From Hegel to Kant: Steinthal’s Evolving Reading of Humboldt

Introduction

Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) was an important figure in nineteenth-century German philosophy. Together with Moritz Lazarus, he founded Völkerpsychologie, a branch of psychology that studies mass phenomena such as language, myth and cultural products. Steinthal and Lazarus also established and directed the journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (1860–1890). Many young scholars who became important philosophers, including Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Paulsen, Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Windelband, contributed to the journal and were influenced by Steinthal. Steinthal’s development of Herbart’s mental mechanics, which aimed to free it from metaphysical presuppositions, also had a profound influence on later thinkers such as Richard Avenarius and Hans Vaihinger. It is further worth noting that Steinthal was a prominent representative of Jewish culture, serving as director of the German-Israelite Community Association from 1883 onward. Despite his relevance, Steinthal is not much studied today.^[1]

Steinthal’s interests were wide-ranging, including philosophy, religion, ethics, psychology, philology, and linguistics. In particular, Steinthal was drawn to the latter when he discovered the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). In one of his writings, Steinthal even said that he saw his relationship to Humboldt as similar to that of Theophrastus to Aristotle, that is, as a follower who continued and further developed the ideas of the master (OSP, 318). One of the leading experts on Humboldt, Jürgen Trabant, regards Steinthal as the “first and most important” of the nineteenth-century scholars of Humboldt (Trabant 1983, 261). Therefore, Steinthal’s relationship to Humboldt is worthy of investigation, all the more so if we consider that his opinion of Humboldt changed over the years, reflecting the changes in his own views.

This paper aims to reconstruct the evolution of Steinthal’s interpretation of Humboldt, in particular by showing how it evolved from a Hegelian to a Kantian reading of Humboldt’s philosophy. In this way, it becomes possible not only to grasp the complex facets of Humboldt’s influence on Steinthal, but also to mark the different phases of Steinthal’s own philosophical development. This paper thus contributes to the literature on Steinthal in several ways. First, it supports Davide Bondì’s identification of three stages in Steinthal’s development (Bondì 2008, 2013) by showing how they correspond to three different interpretations and evaluations of Humboldt’s philosophy. Second, it corrects the work of scholars who have studied the relationship between Steinthal and Humboldt by arguing against the thesis of a continuous Hegelianism and Hegelian interpretation of Humboldt by Steinthal. For example, Jürgen Trabant has claimed that Steinthal attempted “to systematize linguistics from a Hegelian perspective” (Trabant 1990, 66). Similarly, Donatella Di Cesare claimed that Steinthal “tried all his life to force the real Humboldt into his ideal Humboldt” by “replacing the problematic Kantian-Humboldtian ‘idealism’ with the rigid and firm Hegelian-Steinthalian idealism” (Di Cesare 1996, 324–325). On the contrary, I will show that Steinthal gradually distanced himself from Hegel and the Hegelian interpretation of Humboldt, to finally embrace Humboldt’s Kantianism.

This paper also complements Manfred Ringmacher’s important study, which argues that Steinthal exhibited a continuous ambivalence towards Humboldt, by analyzing his contradictory judgments across all his publications and dividing them into two distinct sections: “Humboldt is praised” and “Humboldt is criticized” (Ringmacher 1996, 28–42, 43–91). I challenge Ringmacher’s reading by identifying three distinct phases in Steinthal’s evaluation of Humboldt’s ideas: partial endorsement, outright rejection, and ultimately, full acceptance. Moreover, Ringmacher focuses on Steinthal’s and Humboldt’s linguistic theories, while I turn my attention to their broader philosophical framework, which allows me to bring to the fore the impact of Steinthal’s reappraisal of Kant on his reappraisal of Humboldt and, in particular, Humboldt’s Kantianism.

The issues at stake in nineteenth-century German debates about linguistic were deeply connected to philosophical questions of the most far-reaching kind, such as (1) the relationship between the concrete particular reality and the underlying universal spiritual forces at work in history and human culture, and, consequently, (2) the relationship between the empirical study of that concrete reality and the knowledge (or impossibility of knowledge) of those universal forces. It is in this context that one must understand Steinthal and his evolution from a Hegelian to a Kantian reading of Humboldt.

For Steinthal, Hegel and Kant did not represent the authors of a complex corpus to be engaged with philologically and critically. Rather, he saw them as incarnations of two different approaches to the problems of the theory of knowledge. ‘Kant’ was the stand-in name for a philosophy according to which the subject is never able to fully grasp the object of its investigation. On the account attributed to Kant, reason can attempt to organize the fragmented empirical reality in a unified way through the creation of all-encompassing ideas even though the latter can never really fit the empirical material because of the original separation between subject and object. On the other hand, ‘Hegel’ was the stand-in name for the idealist philosophy of identity, according to which the division between subject and object, and between the universal and particular, are overcome in the unity of the Absolute with its all-encompassing concrete historical development.

