Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea

Abstract

Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea Joel B. Lande (bio) I. Revolution, Evolution For many German-speaking intellectuals around 1800, the events surrounding the French Revolution assumed pivotal importance. Beyond the first-hand reports from prominent authors, including Georg Forster und Joachim Heinrich Campe, there were also figures further removed from the epicenter of revolutionary events, who felt personally addressed by the upheaval.1 Perhaps the most prominent instance of such engagement can be found in the final text Immanuel Kant published during his lifetime, the Conflict of the Faculties (1798). From his far-flung university town along the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea, Kant asserted his belief that the ongoing Revolution was of universal human importance. At the heart of Kant’s observations is the set of concerns expressed in the following paragraph The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of gifted people may succeed, or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves [End Page 572] caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race. (Kant, Political Writings 182)2 Kant’s suspicion that the fall of the monarchy, along with the accompanying order of the estates, enjoys a significance untethered from a specific time or place, is closely linked to his philosophical-historical interest in the progress of human society in general. Kant insists on the pivotal place of the Revolution in the course of human history, not because he believes it will immediately result in the realization of the historically ideal form of government—a republican constitution founded on universal principles of natural right—but rather because he senses its potential contribution to that still-distant goal. And so he uses an act of lexical and conceptual sleight-of-hand in order to hide the fact that the events in France since 1789 have involved what he regards as the ultimate political evil, war. Kant’s surprising linguistic move has its source in a problematic aptly described by Hannah Arendt in her study On Revolution. Arendt’s book introduces the claim that “revolutions are the only political events that confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” (21). Kant, for one, responds to this confrontation by distancing himself from abrupt change; in fact, one can reasonably conjecture that a radical start may well have appeared to him irredeemably linked to the post-1790 violence abroad. In his sleight-of-hand, Kant draws on a subtle terminological choice he encountered in a treatise by his student Johann Benjamin Erhard. He picks up on the description of the events in France as a form of “evolution,” as a contingent and flawed stage in the unforeseeable and intractable path traced by humankind. The choice of the word “evolution” was highly unconventional—it was an essentially unused term in the German language of the time, but was also one that Kant, with his Latin education, could easily make his own. To the eighteenth-century German ear, the Latin evolutio or evolvo possessed a less problematic set of associations than the French loanword “revolution.” Both terms had historically promoted the imagination of a uniform and repetitive temporality (the Vulgate speaks of “anni circulus fuerit evolutus”). But for a mode of Enlightenment thought [End Page 573] searching for a way to describe time linearly, the cluster of prefixes ec-, ex-, e- conjured a more congenial set of associations than re-. Erhard’s use of the term “evolution” has a clear vector of movement—toward a “progress of Enlightenment,” as he says (188–189). The recourse of both Erhard and his teacher Kant to this unusual term testifies to...