Beyond Posthumanism

The German Humanist Tradition and the Future of the Humanities

Alexander Mathäs

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789205640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Humanismo en filosofía

Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.

CHAPTER 1

Signs and Wonders

The Humanist Pedagogy of Eighteenth-Century Universal Histories of Mankind

Was Ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt, –

Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,

In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

Introduction

During the last part of the eighteenth century, the European intellectual elites created and promoted an ideal that represented the moral standards and values of the rising middle classes. The self-determined bourgeois individual was male and became the universal norm for humanity. The popular genre of Universalgeschichte (universal history) provided a historical and philosophical foundation that supported the bourgeois individual’s legitimacy. It offered hypothetical explanations for the phylogeny of humanity from its biblical beginnings to what was now considered the most civilized and accomplished stage of human development. Universal histories lent moral guidance and to some extent took on the function of theodicy by conjuring up a past that suggested a trajectory toward salvation.

A literary examination of universal histories can yield insights into the humanist paradigm because the narratives of this genre make exemplary assumptions about what a human being is, where it came from, and what it should strive for. While these histories reveal a new historical awareness of human evolution by giving accounts of the species’ behavioral transformations during the course of civilization, their trans-historical claims about human nature go beyond the representation of historical events. The texts under discussion here—Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (Education of the Human Race) (1780) and Schiller’s “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” (“What Is and to What End Do We Study Universal History?”) (1789)—exhibit a high degree of self-reflection, fueled by the scientific thinking of the Age of Reason. Their main focus lies on education in a broader sense than its contemporary meaning suggests. Their concept of Bildung (literally: formation) is not limited to an education toward a specific professional goal but is rather perceived as an education that comprises the cultivation of the entire personality approaching the ideal of the well-rounded autonomous individual. In addition, Bildung in the life sciences refers to the development of biological organisms. With the advances in the life sciences—that is what later became the disciplines of biology, zootomy, anatomy, botany, and genetics—the dynamic and holistic dimensions of living organisms began to be recognized and started to supersede prevailing mechanistic views (Zammito, Gestation 223–39, 245–85). Ironically, the scientific acknowledgment of the physiological and emotional aspects of life began to challenge the unmitigated belief in reason. The authors of Universalgeschichten utilized this heightened awareness of subconscious, nonrational sensory processes in their texts by appealing to their recipients’ emotional and sensory sensibilities. Although the emphasis on the faculties of perception ostensibly serves a rational goal—the education of the individual—these histories do not lecture or impart factual knowledge in discipline-specific jargon. Instead, they perform their literary pedagogy by stimulating their recipients’ participation through literary devices such as allegories, parables, and metaphors that are often inspired by biblical sources. The literary polysemy of these texts encourages their readers to think for themselves and search for meaning: the prerequisite of a humanist education.¹

While the authors of these historical narratives are influenced by the discourse of reason, they also question seemingly objective factual accounts and contradict rationalist or empiricist truth claims, as the analyses of the texts under consideration will show. The critical examination of “correct,” “objective,” or authorized readings regardless of their religious, historical, or scientific nature is central for my argument, which regards Universal-Historie as a fusion of history and philosophy. This hybrid genre not only challenges existing dogmas but also demonstrates how literary imagination can complement both historical and philosophical discourses. By transcending fixed disciplinary boundaries and imbuing theoretical texts with poetic imagery, these narratives make history more vivid and comprehensible. They also include poetological reflections on why fiction can communicate abstract problems more effectively than putatively theoretical philosophies and factual historical accounts. Ultimately the communicative inadequacy of abstract, rational discourse provides the motivation for the poetic imagery that saturates these universal histories.²

The fusion of history, philosophy, and literature was fairly common until the end of the eighteenth century and attempted to provide some practical orientation and moral guidance for the general public. However, the emerging discipline of history as science, which separates history from literature, attempted to purge the new academic discipline from all ideological, philosophical, and political concerns during the course of the nineteenth century. Historian Hayden White deplores the increasing specialization of the discipline, which focused exclusively on “the historical past” without taking into account the past’s relevance for the present:

The historical past is a theoretically motivated construction, existing only in the books and articles published by professional historians; it is constructed as an end in itself, possesses little or no value for understanding or explaining the present, and provides no guidelines for acting in the present or foreseeing the future. (White, Practical 9)

Unlike the specialized academic “historical past,” the “practical past”—a term that White took from political philosopher Michael Oakeshott—concerns itself with notions “which all of us carry around with us in our daily lives and which we draw upon … for information, ideals, models, formulas, and strategies for solving all the practical problems” (ibid.) In other words, the “practical past” would look at history in terms of its effect on the present and possibly on the future. For instance, Hegelian or Marxist representations of history belong to this category, and so do the universal histories by Lessing, Herder, and Schiller.

