Intellectual history

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The term intellectual history combines the words spirit (related to the metaphysical , spiritual , intellectual realm) and history (related to the origin, tradition and development of intellectual conceptions and the cultural structures created from them). Intellectual history refers to a methodical approach in the humanities , i.e. those sciences that deal with the emergence, formation, transmission and effect of intellectual conceptions (ideas) and currents or epochs, including their manifestations in cultural structures. These include in particular the history of religion , the history of philosophy , the history of literature , the history of art and the history of science . Many questions of intellectual history concern several of these sub-disciplines, and the classic determination of the proprium of intellectual history methodology emphasizes this interdisciplinary connection. The subject is classically overarching conceptions and developments of world views, world views and their individual aspects, within or between different intellectual currents or epochs.

Development of the method of intellectual history

The Scottish poet John Barclay (1582–1621) tried in his work Icon sive descriptio animorum quinque praecipuarum nationum in Europe , published in 1614, to give a characteristic of the "spirit" (spiritus) of the different European nations. There are similar efforts at Montesquieu and Voltaire . In the German philosophy of the Enlightenment, Dieterich Tiedemann and Georg Gustav Fülleborn speak of the "spirit" of different philosophical approaches and generally also of a "zeitgeist". German idealism and romanticism tie in with these views and speak to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and others z. B. of an “objective spirit”, “which manifests and interprets itself in different moments”. Heinrich Ritter , based on Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher , drafts the program of a knowledge of the "spirit" "[n] not only [...] of the individual philosopher [...], also [...] of his school, [...] of his time, [...] of his people, since it is assumed that in all these forms there is a peculiar way in which the power of mankind expresses itself. The highest task for history, if it could be achieved, would be to represent the spirit of humanity itself. "

Following Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , a distinction is also made between the sciences of nature and the spirit. While this does not mean a contradiction in Schelling's work, Wilhelm Dilthey and his students work out a method from the history of ideas , which is largely based on assumptions about the philosophy of life. In the German quarterly journal for literary studies and intellectual history , published by this group since 1923, various methodological publications for determining the intellectual history research program are also published, e.g. B. by Erich Rothacker and Eduard Spranger . This definition can also be explained by the turning away from positivist narrowing in historical studies and literary history. The initial orientation towards a metaphysically demanding and, under modern conditions of understanding, elusive concept of the spirit is lost in favor of a "systematic use of all hermeneutic aids that are available"

Differentiation between natural sciences and humanities

In the form known today, it comes mainly from Wilhelm Dilthey . He wanted to provide his own theoretical and methodological foundation for literary and other cultural studies, namely in return for their orientation to the natural sciences that were empirically and legally founded in the 19th century and therefore leading and exemplary for other sciences. Dilthey assumed that human experience is divided into two areas: that of the surrounding world ( nature ) with its objective-lawful conditions, and that of inner experience and its manifestations ( culture ). The latter owed their intrinsic value to the fact of human self-confidence, characterized by “a sovereignty of the will, a responsibility of actions, an ability to submit everything to thought” and to let cultural products arise from it. According to Dilthey, the natural sciences seek to explain their objects in terms of cause and effect, general law, and special case; In contrast, the humanities would try to understand the relationship between whole and part, between inner impression and outer expression, and the development of mental ideas. For Dilthey, however, both types of science stand in the larger context of the lifeworld , from which the natural sciences, however, disregard, while the humanities refer back to them.

Weltanschauung, zeitgeist

Dilthey also developed the typology for the concept of Weltanschauung , which is central to the history of ideas , which he divided into three basic types according to their attitude to nature: Naturalism (man sees himself as determined by nature; examples: Epicurus , Lucretius , Thomas Hobbes , La Mettrie , Georg Büchner ); Idealism of freedom (man is autonomous, has free will and can determine himself; examples: Friedrich Schiller , Immanuel Kant ); Objective idealism (man is aware of being one with nature; examples: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Baruch Spinoza , Giordano Bruno ). This approach influenced Karl Jaspers ' Psychologie der Weltanschauung (1919) and its tripartite division into The Great Philosophers (1957).

The zeitgeist can be seen as a forerunner of the concept of worldview and also an important concept for intellectual history . It means the mental state (not: mental state!) Of a certain period of time or an entire epoch, that is, its intellectual and cultural “climate”. It was introduced by Johann Gottfried Herder in 1769 (in a review of the work Genius seculi by Christian Adolph Klotz ) and adopted by German Romanticism (which viewed it as a characteristic of an age, not a general description); he is best known from Hegel's Philosophy of History.

History of ideas

A subspecies of intellectual history is the history of ideas , which was initiated by Berlin-born Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962; 1910–39 professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore) at the beginning of the 20th century and its most famous expression in his main work The Great Chain of Being found. This approach was continued by René Wellek , Leo Spitzer , Ernst Robert Curtius , Isaiah Berlin , Michel Foucault (discourse theory), Reinhart Koselleck (project of historical semantics) and others.

