Category: German Thought

The Birth of Romanticism – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

I always love these books that try to recreate the world out of which an idea arose. No matter how significant I am told a thought is, it seems unimportant until I can see the people who came up with it, how it affected them and why they needed it in their lives. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I read last year, or Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, are all such books. Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which deals with the thinkers surrounding the University of Jena in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, is yet another. What distinguishes Wulf’s contribution is that it also has a lot in common with the works of Richard Holmes, whose “Glorious” naturally adorns the dustjacket. By this, I mean that Wulf’s book is as much a story as it is an engagement with the ideas. Yet Wulf’s attempt to craft all this into a story is both Magnificent Rebels’ strength and its weakness.

The story takes us from 1794 to 1806, with a prologue and an epilogue to tidy things up. A short time period, but veritable anni mirabiles for the arts, philosophy, and world. In the tiny town of Jena, almost everyone worth knowing in German culture was gathered together, at a time when the German people were about to make earth-shattering contributions to the world after so many centuries of doing very little (the exception being Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who helped set the stage). Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Tieck represented poetry and prose, then there were the Schlegel brothers and Fichte and Schelling and finally Hegel for philosophy and theory. Wulf also draws our attention to the women – in particular, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. They were every bit as important in theorising – and writing – as their husbands, and Magnificent Rebels helps put them back in the intellectual arena.

These names listed above are the foundational figures in Romanticism. Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but here we have the heavy stuff, the theory and the ideas that gave German – and later European Romanticism – its intellectual heft. (Coleridge, we learn, never made it to Jena, but he still stole verbatim an awful lot of Schelling and was instrumental, alongside Carlyle, in popularising German thought in the Anglophone world). We have the idealisation of love, the obsession with the infinite, nature, experience and the importance of the self which all came ultimately to characterise Romanticism, such as any of us may be able to put our fingers on what it actually means.

Wulf’s primary intellectual contention is that these guys helped place the individual at the centre of the world for the first time. The philosopher Fichte, in particular, declared that you must “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.” Wulf uses the historical context to explain how revolutionary this was. At the time, in the German states one needed permission from the ruler to divorce, and often to travel too. Not just women, but even men were heavily restricted in their individual autonomy. The philosophers of Magnificent Rebels, so we learn, set off a chain reaction of self-centredness (in good ways and bad) whose ramifications are still being felt to this day.

So why Jena? Jena was a small town, but its university became famous in this brief period because it was perhaps the best place in Germany for freethinkers. The reason for this was that it was a prime example of the dysfunctional governance that characterised much of “Voltaire’s Nightmare” – the Holy Roman Empire. Jena’s university was governed, at the same time, by the rulers of the four Saxon states – Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Meiningen. As you can imagine, this meant that nobody could agree on the rules and those that were agreed upon were practically impossible to enforce. This was one factor.

The second factor was friendship. Magnificent Rebels is to a large extent a paean to the power of friendship to achieve massive leaps forward in any area where friends strive together. Everyone invited their friends and relatives so that even if someone did not have a teaching position at the university at Jena, they still had plenty of good reasons to be there. In the evenings all these clever people got together and drank and thought and read – what Novalis called “symphilosophising” because, like a symphony, it was a group activity. Everyone built atop the other. Fichte built atop Kant’s philosophy, then Schelling atop Fichte, and Hegel atop them both, so that by the time the book ends it is no longer possible for any of the philosophy described to be comprehended by a normal human being such as your humble reviewer.

Friendship builds a wonderful thing, and then the ideal begins to fall apart for the same reason. Where we could perhaps have had twenty or thirty years of greatness, personalities get in the way. Fichte gets himself kicked out of the university for not knowing when to shut up, Schiller gets offended the entire time and loses all his friends but Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel is unable to do anything that would make him money and is far too combative for his own good. Novalis and then Schiller are killed by disease, and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline divorce. Everything and everyone break up, and then the French invade and ransack the town and that really puts the nail in Jena’s coffin.

