Academic literature on the topic 'Enlightenment – Germany – Baden'

The “Danne-Virke” Viewed in the Perspective of “Creation” TheologyBy Helge Baden Nielsenis a paper read to the Annual Conference of the GS on 14. January 1988. Its theme is Grundtvig’s alternative to the transcendental idealism of German philosophy that prevailed in Denmark during the better part of Grundtvig’s lifetime. The first part of the paper is devoted to other angles on the “Danne-Virke” in the literature on Grundtvig, be it a literary approach as with Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen, or one in terms of the history of Grundtvig’s personal development as with Kaj Thaning in Grundtvig-Studier 1953. In this context Baden Nielsen thinks it vital to emphasize that any dividing-up of Grundtvig’s work into periods tend to obscure an implicit continuity in Grundtvig’s thinking that stems from his position as a theologian. The Bible was the very air he breathed, and here his thinking began in the opinion of Baden Nielsen. That also holds true of Nordens Mytologi 1808. According to his almanac for 1813 he read the New Testament five times during that year. In the last instance he was a Christian thinker who fought to get his message through, whether he worked as a priest, a historian, or a philosopher, or for that matter as a budding poet, inspired by the poetics of Romanticism. His development means that his theological insights are deepened so as to illuminate still wider areas of experience. What has been described as conversions and spiritual breaks are often something external: changes in his method of working or in the way he faces the world and the contemporary age. An example is his sermon for Saint Stephen’s Day 1815. Now he wants to implicate faith in a new way, in human affairs as well as in his thinking. With reference to everyday speech and elementary human experience he wishes to establish the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of revelation as irrefutably true. But in essence his position is as before. His basic assumption is the idea of man as created in God’s image. Consequently he holds by the anthropology of Creation theology as did Luther. He wanted to expose as untenable the school of philosophy that had influenced the intellectual elite. If one gets “wed” to a particular way of philosophizing, the result may be that the very scope and independence of theology will be undermined. As Maker God is not remote, but near at hand, speaking to man through creation and history. Concurring with Henning Høirup Baden Nielsen thinks Grundtvig’s assessment of philosophical idealism highly accurate, whether man exist by virtue o/himself (being independent) or, at least, in his own right (being free in the strictest sense of the word), for that is what it is all about, as Grundtvig puts it in the Danne-Virke I, p. 114.According to Baden Nielsen Thaning’s contention that in the Danne-Virke Grundtvig gets stuck or runs out of energy is not strictly correct. It would be truer to say, according to Baden Nielsen, that he took his work of enlightenment and clarification as far as it was beneficial to himself. Any true philosophy about man Grundtvig holds to be historical. In the view of Baden Nielsen, such a historical philosophy (“vidskab”) reflects man’s struggle to understand himself as one who exists. The following quote by Grundtvig contains the gist of his anthropology:“...when man exists, neither by virtue of himself or in his own right, when he is a creature, ... then all activity within him and all works by him presuppose an impact made on his constituent parts, all spiritual activity and all spiritual works an impulse from the Spirit upon the body and consciousness. Physical activity presupposes a physical impulse, and a spiritual one conditions spiritual action, and all that is required in man is an aptitude for receiving impulses, which, on its side, cannot possibly exist by virtue of itself or in its own right, but presupposes a processing of any received impact.” (Danne-Virke II, p. 183 f.).Man’s identity is external to himself. It is Luther’s idea of “justitia aliena” expressed in terms of phenomenology in Baden Nielsen’s view. With my hand I feel that I have a body. There is an established relationship between an ego and a body. I have become aware of myself. This “clear idea” Grundtvig holds to be “exactly the rational self-consciousness, without which all self-contemplation and all clear ideas about things in their relation to each other and to us were impossible.” (Danne-Virke II p. 154). Thanks to this primary insight man has conceived of himself as dependent on time and space, “as temporary and dependent, being aware of the fact that he could not call himself independent without contradicting himself. ” (Ibid. p. 158) But according to Baden Nielsen this way of thinking rests entirely on one particular theological presumption that man was created in God’s image, that God made the world through His Word and made an image of Himself in man. (The reality of Creation and the reality of Incarnation). This theological presumption is not proved, but is confirmed by the very structure of human existence. Perception he sees as the condition making it possible for God to produce His own image, in which He may reveal himself to man.Perception is also fundamental to Grundtvig’s idea of Revelation: “Seeing is no act on the part of the seer, but perception. Not the mirror, but the object, or rather the progenitor of them both and their relationship produce the spectacle (or vision), and a spiritual vision that shows itself in a physical speculum is a revelation.” (D anne-Virke III, p. 282). This spiritual vision is communicated to man by the Word, which is registered by hearing, while being Spirit as well.Baden Nielsen detects a circular structure in Grundtvig’s reasoning: his initial assumption is faith in the reality of Creation, which is confirmed by experience and the very structure of human existence. And conversely: It is impossible for Grundtvig to proceed from temporal, physical human life without the problem of spirit and eternity being brought up by the antithesis of Truth and Untruth.According to Baden Nielsen Grundtvig’s main aim was to lay down the irrefutability of an understanding of life in terms of the idea of Creation. By illuminating the unseverable connection he found between Christianity and human life, he would be armed in a new way when he would again be called upon to vindicate Christianity in the pulpit. The insights he attained in the Danne- Virke were to prove fruitful for his sermons, while later on bringing about his discovery of his spiritual affinity with Irenaeus.

