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Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. He recognizes it, but his position is different. He questions its legitimacy and highlights its contingency through his resistance to and questioning of her assumptions and privilege. This illustrates one of the distinctive premises of Orientalism, the power of the west to determine the meaning of all things Muslim which is based on a denial of Muslim agency.
Muslims can be represented and spoken for by the west because they are incapable of speaking for themselves. Thus, no matter what Khan says to her, no matter how much he explains what the garden means in his terms, Claire does not and cannot understand him. It is not in her terms, the hegemonic terms of reference that constitute her Orientalist understanding of Muslims, Islam, and terrorism as essentially linked together. Secondly, it is not on her terms because it challenges her privilege within this order, the western privilege to define the war on terror discourse through Orientalism and to speak for his garden design.
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The gap between his explaining and her understanding is visible to him, but not to her. Her privilege and the hegemonic configuration of meaning associated with it is invisible to her because it has been normalized as part of her privilege. However, Khan does see it and understand it. His subordinate position does allow him to understand her meaning very well. His challenge is based precisely on the fact that he understands it, but he does not agree with it as legitimate.
Therefore, he chooses to subvert her position by putting forward his terms and his meaning as a counter-hegemonic practice and as a critique of Orientalism. Related to the issue of intelligibility and the meaning of the design is the link between Muslim agency and knowledge. Who has the authority to speak for and about Muslims is closely tied to what constitutes knowledge of and about Muslims since both are integral and intertwined components of Orientalism.
Lastly, the issues raised in this encounter are visible in the perception of Muslims in the US in the war on terror. At the base of this controversy was the Orientalist assumption about the fundamental difference of Muslims from the west, that they are a threat and that all Muslims everywhere are threats for this reason. Second, it also demonstrated the denial of Muslim agency. The Orientalist assumption of Islam as a threat and therefore an inability to believe otherwise feeds a general attitude towards Muslims as suspects and security threats.
They make visible the hegemonic configuration of power and meaning underlying this discourse and the subject positions within it. A public transcript is the record of the open interaction between dominant and subordinate actors, which includes what is said as well as what is not said. It is not absolute. This hidden transcript slowly unfolds, initially through non-verbal gestures, such as his demeanor and his posture. He is calm, cool, without affect. He sits across the table, looking directly at Claire.
Said illustrates this very aptly through a transcript of an Israeli radio broadcast at the time of the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in But the exact way in which the Palestinian answers, repeating the phrases used by the Israeli interviewer, has the effect of dramatic irony. Abu Leil, to which terrorist organization do you belong? And what was your mission in South Lebanon?
And wherever there were women and children, we would terrorize. Everything and all we did was terrorism. It would be significant to Palestinian listeners as a form of resistance presented as outward compliance. They can hear the hidden transcript. Khan moves from irony to direct confrontation in this encounter, however. Each round and twist of the spiraling conversation brings the hidden transcript closer to the surface and into the open as the zone of contestation becomes more overt.
After this point in the conversation, Khan takes a stronger position, countering hegemony directly, bringing the hidden transcript into direct, verbal confrontation with the public one. This western privilege is the lynchpin of the hegemonic structure of Orientalism as a discourse. The configuration of power must change in order to accommodate this destabilizing event. One could interpret this ending as Khan having the last word, literally and figuratively.
He speaks and Claire is speechless. She has no more words. More than that, it is his claim to power that leaves no room for her, literally. She has to exit. It is tempting to read this ending as a void, a sudden vacuum, as something that is missing. Rather, it is de-centering of Orientalism as a particular hegemonic order, producing the space for a different articulation of power that does not take the west as its reference point. Translating this into non-fiction, what does this mean for Muslims today?
These two processes go hand in hand. This comes back to the idea of agency, of Muslim agency to define themselves as subjects in their own terms. It means creating a space for a different reading of the political, while speaking within it as well. It requires Muslims to name the contingency of the war on terror discourse and to challenge it by pointing out how the processes of securitization are at work to stigmatize and stereotype Muslims as dangerous Others. Manchester University Press, A Meditation on the Meaning of September 11, Melbourne: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics London: Thinking the World Politically London: Verso Books, , p.
Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, , p. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear. Zed Books, , p. University of Toronto Press, , p. A political perspective on culture and terrorism. Beacon Press, ; Louise A. Russell Sage Foundation, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, , p. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, Faber and Faber, , p. The following article discusses the establishment of centers of Islamic Studies Islamische Theologie in Germany. While many authors have discussed different theories which shape the accommodation of Islam in Western European nation states, I suggest that the security dispositif Foucault has a strong impact on the way the state and religious communities interact with each other.
The Verfassungsschutz becomes a defining power in the attempt to locate Islam in the German religio-political landscape by influencing the politics of several state agencies. A hegemonic Islamophobic discourse, in which Islam has become a security threat, seems to foster such a policy.
I will elaborate the securitization of Islam through the Verfassungsschutz by tracing its role in the institutionalization of Islamic Studies at state universities. Churches and religious denominations can be legally recognized as public corporations, which is a privileged status that allows religious classes in public schools and does not allow the state to interfere in the autonomy of these religious public corporations.
This is a level that no major Muslim association has achieved yet. Arguments for non-recognition by the German state are the low membership of these Muslim associations, their short length of existence and the non- existence of widely accepted religious authorities in Islam. One example is the German Islam Conference Deutsche Islamkonferenz, DIK , which was introduced in by the Ministry of Interior as a forum to discuss the future relationship between Islam and the German state with a wide range of Muslim representatives.
Disciplining here is used in the Foucauldian meaning, describing technologies that create politically obedient subjects with the ultimate aim of power. Muslim associations, intellectuals and their voices and policies. This does not mean that Muslims have no agency. I will use official statements of the WR as well as interviews conducted with institutional players involved in the institutionalization of these centers.
In his understanding of knowledge, power and discourse, a security narrative has to be discursively legitimated in the realm of a political argument. As a social construction, a security dispositif accordingly relies on an imagined security threat. A security dispositif is the basis that necessitates the disciplining and hence legitimizes the governing of people. Instead of including Islam in a common social narrative and integrating it into church- state-regulations, the notion of Islam as a security threat was institutionalized by conflating factors such as immigration, ethnicity, socio-economic deprivation, and the war on terror 18, a distinctive amalgamation in Islamophobic discourses.
It goes further, as Cesari puts it, when trying to display Islam as incompatible with an imagined Western lifestyle and as a security threat. This widening resulted in not only targeting the prevention of crimes but also in creating situations of abstract danger. In civil society, many NGOs do not want to cooperate officially, fearing the loss of public funding and negative media coverage. Cooperation with state bureaucracy is also restrictive, as funding for projects is at risk, if they cooperate with Muslim associations under suspicion by the VS.