Wulf’s story takes us through all of these characters’ lives, although with so many of them to meet, we cannot get too close to them. We get a rough idea of what they were each about, but not as much as I would have liked. I got the impression that Wulf was herself defeated by some of Schelling and Fichte’s notorious twaddle, which is fair enough. I learned that Goethe was fat and Schiller was always ill. The main thing that Wulf does in Magnificent Rebels is deal with their interconnections. How their relationships with one another changed over the years, through feuds and fights. We feel ourselves caught up in this whirlwind of creativity, and that’s probably the book’s best quality.

More than the reorientation towards the individual, Magnificent Rebels details the ideas that the early Romantics threw down that taken together hint towards what Romanticism as a whole might mean. We get Fichte’s self-centredness, “My will alone… shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”, Friedrich Schlegel’s emphasis on the importance of words, “the letter is the true magic word”, and Novalis’s legendary definition: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise”.

Nowadays we tend to think of Romanticism as slightly dangerous in its irrational tendencies. This isn’t entirely borne out in the book. It is holistic rather than anti-rational, though often its thinkers’ desire to make everything pulsing and interconnected went up against what the scientists were telling them. It was only growing old and the French armies that turned many of these theorists from dreamy, passionate believers in a new world into much darker figures of reaction and nationalism. If Wulf’s book has a message for us today, it is that the Romantics of Jena changed our world, but their gifts are ours to use or misuse. They liberated us by freeing our sense of self from being the exclusive possession of a monarch. But they also made possible the terrible self-centeredness and materialism that are destroying this liberated world. Reflection, the turn inwards, is a thing that needs to be learned again and again, by successive generations, and Magnificent Rebels is of clear value beyond teaching us history because it helps us do just that.

For me, the main thing I got out of the book was this sense of collaboration and its power. This year I held a little gathering of my own at my family’s home in Switzerland. For just over a week, I and several friends were treated, under the watchful eyes and extremely talented housekeeping of my girlfriend, to brilliant food and equally sparkling conversation. Each day we walked upon the forested mountains, or bathed in mountain lakes, or reached the foot of the glaciers. It was, in a word, divine. One evening I stood outside with a friend and discussed the intricacies of interpreting ancient biblical texts – he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel – on another day, we discussed the development of atonal music in a mountain restaurant. I can think of nothing better.

What is obvious to me is just how much I grow when I am surrounded by good company. However much I am grateful to books like this, and the voices of the dead that they contain, the real world is all that much more rewarding. There is no passion that fully withstands the cooling of its ink upon the page. Yet where could I find another Jena? I was at Cambridge, of course. There are quite a lot of clever people there. But now I am no longer there; the world has swallowed me up. Still, one mustn’t lose heart. Many of the figures who flit through Magnificent Rebels spent only a few years in Jena before having to leave, and still they left their mark upon their friends and the world. Life is long, making friends is hard, but one day, we may hope, we shall each of us have our Jena. 

Karl Jaspers on War Guilt

I haven’t quite decided whether I like what I read being relevant to understanding the world around me, or whether that relevance is ultimately more disturbing than positive. At university, I read Theodor Adorno’s essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” and then later on various things of Hannah Arendt’s, such as “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility” – both works that aimed to analyse the state of the German body politic in the aftermath of the Second World War. These were interesting enough and helped me write essays, but they were not ultimately texts that I thought would have much use in my day-to-day life. Nietzsche might turn me into a superman, but Adorno and Arendt would at best only teach me to look at history with care and scepticism. Now, however, it seems that I was completely mistaken.

Since the events of February 24th, I have returned to these pieces in an attempt to understand some of the questions that the present conflict will raise within Russia if it is ever to return to the Western international community as anything other than a pariah. After the Second World War Germany lay in ruins and the Allies had to work out what to do with the Germans themselves. Some of them, of course, had perpetrated perhaps the greatest mass evil the world had yet witnessed; others, however, had merely stood by; and still, others had actively or passively resisted the Nazi regime. But as Arendt points out, the only way to be sure that someone actually was an anti-Nazi was after they had hanged them. The Allies ultimately decided not to blame the German people as a whole; instead, they organised the Nuremberg Trials for Germans who were most obviously guilty of terrible crimes.

