- Intellectual movements in this respect resemble other social movements (Marwell
and Oliver, 1993). - Goethe on his travels in 1774 sought out Lavater, and it was on their voyage
together down the Rhine, when Goethe was flushed with new fame from publishing
Werther, that both first met Jacobi. The custom of the day was for travelers to visit
the famous, and conversely for famous travelers to be greeted by literary aspirants
along the way. The pattern recurs throughout Goethe’s autobiography ([1811–32]
1974). - Herder, another friend of both sides of the network, took from Jacobi’s publicity
the cue to become an ardent Spinozaist. His Gott: Einige Gespräche (1787) rejected
Kant as dry scientific rationalism and extolled the flowing impulses of nature as
Spinozaist penetration by the infinite attributes of the divine (Zammito, 1992:
243–245). Herder’s vitalist philosophy sounds superficially like Schelling’s Natur-
philosophie of a decade later, except that the latter would perform the task with
post-Kantian tools: the synthetic a priori, the categories of the understanding, and
the dialectic of the transcendental self. Kant himself probably goaded his old pupil
into this split by his own review in 1784 of Herder’s Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit, in which he rejected on critical grounds Herder’s particularistic
philosophy of history. - By 1802, publications on Kant numbered 2,832 items (Guyer, 1992: 449; Beiser,
1987). - About the same time, Fichte fell in love with a relative of the famous poet
Klopstock. He eventually married her after the success of his book in 1793 made
it economically possible. - In 1790 the French clergy were turned into elected civic functionaries; in 1794
Christianity was replaced with an official Deist cult, complete with a new calendar
beginning with the Year One. The civic church lasted until Napoleon’s 1801
Concordat with the pope restored Christianity as the state church. - The atmosphere of Idealism, electrical science, and sexual liberation that sur-
rounded Schelling is expressed in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein,
written in 1816 in a Swiss castle to entertain her companions Byron and Shelley.
Mineralogy, another new field of scientific discovery, was also the site of Romantic
speculation; in the context of the time, it was not incongruous that the most
extreme member of the Romantic circle, Novalis, was a mining engineer. Sweden-
borg held the same occupation in a previous generation. - Born in 1770, Hegel did not make his independent mark until he was 37, with his
Phenomenology of Spirit. In contrast, Schelling (born in 1775) was precocious, a
famous leader of Idealism by the age of 20, and progenitor of three different
systems by age 28—a forcible illustration that what counts is not biological age
but time of centrality within the active network. Kant was a prolific publisher from
1781 (age 57) through 1798 (age 74), the years when he was maximally energized
by being the center of attention. - Hölderlin was finally recognized as one of the greatest German poets through the
attention of Rilke and Stephan George after the complete edition of his works came
out in 1913.
1004 •^ Notes to Pages 627–636