As a result, Muslim associations become excluded from civil society and from dialogue platforms between the state and religious communities. In addition, Schiffauer has shown that individual members of these associations may lose their citizenship or may not even be awarded citizenship, get expelled and lose their permit of residence due to their membership in an association that is suspected of being anti-constitutional. This reveals the impact of security agencies on the politics of other state bureaucracies such as immigration authorities.
Another form of policing is surveillance and control after Friday-prayers in different mosques some belonging and others not belonging to these associations , where people are held for hours by the police. In public debates, security-issues are intermingled with issues of social cohesion. She argues that integration policies increasingly affect the regulation of Muslim religious practice and have become securitized.
The VS defines legalist Islamism as follows in one of its statements: They offer a comprehensive network of education and ministry. Karahan, a member of the IGMG, criticizes the VS not only for ignoring all the positive social efforts he claims his association has performed in the areas of education and ministry, but for transgressing its area of responsbility. Hence, this allows many suspicions to generate. This would effectively include all Muslims in this category.
Interpreting from the above definitions, the ideal German Muslim subject is a Muslim who does not formulate his own interests, but rather submits to the dictated interests of the VS whose ultimate goal is to protect the German state. Hence, these passages show the power the VS ventures to have in defining Islam, integration, the Muslim security threat and consequently how society should not be influenced by Muslims: No creation of interest groups, no creation of networks of education and ministry, no cultural difference.
This reveals a conflation of Islampolitik with issues of security and social integration, as observed in politics and academia by the anthropologist Sunier. This is supposed to make the state neutral towards different religions. While the state is not allowed to establish a theology department or any denominational-oriented academic program unilaterally, 57 churches and denominations are allowed to have private universities. The reward of a first academic degree is even bound to the membership of the person in the respective Church. Although the WR is arguing very much on the basis of the constitutional order and trying to emphasize the principle of parity and the principle of religious autonomy of every religious community Art.
One aspect is the autonomous power to define the issue. I argue that it is a transgression of the discretionary power of the WR. As part of an asymmetric power relation, it reduces Islam to a certain interpretation. Although this issue has been controversial,67 the reality of Muslim institutions demonstrates the existence of a variety of institutions, i. In principle, the foundation of a private university run by a [Muslim, FH] religious community is constitutionally provided for and can be realized.
Such double provision appears less than practical. The German Muslim subject is better disciplined and governed in the context of an existing academic state-system and not independently, and hence more autonomously. But, state universities would also face the same problem of a lack of home-grown academics to recruit from. It would also be obstructive to cooperation with other disciplines represented at the university, in many cases.
Here, the image of the migrant Muslim who does not have a good command of the German language as a justification for integration policy that aims to create successful German Muslims who speak German may play into this policy recommendation. This illustrates the will of the WR to determine how the ideal Muslim subject will be produced in these centers of knowledge-production. Regulations for organizing an advisory board have been established, yet not all centers have implemented them This is not simply a matter of different ways of setting up an advisory board.
I will discuss the non- establishment process of these advisory boards of the four mentioned centers of Islamic Studies at German state universities and elaborate on the impact of the VS on their constitution. This contract provided the responsibilities and duties of the board: It had to agree to the establishment or change of courses as well as regulations of study and exams. The board also dealt with the recruitment of personnel and was even entitled to remove someone from his or her position.
While the university had to consider only academic aspects, the advisory board was obliged to consider only religious aspects related to the teaching and moral conduct. The board should be composed of eight members — working voluntarily —: However, while the legal dimensions basically followed the recommendations of the WR, the politics were found to differ. Before the advisory board was fully nominated, one of the four members that should have been nominated by the KRM was refused.
This was not done by the university, which is usually entitled to question nominations, but by the then federal Minister of Education, Annette Schavan. This reveals the central role the security dispositif plays here. This politics stems from the so called Extremismusklausel,79 which was introduced in and abandoned in It was an administrative regulation Verwaltungsvorschrift , which made financial support by the Federal Republic conditional upon on a proven commitment to the constitution.
Since the IGMG is a member of the umbrella association Islamrat, which is a direct member of the KRM, the nominee was not considered to be committed to the constitution. The agenda of the meeting was revealing: It asked to nominate a chair of the board and to affirm zustimmen — not discuss — the nomination of various persons.
An application for the accreditation of a course more than pages should have been affirmed. The KRM refused to participate, as one seat of the board was still vacant. Hence, the meeting did not take place. Rather, the courses that should have been affirmed by the advisory board were now offered without any participation of the board. The latter argued that Muslim associations would first of all represent their own interests and secondly they were not theologically trained enough to choose theologically qualified personnel.
Five are local representatives of the largest Muslim associations: While members of the IGBW and the KRM were included in the first plans for constituting an advisory board,87 they were excluded after a while. Hence, it appears that the security dispositif was working: Moreover it specifies where the Ministry of Interior wants to see Islamic theology develop, namely inside the Non-Muslim dominated university, and not in study programs offered by Muslims for Muslims.
Here, perceptions of an ideal academic frame for Islamic Studies by the WR and the security agency coincide. According to one leading Muslim Professor, such an institution would run the risk of restricting research. The head of the IIT advocates a link between Muslim associations and Islamic Theology at universities, because for him, religious authority must be accepted by religious Muslims. In the end, they will serve in the mosques or as teachers in religious classes in public schools. Therefore, Islamic Theology as an academic discipline should be entitled to normativity and not looking at religion from a cold and distant perspective, says the head of IIT.
This is demonstrated in several ways. First, the WR tries to direct the development of Islamic theology in a particular way instead of ensuring it has freedom and independence in research and teaching, turning centers of Islamic Studies into disciplining institutions. Yet, the WR still justifies this on the basis of equal treatment for all religious groups. Second, the VS disciplines the Muslim subject through involvement in the composition of advisory boards, using a security dispositif.
The VS aims to discipline the Muslim subject by defining the main elements of an ideal German Muslim subject. The Muslim subject is disciplined by framing it in a primarily German- speaking environment of state academy, desiring no space for self-determination, but obedience to the state. It is possible to conclude that the institutionalization of Islamic Theology in German academia is a step towards the accommodation of Islam in Germany.
But as demonstrated by the non-recognition of Islamic associations as legally recognized denominations, this process is unfolding with strong state interference, especially by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Hence, the equal treatment of all legally recognized churches and denominations, which is assured by the federal constitution and which is supported by the WR to some extent, is not being implemented.
The role of Muslim faculty members of centers of Islamic Studies who are supporting this policy has not been discussed in this article and needs further attention in a separate paper.
Cambridge University Press, , pp. Only in June , the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat, which is regarded as a heterodox Muslim sect by a number of Sunni scholars, was recognized in Hessen.
