6 

The Human Sciences as a Religious
Duty: Lessing, Hamann, Herder,
Schiller, the Early Romantics,
and Wilhelm von Humboldt

Sometimes the limits of great minds are no less instructive than their achievements. Kant did more to ground modern natural science and morals than almost anyone else, but he did not set forth a critique of interpretive reason (verstehende Vernunft). He lacked a sense for the specific nature of the human sciences; indeed, like other idealists, in the first Critique he avoided solipsism only because he did not really raise the problem. This is all the more astounding because in addition to Kant’s philosophy the greatest achievement of the German eighteenth century was the development of a new human science. But although in 1805 Goethe coedited Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (Winckelmann and his Century), and thus named the eighteenth century after Winckelmann, Kant’s books mention neither Winckelmann nor Goethe (this though Goethe highly valued the connection of nature with art in the third Critique). What was the origin of the German human science? It is well known that its creators often came from Lutheran parsonages and/or had themselves studied Lutheran theology, a course of study that included excellent philological training in Greek and Latin, and sometimes also Hebrew. However, it was precisely this education that threw the intellectually best and morally most upright representatives of Lutheranism into a peculiar crisis: in 1799 Novalis complained about the “hectic influence” of philology on theology. For example, philology taught Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) to reconstruct the actually intended meaning of the Scriptures; this made apparent the contradictions between particular biblical texts that premodern exegetes had papered over—even and especially authors such as Meister Eckhart. Modern historiographic methods identified secondary causes of religious ideas, and these were not always edifying. Most significant, in the eighteenth century confidence in the historical reliability of biblical narratives collapsed, for instance in the chronological information they provide, while at the same time the universalism of the Enlightenment saw the limitation of salvation history to the Jews and Christians as a narrow-mindedness incompatible with the new ethics. Whereas the Catholic and also the Anglican Churches still did not really accept the challenge of modern biblical criticism, Hume and Gibbon invented a distinctive style of detached irony with which they recounted the natural history of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the vantage point of agnosticism or deism. This form of irony, which is quite different from Voltaire’s malicious glee and the world-weariness of the German Romantics, is nonetheless incompatible with the Lutheran pathos of sincerity. Nietzsche’s aggressive atheism is Lutheran in its sincerity; but the transformation of Lutheranism that took place in Germany’s intellectual elites at the end of the eighteenth century is more complex and consists in the retention of the religious motivation of philology, which was, however, now extended to universal history and philosophically grounded. We can speak of a trinity of theology, philosophy, and philology. The word of God, which was still studied fervently, was no longer limited to the Bible, but manifested itself in the whole history of the human spirit. Understanding it as a unity is not only a valid scholarly interest; it is a religious duty, and presumably it is only by fulfilling such a duty that one has a chance to do something really lasting. No work of Goethe’s expressed this view more splendidly than his fragment “Die Geheimnisse” (The mysteries), with its description of a universal religion of humanity, a description that owes much to a suggestion made by Johannes Valentinus Andreae (1586–1654), who was the author of the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz [The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz], 1616).

