Читать книгу The German Conception of History - Georg G. Iggers - Страница 12

[ CHAPTER III ]

The Theoretical Foundations of German Historicism I: Wilhelm von Humboldt

1.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT’S personality was unique and many-sided,¹ so that his intellectual development was not typical of changes taking place in the German intellectual climate of his time. But there are certainly aspects of Humboldt’s life and thought which are highly indicative of these transformations. An aristocrat, cosmopolitan in outlook, a friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller with whom he exchanged over a thousand letters,² Humboldt on the eve of the invasion of Germany by revolutionary France shared fully in the Humanitätsideal. An active statesman in the Prussian reform administrations of Stein and Hardenberg after 1809, Humboldt participated in the new liberalism, which in the struggle against Napoleon affirmed national values against the principles of 1789. He no longer viewed the German nation as primarily a cultural community, but as one of political power.³ Throughout Humboldt’s life there is a thread of continuity with the cosmopolitan, humanistic orientation of his younger years, as well as a clear shift of emphasis toward the new national values.

Humboldt’s first political writings were stimulated by the French Revolution. He had visited Paris during the crucial months of 1789⁴ and had assessed the developments in France more soberly than many other Germans. They, like his friend Friedrich Gentz, had first welcomed the upheaval with almost unbounded enthusiasm, only to turn as strongly against it. On the surface, his Ideas on an Attempt to Define the Limits of the State’s Sphere of Action of 1791, often considered the classic work on German Liberalism, proposes a state very similar to that of orthodox liberalism since Locke. The state is not an end in itself, but “a subordinated means, to which the true end, man, must not be sacrificed.”⁵ Its purpose is the protection of the fullest freedom of all individuals; its functions are to be reduced to the absolute minimum needed to protect the rights of the individual against violation from within and to guarantee his security against threats from without.⁶ Rejecting the totalitarian argument that the state must further the happiness of its citizens, Humboldt denies the state all positive functions, including a role in education, religion, or the improvement of morals.⁷ These and other functions might be required in society, he admits, but they should be the work of free, voluntary associations, not of the state. The state must not be identified with civil society (Nationalverein), Humboldt warns. The state is marked by coercion and the concentration of power; civil society, on the other hand, consists of a pluralism of groups, freely chosen by the individuals and subject to change.⁸ Not the state, but the voluntary institutions of a free society preserve and foster cultural values, according to Humboldt. The line dividing state and civil society therefore needs to be a clear one, with the state forbidden from interference in the private lives of its citizens. This assumes a state, governed by standing laws which guarantee the rights of the private individual against official interference.

But the theoretical foundations upon which Humboldt bases his concept of the state were very different from those of classical liberalism. The latter had sought a theoretical justification for individual liberties in a doctrine of natural law. It saw the sources of man’s humanity in his ability to think and thus to grasp the rational structure of the universe and of ethics. Classical liberalism viewed rights in terms of abstract, universal principles. It saw those characteristics as essentially human which were universal and uniform among men. But for Humboldt, as for Goethe, Schiller, or Herder, who also shared in the Humanitätsideal of German classicism, it was essential to man’s humanity that he develop his own unique individuality to its fullest. They shared the Enlightenment belief that man possessed a special dignity, but this dignity, they held, had to be understood in dynamic terms of individual growth. However, while they recognized that man’s dignity and end were prescribed by the nature of things or reason, they did not think that reason dictated clear rules for this development. Rather, man’s growth had to be governed by the inner nature of his peculiar individuality. Freedom from state interference was necessary because “man’s highest purpose—the one prescribed by eternal immutable reason, not by changing inclinations, (was) the highest and most proportioned development of his resources into one whole.”⁹ Yet this development was possible only when the state did not interfere with man’s natural development. The individual was a living organism; the state a mechanical tool which, through legislation, would impose external restraints upon natural growth.¹⁰ Man did not exist in a vacuum, Humboldt acknowledged, and in contrast to the state society was natural and necessary for the individual as he unfolded his “unique individuality” ( Eigentümlichkeit).¹¹ Humboldt assumed that there was a basic harmony among individualities in growth and did not see in society as such, as distinct from the state, a significant source of constraint. Indeed, if the functions of the state were restricted to a minimum, then in his opinion the “highest ideal of the co-existence of human beings” could be attained; namely, that in which “every being develops not only out of himself and for his own sake.”¹²