The rest of the Muslim associations, being majority Sunni and mainly from Turkey, have not been legally recognized yet. Transcript Verlag, , pp. Campus Verlag, b, pp. Approaching Religion, Vol 1, No 1 , Die deutsche Angst vor dem Islam, C. For further reading see: Princeton University Press, , pp. Selected Interviews and Other Writings ed. Colin Gordon , , pp. Milton Keynes, , p. Religion, Politics and Law, New York: Routledge, , , p.
For a study that puts this issue in a context of the general evolution of migration and integration politics see: Verfangen im Dialog der Deutschen Islamkonferenz, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, Pluto Press, , pp. The Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House, , pp. Peter Lang Verlag, Janbernd Oebbecke et al eds. Janbernd Oebbecke et al. Islam und Verfassungsschutz, , p. Campus Verlag, , All citations of the VS are the author's. Vrije Universiteit, , pp.
The WR is one of the most important policy advisory bodies in the field of sciences in Germany. Its 32 members are appointed by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany based on a proposal by leading academic institutions of the Republic of Germany. For this reason, it regularly publishes recommendations and prepares reports relevant to scientific institutions, especially universities. Michael Kiefer , p. These rights of participation are realized especially through the religious communities influencing the composition of the faculty personnel.
The KRM represents the four largest Muslim associations working on a grassroots-level via educational institutions and mosques. After five years, these institutions should be evaluated. Negotiating Religion, Europe, and the Self, Bielefeldt: Die Zeit, 08 November , http: Die Zeit, 02 October , Nr. Berufung und Konstituierung des Beirats, in: Forschung, 05 July , http: Die Traditionen im Kopf, in: Deutschlandradio Kultur, 07 December , http: IslamiQ, 08 December , http: The political implications of this point are eloquently captured by the legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in his farewell poem to Edward Said: Recent history in the Middle East resonates quite frighteningly with these insights, starkly so in the Frankensteinian post-September 11 world.
But such logic, not unlike its predecessors of the previous half millennium, is not without moment in the current scramble for world domination and does indeed square in with established doctrine both in respectable academic circles and centers of power. In this battle for Muslim hearts and minds, education becomes the ideological nexus where Islamophobia and neoliberalism interlock in upholding and consolidating American imperialism.
Another emphasis is on the inculcation of civic values likely to have a liberal civilizing effect on Muslims. Part of this program is also the proliferation of proposals exhorting Muslim countries to subordinate educational systems to purely market exigencies and global economic interest. This is vehicled through a new discourse centered around employability, skills and the knowledge economy.
These acts of educational, cultural and economic violence betray an unattractive mix of Islamophobia and neoliberalism with significant implications for the cultural and political future of Muslims. Through the examination of Western projects of educational reform, this paper will thus attempt to disentangle the connections between Islamophobia as both a racialized and a neo-orientalist discourse and neoliberalism as an economic and ideological orthodoxy in the service of Western designs for domination over the Middle East.
This parochial rendering of Islamophobia as a phenomenological reality that exists primarily in the minds of Islamophobes obscures its embeddedness in political and cultural structures. It removes from view the fundamental fact that Islamophobia, as a discourse and an experiential reality, is systemic and ingrained in the deep structure of contemporary Western ideological culture. Islamophobia does not, however, exist in a form of structural stasis, merely providing the conditions of possibility for the maintenance of a particular cultural, political and legal structure.
Islamophobia does, more crucially, interlock with broader designs of domination and global control. Its significance has taken on remarkable dimensions as it has become the foundation of a new racialized, globalized hierarchy in the age of terror. Naked power and war-mongering are conventionally cloaked in the garb of noble intent and lofty ideals. The past few centuries are replete with an assortment of myriad variations on that same theme. In the post-cold war era, as argued, these global designs coalesced around the imperial project of capitalist democracy.
In the age of terror, neoliberalism has occupied center stage in the neo-imperial discourses and projects targeting the Muslim world. It rests on the Islamophobic instrumentalization of education and reform to institute a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual reconfiguration of the Muslim world for global hegemony. This Complex operates at the intersection of American educational imperialism, Islamophobic securitization and neoliberalization.
These schemes of liberal-capitalist-oriented education were integral to the global scheme of the production of liberal-capitalist Last Man in the third world. Embracing free trade and free markets holds magnificent things in store for humanity, so we are promised. Shrouding imperial ambitions in the thick veil of high-sounding moral ideals is not an entirely novel colonial ploy. In tandem with global neoliberal restructuring, neoliberalization from below forms the centerpiece of the ideological war for hearts and minds and pockets to de-radicalize young Muslims.
Neoliberalization in this context takes on a vast social and cultural dimension. It is not simply an economic dogma concerned with the reshuffling of economic structures. These mainly concern individual choice, individual responsibility, initiative, entrepreneurship, skills and freedom. The strategic significance of these neoliberal professions is not limited to the economic transformation they are meant to effect. Neoliberalism meets education meets Islamophobia.
One report denounces Pakistani education as a hub for breeding bigoted fundamentalists and terrorists. The authors make it clear that Pakistani education should emphasize usable skills rather than knowledge. Neoliberal education holds humanizing potentialities in store for these youths, as does Disney. The panacea for inoculating the fundamentalist inclinations of Muslims is educational Disneyification. The subtle neoliberal reconversion to prod Muslim children away from fundamentalist habits and to entice them to imbibe the magic of consumerist, neoliberal wonderland can be effectively implemented through Sesame Street, finely tailored to local taste.
According to Corporate Watch, Unilever is at the forefront of the neoliberal global apartheid agenda. It expends huge amounts of money and effort to promote consumerism in the South targeting the poor and children to alter their eating habits and adopt western lifestyles. This is Islamophobic Disneyification as commercialism. In this respect, Republican Senator Bill Nelson acknowledges with great self-adulation: Baudrillard once caustically observed that Disney represents the only authentic reality in America.
At least, in our case, Disney does seem to offer one essential element of the authentic reality of the Islamophobic-educational-neoliberal dystopia in the simulacrum of the American imperial theatre. Purging curricula of intolerance and bigotry has therefore been a trope much bandied about in proposals for educational reform in the Muslim world.
The Saudi textbook promotion of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism is a prime target of Islamophobic liberal civilization. What emerges is a bleak record of intolerance and bigotry deserving of scorn and condemnation. Repeatedly, Jews are demonized, dehumanized, and targeted for violence. These magnanimous gestures find resonance in intellectual circles as well.
Fareed Zakaria lambasts educational systems in the Middle East for fomenting anti- Americanism: This visceral hatred has spread deadly fundamentalist contagion elsewhere in the Muslim world, which calls for immediate action. Neoliberal education reform becomes imperative in order to confront the obscurantist forces of Islamic intolerance. She proscribes the remedy: All these schemes demonstrate the centrality of educational neoliberalization from below in the attempt to combat intolerance and bigotry, thus attesting to the tight connections between neoliberalism, educational reform and Islamophobia.
