As my mind is of the German type, “speculative, laborious, and unsound," it occurs to me that the phenomenon Hewitt describes in relation to Darwin is also visible in the reception (within Germany) of Kant's philosophy. The younger German Idealists had read Kant and Fichte as teenagers, and they were extremely conscious of the difference between themselves and writers who came to Kant and Fichte's theories in middle age or later. (Ironically, this latter group included Kant and Fichte themselves. The elderly Kant publicly denounced his idealist disciples, writing "May God protect us from our friends. Our enemies we can take care of ourselves." And Fichte eventually had the same problem.) Goethe, who at least in the 1790s and 1800s was the member of the older generation most eager to keep up with the philosophical cutting edge, kept hiring ever younger professors at Jena to help him keep abreast of what was going on. (Schiller, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as a postdoc: the talent pool was deep!)
When Hegel got his first regular professorship and Heidelberg, he made a big effort to reconcile with Fritz Jacobi. He'd come to the conclusion that Jacobi's religious critique of Fichte had been useful in helping to move modern philosophy forward, and that his differences with Jacobi were generational. Upon Jacobi's death he makes some remark in a letter that I can't recall precisely, I want to say that a whole generation had passed away or that Jacobi was the last of a heroic generation or something (ironically, as the shape-shifting Goethe would live for more than a decade). But I bet I'm modernizing the phrase, I'll look it up when I get a chance.
Yes, that's an excellent comparison. I think you can see a very similar pattern of reception in a lot of cases. The reason Martin Hewitt chose this project wasn't because he's a scholar of Darwin but to test generational patterns of reception, and Darwin's theories were so controversial that everyone had to react, making it very testable. Darwinian evolution may be the best single example of a theory that provoked a genuine intellectual cataclysm WITHOUT an explicit social movement attached (not to say that there were no social implications, but you know what I mean). But Kant is surely one of the best analogies. Interested in whether anyone can think of others. It does feel like a phenomenon that was possible roughly from the Enlightenment to WWI, and only then.
I'd be interested in the phrase if you come across it.
“Every generation is a secret society, and has its incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes and interests which are a mystery to both its predecessors and to posterity.”
Thanks for this and for your earlier review/essay in “Generations.” It makes me think of Noah Webster’s 1827 critique of Jefferson’s “usufruct to the living,” which he took to be the political application of Jefferson’s generational thinking:
“The general principle adopted by Mr. Jefferson is, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither power nor rights over it; that no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him, for if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living; that what is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals; that each generation may be considered as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation; that the period of a generation is thirty-four years; that a majority of a generation therefore will be dead at the end of eighteen years and eight months; and that at nineteen years from the date of a contract, the majority of contractors (the generation) are dead and their contract with them. Mr. Jefferson then supposes a case in which a majority of a generation borrow a sum of money equal to the ſee simple value of a state, and consume it in eating, drinking or quarreling and fighting. From this he infers, that in nineteen years, when the majority are dead, there is an end of the debt.”
So great, as always.
As my mind is of the German type, “speculative, laborious, and unsound," it occurs to me that the phenomenon Hewitt describes in relation to Darwin is also visible in the reception (within Germany) of Kant's philosophy. The younger German Idealists had read Kant and Fichte as teenagers, and they were extremely conscious of the difference between themselves and writers who came to Kant and Fichte's theories in middle age or later. (Ironically, this latter group included Kant and Fichte themselves. The elderly Kant publicly denounced his idealist disciples, writing "May God protect us from our friends. Our enemies we can take care of ourselves." And Fichte eventually had the same problem.) Goethe, who at least in the 1790s and 1800s was the member of the older generation most eager to keep up with the philosophical cutting edge, kept hiring ever younger professors at Jena to help him keep abreast of what was going on. (Schiller, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as a postdoc: the talent pool was deep!)
When Hegel got his first regular professorship and Heidelberg, he made a big effort to reconcile with Fritz Jacobi. He'd come to the conclusion that Jacobi's religious critique of Fichte had been useful in helping to move modern philosophy forward, and that his differences with Jacobi were generational. Upon Jacobi's death he makes some remark in a letter that I can't recall precisely, I want to say that a whole generation had passed away or that Jacobi was the last of a heroic generation or something (ironically, as the shape-shifting Goethe would live for more than a decade). But I bet I'm modernizing the phrase, I'll look it up when I get a chance.
Yes, that's an excellent comparison. I think you can see a very similar pattern of reception in a lot of cases. The reason Martin Hewitt chose this project wasn't because he's a scholar of Darwin but to test generational patterns of reception, and Darwin's theories were so controversial that everyone had to react, making it very testable. Darwinian evolution may be the best single example of a theory that provoked a genuine intellectual cataclysm WITHOUT an explicit social movement attached (not to say that there were no social implications, but you know what I mean). But Kant is surely one of the best analogies. Interested in whether anyone can think of others. It does feel like a phenomenon that was possible roughly from the Enlightenment to WWI, and only then.
I'd be interested in the phrase if you come across it.
“Every generation is a secret society, and has its incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes and interests which are a mystery to both its predecessors and to posterity.”
--John Jay Chapman, 1915
Great quote.
Thanks for this and for your earlier review/essay in “Generations.” It makes me think of Noah Webster’s 1827 critique of Jefferson’s “usufruct to the living,” which he took to be the political application of Jefferson’s generational thinking:
“The general principle adopted by Mr. Jefferson is, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither power nor rights over it; that no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him, for if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living; that what is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals; that each generation may be considered as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation; that the period of a generation is thirty-four years; that a majority of a generation therefore will be dead at the end of eighteen years and eight months; and that at nineteen years from the date of a contract, the majority of contractors (the generation) are dead and their contract with them. Mr. Jefferson then supposes a case in which a majority of a generation borrow a sum of money equal to the ſee simple value of a state, and consume it in eating, drinking or quarreling and fighting. From this he infers, that in nineteen years, when the majority are dead, there is an end of the debt.”