Such a concept of individuality appears hardly compatible with the concept of equality in the classical sense. Indeed, certain important elements of classic liberal political theory are missing. There is nowhere any proposal for government by consent, nor for any system of checks and balances to control the power of the state. Indeed, because Humboldt conceives the state as unified and possessing “absolute power”¹³ and rejects the representative principle, he argues that the state’s functions must be limited to the bare minimum of preserving security. Because of the coercive character of the state, the positive social functions must be left to voluntary associations. Were the state to carry on positive functions, Humboldt maintains, it would require the consent of every individual, something very different from the majority will of its representatives.¹⁴

The Limits of the State constitutes a theoretical repudiation of the paternalistic welfare state, primarily that of the absolutistic Polizeistaat of eighteenth-century enlightened depotism, but in principle also of the revolutionary state. In no sense does the book contain a rejection of monarchy as such, or even of absolute monarchy. As Siegfried Kaehler has pointed out in his political biography of Wilhelm von Humboldt,¹⁵ Humboldt’s endorsement of the French Revolution never goes beyond the idea of liberty. Already in 1789, he viewed with misgivings the egalitarian aspects of the revolution. In his diary, he condemns the decisions of the night of August 4th, abolishing feudal rights in France, “when a number of nobles, most of them poor, gave away what belonged to the wealthy.” As he tells an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution:

I said that the deputies had no authority to renounce (these privileges), that the surrender of these privileges had come too quickly and had no useful but only harmful consequences since they nourished chimerical ideas of equality.¹⁶

Perhaps most strikingly in discord with classic liberal ideals is Humboldt’s glorification of war in the Limits of the State. Kant, too, had paid homage to the positive aspects of war.¹⁷ War and antagonism had stimulated human activities and hastened the development toward a civil society on rational foundations in which war would be abolished. But for Humboldt war is a desirable end in itself, a permanent feature of human societies, “one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of the human race.” He regretfully saw war assume a less and less important place in the modern world, and believed there is no substitute for it. War “alone gives to the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void.”¹⁸ Standing armies must be abolished not to dampen the warlike spirit but to spread it through the nation, to “inspire the citizen with spirit of true war.”¹⁹

Doubtless, this positive attitude toward war is related to Humboldt’s anti-eudaemonism, his rejection of personal welfare as the highest ethical good. This attack against “eudaemonism” is central to the thought of all the significant writers of the German historical tradition from Humboldt to Meinecke and of German Idealists from Kant to the Hegelians. “Happiness and pleasure,” Humboldt observes, “are far removed from the dignity of man. Man most enjoys those moments in which he experiences the highest degree of strength and inner unity. But at these times he is also closest to profound misery.”²⁰ For Humboldt the highest ethical good is still found in the development of the individuality and uniqueness of each man. But the higher values, which replace personal happiness as the highest good, could be easily interpreted, as they later were by German writers of the historicist and German Idealist tradition, in terms of the subordination of the welfare of the greatest possible number of individuals to the historic destiny of the community.

In that case, could the limited state, advocated by Humboldt in the Limits of the State, actually be established? This raises the question whether man possesses meaningful choices in his political behavior or must act exclusively within the framework of historical institutions. In the final chapter of his book on the application of theory to reality, Humboldt deals with this question, and develops a theory of social change. Classical liberalism holds that society could be effectively changed by the application of theory to social reality. Without entirely discounting the role of ideas, Humboldt emphasizes the limitations of such an approach. Change could take place only within a concrete historical and social situation, he argues; hence the application of theories to societies is possible only within very narrow limits. Every situation (Lage) in which men find themselves has a definite inner structure or form that can not be transformed into any self-chosen one. Change is possible, however, but it requires a prior transformation of opinions and attitudes. One could, without disturbing the existing order of things, prepare for transformations by acting on the minds and characters of men and giving them a direction no longer in accord with the status quo. Any other approach would disturb the natural course of human development.²¹ and have disastrous consequences.

