Outline
I. Introduction: Ultimacy and Legitimation
II. Essentialism and Integrationism in Romanticism
A. Essentialism
1. Essentialism in Schleiermacher
2. Essentialism in Fichte
B. Integrationism
1. Integrationism in Schiller
2. Integration beyond Schiller
III. Conclusion: Contexts and Consequences
The question, then, becomes how Romantic texts defend their answers to the "ultimacy question." That they pose the question should not be controversial. Interpreted enough, it may be said that every text reveals its "priority list" of human endeavors: explicit or not, the sometimes metaphysical, sometimes antimetaphysical character traits of ultimacy lurk behind any effort at art or philosophy (and certainly theology), even those which seek to undermine the coherence of ultimacy itself. Generally, however, one does not need to dig even this deeply to expose the foundations of Romantic projects. In a post-Kantian, post-Reformation Europe, the competition of discourses for 'primary' status was an overt one; whether art, philosophy, or some new form of religion would be the standard bearer of the transcendent was still up for grabs. Consequently, statements alleging the ultimate nature of the activity in question -- producing art, 'intuiting' God, etc. -- are common in Romantic texts. We can glibly rephrase the dilemma thus: "how is the best way to spend one's time?"
As I have suggested, the answer itself to this question is not our primary focus -- it is usually easy to predict how an artist or philosopher or theologian will reply. Rather, if art, for example, is the "best use of one's time," what criteria are used to judge it superior? If religion is the highest activity of humankind, why is that the case? More than the Meanings posited or defended as ultimate, the legitimation strategies for those meanings is our subject here.
This paper will argue that two strands of legitimation run across German and English Romantic sources, which I label 'essentialist' and 'integrationist.' A essentialist defense of a discourse or activity would argue that it is the "true" nature of personhood. Schleiermacher's view of religious intuition fits this mold: Religion is ultimate for Schleiermacher because it is the highest quintessentially human activity, and only in engaging in true religion is the human fully actualized. Likewise, in Fichte's Vocation of Man, moral praxis enables the postulation and recovery of extra-egoistic reality because it is the consummate, essential human vocation. In both cases, the claim to ultimacy is substantiated by the assertion that the ultimate activity or faculty is "essential" in humanity.
An integrationist legitimation, on the other hand, is based less on the quasi-ontological status of the faculty in use and more on the discourse's ability to synthesize, reintegrate, re-enchant (to use Weberian language), the world and the person. Schiller's view of art seems to exemplify this claim. In a world disintegrated by economic and ideological erosion, art for Schiller can reunify (perhaps to a greater extent than 'original unity') humankind; this harmony is of 'ultimate concern' (Tillich).
Of course, the two strands of legitimation are intimately interwoven in most Romantic sources. They are bound up even in Kant, where the aesthetic is in some sense an independent and prized faculty of the person, and yet also integrates reason and passion in some form of higher synthesis. To speak of the aesthetic as essential, and separate from the intellect and the emotions, is thus perhaps somewhat off the mark. And yet to speak of it as purely integrationist, without any intrinsic status, also seems unfaithful to Kant's epistemology. Throughout, then, we may expect the ultimate faculty to be integrative and for integration to be resultant from the application of a essentially 'high' discourse. Yet the distinction I hope to draw between integrationism and essentialism is useful for identifying these how grounds legitimation themselves compete, each -- as the concluding portions of this paper try to briefly develop -- with their own set of conceptual and political consequences.
In a way, essentialism and integrationism address different concerns within the Romantic context, and can be seen in this light and in light of the discourses they champion. Essentialism carries forth the roughly foundationalist project common in the Enlightenment, questioning the primacy of discursive Reason as opposed to imagination, or the religious intuition, and so on. By shifting the definition of essentiality, a Romantic might hope to redefine the question of what is to be considered justified, or promoted, or pursued as ultimate. An integrationist perspective addresses different concerns which seem more uniquely Romantic. We will return to these questions in greater depth in the concluding portions of this paper, but it should already be relatively clear that integrationist discourse seeks to re-enchant a world where Enlightenment projects, which essentialism still carries forth (albeit with a different champion), may be no more than a symptom of the disease. Rather than answering a Kantian or other Enlightenment challenge to ultimacy, the integrationist changes the fundamental terms of that challenge, arguing that what is ultimate is not that which is essential itself but that which recombines and resynthesizes all that is human. This comparative discussion will continue in part three, but it may be useful now to sharpen the focus on those currents of thought which exemplify the categories I am trying to develop.
