13. WESTERN RATIONALISM
ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM STIR TO LIFE
CONTENTS
 The birth of the idea of "nationalism"
 The German Romanticists
 Hegel
The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
America – The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 398-402.a name="Nationalism">
THE
BIRTH OF THE IDEA OF "NATIONALISM" |
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Ultimately Napoleon had achieved stability and
unity in Revolutionary France only by focusing the country outward
towards its neighbors – in an imperialist quest to establish, through
his conquering armies, control over all of Europe (and supposedly also
a quest to bring to Europe French Enlightenment and political-social
reform in the process). Bringing the peasant class into the highly
respected role of soldering made Napoleon extremely popular with that
class. In essence he moved out into the world with a new national army,
far more powerful (highly motivated, like a tribe) than the
professional or paid troops of the European dynasties that Napoleon set
out to topple.
But his popularity and dominating role in
French politics and French imperialism came at the price of making
enemies of everyone else in Europe that was not French or was not
completely engulfed in French culture (which at the time was the
unifying culture of Europe's ruling classes).
Ultimately what Napoleon did in
developing the idea of the French nation set loose the desire of other
Europeans to find their own paths to acquiring a similar nationhood,
whether Russian, Italian, German, Polish, etc. Other countries,
England, Spain, Dutch Netherlands, who already had laid out something
of national foundations of their own, also found those respective
nationalist sentiments strengthened further by the same Napoleonic
challenge.
America of course also had laid out
something of a national identity during its War of Independence from
Britain. But with the lifting of the British challenge (not completed
until the conclusion of the War of 1812), internal cultural differences
rather quickly began to trouble America's own national journey. This
led to the horrible Civil War, a vicious battle over the matter of
whether the United States would indeed stay united or instead would
split into a number of smaller political units, not just North versus
South but also East versus West. Under Lincoln's leadership (and with
Divine counsel to Lincoln) this issue in America was finally resolved –
brutally – at the same time that Germany and Italy were struggling,
also brutally, to find unity as new European nations.
The role of Romanticism in growing the sense of nationhood.
The French Revolution had initially
challenged Europeans to investigate further this idea of building human
progress on the basis of the ability of man (any man / all men,
potentially) to reason clearly ... if properly brought up to do so. But
when given the chance to put this utopian dream into practice, the
French ultimately had failed miserably – very, very miserably.
A reaction against such worship of Human
Reason naturally set in, not just among the skeptical British
Empiricists but among a number of continental scholars, especially the
German Romanticists. This latter reaction developed on the European
continent especially when it became obvious that under Napoleon what
stood behind French power was not Reason, but some kind of special
Spirit that rose naturally out of the soul of an energized people
themselves (French peasants becoming national warriors).
This
quest for such Spirit (German Geist) would mark much of European
philosophy during the 1800s, especially that coming out of Germany,
whose philosophers seemed to dominate the field of intellectual inquiry
on the European continent that century, the way the French had done so
the century before.
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The German Romanticists Herder and Goethe
Two young Germans, Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe helped found together the Sturm und Drang
(Storm and Drive) Movement of the 1770s, celebrating the spirit of
struggle as the necessary element in achieving what the Rationalists
had felt would be achieved simply through pure reason.
 Herder.
The clergyman Herder studied under Kant at Königsberg, but moved away
from Kantian rationalism into a mystical world presided over by God. As
a young pastor he met Goethe, inspiring the latter with his insights
into Biblical literature. He recognized that the Hebrew literature of
the Old Testament was more of the nature of poetry and folk narrative
than technical science (which was how Rationalistic Western society was
coming to think and operate at that point), and that it was necessary
to understand the Hebrew writings as such – not as mechanistic science
but as deeply inspired narrative or parable – in order to comprehend
their great truths.
The two men became good friends whose
speculations together about human knowledge birthed the Sturm und Drang
Movement of the 1770s, elevating human emotions above human intellect.
Eventually their thinking would settle down a bit and evolve towards
Classicism, or love of the styles of classical or ancient Greco-Roman
antiquity in an attempt to balance human emotion and human intellect.
Herder was a strong German nationalist,
at a time when Germans were attempting to construct the idea of a
German nation (Germany at the time was divided into hundreds of
independent states, large and small). Yet he was cautious about letting
the highly emotional tribal spirit of nationalism get too far away from
practical reason.