This stress upon the role of “pure theory” in legislation sharply distinguishes Humboldt from the historicist position of a Savigny. Despite his recognition of historical realities, Humboldt affirms:

that natural and general law is the only foundation of all positive law, and that one always has to come back to natural law, and that therefore—to cite a principle of law which serves as the source of all other principles of law—no one can ever in any way obtain a right through the energy or the ability of another person without that person’s consent.²²

Humboldt’s affirmation that such a transcendent law exists signified, of course, his recognition that not all institutions function in accord with this transhistorical norm. This was already implied in the mere fact that Humboldt wrote a book on the theory of a nonexisting state. But did this recognition of a “natural and universal law” not stand in contradiction with Humboldt’s belief that the individual should be judged only by measures proper to him, and not by external abstract norms? Humboldt thus agrees with the French revolutionaries that the state must bring the “real condition of things” as close to the “right and true theory” as possible. But this “approximation” is possible only insofar as “true necessity” does not hinder its course. The possibility of change, however, rests on the assumption that “men (were) sufficiently receptive of that liberty which the theory (taught), and that this liberty could bring about those wholesome consequences which always accompanied liberty when there were no obstacles in its way.” But the “possibility” of applying the theory is always limited by “Necessity” (Nothwendigkeit). Doubtlessly keeping in mind the developments in France, Humboldt warns that to ignore “necessity” in effecting social reforms would lead to the destruction of the very values these reforms are intended to bring about.²³

What is left of theory and of “universal, natural law” in view of the force of “necessity?” Apparently very little. The state “must always let its actions be determined by necessity.” This principle was not conceived in terms of historical determinism; rather, necessity was defined in terms of the “unique individuality” of men.²⁴ Necessity, the respect for the uniqueness of the individual, determines the theoretical demand for the limited state. The recognition of the uniqueness and diversity of men forbids the state to undertake “positive” action to achieve “useful” ends, since what is useful to an individual is always subject to speculation and can not be determined from the outside. Necessity is thus in harmony with freedom. No “other principle [could] be reconcile [d] with respect for the individuality of independent beings and the concern for freedom which derive [d] from this respect.”²⁵ Then what remains of theory, of “eternally immutable reason,” of the “natural, universal laws of nature” is merely the recognition of the total diversity of men. The theory of the state, confronted by the necessities of the real situation, hangs in mid-air as an abstraction, incapable of realization.

Humboldt is quite aware of all this. In describing the “theoretical principles” of political power, he proceeds from the “nature of man,” viewing man “in the form most characteristic of him,” not yet determined by any concrete relationships. “But man nowhere exists like that,”²⁶ he adds. The implementations of the theory require a degree of maturity for freedom. “Albeit, this maturity is nowhere perfect and in my opinion will remain foreign to the sensual, extroverted individual.”²⁷ Thus, Humboldt asks his readers to refrain from all comparisons with reality, “despite all the general observations of these pages.”²⁸ As he wrote to Schiller: “This treatise has no relation to present-day circumstances.”²⁹ This may explain in part why this classic of German liberalism was never published in its entirety during Humboldt’s lifetime, but appeared only in 1851, long after his death.³⁰

2.

Humboldt’s defense of the liberal state in The Limits of the State, however, includes two basic assumptions which in their modified form are still reminiscent of classic liberal theory. Humboldt maintains that there is a “pure theory” of the state, one based upon the principle of “eternal reason” and thus opposed to the existing “positive” state. This holds true even if for him, in contrast to classic liberal thought, the chasm between the ideal and the existing state are unbridgeable. Moreover, he finds a human dignity common to all men. In his other writings, Humboldt carefully attempts to free himself from all abstract or universal principles and more closely approaches an organicist concept of society and history.

This had been already true of his critique of the new French Constitution which he had written in August 1791, a year before the Limits of the State?³¹ It had been a great error of the Constituent Assembly, he holds, to attempt to base a constitution upon “pure reason.” Only that could develop harmoniously in men or in the state as “a sum of active and passive human energies” which has its origin within and is not imposed from without. Constitutions can not be drafted on men as sprigs on trees. “Where time and nature have not done the spade work, one might as well bind blossoms with threads. The first noonday sun will wilt them.”³² He does not urge the wise legislator to work out the “pure theory” of the intended reform in detail, as he does in the Limits of the State, but asks him to free himself from abstract considerations, to determine the actual direction of change, and then modify this direction by degrees. While reforms are possible within narrow limits, human institutions are only to a very small extent the result of deliberate human action. Indeed, as he comments, “when we offer philosophic or political reason for political institutions, we will, in actuality, always find historical explanations.”³³