Ironically, in light of the 'happy Greeks' trend in integrationist texts, we might trace this desire for essentialist definition to Classical atomism, and its drive to break complex (integrated?) units down to their core constituents. In any case, it should be no surprise that essentialist conclusions tend not to justify themselves. It may be that to do so, as the failure of the twentieth century's efforts suggest, is simply impossible, that there cannot be any explanation for postulates about human "essence," if the concept is coherent at all. But giving essentialism a little more credit, the justification problem is definitional: if an essence is justified in terms of something else, it's no longer essential. Reason or intuition cannot be said to be 'The Human Activity' because of something else -- that something else would be the real defining factor of humanity. This is not to say that essentialism does not try to explain itself; Enlightenment theories about Reason, for example, often mention how Reason is that which distinguishes us from animals, and as such is the human quality to be maximized. Of course, such legitimations only go so far. It is unclear why that which supposedly distinguishes us from animals is necessarily 'better' than the pleasure principle or an opposable thumb. At some point, essentialist discourse must begin by saying that it just is.
Schleiermacher's answer is essentialist because it basically
fits the form of "We should do x because it is the highest human
activity." It is the highest human activity for two reasons:
first, it has as its object the entire universe, including
humanity, in all its greatness, and second, it has its roots at
the deepest core levels of the human psyche. The first reason is
the religious object; the second the religious subject. On the
former subject, Schleiermacher asks at the conclusion of the
second speech,
I have shown you what religion is. Have you found anything
therein that would be unworthy of your highest human
formation? Must you not, in accord with the eternal laws of
spiritual nature, yearn all the more anxiously for the
universe and strive for a self-effaced union with it. . . ?
(Schl 135)
The argument here is clear, and runs throughout the second
speech: religion is the ultimate activity because it addresses
the ultimate -- the entire universe, in its infinity. Yet
Schleiermacher makes the second, "subject-ive" argument
immediately following.
Become conscious of the call of your innermost nature, I
beseech you, and follow it. . . Turn back to what lies so
close to you, especially to you, for whom a violent
separation unfailingly destroys the most beautiful part of
your existence.
(Schl 135)
This argument is also clear, but very differently grounded: religion is the ultimate activity because it is the highest and most essential ("innermost") part of the human condition. Schleiermacher's essentialist psychology is further developed in the third speech. Schleiermacher speaks of religious intuition not as something to be taught but something to be uncovered. "We cannot teach them to intuit," Schleiermacher states, because teaching can only evoke mimesis. (Schl 144) "But does that penetrate to their being? Is that religion?" (Id.) Religion must come from the depths of being to be authentic. Unsurprisingly for a Romantic, Schleiermacher identifies this pure, essential spirituality with children and the "longing of young minds for the miraculous and supernatural. . . . This is the first stirring of religion. A secret, uncomprehended intimation drives them beyond the riches of this world." (Schl 146) Schleiermacher laments the suppression of this "honest, uncorrupted" proclivity by the forces of prudence and practicality. (Schl 147) In short, if we were only true to our core selves (inner children?), we would be natural religious intuiters. Indeed, says Schleiermacher, anyone who seriously looks inside himself will find the religious source which lies at the heart of every human. (Schl 152) There is not much more in the way of justification for Schleiermacher's essentialism. He seems firmly to believe that if we introspect sincerely and intensively enough, we will agree that his deep and true essence of the human spirit is indeed present.