Treating these sentiments as floating phenomenological entities thus brackets off any attempt to study them in their relevant context and ultimately annuls any careful consideration of causality. There is no awareness to attribute negative perceptions or prejudice to the long-standing American military, political and economic dominance or relentless American cultural imperialism or US collusion in supporting repressive regimes and shielding them from local pressures for reform Khalidi , The long- standing grievances over the occupation of Palestine and collective punishment of Palestinians seem irrelevant.
Gausse , for one, attributes part of Saudi popular anti- Americanism to US unconditional support for Israel, Israeli terror and continued occupation. Needless to say that forms of hostility and prejudice should not be condoned under any circumstance, but elementary understanding of the context that enables them is imperative if we are to build a decent future. It takes scrupulous Islamophobic rigor not to observe the evident elements of causality in this respect. Islamophobic reality-principle flouting also flies in the face of geopolitical actualities. The opprobrium against anti-Semitism in Saudi textbooks ignores the very special bond that is gradually bringing Saudi Arabia and Israel together.
These instances of ideological myopia are instructive and reveal the reality of Islamophobia as a hermeneutic category. The prejudiced Islamophobic hermeneutics should not be construed on depoliticized, individualized grounds or on the basis of moral deficiencies. What the consistent pattern of Islamophobic conceptual myopia reveals is a systemic, racist epistemic economy. It helps us navigate the deluge of stimuli that compete for our attention and impose some order on a chaotic reality. And it crucially provides us with a sense of existential control and security.
All this is obvious and natural. But what is not so readily recognized is the fact that the focus of attention is anything but natural and that what we choose to zero in on is colored by our socially constructed mental and ideological predispositions. In many instances, perception is determined apriori, a result of wired-in ideological fossilization. Islamophobic selective attention is no exception. The regular fixation on the political, cultural et al. Moralizing critiques of it as an illustration of hypocrisy are patently off the mark. The problem is not some moral failing to see reality for what it is.
The fixation has roots in a collective Islamophobic structure that has solidified into a narrow ideological filter. It is institutionalized racism. The selective outrage directed against intolerance and the violent anti-American and anti-Semitic content of Saudi textbooks is a telling example of this. The vehement condemnation does not extend to Israeli textbooks where the incitement to and legitimation of violence against Palestinians is widespread nor is there any apparent effort to produce a balanced, comparative and critical account of these phenomena in a broader frame of analysis and understanding.
In the US, Michael Apple has documented the right wing takeover of US education central to which is a curriculum shot through with bigotry and intolerance; not to mention the systemic racist sanitization of American history and the invisibilization of the historical plight of Native Americans, Afro-Americans and Hispanics. The erasure of these last instances and the parallel incessant zooming in on Saudi textbooks is not a question of oversight, ignorance or hypocrisy.
It is ingrained in mainstream intellectual and political culture. This is deep-seated institutionalized epistemic racism. But Saudis are not alone in their predisposition to the incurable malady of anti- Americanism. According to the latest Gallup annual global survey , the United States is considered to be the greatest threat to peace in the world, surpassing other contenders by a significant margin. To be sure, widespread hatred of America does exist among pupils. It is the most powerful country [in the world], but it is also the most dangerous.
America wants to look like God because they [the US government] want to decide who must die or not. George Bush wants to control the world. He is not a good president. There is very much racism because the society is controlled by the WASPs. I just hate the politics in the United States. The United States is great, without the Americans. I hate their president because he abuses his power, and makes war everywhere. This sample represents only a small portion of a larger phenomenon: But Islamophobic doctrinal rigor requires that these are exempted from denunciation, and therefore no equivalent civilizing educational proposals are envisaged.
There are graver omissions in this process of Islamophobic selective attention. It has irreversibly shattered the fabric of Afghani and Pakistani society and condemned a whole generation to a future of violence, death, displacement and misery. It stands in monumental contrast to the current promotion of the ideals of respect for life and the love and trust of humanity reviewed above.
A group of Mujahiddin attacked 28 Russian tanks of which they burned 15 tanks. How many Russian tanks did escape? There is more to kindle the mathematical reasoning fire in the impressionable minds, perhaps as a preliminary step to the spread of freedom and democratic attitudes: The rest should become painfully clear and does not warrant any elaborate comment. Islamophobic blinders are thick indeed.
It was the year civilizational apocalypse fatefully descended on this much injured country. From the war crimes in Fallujah to targeted assassinations, from the thuggery of mercenaries to the torture and rape chambers of Abu Ghraib, Iraqis saw their lives, histories, dignity and indeed their humanity lurch from disaster to disaster as a new chapter of colonial history was beginning to unfold.
But soon, Iraqis would be subjected to assault on a grand scale when their country became the object of an experiment in social, economic, political, cultural and —as we shall see presently- educational annihilation. In an epithet, journalist Nir Rosen mourns the disappearing of Iraq: The experiment is one of civilicide, tout court.
Parallel to culturicide, memoricide and historicide is educide, with its implications for epistemicide and linguicide. Total destruction created a vast opportunity for redrawing the Iraqi educational terrain. This was an essential ingredient of the dreadful recipe that Bremer concocted for the neoliberalization of Iraq. Education thus became the locus of a neoliberal economic revolution and the Islamophobic remaking of Iraqi education and minds. The destruction of Iraq created an educational terra nullius primed for neoliberalization, Americanization, epistemicide and linguicide undergirded by Islamophobia.
This is patently illustrated in the stints of two Coalition Provisional Authority education advisors, Erdmann a fresh Harvard graduate and the more flamboyant John Agresto later to become the chancellor and provost of the American University of Iraq in Suleimania. For him, culturicide was a blessing in disguise. And it really did. The clean start heralded the organizational dismantling of universities. Educational vassalage was also high on his agenda: The blueprint is no less than the dismantling and the complete neoliberal and epistemic colonization of Iraqi education. These projects appear to be redolent with Islamophobic educide and epistemicide.
As Watenpaugh et al. The physical liquidation of the intellectual class in Iraq was one of the most horrifying episodes of epistemicide. The systematic assassination and terror campaign targeting academics and scientists were meant to obliterate an intellectual and academic culture and establish a new one on its ruins. These factors combine to produce a severely impoverished and subordinated educational and intellectual culture. The basic anthropological conditions or forces of human existence characterize — again triadically — political institutions and societies, depending on which of the basic conditions or forces is dominant.
