Black Athena by Martin Bernal

Author:Martin Bernal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Humboldt’s Educational Reforms

Objectively, whatever their subjective political positions, Humboldt and Schiller helped defend the status quo. It was precisely to this kind of safe radical that the Prussian monarchy turned after the humiliation of the traditional government and its beloved army after their catastrophic defeat by Napoleon at Jena in 1806. In 1809, among other reforms undertaken to face the French Revolutionary challenge, Humboldt was entrusted with the reorganization of the educational system. He based the new structure on Bildung, which he believed would reanimate the German people after their crushing defeats. In higher education he consciously rejected the French Polytechniques, with their emphasis on mathematics and natural science, in favour of schools teaching the much broader concept of Wissenschaft. Ostensibly the new Prussian curriculum was to contain the three disciplines of mathematics, history and languages. Humboldt’s priorities, however, can be seen from the fact that no mathematics was taught for the first five years at his chief creation, the new university at Berlin.15

The leading scholar Humboldt recruited to Berlin was Wolf, who, as we have seen, introduced the Seminar, which spread from there to Prussia, then to Germany and then beyond. This system, with its insistence that students learn actively through their own research, would seem to give the students far more freedom and scope for originality than do traditional lectures. Over the past 180 years, however, while the form has produced great scholarly achievements, it is apparent that it can be and is used as a very effective tool to control both the choice and the treatment of topics of academic concern.

Wolf’s practice of Altertumswissenschaft followed that of Heyne and the Göttingen school. He rejected what he saw as the conceptualizing and abstract search for universals of the Enlightenment, in favour of direct confrontation with particulars and detailed source criticism. Completely oblivious to what can be seen, with hindsight, as his own intense Romanticism, he was able to write: ‘All our research is historical and critical not of things to be hoped for but for facts. Arts should be loved but history revered.’16

This simple-minded approach has dominated the practice of most history and Classics ever since. Humboldt, at least by the end of his life, was far more sensitive. In his essay ‘The task of a historian’, he recognized that comprehension of the past required far more than external description. What was needed was a balance between ‘rational observation’ (beobachtender Verstand) and ‘poetic imagination’ (dichtende Einbildungskraft). The historian, however, unlike the poet, must subordinate his imagination to the investigation of reality, and ‘must of necessity yield to the power of form, while keeping constantly in mind the ideas which are its laws.’17 In the 19th century these ideas certainly included the ‘scientific laws of race’.

Humboldt also tried to wrestle with the difficulties of the relationship between subject and object in historical enquiry, which he believed required some feelings of kinship such as those existing between Germany and Ancient Greece. It was thus possible to write a history of Antiquity.

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