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Humboldt the Proteus

Frederick C. Beiser

in The German Historicist Tradition

This chapter is a detailed examination of the intellectual development of Wilhelm von Humboldt's theory of history. It treats Humboldt's shifting intellectual interests as different approaches to the ... More

This chapter is a detailed examination of the intellectual development of Wilhelm von Humboldt's theory of history. It treats Humboldt's shifting intellectual interests as different approaches to the problems of history. Humboldt's classicism, anthropology and philosophy of language are examined insofar as they affect his view of history. The final section is an account of Humboldt's famous essay on the task of the historian. Humboldt is treated as a transitional figure insofar as he belongs to, yet sees beyond, the naturalistic tradition of anthropology.Less

The Debates about Universal History and National History, c. 1800: A Problem-oriented Historical Attempt*

Hans Erich Bödeker

in Unity and Diversity in European Culture c.1800

Friedrich Rühs outlined the problems in the complicated relationship between national history and universal history around 1800. The change in theory from universal to national history, from the ... More

Friedrich Rühs outlined the problems in the complicated relationship between national history and universal history around 1800. The change in theory from universal to national history, from the totality to the individual, was not only the result of methodological or intra-disciplinary consistency, but reflected nationalisation. The background was provided by the particular historical experiences of the time around the turn of the century: the French Revolution and, even more, changes in the German states and the impact of Napoleon Bonaparte's rule. The debates about the relationship between universal history and national history began during the heyday of Enlightenment history-writing. The switch from, in simplified terms, ‘Enlightenment history’ to ‘historicism’, it seems, also took place in these debates, which were, for a time, its primary setting. The authors involved were historians, philologists, philosophers, theologians and men of letters; the names ranged from Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig von Schlözer, and Johann Gottfried Herder to Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen.Less

Germany and the Humboldtian Model

R. D. Anderson

in European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914

The University of Berlin, founded in 1810 under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, is traditionally seen as the model institution of the 19th century. In fact the German system emerged from ... More

The University of Berlin, founded in 1810 under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, is traditionally seen as the model institution of the 19th century. In fact the German system emerged from innovations both before and after 1810. Its features included the unity of teaching and research, the pursuit of higher learning in the philosophy faculty, freedom of study for students (Lernfreiheit, contrasted with the prescriptive curricula of the French system), the educational ideal of Bildung based on neo-humanist admiration for ancient Greece, corporate autonomy for universities despite their funding by the state, and the notion of academic freedom. The group of reformers in Prussia included philosophers like Fichte and Schleiermacher as well as Humboldt, and Berlin University was a focus of national cultural revival. The German model had a profound influence throughout central, eastern, and northern Europe.Less

A Prussian on Liberty

Florian Schui

in Rebellious Prussians: Urban Political Culture under Frederick the Great and his Successors

The conflicts between civil society and state that were discussed in the previous chapters were influential beyond their immediate political, spatial and chronological context. The conflicts in which ... More

The conflicts between civil society and state that were discussed in the previous chapters were influential beyond their immediate political, spatial and chronological context. The conflicts in which urban Prussian successfully defended their freedom against state interference formed the background against which a young Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote his famous tract On the limits of state action that profoundly influenced the development of liberalism in the modern period. In particular John Stuart Mill was influenced by Humboldt writings but also other European liberals read Humboldt's work and incorporated his arguments in their own arguments. This chapter reconstructs the original historical context of Humboldt's arguments by placing it in the context of the debates that took place in the Prussian public in the second half of the eighteenth century and that have been explored in the preceding chapters. The chapter also place the influence of Humboldt's work in a European context of the development of liberal political thought.Less

Berlin

Mike Higton

in A Theology of Higher Education

This chapter, on the University of Berlin, argues that the Wissenschaftsideologie that surrounded the new university’s creation was, in part, an attempted repair of the broken and disputatious world ... More

This chapter, on the University of Berlin, argues that the Wissenschaftsideologie that surrounded the new university’s creation was, in part, an attempted repair of the broken and disputatious world of Christian learning. That is, the Romantic theorists Wissenschaft appropriated a tradition-specific Christian vision of free, peaceable exchange (the economy of gift and reception in the Body of Christ) and sought to remake the whole world of learning on the basis of that vision. That remaking required, however, that they revise or abandon anything that could not be made to fit with the proper freedom of such peaceable exchange, including the heteronomous commitment of learners to particular traditions of religious thought and practice. The account they provided of the university – indeed, the account they provided of reason itself – was therefore inescapably both theological and anti-theological.Less

Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, and the Birth of Modern Linguistics

Michael N. Forster

in German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and beyond

This chapter provides an account of the origins of the modern science of linguistics. It focuses on the three thinkers — Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt — who played significant ... More

This chapter provides an account of the origins of the modern science of linguistics. It focuses on the three thinkers — Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt — who played significant roles in the birth of the new discipline. It was Herder who laid the foundations, and after him it was Friedrich Shlegel who played the most pivotal role. By contrast, Wilhelm von Humboldt's contributions were less fundamental and were counterbalanced by more dubious positions that he adopted. The chapter also discusses the main positive contributions made by Schlegel and subsequently refined by Humboldt. Additionally, it considers two further lines of argument due to Schlegel and especially Humboldt which are of more questionable value.Less

Language at an Impasse, in Passing: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Agamemnon Translation

Kristina Mendicino

in Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism

This chapter argues that Wilhelm von Humboldt’s most original insights into the emergence of the word are presented in the preface he appends to his translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. There, ... More

This chapter argues that Wilhelm von Humboldt’s most original insights into the emergence of the word are presented in the preface he appends to his translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. There, translation and language are considered immediately according to their temporality, and the labor of translation becomes recast in dynamic terms that anticipate his famous definition of language as energeia in his magisterial treatise, On the Diversity of Human Language Structure. When does translation and, by analogy, language itself, emerge—and by what force? Only in addressing this question is it possible to delineate the way in which translations might work upon language at any “given point in time,” along the lines of an incommensurable foreign text, where, as Humboldt puts it, one “can always only set against each utterly proper term a different one” (8: 130). And only through such collisions—which, for Humboldt, make up the structure of the symbol—might a given language be renewed through translation, and give rise to language as it had never hitherto been spoken or written. This is what every translation, according to Humboldt, should promise—which turns out to be not the promise of linguistics, but of Aeschylus’ prophetess, Cassandra.Less

‘Weiber=Apologeten’ and ‘Mode-Misogyne’: 1 Ideologies of Gender

HELEN FRONIUS

in Women and Literature in the Goethe Era 1770-1820: Determined Dilettantes

In 18th-century Germany, gender roles were not yet normative, but in the process of being negotiated. Both men and women played an active part in this process. This chapter describes the development ... More

In 18th-century Germany, gender roles were not yet normative, but in the process of being negotiated. Both men and women played an active part in this process. This chapter describes the development of essentialist definitions of femininity in Germany during the last quarter of the 18th century, taking as its starting point gender discourse, always cited as a primary cause of women's social and literary exclusion. It shows that the 18th-century discussion of the role of the sexes was by no means uniform and monolithic, but rather fragmented and contradictory. The areas and character traits designated as taboo for women were contested, redefined and subtly extended by a variety of authors, thereby leaving lacunae in which women writers might validate their work. The views of Joachim Heinrich Campe, Ernst Brandes, and Wilhelm von Humboldt regarding gender are discussed, along with reflections of gender in German literature.Less

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Michael N. Forster

in German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and beyond

This chapter focuses on Wilhelm von Humboldt, a founder of linguistics. It provides an overview of Humboldt's life and thought. He knew most of the leading intellectuals of his time personally, ... More

This chapter focuses on Wilhelm von Humboldt, a founder of linguistics. It provides an overview of Humboldt's life and thought. He knew most of the leading intellectuals of his time personally, including Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Heyne, George Forster, Fichte, Jacobi, and Coleridge. His earliest theoretical statement on language, the short essay On Thinking and Speaking, is strongly influenced by Herder. His mature philosophy of language contains many further borrowings from Herder as well. His intellectual contributions cover several fields, but he deserves to be remembered above all for his work in developing the discipline of linguistics and for his educational and political philosophy. Humboldt holds that language is essential to the very existence of the human being.Less

Ethical Formation and the Invention of the Religion of Art

Jennifer A. Herdt

in Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition

Chapter 4 shows how Kunstreligion, the Religion of Art, came to be seen as a critical resource for the self-formation of mature humanity (Menschheit). Schiller, Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt ... More

