A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

1751–1780 Lessing and the Enlightenment.

1773–1787 Storm and Stress Period.—The Enlightenment proper at an end.[52]

1787–1805 Classicism. (Schiller d. 1805).

1795–1850 (approximately) The Romantic Movement.

1850– The Realistic Movement.

The Political Enlightenment of Germany—Frederick the Great. Political changes preceded and did not follow philosophical theories in the German Enlightenment. Germany was therefore like England and unlike France in this respect. The coming of Frederick to the throne of the now powerful Prussia, the reforms that he inaugurated, the religious toleration that he granted, his recall of Wolff to Halle, his avowed support of intellectualthings, and especially the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) were the political groundwork that made possible the Enlightenment in Germany. Frederick himself is the great figure in the German Enlightenment, just as Voltaire is in the French. Frederick accomplished in concrete acts for political Europe what Voltaire accomplished for ecclesiastical Europe. Voltaire destroyed the ecclesiastical absolutism of the spiritual power, while Frederick destroyed the absolutism so long connected with the name of the Holy Roman Empire and the House of Hapsburg. Before he died, he had freed the German states from the dominance of Austria, and had given to the Empire its death-blow. In the Seven Years’ War he had given to modern Europe an example of a new political ideal in an autocrat who professed to be the servant of the State. His whole thought was upon the advancement of his State. He set up the principle of the equality of his subjects before the law, and the principle of religious and philosophical liberty. In his external struggles with Austria and in the internal construction of his kingdom Frederick is the protest of the Enlightenment against the arbitrary despotism of political Europe. The example of Frederick was an inspiration to all Germany. Kant calls the eighteenth century the Age of Frederick the Great. Frederick had made his subjects feel that they were Prussians, or, as Goethe puts it, “Fritzche” (Fritz’s men); that the great foe of the German people was the German Empire as personified by the Austrians and Saxons. When he had conducted to a successful issue a deadly war of seven years single handed against the combined force of more than half of Europe,—Austria, Russia, and France, all representing politicalabsolutism,—he inspired patriotism not only in his own subjects, but in the people of many other German states. Reforms were undertaken in Bavaria, Baden, Saxony, Brunswick, etc., and by Catherine of Russia and Joseph of Austria.

Furthermore, Frederick himself was personally enlightened; he looked upon himself as the greatest among those of enlightened intellects. He had become denationalized by his early training. His father was fond of what was German, his mother of what was English, and he himself of what was French. He had studied Bayle, read French philosophy, and become acquainted with the rationalism of Wolff and the empiricism of Locke. He was at one time an atheist and materialist; but deism was his natural attitude of mind, for he emphasized morality above speculation. Conceiving himself, as the most enlightened, to be the great servant of the State, he undertook the enlightenment of his people. All Prussia must be enlightened by him, and therefore no restrictive institutions, such as guilds and corporations, could be permitted. The best man should rule, and he was the best man. Since the people are incapable of looking after themselves, they must be compelled under his benevolent autocracy to be enlightened, rational, and happy.

The Course of the German Enlightenment. Why did not the movement become as in France a political revolution? There are three reasons why it did not: (1) the reforms that the German princes adopted were wise; (2) Germany was composed of segregated states in which concerted action was difficult; (3) a new intellectual and æsthetic current was begun by Lessing, of whom we shall speak. There is no doubtthat the Enlightenment in Germany pointed to the same result as in France. From 1760 to 1780 it looked as if Germany as well as France would witness a tremendous social upheaval. From 1773 to 1787, Germany was stirred by the Storm and Stress movement. Frederick himself had pointed to the English parliamentary government as the “model for our days.” The most of the German thinkers were at heart republicans,—Klopstock, Schiller, Kant. Every man in Germany became a little Frederick, and tried to enlighten those who were inferior to him. The movement extended to the schoolroom. Secret societies were formed of kindred enlightened souls to enlighten the world. The most important of these societies was the Illuminati. The aim of these was to free men from national and civil ties, from pedantry, intolerance, political and theological slavery. The human heart is the basis of society, and the only worthy object of study. The Illuminati included even princes among its members. It was established in 1776 and prohibited in 1786. There was a distinctive Storm and Stress literature. This was set in motion by Rousseau’s Héloïse and Emile, which were widely read in Germany. Writers glorified the individual, called men back to primitive and uncorrupted nature, denounced civilization, and for twenty years it almost seemed as if the German Enlightenment had turned from the intellectual achievements of Lessing, and would follow the sentimental appeal of Rousseau. Herder was particularly prominent in this movement, also Goethe and Schiller in their early writings.

Of the three factors that saved Germany from a political revolution, perhaps the most potent was the new, fresh, literary ideas of Lessing. If Frederick is theoriginator of the German Enlightenment, Lessing is the savior of it. The Enlightenment in England stopped with the phenomenalism of Hume, in France with the Revolution, but in Germany it has in a sense continued even to the present day. The classic period of Goethe and Schiller, the modern scientific achievements of the Germans, have their perpetual source in Lessing. He not only gave the death-blow to the pedantic absolutism of the intellectual past, but he set the movement upon a permanent intellectual basis, upon which it has stood against the assaults of sentimentalism for a hundred and fifty years.

Lessing. G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) was not only a sound scholar, but a polished man of the social world. He was a writer of epigrams, fables, and comedies, a dramatic and literary critic, a translator and essayist, a student of philosophy and ecclesiastical history, and a writer upon art. His Nathan the Wise is, after Goethe’s Faust, the greatest literary production of German thought. With him German literature begins. He rejected the French models accepted by Gottsched; he introduced Shakespeare to the Germans; and he surpassed all his contemporaries in literary and artistic reform, social enlightenment, and religious emancipation. Lessing and Winckelmann were the first to spread a love for the past by a critical study of it. Lessing was not a violent iconoclast like Voltaire, but a discriminating critic. He said that if Leibnitz had wished for an interpreter, he would not have chosen Wolff. The new literary writers, Lessing and Herder, in their insistence upon subjectivity and intuition, rather than Wolff, were the true interpreters of Leibnitz. Lessing differed from the Enlightenment in his conception ofthe present in its continuity with the past. Herder, too, was interested in development. Lessing pointed to the perfect models in the past; Herder to the origins of things. Both believed in an immanent God and the harmony of the universe. At this time the problems in æsthetics came to light, and with them the creation of “world literature,” which drew from all historical thought—from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. The Pietists, the Wolffians, and the literary writers agreed in taking the subjective point for their view of life. Thus Leibnitz appears through Lessing as a motive power in the German Enlightenment. Lessing’s doctrine of individuality so transcended that of the Storm and Stress Period that he was not understood by it. His enlightened individual suppresses his individuality. But his principles were so fundamental that the Storm and Stress Period proved to be only an interruption, and the German Enlightenment was perpetuated. He thus projected himself beyond the eighteenth century by the instruments of that century.