In light of this situation, Steinthal’s views on Hegel and Kant should not be judged by how accurately they reflect the texts of these authors. Rather, they help us to understand how, at the time, ‘Hegelianism’ and ‘Kantianism’ signified opposing sides in an ongoing battle, thereby becoming polemical labels and benchmarks used to determine the position of the participants in the debate.^[2]

As we shall see, Steinthal struggled throughout his life to position Humboldt within these two axes. Moreover, Steinthal’s own judgement of these two approaches to philosophy changed over the years, as he moved from accusing Kant of dualism to making the same accusation against Hegel. Therefore, by looking at how Steinthal positioned Humboldt according to these axes, we will see how Steinthal himself changed his own positioning within this scheme.

The Drift Away from Humboldt During the 1850s

We have seen that, in the 1848 essay, Steinthal adopted a double strategy. On the one hand, he criticized Humboldt’s reluctance to fully identify the universal and the particular; on the other, he forced Humboldt in the direction of Hegel, promoting an interpretation according to which the individual is nothing but a manifestation of the universal.

In the works of the following years this judgement becomes harsher: Humboldt is openly accused of dualism, and even the critical reference to Kant, previously only suggested, becomes more insistent. This is the case in particular in Die Classification der Sprache (The Classification of Language, 1850), in its revision entitled Die Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues (The Characteristics of the Main Types of Language, 1860), and in the first two editions of Der Ursprung der Sprache (The Origin of Language, 1851, 1858).

In the work on the classification of language Steinthal now holds that Humboldt’s philosophy contains a “double dualism” (CTS, 31). He is a dualist as regards his conception that “individualities […] are rays emanating from the same center and this center, and this vital principle, this ‘independent and original cause, not itself in turn conditioned and transitory in appearance,’ is in its essence completely unknown to us” (CTS, 22–23, with a quote from Humboldt [1836] 1999, 26). According to Steinthal, therefore, in Humboldt’s philosophy the individual and the universal “are completely separated from each other. The latter is a force eternally hidden from us, […] the universal is the essence, the particular individuality a mere phenomenon, the one is the cause, the other the effect; but between the two Humboldt puts an unbridgeable gulf” (CTS, 24).

Because of this view, Humboldt’s theoretical reflections are said to ultimately fall prey not only to dualism, but also to “mysticism” and “dogmatism” (CTS, 24, 29). What led Humboldt down this erroneous path was Kantian philosophy: “Here, too, dualism, rigid separation of the opposing determinations of reflection, here, too, the darkness created and preserved in the thing-in-itself” (CTS, 27).

However, Steinthal believes that Humboldt avoided Kantian dualism in his actual research; as a genius linguist, he was able to intuitively grasp the unity behind the multiplicity we find in reality, by discovering its universal grounding. Since the “genius is the true resolution of the contradictions between the individual and the universal; it is the individual who has the universal within him” (CTS, 27), being a genius, Humboldt “observes” and “demands” the “unity not understood by reason” (CTS, 34). However, since “the barriers” erected by theory are “circumvented, not eliminated” by genius (CTS, 37), Humboldt’s thought presents a “contradiction between […] theory and practice, genius and reason” (CTS, 28). This is the second of the two dualisms mentioned above: the “purely theoretical, metaphysical dualism, closely linked to the Kantian philosophy from which Humboldt had come” is accompanied by a dualism “consisting in the contradiction between theoretical-general principles and the results of empirical-historical research” (CTS, 31).

In light of this new assessment, Steinthal is even more convinced that it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff in Humboldt’s work. The wheat consists in his empirical investigations. As a linguist, Humboldt was capable of grasping the unity and universality of human spirit as it unfolded in the diversity of human languages. The chaff is his Kantian-inspired theoretical apparatus, with its dualistic tension toward an unknowable background that never fully manifests itself. In order to get rid of this Kantian dualism, “one must overcome the category of substance” (CS 58), that is, the idea of a substrate that is not fully realized in its concrete and active historical unfolding.