No one so energetically pursued the breakdown of the old Lutheran orthodoxy, (and did so with religious arguments that he adapted according to his changing conversation partners) as did Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). Perhaps his most momentous text is Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, 1777), in which he teaches, just as Kant does a little later, that contingent historical truths cannot provide the foundation for necessary rational truths. It would therefore be a mistake, for example, to try to justify Christological dogmas on the basis of biblical accounts of miracles, even if one could persuade oneself of their historical veracity, which is not easy in an age without miracles. (On the other hand, in “Das Christentum der Vernunft” [“The Christianity of Reason”] the young Lessing defends the doctrine of the immanent Trinity on the basis of the idea of God’s thinking of himself.) Yet it would be false to attribute to Lessing a farewell to Christianity, with regard to which the defenders of the religion of reason, which is sometimes called “Deism,” adopted entirely different positions. Although it decouples the Christian command to love from traditional doctrines of faith, “Das Testament Johannis” (“The Testament of St. John”), which is despite its brevity one of the most moving dialogues in the German language, defends it resolutely. Lessing’s most important work in the area of the philosophy of religion, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1780), acknowledges the necessity of positive divine revelation at the beginning of the process of education, but argues that the latter seeks to promote reason, which in the end requires neither worldly nor other-worldly sanctions. Autonomy and theonomy once again coincide, but factual history of religion can and should be conceived as rational. Lessing’s sympathy with a religion of reason made it easier for him to be friends with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1796), with whom Jewish thought begins to have an important place in German-language philosophy. Rejecting Johann Kaspar Lavater’s unabashed demand that he convert to Christianity, Mendelssohn clung to his religion, which he nonetheless interpreted rationalistically; with his contribution to the Haskalah he paved the way for the emancipation of the Jews. In the eponymous hero of Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), which is a manifesto directed against the subordination of morality to an irrational God and against ecclesiastical arbitrariness, as well as an apology for a religion freeing itself from external rites, Lessing erected a monument to his friend, who after Lessing’s death defended him against Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s (1743–1819) accusation, in Über die Lehre des Spinoza (On Spinoza’s doctrine, 1785), that he was a Spinozist. The controversy over pantheism that was connected with this had two consequences that Jacobi had not intended. First, it led to an increased interest in Spinoza; and in 1811 he repeated the accusation of pantheism against Schelling. Second, Mendelssohn rightly pointed out that Lessing’s pantheism was much more subtle than Spinoza’s, and hardly deviated from a theism like Leibniz’s. There can be no doubt that Lessing is a moral realist and defends a teleological interpretation of reality—and this corresponds to Leibniz, not to Spinoza. The fascination with Spinoza in the German culture of the time was determined by his language, which was uncompromising compared to Leibniz’s; it was nonetheless, as also in Herder, a Spinozism transformed by Leibniz. That was to change only with Nietzsche. However, Jacobi’s philosophical achievement consists in having emphasized the importance of unmediated evidence (of belief and feeling, and later of an immediately intuitive reason) for the theory of knowledge. He held that in it alone a personal God was given.

Lessing might seldom be first-rate as a poet (because he too often says too clearly what matters to him); but as a literary critic and aesthetician he is always first-rate. To be sure, around 1750 German culture had already produced, with Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–1759) and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), important works on hermeneutics and aesthetics, but Lessing represents something entirely new. His Laocoon (1766) deals with the “limits of painting and poetry,” and is thus an attempt to differentiate aesthetic norms (for example, the role of the ugly) for the different arts. That presupposes the general concept of the fine arts, which first appears in the modern age. What makes Lessing’s treatise so magnificent is the combination of a comprehensive knowledge of Antiquity, a great familiarity also with modern literature, and a construction of new categories characterized by precision. He can be accused of having given aesthetics too strong a psychological bias, and of having committed a few philological errors; but in the combination of classical philology and general aesthetics the work is just as trailblazing as Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art, 1764). There had already been antiquarian archeology, but Winckelmann’s contrast between Greek and Oriental art, the discovery of a law of development for ancient art in the third part of his fourth chapter, his glorification of Greek civilization on the basis of a religion of art, and finally his way of describing art, which is an art in itself, guarantee his work’s epochal standing. It is again the fusion of detailed knowledge and general categories that made it such a success—even Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History, 1915), with its paradigmatic opposition of Renaissance and Baroque, would be inconceivable without Winckelmann. And the philhellenic idea produced a new form of humanism that, unlike the first humanism, detached itself from Christian dogma, though in its universalistic ethics it owes far more to Christianity than to Antiquity.