In the fragment “On the law of the Development of Human Energies (1791),” Humboldt sets the limits of reason and abstract law even more narrowly. Even if we possess the key to the universe, “a rational truth that pointed to the necessity of a uniform law,” this knowledge gives us no real insight into the nature of things. For living Nature, in contrast to “lifeless,” physical nature, can be grasped only through an act of understanding, of intuitively experiencing its innermost character. Indeed “understanding” of the lifeless, physical world is not really possible. We can establish uniformities in its behavior, but these relate only to its external appearance, not to its inner essence, which we can grasp in others who are analogous to us in being alive. We can know living things only through the energies they express which reflect their particular individualities. The more we succeed in reducing phenomena to abstract concepts, the further we move away from the understanding of real living forces and of individual essences.³⁵

In other essays of the 1790’s, Humboldt develops further his concept of individuality and its implications for ethics and education.³⁶ In “On the Spirit of Mankind,”³⁷ written in 1797, he stresses that every man must have a goal, a “first and an absolute yardstick,”³⁸ but this ultimate value must be related to his inner nature. The final goal common to all men is the “dignity of men,” but there is no set pattern by which this can be attained. However, this “absolute yardstick,” which man finds only in himself, does not relate to “momentary pleasure or for that matter to his happiness.” It is a “notable characteristic of man’s nature to be able to scorn pleasure and to do without happiness.” This yardstick is to be found in a man’s “inner value, in his higher, more perfect self.”³⁹ Humboldt, in distinguishing between the essential and incidental elements of individual character, already approaches his later view that each individual represents an idea. Still noticeably missing is the view that collective groups, other than mankind as a whole, possess individual character or represent ideas. This concept was to become important to Humboldt’s later political writings.

3.

Until 1809, Humboldt’s relation to politics had been that of an outsider. Even as Prussian envoy and minister plenepotentiary in Rome, between 1802 and 1809, Humboldt had primarily devoted himself to aesthetic and scholarly tasks. Since 1792, he had written no essay on political questions, and even in the Limits of the State he had approached politics as a theoretical problem without direct relation to reality. As one of his political biographers observes, his primary concern in the Limits of the State is not with the question of the needs and functions of the state, but an aesthetic interest in the development of the individual personality.⁴⁰

This relationship changed abruptly, when Humboldt was called to Berlin in 1809 upon Baron von Stein’s recommendation that he reorganize the Prussian system of education. From 1809, until the reaction which set in with the Carlsbad Decrees in 1819, Humboldt served the Prussian state in active, policy-making roles; for example, as envoy to Austria from 1810 until the end of the Congress of Vienna; as minister charged with the task of preparing a draft for the Prussian constitution in 1819; as one of the statesmen who, under the leadership of Stein and Hardenberg, attempted to reform the Prussian state along liberal lines after the humiliating defeat at Napoleon’s hands in 1806. He succeeded in reshaping the Prussian schools in accord with his Humanitätsideal. In the primary schools, he modified the then existing pedagogy, which he considered mechanical and rationalistic, and substituted Pestalozzian methods that took into account the inner needs and interests of the individual child. In the Gymnasien, he replaced preoccupation with Latin philology with emphasis upon the study of the Greeks. Influenced by Winckelmann’s perhaps one-sided interpretation of Greek art, Humboldt believed with Goethe that the Greeks had succeeded in approximating the ideal of the harmoniously proportioned and totally developed individuality. He was instrumental in founding the University of Berlin in 1810, with its principles of freedom of research and teaching which were to set a pattern for all German universities.⁴¹ He unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the function of the centralized state in matters of education by urging the transfer of state school funds to the local communities. Humboldt’s very assumption of the responsibilities of minister of education, of course, constituted a recognition of functions of the state which he had previously denied.

While it may be going too far to see in Humboldt’s turn to the state, as one historian has done, the decisive victory of the “individuality of supra-individual forces over the individual who has lost his sovereignty to the living forces of history that surround him,”⁴² Humboldt’s concept of the relation of the individual to the state and the nation underwent a radical change. In his political memoranda, Humboldt continues to view the organization of the state not merely in terms of the needs of the state, but also in terms of the education of its citizens as individuals. For this reason, he stresses the need to transfer state powers to voluntary associations in which individuals can grow through participation. But under the emotional impact of the new political nationalism in the era of the Wars of Liberation, Humboldt began to recognize the state as a metaphysical reality. The state has an existence independent of the needs of the individual, and the nation is interwoven with the state. This new orientation appears most clearly in his “Memorandum on the German Constitution” of December 1813.⁴³ Nation, state, and people are one, he observes.