Thus, in addition to religion's privileged access to the
biggest prize of all, the infinite universe, only religion can
access this deep and abiding essence of humanity. Finally,
[E]verything that belongs to a truly human life and that
should be an ever more active and effective drive in us must
proceed from the innermost part of our constitution.
Religion is of this nature.
(Schl 144)
It is interesting to note, concluding our brief discussion of Schleiermacher, that Schleiermacher's form of essentialism, which deliberately separates religion even from its close "friendly souls," art, philosophy, and poetry, rejects explicitly the integrationism espoused by Schiller, Schlegel, and Novalis, which promised an ultimate unification of the various discourses. Noting the immensity of human creative drive, Schleiermacher attacks the notion of having "him, for whom one object is too great, unite all three of those objects of human striving [art, philosophy, and religion]. . ." (Schl 131) Schleiermacher remarks that these pursuits, because they appeal to different aspects of the person, cannot and ought not be subsumed in one another. (Id.) Of course, insofar as religious intuition is universalizing, it does have as its domain the realms of art and philosophy. But Schleiermacher explicitly rejects the merging of discourses, I suggest because his psychology dooms such an enterprise to failure.
Yet Fichte is not content to remain in the mire of solipsistic ignorance, and will ultimately reconstruct the entire world-picture he has just destroyed. The engine of this reconstruction is a moral imperative Fichte declares to be essential to humankind: man's "vocation." "'Your vocation is not merely to know, but to act according to your knowledge'; this is loudly proclaimed in the innermost depths of my soul. . . ." (83-4; emphasis in original)
The authority of this 'voice' derives itself from its depth, and proceeds to drive Fichte's proto-pragmatic conclusion that we must treat the world as if it exists because the action-oriented imperative requires it. As in Schleiermacher, Fichte's 'voice' makes its case on essentialistic grounds. It continues, "'You are here, not for idle contemplation of yourself, or for brooding over devout sensations--no, you are here for action; your action, and your action alone, determines your worth.'" (84) Action, which requires morality and a sense of the 'real,' is necessary for Fichte because it is the essence of human worth.
Fichte spends the next few pages of the Vocation reflecting on the freedom of this voice and its apparent transcendence of the sort of epistemological uncertainty that had characterized Fichte's earlier thoughts and perceptions. (Indeed, the moral order later comes to be identified with the Divine.) And the voice's injunction, that action is essential to humanity, proves extremely fertile for Fichte's system. Fichte becomes able to say "conscience alone is the root of all truth" (90) insofar as it is not contingent upon the suspect perceptual evidence that grounds knowledge, and this noncontingency relies on the (Divine) voice that says that to act is essentially human.
"Mere knowledge" (90) cannot get us past "mere pictures" (id.), but "our interest in a reality" (id., emphasis in original) can, and indeed must. For Fichte, this interest is universal; "No one who lives can divest himself of this interest, and just as little can he cast off the faith which this interest brings with it." (id.) The essentially-action-derived requirement for a reality, which brings "dignity" (91) to the human, becomes the engine for Fichte's reconstructive efforts. More than that: the essentiality of action thus defines Fichte's subsequent philosophical project.
There is but one point toward which I have unceasingly to
direct all my attention--namely, what I ought to do and how
I may best fulfill the obligation. All my thoughts must
have a bearing on my actions and must be capable of being
considered as means, however remote, to this end; otherwise
they are an idle and aimless show. . .
(95)
Praxis defines thought for Fichte, because praxis is the essential "vocation of man." Through its "edict of conscience alone, truth and reality are introduced into my conceptions." (94)
Later in Book Three, Fichte does return to the derivation of man's "vocation" and why it is humanity's defining characteristic, though in terms of actual explanation his essentialism is scarcely more "justified" than Schleiermacher's. The "voice within me" (101) returns to say, "'It is impossible that [human relations] can remain thus; it must become other and better.'" (id.) Fichte is simply "unable to conceive of [the present state of humanity] as its complete and final vocation." (id.) Life would not be worth living if it were so. "To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this ceaseless and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to pass away, and pass away only that they may reappear as they were before. . . ?" (id.) Fichte rejects Kohelet's vanitas: "This can never be the vocation of my being, or of all being." (id.) Similarly, later on: "The present life cannot be rationally regarded as the sole purpose of my existence or of the existence of a human race in general. . . There must therefore be a purpose in human existence which lies beyond this life." (121) By the end of the book, of course, this purpose and the Will to attain it is literally 'beyond this life;' it is Divinely transcendent.