Lessing’s writings on the philosophy of religion and aesthetics are largely independent of one another. Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1802) achievement consists in having developed a theology of the human sciences, so to speak: in his work, the elucidation of the intellectual world, and in particular of the poetic art of peoples, becomes a kind of religious duty. Since Herder interprets the Bible purely immanently, like other texts, and thereby helped found German Oriental studies, he seems to follow Reimarus; but since in decoding all the great texts he senses in them the spirit of God, as it were, we can just as well say that he universalized traditional biblical interpretation. In this regard Herder was influenced by the “Magus of the North,” Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), in whom uneasiness with the rationalism of the Enlightenment found a hermetic expression: there are few German-language works that are so hard to understand as the short and obscure writings—sparkling with wit and Bible quotations, and deliberately unsystematic-associative—of this Laurence Sterne of philosophy. Hamann’s starting point is a religious experience, namely his personal relationship to Jesus and to the Bible as the word of God; to this aspect of his thought only his admirer Søren Kierkegaard remained faithful, not Herder, who followed Lessing in Christology. But Herder was able to achieve a synthesis of Lessing and Hamann only because the latter used a basically old-fashioned form of theology to discover, even in the pagan world, resonances of Biblical salvation history. In his first work, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (Socratic Memorabilia, 1759), which is directed against Kant’s critique of Hamann’s way of life, he presents Socrates as a predecessor of his own existential conception of philosophy; the bodily aspects of philosophizing, such as Socrates’s homoeroticism, are emphasized. At the same time, Socrates is an equivalent of the Jewish prophets; indeed, the whole of human history has to be interpreted as mythology, that is, as a type of biblical events: “a riddle that cannot be solved, unless we plow with a calf other than our reason.” According to Hamann, and his friend Jacobi, belief can and should not be justified, “because belief takes place as little through reasons as do tasting and seeing”; feeling is irreducible to concepts. Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce (Aesthetics in a nutshell) emphasizes the prerational origin of human culture in poetry, song, and similes; in the modern world, which has lost its connection with the divine, the creature becomes alternately a sacrificial victim and an idol. Hamann’s biblical piety leads him to a metaphysics of language. In his Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft (Metacritique of the purism of reason) he cites as one of his main objections to Kant’s ideas his neglect of the linguistic nature of our reason. He refers thereby to a central theme of later philosophy, even though his philosophical style is so little commensurable with Kant’s rigorous analyses. The later opposition between hermeneutic and analytic philosophy is preshaped in the debate between Hamann/Herder and Kant.

Herder is central in the history of German culture for three reasons. First, he gave German philosophy a new focus in the disciplines of philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of language and history, and aesthetics and hermeneutics. Second, through his poetics, which broke with French classicism and rehabilitated popular poetry and Shakespeare, through his own highly expressive style, and also due to his personal meeting with Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770/71, he helped found the “Storm and Stress” (Sturm und Drang) movement, which represents, as it were, the spring awakening of German poetry. Third, through his career as its general superintendent, he introduced the new philosophical religiousness into the Evangelical Church. However, his philosophy is less rigorous methodologically than that of Kant, who wrote a sharply critical review of Herder’s main work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas toward a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1784–1792); and even if Kant did not do justice to its importance, the mediation between Herder’s substantial insights and a formally more rigorous philosophy remained a task that only the German idealists proved capable of performing—with regard to anthropology, Fichte, and to the remaining disciplines, Hegel. Herder’s prize-winning Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language, 1772) is directed, on the one hand, against Johann Peter Süssmilch’s theory of the divine origin of language, and on the other against Condillac’s theory of the animal origin of language. Herder’s assumption of a purely human origin reflects a deeper religiousness, precisely because it avoids using elaborate stage machinery and anthropomorphizing God, while at the same time attributing creative powers to human beings, precisely qua creatures of God: “The origin of language thus becomes divine in a worthy manner only insofar as it is human.” The possibility and necessity of language emerged from the specific nature of human beings, who differ from other animals through their lack of instincts: a thesis that deeply influenced Gehlen. Precisely because man’s senses are less acute, he can relate to the whole world; and this relationship to the world is not something that is imposed on an animal basis, but instead changes the nature of animal functions: “The most sensual condition of humankind was still human.” The decisive mark of the human being is language, which according to Herder must develop even in an isolated human; in his work, language’s communicative function plays a smaller role than its expressive and representative function. In the context of a complex philosophy of the senses, Herder justifies the special status of the intermediate sense of hearing. Thinking manifests itself in speech and underlies it; thus the development of the mind can be inferred from that of language. Poetry precedes prose; abstract concepts are acquired late.

Herder’s work Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity, 1774) is even more important; it is directed against Voltaire’s Philosophie de l’histoire (Philosophy of History). Since the publication of Herder’s book there has been a specifically German philosophy of history; Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history simply carry out Herder’s program. The true turning point in the history of the philosophy of history occurs in the eighteenth century, when the ancient cyclical model—to which the greatest Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), still clung—is superseded by the idea of progress. Although Vico and Herder share similar interests (it was, significantly, in one of Hamann’s letters to Herder that Vico was mentioned almost for the first time in the German-speaking world) and both of them took a particular interest in the prerational phases of human culture (which in no way makes them opponents of Enlightenment), Herder’s philosophy of history, like Voltaire’s, approves of progress: the development from the world of the patriarchs of the Orient through Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and medieval Christianity down to the modern age is compared with the ages of human life. But unlike Voltaire, and entirely like Vico, Herder insists that the individual epochs have their distinctive logics which have to be grasped as such: even Winckelmann is reproached for having unjustly subjected Egyptian art to Greek standards. It is a mistake to attribute relativism to Herder, or even to celebrate him, as did the National Socialists, as a predecessor of an antiuniversalistic nationalism: Herder is concerned only to recognize without prejudice the values that are possible at a specific stage of development and that are sometimes incompatible with later ones; virtues and vices are therefore often interwoven. Seeing more than mere barbarism in pre-Enlightenment cultures is for Herder a religious duty, because thereby Providence is recognized in history; fundamentally, it is the expression of a universalistic ethics, to which he adheres and which he sees as prepared by Christianity’s supersession of the ancient ethnic religions. The advancement of humanity always remains Herder’s goal. To be sure, he grants each culture a right to its own specificity. He criticizes the moral atrophy and hypocrisy of the Enlightenment (for example, European colonialism), but he knows that this latter period, too, has its necessary place in the history of humankind. In his main work, the history of humankind is integrated into the history of nature, within which the special status of humans is worked out in a way that remains valid today.