Once again, Steinthal held that this can be achieved by looking at Hegel, who aimed precisely at “fluidifying the substance in the subject” (CS, 58). On Steinthal’s account, however, this fluidification should not be achieved through the abstract subject of Hegel’s idealist philosophy, devoid of any concrete content, but rather through the real subject of psychology. Thus, we encounter an “only seemingly paradoxical fact,” namely that in Steinthal “the mediation of Hegel paves the way from Humboldt’s philosophy of language to the psychology of Herbart and Lazarus” (Meschiari 1991, 291).^[6]

In accordance with this turn, in Der Ursprung der Sprache, Steinthal seeks to correct Humboldt by means of the psychology of Herbart. He praises Humboldt for recognizing the unity of spirit and language – cogito ergo loquor, as the famous motto in the next edition has it (US2, 66) – but criticizes him for assuming that both stem from a mysterious common root. By postulating this unknowable substratum, Humboldt reopened the door to the notion of substance, betraying his original intuition that spirit and language are energeia, Tätigkeit, human activity. In order to avoid any recourse to the notion of substance, it is necessary to “take the question of the origin of language away from the metaphysical battlefield and place it on purely psychological ground” (US1, 20). After having affirmed “in the most decisive way the identity of language and spirit,” Steinthal turns his attention to the question “according to which psychological laws do the spirit arise and act” and what is the “connection of language with the lower and higher activities of the spirit” (US1, 19).

Steinthal provides his answer to these questions in his magnum opus Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Introduction to Psychology and the Science of Language, 1871). In this two-volume work, he embarks on the attempt to ascertain the fundamental law of ‘mental mechanics’ (as per the title of the first volume: Psychische Mechanik), in order to explain the ‘evolutive history’ of the human mental faculties and thus culture (as per the title of the second volume: Psychische Entwicklungsgeschichte). In so doing, the two volumes combine Herbart’s idea that we can describe the mechanical laws at play in all psychological processes with Humboldt’s idea that we can depict the development of human spirit parallel to the development of language. In accordance with Herbart, Steinthal defines cognitive processes in terms of ‘apperception,’ which he describes as “the movement of two representation-masses [Vorstellungsmassen] toward each other to produce knowledge” (AS, 171). This process of apperception is based on two assumptions. First, the representations merge to form clusters of mental contents (representation-masses). Second, these representation-masses remain latent below the threshold of consciousness until new, similar representations recall them, causing them to fuse together. This fusion of old representation-masses with new ones is the apperception process, by which we relate unknown content to what is already known, thus becoming capable of comprehension.

According to Steinthal, language plays a fundamental role in these processes, as it is the primary means by which the mind recalls representation-masses, to the extent that speaking and apperceiving are practically the same process (the Humboldtian idea of cogito ergo loquor). It is the ability of human beings to constantly improve their understanding of the world through their ever-evolving representation-masses (and languages) that makes them historical beings, as their understanding of reality progresses over time.

Let me now return to Der Ursprung der Sprache, particularly the second edition of 1858, in which the subtitle is changed from “An exposition of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s view compared with those of Herder and Hamann” to “An exposition, critique, and further development of the prevailing views.” Compared to the first edition of 1851, its significant amendments shed light on Steinthal’s new view of the relationship between Humboldt and Kant, as the criticism of Humboldt put forward in the first edition is now accompanied by a more positive evaluation of Kant’s philosophy. Although Steinthal blames both thinkers with dualism, he regards Humboldt’s dualism as more dangerous. Even though Kant built his philosophical system by distinguishing the phenomenal realm of empirical knowledge from the noumenal realm accessible only to practical reason, he nevertheless assumed their concordance, and “only faith in this concordance could lead Kant to hold his theory to be true” (US2, 114).

Conversely, as was discussed above, Steinthal considers Humboldt’s work to be tainted by a contradiction between the linguist and the philosopher. The linguist has a keen eye for the “individualities of form” and is convinced that “spirit is only an activity, language consists only in speaking, and language and spirit are identical” (US2, 115, 112). The philosopher, on the other hand, seeks a universal principle that holds these individualities together and is the cause of this activity. Consequently, “the spirit is considered as a being” and “language as an autonomous force separate from the spirit” (US2, 112), with the result that, in order to regain their unity, an inaccessible common root must be postulated. Between the linguist and the philosopher, then, there is “a complete and destructive contradiction.” As Steinthal puts it, “this is not Kantian dualism” – in which one can still “rest” – but “a much more serious phenomenon,” since in Humboldt’s contradictions “no spirit finds peace” (US2114).

To sum up, in this phase, we find a harsh judgement of Humboldt, a softening of the critique of Kant, and a departure from the easy solution of a renewed philosophy of identity modelled after Hegel’s absolute idealism in favour of a psychological study of the spirit-language nexus stemming from the fact that both are human ‘activities.’ In this new framework, Steinthal’s earlier idea that knowledge consists in the unity of observation (Anschauen) and thought (Denken) develops into the recognition that “every act of knowledge, every step in the development of consciousness takes place with the help of an a priori and an a posteriori factor” (AS, 13). However, these a priori and a posteriori factors are not interpreted in a rigorous Kantian sense, but rather reframed within the context of Herbartian psychology: Steinthal identifies the a priori forms of knowledge with the already-present representations-masses used to elaborate the newly acquired material. Accordingly, he claims that they are only relatively a priori, since they have an ‘evolutive history’ that explains their origin and formation.