The situation in Russia will not be similar to that of Germany after 1945 and hopefully Ukraine will also escape a similar fate. But there is much that needs unpacking, challenging, and working through if we ourselves are to be able to engage constructively with Russia and the Russians. Because in adopting an attitude of blanket condemnation of the Russian people, we not only copy the Russian state’s own idiotic stance that suggests Ukraine is composed entirely of banderovtsi (supporters of the Ukrainian Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera), we also lose the sense of nuance and humanity that is necessary for living successfully on this shared planet.

Anyway, in preparation for a much longer piece I have read Karl Jaspers’ lecture series The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage). Like Arendt’s “Organised Guilt”, Jaspers’ lectures were given as the smoke was still rising off a ruined Germany. Jaspers, not a Jew himself but married to one, was concerned with identifying what his people were guilty of and who should be their judges. In this post I will summarise his work. Translations are my own.

Among the ashes

Germany’s manufacturing capacity had been burnt to the ground, but there was still greater damage inside men and women’s hearts. People had lost common ground, there was no way to communicate anymore. More than that, people had lost the ability to reflect. The Question of German Guilt takes us back to the Enlightenment and in particular Kant’s view of intellectual maturity as stated in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”. Germans, Jaspers thought, needed to regain their maturity – here defined as the ability to think for themselves (what Kant used the Latin phrase “sapere aude” – “dare to think” – to mean).  No longer should Germans hide behind “pride, doubt, anger, defiance, revenge, scorn” – instead they should listen and think, having set their emotions “on ice”.

It is only through rebuilding the ability for Germans to talk to one another that they will be able to connect to one another again. And then, once that has been achieved, “we create the essential foundations for us to talk to other peoples once more.” The only way out of pariahdom is to return to communication within one’s own broken state. But twelve years of propaganda and ideological pressure had done much to destroy internal unity among the Germans and deprive them of their solid ground.

Four Types of Guilts

The world (eventually) condemned the Nazi state, and rightly so. People wanted things to be made right and the Germans to be punished. But Jaspers is keen to demarcate the areas where the rest of the world was right to attack Germany, and where it ought better to keep silent. To this end, he defines four separate types of guilt.

Criminal Guilt

The first of these is criminal guilt. This one is familiar to us all. A crime has been committed when a law has been broken, and punishment is exacted through the court. One punished in this way has the opportunity to defend themselves using defined measures, like a defence lawyer.

Political Guilt

The second type of guilt is political guilt or political accountability. The things a state does, whether good or bad, concern political guilt. Every citizen is politically guilty because every citizen is responsible for their state. The Germans did not, strictly speaking, vote as a majority for Hitler, but they were still guilty for his actions because they did not act to remove him from power. The actions undertaken by Nazi Germany are, therefore, in this limited way, the fault of the German people. Instead of a court, here the arena for judgement is determined by power, or “the will of the victors”. The Allies and Soviets had won and gained control over Germany, so it was entirely fair for them to determine a punishment that would work out this political guilt. Whether they wanted to restrain themselves or murder as many Germans as possible, this was up to them.

Political guilt grows out of minor failures, especially to resist harmful political tendencies. Eventually, it became next to impossible to resist the Nazis. But there were many opportunities, especially early on in Hitler’s tenure, when the Germans could have prevented him from consolidating his control. Even if we feel useless and unfree, that is the eventual result of situations where we could have acted to prevent ourselves from becoming so.  

Moral Guilt

Next, we have moral guilt. The actions taken by individual people, whether or not they break laws, are still things the individuals are responsible for. With moral guilt, there is no way to pass the responsibility on to others. Being ordered to do something is no excuse, nor is being scared. If we pull the trigger in a war, we are not always guilty of a crime, but we must make peace with our own soul about our actions. Likewise, if we do not act to prevent something bad, such as the removal of a Jewish friend to the camps, we are not guilty in a criminal sense, but we are guilty in a moral sense. Within our own conscience – the only valid courtroom [MP1] – we must determine how to live with ourselves. Nobody can tell us we are morally guilty, and nobody can punish us for moral guilt. All these mechanisms lie within the individual soul or heart and are nobody else’s business.