The authors of universal histories were aware that their accounts were to some degree hypothetical and subjective. Nevertheless, they questioned accepted mythical or religious narratives and examined them through rational inquiry. After all, inductive reasoning became prevalent during the eighteenth century with the emergence of hermeneutics, allowing enlightened philosophers, historians, and literati to challenge unsustainable biblical and mythological claims of the genesis of humankind by supporting their assertions with historical evidence.³ Despite their scientifically motivated skepticism toward religious myths, the authors relied to various degrees on biblical events to support their arguments. In short, many universal histories attempted to reconcile traditional religious beliefs and modern secular views based on scientific knowledge by rationalizing accepted biblical truths. These histories included speculations about early stages of the human species, which had remained in the dark for lack of scientific explanation and written documentation. The absence of scientific evidence, however, stimulated imaginative hypotheses about early human history. Moreover, the authors’ awareness of their narratives’ hypothetical nature resulted in philosophical reflections on historiography.

In the following I will examine Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts in the context of the debate on Vernunftreligion—that is, religion that complies with the laws of reason—and the role of divine revelation through miracles in biblical accounts. This contextualization is necessary because it sheds light on the connection of Lessing’s didactic intentions and his aesthetics: Erziehung durch Offenbarung (education through revelation). The allegorical function of miracles is central in light of the growing importance of subjective sensory perception and the communicative efficiency of poetic discourse. An in-depth analysis of selected textual metaphors and allegories will demonstrate the didactic efficacy of Lessing’s aesthetics. My interpretation will also show how the formal structure of the text supports its educational intention. Chapter 2 will discuss Schiller’s universal histories, especially his programmatic “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” (“What Is and to What End Do We Study Universal History?”) and, more briefly, “Die Sendung Moses” (“The Legation of Moses”) (1790). Read together, chapters 1 and 2 will provide a comparative analysis of the many literary commonalities and differing aspects of Lessing’s and Schiller’s historical narratives. The chapters will conclude with some reflections on Enlightenment anthropology from a posthumanist perspective.

Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts

Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts⁴ is less concerned with historical facts than with the adaptation of biblical accounts of the early history of mankind for a contemporary audience.⁵ Like many universal histories, Lessing’s Erziehung equates the history of the human race with the development of an individual.⁶ It concentrates on biblical sources, such as the Egyptian captivity and Legation of Moses, as well as the appearance of Christ. These biblical stories are called upon to illustrate the relationship between God and humankind, the distinctions between divine revelation and human education through rational inquiry, as well as between sensory experience and intellectual understanding. While the narrative deviates from traditional histories of salvation because of its hypothetical nature and open-ended structure, it nevertheless follows the conventional trajectory from life in sin toward redemption (LW 10:690).⁷

The text has a three-part structure. Beginning with the Old Testament, the narrative focuses on the education of the Hebrew people. It stands for the education of mankind, and their unification under an almighty single God who punishes the Hebrew people for their sins and rewards them for their good deeds (§1–53). In part 2, which captures the period of the New Testament, God no longer rewards or punishes humans during their lifetime because Christ has taught them that they will be rewarded in the afterlife (§54–76). In the third part, humans would be enlightened enough to lead virtuous lives without the promise of a reward. The third part extends into the future because humankind has not achieved this state of perfection (§77–100). This part ends with speculations and questions about the possibility of an afterlife or metempsychosis (§97–100). Lessing’s text is particularly concerned with the fundamental question: how is divine revelation related to reason? As an example of Vernunftreligion, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts applies rational argumentation to explain a deistic world order. It addresses the question why God created imperfect human beings and allowed them to lead immoral lives without being punished in this life (§28–29). The answer to that question is embedded in Enlightenment pedagogy, namely that humans can only become autonomous individuals if they are permitted to discover their own errors.