The Rapprochement with Kant and the Criticism of Humboldt and Hegel During the 1860s

The direction towards Kant that Steinthal took in the 1850s, away from Humboldt and Hegel, culminated in the lecture Philologie, Geschichte und Psychologie (“Philology, History and Psychology,” 1864), in which Kant is openly praised and no longer regarded as a dualist thinker.

The essay begins with a passage that has a distinctly Kantian tone and contains an implicit criticism of Hegel’s idealist philosophy. Steinthal here traces the boundaries between the realm of purely philosophical constructions and the empirical knowledge of reality as follows:

There is a sphere of the highest scientific concepts or categories, such as being and becoming, essence and appearance, substance and force, etc., and of the most general forms of scientific thought, such as concept, judgement, inference, induction, that is, a sphere of what are traditionally called metaphysical categories and logical forms of thought, which underlies all the sciences and which in itself will always form a separate subject of a special science to which we may leave the time-honored name of philosophy. If we now add ethics and general aesthetics to metaphysics and logic, we may well have defined the sphere in which philosophy has its proper place and operates in full autonomy. Philosophy has misjudged its powers, it has misjudged the nature of human thought, it has made a complete mistake about its own nature, when, going beyond the boundaries drawn above, it has entered the realm of objective phenomena, of reality, with constructions that should have been exclusively its own. (PGP, 1–2)

More importantly, compared to Steinthal’s early writings, the picture now appears reversed: Kant is portrayed as someone who tried to solve the contradictions between the a priori approach of philosophy and the empirical approach of science, and Hegel as someone who championed dualism. According to Steinthal, “the dualism between, on the one hand, philosophy or speculation and, on the other, empiricism or history” is “a product of the Middle Ages” “unknown to antiquity” (PGP, 2). Kant is said to have attempted “a reconciliation between empiricism and speculation” by “separating between what is inherent in human knowledge per se and constitutes the essence of our cognitive faculty, and what is acquired through experience” (PGP, 5). The problem is that, after Kant, dualism returned in the idealist philosophy represented by Hegel. According to Steinthal, in Hegel’s conception “all the disciplines of the natural and historical sciences […] exist doubly” (PGP, 5), on the one hand in philosophical form, insofar as they can be obtained a priori by dialectical means, and on the other hand in empirical form, insofar as they can be obtained by a posteriori investigation. As a result, “with Hegel, dualism” has “reached its peak and an extension that embraces the entire universe” (PGP, 5).

Steinthal claims that Hegel’s dualism arises from the tendency to hypostatize the concepts created by the human mind: they are treated as something existing in themselves, “ordered in a hierarchical scale according to the degree of their universality” and transformed into “all-creating forces” (PGP, 9). When concepts are elevated to ideal principles that sustains reality, the “generative forces that operate in the universe and condition all natural and spiritual phenomena” are replaced by the “dialectical passage from one concept to another” (PGP, 9–10).

But Hegel is not the only one Steinthal accuses of this way of thinking. Humboldt himself faces the same accusation. Instead of concretely investigating the mechanisms at work in historical, linguistic and, more generally, spiritual processes, Humboldt is said to stop the investigation at general concepts – such as the concepts of ‘language,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘intellect’ – that embrace these mechanisms, but for this very reason also conceal them.

In particular, since for Steinthal spiritual activity is ultimately psychological, what he takes Humboldt and Hegel to lack is a psychological analysis which traces “the phenomena of the life of the soul” back to “relations and movements between certain very simple elements of the soul, spiritual atoms” (PGP, 52). Historical research, like linguistic research, cannot speak of ‘spirit,’ ‘language,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘ideas’ as if they were active forces operating on each other, but must study the dynamics between the representations underlying these concepts. Otherwise it will end up replacing the “real movement of real factors” with a “dialectic that is the logical movement of concepts” (PGP 63).

In Steinthal’s eyes, thinkers such as Hegel and Humboldt forgot that:

[I]deas, which ought to be, must necessarily be ideas of a subject, and must exist in a soul, in a consciousness. […] The real relationship underlying these concepts is based on the laws of the movement of representations in consciousness, on the laws of association, combination, and generation of representations, on the laws of communication between individual subjects, and their union into a collective consciousness, on the laws of appropriation, formation, and enrichment of the given. An idea is merely an abstract content that has reality only insofar as it lies in a consciousness or a subject, and has power only insofar as it enters into an effective relationship with other contents of that consciousness. (PGP, 69)

Indeed, ideas are “condensations” (Verdichtungen) that must be broken down into their constituent psychic elements in order to reconstruct the “middle terms” that actually hold the thread of historical development together. Accordingly, explaining history in terms of abstract ideas means to limit oneself to a “purely aesthetic construction,” instead of seeking a true “genetic explanation” (PGP, 63). In so doing, “nothing is understood of the real causes of these facts, of the actual growth of ideas, and thus the task of the historian is only partially solved” (PGP, 70).

