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Wulf is an unconventional historian with an unconventional background, and her work reads much more like a narrative-driven piece of New Journalism than a theoretical entry from the Cambridge Studies series on philosophy. As revealed by the tagline of this book, The Invention of the Self, Wulf's new work is an exploration into the roots of modern conceptions of self-determination done through character studies of the Weimar classicists -- Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Kant in particular. I could see fans of narrative-driven nonfiction writers like Laura Hillenbrand or Roger Lowenstein enjoying Andrea Wulf in the same way.
While I am always happy to see new work focusing on the Weimar classicists, whose ideas serve as a stark contrast to dystopic forces from the brutality of the French revolution to the banality of corporate life today, I think I agree with this article writer about the weakness of Wulf's synopses. As compelling as Wulf's exposition is, it feels to me somewhat overpractical to constrain these powerful thinkers through the lens of a Socratic Know Thyself commandment in her emphasis on self-determination. Certainly there is a place for a feel-good, narrative-driven book like this, but I personally would point people towards the essays curated by Carroll, Giles, and Oergle in Aesthetics and Modernity or Leslie Sharpe's Cambridge Studies entry on Schiller for a drier but more thought provoking exploration of German Idealism and the valuable concepts it would spawn through the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century.
Thanks for reply/insight. I much prefer the Cambridge approach. Still I might offer this Wulf like reply.
I liked the mention of "banality of corporate life." This is something that me hit lately. Manufacturing is more exciting on the whole than software services I'm in now. But I think it's also age related. Post-45 there's a folding/ integration / joining / quickening in which the world becomes smaller. And in that world sameness is more apparent. In other words I don't think I'd write banal at 20, but I would now
Might you have a link to "Aesthetics and Modernity" or say who the author is? I found a couple of titles but they seemed to be about political theory.
Also might you or someone else recommend something in between Wulf and a Cambridge Studies series style book?
The original title is: “How Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age” which makes more sense than the current title “Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age.”
The fact the Goethe and Schiller ushered in the Romantic Age is pretty uncontroversial.
No: music ushered in the Romantic age, earlier than Goethe and Schiller in literature.
The musical style, a decisive break from the High Baroque, was initially called "Sturm und Drang." It appeared in the work of Gluck and Haydn in the 1760s.
By the first decade of the 19th century, Goethe and Schiller had retreated from Romanticism. In the same decade, middle-period Beethoven had already made Romanticism immortal.
Immortal is not an exaggeration. To this day, orchestral film music remains utterly derivative of late Romantic composers like Richard Strauss.
The most famous example of musical Romanticism's enduring dominion is probably the opening of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Everybody knows the fanfare and the ecstatic harmonic progression that follows in full tutti; few know it was written by Strauss in 1894.
The rip-offs of Academy Award winner John Williams would be impossible without the much better music of the 19th century.
Corresponding data point: in 1822, Beethoven chose Schiller's "Ode to Joy" (1785) to provide the lyrics for the final movement of the 9th Symphony.
I believe it's unfair to call Williams' music a rip-off; film music, as enjoyable as it can be, has a commercial purpose and is created to stand behind the action and dialog of a film, not stand alone as music of the Romantic masters was. His score to Star Wars: A New Hope was a deliberate call-back to the music of Korngold, Steiner, Newman and others who defined film music in the 1930s and 1940s. Korngold was both a legitimate composer of late-Romantic music and a film composer.
I don't think it's wise to conflate Sturm und Drang with Romanticism, despite their similarities. They are also quite distinct in many respects.
And Beethoven is rightfully considered to be a transition point between the Classical and the Romantic style, you can hear the echos of Haydn (and even Bach) even in his late works.
I was careful to say "middle-period Beethoven." Beethoven's stylistic evolution over the course of his life truly astonishes. In his late period, e.g., the Grosse Fugue, one can hear Bartok being invented.
And he was stone deaf by then. It's staggering.
Fwiw Beethoven was inspired by Schiller, and the finale of Beethoven's 9th symphony is an adaptation of Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy".
Wasn't Hegel a contemporary of Goethe? What effect did both of them have on each other?
Goethe and Hegel both get some character-driven exposition in this book, but Hegel is about twenty years younger than Goethe, so the interactions focus more on the contemporaneous groupings of Goethe-Schiller-Fichte and later Schelling-Hegel than direct interaction between the two. Goethe as a poet is generally viewed more through the lens of literary criticism as opposed to the philosopher Hegel who is generally studied with the analytical rigor of philosophy, considering his position as one of the premier post-Kantian German idealists.
The two share much ideological agreement, like when both offered great praise for Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic of Education of Man, but while Hegel generally quotes Goethe with veneration, Goethe seems generally suspicious of Hegel's philosophy -- in one meeting offering open criticism to Hegel about his dialectic, for example.
One work that goes into detail on both thinkers would be the late Walter Kaufmann's first volume of his trilogy Discovering the Mind, in which he offers an opinionated criticism of Kant and Hegel's obscurity and obfuscation by contrasting it with Goethe's thematic clarity.
entgötterte Natur (Schiller)