A group cannot be morally guilty as a collective. Only individuals can be morally guilty, as their consciences are their own. To generalise a group as guilty for anything other than their political failures is the beginning of hate: “it would be as though there are no more people, only collectives.” When we refer to the people so much it destroys individual dignity and lays the ground for ideologies that destroy the individual within us. 

Metaphysical Guilt

Finally, we have metaphysical guilt. This is where Jaspers’ philosophical leaning becomes most apparent. This kind of guilt is connected to our existence as members of a common humanity. “There is a solidarity between human beings as human beings, which makes every individual responsible for every injustice and harm that takes place in the world, especially for those crimes which are committed in our presence or with our knowledge. When I do not do what I can to stop them, so am I guilty.” This is guilt over human badness, a kind of shame at what we are capable of, and though it is spread over all of us alive, it is worse for those who are close, physically, and temporally, to horrors. It is a kind of survivor’s guilt mixed with shame at what we humans are – “that I still live, that is my guilt”. The only potential judge for such guilt is god.

Consequences, Defences.

Each of these guilts has its consequences. Criminal guilt has punishment, while political guilt has accountability and making amends, whether this be through reparations or being destroyed by the victors. Moral guilt leads to a painful process of renewal, first by insight and then later by atonement. Finally, an awareness of metaphysical guilt leads to “a changed consciousness of humanity’s own self before God.” We learn something about who we are and are left humbled by it.

We must be able to defend ourselves, especially against the accusations of others. In The Question of German Guilt Jaspers’ describes some of the ways in which we might do this. Firstly, we can distinguish between ourselves as an individual and the group our accusers may wish to forcibly merge us into. We can state the facts of the case, and we can appeal to rights (providing, however, that we have not broken those of others – hypocrisy is rarely an effective defence!). We can reject the judge as biased, or the accusations themselves as not being used to establish truth or justice but as instead serving some other, less worthy purpose – as punishment themselves, or to discredit us. Ultimately, the main thing to note about the process of public accountability is that we can demand “accountability and punishment,” but we can never demand “regret and rebirth”. The latter can only come from within.

The Germans’ Guilt

After WW2 Germany was covered with foreign soldiers, many of whom were forbidden even from exchanging a friendly word with their former enemy’s people. Meanwhile, placards were going up with the phrase “Das ist eure Schuld!” (this is your fault) next to scenes from the camps. It was not an easy time to be a German, even without the refugee crisis that the dislocation of the Germans from their homelands in Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and others had caused. But the phrase “this is your fault” is not as clear as it appears. It can mean “You tolerated the regime”, “You supported it”, “you stood by before evil,” “you committed criminal acts”, and “as a people you are lesser, criminal, and bad.” In short, it can mean an awful lot. So, what should it mean? What guilt was there, according to Jaspers, and were there any mitigating factors?

The Nuremberg Trials determined criminal guilt, trying Germans who had committed clear crimes against humanity and war crimes. By determining criminal guilt, the other forms of guilt were brought into sharper focus. All the Germans were politically guilty because they had failed to make their government accountable. “But making someone accountable is not the same thing as recognising them as morally guilty.” So, it is in matters of moral guilt that there are distinctions to be drawn among the Germans. Some people of course do not have a conscience, but for the majority, there would be varying degrees of moral guilt and a consequence need for reflection, atonement, and renewal.

Jaspers notes the different ways that moral guilt can manifest itself, ranging from false consciousness, partial approval of the state (weren’t the autobahns great?), to delusions including self-deception (thinking you can change it from within). The only way of lessening one’s moral guilt as a German would be to have acted to prevent injustices and doing things like sabotage.  

Mitigating Factors

The problem with political guilt in particular is that we can never completely nail it down. We all know how the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War left Germany in a position where fascism could develop effectively – here the victors of that war must bear some guilt for the eventual “round two”. But there was also inaction after Hitler had risen to power. Jaspers notes as examples the Vatican’s concordat with Hitler in 1933, international recognition of Nazi Germany, and the decision to let the Olympic Games go ahead there. We Europeans were also guilty of inaction, preferring an uneasy peace to a war that could have saved us all from still greater horrors. These factors do not change the fact that Germany needed to be held accountable in 1945, but they do make it clearer that Germany’s guilt was not absolute.

