Nicholas Boyle

The Composition of Die Wahlverwandtschaften

Abstract Using such of Goethe’s working papers as survive, his diary entries, and remarks by himself and others in correspondence and conversation, the attempt is made to trace the process by which Die Wahlverwandtschaften was drafted in 1808 and revised in 1809. It is concluded that the 1808 draft was much closer to the published Part One of the novel than Wolff claimed in his reconstruction (1955) and that most of Part Two was written in 1809. It is argued that the narrative is set in the years 1806–7, probably in Anhalt, and among the figures who suggested themes to Goethe were Otto I, Napoleon, Prince Bernhard of Weimar, and Henriette Hendel-Schütz.

Pascal, Montaigne, and "J.-C.": The Centre of the Pensées

In an important book on the mathematical antecedents of the philosophy of Leibniz, Michel Serres has argued that Pascal’s work, scientific and theological, addresses itself first and foremost to a question implied by Copernicus but asked only by Kepler: Has the material universe a centre? Is it naturally oriented, ’polarized’? Does it have a ’sense’? And finding, like Giordano Bruno (for example in the fragment Br 72; Laf 199’ ), that the answer to this question is that the material universe, natural space, has no centre, is homogeneous, the same in all its infinite parts, Pascal, according to Serres, turns in his search for meaning

Reason's form

I The question of freedom in the modern German tradition is not just a metaphysical question. It concerns the status of a free life as a value, indeed, as they took to saying, the ‘absolute’ value. A free life is of unconditional and incomparable and inestimable value, and it is the basis of the unique, and again, absolute, unqualifiable respect owed to any human person just as such. This certainly increases the pressure on anyone who espouses such a view to tell us what a free life consists in. Kants famous answer is ‘autonomy’, where this means first or minimally freedom from external constraint, coercion and intimidation (‘thinking for yourself’), but even more importantly, being in a certain specific sort of self-relation. I can only be said truly to be ‘ruling myself’ when the considerations that determine what I do are reasons. But if, finally, in exercising reason I am merely rationally responsive to inclinations and desires and aversions, I am (according to Kant) still letting such contingent impulses ‘rule’ my life, however strategically rational or hierarchically ordered my plans for satisfaction turn out to be. So, Kant concludes, I am only truly autonomous, self-ruling, when the one consideration of importance (that is, normatively authoritative) in what I do is, as he says so frequently if still mysteriously, the ‘ form of rationality’ as such. The more familiar name for such a necessary condition of autonomy is the Categorical Imperative. To make clear that this subjection to the ‘form’ of rationality counts as autonomy, Kant also insists that this moral law be understood as ‘self-legislated’, that we must be able to regard ourselves as its ‘author’, and that we are bound to such a law because we bind ourselves to it.

Inventing the Intellectual: Schiller and Fichte at the University of Jena

Abstract Following their appointment to professorships at the University of Jena, Schiller and Fichte both delivered lectures — Schiller’s inaugural lecture on universal history written immediately before the outbreak of the French Revolution and Fichte’s lecture series on the vocation of the scholar written in the aftermath of the Terror — that sought to define the new role of the intellectual in German public life. From their different historical perspectives the lectures reflect in different ways the problematic nature of the role, in particular its lack of connection to the socio-political base of an independent and self-governing middle class and hence its distance from political power.