In the way in which nature united individuals into nations and sorted mankind into nations, there lay contained a deep and mysterious means by which the individual, who is nothing by himself, and the race (Geschlecht), which has meaning only in individuals, kept on the true road of the proportionate and gradual development of their energies.⁴⁴

Germany was not merely a spiritual unit, Humboldt now urged; as he and Goethe had once believed, Germany required no political bonds, but rested upon a community of “manners and customs, language and literature.” What made Germany a whole was the “memory of rights and liberties enjoyed in common, of glory won in battle and dangers faced together, the memory of close bonds which linked the fathers and which are now alive only in the nostalgic longings of the grandchildren.”⁴⁵ This unity required political expression. Fearful of overly great centralization, Humboldt saw a confederation as the solution of the problem of national unification most in harmony with German’s history and character, although a confederation dominated by Prussia and Austria. However, this German state needed to be strong against the outside, not merely to provide protection in an unstable world, but also because political power was a prerequisite for the cultural development of Germany.

Germany must be free and strong, not only to be able to defend herself against this or that neighbor, or for that matter, against any enemy, but because only a nation which is also strong toward the outside can preserve the spirit within from which all domestic blessings flow. Germany must be free and strong, even if she is never put to a test, so that she may possess the self-assurance required for her to pursue her development as a nation unhampered and that she may be able to maintain permanently the position which she occupies in the midst of the European nations, a position which is so beneficial to these nations.⁴⁶

Power, largely conceived in military terms, now appeared to Humboldt as a positive good. This was not inconsonant with his earlier observations on the positive effects of war upon character. As he wrote in 1817, in a recommendation on the army budget:

The usefulness of a strong army ready for battle begins long before the day war is declared. Throughout periods of peace such an army assures internal security, strengthens the influence of the state in all its dealings with foreign powers, and exercises an influence on the character of the nation.⁴⁷

This emphasis upon the dependence of the individual on the nation finds its most extreme expressions in passages in his correspondence during the war years. Because of their casual character, perhaps they need to be received with some caution. Thus, he writes his wife:

Believe me. There are only two good and benevolent forces (Potenzen) in this world, God and the nation (Volk). Everything in between is useless and we are of use only to the degree that we are close to the nation (Volk).

Again he states:

All national energy, life and spontaneity rests in the nation (Volk). One can accomplish nothing without the nation and needs it constantly. Man is nothing but by virtue of the power of the whole and only as long as he strives to be in accord with it.⁴⁸

This concept of the nation or people as an individual with an individual character led him to propose a harsh treatment of France at the Congress of Vienna. He based his demands not only on the political interests of Prussia or of Germany, but on his condemnation of the French national character, the absence of a “striving for the divine which the French lack not only as a nation but virtually without exception also as individuals.”⁴⁹

From this new emphasis upon historic and collective forces, the draft recommendation Humboldt prepared for a Prussian Constitution⁵⁰ is interesting, for it indicates a new type of liberalism which no longer recognized the individual as the basic unit in politics and as the purpose for which the state exists. The draft did guarantee the basic rights of the individual to be secure in his person and in his property, due process of law, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press. It also provided for representation. The draft conceived the constitution not merely as serving the “objective” purpose of the state and providing more efficient government, but also as fulfilling the “subjective” needs of the citizens. Through political participation, they would grow morally and spiritually. Society was no longer seen as a composite of individuals, but as an organic whole of corporations representing social functions. The corporations, it is true, were adapted to the demands of modern Prussian life and primarily were viewed as organs of political representation.

