back to Herder, whose Ideas are quoted by Schelling in his Draft and cited frequently by the naturalists of the period" (154). Ziolkowski points to Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, "the leading promulgator and popularizer of Naturphilosophie" (155), who came under the personal influence of Herder in Weimar and whose greatest work "bears more than a superficial resemblance to the Ideas of his mentor Herder" (156). As a scholar who has devoted many years and pages to trying to establish the importance of this connection, I welcome Ziolkowski's book as congenially as he welcomed the parallel endeavors of Robert Richards.