In light of this, it is clear why Steinthal writes that “[h]istory, according to the character of its most essential task, must be based on the psychological method” (PGP, 73). In particular, it is Völkerpsychologie, which studies “the human being as a spiritually developing being,” that must support the study of history. Steinthal even writes that the “philologist or historian is the Völkerpsychologe and vice versa” (PGP, 75 emphasis mine).

In the essay of 1864, Steinthal thus places Hegel into the category of dualistic thinkers to which Humboldt had long since been relegated, accusing both of hypostatizing concepts into metaphysical forces instead of providing adequate psychological analyses of them, thus substituting real dynamics with merely logical-dialectical relations.

The one who is now positively re-evaluated is Kant. It is true that the tradition of Herbartian psychology on which Steinthal draws had long accused Kant of hypostatizing the ‘faculties’ of the soul.^[7] However, he holds that the type of hypostatization we find in Hegel and Humboldt leads to metaphysics and dualism by positing abstract ideas as hidden forces behind the historical course. On the other hand, Kant’s theory of the faculties hypostatized mental functions into different agents (e. g., the understanding or the will), but did so with the right purpose, namely, analyzing mental processes. Since this theory already tended towards psychology, it could easily be translated into an account of the concrete dynamics between representations.

The Newfound Appreciation of Humboldt of the 1880s–1890s

In the 1860s, Steinthal’s reflections reached a point of equilibrium that lasted until the 1870. During these years, he came closer to Kantian themes, at the expense of the now rejected Hegel and Humboldt, and he turned to psychology to support his theories about the development of culture and language. This work culminated in the publication of his major book, Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft.

Two works Steinthal published in 1877 offer a telling example of his now divergent opinions about Kant and Humboldt. In the second part of the article “Zur Religionsphilosophie” (1875–1877), he writes that “the “fundamental metaphysical thoughts” expressed in it “are entirely based on Kant” (RP, 5). On the other hand, the third edition of Der Ursprung der Sprache (1877) downplays Humboldt’s importance significantly:

Where do we stand today in relation to Humboldt? […] Not as it was in 1858, twenty years ago. […] Today Humboldt is no longer the center, the origin and the end of the science of language; now he no longer belongs to the living present, but to history, albeit living history.^[8] (US3, 372)

However, this moment of maximum distance from Humboldt was reverted in the early 1980s, when Steinthal began editing the collection of Humboldt’s works. His renewed study of Humboldt’s texts, with fresh eyes and new interests, and the opportunity to work on the manuscripts, discovering that seemingly contradictory passages were often the result of different drafts, certainly contributed greatly to Steinthal’s rediscovery of Humboldt. Most importantly, his reappraisal of Humboldt would certainly not have taken the form it did if he had not returned to his work armed with a new understanding of the significance of the Kantian legacy.

In the 1870s, Steinthal had experienced a deep personal crisis, caused by grief over the death of two of his three sons and the political atmosphere in Germany, where anti-Semitism was on the rise. These events led him to turn away from his interests in psychology and linguistics, without even completing the planned second volume of Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and to turn instead to philosophy of religion (“Zur Religionsphilosophie,” 1875–1877) and ethics (Allgemeine Ethik, 1885). But these new interests did not lead Steinthal to posit otherworldly forces at work in the reality; on the contrary, they led to a further step in the direction of anthropology and a wholly immanent philosophy. As Steinthal writes in his correspondence:

I hesitated for a long time with my letter of rejection of all transcendence. Now I am at peace. I see that all ideas are falling away; the ideals and the experience remain with me. Now I boldly go ahead and create for myself a godless and soulless world, which, however, is not in the least lacking in spirit and ideals, nor in incarnated ideas. The ideas are our product and therefore completely immanent (Steinthal to Glogau, 14/01/1876, in Belke 1971–1986, v. 2/1, 36).

In this new direction of Steinthal’s reflections, Kant’s writings beyond the first Critique become increasingly central, as they conceive of the practical-aesthetic dimension as a way to ascend to the ideal sphere, and thus to breathe life into the aridity of the phenomenal world, without assuming any transcendence.^[9]

This new understanding of the entirety of the Kantian project provides Steinthal with the key to unravel what had previously appeared to him to be Humboldt’s inner puzzle and contrast. The presence of Kantian themes, condemned in the 1848 writings as a juvenile remnant of Humboldt’s education, is now declared the key to understanding this author and correctly traced back to Schiller’s influence on him. In the light of this rediscovery of Kant’s importance for Humboldt, Steinthal now devotes an entire section of his commentary to Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues (On the Diversity of Human Language Structures, 1836) to “Humboldt’s Relationship to Kant” (SWWH, 230–242).