Humboldt wished to maintain the economic freedom established by the reform edicts. The political role of the nobility was to be preserved only to the extent that the nobles still fulfilled an actual function. Humboldt idealized corporate institutions far less than Stein. Extensive administrative functions were to be transferred from the central government to the communities and the provinces in order to stimulate local participation in public affairs. The proposed estates general for the monarchy were to have powers similar to those possessed by the parliaments created by the French Charter or by the Southwestern German constitutions granted in the 1820’s, and they were to resemble these parliaments in their organization. But the language of this document, which certainly envisaged a much higher degree of popular participation than did these other constitutional documents, was much further removed than they were from the principles of 1789. The author of the Limits of the State now saw the individual acquire his rights of citizenship, no longer by virtue of being an individual, but only on the basis of meeting the qualifications for acceptance into a corporation.⁵¹

4.

There is little radically new in the three important essays which Humboldt wrote on the nature of history after 1814. His views of history, in terms of growth and life, his stress that the act of understanding requires the total personality and not merely the rational faculties of the observer, and his belief in the uniqueness of the individual, were all present. However, the emphasis had changed. The residues of belief in a common human nature and in common human rights derived from reason (basic elements of the theoretical foundations of the political liberalism of Humboldt’s Limits of the State), now had receded almost completely in the background. His theoretical rejection of rational ethics and of objective criteria of knowledge was now almost absolute. History remains the only source of knowledge about man, but since man is irrational and history the scene of his actions, history must be approached by a method which takes into account this irrationality.

Three aspects of Humboldt’s essays of this period are of particular interest: (a) the extent to which he pursues the irrational forces of life and history; (b) his theory of ideas⁵² by which he seeks to find a metaphysical foundation for his doctrine of individuality and discover meaning and a common basis of existence in a pluralistic world; (c) his theory of understanding or Verstehen⁵³ through which he attempts to do justice to the irrational nature of history, as well as of man.

The first aspect, the irrational character of history, forms the topic of Humboldt’s “Reflections on World History,”⁵⁴ a bitter critique of the idea of progress and all attempts at systematic philosophies of history, including those of Kant. It is folly to seek meaningful direction in history, Humboldt argues. Attempts to do so only do violence to the events of history by forcing them into schemes and robbing them of their individuality. They treat mankind too intellectually, cutting the close relation of man’s history with the forces of nature. There is indeed coherence (Zusammenhang) in history, but of an organic rather than an intellectual kind. Mankind, Humboldt suggests, resembles a plant, an analogy which was not entirely fortunate since a plant possesses an internal structure which Humboldt apparently denies to the history of man. The individual person’s relation to the nation is comparable to a leafs relation to the tree. Mankind consists of a ladder of individualities from the individual through the collective bodies to the race as a whole. Each individuality (whether individual person or nation) receives its unique character not in slow stages, but by sudden spontaneous generation. The birth of an individuality is also the beginning of its decline. The individuality dies, but its spirit survives. Thus, it is “the most important thing in world history to preserve this spirit as it endures, changes form, and in some cases becomes extinct.”⁵⁵

There is indeed a purpose to world history, but it is not to be found in a progressive perfection of man. We must not expect man to attain an abstractly conceived end, Humboldt warns; rather, we must hope that the “creative power of nature and ideas remains inexhaustible.”⁵⁶ Mankind as a “whole” existed only “in the never attainable totality of all the individualities which in the course of time become real.”⁵⁷ The intent of history is that all energies express themselves and develop clear expressions of their individual characters. There is no higher purpose. Individual lives are not parts of a superpattern. “The fates of human generations roll past like the streams which flow from the mountains to the sea.”⁵⁸

In sharp contrast to German Idealist philosophers or even to Herder, Humboldt denies any meaningful development in history. Here the analogy with the plant seemingly ends. For every individual at his spontaneous birth contains something radically new. Again the genius, “a great mind or a mighty will,” might suddenly give rise to something “new and never experienced,” completely incapable of “mechanical” explanation.⁵⁹ Certain uniformities do exist in nature and even in man, Humboldt admits. Without them, no statistics would be possible. But the element of freedom and the continuous creation of novelty make any historical prediction impossible. Indeed, history is chaos. Man, possessing intellect, might carry certain ideas from nation to nation and develop them, “but suddenly,” he warns, “his noblest creations are destroyed again by natural events or barbarism,” for “it is evident that fate does not respect the creations of the spirit. This is the mercilessness of world history.” In studying wars and revolutions the historian does not need to ask about their purposes, but only about their origins which often were “physical or animalistic” in character. Basic in human history is the vitalistic “urge to produce and to reproduce.”⁶⁰ The historian who primarily approaches world history from the standpoint of the growth of cultures or civilization misunderstands the extent to which man is not a being of reason and understanding, but a product of nature.⁶¹

This brings us to the second aspect of Humboldt’s essays. If history is all flux, the individualities remain as a stable element and through them history gains meaning. In his essay “On the Task of the Writer of History, (1822)”⁶² Humboldt further develops the thought, already expressed in earlier writings, that the individualities are merely the concrete, historical expressions of an underlying metaphysical reality, the ethical ideas.

