Intellectual nobility
The term intellectual nobility has been used since the 18th century and describes a nobility that is not innate or conferred, but acquired through one's own education . Spirit needle is a property that the educated middle class claims to be and is directed against class barriers .
The prerequisite for this is the growing conviction since Renaissance humanism that the nobility should not only be based on origin but also on personal virtue - a virtue that is increasingly emancipating itself from religious values and allows a proud display of one's own achievements. Up to the middle of the 18th century, such an intellectual nobility was characterized by the bourgeois appropriation of court culture (as with the phenomenon of preciosity ). The absolutism needed a large number of well-trained court and state officials who were close to their prince. In the German-speaking area, for example, it was Johann Christoph Gottsched who orientated himself on the French classical period and tried to convey this to German-speaking citizens.
Later, the notion of an intellectual nobility was based on a concept of nature that turned against the “external” court culture : Johann Caspar Lavater , for example, had the view that one recognizes intellectual nobility by its physiognomy , and Friedrich Schiller associated it with feminine grace :
"Such a high sense, such a rare nobility / in this divine form."
At the end of the 19th century a certain hostility towards education developed among the nobility, who were no longer able to cope with the ardor of the educated bourgeoisie, so that they withdrew to professional activities such as dancing and hunting. With this, the idea of the intellectual nobility lost the connection between the nobility and the bourgeoisie that it still had in the salon culture of the 18th and 19th centuries.
During National Socialism there was an interest in tying the intellectual nobility acquired through one's own achievement back to the idea of "high descent", as with Hans Schmitz ( blood nobility and intellectual nobility in high court poetry , Würzburg 1941).
In contrast, Thomas Mann saw the “nobility of the spirit” in connection with humanity .
literature
- Klaus Garber, Heinz Wismann (ed.): European society movement and democratic tradition. The European academies of the early modern period between the early Renaissance and the late Enlightenment , Tübingen: Niemeyer 1996, 2 vols. ISBN 3-484-36526-9
- Thomas Mann: Nobility of Spirit: Sixteen Attempts on the Problem of Humanity , Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer 1945
- Rob Riemen: Adel des Geist - A forgotten ideal , Siedler, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-88680-948-6