We can now say that the practical (praxis-al) essence of humanity derives itself for Fichte from the simple meaninglessness of life without it. Fichte's language in this regard, as reflected in the excerpts above, is almost Sartrean in its expression of nothingness, and his derivation of an imperative from nothingness's 'Freedom' even more so. (Perhaps, to be more fair, we should say that Sartre is Fichtean.) Yet Fichte's essentialism cannot justify itself with recourse to anything else -- if it did, of course, the 'something else' would be essential. It rests on the absurdity of its absence.
How Fichte's project unfolds from here is beyond the scope of this paper: the foundations are our interest. The origins of Fichte's ethico-metaphysical project are essentialist: the core, and the ultimate, aspect of humanity -- and, for Fichte, of the universe itself -- is the moral will, necessitated by the essential vocation of man, action in the world. Since, unlike Schleiermacher, Fichte does not believe that morality, the dictates of action, may flow from something else or may be constructed on solid foundations, the brute facticity of man's vocation is the ground upon which Fichte's claim to ultimacy is based.
Schiller will be our sole Romantic focus here, yet he is by no means the only exemplar of this trend of thought. On the contrary, Schiller's philosophical writings are but the first clear entry in what becomes a very crowded integrationist field. Of course, Hegel apotheosizes the idea of integrative synthesis in a way more mimicked than advanced by his followers, including Marx. And Schiller may be seen in some ways as recovering the integrative potential of the aesthetic in Kant, the aesthetic functioning in this reading as a place of synthesis of the moral and sensuous, the understanding and the sensibility. Finally, Schiller is not alone on the Romantic integrationist field. Schelling -- whose System of Transcendental Idealism can be seen as promoting the art-product's overcoming of the dualisms of subject and object, finite and infinite, adn the like -- can surely be associated with integrationist idealism. And Novalis' laments over the degeneration of Europe yearn for a reuninification of the religious and "secular," whose political ramifications will be briefly discussed at the end of this paper.
Nonetheless, it is Schiller who best represents the integrationist urge in Romanticism, and it is to some of the features of his integrationism to which we now turn.
Combining fullness of form with fullness of content, at once
philosophic and creative, at the same time tender and
energetic, we see them uniting the youthfulness of fantasy
with the manliness of reason in a splendid humanity.
(Schil 38)
There, "the mind had still no strictly separate individualities, for no dissension had yet constrained them to make hostile partition with each other and determine their boundaries." (Id.) It may be that Schiller, as has been argued, successfully avoids the fate of simple nostalgia by positing the Greeks more as an unattainable and undesirable Blakean innocent than as a true Arcadian ideal. Yet the ideal of unity is unmistakable. "The prize of humanity" in Schiller is in the unification of imagination, reason, intellect and aesthetic. (Schil 39)
Schiller proceeds to offer a Freudian-Marxist-Veblenian
account of how culture inflicted the disintegrative wound on
modern humanity. (Id.) Political life is analogized to a
machine made up of "lifeless parts." (Schil 40) "State and
Church, law and customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was
separated from labour, means from ends, effort from reward."
(Id.) Importantly, Schiller does not appear to blame this
"disorder" on the neglect of a particular faculty or the straying
from some essence of the person. (Schil 39) The decay was bound
to happen, as faculties mature and grow. (Schil 43) But it is
time, Schiller argues, to recognize the disadvantages of
disintegration. He offers something of a manifesto towards the
end of the Sixth Letter:
Only by concentrating the whole energy of our spirit in one
single focus, and drawing together our whole being into one
single power, do we attach wings, so to say, to this
individual power and lead it artifiially beyond the bounds
which Nature seems to have imposed upon it.