Yet the term “ideas” must not mislead us, for they are not clear concepts. They are not to be understood in the Platonic sense as pure forms which could find their repeated imitations or approximations in the physical world. Each idea represents the essence or character of an actually existing individuality. In this sense, ideas are conceived as eternal and would survive their physical manifestations. But ideas certainly are not universal in the sense of a Platonic triangle or of the Platonic concept of justice, able to manifest themselves in very different historical situations. Each idea is related to something real in the physical world. Humboldt probably never should have used the term “idea” in this way, for he refers to something thoroughly nonrational; namely, to those elements in natural and historical reality which cannot be explained in terms of rational factors. The doctrine of ideas, as formulated by Humboldt, involves the recognition of the basically irrational character of human history and human life. Indeed, Humboldt’s concept of individuality carries within it elements of the nihilistic notion that history is nothing but a mass of individuals with individual wills.

This doctrine of ideas seems to point at a hopeless chaos of values. Actually, of course, Humboldt was neither a nihilist nor even a thoroughgoing relativist. By seeking the idea in the existing, limited individualities, Humboldt reflects his faith that there is meaning in the midst of flux; that all fits into a divine mystery; that “world history was inconceivable without a cosmic plan governing it.”⁶³ Each idea reflects one aspect of infinity. Although it is impossible for man to understand the “plans of this cosmic government” (Weltregierung), he can intuitively gain glimpses of it (erahnden) through the ideas.⁶⁴

Thus, despite his insistence upon flux and chaos in history, Humboldt preserves his faith that in a higher sense history is a meaningful drama. Humboldt makes two assumptions fundamental to the optimism that distinguishes the Historismus of the nineteenth century from the radical relativization of values with which historicism has been identified in twentieth-century Germany. He assumes that individuals have an inner structure and character, that they are not merely a bundle of passions. He therefore admonishes: “One must seek the Best and the Highest that the subject has attained in all his diverse activities. This we link together into one Whole, a Whole that we consider to constitute its unique and essential character. Everything that does not fit into this character, we may consider to be incidental.”⁶⁵ He also assumes that the great diversities in history all fitted in some mysterious way into a harmonious whole; that if left to their free course all historical tendencies were good; and that, in this best of all possible worlds, evil consisted of the attempt to divert the natural tendencies of history.

The third aspect to be found in Humboldt’s essays—recognition of the role of the irrational in history, joined to a faith in an ultimate meaning in the flux of human events—poses special problems for the historian. Humboldt was the first nineteenth-century writer to work out a theory of knowledge which took these insights into account.

A first important methodological consideration arose for Humboldt from the fact that in approaching history the historian is dealing with “living,” not with “dead” matter. Here, similar to later writers, Humboldt makes a distinction between the methods applicable to the “natural sciences” and those proper to the “historical sciences.” However, Humboldt never conceives physical nature to be entirely dead or nonhistorical. The living can never be approached as something static that might be viewed under fixed conditions at one given point of time. To comprehend a living being, we must see it as a totality and understand its inner essence. For Humboldt this cannot be achieved by mere external description, but requires harmonious use of “rational observation” (beobachtender Verstand) and “poetic imagination” (dichtende Einbildungskraft).⁶⁶

But as Humboldt developed his theory of individuality into a metaphysical doctrine of ideas, these conditions for historical understanding, which he presented at the turn of the century in “The Eighteenth Century,” no longer sufficed. Now, in “On the Tasks of the Writer of History,” he sees history as the only guide to an approximate understanding of the “totality of being.”⁶⁷

