Universal History

Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? (1789)What is and to what end does one study universal history?

This is the inaugural lecture which Schiller gave in two parts on 26 and 27 May 1789 in order to mark his appointment as Professor of History at the University of Jena.

In the first part Schiller makes a distinction between the ‘Brotgelehrte[r]’, the scholar who works for his bread, and the ‘philosophischer Kopf’ (philosophical brain). The ‘bread scholar’ is a hack worker, who represents the ideology of his patron; only the ‘philosophical brain’ has an independent mind.

In the second part Schiller deals with the theme of universal history, which considers the extent to which previous ages have contributed to the development of humanity. Influenced by Kant’s essay ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’; ‘Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), which he had read in 1787, Schiller argues that spontaneous actions can bring about what looks – in retrospect – like a plan, even if it did not seem that way at the time (see below, T. J. Reed, p. 274).

Nicht lange kann sich der philosophische Geist bei dem Stoffe der Weltgeschichte verweilen, so wird ein neuer Trieb in ihm geschäftig werden, der nach Übereinstimmung strebt – der ihn unwiderstehlich reizt, alles um sich herum seiner eigenen vernünftigen Natur zu assimilieren und jede ihm vorkommende Erscheinung zu der höchsten Wirkung, die er erkannt, zum Gedanken zu erheben. Je öfter also und mit je glücklicherem Erfolg er den Versuch erneuert, das Vergangene mit dem Gegenwärtigen zu verknüpfen, desto mehr wird er geneigt, was er als Ursache und Wirkung in einander greifen sieht, als Mittel und Absicht zu verbinden. […] Er nimmt also diese Harmonie aus sich selbst heraus und verpflanzt sie außer sich in die Ordnung der Dinge, d. i. er bringt einen vernünftigen Zweck in den Gang der Welt und ein teleologisches Princip in die Weltgeschichte.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/schiller/universl/universl.html

The philosophical mind cannot contemplate the stuff of world history for long, before a new drive starts to stir in him, which strives for correspondences – which drives him irresistibly to assimilate everything around him to his own rational nature and to raise everything that appears to him to the level of thought, which is the highest effect he has known. The more often and successfully he renews the attempt to connect the past with the present, the more he will be inclined to take the cause and effect which he sees intertwined, and to combine them as means and intention. [..] He takes this harmony from within himself and projects it outside himself into the order of things, i.e. he brings a rational purpose to the world’s course, and a teleological principle into world history.

In other words, order in history is not a divine plan, but the construction of a creative mind. As Elisabeth Krimmer points out (see below, p. 224), this anticipates the ideas of the American historian Hayden White. This lecture also draws on Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit; Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History (1784-91, four parts).

Further Reading

Nicholas Boyle, ‘Inventing the Intellectual: Schiller and Fichte at the University of Jena’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 81:1 (2012), 39-50

Elisabeth Krimmer, ‘God’s Warriors, Mercenaries, or Freedom Fighters? Politics, Warfare, and Religion in Schiller’s Geschichte des Dreyßigjährigen Kriegs’, in Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, ed. by Jeffrey High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 217-35

Stephen D. Martinson, ‘Filling in the Gaps. “The Problem of World Order” in Friedrich Schiller’s Essay on Universal History’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1988/89), 24-46

T. J. Reed, ‘So Who Was Naive? Schiller as Enlightenment Historian and His Successors’, in Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, ed. by Jeffrey High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 271-83

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)