The friction between traditional religious dogma that demanded the unconditional belief in biblical miracles and a deist position of a rationally organized universe is reflected in the so-called Fragmentenstreit (1777–79), which surrounded the creation of the Erziehung. This tension is apparent on several levels and throughout the text.⁸ Therefore it is important to provide some necessary background information. The Fragmentenstreit followed Lessing’s publication of excerpts of Samuel Reimarus’s “Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes” (1774–78), a polemic against the fundamental dogmas of orthodox Christianity and their insistence on the verbatim veracity of the Bible.⁹ Lessing criticized, above all, that Reimarus did not take into consideration that perceptions of reality keep changing through the ages.¹⁰ In other words, Lessing objected to Reimarus’s ahistorical point of view, which disputed the credibility of miraculous revelations in general. For Lessing, these biblical revelations have a different function other than showing God’s omnipotence and ability to make miracles happen. He suggests that enlightened recipients could interpret the depiction of miracles in multiple ways if they take into account the continuously changing epistemological horizon.¹¹

Lessing originally figured only as editor but not as author of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.¹² The editor alerts the reader to the author’s limited and provisional point of view. In his “Vorbericht” (preface) he presents the author as someone who addresses his audience from an elevated position on a hill with a commanding view that allows him to believe (italics mine) to see “beyond his projected path” (LW 10:74).¹³ By separating editor from author and creating a fictitious narrator, Lessing emphasizes the text’s fictional tenor, which undermines any claim to objectivity.¹⁴ Thus he lets the text speak for itself with the modest hope that readers may recognize the illuminating aspect of religion. Many of the author’s crucial suppositions are expressed in the form of questions or obvious speculations, adding to the text’s polysemy (Eibl 247).¹⁵ By exhibiting inconsistencies, contradictions, poetic imagery, and equivocal open-endedness, Lessing stresses the text’s pedagogical function over and against its historical truth claims. In other words, he creates an evidently fictitious story of the development of humanity in analogy to its biblical accounts (Eibl 249) in order to shift the attention from the focus of the veracity of historical events to readings that ask for the “inner truths” of metaphors, allegories, and images. By encouraging the readers to find answers for themselves, Lessing stimulates the recipients to become self-reliant.

Lessing’s endorsement of divine revelation in the Erziehung seems paradoxical in view of his refusal to accept the historical veracity of biblical miracles. His defense of divine intervention becomes understandable, however, if one considers that he supports the depiction of miracles as poetic expressions of universal truths and not as actual events that happened at a specific time and place. For Lessing, the use of biblical miracles is meaningful only if it teaches the readers to become autonomous human beings who act according to a humanist ethics. Biblical miracles can be compatible with reason because of their pedagogical effectiveness.¹⁶ In short, Lessing’s aesthetics takes advantage of the correspondences between the literary and religious imagination and their common evocation of allegorical and metaphorical imagery for educational purposes.

The text’s numerous ambiguities also should be seen as a deliberate authorial strategy. The citation from Augustinus’s soliloquies that prefaces Lessing’s text supports this assumption and can be regarded as its motto: “Haec omnia inde esse in quibusdam vera, unde in quibusdam falsa sunt” (This is all true in a certain respect, from which it is also wrong in a certain respect) (LW 10:73). The oxymoron addresses a problem that pertains to all artistic depictions, namely that representations are generally based on dissimulation. Norbert Altenhofer reveals many references to Augustinus’s Soliloquia throughout Lessing’s text and demonstrates that they were an influential source with regard to both content and dialogical form. Whereas Augustinus stresses art’s dissimulating disguise in order to proclaim the unique integrity of Christian faith, Lessing employs his poetic depictions to show that poetic “disguises” in the form of analogies, images, metaphors, etc., are able to reveal an “inner truth” that cannot be expressed literally (LW 10:864–65, Schilson). He defends the depiction of biblical revelations as long as we recognize their parabolic or symbolic qualities (Hayden-Roy 400–401). Thus, Lessing a...