Chapter 4 shows how Kunstreligion, the Religion of Art, came to be seen as a critical resource for the self-formation of mature humanity (Menschheit). Schiller, Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt regarded art as having displaced Christianity’s role in ethical formation. Aesthetic education, they believed, would generate harmony among the opposing forces of the human spirit, effectively resist the instrumentalizing reduction of human persons, fit them for stable self-government, and preclude the revolutionary excesses of the French Revolution. The chapter argues that it was Humboldt’s understanding of Bildung, rather than Herder’s, that became institutionalized within the pedagogical and cultural institutions of later 19th-century bourgeois culture (the Bildungsbürgertum). Within this later context, Bildung came to be equated with a classical liberal education, regarded as a badge of bourgeois nobility and taken an excuse for political passivity. In the tumultuous atmosphere surrounding the French Revolution, however, it was not yet evident how easily liberal individualist Bildung could be politically domesticated.Less

Beyond theory: Metonymy in critical practice

Sebastian Matzner

in Rethinking Metonymy: Literary Theory and Poetic Practice from Pindar to Jakobson

This chapter explores the impact of the new theory of metonymy on critical practice in various fields. The first of three case studies breaks new ground in translation criticism by assessing what ... More

This chapter explores the impact of the new theory of metonymy on critical practice in various fields. The first of three case studies breaks new ground in translation criticism by assessing what happens to metonymy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon into German (by Jenisch, Humboldt, Droysen, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff) and English (Browning). It renders visible previously unrecognized translation strategies, opens up new dimensions for comparing literary translations, and challenges the conventional ‘foreignization’-versus-‘domestication’ dichotomy. The second case study offers a stylistic assessment of what constitutes the distinctive ‘hellenizing’ style in Housman’s ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’ and Schiller’s The Bride of Messina, highlighting the crucial role metonymy plays in it, while the third offers a critical reappraisal of (post-)structuralist reappropriations of metonymy (by de Man, Lodge, White, and others) in the light of the new insights gained here and formulates parameters for best practice in structuralist analysis and inter-arts criticism.Less

Scenes of Human Science

in The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) classified languages into families and developed a general linguistic typology. His major theoretical work on language, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen ... More

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) classified languages into families and developed a general linguistic typology. His major theoretical work on language, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluβ auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind), published in 1836, grounds the emerging field of comparative language study in a pre-Darwinian linguistic structuralism. This chapter explores the scenic imagination in Humboldt's theory of language and in Friedrich Max Müller's originary anthropology, which gives language and religion equal treatment. It also discusses the views of J. F. McLennan (1827–1881), Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881), Emile Durkheim (1857–1917), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), René Girard, and Franz Boas.Less

Historicism

Frank Ankersmit

in Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

This chapter contends that the historicism of Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt was formulated in the idealist and romanticist idiom of the 1820s and 1830s, which can no longer satisfy us in ... More

This chapter contends that the historicism of Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt was formulated in the idealist and romanticist idiom of the 1820s and 1830s, which can no longer satisfy us in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Their argument therefore needs to be translated into more contemporary terms. Doing this is a major part of the project in this book. The chapter goes on to discuss historicism and Neo-Kantianism; Richard Rorty's thoughts on Heidegger and Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language; and the tradition of German historicism. It argues that however doubtful the ancestry of the notion of the historical idea may be, it remains indispensable for a proper understanding of the writing of history. It is the legacy of historicism to all later philosophy of history, and the price to be paid for ignoring it is to dream away in scientistic illusions. Universal History and the historical idea should no longer be regarded as the products of speculative thought nor as entities in the past quietly awaiting their historical investigation. Instead, they lead their life only in the domain of historical representation.Less

Herbart and Prussian Educational Reform

Frederick C. Beiser

in Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy

This chapter considers Herbart’s work as an educator in his Königsberg years. It covers first Herbart’s remarkable relationship with Wilhelm von Humboldt and their work on the reform of Prussia’s ... More

This chapter considers Herbart’s work as an educator in his Königsberg years. It covers first Herbart’s remarkable relationship with Wilhelm von Humboldt and their work on the reform of Prussia’s educational institutions. It considers Herbart’s various projects to improve education in Prussia, his pedagogic institute, his didactic seminar, and his work on the scientific deputation. It treats Herbart’s attitude toward state intervention in education and his stance toward the repressive Wartburg decrees.Less

Enlightened Liberalism

Otfried Höffe

in Critique of Freedom: The Central Problem of Modernity

In this chapter, the author defends a position he calls "enlightened liberalism" against critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism, and he shows how it is necessary to ward off the threats of ... More

In this chapter, the author defends a position he calls "enlightened liberalism" against critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism, and he shows how it is necessary to ward off the threats of ideological or authoritarian politics. The author engages with thinkers such as Smith, von Humboldt, Mill, Rawls, and Rorty.Less