(Schil 44)
Schiller points to a need for a more complex unity than that of the Greeks, and it is interesting that he notes it will not come of its own accord. Even if History has been a story of fortunate falls, getting up is a deliberate and active proposition, with a unified focus that involves the entire human.
By the end of the Letters, it has become clear that this focus is to be that which has the unitive power Schiller requires: "Beauty, therefore, as the consummation of his humanity." (Schil 77) The 'ultimate question' is answered again, but the answer is not legitimated as it was in Schleiermacher (religion as essence of human) or Fichte (moral action as essence of human vocation). Rather, the aesthetic pursuit of Beauty and "living form" is ultimate because it involves all of man's "games." (Schil 79-80) Schiller offers a second manifesto:
For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he
is the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly
Man when he is playing.
(Schil 80)(Emphasis in original)
This sort of aesthetic "free play" (to analogize once again to existentialism) is developed at some length in the Letters, but as in Fichte, the foundations rather than the subsequent construction are of interest to us here. The central feature of Schiller, which will be developed in the next subsection, is that it is integration of all faculties -- rather than the recognition that one is essential -- is the legitimation for why the pursuit of Beauty as living form is the ultimate activity of human life.
As mentioned earlier, it is probably Hegel more than Schiller who is responsible for the growth of this narrative. Yet to look prior to Schiller is to engage in our own, and Novalis', "happy Greeks" narrative, that of the integrated Medievals, for whom Christendom was Europe and public duty was private desire and so on. In any case, the recognition of non-integration has been with modernity at least since Don Quixote. Yet what may have been definitional for Cervantes is for Schiller and Hegel a historical process. The necessary historical development of specialization, in an interestingly anti-Smithian twist, is useful for its potential reintegration. Obviously, integrative ideas are conceptually fecund, informing contemporary cultural criticism as much as quintessentially Romantic longings for the wholeness and completeness of the favored symbol of the closed circle. The circle may be our concluding symbol of Romantic integrationism: it is ultimate because it is complete, whole, finite and infinite simultaneously.
Essentialism and integrationism may be seen not only as legitimations of the Good in question but also as rhetorical approaches to competing discourses. If an essentialist argues, for example, that religion is the consummation of what is most truly human, the only immediate rebuttal appears to be 'No, this is what is most truly human,' which has a somewhat unconvincing ring. Indeed, with essentialist discourse rarely justifying itself (as discussed below), it seems hard to arbitrate a dispute between, say, a Schleiermachian position and a Fichtean one. One asserts intuition of the infinite as essential, another action in the betterment of humanity. We can uncover the philosophical machinery that promotes these claims, but who can decide which is ultimately essential? Essentialist discourses compete against one another in an almost blind boxing match of assertion.
Integrationism as a discourse-competing strategy seems more amiable to some form of 'proof.' In the first place, integrationism does not really demand a hierarchy of human faculties as does essentialism. One can claim that art has the power to unite reason and the passions, the individual and the polity, and so on, without suggesting that other pursuits are a waste of time. The question almost becomes an empirical one; it is not impossible to arbitrate a dispute over which faculty or activity unites the broken pieces of human society, if the idea of broken pieces is even coherent. Obviously we may want for evidence -- a utopian integrationist would immediately object that we've never really tried Art properly, with the possible exception of the Arcadian, happy Greeks. But in principle it is possible to evaluate competing integrationist claims, if not in terms of measurable success, then at least in principle and in accord with an epistemology which need not itself be the object of contention.
Yet this does not answer the final problem I wish to briefly raise in conclusion: the social/political consequences of essentialism and integrationism as such. Of course, even without alleging a real historical connection between any of the particular figures of Romanticism and a particular wrong (Heidegger notwithstanding), one might still imagine at least some of the theorists discussed above becoming somewhat aghast by my subjecting their "ultimate claims" to a political testing ground. Yet to do so derives its necessity here neither from the quintessentiality of political discourse nor from the integrative potential of political discourse (Habermas) but rather from the very absence of such traits as attaching to any expression or trait. The testing ground which I propose here is one descendent from skepticism and concern: skepticism that claims to ultimacy are correct, concern that they may be implemented with disastrous consequences for human autonomy.