Central to this Kantian reinterpretation of Humboldt is the notion of Erscheinung (appearance) as the place where an “original and unconditioned force” realizes itself. This force “in itself” is “a limiting concept which, precisely because it serves as a limit, is not purely negative.” Phenomena, that is, the manifestations of such a force, “are causally connected with each other and accessible to our senses, explicable by our intellect.” Our reason, however, is not content with uniting phenomena that succeed one another in the causal chain, but seeks the unity of that original foundation which produces the appearance. Still, since “this original force remains completely unknown to us, we try to understand phenomena by means of ideas” which “count for us as the equivalent of the original force,” in the sense that they represent the attempt by which we “dare to think the original force” (SWWH, 159–160).

In other words, for Steinthal, Humboldt follows Kant by maintaining that reason’s attempt to seek a cause for phenomena has a twofold result: on the one hand, the ‘finite’ use of reason leads us to relate them as causes and effects; on the other hand, the ‘infinite’ use of reason urges us to trace them back to an ultimate cause, not phenomenal but intelligible, which, precisely because it is not empirically attested, can only be an ‘idea,’ something constructed by the spontaneity of reason.

In the section devoted to the relationship between the two thinkers, Steinthal points out that with these theses “Humboldt remains entirely within the boundaries drawn by Kant,” since Kant himself “considers it logically permissible to think” that “every empirical cause” is accompanied by an “intelligible cause,” just as “every thing” is accompanied by “a thing-in-itself.” But for both Kant and Humboldt, this intelligible cause merely exists insofar as it is posited by a demand of reason, and not insofar as it is a reality that can actually be attained. In fact, he takes Humboldt to hold that the ideas “remain a noumenon in the negative sense, with no meaning other than that they cannot be explained within the mechanical chain of causality, since Humboldt does not allow for any intellectual intuition” (SWWH, 238–239).

Therefore, we can conclude that Steinthal’s initial belief that Kant’s dualism was preserved by Humboldt – the dualism of empirical reality and things-in-themselves, of phenomenal and intelligible causes – disappeared once he acknowledged that both Kant and Humboldt regarded this supposed substratum as a negative idea posited by reason, urging us to grasp the phenomena in a way that is never exhausted by the intellectual order of concepts and thereby forcing us to produce rational ideas.

It is through ideas, then, that we give form, that is, unity and order, to the multiplicity of the real, and this form is achieved not by “abstraction,” the residue of which is merely “a miserable caput mortuum,” but by the “imagination” (Einbildungskraft), which performs the “marvellous task of passing from the realm of experience to a realm of ideals,” thus infusing reality with “the infinity of reason” (Humboldt [1795] 1903, 336, qtd. in SWWH, 118). All ideas, however, refer back to a fundamental idea, that of a “vital principle” (if one defines it by looking at nature) or of a “world governance” (if one defines it by looking at history): in other words, the idea of an intelligible reason that sustains the course of phenomena without being reducible to it. This idea constitutes for Humboldt “the transcendental object” (SWWH, 238).

Another example of a transcendental object discussed by Steinthal is the “transcendental ego,” or what Humboldt also calls “character.” Indeed, human beings are not only empirical beings, causally embedded in the phenomenal world, but also possess an intelligible side, their “character,” which represents their “individuality,” their “genius” (SWWH, 240). But what does this ‘character’ of human beings imply? First of all, it means that the individual should not be thought of as the chaotic result of a series of causally related actions, but as a being endowed with a unifying principle that defines and individualizes him. Secondly, character is precisely what enables the particular human being to enter into a relationship with the universal.

Steinthal points out that when Kant speaks of the “intelligible character” of the human being, he stops short of assuming “a union of individuality, i. e., the transcendental ego, with the transcendental object,” although this connection can be considered an implicit consequence of Kantian philosophy “once the ego is posited as intelligible” (SWWH, 240). Conversely, this union is openly asserted by Humboldt, who finds precisely in the character “the point of contact of individuality with the Absolute” (SWWH, 473). Only the intelligible character enters into a relationship with the transcendental object, because only the genius of the individual – that is to say, a non-phenomenal force – is capable of looking at the chaos of the world and seeing in it a government of the world, through an act that transforms the scattered historical material into the order formed by ideas, insofar as it finds these ideas already at work in it – as is precisely proper to the historical genius, which “brings (mitbringen) the form insofar as it extracts (abziehen) it from the object” (SWWH, 110, reference to Humboldt [1821] 1967, 65).