At this point in the text, Schiller indicates, interestingly, the necessity of an intermediary force that is successful in changing the rolling wheel of state at the moment of its reversal. In other words, if, for Schiller, it was at first the aesthetic state that appeared to catalyze a smooth shift of paradigms from the natural state to the moral state, then at the end of his text, he posited a triadic development, the highest point of which is occupied by the aesthetic state, since here the instrument that serves is the free citizen: That was most certainly on his mind when, on July 13, , he wrote the following to Duke Friedrich Christian von Augustenburg: In his last, most important text, the question changes but not the basic anthropological conception.
Not by chance is the idyll understood as a synthesizing concept, in which the opposition of reality and ideal, satire and elegy, appears to be suspended 8: Nevertheless, in both parts of the argument, the triadic cognitive model that will become characteristic of the dialectics of idealistic philosophy is still directly and indirectly perceptible. Characteristically, in a footnote, Schiller introduces a three-stage model Dreischritt in the context of poetic genres and types of sensation, in which the ideal is raised up as the sought-after concept of synthesis.
He distinguishes three moments epistemologically and classifies them cultural-historically as follows: In der zweiten stehen wir. In his three major philosophical texts, Schiller works with opposing concepts that are ultimately united into a synthesis. What makes his writings especially interesting documents of the time is that they never attempt to cover up their ruptures or resolve their contradictions.
At the end of each of his three major texts, Schiller emphasizes not only the experimental character of his reflections but also draws attention to the discrepancies between theory and practice, idea and reality. From this point of view, it comes as no surprise that with each new writing he should, to some extent, start anew methodologically and thematically.
This does not mean, however, that he altered his anthropological concept of the human being, which runs as a red thread throughout all his theoretical statements. If we visualize in overview the smaller as well as the more comprehensive contributions to the philosophical discourse of the time, it is strikingly clear that from the pamphlets of his youth to the well-known essays of the last decade of the eighteenth century, Schiller formulates a set of fundamental principles concerning the psychosomatic conditions of human existence.
Darstellung der leidenden Natur; zweitens: Art, in this case theater, turns out to be the aesthetic demonstration of the divine atomic nucleus in the human being, a view that can, moreover, be found in Wieland as well as in Herder, and whose intellectual origins are in Christian stoicism10 and the tradition of baroque drama. Pathetic representation illustrates the real purpose of art: Here Schiller captures the dichotomies of his dissertation more precisely as person and condition, being and time, which human beings experience in different ways.
Just as in Theosophie des Julius, he brings the antitheses of egoism and love into functional relation with the corresponding political institutions, with despotism and the free state 8: The schema of self-diminution and self-expansion that the essay Theosophie des Julius connects with the positive and negative characteristics of egoism and love supplies the framework for the comparison of the statecraft of Lycurgus and Solon.
Schiller expresses this principle as follows: His unquestionably high opinion of the human being — in no way a rare view among eighteenthcentury intellectuals — must also be reflected in political institutions and society. In this way, the historian would indeed become an author of pathetic representation, whose business it would be to report the triumphs of the person over the surrounding circumstances. Whereas the first thesis in Latin was rejected again, the second was accepted.
Both were written in ; the last one was also published in the same year. To be more correct, one could speak here of transcendental aesthetic concepts that early romanticism took over and continued. Reprint of the second edition of , edited by Leonard Forster. Schings, Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im Works Cited Abel, Jacob Friedrich. Eine Quellenedition zum Philosophieunterricht: An der Stuttgarter Karlsschule — Poesie, Reflexion und gesellschaftliche Selbstdeutung. Dewhurst, Kenneth, and Nigel Reeves.
Medicine, Psychology and Literature. Von der Bestendigkeit De Constantia. Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. Hinderer, Walter, and Daniel O. Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller. Das Erdbeben von Lissabon. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert. Since various forms of classicism had been prevalent in European letters for around three centuries, at first sight we might view German classicism as a mere footnote. Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy Nature is to copy them.
The adoption of the ancient authors as literary models would mean a restoration of simplicity, moderation, and good sense. Rather, the corruption that surrounds him is merely a symbol for the work of temporality in general, and the pure form displayed by Greek art is to be seen less as the product of a free society than as an achieved conquest of time.
Whereas Schiller might seem to be outbidding Pope merely in adding a new strand of political polemic to the traditional advocacy of a classical aesthetic, he is in fact heightening the neoclassical argument by rephrasing it as a metaphysical one, for he is attributing to a classically inspired art a power not just of liberation but of redemption.
It is not possible to point to one overpowering new idea that Winckelmann contributed to the discussion. As Hatfield argues, his thought is an eclectic synthesis. Altogether, his work denotes a multiple shift in the approach to antiquity: Last but not least, we can observe the shift from the idea of antiquity as the source of rational norms to one of Greece as a lost paradise and the object of insatiable yearning.
The protracted composition of this tragedy had left Schiller dissatisfied with his achievements to date and with his working method, and the study of the ancients was intended to enhance his skills. It is notable that Schiller had to use the available translations of Euripides into Latin, French, and German, for unlike Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, he never had the opportunity to study the Greek language thoroughly. Thanks to the progress of moral culture and the comparatively milder spirit Geist of the times, the modern author enjoys an inherent advantage over the ancients. With the third phase, we see Schiller returning to a more speculative preoccupation with antiquity.
In the early part of each treatise, an eloquent passage praising Greek culture for its harmony with nature is encountered, while the possibility is also held out that, with our higher level of rationality and morality, the moderns can actually surpass the Greeks. Schiller had earlier planned a drama, Die Malteser, that was intended to conform to the pattern of ancient tragedy.
Though he resumed work on it in these years, it was left unfinished at his death. The most classical of the completed plays of this period is Die Braut von Messina The Bride of Messina, , in which Schiller attempted a synthesis of ancient and modern techniques and motifs, including a chorus, the use of which he justified in his Foreword by philosophical arguments. But Wallenstein also contains in Gordon a figure whose role is based on that of the ancient chorus, and even the romantic tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans The Maid of Orleans, has a scene act 2, scenes 6—7 derived from an episode from the Iliad and written in iambic trimeters, the Greek tragic meter.
A letter of July 26, , shows that he had not abandoned the conclusions of the foregoing speculative phase. The drive towards unification, of which humanity is the goal, goes beyond the immediate human sphere.
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Perhaps we can infer, he suggests, something about our future: Schiller seems to be hovering between a Christian affirmation of the immortality of the soul and a more mysterious suggestion as to a future deification of humankind. Schiller is intensifying the conventional concept of perfection, Vollkommenheit, to the point where the difference between humanity and God is suspended. The theme of the poem is the birth of Venus, which brings about a softening and rejuvenation in the natural world, and which for humankind signals the arrival of civilization after a somewhat Hobbesian prehistory.