What are we to make of this sentence of Novalis':
From the holy womb of a venerable European Council shall
Christendom arise, and the task of awakening will be
prosecuted according to a comprehensive divine plan.
(Novalis 63)
Unreassured by his claim that "no one will protest" because "the essence of the Church will be true freedom," (Id.) I must wonder if the claims of integrationism are too inclusive to allow for difference that, in a post-Auschwitz world, is at last as pressing for Europeans as it has been for Africans and other Others for many centuries. One might suspect that, Foucault and Rorty uncomfortably in hand, essentialism is the greater of the two evils: after all, Reason is power to suppress. And in our contemporary philosophical context, essentialism seems a very difficult case to make. For political as well as post-Wittgensteinian epistemological reasons, essentialisms do not seem to be exceptionally viable philosophical programs.
Integrationism seems more conceptually alive. Yet claims about the disintegration of society at the hands of capitalism and bourgeois culture look suspiciously like Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and Pound's "usura." If there are forces of disintegration, Others within the polity who not only ruin its purity but actively continue breaking it down into logico-economic units, not realizing higher aesthetics, it seems clear to me who these people are.
Is it possible to "save" integrationism? The task seems somewhat daunting, because if the political is to be included in integration -- even if, as in Schiller, it is not the engine thereof -- it is hard to see how pluralism and difference can endure. We can absolve integrationism of guilt for Nazism, claiming that Nazism was in fact a new barbarism of overrationality, its aesthetic claims notwithstanding. Yet that does not answer whatever problems may be intrinsic in integrationist discourse from Schiller to Marx to Stalin to Pat Robertson.
It might be possible to rescue integrationism by returning to Schiller's insistence that integration of society result from integration of individuals, rather than Stalin's (and Le Corbusier's) inversion of the process. And along the way, one might try to excavate in Schiller and elsewhere in Romanticism a veneration of process, that it is not so much the possibly- unrealizable Schillerian unification that is the living Romantic ideal but the individual bildung that aspires to it. It is unclear how much "integration" is left in this reformed project, or why, save the beauty of its initial expositions, integration remains a desideratum worth the reforming effort.
One must remember that it is not the aesthetic we are "saving," which may be justified by a band of theories so wide as to include the Dionysian bardism of Whitman and his contemporary echoes and the psycho-religious conservatism of an Eliot or F.R. Leavis. Rather, the integrationist project is that ultimate goods are substantiated by their capacity to involve the "whole" human. The idea has its intuitive appeal in a world very much made up of fragmented people, selling their emotions at work and disconnected from them at home. Schillerian redemption seems tremendously attractive to today's many Babbitts, especially with the arrogance of essentialism rendering its privilege unavailable. Yet if one is really a whole person, "playing with the whole self," as it were, idiosyncrasy, privacy, and difference become matters of concern if the holism in question is societal and not merely individual in nature. Even Schleiermacher's community built on a recognition of some difference in the way essentialisms interact is problematized by a politics of linkage between the aesthetic, social, and (presumably) economic -- which of course Schleiermacher expressly separated from his religious essence.
Interestingly, this demand for difference in integration begins to take a distinctly postmodern shape (or lack thereof). This may be somewhat surprising, since the sort of metanarratives with which postmodernism is supposedly concerned are modern ones, and it is Schiller who, as a Romantic Cervantes, relentlessly criticizes modern categories and alienation from the unitive ideal. Whatever the possibilities for integrationism without suppression are, I have only attempted to recognize the trend as distinct from essentialism and question its consequences. The question of what a postmodern integrationism would look like, unsatisfyingly, must be left open.
(Until next semester.)
Works and Editions Cited
Johann Gottleib Fichte, The Vocation of Man
Novalis, Christendom or Europe
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers(1799 version, Crouter trans.), Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988.
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