For the history of ideas, Lovejoy takes individual ideas and concepts as the basic unit of analysis. These act as building blocks of the history of ideas; they remain relatively unchanged over long periods of time, but combine to form new patterns and are expressed in ever new forms, namely typical of the epoch and thus structuring the story. It is the task of the historian of ideas to identify such ideas and terms and to describe their historical appearance and disappearance and, if possible, to explain them coherently.

The expression the history of ideas was first used by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim in his work Ideologie und Utopie (1927). He distinguished it from the Marxist-materialist historiography type, not in order to fall back into an idealism, but in order to anchor the history of ideas neutrally and descriptively in the historical conditions of origin (for which he speaks of "relationalism" instead of relativism: the historian of ideas must relate his objects to theirs Setting the conditions for possibility and development; instead of continuity, research focuses on changes and innovations).

Intellectual history in literary studies

The history of ideas was the leading theory and method in German studies in the first half of the 20th century, replacing positivism and the predecessor of the work- immanent interpretation (see below). The positivism developed by Auguste Comte in the first half of the 19th century was adopted by the French historian and literary historian Hippolyte Taine , who declared cultural works to be determined by race , milieu and temps (inherited, learned, experienced). Accordingly, positivism in German studies was particularly important in two areas:

1. Authors' biographies : Positivism represented biographism, ie the unity of life and work (which usually led to its reduction to that), and tried to explain the works in terms of the aforementioned trias of Taine from their circumstances. A prime example of this was Goethe's love poetry from Sesenheim (Friederike Brion) via Frankfurt (Lili Schönemann) and Weimar (Frau von Stein) to Karlsbad (Marianne von Willemer), which - according to Goethe's own dictum in "Poetry and Truth", all of his works are "fragments of a large denomination" - researched and interpreted as an expression of his personal life. This reduction of the work to life often led to the accusation of “stuffing things”, ie not getting beyond collections of material and short-circuit identifications of life and work (ignoring the intellectual content and the poetic design). The main exponents of such a positivism in German studies were Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886) and his student Erich Schmidt .

2. History and impact of individual literary texts. Here, historical-critical text editions rich in facts were created (namely on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Friedrich Schiller , Johann Gottfried Herder , Heinrich von Kleist ) and extensive material and motif stories.

Intellectual history reacts to this purely fact-oriented positivism, which it appears to be too superficial and analytical, by defining poetry and literature as a component (and mainly influenced) by intellectual currents, i.e. as an expression of the zeitgeist (see above). Marion Maren-Grisebach contrasts positivism and intellectual history as follows: Positivism : Literature reflects a) reality, historical facts and is b) itself part of this reality, i.e. it reflects experiences of the given and c) is necessarily causally determined like this itself. This leads to the following procedure: describe and then explain, reference back to the biography, rational analysis on an induction basis, the work-object is at the center, a linear approach. Intellectual history : Literature creates a) intellectual structures, reflects ideas and takes part in zeitgeist currents that are timeless, b) it creates and thus shares transcendence, the product of the creative spirit, which c) makes literature appear autonomous. This leads to the following procedure: reliving understanding, isolation of the work, intuitive synthesis on the basis of deduction, the focus is on the author-subject, cyclical approach.

Important authors and works from the history of ideas are:

  • Fritz Strich : German Classical and Romanticism (1922),
  • Paul Kluckhohn : The Concept of Love in 18th Century Literature and Romanticism (1922),
  • Hermann August Korff : The Spirit of the Goethe Era (1923–53),
  • Walther Rehm : The Thought of Death in German Poetry from the Middle Ages to Romanticism (1928),
  • Rudolf Unger : Essays on literary and intellectual history (1929).

Since the history of ideas as theory and method proved to be susceptible to folk ideas, it was replaced after the Second World War by the work-immanent interpretation .

Critique of the history of ideas

From the 1960s onwards, both the intellectual history and the work-immanent method were increasingly criticized as idealistic or unworldly, first from the approach of a social history of literature , then also from the history of mentality and historical anthropology. The former emphasized that literature was determined less by intellectual currents and eternal ideas than by socio-historical processes (above all the emancipation of the bourgeoisie and its ideological preparation, which also includes literature). This approach was supplemented by the history of mentality , while historical anthropology tried to create a picture of historical man for whom the integration of his physicality was constitutive (explicitly directed against abstractions of the intellectual history by Odo Marquard 1973): How were physical conditions, sensual instinctuality ( Sexuality) and emotional needs of historical people? How did they comment on it? How are both to be understood today?

Interestingly, the Enlightenment was the main area of ​​interest in intellectual history as well as social history and historical anthropology. In view of the decisive historical epoch threshold around 1800 (R. Koselleck), this is not surprising.

