?? notes

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2.3

4 min read

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2.3
Figures:

  • Winkelmann (idealization of Greek art)
  • Kant
  • Herder (his Humanitat)
  • Fichte (German National Identity)
  • Humboldt and Niethammer (educational reforms)

Humanism in 19th Century Germany

  • from abstract man to the ideal of man
  • this ideal is always teleological
  • a rediscovery of education through the Greeks
  • mankind’s ideal becomes the Greek

Germany’s version of Greece (German Classicism):

  • a cultural ideal
  • Winkelmann: imitating the Greeks is how one can achieve a great society, art as pure and non-material, ideal of beauty and morality
  • Winkelmann preserves platonic material/immaterial dicothomy
  • all humans must strive towards ideal beauty (telos)
  • beauty is a coherent, haromonic unity from which no part can be removed
  • in Greek art both moral and aesthethic beauty are reincarnated
  • art is merely putting these IDEALS into corporeal FORMS
  • they (wrongly) understood Greek sculpures as pure forms, due to their lack of colour (they actually had colour)
  • for them Greek art speaks to an idealized, rational mind, and not to the senses (wrong!)
  • Winkelmann’s over-idealized misreadings were still very important for his readers
  • art is purely contemplative, with no political or historical character to it…
  • people influenced: Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, Herder, Kant…
  • Germany was then 300 city states, and not a proper country, so this idea of art was useful for building up a german national identity
  • idea of German exceptionalism which the Nazis loved
  • GERMAN CLASSICISM: a desire to return to Greece, essentially
  • German classicism begins in 1800, right at the Enlightenment’s end
  • This idealized Greecee (and the German education system) is Burckhardt’s enemy

From Herder to Fichte:

  • HERDER - philosopher, theologian, poet, friend of Goethe/Schiller

  • philosophy as a way to inquire about man, an agent of history; no longer all about pure Reason, historicity takes the foreground

  • Kant’s 3 questions: what should I do, what can I know, what can I hope (all together → what is a human being?)

  • Kant’s philosophical anthropology has as a mission to produce a human being, a proper one

  • Herder: the French idealized version of man is not fully proper, humans are also brutal, immoral, irraitonal, etc…

  • Herder: YES TO RIGHTS, BUT THEY MUST COME WITH DUTIES

  • so human beings are complex, and must be comprehended under a variety of fields, from many perspectives

  • Herder’s HUMANITAT: natural law, philantropism, solidarity, general education, perfection of the individual through education, renaissance humanism

  • humanity still has to be shaped, formed by education

  • becoming a human being is now all about (because of Winkelmann) achieving certain perfections in Beauty and Virtue

  • BILDUNG [Herder’s education]: formation, education, creation, creating a picture of some immaterial, perfect form, imagination (a picture of truth - Fichte)

  • FICHTE - we ought to strive towards the absolute, God, the source principle of life, we must replicate the absolute within us

  • BILDUNG for Fichte is a creation of the absolute within us (collectively, individually)

  • the Absolute is a kind of teleological completion of man’s moral destiny

  • Fichte advoked german nationalism and chauvinism

  • the first step away from Enlightenment Universalism (Kant, despite his faults) and towards a new German national identity

Humboldt and Niethammer:

  • neo-humanism is the enculturation of the Germans
  • Humboldt was put in charge of reforming Prussian education
  • Niethammer - same task, but in Bavaria
  • the idea of schools that present a kind of general education meant to highten men as much as possible, help them achieve some sort of perfection
  • heavily against specialized education, which can come in only later, after a general foundation
  • English education was, Humboldt, too practical → too Bourgoise-inclined (teaching accounting and such), too practical, and that it would corrupt the German spirit and reduce its striving for perfection

Menschheitsbildung (men-building education):

  • holistic education meant to create complete men, not specialists
  • Winkelmann’s sculptures which are beautiful only when whole is Humboldt’s inspiritation

Neo-Humanism:

  • study of Latin and Greek, history, poetry
  • an outcome of Humboldt and Niethammer’s education reforms
  • instituted in Gymnasium (grammar schools)
  • a revival of Greek culture in 19th Century Germany
  • GERMANY WILL BECOME GERMAN IF IT BECOMES GREECE
  • Herder’s multiple domains of the human are what Bildung tries to unify
  • we are fully individual if we become universal

Neo-Humanism, analyzed:

  • the education-work separated means neo-humanist education alienated people from their social life, and concrete political actions
  • Germans did not become Greeks, but made a disturbed vision of the world
  • there was a complete loss of common sense (a thing present with the Brits)
  • at the end this education did not prevent the rise of the Nazis
  • universal humanism died somewhere along the German circlejerk of how Greek they were, drowning in the piss and shit of their own chauvinism
  • the neo-humanists were essentially of nazi-precursors, those who build the building within which National Socializm would fester like mold

Graph View