Purification – Living With Guilt

The last parts of The Question of German Guilt are concerned with living with our moral guilt. Unlike criminal guilt, which ends when a sentence is served or a fine paid, or political guilt which is bounded by a peace treaty and thereby ended, moral guilt lasts forever. “It never ends. Whoever bears [such guilt] within themselves begins a trial that lasts a lifetime.” Someone who is morally guilty wishes to make amends, but they cannot be demanded of such a person, and they must again rely on their conscience to determine what is necessary to set things right. But things must be set right, because moral purification “is the way human beings are human beings”. Once we are conscious of our guilt, we can feel again a human solidarity and common responsibility, without which freedom is impossible.

Conclusion

Jaspers was not the only person trying to work out what to do about the fact that his people had committed crimes of a hitherto unprecedented evil, and his thoughts in The Question of German Guilt are not necessarily the best approach. Yet I can’t help but feel that they will prove a good starting point for considering Russian guilt, when that time comes. Russian citizens have had ample time to vote their president out of office, and then to remove him from power by other means – that they have failed is their common political guilt. Meanwhile on the battlefield, in Mariupol and Bucha and countless other cities and towns, crimes have been committed which must be tried in a court of law. Some of them, indeed, already have been.

But I am more interested in matters of moral guilt. It seems to me correct that the Russians have very different levels of moral guilt, ranging from inaction to active opposition to grudging support for their state. Thinking about the Russian people as collectively morally guilty is idiotic and counterproductive – indeed, more than one of the (recent, academic) essays I have read on this kind of guilt says that the only way for an awareness of moral guilt to grow within a group is from within that group. If an outsider like me or you tries to tell the Russians they are guilty it will almost always have the opposite effect. Therefore, we should be silent on the accusations if we care about the state of others’ souls, however much we might desire retribution for crimes committed in their name. The only exception Jaspers makes is that of friends – others who are close to us and who we acknowledge to have a genuine interest in our souls.

I have not written this piece to defend Russians. Certain of my friends sharing memes about how their conscience is killing them does nothing to diminish their obvious and, often, continued failure to act. But we must realise that guilt is a complex thing, and once the last gun goes silent there will be things that we can demand from the losing side of this conflict, and things that we cannot. And unfortunately, matters of conscience will always be beyond our reach.

Ultimately I am not quite sure how far I agree with Jaspers. I hope anyone who, like me, has been thinking about guilt these past few months will appreciate just how much of a quagmire the whole topic is. If you have an interesting take on how to work out guilt and responsibility in this or any other conflict, consider leaving a comment.

An Uninformative Post about Kant’s Prolegomena

I find most philosophy sufficiently difficult and insufficiently relevant to my own life that I rarely have any great desire to read it for pleasure. Naturally, there are exceptions. Schopenhauer suits my temperament and is important for demystifying much of the 19th century’s literature – that he actually is a talented writer too is yet another reason to read him. Nietzsche is inspirational in his own way, though I find him less entertaining than I once did. And all the existentialists are interested in questions about how to live one’s life. This is something that I find rather useful as I am trying to live too.

Then there’s Kant. Kant is a proper philosopher. He never left the area around Königsberg where he lived in East Prussia. And yet he created the most magnificent works through sheer force of will and mind. I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate his influence, which is not just limited to the likes of Kleist, who I dealt with here recently, but also to other people who built upon him, like the aforementioned Schopenhauer, and people like Fichte and Marx and Hegel. Modern philosophy started, probably, with Descartes, but Kant is another contender for the title. He is certainly one of the most influential philosophers of all time. It made sense to read him.