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Defence date: 10 February 2006
Examining Board: Prof. Tim Blanning, University of Cambridge ; Prof. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, European University Institute ; Prof. Regina Schulte, European University Institute (1st Supervisor) ; Prof. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Universität Münster (2nd supervisor)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

The term ‘historicism’ has a range of different meanings. It is often used in a broad sense to refer to any theory or approach that characterises human culture, or belief- and value-systems, in historical terms. Accordingly, a vast range of philosophical projects that emphasise historicity and that rely on historical methods have been labelled historicist, including, for example, those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Benedetto Croce, Robin Collingwood, and Michel Foucault. Historicism is sometimes understood more narrowly to refer to historical accounts that reject the idea of linear historical progress and stress that there is a diversity of historical cultures that cannot be measured by the same standard. Historicism in this sense is often associated with historical relativism, the view that epistemic or moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular historical context (e.g. Bambach, 1995; Iggers, 1983; Wittkau, 1992). Sometimes, a further ingredient of the view is taken to consist in the idea that the historical disciplines do not aspire to general knowledge, but rather seek to capture the unique, unrepeatable, and individual character of historical phenomena. A quite different understanding of the term singles out theories of historical development that aim to uncover the laws of history in order to predict the future. Historicism in this sense comes in naturalist and anti-naturalist forms, depending on whether the laws of history are modelled on natural laws (Popper, 1957). Yet another use is as a concept in intellectual history. Here, historicism refers to a specifically German tradition or movement that emerged in the late eighteenth century and extended throughout the nineteenth. Depending on how the story is told, this movement emerged in response and opposition to the universalism of the Enlightenment natural law tradition (Iggers, 1983), or with the goal of justifying history as an empirical discipline capable of objective knowledge (Beiser, 2011; Jaeger and Rüsen, 1992). Many of the meanings and connotations that the concept of historicism carries today go back to late nineteenth century. The term historicism had earlier been used sporadically and in reference to specific philosophies like Winckelmann’s or Hegel’s. In the late nineteenth century, it took on a more precise meaning, initially a pejorative one, as it was taken up in debates about the relation between philosophy and the historical disciplines. The central protagonists in this debate are Wilhelm Dilthey on the one hand, and his critics, who accused him of historicism, on the other – Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Edmund Husserl. The debate between Dilthey and his critics extended to three interrelated problems. First, the question of historical method and what distinguishes the historical disciplines from the natural sciences. Second, the question of how philosophical method relates to historical method. And third, the question as to whether philosophy is a science, or the expression of world-views. For the Baden neo-Kantians Windelband and Rickert, historicism consists in the reduction of normative philosophical questions to matters of empirical, historical fact. Historicism is akin to psychologism, and both are seen to lead to relativism and scepticism (Windelband [1883] 1924; Rickert [1905] 1907). Husserl later criticises historicism along analogous lines and finds in Dilthey’s philosophy of world-views a paradigmatic example of the view (Husserl [1911] 1965). This entry focuses on how the concept of historicism was first forged in the debate between Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, and how it was later taken up by Husserl.