Venus is again the presiding deity here, for it is her worship at the shrine at Amathus that forms the focus of this magnificent poem, and instead of the heroic exploits of Hercules, Schiller celebrates a form of interaction between gods and mortals that is more appropriate to this goddess: In its full complexity, it states that in antiquity human beings were more human than they are now, in the sense of being more natural and less corrupted by culture. In particular the Greeks did not try to approach divinity as Christians do, that is, by misguidedly suppressing their humanity through an ascetic morality, and they also did not suffer from the division of labor that distorts and fragments the modern personality.
However, and only here do we see the full paradox, the Greeks came closer than we do to divinity precisely by disclaiming any desire to be more than human. But the nature that is enshrined in Greek culture is not the nature of Alexander Pope. Pope understands nature as a codification of the rules of good sense, whereas Schiller to compress the impressions left by the poem into a single phrase presents it as a perpetual springtime of youth, dance, and free love. The common thread running through the Greek panorama, with its numerous mythological vignettes, is the unity of nature and spirit or of human and divine.
With remarkable dialectical skill, Schiller portrays modernity in this poem as groaning under both an ascetic Christianity and an abstract, mechanistic science, each of which is presented as a result of the same original estrangement. He adheres to the same intellectual model in his essays of the next decade. The course of history is characterized here as a fall from a state of nature into one of culture, with the latter being understood as the fragmentation wrought by the destructive faculty of the understanding.
Its full scope is revealed in two further statements that illuminate each other. As the juxtaposition of the two statements shows, nature stands as both the first and the last term in a triadic scheme, for the future ideal is itself associated with the concept of nature. And yet the ideal nature is not identical to the original nature, but is posited as existing at a higher level of consciousness and morality. On the one hand, they represent a paradigm of unity and harmony to an age that has lost these qualities, and hence they are an object of aspiration and longing.
Therefore the Greeks must also represent a stage that humanity has outgrown and must outgrow further. In a handwritten comment on an essay by his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller sketched an analogy for this dialectic of unity and division in the cognitive process: In the second phase, we still long for the first, but in the third, we have no need to do so.
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Similarly, in the third phase of history, we will no longer wish for the return of the Greeks 8: It is of course ironic to find the Greeks at the heart of such a quintessentially un-Greek argument, though it is also possible to relate it to the Neo-Platonic dialectic of fall and return that M. Abrams has applied so effectively to the Romantic era. In the context of the eighteenth-century argument, nature and culture are antithetical terms. How, we wonder, can it then make sense to describe Greek culture as natural? Winckelmann had also used the concept of nature to establish the superiority of Greek sculpture, but his argument is largely restricted to matters pertaining to anatomy, such as the athletic training of Greek youths.
Schiller expands the argument far beyond this narrow base. First, as we have seen, he defines nature as unification, and he uses this term to illuminate not only the Greek religion, which projects humanity into nature and the divine world, but also the quality of Greek society, with its less advanced division of labor, and even Greek individuality, in which the human faculties are not fragmented.
But Schiller is clearly aware of the problem that the Greeks also had a flourishing culture, and so he describes them as having achieved the maximum degree of culture that is still reconcilable with nature: The further advance of culture in modern times necessarily brought a rupture with nature, and the breach can only be healed by the reconstitution of nature at an ideal level, however that is to be understood. In their poetry we do not come across the idea of nature, for nature was their immediate life and not an object of reflection or longing.
The stress on simplicity as a feature of Greek poetry may be consistent with the old neoclassical doctrine, but this concept is now embedded in a speculative system of which Boileau and Pope had no inkling. On one hand, it stands for the dominion of the intellect that, with its compartmentalization and mechanization, has disrupted an original, natural unity.
On the other hand, it means the process by which the rupture can be healed and the unity restored at a higher level. How did Schiller envisage this higher art? It may seem to be making matters still more complicated when in the Ninth Letter he tells us that Greek art preserved the achievements of Greek nature, but this provides us with our answer. A simple formulation comes in the ninth Brief, where, desiring to preserve the young artist from the harmful influences of modernity, Schiller sends him to school in Greece. Here he is able to cause the predominantly dactylic rhythm to express a poised and wistful lyricism: For Schiller, the Greeks may represent the best instantiation to date of the fusion of form and life, for which he calls in the Fifteenth Letter, but the principle of form is itself timeless, a metaphysical force that enables us to master the world of flux in which we live.
We are not all that far from the world of Gottsched and German neoclassicism here. The original chorus, he writes, grew from the natural and mimetic art of ancient Greece. However, since modern art is not mimetic, the chorus can be retained, albeit with a different justification.
Far from reflecting reality, the task of modern art is to transform reality according to a model that is at once natural and ideal. Although Schiller speaks of the future state as different from Greece, it is still based on Greece as its prefiguration. Hence he calls for the revival of Greek motifs in drama, not merely the chorus but also the creation of a more external and public form of life: Although Schiller used the chorus only once, one can recognize in this wider explanation some more general features of his later dramatic style.
This brings us to the question of whether Schiller responded in any way to the political legacy of ancient Greece. The answer here must be mainly negative. The problem of disunity in Greek history, that is, the actual fragmentation of the country into warring statelets and the frequency of civil strife within them, is barely touched upon. Schiller is thinking here of a national theater as a means of overcoming German Vielstaaterei. And yet, as he would have had to acknowledge, the theater failed to have any such effect in Greece, and the similar hopes placed in the German theater would turn out to be no less chimerical.
What is left is the fallback position of the theater, or of art in general, serving as a refuge for ideals for which there is no room in real life, that is, as a substitute and a consolation and not as a means of making them a reality. Two qualifications should be made to this depoliticized picture.
Castigating the Spartan legislator, Schiller writes: All this is still abstract, but further on in the lecture Schiller writes that Solon understood these relations correctly, and hence built a state in which, in contrast to the Spartan tyranny, men governed themselves and were thus capable of the highest cultural attainments. For this reason, the references to the historical Athens and the poetic image of the Greek Golden Age do not really represent distinct interpretations of Greece but are rather the two faces of a single complex idea.
Greece figures here as the locus of two succeeding eras, both of which are states of nature, although the second is also one of culture. Next, in a passage of astonishing concreteness, he describes the arrival of civilization and its advance in Greece up to the limits set by nature.
Greek religion, art, technology, commerce, and exploration all receive their due. Even the inevitable social disunity can lead to new forms of cooperation: Significantly, it is not the selfgovernment of the Greek republics but their patriotism that Schiller celebrates, and also, by his skillful translation of the Thermopylae epitaph ll. This is not to suggest that individual texts are inaccessible to a straightforward reading.
The ballad, based on a story from late antiquity, tells of the unmasking of two murderers at a performance of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, during which the chorus of the Furies provokes such terror in the criminals that they spontaneously confess their crime. The elegy begins with an evocation of the close relationship in antiquity between poets and their audience, and goes on to celebrate the wider harmony existing at that time between idea and reality; not only were the gods visible, the poet also did not have to struggle for an inner vision but took his inspiration from the reality that surrounded him.