The task of the historian, as presented in the latter essay, is to depict what has happened (Darstellung des Geschehenen). Toward that end he must begin with a simple description. But what has happened (das Geschehene), Humboldt hastens to point out, is “only in part accessible to the senses. The rest has to be felt (empfunden), inferred (geschlossen), or divined (errathen)” Only fragments are apparent to the observer. “What binds these fragments, what puts the individual piece in its true light and gives form to the whole remains beyond the reach of direct observation.” Facts are not enough. “The truth of all that happens requires the addition of that above mentioned invisible element of every fact and this the writer of history must add.”⁶⁸

The role Humboldt now assigns to the historian is a much more ambitious one than previously outlined in his earlier essay. It involves more than merely grasping the character of an individual personality or of a nation. Through the study of the individual, the historian now could gain general knowledge, once the task of the philosopher. But if the historian’s intent (the search of ultimate truth) now resembled that of the traditional philosopher, his method, the only one by which such truth could be approached, had to remain that of the historian, according to Humboldt.⁶⁹ The historical sense requires “a feeling for the real” in its “flux” and “timeboundness,” yet it also involves the search for meaning.

The historian, Humboldt stresses, does not merely arrange facts meaninglessly; he attempts to discover links, to understand the events in a larger context. This distinguishes him from a mere pedant. “The historian worthy of the name must present every event as part of a whole.”⁷⁰ He recognizes on one hand, the “inner spiritual freedom” of every individuality and, on the other, the dependence of every event on preceding and accompanying causes. He perceives that “reality, not withstanding its apparent haphazardness, is governed by necessity.” But to impose concepts upon the actual events is to violate this historical reality; not to go beyond the bare facts is to forego meaning. Not merely the understanding of a wider context, but the understanding of a concrete, individual historical situation requires more than the mere presentation of facts.

This interrelation of facts and ideas demands a twofold methodological approach. The first requirement, Humboldt counsels, is an “exact, impartial, critical examination of the events.”⁷¹ Here is the core of the critical method, the establishment of facts, the weighing of evidence through the empirical and rational approach to sources, documents, and the like. But in the search for meaning, for the “links within the matter under investigation,” this approach does not suffice. The idea must be comprehended, and the act of comprehension (Begreifen) requires resources other than those of purely conscious perception. In his search of the idea, the historian resembles the artist; only he is not permitted the latter’s free use of phantasy, but is much more closely bound to reality. The critical, empirical approach to this reality has to be supplemented by “intuiting that which cannot be reached by this means,” but by intuition (Ahnden) which proceeds from the concrete facts.⁷² This intuition for Humboldt implies that the “ideas” which express themselves in concrete reality, can be comprehended only approximately and dimly. But it also assumes that meaningful relationships exist. For man’s intuitive understanding (Ahnden) or rational comprehension (Begreifen) of such truth

presupposes within the comprehendent something analogous to what later will actually be comprehended, a pre-existing, original agreement between subject and object. Comprehension involves not merely development of subjectivity nor taking from an object, but both simultaneously.… When two persons are separated by a gulf, no bridge of understanding can lead from one to the other. In order to understand one another, one must in a sense already have understood each other to begin with.⁷³

However, this theory of understanding assumes a common bond not entirely compatible with Humboldt’s view of the radical uniqueness of individuals, a contradiction of which he was never fully aware.

“On the Tasks of the Writer of History” was Humboldt’s last great contribution to historical theory. Two years later, Ranke’s Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples appeared with the famous methodological appendix, “In Criticism of Recent Historians.” But the basic metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of the great tradition of German historicism from Ranke to Meinecke had been already formulated by Humboldt. With his essay “On the Tasks of the Writer of History,” the philosophical theory of German historicism was complete. The break with Aufklärung and Humanitätsideal was now very real. Humboldt had always seen in history a vital, dynamic force which could not be directed by rational planning. He had never shared the faith of the philosophes in the possibility of reorganizing society along rational lines. Nevertheless, he had been firmly convinced that the basic unit in society is the individual. His concept of liberty had been cosmopolitan rather than national.

In the three decades that separated the essay “On the Limits of the State” from “The Tasks of the Writer of History,” Humboldt came to recognize the primacy of collective forces and he identified these with nationality. Humboldt recognized the central role of the state within the nation, and he developed a theory of knowledge aimed at the understanding of the irrational, vital forces of history and of the unique, metaphysical reality of these forces. These theories, the doctrine of ideas, the individualizing approach, the concept of the central role of politics in history, formed the basic elements of the philosophy of history of German historiography and historical thought from Ranke to Meinecke.