and its implications for ethics and education.36 In “On the Spirit of Mankind,”37 written in 1797, he stresses that every man must have a goal, a “first and an absolute yardstick,”38 but this ultimate value must be related to his inner nature. The final goal common to all men is the “dignity of men,” but there is no set pattern by which this can be attained. However, this “absolute yardstick,” which man finds only in himself, does not relate to “momentary pleasure or for that matter to his happiness.” It is a “notable characteristic of man’s nature to be able to scorn pleasure and to do without happiness.” This yardstick is to be found in a man’s “inner value, in his higher, more perfect self.”39 Humboldt, in distinguishing between the essential and incidental elements of individual character, already approaches his later view that each individual represents an idea. Still noticeably missing is the view that collective groups, other than mankind as a whole, possess individual character or represent ideas. This concept was to become important to Humboldt’s later political writings.
3.
Until 1809, Humboldt’s relation to politics had been that of an outsider. Even as Prussian envoy and minister plenepotentiary in Rome, between 1802 and 1809, Humboldt had primarily devoted himself to aesthetic and scholarly tasks. Since 1792, he had written no essay on political questions, and even in the Limits of the State he had approached politics as a theoretical problem without direct relation to reality. As one of his political biographers observes, his primary concern in the Limits of the State is not with the question of the needs and functions of the state, but an aesthetic interest in the development of the individual personality.40
This relationship changed abruptly, when Humboldt was called to Berlin in 1809 upon Baron von Stein’s recommendation that he reorganize the Prussian system of education. From 1809, until the reaction which set in with the Carlsbad Decrees in 1819, Humboldt served the Prussian state in active, policy-making roles; for example, as envoy to Austria from 1810 until the end of the Congress of Vienna; as minister charged with the task of preparing a draft for the Prussian constitution in 1819; as one of the statesmen who, under the leadership of Stein and Hardenberg, attempted to reform the Prussian state along liberal lines after the humiliating defeat at Napoleon’s hands in 1806. He succeeded in reshaping the Prussian schools in accord with his Humanitätsideal. In the primary schools, he modified the then existing pedagogy, which he considered mechanical and rationalistic, and substituted Pestalozzian methods that took into account the inner needs and interests of the individual child. In the Gymnasien, he replaced preoccupation with Latin philology with emphasis upon the study of the Greeks. Influenced by Winckelmann’s perhaps one-sided interpretation of Greek art, Humboldt believed with Goethe that the Greeks had succeeded in approximating the ideal of the harmoniously proportioned and totally developed individuality. He was instrumental in founding the University of Berlin in 1810, with its principles of freedom of research and teaching which were to set a pattern for all German universities.41 He unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the function of the centralized state in matters of education by urging the transfer of state school funds to the local communities. Humboldt’s very assumption of the responsibilities of minister of education, of course, constituted a recognition of functions of the state which he had previously denied.
While it may be going too far to see in Humboldt’s turn to the state, as one historian has done, the decisive victory of the “individuality of supra-individual forces over the individual who has lost his sovereignty to the living forces of history that surround him,”42 Humboldt’s concept of the relation of the individual to the state and the nation underwent a radical change. In his political memoranda, Humboldt continues to view the organization of the state not merely in terms of the needs of the state, but also in terms of the education of its citizens as individuals. For this reason, he stresses the need to transfer state powers to voluntary associations in which individuals can grow through participation. But under the emotional impact of the new political nationalism in the era of the Wars of Liberation, Humboldt began to recognize the state as a metaphysical reality. The state has an existence independent of the needs of the individual, and the nation is interwoven with the state. This new orientation appears most clearly in his “Memorandum on the German Constitution” of December 1813.43 Nation, state, and people are one, he observes.
In the way in which nature united individuals into nations and sorted mankind into nations, there lay contained a deep and mysterious means by which the individual, who is nothing by himself, and the race (Geschlecht), which has meaning only in individuals, kept on the true road of the proportionate and gradual development of their energies.44
Germany was not merely a spiritual unit, Humboldt now urged; as he and Goethe had once believed, Germany required no political bonds, but rested upon a community of “manners and customs, language and literature.” What made Germany a whole was the “memory of rights and liberties enjoyed in common, of glory won in battle and dangers faced together, the memory of close bonds which linked the fathers and which are now alive only in the nostalgic longings of the grandchildren.”45 This unity required political expression. Fearful of overly great centralization, Humboldt saw a confederation as the solution of the problem of national unification most in harmony with German’s history and character, although a confederation dominated by Prussia and Austria. However, this German state needed to be strong against the outside, not merely to provide protection in an unstable world, but also because political power was a prerequisite for the cultural development of Germany.
Germany must be free and strong, not only to be able to defend herself against this or that neighbor, or for that matter, against any enemy, but because only a nation which is also strong toward the outside can preserve the spirit within from which all domestic blessings flow. Germany must be free and strong, even if she is never put to a test, so that she may possess the self-assurance required for her to pursue her development as a nation unhampered and that she may be able to maintain permanently the position which she occupies in the midst of the European nations, a position which is so beneficial to these nations.46
Power, largely conceived in military terms, now appeared to Humboldt as a positive good. This was not inconsonant with his earlier observations on the positive effects of war upon character. As he wrote in 1817, in a recommendation on the army budget:
The usefulness of a strong army ready for battle begins long before the day war is declared. Throughout periods of peace such an army assures internal security, strengthens the influence of the state in all its dealings with foreign powers, and exercises an influence on the character of the nation.47
This emphasis upon the dependence of the individual on the nation finds its most extreme expressions in passages in his correspondence during the war years. Because of their casual character, perhaps they need to be received with some caution. Thus, he writes his wife:
Believe me. There are only two good and benevolent forces (Potenzen) in this world, God and the nation (Volk). Everything in between is useless and we are of use only to the degree that we are close to the nation (Volk).
Again he states:
All national energy, life and spontaneity rests in the nation (Volk). One can accomplish nothing without the nation and needs it constantly. Man is nothing but by virtue of the power of the whole and only as long as he strives to be in accord with it.48
This concept of the nation or people as an individual with an individual character led him to propose a harsh treatment of France at the Congress of Vienna. He based his demands not only on the political interests of Prussia or of Germany, but on his condemnation of the French national character, the absence of a “striving for the divine which the French lack not only as a nation but virtually without exception also as individuals.”49
From this new emphasis upon historic and collective forces, the draft recommendation Humboldt