In both poems, Greece serves as the ideal locus for a paradigm of humanity and society. They portray a world in which aesthetic, religious, and ethical experience all work together, in which inner and outer experience mirror each other, and in which the poet is the mouthpiece for communal beliefs. It is a powerful vision, and we do not disparage Schiller by saying that he based it on the deficiencies and absences that he felt in himself and in the world in which he lived.
But with its combination of personal engagement and intellectual sophistication, of formal clarity and moving lyricism, it deserves to be counted among the finest and most interesting versions of classicism to have appeared in European letters. It is more likely that his ideas were transmitted to him by Wieland.
"Netz" English translation
Klaus Harro Hilzinger et al. Known as the Frankfurter Ausgabe; Frankfurt am Main: Poems are quoted from vol. His hexameter translation of part of book 1 is a school exercise and is of less interest. The name Ludovisi refers to the Roman villa where the original could be inspected. As Rolf-Peter Janz informs us in his commentary 8: Schiller must thus have known it only from hearsay. This crisis in his concept of nature gives rise to the rupture in his aesthetics between the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime.
On page 73, Auerbach quotes his own definition of figura from a previous article: For a recent discussion, see Ritzer. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. The Poetry of Desire. The Poet and the Age. Poetik und Hermaneutik 4. Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Griechenland in Herders typologischer Geschichtsphilosophie.
Loeb Classical Library, London: Iphigenie und Maria Stuart. Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Resigning his post as a military doctor in Stuttgart in September left Schiller without a steady income and heavily in debt. As a historian he gained new intellectual perspectives, social connections, and sources of income.
In Schiller moved from southwest to central Germany and soon became a noted partner in the flourishing book and newspaper industry. Already well known as a dramatist, as a writer he encountered personal engagement and intellectual interest within socially open-minded literary and artistic circles in Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, and Weimar. In the second issue of the magazine, in February , the second act of Don Carlos appeared.
The encouragement of the prominent Weimar writer Christoph Martin Wieland in the fall of was critical. The young historical narrator became courageous. In this subsequent work, at least four volumes of personal memoirs from European history since the Middle Ages were to appear annually.
Schiller accepted the task of writing an introductory historical overview for every volume. But that was not enough: His involvement in the German university system, with which he was not yet familiar, was a personal challenge. Schiller also recorded other of his earliest lectures and published them soon thereafter. The end of saw the continuation of his Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande. He overestimated his energy, and became a victim of the book until, in January , his appalling physical condition caused him to take a break, at which point he either dropped his previous commitments or handed them over to someone else.
He devoted his time first to aesthetic and anthropological questions, publishing them in extensive pamphlets. In , poetry and drama moved back to the center of his attention, partly due to the influence of his friendship with Goethe. For it is based on a problematic approach that is retrospective in nature, and in many respects often the anti-historical resentment of those who are committed to literature in the narrower sense. One has to keep in mind that Schiller the historian was still an artist.
For him and his contemporaries, art and science were the two great cultural realms, and were related in their investigation and mediation of truth. Beginning in Stuttgart, stories based on authentic life experiences fascinated Schiller. As an author he had a need to tell true stories. In the story he reports on the destiny of two brothers in the environs of Stuttgart.
He places the story into the context of the most recent history and its educated society, telling it in the form of a drama. Here the original relationship between his literature and his historical project becomes graphically clear, as Schiller narrates once again a nexus of occurrences that extend from the framework of the everyday and were of special interest to him. As an author, he considered it his task to bring them back to life with the aid of narrative representation. But, before writing the final version of Verbrecher aus Infamie, Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre Criminal Out of Dishonor, , which was based on the life of an actual criminal, Schiller reflected thoroughly on the functions of historical narration and its specific methods.
The first printing of the second act of Don Carlos, the most important historical drama of the young Schiller, is the focus of attention of the aforementioned second issue of Thalia. His preparations for writing the play included considerably more study of historical literature than for his earlier pieces. In the process of studying the literature, Schiller recognized that an appealing, modern literary-historical narration ran parallel to traditional historiography. For some time, Schiller had known Sebastien Mercier, the French dramatic poet who at that time was capturing the stage with his Tableaux historiques.
In the second issue of Thalia, Schiller published a translation of a characterization of King Philip II of Spain by Mercier that was associated thematically with Don Carlos, thereby presenting another piece of historical prose. Even though he borrowed the topos, the verse makes it clear that, next to narrative stories, Schiller also had an overarching concept of universal history. As has been mentioned, in the course of the year Schiller took on a new literary project that included the term history in its title: In addition to the many forms of historical narration and reflections on history that Schiller undertook during this period, we point once again to the two historical dramas that originated in these years.
After delving into all of these forms of historical representation that he had been using since , in the fall of Schiller shifted to history. The forms of historical thinking and representation that he had developed previously affected his new practice of critical, referenced, and pragmatic historical portrayals. It is only at this point that Schiller depicts himself as a historian and is recognized as such by his readership. The transition to scientific historical narration was indeed a leap for Schiller in an existential sense.
In his letters of January of that year, Schiller underscores the following points: Instead, in historical narration, he borrows themes taken from external sources and is able to process them freely. He hopes for a different audience. Schiller does not only want to write for friends of belles-lettres, who are mostly women.
He also wishes to reach the politically and economically interested businessman. He needs a higher income. After his previous bad experiences, he now places his bets on historical literature and on collaboration in magazines. In sum, for Schiller, the transition to professional historical writing was tied to a new outline for his life that goes beyond a change of subjects. He wanted to be better anchored socially and, with the means at his disposal, to be active in public life.
In the various states of the Holy Roman Empire, the s were high points for the reform movement and its initiatives, especially in education. His interest in alternative social behavior was visible early on. With his second drama project, Fiesco , he referred back to a national uprising in the city of Genoa.
In Kabale und Liebe Intrigue and Love, written —83, published , he staged the social conflicts of his own epoch, and, in Don Carlos , the stage became the world theater of European history. It was only after these historical dramas that Schiller completed the transition to the writing of history, thematizing the Dutch revolution of the sixteenth century in his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung.
As he writes in his introduction, he wished to erect a monument to the strength of the middle class: In reading the introduction 6: Schiller first became aware of the history of the Dutch revolution of the late sixteenth century in conjunction with the writing of his drama Don Carlos. He began writing in August , after settling in Weimar. At the beginning of October he informed his publisher that he had completed the text.
One could almost say that, on that evening, the historian Friedrich Schiller was born. Wieland, the influential editor of the journal Teutscher Merkur, was present, and, as Schiller was to report to Huber in his letter of October 26, , proclaimed that Schiller was born to write histories. Wieland agreed to publish the text in his journal. It appeared in that publication at the beginning of In an accompanying note, Wieland declared the dramatist and poet to be a historian. His audience, the German educated class, now expected a historical work from him.