Then with the outbreak of the French
Revolution in 1789 Herder would support the Revolution, producing a
split between himself and many of his friends, including Goethe.
Finally, his dedication to refuting Kant's theories would place him
pretty much in isolation within the German academic community.
 Goethe. Goethe was an individual of wide tastes and talents, being a poet, dramatist and
scientist all in one. He was early influenced by Herder, who inspired
in him a deep appreciation of German folk culture and consequently a
spirit of German nationalism.
But Goethe was also a profound
individualist, intrigued by the power and depth of personal experience
and emotion. In his first play, Götz von Berlichingen
(1773), Goethe explored the depths of individual human sentiments –
helping to lay the foundation for the Sturm und Drang Movement, which,
among other things, advocated personal freedom in the face of
oppressive, medieval attitudes in Germany concerning the role of the
individual in society. This Sturm und Drang Movement would later
blossom into German Romanticism.
In the 1780s Goethe went to Rome to study
classic art, architecture, and literature and for a while came under
the more formalistic style of the neo-classicist movement. But on his
return to Germany he found little appreciation for his new views. He
then turned to science for a while. But his longer-standing romantic
inclinations reasserted themselves, and his independent individualist
style returned to the fore. This culminated in his all-time great work,
Faust (actually written and rewritten in two parts over a long period
of time reaching perhaps from 1772 to 1829), which was an epic tale of
the search of the individual for that which is of a lasting or
transcending value in the face of freedom's great opportunities – and
uncertainties.
His Faust
would become the best-read work of German literature (roughly
equivalent to the place Shakespeare has long enjoyed in English
literature), inspiring young Germans for generations to quest for the
German ideal, the romantic spirit or soul that made Germany unique
among the nations.
Herder's and Goethe's ideas would leave
their mark on German nationalist thinking by putting into place a
powerful intellectual legacy for others to pursue, with the idea of
exploring the spirit of man as well as his intellect. However both of
them eventually moved on to the philosophy of Classicism, which
idealized the cultural and political achievements of the ancient Greeks
and Romans, who became for them models that Europeans should attempt to
emulate (as it was also for Americans at the time, who took up the
Roman idea of the Republic as the political structure they were trying
to set up in 1787).
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: historical progress through struggle
 Just
as Goethe was to become Germany's grand poet of the century in Germany,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would become Germany's grand philosopher
of the century. Hegel built on the Sturm und Drang idea of the
blessings of struggle, seeing in the tension between opposing forces
(usually in the form of newer, radical ideas and practices challenging
older, established ideas and practices) the possibilities of birthing a
new standard, one operating at a higher social level than previously.
This idea eventually became his famous dialectic, the struggle of two
opposing things eventually birthing a third, superior thing – a
dialectical dynamic supposedly found in all aspects of material as well
as biological and social or cultural development on this planet.
But he added to this purely mechanical formula the idea that the
process itself was not random, but instead guided by a superior
Weltgeist / World Spirit or World Mind (or just simply God) that was
directly involved in the entire process as part of a quest for the
completion of history, with the full union, in a state of perfect love,
of all things together. Even God (especially in the form of the living
Jesus) was part of this process, seeking his own completion in union
with man – or man in union with him, when all would be one in a perfect
state of love and peace.
From this point on, virtually all the
1800s sense of progress (not just in Germany but in much of the whole
of Western Civilization) was shaped by the idea not just of
philosophers sitting in their salons directing others rationally toward
a utopian world, but by the direct involvement of those who would bring
history forward, through noble struggle, struggle directed by some
great Spirit. Without such struggle, violent though it might be,
progress was impossible.
Hegelianism also touched on group pride,
as nations or classes came to see themselves as being under the special
anointing of the World Spirit to take the lead to direct history into
the next era. This fed powerfully into German nationalism, with its
sense of special German historical destiny.
But this also fed powerfully into the
working-class movement also arising at that time, a movement which came
to view the industrial workers of the world as the true moral
underpinning of the world to come.
 For more information on Hegel
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Go on to the next section: Darwinism ... and Marxism
 Miles
H. Hodges
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