The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History

Asko Nivala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351797276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The nineteenth-century Romantic understanding of history is often confused with the longing for the past Golden Age. In this book, the Romantic idea of Golden Age is seen from a new angle by discussing it in the context of Friedrich Schlegel's works. Interestingly, Schlegel argued that the concept of a past Golden Age in the beginning of history was itself a product of antiquity, imagined without any historical ground.

The Golden Age was not bygone for Schlegel, but to be produced in the future. His utopian vision of the Kingdom of God was related to the millenarian expectations of perpetual peace aroused by the revolutionary wars. Schlegel understood current era through the kairos concept, which emphasized the present possibilities for public agency. Thus history could not be reduced to any kind of pre-established pattern of redemption, for the future was determined only by the opportunities manifested in the present time.

Part I
The Golden Age and Primitivism

1
The Savages

The aim of this chapter is to study whether Friedrich Schlegel believed in a historical era called the Golden Age in the beginning of human history. As suggested in the Introduction, many previous studies on the Romantic philosophy of history have claimed that Schlegel understood history according to the triadic model, in which the primal Golden Age would be restored in the future after the present dissolution. This chapter discusses Schlegel’s historical research relating to the prehistory in order to show why this interpretation is not only simplifying but even misleading.

The chapter begins by examining Schlegel’s reception of soft primitivism, and why one should not confuse it with other versions of the Golden Age myth. His reading of primeval humankind will be compared with other contemporary anthropological theories and travelogues concerning the ‘savage’ stage of humanity. In addition to the Greek tradition, the chapter analyses Schlegel’s reception of the paradise myth, which has certain similarities with the Greek belief in the original Golden Age. Moreover, it focuses on the discovery of agriculture, which according to Schlegel was the key moment in the invention of the Golden Age myth. Finally, the chapter compares Schlegel’s idea of the Golden Age with hard primitivism, which was another classical idea about the natural state of humankind that had opposite implications from soft primitivism.

Miserable Beginnings

The first Greek version of the Golden Age myth is found in Hesiod’s Works and Days. He was the first to call the primal state of humankind the Golden Age. It is apparent when reading Friedrich Schlegel’s studies on antiquity that Hesiod’s idea was very familiar to him. Schlegel believed that Hesiod’s myth of the Five Ages was mainly based on a Homeric idea that the primeval age was the best one:

The Hesiodic history of humankind primarily follows the Homeric world view. It is hardly anything other than a genealogical execution of and supplement to the favourite Homeric saying: “the older, the better.”¹

This is an instructive example of the difference between the Golden Age and primitivism. The Homeric epics did not refer to the myth of a Golden Age, although they clearly contain traces of an attitude which Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas have called ‘chronological primitivism’. The primeval phase of humankind was the best, because humans were then most natural and genuine. In other words, according to both Hesiod and Homer, the direction of historical change is one of continuous decline from the origins. This view clearly implies the progressive decline of humanity.²

As Schlegel noted, Hesiod was the first to systematise this idea to a historical narrative. In Hesiod’s mythical narrative, the first people of the golden race³ lived in harmony. Hesiod writes in a famous passage about the golden race:

First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos [i.e. Cronus] when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint.⁴

The golden race did not need to labour to gather their food, because the earth gave them all they needed without any physical effort. They lived together in peace, and their moral character was righteous. Hesiod’s description of the golden race belongs to a tradition that Lovejoy and Boas have characterised as ‘soft primitivism’. This race lived an idle and blissful life with no anxieties. Therefore Hesiod’s Golden Age is the opposite of ‘hard primitivism’, according to which the first humans are assumed to have lived in rude and harsh surroundings where they had to fight for their living.⁵ In the case of Hesiod, soft primitivism overlaps with chronological primitivism. The most happy era of humankind was in the very beginning.⁶

Chronological primitivism is not necessarily the opposite of a belief in progress. Rather, it is possible that it only projects the idea of improvement to the past instead of the future. The literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has defined this concept of history as ‘historical inversion’, where mythological and artistic thinking located ideal categories such as justice, perfection and a harmonious condition of man and society in the past. This has enabled authors to use the past as a tool of political and social criticism of the present conditions. The myths of paradise or a Golden Age are examples of this historical inversion, as well as the modern concepts of a state of nature. According to this inversion, a thing that could be realised exclusively in the future is portrayed as something belonging to the past.⁷ Hence, the philosophical quest for the first principle could also be seen as a modification of this historical inversion. Chronological primitivism is not typical only of mythical thought, but rational thought can be primitivist as well, if it is characterised by a longing for the origin or the first cause of things.