Motivated by Wieland, as well as by the prospect of a professorship at the University of Jena, Schiller knitted together the next phase in his life by turning decidedly in this direction. He now concentrated completely on historical work and on source materials with which he had not been familiar, but which provided him with a new self-awareness. Before completing his account of the Union of Utrecht in July of , Schiller had begun to envision continuing this thread of history in a multi-volume project on the topic of the fall of the Netherlands.
He also provided a comprehensive summary of his historical research for the volume. He named the sources from which he had profited most 6: Second, Schiller cited more recent authors, specifically from the fields of statistics and economic history, with whose help he could add a cultural-historical dimension to his manner of representation. Influenced by the then-increasing interest in psychology, Schiller dedicated considerable space to character analyses of his leading dramatic figures.
Beginning with Don Carlos Schiller succeeded in helping to bring about a breakthrough in the direction of historical writing in Germany. Schiller wanted to tie these traditions together. He wanted to go back to the sources themselves in a critical and pragmatic manner. At the same time, he wanted to write in a polished style. With such historical narration Schiller aimed at practicing a philosophical way of thinking about history that places stories into a modern context of development. One may conclude that Schiller followed the events in France with particular attention, sympathy, and expectation.
He saw it necessary to create a new discourse concerning the idea and goal of universal history. Furthermore, new orientations opened up for the methodology and self-understanding of the writing of history. In his inaugural lecture, Schiller juxtaposes two different and fundamental approaches: The latter is the philosophical study of history. However, historical writing since Aristotle had been focused only on actual occurrences; it was the responsibility of philosophy to inquire into the universal and the true. Schiller opposes this traditional limitation of history. He was convinced that universal history could achieve something that had been considered impossible in the Western tradition, namely, the arrival at universally valid truth-claims from a close study of the past.
The individual human being would be liberated from the limitations of his private existence and placed into a larger social context. This programmatic introductory address was followed by a number of lectures that illuminated specific connections between occurrences in human history. Three of these lectures have been preserved.
They give us an impression of how Schiller completed his project of universal history. He refers to a biblical tradition, and presents an example that shows the courage and innovative power of his enlightened spirit to interpret the Bible in a new way. In a separate section of the essay, Schiller addresses the origins of social inequality.
He ends with an analysis of the origin of legends concerning monarchical sovereignty in light of the idea of the sovereignty of the people. Yet he also refers back to a report about ancient Egyptian mysteries.
Here he highlights the problem of the self-liberation of an oppressed people. Schiller singles out the constitutive role of Moses as the leader of his people, that is, the figure of a ruler. In addition, Schiller deals with the question of what significance religion can play in such a liberating process; on the one hand, for the common people, and, on the other hand, for the educated.
At the same time, a third reality is involved: Its central themes stand in the foreground and form the criteria for the comparison: Eventually, in the discussion about constitutional patriotism in a republic of citizens, he pleads for representative democracy. With that, his writing attains a political relevance achieved by no other universal-historical text. Schiller composed all of these universal-historical texts during the first year of the French Revolution. With his unswerving republicanism he was even ahead of developments, constitutionally.
His vision, which was directed at those nations that were undergoing a process of emancipation, was broadened to a universal one. In these weeks, he considered the ideal of a self-liberating humanity to be the only sensible mode of philosophically-oriented historical thinking. In light of the democratic revolution, which was now crossing national borders, history had indeed become a history of humanity. He had already publicly posed these questions early in his career. That he asked the question in this way reveals that he had in mind different basic conceptions of the general significance of history and its future role in a middle-class society.
Schiller points out that contemporary historiography still considered itself to be part of rhetoric, whose task it is to offer a moral explanation of past histories which, as he put it, warm the heart. For his part, however, Schiller argues in favor of separating historical writing from rhetoric, to which it had been attached since ancient times. It could now concentrate on its own specific duties and have its own legitimate methods: Young Schiller makes his point on the basis of a psychology of the soul Erfahrungsseelenkunde that was then considered to be modern.
It is remarkable how clearly he pleads for the emancipation of the writing of history from rhetoric while separating drama from history, even though both merge in his person. The historian has to uncover the motives of human behavior with cold reasoning and has to explain its structural relationships, but not take a moral stand. If he does this, he offends the republican freedom of the reading public, whose task it is to serve as the jury 7: He points out the historiographical significance of police, medical, and prison files 7: This call for a clear separation of historical writing and poetry by the young Schiller, which has hardly been recognized, makes his transition two years later from the one discipline, drama, to the other, history, more understandable.
As the preface to the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande exhibits, Schiller underscores the separation of historical writing from the novel. However, this raises the question of what form historical representation should take. The historian remains true to his credo: For him, contemporary historiography was on its way to becoming an empirically analytical science. The reference back to the sources and their critical analysis is of central importance here. By his own admission he did not want to become a professional scholar of history.
His primary concern was with problems of historical interpretation, as well as with the transmission and presentation of historical connections. Since the time of his more intensive study of history in Dresden, Schiller was influenced more and more by the historiography of the English-Scottish Enlightenment William Robertson, Robert Watson, Edward Gibbon. They saw it as a new science of humanity, a genus of nature that runs through different stages of progressive development to become, and further cultivate, middle-class society. Schiller had become familiar with these works as a student at the Karlsschule.
Schiller was impressed with this work, and even more so with Kant. He certainly did not overlook the fact that, in his foreword, Kant expressed the hope that the writing of history would have its own Newton. What Kant had in mind was a historian who not only supplied intellectual descriptions of events, but remained focused on the possible goal of a history of enlightenment, namely a world comprised of nation-states in which there was middle-class freedom for all and an internationally secure rule of law.
Schiller himself had in mind a universal history that was to be enacted methodologically and critically. But he held on to history as the central realm of experience that challenged not only the philosophical thinker but also the poet and dramatist. Schiller was no doubt the last historian to adopt the perspective of the Enlightenment before it was shattered by the experience of revolution.
But even this he understood to be a challenge to his own thinking about universal history that further motivated him to rethink its own traits and their historical interconnections in the hope of achieving an authoritative standpoint in the present. The winter semester of to was the first one during which Schiller devoted his full energies to his work at the university. Here he addresses the connection between the writing of history and the drama of history, the relationship between historical and political truth, and offers opinions about sublime events in history. This meant, above all, his critical assessment of the French Revolution.
New problems and perspectives emerged from this experience of history. After having moved to Jena, Schiller met a number of women of the court, among whom was Charlotte von Lengefeld, to whom he proposed. When the wedding was announced in December , the ruling duke, Carl August of Saxony-Weimar, took a personal interest in the marriage.
Schiller was named Hofrat and thereby became worthy of appearing at court and entitled to all attending rights and privileges.