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The turmoil in ideas that Europe had experienced in previous centuries continued into the 1800s, as Europe was disturbed by a growth in technology and capitalism, the factory system, a developing middleclass, lower class unrest, and by advances in the sciences and medicine. A few Europeans in the 1800s continued the attempt at putting it all together in what was called philosophy, while a few in China, Japan and India were becoming increasingly interested in ideas from Europe concerned with science and technology.
In Iran there was also some turmoil in ideas. Shia orthodoxy dominated in Iran through the 1800s, with Sufi mystics still believing that study could unveil hidden meaning in the text of the Koran. Another thinker in Iran, Karim Khan Kirmani (1810-1871), wanted to unify all strands of truth, from politics to science, into a single Islamic worldview. He spoke of the essential validity of the Koran but wanted freedom from orthodox interpretation. He adhered to the traditional political view that some were born to rule, some to be ruled, some to be masters and some to be servants, but he was also interested in astronomy, chemistry and linguistics. He spoke of the essential validity of the Koran but wanted freedom from orthodox interpretation. Kirmani wrote numerous books and letters, creating controversy among supporters and opponents alike, while being regarded among the Shia as a leading savant.
Iranian authorities wished to keep dangerous ideas from the West out of Iranian society, and they were challenged also by a movement called Babíism. It was a movement that held that God is the knower, sustainer and the omnipotent, and that God is essentially unknowable. The aspect of their belief that disturbed the authorities was the claim that a new prophet was coming who would bring a new era, uniting all humanity and abolishing all racial, class and religious prejudices. Islam held that Muhammad the Prophet was the last of the prophets, and the liberalism of Iran's authorities was limited. The leader of the movement, Mirza Ali Mohammad, was executed on July 9, 1850, watched by a crowd of 10,000. Also 20,000 of his followers, who refused to recant their faith, are said to have been put to death. The Babíist movement became the Baha'i faith, its persecution to continue into the twentieth century. As recently as 1983, the Iranian government of the Ayatollah Khomeini executed a seventeen-year-old girl, Mona Mahmudnizhad, whose crime was her faith.
In the early 1800s many were rejecting the rationalism and atheism that had been proclaimed by French Revolutionaries. Robespierre had been a believer, a Christian, but no matter. Reason rather than faith had been proclaimed by the French Revolution, and many saw the godlessness of the revolution, and the materialism of liberals, as too simplistic, or as idiocy. There was in Europe the view that imagination and spirit, or soul, or in some cases traditional religion and authority had been ignored. A part of this was the revolt against the Enlightenment's belief in the ancient Greeks and a revolt against the emotional restraint that had been valued by the ancient Greeks. Emotional freedom was proposed in the place of restraint, the same emotional freedom that allowed one a leap of religious faith -- the emotionalism that some Greeks disliked in the worship of Dionysus.
Since the Enlightenment, however, religious leaders were accepting aspects of science, and a belief in rationality accompanied the belief in the free reign of emotion. Many did not see the two as absolutely incompatible. Some continued to extol rationality, while others believed in intuition -- as had Rousseau, who had given a boost to romanticism, believing as he had in the emotions of the unlearned rather than in the reason of intellectuals.
Romantics believed in spontaneity and emotional intensity. Romantic artists rejected anything buttoned down or artificial, and they were more likely found in barren garrets than in drawing rooms, where people were stiff and controlled. Some disliked combing their hair. They yearned for the lofty, to ascend to new heights in individualistic human experience and spiritual triumph. If they had been living in the twenty-first century would have enjoyed getting high, dressing with indifference to order, and in popular music would have joined those trying to ascend to new peaks of unrestraint in screaming, antics, bang-bang or boom-boom.
