Political Crisis as the Outer Layer of Causality
From the stance of the traditional sociology of knowledge, it is tempting to
attribute German Idealism to the effects of the French Revolution and Napo-
leonic wars. If we except Kant’s writings of the 1780s as not yet Idealist, the
period 1789–1815 coincides nicely with the Idealist efflorescence from Fichte’s
optimistic Critique of Revelation in 1792 to Schopenhauer’s resigned World
as Will and Representation in 1819. The abolition of Christianity in France in
1794 contributed to a heady, even apocalyptic atmosphere among the Idealists,
who boldly put forth philosophies which earlier would have been punishable
as heretical substitutes for religion.
The flaw in this explanation is that it fails to explain philosophy in France
itself. Far from supporting Idealism, the intellectual positions that flourished
during the Revolution were the opposite of Idealist, religious, and voluntaristic
ones. Materialism, which had been popular among the radical pre-Revolution-
ary philosophes, received its most extreme expression from Cabanis in 1802;
the first statement of biological evolution, by Lamarck in 1809, saw the light
during the days of freedom from religious dogma; Laplace could declare
publicly that his model of the universe was completely deterministic and that
he had no need for “that hypothesis” of God; and the sardonically atheistic
writings of de Sade were published during 1791–1811.
One could try the causality the other way and see Idealism as a German
nationalist reaction against the materialism of the French. But this does not
work for the major German philosophers, most of whom were enthusiasts of
the French Revolution, at least during the creative upsurge of the 1790s. After
Napoleon’s conquest of Germany in 1805–1807, Fichte turned nationalist, and
indeed lost his life in volunteer hospital service during the liberation wars of
1812–1814. Schelling too turned conservative, and old Romantics like Frie-
drich Schlegel by 1808 had joined the Catholic Church; Schlegel eventually
became a state publicist in Metternich’s Austria. But the conservative turn
happened at just the time these thinkers ceased to be creative. Hegel in contrast
continued to be a fervent supporter of Napoleon all the way to Waterloo and
beyond.
Nor did the intellectuals of other states at war with France generally take
an Idealist stance. In England, the period saw the dominance of Utilitarian
ideas (especially Bentham’s publications in the 1790s) that bear no resemblance
to German Idealism. The Romantic poets, Coleridge and later Shelley and
Keats, picked up Schelling’s aesthetic nature idealism; these poets tended to be
political radicals, not anti-French anglo-patriots. There is no correlation be-
tween either proximity or hostility to the French Revolution and Idealist
philosophy.
The effects of the Revolution on the content of philosophy were not so
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^661