Genius, or character, is not only expressed in the cognitive sphere, but also in the practical sphere. The intelligible character connects the individual with the ‘governance of the world,’ in that the individual is not merely a link in a mechanical chain of causality, but holds within itself the force of ideas and of its own free and creative individuality, and is thus able to give new directions to events.^[10]

For Steinthal, it is precisely this “identity of the forces at work in history and in the inner self of the scholar” that constitutes the “fundamental tenet of Humboldt’s theory of knowledge.” In writing this, Steinthal refers to the passage in “On the Historian’s Task” in which Humboldt affirms that “all understanding presupposes in the person who understands, as a condition of its possibility, an analogue of that which will actually be understood later,” while adding that “[i]n the case of history that antecedent of understanding is quite obvious, since everything which is active in world history is also moving within the human heart” (Humboldt [1821] 1967, 65).

In light of Humboldt’s conception of the genial character – understood as an individual principle that uses the ideas to know and shape reality – Steinthal asserts that “in his description of the genius, Humboldt has extended what Kant says about aesthetic genius to all fields of intellectual activity” (SWWH, 242). Indeed, according to the Critique of Judgment, the individual who possess that natural talent that is “genius” is able both to find the aesthetic ideal (not through intellectual abstraction, but through the power of his imagination) and to produce it, thus shaping reality in accordance with it when he realizes this ideal in his artistic works.^[11] Humboldt expands on this notion by saying that not only the artist, but also those who “make history” and those who seek to understand reality – that is, “the poet,” “the historian,” and “the philosopher” – must possess a supersensible, genial force that enables them to extract, bring, and realize the ideal in the phenomenal world, so as to “seek the mastery and voluntary unification of the material of the senses through and with the idea” (Humboldt [1830] 1907, 514, qtd. in SWWH, 110).

On Steinthal’s new reading, then, Humboldt proves to be a Kantian in most regards. According to Steinthal, Humboldt only seems to diverge from Kant in his treatment of the relationship between mechanical-phenomenal causality and ideal, free, intelligible causality. On his account, Kant argues “that for every empirical cause as a phenomenon there must be an intelligible cause at its foundation, just as for every thing there must be a thing in itself.” On the other hand, Humboldt is said to treat “the issue as if the processes in history were determined by a twofold kind of causality, namely by mechanical causes and by ideas, and as if these not only existed side by side, but could act together and often even against each other.” But even in this case, the distance between the two thinkers is only superficial and stems from the “expressions” used by Humboldt for “convenience,” since “his true conception was undoubtedly that both kinds of causality do not exist side by side, but appear as such only to us,” in the sense that we “have two kinds of knowledge for the connection of phenomena, one that we obtain through sensible experience, and another that goes beyond this experience” (SWWH, 238).

Accordingly, Steinthal emphasizes that, for Humboldt, “the causal approach is insufficient in itself,” only in the sense that we need “as a supplement, not a teleological but a transcendental approach, which contradicts the causal approach so little that it actually provides its ultimate justification by allowing us to recognize the regularity (Planmässigkeit) of progress” (SWWH, 170). As we have seen, this ‘regularity of progress’ is only an idea, namely the idea of the governance of the world, which is not empirically discoverable and therefore never certain. As with all other intelligible ideas, in this case as well we are aware “that there is something of which man can only have an inkling, but which lies beyond his understanding and linguistic expression, even though language is the only means of making use of this inkling and of being able to discover something of this inaccessible field” (SWWH, 475).

In contrast to his earlier position, Steinthal no longer brands Humboldt’s position in this regard as a retreat into mysticism, dogmatism, or dualism. I hold that this revaluation is made possible by a new understanding of Kant and Humboldt’s Kantianism. Steinthal has come to understand the positive as well as the negative meaning of the limits of knowledge. These limits are negative in that they are not part of the field of knowledge and therefore can never be fully known, but they are positive in that they serve to encompass, unify, and give meaning to what falls within them. Thus, Steinthal writes that, in Humboldt’s view, “Kant’s doctrine is a criticism whose real intention is to be found in the determination of the limits of our knowledge in opposition to dogmatism,” but what is beyond these limits, the absolute, is regarded by Humboldt “as unknowable, unprovable, but for this reason no less absolutely certain” (SWWH, 237).