Herder was helpful to Goethe’s poetic genius, because he drew his attention to the vitality of original folk poetry and offered him a universal-history perspective on all the creations of the human spirit. Thus a unique mixture of natural freshness and philosophical subtlety was produced that characterizes German culture around 1800 and distinguishes it as much from the artificiality of the Rococo as from the ultimate hostility to the intellect that characterized the Rousseauist revolt directed against it, from the naïveté of Anglican orthodoxy as well as from the condescending winks of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. The German concept of Kultur, in contrast to the French civilisation, has its origin here, and in it compensation plays a role: the resort to Germany’s own folklore was possible and necessary, because Germany did not enjoy the same intellectual prestige as did France. Lessing’s twofold talent as a poet and a philosopher was not granted to many; but his model sensitized German poets to philosophical questions and oriented German philosophers toward aesthetics. Goethe himself gave perfect poetic expression to the complex worldview that was now formed, and, with the Bildungsroman, created a new and typically German (because intellectual) subgenre, even if he himself was not a professional philosopher, or even an original aesthetician (only his concrete interpretations of artworks, in the plastic arts even more than in poetry, are pathbreaking).

In contrast, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) has a permanent place in the history of aesthetics; indeed, he gave it a central role in the conclusion of the system of philosophy that is only envisaged in Kant. In “Über Anmut und Würde” (“On Grace and Dignity,” 1793), Schiller already thoroughly criticized Kant’s moral rigorism on the grounds that although subjection to the moral law is needful, with grace, a harmony of inclination and duty is possible. Thus a traditional aesthetic category is given a moral function. The letters “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” (“On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795) attribute in a more general way a central role to beauty in mediating between nature and morals; without it, morality easily becomes coercion. Certainly Schiller’s valorization of the sense of beauty also pursues a political goal; aesthetic education is conceived as an alternative to revolution, which is according to Schiller a misguided path to the realization of moral ideas. Presumably he thereby furthered the ideal of an apolitical aesthete that distinguishes the German culture of the nineteenth century from English or French culture, in which intellectuals were often involved in the government or acted as its challengers. And yet the hope of restoring, through aesthetic sensitization, the ancient unity of all spheres of life and thereby preparing the way for a more moral society is a noble one; and the theory of the play drive, which mediates between the sensuous and the formal drive, gave pedagogy a new twist. “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 1795) attempts to distinguish two basic types of poetry that also reflect the opposition between Goethe and Schiller themselves, but belong to a philosophy-of-history perspective. The opposition between ancient and modern poetry, which had been agitating European poetics since the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, was thereby raised to a new conceptual level; in particular, Schiller recognized that the longing for nature is not itself a natural feeling, and emerges late.