There was a libertarian aspect to European romanticism -- a desire to be free of the tyranny of convention, or the impositions of opposing political philosophies. In Britain were those who accepted those parts of the Enlightenment that suited them while rejecting the egalitarianism and empiricism of people like Jeremy Bentham and Stuart Mill. A few championed a philosophy that claimed reality to be essentially idea rather than materiality. And on the side of romanticism were the writings, including poetry, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) - Britain's best known conservative early in the century. Coleridge had been friendly toward revolutionists during his younger days, but he had had a change of mind by the beginning of the century. In 1801 he began sinking into an opium habit. He passed through Pantheism (God is everywhere and everything) but he recovered his Christian faith in time to appeal to conservatives. He denounced Pantheism as atheism (if God is everything than there is nothing distinct that can be called God). He embraced philosophical idealism, and, as libertarians do, he championed free speech.
The battle between reason and emotion and combinations of these was alive on the continent. And the foremost among those in this was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It was believed that he had found a synthesis that did what philosophy was supposed to do -- explain it all. Hegel was for the rational in that he saw history moving by a conflict of ideas and a logic of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis. And he was romantic in his belief in great men moving history -- men like Napoleon, whom he had admired. Hegel believed in specifics, the world of fact of the scientists, and he believed in the great absolute about which mystics believed. History, he believed, worked its way with specifics responding within the whole, with the synthesizing of contradictions, to an ultimate. Reaching the ultimate was the reaching of freedom. The ultimate and absolute was also God. The ultimate politically, the end of history's march toward perfection, was the state he lived in -- Prussia -- in alliance with God.
For some, history had been dead and dumb, but thanks to Hegel they now found meaning in it, while a few others believed that Hegel's explanation for everything was a bit premature. For the 21st century's Francis Fukuyama, Hegel contributed to the modern understanding of humanity by describing humanity as having progressed through a series stages. Writes Fukuyama:
Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes.
Karl Marx was influenced by Hegel. He took God from Hegelism and created historical materialism and what some would call scientific socialism.
Soren Kierkegaard (kęr'kegôr) (1813-1855) , of Copenhagen, completed a masters degree in theology. He rejected rational justifications for belief in Jesus Christ. He rejected the attempts by Christians in the third and fourth centuries to superimpose philosophical arguments and reasoning upon Christianity's core belief that Jesus was humanity's savior. Kierkegaard believed in passion and in choosing to believe in Jesus on the basis of one's passion. Certainty, he claimed, is found only in an unjustifiable "leap into faith." He rejected Hegel's attempt to rationalize Christianity, Hegel in general and any other attempt at reasoning one's way to a unified view of all. He challenged what he thought was nonsense at every opportunity, and this put him at odds with established Protestant churches. Rejecting the ability to reason to truth, Kierkegaard was left with truth close to that of the founder of Skepticism, Pyrrhon. Truth as Subjectivity was the title of one of his books. Kierkegaard claimed that it was in the mind that God existed. And he described people as responsible for their choices -- no blaming an exterior force, such as the Devil.
Kierkegaard's view was the founding of modern existentialism. Atheistic existentialists would join him in holding that humans were limited to choices and that there was no objective right and wrong that could be reasoned to. To the existentialists, living was a struggle with an exterior world that was fundamentally absurd.
A few Christian theologians, impressed by science more than they were by Kierkegaard, had been trying to apply what they believed was reasoning to Biblical interpretation. What was called criticism was intended to be a neutral investigation - science being neutral, its purpose merely to understand. Biblical criticism acquired various names: narrative criticism, textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, et cetera.
In the second half of the century, science-minded theologians were interested in the new efforts in archaeology. Archaeological digs had begun among the Maya, the Toltec and Aztec ruins. In the 1870s, a German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, was digging and examining the ruins of Troy. The biggest shock to Judaism and Christianity had not come yet. Jews and Christians still believed that the ancient Hebrew worshippers of Jehovah were the first makers of law. The shock would come with the publication in 1902 of Hammurabi's laws, which predated what was believed to be the time of Moses.
A German professor of theology, Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), became the best known of those academicians who believed they were studying the Bible scientifically. They were applying their knowledge of linguistics to their studies, and they found what they thought was evidence of different writers having contributed to the different sections of the Bible. They compared the ideas expressed by the different Biblical writers, and they studied the relationship between ideas expressed and the context of text within which those ideas existed. Wellhausen concluded that Old Testament was a product of an evolution in ideas among various writers rather than a product of divine inspiration. He concluded that Moses had not written the Torah. And from the orthodox he received anathemas.
