historicism and schlegel and historismus and winckelmann

So, as the previous essay has shown, 20th century English usage presents us with at least three distinct definitions of historicism. It can mean either locating something in its "own" period; it can be used to express a belief in historical relativism; it can be associated with some kind of "transcedental" truth or a comprehensive theory of history, a sense that history moves along according to patterns or laws. The purpose of this essay is not to trace how each of these definitions came into vogue. I simply want to peel back all of these meanings and go to the first usage of the term, as far as I know of it, and rest myself right there.

Back to Germany

It is not unexpected that this term came out of Germany. And so I was fortunate to find an article by the eminent German historian and historiographer Georg G. Iggers on the term ("Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1995, 129-52). Iggers argues that the first use of Historismus he found is in some fragmentary notes on philology jotted down by Friedrich Schlegel in 1797. Schlegel said that "Winckelmann's Historismus" had introduced a "new epoch" in philosophy by recognizing the "immeasurable distinctness" (den unermesslichen Unterschied) and the "totally unique nature of Antiquity" (130). Iggers goes on to say that, for Winckelmann, the popular philosophers of the 18th century had distorted the view of Greek antiquity by imposing their own philosophical notions on it. Schlegel warns against any "unhistorical opinion" that has no reference to "specific persons." Let's stop right there.

Schlegel is contrasting the efforts of Winckelmann and philosophers in looking at classical antiquity. The former, for Schlegel, wanted to look at that era in its own terms, in its full uniqueness and distinctness, while the philosophers just seemed to want to examine the classical past for the way it illustrated or supported their own philosophical predilections. Well, who was Winckelmann and what did he do?

Johann J. Winckelmann (1717-68)

The first intellectual biography of Winckelmann in English only came out in 2000 (Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, by Alex Potts), but his contribution to the development of art history, especially through his History of the Art of Antiquity, has been well-known in English for a long time. Winckelmann only came into contact with Greek art in 1748 as a librarian near Dresden, and in 1755 he wrote a formative essay entitled "Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks," in which he argued that the only way for us to be great or worthy of imitation is to imitate the Greeks. Thus, Winckelmann pursued the ideal of mastery of Greek literature, philosophy and art as foundational to education and culture. He converted to Catholicism and entered into the service of a priest in Rome who would become a future Cardinal and, in that and a subsequent position, was able to have access to the Vatican art treasures, as well as to the world of ancient Rome (he never made it to Greece).

His 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity is probably the first work to try to understand Greek Art in an organic fashion--with a history of growth, maturity and decline, and he developed criteria for trying to define and assess an ancient ideal of beauty. He bequeathed to the world of classical studies and art history a periodization of Greek art that still was present when I first studied classics in 1970-- pre-Phidian or archaic, 5th century sublime style, 4th century maturity in Praxiteles and Apelles, and the "imitative" period of Hellenistic and Roman decline. His fame also rests on a careful description of individual art pieces.

Back to Schlegel and Historicism

This is not the place to try to evaluate Wincelmann's work. It is now obvious to any who study him that he was importing his own sensibilities into both a definition of Greek beauty as well as a periodization of Greek Art. But that really isn't the point. He seemed to be the first one who captured the imagination of subsequent generations as one who consciously tried to separate an understanding of antiquity from contemporary philosophy. What we have learned since Winckelmann's time is that there is a tension in historical scholarship that none of us can evade: on the one hand we have ancient documents and try our best to "locate" a person within his or her time, trying to understand the life s/he lived from a perspective that would have been familiar to that person. But, on the other hand, we know that every effort at biography or historical reconstruction derives from a person who lives in a different era and has a different reality than the person s/he is describing. Sometimes I think that bibliographical essays do not really yield a "cumulative" knowledge of the subject studied but rather only show us the (possibly hidden) presuppositions of authors as they approach their subject. So, there is no "pure" history or biography. It is all perspectival. Yet, we still want to be able to say that one account is "better" or "truer" than another.

Conclusion

Thus, we can lay aside our concerns about what Winckelmann really was doing and focus on the way that Schlegel saw his work. Schlegel saw Winckelmann's work as bringing the world of classical antiquity (and art especially) to life as it actually was. Schlegel's excitement centered around the fact that this other world was separate from ours but still spoke to us; that it could be described by diligent effort; that it had lessons of immeasurable greatness and uniqueness to teach us. When this kind of realization dawns on you, that history has depth and that you, by study, can enter into that depth, it has the power of a revelatory insight. Your life is never the same again. You are both divided from but curiously united to those in the past, sharing the same terrain of humanity even as you understand afresh their utter difference from you. It is this sense of historical distance, the historical sense that I have described, which Schlegel described by the term Historismus. This is the way I will use the term. As such, it is a term of great hope and encouragement--to study and to try to "get into the skins" of other people. It is a most humanistic term. That is where I will keep it.

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