This linkage between aesthetics and the philosophy of history constitutes an essential characteristic of the early Romantic reorientation. Since it was also strongly influenced by Fichte, it should actually be dealt with in the next chapter, but will be discussed now because of its aesthetic focus. The importance of August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)—who, along with the Humboldts, Grimms, and Manns, are among the most significant pair of brothers in German intellectual history—consists in the fact that they were the first to command an exhaustive knowledge of the whole of world literature; with them was born a canon of world literature. To the new ideal of the autonomy of art, which is manifested in the theory and in the reality of absolute music, consummately described by Carl Dahlhaus, as well as in the triumph of poetics over rhetoric, corresponds criticism’s sense of its mission as a middle term between philosophy and history. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures “Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur” (“On Dramatic Art and Literature,” 1809–1811) not only lay out a panorama of unprecedented breadth, but they also adhere to the principle that different norms underlie classical and Romantic drama: despite their differences, Sophocles and Shakespeare are equally important. The special status of Greek poetry consists not only in the quality of its masterpieces, but also in the paradigmatic nature of its development. The Schlegels were not only equally competent in ancient and modern literature, but also had begun to explore literature outside Europe. They founded German Indology, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enjoyed a leading role worldwide. Friedrich Schlegel was less disciplined than his brother, but he used new literary forms for literary criticism. In addition to the treatise, he was master of the aphorism and of the dialogue as well; his “Gespräch über die Poesie” (“Dialogue on Poetry,” 1800) mirrors the Romantics’ culture of conversation, in which for the first time women also had a place, even if limited to providing inspiration, and which itself represents a poetical poetics. Philosophy was to be poetic, and poetry was to become philosophical. The fragments published in the periodical Athenäum, which appeared only from 1798 to 1800, also express the early Romantics’ common philosophizing. The commonality remained as short-lived as that of the “Storm and Stress” writers, and yet the ideal of philosophical friendship among young people remains so beautiful and is so typical of German culture, that we cannot smile at it but only elegiacally invoke it. Schlegel’s fragments anticipate many ideas that Hegel was to elaborate, though they are expressed in a deliberately paradoxical, antisystematic form that at the same time yearns for system: “It is just as lethal for the spirit to have a system as not to have one. It will therefore have to resolve to combine the two.” One cannot live with such paradoxes; in the long run the sense of ultimate forlornness that arises when one is faced with an infinite abundance of important intellectual works produces an inner emptiness against which even the Romantic theory of irony is of only a little comfort. Schlegel finally converted, along with his wife, Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea, to Catholicism, which however only slowly became the starting point for innovative German intellectuals.

One of the most original contributors to Athenäum was Georg Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), who called himself Novalis. His “Hymnen an die Nacht” (“Hymns to the Night”) provided a dark counter-accent to the Enlightenment’s metaphor of light, justified a longing for death (which never became aggressive, however), and nostalgically invoked pagan and Christian religious history. His essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (Christianity or Europe) glorifies, even if it ironically refracts them, the Catholic Middle Ages and criticizes both the Reformation and the main trends of the Enlightenment, which in his view undermine any enthusiasm. At the same time, Novalis had great hopes for German culture, which was in the van of “a slow but sure movement ahead of the other European countries”; Goethe is said to believe that “the intellectual barycenter lies under the German people.” To be sure, Novalis was a convinced European; for him, Germanness was in principle a universal ideal. But he emphatically defended the Prussian monarchy, which was not yet constitutional; a genuine royal couple is more important to him than a constitution, as we read in his “Glauben und Liebe oder der König und die Königin” (“Faith and Love, or the King and the Queen”), which rhapsodizes on Queen Louise. Given Novalis’s endearing disposition, it is not easy to criticize him; but it is nonetheless true that political Romanticism, which was given eloquent expression especially by Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829) and to which Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for example, adhered, made more difficult Germany’s transition to a parliamentary monarchy on the British model. The reader will evaluate more positively Müller’s astute discernment of the moral and religious presuppositions that underlie economic processes (factors that had less interest for contemporary British economic science), which motivated him to grant the state a more important role in the economy.