Europe had been parting from its ages-old tie with religion and entering a new age of secularization. Intellectuality was less dominated by theology and increasingly dominated by natural science, economics, sociology and history. Leading composers were writing symphonies and sonatas rather than predominately ecclesiastic music. Rather than churches and monuments concerning religion, architects were being commissioned to build museums, libraries and other public buildings. And secular newspapers were becoming more influential.
Religion was disappearing from high culture and was receding a little in general. Works of literary fiction were ignoring devotion to God and instead uncovering personalities and the character of people. Religion remained a large part in expressions of political power and remained a part of the private lives of some aristocrats and was very much alive among the middleclass. But it was less so among many of the laboring poor, who saw themselves as not benefiting from God's beneficence.
In 1846, Mastai-Ferretti was "crowned" Pope. He took the name Pius IX, and he was hailed by many as a liberal, having defeated the candidate considered conservative. But the political upheavals of 1848 turned Pius IX into a staunch conservative -- against anything that threatened the established order.
In 1854, Pius IX overrode a disagreement among Catholic scholars and proclaimed the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary as revealed by God. In 1864, he issued an encyclical letter, the Syllabus of Errors, listing "modernist, liberal" beliefs and trends of which he disapproved. Among these was pantheism, and he listed as errors reason "without any reference whatsoever to God " and the belief that with reason alone one could find one's way to truth and to the difference between good and evil.
In 1869, Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council, at which papal infallibility was proclaimed. But the following year Italy was unified and the Pope lost possession of Rome and the papal states, leaving him with the Vatican, where he considered himself a prisoner. There he remained unreconciled to his political losses and forbade the faithful to participate in civil government. Meanwhile, laborers in mines and in factories in France were drifting away from the Church, and Catholics led by an eminent historian, Johann Josef Ignaz von Dollinger, declared the Vatican decrees untrue. Dollinger was ex-communicated in 1871, and he and about 100,000 others formed what they called the "Old Church."
Through the 1800s, interest in history increased. Archaeology was becoming a tool for historians, as was the study of linguistics -- philology. Historians were more concerned with discipline and in documenting their sources. The belief that history was a science as hard as the physical sciences was waning while some were restricting themselves to the empirical and merely trying to describe what actually happened. And in the writing of history more attention began to be given to cultural and economic developments. Histories were written that specialized in law, literature or philosophy, and a new interest in the East, near and far, laid ground for the writing of world histories.
One of the more prominent historians of the century's later decades was Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896). He was a German who gave up his early liberalism, became a supporter of Prussia and held to the view that history was "the objectively revealed Will of God." His History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, the first volume of which was published in 1879 and, despite its flagrant biases, it was celebrated for its manner of writing and its reliance on authoritative sources. Treitschke was hostile toward Jews. He was influential with his fellow Germans, especially students, and helped create fervent German nationalism and chauvinism, support for German colonialism and hostility toward Britain.
A Frenchman, Joseph Gobineau (1816-82), moved in the same circles as Alexis de Tocqueville, and de Tocqueville was impressed by what he thought was Gobineau's charm and lively mind. Gobineau was a Catholic with some liberal leanings. He held that morality was possibly independent of religious belief and that Christianity had added nothing morally significant to that which had been offered by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. He thought that Jeremy Bentham had erred by accepting philosophical materialism, and, in a letter to de Tocqueville (dated October 16, 1843), he wrote that no religion was harmful if properly observed. Everyone, he wrote, wants "to perfect himself through a conception of duty" and "all have an immensely sincere desire to seek what is good."
Politically, Gobineau was conservative. He was offended by the attempt at revolution in France in 1848 and its "pillage and burning, and massacre." Gobineau believed in local rights over central authority, and he believed in personal honor, which he thought of as an historic attribute of the aristocracy -- not common folk. He saw ideas about equality, democracy and "the mob" as a threat to the well-being of the world. He associated these ideas with materialism. Like many aristocrats he was hostile to the new industrial capitalism that was on the rise. He yearned for the old aristocratic order, which he believed was marked by respect for family and for hierarchy. Politically he saw liberalism as dangerous because it encouraged a lack of respect for social order.