One might expect that because Friedrich Schlegel was among the most famous early Romantics, he would have been fascinated by Hesiod’s Golden Age and its historical inversion. In the influential triadic interpretation, Schlegel’s historical thought has often been presented as a variant of this historical inversion, projecting the future goals to the past. However, this reading is misleading. The historical inversion would be in contradiction with Schlegel’s coherentist epistemology. Manfred Frank and Guido Naschert, in particular, have emphasised how Schlegel’s epistemology was not grounded in the longing for a single, most ‘original principle’ (Grundsatz) of all thought, but on a ‘reciprocal proof’ (Wechselerweis) of two or more equally original principles. This view is characterised by an antifoundationalist epistemology, in which the truth is found in the coherent constellation among two or more equally original principles that will reciprocally justify each other. Schlegel developed this view as a critique of Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s (1757–1823) and Fichte’s philosophy of first principles.⁸

Schlegel was interested in the condition of the first humans, but he questioned both soft primitivism and historical inversion. In his essay “Über die homerische Poesie” (About the Homeric Poetry, 1796), Schlegel considered the historical situation of the first Greeks, before the discovery of agriculture and even before the control of fire. The immediate aim of this essay was to evaluate Friedrich August Wolf’s (1759–1824) thesis concerning the authenticity of the Homeric epics.⁹ Following him, Schlegel argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey must be significantly younger than previous scholars had thought, and not written by a single author called ‘Homer’.¹⁰ Using the methods of historical criticism,¹¹ Schlegel broke the epic distance that had traditionally separated the timeless Heroic Age from the historical continuum.¹² He writes in the beginning of his essay:

The oldest inhabitants of Greece are presented to us as semi-bestial savages, who rambled in the woods without the use of fire, or were hiding in caves, and scraped their miserable subsistence from herbs, roots and acorns. During the Heroic Age, however, the Homeric documents depict already mighty princes, and a great inequality of fortune and rights; [they also depict] already a far denser population than a wandering life without a homeland seems to permit. All this indicates and presupposes that agriculture, the father of refinement and slavery, must have been introduced already a long time earlier.¹³

Surprisingly perhaps, Schlegel’s description does not include the typical soft-primitivist elements of eighteenth-century pastoral. His “oldest inhabitants of Greece” resembled animal-like creatures rather than merry shepherds. Without agriculture and proper shelter, human life will have been extremely unpleasant. In contrast with Hesiod’s soft primitivism, fruit did not fall off trees, but the first Greeks had to make their way laboriously through the forest in order to collect roots, acorns and other wild plants for nourishment, before sleeping in gloomy caves at night. Their ignorance of the use of fire references the Greek myth of Prometheus as the bringer of fire, which is a metonymy for technology in general.¹⁴ Before the invention of technology and culture, human existence was miserable. In contrast with this, the Heroic Age of the Homeric epic clearly presupposes the invention of agriculture and slavery. Therefore, Schlegel concludes that these works cannot really have originated in the first era of Greek history, but they must date from significantly later.

Travelogues and Eighteenth-Century Anthropology

Although Schlegel mainly analysed the thinking of classical authors about primeval humankind, his studies on Greek culture also disclose important aspects of his anthropology.¹⁵ When Schlegel imagined the surroundings of the first Greeks, he compared them with the savage stage of first human beings in general. It was typical for the age of colonialism to assume that one could infer the origins of humanity based on the knowledge about the savages living in other continents.¹⁶ Modifying Lovejoy’s and Boas’ terminology, we could call this ‘synchronic primitivism’. The historian Michael C. Carhart has demonstrated that both classical and biblical scholars studied travel journals or even made field trips among contemporary nomadic tribes to understand the age of Homer—or Moses. For example, the classical scholar Robert Wood (1717–1771) and his entourage travelled in 1751 to the ruins of Palmyra and Lebanon, and sailed from there to the Aegean coast in search of the historical Homer. Whereas mythology offered a perspective into the primitive past of a people, travelling was an op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The Golden Age and Primitivism
• PART II The Blossoming and Decline of Culture
• PART III The Problem of a National Golden Age
• PART IV Kingdom of God
• Conclusion
• Index