Rather than starting with the Critique of Pure Reason, I decided to read a much smaller work instead – the Prolegomena. Or to give it its full and catchy title, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic that Could Be Considered a Science. The Prolegomena is a work Kant wrote to make his Critique of Pure Reason more accessible to the masses, (a group to which in this instance I most definitely belong). He was unhappy that people didn’t understand it, especially because he was convinced that what he had written was so absolutely ground-breaking that all previous attempts at metaphysics might as well be thrown away as a result. The Critique have the desired effect – he needed to descend from his ivory tower. And so he wrote this. And I read it.

In German! Yes, I read it. I learned all of those idiotic words like “derive” and “inertia” which spice its pages. And I can confidently say that I understood next to nothing. But I have read it, and that’s an achievement. I had no real intention of understanding the work when I set out. I dutifully noted key points in the margins and did my underlinings, but I was not following Kant’s argument and was not trying to. I am still trying to work out whether or not this was a waste of time.

With any philosophy I am much more interested in its spirit than its contents. By “spirit” I mean the character of the writer lying behind the words. I wanted to receive a vision of the world to add to my collection. I know that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ridiculous, but I find his pessimistic vision powerful. I know that Nietzsche’s philosophy is likewise brutal and silly, but I sense the force behind his words. As long as I get a feel for the author’s worldview, and one or two of the consequences of it, I do not mind the quality of its foundations. Unfortunately, a casual chat with anybody, including the person that stares at us in the mirror, will reveal that few of us live according to worldviews that are philosophically sound. But still we live.

With Kant I had a sense of extreme rigour. There was no imagination here, but a kind of terrifying devotion to organisation and clarity. He built a philosophy like one builds a machine – Schopenhauer built one like one paints a landscape. Kant’s overwhelming concern for truth, for duty, and for an absence of any form of “Schwärmerei” or muddle-headed dreaming, was inspirational. There was something almost Victorian in his devotion to reject playfulness. His long sentences were designed to evidence the pedigree of his thought, whose ancestry like that of a good dog could be traced back deep into the past. As I have mentioned, I understood nothing here; I only felt. And yet I felt Kant’s mechanical striving to be supremely relevant to the modern world. I do not mean this in a good way. As many commentators (e.g. Theodor Adorno) have discovered, in all this purity and conclusiveness there is something that tolerates no human frailty. 

I have never been one to keep myself at night, wondering whether synthetic a priori judgements are possible. I am content to avoid overturning too many philosophical stones. But I appreciate that Kant does. Inspired by Kleist’s Kant Crisis, I often lowered the Prolegomena and stared out in front of myself and told myself that the things I saw I saw not as themselves, but only as they were transformed by my perception, and that I would never be able to know what this or that table or chair really was. Such tasks were sometimes successful, and I would be left with a disorientating sense of the uncanniness of the world we take to be stable. But more usually I was left puzzled and could not quite work out what I should do with the information. I could not understand why I should care.

It is strange to think that Kleist had a breakdown upon learning that we could not know things as themselves. It seems almost funny now. And yet, I wonder what it means, that philosophy could reach the heart of a man with such force as to shake him. This is not the quest for meaning that attacks most of us from time to time. I feel like a doubt in the foundations of the world requires a much more sensitive sensibility, one that I myself probably lack. It is impressive really, to care that much. I feel like these days we are all so jaded that the news that the world is not what it seems wouldn’t mean anything much to us.

Conspiracies, late-capitalist pressures, mass-surveillance, the internet. Whether or not one agrees with them, their growing presence within our world seems to prepare us for Kant’s sceptical, boundary-setting truth – that our knowledge is limited, that some things cannot be known. We already live in a state of conscious ignorance of the foundations of our lives, only this time these foundations are not related to perception of metaphysics or natural law or whatever Kant is actually taking about, but to everything around us that makes being alive possible in this world. (I appreciate that for philosophers, the two are the same thing. Indeed, I also appreciate that if I bothered understanding Kant, I would find more insights than just a scepticism about metaphysics. All this will take time.)

And so, although I have not been convinced of anything to do with metaphysics, I haven’t come away from the Prolegomena empty-handed. I have a sense of Kant’s spirit, and a sense of how that spirit might manifest itself in our modern world. Does that justify trudging through a hundred and fifty pages of dense German? Alas, the answer lies beyond the limits of pure reason.