Gobineau wrote that as he studied the "restless modern world" he found the horizons of his "inquiry" growing wider and wider and further into the past. Professionally he was a diplomat, and in his spare time he put the findings of his study into a book, a work of history, the title of which was The Inequality of the Human Races (Essai sur l'Inégalitédes Races humaines). These were times when others were trying to be scientific about race. At Leipzig, in Germany, in 1849 a work by Karl Gustav Carus had been published under the title "On the Unequal Capacity of Different Races for Further Cultural Development." Also in Germany, the composer Richard Wagner, perhaps with no scientific pretensions, was proclaiming that race was the key to artistic creation. In Scotland in 1850, Robert Knox was attempting to be scientific with his book called The Races of Man. And in 1854 a book was published in the United States entitled Types of Mankind, written by two men, Nott and Gliddon. Gobineau intended to be scientific also. He believed that history could be scientific if properly done, and he made an effort to draw from reliable sources.
Gobineau wrote of white people -- Aryans -- having conquered India, and he assumed that these Aryans were superior to those in India that they had conquered. The Aryans in India, he claimed, had built one of the great civilizations.
Gobineau's sources turned out to be less than perfect. He wrote that it was Aryans from India, moving to the Nile River, who had created the civilization of Egypt. He believed that Aryans had created the Assyrian civilization, which he described as including Phoenicians, Lydian, Carthaginians and Jews. He saw Aryans from India conquering their way to China had creating civilization there. And, of course, there was the great Greek civilization created by Aryans -- the Greeks from the same stock as those great conquerors, the Medes, the Persians and the Bactrians. And there was the great Roman civilization, also created by Aryans. All the great civilizations, according to Gobineau, had been created by Aryans.
According to Gobineau, whites alone were culturally creative. Superiority, he believed, was demonstrated by conquest (an idea that Hitler was to follow). Conquest was, he claimed, an expression of vigor, will-power and people with valor in their hearts and victory in their hands. Whites he claimed have "reflective energy." Others, he believed were "never able to shake themselves from their impotence."
Gobineau believed that in examining the past he had discovered the laws of science governing the fall of civilizations. Degeneration came, he wrote, because conquerors always mixed with those they had conquered, polluting the purity of race of the conquerors, submerging the conquerors into the inferior body of non-Aryans. Jews, he held, had once been pure but had become a threat because they had been "bestialized" through mixing biologically with black Africans.
The first two volumes of Gobineau's book appeared in 1853. Two more volumes appeared in 1855. His views fit with the uncritical acceptance among Europeans of their primacy in the world -- an ethnocentrism and conceit that could be found in much of the world. But, according to Hanna Arendt, Gobineau had done something unique. She wrote:
Nobody before Gobineau thought of finding one single reason, one single force according to which civilization always and everywhere rises and falls. [note]
For Gobineau, as for the Roman historian Tacitus, Germans were heroic figures, with valor, a love of war and honor. Gobineau mentioned later Roman writers describing German invaders, and he wrote that the Germans "appear to us now as great and majestic as they were thought barbarous by the writers of the Later [Roman] Empire." Gobineau was one of those historians who believed that the Germans had made a great contribution European civilization following their having overrun the Roman Empire. This he believed was overturned with the Renaissance. The Renaissance, he claimed, marked a rejection of the Aryan-German cultural achievement.
Gobineau admired Prussia for being a purely German state, unlike Austria, whose empire embodied Italians, Slavs and Hungarians -- a view that was to be shared by the Austrian born, Adolf Hitler.
Another writer opposed to democracy and materialism who was to have an influence on the twentieth century was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche despised the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, describing it as a "pig philosophy." He too was a pessimist, skeptical about all the promises of happy outcomes that were floating about Europe, including talk of classless societies. He despised mediocrity and the masses. Liberalism, he believed, led to revolution, bloodletting and crime.
