Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany

This elegant, erudite essay demonstrates “how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era” (ix). Concentrating on the fi rst decades of the 19 th century and the four traditional “faculties” of the university, Ziolkowski explores the sudden conviction that, in Karl von Savigny’s phrase, “the historical sense has awakened everywhere” (cited, 124). The French Revolution— together with the “epistemological revolution” associated specifi cally with Kant but culminating a longer and wider “disenchantment of the world”—triggered “an intensifi ed awareness of time itself” (9). (Less convincingly, Ziolkowski throws in the “industrial revolution” as a third revolutionary rupture. It does not play much of a role in his detailed exposition.) This awakening historical sense was Romantic in “the shared view that human knowledge constitutes a vital whole [which could be] grasped in its totality only through a twofold approach employing both history and system” (173). Ziolkowski’s narrative touchstone is the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. His key exemplars from the four “faculties” of the traditional university all passed through the University of Berlin in its moment of crystalizing impact: Hegel in Philosophy, Schleiermacher in Theology, Savigny in Law, and Hufeland and Reil in Medicine. Moreover, the new University of Berlin embodied “a wholly Romantic theory of the university” (16) envisioned primarily by a group of brilliant thinkers who had gathered in Jena in the 1790s—Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Wilhelm von Humboldt—all of whom believed utterly in what Schelling called “the living unity of all sciences” (cited, 18). They believed further that this “unity of knowledge should be incorporated institutionally” (23). The university must be an “organic whole” where Wissenschaft could be conceived as a worthy end in itself, devoted to the “realm of hitherto unsolved problems” (25). The so-called “higher faculties”—theology, law, and medicine—were too career-oriented to fulfi ll this ideal. As Schleiermacher summarized this whole body of thought in his crucial Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense (1808), “the faculty of philosophy should constitute the center of the university” (23). Only under such a structure could the individual come to “understand how his particular discipline is related to the harmonious structure of the whole” (18). This systematic holism could only be achieved—individually or culturally— through historical reconstruction. “For the individual, education or Bildung consists in acquiring for himself what the world spirit has already learned in the course of history” (55), in the exemplary formulation of Hegel. As he argued, “the consciousness of the individual in its development recapitulates the historical development of the world spirit” (43). This idea that “ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny” held sway across the Romantic moment from its literal exposition in von Baer’s laws of embryological physiology to its extended sense as a philosophy of self-formation, or Bildung (139). More precisely, the key thinkers of the Romantic moment came to believe that histori-