In light of the above, we can also understand Steinthal’s definition of Humboldt’s thought as “Kantianized Spinozism” (SWWH, 14): like Spinoza, he wants to affirm the unity of the finite and the infinite, the universal and the particular, but in doing so Humboldt draws on Kant, since he uses the tools of the transcendental theory of knowledge rather than metaphysics to delimit the boundaries between these different spheres.^[12] Humboldt’s Kantianized Spinozism therefore consists in the fact, Steinthal writes, that

Humboldt did not think of monism without also thinking of the multiplicity within it. The absolute original force is at once a multiplicity of forces. The absolute is only a limiting concept for him; our human finite spirit cannot really think it, i. e., think the all-unity. We are bound to experience and can only think the multiplicity of appearing forces. That is why Humboldt’s task is not to see how the infinite One splinters into many finite ones, but how the Many gathers to form a unity. (SWWH, 178, emphasis mine)

This last sentence perfectly expresses the Kantian inversion of the Hegelian paradigm through which the young Steinthal interpreted Humboldt. According to Steinthal, Humboldt did not see in the fragmentary nature of world events the self-articulation of the universal, as Hegel did, but rather, in a Kantian manner, a chaos to be ordered by bringing to it as much unity as the limited human faculties allow.

Faced with the eternal problem of the relationship between the phenomenal world and intelligible reality, between the individual multiplicity and the unity of the universal, Steinthal no longer seeks refuge in Hegel and the philosophy of identity, with its promise of reconciling the two sides in the pacifying moment of synthesis. Rather, in Kant and Humboldt he has found a philosophy capable of holding these opposing poles together without succumbing to the temptation to resolve them into one. This feature of Humboldt’s thought no longer appears to him as contradictory, but rather as “the purest unity of a system of thought” in which “every proposition springs from the center of a rigorous, intellectually relevant, and morally profound conception of the world,” to the point that “it is astonishing how in such a man all thoughts, in whatever field they move and however distant in time they may have been expressed, show a close and firm connection” (SWWH, 3).

In fact, Steinthal did not merely reinterpret Humboldt in the light of Kant, but made this perspective his own, as is clear from the Allgemeine Ethik. The only way out of the antinomy between the blind causality of the natural sciences and the teleological unfolding of Absolute Spirit, which risks throwing us either “forward into positivistic nothingness or backward into idealism, discredited as mythology and metaphysics,” is to recognize, “as Kant correctly saw,” that only ethics can safeguard the ideal dimension without sacrificing the scientific-natural dimension (AE, 17–19). In ethics (and aesthetics), the human being “sets purposes and gives form,” “grasps and creates an intelligible world in and alongside the actual world,” and all this through ideas, which – as Humboldt had seen – are what “we gain or construct when we connect finite phenomena with the ultimate principles of knowledge, with the infinite” (AE, 76–77).

In this light, it is significant that the chapter of the Allgemeine Ethik on “The Ideas” concludes with an “Annotation” of a few pages in which Steinthal makes explicit his theory’s debt to Herbart, Kant, and Humboldt, who thus stand out at the end of his intellectual journey as the three fundamental reference points of his philosophy (AE, 75–79).

Conclusion

In summary, I have argued that we can identify three phases in Steinthal’s reception of Humboldt. (1) A Humboldtian-Hegelian phase in which Steinthal strives for a renewed philosophy of identity. In this phase, Humboldt’s philosophy is read through the lens of Hegel and the influence of Kant is downplayed. Steinthal accuses Kant of being responsible for the residual dualism in Humboldt’s thought. (2) A Kantian-Herbartian phase, in which Steinthal increasingly distances himself from Humboldt and Hegel, accusing them of hypostatizing ideas into metaphysical forces, falling into dualism, and avoiding the study of concrete psychological processes. (3) A Kantian-Humboldtian phase, in which Steinthal finally recognizes and praises the fundamental Kantianism of Humboldt’s philosophy.^[13]

As I hope to have shown, this revaluation of Humboldt’s Kantianism was made possible by the progressive discovery of the deeper meaning of Kant’s criticism, a renewed philological confrontation with Humboldt’s work, and the fact that ethical, aesthetic, and religious themes became central to Steinthal’s reflections during the 1870s (to some extent at the expense of psychology).

Steinthal thus arrived at a conception of history in which the idea of a plan behind the course of events does not concern the realization of the Absolute Spirit, but is a demand made by human reason without any guarantee of objectivity. Therefore, he considers the human being, and not Absolute Spirit, to be the true protagonist of history; what is more, a human being who is fully historicized – since “even ethics is only a historical product” (AE, 430) – and, following Humboldt, a human being who is conceived in his irreducible individuality:

We do not speak of the individual as the natural exemplar of the genus man but of the individual spirit in which the whole realm of the intelligible is reflected, collected and realized. The individual is not only the smallest part of the ethical whole, the cell of the ethical organism, but is the whole of ethics, is ethics itself. He is the active (tätig) principle through which ideas acquire effectiveness. (AE, 432)

In this respect, then, we can say that the late Steinthal participated in his own way in the strand of ‘heterodox’ Kantianism that began with Humboldt and developed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which rejected metaphysics in favor of a historicist anthropology.^[14]