To art’s new autonomy corresponded the autonomy of religion, which Friedrich Schlegel’s Reformed friend Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) elaborated in Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1799). According to Schleiermacher, religion is to be reduced neither to metaphysics nor to morality, but is instead a “sense and taste for the infinite.” Thus religion became accessible once again to people who had detached themselves from the old dogmas. Schleiermacher’s theology of feeling has roots in the Enlightenment and in Pietism, even if it represents something entirely new and is probably the greatest caesura in the history of theology since Thomas Aquinas. Scholarly theology was now to be based on subjective seriousness and modern standards of rationality rather than on the authority of tradition. Thus even in his later theological writings Schleiermacher continues to adhere to a modern hermeneutics which he decouples from any consideration for dogma: we are not allowed to read later dogmas into the Bible. His Hermeneutik und Kritik (Hermeneutics and Criticism, 1838) is perhaps the classical work of the discipline, in part because Schleiermacher was, among other things, a first-rate classical philologist. His translation of Plato remains unsurpassed because, like other great German translations of the time, it remains close to the language of the original, rather than following the model of Dryden’s translation of Vergil or Pope’s translation of Homer, which make their authors sound like elegant Englishmen; and his study of Plato’s philosophy deeply influenced his own philosophical writings. However, in his work, in contrast to Hegel’s, dialectic is understood as an art of conversation, not a method for producing concepts. Whereas the eighteenth century had studied primarily Hellenistic philosophy, a shift to classical Greek philosophy now took place that ultimately can be explained only by the fact that German idealism is the most original reincarnation of Platonism. The idea that it is up to the Germans to receive the Greek heritage motivates the German fine arts, poetry, and philosophy of the time; it could be argued that only a culture that had developed slowly had the ability to understand the Greeks.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) in particular articulated the neohumanist conviction that no other nation could understand the Greeks as well as Germany, for Germany was essentially related to them “in its language, the many-sidedness of its strivings, the simplicity of its sense, its federalist constitution, and its latest fortunes.” This he wrote in his Geschichte des Verfalls und Unterganges der griechischen Freistaaten (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Greek Republics), which was never completed, and which, in contrast to Edward Gibbon’s history, is devoted not to Rome, but to Greece. Humboldt’s importance lies in part in his creation of institutions in which the project of a new human science could be permanently established. In 1809–1810, as director of the section for ecclesiastical affairs and public education within the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, he was instrumental in founding the University of Berlin, which, in contrast to most contemporary universities in Europe, was conceived as a research center. Its research would, however, be inspired by teaching students who would participate in the research. In addition, Humboldt bequeathed to Germany a legacy of educational and cultural policies that encouraged instruction in music and drawing and the organization of libraries and museums, introduced state examinations for certifying teachers, and ended the prohibition on visiting foreign universities. Not all of his ideas were realized—for example, alternatives to the humanist Gymnasium were created, though the latter’s great prestige is owed to Humboldt, who in his school plan for Lithuania wanted even carpenters to know Greek. Humboldt was part of a broader movement that concentrated on inner regeneration after Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon; but he had few allies who shared his enthusiasm for reaching this goal through the use of culture, embodied in a comprehensive concept of education (Bildung). Disciplines were to be pursued only with a view to the whole and to shaping the self, and they were to be understood in their historical development; that was, in his view, what distinguished education from the mere accumulation of knowledge. Therefore Humboldt rejected the partitioning of the Academy of Sciences into divisions. His concrete political decisions continued to be shaped by his early Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (Ideas for an attempt to determine the limits of state action, 1792), which exercised a lasting influence on John Stuart Mill and sought to limit the state’s tasks in a way quite foreign to Germany. Certainly, Humboldt neglected the state’s economic and social obligations; but his insight that the nation suffers when the state undertakes too much remains correct: if the state distributes goods, abilities atrophy. The autonomy of scientific institutions remained a central concern even for this Prussian official; the state had to know that science “would go infinitely better without it.” As a diplomat, Humboldt advocated classic liberal principles and feared that a united Germany would endanger the European balance of powers and might wage wars of conquest, which would hardly be conducive to its spiritual education. More important than the essay “Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers” (“On the Historian’s Task,” 1821), in which Humboldt emphasizes that the grasping of facts must always be guided by ideas, are his linguistic works, especially “Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts” (“On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species,” 1836), the posthumously published introduction to his work on the Indonesian Kawi language. Before Humboldt, hardly anyone had mastered so many languages; his linguistic typology, which was partly anticipated by the Schlegels, is still influential today. But the truly philosophical aspect of his work, which guarantees linguistics an intrinsic value and legitimates, for instance, the interest in dialects, lies in his analysis of the relationship between language and thought. To be sure, Humboldt focuses on the influence of language on thought; what interests him more than the classification of the world that takes place in vocabulary is the basic grammatical structure of language. He overestimates the influence that inflection exercises on thought, for example in Sanskrit, which he contrasts to the isolating linguistic structure of Chinese, even though he is certainly aware of the reduction of inflection over time in Indo-European languages. But Humboldt’s thesis that there is no standpoint outside language differs from the views of later linguistic relativists in that he interprets language itself as an—unconscious—work of the mind. He emphasizes that a universal linguistic competence underlies every individual language, and that it is this principle that makes mutual understanding possible, even if, because of the holistic nature of language, the connotations of words corresponding to each other in different languages are in no way the same. Every language can express an infinite number of ideas by further modifying a finite number of elements; in particular, poetry and philosophy expand language.