Nietzsche believed that the best of the human species did not always survive and triumph as some believed Darwin had suggested happens in the evolution of species. Instead the best of men were weighed upon and dragged down by the weight of mass mediocrity. The strong, Nietzsche believed, had to be protected from the weak, the fortunate from the unfortunate, the healthy from the degenerate.
Nietzsche believed in the imaginative and vigorous man of virtuous character that was the ideal of aristocrats. Nietzsche was morally earnest, objecting to what liberals spoke of as the pursuit of happiness. And he was opposed to what he saw as the bourgeoisie's focus on accumulating money. Such people, he believed, had no sense of honor. They lacked good style or a taste for that which made life worth living.
Nietzsche supported what some describe as the independence and personal achievement in spirit. He was not a supporter of nationalism. Aristocrats had tended to be internationalist, and Nietzsche saw nationalism as an attraction for the mob and as a threat to human freedom. He foresaw demagogues using nationalism to arouse and exploit the fears of the vulgar.
Nietzsche had been a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the young age of twenty-four -- appointed before acquiring his doctorate. He had been a student of pre-Socratic Greece. As a philosopher he was in the tradition of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who believed in an empiricism balanced with reason.
Nietzsche developed his philosophy from his struggle with the history of the ancient Greeks. Unlike Gobineau he rejected Christianity. He had a low opinion of dogma and those who do not question authority and think for themselves. Religions, believed Nietzsche, taught a slave mentality. He saw a connection between Christianity and the rising belief in democracy and socialism among Europeans. He also lost respect for academia. He described as sheep those who would follow the dictates of scholars. Academicians, he believed, were more interested in protecting themselves than in pursuing truth. He believed in pursuing an understanding of the world through an open-minded investigation of the past and present.
Nietzsche was against Buddhist negations of life that had been adhered to by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche had at first admired Schopenhauer but had turned against him. Nietzsche held to a romantic embrace of life that included the good and the bad. He disapproved of romantic flight from reality or any other form of intoxication.
The world knows Nietzsche for having said God is dead. Regarding this, here is what is written in Wikipedia:
God is dead is perhaps one of the most commonly misunderstood phrases in all of 19th century literature. The phrase should not be taken literally, as in, "God is now physically dead," or, "Jesus, both the son of God and God himself, died on the cross"; rather, it is Nietzsche's controversial way of saying that God has ceased to be a reckoning force in the people's lives, even if they don't recognize it. After all, the philosopher is famous for his "punning" writing style that can be easily perceived as ambiguity. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it is time to transcend both the concept of God and the "good vs. evil" dichotomy found within most religions. The phrase is also commonly misunderstood as an exultation, whereas it is clear from the full context that it is instead a lamentation.
At the age of forty-four, Nietzsche succumbed to "dementia" -- a mental disorder with "memory failures, personality changes, and impaired reasoning." Researchers now believe that his having been diagnosed as having syphilis was the product of medical incompetence and quackery of the times. Nietzsche died of pneumonia in 1890.
Nietzsche's writings -- mainly in the 1880s -- would attract some the world's most famous writers and artists. After his death his younger sister, Elizabeth, tried to elevate him by promoting his dementia as part of a higher mental state. The famous dancer, Isadora Duncan responded favorably, asking, "How do we know that what seems to us insanity was not a vision of transcendental truth?" Elizabeth embodied much that Nietzsche disdained. She lived during the rising of National Socialism and transformed Nietzsche. Adolf Hitler would take from Nietzsche what suited him: Nietzsche's belief in the uncommon man and his disdain for democracy. Hitler, it is said, would have Nietzsche's novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, issued to every soldier in the German army. In Britain and the United States, Nietzsche would become known as the "the Nazi philosopher."
Nietzsche would not have liked the fascists, especially Hitler's anti-Semitism. That big ideas move history is an exaggeration. Nietzsche's belief in the exceptional man and his hostility toward mediocrity and democracy would be only a miniscule part of the creation of tumult that he predicted would be coming in the twentieth century -- a tumult he believed would be produced by irrationality among common people moved by demagogues.
Recommended Books
Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political tThought of Count Gobideau, by Michael D Biddiss, 1970.
Freedom in the Modern World, by Herbert J Muller, 1966.
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