Important currents in the history of ideas

See also

literature

  • Isaiah Berlin : Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Hogarth Press, Pimlico 1979, ISBN 0-7126-6690-7 .
  • Isaiah Berlin : The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. John Murray, Pimlico 1990, ISBN 0-7126-0616-5 .
  • Isaiah Berlin : The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History. Chatto & Windus, Pimlico 1996, ISBN 0-7126-7367-9 .
  • Isaiah Berlin : The Power of Ideas. Chatto & Windus, Pimlico 2000, ISBN 0-7126-6554-4 .
  • Karl-Martin Dietz : Metamorphoses of the Spirit. 3 volumes. Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-7725-1300-X .
  • Wilhelm Dilthey : Collected Writings I - XX. Eds. B. Groethuysen, G. Misch, H. Nohl, OF Bollnow, K. Founder and others, especially:
    • I: Introduction to the humanities. (1883) 1959
    • II: Weltanschauung and analysis of man since the Renaissance and Reformation. (1913) 1957
  • Wilhelm Dilthey : The experience and the poetry. 1905. (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1965 (Kleine Vandenhoeck series 191))
  • Lutz Geldsetzer : Intellectual history. In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy . Vol. 3, pp. 207-210.
  • Wolfgang Fritz Haug : Geistesgeschichte , in: Historical-critical dictionary of Marxism . Vol. 5, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg 2001, Sp. 91-105.
  • Friedrich Heer : European intellectual history. 1953-64. (Abridged paperback edition. I: From Augustin to Luther. II: From Erasmus to Goethe. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1970)
  • Arthur Oncken Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being. 1936. (Harvard, Cambridge 1964)
  • P. Kluckhohn: Intellectual history. In: W. Kohlenschmidt, W. Mohr (Hrsg.): Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Volume 1. 1958, pp. 537-540.
  • Paul Oskar Kristeller : The philosophical significance of the history of thought. In: Studies in the Renaissance thought and letters. Rome 1956.
  • Chr. König, E. Lämmert (Ed.): Literary studies and intellectual history. 1910-25. (Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / M. 1993)
  • Maurice Mandelbaum : The history of ideas, intellectual history and the history of philosophy. In: The historiography of the history of philosophy, History and Theory. Supplement volume 5 (1965) pp. 33-66.
  • Karl Mannheim : ideology and utopia. 1929. (Schulte-Bulmke, Frankfurt / M. 1969)
  • Odo Marquard : Difficulties with the philosophy of history. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1973.
  • Erich Rothacker : Introduction to the humanities. 1930. (WBG, Darmstadt 1972)
  • Erich Rothacker: Logic and systematics of the humanities. 1927. (WBG, Darmstadt 1970)
  • Erich Rothacker: history of philosophy and intellectual history. In: German quarterly for literary studies and intellectual history. 18, pp. 1-25 (1940).
  • Eduard Spranger : What does intellectual history mean? In: Education. 12 (1937), pp. 289-302.
  • Heinrich Ritter von Srbik : Spirit and History from German Humanism to the Present. Volume I-II. O. Müller, Salzburg 1950.
  • Richard Tarnas : The Knowledge of the West. The world views of Europe through the ages. 1991. (Albatros, Düsseldorf 2006)
  • Jeremy L. Tobey : The History of Ideas: A Bibliographical Introduction. Vol.1: Classical Antiquity. Vol. 2: Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Clio, Santa Barbara 1975.
  • Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. In: Philip P. Wiener (Ed.): Dictionary of the History of Ideas . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1973-74. (Online Edition of the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center Library)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Geldsetzer, 208
  2. ↑ See Geldsetzer, 207
  3. ↑ Geldsetzer, 207f
  4. ↑ Lectures on the History of Philosophy, ed. by H. Glockner, 17, 81, here to Geldsetzer, 209
  5. ↑ On the formation of the philosopher through the history of philosophy (1817), 108, here n. Geldsetzer, 209
  6. ↑ Geldsetzer, 209
  7. ↑ Dilthey 1883/1959 p. 6
  8. ↑ See especially Introduction: The Study of the History of Ideas
  9. ↑ Cf. his foreword to the English edition of 1936 (printed in the edition bibliographed below, pp. IXff)
  10. ↑ II. Part 7th book, HA Ed. E. Trunz Vol. 8 p. 283
  11. ↑ See the still useful works by Elisabeth Frenzel "Fabrics of World Literature" (1. A. 1962) and "Motive of World Literature" (1. A. 1976) published by Kröner-Verlag
  12. ↑ Medthoden der Literaturwissenschaft, Bern / Munich: Francke, Dalp-Taschenbuch 397, p. 28.
  13. ↑ See Josef Nadler: Literaturgesch. of German tribes and landscapes, 3 vols. 1912-18