- Sources on the movement to abolish the university (Lilge, 1948: 2–3; Schnabel,
1959: 408–457; Weisz, 1983: 18). On German education and its reform (Paulsen,
1919; Bruford, 1965; Brunschwig, 1947; Ben-David and Zloczower, 1962; Ham-
merstein, 1970; Turner, 1974; McClelland, 1980; Mueller, 1987). - The first educational administration independent of the church was founded in
Prussia in 1787, a council composed of legal administrators, university professors,
and rectors of the chief Latin schools. In 1794 the Prussian legal code made all
schools and universities state institutions. The reforms in place by 1820 gave the
philosophical faculty a further career basis: teaching in a secondary school was
professionalized under the requirement of three years of university study in the
philosophical faculty. In the 1700s most secondary school teachers were theology
students waiting for a pastorate to open up. Prussian reforms after 1787 simulta-
neously raised the pay of secondary teachers to the point where they could compete
with pastorates (Mueller, 1987: 18–26). - For example, the University of Berlin expanded from 28 chairs for full professors
in 1810–1819 to 115 chairs by 1909; total teaching staff expanded from 54 to
540. In German universities as a whole, total faculty (including the ranks of
Ordinarius, Extraordinarius, and Privatdozent) grew from 890 in 1796, to 1,200
in 1835, to 3,000 in 1905 (McClelland, 1980: 80, 258–259, 266). - I put aside some cases which further complicate the argument. A few non-academic
individuals became famous in philosophy even after the academic revolution in
their nation: Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus. But most of these
were academic hybrids, dropouts from academic careers (Sartre teaching in a lycée
was pursuing a typical French academic career, like that of Bergson). And we
generally see in their work a shift back toward a literary mode, a de-differentiation
of the intellectual role and a revolt against the technical level of philosophy along
with this distancing from an academic base. - Emerson’s network ties, before his creative work began in 1836, were literary:
Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle. The Transcendentalists purveyed a
mélange of Goethesque pantheism, Plotinine emanationism, Platonic Ideas, and the
adulation of geniuses such as Shakespeare. Kant was often invoked but his distinc-
tion of critical versus dogmatic philosophy ignored; epistemological issues were
dismissed in favor of direct intuition of higher Truth. The St. Louis Hegelians were
more rigorous but unoriginal in the fashion typical of idea importers. Their arena
for innovation was to apply the dialectic to current events. For example, in the
Civil War, the slave-owning states represented “abstract right,” the North “abstract
morality,” and the victorious Union was Hegel’s ethical state (Pochmann, 1948:
32). - How then did earlier non-academic philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza
create metaphysical systems? Generally speaking, it was against their expressed
intentions. They were part of the scientific revolution, that is to say, the movement
of rapid-discovery scientists which their general arguments were intended to justify.
These intellectuals were unable to replace philosophy with science, because the
very act of arguing for the foundations of science, and any continuation of these
arguments by their successors, re-creates the turf of philosophy. Why thinkers like
1006 •^ Notes to Pages 640–646